The Celebrity (13 page)

Occasionally Hathaway would look at him and think, He’s like a kid out for the school team. He’ll make it. He’s not after money, at least not yet; something else is gnawing at him, and he’s going to go a long way.

Ambition, nerve, dissatisfaction with his lot, an unwavering admiration for fame and success—these were good American traits and Thornton Johns had them all. Would he get anywhere at all if somebody like himself, James Whitcomb Hathaway, were not constantly there to help him, to teach him, to give him orders?

Yes, Hathaway thought, somewhat to his own surprise, Thornton Johns would. And should.

T
O REPORT THAT GREGORY
Johns was any less apprehensive than Thornton about a possible rescinding of Imperial Century’s great decision would be to place so severe a strain on credibility that the point were better left unmade. Yet the unlikely truth is that during the restless days of the unsigned contracts, Gregory’s chief focus for anxiety was his approaching departure for Hollywood and that he was, as a result, incapable of fine, pure concentration on any other issue.

He had brought the trip on himself—in justice to Thorn and to Hathaway, he never lost sight of the point—but who could have thought that a chance remark, in the days when magnificent speeches cost him nothing, would ever have resulted in the twin strips of railroad tickets in his breast pocket?

He could, of course, have stopped that part of the movie deal, but he had been unable to reject what looked like a chance of getting a more honest and uncompromising picture. He had suspected his own motives, had accused himself of disguising a simple greed for another ten thousand dollars under a cloak of nobler motives, and had recalled horrid stories of many other authors who had built their own set of neat rationalizations before capitulating to Hollywood and its blandishments.

He, at least, would be back in four weeks.

But the fact of his going at all was, even now, almost unassimilable. Do what he might, he could not accept it fully, though at this very minute Abby was in the bedroom beginning to pack the few new things they had bought for the trip, and though he was at his desk, dutifully trying to clear it of neglected correspondence and of the remaining newspaper pieces to which he was committed.

It was the first of March and they were going on the fourth. He kept trying to imagine himself arriving in that city of glittering legend, going to the studio, meeting the fabled men from whose Jovian foreheads countless full-bodied—and luscious—Minervas had sprung forth.

He reminded himself that this same studio also employed producers, writers, directors who, from time to time, had actually offered their cameras “serious adult pictures,” and he comforted himself with the thought that it would be with these men he would be working. He began to frame the discussions he would have with them, about the sequences of scenes, about how to condense and telescope without watering down the book. For some reason, the vision of happy agreement eluded him; everything he imagined himself saying was in rebuttal of something they were all holding out for. He tried to picture himself seriously setting about the business, every Saturday morning, of endorsing a pay check for two and a half thousand dollars, but this also eluded him. Two and a half thousand—it was puzzling that his mind preferred to phrase it this way. The over-all price for the book had been split, on Hathaway’s and Thorn’s insistence, for tax reasons, into five equal annual payments, but he rarely thought about thirty thousand a year for five years, and couldn’t remember to deduct Digby and Brown’s share when he did. There was a curious rolling grandeur in the phrase “one hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” and he heard it, like a secret thunder, among the peaks and valleys of his loftier moments.

Then he would come back to the trip itself and the grandeur would depart and the peaks crumble. It was the social part of Hollywood that he could scarcely contemplate. He tried not to think of the inevitable dinners and parties to which the studio executives would invite them, and whenever he did think, the old inner tightness took charge of his lungs and stomach. At least twice a day he would visualize one of these parties, with everybody in evening dress, himself strangely encased in new black wool and starched linen, attempting small talk and witty banter with some reigning queen of the place. Or he would see himself at a long dinner table, next the hostess; he was gazing at the crystal and silver and candles and flowers, while he floundered desperately for something to say.

At these appalling visions, his breath would catch, his pulse race, and his heart burst with longing for the time when the icebox and Saks Fifth Avenue had seemed important problems.

Life, Gregory Johns thought without attempting to be original, changes. Hat had changed. Hat was being difficult about not going with them to Hollywood. Hat wanted to quit Hunter now so she could go too—and the hell with the lost credits and the longer stay at Poughkeepsie. The prospect of living alone, for a month, free of supervision except for the Zatkes’ promise to look in on her, had consoled her only briefly. Even her new clothes from Saks and the vista of Vassar had begun to lose their honeymoon charms. Though Gregory Johns considered himself no less a doting father than any other father of a pretty daughter, he had come slowly to admit that good fortune was indeed making Hat a bit of a problem. A pain in the neck, he amended, let’s face it.

“Oh, Mother, please! Now that I know I’m leaving Hunter anyway, I
can’t
finish out the semester.”

“We’ve talked it out and out and out,” Abby said. “We both think you have to.”

“But I can’t
bear
the place one more day—it’s ghastly.”

“Please don’t say ‘g
ah
stly,’ dear,” Abby said, broadening the “a” even more than her daughter had done. “You’ve never lived in England.”

“That’s another thing. You and Daddy seem to think everything I do these days is artificial or superior or something.”

“Not everything,” Gregory Johns said.

They all go through phases, he told himself now. They get over them, but it’s tough waiting. He sighed and was suddenly grateful for the pile of letters on the desk before him. Purposefully, he read the top one again, drew his yellow pad toward him, sharpened a pencil, abandoned both in favor of notepaper and a pen, and rapidly wrote, “Dear Mr. Lithergowan.” Then he paused.

There were twelve or fourteen letters in the pile; he could not possibly finish them all before starting for town. This would be the last time he would see Ed for over a month, but, clearly, he ought to sit right here and get through every last answer. Since the news of Imperial Century had been printed, his mail had changed character too. Most of this pile had come in envelopes marked
URGENT,
addressed to him at Digby and Brown, and readdressed, sometimes within the same week, by Ed Barnard’s secretary.

He glanced at the date of Mr. Lithergowan’s letter: February 19th. It was from the Society for the Prevention of Atomic Wars, and was an invitation to address the June 27th dinner meeting of the national council of SPAW at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. He studied the typed line under the signature of the Executive Secretary, saw that it was Lithengowan, and squiggled his pen over the “r” to make it an “n.” It’s no Communist bunch, he thought, or they wouldn’t let a world government speech into the room.

At this point Gregory Johns fell victim to another of his nightmares. He was on a lecture platform before an audience of a thousand people; he was being introduced; they were applauding, looking up at him expectantly; he tried to say, “Ladies and Gentlemen,” but his Adam’s apple was a blob of dry glue on his larynx and he could only stand there working his mouth like a bellows at a fireplace—

Scrupulously he perfected the curl of the comma after the “Lithengowan,” and began to write.

“I am deeply grateful for your invitation to address your June 27th meeting, and of course you must know that I am in heartiest sympathy with the basic purpose of your organization. However, as so many authors do, I have had to make an unbreakable rule, based in part on my belief that the primary function, and perhaps greatest usefulness, of—”

He held his pen in the air, read what he had written, and crumpled the sheet into a tight ball. He drew another sheet from the drawer and wrote again:

“Dear Mr. Lithengowan,

“I can scarcely plead a previous engagement for your dinner meeting five months from now, so I shall not even try to soften my refusal. I have—”

This sheet became an even tighter ball. How goddam coy could you be? And how positive that the unknown Mr. Lithengowan would regard a refusal as a blow that needed softening? He reached for a third sheet.’

“Dear Mr. Lithengowan,

“It is quite impossible for me to accept your invitation for June 27th, but I thank you for extending it.

“Yours very truly,

“Gregory Johns”

He sat back, satisfied at last. He addressed an envelope, folded the page, inserted one corner, and shouted, “Abby, could you look at this?”

Abby came in and read the note. “It’s fine,” she said.

“I wrote a couple of other ones first, but this is all right, isn’t it?”

“It’s pretty brief, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t be.”

“It’s abrupt and arrogant as hell,” he said.

He ripped it across and put Mr. Lithengowan at the bottom of the pile. The next letter was from “Author Meets the Critics,” and as he lifted it, the one below that was revealed. “Tex and Jinx,” Gregory said. “Aren’t they the lucky ones, both having X’s?” He began to riffle through the remaining sheets. “Here’s one from Pegeen and Ed Somebody, and one from a show called ‘Who Said That?’ and one from ‘Meet the Author’ and a couple from other political organizations and one from—”

Suddenly he opened the center drawer of his desk and swept the whole lot into it and out of sight. “I’ll get at them tomorrow,” he said, slamming the drawer and feeling immensely better.

“I can’t see why you won’t let me or Thorn do them.”

“Thorn’s in deep enough with the telephoned ones.”

“He loves it. He’s at his best fobbing people off, and leading them on, and being in the middle of a big to-do.”

“I know he is.” He took off his glasses and dug at his eyes with the knuckles of his index fingers. The arrangement about business calls had begun one morning when the switchboard girl at Digby and Brown had breathlessly called Thornton’s office in a crisis of indecision and apology. She hated to bother him but the Zoring Smith Lecture Bureau was in a terrible state and so was she and she had phoned Mr. Gregory Johns three times with no answer at all and the Zoring Smith Lecture Bureau had an emergency about a lecture for that very evening and she just didn’t know what to do. Thornton, quite happily, had authorized her to give out his office number any time she wished to; he was his brother’s representative and it was no bother at all. Informing Gregory of this step, Thorn had urged the wisdom of extending it to official mail as well. Business letters were murder for Gregory but duck soup for him and there would be tons of them once the book was published and the movie on Broadway and in Podunk.

“I’d let him do some of the mail,” Gregory went on, “if he weren’t so pigheaded. If we did buy him a car or some other big present, he’d refuse that too and we’d have another fight. We don’t fight much but that one sure was a peach.”

“We’ll think of something.”

They looked at each other. They kept coming back to last week’s quarrel: Thorn had exploded into shouting rage. “For God’s sake, if I was right not to take commission when a book earned eleven hundred dollars, what the hell magic makes it O.K. if it earns eleven thousand or a hundred and eleven thousand or a million?” Gregory had shouted back, “But if I’d pay any other agent over twenty thousand, what makes it O.K. for me to pay you not a red cent?” “Lay off, will you? I didn’t have one damn thing to do with the book club, and as for the movie sale, I
wanted
to try it, and it worked. I’m satisfied.” “Quit thinking only of whether you’re satisfied—how do you think we’re going to enjoy
keeping
that twenty thousand?”

The deadlock was still unbroken and Gregory and Abby had come to hate it for existing. Neither one had the soul of a bookkeeper, yet they felt that any small present was somehow inadmissible and verbal gratitude no longer adequate. As Gregory had once pointed out, when somebody works day and night for a month to put a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in your pocket, you couldn’t feel right merely by saying, “Gosh, thanks.”

Now Abby said, “Thorn doesn’t want a new car. He’s having a great lark and he gets a big bang out of seeing his name in the papers.”

Gregory looked reflective. “I bet it’s not going to be much fun, getting back to fire insurance and fur floaters, when all this is over. Thorn must think of that.”

“Cindy says he’s reading all your old books again.”

“Just
Partial Eclipse.
He’s already talked to Hathaway about it.”

They had met Hathaway just once. It was an odd evening; they were so grateful for his belief in
The Good World,
and for everything he had done about it, that they had expected to like and admire him immensely. But they found him somehow glib even about his political convictions, and they thought him vain and too ready with mentions of well-known people.

“Knowing Hathaway has changed Thorn a lot,” Abby said. “Don’t you think so?”

“He started changing before he ever saw Hathaway.”

“Before?”

“Something got boiling up in him that night Digby phoned from Chicago.”

She tried to remember anything significant in the way Thorn had behaved at the anniversary party. When Gregory pocketed impressions for further examination, he usually drew them out later, one by one, for her to examine with him, but he had said nothing about this.

“I’ve sort of been wondering,” Gregory went on slowly, “whether Thorn wouldn’t really like to chuck his whole life and start over.”

“His whole life?”