by Ed Ifkovic
“I don’t understand.” I was bewildered. “For what-four years-they follow Jimmy?”
“Yes, and after East of Eden and Jimmy’s spectacular celebrity, they ratcheted up their obsession. They feel they own him. They follow him.”
I was furious. “They are sick.”
“Harmless, Edna.”
“Oh, no, no, Tansi, I don’t think so.”
“Edna, you seem to give them more worth than they deserve. Stars need their fans.”
“Tansi, you seem to believe Hollywood is a land removed from the rest of America.”
“And it isn’t?”
I paused. “They’re like Tommy-living no life but Jimmy’s. They can’t have his life, you know.”
“They don’t work or anything. They live at home, and indulgent parents let them play out their bit parts.”
“I suppose it’s cheaper than the cost of an asylum.”
“Edna!”
Tommy and Polly, unhappy with the sudden proliferation of red-nylon jackets in Googie’s, left, nodding to Tansi and me as they passed. I noticed they purposely avoided looking at the Strand twins, who’d been facing each other, but then swiveled on the seats, facing out, grins plastered on faces. Their eyes never left Tommy. After all, Tommy Dwyer was a James Dean friend.
Tansi was telling me how the Strand twins amused her, but she stopped.
James Dean was standing just inside the front door. Oddly, he just seemed to appear: an apparition materializing from another world. But, of course, he’d strolled in, in a leather jacket and biker boots. He sat across the room, but didn’t acknowledge us, and I watched his profile: rigid, the flexible mouth, the cigarette dangling. He noticed me watching him, but turned away, looking away, too, from Alva and Alyce Strand. I saw him suck in his breath.
Clearing her throat, Tansi yelled across the tables: “Jimmy, here.”
He shook his head. No.
Jimmy’s presence compelled the eatery into an awkward paralysis. People stopped talking and watched him. Looking up, Jimmy caught my eye. Sheepishly, I smiled. Jimmy narrowed his eyes, tucked his head into his chest like a bantam cock, and turned away. I felt foolish, rebuffed, the slight acknowledgement I’d offered rejected. For a second, I was furious. How dare he? I was Giant; I was Show Boat; I was-I stopped. I had no idea what I was to boys of his generation. I wrote words down and sometimes actors read them into cameras. Suddenly, I felt ancient-an attitude I never allowed myself. The dowager in the diner. The waitress had placed two sodas on the table, and I pushed mine to the side. Tansi, I noted, quickly drained her glass and was now munching on an ice cube.
Tansi looked flustered. “It isn’t personal, Edna. He’s moody sometimes.”
“He’s downright rude.”
“Oh, Edna, no.”
“He’s a brat.” I paused. “And stop defending him, Tansi.”
“I’m not…”
“He’s allowed to get away with boorish behavior because you let him.”
“Talent has its entitlements.”
“Nonsense. I’ve been talented all my life, and I…”
Tansi cut me off. “And you’ve been known to be imperious. Even rude sometimes. I mean no offense, I…”
I pulled back, smiled. Good for you, Tansi, I thought. “None taken. But I’m that way with fools. Jimmy has to learn to sort out his rudeness.”
Tansi shook her head. “Maybe you should give him lessons.” She meant it humorously-even her eyes got bright-but the line came out too quickly, too strident.
I glared.
When I turned to look at Jimmy, he was gone. I hadn’t even heard the chimes over the door ring. Maybe he was an apparition.
Late that night, in my hotel suite, settling into my pillows with tea and a Mary Roberts Rinehart mystery I had trouble following, my phone rang.
“I’m in the lobby,” Jimmy said.
“And?”
“Invite me up.”
I glanced at the clock. “Jimmy, it’s after ten.”
“So?”
“For a minute.”
Within seconds he was there, slumped into a chair by the window, his leather jacket still zipped up, looking around the room. “They’re really scared of you, Miss Edna, if you get all these rooms for yourself.”
“I’m famous.”
“So am I.”
“What do you want, Jimmy?”
He shrugged his shoulders and mumbled.
“You’re going to have to be more articulate with me. I’m old, hard of hearing, and I value oratory as a lost art.”
“You know, in high school I won the Indiana state competition for oratory.”
“And as a prize, they took away your need for future clarity?”
He laughed. “I love it. You won’t let me win.”
“I didn’t know we were in a contest.”
“Everything is a contest in life.”
“And you have to win?”
“Of course. I always do.”
“And you need to do battle with old ladies in sensible shoes and beauty-parlor perms?”
His eyes widened. “Everybody lets me win these days. It ain’t fun.”
“Maybe you need new combatants.”
“That may be so. I got no one to fight with.”
“You seem to have your crew-Tommy, Polly, Lydia, Nell…”
He cut me off. “Miss Edna, I’ve come here to beg and plead.”
“I don’t know you, Jimmy.”
“Yes, you do.” He looked toward the window, out into the black night. “I got famous too fast.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. “I heard about your Hill Number One TV show.”
He shook his head. “Oh, that. The Strand twins. They’ll disappear.”
“Like Carisa Krausse?” I wanted to challenge him.
Jimmy slumped back, folded and unfolded his arms. He started to speak, then stopped, stammered. Grunted. “What?” I asked.
“Sort of why I’m here.”
“Jimmy, you were rude to us at Googie’s.”
He looked surprised. “How so?”
“You enter, I assume through the front door, although legions of fans may ascribe other powers to you, and you ignore civilized nods of hello.”
He didn’t answer.
“I don’t like rudeness.” My voice was a little too strident. I was surprised that I was nervous.
“I wasn’t being rude.”
“Perhaps we’d both better consult the same dictionary then.”
“You do got a way about you, Miss Edna.” He sat up, grinning. “I wanna be like you when I grow up.” He tilted his head and looked at me, as though expecting a laugh. But I sat there, lips pursed. “Look,” he said, “rude is not ignoring you in a dumb diner. That’s just-just, well, nothing. It’s, it’s, like, well, nothing. Rudeness, if you think about it, is barging in here late at night, uninvited, and jostling with you, working myself up to asking a favor of you. That’s the real rudeness.”
I fell under his spell, a little intoxicated by his hazy, narcotic drawl. I sat back, relaxed. “Tell me about Carisa Krausse.”
“Hey, we had an idle fling in Marfa. I was bored, there was nothing to do. She was pretty, she was always around me, Pier Angeli had just left me, and, well, nothing happened. A couple late-night rides in a car I borrowed from Mercy. They took my car away so I wouldn’t kill myself. Suddenly, I see she’s falling for me. Before Marfa, back here, in rehearsals, she was around, and I’d sensed her…well…instability. But sometimes I lack common sense. I swear we never…we…there is no way any baby is mine, Miss Edna. Not with her.”
“What about other women?” He was sitting up now, the sober schoolboy before the demanding teacher.
“That’s mostly PR. Like Terry White, that pretty vacuum. You know, the studio had me and Terry go to a movie. So the limo pulls up, she says not one damn word to me, not one, but the minute we get out of the limo and the reporters are there, the big smile comes on, she gr
abs my arm, and acts like we’re lovey-dovey boyfriend-girlfriend. Not a word the whole time.” He sighed. “Sometimes I actually like the girls they hand me. Most times I don’t.”
“But your reputation?”
His eyebrows raised, the eyes unblinking. “I don’t know what reputation I have.”
“Mercy says you ‘sort of’ go through women.”
Jimmy looked at the ceiling, then burst into laughter. “Love that Madama. So…so…”
“Truthful?”
“Maybe so.” He crossed and uncrossed his denim-clad legs, stared at his boots. “I’m not sure what to do around women,” he said, suddenly.
“What does that mean?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I just got some questions I gotta answer.”
Now I was confused. “About what? Marriage?”
He opened and closed his eyes, blinking wildly. “Well, sex, frankly.”
Not a subject I was comfortable with, truly. I winced. Birds and bees may indeed do it, but not on my watch. I’m almost seventy, and I stare like a deer in the headlights at the mention of that monumental and ferocious three-letter word.
“I’m not following you.” And I wasn’t.
“Forget it.” He stood up and walked to the window, looking down into the street. “You got some good view of an empty city here.” He pointed. “Somewhere over there is Chinatown. The street of the Golden Palace. You can get your fortune told there.” He looked back at me. “You know, L.A. has a real different energy than New York. New York is pulsating and real nervous-like. It’s jumpy and feverish. It’s all throb and burst. That’s where artists can grow. You know that. You live there. L.A. is emptiness. So much room to wait things out, to dream and not to do. People, you know, float from one exhibitionist outpost to another, grasping for ideas that are best left untouched.” Most of what he’d just said was mumbled, and he seemed to laugh at the end of each line, as though embarrassed by the sentiment.
“What are you talking about?”
“I want you to talk to Mercy. That’s why I’m here. Convince her to talk to Carisa. Mercy was the only person Carisa liked. She told me that. She said Mercy reminded her of an older sister who died of some disease or something. And that fool Jake Geyser called me again tonight, and asked me if I had any idea how to shut Carisa up. This is all beyond him, though he won’t admit it. He’s panicking. Unwed mothers, Jimmy Dean’s love child, forbidden passion, God know what other lies. They’re pressuring me. What am I supposed to do?”
I nodded. And then kept nodding. Even after he left, backing his way out like a servant in some costume drama, bowing and shuffling, I sat there nodding. Then I got angry with myself. I felt, suddenly, that he’d charmed me, wooed me, reeled me in like an available (and not very challenging) fish. I glanced at the clock. After eleven. I didn’t care. I dialed Mercy’s number, knowing she’d be up. I apologized, but Mercy was delighted to hear my voice. I filled her in on Jimmy’s visit, even the earlier encounter at Googie’s, and Mercy chortled. “Did he tell you about his mother?”
“No.”
“He’s saving that story for you. It starts out, ‘I was nine when my mother died.’” She stopped, and seemed sorry she was making light of his story. “But it’s real. His pain is worn like a coat he can’t take off. But let me guess. He wants you as intercessor with me.”
“Yes, he wants you to talk to Carisa.”
“I’ve already told him no.”
“Why not, Mercy? I don’t understand.”
“I don’t know, really. Like Tansi, I just assumed it would go away. I don’t believe Carisa is pregnant. She’s just a melodramatic and misguided girl…”
I closed my eyes. “I promised him I’d convince you otherwise.”
Mercy laughed. “I knew it.” Then I heard her sigh. “You know, after that last letter to Warner, I’ve been thinking maybe I should step in.” A pause. “If I go there, you have to go with me.”
“I don’t think…”
“I’m not giving you a choice. Good night, Edna.”
That night I dreamed of towering, pitch-black oil rigs, a line of them punctuating the parched yellow land, strung out like telephone poles. Rhythmic drilling in the arid Texas landscape, monotonous and steady and thunderous. All night long the clamorous cacophony of cold steel and taut wire and oily rod against caked, clay-packed dirt-pounding, pounding, pounding. I woke with a headache.
Chapter 6
Los Angeles lay, at midafternoon, under a heavy sun, like a blister erupting on the skin. A film of dry heat covered the sidewalks and buildings, and everything struck me as sere or lemon yellow; dried skin, flaking, dissolving into dust. I’d spent late morning and early afternoon in meetings with studio execs. Stevens, rushing in from shooting for five minutes of comment, made an off-hand remark about Jimmy’s annoying tardiness, but then qualified it-after all, he was talking to the money men-remarking that Jimmy’s performance was nothing short of glorious. I nodded. I’d seen an hour of dailies that morning and was pleased. When the meeting finally broke, I went for a walk. But not very far. Under a nickel-gray sky with that lazy sun behind wispy clouds, the heat exhausted me. And besides, people in L.A. didn’t walk. They only moved on wheels. My beloved Manhattan pastime was taboo here. An old lady tottering along hot sidewalks in expensive shoes, I fully expected a benevolent passerby to offer smelling salts or a free ride to a mental ward.
Back at the hotel, I napped, a brief uncomfortable sleep, fraught with Gothic visions of screaming children impaled on wrought-iron fences. It startled me awake, that ugly nightmare. Children? Fences? Impalement? I lay there, a bead of sweat on my brow, and suddenly remembered last night’s equally disturbing dream-all those oil rigs on endless Texas plains, pounding, pounding. L.A., I told myself, sitting up and preparing to put a cold compress on my forehead, was a place conducive to jolting nightmare. Only in murderous and serendipitous New York City could a soul find comfort-so long as you were fifteen floors above the city, tucked into an Upper East Side doorman building, away from the slapdash West Side and cacophonous Lower Manhattan. Frontier lands, both places, wild west shows, noisy and grimy.
Promptly at five I left my suite, headed downstairs to the Cocoanut Grove, where Warner was hosting a cocktail party. The one formal-attire event of my visit. Posh, posh. Men in rented tuxedos and women in ostrich plumes, doubtless. I was guest of honor, the invitation said, but so was producer Henry Ginsburg and director George Stevens. So, I joked, were Liz and Rock and Jimmy. And Chill Wills and Jane Withers. Maybe even Lydia Plummer with her two-word moment. Oh well. Five to seven. Two hours of stilted chatter, indigestible food, and expensive but warm champagne. I’d dressed appropriately, as indicated by the invitation. The creamy off-white silk flared dress with swirls of silver piping around the clinched belted waist, a lace bodice (a nod to my Victorian birth, I told myself), the rope of cultured pearls I felt naked without, and the black patent-leather clutch containing nothing but a hairbrush, faint red lipstick, perfume, and a mirror. This was as regal as I’d ever look: the novelist dowager, the first lady of American literature, taking on Hollywood.
Closing the door behind me, I paused, and remembered the elbow-length white gloves I’d specifically bought, obligatory at such formal occasions. A woman without gloves is a social misfit, I knew, recalling my forgetting to wear gloves to the Hoover White House and the looks I’d garnered, my escort into the room taking my bare forearm as though touching poison ivy.
I met Mercy in the hallway outside the Cocoanut Grove and apologized for last night’s telephone call. She shrugged it off. “Actually, you got me to agree to something I was trying to convince myself to do anyway. I was able to sleep well.”
And I dreamed of grimy oil wells and disemboweled, impaled children.
Mercy was in a shimmering blue cocktail dress with a band of rainbow-tinted sequins accenting the scalloped neckline, very nice, indeed. And a single gold heart around her neck. Simple, but elegant. A rhinestone
clip in her hair, almost lost in the curls. I suddenly thought myself dowdy, drab, the old prune with the pearls.
She nudged me, pointing. “Sal Mineo.”
I turned to see a slight, dark boy passing by, looking straight ahead, dressed in a grownup tuxedo. “He looks like he’s twelve.”
Mercy leaned in. “He’s part of Jimmy’s fan club. Ever since Rebel. By the way, did they screen the movie for you? You have to see that red jacket you’ve come to love. Anyway, Sal’s been emulating Jimmy, the preening walk, the insolent glare, the clothing, even the haircut. In Marfa, he stared at Jimmy all the time.”
Tansi joined us. “My, my, Tansi,” I said. “You really do go all out for cocktail hour.”
For a second Tansi looked unsure of herself, but she noticed I was smiling, my eyes appreciative. “I try.”
“Very…fetching.” And, I told myself, it was, this metamorphosis in Tansi. The awkward angular figure with the unruly hair was transformed by a pencil-shaped velvet dress, teal blue, with black satin stripes running down the sides, up around the high collar, lace trimmed. Very proper, yet oddly sensual. She’d had her hair done, not the usual assembly of bobby pins and helter-skelter baubles, with vagrant wisps of runaway hair escaping. No. Tansi had spent time at a salon-“The one on Rodeo Drive,” she informed, “you know, Duarte’s”-and the effect was, indeed, arresting. The pointed plain face was softened by cascading curls, and she wore a pillbox hat, with pinned-back veil. Unlike mine, her gloves were wrist length, and looked more appropriate. Mercy, too, wore such gloves. As did all the women walking by, I noticed. Only I wore gloves that encased my arms to the elbow. But I didn’t care for Tansi’s makeup-shrill whore’s lipstick, fire-alarm red. She did love that red. She saw me looking. “It’s called Ever-So-Red,” she said. “From Pond’s. All the starlets wear it.” She twirled around, happy, and the satin stripes caught the overhead light, spotlighting her. She whispered to me, “Maybe this will get me married.”