Big Money (55 page)

She was dizzy. She walked up and down the room trying to catch her breath. “Goodnight, hot sketch,” Si said and carefully put on his coat and vest again and was gone out the door. She was dizzy.

Sam was back and was showing her a lot of calculations on a piece of paper. His eyes bulged shiny into her face as she tried to read. His hands were shaking. “It's tonight,” he kept saying, “it's tonight that our lifelines cross. . . . We are married whether we wish it or not. I don't believe in freewill. Do you, darling Margo?”

Margo was dizzy. She couldn't say anything. “Come, dear child, you are tired.” Margolies' voice burred soothingly in her ears. She let him lead her into the bedroom and carefully take her clothes off and lay her between the black silk sheets of the big poster bed.

It was broad daylight when Sam drove her back to the house. The detective outside touched his hat as they turned into the drive. It made her feel good to see the man's big pugface as he stood there guarding her house. Agnes was up and walking up and down in a padded flowered dressinggown in the livingroom with a newspaper in her hand. “Where have you been?” she cried. “Oh, Margie, you'll ruin your looks if you go on like this and you're just getting a start too. . . . Look at this . . . now don't be shocked . . . remember it's all for the best.”

She handed the
Times
to Margo, pointing out a headline with the sharp pink manicured nail of her forefinger. “Didn't I tell you Frank was watching over us?”

 

HOLLYWOOD EXTRA SLAIN AT PARTY

Noted Polo Player Disappears
Sailors Held

 

Two enlisted men in uniform, George Cook and Fred Costello, from the battleship
Kenesaw
were held for questioning when they were found stupefied with liquor or narcotics in the basement of an apartment house at 2234 Higueras Drive, San Pedro, where residents allege a drunken party had been in progress all night. Near them was found the body of a young man whose skull had been fractured by a blow from a blunt instrument who was identified as a Cuban, Antonio Garrido, erstwhile extra on several prominent studio lots. He was still breathing when the police broke in in response to telephoned complaints from the neighbors. The fourth member of the party, a German citizen named Max Hirsch, supposed by some to be an Austrian nobleman, who shared an apartment at Mimosa in a fashionable bungalow court with the handsome young Cuban, had fled before police reached the scene of the tragedy. At an early hour this morning he had not yet been located by the police.

 

Margo felt the room swinging in great circles around her head. “Oh, my God,” she said. Going upstairs she had to hold tight to the baluster to keep from falling. She tore off her clothes and ran herself a hot bath and lay back in it with her eyes closed.

“Oh, Margie,” wailed Agnes from the other room, “your lovely new gown is a wreck.”

 

Margo and Sam Margolies flew to Tucson to be married. Nobody was present except Agnes and Rodney Cathcart. After the ceremony Margolies handed the justice of the peace a new hundreddollar bill. The going was pretty bumpy on the way back and the big rattly Ford trimotor gave them quite a shakingup crossing the desert. Margolies' face was all colors under his white beret but he said it was delightful. Rodney Cathcart and Agnes vomited frankly into their cardboard containers. Margo felt her pretty smile tightening into a desperate grin but she managed to keep the wedding breakfast down. When the plane came to rest at the airport at last, they kept the cameramen waiting a half an hour before they could trust themselves to come down the gangplank flushed and smiling into a rain of streamers and
confetti thrown by the attendants and the whir of the motionpicture cameras. Rodney Cathcart had to drink most of a pint of scotch before he could get his legs not to buckle under him. Margo wore her smile over a mass of yellow orchids that had been waiting for her in the refrigerator at the airport, and Agnes looked tickled to death because Sam had bought her orchids too, lavender ones, and insisted that she stride down the gangplank into the cameras with the rest of them.

It was a relief after the glare of the desert and the lurching of the plane in the airpockets to get back to the quiet dressingroom at the lot. By three o'clock they were in their makeup. In a small room in the ground floor Margolies went right back to work taking closeups of Margo and Rodney Cathcart in a clinch against the background of a corner of a mud fort. Si was stripped to the waist with two cartridgebelts crossed over his chest and a canvas legionnaire's kepi on his head and Margo was in a white eveningdress with highheeled satin slippers. They were having trouble with the clinch on account of the cartridgebelts. Margolies with his porcelainhandled cane thrashing in front of him kept strutting back and forth from the little box he stood on behind the camera into the glare of the klieg light where Margo and Si clinched and unclinched a dozen times before they hit a position that suited him. “My dear Si,” he was saying, “you must make them feel it. Every ripple of your muscles must make them feel passion . . . you are stiff like a wooden doll. They all love her, a piece of fragile beautiful palpitant womanhood ready to give all for the man she loves. . . . Margo darling, you faint, you let yourself go in his arms. If his strong arms weren't there to catch you you would fall to the ground. Si, my dear fellow, you are not an athletic instructor teaching a young lady to swim, you are a desperate lover facing death. . . . They all feel they are you, you are loving her for them, the millions who want love and beauty and excitement, but forget them, loosen up, my dear fellow, forget that I'm here and the camera's here, you are alone together snatching a desperate moment, you are alone except for your two beating hearts, you and the most beautiful girl in the world, the nation's newest sweetheart. . . . All right . . . hold it. . . . Camera.”

but a few minutes later this false land disappeared as quickly and as mysteriously as it had come and I found before me the long stretch of the silent sea with not a single sign of life in sight

 

Whippoorwills call

   
And evening is nigh

    
I hurry to . . . my blue heaven

 

LINDBERGH IN PERIL AS WAVE TRAPS HIM IN
CRUISER'S BOW

 

Down in the Tennessee mountains

   
Away from the sins of the world

Old Dan Kelly's son there he leaned on his gun

   
A thinkin' of Zeb Turney's girl

 

ACCLAIMED BY HUGE CROWDS IN THE STREETS

 

Snaps Pictures From Dizzy Yardarm

 

Dan was a hotblooded youngster

   
His Dad raised him up sturdy an' right

 

ENTHRALLED BY DARING DEED CITY CHEERS
FROM DEPTHS OF ITS HEART

 

FLYER SPORTS IN AIR

 

His heart in a whirl with his love for the girl

   
He loaded his doublebarreled gun

 

LEADERS OF PUBLIC LIFE BREAK INTO
UPROAR AT SIGHT OF FLYER

 

CONFUSION IN HOTEL

 

Aviator Nearly Hurled From Auto as it
Leaps Forward Through Gap in Crowd

 

Over the mountains he wandered

   
This son of a Tennessee man

       
With fire in his eye and his gun by his side

Alooking for Zeb Turney's clan

 

SHRINERS PARADE IN DELUGE OF RAIN

 

Paper Blizzard Chokes Broadway

 

Shots ringin' out through the mountain

   
Shots ringin' out through the breeze

 

LINDY TO HEAD BIG AIRLINE

 

The story of Dan Kelly's moonshine

    
Is spread far and wide o'er the world

How Dan killed the clan shot them down to a man

    
And brought back old Zeb Turney's girl

 

a short, partly bald man, his face set in tense emotion, ran out from a mass of people where he had been concealed and climbed quickly into the plane as if afraid he might be stopped. He had on ordinary clothes and a leather vest instead of a coat. He was bareheaded. He crowded down beside Chamberlin looking neither at the crowd nor at his own wife who stood a little in front of the plane and at one side, her eyes big with wonder. The motor roared and the plane started down the runway, stopped and came back again and then took off perfectly

A muggy day in late spring in eighteen eightyseven a tall youngster of eighteen with fine eyes and a handsome arrogant way of carrying his head arrived in Chicago with seven dollars left in his pocket
from buying his ticket from Madison with some cash he'd got by pawning Plutarch's
Lives
, a Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
and an old furcollared coat.

Before leaving home to make himself a career in an architect's office (there was no architecture course at Wisconsin to clutter his mind with stale Beaux Arts drawings); the youngster had seen the dome of the new State Capitol in Madison collapse on account of bad rubblework in the piers, some thieving contractors' skimping materials to save the politicians their rakeoff, and perhaps a trifling but deadly error in the architect's plans;

he never forgot the roar of burst masonry, the flying plaster, the soaring dustcloud, the mashed bodies of the dead and dying being carried out, set faces livid with plasterdust.

Walking round downtown Chicago, crossing and recrossing the bridges over the Chicago River in the jingle and clatter of traffic, the rattle of vans and loaded wagons and the stamping of big drayhorses and the hooting of towboats with barges and the rumbling whistle of lakesteamers waiting for the draw,

he thought of the great continent stretching a thousand miles east and south and north, three thousand miles west, and everywhere, at mineheads, on the shores of newlydredged harbors, along watercourses, at the intersections of railroads, sprouting

shacks roundhouses tipples grainelevators stores warehouses tenements, great houses for the wealthy set in broad treeshaded lawns, domed statehouses on hills, hotels churches operahouses auditoriums.

He walked with long eager steps

towards the untrammeled future opening in every direction for a young man who'd keep his hands to his work and his wits sharp to invent.

The same day he landed a job in an architect's office.

 

Frank Lloyd Wright was the grandson of a Welsh hatter and preacher who'd settled in a rich Wisconsin valley, Spring Valley, and raised a big family of farmers and preachers and schoolteachers there. Wright's father was a preacher too, a restless illadjusted Newenglander who studied medicine, preached in a Baptist church in Weymouth, Massachusetts, and then as a Unitarian in the middle
west, taught music, read Sanskrit and finally walked out on his family.

Young Wright was born on his grandfather's farm, went to school in Weymouth and Madison, worked summers on a farm of his uncle's in Wisconsin.

His training in architecture was the reading of Viollet le Duc, the apostle of the thirteenth century and of the pure structural mathematics of gothic stonemasonry, and the seven years he worked with Louis Sullivan in the office of Adler and Sullivan in Chicago. (It was Louis Sullivan who, after Richardson, invented whatever was invented in nineteenthcentury architecture in America.)

When Frank Lloyd Wright left Sullivan he had already launched a distinctive style, prairie architecture. In Oak Park he built broad suburban dwellings for rich men that were the first buildings to break the hold on American builders' minds of centuries of pastward routine, of the wornout capital and plinth and pediment dragged through the centuries from the Acropolis, and the jaded traditional stencils of Roman masonry, the halfobliterated Palladian copybooks.

Frank Lloyd Wright was cutting out a new avenue that led towards the swift constructions in glassbricks and steel

foreshadowed today.

Delightedly he reached out for the new materials, steel in tension, glass, concrete, the million new metals and alloys.

The son and grandson of preachers, he became a preacher in blueprints,

projecting constructions in the American future instead of the European past.

Inventor of plans,

plotter of tomorrow's girderwork phrases,

he preaches to the young men coming of age in the time of oppression, cooped up by the plasterboard partitions of finance routine, their lives and plans made poor by feudal levies of parasite money standing astride every process to shake down progress for the cutting of coupons:

 

The properly citified citizen has become a broker, dealing chiefly in human frailties or the ideas and inventions of others, a puller of levers, a presser of buttons of vicarious power, his by way of machine craft . . . and
over beside him and beneath him, even in his heart as he sleeps, is the taximeter of rent, in some form to goad this anxious consumer's unceasing struggle for or against more or less merciful or merciless money increment
.

 

To the young men who spend their days and nights drafting the plans for new
rented aggregates of rented cells upended on hard pavements
,