Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

"I'm sure he will," Lucinda agreed, smiling at the cameraman.

"Well, Harry?" Nolan insisted – "what about it? Who's got the rights of this argument?"

"Miss Lee," the cameraman said, sententious.

"Miss Lee has! Say: how do you make that out?"

"You don't want to make your background too prominent, Mr. Nolan," Iturbide explained patiently. "This set is going to stick out in front of the actors. You won't be able to see what they're doing against a checker-board like that."

"Ah, you give me a pain!" Nolan retorted crushingly. "That background's all right – going to photograph like a million dollars, I tell you."

"But, Mr. Nolan," Lucinda resumed with more confidence: "don't you see that the set is completely out of key with the atmosphere of the story? It isn't in the least like the supper club the author described."

"Bet your sweet life it isn't! Look here: I read that story, and I know all about it, and I can show you where the author was all wrong with his idea of the kind of a joint Nelly was running – "

"It wasn't what you call a 'joint,' to begin with, Mr. Nolan."

"That's just the very point I'm trying to make. If it isn't a joint you're dancing in, where's Richards get off with his kicking about you not being good enough to marry his son? It's got to be a joint, or there won't be any sense in the way he fusses when he finds out you and Dick are stepping out together. If that place in the book wasn't a joint, I'm a kike!" Nolan paused in triumph to let his argument sink in. "Now" – he brandished a hand at the set – "this is a joint, and a regular one, if you want to know. Some class to this. I doped it all out myself. Take those tablecloths, now: that's the identical kind they were using in Montmartre last time I was in New York. And those panels on the walls – I got the idea for them from Reisenweber's Paradise Room, only these are sportier. And that black woodwork and all… Why, we've taken the best points of all the classiest joints in New York and lumped them into one set, and improved on them at that. Now when this poor fish of a Richards sees his son dancing with you in a joint like this, he'll have some excuse for claiming you ain't all you might be."

"The trouble is," Lucinda replied gravely – "I mean, from your viewpoint the trouble will be —Richards will never see Dick dancing with me in this set."

"What's the reason he won't?"

Lucinda smiled slightly, shook her head slightly, slightly shrugged. In the course of Nolan's harangue it had been revealed to her that no greater calamity could possibly be visited upon the picture than to permit its essential colour of good taste to be vitiated by the introduction of this purely atrocious set. It would be like asking the public to believe that people accustomed to sup and dance in the Crystal Room at the Ritz had transferred their favour to the roughest cabaret in the purlieus of Longacre Square.

"What's the reason he won't?" Nolan repeated, raising his voice angrily.

"Because I won't work on this set, Mr. Nolan – until it is restored to the design I approved."

"But – my Gawd! – you can't do that, Miss Lee – you can't hold up this production like that. Why, it'll take weeks – "

"How long will it take, please, Mr. Coakley?"

"Well, I don't know, Miss Lee – I might be able to rush it through for you in a week or ten days."

"There!" Nolan obtruded an excited smirk and weaving hands between Lucinda and the technical director. "You hear what Coakley says. Ten days! You can't hold up this production ten days, Miss Lee."

"I can," Lucinda corrected coldly, "and will, no matter how long it takes to make this set resemble a place self-respecting people would patronize."

"But – listen here! – you can't go to work and upset all my plans at the last moment, like this. Company called for half-past eight – fifty extra people hired for four days' work – orchestra from the Alexandria and all – the best caterer in Los Angeles engaged to serve the eats – ! You can't throw me down like this – "

"I'm sorry, Mr. Nolan. You should have consulted me before ordering such changes on your own responsibility – "

"Look here: am I directing this picture, or ain't I?"

"I'll answer that question when you answer mine: Am I paying for this production or are you? And if I am, are you the only one whose wishes are to be considered?"

"Listen, now, Miss Lee." Nolan made a frantic effort to be calm and urbane. He swallowed hard. "Listen: I don't want to have any trouble with you, but you're making it all-fired hard for me. I've been in this business ever since there was a studio in Hollywood, I've directed hundreds of productions, hundreds of 'em, I ought to know my business – "

"It was on that assumption precisely that you were hired," Lucinda reminded him sweetly.

"But ever since I been working with you, I've felt – you've made me feel – damn it! you've been watching me and thinking sarcastic things about the way I do – "

"Did you never before suspect you were psychic, Mr. Nolan?"

"And now you openly criticize my judgment about this set and say you won't work on it – "

"You understand me exactly," Lucinda assented.

"You mean that?"

She nodded.

"Well, that – settles – it!" Nolan flung both hands above his head and waggled them insanely. "That settles it! I'm through – I'm finished – done! I'm out! I quit!"

He hesitated a single instant, searching Lucinda's face to see it blench at this awful threat; and in disappointment whirled on a heel and barged out of the set so blindly that he blundered into one of the frames and knocked it flat.

Lucinda nodded quietly to the technical man.

"Please make the changes as soon as you can, Mr. Coakley. It's all right: don't apologize any more. I quite understand it wasn't your fault."

The president of Linda Lee Inc. wasn't in his office, neither was his car in the parking yard; but Nolan evidently knew where to find him, for Lucinda had not been twenty minutes in her rooms at the Hollywood when Lontaine's knuckles rattled on the door. His agitation, when she admitted him, was intense, almost pitiable. One gathered that he considered a tiff between star and director a catastrophe second only to national censorship of pictures. He stammered painfully over his account of Nolan's ultimatum, which had been accompanied by a demand for the balance of his pay in full and at once.

"I presume you haven't heard from your lawyer yet, Linda …"

"He hasn't had time to get my letter."

"I don't suppose – you couldn't wire him now? It would give us a frightful black eye if Nolan were able to say we couldn't pay him."

"But he's had twelve thousand or so already. Why should he get the balance of his fee if he refuses to earn it?"

"But he claims you as good as fired him – "

"No doubt he would." Lucinda corrected to the last letter that misstatement of fact… "So you see, the truth is, Mr. Nolan fired himself in a pet because I refused to let him ruin the supper club sequences. Now if he wants the rest of his twenty-five thousand, he'll have to hire himself on again."

And eventually despairing of a change of heart in Lucinda, Lontaine took himself off to test his powers of moral or other suasion on Nolan; and at intervals during the evening called up to report progress, or rather that absence of progress which rewarded his best endeavours. Hope died hard in him, however; and some time after midnight the telephone routed Lucinda out of her bed to receive a somewhat disconnected communiqué to the effect that Lontaine's cunning as a diplomat had at length wrung from Nolan a promise to return to work the next day.

Strains of jazz which filtered over the wire, a singing background for the muzzy accents which retailed this glorious news, led Lucinda to infer that Lontaine was calling from Santa Monica, and to suspect that Nolan's capitulation had been to some extent at least due to the humanizing, at times, influences of the stuff the genial bootlegger vends; but perhaps no more than to the intoxicating kindness of Fanny's eyes…

To her taste the Affair of the Comedy Feet was something more farcical, though Nolan did take it in a depressing spirit of deadly seriousness.

In fact, one of the heaviest handicaps under which this young man laboured in his progress through life was a tendency to take frivolous matters, including himself, a shade over-seriously; a fault he shared with so many of his fellows of the studios that Zinn one day was moved to comment on its cause, not without psychological insight.

"One of the big troubles with the fillum business," he observed sagely, "is the way it's made a lot of people rich what wasn't never meant to be that way. And take it from me, pictures ain't never going to be right, really, until most of that bunch gets out of the business or gets over their surprise.

"Independence," he mused, "is one of the dangerousest weapons a person can put in the hands of an ignorant guy."

Next to himself and his amours, the thing Barry Nolan took most seriously was Comedy, so much so that he clothed the word with the capital even in his private meditations, and devoted a good part of his professional life to perspiring efforts to interject Comedy into the pictures he directed, especially those in whose composition Comedy, as he conceived it, had no business to find place.

Thus with the picture upon which his genius was at present engaged. Over the unfolding of its story the Comic Spirit did indeed preside, but manifested only in the rustle of its satiric wings, in a whisper of wit ever and anon animating the speech of its creatures; never in the head-on collision of two actors trying to pass through one doorway in opposite directions, never in the capers of a cross-eyed comedian dogged to his undoing by a pack of wild pies. So that Nolan felt it devolved upon him to save the picture by distorting situations integral in its plot and by devising others for interpolation, to the end that Comedy, the Comedy of the cinema, of physical mishaps and deformities, might mow and bow upon the screen its bid for guffaws.

If the results he gained were often lamentable, Lucinda ceased to offer comment when her first diffident strictures had been ungraciously overruled. It would be time enough to fight for a decision, she reflected, when the picture was ultimately cut to length and assembled; in which process much of this deplorable stuff would be sure to go by the board, for very lack of space.

Piqued to find her so unresponsive, Nolan issued secret orders that his most ambitious comic flights were not to be shown Lucinda with the other rushes, and confined further efforts in the vein to scenes in which she took no part.

And it was thus that the Comedy Feet crept up on her unawares.

Some time subsequent to the Battle of the Supper Club Set, when his equanimity seemed to have been completely restored, Nolan acquainted Lucinda with the details of an utterly unique method of screen introduction which he had invented, all out of his own head, with a view to lending distinction to her début.

By this device the public was first to make her acquaintance through the medium of a close-up framing two pair of dancing feet, Nelly's (that is to say, Lucinda's) and her professional partner's. Then, as these rested, the partner's feet were to be eliminated, and the close-up, after lingering one fond, reluctant moment on Lucinda's ankles, was to travel up her person until it hovered upon her head and shoulders.

If not strikingly novel, the business seemed simple and innocuous enough to Lucinda, and she posed for it according to instructions and without misgiving.

But when, the next day, she sat with Nolan in the projection-room, reviewing the rushes, this is what the screen revealed to her astounded eyes:

She saw first a stripling fashionable, an admirer of hers in the story, stroll down a section of sidewalk in the Los Angeles shopping district (which Nolan asserted was "Fifth Avenue to a T") enter a florist's shop, select roses, and scribble a card to accompany them, while the florist summoned an errand boy, a repulsive white slug of a child, eight or nine years of age, heavy with unwholesome fat and wearing an habitual look of hopeless vacuity, whom Lucinda had several times noticed, not without wonder, as he loitered drearily about the stage.

As she now saw him, the boy had been heartlessly shoe-horned into the brass-bound livery of a page, and wore upon his feet a brace of leathern wrecks which even the broad charity of a Charlie Chaplin would have hesitated to call shoes.

Waiting for the card to be written, this bleached sausage of a child restlessly shuffled his tragic feet, and again and again wiped them on each other. To make sure that nothing of the fine Comedy of the business would be overlooked, the feet were isolated in an heroic close-up.

She saw the boy take the box of roses and leave the shop to deliver them. As he emerged to the street the fiendish camera pounced upon his feet and again held them up to derision in a close-up wherein they resembled more than anything else abnormal vegetable growths uncannily animate. Nor was this enough. With the savage elemental humour of a Yahoo the camera hounded those fungoid feet as they clumped and dragged and faltered along the sidewalk, their monstrosity painfully stressed by contrast with the trim legs and dainty feet of feminine passers-by, the decently shod feet of men.

When unstinted quantities of film had been squandered in this delectable pursuit, the Comedy Feet were shown performing a side-splitting stumble over the threshold to the supper club establishment.

The close-up of Lucinda's feet with her dancing partner's was then disclosed; and the camera shifted its intimate attentions to another pair of feet disgracefully clad, which were discovered in the act of pressing the pedals of a piano and appeared to belong to a low comedy stage mother whom Nolan had foisted upon Lucinda in his version of the continuity. These last the camera followed as they left the piano and shuffled across the floor to meet the feet of the errand-boy, then as they crossed to halt near the feet of Lucinda.

Followed the ascent of the close-up to frame on Lucinda's face as she smiled down at her armful of roses.

The film ran out then, darkness fell, the ceiling light came on, and Nolan, who had the chair immediately in front of Lucinda's, twisted round with a bright, expectant grin to study her face for the glow of glad appreciation which he felt his ingenuity had earned.

She managed a wan little smile for him, but her eyes held still a look of bewilderment too deep to be readily erased, too despairing to be misread. Nolan flushed, but wasn't ready to admit defeat.

"I'll tell the world," he declared defiantly, "the screen never seen an introduction like that before!"

Anxious to avoid a repetition of their former squabble, Lucinda sought vainly for some equivocal phrase that would content the man's stupendous vanity. But, inconceivably inane as it sounds, the business of the Comedy Feet has been here set forth without the faintest colour of exaggeration; and her wits were numb from the impact of its wanton stupidity.

"Well!" Nolan sneered in an effort to reassert his authority – "I can see it didn't make a whale of a hit with you, Miss Lee, but believe me, the audiences will eat that stuff up, simply eat it up!"

"Don't you think," Lucinda ventured – "perhaps it's a little long, Mr. Nolan?"

"Oh, maybe a little trimming here and there won't do any harm. But it can't come down a whole lot without hurting the Comedy effect."

"But – I don't like to seem hypercritical – but that's what's troubling me. You see, it doesn't seem terribly amusing to me."

Nolan's eyes snapped, but as yet he had his temper under fair control.

"I'd like to know why not," he replied with more civility than the bare words as quoted can convey.

"If you'll be patient with me, I'll try to explain. It seems to me in a story of this sort, about real people struggling with real emotions, whatever comedy is introduced ought to be in character or consistent with the general tone of the picture."

"Well?" Nolan drawled wearily.

"Well – assuming there's really something funny about that child's pitiful feet – it's utterly at odds with probability to place him, dressed as he is, in the shop of a Fifth avenue florist. No such establishment would dream of employing such a caricature of an errand boy… Don't you see?"

"No," Nolan replied with an offensive echo of her inflection – "no, I don't see. It's Comedy, audiences are always howling for Comedy, and if anything on God's green earth can save this rotten picture it'll be the Comedy I'm sticking into it."

"Then I'm afraid it's hopeless."

"But I'll tell you what I do see." Nolan leaned over the back of his chair and grinned mirthlessly into Lucinda's face. "I see what I've seen all along, and that is there's no pleasing you, Miss Lee! Ever since I started on this picture you've had the old harpoon out for everything I did, and this, what you're saying today about this introduction I invented for you, is all of a piece with the way you've been acting all along."

"But, please, Mr. Nolan!" – Lucinda was trying her best to be temperate – "surely this isn't a reasonable attitude to take, surely you can make allowances for honest difference of opinion."

"Ah, it ain't your fault!" Nolan jerked angrily out of his chair and turned to the door, but delayed long enough to deliver a valedictory: "And I'm a sap to let anybody that knows as little about pictures get my goat like you do. Have it your own way – chuck the whole sequence out, if you don't like this introduction I framed special for you. It's your picture, I should worry what the piece of junk looks like when you're through with it. But I tell you one thing: If that introduction don't stand, my name can't go on the picture as its director. And that's flat, my lady!"

And before Lucinda could take advantage of this wide invitation to a withering retort, the door slammed on Nolan's impassioned exit.

XXXV

The day of the Last Stand in the Living-Room Doorway began auspiciously enough with receipt of a night-letter from Harford Willis stating that money matters had been arranged in conformance with Lucinda's wishes, and adding that Willis hoped before long to give himself the pleasure of calling on her in person; the business of another client was requiring his supervision in San Francisco, on the way out he could readily stop over in Los Angeles for a day or two, he was leaving New York the day he telegraphed.

Not a little to her own wonder, Lucinda found herself pleasantly excited by the thought that she was to see this old friend so soon again. Had his telegram come a week or so earlier, she must have been quite as much annoyed, have deemed its implicit promise of meddling in her affairs an inexcusable impertinence. But a week or so ago, at least up to the time of Bellamy's reappearance, she had been comparatively serene, smug with self-contentment because of the semblance of success which had thus far attended the rather off-hand measures she had adopted in dealing with the larger issues of her life. Now, however, she knew no more peace of mind, in the last fortnight the pressure of perplexities had grown so heavy that she found herself eagerly looking forward to the arrival of one in whom she could confide, of whom she could ask counsel, without fearing to hear self-interest sound in his responses.

Harford Willis might disapprove the roads she chose to go, but so long as she kept within certain bounds, which she herself would never dream of overstepping, he wouldn't censure; and if she found the going rough in the ways of wilfulness, his sympathy would none the less be constant, he'd never say, "I told you so;" and never would he be guilty of advising any course of action to the end that he himself might profit. Take him for what he was, there was nobody like him, nobody else whom she could so trust … not even Lynn…

Not even Lynn! A bitter thought to have to think, but a true, and one it were not the part of wisdom to ignore, that she couldn't look to the man she loved with all her heart, and who loved her well in his way, she knew, for sympathy in her trials and for unselfish advice, as she could to another in whose consideration she was merely a pretty, headstrong girl whom he had known since she was little, the daughter of an old friend.

For the truth was (idle to deny it longer or hope against hope that one might be mistaken) Lynn was changed, had ceased to be the light-hearted and irresponsible but tender lover of the days before Bellamy had come back to play skeleton at their feast, of late had grown irritable in a fashion new to Lucinda's knowledge of him, somewhat sulky and suspicious of temper, impatient of Lucinda's troubles when she wanted condolence and soothing, and over-ready to remind her he had troubles of his own.

She wasn't disposed to quarrel with him on that account, she was too fair-minded to deny him his grievances or the right to nurse them. Surely the situation in which Lynn now newly found himself was one to play the deuce with the sunniest of dispositions – to be an accepted lover and have a husband continually if with pretended playfulness snapping at one's heels, or else circling watchfully in the not too remote distance and showing his teeth, every time one looked his way, in a grin as malicious as it was brilliant.

Then there was that trouble with Lynn's foot, something that had turned out, rather to Lucinda's astonishment, to be a real injury, no make-believe feigned for an occasion. At the studio second-hand accounts came to her, of how Summerlad's foot had slipped, while he was doing "river stuff," and had been severely pinched between two logs. It hadn't seemed much of a hurt at the time, and Summerlad had made light of it, just as today he made light of it; but it had been slow to mend, and even now, though he usually managed to get through his work for the camera without registering the injury, there were days when he walked with a noticeable limp, when inability to get about with comfort interfered seriously with the amusements he had been accustomed to share with Lucinda.

So she wasn't seeing so much of him as aforetime, and when she did, what with natural preoccupation in their respective afflictions, to say nothing of the greater annoyance that afflicted them in common, the old unconstraint was grievously missed.

But nothing in this life lasts (Lucinda insisted on iterating, in a temper doggedly philosophic) and even as that earlier time of ecstasies had passed, this time of trial would pass, the day would come when, her picture finished, she would be free to leave the studio and forget Bellamy's existence, go on to Reno and get her freedom, when Lynn would be hers alone and they two could look back at this time and laugh to think how it had galled them.

Busy with such reflections, and with the pleasing prospect of soon having a willing audience for her complaints, Lucinda made nothing of the fact that Lontaine showed the whites of his eyes and shied back like a skittish cob from the telegram which she submitted to his inspection, and was even not much tranquillized by the cheque which, at the same time, she gave him for the replenishment of the company's coffers. And in her most amiable temper she hurried from his office to her dressing-room, into the newest, prettiest and most becoming dance frock she had ever owned, who had owned so many, and then out to the stage.

The company was waiting, the cameras were waiting, Nolan with an air of noblest patience was waiting. All of which was quite needless, for there was other work in abundance that could have been attended to, there were scenes in the same sequence in which she didn't appear and which might easily have been rehearsed if not photographed even though Lucinda was a bit tardy. But that wouldn't have suited Nolan's little book: having told Lucinda when he would want her at a fixed hour, he was determined that nothing should go forward till she showed up. That wasn't the Nolan method in dealing with women, to let them play fast and loose with his mandates and pretend it didn't matter. Was he not Barry Nolan, well-known for his success in taming temperamental actresses? A reputation honestly earned and of which he proposed that Lucinda should now be reminded in no uncertain accents. And if one had ventured to question his policy, he would have pointed out that company morale was bound to suffer if the director neglected to "go to the mat with" his star every so often. The success of every human undertaking depended on undisputed authority vesting in one and only one directing head – in moving-pictures, the director's. A lesson every star needed to be taught upon occasion. You had to keep hammering it into the poor dumb-bells, or they got the swelled head – and then where were you?