Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

by Louis Joseph Vance

Nolan grinned sheepishly and scratched his head. "I guess we're a terrible lot of roughnecks out here on the Coast, Miss Lee—not onto fine points like that. But it's all right: we'll change the subtitles to read luncheon instead of tea."

"But you've just shown me lunching at another restaurant. It isn't reasonable to make me eat two luncheons in one day."

"That's easy. We'll make the subtitle read: 'Luncheon at the Ritz the next day.'"

"I hate to keep on objecting, Mr. Nolan, but the situation depends on these people meeting at tea the very day they lunched together."

"Well, if we can't fix it with a subtitle, we'll have to change the situation, then. We can't go back and shoot those scenes all over again, it'd cost too darn much; and anyway we haven't got time."

Having kept the Linda Lee organization awaiting his convenience for five weeks after the date upon which he had agreed to begin directing for it, Nolan was now with the utmost sang-froid trying to jam through in one month an undertaking for which he would, going his normal gait, require all of two; partly because he was being paid by the job instead of by the week, in part because his services for the next picture had not been bespoken and he was flirting with a bid from the East, an offer contingent upon his being able to leave Los Angeles not later than a set date, finally and not in the least part for another reason altogether, a peculiarly private one.

He wasn't happy in his present circumstances, his vanity was deeply wounded, and the wound was not likely to heal so long as he must continue in the humiliating position to which he had been reduced by Lucinda's insusceptibility to his charms of person. Nolan had all along looked forward to this engagement with considerable animation, because Lucinda was a type new to him and he counted on learning about women from her, too. The trouble was, he hadn't in the least suspected that she was to prove not only new but unique in his experience. He knew what it was to be resisted, and didn't mind that so much, finding it at worst flattering. Once or twice since becoming a director he had even met with the appearance of indifference, and had had the fun of showing it up for what it really was. But this was the first time in many years that any woman with whom he had been brought into professional contact had proved not so much indifferent to him as unconscious that he boasted any attractions calling for even such negative emotion. Nolan needed some time to appreciate that this unprecedented and outrageous thing could really be, and when he did he was hurt to his soul's marrow. By nature buoyant, he found himself growing morose; by reputation the best-tempered of directors, he heard himself snapping at his subordinates like the veriest martinet of them all. Worse yet, Lucinda seemed not even to reckon him a genius at his calling. An unheard-of state of affairs and one intolerable to a man of his kidney. He wanted more than he had ever wanted anything to be quit of her for good and all and at the earliest possible moment.

For the indignities which he felt had thus been put upon him in a fashion wholly uncalled-for there was, of course, reparation proffered in Fanny Lontaine's indisputable awareness of him. And even as Lucinda, Fanny too was clearly "class." On the other hand, she had a husband, undeniably an ass, puffed up out of all reason with self-importance, but still and for all that a husband. Besides, having set his heart on a star, Nolan conceived it to be inconsistent with his dignity to content himself with a satellite. So he sulked and could not be comforted.

Necessarily the picture suffered through the languishing of his interest; and Nolan, foreseeing the professional and public verdict, did his best to forestall it by privately letting it be known he'd been a dumb-bell to tackle the job of making an actress out of a rank amateur, only for the jack involved he would never have tried it. And then the story they'd asked him to do—! One of these society things, you know: no punch, no speed, no drama, nothing but five reels of stalling, clothes and close-ups, padding for a lot of lines; a regular illustrated dialogue. What could you do with a story like that, anyway?

More openly, in the course of time, as he grew acutely self-conscious of inability to cope with what he chose to deny, the dramatic possibilities intrinsic in the story of a father who falls in love with the woman loved by his own son, a woman whom he has sworn to expose as unworthy to be his son's wife, Nolan spoke of the production in the studio as "this piece of cheese."