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PARTISAN REVI EW
No wonder Wilhelm delayed the moment when he would have
to go into the dining room. He had moved to the end of Rubin's
counter. He had opened the
Tribune;
the fresh pages drooped
from his hands; the cigar was smoked out and the hat did not de–
fend him. He was wrong to suppose that he was more capable than
the next fellow when it came to concealing his troubles. They were
clearly written out upon his face. He wasn't even aware of it.
There was the matter of the different names which, in the
hotel, came up frequently . "Are you Dr. Adler's son?" "Yes, but
my name
is
Tommy Wilhelm." And the doctor would say, "My son
and I use different monickers. I uphold tradition. He's for the new."
The Tommy was Wilhelm's own invention. He adopted it when
he went to Hollywood, and dropped the Adler. Hollywood was his
own idea, too. He used to pretend that it had all been the doing
of a certain talent scnut named Maurice Venice. But the scout never
made him a definite offer of a studio connection. He had approached
Wilhelm, but the results of the screen test had not been good. After the
test Wilhelm took the initiative and pressed Maurice Venice until
he got him to say, "Well, I suppose you might make it out there."
And on the strength of this, Wilhelm had left college and had gone
to California.
Someone had said, and Wilhelm agreed with the saying, that
in Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected,
as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly
screwed down had slid into Southern California. He himself had
been one of these loose objects. Sometimes he told people, "I wa" too
mature for college. I was a big boy, you see. 'Well,' I thought,
'when do you start to become a man?'" Mter he had driven a
painted flivver and had worn a yellow slicker with slogans on it,
and played illegal poker, and gone out on coke dates, he had
had
college. He wanted to try something new and quarreled with his
parents about his career. And then a letter came from Maurice
Venice.
The story of the scout was long and intricate and there were
several versions of it. The truth about it was never told. Wilhelm
had lied first boastfully and then out of charity to himself. But
his memory was good, he could still separate what he had invented
from the actual happenings, and this morning he found it necessary
