by Ed Ifkovic
He slipped into a seat, leaned his elbows on the table, and hunched forward. “Had some trouble with my cycle.”
“Your what?” I asked. Because, if I heard correctly, Jimmy pronounced the word cycle as sickle.
“My motorsickle.” Or so I spelled it in my head.
I grinned. “You from the Midwest?”
“Fairmount, Indiana, ma’am,” he said in a drawling, lazy voice. “Cows and corn and religious copulation.”
He began fiddling with the breadbasket, spinning it around, extracting the thick breadsticks, lining them up, log-cabin style, crisscrossing them, using every piece in the wicker basket. I stared at the construction, expecting disaster. Jimmy flicked it with a finger and the makeshift pile shifted, but didn’t topple. Boorish, I thought, and childish.
“I understand you’ve not read my Giant,” I said, purposely, looking into his face.
Jimmy looked at Mercy, half-smiled, rubbed one of his eyes with a grimy finger, and turned to me: “Rumor has it I haven’t even read the screenplay.”
“What?”
“If you listen to dictator Stevens who calls himself my director.”
“Don’t you think…”
“I think I understand Jett Rink the way you want me to. He’s a hungry boy who becomes a hungry man. He gets what he dreams of, but it ain’t ever enough.” He pushed the breadsticks, and they scattered across the table. He gazed around the room. “Sometimes when I come here nights, I sit in a little supply room right beside those kitchen doors. I sit on an orange crate, and munch on antipasto Patsy makes for me. And nobody knows I’m there. No one. My own little room, a closet with boxes filled with cans and jars and God knows what else. The problem with L.A. is that everyone is always expecting you to say something.”
“And you’d rather be quiet?” I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. “I refuse to sit over there.” He pointed to a booth across the room.
I pulled in my cheeks. “Too far to walk?”
Jimmy giggled. Actually giggled, full-throated and rich, and we all smiled. He pointed a finger at me and shook it, as if to say: “Good one, Miss Edna.” Then, serious, “No, that’s where Pier and I always sat. Unlucky number six.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. “You’ve been here two minutes and you’re talking to yourself.” I wasn’t happy.
Mercy interrupted. “Edna, Jimmy dated Pier Angeli for a long time. You know, The Silver Chalice, with Paul Newman. Didn’t you read about it in the papers?”
“The gossipy sheets? Hollywood blather and bilge? Not even with a decree from Caesar himself would I…”
Jimmy spoke over my declaration. “You know, I asked her to marry me. But I’m not the kind of good boy her mustached Italian Catholic mama wanted, so she forced Pier to marry that empty shell Vic Damone. You know how Italian mothers believe their pretty daughters are all virgins, which is why they all try to become whores as fast as possible…”
Mercy reached over and touched him on the wrist. “Jimmy, enough.” Emphatic, but motherly, I thought.
Jimmy gathered up the breadsticks and tossed them back into the basket. The table was strewn with crumbs, flecks of sesame seeds.
For a while, we sat there, a frozen tableau, and I felt the room moving around me. Dishes rattled, glasses clinked, a waiter mumbled in angry Italian to another waiter. Silence at the table. A waiter gave us menus, then left. Jimmy drummed on the edge of the table with a breadstick, and the tip snapped off, toppling to the carpet. I heard his boot heel grind it. He hadn’t removed his dazzling red windbreaker, unbuttoned over the T-shirt. The brilliant red against the ivory white, sharp enough against his fresh blond looks. Very dramatic, I thought.
He clicked his tongue. “Miss Edna, can I give you a ride on my cycle sometime?” There was a mischievous gleam in his eye.
“I’m afraid I’d fall off the back.”
“Not if you hold onto me tightly. I’ll take you for a spin out to Laurel Canyon, all narrow roads and hairpin turns, up into the Hollywood Hills where you can look down on a different L.A.” He squinted his eyes. “Unless you want to do the driving. I’ll hold onto you.”
I realized he was flirting with me. Oddly, I was enjoying it. “The problem is that I’d travel so slowly you’d fall off for sheer boredom.”
“Jimmy likes speed,” Mercy said.
“If you can see where you’re going, then there’s no use in heading there.” He looked at Mercy. “Tell Miss Edna about the time I gave you a spin in my MG.”
Mercy laughed. “I can’t remember because I was unconscious for most of it.”
We were interrupted by Tansi’s arrival. She rushed to the table, apologizing for lateness, blaming it on the garage that serviced her new car. Tansi pulled up a chair, repositioned it, twisting her body this way and that, sputtering, taking over the conversation. We sat there, waiting. “A scratch, mind you, on a new car.” Jimmy, car aficionado, immediately began a barrage of questions about the Chevy Bel Air she’d purchased. Shoptalk, the two of them. I lost interest, then became angry at the inane exchange, Tansi talking of engine size, accessories, tire sizes.
“Can I drive it?” Jimmy asked.
Tansi balked. “But you speed, Jimmy.”
He turned away, bored now. He lit a cigarette, blew smoke across the table, and Tansi reached into her purse for a cigarette. I watched the two of them smoking, and was momentarily enthralled: Jimmy’s careful, deliberate playing with the cigarette, the long Chesterfields moving and sliding as he inhaled, or said a few words. Tansi, however, worked at the cigarette, as though it required calculation. The thin shaft was unnecessary and a little irksome, but part of a picture she was setting up in the eyes of someone watching. One was total seamlessness; the other artifice; one, syncopated rhythm, the other, a pesky protuberance.
Jimmy offered me a cigarette. I debated taking one but finally shook my head. “Now and then, with a cocktail. At the end of a day’s work.”
“When I wake in the morning,” Jimmy said, “I usually find I already have one in my mouth.”
“I find it relaxes me,” Tansi volunteered, and Mercy and I both started to laugh.
Mercy tapped her on the wrist. “Tansi, it actually seems to make you a bundle of nerves.”
But Tansi was in a good mood now. “You know, I learned to smoke from Bette Davis movies. You know how she leans in to light cigarettes, bringing the cigarette to the match?”
“Is that what you were doing?” I asked, smiling. “I thought you were trying to set yourself on fire.”
Jimmy drank wine spritzers, finished the first one in a couple of gulps, and immediately signaled for another. I sipped my martini, very acceptable—and picked at an antipasto. Suddenly Jimmy stood up, stopping the conversation. Then he slumped back down, dug into the pocket of his jeans and extracted a piece of paper, which he tossed, carelessly, onto the table. It lay there, crumpled, like a wasted napkin; but, I noted, it held all of our eyes; some unearthed runic tablet, magical now, and powerful.
“The new letter,” Jimmy said.
I reached for it, but Jimmy put his hand on it. My fingers collided with his. “What Jack Warner didn’t want you to know, Miss Edna, is that a girl I dated while we were on location in hellish Marfa, Texas, has sent me this letter and one before it, claiming I’m the daddy of her unborn bastard baby.” He waited, watching me. Tansi made a gargling sound, throaty and harsh. But Jimmy never looked at her.
I stared. “And, I gather, you’re not?”
Jimmy howled, stretched out his arms and threw back his head. “You’re something else, Miss Edna.”
I was frowning. “I’m serious.”
“No, it ain’t true. I swear. And she’s crazy.”
“Just what does she want?”
Mercy spoke up. “It’s hard to say. In the first letter she said she wants marriage, that Jimmy be a real husband and father, as he’s supposed to, but she ends by saying she wants money so
she can go away. Two different messages.”
“And in this new one she hints she’ll tell the world my dark secrets to that rag Confidential and ruin my career.”
Tansi was rattled. “Good God. That’s what Mr. Warner is afraid of.”
Mercy turned to me. “Jimmy gave Warner the first letter…”
“My mistake! I never learn.”
“You had to. You had to,” Tansi said.
Jimmy ignored her. “Carisa’s just plain crazy.”
“Warner is afraid any negative publicity will hurt the movie,” Mercy noted. “Maybe even sink it. America in these blacklist Commie days is not too forgiving of Hollywood and its sins. Careers lost, lives ruined.”
Jimmy stretched out his arms again. “I’m innocent,” he said, staring at the ceiling, looking bored.
I grunted. “So are those sad souls condemned by Senator McCarthy, now begging for jobs from friends who turn their backs on them.”
Mercy spoke softly, “I really thought it would go away, Edna. A stupid, desperate girl who’s misguided. Talked to by the studio. But now,” she turned to Jimmy, “a second letter.”
“This one is plain crazy, folks. My deep dark secrets. ‘You think you’re a big movie star now.’ That sort of thing. ‘I’ll take care of that. Marry me. You promised.’”
Tansi was surprisingly blunt. “Well, did you promise her?”
Jimmy shook his head. “I never promise women things.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He finished his drink, smacked his lips, and signaled the waiter for another. I didn’t like this. I’d been sipping my cocktail slowly.
I waited a moment. “Tell me, do you have dark secrets she can tell the world, Jimmy?”
Jimmy closed his eyes for a second. “We all have dark secrets we don’t want the world to have.”
I pontificated. “I don’t.”
Jimmy narrowed his eyes. “You’re a downright fibber, Miss Edna.”
I drew in my breath. I didn’t like this. This young man was hard to read. Talented, maybe—probably. But foolish, impetuous, foolhardy. Like most young men, a blunderer, if not a downright bounder.
He seemed to read my mind. “I’m not a cad.”
“Just what happened in Marfa?” I asked. Giant was my goldmine. Visions of studio hesitation, delayed openings, audience boycotts, a callow but censorious press, nasty accusation, deadly scandal. My mind reeled.
Mercy began, “There was nothing to do in Marfa. For six long, long weeks. Nothing. Except for stars like Jimmy and Rock and Liz, who lived in houses, we stayed in the one hotel, the Presidio, three or four to a room, while Jimmy shot jackrabbits at night, riding in a Jeep out over the white buffalo grass.”
Jimmy didn’t seem to be listening. He spoke over her words. “Mercy came down with sun poisoning.”
“Jimmy was the ringleader of a bunch of young people, like his friend Tommy and some other bit players, including Carisa. They hung out at the Old Borunda Café on San Antonio Street and drank Lone Star beer…”
“And died from the heat,” Tansi added.
Mercy kept going. “But Jimmy started seeing Carisa Krausse who, despite her name, played a Mexican girl in the film. I was surprised to see her there because, well, I’d worked with her before in All the King’s Men, and no one liked her. Something was wrong with her. She’d become peculiar, quirky, talked too much, accused.”
“And no one warned me,” Jimmy said.
“Anyway, her behavior became so erratic and unprofessional, a malingerer, that Stevens fired her, shipped her back to L.A., and when we all got back here, she wrote that first letter.”
“And now a second,” Jimmy said, shaking his head.
“And this is the news Jack Warner wants me shielded from?”
Jimmy grinned. “Everybody, well…ah…is scared of you.”
“So what’s the answer?”
I noticed, sadly, that Jimmy was tipsy, though it was easy to miss, given his slurred, inarticulate speech, half-spoken sentences, grunting, and his slouching. I caught Mercy’s eye, and then turned to Tansi, who looked bothered, casting sidelong glances at Jimmy, watching. Eyes half shut, lips drawn into a drunkard’s bemused smirk, Jimmy seemed ready to fall asleep. Good Lord, I thought, this is like a rehearsal for the final scene of Giant, with Jett Rink collapsing onto the banquet table in a drunken stupor. The inevitable final act of a story that began when a lonely boy fell in love with another man’s wife.
My question hung in the air.
“Madama can help.” He raised his glass to her.
But Mercy shook her head. “Just because I met Carisa at an earlier shoot—we actually rehearsed together one day—Jimmy thinks I can talk sense to her, make her see how…” She trailed off, shrugged her shoulders, punctuating the moment with her deep sigh. “You can’t talk to an irrational woman, Jimmy. She has problems…”
He cocked his head to the side. “Come on, Madama. You can talk some sense into her. People like you.”
“Not everyone. And I have a poor track record with deranged women. Some of your other friends know her better. Lydia, for one.”
“God, no,” Jimmy moaned.
Tansi turned to me. “Jimmy just broke up with Lydia, also in the movie. Lydia Plummer.”
I smiled, “You certainly do move through a crowd, Jimmy.”
He didn’t answer. “Madama…”
Mercy, firm, rigid. “Jimmy, if talking to Carisa would help, I would. But she’s obviously got some obsession here. And what if there really is a baby?” Jimmy shook his head, denying the possibility. “Let Jake Geyser and Jack Warner take care of this. They have experience with this kind of tomfoolery. After all, need I point out, Hollywood is built on blackmail and threats and rumor? They must have ideas, no?”
Tansi lit a cigarette. “I agree. Stay away from her. If the press got wind of this, my God! It’ll go away. It has to. Jimmy’s name must be kept—well, pure.”
Jimmy’s eyes got wide. “Pure?” Sarcasm in his voice; bewilderment. He looked at Tansi, and I realized he didn’t care for her. Worse, he probably rarely knew she was in the room, this drab, pencil-thin woman with fluttery nerves and bird-like gestures.
“Yes, pure. Like it or not. My job is to secure your image.”
Jimmy made a sudden click-click-click sound, his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Madama,” he pleaded.
I looked at her. “Mercy, you seem so set in this matter. Is there something you’re not saying?”
Mercy just shook her head.
“But if this—this Carisa knows you…”
Tansi looked horrified. “Edna, my God. I can’t believe you’d suggest talking to this woman. This is like stoking a fire. Making her think we’re taking this seriously.”
“We have to take it seriously,” I insisted.
Tansi wasn’t happy. “She’s a failed actress living in tenement in the worst neighborhood in L.A. Out of a job, nothing. Should we send a Warner Bros. limo to her doorstep?”
Jimmy, restless, zipped up the red jacket to his neck, stood and looked down at us. A little unsteadily, he backed up, toppling a chair, and, in a melodramatic gesture, he moved his hand out toward us, a slicing gesture, cutting—a signal of leaving. He backed off, and disappeared through the kitchen.
***
In my darkened suite at the Ambassador, I lay in bed, unable to sleep. This was to have been a celebratory visit to Hollywood. My arrival during the final days of shooting, the ceremonial gesture of Jack Warner and George Stevens, who’d already confided that the film was wonderful—a blockbuster, they promised. A Hollywood high mark; enduring, legendary. But now this. I closed my eyes. Images of Jimmy Dean at the dinner table, the swagger, the pouting, the enigmatic shifts in conversation. My God, this debacle of the poison letters. Probably a cavalier Casanova violating this poor woman’s trust. A gigolo. A failed actress with the impossible name of Carisa Krausse playing a sullen Mexican servan
t in my movie. Jimmy Dean, this girl and that. Kiss this girl, hug that one. Leave them behind. The pretty boy hero, girls strewn at his ankles like leaves swirling at the base of an autumn tree. Look at Tansi, wormwood spinster with crimson nail polish, eyes aflutter; that sensible woman I’d known as a young girl. Even Mercy, another smiling supplicant. Even me. Caught by him, fascinated by the enigma, entangled now. Something wrong about the boy. Whole parts of him left untouched, ignored, avoided. Well, it was Jack Warner’s problem, and that toady Jake Geyser—another simpering fool. Let…
The phone rang. I jumped, glanced at the clock. Midnight. Twelve o’clock. Three a.m. back in New York, where I belonged among the cosmopolites. In my own bed on the Upper East Side. I fumbled at the nightstand.
“Hello.”
Silence.
Louder. “Hello.”
A sputter. “Well, I was telling you the truth, Miss Edna.”
My head cleared. “Jimmy?”
I heard him clear his throat, then a stifled snort. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s all right.”
“Do you believe me?”
In the darkness of the room, everything around me unfamiliar, I listened to the tinny, faraway voice. For a second I imagined I was hearing a little boy’s voice, so high and breaking; wavering, pleading. Startled, I found myself breathing hard. “Jimmy.”
“Something horrible is gonna happen, Miss Edna.”
“Like what?”
Silence. “When people push me, things happen.”
I felt a chill up my spine.
“You know, I don’t know how I’m supposed to take care of things by myself. Everybody expects me to make it on my own. I can’t do this on my own. They don’t realize…” The words stopped abruptly. I heard noise behind him, not too far away—drunken revelry, shrill laughter, a snatch of jukebox music. Papa loves mambo. Mama loves mambo. Bar noises.
“Jimmy…”
Then I realized the line was dead.
CHAPTER 3
As I sipped tepid coffee and munched on dry cinnamon toast in the coffee shop the next morning, I was paged and found myself talking to Jack Warner. Idly, I’d been reviewing the breakfast served me at the posh Ambassador. I’d already returned the pancakes, deeming them desiccated shoulder pads from an abandoned Joan Crawford dress. I’d maintained the milk for the coffee had turned, the butter clotted, lumpy and discolored. I’d resigned myself to anemic toast and decided breakfast would have to wait until New York—Molly’s toothsome French toast, made from thick slabs of homemade bread, with real maple syrup the color of precious amber. Out of season strawberries, plump and scarlet and juicy, probably flown in from California. All my life, I thought suddenly, I travel, travel, travel; all my life I want to hurry back to New York City, where, staring out from the fifteenth floor, I announce royally that I despise it to the marrow of my being. Well, we always hate the thing we love too much.