The Englishman’s Boy

soiled angels wrapped in a dirty cloud. The sea blurs; Rachel’s face shines luminous behind a veil of moisture. Like gauze on a lens, it softens her.

Before I know what I am saying, I tell her I love her.

She lights a cigarette, the flame cradled in her hand. “This isn’t like you, Harry,” is her only comment.

“You said not to plan so much. It just came out. Maybe I’ve adopted your style – out of control.”

“Or maybe you just want somebody to take over for you. Tell you what to do.” Her gaze is fixed on the beating waves. “I can’t do that. What I am willing to do is take care of the bills for your mother until you settle this thing.”

“I’m not broke yet,” I say.

“All right, then do something. Don’t play helpless.” She stubs out the cigarette. “I’m going for a swim. Think about it. Decide.”

I avert my eyes, listen to the rustle of her disrobing. Each article of clothing she discards, the strength of her perfume increases. Then the scent of her is gone, the void filled by the poorhouse-soup smell of the Pacific, suggestively warm, vaguely salty, vaguely vegetable. I wait, but not as long as I should have, stealing a glimpse of her as she covers the last few yards of sand to the waves, her outline bleary in the rain, delicate, moving – a small ghost.

I had wanted to reach out and touch her. For an instant, I had half-believed she wanted to be touched. But a moment’s cheap daring fails, even in the mist. Do something, she said. But what? Ambiguous. Wasn’t it?

So I do something. That night I go to my office in Best Chance Studios and clean out my desk, sit down and type out a letter of resignation. My letter isn’t righteous or impolite, it simply treats what happened at the party as if it hadn’t, like a fart at a formal dinner. Not a mention. The best exit I can manage from a bad situation. I only hope it will work.

Dear Mr. Chance,

I regret to inform you that I am no longer able to continue in your employ. Our last meeting impressed upon me that I have neither the talent nor the experience to undertake a scenario for a picture of the scope, breadth, and magnitude you envision. I am sorry that I have failed you in a project which is so near and dear to your heart, but I am also confident you will find someone who is far better equipped to undertake it than am I.

I have left the keys to the car in my desk, and the car in the lot. All interviews, notes, and the carbon copy of the rough draft of the scenario in my possession will be returned to you under separate cover by registered mail. Please consider my resignation effective as of this date. I am sorry I could not have been of greater service.

Yours sincerely,

Harry Vincent

Closeted in my apartment I wait to see what Chance’s reaction to this will be. No letter, no ringing phone. I haunt my window, watching the street, expecting Fitz, but Fitz doesn’t come. Young women in cloche hats parade back and forth on the sidewalk, walking furry handfuls of dog straining on leashes fine as fishing line. Mexican gardeners trim little squares of lawn in front of the apartments lining the street, their lawn mowers tossing spumes of green. The milkman, the postman, the iceman come and go. By noon the sun roasts the road and makes the softening asphalt smell like bad meat cooking, everybody but me pulls down their window blinds to hold the heat at bay. I leave mine up so I have warning of Fitz’s arrival.

A little after six the telephone operators, the hairdressers, the manicurists, the waitresses, the salesgirls bustle by. In the passageways of my building girls heft packages and struggle with keys. Doors bang shut, radios start to squawk, the tantalizing smell of frying pork chop and hamburger reach me as I sit smoking at my window, cocking an eye for Fitz. Time passes and turns the road briefly golden, the sky a turquoise swimming pool of bliss. The sun dips, the boulevard slides into grey, the horizon blushes pink before freckling itself with pale evening stars. I doze in my chair, jerking awake to every sound outside, my head turning to the street before my eyes have opened. No Fitz.

After four or five days of this, I begin to think maybe he isn’t coming, maybe I’m getting away with it. I start to look for another job. But I’m still a nervous kid playing hooky, looking around corners, half-afraid of bumping into the truant officer, Denis Fitzsimmons.

I know one or two people at most of the studios, but they are lowly types without the pull to snooker me employment the way Rachel Gold did. I make the rounds at Fox, Metro, Goldwyn Company, Louis B. Mayer Productions, Universal, Famous Players-Lasky, United Artists and Warner Brothers. Sure, I have experience, but experience writing titles. Any hack can write titles, titles are work for burned-out, boozy newspaper has-beens. The studios want creative types. Somebody with ideas. Somebody with zip. Sell me a story, they say. If you can’t sell me on a peppy story, I don’t need you.

I try, but when I push some story idea the hysterically false enthusiasm of my voice prompts such shame and embarrassment that gradually my improbable and idiotic scenarios falter, trickling away into the censuring silence of my auditor like a weak stream into desert sand.

“What’s this, kid?” they say. “No cigar.”

They aren’t interested in me, but they are interested in Chance. What’s going on with him? Rumours are obviously surfacing. Rumours of a big Western. I learn that things are moving rapidly with the picture we had dawdled over, moving fast.

Somebody at Universal informs me Chance has suddenly hired a lot of “pioneer types,” grizzled, hard-faced men who could give you nightmares with a glance, men whose reputations are worse than the way they look. He’s cleaned out a reservation of Sioux, loaded them on a train bound for Montana, men, women, children, cost no object. It seems that shooting has already begun. Chance must have doctored the script himself.

And I learn he hasn’t cast Noah Beery in the lead as I’d suggested, but a punk of seventeen by the name of John Bean who has the manners of a reform-school inmate. Bean can act, they say, but he isn’t box office, too much meanness in his eyes to make hearts flutter or to melt an audience like an ice cream cone on a hot day. He’s been in trouble with the police in Los Angeles, some claim it was drugs. What the hell is Hays going to say? What the hell is my former boss up to? they want to know. What’s he doing with this zoo? I only shrug noncommittally and grin weakly, play stupid, and keep my mouth tightly zipped. If anybody’s going to get anything on Chance it isn’t going to come from me.

Day after day I beat on doors without getting so much as a sniff of interest from any of the majors. I decide to swallow my pride and turn to the small studios and independents referred to as Poverty Row, operations which teeter on the precipice of bankruptcy and take small profits from quickie one- and two-reelers to plough back into more of the same.

Six long weeks after my resignation from Best Chance Pictures, I find myself in the office – really a glorified outhouse with a pepper tree out front stickying up the porch – of a man called Herbert Farnum, who rattles off cheap Westerns and Mack Sennett copycats. I’ve hardly finished trotting out my credentials when he slings his big feet up on his desk and says, “So you used to work for Best Chance Pictures. What’s the dope on this Western Chance is making? They say he’s throwing big bucks into it.”

“That all started after I left,” I say. “I don’t know anything about it.”

“I’ve heard he’s going to direct,” Farnum says. “All of a sudden I hear he directed pictures in the East before the war. Made one- and two-reelers when things were just getting off the ground. But he didn’t use his own name so’s not to embarrass his old man. A rich boy’s hobby. I’d call that news. You know anything about that?”

“Not a thing. But I doubt it’s right.”

“Talk is that’s how he and his monkey Fitzsimmons got together. Back in the days that the directors in New York used to hire tough boys from the Irish gangs – Plug Uglies, Hudson Dusters, the Whyos – to protect them from Pinkerton detectives who smashed their cameras and kicked the shit out of their crews for ignoring the Motion Pictures Patent. Sounds like for a society boy Chance liked the low life and the rough stuff.”

“Who told you that?”

“Word gets around,” he says vaguely. “Some little birdie’s been singing. As the man said, your past has a habit of catching up to you. And besides, he’s got to have a taste for the bad boys if he’s making a movie about that fucking Shorty McAdoo. You know Shorty McAdoo? Mean little cock-sucking bandit. He worked for me once and he didn’t do nothing but stir up trouble with the cowboys. Haley Carr, my star, told the director to fire him. When McAdoo found out why he was getting his walking papers the little son of a bitch climbed on a horse and chased Carr all over the lot until he roped him. Then he dragged Carr down Gower on his belly. Carr was so scabbed up we had to take him out of the picture and stick somebody else in. We had a day of retakes on account of that fucking