Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

by Louis Joseph Vance

The set was a simple angle, where two walls met in an apartment hallway, with a door that opened inward from a living-room set beyond. In this last the big dramatic moment of the play was to be staged, a scene involving Lucinda and her two leading-men, the heavy father and the juvenile, his son, both of whom were understood to be in love with Nelly.

Here, in his bachelor apartment, Nelly was to call at midnight on the father, seeking him without care for appearances in an hour of desperation, to beg him to intervene with the villain of the piece and save her wayward brother from imprisonment on a charge of theft.

The madly infatuated father was to take this opportunity to propose marriage, and Nelly was to accept him, momentarily carried off her feet by the sincerity of his passion as much as by the glamour of his wealth and social position.

While this was going on, Dick, the son, passing in the street, was to catch a glimpse of Nelly's shadow on the window-shade and, wild with jealousy, demand admittance. The father, divining his son's suspicions and desiring to allay them, furthermore at a loss for a fair excuse for refusing to see the boy, was to conduct Nelly to the private hallway and leave here there with the understanding that, while he was letting Dick in at the front door, she was to slip away by the back.

Instead of doing so, Nelly was to linger behind the door and overhear the quarrel between father and son, in the course of which it was to transpire that the former had once offered to wager the latter that he could make the girl his mistress within a given period of time. Whereupon, in revulsion of feeling, Nelly was to confront the two and, while confessing she had planned deliberately to marry either one or the other of them for his money, assert herself to be too good to be the wife of either.

It is illustrative of the topsy-turvey methods of cinema production that no part of this sequence had as yet been photographed except the scenes in the street when Dick, passing on the way home to his own bachelor quarters, looked up and espied Lucinda's shadow; and that Lucinda was now to enact the scene at the doorway before taking part in the living-room scenes which in the photoplay would precede and follow it.

The angle had been set up directly adjoining the living-room set, in order that the door, when Nelly opened it to denounce father and son, might reveal a glimpse of that interior with the two men standing thunderstruck.

Nolan proceeded now to act out in his own person the business which he conceived to be in character for a girl of Nelly's quality in circumstances so contrived as to make voluntary eavesdropping on her part seem constructively defensible. And Lucinda looked on with earnest attention and puckered brows, eager to catch every hint that would help her become a better actress. Her distrust of Nolan extended only to his abilities as a constructive builder of story-telling pictures and a judge of pictorial values. For the very considerable amount of raw power as a pantomime which he indubitably possessed, she had much respect. Prior to invading the realm of motion-pictures, Nolan had served long and arduous apprenticeship as a general utility actor in stock companies of the Middle West and the Pacific Coast. He knew every trick of gesture and expression and how to communicate the secret of their most effective use in the delineation of theatrical as distinguished from real emotion. In this respect his greatest fault was a tendency to overdo things, to let enthusiasm for acting run away with discrimination.

This enthusiasm was running away with him now, he was building the solo scene which Lucinda was to play on lines of broad emotional melodrama widely inconsistent with the situation. Forgetting that, while the conversation assumed to be going on beyond the door was one well calculated to annoy and disgust her whom it concerned, its revelations were after all hardly of a character to break her heart, who was in love with neither of the speakers—indifferent to these considerations, Nolan was, as Nelly, ranting and raving in the angle like one gone half-mad with shock and grief. Yet such was the fire he infused into the performance that for the time being he truly succeeded in perverting Lucinda's grasp of the scene, and won her admiration in spite of her latent dislike. So that when, having exhausted his repertoire of emotional artifice, he stepped out of the camera lines, consulting Lucinda with a glance and the stereotyped enquiry, "See what I want, dear?" she replied without thinking—"You make it most real. I'll do my best"—and stepped into character and the set as the lights blazed on, the cameras began to tick, and Nolan seized his baton of authority, the megaphone which he invariably used while directing, though he had as much need of it now as the cameras had of telescopic lenses.

"Now, dear," he blared through this instrument—"go to it and show us all you've got. Don't be afraid of letting yourself go. Remember, this is your Big Scene, biggest you've got in this story, your one grand little chance to put it over that you're a sure-enough actress.... That's it"—the elderly leading-man ushered Lucinda into the set from the living-room side, laid a finger to his lips, and pointed down the hallway before disappearing—"that's it—nod to show you know what he means. Now you start for the back door. You haven't thought yet it would be a swell idea to stop and listen to all they're saying about you. But now you do, now you hesitate, turn, look back at the door, frowning. Pretty work. Now go back, but not all at once. Make us see you don't think you ought to do this sort of thing, make us see the big struggle with your better nature, and better nature losing out. Good. Now you put your ear to the crack in the door and hear your name. Give a big start and look horrified. You never dreamed men could talk about women like that, you know, you wouldn't have believed Richards and Dick could talk that way about you. Show us horror, dear, and make it strong, you can't make it too strong. Remember: you're just realizing the man you love is such a rotten cad he could make a bet about your virtue. It just makes you feel sick all over——!