"I presume that's what you'll do, if the directors persist in making it impossible for you to make any money."
A twinkle kindled in the beady eyes, a rougishly confidential grin formed on the fleshy features. "Now, listen, Miss Lee: I never told you I wasn't making money, did I? It's the jack directors waste on me I'm kicking about. Any time things get so bad you can't give one of them megaphone nurses his head and still get your production cost back and something over, I got it all framed so I can ease out and never be missed."
And when Lucinda had obliged by voicing a polite doubt that such a thing as this could ever come to pass, Zinn concluded with grim humour: "I got everything all set to sell the studio to the county for an insane asylum; then nobody in Hollywood won't never know the difference."
Running true to the form thus forecast, Jacques kept the Summerlad company away so long that its return found the first Linda Lee production in full swing, with Barry Nolan in command, Lucinda playing the supple puppet of his whim from sun to sun, Fanny demurely walking through the feminine part of second importance, and Lontaine functioning at the peak of his capacity as executive genius of the organization and showing the strain of it all in his prominent blue eyes.
Why it should be so hard on him nobody seemed to know and Lontaine was too busy to explain; while Lucinda, in the prepossession of her anxiety to give a good account of herself before the camera, carelessly accepted that prodigious display of activity, that mien of unremitting abstraction, as phenomena doubtless common to men of affairs, and never paused to wonder why Lontaine need be so fretted and fretful when everything was now in the hands of Nolan and his assistants, who did pretty much as they pleased anyway, as a rule consulting Lontaine if at all only after acting on their own initiative and leaving to his office merely the routine of financial matters.
Nevertheless Lontaine was ever the first of the Linda Lee forces to show up at the studio in the morning, the last to leave it at night, and between whiles kept incessantly on the go: trotting from his desk to the stage to give Nolan the benefit of advice which was invariably attended to with much patience and disregarded with more promptitude as soon as its source turned his back; to the laboratory to run a wise eye over negative newly developed as it came dripping from the vats to be stretched to dry upon huge revolving drums; to the studio of the technical director, to badger that competent and long-suffering gentleman about sets and their dressing; to Zinn's sanctum overlooking the "lot," where that old-timer sat spying out on the comings and goings of his employees and spinning his endless schemes of avarice, but ever ready to lend an ear and give cunning counsel to a tenant who paid his rent on the nail; to the projection-rooms to view the rushes; back to the stage to flatter Lucinda, felicitate Nolan, and buttonhole subordinate players for earnest conferences apart concerning their performances—this last a habit which, since it afforded the actors a chance to talk about themselves, earned Lontaine the loving gratitude of all hands, barring the directorial staff whose job it was to undo all that he did, were it well done or ill, for the sake of morale and to preserve unimpaired the precious prestige of Barry Nolan.
At other times members of the cast loafing about the lot while they waited to be called to work on the stage, would observe the president of Linda Lee Inc., at the window of his tiny office in the administration building, brooding portentously over documents of legal aspect, or with fine flourishes of the fountain-pen affixing his hand to those cheques which, issuing forth in a steady stream, kept the treasury always at low ebb no matter how often or how generously Lucinda might replenish it.
Neither did the silver-and-blue car know overmuch rest. In view of the man's ubiquity in the studio, it was surprising how often Lontaine was to be seen speeding down Sunset Boulevard, bound for the business centre of Los Angeles, to other studios for mysterious conferences with local somebodies who had no known interest in the destinies of Linda Lee Inc., or to objectives whose nature remained a close secret between Lontaine, his chauffeur, and his God.
To all these picturesque symptoms of hustle and bounce, so little in character with the Briton of tradition, his wife played silent but attentive audience; though oftentimes her pretty eyes would light up with an unspoken comment too pungent to be wasted and, discreetly questing a sympathetic confidant would find it without fail in Barry Nolan, who learned to watch for that look whenever one of Lontaine's antics made a more than everyday appeal to his sense of humour.
Irish both by descent and profession, Nolan had at least that sense conspicuously developed. What others he possessed of which as much might be asserted, was a question which came to occupy many of Lucinda's spare moments. She was not at all disposed to be hypercritical, in the beginning, she had yet to cultivate conceit in her abilities as an actress, she knew that she knew little more than nothing about the manufacture of motion-pictures; and Summerlad had so highly recommended Nolan she inclined to suspect there must be something radically wrong with her judgment. With all this, she couldn't pretend to account for Nolan's high place in the hierarchy of the cinema, unless a sprightly and affectionate disposition, a fetching grin, infectious verve, impudence without end, and a distinctly indicated vein of genius at crap-shooting, summed up the essential qualifications of a director who pretended to earn a wage of twenty-five thousand dollars per production. Certainly nothing that Nolan was contributing to this present picture, in the way of action, business, sense of dramatic proportion and feeling for pictorial values, appealed as in any way inspired—except occasionally by a retentive memory.