– You’re not listening to me. That may be true, and The Music Box is a fine picture, but I’m trying to tell you that shorts won’t win me any more Academy Awards, and shorts won’t pay salaries. You must start thinking in terms of features. I can’t fund a slate of shorts and make them pay. Look, I’m not shelving short pictures entirely, but we all have to understand that their time is coming to an end. I’m going to need at least one feature a year from you. The first is this.
Hal Roach hands him a script – an outline, really. It’s clear that it’s something Hal Roach has been working on personally because his fingerprints are all over it, literally and metaphorically. It’s called Babes in Toyland.
Isn’t that an opera? he asks Hal Roach.
– Operetta. A little opera – you know, funny. I bought the rights from RKO, and MGM will finance it for a million, maybe a million and a half, as long as we get a singer for the male lead. Although, obviously, the picture is yours and Babe’s. Take the script away with you. Read it over the holidays. We’ll talk when you return.
He stands, rolling up the script as he rises. Hal Roach looks pained, as though Hal Roach cannot bear to see his work treated in this way; that, or Hal Roach fears being beaned with it.
I’d wish you a merry Christmas, says Hal Roach, but I don’t know if it’s appropriate after what you’ve been through. Where will you spend it?
– South Palm.
– With your sister-in-law?
– No, I don’t think so. We’ve decided that it might be best if she and the kids move into their own place. I’ve found somewhere for them.
– How’s she doing?
– Not good.
Hal Roach puts his hands in his pockets.
He waits.
– You been in touch with Lois? says Hal Roach.
– No.
Have you? he wants to ask, but decides against it.
It’s a damned shame, says Hal Roach. She’s a lovely girl. But you never know. At this time of year, people start reflecting on family. They get to put things in perspective.
He does not want to hear this, not from Hal Roach.
– Maybe you could have someone issue a press release. The paths of happiness may have been cleared of dead leaves by now.
Hal Roach takes the hit before landing one in return.
– If you put your girlfriend in one of my pictures again, you and I will have a serious disagreement.
The meeting is over.
119
Amid the holiday celebrations, he suffers only a deep and abiding premonition of disintegration of which he cannot speak, not even with Babe. He knows that Babe is concerned about him. Babe doesn’t like to see him this way. Babe already has one drunk on his hands, and does not need another, but Babe remains as solicitous of him as ever. Babe was there for him in the days and weeks after the divorce came through, and Babe was there for him when Teddy died.
Babe will always be there for him.
But Babe cannot understand the fragmentation he is experiencing. Lois and his daughter gave structure to his existence. Just as he requires order in his working environment, so also does he need it in his personal life, and disruption to one inevitably involves a disturbance in the other. The fact that he was largely responsible for fatally undermining his own marriage does not change this. It was the stability, however fragile, of his home life that enabled him to stray: a tension of symmetry. Only in his pictures is he content to let chaos prevail. He abjures it in reality, yet at the same time he is driven to act on instinct, just as on the set of a picture the scripts over which he labors may provide the framework for spontaneity. But one cannot exist without the other: to create artistic discord, he depends upon the consolations of domestic harmony.
The solution, then, to the profound upheaval in his world caused by the divorce is to find a way to restore equilibrium as soon as possible. With his sister-in-law and her children safely situated elsewhere, he tries to convince Ruth to move out of her parents’ house in Watts and join him at South Palm. But Ruth is conscious of appearances. His divorce will not be final for another year, and she does not wish to be the subject of gossip.
We can’t live together, Ruth tells him. People will talk.
In other words, Ruth will fuck him, but she will not live under the same roof as him, or not without company to add the appearance of propriety. And Ruth is entitled to take this position. She has a business of her own, and therefore a reputation both personal and professional to protect.
It is a quandary.
120
He meets Babe for a drink at the Cocoanut Grove. The atmosphere at the Grove is celebratory, and with so much activity they find it easy to sequester in a quiet corner. Babe is leaving with Myrtle to spend Christmas in Palm Springs. Babe says that he is welcome to join them, but he tells Babe that he would prefer to stay in the city. He does not discuss questions of order and stability with Babe. He does not share with Babe the breaches in his quiddity. They talk of his meeting with Hal Roach, and the script for Babes in Toyland. Babe, too, has received a copy.
I don’t much care for it, he tells Babe.
Babe, by contrast, admires the ambition of the piece, and is pleased that it is a musical. If Babe has any regret about the pictures they are making together, it is that opportunities seldom arise for him to sing.
But why? Babe asks.
– I think it’s silly. I don’t want to dress up as some fairytale character.
– You’ve dressed up as worse before.
– And I don’t wish to do so again.
Babe backs off. Babe realizes that there is no point in talking with him about work when he is in this humor. He does not tell Babe that he is also frightened. He has control on a two-reel picture; he can bend directors to his will. But the longer the picture, the less control he can exert. Babes in Toyland will compound this problem because Hal Roach proposes to fill the cast with both stars from the lot and actors borrowed from other studios. With a million dollars or more of MGM’s money riding on it, Babes in Toyland will have many masters, and he will be fortunate if he is one. This will be disorder in the guise of order. This will be a tumult of voices in a time of personal discord.
How is Lillian? he asks.
Babe shrugs in reply. Lillian DeBorba is a transitory respite from Myrtle, and no more than that. The relationship cannot last, particularly because Dorothy DeBorba is no longer among the cast of Our Gang and therefore her mother has no reason to be around the lot. Just because Babe and Myrtle are back together doesn’t mean reporters are not curious about the mysterious blonde mentioned in Myrtle’s original suit, and whether Babe might have other such women in his life.
I want Ruth to move in with me, he tells Babe.
– That’s kind of sudden, isn’t it?
– I find it hard to be alone.
– It’s the season. It’ll pass.