Earl Brady
A film director working out of a reconstructed Gaumont lot above Monte Carlo — the one man on the Riviera who looks at Rosemary Hoyt and sees a professional actress.
Rosemary for his next picture, and the freedom to make ambitious films on the Riviera rather than inside the American studio system.
The book
At a glance
- American film director working on the Riviera
- An old Gaumont lot in reconstruction at La Turbie, above Monte Carlo
- To make a picture with Rosemary; he wired the coast about her from Paris
- The studio visit, the Villa Diana dinner, and the drive home afterwards
- Rex Ingram, in part — the Irish-American director who ran a studio at Nice in the 1920s · 1892–1950 · Dublin, Ireland
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeRosemary goes to see him about as sulkily as it is possible for her to be, because her mother has told her to go alone. She rides up the rugged hill to La Turbie to an old Gaumont lot in process of reconstruction, and standing at the grilled entrance she might be looking into Hollywood: the debris of a recent picture, a decayed street scene in India, a great cardboard whale, a monstrous tree bearing cherries the size of basketballs. Brady's voice is a little too compelling for private life and trails a faintly defiant cockney accent.
He tells her he saw Daddy's Girl in Paris and wired the coast immediately to find out whether she was signed. He asks what her plans are and who decides them, and she says her mother does and that she could not do without her. Then he looks her over completely, and something in Rosemary goes out to him — not liking, and not the spontaneous admiration she felt on the beach that morning, but a click. He desires her, and as far as her virginal emotions go she contemplates it without much difficulty. She leaves the lot with a spell still on her, and buys espadrilles on the way to the train.
How the book draws them
- The voiceToo compelling for private life, with a faintly defiant cockney accent under it. He talks across a set as a matter of habit.
- The professional gazeHe notices how she looks the way a director notices: lighting, casting, publicity, and what a face will earn. He is the first person she meets in France who is not primarily reacting to her prettiness.
- God, what a pictureHis verdict on Daddy's Girl, delivered twice. She frowns rather than smile in silly agreement, and he grants her the point at once.
- Rough beside DickAt the Divers' villa his heartiness reads at first as a crude assertion of his own mental health, and becomes, moment by moment, a social thing. He is the guest McKisco directs withering remarks about the movies at.
- Energy with an objectUnlike almost everyone else on that beach, his intensity is pointed at making something. The comparison quietly costs Dick more than it costs Brady.
- The other futureHe also proposes walking down to the sea wall with her, and she stalls, because she is waiting for Dick to reappear. The choice is offered plainly and she does not take it.
He gets no resolution, because his function is not plot but contrast. He offers Rosemary work, adulthood, and a life in which what she is worth does not depend on Dick's attention, and the novel simply leaves the offer standing.
The comparison it draws is quiet and unkind. Dick sees in Rosemary an image of youth that might renew him; Brady sees a professional who can carry a picture. Brady's interest is the less romantic of the two and by some distance the more respectful of what she could become.