The Last Tycoon / Последний магнат. Книга для чтения на английском языке

“He gave me a lot of phoney advice and I tried it all, but nothing doing. Esther and I sit opposite each other at dinner, and I’m ashamed to look at her. She’s been a good sport about it[59 - been a good sport about it – (разг.) хорошо держится, не показывает виду], but I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed all day long. I think Rainy Day grossed twenty-five thousand in Des Moines and broke all records in St. Louis and did twenty-seven thousand in Kansas City. My fan mail’s way up, and there I am afraid to go home at night, afraid to go to bed.

”

Stahr began to be faintly oppressed. When the actor first came in, Stahr had intended to invite him to a cocktail party, but now it scarcely seemed appropriate. What would he want with a cocktail party with this hanging over him? In his mind’s eye he saw him wandering haunted from guest to guest with a cocktail in his hand and his grosses up twenty-seven thousand.

“So I came to you, Monroe. I never saw a situation where you didn’t know a way out.

I said to myself: even if he advises me to kill myself, I’ll ask Monroe.”

The buzzer sounded on Stahr’s desk – he switched on the dictograph and heard Miss Doolan’s voice.

“Five minutes, Mr. Stahr.”

“I’m sorry,” said Stahr. “I’ll need a few minutes more.”

“Five hundred girls marched to my house from the high school,” the actor said gloomily, “and I stood behind the curtains and watched them. I couldn’t go out.

”

“You sit down,” said Stahr. “We’ll take plenty of time and talk this over.”

In the outer ofifce, two members of the conference group had already waited ten minutes – Wylie White and Jane Meloney. The latter was a dried-up little blonde of fifty about whom one could hear the fifty assorted opinions of Hollywood – “a sentimental dope,” “the best writer on construction in Hollywood,” “a veteran,” “that old hack,” “the smartest woman on the lot,” “the cleverest plagiarist in the biz”; and, of course, in addition she was variously described as a nymphomaniac, a virgin, a pushover, a Lesbian and a faithful wife.

Without being an old maid, she was, like most self-made women, rather old-maidish. She had ulcers of the stomach, and her salary was over a hundred thousand a year. A complicated treatise could be written on whether she was “worth it” or more than that or nothing at all.