'You have a most remarkable memory. Are you sure you have the
right picture--and the right actor?' he asked.
'Am I!' said Pat grimly. 'I can see you right now. Only you
didn't have much time to complain about the uniform because that
wasn't Corker's plan. He always thought you were the toughest ham
in Hollywood to get anything natural out of--and he had a scheme.
He was going to get the heart of the picture shot by noon--before
you even knew you were acting. He turned you around and shoved you
down into that shell hole on your fanny, and yelled "Camera".'
'That's a lie,' said Phil Macedon. 'I GOT down.'
'Then why did you start yelling?' demanded Pat. 'I can still hear
you: "Hey, what's the idea! Is this some -- -- gag? You get me
out of here or I'll walk out on you!"
'--and all the time you were trying to claw your way up the side of
that pit, so damn mad you couldn't see. You'd almost get up and
then you'd slide back and lie there with your face working--till
finally you began to bawl and all this time Bill had four cameras
on you. After about twenty minutes you gave up and just lay there,
heaving. Bill took a hundred feet of that and then he had a couple
of prop men pull you out.'
The police Captain had arrived in the squad car. He stood in the
doorway against the first grey of dawn.
'What you got here, Sergeant? A drunk?'
Sergeant Gaspar walked over to the cell, unlocked it and beckoned
Pat to come out. Pat blinked a moment--then his eyes fell on Phil
Macedon and he shook his finger at him.
'So you see I DO know you,' he said. 'Bill Corker cut that piece
of film and titled it so you were supposed to be a doughboy whose
pal had just been killed. You wanted to climb out and get at the
Germans in revenge, but the shells bursting all around and the
concussions kept knocking you back in.'
'What's it about?' demanded the Captain.
'I want to prove I know this guy,' said Pat. 'Bill said the best
moment in the picture was when Phil was yelling "I've al-READY
broken my first finger nail!" Bill titled it "Ten Huns will go to
hell to shine your shoes!"'
'You've got here "collision with alcohol",' said the Captain
looking at the blotter. 'Let's take these guys down to the
hospital and give them the test.'
'Look here now,' said the actor, with his flashing smile, 'my
name's Phil Macedon.'
The Captain was a political appointee and very young. He
remembered the name and the face but he was not especially
impressed because Hollywood was full of has-beens.
They all got into the squad car at the door.
After the test Macedon was held at the station house until friends
could arrange bail. Pat Hobby was discharged but his car would not
run, so Sergeant Gaspar offered to drive him home.
'Where do you live?' he asked as they started off.
'I don't live anywhere tonight,' said Pat. 'That's why I was
driving around. When a friend of mine wakes up I'll touch him for
a couple of bucks and go to a hotel.'
'Well now,' said Sergeant Gaspar, 'I got a couple of bucks that
ain't working.'
The great mansions of Beverly Hills slid by and Pat waved his hand
at them in salute.
'In the good old days,' he said, 'I used to be able to drop into
some of those houses day or night. And Sunday mornings--'
'Is that all true you said in the station,' Gaspar asked, '--about
how they put him in the hole?'
'Sure, it is,' said Pat. 'That guy needn't have been so upstage.
He's just an old-timer like me.'
MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD
Esquire (April 1941)
I
The swarthy man, with eyes that snapped back and forward on a
rubber band from the rear of his head, answered to the alias of
Dick Dale. The tall, spectacled man who was put together like a
camel without a hump--and you missed the hump--answered to the name
of E. Brunswick Hudson. The scene was a shoeshine stand,
insignificant unit of the great studio. We perceive it through the
red-rimmed eyes of Pat Hobby who sat in the chair beside Director
Dale.
The stand was out of doors, opposite the commissary. The voice of
E. Brunswick Hudson quivered with passion but it was pitched low so
as not to reach passers-by.
'I don't know what a writer like me is doing out here anyhow,' he
said, with vibrations.
Pat Hobby, who was an old-timer, could have supplied the answer,
but he had not the acquaintance of the other two.
'Use that saddle soap.'
'Funny!' thundered E., 'It's SUS-pect! Here against my better
judgement I write just what you tell me--and the office tells me to
get out because we can't seem to agree.'
'That's polite,' explained Dick Dale. 'What do you want me to do--
knock you down?'
E. Brunswick Hudson removed his glasses.
'Try it!' he suggested. 'I weigh a hundred and sixty-two and I
haven't got an ounce of flesh on me.' He hesitated and redeemed
himself from this extremity. 'I mean FAT on me.'
'Oh, to hell with that!' said Dick Dale contemptuously, 'I can't
mix it up with you. I got to figure this picture. You go back
East and write one of your books and forget it.' Momentarily he
looked at Pat Hobby, smiling as if HE would understand, as if
anyone would understand except E. Brunswick Hudson. 'I can't tell
you all about pictures in three weeks.'
Hudson replaced his spectacles.
'When I DO write a book,' he said, 'I'll make you the laughing
stock of the nation.'
He withdrew, ineffectual, baffled, defeated. After a minute Pat
spoke.
'Those guys can never get the idea,' he commented. 'I've never
seen one get the idea and I been in this business, publicity and
script, for twenty years.'
'You on the lot?' Dale asked.
Pat hesitated.
'Just finished a job,' he said.
That was five months before.
'What screen credits you got?' Dale asked.
'I got credits going all the way back to 1920.'
'Come up to my office,' Dick Dale said, 'I got something I'd like
to talk over--now that bastard is gone back to his New England
farm. Why do they have to get a New England farm--with the whole
West not settled?'
Pat gave his second-to-last dime to the bootblack and climbed down
from the stand.
II
We are in the midst of technicalities.
'The trouble is this composer Reginald de Koven didn't have any
colour,' said Dick Dale. 'He wasn't deaf like Beethoven or a
singing waiter or get put in jail or anything. All he did was
write music and all we got for an angle is that song O Promise Me.
We got to weave something around that--a dame promises him
something and in the end he collects.'
'I want time to think it over in my mind,' said Pat. 'If Jack
Berners will put me on the picture--'
'He'
ll put you on,' said Dick Dale. 'From now on I'm picking my
own writers. What do you get--fifteen hundred?' He looked at
Pat's shoes, 'Seven-fifty?'
Pat stared at him blankly for a moment; then out of thin air,
produced his best piece of imaginative fiction in a decade.
'I was mixed up with a producer's wife,' he said, 'and they ganged
up on me. I only get three-fifty now.'
In some ways it was the easiest job he had ever had. Director Dick
Dale was a type that, fifty years ago, could be found in any
American town. Generally he was the local photographer, usually he
was the originator of small mechanical contrivances and a leader in
bizarre local movements, almost always he contributed verse to the
local press. All the most energetic embodiments of this 'Sensation
Type' had migrated to Hollywood between 1910 and 1930, and there
they had achieved a psychological fulfilment inconceivable in any
other time or place. At last, and on a large scale, they were able
to have their way. In the weeks that Pat Hobby and Mabel Hatman,
Mr Dale's script girl, sat beside him and worked on the script, not
a movement, not a word went into it that was not Dick Dale's
coinage. Pat would venture a suggestion, something that was
'Always good'.
'Wait a minute! Wait a minute!' Dick Dale was on his feet, his
hands outspread. 'I seem to see a dog.' They would wait, tense
and breathless, while he saw a dog.
'Two dogs.'
A second dog took its place beside the first in their obedient
visions.
'We open on a dog on a leash--pull the camera back to show another
dog--now they're snapping at each other. We pull back further--the
leashes are attached to tables--the tables tip over. See it?'
Or else, out of a clear sky.
'I seem to see De Koven as a plasterer's apprentice.'
'He goes to Santa Anita and plasters the walls, singing at his
work. Take that down, Mabel.' He continued on . . .
In a month they had the requisite hundred and twenty pages.
Reginald de Koven, it seemed, though not an alcoholic, was too fond
of 'The Little Brown Jug'. The father of the girl he loved had
died of drink, and after the wedding when she found him drinking
from the Little Brown Jug, nothing would do but that she should go
away, for twenty years. He became famous and she sang his songs as
Maid Marian but he never knew it was the same girl.
The script, marked 'Temporary Complete. From Pat Hobby' went up to
the head office. The schedule called for Dale to begin shooting in
a week.
Twenty-four hours later he sat with his staff in his office, in an
atmosphere of blue gloom. Pat Hobby was the least depressed. Four
weeks at three-fifty, even allowing for the two hundred that had
slipped away at Santa Anita, was a far cry from the twenty cents he
had owned on the shoeshine stand.
'That's pictures, Dick,' he said consolingly. 'You're up--you're
down--you're in, you're out. Any old-timer knows.'
'Yes,' said Dick Dale absently. 'Mabel, phone that E. Brunswick
Hudson. He's on his New England farm--maybe milking bees.'
In a few minutes she reported.
'He flew into Hollywood this morning, Mr Dale. I've located him at
the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.'
Dick Dale pressed his ear to the phone. His voice was bland and
friendly as he said:
'Mr Hudson, there was one day here you had an idea I liked. You
said you were going to write it up. It was about this De Koven
stealing his music from a sheepherder up in Vermont. Remember?'
'Yes.'
'Well, Berners wants to go into production right away, or else we
can't have the cast, so we're on the spot, if you know what I mean.
Do you happen to have that stuff?'
'You remember when I brought it to you?' Hudson asked. 'You kept
me waiting two hours--then you looked at it for two minutes. Your
neck hurt you--I think it needed wringing. God, how it hurt you.
That was the only nice thing about that morning.'
'In picture business--'
'I'm so glad you're stuck. I wouldn't tell you the story of The
Three Bears for fifty grand.'
As the phones clicked Dick Dale turned to Pat.
'Goddam writers!' he said savagely. 'What do we pay you for?
Millions--and you write a lot of tripe I can't photograph and get
sore if we don't read your lousy stuff! How can a man make
pictures when they give me two bastards like you and Hudson. How?
How do you think--you old whiskey bum!'
Pat rose--took a step toward the door. He didn't know, he said.
'Get out of here!' cried Dick Dale. 'You're off the payroll. Get
off the lot.'
Fate had not dealt Pat a farm in New England, but there was a caf�
just across from the studio where bucolic dreams blossomed in
bottles if you had the money. He did not like to leave the lot,
which for many years had been home for him, so he came back at six
and went up to his office. It was locked. He saw that they had
already allotted it to another writer--the name on the door was E.
Brunswick Hudson.
He spent an hour in the commissary, made another visit to the bar,
and then some instinct led him to a stage where there was a bedroom
set. He passed the night upon a couch occupied by Claudette
Colbert in the fluffiest ruffles only that afternoon.
Morning was bleaker, but he had a little in his bottle and almost a
hundred dollars in his pocket. The horses were running at Santa
Anita and he might double it by night.
On his way out of the lot he hesitated beside the barber shop but
he felt too nervous for a shave. Then he paused, for from the
direction of the shoeshine stand he heard Dick Dale's voice.
'Miss Hatman found your other script, and it happens to be the
property of the company.'
E. Brunswick Hudson stood at the foot of the stand.
'I won't have my name used,' he said.
'That's good. I'll put her name on it. Berners thinks it's great,
if the De Koven family will stand for it. Hell--the sheepbreeder
never would have been able to market those tunes anyhow. Ever hear
of any sheepherder drawing down jack from ASCAP?'
Hudson took off his spectacles.
'I weigh a hundred and sixty-three--'
Pat moved in closer.
'Join the army,' said Dale contemptuously, 'I got no time for
mixing it up. I got to make a picture.' His eyes fell on Pat.
'Hello old-timer.'
'Hello Dick,' said Pat smiling. Then knowing the advantage of the
psychological moment he took his chance.
'When do we work?' he said.
'How much?' Dick Dale asked the shoeshine boy--and to Pat, 'It's
all done. I promised Mabel a screen credit for a long time. Look
me up some day when you got an idea.'
He hailed someone by the barber shop and hurried off. Hudson and
Hobby, men of letters who had never met, regarded each other.
There were tears of anger in Hudson's eyes.
'Authors get a tou
gh break out here,' Pat said sympathetically.
'They never ought to come.'
'Who'd make up the stories--these feebs?'
'Well anyhow, not authors,' said Pat. 'They don't want authors.
They want writers--like me.'
PAT HOBBY'S COLLEGE DAYS
Esquire (May 1941)
I
The afternoon was dark. The walls of Topanga Canyon rose sheer on
either side. Get rid of it she must. The clank clank in the back
seat frightened her. Evylyn did not like the business at all. It
was not what she came out here to do. Then she thought of Mr
Hobby. He believed in her, trusted her--and she was doing this for
him.
But the mission was arduous. Evylyn Lascalles left the canyon and
cruised along the inhospitable shores of Beverly Hills. Several
times she turned up alleys, several times she parked beside vacant
lots--but always some pedestrian or loiterer threw her into a mood
of nervous anxiety. Once her heart almost stopped as she was eyed
with appreciation--or was it suspicion--by a man who looked like a
detective.
--He had no right to ask me this, she said to herself. Never
again. I'll tell him so. Never again.
Night was fast descending. Evylyn Lascalles had never seen it come
down so fast. Back to the canyon then, to the wild, free life.
She drove up a paint-box corridor which gave its last pastel shades
to the day. And reached a certain security at a bend overlooking
plateau land far below.
Here there could be no complication. As she threw each article
over the cliff it would be as far removed from her as if she were
in a different state of the Union.
Miss Lascalles was from Brooklyn. She had wanted very much to come
to Hollywood and be a secretary in pictures--now she wished that
she had never left her home.
On with the job though--she must part with her cargo--as soon as
this next car passed the bend . . .
II
. . . Meanwhile her employer, Pat Hobby, stood in front of the
barber shop talking to Louie, the studio bookie. Pat's four weeks
at two-fifty would be up tomorrow and he had begun to have that
harassed and aghast feeling of those who live always on the edge of
solvency.
'Four lousy weeks on a bad script,' he said. 'That's all I've had
in six months.'
'How do you live?' asked Louie--without too much show of interest.
'I don't live. The days go by, the weeks go by. But who cares?
Who cares--after twenty years.'
'You had a good time in your day,' Louie reminded him.
Pat looked after a dress extra in a shimmering lam� gown.
'Sure,' he admitted, 'I had three wives. All anybody could want.'
'You mean THAT was one of your wives?' asked Louie.
Pat peered after the disappearing figure.
'No-o. I didn't say THAT was one. But I've had plenty of them
feeding out of my pocket. Not now though--a man of forty-nine is
not considered human.'
'You've got a cute little secretary,' said Louie. 'Look Pat, I'll
give you a tip--'
'Can't use it,' said Pat, 'I got fifty cents.'
'I don't mean that kind of tip. Listen--Jack Berners wants to make
a picture about U.W.C. because he's got a kid there that plays
basketball. He can't get a story. Why don't you go over and see
the Athaletic Superintendent named Doolan at U.W.C.? That
superintendent owes me three grand on the nags, and he could maybe
give you an idea for a college picture. And then you bring it back
and sell it to Berners. You're on salary, ain't you?'
'Till tomorrow,' said Pat gloomily.
'Go and see Jim Kresge that hangs out in the Campus Sport Shop.