Authors: Laura Z. Hobson
Luther Digby gazed at the ceiling. He gazed at the rug. He was mesmerized by the perforated wing-tip of his right shoe. Then he buzzed for his secretary. “Joyce,” he said briskly, “bring in all the Gregory Johns correspondence right away, please.”
“All of it? Did you say
all?
”
“And then tomorrow I’ll want to start going through my correspondence with our other authors. Even the ones who have gone to some other house.”
“Yes, Mr. Digby. Did you say
all
of the Gregory Johns correspondence?”
“Every letter I ever wrote him or he ever wrote back. Starting with 1928 or ’29, before he was out of college.”
For the next few weeks, an invading bitterness swept the soul of James Whitcomb Hathaway every time he passed the corner of Park and Fifty-Seventh. For Thorn to back out at this stage, after Ephraim, Farley, and Jonathan had discovered the plan, for Thorn to have signed a five-year lease on an office for himself the day before announcing he was backing out, for Thorn to have dug up that preposterous lie about writing a book to explain kicking him aside—all of it sent acid gushing through Hathaway’s veins.
“Digby came after me, Jim, with such a huge advance, I owed it to my family to accept it. So there just won’t be the time now.”
Hathaway had argued, cajoled, offered to delay for a full year, had even notched up the profit ratio another three per cent in Thorn’s favor. Thornton Johns scarcely heard him. Thorn seemed encased in some new armor of his own, against which Hathaway’s words went ping-ping-ping. When Thorn told him he had already borrowed three thousand dollars from Gregory for office furniture—“I want light woods and dark walls, something like Von Brann’s at Imperial”—Hathaway had withdrawn into an armor of his own. Most of the time he was still in it.
Ambition, nerve, dissatisfaction with one’s lot, an unwavering admiration for fame and success—long ago it had been clear that these traits would take Thornton Johns far. But who could have suspected that in less than a year Thornton Johns, so naive then, so diffident, would be demolishing the beautiful edifice of the Hathaway-Johns Agency, and stand immaculately apart from the rubble on the sidewalk?
“You’ll get somebody else, Jim, somebody far better than me. ”
That air of modesty—wormwood with the acid!
This phrasing bothered James Whitcomb Hathaway but he did not pause to change it. The gall of the man, the unspeakable calculating gall of him, to crawl out on the person who had launched him into the Big Time.
Nobody could criticize Thornton Johns for wanting to be well known. To defeat the awful gray anonymity of life—it was natural for any man to want that. But Thornton Johns wouldn’t be satisfied until his name was a household word from New York to California.
Damn it, Hathaway thought, it will be. This is the country for people like. Thorn, this is the age. It may take him another year or two, but he’ll get there. Fifty thousand a year minimum income and a household word with every family that reads or goes to a lecture or has a radio or television set.
Radio and television. James Whitcomb Hathaway winced at the syllables. Two days after the crawl-out, Thornton Johns had suggested lunch at Le Persiflage. Perhaps he’s changed his mind, Hathaway had thought; perhaps something’s made him ashamed of himself. I’m glad I covered up enough so he thinks we’re still friends.
“Say, Jim,” Thorn had said, after the preliminaries were over, “I’ve been wondering about these personality programs on the air, and on television. Like the Tex and Jinx Show, Faye Emerson, Mary Margaret McBride—don’t they have lecturers quite often? Couldn’t you fix me up on some?”
Hathaway dropped his fork. The headwaiter retrieved it himself, bawling at a busboy, “New fork for Mr. Johns’ table.”
“Not just as a favor, Jim,” Thorn had continued with his magnificent smile. “Except at first, maybe. The moment you do team up and become Hathaway-Somebody, Incorporated, of course we’d switch to the usual commission basis.”
Hathaway had wanted only to reach across the table and hit him. He remembered Gregory’s law work and chose withering sarcasm instead.
“Are you seriously suggesting, Thorn, that I’m going to end up being agent to the great Thornton Johns?”
Thorn had looked hurt. By God, Hathaway had thought wearily before Thorn could answer, by God, I suppose I am.
T
HE GOOD WORLD CLOSED
its record-breaking run at the Palladium the last week in October, and during November it was playing, as
Variety
put it, The Nabes. It played Poughkeepsie early; it played Martin Heights, Roslyn, and Freeton; out in Wyoming it played Greybull, Lovell, Cody, and Sheridan before the great snows began.
To virtually everybody in the Johns orbit, the tempo of life stepped up once more.
Hat’s letters from Vassar were, for the first time, ecstatic. For a while, like her occasional weekends at home, they had been so casual that they had worried her parents; they had sounded guarded, too filled with details about courses and teachers and not enough about friends and fun. Now they became lyrical; a lilt of joy ran through every one of them. “It’s playing right on campus at the Juliet, and I gave a party and took ten girls, and then on up to the Pub on the Hill afterwards. I’m stony but I don’t care. This is the most wonderful place in the world, and I’m so happy living at Cushing, I could die. Could you possibly send me fifteen dollars extra right away?”
From Freeton, Gerald or Geraldine telephoned nearly every day for a week, and only when
The Good World
was replaced by
Pinky
did Geraldine sound subdued. “You have to do something for me,” she told Gregory one morning. “Maybe it’s silly of me, looking way ahead to January, but your father and I want our next anniversary party to be out here in our house and you have to promise you’ll come.”
Gregory said mildly, “Now look—” but his mother’s voice trembled a little as she interrupted and went on.
“When you get old, even your close friends neglect you,” she said, “but I think your father blames me. I told him long ago that people never like it if somebody else’s child gets famous, and then when Thorny started to get famous
too,
it just broke their nerve.”
Gregory restrained an impulse to discuss the point.
“Anyway,” his mother said, “an anniversary would be a real reason to invite everybody in again. And they’d all accept if they knew you and Thorny were
both
coming.”
“Of course we’re coming,” Gregory said heartily. “We’ll throw the biggest anniversary party you ever saw. You go right ahead and ask all of Long Island.”
By Thanksgiving, Harry Brinton was pulled in for the art work on his first national advertising account. The president of one of the largest hat companies in America wanted a testimonial campaign on Distinctive Hats for Distinguished Men, and was told that Brinton not only had an A-1 art service, but also great influence with his brother-in-law, Gregory Johns. And since Gregory Johns had never yet signed any known testimonial, his photograph wearing a Distinctive hat, and his signature to a Distinctive statement, would clearly be even more distinguished than most of the distinguished signers they could line up more readily.
Upon hearing from Gloria of Harry’s latest and greatest new account, both Gracia and Georgia turned upon their respective husbands and demanded why
they
couldn’t show a little red-blooded American ambition.
“We belong to a famous family,” Gracia said, “and look at all the good it. does us.” Georgia’s remarks paraphrased her sister’s.
Up on Morningside Heights, Thorn Junior ran for the presidency of his two clubs. His fellow students, having mellowed considerably since their Shakespeare class at the close of the spring session, elected him unanimously, and young Thorn got gloriously drunk for the first time in his life.
“The trick,” young Thorn decided boozily, “is keep your, trap shut. The fellows know who’s Big Man on Campus anyways.”
In a beauty parlor at the Ritzy Mrs. Luther Digby repeated stubbornly, “Not even a rinse. Don’t touch it up at all. That’s why I changed from my old place—they won’t let me let it grow out. I
like
it gray.” She stared bleakly at the mirror before her. She had known it wouldn’t do any good; with Luther buried up to his ears in musty old letters whenever he did condescend to stay in for an evening, he wouldn’t notice it if her hair were dyed lime green.
At Digby and Brown, the switchboard came under the ministrations of a girl named Mabel, tall, angular, and inefficient. Janet married Mr. Muncy’s assistant, and, as she was leaving to do so, earnestly told two of the secretaries that if they’d only realize how high-class it was to work for a big successful publishing house instead of, say, for some hardware company or button manufacturer, they’d begin to
feel
and
act
glamorous and improve their position in life the way she had.
In an elegantly decorated three-room office on Park at Fifty-Seventh, a stack of new memo pads sat on a desk of off-white mahogany. They were engraved, “From the office of Diana Bates, Executive Assistant to Mr. Johns.” Since moving uptown, Diana had got a typist to assist her on routine work, a twenty-dollar weekly raise, a nutria coat, and a new point of view. Having inadvertently stayed in on a California call eight seconds too long, in her official desire to check the clarity of the connection, she had recently overheard one remark of Jill Goodwyn’s, noiselessly replaced the receiver, and proceeded to Think Things Over. If famous movie stars had to compromise with life and accept the risk of scandal and disaster, might it not be wise to give in at last and embrace the second-best possibility long offered by “Roy Tribble?
Diana gazed at her off-white desk, the dark charcoal walls, the white Venetian blinds against the glittering expanse of wall-to-wall window. She stared at her new memo pads and saw the buzzer by which
she
might now summon help.
The lids on Diana’s beautiful eyes lowered and as if from behind a veil, she delicately dialed Roy Tribble’s number.
Hulda no longer drove Cindy mad. Hulda no longer indulged in bare feet, sullen looks, or
sotto voce
rudeness to the Mister or Missus. Hulda never went to market without getting dressed up and never ordered without first demanding loudly, “You seen that movie yet?” Whether the answer was yes or no, Hulda took it as a signal for prolonged discussion, and proved herself an expert on box-office figures at the Palladium and the entire Loew circuit. Whenever the butcher did try to palm off a tough chicken or stringy steak, Hulda resorted to a remark she had made three times a week for over a month. “Mr. Gregory Johns comin’ tonight, won’t eat nothin’ but the best.”
A New York institution, founded in 1939, and known as Celebrity Service, Inc., received twelve calls in one day from subscribers so conditioned to the ways of The Great that it had not occurred to any one of them to look for Gregory Johns in the telephone book.
Dedicated to duty, Celebrity Service sought once more to expand the meager information which, unknown to Gregory Johns, had begun to appear in its files last January, when the book columns had announced the B.S.B. selection. The files still showed nothing that had not appeared in the public prints. And this was only a fraction of what they showed on Thornton Johns.
Thereupon, Celebrity Service, also detouring the telephone book, called the Stork Club and asked for Thornton Johns’ number.
Diana and Mr. Johns being out to lunch, Diana’s new assistant redirected Celebrity Service to Mrs. Johns.
Cindy had never heard of Celebrity Service. As she listened to explanations, she scarcely believed that there was anything so glamorous as a firm that bothered only with celebrities. And when she realized that her own husband was listed with them, she could scarcely contain herself. The Social Register, Who’s Who, Burke’s Peerage—all of it was mid-Victorian, stuffed-shirt, old-hat.
She,
Lucinda Johns, was married to a man who had been crowned in true twentieth-century style.
From Wyoming, in December, came a thick letter enclosing several clippings and snapshots. Gwen and Howie, who had remained endearingly simple about the book and movie, had been amused by these pieces from the Wyoming press, which declared that Gregory Johns and his family were annual visitors to The Equality State, and would again be staying at the Chisholm ranch at Shell Canyon next summer. “Have a look and laugh,” Gwen wrote.
Gwen then went on to her news. She had finally talked Howie into gambling on six large cabins instead of two small ones. The stone foundations and outside chimneys were already complete, the log walls were nearly up, and as the snapshots would prove, everything ought to be ready in the spring. Resort advertising in the
Saturday Review of Literature
had already been contracted for and the new entrance from the main highway was finished and handsome. “If you were a civilized tourist or dude,” Gwen wrote, “wouldn’t
you
find it inviting?”
The photographs of the entrance showed tall rough-hewn gateposts with a horizontal fifty-foot beam suspended across them in true Western style. From this beam swung a forty-foot sign which proclaimed
THE GOOD WORLD RANCH.
Below it, in a smaller but still highly legible square, hung another sign: “Gwendolyn Johns Chisholm, Manager.”
Precisely one week after Abby announced she was through with apartment-hunting until spring of next year, the Zatkes ended the search for her. Mary Zatke had often made the rounds with Abby; Mary said it would be hateful to have their closest friends give up and move to New York, and the Smiths and the Feins down the street agreed with her.
But in all of Martin Heights, the only apartment that would be available this year was 3B, across the court from the Zatkes and the Johnses, and one room smaller than each of theirs. A place that would give Gregory a study and Hat a room of her own simply did not exist in that world of Garden Developments. Families that needed six rooms had never concerned its architects and builders; they had always regarded two-, three-, or four-room apartments as the American Norm.