Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

by Louis Joseph Vance

Lucinda contributed her first smile since nightfall to the darkness of her bedchamber.

But having smiled, she frowned involuntarily....

No note came from Bellamy the next morning, and nothing transpired in the course of the next several weeks to afford any clue to the riddle; with the upshot that Lucinda thought about her husband a great deal more than she wanted to or had at any time since leaving Chicago. Curiosity being piqued no less than vanity, though she kept assuring herself it was a matter of indifference to her what Bel did or didn't nowadays, invariably the consideration followed that, all the same, it was strange, it wasn't like Bel to treat any woman so rudely.

She would, in those days, have been glad and grateful for some interest so absorbing as to relegate this vexing question to the realm of the immaterial, where rightly it belonged. But, with Summerlad away, nothing much happened with enervating regularity, the most interesting hours Lucinda knew were those spent in her rooms waiting for Lynn to call up on the long distance telephone. This he did every evening, and though she was thus daily provided with exhilarating moments, those that followed always seemed desperately the duller. The truth was, lacking the sense of danger, of flirting with fire, that was intrinsic in their love-making, lacking the sense of doing something that she oughtn't, calmly flouting the rigid code of her caste and having nothing to pay, Lucinda was beginning to find her environment a trifle tiresome. Say what one would, there was a certain cloying sameness about it all.

Somebody once said in her hearing that there wasn't any weather in Southern California but only climate. And it was true that at times the wonder and beauty of everlasting sunlight seemed a poor offset to its monotony; so that Lucinda would sometimes find herself grown a little weary of the sky's dense, inexpressive, day-long blue; and even its nightly extravagance of stars now and again impressed her as being too persistently spectacular, an ostentation on the part of Nature as tasteless as many jewels plastered on a woman's pretty bosom. One rather wanted to recommend the chiffon of clouds....

Then, too, one grew acquainted with certain, definite limitations restricting the amount of amusement to be had of taking active or passive part in the simple, rowdy pleasures of the motion-picture peerage. When one had several times attended the festivities these staged in the public resorts most in favour or in their private homes, one was apt to feel moderately surfeited with jazz of all sorts, mental and moral as well as musical, and a society made up in the main of men who thought it too much trouble to dress and women who as a matter of habit airily consummated the contradiction of being at one and the same time under and over-dressed. And once the novelty of learning to speak a strange tongue had worn off, no great amount of intellectual nourishment was to be extracted of studio shop-talk, which commonly was concerned in the ratio of one to ten with the business of making motion-pictures and with the private, broadly speaking, lives of the people who were making them, lives seldom held worth the discussing when their conduct was decorous.

Though personal liberty of action and freedom of speech be part of the inalienable heritage of the American people, it was the sum of Lucinda's observation that in the studios both were practised to the point of abandon. She considered herself the most liberal-minded of women, the life she had led till now had left her few illusions, she had even been known to enunciate an aphorism in the sense that hypocrisy is a lubricant essential to the mechanism of society: here, however, she remarked, such lubrication was so generally dispensed with that oftentimes the bearings screeched to Heaven.

But Heaven made no sign, and the Hollywood of active and retired tradespeople, to which the studios had brought prosperity beyond its maddest dreams, stuffed its ears and made believe there was nothing to hear.

As for the studios, busy, complacent, and well-content to be spared the troublesome necessity of pretending to be better than they were, they forgot (if, indeed, they ever stopped to think) that they did not constitute the whole of the community, and chuckled openly over a saying that ran their rounds that season, the mot of one of their own wits:

"Are you married? Or do you live in Hollywood?"