“Curt, you’re getting too nervous,” another of his executives said. “You’re always getting too nervous.”
“Yeah, I got nervous when Studio One went to the Coast, and I got nervous when Kraft went off the air, and I get nervous right now when I see all these shows and on the credit crawl it says ‘Filmed in Hollywood at Desilu’ or some other cockamamie mixed-name outfit, yeah, I get nervous. You think I’m in business for my health?”
“What do you want to do, Curt?” David asked.
“I don’t know what I want to do. That’s why I called this meeting.”
“You want to pick up everything, lock, stock and barrel, and go West?” one of the executives asked.
“Maybe.”
“Foolish,” another of the executives said.
“Look, you said For Whom the Bells Toll was foolish when they wanted to do it, so they did it in two parts and it was a big hit.”
“It was a lousy job.”
“Who’s interested in lousy or good? It was a hit.”
“The movie was better.”
“It is only my pistol, Maria,” one of the executives quoted.
“Don’t clown around,” Sonderman said. “We’ve got business here.”
“It’d be foolish to go West, Curt,” one of the men said. “This is just a fad. A few new studios, a few actors and directors with itchy feet—”
“Itchy feet, my nose. That’s where the long green is, Hollywood, California. So we’re sitting here and watching the industry collapse all around us. That’s smart, all right. That’s smart if you’re in business for your health.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“This is April. We’ve still got the season to finish, and with a little luck we won’t be selling apples on the street before the fall. But we’ve got the whole summer to fool around with, while everybody’s showing reruns. I suggest we start fooling around in Hollywood. I suggest we send a man out there to get the lay of the land and to deliver a full report. And if there’s room for us out there, then, gentlemen, we are going out there!”
The executives fell silent.
“You feel like taking a trip to Hollywood, David?” Sonderman asked.
“If you want me to,” David answered.
“When does your show go off the air?”
“The last one’s on June sixteenth.”
“Can you leave by July first?”
“I think so.”
“Yes, or no?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like a vote on this,” Sonderman said.
The executives voted unanimously to send David Regan to Hollywood on July first, just to scout around. David sat and watched the hands go up all around the table in the paneled room. Oddly, only one word popped into his mind.
Gillian.
It was April, and a time for making plans.
Amanda sat down with her uncompleted suite and read it through carefully, and then decided if she was ever going to finish it, she would finish it this summer. Her own tenacity, her own concentration, sometimes amazed her. The suite would lie dormant for months at a time, untouched, barely thought of in the press of her household duties, and then she would begin working at it steadily again, sometimes devoting as much as eight hours to it in a single day. And then the world would close in again, the petty everyday things that had to be done to keep a home running smoothly, and she would put the work aside, once leaving it for as long as six months before returning to it again. There had seemed no real rush, no real necessity for completing the composition. She wanted it to be perfectly right, and so she had taken her time, knowing it was there, knowing she could always return to it. But now she had an idea, an idea she had never considered before, and the idea presented a new field for speculation, and a definite incentive for completing the suite during the summer.
She was, after all, a graduate of Talmadge University, and some of the music instructors there were rather well known in musical circles, and she had always been a good student and a favorite of many of them. As soon as the composition was finished, she would walk over to the school and renew old acquaintances, casually mention that she had been working on an orchestral suite for a good long time now and had just finished it this summer, well no, really I’m sure you wouldn’t want to hear it, no, it’s nothing really, well, if you insist, I’ll play it for you, though I’m not sure the full effect will be realized with piano alone. And then, yes, she would take advantage of whatever connections they had. Then, yes, she would try to get the work performed, try to get it recorded — but first, of course, she had to finish it.
She was thoroughly satisfied now with the major theme, the section she called Genesis, the opening section with its choralelike overtones. The theme ran throughout the entire work, its solemn ponderous chords appearing in the most curious places, illogically springing up in the Revival section where, and she thought this was an innovation, she had actually used clapping hands as a part of the scoring, two sections of clapping hands in counterpoint to each other and to the timpani and brass. The spiritual section still disturbed her, though, despite the gimmickry of the clapping hands, not really an original concept anyway, Bernstein had used it, though not as flamboyantly, still she wasn’t satisfied with the section, it did not have the true ring of an old-fashioned revival meeting.
Nor was she happy with the brief section in the minor key, the section she had titled Episode, somewhat tangential to the concept of the entire work, and with a foreign flavor to it, actually a Russian flavor. She thought Episode described it fairly accurately, a sort of interlude, a filling-in of spaces, a jaunt away from the major theme of the entire work, and yet a section that advanced the first two sections, the introductory section labeled Genesis, and the spiritual, hand-clapping, joyous, happy, loving second-section called Revival. Still, it needed work, she knew that.
The last and final section of the composition was called Judgment Day, and it recalled the major theme again, picking up the tempo and enlarging upon it, striking each note sharply and cleanly, with a great deal of brass and a segue into strings again. Judgment Day, in fact, borrowed from each of the work’s sections, trying to round out a cycle, something begun with Genesis and ending with the final note of the suite, but really a cycle that was never fully completed because after Judgment Day, there would be another Genesis, and another joyous Revival, and perhaps another Episode, and then again into Judgment Day, the cycle was endless and mystifying, somewhat like a medieval round. The problem in the final section — or the problem as she visualized it — was the resolution of the various themes stated throughout the work, themes that certainly needed resolution before the final note was sounded, but which needed resolution in terms of a sudden alteration of tempo toward an overwhelming climax of sound. The last section moved faster, there was the rushing sound of strings in the background, the reeds seemed to flow more swiftly, the brasses tongued their passages in staccato wildness, everything seemed to rush, oh how she hoped it would rush, toward a climax where theme after theme was resolved separately, and where the major theme was stated triumphantly and majestically.
Or at least, that was what she wanted.
And what she did not yet have.