Linda Lee, Incorporated Part 11

Of these one was tall and dark, with a thick mane of wavy black hair, a wide and mobile mouth, and great, melancholy eyes. His well-tailored morning-coat displayed to admiration a splendid torso. The other was a smaller, indeed an undersized man, who wore a braided smoking-jacket but no paint on his pinched, weather-worn face of an actor. His manner was intense and all his observations (and he was doing most of the talking) were ill.u.s.trated by gesticulation almost Latin in its freedom and vividness.

"King Laughlin," Mr. Culp's secretary informed Lucinda--"man in the smoking-jacket, he always wears one when he's working--greatest emotional director in the business, n.o.body can touch him. Why, alongside him, Griffith's a joke in a back number of Judge. You wouldn't guess what he gets: thirty-five hundred."

"That's almost a thousand a week, isn't it?"

"Thousand a _week_!" Mr. Lane suspiciously inspected Lucinda's profile.

Could it be possible that this well-born lady was trying to kid him? But no; he could see she was quite guileless. In accents of some compa.s.sion he corrected: "Three-thousand five-hundred every week's what King Laughlin drags down in the little old pay en_vel_ope. But that's Mr.

Culp all over; expense's no object when he's making an Alma Daley picture, nothing's too good."

"I'm sure...." Lucinda agreed vaguely.

Out of the corner of an eye the director had become aware of a new audience and one worthy of his mettle, and he was already preparing to play up to it. Dropping the easy, semi-confidential manner in which he had been advising the younger and taller man, with surprising animation Mr. King Laughlin s.n.a.t.c.hed a silk hat and stick from the other's unresisting hands.

"Right-O, Tommy!" he said in the nasal tone of the English Midlands. "I think you've got me now, but just to make sure I'll walk through it with Alma." He turned graciously to the woman: "Now, Alma dear...."

Miss Daley, herself not unconscious of a fas.h.i.+onable gallery, shrugged slightly to signify that she didn't mind if Mr. Laughlin thought it really worth while, it was all in the day's drudgery, and made a leisurely exit from the set by way of a door in its right-hand wall. At the same time Mr. Laughlin walked off by a door approximately opposite, and the young man in the morning-coat strolled down to the front of the set and settled himself to observe and absorb the impending lesson.

Mr. Laughlin then re-entered in character as a degage gentleman with an uneasy conscience, indicating this last by stealthily opening and peering round the edge of the door before coming in and closing it with caution, and gentility by holding hat and stick in one hand and carelessly trailing the ferrule of the stick behind him. Relieved to find the room untenanted, he moved up to the table, placed the hat on it crown-down, propped the stick against it, turned and gave the door in the right-hand wall a hard look, then bent over the table and pulled out and began to ransack one of its drawers. Thus engaged, he said clearly: "_All right, Alma!_" and immediately gave a start, whereby it appeared that he had heard footfalls off, and slammed the drawer. At this Miss Daley entered, a listless little figure so preoccupied with secret woe that she quite failed at first to see Mr. Laughlin, and when she did gave a start even more violent than his had been, clasping both hands to her bosom and crying out in a thrilling voice: "_Egbert!_"

Mr. Laughlin kept his temper admirably under the sting of this epithet; all the same, anyone could see he didn't fancy it a bit. However, first and always the gentleman, he offered Miss Daley a magnanimous gesture of outstretched hands. Instantly the poor girl's face brightened with a joyous smile, a happy cry trembled upon her lips as she ran to his arms.

He enfolded her, with a fond hand ground her features into the shoulder of his smoking-jacket, and turned his own toward the camera, working them into a cast of bitter anguish.

Gently rescuing herself, Miss Daley discovered _Egbert's_ hat and stick, turned to him and looked him up and down with dawning horror, audibly protesting: "_But Egbert! you are going out!_" He attempted a disclaimer, but it wouldn't wash, the evidence of the top hat and the smoking-jacket was too d.a.m.ning; and in the end he had to give in and admit that, well, yes, he was going out, and what of it.

Evidently Miss Daley knew any number of reasons why he ought to stay in, but she made the grave mistake of trying to hold him with affection's bonds, throwing herself upon his neck and winding her arms tightly round it. And that was too much: _Egbert_ made it clear that, while he'd stand a lot from a woman to whom he was Everything, there was such a thing as piling it on too thick. And against her frenzied resistance he grasped her frail young wrists, brutally broke her embrace, and flung her from him. She fell against the table, threw back her head to show the pretty line of her throat, clutched convulsively at her collar-bone, and subsided upon the floor in a fit of heart-broken sobbing; while _Egbert_ callously took his hat, clapped it on his head, and marched out by a door in the rear wall, his dignity but slightly impaired by the fact that the hat was several sizes too large and would have extinguished him completely if it hadn't been for his n.o.ble ears.

Without pause Mr. Laughlin doubled round to the front of the set, threw the waiting actor a brusque "See, Tommy? Get what I mean?" and encouraged Miss Daley with "That's wonderful, Alma dear. Now go on, right through the scene."

Miss Daley, lying in complete collapse, with her head to the camera, writhed up on an elbow, planted her hands upon the floor and by main strength pushed her heaving shoulders away from it, keeping a tortured face turned to the camera throughout. Then she got her second wind, caught hold of the edge of the table, pulled herself up, looked around wildly, realized that she was a deserted woman, saw her hat by Tappe hanging on the back of a morris-chair by Ludwig Baumann, seized it, rushed to the door by which _Egbert_ had escaped, and threw herself out in pursuit.

Mr. Laughlin clapped gleeful hands.

"Fine, Alma, wonderful! You're simply marvelous today, dear. Now Tommy, run through it just once with Alma, and then we'll shoot."

Mr. Lane bustled about and found chairs for Lucinda and her friends, upon which they composed themselves to watch Tommy interpret Mr. King Laughlin's tuition in the art of acting for the screen.

To the best of Lucinda's judgment, however, the greater part of Mr.

Laughlin's efforts had meant to Tommy precisely nothing at all. Beyond the rudimentary mechanics of the physical action sketched in by the director, Tommy made no perceptible attempt to follow pattern, and disregarding entirely its conventional but effective business, embellished the scene instead with business which was, such as it was, all his own, or more accurately that of a dead era of the speaking stage.

Like a wraith of histrionism recalled from the theatre of _East Lynne_ and _The Silver King_, Tommy carved out his effects with flowing, florid gestures, and revived the melodramatic stride and heroic att.i.tudinizing; and though he wilfully made faces at the camera throughout, he demonstrated the deep veneration in which he really held it by never once showing it his back, until, having duly spurned the clinging caresses of Miss Daley, he was obliged to march to the door, and even then he made occasion to pause with a hand on the k.n.o.b and, throwing out his chest and fretfully tossing rebellious black locks from tragic brows, granted the camera the boon of one last, long look at him ere making his exit.

And when Mr. Laughlin tranquilly approved this performance and announced that they would forthwith "shoot it," Lucinda began to wonder if there were possibly something wrong with her own powers of observation.

"But," she protested to Mr. Lane, who had coolly elected himself her special squire and placed his chair close to hers--"that man they call Tommy--he didn't play the scene as Mr. Laughlin did."

"Oh, Tommy Shannon!" said Mr. Lane equably--"Tommy's all right, he knows what he's doing--best leading man in the movin' picture business, bar none. King Laughlin knows he can trust Tommy to put it over his own way. All you got to do is to let Tommy Shannon alone and he'll ring the gong every shot."

"But if that's the case, why did Mr. Laughlin take so much trouble to show him----?"

"Well, you see, it's this way," Mr. Lane explained: "King's all right, and Tommy's all right, too, both stars in their line; but if Tommy don't see a scene the way King shows him, and King starts to bawl him out, why, Tommy'll just walk off the lot. And then where are you? You can't finish your picture without your leading man, can you? And there's maybe a hundred-and-fifty or two-hundred thousand dollars invested in this production already. One of the first things a director's got to learn in this game is how to handle actors. That's where King Laughlin's so wonderful, he never had an actor quit on him yet."

"I see," said Lucinda thoughtfully. "The way to handle an actor is to let him have his own way."

"You got the idea," Mr. Lane approved without a smile.

"But suppose," she persisted--"suppose the leading man insists on doing something that doesn't suit the part he's supposed to play, I mean something so utterly out of character that it spoils the story?"

"Sure, that happens sometimes, too."

"What do you do then?"

"That's easy. What's your continuity writer for?"

"I don't know, Mr. Lane. You see, I don't even know what a continuity writer is."

"Why, he's the bird dopes out the continuity the director works from--you know, the scenes in a picture, the way they come out on the screen: Scene One, Scene Two, and all like that."

"You mean the playwright?"

"Well, yes; only in pictures he's called a continuity writer."

"But that doesn't tell me what you do when an actor insists on doing something that spoils the story."

"That's just what I'm trying to tell you, Mrs. Druce. You get your continuity writer, of course, and have him make the change."

"You mean you change the story to please the actor?"

"Sure: it's the only thing to do when you got maybe a hundred-and-fifty or two-hundred thousand dollars hung up in a picture."

"But doesn't that frequently spoil the story?"

"Oh, what's a story?" Mr. Lane argued reasonably. "People don't go to see a story when they take in an Alma Daley picture. They go because they know they get their money's worth when they see a Ben Culp production that's taken from some big Broadway success and costs a hundred-and-fifty or maybe two-hundred thousand dollars. But princip'ly, of course, they go to see Alma Daley, because she's the most pop'lar actress on the screen, and makes more money than Mary Pickford, and wears the swellest clothes that cost sometimes as much as twenty thousand dollars for each picture; and besides she's the grandest little woman that ever looked into a lens, and there's never been no scandal about her private life, and an Alma Daley picture's sure to be clean.

Why, Mr. Culp wouldn't let Miss Daley act in any picture where she had to be wronged or anything like that. When he buys a play for her and the heroine's got a past in it or anything, he just has the story changed so's there's never any stain upon her honour or anything anybody could get hold of. That's one thing Mr. Culp's very partic'lar about; he says no wife of his shall ever go before the public in a shady part."

"Has he many?"

Mr. Lane looked hurt, but was mollified by the mischief in Lucinda's smile.

"Well, you know what I mean. But we better stop talking, if it's all the same to you, Mrs. Druce, or Miss Daley'll get upset. They're going to shoot now."

The warning was coincident with the sudden deluging of the set with waves of artificial light of a weird violet tint, falling from great metal troughs overhead and beating in horizontally from the metal stands or screens, which were now seen to be banks of incandescent tubes burning with a blinding glare.

Nor was this all: shafts and floods of light of normal hue were likewise trained upon the scene from a dozen different points, until the blended rays lent almost lifelike colouring to the faces of the actors, whose make-up had theretofore seemed ghastly and unnatural to uninitiate eyes.

Stationed just beyond the edge of the area of most intense illumination, the audience sat in a sort of violet penumbra whose effect was hideously unflattering. In it every face a.s.sumed a deathly glow, resembling the phosph.o.r.escence of corruption, the red of cheeks and lips became purple, and every hint of facial defect stood out, a purple smudge. So that Lucinda, reviewing the libelled countenances of her companions, breathed silent thanks to whatever G.o.ds there were for their gift of a complexion transparent and immaculate.

"Camera!"

The command came from King Laughlin. Lucinda could just hear a m.u.f.fled clicking, and seeking its source discovered a youngish man, with a keen face and intelligent eyes, standing behind the tripod and turning in measured tempo a crank attached to the black box.