West of Sunset by Stewart O’Nan Read Free Book Online Page A

have seen Ernest, because that night they barely had time to say hello. Fredric March’s place in Beverly Hills was a timbered mock Tudor mansion complete with formal gardens and classical statuary. There, nibbling hors d’oeuvres and sipping cocktails passed by Filipino servants, they honored the brave Spanish peasants by talking shop and writing checks. For Hollywood it was an oddly homely bunch. The only star he ran into besides their host was Gary Cooper, who stood a foot taller than anyone in the room. The rest were older—balding, bespectacled gnomes: writers and directors and composers, most of them Jews, recent émigrés from the continent. In a last-ditch act of self-interest, half a millennium after the Inquisition, the refugees were taking up a collection to save their persecutors.
    Ernest, sans Dietrich, was slicked-up in a buttercream linen suit that might have come from Metro’s wardrobe department. He limped over to the mantel and held forth on Franco and Catalonia and the defense of Madrid while a projectionist erected a screen. To his credit, he told the party the same tale of his war wound he’d told Scott and Benchley, including bumping his head.
    â€œI think we’re ready,” he said, and signaled someone in back to kill the lights.
    The film, as Dottie prophesized, was stultifying, all long shots and portentous voiceover. Ernest had written the script, and the repetition of key words, instead of being powerful, was lulling. Via an insistent montage, the Republic’s hopes were linked to the farmers’ harvest, so that in the end the rain darkening the dry soil and rushing muddy through the ditches was accompanied by heroic and, to his ears, vaguely Soviet crescendos. It was ridiculously simple, and even more frustrating after what Ernest had told them at lunch. Was the cause somehow nobler, being lost? Emotionally, yes, conceded the southerner in him; practically, reminded the northern boy, no. He hoped this wasn’t what Ernest expected him to do with
Three Comrades
, because he was incapable of it.
    â€œWasn’t that something?” Dottie asked the gathering as the lights came up, and they applauded once more. As president of the Anti-Nazi League, it was her job to pitch them, and she did, nakedly, calling on them to do what was right. “I don’t have to tell you what’s at stake.”
    When it came time to pledge, he wrote a check for a hundred dollars—a pittance compared to what others were giving, but more than he could afford, so that he felt at once righteous and extravagant and doubly guilty. It was a great weakness of his, being unable to resist even the least gesture.
    The evening was wrapping up, the waiters collecting the empty glasses. Already there were cars idling out front. He made to congratulate Ernest, but he was mobbed by admirers. Dottie and Alan were throwing a party for him back at the Garden. Scott figured he’d see him there.
    As a matter of courtesy, he sought out Fredric March to thank him.
    â€œThank
you
, sir,” March said heartily, clearly unaware of who he was, a fact Scott dwelt upon, cruising the neon gauntlet of Sunset. L.A. had never been his city, and as the glowing late-night coffee shops and drive-ins slid by on both sides, he thought he understood why. For all its tropical beauty there was something charmless and hard about it, a vulgarity as decidedly American as the picture industry which thrived on the constant waves of transplants eager for work, offering them nothing more substantial than sunshine. It was a city of strangers, but, unlike New York, the dream L.A. sold, like any Shangri-La, was one not of surpassing achievement but unlimited ease, a state attainable by only the very rich and the dead. Half beach, half desert, the place was never meant to be habitable. The heat was unrelenting. On the streets there was a weariness that seemed even more pronounced at night, visible through