herself once again, it was a good crowd. She and Max could certainly pull them in …
Everything was just fine.
… Were the flags hanging too low, so close to the candlelight …?
Concentrate.
Max was – was he? – was he running a finger along Blanche Williams’s cheek? He should stop it! She should put a stop—
Concentrate.
Dougie Fairbanks was talking to her. He was saying something as if it were quite fascinating … Someone’s chauffeur had made a killing on the stock market … She hardly needed to listen. These days, everyone knew someone who knew a chauffeur who’d made a killing. In fact conversation around Eleanor’s star-studded banqueting table wasn’t much different from conversation at a million dining tables across America that night. There was only one thing anyone ever seemed to want to talk about any more: who’d made how much on what stock and at what margin … the increase in values of Bethlehem Steel versus General Motors, National Waterworks versus United Founders … The stock market was everyone’s obsession.
Added to which, it happened that the day of the Beecham Supper Party, 17 October 1929, had been a reassuringly good day on Wall Street: an excellent day, after a disconcertingly bad one, at the end of a record-breaking summer. There had been a couple of serious wobbles at the beginning of the month, ‘just to keep things exciting’, Max and his friends confidently agreed, but that morning, newspapers had been filled with the comforting forecasts of the experts:
‘Stock prices,’ declared Professor Fisher of the University of Yale, ‘look as if they have reached a permanently high plateau.’ His respected voice was just one of a chorus of bullish experts, academics, business moguls and financiers, and the markets had taken comfort. Up, up and up went the stock prices again, back on their apparently relentless rise. It meant that anyone who’d put in a call to their brokers before sitting down to dinner – and that included most of Eleanor’s guests and Eleanor’s husband, too – would be wanting to chew over their successes this evening.
But not Eleanor. On this particular night, 17 October, with fifty-one guests to worry about, and a dipping arc light, and Marion Davies, and the flags, and bloody Max, kissing her so tenderly one minute that her heart swelled with hope, and talking so animatedly with Blanche Williams the next, Eleanor was finding the usual subject less than compelling.
‘Well that’s just too fantastic, Dougie,’ she said blandly. ‘He must be one happy chauffeur.’
‘Isn’t it terrific!’ Douglas Fairbanks shouted. Because Douglas always shouted. Because he hated not to be the centre of attention. ‘And isn’t that such a terrific feeling!’ He turned to the rest of the table: ‘Doesn’t everyone think? Don’t you think so, Von Stroheim? Isn’t it great to know we live in a country where your average Joe can turn himself into a millionaire just by … knowing how to do it? Mr So-and-So from Nowheres-Ville can make a million! Just like that! Just like you and me! That’s why I love America!’ He thumped the table with such emphasis it made Eleanor jump. ‘That’s why I’m proud to be an American! Charlie-boy, c’mon. Admit it!’ he shouted. ‘You heard Professor What-Not, Tuesday. You heard what the man said! Are you telling me you know better than the professor from Yale?’
But on this, as Douglas knew well, his friend Charlie Chaplin would never agree with him, nor with Professor What-Not from Yale. Charlie – an Englishman, in any case – was, that night, the solitary voice of caution among them. ‘You know exactly what I think, Dougie,’ Charlie said wearily. He’d said it many times before. ‘You got people making money out of money that never even existed in the first place! It’s a trick of the light, I keep telling you. It’s a whole pile of nothing, built on a mountain of Zilch. It can’t go on.’
‘Aw, Charlie!’ groaned Marion. ‘Don’t go getting started on that again! … J-just nobody wants to hear it!’
Charlie smiled at her. Shrugged. ‘Dougie asked me,’ he said. ‘In any case, I’m only passing on what I’ve been told by the experts …’
‘By ONE expert!’ Douglas Fairbanks shouted. ‘And you know, you keep on about your “expert” like the guy’s some kind of oracle … but he’s a solitary, single voice, Charlie-boy. There’s no one out there supporting him …’
‘There’s going to be a crash.’ Charlie shrugged. ‘It’s what he told me. And it’s going to be catastrophic. It’s only a matter of when … Personally – as you know, Dougie – I’m out.’ He looked up and down the table. ‘I’m guessing I must be the only person round this table without a stock to my name. Ha! Maybe I’m the only person in the entire business!’
‘Butch Menken’s sold out,’ someone commented. Not Eleanor.
‘Butch sold up, did he?’ Charlie said. He looked at Mary Pickford, whose voice had provided the information. ‘When, I wonder? Do you know?’
‘Oh, a couple of weeks back. I considered following him …’ She smiled. ‘Where Butch Menken leads …’ she said.
‘… We all should follow,’ Charlie finished for her wryly. ‘Well. He’s a smart man.’ Eleanor said nothing. She examined the silver-plated dessert fork in her hand, didn’t glance up. There was a tiny lull, hardly perceptible – because of the history: Butch, Max and Eleanor used to be thicker than thieves. It was quickly, tactfully, broken by Marion.
‘Made a killing though, dintcha, Charlie?’ she called out. ‘Every s-single stock he owned. Sold the lot. Pretty much, huh? Imagine it! And now he’s sore, because if he’d stayed in just one more day, or two more days, he would have made another k-killing, same as all the rest of us! Isn’t it so, Charlie!’
‘All I’m saying …’ Charlie paused, sighed, and apparently thought better of continuing. ‘… Just don’t come crying to me when all the money’s gone …’
‘Ha! It wont be for m-money that M-Marion comes crying to you, Charlie boy …’ declared Douglas.
He looked around to collect the laughter – but was met instead with a brief, shocked silence. His wife, beside him, put a quietening hand on his shoulder. ‘Isn’t that right, Mary?’ he said to her weakly.
He was drunk. Clearly. And a fool. Everybody knew it. Even so … Eleanor glanced nervously at Marion.
‘Such beautiful candelabra,’ Mary Pickford said smoothly, in her sweet, steely voice. ‘Tell me, Eleanor, did you pick them up in Europe?’
Eleanor turned to her gratefully. She was about to say yes, to tell Mary a touching story of how she’d discovered them – all eighteen of them – covered in dust in a little antique market on a side street in Roma—
‘Oh, they’re terrific little antiques!’ broke in Douglas. ‘They remind me of a funny incident a few years ago …’
Eleanor longed to lean across and apologize to Marion, but so long as the stupid shoyte continued to jabber at her, it seemed quite impossible.
‘… I had the candelabra in the one hand and there was I,’ he bellowed, ‘a hundred foot up on the rigging, the whole damn thing swaying. Next thing – WHOOSH! … The entire set’s up in flames and I’m thinking to myself – I kid you not – I AM GOING TO DIE! Right here, right now. And I’m dressed as Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest!’
Eleanor, not really listening, offered him only the wannest of smiles.
‘Imagine me, El!’ he cried stubbornly, determined to get a better response, ‘I’m a hundred foot in the air …’ He stood up, grasping the nearest candelabra as he rose, his infuriating, actorish laughter filling the air. He held the flames aloft, waving them this way and that –
‘… I’m holding onto that rigging for grim death! …’
Eleanor watched him. Felt the cold, wet fear crawling slowly over her