I looked at Mike and he looked at me.
“O.K. with us.”
“O.K. with the rest of you?
Kessler?
Bernstein?”
They weren’t too agreeable, and certainly not happy, but they agreed to play games until we gave the word.
We were warm in our thanks.
“You won’t regret it.”
Kessler doubted that very much, but Johnson eased them all out, back to work.
Another hurdle leaped, or sidestepped.
“Rome” was released on schedule and drew the same friendly reviews.
“Friendly” is the wrong word for reviews that stretched ticket line-ups blocks long.
Marrs did a good job on the publicity.
Even that chain of newspapers that afterward turned on us so viciously fell for Marrs’ word wizardry and ran full-page editorials urging the reader to see “Rome.”
With our third picture,
“Flame Over France,” we corrected a few misconceptions about the French Revolution, and began stepping on a few tender toes.
Luckily, however, and not altogether by design, there happened to be in power in Paris a liberal government. They backed us to the hilt with the confirmation we needed.
At our request they released a lot of documents that had hitherto conveniently been lost in the cavernous recesses of the Bibliotheque Nationale.
I’ve forgotten the name of whoever happened to be the perennial pretender to the French throne.
At, I’m sure, the subtle prodding of one of Marrs’ ubiquitous publicity men, the pretender sued us for our whole net, alleging the defamation of the good name of the Bourbons.
A lawyer Johnson dug up for us sucked the poor chump into a courtroom and cut him to bits. Not even six cents damages did he get.
Samuels, the lawyer, and Marrs drew a good-sized bonus, and the pretender moved to Honduras.
Somewhere around this point, I believe, did the tone of the press begin to change.
Up until then we’d been regarded as crosses between Shakespeare and Barnum.
Since long obscure facts had been dredged into the light, a few well-known pessimists began to wonder sotto voce if we weren’t just a pair of blasted pests. “Should leave well enough alone.”
Only our huge advertising budget kept them from saying more.
I’m going to stop right here and say something about our personal life while all this was going on.
Mike I’ve kept in the background pretty well, mostly because he wants it that way.
He lets me do all the talking and stick my neck out while he sits in the most comfortable chair in sight.
I yell and I argue and he just sits there; hardly ever a word coming out of that dark-brown pan, certainly never an indication showing that behind those polite eyebrows there’s a brain—and a sense of humor and wit—faster and as deadly as a bear trap.
Oh, I know we’ve played around, sometimes with a loud bang, but we’ve been, ordinarily, too busy and too preoccupied with what we were doing to waste any time.
Ruth, while she was with us, was a good dancing and drinking partner.
She was young, she was almost what you’d call beautiful, and she seemed to like being with us.
For a while I had a few ideas about her that might have developed into something serious.
We both—I should say, all three of us—found out in time that we looked at a lot of things too differently.
So we weren’t too disappointed when she signed with Metro.
Her contract meant what she thought was all the fame and money and happiness in the world, plus the personal attention she was doubtless entitled to have.
They put her in Class B’s and serials and she, financially, is better off than she ever expected to be.
Emotionally, I don’t know.
We heard from her sometime ago, and I think she’s about due for another divorce.
Maybe it’s just as well.
But let’s get away from Ruth.
I’m ahead of myself.
All this time Mike and I had been working together, our approach to the final payoff had been divergent.
Mike was hopped on the idea of making a better world, and doing that by making war impossible.
“War,” he’s often said, “war of any kind is what has made man spend most of his history in merely staying alive.
Now, with the atom to use, he has within himself the seed of self-extermination.
So help me, Ed, I’m going to do my share of stopping that, or I don’t see any point in living.
I mean it!”
He did mean it.