The Magnificent Esme Wells

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The Magnificent Esme Wells Page 9

by Adrienne Sharp


  Today, though, I was the only one in love with him. Buzz’s girls, my mother included, were furious with him, fidgeting, exchanging glances. Normally, Buzz dressed them all like queens, but that day they were costumed as fools, outfitted in puffy black Negro wigs, black makeup thick over their faces. Their arms were painted black, too, their legs made dark with black hosiery, their feet identical in black tap shoes with black bows. The only thing white about them was their lips, which were clown white, drawn big, giant-sized. The girls looked nothing like their usual ultra-glamorous selves and they looked none too happy about the difference, either. Today they were shooting the number I’d watched them rehearse earlier this week, “I’m Just Wild about Harry.” The girls started complaining about the blackface in the dressing rooms, in the makeup chairs, and continued complaining about it as they walked all the way to the set.

  There was always some gimmick with Buzz, though usually it was a pretty one—illuminated violins for the girls to play, ten-foot ribbons to be unscrolled from the floor, enormous feather boas for the girls to wave or cellophane-covered hoops for them to jump through, capes made of linked gold coins that clinked when they shimmied, a row of fifty white pianos with fake keys for the girls to pretend to play. Unfortunately, today the gimmick was humble, humiliating even, as was the choreography. All my mother and the other girls had to do in their spongy wigs and blackface was to stand on the rows of a riser behind the girl actually singing the number and to shake their heads, which had top hats with pom-poms on long wires affixed to them, their every move making those pom-poms quiver. If there was ever a day to make my mother rue her lot, this was that day.

  Also, unfortunately, Buzz was in one of his moods. It was hard to tell if he was hung over or if he’d had too much to drink already. Even before noon, it was already the umpteenth time I heard him call, “Cut!” This, of course, was squawked from the heavens, as Buzz made it a habit to ride the boom or climb above the set to see what the camera would shoot, walk the girders seventy, eighty feet in the air, camera finder in hand. I saw the girls start shaking at the sound of his voice and look up to the rafters to spy Zeus with his thunderbolt. Make that Apollo. Apollo with what? If I’d ever gone to school, I might know to tell you.

  God, or the closest thing MGM had to Him, Louis B. Mayer, had given Buzz this entire picture to direct, his first, a B picture with some song and dance numbers. So Buzz wanted this picture to go well. Needed it to go well. The old-fashioned musical was dying, the big extravaganzas that Buzz had brought from New York to California eight years ago had just begun to fall out of favor, all that gold he’d spun dwindled to floss, and all Broadway’s players had relocated here to Los Angeles, it seemed, holding out their hands to the Hollywood gods, the same palms Florenz Ziegfeld once filled with gold. And Buzz liked it here, they all did, liked this brown fragrant landscape where it was always warm. He wanted to stay.

  “Cut!” I could hear Buzz’s intake of breath from on high. “Do you have any idea at all what you’re supposed to be doing?” He hung his sour face over one of those ten-ton klieg lights, the better to see his unfortunate victim, who happened that day, that moment, to be Judy Garland. Garland’s face, uptipped in response, was a blank black slate. A damp slate. I could see the sweat beaded up on her forehead. She’d been working hard, despite the fact that she was exhausted and overbooked by the studio, as my mother had told me. In my child’s head, I thought, Leave her alone. But, of course, he didn’t.

  His next words were, “Just what the hell do you think you’ve been doing?”

  Garland jutted her chin at him. Defiantly. And said, “Exactly what you showed me.”

  Wrong thing to say.

  Everybody stirred. Even my own stomach felt the spoon.

  Buzz liked humble quiescence. But perhaps because he was so far away, bird on a wire, Garland figured it was safe to say whatever she damn well pleased. She’d only just finished shooting The Wizard of Oz, which hadn’t been released yet, so she was still just the bit actress, the nice girl who lived next door to Andy Hardy whom Buzz felt he could push around.

  “Well, aren’t you a silly little bitch?” Buzz barked, red mouth, red tongue, and even from the distance we could all hear the hiss of that digraph, which was nasty, and patently unfair, because Judy Garland wasn’t any of those things—silly, little, or a bitch. But Buzz was too worked up to care about the truth. “You’re fucking up my number and you’re tiring out my girls. And every time we have to do it over because of you, they have to do it over, too.”

  I could pick out my mother now, the bold one rolling her eyes, bold because after all, she had been with Buzz from Day One, rolling those eyes at the girl next to her, who shook her head in response, pom-pom gently bouncing.

  We all knew what was coming. More invective, more takes.

  Buzz didn’t like Judy Garland, but Mr. Mayer had forced him to cast her. Because of her rolled shoulders, Buzz called her behind her back, as Louis B. Mayer did, “the little hunchback”—and in addition to her posture, he also took exception to the amphetamines the studio fed her, the pills that kept her upright but couldn’t keep her legs from going this way and that. In fact she was so stuffed with pills that she had the hollow look of one of those floating ghost women I saw when my mother was confined at Camarillo.

  “All right, let’s go again,” Buzz said and he whirled his arm like he was turning the key on a mechanical toy. And so they all started it up again, Garland shuffling and shucking front and center, my mother and the rest of them standing on their risers, shifting their weight from one foot to the other, pom-poms boinging on their springs, Buzz yelling at Garland, “Open your eyes. Open your eyes! Wide! Left, left, right, right.”

  And then just as Garland was singing,

  I’m just wild about Harry!

  And Harry’s wild about me!

  she stumbled, left foot caught on the right, and simultaneously, Buzz took a sudden tumble from the catwalk, the two of them finally on the same page in catastrophe, his white body making a swoosh, traveling with ridiculous speed, arms and legs spread-eagled as he dropped from the heights, sleeves and pant legs quivering in the cosmic winds.

  At first, I thought there’d been an earthquake, like the one my mother described that had sent Buzz tumbling from the boom six years ago, during the filming of the Shadow Waltz number from Gold Diggers. The 6.4 tremor had knocked Buzz from his perch and then knocked out the electricity, plunging the soundstage into the blackest black. He’d called out to his screaming girls—some of whom were standing eighty feet high in the air on that winding staircase of his, clutching their now unillumined violins—telling them to sit down right where they were as carefully as they could. One of the grips felt his way over to the soundstage door, which sounded, sliding open, like a metallic earthquake all its own. My mother described her terror that day so well, I felt I was there. And in fact I was, as my mother was pregnant with me.

  But there was no earthquake today. Who knows why Buzz fell this time. Maybe he’d seen that misstep of Garland’s and his temper tipped him over. Maybe Apollo didn’t like him screaming at one of his disciples and leaned down from Olympus to give Buzz a push with one divine finger. Of course, I’d been half worrying this might happen because he was up there in such a state, and I stood up as he fell and ran toward him, screaming, smelly gypsy hair flying, paper robin falling from my hands, having given the gift of flight to Buzz. Everybody was screaming. Even Garland’s jaw opened, the musical notes flying from it turning into frightened birds, melody transmogrified into a squawk.

  Buzz didn’t fall all the way to the ground, of course, because he had tied himself to a rope thrown over an adjacent girder, and the other end of the rope was held by one of the camera grips on the ground, Big Harry, whose job it was to winch Buzz back up to his beam if he should slip, like a circus worker rescuing an aerialist who’d plunged from the high wire. So for better or worse Buzz didn’t fall to his death, as Garland was probably hoping, a l
ittle less wild about this particular Harry. But Buzz did look ridiculous, the way a director never wants to look in front of his cast, stalled there midflight in his leather harness, arms outstretched, legs kicking in some useless spasm. Distressed, I waved my hands at him, strung up like a chicken four feet above me.

  By now, Garland had shut her mouth and pinched her lips together, looking altogether satisfied. Who could blame her?

  And all through the hubbub, Buzz was apologizing, “Gee, I’m sorry, Harry,” with a humility I never saw him employ when he spoke to his dancers, who were always bitches or idiots, and Harry was calling out, “Hang on, Buzz. I’ve got ya.”

  I stood on tiptoe, then jumped, trying to reach him, as if somehow I could be the one to save him.

  “It’s okay, Esme,” Buzz said to me from where he hung, upside down now, face red, my anxiety turning his fury and embarrassment to solicitude. He reached down to me and clasped the hand I held up. Our fingers touched, and he twirled me, then lifted me a little until my feet were an inch from the floor, made a game of it, until Harry finally unhooked him from the harness and Buzz was upright again, keeping one hand on my little shoulder while he called Garland out as a sorry—and then with a quick look down at me—witch, responsible for his fall and a lost day of shooting.

  It was amazing how quickly he made the transition from abject apologist to imperious dictator once his sneakered feet were back on the ground. And Garland just stood there with her rounded shoulders and her glistening blackboard face and all the other girls, about twenty of them, I guess, stood there just as she did, obsequious. Standing there next to him, his hand on my little shoulder, I felt wickedly complicit, as if he were a ventriloquist and I were his puppet and his words were coming out of me.

  Discomfited, I tapped on his arm.

  Buzz stopped mid-word to stare down at me, stunned or apoplectic, I couldn’t tell. His brows were thick as black bristly caterpillars, his face the face of an advisor to a Roman emperor.

  He was looking at me and I had to do something. So I said to him, already regretting it, “You’re being mean.”

  Silence. I looked around. Roman statues, every one. My mother’s face: furious horror.

  Buzz looked away from me then, looked up at the harness still dangling from the rope and for a moment I thought he might buckle me into it and leave me hanging there all night as punishment. But he didn’t. He compressed his lips into a long flat line. Nobody moved. Then he turned to Garland and said, “Sorry, dear,” and to the rest, “Let’s call it a day, girls,” and he strode past my mother toward the big metal door of the soundstage. As he passed her, I heard him say, “Don’t ever bring her to the set again,” and though my mother opened her mouth to answer, he kept walking.

  I’d gone from teacher’s pet to pariah in five seconds.

  “What’s gotten into you, Esme?” she said when she reached me, the wire with her pom-pom swaying like crazy. I stared at her strange black face, not quite sure all of a sudden that she really was my mother. “He’s the director. He’s a man. He can do and say whatever he wants.”

  One of the grips scrambled to open the big soundstage door as soon as it became clear Buzz intended to keep walking, that he’d bust right through the heavy barn door if the men couldn’t slide it open in time. But the door slid aside almost quickly enough, Buzz just skimming the side of it, the mechanism clanking crazily as it revealed the sun and sky I’d almost forgotten about and which made a bit of a sham of everything within. Buzz was a silhouette and then nothing.

  To my surprise, my mother went steaming after him into the sunlight. To apologize? Surely she wasn’t going to ask him about her screen test now, with him in this state, after what I did? But you could never tell with my mother—when she got an idea in her head, it was hard to stop her. Or maybe she was just trying to run away from me. Like everybody else.

  Because usually at the end of a shooting day, the girls made a big fuss over me as we walked together to the General Dressing Rooms. I always looked forward to that. They’d call out, “Comeer, Little Movie Star,” and to my mother, the girls would say, “Dina, what a cute little sister you have.” To which my mother always said, “Don’t I?” giving me a hard warning squeeze, even though I knew very well I wasn’t to say anything to the contrary. On the set, I was my mother’s little sister and my father was her boyfriend, not her husband. I didn’t particularly like pretending to be her sister or the feeling I had that my mother wished that were actually the truth, but I liked the attention being there brought me, liked the sweat and perfume, wigs and costumes, the way all those pretty girls petted and kissed at me, saying, “Won’t be long before you’re one of us, honey.”

  Clearly, I was getting none of that today. Buzz’s girls, like my mother, couldn’t be scurrying away from me any faster. And I wasn’t going to be getting any of that tomorrow or any other day, now that I’d been banned from the set.

  There was only one person who hadn’t abandoned me. Miss Garland, who, as she passed me by, leaned over and kissed the top of my head. It was so quick, I wasn’t sure if it had happened at all or if I had imagined it, but when she turned her black face back to me and winked at me over her shoulder, I knew it had happened for sure. Yes, she winked at me and then she stepped right on top of the paper robin I’d dropped, smashing it. It lay on its side, now, and the highly polished soundstage floor made it look like two robins, kissing. What did I care about that smashed bird now, now that Buzz hated me? I stepped over it to follow her out.

  And there, by the soundstage door, I found my mother talking earnestly to Buzz. Lord, what was she saying?

  I tucked myself against the side of the building, but I couldn’t hear them, so I watched them, and watching them, I noted how my mother had gotten thinner seemingly overnight, her arms and legs whittled away and her full cheeks gone, as if whatever liquid in them had been sucked out with a straw and the flesh had collapsed against her teeth in despair, as if she and my father had drawn some sustenance from one another I hadn’t known about and without it, she had shriveled. Instantly. She looked like one of her silent screen icons, that hollow-cheeked Joan Crawford from Taxi Dancer. Crawford looked gorgeous. But my mother didn’t. She looked desperate. Desperate for some new kind of sustenance.

  No, I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but in this silent movie, this pantomime, my mother, my beautiful mother, was begging Buzz for something, this I could tell. And I didn’t think she was begging on my behalf, but on her own. I think, too, she had forgotten she was standing there before Buzz in blackface, with those wire springs on her head like Martian antennae bending this way and that as she entreated him, and when she reached up her hand to stroke her hair, one of her favorite gestures, her hand found nothing to stroke at but that fat black woolly wig. If you were going to beg, you couldn’t look ridiculous. You had to look appealing. Especially because MGM was picky about ordering tests. They were expensive, $600 apiece, which I knew my mother knew.

  Still, I crossed my fingers. Maybe Buzz would give her what she wanted. He had given her a nice close-up last month as she ran by the camera for the titular “Babes in Arms” song with Douglas McPhail because Buzz was not only good to his crew, handing them cards as a shoot wrapped, promising them jobs on his next film, but also good to his dancers, making sure to give each of his girls her little moment, They’re all so pretty and who doesn’t like to look at a pretty girl? And though my mother was a very pretty girl, almost all of the close-ups belonged to Garland, of course, because she was the star, even if those close-ups featured her capped teeth and the nose the studio was always trying to reshape by making her insert these rubber discs in her nostrils.

  Buzz was looking down his own nose at my mother. Don’t beg, I wanted to tell her. Be the queen.

  Now, of course, I better understand her. Some things are worth begging for. Youth and beauty were what she had to offer, and though that year she was only twenty-three, she must already have been counting her appro
ach to thirty and its inherent limitations, the horizon that spelled curtain in show business. Who wants a thirty-year-old chorine? The aging chorine is a somehow pathetic creature. But the thirty-year-old star? Well, she’s in her prime. Ripe. Lush. Delicious. You have to be center stage by thirty or you’ll never get there. And it didn’t look like my father was going to get her there.

  But Buzz was shaking his head, turning away. Was this made easier to do because she was masked, concealed by the blackface, not really quite Dina Wells? Or was it just easy to do because he was Busby Berkeley, imperious for the moment, humbled by time soon enough. In a few years, Judy Garland would be a big star, and he would be a washed-up nobody, and she’d have him kicked off the picture he was directing her in.

  When he walked off, I called out to my mother, wanting her, but when she turned to me, I went mute. The way she looked at me. Yet, I ran over to her nonetheless. What else was I going to do? Hide somewhere on the lot? Jump in our Cadillac and drive myself home? When I reached her, my mother made her lips into a flat line. “You and your father,” she said, “ruin everything for me.”

  Oh.

  16

  Las Vegas

  1947

  Unlike Hollywood, where the big stars never spoke to the girls who danced behind them on the soundstages, here in the great democratic desert, the stars paid us notice. The Flamingo headliners—Jack Benny, Sophie Tucker, Tony Martin—knew all of our names and they bought us drinks and they sang Happy Birthday and blew out candles on birthday cakes with us and they let us take our pictures with them and they autographed them With Love. We weren’t studio chorines, we were Las Vegas showgirls. And as such, we were cherished—both on the stage and in the casino.

  Pretty soon the stage managers would start keeping us younger girls corralled in the dressing rooms between shows, while only girls of legal age were allowed to dress up the tables, but in 1947, there were no rules until we made them up and that rule about keeping the younger girls in the back hadn’t been made up yet. We were all given free chips to play in the casino and a drink or two to sip—even if I was fifteen and wasn’t allowed to actually sip from the glass. This is for show, now, Baby E. We were told to mingle with the regular players and smile at the celebrities, we lovely dancers of the Fabulous Flamingo, serving as living, breathing, smiling, ambulating advertisements for the next show at midnight.

 

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