The Tall Boy: A Memoir

by Jess Gregg

  As the excitement of reunion wound down, we wandered through the cool arcades, not consciously trying to remember, but unable to forget the day when, along with half of Paris, the three of us had come here to pay our respects to the great novelist. I could not help contrasting those two highly public leave-takings. Colette’s name had grandly outlived her death, but Gower’s already seemed to be dimming. Forty-Second Street was still playing in New York, one of the longest runs in theatre annals, but the producer had begun taking sole credit for its success. Another director was now reigning supreme over the musicals, and the show-business historians had found new champions. Time does that sort of thing. But it can also cure.

  Maybe the healing had been going on without my realizing, and only now was I aware of it: a naturalness in thinking of him once more. Hindsight was handy, and even clear. Remarks I hadn’t picked up the first time around began to seem like minor rosebuds. A feeling of closeness was there again, and when Marge and I glanced at each other, I knew she felt it too. Her face was so luminous, I wanted to ask if she was still in love with him. Then it occurred to me, that she could be asking me the same question.

  It was something she and I had never discussed. Nor did we now. Or need to. She slipped her arm through mine, and, sometimes talking, sometimes silently musing, we strolled back through the garden, and out into the mid-day rush of rue de Beaujolais.

  19

  THE DEGAS LOOK

  I caught the last plane out of New York that night. The flight was not easy. I could not rest for the images of Noo that kept crossing my mind. These, at least, did not hurry. In my thought, she took her time showering, then brushed her hair till it shone, and only at last opened the plastic bottle. It was half full of capsules, and she took them all; Washed each one down with a sip of water. “All gone,” I imagined her saying, the phrase she had used in her baby days when she had finished her meal. Then she lay back in bed and turned off the light.

  Her husband met me at the airport and drove me to the hospital. He had let her sleep late that morning, he told me—a little extra rest would do her good. At noon, he had knocked at her door, and when there was no answer, entered. The room was dark, silent except for the labored breathing. He spoke her name, then shook her shoulder. A moment later, he was dialing 911.

  She still wasn’t out of danger when they brought me to her side. She was not conscious, and her color was like tallow, but at least her breathing was more regular. No note had been left behind to explain her action. An intern had stapled a blue paper bracelet around her wrist with all her statistics, yet I had to face the fact that I didn’t know who she was anymore.

  She was eight years younger than I, and named after our grandmothers, Jean and Ellen. Pronunciation of these was too complex for her early efforts, so she called herself Nini. Inevitably, Shady and I exaggerated this into Noonoo, but usage soon reduced it to Noo. She was an enchanting child—blond and snub-nosed, with the long, straight eyelashes of a horse. Our mother and father didn’t want me or Sharlie to feel left out so they made us her god parents. Of course we overdid this—doted on her in the way that smothers Easter chicks. Literally hand-fed her. “I do it by myshef,” Noo would eventually protest. That’s the problem of being the baby of the family, I suppose—everyone wants to live her life for her.

  Noo at fifteen

  I don’t mean that she was putty in our hands. She had a stubborn streak that would show up inconveniently. Fearless too—held out her hands to the most scurvy-looking animals. And once when she was eleven, she swam across the bay from our summer house on Balboa Island. Didn’t tell anyone she was going, and took no one with her. Some fishermen picked her up when she’d swum nearly the whole distance. She gave them no more explanation than we got now about the sleeping pills.

  I came to see her at the hospital every day that week. Gradually, she fumbled back into consciousness, and on the third afternoon, when I sat down by her bed, she knew me, and whispered, “Hello, Buddy.” Mostly, we just smiled and nodded at each other, but long before I actually asked her, the air was loaded with the question. “Why did you do it, baby?”

  I said it softly, but the nurse picked it up. “Now, now, we’re just going to talk about happy things.”

  So that’s what we talked about—good times, mostly childhood. The snap-shots I had taken of Noo growing up find little to agree upon. In one, she is gangling and big-toothed with her blond hair tinctured green from the swimming pool. In another, she’s plump and simpering, looking rather like a cloud of luminous gas. But when I came back to Los Angeles after graduating from college, I found a fourteen-year-old beauty—tall, fair-haired, and dreamy-eyed. She had changed her middle name to Vivian in tribute to Scarlett O’Hara, who was also responsible for her way of looking up at a man through her lashes.

  I began going berserk with the camera—Noo pensive in the garden, Noo in tennis togs, Noo on horseback. The images glowed with her youth, but after the twenty-third batch, “glow” got kind of stale. I varied it by snapping her in old Halloween wigs with blacked-out teeth, grotesque travesties that we topped off with nonsense stolen from radio shows.

  Me: “Are you Rubiyat LaTrine or the Countess di Rumpf?”

  Noo: “I sure am, honeychile.”

  It was not very funny, but it never ceased to break us up. A better set-up was inspired by a black evening gown that Sharlie had left behind when she got married. My photographs of Noo dressed up in it copied the glamorous artifice of fashion magazines back then. Not anywhere in nature could you find the mouth I painted over her lips. And the eyes! only in the royal tombs of Egypt. “Is that me?” she asked Matt when she saw the proofs.

  Matt usually helped me take these photos. My closest companion and artistic ally, he had wonderful ideas about dramatic lighting, which he borrowed from Twentieth Century-Fox, where he was under contract. It was I, however, who developed the Degas look. I say develop, but actually, it was the product of my incompetence. Either my camera was out of focus, or the tripod got jarred, but the resultant images of Noo were hazy, romantically unreal. We began to emphasize this. Just as I’d click the shutter, Matt would spur that dreamy look of hers by whispering, “You’re in love!” Actually I think she was. With Matt, of course. Well, perhaps I was too.

  Blond, and twenty-one, Matt had all the advantages of perfect features. When we would walk into a night club, I’d notice how every head turned to look at him—it was almost as good as being handsome myself. But Matt was never self-conscious about it. Being on show was his career, something the actors’ agents all encouraged. What the agents didn’t encourage however, was his always being with me. Boys going out with boys wasn’t good for his image, they complained—could wreck his chances in films in the fans caught on. “I got a note from the Pope today,” he told me—that’s what he called the head of the agency. “He says if I don’t have a regular girlfriend to trot around, he’ll assign me a starlet.”

  Both of us groaned at that idea. If we were going to be stuck with a smoke screen, we wanted one who would be fun. None of the young actresses we knew were quite right for the role, however. She would have to be someone with class Someone who wouldn’t try to take over. And most especially, one who wouldn’t be too knowing about our relationship. Matt frowned thoughtfully. “What about Noo?” he asked.

  “Come off it,” I said. “She’s only fourteen.”

  “You’d never guess it,” he said, nodding at one of our fashion pictures.

  “Anyway, Mom’d never allow it.”

  “But it won’t be for real,” he argued. “It’s only for appearance. And after all, you’d be along. Where could you find a better chaperone?”

  That, in fact, was the clinching argument I gave my parents, and the next Friday, Matt and I took Noo to a big charity do in Beverly Hills. She wore one of Sharlie’s cocktail dresses, but still looked like a kid dressed up until we smeared a touch of silver on her eyelids. And there was nothing childlike about the way she responded when
some publicist wanted to snap a picture of her. “Please,” she murmured, practically Garbo, “no photographs.”

  It worked like a dream. Or nearly. My father grumbled about his baby growing up so soon. And my screenwriter friend, Ellis, invoked Freud, warning of unseen consequences. But the agents were satisfied. Letting people think that Matt was engaged to my sister was the perfect excuse for him and me always being together. “Ought to have another girl along to make it look really kosher,” suggested Carole, a young and knowing divorcee. Sometimes, she came with us, but it was more fun when we kept it just a family unit.

  The Mocambo was the most glamorous of the clubs on Sunset Boulevard, and an essential place for Matt to be seen, but we kept having to get Noo home by midnight since we usually said we were only going to a movie. However, we gradually expanded this lie into the popular teen-age ruse of slipping her out the back door after she had told our parents she was going up to bed. There was no harm in this deception, Matt and I assured each other—what Mother and Dad didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. Or Noo either. She guessed nothing about Matt and me—not for some decades would the mysteries of queerdom become common knowledge among adolescents, or, for that matter, grown-ups. All she knew was, she got to go dancing, see celebrities, and be with the boy she adored. When some of her classmates bragged about going to the prom at the Black Fox Military Academy, she was able to drop in a mention of Ciro’s, or the new Kit-Kat.

  We took her to all of them. Bishop’s, for instance. It was way downtown, sort of a home away from home for jazz musicians, so smoky you couldn’t tell who was dancing with who. Noo liked it because once Lana Turner told her she loved her dress. But she liked the Baroque too, because whenever we came in, the pianist would slyly sneak in a phrase of Oh, You Beautiful Doll—though whether in tribute to her or Matt I could never determine. “Act as if you’re used to it,” I always told her; and she glided through these evenings, smiling but slightly apart, like someone in the future trying to remember this moment.

  Most exciting, because it was most dangerous, was the Clover Club, a starkly modern building that crouched on the hillside above the stretched-out glitter of Los Angeles. Except nobody went up there for the view. Rumor was, there was gambling upstairs, and drugs could be had; but it was the era of hiding everything, and the management devised its own smoke screen by making the downstairs appear to be the in-place for the younger set—featured the music we liked, usually waived the cover charge, and really courted us.

  The maitre d’, especially. Jorge. He was a little gray-haired Filipino who always found a table for us right in the center of things. After our second visit, we never had to order again: he automatically brought over our drinks, scotch for Matt and me, and a wicked looking ginger ale with two cherries for Noo. Everyone called him George, but she was taking first-year Spanish at school, and pronounced his name correctly. It sounded like she was clearing her throat, but he adored it—was always kidding that he was going to steal her away.

  And one night, we thought he had. The music suddenly got so loud we couldn’t hear, and Jorge barreled over to our table and grabbed Noo’s wrist. He dragged her through the service door into the kitchen, and down a corridor that was just chicken-wire and plaster. Matt and I caught up with them as he was shoving open a metal fire door. A warning light flashed on, and he shoved us out into a dark alley. “You not come here no more, or I telephone papa” he yelled, and slammed the door on us.

  We didn’t understand until the next morning when we saw the newspaper—some gangster had been polished off in the foyer, and the cops had moved in quickly, demanding to see everyone’s identification. “Hope you weren’t too scared by all that,” Matt said. But Noo shook her head. “I loved it,” she said. She was still calling it the greatest night of her life, three or four years later.

  By that time, Matt and I had become merely friends. However, he continued to take Noo out dancing, or to social occasions where it was important to be seen with someone charming, young, and female. Some of the other young actors we knew had begun dating her too, all of them personable and handsome. Our mother was delighted that her youngest was so popular, and Noo, herself, adored the young men’s attention—very week, was in love with another of them. “Just in love, y’know,” she told Ellis. “Nothing more serious.”

  “Ah,” he said, with his half-hidden mockery, “I’m glad it’s not more serious than love.” He was fond of her in his studied way, and often reproached me for what he called her protective services. “Are any of these dates of hers straight?” he asked me. “Is a single one of them heterosexual?”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Does she know that?”

  “I shouldn’t think so.”

  His transparent eyebrows lifted. “And she’s how old now?”

  I got uncomfortable. “Sixteen, seventeen, I don’t know.”

  “At all events,” he said, “too old to be playing with paper dolls.”

  He could speak more plainly than that, however, and before long, did. We ran into each other by the pool of director Billy Wilder, who I was trying to interest in a story of mine. Apparently Ellis was there to interest Wilder in a story of his, and there was a sudden tension between us. He asked after Noo, and took offense when I replied inattentively that she was busy that day.

  “Ah?” he said. “Camouflaging which notable young queer?”

  I was attentive now, all right, and faced him. “Not very funny!”

  “I quite agree,” he said. “Rather sad, in fact. Some people might consider that you’ve turned her into a junior fag hag.”

  He made no pretense of listening to my angry denial. “Indeed, some might say you’ve used her as drag,” he continued. “Dressing her up in all the glitz you don’t have the courage to put on yourself—surrounding her with all the young men you’re attracted to, but are afraid what people ’ll think—trying to live out your fantasies through her.”

  “That’s not so,” I cried.

  He shrugged. “By the time you discover it is, it’ll be too late for her.”

  Our friendship did not recover soon, but I did not dismiss what he had said. While most of his accusations seemed too absurd to even consider, they left me feeling uneasy for Noo. This nagged me until I was forced to do something about it. I won’t say I phoned Central Casting, but by the end of the week, I had rounded up some very attractive young men, all of them guaranteed straight as an arrow, and set up some beach picnics and impromptu barbecues where they could meet her.

  Somehow it didn’t work. She had fun at these parties, and enjoyed romping in the surf with the vigorous young men, but she was not used to their hot-handed play once the campfire died down. As a result, whenever there was a choice, she chose to be with softer boys who chatted about ballet or music, conferred about her clothes, and left her at her door with a harmless kiss on the cheek.

  Perhaps this pattern changed when she went east to college—I cannot be sure, since I was consciously drawing away from her now. However, she wrote enthusiastic letters about her studies, the proms she went to, and especially the plays she was cast in. Eventually, one of her former escorts recommended her to a troupe of touring actors, and she left college to travel about the Midwest and New England, playing Shaw, Shakespeare, and Oscar Wilde at schools, women’s clubs, and town halls. Sharlie and my mother held their breath unnecessarily—they had heard the usual stories about men setting snares for young actresses. But Noo was never safer, according to Maggie, the troupe’s character woman.

  “She wasn’t responsive to boys from the colleges we played,” she told me later. “They were too rough and too hot. She much preferred being with one of our more artistic actors, until I explained a few genetic subtleties she’d been missing. I suppose that’s what turned her attention to older men.”

  “Older men?”

  “Guys in their forties and fifties,” she said. “By that age, they’re more appreciative, more willing to make concessions to the kind of po
etic romancing she likes. A lot gentler than the jocks, and infinitely more relevant to a girl than—” She hesitated, then met my eyes frankly. “—than you gay guys.”

  The man Noo married when she was twenty-two was exactly twice her age. He was a quietly handsome drama professor with a daughter almost as old as herself. They honeymooned in Italy, and then settled down on a small Southern campus. From time to time, I visited them, but found her to be quite unlike my old Noo. Gone was the glamorous grooming I had instigated—she was plump, pretty, and suburban now—but the change I sensed was less visible. “Are you all right?” I finally asked. “Are you happy?” She nodded and smiled and found another subject to chat about.

  They moved often, finally returning to California, and it was here that she gave me a clue. I was in Hollywood writing a film, and she drove into town to see me. As we strolled her ungainly dog around the block, she referred obliquely to some change she was experiencing. “What kind of change?” I asked. A sudden uneasiness made me camp it. “Aren’t we a little young for change a vie?”

  She shrugged and smiled, but it was not her old smile: her lips pressed tensely against her teeth now. Privately, I asked her husband what was troubling her, but his answers were discreetly vague: winter always depressed her, she’d had a cold, etc. The night before I returned to New York, however, he said suddenly, “It’s as if she’s grieving over something.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure she does either.” He shook his head. “Like a kid who can’t find her way home.”

  For over a year, she scarcely wrote to me, though she would talk on the phone if I called her. Usually, that is. Once, in answering, she faked a voice and said she was not at home. Generally, she seemed pleased to hear from me, but became a stranger if I asked questions. She spoke a great deal about prayer, and often about old times, “back when everything was so simple.” I had no idea how serious it was until I got the phone call that she had tried to take her life.