Rose was shocked by the harshness of Pauline’s tone. Her great friend had never spoken to her in such a manner before.
“She’s not herself. She hasn’t been herself for weeks,” said Camilla, in defense of her friend.
“Pauline’s become bitter,” Rose said, as a way of avoiding the issue about herself. “All that business about that whore Jules was involved with.”
“She’s not a whore,” said Camilla. The picture of the husband-grabbing hussy that Pauline’s friends perpetuated when discussing Flo was in conflict with Camilla’s remembrance of the pretty young woman she had met in Philip’s room at the Chateau Marmont and had later hugged at Jules’s funeral.
“Pauline’s changed,” continued Rose. “Don’t you feel it? She’s gotten terribly tough.”
“You’re only changing the subject again, Rose,” Camilla said shyly. “Pauline is right. She’s the only one of us who had the guts to say what she said. Madge wouldn’t. Even Archbishop Cooning wouldn’t. You simply have to do something, Rose. You’ll be dead if you don’t. None of us can remember when you haven’t had an arm in a sling, or been on crutches, or a walker, or a cane, all from falls when you were loaded.
This time you could have burned to death. Thank God your fire-alarm system was working.”
Rose, unexpectedly, started to cry.
“You should talk to Philip,” suggested Camilla.
“Philip? Your Philip? That good-looking young man? I’m always happy to talk to Philip. But why?”
“Are you going to be home at six?”
“I think so. Why?”
“I’m going to send Philip over. Just talk to him, Rose. Listen to what he has to say. And don’t interrupt him, the way you always interrupt everybody, like the former President. I hear the President’s wife was furious with you. Please. Do it for me.”
In the beginning the arrangement between Flo and Cyril was felicitous. Joel Zircon approached several publishers and related back to Flo and Cyril that there was immense interest in Jules’s Mistress.
“What they want is an opening chapter and an outline for the rest of the book,” Joel reported. “After that, we make the deal.”
“What kind of money are they talking?” asked Cyril.
“In the six figures, at least,” said Joel.
That was also what Flo wanted to know but couldn’t bring herself to ask. Her pool man had left her a note that morning, saying that he wouldn’t be able to come anymore, as he hadn’t been paid for his services. She feared that other services she had long taken for granted were going to be cut off. Whenever she thought of her financial situation, a feeling of desolation and hopelessness came over her. She had begun to realize that her only salvation was with Cyril Rathbone.
“I could always go back to modeling,” she said to Cyril one day, as if she had other alternatives in her life to the one that he was offering her.
“You were never in modeling, Flo,” answered Cyril. “This is a time for you to be practical about your future. Jules is not here anymore to take care of you. You have to think of taking care of yourself.”
They met late each afternoon after Cyril finished his column for Mulholland. He came to her house for two hours with his tape recorder, before he went home to dress for whatever dinner or screening he was going to attend that evening. He asked her questions. At first she was guarded in her answers, always protective of Jules. She was critical about herself. “I was stupid about money. Jules was very generous with me. I spent, spent, spent,” she said. “If I had saved something each week, when that enormous check came, I wouldn’t be in the jam I’m in now.”
“Allow me to play devil’s advocate for a moment, Flo,” said Cyril.
Flo wasn’t exactly sure what devil’s advocate meant, but she nodded in agreement for Cyril to play it.
“Did it ever occur to you that that was the way Jules liked it?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“As long as you didn’t have any real money, you wouldn’t ever leave him. After all, Jules’s money was limitless. Your weekly spending sprees were nothing to him. So your curtains cost forty thousand dollars. So your new closet cost forty thousand more. So this gray satin fabric cost ninety-five dollars a yard. So what? That was peanuts for Jules. So were all your Chanel suits. Did he ever buy you a valuable picture that you could sell? No. He didn’t give you any equity, Flo. Think about it.”
“But he wanted to take care of me,” insisted Flo.
“But he didn’t, did he?”
“Yes, yes, I have these papers. Look.”
“Delivered on the day of his death, Flo. Wise up. Jules was a very brilliant man. He had to know that Pauline could do what she’s doing and every court in the land would agree with her. He had five years to do what he waited until the last day of his life to do.”
Flo’s eyes filled with tears. She could not bear to think that Jules deprived her in order to hang onto her. “I blame everything on Sims Lord,” she said.
“Sims Lord is just a very high-priced hired hand, Flo. He’s only doing what first Jules told him to do and now what Pauline is telling him to do,” said Cyril.
“He wanted to set me up and I turned him down,” replied Flo.
“Set you up how?”
“As his lady friend.”
Cyril remained perfectly still. He had learned never to exclaim with pleasure when someone he was interviewing began to reveal something that the person had no intention of revealing. He merely nodded, as if what she was saying was of no more interest to him than anything else she was saying.
“Right here, on this same sofa,” said Flo. She patted the cushion next to her, the same cushion with Kippie Petworth’s blood on the reverse side, about which she had not told Cyril yet. “About a month after Jules died. He came here to tell me the estate wasn’t going to honor the agreements Jules made for me.”
“And he came on to you at the same time, did you say?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Held your hand, or something?”
“Held my hand, Cyril? He put my hand on his dick. And he was supposed to be Jules’s best friend. And Jules was only dead a month.”
“And what did you do?”
“Took it away, of course.”
“And what did he do?”
“Took it out.”
“Took what out?”
“His dick.”
“No!”
“Yes! Like I was supposed to go into raptures over it.”
Cyril was beside himself.
“Let me tell you something about Jules,” said Flo. “He was a gentleman with me. I knew he had the hots for me from the day we met in the coffee shop, but he never laid a hand on me until he took me to Paris. That was the first time.”
“Yes, yes, you’ve already told me that. Let’s get back to Sims Lord for a moment.”
In time, as orchestrated by Cyril Rathbone and Joel Zircon, the word was about that Flo March, the one-time waitress who had become the mistress of Jules Mendelson, was writing her memoirs, to be entitled Jules’s Mistress. By design, Cyril’s name was never mentioned as her collaborator. It was reported that Flo was dictating her remembrances into microcassettes, and that already there were forty hours recorded.
“Flo March is prepared to tell all,” wrote Army Archerd in Daily Variety. “Her story promises to be hot, hot, hot,” wrote George Christy in the Hollywood Reporter. Cyril Rathbone, echoing both of the above in his column in Mulholland, could not resist adding, “Arnie Zwillman, are you listening?”
“But why did you say that about Arnie Zwillman?” cried Flo, after she read Cyril’s column.
“It’s called creating a market,” answered Cyril, in a patient tone of voice. He spoke to Flo as if he were a great teacher and she a backward pupil.
“But Arnie Zwillman is a very dangerous man,” said Flo. There was an element of fear in her voice. “I know for a fact what he did to Jules. He destroyed his chances of going to Brus
sels, just like that, overnight. You can’t fool around with a man like Arnie Zwillman.”
“Believe me, you have nothing to worry about, Flo,” said Cyril.
“I wouldn’t be too sure about that, Cyril.”
“Joel Zircon says his phones are ringing off the hook. Publishers can’t wait to get their hands on the outline.”
“What’s taking you so long to write the first chapter and the outline? I’ve done forty hours of tapes. How much do you need?”
“Patience, Flo. Patience,” said Cyril.
That night, late, a car drove up the driveway of Flo’s house on Azelia Way. She was alone, as she was always alone those nights, and could hear the sound of the tires on the gravel of her driveway. She couldn’t imagine who would be coming to call at such an hour. She could hear the sound of the engine running. Waiting, she expected her doorbell to ring, but it didn’t. Her curtains were drawn, and she opened them just enough to peek outside. A car, which she at first thought was Jules’s Bentley, was sitting there, idling, with the headlights on and the engine running. Then she realized it was a different color than Jules’s car, a color that looked like gold. She saw also from the grille that it was not a Bentley but a Rolls-Royce. In the front seat sat two men who were looking at her house. A feeling of panic gripped her. She quickly closed the curtains. On tiptoe, she went to the front door and double-bolted it. She went through her whole house, closing curtains and making sure doors and windows were locked. After twenty-five minutes, she heard the car turn around in her driveway and pull out.
She waited for fifteen minutes more and then peered out of the curtains again. The car was gone. Everything appeared normal. She went to the front door and listened. There was no sound. Very quietly she unbolted the lock and, with the chain still on, opened the door a crack to look outside. Everything was quiet. As she closed the door again, she saw a white box that had been left on her doormat. She opened the door just wide enough to grab the package and then slammed the door again and bolted it.
In her living room, she opened the box. There was a card in an envelope, which she opened. “It’s loaded,” the card read. “Put it in your mouth and fire it.” The note, typed, was unsigned. She removed the pale pink tissue paper. There, nestled, was a small gun. For a long time she stared at it. Then she picked it up. She could not believe that it was loaded, but she did not know enough about guns to know how to open it to check. Using both hands, she pointed the gun at the sliding glass window that opened onto her terrace and swimming pool. After several moments of indecision, she pulled the trigger, and the gun fired. The noise was deafening. The plate-glass window splintered in all directions.
She could not move from her place on the sofa. Her body was soaked with perspiration. Her breathing was heavy. She felt a different sort of fear than the fear she had felt from having no money. For reasons which she could not explain to herself at that moment, she thought of Marilyn Monroe. “They got rid of Marilyn,” she remembered saying to Jules at the steak house in the Valley.
The next morning, still shaken from her experience of the night before, Flo went back to the AA meeting in the log cabin on Robertson Boulevard. She had not been there for several months, but she knew that she had to begin to put her life in order again. She wore her huge dark glasses and her hair was wrapped in a scarf. She sat away from the other people, drank a cup of coffee, smoked a cigarette, and looked around for Philip Quennell, but she did not see him. At first she was disappointed that he was not there, because she had parted from him so badly the last time he went to her house to try to help her, but then she was relieved. If he had been there, she might not have been able to do what she decided to do.
She had never raised her hand to share at a meeting before, but that morning she felt the need to speak. She raised her hand in such a tentative fashion that the speaker did not notice her at first and called on several other people. Then, when she decided that she would not raise her hand again, the speaker called on her. “The lady with the dark glasses and head scarf,” he said, pointing at her.
Flo knew that she could not use her own name, even her first name, because she had become notorious. “My name is, uh, Fleurette,” she said. She had always hated her real name. Even before she learned about the ways of elegant life from Jules Mendelson, she thought her real name sounded cheap, and she spoke it in a muffled voice, as she did the next words, “I am an alcoholic and chemically dependent.” She looked about her, still wearing her impenetrable dark glasses, frightened. The room was silent. “I had almost a year in the program, and then I had a slip. This is my first day back.”
There was applause from the group, who were celebrated for their tolerance of the transgressions of their members. Encouraged by their friendliness, Flo began to talk. She said that she had been a kept woman. “I am a mistress. Or, rather, I was a mistress. I hate that word, but it’s what I am. I have been kept by a very rich man for five years. When I first met Mr. So and So, I didn’t have a pot to pee in, or a window to throw it out of.”
She said that she knew his business secrets and the deals she had heard when he made telephone calls from her bed during the afternoons after they made love. She discussed his heart attack and his death. She said that she had lived the life of a princess for five years but that now she was broke and about to lose the house that she thought had been put in her name. She said she knew about a covered-up murder and who the murderer was. She could not stop talking.
In a corner of the room, also disguised with dark glasses and a head scarf, was Rose Cliveden. Her hands were still bandaged from the burns she had suffered when her bed caught on fire. She had refused to go to the clinic in Palm Springs, as suggested by her friends, but, after meeting with Philip Quennell, she had agreed to go to AA meetings for two or three weeks. On this particular morning, he had promised to meet her there at the log cabin, as he guaranteed that she was unlikely to see anyone she knew, as she might at one of the more fashionable meetings in Beverly Hills, but, to her annoyance, he had not appeared. She could not relate to any of the stories told by any of the people who had shared their experiences. “I have nothing in common with any of these people,” she thought to herself, as she gathered her bag and prepared to leave.
It was then, while she was slowly walking out of the frightful little room, as she later described it, that the woman called Fleurette began to speak. Rose was already at the door, tiptoeing out, when it suddenly dawned on her, when she heard the words gangster and President of the United States, that Fleurette, with the dark glasses and the good-looking suit, was none other than the infamous and notorious Flo March, who had brought such unhappiness to the life of Pauline Mendelson. Riveted, she stared at her.
“My God,” thought Rose. “That’s the same woman I saw outside the church talking to Jules at Hector Paradiso’s funeral last year. And the one from Jules’s funeral.” As if she were in a theater at a play, where the second act suddenly began to show more promise than the first act had, she tiptoed back to the seat that she had abandoned and sat, rapt, throughout Flo March’s sharing.
Philip Quennell, who regularly attended the early-morning meetings at the log cabin on Robertson Boulevard, arrived very late that morning. An unexpected telephone call from Lonny Edge, complaining bitterly about a description of himself that had appeared in Hortense Madden’s account in Mulholland of his possession of the manuscript of Basil Plant’s supposedly unfinished novel, had caused the owners of the bungalow where he lived on Cahuenga Boulevard to serve notice that he must vacate the premises by the first of the month.
“On what grounds?” Philip asked.
“They said the article insinuated that I was using my apartment for purposes of prostitution. I mean, I only turn a couple of tricks a week in my apartment. Most of my work I do elsewhere, in my clients’ homes. But I don’t exactly want to go to court over it, if you know what I mean,” said Lonny.
“Listen, Lonny. I have to be somewhere. I can’t talk now. I’ll
call you back later,” said Philip.
“You giving me the runaround, Philip? You’re the one who got me into all this about that fucking manuscript that was just sitting on my table peaceably for three years, until you came along and began stirring things up.”
“No, I’m not giving you the runaround, Lonny. I just promised somebody I’d be somewhere. I’ll call you later.”
Philip arrived at the meeting as it was breaking up.
“I’m so sorry, Rose,” he said, when he saw her. Knowing how spoiled she was, he expected her either to have left or to be in a foul mood with him for suggesting that she meet him on Robertson Boulevard at seven o’clock in the morning and then not showing up. “I had a sort of emergency telephone call that I had to attend to. How did the meeting go? At least you stayed to the end.”
“Darling, it was fascinating, absolutely fascinating!” said Rose. He had never seen her so animated, except when she was drunk. “You have no idea what you missed. You won’t believe who spoke.”
“Who?” asked Philip, confused by her enthusiasm.
“Flo March!” she said.
Philip, surprised, looked at her.
“She’s the one who was Jules Mendelson’s mistress,” said Rose, in explanation. “My dear, the things she said! I’m sick you weren’t here.”
“Rose, would you like to go out for a cup of coffee with me,” said Philip. “We have to talk.”
“Oh, no, I can’t, darling. I have things to do,” she said. “But I’ll be back tomorrow. Every morning. It’s fascinating. Better than the movies. Why didn’t you tell me it’s so fascinating?”
“Listen, Rose. You do know, don’t you, that what you hear in these rooms must never leave these rooms,” said Philip.
“What does that mean?” asked Rose.
“It means that you mustn’t discuss what you’ve heard here, or tell the names of any of the people you might have seen here. That’s why it’s called Anonymous.”
“Oh, darling, my lips are sealed,” said Rose. She could not take her eyes off Flo and squinted to better take her in. “Pretty little thing, isn’t she? You’d never know she was only a waitress, would you? See you tomorrow, darling. Love to Camilla. Big hug.” She blew Philip a kiss and ran off.
An Inconvenient Woman Page 44