“Well?” Lester asked again.
I tossed the magazine down on the table. “I’ve never taken charity,” is all I said. I went back to stirring the beans.
Molly picked up the magazine and began to read out loud.
“‘Included among the nearly 500 bit players and extras in MGM’s The Great Ziegfeld are two pioneering movie queens, Florence Lawrence and Florence Turner. So unimportant to the story are the characters they enact that the two are denied any billing.’”
She stopped reading and looked over at me. “Extras are too important,” she said, all pouty. “We give a film its veri—veris—”
“Verisimilitude,” I finished for her, the heat rising from the stove to my face. That’s the line the studio gave us.
“Yeah, we make pictures real,” Molly said.
“Molly,” Lester said gently, “put the article down.”
“No, go on,” I told her. “Read the rest of it. Read every last bit of it.”
Lester sighed. Molly picked up the magazine, searched for her place, and resumed her recitation.
“‘Neither do you find the names of Florence Lawrence or Florence Turner in the press sheet thoughtfully prepared and provided by the MGM publicity department—although ample attention is paid to “Hollywood’s shapeliest atmospheric players,” the young girls recruited for the chorus.
“‘What must have Miss Lawrence and Miss Turner been thinking as they found themselves relegated to the nameless “potter’s field,” while the publicity staff’s manpower concentrated upon the “shapeliest eleven”—whose assorted blondes, brunettes, and redheads were as yet unborn when our two Florences were queens of the box office?
“‘Once great stars. Today, extra women accepting charity in exchange for character roles. Theirs is the tragedy of Hollywood.’”
Molly put down the magazine. Lester gave her a look.
I served the beans. Molly put one forkful to her mouth and then began to cry. Just sat there in her place and cried loudly, like a baby in a high chair, clutching her fork still in the air. I finally reached over and took the fork from her hand, setting it down on her plate. I found the napkin on her lap and held it to her nose. She was beginning to slobber.
“Go on,” I said. “Go to your room.”
She pushed herself away from the table and ran across the kitchen to her little room. Lester and I could hear her muffled sobs into her pillow.
“The most important thing in this business is apparently growing old gracefully,” I said, holding up the magazine and looking at the fresh, unlined face of Bette Davis. “You can’t do that on the cover of a fan magazine.”
“Flo, don’t let such things wear you down,” Lester said. “You were the greatest of them all. The very first. All the rest live in your shadow.”
“Molly didn’t read everything,” I said, avoiding his words. “They quoted Pickford. She was the first to take my place, you know.”
“She never had what you had,” Lester insisted.
“Listen. She tells the reporter, ‘I made up my mind to step into the wings while the audience was still applauding.’” I put down the magazine. “Now she lives in splendor at Pickfair, Hollywood’s royal dowager.” I looked around my tiny cottage. “And we’re here eating beans.”
Oh, I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself. I really wasn’t. Whenever the pain didn’t have me by the throat, I counted my blessings. Who I felt sorry for was Molly, whose sobs we had to listen to all through dinner.
“I suppose she thinks it could be her,” Lester said as we cleared away our plates.
I didn’t respond. How many years had Molly been in Hollywood by now? Two? Almost three? She hadn’t yet landed a single speaking part in a film. The one she thought she had landed ended up on the cutting room floor, as so many of them do. I suppose she did see herself in my situation, twenty, thirty years from now. But the difference was, I had tasted it. I had been there. I had been on the cover of those damn fan magazines. She never had.
And never would.
That night I sat up with her for a change. She lay in her bed unable to sleep, plagued by fits of tears.
I was telling her about my marriages. I’m not sure how we’d gotten onto the subject, but my tales seemed to distract her from her crying jags.
“When I discovered Charles with that woman,” I explained, “I had two choices: I could close my eyes to it, or I could kick him out.”
“So you kicked him out,” she said.
“No. I closed my eyes for as long as I could.” I laughed. “I kept them squeezed shut, in fact—so tight that I barely saw the sun rise and set.” I took her cold, soft, tiny hands in my own. “You see, I was Florence Woodring. At least, being her, I didn’t have to face who I’d be otherwise.”
“I don’t understand,” she said softly.
I sighed. “It was the same later, when I married Bolton. Oh, boy, what was I thinking then? If I’d thought Charles was a mistake, Bolton exceeded all my worst expectations.”
“Why did you marry him?”
“Who knows? Maybe it was just my ego. Someone wanted me again. Charles had finally left me—I didn’t leave him. He left me because the other woman wasn’t content. She wanted to be Mrs. Woodring. So what could I do? I divorced him and found somebody else. Bolton.” I spit the name as if there were fuzz on my tongue.
“Who was he?” Molly asked.
“Nobody. An unemployed actor. So he said. A boy. A spoiled little boy. I never really knew him. It was all over so quickly.”
“He hit you, too,” Molly said. “That’s what you’ve said.”
I nodded. “Right from the start. We rushed out to Arizona, so we wouldn’t have to wait. Got hitched up by a justice of the peace in the middle of the night. Oh, we were tempestuous. That’s the word. I was so happy, so thrilled that a man was paying me attention again, after Charles’s betrayal. Bolton was young, handsome. Younger than me anyway and handsome by my standards, which had fallen pretty low by then.”
I laughed at myself. Molly reached over and took my hand.
“And that night, our wedding night, in our hotel, he slapped me so hard my teeth cut my cheek. There was blood all over the wall. I wasn’t very happy performing my conjugal duty after that, as you can well imagine. I tried to run off. But he wouldn’t let me.”
Molly’s hands tightened their grip on mine. “You mean—he raped you?”
“If you believe husbands can be rapists, as I do.” I smiled down at her. “I thought that it would be better when we got back to Los Angeles, that I could just settle into being Mrs. Henry Bolton. Anything not to be Florence Lawrence again. But it went on that same way for a month and a half, and finally I ran away, filed for divorce. Three months it lasted, from start to finish.”
“Oh, Flo.”
I shrugged. “There was nothing left for me to do but petition the court to go back to my maiden name.” I looked off toward the window, where a full moon seemed to fill the sky. “Which, on the record, at least, was Lawrence. Once more, I had to go back to being Florence Lawrence. It was the only way to survive.” I paused. “And I’ve been her ever since.”
“That’s when Mr. Mayer hired you?”
I nodded. “Florence Lawrence wasn’t worth much by then, but I found I could still trade on her name with people like Mr. Mayer, who had long memories and enough guilt.”
Molly sat up, her own pain forgotten for the moment. “But what about Harry, Flo? Wasn’t Harry good to you?”
“That’s enough talk for tonight, missy.” I ran my hand over her brow. “Try to sleep. Just remember: Margaret Butz can be whoever she wants to be. Don’t wait until it’s too late, when you can’t go back.”
I kissed her gently on the lips. She reached up with her frail little arms to encircle my neck. I held her for a second, then let her go.
They wonder if I could really have taken that poison. If I could really have gone that far, been that depressed, that miserable, and tried to take my
own life.
Of course I could have. It’s actually quite easy to imagine. I thought about it often. Pills, bullets, gas. Whatever might work. Hadn’t my father killed himself? Maybe it ran in the family.
The thought was a constant presence in those months, when the pain would suddenly arrive in the middle of the night, like a drunken husband, angry and insistent on having his way. I had no way of fighting it off. It would simply pin me down, its hot horrible breath on my cheeks, its wet, burning tongue slithering down my neck, between my breasts. I was helpless before it. Death seemed a sweet alternative.
Florence Bridgewood, in her short time on earth, had never known such pain. But I had none of her resources, none of her means. She wasn’t even someone I remembered anymore. So I just lay there in my bed, letting the pain have its way with me.
“Sometimes I think about taking a gun to my head,” I admitted to Marian, my dotty old neighbor.
Her old face had lifted in animated shock. She was the daughter of Baptists, after all. Such things were sinful even to speak of—even if she secretly delighted in hearing about them.
“Florence!” she scolded me. “How can you say such things? Suicides are the same as murderers—left to dwell among the unsaved.”
She sounded like my grandmother. Looked a little like her, too, with her knotted white hair and burlap skin. Marian was a dear old lady, one who could knock back her gin with as much ease as Bob and his young bucks, but who, to all outside appearances, was a very prim and proper old maid.
“Oh, come now, Marian,” I chided. “When you’ve seen as much death as I have, staring you in the face, none of it seems so shocking anymore.”
“You sound like a cold-blooded killer,” she snapped. “I won’t hear any more of this. You’re just down in the dumps—that’s all.”
It was Sunday morning. Marian and I sat at my kitchen table sipping coffee. The birds were busy chattering in the ficus trees. I’d spent a fitful night, tossing and writhing, the headaches taunting me, one moment wracking my body with pain, the next disappearing into the darkness.
There was a knock. I spied Lester through the checkered curtains on the door.
Marian gave me a sly wink. “Your beau,” she whispered.
“Please, Marian,” I said. “Lester’s my doctor.”
“Who’s always making house calls.”
I frowned at her, then stood, with some sharp difficulty, to answer the door.
“Hello, Lester,” I said.
In his hands, he held a glass-covered plate with a chocolate cake inside. “I can’t stay,” he said. “I’m on my way to church. But I wanted to check in with you and Molly.”
“She’s still sleeping,” I told him. “But the headaches kept me up most of the night.”
He just shook his head sadly. Poor Lester. How badly he wanted to rescue me, to find a way out of the maze for me. But all he could do was stand there in front of me, impotently, shaking his head back and forth.
“Here, take this,” he said. “I thought maybe it would cheer you up. I bought it at the church bake sale.”
I smiled, accepting the cake. How kind he was.
“Helloooo, Lester,” Marian sang, waving her hand from the table.
“Good morning, Marian,” he said in reply.
I looked down at the dish. I could see through the glass how carefully the baker had swirled the frosting. I reached up and kissed Lester on his pink cheek. He blushed, of course.
“You’re still my heroine, Flo,” he said huskily.
His heroine. In his eyes, I wasn’t a pathetic old woman eking out a life in pictures, drinking and smoking too much, plagued by suspicious headaches and spells of weariness. No, I was still The Biograph Girl, whom he loved most in the world—even more than Jesus, he’d written all those years ago.
“Take care of yourself now, Flo,” he told me. “And Molly, too. I’ll be back tomorrow to check on the both of you.”
“Thank you, Lester.” I smiled up at him. “And thanks for the cake.”
“Good-bye, Marian,” he called.
“Toodle-loo, Lester.” She waved her handkerchief after him.
She was standing behind me now. I felt as if I might cry, watching him walk back down past the dewy roses and gnarled cacti to his car. I turned and handed the cake to Marian. “Put this on the table, will you?” I asked.
She took it. I watched her—and it was good that I did, because she misjudged the distance of the table and almost dropped the cake on the floor.
“Marian!” I shouted, and despite my pain, I lunged over in time to catch the cake and set it safely on the table myself. “My goodness, Marian. When will you get your eyes checked? You need glasses! You’re practically blind! I keep telling you.”
She lifted her old chin haughtily. She’d never admit to being nearsighted. Dear, vain old thing. Sometimes, in the yard, she’d call over, “Yoo-hoo, Molly!” when it would be me hanging out the clothes. Me.
And it wasn’t easy to mistake me for Molly.
Another bad night. At five A.M. I rose. Somehow the nights were the worse, and I often cut them as short as I could.
Even in the hazy light of dawn, I could see Molly had been up during the night. The top of Lester’s cake dish had been removed and still sat at the far side of the table. I could see a slice had been cut, crumbs trailing across the table to an empty plate. I smiled to myself. She must be feeling better if she was eating cake in the middle of the night.
I sat down at the table myself. Outside the sun was rising higher in the sky. The light behind the drawn shades was growing stronger.
Cake for breakfast? Oh, why not, Flo? I told myself. Live a little.
I found the knife Molly had left on the table and cut into the cake.
I can still remember how perfect it was. How rich, like devil’s food is supposed to be. Sinful. I sliced just a small wedge, and I rested it in my hand before transferring it onto Molly’s crumb-strewn plate. I decided to go full speed ahead—dispense with a fork, eat it with my hands.
I broke off a hunk and brought it to my mouth. So delicious. So rich, so fudgy—
But something else.
Crunchy—on my tongue—
I looked down at the table.
The crumbs littered there were moving.
I snapped up the shade behind me. The sun streamed in. The shade rattled around and around, sending a terrible noise and shudder throughout the room.
Ants.
The cake—the table—my hands—were covered with ants.
I spit what was left in my mouth back onto the plate, standing up frantically, knocking over the chair.
“Oh! Oh! Dear God!”
Ants. Everywhere. Big, fat, round-bellied black ants. Crawling out of the cake, down the legs of the table, across the floor.
I screamed. My fingers were in my mouth, madly scraping at my tongue. I screamed again and again until Molly finally came running out of her room and threw her arms around me. We both collapsed to the floor and cried there together until there was no more air left in our lungs to cry.
The Present
Oprah Winfrey stands in front of her studio audience with her arms spread wide. “Today, more and more people are living to be 100 or older,” she says. “In fact, they are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population. Today, there are 61,000 people past the century mark—imagine that. 61,000. And by 2020, that number will more than triple.”
The camera pans the audience. Mostly women in their thirties and forties, a good mix of white and black.
“The very concept of ‘old’ is being redefined,” the talk show hostess continues. “Listen to what one geriatrician from Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital says: ‘Eighty-five is nothing. Eighty-five is young. Eighty-five is fifteen years away from 100.’”
She laughs. So does her audience. “Living to 100 is no longer a quirk of nature,” she says. “But rather, it is a possibility to strive for. A goal. Obviously, the rate of disability is
high among this segment of the population, but even that is changing. In talking about increasing the average life span, doctors aren’t looking to simply prolong dependency. They’re talking about people living full, active, rich lives to age 100—and beyond.
“Today we are honored to have with us a number of centenarians, all of whom are thriving—enjoying life and continuing to contribute to society. We are pleased to be joining forces with a nationwide campaign led by the National Institutes of Health, designed to encourage healthy lifestyles and push the average life expectancy higher in the twenty-first century.
“And to help us kick off the ‘Dare to be 100’ campaign, I am thrilled to have with us perhaps the nation’s most famous centenarian—the first star of them all, The Biograph Girl—Miss Florence Lawrence!”
The audience cheers. The theme music swells. The camera pulls in for a closer shot of Oprah. Seated now beside her is Flo. Her entrance wasn’t shown on camera; her walk today was deemed a bit too shaky by the producers. The cheers rise in volume as Flo acknowledges the audience with a little wave of her hand.
“Her lipstick is too subtle,” Richard says. “What’s wrong with scarlet?”
Rex brings him a bagel with cream cheese and they settle down on the floor in front of the TV in their hotel room. “And that wig,” he grimaces. “She looks like a cross between Jennifer Aniston and Margot Kidder in the Superman movies.”
“Yeah,” Richard agrees. “What’s wrong with her real hair?”
“She looks tired,” Rex says. “Poor Flo.”
Richard just nods.
“Dare to be 107!” Oprah is saying as a stagehand wheels out an enormous birthday cake, one hundred and seven candles flickering.
The audience sings “Happy Birthday” to Flo. She laughs. “Careful you don’t burn the damn place down,” she quips.
But there’s no suggestion that she attempt to blow out the candles.
“Flo, you beat the odds, girl,” Oprah’s telling her after they’ve settled down. “Because according to statistics, a newborn girl born at the turn of the century in the United States or Canada had a life expectancy of 51 years. So you rule.”
The Biograph Girl Page 39