LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER 2

      It was nine o’clock of a July night and there were still some extras in the drugstore across from the studio—I could see them bent over the pin-games inside—as I parked my car. “Old” Johnny Swanson stood on the corner in his semi-cowboy clothes, staring gloomily past the moon. Once he had been as big in pictures as Tom Mix or Bill Hart—now it was too sad to speak to him, and I hurried across the street and through the front gate.

      There is never a time when a studio is absolutely quiet. There is always a night shift of technicians in the laboratories and dubbing rooms and people on the maintenance staff dropping in at the commissary. But the sounds are all different—the padded hush of tires, the quiet tick of a motor running idle, the naked cry of a soprano singing into a nightbound microphone. Around a corner I came upon a man in rubber boots washing down a car in a wonderful white light—a fountain among the dead industrial shadows. I slowed up as I saw Mr. Marcus being hoisted into his car in front of the administration building, because he took so long to say anything, even good night—and while I waited I realized that the soprano was singing, Come, come, I love you only over and over; I remember this because she kept singing the same line during the earthquake. That didn’t come for five minutes yet.

      Father’s offices were in the old building with the long balconies and iron rails with their suggestion of a perpetual tightrope. Father was on the second floor, with Stahr on one side and Mr. Marcus on the other—this evening there were lights all along the row. My stomach dipped a little at the proximity to Stahr, but that was in pretty good control now—I’d seen him only once in the month I’d been home.

      There were a lot of strange things about Father’s office, but I’ll make it brief. In the outer part were three poker-faced secretaries who had sat there like witches ever since I could remember—Birdy Peters, Maude something, and Rosemary Schmiel; I don’t know whether this was her name, but she was the dean of the trio, so to speak, and under her desk was the kick-lock that admitted you to Father’s throne room. All three of the secretaries were passionate capitalists, and Birdy had invented the rule that if typists were seen eating together more than once in a single week, they were hauled up on the carpet. At that time the studios feared mob rule.

      I went on in. Nowadays all chief executives have huge drawing rooms, but my father’s was the first. It was also the first to have one-way glass in the big French windows, and I’ve heard a story about a trap in the floor that would drop unpleasant visitors to an oubliette below, but believe it to be an invention. There was a big painting of Will Rogers, hung conspicuously and intended, I think, to suggest Father’s essential kinship with Hollywood’s St. Francis; there was a signed photograph of Minna Davis, Stahr’s dead wife, and photos of other studio celebrities and big chalk drawings of mother and me. Tonight the one-way French windows were open and a big moon, rosy-gold with a haze around, was wedged helpless in one of them. Father and Jacques La Borwitz and Rosemary Schmiel were down at the end around a big circular desk.

      What did Father look like? I couldn’t describe him except for once in New York when I met him where I didn’t expect to; I was aware of a bulky, middle-aged man who looked a little ashamed of himself, and I wished he’d move on—and then I saw he was Father. Afterward I was shocked at my impression. Father can be very magnetic—he has a tough jaw and an Irish smile.

      But as for Jacques La Borwitz, I shall spare you. Let me just say he was an assistant producer, which is something like a commissar, and let it go at that. Where Stahr picked up such mental cadavers or had them forced upon him—or especially how he got any use out of them—has always amazed me, as it amazed everyone fresh from the East who slapped up against them. Jacques La Borwitz had his points, no doubt, but so have the sub-microscopic protozoa, so has a dog prowling for a bitch and a bone. Jacques La—oh my!

      From their expressions I was sure they had been talking about Stahr. Stahr had ordered something or forbidden something, or defied Father or junked one of La Borwitz’ pictures or something catastrophic, and they were sitting there in protest at night in a community of rebellion and helplessness. Rosemary Schmiel sat pad in hand, as if ready to write down their dejection.

      “I’m to drive you home dead or alive,” I told Father. “All those birthday presents rotting away in their packages!”

      “A birthday!” cried Jacques in a flurry of apology. “How old? I didn’t know.”

      “Forty-three,” said Father distinctly.

      He was older than that—four years—and Jacques knew it; I saw him note it down in his account book to use some time. Out here these account books are carried open in the hand. One can see the entries being made without recourse to lip-reading, and Rosemary Schmiel was compelled in emulation to make a mark on her pad. As she rubbed it out, the earth quaked under us.

      We didn’t get the full shock like at Long Beach, where the upper stories of shops were spewed into the streets and small hotels drifted out to sea—but for a full minute our bowels were one with the bowels of the earth—like some nightmare attempt to attach our navel cords again and jerk us back to the womb of creation.

      Mother’s picture fell off the wall, revealing a small safe—Rosemary and I grabbed frantically for each other and did a strange screaming waltz across the room. Jacques fainted or at least disappeared and Father clung to his desk and shouted, “Are you all right?” Outside the window the singer came to the climax of I love you only, held it a moment and then, I swear, started it all over. Or maybe they were playing it back to her from the recording machine.

      The room stood still, shimmying a little. We made our way to the door, suddenly including Jacques, who had reappeared, and tottered out dizzily through the anteroom on to the iron balcony. Almost all the lights were out, and from here and there we could hear cries and calls. Momentarily we stood waiting for a second shock—then, as with a common impulse, we went into Stahr’s entry and through to his office.

      The office was big, but not as big as Father’s. Stahr sat on the side of his couch rubbing his eyes. When the quake came he had been asleep, and he wasn’t sure yet whether he had dreamed it. When we convinced him he thought it was all rather funny—until the telephones began to ring. I watched him as unobtrusively as possible. He was grey with fatigue while he listened to the phone and dictograph; but as the reports came in, his eyes began to pick up shine.

      “A couple of water

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