The Deer Park by Norman Mailer Read Free Book Online Page A

and zero.” He poured his drink and took a sip before putting it down. “When Lulu and I got married, I knew it could never last. That was what bothered me afterward. You begin to think you’re a sleepwalker when you can’t believe in your marriage on your wedding day. That’s why I needed the Rumanian. My work was going to hell.”
    It had come on him, after fifteen years and twenty-eight pictures, that he would never be powerful enough to make only those pictures he wanted to do. Instead, he would always be making the studio’s pictures. He was not even surprised to decide that he had no real desire to make his own films. For better or worse, his true marriage was with the capital, and he knew nowhere else to go. Worse. The commercial reputation at which he had sneered was being lost. His last picture,
Love Is But a Moment
, had been an expensive failure, but the two which came before it had not been successful either. “And then,” Eitel said, “there was that Subversive Committee.” It had hung over him for months. There were so many petitions he had signed, so many causes to which he had given money, first from conviction, then from guilt, finally as a gesture. It was part of the past; he was indifferent to politics; yet he learned that in the next subversive hearings in the film industry he would be called, and if he were not ready to give the name of everybody he knew who had ever belonged to any of the parties and committees on the government’s proscribed list, he could never work again in the capital.
    He felt nothing for all those people he once had known; some he liked in memory, some he disliked, but it seemed ridiculous to end his career by defending their names with his silence and so indirectly defending a political system which reminded him of nothing so much as the studio for which heworked. Yet there remained his pride. One did not go crawling in public.
    “It was horrible,” Eitel said. “I couldn’t make up my mind.” He smiled at the memory as if relieved it were gone. “You can have no idea of the work I put in. I had no time to
ponder
the moral questions, I was too busy having conferences with my lawyer, my agent was taking soundings at the studio, my business manager was lost in sessions with accountants to review my income-tax returns. They analyzed the situation, they refined it, they analyzed it again. My expenses were high, they told me, my salary was a necessity, my capital had been drained in divorce settlements, and Supreme Pictures was not going to protect me from the Committee. What with my big salary, my agent was even convinced they had encouraged the Committee to start on me. It seemed that when one got down to it, I had very little real money. So, they all advised the same thing. Co-operate with the Committee.” Eitel shrugged. “I said I would. I was sick about it, but there it was. My lawyer and I started to spend hours going over what I would say. In the middle of it all I started changing my mind again. When I got down to the details it was just too unpleasant. I got the lawyer to draw up a different plan in case I would not co-operate. And all the while friends kept seeing me and giving advice. Some said I should talk, others told me to be an unfriendly witness, others came just to admit that they didn’t know what they would do. I was finding it hard to sleep. What nobody took into account was the picture I was making. The studio had assigned me to film a musical,
Clouds Ahoy
. I couldn’t have asked for anything worse. I hate musical comedies.”
    Everything about the picture was wrong. His producer interfered on the set, there were visits by high studio executives who did not say a word. Delays came up which could have been avoided and others which could not; the star got sick, the color film showed mistakes in lighting, Eitel had a fight with the cameraman, a grip was hurt, it was decided that changeshad to be made in the script, the schedule fell days behind,