But these peculiar tribulations rankled neither severally nor even in
their sum more distressfully than did the trouble at the studio, where
daily the tension of ill-feeling between actress and director grew more
taut, as Lucinda's earlier misgivings ripened into articulate
dissatisfaction with Nolan's methods and their fruits, and as that
sensitive artistic soul reacted deplorably, in terms of begrudged
civility at best, and at other times of stubborn Celtic oppugnancy.
Dilatory tactics in directing had become too fast a habit with Nolan to
be broken at will, and had forced him to forego his chance at that
attractive job in the East. For which, of course, he would never forgive
Lucinda. And he was otherwise so fed up with the feeling that he was
unappreciated, that he had taken to fuming nastily over every set-back
which put off the final "take" by so much as an hour, and indeed was
more than once only restrained from "walking off the lot and leaving the
picture flat" by the consideration that he had as yet been able to
wheedle out of Lontaine a mere niggardly half of his contract fee in
advance.
Aware of what was in the air, the supporting players held their
collective breath against that explosion which all felt was due at any
moment to hoist them into the same element and leave them there, belike,
in indefinite suspense. Individually they went with a nice if naive
diplomacy in all their dealings with Miss Lee and Mr. Nolan
individually; for who could foresay whose hands would hold the symbols
of power when the dust had settled? But the sympathies of the producing
staffs, to a man, Lucinda was sensible, were with Nolan; and though
this nettled her at times, she consoled herself with the reflection that
it was after all only natural, since the best directors, that is to say
those with the most artful and resourceful press-agents, hand-pick their
lieutenants as a general custom and carry them along as they lightly
flit from berth to berth. And she derived a little comfort from the
belief that the cameraman was on her side.
Cameramen, being highly trained specialists in an exacting art, are more
often than not men of independent minds, iconoclastic in their attitude
toward the directors with whom they work. Iturbide was of this tribe. He
knew his trade, not Nolan or any other could instruct him in it. If he
reckoned the light not right for any take, that scene would wait though
Nolan raved and the heavens quaked. In the choice of the right angle for
any shot his judgment was final, even Nolan learned in time not to
dispute it. And he accomplished his will with a singular economy of
words and emotion, the more remarkable in view of the mercurial temper
with which tradition accredits the race from whom he sprang. He was
Mexican, a tall and rangey body, with eyes as beautiful as a woman's,
and much to the silken courtesy of the Spanish whose blood he shared.
"No, Mr. Nolan," he would announce in a strongly accented and resonant
voice, shaking his head sorrowfully after setting up his camera and
assaying the light by peering through a strip of negative film exposed
behind the lens--"no, I no take--light no good. Tomorrow we take, maybe
light better then." And while Nolan, who as like as not had voluptuously
kept a regiment of extra people waiting all day to work in this the last
hour of the afternoon--while Nolan spluttered and swore and offered to
go down on his knees if prayers would move Iturbide to change his mind,
the cameraman would be placidly superintending the demounting of his
camera, and pocketing the darling lens whose care he never would trust
to hands other than his own. And that scene would not be taken until
the next day--not then, if the light were not exactly to Iturbide's
liking. Which was one among a number of reasons why his photography was
credited with having saved many a picture otherwise without virtue.
Scrupulous always to avoid giving unprovoked offense, in the series of
skirmishes which made the final two weeks of Nolan's engagement
memorable, Iturbide played the part of benevolent neutral; but if
Lucinda were not mistaken in her reading of his eyes, the best of his
benevolence was reserved for her.
Historically--and setting aside minor clashes of opinion as mere affairs
of outposts--the private war progressed to its conclusion in three
stages, which for convenience may be named the Battle of the Supper Club
Set, the Affair of the Comedy Feet, and the Last Stand in the
Living-Room Doorway.
In the novel from which the picture in production took its name and
little else, most of the plot development was worked out in a
fashionable supper club, where Lucinda in the character of a
professional dancer, figured nightly as what for some reason New York
that stays up nights knows by the name of "hostess." The rooms of the
club as described bore close resemblance to the premises for years
tenanted by the Club de Vingt in East Fifty-eighth street, to whose
general plan, however, fanciful embellishments had been added in an
effort to make it a frame worthy of the dancer's charms.
Over the lay-out, or scheme, for this set, Lucinda had spent many hours
and much thought--before Nolan found time to give the production any
attention whatever--in consultation with Harry Lontaine and Mr. Coakley,
the talented young man who served the Zinn Studios in the capacity of
general technical director: an office which as organized by the
motion-picture trade, comprehends those--among others--of architect,
landscape-gardener, scene, house, sign and artist-painter, interior
decorator, and amateur of the art of every era, from the Eolithic to
that of East Aurora. And in the end Lucinda had turned to her work
before the camera well-satisfied that Mr. Coakley knew what to do and
how to do it, and would assemble an excellently suitable room if left to
exercise his own good taste and ingenuity.
The most pretentious bit of building required by the production, the
supper club was the last to be erected, and wasn't ready till the
beginning of the fourth week of Nolan's reign; as Lucinda learned it
was, one evening, when the assistant-director circulated a call for the
entire company to work on it the next day.
Accordingly, Lucinda and Fanny strolled over to the main stage, where,
behind a flimsy fence of sides--frames of wood and paint-smeared canvas
held up by struts--the precincts of the supper-club basked in the
cynical glare of Cooper-Hewitts overhead.
Inside the barricade, Lucinda halted with a cry of shocked remonstrance.
In the middle of the floor, upon which she was to give the solo dance
which she had been weeks rehearsing under a veteran professional, Nolan
stood vivaciously lining out tomorrow's proposed campaign for the
benefit of a group composed of his first assistant, Mr. Wells, Iturbide
and the second cameraman, and Mr. Coakley.
There was nothing else to break the full force of the blow which fate
had prepared for Lucinda's expectations.
Of the gay, exquisite scheme upon which she and Coakley had agreed,
guided by the novel, there wasn't a sign. The main masses of woodwork
were here all a dull, blank black. The panels, which were to have framed
baskets of fruit and garlands of flowers, in low poly-chrome
relief-work, had yielded place to paintings in the style of French
posters, of women in antic postures and clothed only enough to accent
their nakedness. The little tables that lined the walls were dressed
with cloths checquered staringly in red and white. The imbecile geometry
of the Cubists had patterned all the draperies and upholstery materials
in weird juxtapositions of colour apparently intended to give away the
grisly cosmic secret that there was something rotten in the solar
spectrum. And at the far end of the room there was.... Lucinda looked
twice to make sure her eyes did not deceive her. But, no; there it was:
a bar, a veritable zinc of the common Parisian cabaret.
And while she gaped aghast, hysterically torn by a desire to scream with
lunatic laughter and an impulse to weep and dance with rage, Nolan spied
her and, deserting his audience, tripped briskly over, beaming happily.
"Well, Miss Lee! how about it, eh? A little slice off the top of the
real Bohemia, I'll tell the world. And wait till you see how she
screens. O bay-bee! but this glad young set's gonna photograph like a
million dollars."
Lucinda choked down the anger with which her lips were tremulous. For an
instant she stared hopelessly at Nolan, comprehending that this vile
parody of the design she had approved was due wholly to his arbitrary
action in contradicting the plans without reference to her wishes. And
she could have cried with disappointment and vexation. As a matter of
simple fact, her eyes did fill in that bitter moment when she was made
poignantly aware of how high her hopes had been and how heartlessly
frustrated, and how helpless she was to express a tithe of her
indignation without jeopardizing the good of the picture.
If she spoke her mind it were inconceivable that Nolan should consent to
continue as director. And grave and well-grounded as was her
dissatisfaction with him, Lucinda was not yet ready to believe it would
benefit the picture to have it finished by another intelligence than
that under whose guidance it had been so ill-begun.
And it is by this that the potential artistic stature of Linda Lee is to
be reckoned, that in this the young beginning of her career she had
already learned, what many who walk with the great ones of the screen
have never learned and are incapable of learning, to think of her work
before herself, to esteem her role as something less than the story
which gave it excuse for being, to hold the welfare of the picture as a
picture more important than her own.
While still she faltered, fearing to speak her mind, Coakley came up
with the others. To him she turned reproachfully.
"Oh, Mr. Coakley! _why_ did you do this?"
Before Coakley could reply Nolan cut in irritably: "Do what? What's the
matter now?"
"I'm asking Mr. Coakley why he didn't carry out the design we agreed on
for the supper club."
Coakley grinned and scratched an ear. "Mr. Nolan's ideas, Miss Lee," he
drawled uncomfortably.
"Mr. Nolan ordered this change?"
Nolan brusquely interposed: "Of course, I did. What's wrong with the
set?"
"And you didn't consult me, Mr. Coakley?"
"I supposed you knew, Miss Lee."
"Say, listen here!" Nolan snapped--"what's the grand idea? I said I was
responsible for this set, didn't I? I gave Coakley's lay-out the
once-over, saw it wouldn't do, and told him what I wanted. And why
wouldn't I? Look't what we got. Not much like that glorified tea-room
you were satisfied with, is it?"
"No, Mr. Nolan--not much. I grant you that."
"Well, then, what's the big objection?"
"Simply that the set is out of harmony with the rest of the picture----"
"Out of harmony! Why, it's going to _make_ the picture! You ask Harry
Iturbide here. He'll tell you, when that set's flashed on the screen
it's going to knock your eye out."
"I'm sure he will," Lucinda agreed, smiling at the cameraman.
"Well, Harry?" Nolan insisted--"what about it? Who's got the rights of
this argument?"
"Miss Lee," the cameraman said, sententious.
"Miss Lee has! Say: how do you make that out?"
"You don't want to make your background too prominent, Mr. Nolan,"
Iturbide explained patiently. "This set is going to stick out in front
of the actors. You won't be able to see what they're doing against a
checker-board like that."
"Ah, you give me a pain!" Nolan retorted crushingly. "That background's
all right--going to photograph like a million dollars, I tell you."
"But, Mr. Nolan," Lucinda resumed with more confidence: "don't you see
that the set is completely out of key with the atmosphere of the story?
It isn't in the least like the supper club the author described."
"Bet your sweet life it isn't! Look here: I read that story, and I know
all about it, and I can show you where the author was all wrong with his
idea of the kind of a joint _Nelly_ was running----"
"It wasn't what you call a 'joint,' to begin with, Mr. Nolan."
"That's just the very point I'm trying to make. If it isn't a joint
you're dancing in, where's _Richards_ get off with his kicking about you
not being good enough to marry his son? It's got to be a joint, or there
won't be any sense in the way he fusses when he finds out you and _Dick_
are stepping out together. If that place in the book wasn't a joint, I'm
a kike!" Nolan paused in triumph to let his argument sink in. "Now"--he
brandished a hand at the set--"this _is_ a joint, and a regular one, if
you want to know. Some class to this. I doped it all out myself. Take
those tablecloths, now: that's the identical kind they were using in
Montmartre last time I was in New York. And those panels on the walls--I
got the idea for them from Reisenweber's Paradise Room, only these are
sportier. And that black woodwork and all.... Why, we've taken the best
points of all the classiest joints in New York and lumped them into one
set, and improved on them at that. Now when this poor fish of a
_Richards_ sees his son dancing with you in a joint like this, he'll
have some excuse for claiming you ain't all you might be."
"The trouble is," Lucinda replied gravely--"I mean, from your viewpoint
the trouble will be--_Richards_ will never see _Dick_ dancing with me in
this set."
"What's the reason he won't?"
Lucinda smiled slightly, shook her head slightly, slightly shrugged. In
the course of Nolan's harangue it had been revealed to her that no
greater calamity could possibly be visited upon the picture than to
permit its essential colour of good taste to be vitiated by the
introduction of this purely atrocious set. It would be like asking the
public to believe that people accustomed to sup and dance in the Crystal
Room at the Ritz had transferred their favour to the roughest cabaret in
the purlieus of Longacre Square.
"What's the reason he won't?" Nolan repeated, raising his voice angrily.
"Because I won't work on this set, Mr. Nolan--until it is restored to
the design I approved."
"But--my Gawd!--you can't do that, Miss Lee--you can't hold up this
production like that. Why, it'll take weeks----"
"How long will it take, please, Mr. Coakley?"
"Well, I don't know, Miss Lee--I might be able to rush it through for
you in a week or ten days."
"There!" Nolan obtruded an excited smirk and weaving hands between
Lucinda and the technical director. "You hear what Coakley says. Ten
days! You can't hold up this production ten days, Miss Lee."
"I can," Lucinda corrected coldly, "and will, no matter how long it
takes to make this set resemble a place self-respecting people would
patronize."
"But--listen here!--you can't go to work and upset all my plans at the
last moment, like this. Company called for half-past eight--fifty extra
people hired for four days' work--orchestra from the Alexandria and
all--the best caterer in Los Angeles engaged to serve the eats--! You
can't throw me down like this----"
"I'm sorry, Mr. Nolan. You should have consulted me before ordering such
changes on your own responsibility----"
"Look here: am I directing this picture, or ain't I?"
"I'll answer that question when you answer mine: Am I paying for this
production or are you? And if I am, are you the only one whose wishes
are to be considered?"
"Listen, now, Miss Lee." Nolan made a frantic effort to be calm and
urbane. He swallowed hard. "Listen: I don't want to have any trouble
with you, but you're making it all-fired hard for me. I've been in this
business ever since there was a studio in Hollywood, I've directed
hundreds of productions, hundreds of 'em, I ought to know my
business----"
"It was on that assumption precisely that you were hired," Lucinda
reminded him sweetly.
"But ever since I been working with you, I've felt--you've made me
feel--damn it! you've been watching me and thinking sarcastic things
about the way I do----"
"Did you never before suspect you were psychic, Mr. Nolan?"
"And now you openly criticize my judgment about this set and say you
won't work on it----"
"You understand me exactly," Lucinda assented.
"You mean that?"
She nodded.
"Well, that--settles--it!" Nolan flung both hands above his head and
waggled them insanely. "That _settles_ it! I'm through--I'm
finished--done! I'm out! I quit!"
He hesitated a single instant, searching Lucinda's face to see it blench
at this awful threat; and in disappointment whirled on a heel and barged
out of the set so blindly that he blundered into one of the frames and
knocked it flat.
Lucinda nodded quietly to the technical man.
"Please make the changes as soon as you can, Mr. Coakley. It's all
right: don't apologize any more. I quite understand it wasn't your
fault."
The president of Linda Lee Inc. wasn't in his office, neither was his
car in the parking yard; but Nolan evidently knew where to find him, for
Lucinda had not been twenty minutes in her rooms at the Hollywood when
Lontaine's knuckles rattled on the door. His agitation, when she
admitted him, was intense, almost pitiable. One gathered that he
considered a tiff between star and director a catastrophe second only to
national censorship of pictures. He stammered painfully over his account
of Nolan's ultimatum, which had been accompanied by a demand for the
balance of his pay in full and at once.
"I presume you haven't heard from your lawyer yet, Linda ..."
"He hasn't had time to get my letter."
"I don't suppose--you couldn't wire him now? It would give us a
frightful black eye if Nolan were able to say we couldn't pay him."
"But he's had twelve thousand or so already. Why should he get the
balance of his fee if he refuses to earn it?"
"But he claims you as good as fired him----"
"No doubt he would." Lucinda corrected to the last letter that
misstatement of fact.... "So you see, the truth is, Mr. Nolan fired
himself in a pet because I refused to let him ruin the supper club
sequences. Now if he wants the rest of his twenty-five thousand, he'll
have to hire himself on again."
And eventually despairing of a change of heart in Lucinda, Lontaine took
himself off to test his powers of moral or other suasion on Nolan; and
at intervals during the evening called up to report progress, or rather
that absence of progress which rewarded his best endeavours. Hope died
hard in him, however; and some time after midnight the telephone routed
Lucinda out of her bed to receive a somewhat disconnected communique to
the effect that Lontaine's cunning as a diplomat had at length wrung
from Nolan a promise to return to work the next day.
Strains of jazz which filtered over the wire, a singing background for
the muzzy accents which retailed this glorious news, led Lucinda to
infer that Lontaine was calling from Santa Monica, and to suspect that
Nolan's capitulation had been to some extent at least due to the
humanizing, at times, influences of the stuff the genial bootlegger
vends; but perhaps no more than to the intoxicating kindness of Fanny's
eyes....
To her taste the Affair of the Comedy Feet was something more farcical,
though Nolan did take it in a depressing spirit of deadly seriousness.
In fact, one of the heaviest handicaps under which this young man
laboured in his progress through life was a tendency to take frivolous
matters, including himself, a shade over-seriously; a fault he shared
with so many of his fellows of the studios that Zinn one day was moved
to comment on its cause, not without psychological insight.
"One of the big troubles with the fillum business," he observed sagely,
"is the way it's made a lot of people rich what wasn't never meant to be
that way. And take it from me, pictures ain't never going to be right,
really, until most of that bunch gets out of the business or gets over
their surprise.
"Independence," he mused, "is one of the dangerousest weapons a person
can put in the hands of an ignorant guy."
Next to himself and his amours, the thing Barry Nolan took most
seriously was Comedy, so much so that he clothed the word with the
capital even in his private meditations, and devoted a good part of his
professional life to perspiring efforts to interject Comedy into the
pictures he directed, especially those in whose composition Comedy, as
he conceived it, had no business to find place.
Thus with the picture upon which his genius was at present engaged. Over
the unfolding of its story the Comic Spirit did indeed preside, but
manifested only in the rustle of its satiric wings, in a whisper of wit
ever and anon animating the speech of its creatures; never in the
head-on collision of two actors trying to pass through one doorway in
opposite directions, never in the capers of a cross-eyed comedian dogged
to his undoing by a pack of wild pies. So that Nolan felt it devolved
upon him to save the picture by distorting situations integral in its
plot and by devising others for interpolation, to the end that Comedy,
the Comedy of the cinema, of physical mishaps and deformities, might mow
and bow upon the screen its bid for guffaws.
If the results he gained were often lamentable, Lucinda ceased to offer
comment when her first diffident strictures had been ungraciously
overruled. It would be time enough to fight for a decision, she
reflected, when the picture was ultimately cut to length and assembled;
in which process much of this deplorable stuff would be sure to go by
the board, for very lack of space.
Piqued to find her so unresponsive, Nolan issued secret orders that his
most ambitious comic flights were not to be shown Lucinda with the other
rushes, and confined further efforts in the vein to scenes in which she
took no part.
And it was thus that the Comedy Feet crept up on her unawares.
Some time subsequent to the Battle of the Supper Club Set, when his
equanimity seemed to have been completely restored, Nolan acquainted
Lucinda with the details of an utterly unique method of screen
introduction which he had invented, all out of his own head, with a view
to lending distinction to her debut.
By this device the public was first to make her acquaintance through the
medium of a close-up framing two pair of dancing feet, _Nelly's_ (that
is to say, Lucinda's) and her professional partner's. Then, as these
rested, the partner's feet were to be eliminated, and the close-up,
after lingering one fond, reluctant moment on Lucinda's ankles, was to
travel up her person until it hovered upon her head and shoulders.
If not strikingly novel, the business seemed simple and innocuous enough
to Lucinda, and she posed for it according to instructions and without
misgiving.
But when, the next day, she sat with Nolan in the projection-room,
reviewing the rushes, this is what the screen revealed to her astounded
eyes:
She saw first a stripling fashionable, an admirer of hers in the story,
stroll down a section of sidewalk in the Los Angeles shopping district
(which Nolan asserted was "Fifth Avenue to a T") enter a florist's shop,
select roses, and scribble a card to accompany them, while the florist
summoned an errand boy, a repulsive white slug of a child, eight or nine
years of age, heavy with unwholesome fat and wearing an habitual look of
hopeless vacuity, whom Lucinda had several times noticed, not without
wonder, as he loitered drearily about the stage.
As she now saw him, the boy had been heartlessly shoe-horned into the
brass-bound livery of a page, and wore upon his feet a brace of leathern
wrecks which even the broad charity of a Charlie Chaplin would have
hesitated to call shoes.
Waiting for the card to be written, this bleached sausage of a child
restlessly shuffled his tragic feet, and again and again wiped them on
each other. To make sure that nothing of the fine Comedy of the business
would be overlooked, the feet were isolated in an heroic close-up.
She saw the boy take the box of roses and leave the shop to deliver
them. As he emerged to the street the fiendish camera pounced upon his
feet and again held them up to derision in a close-up wherein they
resembled more than anything else abnormal vegetable growths uncannily
animate. Nor was this enough. With the savage elemental humour of a
Yahoo the camera hounded those fungoid feet as they clumped and dragged
and faltered along the sidewalk, their monstrosity painfully stressed by
contrast with the trim legs and dainty feet of feminine passers-by, the
decently shod feet of men.
When unstinted quantities of film had been squandered in this delectable
pursuit, the Comedy Feet were shown performing a side-splitting stumble
over the threshold to the supper club establishment.
The close-up of Lucinda's feet with her dancing partner's was then
disclosed; and the camera shifted its intimate attentions to another
pair of feet disgracefully clad, which were discovered in the act of
pressing the pedals of a piano and appeared to belong to a low comedy
stage mother whom Nolan had foisted upon Lucinda in his version of the
continuity. These last the camera followed as they left the piano and
shuffled across the floor to meet the feet of the errand-boy, then as
they crossed to halt near the feet of Lucinda.
Followed the ascent of the close-up to frame on Lucinda's face as she
smiled down at her armful of roses.
The film ran out then, darkness fell, the ceiling light came on, and
Nolan, who had the chair immediately in front of Lucinda's, twisted
round with a bright, expectant grin to study her face for the glow of
glad appreciation which he felt his ingenuity had earned.
She managed a wan little smile for him, but her eyes held still a look
of bewilderment too deep to be readily erased, too despairing to be
misread. Nolan flushed, but wasn't ready to admit defeat.
"I'll tell the world," he declared defiantly, "the screen never seen an
introduction like that before!"
Anxious to avoid a repetition of their former squabble, Lucinda sought
vainly for some equivocal phrase that would content the man's
stupendous vanity. But, inconceivably inane as it sounds, the business
of the Comedy Feet has been here set forth without the faintest colour
of exaggeration; and her wits were numb from the impact of its wanton
stupidity.
"Well!" Nolan sneered in an effort to reassert his authority--"I can see
it didn't make a whale of a hit with you, Miss Lee, but believe me, the
audiences will eat that stuff up, simply eat it up!"
"Don't you think," Lucinda ventured--"perhaps it's a little long, Mr.
Nolan?"
"Oh, maybe a little trimming here and there won't do any harm. But it
can't come down a whole lot without hurting the Comedy effect."
"But--I don't like to seem hypercritical--but that's what's troubling
me. You see, it doesn't seem terribly amusing to me."
Nolan's eyes snapped, but as yet he had his temper under fair control.
"I'd like to know why not," he replied with more civility than the bare
words as quoted can convey.
"If you'll be patient with me, I'll try to explain. It seems to me in a
story of this sort, about real people struggling with real emotions,
whatever comedy is introduced ought to be in character or consistent
with the general tone of the picture."
"Well?" Nolan drawled wearily.
"Well--assuming there's really something funny about that child's
pitiful feet--it's utterly at odds with probability to place him,
dressed as he is, in the shop of a Fifth avenue florist. No such
establishment would dream of employing such a caricature of an errand
boy.... Don't you see?"
"No," Nolan replied with an offensive echo of her inflection--"no, I
don't _see_. It's Comedy, audiences are always howling for Comedy, and
if anything on God's green earth can save this rotten picture it'll be
the Comedy I'm sticking into it."
"Then I'm afraid it's hopeless."
"But I'll tell you what I do see." Nolan leaned over the back of his
chair and grinned mirthlessly into Lucinda's face. "I see what I've seen
all along, and that is there's no pleasing you, Miss Lee! Ever since I
started on this picture you've had the old harpoon out for everything I
did, and this, what you're saying today about this introduction I
invented for you, is all of a piece with the way you've been acting all
along."
"But, please, Mr. Nolan!"--Lucinda was trying her best to be
temperate--"surely this isn't a reasonable attitude to take, surely you
can make allowances for honest difference of opinion."
"Ah, it ain't your fault!" Nolan jerked angrily out of his chair and
turned to the door, but delayed long enough to deliver a valedictory:
"And I'm a sap to let anybody that knows as little about pictures get my
goat like you do. Have it your own way--chuck the whole sequence out, if
you don't like this introduction I framed special for you. It's your
picture, I should worry what the piece of junk looks like when you're
through with it. But I tell you one thing: If that introduction don't
stand, my name can't go on the picture as its director. And that's flat,
my lady!"
And before Lucinda could take advantage of this wide invitation to a
withering retort, the door slammed on Nolan's impassioned exit.