Getting Garbo

by Jerry Ludwig

  He rises. I get up, too. Grab his arm. Don’t want to end it like this.

  “Hey, Kenny, I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to suggest that you’d ever—”

  He shakes my hand off his arm. Glares at me. I’ve never seen him this angry before. “You asked how it’s going with Viola? Lemme tell you—compared to you and me, it’s like being a nursemaid. But he’s a decent guy. Basically, you always treated me like a shithook. So that’s what I was. Now I’m startin’ clean. And it feels good. I can help him. I’m tired of trying to help you, Roy. We’re done.”

  He’s going for the door. I trot along with him. Trying to make nice. Not knowing how to turn this one around. “Well, if you ever need anything from me, my door’s always open to you, Kenny—”

  I hear a hiss in my ear.

  Ask him, Jack Havoc says. Don’t let him get away without asking him.

  We’re in the driveway now. Killer climbs into his car. I’m standing beside the open window. “Thanks again for comin’—”

  Ask him!

  “Hey, you see Reva at the funeral? You know, little Reva, what’shername again—?”

  He looks up at me. Sorta funny. Could he know why I’m asking? C’mon. Getting paranoid. “I’m not your fuckin’ Rolodex. Jesus. You’re her whole life—and you can’t even remember her name? Fuck you, Roy. I don’t know you anymore.”

  And he drives off.

  Really finessed that one, didn’t you? Jack Havoc says.

  He’s being snide, of course. That’s when this thought hits me. There’s no point in trying to explain it to him. Or Killer Lomax either. It hardly makes sense to me. I mean, I know it’s only just delaying the inevitable. But it suddenly occurs to me that forgetting Reva’s last name may be the nicest thing I’ve ever done for anybody.

  25

  Reva

  The blue-uniformed cop who drove me from Larry Edmunds Bookstore to the police station on Cole Avenue in Hollywood has me sit beside a desk in the big squad room downstairs while he two-finger types a name-address-phone number report. Then he turns me over to Detective Vallenzuega, the juvenile officer, whose cluttered cubbyhole is one flight upstairs. Detective Vallenzuega points at a bench and tells me to wait there, while he takes phone calls that have nothing to do with me. That gives me time to think about whether or not I’ll tell about Roy. It’s like picking the petals off an imaginary daisy. Do tell, don’t tell, do, don’t, do, don’t. There’s lots of time to torture a decision, because it’s a long wait, but, hey, that’s one thing I learned how to do as a collector. Wait. Try to think of something else, anything else….

  • • •

  We once waited for hours on a freezing winter morning down at the Hudson River pier where an Italian liner, the Andrea Doria, was docking. Anna Magnani was on board. She was the star of Open City, a great foreign film about Rome in World War II, that Roberto Rossellini directed, but what she was most famous for in America at that moment was that she and Roberto Rossellini were a hot item before Rossellini dumped Magnani for Ingrid Bergman, whom he knocked up while she was still married to this Swedish dentist. That was the scandal of the century, at least up until then. So it’s a Sunday in March, and the wind blowing off the river is frigid enough to turn the liquid on your eyeballs into ice, but we’re the Secret Six, so we hang in there.

  It was the day I really became a coffee drinker. Before that I didn’t like the taste, but the weather was so cold and I put so much sugar in each cardboard cup that it kept me warm and tasted good and I was hooked. We hadn’t found out Magnani was coming in on the Andrea Doria until it was too late to go down to the customs house and get passes letting us onto the pier, so we were reduced to covering her arrival the hard way. We were staked out in an area only partially protected from the elements, near the car ramp where every vehicle that exited the pier had to stop, roll down the window and turn in their pass. That gave us a chance to peek inside the limos. We took turns standing out in the cold, while the others shuddered nearby.

  Tillie Lust, bundled like an Eskimo in an imitation fur coat with hood and still looking like a teenage sexpot, was stamping her feet and telling me about the lost love of her life. “His name’s Chuck, he’s an Italian guy used to live in the South Bronx, and he’s the star of the football team at Taft High, tall, dark and handsome.”

  “Hubba-hubba,” I say, to keep warm and keep her talking. It’s like I’m picking up pointers from a prom queen. “So what broke you up?”

  “There were too many cultural differences.”

  “Because he’s Italian and you’re Jewish?”

  “No, because he only cares about sports and never goes to the movies.”

  Abe Franks, a farm boy who hails from deepest Alabama, who came up north to finish high school under the GI Bill and never went home, asks what we’re talking about.

  “About Anna Magnani, of course,” Tillie says. “Did you hear what she did to Ingrid Bergman?”

  Abe, who’s as sweet-natured as he is gullible, bites. “No, whut?”

  “Magnani went to the airport in Rome when Bergman flew back to have Rossellini’s baby, and when Bergman came down the airplane ramp, Magnani threw meatballs at her.”

  “Man, tha’s one tough lady,” he drawls. “Did Ingrid get hurt?”

  We start laughing and Abe knows he’s been had, so he laughs, too. “Ah knew you was just kiddin’.”

  Finally we spot a star, at least a semi-star. It’s Lionel Stander, the gravel-voiced character actor who was so mean to Fredric March in A Star Is Born. He is sitting in the back seat of this 8Z limo with his young wife, and he’s got a big mop of hair and is wearing his topcoat draped over his shoulders, so he looks like Dracula, but we’re glad to see him because he’s a rare autograph, since he’s been making movies in Europe for a few years.

  “Welcome home, Mr. Stander,” Pam O’Mara says, as we offer our books in through the car window. “What’s your next project?”

  “Starting Tuesday I’m gonna play a starring role in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee,” he rasps pleasantly. We read about his testimony later in the week, how he got the HUAC chairman to turn off the TV cameras and lights, “because I only perform on TV for entertainment or philanthropic organizations, which I don’t think this is.” The Committee confronted him with the evidence against him, mostly based on some other character actor’s testimony that Lionel Stander tried to persuade him to join the Communist Party because it was a good way to meet girls. Stander was blacklisted for a bunch of years after that.

  So we’re still on the lookout for Anna Magnani, but most of the passengers seem to have disembarked. Now the conversation has shifted to the day’s headlines. Billy Daniels, the debonair nightclub and TV singer, Mr. Old Black Magic himself, has had his face slashed in a lover’s quarrel.

  “They had to take umpteen stitches,” Pam reports. “They say his face is gonna be okay, though.”

  There’s a long pause after that; none of us know what to say. It’s too serious to make jokes about. We all like Billy Daniels, he’s always nice to the collectors.

  “Love,” Tillie finally says. “Guess y’gotta watch out for love sometimes, it can kill you.”

  • • •

  “Just tell me straight—what the hell do you find so fascinating about this punk Roy Darnell?”

  Detective Phil Vallenzuega, that’s what it says on the name plate on his battered desk, is ruddy-faced and built like a barroom bouncer, barrel chest merging into beer belly. His horrendous houndstooth sports jacket is draped over the back of his desk chair.

  The waiting is over.

  After nearly two hours.

  Too much time to consider too many possibilities. Maybe they’re going to give me the third degree, force me to tell everything I know, make me betray Roy. They have their ways. One thing’s for sure, it’s getting late, after five o�
��clock now. They can’t put you in the gas chamber for swiping movie stills, but I’m wondering if I’m going to be sleeping in a cell overnight. Then I heard Detective Vallenzuega mention my name on the phone. Followed by two grunts and an uh-huh. He hung up and gestured me to the chair in front of his desk.

  “Ho-kay, Reva,” he says.

  His voice is kind of too small for the size man he is. Not pipsqueaky, just surprising, when you expect an Ezio Pinza basso to emerge from that huge chest.

  “Has anyone ever said that you look like Wallace Beery when he played Pancho Villa?” I figure let’s get started on the right foot, but Detective Vallenzuega won’t play. He just shakes his head.

  “You’re the first. How old are you, Reva? Fifteen, sixteen?”

  “Nineteen.”

  He frowns and looks at the report the cop gave him. “Nineteen. Then why’d they send you up here? You don’t look nineteen.”

  “Maybe that’s why.” I add, helpfully, “Mary Pickford was still playing teenagers when she was in her thirties.”

  He puts down the report. “I gotta send you downstairs. In the eyes of the law you are no longer a minor—”

  “Hey, did you see Ginger Rogers in The Major and the Minor? She fooled Ray Milland and everybody into thinking she was a kid.”

  “I don’t go to the movies much. They rot your mind.”

  “Do I really have to go downstairs? And sit at someone else’s desk for two more hours?”

  He thinks it over, then shrugs. “Ho-kay, we can do it here.” He indicates the phone, the last call he got. “We’ve verified that you do not have a prior arrest record. But you’ve made an auspicious debut. Shoplifting. The bookstore people say the photographs you took are worth in excess of $150, which makes it grand theft, a felony offense—”

  “Horse pucky!” I snort. “They’re selling those stills for a buck apiece—”

  He cuts me off. “So, let’s suppose it’s just a misdemeanor. Misdemeanor theft could still mean thirty days in jail and a $500 fine.”

  I start to cry. Because I feel like crying and because it seems like it might be a good tactic. It isn’t. He doesn’t blink, just wearily pulls a half-empty box of tissues out of his drawer and shoves it at me. I blow my nose and stop crying.

  “Look, girly, we know what you been up to. You got tagged this time, but how about those fifteen, twenty other times you thought you got away with it?”

  “I never did this before in my whole life,” I protest, knowing that he’s just playing the percentages, trying to bluff me. “Honest, Detective Vallenzuega!”

  He looks at me speculatively, looks at the report on me again and shakes his head. “I don’t get it. What’s so special about this Roy Darnell that you’re ready to go to jail over him?”

  That stops me, because for a second I think he knows. Then I realize he doesn’t, unless I tell him. So here we are at the crossroads again.

  “This Darnell is bad news, any way you slice it. He’s always taking a poke at photographers, brawling in saloons and on the streets, cussed out the cops who tried to break up a fracas last month in front of Ciro’s. Don’t you read the papers? His wife just got bumped. What kinda person is that to look up to?”

  I could tell him. Really tell him. The shoplifting charge would vanish.

  “Roy Darnell’s a good actor,” I say lamely in my defense.

  “So’s Lassie, but we’re talking about you.” He leans back and his swivel chair squeaks under the shifting load. “Know what happens when you get a police record? It follows you around. Forever. You have to declare it when they ask you on job applications, so you won’t be able to get work at a decent place. That’s what’s gonna happen. Is that worth it to you?”

  I respond on cue, with vigor. “I’ll never do it again. I swear.”

  He sighs. “I’m not scaring you, am I? See, you’re too old. This works best on kids.” He shakes his head. “Reva, Reva—you’re a smart cookie. So let me level with you. With a clean record and your Corliss Archer looks, plus squirting a few tears, well, the worst that’s likely to happen—if the D.A.’s office is even willing to spin their wheels and go to court—is a suspended sentence or probation and maybe a light fine. Probably just a stern warning from the judge. ‘Behave yourself in the future, young lady.’”

  “I will. I really will.”

  Vallenzuega is studying my face. His brow furrowed. And this next part jolts me because it doesn’t seem to go with the regular spiel. It’s like he senses something. “Reva,” he says slowly, “Why do I get the feeling you want to tell me something?”

  Because I do.

  You’d be a hero, I’d be famous for a day, we’d both be on the news.

  Because I don’t.

  All I have to do is keep my mouth shut, give Roy the benefit of the doubt. So I change the subject. Fast.

  “What’s that funny button on the lapel of your jacket?” I ask. “Are you a Shriner or an Odd Fellow or something?”

  He glances at the jacket hanging over the back of his chair. “Just a thing the company gave me. So I wear it.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “Got nothin’ to do with what we’re talking about, so—”

  “I have to answer all your questions, but I ask you just one—”

  “Ho-kay. I was working in Hollenbeck Division couple years ago and my bank is in Pasadena. It was payday and I wanted to make a deposit so I took a quick spin over on my lunch hour in a company car. I go in the bank and when I’m next in line I notice that the guy in front of me at the window is sticking up the place. So I grab him and we’re wrestling around for his gun, rolling on the floor and all, struggling away, and I finally subdue him and call for backup and that was it.”

  “The lapel,” I say.

  “Oh yeah. So it got in the newspaper and then someone put it in for consideration for the Medal of Valor. See, but there was a problem, because I was using an LAPD car and I was over the city line in Pasadena. So they couldn’t decide whether to bring me up on charges for misusing department property—or give me the medal.”

  “But then they decided,” I say. “So that thingy means you won the Medal?”

  “Uh-huh. For being in the wrong place at the right time.”

  “Or maybe it’s the other way around.” I start to laugh. “Just like me.” I’m talking about more than Larry Edmunds Bookshop, but he doesn’t know that.

  He laughs too, and it’s the first time I’ve ever shared a laugh with a cop.

  “Ho-kay, now we’re back to you. What am I gonna do with you?”

  “Look, can’t we just chalk it up to experience?” I say. “I really learned my lesson, I mean, it was just a stupid whim, I took the still photos because I didn’t think anyone else’d want ’em as much as I did and—”

  There’s a knock on the door, so I don’t have to keep rattling away. “Come in,” Detective Vallenzuega calls. The door opens and it’s my mother. I’d sooner see a prison matron standing there.

  “I’m Reva’s mom,” she says, coming forward like an angel of mercy, squeezing my shoulder. She’s wearing her pink business suit that combined with her upswept champagne blonde dye job makes her look like a cone of cotton candy. Her working duds. That means she didn’t get to change clothes after work, probably walked in the door from the bank when they got her on the phone. She’s been plowing through rush hour traffic to get here, and she hates traffic. Normally we would be seeing Vesuvius in eruption under such circumstances, but she’s as pleasant and caring as Eleanor Roosevelt.

  “How’s my little girl?” she says to me. “You all right?”

  “I’m fine, Mother.” I can’t believe this.

  “Whatever’s happened, I blame myself,” she confesses to Vallenzuega. Wide-eyed. Pleading for mercy. “Reva’s a good girl, but she associates with people who are beneath h
er, and it’s my fault for letting the bad element rub off on her.”

  I know those lines, but from where? Suddenly I’ve got it. Mother’s doing Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce. Life imitating art. Could you die? But to non-movie fan Vallenzuega, it’s a premiere.

  “If there’s some way you people can find it in your hearts to forgive her, I guarantee it’ll never happen again. She’s never been in trouble before. She’s a good girl,” she repeats.

  Vallenzuega has been watching her. Not blinking, mouth half-open, not wanting to miss a second. Maybe he doesn’t go to the movies but he can spot a performance when he sees one. Now he nods, as if he’s been persuaded by her impassioned plea. “I believe you, ma’am. Reva and I have been having a good talk and I think the best thing for everybody is if I release her—into your care.”

  Mother smiles gratefully and dabs at her eyes with the matching pink hankie she has tucked up her sleeve. I glare at Vallenzuega, who gives me a covert wink.

  “Watch out for all those movies,” he says to me.

  “I know,” I say, “they’ll rot my mind.”

  We go down the stairs together, Mother and I, hand-in-hand, am I dreaming? Vallenzuega at the top of the staircase, waving goodbye, wishing me luck. “Don’t let me see you back here, kid.”

  “I’m not a kid,” I call back to him.

  As soon as we’re out of the building and around the corner, heading for our car, Mother stops and turns on me. No more Eleanor Roosevelt. Lizzie Borden’s back in town. “You little cunt, do you know I could lose my job at the bank because of you and your crazy shit?”

  She slaps me very hard across the face. I can feel each of her fingers outlined on my cheek, but I don’t cry. I never cry in front of her.

  “Stealing stupid photos of Roy Darnell—didn’t I warn you, again and again, that he’s bad news for you? It’s in your chart, Reva, and the stars don’t lie!” I’m not sure if she’s talking movies or astrology.

  Mother navigates like a Destruction Derby driver through the rush hour traffic back to our apartment with hardly another word, which is fine with me. If she thinks she’s punishing me with her silence, well, do it some more.