Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [110]
I had a moment of panic as I agreed. I hadn’t a clue who Fannie Hurst was, though the name sounded familiar, and I hadn’t wanted to sound like a schmuck to my friend, particularly since it involved something to do with my own profession. What kind of editor doesn’t recognize the name of a famous author, after all? Somewhere in the back of my head was the idea that Hurst might be the author of Stella Dallas, but I wasn’t even sure that it had ever been a book before it became a movie. Whoever she was, I knew she was not young, so I called Irving Lazar and asked him what he knew about her.
“Forget it,” he said. “She’s dead.”
I objected. She could hardly be giving a cocktail party in her apartment from the grave.
Lazar was not convinced. “Trust me, kiddo, she’s been dead for years.”
I asked if he could remember any of her titles. “She was a journalist,” he said. “Wrote for William Randolph Hearst, I think. They were big pals. She did books too, though.… Something Street … Easy Street? Nah. Wait a minute, I’ve got it: Back Street. Big best-seller, way back in the twenties, I think.… Got made into a movie.” There was a pause, while he switched gears. “Listen, how about Gar Kanin?” he asked. “I’m not getting what I want from Bennett. Give me two-fifty and he’s yours. No, make that three-fifty, and I’ll throw in foreign. They love Gar in London.”
I did not have an opportunity to read any of Hurst’s works before her party, so when I met Wodtke in the lobby of her building I was still ignorant of her. Everybody recognized her name all right, but that was it. Most people, like Lazar, assumed that she was dead.
The Des Artistes is one of New York’s most famous apartment buildings, a spectacular, towering Gothic fantasy on West Sixty-seventh Street just off Central Park West, where the lobby looks as if Count Dracula was about to descend in the elevator, and the exterior of the building makes you look up expecting to find Quasimodo perched among the stone-carved spires, buttresses, and gargoyles. Constructed during the 1920s as a kind of artists’ cooperative because of the shortage of studio space in New York, the Des Artistes had its own restaurant, with sprawling murals by Howard Chandler Christy of naked nymphs cavorting in the woods, perfectly embodying the spirit of luxurious bohemian decadence and contempt for the bourgeoisie in which it was built, in the years before the Crash wiped out most of the people who had intended to live, paint, and sculpt there.
The ancient elevator bore us up to Hurst’s floor at a glacial pace, as if rising from a crypt. It creaked and groaned like a ship under full sail. An ancient majordomo ushered us into a dark vestibule as if he had just risen from his coffin to answer the bell and showed us into a big, glassed-in living room–studio, two stories high, dimly lit by twenty-five-watt bulbs (in what had once been ornate gas fittings) and enough candles for a major funeral.
The windows were immense—two stories tall and filling one whole wall of the room—but they were draped in many square yards of black velvet, trimmed in faded gold, that came all the way to the floor. Against the other wall was a minstrel’s gallery in dark wood, with a narrow carved-wood stairway leading up to it and false windows in stained glass. Everywhere, standing in sheaves in tall vases under the dim light, were calla lilies, hundreds of them, giving off a sickly, sweet, cloying odor.
Swimming in the gloom were our fellow guests, dwarfed by the furniture and, for the most part, even older than the butler, who announced us in a low, croaking whisper, like a rusty iron gate swinging in the wind. It was difficult to believe that only a few floors below us was contemporary New York City. It was as if we had stepped straight out of the elevator into the gloomiest of haunted castles, peopled by ghosts. The men were small, ancient, dressed with a certain old-fashioned elegance not at all of this epoch; the women