The Celebrity (29 page)

Zoring Smith looked at him without expression, and again Thorn thought, He’s hard as hell. Well, so am I. He opened his portfolio and slid the largest of the Hollywood newspaper stories across the desk. Then he sat back and watched. He saw the uninterested first glance; he saw the dawn of recognition; he saw Smith read the captions and then the whole piece.

“That was my first lecture,” Thorn said easily. “I’d like to tell you a bit of a story about how they persuaded me to try it.”

Ten minutes later, Thornton Johns was thinking, When old Zoring smells business cooking, he softens up like butter. “So now I’ve tested myself in the East, in absolute secrecy, of course. Even my brother doesn’t know about the last three dates. Or Lenny Lyons or Winchell or any of the columnists or anybody who could even tell a columnist.”

“Why not?”

“My brother Gregory might act up and stop me cold. He came close to that out West. But next week, they’re heading for Wyoming. They’ve got the touring craze, and a problem with their daughter, and they’ll be gone until Labor Day.”

For the first time Zoring Smith permitted himself a smile. “While requests for lectures by Gregory Johns still keep coming in?”

“Precisely.” Thornton Johns smiled also.

“You’ve thought out every aspect of it, haven’t you, Mr. Johns?”

“I know summer is dead for big lectures, but if you could fix up a few minor dates, we might get some pretty good quotes and blurbs for your folders. Then, whatever happened after Labor Day could go ahead and happen. I’m working out a new lecture that nobody could stop me from giving.”

Zoring Smith was looking hard once more. “There’s a big draw in a title like ‘My Brother, Gregory Johns,’ you know.”

“‘Runaway Best Sellers’ is no slouch of a title, is it? There’s all kinds of stuff available—I’m collecting quips and anecdotes all the way back to
David Harum.
”

An unwillingness fell upon Mr. Smith. “Building up a new lecturer is a sizable investment,” he said. “Printing, mailing, sending wires, advertising in small towns all over the country. ‘Runaway Best Sellers’ might be a draw—”

“With my
name
played up so they’d get the hookup at once?” Thorn asked. The unwillingness visibly lessened. “I’m sure you’d find a way to link my billing up with my brother’s book. What other runaway best seller would I be talking about?”

“You
have
thought out every aspect of it.” Admiration touched Smith’s face with sudden brightness. From a black marble inkstand he plucked a ballpoint pen, wrote rapidly, and then read aloud. “‘Thornton Johns, Public Relations Counselor to Gregory Johns and Other Leading Authors.’”

Thorn nodded. “Mind you, I’m not looking for trouble—I usually can win Gregory over. He blazes up but then he’s apt to go philosophical and shrug things off.”

“I’m sure he does. I’ve often noticed that people who are high-hat about publicity are perfectly able to appreciate the vast benefits that accrue from it.”

Thornton laughed. “Anyway, I’d say we could plan on using the old title for quite some time. By the way, do you ever send out scouts? I have one more date of my own, a garden club, really, in Kingston on the tenth. My friend Miss Goodwyn is coming from the Coast for several weeks, and I thought she might drive up with me.”

Smith tipped back in his chair and looked appraisingly across the desk. For several moments he said nothing whatever. Then he reached for his phone and pressed a button on it. “Dot, bring in the list of opens, will you?”

Thorn watched him run down the typed schedule sheets, checking off one, then another, then another entry. After nine check marks, Zoring Smith looked up. “Do you think you’d be ready to tackle a New York City audience by the end of August? In, let’s say, the Waldorf-Astoria?”

Thorn jumped. “Good Lord, the Waldorf!”

“The Grand Ballroom, about a thousand people. It’s a special function and it’s hard to book speakers out of season like that.”

“A thousand people?” Thorn quailed. But hadn’t he proved he could face an audience anywhere? A thousand people applauding at once—

“It would be a shame to waste Miss Goodwyn on Kingston,” Zoring Smith said gently.

Early that same morning, when Thorn had phoned Cindy about being kept in town all weekend, damn it, on important business, he had also informed her of Gregory’s and Abby’s sudden choice of Wyoming for their vacation. Both pieces of information had made Cindy snap with annoyance. It was turning into a terrible summer.

It’s all right for Thorn, she had thought. He’s busy every second; he doesn’t have to sit around this awful beach and talk to these awful middle-class people and wish something would happen. Something
does
happen to him all the time; everything that happens to Gregory’s book Thorn takes over bodily and makes it happen to him too. And it’s only right that he should. I suppose Gregory and Abby never admit how much of
The Good World’s
success is due to Thorn. If he hadn’t sold it to pictures and there hadn’t been all those months of exciting movie publicity all over the country, publication day might have been a mighty different affair.

This wifely defense of Thorn, coming on the heels of wifely resentment, confused Cindy. She looked around at the beach, then at the two women who had plopped down beside her the moment she had arrived, and she thought of the month she had spent with the greatest movie stars in the world. Pain pierced her and though she had barely been out doors for twenty minutes, she made vague excuses and returned to the house.

The house was more awful and middle-class than the beach. Three years ago when they had first come out to Quogue for the summer, the rented Cape Cod cottage had seemed colorful and charming; now the varnished rattan furniture and glassy cretonnes chilled her blood. Their apartment in New York was inane too. Gloria’s apartment, Georgia’s, Gracia’s, the house in Freeton—how different they were, how dismally, sadly remote from the great dramatic places of Beverly Hills and Brentwood!

A heavy thump-thump slapped at her ears and she glanced toward the kitchen. She had screamed at Hulda about those bare feet; Hulda would listen stolidly and slide into the broken-down sandals she had stepped out of in the middle of the kitchen floor. Two minutes after Cindy left, the naked, thump-thump would start once more.

This was the last summer for Quogue.

Other summers, Thorn always came out on Thursday evenings for long weekends. Now that was unheard of, and every other Friday the phone would ring and before she picked it; up she would know. Next week Jill Goodwyn was arriving—a preliminary anguish squeezed Cindy’s vitals. She went outside once more and sank onto a weather-beaten canvas hassock.

The heat, the implacable heat! Right on the beach, ten o’clock in the morning, and there was no stir of air, nothing but this stationary choking heat. If only she were going to Wyoming too! The boys were still asleep; they might as well stay asleep around the clock for all the companionship she got out of them this summer. Beachcombers by day, the town beaus by night, they had become as impossible as their father.

I need a facial, Cindy thought, or a new dress.

She was suddenly seeing Magnin’s and Saks in Beverly Hills. “Mrs.
Thornton
Johns, isn’t it?” Again an anguish gripped her. In New York, it hadn’t been so galling a comedown; at places like the Stork, it still meant something to be Mrs. Thornton Johns. She was perfectly sure she could get in at the Stork now even if she went without Thorn.

She glanced at her watch. With that endless drive, lunch in town was out, but she could shop in air-conditioned stores during the afternoon, go to the Stork with Thorn or somebody for cocktails, and spend the night at the apartment. A new dress
would
help; just getting away from this blaze of hot sand would help.

She went inside to the telephone and called Thorn back. His reply merely stiffened her resolution; let him have business appointments right through the afternoon and evening, if that’s what he really had. Men were so naive; they expected their wives to believe every single thing they told them, never, realizing that even wives who weren’t taken-in at all might decide on compromise rather than showdown, provided enough was at stake. What fool would give up everything Thorn had won for himself this year, and the larger things Thorn was moving toward?

Cindy put in a call to Fran Hathaway; Fran was just as bored with Stamford as she was with Quogue and most certainly could meet her by four-thirty. They could have drinks, an early dinner, perhaps an early movie, and if Cindy did decide to drive back tonight, it wouldn’t be too awfully late for her. Cindy thought, If not a new dress, a new hat, and I’ll wear it to the Stork.

A pumping energy sustained Lucinda Johns through the long slow trip; it carried her through eleven try-ons in Ready-to-Wear Millinery at Bergdorf Goodman and through six try-ons in Ready-to-Wear Millinery at Saks Fifth Avenue, at which point a click of recognition told her she had found a love of a hat. It was early for black velvet, but her rough caramel straw was poison. She adjusted the triple mirrors on the small table at which she sat, and studied her left and right profiles. The sweep of blue-green coq feathers at one side really was dashing. “I’ll wear it,” she said. “You can send my old one.”

“Is it a charge?”

Cindy nodded carelessly. She didn’t like this salesgirl, a mousy, studious old maid, with bifocals. “Mrs. Thornton Johns,” Cindy said to the pad in the girl’s hand. The hand went on nipping carbons between the sales checks, and a tiny geyser of anger erupted in Cindy’s heart. Obviously this creature never read Leonard Lyons or Danton Walker or even Winchell.

“What was the name?” the salesgirl asked.

Cindy paused. Had the last bill been corrected, as per written request, to Mrs. Thornton Johns, or had it still been addressed to Mrs. G. T. Johns?

“Mrs. G. T.—” Cindy began. The pencil waited. Through the upper half of the bifocals, the enlarged eyes looked up bulbously. “Now please don’t get it confused with Mrs. Gregory Johns,” Cindy said. “It’s—”

The pencil jerked away from the pad. “Gregory Johns? Are you related to Gregory Johns the author?”

“He’s my brother-in-law.” Cindy glanced once more at her left profile under the iridescent sheen of the feathers. “And we are forever getting each other’s bills. Mrs. G.
T.
Johns; better put down Mrs. Thornton Johns too. The account is being changed over.”

“Oh, Mrs. Johns, I’m a real bookworm, and I just can’t tell you what a thrill—”

Cindy interrupted to give the address. The mousy one went on gabbling; Cindy signed the sales check, nodded in farewell, and left. As the elevator doors slid silkily open, she thought, A new hat always
does
set you up; no wonder I feel better.

Gregory Johns’ suggestion about Wyoming, as a solution to the family vacillation between Canada and the Cape, had come one blistering afternoon after Abby had lost her temper at a watermelon.

It was only half a watermelon, and even before she had tried to fit it into the icebox, a sense of impending disaster had threatened her all day. The mailman had brought nineteen more letters from readers and for the first time Gregory had looked at them with lackluster eyes. “Eight hours a day for me, and four hours a day for you, for over two months,” he had said. “We’re never going to get back to normal, and I’m never going to get back to my manuscript.” She had asked if the time had not come to call a halt on answering readers, and he had curtly replied it had not.

For three weeks the temperature had never dropped below ninety except for a couple of hours before dawn. There were almost daily scenes with Hat about extra money for clothes, about a larger allowance for everything, about why she couldn’t stay out as much as she liked in the evening, now that she had made all her grades at Hunter and was supposed to be having a vacation and some fun before starting Vassar.

The search for an apartment also had precipitated two or three quarrels with Hat, the latest one that very morning. “I saw the most divine apartment yesterday,” Hat said, as Abby started wearily on the real estate ads once more. “Pat and I were passing this new building going up on Fifth Avenue and we stopped to look at the floor plans pasted on a window. The renting agent came out and I told him who I was and he took us right up in the workmen’s elevator. There’s only one apartment left—it has a terrace running around three sides of it—”

“I suppose,” Abby said, “you didn’t ask what the rent was.”

Hat looked at her mother pityingly. “None of the good buildings going up on Park or Fifth are for
rent.
They’re all co-operatives—you
buy
the apartment. This has six rooms and is just divine.”

Abby’s irritation over this had revived her irritation over last night’s episode about the car. Hat had been learning to drive, and it was inevitable that sooner or later she would ask to go out in it alone, without Gregory. At dinner last night, with Patrick once more the family guest, Hat had suddenly said, “Look, I know won’t be allowed to drive this year, but Pat has a license.”

“I’ve had one for eight years,” Pat said.

“Couldn’t we go out for some air?”

It was clear Hat was not suggesting a family drive. Refusal would have been so revealing, and so difficult for modern parents to defend; in the presence of Pat, discussion had been stilted and surface-thin. “Well, be home by ten, please.”

And then, by ten-thirty, the resentment at disobedience; by eleven, the intrusive unwelcome visions of what they might be doing; by eleven-thirty, the terror of a smashup. To have the pair of them blandly explain, at midnight, how they had taken the wrong turn off the Speedway and driven for miles along the Belt Parkway—

Abby had waked this morning, still roiled, and found herself remembering it off and on all day, angry each time. But it was the watermelon that pulped her remaining self-control. The fact that it was only half a watermelon, by some secret mathematical logic of her own, had quadrupled her rage. Properly iced in the market’s ceiling-high vault, it was guaranteed to remain cold until dinner, and she had carried it home eagerly at five o’clock, a magnificent coolness in her wilted arm. Thirty minutes later, she had looked at it suspiciously on the kitchen table, rolled back the cellophane over its pink flesh, touched it with a forefinger, and even spooned out and tasted a round chunk of it. Then she had taken it to the old icebox and opened the door.