“Johnny.”
“Be another fifteen minutes.” Johnny Kaplan smiled.
When he had returned to the hollow, clattering activity, Marylin said, “Those were Linc’s personal observations about the men on the Enterprise.”
“That’s why he fictionalized.”
“He never intended them to be published.”
“If there is one thing I am damn well certain of on this earth, Marylin, it is that every writer hungers for his words to see light of day, either in print or on a screen.”
“Not Linc.”
“How are you so positive, so richly positive? Tell me how you know what an extremely complicated young man with an IQ of over one-sixty would want. I sure as hell don’t, and,” Joshua added bleakly, “I was his father for twenty-four years.”
Those stupid tears again. She inhaled deeply, as she did to calm herself before the cameras.
He rested his arm around the back of her chair. She could feel the faint emanation of his body heat, smell his cologne and sweat. “You’ll get the royalties,” he said.
“That means the book is mine?”
“Legally and morally, yes.”
“I won’t sell it.”
“Oh, Christ! Those huge sea-colored eyes accusing me as if I had horns and a pitchfork. Listen to me, Marylin, this is not an act of necrophiliac despoilment. This is a fine and beautiful book that Linc wrote with his heart’s blood. His legacy to the world. He had no child . . .” Joshua halted abruptly, saying quietly, “Erase that, forget I said it. Don’t, Marylin.”
“I’m . . . all right.”
“Your eyelashes will come unglued, you’ll run streaks in that mucky Pan-Cake.” His arm moved around her and he clasped her padded shoulder. “No crying allowed on Magnum time—not until we make you a star.”
She managed the saddest little smile. “That’ll be the day,” she murmured, shifting from his grasp.
“We’ll discuss it at lunch. Ever been to Lucey’s across the street?”
“That’s very kind, but—”
“Stop saying no, Marylin, I say goddamn stop saying no.”
“I promised to have lunch with Johnny Kaplan, you just met him.”
“O.K., so then I’ll drive you home when the shooting’s over.”
“My car—”
“It can stay in the lot. I’ll bring you in tomorrow morning.” He got to his feet. The intense desert tan somehow increased the dictatorial power of the large, thickset body.
“All right,” she sighed.
He smiled. “See you at the main gate at five.”
* * *
She waited in the cold twilight, half-blinded by the headlights of cars streaming out the Magnum gate, the damp January wind slashing against her legs in their wartime rayon stockings.
I may send some of my stuff from time to time. It’s just for you.
Your writing?
It’s just for you.
Expecting Joshua either in the big Packard that had belonged to Mrs. Fernauld—Linc had used it—or his own Lincoln Continental, she did not focus on the odd, foreign-looking car that honked so insistently until the familiar gravelly voice boomed, “Marylin!”
Joshua was pushing open the door of the low-slung two-seater.
As they roared forward, she said, “I’ve never ridden in a sports car.”
“A handmade custom job. It’s a Delahaye one-thirty-five. Been working on Ronnie Colman for months to sell me this sweet hunk of perfection.”
His enthusiasm for the English racing car lulled Marylin’s tense determination to keep Linc’s last wishes.
At the apartment, Joshua walked her up the unlit wooden staircase.
“My mother is home, so we won’t have a chance to talk,” Marylin said. “But, Joshua, I want you to know I’m really serious about protecting Linc’s privacy.”
“You sweet little Mary-linn you.” Joshua’s teasing was gentle. “I’ve been holding off until we got here. Your mama’ll be on my side.”
Marylin halted, turning to him. Her soft brown hair, released from its upsweep, blew around her white face.
“Why the surprised outrage?” he asked. “Linc told you I obtain my ends by fair means or foul, didn’t he?”
“Those stories are mine, you said so.”
The large fingers clenched the rail. “Look at it from my point of view. I have a something, call it a gift, call it a goddamn albatross I carry on my back, but it’s me, my identity—you’re an actress, I don’t have to explain to you what creative work means. Now. I have an only son. He inherits my nose, my eyes, as well as my accursed gift—my blessed curse. He goes off to fight, but he sends back part of his soul, part of him as real as his eyes or his nose, then he’s goddamn killed. This book is a continuation of me, yet finer than anything I can conceive of doing. Now, I ask you, how can I allow that to be buried?”
Marylin sighed. “Joshua, Linc would have said if he intended publishing those stories.”
“He was hedging—it’s common enough with writers. He was afraid, Marylin, afraid that his work would be found wanting and rejected.”
The door was flung open. NolaBee stood outlined by the light behind her, turbaned head tilted to one side. “Marylin, is that you? We’ve been waiting. I thought we’d drive on over to the Ranch House and eat hamburgers—who’s that with you?”
“Me. Joshua Fernauld.”
“Joshua! My, what a time it’s been! Why are you standing out there in the cold? Marylin, where’re your manners?”
In the warm, messy apartment, NolaBee’s condolences washed over Joshua with a certain widowly warmth, a sharing commiseration that said “welcome to the ranks.” Roy, the makeup heavy on her freckled embarrassment, mumbled that she, too, was sorry about Mrs. Fernauld.
“Why don’t you come along with us to the Ranch House?” NolaBee asked.
“What about BJ?” Roy asked.
“She’s still in Palm Springs with her grandmother,” retorted Marylin, who had already asked this of Joshua. “Mr. Fernauld must have dinner waiting for him at his house.”
“It so happens that I’m at loose ends.” Joshua paused, looking at NolaBee. “Before we go, there’s something Marylin and I have to finish hashing out.”
NolaBee’s expression was alive with curiosity. “About Marylin’s work over at Magnum?”
“Indirectly,” he said.
“It’s about publishing Linc’s stories,” Marylin said in a beleaguered tone. Her head ached across the brow. “Nothing to do with my acting.”
“But it is.” Joshua sat at the old round table where a nearly empty grape-jelly jar centered a scattering of crumbs. “I hadn’t told you the best part, Marylin. I’ve finished a script of the novel.”
“You mean Linc will have a movie credit?” cried NolaBee. “Why, Joshua, I reckon you’re giving him something much better than the medals.”
“Mama,” Marylin sighed. “Those stories were never intended for publication.”
Joshua and NolaBee ignored her.
He said, “I really had two scripts. The first I outlined to sell Paramount on the idea. Jesus, you should have heard me spinning the top dogs the story they wanted, every wartime cliché in the book. The second was the version I always intended. An honorable adaptation.”
“Aren’t you the sly one,” admired NolaBee.
“In my business, seduction’s a necessity. Paramount has plans to make it as a big-budget A. I’m counting on Leland to convince them to borrow Marylin for the part of Rain.”
NolaBee gasped. “No!”
“Wowee!” cried Roy.
Marylin stared reproachfully at Joshua, and went to pour herself a glass of water, holding her wet fingers against her painful brow. “The book belongs to me,” she said sharply. “It’s not going to be sold.”
NolaBee said, “Marylin, you’re being right silly. Linc would have wanted this movie—”
“No, NolaBee,” Joshua interrupted. “The book yes, the movie n
o. But I’ve been working at Paramount long enough to know their publicity is tops. Island would be promoted in the grand style. Big drums banging all the time, à la Gone with the Wind. The hoopla would be the making of Marylin.”
“This is your chance, darlin’,” cried NolaBee. “If you don’t grab it, you’ll be playing tacky little bits forever.”
“Linc wouldn’t want it,” Marylin said stubbornly.
“But this is what all I’ve worked and slaved for.” NolaBee’s voice was heavy with blackmailing maternal reproach.
“I’m starved,” Roy put in. “Can’t we discuss this at the Ranch House?”
They sat at one of the Ranch House’s barbecue tables eating oblong rare hamburgers, salad, and crusty hash-browns. Marylin, whose headache had resurged violently, toyed with her food. Joshua watched her reflexively, his obsidian eyes unreadable.
When NolaBee, perky and bright-eyed next to him, brought up the matter of Linc’s book, Joshua derailed the subject. When you were with Joshua Fernauld, he dominated. They did not speak of Island again that night.
* * *
The next few days, NolaBee worked ceaselessly on Marylin. Though desperately unhappy and prey to uncontrollable weeping fits, the girl nevertheless steeled herself to resist her mother, an unspeakably difficult task when being bombarded with veiled reminders of personal self-abnegation, of sacrifices and unending toil aimed toward this precise chance.
In the end it was Marylin’s own clamoring memories that broke her. She would question herself over and over whether Linc’s ambition had been to make it as a writer. The answer always came up the same. He had. If only to prove something to his father. It would be harshest inequity to doom his work to the eternal darkness of the drawer of her bedside table.
Angels came in on its twelve-day shooting schedule, and Joshua dropped by for the wrap party. It was a low-budget film, so the refreshments were simple: Coca-Cola, potato chips, and cookies. Offering him a soft drink, Marylin told him in a low stammer, “Go ahead with the publisher and the script, Joshua.”
He spiked his drink, gazing over the paper cup at her. There was an intensity in his look that caught her like a lasso, and she could do nothing but gaze back at him, wondering at the thoughts behind the craggy features. Suddenly she shivered.
18
Island, by Lincoln Fernauld, New York, Random House, 1944, 320 pp., $2.50.
Just one of the magnificent qualities that sets this book apart from all the other war stories that we are reading is the wealth of known color that makes this, today’s war, different from any other. Island is set aboard an unnamed aircraft carrier, and we enter into the hearts and minds of its men. We are staring with exhausted eyes as our fuel gauge sinks to empty, we are struggling with two heavily batteried fluorescent wands to signal in a crippled F6F whose nineteen-year-old pilot has never before made a night landing, we are a young lieutenant attempting to declare his love before sailing while a line of impatient men wait to use the single pay phone, we are perched on the flag bridge in a tall steel chair looking at the fleet entrusted to our care, we are adrift on a cruelly empty sea praying that somehow the Kingfishers—the OS2U rescue planes—will find us. . . .
This, from Saturday Review, April 7, like all other reviews, blessed Island for its gem-perfect detail, lyrical clarity, its understated wartime drama, and concluded with an elegiac paragraph for the loss of so great a talent as Lieutenant (jg) Lincoln Fernauld.
Random House advertised nationally, the Book of the Month Club selected Island, but it was the massive studio publicity campaign about the search for Rain Fairburn, the beautiful, tenderly young heroine, that put the novel across. For three months, Island fever swept the country.
John Garfield, borrowed from Warner’s, was cast as Lieutenant Nesbitt. On June 6, 1944, D-Day (when Allied soldiers slogged through the surf, fought, bled, and died on Normandy beaches rechristened with the un-Gallic names Omaha, Utah, Gold, Sword, and Juno), shooting began on Island. As yet no Rain Fairburn had been found.
On June 19, a joint Magnum-Paramount publicity release announced that the juicy plum had gone to a newcomer who had felicitously changed her name to Rain Fairburn.
Marylin, who heard the news only a few hours before the release, envisioned Leland Hayward conniving like a demon to get her this role. Her gratitude to her agent was tear-drenched and slightly overwrought.
She concluded with, “I’ll do everything I can to live up to your faith in me, Mr. Hayward—I can’t put into words how very much I appreciate your faith in me.”
“Don’t thank me, honey, thank Joshua. He told Frank Freeman he wouldn’t renew with Paramount if they didn’t borrow you for the part. He told Freeman you were Rain, he ranted, he stormed. He bulldozed. A powerhouse, that’s Joshua when he’s hot after something. Thank him.”
“I guess he explained about me and Linc?” she said. “He’s doing it for Linc.”
Leland Hayward gave her an enigmatic smile and said nothing.
* * *
At the end of June, Marylin’s option was again picked up, and she received the stipulated two hundred a week. (Paramount was paying Magnum twelve hundred a week for her services.) Though the Island royalty checks had not yet started to flow, Marylin had received a substantial hunk of cash for the movie rights, enough for NolaBee to quit Hughes and to make a down payment on a small wrong-side-of-the-tracks Mediterranean-style house on Crescent Drive—the place was going for a bargain price because it was adjacent to the parking lot of Ralphs supermarket.
Marylin spent little time there. Her life had become an unending cycle of rising in the dark, working with nervous intensity through the day, arriving home to choke down the soft eggs that a concerned NolaBee poached or boiled, then falling into her bed with muscles aching and brains ajangle to study her lines for the next day. A grimly isolate existence analogous to a jail sentence.
Her puerile inexperience, the demands of being in front of the camera almost continuously in a major high-budget feature, the never-ending fusillade of half-truths and outright fabrications about Rain Fairburn (her!) emanating from the columns and radio slots of the gossip queens worked to pathological effect: she moved in a daze of sheer animal terror.
The film’s director, Bentley Hendrickson, a soft-spoken, mustached homosexual, not unreasonably resented a borrowed newcomer being foisted on him, resented that magazine writers and photographers were permitted on his set to interview this pretty, totally incompetent nonentity. He would drawl out a stinting word or two of directorial advice to the other actors, seasoned craftspeople all, then slouch in his canvas director’s chair offering Marylin no palliative word of encouragement, no constructive criticism. He ordered retakes, up to fifty of them, for her scenes.
To Marylin these scenes were a nightmare parody of her times with Linc. She was too paralyzingly close to her role. For once she could not bury herself in her work.
Every move she made was wooden.
Bentley Hendrickson’s bitchily exaggerated ennui, the executive producer’s iciness as he looked directly at her when he repeated how far behind schedule they lagged, the crew’s hostile witness to her eternal inadequacy, were unbearable. At times she froze with humiliation and grief. Shivering uncontrollably, she would rush from the set to the converted trailer that was her dressing-room.
By the end of the second week she was reduced to a terrified, nearcatatonic wreck.
On the following Monday the first scene scheduled was Rain hearing by telephone that her lover is sailing. Lamentably evocative. Marylin huddled in the trailer-dressing room, ruining the makeup artist’s labors with a torrent of tears.
The second assistant director knocked to tell her they were ready for her.
“Be right there,” she said in a muffled voice.
Fifteen minutes later, still in the trailer, she was repeating the identical words to the first assistant. This time her voice rose a hysterical half-octave.
A few minutes later, without a k
nock, the door opened. Joshua filled the metal door frame—he had to bend his shock of gray hair to enter. The trailer shook as he crossed the threshold.
She sat up, jerkily dabbing at her eyes. “Joshua.”
He was producing a pint of Southern Comfort from a paper bag. “You look in desperate need,” he said.
“Yech. Put that away. I’ve got the stomach flu.”
“Flu, bull! What you have is a massive, full-blown case of camera jitters.”
“I don’t!” she burst out, then crumpled back on the daybed. “Yes! Yes I do! All those people out there depending on me! Joshua, I’m no good, I never was. You’ll have to get Mr. Hayward to withdraw me from the film—I’m positive Paramount wants to replace me. Magnum won’t pick up my option! And I’m glad, glad!” The words raced out, high-pitched, near-demented. “I don’t belong in movies, I shouldn’t even be an extra. I don’t have what it takes!”
He was pouring Southern Comfort into her water tumbler. “Mea culpa. What a horse’s ass am I, not to have foreseen the difficulties involved for you in this part.”
“I’m not an actress.”
“You’re an actress to the bone. Listen to me, Marylin. That scene you’re meant to be playing is a close-up. A close-up shows mental processes.” He thrust the glass into her hand. “Down the hatch.”
The smell was nauseating, like sweetly rancid straw. “I’ll throw up.”
“Marylin!” he commanded roughly.
She gulped. The cloying liquid went roughly down her throat, and fresh tears wet her eyes.
“Thinking,” Joshua said. “Thinking. That’s the long and short of your scene.”
“But—”
“But nothing. I should know, I wrote the damn script. A close-up. Listen to me, Marylin, I repeat what is graven in stone. A close-up is to show the audience a thought. You can think, I goddamn know you can think.”
“Think? I’m so stiff with fright that my mind’s ready to shatter like glass. Ask Mr. Hendrickson—” She clutched at the glass. “Joshua, he hates me.”
“That’s his shtick, he stands aloof from his actors until they give a performance for him.” He poured a little more liquor in her glass. “Let me pass on a trick that I used when I was a brash young writer pitching stories. I’d face those fat producers, my guts griping with anxiety, and imagine them in their big chairs, smoking their big cigars, wearing long johns.”
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