The Pilgrimage of Roger Haydock

When Roger Haydock consented to go to Hollywood, against his better judgment, he had lately been presented with an important award for fiction, in connection with a book he had written chiefly for his own amusement (and that of his son) and which he had thitherto thought of, if at all, as a trifle. Since the advent of the honorific, he had reviewed his opinion and found it wanting in perception. More specifically, he had missed becoming pompous only through the steadying influence of his wife, a leggy, good-humored brunette who viewed him with tolerance and a wry concession to his faults. Attached to this man, like a gyro to a steamboat, she kept him from turning turtle as he wallowed through the self-roiled seas of a writer's life.

Haydock's communications with Hollywood had been tonic but jangling. The most majestic of the studios had bought his book, for a princely sum, and was planning to convert it into a film epic of Americana. The finished product would be peerless in length and heroic in all its dimensions. In numberless conversations by long-distance telephone, he had sought, and failed, to ascend to the high plateau of moonstruck superlative where the studio officials loved and sang. To start with, he was made uneasy by the very length and frequency of the calls. Haydock admired Thoreau's thesis of simplicity, and while he was perfectly profligate in questions of large finance, he often descended to stinginess over small household incursions like garbage collection, charity drives for diseases sponsored by television comedians, phone calls when a postcard would do, and the brigandage of listless plumbers. "These fellows throw money around like sailors ashore," he complained to his wife. "It's unwholesome, and may bring on runaway inflation." "Quite possibly they know what they're doing," she said. "It's often necessary to spend money to make money. To coin a phrase," she added, performing the ritual, to dodge a barb and keep the peace.

After nearly a year of effort, the studio had tentatively settled on a script, the sole survivor of a batch of five, which included one by a reformed drunk who confessed, under pressure, that he had never gone through the book but had read "a very long, detailed review." His departure from the story, which was rustic in flavor, was a masterwork of creative writing; he led the characters out of their Southern milieu to spend most of their time in a San Francisco saloon, talking, and brought the plot to a denouement of conspicuous apathy with an irrelevant argument for homosexuality.

Haydock himself had not been invited to join in the preparation of the screenplay. The studio had its reasons. The first of these was that he was generally untutored in the medium; for another, he was known to be difficult. Haydock had not wished to write the movie, but he preferred the studio to believe that he could. As he told them on the phone, with a wonderful lack of tact, he was an expert on motion pictures; the fact is, he had celluloid in his blood (and here his voice began to sound just faintly like the melodious rasp of W. C. Fields), and had spent thousands of hours sitting in movie theaters to avoid making conversation with bores. Apparently the studio regarded the qualification as flimsy. Also, Haydock's reputation for arrogance, independence — he was moderately rich — impatience with less sprightly minds (which often seemed to him to include everybody alive), bumptious challenge, vague threats of violence, and frequent audacious mischief had caused concern of a preventive nature.

Haydock was aware of these traits, and considered them disturbing. He liked to deplore them to his wife, hoping to be reassured that they didn't exist, but she usually shrugged, knowing better, and offered only the dubious palliative that "it may only be a phase," a statement that set his teeth on edge. It was, in a sense, a family joke. If one of the children burned down a barn, his wife dialed the insurance man, as Haydock stamped ranting through the living room, and remarked soothingly, "Don't worry; it's nothing but a phase." "Of course," he would shout, "and next comes the grand larceny phase, and then the smuggling, and then kidnapping, then piracy, and, at last, murder. How close are they to their murder phase?" Later, to be sure, he reflected that he had been excessively censorious, whereupon he summoned the culprit and bragged at length about the many (superior) black deeds of his own youth; then he gave the child five dollars for injecting verve into the neighborhood play. Haydock was, in short, a man of extremes. In his attitude toward his work, he was alternately self-deprecatory and conceited, humble and overbearing, capricious and hurt if the mood was rejected; at times savagely critical of a colleague and again writing him a warm, sincere note of commendation. No doubt the keystone of his character was inconsistency: he was blown by whimsical winds. He found it difficult, for example, to live anyplace in contentment for over six months: the climate turned foul, the people palled, the customs were stupid, the structures grotesque, the geography deliberately offensive. He had once moved the family from a palatial villa near Cannes because the Mediterranean was too blue. "It's like a damned poster," he said. "It's a fake. They pour pigment in it every night, in that river that comes in up near Nice."

Despite this erratic search for the green pastures of body and soul (which his wife curbed with enough firmness to make life possible, and which he himself watched and fought) Haydock had a hard, artist's core of professionalism. When he sat down to work, he knew what he was doing. Moreover, he proceeded with suicidal reliability in a straight line until the job was finished. If the subject matter was subtly attuned to his special viewpoint, he perhaps knew what he was after better than anybody else in the world could have, and it was this insight, this vast, ordered fund of concept, idea and execution that the studio officials now wished to bring to bear on their completed script. Hay-dock's, the studio felt, was the original creator's unique knowledge of how to diffuse throughout a screenplay the book's delicate spirit. He could not help but applaud an understanding so sensitive, and while he was by no means eager to go to Hollywood, he was, he decided, willing. Even so, he had what he considered to be the usual misgivings of the successful Eastern toiler in the mysterious vineyard of rhetoric. The gossip in the bazaars was disparaging, and the literature he had read on the subject (by writers whose options were dropped) drew gloomy pictures of a frosted-cake, jerry-built land in thrall to monied, illiterate vulgarians. Worse, it was a poppy-field of remorseless corruption, a belle dame sans merci to whose charms — cash and a sinus-free climate — the finest talents of the East had fallen prey. Haydock and his wife talked it over, flirting as close to a serious discussion as they ever came, and agreed to keep their heads. "They say they'll put us up in a first-class suite at the Beverly Sunset," he said, "with unlimited access to room service and all the amenities. It sounds risky. I think I'll drop them a postcard and ask them to lodge us in a motel somewhere near downtown Los Angeles, say in the Mexican section." "Don't be an ass," his wife replied, reminding herself that for once she could probably get an expensive permanent without having a domestic fuss.

• • •

They were whisked to the West Coast by jet (superjet) plane, in a five-hour trip that was uneventful except for one trivial lapse by Haydock, the result of overstimulation from two unaccustomed (free) martinis at 11 o'clock in the morning. For a man determined to maintain his equilibrium, the week began, in fact, on a note of whirligig unreality, and characteristically he grumbled out of all proportion. The drinks came immediately after takeoff, and a full dinner, including a lobster cocktail and a large sirloin, was served at 3:30 in the afternoon. Midway during the dangerous void thus produced, Haydock asked (offering grandly to pay) for a third drink; he was refused by one of the several faultlessly beautiful and efficient stewardesses, whose policy denial sounded, he thought, like a taped recitation from a Dresden doll. Brooding over a corporate folly that could intoxicate 100 passengers, on the house, then let them squirm for hours without further alcohol or the soporific of food, he decided that the stewardesses, too, were hostile and also identical. When he chattily asked one if the company ran them off on a mimeograph, his wife's protest was so bitter that he spent the rest of the trip over-compensating with ornate compliments, apology and thanks.

He was glad to see the Los Angeles airport swim up out of the deep, hand-sprinkled, artificial green of the coast and to greet his agent, Fred Eisenfeld, whose sun-tanned face, relaxed by years of cheerful cynicism, seemed to provide a peg of sanity upon which to hang this nervous venture. "What do these birds want out of me?" Haydock demanded on the ride to the Beverly Sunset. "Nothing," said Eisenfeld, long used to springing things on twitchy writers one at a time, with pressure-chamber spaces in between, to avoid cases of the literary bends. "They want you to enjoy the hotel, swim in the pool, eat the food, maybe come out to the studio a time or two when you get rested up." "What am I supposed to say about their script?" "Tell them the truth; tell them how it hits you," said Eisenfeld easily. "What if it hits me bad?" "Then tell them it's terrible; say they've injured you professionally; refuse to come out of your suite; challenge the head of the studio to a duel; sue. You might even say 'I vant to go home.' That line's been very successful out here in the past."

"OK," said Haydock, grinning. He had known and trusted Eisenfeld for a long time and was relieved to be yanked back into a reasonable frame of mind. In this milieu, it was soothing to be around somebody to whom the most childish and explosive byways of human conduct were commonplace, the daily fare of a shepherd stuck by choice with a herd of black sheep. So thinking, Haydock restrained himself to a minimum of comments, all scathing, over the bustle and ceremony of arriving at the Beverly Sunset Hotel, an establishment of flashing splendor. As he watched the quick, expert deployment of liveried doormen, car-parkers, bellhops and other units, he took cover behind a potted palm and signaled wildly to his wife and Eisenfeld, nearby, to get down, to avoid being hit. "They're guerrillas," he hissed. "They've already got my bags. That's the way they operate, in little bursts; besides, I recognize the uniforms from the Pacific." During the war, Haydock had suffered a very tangential brush with the enemy on Bougainville, and, now, was often inclined to look on himself as a seasoned fighter, like the ailing but randy old "combat man" of Over the River. "Come out of there, you idiot," his wife said, "you're making a scene." "Duck!" hissed Haydock. "Grab yourself a foxhole in the Riviera Lounge." Eisenfeld only smiled, enjoying it all, and indeed it was for his entertainment that Haydock had begun this absurd charade.

In their room, or suite, for it seemed infinitely spacious and divided, Haydock was authentically impressed. Spurred on by the reliable audience of his agent, he took note of the drapes, the reproductions of Matisse, Bonnard and Picasso (which he described as superior to the originals, with fresher color) and the three tinted telephones, each with its own number. Then he found a fourth phone in the bathroom. "By God, what (continued on page 40) Roger Haydock (continued from page 34) do you think of that? Strategically placed, too; you can reach right up and take it off the hook without even laying down your book." He lifted the receiver, summoning the switchboard girl. "This is Roger Haydock, in the bathroom of 411 and 412," he said. "Did you wish me to put this on the conference board, sir?" she asked in a cultured, rather stagy voice, which Haydock immediately deduced had been trained by an elocutionist, probably at one of the studios. "What in hades is a conference board?" "It's like when they have a conference up there — an outside call's put on all your phones, so everybody can hear." "Arrange the conference board at once," said Haydock, flushing the toilet in some agitation. "This is important." When the other phones rang, they were answered by his wife, who was hanging clothes in a bedroom closet, and by Eisenfeld, who was comfortably sprawled in the sala. "Get your pencils and pads," said Haydock tersely. "Let's have a conference." His dictum evoked only an inelegant expletive and click from the bedroom, and Eisenfeld's tolerant chuckle.

After he had stoically absorbed a lecture from his wife for not making a show of gratitude to Eisenfeld, to the studio, and to the hotel manager (whose card was attached to a spray of chrysanthemums and a basket of fruit in the $60-a-day suite), Haydock resolved to get back to earth. But his good intentions were shattered by the arrival of the rental-car man, who bore a strong physical resemblance to Rock Hudson, and, he decided, a mental similarity to another popular mime of the region, a donkey named Francis. "Here's your key to the Thunderbird, sir," the man said, awaiting a tip with haughty servility, like Arthur Treacher in one of his many roles as a menial. "What Thunderbird?" Haydock replied. "I've got a Jeep, and a Chevrolet. Where'd it come from?" "Search me," the man said, sensing trouble and taking on a rather Bogartian leer. "They give it to me at the agency; that's all I got." "It's from the studio," Eisenfeld spoke up. "You can't move around in this town without a car. They didn't have time to put in a transportation system." "How does this car shift?" demanded Haydock, giving the representative a keen look. "I don't know. It shifts pretty good. I only drove it once. They keep it greased, you know what I mean." "I mean how does it shift?" said Haydock with emphasis. "Well, Jesus, you push on the gas and it shifts itself. Automatic." "Aha!" cried Haydock. "Now we're getting somewhere." He assumed a professorial stance, as his wife murmured in disgust, and said, "The point is, I don't want a car that shifts by itself. Neither do I want one with windows that roll up automatically. Maybe you'd better make a note of this. I assume you have several species?" "Buddy," said the man wearily, "we got 'em all." "Well, then," Haydock continued, with a familiar feeling of impotence before the onrushing tidal wave of nonsense, "no magic transmission, no power brakes and no power steering — those are musts. Eventually, people's arms and legs will fall off. No multicolors, two headlights only, no fins and no plastic — leather seats — no singing horns, no radio, no chromium ——" "I don't know," said the representative doubtfully. "I'm sorry," Haydock said. "I should have put this in the affirmative. What I do want is as follows: a very old, black car, with a divided windshield that's glass color — not blue — floor gearshift topped by a rubber knob, running boards made out of steel that isn't rolled paper-thin, walnut dashboard, and thick wooden steering wheel. Emergency brake on the outside, or left-hand, running board, with a tool box nearby. Side curtains that don't quite fit, so you can have a little fun if a storm comes up, and a wind-up clock that's been out of whack for years." "I don't know," said the representative. "I just don't know what it would be." "It would be," said Haydock quietly, "a 1924 Haynes. That's all, my man. Here's a dollar for your trouble. We're going out. When you get the car, please leave the key at the desk. If it doesn't have a self-starter, leave a crank."

"What I don't understand," said Eisenfeld, deep in his sprawl on a sofa, "is why you ever became a writer."

"He's a stand-up comedian," said Haydock's wife. "He's just one long scream of laughter."

"Bring on the studios; I've got this burg exactly where I want it," Haydock told them.

• • •

Driving out, the next morning, he watched the immaculate, inspired houses roll past under the hard blue sky and suddenly felt, in his stomach, a warning ting-a-ling of nerves. He had been expecting it, the other side of the coin — hollow apprehension — the textbook "floating anxiety" that fixed its grip in the empty wake of merriment. He was bothered, often nearly paralyzed, by seriousness, and by importance, and this trip to the studio was important, for he earnestly hoped that a good movie would be made of his book. He sought to regain his ascendancy (by this age he had gathered a store of little flags with which he could mark the solid-ground path out of the swamp) by asking questions, essentially derisive. From his position in the back seat, with Eisenfeld's shaggy mane and his wife's ponytail glaringly framed by the white road before him, he said, "These houses, now. They're stunning, all different, too, but are they actually inhabited? I was through here three or four times during the war — I was doing most of Nimitz' planning, then, as you may recall from reading the papers — and I've never yet seen a sign of life around a house, or anybody swimming in a pool. I take it the place is abandoned, like Virginia City." Eisenfeld, in his unimpressed way, loved this shrill, implausible, tumescent, perhaps impermanent settlement, but he had long ago ceased to bristle upon hearing it abused. "Oh, they're in there. All the actresses — the ones not working — are reading Shakespeare for pleasure. They come out at night when the racket starts. Like bats." "What racket?" demanded Haydock suspiciously. "It isn't a night-club town; certainly places like Ciro's and Mocambo fold up in a hurry." "Orgies," said Eisenfeld. "They go to each other's houses and have orgies. This is Sin-town; it's decadent; it's pulling down the moral structure of the nation." "I'd like to hear about some red-hot Hollywood sin," said Haydock's wife. "Something juicy, for use at the Woman's Club when I get home. Spofford's in a slump." Casting about, Eisenfeld spoke at length of the great Hollywood names, the mobile, enlarged photographs, in two dimensions, that comb their Lorelei locks for an affection-starved republic. Few of these, it seemed, had the conventional distribution of hormones; one, moreover, was paying court, with some hope of success, to a jaguar. He mentioned a powerful industrialist, a shadowy figure, ill-kempt and acerbic, whose importation on terms approaching peonage of golden, melon-breasted nymphs now formed a little nucleus of notability among the younger actresses. In the whispered, fearful prattle of the soirees, he was "the girl miser," who hired eunuchs to steer his bonded troupe in and out of bars, when he himself was busy. "Fellow has the devil of a time keeping track of them," said Eisenfeld. Haydock, sympathetically moved, suggested that he put the girls in white skullcaps and sweaters, each bearing a scarlet letter "P," and Eisenfeld turned into the studio.

At the gate, several armed policemen came out to give them a close, hard look, causing Haydock to lift his arms and cry "I'm clean," but Eisenfeld exchanged a few pleasantries, having to do principally with Las Vegas, the current joke town of the area, and they were waved on. Even so, Haydock refused to let it drop. "They expecting trouble around here?" he asked, and (continued on page 101) Roger Haydock (continued from page 40) getting out of the car, at a parking space, he tapped his wife on the shoulder. "The workers are about to revolt. Revolution's in the air: you can smell it." "Oh hush up, and let me enjoy it," she said. Early, as Haydock always was, out of some mysterious dread of the moment (customarily he sat an hour in waiting rooms, before boarding trains), they walked on slowly, past vast gray hangarlike buildings, past outdoor sets, one with the standard rattle of musketry and Indian yelps, and bodies stacked like sawlogs, past, at last, three soaring wooden monoliths, uninscribed, loftily guarding their secrets. "Hold on a minute," said Haydock, stepping over. "I want to see who's buried here." "They're oil wells." Eisenfeld explained patiently. "They struck oil, and boarded up the derricks to make them look better." With a simulation of faintness, Haydock leaned back against the shaft: then he said, "You aren't serious, of course. What you mean is, the set designers stuck these up and claimed they housed oil wells, to tie in with the general atmosphere." "They're real," replied Eisenfeld, waiting. Haydock pressed his face against the boards, shaken a little at this awesome preservation of the unities, certain for a moment that he could never again use with conviction the old contemptuous, identifying words like sham, masquerade, magic lantern, make believe. He was able to hear, deep inside, the steady pulsations as the punctured earth bled black juice, fighting off deficits, beating back the bankers, competing with TV.

It would be difficult to say what Haydock expected his producer to resemble. The truth is that he had no definite picture in mind, but confusedly hoped that he might be wearing a blazer, with Mr. Bronstein stenciled on the back. (This would imply, of course, a canvas chair in the same genre, on the set, and, alongside, a kind of human echo with a vocabulary consisting of "Yes.") His knowledge of him was limited to a few films he had made, some of them good, one or two brilliant. It was a snobbish source of pride to Haydock that he had never quite probed the anatomy of a producer's duties, never determined where his responsibility began and ended, the outer limits of his sphere of influence. What he was not prepared for, and it shocked him, was an unbombastic gentleman of contemplative mien in a well-cut stripeless dark suit and seated in an office whose fabrics and paintings, whose workaday Swedish desk, whose family pictures and small mementos of places seen and cherished, implied a taste far beyond the legend. Victimized as he was by the novels and stories, he had expected (he realized now with unfrivolous accuracy) something false and foxy, a shade less than respectable. He had looked for a man who by the questionable genius of opportunism had survived the storm winds of front-office deceit and caprice, nepotism, public infidelity, changing taste, topical surprises, depressions and recessions, the good pictures that failed to catch on, the bad ones that made a box-office showing, options, temperament, disloyalty, attack and counterattack — the long, dreary catalog of hurts and failures inevitable when the spectrum of positive arts is fused into a single, unconvinced industry. He felt tricked. This was not the careless mogul of the long-distance telephone, and he was suddenly aware that the moonstruck superlatives, the high-sounding declarations of intent, had been served up, like unwanted hors d'oeuvres, because they were expected by a new diner in this well-advertised café. Haydock saw with chagrin that it was he himself who had been examined and found vulnerable. As the pricked bubble of his ego subsided, leaving the professional whom the studios had patiently awaited, he became involved in his book as a movie for the first time.

They chatted at length. Bronstein's comments on the novel proved that he had read it with discernment. He referred affectionately to favorite chapters, to scenes, to dialog, even to isolated words and phrases, that Haydock, too, now felt were the truest marks of his creation. But there was no embarrassment of lavishness here, nothing "Hollywood." Bronstein's praise was rich but not fulsome. Haydock listened in admiration while the producer described the technical problems of bringing to the screen a long book, astir with activity, swollen with plot and subplot. Elisions must be made, bridges devised by screenwriters that would span certain areas while retaining the book's basic tone, new areas constructed (all still in the spirit), characterizations subtly altered — this one strengthened, that played down — to attract the stars who in the end might mean a golden shower or disaster at the box office. There was a great deal more. The first, the most important task was, of course, the need to shape this uncinematic work into three acts. Haydock was obliged to agree that it could scarcely be a travelog, a succession of scenes, no matter how lively and entertaining. Of pressing importance was the protraction of the dramatic curve, with its beginning, middle and end, and climax wrought in timely perfection, as by an ardent and expert lover. But the supreme task would be to take what was good about the book and make it better. Haydock sat up, alerted by the view halloo. He could hear the distant baying of hounds. This was a familiar game trail down which he, as the quarry, had bounded in anger for nearly 20 years. How many times, he wondered sadly, from how many strivers who had tried and failed to become writers, had he defended a labored-over, sweated-over, constructed-in-agony product? On their record, what inexplicable arrogance could persuade them of their superior knowledge? They were, he felt, adjudging their betters by the critical standards that had caused their own collapse, and only by staving them off, at great cost to his serenity, had he managed to stay professionally alive. So acute was his bitterness on the subject that, often, he had mulishly rejected suggestions that would patently have been to his benefit. Gently (for he wished to avoid argument) he expounded to Bronstein, to Eisenfeld and to his wife, his theory that the good movies, the real winners, had been those which had simply followed the book. He cited David Copperfield and Gone with the Wind, spinning off at random examples which, though not arty, or even self-consciously artistic (therefore unsuspect to a money man) were yet critically sound and had played merry tunes in the till. "In both cases," said Haydock, "nobody was inspired to write a new book. They decided that the original was good enough to film. It was a matter of story and cast — —"

"Let's go have lunch at the commissary. I think Mrs. Haydock might enjoy it," said Bronstein with genuine Old World courtesy.

After a wholesome meal at which the producer discoursed with erudition on a variety of subjects — medicine, law, bowling, psychiatry, horticulture, Las Vegas, primitive religions — Haydock and his group were turned over to a studio guide, who led them on a tour of the sets. For anyone in search of glamor (and despite his scoffing talk, Haydock was a secret fan, an addict, hooked since childhood) the experience was curiously baffling. In these halls, or others like them, trod the ghosts of Garbo and Barrymore, of Theodore Roberts, of W. C. Fields and Charlie Chaplin, Jack Gilbert, Wallace Reid, Lon Chaney, Dolores Costello, Jean Harlow, Douglas Fairbanks, "Freckles" Barry — the gorgeous, unpredictable symbols, living and dead (but gone from these painfully empty halls) who had set the rhythm of an age. Virtuosi or hams, Haydock thought, they possessed more than the ordinary marks of identity, and they would be cherished. En route to the set of one film-in-the-works, an ode to slum clearance, Haydock recognized a popular idol of the moment, Rance ("Sweat-sox") McGee, a skinny, tousled-haired youth, somewhat the worse for acne, in frayed blue jeans and a saucy, stained sweater. Wrench in hand, he was seated on the ground beside a Cooper Monaco, changing a piston rod, or draining the oil, or maybe only tightening a nut. "I know a garage where that kid might get a job, if he'd clean up a bit," said Haydock in a normally loud tone, but his wife shushed him indignantly. On another set, there was being waged what was informally described by the crews as "the battle of the bosoms." Co-starred, after an inspirational idea by an obscure associate producer, José Serpesil (whose superior promptly stole most of the credit), were a bovine Danish matron whose dramatic gifts, which measured out at 44–28–39, were presently without peer in the film world, and an Italian actress whose dimensions (40-1/2–23–40) — nothing to be ashamed of, but certainly an inch or two short of genius — had placed her abreast of the competition so to speak, assisted by a peculiar, rotary, heaving motion with which she managed her wares under stress. She was a youngster yet, so Haydock had recently read in a column by Lolly Parsons (45–35–48), and gave every promise of fatting up to aggressive contention. As he gratuitously established Miss Parsons' contours, he wondered if this new Bertillon system would be carried on to its idiot's extreme, in the style of other American hysteria. He toyed with headlines in the Times: Princess Margaret (39–22–36) Arrives for White House Visit; and Senator Smith (36–26–38) Demurs at General Rank for Actor. Haydock lagged behind to listen, or watch, hoping to see the noted mammaries in full swing, but it was a scene in which both stars were covered, one having turned nun, after a career of matchless carnality, and the Italian being in coy process of announcing to her lover, a car thief, that she was about to have a baby. Both of these repeated cinema travesties of actions essentially private had embarrassed Haydock for years; besides, neither actress could speak recognizable English, so he turned away.

Before they broke off the visit, their escort steered them— furtively, in the style of a runner for a peep show in Montmartre — to a set whereon was being enacted a drama of beatnik life in the Village. Before the camera were several creatures in costumes unspeakably offensive — a sissified youth, with bangs, compressed into tight black corduroys, a high yellow vest and a Norfolk jacket; another in a derby and a horizontally striped sweater that reached to his shins; a third in filthy ducks, the right leg torn off at the knee; and a sprinkling of barefoot, unmade-up girls. They lolled comatose on the floor of what appeared to be a flat of singular decor, with two hideous abstractions, one in a triangular frame, another painting more representational — a clear, well-composed view of a woman choking a baby — and a rough-hewn sculpture of a Madonna with three breasts. To the erratic accompaniment of a drum roll, a pallid, hollow-cheeked girl stood listlessly reciting an unrhymed poem in which she stated that she hoped to murder her mother. Haydock moved up, fascinated; then he found himself beside the producer, a man he knew slightly, presumably the guiding spirit behind two brilliantly tasteful films of recent years. "It's hilarious," Haydock told him. "Good stuff. Do you allow them to run loose at night, or lock them up on the set?" "Mr. Haydock," said the producer solemnly, "this is going to be a very, very important document of Today. We've done a very large amount of research." Horrified, Haydock saw that he was deadly serious. For a wild instant, he wondered if he could be drunk. Drifting away, mournfully uncertain whether after all it could be he himself who in the quick rush of years had missed the beat, he stood beside a boy and a girl, members of the cast, momentarily idle, who had reached some abstruse impasse in a romantic alliance. "Tony, liss-en," she said, her slight body bent forward, both hands clawing the air, her pretty lower jaw outthrust and moving laterally, chewing the words. "Look, Tony, will you liss-en? I mean, what I mean is, I — I mean Tony will you LISS-EN? I mean I don't understand you-oo." In a sudden revulsion of feeling, Haydock briefly harbored the notion of removing to Tierra del Fuego until method acting had been stamped out and some public-spirited citizen had bombed the Actors Studio. One Brando could be a boon, he reflected; 5000 assumed the proportions of a Biblical plague. Desperately he looked about, hoping that there might emerge from these mock-up cathedral shadows another Valentino, with greasy, patent-leather hair, and an imperious cinema queen in the raucous tradition, raising hell with a director. He was fed up with the ordinary, tired of verisimilitude, surfeited with the dreary. His needs were simple; he wished to be entertainingly kidded. In his dark seat in the theater, Haydock preferred to feel that great things were coming; he believed in the vampire's promise.

• • •

In the following 24 hours, he and his wife were swept along the glittering Hollywood trail of cocktail party, lunch at Romanoff's and star-studded dinner. Exhausted, and with no commitment for nearly half the next day, they decided to enjoy their hotel, which certainly was one of the world's finest, and have a midday snack in their suite. And it was here, returning upstairs from a breakfast of black-walnut waffles on the sundrenched Patio Portofino, that they caught, and checked, their first delusion of grandeur. The door to another suite was open, as the maids tidied up, and Haydock stopped, nettled. Not only was the wallpaper superior, but the suite itself looked out to the Alcazar Gardens, while the Haydocks' gave onto the boulevard in front. "By God, for two pins I'd ask them to move us," he said. "After all, for 60 bucks a day ..." "It is more attractive. There's no doubt about it," replied his wife, musing. Then with a little shake of her head, she said, "Hold on; this is what we weren't going to do — remember?" Half-convinced, Haydock permitted himself to be led docilely home. A few minutes later, they agreed that it had been a close call. During the morning, she wallowed in the luxury of the hotel's beauty parlor, getting the full treatment from permanent to pedicure, while Haydock, aching in every joint, called in the house masseuse, a strapping Finn, who set to work with shrill yelps of joy. Buckling to her work, she gained a chancery toehold, then, when he kipped free, slipped easily into a Turkish leg-stretcher, meanwhile applying an illegal Indian rub to his left wrist. She was remarkably powerful, even for so large a woman. Haydock's young years had been spent in a rough section of the land; he had an authentic knowledge of fighting, but he began to wonder, for one of the few times in his life, if he hadn't given away too much weight. First, not surprisingly, she announced that, in Hollywood, it was necessary to pound with unusual vigor; the residents were in terrible shape. The ordeal continued, to a running, heavily accented commentary on Hollywood and its people. Within 10 minutes she had divulged enough questionable material about five or six of the leading stars to have them jailed for an aggregate of at least 35 years. In spite of his disillusionment, Haydock breathed more freely. The heat, for the moment, had been taken off himself. But when she flipped him over on his back, using a quarter nelson and crotch hoist, she seized his right leg and bent it back on his stomach with a crack that must certainly have been audible in the next suite. "I not a masseuse," she said, with a false effort at a smile. This came as no news to Haydock, who decided that he had seen her in an all-lady mudathon, on television. "Physiotherapist, licensed. In Scandinavian contry, doctor have us setting all broken bones." It seemed only fair, he thought, since they had probably broken most of them. Still, he felt reassured. It's safer to have advance knowledge of an enemy's objective. He realized now that she was planning to break his leg and set it, and he steeled himself to thwart her. He was still ahead, on points, when his wife returned from the beautician, and after the therapist left, carrying her bag with professional costume and, he imagined, splints, iodine, adrenaline and chloroform, along with her laissez-passer from the Scandinavian doctors, and perhaps a letter of appreciation from the Finnish Society of Morticians, they discussed the morning, his wife joyous with the usual frizzled permanent, himself because he was alive.

Riding the crest of high spirits, he thought the time propitious to put room service to the test. In addition, he had a score to settle with the hotel for sending up a homicidal Amazon. "We've neglected this bunch," he said. "They may be hurt. What's more, I notice where they claim on the menu they can supply any food on earth. It seems a little broad." "All right," she said, "but don't act up." He sat lost in thought; then, rousing himself, he rang room service and was answered by a male voice unmistakably French. "My wife and I wish lunch sent up," said Haydock. "Something simple but nourishing." He divined that the man's reply — "Continuez, Monsieur" — was a trifle disappointed. Even so, the French, the quick perception that he was dealing with a bilingual gourmet, struck a genial note. It was the correct atmosphere in which to order lunch in this special hotel in this particular town. "My wife wants a caviarburger and a bottle of Gewurtztramminer, '45. For myself, I'd like a Strasbourg goose stuffed with filet mignon. And, I think, a couple of bottles of Berliner Weissbier, extra pale." As his wife took over the phone, by force, he could fancy that he heard the faint words, "At what temperature, Monsieur?" but it may only have been an echo of other orders, from other rooms. "I'm Mrs. Haydock," said his wife acidly, as if the relationship might be unusual in the voluptuous chambers of the Beverly Sunset. "My husband isn't himself this morning; he's overexcited. What we would like is Persian melon, two small, rare filet mignons, and asparagus with Hollandaise, with maybe three bottles of Carlsberg." Haydock was astonished. Since her days at an Eastern school and college, and the hurried, frantic weekends at Princeton and New Haven, she had settled into a kind of hamburger regimen. Heretofore, the outside limit of her room-service imagination had been chicken salad. While he had been skylarking, in a setting uniquely frolicsome, his wife was serious about this uncharacteristic noontime fare. He watched her as she replaced the receiver and walked, humming, over to inspect her hair. And when the waiters came, silent, polite, deft, evoking their radiant viands from silver vessels like a magician producing rabbits from a hat, he was staggered to see her stroll up and cut into a filet with a look of regal suspicion. "Something is wrong, Madame?" "Well, they are a little overdone," she said. "Then, Madame, we should by all means take them back." "That might be best," she said absently, returning to the mirror for a last dab at the permanent. Haydock leaned back on the sofa aghast. In the 13 years of their marriage she had never before stooped to any such caricature of the manorial indifference to peasantry. Indeed, they had often deplored this in two or three of their friends — well-known, self-made people whose beginnings had been humble and who, now, were rushing, hard to please, pressing slightly, trying to catch up with an imitation of something that scarcely existed. All the same, he decided, she was right, you know. It made little sense to eat a filet mignon, especially here, that fell below the level of perfection. Besides, it might be tonic for the staff; only way to keep those fellows down there on their toes. When at last they were served, he signed the check with a casual glance and thought that, at $33, it seemed more than reasonable.

That night, at Bronstein's party, he tried to drink in moderation, wishing to discuss the script he had been given at the studio. But it was an uphill job. The function was not at all what he expected; the house itself made him uneasy. It was charming, exquisite even: but it was not stagily so. It had an offhand, comfortable look. There was no movie bar with its row of barstools (just like your favorite saloon's). The living room, low, half-darkened, spacious, had sofas that were neither bolt upright nor deep enough to shoot one's feet out at a tendon-wrenching angle. The dining room, with a working fireplace, looked out through a broad glass wall to a handsome expanse of greensward that ran down to a pool in which someone (and Haydock had a strong conviction that it was not a studio extra, hired for the occasion) at the moment was swimming. There were no jokes in the bathroom. He had met Bronstein, Haydock reflected, and should have known better. But he had read the books and seen the films that these partial outcasts made in unaccountable disparagement of themselves, and he felt a sense of letdown. It was for an instant relieved when he belatedly became aware of the hallway, in which hung a gallery of breathtaking oils, unusual by any literate standards. Very briefly, he thought he had discovered Bronstein's Achilles' heel; surely this passage had felt the delicate knowing hand of a set designer; then he dismissed the idea as unworthy. He wandered moodily around, meeting the guests — playwrights, authors, professional people of distinction — and members of Bronstein's family, each of whom had done something spectacularly fine in the large worlds of medicine, law, scientific research. Not quite cheated (for he would have been pleasurably irritated), he yet missed the rackety group singing at the piano (perhaps wearing funny hats); the corkscrew apologies for Russia, with the current witticism in belittlement of tyranny and suppression — "If you have one Hungarian friend, you'll never need an enemy"; the man who maneuvered you into a corner and said, "I consider myself a liberal, and you sure can't generalize about races, BUT — —"; the inevitable Jew who told a derisive story about Jews (one that Haydock would never have told, and had no wish to hear); the outsized, aggressive he-man who drunkenly demanded to know if there were any Communists in the house.

After the deferential colored staff had served a flawless dinner — an epicure's revel that Haydock, in his new mood, decided made the hotel fare seem tasteless and sterile — he retired with Bronstein to a study adorned (unobtrusively) with testimonials to past triumphs. There they discussed the script. Haydock had read and reread it conscientiously, making explicit notes. He had even rewritten a long scene, with dialog, to illustrate his basic complaints: that the script was uncomfortably humorless, that the characters represented a kind of reincarnation — having died under the studio's treatment and been perpetuated in another form, like the Tin Woodman of Oz — and that the story was practically new though not necessarily fresh. Aided by the spirits he had drunk (which consisted of four highballs, three glasses of wine and a hearty slug of cognac), he talked fluently but without heat. His preamble exonerated the writer of the script (fired weeks previously); the man had clearly tackled a genre of book with which he felt ill at ease. Haydock never doubted that the new writer, a youth who had been engaged to reshuffle the fifth script, would construct a chronology easy to clothe in the book's original garments (according to Eisenfeld, there had been some sub rosa talk of asking Haydock, later, to do a "polish job" on the finished product). Warming to this opening theme, feeling the cognac work its magic, he slipped into gentle sarcasm, one of his recurring faults. He had no doubt that such a richly promising youngster, whose name was already a household word (Haydock had never heard of him, as he was perfectly aware that Bronstein knew), would blossom into one of the true geniuses of tomorrow. He rambled on, waxing in eloquence, and found himself, as often, thinking on two levels: a part of him discoursing with brilliance, and another standing off in applause. He harked back to the origins of movies, speaking with nostalgia of men old enough to be his grandfather, of David Wark Griffith, of Broncho Billy Anderson, of Adolph Zukor. He was pleased by the success of The Squaw Man, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Bernhardt's Queen Elizabeth. These were the good parts, that made the fight worthwhile. Haydock graciously paid tribute to Bronstein's studio, sketching its history and growth (wondering with awe how he could remember it all), and came down to cases with a rousing back-clap for Bronstein's own pictures. As to the project at hand, "You and I, working together," he said, lighting a cigar (one of his host's, which would cause him to sneeze all the next day), "can lick this thing. I haven't the least doubt of it." "Pardon me?" said Bronstein. Haydock wobbled back to earth, somewhat in the manner of a spent rocket, without any way stops. Perfectly sober, he restated a few of his points about the script. Then he realized that his host was not listening. Perhaps he had never listened, from the day Haydock walked into the studio. What he heard instead, Haydock thought, was a clamorous litany of shouts from other sets, tasks finished, the ideas and rules, precept and example, that staked out the margin of safety in this industry that fearfully tiptoed day by day over its own worn trail. As his mind raced rapidly back through the week, Haydock realized that nobody ever listened here; it was the secret of social gift in this land. Why had Bronstein wished to see him? Sadly, Haydock realized that he might never know. A film would be made from his book. Impersonally, as one might scan the movie list of a newspaper, he wondered what it would be like.

• • •

They went home the next morning. At the airfield, the jet, which had raised its bulk so formidably before, had lost its towering appearance. Frowning, Haydock imagined that the Russians already had produced one twice as big. "Anyhow," said his wife on the plane, snapping her fingers at a stewardess, in search of a magazine, "we didn't lose our heads." New York, when they landed, looked colorless, almost real — Haydock missed the vivid artificiality of Beverly Hills — and when they reached Spofford, he stood in his yard, glancing around with mild distaste. The house of which they had been so proud appeared somehow to have shrunk, and the "green," a sweeping triumph of impeccable bluegrass, seemed seedy. Even his children, returning from their private day school, had a raffish, casual look, as if they belonged in New England.

Though the hour was late, they decided to dine at home, with an accent on simplicity, watching television, their plates in their laps, the first dull step on the nervous road back to normal. They agreed that it was important. Carefully, Haydock tested the hamburger steak that his wife plopped down with a curious air of abstraction. It was clearly overdone. For a brief, mad moment, he decided to send it back to the kitchen, but he refrained when he considered that nobody was there to receive it.

What was the one great way to live? First thing in the morning, Haydock thought, he would write Bronstein a letter. It would strike just the right note — grateful and interested but aloof, admiring and wise, a siren letter, leaving the door open for further negotiation.

he had read all the books and seen all the sights, but hollywood still held some surprises for him