ELSA BANNISTER
Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai, 1948,
directed by Orson Welles
“You need more than luck in Shanghai,” did she say? And more than one man to give you a name anyone would remember?
Is evil an unequivocal current in the world, a primary color in human nature? Is it useful or necessary to preserve the word? Was Hitler evil, was Noah Cross, was Elsa Bannister? Or should we rescue them a little and say they were disturbed, in the hope that actions such as theirs are automatically demented, quite outside ordinary human nature? If they were mad, then was all the harm they did meant in the hope of some larger good, and did madness blind them to the truth? Or were they just as deliberate and careful as an author, inventing a bad character, and then letting themselves slip into it, enjoying the wickedness as any child might? Is evil just a notion we share, a word in common, or is it a box that all of us must look into once at least?
I met Noah Cross once, in Omaha, at a party for Potter when he was ninety. Well, not quite met, I suppose. Saw him, asked him a question and got an answer. We say we have met the famous when they are unaware of us. We treat them like sites and wonders, and come away with snapshots. I knew some of the things he had done, and I think I regarded him as someone who just lost control. Not mad but weak, weak in a way that seemed to him like strength. But he proved a witty man, a man in control, capable of fine discrimination in cutting and eating a broiled sea bass, in recollecting a hand of bridge, or in describing the talk at San Simeon and judging whether Louise Brooks was to be trusted. He spoke in elegant sentences; his eyes twinkled over nice points, as if he were teaching them to good students; he declared himself a devotee of doubt and moderation. He seemed neither mad nor compulsive. He said to me, confidentially, “You see, Mr… . Bewley, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and right place, why, they’re capable of anything.” It was a dark, brazen estimate, but he made it sound encouraging. I suppose we did meet, even if he fudged my name and offered that motto to any local building-and-loan man—dry sticks who deserved a shiver.
So Elsa was born in Chifu, in China, in 1918. Born in what was called a house of joy at that time and in that place, the child of a whore named Poppy Munson, a Eurasian of a rare kind, I gather, with Oriental features and fair hair. “Blue, blue eyes, but slanted in their secret way,” said Cross. He had been in the East at that time, and he declared—in a spirit of generosity—that he was the father of Elsa. I doubt that anyone could know that for sure. Poppy Munson had too many Caucasian clients. But Cross believed enough in doubt to use it.
Elsa Munson was brought up in her mother’s trade, and she was famous as a child prostitute. Sailors told stories about her. We cannot say what she thought of this, whether she was hurt or complacent, whether the ordeal unbalanced her or seemed matter-of-fact. Whatever, she was a party to the orgy at the Astor Hotel in Shanghai in 1933 terminated by the suicide of C. C. Julian. Yet two healthy adolescent girls could surely tip a drunk out of a low-silled window if they felt the urge. If they were bored, horrified or out of their minds. If they were evil, or curious about evil’s reputation.
Cross sent money for the girl to be brought to America. He put her in a boarding school in Connecticut, had her taught English, go to dancing classes, eminent doctors and fashionable priests, turned out a polished woman. Then he sent her one of his lawyers to arrange her adult affairs. This was in 1939, when she was twenty-one. The lawyer was Arthur Bannister, a lurching figure on two sticks, a crippled frog without the power to jump for himself.
Elsa married him, to get out of her finishing-school prison. Of course, he looked at her askance as any hobbling lawyer nearing fifty would wonder at a beautiful young woman picking him. But a lawyer is no novice with iniquity or compromise. He could see the liberty that Elsa was winning, as well as the sly jokes that would play to his back. But he would abide by the uncertainty and the jealousy. And if he ever felt shame, then he could contemplate the times when Elsa, like a dainty cat, would have to roam over his broken body at his instruction. A kind of usefulness held them together.
Bannister was transformed as a lawyer. He relished his ghastly lame-spider walk from table to witness. He extended it, sucking in attention. His strategies became bolder. An exhibitionist had always been masked by his crippled condition. Aroused by Elsa, he came into the open. His reputation and his income increased. He was talked about, and always the young, blonde, baleful-eyed wife was alluded to as the secret in his career.
Bannister took a partner, George Grisby, a brilliant, unstable man whose trial tactics were notorious. Their practice was based in San Francisco, on Montgomery Street, and their fame spread on a series of bizarre murders and society divorces. Elsa presided over one of the big houses on Washington Street, near the Presidio, keeping small dogs and romantic poets around the place, an icy hostess at dinners for other lawyers, a woman who seemed old already—never quite young or hopeful, never exactly American, never flawed by a single rash dream. Evil in idleness, perhaps, a lazy evil, too indolent to strike, bored evil, a variety that can float on unmotivated cruelty.
In New York on a summer night, she was riding in a horse-drawn carriage when hoodlums tried to rob her. A strolling passerby, Michael O’Hara, rescued her and drove her back to her hotel, yarning about China, Macao and sundry haunts. He had a half-caste look himself, high cheeks and narrow almond eyes full of self-love. He had a drugged face, and he was so large, so garrulous, so very innocent that Elsa thought to take hold of him like a balloon and make him squeak. She got Bannister to hire him as bosun on their yacht. Wasn’t Michael a sailor, reeling along on dry land as if riding a swell?
Their yacht, the Circe, was headed down to the Caribbean, and then by way of the canal and back to San Francisco. It was the Bannisters’ vacation, and Grisby was brought along to keep them amused. Elsa could see that Michael adored her; anyone could guess why she had had him hired. It inflamed him all the more that Elsa took their love for granted instead of letting him win her in his slow, romancing way. But she let Michael see Bannister humiliate her, and she was breathless with excitement the night Michael compared them all to a sea of sharks drunk on blood. It was like the stink of an orgy. Did she think she might destroy them all? Surely she never believed in going off with Michael to a house on a high cliff, called Nepenthe, where they would be happy. Happiness was not her thought. She was irked by existence, and wanted it to burn with the heat of the sun. Elsa was captivated by pictures of the new atomic explosions, a death by light.
The Circe sailed through fermenting seas, they picnicked on islands, dived from rocks and canoed on rivers filled with snakes, alligators and flamingos. In San Francisco, there were two killings and a trial where Bannister cross-examined himself. Elsa smiled at his mockery of the law. Finally, a bewildered Michael—a baby bull—ran away from the court. Elsa found him in a Chinese theater on Grant. There in the dark his hand felt the gun in her silk bag. “I was taught to think about love in Chinese,” she whispered to him, her mind set on the Chinese show; but he had guessed the truth from the hard shape.
It all ended in the fun house with her and Bannister shooting at images of one another until all the mirrors were gone and only the real bodies stood up. And so they killed each other amid all the broken glass. Was she evil? Was she to blame, or did those early influences explain her malice? Is destruction an energy that takes us all at some time or another? Or is a woman as dark as that because so many men fear the way she provokes them? Elsa Bannister, dead at thirty. Evil’s such a grand word, good’s such a towering thought. I rule them out in favor of another pair—bored or hopeful, fatigue or life. As Bannister said himself in the fun house, “Of course, killing you is killing myself. But I’m pretty tired of both of us.” That thing called “evil” has been through disappointment first. It thinks itself betrayed by life and wants revenge.
ADELINE LOGGINS
Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon, 1973,
<
br /> directed by Peter Bogdanovich
In Bogue, Kansas, on a July day in 1936, they were burying Rose Loggins. Just the preacher, Rose’s nine-year-old daughter, Addie, and a scattering of Bogue people including the man driving the car when Rose was killed, and his brother, for moral strength. Moses Pray came by as they were tossing in the earth. The noise of it gave him start number one. Number two was finding it was supple Rose turning stiff as the boards.
Moses was known a little in Bogue, but only a little because if you are in the business of selling Bibles to widows you have to keep moving; when customers see you it should be for the first and only time. So much acquainted with widowhood, Moses was especially sad to come upon a recently deceased lady, and a lady alone, for Rose Loggins had never obtained, or sought, benefit of clergy.
He had scarcely had time to put his hat back on at the close of the simple ceremony when those neighbors charged by Bogue with delivering Addie to her Aunt Billie in St. Joseph, Missouri, dumped the kid on him. He had a car and he had let on, while still distraught and before they had hinted at the child’s destiny, that he was going in that direction. This Addie was a blunt little nut who looked like a boy and turned fiercer than a girl if you made that mistake. There was also the uncalled-for suggestion from those Bogue hicks that since Moses and Addie had such a resemblance … How in the world anyone saw that Moses did not know; he could barely recollect now, all those years later, whether he and Rose had ever, even once, partaken in a way that would bring even the chance of truth to those coy, sidelong looks.
So Moses just took the dour child, with her belongings, to the Bogue depot to put her on a train. That was reasonable since he had, so to speak, been presented with $200 by the car driver’s brother on account of the accident. Whatever was left from that after the one-way to St. Jo would be compensation enough to Moses for the good deed.
However, at the depot, Addie pipes up with the idea that the $200 is rightly hers since the brother had meant it for Rose’s surviving child, and now Moses was stealing it. Furthermore, she was herself suspicious that she might be Moses’s kid. You have to be so careful what you say in front of the young. Just to avoid an ugly scene, Moses sold back the train ticket and put the brat in his car.
So Moses set out for St. Jo reckoning to play the Bible game along the way and deposit the girl with as much of the $200 as she could count before he was off. The Bible game was very simple. You bought a paper with all the death notices. You saw that Pearl Morgan, say, had lost her hubby. You found where she lived, got over there and picked out a nice Bible in red or blue leather and you quick-printed on the front, “For Pearl.” Then knock on the door and, “Good day, ma’am, I’m just delivering the Bible Mr. Morgan ordered… . Oh, no! He’s dead? … Well, I am devastated… . Yes, that’s right, ma’am… . ‘For Pearl’ it says… . Oh, you’re Pearl… . Now, you don’t have to take it… . Well, it is $6.77.” Whereupon Addie interrupted and said, “Oh no, Daddy, remember, this is the $9.54 edition.” Just like that!
One way and another Addie got herself into the act. He didn’t know where she’d learned some of her tricks, like the twenty-dollar-bill routine. She even outlived Trixie Delight, a vaudeville artiste Moses picked up in Cawker City. At first Moses had just thought Addie was downright jealous, but he took a better view of her when she alerted him to how Trixie was taking a little bit on the side from Floyd, the desk clerk at their hotel. After that it was just Moses and Addie getting on with the father-and-daughter show, though Moses was always careful to insist they were not kin.
The last bit of Kansas they took in a rush because some sheriff was after them: they had sold his own whiskey to a bootlegger who happened to be the sheriff’s twin, yet more fraternal than identical. But they made it over the river into Missouri and thought they were safe in St. Jo when the sheriff turned up and just beat Moses black and blue. Moses took Addie to her Aunt Billie’s and the child resigned herself to the new home. But in two minutes she knew how dull it was going to be, and before three she was running down the road after Mose. On those Midwest roads you can see in your rearview a mile behind you.
That settled the partnership; they got along very well for the next few years, without ever having to discuss whether it was business or sentiment that kept them together. We come to 1942, with Addie now fifteen, and a forward fifteen, showing just what can be done with good bone structure and a young woman with lipstick. They were in their hotel room in Ponca City, Oklahoma, when this conversation ensued.
“Mose?”
“Hmm.”
“Mose.”
“What is it, honey?”
“You’re absolutely certain, are you, that you’re not my father?”
“How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Hmm.”
“Anyway, I’m only thirty-three, hardly old enough to be your father.”
“No?”
“No.”
“You’d have been seventeen. Couldn’t you do it then?”
“Well, who knows? I wasn’t doing arithmetic. I didn’t do it, that’s all that counts.”
“Hmm. I think that’s an excellent thing.”
“Certainly is.”
“Excellent.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, Mose, the way I’m beginning to feel about you, it’d be a shithouse if we were kin.”
“What?”
“Oh come on, slowpoke.”
“Button that up!”
“Mose!”
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Cuddling.”
“Cuddling!”
“Seeing as we’re not father and daughter, I think we should take advantage of all these shared hotel rooms.”
The very next day Moses Pray joined the army and got off to war. It was one duty taking priority over another. The country was vulnerable, and he knew that Addie would get by.
JAY LANDESMAN GATSBY
Alan Ladd in The Great Gatsby, 1949,
directed by Elliott Nugent; and Robert Redford, 1974,
directed by Jack Clayton
So much of it comes back to the mystery of being a Midwesterner. But in attempting to describe that, you must be able to say where the area is. There was a man once who said, without a flicker of irony, that San Francisco was the part of the Midwest he hailed from. Earlier today, doing a crossword, Mary Frances asked if Pennsylvania was ever considered to be in the Midwest.
Why not? The Midwest could be that mathematical center, a pinhole, or it could be all “the dark fields of the republic” between two narrow coastal strips, like the body inside its skin. Then there’s that New Yorker cartoon, like the surrealist map of the world, warped by feeling, with desert prairie beginning on the other side of the Hudson, and stretching as far as the Pacific. When Americans use the term don’t they think of a space of tranquillity or absence in the heart of the country, in the heart’s heart? The ruffled dun-colored carpet across which coast-to-coast flights must pass, the uneventful land below while the movie plays at thirty-seven thousand feet?
I’m looking now at the Rand-McNally; it’s one of my favorite books on America. I’m studying the two-page spread on Nebraska. That’s Midwest to most people. It’s a state determined by straight edges, except in the east, where the crinkle of the Missouri breaks the rectangle. And it’s geometrical-looking inside the boundaries, with straight-line roads, the tidy blocks of counties, and so much white space to make the lines look bolder and more confident. Lines can go frantic there, the way taut wire curls up when it snaps. Up in the northwest of the state, there’s Cherry County, “where the hay is so fine,” said Willa Cather, “and the coyotes can scratch down to water.” As far as I can tell, the county is ninety-five miles by sixty-two miles, that’s 5,890 square miles. Yet, really, on the map it’s a picture of nothing. There’s a row of small towns in the north, along 20, and two roads going north-south, 61 and 83, with hardly a notch on them. There are a few lakes, the threads of ri
vers and the McKelvie National Forest. But it’s bare, flat and empty. Maybe the most interesting thing in the county is the place where Mountain Time meets Central Time, out there in the nothing, with an hour in a single stride.
There’s so few people in Cherry County, and so few who’d want to be there. If Nebraska means dullness in Manhattan or on Russian Hill, then Cherry County is what Nebraskans regard as the back of beyond. And in all the high-pressure places in America—where books are published, movies produced, the country governed, the money counted, TV generated—the Midwest stands for that sleepy space and the anonymous audience. “The dark fields of the republic”—extensive, conservative, unenlightened, pastoral. A place where, if you stay, you are seemingly content to be lumped in with the average, the quiet and the normal. A part of the nation where all the writers on the fringes imagine exists an archetypal uncomplaining Americana, like Bedford Falls.
As if there isn’t strangeness in Nebraska. As if the wind coming across all that flat warm earth couldn’t make a person feel the terror of being fifteen hundred miles from sea in any direction, choking in the dry aroma of wheat and dirt, until your head feels full of chaff. As if the straight roads didn’t have sudden, inexplicable kinks in them, like the barbs in wire. The Midwest is taken for granted. It is not glamorous or romantic; it is not noticed because the movie is playing then, and because from that height there is so little to see. But don’t think the Midwest doesn’t long to be in the movie. Let me tell you: Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Fred Astaire, all born in Omaha; Robert Taylor in Filley, and Henry Fonda in Grand Island. No, there’s great acting and dreaming here, like barbed wire in our heads.
Suspects Page 23