Chance raises his hands above his head, clasps them in a prizefighter’s gesture of victory, shakes them at the mob. The mindless roar is physical, a hot wave of breath on my back. I twist around and confront a wall of faces; a painted midway canvas of freaks, a nickel’s worth of depravity, the mouths yawning cavernous and hungry, the eyes blazing.
But now the mad clamouring sputters, fades out, disintegrating into lonesome cries, desultory handclapping. I look back and Chance is strolling up the carpet into a barrage of winking flashbulbs, Fitz walking carefully in the rear, the tall hat balanced on his head, the flowers bundled in a big fist.
Around me everyone subsides into disappointment. It’s over now. A sort of post-coital tristesse settles on us, a listless shame. We avoid each other’s eyes, shrink from touching one another; the knot which briefly held us together is unravelling, people are drifting away like scraps of paper blowing in an aimless wind. Across the street, uniformed flunkies are closing the main doors of Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, the temple is being secured. It is too late for the picture. I will miss Besieged.
For three hours I sit in a café drinking coffee, keep trying to imagine what the audience is being treated to up on the big screen four blocks away. Every fifteen minutes I check my watch and light another cigarette. People stare at me because of the tuxedo. At eleven I pay the bill and go out into the night. A fitful wind has sprung up, a wind that seems to nudge me in the direction of Grauman’s. Although it feels like rain, I don’t turn for home. Instead I button my jacket, stuff my hands in my pockets, and permit myself to be shoved along by the wind at my back. The self-congratulatory speeches will have ended long ago, the last reel will be playing itself out, soon the theatre will empty. It’s a short walk but feels endless. The avenue is deserted and still, the streetlight poles stark, the ponds of light at their feet bright, shallow, sterile. My left shoe rasps on the concrete, hoarsely, monotonously. I drag it past a line-up of parked automobiles, chauffeurs killing time as they wait for the picture to finish. The police have left, the rope barrier is down, but a few stubborn souls still huddle in the wind, waiting. Tramping up the theatre side of the street, I am treated to a star’s-eye view of the fans. From this perspective and distance they look small and pitiable, like children somebody has forgotten to collect after a birthday party.
I stop and light a cigarette under the marquee. None of the officious staff raising the green-and-white awning against the possibility of rain tell me to move on. It is the tuxedo. They assume I am waiting for a friend.
All at once there’s an excited rushing about of Grauman employees, the doors are opening, the picture is over. The first of the audience spilling out talk animatedly, always a good sign for a picture, while others linger in the lobby, an even more auspicious sign. Out in the fresh air women draw their furs tightly around their shoulders, the men light cigars and impatiently scan the street for drivers and automobiles. One of Grauman’s young men beckons imperiously to the line-up, headlights snap on, the cars move forward like dominoes tipping in a chain reaction. The remnant of fans wave autograph books in the air and cry out beseechingly from across the road.
Here a tuxedo can loiter, smoke a cigarette, cast eyes up to the sky for portents of rain. Betty Blythe, star of the Queen of Sheba, passes close enough for me to touch, and so do Bessie Love and Colleen Moore. Others troop by, gentlemen and ladies I don’t recognize, L.A. businessmen, lawyers, doctors, their wives. People with enough social standing, enough money, to be granted the boon of buying a ticket to a premiere, to be granted the pleasure of rubbing shoulders with Charlie Chaplin, people who fifteen years ago would have dismissed picture people as vulgarians.
I hear bits and snatches of conversation popping up like bright birds in a bush. “Superb!” says someone. “All it needed for perfection was a true star!” is the opinion of another. “Where is he? Where’s Chance?”
I spot Fitz, a head taller than anyone else, doing a chain-gang shuffle through the bottleneck of congestion in the lobby doors. Where Fitzsimmons is, Chance will be too.
I’m correct. Once under the awning Chance holds court, greeting admirers. Actors behave like they do before a camera, pantomiming their awe, their delight, their amazement. When actresses seize Chance’s arm and cuddle against his shoulder, or raise themselves on tiptoe to plant a kiss on his cheek for photographers, he receives their attentions with awkward, old-fashioned, gentlemanly courtliness.
Chance is happy. He shines with it, happiness suffuses him. Nodding and smiling, he shakes hands, accepts pats of congratulation on the shoulder. Men offer him cigars. I read his lips. Over and over he is saying, Yes, yes, yes.
Now Fitz is guiding him away, escorting him down the carpet. For an instant Fitz’s and my eyes lock, and he deftly steers Chance a little to the right to avoid us meeting. They go past. A determined well-wisher importunes them, expressing admiration for the picture. Chance begins nodding again.
It starts to rain lightly, just hard enough to flicker in the light of streetlamps and headlights, sparse and granular, like a shower of rice at a wedding. Across the street, the little covey of devotees, neglected, is breaking up. Someone opens a newspaper over her head. Someone is crossing the road. Someone else is following him.
The first jaywalker moves like a somnambulist, looks neither right nor left, steps into the path of an oncoming car. The pavement is slick with rain, a horn blares, the car brakes, slides to a stop inches from the man’s legs. Under the awning people break off conversations to stare curiously. In the glare of the headlights the man stares back, searching the faces.
Shorty in a black suit and white shirt, collar buttoned tightly. His face lit from beneath by the car headlights, the planes of his face like snow, his eyes black and sunken. He looks old, a walking corpse. He steps up on the bumper of the car and surveys the crowd under the green-and-white awning. “Chance!” he shouts. A woman laughs in surprise, as if this were a joke.
Shorty steps down from the bumper, advances. Wylie follows, eyes switching nervously back and forth. The light of the marquee falls full upon McAdoo, carrying himself like an old soldier, wearing his black suit like a uniform. He passes everybody as if they were nothing more than fur coats and evening dress hung on a clothesline for airing. People step aside, make way for him. He looks strange under the electric light; his tan is gone and his face burns with a hospital pallor. Sick, you would think, if the firm, steady tread, the young man’s stride which bears the old face onward, didn’t belie it.
Reaching Chance and Fitz he says loudly, “I’d like a word.”
Chance stands with a sceptical smile on his lips, his head turned ever so slightly to one side, his eyes fastened on the belly of the awning. “If this is business,” he says without looking at McAdoo, “you must make an appointment to see me. I do not conduct business on social occasions.”
Wylie shifts his feet on the carpet. McAdoo’s mouth tightens. “I come to ask you to write to the newspapers and tell them that feller in your picture ain’t me.”
Chance is still smiling, still refusing to look McAdoo in the face. He watches the awning flutter with gusts of wind and rain. “Of course it isn’t you,” he says. “Mr. McAdoo is dead.”