No Sale

by Patrick Conrad

  But Frances was not happy with the system. She had everything in Hollywood except money. She considered herself a fully fledged actress and not some shop-window mannequin to be disposed of by others. She quarrelled with everyone, even with Zukor and other moguls.

  And when her problems surfaced on the night of 9th October 1942, there was no one left to help her.

  It all began with a trivial traffic check on the Pacific Coast Highway. She was sitting at the wheel drunk and was pulled over. After a furious row she ended up in a cell in the Santa Monica jail. She was sentenced to 180 days in jail on probation, provided she reported to a justice of the peace three times a week, which she of course forgot to do. One week later she was arrested again in Hollywood’s Knickerbocker Hotel, after she had been seen by passers-by walking along the Sunset Strip drunk and with her breasts bared. After another furious row with the police, she was dragged naked out of the hotel through the lobby. She looked terrible and at the police station no one recognized her. When the duty officer asked her profession, the new Garbo replied: “cocksucker”.

  A mass of reporters and photographers followed her trial. Judge Hickson, whom she insulted and at whom she hurled an inkpot, was not generous. When she left the courtroom under escort, she turned to Hickson and asked: “Have you never had a broken heart?”

  “Of course her heart was broken,” says Cox to Shelley in the photo. “After her divorce from Leif Erickson she had a chaotic relationship with Clifford Odets, who had run out on her a couple of weeks earlier. And Paramount had fired her. At least she had reasons to drink.”

  Instead of helping her in her misery, her new employer Monogram Pictures gave the leading role she was to play in No Escape to Mary Brian. After exploiting her blatantly the world of Hollywood turned its back on her. Frances is alone. From her cell she cries for help, but no one hears her. Even her own mother, who had her declared insane and blamed the whole thing on the international communist conspiracy.

  Cox is not so sure about this last point, or the way Starr sums up the last years of Frances Farmer’s life. But it makes no difference. Although the essay has little to do with film, he is captivated by the fascination that this story of decline and downfall exercises on his young student.

  Because she refused to work in prison, Frances was incarcerated in a sanatorium. There she was forced to undergo a course of insulin for three months, a barbaric treatment to shake off drink that nowadays is banned. After that she was moved to the state loony bin in Steilacoom, a pathetic madhouse near Washington, where, far from the glamour of Beverly Hills, she spent the final ten years of her life in degrading circumstances.

  I chose Frances Farmer not just because I admire her talent as an actress but to demonstrate that an insignificant incident on a highway can lead to the most appalling nightmare. That a life full of glitter and glory can be overturned, from one day to the next, through an act of stupidity if no one offers a helping hand. Indifference can prove fatal if everyone averts their gaze. Just like Clara Bow, Veronica Lake, Gail Russell or Gene Tierney, Frances Farmer died utterly alone, consumed by alcohol and suffering, the victim of the ignorance and cowardice of the dream world that surrounded her.

  Who is guilty? Those who end up in the maelstrom crying and howling, until, in the end, they drown? Or those who, neatly dressed, stand on the waterside and watch, unmoved and deaf to their entreaties? For me she was a saint.

  Perhaps Shelley was too, thinks Cox, stroking her legs in the photo with his forefinger. Perhaps I did not hear her cry out, and stood neatly dressed on the waterside, while she drifted away among the pleasure boats and the trash.

  12

  Starr Mortenson

  Victor Cox was discussing the unsuccessful return of Clara Bow in The Wild Party and Call Her Savage in his series on comebacks, when she appeared in his class at the end of October. She murmured a relaxed “Hello everybody!”, snuggled up onto a bench at the back of the classroom like the It Girl, grinned at Cox and stared at him with her big dark eyes. The resemblance to the actress who had died in 1965 was so disconcerting that he was unable to continue with his lecture. He asked her to stay and sent the other students home.

  She was just nineteen, but with her finely delineated eyebrows, crimson lips and short-cropped black hair, all accentuating her pale make-up, she appeared five years older. Her father was cultural attaché at the Belgian consulate in New York, where she was studying film direction at Colombia University. He had recently been recalled to Belgium; she did not know how long it would be but so as to lose no time she had enrolled at the Drama Institute as an external student.

  “Do you know who you look like?” mumbled Cox, as dizzy and uneasy as that evening twenty years earlier when Shelley had entered his life in her Indian costume.

  “Louise Brooks. That’s what my fellow students called me in New York. I admit that I do act like her.”

  “Wrong,” mumbled Cox again. “Clara Bow.”

  “Wow! The hottest Jazz Baby in film!” she laughed. “That’s something new!”

  Her name was Starr Mortenson.

  “Starr with a double R. It was Daddy’s idea.”

  “Not a bad idea if you’re called Mortenson.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That was Marilyn Monroe’s real name.”

  “I thought it was Baker. Norma Jeane Baker.”

  “Baker or Mortenson.” Cox dreams on. “Perhaps you are distantly related?”

  “I’d be surprised. My father’s family was originally Swedish and my mother comes from Antwerp – ‘the place where girls go wrong!’”

  She came from another planet – a planet where every woman resembled Clara Bow and every man wandered among white concert grands on disorderly sets, driven mad with suppressed desire. She was not only eerily beautiful – she knew it. Not one of the callow donkeys he lectured to had ever heard of Louise Brooks or Norma Jeane Baker. Sometimes he wondered in a fit of despondency why he was still taking the trouble in the autumn of his life to initiate this pimply crew into the magic of cinema. For twenty-five years, he had tried fruitlessly, bar a couple of exceptions, to communicate his passion for the Seventh Art. And now he was weary, disillusioned and yearning for retirement. Then Starr had slipped radiantly into his class, a belated and unexpected gift. She was the light in the darkness, the embodiment of the redemption to which he would devote himself utterly in the time that was left to him.

  Because his attention was now directed exclusively at Starr, her fellow students felt neglected and had filed a complaint. After a couple of months, he was summoned to see the director of the Institute who pointed out that Cox’s class comprised twelve students, who all deserved to be treated in the same way. He did not deny that Mortenson was probably his best acquisition, but he reminded Cox that she had enrolled as an external student and that she was not obliged to sit the exams. Cox protested that she had every intention of doing so. “But just for the hell of it”, he said, because actually she had nothing more to prove.

  Starr attended the course erratically. Sometimes she stayed away for days, and then he found it difficult to concentrate on his lecture. Because he could not conceal his anxiety during her absences, the wildest rumours started to circulate in the Institute corridors. When she stayed away in May for a whole week he decided in desperation to go and look for her at home. “Victor!” she cried when she opened the door. “What a lovely surprise!” She had called him Victor. “In the States,” she said, “it’s normal for students to call teaching staff by their first name.” In answer to the question why she was no longer coming to school, she said she was working on a paper about Clara Bow. Just for him. She saw that his eyes were starting to water and invited him in. Her parents were out and she had the whole house to herself. He sat pressed against her until late into the night, feverishly reading her manuscript: the lines about the pathetic court case that Clara Bow launched against her secretary Daisy DeVoe, who had sold the story of her secret relationship
s with Eddie Cantor, Gary Cooper, Bela Lugosi and John Wayne (who at that point was still called Marion Morrison) were simply brilliant. But when he read the final chapter, in which La Bow and Buster Keaton died together in a sanatorium, he could no longer control his emotion and kissed her on the cheek. Fleetingly. After all, she was only nineteen. She smelt of Chanel No. 5, Marilyn’s perfume.

  She finished the year at the top of the class. It surprised no one. Evil tongues still maintained that her good marks were undeserved, to which Cox tirelessly replied that she was miles ahead of the others and had a natural gift. And that was it.

  At the end-of-year student ball she asked him to dance. Let them gossip, she whispered in his ear, I prefer dancing with you to those pimples. Barely able to speak, he asked her what her plans were for the vacation. She said that she was going to New York for two months to visit friends.

  “I’ll send you a postcard of the Statue of Liberty. Promise.”

  “You won’t come back. I can feel it.”

  “Don’t nag, Victor. In September I’ll be back at your door again.”

  During the endless summer months Victor Cox stayed in Antwerp organizing his collection of cinema props and curiosities. He even bought a couple of new pieces over the Internet, including the little black hat with a lace veil that Clara Bow wore at her wedding to Rex Bell. A present for Starr when she came back.

  And come back she did. On 3rd September she called him. Half an hour later they were sitting outside a café by the cathedral. “You’ve turned quite grey,” she said, “you’re even more attractive than before.” He gave her the hat. She put it on, curled up in his arms and kissed him slowly on the mouth. Cox could not let go of her. He was confused and embarrassed but he hoped everyone was watching them. He could not remember ever being so happy, not even when he had stood on the dance floor with Shelley twenty years before.

  The new academic year passed as if in a dream. Starr did not often show up at the Institute, but Cox saw her almost every day outside class. They went to the cinema together or watched old films on video at home. It was better that way. Both of them understood that something was growing between them which was best not exposed to scrutiny. During the Christmas vacation she went away with her parents, which reassured Cox, back to New York to see in the new year and celebrate the new millennium on Times Square. This time she sent him a postcard. Not the Statue of Liberty, but a photo of Louise Brooks in Pabst’s Lulu. On 31st December she called him at midnight to say that she missed him. Over the phone he could hear the fireworks in the background, the sirens of the ambulances and fire engines, and the music of the bands and he cried: “Me too! I miss you too! I love you, Miss Mortenson! Come back quickly!” Later she told him there had been too much noise and she had not been able to understand him.

  He had often asked her why a pretty girl like her preferred to spend her time with an old professor rather than with boys of her own age. “Because they’re vacuous, clumsy prigs, because they have no style, because they’re lousy at conversation, lousy at drinking and most of all lousy at making love and I don’t know what I could share with them.” She smiled irresistibly. She had so much in common with him that the difference in their ages meant nothing. Shelley had maintained the same thing too at first. But with her he had gone to bed, while in all these months he had barely dared to touch Starr.

  Once, when they had each drunk a bottle of Chablis, sitting among the palm trees on the veranda of the Café Mozart in Antwerp’s art-deco district, and she was stroking him on the shins with her bare foot under the table, he asked her whether she missed it.

  “What do you mean, it?” she asked, with the glassy look of Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon, staring at the Milky Way above the veranda.

  Cox pulled on his cigarette, inhaled the smoke deeply and waited. Just as Bogart would have done at such a moment.

  “Don’t be so sure I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be.”

  “Bogie in The Maltese Falcon.”

  She was unbeatable. Cox blew out his cigarette smoke, coughing.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “What you don’t know, you won’t miss. But I have all the time in the world.”

  “Of course. You’re young.”

  “You too.”

  “I’ve been around so long I can remember Doris Day before she was a virgin.”

  “Groucho Marx?”

  “Right. And what’s more you’re much too beautiful.”

  “The arrangement of the features in your face is not entirely repulsive to me.”

  “Greta Garbo to Melvin Douglas in Ninotchka.”

  “Well done.”

  “Starr, we should stick to our innocent little games. You would only be disappointed.”

  “I’d be surprised.”

  “You are the daughter I never had.”

  “Close your eyes. What can you see?”

  “I can see you.”

  “Always?”

  “Always.”

  “Then it’s time to come and see what’s on the other side of the mountain.”

  Cox could not place the quote. She had won and laughed so loud that the restaurant fell silent and the waiters, laden with Dame Blanche sundaes and chocolate mousse, turned to stone.

  After the death of his wife, Victor Cox had discovered the Docklands district, where she had passed the last years of her double life. At first he would go and stroll there by day out of curiosity to see the spot where she had died. Later he ventured out there at night too, so as to meet her friends, some of whom looked as if they might have stepped straight out of a film noir. No one really knew who he was, and on several occasions, during a nostalgic conversation about Shelley, he had the impression he was only now getting to know her. What struck him in particular was that everyone missed her and agreed that Dixieland without Drunken Dixie had lost much of its panache.

  Tonight he has arranged to meet Starr in the Macumba at eight. The pub is peaceful. The happy hour regulars have all toddled off home and it’s still too early for the night owls.

  Cox is sitting on the terrace from where he has a view of the dark carcass of the Nassau Bridge and the swaying masts of the sailing ships in the Bonaparte Dock. The weather is still as balmy as yesterday when he sat at home correcting papers by the open window.

  Ten minutes late for their appointment she walks over the bridge waving. Gay, seductive, dangerously innocent. She sits down opposite him, and, like a ritual, takes her mobile, lighter and cigarettes out of her bag and lays them on the table next to the file containing her paper on Frances Farmer. Naturally, Jos the Screw notices her, hurries out and bows to her like a mahogany giant.

  “What would your daughter like to drink?”

  “Daughter? Granddaughter more like! What are you drinking, grandpa?”

  “A dry Martini.”

  “I’ll have the same.”

  Starr bursts out laughing. Cox does not find it so funny.

  “Come on Vic, it’s a joke! What did you think of my paper?”

  “It doesn’t have much to do with cinema. Apart from that, it’s well documented, as usual. Fourteen out of twenty.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I would have preferred you to discuss her films rather than her life.”

  “Her life made me think of your ex’s, that’s all.”

  “What do you know about Shelley’s life?”

  “Everything. Like all of us at college. I realize what you went through for all those years. It must have been terrible. But I also tried to imagine the kind of hell Dixie found herself in.”

  “It was all a long time ago.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re sitting here by chance. When I came over the bridge just now I imagined she was lying there and I had to wade through her blood to get to you.”

  “It is a bit like that.”

  “Some people have blood on their hands. I have blood on my shoes. What do you think of my new boots by the way?”

 
“Cute.”

  13

  Alfred Hitchcock

  Saturday, 1st July 2000

  Today I turned sixty and started the latest chapter of my story in this belated and unexpected diary. A chapter devoted entirely to Starr – because nothing else matters any more and a world without her has become unimaginable. Starr Mortenson – my star, just as Dietrich was the star of von Sternberg or Harlow was the star of Capra. Now that I am starting retirement, a time of turmoil has dawned and I can finally give expression, without hesitation or shame, to my most secret dreams. I have always behaved as a docile, patient man, lost among the anonymous spectators of my countless theatres. All my life I have fed on the dreams of others. A kiss was nothing but four lips six feet wide barely touching in close-up, or two gigantic mouths intertwined on a screen in the night. But from today I choose life over the imitation of life. Because from today I consider my life to be the film in which I immortalize, for myself, the fleeting beauty of her thousand faces. With the same passion, the same undisguised desire, the same complicity that Chaplin shows when he takes Paulette Godard by the hand at the end of Modern Times and, on a country lane leading to nowhere, turns his back on what has passed. The infatuation of Rossellini for Ingrid Bergman in Stromboli, of Orson Welles for Rita Hayworth in The Lady of Shanghai or of Cassavetes for Gena Rowlands in Love Streams.

  The entire faculty has gathered in the ballet room of the Institute to celebrate Victor Cox’s departure and birthday. In his valedictory address, the director did not only talk about his exemplary career. He also praised the professor for the courage and steadfastness he had shown after the dramatic disappearance of his wife. And he ended on a humorous note, mentioning his friendship with Starr, who he said would undoubtedly stay and look after him like a grateful daughter, at which the company burst into hearty, liberating laughter. The Councillor for Culture handed him the medal of the City of Antwerp and a book about Hitchcock, which he had already had on his shelves for ten years.