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

and an expensive scene with extras, calculated to take a morning, went into the morning of the next day; everything was lax, and Eitel knew he was to blame. Each night for salt to his sores, he had to sit in a projection room and watch the rushes from the last week. The more he worked, the worse it got. The pace was too slow or too rapid, the comedy was not funny, the sentiment was pious, and the production numbers with their troops of dancing girls and their kaleidoscope of scenery looked like a battlefield after the war between the dance director and Eitel. Lost in the middle was “the Eitel touch”; here and there a scene with studied composition, intricate shadows, and a patch of atmosphere. It went on like this for three weeks of shooting, until one morning, with the picture not half done, everything went wrong, and everybody, producer, director, actors, cameramen, and grips, dance director and chorus, milled over the sound stage. Eitel, his nerves out of control, walked off the set and left the studio. Immediately, his contract was revoked by Supreme Pictures, and the next morning another director was given the thankless mission of finishing
Clouds Ahoy
. Eitel wasn’t there to learn the news. When he quit the studio that morning, he was beginning to act a script of his own which, whether behind or ahead of schedule, took several days to unwind.

CHAPTER SIX
    E ITEL WENT directly back to his fourteen-room house, and told the butler not to answer the door. His secretary was away on vacation, and so he called his answer service and told them hewas going to be out of town for the next two days. Then he sat down in his study and began to drink. His telephone rang all afternoon and the only sign of how much liquor he had swallowed was that the sound of the phone became funny.
    The fact was that he could not get drunk. Too sobering was the other fact that in forty-eight hours he would appear before the Committee. “I’m free now,” he would tell himself, “I can do what I want,” and yet he was able to think of nothing but the damage of quitting the set of
Clouds Ahoy
. His contract with Supreme was ruined, no doubt of that. Still, if he co-operated with the Committee, he would probably find work at another studio. What it amounted to was that a fit of temper was going to cost him a few hundred thousand dollars over the next five years. “It all goes in taxes anyway,” he caught himself thinking.
    The night before the day he was due to testify, he still had not seen his lawyer, and spoke to him on the phone only long enough to say he would meet him at his office a half hour before the hearings started. Then Eitel rang his answer service and started to take the list of messages. In the thirty-six hours since he had left the studio, there had been more than a hundred calls, and after a while he became tired of it. “Just give me the names,” he said to the operator, and forgot them even as she mentioned them. When the girl came to Marion Faye, he stopped her. “What did Faye want?” Eitel asked.
    “He didn’t leave any message. Just a phone number.”
    “All right. Thank you. I’ll take that, and you give me the rest later, dear.”
    Faye arrived an hour after Eitel phoned. “Trying to get used to living alone?” he greeted Eitel.
    “Maybe that’s what it is.”
    Marion sat down and tapped a cigarette carefully on his platinum case. “I saw Dorothea yesterday,” he said. “She’s betting that you’ll talk.”
    “I didn’t know people were betting on me,” Eitel said.
    Faye shrugged. “People bet on everything.”
    “I wonder why?”
    “It’s the only way to know.”
    “Well,” Eitel said, “how are you betting, Marion?”
    Faye looked at him. “I put down three hundred dollars that Dorothea is wrong.”
    “Maybe you’d better hedge that bet.”
    “I’d rather lose it.”
    Eitel tried to sit back in his chair. “I’ve been hearing a great many stories about what you’re doing in Desert