Hollywood (33 page)

Caroline had thought that, perhaps, there were far too many scenes involving railroad tracks. But then, thanks to a life of privilege, she herself had never had a meeting much less a love scene of any kind, anywhere near a railroad. But Tim assured her that the effect would be overwhelming.

As José reaches the girl, he throws his arms wide—the crucifixion yet again—and drops dead. Then, from nowhere, happy workers appear and lift high his body and carry him back down the tracks, away from the girl, the camera, life.

Caroline deeply hated the entire project but George Creel was delighted. Despite Tim’s preference for the down-trodden, he seemed quite pleased to be a tool of capitalism.

“Interlock!” Tim shouted, and the scene began. Caroline slipped out of the sound-stage and into a corridor that led to the office of the president of Traxler Productions, herself. Everything was suitably shabby, as befitted a onetime Harlem casino gone to slow ruin. But within the casino’s shell, Hearst had built a number of modern studios while not improving, as the bankers liked to say, the property.

Caroline’s secretary presided in the small outer office, answering the telephone, which rang constantly. Everyone wanted to act or write or do anything that would bring him into the magical world of giant images and somewhat diminished salaries: movie grosses for 1918 were a fraction of what they had been the previous year, and if the influenza epidemic kept the theaters empty much longer, 1919 would be a disaster for everyone except the bankers and their real estate. European production was also becoming competitive and Hollywood was in danger of losing its world market. Fortunately, Caroline, who had devoted years to making an unlikely success of the Washington
Tribune
, was used to drudgery and the deferral of pleasure. Also, this particular
“business” was actually more pleasurable in its drudgery than the
Tribune
was in its glory, because at the paper she had been quite alone in her private life while now private life and work had combined in a way that she had never thought possible. She counted her blessings on one finger.

The secretary gave her a list of telephone messages; and a long cablegram from Blaise in Paris. He had been to Saint-Cloud-le-Duc. The wing that had been used as a hospital was now empty; in need of repair. Wilson was the messiah. Colonel House was not. That was cryptic, she thought. Blaise had been invited by the President to be an observer at the conference and, presumably, he was busy observing but not reporting to their readers.

In December, Blaise had sailed with the President and Mrs. Wilson on the
George Washington
. There were over a thousand Americans in the presidential entourage, and Blaise had reported that Wilson was in high spirits. No senators of either party had been chosen for the official delegation, a fatal move, Burden told her, but then since his near-death from flu, everything smacked of mortality. Except for old Henry White, there was no elder statesman in the delegation, only Wilsonian spear-carriers, and Lansing, who was on hand to act as the President’s deputy, dedicated to eliminating Colonel House. George Creel was also present in order to make propaganda. But for once Creel was not needed.

On December 14, Wilson arrived in Paris as Europe’s savior. From the news-reels, Caroline could see that the French crowds were unlike anything that anyone had ever witnessed before, even those aged members of the Jockey who liked to claim that from a mother’s arms they had seen Bonaparte ride in triumph through the streets, kings chained to his golden car. Actually it was the mothers, held in other arms, who remembered the imperial glory. Plon’s mother-in-law recalled vividly the day at Fontainebleau when Napoleon stood on the outside staircase and said farewell to the Guard. Caroline could visualize that moment perfectly on film.

Photo-play scripts were piled high on Caroline’s desk. They read like a combination of plays and feature journalism. But the most engaging thing about the form was that there was no way to tell a good one from a bad one. What seemed the worst writing on the page often came startlingly alive on the screen; and the reverse. There were two photo-plays about Napoleon by writers who had not bothered to read anything about him. Idly, Caroline wondered if she herself might be able to construct a story about the Emperor, relying not so much on expensive battles as on drawing-room skirmishes to save production costs: tears in the boudoir, history in bed. The secretary rang.
“Mr. Hearst,” she said, with quiet reverence:
their
Napoleon. Caroline picked up the receiver. Before she could speak the thin, high voice commenced. “This is the Chief.”

“This,” said Caroline, “is the squaw.”

There was a pause. “I’m sorry,” said Hearst at last, “I guess it’s a habit.”

“Mine, too.”

Impervious to irony, Hearst was a slave to jokes, particularly very old ones. “I’m at the Beaux Arts. You want to have breakfast with us? I’ve got news.”

Caroline was delighted, she said, to have a second breakfast; news, too.

The morning was cold and cloudy and the streets empty. The troops had not come home, and the flu still kept people indoors. Caroline had become fatalistic and no longer wore a mask.

The Beaux Arts in Sixth Avenue catered to New York’s High Bohemia. Actors and actresses favored its high rooms, tall mullioned windows, Italian plaster-work. Here Marion Davies lived in quiet splendor at Hearst’s expense. A Japanese butler showed Caroline into the living room, where Hearst was standing beneath a portrait of himself that looked more like Hearst than he did. All natural pink and gold, Marion sprang like a cat from a sofa and threw her arms about Caroline and kissed her, wine upon her breath. The Chief did not like to drink himself and did his best to discourage others. Marion was not easily discouraged. “My movie …” The first “m” gave no trouble, the second did. But she went on, stammering breathlessly. “… doesn’t start for another week. So Pops and I are having a real holiday here in town …”

“I’d rather be in Palm Beach.” Hearst held up an early edition of the
American
. Even across the room, Caroline could read the headline “TR DEAD.”

“Is this a joke?” Hearst was known for practical jokes, involving fake headlines and stories calculated to terrify guests, not much different in tone, Caroline had observed, from his actual papers.

“No. He died at Oyster Bay last night. I think we’re first.”

“I hope we’re not last.” Caroline prayed that Mr. Trimble had been on the job early that morning. Since Roosevelt’s recent stay in Roosevelt Hospital, Caroline had ordered the obituary to be brought up to date; yet no one had really expected all that energy to be snuffed out on the eve of a political restoration. “What was the cause?”

“Some sort of blood clot. Last night. While he was asleep. I wouldn’t mind going like that.”

“Pops!” Marion helped herself to more breakfast wine, which turned out
to be hock. In response to the news, Caroline drank a glass straight down. “You’re much too young.” Marion gazed fondly at the huge bear that Hearst had turned into, so unlike the slender, gaudily turned-out young man that Caroline had first met, twenty years earlier.

“This changes everything,” said Caroline, trying to recall just what would be changed.

“Well, the Republicans don’t have a candidate, that’s for sure. TR had the whole thing sewed up. Months ago. He and Taft had buried the hatchet. That took care of the regulars. Then he was going to run with Beveridge to keep the progressives happy. He would’ve won, too.”

“Against Wilson?”

“Yes. But not against me.” This was said so matter-of-factly that Caroline almost did not take it in.

“You?” Caroline stared dumbly not at Hearst but at the headline.

“Pops has all sorts of letters to and from that awful man, who took money from the oil people like Hannah … what was her name?”

“Mark Hanna was
his
name.” Hearst’s smile was more than usually thin. “I was going to really get him this time around, the way he got me over McKinley, claiming it was me and
the American
—or the
Journal
then—that inspired the killer when there are those who think that
he
may have had a hand in killing McKinley.”

“Roosevelt?” Caroline’s head was spinning.

“That’s the story. Roosevelt and Rockefeller were in on it, to keep McKinley from going after the Standard Oil monopoly, which is why Roosevelt never did go after Rockefeller until I forced him to, and then he did nothing much but make noise.”

Like so many inventors of the news, Hearst himself was capable of believing anything. When Caroline first became a publisher, she was struck by the number of otherwise sane people who would suddenly produce a carefully documented “proof” that President Garfield’s murderer, say, had been in the employ of the Jesuits or the Zionists. When the “proofs” were disproved, other documents appeared; and the plot widened. Now Hearst appeared to believe that Roosevelt had been involved in McKinley’s assassination. “Will you include this in the obituary?” Caroline was light.

“No.” Hearst led the way into the adjoining dining room. “But one day I’ll do something with it.”

“Poor Pops.” Marion took her place opposite Hearst. Caroline sat to Hearst’s right. As an elaborate breakfast was served by the Japanese butler,
Caroline told of Blaise’s cablegram. But Hearst was indifferent to the Peace Conference and to Wilson, whom he disliked largely because he was a dreary schoolteacher who had got the prize that he ought to have had. But Hearst was eloquent on the subject of his latest enemy, the Irish governor of New York, one Al Smith, whose combination with Tammany had denied Hearst the mayoralty in 1917. “Now the Governor’s complaining because I’ve been made the official greeter of the troops when they come back …”

“Wonderful spot for Pops,” said Marion, looking wistfully at her empty wineglass. “Right in the center of all those news-reel cameras when the ships come in and the boys march off and there’s the Mayor, who appointed Pops and just made Pop—that’s my real old man—a city magistrate up to the Bronx.” This flood was stopped by the filling of her glass.

“Roosevelt was their choice to take my place next week when the
Mauritania
comes in. Well, he won’t be there, and I will. Mother won’t,” he added.

“Mother won’t what?”

“Be there. My mother.”

“She’s got flu.” Marion sounded satisfied.

“I didn’t know she was here.”

“She came for the holidays to be with the boys. I warned her. This place is sickly, I said. Anyway, she’s mending now. She’ll go back to California. She’s given away twenty-one million dollars in charity …”

“Less than you’ve spent on newspapers and,” Caroline looked at Marion and said, quickly, “art.”

“I’m not in that league. But I’m losing money. Are you?”

Caroline was used to the Chief’s candor with her. He treated her not as a lady or even as another man; he treated her as an equal, flattered her by his open envy of what she had done with the
Tribune
. “No. We’re profitable. It’s been a good year for the
Tribune
and …”

“1 didn’t mean the papers. You can’t lose money with a war on. No. I meant with your photo-plays.”

“Well, we’re suffering like everybody else. But we’re in the black.”

“Red is what Pops is in,” said the immediate cause of his losses, eating a truffled egg in aspic. “He pays too much for Mr. Urban and everybody—”

“I want the best. It’s like a paper—”

“We had a scene where I meet my beloved in an English country house and I’m playing—I forget who. It’s all a blur. I’ve been in five movies in the last year, playing five different people, with five hundred different costumes. Anyway, Pops comes on the set and I’m standing in front of this fireplace,
crying my heart out with—oh, I remember now! Ramon Novarro, who isn’t my suitor but he’s blackmailing me because of something. And Pops says, ‘That fireplace isn’t right for the period.’ So Mr. Urban, the most expensive designer in the world, who tells Mr. Ziegfeld where to head in, says, ‘It is, and the grays set off the blacks.’ Don’t you love it? Anyway, guess who wins? So while they all have to go looking through Pops’s warehouses filled with junk because he knows he owns the right fireplace but can’t remember where he put it, the picture stops but everyone goes on being paid.”

“It’s things like that …” Hearst began vaguely; and ended, mind elsewhere. “We should make an anti-Red film …”

“I am making one.” Caroline never understood Hearst’s use of the first person plural, sometimes collegial, other times imperial, editorial.

“So’s Zukor. He bought the rights to that play … you know.”

Caroline did know, and she, too, had wanted to buy it,
Paid in Full
, by Eugene Walter. “Tim’s competing with it, he says.”

“We can’t have too many movies like that. When there’s no epidemic, there’s nothing like Reds for getting to everybody.”

“There’s a Marion Davies fan club in Moscow.” Marion Davies was touchingly awed by herself.

“There’s one probably everywhere in the world. And we thought newspapers were something. Funny how the Jews got in on this before we did.”

Like everyone else involved in photo-plays, Caroline had given the subject considerable thought. “Don’t you think it’s because they’re the same sort of people as the audience used to be? Just-arrived immigrants who could only afford movies at the nickelodeon?”

“Then why not the Irish or the Italian immigrants?” Hearst shook his head. “Fashion,” he answered.

“What does that mean?”

“Zukor and Loew own half the theaters in the country and Famous Players and Paramount, and they’ve just swallowed up Triangle and most of the other little companies except you and me. Well, they didn’t go to Yale like we did.”

“Like you did. I am only a woman …”

“Let him have it, Caroline.” Marion was tipsy; she was also, or so she had told Caroline, a secret suffragette.

“They were immigrants, and they were in the fur business, and Zukor made a small fortune guessing what the fashion for next year would be. Red fox,” Hearst ended, cryptically.