The Celebrity (31 page)

Jim didn’t phrase it just that way to Maude Denkin, and Thorn was relieved. He had admired this already legendary old lady the night the Hathaways had taken him and Cindy along to her party of Broadway stars, and he had pumped Hathaway about her in preparation for this evening. She was indeed an eccentric, with her diatribes against jeweled fingers, costly furs, and what she called “the rubberneck restaurant, with everybody craning to see who’s four tables down.”

Now, sitting here with her and Jim, over a gourmet’s dinner and important wines, Thorn was doubly fascinated by her; with her shabby clothes, her indefatigable play-a-year for twenty years, her movie-a-year for the past ten or twelve, and her old-maid passion for six nephews, four nieces, and seven Persian cats. Whenever Miss Denkin stopped talking about her newest play or her last play or what would be next year’s play, she began enthusiastically on the cats and nephews and nieces, all of whom she appeared to adore with indiscriminate fervor.

And soon Thornton Johns found himself wondering about her generosity. Having started her big-time successes so long before taxes jumped through the ceiling, Miss Denkin must have a million or so tucked away. Could he take her out to lunch alone one day, and interest her in securing endowment insurance for each of the ten kids, to provide them with certain sums of cash at the milestone moments of their lives—at graduation, marriage, the launching of business careers?

The effervescent energy that had moved him to talk insurance to Roy Tribble suddenly bubbled higher than ever. How odd that, at the moment when final deliverance from insurance was at hand, he was finding himself so keen to beat all his previous records for new business.

Was it Jill’s impending arrival tonight, and the memory of her chatter last spring about untransacted business on an extra policy, that had turned his mind so sharply again to insurance? Or Maude Denkin’s present chatter about six nephews and four nieces?

Hip-deep in prospects. Not Tribble-sized prospects either. At the outside Tribble might be good for another twenty thousand; Roy’s annual premium on that would be a thousand dollars; commissions on it only four hundred the first year, and fifty a year for the next nine. No longer would that make a Thornton Johns reach, stretch, put his full powers to work. But a hundred-thousand-dollar deal, spread among Miss Denkin’s beloveds? Or an additional policy of a hundred thousand to Jill Goodwyn? If the assured were age thirty-five, the annual premium on a hundred thousand was about five thousand and the broker’s commission would come to two thousand the first year and two hundred and fifty dollars per year the next nine.

Thornton Johns smiled into Miss Denkin’s watery old eyes and thought, I wonder how old Jill really is. Suddenly he longed to see her once again. At this very moment, she was in the skies above Illinois or Ohio, lying back in her adjustable chair, resting, thinking ahead. Just before dinner, he had wired the plane, “
THE NEW LEASE IS READY, IF YOU’LL SKIP THE SMALL TYPE
,” and though he was not certain what he had meant by the last phrase, it set his pulse racing to imagine Jill trying to interpret it. Sentimental young girls, after all, were not his style. To a mature and gifted man, the spoiled imperious demanding woman offered more of a challenge. And in many ways more of a reward.

I
F
H
ARRY
V
ON
B
RANN
were a man for an ulcer or high blood pressure, the summer of 1949 would have seen him felled by one and terrified by the other. Two-other studios were rushing out films with world government themes, and Harry Von Brann was no man to trail anybody. Thus, weekends were abandoned for the entire summer by everybody with what Von Brann now called “a civilized employment contract,” and even the Fourth of July was no official holiday for Hy Bernstein, Dick Morosky, or himself.

Instead of “in the cans by October and on Broadway by Christmas,” the new schedule called for “sneaks by Labor Day, and goddam it Broadway right after that.”

The news of the early release date reached Gregory Johns and his family a few days after their arrival at the H Bar C Ranch, the official name for the large, untidy, prosperous Chisholm place, and, immediately, Gregory’s inner seismograph began again to register his old tremulous fear about the movie. Hy’s last letter had said nothing of this speedup, but that was back in June, and it would have been in character for Hy not to mention it even if he had known it at that time. Hy had written only of the script, of the new opening he was suggesting to Von Brann and Morosky—“a moody device,” Hy had called it, “to establish the mood, I mean, not moody. If it plays right, it ought to be larger than moodiness, and when the delayed dialogue begins, Barlowe’s lighthearted first speech, the one we agreed on, should have redoubled impact.”

Abby and Gwen and Howie were delighted at the comparative nearness of the picture and Hat was sent into a spin of excitement, as if she could see it next week. Gregory warned Hat that even Von Brann could be frustrated, that there was still, an excellent chance the picture could not be ready until October, by which time she would be at Vassar, and not present, for the official opening.

Hat took this warning lightly and dashed out to the corral to tell all her Chisholm cousins. The Chisholms raised horses; a couple of hundred were off in the hills and about thirty in the corral. Along with two hired hands, the three older Chisholm children were responsible for them, and Hat pitched in on all the heavy work they did. She was up at six every morning; in a week she could ride as well as they. She did not limit herself to pleasure rides, like the occasional tourists the Chisholms put up in the two dude cabins they had built a year ago; she quickly got tough enough to go along on a full day’s roundup.

In levis and plaid shirts, Hat no longer bore a resemblance to the pages of
Vogue
; since her cousins showed no interest in what dormitory she was to live in at Vassar, she soon dropped all references to Strong, Lathrop, and Cushing; she even forgot cashmere sweaters and the desperate necessity for a fur coat. Watching her, her parents sometimes wished they need not return East for a long time.

Gregory and Abby rode clumsily, with no hint of carefree ease in the saddle, but they soon loved riding as much as Hat did. Occasionally, with Howie and Gwen, they would ride off directly after six o’clock supper and watch the sun go down in pure brilliance behind the jagged red rock skyline of the Big Horns. They could hear the roar of Shell Creek cutting down through Shell Canyon; the gradual night came down soft and hesitant; the dry heat of the day blew to nothingness in the wind from the mountains.

Sometimes they drove all the children twenty miles to Greybull to see an early movie; occasionally ranchers and their wives would come down from Lovell or all the way out from Cody, to visit the Chisholms and meet the Johnses.

“You didn’t think ranchers read books, did you, Greg?” Howie Chisholm asked Gregory after one such visit.

Gwen said, “Let him alone, Howie, and how many times do I have to tell you he hates to be called Greg?”

Gregory laughed. “Anything Howie calls me is fine.” In the ten years since the Chisholms’ last trip East, Gregory had forgotten how much he liked both of them. Howard bore no resemblance to the rangy, gimlet-eyed rancher in Westerns; he was mild in manner, short and squared-off in build. During the winter months he went back to his reading of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles in the original; he had meant to teach Greek and the Attic tragedies at Missoula, and had done so for one year after getting his B. A.

“Damn my hide,” he liked to say, “if Uncle Bill didn’t die just in time and leave this place and twenty skinny cow-ponies, I might have stayed on forever and become a trustee.”

This gave Gwen her opportunity to say he might at least have made a good trustee. It was Gwendolyn who was the driving force behind the ranch. She was as easygoing and gay as a colt, but it was she who set the prices and did the trading on the horses, ordered the supplies, kept the books, ran the hired hands. It was she who had insisted on building the two cabins and who was planning two more in the fall. “It kills me,” she said, “to have tourists drive up when the sun’s going down, afraid to try the pass to Sheridan in the dark, and have to say no room.”

After a few days on the ranch, days of riding, fishing, chopping wood, Gregory rediscovered the solid good ache of forgotten muscles, the big muscles never used at a desk, the thigh and calf muscles, the chest and shoulder muscles; he swore they would return every summer as long as the Chisholms would have them.

If anybody had told Gregory Johns that he had been in a state of shock since publication day, he would have laughed. At most he might have conceded, “Well, a happy shock.” But now, a sense of strain, of watching, of waiting for Thorn’s news and bulletins and reports—all this began to die away, with the gradualness of the mountain-clinging daylight of Wyoming, and, in its dying, proclaimed its onetime existence.

In the third week at the ranch Gregory began to write. Only the middle hours of the day went into working; after breakfast he would hang around with all the kids at the corral, or go riding with them, or alone with Abby. Toward ten he would go to his room, emerge for lunch at high noon, and then go back until four. Since the train trip to the Coast, he had worked on his new book only in bits and pieces, spurts of a few hours at a time, days apart, each stop a reckless throwing away of momentum, each new attempt a digging down within himself to recapture ideas, sequence, mood.

But now, day after day for most of August, he wrote, and the slow arduous pages once more began to pile up in a blessed yellow sheaf. The last chapter of
The Good World
had been completed nearly a year ago; a writer had at last to write forward steadily or feel part of himself die.

Thorn’s letter about the Waldorf shattered his calm.

It came on their last day at the ranch, and Thorn explained that he had decided to write rather than wait for their return, to give Gregory plenty of time to see what it had meant to him, in case they should later feel like reopening the question of his lecturing again. “I had put the whole idea behind me, of course,” Thorn wrote, “and the idea of speaking again took shape so slowly, it was scarcely an act of will at all.

Weeks ago Zoring Smith approached me on this plushy affair at the Waldorf, a centennial for the Carstairs Paper-Co. They wanted outside speakers, not just the usual vice-presidents, and since they supply half the book presses in the country, Zoring thought a talk about the No. 1 best seller would liven up the proceedings. Finally I gave in and now that I’ve tried the Big Time, I just can’t tell you what it’s done for me. And, in the damnedest unexpected way, for the boys. They were there that night—I’d never realized how big a lift kids get when it’s their own father earning all the applause.”

Gregory swore. “So now I’d be robbing young Thorn and Fred,” he said to Abby.

Thorn had enclosed small notices of the talk. The blare of Hollywood was missing; there were no pictures; the tone was pleasing. “The longest speech was the last one, by Thornton Johns, who spoke about his brother, the author of the highly praised best seller,
The Good World.
The delighted audience applauded him to the echo, as did the guests of honor seated on the platform. These included—”

Gregory ignored the dozen names, but over his shoulder, Abby read aloud, “‘—and Jill Goodwyn, who will appear next year in a Paramount picture based on Gregory Johns’ earlier novel,
Horn of Plenty.’
”

“Where did it say that?” Gregory went back to the last paragraph and read it word for word.

“Do you suppose they’re having an affair?” Abby said.

“Not unless it’s on a lecture platform with every seat sold.”

Later they got back to the rest of Thorn’s news. The Hathaway-Johns Agency was still problematical; time had flown so quickly, it would be next spring before they could hope to start. This presented a basic problem. If Gregory’s next book should be ready in the spring or summer of 1950, Thorn’s first obligation would be to that. He hoped Gregory could, on his return to New York, give him some Indication of schedule on his new manuscript, also some Idea of its theme. In the greatest confidence, of course. It was a touch embarrassing to have people ask him what the new one would be about and not to know enough to sound convincing when he replied that it was even better than
The Good World
but that he was pledged not to reveal a word of it. “You see, I’m laying the groundwork for the next big push already.”

“The more Thorn does for me,” Gregory said, “the further away from him I feel. That’s base ingratitude, I guess.” Abby made no answer and he fell silent. He was thinking about young Thorn and Fred.

Hat hated to leave the ranch, but just as they were starting, they had a telegram that made her feel she would explode with joy.
The Good World
was completed and private screenings for New York’s most influential people were to start before she left for Vassar!

How many girls her age had ever seen a preview of a movie, she asked herself again and again, during the long drive home. How many Vassar girls had ever been invited to a screening for New York’s most influential people? What luck to have something fascinating to talk about, instead of gawking around the campus, the way new girls always did at college. She could kiss Mr. Von Brann and all of Imperial Century for pulling this off in time, and if some Act of God forced them to delay the Previews after all, she would simply die.

Had Pat ever been to a private screening of a movie before the public was allowed to see it? She couldn’t wait to see Pat again either; she could imagine his face when she casually invited him. to the preview with her. That is, if Daddy and Mother would let her. If? With college taking her away from home so soon, they certainly wouldn’t be silly enough to start a row about anything she wanted. She’d wait until they were back in the apartment and then, with her trunk half packed with new clothes, and separation looming large, she would ask them.