Franny nodded. They work from the inside, she thought. What in hell does that mean? What inside?
Mollie had been listening to Patrick’s sotto voce to Franny. When he stopped she said in a low voice: “But there’s more to it than that. Once their understanding of the character is as complete as possible, then they need to be, not just portray, but to be, to feel at that moment on the stage as if they were, that person. In other words, you are not showing emotion as you think it might be, but you are, you see, feeling it, being yourself moved by it, before the eyes of a live audience.”
Franny said, almost timidly, “But then it’s not acting really, is it?”
“The best acting, actually,” said Patrick. “Because it isn’t acting except in the broadest sense.”
Franny stared at the students in front of her. Engrossed in their study, they paid no attention to their teachers or the visitors, did not even seem to be aware of themselves. One boyish-looking actor, pointing to the script before him on the table, burst out in a constricted voice: “But I hate this guy. Really despise him. What do I do with that? How do I handle that?”
The instructor, who looked the same age as the students, said, “Keep remembering how much you dislike him. It will help you in the part. Especially if you believe, as somebody else just said, that he hates himself. Right, Mr. Franklin?”
Arnold scraped his chair forward. “You’re quite right,” he said, the pedantic tone of his youth creeping into his voice. His hands moved with swift gestures, his eyes flashed behind his glasses, lighting on student after student and stopping at the instructor. He sketched out in fluent sentences his concept of the character. Then he began to talk knowingly about the character’s father. The students switched around in their chairs to look at him. The boyish-looking actor, still on his feet, stared down at the playwright. At one point he broke in upon him to ask a question. Arnold was all understanding, all patience. He stood up to make an abrupt, cutting motion with the side of his left hand against his thigh, to show what the self-hating character might do at a moment of tension in the play.
“I’d like to hear what you think now,” Arnold said, gesturing toward the students. He moved his chair so far forward that he was now in their circle. Tumbling over each other in their eagerness to speak to him, to test their insights on the creator of the character, they interrupted each other to offer one opinion after another, the women in stage-accented, controlled voices from which all trace of regional origin had been studiously erased, the men in smooth, low-register tones. In their efforts to establish the precedence of their views they grew heated, even angry, with those who disagreed with them, as if they had been discussing a person related to them by blood.
By the time Patrick Cairns entered the circle to make a suggestion, they all appeared to have forgotten that the father of the character did not appear, was not even referred to, in the play. Patrick was pleased at this obedience to his dictum that it was important to create a whole childhood for a character one was to play, complete with friends, homes, fears, grandparents, toys, games, etc., and then, “from this unnecessary welter,” he said to them now, “raise up the character.” They all listened with respect to what he said, couched as it was in his authoritative, carefully maintained, Anglo-Irish accent.
Mollie had been impelled by her interest in what everyone was saying into moving her chair into the area of discussion, leaving Franny alone on the periphery, beyond the waving arms, animated faces, sparkling eyes, and colliding opinions, beyond all the evidence, astonishing to her, of heated minds at work on a purely imaginary project. She did not move closer. She said nothing.
The boyish-looking actor insisted with great force that when his character walked he was sure he pounded his heels. “It is essential to my concept,” he said, pounding his fists rhythmically on the table to simulate the action of feet. “Does he crack his knuckles, do you think?” asked a girl with long, dark hair and an impish twist to her lips. “And if he does,” said a boy with hair cut in close, caplike fashion, “does he usually do it sitting down or standing up?” The class laughed at the little joke. The young actor sat down, looking somewhat miffed.
During the rest of the afternoon, until the Cairnses invited Franny and Arnold to tea in their office, the two of them attended three rehearsals, a dramatic reading, a class in movement and dance, and one in eurhythmics. They watched a young director block out a scene from Richard III. At four thirty, after tea, Patrick asked Franny if she would like to talk to a group of students interested in the techniques of screen acting.
“Oh no. No.”
“Informally, of course. They’re all admirers of motion pictures. Would you do it?”
Franny appeared frozen at the thought. She shook her head again. She refused to go back to watching a group work once the idea of talking to them had been suggested to her, countering Patrick’s suggestion with one of her own.
“But I might like to come back some time and … go to some classes in acting or something as, well, a student, you know. Could I do that?”
Mollie answered before Patrick could. “Delighted, Miss Fuller. We can arrange it any time. You could attend for any space of time that would fit into your schedule. A few days, a week, a month, anytime at all. We’d be so pleased.”
Mollie wasn’t being polite. Her enthusiasm for the project was genuine. As she spoke she was silently stage-managing Franny Fuller’s attendance at the Atelier, choosing a photographer to take many informal shots of the famous movie star having lessons, listening to Pat’s lectures on the Way Theory of Acting, participating in improvisations with the young students, perhaps even taking a part (small: after all, she was a novice in the theater!) in a play. Mollie could visualize a new edition of the Atelier catalogue. Among the action photographs of students at work, a clear one of Franny Fuller herself, being instructed.…
Patrick, whose visions, without consultation, often paralleled Mollie’s, said: “What would you like to do most? What sort of class, Miss Fuller? We could easily arrange it so that it would be scheduled for you.”
Franny said she thought “the talking through of character.” She repeated the clause that seemed to have impressed her: “how you work from the inside.” Her whisper filled the little office. Arnold laughed, embarrassed at the idea of this voluptuous beauty, overflowing her insufficient, vulgar dress, the woman he loved in spite of himself and all the difficulties raised by her fame and her ignorance, working seriously to learn acting. He covered his lapse by a display of enthusiasm for the project:
“It would be fine for you, Franny. It is a different approach from … films,” (he hesitated over the words, trying to stay on this side of politeness) “you can see that.”
Nothing came of it. The whole idea of the stage and the school terrified Franny. She was like a bather at the edge of a cold ocean who is persuaded, against her will, to test the water and then, chilled at the first touch, retreats to the warm beach. A few days later she told Arnold she had to fly back to Hollywood for retakes on the picture she had just finished. Mollie was always to remember her secret plans for Franny Fuller with regret and some guilt. It was a conspiracy she had entered into with herself, to use Franny for her own ends. She felt like a philanthropist who plans to leak to the press the extent of his charitable contributions.
Franny was in Hollywood when Arnold Franklin, miserable in New York without her enlivening beauty, flew to the Coast, rented a car, and drove to Beverly Hills. He found her lying out beside her half-empty swimming pool, asked her to marry him almost at once, and then flew home, full of delight with her agreement that she would come to New York for the ceremony when the retakes were completed.
From The Fabulous Franny Fuller (As Told to Mary Maguire):
My marriage to Arnold Franklin, the famous poet, was a great day in my life. I went back East as soon as Pot of Gold was finished. Arnie and his whole family, except his father who had to work that day, met me at Idlewild Airport. I loved his mother
at first sight—she was so warm and kind to me. From the very first, his sisters, Lucille and Ruth, treated me like one of the family.
There was a crowd of reporters at the airport. They took pictures of us all, Mrs. Franklin kissing Arnie, and Arnie and me kissing, and Arnie’s sisters kissing him. My hair is blown every which way in those pictures and the sun strikes Arnie’s glasses and makes him look blind. But we both look happy. And we were!
We drove into New York in the airport limousine because the Franklins had no car and Mrs. Franklin said that taxis were too expensive on the Island. I remember that Arnie got mad at a man sitting behind us who kept poking his head forward. Arnie shoved him back and told him to mind his own d——business. I thought Arnie was going to hit him! I could see how much he loved me! That day I really felt good about everything!
We stayed at the Plaza, where I always used to stay, because the Franklins only had a small apartment in Brooklyn, and Arnie’s house was lent to a friend. But we went there for most of our meals. How Mother Franklin could cook! The first night we were there, I met Arnie’s father. This was harder than meeting his mother. His father is a very quiet man and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking about me. He worked downtown, he said, where he was a salesman for a knit-goods company. He shook hands with me when we met and seemed very reserved toward me, I thought. I didn’t know whether it was because I wasn’t Jewish or because I was in the movies or because he disapproved of the way I looked. I did try to dress right that evening, high-necked, loose dress and all that. But of course I didn’t come out looking like Lucille or Ruth. I felt that in Mr. Franklin’s eyes something was wrong with me somewhere. I made up my mind that I was going to win him over!
The wedding was held in a reception room at the Pierre. Arnie had made all the arrangements. I wore a light-blue dress—after all, I’d been married before and so had Arnie, who wore a new light-gray suit he’d bought at Brooks Brothers. Lou Price said he thought I should wear white, but I didn’t want anybody to think I was trying to be something I wasn’t. Arnie looked wonderful in his light suit, more like a Californian than a New Yorker.
His father wore a dark suit and didn’t seem happy, but the rest of the family were swell to me, really swell. I met all Arnie’s aunts and uncles and his cousins and their children before the ceremony. Arnie’s grandfather didn’t come. Mr. Franklin said he wasn’t well. Arnie seemed upset that he wasn’t there. I have never met him. I’ve heard he’s very old and almost blind and was once a famous religious scholar, or something like that.
We were married by an old friend of Arnie’s mother, a cantor. I couldn’t understand any of the Hebrew in the ceremony, but I enjoyed it all. There seemed to be a mystery about that language. Very few people there knew what the cantor was saying, I thought. But everyone listened very respectfully. Lou Price was Arnie’s best man. Since he was the one who introduced us, it was wonderful to have him there although he looked funny, being about half as tall as Arnie. The Cairnses were there too, old friends of Arnie’s from the theater whom I knew too—I once visited some classes at their school and enjoyed them very much.
During the ceremony I thought about Eddie Puritan and wished he had been alive to come. I loved that guy. I suppose Lou Price must have been thinking about him too because he looked sad a couple of times. I wished I’d thought to ask Dolores Jenkins, my stand-in and friend, to come East for the wedding. Except for Arnie and Lou there was no one there I really knew.
The Franklins were wonderful to me. Mrs. Franklin said she thought of me as a daughter. Mr. Franklin didn’t say much, but I think that was because he didn’t like all the fuss the press was making outside the door where Arnie and Lou had insisted they had to wait until after the ceremony was over. There was a wonderful supper after the wedding. After it was all over we had only a week before I had to get back to Hollywood to start work on a new picture. So Arnie and I drove to his place in New Hampshire.
He had a lovely old farmhouse there, very old, but he’d fixed it up and it was very comfortable. We stayed there for six marvelous days. We were divinely happy. A couple of reporters followed us there from New York. Arnie made an agreement with them: If they could take some pictures of us, me in jeans and a work shirt and Arnie cutting wood, the kind of pictures they seemed to want, they would go away and not bother us again. They took some great pictures and then they left.
We walked a lot in the woods, Arnie taught me to cook some of the things he liked to eat, and we talked and talked. It was a divine time and, as I’ve said, I’ve never been happier.
But like all good things it had to end. Arnie was beginning to work on a long poem. He told me something of what he wanted to do in it. It was fascinating for me to be in on the beginning of a great thing like that. At the end of the week we drove to Boston and I flew back to Hollywood. Arnie had to go to New York to see a publisher who wanted to bring out a book of his poems. He promised to join me in Beverly Hills in a few days.…
Arnold Franklin went to Hollywood to be with Franny. The reasons given by his agent, Lou Price, to Mary Maguire, suited the American dream of marital bliss and success into which the press had cast Arnold and Franny. By good fortune, reported Mary Maguire, Franny’s contract to do a new picture had coincided with the offer made to Arnold Franklin to write a scenario from one of his plays.
FF, ARNIE, OK PIX, Variety reported. Mary Maguire made an ecstatic lead paragraph out of it:
DELIRIOUSLY HAPPY, ARNIE FRANKLIN FOLLOWS FF TO COAST FOR START OF HER THE LONELY ONES. HE WILL DO THE SCRIPT FOR HIS OWN NEVER-PRODUCED PLAY.… FF WILL WORK AGAIN WITH HER FAVORITE (SHE SAYS, BUT WE KNOW BETTER) COSTAR BROCK CURRIER.… THE PRESS IS DELIGHTED WITH FABULOUS FRAN’S NEW NAME. NOW THEY CAN WRITE FFF … OR EVEN FFFF, FOR FABULOUS ETC. FRANKLIN.
Activity in Hollywood’s studios was hectic when Arnold arrived to begin his sentence, as he referred to it, as a screenwriter. Heads of the little city-states which each studio constituted felt, unanimously, that the fierce realities of the war demanded more “upbeat” entertainment for “our boys” overseas. While these pictures were in the works some leading men left for the services, and some female stars donned elegant uniforms in which to travel to entertain soldiers and sailors “live,” or in which to sell war bonds to well-to-do war-industry workers.
Hollywood responded to overseas death and destruction with musical accounts of gay shore leaves, filled with dancing sailors and obliging, tap-dancing beauties. Bored homefront audiences loved them, the more absurd and unlikely the better, and attendance records, even at afternoon performances, were at an all-time high, reported Mary Maguire, in those words.
Hollywood and Beverly Hills shocked Arnold. Lou Price had warned him about the untidiness of life on the Coast. But he was unprepared for the lack of visible day-to-day progress in the lives of the people he met. Scenarios were written, scenes shot, sets and costumes designed, and background music composed: these things he knew happened, but he had no idea when all of it was accomplished.
Everyone was constantly out of their own houses or away from their offices “for the day,” visiting other people’s swimming pools, lying in redwood loungers in wet bars at the back of someone else’s beach house. Or, it seemed to him, everyone was in automobiles, snakelike lines of them on the way to another house, to “The Club,” to a preview, to Ciro’s or Romanoff’s. “You go on ahead, we’ll follow,” was the substitute Hollywood sentence for “goodbye.” Arnold found himself perpetually following someone he knew only slightly to a place he’d never been before in a car to whose other occupants he was a total stranger.
In the early months of their marriage, when friends and acquaintances were often at her house, Franny seemed content. She didn’t say much, but she liked the house to have other people in it, especially at night when she had trouble sleeping. This came as a surprise to Arnold. In New York he had known her to sleep interminably, and he had worried that she was ill. At first Hollywood seemed to awaken and exhilarate her. She want
ed to “show” him her friends. It turned out that her friends were far less interested in him than she had thought they would be. After the first polite exchange, they would turn back to talk movie gossip with Franny.
Arnold felt pigeonholed, filed away under “Franny’s husband,” of the same order of things as Franny’s electric organ which, in fact, had arrived at Fullerton (the synthetic name bestowed on her house by Premium’s publicity department) at the same time as he had, a wedding gift from the Price Agency. No one who visited them could play the instrument, nor could Franny. Arnold tried, fitfully, but hated its fraudulent tones. For him it became another of those vestiges of movieland’s civilization that filled the houses he visited: the Pla-Pal Prohibition hidden bar-radios to which no one seemed to listen, elaborate electrical devices for mixing drinks that no one wished to waste time with, and gardening tools of such ingenuity and complexity that the Japanese gardeners found them intimidating.
These unused machines offended Arnold’s sense of strict economy. He spent the little time Franny permitted him alone trying to follow the optimistic directions that came with the electric organ. The brochure read: “With just a few minutes’ practice and the ability to follow the numbers of the chords, anyone can learn to play this magnificent organ at the first try.” He never progressed much further than the first set of chords.
Confusing as this way of life was, after a little while Arnold was able to bring some personal order out of it all. When everyone started off, in a great burst of energy and hilarity, for Another Place, he would manage, in the confusion, to be left behind, go to his typewriter, and turn out some dialogue for the script he was trying to complete. With the legend of Scott Fitzgerald in his memory, he worried about drinking and “not producing.” He welcomed any sudden turn in the social tide that moved people out of Franny’s house and off to some Other Place. He had no trouble with the technique of preparing a movie script after spending some days with writers from the studio and reading a number of their finished scripts. His trouble was in finding enough consecutive time in which to produce something that seemed to him to have value.
The Missing Person Page 12