by Ed Ifkovic
Swiveling to face me, they beamed. I saw a bubble of drool at the corner of Alva’s mouth. I feared they might hug me.
The restaurant was a seedy, dimly-lit eatery, more hash-house tavern than hamburger haven, with a weathered oak bar and a few rickety tables by the front window. In back, through a partition of suspended beads, was a dance room, with a jukebox. Empty now at midday, the place probably thrived at night, derelict though it was. I’d never know. It was called Ruth’s Grill, and the daytime menu consisted of hot dogs and cheap Mexican food. The nighttime menu over the bar listed rib-eye steak and barbecued chicken. The Strands and I took a table by the window, and Alva said the hotdogs were wonderful, but suggested we skip the enchiladas. I had no desire to sample any of the offerings. They’d spent hours sitting there, they confessed, nursing lemon phosphates while waiting to see whether James Dean would show up to visit Carisa Krausse.
I ordered a coffee but its resemblance to the La Brea Tar Pits suggested I’d best leave it untouched.
It was easy to entertain the bubbly twins, at least for a few minutes, while they dipped and twisted in the chairs, constantly gazing out the grimy window, as though Jimmy might return. I regaled them with an innocent-and largely fictitious-take on Jimmy’s horseplay, his zany life. No violation of privacy. I’d garnered all of it from the exaggerated press releases Warner’s supplied to Hedda Hopper and others of her ilk. The Strand twins, though they probably already knew (and relished) every morsel, nevertheless begged for more. After all, here was a legitimate companion of James Dean, the novelist herself, authoress of Giant and other works they’d never heard of. And I called him Jimmy.
I, the veteran interviewer, with miles of soul-numbing Republican and Democratic Presidential Conventions under my younger belt, segued neatly into the events of the murder. After all, we sat across the street from the murder scene. So they chattered freely about their encounters with Jimmy, and nothing they offered was news to me. I was beginning to get depressed. For two inveterate watchers, they seemed to register very little. Days were blurs, times indefinite, hours merging daylight with evening; yes, that day, or was it…no…maybe…really, he was here twice…it’s hard to keep track…but he had the station wagon not the…never the sports car…On and on. I got tired.
Sitting back, my head against the plate-glass window, I kept listening.
Alva asked for another drink. I ordered it. Alva said would I mind if he smoked. I nodded. Go ahead. He offered me one. I took it, fiddled with it, and the boy lit it for me, very gentlemanly, but then I realized it was stale, and put it out in the ashtray. His sister Alyce was shaking her head. “What?” I asked. Alyce muttered something about ladies not smoking.
Ladies, I thought, need to smoke when the conversation bored so thoroughly, massively.
Alva blew smoke into my face. “That other guy is a pest, though,” he said.
I sat up. “What other guy?”
“You know, from the studio.” He described Jake Geyser, imperfectly. “He looks at you like you’re a bug” and “He talks like he’s a prince or something.”
“What about him?”
“A couple times when we waited here, we’d see this guy. Like he was checking up on James.”
“Did you talk to him?”
Alyce responded. “Yeah. He told us to get lost. He’d call the police if we kept hanging around James. He was here more than James. The guy would be around, like watching.”
“He acted like he was his guardian or something,” Alva noted.
“James has a right to go anywhere he wants.”
Alva nodded. Alyce nodded.
I nodded.
“I mean,” Alyce went on, “he looks angry a lot, like he was going to punish him.”
Doubtless he wished he could. Puritan stockades on the town green; whippings; Chinese water torture; his face on the cutting room floor.
“What about Carisa Krausse? Did you talk to her?”
“No, we don’t like James’ girlfriends.”
“Did you ever see Carisa with Jimmy?”
Alyce whispered, “No, but we knew he went to see her. We saw him walk in there. And we’d see her around the streets.”
They looked at each other, confused. “The last time we saw her was here. Right here. In this restaurant. This table.”
“You were in the restaurant?” I asked.
They shook their heads, no. “We were walking back and forth on the sidewalk and I looked in. She was sitting right where Alyce is, that seat, facing out to the street.”
“Alone?”
“No, she was talking to some friend of hers, some girl.”
“Are you sure it was Carisa?”
“Oh, yeah, she had that look, you know.”
“What look?”
“Hollywood movie star, the makeup, the hands holding the cigarette in the air, the…the…chin up, the smile.”
But Alva interrupted, “But she wasn’t smiling, Alyce.”
Alyce nodded. “That’s right. She was angry about something.”
“How could you tell from outside?”
“Because when I spotted her, I said to Alva-she’s in there. And maybe James is with her, but it was just this woman with her. But she was waving her arms, and her face was all…” She stopped.
“Contorted.” He finished.
“Contorted. You could tell she was yelling. And her girlfriend was yelling back. I could see her shaking her head back and forth, like no, no, no, no, no. You know.”
“Then what happened?”
“Nothing. We left.”
“Did you recognize the woman she was with?”
“No. It was Carisa Krausse I watched.”
“Were you here on the day Carisa died?” I asked.
They looked at each other. They nodded.
“What did you see?”
They stiffened. “Nothing. We didn’t stay. I mean, we came here because we thought we saw him driving this way, but everything was real quiet here. So we just left.”
“We wanted to get back to the cocktail party in case he went back.”
“So you saw him leave the party earlier?”
They nodded. Alyce said, “That’s why we thought he was coming here.”
Alva stood up. “We gotta go.”
Alyce jumped up.
“You’re making us nervous,” Alva looked to the doorway. “What does this have to do with James Dean?”
“I don’t know.”
“I thought you were going to tell us stories.”
“I did, didn’t I?
They looked at each other. “We don’t know if you like him the way we do.”
“Of course I like him.”
Alva, panicking, “We don’t know if we believe you.”
Chapter 19
Jimmy invited some friends to his new apartment in Sherman Oaks. “It’s not a party. I don’t like parties,” he told me on the phone. “But I got this cool new home.” I had to attend, he insisted. “You got to, Miss Edna. My new place is where I hide away from the world.”
“You’re not exactly hiding if you throw a party.”
“It’s not a party.”
He was making last-minute phone calls. He begged Liz Taylor until she said she’d stop in. She had another obligation. Mercy balked, but Jimmy persisted. I asked him if he’d invited Rock Hudson. “That famous star of I Was a Shoplifter?” To my bafflement, Jimmy explained, “One of his early classic roles.” I kept saying no. Nighttime parties, unlike the serene afternoon luncheons and the genteel dinner parties I hosted, were for the young. But Tansi, all a-titter, finally convinced me; and so Mercy picked me up at the hotel and then Tansi at her apartment on Santa Monica Boulevard.
Tansi was waiting at the curb, and with her was Nell Meyers. That surprised me. Well, maybe this party was not so bad an idea after all.
Tansi was dressed in gold pedal-pushers I deemed too young for her; a white puffy blouse, cinched at the waist by a huge gold belt; and
she wore a nail polish so loud it called attention to her bony, unlovely fingers.
I smiled at Nell, who didn’t smile back. She fascinated me, this young girl new to Jimmy’s world. Script girl to the stars, the Bohemian with her all-black outfits and her Garboesque makeup, both at odds with her squat, cast-iron stove build and that bobbed Anita Loos hairdo. Had Jimmy invited her? Or had Tansi convinced her to come along, acting as her protector since she’d engineered Nell’s departure from the Studio Club?
“Jimmy said to bring Nell,” Tansi told us. “At first she said no, but I told her she can’t hide away in her room. This is Jimmy’s new apartment we’re going to see.”
Nell said nothing, but looked bored, actually yawning and staring out the window.
Tansi talked as though Nell were not there: “Nell is part of the Beatnik crowd that hangs out at some cafe near Pershing Square.
Nell said nothing. Then, out of the blue, “Jimmy plays the bongos.”
I stared, transfixed. I caught Mercy’s eye. “Bongos?”
“He’s very good.” Mercy was savoring this.
“You’ve heard him?”
“I have,” Nell answered.
I enjoyed the leisurely ride out of L.A. into the twisting lanes and woods of San Fernando Valley. It was a cool night, and the air seemed to hum. Once there, we trudged up a narrow lane to what struck me as a rustic hunter’s lodge, hidden under dense shrubbery, wild eucalyptus, sagging palm trees. I smelled ripe lemons. Jimmy rushed down to greet us, dressed in tight jeans and a white T-shirt, a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve. He gallantly took my elbow, escorting me. “My hideaway,” he said.
Inside, manic and bouncing around the huge room, Jimmy pointed to a balcony, where, he said, he slept on a mattress on the floor, where he could gaze down at a seven-foot rough-stone fireplace that covered one wall, above whose mantel was a gigantic bronzed eagle, grotesque and garish, wings extended, with menacing talons. “I’ve named him Irving,” Jimmy said.
Scattered around were bongos-I feared a concert of discordant, horrible music-piles of hi-fi recordings, cameras, books, tape recorders. On one wall tacked-up bullfighting posters, frayed at the edges. This was a young man’s room. Here and there were ungainly heaps of discarded clothing, underwear, rumpled trousers, all pushed into corners. There seemed to be packs of Chesterfields everywhere, all opened, all missing a few cigarettes, each one with a box of matches inserted under the cellophane. As we walked around the rooms, music blared from speakers suspended high on the walls. Mercy begged him to turn down the volume, which he did reluctantly.
I was drawn to a corner where an easel rested. He was in the middle of executing a lovely pen-and-ink drawing, a young girl’s face, gentle and quiet: an amazingly calm visage in a room designed for chaos. And behind the easel a small, black walnut table, on which, to my abject horror, rested the incomplete (but recognizable) sculpture of my own granite head.
“For God’s sake, Jimmy, throw a sheet over that. Would you have your guests flee into the night?”
He grinned.
The music still bothered me. “What is that?” I asked.
“African chants.”
“Could you turn it off?” Tribal music, insistent, the drums beating mercilessly, the wails floating over reiterated beat; rawness, aching and sensual. Hardly party music. More appropriate for a soundtrack to a Johnny Weissmuller movie. Ape man, and boy. Swinging on vines.
Jimmy slipped on a recording of Doris Day. “For you.” He bowed. Still inappropriate. Sappy, saccharine, painful.
Some guests sat on a threadbare sofa. I recognized Patsy D’Amore, owner of the Villa Capri. Three other men, waiters and kitchen staff, I was told, sat with him, in a line-thin, quiet men who sipped wine and stared straight ahead. They looked as unhappy to be there as I felt. Was this the party? The four men, silent, listening to an ebullient Jimmy, and four women, myself one of them-the venerable novelist.
This was hardly right, downright untoward, this freakish grouping. Nell, as short as a child but gaudy in her danse macabre makeup and shellacked Garboesque demeanor, was the sudden cynosure of the leering men, as she sat yoga-fashion on the floor. I wondered what her relationship was with Jimmy. Tansi had said she was not really part of his crowd. He had no interest in her. Yet Jimmy touched her on the shoulder when he walked by her, and she smiled at him. In the shadowy light of the room, she looked exotic, mysterious; and I supposed men might be caught by that allure. When, at one point, she wandered into the small kitchen-“Jimmy has the greatest lemon trees out back”-my suspicions were confirmed. Nell had been there before.
Polly and Tommy walked in. They’d obviously had yet another spat. Or, at least, Polly was the battler. Her face was flushed, the mouth set, the eyes hard. Tommy seemed nonchalant, spirited. He looked like he’d been drinking. I caught a few of Polly’s spat-out words: “I warned you last time.” But I’d come to expect the eternal warfare of those two sad souls. They seemed to crave it, thrive on it; battles royal, then making up, a dynamic that served as glue for an unhappy love story.
I sipped tepid white wine in a jelly glass. That seemed to be all Jimmy had available for his guests. Nothing to nibble on. The music came to an end. Silence in the room.
Sal Mineo appeared on the threshold, looking as if he’d come to the wrong address. Behind him, nudging him into the room, was a stocky man dressed in a lime-green shirt, a man with no neck and a spindletop wooly haircut. I couldn’t remember his name though I’d met him a half-dozen times. An assistant director. Sal smiled at me, and then sat by himself in a corner, looking very much the misbehaved schoolboy, sans dunce cap. He spoke to no one, not even to his director-friend.
Tommy and Polly sat next to each other, up against each other, and didn’t move. I watched the young couple, especially when Jimmy neared: Tommy getting tense, Polly softening her hard eyes. Jimmy whispered something to them and both smiled.
Jimmy got tipsy and climbed up the balcony, where he located and displayed Marcus the Siamese cat, who’d take shelter behind the mattress. “Performance time,” he bellowed. He removed his horn-rimmed glasses. We’re now all a blur, I thought, much the way he wants the world to be-blot out the harsh, linear lines, fog over the faces of people who can get to you. “The greatest poet in the world,” he announced, “was from Indiana.” I rolled my eyes: he couldn’t mean-
Yes, he did, indeed. “James Whitcomb Riley, Hoosier hick like myself, an old geezer who never met me, but he wrote about me.” And then, to my amazement, he recited verbatim Riley’s lines:
I grow so weary, someway, of all things
That love and loving have vouchsafed to me.
Since now all dreamed-of sweets of ecstasy
Am I possessed of: The caress that clings-
The lips that mix with mine with murmurings
No language may interpret, and the free,
Unfettered brood of kisses, hungrily
Feasting on swarms of honeyed blossomings
Of passion’s fullest flower-For yet I miss
The essence that alone makes love divine-
The subtle flavoring no tang of this
Weak wine of melody may here define:-
A something found and lost in the first kiss
A lover ever poured through lips of mine.
When he finished, the room was silent. I glanced at Tansi, who seemed to be weeping. Jimmy himself, hanging precariously over the balcony with a mewing kitten cradled in his arms, seemed suddenly embarrassed. Then, his lips trembling, his eyes closed, his free hand fluttering in the air, he said, “I don’t know why I do things.” He fell back onto the mattress, out of our sight.
We stood there, all of us, stunned, silent, heads inclined toward the balcony. Scraping sounds, gurgling noises, a faint meow, a raucous laugh. He stops time, I thought. He deliberately tilts the earth upward, bending the axis, dislocating longitude. In the stillness I could hear Tansi’s labored breathing, a cigarette smoker’s whistli
ng squeak.
Suddenly, all our inclined heads swiveled as one to the doorway where Liz Taylor stood, bathed in the shrill honey-yellow glare of the outside light; just stood there, and in that moment seemed to take possession of the room. A statue, elegant really. And so dangerously perfumed and lipsticked and coifed that the line of dumbstruck men, positioned on the sofa, seemed frozen in a kind of saliva-drooling awe. Really, I mused, for God’s sake. She wore a satiny black cocktail dress, clinging, sequined, with a diamond necklace and on that wrist a diamond bracelet. Jack Warner’s bauble.
Behind her stood two paper-doll cutouts, an interchangeable young man and young woman, both in tweedy suits and horned-rimmed eyeglasses.
She spoke into the silence. “Where’s Jimmy?”
From the balcony Jimmy, unseen, cried, “Liz, you came to my party.”
Liz didn’t know where to look. “I told you I would.” A voice that was curiously Southern in texture, lilting, sweet.
Liz looked around and caught my eye. She nodded. But her look swept the room, and her eyes narrowed. “Jimmy, you lied to me.”
A pause. Jimmy’s drunken titter. “I lie to everyone. It’s my job.”
Liz fumed. “You said everyone from Giant would be here. George and Chill Wills…and…” She nodded over her shoulder. “I had them drive me here, knowing I’d be late for a house party an hour from here…” Her face closed up, furious, tears in her eyes. “Why do you do these things?” She drew her lips into a tight line.
At that moment one of the men on the sofa-one of the waiters from the Villa Capri-stood, dizzy with drink, emboldened, and sputtered, “Miss Taylor, I…” Suddenly, the room seemed to unloosen, relax. Mercy turned to me, Tansi took a step forward, Tommy and Polly walked away from each other. But it was all jerky, unsure movement, like a mechanical toy that wanted oil. It clearly alarmed Liz who, glaring one last time at the now-silent balcony, turned and fled the house, leaving a cloud of gardenia perfume that covered us like bedroom fantasy.
Silence. Then Tansi sputtered, “Well…”
Mercy whispered, “I love a woman who knows how to enter a room.”