AN Outrageous Affair

by Penny Vincenzi

  She was calm when she did, but a lot of the fight had gone out of her. It didn’t come back for a long long time.

  Brendan used to talk to us for hours about Caroline, Fleur’s mother. How much he had loved her, how much he had been hurt. It was a terrible story, but I suppose we should try not to blame her. It was all a series of dreadful coincidences, but we all felt that surely, surely if she had loved him, she would have waited for him. We all saw her, in spite of everything Brendan said, as a hard, selfish woman. I mean who could part with that tiny beautiful little thing? Brendan tried to explain, to excuse her; but it made little sense. And then she married, so quickly, some English lord or other, and had more children. You cannot tell me she could have loved either of them, Brendan or the lord. As she grew up, it was so hard for Fleur to understand, to cope with.

  And the other thing of course, Brendan being so hurt by what Caroline did, it excused, for us, much of what came later. We forgave him because of the damage Caroline had done.

  1954–6

  Brendan was getting desperate. He went to the cattle calls every day, trying for extra work, but the studios were cutting back altogether with the new competition from television. It was a favourite film business statistic at that time that in the five years between 1946 and 1951 the number of people owning TV sets had increased from ten thousand to twelve million. Another favourite was that by 1952 movie profits had dropped five hundred million dollars. Warner Brothers led the way in closing down studios; contract players were being cut from the payrolls, and a large number of the old back lots had fallen into total disrepair. Expensive and spectacular gimmicks such as Cinemascope and 3D didn’t seem to be working quite the magic everyone had hoped for. Howard Hughes had quit, and Zanuck was on the way out. The golden days of Hollywood (everyone said) were over. There was also the horror of the McCarthy era to deal with; as stars were bullied and pressured into betraying friends and declaring them as having communist sympathies, questioned and then cross-questioned in front of the committees, many of them cracked. Others who held out found themselves swiftly dropped by their studios. Brendan was warned repeatedly not to express the most mildly socialist or even liberal view, and thus get branded a ‘Tinsel Town Pink’; if he did, he was told, he would find himself under serious suspicion. It was a time for testing characters; the news that his greatest heroine, the larcenous Betty Bacall, was amongst the courageous who stood up and were counted as friends of some of the accused merely served to set her on a higher pedestal still for Brendan.

  Brendan, worried, hard up, missing Fleur, wondered why he stayed. Probably the main reason, he said one night to his girlfriend, Rose Sharon (‘No, of course it’s not my real name, you dummy, they put the Sharon bit in to give me a biblical ring for The Robe’), was because in spite of everything they all had fun. There was a great sense of companionship amongst the swarms of unsuccessful young actors; they earned their livings pumping gas or carrying groceries out of the markets, or the more fortunate worked in one of the innumerable restaurants and bars. Rose, who after her minute part in The Robe had not worked at all, was a waitress at the Garden of Allah, on Sunset Boulevard, where the stars lived in gilded luxury in their poolside bungalows. Brendan had a job at Musso and Frank, the writers’ favourite hangout on Hollywood Boulevard, which he loved because it felt more like New York than LA with its dark deep interior and long straight bar and wooden panelling and waiters with long white aprons; William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler and reputedly Hemingway sat and drank and talked in the back room there from lunch through to long after dark.

  He got fired from Musso and Frank in the end for chatting up his favourite customers and keeping the others waiting too long for their orders, and after that it was the gas stations, and occasionally washing up at Schwab’s. Schwab’s was the famous drugstore on Sunset where Harold Arlen had written Over the Rainbow and Lana Turner was supposed to have been discovered and actually hadn’t been at all. It was a great hangout for young actors, and if they weren’t at the Rain-check Room or Barney’s Beanery, they were there, sitting around in the back room, playing gin rummy and gossiping. If anyone wanted to find someone really badly, they would begin at Schwab’s.

  He and Rose were very fond of one another; like him, she was ambitious to be a real actress, ‘not just a Hollywood doll’, and they spent long hours over a shared beer, planning how they would achieve success. Brendan would not have told her so in a thousand years, but he did not really rate Rose’s chances too highly; he thought she was pretty, but not spectacularly so, with golden-brown hair rather than the peroxide blonde favoured by the Misses Turner, Grable and Monroe, and a neatly charming little face; he could certainly see no larceny about her. Her greatest asset in Brendan’s view was her singing voice which was remarkable, deep and slightly harsh, with a tender quality on certain notes and phrases which was reminiscent of the young Judy Garland’s. Brendan was always urging her to go to the calls for singers, but Rose said no, she wasn’t going to be a song and dance girl, that wasn’t what she was in Hollywood for. Brendan said if she really wanted to be a real actress she was in the wrong place anyway, she should head for Broadway, but Rose said she couldn’t afford to get there, and she knew Hollywood, she had grown up in California and the thought of cold, distant New York didn’t seem any more promising.

  After a bit they moved in together, into a tiny walk-up apartment over a garage on La Brea; at first the idea was simply to cut down on their outgoings, but they got very drunk one night, and Rose was in despair over ever getting so much as a one-line part, and Brendan took her into his arms to comfort her and dry her tears and, slightly to their surprise, they suddenly found themselves enjoying some excellent sex. Rose was remorseful in the morning and said she had never done anything like that in her life before, and Brendan, deliberately misunderstanding, said she was clearly lying, and pointed out that it had been the best fun, they were very fond of one another and it also meant they no longer had to take turns for the camp bed and that was that. He told her all about Fleur and Caroline and she told him all about her long-term affair with a married man which she had finally managed to end six months earlier, and after that they became inseparable.

  Meanwhile Brendan’s money was running out. It was five months since he had been signed off from the studio, and apart from the occasional extra work, he was earning nothing except what he made at the gas stations and Schwab’s. It was enough to live on, but it wasn’t enough to send home to Fleur and Kathleen.

  ‘You should get yourself a job as a gigolo,’ said Rose one night, half seriously, as they sat thumbing rather desperately through the Hollywood Reporter, looking for calls they might conceivably have not heard about. ‘It would help a lot. Just for the odd day here and there. This town is full of sex-starved ladies who’d pay good money for you.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Brendan, kissing her slightly absentmindedly. ‘I wouldn’t do anything like that. I’d rather give in altogether. And I can’t stand older women anyway. I like fresh-faced young ones like you.’

  ‘Good,’ said Rose. ‘But don’t write it out completely. You might get desperate.’

  ‘Not that desperate,’ said Brendan. He knew he was lying.

  Naomi MacNeice was one of the very few women with any power in Hollywood. She was a studio executive at ACI (frequently compared to RKO in its size and stature) and was, amongst other things, in charge of new talent. ACI was an interesting studio, best known for its ability to be second with any trend, a commercial, clever, well-thought-out second. Let Columbia and Warner pioneer and make the mistakes, was the philosophy at ACI, we’ll watch the successes and be right on their tail. It was headed up by a man called Stephen Sarandon, an icy cool, shrewd businessman who told his chief executives every day that they were in Hollywood to make money above all else. ‘Anything else is icing on the cake.’

  True to Yolande duGrath’s observations, the entire stud
io style followed Sarandon’s: everybody tried to be cooler, shrewder, more obsessed with making money than everybody else. Naomi MacNeice fitted the mould very neatly. She had also great talent; in the three years she had held the job, she had been personally responsible for signing up (amongst others) the new young actress, Janey Chamberlain, already twice nominated for an Oscar, the brilliant dancer Brett Durante, who was said to have Gene Kelly practising for an extra hour a day for fear of being moved out of a job, and the dark sultry Mimi de Leon, who couldn’t act for nuts, but whose presence in a film would guarantee a line right around the block to watch it. Naomi was consequently extremely powerful.

  She was forty-five, owned to thirty-seven, and looked like an older Grace Kelly, with ice-blonde hair immaculately coiffed, equally icy blue eyes, a perfect, pale porcelain skin and a figure that owed its twenty-year-old shape to a regime in the gymnasium every day that was so harsh her own instructor urged her to ease it off otherwise she’d kill herself. Naomi told him she would far rather die than get fat, and continued to rise at six every morning and work out until eight, when she breakfasted on a slice of lemon in warm water and went to work. She was too busy there to think about being hungry.

  She was famous in Hollywood: her entrance into Ciro’s or the Mocambo would result not in a silence, as Betty Bacall’s might, or Lana Turner’s or Yvonne de Carlo’s, but in a buzz of chatter; the people who knew her would stand up to greet her as she passed their tables (to be greeted with her gracious cool smile), and the ones who didn’t would remark on her arrival, wonder what she was doing there and who with, and relate some well-worn anecdote about her.

  She lived in a Spanish-style mansion on San Ysedro Drive, with a series of lovers and a quartet of Siamese cats; anyone enjoying the favours of her skinny body had to do so with the cats roaming the bedroom and often the bed. She had been married several times, but was currently and ostentatiously single; Hedda and Louella and Sheila Graham all devoted regular space in their columns to a debate as to when and indeed whether this might change once more. There were rumours (much fuelled by rejected lovers) that she was a lesbian, but nobody had any direct experience or proof of this; Naomi seemed in no hurry to set the record straight one way or the other.

  All the unsuccessful young actors in Hollywood dreamed of being discovered by Naomi MacNeice; but Brendan, having served her the wrong dressing on her salad once at Musso and Frank, had decided it would be more like a nightmare and said so. Yolande duGrath, who was one of the people he said it to, had enjoyed the remark and indeed the accompanying anecdote so much she repeated it a few times to a few people, including Naomi herself over lunch at Trader Vic’s. Naomi had smiled coolly and asked what the inefficient young waiter was doing now. ‘Washing dishes? Or pumping gas?’

  ‘Both,’ said Yolande.

  ‘Does he have any talent?’

  ‘Very little. But he looks OK. His face works with the camera.’

  ‘Larceny?’ asked Naomi. Yolande’s yardstick was well known.

  ‘A little larceny.’

  ‘Did Theatrical try him out?’

  ‘Yes. He was on sixty days. He tested badly.’

  ‘He sounds like a no-no altogether,’ said Naomi.

  ‘Not altogether,’ said Yolande. ‘He has great charm, Irish charm.’

  Naomi had an Irish great-grandfather. ‘Maybe I should have a look at him,’ she said. ‘We need a new juvenile lead very badly.’

  Yolande’s eyes met hers in frank amusement. ‘You could,’ she said. ‘Olivier he isn’t.’

  ‘I’m not looking for Olivier.’

  When Brendan got the message that Naomi MacNeice had called him at Schwab’s, he assumed it was a hoax and didn’t call back. Naomi, who was not used to not being called back, told her secretary to call again. This time, shaking with a mixture of excitement and terror, he phoned the number. It was not her direct line, nor even her private secretary, but the general switchboard at ACI and he had to put ten quarters in before he was put through.

  ‘Is Miss MacNeice there please?’

  ‘She’s engaged right now. May I help you?’ Janet Jones, Naomi’s private secretary, had initially got the job on the strength of her voice which would have frozen out the entire Palm Desert.

  Brendan took a deep breath. ‘She – uh, asked me to call.’

  ‘She did?’ Miss Jones’s voice implied that God Himself was rather more likely to have invited a phone call than Naomi MacNeice. ‘What name is it?’

  ‘Brendan FitzPatrick. That is – no, it’s Byron Patrick.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Which of you is calling?’

  ‘Uh – Byron. Byron Patrick.’

  ‘Are you quite sure of that?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Very well. If you’d like to hold on.’

  Eight more quarters later, she said, ‘If you’d like to come in this afternoon, Mr Patrick. At three thirty.’

  ‘But – I – how –’

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Patrick.’

  The phone went dead.

  ‘It has to be one huge hoax,’ said Brendan. He had invaded the lush poolside dining area at the Garden of Allah to tell Rose, who was lining up knives with military precision.

  ‘Only one way to find out.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I shall look such a fool. Turning up there.’

  ‘More of a fool if you don’t. Brendan, will you please get out of here, I shall lose my job.’

  ‘OK, OK, I’m going. I’ll see you tonight.’

  ‘Fine. Good luck.’

  ‘I still think it’s a hoax,’ said Brendan. But it wasn’t.

  ‘Yolande duGrath tells me you have no talent,’ said Naomi. She was sitting behind her massive mahogany desk, her back to the window, the thick curtains behind her blotting out the Californian sunshine. The air-conditioning and a huge fire roared in unison; the room was chilly. Brendan looked at her blankly, too upset to try to appear cool.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Naomi sounded mildly impatient. ‘I said Miss duGrath tells me you have no talent.’

  ‘She did? She can’t have. She’s my friend.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s why she said it. Friends have a duty to be honest.’

  ‘Then she should have said it to me. Not you.’

  ‘I expect,’ said Naomi with an infinitesimal smile, ‘she imagined that not having your contract renewed would give you a clue.’

  ‘A lot of talented people don’t have their contracts renewed,’ said Brendan bravely.

  ‘Really? You must let me have a list.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Would you like to read for me?’

  ‘What?’ said Brendan. He couldn’t help it.

  ‘Mr Patrick, I think you must have a little trouble with your hearing. It can’t be helping your rather dismal career. I said, would you like to read for me?’

  Brendan looked at her. ‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘Yes, of course I would.’

  Naomi looked at him for a long time. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I am casting for a thriller next week. I need a detective. He’s something of a – what shall we say – a fool. I think you might play him rather well. The casting stage at eight thirty on Tuesday. Good afternoon, Mr Patrick.’

  She didn’t even come to the casting; nor was Brendan tested. There were forty-two actors in front of him, and after the forty-first they were all told to go home, Brendan was almost in tears.

  ‘I told you she was a no-good bitch,’ he said to Rose that evening. ‘She’s vile. I loathe her.’

  ‘She sounds disgusting,’ said Rose. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Do we have any left?’

  ‘J
ust about one spoonful. We could share it.’

  ‘You have it. I just decided I need something stronger. I’m going out to get a beer. I’ll be back in a minute.’

  ‘OK.’

  Out on the street he met a friend, a fellow gin rummy player.

  ‘There was a call for you this afternoon. Latish.’

  ‘There was?’

  ‘Yes. From some dame called Janet Jones. Ring a bell?’

  ‘A dismal one. A death knell. What she say?’

  ‘You’ve to call her. First thing.’

  ‘Can’t think why. Maybe I left something at the studio.’

  ‘Maybe you did.’

  ‘Mr Patrick?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Miss MacNeice has asked me to call you. She wants to see your publicity pictures. She says you’re to bring them to the Brown Derby at twelve. And have lunch with her.’

  ‘I – can’t,’ said Brendan, speaking with great difficulty.

  ‘Why not, Mr Patrick?’

  ‘I – uh – have another engagement.’

  ‘Mr Patrick.’ The freezing voice sounded almost kindly. ‘Don’t be such a fucking idiot.’

  ‘Sit down,’ said Naomi MacNeice. ‘Do you have the pictures?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I see them, please? Thank you. What are you going to have?’

  ‘A Cobb’s salad. That’s what everyone has here, isn’t it? De rigueur. Once a week, regular as clockwork. That and a few fake calls brought to your table, and then you’re safe to leave again.’

  She looked at him, her ice-blue eyes touched with amusement for the first time. ‘Quite correct,’ she said. ‘Although some of the calls are genuine of course.’

  ‘Oh really?’

  ‘Really.’ She was looking through the pictures. ‘These are quite good. Who took them? Bernie Foster? I thought so. Tell me, is Mr Berelman still – what shall we say – hand in glove with Mr Clint these days?’