“Is that so?” said Bunny, a trifle startled.
“Sure thing! He’s nuts on this red-hunting business, and the pinks are worse than the reds, he says. I’ve been worried about you.”
“Never mind,” said Bunny, perceiving that this was a “josh,” such as helps to make life tolerable for idle men, young and old. “Dad will spend two hundred thousand and get me out again.”
“Come to think of it, I guess Verne would chip in—wouldn’t he, Annabelle?”
“None of my guests ever stay in jail,” replied the star.
“They phone to Papa, and he phones to the chief of police, who lets them out right away.”
She said this without smiling; and Harvey Manning remarked, “You see, Ross, Annabelle has a literal mind.”
IV
Yes, that was the truth about this bright luminary of the screen, as Bunny came to observe it; she had a literal mind. All the poetry and romance the public imagined about her—that was in the public’s eye, so to say. All that Annabelle had to contribute was a youthful figure and a pliable face; the highly paid directors did the rest. She produced pictures as a matter of business, and her talk was of production costs, and percentages on foreign sales, just as if it had been an oil well. That was why she got along with Vernon Roscoe, who also had a literal mind. A primrose by the river’s brim a yellow primrose was to him, and to Annabelle it was a decoration for an “interior,” or a background on “location.”
There was a certain grim honesty about this, as Bunny discovered; it was Annabelle’s desire to be an actress rather than a mistress. “By Jees,” Verne would proclaim to his guests, “it’s cost me eight million dollars to make a movie queen out of this baby.” And the thirty year old baby had the dream that some day she would achieve a masterpiece, that would earn this eight million and vindicate her honor. Meantime, she paid installments by taking care of Verne—so publicly that it was quite touching, and respectable according to the strictest bourgeois standards. If the oil magnate had ever had the idea that in taking to his bosom a movie star he was going to lead a wild and roystering life, he had made a sad mistake, for he was the most hen-pecked of all “butter and egg men.”