Hollywood (34 page)

“He was partial to red fox?” Caroline quizzed the oracle.

“He made a killing in June, figuring women would all be wearing red fox in October. Then he bought up the nickelodeons. Then he figured that you could make money with movies that run as long as plays, which everyone said was impossible, proving what had been good for the masses was now good for the classes. And it worked. Unbelievable. Here they are mostly Jewish furriers, who can hardly speak English, mostly from Hungary, of all places, and
they’ve
got the movies. Lucky, they’re good Americans, I’ll say that. They serve us well. Only where are
we
in all this?”

“Surely, D. W. Griffith—” Caroline began.

“He’s Jewish, too. But denies it. Because he’s a Southerner, and wants to be mistaken for a gentleman, God help him. Besides, he was an actor.” Hearst employed the most horrible epithet of their class.

“
I’m
an actor.” Marion glared over her wineglass.

“No,” Hearst said mildly, “you’re a star.”

“All in all,” said Caroline, suddenly a hard, cold business woman, “there’s a lot of money in movies.”

The Chief nodded. “Yes. Mine.”

They were joined by Edgar Hatrick, the eager young man who was in charge of Hearst’s movie enterprises. Since they were obviously about to discuss their business, Caroline excused herself and walked through chilly streets to the Plaza, a comfortable modern hotel that had replaced, in 1907, an earlier Plaza Hotel.

In the drawing room of Caroline’s suite, the ten newspapers that she studied every day from all around the country were neatly stacked, and as she went through them, one by one, to see how different stories were covered, she found herself daydreaming about movies. They were insidious. They were like waking dreams that then, in sleep, usurped proper dreams. There was power here but she was not sure what it was. There was crude propaganda of the sort that she had made at Creel’s insistence. But newspapers could do that sort of thing, too. There was more to this new fad than anyone had grasped, and she could understand why Hearst, too, was bemused by the whole thing. A moving picture was, to begin with, a picture of something that had really happened. She had really clubbed a French actor with a wooden crucifix on a certain day and at a certain time and now there existed, presumably forever, a record of that stirring event. But Caroline Sanford was not the person millions of people had watched in that ruined French church. They had watched the fictitious Emma Traxler impersonate Madeleine Giroux, a Franco-American mother, as she picked up a crucifix that looked to be metal
but was not and struck a French actor impersonating a German officer in a ruined French church that was actually a stage-set in Santa Monica. The audience knew, of course, that the story was made up as they knew that stage plays were imitations of life, but the fact that an entire story could so surround them as a moving picture did and so, literally, inhabit their dreams, both waking and sleeping, made for another reality parallel to the one they lived in. For two hours in actual time Caroline was three different people as a light shone through a moving strip of film. Reality could now be entirely invented and history revised. Suddenly, she knew what God must have felt when he gazed upon chaos, with nothing but himself upon his mind.

B
laise shook his stepbrother’s hand. Since the death of Plon, André was now Prince d’Agrigente. Ten years older than Blaise, he looked as if he could have been Blaise’s father. The hair was white. The face was white; only the black eyes seemed alive in all that arctic bleakness. Like Plon, he had married money; unlike Plon he had maintained good relations with his wife, whom he saw several times a year. She lived at Aix-les-Bains in a family house. He stayed in Paris, with his mistress and her two children, neither his, he would say with a bitter pride, as he had been impotent for twenty years.

Blaise gazed with more curiosity than fondness at the stepbrother whom he had hardly known. André stayed close to Paris and Blaise stayed close to the
Tribune
. “You’re thin,” said Blaise, as they entered the bar of the Crillon. For all practical purposes, the entire hotel had been taken over by the American delegation.

“You’re not,” said André, looking about curiously. “I’ve never seen so many Americans all at once.”

“Come to America.”

“Why bother? They come to us. Do you like them?”

“I am one.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I do.” Blaise found them a table near the bar. The room barked and growled with English. Most of the men were relatively young, and there were not many ladies on view, since the President had insisted on absolute seriousness for the thousand or so American men who had come to Paris to arrange eternal peace for all mankind. Everyone took himself very seriously, the President most of all.

André ordered whisky; like the rest of his generation, he was very much in the English style. Blaise drank Pernod. “Is this president of yours as stupid as he appears?” André was above politics but not above Saint-Simon. The characters, not the politics, of important personages amused him.

“
How
stupid does he appear to you?” Blaise was surprised to discover he was deeply annoyed when Europeans criticized anything American; something he himself never ceased to do.

“Those speeches!” André’s eyes rolled upward. “He is so … so Protestant.”

“Well, that is the nature of his mission.”

“A messiah? Well, I can see that. Everyone can see that when he drives through the crowds, and the crowds go mad with stupidity, too. I watched him make his entrance here. The saint from across the water. I suppose now he’ll go home where he belongs.”

“No. He stays until the middle of February. Then he goes home, to adjourn Congress. Then he says he’ll come back.”

Lansing had appeared in the door to the bar. There was an immediate hush. Then two men rose from a table and joined him, and the three departed. “Is that a great man?”

“No. Just the Secretary of State, one of the peace commissioners.” When Wilson had appointed the American commission he had taken no one’s advice. Arbitrarily, the President had chosen Lansing, House, a general from the Supreme War Council and, as token Republican, that ancient enchanter-diplomat Henry White, a man of no political weight save his friendship with Theodore Roosevelt, now storming Valhalla or wherever it is that strenuous heroes go.

After the President’s triumphant entrance into Paris, even Blaise was optimistic that the treaty would soon be drafted. Technically, this was the Preliminary Peace Conference which would agree upon the terms to which the Germans, when they eventually joined the conference proper, must
submit. But despite worldly laurels, the President did not immediately have his way. Since the conference was not yet ready to begin, Wilson was encouraged by Prime Minister Lloyd George to show himself to a grateful England and by Prime Minister Orlando to a grateful Italy. Thus, two weeks had been agreeably wasted. The crowds were head-turning; and the head that was turned, as the premiers had shrewdly intended, was that of Wilson. He returned to his Paris quarters, the Palais Murat, tired but exalted.

During this time, Blaise had worked with Colonel House, whose staff occupied much of the third floor of the Crillon, under the supervision of his son-in-law, Gordon Auchincloss, a cousin of the ubiquitous Apgars. Blaise acted as an unofficial liaison with the French press, which tended to mordancy on the subject of their savior, taking their cue from Clemenceau, whose view of those who would change man’s nature was sardonic when not sulphurous. The conservative André echoed the radical Clemenceau in this dark view of the human race. “It is pointless to ask us not to do everything possible to smash Germany to pieces. Look what they have done to us this time. Look what they did in 1870 …”

“Look what
we
did to them under Napoleon …”

“They kill more people these days, and the survivors remember longer. My dear Blaise, the Germans will come back one day if we don’t split them up into little countries the way they were before Bismarck.”

Blaise knew all the arguments; all the answers. That was the problem with politics, whether domestic or international. As the great questions were always posed in the same way, they invited answers that were equally predictable and unchanging. How anything was resolved remained to Blaise a mystery. He assumed that this particular conference would be “won” by the most patient faction. Sooner or later, Wilson would tire. Yet Blaise was also convinced that the President was most certainly an agent of history, occupying the right place at the right time, and when all force was so gathered in someone with a plan, the Clemenceaus and Lloyd Georges and Orlandos would be powerless. Even Blaise had been impressed by the size of the crowds in the three countries that had lost millions of men during the last four years while even more millions had died of flu.

George Creel joined them, as if he had been invited. André gazed at him with the amused curiosity of someone at a circus, eager to be delighted by strangeness. “How is room 315?” Creel liked to pretend that he and Blaise were in warring camps, which, in a sense, they were. Colonel House and Lansing were at permanent odds, a situation reflected in the staff of each.
Although Creel was the master propagandist, Colonel House and his son-in-law were formidable manipulators of the press, as Blaise could appreciate rather better than anyone else. Because Colonel House was apparently so self effacing, his was the only face that anyone of importance wished to confront. He who had been Wilson’s eyes and ears was now thought to be the great man’s brain. In due course, Wilson would grasp all this, and unless Blaise had entirely misunderstood human vanity, the President would free himself of the whispering Texas charmer. Lansing was too unimaginative to make trouble between Wilson and House, while Creel could do so only indirectly. On the
George Washington
, it had been Blaise’s impression that Wilson was not well pleased by either man. Each had told him, in his own way, that he ought not to commit the prestige of the presidency to what, after all, would be no more than a sort of cut-throat poker game, where gamblers cheated and knives glinted. But Wilson was filled with missionary zeal, worsened by the crowds that proved to him that he was the divine instrument of all the hopes of every single sweaty component of those gray-pink-brown hordes which, like vast stains, flooded ancient squares and swirled headlong down wide modern streets. The smell of the Paris crowd had been enough to drive Blaise back to his room at the Crillon on the third floor, where Colonel House reigned in well-publicized secrecy. “Three-fifteen wants to get started as soon as possible. What about the second floor?”

“Lansing is having his problems with Clemenceau.” Creel was direct. Then turned to André. “I assume you aren’t his nephew, or a member of the Cabinet?”

“No. I am idle. I have always been idle. But I like nothing more than watching the ants run about after their hill has been kicked over.” Blaise was delighted that his old-world connection made not the slightest effort to accommodate the new world.

“That’s one way of looking at it.” Creel was indifferent to malice. “Clemenceau would like to wait until things have settled down before the haggling starts. Lansing wants to start now, but leave the League of Nations until after the treaty is signed.”

Blaise nodded. “Since the President is more interested in the League than in the treaty, Lansing shouldn’t be surprised at the influence of the third floor.” House always supported the President, to his face. Lansing dared argue, up to a point.

“Certainly,” said Creel, vibrant in his own malice. “The Colonel is well supported by his family. They outnumber the delegation.”

“A loving family man is everywhere admired.” But Blaise had been surprised by the Colonel’s unexpected recklessness when it came to his private arrangements. Save for Edith, Wilson had brought none of his own family, including his son-in-law Francis Sayre, who had worked for the Inquiry. Wilson had also discouraged everyone except the highest officials from bringing wives. Yet House had brought his sister as well as his daughter and her husband, Gordon Auchincloss, who had, in turn, brought along his law partner and
his
wife. Currently, House was trying to assign Auchincloss to the President as a secretary during the conference, and Mrs. Wilson was taking a darker and darker view of the less and less gray eminence of House. Wilson himself was sphinx-like, pursuing his own high destiny in his own eloquent way. There were storm warnings everywhere.

“Clemenceau used to live in America.” Creel waved to a departing group from the Inquiry. Tonight would be an easy night for everyone. The next day the conference would begin at ten-thirty, January 18, the forty-eighth anniversary of Bismarck’s declaration of the Second Reich in the fallen capital of France. With grim pleasure, Clemenceau had picked the date. “He was married to a New York girl, and then divorced.”

“That,” said André, eyes glittering, “explains his love for America.”