From under my hat (1952)

From under my Hat Doug Sr. had promised his mother when he was nine years old that he would never drink. And I never saw him take anything stronger than water until after he married Sylvia. Then it was party, party, party night and day; and Doug drank to get through the interminable sessions. But, like his boyhood idol Theodore Roosevelt, it took only a jigger to start him off and make him more strenuous than usual. "Why don't you go home?" I said to him once when I met him in a night club, practically out on his feet. "Can't," he smiled wanly. "I have to wait for Sylvia." "Someone'll see she gets home. She always does. This is killing you." "I know, but she's my wife." I've always thought if he had received that telephone call from Mary Pickford, life might have been different for them both. He might even be alive today, wTho knows? While he enjoyed royalty and the importance it gave him, international society as a steady diet was wrong for him, and he knew it. Doug was a man who enjoyed going to bed at nine, getting up with the birds, leaping over a wall to wake himself up. He lived by day; the night was made for sleeping, not for howling. Norma Shearer was Sylvia's best friend. The Thalbergs and Fairbankses were next-door neighbors in Santa Monica and in and out of each other's houses at all hours. Norma decided to give them a party and invited Doug's closest personal friends. During the afternoon Doug was taken ill. No one thought it was serious until 7 p.m. when Sylvia phoned Norma: "I'm terribly sorry, but we can't come. Douglas is much worse." Their place cards were removed from the table and the guests sat down to dine at nine o'clock. During the first course, Norma's butler gave her a whispered message. One or two people noticed that she turned pale, but dinner went on without a ripple. Afterward they danced, played games, and had a generally gay old time until the party broke up at 3 a.m. As one of the guests got 80