Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

And then it would be amusing to see Los Angeles under the wing of so well-informed a motion-picture impresario as Lontaine. That afternoon at the Culp studios had been fascinating; how much more so would it be to live for a time in a city that was, at least as Lontaine limned it, one vast open-air studio, to be associated with people who were actually doing something with their lives. What a change from the life that had grown to seem tedious and unprofitable even before Bellamy had made its continuance intolerable!

"But you haven't told me," she complained, "about those tests. Did you go to see them that day? How did they come out? How did I look?"

"Oh, Cindy! what a shame you missed it. You were adorable, everybody simply raved about you."

"Fact, Mrs. Druce. You outclassed even Alma Daley in that Palm Room scene. No, but seriously: it was you first, Miss Daley second, Fanny a good third, the rest nowhere. You missed scoring no end of a personal triumph in the projection-room. Though, if you ask me, Miss Daley was just as well pleased."

"You're making fun of me."

"Absolutely not."

"Well, it's hard to believe, but if you mean it, the Culps and their cameraman would seem to have been right."

"Oh, I'd almost forgotten!" Fanny cried. "Mr. Culp was terribly put out because you weren't there, and made me promise faithfully to ask you to call him up and make an appointment for another private showing."

"Right about what?" Lontaine earnestly wanted to know.

"Why, they were so sure I would screen well, as they put it, Mr. Culp made me an offer, as we were leaving, to act with his wife in her next picture."

Lontaine's eyes widened into a luminous blue stare; and abruptly, as if to hide the thought behind them, he threw away a half-smoked cigarette and, helping himself to another, bent forward, tapping it on a thumb-nail.

"Really, dearest? How priceless! And what did you say to the creature?"

"Oh, I was kind but firm."

"Ben Culp's a big man in the cinema game," Lontaine commented without looking up. "His advice is worth something, Mrs. Druce. If he says you'd make a hit, you might do worse than listen to him. That is, of course, if you should ever think of taking a flyer in the motion-picture business."

"I'm not even dreaming of such a thing. Why, it's absurd!"

"I'll wager you wouldn't say so if you once saw yourself on the screen. Only wish I had a print of those tests to show you."

"I'm not curious."

"Then you're the modern miracle, Mrs. Druce – a woman without either vanity or a secret ambition to be a cinema star." Lontaine laughed and lazily got up. "I can only say you've got a chance to make a name for yourself I wouldn't overlook if I stood in your shoes… But if you'll excuse me now, think I'll roll along and arrange matters with the conductor and porters."

"You're too good to me," Lucinda protested. "I know I'm imposing – "

"Absolutely nothing in that. Only too happy."

The door was behind Lucinda's shoulder. Closing it, unseen by her, Lontaine contrived to exchange with his wife a look of profound significance. Then he lounged thoughtfully forward to the club car and delayed there, in deep abstraction, long enough to smoke two cigarettes before proceeding to hunt up and interview the conductor about Lucinda's change of destination, then instruct the porters to shift her luggage to the Lontaine drawing-room and his own effects to the section she was vacating.

Into making this move Lucinda had been talked against her half-hearted demurs. She knew very well it wasn't the right thing to do, to take advantage of their kindness of heart, to separate husband and wife; but they wouldn't listen to her; and after all it was hardly in human nature to undergo again the ordeal of the open sleeping-car by night if one might by any means avoid it; while Lontaine insisted he wouldn't mind in the least.

"I'm an old hand at travelling under any and all conditions," he had asserted – "accustomed to roughing it, you know. Even upper berths hold no terrors for me, while a whole section is simply sybaritic sensuality. If one hadn't brought Fanny along, it would never have entered the old bean to do oneself better than a lower. Absolutely. You don't imagine Fan and I could rest in comfort, knowing you were unhappy back there? Rather not!"

In point of fact, Lontaine had been at once eager to earn Lucinda's favour and not at all averse to a move which promised more personal liberty than one could command penned up in a stuffy coop with one's wife. Oh, not that he wasn't fond enough of Fan, but – well, when all was said, one was bound to admit Fan was a bit, you know, American. Not to put too fine a point on it, decidedly American. Nobody's fool, Fan. Had a head on her shoulders and used it, and a way of looking at one, besides, as if she were actually looking through one, now and then, that made one feel positively ratty. Chap could do with an occasional furlough from that sort of thing.

It wasn't as if they were still lovers, you see. Rough going, the devil's own luck and mutual disappointment had put rather a permanent crimp into the first fine raptures. They got along well enough nowadays, to be sure, but it was no good pretending that either couldn't have done just as well alone. But then it had hardly been in the first place what one might call a love match. Oh, yes, tremendously taken with each other, and all that; but if you put it to the test of cold facts, the truth was, Fan had married with an eye to that distant title, whose remoteness the War had so inconsiderately failed to abridge, while Lontaine had been quite as much influenced by Fan's filial relationship to a fortune of something like eighty millions. But that hope, too, had long since gone glimmering.

Rotten form, not to say vicious, on the part of the Terror of the Wheat Pit, to cut off his only begotten daughter with a shilling, one meant to say its equivalent measured by the bulk of his wealth. The legacy Fan had picked up in Chicago would have been barely enough to satisfy their joint and several creditors. Not that one was mad enough to fritter the money away like that. But if this Los Angeles venture were to turn out a bloomer…

But why anticipate the worst? Buck up and consider the widely advertised silver lining… A bit of luck, falling in with this Druce girl, under the circumstances. No question about the solid establishment of her financial standing: the good old Rock of Gibraltar was a reed in the wind by comparison… Now if only one dared count on Fan's being amenable to reason, grasping the logical possibilities, doing her bit like a sensible little woman…

Seated in Section 10, waiting for the porter to bring back his personal impedimenta from the drawing-room, Harry Lontaine turned a handsome face to the window, frowning absently, the nervous frown of a man whose cleverness has never proved quite equal to the task of satisfying appetites at once strong and fastidious.

By degrees its place was taken by a look of dreaming: Lontaine was viewing not the dreary wastes of Kansan lands under the iron rule of Winter but a California of infatuate imagining, a land all smiling in the shine of a benign sun, set with groves of orange trees and olives, dotted with picturesque bungalows whose white walls were relieved by the living green of vines, and peopled by a race of blessed beings born to a heritage of lifelong beauty, youth, and love-in-idleness; a land in whose charmed soil fortunes grew of seeds of careless sowing, and through whose scenes of subtropical loveliness prophetic vision descried a heroic figure moving, courted and applauded by happy, unenvious multitudes, the figure of Harry Lontaine, Esq., newest but mightiest overlord of the cinema…

From this delectable realm the dreamer was recalled by consciousness of somebody standing in the aisle and staring impertinently. Racial shyness erased all signs of wistfulness in one instant and cloaked sensitiveness in a guise of glacial arrogance; in another, recognition dawned, and hauteur was in turn discarded and a more approachable mien set up in its stead. Lontaine was too diligent a student of motion-pictures not to know at sight the features of Lynn Summerlad, by long odds the most popular male star of the American cinema. A personage worth knowing…

Misreading his expression, Mr. Summerlad felt called upon to apologize.

"Beg your pardon, but I was expecting to find a lady in this section, I may say a friend: a Mrs. Druce. Do you by any chance – ?"

XIX

Bridge killed the long hours of that first afternoon on board a train whose windows revealed seldom a prospect less desolate than one of prairie meadows fallowed but frozen, dusky beneath a tarnished sky: a still and roomy land spaciously fenced, scored by rare roads that knew no turning, but ran like ruled diameters of the wide ring of the horizon: the wheat-bin of the world swept and garnished by winter winds.

Lynn Summerlad made a fourth at the table set up in the Lontaine drawing-room; invited by Lontaine as an acquaintance of Lucinda's and a grateful addition to the party because he played something better than merely a good game.

Not only "fearfully easy to look at" (as Fanny confided to Lucinda) but fair spoken and well if at times a shade carefully mannered, he was intelligent and ready of wit; so that, when he proved these qualities by not forcing himself upon the trio at or after dinner, he was missed; and Lucinda, while she waited for sleep to blind her eyes that night, discovered that she was looking forward to the next afternoon, when Bridge would be again in order and infeasible without the fourth.

But she was too sleepy to be concerned about the methods with which Summerlad, making no perceptible effort, had succeeded in winning back the ground which over-assurance had lost for him at the breakfast table. It was enough that he qualified as that all too unordinary social phenomenon, "an amusing person."

She began to study him more intently if discreetly, however, when the train pulled into Albuquerque for its scheduled stop of an hour at noon of the second day, and the Lontaines and Lucinda, alighting to stretch their legs, found Summerlad, alert and debonnaire, waiting on the platform, prepared to act as their guide and protect them against their tenderfoot tendency to purchase all the souvenirs in sight.

This quiet process of noting and weighing ran like a strand of distinctive colour through the patterned impressions of the day, till, retracing it in reverie after nightfall, it was possible for Lucinda to make up her mind that she liked Lynn Summerlad decidedly. True that he was not of her world; but then neither was she herself any more, in this anomalous stage of the apostate wife, neither wife nor widow, not even honest divorcée.

If Summerlad's character as she read it had faults, if an occasional crudity flawed his finish, these things were held to be condonable in view of his youth. He seemed ridiculously young to Lucinda, but sure to improve with age, sure to take on polish from rubbing up against life. Especially if he were so fortunate as to find the right woman to watch over and advise him. An interesting job, for the right woman…

Not (she assured herself hastily) that it would be a job to interest her. An absurd turn of thought, anyway. Why she had wasted time on it she really didn't know. Unless, of course, its incentive had lain in consciousness of Summerlad's naïve captivation. One couldn't very well overlook that. He was so artless about it, boyish, and – well – nice. It was most entertaining.

It was also, if truth would out, far from displeasing.

Apprehension of this most human foible in herself caused Lucinda to smile confidentially into the darkness streaming gustily astern from the observation platform, to which the four of them had repaired to wait while their several berths were being made up. But the hour was so late, the night air so chill in the altitudes which the train was then traversing, that no other passengers had cared to dispute with them the platform chairs; while Fanny had excused herself before and Lontaine had quietly taken himself off during Lucinda's spell of thoughtfulness. So that now she found herself alone with Summerlad, when that one, seeing the sweet line of her cheek round in the light from the windows behind them, and surmising a smile while still her face remained in shadow, enquired with a note of plaintiveness: "What's the joke, Mrs. Druce? Won't you let me in on the laugh, too?"

"I'm not sure it was a joke," Lucinda replied; "it was more contentment. I was thinking I'd been having a rather good time, these last two days."

"It's seemed a wonderful time to me," Summerlad declared in a voice that promised, with any encouragement, to become sentimental.

"Quite a facer for my anticipations," Lucinda interposed firmly – "considering the way I had to fly Chicago and my husband." Then she laughed briefly to prove she wasn't downhearted. "But I daresay you're wondering, Mr. Summerlad…"

"Eaten alive by inquisitiveness, if you must know. All the same, I don't want to know anything you don't want to tell me; and I don't have to tell you, you don't have to tell me anything – if you know what I mean."

"It sounds a bit involved," Lucinda confessed, judgmatical; "still, I think I do know what you mean. And it's only civil to tell you I was leaving to go to Reno by way of San Francisco when my husband found me at the Blackstone. But now the Lontaines have persuaded me to spend a few weeks with them in Los Angeles – "

"That's something you'll never regret."

"I hope so."

"You won't if you leave it to me."

"Yes, I'm sure you mean to be nice to us; but you're going to be very busy when you get to Los Angeles, aren't you?"

"I'm never going to be too busy to – "

"But now you remind me," Lucinda interrupted with decision. "I've got a great favor to beg of you, Mr. Summerlad."

"Can't make it too great – "

"Fanny and I were discussing it this morning, and it seemed wise to us… You've seen something of how persistent my husband can be – "

"Can't blame him for that."

"Well, then: the only way I can account for his having found me in Chicago is on the theory that he employed detectives. But of course I'd made it easy for them by using my own name wherever I went."

"Why don't you use another name, then?"

"Just what Fanny and I were saying. If I don't, Bel – Mr. Druce – is sure to follow me to Los Angeles, sooner or later, and make more scenes. I'd like to avoid that, if I can."

"Surest thing you know, he'll find out, if the Los Angeles newspapers ever discover Mrs. Bellamy Druce of New York is in the civic midst. The best little thing they do is print scare-head stories about distinguished visitors and the flattering things they say about our pretty village."

"That settles it, then: I'm going to be somebody else for a while. Help me choose a good, safe nom de guerre, please."

"Let's see: Mrs. Lontaine calls you Cindy…"

"Short for Lucinda."

"How about Lee? Lucinda Lee?"

"I like that. But it does sound like the movies, doesn't it?"

"What do you expect of a movie actor, Mrs. Druce?"

"Mrs. Lee, please."

"Beg pardon: Mrs. Lee."

"And you'll keep my horrid secret, won't you?"

"If you knew how complimented I feel, you'd know I would die several highly disagreeable deaths before I'd let you think me unworthy of your confidence."

"That's very sweet," Lucinda considered with mischievous gravity. "And I am most appreciative. But if you will persist in playing on my susceptibilities so ardently, Mr. Summerlad, I'll have to go to bed."

"Please sit still: I'll be good."

"No, but seriously," Lucinda insisted, rising: "it is late, and I want to wake up early, I don't want to miss anything of this wonderful country."

"You won't see anything in the morning but desert, the edge of the Mojave."

"But we've been in the desert all afternoon and I adore it."

"Oh, these Arizona plains! they're not real desert; they're just letting on; give them a few drinks and they'll start a riot – of vegetation. But the Mojave's sure-enough he-desert: sand and sun, cactus and alkali. I'm much more interesting, I'm so human."

"Yes: I've noticed. Masculine human. But, you see, a desert's a novelty. I really must go…"

She went to sleep under two blankets, but before day-break a sudden rise in temperature woke her up.

The train was at a standstill. Lucinda put up the window-shade to see, all dim in lilac twilight, a brick platform, a building of Spanish type, a signboard proclaiming one enigmatic word: NEEDLES.

Sharp jolts in series ran through the linked cars, a trainman beneath the window performed cryptic calisthenics with a lantern, one unseen uttered a prolonged, heart-rending howl, couplings clanked, the train gathered way.

As it toiled with stertorous pantings on up-grades seemingly interminable, the night grew cool again but by no means so cold as at bedtime. The outposts of Winter had been passed. The porter who tidied up the drawing-room in the morning opened a window and adjusted a cinder-screen: the breath of the desert was warm but deliciously sweet. Outside, heat-devils jigged above a blasted waste that was, as Lucinda viewed it, weirdly beautiful. The noontide air at Barstow had all the fever of a windless day of August in the East. Within the riven scarps of the Cajon Pass it was hotter still. A long, swift down-swoop toward the Pacific brought them by mid-afternoon to San Bernardino, set in emerald, where people lolled about the platform in white flannels and airy organdies.

The panorama of sylvan loveliness, all green and gold, commanded by the windows from San Bernardino onward, prepared for a Los Angeles widely unlike the city of Lucinda's first confused impressions, for something Arcadian and spacious instead of a school of sky-scrapers that might have been transported en masse from almost any thriving commercial centre of the North Atlantic seaboard. She was sensible of dull resentment as Summerlad's car – an open one but of overpowering bigness and staggering in its colour-scheme of yellow and black with silver trimmings – progressed in majesty through streets where monstrous trolleys ground and clanged, motor vehicles plodded, champing at the bits, in solid column formation, and singularly shabby multitudes drifted listlessly between towering white marble walls.

Only train-weariness and the glad prospect of a tub bath earned the Hotel Alexandria forgivenness for its sin of ostentation in pretending to stand at Broadway and Forty-second street, New York.

That sense of having been somehow swindled was, if anything, stronger in consequence of an expedition afoot with Fanny after breakfast, in the course of which the two women explored the shopping and business district adjacent to the hotel. The imaginations responsible for the plan and building of the city had suffered from that deadly blight of imitativeness which afflicts the American mentality all the land over, restricting every form of emulation to charted channels, with the result that ambition seldom seeks its outlet in expression of individuality but as a rule in the belittling of another's achievement through simple exaggeration of its bulk and lines, in being not distinctive but only bigger, showier, and more blatant.

Having lunched with Fanny (Lontaine was busy, it was understood, promoting his indefinite but extensive motion-picture interests) Lucinda returned to rooms which Summerlad had caused to be transformed in her absence into the likeness of a fashionable florist and fruiterer's shop; and while she was trying to decide whether to move half the lot or herself out into the hall, the telephone rang and a strange voice announced that Mr. Summerlad's chauffeur was speaking and Mr. Summerlad's car was at the door and likewise at the disposition of Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Lontaine for the afternoon.

"Ought we?" Lucinda doubted with a little grimace.

"Why not?" Fanny asked.

"It seems just a bit… Oh, I don't know. I presume it would be ungracious to question Californian hospitality."

"Copy-Californian," Fanny corrected. "Chances are you'll find Summerlad's a native son of Omaha or some point East. Does it matter? He means well, and we want to see Los Angeles."

"But that car!"

"It is rather a circus-wagon; but judging by what we've seen in the streets today, the way to make oneself conspicuous here is to sport a car of gaudy black or screaming navy blue. In the racy idiom of the Golden West – let's go."

They went. In ten minutes Los Angeles of the sky-scrapers was forgotten. For three hours league after league of garden-land, groves, plantations, ocean beach, bare brown hills, verdant valleys wide as an Eastern county, all bathed in sunlight of peculiar brilliance and steadiness falling through crystalline air from a sky innocent of cloud, passed in review before beauty-stricken eyes.

In the end the car turned without warning off a main-travelled highway, swept the bluestone drive of what might well have been parked private grounds, and stopped before the imposing, columned portico of an old Colonial mansion.

The chauffeur turned back a friendly, grinning face. "This is where Mr. Summerlad works," he announced – "the Zinn Studios."

"Studios!"

"Yes, ma'm – where they make the movin'-pictures."

Lucinda stared unbelievingly at the building, finding it hardly possible to reconcile such mellow beauty of scheme and proportion, so harmonious with the spacious lawns and massed foliage of its setting, with memories of those grubby, grimy, back-street premises tenanted by the Culp studios in New York.

A screen-door beneath the portico opened, Mr. Summerlad emerged, a shape of slender elegance in Shantung silk, and ran impetuously down to the car. With more deliberation Lontaine appeared and waited.

"Mrs. Lee, Mrs. Lontaine: I hope you'll forgive me for telling Tom to stop in here instead of taking you back to the hotel. Lontaine's here, and we've planned a little surprise, dinner at my place out in Beverly Hills, just the four of us. You won't say no and spoil everything? That's splendid! But it's early, and perhaps you'd like a look around a regular movie factory first…"

Conducting them through the building by way of a panelled entrance hall, Summerlad explained that the stages were temporarily idle, due to the fact that photography on two productions in process had recently been finished and their casts disbanded, only the directors and their staffs remaining to cut and title the films; while the production in which Summerlad was to play the lead was as yet not ready for the cameras.

The working premises lay behind the administration building. But here again Lucinda noted few points of close resemblance to the Culp studios. A field several acres in extent, about half in turf, was surrounded by a sizeable village of glass-roofed stages and structures housing the technical and mechanical departments – a laboratory, a costumier's, property, carpenter and scene-painting shops, directors' offices, dressing, projection and cutting-rooms, a garage, sheds to shelter motor-cars and trucks by the score, stables, a small menagerie, a huge tank for "water stuff," a monolithic fire-proof vault of cement for the storage of film.

Due in great measure to temporary suspension of active camera-work, the place seemed very peaceful and pervaded by an atmosphere of orderliness and efficiency. There were no actors wasting time about the grounds, no sets occupied the huge enclosed stages, the men at work in the several departments seemed all to be busy.

"Well, Mrs. Lee: what do you think of a California studio? Not much like what you've seen back East, eh?"

Lucinda shook her head, and smiled. "I am enchanted with this country," she said; "if what I've seen of it this afternoon is any criterion, I'm afraid it's going to be hard to go away from…"

"You haven't begun to see it yet." Summerlad declared. "Wait till we've had a few motor trips."

"As for your studio, it is most marvellous to me. If they're all like this, I don't wonder people are mad to act in motion-pictures. If Mr. Culp had promised me anything like this, I don't believe I should have had the courage to refuse."

"It's not too late to change your mind, Mrs. Lee," Lontaine suggested. "In fact, if I thought there was any hope you would, I'd go down on my knees to you. Oh, not to act for Culp, but for me; or rather, for yourself, as the head and the star of your own company. No: I'm serious. I've been talking with several people today who want me to try producing out here. I can get unlimited capital to back me. This country today is crying for better pictures – and I know how to make them. I can bring to the American cinema the one thing it needs, a thorough knowledge of European methods. Only one thing makes me hesitate, the lack of a suitable star. All the people of real ability seem to be tied up under long-term contracts. I may lose months looking for the right actress unless you – "