by Ed Ifkovic
“Not yet.”
Mercy introduced him to me. “Tommy grew up with Jimmy in Fairmount, Indiana.”
Tommy beamed. “A year behind him in high school. Knew him to say hello to. I bumped into him in New York when I moved there. He was trying to be an actor. Me, too. Everybody in New York wants to be an actor. We spent the whole of one long afternoon watching Monty Clift in A Place in the Sun in Times Square. Over and over. I couldn’t get him to leave. We had the best time. Then, you know, Jimmy came out here for East of Eden.” It had a rehearsed, rushed sound to it. He seemed ready to add to the dreary biography, but the look on my face stopped him.
I didn’t like his voice-cracking, flat, boring. Worse, the eyes now darted, furtive, from me to Mercy, then to the whole room, squinting, watching. For Jimmy? Close up, he was a pale reflection of Jimmy. He was just there, like a potted plant. “I stopped in to see Jimmy,” Tommy said, “but, well, Jimmy is Jimmy.” He looked back and motioned to the young woman he’d walked in with. “That’s Polly, my girlfriend. From New York, too. I trailed Jimmy out here, and she trailed me.” He laughed, waved at her. “She’s in for a costume fitting.”
Polly seemed content to stay back with the other woman, both standing with folded arms. I found myself wondering about the second woman, who looked peevish. “And who is that other girl, who looks so unhappy?”
Tommy chuckled a little too long, ending with a rough phlegmatic cigarette cough. “That’s Lydia Plummer, who was Jimmy’s girl for about a month. She wanted to make it last forever. She’s got a speaking line in the banquet scene. Two words.” He motioned both women over, but George Stevens was suddenly back in the room, thundering. The two women hugged the back wall, uncomfortable, anxious to leave. Tommy, a little nervous, excused himself. He said to Mercy, “We don’t belong here today. Tell Jimmy I’m looking for him. He ain’t answering the phone.”
When Tommy left, I asked Mercy, “Why does he dress like Jimmy?”
“Because, sadly, he wants to be Jimmy. He thinks he can be the next James Dean.”
“And how does Jimmy feel about that?”
“Hard to say. He’s gone out of his way to plead for parts for Tommy and Polly. They’re like leeches. He got him to play a ranch hand in Marfa, but Tommy couldn’t stay on a horse. Still, you see him in a couple scenes. Polly was there, playing one of Bick’s party guests. She had a line, but lost it in a script edit.”
“So what does he do?”
“When he’s not making believe he’s an actor, he parks cars in the lot across the street from the CBS Radio Studios on Sunset. The same lot where Jimmy parked cars before he went to New York.”
“And they’ve remained friends?”
“Sort of.”
“That’s not really a testimonial.”
“Something’s been happening with Jimmy’s crowd,” she said, slowly.
“New faces?”
“Not so much new, but old ones disappearing.”
“And that includes Tommy and Polly? And, I gather, this Lydia Plummer, who seems to have come here today to look distraught.”
Mercy nodded. “Exactly. Jimmy seems to be trying to get distance from Tommy. Jimmy is on the verge of being the next major star. He knows it. He wants it. He’s gonna have to leave people behind.”
“That sounds cruel, though perhaps necessary.”
“Very necessary, so far as Jimmy is concerned. Look, Edna, Tommy’s a drain. And this red nylon jacket is the last straw. Pathetic copycat. But Jimmy’s been leaving people behind for years. He stops thinking about people he’s friendly with, and then they’re gone. Jimmy’s loyalty takes him only so far.”
I looked to the doorway. I wanted to see Jimmy walk in.
The news people and the photographers were packing up, and George Stevens stormed around, a big, blustery heap of a man, shaking with fury. “I sent a car to his new apartment in Sherman Oaks. No Jimmy. No one has seen him.”
I kept my mouth shut. Stevens apologized to me, gallantly, but I waved my hand. But clearly it did matter to the officious Stevens, a taskmaster, a man who approached his movies with a sense of sheer professionalism, everything in place, no room for moodiness or spurts of juvenile behavior. Jimmy was a schoolyard bully making his own rules. I touched him on his sleeve. “The film is important, George, not a picture of me with James Dean.”
Stevens spoke too loudly. “But that’s what I ordered.”
I shrugged.
Stevens leaned in. “You know, I’ve written a memo listing every late or missed shot, every sullen remark, even his stupid rudeness to a crew member. And I’ll tell you, Edna. I’ll never make another movie with him. Never.” He half-bowed, a sort of Prussian stiffness that struck me as anachronistic-I’d seen silent-era German directors do likewise, Josef von Sternberg, for one-and left the room.
Tansi watched him leave. She came over to me, hurt in her voice. “No, he’ll never make another movie with you,” she whispered to his retreating back. “I’ll be his choice not to.”
Chapter 4
“Miss Edna.” A voice boomed behind me. Jimmy arrived two hours later. I’d just returned from lunch with Mercy and Tansi.
“Of course,” Tansi mumbled. “Now he arrives.”
Jimmy stood there, nonplussed, inhaling a cigarette, while Tansi, frantically dialing numbers from a book she carried, managed to get some photographers and reporters, lingering on the lot, back into the room. Jimmy was at his most gracious, greeting me as though he’d never met me before, then smiling for the cameras, flirtatious, mischievous, circling me like I was a delightful prey, putting his arms around my shoulders, whispering. The photographers loved it.
I loved it. In spite of myself.
Jimmy had arrived as Jett Rink-the young wildcatter, worn denims and scuffed boots and ten-gallon hat, dipped low on his forehead. He was the rangy, belligerent ranch hand, seething with resentments, falling in love with Bick’s wife, and not yet the cruel and despotic oillionaire of JetTexas Oil.
As the photographers snapped pictures, Jimmy charmed and insinuated. He danced on chairs, he whooped and hollered. He sang a cowboy tune in the twangy, nasal Texas accent he’d mastered for the role. Everyone grinned. At first, I was alarmed by his manic performance, but finally I relaxed. This was no errant schoolboy, some Peck’s Bad Boy for a disaffected generation of post-war lost teenaged children. This was a self-absorbed lad, himself his best and most tantalizing subject. True, his moods were explosive and extreme. A troubled boy, certainly. But watching him unfold himself, like a tentative flower, petal by petal, unsure but seeking the overhead noontime sun, I realized there had to be a strain of purposeful scheming in him, a force that competed with some natural orneriness, some tractor-pull stubbornness. This boy of the Midwest soil, this dervish, this carnival showman, this brilliant hayseed.
He was playing to the camera, swinging me around like some dosie-do barn dancer. I let him, intoxicated, but wary.
“Rope tricks,” he announced, laughing, as he proceeded to twirl a lariat, rodeo style, the sloppy ovals he created lingering in the air like dusty rings blown by cigarette smokers. “I learned this in Marfa. That, and the insatiable mating habits of jackrabbits.”
He insisted on teaching me to twirl a lariat, standing behind me, holding my elbow and wrist, spinning out the thick rope like a spider launching a filament. I was awkward and a little embarrassed. I’d not even told my own doctor about the growing weakness in my shoulders, those sharp pains, but I played along, gamely. Under his tutelage, I actually hurled out the rope, and Jimmy yelled, “Whoa, little doggie.” Which made everyone, including me, howl. The photographers were savoring this. Exhausted, I begged respite, and Jimmy, the cavalier gentleman with an arm around my waist, led me to a chair, the one marked EDNA FERBER, in fact.
“You’re a real cowgirl.” He politely kissed my hand.
“Sure, Annie Oakley with a blue rinse and rhinestone brooch.” Though, I admit, my heart raced. I was loving this.
>
Flushed, I surveyed the room. Rock Hudson, standing in a doorway, was frowning. Behind him, George Stevens, arms folded, watched, quiet-his face set. Rock leaned into Stevens, who nodded up and down. Again, I told myself that they were right. Of course they were right. Jimmy was impossible. A boy so easy to condemn, yet so easy to forgive.
Frankly, I was baffled by my own behavior here. This was not like me. I’d long ago dismissed frivolous behavior from my life, and there were days I felt I’d even relinquished my sense of humor. There were days when everything bothered me, made me testy. There were weeks when I was filled with nameless rages, feuding with my old friends, with family. I wrote damning letters to people who once loved me. Well, I didn’t like being old, old. I didn’t like the fact that my New York friends were all old, old. Now-here was this Jimmy, a wood sprite, Ariel, genie in a bottle. He got me laughing, stupidly, unexpected, and from the depths, and I was out of practice. The muscles at the corners of my mouth ached.
After the press disappeared-oddly, they’d all forgiven Jimmy for being late, backslapping, making wild promises to him, one even promising to accompany him to a car race-the room went quiet. Suddenly Jimmy started walking in circles; fretful, nervous, unable to settle. Tansi and I sat, like jurors in a box, as Jimmy hummed and grumbled, yet could not stop moving. He looked unhappy.
Jake Geyser had monitored the brilliant spectacle from a distance. He glowered like Cotton Mather wagging a bony, blackened finger at the depraved souls of Salem. He strode across the room. A man used to compliance, he’d been given a task he never sought: herding in the recalcitrant actor and, worse, dealing with blackmail, threats, and vitriolic letters. His was probably a world of brandy snifter decorum, golf engagements on forest-green courses, of Sundays in the park with a tweedy wife and a passel of obedient, if stymied, children. Not in the job description-this-this rebel. Hollywood, as he knew it from the star-system days of the forties, was Clark Gable or Humphrey Bogart or Joan Crawford or Katherine Hepburn-as efficient as office machinery.
He spoke through gritted teeth. “Jimmy, your lateness throws off a whole schedule.” He waited. “Mr. Stevens is fit to be tied.”
Jimmy was quiet too long, and everyone waited. Standing a couple of feet away from the steel-jawed Jake, the slovenly Jimmy seemed to coil downward, a spring unhinged, and the lariat he still gripped floated menacingly in the space between them.
Jimmy looked into the stern, unyielding face. A half-smile. “Well,” he slurred, in an exaggerated Texas drawl, “if he’s fit to be tied, I got me here a right appropriate lasso.” He spun the rope outward, and it brushed Jake’s jacket. Jake jerked back. Jimmy squinted. “You know, as an Indiana farm boy, used to the smells and mayhem of barnyards and hen coops, I’d have to say that you are easily recognizable as a horse’s ass.”
The two men stood there, hating each other. Those nearby squirmed, uncomfortable. Fascinated, I watched the dynamic, though I was unhappy with this ridiculous Mexican standoff. Men at their silly games. You first. No, you first. Come outside and I’ll…
Jake, the unpracticed combatant, sputtered, turned and fled the room; Jimmy threw out the lariat, high above his head, floating the ropes, attempting some exquisite and perfect circle. It fell to the ground. He looked at me. “I read that DaVinci could draw a perfect geometric circle freehand, without a compass. Tell me I can’t make this rope do the same.” Again, he hurled the lariat pell mell over his head, but the circle he created was lopsided, sloppy, and the rope fell onto his shoulders, so he stood there, perplexed, looking like a man who’d just failed to hang himself.
I kept glancing at Tansi, who had positioned herself on my left, her elbow bumping mine. She was breathing hard, and I marveled at the spectrum of shifting emotions that glided across her features. The eyes that followed the crestfallen and embittered Jake to the door were triumphant, her enemy bested. Her lips were drawn into a tight, compressed line, but there was glee in her eyes-a shimmering that scared me. But when Tansi looked back at Jimmy, standing there like a dumbfounded circus clown, the rope looped over his neck, Tansi’s eyes glazed over, and she looked like she was afraid. Not of him, but for him. She made a tsk ing sound, and I caught her eye.
“Nobody understands him,” she said.
“I believe I do,” I answered.
The air went out of the room. Mercy insisted we needed coffee. “I’m from Kinsman, Illinois. Population 164. In my blessed Papist household we addressed any problem with pots of hot, brewed coffee, so strong it corroded our Catholic soul. That was, of course, before I discovered liquor.” She squired us out of the building, across the cement walkways that connected the various soundstages, and out the front entrance, to the Smoke House, a sandwich-and-coffee eatery by the front gates that served as a hangout for the Warner crew and performers. “This is where we live,” Mercy told me. Tansi, like an obedient dog, followed, unhappy. Leaving, we spotted Jake on the telephone, and, looking at the taut tendons in his beet-red neck, I understood how furious he was.
Seated, with coffee, I said, “That was not a good moment.”
“Honestly,” Tansi fumed, sitting back, “Jake is so…”
Mercy interrupted, “Tansi, you have to stop apologizing for Jimmy.”
“I’m not. It’s just that Jack Warner told me…”
“Tansi, Jimmy was wrong this afternoon. Plain wrong.”
Tansi stared into her lap.
Silence. I examined a mountainous cheesecake under glass, dripping with glazed strawberries. In a frosted glass case a stainless steel bowl contained wavy whipped cream, stung by the cold. Perhaps a nibble, a taste. I stopped looking.
Staring at Tansi’s stricken face, Mercy changed the subject, talking about her husband Fletcher, a weekend trip they were planning to San Francisco-a brief respite to see friends. Tansi relaxed, and I decided I would have the cheesecake. Tansi lit a cigarette, expelled the smoke, and I surprised myself. I craved a cigarette. Tansi made a joke when Mercy said her husband, though tolerant of her being an actress and gone for weeks at a time, often told strangers she was a cruise ship entertainer. “At least,” Tansi quipped, “he didn’t say you were the beleaguered assistant to a tight-fisted film mogul. That’s one more euphemism for the oldest profession on earth allowed a woman.”
“Tansi!” I yelled, shocked. But we all started laughing, and Tansi couldn’t seem to stop.
The eatery was largely empty at that hour, but Mercy nodded to some newcomers who strolled in, ordering coffee to go, and I realized one of the two women had been with Tommy Dwyer earlier. What was her name? The one with two words in Giant. Mercy waved them over, but both seemed a little reluctant, looking at each other.
Lydia, I recalled, Jimmy’s most recent girlfriend; that is, his most recently discarded flame. Yes. Lydia Plummer, hovering back in the shadows with Tommy Dwyer’s girlfriend, Polly. Now the women slipped into chairs opposite us, and Mercy made the introductions. “Edna, meet two of the satellites that revolve around Jimmy Dean. Lydia Plummer, still in costume-will they ever film that banquet scene? — and Nell Meyers, who works in the script department.” Both women nodded, then looked at each other. I could see that Lydia did not appreciate Mercy’s comment about her being another moon in Jimmy’s peculiar solar system.
“I can’t stay,” Lydia said, looking at no one. “I’m supposed to be there. They’re reshooting a scene. I have one line and I don’t want to tempt the cutting room floor.” She seemed to be speaking to the far wall, and her eyes looked teary.
Curious, I studied both women. So this was Jimmy’s last girlfriend-this bit player, Lydia Plummer. You saw an eye-catching girl, slender of frame though oddly fleshy, the mouth too large and too pouty, robust painted lips, the eyes already lost in wrinkling, bunching skin. It was hard to read her features, covered as she was in her screen makeup. But I thought her coarse-a roadhouse waitress, perhaps, a buxom Tom Jones barmaid. A little too vacant-eyed. That bothered me. The eyes glassy, perhaps a drinker’s ey
es, dim, washed out. I wondered what she looked like without the elegant costume, the trumpery, but I supposed Lydia a prosaic beauty, maybe a high-school belle who was told too often she should be in Hollywood. Stupidly, she bought that Greyhound ticket.
“So you have a speaking line?” My words seemed to startle her. She actually jumped.
Lydia ran her tongue over her lips, moistening them. “One line in Giant, tomorrow a leading role. Look how fast it happened to Jimmy.” The words stretched out, labored over. But she said Jimmy’s name with an icy sarcasm, spitting out the word, and the name hung in the air like a black mark.
Mercy shook her head. “Edna, Jimmy is not one of Lydia’s favorite people these days.”
Lydia grunted. “Swine.” She tossed back her head, and the light caught the gold necklace around her neck. Then, in a quiet confessional tone, the voice now soft and fuzzy, “I just don’t understand why he stopped caring.” Again, she stared at the far wall. Following her gaze, I was intrigued by the sight of the cheesecake.
Nell spoke for the first time. “Lydia, you know how things are.”
A flash of anger. “No, I don’t. Not actually. Only someone who’s never been in love can say that.”
Nell turned red. The two women, I noticed, were a contrast: Lydia, fleshy, grossly sensual, perhaps; a little raw at the edges; a strawberry blonde; and Nell, short, squat really, round like a fur ball, a roly-poly frame that seemed, somehow, block-like, stolid. Perhaps it was the look in her eyes that suggested immobility, a marble glare, humorless. And yet she seemed to be smiling, like she was constantly telling herself a joke she expected no one else to get. A girl perhaps twenty, unpretty in a land where beauty was the name of the game. So she slapped on makeup, heavily so, a feeble attempt to enliven that dull face with powder and eyeliner. The general effect was of a chestnut burr slathered in confectionary sugar. You saw a girl all in black, a beret on her head-eyes darkened with kohl-chalk. She was very Greenwich Village transported to California, land of sunshine. A girl dropped into the wrong geography. No-some ersatz replica of Greta Garbo, an exaggerated approximation of the mysterious Swedish actress. Nell Meyers, script girl as seductress, playing an exotic chanteuse, maybe, waiting to be famously alone. If Lydia seemed garish and effusive, a pretty woman spilling out of her sexuality, then the younger Nell was a shadow, a hidden corner. Lydia was a bar girl with too many drunken nights at gin mills under her girdle. Lydia at middle age would be a Botticelli slattern, all rolling bulge and generous lipstick and five-and-dime perfume. Nell at forty would be a rotund sorcerer with a mosquito-thin voice, sitting on a bar stool saying, “Don’t come near me.”