On leaving the restaurant, Jay made it a point not to be seen by Cauliflower, dissolving into the crowd waiting at the front to be seated.
Jay’s first day in court, he looked around and saw James Cagney, George Raft, Paulette Goddard, Franchot Tone, Edward G. Robinson, and the bandleader Horace Heidt. Everyone stood when Superior Judge Goodwin “Goody” J. Knight entered. A youthful thin-lipped man with a splayed nose that looked as if he had taken one on the nozzle, he was presiding without benefit of jury, a request agreed to by both parties. Whether or not the judge knew it, all of Hollywood was counting on him to preserve filmland’s reputation.
On Monday, August 3, for the first time, Miss Astor entered the courtroom. Although Jay had seen her in New York City, he couldn’t get over her stunning good looks. A soulful, dark-eyed, ethereal wisp of a woman weighing barely one hundred pounds, she was even more beautiful than he had remembered. Film cameras failed to capture her essence: her gorgeously chiseled, slightly uneven but lovely, cameo-like features, her throaty sensuous voice, her full lips and Titian hair. Whether flanked at a table by her two lawyers (only one of whom spoke), or on the stand, she became the fixed star of the courtroom.
Behind Jay sat the peanut gallery, a vast sea of staring eyes and listening ears, composed mostly of middle-aged and elderly women, who perched in their chairs, wearing their proper hats and holding their paper bags. Their mood decidedly favored Miss Astor, despite Dr. Thorpe’s good looks. Jay gathered they were willing to forgive her indiscretions because of her readiness to risk her career for the custody of her daughter.
The strategy on both sides was the same: to prove the other party morally unfit to care for the child. Marylyn’s nurse, a plain looking bespectacled woman in an ugly frock, approvingly pointed out that Mary kept the child in virtual isolation every summer to protect her from polio. Her view of Dr. Thorpe was less kind. She testified that beautiful women often came to the house to spend the night, and even took breakfast in bed with him the next morning. Miss Astor’s attorney, a roly-poly, round-faced fellow with an unruly shock of curly hair, went so far as to suggest—to the gasps of the courtroom—that Dr. Thorpe entertained more than one woman in bed at the same time.
Dr. Thorpe defended himself against these charges by using his patrician bearing to good effect. A handsome, curly headed, debonair, well-spoken gynecologist and surgeon to the movie stars and other rich women, Thorpe responded through set teeth:
“Untrue . . . all of it untrue. I feel very sorry for Miss Astor that she would allow her hired help and attorney to resort to such slanders. But by doing so, she leaves me no alternative . . .”
The doctor broke off without finishing the sentence, an interruption that left everyone wondering: Did he mean to publish her diary? Not until Miss Astor took the witness stand did the courtroom learn that the two large ledgers, bound in black cloth with bright red edges, resembling a grocer’s account books, had indeed been entered into the trial as Exhibit A. The public and press, though, did not get to see all the pages, covered with Miss Astor’s distinctly feminine handwriting in deep purple ink, but only those that Dr. Thorpe’s attorney, a bald ex–narcotic agent, chose to release. Although she acknowledged that she’d mentioned many men in her diary, she claimed that much of what Dr. Thorpe’s lawyer released was a forgery. Listening to her tearful testimony, Jay was inclined to believe what she entered into the record as her “real diary”:
“Nothing could have been more sincere than my love for Franklyn a short while ago and yet—we are now simply worlds apart. I am not myself with him. Sometimes it’s pretty bad—we don’t think alike; and we’re not interested in any of the same things. All we have to talk about is the doings of the day: some patient of his who won’t pay a bill, the servants, the gardener, the baby, her discipline and cute ways, money matters, the trouble with my family—and that’s all. Franklyn has no sense of humor whatsoever. I like laughter and people and he sits around with them like a bump on a log. He doesn’t know what to discuss, except politics and medicine.”
After meeting the playwright George S. Kaufman, whom she adored immediately, she tried in her diary to make sense of her feelings.
“Does this happen over and over again? Am I going to keep on forever thinking this is it? What the hell is it? And what do I want? First of all I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason for my constant restlessness and dissatisfaction with life in general is because I don’t like to be alone. I’m scared to death of independence, and the result is I’m always tying myself up imagining myself deeply in love with someone I’ve no right to be tied up with.”
All of the people following the trial had the same question in mind: Did she author the racy parts? Perhaps Jean Harlow would know. Jay had promised his editor that he would include Miss Harlow in his reports. Now was the time to call her.
“Do you remember me?”
“Of course Jean remembers you. We played poker together and Jean predicted that one day you’d visit her in Hollywood—and she was right. Come on over. Here’s how you can find her house.”
Directions followed. Jay drove to the leafy Bel Air and Beverly Hills area and eventually located her estate. Jean answered the door wearing a sheer silver shift that offered no more than a nod to the convention of dress. She might just as well have come to the door naked, which he understood she sometimes did. Leading him through the house to the pool, she excused herself. He sat in a padded deck chair and admired the view of the city. Returning a few minutes later with a tray of drinks and noshes, she put it on a white-enameled table, shaded by a green awning, and stretched her gorgeous body on a chaise longue. They drank and reminisced until suddenly she stood up, wriggled out of her shift, and dove into the blue water.
“I don’t have a bathing suit,” Jay said stupidly.
“Neither does Jean.”
Feeling terribly self-conscious, he stripped and cannonballed into the pool trying to cover his nakedness. They swam and splashed each other playfully, until she pulled him up against her body and kissed him with tongue and lips. What he feared most happened: he sprouted an erection. Jean laughed and said:
“There seems to be an eel in the pool.”
Torn between wanting to ravish her and fearing that some mobster would kill him, he exited the pool, took an enormous bath towel from a trolley piled high with them, and wrapped himself up like a mummy.
She returned to the chaise longue and lay undressed, letting the water evaporate off her body in the warm light that had not yet shaded toward evening. He had an urge to lick the drops off her, running his tongue across her perfect alabaster skin and into hidden places. Thank goodness for the bath towel. Once again he was rampant. Forcing himself to focus on her face and not her body, he said that he had been attending the Astor-Thorpe trial and wanted to know what she thought about the discrepancy between the ruminative and the rutting Mary.
She surprised him by responding, “You can ask her yourself. Jean will call her now,” and went into the house, standing naked just inside the open French doors talking on the telephone. He could hear her say, “Fine, we’ll drive over about nine, after we’ve gone out to dinner.”
“Jean will just throw something on and be back in a jiff.” At the door she turned and smiled. “Jean told you that someday we’d dine together. Jean knows these things.”
They ate at a small restaurant on Sunset Boulevard—salmon and a salad. When Jean mentioned Longie, Jay asked her not to tell him they had dined together. His request seemed to flatter her. She wanted to pay for the meal, but he wouldn’t hear of it. They drove in Jean’s red Cadillac to Miss Astor’s Toluca Lake mansion, where she retreated each night after court. A tired, wan Mary greeted them in the living room, with the lake glistening beyond huge windows. There they sat among the great thick rugs and luxuriant pillows, soft lights, and profusion of indoor plants, including an ornamental monkey-puzzle tree that reached to he
r cathedral ceiling, comforted by the knowledge that the great iron gate and the solemn night watchman would combine to restrain the reporters camped outside her house.
“I love this place,” she said. “It’s everything that the Quincy and Chicago apartments were not, the holes where I grew up. Did you know,” she said aimlessly, “I once placed second in a beauty contest to Clara Bow. The ‘It’ girl had more to show physically, and I more mentally.”
At first Jay thought her comment strangely self-serving, but soon realized that she had a first-rate mind, even if she was emotionally immature. Jean and Mary, like two teenagers, giggled and joked, sometimes at Mary’s expense. When the subject migrated to the diary, she rued Dr. Thorpe’s confiscating it and the descriptions of men easily identified. Otherwise, she felt perfectly satisfied that her diary had served her well as a faithful confidante.
Jay specifically asked her about George S. Kaufman, who held center stage in the “thrill omnibus.” With admirable candor or foolish indiscretion, Mary told them a part of the story surrounding their affair, beginning with the breakdown of her marriage.
“The fact that I was in love with George had nothing to do with my wanting a divorce, but of course Franklyn thought it did. The real reason was I didn’t love Franklyn anymore. I was unhappy and bored with him, and I didn’t think one should live with a person feeling that way.”
Jay could feel the pain of this troubled woman; her loneliness and need for love palpably filled the room. To break the tension, he pointed to the monkey-puzzle tree. “That’s some tree. I’ve seen only one other like it. Did you grow it yourself?”
“No, my current gardener installed it. He’s very good.”
She returned to her memories of George. “We had rapturous moments, delicious, sublime. We’d sing at the piano and talk about books and shows. The great bane of modern life, boredom, never assailed me when I was with him.”
Jean, who had been unusually quiet, said rather too crassly, “Love ’em and leave ’em. That’s Jean’s motto.” She shifted the gum in her mouth and added, “Well, it’s all over now.”
Mary replied heatedly, “Not until I have Marylyn and the diary!”
Jay could understand her desire to have her daughter legally assigned to her, but it seemed a little late to worry about the diary. “Just words,” said Jean, with a wave of her hand.
“Franklyn has his own reasons for taking the diary,” Mary said cryptically.
On the way back to Jean’s house, Jay started to wonder. The doctor had a wide practice among Hollywood stars, not as a psychiatrist or therapist, but as a surgeon and gynecologist. According to rumor, Jean’s numerous affairs, as well as those of other actresses, had led to several abortions. Had Mary used a code to identify these people? If Thorpe had performed illegal operations, Jay could understand why the doctor would want the diary.
Certainly he couldn’t ask Jean. When they returned to her place, she reminded him that at Longie’s party he had agreed to play poker with her in Los Angeles and insisted that he honor his word. In an upstairs sitting room she had a table laid out with cards and chips, as if, like Miss Havisham, she was waiting for the suitor’s return. They played well into the night, and Jay had the feeling that he might have been able to share more than her card table if he had stayed on; but he wanted to return to the courtroom before other reporters grabbed the best seats in the jury box and he was forced to sit at a distance.
He kissed Jean goodnight and promised to return in a few days to take her to dinner and then to the Trocadero. She said wistfully:
“Longie and Jean used to go there.”
Outside Jean’s house, the silver moonlight had miraculously turned the lawns blue, and the sky, vibrant with stars, seemed just one dream away from descending and, like the arms of Arietta, embracing him with astral brilliance.
On two hours of sleep, he attended the next day’s court session. Miss Astor gave him a radiant smile and sat down next to her attorney. Garbed attractively in a dazzling white ensemble of sharkskin silk, she also wore a sheer brown blouse, a tan felt hat adorned with an orange-tinted feather, white sandals, tan stockings, and brown gloves. A jeweled brooch shone at her throat.
Some of the quotations from Mary’s diary that had appeared in the physician’s affidavit charging her with “continuous gross, immoral conduct,” the ones she deemed forgeries, now surfaced.
“Once George lays down his glasses, he is quite a different man. His powers of recuperation are amazing, and we made love all night long. . . . It all worked perfectly, and we shared our fourth climax at dawn. . . .
“We saw every show in town, had grand fun together and went frequently to Seventy-Third Street where he fucked the living daylights out of me. . . .
“Was any woman ever happier? It seems that George is just hard all the time. . . . I don’t see how he does it, he is perfect.”
When Kaufman came to Los Angeles, she saw him at his hotel.
“Monday I went to the Beverly Wilshire . . . he tore out of his pajamas and I never was undressed by anyone so fast in all my life. Later we went to Vendome for lunch, to a stationer’s shop . . . then back to the hotel. It was raining and lovely. It was wonderful to fuck the entire sweet afternoon away . . . I left about six o’clock.”
Shortly thereafter, Kaufman and Moss Hart went to Palm Springs. Miss Astor followed.
“Ah, desert nights—with George’s body plunging into mine, naked under the stars . . .”
Judge Knight issued a subpoena for George S. Kaufman.
At the conclusion of that day’s testimony, Jay migrated to a diner a few blocks away and sat over an egg bagel—the owner claimed never to have heard of a water bagel—and a bad facsimile of coffee. During the courtroom proceedings, when the questions and answers had begun to beat a repetitive tattoo and Jay’s mind wandered, the word “current” kept surfacing in his head, until it lodged there like a splinter demanding attention. As he dunked his bagel in the virtually tasteless liquid, he suddenly remembered the context: Miss Astor saying, “My current gardener.” Her use of the word “current” had to mean that the gardener now caring for her grounds had replaced someone else. How recently? He could hardly wait for the next day.
As Miss Astor passed down the aisle to take a seat next to her attorney, she again threw him a smile. Dressed in a simply tailored navy blue taffeta tunic dress, accented by a single diamond brooch, and a broad-brimmed matching hat, she lent a touch of relief to the severity of her outfit with white gloves and purse. Her shoes were of black suede and her sheer silken stockings of sunburn tan. Jay smiled back and, before the judge arrived, leaned out of his first-row seat in the jury box and asked an attendant to hand Miss Astor a note. It read: “What is the name of your current gardener and when does he come to your house?” She took a small gold fountain pen from her purse, unscrewed the cap, scribbled on the paper, and handed it back to the attendant. She had written: “Piero Magliocco, every day.”
Called to the stand and asked about the trip to New York when she first met Kaufman, Mary prefaced her answer with some comments about her marriage having begun at that period to fail. She dabbed her eyes with a lacy handkerchief and explained:
“I felt as though I had been in a foreign country and had suddenly found people who spoke my language. I met Edna Ferber and Moss Hart and Alec Woollcott and Oscar Levant. I went to a small gathering where people hung around the piano and listened to a new score that George Gershwin was playing for them; it was a new concept of opera and was to be known as Porgy and Bess. I felt that I was accepted easily and without question; I liked their ideas and opinions and points of view.”
For nine days, the spectators hung avidly and silently on every detail that dealt with life as most of the spectators had never lived it—a Bohemian world of orchidaceous ladies and artistic gentlemen. Rumors circulated that, behind the scenes, pressure was building for J
udge Knight to conclude the proceedings. Apparently, Will Hays and the Legion of Decency had appealed to studio executives to immediately stop further hearings of the case, with its “spicy testimony and scandalous mention of big film names.” On the last day, Judge Knight summoned the lawyers to his chambers, where they deliberated on a settlement. When the judge and the lawyers emerged, their smiles betokened an agreement.
“Baby Marylyn Thorpe,” the judge declared, “will remain with Miss Astor during the school months of the year, except for weekends, and with Dr. Franklyn Thorpe during the summer and vacation periods, except for Christmas and Easter, which she will share with both parents. The child’s teachers, nurses, and governesses will be selected by mutual consent, and the cost of the child’s upkeep will be shared as the court may direct. As for the diary, its final disposition will rest with the court, for the nonce to be placed in a vault assigned to County Treasurer Roger Byrum. By stipulation, it will be made available again only if the custody case is reopened at some future date.”
Mary retreated at once to her Toluca Lake mansion, where numerous friends, including Jean Harlow and Jay, celebrated her self-declared victory. He had hoped to catch a glimpse of Mr. Magliocco, gardener, at Mary’s house, but they arrived too late. At some point during the celebration, Jay asked her if he might stroll through her garden. She told him to feel free to “perambulate” wherever he wished. As he wandered toward the garden shed, he wondered where—in which safe-deposit box, in which hands, in which bonfire of the vanities—the million-dollar diary would end up.
The shed revealed nothing unusual, except a stack of torn papers in one corner that he assumed Mr. M. used for repotting and planting. All of them treated the same subject: the recent polio cases in the city. Her faithful gardener had collected information on recent advances in the treatment of the disease and on prevention; perhaps his training as a priest had left him with pastoral sympathies. At the house, Jay inquired discreetly of the maid which kind of vehicle Mr. M. drove.
Dreams Bigger Than the Night Page 25