The Golden Age Read Free

they
believe
it?” Balderston was oddly urgent.
    “I wouldn’t know.” Timothy felt himself cut loose in deep waters. What
was
going on this night at Laurel House?
    “You were married to Caroline Sanford, weren’t you?”
    “We kept, as they say, company. Not quite the same thing.”
    “Sorry.” Balderston actually blushed. Then he looked about him. “Anyway, here’s the real—not the phony—war. In this room. There’s Senator Borah, taking money from the Nazis to pay for his isolationist line.”
    Timothy was never shocked by what film producers or even politicians did, but for a senator to take money from a dictator like Hitler was, perhaps, going too far. “I’ve known the Lion of Idaho for over twenty years.” Timothy was mild. “He’s a total isolationist. Why would he take money for doing and saying what he does and says anyway?”
    “I defer,” said Balderston, “to your long years, in and out …”
    “Mostly out.”
    “… of this Jacobean court.”
    “Jacobean?” Timothy found the adjective inappropriate for something as essentially mundane as the American political system. “Will there be poisonings? A sword through the tapestry? Statesman murdered in a bathtub?”
    Balderston laughed. “Nothing so good, I’m afraid. But even so, I’ve counted three Axis agents here tonight.”
    “How many British?”
    “Only John Foster, and he’ll tell you everything that he is trying to do to get us into the war, with absolutely no success. Then, if all else fails, he does a nice imitation of Senator Borah. John is a model spy.”
    The young assistant director approached Timothy. “We’re all set up in the library, Mr. Farrell.”
    Timothy gave the AD his list of those who had agreed to speak to camera—for and against American participation in the European war. Blaise’s office at the
Tribune
had been happy to do the preliminary work. Thus far, no one had turned down Timothy’s invitation, particularly when they were told that the format would resemble Henry Luce’s
March of Time
, easily the most popular of all newsreel programs, a new one shown each month in every movie house in the land. But where
The March of Time
dealt with a subject for no more than fifteen or twenty minutes, Timothy and his sponsors—an eclectic mix that included pro- and anti-war investors as well as L. B. Mayer’s studio, MGM—were willing for him to make a ninety-minute feature thatcould then be cut into smaller segments. The voice-over narrative would be done by the notorious young radio actor Orson Welles, who had terrified the nation the previous year with his “reportage” of a Martian invasion of New Jersey. “I picked what I thought would be a perfectly incredible target for conquest. You see how wrong I was. Everyone believed that Martians lust for dominion over Passaic, New Jersey.” Then Welles agreed to narrate Timothy’s film. “We must call our film ‘War or Peace?’ ”
    “Why not ‘Peace or War?’ ” Timothy suggested.
    Welles grinned. “Less on the nose, I agree. I’m against Hitler, you know.”
    “I’ll tell him, when I interview him.”
    Welles’s eyes were suddenly very round and protuberant, like a vast Pekinese confronting dinner. “You’ve got
Hitler?
To interview?”
    “Why not?” Timothy lied. He had been in the movie business almost thirty years, longer than the youthful Welles had been alive. But presently, after a prodigious number of stage and radio triumphs, Welles would be making his first film in Hollywood, after first narrating Timothy’s film. Meanwhile, Timothy’s muttered questions and asides would be the only narration in the library with its dark wood paneling and portrait of Aaron Burr over the fireplace. Later, Welles’s voice would be dubbed in.
    The five-man film crew, as always when left on their own, had overlit the room. Timothy brought down the lighting, aiming for the sort of Götterdämmerung effect that he had first concocted for