Suspects

by David Thomson

  This quality of perversity drew invitations from Berlin in 1927. Learning enough German for some songs, Elise went there. Whether stunned or indifferent, she responded to the greater salaciousness of German cabarets with a coolness that was all the more inflaming. She seemed untouchable, so corrupt she could resist every man’s desire; there was a clamor to lay hands on her. If she gave herself to no one man in particular, all of them felt her denial. In 1929, a distinguished official in the Ministry of Education named Janrath shot himself beneath a large photograph of Elise on which he had stuck feathers giving an extra sensual texture to her filmy skirt.

  There was an ugly noise in the Berlin papers: Elise’s foreignness was held to blame; she was called “a depraved nymph” and so on. Pictures of the Janrath wife and children—rather like a soccer team, so many and so glum—were printed in silent accusation, next to Elise’s knife of a smile. She did not bother to defend herself. She went by train to Santander, and took a boat for Morocco. During that voyage, she changed her name to Amy Jolly, and elected to be as sinister as the world wanted to believe.

  She had come to the land of the Foreign Legion with the same need as many of its soldiers—a new name, a chance to escape, and hardship of service to stand as a rebuke for the guilt she was too proud to acknowledge. The self-respect of the silent and ungiving made a pact between her and the legionnaires. For the first time in her life she was acclaimed but not pursued. The soldiers regarded her as a true myth, someone who would fade into ordinariness if one of them actually had her in love. She guessed this reasoning, and smiled through the loneliness it entailed.

  But one soldier struck her. Tom Brown, an American apparently, was a laconic, long-limbed man, secretive yet mocking his own discretion. She felt weak whenever she saw him, grinning back at his grin, and wondering if she would faint. Her desire made her feel she would die without him. There was a dispassionate curiosity in her aware how mad she was for him. She was sensible, of course, at all times, never a hair out of place. But what fuller proof was there of madness when she was really wild with longing?

  Brown may have thought of killing this woman: his bleak calm was so close to being ruined by her. He loved her, too, no matter that he had given up on that notion, and its concession to women. But he was not as resolute or hard as he wanted. Feeling would creep in: we cannot look at things, and see them, without giving vulnerability and surprise a chance. So he had to defend himself against her impact. He had an elaborate, insolent salute for her, a deprecating wave of the hand to indicate playfulness. Yet her straight glance cut through the ornate gesture so that he felt pierced.

  He gave in to love. He said he would go with her, be with her. Then, out of some horror of the weakness it meant, he picked up a stick of her greasepaint and wrote on her mirror, “I changed my mind. Good luck”—with a slash and a scroll beneath the message, reasserting his salute. She read it, and when the day came for Brown’s regiment to march south into the desert, she followed him through the ace-of-spades archway in the wall, kicking off her high-heeled shoes, pleased by the heat of the sand. It was 1930.

  Amy Jolly grew dark from the sun. Tom Brown watched her become a Legion whore, taken by other men. He never protested or touched her himself, and he no longer saluted her. She believed their love could only be expressed by frustration; they never dulled in each other’s eyes. Amy looked like an Arab, but the nomadic life did not spoil her. She was loved, and nothing else does so much for appearance.

  A kind of mysticism settled on her, mixed with hashish and superstition learned from the other camp women. They had seemed impossible companions once, but Amy knew them now, especially Tanya, a Bedouin who taught her fortune-telling. Tanya told her she had innate feeling for the art—she only gave her timing and confidence, just as Colette had shown her how to hold a stage.

  They traveled together in Africa and came to Cairo, where they opened a club in 1936. It was a haunt of Allied officers during the war. When Tanya died, Amy took her name and became sole owner of the club. She dyed her hair black, wore kohl and smoked cheroots. She kept girls for the soldiers, but no longer sold herself. In 1946, she took a boat to Mexico, anticipating disturbances in Egypt.

  By 1950 she had reached Robles, where she opened her newest premises. It was a small place, but discerning customers sought her out. She served drink and chili, and she slowly acquired a few very young, outrageous girls. Tanya ran the club with a disdain that had become her public persona. She liked another American, a sheriff named Quinlan from over the border. He was a heartfelt detective, who could often tell her her own thoughts. Yet he was not afraid of asking Tanya’s occult advice. They were lovers for a time, wearied by their own appetite. They watched their orgies with far-off, amused sympathy. She knew he was a dead man in whom talent was turning sour and fat. He gave her up and then a few years later came back on a case that was already ruining him. Tanya watched him die, like a weighted balloon, in the trash of the border. It didn’t surprise her; she guessed Quinlan had chosen her as the person to utter his epitaph.

  She closed her place and drank herself to death in a year. It was not hard for someone who still had the inner delicacy of the young Elise. The most raddled whore can have the self-esteem of a child collecting wild flowers in Brittany, noticed by an author and set down in a freshness that never ages.

  I am old, but I can still see myself as a loner not tired by the road and its endless motels. To this day, I would rather think of something out of reach than be emperor of what I know.

  NORMA DESMOND

  Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, 1950,

  directed by Billy Wilder

  You can look at movie magazines from the early 1920s, amazed at the faces of beautiful young actresses, stars then, but so little known now that their euphonious names sound concocted—Barbara La Marr, Lupe Velez, Agnes Ayres, Alexandra Laguna, Leatrice Joy, Norma Desmond, and so on. All brunettes, with black lips, curls stuck on their brows and eyes like bulletholes: they seem to cherish the pain of sexual exploitation by men. There is implacability in the faces, like a ship’s figurehead battling into the elements. It comes from signaling feelings; those silent women are stranded in the impossibility of utterance. A few years later, after sound, women’s faces softened. The loveliness grew quiet and intriguing. Words were put out, like bait on the threshold of their being. They smiled, where silent faces had had trumpeting frowns.

  It must have been maddening. Not many of them lasted more than a few years; the business was exhausting, and that kind of beauty is our endless American resource. It was only will that made any of them famous, or put forbidding strength in their faces. Somehow, they all seemed overdone; no matter how hard they tried, they must have known the shame of feeling coarse or clumsy. You can imagine them killing even, at the end of their tether, laughing if the gun went off and there was only a small puff of light to show explosion. But the man aimed at was staggering, stupefied, his hands clutched to the hole where life was leaking out. The ladies could make you believe.

  So many of their names were false. Norma Desmond was born May Svensson in Milwaukee in 1899. She was the daughter of Swedish immigrants, the youngest of five children. Years later, some version of Miss Desmond told Photoplay: “I had picked a good time and place to be born. The automobile was not much older than I was, so there weren’t many of them. Trolleys and wagons were pulled by horses, and none of them went too fast. It was a safe, clean time. When you were thirsty in the summer, your mother made a pitcher of lemonade. And everyone did the family wash on Monday and hung it out in the fresh air to dry.”

  Charming, don’t you think? But actresses are in love with such crystal-clear happiness. May Svensson’s early life was not a pitcher of homemade lemonade or the bouquet of fresh laundry. Instead, she was taken by her father on his tours of Wisconsin and Minnesota, selling Bibles and being driven by penury into increasingly reckless confidence tricks in which the daughter was often the decoy. They lived in cheap hotels, or
on the run: there were a few nights in town jails, the child in a cot next to the sheriff’s desk waiting for her father to be released.

  And so it was, in 1911, that May saw her father shot down by a man named Gregson, the victim of a small enough fraud, a God-fearing but choleric man who had pursued Svensson for seven months. May was holding her father’s hand, and talking to him, coming out of a diner in Kenosha, when a pistol blast met them. She felt the pressure in the air and was dragged sideways by her father’s fall, his dead grip on her growing tighter.

  She had her picture in the Chicago papers, wide-eyed, floridly becurled and stricken. A manager at the Essanay studios noticed it, and his flabby head was so touched by her plight that he saw a way of making money. He found her and devised a series of one-reelers about a waif, “Sweedie” she was called, an orphan and an outcast who got into sentimental scrapes and comic adventures. The films were poorly made, but the child bloomed in them. The camera breathed in time with the rising beat of puberty; in a year of those short movies she became an object of furtive lust, her picture pinned in lockers. The movies learned early how to fashion an arousing innocence that inspires its own spoiling.

  “Norma Desmond,” as Essanay had called her, was married at fifteen to Wallace Beery, twice her age and the robust exponent of his own ugliness. It was like a virgin princess being taken by a barbarian. The public was thrilled with alarm. In reality, Norma scolded him incessantly, until he left her with the beach house, all but one of their cars and the vases filled with his cash. This was 1917.

  She had an extraordinary career in silent pictures, earning as much as $15,000 a week, to say nothing of bonuses. She worked for Marshall Neilan, Cecil B. De Mille, Harry D’Abbadie D’Arrast and Allan Dwan. Her burning gaze played on audiences like the light of the screen. The industry romanticized her and her “enchanted” life. Perhaps she believed those stories herself—her image was over-powering. She had gone so swiftly from the sordid to the luxurious, from being abused to being worshipped. She was a Cinderella who became a tyrant queen, without time to clean the coal dust from her fingernails. An aura of transformation surrounded her. There was a famous portrait of her face staring through an embroidered veil, a celebration of beauty as a fatal delusion. She met the tycoon Noah Cross and he mounted a play with her as Salome, discarding hundreds of veils, while he sat on a stool in the wings to see her body emerge through the misty gauze.

  Perhaps her conviction was too intense for the naturalism of sound pictures? Or were her demands for money more than the industry could endure? Princess of the Micks, her film for Max von Mayerling, her husband, was a disaster in which she sank one million dollars of her own money. And so she went to France, marrying a marquis whose name she never learned to spell. She made a film there, Une Jeune Fille de campagne, about Charlotte Corday, in which the character will not speak—to protect her excessive expressiveness or the actress’s lack of French.

  While in Europe, she married the German Baron von Rauffenstein. Mayerling had never really been given up during these other marriages. He simply went from being husband to personal manager; it meant he dressed earlier in the day. There was consternation in the press, but the three figures handled the “ménage” without dismay. Moreover, in 1931–32, Norma Desmond had an affair with Serge Alexandre, also known as Stavisky. To this day there is a rumor in France that she had a child by the swindler, a daughter, who was passed on to a simple farming couple on the estate of Baron Raoul, a friend of Alexandre’s. (An unexpectedly striking face in an out-of-the-way place will often inspire such fancies. But suppose real foundlings are not especially pretty, what then?)

  In 1934, she returned to the mansion on Sunset Boulevard (bought for her by Noah Cross), where she would remain until her removal, at the hands of the police, in 1950. Mayerling came back to America in 1939 and became her butler. Norma Desmond slipped from glory to oblivion, unaware in her retreat of any change in her power or her looks. She was so removed from public contact now, she may have thought herself divine.

  She had only a monkey as an intimate until Joe Gillis strayed into her life. He seemed to offer the means of a comeback, but he was also a lover and a slave. When he thought to leave her, she shot him, in the belly, as yet unaware that her own body nurtured his child. In the asylum hospital, she never deigned to notice her swelling or the birth of the boy. She was officially insane, lecturing the other inmates and shooting them with imaginary guns when they ignored her. She died in 1959, still firing.

  JULIAN KAY

  Richard Gere in American Gigolo, 1980,

  directed by Paul Schrader

  Critics of our educational system would appreciate Julian Kay, if they could stomach the squalid aspects of his success. They say schools are organized stagnation, where inept teachers confront the brutal young with dread and contempt. They say teaching is brain-washing; only learning counts, and in most of our schools those charged with education are indifferent to whether that occurs. And so, the claim goes, a growing body of young waste forms, overcast and unaware, with no role in society except to infect the educated with their resentment.

  I don’t know the answer. Some say all children should stay at home and learn from their parents. But isn’t that a way of ensuring narrowness and the excess of shelter that leaves us tender? What would happen to business if parents were at home, practising cottage instruction? Yet I wonder, if I had had the time, whether I couldn’t have kept my children in what I believed. They might have understood me, and Mary Frances, and that might have helped them in the world. As it was, they went out there and they suffered for it. People talk of change, and faster change too, as if to say parents must be resigned to a kind of knowledge redundant to their children. But I read to them, and all their later pain seemed to have the atmosphere of stories.

  Julian Kay is a model of self-education, and survival. In all the gallery presented here, I doubt if another person has overcome such handicaps, or made so much of himself. Out of a tangle of grossness, he has grown smooth, acceptable and negotiable. There is already some talk of a political future for him. After all, he is rich, good-looking, well-spoken, and he has come from the world of the misbegotten. He has great appeal to a voter seeking miracles.

  He was born in 1951, in an asylum hospital, taken with forceps from the small, irate body of his mother, Norma Desmond, the onetime movie actress. The father was Joe Gillis, a screenwriter who had become Miss Desmond’s companion and paramour and then her victim. Even so, the birth certificate says “not known” in the matter of a father. And since the mother was a certified incompetent, Max von Mayerling, one of Miss Desmond’s former husbands, was listed as guardian to the infant.

  Julian never spoke to or was spoken to by his parents. Max von Mayerling told him that he was an orphan. Norma Desmond was dead by 1959; Max died in 1964, when Julian was thirteen. But Max left a letter of explanation with a lawyer in Santa Monica, to be given to Julian on his twenty-first birthday. That letter was sent to the last known address of Julian Kay; sent and not returned. Only Julian knows whether he saw and understood it, and his face is still lovely and unlined in its public appearances.

  Mayerling took a small apartment in Inglewood, and lived there with the child he called Julian Kay. Long before Max’s death, Julian had fallen into a pattern of truancy. Whenever Max had an engagement as a magician at a children’s party, he would enlist Julian as his assistant. It was Julian he vanished from closed trunks and Julian he sometimes sawed in sections, only for the little boy, in mauve tights, to reappear as whole and bouncy as a rubber ball.

  On other days, Julian was inclined to set out for school, then take some wrong turning and head north to explore Los Angeles. At ten and eleven, having purposefully grubbied himself beforehand, he collected quarters whistling up taxis for people outside big hotels. His special charm in this was his line of chatter to the ladies as they waited for the cab. Without ever being dirty, he was a sophisticated urchin, passing on the ornate words and sa
turnine wisdom he had picked up from Max. One or two of the ladies gave him presents or called him honey. One, on her own, asked him to ride out to Pasadena with her, and on the way she manipulated him and collected his first pearly semen in an Yves St. Laurent scarf. Julian had to walk back from Pasadena, fulfilled, striding on love’s air.

  Max von Mayerling had a collection of erotica, which he never hid from the boy. The old man would tell Julian stories at night about his own sexual adventures in Vienna, Budapest, Monte Carlo, and so on. He taught Julian French and German; he told him how to play servant or master; he gave him jokes, gestures, tricks and touches. He made an adroit gentleman out of him.

  When Max died, Julian arranged the funeral and went on with his life as usual. There were no relatives to rescue him; no inspectors to make sure he was still cared for. He went to school no more often than before. He kept the apartment up, selling some of the more ponderous furniture Max had collected. As for money, he set out to offer himself and a taxi to single ladies. He was a strong youth, and he got a reputation. Women went in search of him.