At the studio gate, she saw a long, low roadster sparkling faintly in the moonlight. A slim young girl stood with one foot on the running board, wrapped tightly in a short coat with a huge fur collar; a tall man in gray held the door open for her. They were speaking softly, in low voices Claire could not hear.
Two girls passed by and looked at them. “That’s Winston Ayers and his discovery,” Claire heard the girls whisper. They heard it too. They looked at each other, looked straight into each other’s eyes. They smiled. His smile was warm and soft. Her smile was hard and bitter. She swung behind the wheel, and slammed the door, and was gone. He stood motionless and watched the car disappearing down the long dark road.
“You can think what you wish!” said Claire Nash to Winston Ayers, who had met her in an obscure restaurant at her request. “I’m through with it! I don’t think anything and I’m tired of thinking. It’s all too silly. I’m putting an end to the stupid comedy.”
“Certainly, Miss Nash,” he answered imperturbably. “It can be done easily. I am sorry if this little adventure has given you cause for annoyance.” It was all he said. He asked no questions. He never mentioned the
Child of Danger
set, as if he had never seen her there.
She tried to forget it all, and she smiled at him warmly, invitingly, hopefully. The cold, hard face before her remained unmoved. She had known on their first meeting that there was little hope for the wish this man awakened in her. She knew now that there was no hope at all. Something had changed him. She thought she could know also what that was, if she but put her certainty into words; but she did not want to know.
She walked alone back to her hotel room, feeling very tired and very empty.
This was on a Monday. On Wednesday, the screen columns of the Hollywood papers announced that Claire Nash had sailed from Europe, outwitting the reporters who had tried to learn the name of the boat she was taking; she was, the papers further stated, to fly back to Hollywood immediately upon landing in New York.
Claire bought all the papers. She sat in her room looking at them. It seemed to her that she was coming out of a nightmare.
Then she sent a long, detailed wire to her secretary in New York. The secretary was to take a Deluxe Transcontinental Flyer for Hollywood in five days; she was to register herself aboard as Claire Nash; she, Claire, would meet the plane at the last stop before Los Angeles and they would exchange places; then a proper welcome would greet her in Hollywood.
She dispatched the wire, entered the first bar she saw, and ordered a drink. She had spent too many nights alone in her room, afraid to venture into the gay night spots where her old friends would see and recognize her. She could stand it no longer. She could not wait another week. She didn’t care. But nothing happened at the bar. No one saw her.
The banquet was coming to an end. The long white table, precise and formal, was like a river frozen under a mantle of snow, dotted with crystal, like chunks of ice, with flashes of silver like sparkling water in the cracks of the snow, with flowers floating like islands in midstream. The cash value of the names borne by those who filled the great hall would have stretched in a line of figures from one end of the table to the other. Hollywood’s great and costly were gathered to celebrate the signing of a five-year starring contract between Miss Heddy Leland and Wonder-Pictures, Inc.
In the place of honor, a thin little figure modeled in white rose from the billowing waves of an immense skirt, a cloud of white chiffon with rhinestones sparkling as lost raindrops in the mist. She sat, straight, poised, calm, as correct as the occasion demanded, all but her hair, brushed back off her forehead, wild, untamed, ready to fly off and to carry the white cloud away with it, away from the frightening place where she had to smile, and bow, and hide her eyes and her wish to scream. On her left sat Mr. Bamburger’s huge, beaming smile and Mr. Bamburger’s huge, beaming diamond shirt studs. On her right sat Winston Ayers.
He sat motionless, silent, grim; he seemed to have lost his impeccable manners and forgotten to compose his face into the proper smile of enthusiasm; he showed no enthusiasm whatever; in fact, he seemed not to know or care where he was. Heddy knew suddenly that this day, this day for which she had waited and struggled through such hell, meant nothing to her compared to the thoughts which she could not guess in the mind of the man beside her. He made no effort to speak to her. So she did not turn to him, but smiled dutifully at Mr. Bamburger, at the flowers, at the endless, ringing sentences of the speakers:
“Miss Leland, whose incomparable talent . . . Miss Leland, whose brilliant youth has achieved . . . Hollywood is proud to welcome . . . Fame never smiled so brightly upon a greater future . . . We, who are ever on the lookout for the great and the gifted . . .”
“Miss Leland . . .” Winston Ayers overtook her in a dark gallery of the building, where she had fled to be alone, to leave the great banquet unnoticed and escape. She stopped short. At least, someone had missed her; he had, he who had not seemed to know that she was there.
She stood still, white as a statue in the darkness. A cold wind blew from the Hollywood hills, flaring her skirt out like a sail. He approached. He stood looking down at her. The look in his eyes did not seem to fit the words she heard in his slow, mocking voice:
“I have neglected my duties on this great day, Miss Leland,” he said. “Consider yourself congratulated.”
She answered without moving:
“Thank you, Mr. Ayers. And thank you—for everything.”
“Unnecessary,” he shrugged. “From now on, you need no further help from me.” She knew he said it as an insult; but it sounded like regret.
“I’m glad of it!” she said suddenly, before she knew she was saying it, her voice alive for the first time, alive and trembling. “I still owe it all to you, but I wish I didn’t. Not to you. To anyone but you. Gratitude is such a hard thing to bear. Because it can . . . it can . . .” She could not say it. “Because it can take the place of everything else, be considered to cover, to explain everything else, to . . . I don’t want to be grateful to you! Not grateful! I wish I could die for you, but not because of gratitude! Because I . . .”
She stopped in time. She didn’t know what she was saying; surely, she thought, he couldn’t know it either. But he stood very close to her now. She looked up at him. She knew what his eyes were saying, she knew it so clearly all of a sudden, that she hardly heard his words and paid no attention to them, his words that were still struggling against that to which his eyes had surrendered.
“You owe nothing to me,” he was saying coldly. “I’ve wanted to tell you this for a long time. I knew I’d have to. I didn’t select you because I had faith in you or because I saw anything in you. I’m just as much of a fool as the others. I selected you as a trick, a gag—to prove something unimportant to someone even less important. I’ll tell you the whole story someday. I can’t claim your gratitude. I can claim nothing from you. I didn’t think it would ever make any difference to me, but it does. It does.” He finished in a grim, low voice, still hard, still cold, but something in its coldness had broken: “Because I love you.”
It was not the mocking, skeptical writer who took in his arms the trembling little white figure and whose lips met hers hungrily. . . .
“Oh, my dear, my dear,” said Winston Ayers when he led Heddy Ayers into his apartment, three days later, “more than movie careers depends on chance!”
More than movie careers depends on chance. . . .
“Extry! Extry!” the newsboys were yelling on street corners. “Horrible catastrophe! Airliner crashes with twelve passengers!”
Eager citizens tore the papers out of the boys’ hands, with the hungry joy of a big sensation. And the sensation grew when the next editions appeared with huge black headlines:
CLAIRE NASH DEAD
In smaller type it was explained that the star had been registered among the passengers of the ill-fated liner which crashed on its way to the last stop before Los Angeles; that no one aboard had survived; that the bodies were mangled beyond recognition.
Then the flood broke loose. From coast to coast, tragic articles sobbed over the terrible loss in miles of close-printed black columns. It was said that the screen had been deprived of its brightest luminary; that her name was written in the book of Immortality; that the whole world would feel her absence; that there never would be another Claire Nash; that Wonder-Pictures, Inc., had signed Lula Del Mio, the famous ingenue, for the starring part in
Heart and Soul,
which the unforgettable Claire Nash was to have made.
In her little hotel room, having come back from the city where her plane never landed, Claire Nash sat among an ocean of newspapers. No obituary notices had ever had such a happy reader. That, thought Claire joyously as she read, was that. This was what she meant to the world. They knew her true value, after all. What publicity and what buildup! What sensation to come, when the world would learn suddenly that its brightest luminary was still shining! She delayed her resurrection for a few days. The bright crop of glowing words that fell into her hands with each new paper was like wine to her battered, thirsty soul.
She frowned for the first time, though, when the producer’s nephew, whom she had thoroughly forgotten, appeared in print with an article about their years-old divorce; a sad, gentle article which, however, brought out some intimate details of the matter that had better been kept hidden. No doubt, he had been well paid for it and a mangled corpse could not bring suit, but still, there were the Women’s Clubs, and that sort of thing did not help a star’s reputation.
She stopped smiling entirely when a featured player of smoldering Latin charm, long since unemployed, whose name she had trouble in recalling, published a lengthy confession of his love life with Miss Nash, the details of which she recalled only too well. And the Sunday supplements carried such stories, with snapshots and facsimiles of letters, that she decided the time had definitely come to stop it. What the country was beginning to whisper about Claire Nash was neither as sad nor as beautiful as the obituary notices.
“I really cannot understand, madam, how you can persist in that queer statement,” said Mr. Bamburger to Claire Nash, a haggard, green-faced, wild-eyed Claire Nash who sat in his office after her long, desperate struggle to gain admittance.
“But, Jake . . .” she stammered. “But you . . . I . . . for God’s sake, Jake, you can’t make me think I’m crazy! You know me. You recognize me!”
“Really, madam, I have never seen you before in my life.”
Mr. Bamburger’s secretary left the room. Mr. Bamburger rose hastily and closed the door.
“Listen, Claire . . .”
She jumped to her feet, a radiant smile drying her gathering tears.
“Jake, you fool! What’s the gag?”
“Listen, Claire. Of course, I recognize you. But I won’t recognize you in public. Now, don’t stare at me like that. I won’t—for your own good.”
She sat down again, for she was going to fall.
“I . . . I don’t understand,” she muttered.
“You understand,” said Mr. Bamburger, “only too damn well. You’ve read those articles, haven’t you? What producer do you think will want to touch you now with a ten-foot pole?”
“But I can . . .”
“No, you can’t. You can’t sue those fellows, because they’ll prove it all. You know it and I know it. And we know also that the Women’s Clubs and all the Moral Uplifters would boycott a studio off the face of the earth, if any of us were fool enough to star you again.”
“But . . .”
“Where were you all this time, you nitwitted idiot? Why did you let all those obituaries go on? If that alone weren’t enough! Do you think the public would love you for that kind of a publicity stunt? Capitalizing on a catastrophe! It would ruin all confidence in the picture business, if they knew! The day is past for cheap, fantastic press-agent tricks like these!”
“But I’ve explained it to you! I did it only because . . .”
“Oh, so you think you’re going to confess the real story? Tell the world that you weren’t on that plane because you were pulling a silly, lousy trick on the studios? And do you expect us producers to back you up in that and make ourselves look like a bunch of jackasses?”
“But . . . but . . . but I’m popular . . . I’m a great star . . . I’m a box-offi—”
“You were. You were also slipping. Oh, definitely slipping, my girl. Take a look at the reports on your last two pictures. The public’s getting sick of ingenues. Besides, we have signed Lula Del Mio to take your place. We don’t need two of a kind. . . .
“Take my advice, Claire,” Mr. Bamburger was saying half an hour later to the white ghost of a woman who was leaving his office. “Stay dead officially, leave Hollywood, and give up the movies. Better for your reputation and your peace of mind. Of course, you can prove your identity easily. But the public won’t take you. You’ll only make yourself ridiculous. And no producer will take you. Ask them. They’ll tell you the same things. You’ve made quite a fortune in pictures. You don’t have to work. Rest and enjoy it. Try to marry some nice, respectable millionaire. Forget the movies. I am more experienced than you are and I know the business: the screen is not for you any more.”
Mr. Bamburger objected violently. Werner von Halz objected with a string of invectives in five European languages. But Winston Ayers and Heddy Leland Ayers, his wife, insisted quietly and irrevocably. So Jane Roberts was signed for the second feminine lead in
Child of Danger.
The character appeared only in the second half of the picture and the part had not yet been filled.
Mr. Bamburger surrendered on condition that Jane Roberts remain strictly Jane Roberts, change the color of her hair and the shape of her eyebrows, keep to herself socially, and let no breath reach the press about any connection between her and Claire Nash.