West of Sunset (20 page)

“Western Union.”

He thought it would be from Ernest, a dressing-down from the barricades of Madrid for letting the picture get away from him.

“Mister Scott,” Flora called up. “Telegram.”

KUDOS
ON
BOFF
O
REVIEWS
, it read.
SCOTTYS
DA
Y
PERFECT
.
ZELDA
GOIN
G
SOUTH
TOMORROW
.
REG
ARDS
OBER

He wanted to argue with the first part, but a call to Eddie Knopf confirmed it.
Variety
, the
Hollywood Reporter
, the
Times
—everyone loved Margaret Sullavan.

“Because they're idiots,” Dottie said.

“Oh,” Alan said, “I liked her.”

She'd heard it was Mayer who capitulated to the Germans. “Mank told them to blow, so they went over his head.”

“It's not Metro-Goldwyn-Mankiewicz,” Alan said.

“L.B. made him go back and reshoot whole scenes.”

“I thought so,” Scott said.

“It's still obvious,” she said. “Anyone with half a brain can tell who the bad guys are.”

It was this hope he clung to, rather than his first impression, when he thought of
Three Comrades
. The picture quickly became a hit, and Margaret Sullavan a star, earning an Oscar nomination. Its success only confused him further, having so little to do with the original script. He worried that Ernest might think he hadn't tried, or hadn't fought hard enough for his vision. It seemed fitting that Ernest should have the last word, having admonished him in the beginning. Since they'd met he'd served as Scott's political if not his artistic conscience. Whether Ernest was disappointed or sympathetic or both, his opinion meant something to him. Every day, for weeks, Scott expected him to write or call or cable, willing, like a guilty sinner, to abide by his verdict, but he never did.

W
ith summer and its Mediterranean days came the neighbors, en masse, their fantastic cars lining the drive. From Metro and Fox and Universal and Warner's and Paramount and lowly RKO they came, the big names seeking respite from shooting schedules and interviews, bringing their cooks and housekeepers and nannies. “Hoity-toity,” Flora said. For all its rustic charm the Colony was an extension of the studios, another gated enclave reserved for the stars. Out of costume, glimpsed against the vast backdrop of the sea, they seemed diminished, merely human, unworthy of either adoration or gossip. They swam and sunned and frolicked with their children while he watched from his dormer, scratching away at
The Women.
He'd forgotten how much little dogs barked. This was the real season here, families wiling away the blue afternoons building sandcastles and flying kites. After the long months alone, he welcomed the influx of life, if not the disruption.

Everyone wanted to be at the beach. He had guests himself. In August he hosted Ober, out to check on the Hollywood office, taking him to the Cocoanut Grove and the Clover Club, as if trying to impress a date. So far Metro hadn't said anything about renewing his contract, which Ober thought a bad sign. He'd spent too much time off the lot. They didn't care that he was sick, or that Stromberg said he could. They needed to see his face.

As hoped, Scottie had gotten into Vassar. After her sojourn in Europe, she and Peaches Finney trained west and stayed a week, lolling on the beach and palling around with Sheilah before heading off to college. She'd grown taller, and seemed older to him, more thoughtful.

“You were right,” she said. “In Paris they expect war any day now.”

She'd taken pictures of their old place in the Rue Tilsit, of Saint-Sulpice and the Boul Mich and La Coupole, where the maître d' remembered them.

“How is Louis?”

“He asked after mother.”

“What did you say?”

“I said you were both well.”

“Thank you.”

“I think he was a little in love with her.”

“Everyone was back then. She was fascinating.”

He wanted her to stay longer. Each night after dinner they talked by the fire until Peaches was yawning, and still it wasn't enough. He wanted to follow Scottie east, take a flat in Poughkeepsie and feed her on weekends. The next time he saw her she would be a know-it-all coed, enthralled with Harvard men. In a sense, his dream for her was coming true, except now he had no role in it. Saying good-bye at the station, he gave her his copy of Ovid.
Non scholae, sed vitae discimus,
he wrote
. Love, Daddy.

Like any shore resort, after Labor Day the place emptied out, leaving the pelicans and sandpipers as his sole entertainment. The weather was too good. It hadn't rained in weeks, and the hills were brown and dry, the chaparral like tinder. Heeding Ober's advice, he commuted to the studio, driving into the sunrise every morning, expecting to come home and find the Colony burned to the ground. He was in his office, fixing
The Women
, when Max called to tell him Tom Wolfe had died.

He'd known Tom was laid up in Seattle with pneumonia, but blamed it on overwork. For months he'd been traveling the Northwest on foot, doing research. He was obsessive in his enthusiasms, immersing himself in material. He'd rest and get well, as he always did, and bash out a generous, messy book. Instead he'd left the hospital and taken a train east and his heart had given out. At Scribners he'd been a brother to Scott, along with Ernest, and the idea that a man of his gargantuan ambition and vitality could suddenly be gone shocked him. Sheilah had never met Tom. Trying to describe him, Scott raised his arms wide, outlining a giant. In that sense it wasn't entirely a surprise. He had to have weighed three hundred pounds, and ate and drank like a Khan. Scott didn't mention that Tom was three years younger than him.

I envied his powers,
he wrote Max,
as I envy Ernest's, knowing they're not mine. I like to think the three of us—and in a different fashion, Ring—were after what might be called the American soul. Being surer of himself, Tom was more open about it, where Ernest and I hide behind the cover of art and irony. At heart Tom possessed a religious feeling for the country and his best work has an ecstasy that can't be manufactured. While it may be too much to wish for, I hope he found his way again in this last book.

He didn't brood as he had after Ring's death, but sometimes, standing at his window overlooking the boulevard, he thought of his mother's last days in St. Paul. He'd been holed up in Asheville, Tom's old hometown, frittering away the summer, and couldn't be reached in time. She'd doted on him, her golden son, and he'd repaid her stingily. How much of the past—how much of life—was unrequited?

His funk deepened when Stromberg pulled him off
The Women
and handed it to Anita Loos, removing any chance of him getting a credit. From the beginning he'd despised the play. Being relieved of command was just a further indignity.

His new assignment was
Madame Curie
, from a treatment by Huxley. Once again he was supposed to be writing for Garbo, though by now he'd come to understand that every producer at Metro invoked her name when they were pitching a project. He tried to picture her, smoldering and aloof in a white lab coat. The whole idea was ludicrous, as was Huxley's treatment, a May-December romance framing the discovery of radium, capped by the dogged scientist's inevitable tragic death. He dutifully went back and read her autobiography, only to find it equally pat.

The truth, as every Frenchman knew, was that she was sleeping with the young lab assistant. It had been a great scandal, complete with photos in the papers of the love nest, a bedroom naked save, curiously, a picture of her elderly husband nailed like an icon above the headboard, but, as with
Infidelity
, he couldn't tell that story.

Though both Scottie and Zelda seemed to be doing well, the run of bad news left him scattered and worried for the future. Late one day he was driving home when the radio said Hitler had annexed the Sudetenland. He was poking along the Coast Highway with the sun glittering off the water, the tawny mountains rising in the distance, while from the dash the voice of the dictator raged, urging the German people to take back their rightful living space.

He'd missed the last war, and imagined what part he might have in this one. If Metro wasn't going to renew him anyway, he could beg an assignment from
Esquire
as their Paris correspondent, rent their old pied-à-terre in the crooked streets of Montparnasse and report on the French High Command. He could hire a driver and wire stories from the front. Unlike Ernest, he was a trained soldier. Live fire didn't faze him; he'd faced it a dozen times in camp and had always done well. He was still a decent shot. Last fall when he'd hunted pheasant with Sid and Pep, he'd bagged his share. If he wasn't the cocksure lieutenant he'd been twenty years ago, he liked to think he was wiser. While he no longer saw death in battle as glorious, after his angina scare he wasn't afraid to die.

“You have got to be joking,” Sheilah said.

“Why?”

“You can barely climb the stairs.”

“I climb them ten times a day. Ask Flora.”

“Well you shouldn't. What if they use gas?”

“It's illegal.”

“You're not even supposed to be smoking. I'm sorry, I think it's foolish and irresponsible.”

As if to prove her point, later that week he came down with a barking cough.

Fall was upon them, the nights growing colder, dampness stealing in, lingering through morning. His lease was up at the end of October. As much as he loved the sea, his lungs weren't suited to it, and Sheilah began looking for a new place for him.

He would have been happy to go back to the Garden. Bogie and Mayo had gotten married, and his old villa was available. The simplest solution would be to move in with Sheilah, but she wouldn't discuss it. Everything close to the studios was too expensive, and after several weekends nosing around Hollywood, viewing ghastly furnished flats, she canvassed her friends in the English colony and by chance found a cottage even cheaper than the one in Malibu.

The reason it was so affordable was the location. It was out in the valley, beyond the matchstick tract developments and the great dam and basin built to sustain them, a guesthouse on an estate surrounded by ranchlands. Hemmed in between the mountains, the climate was warm and dry, a point Sheilah made repeatedly. Technically it was Encino, though there was no town, only a crossroads general store and filling station. It was horse country, white board fences running for miles. The dusty hills reminded him of Montana the summer he'd worked on the Donahoes' ranch, playing poker with the cowboys in the bunkhouse and writing slavish letters to Ginevra.

BELLY
ACRES
, the wrought-iron arch above the gate read. The manor house perched atop a knoll that commanded an expansive view of the Sierras, while the cottage sat at the base, a plain raised ranch with a white picket fence and empty pool. The owner was Edward Everett Horton, a dandyish Anglophile character actor known for his flowing mane and prissy dithering. He spent most of his time in London and New York, directing for the stage, leaving his diction coach Magda as a caretaker. A ginger spinster in a coolie hat, sunglasses and culottes, she showed them about the grounds, treating them like guests rather than prospective tenants, introducing her titled rosebushes with a grandmother's pride. She and Sheilah bantered in the same chirpy, flitting English, talking too fast for him to make sense of each exchange, and as they toured the gardens he trailed behind, feeling left out, as if they were speaking another language.

The cottage was bright and airy, furnished like a Nantucket saltbox with Wallace Nutting reproductions: rag rugs, dropleaf tables and ladderback chairs. The kitchen and downstairs bath were modern and freshly scrubbed, smelling tartly of ammonia. There was a girl who came once a week, Magda said, very dependable. Sheilah nodded, pleased. Upstairs, a picture window in the master bedroom framed the distant peaks to the east. A verandah that could be used as a sleeping porch overlooked the pool, which Magda called an absolute godsend in the summer.

It was his for two hundred a month, a savings of a full hundred over Malibu. Besides its remoteness and ridiculous name, there was nothing to which he could reasonably object, yet even after signing the lease, he resisted Sheilah's enthusiasm. He wasn't ungrateful, but as providential as the new arrangement was, it was temporary, another step down, and the fact that she'd found the place through well-connected friends added an unpleasant dash of public charity.

He'd miss Malibu. Though he'd been lonely there, the blue days were ample recompense, and the fortunate sense of living in a private Eden. No one would ever colonize Encino.

At the office he slogged away on
Madame Curie
. At night he packed. His wanderings after leaving Baltimore had made him an expert at traveling light, but since coming West, somehow without realizing it he'd gradually added to his wardrobe so it no longer fit his bags. He'd also accumulated a distressing number of books. Likewise, as he cleaned out the closets and dresser drawers, he discovered empties he couldn't remember hiding. He would have said he'd been good about drinking, but he'd only been here six months and just upstairs there were a dozen bottles. He gathered them in a burlap sack, waited till the night watchman had passed and stuffed them deep in Bing Crosby's trash.

That weekend Sheilah helped him move, the two of them caravanning over Laurel Canyon in their loaded Fords like homesteaders, leaving the city and the sea behind. Encino was actually closer to the studios than Malibu, a fact not lost on the developers of Edendale, yet topping the pass and winding down the far side of the mountains felt like crossing a border, as if the valley were a different country. After the mobbed commercial blocks of Wilshire and Sunset, the wide-open fields seemed empty, strangely depopulated. A farmer hauling a hay wagon with his tractor waved them on. A mile later, a raven tore at something smashed flat in the road. Except for the Sierras, they might have been in Nebraska.

He wasn't opposed to the rural life. Its slowness was better for getting work done. They'd rented the same kind of out-of-the-way estate in Delaware when he was beginning
Tender
, and though Zelda hadn't been well at Ellerslie, and they had too many weekend guests, he'd written the first and best section there. If Metro wasn't going to extend him, maybe he could finally start his novel. He thought he understood enough about Hollywood, and he'd never find a cheaper set-up.

The gate was unlocked. Magda had left fresh-cut roses by the sink, and an extra key which he presented to Sheilah. It didn't take long to get settled. The closet in the master bedroom was meant for a couple, and his things looked meager, as if he were just visiting. The place was spotless, but Sheilah insisted on scrubbing the kitchen before they made a run to the store at the crossroads to stock the larder. Like the Malibu Inn, it had his Gordon's. They noticed the bottles at the same time, and she gave him a look like a warning. He didn't joke that the price was lower here.

To celebrate—or was it a bribe?—she made him his favorite, steak and mashed potatoes and gravy. They read Shelley and Donne and Byron, and later, by candlelight, christened the lumpy bed.

“I hope you like it here.”

“I hear the girl's very dependable.”

“Be serious.”

“I like being here with you.”

“That's not what I mean.”

It was the same impasse they always reached, the inevitable yet impossible next step that kept them apart. In everything else they agreed, but here her sympathy ended and they both turned hard, fighting with silence. He was to blame, yet felt helpless, bound. The only worthy sacrifice was the one he couldn't make.