West of Sunset (14 page)

“Oh, too bad,” she said, looking out at the rhododendron. “The snow's all gone.”

“I thought you didn't like snow.”

“I like it here. It reminds me of Switzerland.”

The old places, she meant, Gstaad and St. Moritz, not the clinic with its caged staircase and white-tiled baths. Why was the past so keenly double-edged, or was it the present, being middling and empty? He tried not to think of Sheilah, of his life waiting in L.A.

“If I can get the time off, I'd like us to spend Easter together—you, me and Scottie. We could try Virginia Beach again.”

“That would be nice.”

“I'll ask Dr. Carroll.”

Whether it was possible or not, he'd wanted to promise her something, as if that might make up for him leaving. He signed her in at the front desk, held her a moment, then stood beside her until a nurse arrived to escort her back to the ward.

“Good-bye, Dodo. Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas,” he said, and, watching her go, wished he were taking her pills.

Mrs. Sayre had already talked with the doctor, calling, apparently, while they were in the air. “It sounds like the visit was a great success.”

“Not exactly,” Scott said, and described how, as the trip went on, Zelda grew more and more inward.

The doctor nodded as if this was normal. They could step down the dosage and see how she responded, though, as with any inhibitor, that would limit its effectiveness.

“But overall,” the doctor said, “it went well?”

He agreed, grudgingly. It was only the next day, in freezing New York, after seeing Max and Ober and stopping in at several of his old haunts on Third Avenue to warm up, that he realized what he should have said. “Fuck you,” he told the bar at large, repeating it with amused and grandiose satisfaction, and then he was out in the street, swinging and being hit in the face, tasting blood. It felt good to fight—it felt true, as if he'd made the right choice, though now it seemed he had several opponents and they were laughing, pushing him around a closed circle, taking turns. Even as he fell, he stuck to his answer.

H
e hated coming home to an empty place, the still silence a reproof. The only mail was an overdue bill from the cleaners. He'd left the stove light on, and the milk in the fridge smelled. At least Bogie was back.

“I'm guessing your mother-in-law's a southpaw,” he said, turning Scott's chin to examine the damage.

Mayo said she could put some concealer on his eye, and though there was no hiding his fat lip, he sat for her like an actor in makeup.

Sheilah was disappointed in him, as he knew she'd be, wincing in sympathy as she touched his face. Was it going to be like this every time he went East? She spoke as if there must be an end to it, a hope he'd long ago dismissed, and which, coming from her, seemed unearned and unfair, leading to a brittle stalemate. He didn't understand. In Alabama he'd daydreamed of seeing her; now his head ached. She had good news—her agent had arranged an audition for a syndicated radio show, a five minute spot each week—but the mood was ruined. He didn't tell her his plans for Easter, and she didn't invite him to stay the night. In a way he was glad.

To regain himself, he wrote. A storm front had blown ashore, blanketing the city, and the weather was perfect for it. Mornings he woke early and put in his hours at the kitchen table, the rain tapping the roof. For years they'd lived on his stories, but sometime during Zelda's troubles he'd lost the knack for those tales of young love the
Post
favored. His last few had appeared in
Collier's
, who paid half what the
Post
did, and
Esquire
, who paid even less. Ober might have set his sights lower, but Scott hadn't. He still believed he was as good as anyone out there, and when he turned a paragraph he'd been struggling with, he nodded with the satisfaction of a craftsman, lit another Raleigh and forged on.

At the studio he hid from Eddie till his lip healed, having lunch sent in and working late, trading last-ditch revisions with Paramore, who'd taken the opportunity while Scott was gone to rewrite the entire script. Every couple of hours new memos came down from upstairs. Couldn't Margaret Sullavan be in a wheelchair rather than a bed so the scene would have more action? Did the car have to be a Daimler? Why not a Ford? Next week they started shooting on Stage 11. The sets were already waiting.

“I don't know why you're wasting your time,” Dottie said. “Mank's just going to change it anyway.”

“I'd rather have him change my lines than that bastard's.”

Alan tossed her a goggle-eyed double take. “You can't argue with that kind of logic.”

“The Nazis are still the bad guys,” she checked, and Scott remembered Ernest's warning.

“That's the one thing we agree on.”

“Then you've done everything you can. Time to push it out of the nest.”

“And lay another egg,” Scott said.

“You've done this before,” Alan said.

Turning in the script was anticlimactic. He gave his messy final draft pages to his secretary, who gave the typed pages to Paramore's secretary, who gave the script to Eddie, who gave it to Mank, who, several long days later, sent Scott a copy with an official Metro stamp declaring it APPROVED. His name still came first, but Paramore had completely changed the big hospital scene.

To protect his work, he needed to be on the set. He made his case to Eddie, but Mank didn't want either of them in his hair. There was no point complaining. He was getting a credit, his first in three visits, and on a prestige picture. It qualified as a triumph, except now he had nothing to do.

My Dearest Pie
, he wrote
. I want to apologize for not making it up your way while I was in New York. I'd hoped to steal an afternoon and rescue you and Peaches from the horrors of the dining hall but got caught up in some nonsense in the city. Suffice to say I was overdrawn both physically and emotionally by then, and poor company. Your mother and I survived Miami and she was happy to be home. The doctor has her on a new medication meant to render her less excitable but which goes too far, I think. She was entirely pleasant yet entirely lacking the high spirits that make her the exceptional woman she is. My hope is that she will be more herself at Easter, and that you can join us then. Details to follow.

As for your Latin, please stick it out. While it may seem a burden now, you'll discover it is indispensable, and the better schools will expect it. You have three months left. For all of our sakes, please apply yourself. You'll have the whole summer to loaf around. Think of June as a finish line. I wasn't joking about Europe. The way things are going this may be the last chance to visit there freely, and while we're not completely out of debt yet, I could happily see it as an investment. Everything, of course, depends on what you want.

Let me know your thoughts when you have a chance. Sometimes I feel I'm talking to the air out here.

He thought it was natural: after spending every minute with Zelda, he was lonely. Sheilah avoiding him as punishment only made it worse. The rainy season was upon them, mudslides cutting off the canyons. He had a story to work on, but woke up late, then wasted his days at the office dipping into Conrad and watching the wet hedges for Mr. Ito.

Bogie understood. Those empty stretches between jobs were the most dangerous.

“Idle hands,” he said, toasting him and pinching Mayo.

It was true. As a boy, he'd always had some elaborate project that had nothing to do with school. On Summit Avenue, alone in his aerie, he drew the stately homes across the street and numbered the many windows and doors, compiling a detailed log of his neighbors' activities. In sixth grade, simultaneously, he kept a diary concerning the girls he liked and a ledger chronicling every penny he made and spent. These secret fascinations led nowhere in the end, were left mysteriously incomplete like the detective novel he patterned after Sherlock Holmes, to be replaced by his next obsession. At Princeton, when he was supposed to be cramming for exams, he wrote a musical. In the army it was a novel. Nothing had changed. He was still that boy, happiest pursuing some goose chase of his own making, and lost without one.

The temptation was to start his Hollywood book. He knew his producer; it was the business he needed to learn. All along, in his own disorganized fashion, he'd been taking notes. He had a good enough grasp of that world to begin, but he'd only be pulled off it anyway.

Joan Crawford saved him. She was nearing the end of her contract, and after flopping with
The Gorgeous Hussy
, she needed a hit. While she was the studio's top female star, over the years her range had narrowed. No longer the wide-eyed flapper or plucky shopgirl, she lacked the youth and softness to be a romantic lead. Now she specialized in playing the scorned woman in her own brand of weepies, enduring mortifications in the second act to reap a bittersweet revenge in the third. Eddie came down to give him the good news in person. Hunt Stromberg wanted Scott to adapt a
Cosmopolitan
story for her, a love triangle teasingly titled
Infidelity
.

“Sounds like typecasting to me,” Dottie said, and for a shocked second he thought she meant him.

“She's the wife.”

“So it's a fantasy,” Alan said.

“She's slept with everyone at Metro except Lassie,” Dottie said.

“You'll like Hunt,” Alan said. “He's not like Mank. He doesn't think he's Shakespeare.”

The story itself wasn't much. A rich businessman invites his beautiful secretary to dinner at his mansion while his wife is away in Europe. The next morning the wife returns early and surprises them at breakfast, and as the three of them calmly sit there, served by the faithful butler, the man knows his marriage is over and imagines the great mansion empty and echoing. From these two scenes Scott was supposed to come up with a whole picture.

He met with Stromberg that afternoon, not in an overpopulated conference room but privately, man-to-man, in Stromberg's office, a mahogany den lined with bookshelves. He was young, of a different generation than Mank and the others, gangly in tweed, the new junior professor. As Scott suspected, he'd read
Gatsby
. He pitched the picture to him as if Scott might say no.

“We want modern and adult but still warm. We need to feel sympathy for all three of them, that's the only way it works.”

Scott wanted to say it was impossible with Joan Crawford, but nodded, jotting notes.

“The location's open, what line the husband's in, all that business. She doesn't have to be his secretary, she can be a scientist or a concert pianist, we just have to like her, or at least understand why she does what she does.”

“Love,” Scott offered.

“Kick it around. I've got Myrna Loy for the girl.”

He couldn't think of a tougher combination. Somehow she had to be innocent—they all did, otherwise the audience would turn on them. In his experience, people in love were helpless, except, rather than pure of heart, it made them selfish, walled-off, so focused on their own happiness they'd let the rest of the world burn—a mistake he'd almost made with Lois Moran. He felt the same murderous indifference from Zelda that awful summer in Juan-les-Pins and recognized it in himself with Sheilah. How could he show that coldness overtaking the husband without making him despicable?

He was free to invent any solution, which in the beginning made the challenge harder, but also meant the script was all his. Working for Stromberg was a step up, everyone said, and Scott could see why. Where Mank pitted his writers against each other to get his way, Stromberg sat back and let him figure out how to tell the story.

The first thing he needed to figure out was how to use Joan Crawford. He studied her like a test subject, skipping lunch to sit in the flickering dark of Thalberg's old projection room with a Coke and a chipped ashtray, watching her arch her eyebrows and smirk her way through
Possessed
and
Chained
and
Forsaking All Others
, trying to discern her strengths. She had good cheekbones and her clothes showed off her figure, but she wasn't a natural actress. In her wronged women there was no depth, no shading. When she was supposed to be happy, she smiled too brightly; when betrayed, she raged like a harpy, coming off not just false but ridiculous. She was consistently mawkish and overwrought, with one interesting exception.

In every picture, for the bulk of the second act, she was asked to bear her heartbreak and carry on. Family and social standing lost, she was reduced to menial jobs to support herself. She clenched her jaw and wrung out laundry, did dishes, scrubbed floors, at first resentfully, but then, as she recovered herself, with an avidity and pride that struck him as genuine. This was why she was a star, not the maudlin hysterics. Beneath the sweeping, cantilevered gowns by Adrian, she was steely and practical. Her character would have to be strong, maybe stronger than her husband. Yes, and obviously stronger from the very beginning, a Lady Macbeth who drives him into the secretary's arms—but with nobler ambitions, a reformer or humanitarian.

“When they break up, she doesn't crumble,” he told Stromberg. “He does. Then when he realizes what he's done, it's her decision to take him back or not—which works, since it's her picture. Her audience will understand either way.”

“What about the secretary?”

“The secretary really does love him, she's just a kid. We have her play her a little wide-eyed, the small town girl with a big heart. It's tougher on her than anybody.”

Stromberg mulled it, drawing on his pipe.

“How soon can you have a draft together?”

“Six weeks.”

“You've got eight. Give me something good.”

He would need them. By the end of the first week, all he had was his opening, a long shot of a wedding reception in the Waldorf's rooftop gardens, where he and Ginevra once danced under the stars. Through matching opera glasses, two older women in a neighboring building spy on the various couples, divining the state of their love lives. To distant music, panning, we get the candy figures atop the wedding cake, the newlyweds stepping out for their first dance, the proud parents clapping, a bridesmaid and her date strolling hand in hand among the rose beds, cherubs kissing atop a fountain, till we come to Crawford and her husband, off in the farthest part of the garden, the corner parapet, facing away from each other, looking down the dark canyons of Manhattan, lost in their separate thoughts. “Oh dear,” one of the grannies says. “What happened to them?”

He liked the question, the way it set the stage, but then bogged down in false starts. The source material was so skimpy, it was like writing an original script. After wrestling with her profession for several days, he settled on her being a fashion designer, except he knew nothing of that world, and had to walk over to wardrobe and get filled in by one of the dressers.

He already had the wife and the husband, they were easy. The secretary was trickier, stuck in the middle, and as he had with Vivien Leigh in
A Yank at Oxford
, he based her on Sheilah.

They were back together after another campaign of poems and roses, another promise to stop, or at least try. He didn't dare say that on average he hadn't been this sober in years. Valentine's was coming up, an opportunity to redeem himself. He made reservations at the Cocoanut Grove and hit Bullock's for a new tux, taking a detour through the Women's section with his notebook open.

Bullock's, Schwab's, the Troc—everywhere he went he pictured Joan Crawford, imagined her character parsing the other women on the street. He began to pay attention to fabrics and hemlines, and to be dismayed at the epidemic of slacks.

One noontime, walking over to the commissary after working all morning, he ran into her—unmistakable, with that great, haughty face. Up close she seemed smaller, her waist tiny from dieting. She didn't recognize him, and he had to introduce himself.