He
received seven hundred dollars for every story, at that time a large
emolument for such a young man--he was not quite thirty--and for every
one that contained enough "action" (kissing, shooting, and sacrificing)
for the movies, he obtained an additional thousand. His stories varied;
there was a measure of vitality and a sort of instinctive in all of
them, but none attained the personality of "The Demon Lover," and there
were several that Anthony considered downright cheap. These, Dick
explained severely, were to widen his audience. Wasn't it true that men
who had attained real permanence from Shakespeare to Mark Twain had
appealed to the many as well as to the elect?
Though Anthony and Maury disagreed, Gloria told him to go ahead and make
as much money as he could--that was the only thing that counted
anyhow....
Maury, a little stouter, faintly mellower, and more complaisant, had
gone to work in Philadelphia. He came to New York once or twice a month
and on such occasions the four of them travelled the popular routes from
dinner to the theatre, thence to the Frolic or, perhaps, at the urging
of the ever-curious Gloria, to one of the cellars of Greenwich Village,
notorious through the furious but short-lived vogue of the "new poetry
movement.
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