by Ed Ifkovic
Jack Warner, crisp and authoritarian on the phone, said there was a meeting at ten. His office. He said he’d provide breakfast. I winced.
“Something’s come up,” he said.
“I know about the letters to Jimmy Dean.”
“I know you do,” he said, flatly. “I’m sorry, Edna. It’ll be handled promptly.”
Promptly? The first letter arrived three or four days earlier. What passes for promptitude out here in the land of lights, camera, inaction? “Jimmy says she’s lying about the…” I looked around, glancing at the other diners, themselves intent on wolfing down indigestible and sickly gray eggs…“matter. At hand.”
I could almost hear Warner smoking—the intake of cigarette smoke, the raspy cough. “Things are different now. I got a letter yesterday,” he said. “This one was addressed to me.”
Back in my room I dialed Mercy’s number. Though she lived with her husband outside L.A., Mercy was subletting a small efficiency near the Burbank studios. A convenience, she said. She despised the expansive L.A. freeways, jumbled with traffic most mornings and afternoons; she dreaded the dreary fogs that sometimes settled in during the late summers, a haze that covered the steamy avenues. She liked her hideaway, a stone’s throw from the soundstage. She answered on the first ring, and I told her about Warner’s call. “I’m not surprised Carisa has the nerve to include Warner in her scheme,” Mercy said. “One night, after sipping too much brandy at some party, she told me the only way to make it in this business was to get to know Jack Warner himself. She said she had his private home number, but was saving it. She had big plans.”
“She was already an actress.”
Mercy scoffed. “You’re using the word generously, Edna.”
“But she got roles.”
“No, Edna, like most bit players, she was just there—like a newspaper left on a breakfast table.”
“So she thought she had a future?”
“What bit player doesn’t? She said all she had to do was fall into his path, and he’d spot her talent.” Mercy chortled. “She thought discovery was the art of timing.”
“These letters seem to be her new exercise in bad timing.” I paused. “Come to the meeting with me,” I said, abruptly.
Mercy laughed. “No, no, no. Oh Lord no. Old Man Warner would flip to see me, a supporting actress, at his table uninvited. You know, when he calls meetings in his own bungalow, no one sits to his immediate left or right, fearful he might ask a question they can’t answer. Sorry, Edna, report back to this private citizen when you leave.” She laughed again, enjoying the moment.
That didn’t make me happy. “Will you be at the studio later today?”
“Yes. Late morning. No shooting today. You’re scheduled to do photo sessions with journalists. Smiling with Rock, schmoozing with Liz, dancing with Jimmy, philosophizing with little old homespun me.”
I groaned. “A wasted day.”
“Don’t you like to have your picture taken?”
***
Sitting in Warner’s conference room, a Spartan arrangement of long table and straight-backed chairs, with grainy photographs of forgotten movies on one of the walls, I surveyed the group of officious men gathered around me. The War Council, I deemed them: perfunctory, dull-eyed men, in crisp seersucker suits, some with barricades of briefcases and derby hats situated before them. Each man rigid of spine—faces cleared of liveliness, blood. Men who looked like front-office accountants or junior-level bankers; men who looked as though they desired to be elsewhere. Glancing at his wristwatch, one man flicked a piece of inconvenient lint from a sleeve; another seemingly developed an early tic; another man, as round as a bowling ball, with rubicund face, scratched a red, balding, flaked scalp. And the one other woman, Tansi, seated at my right, sprightly this morning in a pastel print dress, white daisies against a light blue cloth, with a string of tiny pearls choking her neck. She looked ready for a picnic.
She nodded at the men, like a hand puppet with loose wiring at the neck. They ignored her. And I suddenly understood Tansi’s nervousness, her twitching. The lone woman in the den of dismissive, self-important men, a woman who’d gained a modicum of Hollywood power, but would never be given equal billing in any of these men’s worlds. I certainly understood that deplorable state: all my life I’d battled the disregard of unimaginative men in power, grotesque lumpen souls who guffawed at their own unfunny lines, who thought their tired insights original. Tansi, when I knew her in New York, the fresh young Barnard graduate, was delightfully cynical, witty, downright funny. So the world of men had hammered that out of her, obviously. On the quicksand battlefield she’d floundered, surrendered. She wasn’t a Dorothy Parker who could best the men she encountered. She wasn’t Jane Addams or Eleanor Roosevelt. She wasn’t, well, Edna Ferber, who brooked no attitude from these lesser lights. I’d have to talk to Tansi about that. Men could be beaten at their own game—you just had to tell yourself it was easy to win.
Seated next to George Stevens, Jake Geyser was speaking, his public voice not East Coast Princeton now but, jumping the Atlantic, decidedly British aristocracy. I concluded he’d been an actor as a young man, probably a servant in those tiresome, English drawing-room comedies. Jake was reviewing the letters, and Warner watched him closely.
“Mr. Warner,” he said, nodding to the boss, “wants to review what we know—have done. About this mess.” He hung on the words, as though they were an unwelcome sentence come down from the Spanish Inquisition. “I’ve telephoned Carisa Krausse again, but the conversation was…unsuccessful.”
“What the hell does that mean?” said Warner. Everyone jumped.
Jake kept going, feebly. “I’ve visited her.” He grinned. “She doesn’t live in a desirable neighborhood. We all know Skid Row—at least from the newscasts—all the drunks, the prostitutes, the pawnshops. I was afraid to park my car.” Kaaaah, he said. Beacon Hill Boston now, perhaps. Lord, he was a smorgasbord of dictions.
“And?” Prompting from Warner.
“Frankly, sir, she’s hard to read. I think a little mad.” Uncomfortable, he looked around the room, as though for support. Nothing, obviously, had been done. “I’m trying to understand what she wants.”
George Stevens thundered, “She wants to sink my movie!” He actually leaned into Jake, who inclined his body away.
“I’m not so sure. I get the sense she’ll go away if she gets what she wants.”
“What, marriage to James Dean?” Tansi offered timidly.
Jake ran his tongue over his lower lip. “She’s hard to read, as I say. She…her conversation is all over the place. I was uncomfortable sitting in her rooms. She lives like a packrat, papers everywhere, clothing strewn about. I felt at one point she’d attack me. I’d have to call the police, but you said,” to Warner, “whatever I do, keep the cops away from this.”
Back and forth. Balderdash, rehashing familiar ground, struggling to find an answer. The toady as purveyor of codswallop.
I interrupted, impatient. “Your letter, Jack?”
Warner looked at me, and seemed surprised I’d spoken—and didn’t look pleased. “Largely illiterate scribbling. I’d like to know who hired her for Marfa, frankly. She doesn’t even punctuate her sentences.”
“I don’t think parsing sentences is why we’re here.” Folderol, I thought, a waste of time.
He held up his hand. “Carisa’s letter to me, like her new letter to Jimmy, outside of its ebb-and-flow grammar, threatens exposure to Confidential magazine. Just an off-hand threat so far, no contact with those bastards. It seems Confidential has tired of beating the Hollywood blacklist to death and even all those racial scandals—what Negro is wooing what white beauty, what blond starlet Sammy Davis is bedding at the moment—and is going after other sordid indiscretion. So I guess Carisa knows that. And, I gather, Jimmy likes to…” he glanced at me, then Tansi, himself now the decorous, polite gentleman…“have his fun.”
Nincompoopism, Hollywood style, dictators
hip masquerading as consensus, ending an hour later. “Edna has to meet the press,” Warner announced. Staring at Jake, he told him to take care of business. Jake, his diction suddenly sounding more South Jersey shore than Oxford, sputtered, “I’ll do my best.” The wrong answer, surely, for Warner squinted his eyes and his face got red. I knew Jake’s next job would be waiting tables at Don the Beachcomber, dishing out the moo shoo pork.
As the room cleared out, Warner signaled me to stay. He wanted a “quick word.” He confided, “A bump in the road, Edna, really.” Then Stevens and Warner both spoke at me, edgy, trying to play down the incident. I wanted to get away, frankly. Warner grumbled, “I gave orders for everyone to keep their mouths shut.” Emphatic, deliberate.
I found myself contrasting the two important men. The first time I’d met them, that dinner at Romanoff’s, I’d been intrigued: Stevens, the beefy, affable sort, and Warner, the slender, controlled businessman. They seemed to circle around each other, like cobra and mongoose, respectful but aware that life shifts in a flash. Stevens, for all his blustery confidence, struck me as an overgrown schoolboy, happy with a camera he got for Christmas. Warner, keeping his distance, appeared the grammar-school principal, watching, wary. When he moved, he always seemed to be positioning himself. He’s the director here, I thought. The man conscious of angle and perspective.
Now, both men leaned into me, anxious. Stevens bristled, then blustered, talking loudly, and seemed intimidated by me. But Warner fascinated me, unhappily so; he seemed to speak in a deadly, unlovely drone, matter-of-fact, and, for some reason, he spoke over my shoulder, as to a person behind me. Worse, his eyes suddenly focused—drilling into me—when the subject was the bottom line, the money I’d invested in the movie. Oddly, I thought of a villain out of a nineteenth-century stage melodrama. I sighed. These two men would never be friends in any world other than Hollywood.
When Warner stopped talking, Stevens started to say something, but Warner cut him off. “Edna has to meet the press.”
***
Soundstage B, where Giant was being filmed, buzzed that afternoon, not with assistant directors and best boys and costume girls, but with reporters and photographers, led by a fussy Hedda Hopper. The set itself was properly movieland: carefully positioned props, bits of Texas gimmicky, weathered lariats and saddles, even the vintage 1924 Rolls Royce touring car used in the movie. Flashbulbs popped, blinding. Photographers screamed requests, one more shot, just one. Hedda Hopper chatted with Chill Wills. Jane Withers leaned in to kiss her. I sat in a canvas-backed chair, gaudily stenciled with my name in blocky black letters: EDNA FERBER. I wondered, idly, if I could cram it into my suitcase. It would be quite the conversation piece at one of my dinners. Edna on set. The novelist on location. Noel Coward would hoot. George Kaufman would snicker; he’d quip that I was the Rita Hayworth of bestsellerdom. Dick Rodgers would steal it, hold it for ransom. Someone snapped my picture, and, trancelike, I muttered, “Yes, I love what they’ve done to my novel.” Yes, yes, of course. I posed and smiled, a wide-eyed Mary Pickford agog at the Hollywood fuss and frenzy.
Jack Warner introduced me to the press as “the little lady who started the new civil war in Texas,” alluding to the fury my novel had caused, with its view of Texas smugness, shallowness, and intolerance. Now, aptly, he quoted my favorite line. “What littleness is all this bigness hiding?” Everyone laughed. Score one for Warner. But I wondered at the irony of his using the sentence.
Rock Hudson, I decided, was trying hard to impress me. Not only that, he was too tall. Surely over six feet four, and broad-shouldered, a stone wall. Wisconsin lumberjack, with that granite chin and those long arms, but the manner was too obsequious, too slick. After all, I was but five feet tall, tiny—maybe tinier than ever, as age stooped me—so now I had to look way up, since he made no effort to dip down to me. The effort was a little like a tourist looking up at the Empire State Building and realizing, finally, it wasn’t worth the neck strain. When I called him “Sonny,” he seemed shocked. Maybe he was savvy enough to realize that the epithet was my name for all young men in disfavor.
“Miss Ferber,” he said, still not stooping, “an honor.”
I bit my tongue. “The honor is all yours,” I said. He chuckled.
I heard someone muttering that Jimmy was late, and I saw Rock twist his head, eavesdropping. The smile disappeared. Stevens had demanded the major cast be there—in full regalia, head-to-toe costume and makeup. Mercy had told me that Jimmy often balked at Stevens’ demands, disliking the man’s dictatorial manner. He was used to the free-flowing, Method-acting any-way-you-feel style of Nick Ray, the Bohemian director of Rebel Without a Cause, whose own mumbling speech and desultory direction appealed to Jimmy. Now, lamentably, Jimmy hadn’t bothered to show up. Stevens, hovering nearby, spat out under-his-breath commands to his aides, who scurried off like hyperventilating mice. Rock Hudson, still standing next to me—the tallest schoolboy at the birthday party—narrowed his eyes. “We’re not all so professional,” he confided to me.
I smiled, as a camera popped in my eyes. “Meaning what?”
“Jimmy doesn’t take some things seriously.”
I felt the need to defend the boy I scarcely knew. “Jimmy seems to listen to his own clock.”
Rock widened his eyes. “He’s…unreliable.” Again, the flirtatious smile. “Such boys are dangerous.”
I stared up at him: the stone-carved face, cynosure of millions, Modern Screen’s actor of the year, the all-American male, so emphatically wrought he seemed almost a façade of a building. Dressed as a rich ranch baron, with pristine white linen suit and ten-gallon white hat, he seemed a statue in a public park. Soon a flock of pigeons would discover him. “Ma’am,” he was saying, oddly speaking in his Texas drawl, in character, “in Marfa, Jimmy and I shared a house. Days would go by and he wouldn’t say a single word to me.”
“Well…”
“He never smiled.”
I’d heard the stories. Jimmy and Rock, water and electricity. Norman Rockwell and a Village Beatnik poet, co-habitating. Deadly.
“It’s a new generation,” I said, a little lamely.
Rock would have none of it. “I’ve seen the future, then, and it doesn’t take a bath.”
I sidled away, my back to him. Luckily Liz Taylor, herself late from makeup, rushed in, smiling. Tansi waved to her, as to an old friend. Rock, doubtless staring at my small but iron-rod back (though, I believed, neatly attired in a polka dot blue-and-white flare dress, clutch bag, and three-stranded pearls), mumbled something about wardrobe, and disappeared. One last camera pop made him turn and look, a rigid line of gleaming teeth. But the photographer was focused on the radiant Liz.
Arriving with two assistants pecking at her, Liz Taylor sallied up to me, took my hand, and thanked me for the role of Leslie Benedict. I smiled, a little flabbergasted. How beautiful the woman was. How stunning. A woman whose tinkling, nervous laugh and melodic timbre seemed perfect for her patrician, girlish beauty. And those violet eyes, riveting as cut gemstone. A raving beauty, reminding me of Lillian Russell, a beauty of another century—and more buxom. A different standard of beauty then, but compelling and magnetic. But Liz had a way of charming, tucking herself into me. When the photographers finished, we sat in a corner next to the out-of-place Rolls Royce, gabbing like sorority sisters, with me oddly at ease.
The subject turned to Jimmy. Liz pointed at George Stevens, conferring with some lackey, both their faces crimson. “George isn’t happy,” Liz said. “Jimmy is supposed to be here, of course. I know he wants to meet you…”
“I’ve met him,” I said, grandly. “Quite the original.”
Liz laughed. “He’s quite wonderful. He has a wonderful laugh and a warm heart, really.”
I cut in. “Rock Hudson doesn’t like him.”
Liz pooh-poohed the rivalry. “Oh, Rock, he’s wonderful, too. But he’s from another era of acting: study your lines as written, stand on your mark, just follow the direc
tor. Rock’s afraid people won’t like him. Jimmy doesn’t care. Jimmy likes to…well…improvise. A script is just a suggestion. Rock can’t do that. And that’s what Jimmy does best.”
“Yet you get along with both of them?”
“Well, yes, of course.” It dawned on me that most people got along with Liz. “In Marfa, Jimmy clung to me. Like he was an orphan. We’re about the same age—what is he? Twenty-four or so? But he looked at me as, like, a mother or an older sister. Can you imagine that? At first disconcerting, but then I realized what he needed from me. Other men woo me, shamelessly, fawningly, promising me anything. I’m used to people flattering me. Jimmy demanded I flatter him. You know, he never made…advances. Ever. Jimmy just wanted a shoulder to cry on.”
Mercy McCambridge had said much the same thing. “Mercy,” I said, baiting, “said he saw her as a mother…”
“The both of us, really. Once he even stumbled, called her ‘Mom’ on the set. Usually it was ‘Madama’ because Jimmy always stays in character. It was so charming. When everyone laughed, he pouted and stormed away. Mercy and I didn’t laugh. Jimmy disappeared for hours.” Liz shook her head. “Jimmy’s a strange boy. Rock’s a strange man. That’s the difference. Boy and man: both rivals for Mom’s affection.”