Duplicitous

by Nicholas James

“Not any longer,” Bill Angler told the Frenchman.

  “What have you done,” an exasperated Colette asked.

  “Why don’t you ask the State Department yourself?”

  “I’ll do so immediately.” He grabbed my arm and tried to lead me away.

  “Hold it,” a police Captain said. “Take those cuffs off.”

  DeColette was infuriated but did as he was instructed.

  The handcuffs came off and I strode out of the police station with Angler as DeColette was swearing in French when he left with his partner for the car.

  As Angler and I walked outside the station, I asked the lawyer how he managed to pull that off. “You know a man named Trini,” he asked me as he opened the passenger door of his Cadillac.

  “Did he talk?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were being extorted?”

  “I was going to…”

  “You’ve got to come clean on what you remembered on the boat that day.”

  “But I let him die!”

  “Letting a man die isn’t murdering him.”

  “All right,” I said, “Set it up. I’ll go to the police as soon as you’re ready.”

  When we opened the front door, Sabrina came rushing to my side. “What the hell was that about?”

  I introduced Sabrina to Angler and explained that it was nothing but a foiled arrest for murder. “They were going to take me to Tahiti until this genius stopped the process. Come over here,” I said to Angler as I approached my desk and immediately wrote a check for his retainer. “I wouldn’t want to lose your services.”

  Angler left and I sat back in my chair, wasted, as Sabrina poured me a drink. I downed a quick shot of Wild Turkey, and then went to Paramount just in time for the scene when Gillis returns home after Betty and he shared a romantic scene at the studio.

  Gillis is at the end of his wits. He knows that he has to come clean about his arrangement with Norma but he’s too crazy about Betty to do so. As it turns out, though, he doesn’t need to reveal the black truth to his newly beloved. Norma Desmond is doing it for him.

  From his room, Gillis can hear Norma dialing the phone. He listens through the door, hears Norma talking with Betty, telling her about Joe, slowly revealing a torrid description of the lives they live together.

  “Do you know where he lives?” she says, “Do you know how he lives? Do you know what he lives on?”

  “Who are you? What do you want? What business is it of yours, anyway?”

  “Miss Schaefer, I’m trying to do you a favor. I’m trying to spare you a great deal of misery. Of course, you may be too young to even suspect there are men of his sort. I don’t know what he’s told you but he does not live with relatives…or with friends in the usual sense of the word.”

  At this point, Joe grabs the phone from Norma’s hand and invites Betty to discover the truth. He asks her to come out to 10086 Sunset Blvd, then slams the phone down and hovers over the aging movie Queen. She becomes frantic, explaining that she’s been going out of her mind over the thought of him with someone else, that she couldn’t help what she was doing.

  Gillis remains silent, pacing the room until the doorbell rings. Gillis answers the door instead of Max and escorts Betty into Norma’s mansion, where he shows off her lugubrious décor, shows off the private projection room, talks about the underground bowling alley.

  “I didn’t come here to see a house,” Betty interrupts, “What about Norma Desmond?”

  “This is what I’m trying to tell you,” Joe responds. “It’s lonely here so she got herself a companion. Very simple set-up. Older woman who’s well to do. A younger man who’s not doing too well. Can you figure it out yourself?”

  “No. I haven’t heard any of this. I’ve never got those telephone calls and I’ve never been in this house. Now, get your things and let’s get out of here.”

  “All my things,” Joe replies, “All my things? All my 18 suits and the custom made shoes and the six dozen shirts and the platinum key chains and the gold cigarette cases?”

  “I can’t look at you anymore, Joe.” And Betty covers her face.

  “How about looking for the exit?”

  Joe escorts her out of the house, then stops and wishes her good luck. “When you and Artie get back,” he says, flipping on the light in the pool, “If you ever feel like taking a swim, here’s the pool.” Betty turns and looks at Joe for a second, a last look at the man she fell so deeply for, then she turns back and hightails for the car she came in.

  TABU REVEALED

  Gillis wasn’t the only one who had to come clean and reveal the life he’s been living. It was time to do the same thing myself.

  “You’re not turning yourself in,” Angler tells me as he takes me to the Santa Monica Police Station, “You’re turning Hitu in.”

  As soon as we get out of Angler’s car, photographers start flashing pictures. But it was no longer just about me. Hitu was big news now.

  “Did you know this native who went on a killing spree,” a reporter asked.

  Hitu had just killed two people in the Tahitian government offices. Hitu claimed that he was doing it for his country but, under questioning, he let slip that he was the painter of Michel Lumiere’s work, that he was tired of being exploited by all the French bastards.

  Inside the police station, there was ordered chaos. DeColette was there along with his American counterparts. They handled me tenderly, seeing me, at last, as the aggrieved party. I sat down for my statement and told them the truth about Michel’s murder and the shame I carried for not trying to save Michel’s life.

  When I was finished, I was allowed to go but the suspicion still hung over my head. I had to wait for release, for some definitive proof that it was Hitu who killed Michel.

  DEPARTURES

  The next day I was back on the job, I remember feeling free, like Gillis, of the madness that had imprisoned me. We were both playing out final scenes in the drama of our duplicitous lives.

  We were shooting the scene after Betty left the house, when Joe ascends the stairs to his room. Norma thanked him desperately for doing what, to her, was the right thing, sending away her competition. But Betty’s departure only inspired Gillis to follow. He pulled out his suitcase and started to pack.

  Norma opened Joe’s door and saw him putting his clothes into a suitcase.

  “What are you doing?”

  Gillis continued to retrieve the things that he came with, leaving the closet full of the fine suits that Norma had bought for him.

  Norma stood in the doorway, petrified. “You’re leaving me!”

  “Yes, I am, Norma.”

  “No you’re not.” And she yells for Max, her persistent solver of problems, the one who’s kept Norma uninformed about things that might hurt her, things that might bring her closer to reality.

  “Thanks for the use of letting me wear the handsome wardrobe,” Gillis told her. Then, taking off his watch, he tosses it on the bed. He does the same thing with his cigarette case. “And thanks for the use of all the trinkets.”

  Desperate, she offers him money.

  “Norma, you’d be throwing it away. I don’t qualify for the job.” He closes his suitcase. “Not anymore.” She grabs it, screaming again for Max.

  “I can’t face life without you.” Then the tone of her voice turns threatening. “And you know I’m not afraid to die.”

  “That’s between you and yourself.”

  “You think I made that up about the gun, don’t you? All right.” And Norma runs to her room, then back with the gun held in both hands. “See?” she tells Gillis, “You didn’t believe me. Now I suppose you don’t think I have the courage?”

  “Oh, sure, if it would make a good scene.”

  “You don’t care, do you? But hundreds of thousands of people will care!”

  “Oh, Wake Up, Norma. You’d be killing yourself to an empty house. The audience left twenty years ago. Now face it!”

  “That’s a lie,” sh
e yells, clutching her revolver. “They still want me!”

  “No they don’t!”

  “Then, what about the studio? What about DeMille?”

  “He was trying to spare your feelings. The studio only wanted to rent your car.”

  “To what?”

  “DeMille didn’t have the heart to tell you. None of them had the heart.”

  “That’s a lie! They want me. I get letters every day.”

  Max has walked into the room. Gillis looks to him. “You tell her, Max. Come on, do her that favor. Tell her there isn’t going to be any picture. There aren’t any fan mails except the ones you write.”

  “It isn’t true,” Norma says with desperate fear. “Max?”

  Max gulps, then, impervious to Gillis’s prodding, announces “Madame is the greatest star of them all!” He crosses the room saying he will take Mr. Gillis’s bags to the car. He picks them up and leaves.

  Norma, now completely in a hypnotic state of mind, says “You heard him. I’m a star.”

  “Norma, you’re a woman of fifty. Now, grow up! There’s nothing tragic about being fifty, not unless you act like you try to be twenty-five.”

  Oblivious to Gillis, Norma stares up at the heavens. “I’m the greatest star of them all,” she whispers to herself.

  Gillis takes his last bag and walks out of the room. “Good Bye, Norma!”

  “No one ever leaves a star,” she continues whispering to an empty room. “That’s what makes a star a star.”

  Norma suddenly realizes the reality of what’s happening and it breaks her in two. “Joe?” she says in a rising voice, “Joe?” over and over again. She follows him outside, with the gun, as he continues to ignore her pleas. Then, when he’s near the pool, Norma Desmond fires into Joe’s back and stops his exit. She fires two more times and Gillis falls into Norma’s well lit pool.

  Max runs up, sees Joe’s body in the pool. He approaches Norma. By now, she is completely gone from this reality. Still gazing into the skies, she says, “The stars are ageless, aren’t they?”

  The stars are also keen witnesses to murder and betrayal. When I got home that night from the studio, I learned that Hitu had been captured. He had confessed to killing Michel because he stole his artwork, that he didn’t care what happened to him, that the spirits of his ancestors would visit the French and eventually throw them off the islands and destroy them.

  WONDERFUL PEOPLE IN THE DARK

  The final day of photography on Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard began at daybreak, a grey overcast morning loomed around Norma’s house. Joe Gillis was being dragged out of the pool he always wanted, ever so gently. “Funny how gentle people get with you once that you’re dead,” Gillis narrates.

  With the arrival of the police, crowds started to gather at Norma’s front door, trying to get inside. Finally, they want to see the star, they want to be near her for when she gives her final scene.

  The Paramount newsreel truck arrives; the cameras go into the foyer that is now filled with reporters and police. A cop tries to place a call but Hedda Hopper, the gossip columnist, already has control of the phone, calling in her report from Norma’s bedroom.

  “City desk,” she says. “Hedda Hopper speaking. I’m talking from the bedroom of Norma Desmond.” She stops for a moment, annoyed by the other end’s reaction. “Don’t bother with a rewrite man. Take it Direct. Ready?” After a brief pause, she describes the gruesome scene. “As daylight breaks over the murder house, Norma Desmond, famous star of yesteryear is in a state of complete mental shock. A curtain of silence seems to have fallen around her…” Then we pan away from Hopper and to the greatest star of them all, sitting at her boudoir, primping herself, getting ready for the cameras. The police question her about the murder, about her relationship, how it happened and so on. None of it reaches the ears of Norma Desmond. She is putting the final touches on her face. The only thing she hears is when someone says, “Newsreel men are here with the cameras.” The police tell the man to get rid of them but the word “cameras” is the only word that Norma has heard.

  “Cameras,” she says to herself, and then turns to Max, “What is it, Max?”

  Max walks over to Norma. “The cameras have arrived,” he says.

  “They have?” She pauses. “Tell Mr. DeMille I’ll be on the set at once.”

  “What is this?” a detective asks. Another one says, “Well it’s one way to get her downstairs.”

  Norma says to excuse her, that she has to get ready for her scene. Max goes downstairs; he stands between the two newsreel cameras in the same position that Erich von Stroheim used to stand when he was a director.

  Norma Desmond appears at the head of the stairs and the still photographers flash away, the whole foyer is asking questions, creating a loud racket. Above them all, Max von Mayerling’s voice yells out, “Quiet Everybody!!” And suddenly, the chaos is under control.

  “Lights!” Max yells, then more gently leaning forward “Are you ready, Norma?”

  Norma moves forward, puts her hand on the balcony. “What is the scene? Where am I?”

  Max looks embarrassed but comes out with a description of the scene: “This is the staircase of the Palace.”

  “Oh, yes, yes,” Norma says, “Down below, they’re waiting for the princess.” She puts aside her scarf. “I’m ready.”

  Commandingly, Max says “Cameras!” They roll, then “Action!”

  Norma, shot in slow motion, descends the staircase. The fact that the attendants to the princess, the people she passes on the way down, are either police or newsmen seems to have no effect on her. She is completely present within the world of the motion picture that is being shot within her mind. But at the bottom of the staircase, she stops.

  “I can’t go on with the scene,” she confesses, “I’m too happy.” Looking off camera, Norma says, “Mr. DeMille, do you mind if I say a few words. Thank you.”

  Pause. She looks around and says “I just want to tell you how happy I am to be back in the studio, making a picture again! You don’t know how much I’ve missed all of you. And I promise you; I’ll never desert you again, because after Salome, we’ll make another picture and another picture. You see, this is my life. It always will be. There’s nothing else. Just us, and the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark.”

  “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up” and Norma Desmond walks towards the screen for the last time.

  JUST LAST NIGHT

  With production over on Sunset Boulevard and the matter of Michel’s murder finally put to bed, it was time to reconstruct myself or at least attempt to try out living a new life with Sabrina and, perhaps, entering a new period with my painting. But when I found myself with the time and place to act, I could function only slightly; mostly, I was in the vacant chamber of my own self-obsessive thoughts. And I wasn’t obsessing about a bright horizon with Sabrina and Mara, I was in a slow down mode where the past that hadn’t been buried kept popping up – in my solitary sunset drinking, in my attempts to try and conjure up a new painting about what I felt, in the music of memory that twirled itself around my daily habits.

  The hallucinations didn’t stop once I resolved the problem with my guilt about Michel’s death. They came without warning, hit me hard, then dissolved into the inner night that I wandered around in during the day. When I went to the gallery in the morning and saw a freshly bathed Sabrina, the attraction and attachment that I had been developing would fizzle out. Instead of having fun with her at work, I would get morose about the workings of the gallery – Would we make enough money this week? Would the press around the Michel murder stay out of my head? And most persistently, would Katharine stay dead?

  This last one was the most troublesome. When I was alone in my bedroom studio, I would be painting the same work over and over again – a portrait of Katharine sitting in Ernie’s Restaurant in San Francisco, the site of our last meeting. After our tense dinner, Katharine chose to go for a solit
ary walk in the hills of San Francisco to work out problems that she couldn’t or wouldn’t work out with me.

  Ernie’s had all the old San Francisco elegance. It was opened in 1932 but it might have been from decades earlier. It was witness to many trysts and many break-ups. In the days following Sunset’s production, I began living in the last break-up, aided by an imagination too clear and a sense of falling that wouldn’t go away. When I was in my bedroom late at night, the waves weren’t for the Santa Monica Beach; they were the distant rumbles from San Francisco Bay that filled my skull as I was attempting an abstract of Katharine in Ernie’s.

  I did this painting on a large, white canvas with a claustrophobically tempered texture. The first version was as muddled as my painful memories would allow, done with transferring colors from a plastic cut out that I painted by instinct, by my feeblest memories. The effect was a swirl of feelings, mostly grey and crimson, that was both repulsive and attractive. But then, as I drank more and consumed more Provenance and Benzedrine, the cloistered quality of my portrait was brought out into the open. I began to get realistic. I would use my brushes to do a representational image of a Katharine torn by mesmerizing memories attempting to present me with her freshest, most ethereal face.

  “Are you pleased with your work,” Katharine would ask from someplace between current and distant time.

  “I’m pleased that we’re able to sit here in Ernie’s and have dinner together.” I would go into the painting in my imagination. The gentle light that exuded from Ernie’s exterior would surround me as I worked on the painting. I would defy the mind-controlling strength of the medications I was on and my bedroom became a reflection of all the bedrooms that Katharine and I occupied over the previous twenty years. We were in France, in the Seychelles. We were in Santa Monica and London but mostly, we were in that last night in Ernie’s where Katharine melted verbally, then froze emotionally.

  “Are you happy with the way things turned out?” Katharine’s hair was cut short just before this dinner. On the same day, she also scored a huge amount of heroine, enough to lessen her lifetime considerably.