Books: Merton of the Movies
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Harry Leon Wilson >> Merton of the Movies
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At luncheon in the cafeteria he waited a long time in the hope of
encountering Henshaw, who would perhaps command his further services
in the cause of creative screen art. He meant to be animated at this
meeting, to show the director that he could be something more than
an actor who had probed the shams of Broadway. But he lingered in
vain. He thought Henshaw would perhaps be doing without food in
order to work on the scenario for Robinson Crusoe, Junior.
He again stopped to thank his friend, the casting director, for
securing him his first chance. She accepted his thanks smilingly,
and asked him to drop around often. "Mind, you don't forget our
number," she said.
He was on the point of making her understand once for all that he
would not forget the number, that he would never forget Gashwiler's
address, that he had been coming to this studio too often to forget
its location. But someone engaged her at the window, so he was
obliged to go on without enlightening the woman. She seemed to be
curiously dense.
CHAPTER VII
"NOTHING TO-DAY, DEAR!"
The savings had been opportunely replenished. In two days he had
accumulated a sum for which, back in Simsbury, he would have had to
toil a week. Yet there was to be said in favour of the Simsbury
position that it steadily endured. Each week brought its fifteen
dollars, pittance though it might be, while the art of the silver
screen was capricious in its rewards, not to say jumpy. Never, for
weeks at a stretch, had Gashwiler said with a tired smile, "Nothing
to-day--sorry!" He might have been a grouch and given to
unreasonable nagging, but with him there was always a very definite
something to-day which he would specify, in short words if the
occasion seemed to demand. There was not only a definite something
every day but a definite if not considerable sum of money to be paid
over every Saturday night, and in the meantime three very definite
and quite satisfying meals to be freely partaken of at stated hours
each day.
The leisure enforced by truly creative screen art was often occupied
now with really moving pictures of Metta Judson placing practicable
food upon the Gashwiler table. This had been no table in a gilded
Broadway resort, holding empty coffee cups and half empty wine
glasses, passed and repassed by apparently busy waiters with laden
trays who never left anything of a practicable nature. Doubtless the
set would not have appealed to Henshaw. He would never have been
moved to take close-ups, even for mere flashes, of those who ate
this food. And yet, more and more as the days went by, this old-time
film would unreel itself before the eager eyes of Merton Gill. Often
now it thrilled him as might have an installment of The Hazards of
Hortense, for the food of his favourite pharmacy was beginning to
pall and Metta Judson, though giving her shallow mind to base
village gossip, was a good cook. She became the adored heroine of an
apparently endless serial to be entitled The Hazards of Clifford
Armytage, in which the hero had tragically little to do but sit upon
a bench and wait while tempting repasts were served.
Sometimes on the little bench around the eucalyptus tree he would
run an entire five-thousand-foot program feature, beginning with the
Sunday midday dinner of roast chicken, and abounding in tense
dramatic moments such as corned-beef and cabbage on Tuesday night,
and corned-beef hash on Wednesday morning. He would pause to take
superb closeups of these, the corned beef on its spreading platter
hemmed about with boiled potatoes and turnips and cabbage, and the
corned beef hash with its richly browned surface. The thrilling
climax would be the roast of beef on Saturday night, with close-ups
taken in the very eye of the camera, of the mashed potatoes and the
apple pie drenched with cream. And there were close-ups of Metta
Judson, who had never seriously contemplated a screen career,
placing upon the table a tower of steaming hot cakes, while a
platter of small sausages loomed eloquently in the foreground.
With eyes closed he would run this film again and again, cutting
here, rearranging sequences, adding trims from suddenly remembered
meals of the dead past, devising more intimate close-ups, such as
the one of Metta withdrawing pies from the oven or smoothing hot
chocolate caressingly over the top of a giant cake, or broiling
chops, or saying in a large-lettered subtitle--artistically
decorated with cooked foods--"How about some hot coffee, Merton?"
He became an able producer of this drama. He devised a hundred
sympathetic little touches that Henshaw would probably never have
thought of. He used footage on a mere platter of steak that another
director might have ignored utterly. He made it gripping--the
supreme heart-interest drama of his season a big thing done in a big
way, and yet censor-proof. Not even the white-souled censors of the
great state of Pennsylvania could have outlawed its realism, brutal
though this was in such great moments as when Gashwiler carved the
roast beef. So able was his artistry that Merton's nostrils would
sometimes betray him--he could swear they caught rich aromas from
that distant board.
Not only had the fare purveyed by his favourite pharmacy put a
blight upon him equal to Broadway's blight, but even of this
tasteless stuff he must be cautious in his buying. A sandwich, not
too meaty at the centre, coffee tasting strangely of other things
sold in a pharmacy, a segment of pie fair--seeming on its surface,
but lacking the punch, as he put it, of Metta Judson's pie, a
standardized, factory-made, altogether formal and perfunctory pie--
these were the meagre items of his accustomed luncheon and dinner.
He had abandoned breakfast, partly because it cost money and partly
because a gentleman in eastern Ohio had recently celebrated his
hundred and third birthday by reason, so he confided to the press,
of having always breakfasted upon a glass of clear cold water.
Probably ham and eggs or corned--beef hash would have cut him off at
ninety, and water from the tap in the Patterson kitchen was both
clear and cold. It was not so much that he cared to live beyond
ninety or so, but he wished to survive until things began to pick up
on the Holden lot, and if this did bring him many more years, well
and good. Further, if the woman in the casting office persisted, as
she had for ten days, in saying "Nothing yet" to inquiring screen
artists, he might be compelled to intensify the regime of the Ohio
centenarian. Perhaps a glass of clear cold water at night, after a
hearty midday meal of drug--store sandwiches and pie, would work new
wonders.
It seemed to be the present opinion of other waiters on the extra
bench that things were never going to pick up on the Holden lot nor
on any other lot. Strongly marked types, ready to add distinction to
the screen of painted shadows, freely expressed a view that the
motion-picture business was on the rocks. Unaffected by the
optimists who wrote in the picture magazines, they saw no future for
it. More than one of them threatened to desert the industry and
return to previous callings. As they were likely to put it, they
were going to leave the pictures flat and go back to type-writing or
selling standard art-works or waiting on table or something where
you could count on your little bit every week.
Under the eucalyptus tree one morning Merton Gill, making some
appetizing changes in the fifth reel of Eating at Gashwiler's, was
accosted by a youngish woman whom he could not at first recall. She
had come from the casting office and paused when she saw him.
"Hello, I thought it was you, but I wasn't sure in them clothes. How
they coming?"
He stared blankly, startled at the sudden transposition he had been
compelled to make, for the gleaming knife of Gashwiler, standing up
to carve, had just then hovered above the well-browned roast of
beef. Then he placed the speaker by reason of her eyes. It was the
Spanish girl, his companion of the gilded cabaret, later encountered
in the palatial gambling hell that ate like a cancer at the heart of
New York--probably at the corner of Broadway and Fifth Avenue.
He arose and shook hands cordially. He had supposed, when he thought
of the girl at all, that she would always be rather Spanish, an
exotic creature rather garishly dressed, nervously eager, craving
excitement such as may be had in cabarets on Broadway, with a marked
inclination for the lighter life of pleasure. But she wore not so
much as a rose in her smoothly combed hair. She was not only not
excited but she was not exciting. She was plainly dressed in skirt
and shirtwaist of no distinction, her foot-gear was of the most
ordinary, and well worn, and her face under a hat of no allure was
without make-up, a commonplace, somewhat anxious face with lines
about the eyes. But her voice as well as her eyes helped him to
recall her.
She spoke with an effort at jauntiness after Merton had greeted her.
"That's one great slogan, 'Business as Usual!' ain't it? Well, it's
business as usual here, so I just found out from the Countess--as
usual, rotten. I ain't had but three days since I seen you last."
"I haven't had even one," he told her.
"No? Say, that's tough. You're registered with the Service Bureau,
ain't you?"
"Well, I didn't do that, because they might send me any place, and I
sort of wanted to work on this particular lot." Instantly he saw
himself saving Beulah Baxter, for the next installment, from a fate
worse than death, but the one-time Spanish girl did not share this
vision.
"Oh, well, little I care where I work. I had two days at the Bigart
in a hop-joint scene, and one over at the United doin' some board-
walk stuff. I could 'a' had another day there, but the director said
I wasn't just the type for a chick bathing-suit. He was very nice
about it. Of course I know my legs ain't the best part of me--I sure
ain't one of them like the girl that says she's wasted in skirts."
She grinned ruefully.
He felt that some expression of sympathy would be graceful here, yet
he divined that it must be very discreetly, almost delicately,
worded. He could easily be too blunt.
"I guess I'd be pretty skinny in a bathing-suit myself, right now. I
know they won't be giving me any such part pretty soon if I have to
cut down on the meals the way I been doing."
"Oh, of course I don't mean I'm actually skinny--"
He felt he had been blunt, after all.
"Not to say skinny." she went on, "but--well, you know--more like
home-folks, I guess. Anyway, I got no future as a bathing beauty--
none whatever. And this walkin' around to the different lots ain't
helpin' me any, either. Of course it ain't as if I couldn't go back
to the insurance office. Mr. Gropp, he's office manager, he was very
nice about it. He says, 'I wish you all the luck in the world,
girlie, and remember your job as filin' clerk will always be here
for you.' Wasn't that gentlemanly of him? Still, I'd rather act than
stand on my feet all day filing letters. I won't go back till I have
to."
"Me either," said Merton Gill, struggling against the obsession of
Saturday-night dinner at Gashwiler's.
Grimly he resumed his seat when the girl with a friendly "So long!"
had trudged on. In spite of himself he found something base in his
nature picturing his return to the emporium and to the thrice-daily
encounter with Metta Judson's cookery. He let his lower instincts
toy with the unworthy vision. Gashwiler would advance him the money
to return, and the job would be there. Probably Spencer Grant had
before this tired of the work and gone into insurance or some other
line, and probably Gashwiler would be only too glad to have the
wanderer back. He would get off No. 3 just in time for breakfast.
He brushed the monstrous scene from his eyes, shrugged it from his
shoulders. He would not give up. They had all struggled and
sacrificed, and why should he shrink from the common ordeal? But he
wished the Spanish girl hadn't talked about going back to her job.
He regretted not having stopped her with words of confident cheer
that would have stiffened his own resolution. He could see her far
down the street, on her way to the next lot, her narrow shoulders
switching from light to shadow as she trudged under the line of
eucalyptus trees. He hoped she wouldn't give up. No one should ever
give up--least of all Merton Gill.
The days wore wearily on. He began to feel on his own face the tired
little smile of the woman in the casting office as she would look up
to shake her head, often from the telephone over which she was
saying: "Nothing to-day, dear. Sorry!" She didn't exactly feel that
the motion-picture business had gone on the rocks, but she knew it
wasn't picking up as it should. And ever and again she would have
Merton Gill assure her that he hadn't forgotten the home address,
the town where lived Gighampton or Gumwash or whoever it was that
held the good old job open for him. He had divined that it was a
jest of some sort when she warned him not to forget the address and
he would patiently smile at this, but he always put her right about
the name of Gashwiler. Of course it was a name any one might forget,
though the woman always seemed to make the most earnest effort to
remember it.
Each day, after his brief chat with her in which he learned that
there would be nothing to-day, he would sit on the waiting-room
bench or out under the eucalyptus tree and consecrate himself anew
to the art of the perpendicular screen. And each day, as the little
hoard was diminished by even those slender repasts at the drug
store, he ran his film of the Gashwiler dining room in action.
From time to time he would see the Montague girl, alone or with her
mother, entering the casting office or perhaps issuing from the
guarded gate. He avoided her when possible. She persisted in
behaving as if they had been properly introduced and had known each
other a long time. She was too familiar, and her levity jarred upon
his more serious mood. So far as he could see, the girl had no
screen future, though doubtless she was her own worst enemy. If
someone had only taught her to be serious, her career might have
been worth while. She had seemed not wholly negligible in the
salmon-pink dancing frock, though of course the blonde curls had not
been true.
Then the days passed until eating merely at a drug-store lunch
counter became not the only matter of concern. There was the item of
room rent. Mrs. Patterson, the Los Angeles society woman, had, upon
the occasion of their first interview, made it all too clear that
the money, trifling though it must seem for a well-furnished room
with the privilege of electric iron in the kitchen, must be paid
each week in advance. Strictly in advance. Her eye had held a cold
light as she dwelt upon this.
There had been times lately when, upon his tree bench, he would try
to dramatize Mrs. Patterson as a woman with a soft heart under that
polished society exterior, chilled by daily contact with other
society people at the Iowa or Kansas or other society picnics, yet
ready to melt at the true human touch. But he had never quite
succeeded in this bit of character work. Something told him that she
was cold all through, a society woman without a flaw in her armour.
He could not make her seem to listen patiently while he explained
that only one company was now shooting on the lot, but that big
things were expected to be on in another week or so. A certain
skeptic hardness was in her gaze as he visioned it.
He decided, indeed, that he could never bring himself even to
attempt this scene with the woman, so remote was he from seeing her
eye soften and her voice warm with the assurance that a few weeks
more or less need not matter. The room rent, he was confident, would
have to be paid strictly in advance so long as their relations
continued. She was the kind who would insist upon this formality
even after he began to play, at an enormous salary, a certain
outstanding part in the Hazards of Hortense. The exigencies, even
the adversities, of art would never make the slightest appeal to
this hardened soul. So much for that. And daily the hoard waned.
Yet his was not the only tragedy. In the waiting room, where he now
spent more of his time, he listened one day to the Montague girl
chat through the window with the woman she called Countess.
"Yeah, Pa was double-crossed over at the Bigart. He raised that
lovely set of whiskers for Camillia of the Cumberlands and what did
he get for it?--just two weeks. Fact! What do you know about that?
Hugo has him killed off in the second spool with a squirrel rifle
from ambush, and Pa thinking he would draw pay for at least another
three weeks. He kicked, but Hugo says the plot demanded it. I bet,
at that, he was just trying to cut down his salary list. I bet that
continuity this minute shows Pa drinking his corn out of a jug and
playing a fiddle for the dance right down to the last scene. Don't
artists get the razz, though. And that Hugo, he'd spend a week in
the hot place to save a thin dime. Let me tell you, Countess, don't
you ever get your lemon in his squeezer."
There were audible murmurs of sympathy from the Countess.
"And so the old trouper had to start out Monday morning to peddle
the brush. Took him three days to land anything at all, and then
it's nothing but a sleeping souse in a Western bar-room scene. In
here now he is--something the Acme people are doing. He's had three
days, just lying down with his back against a barrel sleeping. He's
not to wake up even when the fight starts, but sleep right on
through it, which they say will be a good gag. Well, maybe. But it's
tough on his home. He gets all his rest daytimes and keeps us
restless all night making a new kind of beer and tending his still,
and so on. You bet Ma and I, the minute he's through with this
piece, are going pronto to get that face of his as naked as the day
he was born. Pa's so temperamental--like that time he was playing a
Bishop and never touched a drop for five weeks, and in bed every
night at nine-thirty. Me? Oh, I'm having a bit of my own in this
Acme piece--God's Great Outdoors, I think it is--anyway, I'm to be a
little blonde hussy in the bar-room, sitting on the miners' knees
and all like that, so they'll order more drinks. It certainly takes
all kinds of art to make an artist. And next week I got some
shipwreck stuff for Baxter, and me with bronchial pneumonia right
this minute, and hating tank stuff, anyway. Well, Countess, don't
take any counterfeit money. So long."
She danced through a doorway and was gone--she was one who seldom
descended to plain walking. She would manage a dance step even in
the short distance from the casting--office door to the window. It
was not of such material, Merton Gill was sure, that creative
artists were moulded. And there was no question now of his own utter
seriousness. The situation hourly grew more desperate. For a week he
had foregone the drug-store pie, so that now he recalled it as very
wonderful pie indeed, but he dared no longer indulge in this luxury.
An occasional small bag of candy and as much sugar as he could
juggle into his coffee must satisfy his craving for sweets.
Stoically he awaited the end--some end. The moving-picture business
seemed to be still on the rocks, but things must take a turn.
He went over the talk of the Montague girl. Her father had perhaps
been unfairly treated, but at least he was working again. And there
were other actors who would go unshaven for even a sleeping part in
the bar-room scene of God's Great Outdoors. Merton Gill knew one,
and rubbed his shaven chin. He thought, too, of the girl's warning
about counterfeit money. He had not known that the casting
director's duties required her to handle money, but probably he had
overlooked this item in her routine. And was counterfeit money
about? He drew out his own remaining bill and scrutinized it
anxiously. It seemed to be genuine. He hoped it was, for Mrs.
Patterson's sake, and was relieved when she accepted it without
question that night.
Later he tested the handful of silver that remained to him and
prayed earnestly that an increase of prosperity be granted to
producers of the motion picture. With the silver he eked out another
barren week, only to face a day the evening of which must witness
another fiscal transaction with Mrs. Patterson. And there was no
longer a bill for this heartless society creature. He took a long
look at the pleasant little room as he left it that morning. The day
must bring something but it might not bring him back that night.
At the drug store he purchased a bowl of vegetable soup, loaded it
heavily with catsup at intervals when the attendant had other
matters on his mind, and seized an extra half--portion of crackers
left on their plate by a satiated neighbour. He cared little for
catsup, but it doubtless bore nourishing elements, and nourishment
was now important. He crumpled his paper napkin and laid upon the
marble slab a trifling silver coin. It was the last of his hoard.
When he should eat next and under what circumstances were now as
uncertain as where he should sleep that night, though he was already
resolving that catsup would be no part of his meal. It might be well
enough in its place, but he had abundantly proved that it was not,
strictly speaking, a food.
He reached the Holden studios and loitered outside for half an hour
before daring the daily inquiry at the window. Yet, when at last he
did approach it, his waning faith in prayer was renewed, for here in
his direst hour was cheering news. It seemed even that his friend
beyond the window had been impatient at his coming.
"Just like you to be late when there's something doing!" she called
to him with friendly impatience. "Get over to the dressing rooms on
the double-quick. It's the Victor people doing some Egyptian stuff--
they'll give you a costume. Hurry along!"
And he had lingered over a bowl of soggy crackers soaked, at the
last, chiefly in catsup! He hurried, with a swift word of thanks.
In the same dressing room where he had once been made up as a
Broadway pleasure seeker he now donned the flowing robe and burnoose
of a Bedouin, and by the same grumbling extra his face and hands
were stained the rich brown of children of the desert. A dozen other
men of the paler race had undergone the same treatment. A sheik of
great stature and noble mien smoked an idle cigarette in the
doorway. He was accoutred with musket and with pistols in his belt.
An assistant director presently herded the desert men down an alley
between two of the big stages and to the beginning of the oriental
street that Merton had noticed on his first day within the Holden
walls. It was now peopled picturesquely with other Bedouins. Banners
hung from the walls and veiled ladies peeped from the latticed
balconies. A camel was led excitingly through the crowded way, and
donkeys and goats were to be observed. It was a noisy street until a
whistle sounded at the farther end, then all was silence while the
voice of Henshaw came through the megaphone.
It appeared that long shots of the street were Henshaw's first need.
Up and down it Merton Gill strolled in a negligent manner, stopping
perhaps to haggle with the vendor who sold sweetmeats from a tray,
or to chat with a tribal brother fresh from the sandy wastes, or to
purchase a glass of milk from the man with the goats. He secured a
rose from the flower seller, and had the inspiration to toss it to
one of the discreet balconies above him, but as he stepped back to
do this he was stopped by the watchful assistant director who stood
just inside a doorway. "Hey, Bill, none of that! Keep your head
down, and pay no attention to the dames. It ain't done."
He strolled on with the rose in his hand. Later, and much nearer the
end of the street where the cameras were, he saw the sheik of noble
mien halt the flower seller, haggle for another rose, place this
daintily behind his left ear and stalk on, his musket held over one
shoulder, his other hand on a belted pistol. Merton disposed of his
rose in the same manner. He admired the sheik for his stature, his
majestic carriage, his dark, handsome, yet sinister face with its
brooding eyes. He thought this man, at least, would be a true Arab,
some real son of the desert who had wandered afar. His manner was so
much more authentic than that of the extra people all about.
A whistle blew and the street action was suspended. There was a long
wait while cameras were moved up and groups formed under the
direction of Henshaw and his assistant. A band of Bedouins were now
to worship in the porch of a mosque. Merton Gill was among these.
The assistant director initiated them briefly into Moslem rites.
Upon prayer rugs they bowed their foreheads to earth in the
direction of Mecca.
"What's the idea of this here?" demanded Merton Gill's neighbour in
aggrieved tones.
"Ssh!" cautioned Merton. "It's Mass or something like that." And
they bent in unison to this noon-tide devotion.
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