When the flat changed Gillis’s plans, he turned into a random driveway that ended up as the immediate solution to his chase. His pursuers continued down the road without seeing him. Further up the abandoned driveway, Gillis discovered a decaying garage, a perfect hiding place. He drove in and then assessed the car next to his – a dusty Isotta-Fraschini from 1928. Gillis figured that was probably the last year that car was driven. It seemed in keeping with the rundown mansion he looked over after leaving the garage. He wondered when the tenants had moved out. But much to his amazement, there were still residents in that neglected estate.
“You there,” a voice rang out from the abandoned house, “why are you so late?” Gillis looked around, trying to find the source of that voice and she spoke again, “Why have you kept me waiting so long?” Then, he saw a woman in sunglasses, standing behind a bamboo screen.
The front door opened and a butler beckoned Gillis to enter the mansion. “In here,” he said.
Gillis walked over. “I just put my car in the garage. I had a blowout.”
“Go on in,” Max the butler continued.
“Look, maybe I better take my car and get it off…”
“Wipe your feet,” Max instructed Gillis, pointing down to the door matt. Gillis obligingly wiped his feet and Max, played by Erich von Stroheim, pointed to the open door. “Go on.”
That’s where we stopped location for the day and went back to Paramount where we shot interiors on a sound stage. We were in Norma Desmond’s living room, an ornate and depressing space that had dozens of photographs on display, photographs mainly of Norma but also of her friends – Valentino, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin. The room was like the inside of a pyramid where time stood still and the deceased inhabitant was still lurking about alive, though her liveliness was only known to herself.
When Norma heard that Gillis was a screenwriter, she invited him to read the screenplay she’d been writing by hand for years. On a card table placed between two canvas director’s chairs, there lay hundreds of pages of Salome, the script that would be Norma’s return to the screen. She explained to Gillis that she would have DeMille direct it.
“And you’d play Salome?” Gillis asked.
“Who else?”
Norma’s face, stretched by multiple face lifts, projected itself forward as she described the thrill that she would have as she kissed the “cold, dead lips” of the decapitated Saint John. The furthest thing from the failed writer’s mind at that moment was that he would soon become Saint John and it would be his cold dead lips that Norma would kiss after consuming Gillis’s ambition and youth.
When the day’s long shoot was over, while Wilder and Charlie Brackett were still working on completing the script, I stopped by at Billy’s invitation. He had received the photograph of Gillis’s blowout and wanted to praise me.
“This is exactly what I wanted,” he told me, “the spear from Norma Desmond’s will that steers Gillis’s car into the buried heart of Hollywood.”
“You sound like a press agent.”
Billy laughed. “You don’t say? It’s the publicity department’s copy for your shot.”
Charlie Brackett was putting on his coat.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
An exhausted Charlie responded, “Ever hear of sleep?”
“But what about tomorrow’s shoot?”
“We wrote that,” Charlie answered.
“Then, what about the day after?”
“We’ll write that tomorrow night.”
Brackett left Billy’s office, walked by us outside the window, in a daze from overwork. Billy overworked everyone’s mind and spirit. He, himself, seemed to have no limit of energy. That’s how we stayed up for hours longer that night as we reminisced some more about Berlin.
“I remember standing in the lobby of the Savoy Hotel,” I recounted to Billy while we were on our third or fourth drink. “It was 1929 and I was escorting a young fraulein. I registered us as Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Lumiere. The bellboy escorted us to our top floor room in a grand new elevator. We rose above the elaborate staircase in silence and distance from the realities of suffering that I saw in the chambermaids faces, in the clerks’ tired eyes, in the welcoming arm that the bellboy extended as he led us into our luxurious rooms.”
“You were with your murderess that night,” Billy said.
“How did you know?”
“How could I forget Odette?’
“If she’d murdered me, Billy,” I said with a weak voice.
“I know, I know, you’d still be happy. But go on…”
“I was only nineteen.”
“Perfect age to be in total chaos.”
“That’s what it was, wasn’t it?” I sighed. Back then, Berlin was a contrast between the Nazis and that squalor from those beautiful losers of the war and the city – the cross-dressing night clubs.
“The maimed warriors of the lost war and the cocaine carriers.”
“The ones you supported.”
“I needed something to feel normal.”
“What is this normal you’re talking about?”
“Well, normal for me then, normal enough to get my job at
UFA.”
“That was after we met,” Billy interrupted.
“My artwork got me a job painting sets on Thunderbolt.”
“I got you a job painting on Thunderbolt. You were too scarerd to blink in front of the art director.
“Not too scared to drink.”
“You still aren’t.” Billy took my glass and filled it with just the thing I needed to crash my car on the way home.
“Thunderbolt was okay but you really hit a home run when you worked on The Blue Angel.’
I couldn’t help smiling to myself. “Are you still in touch with Marlene?”
“I sleep with her every night.”
“In your dreams, Billy.”
“What about your dreams?”
“My dreams of Marlene?”
“All right,” he said encouraging me, “Your dreams of Marlene.”
“I remember the shoot, that older woman performing in the cabaret, clutching the breath that filtered its way through every male mouth in the place.”
Reliving this story in my mind, I let Billy wait while I became more focused on the set of The Blue Angel, the way it loomed before my eyes like a demon of compulsion and obsession which welcomingly tarnished me as I watched Marlene perform Falling in Love Again time after time.
I was remembering some of the photographs I took of the middle-aged and thoroughly innocent Emil Jannings’s face as he confronted the temptress in the nightclub. I saw the pale determination to avenge the poor corrupted high school youth appear on his face, a conviction that lost all of its power when confronted by the charms of Lola. He came to The Blue Angel nightclub to stop his students from falling for the dark charms of the enchantress and ended up becoming the greatest victim of them all, enriched and in ruins.
The Blue Angel was filmed in English and German simultaneously, first a set-up in German, then one in English. This practice, common in the early days of the talkies, allowed the production company to release the picture in the English-speaking world, competing directly with Hollywood, teasing sentiment and cash
“After Lola finished singing Falling In Love Again, in English, Marlene walked by me and asked me to light her cigarette. As I fumbled, she placed her hand on mine, easing my anxiety with a touch and a smile. I ignited a flame for her and Marlene seemed to take pity on the nineteen-year-old boy.”
“That’s when she handed you Odette.”
“Lola’s ‘Cold, Dead Lips’”
“Lola wasn’t cold. She was hot as hell.”
“I remember the night that you finally had her,” Billy said.
“But I was in love with Marlene, Billy,” I said, then we both laughed.
“Love was everywhere then, wasn’t it, Alex? Love, he repeated, “you were still sli
pping and sliding in it when you came in the next morning.
“Everyone knew, didn’t they?”
“You could have played the professor that morning if you had been twenty years older and added a hundred pounds.”
I closed my eyes, thinking about Emil Jannings’s amazing performance, the way that he crowed like a cuckold as he was loving his love and his mind>’
Billy put my hat on my head and took the drink from my hand.
“Look, kid, it’s two o’clock and I’ve got to be on the set in four hours.”
“Then, why don’t we just stay here?”
“I need my own bed, Alex.”
I struggled to give up and gave Billy a withering smile.
“And you need a driver.” We started walking for his car while he told me I didn’t need to be in until the late afternoon. For this, I was most grateful because I couldn’t honestly say when I’d take up residence with myself again.
While I was stumbling my way to Billy’s car, my memory decided to take advantage of my weakness and I could feel myself kissing Katherine’s cold dead lips as they fished her out of the bay.
COLD, LIVE LIPS
I woke with the dawn, then went to the kitchen and made myself a Fernet Branca with strong coffee, my antidote to a hangover. Sitting at the dining table and before my brew woke me up, Mara walked into the room.
“Tough night, shooting, huh, Daddy?”
I looked up at her, perplexed at the same time that I felt a spark of joy to see her again, to be reminded of her mother’s young figure and the mornings when we woke up together.
“I think I’ll join the drama club,” she said.
“Drama,” I echoed, “Don’t you get enough of it just being sixteen?”
Mara smiled without replying. She poured herself some coffee and left the room.
While I was waiting for her to get dressed, while I was attempting to get dressed myself, my mind succumbed to another one of my hallucinations. It wasn’t about Michel or the unanswered question of whether or not I had killed him; it was about my “sugar mommy.” I could see her sitting in her living room, drinking champagne and eating caviar like Norma Desmond. Her walls were cluttered with valuable art. She had a Vlaminck, a Velasquez, a Van Gogh and other artists whose names began with “V.” The whole room was a projection of my collapsing mind…until Mara walked in and told me she’d be late for school.
We stepped outside and into the car a studio flunky had delivered to my house in the early morning. After dropping Mara off, I drove to my psychiatrist, Alice Devoille, a woman who had been trying to explain myself to me since my wife’s death and having a hard time convincing me that my dreams and fantasies were a normal part of the grief process. When faced with my confrontational behavior, she would whisk me to unconsciousness with her own version of hypnotherapy, something that more often than not led me deeper into self-loathing, not providing the comfort that she had intended.
I parked on Westwood Boulevard before my appointment, laid my eyes on some of the UCLA co-eds going to class, the shapely girls in their spring dresses. I thought about Mara after I got out of the car. She would soon be torturing young men merely because of her beauty.
Once in Alice’s office, I sat on the couch and greeted my psychiatrist.
“Alex,” she said with her warm, her annoyingly understanding persona. She was made of the stuff that came out of people after the war, the positivity about reconstruction, and the unwarranted assurance that everything would be okay. And her constructive bent was there despite the fact that her own keen suffering was never fully resolved. Alice was not an attractive woman, something that might account for her having a career in the first place when all women seemed obliged to marry and produce offspring. Whatever beauty Alice had was in her compassionate manner, her willingness to counter the nightmares of the people who put their trust in her.
Alice was fifty-six and just at the start of an independent career. Before she rented that office, she had worked for the City of Los Angeles, in adoptions. It was her responsibility to interview potential parents, to see if they were fit enough to adopt a ward of the state. I wondered if she would approve of me as a parent.
“How are you?” she asked as she sat down in a chair opposite me.
“Another dream,” I confessed.
“Tell me about it,” she said like a caring mother.
“It was about Michel again. I was on the boat and heard Michel crying out. I ran up to the helm and grabbed my iron umbrella. I opened it and tried holding it above him even though it wasn’t raining. When Michel turned around, his face cracked in two and he grabbed my umbrella. I wanted to help him but instead, I took the umbrella and jumped off the boat. Then, as I was treading water with my umbrella, Michel’s blood rolled off the boat and was staining the crystal clear waters…maybe I really did kill Michel and wouldn’t let myself remember it when I’m awake.”
Alice sighed with her eyes.
“Then, maybe it was Katharine I killed. There was no blood when she died but the body falling such a distance made the water as hard as cement,” I said.
“You know what day this is?”
“No,” I responded with a cold voice. Alice’s tone, for some reason, reminded me of my mother’s, the transference apparently having worked out.
“Where is Katharine in all this?”
Still dead, I wanted to say. It was a long time since my wife’s suicide but I still felt her touching me. The phantom touch reminded me of my mother when she used to grab me and give me one of her arresting stares. Always, she punished me for going out of the dreadful basement apartment we had in Brooklyn. Always, I pleaded with her to love me. I wanted to do the same with Alice. Then, I felt myself falling into the past. “What if I had met Katharine as a child?”
“You were hardly more than a child, Alexander. What was your age, twenty? Twenty-one?”
I didn’t respond. I lay on the couch with my eyes closed.
“Alex, where are you?” Alice spoke into my visions.
I looked up at her, blankly.
“You seem to have gone away again.”
“I was with Katharine, the night we first met.”
“You haven’t spoken about what day this is.”
I was confused. What day was it?
Then, I saw the city of San Francisco, upside down, reaching out to grab me. It was the first anniversary of Katharine’s leap from the Golden Gate Bridge.
“How did I forget?” A shiver went through me in spite of the day’s heat. I folded my arms in front of me, looked at the print of a Modigliani painting. The girl had a faraway look, a lost look, a look that attempted to conceal a hearty guilt, the kind of guilt that you could eat for breakfast before throwing up.
I heard wind chimes coming from Alice’s patio. They replaced the other sounds, the sounds of traffic and the development of a regular day. I stared through the window, looked into the distance.
“What do you see, Alexander?”
Other psychiatrists might ask what I was feeling but not Alice, she knew me better, my strange predilection to have visions of the future and visions of the past. It was what I used to use when I painted a long, long time before. My visions were put on canvas and I stood back to appreciate them when I was finished. But no one else seemed to appreciate them or understand them. Certainly, no one bought them.
“I was thinking about my mother at night.”
“Which night was that?”
“When I was twelve…when I just learned to masturbate.”
“Go on.”
“She found me doing it and I immediately stopped, tried to pretend I was reading the magazine I was using.”
“What did she do?”
“It was awful.”
Pause.
“She came and lay down on my bed. Then, she pulled back my sheet and saw the sticky cum that matted my sparse chest hair.”
A longer pause. “I can’t talk about this.”
�
�What did she do to you?”
“She grabbed my penis and began to massage it. Then she laughed and kissed me on my ear. She blew into it.”
Alice’s wind chimes began to rattle violently. It was as if the wind was chasing me, making me tell Alice the truth about my mother’s incest. “She leaned down to my penis and put it in her mouth. She started sucking me off.”
Pause.
“I was horrified, but…”
“But?”
“I enjoyed it.”
“Of course you did, she was stimulating you.”
“But she was my mother.”
“She was the closest woman you had in your life.”
“I was only twelve!”
“Did you stop her?”
“I, I didn’t want to. She excited me. I came again, in her mouth.” I began to cry. “I wanted her to do it again. I felt comfortable with her. I felt like one of the men who were always visiting her, moaning and making violent sounds when they were finishing themselves off.”
“How long was this going on?”
“I don’t know. It must have lasted for a year or so. I remember going to school in the morning, feeling ashamed and excited, knowing that I knew more about the world than anyone else at school. But I could never tell them. I could never share my sexy experiences.”
“How did it end?”
“It was a punishment.”
“What had you done?”
“I was spending too much time painting, not studying, not willing to let my mother come in my room anymore – even though I wanted her to. She was all I had in the world.”
“Then, why didn’t you let her?”
I looked at Alice incredulously. “I was fucking my mother. It was wrong and I felt it in my bones. I wanted to do something apart from her. I thought that my paintings would sell and I could move out, be free from her and free from the memory of how I enjoyed being her young lover. It was wonderfully shameful. It was the shame that excited me the most.”
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