‘An’ she’s not th’ only one!’ Mrs C. was emphatic, but whether in reference to herself or someone else was not clear.
Since we were alone together in the drawing-room I used the chance to ask if she had managed to discover anything more about Esmé. All she knew was that Meulemkaumpf, a notorious avoider of publicity, was at present unusually assiduous in pursuing privacy. ‘That could ‘ave somefink ter do wiv ‘is wife, I shouldn’t wonder, Ivan.’
I took her meaning. The Press would be bound to read the worst into Meulemkaumpf’s offer of protection to my darling. Now, knowing more about the man, I no longer suspected him of bearing her away to have his will with her at some lonely ranch. I realised that Esmé, believing herself deserted, had appealed instinctively to a native American gentleman. I longed for the chance, I told Mrs Cornelius, to explain what had happened. She offered the opinion that it was possible we both had some explaining to do, but before she could elaborate we were joined by Buck Buchmeister and a couple of his louder technician friends who were discussing a set they had just constructed for J.M. Schenk’s Graustark.
Buchmeister had had some hand in directing the picture, I gathered, under a pseudonym. It was not particularly uncommon in those days for people to ‘moonlight’ for rival studios sometimes for the extra money, sometimes to help out a friend, or to fly, as it were, under flags of convenience. It is safe to say that in Hollywood not more than one person in three retained anything like their original name. This fashion was started by the Jews who, of course, had every possible motive for encouraging the habit, since it helped so many of them to assimilate into American society. Not that these particular Jews were illiterate or uneducated. I have nothing against the better type of Jew. They contribute a good deal to our society and are frequently very charitable. My only reservation is the common one, that it is not healthy or sane to have one minority race, with all its inherited traditions, many of which are at odds with our own, dominating our culture. It is not surprising that certain alien ideas crept into the cinema in those years. I need only mention The Enemy, Name the Man, He Who Gets Slapped, The Case of Lena Smith, or Man, Woman and Sin, most of which were set abroad and dealt with subjects in ways that scarcely married with the ideals of the American people. Not that I had anything against Jeanne Eagels, whom I admired in all her films, but it was no surprise to me when I learned of her tragic death. There is a certain strain accompanying the kind of role she had to play in, say, Jealousy and The Letter. And, inevitably, Communism had eaten into Hollywood’s great heart by the 40s when it became necessary to cauterise the wound by methods some found crude and brutal, even cruel, but which many of us knew to be all too kind. The proof of this was that the communists did go to other countries to continue to propagate their messages while others, as in the case of the infamous ‘Kubrick’, simply changed their names and did not stop for a second! And we now see the results, day after day, on BBC and ITV which are nothing but a catalogue of every disease ever carried by word of mouth. Tolerant and easy-going as I am, sometimes I think my ‘live and let live’ attitude was inappropriate, especially during my Hollywood glory days.
For all that my thoughts were constantly turning to Esmé and speculation as to how she was spending her first holiday in America, that Christmas at Buchmeister’s was happy enough. I got to talk to several of the set-technicians and to discuss solutions to their problems. It seemed they thought I had a natural talent for their discipline and one of them, Van Nest Poldark (a Cornish buccaneer, as he styled himself, descended from a long line of novelists, smugglers and wreckers), told me I should be working in the technical department of a major studio. I laughed and pointed out that I was an engineer by profession and vocation. He argued that this was all the more reason I should try my hand at film designing. ‘It requires the knowledge of an Isaac Newton coupled with the aesthetic eye of a Michelangelo,’ he said. I thought he, in the manner of so many members of the kinema fraternity, was exaggerating somewhat, but then he gave me his card and suggested I come to see him at Paramount, which he had just himself joined. I did not throw the card away. As I told Madge later, if I could not see my inventions come to life in the real world, at least I might have the pleasure of seeing them realised on the movie screen. Thus, too, I might acclimatise the public to, as it were, my cerebral vision. I have never disdained nor, I hope, abandoned the popular arts. Fired by this vision of how I might popularise some of my ideas, I began to consider Poldark’s offer.
My enthusiasm for this was quickly replaced, however, by an altogether different diversion. Madge and I, availing ourselves of the festive confusion, were actually able to slip back into my bedroom where, to help her sustain her pleasure, I introduced her to the benefits of that much-maligned substance its original discoverers called el nevada and which has proved such a peculiarly apt servant to 20th-century Man. By the following afternoon we were both exhausted, having attempted almost every sexual variation possible for two athletic young people to enjoy in the confines of a small hotel room on a bed four feet by six. I loved the musty stink of a creamy dark skin which suggested that long ago there had been a lick of the tar brush in Madge’s family. It has been my experience that women of the octoroon or mulatto persuasion make the most passionate lovers, particularly if there is also Jewish blood in the mixture. One need hardly speculate as to why Moorish women are still very highly prized in the harems of North Africa and the Middle East, but I will come to that later. (It was Madge, needless to say, who first raised the notion of extending our number to three.)
I told Madge to report for work the next day. I would rest and prepare further notes for the proposed script. She said that she would have to come in the late morning rather than the afternoon as she had an appointment at four, an audition for a movie at last. I wished her luck but warned her not to get too involved with the idea. For every hundred girls in Hollywood perhaps one or two ever got legitimate movie work.
Informing me that she, better than anyone, knew how to keep her head screwed on, my spirited little floozy kissed me on the nose and left. Half-an-hour later the telephone rang. The concierge told me a young lady had arrived and was asking for me. Conscious of the exaggerated morality of the place, I told him I would come down to the lobby. Doubtless Madge had forgotten to clarify something and since she had no easy access to a telephone she had simply turned in her tracks and come back. I dressed quickly, aware that while I did not look at my best, neither did Madge, and descended yielding Turkey and red plush to the lobby where, all in white, like the angel I knew her to be, her hair in a fashionable bob so that anyone might easily have mistaken her for Ruth Taylor, my darling had come to me at last! With joy I advanced towards her and then, conscious of my lack of sleep, I paused. ‘Esmé?’
If I needed confirmation her wonderful, trilling laugh filled the great lobby. ‘Maxim! Now it is Emily Dane. Like you, I am at last an American.’ She opened her arms to embrace me. Though this was what I had longed for, again I hesitated. I could smell the stink of the past sixteen hours on my body. Madge’s perfume was still in my moustache. ‘I am filthy,’ I said. ‘I have been working all night. Sit here and let me get clean. I can be back in fifteen minutes.’