by Ed Ifkovic
“Where was I?” her grandfather interrupted.
“In the garden, I think, out back.”
He frowned.
“So how long was he upstairs?” Mercy asked.
“It was like minutes, I guess. Then I heard him on the stairs, and he comes running down, real fast, and out the door.”
“Did you see his face?”
“Why?”
“Was he angry?”
“He went by too fast. I couldn’t tell. And I jumped back, afraid he’d spot me.”
“But,” I said, “you said you saw him again. He came back. Later?”
“Yeah, I mean, well, I thought he left for the day so I didn’t care. I got ready to go meet my friend, you know, do something. So long’s I’m back early, Abuelo doesn’t mind. So like fifteen minutes later-I don’t know-I left and I waited for the bus on the corner. The bus came and I got on, and, you know, it goes by my house. So I’m staring out the window and then, all of a sudden, there he was again, running out the front door. Like a maniac. But the bus was moving, and I had to crane back my neck. He’s running and all, running, like…”
“And you hadn’t seen him arrive?”
“No, I was dressing in my room. I never expected him back.”
Mercy, her voice dark. “And then he was.”
“Yeah, I was so angry. Here I was on the bus, and he’s running out of my building.”
“Alone?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you see him get into a car?”
“The bus was moving fast, you know, but, no, but I felt somebody was waiting for him there.” She paused, as though conjuring up a picture in her head.
“What?” From Mercy.
“Well, looking back, I saw this car across the street, and there was this lady sitting there, looking out, at him. She was watching him. I could see her right there, but the bus was turning. And I thought, God, he got some girl waiting for him.”
“He went to the car?”
“I couldn’t tell, but I thought so. Looked like it. He was running in that direction-toward her. Jumping off the stoop, onto the sidewalk.”
“So you don’t know if he was with her?”
“No, I don’t, but I just had that feeling. You know? Like she was waiting.”
“Why?”
“Because suddenly I felt that I’d seen her sitting there before. I don’t know exactly, but something about her made me remember. Like she’d been one of the people that visited Carisa. One of her actress friends. Maybe with him. I don’t know. I mean, you know how it’s like in the back of your head, and then it’s there, sort of. It all happened so fast. I’m on the bus and it’s moving, and so I’m thinking that maybe he dropped something off.”
“What did she look like?”
“I dunno. She was just one of the girls that come here. I kept thinking-she’s in the movies, maybe. Maybe Julie Harris from East of Eden. James Dean and her together.”
“You can’t describe her?” I asked.
“I thought I just did.”
Both of us waited, expectant, but nothing followed. Connie seemed edgy now, as though she’d said something she shouldn’t have.
“And you told this to Detective Cotton?” I asked.
She nodded.
I turned to Mercy, who stared back. Cotton hadn’t mentioned any of this to me, certainly; but why should he? It was his investigation, not mine. He meted out information piecemeal as was his desire, though it bothered me-this sin of omission. Then, like a hot flash, I experienced a wave of fear: yet another block in the wall being built around Jimmy.
Connie was mumbling something else. “I also told him about Alva and Alyce.”
“Who?” From Mercy.
“You know,” I said, “the twins, the boy and girl who follow Jimmy around.” I turned to Connie. “They were here that day?”
She shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Crazy. Those two. They’re always around. Somehow they learned James Dean comes here and sometimes they wait in the restaurant across the street, watching. I don’t know if he even talks to them. They are so weird, those two. Always together, running around like maniacs or standing on the sidewalk, staring.”
“So they were here that afternoon?”
“Yeah, that’s what I told the detective. When the bus stopped at the next stop, I noticed they were running up the street, turning into my block. Almost arm in arm, hurrying, like they knew James Dean was there. A couple times when I talked to them, they’re, like, out of breath. Was he here? What’s he like? What did he say to you?” She grinned. “I told them he always talks to me, and they go crazy.”
Her grandfather interrupted. “Connie, you talk to these crazy people? And you lie to them?”
“It’s not, like lying, Abuelo. It’s like we’re in the movies. Sometimes I imagine whole conversations with James.”
“Such foolishness.” He shook his head but never took his eyes off her face.
An absolutely beatific look washed over her; a quietude, a softness in her already gentle features. “It’s James Dean,” she breathed, so reverential that no one said anything. She wrapped her arms around her body, swayed a bit, and closed her eyes. “It’s James Dean. Not on the screen. Here. In my hallway. In my house. Here. Who else can say that? Not my friend Jennie. The star she’s come closest to seeing was Montgomery Clift in a car. Passing by. That doesn’t count, if you think about it. James Dean, well, he smiled at me.”
Chapter 15
Rock Hudson’s publicist had called twice, trying to set up a luncheon. I’d resisted but Tansi, walking in as I was stumbling through an excuse, mumbled in a tinny, schoolmarm voice, “Oh Edna, you have to, it’s Rock Hudson.” I found myself grinning. And, oddly, I agreed to a hasty lunch in Jack Warner’s private dining room. Now, sitting with the brilliantly handsome man in that quiet chamber, platters of untouched food delivered to us by obsequious servers who promptly bowed and disappeared, I stared across the table. I wondered why I’d taken an instant dislike to him. Steely eyed, suspicious, Rock stared back, a sliver of a smile on those beautiful lips.
“You seem uncomfortable.” His voice was throaty, a careful mannered drawl, rich and full.
“I’ve never really liked very, very tall men. You notice I’m very small.”
Suddenly he roared, Texas-style gusto, probably learned from my novel, his hand slapping his thigh. “And I thought you didn’t like me because of my personality.”
“I don’t know you, personally, that is,” I said evenly. “All I know is the matinee idol up there on the screen.”
“And that’s not me?”
“Do you believe it is?”
Again, the mesmerizing eyes, the purposely jutting chin, the graceful turn of the long rugged body in the Texas millionaire denim shirt. “There is someone called Rock Hudson, you know.”
“He’s an invention.”
He smiled broadly. “True, but I don’t remember the other person. That bumbling, frightened, wide-eyed lad from Winnetka, Illinois, named Roy Fitzgerald.”
“You like your success?”
“Of course.”
“Is that why we’re having lunch, so you can assure me that you’re happy in your celluloid world?”
A long silence, Rock playing with a fork. He put it down. “Jimmy Dean,” he said, finally.
“Magical words, no?”
“Not to me. I hear he’s seduced you into his fragile web.”
I laughed. “Good God, Rock, give me some credit.”
He held up his hand, palm out. “I don’t care about Jimmy, Miss Ferber. I care about this movie, and what he’s capable of doing to it. Sinking it. Giant is a milestone for me, a film that’s moving me one more step away from B-movie oblivion. That’s where I was three or four years ago. Jimmy’s playing fast and loose with his fame. I don’t. I’ve worked hard. I’ve bowed and scraped and played the game. I’ve totally embraced this invention-as you call it-called Rock Hudson until it’s cash at the b
ank.”
“You’ll still be a star.” My hand dramatically swept from his face down across the table.
“Not if the movie is killed.”
“No one is killing the movie. Not on my watch.”
Rock sat up, sucked in his breath. When he spoke his words were clipped, his face scarlet, his dark eyes piercing. “I think he’s a murderer. I do.”
“Rock, for heaven’s sake.”
“There’s something wrong with him. You know, Miss Ferber, in Texas we shared a house. He was a filthy pig, he was brazen, he was purposely rude and foul. Christ, he spit on the floor, he,” a pause, “did a lot worse things, I tell you. In Texas, working with George Stevens, we sensed-I sensed, Liz did, so did others-that here was our future. This movie would always say something about us. But Jimmy acted like it didn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters to him.”
He frowned. “He puts his private life out there. Everyone can talk about it, mangle it.”
“And you don’t?”
He looked alarmed. “Only I’m in control of my private life.” He drew his lips into a thin line. “That’s why it’s dangerous to get close to a guy like Jimmy.”
“You might be colored by the same brush?”
He hesitated. “Exactly.” Then he smiled. “No chance of that. He hates me. I hate him. If I have to talk to him, he refuses to answer me. A baby boy, a slaphappy puppy.”
“This doesn’t make him a murderer.”
“Miss Ferber, one thing I know that some folks around here don’t know is that it can all disappear in a flash.” He pointed around Jack Warner’s well-appointed room with the plush gray carpeting, the cascading draperies. “I fought my way here. I’m not gonna let it vanish. Warner has to play this murder his way.”
“What if Jimmy is innocent?”
That seemed to surprise him. “The Jimmy Deans of this world are always guilty of something.”
“Have you no sins?”
“Rock Hudson is an invention, as you said.” He grinned. “He’s been created without sin.”
“That’s not answering my question.”
He faltered. “I just want to do my job, Miss Ferber.”
I pushed some food around my plate. Neither of us had touched the lunch. “Well, I respect that.” And my words made him smile, sit back. “It’s how I got where I am, too.” We looked at each other a long time.
For some reason now, idly, he started to ramble on about acting-serious acting, he said-about dreaming. Especially dreaming, the will-o’-the-wisp vagaries allowed by unpredictable fortune. His early days, waiting for a break, his numbing work as a truck driver. I sat back, charmed by the warm-water flow of words. The more he spoke, the more he sounded like a schoolboy-some lonely fourteen-year-old kid, a feckless dreamy kid, cruising down a back lane on a clunky bike, hurling newspapers onto whitewashed porches and emerald-green lawns enclosed in picket fences. The modulated voice disappeared, and what surfaced was a curious mixture of laid-back Midwest twang and jittery teenage angst. I marveled at the transformation. And, emphatically, I liked it.
His stories reminded me of an Appleton, Wisconsin boy I remembered from Ryan High School days-a gangly, long-limbed boy whose name I’ve forgotten but whose presence has stayed with me. A boy on the high-school stage, acting a piddling role in A Scrap of Paper, his quivering voice and jerky body at odds with the ferocious hunger in his eyes, the fire there, the desperate desire to be away from the parochial town, to be out there in the world, magnificent on some city on some hill. So I felt then that I knew Rock in a way he’d probably forgotten. And the more he talked, the more I realized I couldn’t dislike him. That was too easy. I didn’t want to pity him either because so much of him struck me as so hollow, vain, lost. No, the fragility he refused in himself was what made me smile now.
So we talked about his role as Bick Benedict, about Giant, and he talked about So Big, which he said he’d read and loved. And when I stood up to leave, he said, “I’ll be in New York this fall. Can we have lunch, you and me?”
Standing, facing him, I nodded. “Of course. My pleasure.”
“Thank you.”
In the hallway I closed my eyes, still thinking of that shy boy from my high school days.
“I may actually learn to like Rock Hudson,” I told Mercy when I saw her in her dressing room.
“Oh, no, he charmed you.”
“No, Mercy, I just allowed myself to be charmed. That’s different.”
Later, resting at my hotel, I opened my door to face a dapper-looking man in formal attire-though the tie was slightly askew-a courtly-looking gentleman, graying at the temples. A sheepish grin on his face. Jimmy bowed to me, in costume as the middle-aged Jett Rink, the oillionaire in decline. They’d shaved his temples to create a receding hairline, and the makeup attempted to suggest a dissipated, unhappy man. I wasn’t convinced-he looked vaudevillian stock character, some clown in a monkey suit.
He looked over his shoulder, feigning nervousness. “I escaped for the afternoon. Stevens thinks I’m in my dressing room. My scenes were done this morning, but he likes us to be around in costume to flatter his ego.” He handed me a crumpled newspaper. “This is for you.”
“Come in,” I said. I’d been reading a novel by Sloan Wilson. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Annoyed at its prosaic style and its ugly view of the world, I was looking for an escape. “Come in.”
He fell into a chair, drew his legs up to his chest, wrapped his arms around them.
I unfolded the paper and found myself staring at a small, amorphous piece of clay, an embryonic torso, clay twisted into arms and legs and a narrow, long protuberance that, perhaps, would become a head. An incomplete body, some surrealistic object, a figure suspended between creation and fruition. I held it, wondering what to say.
“I made it for you,” he said, finally. “You like it?”
“Yes. I didn’t know you sculpted.”
“I do a lot of things.” He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s, like, anonymous man. You got to do the rest of the work yourself-create a life for it in your head. Like I imagine you do when you write characters like Jett Rink.”
“Is that why it has no face?”
“You’re missing the point,” he said. “Faces get in the way of things. Look at me. Everybody keeps telling me I’m…I’m gorgeous. You don’t know how sick that makes me feel.”
“It’s a gift.”
“Or a curse.”
“It’s your point of view, Jimmy.”
A broken smile. “Exactly, I guess. That’s the point of my statue there. See? Point of view.” He withdrew a folded piece of paper from his breast pocket and handed it to me. I unfolded it and found myself staring at a remarkable likeness of my own head, ancient and large, with a mane of teased white locks, and fiery, hard-as-nails eyes.
I gasped. “My Lord. Me?”
He grinned. “You.”
“This is very good. I mean, I don’t like any pictures of myself-never have. But this is startlingly true.”
“You have a great head on that tiny body. It dominates. It’s there, like a monument.”
“The missing figure from Mount Rushmore.”
“It’s a sketch I’m doing for a sculpture I’m working on-of you.”
“Thank you.” I waited. “Jimmy, where do you find the time?”
“I never sleep. I feel like I gotta keep moving. I feel like there’s a wall out there and I keep nearing it. It’ll stop me.”
“Are you talking about fate?”
“Yeah, fate. Maybe.” He banged his head, as though rattling his brain. “I read a lot about the Aztecs. I’m a bad reader and I go slow. Like a page a day. But they had this cool sense of doom, you know, from what I’ve read. Like they tried to make the most of whatever time they had on earth. The Aztecs, well-I want to live my life like they did. Hard driving, filled up.”
“You’ve made a good start. You’re young and famous. At what? Twenty-four?”
“It means nothing. I’m not famous inside. Movies lie. You ever see Sunset Boulevard, when it came out a few years back?” I nodded. “Well, I’ve seen it over and over. I watch Gloria Swanson, old, you know, and there she is, walking down that final staircase and she says that I’m-ready-for-my-close-up line. Well, I’ve already had my close-up scene. At twenty-four.” I started to say something, but he held up his hand. “No, let me finish. But the line that always gets me is when she says: ‘I’m still big, it’s the pictures that got small.’ Whenever I hear that, I think, wow. That’s not me, can never be me.” He breathed in, closed his eyes. “So now I’m on the big screen, and I’m big, big, big. So big, you know. But I think, I’m still small, even though my pictures got big.” Then, as if jolting himself from a reverie, he sat up. “Enough.”
“Jimmy, there’s nothing wrong with fame.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s what I hungered for. How can there be anything wrong with it?” His voice was ironic and slurring. He stood. “I gotta get out of here. I gotta make the scene with Ursula Andress for some photographer.”
“I understand she’s beautiful.”
“Sure is. A hell-fire, too. Studio set us up, originally, one of those phony lovey-dovey things. But we hit it off, strangely, and now we’re really dating,” he stressed the word, “as opposed to being seen together.”
“Hell-fire?”
“We do battle, her and me. She’s got a temper, like me. I’m learning German so we can fight in her own language.”
I waited a second, then said, “You don’t hit her, do you?”
Jimmy squinted, interlocked his fingers and stretched out his arms. “People been telling tales about me, Miss Edna?”
“I heard…”
He sucked in his breath, breathed out, making a bubbly sound. “Sometimes things get a little heated, and, like something rises in me, so red-hot I’m about to burst, and I lash out.”
“You should never hit a woman.”
“They hit me, too, you know.”
“Still, a man has an obligation.”
“Pier Angeli used to slap my face. I’d slap her back. Lord, Natalie Wood slapped Sal Mineo one afternoon. That surprised the hell out of him.”