I don’t know how long I sat there. Even the changing play of light and shadow comforted my senses. After a time I came to life again, and that was when the awareness of someone watching me began to grow. It wasn’t the inimical feeling that I’d had with Blue Chevy, but more like eyes fixed upon me in an impersonal but unwavering stare.
Not until I looked about searchingly did I see her. Monica Arlen! The bronze bust rested on its pedestal in shadows that made it almost invisible at this time of day. I left my bench and crossed a concrete slab over a pool, to stand before the remarkable likeness. A small plaque offered lettering, and I leaned over to read the words. The bust had been sculptured and cast in 1946, the year after the war had ended. The same year in which Mirage was made. The sculptor was Peggy Smith.
As Monica had said, she’d been an artist in her own right—perhaps with natural gifts that had never been fully developed. Peggy Smith hadn’t sought fame for herself during those years, but had lived in the shadow of Monica’s fame, willing to serve her to the neglect of her own very real talent.
There was so much I needed to understand about Monica and that time long past. I knew the clues would come, once I gave myself fully to the search. One bit of exploration always led to another, until a subject that seemed simple to start with developed a complexity that could lead in rewarding and unexpected directions. This time I would have the space of a book in which to develop whatever I wanted.
One of the aspects I must understand was how Monica Arlen had been able to inspire such personal loyalty as Peggy Smith had given her, and which was now being shown again by Linda Trevor. There were depths here that I hadn’t begun to explore, and I was lucky to have Linda as a living source to help me grasp what eluded me. Right now, however, my attentions had to be divided. Always uppermost was the threat to Keith and the danger of what Owen might do next. A peaceful interlude in the museum gardens was a gift to be grateful for, but it couldn’t last.
For a few moments longer I studied the bronze face. The sculptor had caught Monica’s subtle smile exactly—that screen smile suggesting laughter about to break, yet hinting of sadness as well. An enchanting, heartbreaking smile—even more vulnerable than Saxon’s. Peggy Smith had caught the exotic tilt of the eyes—that accident of birth which had given a striking appeal to Monica’s face and made it so memorable, so different from the patterned face of other screen stars. And still did.
For now, I had been too long away from Keith, and I turned from that fixed, impersonal bronze gaze and walked back through museum corridors. I found a telephone, and Linda said she would come for me right away. When I went outside to wait, I was relieved to see no blue Chevy in sight.
On the drive up the mountain I told Linda that Jason had invited Keith and me to the ranch tomorrow, and she seemed oddly uneasy.
“Don’t you think I should go?” I asked.
“Of course you must go.” Although she spoke quickly, I had a feeling of something being held back.
“Have you changed your mind about my staying here?”
“Of course not!” Again the words came quickly, and I wished I needn’t doubt her sincerity. If I lost Linda as an ally, nothing here would work, and sometimes she puzzled me.
“Is it anything Monica has said?” I asked. “You do sound doubtful.”
Her mood changed abruptly. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t even thinking about Monica. It’s Jason—but never mind that now. Of course you must go out to the ranch.”
Near the gatehouse the blue car had been parked in the shadow of a palm tree, with a man behind the wheel. I didn’t look at him as we drove through, but all my tensions swept back. Owen would never be satisfied with merely watching. Sooner or later he would move, and I would never know what to expect until it happened.
When we reached the terrace before the house, I went inside, bracing myself for a stormy session with my son, who was undoubtedly going to be upset by my hours of absence.
Instead, I found Keith sitting on the tiles of the dining room floor, playing a board game and arguing happily with another small boy.
Helsa Carlson came in from the kitchen, smiling. “This is my grandson, Miss Hamilton. Jonah Fernandez. His family lives in Cathedral City, and sometimes I invite him here to visit me. He’s going to stay for a few days this time.”
Jonah Fernandez! What a wonderful name.
I thanked Helsa warmly for understanding Keith’s need. She seemed a little less guarded with me than she’d been yesterday. Perhaps because Monica appeared to have accepted me?
Jonah was as fair as Keith was dark, revealing his Scandinavian heritage in hair and skin. His eyes were almost black, however, and a Spanish love of fun twinkled in them. The boys’ heads nearly touched as they bent over their game, and for once Keith didn’t jump up anxiously and run to me. He was completely preoccupied, and couldn’t be bothered with grown-ups just then. I blessed Helsa.
When the phone rang in Linda’s office, I found myself starting, as I’d done ever since that disturbing call yesterday. But when Linda had answered, she came to tell me that it was Monica calling from her apartment. I was to visit her right after lunch, and I could bring a notebook if I liked, but no camera or tape recorder.
Luckily, I felt more prepared after a morning in which I’d met Saxon Scott and seen Peggy Smith’s remarkable bust of Monica Arlen in the Desert Museum.
So now my search into the past was to start in earnest, and it must somehow help me to endure and get through the present.
SEVEN
At lunch I told Linda that Saxon Scott had agreed to talk to me.
“I thought you were going to call him for me,” I said. “Why didn’t you?”
Linda shook her head unhappily. “I kept putting it off. I suppose I feel guilty because Monica will hate your seeing him. Sometimes I almost wish you weren’t going to do this book. I’m afraid of all the painful things it may open up for Monica.”
This vacillation on Linda’s part wasn’t going to help. “I must go ahead with it. And of course I’ll need to see a number of people who knew her. Especially Saxon Scott. She has to accept that.”
“I know. You’d better make it clear to her. She’s only thinking about her own role. I can sympathize, since it is her story, and it should be written the way she wants.”
That would bear arguing, but I let it go. No one stood alone, and there was much more to anyone’s life than a single, personal viewpoint. I not only wanted to write this book and make it really good, but I needed to do it for Keith’s sake as well as my own. More and more it loomed in my mind as a means by which we could escape Owen, and perhaps even fight him.
After lunch I left Keith with his new friend, and Linda took me upstairs to Monica’s carved and brass-trimmed door. A formidable door—perhaps symbolic of shutting out the world.
Before she raised the knocker, Linda gave me a last warning. “Monica still doesn’t know about Wally’s scheme for getting her onstage at the Annenberg Theater with Saxon, so it’s up to you to persuade her.”
“It’s not up to me,” I insisted, “but I’ll do what I can if there’s an opportunity.”
“It would be so beautiful if we could get them together on that stage.”
Linda sounded dreamy again, and listening to her I felt the answer—some of it—to her years of devotion might lie in this very dreamworld she could slip into at times. When Linda put aside her wry cynicism, she was still wholeheartedly a fan. That too was a phenomenon I must explore. The devotion, sometimes the fanaticism of fans had its own strange psychological twists. One had only to think of Valentino’s death, and more recently the whole Elvis Presley convulsion. I’d been a fan myself, but never to that extent, and by now my own fantasies had worn a little thin, so I could take a more realistic view—at least some of the time.
When Monica called for us to come in, we stepped into an airy upper level room, open from the mountain at the rear to the view over the town at the front of the house. The sun had passe
d its zenith so that a softer light than that of full morning glowed outside the stretch of eastern balcony.
The room was pleasant and comfortable, with no particular effort at “decoration.” It looked like a room that had grown into itself over the years. The sofa, with its plump cushions, was beige, and so were two of the chairs. Only yellow and green cushions here and there lent color. Between round Moroccan rugs, the parquet floor gleamed in contrasting woods, and eggshell bookcases carried out the sense of light, as did walls and ceiling. There were a few pictures, framed originals, surprisingly modern, including a Roy Lichtenstein of an aviator. These seemed to indicate that Monica kept up to some extent with what was going on in the world. Strangely, there was not a single photograph from the Hollywood years. Because all that time was lost to her and had become too painful to recall, ending as it had?
This afternoon she had chosen to play Monica Arlen again, gowning herself in a flowing white silk caftan, caught in at the waist by a braided gold cord. Again, her makeup had been carefully applied, though today she wore no chestnut wig. Her natural gray hair was worn in the old-fashioned pageboy style of her pictures—now being revived as smart and modern. Daylight was far from kind to her, and nothing could hide the marks of age when she was seen close up. Yet all this became unimportant because of the inner illusion she could create of a far younger, more beautiful woman—that woman I had seen so often on a screen. She had the confidence, the air, to carry it off, so that the make-believe never seemed pitiful.
Beside her, the royal Siamese lay curled on a green cushion, her blue eyes surveying Linda and me as supplicants before a throne. Her two attendant angels, with the plural names, Seraphim and Cherubim, played background chorus to Annabella’s center stage. Both cat and mistress knew their own importance.
On the balcony outside, Ralph Reese sat smoking as he stared idly over the town. He didn’t trouble to look around as Linda and I came into the room.
With her own familiar grace, Monica rose to greet me, her hands outstretched and all her lovely charm in evidence. Her movements were exactly as I remembered—and she remembered—making no concession to debilitating age.
Watching her, I knew again that an honest and revealing biography of Monica Arlen was going to be difficult to do. In the beginning she would play exactly the role she chose, and no other. She would tell me what she wanted me to know, and nothing else. The problem would be to get past the actress to whatever real woman might exist. The “real” woman was full of secrets, perhaps some of them dark and haunted—but those were the secrets I must bring to light, whether I used them in print or not.
Linda started to leave, but Monica nodded to her graciously. “Please stay. I want you to hear this.”
I almost wished Linda would go, now that she’d begun to waver about the book, but she hesitated, and Monica spoke more sharply.
“Sit down, do. And don’t fidget. After all, you’re the one who knows where every picture and paper is kept, and you may help me fill in when there are things I’ve forgotten.” She pursed her mouth at me. “At my age, there’s so much that I forget.”
Even as she spoke, I knew this was no admission of her years, but her own little joke. This woman would forget nothing that she chose to remember. She was merely producing an act for whatever she wanted to dismiss.
Linda sat down, still uneasy. “What about him?” She nodded toward Ralph.
“He doesn’t matter. Goodness knows what happens inside his head—if anything ever does.”
Linda sat in a chair across the room where she wouldn’t intrude, and Monica took her place again on the beige sofa, stroking Annabella with one hand and picking up the famous iris with the other. She hadn’t troubled to lower her voice as she spoke, but if Ralph heard her he gave no sign, teetering back in his chair and smiling slightly, as though the world and everything in it amused him. More than anyone else in this house he made me uncomfortable, and I mustn’t make the mistake of discounting him.
I’d brought a loose-leaf notebook and soft pencils, and I got ready to make notes. There’d been no time to jot down questions ahead of this interview, but I knew that enough would occur to me. I mustn’t be too provocative to start with, lest I alarm her.
“What do you want to know?” Monica asked. “Where do you want to begin?” Annabella made one of her plaintive remarks, and Monica tapped her lightly on the skull. “Now, now, Annie,” she said, “tell me later.” And then to me, “Annie does tell me things, you know. I’m sure she has second sight. Of course she’s had a lot to say about you.”
I wasn’t sure how to take this. “For instance?” I prompted.
“Oh, just that you spell TROUBLE in capital letters. But I expect she’s jealous.”
Annabella regarded me balefully and began washing a paw with a raspy pink tongue. I suspected that no one else would dare call her “Annie.” Close to the sofa, Cherubim cuffed Seraphim, or perhaps it was vice versa, but neither made a sound.
“I’m glad to see you’re wearing my ring,” Monica went on. “It should be seen, and not hidden away in a jewel box.”
“I’m proud to wear it. But just for a little while. Then I’ll return it. Right now perhaps we can start with your childhood. I know very little about your early life, so I’ll be glad of anything you want to tell me.”
The iris nodded in emphasis as Monica waved it. “I don’t want to talk about my childhood. All that bores me. Linda has plenty of printed information out of the past. Ask her.”
“Some of it may not be accurate,” Linda objected mildly. “Studios used to make up what they pleased for publicity releases, and not all the fan magazines based their stories on fact. Not any more than Hedda and Louella did. Rumor was good enough.”
I had to persist. “Just a few details. You were born in Desert Hot Springs, not far from here?”
“It’s all a matter of record,” Monica said impatiently. “Even the dates. I’ve never lied about my age.”
Linda helped me. “She was born on her parents’ ranch near where Desert Hot Springs is now. It didn’t exist as a town until the forties.”
“My mother told me that you grew up there until your mother took you to Hollywood?”
“What difference does it make? My life didn’t really begin until I got into pictures.”
“Something made you ambitious, drove you. I remember reading about how gutsy you were as a young girl. You always did the unexpected—things that brought you attention in the right places, so you could prove your talent. What do you suppose gave you that drive?” I was always more interested in whys than in wheres and whats.
“Being a child wasn’t a happy time for me. I don’t want to think about it.”
A sense of kinship touched me. I hadn’t had a happy childhood either, and when I was growing up, she had been my beacon.
“Who did you look up to?” I asked. “What drew you to Hollywood?”
She considered for a moment. “I suppose it was having the right sort of face that took me there. And wanting to get away from where I was.”
Again she let the question drop. Perhaps I could find someone around Desert Hot Springs who would remember her family—my family—and remember her. If there was concealment of her girlhood, then I had to dig it out. But right now I must find a way to start her talking more freely.
“This morning I saw that marvelous bronze bust of you in the museum.”
She smiled almost warmly. “I suppose you know that Peggy Smith did that? It’s considered her best work, though I’m afraid she only used her talent when the whim moved her. A great natural gift, but untrained. Everyone kept telling her that. Once she did a little stone nymph and a fawn that I always liked. They used to stand in the garden of Cadenza—my home in Beverly Hills.”
“The same ones that are in your garden on the mountain here?”
“You’ve seen them then? Yes, I brought those two with me when I moved here for good. Peggy spent too much time on me. She was the only one w
ho stood up against my—my enemies.”
“Why should anyone be your enemy?”
Monica shook her head darkly. “That was a precarious world. And terribly hard for women. It wasn’t always talent that gave you the first step up. We all walked tightropes, even after we were established. The studios owned us, and they could discard us if we lost our popularity. I fought for all my chances. One slip and you started down. Then, suddenly you had no friends.”
She must be remembering the time after Mirage.
“But you never slipped,” I said quickly. “Mirage was your greatest role. You could have gone on as long as you wished.”
“No! I was always tied to Saxon—to those sentimental comedies. If it hadn’t been for him … Anyway, I didn’t want it anymore after that horrible thing happened. I suppose I blamed myself afterwards. And that’s been hard to live with.”
It was time to be provocative, and she’d given me an opening. “You mean your friend Peggy’s suicide?”
Monica closed her eyes and let the iris droop. “That’s what everyone called it—suicide. But I was never convinced.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, startled.
“Never mind now. Let’s go on.”
Ralph left his chair and came in from the balcony. “Hey,” he said to Linda, “what’s that blue car doing down by the gate? It’s been there on and off ever since morning, and just now the fellow driving it got out and disappeared toward the gatehouse.”
Linda gave me a quick look that said, Don’t upset Monica, and stood up. “I’ll call the guard at the gatehouse right away, just in case. I can use the phone in my office.”
“Maybe I should go down there and see what’s up,” Ralph said.
“Yes, you do that.” Monica dismissed him with a wave of the iris.
When they’d both gone, she sat silently, staring at nothing. I still wanted to know what she’d meant in her hint about Peggy’s death.
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