The Biograph Girl

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The Biograph Girl Page 53

by William J. Mann


  Ben feels suddenly adrift, as if nothing makes sense, as if everything he’s ever known or believed in has all at once been disproven. Mom, Dad—what was Richard talking about? They left us nothing between ourselves.

  It’s true that Ben has to go way, way back to remember being close to Richard, back to kindergarten, first, second grade—way back before the comparisons and the competitions began, when life was simple and they were just two little identically dressed boys, catching pollywogs, eating Mars bars, laughing as Bunny Rabbit dropped the Ping-Pong balls (yet again) on Captain Kangaroo.

  Maybe I haven’t always been the greatest brother either, Ben thinks. And wouldn’t it be nice if—

  He snorts. Who the hell is he kidding? That goddamn Richard has got some plan—some plan that surely involves screwing Ben. That’s the way it’s always been, and there was no reason to think it was going to change.

  He punches in Xerxes’s number back in New York. It’s close to three A.M. there. He doesn’t care. He gets Xerxes’s machine. “Pick up!” Ben shouts. “Wake up and pick up the phone!”

  “Wha …?” comes Xerxes’s groggy voice, cutting off the machine.

  “You’re gonna see Flo crack on the news tomorrow,” he tells him. “The Castro Theater was a fiasco.”

  “What? What?”

  “She just broke down. Then my fucking brother jumps up on the stage like some goddamn Harrison Ford or something. But we got the story out of her. The full story about the girl.”

  “Richard jumped up on the stage?”

  “Are you listening to me? We got the story. She didn’t kill her. At least, not directly. But I think a fair case can be made to say she manipulated the situation. It’s ambiguous, but I like ambiguous screenplays. Let the audience decide.”

  “I’m not following,” Xerxes tells him.

  “Look. Glick was in the audience. He saw her fall apart. You need to call him first thing in the morning. Tell him that we’ve got the full story, that I’ll do a rewrite as soon as I can. Jean’s taking Flo off the tour. It’s done, kaput.”

  “What about ‘Dare to be 100?’”

  “Screw them. The point is to get the film into production as soon as possible. We’ve got to work fast while all this is still news. Before people stop giving a shit about Florence Lawrence, after she’s back in Buffalo hidden away.”

  “So how did she do it?” Xerxes asks. “How’d she get them to think the girl was her?”

  “It’s so simple you won’t believe it. It’s not too far from what she’s always been saying. They made a mistake, and she took advantage of it. But this Molly—she was unstable. A flake. And Flo encouraged her depression, and then didn’t call an—”

  He turns.

  Jean is sitting in a chair behind him, watching him. Her face is white.

  He swallows, staring at her.

  “Ben? Are you there?” Xerxes’s voice crackles over the phone.

  “I’ll talk to you later.” Ben finds his throat terribly dry.

  “What is it? What’s—”

  Ben hangs up the phone.

  “How long have you been there?” he asks Jean.

  “From the time you were screaming into Xerxes’s machine to pick up the phone,” she says.

  He feels his neck tighten. The sides of his torso suddenly become damp. He can’t say anything else. He fights the feeling that he’s back in grade school and Sister Mary Bernardine has discovered him in the boy’s lav, smoking cigarettes, and there’s no use trying to squirm out of it, because the evidence is hanging in the air.

  This is not like that, he tells himself. I’m not a sixth-grade kid anymore. This isn’t Sister Mary Bernardine. It’s Jean, and I’ve kissed her, even though she’s a nun. I’ve kissed her and I might even be starting to like her—like her a lot—even if she is a nun.

  “How could you, Ben?” she asks.

  He’s unnerved by how calm she is. She’s just sitting there, her hands folded in her lap. Her face is white and her lips are drawn tight, but otherwise she seems a model of poise and composure. She repeats her question when he doesn’t answer, showing only mild pique. “How could you, Ben?”

  “How could I what?” He tries to smile. “Look. Don’t get worked up about how I sounded with Xerxes. That’s just agent talk. Tough Hollywood trade talk.” He laughs uneasily. “Macho games. Silly, really. I’m still committed to—”

  “To what, Ben?” Jean stands, approaches him.

  He tenses. Goddamn, he thinks. It’s just like Richard earlier. He recoils a bit, instinctively afraid she’s going to haul off and sock him.

  “I’m—I’m committed to writing a script that will be fair—and honest.”

  “Let me read it, Ben.”

  “Well, I’m not really comf—”

  “Let me read it!” she screams, causing him to jump back.

  Now her fury catches up with her. “I don’t give a—how would you say it, Ben?—a good, long shit if you’re comfortable or not. You get that script right now and let me read it.” She folds her arms across her chest.

  He starts to protest again, but stops. He walks over to his briefcase, pops it open, withdraws a bound photocopy of the screenplay and hands it to Jean.

  “It’s still a draft,” he says weakly.

  “I gathered that from your conversation. There’s still a case to be made that Flo manipulated the situation, that she killed Molly indirectly.” She looks down at the title page.

  SILENT SHADOWS:

  THE TRUE STORY OF FLORENCE LAWRENCE

  BY BENJAMIN CARTWRIGHT SHEEHAN

  She settles down into a chair and begins to read. Ben paces anxiously behind her. She doesn’t get through many pages before she puts it down.

  “Flo never agreed to let you talk about the baby,” she says, looking back at him.

  “I had to, Jean. I had to include that.”

  “But this is too painful. You can’t do this to her. She’s held on to that secret for eighty years. What right do you have to expose it?”

  He makes a sound in disbelief. “What right do I have? What right does any filmmaker—any biographer of any public figure—have to expose anything? That’s just the way it’s done, Jean.”

  She stands, approaching him again. “Well, I don’t like it, Ben. I don’t like the way it’s done.” She puts her face close next to Ben’s. “It’s not my way—or Flo’s either. We all carry around secrets, Ben. We all have parts of our lives we keep inside ourselves. That we treasure or grieve or fear. You want to take those parts of Flo’s life that she’s kept so close to her all these decades and throw them out there to the public—like scraps of flesh to a pack of ferocious dogs.”

  They just stare at each other.

  “Well, I say no, Ben. Our contract gives Flo and I script approval. And I’m afraid I’ll have to call this one in.”

  “Actually,” Ben says, his face hard, “you only have the right to be consulted. And Flo’s a public figure again. There’s nothing to stop me from writing another script about her outside of any contractual arrangement with you.”

  She seems taken aback by his rigidity. “You would do that, Ben?”

  His icy demeanor cracks. “I don’t want to, Jean. I don’t want to do anything to hurt Flo. Or you. You’ve just got to trust me, Jean. Please. I—I don’t want to lose you.”

  “Then tear up the script,” she says.

  “I can’t,” he says.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s already sold.”

  It seems to take a moment for the words to penetrate. Then Jean asks, “It’s already sold?”

  Ben nods.

  “Don’t say any more to me,” she tells him, dropping the script to the floor as if she was suddenly afraid of being infected by it. “You’ll be hearing from our lawyer.”

  She turns to leave the room, then stops. She looks back at Ben. Her face is red now and her eyes filled with fire and gleaming with tears. “I did trust you, Ben,” she tells hi
m, and he knows she’s not crying for Flo now. “More than that. I believed in you. Believed you to be a man of honor. A man of compassion. An artist, Ben. I believed you to be an artist. I even”—Her voice cracks, and she can’t finish. She looks down at the floor, then back up at him. “And it was even more than that, too, Ben.”

  She leaves him standing in the middle of the room. A breeze from the open window catches the pages of his script on the floor and blows them gently, one by one, as if an invisible hand were turning them.

  “Hey, Nooker! Anita!”

  Richard encircles both of them for a three-way hug. He’s just come outside the hotel, where Jean and Flo are waiting for him in a limo. Rex and Anita have just stepped out of a cab.

  “I saw what happened to Flo on the news,” Anita tells him.

  Rex nods. “We both did. We were watching it in L.A. last night after my show.”

  “Is she all right?” Anita asks.

  “She’s fine now,” Richard tells them.

  “Are you sure?” Rex asks. “She seemed so distraught.”

  Anita’s face clouds with anger. “What have they done to her?”

  “Well, whatever it was, we got to her in time,” Richard says. He looks over at Rex. God, it was good to see him. “Hey, how was closing night?”

  “Terrific,” Anita answers for him. “Ovation after ovation. I flew in just so I could see it.”

  “Isn’t she fab?” Rex winks over at Anita.

  “More fab than ever,” Richard says, giving her a kiss. “Hey, come on with us to dinner. It’s Flo’s last night before she heads back east.”

  “Where’s Ben?” Anita asks, a little apprehensive.

  Richard shrugs. “Persona non grata, I’m afraid. Come on. Get in the car.”

  It’s a limo that Richard’s paying for. Okay, so he had to put in on credit, but it was Flo’s last night, after all. Might as well live it up.

  Flo is delighted to see Rex and Anita. They reach over and each hug her in turn, telling her how lovely she’s looking. “In this old dress?” she says. “Who gave this one to me, Jeannie?”

  “That’s Calvin Klein,” Jean tells her.

  Flo winks. “You should see the Bob Mackie number back in the hotel,” she tells them. “That one I like. All sorts of sequins.”

  “How about your hat?”

  Flo smiles. She’s wearing a black sequined cloche. “Oh, this was mine. Bought it right here in San Francisco in 1939. Thought it would be appropriate to wear.”

  “Well, you look magnificent,” Rex tells her.

  They all concur. Flo eats it up.

  “It’s good to have you back, sweetheart,” Richard whispers to Rex, slipping his arm around him as the limo driver starts the engine.

  “Were you a good boy without me?” Rex asks, nuzzling his boyfriend’s neck with his nose.

  “Nooker,” Richard says, “I’m only good with you.”

  Jean watches them. How much in love they are. Even after six years. How lovely. How rare.

  She has tried very hard not to think of Ben. Not to think of how vulnerable she made herself with him. Not to think of how wrong were her instincts. He conned me. He used me. He lied to me.

  Her instincts have never been so wrong. That’s what threw her for the farthest loop. Not even the heartbreak was as terrible as that. Worse than anything was the fear that her instincts had failed her, that she could no longer trust her own heart. “It’s the one thing that never fails you,” Anne Drew had always told her. “Your heart is the one thing that’s always reliable.”

  But hadn’t Anne’s heart deceived her as well? Hadn’t Anne believed Jean’s love for Victor had somehow crowded her out of Jean’s soul?

  “How have you been, Sister?”

  Jean looks up. Anita Murawski’s pretty, pleasant face—too much mascara, perhaps, but pleasant nonetheless—smiles over at her.

  How could Jean tell her? That she had fallen in love with the man Anita once loved—and likely still did? That he had turned out to be a deceitful louse? That he had caused her to doubt the one thing in this world she had never doubted before?

  “It’s been—well, it’s been a bit of a bumpy ride,” she tells Anita.

  “I guess so,” Anita agrees. “But you’re going home now.”

  Jean looks over at Flo. Yes, I’m going home. We’re going home together. Maybe St. Mary’s isn’t where I want to be, but for now, home is wherever Flo is. For however much longer she has left, no matter what comes out, no matter how many movies people make about her or books they write.

  “Yes,” Jean agrees. “We’re going home.”

  She takes Flo’s hand in her own.

  They cross the Golden Gate Bridge, resplendent in its span across the bay in the late afternoon sunshine. There’s no fog for miles around. The orange-gold spires of the bridge streak upward into the blue sky, and Flo strains to look up at them.

  “It’s so beautiful, isn’t it?” she says. “I remember the first time I saw this bridge. I was awestruck. It hadn’t been built when I first came out, you know, back before the earthquake. But when I returned, I thought the bridge was so lovely that in some ways it made up for all of what was lost.”

  She sighs, looking back inside the car around at all of them. “There’s only one place in the world more beautiful than San Francisco, you know.”

  Richard grins. “Santorini—right, Flo?”

  “You’ve been listening,” she says to him.

  “To everything,” he tells her.

  Their eyes hold.

  They enjoy a lovely dinner in a quiet, secluded restaurant up the side of Mount Tamalpais. The soft fir trees cloak them as they eat, shielding their laughter from the outside world. Anita regales them with stories of her last days on the soap opera, in which her character contracts a rare South Seas malady and dies just as she is about to reveal the identity of her real mother. She reenacts the scene, leaning back melodramatically in her chair. Flo laughs and laughs, smoking practically a hundred cigarettes.

  “You’re the only person I tolerate cigarette smoke from, Flo,” Rex tells her.

  “Actually, I’ve considered giving them up,” Flo says. They all look startled. “They say every month you don’t smoke adds a month onto your life. I figure if I stop now, I might just break even.”

  They laugh.

  “Well, I have some news,” Anita says.

  “Tell us,” Flo instructs.

  “You’ll never guess who took me to dinner right before I left New York.”

  “Who? Who?” they all ask.

  “Jameson Collins.”

  “The film guy?” Richard asks, incredulous.

  “The very same.” Anita grins.

  “Well, he didn’t waste any time, did he?” Rex laughs.

  Flo twinkles. “You never know about those bookish types.”

  “And isn’t it a coincidence you’re both here in San Francisco?” Richard observes.

  “Well, he has asked me to a little function for the Academy,” Anita says, batting her eyelashes.

  “That would be the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,” Rex says.

  Anita winks. “Which reminds me. He told me that the Academy wants to give you an honorary Oscar, Flo.”

  Flo grins. “Well, isn’t that something? I remember when Mr. Griffith got his. They quoted him in the papers as saying, ‘What art? What science?’”

  They all laugh.

  “You seem like your old self again, Flo,” Rex tells her.

  “Do I?” She seems pleased by this. “If only I could stay this way.”

  “You can,” Jean tells her.

  Flo just sighs. She looks back over at Rex. “What about you?” she asks. “You’ve been sick. Don’t lie to me.”

  He shrugs. “Not really sick. Just adjusting to some new meds.”

  She narrows her eyes at him. “I remember the influenza epidemic of 1918,” Flo says. “I thought it was the most horrible thing that could eve
r happen.” She pauses. “I never could have imagined AIDS.”

  Rex raises his eyebrows in surprise. “How did you know I have AIDS, Flo?” he asks.

  “Oh, please,” she tells him. “I’ve lived a long time. There’s not much I can’t figure, can’t deduce from the clues available.”

  Jean looks over at Rex. Flo might have known, but it’s clear she hadn’t guessed. “Are you … doing all right?” she asks.

  Rex grins. “To be honest, Sister, things change so fast it’s hard to say. These new drugs have done wonders but they’ve also added on some rather unexpected fatty deposits. Now, if it were just a case of vanity, I’d say I could live with it. Even with this little old hump on my back. But it does things to your cholesterol—and that in turn increases the risk of heart disease.”

  He sighs. “I figure there’s always going to be something in life, so there’s no use getting too worked up about it.” He laughs. “So to answer your question: Yes, I think I’m doing all right.”

  Richard takes his hand under the table.

  “Well, listen, Sexy Rexy,” Flo says. “I’ve had a hump on my back for twenty years and it hasn’t slowed me down a whit.” She smiles wistfully. “All right. Maybe just a whit.”

  “You’re my inspiration, Flo,” Rex tells her and blows her a kiss.

  “Hold on to life,” Flo says, more to herself than any of them there. “As I used to hear Johnny Weissmuller say, swinging over the Tarzan river, ‘The main thing is not to let go of the vine.’”

  They all laugh yet again.

  Flo’s still looking at Rex. “When it’s time,” she says softly, “you’ll know when to let go.”

  They fall quiet for a moment. Then Flo lifts her eyes from the table and laughs. “Do your act for us, Rex,” she commands. “Give us the Barrymores.”

  He laughs in return, feigning modesty. The others urge him on. “Okay, okay,” he says. “All right. First John.”

  He stands, clears his throat, and waves a glass of water in his hand. “Method acting?” he growls, slurring his words. “There are quite a few methods. Mine involves a lot of talent, a glass, and some cracked ice.”

  “Hear, hear,” Richard says.

  Rex’s eyes dance. He straightens his back, assumes an air of regality—Ethel as the Empress Alexandra. “Oh, holy Rasputin,” Rex cries to the giggles of the table.

 

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