Another Year, page 22
The porter came in to say the beds were ready, and they found their rooms astonishingly transformed. The beds had been concealed in the compartment walls and were much roomier than they had expected. All kinds of useful gadgets had been revealed, like hooks to hang one’s watch on and nets to hold night necessities, and small, phosphorescent blue dots on the light switches to show you where they were in the dark. The sheets looked so inviting that they went to bed without delay. Ruth and Rosemary had the drawing-room and Mr. Matthews the roomette next door.
He got into his pyjamas and lay watching the Hudson River in the moonlight—picturing the homes behind the lights on the far bank, and wondering what the people were doing in them. He thought of the first colonists paddling up the river and camping in the perilous woods where now the pleasant houses lay. To meet America for the first time under the light of a full moon was a rare experience.
He had never passed a night in a train before, and when the gentle motion of it lulled him off to sleep, he slept much deeper than he had thought possible. He woke up thinking he had dozed for half an hour, but it was almost light and the river had gone, and they were running through a boundless farm land.
Soon after breakfast they were in Chicago, and a man from Paragon Pictures met them and got them into a taxi and drove them down a sordid street to the Sante Fé Station, where The Chief was waiting to take them to Los Angeles.
The things that Mr. Matthews had read about Chicago had prepared him for blood-curdling events. He half expected the roar of tommy guns in the station lobby, with gangsters mowing down police, but there seemed to be no gangsters about that morning. None of the people looked as if they had ever been chased or shot at, and the only policeman in sight was fat and amiable, and sharing an orange with a little girl. He remarked upon this unexpected tranquillity to the Paragon man, who laughed and said he had lived in Chicago for twenty years and never seen a gangster or heard a gun fired. “It’s a big city,” he said, “and the rough stuff happens down the other end.” Mr. Matthews could not resist a feeling that Chicago had let him down. They saw fine buildings in the distance but the streets they passed through were as dull as Woodbank.
The Chief had a big illuminated profile of an Indian Chief attached to the observation platform. Their rooms were like those in the New York train and there was time to lay in a store of oranges and shelled walnuts in cellophane bags before they left.
“You’re all set for Hollywood now,” said the Paragon man. “There’s no more changing till you get to Los Angeles the evening after to-morrow.”
On the outskirts of Chicago they passed some big enclosures full of cattle that would soon depart in little tins to every corner of the world. They ran through vast prairies where the cattle roamed, and at sunset they saw the Mississippi. They were now in the America that Mr. Matthews knew from his reading of Mark Twain. They saw boys like Huck Finn sitting on gates in wide-brimmed hats and dungarees, and a coloured man like Jim the nigger dozing on the veranda of a tumbledown old shack.
During the night the train began to climb. It laboured heavily and their ears began to crack, and when they pulled the curtains in the morning the scene had completely changed. They had taken a wide sweep to the south. The sparse green prairies were behind them and they were in the desert: all tumbled boulders and scrubby bushes, with strange dome-shaped hills in the distance like hunched-up human shoulders—pink and gleaming in the sun.
When they went down the corridor to get their breakfast and crossed the open platforms between the cars they were startled by the gust of hot dry air that greeted them. In New York their drawing-room had been warmer than the outside night, but conditions had slowly reversed themselves, and they were now in cold storage for their journey across the desert.
In February the heat of the desert was no greater than an August afternoon at home. When breakfast was over they sat outside on the observation platform, basking in the sun—thinking of the fog and slush in Woodbank and watching some strange little animals that sat in rows on their hind legs like begging dogs, staring at the train.
The country grew more desolate. There were native Indian villages of ramshackle mud huts and dark thin men with long black hair and bulky women in shapeless cotton frocks nursing dark-brown babies. Mongrel dogs prowled round, and the cattle were nearly as thin as the bleached skeletons of the dead ones that lay in the aching heat among the rocks. Sometimes it seemed as if they were in a land untouched by white men, then suddenly a tarred modern road would swing out of nowhere and run along beside the railway, with signs against it—“EAT AT JOE’S PLACE. CHICKEN DINNER. 2 MILE”.
At sundown they came to Albukerque, and the train stopped long enough for passengers to stretch their legs and see the Museum of Indian relics that adjoined the station. Some old and dirty Indian women were selling souvenirs, and Ruth bought a silver brooch of native workmanship to send to Mrs. Burgin, and Mr. Matthews bought an ash-tray shaped like a Mexican hat.
The quick tropic twilight came while they waited for the engine to refuel, and when the sun went down the stars came out and the air grew keen, and they saw the luminous blue sky and knew the magic of the desert night.
When the train moved on the desolation was more awesome in the darkness. In the dining-car the lamps were lit and the curtains drawn. They had sliced turkey, with a green salad and fresh figs and ice-cream, and it seemed miraculous to have such delicacies in such a stricken wilderness. Mr. Matthews lay in bed in the darkness so that he could better see the desert in the moonlight. Eerie-looking cactuses raised distorted arms like witches, and sometimes, far away, he saw a tiny, lonely light.
The last day opened with a stop to take a second engine on the front and one at the back to push. They began a panting, grinding climb that went on for miles, twisting and turning through ravines so steep that even with three engines they groaned along at walking pace. The more they climbed the more relieved Mr. Matthews felt about the engine at the back. If the train broke in two, with nothing behind their helpless carriages to stop them, they would run all the way back to Chicago unless they took a precipice on the way. They could hear the engines panting, even through the sealed windows of the air-conditioned car. Fierce crags rose sheer on either side, with dark birds hovering over them like vampires: there were deep red furrows down the mountains where the floods roared when the rare storms came, and Mr. Matthews’ ears began to crack alarmingly, and his head felt like a pumpkin.
By lunch time they had reached the summit of Cajon Pass, and stopped to take away the extra engines. The hardest stretch was over, and the train ran easily, almost free wheeling down to the Pacific Coast. Mr. Matthews’ ears began popping back again, but for days his head felt swollen and buzzed inside.
It was California now, and slowly the colour came back into the cheeks of the land. They saw a genuine cowboy in a wide-brimmed hat with a knotted scarf around his neck—exactly like a cowboy in a film, riding a frisky little horse that was galloping away to nowhere in particular. They saw broad fields of maize: and then a neat plantation with irrigation channels down it, and trees with lush green leaves and yellow fruit. “Oranges!” Ruth suddenly exclaimed:—“look at them—thousands of oranges!—even on the ground!”
The ones on the ground astonished Mr. Matthews most: he had never thought of oranges lying about as windfalls. “What a waste,” he murmured—“what a terrible waste!”
The orange groves were soon surrounding them on every side: thousands of neat bushy trees like regiments on parade. Sometimes there were lemons and sometimes grape-fruit. There were notices beside the road, “ORANGE JUICE. AS MUCH AS YOU CAN DRINK. 5 CENTS”.
The towns grew bigger and more prosperous, with tree-lined avenues and shady bungalows and trim gardens full of flowers. They passed a college where boys were playing football, grotesque with their padded shoulders and crash-helmets and tight knee-breeches. The porter came in to brush them down and take their luggage. “Los Angeles in ten minutes,” he said.
Chapter Twenty Five
Mr. Matthews had imagined Hollywood as a kind of super-Monte Carlo with esplanades along the Pacific Ocean lined with the mansions of the film stars and monster luxury hotels. He found instead that Hollywood was merely a suburb of the mighty city of Los Angeles, and rather an ordinary, shabby little suburb at that.
Its fame as the great Film City of the world now rested on its memories, for most of the big studios had long since outgrown its narrow confines and moved into the wider spaces of the surrounding plain. It was no longer fashionable to live in Hollywood itself, for the stars had moved westward into the cooler districts nearer to the ocean—at Beverly Hills and Westwood and Santa Monica.
But thousands of sightseers came to Hollywood every summer, and its name had stuck to every American film, wherever it was made, as surely as the name of Cheddar sticks to every cheese that traces its ancestry to a forgotten English village.
Mr. Matthews discovered these things later on, when he had the leisure to think and look around him, for during the half-hour following his arrival he was too bewildered and distracted to think of anything at all.
The train had scarcely stopped before an enormous man clambered up the steps and lumbered in to meet them. He was so big that he could hardly squeeze into their small compartment.
“Well!” he cried—“here we are at last!—fine!—swell!—have a good trip?—You did?—well, that’s great!”—and he shook them all by the hand and patted them on the shoulders as if this were the supreme moment of his life.
Mr. Matthews had never seen such a remarkable man. He towered above six feet and was immensely broad, although the cut of his jacket made it impossible to tell where nature ended and the shoulder pads began. His face was round and fat like an enormous cherub. He wore a mustard-coloured jacket with a huge check pattern in it like hundreds of lit-up windows in a skyscraper. His tie was like a strip of ornate wallpaper: his sweater bright green: his trousers white with a black pin-stripe in them and his socks were yellow. His shoes were half white canvas and half brown leather and he wore a ring with a stone in it that looked like a blue glass eye.
His name was Len Cogweiler, from the publicity department of Paragon Films, and when the greetings were exhausted he steered the Matthews along the corridor and waved towards a group of men with cameras waiting beside the train.
“Some of my boys,” he said.—“Okay!—let’s do the shooting!”
The photographers all had different-shaped cameras and some had little sticks with flash-bulbs on them. First of all Mr. Cogweiler posed the Matthews in a group: Ruth and Rosemary were told to laugh and Mr. Matthews had to hold his hat up in the air as if acknowledging applause. Then Rosemary was taken alone on the observation platform, waving a handkerchief and laughing—then Mr. and Mrs. Matthews had to walk along arm-in-arm like Darby and Joan, and Mr. Cogweiler liked this so much that he took them twice. Finally Mr. Cogweiler himself was taken—shaking hands with each of them in turn. The photographers worked away like demons—sometimes squatting on their haunches—sometimes on tiptoe with cameras above their heads, and they took it in turns to blow their flash-bulbs off.
Some passengers and coloured porters gathered round to watch in mild amusement, and Mr. Matthews had never felt such an abject fool in all his life—specially when he had to laugh and hold his hat up in the air and remain transfixed in that idiotic pose while one of the men adjusted a misfired flashlight bulb. By the time it was over be disliked Mr. Cogweiler more than any man he had ever met. At first he tried a feeble protest, but Mr. Cogweiler ignored it. He swept it aside and appeared to have no regard whatever for the Vicar’s dignity and feelings: he mesmerised him with his overpowering personality and put him through his antics like a poor browbeaten circus animal.
Worse things soon threatened the unhappy Vicar, for when the camera men had finished Mr. Cogweiler announced that he was going to “take care” of the Matthews for the rest of the day. Ten minutes of Mr. Cogweiler had reduced the Vicar to a pulp—an hour, he felt, would finish him, and he had a yearning impulse to run away down the rail tracks and escape—even if it meant a slow death in the desert.
But a remarkable transformation now came over Mr. Cogweiler. The difference between Cogweiler the publicity man and Cogweiler the host was the difference between a Jekyll and a Hyde. In his work he was ruthless: he would push a victim over a precipice if it made a story for his Press Department, but in private—as the guide, philosopher and friend of newcomers to Hollywood—he was a delightful man with a boyish enthusiasm that was quite disarming.
When the camera men had gone he mopped his brow, relaxed and smiled. He seemed to grow smaller: even his check coat appeared to lose a little of its bite. “I guess you quiet folks from England find it hard to take that stuff,” he said. “But it’s just one of those things out here. You’ve got to go through it, but it’s over now and it won’t happen again. If you come along to my car I’ll drive you out to a nice little house we’ve taken for you in Beverly Hills.”
At first it was a network of squalid streets and jangling tram-cars. There were a lot of dark-skinned Mexicans about, and Chinese and negroes, and a good many shops with “Chop Suey” written over them, and Chinese signs beneath.
“We’ve got all kinds out here in Los Angeles,” said Mr. Cogweiler. “It’s a big city—the tenth biggest in the world with close on two million people in it. From the centre here you can drive twenty miles in any direction and still be in the city. It’s well spread out because it’s in the earthquake belt. That’s why you don’t see many tall buildings. Small wood-framed ones take the shaking best.”
“Do you have many earthquakes?” enquired the Vicar.
“Two or three a week,” said Mr. Cogweiler. “But you don’t have to worry. You don’t even feel most of ’ em—just a window shaking, or a cup chinking on the dresser, maybe.”
They soon got clear of what Mr. Cogweiler called “downtown Los Angeles”. They lost the tram-lines and the ugly brown brick stores and apartment houses and drove into a cleaner, fresher district of smaller buildings painted white and cream, generously spaced with little squares of lawn around them. They turned into a street so wide that three cars moved abreast in both directions. “Sunset Boulevarde,” said Mr. Cogweiler. “It goes right on through Hollywood and Beverly Hills until it hits the ocean at Santa Monica twenty miles away.”
The name well suited the boulevarde at this hour of the evening, for straight ahead the sun was setting: a golden, cloudless sun that left a luminous, treacle-coloured sky behind it. The shops and private houses were mixed together in a rather haphazard way, with empty spaces of long rank grass at most of the corners. There were “drive in” restaurants where people took their cars right up to a café, and girls in smart uniforms brought hot food and sandwiches on little trays that fitted outside the car windows. There were lots of cafés and eating-houses advertising “charcoal-grilled steaks” and “barbeque” and “chicken dinner”, and Mr. Cogweiler said that half the population of Los Angeles ate most of their food away from their homes.
The shops were arranged quite differently from those in England. There were no separate butchers or fishmongers or dairies or grocers or fruiterers, because all these things were sold in the big covered “markets”. The rest of the things you needed were mainly in the “Corner Drug Stores” that sold books and newspapers and soft drinks and cigettes besides the normal goods one bought at chemists. The only individual shops seemed to be dry cleaners, beauty salons, jewellers and those that sold clothing and cut flowers.
They passed through Hollywood, which looked no different from the other shopping districts except for bigger restaurants and a few tall hotels. Mr. Cogweiler pointed out a piece of waste land where Charlie Chaplin made his early pictures, and a tumbledown old place where Douglas Fairbanks began his climb to fame. He showed them where the old Keystone Comedies were made in the open streets, and a dark, foreign-looking cemetery where they buried Rudolf Valentino. The old film colony was as deep beneath the new business town of Hollywood as the remains of Roman London were beneath the Banks and Insurance Offices of the modern city.
“We got you a little house on Maple Drive in Beverly Hills,” said Mr. Cogweiler. “Because we guessed you’d rather have your own place than a suite in a hotel. It’s nicer for quiet folks accustomed to their own ways, and you can always dine out when you want to.”
He gave them some useful homely hints that came rather unexpectedly from such a hard-boiled film man. “Take it easy at first,” he said—“Don’t try long walks or climbing the hills until you get used to the climate, because the air’s thin and you’ll get over-tired. You’ll find yourselves getting sleepy, too—so relax when you feel like it, and always put a woolly on at sundown, because it’s cold at night—even in the summer. Eat lots of salad and you’ll be okay.”
It was nearly dark when the car turned down a wide quiet road lined with palm trees. “Beverly Hills,” said Mr. Cogweiler—“Where the stars live.”
He pointed out the houses of people whose names were known the whole world over. “That’s where Wallace Beery lives,” he said. “Ronald Colman’s up there behind those trees, and Mary Pickford’s on that ridge with David Selznick the producer next door. Here’s Hedy Lamarr’s and that’s Herbert Marshall’s.…”
They turned into a narrower and more secluded road. The houses were smaller than the Matthews had expected, but in charming taste, with lovely gardens and lawns as smooth as bowling greens. Bright flowers showed dimly in the dark, and shady trees.
They stopped outside a little house in the Spanish style, with pink stucco walls and a roof of wavy, bright red tiles. There was an intriguing, rambling look about it, with wrought iron screens across the lower windows and a little Spanish balcony painted in bright colours and a long weird-shaped cactus on the lawn. “This is it,” said Mr. Cogweiler. “It’s nice inside. I guess you’ll like it quite a lot.”
