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What does [Upton] Sinclair know about anything? He’s just a writer.

Louis B. Mayer

1949

‘All my brother ever wanted to do is make this a better town.’

The taller of the two men fingered the lock of the safe and turned to face the angry young cowhand. ‘Wait a minute, boy. Americans built this town with bare hands and know-how: anyone who don’t like it here can go back to where they come from.’

The young cowboy leaned across the banker’s desk and spoke in the manner of a man trying hard to control his temper. ‘Did you ever walk as far as your own ranch-house, Mr Sanderson? Did you ever see what kind of shacks those Mexicans live in, did you?’

‘Would,’ explained the banker, ‘but I just can’t stand the smell.’ He smiled.

They both turned as a sound of gunfire and galloping horses grew louder. Half a dozen horsemen galloped past, firing six-guns into the air. The young cowboy said, ‘Seems like you might be taking yourself a long deep sniff.’

Baxter kicked open the doors of the light-trap because he was balancing two thick-shakes and my pastrami on rye: a Hollywood breakfast! I used my thumbnail to prise the lid off the shake carefully, so as not to spill it. Around the cardboard lid, serpentine coils of film spelled out ‘San Fernando Valley Drugstore established 1934’. I flicked it as far as the front row of seats. Some days I could hit the screen. I always sat at the very back of the viewing theatre alongside the glass panel of the projection room. The big fans were there, so I could ignore the ‘No Smoking’ signs without worrying about top brass wandering in to sniff and see why the red light was on. Baxter unwrapped my straws and arranged the hot sandwiches and dill pickle on a paper plate. He was flustered. Normally he would have ducked under the projection beam, but now the mayor of the township was only one inch high as he stamped around on Baxter’s forehead.

‘You’re in the light, Baxter.’ He nodded but he hadn’t heard me. I wondered why I’d put up with him for five years, but in 1944 only dopes like Baxter and layabouts like me had escaped the Army.

‘You’re in the light,’ I said again.

‘They are not renewing your contract, Peter.’

We both knew I didn’t have that sort of contract. I was on monthly salary and that’s all they had to give me to say goodbye.

I started on the sandwich. ‘Every day I tell you, no lettuce. Every day!’

It wasn’t really unexpected. I was fighting a desperate rearguard action to protect my script against a ‘creative producer’. That’s always a mistake, but in 1949 it was a fatal one.

‘McCann, the cop on Gate Three, told me. There’s an envelope waiting for you when you check out. The girl from accounts told him what was in it.’ Things were tough all over: the mayor was being held down on Baxter’s chest by three cowboys, and when Baxter moved they rippled.

I ate only the meat out of the sandwich. I put the thick-shake under my seat and got up. It was a bright idea to put fascist-style arguments into the mouths of my heavies, but like so many of my ideas it was sadly mistimed.

Baxter said, ‘It was a great gesture, Peter. And on your kind of salary an unmarried guy can afford a gesture now and again.’ I nodded. He said, ‘You could talk to the Guild, but you’ll be grabbed by Warner’s, or Paramount, you see. You’ll maybe double your take-home pay. It’s the best thing that’s happened to you.’ He had a big smile fixed on his face and for a moment I was tempted to see how long he could hold it, but I remembered the good times.

‘OK. I’ll phone Jim tomorrow and tell him you are some kind of genius. He’ll probably find you some other hack.’

‘He will if you ask him, Peter. He respects you.’

‘Sure.’ I didn’t turn the lights up. I groped along the seat backs and out of the double-doors of viewing theatre number eight without saying another word. I suppose Baxter told the projectionist to stop showing Last Vaquero, or maybe it’s still running. Anyway, it was a lousy script. Maybe the first draft I’d written would have made a decent film but the rewrite had got too much stuff about hard work and truth bringing success. That took care of any irony that I’d tried to bring to it. Koolman Studios had a standing order about ‘values’ and I’d been crazy to try to get by it, let alone to add a few ideas of my own.

I didn’t realize that it was going to be the last time I walked through the Koolman Studios for over fifteen years. I blinked in the daylight and went past the big sound stages to the writers’ building.

A tractor train with pieces of a Hawaiian village rumbled past. The kid driving it shouted something to me and I waved. A group of men in heavy make-up and silk dressing-gowns were standing outside the door of Number Two stage, smoking desperately. They looked up when the kid shouted and they looked at me. Already I felt a twinge of the paranoia that an investigating subcommittee had brought to Hollywood.

It was still only 8.45 A.M. on a February morning but the sun was bright enough to burn your eyes out. I called into my office to collect a couple of shirts and a half-completed short story. The typewriter and the ten-dollar fan belonged to the management.

From my window I could see the empty lot where walls and stairs were stored. Beyond it there was the block that housed the accountants and the lawyers. Significantly, theirs was a two-storey brick building with fitted carpets and air conditioning; the writers’ ‘block’ was two timber sheds linked by a dimly lit corridor that was part of film storage.

Around the Koolman layout there was a high white stucco wall surmounted with rows of barbed wire and broken glass, but the executive building faced inwards to bright green lawns above which hovered white sprinkler mist. I took the forbidden short-cut to the main gate. It was time I lived dangerously. I passed Leo Koolman – the Studio’s whizz-kid – and my producer Kagan Bookbinder. They were sitting in Bookbinder’s brand-new convertible. It was bright red, with a grinning chromium front that people who were still on the waiting-list for new cars called ‘Japanese Admirals’. The car radio was singing quietly.

Bookbinder was trying to remember how to look embarrassed, but then decided I’d not had my news yet. He was a tough-looking bastard, like an extra for the desert island set that had been in constant use since Pearl Harbor day.

Leo Koolman was a vain kid with a perfect suntan and a Hawaiian shirt with red and orange flowers on it. In those days he was tipped as the only person with the youth, drive and experience to get the studio out of the jam it was in. As one of his first victims I still find it difficult to admire his judgement.

Koolman said, ‘Do you know the nominees?’

‘The Academy Awards,’ Bookbinder explained. ‘They weren’t on the early bulletin. We’re waiting for the nine o’clock.’

‘Hamlet,’ I said, ‘Laurence Olivier.’

‘You’re guessing,’ Koolman accused. He was hoping that I wasn’t just guessing. A British winner would automatically mean a rise in the Stone stakes.

‘Who else?’ I said cockily. ‘Dan Dailey, Clifton Webb?’

‘You could be right,’ admitted Bookbinder, smiling and bull-shitting to the end.

Koolman wasn’t so admiring. ‘All writers are supposed to use Gate Three.’

I smiled to both of them and kept walking.

‘You think Olivier for best actor?’ Koolman called.

‘And Shakespeare will get “story and screenplay”.’

The nine A.M. newscast gave the nominations as I’d predicted: Dan Dailey, Clifton Webb, Lew Ayres and Montgomery Clift. Seven weeks later Olivier got his Oscar. Leo Koolman was heard to describe me as psychic but he didn’t come offering me a seer’s job. Perhaps because Shakespeare lost out to John Huston.

Olivier was an easy guess. The previous year – in a tussle with Colman, Peck, Garfield, Powell and Redgrave – he might have been given a tougher run for his money but there was a growing feeling that Hollywood had been kissing its own backside for too long. Hamlet was a fine opportunity to break the tradition that only US productions got the award.

In spite of their accents, at least these limeys spoke some kind of English, and no one could say that the bard was a commie. The ‘best actor’ was foreign, but at least he was a ‘sir’ with three previous nominations behind him. It was on this ripple of reckless xenophilia that Leo Koolman launched Marshall Stone to his place in cinema history.

News of neither my genius nor my prescience had spread to script departments of the other studios. Whether I was blacklisted or merely redundant I never found out, but after nearly three months of explaining my screen credits and the ones that got away, I nursed my old Ford back to New York in easy stages.

I hadn’t liked New York in 1944 and I didn’t like it all over again in 1949. I wrote indifferent advertising in the copy department of a Madison Avenue agency for three months until my air conditioner went out of action in late August. A decision I had been deferring for several weeks was made easier when the agency merged and I was the ‘last in’ that a management agreement had promised would be ‘first out’.

It was only after I got back to London that my luck changed. I wrote a biography – Stanislavsky: A Man and His Method. It was a labour of love financed by a job as a bartender. It was a book-club selection. I followed it the following year with a history of Italian opera that was little more than a compendious reference book. Then, after two years hard work, I had a lucky success with my biography of Caruso. Soft-cover rights enabled me to pay off the mortgage on my small house in Islington, and serial rights put something into the bank and got me a contract as entertainment editor on a posh Sunday newspaper.

Many many years ago, my wife had been married to Marshall Stone. We met at a party not long after her divorce. She recognized my face from my days in Hollywood, and three years later a middle-aged author had breakfast in bed with a brunette lawyer before walking round the corner to be married.

So the three articles I did for the paper: ‘Cinema tomorrow, overture or finale?’ perhaps over-emphasized the importance of Marshall Stone’s contribution to the post-war history of the cinema.

Several times I’d mentioned to my publisher the idea of doing a book about the superstar phenomenon. He insisted that only Stone’s life had all the ingredients such a book needed: the overnight fame, the ostentatious wealth, the immense talent evident and so sadly squandered. The fact of having done that first Stone script and of being married to his one-time wife gave me all the cards. And yet it also made the task impossible. To write about the other man is difficult enough but when that man is Marshall Stone…

There had been times when I wondered if our two daughters – six- and eight-year-olds – would grow up disappointed at a father who had so nearly been Marshall Stone, but one meeting with the grown-up son of Stone and Mary dispensed with that one.

I still would not have gone ahead if Mary hadn’t encouraged me. Primarily I was keen on the project because I believed Stone to be a rare talent. It was only after I began work on the book that I discovered other motives within myself. I wanted to revisit the world I’d walked out of, that sunny day on the Koolman lot. And to some extent I wanted to know more about the life that my wife had exchanged for mine.

There was no mistaking the address the film company had given me. Pantechnicons, generators, a couple of limousines with dozing chauffeurs left no doubt that this was where Stool Pigeon was being shot. Edgar Nicolson – the producer – had leased this condemned house in Notting Hill Gate for five months at fifty pounds per week. It was a high rent for a derelict London slum but by using the lower half of it as production offices and building his sets floor by floor as they were needed he could save the cost of going into a studio. Offices, projection theatre, workshops, recording facilities and space to do the same film in one of the big studios would have cost him ten times the money. However, the big cars and luxury dressing-rooms were still mandatory. The industry had learned how to tighten its belt, but it still had quite a gut.

These all-location films were more relaxed than studio productions. There was an atmosphere of goodwill and informality among the crews. The big studios had too many elderly technicians watching the clock so that they could rush back to their semi-detached around the corner. These location crews were the industry’s Foreign Legion. Most of them had spent their lives travelling from unit to unit. They drank, screwed and gambled like legionnaires too. In the hallway one of them asked me for a light. He was a fuzzy-haired man in denims. I remembered him from a decade ago when I had been on my very first assignment for the newspaper. He’d been a twentieth assistant director then: now perhaps he was eighteenth. I remembered him telling me what was wrong with Godard and Fellini in exact and lucid detail. He was right but it hadn’t done him much good. Did he still dream of becoming a director, and did he still believe that this was the way to do it?

He said, ‘And next week Richard is going to do the explosions right there in the garden.’

‘That should give the neighbours something to talk about.’ Two prop men and some grips pushed past us with a plaster section of a battle-scarred Buddha.

We watched them huffing and puffing up the stairs. He said, ‘The bangs: yeah, but we’ve got permission. Dick Preston is quite a character.’

Richard Preston was a director from TV. Someone at Koolman International had decided that, since youngsters made up the bulk of the audience, kids should make the movies. As a business philosophy it would hand Disney to the adolescents and the computer industry to the computers.

‘They’re shooting on the roof today, Mr Anson. Wait on the top landing if the red light’s on.’ He took a call-sheet from his pocket. ‘You’ve got Suzy Delft doing shot number 174,’ he grinned, ‘for the fifteenth time.’

‘It’s her first day on the set?’

‘I think it’s her first day anywhere.’

‘Is she going to be all right?’

He grinned. ‘The greatest little piece in the business, and for half a page and a photo in your rag – she’d do it!’

‘Where’s the big man?’

‘Marshall Stone – he’s gone to the Test Match.’

‘He’s on the call-sheet.’

‘Yeah! Fixed it with the director. After the girl’s done, there are a couple of pick-up shots with Jap soldiers. We’ll finish early. It’s a slack day.’

‘Where’s publicity?’

‘Next landing, he’s in there, no one with him.’

‘Ta.’

The unit publicist had found a nice little office. On a cork board behind him there were a dozen stills pinned up in sequence. On another wall there were the Press clippings that had so far appeared. Mostly they were in the fan mags and trade journals: about one hundred column inches in all. The biggest of the clippings included a photo of Marshall Stone relaxing in a canvas chair. One cowboy boot was flung carelessly over the arm of it and the stills man had angled the shot to include the star’s name stencilled on its canvas back. Stone was smiling a wry compulsive grin that made you sure that success had come upon him with the unexpectedness of a traffic accident. I read the final para of the piece.

‘The cinema is my life’ said Marshall just before I took my leave. He gave the shy smile that tells his friends that he’s talking of things that are sacred to him. He said, ‘Once I’m involved with a part I just can’t leave it, I just can’t. If I have a fault it’s being too concerned with the craft of acting. Perhaps Larry or Johnny [Olivier and Gielgud – Ed] don’t need to put in the hours I put in. But we ordinary mortals have to run fast to keep up with such strolling players.’ I don’t think Marshall Stone need worry as far as a few million movie-goers are concerned.

‘Did you write this crap?’ I asked the unit publicist.

He grinned.

‘Can I have a copy?’

‘What’s the catch?’

‘For research.’

‘As a bad flack’s handiwork?’

‘I wouldn’t do that to you, Henry,’ I said. ‘We’ve both got to live with the industry.’

‘In the immortal words of Sam Goldwyn, “Include me out”. This is the last picture I’ll do as publicity man.’

‘Do you know, Henry, you said that to me when you were doing that film at Ealing.’

‘I might surprise you.’

‘Yes, you might go to Spain and write one of the great novels of the decade: send me a crate of Tio Pepe.’

He passed me a fresh copy of the fan mag containing his phoney interview. I put it into the red folder that I had marked ‘Marshall Stone’. It was the only thing in it.

‘Where is it all going on?’

‘The roof.’ He reached for some mimeographed biographies that were stacked near the duplicating machine. Suzy Delft, Edgar Nicolson the producer, Richard Preston the director. ‘I’ve run out of Stone’s but I’ll send you one. Help yourself to any of the stills you want.’

On the top of the pile was a large shiny photo of the director, dressed like a Red Indian squaw and posed as if screaming directions through a megaphone.

The Prestons in the industry were making so much noise that every magazine and newspaper I opened, and TV too, was talking about the great youth revolution that had taken over the movie industry. Well, youth had taken over the movie industry like Negroes had taken over the electronics industry. There were some, seated near the door and always busy, convincing bystanders that integration was here. But just as the mandatory Negro actors were still only getting feature billing, so the kids who were supposed to be running the film industry were getting their money from the same old big daddies who have been running the movies since movies were old enough to speak.

On this production Koolman had put old Edgar Nicolson around Preston’s neck but the kid was giving them quite a run for their money. Whether he’d get a chance to repeat his fun and games was another matter. There had been sixteen rewrites on this script, and that was the official count! The director seldom looked at the latest version and his continuity girl had been told that avant-garde films are fragmented, by which Preston meant that each day’s shooting was best invented the previous night. It wasn’t a concept his producer found easy to adapt to. Twice Preston had been fired. The major reason for both reinstatements was that only Preston believed that the existing footage could be fitted together to make a coherent whole.

They were filming on the roof amid a jungle of tropical plants. I watched Suzy Delft walk through a shot in which she took a flower from a bush and smelled it. She moved in that stilted way that models do, pausing each time she moved an arm or leg. It was the height of professionalism for a stills photo but in the viewing theatre it could look like Keystone Cops.

Preston talked to his cameraman and they decided to move one of the brutes. Heaving the arc light into its new position took several minutes, and the script girl brought out her portable typewriter and began to hammer at the continuity sheets. Suzy Delft sat down on a prop barrel until the fuzzy-haired assistant came back with a cup of tea and the sort of bacon sandwich that only location caterers can make. Then Preston decided that he could print the last one after all. ‘The two-shot,’ he called.

Suzy Delft groaned and gulped her tea. Her face was familiar, I’d seen her in bra ads and beer commercials. She was one of a dozen girls that Leo Koolman described as his discoveries. There was a tacit agreement among show-biz writers that the droit de seigneur of movie moguls died with the Hollywood czars. But if anyone could give that tradition the kiss of life, Koolman could, and Suzy Delft would not be the first one to get it, even if she was regularly seen at premières and parties with Marshall Stone.

There were several theories about how Suzy Delft broke into films. Journalists liked to believe it was due to the headlines she got from a mangled Marxist quote during the most fashionable of last year’s political riots. Girls seemed to prefer the story about her surrendering to Koolman in exchange for a leading role. Romantics had their story about how she starred in dozens of blue movies before coming above ground. These were the sort of stories that the world insists upon attaching to girls like Suzy Delft, for she looked not only as beautiful as an angel but twice as innocent. Without her rumoured depravity her face was a tacit reproach to all of us. Even for the boy who brought her tea she was able to spare more than a brief thank you, and she hung on to every word of his stuttered reply.

Suzy Delft was a montage of her own aspirations. Her half-closed eyes were Dietrich and her half-open mouth Garbo, while the stiff-limbed gaucherie of every movement was Mary Poppins. Her hands were held away from her sides and her fingers stretched like a wooden doll. Her dark hair was pulled tight and fastened in pigtails. Her tomboy toothiness was also part of the role she played both on stage and off. She was a schoolgirl – a stunningly beautiful one – on the verge of sexual awakening; at least, that’s how the Koolman people were building the publicity. Her poster was being drawn by the same man who’d done those cuddly Disney animals.

Her agent was on the set watching her. Jacob Weinberger was one of the best-known flesh peddlers in the business but I wouldn’t say he was popular; what agent was. I wondered if he had told her not to run back to her dressing-room between each take. Apart from speeding things up, staying here on the floor exchanging shy words with the crew was creating a good impression upon them. It would help her to know that they were all sympathetic towards her, and every actor needed an appreciative audience, even if it was only a crew.

Stool Pigeon was a war film: ten soldiers in the jungle trying to get through the enemy lines. It was an opportunity for miscegenation, full frontal nudity, cannibalism, sodomy at gunpoint, blasphemy and incest in a story that would otherwise have had to rely upon killing as its sole entertainment. They had shot the previous scene with the sunlight full on Suzy Delft’s face. Now they had to do a reverse of the two Negroes against the light. Understandably they were running into lighting trouble.

I was standing near the water tank. With tropical plants concealing its edges the Japanese soldiers were going to wade through it pretending it was swamp. They would have to keep the cameras low to avoid the London skyline but they would have real sky instead of back projection or a painted set.

‘Real sky is more important than matching,’ Preston told me. I nodded. Preston looked back to watch his lighting cameraman take a reading from the Negro’s face. He shook his head. There was still not enough light there. Preston said, ‘The stupid bastard. If he’d told me we were heading into problems, we could have shot the girl against the light and had the spades looking into it.’

When they had positioned another brute they couldn’t find the slate or the slate-boy. Finally he emerged, bringing a second cup of tea for Suzy Delft.

‘Turn over,’ said Preston.

‘Running.’

‘Scene: one eight one, take one,’ said the slate-boy.

The first Negro stared into the camera, shielding his eyes from the brute as if it was the sun. ‘Cut,’ yelled Preston. “That was good,’ he said. ‘Let’s print that.’

‘There was a hair in the gate, Richard,’ said the operator, his voice muffled as he examined the inside of the camera.

‘What is this: amateur night?’

‘Sorry, Richard,’ said the lighting cameraman.

‘Sorry, Richard,’ said Preston sarcastically.

He walked over to the continuity girl and grabbed at her hair in mock anger. She winced with pain. He said, ‘If we don’t get it by quarter past we’ll let the Japs go.’

The four Japanese soldiers were playing bridge on a prop horse carcase. One of them, a fat fellow with a long false moustache, smiled briefly at Preston before bidding.

The producer walked over to me. He said, ‘We’ll never get to the Jap soldiers today.’ Edgar Nicolson was an old crony of Marshall Stone’s. Some rumours said that their friendship was the only reason that Stone was doing this low-budget undistinguished production.

There were other opinions. Preston said that Stone had approached him personally and asked to be in it. Stone said that old friends come before a man’s career. My information was that Stone had had a two-picture obligation to Koolman International after backing out of the Civil War epic they did last year. He’d already done Silent Paradise with Edgar Nicolson and that was in rough assembly. This would fulfil his obligation.

Edgar Nicolson was forty-eight. A short Englishman with a complexion like a raw pork chop. His eyes were bright blue and he had a habit of opening them wide and staring to emphasize the many important things he said. He contrived to dress like a country squire but the cut of his lightweight tweeds, Cardin shirt and Garrick Club tie suggested a successful character actor. His voice was pitched artificially low and it was the voice of an actor. His classless speech was studded with the Americanisms that everyone in the film business picked up, but his clipped articulation would have suited a guards officer briefing his troops for a dawn attack.

‘How are you doing, Edgar?’ He twitched his nose. To say he always looked as if he’d detected a bad smell was a slander: his nose was as inscrutable as his eyes. It was Edgar Nicolson’s tiny mouth that revealed the slightly sour taste that the world had left there. Or perhaps it was only me who saw his mouth like that.

‘If producers worked a forty-hour week, I’d finish work every Tuesday evening.’ He waved his progress sheets in front of me.

‘Your Japs are a bit plump.’

‘They usually play tycoons these days.’ He used his ivory-handled walking-stick to flick a plastic cup out of his path. ‘You know the worst thing about my job?’ He didn’t pause in case I did know. ‘It’s like running up a down-escalator. At the end of any given week which I’ve spent arguing with catering companies about the temperature of the location soup, apologizing to an agent that it should be a Ford – and not a Rolls – that collected his client one morning last week, persuading a shop steward that one muddy field doesn’t justify a protective clothing allowance and pleading with New York to give me an extra ten days on their delivery date without changing their release arrangements – after that kind of week, all anyone on the production knows is that nothing happened: it’s a negative sort of process being a producer.’ He stared at me until I replied.

‘Like running up a down-escalator.’

‘At least like walking up. This industry likes to pretend the producer is some sort of blimpish general dozing in his HQ while the crews fight the battle. In practice it’s the producer taking all the shit so that the crew can work undisturbed.’

‘So Stone’s watching cricket today.’

He smiled. He wasn’t going to be drawn as easily as that. He looked around the roof: they were changing the lighting set up for the third time in half an hour. He called to the runner, ‘I’m going for coffee with Mr Anson, tell me when my rushes are ready.’

On our way to the canteen he showed me his mountain shrine. They had assembled the Buddha there; its nose was taller than the painters and property men who swarmed all over it. There was a smell of freshly sawn wood and quick-drying paint as the chipped edges of the plaster mouldings were covered with gold. The room was hot with the rows of bare bulbs, installed so that the carpenters could work through the night. A set dresser experimenting with joss sticks made a thin plume of sweet-smelling smoke. Already it was convincing enough for the hammering to seem like blasphemy and to make the set dressers whisper as they arranged the flowers and offerings before the enlightened one.

‘All OK, Percy?’ said Nicolson.

The construction manager said, ‘It’ll be ready by morning but I’ll need an extra painter or two on my overtime crew.’

‘Let’s try and make it one,’ said Nicolson. He closed the big mahogany door to muffle the sound of the construction gang. The canteen had once been beautiful but now its moulded ceiling had a pox of damp marks and its paper was torn. With lunch over, the room had been used to park scaffolding and sandbags and pieces of a machine-gun nest.

At the far end of it, the caterers had left urns of coffee, tea and milk, a stack of plastic cups and a tin of biscuits from which all the chocolate ones had been removed. Lunch had been cleared away, apart from a fleet of plastic spoons that had been obsessionally arranged to sail the length of one table, and a steamed potato that had been trodden into the parquet.

‘White?’

I nodded. It was an unusual concession to my taste; Edgar usually knew exactly what was best for everyone. He poured coffee for both of us and we sat down. A youth in a dirty apron appeared from the room beyond. He brandished a plate of biscuits: all of them were chocolate.

Nicolson nodded his thanks to the boy. ‘How’s Mary?’

‘She works too hard.’

He nodded. He sorted through the chocolate biscuits. ‘My wife thinks I have endless lines of big-titted girls trying to get me on to the couch.’

‘I’ll tell her about the chocolate biscuits,’ I warned him.

‘That’s all it needs,’ he devoured a biscuit hungrily. He took a second one, bit into it and then studied the edge as if trying to understand the secret of its manufacture. ‘It’s a great life,’ he said.

The runner returned. “There’s a lady,’ he said to Nicolson.

‘A lady!’ He did a piece of comedy.

‘To see you about casting, she said. She’s with Mr Weinberger.’

‘I know,’ said Nicolson. To me he said, ‘An actress: it won’t take a couple of minutes.’ I nodded. ‘Tell her to come down here,’ Nicolson told the boy.

‘I’m doing a picture called The Farmer’s Wife, after this one: Gothic horror. I’m looking for people. It’s bloody difficult finding a convincing Wisconsin farmer’s wife of about thirty-five. Here in London.’

When the woman came in I recognized her. I’d seen her with Richardson and Olivier at the Old Vic at the end of the war. She had that glazed look that actors get when they have to look for work instead of work looking for them. Goodness knows how many auditions she’d been to in her time. I saw her switch herself on as she came through the door. Nicolson changed too, he used a voice that was not his own, as if it was a plastic overall he put on to stop the blood splashing.

‘I can’t quite remember the name…’

‘Graham.’

Nicolson laughed. ‘Oh, I know your last name, it’s your first name I can’t remember.’ I had the feeling that he would have known her first name if she’d told him that.

‘Dorothy,’ said the woman.

‘Dorothy Graham, of course. I’ve seen you so many times on the stage, Dorothy. It’s wonderful to meet you.’

‘We’ve met before: at a party at Mr Weinberger’s last year.’

‘Oh, sure, I remember. Smoke?’

‘Thank you.’ She declined with a movement of an uncared-for hand.

‘What have you been doing lately, Dorothy?’

‘I did the Albanian secret agent in the TV series “Mayday”.’

‘I remember it.’

‘It wasn’t very good but the money was good. Very good, in fact.’

‘That was the winter before last, wasn’t it. What have you done since then?’

‘I’d worked so hard the previous year that I decided to have a bit of a holiday after the series ended.’ She said it in a rush, as if she’d said it many times.

‘Now, I’m not casting this picture,’ said Nicolson, ‘because I haven’t yet settled the deal. I’m just taking a look at a few people.’

‘When would you be shooting, because I do have a few things planned for the coming year.’

‘October, November. Probably at Pinewood, no location work or anything. From where you live could you get out to Pinewood each morning?’

‘Dear old Pinewood.’

‘I’d send a car, of course.’

‘Of course.’ They left it there for a moment or so, each relishing their role of successful producer and glamorous star.

Nicolson said, ‘It’s the story of a woman who is haunted. She sees the past, the things that have happened in this strange old farmhouse, the things that are going to happen. Her husband and the grown-up sons think she’s going nuts and then one night this kind of crazy monster turns up. It’s a pretty scary movie; hokum, lots of special effects.’ He nodded to himself and added, ‘And a great part for you, quite different to anything you’ve done before.’

She tried to think of something appropriate to say. ‘It sounds fun. I’ve never done a horror film. Who will be directing?’

‘This is something that still has to be sorted out, Dorothy. I’m just taking a look round, you know.’

She smiled. I remembered her more clearly when she smiled. New York: a wonderful St Joan. And a Lear that had nothing except her superb Goneril. ‘I will have that cigarette,’ she said.

‘Sure,’ said Nicolson. He got to his feet, grateful to her for lessening the guilt he felt at knowing she was not suitable. She opened her handbag to look for a lighter. It was real leather, a treasure from the days when she was rich and had every prospect of getting richer. Now the leather was scuffed and one corner had been carefully repaired. Nicolson lit her cigarette for her. She had an envelope alongside her in the chair and now she put it on the canteen table. ‘I brought these,’ she said.

Nicolson tipped the contents of the envelope out on to the table. There were a dozen large glossy photographs. Some were the dreary stills of British films of the forties and others were stagey publicity pictures, the definition softened to a point where her face was like a back-lit bowl of rice pudding. The only thing they had in common was that in every one she was very young and very beautiful. We found it impossible not to look at her to compare the reality. Whatever she read in our faces it was enough to make her flinch.

‘You take these with you,’ said Nicolson. ‘As I say, we’re not casting yet.’

‘I had to come this way,’ said the actress. ‘I was visiting some friends who live just round the corner.’

‘That’s swell,’ said Nicolson. ‘It’s lovely to see you again.’

‘I like to keep in touch.’

Neither of us spoke until a couple of minutes after she had gone. ‘I’ll have to see a lot of people before I decide,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s a special kind of technique, horror films. And anyway, the director is going to want a say in who we use. The wife: that’s a feature role we’re talking about.’

The unit runner came into the canteen. ‘Mr Benjamin says your rushes will be on the projector in ten minutes, sir. Will you be coming down or will you see them with Mr Preston this evening?’

‘I’ll be down.’

‘And your secretary says to remind you that they are screening the rough assembly of Silent Paradise at Koolman International tonight. There was a message from them saying that if Mr Koolman comes on the early plane, he will be at the screening too.’

‘OK,’ said Nicolson without enthusiasm. ‘And Mr Stone?’

‘His secretary says he’ll be there.’

To me Nicolson said, ‘Did either of us think we’d ever be pleading with Eddie to come and see himself starring in a movie?’ He sighed. Only Stone’s intimates called him Eddie. Often it had a disparaging tone, as if by knowing him before he was rich and famous, the speaker was in a privileged position to criticize him. Even Mary was able to imply that ‘poor Eddie’ or ‘little Eddie’ was what she meant when she used his first name.

‘Bookbinder must have seen something in him.’

‘Sure: Olivier’s head on Brando’s body. That’s what every actor was in 1948.’

‘But you don’t think so?’

‘Wait a minute, Peter. Eddie is bloody good. He has some of Olivier’s economy…’

‘But?’

‘Gielgud has perception, Peter. That’s why actors envy him.’

‘I screened Last Vaquero twice last week. Stone is very stiff. Did you ever notice that?’

‘He wanted that. He worked on it. Maybe he’s not very intellectual, but he’s not an instinctive actor: he uses his brains. I saw him acting with some old fellow once and this guy had thought up the business of pulling his ear lobe – he was Italian or something. Eddie said, look like you might pull your ear lobe, even touch your ear, but best of all be a man who is ashamed of this awful ear-pulling and is trying to break the habit. Now that’s what I mean by economy. Use that for your book, if you like.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, although I had the feeling that Edgar Nicolson’s anecdote had been related many times to many reporters.

‘Ellen Terry said it: act in your pauses.’ He arranged the empty plastic cups in front of us. The fleet of spoons was probably a Nicolson. He said, ‘The trouble that Preston is having with the girl is the thing you have with all young actors. They only act when they are speaking their lines. But acting is using your mind so that when you do speak, the lines come as a natural sequence of thought and emotion.’

‘Getting the lead in Last Vaquero made him,’ I said. ‘Without that, he’d still be hanging around Chasens hoping for a walk-on.’

‘And would you believe me if I told you that I nearly got that role, Peter.’ He took a pipe from his pocket and filled it. He closed his eyes while he did it and his face and his body gave those little twitches that dreamers show in heavy sleep.

There was electricity in the air that almost forgotten night in 1948. There was no rain or thunder, nor even the silent erratic lightning that so often presages a storm in southern California. Yet Nicolson remembered feeling that the air was charged. He might have ascribed this to his anxiety or to the special tensions of the night, except that the radio reacted to the same disturbance in the air. The San Jorge station had an hour of big-band jazz every night at the same time. That night it was Jimmie Lunceford, and Nicolson remembered how the static had eaten most of the vocal, ‘When you wish upon a star.’ He could never again hear that melody without going back to that night.

Even today that interstate highway out of San Diego isn’t complete. In 1948 there was not even talk of it. The road past the Sunnyside was dark except for the tourist court itself: a yellow floodlight on two moth-eaten palms and a jacaranda tree. The broken vacancy sign was flickering.

It was only after the car lights were off that the mountains could be seen, like huge thunderclouds that never moved on. San Jorge was on the far side of them, ten miles or more along the valley road. When the cops came – just county cops from San Jorge – the red lights of the two cars could be seen moving down those foothills like the bloodshot eyes of some prehistoric monster slithering across to the Pacific Ocean to slake its thirst. But it was much later that the cops came. When Nicolson arrived no one had even phoned them.

He locked the doors of his car. By the uncertain light of the sign he could see a grey Ford sedan from the Koolman Studios car pool. Beyond it, carelessly parked, was Eddie Stone’s new MG. Nicolson wanted to enter the coffee shop as quietly as possible. It was a neurotic desire that could make no difference to the outcome. He tiptoed across the porch but a broken board creaked and the fly screen slapped closed with a sound like a pistol shot. Nicolson had never felt more clumsy both physically and mentally. Stone would have done it all quite differently. A bell pinged as he opened the door. Neon strips lit the place with a harsh blue light. In the centre there was a U-shaped counter with stools. On each side of it there were half a dozen scrubbed wooden tables. One table, near the juke box, was covered with a red cloth and set with ice water, tableware and a menu. Kagan Bookbinder – the producer of Last Vaquero – and Eddie Stone were sitting at the table.

A Mexican woman with a stained overall looked out of the service door when she heard the bell. She waited only long enough to make sure that Edgar Nicolson was the man that the others had been expecting.

Bookbinder said, ‘Sit down, Edgar.’ He got up and reached over the counter to the shelf under it, and he groped to find a clean cup. He poured Edgar Nicolson a cup of coffee and put it on the table in front of him.

Seen through Edgar Nicolson’s eyes the scene was static, as memories always are. The air is blue with cigar smoke in a way that it seldom becomes in these tar-conscious days. The men’s haircuts are so short as to be almost military and their California sports clothes now seem freakish. Eddie Stone and Nicolson are wide-eyed kids with long necks and slim hips. Stone has a kiss curl that falls forward across his forehead. Bookbinder seems elderly to the two young English actors but in fact he is only four or five years their senior.

Kagan Bookbinder was wearing one of his old Army shirts. Still visible on it were the dark green patches where he’d recently worn major’s rank and a slab of medal ribbons. His war decorations were not all of coloured ribbon, though. His cheek was scarred and his nose had suffered a multiple fracture which proved impossible to reset. On some men a scarred cheek can evoke thoughts of university duels. On the barrel-chested Bookbinder it was easier to imagine that he had fallen down a staircase while drunk on cheap wine.

Bookbinder’s voice was similarly unattractive. Among the soft California drawls that even the Hungarians managed to assume after a few weeks, Bookbinder’s Eighty-First Street accent was hard and aggressive. Perhaps with a less notable war record he might have chosen to conceal his German origins. Perhaps he was just lazy, perhaps it was his way of being provocative. Perhaps he just didn’t know he had any accent.

‘Sit down,’ repeated Bookbinder. ‘We haven’t got a lot of time.’

‘I must see her.’

‘Not yet.’

Stone said, ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

‘How is she?’ said Nicolson again. So Stone was going to play it like that – why didn’t you tell us – oh well, espionage and show business have in common the tradition that everyone abandons you when you are in trouble. Again Nicolson said, ‘How is she?’

Bookbinder didn’t answer. He pulled the blind a little to one side and looked out of the window. He waited to see another grey Ford sedan park alongside the one he had brought. The studio drivers ignored each other.

The studio had three doctors on the payroll. This one was the senior, a man of about fifty with grey wavy hair and a dark suit. Bookbinder excused himself with no more than a grunt before going out to talk with him. Edgar Nicolson and Stone looked at each other covertly but did not speak. Stone drank coffee and Nicolson read the menu to divert his eyes.

Hamburger with all the trimmings. Roll. Butter. Jello. All the coffee you can drink. 85 cents. Today’s special. Thank you for your custom. Come again.

Clipped to the menu there was a white card distributed by the local radio station.

The headlines from the four corners of the world by courtesy of YOUR local radio station, San Jorge, California. Hollywood, Tuesday: new evidence of commie subversion in movie colony will bring famous stars to hearing. Washington, Tuesday: State Department official predicts indictment of Hiss on perjury charges. Nanking, Sunday: Chinese government army mauls reds in struggle for coastal cities. Weather: more floods feared for north of state. Low today: 71°. Downtown San Jorge 77°. Humidity 87 per cent. Pressure 29.6. Pollen count 40. Wind from south-west at 15 mph.

‘Stone. Eddie Stone.’

Nicolson looked at the bronzed man sitting opposite him. ‘That’s my name,’ explained Stone.

Nicolson awoke from his reverie with a convulsive start. ‘Yes, I know you. I’m Edgar Nicolson. And I’ve seen you around in London: Legrains, the French, Gerry’s.’

‘That’s it,’ said Stone. There was a long silence. ‘This is bad luck for you,’ said Stone.

‘Yes, you’ll get the part now,’ said Nicolson.

‘I wouldn’t be too sure. He seems pretty keen on your test. He showed it to me as an example: the first one I did was so terrible.’

Nicolson did not believe him but it was a friendly fiction. They looked at each other, assessing the competition that each faced from his rival. They had both invested in steam baths, facial treatments and had had their hair conditioned, waved and set. Stone’s brows had been trimmed and his lashes darkened. Nicolson couldn’t decide whether Stone’s tan was genuine or not but it made him look very fit and made his teeth seem very white. Nicolson tried to decide if any of Stone’s teeth were capped. Whichever of them got the role in his film, Bookbinder had already arranged for extensive recapping of the teeth. Many stars began their movie career with a week in the dental chair. It was one part of the contract that Nicolson did not relish.

‘Yes, you’ll get the part,’ said Nicolson. ‘This business with the girl will terrify the front office. And, let’s face it: the final decision is going to be made by some bastard in publicity.’

‘These bloody film people…’ said Stone. It was almost an agreement with Nicolson’s despair. Stone reached forward and gripped his arm. ‘I won’t do it.’

‘What?’

‘Take it from you. Winning the role fair and square: yes. I’ll fight you tooth and nail for the part, but I don’t want the part as a last resort of a nervous flack.’

‘Don’t be so stupid. If I don’t get it and then you turn it down they’ll give it to some other actor. Where does that get me.’

‘I’ll not take it, Edgar. You’ll see. These Hollywood bastards behave like Lorenzo the Magnificent, it will do them a power of good to hear an actor telling them to stuff a contract. Screw Hollywood!’

‘I could never live here,’ said Nicolson.

‘The stage,’ said Stone. ‘An actor needs the stage and an audience. The juices drain out of a man who spends his days transfixed by a bloody one-eyed machine.’

‘I like films –’ said Nicolson.

‘Films,’ said Stone. ‘Yes, we all like films. If you are talking about De Sica and Visconti. If you’re talking about Bicycle Thieves or Open City: everyone likes real films about real people in true life conditions.’

‘But there’s a new realism here in films –’

‘Hollywood films are about murderers, psychopaths, gunmen. What I’m talking about is the starkness of Bataille du Rail, the poetry of Belle et la Bête. No, Hollywood is a fine place to earn some money and to see some great professionals at work, but Englishmen like us are rooted in European culture. We die if we stay out here. Look around you, look at the limeys who live here.’

‘You think so?’

‘Sure of it. You charge your batteries in the theatre – here you just flash the headlights.’ He nodded. ‘What are you drinking, Edgar. It is Edgar?’

‘Diet soda. Yes, Edgar Nicolson.’

‘What you want is strong black coffee with a slug of something in it.’ He took a hip flask from his jacket and poured both coffee and brandy. ‘And stop looking so bloody worried, Edgar. We English have got to stick together. Am I right? Stick together and we can beat the bastards.’

Until that moment Nicolson had still been confident that the part he wanted would be his. Nicolson had the right build for a cowboy, a better walk and his voice was far far better than this fellow’s. But now he knew that Stone would stop at nothing to wrest the part from him. He’d been in the profession long enough to know the desperation with which actors fight to secure work but usually they had been crude oafs who could not stand up to Nicolson or measure up to his skills. Stone was not just another stupid actor. He was as smooth and as hard as an aerial torpedo and just as dangerous, but not perhaps as self-destructive. Stone surely didn’t expect Nicolson to believe that soft soap about turning the offer down, it was his way of declaring that he was going to do battle. Stone smiled a silky smile.

Nicolson said, ‘Yes, we must all stick together,’ and then he pushed the coffee to the far side of the table. If Bookbinder smelled the alcohol he would be marked down as a lush, and that was enough to lose him the part without this stupid girl going dramatic on him. Stone noticed him move the coffee. ‘Don’t feel like it, eh?’

‘I get tense,’ said Nicolson, ‘and then my stomach just rejects everything.’

‘I understand,’ said Stone. He understood.

A dish broke in the kitchen and there was a brief snatch of Spanish. The swearing was quiet and ritualistic as if there were too many breakages for a man to waste much energy on any one of them.

Bookbinder came back to the car with the doctor. They stood outside talking, and then the doctor went away. When Bookbinder came back inside, he poured himself coffee from the Silex on the burner and drank a lot of it before he spoke. ‘It’s happened before, Edgar, and it will happen again. The studio publicity guys spend more time keeping news out of the papers than getting it in.’

Nicolson said, ‘She took an overdose, you said?’

‘The whole bottle. The label of the studio pharmacy on it.’

Stone said, ‘Are you going to remove the bottle?’

‘That’s another department.’ Bookbinder pulled the curtain aside as another Ford arrived. The door pinged and a young curly-haired man entered. He wore a dark-blue wind-cheater, flannel trousers and white sneakers. He looked like a young stockbroker on vacation, or a half-back who’d broken training. Already he was showing the plumpness about the face and arms that predicted the huge middle-aged man he was to become.

‘Weinberger! Am I glad to see you,’ said Bookbinder.

‘Wie gehts?’ said the young man. Bookbinder nodded but was not amused. ‘You really screwed up a heavy date.’

‘Complain to Nicolson,’ said Bookbinder, ‘it’s his party.’

‘I want to see her,’ said Nicolson.

‘Sit down and shut up,’ said Weinberger. He put his hand on Nicolson’s shoulder and pushed him down on to his seat. ‘You do exactly what you are told and you might come out of this unscarred. First, her real name.’

‘Rainbow,’ said Nicolson, ‘Ingrid Rainbow.’

‘So why did she check in as Petersen?’ asked Weinberger harshly. It was a new side of Weinberger that Stone and Nicolson were seeing: he frightened them.

‘I don’t know. Perhaps that’s –’

‘You stick to not knowing. I don’t want you doing any guessing.’

‘Can I see her?’ said Nicolson.

Weinberger shook his head.

Edgar didn’t protest. He wanted to see the poor child. He wanted to talk to her, reassure her and tell her that he was worried. But he didn’t want to do it right now. The atmosphere was not sympathetic; even if Stone and Bookbinder remained here he would still be inhibited by them.

‘The doc’s been?’ said Weinberger.

‘That will be OK,’ said Bookbinder.

Bookbinder turned in his seat, stubbed out his cigar and bit his lower lip. Weinberger said to Nicolson, ‘You’ve visited her here? Here at the motel? The receptionist would recognize you?’

Nicolson nodded.

‘Oh well,’ sighed Weinberger, ‘we’ll sort that one out too.’ He nodded to Bookbinder.

Weinberger got up and steered him across the room to the service door. As they went through it there was a smell of burned fat and the strangled scream of a mixer. Just inside the kitchen Weinberger leaned close to the producer and gestured angrily. The service doors flapped, each swing providing a frame of a jerky old film. Nicolson knew they were deciding.

Eddie Stone was sitting well back from the table on the far side from Nicolson. He caught his eye and Stone smiled. As a child, Stone’s smiles had been nervous ones, but he’d soon learned the advantage of preceding all his remarks with an unhurried smile. ‘I didn’t know about it, Edgar. I was with Kagan when you phoned.’ He moved his chair back even more. Nicolson felt like telling him that whatever the trouble was, it wasn’t contagious. But they both knew it was. Nicolson looked at the service door. He could see the feet of the gods.

Weinberger said, ‘It’s not impossible to do it the other way: it’s tricky but not impossible, Kagan.’

‘What the Nicolson kid does once, he’ll do again. If Stone fouls up we can both say we’re surprised. But if Nicolson even gets a parking ticket, front office will want our balls.’

‘I’ll try to keep them both out of it.’

‘I know you will. You talked to New York?’

‘I can’t get New York for a couple of hours. But if you say Stone, he’ll stay as clean as a whistle. I promise.’

‘Stone,’ said Bookbinder and nodded.

‘Whatever you say,’ said Weinberger. Bookbinder grabbed him as he began to turn away. He reached for the top of the half-door and pulled it closed. ‘Don’t give me that, you bastard!’

Weinberger looked at the producer but said nothing. Bookbinder finally said, ‘I carried this idea for nearly three years: lunches for story editors, presents for production guys and ten thousand bucks for a lousy story treatment. I’ll never recoup that dough. Why shouldn’t I have five per cent of Stone’s contract? Two pictures from now he’ll be earning ten times my salary.’

‘And Nicolson’s agent wouldn’t play?’

‘Stick to publicity, kid. You don’t know when you’re well off.’

‘Stone, then?’

Bookbinder just looked at him.

They came back from their conference with grim determination on their faces. So must Bookbinder have looked when shooting down his Jap bombers. When they got to the table they halted like a firing squad. Then they exchanged the briefest of glances to decide who should say the next bit. Everyone knew it was the producer’s decision but Weinberger was paid his salary to handle trouble. Finally Bookbinder said, ‘Weinberger can cool the local Press and handle the cops but this means that I can’t use you to star. I’m sorry, Edgar, I can give you the role of the thief if it all blows over, but even that…’

Edgar Nicolson said, ‘What do you get for attempted suicide in this state?’ His voice was only a whisper.

‘Don’t worry about that end of it,’ said Weinberger.

Bookbinder made a gesture towards Stone. ‘Eddie will go back to your place with you. You’ve been together all day. The cops will probably want you, so stay off the juice.’

‘I never drink.’

‘Good. Weinberger will do what he can. It might happen that the cops won’t phone you.’

Weinberger was sealing large-denomination bills into plain envelopes and pencilling the corners to show how much they contained. Bookbinder said, ‘I’m sorry about all this, Edgar…’ He looked at Stone and Weinberger. ‘We’re all sorry about it. You would have made a swell cowboy.’

Edgar stood up and Stone did too. ‘Get going,’ said Bookbinder, ‘I’m going to phone the cops now.’

‘What about the waitress?’

‘Manageress,’ said Bookbinder. ‘Weinberger will see to that. You haven’t been here tonight.’

When they were outside in the dark, Edgar said, ‘I’ll lead the way, you follow. Flash me if you want to stop.’ Stone didn’t answer. He turned away. Edgar Nicolson touched his sleeve.

‘Did you hear anything about Ingrid? Will she be OK?’

Stone kicked an empty beer can. The entrance to the tourist court was littered with them. ‘Edgar,’ said Stone gently, ‘she’s dead. That’s what everyone is so worried about.’