The Immigrants (43 page)

He did not know why he chose Martha Levy, nor did he ask himself why; he was simply not given to self-searching or introspection; possibly she reminded him of a girl he had lived with for a while who had finally turned on him and thrown him out of her house and her life. And while it might be said that Martha’s talents left much to be desired, that was also the case with four fifths of the enrolled members of the New York School of Acting.

Spizer was not an originator. His outbursts of critique and direction were couched in precisely the same words the New York director had used. He would lash out at Martha, “Donkey! Donkey—you, Levy, look at me!”

Martha would turn to him, hurt, terrified.

“Why do I call you a donkey? Why not a Shetland pony? Why not a gazelle?”

Martha would become speechless, embarrassed, trembling.

“Because a donkey brays. Brays. Voice is voice, not braying!”

Or he would shout, “Clowning! You’re not acting, toots. You are clowning!”

After two weeks of this, Martha was reduced to a point where she would approach each day with fear and finish each day at the point of tears. The persecution reduced her to a point where she fed it herself, unable to remember her lines, unable to do anything right.

She would return to her apartment and weep, determined each day

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to get out of the school, to leave a place that had become a torture chamber—and then telling herself that she would not quit, not yet, that if this was the way to become an actress, she would endure it and see it through.

And then, after the first two weeks, Kelly said to Spizer, “Marty, maybe you’re leaning too hard on that Levy kid.”

“She stinks.”

“You got a hate on, buddy,” Kelly said. “Take an other look.

She’s not a bad-looking broad, and she’s loaded.”

“What do you mean, loaded?”

“You’re telling me you don’t know? Is this Marty Spizer or some jerk?”

“Come on, come on, don’t play games.”

“Her old man is Marcus Levy. San Francisco.”

“And who the hell is Marcus Levy?”

“For you, Marty, there is obviously nothing west of the Hudson River.”

“Except for this shithole.”

“Marcus Levy is one of the L’s of a thing called Levy and Lavette, which owns the biggest department store in California, not to mention a shipping line and maybe half the land in California and maybe a few other good ies too.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Like hell I am. Talk to her sometime instead of spit ting at her.”

“You schmuck!” Spizer burst out. “You dumb mick schmuck!

You let me ride her all this time and you never tell me I’m shitting in a pot of gold. Where are your brains?”

“I’ll tell you where yours are, you dumb bastard. In your asshole.”

That same day, Marty Spizer asked Martha to have lunch with him. She looked at him, dumbfounded and speechless.

“Say yes, honey,” he told her gently. “The initiation is over.

You’re going to be an actress.”

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He took her to Musso and Frank’s on Hollywood Boulevard, playing expansively the roll of tour guide and knowledgeable citizen. Sitting across the table from her, summoning up every bit of charm he had ever seen or heard, he said to her, “I suppose you wondered why I put you through those two weeks of hazing?”

Her eyes welling with tears, Martha shook her head. “I don’t understand it at all. Maybe I am rotten, but I’m no worse than most of the kids.”

“Martha,” he said earnestly, “you’re a damn sight better than any of them. You got a natural talent, a gift, a glow. That is precisely why I leaned on you. I had to shock you into letting go. I had to give you what Stani slavsky calls a sense of your interior. I had to hit you to make you know you are alive, and I may say that you know it, baby.”

“Then you don’t think I’m hopeless?”

“Hopeless? Are you kidding?”

She was biting her lip, trying to hold back the tears. “I was so miserable—so wretchedly miserable.”

“Exactly. You were feeling, you were alive. All right, that’s over.

Phase one is done. Now we make you an actress.”

Gregory Pastore was one of those virtuoso painters who appear to have enormous reservoirs of skill in their hands yet very little in the head or the heart. He com pleted both portraits of Jean Lavette at about the same time. The clothed portrait, which depicted her in a Gre cian type of blue gown, barefoot, her splendid hair loose, evoked echoes of Eakins, whom she admired so much—as Pastore well knew—but it had a sleek perfec tion, which Eakins would have found distasteful and dis honest. By now Jean’s taste in painting had developed to a point where she was aware of the incipient vulgar ity

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in trompe l’oeil when applied to the human figure; nevertheless, she was sufficiently self-oriented to react to the beauty of the woman in the long canvas. What it lacked in truth, it made up for in sheer perfection, and that certainly did not displease her.

The nude Jean was a better painting, bold and lusty, filled with life and flesh instead of perfection. Pastore had fleshed out her breasts and her hips, bent her head forward so that her features were unrecognizable behind a wave of her fine honey-colored hair, and laid one hand provocatively on the pubic tuft.

“It’s a damn good painting,” she said when he showed her, finally, the finished product. “What do you want for it?”

“You or three thousand dollars,” he replied, grinning with pleasure. “And that’s a princely—a kingly—price for any woman.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Become my mistress for one month, and it’s yours free.

Otherwise, three thousand clams.”

“In other words, if the price is right,” Jean said, not at all disturbed by his offer, “any woman is a whore?”

“I’ve always thought so.”

“Perhaps. Only you don’t appeal to me that way, Gregory. And you don’t bathe.”

“You are a bitch, you know.”

“Oh? Anyway, I want it. Bring both paintings to my home tomorrow. I’ll have a check for you.”

“Three thousand.”

“I heard you the first time.”

When the paintings arrived on the following day, Jean hung the full-length clothed portrait of herself at one end of the living room between a John Marin land scape and a Charles Sheeler industrial scene. A big Re noir nude that had occupied the same space was moved into Dan’s study, to take its shadowy place with the Winslow Homers and the Frederick Remingtons, works by artists whom

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Jean tolerated grudingly. A few years before, Jean had enlarged the living room, ripped out all the molding, created plain walls of a pale ivory tint, and installed ceiling spotlights. The Queen Anne antiques went the way of the molding and were replaced by pieces in the Chinese style. She had gone through a period of Japanese prints, but now she tired of them and relegated them to other rooms. Her collec tion now included over thirty paintings, eighteen of which she felt were as good as any modern collection in San Francisco.

The nude went to her bedroom, where it kept com pany with a second Renoir nude, a Picasso of the Blue Period, and two Degas ballet scenes. For the two weeks after it was hung, Dan had no occasion to set foot in her bedroom. When finally he did and saw the painting, he stared at it for a few minutes before he asked her whether it was a painting of herself.

“What nonsense! Does it look like me?”

“Yes.”

“I’m amazed you remember.”

“I remember,” he said.

“And if it is me, does that disturb you?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

Yet it mattered. It chipped away at his self-respect, his shrinking sense of himself as a male creature, and at his confused, anxious, and complex musings on moral ity. The morass deepened one day when, passing the open door of Jean’s bedroom, he saw Barbara standing there staring at the picture. His first instinct was to es cape unnoticed. His daughter was fourteen years old, already ripening into womanhood, tall, lissome, and in creasingly foreign to him.

He stopped in the hallway, turned, and forced him self to walk into the room. Barbara glanced at him and then returned her gaze to the painting. He was embar rassed; apparently, she was not.

“It’s Mother, isn’t it?” Barbara said.

“No.”

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She faced him now. “You don’t think so? Did she tell you that?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it looks like her. I should think you’d be in a perfect pet about it.”

“It’s not your mother, and I don’t think you have any business in her room.”

“The door was open,” Barbara replied, and then stalked out past him; and he stood looking after her, wondering why every approach to his daughter went wrong.

The new line of credit at the Seldon Bank passed two million dollars before the airline—West Coast Air, as they decided to call it—was ready to begin service. New problems kept cropping up: limousines at either end, service within the airplane, sky-high insurance rates, and above all the rumors that another twelve-passenger plane was being developed that would put the Ford Trimotor out of business. Dan spent a hundred thousand dollars on two of the best aircraft designers in the busi ness and set them to work to invent a faster and quieter plane than the Ford. With this and the complexities of terminals, pilots, mechanics, transportation, franchises, and a hundred unforeseen problems that occurred be cause no one west of the Rockies had ever operated a passenger service before, it was not until mid-1928 that the airline opened for business.

By that time, even Dan’s enormous calm had been splintered. He would get to bed night after night at two or three in the morning and then find that he was un able to sleep; he would toss and turn until dawn and an hour later be in his car headed out to the new air-field. In the midst of all this, the Sacramento, the largest and newest of their passenger liners, was rammed by a cargo ship in New York City’s Lower Bay, and Dan had to spend three and a half agonizing

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days on the train to New York and then three more weeks seeing the situa tion unsnarled and the ship into dry dock for repairs.

When at last the great day came and the big Ford Trimotor stood shining in the California sunshine, Dan was miserable rather than pleased or exultant, ex hausted, taking part in the ceremony with a kind of dulled indifference. It was a good turnout, all things considered, with almost a thousand people present to watch the great silver bird take to the air and inaugu rate a new era. His children were away at school, but Jean was there, as beautiful as ever and the center of attention, not only for the photographers but for Mayor Rolph, Governor Clement Young, her father, and her friends. Both the mayor and the governor spoke, and then Mark, who had declined to be one of the twelve on the first flight— as had Jean—read a short speech that Dan had been too busy to write. A troubled Sarah kissed Dan, hugged him to her, and said, “I wish you weren’t going up in that crazy thing, Danny.” The Dumphy Marching Band played, people waved and shouted and clapped their hands, and Dan climbed into the plane, along with Sam Goldberg, who had begged to be given one of the seats, Jerry Belton, in charge of pro motion and the author of Mark’s speech, Toby Bench, the radio commentator, and eight newspapermen and photographers. Dan made his way up to the pilot’s com partment, where he told Bill Henley, war ace and his chief pilot, “This is it, Billy, and for Christ’s sake, let’s give them something to talk about.

Smooth and easy.”

“O.K., boss.” Henley grinned and turned on the igni tion. The three motors roared into life, a deafening sound; and back in his seat, next to Sam Goldberg, Dan breathed a sigh of relief and cast his eyes around at eleven, white-faced, tight-lipped people. The passengers partook of so total a sense of terror that Dan burst out laughing, and Goldberg yelled at him, “What’s to laugh? Let me out of this deathtrap!”

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Jean watched the great silver plane roar down the runway and lift off, so easily and gracefully, lifting up higher and higher, effortlessly, and something caught in her throat, and for a moment she regretted that she had declined Dan’s invitation to come with him. But only for a moment. As Dan had said, it didn’t matter.

Martha, accompanied by a now-devoted Marty Spizer, was in the crowd that welcomed the Ford Trimotor as it floated, light as a leaf, into the Los Angeles airport. There, on a lesser scale, the San Francisco scene was repeated, to the sound of wild cheering at, according to the mayor, “the opening of a new era—a time when we can think of San Francisco and Los Angeles as sister cities.”

“That’s Danny, the tall man with the black, curly hair,” Martha told Spizer excitedly, pushing through the crowd. “Daddy was supposed to be with him, but I don’t see him.”

“He’s one big sonofabitch,” Spizer said.

“He’s a pussycat, and he’s my dear, dear friend. Come on.”

As they tried to make their way through the crowd of press and celebrities that surrounded Dan, Spizer said, “What gives between you and this guy? You couldn’t wait to get down here.”

“He’s Danny. I’ve adored him since I was a kid.”

When Dan spotted her, he pushed through the crowd and swung her up in his arms. “Baby, I’ve missed you.”

“Where’s Daddy?”

“He chickened out.”

“And Jean?”

“Same thing. Old Goldberg here was the only one with guts enough to make it. Sam,” he said to Goldberg, who stood beside him, thanking God that firm earth was beneath his feet, “you remember Mark’s daughter, Martha?”

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Martha introduced Marty Spizer as “the director and producer,”

and then Dan told them not to go. He’d get through the rest of the formalities and they’d all have dinner together. “Whatever you say,” Goldberg agreed. “But I’m taking the train back.”