by Anne Bernays
I asked Charlie to talk with Lula Baroney. It would probably mean a trip to see her in her own house; she wasn’t likely to want to come to New York to talk. We’d put him up in a nice Boston hotel like the Copley Plaza, give him an expense account. He could take in a Red Sox game.
He told me his daughter was in a play at school he had promised to see.
My skin began to prickle. He was making it hard for me to insist he follow through on this possibly madcap idea of mine. But I was the boss; it wasn’t his decision. “I’m sorry . . .” I began and he interrupted me: “I shouldn’t have said that. I can see Connie anytime. She always gets the leads in the play.”
I thanked him. I really meant it. I counted on his steadiness and common sense—a commodity that seemed to me to be going dry in the general population. Take, for instance, the sticking power of Dianetics, dreamed up by a con artist named L. Ron Hubbard—the name was enough to get your doubts in gear. Many actually believed this man who claimed to be able to regress anyone to their pre-birth condition and thereby rid them of their hang-ups. Some people relegated Dianetics to the same category as psychoanalysis, which also smelled a little fishy. In any case, I counted heavily on Charlie to be where I needed him.
After consulting with our publisher, I gave Charlie an open-ended expense account, told him to spend as many days as he thought necessary. Take taxis, eat at Locke-Ober’s, think of this as a working vacation. Some might think the task I was handing him would be a lark, but not Charlie, nor I, for that matter. To say it was soul-robbing would be to exaggerate, but it was heading in that direction. Charlie had studied English Literature at Harvard, was one of its stars, and had published a piece about a Donne elegy while still an undergraduate. The difference between Donne and Baroney was the difference between a filet mignon and a hot dog.
“Take a few days, don’t be in too much of a hurry,” I added as we both headed toward the door of my office. “Get to know the lady, don’t promise her too much money, you know what I mean; I don’t have to spell it out for you. We’re going to have to hire a ghost to work with her, and good ghosts don’t come cheap, as you know.”
I told him to phone me whenever he felt like it. “I’m on call.”
“You act like I’m going to Antarctica, for crissake,” he said.
IT WAS remarkable how this new venture distracted me from my troubles—real and imagined—at home. Charlie stayed in touch. In fact, he wrote me daily letters on Copley Plaza stationery. I enjoyed these communications because they were so obviously meant to be read and appreciated by a connoisseur. It had been easy enough to locate and get an invitation to visit the lady in a triple-decker in the unlovely suburb of Somerville—“the second most heavily populated urban area in the United States. Most of the inhabitants live in three-storey wooden houses, one family per floor. The houses look like tinder boxes. Nobody puts a number on their house. What are they afraid of?” He had finally located Baroney’s house by asking several neighbors who gave him a funny look; they were not used to strangers. The lady was waiting for him. She had dressed herself up in a gown that Charlie figured she had taken away with her when she finished one of her movies. “It was covered with those little disks that sparkle. It was ten-thirty in the morning.” Even though Baroney had taken the hook that had “memoirs” as bait, she was suspicious to begin with; Charlie surmised suspicion was part of her nature or maybe she had been thrown this hook before without resolution. The place was “darker than a cat’s asshole,” he wrote, speculating that darkness is kinder than light to the ravages of age. “I groped my way onto the living room couch, bumping into a table on the way.” Baroney asked him to excuse the mess. “There wasn’t any. After sitting me down and plying me with coffee, she asked my name for the third time. ‘I’ll call you Charles if you don’t mind,’ she said. ‘I loathe nicknames. And I want you to call me Lucille, never Lula. I loathe that name. It was probably that bitch, Hedda Hopper, who gave it to me. Made me sound like a common streetwalker.’ ”
Charlie was sure her manner of speaking came from an acting coach rather than her parents. But that was explainable; she came from the era when actors were taught to talk like English gentry, even though she only played in two or three “talkies” before she retired to a life of disappointed dreams. The woman’s suspicion gradually melted into a river of life story. “It would have sounded tragic if it hadn’t had so many horrible things in it: incest, alcoholism, a child born with missing fingers.” She seemed to enjoy telling this story of tragedy compounded. Charlie admitted that he doubted a good deal of it—“too dramatic; there isn’t time in one life for all that crap.” Every once in a while he heard noises overhead, and it turned out that Lula’s daughter lived on the second floor. “And when I said that I’d like to meet Claire,” she said, ‘No, you wouldn’t—believe me,’ which only piqued my curiosity. Just before I got up to leave I told Lula again that she had had a fascinating life and that we at Griffin House, a major book publisher, would like to bring out her memoirs.” She said she’d think about it. ‘Come back tomorrow.’ It had the ring of a fairy tale where the hero has to do something three times in order to break the spell or get the girl or find the treasure.”
The next day I received a second letter. He had taken Baroney to lunch. She wanted to go to the Ritz . “I was afraid she might make a scene, come on like Bankhead, waving a cigarette holder and making demands in a loud voice. The room is so large and bright, the tumblers so blue, the waiters so impeccable, the hush so pervasive—like a surgeon’s waiting room. You have to talk in a low voice or people at the next table will hear you. But she behaved herself, even wore a suit and a frilly blouse.” Baroney obviously hadn’t been wooed in quite some time and toyed with Charlie who, when he tried out the ghost idea, was surprised by her vehemence. “ ‘I can do my own writing thank you very much.’ Then she said, ‘How much?’ I nearly choked on my scrod. “You mean, how much advance are we offering?” ‘I’m no dummy,’ she’d said. ‘Maybe I haven’t made a movie in twenty years, but I know what goes on.’ ”
She had a devoted fan club. Her fans wrote her more than a hundred letters a week. Besides, she told Charlie, she had had similar offers from two other publishers. He didn’t believe her but had to play along or risk implying that she was a liar. These were just the sort of mind games Charlie most disliked playing. He preferred to read and edit—with the pesky author nowhere in sight or sound.
After he took her home in a taxi—“Twelve bucks!”— she told him to come back the next day and he’d have his answer.
After getting Charlie’s second letter I phoned him and we discussed the project. Should we sweeten the pot, already at a hefty thirty thousand, or should we stick to our original figure and see if she caves?
So we went up fifteen hundred, and Baroney agreed to talk to a ghostwriter who would put the story in order and give it a readable structure while she would do most of the writing. It was a reasonable agreement, given the fact that she could barely write her own name and would be grateful, at the end, for the graceful prose of a professional wordsmith.
CHAPTER 8
Charlie McCann stayed in Boston for three days talking to Lucille Baroney, holding her hand and making her feel desired, sought after. He returned to New York with a promise from her that she would let Griffin publish her memoir. I authorized a raise for him; he was pleased, of course, but said he was only doing his job, a fireman rushing into a burning building to rescue two children and a puppy.
“That’s what I’m paid to do,” he said. Knowing Charlie, I was sure this wasn’t a case of false modesty.
“Let’s have lunch to celebrate,” I said. We went to Louis XIV and ordered Bombay gin martinis. We toasted each other.
“Don’t you feel spoiled by all this?” Charlie said, looking around the restaurant serving overpriced meals to well-heeled customers, most of whom were on expense accounts. “I do. Did I ever tell you my father owned a tavern in Hell’s Kitchen? We lived ups
tairs.”
I told him I knew he’d come from the wrong side of the tracks but not about the tavern.
“Prohibition was tough for our family. Nobody mentions that. Those fucking women with their bibles.”
I considered the many differences between us, and remembering how when we met at school I was shocked by his trousers, which were dark blue and shiny.
“You’ve come a long way,” I said, then realized that he might take this as condescension. But he didn’t react as if I had condescended to him. He just smiled at me.
I realized that Charlie had said something to me, but I hadn’t heard a word of it. He was saying, “So, Walt, what’s your take?” and I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. This is because a few hours earlier Barry and I had had a tête-à-tête in the car during which he told me he loved me, a sentiment he usually avoided as being too explicit, not sufficiently ironic. Nevertheless, it warmed me. It also made me wonder why he was telling me this now. Had something shifted in our relationship? Was something about to change? So I was somewhat distracted not by out-and-out worry but by a knife-edge of anxiety that kept nicking me.
Over an excellent, meal—steak tartare, lobster salad, espresso—Charlie and I talked about the problems we might face in getting Lucille to open up to a writer assigned to ghostwrite her book. Charlie repeated to me that when he brought up the subject of someone else doing the actual putting down of sentences and paragraphs she bristled. “I don’t need a writer. I’m the writer.”
“No darling, you’re the actress,” Charlie told her.
He assured her that the hired writer would only ask her questions designed to trigger long-buried memories. She should not mind some editing; every writer needs some editing. “He’s going to put words in my mouth,” Baroney had said. “I don’t want that. You think I can’t think for myself? That my memory’s shot?” Charlie said she got hot under the collar. He plied her with strong spirits; her preferred drink was single malt whiskey. “Natch,” Charlie said. She calmed down enough to let herself be persuaded that the hired writer would not interfere with her thought processes in any way. “It was the liquor what done it,” Charlie told me. “For an actress she’s pretty sharp.”
I thanked him again; he asked me to stop thanking him and changed the subject with a rather heavy hand, but that was all right; I was beginning to tire of it myself. He wanted to know more about Phyllis’ boss’ suicide. He’d read about it in the newspapers, heard it discussed on the radio and television, but was there more? Had Arnie been depressed?
Charlie seemed absorbed in the details of Arnie’s suicide. He didn’t know Phyllis well although he and his wife Marian had been to dinner at our house several times. So he knew her mainly as his hostess, a role she sparkled in. Bette Davis at the dinner table. Sometimes when I watched her charming the man to her right, then the man to her left, I wondered how I could ever have been drawn to her.
Charlie furrowed his brow. How much did I know about Arnie? Did he leave a note? Did he open the window before he jumped? Had he said anything at breakfast that would have led his wife to prick up her ears? Did I think he had been unfairly accused? He switched gears: How would I like to spend the rest of my life in Costa Rica? He’d heard that life there was easy, simple and straightforward, no one on your ass, trying to make you look like a criminal.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“Just idle speculation. I’m fed up to here with this fucking government. It can’t happen here? Man, it’s happening right now. Arnie had to be clinically depressed.”
“Either that or he was faced with a choice he didn’t want to make. So whoosh—out the window!”
For the first time I could remember, Charlie looked at me as if he didn’t like me.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s no joke, I know.”
“That’s okay,” he said, looking at his watch. “Let’s get back, there’s a week’s worth of work on my desk. Thanks for lunch.”
We walked back to the office, using small talk to cover over the small fissure that had somehow opened up between us during lunch. I had absolutely no clue as to what had set Charlie off. Was it Madame Baroney and her ego? Or the nature of his job, which clearly was changing from painstaking literary mining and accumulation into something much more like the naked commerce of sparkling merchandise—beads and trinkets? Who knew? Maybe his wife had woken up on the wrong side of the bed and chewed him out for not carrying his breakfast things over to the sink.
“MISTER SAMSON?” Mid-morning on a Saturday the shiny face of the cook preceded her body into my study. For a change, I was concentrating solely on the work in front of me, undistracted by problems domestic or otherwise, not by Phyllis, Kate, or even Barry, who for the past several days had been especially cheerful and seemingly content with his living arrangements. To emphasize its permanence he had bought a ficus plant and installed it in his room, watering it religiously, and watching it grow as if it were a child.
“Come in, Grete,” I said, suppressing a gesture of annoyance.
“May I come in, sir?” she said.
“I just told you to come in,” I said.
“Thank you sir,” she said. She had on her cook’s uniform, white dress, white apron with dark marks of grease I figured couldn’t be laundered out, white shoes with laces. Her hair was pulled tightly over her scalp and fixed in back in a bun. It occurred to me that I hadn’t the slightest idea where this woman came from. She had an indeterminate accent. Middle Europe? A little east of that? She looked to be in her late forties or early fifties. I didn’t know anything about her except her cooking. She probably wasn’t married because she lived upstairs in my house. But did she have a beau? What did she do on her days off? I couldn’t imagine. Spend the evening dancing the polka in Queens? Meet with her girlfriends at Childs for a meal cooked by someone else? Visit her old mother on Staten Island? Who was she?
Grete hesitated, unused to venturing this far from her kitchen and the back stairs.
I urged her again to come in. This time she stepped over the threshold. She was large, not so much fat as large, her bones thicker than mine. Her shoes were as long as mine. I looked away from her feet, not wanting to embarrass her.
“What can I do for you, Grete?”
“Well I hate to bother you sir, but . . .” She stopped. Her eyes were glistening. “Marie and I were wondering, Mr. Samson, what Mr. Barry’s duties are. I don’t mean to snitch, sir, but we were wondering why he’s always hanging about in the kitchen and his legs getting in the way when I’m trying to mop the floor, and he won’t run any errands for me, like down to Gristede’s for a head of lettuce.”
“None of your business” was on the tip of my tongue, the words scrambling to escape from my mouth, but I clamped my jaws together.
“If you’d like, Grete, I’ll speak to him about doing more work around the house and especially about not getting in your way. You know of course, he was hired to drive me and Mrs. Samson in the car. So it’s not surprising he seems to have less work to do than let’s say, you or Marie.” I paused and waited for her to say something more but she kept her own mouth shut. “I’ll tell Barry to run your errands for you—although, as I said, that wasn’t in his original job description.”
“I don’t know anything about description but I know about other things,” she said.
“What are you driving at, Grete?”
“Nothing, Mr. Samson. I wasn’t driving at anything.”
“Is there anything else, Grete?”
“Just one more little thing, Mr. Samson. I went to the eye doctor on Thursday, my day off you know, and he says I need a pair of glasses. I never needed glasses before. All of a sudden my eyes went bad on me and I can’t see the little things like I used to.” She held up her left hand where a Band-Aid lay across her index finger. “You see? I cut myself slicing the onions, I couldn’t see right. First time I’ve ever done that. I bled like a cut pig, honestly. And last week I couldn’t
thread the needle. Five minutes I was trying to get the thread through that little hole so I could mend my stockings. I’ll need a pair of glasses then, the doctor said so. They cost a lot of money, I think. I was wondering if you could see clear to give me a little raise to help pay for my new spectacles?”
I told Grete I thought that could be arranged. I would talk to Mrs. Samson but I was sure there wouldn’t be a problem. She’d been with us for three years; she was a valuable member of the household. I agreed with her that glasses were indeed a necessary item, not something that if you needed you could do without.
“Oh thank you, Mr. Samson. I’m much obliged to you.” She gave me an ambiguous smile.
“All right, then, Grete, I should be getting back to work.” I looked pointedly at the manuscript on my desk. “By the way, that pot roast last night—you outdid yourself. It was delicious.”
“Thank you, Mr. Samson. I try to do my best for you and Mrs. Samson. I’ll get back to my own work now.” She withdrew, head last.
I was rattled by Grete’s visit. Who wouldn’t be, under the circumstances? The thing was, in my experience there were no circumstances like mine. The weight of convention, of what was accepted and what not, descended on me and I felt weak. My heart fluttered as if there were a bird imprisoned inside my chest. I broke out in a sweat. I stumbled upstairs. Phyllis was in our bedroom, reading. She asked me what was the matter, was I feeling sick? “You look as if you were about to faint,” she said.
I told her I had a touch of heartburn.
“How can you be sure it isn’t a heart attack?” she said.
“I just know it isn’t. But I’m going to lie down for a few minutes. Have we got anything for heartburn?”
I lay down on our bed and she brought me two antacid tablets that tasted like chalk and told me to chew them. Like most women, Phyllis had the feral instincts of a nurse; it’s possible they enjoy seeing men enfeebled.