Also by Jacqueline Briskin
Dreams Are Not Enough
Too Much Too Soon
Everything And More
Jacqueline Briskin
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
New York
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
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Published by the Penguin Group
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ISBN: 978-0-698-19655-1
Copyright © 1983 by Jacqueline Briskin
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This is for Bert and Lauren
CONTENTS
Prologue
Book One 1941
Book Two, 1943
Book Three, 1944
Book Four, 1949
Book Five, 1954
Book Six, 1958
Book Seven, 1970
Book Eight, 1972
Epilogue
Prologue
The gun was jarringly out of place.
This sunlit morning lacked the climate of violence. A breeze fragrant with citrus blossoms rippled through the small Beverly Hills back garden, while from beyond the tall redwood fencing came the peaceful racket of a suburban Sunday: a lawn mower’s roar, toddlers’ shrill cries, the masculine voices of Dodger warm-up coming from transistors—the home team was on a winning streak this June of 1970.
The two women facing each other across the handgun looked more as if they should be lunching together at the Bistro: both were in their early forties, handsome, and obviously well-to-do. One wore slacks with a smartly cut taupe blazer, the other a Chanel blouse and skirt.
There was a small click as the safety catch was released.
“This is all crazy,” said the woman in slacks. Because she had known her attacker for so many years, she ventured a step closer.
“Stop!”
The intended victim halted. As she stared at the muzzle, her disbelieving expression hardened to horror. Her pupils contracted. Then, flexing her knees, she sprang, a clumsy, nonathletic leap, to grip the arm aiming the improbable weapon.
For a long moment that seemed an eternity, the pair remained locked in an outlandish wrestlers’ hold.
The sharp sound rang out like a car backfiring.
One woman slumped to the ground. A heartbeat later, she died in the other’s arms.
That gunshot would echo endlessly in print, on television, in people’s hearts, for these two, together with another woman equally involved, led the sort of lives of which dreams are made. Between them they had vast wealth, beauty, acclaimed talent, triumphant careers, the adoration of famous men. The jealousies and loves, the friendships, the betrayals, the broken promises that formed a twisted path to this lethal moment would initiate hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles. A docudrama miniseries starring Candice Bergen, Ann-Margret, and Tuesday Weld would win an Emmy. There would be four critically acclaimed books written about the shooting, and Norman Mailer’s The Golden Girls would become the runaway best-seller of the year.
In life and in death there was a heady glamour surrounding these three women who had everything—and more.
Book One
1941
Senator Robert La Follette often referred to Grover T. Coyne as the greatest criminal of the age. When Theodore Roosevelt spoke of “the malefactors of great wealth,” he aimed the remark at Grover T. Coyne. The name Coyne, in most people’s minds, has always been synonymous with ruthlessness and staggering wealth.
—Grover Coyne, a Biography, by Horace Soess
GERMAN ARMY INVADES POLAND
—New York Times, September 1, 1939
The casualties of last night’s raid were dreadful. In almost every block, houses are gone. Yet today Londoners are defiantly gay, the women wearing their smartest spring hats, the men their brightest ties.
—Edward R. Murrow’s This Is London, April 28, 1941
Early this morning Chilton Wace, an employee of Roth’s Haberdashery, 20098 Long Beach Boulevard, Long Beach, was shot by an intruder. He is reported in grave condition at St. Joseph’s Hospital, Long Beach.
—Los Angeles Times, May 19, 1941
1
Marylin Wace leaned toward a medicine-cabinet mirror with a triangle broken from the lower-left corner, the only decent-size mirror in the house. She plucked a stray eyebrow with an old loose-screwed nail scissors, and her hand did not falter at the loud bangs that shook the thin door behind her.
“What are you doing, camping in there?” Roy shouted.
Not answering her younger sister, Marylin extracted a hair with her makeshift tweezers.
There was more banging. “I’ll be tardy! Oh, now you’ve done it!” Roy’s panic was comedic exaggeration. “I’m wetting my pants!”
“Won’t be a sec, Roy,” said Marylin, peering at her reflection to ascertain she had a clear arch.
The pronounced widow’s peak of soft, gleaming brown hair and the small cleft of chin gave the face in the mirror a piquant charm. The nose was delicate, the clear skin luminous. Four months short of her seventeenth birthday, Marylin Wace would have been exceptionally pretty if it weren’t for her eyes. The greenish-blue eyes had a depth that stopped her from being china-doll pretty. Without resorting to hyperbole, Marylin was a memorably beautiful girl.
Passing her tongue over Tangee Rose colored lips, she formed a smile that was surprisingly free of narcissism. Marylin lacked even the most timid vanities of adolescence. As far as she was concerned, her beauty was merely a validated passport to enter into the life of each new school. Through the Depression, the Wace family had moved at least three times a year—they moved whenever Chilton Wace was energized by his wife’s Georgia-accented insistence that he look for a job “a mite more worthy of your talents.” A good-natured hypochondriac with a wide aristocratic forehead and neat features, he relied on his feisty little spouse to make his decisions.
The Waces had been living in Long Beach, California, for nearly five months. Marylin’s looks and gentle, quiet charm had eased her into the right clique at Long Beach Jordan High School.
She licked her finger to smooth both eyebrows. Because she fretted over her lack of height—she was a scant five feet tall—she pulled herself as straight as she could as she emerged.
Roy made a mock bow. “Lovelier than Garbo,” she said sourly, then grinned. “It’s nearly worth wetting your pants over.”
“Oh, you,” said Marylin, affectionately tousling her sister’s vibrant brown hair.
Roy was twelve, and her redundancies (affectionately called “Pudgy Pudge” by her father) had not yet blossomed or indented into the curves of puberty. Her wide smile, large round eyes, and tilted nose gave her the look of a pretty, eager teddy bear. She considered herself triply cursed by her weight, her freckles, and her wayward auburn-brown curls that no amount of brushing could subdue. “Pa didn’t get home,” she worried.
“I know.” Marylin’s eyes showed similar concern. “That inventory’s sure taking a longer time than he figured.” Chilton Wace was currently employed in Roth’s menswear shop on Long Beach Boulevard, and Mr. Roth had assigned him—t
he only full-time employee—to take inventory in the dim, cramped stockroom with its unpainted shelves of dungarees and racks of vivid, big-shouldered sportswear favored by the dockhands and oil crews who inhabited the port town.
“Slave labor, that’s what it is. Pa’s too darn good-natured,” Roy said. The bathroom door closed on her.
Marylin was in a board-enclosed porch. Strong morning sunlight came through the glazed door which was the makeshift bedroom’s only window, and there was a pervasive odor of petroleum from the surrounding forest of oil rigs. She edged around, making her and Roy’s sagging iron cots, humming in tune with her mother’s loud, cheerfully off-key rendition of “South of the Border.”
A single room at the front of the cottage served as dining room, parlor, master bedroom, and kitchen.
NolaBee Fairburn Wace was flipping pancakes at the old high-legged stove. NolaBee’s skin had the drab, pocked texture that is a leftover from bad acne. Her features weren’t pretty enough to make up for this flaw, and she would have been classified as a homely woman—if it weren’t for the snap and sparkle of her small brown eyes and the mobile expression that indicated curiosity, interest, life. NolaBee Wace’s nomadic existence had worn down neither her girlhood enthusiasm nor her sense of fun.
Her thin brownish hair was coiled in many strips of newspaper, a dishcloth of flour sacking served her as an apron, protecting her worn blue kimono.
“Good morning, Mama,” Marylin said as she went to kiss her mother’s drab cheek.
Without removing the cigarette that dangled from her mouth, NolaBee smiled at this gorgeous creature who had improbably sprung from her. “That blouse is right becoming,” she said. “I reckon it never looked so good on Aunt Lucie Fairburn.”
Marylin forced a smile. The one thing she did not admire about her optimistic, lively mother was the way that NolaBee took it for granted that the Waces should wear hand-me-downs. Chilton Wace’s wanderings during the Depression had never taken the family back to Greenward, Georgia, so Marylin did not know firsthand the homeplace of generations of Waces, Roys, and Fairburns, but she had learned the town’s convoluted genealogies by the ribbon-tied cartons of old clothes that arrived every Christmas. Back in Greenward this cousin overused mothballs, that niggardly aunt cut off every button, this in-law sweated corrosive acid into her clothing.
“Here,” her mother said, sliding three large brown pancakes onto a plate. (At the beginning of the month there would have been bacon.) The table was not set: NolaBee kept house casually, messily, cheerfully, and meals were eaten wherever, chez Wace.
This sunny April morning Marylin elected to breakfast perched on the window ledge, and as she ate, she gazed down the steep slope that leveled out near the harbor. Tall, oil-blackened rigs towered over shabby little houses set amid untended yards. Marylin tilted her head to see the gray frame shack where a jazzy piano sounded all night and men came and went. With tight lips NolaBee had warned both girls not to go near—or even to look at—the place, so Marylin understood this was a bad house. Naturally she was forever angling for a sight of the three vividly dressed women who dwelled there. Each time she succeeded in glimpsing one, she felt a pang of guilt. Her mother did not want her to, and Marylin, though she had not inherited her father’s timidity, was a dutiful child. Obedience was her one means of repaying NolaBee’s lavishly adoring love.
NolaBee asked, “Going to the Drama Club again this afternoon?”
Marylin turned hastily, blushing. “We’re reading The Male Animal.”
“I reckon you’re the best little actress there.”
“Not by a long shot, Mama.” Marylin sighed.
“You need more confidence,” said NolaBee with an amused chuckle. “Else you’re never going to make it in Hollywood.”
A prodigiously enthusiastic fan of everything and everyone connected to the screen, NolaBee read and reread her tattered pile of Modern Screens and never missed the broadcasts of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. She gossiped about Claudette, Joan, Clark, Tyrone, and Errol as she would family members. Whenever there was any spare change, she treated the girls to double-bill Saturday matinees, and more than half-seriously twitted her gorgeous elder, her pet, about becoming a star.
“Drama Club’s a good way to meet people, that’s all,” Marylin said, dipping a slim wedge of pancake in syrup.
“You’ll be able to use everything you’ve learned, I reckon, once you’re signed.”
Marylin’s dreams had nothing to do with movie fame, but were mundanely centered on falling in love, marrying, having babies. “Oh, Mama, stop teasing. You know I’m not any good.”
“What are you saying! Last Christmas in San Pedro, who got more curtain calls than anyone?”
“Mama, a high-school play, and—”
“Mrs. Wace?”
Both mother and daughter turned toward the voice.
At the rusty screen door stood a tall, gangly boy. Marylin recognized him as the part-time janitor who worked with her father at Roth’s. His name was Jimmy Brockway, and like her he was a junior at Long Beach Jordan; when they passed in the hall, he sometimes stammered out a greeting.
“Yes, I’m Mrs. Wace,” said NolaBee.
“My name’s Jimmy Brockway, I work at Roth’s Menswear . . .” His voice petered off in a miserable gasp as if he were clutched in a stranglehold.
“Yes?” encouraged NolaBee.
“I sweep before I go to school. . . . This morning, when I got there . . .” His voice faded again.
NolaBee’s curl papers tilted at an odd angle. “I reckon you saw Mr. Wace, then?”
“Uhh, maybe I’d better come inside.”
NolaBee, usually so swift and sure, did not move, so Marylin set down her plate and went to unhook the screen door.
The boy’s Adam’s apple bobbled as he looked at her; then he turned away. Fixing his attention on the double bed, which was rumpled only on one side, he mumbled, “Uhh, there was a problem over there. Mr. Roth sent me to tell you.”
NolaBee and Marylin continued staring at him.
“Mr. Wace . . . he . . . uhh . . .”
“Go on,” Marylin whispered.
“He’s in the hospital,” the boy blurted.
Marylin gasped. NolaBee gave one loud cry.
“What happened? What’s wrong with him?” Marylin demanded hoarsely. Among her father’s numerous complaints about his health were chest pains.
“I don’t know. Mr. Roth just told me to tell Mrs. Wace to get on over to St. Joe’s—St. Joseph’s.”
“Yes, the hospital,” said NolaBee, her face pale and squeezed into piteous lines.
“I’ll take you—I have a car.”
NolaBee, yanking off the dishcloth-apron and pulling on a sweater, the brown one that Cousin Thela Roy had sent with holes already in both elbows, rushed out into the too bright sunlight.
“My sister!” Marylin cried urgently. “I have to get my sister!”
She ran through the boarded porch, banging on the bathroom door. “Roy. Roy.”
“You took your own sweet time, now let—”
“Open up! It’s Pa—he’s in the hospital.”
The door burst open. Roy stood there, the Arm and Hammer baking soda that the Waces used as toothpaste caking her mouth, which was nearly as white. As Marylin was NolaBee’s girl, so Roy was her father’s favorite.
NolaBee and Marylin sat up front in the Onyx jalopy while Roy rode in the rumble seat. Aside from that, not one of the three could ever remember any other details of the brief ride to St. Joe’s.
2
The Onyx shuddered to a stop in front of the hospital’s stucco Virgin. Roy clambered down from the rumble seat and raced up the steps ahead of her mother and Marylin.
In the empty lobby she halted a few feet from the reception desk. A wizened peroxide-blond nurse continued reading her Saturday Evening Post, ignoring the intruders.
NolaBee’s face seemed shrunken inside the Medusa’s nest of curlers. Garrulous in al
most any situation, she approached the desk silently.
It was Marylin who said in her soft little voice, “We’re looking for Mr. Wace, he was brought here this morning. Do you know what’s wrong with him?”
“Weights?”
“W-a-c-e,” Roy spelled.
The nurse slowly bobbed the eraser end of a pencil down a page of names.
“W-a—” Roy started.
“Little girl, I’m not deaf,” said the nurse.
NolaBee gave a small cough. “Is it his heart?”
The nurse, opening her magazine, said, “Go down the left corridor as far as you can go, then turn to the right. You’ll come to doors with a sign on them.”
Marylin and NolaBee gripped hands while Roy darted ahead of them.
On each of the double doors was painted:
Emergency Ward
No Entry
Ring for Information
“Emergency,” NolaBee whispered. “Emergency?” A chrome and Leatherette couch was pushed against the wall, and she sank down on it as if her legs had given way. Hand at her mouth, she watched Marylin press the button. A metallic buzz sounded briefly.
The three Waces stared expectantly at the doors. The faraway sounds continued, voices, a rumbling as if wheeled carts were being moved.
Nobody came out.
Roy jammed her finger down on the button, keeping it there.
After what seemed an interminable length of time both doors banged open and a short, fat nurse bustled out. “What do you think you’re doing with that bell?” she demanded.
“We’re the Waces,” Roy said.
“Family of Mr. Chilton Wace,” Marylin added politely.
“There’s no need for this sort of ruckus!” The nurse glared at Roy. “As soon as there’s anything to hear, you’ll be told.”
“But we don’t know what’s wrong with my husband,” said NolaBee in a strange, humble voice. “What’s happened to him?”
Everything and More Page 1