"Who, me? Naw, naw, little lady; quit your kidding. I don't know enough. Me try to sit in with sure-enough brains? Say! I seen the way you looked when I wanted to know who wrote Paradise Lost. No: Isadore Zinn belongs in with the rest of the bunch that's been good enough up to about now but's got to be junked before pictures will get a chanst to be any better'n they ought to be. Oh, I ain't got no kick coming; I've made mine and put it away where nothing real mean's ever going to happen to it; and when the sky falls on Hollywood it'll find me some other place, playing pinochle and absolutely innocent of the entire fillum business."
"You don't seriously believe that will ever happen."
"It'll happen just as quick's Wall Street wakes up to the way it's been gypped—and it's moaning and tossing in its sleep right now. Wall Street put up its good money because pictures made half-way on the level earned more and earned it quicker'n any other investment they could find. Wall Street didn't worry none about what graft was being gotten away with as long's they thought they was going to get their money back and a hundred per cent. profit every so often. But that was yesterday, when audiences would shell out cheerful and sit through anything because pictures moved. Today they're still lining up at the box-office, but only because they can't believe the day won't never come when they'll maybe see something worth their time and coin. Tomorrow they'll be saying, 'Show me!' before they'll dig up as much's a thin dime. And that's when Wall Street's due to tumble to it, they's only one way for it to save its investments in the fillum game, and that is take hold of it and run it like a honest-to-goodness business. And when that happens, when the fancy salaries get pared down to the quick, and the good graft's all gone, and there ain't no way no more for the assistant property-man to charge the upkeep of his lady-friend's limousine to overhead, and the director what wants money to build ancient Rome with and burn it down for a showy interlude to a society comedy will only get the hearty laugh—why, along about that time a terrible lot of people are going to find out California's a cold, hard place, spite of the climate and all, and a heap of highly hand-painted automobiles is going to be dumped on the used-car market in Los Angeles."
Some disturbing mental echo of this screed one day inspired Lucinda to devote several painful hours to totting up her bank account, a duty which she had been religiously forgetting for months, and whose performance brought to light the fact that she had already given Harry Lontaine cheques to his order in the sum of two-hundred and ten thousand dollars, to be cashed by him and deposited to the credit of Linda Lee Inc.
If she felt slightly dashed by this discovery, it was less because of the money involved—for she had from the first been prepared to pay more dearly for her whistle than Lontaine had declared it would cost—than because the end was not yet, the first picture remained unfinished, many heavy payments on account of it were still to be met, and her private extravagances, added to the financing of Linda Lee Inc., had left little worth mentioning of the money which Harford Willis, at her requisition, had paid into her drawing account in New York.
It was now necessary to write Willis and ask him to find her more money; and that involved, as a matter of simple courtesy to that old friend and a devoted steward of her interests, explanations which she would much rather not make just yet.
But her only other course was to consult Lontaine in the faint hope that out of the sums entrusted to him there might be enough left in the company's treasury to see it through the present production. And this she hesitated to do because of an intuitive feeling that he would take this as directly challenging his competency to handle her money if not his good faith. Lontaine was such a sensitive soul.... However, he spared her the pain of deciding to do nothing, for the next time they met he blandly advised Lucinda that the company could do with another twenty thousand as soon as she could find time to draw the cheque; and on learning that it would have to wait a few days, or until she could hear from Willis, seemed considerably discountenanced; or else fancy misled her.
As for that, it might have been merely her fancy that Lontaine thenceforward betrayed a disposition to keep out of her way, and when he couldn't was at pains to iron out the wrinkles in his temper before venturing to respond to her always friendly advances; that perceptible hesitation prefaced the utterances Lontaine addressed to her, constraint had crept into their relations, till then so easy and cordial, and added opacity was to be remarked in the stare of those introspective blue eyes.
Since it was unthinkable that she should be long embarrassed, for want of ready money, or that Lontaine should believe she could be, Lucinda couldn't imagine why he should show such signals of a mind perturbed, and could only do her best to dwell upon the matter not at all. Heaven knew she had other worries a-plenty to cope with!
It was annoying, for example, to feel that one was expected to feign blindness to what was going on under one's very nose, namely Fanny's essays in the ancient and vulgar art of vamping, with Bel in the rôle of voluntary victim—or a vastly better actor than he had ever before shown himself to be. Nor did the quite transparent naivete of Fanny's methods, as Lucinda viewed them, cause patience to be any the less a labored virtue. If you asked Lucinda, Hollywood had added no finish to Fanny's cosmopolitan technique of flirtation, but rather the reverse; in this respect, as in too many others, Fanny seemed to have taken on a shade too much the colour of her environment. One looked and made allowances for the crudely obvious in women educated by directors to believe that certain elementary gestures (for which see any screen) were surely efficacious with men of every class alike. But Fanny knew better than to make herself grotesque.