Crowned Heads

by Thomas Tryon

  “Certainly, my dear.” Willie showed her to the jungle mural beside the bar. He pressed the nose of one of the painted monkeys and a small door sprang open on a touch latch. She gave him a surprised look, went in, and closed the door. Bill, meanwhile, had returned to the bar and was seated on a stool.

  “Shore is a swell spread, pardner,” he said as Willie joined him.

  “Thank you, Bob.”

  “It’s—uh—Bill.”

  “Oh—Bill, of course, sorry, same name and I can’t even remember it Bill—Bowman, is it?”

  “Bowie. Like in the knife? Bill Bowie.”

  “That’s certainly a Western-sounding name, Bill. Where’re you from?”

  “Montana.”

  “Ah, yes, Montana. Gary Cooper came from there, and Myrna Loy, I believe. What’s it like, Montana?”

  “Big.”

  “Oh yes. To be sure. Montana’s certainly that.”

  Bill leaned across the black Formica counter to survey the collection of framed photographs over the back bar.

  “That’s sure a lot of famous people you got there.”

  “Famous and fleeting, alas. Most of them are dead.” It was true: Charles Laughton, Humphrey Bogart, Maurice Chevalier, Linda Darnell, Basil Rathbone, Carmen Miranda, W. C. Fields, the Barrymores; all dead. But, Willie pointed out, many of them had at one time or another been in this very room, sat at this very bar. The cream of the cream of Hollywood had in the old days flocked to the Marshes’ game room, where any excuse had been an excuse for a party. Jewels and furs and immodestly exhibited breasts, famous faces, famous names. Here men had traded wives on the spot, women had switched lovers between the canapés and the baked Alaska.

  Willie stole a moment to check his appearance in one of the mirrors, and was satisfied. Because his silver-blond toupee was expensive and sat well, it didn’t reveal the haste with which it had been attached. He looked dapper and spruce; even though his once-flat stomach was now betrayed by a melonlike paunch, the cowboy outfit gave him a youthful, jaunty air. His eyes were still clear, a gentle but keen gray, with a quizzical, amused air, and his nose was long and authentic-looking. A year-round iodine-colored tan did much to give the impression of health and vigor.

  Daintily, gingerly, the dogs had come, their nails clicking on the tiles, to sniff around at Bill’s pointed boots. He leaned to pet one of them. “Hey, they’re about the teeniest dogs I ever saw.” Willie could tell that he was nervous; his pale eyes were restless, they darted away from Willie’s, from object to object, space to space, then returned again to confront his host with apologetic mildness. To put him at ease, Willie trotted out the insouciance and stylish wit he was famous for—for years he had been the delight of hostesses for his talents as a raconteur.

  The girl was still in the bathroom. Bill leaned back on his stool and called down along the wall to the door in the mural. “Hey, Jude, didja fall in?” There was a mumble and a murmur from within; he sauntered to the door to see what the trouble was. Willie watched him go, the sleeves and shoulders of his buckskin jacket bulging, the fringe bobbing, his legs swinging with an easy cowboy gait. The door opened a crack, there was a brief exchange, and Bill returned to report that Judee needed a hand towel.

  From behind the bar Willie took some of the expensive guest towels Bee had ordered at Francis-Orr. Embossed in the corners was the well-known New York Times Hirschfeld caricature. Bill handed the towels through the door and returned to his stool.

  “Havin’ some trouble in there,” he confided. “It’s her time of the month.”

  Willie colored in embarrassment; in his day people didn’t discuss such personal matters so casually. Badly wanting a drink, he was in a quandary; if he had one himself, he had to offer them one, too. No mention had been made again about their leaving—Willie had already noted the dark marks Bill’s boot heels left on the white tiles; they would be difficult to clean up. He was reminded of lately occurring events which would have made Bee blush, had she known, other boots and other marks, the results of scuffles and fracases. Since Bee’s death he had, out of loneliness, on occasion entertained some vaguely Hollywood types, hardly savory ones, and there had been several “incidents.” One morning the cleaning woman had arrived to discover one of the mirrored screens smashed, and there was blood, too. Willie had a black eye and a swollen lip, and he doubted she believed the story that he had walked into the screen by mistake. But those were the sort of things that happened since Bee was gone.

  Still, he prided himself on being a hospitable host, no matter the circumstances, and all at once he heard himself asking, “Would you care for a drink, Bill, while we’re waiting?”

  “Ah’m not much of a drinker, Mr. Marsh—”

  “Willie. Call me Willie.” He disliked being called Mister by younger people.

  “Uh—Willie,” repeated the young man, though the name did not come easily to him.

  “Perhaps a little wine?”

  Wine would be fine, he said. Willie opened the bar refrigerator and brought out a half-gallon jug of Gallo Chablis.

  “Hey, look at all the champagne,” Bill said. The top shelf held nearly a dozen bottles, Cordon Rouge, of which Willie usually kept a large supply on hand, but not for casual drop-ins. He shut the door quickly and poured the Chablis into a goblet, one of Bee’s good Baccarat. He snicked the rim with his fingernail as he handed it over; the ring held, then died in the room.

  “Hey,” said Bill.

  Willie took one of the Baccarat double-old-fashioned glasses and mixed himself a large Scotch and soda, then filled the ice bucket from the refrigerator. He closed the door quickly again, set the bucket on the bar, and added cubes to his drink.

  “Say”—Bill was peering across the bar at the pictures again—“is that Fred Astaire?” Willie nodded, and pointed out several others: Jean Cocteau, Jack Dempsey, Edna Ferber, Cecil Beaton, each signed: “To Bee and Willie” or “To Willie and Bee.” There was a photograph of Willie side by side with Serge Lifar on a piano top, another with Helen Morgan on a sound stage, another with Somerset Maugham, standing on the terrace of a villa. “South of France,” Willie explained. Bill nodded. One with Carl Van Vechten, with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, with Fiorello La Guardia, Coco Chanel. Bill nodded and nodded.

  The girl finally came out. She clopped across the floor on her wooden platforms and stood dolefully beside Bill, blinking shyly at Willie behind her granny glasses. She looked shabby and bruised and a little tender; Willie felt sorry for her as he would for a cat kept out in the rain. He finished his drink quickly and made himself another, and Bill rang the rim of his glass for the girl—Willie had forgotten her name again—and held it against her ear. She had obviously burned her bra or didn’t own one; her breasts sagged under the print halter whose knot she kept tugging at nervously behind her mop of hair.

  “How come everyone calls you ‘Little Willie’?” Bill asked, smiling crookedly at him across the bar. Willie swirled the cubes in his glass, drank, then smiled modestly.

  “That’s an old, old story,” he began expansively. “Goes back to before I was an actor. A recitation I used to do when I was a boy. I—hem—became kind of famous for it, and the name stuck, so on so forth.”

  “Recitation?”

  “We used to do what they called parlor pieces in those days.” He set his glass down and stepped out on the checkered floor to offer his famous impression of a small boy coming onto a stage before an audience of which he is terrified. With appropriate gestures he recited:

  “Little Willie in the best of sashes

  Fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes.

  Later on the room grew chilly,

  But nobody thought to poke up Willie.”

  Bill slammed his large hand on the black Formica counter.

  “Hey, that’s darn funny, y’know?”

  Willie went behind the bar again. “It was just this little thing I learned for company. People were always saying, ‘Do Little Willie,’ and afte
r a while the name stuck.”

  “Darn funny,” Bill repeated. He seemed to respond to each of these anecdotes in precisely the same way, a quick bright laugh that grew slightly hollow; he would nod and sometimes crack his knuckles, and the eyes continually swerved. The girl, who had perched herself on another stool, said nothing. Her lips were full and ripe and the top one overhung the lower with a curl that could be taken for either cuteness or petulance.

  “How you feelin’, Jude?” Bill asked.

  “Okay.”

  “Are you not feeling well? Would you like to lie down?” Willie offered solicitously.

  “Naw, naw,” Bill said, “it’s nothin’ like that. It’s—you know.” He winked at Willie again, and put his arm around Judee and gave her a little hug.

  “I need a Tampax,” she said forlornly. Then, “You don’t possibly have …”

  “No, no, I don’t,” Willie answered quickly.

  “We’ll get Arco to stop at Turner’s when we go down the hill,” Bill told her.

  “What do you suppose has happened to your friend?” Willie asked.

  “Danged if I know,” Bill said. “He’ll be ’long.”

  “Would you care for some wine?” Willie suggested; she nodded. He brought out the jug again.

  “Look, Jude,” Bill said, pointing to the gallery of pictures, “Tallulah Bankhead. Signed personal.” The eleven-by-fourteen glossy of Miss Bankhead was inscribed to “Darling Bee and Willie,” etc. Judee had seen the actress on The Lucy Shaw; one up for the host.

  “Here’s a funny one, if you like Tallulah stories,” Willie said, pouring wine, then mixing himself another Scotch. “Bee and I used to play bridge a lot with her, and we were always looking for a good fourth. She’d met this fellow, name of Vinson, I think, up at San Simeon—the Hearst ranch, that is—and she discovered he was a good partner. When the game was won she tossed her address book at him and said, ‘Dahling’—she called everybody ‘dahling,’ you know—‘dahling, put your name down for me and we’ll play again sometime.’ He did, and when she saw he’d written it under V she asked why. Because his name was Vinson, he said, and she flung the book back at him. ‘Don’t be tiresome, dahling, I can’t remember V—put it under B for Bridge. Bah hah-hah-hah-hah!’”

  Bill chuckled appreciatively. “Hey, that’s a terrific imitation.”

  “We were quite good friends.” He pointed to one of the gallery pictures, a large group gathered onstage, all smiling broadly for the camera. “A Sunday night benefit at the Winter Garden. They were all there that night—Tallulah, Lynn Fontanne, Helen Hayes, Merman. Ruth Gordon, Jane Cowl. Most of them had been my leading ladies.”

  “Honest?” said Bill with evident interest. “Did you really work with Lynn Fontaine?”

  “Fontanne,” Willie corrected mildly. He tapped a manicured nail under one of the faces. “And there’s Bee herself, between Lynn and Lenore Ulric. Right up there among the greats.”

  His host went on pointing; Bill seemed to see Bees everywhere. An original framed New Yorker cartoon by Peter Arno showed a crowd of people clustered around the entrance to a nightclub, from which were emerging two heads; said one curious onlooker to another, “Dunno, it’s either a raid or Bee and Willie.”

  Under glass and handsome black-and-gold-bordered mats were:

  Little Willie with the best of sashays,

  And Bee in a bonnet of Lilly Daché’s,

  Hither, thither,

  To lyre or zither,

  Lots of dither,

  Bee and Willie go.

  But every Russian, Lett, or Hessian,

  Must ask himself poor Willie’s quession,

  Like Hamlet in his hamlet, see?

  … To Bee or not to Bee?

  COLE PORTER

  And:

  Please do not you think me harsh

  If I say of Willie Marsh

  He must mind his q’s and p’s

  And all the p’s, I think, are Bee’s.

  DOROTHY PARKER

  There were sketches and caricatures by James Thurber, Covarrubias, John Held, Jr., the latter making reference to “the Bee’s knees.” Another, a few scrawls on a cocktail napkin and signed “Dali,” showed the head of an enormous bee, wings fluttering, and covered with glittering jewels. The bee’s face was similar to that in all the other drawings, and under it was printed “The Queen Bee.”

  Judee touched Bill, her features screwed into a plaintive, waif-like expression. “When’s Arco going to get here?” she murmured. Bill reassured her that Arco would be along. She took a chair, diddling her wineglass nervously, while Bill lunged to peer at one of the paintings hung in an elaborate gallery arrangement along the broad length of an unmirrored wall.

  “Hey, who’s this guy stuck with arrows?”

  “Ah, the Saint Sebastian?” Willie went to stand beside Bill. “Bee picked that up in Italy.” The picture portrayed the near-naked gnarled figure of the saint, bound to a tree and martyred by many arrows. “It’s Quattrocento.”

  “Huh?”

  “That means it was painted in the fifteenth century.”

  “Oh. Hey, that’s old.”

  “We think so.”

  Bill’s busy eye darted about the room, again flicking speculatively to the pair of closed carved doors, finally lighting on the jeweled crown under the glass dome, Fedora’s crown.

  “Did you by chance see us in The Miracle of Santa Cristi?” Willie asked.

  “Aw, sure—sure, I saw that one.”

  Willie took up from the table a framed Kodachrome still and handed it to Bill. It showed Fedora costumed as the Virgin Mary, wearing a blue headdress bordered in gold, flowing white robes gathered by a gold girdle at the waist, and on her brow, the identical crown that was in the glass dome.

  “Did you know we’re on TV tonight?” Willie remarked.

  “No kidding? What in?”

  “The Player Queen.”

  “I missed that one. I saw Mozambique once, though.”

  “Madagascar.”

  “Right. Madagascar. Ever see Madagascar, Jude?”

  “No.” She sounded disconsolate as she ran her fingertips over the glass tabletop.

  “Listen, why don’t I go call, how’s that? Could I use your phone, Willie, see if I can track Arco down?”

  “Certainly, my boy.” Aware that the girl was watching him, Willie replaced the picture on its stand and turned to her.

  “Would you care for some music?” he offered.

  “Okay.”

  “What kind do you like?”

  “’Sup to you. Pink Floyd?”

  Willie laughed as he crossed to the pickled and bleached armoire where the stereo components were hidden. “Afraid we’re not very modern here. Anything else?”

  “I don’t care.”

  He thumbed through some albums on a shelf, slid one out. “How about some Broadway show music?” She said that would be okay; he put on Call Me Madam. Bill was talking in low tones on the telephone. Taking his drink along, Willie joined the girl, who had wandered out into the lanai. Her large, softly bulgy eyes popped out with the entranced wonder of a child. Willie thought they indicated a hyperthyroid condition.

  “Gee,” she said, “it’s really nice, huh? Real movie star.” She looked around at the wrought-iron furniture grouped on the bright green Astroturf, the luxurious chaises by the pool coping, the cabaña at the shallow end of the pool, at the other, the diving board, and a fountain with a nude female figure pouring water from an urn into a large stone shell, whence it in turn flowed into the pool.

  “If you look just there,” he said, pointing, “you can see Catalina.”

  “No kidding? Where?”

  He took her to the end of the pool and pointed again to the island, whose low lines could be discerned against the far horizon.

  “That’s the first time I ever saw it,” she said.

  “Really? Where’re you from?”

  “Here. Right down there, as a matter of fact.�
� She indicated some buildings in another direction. “See that gray roof in front of the big blue building? The Shermart?”

  Yes, Willie knew the market.

  “That’s where I come from,” she said. “The Shermart.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “My mother left me in one of the aisles.” She made a little face, then added, “In a shopping cart.”

  “You mean she forgot you?”

  “No. Just left me. Between breakfast foods and cake mixes.”

  “Your mother abandoned you?” Willie was shocked.

  She nodded. “I’m an ‘agency baby.’ That’s what they called us. I’ve had about six foster mothers.” It didn’t seem to bother her. She straightened her legs and unconcernedly clacked her shoes together. Willie was dumfounded, revolted that a parent could do such a thing to her own child, flesh of her flesh; and between the breakfast foods and cake mixes!

  “I was Miss Pacific à Go-Go,” the girl remarked wistfully. “I used to spell my name with an i, I dotted it with a circle, I thought it was pretty, but Arco didn’t like it.”

  “Who is this Arco?”

  She peered at him over the rims of her glasses. “That’s who we’re waitin’ for, Arco.”

  “I see.”

  “I think you’re real nice, Mr. Marsh.” He insisted that she, too, call him Willie. “And I think you’re real lucky,” she pronounced solemnly. Her face was curiously round for her thin body, with an almost schoolgirl plumpness, and she waved her babyish hands at everything she saw.

  “Lucky how?” he asked, trying not to sound patronizing.

  “All this. Being rich and famous. Having a lovely home where people can come to, and you give them wine, and everybody acts nice. You’re really very fortunate.”

  “Why … yes, I suppose I am. Thank you, Judee.” He was both surprised and quite touched at her little speech. For all her present discomfort, she seemed an amiable sort, obviously not very bright, but his heart went out to her, having been so callously disposed of by her parent. Her nails were painted a dull brown color, and her lipstick didn’t match. When she turned to look at the view again he noticed a series of ugly red lines down her thin back, exposed by her low-cut halter; they looked as if they must be painful.