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movie he wanted to make. “The war which put a finish to five hundred years,” he was fond of saying and he and his wife went back to their marriage. He had his affairs, she had her affairs; they told each other about them, for they swore they must be honest with one another. Yet they quarreled. He had been offered a big salary at Supreme Pictures, and he said that he should take it, she said that he should not; he was full of the premise that to make the movies he wanted, he had to be powerful in a studio. He made two bad pictures and one of them made a lot of money, and then his wife wanted a divorce, she had found somebody else. He had dreamed for years of such a solution, yet to his surprise, he could not let her go; they had one of those final reconciliations, and a half year later they divorced. Eventually she moved to another city and married a labor organizer and Eitel never saw her again. By now he could hardly remember her.
    Next he married an actress from the social register. While it lasted, he made movies, many movies, he bought a fourteen-room house with a library, a wine closet, a gymnasium, a swimming pool. There was a four-car garage, a volleyball court, a badminton court, and a tennis court; vines grew on the terraces and a row of cypresses leaned toward the ocean, there was a kennel for a dozen dogs, a stable for two horses. That was his second marriage and he kept the house long after the wife. From the wife he had picked up what he wanted, and paid for it of course.
    His second divorce coincided with his commission into theArmy. In Europe, he made training films and combat films and traveled the cocktail circuit of generals and beauties and black marketeers, of politicians and movie producers and statesmen. He even made the last of his good films, a documentary on parachute troops so different from all the battles one saw on the screen that the Army never released it.
    When Eitel came back from the war, he took on the last of his reputations. There was a year or two when he was supposed to have slept with half the good-looking women in the capital, and it was a rare week which did not have his name in one gossip column or another. His films made money and he was the highest-paid director at the studio, for he had the reputation of being able to get relatively superlative performances from relatively untalented actresses. But his style had changed. In the face of all the pictures he was not encouraged to make, he came to choose movies of intricate action and odd character until it became at last a trade-mark, and “the Eitel touch” would guarantee a string of exotic murders. “Audiences are made of sentimental necrophiles,” he said to me once.
    Yet of all the time which passed in making money and spending it, in directing films which were a compromise—actors, story, and plot furnished by Supreme Pictures; atmosphere and master’s touch by Charles Francis Eitel—it was his last year in the capital which concerned Eitel the most. Over and over he would return to it in conversation.
    The last year began with his third divorce. He always married out of pity, Eitel said to me, and he had come to distrust pity. It was the sure sign of vanity. “I’m the archetype of the John who marries five or six times because he just can’t believe the poor girl will live without him.” The third wife had been beautiful, she was Lulu Meyers. “You’ll meet her sooner or later,” Eitel told me. “She comes down here between pictures.” Lulu was very young, Eitel went on, he had really believed she needed him. “It’s subtle when a marriage ends. You always go hog-wild. And to make matters worse, I was on vacation at thetime. I don’t know why, I got into the most dreary affair with a Rumanian actress. She had had one of those horrible lives you can’t even bear to think about. Her first husband, the young love, was killed in a street accident, her second husband stole her money. It was grim. Apparently