Merton of the Movies/Chapter 16
OF SARAH NEVADA MONTAGUE
They were six long weeks doing the new piece. The weeks seemed long to Merton Gill because there were so many hours, even days, of enforced idleness. To pass an entire day, his face stiff with the make-up, without once confronting a camera in action, seemed to him a waste of his own time and a waste of Baird's money. Yet this appeared to be one of the unavoidable penalties incurred by those who engaged in the art of photodrama. Time was needed to create that world of painted shadows, so swift, so nicely consecutive when revealed, but so incoherent, so brokenly inconsequent, so meaningless in the recording.
How little an audience could suspect the vexatious delays ensuing between, say, a knock at a door and the admission of a visitor to a neat little home where a fond old mother was trying to pay off a mortgage with the help of her little ones. How could an audience divine that a wait of two hours had been caused because a polished city villain had forgotten his spats? Or that other long waits had been caused by other forgotten trifles, while an expensive company of artists lounged about in bored apathy, or smoked, gossiped, bantered?
Yet no one ever seemed to express concern about these waits. Rarely were their causes known, except by some frenzied assistant director, and he, after a little, would cease to be frenzied and fall to loafing calmly with the others. Merton Gill's education in his chosen art was progressing. He came to loaf with the unconcern, the vacuous boredom, the practised nonchalance, of more seasoned artists.
Sometimes when exteriors were being taken the sky would overcloud and the sun be denied them for a whole day. The Montague girl would then ask Merton how he liked Sunny Cafeteria. He knew this was a jesting term that would stand for sunny California, and never failed to laugh.
The girl kept rather closely by him during these periods of waiting. She seemed to show little interest in other members of the company, and her association with them, Merton noted, was marked by a certain restraint. With them she seemed no longer to be the girl of free ways and speech. She might occasionally join a group of the men who indulged in athletic sports on the grass before the little farmhouse—for the actors of Mr. Baird's company would all betray acrobatic tendencies in their idle moments—and he watched one day while the simple little country sister turned a series of hand-springs and cart-wheels that evoked sincere applause from the four New York villains who had been thus solacing their ennui.
But oftener she would sit with Merton on the back seat of one of the waiting automobiles. She not only kept herself rather aloof from other members of the company, but she curiously seemed to bring it about that Merton himself would have little contact with them. Especially did she seem to hover between him and the company's feminine members. Among those impersonating guests at the hotel were several young women of rare beauty with whom he would have been not unwilling to fraternize in that easy comradeship which seemed to mark studio life. These were far more alluring than the New York society girl who wooed him and who had secured the part solely through Baird's sympathy for her family misfortunes.
They were richly arrayed and charmingly mannered in the scenes he watched; moreover, they not too subtly betrayed a pleasant consciousness of Merton's existence. But the Montague girl noticeably monopolized him when a better acquaintance with the beauties might have come about. She rather brazenly seemed to be guarding him. She was always there.
This very apparent solicitude of hers left him feeling pleasantly important, despite the social contacts it doubtless deprived him of. He wondered if the Montague girl could be jealous, and cautiously one day, as they lolled in the motor car, he sounded her.
"Those girls in the hotel scenes—I suppose they're all nice girls of good family?" he casually observed.
"Huh?" demanded Miss Montague, engaged with a pencil at the moment in editing her left eyebrow. "Oh, that bunch? Sure, they all come from good old Southern families—Virginia and Indiana and those places." She tightened her lips before the little mirror she held and renewed their scarlet. Then she spoke more seriously. "Sure, Kid, those girls are all right enough. They work like dogs and do the best they can when they ain't got jobs. I'm strong for 'em. But then, I'm a wise old trouper. I understand things. You don't. You're the real country wild rose of this piece. It's a good thing you got me to ride herd on you. You're far too innocent to be turned loose on a comedy lot.
"Listen, boy—" She turned a sober face to him—"the straight lots are fairly decent, but get this: a comedy lot is the toughest place this side of the bad one. Any comedy lot."
"But this isn't a comedy lot. Mr. Baird isn't doing comedies any more, and these people all seem to be nice people. Of course some of the ladies smoke cigarettes"
The girl had averted her face briefly, but now turned to him again. "Of course that's so; Jeff is trying for the better things; but he's still using lots of his old people. They're all right for me, but not for you. You wouldn't last long if mother here didn't look out for you. I'm playing your dear little sister, but I'm playing your mother, too. If it hadn't been for me this bunch would have taught you a lot of things you'd better learn some other way. Just for one thing, long before this you'd probably been hopping up your reindeers and driving all over in a Chinese sleigh."
He tried to make something of this, but found the words meaningless. They merely suggested to him a snowy winter scene of Santa Claus and his innocent equipage. But he would intimate that he understood.
"Oh, I guess not," he said knowingly. The girl appeared not to have heard this bit of pretense.
"On a comedy lot," she said, again becoming the oracle, "you can do murder if you wipe up the blood. Remember that."
He did not again refer to the beautiful young women who came from fine old Southern homes. The Montague girl was too emphatic about them.
At other times during the long waits, perhaps while they ate lunch brought from the cafeteria, she would tell him of herself. His old troubling visions of his wonder-woman, of Beulah Baxter the daring, had well-nigh faded, but now and then they would recur as if from long habit, and he would question the girl about her life as a double.
"Yeah, I could see that Baxter business was a blow to you, Kid. You'd kind of worshiped her, hadn't you?"
"Well, I—yes, in a sort of way"
"Of course you did; it was very nice of you" She reached over to pat his hand. "Mother understands just how you felt, watching the flims back there in Gooseberry"—He had quit trying to correct her as to Gashwiler and Simsbury. She had hit upon Gooseberry as a working composite of both names, and he had wearily come to accept it—"and I know just how you felt"—Again she patted his hand—"that night when you found me doing her stuff."
"It did kind of upset me."
"Sure it would! But you ought to have known that all these people use doubles when they can men and women both. It not only saves 'em work, but even where they could do the stuff if they had to—and that ain't so often—it saves 'em broken bones, and holding up a big production two or three months. Fine business that would be. So when you see a woman, or a man either, doing something that someone else could do, you can bet someone else is doing it. What would you expect? Would you expect a high-priced star to go out and break his leg?
"And at that, most of the doubles are men, even for the women stars, like Kitty Carson always carries one who used to be a circus acrobat. She couldn't hardly do one of the things you see her doing, but when old Dan gets on her blonde transformation and a few of her clothes, he's her to the life in a long shot, or even in mediums, if he keeps his map covered.
"Yeah, most of the doublers have to be men. I'll hand that to myself. I'm about the only girl that's been doing it, and that's out with me hereafter, I guess, the way I seem to be making good with Jeff. Maybe after this I won't have to do stunts, except of course some riding stuff, prob'ly, or a row of flips or something light. Anything heavy comes up—me for a double of my own." She glanced sidewise at her listener. "Then you won't like me any more, hey, Kid, after you find out I'm using a double?"
He had listened attentively, absorbed in her talk, and seemed startled by this unforeseen finish. He turned anxious eyes on her. It occurred to him for the first time that he did not wish the Montague girl to do dangerous things any more. "Say," he said quickly, amazed at his own discovery, "I wish you'd quit doing all those—stunts, do you call 'em?"
"Why?" she demanded. There were those puzzling lights back in her eyes as he met them. He was confused.
"Well, you might get hurt."
"Oh!"
"You might get killed sometime. And it wouldn't make the least difference to me, your using a double. I'd like you just the same."
"I see; it wouldn't be the way it was with Baxter when you found it out."
"No; you—you're different. I don't want you to get killed," he added, rather blankly. He was still amazed at this discovery.
"All right, Kid. I won't," she replied soothingly.
"I'll like you just as much," he again assured her, "no matter how many doubles you have."
"Well, you'll be having doubles yourself, sooner or later—and I'll like you, too." She reached over to his hand, but this time she held it. He returned her strong clasp. He had not liked to think of her being mangled perhaps by a fall into a quarry when the cable gave way—and the camera men would probably keep on turning!
"I always been funny about men," she presently spoke again, still gripping his hand. "Lord knows I've seen enough of all kinds, bad and good, but I always been kind of afraid even of the good ones. Any one might not think it, but I guess I'm just natural-born shy. Man-shy, anyway."
He glowed with a confession of his own. "You know, I'm that way, too. Girl-shy. I felt awful awkward when I had to kiss you in the other piece. I never did, really" He floundered a moment, but was presently blurting out the meagre details of that early amour with Edwina May Pulver. He stopped this recital in a sudden panic fear that the girl would make fun of him. He was immensely relieved when she merely renewed the strength of the handclasp.
"I know. That's the way with me. Of course I can put over the acting stuff, even vamping, but I'm afraid of men off-stage. Say, would you believe it, I ain't ever had but one beau. That was Bert Stacy. Poor old Bert! He was lots older than me; about thirty, I guess. He was white all through. You always kind of remind me of him. Sort of a feckless dub he was, too; kind of honest and awkward—you know. He was the one got me doing stunts. He wasn't afraid of anything. Didn't know it was even in the dictionary. That old scout would go out night or day and break everything but his contract. I was twelve when I first knew him and he had me doing twisters in no time. I caught on to the other stuff pretty good. I wasn't afraid, either, I'll say that for myself. First I was afraid to show him I was afraid, but pretty soon I wasn't afraid at all.
"We pulled off a lot of stuff for different people. And of course I got to be a big girl and three years ago when I was eighteen Bert wanted us to be married and I thought I might as well. He was the only one I hadn't been afraid of. So we got engaged. I was still kind of afraid to marry any one, but being engaged was all right. I know we'd got along together, too, but then he got his with a motorcycle.
"Kind of funny. He'd do anything on that machine. He'd jump clean over an auto and he'd leap a thirty-foot ditch and he was all set to pull a new one for Jeff Baird when it happened. Jeff was going to have him ride his motorcycle through a plate-glass window. The set was built and everything ready and then the merry old sun don't shine for three days. Every morning Bert would go over to the lot and wait around in the fog. And this third day, when it got too late in the afternoon to shoot even if the sun did show, he says to me, 'c'mon, hop up and let's take a ride down to the beach.' So I hop to the back seat and off we start and on a ninety-foot paved boulevard what does Bert do but get caught in a jam? It was an ice wagon that finally bumped us over. I was shook up and scraped here and there. But Bert was finished. That's the funny part. He'd got it on this boulevard, but back on the lot he'd have rode through that plate-glass window probably without a scratch. And just because the sun didn't shine that day, I wasn't engaged any more. Bert was kind of like some old sea-captain that comes back to shore after risking his life on the ocean in all kinds of storms, and falls into a duck-pond and gets drowned."
She sat a long time staring out over the landscape, still holding his hand. Inside the fence before the farmhouse three of the New York villains were again engaged in athletic sports, but she seemed oblivious of these. At last she turned to him again with an illumining smile.
"But I was dead in love once before that, and that's how I know just how you feel about Baxter. He was the preacher where we used to go to church. He was a good one. Pa copied a lot of his stuff that he uses to this day if he happens to get a preacher part. He was the loveliest thing. Not so young, but dark, with wonderful eyes and black hair, and his voice would go all through you. I had an awful case on him. I was twelve, and all week I used to think how I'd see him the next Sunday. Say, when I'd get there and he'd be working—doing pulpit stuff—he'd have me in kind of a trance.
"Sometimes after the pulpit scene he'd come down right into the audience and shake hands with people. I'd almost keel over if he'd notice me. I'd be afraid if he would and afraid if he wouldn't. If he said 'And how is the little lady this morning?' I wouldn't have a speck of voice to answer him. I'd just tremble all over. I used to dream I'd get a job workin' for him as extra, blacking his shoes or fetching his breakfast and things.
"It was the real thing, all right. I used to try to pray the way he did—asking the Lord to let me do a character bit or something with him. He had me going all right. You must 'a' been that way about Baxter. Sure you were. When you found she was married and used a double and everything, it was like I'd found this preacher shooting hop or using a double in his pulpit stuff."
She was still again, looking back upon this tremendous episode.
"Yes, that's about the way I felt," he told her. Already his affair with Mrs. Rosenblatt seemed a thing of his childhood. He was wondering, rather, if the preacher could have been the perfect creature the girl was now picturing him. It would not have displeased him to learn that this refulgent being had actually used a double in his big scenes, or had been guilty of mere human behaviour at odd moments. Probably, after all, he had been just a preacher.
"Uncle Sylvester used to want me to be a preacher," he said, with apparent irrelevance, "even if he was his own worst enemy." He added presently, as the girl remained silent, "I always say my prayers at night." He felt vaguely that this might raise him to the place of the other who had been adored. He was wishing to be thought well of by this girl.
She was aroused from her musing by his confession. "You do? Now ain't that just like you? I'd have bet you did that. Well, keep on, son. It's good stuff."
Her serious mood seemed to pass. She was presently exchanging tart repartee with the New York villains who had perched in a row on the fence to be funny about that long-continued holding of hands in the motor car. She was quite unembarrassed, however, as she dropped the hand with a final pat and vaulted to the ground over the side of the car.
"Get busy, there!" she ordered. "Where's your understander—where's your top-mounter?" She became a circus ringmaster. "Three up and a roll for yours," she commanded. The three villains aligned themselves on the lawn. One climbed to the shoulders of the other and a third found footing on the second. They balanced there, presently to lean forward from the summit. The girl played upon an imaginary snare drum with a guttural, throaty imitation of its roll, culminating in the "boom!" of a bass-drum as the tower toppled to earth. Its units, completing their turn with somersaults, again stood in line, bowing and smirking their acknowledgments for imagined applause.
The girl, a moment later, was turning hand-springs. Merton had never known that actors were so versatile. It was an astounding profession, he thought, remembering his own registration card that he had filled out at the Holden office. His age, height, weight, hair, eyes, and his chest and waist measures; these had been specified, and then he had been obliged to write the short "No" after ride, drive, swim, dance—to write "No" after "Ride?" even in the artistically photographed presence of Buck Benson on horseback!
Yet in spite of these disabilities he was now a successful actor at an enormous salary. Baird was already saying that he would soon have a contract for him to sign at a still larger figure. Seemingly it was a profession in which you could rise even if you were not able to turn hand springs or were more or less terrified by horses and deep water and dance music.
And the Montague girl, who, he now fervently hoped, would not be killed while doubling for Mrs. Rosenblatt, was a puzzling creature. He thought his hand must still be warm from her enfolding of it, even when work was resumed and he saw her, with sunbonnet pushed back, stand at the gate of the little farmhouse and behave in an utterly brazen manner toward one of the New York clubmen who was luring her up to the great city. She, who had just confided to him that she was afraid of men, was now practically daring an undoubted scoundrel to lure her up to the great city and make a lady of her. And she had been afraid of all but a clergyman and a stunt actor! He wondered interestingly if she were afraid of Merton Gill. She seemed not to be.
On another day of long waits they ate their lunch from the cafeteria box on the steps of the little home and discussed stage names. "I guess we better can that 'Clifford Armytage' stuff," she told him as she seriously munched a sandwich. "We don't need it. That's out. Merton Gill is a lot better name." She had used "we" quite as if it were a community name.
"Well, if you think so" he began regretfully, for Clifford Armytage still seemed superior to the indistinction of Merton Gill.
"Sure, it's a lot better," she went on. "That 'Clifford Armytage'—say, it reminds me of just another such feckless dub as you that acted with us one time when we all trouped in a rep show, playing East Lynne and such things. He was just as wise as you are, and when he joined out at Kansas City they gave him a whole book of the piece instead of just his sides. He was a quick study, at that, only he learned everybody's part as well as his own, and that slowed him. They put him on in Waco, and the manager was laid up, so they told him that after the third act he was to go out and announce the bill for the next night, and he learned that speech, too.
"He got on fine till the big scene in the third act. Then he went blooey because that was as far as he'd learned, so he just left the scene cold and walked down to the foots and bowed and said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, we thank you for your attendance here this evening and to-morrow night we shall have the honour of presenting Lady Audley's Secret.'
"With that he gave a cold look to the actors back of him that were gasping like fish, and walked off. And he was like you in another way because his real name was Eddie Duffy, and the lovely stage name he'd picked out was Clyde Maltravers."
"Well, Clifford Armytage is out, then," Merton announced, feeling that he had now buried a part of his dead self in a grave where Beulah Baxter, the wonder-woman, already lay interred. Still, he was conscious of a certain relief. The stage name had been bothersome.
"It ain't as if you had a name like mine," the girl went on. "I simply had to have help."
He wondered what her own name was. He had never heard her called anything but the absurd and undignified "Flips." She caught the question he had looked.
"Well, my honest-to-God name is Sarah Nevada Montague; Sarah for Ma and Nevada for Reno where Ma had to stop off for me—she was out of the company two weeks—and if you ever tell a soul I'll have the law on you. That was a fine way to abuse a helpless baby, wasn't it?"
"But Sarah is all right. I like Sarah."
"Do you, Kid?" She patted his hand. "All right, then, but it's only for your personal use."
"Of course the Nevada" he hesitated. "It does sound kind of like a geography lesson or something. But I think I'll call you Sarah, I mean when we're alone."
"Well, that's more than Ma ever does, and you bet it'll never get into my press notices. But go ahead if you want to."
"I will, Sarah. It sounds more like a true woman than 'Flips.'"
"Bless the child's heart," she murmured, and reached across the lunch box to pat his hand again.
"You're a great little patter, Sarah," he observed with one of his infrequent attempts at humour.
On still another day, while they idled between scenes, she talked to him about salaries and contracts, again with her important air of mothering him.
"After this picture," she told him, "Jeff was going to sew you up with a long-time contract, probably at a hundred and fifty per. But I've told him plain I won't stand for it. No five-year contract, and not any contract at that figure. Maybe three years at two hundred and fifty, I haven't decided yet. I'll wait and see—" she broke off to regard him with that old puzzling light far back in her eyes—"wait and see how you get over in these two pieces.
"But I know you'll go big, and so does Jeff. We've caught you in the rushes enough to know that. And Jeff's a good fellow, but naturally he'll get you for as little as he can. He knows all about money even if he don't keep Yom Kippur. So I'm watching over you, son—I'm your manager, see? And I've told him so, plain. He knows he'll have to give you just what you're worth. Of course he's entitled to consideration for digging you up and developing you, but a three-year contract will pay him out for that. Trust mother."
"I do," he told her. "I'd be helpless without you. It kind of scares me to think of getting all that money. I won't know what to do with it."
"I will; you always listen to me, and you won't be camping on the lot any more. And don't shoot dice with these rough-necks on the lot."
"I won't," he assured her. "I don't believe in gambling." He wondered about Sarah's own salary, and was surprised to learn that it was now double his own. It was surprising, because her acting seemed not so important to the piece as his. "It seems like a lot of money for what you have to do," he said.
"There," she smiled warmly, "didn't I always say you were a natural born trouper? Well, it is a lot of money for me, but you see I've helped Jeff dope out both of these pieces. I'm not so bad at gags—I mean the kind of stuff he needs in these serious dramas. This big scene of yours, where you go off to the city and come back a wreck on Christmas night—that's mine. I doped it out after the piece was started—after I'd had a good look at the truck driver that plays opposite you."
Truck driver? It appeared that Miss Montague was actually applying this term to the New York society girl who in private life was burdened with an ailing family. He explained now that Mr. Baird had not considered her ideal for the part, but had chosen her out of kindness.
Again there flickered far back in her eyes those lights that baffled him. There was incredulity in her look, but she seemed to master it.
"But I think it was wonderful of you," he continued, "to write that beautiful scene. It's a strong scene, Sarah. I didn't know you could write, too. It's as good as anything Tessie Kearns ever did, and she's written a lot of strong scenes."
Miss Montague seemed to struggle with some unidentified emotion. After a long, puzzling gaze she suddenly said: "Merton Gill, you come right here with all that make-up on and give mother a good big kiss!"
Astonishingly to himself, he did so in the full light of day and under the eyes of one of the New York villains who had been pretending that he walked a tight-rope across the yard. After he had kissed the girl, she seized him by both arms and shook him. "I'd ought to have been using my own face in that scene," she said. Then she patted his shoulder and told him that he was a good boy.
The pretending tight-rope walker had paused to applaud. "Your act's flopping, Bo," said Miss Montague. "Work fast." Then she again addressed the good boy: "Wait till you've watched that scene before you thank me," she said shortly.
"But it's a strong scene," he insisted.
"Yes," she agreed. "It's strong."
He told her of the other instance of Baird's kindness of heart.
"You know I was a little afraid of playing scenes with the cross-eyed man, but Mr. Baird said he was trying so hard to do serious work, so I wouldn't have him discharged. But shouldn't you think he'd save up and have his eyes straightened? Does he get a very small salary?"
The girl seemed again to be harassed by conflicting emotions, but mastered them to say, "I don't know exactly what it is, but I guess he draws down about twelve fifty a week."
"Only twelve dollars and fifty cents a week!"
"Twelve hundred and fifty," said the girl firmly.
"Twelve hundred and fifty dollars a week!" This was monstrous, incredible. "But then why doesn't he have his eyes"
Miss Montague drew him to her with both her capable arms. "My boy, my boy!" she murmured, and upon his painted forehead she now imprinted a kiss of deep reverence. "Run along and play," she ordered. "You're getting me all nervous." Forthwith she moved to the centre of the yard where the tight-rope walker still endangered his life above the heads of a vast audience.
She joined him. She became a performer on the slack wire. With a parasol to balance her, she ran to the centre of an imaginary wire that swayed perilously, and she swung there, cunningly maintaining a precarious balance. Then she sped back to safety at the wire's end, threw down her parasol, caught the handkerchief thrown to her by the first performer, and daintily touched her face with it, breathing deeply the while and bowing.
He thought Sarah was a strange child—"One minute one thing and the next minute something else."