Some Faces in the Crowd by Budd Schulberg Read Free Book Online Page A

forgive him if he didn’t.
    “All right,” he said. “All right. You told me, Marshy. Never forget you were the one who told me. I can’t decide whether to do it tonight or wait until after my broadcast tomorrow. I have a very important broadcast tomorrow. I am going to declare war.”
    “Just you? Without even bothering to inform Congress?”
    “The people will inform Congress,” he explained. “I’ve had enough of these Russkies and Chinks and foreigners pushin’ us around. I say it’s better to get it over with now while we’re strong than wait for decay to set in. Like my Cousin Abernathy used t’ say …”
    “Please,” I said, “on the great American public you get away with it, but don’t perpetrate that fake cousin on me.
    He believed he had a Cousin Abernathy, that was the frightening part. And now he believed he could declare war, that was even more frightening. The screw that always had been loose in him had worked itself free and the motor was coming apart. He was saying, “If I tell the people to declare war they will flood the White House and their congressmen with letters and telegrams. The GI’s will insist on going into action. Volunteer militias will rise in every town and hamlet in America. The people listen to Lonesome Rhodes. The people act with Lonesome Rhodes.”
    It frightened me. Maybe he was only bluffing. Trying to get a rise out of me. He knew how I felt about irresponsible amateurs with mass followings sounding off on international crises. He knew where I stood on these oracles who flunk the most elementary course in human relations but never hesitate to tell us how we could have saved those three hundred million Chinese from Communism or how to turn back the tides of Africa. So maybe this idea of declaring war was his idea of how to have fun with Marshy. But what if it was what he said it was? He had been able to bring the British to a boil. What was to stop him from bringing the whole world to the popping point? “In the Event of an Enemy Attack”—I saw those ominous billboards showing up among soft-drink and cigarette ads along American highways. I saw the fatal mushroom of atomic ruin rising above gutted, faceless cities. I saw Lonesome Rhodes as a gum-chewing Nero strumming his cigar-box git -tar and easing into the commercials while civilization burned.
    “All right,” I said. “Don’t jump. I’ll come. On one condition. That you hold off your war until I get there.”
    “Don’t think you can talk me out of it, Marshy baby,” he said. “I’m fed up. I’m loaded for bear.”
    “You’re loaded, there’s not much doubt about that,” I said. “Now go to bed. Cool off. Sleep on the war.”
    “I’m sick ’n tired o’ being stalled,” he said. “The night before last I tried to get Joe Stalin on the phone. I figgered if Joe and I could get out behind the old woodshed together we might be able to work something out. But the big bum thinks he’s too high ’n mighty to talk to me. Okay, sez I, I got an army of fifty million viewers back o’ me, ready to march when I blow the whistle. I’ll settle his hash.”
    “Take a hot bath,” I said. “And then two empirin and a phenobarbital. And stay in bed and rest until I get in.”
    I flew in early the next afternoon and went right to the Waldorf. Lonesome was in a terrible state. He hadn’t shaved in three or four days and there was so much Irish whiskey in him that he smelled like a branch of Jameson’s. Whiskey had stained his bathrobe and empty bottles made a slum of his penthouse suite.
    “Marshy honey, bless you, baby,” he said when I came in. “Stay here and marry me and you’ll be the first lady of America. Lonesome Rhodes Clubs all over the country want me to run for President. But I’m not sure I want it. I can’t do everything myself.”
    “Please,” I said. “Just no war today. I’m simply not ready for war today.”
    “Marshy, honey, for you I’ll do anything. I should have had