Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

She could have endured and even come to enjoy the strain of satisfying Paul as an actress had there been less to do as trouble-shooter. The ancient contrast appeared again in full force—that most people liked her a great deal while few could like Paul except with a degree of partisanship that made them just as difficult to handle themselves. (Among these few were several actors and a negro set-boy for whom he had performed some unexplained kindness.) The trouble was that there were so many more possible antagonisms on a movie stage than in a theatre—so many more rules, written and unwritten, to be despised and challenged; so many more taboos to tilt against, so many more egos to affront. Typical, perhaps, was the row with the musicians. The scene called for Carey to play the piano, which she did on a silent keyboard while a professional pianist dubbed in from the background. Paul’s first complaint was that the pianist played too well; after a second try, Paul complained that he played too badly. Paul then went to the piano, played the thing himself, and declared himself thoroughly satisfied. “There’s all the difference,” he said, “between a non-professional playing as well as he can and a professional deliberately playing less well than he can.” Perhaps there was, but there also happened to be Petrillo’s union that would not let Paul play at all. It took an hour or more to convince him that he could not fight Petrillo, and several days to appease the musicians who considered themselves slighted by the whole incident.

Then there was his refusal to admit strangers to the set and his rudeness to a New York executive (and principal Majestic stockholder) who assumed that rules did not apply to him. There were also scenes with the camera-man, who regarded his machine as a Copernican sun round which the picture should revolve, whereas to Paul it was an Einsteinian eye that must move relatively to the actors all the time. Furthermore, Paul wanted to select the lens and teach the man his job; as he was a veteran who had worked for Essanay in nickelodeon days he took this very ill indeed, and the fact that Paul knew all the mechanics of camera work did not mollify him. The sultriest arguments they had were over Paul’s frequent use of dolly and boom, which caused extra trouble and higher costs. Yet in another way Paul’s methods were too economical to be popular; both camera crew and stage-hands liked a director whose many takes gave them plenty of idleness on the set. But Paul was often satisfied with the first take, and took a second only for protection. His procedure was to rehearse and rehearse, with the camera going through all the motions of the shooting and the camera-man doing what he was told instead of presiding over a mystery.

But of all disputes the fiercest were with the writers, since to begin with, Paul had disliked both story and script. The former, supposed to be based on a novel, had really retained little but the title, and this, for all that it signified, might just as well (had they not been used before) have been Gone With the Wind or If Winter Comes. As for the script, Paul claimed it was intolerably wordy; “Nobody talks like that in life”, he kept on saying, though with scornful inconsistency he could agree that many people did, if they attended movies often enough. A rewrite, made after heated conferences, resulted in a second version hardly more to his taste, but by that time the shooting date was near and there was no time for a further rewrite. Nor, to be frank, was Paul at all anxious to have one. He was perfectly satisfied to doctor the script himself as he went along, thinning out dialogue, changing background, inventing incidents, introducing new facets to character, and generally playing God. The writers had every reason to hate him, but since also they were pretty good writers they were even fascinated by him a little, as by a cross unlikely to be inflicted on them again. One of them took him aside after an especially stormy argument and said, almost affectionately: “Look, Mr. Saffron, you haven’t been here long —you don’t know the way things work. Maybe, as you say, there’s too much dialogue in pictures, but what the hell do you expect us to do— turn out a script full of stage directions? You know nobody ever takes any notice of what a writer wants actors to DO—only of what he gives them to SAY. Ever seen a top executive looking over a script? Unless you can make him yell ‘Boy, oh boy, what dialogue!’ you’re out of luck… So you see how it is, Mr. Saffron?”

“All I see,” Paul answered, “is that Mendelssohn would have been in trouble here for writing Lieder ohne Worte.”

The writers laughed and appreciated him more for this and other sallies than he did them for their considerable patience. There was no doubt that he had never really liked writers since the day he had ceased to be one himself. Of course he would show respect to literary eminence, and in the presence of business men he could even feel distant kinship with any writer at all, as with any muralist or trumpet player or landscape gardener; but as a rule he was on constant guard. Stage playwrights especially he had always been wary of, since they had a relatively privileged status and even he could not cut and change their work without a semblance of permission. But his more recent and heightened hostility had actually sprung from a war-time neurosis; in the prison camp he had seen a few writers occasionally writing, and their self- containedness, their ability to work with a pencil and a scrap of paper in relative secrecy and in disregard of events, had rubbed raw his own grandiose frustrations. It was thus in part a pathological grudge, and now the chance to pay it off was unique. Always quick to grasp a situation before he knew the reasons for it, he had soon sensed that Majestic’s professional scenarists, even when high-salaried, carried none of the prestige of the older kinds of writer; so that at long last he had the breed where he wanted it—in subservience to the over-all authority of the show-maker —i.e. himself. It was the one point on which, without realizing it, he was in full agreement with the studio heads—though they, of course, set themselves above him with an equal degree of arrogance.

Finally, he was at odds with the publicity department and the columnists who wrote movie stuff for newspapers and fan magazines. He did not trouble to understand their function, but let them know that even if he did he would probably despise it. On first reading gossip items that he and Carey were contemplating a reconciliation, he had snorted contemptuously, and when asked if it were true had denied it with an emphasis that might have sounded ungallant had not Carey been with him to laugh and back him up. But of course the rumour stayed in circulation, only weakened slightly by an alternative theory that Carey was interested in her leading man. She was; she liked Greg Wilson very much. They often dined and were seen together.

Greg was a big, jovial forty-seven, and quite sensationally handsome. By careful make-up and constant attention to physique he had been playing parts of twenty-five-year-olds so long that there was a certain puppy quality in his entire behaviour and personality. Two marriages had failed, possibly because he was less exciting in life than on the screen; he had now for several years been alone, popular, and extremely eligible. He was also Majestic’s biggest and therefore most privileged money-maker, playing golf with the studio heads and fringeing on the kind of society that did not normally admit movie people at all. A likeable fellow, whose love scenes were so wooden that women imagined what it must be like to teach him. He found it hard to memorize more than a few lines at a time. When it was conveyed to him (not over-subtly) that Paul had not wanted him in the picture, he said: “For Pete’s sake, why should he? I don’t blame him.” When he met Carey he made it almost too clear that he was smitten; actually he wasn’t, but he enjoyed thinking he was. He had all the bluff open-air reactions to most things that his screen characters had—except one reaction that nobody could have foreseen and that had certainly not been foreshadowed in any part he had ever played. This was a curious attachment that he developed to Paul. Paul, he went around telling people, was the greatest director he had ever known. “Look!” he exclaimed, when he saw the daily rushes. “Would you ever believe that’s ME?” There was something warm and engaging about him, and Carey found him a constant ally in her efforts to smooth out troubles that arose from Paul’s behaviour on and off the set.