FullReads

“Lay down,” said Irish Mary, “an’ get easy. Lyddy won’t be home till six if she’s early, an’ she’ll prob’bly be in bed by nine now they’re rushin’ the end of the picture, an’ she’s got to be on the lot made up by nine or sooner.”

“Nine–in the morning!”

“Well, sure! You soon get used to it. They’ve got to get all the daylight they can, an’ times the fog’s low earlier, or they’d likely start at seven or eight. You look a little beat, dearie. Lay down. I’ll have you unpacked while we’re eatin’.”

But Harrietta did not lie down. She went to the window. Below a small army of pigmy gardeners were doing expert things to flower beds and bushes that already seemed almost shamelessly prolific. Harrietta thought, suddenly, of her green-painted flower boxes outside the eleventh-story south window in the New York flat. Outside her window here a great scarlet hibiscus stuck its tongue out at her. Harrietta stuck her tongue out at it, childishly, and turned away. She liked a certain reticence in flowers, as in everything else. She sat down at the desk, took up a sheet of lavender and gold paper and the great lavender plumed pen. The note she wrote to Ken was the kind of note that only Ken would understand, unless you’ve got into the way of reading it once a year or so, too:

Ken, dear, I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit hole, and yet–and yet–it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life.

Two weeks later, when she had begun to get used to her new work, her new life, the strange hours, people, jargon, she wrote him another cryptic note:

Alice–“Well, in our country you’d generally get to somewhere else–if you ran very fast for a long time, as I’ve been doing.”

Red Queen–“Here it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.”

In those two weeks things had happened rather breathlessly. Harrietta had moved from the splendours of The Place to her own rose-embowered bungalow. Here, had she wanted to do any casement work with a white rose, like that earlier heroine, she could easily have managed it had not the early morning been so feverishly occupied in reaching the lot in time to be made up by nine. She soon learned the jargon. “The lot” meant the studio in which she was working, and its environs. “We’re going to shoot you this morning,” meant that she would be needed in to-day’s scenes. Often she was in bed by eight at night, so tired that she could not sleep. She wondered what the picture was about. She couldn’t make head or tail of it.

They were filming J. N. Gardner’s novel, Romance of Arcady, but they had renamed it Let’s Get a Husband. The heroine in the novel was the young wife of twenty-seven who had been married five years. This was Harrietta’s part. In the book there had been a young girl, too–a saccharine miss of seventeen who was the minor love interest. This was Lydia Lissome’s part. Slowly it dawned on Harrietta that things had been nightmarishly tampered with in the film version, and that the change in name was the least of the indignities to which the novel had been subjected.

It took Harrietta some time to realize this because they were not taking the book scenes in their sequence. They took them according to light, convenience, location. Indoor scenes were taken in one group, so that the end of the story might often be the first to be filmed.

For a week Harrietta was dressed, made up, and ready for work at nine o’clock, and for a week she wasn’t used in a single scene. The hours of waiting made her frantic. The sun was white hot. Her little dressing room was stifling. She hated her face with its dead-white mask and blue-lidded eyes. When, finally, her time came she found that after being dressed and ready from nine until five-thirty daily she was required, at 4:56 on the sixth day, to cross the set, open a door, stop, turn, appear to be listening, and recross the set to meet someone entering from the opposite side. This scene, trivial as it appeared, was rehearsed seven times before the director was satisfied with it.