Minnie Flynn/Chapter 16
ON Minnie's twenty-fourth birthday, Hal Deane gave her a diary. "Minnie, dear," he said when he handed it to her, "you're going to be amused at my gift."
"It's a bracelet!" Minnie cried, shaking the box. "One of those lovely Chinese jades I was admiring the other day. Have I guessed right?"
Deane smiled, but not with embarrassment. "No, Minnie, not a semi-precious stone. But a precious one! That is, if you wear it close to you it will some day be more precious than even a jade bracelet."
"Oh, what is it?" Minnie cried, childishly eager. "No, it's not a bracelet; it's too heavy for that. Is it one of those fascinating ivory bead belts?"
"Open it and see," said Deane, "but prepare yourself. My birthday offering isn't a surprise—it's a shock! It's such a bold, simple gift to one who has so much. Too much," he added.
Minnie had torn away the tissue paper. "Oh," she said, her voice unconsciously flattening, "It's a book. But a very pretty little book. That's awfully nice of you, Hal."
"It's a diary, Minnie."
"One of those things you write in yourself? Oh, yes, I see it is. Look here, Hal, you don't suppose I'm going to have time to fill up all these empty pages, do you?"
"Take time for it, Minnie."
"But, Hal"
He took the book and opened it. "See how little space is set aside for each day's record. Just a few lines. Minnie, I want you to do this for me. Every day, or every few days, pick up this book and jot down—sometimes what you are thinking—sometimes what you are doing—a line here about the people you meet, a line there about what you hope to build to in your future."
"Oh, heavens, Hal, I'm no novelist. I have a hard enough time reading books, let alone writing them. What's the idea? Want to develop a new talent in me? Getting tired of making an actress out of me?"
"Here is why I want you to do it, Minnie: so you'll have some record of your footsteps, to be sure whether they're marching forward, upward, or if they are traveling zigzag and starting downhill. We are all so blinded by petty momentary triumphs, it is easy to forget the immanent failures, unless we have a concrete record of them. We need a definite perspective on all our movements to gauge how direct is our travel. At the end of each year, sit down with this little book and read over all you have written. Observe how you are making the grade, if you're climbing straight upward shooting on all cylinders, or swerving far off your course. Be frank with yourself. Everybody's cheating Minnie Flynn—don't you cheat her! Be loyal enough to tell her the truth. Promise me, Minnie, you'll do this." Then he added with twinkling eyes, "Promise that you'll keep the record in this book so straight they'll refer to it on Judgment Day."
Minnie laughed. "Hal, you're a darling, but you do have the darnedest, most radical ideas I ever listened to. All right, I'll keep the silly old diary. To prove I'm serious, I'll let you read it on every one of my birthdays. And that will be sesame for more of your delightful lectures on virtuous lives and how to lead them. Hal, you do make virtue so blah! If I listened to you, I'd have to cut out half the fun there is in life, booze and cards and all-night parties, and spooning fests . . . why, I do believe you'd even make me give up ducky old Gilbert, though you have to admit he's just a lamb these days."
"Oh, is that his latest disguise?" with cryptic humor.
"Hal! Shame on you. Now I'm sure you still care enough for me to be jealous."
"Zealous, not jealous. I admit it was my conceit to want to save you from yourself. I'm still working for that objective, but making so little headway. I would have to lead your lamb to slaughter before you'd ever harken to me. Loud as my voice is, his is louder."
"You've been shouting at me like a camp meeting evangelist for—for—let me see—it's six years, now."
"I shout, and your ears don't hear me. He whispers, and your very heart listens. Sly, whispering men. Hell must be paved with them."
"They won't be lonesome there," she laughed banteringly. "All the pretty girls whose ears have turned toward them will be there with them, and you'll be in that nice, cool virtuous heaven"
"—and still shouting!"
"—to ears that can't hear you." Minnie was laughing now. "And that will be the hell of it!"
"I give up," said Hal. "What's the use of lecturing to a marble statue"
"—who is chipping so fast you won't be able to recognize the old resemblance soon. Thank heavens for that," she added hastily. "I'm not going to stand still. Virtue be damned! I'm not a child, Hal, but a pretty sufficient person these days. Apologies for my conceit, but don't forget, young man, I'm a self-made star, and I've pulled myself up out of nothing to the big position that I hold now."
Deane made an extravagant bow. "I sweep my hat on the ground," he teased. "I would endow you with all the virtues of spirit and brain that have already been given you by your press agents."
"You sarcastic devil!"
"Substitute that to angel, Minnie. Don't forget that you have just visualized me sitting on a cool cloud playing a harp."
"Kiss me, Hal. I don't know whether to love you or despise you. You're the only man who has nerve enough to make me angry."
His lips scarcely brushed her cheek.
"Don't forget your promise, Minnie," he called to her as he walked from her dressing room onto the stage. "A few lines every day in my birthday gift."
"All right, stingy. I'll jot down a few lines this very minute." She wrote:
It was a long time before Hal Deane saw the little diary again. Much had taken place in those epochal years. America's prodigal hand had sowed France with the seeds of new life. Deane had left Hollywood before the papers, blasting the terrific news of war, had fallen from the trembling hands of the picture colony. Quietly in the night he slipped away to San Francisco. He was in training camp before Hollywood missed him.
Minnie wrote in her diary:
When Hal Deane returned to Hollywood two years later he was shocked to find life ticking on as regularly as if the pulse of the whole country were not throbbing from its blood transfusion to weakened France. Starred banners floated from the turrets of the studios, a few lonely, undecorated graves of Hollywood boys lay in the scarred meadows of the Marne, there were moments of exaltation and rejoicing when California troops returned, there were the hungry mouths of many charities to be fed by the generous picture people—but under the ripple of its surface the heart of Hollywood seemed strangely undisturbed. Minnie's joy at his return was sincerely touching. He had been wounded.
"Oh, how wonderful, how terribly wonderful," she cried out to him. "And you won't even let us talk about it. Dismiss it as if it were a piffling hundred dollar a week contract."
Deane laughed rather bitingly. "I can remember a little girl who had to struggle to keep back the tears when I told her she was to have a hundred dollars to spend—a whole hundred dollars."
"Isn't it unbelievable, Hal? I spend twice that sum on perfumes now, and think nothing about it. A hundred dollars. Puff! I blow it like a feather into the air. It's gone—floating away on the breeze."
With a swift, sweeping glance around him, Deane could see how little money had been valued. "Ever save anything?" he asked.
"Heavens, Hal, how can I? You know the war was an awful drain on us, so many charities. I nearly died every time I thought about those poor boys over there—I did give until it hurt! Then it costs so much to live—and you've got to keep up your share of the entertaining."
"But surely you haven't spent all of it."
Minnie was delighted with her own improvidence. She felt rather distinguished by her careless indifference to money, felt that it made her rather an interesting character to be so wanton with the vast sums she had earned. She leaned back indolently, and her eyes were dreamy with the caress of self-approval. "I'm a reckless, casual sort of person, Hal, utterly improvident. Can't be fettered to any conventional hitching post. Once in a while I'm scared to death for fear I'll go broke. Loathe being advised, hate to talk business, really don't think any great artist should be annoyed with these vulgar details." When she saw he was amused, she stopped short. "I suppose you think I'm a damned fool," she said after a pause, waiting for the words which trembled on his lips.
"Not damned yet."
Minnie threw back her head and laughed. "How a pulpit ever got away from you is more than I can see."
"In two years you haven't changed a bit. I've quit arguing with you. You belong to the class Ben Jonson spoke of when he said, 'Argue with a woman for an hour, and she'll still be of the same opinion if she can remember what it is.'"
"Wait a minute. Let me put that down in my diary." And she was laughing as she spoke, though Deane's pointed criticisms were little needle pricks under her skin.
"I haven't forgotten that you promised to let me see the diary."
"Please, Hal, don't look at it. You won't like it at all"
"Why not?"
"It's—well, it's full of Gilbert. You wanted me to write of all that is in my heart, so I wrote about Gilbert."
"I understand, Minnie. I'm making no criticism. I won't even see what you've said about him. I'm interested only in Minnie. And I do want to see what you've said about her."
"All right, I'll let you peek, but for pity's sake, don't criticize the spelling."
"Don't worry, I'm going to look far beyond even that."
He turned over the pages, his eye catching and lingering on items that amused him, shocked him, or enlightened him:
A sneer flickered to Deane's lips as he read:
Six months of barren pages. No writing in Minnie's childish hand. "Why not?" Deane asked, "Was there nothing to say?"
"Nothing but worry, worry, worry."
"About your pictures?"
"Yes. I wasn't getting over as well as I had been. They weren't giving me good material."
"And you were not at all to blame?"
With a little quaver of indignation: "What do you mean, Hal? How could I be?"
"Weren't you having such a good time you began to grow rather indifferent to your appearance, to your work? Success is a jealous, demanding mistress."
"Do you expect me to be a slave to success?"
"All successful people are slaves."
"But, Hal, I've got to live a little while I'm still young. I'm—why, I'm nearly twenty-five, you see."
"You'll be twenty-seven next November."
"Ssh, you traitor! What do you mean, talking friendship in one breath, then telling a woman's real age in the next? Shame on you!"
"Why is age such a bugbear to women? Men take pride in growing old. All their cumulative knowledge pleases them. Tickles their vanity."
Minnie looked around furtively. "For the love of heaven, don't tell Gilbert I'm nearly twenty-seven! He thinks I'm only twenty-five."
Deane rocked with laughter.
"What's so funny about it? I don't get your amazing sense of humor."
"Carlton is at least five years older than he admits he is."
"I don't believe it. You just said men didn't mind growing old."
"Men don't."
Minnie didn't recognize the sting in this brutally frank analysis of Carlton until days later. Then she wrote in her diary:
But this writing was only a subconscious trick to ward off a creeping fear of imminent disillusion. She wanted to be blind. Gilbert Carlton alone satisfied the complete, sensuous release of her own passions. She believed she loved him in spite of all that he had cost her. Though she admitted it to no one, Minnie knew the most definite reason for her losing some of her popularity was through the back lash of scandal. Gilbert Carlton's divorce was a nasty affair. The public resented it. Minnie's name was whipped through it like a long train through the mud. When the press agents tried to paint beauty and tenderness into their romance, it was discounted as false, unsavory. The opinion of one wounds; the opinion of a hundred thousand kills. The hundred thousands were killing Minnie Flynn.When her three year contract with the Western Studios was up, they did not renew their option. They didn't want to balance any unsteady weight upon their shoulders. From the reports pouring in through all the tributaries of their New York office, Minnie was losing ground. Making six pictures a year, the organization found it necessary to back their output with more and more spectacular and forced advertising to attract any attention to them. The public promised so much in the glittering advertisements, but finding always the same pattern upon the screen, was indignant.
So certain was Minnie that she would immediately sign another contract, she was amazed when her option was waived aside. Indignantly she turned to the other organizations. No one was interested in a contract. They talked making independent pictures with her, but there was no offer for a position yielding a harvest of weekly remuneration until Horace G. Watson, the self-appointed representative of New York capital, called upon her with his startling proposition for making the June Day Productions. Unlimited money, he told her. For her, five thousand a week drawing account, and ten per cent of the gross earnings of the picture. Her choice of studios, directors, stories, leading men.
"Who is Horace G. Watson?" Minnie inquired eagerly among the picture colony. No one had heard of him. But what did it matter. He was a veritable horn of plenty. Wall Street money, he said. He made her see money flowing like a molten stream down the wide cañons of Broad Street, its shining tides emptying at her feet. Watson was one of those men who talked very fast, tripping their protagonists with dexterous phrases. He seemed amazingly clever, but he was only shrewd. His scheme was to get June Day's name to a contract, then act as the middleman, the promoter, going in search of men with money who were eager to get into this new booming, fascinating gamble, picture production. Watson knew that Minnie was already counted as passé. But hers was the best name he could juggle before men whose knowledge of the picture industry was very slight, whose eyes were blinded by the glare of electric display over Broadway theaters. Watson had pages of the last company's advertisements of June Day, actress, to lay before them.
Watson deliberately sought men who he knew were already intrigued by this new form of gambling, and it was easy for him to sell one man a hundred thousand dollar block of stock in the June Day Production Company, another a fifty thousand block, and still another twenty-five thousand. There were always a certain number of "suckers," who blindly took small blocks of stock.
And so the new company was launched. Millions were supposed to be in back of it! But there were only two hundred thousand in the treasury. Horace G. Watson had already transferred forty thousand to his own account, his commission for organizing the company.
Pete was too ignorant to understand the dexterous magical moves of wildcat financing. Some of Minnie's faith in Pete had been shaken since she had lost thirty thousand in oil. She had bought stock in the Four Leaf Clover well. Pete thought the name would be lucky.
She closed her ears again to Deane's advice, though she did engage Sam Binns, who had crossed and recrossed her path through the years of her steady climb, as studio manager. Her trust in him equaled her trust in Hal Deane. Pete was made Binns' assistant. It meant a good salary, an office, and a title. He would seldom be there to bother her. On the days when he wasn't drunk, he lay in sodden sleep in his own gaudy apartment.
Minnie spent most of her first week's salary in a series of fêtes announcing her forthcoming marriage to Gilbert Carlton.