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By Root 1977 0

love from his employees and his stars, but he did expect honesty. He dealt fairly with them, treated them like family, ensured the happiness on the set of even the lowliest extra by paying them promptly and well. His stars were sent flowers regularly and given extra little gifts, like the brand-new low-slung scarlet Packard roadster for Mae, the floor-length ermine cape for pretty Dawn, and the biggest blue-tiled swimming pool in California for Mitzi. He even paid Tom’s racehorse trainer as well as picking up the tab for Ralph’s custom-made London suits and hand-crafted shoes. All he asked in return, besides good money-making pictures, was that they kept their sex lives quiet and their names out of the papers—except for the carefully posed inserts in Picture Play, Photoplay, and Motion Picture Classics. And on the rare occasions when he met his stars socially, at a party at one of their sumptuous houses or a formal dinner held at his own mansion next to the Burton Green estate on Lexington Road in smart new Beverly Hills, he was cool, charming, polite, and always remote.

And when he sat in his big office with the pictures of his stars on the walls or strolled his fifty acres on Cahuenga, inspecting his fine studios and his newest cameras and his revolutionary klieg lights, he knew he was master of all he surveyed. At his fine thirty-room mansion on Lexington he could count great paintings on his walls, tasteful decor, and fine carpets. There were flowers in each large sweet-smelling room, a dog sprawled on his terrace, tall cedars to spread shade across his carefully tended lawns. He had a housekeeper and servants, a chauffeur and half a dozen automobiles, he had accountants and lawyers and a great deal of money in the bank. And he worked twenty-four hours a day to keep his loneliness at bay.

He almost looked forward to the problem confronting him now. Finding a new director for Scheherazade would not be easy; the best were already working at other studios.

The intercom buzzed noisily. He pressed the switch and his secretary said, “Miss Lilian and Miss Mary Grant are here to see you, with their mother, sir.”

He sighed. Stage mothers were an eternal problem, but he always vetted every member of the cast personally before any of his films went into production, and his was the final yes or no. The Grant twins were in the final round of casting for the roles of two dance maidens, not big roles but well featured. At least they had been in the last script he saw. Now he would have to tell them that the film was postponed indefinitely, until he could find a new director.

He stood up as they entered, shook their hands, gave each of them a chair, and then returned to his seat behind the desk, sitting back with his hands folded, looking at the girls, unsmiling.

Winona Grant assessed him as he assessed her girls. She had heard a lot about the reclusive C. Z. Abrams, how he had taken over Schroeder’s dilapidated studios and in two years made Magic a name to be reckoned with in motion pictures. It was said he had made a fortune turning out hundreds of cheap little comedies and serials that fit into almost any bill at every movie theater around the country. Magic had not made its name in big features, but now it was on its way, after hits like Dark Destiny and the long-running serial The Adventures of Mitzi and Tom Jacks’s spectacular western sagas. It was also said that C. Z. was about to spend a great deal of that quickly amassed fortune on his new epic, and after the failure of Griffith’s Intolerance, the word around the casting offices was that he had better know what he was doing.

However, Winona did not care about C. Z.’s great gamble. All she wanted was featured roles for her daughters.

“Both Lilian and Mary are accomplished in all forms of dance, Mr. Abrams,” she said, gushing and smiling brightly at him. “Ballet, tap, rhythm and movement….”

“I am sure they are, madam,” he replied, shifting his cold stare from the girls to her, “and may I compliment you on their beauty. Unfortunately, we are having some problems. We are