It is a great feeling to walk into a crowded room and have someone introduce you and see by the people’s faces that you mean something to them. Anyway, it meant a lot to me. It meant a lot too when I began to receive large sums of money, where previously I had to manage on forty dollars a week.
When I was assured that the play would enjoy a long run, I left New York for Hollywood. I felt that with my present reputation I should be in demand and perhaps establish myself as a top flight script writer. As I was now drawing almost two thousand dollars a week from royalties, I did not hesitate to take an apartment in a modern block off Sunset Boulevard.
Once I had settled down, I determined to exploit my opportunities and after considerable thought and planning I began work on a novel. It was a story of a man who had been hurt in the war and could not love his girl. I had known such a case and I knew what had happened to the girl. It was explosive material and it had made a big impression on me. Somehow I managed to get that impression over in the book. My name helped it, of course, but even at that, it wasn’t such a bad piece of work. It sold ninety-seven thousand copies and was still selling by the time my second book was on the market. This one was not so good, but it sold. It was my first attempt at creative writing which I found exceedingly difficult. My third novel was based on the lives of a married couple I knew intimately. The wife had behaved outrageously and I had felt very bad about the final break up. All I had to do was to sit at my typewriter. The book wrote itself and when it was published it scored an immediate success.
I was sure after this that I had the golden touch. I told myself that I could have succeeded without John Coulson’s play. I marvelled at my stupidity to have wasted so many years of my life on an office stool when I could have been writing and earning big money.
A few months later, I decided I would have to write a play. Rain Check had finished playing on Broadway and was now touring. It was still doing excellent business, but I knew that before long I would be receiving smaller royalties and I did not wish to lower my present standard of living. Besides that, my friends were asking me when I was going to write for the theatre again and my constant excuses were becoming threadbare.
When I began to plan a play I found I had no ideas that could be dramatized. I kept trying. I talked to people, but in Hollywood, no one gives away ideas. I thought and worried, but nothing came. Finally I said the hell with a play, and decided to write another novel. So I sat down at my typewriter and wrote another novel. I just cut into it and kept writing until I finished it. Then I sent it to my publisher.
Two weeks later, my publisher asked me to lunch. He was very direct and said bluntly that the book was no good. He did not have to convince me. I knew the book was no good the moment I had finished it. So I told him to forget the book. I explained that I had rushed it, that I had been constantly interrupted and that I would let him have something up to standard in a month or so.
I began to hunt for a place where I could work without interruption. I told myself that if I could get away from the mob that demanded my time and attention, if I could find some quiet spot with a good view so that I could get my nerves right, I would write another best seller, and even a great play. I was so sure of myself now that I was certain that, given the right surroundings, I could do really good work. Eventually I found a place that I felt was ideal in every way.
Three Point was a one storey cabin which lay back a few hundred yards from the road to Big Bear Lake. It had a wide porch and a magnificent view across the hills. It had been furnished with every conceivable luxury and a number of modern labour saving devices had been installed, including a small, but powerful generating plant. I was delighted to hire it for the summer.
I hoped that Three Point would be my salvation, but it didn’t work out that way. I would get up around nine o’clock and sit on the porch with a pot of strong coffee at my elbow and my typewriter before me. I would stare at the view and get nowhere. I would spend the morning smoking, looking at the view, writing a few lines and tearing them up. In the afternoon I would take the car over to Los Angeles, where I would wander around talking to the movie writers and watching the film stars. In the evening, I would try again, get irritated and finish off the evening by going to bed.
It was during this crisis of my career, when success or failure could be influenced by the slightest mental disturbance, that Eve came into my life. Her influence became so great that I was drawn to her as a pin is drawn to a giant magnet. She never knew the real extent of her power over me and if she had known, she would not have cared. Her arrogant indifference was the hardest part of her character I had to endure. Whenever I was with her, I had an overwhelming urge to obtain some moral surrender from her, to make her give up the secret strength that she had. The struggle between us was an infernal obsession with me.
But this is enough. My stage is set and my story can begin. I have long planned to write it. I have tried before and failed. This time I may succeed.
It may be that if this book is ever published, it will find its way into Eve’s hands. I can imagine her lying in bed, a cigarette between her fingers, reading what I have written. Because her life is peopled by so many unidentified men, who must inevitably be shadowy figures in her mind, she will have forgotten most, if not all, of the things we did together. It may interest her to re-live the futile moments of our association and it may also give her confidence in her strength and ability to continue to stand alone. At least, she will learn when she has reached the end of my story that I have probed deeper into her life than she imagined, and, in stripping some of the camouflage from her, I have also stripped myself.
And when she has reached the last page, I can imagine her, with that contemptuous, wooden expression on her face I have seen so often, tossing the book indifferently aside.
CHAPTER TWO
AT a gas station in San Bernardino, they told me there was a tornado warning out.
The attendant, in smart white overalls with a red triangular badge on his breast pocket, advised me to stay in San Bernardino for the night, but I wouldn’t listen.
When I got into the hills, it began to blow. I kept going and a mile further on the stars were blotted out and then torrential rain came down like a black steel curtain shutting in the night with mist and water.
All I could see through the half crescent clearing made by the wind-shield wiper was the rebounding rain on the car’s hood and a few feet of the shiny black road in the light of my headlights.
The noise of the wind and the rain against the car made me feel that I was imprisoned in a giant drum upon which some lunatic drummer was beating. All around me came the sound of trees falling and rocks shifting, and above all this, the noise of water against the wheels of the car. Rain flowed down the side windows and reflected my face, lit by the yellow light from the dashboard.
Then I nearly ran off the road. I had the hillside on my left and nothing but a clean drop into the valley on my right. My heart raced as I wrenched at the driving wheel and I fed more gas into the engine. The wind was so fierce that there was hardly any increase in the car’s speed. The needle of the speedometer flickered between ten and fifteen miles an hour which seemed to be the best speed I could squeeze out of the engine.
Coming slowly around the next bend, I saw two men standing in the middle of the road. They had lanterns and they wore black slickers that shone in the rain and lantern light.