Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1936)

PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE FOR DECEMBER, 1936 105 Script Girls Prefer Husbands CONTINUED FROM PAGE 59 a stagnation that was like death. A shocked sense of growing horror held her rigid, stunned. Vaguely, she began to see the merciless logic of circumstance. There seemed to be ice in her veins. She shuddered faintly. Had she been merely a means to an end? She wondered. Was that what the quarrel, in Kessler's house had been about? Those whispered conferences? She recalled the conversation shs had unwittingly overheard between Kessler and Paul. " Vou can't buy him off," Kessler had said. "It's not money he's after — " A sudden heedless and primitive anger surged through her. Fool! Fool! They had used her as a cat's-paw — to pull their individual chesnuts out of the fire! It all began to make sense now. How unbelievably innocent she had been! She had believed everything. And Paul, master of every gesture in the human gamut, had dramatized another wedding and taken another wife ! "You don't suppose," broke ' in Jimmy maliciously, "that Alma happens to be here by coincidence, do you?" She turned to him and the arctic fury in her gray eyes stopped him. He shrugged, grinned weakly. "Okay!" he said. He flopped into the water and swam away. Sue arose and went to her room. She locked the door. She changed her clothes and sat by the window in a stupor. She looked into the patio with unseeing eyes, then up at the bold hills. Slowly, an unescapable and insidious logic arranged the sequence of events and completed the inevitable pattern. She arose abruptly. She must see Paul at once. nATJL was sitting at his desk when she ' entered his room. He looked up and smiled intimately to her; but the smile faded instantly when he looked closer. "Why, darling!" he said. "What's wrong?" She studied him curiously and ran her hand across her forehead. She said thinly: " There are a few things I'd like to ask you — "Not now, dear," he answered, easily, his eyes sharp. " I'm busy. Can't we skip it until tomorrow?" "No," she answered sharply, "we can't. You've played those imperturbable roles so long, that you can't act naturally at any time, can you?" He looked at her in silence, his eyes narrowed. "There isn't going to be any tomorrow," she told him. " I won't be here." Trenchantly, with lashing, bitter sentences, she told him what she thought of a man who would do what he had done to her. "You have no honor, no principle," she said, furiously. " You simply needed some little female fool to protect yourself, and I happened to be around — handy — ready to be used!" He slumped into his seat with an apathetic weariness. "That isn't so," he said. "Sol merely suggested — as a bright joke — that if I married — oh, hell, Sue! It was only a joke! That's what was said, and I won't lie about it. But that night, at the piano — " He paused listlessly. "It may look like a frame-up to you. but it wasn't. You turned the tables on me, Sue. I did fall in love with you — " "You lie!" she whispered furiously. He looked at her and his voice sounded dead: "Have it your own way." He sat inert, seemingly collapsed. "What do you suggest I do about it? Whatever you say — " "Do?" she echoed. "I'm leaving you, Paul. I'm bowing out. Everybody's reputation has been saved — and Mammoth's box office has been saved. What further legitimate use have you for me? Unless you need a quiescent mistress — " "Sue."' he snapped. He was calm but icily emphatic. But a tense and blindly unreasoning anger drove her on: "A wife means nothing to you." Her misery was intense. "But why did you have to use me for your filthy purpose— " "I might remind you," he interrupted, with a mounting sombre wrath, "that your escapade, in pajamas, in Bill Lederer's home, is not unknown to me — the stranger in Hollywood! Perhaps I thought I was not doing you any irreparable harm — " He paused at the stricken look upon her face. The implication of his words made her flinch as if he had struck her a mortal blow. She stared, uncertainly, astonishment in her eyes, her lips moving but uttering no sound. There are people who die standing. She was that sort. "I'm — sorry," he said, with a harsh contrition. "I shouldn't have said that. I apologize — " "I might have expected — that — from you," she whispered. " Decency — is wasted on you." She was consumed with a corroding bitterness, a flaming desire to pierce his complacency; to wound him; to hurt him as he had hurt her, for love and hate tread close together. "But," she said, "the ironical little paradox is inverted. You thought I loved you, didn't you?" She laughed. "Sue!" he snapped sharply. "Stop it! I'm sorry — " Heedlessly, she rushed on: "You thought I loved you! You went to great lengths, you and Kessler and Alma, to shield yourselves from Ricardo — but what about me? What's to prevent me from filing suit for divorce against you? What's to prevent me from sueing Alma Allen for alienation of affection? What's she doing down here, following you around?" She was trembling with a blind rage. ' I HATE you!" she whispered. "I hate you ' more than anyone in this world, Paul. I hate you so much it frightens me. I — I — could kill you!" He sat staring at her, his eyes stunned and unbelieving. "Are you crazy?" he asked harshly. "You don't know what you're talking about. Sue — think! I didn't mean — " She was in the last reaches of an intense rage and a bottomless humiliation. Blindly, she turned away and walked from the room. She locked her door, threw herself on her bed and wept as women weep over their dead. In her heart there was utter shipwreck. An acute sense of calamity hammered at her through a haze. She felt defenseless, wrung out, sapped of any volition. There was nothing left for her now. Her world was destroyed. She packed her bags and returned to Hollywood, alone, that night. 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