“Your Emil directed your movie. The one that picture’s from.”
“It was a publicity shot. But yes.”
Her coffee was almost gone, and Miriam wasn’t offering any more. That didn’t seem promising. She kept her cup in her hand, to signal she was still drinking from it and shouldn’t be thrown out just yet. “What happened to him?”
“He died in a car accident. About a year after the picture was finished.” Then, as if to fend off a follow-up, “He was driving drunk. People did that in the twenties, too.”
“I’m sorry.” For the first time, she considered that Miriam might feel about Hollywood as she did about Yazoo City.
“It was a long time ago.” Back to the “sorry-to-disappoint-you” voice. “Don’t worry, I don’t go all weepy every time I hear his name.”
“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I’ve been trying to see some silents lately. I’ve never known anybody who made one. I wanted to hear what it was like.”
“Moviemaking’s dull. That’s why the stories you hear are all about what goes on off set. It’s Christmas night. I would think if you weren’t with your family, you’d be off with that young man I met.”
She set the cup down; if Miriam wanted her to leave now, at least she could go back upstairs and cry. “We broke up.”
Miriam reached over and patted her shoulder. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be tactless, truly. So that’s why you’re asking about Emil. You want to hear that life goes on. That sort of thing.”
She hadn’t expected the pat, but she didn’t want the pity. “If I want to hear that time mends broken hearts or whatever, I can talk to my roommates. They’ve been telling me that for two weeks.”
“That’s good of them. But they’re wrong.” Miriam gave no indication she thought this was bad news. “You sweep the pieces into a corner. And after a while they stay put.” She set down her cup and poured in a little more brandy. “You really do want to hear about it, don’t you. You want to hear about this old movie nobody’s ever seen. You even brought me a bribe.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be a bribe, exactly.”
“No, that’s bad of me, it was very kind. This was your own scarf, wasn’t it.” She tried to think of a plausible denial but Miriam didn’t pause. “And if I don’t tell you the whole story, you’ll be back at Key Food, wanting to carry my groceries up four flights again until you wear me down. You’ll be at my door on Lincoln’s Birthday, ready to give me a stove-pipe hat.” She poured some more coffee into Ceinwen’s cup. “I guess I’d better go ahead and indulge you before you go to any more trouble.” She added some brandy. “I’d tell you it’s a long story, but I get the feeling that’s what you want.”
She picked up her coffee so fast she sloshed a bit into the saucer, and said, “All the best stories are long.”
Miriam smiled. “You’re a romantic.” She looked past Ceinwen, at the picture on the table. “You tell me something first. Were you always pretty?”
Ceinwen hadn’t felt pretty for more than two weeks, and not that often even before, but a good guest doesn’t whine to her hostess. “No. I was skinny as a kid and way too pale and I had glasses and it took a while for the gap in my teeth to close up. Then my eyes got better and so did my looks, I guess. Nobody thought much of me in Mississippi. They like ’em tan and athletic down there.”
“They liked them plump and hearty in Milwaukee when I was growing up,” said Miriam.
It wasn’t Kansas City, but it was close. “I wouldn’t have guessed Milwaukee.”
“Why not? It was quite a sophisticated town in those days, at least for the Midwest. They tell me it isn’t as nice now.”
“Nobody liked your looks in Milwaukee?”
“Oh, I wasn’t the fashion, but people liked the way I looked. I wasn’t one of the ones who start out plain and blossom.”
“Yeah, I guess that was me.”
Miriam tucked her legs up on the sofa. “Me, I was always pretty. I got tired of it early on. Just about the first thing I can remember is people stopping Mother in the street to tell her how pretty I was, and Mother talking and talking to them about my eyes and my bones and my hair. I heard it so much, it got to be like someone noticing I had teeth. Mother had been a beauty herself, but she had me late in life, after they’d just about given up on having any children at all. By the time I reached my teens, her looks were mostly gone and she’d gotten stout.”
“My grandmother used to say that when people can’t stand their own looks anymore, they gussy up the kids.”
Miriam nodded. “It’s natural. But Mother took it further. She kept entering my photo in contests, wanted me to do amateur theatricals and plays. Father wouldn’t have any of it.”
“Didn’t approve of actresses?”
“No, he did not. And his word was law. But the year I turned fourteen there was diphtheria going around. Mother didn’t catch it, she never caught anything, but Father caught it, and he died. And I got it too, and I was terribly sick. My hair fell out. I remember Mother standing over me and at first I thought she was feeling my forehead for fever, but she was running her hand over my scalp, trying to see how much hair was left. It did grow back, but it took almost a year. My hair had been pin-straight before, but it grew in with a wave, and when it started getting thick again she’d brush it and say maybe diphtheria was a stroke of luck. The sickness hadn’t changed my face at all, and curly hair was much more fashionable. Meanwhile I’d been out of school so long I had to repeat the year.
“And of course with Father gone she could enter me in as many fool things as she liked. She kept making me do plays, but I was lucky to get the ingenue and sometimes I didn’t even get that. Then I won a beauty contest in Milwaukee. I’d placed second or third in a few before, but this was a big one, city-wide. Mother figured it would give us some kind of entree in Hollywood.”
“You didn’t want to go?”
“Heavens no, but there was no question of trying to talk her out of it. I refused one beauty contest and she took to her bed. I was ungrateful, I didn’t love her, I was trying to kill her. She carried on for a week until I finally gave in. After that I tried sabotage. They’d tell me to smile and I’d bare my teeth. I’d slouch when I was supposed to be graceful. I’d fake stage fright. I don’t know where I went wrong with that last contest, but somehow I did win. And there we were in Hollywood, with probably a thousand other girls from a thousand other contests. Didn’t matter to Mother. As soon as we got off the train she started gushing on about the sunshine and the oranges and the ocean. I had to wear a hat to ward off freckles, citrus still gives me an acid stomach and neither one of us could swim. I don’t even like stucco. But she sold our fur coats the first week we arrived, and I knew what that meant. We had to stick around until she came to her senses.
“Every little bit part I got made her think I was ripe for discovery. She took me to every casting call. I even met with Chaplin.”
Now that was impressive. “How did it go?”
“Badly. Like everyone else we’d heard he liked girls innocent and young. I was eighteen, and that was actually a bit old for him, but Mother thought I was a sure thing. Then when he came in I crossed my legs at the knee, pulled my hem up a bit and asked him for a cigarette. Mother tried to tell him I didn’t smoke and this was my idea of being comical, but he couldn’t get me out of that office fast enough. I think that was the closest she ever came to slapping me.”
She couldn’t believe it. “Why? Why did you blow it like that? It was Chaplin.”
“Because I knew how it would go. At best I’d get another bit, like all the other bits I got now and again. Simpering on the sidelines, handing the star her powder puff. Only if it was Chaplin it would be worse, because Mother would be more sure than ever that I was going to be a big noise. I knew it wasn’t going to happen. And I was getting letters from my friends in Milwaukee, and they were going to parties and getting engaged, and some girls were even going to college. And Mother and I were living in fur
nished rooms, and every day we weren’t on set waiting for my few pitiful shots we were in offices, standing in line with girls my age, a lot of them with parents just like mine.”
“Stage mothers.”
“They’re a cliché, I know, but Mother was as typical as they come.” She paused and smoothed a lap crease, then continued, a little more gently. “That isn’t fair. Believe it or not she was better than most. And what people don’t mention is that the girls were just as bad. They wanted to be stars, too, and they hated any competition. It wasn’t as though we offered one another any comfort. I tried to befriend a few and gave up.
“So it had been about a year and Mother got wind of a new project over at Civitas. It was a small studio but the head, Frank Gregory, was trying to make it bigger. And he’d brought over a director from Ufa to make a costume picture. It was going to give them some prestige, some clout with the big boys. Nobody here had seen this fellow’s movies, he’d only made two as director, but whatever Gregory’s people saw in Germany they liked.”
“Did you like them?”
“I never saw them. After the war I thought I might get a chance, but they’d been stored in Berlin.”
Ceinwen thought of the aerial shot of Berlin in A Foreign Affair, not a building intact, and didn’t have to ask more.
“When Mother heard Emil Arnheim was casting she sent him my pictures and the next thing I know she’s shoving a book at me, which she’d certainly never done before, and demanding that I read it because I have an interview with the director who was going to film it. An old Gothic romance called The Mysteries of Udolpho, which even then hardly anybody had read. And everyone thought the choice was crazy, because it’s a perfectly terrible book.”
“I read that one. I liked it.”
“I can’t imagine why. Most people know it only because Jane Austen made fun of it.”
“Northanger Abbey. That’s why I read it. But I still liked it. I thought,” said Ceinwen, trying to phrase things with finesse, “it had a lot of atmosphere.”
“What sort of atmosphere?”
“It was sexy,” admitted Ceinwen. “To me at least.”
She’d never seen this before—Miriam was delighted. “That’s what Emil thought. Sublimated sex, the whole thing. He thought he could bring that out in the movie, and he wouldn’t have to bother with the prose, which didn’t exactly sing on the page. I didn’t know that, of course. I just knew Mother wanted me to read it. Which I did, although I skipped big sections and snuck my own books between the covers when she wasn’t looking. And then when I went to meet Emil, I wasn’t supposed to tell him I had read the book, because that would look overeager, but I should be as much like Emily St. Aubert as possible. I had to remember to be sweet and high-toned and I’d better not embarrass us by talking about Milwaukee or modern authors. If he asked me if I had read the book, I was to say no, and bring up Ouida and Baroness Orczy. Then he’d think I was too romantic to be ambitious.”
“That’s kind of clever.”
“She was diabolical. But I’d had it. I had a notion that if this one fell through, I could persuade her to give things up. We’d run through most of the money Father left us and were living on what little I earned and some sewing Mother did on the side. I could sew too, but she wouldn’t let me do it for more than an hour or so at a time, because it would make me squint and I’d get lines around my eyes. I’d just turned nineteen without a single friend to share a slice of cake with me, and I told myself that would be the last birthday I’d have in Hollywood.
“We went to Civitas and waited outside his office and right away I thought things were different. There was only one other girl ahead of me, a different type altogether, very blonde, like Emily in the novel. The secretary told her to go in and she stayed a bit longer than I expected, and Mother didn’t like that at all. Then it was my turn.
“And we walked in and it was just him, no assistants. He was rather handsome and a bit younger than I’d expected. And he takes my hand and he shakes it—I was used to having it kissed by the Europeans, which I always hated. He kept calling me Fraulein, which I thought was dreadfully affected. His English was excellent and anyway, how hard is the word ‘Miss’? And he didn’t want to know about what I had done before, instead he asked me questions about myself. At first I answered yes and no and right around the time I thought Mother was going to kick me he switched to questions that required real answers. Impertinent things, I thought, like what was my favorite fabric for a dress.
“We hadn’t been there very long when he sat on the edge of the desk and said, ‘You don’t want to be here, do you, Fraulein Clare?’ And I snapped, ‘No.’ That was when Mother really did kick me. But I didn’t care, I was sick of it all. He said, ‘Where would you rather be?’ I said, ‘I wish I were at home reading a book.’ He asked, what would I be reading, then? And Mother jumped in and said I’d been reading The Scarlet Pimpernel all week. He gave her a look and said, ‘Why, that’s exactly the sort of the thing a romantic heroine should be reading.’ And she said yes, that was the sort of thing I read all the time, she couldn’t stop me. I was the most romantic girl in the world, all day long I dreamed of finding a soulmate.
“And he asked if he might speak to me alone. She didn’t like that. Mind you, I don’t think she was worried about my virtue at all. She was worried I was going to tell him I hated the movies and I hated Mrs. Radcliffe and I hated him and that would be that, I’d never be the next Lillian Gish. She said surely he understood that a mother had to think about even the appearance of impropriety. And he said he understood of course, but still, ‘Frau Clare, I can’t tell whether your daughter is suitable if I can’t see how she is without her mama around.’ He was putting it to her plainly; she left us alone, or else.
“She was stuck, and she left. He shut the door behind her and went back to sit on the desk. The only other time I was left alone with a director he’d asked to see my legs, and I’m sure I wasn’t looking very friendly. He said, ‘All right Miriam’—not Fraulein, not Miss Clare, Miriam—‘what are you really reading?’
“I said, ‘I’m reading Manhattan Transfer.’
“He let out this huge laugh, and then I started laughing too, because all I could think of was Mother hearing him through the door and how she must be planning to kill me for clowning around with a director who was casting a serious part.
“He asked me if I’d read the novel, and since he hadn’t fallen for any of our other lines I told him yes, as much as I could stand. He said they were changing the setting to the Napoleonic era, because he liked the look of the costumes better than the sixteenth century. And they were changing the heroine’s name to Madeleine, because the publicity people said they didn’t want to spend all their time explaining the difference between Emil and Emily. And we both started laughing all over again.
“He asked me if I thought I could play Madeleine, and I told him no, I could barely walk across a set. Then he said he’d called us only because I was the most beautiful girl in any of the photos. He never once considered me for Madeleine, he figured he could use me in one of the ball scenes. I said, ‘Please don’t do that. It will only encourage Mother and I’ll have to spend another year here at least.’ And he laughed some more and said he’d give me a screen test. And if I was truly as awful as all that, he’d tell Mother I was never going to get anywhere, and she should take me back to Milwaukee and let me read modern novels and get married.
“He tells Mother that he’s going to give me a screen test day after tomorrow. She spent the next day trying to get me to move like an aristocrat and act more Napoleonic instead of sixteenth century, and I did everything she asked, thinking this would be the last of it.
“We got to the studio and they put me in makeup and this costume that had obviously been made for a woman with a much bigger bosom. They forgot to pad me out and it was hanging off me, and I didn’t say anything because what did I care, it wasn’t a real test anyway. When I walked out, Emil did kis
s my hand, which thrilled Mother, and for once I didn’t mind because he winked at me as soon as her back was turned. And he told her, very politely, that it was best she wait off set. And she left. It was glorious.
“Now you know in those days with no sound, the director could talk to you the whole time. As soon as the cameras started turning, he started telling me what to do. It was a scene between Count Morano and Madeleine, and I was supposed to be recoiling from his advances. The actor playing the Count didn’t much appeal to me and I thought that would help, but then I started and Emil ordered the camera off after just a minute or two, and I knew I’d been as terrible as ever.
“And he took me aside and told me that if I didn’t at least try, Mother would be able to tell and who knew how’d she react. He said he knew I must have had men trying to flirt with me in the casting offices, and I probably hadn’t liked it. He was so kind that I told him about the other director who’d made me lift my skirt, and getting poked and sometimes pinched and having to stand up and turn around so they could comment on my legs or my chest, and how awful it always made me feel. He said fine, think about that. We started over and I realized this wasn’t bad. He was going to get me out of there, and I did everything he asked. It took longer than I expected, maybe six or seven takes, and I wondered about that. When the test was over he told me to go out and have a good time. I told him I wouldn’t be going anywhere, I’d be going home with Mother, like always. He said I wouldn’t have to do that much longer.
“We didn’t hear anything for a couple of days, and then a couple more days, and Mother was beside herself. Then a week had gone by and we were at home, I don’t remember doing what, and the phone rang in the hallway and Mother went to answer it. And she starts shrieking. ‘Miriam, Miriam! You’re Madeleine!’ It was absolutely the last thing I had expected. It was a catastrophe. I wasn’t blonde, I wasn’t sweet, or blushing, or aristocratic, and I couldn’t act. Everyone was going to find out I couldn’t act. She told me, ‘Miriam, he wants to talk to you.’
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