by Daniel Kraus
VII.
BRIDEY HADN’T HYPERBOLIZED HER MARTYRDOM at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cross. She succumbed to a fifth MGM seasonal and acquiesced to every lucrative loan-out to Paramount, Warner Brothers, and RKO. What few calendar boxes remained were crossed out by live dramas at Lux Radio Theatre or advertisement shoots arranged by the image department, most of which married a shot of my regal Bridey with blather she’d rather die than utter aloud:
“This Face Powder Allows Me to Be Nonchalant About My Complexion.”
“Nine Out of Ten Women Have Hosiery Problems—But I’ll Tell You My Secret.”
“For Now I’m Only a Bridey, But I Still Dream of Rose Blossom Engagement Rings!”
For the sake of In Our Image she accepted these indignities and more. She was absent day, night, and weekend, leaving me oodles of time to wander the mansion’s dueling grand staircases, red-wallpapered sitting rooms, bead-curtained verandas, and even dull pantries, dodging servants and, because it was my disposition, contemplating the occasional theft.
In fact, I was pondering the pilferage of a sinister stone carving of Paleolithic origin when I became aware of footfalls advancing upon the drawing room with greater speed than any servant. So convinced was I that a sneak thief was in my midst that I lifted the priceless carving like a bludgeon.
That it was a twelve-year-old girl flustered me. My unnatural silence had scrambled the child’s radar and she pulled to a halt. I remind you that it was 1936 and the little lasses of America had been brainwashed by the bouncing ringlets, polka-dot baby-doll dresses, and red Mary Janes of child star Shirley Temple. Even mothers battered by the Depression sewed their daughters copycat costumes. This girl, however, wore an expressionless gray tunic. Her long black hair flaunted not one festive ribbon and was instead held at bay by a nondescript band.
Verily, she was a wholly unremarkable thing save the banker’s stack of money she was stuffing into her wee purse. She was caught in the act, eyeing my makeshift weapon, young muscles flexed to flee. I lowered the stone figure and she exhaled. From the other end of the palmette-patterned Mahal rug, she fired a penetrating squint.
“You’re Z.”
Usage of the private nickname was all the evidence I required.
“And you,” said I, “must be Gopher.”
“Nnn.” A hard hum of irritation. “Margeaux.”
I postulated that the pubescent’s impertinence stemmed from the tragedy of having inherited none of her mother’s beauty. Indeed, what traces existed of Bridey—the ember eyes, the natural frown—emphasized the regrettable averageness bequeathed by the uncredited father. The girl was thirty pounds too heavy and bore the weight on a slack, dangling posture. Crooked glasses pinched her nose, and teeth, indeed gophery, shone with the first set of steel orthodontia I’d ever seen.
I attempted a host’s smile.
“Your mother forgot to mention your visit.”
Her voice was thick from the mouthful of metal.
“My mother doesn’t forget anything.”
“She wished to surprise me, then?”
“Wow,” said she. “You don’t know anything, do you?”
She traversed the rug with slow, scuffling steps, making no attempt to hide the cash-crammed purse, and placed her crossed arms across the top of a rosewood armchair.
“You’re just like Mother said. You’re all pale and sad-looking.”
“Sad? No, small child, you are confused.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being sad. Sadness builds character.”
“I don’t believe in it,” sniffed I. “Never understood the point.”
Margeaux shrugged.
“That’s what they tell me, anyway.”
“Are all modern instructors so cheeky?”
“Therapists. Mother has me seeing a million. They ought to just lobotomize me and get it over with.”
“I fail to see how one could be sad with so much money in her purse.”
In acknowledgment of the touché, she raised one eyebrow. Just like Bridey.
“You’re meaner than Mother’s other men,” said she.
“I am not mean. I simply do not care for children.”
“That’s a laugh. You’re barely older than me.”
“I am older than I look.”
“Then why don’t you like children?”
The query was fair, but the answer private. My extended death had introduced me to three: Little Johnny Grandpa, Gladys Leather, and Harold Quincy, juveniles with nothing in common except for having left my acquaintance desolated or dead. It was time, thought I, to frighten away this ankle-nipping imp before she began down a comparable road.
“I do not like children because they do childish things like steal money. Now, shall I bother your mother at the studio with a telephone call? I’m sure that director, producers, actors, and equipment operators alike will welcome such a worthwhile interruption.”
Margeaux gestured her chin at the stone Austrian I was throttling.
“You weren’t planning on stealing that, I hope.”
“You know, I’ve had a change of mind. Let me make some calls about that lobotomy.”
The girl did not know how to smile (with that orthodontia, who would want to?), but she dropped her shoulders to convey disarmament. The movement pulled at the sleeves of her tunic and I saw dozens of lines drawn across her pudgy forearms in seashell patterns. They were scars—deliberate and artful and the most beautiful thing about her, which was, I realized, a truth of considerable melancholy.
I clacked my teeth in vexation. I did not enjoy feeling sympathy for this funked Ophelia, even though I knew by instinct that she understood me; both she and I had won attention because of our contiguity to death. It was an obnoxious reminder of my intrinsic uselessness and I lashed out.
“Well, girl, are you returning the money or not?”
Her voice was gentler.
“I don’t mind that you’re mean.”
“You have yet to see mean, I promise you.”
“Mean is real, at least. Mother’s other men had all these big phony smiles and big phony faces. Sure, they were nice. But what’s the point of being nice if you’re just going to look in a mirror all day? My therapists tell Mother I’m depressed because I’m not pretty, but that’s stupid. I’m depressed because nobody cares about anything. Do you know about the Dust Bowl? Farmers are losing everything they have and you think people out here care? They don’t even know what farmers do.”
“Your mother is not like that.”
“She is. She thinks she’s different but she’s not. You watch. I’d rather be dead than be like that. Really, truly. I’d rather be dead and buried.”
My eyes shifted again to her armful of scars. This time she noticed and her eyes, Valentine all the way, flared. Rapidly I contemplated adultlike consolations one might speak and—Hail Mary, full of grace, all that drivel—I spoke them.
“Bridey cares about you very much. If things were different, if she could claim you without scandal, I have no doubt that you would be living right here with us.”
“Is that what she said?”
“Yes.” I shrugged. “More or less.”
“Don’t forget she’s an actress. She’s Bridey Valentine and she gets what she wants. We’re just two of the people who give it to her.”
Such dismal wisdom from so pint-sized a sage might have inspired laughter had not the words cut with so sure a hand. Even I had to admit that I was there at Bridey’s pleasure, and that she could dispose of me at first displeasure. The realization rattled me. It was, surmised I, how Margeaux must feel every day.
Perhaps I would steal the Paleolithic figure after all. It was worth money, and it was always wise to plan ahead.
Margeaux patted her purse.
“I don’t suppose you could forget to men
tion I was here.”
“The servants,” said I, “have all seen you.”
“Yes, but them I can pay off. Mother isn’t known for spoiling her staff.”
Her accosting stare broadcasted the hope that I, on the other hand, was unbribable. Had you told me an hour earlier that the respect of a twelve-year-old girl would have me burning with pride, I would have booked you a padded cell. Now I was reluctant to see Margeaux go and so delayed her with a question.
“Where on Earth did you get that money?”
But Margeaux had determined that our conversation was kaput and was already stomping toward the veranda exit. She did do me the favor of pausing at the doorway. Her graceless stoop was unchanged; there was something brave about that.
“The walk-in shoe closet. Top shelf. Second-to-the-last hatbox on the left.” She shook her head. “Honestly, Z. You need to work on your snooping.”
VIII.
PITY THE SWINDLER WHO TRIED to put one over on Bridey. Within minutes of homecoming, she sensed Margeaux’s storming of the compound. Bridey was not cross; rather, her brisk manner evinced an embarrassment over the lengths her daughter had gone to avoid her. Nothing more was said of Margeaux until a month later, when I overheard Bridey’s end of one of their calls. Before then I’d had no interest in eavesdropping, but now I toed up to a wall well-positioned for espionage and peeked around it.
Scandal rags would have paid good money for a photograph of the invincible Bridey Valentine in a state of such defeat. Her upper body was slumped across a telephone table, hair uncombed, face unpainted, and bundled in a salmon-pink robe.
“I suppose I did start smoking at your age but that’s beside the poi—. Why, that’s a horrid thing to say. Of course you will live long enough to care. You’re doing so much better, that’s what everyone tells—. You’re a bright girl with a wonderful future. I don’t see why you can’t be happy.”
She twisted the telephone cord around her purpling finger.
“If only you would engage with people, participate. You used to twirl your baton, what happened to that? Oh, yes. Well, we can’t all be coordinated. What about that play you did in fourth grade? You had so much fun. Well, no, I didn’t, and I’ve apologized for that, but what would have happened had I come? There would have been questions, it would’ve become a three-ring—. Baby, I’m not being conceited, I’m—”
Vertebrae pressed through her robe.
“I don’t expect you to be interested in acting. That was silly of me. I just want—Gopher, I want whatever you want. I want you to be happy—healthy and happy. Just don’t smoke too much, will you promise? And do what your therapists tell you. And eat right—baby, I’m not saying a word about your weight, but you must read that booklet I sent about moderation. And sleep—are you getting enough sleep? Do you need another prescription?”
Her head of messy hair perked up.
“Why, yes, Z’s here. Is there something you’d like me to ask him? Or if you’d enjoy speaking with him personally, I’d be happy to—”
Ten thousand fan letters a week, Americans spraining their wrists to describe the depths of their devotion, and a few muttered words from an unsociable child had rubbled her confidence. I began to look for a hiding place until I heard Margeaux’s mortification blaring from the receiver.
“Gopher, Gopher—all right, I won’t put him on—I didn’t mean to—I’m just trying to—”
Margeaux severed the connection, and it took thumb-screw levels of endurance to ride out the ten minutes that groveled by before Bridey placed the handset into its cradle. When next I dared look, I found her mourning her reflection in the wrought-iron mirror over the table. I knew what she saw. It was early; she was undressed and without cosmetics; she was not armed to hide from herself the truth.
Bridey was thirty-eight in a town that preferred its ingenues still dewed from their buds of womanhood—in other words, my age. She was furthermore estranged from the daughter whose youth might pull against the ever-nibbling shark of time. Bridey led a life rich of food, rough of tobacco, harsh of alcohol, and late of nights, everything against which she warned Margeaux, and even a face and body like hers could not triumph ad infinitum.
Insecurity, as if bid by this bugle, came marching with the September 1936 death of Irving Thalberg. To you the name likely means nothing, but to Tinseltown noblesse, he was “the Boy Wonder,” the humble son of German Jews appointed manager of Universal Studios at age twenty and the driving force behind the MGM dynasty. In hindsight, his sudden death at age thirty-seven was the first spot of tarnish upon a golden era.
Not since Rudolph Valentino’s passing had Hollywood so grieved. On the day of the funeral, five minutes of silence were held at every studio in town, and newspapers squared their every inch with mawkish eulogies from the crème de la crème. I cared not one stale fig about a dead executive, but Thalberg had been the orchestrator of Bridey’s twenty-five-film plan—upon which rested the eventual fate of In Our Image. I offered her encouragements: everything would work out, she was bigger than any one producer, that sort of tripe. She was too smart to believe it.
Bridey recounted the funeral through a veil she refused to remove. The street outside of Wilshire Boulevard Temple had been blocked to accommodate thousands of spectators angling to see the parade of sorrowing stars. Everyone was there and even the squirreliest starlet had been forced to wear inexpressive black. The result was a rare leveling of the field. While the rabbi droned, actresses twisted their necks to gauge the competition. There was no hiding who looked great or merely good, who was laudably young and who was criminally old.
Bridey was sobbing by the time she left—I saw the published photos. She was captioned as bereaving a fallen friend, but that was a stretch. Old age, that rat fink, had crept up on her and stabbed her in the exquisite back. It was fitting, I suppose, that the ambush had happened at a funeral.
She’d slipped the valet an extra twenty to fetch her car first, but it did not arrive before she became entangled in a grapevine that, even at this driest of affairs, bore bruise-colored fruit. Thalberg, the gossipers gossiped, had been sure-footed in his career, but boy, he’d sure made a misstep when passing on the film rights to a book called Gone With the Wind.
I’d never heard of it; I assumed it to be the tale of an interesting tornado. I came to find that the book was not meteorological in nature but instead a Civil War tear-jerker. The property had gone to David O. Selznick over at Selznick International, and with Clark Gable anointed as the male lead, Selznick was ramping up a global search for The Girl, or rather, The Girl to End All Girls, if you believed the chatter outside the Wilshire Boulevard Temple.
Bridey, for one, believed it. Every female in town (and likely a few males) wanted the role of Scarlett O’Hara, and as “Scarlett Fever” engulfed Hollywood, Bridey began hauling around the refrigerator-sized novel, breaking the spine like she was killing it, dog-earing pages until they snapped, and cramming the margins with minuscule manifestos regarding motivation. While Bridey was on set I gave the book a whirl but put it down around page eighty-million, even though I was rather fond of Miss O’Hara. She was pompous, duplicitous, underhanded, and randy. What wasn’t to like?
By those same yardsticks, it was the role for which Bridey had been born. There was but one niggling issue. By my calculation, Scarlett O’Hara began the story in her teens and was not a day over thirty by the drop of the final curtain. Believe me, Reader, I did not relish summoning the thunder of a Bridey scorned, but neither could I stomach months of preparation put toward an impossible end.
One explosive afternoon the topic forced itself.
Bridey strangled the most recent issue of Photoplay.
“It says right here they’ve got Norma Shearer doing lighting tests, and she’s only a couple of years younger than me! I guess they haven’t noticed that Norma hasn’t any tits, absolutely none to speak of. The
falsies alone will send them overbudget!”
She punted the magazine across the room.
“And Tallulah Bankhead? Why, she’s just a watered-down me! And Katharine Hepburn, that grandpa in a dress? It makes my skin crawl! And Bette Davis? Bette fucking Davis?”
She looked about, probably for a gun with which to shoot the Photoplay dead.
“Calm thyself,” urged I. “There are other roles.”
“Not like this one. This one makes me, and it makes my script a reality. I’m not going to sit here and let them hand it to some witless chippy!”
One could not help but recall how Bridey herself had made her name by out-and-out robbing An Orchid Unknown from Old Lady Talmadge, but that footnote I kept to myself. Gingerly I proceeded.
“Regardless of outcome, you know that those hussies cannot hold a candle—”
“Oh, don’t patronize me. I don’t keep you here to kiss my ass.”
“That does not sound half bad.” I winked. “Let us give it a try.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Anything to avoid actual sex. I suppose you’d prefer No-Tits Norma or Grandpa Hepburn.”
“Everything I say upsets you. Henceforth, let us speak only in milquetoast generalities.”
I bent down to pick up the magazine. She booted it out of reach.
“Of course your beloved Wilma Sue never gets older, does she? She’s safe from the ravages of age, perfectly, pristinely dead.”
Bridey’s black eyes blistered. Honed on dozens of sets in dozens of scenarios versus dozens of redoubtable actors, the glower was strong enough to nail me to the wall. Nothing injured me more than base slanderings of Wilma Sue, and Bridey, in her foulest moods, always remembered.
“She wasn’t a goddess,” said she. “She wasn’t perfect. You’ve built a pedestal to this girl like she’s the epitome of virtue, when she was every bit as faulted and as foul as me. It’s a child’s viewpoint, Z. You can be such a child.”
She turned on her black suede heel and cruised from the room. I listened to her clack across a mile or two of flooring before hearing the smart click of the lifted telephone receiver. A savvy hunter, I removed my shoes before pursuing my game on socked feet. The duty I’d taken on, I tried to remind myself, included administering cool water to my overheated female firebrand.