California, Southern -- Fiction; Motion picture industry -- Fiction; Petroleum industry and trade -- Fiction; Political fiction
Bunny was back at Southern Pacific. It was the line of least resistance;
a nice, clean occupation, honorific and easy on the nerves. One who was
good-looking and wealthy, and knew how to charm the professors, could
get by with almost no work at all, and have abundant time to read
Bolshevik propaganda, and watch strikes happen; also to sport about town
with a moving picture star, to drive and dine and dance with her, and
escort her to week-end parties of the Hollywood élite.
He might even have found time to visit the studio and watch her at work
on her new picture; but she would not let him do this. She was too much
in love with him, she could not concentrate with him looking on.
Moreover, she said, her work was horrid, all pictures were horrid; Bunny
wouldn’t like what she was doing. It was just a way she earned her
living, and she had to do what other people told her; it was without any
relation to life, and Bunny, who was serious and educated, would think
it childish, or worse. She liked him to be serious, he was a dear and
all that, and one of the few men who really could tell her something
about the world; he must go on being like that, and not pay any
attention to her pictures.
It struck Bunny as a little mysterious; she protested too much. And
before long he discovered the reason—in some of the gossip about the
screen world which filled pages upon pages of the newspapers. Vee Tracy
was working on a picture about Russia! She was to be a beautiful
princess of the old regime, caught in the storm of the revolution,
falling into the hands of the Bolsheviks, and making one of her famous
“get-aways” with the aid of a handsome young American secret service
man! Vee had been working on this picture for the past six months; and
right in the middle of it, she had gone and got herself a “parlor
Bolshevik” for a lover, and now was afraid to let him know what she was
doing!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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