The American Chronicle - Hollywood Part 25

"He would be a wonderful Bothwell," said Mary.

"Indeed he would, if I were twenty years younger." Caroline, who had never much minded the process of aging, now hated it on the ground that as she was doing it so well, why did she have to do it at all? A red electrical car pa.s.sed by. A woman waved at Emma Traxler, who waved back. "Have you met Mrs. Wilson?"

Mary shook her head. "I am told she's jealous. I can't think why. After all, she married him."

"Would you ... have married him?"

Mary's laugh was most attractive. "Oh, yes. But he never really asked me. I thought he would. In fact, I still have the lace I bought for the dress I expected to be married in."

Caroline looked at her with new interest. Photo-play plots were seldom so unexpected. "Then you must have had very good reason to think that he would want to marry you."

"I did. After all, I was the choice of his first wife. She knew she was dying for quite a long time, and she liked to have me at the White House to ... distract him. I did, or tried to. When I wasn't there, he wrote me every Sunday for years and years."

"The famous love letters?"

"Infamous, I'd say, and hardly love letters. More loving than love, and anyway more political than anything else. I think that's why he got so nervous when Mr. McAdoo said that I was showing the letters to. people. He was always very candid about other politicians, and that was an election year."

Caroline was now certain that the President and Mary Peck Hulbert had had an affair. The brilliant openness of their friends.h.i.+p was a proof. Of course, the President was a very odd man indeed, like an intricate piece of machinery carefully coiled in upon itself. Yet he was more than susceptible to physical pa.s.sion; hence, the unseemly swiftness of the second marriage over the strong objections of his advisers, particularly Colonel House and McAdoo. "How did McAdoo know you were showing the letters to people?"

Mary put a lump of sugar in her tea and then, heroically, removed it. "He didn't. Because I wasn't showing them. There was some sort of White House plot. Everyone was worried that if the President married Mrs. Galt, he might lose the election. Poor Ellen had been dead only a year. And then there was me. The fall and winter after Ellen died, he begged me to come stay in the White House. But I couldn't. My son had lost a great deal of money, and I was trying to get work as an interior decorator in Boston, not the best of cities for that sort of thing. ..."

Caroline murmured no, and wondered at the diversity of Mary's interests. In her poverty, she had tried every profession except the obvious, marriage. "Why didn't you just move into the White House and marry him?"

"I should have." The response was quick. "But I was worried about my son, and money, and I was writing articles for the Ladies' Home Journal. They said they had lost some of my articles, which I knew was untrue, so I got-oh, this is terrible!-but I got the President to write the editor, who promptly found the articles, and printed them."

Caroline had now decided that Mary Peck Hulbert was a fool of astonis.h.i.+ng dimension. To worry a president in time of war with something so trivial suggested true megalomania; to worry in such a way a grief-stricken man in love with her was monstrous. Caroline gazed upon Mary with absolute delight. "Tell me more. Of Mr. McAdoo, that is."

"Well, it appears-I don't know for certain-that he told the President that someone had written him anonymously, from California, saying that I was showing people his letters, so this-plus the fact that he had given me the seventy-five hundred dollars-would make it look like ..."

Fled from the tea-table was luminous Madonna-like Emma Traxler; seated now in her place like an avenging angel was Caroline Sanford, yellow journalist. "He had made you a loan?"

"Oh, yes. You see, we were so broke. So I came to the White House in-well, it was just after the Lusitania was sunk, I remember-and I asked him to take over two mortgages for me for seventy-five hundred dollars, which he did, though he didn't tell me that he was about to marry Edith. But I suppose I must've known, I mean one can always tell that sort of thing, don't you think?"

"Yes. Yes. Yes. Always."

"I must go."

"Oh, no. No!"

"You've been so good to me, Caroline. ..."

The two women were on their feet. "Let me drive you ..."

"No. I'm only twenty minutes by electric car."

"Will you go hear him speak?" The President was due to speak the next night at the Shriners Auditorium.

"I can't," said Mary. "But I'm to have lunch with him and Edith the next day. Sunday. I'm dreading it, really."

"Shall I come with you?" Caroline reminded herself of a shark she had seen off Catalina Island as, like a torpedo, it struck and nearly wrecked a small boat.

"Would you?" Mary's response was so charming and so spontaneous that Caroline almost missed the other's calculation. "I know you know them so well ..."

"Not that well. But the Tribune supports him, and so they are both amiable."

"Meet me in the lobby of the Alexandria Hotel at twelve-thirty. I'll warn them." Mary then hurried to the corner of Highland and Hollywood, where a red car waited. Caroline waved brightly at her, as the electrical car glided east. Three men walked up the steps to the verandah. She recognized one of them. He bowed low; she bowed even lower. "Mr. Griffith." She spoke the name reverently.

"Madame Traxler." He had a stagey melodramatic voice and looked, suitably, like an American bald eagle. "You should be on a stage, working. I see you standing in a window. It's dawn. There are sheer white curtains behind you, billowing in a wind ..."

"From outside or inside?" Caroline could not resist.

The great man laughed. "You know so much! Half the directors keep the wind indoors. I must talk to you soon. After the opening ..."

"Mr. Barthelmess is waiting for you inside."

"Madame." A lower bow, and then he went inside; as he pa.s.sed, she could smell whisky on his breath.

At the Garden Court, Heloise lived what she took to be a rugged western life in a Hollywood renaissance apartment. Tim's flat adjoined Caroline's and the management had made no fuss when a door between the two had been unlocked. But the Garden Court had only just opened, and Emma Traxler was the first star to take up residence. Heloise condescended to cook occasionally for the two of them; and then it was early to separate beds. Caroline found making movies very much like being in school again. One was up at dawn; one spent the day learning lines and trying to please others; and then one went to sleep, as they said hereabouts, with the chickens.

Caroline lay on a sofa, a pile of photo-plays on the floor beside her. At an escritoire, Tim made notes for the next day's work. In the small kitchen Heloise rattled pans.

This was domesticity, Caroline decided comfortably; also, simplicity. She had never lived in a flat before; she had never lived without many servants; she was truly free at last, all thanks to California and a new invention that had brought together some of the most extraordinary people in the world.

"Shall I die with my eyes open or shut?"

"Shut." Tim went on writing.

"Open, I think. I've been practicing. All you have to do is let them go slowly out of focus."

"You'll blink."

"I won't. I'm having lunch with your new star, Mr. Wilson."

This got Tim's attention. He put down his notebook. "When?"

"Sunday. The day after the speech."

"I'm photographing inside the Shriners."

"Why?"

"I don't know. I mean, I can always use that footage of him in Seattle in any labor story. Anti-labor, of course."

"Of course. But why photograph him at the Shriners?"

"Something might happen."

"You think they'll shoot him?"

"Wouldn't that be wonderful?" Tim's blue eyes were ablaze with pleasure. "But I've never had that kind of luck."

"Thank heaven. I quite like Mr. Wilson."

"No one has ever taken scenes from real life-you know, a president on a swing around the circle and then intercut it with a made-up story."

Caroline saw the possibilities; and the dangers. "What, then, is the made-up story?"

"Oh, something political. Maybe to do with the League of Nations even, but it's also got to be a personal story."

Caroline thought of Mary Hulbert, a story so wonderfully inconsequential yet odd that fiction could not properly account for it while lovers of the real world would reject it. She tried to visualize the President's letter to the editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. Then she looked at Tim and beheld the red flag behind him or, worse, the cross. "The possibilities for trouble are endless, my darling," she said, s.h.i.+fting to Emma Traxler, warm and understanding yet, gently, chiding. "A. Mitch.e.l.l Palmer is longing to put you in jail for treason and only the Tribune has stopped him."

"Keep on stopping him." Tim was blithe.

"Why bother with politics?"

Tim looked inspired. "Because I have to."

"Are you a Communist?"

"I might be. One day. Why not?"

Caroline sighed. "You will ruin yourself."

"I thought it was a free country."

"Did you? Then don't think, my darling, ever again. Because your mind is not your most ... formidable a.s.set. It is your heart that does you-and me-so much credit. I am talking exactly like a t.i.tle card so that you won't."

"What have I created?" Tim was delighted with Emma Traxler, less pleased with Caroline Sanford. "I'm sure you never talked like that before I met you."

"No one," said Caroline, "talks like that outside photo-plays. The only freedom that an American has is to conform, as you've discovered." Caroline did not in the least mind the disparity between the country's s.h.i.+ning image of itself and the crude reality. She was entirely on the side of the rulers, ridiculous and unpleasant as so many of them were. She felt a certain generalized pity for the people at large, but there was nothing she could do for them except report murders in the press, and commit suicide on the screen-with her eyes wide open, she decided; and though smelling salts be broken under her nose, she would not blink, she vowed. "Leave politics alone."

"The Warners are doing all right with that amba.s.sador's book ..."

"That's leftover anti-Hun material." A mockingbird started its song outside the window, and Caroline got up and looked out over Hollywood. In the distance, the huge remains of the Babylon set beautifully, insistently, filled the eastern sky with prancing plaster elephants. Hollywood, she decided, could be anywhere-except on earth and in time.

THE ALEXANDRIA HOTEL WAS VERY MUCH in the United States and in present time. The lobby was crowded with Secret Service men, state troopers, police, political delegations, all waiting for a signal from on high that the President would receive them. The intermediary was the President's Secret Service man, Mr. Starling, who sat at a gilded desk near the elevators. He had a list of names in front of him, a telephone, and the abstracted look of someone who had chosen invisibility. As it was, only those who had business with the President were presented to Starling by a tense a.s.sistant manager.

To Caroline's surprise, Mary was late. As she came across the famous million-dollar rug that covered the floor of the lobby, Caroline noted that she had a slight limp.

"I missed the red car. They only run on the hour where I live." Mary started toward the main desk but Caroline led her to Mr. Starling, who rose when he saw her. "Nice to see you again, Mrs. Sanford."

"Mr. Starling." Caroline smiled a Sanford smile. "This is Mrs. Hulbert. We're expected for lunch."

Starling frowned at the list on his desk. "I thought it was Mrs. Peck."

"I am Mrs. Peck, too." Mary was suddenly the First Lady of the Land. Starling gave her a long curious look: then he led them to an elevator. "This goes directly to their floor. The policeman will take you on in." Starling went to his telephone, and the ladies ascended.

"Mr. Griffith lives here." Caroline made conversation. "Or used to. Actors like hotels better than houses."

"Poor things." Mary was compa.s.sionate.

A policeman met them at the door to the elevator and escorted them into the drawing room of a large suite, where Edith Wilson stood. At close to six feet tall, she could appear quite menacing in the fullness of her flesh. She greeted Caroline warmly. Then, with perfect courtesy, she extended her arm to its full length and took Mary's hand in hers. "I am so happy to meet you, Mrs. Peck."

"And I you, Mrs. Wilson. You know, I've gone back to my old name, Hulbert."

"I am sorry," was the ambiguous response. Brooks, the Negro valet, opened the door to the bedroom, and the President entered, smartly turned out in a blue blazer and white trousers. He looked somewhat sunburned, and yet not at all healthy. The eyes behind the pince-nez were dull. But the smile was genuine. "Mary," he said, and he shook her hand for a long moment. "You don't change," he added.

At the far end of the room, Brooks helped a hotel waiter prepare a lunch table for five. The President gestured for the ladies to sit. "Mrs. Sanford, I still remember how we watched your photo-play with you, and never guessed that it was you we were watching."

"I guessed, Woodrow." Edith was serenely knowing.

"You suspected," he corrected her. "But neither of us was certain. Now you act in everything!"

"It just seems like everything."

"How do you weep so easily?" asked Edith. "I mean, never having acted before."

"But we've all of us been acting all the time all our lives ..."

"I have," agreed the President. "But I thought I was unique."

"You were a born actor," said Mary, fondly. "I'll never forget the King Lear you did on the beach at Bermuda, just for Mark Twain and me."

Very good, thought Caroline, glancing at Edith, whose smile looked as if it had been carved in the firm b.u.t.ter of her round full face.

"I wasn't there last night at the Shriners." Caroline decided on an intervention. "But the Times is delighted, and Mr. Farrell, you remember, my director, said it was thrilling."

Wilson nodded vaguely, eyes on Mary, who was lighting a cigarette. Edith continued to smile. "But aren't you speaking too often? I mean for your ..." Caroline subst.i.tuted the word "voice" for "health."

"Of course he is." Edith was firm. "But once he's made up his mind ..."

"I must match the opposition. Hiram Johnson is all over the state, attacking the League. The worst is the ... the ..." Wilson paused; and frowned. Edith's smile was impenetrable. Caroline suspected aphasia, something she herself suffered from when tired: the needed word, no matter how simple, was suddenly not there.

"... the acoustics," said Mary, accurately, to Edith's great displeasure. "Those sounding-boards are never in the right place."

"But San Diego was even worse," said Wilson, pleased to be on course again. "They have something new called a voice-phone. You must remain absolutely still and speak into it and somehow it connects with loudspeakers-like radio, I suppose. I've never had such a difficult time. I like to move about, you know, but there I was, under sentence of death, if I moved."

"It was terrible for Woodrow. But thirty thousand people heard him as if he was talking into each one's ear."

"No. No." Wilson frowned. "That's not true. Just opposite me there was a section that could hear absolutely nothing, nothing." The face was red. He shook his head and coughed. "Asthma," he murmured into his handkerchief. "Imagine! Now."

Suddenly, Admiral Grayson was in the room. He greeted Mary and Caroline, and took the President's pulse and smiled and said, "Lunch is ready. This was to have been our Sunday of rest."

Caroline thought that this was directed at Mary, but as the President led them to the table, he described their misadventures that morning. "I wanted to see an old friend of my wife's-my late wife's-who lives here but has no telephone. So, first thing, we went down the back way, and escaped the press and the crowds, and drove to her house only to find she wasn't there. Then the Secret Service discovered that she had gone to the train station to get a look at me, so off we rush to the station, and there she is ..."

"You can imagine," said Edith, "the sight of the two of us tearing about Los Angeles, with the Secret Service either too far behind or ahead ..."

"Like Mack Sennett," said Wilson. "Do you know him?" He turned to Caroline, who radiated an Emma Traxler silent affirmation.