Hollywood (28 page)

“Chicago, maybe. Of course, it could be made up, like Mary Pickford.” The Duchess hailed a taxi. “The Capitol. Senate side.”

“Well, I think it’s one of the best movies I’ve ever seen,” said Jess, still shaken, “about the war, anyway. I felt like I was there, in the trenches, with all that noise.”

The Duchess marched round to the door to the Senate cloakroom, which was behind the vice president’s throne. As she and Jess were about to go in—the Capitol guards all knew and liked the Duchess despite or because of her bullying ways—the Senator came out of the bathroom opposite, arm in arm with Senator Borah, a tall, burly, lion-headed man from Idaho, who was considered radical. It was typical of W.G. that he would go out of his way to befriend someone like Borah, who had furiously opposed the war-time draft, the Espionage Act, and Liberty Bonds. The first because you did not destroy Prussia by prussianizing the United States; the second because the
First Amendment guaranteed free speech; the third because bonds pushed up prices, creating inflation. As a businessman, Jess entirely approved of number three, and so, secretly, did W.G. Although it was not politically wise to take such stands in a country mad for war, Borah was fearless while W.G. was careful. Mrs. Borah and the Duchess were on good terms; but then they were neighbors in Wyoming Avenue.

W.G.’s smile was huge when he saw his wife and just as huge when he greeted Jess. “Duchess, why aren’t you off at your sewing circle?”

“War’s over, they say. How do, Mr. Borah?”

“Mrs. Harding.” Borah also smiled at Jess, not recalling him. Jess was used to this: the smile of recognition was recognition enough. Borah’s head was like an apple whose two sections started with the part down the middle of his hair and ended with the cleft in his rounded chin. “You see the President’s answer to the Kaiser?”

“I’ve been at the movies.” The Duchess sounded as if she had, somehow, just won the war at the Capitol Theater. “The matinee was crowded, which goes to show that the war’s about over.”

Borah nodded. “Wilson’s told the Kaiser that he’ll have to abdicate before we talk business. First sign of gumption in a long time.”

“I’m going to speak,” said W.G. “This is all pretty historic.”

Jess was allowed to accompany the Hardings into the holy of holies, the Senate cloakroom, a long narrow room, reminiscent of what indeed it was, a men’s club, with a row of tall lockers along one wall, leather chairs, tables, sofas along the other. Two doors at either end gave entrance to the Senate floor.

Like everywhere else, the Senate was sparsely attended these days: those not ill with flu avoided public places. A dozen senators were in the cloakroom; some were writing at the tables; some chatted conspiratorially; a number paid court to the senator from Pennsylvania, the Republican boss Boies Penrose, a man so enormously fat that once wedged into the largest armchair in the cloakroom, it took at least two pageboys to pull him out of his chair. Old and failing as he was, Jess knew, Penrose would decide, as he always did, who would be the Republican nominee in 1920. When he saw Harding, he waved absently; then he continued his conference with a pair of Western senators. Borah went onto the floor.

Harding and the Duchess sat side by side on a black leather sofa, and while the Senator studied his notes, the Duchess talked to Jess. “What Daugherty would give to be here,” she observed.

“Maybe he’ll get here one of these days,” said Jess, who would have given an arm and a leg to be a member of this extraordinary club just as long, of course, as he never had to get up and make a speech. Even more than the dark and guns and the infamous downstairs broom closet, public speaking terrified him. Much of the awe in which he held W.G. was at the ease with which he could stand up before a crowd and talk and talk without the slightest hesitation or any sign of nerves. Of course it helped to be as handsome as W.G.; and as likeable.

“No. Daugherty lost for good two years ago. If you can’t beat Myron Herrick in a Republican primary, you’re never going to get elected in Ohio.”

The senator from New Mexico came off the floor. He was a genuine cowboy with huge moustaches. He had been one of T.R.’s Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War, and he was a regular at the Harding-Longworth poker evenings. “Howdy, Duchess. Jess.” Albert B. Fall never failed to remember Jess’s name.

“I thought you’d gone home to repair some fences.” The Duchess had no real interest in politics but she doted on elections. Like a baseball fan, she knew everyone’s score. Fall was up for re-election in November.

“I’m on my way.” Fall looked curiously at Harding, who was checking his notes. With his glasses on and thick white hair ruffled, W.G. looked more than ever like the editor-publisher of the Marion
Star
whom Jess had first met as a boy. “You speaking?”

“A bit of bloviation to swell the senatorial choir, Brother Fall.” Harding looked up; and smiled. “I shall call for brotherly love, as we accept once more in the concert of nations the good people of Germany no longer duped by their bad leaders now fallen from their thrones.”

“That will please Carrie Phillips.” The Duchess did not so much speak as hiss. Jess felt his face grow hot; palms start to sweat. W.G. stopped smiling. Senator Fall, who had no idea who Carrie Phillips was, merely said, “I just made pretty much the same speech. By the way, I’m getting Colonel Roosevelt to campaign for me.”

“Bully,” said Harding, in a bad imitation of the Colonel, “for you.”

“He’s high on
you
, W.G.”

“He told Daugherty last May that if he was the candidate in 1920, he’d like having Warren on his ticket. That was when he was speaking in Columbus,” added the Duchess, as if erasing with the odd detail her tactless mention of Carrie Phillips.

“He’ll need Ohio, and that’s you, W.G.”

Harding took off his glasses and pocketed his notes. “The Colonel once said
to me, ‘I think I understand most things pretty well, except Ohio politics.’ ”

“Simple,” said Fall. “Cincinnati is one place and Columbus is another. Lot of folks get confused.” Then Fall joined Penrose and whispered something in the fat man’s ear.

“Where is Daugherty?” asked the Duchess.

“Cincinnati. Or maybe Columbus.” W.G. was relaxed. “I haven’t heard. But then I’ve been on the circuit.”

With the President’s blessing, Chautauqua was more than ever popular, and those politicians who earned the major part of their income from speaking in the tents were encouraged to speak as much as they liked on condition that they, subtly or not, support the war effort. Harding’s set speech for years had been the career of Alexander Hamilton, the result of once having read, while taking the cure at Battle Creek, a novel based on Hamilton’s life. Jess had heard the speech a dozen times and could hear it a dozen more. Harding never altered a word or any of the six gestures that he always used, in the same sequence, as prescribed by the elocution book. But the coda of the unalterable speech was changeable. Harding could always join his hero, Hamilton, with whatever contemporary issue he chose—in this case the winning of the war to end all war in democracy’s name.

“Daugherty’s a brilliant man.” W.G. combed his hair, without a mirror, something the thin-haired Jess could never have done. “But he’s got so many political hatreds now that I worry about him. He takes things too hard.”

“He’s a good friend.” The Duchess had been made an ally very early in Daugherty’s campaign to make W.G. president, a most unlikely enterprise, if Theodore Roosevelt was going to run, which he was. But vice president wasn’t so bad, as even Daugherty tended to agree when he and Jess discussed, endlessly, the subject.

“I wish,” said W.G., standing up, and straightening his jacket while the Duchess brushed dandruff from his shoulders, “that he wouldn’t keep mixing up my politeness with folks as agreement or weakness. Somehow or other he’s got the notion that I’m politically sort of below par. You know, easily ‘strung.’ ”

“You’re too nice to people. You trust everybody.” The Duchess echoed Daugherty.

“Trust everybody, and you don’t have to trust anybody. Anyway, you get more flies with honey than vinegar.” Harding pulled in his stomach; held high his head. There was no handsomer man in public life, thought Jess. Then the Senator pushed open the swinging doors and walked onto the Senate floor and into the day’s history.

A
s the crucifix was raised high, Caroline shut her eyes. To date, she had watched
Huns from Hell
a dozen times, and each time she had found something new to dislike despite the fact that she had been compared favorably to Duse, the actress of muted effects. To herself, she seemed more school of Bernhardt, all artifice and embarrassing broadness of gesture.

The moment safely passed, she opened her eyes, and glanced at the President; who was absolutely concentrated on the screen while next to him, Mrs. Wilson gasped inadvertently as the crucifix, yet again, made its fateful rendezvous with poor Pierre’s skull. For all eternity, or until the celluloid turned to dust or whatever celluloid was scheduled to become, Caroline would be raising and lowering that crucifix and Pierre would be falling backwards, backwards, backwards. Could
this
be hell, repetition?

At the end, a new title card had been added, to acknowledge the string of inexorable American victories from the Marne to the Argonne, as the Hun was driven back toward his lair across the Rhine. The guests in the East Room
applauded the victories, undisturbed that the Allies, who had contributed so much, were not mentioned. “We’ll have different cards in the different countries,” Ince had said. “That way everybody gets to win the war except the Huns.” To which Tim had responded, “There’s quite a German audience, too. Why not let
them
win in the German market?”

There was more applause as the picture ended with a long shot of Caroline, gallantly walking into the future, wind from a machine in her hair, eyes aglow with a bad case of kliegitis, and everywhere desolation, broken only at the end by a cloud’s passing and—look! the sun. It had taken two days to get this cloud effect from the pier at Santa Monica.

The lights in the East Room were switched on. The red-eyed guests of the President got to their feet. The President shook Caroline’s hand. “You should be very proud of having produced this.”

“I’m afraid it comes a little late for the war effort.” Caroline, as always, marvelled that after two hours of watching her on the screen people could then turn to her in real life and make no connection at all between the giant shadow-image and the real-life miniature. She had given herself credit as producer because Triangle had run out of money halfway through and to shut down would have been fatal to Tim’s career, or so she liked to think and he to say.

Huns from Hell
had been astonishingly successful; and there was great curiosity about Emma Traxler. There were also numerous photo-play offers for her services, all sent in care of Mr. Ince, who thought that she should take her new career seriously. But Caroline understood luck, if nothing else. There were certain accidents in life that did not recur. This was one. Of course, she could be an old actress, but that was rather worse than being an old private lady who was not obliged, ever, to look into a mirror.

Edith Wilson took Caroline’s arm, and led her from the East Room across the hall to the Green Room. “A few people are staying for coffee. Do join us.”

“Of course, but …”

“Mr. Farrell, too.” Mrs. Wilson was tactful. “I hadn’t realized how—well, powerful, a photo-play can be. In a way, it’s more exciting than the theater.”

“Quicker, certainly.”

“We should have had music. I told Woodrow to get the Marine-band pianist. But, poor man, he’s dead—just like that. The flu. And where do you find someone good on such short notice?” The Green Room was now beginning to fill up. From the War Council, there was the Californian Herbert
Hoover, who was thought to be a genius of organization, or so Caroline read in the
Tribune
. Caroline had found him agreeably shy at dinner. They had talked of China, where he had been an engineer at the time of the Boxer Rebellion. They had not discussed food rationing, a subject which his chubby face, somewhat incongruously, personified.

George Creel and Tim came in together. Creel was delighted. “We’ll show this all over Europe,” he said to Caroline. “Show them just what they owe us.”

Caroline was startled by the crudeness. “Surely they know better than we do what they owe us, if anything.”

“You should take a look at their press! You’d think we hadn’t been in the war at all. That’s why a movie like this is so important. They’ll pretend they won all by themselves and then they’ll try to find reasons not to accept the German peace offer.” The room was dividing into swarms. The largest flocked about the President and Colonel House, who was due to return to Europe, where he would have to convince the Allies that the Fourteen Points were America’s immutable terms for peace.

“I don’t think they’ll want to go on fighting without us.” Creel smiled. “Remember last summer? France was done for. England broke. Well,
we’ll
arrange the peace whether the Allies like it or not. What will you do next, Mr. Farrell?”