by Ed Ifkovic
I started to cry. For three days, since the arrest, I’d been in a trance, airless, hidden away.
Mercy turned from the stove where she was dipping her nose to breathe in the oregano and garlic she’d just tossed in. “Edna.”
I shook my head. “No, it’s all right.” And it was. It was all right because justice, though relentless, had been served.
How close Mercy and I had become! The company of women, I thought. How do men do it, with their distances, their reserves, their denials? Civilization needs forthright, strong women. How else to survive, to guarantee the passing on of feeling, caring, passion, decency? They do have madness to deal with, women do. I looked at Mercy: a woman half my age, with the throaty whiskey voice, a woman not beautiful but whose face held such character, such resonance. We understood each other. Tacitly. Deliberately. Exquisitely.
I smiled.
“Now what?” Mercy smiled herself.
“I’m feeling a bit melancholy. These past days have been so sad.”
Yesterday I sat in the Blue Room, guarded by a nervous Jake who seemed lost without his feisty ally. I smiled at George Stevens who thanked me. He was happy. Jack Warner was away at a meeting but Jake handed me a note. I told you there was nothing to worry about. In Hollywood there’s always a happy ending. Furious, I crumpled it up. There was a note from Rock, away at the same meeting with Jack. I was wrong. I’m sorry. That note I folded and tucked into my purse.
Liz Taylor, dressed in a puffy white linen dress with an apricot scarf around her neck, slipped into the room so softly she seemed a wispy summer cloud. Her violet eyes flickered, and she leaned in, touched me on the shoulder. “It wasn’t supposed to end like this.” I couldn’t interpret the look on her face; the delicate corners of her mouth drooping melodramatically though her eyes—that almost unreal violet tint—seemed faraway. I said nothing. Was this the actress in one more final scene? I didn’t understand Hollywood, never would, didn’t want to. Not this world where lines were scripted for you, collectively rewritten: polished, deleted, giddily celebrated. Just like the people who spoke them. Who were the people who delivered them?
But Liz had a kindness about her, a bittersweet gentility. I sensed a decent human being here. She smiled wistfully, her salutation. Two men and a woman—their faces dull as cardboard—rushed in, as though they’d misplaced a precious jewel and now had found it, and immediately closed in on her, but never touching, whispering about appointments and obligations. She stared at them, her chin set, then moved seamlessly out of the room. Her perfume lingered.
I shook my head. “I’m thinking about Liz Taylor.”
Mercy nodded. “A beautiful woman.”
“There are always too many people around her. She’s never alone.”
Mercy tapped the ladle against the steaming pot. “Alone she might be forced to face the glossy eight-by-ten photograph they’ve turned her into.”
“You know,” I said, “one afternoon I was passing by the commissary, and I saw Rock Hudson sitting by himself, alone at a table, hunched over some papers.”
“So?”
“He just sat there, this—this presence. All these people walked in, crew people, secretaries, best boys, worst boys, I don’t know. And no one approached him.”
“People don’t dare.”
“But why?” My voice was rising. “Over and over he looked up as folks neared, passed by, as though he were expecting someone. He’s one more Jimmy Dean, hungry for attention and recognition, but scared of it. Because…maybe because…he doesn’t quite know the rules he now has to play by. He looked so…so isolated there. He’d planted himself in the middle of the room, as conspicuous as a noonday sun, and he waited. He looked like a shy schoolboy waiting to be picked for sandlot baseball, but only if they made him the star player.” I paused. “You know, Mercy, they’re all up there on the screen and everyone embraces them, that frozen image, but then they sit in a cafeteria and begin to fall apart.”
Mercy laughed. “Good God, Edna.”
“This movie, my romantic story of Texas opulence and penury, has allowed them to avoid looking at themselves. One more chapter in avoiding the awful mirror. Here, in paradise, Jack Warner tells us that we shouldn’t remember Carisa or Lydia. And even dear Tansi.”
Mercy was silent a long time. “It’s just Hollywood.” Flat out. Final.
I nodded. “I was planning to convince Tansi to return to New York. Back there she was spirited, witty. The years in Hollywood made her high-strung, brittle, kowtowing to an ego-mad man like Jack Warner, who wields power like a fist in your face, or Jake Geyser, a toady who mimics his superiors. She lost her bearings here.”
Mercy sighed. “So you really think she did all those things to serve the company? She really believed she was saving Jimmy’s future?”
I shook my head. “No, not really. She told herself that. She did it out of some peculiar loneliness—some aloneness, maybe—that comes from living here among the cannibals. Mercy, she did it for her idea of love.”
“What will happen to her?”
“Well, I’ve had one very angry phone call from her mother. She’s quite the battalion of a woman, that one. She blames me. She’s already lined up an army of high-priced New York and L.A. lawyers—funded by her ex-husband, Tansi’s dipsomaniac father. His millions will save her. I can’t imagine she’ll ever do prison time. There’s so much money there, and power. Probation, perhaps. Petrified Tansi need have no fear. She’s already made bail, of course, and is nowhere to be found.”
“I thought it peculiar that the newspaper talked of Detective Cotton solving the crime, ‘following leads that culminated in the arrest,’ and so forth. That struck me as duplicitous, a cavalier dismissal of your work.”
“Septuagenarian spinsters, albeit with spunk and gumption, and a tiny withered Jewish lady at that, are not supposed to step into his bang-bang-you’re-dead world. But Detective Cotton did assume control when I called him that afternoon, with Tansi sitting with you just ten feet away. In tears. Both of you.”
“I go to sleep thinking of it. It haunts me, her shriveled, empty face.”
“You know, Detective Cotton sent a dozen roses to my hotel. That was a surprise. Of course, each night they droop a little more, shedding perfumed petals. When I fly out tomorrow, I expect the carpet will be covered with browning petals.”
“You’re really anxious to get back home?”
“I am and I’m not. Alaska looms before me like a desolate wasteland. I’ll be flying there again, stuck in snow drifts when it’s a teeth-chattering one-hundred degrees below zero.” I sighed. “L.A. will seem a paradise.”
“Come back to visit.”
“Of course. But I have to do Ice Palace.” I bit my lip. “I suppose it will be my last novel.”
Mercy looked at me sideways. “Edna, you probably said that back in the twenties when you finished Show Boat.”
I grinned. For a moment I imagined myself back in Alaska, my vision colored by these last days in California. I knew my heart beat differently now.
Mercy pointed to a stack of books on a side table, all wearing glossy dust jackets, a tower of neatly stacked volumes. “Thank you,” she said. Earlier I’d arrived with copies of my novels, and, a little sheepishly, had inscribed them to Mercy, each one with a different inscription. In Giant I’d written, “You did not fail him.” That’s all I wrote, and Mercy smiled.
“Did you hear from Jimmy?”
“No,” I said. “They’re shooting every day now—the last scene. He couldn’t…”
“Still, he could have called you.”
“There was a small drawing left in my hotel mailbox. It’s a picture of a boy’s face, and it looks, I suppose, as he did as a young boy: bony, intelligent face, the eyes, the lips—embryonic idol, that one. A boy in what looks like a confirmation suit, with slightly mischievous eyes. He signed it ‘Jim (Brando Clift) Dean.’ It’s beautifully innocent and simple. I’m happy to have it.” I thought of Rock
and Liz. “What will happen to these young, beautiful people?” I said, suddenly. I looked into Mercy’s face. “And you? Out here, among the cannibals.”
“Me, I hide away, look at it all cynically, and probably will dissolve into booze and multiple marriages.”
“Don’t say that,” I warned.
“We pay a price. We’re a patchwork quilt of publicity shoots. Actors have a short shelf life.”
“A lot of this scares me to death. You know, my novels have romantic characters, Mercy. Beautiful, willful women and gorgeous, though horribly flawed, men. But they’re…creations. Here, they use real people who seem unaware that, well…the inevitable arc of rise-and-fall is built into this dreadful illusion.”
“What’s going to happen to him?” Mercy asked. “Could he end up lounging with other stars at the Beverly Hills Hotel swimming pool, waiting to be recognized?”
“I don’t want to think about that. It scares me even worse.”
“I’ll never understand him.”
I stood up, walked to the window. The rain was stopping. I saw a pale blue sky; the eucalyptus and lemon trees gleamed and shimmered in the yard’s sudden light. “He’s all that we think he is. Nothing more.”
“Nothing more?”
I turned and faced her: “But that’s enough.”
EPILOGUE
I wake with a start, glance at the clock on the nightstand. Is it really five in the morning? An absurd hour to be startled awake, neither late night nor hazy morning; a limbo hour, the hour of desperate souls caught between lives. It’s the new draperies, I decide, hung poorly, perhaps, so that watery early morning light, creeping over the Manhattan skyline, filters into the dim room.
But that’s not it. I sit up, as panic floods me. But I’m more annoyed than frightened. I might be dying—but I know this isn’t the case. I’ll die when I’m damn good and ready, thank you. I’ll pencil in my own death on a distant calendar. I have novels to write. Research. Travel. Notes to take, organize. In the dim light, my mind drifts to Alaska—all that cruel ice and bitter cold. Ice Palace: in the works. Death will have to wait.
What did my pesky sister Fanny say when the topic came up last year? “It’s the one force of nature you can’t control, Edna.” We’ll see about that.
My eyes dart around the shadowy bedroom, locating the shapes of the comfortable accoutrements I’ve placed here: the pen-and-ink sketch of me by James Montgomery Flagg, the Baccarat bud vase given to me by Heifetz, the gilt-framed letter from Teddy Roosevelt. Artifacts of my monumental and cherished success. On the small mahogany table by the window is a photograph I placed there yesterday, positioned so I can stare at it, smile, shake my head, grin. Now, suddenly, I want to avoid it, as if it holds a voodoo spell.
An hour later, dressed, I go into the kitchen, surprising Molly who stands at the stove, yawning. “I’ll be back,” I tell my housekeeper, who eyes me nervously. “I need to walk.”
So I stroll down Park Avenue, but I’m dressed inappropriately in a coal-gray cashmere sweater and a jade-green cotton summer dress. I turn back, chilled. I stare into the autumn New York sky—that awful gunmetal gray, as dull as armor plate, yet pale and fuzzy in the far distance, with unlovely, sooty clouds hovering over New Jersey, where, of course, they belong.
As I enter the lobby, I tell myself, triumphantly, that the answer is obvious: I’m still covered with the glitzy fairy dust of Hollywood. July and August in California—well, that explains my uneasiness. All that brutal sun, that wispy late-afternoon fog, those cartoonish royal palms dotting the landscape like a cheap nightclub backdrop. That West Coast ambiance lingers, confuses.
New York in September—what is today’s date? October the first?—is desolate and quiet, Manhattanites pulling themselves back, tucking in the corners of their summer lives, readying, like worm-white rodents, for the long numbing cold.
Dreadful Hollywood. All that smiling and bowing, that sycophantic obeisance. Miss Ferber this, Miss Ferber that. May I get you…How pleased we are…I must say you look stunning in those pearls…Your novel, well, let me tell you…And the heat. Dry, not humid really, but monotonous, deadly. There’s too much space out there. People fall apart, become unhinged, jaws slack, bodies sagging. It takes too long to cross those endless boulevards.
It was such a comfort to return to New York. Emerging from the limo—ostentatiously provided by Jack Warner, no less—I stepped out onto litter on Park Avenue, a discarded half of a pastrami on rye, stuck to a piece of white butcher’s paper. I was back home.
Molly is waiting with a pot of tea. “I forgot my coat,” I say.
“Did you hear the phone ring late last night?” Molly’s Irish brogue is rich and soft.
“Of course not.” A full eight hours in my bed, requisite, solid puritanical sleep; that’s what I demand of myself.
I scan The New York Times, placed so carefully on the breakfast table. I turn the pages aimlessly, refusing to stay on any one page. A wave of panic—again. Shaking, I flip the sheets quickly, driven, oddly understanding that I have no choice. By the time I get to page ten, the phone is ringing. I listen to Molly’s greeting. I wait. Because now I know. For there—as piercing as a dagger to the heart—is the bold headline: “James Dean, Film Actor, Killed in Crash of Auto.”
September 30, 1955. Yesterday. Already a lifetime away.
For a freakish second, I am relieved. It all makes sense: the disruption of my sleep, the edgy morning, the panic.
Henry Ginsburg, producer of Giant, tells me what I’ve just read. His exact words: “The boy is dead.”
Those frenzied weeks in Hollywood make sense now, yet make no sense at all. As I left for the airport, he followed me out to the limo. Hovering, holding onto me, he whispered, “Edna, you’ve known me all your life.”
At the time I smiled, used to his cryptic asides, inarticulate mumbling, and pebbles-in-the-mouth announcements. But that line stayed with me on the long flight back.
Now, reeling, I walk into my bedroom and find myself drawn to the black-and-white photo I’d propped up on the table, situated so that it caught the blaze of high noon, the afternoon light, the twilight shadows. Hunched over, gripping the table with trembling hands, I stare into the face of the dead boy. This exquisite photo arrived two days ago. Jimmy in his Jett Rink ranch-hand costume, the slouch, the ten-gallon hat shading his brow, the light-blue eyes almost absent, the cigarette insolently poised at the corner of his mouth—those sensual, impossible lips. He’d signed it: Jett Rink. Staring into that chiseled face that suggested so much raw emotion by the slightest movement, I touch the photo—my small, knobby fingers on the slick surface. No flesh here, no dimension, no power. I want to tear it into shreds. This boy, this imp of the perverse.
The afternoon the photo arrived, I sent him a letter, a brief thank-you note really, in which I foolishly joked and vamped. Lord, how could a twenty-four-year-old boy make an aging novelist behave like a Victorian damsel in a revival of Tempest and Sunshine? Or like some simpering ingénue in a revival of my own Show Boat? I ended the note: “Your steely profile, which so reminds me of John Barrymore, a soul you’ve probably never heard of—well, Jimmy, you have that profile. But your hellfire car racing and tearing through the Hollywood Hills at breakneck speed will soon take care of that.”
But he couldn’t have gotten the letter. Nor will he.
As I turn away, my hand brushes the photograph onto the carpet, where it’s lost in the shadows. I’m unable to pick it up. If I bend down, I will topple into his death.
A whispered voice, “Edna, you’ve known me all your life.”
Yes, of course I have. I always have. The rebel, romantic fool, the afternoon of a faun, the soul in chains, the voice of the turtle.
But now that life is over.
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