I fell in love with Johnny Farrar in Seville, at the Hotel Alfonso XIII. I had made love to him all over Europe, but I fell in love with him in Seville, on the Costa del Sol. I’d have fallen in love with Quasimodo on the Costa del Sol. I’d have fallen in love with Hayden Shepherd. (Remember him? Pittsburgh?)
And in Marbella, at the Marbella Club Hotel where we were the only two Americans, I knew that if my life ended then and there, I would have seen enough of heaven to know my way around, if and when I ever got there. Marbella was too much. A triple olé for Marbella—two ears and a tail.
Though a minor, and with no passport or birth certificate, I still got around because Johnny was forever greasing the right palms. It was giddy. I had no identity and no responsibility. I was a balloon, confetti, tinsel. And I was never happier in my life.
We were traveling with some English business associates of Johnny’s. Their women were illegally gorgeous, only I don’t think any of them was married. One girl was French and the other Swiss, and they had as little to do with each other as possible. It was as though they always showed up at the same places—but in separate cars. I was prettier but they were grander. It was okay. I’d be grand, too, one day. Maybe any minute.
The Marbella Club Hotel was run by Count Rudy, some kind of Austrian prince who had lost his ass and his title somewhere along the way. A descendant of Franz Josef and a whole mess of Hapsburgs, he was a neat man—cosmopolite and cordial, and he knew every language because he had to, because people of every nationality stayed at his hotel. The Germans were always the first to the beach, either making sure to get beach chairs or rendezvousing with some U-boat. The French were always the first into the dining room, mostly because they never left it. The British, Wimbledonians, played tennis on the mosaic-tiled tennis court and said “bully” and “rather” and “shit.” And the Scandinavians took thermometers down to the Mediterranean and would not go in if the water wasn’t cold enough.
Inland, behind the hotel, was Monte Blanca—the “white mountain”—and Johnny and I climbed a lot of it one day, and when we stopped because we were pooped, we looked out and could see Gibraltar and North Africa and the rest of our lives.
“Ginnie—do you know how old I am?”
“Seven and a half.”
“Close. I’m forty. Twice as old as you.”
“You won’t always be twice as old.”
“No, but it’ll always be twenty years.”
“I won’t hold it against you.”
“I’ll never marry you.”
“Who asked you to?”
“You did. Last night.”
“I did?”
“In bed.”
“Don’t listen to anything I say in bed. I’m not to be held responsible ...”
“Just the same—”
“Why would I want to marry you? You’re twice my age.”
“This isn’t The Stan Arlen Show. So you don’t have to be funny.”
“Whoops. Sorry.”
“I’d like you to stay with me, travel with me—for as long as you like. But I won’t marry you. Do you know what I’m saying, Ginnie?”
“Yeah. You want me to be your mistress.”
“In the terminology of the times—yes.”
“Aren’t I that already?”
“No.”
“How do I get the job?”
“You stop working altogether. That means no more Stan Arlen Show. No more television or nightclubs. No more nothing.”
“Okay, I’ve blown The Stan Arlen Show anyway. I’ve been away for almost three months. If they ever took me back, it would be a television first.”
“I’m being serious, so pay attention.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Much of my business is in Europe. Much of my success is the result of social maneuverings—appearing in the proper places with the proper people.”
“With a mistress?”
“Yes. It’s all right for me to have a mistress—as long as she’s beautiful and charming. But—”
“Aha!”
“She must belong solely to me. Not to Stan Arlen or Richie Pickering. And she must have style. She must have—grandeur.”
“Shit, I think I’ve got a whole lot of grandeur.”
“I think you have, too. A little whacky, but grandeur just the same, of a type.”
“Then screw this mistress crap—let’s get married.”
“I am married.”
“You said you were divorced.”
“I had to. When I saw you in Chicago, I told you I’d be getting a divorce. I knew that if I called you this time in New York, you’d have nothing to do with me if I told you it hadn’t come through.”
“You lied. The world is filled with liars. Hot damn.”
“Ginnie—if that bothers you, you’ve got to get out of here. I’m not big on white slavery or deception. I’m still married. Here’s your chance to run.”
“You’re making it impossible for me to run, and you know it, you sonofabitch!”
“Ginnie, she made it impossible for me. I can’t go into it. If you were a lawyer you’d still have trouble understanding. I could have let you go on thinking I was divorced. But, damn it, I love you too much to do that to you.”
“Oh, my, here’s a howdy-do, isn’t it?”
“Don’t make any decisions just now. Think about it. Well talk about it again in a couple of days. You’re a beautiful woman and—”
“Oh, sure.”
“And that’s part of it—the fact that you don’t know it.”
“Then keep telling me.”
“I’m telling you that you can do just about anything in life that you want to. And I’m saying, if you don’t want to stay with me, I’ll help you. I’ll buy you The Stan Arlen Show.”
“Yeah? Buy me NBC.”
“I’ve got to go back to New York. Just a few days. You’ll go with me. And when I leave, I want you to stay there, at my suite in the Delmonico, and think about everything I’ve told you.”
“I’ve got an apartment—with my friends.”
“No. You have to stay at my place.”
“So the world’ll see you’re keeping me?”
“And you can’t do any shows. You can’t work. You’re on call, okay? That’s the way it has to be.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s the way I want it.”
“Do I have to sleep with friends of yours?”
“What? No. Where’d you get that idea?”
“I don’t know. It just seemed like the next thing you were going to say.”
“You don’t have to sleep with any friends of mine. But neither can you sleep with any of yours.”
“How would you know?”
“You’d know—so I’d know.”
“Boy. All of a sudden we’re so fucking European. Is that grandeur or is that grandeur?”
“I’m sorry, but that’s the way it has to be. If you want to end it—”
“It’s unfair of you to keep saying that. So just cut it out. Jesus, it’s like you give me a toy and then you take it back.”
“Come on. Let’s go back to the club. It’s getting dark.”
“When are we going back to New York?”
“Tomorrow.”
“And how long do we stay?”
“I stay maybe three days. You stay till I send for you.”
“Do I get chained to the radiator?”
“Yes.”
Johnny Farrar did something to me that no man I ever knew could do. He made me feel like a little girl. I don’t think he meant to—he just brought it out in me. I mean, I was always a little girl but had learned how to fool people into thinking I wasn’t. You fool people with things like tits. Little girls have no tits. You fool them with knowing how to make love. And “knowing how” doesn’t mean skill—it mostly means showing up, and saying “oooooh,” and smoking a cigarette while not answering the phone.
But Johnny Farrar somehow seemed to see ri
ght through all that. And I wouldn’t have been surprised if, in the middle of the night, if the lights suddenly went on—I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised to discover that it was a teddy bear I was hugging and a lollipop I was licking.
Anyway, I did what Johnny told me to because I always did what Johnny told me to. Because, if I didn’t, I’d get no allowance, and wouldn’t be permitted to use the phone or stay up late or wear a training bra, so—
I was back in New York—three days with Johnny. Then he was off somewhere he couldn’t take me because it was Alaska and he was hunting elk with the president of General Motors, or Africa where he and the head of the New York Stock Exchange were on safari, or, would you believe it, Russia because the US government had sent him there on something so hush-hush that not even Eisenhower knew what it was about.
When Johnny left for Moscow, he left me with credit cards, two bank accounts, and enough cash to bail out India. I was alone—but I could have bought New York.
During my three days with Johnny, I didn’t call Don or Candy because I figured there’d be plenty of times when I’d be doing that after Johnny had taken off. I did, however, call the Stan Arlen office to tender my apologies for never having given them official notice. But there was a new girl answering the phone and she didn’t even know who I was. Sic transit Ginnie.
Another thing I did was change my hairstyle, figuring maybe that would make me feel more grown-up the next time I was with Johnny. I didn’t mess with the color but I did get rid of the ponytail, swapping it for something that came all the way around from one side and ended up on the other. It looked very Grecian. I thought it was definitely Grecian. It also looked like an earmuff because it covered my right ear completely. It was also a pain in the ass because it required so much time and attention. Every other day I had to spend an hour at the hairdresser’s, Mr. Calvin. He never talked to me—just to my hair. Very weird. Took me an hour every time I left his salon to convince myself there wasn’t a midget in my hair, under my earmuff, whispering little nothings.
On the fourth day, my first without Johnny, I called Candy and she yelled at me for not writing and then invited me to dinner. Spaghetti Ypsilanti or something, her specialty, which she was trying for the first time, and she needed, as she so chauvinistically put it, a “guinea” pig.
It was good to see Don and Candy again. They were so in love. Better than that—they had gotten married. That Candy was older by a couple years didn’t matter because I never knew two people more suited to one another. Both of them were making real good money and Don’s reputation as a TV director was peerless. He had resisted a few feelers from Hollywood because he wanted to make certain he was ready. Very mature of him and, on the surface, much smarter than what Ben had done.
No, they hadn’t heard anything either about Ben or from him. Hollywood seemed to have swallowed him up, though Barry had heard that Ben was acting somewhat the prima donna and just wasn’t doing as well as all his talent indicated he should be doing. Still, it was early in the game and none of us had any doubts that Ben would rise to the top.
Candy loved my hair and immediately called Mr. Calvin for a consultation so that he might conjure up something equally as wild for her. Don thought we were both being dopey, that sophisticated, aristocratic women did not need all that overstatement. We told him to mind his own fucking business and dove into the spaghetti.
They were careful in what they said about me and Johnny, but I could tell that they didn’t exactly approve. I wouldn’t have expected them to. I didn’t approve of it either. I just loved Johnny and he was good to me and none of it was frantic. Somewhere in the back of my head I somehow knew that we would one day be married. It was just a matter of his wife coming to terms with life. It was just a matter of time, and time was something I had plenty of. I was twenty and unemployed. I could wait it all out without getting hysterical about giving up the best years of my life. Candy was at least ten years my senior and it had worked out for her. I didn’t want to think too much about the immorality of it all. The band was playing “Blue Skies.” Who was I to sing “Stormy Weather”?
Arnie Felsen came over and I gave him a big hug. He thought I looked wickedly wonderful—a poor choice of words but heartfelt nonetheless. Oh—he came over with his fiancée, Marilyn, a very nice girl, but that’s about all I could say about her that was positive. She was intellectual and a little creepy in that she followed him around like his shadow, agreeing with him, flattering him. You’d have thought Arnie had just come into a huge inheritance the way she glommed onto him. It was nice for Arnie, though. He did enjoy it. There was a time when I thought he never had a shadow—all of a sudden he had two.
There was a lot of talk about his play. I gathered that he and Don had done a lot of work on it and that some producer was really hot to get it on. I was very impressed with Don. He had talent and patience and seemed to have a good fix on where he was going. I guess what I’m trying to say is I was jealous of him and Candy. I didn’t love Don. I didn’t want to switch places with Candy. It was just that they were doing things together—fun things, creative things, things that were growing and taking shape. Whereas I, for all the clothes and money at my disposal, I was a hanger-on—Johnny Farrar’s lady (I couldn’t think “mistress”), a glorified camp follower, one more company in his conglomerate. Still, as I said, there was no rush, no need to panic at the thought that the warm wax was hardening and that’s what I’d always be. It was all there to be experienced and enjoyed. If it turned sour, I’d know it and I’d get out. By the same token, if it stayed sweet and got sweeter, we’d be married and get on with the rest of the good life.
The nice evening over, we loaded all my clothes into a cab like the Salvation Army leaving the Rockefeller estate. It took two Delmonico bellhops to bring it up to my suite. It was some suite. Five rooms and two bathrooms. But Johnny wasn’t there so it was like living alone in Shangri-la.
I tried to walk around Manhattan without buying anything and that took some doing. I would have preferred the old ponytail and sneakers and jeans, but it would have been bad for my image so I went around all gussied up and people looked at me because I sure as hell stopped traffic. Only no one knew who I was, like in the old days on The Stan Arlen Show—and I missed that. That was another thing that was going to take time.
One day I ran out of cigarettes and ducked into a little store on Lexington Avenue that had everything a drugstore had except a pharmacist. The man behind the counter—gong—he struck a familiar chord. Gong. Bald to the top of his head, after which all that red hair made him look like a lion.
“Sy?”
“Yes. Can I help you?”
“You don’t remember me.”
“Blondie?”
“You do remember me.”
Sy Fein came out from behind the counter and gave me one of his patented rib-splitting hugs, pulling my Guccied feet right off the floor. “Blondie! Oy, is this a Blondie!” He released me and stepped back to size me up. “So let me look. Woo-ee, some business! What happened to you?”
“What do you mean what happened?”
“What happened to your ear?”
“What?”
“It’s all covered. A dog bit you?”
“Sy! It’s the style!”
“Some style. What’s in it—a telephone call?”
“Oh, Sy—it’s so great to see you! You look so good!”
“I am good. How do you like my shop? What do you need?” Hershey bars? Lipstick? Tampons? You name it—I got it.”
“It’s marvelous.”
“I’m here almost eight months. It’s number fourteen on my Hit Parade. What number was I up to when you last laid eyes on me?”
“I think it was seven.”
“Seven. Hmmmm. Well, there’s a lot of water over the bridge since seven. Also—two bankruptcies.”
“But you’re all right?”
“Am I all right? In less than ninety-nine years this place will be all mine. Free
and clear. Like the Suez Canal. But look at you. Who’d you marry—the Sultan of Swat?”
“I’m not married.”
“Oh. So you struck oil. Some duds you’re wearing. Hardly a shmatta from Klein’s.”
“It’s a long story.”
“It usually is.”
“Don’t sound so disapproving.”
“Me? Disapproving? A girl I used to know from torn sneakers comes in wearing a golden earmuff—why should I disapprove? It’s none of my business. You a call girl? Don’t answer.”
“Sy, I’m not a call girl.”
“I only ask because it’s some neighborhood for call girls. This is the Call Girl Belt. You could make a fortune. You could also get syphilis if you go in for that sort of thing. You can get a lot of things but married.”
“I’m not a call girl.”
“Your word against mine.”
“Sy—shut up. You’re being silly. How’s Iri?”
“Who knows? I haven’t seen him since last week. For all I know he’s bombing Pearl Harbor again.”
“Is he all right?”
“I should be so all right. He’s got another restaurant. Just Japanese.”
“It’s not kosher?”
“What he does with his books is his own business. All I know is that he’s making money hand over glove. It’s on the West Side—in the twenties. He cooks right out in front of the customers. Wears a white suit and yelps when he chops a shrimp’s head off. It’s some show. If he knew I saw you, he’d send his best. He’s funny that way. You sure I can’t give you a little trinket? A ballpoint? A flashlight? How’d you like a deck of cards?”
There Should Have Been Castles Page 47