Love of the Last Tycoon: The Authorized Text (No Series) (17 page)

Then, to my astonishment, Stahr had three cocktails, one after the other.

“Now I know you’ve been disappointed in love,” I said.

“What makes you think that, Cecilia?”

“Cocktails.”

“Oh, I never drink, Cecilia. I get dyspepsia—I’ve never been tight.”

I counted them: “—two—
three.
”

“I didn’t realize. I couldn’t taste them. I thought there was something the matter.”

A silly glassy look darted into his eye—then passed away.

“This is my first drink in a week,” said Brimmer. “I did my drinking in the Navy.”

The look was back in Stahr’s eye—he winked fatuously at me and said:

“This soap-box son-of-a-bitch has been working on the Navy.”

Brimmer didn’t know quite how to take this. Evidently he decided to include it with the evening, for he smiled faintly, and I saw Stahr was smiling, too. I was relieved when I saw it was safely in the great American tradition, and I tried to take hold of the conversation, but Stahr seemed suddenly all right.

“Here’s my typical experience,” he said very succinctly and clearly to Brimmer. “The best director in Hollywood—a man I never interfere with—has some streak in him that wants to slip a pansy into every picture, or something on that order. Something offensive. He stamps it in deep like a watermark so I can’t get it out. Every time he does it the Legion of Decency moves a step forward, and something has to be sacrificed out of some honest film.”

“Typical organization trouble,” agreed Brimmer.

“Typical,” said Stahr. “It’s an endless battle. So now this director tells me it’s all right because he’s got a Director’s Guild and I can’t oppress the poor. That’s how you add to my troubles.”

“It’s a little remote from us,” said Brimmer smiling. “I don’t think we’d make much headway with the directors.”

“The directors used to be my pals,” said Stahr proudly.

It was like Edward the Seventh’s boast that he had moved in the best society in Europe.

“But some of them have never forgiven me,” he continued, “for bringing out stage directors when sound came in. It put them on their toes and made them learn their jobs all over, but they never did really forgive me. That time we imported a whole new hogshead full of writers, and I thought they were great fellows till they all went red.”

Gary Cooper came in and sat down in a corner with a bunch of men who breathed whenever he did and looked as if they lived off him and weren’t budging. A woman across the room looked around and turned out to be Carole Lombard—I was glad that Brimmer was at least getting an eyeful.

Stahr ordered a whiskey and soda and, almost immediately, another. He ate nothing but a few spoonfuls of soup and he said all the awful things about everybody being lazy so-and-so’s and none of it mattered to
him
because he had lots of money—it was the kind of talk you heard whenever Father and his friends were together. I think Stahr realized that it sounded pretty ugly outside of the proper company—maybe he had never heard how it sounded before. Anyhow he shut up and drank off a cup of black coffee. I loved him, and what he said didn’t change that, but I hated Brimmer to carry off this impression. I wanted him to see Stahr as a sort of technological virtuoso, and here Stahr had been playing the wicked overseer to a point he would have called trash if he had watched it on the screen.

“I’m a production man,” he said, as if to modify his previous attitude. “I like writers—I think I understand them. I don’t want to kick anybody out if they do their work.”

“We don’t want you to,” said Brimmer pleasantly. “We’d like to take you over as a going concern.”

Stahr nodded grimly.

“I’d like to put you in a roomful of my partners. They’ve all got a dozen reasons for having Fitts run you fellows out of town.”

“We appreciate your protection,” said Brimmer with a certain irony. “Frankly we
do
find you difficult, Mr. Stahr—precisely because you are a paternalistic employer and your influence is very great.”

Stahr was only half listening.

“I never thought,” he said, “that I had more brains than a writer has. But I always thought that his brains be
longed
to me—because I knew how to use them. Like the Romans—I’ve heard that they never invented things but they knew what to do with them. Do you see? I don’t say it’s right. But it’s the way I’ve always felt—since I was a boy.”

This interested Brimmer—the first thing that had interested him for an hour.

“You know yourself very well, Mr. Stahr,” he said.

I think he wanted to get away. He had been curious to see what kind of man Stahr was, and now he thought he knew. Still hoping things would be different, I rashly urged him to ride home with us, but when Stahr stopped by the bar for another drink I knew I’d made a mistake.

It was a gentle, harmless, motionless evening with a lot of Saturday cars. Stahr’s hand lay along the back of the seat touching my hair. Suddenly I wished it had been about ten years ago—I would have been nine, Brimmer about eighteen and working his way through some mid-western college, and Stahr twenty-five, just having inherited the world and full of confidence and joy. We would both have looked up to Stahr so, without question. And here we were in an adult conflict, to which there was no peaceable solution, complicated now with exhaustion and drink.

We turned in at our drive, and I drove around to the garden again.

“I must go along now,” said Brimmer. “I’ve got to meet some people.”

“No, stay,” said Stahr. “I never have said what I wanted. We’ll play ping-pong and have another drink, and then we’ll tear into each other.”

Brimmer hesitated. Stahr turned on the floodlight and picked up his ping-pong bat, and I went into the house for some whiskey—I wouldn’t have dared disobey him.

When I came back, they were not playing, but Stahr was batting a whole box of new balls across to Brimmer, who turned them aside. When I arrived, he quit and took the bottle and retired to a chair just out of the floodlight, watching in dark dangerous majesty. He was pale—he was so transparent that you could almost watch the alcohol mingle with the poison of his exhaustion.

“Time to relax on Saturday night,” he said.

“You’re not relaxing,” I said.

He was carrying on a losing battle with his instinct toward schizophrenia.

“I’m going to beat up Brimmer,” he announced after a moment. “I’m going to handle this thing personally.”

“Can’t you pay somebody to do it?” asked Brimmer.

I signalled him to keep quiet.

“I do my own dirty work,” said Stahr. “I’m going to beat hell out of you and put you on a train.”

He got up and came forward, and I put my arms around him, gripping him.

“Please
stop
this!” I said. “Oh, you’re being so bad.”

“This fellow has an influence over you,” he said darkly. “Over all you young people. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Please go home,” I said to Brimmer.

Stahr’s suit was made of slippery cloth and suddenly he slipped away from me and went for Brimmer. Brimmer retreated backward around the table. There was an odd expression in his face, and afterwards I thought it looked as if he were saying, “Is
this
all? This frail half-sick person holding up the whole thing.”

Then Stahr came close, his hands going up. It seemed to me that Brimmer held him off with his left arm a minute, and then I looked away—I couldn’t bear to watch.

When I looked back, Stahr was out of sight below the level of the table, and Brimmer was looking down at him.

“Please go home,” I said to Brimmer.

“All right.” He stood looking down at Stahr as I came around the table. “I always wanted to hit ten million dollars, but I didn’t know it would be like this.”

Stahr lay motionless.

“Please go,” I said.

“I’m sorry. Can I help—–”

“No. Please go. I understand.”

He looked again, a little awed at the depths of Stahr’s repose, which he had created in a split second. Then he went quickly away over the grass, and I knelt down and shook Stahr. After a moment he came awake with a terrific convulsion and bounced up on his feet.

“Where is he?” he shouted.

“Who?” I asked innocently.

“That American. Why in hell did you have to marry him, you damn fool?”

“Monroe—he’s gone. I didn’t marry anybody.”

I pushed him down in a chair.

“He’s been gone half an hour,” I lied.

The ping-pong balls lay around in the grass like a constellation of stars. I turned on a sprinkler and came back with a wet handkerchief, but there was no mark on Stahr—he must have been hit in the side of the head. He went off behind some trees and was sick, and I heard him kicking up some earth over it. After that he seemed all right, but he wouldn’t go into the house till I got him some mouthwash, so I took back the whiskey bottle and got a mouthwash bottle. His wretched essay at getting drunk was over. I’ve been out with college freshmen, but for sheer ineptitude and absence of the Bacchic spirit it unquestionably took the cake. Every bad thing happened to him, but that was all.

We went in the house; the cook said Father and Mr. Marcus and Fleishacker were on the veranda, so we stayed in the “processed leather room.” We both sat down in a couple of places and seemed to slide off, and finally I sat on a fur rug and Stahr on a footstool beside me.

“Did I hit him?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Quite badly.”

“I don’t believe it.” After a minute he added: “I didn’t want to hurt him. I just wanted to chase him out. I guess he got scared and hit me.”

If this was his interpretation of what had happened, it was all right with me.

“Do you hold it against him?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “I was drunk.” He looked around. “I’ve never been in here before—who did this room?—somebody from the studio?”

“Somebody from New York.”

“Well, I’ll have to get you out of here,” he said in his old pleasant way. “How would you like to go out to Doug Fairbanks’ ranch and spend the night?” he asked me. “I know he’d love to have you.”

That’s how the two weeks started that he and I went around together. It only took one of them for Louella to have us married.

The manuscript stops at this point. The following synopsis of the rest of the story has been put together from Fitzgerald’s notes and outlines and from the reports of persons with whom he discussed his work:

Soon after his interview with Brimmer, Stahr makes a trip East. A wage-cut has been threatened in the studio, and Stahr has gone to talk to the stockholders—presumably with the idea of inducing them to retrench in some other way. He and Brady have long been working at cross-purposes, and the struggle between them for the control of the company is rapidly coming to a climax. We do not know about the results of this trip from the business point of view, but, whether or not on a business errand, Stahr for the first time visits Washington with the intention of seeing the city; and it is to be presumed that the author had meant to return here to the motif introduced in the first chapter with the visit of the Hollywood people to the home of Andrew Jackson and their failure to gain admittance or even to see the place clearly: the relation of the moving-picture industry to the American ideals and tradition. It is mid-summer; Washington is stifling; Stahr comes down with summer grippe and goes around the city in a daze of fever and heat. He never succeeds in becoming acquainted with it as he had hoped to.

When he recovers and gets back to Hollywood, he finds that Brady has taken advantage of his absence to put through a fifty percent pay-cut. Brady had called a meeting of writers and told them in a tearful speech that he and the other executives would take a cut themselves if the writers would consent to take one. If they would agree, it would not be necessary to reduce the salaries of the stenographers and the other low-paid employees. The writers had accepted this arrangement, but had then been double-crossed by Brady, who had proceeded to slash the stenographers just the same. Stahr is revolted by this; and he and Brady have a violent falling-out. Stahr, though opposed to the unions, believing that any enterprising office-boy can make his way to the top as he has done, is an old-fashioned paternalistic employer, who likes to feel that the people who work for him are contented, and that he and they are on friendly terms. On the other hand, he quarrels also with Wylie White, who he finds has become truculently hostile to him, in spite of the fact that Stahr was not personally responsible for the pay-cut. Stahr has been patient in the past with White’s drinking and his practical jokes, and he is hurt that the writer should not feel toward him the same kind of personal loyalty—which is the only solidarity that Stahr understands in the field of business relations. “The Reds see him now as a conservative—Wall Street as a Red.” But he finds himself driven by the logic of the situation to fall in with the idea which has been proposed and is heartily approved by Brady, of setting up a company union.