The screen writer (Apr-Oct 1948)

which closed but the town of that name in Monaco, which is a principality.) A flush came to my cheeks. Sure ! It was there I . . . I . . . I could tell about that incident on the Riviera (not the night club). I found myself doing very well with the hunt and peck system. "At sixteen I went to Europe with two other young fellows. Since, however, they were twenty-one and I was under age I was not allowed in the gaming casino at Monte Carlo, (not the . . .). They left me sitting on a park bench in the square and soon a Lady approached me. She told me I was a bright young fellow and asked if I had five dollars. Since I do not understand French very well and since she was a French lady I am not sure about her saying I was bright but I am sure she asked for five dollars since that part was in English. I asked her if she was too young to go into the Casino also and 1 remember she laughed, being forty or upward. Then she asked me (or demonstrated) — my memory is slightly hazy at this point — if I would like to go to her room with her. I said I would since I had nothing to lose. I guess I was wrong, however. Since it was with her that I lost it. "I remember I worried for about ten days after that and the fellows travelling with me thought it was because I had not been allowed in the Casino, being too young. I did not tell them what really occurred since I knew they would have felt badly about going in to gamble and leaving me like that." That wasn't bad, I decided, but what would the Johnston office say? Likely they'd insist that all the inter J esting part in the room would have to be deleted. Maybe though that part could be done with a dissolve. Still, everything in my life that has been interesting would have to be handled that way and — well, you can't do a whole picture in dissolves. T had to go back to Joe and tell him -*-that so far as my family was concerned, I couldn't write a "remember" story. It was, I think, the first time I ever saw him get so angry. He seemed highly displeased with me and all my relatives. He mumbled something about what my parents needed was a good five cent neurosis. I left him still fiddling with his tie and rubbing his hairy hand over his hairless head. One thing I remember : All the way home I kept thinking — now if only my brother had gone to Wellesley. . . . Roderick Bentley Rides Again By DAVID CHANDLER HIS symptoms were not unusual but unmistakable. He grew testy, short-tempered and a little irritated at all writers ten years his junior. He worried about his hair and found himself writing things like, "He was a young man of fortyfive, in the full prime of life," at the same time that he really felt that forty-five wasn't young. As for that stuff about prime of life, he grew quite belligerent about it. He felt that he was a better lover than he'd ever been now, at his age, a better man, and certainly a better writer. And yet Roderick Bentley felt curiously deflated. He had been feeling that way for some time. He'd been writing professionally, which is to say, more or less earning a living by words on paper, for a long time. He had been through dry periods before, periods when everything that came from his typewriter seemed to him stale, uninspired and pedestrian. But it had never been as now. He wasn't turning out as much copy as he used to ; but he did not even have the satisfaction of feeling that what little he was turnout was good, represented the fine, full flavor of his maturing talents. He grew furious, frightened, afraid he would run out of ideas. A veteran of countless battles over scripts with collaborators, producers and directors, he found himself tense before going into conference. Privately — for he would not even mention this to his best friends or his agent — he felt insecure. It was like a pitcher losing his stuff. He held the ball just as he always had ; his windup was no different, if anything, improved. And yet there was no stuff on the old ball ; it didn't break sharp, it had a bad tendency to miss the plate and, to be blunt about it, the fast ball just wasn't fast. WHETHER this was true or not about Roderick Bentley no one knew for sure. Certainly he did not. But he felt it was true, which is the same thing, or, possibly, worse. He found himself making less money in 1948 than in 1947, when he had made less than in 1946, when, to be sure, he had not equalled 1945. He invented all kinds of excuses. In '46 there was the war and reconversion — you couldn't very well blame him for that, Bentley felt. And in '47, well there was a strike and the studios started trimming costs by firing janitors, messenger girls and him. (He'd been fired many times in his life before, always landing on his feet, frequently in better spots than he'd been bounced from. But now he felt all this talk of cutting deadwood was directed toward him personally.) There were always excuses, but they never really helped. He tried not to be lazy, despite the fact that he could never achieve the output of ten years ago. He wrote stories again and a play and an original or two, up-to-the-minute, yet mature, sincere The Screen Writer, October, 1948 21