Jack and Susan in 1913 (26 page)

He wished he hadn't. For what he saw was two piles of clothing on the floor—a man's and a woman's.

Desperately, he leaned even farther out, to see if he could improve the angle of the shaving mirror. The tiny reflecting surface suddenly swung into a different position, and Jack could see the bed. And in that bed, locked together in an embrace between the covers, were a man and a woman.

Just then the metal umbrella tip slipped between Jack's sweating fingers and plummeted downward toward the sidewalk below. Jack made an instinctive, ineffectual lunge for it—and lost his grip on the ledge.

Jack thought he was going to die, smashed on the sidewalk into more pieces than his shaving mirror. In his fall he wouldn't even have the comfort of knowing he had left a note blaming Susan for everything. A pointless death, that did nobody any good.

But he didn't die. He didn't even fall.

Two strong hands had reached through the window, grabbed him, and pulled him inside.

“Thank you,” Jack began, trying to shake his rescuer's hand even before he knew his identity. His rescuer, however, wanted no thanks. It was a policeman.

“You're under arrest for Peeping Tomism.”

T
HICK VINES OF climbing roses intertwined all over the somber red-stone facade of the Los Angeles city jail. This peculiar resemblance to a bower, however, didn't make it any pleasanter for Jack to be dragged there on his first night in California, facing a charge of Peeping Tomism. He was booked by a weary sergeant who stated merely that he had seen Jack's type before and would doubtless see Jack's type again. He was thrown into a large cell with half a dozen men drunker than he.

The next morning he discovered that charges against him had been dropped. Who had spoken in his behalf he could not discover. He was free to go, and the sergeant suggested that he get out of the place before someone else came forward with a complaint against him.

Jack walked out of the police station with the intention of taking a taxi back to the hotel. He had hailed a cab, but before getting in, Jack reached into his pocket and to his horror discovered that the bills that had been in his pocket the night before—all his money in the world, except for seventy-eight cents in change—was gone. He waved the taxi on and frantically tore at his pockets, turning them inside out. He took off his jacket and searched it minutely. He patted his body to see if he could find the thick wad of bills that he already knew he was not going to find.

Obviously, he'd been robbed the night before. A cell mate, taking advantage of his boozy sleep, had quietly rifled his pockets and taken away every dollar, leaving him only some change.

He went back into the police station and politely explained to the sergeant that he'd been robbed of over three hundred and seventy-five dollars. The sergeant told him pointedly that there were statutes against lying to officers of the law, and that he had best take heed of them.

“There were thieves in that cell last night.”

“And Peeping Toms, too,” said the sergeant. “But the thieves is going to jail, and the Peeping Tom has had the good luck to go free.”

Jack walked back to the hotel, hesitated a moment at the entrance, and then entered with as much dignity as he could muster. The desk clerk eyed him balefully, with a glance that seemed to say,
Now I know why you were so particular as to your room location.

Jack approached the clerk and asked, “Has the Cosmic Film Company checked out yet?”

“
You
should take a bath,” said the clerk, sniffing the air. “That's what
you
should do instead of asking questions about things that don't concern you.” Jack was surprised at the clerk's rudeness. “The management would like to ask you to vacate your room as quickly as possible,” the clerk continued. “I don't believe I need to tell you why.”

How he was going to pay for the room he had no idea, but he put that thought out of his mind. “I'll take the bath first,” said Jack.

It was not easy to wash away the stink of the alcohol and the jail and his misery, but Jack scrubbed. And when he was finished scrubbing, he applied to his hair a packet of yellow dye he had purchased from the barber in St. Louis.

He went back to his room and put on his best suit of clothes. Over that he put on the checked suit of the traveling salesman and stuffed his pockets with underwear and socks. Walking out of the room, he abandoned everything he could not carry out on his person.

He went down in the elevator with the plug hat over his head, smoking a cheap cigar. Hidden behind a fake mustache, and swathed in a halo of foul blue smoke, Jack Beaumont sauntered out of the hotel without paying his bill. On the street he asked the first indigent-looking man he saw for the address and direction of the nearest pawnshop. It was a half a mile away. There he pawned the checked suit, the plug hat, and three pairs of gold cuff links. He came away with eight dollars and seventy-five cents. A Chinese prostitute, who had ignored Jack on his entering the shop, pulled on his arm as he left it. “Two bittee lookee, four bittee feelie, six bittee, doee,” she whispered. Her hair was as black and as lustrous as Susan's, but Jack said, “I've a train to catch,” and pressed on.

The train ride from Los Angeles west to the sleepy community of Hollywood was quite different from the trip from New York to Los Angeles. The car was more like a trolley than a real train—and the landscape was totally different from anything he'd seen before. The train passed through hundreds of acres of fruit groves—oranges and lemons, mostly—and across flat barren fields where tall oil derricks pumped petroleum out of the earth with stately motions. The locomotive and half a dozen cars passed small ranches with cattle and goats, and—to Jack's astonishment—one farm devoted entirely to the raising of ostriches. For the feathers, he thought, remembering Ida Conquest's wardrobe.

Jack leaned far out of the window, with the wind (and the locomotive ashes) in his face, in hopes of recovering from the effects of the alcohol he'd consumed the night before. He bought three bottles of Moxie from a little boy who marched up and down the aisle of the car.

Half an hour later, the train arrived in Hollywood, a quiet town with street after street of small comfortable homes and brown empty hills. If it hadn't been for the strange and rampant vegetation, Jack would have thought he was in some bedroom suburb of New York. It wasn't easy to believe Junius Fane's declaration that this town would rival and surpass Fort Lee as the center of the moving-picture industry in America. Hollywood, California didn't look as if it was prepared to take on much more than a busload of Elks on holiday. But then, considering the notice that Jack saw in the train station with the information on it that alcoholic beverages were not for sale anywhere within the city limits, Jack thought that the Elks might just as well stay away—and the moving-picture industry, too.

Leaving the station, he walked a few blocks north till he came to a wide, divided, dusty, hot thoroughfare. It was called Santa Monica Boulevard, and he picked out a bench that was slightly away from the traffic. He sat down and tried to figure out what to do next. What had happened to him and to his life, he wondered? A stupidly normal childhood in stupid Elmira. A pointless education at Yale where he'd sung in a club and learned to drink and figured out how to pass examinations with a minimum of preparation and had memorized scurrilous lyrics to every song Stephen Foster ever wrote. A dull apprenticeship in the offices of Beaumont, Beaumont, and Beaumont, where almost despite himself he'd learned what he needed to know to carry out the family business when the time came for him to take it over. An essentially dull life, mapped out in the old-fashioned Beaumont way from Beaumont cradle to Beaumont grave. But down the line, in his twenty-seventh year, something had very definitely changed, and the catalyst for that change was a fledgling actress named Susan Bright. As soon as he saw her, things began to happen to him of a sort that had never happened to him before. He ran into bomb-hurling anarchists on the street, he took up false identities, he saved night watchmen from being burned alive, he interfered in armed train robberies, he was arrested for Peeping Tomism—and now here he was, sitting on a green bench in the hot California sun, stuporously staring at a noisy traffic of automobiles and trucks and taxis and trolleys, with no place to lay his head this night.

Behind him, the barren hills north of Hollywood rose forlornly against the pale blue sky. The air was so clear here it was impossible to tell how distant they were. This was a great change from the smoky, soot-filled air of New York. He walked up toward those hills with seven dollars and some change in his pocket. Maybe he could take lodging in a cheap hotel for three or four nights, or perhaps find a cheap rooming house for a week. Out of sight of Santa Monica Boulevard, the streets were completely residential in character. He marched up to the first house he saw and paused a moment before knocking.

A sign beside the door read:

Being none of these things, he knocked. A thin, sour-faced old woman came to the door. She looked as if she never spent a moment of her life in the California sun. Her face was like library paste.

“Have you a room to rent?”

“Are you a movie?” she demanded suspiciously.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You know what I mean. Do you work in the moving pictures?”

“No,” Jack answered truthfully.

“Don't believe you,” snapped the old woman. “You have the face of a liar. Bet you drink, too.”

“When I can get it,” said Jack.

“Won't find lodging around here, then. Don't want movies in decent people's homes, don't want drinkers, don't want people that drive auto-cars twenty miles an hour up and down the streets running down the sober and religious, that's what we don't want, and that's what you are—I can read it in your face like it was written there in your suffering mother's blood—and you won't live
here
.”

With that, she slammed the door in Jack's face.

It wasn't the only such greeting he got. At a dozen other doors he was turned away with a curt, “We don't rent,” or with a more direct, “We don't rent to the likes of you.” The splendor of the sky and the beauty of the flowers were a mockery. Jack had never felt as stranded as he felt this first afternoon in his new home of Hollywood. The westering sun was hot, his head buzzed and throbbed, the Moxie that he'd guzzled on the train was building up uncomfortably in the lower portion of his body, he was stared at by everyone he passed, he was close to penniless, and on top of everything Susan Bright was engaged to Hosmer Collamore and he had seen the two of them locked under the covers of the bed in room 506. The latter made Jack feel worst of all.

He had been steadily working his way up a steep hill, stopping at every house that had a sign advertising rooms for rent, and asking at the others at well. It would have done no good to tell potential landlords that he had nothing to do with the moving-picture industry, but was, in fact, a Wall Street broker. No one would have believed him. The fact that he was not even carrying a satchel was suspicious as well. Eventually he made a final fifty feet up a steep incline and found himself in a state of near total exhaustion, leaning against a post that bore a bell and a sign reading Sunset Boulevard.

It was a wide avenue, unpaved, full of dust, with automobiles parked here and there on either side, like black beetles sleeping in the gathering dusk. He remembered that the building Mr. Fane had found to be the new home of the Cosmic Film Company was on Sunset Boulevard, and he had even written down the number—8400—that Miss Nethersole had provided him. He turned left and walked toward that address.

The street was level, and that was a relief. Houses were sprinkled against the hill that rose immediately upward from the boulevard. The breeze from the ocean was at his back. There was no particular reason to go to the studio, for he had no hope of a pleasant reception there. But there would at least be familiar faces, and a familiar unfriendly face was preferable to a face that was hostile and strange.