Screen Tests

by Kate Zambreno

  Sontag in the Bear Suit Three

  The photograph was taken by her partner Annie Leibovitz in Paris on New Year’s Eve 2001. From On Photography: “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.” She was to die three years later.

  We

  We are skeptical of this writer if she gets too much attention—if her book got this much attention, there’s a reason to be skeptical, we decide. However, we try not to be skeptical of our friends and their books. We are happy for their attention, and miffed if they do not get enough attention, like this other writer, why does she get so much attention, versus our friend, also a very good writer? However, if this other writer becomes our friend or friendly, or gracious about our writing, or our friends’ writing, our skepticism can subside and we will try to read her book without judgment. Also, if some time has passed, and there is less attention, then it is possible to read her book without judgment. Sometimes then we decide it’s very good, yes, worthy of all that attention, which we would have been unable to decide initially. And when the writer is dead we are even less skeptical. We are always like this—why? And all the others like this with us, inverse of our attention to theirs, etc. This is called “community.”

  Pink Bear

  I wrote a passage about the pink bear in the novel, but I found myself editing it out. In one of the first summers that I moved to this street, I saw a very large stuffed pink bear resting against a tree. The pink bear was as large as a full-sized person, or at least a short, full-sized person, but larger than a small child. The kind of sawdust-stuffed bear won at a carnival. It was slumped against the tree, in a posture that I saw as tender, in a way. It was like the bear was drunk, and someone had positioned it against the tree so that the bear wouldn’t lose its balance and could sleep it off. I immediately took a photograph on my phone of the pink bear, and John, later, told me that he took a photograph of the pink bear as well. The fact that the pink bear was leaning against the tree on the sidewalk meant someone was throwing it out, but had enough care for the bear to lean it against a tree. The hope, by placing the pink bear against the tree, on or near the curb, was that someone could find it and take it home, like out of a children’s book. My daughter has a children’s book just like this. A girl finds a stuffed bear, slightly used, and takes it home to be her friend. My daughter loves this book. She likes it to be read to her every night. When I first encountered the pink bear, and then wrote about it, first in my notebook and later in a novel, my daughter didn’t yet exist, and wouldn’t, for a couple of years. Now, my daughter exists, although I’m not sure the pink bear exists, except in my memory, and how I’ve written about it, and how I am writing about it here. Although if the pink bear doesn’t exist, where did it go? Perhaps no one picked it up—it was very large, it would be cumbersome to walk with down the street, and who wants a gigantic, cheaply made, slightly used pink bear? My daughter’s grandparents sent her a very large, but still child-sized, stuffed bear that was also cheaply made, and it is difficult to store in our apartment. At first we tried hiding the bear, in closets, but my daughter always knew to look for it. There was something so wonderful to her about hugging a stuffed animal larger than herself, toppling it over. I wonder, what it would have been like if I had hugged the pink bear that I saw on the street, if I would have felt gently embraced and small in its gigantic arms. We finally got a container to hold my daughter’s three other small stuffed animals, but mainly it’s a container for her bear, to keep it out of our sight. The container cost more than all of the stuffed animals it holds. In one moment of trying to come up with a new game I dressed this bear in some of my daughter’s old clothes while she watched, delighted, so now it wears an old sun hat falling off its head, and on one leg a small bathing suit from when she was a smaller baby, and an unbuttoned dress. When I originally wrote about the pink bear, writing about it reminded me that my mother would sew a birthday Care Bear every time I was invited to a child’s birthday party. The birthday Care Bear was called Birthday Bear and had a pink cupcake with one candle on its white belly. All the Care Bears had names like this, Cheer Bear, Bedtime Bear, Friend Bear, Good Luck Bear, Funshine Bear, Grumpy Bear, Wish Bear, Love-a-Lot Bear, etc., and of course Birthday Bear. I didn’t remember this until I just looked it up online, and now I remember it, vaguely. When I was younger, the Care Bears were really popular—there was a cartoon television show. Writing about the pink bear triggered this memory of the Birthday Bear. I realized the pathos of this as a repeat birthday present, something I didn’t realize as a child. My mother getting out her heavy rose-colored sewing machine, and making a Care Bear from a pattern. A Care Bear that was a counterfeit Care Bear, and since she made a copy for each birthday party, children were receiving a copy of a copy of a Care Bear (itself a mass-produced doll), which must have not been received with as much pleasure as a Care Bear that was store-bought. With this memory, there’s the pathos of three figures. The pathos of the thrifty mother, who must have spent hours stitching together the Birthday Bear, hours I never thanked her for or appreciated, as a way to budget presents for what must have been a stream of suburban children’s birthday parties. There’s the child (that’s me) who has to bring this counterfeit Care Bear to the parties, and balance it on top of all of the wrapped, store-bought presents on the table. Then there is the child receiving the present, and forced to write a thank-you card and feign delight, which he or she did or did not do. Although I did not go to grade school with children whose parents had much money, so maybe they were happy with the gift. Maybe they didn’t know the difference between a real and a counterfeit Care Bear. A stuffed bear is, after all, a stuffed bear. Perhaps I can only grasp the pathos of this from a distance of thirty to thirty-five years (as the Care Bears were created in 1981, the Internet tells me). Although, when I look at images of these sewing pattern Birthday Bears on eBay, I see that they really don’t look at all like a stuffed bear, more like a stuffed pillow. I wonder what happened to all of these Birthday Bears. Or the gigantic pink bear from a couple of summers ago, and its gigantic pink siblings echoed across the city. Do any of them exist as friends in someone’s room? Are there landfills occupied with cheap and counterfeit bears, piled high with their loneliness?

  Tallulah Bankhead

  On a recent visit, while watching my young daughter play, my father at one point referred to her as Tallulah Bankhead. I’m not sure exactly why. Often I don’t laugh at my father’s jokes, but I found this funny, to call my baby Tallulah Bankhead. At the time my father didn’t explain it, and he didn’t wait around for the punch line to reveal itself, probably because he felt no one else would get the joke, but as I sit here thinking about it, I realize it’s perhaps that Tallulah Bankhead—the actress—was famous for her “difficult” behavior, so an apt nickname for a toddler. It’s possible in that moment my daughter was getting frustrated because she wanted to play with the ball being thrown to the dog, and was crabby because she had a molar coming in. I spend time getting lost on Tallulah Bankhead’s Wikipedia page, which is twenty-two pages long (I printed it out). I watch the clip where she is on The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, in the episode entitled “The Celebrity Next Door,” a role originally slated for Bette Davis, before she cracked a vertebra. Bankhead, cigarette in hand, comes off as a Bette Davis replacement, as she sits on the couch in her black lace off-the-shoulder gown that matches Ball’s lace dress. Her gestures and drawl, a mixture of stage British and Alabama, are almost too broad for television. Apparently she arrived drunk to rehearsals, to the frustration of Ball and Arnaz. There is a scene at dinner where for some reason Vivian Vance is waiting on them, in a maid’s costume, and tells Tallulah Bankhead that she is such a fan as she lists her stage and film accomplishments, and Lucy tells her not to bore Ms. Bankhead. “I will tell you when I’m bored,” Tallulah Bankhead then says, in that Tallulah Bankhead way. Later, Lucy will apologize for the “help,” and say
how old her maid is getting, the joke being that Vivian Vance, who is on the other side of the door, listening and reacting in comic disbelief, was actually only two years older than Lucille Ball. I had forgotten that Tallulah Bankhead was up for the role of Scarlett O’Hara, which would have been a revival of her career in Hollywood after a string of flops, but David O. Selznick thought she was too old at thirty-six to start out at sixteen and age more than a decade. Tennessee Williams was frustrated with her portrayal of Blanche DuBois in the 1956 stage revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. I often wonder what’s more tragic—the stars of the studio system who died young or those who grew old and became either shut-ins or caricatures of themselves. Tallulah Bankhead was only sixty-six when she died, of emphysema, malnutrition, and pneumonia. Her last words were “Codeine . . . bourbon.” When I think of Tallulah Bankhead, I think of how she was known for the cutting quip. She was known as more of a personality than an actress, in a way, befitting the childhood friend of Zelda Fitzgerald. She never really had a defining role on stage or screen. There is that line of hers that I believe that I first read in Louise Brooks’s memoirs, “I was raped in the driveway when I was 11. You know darling, it was a terrible experience because we had all that gravel.” But I don’t mention this to my father, when he calls my daughter Tallulah Bankhead.

  Heiress

  I remember the strange feeling of the temporary office I occupied that semester of a feminist film historian on sabbatical, a professor with the last name of Hearst. It was as if I had decorated it myself, with photographs of some of the same actresses that I had previously stuck to the walls of my apartment when attempting to write a failed book of fictional monologues when I first tried to become a writer, now more than a decade ago. I didn’t have much contact with this professor, except the time she left a note asking me not to leave my discarded lunch in her trash can, because of the smell. One day there was a knock on my door, or her door, I should say. It was an elderly classics professor whose office was down the hall, in which he was rumored to live, like a hermit, in that small thatched building on the edge of campus. You do know who she’s related to, he says to me, in a way I can only describe as impish, pointing at her nameplate. I humored the old man, making chitchat. But it was too easy, the idea that a film historian could be related to the inspiration for Citizen Kane. But I just figured out while looking online that the film professor was married to a grandson of Hearst, so she actually married into the Hearst family. I remember how the black-and-white press photograph of Louise Brooks reading on set taped next to the professor’s desk reminded me of the beautiful elegy Brooks wrote about her friend Pepi Lederer, niece to Marion Davies, the actress who was the mistress to William Randolph Hearst. This made me want to go back and reread it, which I finally now have done. The essay is a matryoshka doll of autobiography, as are the other seven essays collected in Lulu in Hollywood, published in 1982, a couple of years before her death and a few years after Kenneth Tynan’s famous New Yorker profile. For the essay, Tynan visits her in her one-bedroom hermitage in Rochester, New York, where she moved in the 1950s after quitting New York, which she quit after quitting Hollywood. Brooks moved to Rochester at the invitation of the curator of the Eastman film archives, in order to watch old movies, including her own, and to write about them and her memories in film. In her essay “Marion Davies’ Niece,” Brooks writes of her own retirement from Hollywood in 1940, when she first moved back to her father’s home in Kansas, and then to New York City, where she realized the best-paying option for an unsuccessful actress at the age of thirty-six was as a call girl. She eventually worked at the counter at Saks for forty dollars a week. “I blacked out my past, refused to see my few remaining friends connected with movies, and began to flirt with fancies related to little bottles filled with yellow sleeping pills.” Whether or not Louise Brooks was a call girl, specifically, or whether she was just kept, in a way, by several wealthy men, is unknown, because she never wrote her memoirs, not really, just these essays. In fact, elsewhere, Brooks called her attempts at memoir, in her quippy way, “Incinerator One,” and “Incinerator Two.” By 1973, Brooks writes, she no longer accepted the Hollywood judgment that condemned her to failure, and began to research writing about her friend Marion Davies’s niece, who had been dead by that time for thirty-eight years, having killed herself at twenty-five years old by jumping out of a window at the psychiatric hospital where Hearst and Davies had her committed for her drug addiction. In her essays Louise Brooks is often a satellite revolving around more famous people, like Humphrey Bogart or Charlie Chaplin, much like her friend was always on the margins, cracking jokes at the end of the table at dinners at Hearst Castle, which is where they met. Louise Brooks writes in the essay that she thought when she quit Hollywood she was cured of its disease of fame, but realized that she hadn’t been completely cured, because for so long she discounted writing about her friend who committed suicide because she too was viewed as a failure. Her friend Pepi was a party animal, her girlfriend part of Tallulah Bankhead’s coterie—that’s where Pepi got her coke from. Pepi tried to be a writer for a Hearst magazine as well as an actress and didn’t succeed at either, despite her wit and charm. She failed at both. Brooks’s essay begins with a meditation on suicide, “No one knows for certain why anyone commits suicide.” The day I write this a successful celebrity has just committed suicide. It was the second celebrity this week to have committed suicide, and using the same methods. It’s all I can think about the entire day. When did publications begin running parallel articles about how celebrities react on Twitter to tragedies? Why do I always read them? Do these responses make me feel less alone? These two celebrities who committed suicide were extremely accomplished, generous, and loved. How exhausting that labor, to keep that up, all of that success, what everyone must have wanted from them at all times. Success doesn’t erase pain or torment. Then what does it do? Is it to have more for us to mourn when they are gone? But what about the failures and the forgotten? Don’t they need to be mourned as well?

  Louise Brooks in a Mint-Green Housecoat

  Instead of preparing for my Skype interview for a teaching job that was not only low-paying but involved moving overseas to another expensive city we couldn’t afford to live in, a job that I was not going to get but also didn’t really want, I watched a documentary about Louise Brooks on YouTube. Over the years I have been watching this documentary, a bit at a time. It’s all I did today, really, except finally make it to a yoga class and monitor my daughter’s diaper rash. I don’t know what I did with all of my obsessions before YouTube. When I was trying to write about Louise Brooks over a decade ago, thinking about her almost half century of reclusiveness, I certainly would have wanted to watch this documentary. The filmmakers came to her apartment in 1974, when she was sixty-eight years old, to ask her about her time making two iconic silent films with G. W. Pabst, Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. These are the films we think of when we think about Louise Brooks, all shiny black bob and creamy slender body, an innocence to her fatality, like Kansas City meets Berlin. The film begins with clips from those films—a movement from her young hands to old hands. She is sitting at her Formica table, a green sofa behind her, and wearing a fairly threadbare mint-green housecoat or robe, her hair now extremely long and almost more green than gray, the bangs grown out, all pulled back in a tight ponytail. She is powdered and has red lipstick on. She is still recognizable—the face now from the face then. The skin, I’ve started to notice skin—how it becomes thinner, pulls downward. Also, a lifetime of smoking, of being shut inside. It is strange to hear her voice, as most of her films were silent, although I recognized her voice, having watched her in the John Wayne B film Overland Stage Raiders, her last role. She has a nice voice—I won’t overload it with birdlike adjectives like Kenneth Tynan does in his 1979 New Yorker profile, when after watching Pandora’s Box on cable, the theater critic exiled in Los Angeles and dying of emphysema realizes Brooks is still alive and has been liv
ing as a shut-in in Rochester, New York, and sets out on a pilgrimage. Her hands folded on the table, she is stern and certain with her narration. MGM wasn’t going to give her a raise with her option—this was in the late ’20s; they were going to pay her $750 a week still, to put her in a string of mediocre Hollywood films. Or there was some guy in Berlin called Pabst who would pay her $1,000 a week to make these other films. So she quit and went to Berlin. And afterwards the head of the studio spread the lie that she left Hollywood because she couldn’t make it once talking films were popularized. In his profile Tynan notes that Brooks has not left her apartment since 1960, for more than two decades, except for a few doctor or dentist appointments. When he interviews her, she has been bedridden for some time with osteoarthritis of the hip. He interviews her while she’s in bed, as she sifts through old photographs and narrates them, and lights cigarettes. They seem to have fallen in love with each other then, or to be already in love with each other. Apparently they kept up a correspondence afterwards. It’s very Veronika Voss. She speaks in the monologue of the lonely not used to having real conversation. She says to Tynan, “You’re doing a terrible thing to me. I’ve been killing myself off for twenty years, and you’re going to bring me back to life.” She spends her life in memories and books, and, he notes, in two rooms, that are clean and modestly furnished. The pathos of the descriptions of the two rooms really gets me, that she is obviously living in genteel poverty, which is made apparent by her shabby mint-green housecoat, which she must have owned for many years. In the large room, Venetian blinds, the green sofa, the table, a TV set, and “flesh-pink walls sparsely hung with paintings redolent of the twenties.” In the other room, a single bed, a cupboard filled with press clippings, a set of drawers with the crucifix and Virgin statue on top. And a stool piled with books. The serious authors, Tynan notes—Schopenhauer, Ortega y Gasset, Edmund Wilson, Proust. She insists on getting out of bed to escort him to the door, with her cane, while she mentions how Proust wrote in bed as well. It’s true, the asthmatic writer enclosed himself into his cork-filled room, away from noise and dust and cooking smells, and wrote In Search of Lost Time over a decade. The fur coat that he didn’t take off, regardless of the temperature.