“Now, dearie. Tell me what you want for lunch and I’ll fix it while you rest.”
Franny said, with her eyes closed: “Some grape juice, please, Mrs. Jenkins.”
“Nothing to eat?”
“No, grape juice is fine. Nothing else.” She was almost asleep as she said the last words, her energy having seemingly been exhausted by them.
After an hour she woke, sat bolt upright, and looked around blankly. She seemed not to remember Mrs. Jenkins. The dream she had just had was still there, whole and terrifying.
Two little boys and Fanny Marker walked barefooted to the dried-up reservoir bed and then crawled into the pipe almost big enough to stand up in and it got darker and then black inside and there was some water full of orange rust like dried blood at the bottom of the black pipe and every sound of her foot on the pipe and the swishing of the water made a roar like a bull and all at once nobody was in the pipe but Fanny and she started to run to one end and banged her head and went down on her hands and knees and crawled in the bloody water and looked back and there at the opening was a great grinning face, the eyes crossed and a great red tongue hanging out and hair all over its head like tar and Fanny screamed and her scream came back to her like the high notes of a saxophone never stopping and Fanny crawled on, her knees scraped and rusty crying so hard she could hardly see, her hair in her face her heart echoing like a drum in that black pipe and at the other end oh jesus, another face, fingers pulling down the corners of the mouth and no teeth in it and the blood roaring in her ears as she tried to stand again and banged hard at the side of her head and slipped back in the muck crying and screaming, even after she remembered about the boys and recognized their faces and saw it was a game and then she put her head down and crashed into one face and fell out of the pipe hitting against the face that pulled away from her before her exploding head the roar the bull’s roars the blood bursting in her hair and fright screaming flowing from her ears the roar and the blackness and the blood
Then she saw Mrs. Jenkins. She shook her head to wipe away the dream, the dream she had again and again since it had happened to her in Utica when she was a child. She smiled her instant, brilliant, distant smile.
“I was dreaming,” she said.
“Tell you what, dearie. I just thought of a place near here you’d like to see. Put on your shoes and I’ll show you.”
“Outside?”
“Oh yes, but not far. Just about five blocks away.”
As they came out of the building, Franny stopped, shocked by the glare of midafternoon California sunlight. She found her sunglasses in her handbag and then turned to look into the window of the bakery. It was almost empty except for white doilies on empty white plates. In the center on a pedestal a three-tiered dusty wedding cake bore aloft two celluloid dolls. Franny stared at them. The groom doll had stiff arms painted black all the way to his finger tips, the bride-doll was buried to her knees in the sooty white cake.
“Come on, dearie, it’s not a bad walk from here.”
Franny pulled a kerchief over her hair. In her workman’s pants and silk shirt she looked waiflike, fragile. Billie-Jo took her hand, as she would a child’s, and pulled her along. It was difficult to make much progress because Franny’s clogs did not give as she walked. With each step her feet made a slapping noise, like the sound a circus clown makes with great false feet. Even so, no one on the street looked at her. The citizen of Hollywood, accustomed to nobodys accoutered like Stars, distrusts everyone he sees: Franny in clogs, work pants, and cat-eyed sunglasses looked like an imitation of Franny Fuller. No one paid any attention to her.
They arrived at a brick building painted black.
“This is the place.”
A sign entirely composed of electric bulbs read WAX MUSEUM. Underneath, in gothic letters, a painted sign said MADAME TWOSO’S and then, in black block letters, SEE THE STARS!
“What’s in there? What is it?” asked Franny, backing away.
Billie-Jo put down two quarters at a window in the kiosk in front of the museum and took Franny’s hand again. They went in through a black velvet curtain and stood uncertainly just inside, blinded in the darkness after the sunny street. In a few moments Billie-Jo saw a green arrow glowing.
“This way, Miss Fuller. The arrow says over here.”
“What arrow?”
“Take off your glasses and you’ll see it.”
Together, like mountain climbers tied together and groping past a dangerous place, they moved in the direction the arrow indicated. Past another black velvet curtain musty with the odors of many hot, confused hands pushing at it, they were in a large, lighted room with recessed glass panels set into walls. Franny put her dark glasses back on.
Billie-Jo said: “Yes, I remember now. We start over here, dearie.” Each window revealed a group of Hollywood stars, called Greats in the legends printed beneath them, in a scene from their GREATEST SUCCESS. Billie-Jo ushered Franny rapidly past the first displays—frizzy-haired Mae Murray embracing smooth, seductive, frowning John Gilbert; languorous, sulky Constance Bennett in the fierce arms of Richard Barthelmess; famous comics in sailor suits, horn-rimmed glasses, and police uniforms chasing women into revolving doors or falling out of skyscraper windows.
“Now, here. Take a look at this one, dearie. Take off your glasses.”
Through her smoked glasses Franny saw herself. She was dressed in a black satin evening gown cut to a deep V in front. Two bulbous wax breasts pressed out of the cleavage of the dress. Waxy and painted so that it looked like the embalmed remains of someone she remembered having known well, her head was thrown back, her eyelids were lowered over glassy bright-blue eyeballs like giant marbles, and her lips, oversized, swollen, and bursting with jellylike red wax, opened as though to allow some last, vital ceraceous breath to escape. Vaguely, because she could not take her eyes away from herself, she was aware of two male figures flanking her, both in evening dress, both handsome, stiff, their marble eyes looking avidly at her.
She recognized the dress but could not remember the movie the scene was from; even the men were unfamiliar. But the angle of that head, the deep dimple struck into the wax cheek (with a hot needle? she wondered), the silky hair pointed down that forehead—oh, she knew that one, that was the face she had worked on as a girl on her mother’s bed, the day Jerryboy came home early to find her there.… Behind the glass, sculptured for all the world to see, was Fanny Marker who lived forever behind her, under her, like vegetables under a stone, and that was why it was so hard for her to breathe, to live.
“Don’t you think that’s a swell likeness? It takes you off just perfect, I think. Take off the glasses. You’ll get a better look.”
Franny made no move. Through the glasses the unlined face, the body, the glowing canary hair, were mercifully darkened, diminished. Bright lights shone down on her manufactured skin, grayed out and dulled into a twilight color.
“I look dead,” Franny said aloud to herself. But Billie-Jo heard her speak.
“What’s that?”
“That really is me,” said Franny. “And I’m her stand-in, like Dolores is mine.”
“Oh no, dearie,” said Billie-Jo.
“Yes,” said Franny in her flat whispering monotone. “See, just look at me. I tell you, look: I’m dead. Really. Dead.”
A week later, lights were being arranged on the set of The Princess and the Pomegranate, and then shifted. Dolores Jenkins waited, changing her position at command, her face tilted upward and then lowered, then raised again. She held still until the lighting director said she could move. Dolores had developed a technique, an occupation to follow, while remaining absolutely still. She would freeze into the desired position and then hold it by thinking hard about non-thought. Sometimes her concentration on blankness was so intense that, when she was told to relax, it was an effort to obey. She was the ideal stand-in, unambitious for herself, unglamorous yet attractive in a quiet way, perfectly yet mindlessly still when she worked.
This day she had been working since seven thirty. The cameramen had been ready to shoot at nine and puttered around ever since trying to appear busy, because Franny Fuller had not arrived. Everyone on the set was trying hard to keep his temper, but every now and then a small ugliness broke out in some corner of the set: there was too little to do.
At the edge of the set Charlene was knitting another in an interminable series of sweaters for her nieces and nephews. On Franny Fuller’s pictures the assistants cultivated hobbies, played tournaments of gin rummy or cribbage, began ambitious pieces of petitpoint with every expectation of finishing them during the inevitable delays in production.
Dolores had finished her posing. She came to sit beside Charlene, stretching her arms above her head, free to do this for the first time in hours. Often she was grateful for delays, but today discontent with the long wait had infected even her.
“I wish she’d get here. It’s damn hot under those lights. I think they do all that fiddling around just to kill time.”
“You can’t prove it by me,” said Charlene, her favorite expression for every contingency. Once Charlene, too, had dreamed of stardom. Now she despised every star on whose picture she’d ever worked. Close to forty, she looked faded and bitter. Her lost hopes colored her conversations.
“She sick—as usual?” she asked Dolores.
Dolores liked Franny, with a fondness born of intense, female, creature sympathy. She viewed her from her own secure, if lower, position, understanding the precariousness of Franny’s elevation, and the price in terrible self-doubt she paid for her eminence. Dolores thought about Gloria Gibson, at the end of her career. Married six times, and then left alone by her last husband, she was ending her life in Palm Springs with a nurse in a cottage on the grounds of Rest Haven Sanatorium. Blank-eyed, her skin pink and dry under layers of badly applied pancake make-up, her eyes blackened by crusted mascara, the Star had not recognized Dolores when last she visited her.
Gloria asked: “Seen Norman lately?” Dolores remembered that Norman was the Star’s second husband who had died fifteen years ago in an airplane crash. Dolores said no, she had not seen him recently. The aging Star then lost interest and turned away to talk to her nurse. Dolores said goodbye. For a moment, intelligence returned to the still-bright, famous blue eyes under the familiar, triangular, penciled brows. “My new picture starts next week,” Gloria told Dolores. “I must be ready. I’m resting up here.” Then her eyes clouded over as though Dolores, by making no response, had failed her in some obscure but crucial way.
The lives of those afflicted by fame were part of Dolores’s Hollywood education. Other stand-ins were similarly learned. They belonged to an unofficial underground of mutual sympathy. Whenever they happened to meet they exchanged information about their “people,” inside tidbits and gossip about their current loves and enduring terrors, their escapes into marriage, love affairs, alcohol, drugs, and delusion. For those forced to live out their sicknesses and ruined affairs in the public eye, Dolores felt genuine sympathy, almost sisterly love. She took no pleasure in their falls from glory, their plunges into the abyss of public neglect.
“This part has been hard on her,” she said. She watched Charlene’s hands whip yarn over the needle with one extended finger. “You really knit very fast.”
“Hard on her? At fifty thousand for sixteen weeks’ work? I should suffer so.”
“You know what I mean. Working with someone like Brock Currier.”
“Because he was a New York stage actor? What’s that mean?”
Dolores was accustomed to defending Franny against all criticism. “Not only that. He’s such a bastard, so hard on women.”
Charlene smirked and brought forth her usual sentence for actors whose looks she admired. “Well, he can put his shoes under my bed any time.”
Dolores laughed half-heartedly, and returned to the defense. “Franny can’t take criticism too well. Every time he raises that eyebrow and smiles his crooked smile down at her she gets sick, I think.”
“Tough.”
“It is. You don’t know her.”
“For crissake, Dolores, how can a woman with those breasts and that fanny and that widow’s peak have an inferiority complex?”
Dolores said nothing.
“Where is she this morning? Her call was for eight, wasn’t it?”
“It could be that she overslept.”
“Oh, come on. Arnold Franklin wouldn’t let her. I hear he starts writing at five thirty in the morning.”
“Maybe she really is sick. She’s not very strong.”
Charlene snorted.
The set emptied for lunch. Reuben Rubin stopped at Charlene’s chair. Since the start of this picture he had grown thinner and looked more boyish. Dressed as he was in a gray striped suit, a vest, and a wide, gray-silk tie (as if to belie the stereotype of the Director) he looked like a worried haberdasher. He pointed to the script in her lap.
“See that for a moment, could I?” he said in his public-school, Brooklynese accent, superimposed on a thin base of Hollywood.
Charlene looked annoyed. She had a proprietary feeling about the heavy, bound volume, and disliked letting it out of her hands. Gathering her wool, needles, and knitting bag to her chest, she indicated by a shrug of her shoulders that Reuben could have the script.
“Bastard,” she said after he had walked away, searching for something in the script as he went.
“No,” said Dolores who liked Reuben’s gentleness. “He’s not. He worries about all the delays. They can never tell up above whose fault they are. I think he often takes the blame for Franny.”
At two, everyone was back, slumped in chairs or leaning against the back of the set, the actors standing in attitudes that displayed their good features, their better profile. An air of universal impatience hung over the set.
Reuben Rubin had retreated into himself. Although the lighting on the set was now dimmed, he still wore his sunglasses, staring through them at the elaborate southern mansion which stood ready for use, like a vacant battlefield waiting for the moment soldiers would arrive to enliven it. He thought about the meaninglessness of everything here, the complex of lights strung up and wheeled into place, the make-up tables laden with restorative potions for faces and hair, the costume racks, the soundmen and cameramen mounted and ready, when nothing was being done, no pretenses being acted out. The set, he thought, is like a track without runners, like an office building before and after hours, like a college dormitory during summer recess. It seems sullen, resentful of its desertion, reproaching its human defectors.
Brock Currier shouted from where he leaned against a cardboard magnolia tree. “Did you ring her again, Rube?” Currier was dressed in a southern colonel’s frilled shirt, immaculate white pants, and white shoes. His full, handsome mouth was tight with annoyance. He had been in this stiff outfit since eight in the morning. Now he felt deeply, personally offended, like a bridegroom who has been stood up.
“The boys did. Arnold Franklin said she’d be right here after lunch.”
“It’s right after lunch now. What lunch does the Great Poet refer to? I had mine an hour ago.”
“Oh, come on, Brock. She’ll be here.…”
“Look, Roo-bin boy, I’m damned sick of this, and you, and her. My contract doesn’t call for …”
Reuben turned and walked to the other side of the colonnade, wanting to hear no more of Brock’s self-righteousness. He disliked the actor, so ordinarily he was careful to treat him with consideration. But today his patience was worn thin. Between him and Brock Currier the weight of unspoken truths hung heavy. Brock’s usual manner of drawing out Reuben’s name was a subtle nudge at his Jewishness. It always succeeded in activating Reuben’s memory: When first he had met Brock Currier as a boy in Chicago Brock’s name had been Aaron Feldstein.
Another hour went by. Reuben came out of the tall box that served as his office and told his assistant to let everyone go home. He skirte
d the façade of the mansion and knocked on the door of an upright, coffin-shaped dressing room in which Dolores was redoing her make-up for the third time that day.
“Charlene there?”
“No. I think she went to lie down in the little girl’s room.” Charlene suffered from her “period,” especially in the afternoon after a large lunch, and was often to be found resting in the ladies’ lounge.
“Oh. Well. Tell her I’ve left her script on your step.”
“Do you need me?”
“No. You might as well cut out. We can’t do anything more today.”
Dolores opened her door, holding her wraparound makeup coat to her chest. In half make-up she looked pale. The normal lines in her face had been erased by pancake covering and nothing had as yet been restored. She smiled at Reuben.
“No word from FF?”
“No word. No appearance. Nothing. You look like Ben Blue in that stuff.”
“Pretty ghastly, eh?” Dolores said, agreeably. “Not much better underneath, either.”
“Your call is for seven thirty tomorrow morning.”
“Okay. Will she be here, do you think?”
“Better be. Brock’s about to call his agent. Maybe even his congressman. A few more of these delays and Fleischer will drop her even if she is the Name in this epic.”
The set was almost dark. Brock slammed the door of his dressing room and came down the two little steps, his crisp hair still wet from the dousing he had just given his head. Without make-up he was swarthy, masculine, and angry-looking. His fans mistook this look for passion and adored him for it. He himself mistook it for acting talent and overrated his abilities. On his way to beatification as one of Hollywood’s “Greats” almost entirely on the strength of this expression, his hair curled endearingly about his ears, his vulgar, piratical teeth shone out of his dark face, and his one, perpetually elevated eyebrow suggested a subtle sexual invitation.
To him Franny Fuller was nothing special, just another dumb, blond female with a famous name, big boobs, a fat ass, and something loose in her belfry. Once, working close to her, he caught a warning look, a quick facial sign, of retreat into herself. Her lids had fallen as if loosened like a venetian blind, and her mouth opened, ripe and desperate for air. He thought he recognized that look as a cry for rescue, a signal of impending disaster.
The Missing Person Page 15