The Celebrity (12 page)

“Mr. Hathaway says he couldn’t take commission, even if there was a movie sale,” Cindy put in. “It’s unethical for lawyers.”

“
You
could take the commission, Thorn,” Gregory said quickly.

“From your money?”

“Why shouldn’t you? Marilyn Laird would.”

“She’s not your brother,” Thorn said.

“But you’re the only agent Gregory has,” Abby said. “The ten per cent would belong to you, even if you
are
his brother.”

“If it came to an awful lot,” Cindy said, thoughtfully, “Thorny could pay Hathaway’s fees out of it.”

“I’m not in this for money,” Thornton Johns said stiffly.

Cindy gazed into distant space; Gregory and Abby looked from her to Thorn and then at each other. The phone rang again.

“Damn it to hell,” Thorn said, and because he was nearest it, tore the receiver off the hook and shouted, “Yes?” He listened, and then in his most gracious voice said, “Let me put him on for you. He’s right here.” He covered the mouthpiece, and turned to Gregory. “It’s somebody from some organization of women politicians.” He held out the receiver.

Gregory began to get up, looked embarrassed, and then sank back in his chair. “Ask them for their number, will you? No, never mind, I’d better take it now.”

Shortly thereafter, Thornton Johns decided that further discussion was needless, perhaps hazardous. “Well,” he said, “Hollywood’s a million to one shot, so don’t think about it too much.” He rose and took Cindy off. At the drugstore on the corner, he stopped to telephone Hathaway, and before the evening was out, the siege of Hollywood began.

Three weeks later, the motion picture rights to
The Good World
were acquired by Imperial Century Studios for $150,000, a price which was destined to be known as “the last big-time money before the slump.”

A subsidiary agreement stipulated that the author, “to ensure the basic integrity of the film to be made from his work,” should be present at all preliminary story conferences, for a term not to exceed four weeks, at a weekly salary of two thousand five hundred dollars. The author’s travel and hotel accommodations were to be arranged and paid for by the studio.

Though final contracts were not yet signed, the studio’s publicity machine began rolling out daily releases about “Imperial Century’s Greatest Picture of the Year,” and in some two thousand newspapers, daily and Sunday, obliging gossip and movie columns co-operated by printing every morsel of official news, as well as conjecture, guesswork, and rumor, collected from sources known only to gossip and movie columnists. In this manner, it quickly became known throughout the nation that the two leading male roles would be played by Gregory Peck and Ronald Colman or by Gregory Peck and Clark Gable, or by Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper, or possibly by Spencer Tracy and Sir Laurence Olivier. The heroine was to be Joan Crawford or Bette Davis or Celeste Holm, though Irene Dunne was also a possibility, as was Greer Garson. The screenplay was being assigned to Robert E. Sherwood or Moss Hart, and negotiations for a Big-Name Director were under way with Elia Kazan or Joshua Logan. The budget was set at two million dollars, though some informed executives had stated, in strict confidence, that it would more nearly approach three. Or perhaps four.

It was left to the excellent reporting of
Variety,
however, to dig out and publish the exclusive human-interest story that the deal had been “agented” by the author’s own brother, and for the first time since June of 1928, when he had shared the honor with several thousand others of his graduating class at college, Thornton Johns saw his name in newspaper print.
Variety
also stated that “a New York attorney, who desires to remain incog for now,” had been active in the negotiations, but the syndicated and local columns of the U.S.A. saw fit, when they rewrote
Variety’s
piece, to ignore this mundane detail and give Thorn a solo role. During the ensuing fortnight, if any interested New Yorker had sent regularly to the Times Square newsstand which carries papers from the entire country, he might have seen Thornton Johns’ name in print well over a hundred times.

Thorn was not that New Yorker. He would have blushed to send Diana forth regularly on such a mission. Even when Hathaway had called one. Wednesday morning to say, “You’re in this week’s
Variety,
page four,” it had been surprisingly embarrassing to send her for it at once instead of waiting until lunchtime to get it himself. He still flinched when he remembered that he had blurted out, “Better get about three copies,” and then, hastily, “Young Thorn and Fred like the damnedest things for souvenirs.” Diana had brought back six copies, each folded back to reveal page four.

“Every crossroads sheet from here to the Coast,” Hathaway had told him a few days later, “is picking up the story.” Thorn had not even considered putting Diana into daily Times Square service. Instead, he abandoned the homeward route he had complained about for years in favor of one twice as mutilating. Each evening, he would leave the East Side subway at Grand Central, fight the mangling mobs on the platforms, shuttle across to Times Square, and there acquire the newest arrivals from the printing presses of faraway cities and towns. He began to look forward to five o’clock and the strange-looking papers with their wonderful names: the Council Bluffs
Nonpareil,
the Youngstown
Vindicator,
the Canton
Repository,
the New Orleans
Times-Picayune,
the San Antonio
Light,
and sometimes didn’t mind when he could find no mention of the movie sale.

As he collected his nightly armful, he would imagine himself in these distant places, buying each of these papers in the lobby of the best hotel, as if he were at home all over the large world beyond the Hudson River, beyond the highways of dutiful weekend driving with Cindy and the boys.

He would leave the newsstand in a pleasing haze, hail a taxi for the final lap of his trip, and in the jolting dimness turn page after page in eager search of the item to tear out and hide in his wallet. If he had too many papers to examine before reaching his house, he would halt the cab under an electric light in Central Park or at a corner of Fifth Avenue and sit on comfortably, while the meter ticked and the driver cast questioning eyes at the mirror over the dashboard, wondering, perhaps, at this madman with a paper-tearing psychosis. At home, Thornton Johns never mentioned his changed itinerary; he could not have said why.

By the end of February, a special scrapbook at his office held nearly seventy versions of the story, and a manila folder a larger number of repeats or duplicates. Diana alone knew of the existence of all of them; she assumed that Hathaway cut them out and sent them along, and this happy error permitted Thorn to keep free of explanations. She read each one word for word and Thorn found himself unaccountably pleased by her gentle astonishment and delight. “Oh, Mr. Johns, isn’t it wonderful to be famous?” Or, “I’m so thrilled—a scrapbook about my own boss.” Or, just as satisfying, “Oh, Mr. Johns.”

Occasionally he would show one or two, no more, recent clippings to Cindy and the boys, or to a client, or to a couple of members of the Premium Club, surreptitiously watching their faces as they read. And each time he was singingly happy.

Yet, as day succeeded day, he began to be aware of a sharp, irrational fear biting into these delicious moments, and suspected that as long as the contracts remained unsigned, he would be unable to escape it. He called himself “superstitious” and “ridiculous,” but he continued to sleep badly, eat sketchily, and smoke endlessly. Over and over, the experienced and composed Hathaway pointed out that the deal
could
not fall through, that the ceaseless publicity from Imperial Century constituted contract enough for any court of law, that there would not be a change of mind, a withdrawal of the offer, a lessening of the price. Thorn would listen, but no word in the English language had yet evolved which could convince or reassure him.

Thornton Johns came to feel, quite simply, that if anything went wrong he would die. He could not bear life if it were to force him down from the pinnacle to which, through courage, persistence, and the nonprofit motive of brotherly love, he had at last climbed. He would have sworn on twelve Bibles that this pinnacle had nothing to do with personal glory. He would have insisted that newspaper publicity, however “amusing,” was basically unimportant to him, that people who worshiped public mention were rather vulgar, and that when he had longed to Be Somebody, he had never given a thought to anything so crass as getting his name in the papers.

For Thornton Johns, in common with most human beings, could discover within himself a depth and purity of purpose that had no relation to the gross results. Thus he never doubted that his chief reward for engineering (with some help, of course) one of the most unlikely sales in movie history came from a sense of flexing, stretching growth when most men his age were beginning to pull in, to repeat, to conserve, to die. He had wanted a hobby and he had found life.

A larger life, a larger Thornton Johns. The persisting fear that something might again reduce him to the lesser Thornton Johns was a nightmare, to put it politely, of amputation. Already it was impossible to remember a time when he had felt himself merely an insurance salesman, devoting a few hours once or twice a year to his brother’s interests. He could no longer have given a coherent recital of the mental processes that had led to his impulsive decision about phoning Hathaway six weeks ago. But where, he often asked himself, where would the Imperial Century deal be today, if I hadn’t had the inspiration and the initiative and the skill to arrange that first appointment with Jim and to make him do what I wanted?

James Whitcomb Hathaway, in addition to being a slightly dishonest lawyer, was an idealist.

Until he had heard the words “world government,” his interest had been drawn more by Thornton Johns’ humble candor than by the possibility of doing business with him, but when he read
The Good World
he had known he would go ahead with the exploratory work that Johns wanted. And when that exploration showed a sale might conceivably be managed, he had forgotten all about his aversion to contingent bases.

Thus Thornton Johns had been practicing not only modesty but also literal reporting, in ascribing to the book the honor of turning the trick. Had he approached Hathaway ten years before with a novel dramatizing the need for intervention against Hitler and Mussolini, Hathaway would have responded with all his heart; five years after that, a book on civil liberties would have won his passionate interest, and any time since the end of the war,
The Good World
would have mobilized all his forces. Being the father of three sons, and having been desperately wounded in the Pacific, he had long ago withdrawn from his other causes to throw himself into the movement for world government, and in that movement he was selfless, unsparing of energy, and occasionally effective.

While he knew that no single book could become a propaganda force powerful enough to influence public attitudes, he believed a motion picture might. A hundred million people seeing the film, he had thought, in this country, in England and France and all of non-Communist Europe, in South America, and the Middle East and parts of the Far East—

He had checked this vision with the Chairman of his world government committee, and the Chairman had prayerfully urged him to dedicate himself to having such a film made. He had discussed it with his wife, who was womanly enough always to urge him to follow his current credo. He had not mentioned it at all to his three law partners, Farley Storm, Ephraim Goldberg, and Jonathan Miller.

James Hathaway had known that selling this book would take dedication indeed, in the shape of incessant work, extraordinary skill, and a certain flexibility of method. He had also known that Thornton Johns would need minute guidance and education at every step of the complicated way ahead. These considerations had not deterred him. B.S.B. had selected the book—was that not a hint of the changing temper of the country? Unlike some of its rival book clubs, B.S.B. never chose a dud; its conscientious judges had a genius for gauging the public’s response, to each choice they made. And the clumsy overselling that had begun immediately in Hollywood had constituted yet another sign of the times. His colleagues out there had reported that some eager beaver at Digby and Brown was making frantic phone calls, sending out galleys to every office boy, but Hathaway had decided at once that that sort of scrabbling around would do no permanent damage. Why not start a whole cycle of pictures about world government and peace?

Whereupon, James Hathaway had gone into an obsessive, though minutely calculated, campaign of action. Day by day, he had guided Thorn, pulled strings for him, sketched out what he should write in wires or say in long-distance calls, planted all the proper rumors among the proper big shots in the studios: Sam Goldwyn secretly considered
World
a great potential box-office draw for the entire family; Darryl Zanuck was crazy about its sure-fire combination of fantasy, comedy, romance, and social significance; somebody at Metro was sketching out songs and dance routines to turn it into a musical, without blanking its dramatic plot. And when Hathaway’s instincts had at last nudged him to do so, he had called the signals for the great Hollywood game of guessing how much money who was offering.

Looking back on the past few weeks, Hathaway could find no error, no missed cue, no waste motion. The Imperial Century deal was, if he had to say it himself, a masterly coup, compounded of political vision, know-how, and constructive delegation of authority. Under his tutelage, Thornton Johns had developed into a perfect front, patient, tenacious, and pleasant to everybody, in every situation. His biggest single talent was a knack for saying things amusingly, and once he had put his air of unworldly devotion behind him, this talent was in constant evidence. “My brother Gregory thinks he’d better go out and play watchdog,” he had said once, dolefully adding, “but if you
do
work him into the deal, he’ll probably crawl out at Grand Central.” This kind of thing went well in business. The Eastern representatives of the studios soon grew friendly with Thorn, and their willingness to lunch with him and talk with him on the phone became a real asset as the final decision drew near.