The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  “Overland three-seven hundred,” she barked at the operator. “Yes, hello, this is Miss Valentine. I require you, at once, to connect me with—yes, that’s right. Darling, I could not care less if he’s busy; interrupt him. Who? I don’t care if he’s got FDR in there. All right, listen up, girlie. You tell him Miss Bridey Valentine is on the line and she’s beginning to feel, let’s say, a nervous breakdown coming on, or perhaps a sunstroke—you know, one of those actressy ailments that can shut down a picture for weeks. Why, yes, dear, of course I’ll hold.”

  When I retired that night, I did so alone, aside from the annotated Gone With the Wind I intended to render into confetti. I did not, though, for as upset as I was, I had to hand it to Bridey—her caveman club still worked. Ten minutes of telephonic tirades had won her an appointment with Selznick for the very next day. I dwelled upon Church, unresponsive to my every cash mailing but no doubt repairing himself toward health. When had everyone begun turning to me, of all people, to maintain mature behavior? Above all, I had to keep the money flowing.

  I placed the novel outside Bridey’s boudoir, all 1,037 pages intact.

  It was a bad sign that she was not carrying the book when she returned the following night. She had frizzed hair and pink skin, evidence that she’d scrubbed away the garish rouge of a twenty-year-old Georgian debutante. We eyed each other, silent as duelists, until she made her way to the library, busied herself at the wet bar, and tossed down her throat a shot of bourbon. She closed her eyes as the antivenom coated her innards. The bear rug, ever mirthful, waited to chuckle at human follies.

  “He offered me a part,” said Bridey.

  I dropped my corpse onto the loveseat.

  “Right there? At the meeting? Why . . . that’s remarkable! The magazine said one thousand actresses have read for the part—one thousand! When will it be public? We should take out a full page in The Hollywood Reporter, thanking everyone for their belief and trust—”

  I, blinkered old nag, quit my nickering upon noticing another three fingers of booze being swallowed, glug-a-glug-glug. Bridey wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and gasped at the corollary gut-fire. She steadied herself against the bar.

  “The part of Belle,” said Bridey.

  This character I did not recall.

  “Belle . . . ?”

  “Belle Watling.” Glug-a-glug-glug. “The powdered old whore.”

  Selznick, hoped I, had removed the breakables from his office prior to Bridey’s combustion. Further details dribbled out as she anesthetized herself: how the role was contingent upon a screen test, a process to which she hadn’t been subjected since naifhood; how the moguls didn’t use to wedge her into pictures, they built pictures around her; how Selznick had interrupted her impassioned pitch so that he could administer an injection of amphetamines to keep himself “glued”; how the whole thing had been an excuse to put Bridey in her place in a post-Thalberg landscape.

  I patted her hand, brushed her hair. I assuaged, I consoled. The evening tilted, lost itself in duration, and sometime during the deadest, drunkest hours, Margeaux’s warnings snaked like an arid Baja breeze about the room’s keystoned arches, corniced ceilings, and dead bear. Mother, she’d said, was a phony like all the rest; Mother, she’d said, cared only for herself and her image. She was a strange one, our little Gopher, but she was not without insight, as I was soon to discover.

  IX.

  BRIDEY INSISTED THAT IT WAS no big deal. Getting a facelift was no worse than getting your teeth done. Who even remembered Joan Crawford’s asymmetrical ivories before she had her jawline straightened? What leading lady hadn’t gagged at Clark Gable’s tooth rot during a love scene before he had the whole set of them replaced?

  My own body brought me regular disgust, and yet I could not stomach her description of the procedure. The crude incisions behind the ears. The stretching of skin as if it were a sheet across a bed. On the day of the surgery I paced the mansion afraid that I might retch the full contents of my stomach—namely, Johnny’s golden aggie, a token of another era when science pretended to perform miracles.

  Bridey was driven home late the following night to avoid being photographed. When she entered clinging to the chauffeur’s arm, I covered my mouth to inhibit a scream. She squinted through the purple custard of two black eyes, her entire face swollen, glossy, and encrusted with blood along the cotton treatments of her ears and jaw. My poor mangled beauty! I took her in my arms, heedless of the staff that watched us, and moaned that we would find a way to reverse the damage, that all was not lost!

  It was needless drama. A deep-peel facial treatment was to blame for the burned flesh but it healed rapidly, as did the bruising and inflammation. Bridey spent half of her recovery in front of a convocation of mirrors and the other half updating MGM on her progress. I hated the surgery the same as I would hate a man who had beaten her, so it was with substantial conflict that I acceded that the procedure had, in fact, rolled back ten years of age.

  Her tightened skin widened her eyes so that she appeared as startled by her beauty as I. Emboldened by this cut-and-stitch, she embarked upon a bonanza of self-improvement, from a month-long diet of vegetable broth to a programmed series of enemas. How she strutted about, hips swinging with spunk enough to knock the skull of a decapitated Viking from its pedestal.

  The role of Scarlett O’Hara had been awarded to actor Laurence Olivier’s wife, an English coquette named Vivien Leigh. But the new Bridey no longer cared. She was nine films into her twenty-five-film contract and rededicated to squeezing the next sixteen for every last award and box office record. She had the face; all she needed was a reason to make people look at it. In other words, she needed a scandal, and no one did scandal better than Bridey.

  This time, the scandal was me.

  To this day I carry upon my bony back a freight of bitterness. I believed, stupidly, that it was affection that compelled Bridey to ask me, at long last, to leave my Beverly Hills confines and visit her upon the set of her new Western, Die, Banditos! That morning I could not knot my tie, and for a blissful few seconds I was an ordinary seventeen-year-old kid, anxious for a date at his first upscale restaurant.

  Never shall I forget the surreality of the stroll to Stage 19. Women in towering headdresses commingled with fellows skirted in Egyptian gold. Workers moved bizarre props—a jade jaguar, a giant plaster head, a science-fiction missile—on wheeled pallets. A cluster of midgets threw dice outside of a stage, while a truck rumbled by with a medieval tower bound for the backlot. I tipped my hat at a lucky fellow tape-measuring the bust of a girl in a flesh-colored leotard. He gave me a quick scan and made, I suppose, a forgivable assumption.

  “The Devil’s Henchmen, right?” He thumbed left. “Two doors down.”

  Outside of Stage 19 lounged a rabble of reporters and photographers chewing toothpicks. As one, they gave me a look before judging me inconsequential. I gave them no mind, so eager was I to get my dead flesh out of the heat. Inside it was cool and dark, so long as I stayed clear of the lights aimed upon a saloon set. The surrounding hullabaloo was like Ed Mann’s newsreel crew times fifty, bustling with harried technicians all the way up to the catwalks. I felt quite small. Movie people, I’d found, had a knack for that.

  Bridey sashayed from the darkness in a plaid frontier dress with fur cuffs, black lace gloves, and a tight black ribbon around her neck. Her baguette of hair bounced about her shoulder as she put my arm across her elbow and steered me back outside. I tried to resist.

  “Might we remain inside? The heat is not good for my—”

  “I’ll simply die without some fresh air.”

  The moment we stepped outside, the lazy shutterbugs spat their toothpicks and became a well-trained firing squad, lifting their cameras in unison and blasting. I blinked at the strobe effect and staggered, but Bridey gripped my suit with one hand while daintily touching her breastbone with the other
.

  “Boys!” scolded she. “I swear a girl cannot enjoy a moment’s privacy.”

  It was flirty fibbery, frisky fakery, and the photogs scarfed it, laughing and pressing closer, firing their pulses of light off her smooth new face. Bridey, the obvious orchestrator of the event, pouted and kittened, then trilled with laughter when they shouted what they were being paid to shout. My heart, that ball of mud, hardened and sank.

  “Who’s the Casanova, Miss Valentine?”

  “Bridey, is this lucky fella pitching you woo?”

  “What’s your name, young man? You in pictures or what?”

  I tried to enliven my daft look. Bridey made up for my hesitation by embracing me, not as she did in real life, with pelvis a-pushing and breasts a-plumping, but in an exaggerated stage hug capped by the hackneyed finale of her cheek pressed flat against my own.

  “His name is Zebulon Finch and I’m simply mad about him! And you can print that: Z, E, B, U, L, O, N.”

  I heard the coffin crack of opened notebooks, the dead grass of rushing pencils.

  “Miss Valentine! How about a smooch with the new beau?”

  Other reporters hoorayed the motion. Bridey dropped her jaw in sarcastic shock before adopting the more familiar suggestive glower. She licked her ruby lips, tilted her face to mine, and drooped backward so that I was forced to sustain her in a romantic dip.

  “Someone call Will Hays.” Her murmur was just loud enough for transcription. “I think we might break the three-second rule.”

  I’d long prided myself on being an accomplished and unrepentant falsifier, yet this public kiss caused me discomfort. It felt as though our unique affection was shoved through a gristmill to create a more palatable product. Ten thousand photographs later (the final third of which guest-starred the Marx Brothers, who dropped by to make hubba-hubba faces), Bridey patted me on the head and sent me home like a good little boy. And like a little boy I sulked for having received less than I’d desired. This might be my coming out—the public cotillion long planned by Dr. Leather—but Bridey had choreographed it so as to benefit only her.

  Our next stop was Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, anchor of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for the premiere of Take My Wives—Please!, Bridey’s long-awaited slapstick slugfest with superstar Greta Garbo. Because the agoraphobic Garbo was her usual no-show, the twenty-thousand fans focused on Bridey, who led me about like a colt. Flashbulbs popped; I smiled, or tried to. What else did one do in Hollywood? Here was the fame I’d originally traveled west to find.

  “Who Is the Mystery Man?” begged the headline of Photoplay.

  I was not, as speculated, an expatriated prince from some sunless empire.

  “What’s Going on in Bridey’s Love Nest?” demanded Screen Romances.

  Not much, aside from one-way erotic servitude.

  “A Boy-Toy for Bridey: Does True Love Know No Age?” inquired Hollywood Low-Down.

  Star-fuckers had short memories. No one recalled my newsreel.

  It was a cool autumn day in 1938 when a team from Life magazine visited the mansion for a six-page photo feature entitled “Relaxing at Home with Bridey Valentine.” She was posed in a series of ludicrous tableaux vivants: beaming in the garden with a badminton racket (she had never played); in the parlor running a feather duster over china (are you kidding me?); and in the bathtub, smoldering from within a coat of bubbles (she believed baths were for babies).

  I, too, was subjected to staged stupidity. The Life squad decked me out in lumberjack flannel and forced me to a kneel atop the accursed bear rug, gripping a log as if I were about to toss it upon the fire. I held the pose for several minutes while the bear, his glass eyes happy with flame, flaunted his tranquil death.

  It was from that locked position, with my last crumbs of pride being lapped up by the bear’s indolent pink tongue, that Bridey gave me a look I shan’t forget. She was pensive, leaning against bookshelves with her pinky nail bit between her front teeth. I’d seen this look before, usually while she searched photos of herself for imperfections she might crush like roaches.

  Despite the fire, flannel, and flashbulbs, I was taken by a chill. This body of mine had long titillated Bridey because of its abnormalities, but her study of me told a developing story. Had not surgery perfected her perfection? Perhaps her lover, already a boon when it came to press coverage, might double his value after benefitting from similar alterations.

  “Mr. Finch?” beckoned the photographer. “America’s housewives prefer you smiling.”

  X.

  HEAR MY CONFESSION: I WORE tights. Gød damn me, I did. Nylon pantyhose had yet to be invented, so these were rayon stockings, but shame made no distinction. Bridey’s late scrutiny had made me fearful of bloat, that inevitable phase of decomposition, and just as anxious about odor. My intent was to snare any scent of rot inside the tights, draw them shut like a garbage bag upon removal, and then air them out in a discreet location before asking Bridey’s people to launder them all to hell.

  California’s incessant sun turned every sidewalk, boardwalk, and open-air bistro into a twenty-thousand-watt floodlight. I tried not to care, but Bridey had been right. I’d looked cadaverous in the Life spread; I’d practically ruined the whole thing. Thus the tights, the support garments, and the Pan-Cake and blush I swiped from Bridey’s vanity and applied with all the artistry of a baboon. In a town full of fruits, I felt the fruitiest, so there was some relief when I was exposed—as it happened, peeling off my tights upon the bed.

  The indignity of it all! I dunked my face into my hands.

  Bridey glided across the room, nightgown flittering, and encircled my stiff, frigid flesh in the lissom warmth of her own. She cooed and petted my hair, and I recoiled. Her painted nails felt like beetles crisscrossing my scalp.

  “There, there. There is no cause for embarrassment.”

  “No cause? I am attired like a courtesan!”

  “You’re self-conscious. It’s only human.”

  “Human,” rued I. “I thought I’d renounced all that.”

  “Hush. This is Beverly Hills. There’s nothing unusual about a man being vigilant about his appearance. Do you think all those cleft chins come from the Chin Fairy? Why, even Valentino had his ears tucked.”

  “I am no actor. Such excuses do not apply.”

  “That’s right, you’re not an actor, and let’s thank our lucky stars for that. What you need, Z, is—well, your needs are unique. But I can help you. I’m glad to help you. I know just the man for the job. Oh, darling, darling! I’m so pleased you felt secure enough in our relationship to come to me with this.”

  Point of fact, I had done nothing of the sort, but Bridey had gone electric. Should I wish to be uncharitable (and I do wish), I’d posit that Bridey had deliberately incited this insecurity so that she might pounce and pamper, thereby luring me up the scalpel-steps of modern glamor. Even cognizant of this, I gestured for her to continue—anything to dig me out from this trench-collapse of pride.

  Bridey’s cosmetic surgeon was named Biff. Let all six syllables permeate you, Reader: Dr. Biff Futterman. You do concur that the name alone was a fifty-foot red flag? Not just any quack could be trusted with my bodily imponderables, so I waffled about scheduling an appointment. Whip-smart, Bridey wrangled us an invite to a dinner party that Dr. Biff was also attending so that I might evaluate him in a looser setting. I acquiesced, despite having a somewhat spotty history with surgeons.

  The party was two hours away in the forests of the San Bernardino Mountains. There nestled the hunting lodge home of the hermetical Maximilian Chernoff, Hollywood’s most esteemed director. An émigré from Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, Chernoff had gotten his start in war pictures—gruff, virile morality plays crammed with sweaty close-ups of agonized men. He’d since meddled with everything from Westerns to musicals, instilling each with a brawny musculature. He’d worke
d with Bridey only once, but it had led to her defining role in All Who Are Wearied and Burdened. If anyone had the brass balls to direct In Our Image, said she, it was Chernoff. Thus the dinner had a second purpose.

  We were thirty, a hodgepodge of movie stars and moguls, financiers and family, all gaily corralled by Chernoff’s wife, Mercy St. Johns, a handsome broad whose age had abbreviated her acting career and who was starved for some of the old Hollywood pizzazz. Everyone received two welcome kisses, one upon each cheek, except for me—the coldness of my first cheek startled her the same as if I’d muttered a sordid proposition.

  Like the rest of the lodge, the dining room was wood on wood and syruped with sconced light that underlit the deer antlers lining the perimeter. The menu was wild game, brought out by servants but cooked by Chernoff himself, who arrived late to the table still clad in a white cooking apron and gesturing for everyone to shut up with their hellos. He could have been the twin of Teddy Roosevelt, some six presidents back: beefy, brusque, and walrused of mustache.

  He indicated one glistening pile of meat and spoke with a Russian accent.

  “Is elk.”

  Then the other.

  “Is pheasant.”

  Without another word he took the head of the table and got down to business with fork, knife, and bare hand, stuffing his cheeks so as to avoid answering questions beyond noncommittal grunts.

  Mercy St. Johns had, at Bridey’s backstage bidding, sat me across from Dr. Biff, where my presence was endured like a fart. Biff was girlish, with feathery blond hair, pursed lips, and buffed nails. He was a grinner and a fawner, tickled to be in high company, and my opinion of him seesawed. That is, until the conversation turned toward the dullest of all topics: politics.