by Carson, Tom
There, that’s better.
To resume. Exiting the Maxwell House, I stepped into the white skull and blue Jell-O of a Los Angeles high noon. It was a typical day on Ivar Street: the remaining letters on the marquee of the shuttered nightclub across the way, closed for many a moon since a freakish bolt of lighting crashed its skylight in, still advertised the triumphant re-urn of USA AL XANDER Κ NE. Plump Judy Maine, our local crazy lady—things hadn’t gone that well for her, so my now former employer had told me, since the day her husband walked into the sea—came lurching along the sidewalk, still looking for her lost dog. Sauntering toward me from the bogus Riviera of his apartment building up the street was Gagilnil’s debonair neighbor Joe Gillis, a scriptwriter whose smile’s weak charm belied his experience as a veteran of both German and Japanese prison camps in the war. Thinking I might hitch a ride with him to Culver City or at least Schwab’s, I hoisted my barely clad bazooms like the Jolly Roger; but the two-faced grin he gave them in reply froze unexpectedly into a look of panic, and he hurried past me to beat a couple of repo-company gumshoes to his car. Sliding into the driver’s seat just as they reversed course to make for their own wheels, he floored the accelerator and sped off toward Sunset Boulevard.
As I peered after him, hand visored like, Magellan’s, I contemplated the unseemly haste with which our endlessly provisional Los Angeles lives could change. Just then, my own did, the unlikely announcement of the fact being a gigantic set of antlers that now glided to a halt before my nose. They turned out to be mounted on the hood of a long black limo, above an engraved silver plaque on the grille that asked: “Are These Yours, Buddy?”
A smoked window was rolled partly down, releasing the actual smoke behind it. From within a Havana cloud came a voice whose regional accent put me pleasantly in mind of my beginnings in Jolene.
“I was right—you look even better in color. Could you use a lift?”
“Well, I wasn’t feeling especially depressed, to be honest,” I cautiously replied. “But I’m always happy to hear a funny story.”
Gurgling mirth from inside the limo. “Say, can you act?”
“Say, Mister—can you pee?” retorted I.
“Get in, then,” said the voice, opening the door.
This was how I soon found myself a starlet under contract to Y. Avery Willingham Productions, makers of Westerns that featured up to four horses onscreen simultaneously and a variety of other Β pictures in which you could often see the scenery wobbling when a character was slammed up against it and told to talk fast—but not too fast, as zippier dialogue tempos would have required lengthier and more elaborate scenarios to push the movie up to feature length. Budget-busting was ever the great fear at Y. Avery Willingham Productions, although its eponymous overseer was flush enough personally to own both a Tex-Mex restaurant, which was in Los Feliz, and a genuine Calder, which was in his foyer.
Over the next two years, I was to act in a variety of roles for this gentleman. In The One-Armed Gun, I played the town schoolteacher, whose big scene came when she jumped up and down in glee as the stagecoach arrived. In The Crowded Balcony; I played a French gangster’s kidnapped moll, who spent virtually the movie’s entire sixty-eight-minute running length tied to a chair, cords passed tautly over and under my bazooms to prevent either one’s escape before the ransom money was delivered. Upstairs from the Calder, in a house in the Hollywood Hills, I played games that might well have given even my sister Suzannah pause.
Mr. Willingham himself was a plump fellow with somewhat bucked teeth and interested, friendly eyes—a clown with the bite of a ferret, as I believe he was once described by a rival and rather more pugnacious maker of thundering horse operas. I found him perfectly charming, not least because he hailed from the same part of the country as I, helping us to understand each other’s not only moods but syntax. I also had a grown girl’s healthy appreciation for his ornate house, a somewhat Moorish-looking edifice originally built for a onetime oil man and later silent-movie producer in a bygone day.
Be that as it may, it was still hard for me to leave the Poil, where my good friends from my early days in Hollywood all gathered in my dingy room to bid me adieu. “Homer,” I said, knowing it would please him, “I think I’m going to miss you most of all.” He stepped back, glowing and wringing his big hands. Turning to Wood, I handed him my, and also his, favorite angora sweater: “I know you’ll give it a good home,” I told him. He smiled under his little mustache and said, “Maybe more than one, if I’m lucky. You never know what might turn up.” Smiling back, I then moved on to the goodbye I had deliberately saved for last.
“But what’s going to happen to me now?” she asked.
“Everything under the sun, Bettie,” I said, hugging her. “Everything under the sun. But with any luck, you’ll be alive at the end of it, and that’s something.” Picking up my cardboard suitcase, I walked out onto Yucca Street, where the great antlered limo had begun diverting the neighborhood urchins—at least those not gainfully employed in selling oregano palmed off as marijuana to the tourists wandering up from Hollywood Boulevard by mistake.
Now, I had a pleasant time with Mr. Willingham. He was a delightful man who made me laugh more than any other I have known, and one of the few to understand how boasting a behind that Moses would have stayed in Egypt for did not preclude a girl from having a personality of depthishness and nuancification, or a mind whose insights could intrigue any writer of fiction less smug than, to pluck a name quite at random from the wet paper bag before me, Mr. John Updike. Yet while the stars never faded from my eyes, I soon discovered that the life of a movie actress was a fairly repetitive one—days of standing around waiting for the lighting to be adjusted and the camera put in position, nights of hanging off a chandelier dressed as a Dresden shepherdess as Mr. Willingham tore up and down the stairs in his boxer shorts, guffawing and trying to grab me, and Pilar the housekeeper tossed her apron up over her face and raced back to the kitchen to muffle a crisis of giggles. In any case, from Cheyenne Summer to Navajo! Ho! Ho! in the dust of the Old West, and from Ginger Snaps Back to Shipwrecked in the contemporary-comedy vein, nearly all the movies I made for Y. Avery Willingham Productions are available for rental—though not, unless the bucktoothed little bastard really pulled a fast one, the rather more special movies I starred in for plain Y. Avery Willingham. Therefore, in the interest of picking up the pace, I will simply skip forward to the ultimate climax in a relationship not short on them, during which I learned something that utterly astounded me.
Lustrously emerging from my marble bath one warm day, I wrapped my hourglass figure in a shortie robe whose silken skimpiness barely covered my beautimous hips, as I thoughtfully proved by bending and stretching in the miraculously unsteamed full-length mirror. Having misplaced my copy of the script for Every Girl Is an Island, my upcoming vehicle, somewhere in the Moorish house’s vast confines, and believing Mr. Willingham to be sequestrating at the moment at the YAWP studios on Hyperion Avenue down in Silverlake, I ventured into his private office off the bedroom, into which I’d been requested not to go. Behind blue curtains, amid stacked scripts, I quickly found another copy of Every Girl Is an Island’s inane scenario, and had turned to depart when my gaze was snared by the sight of a rusty beer can standing alone on the highest shelf.
As there were empty beer cans all over the house, for which Pilar went daily scavenging with a large-capacity garbage bag and a net to snag the ones in the swimming pool, I shouldn’t have found anything unusual in the sight. But the brand name on this one made my vision reel, for it was a can of Horspis Beer—which had never been sold anywhere but in the immediate environs of Jolene, Alabam’-don’t-give-a-damn. On top of that, I knew full well that the old Horspis Brewery—which had soon relocated to St. Louis and changed its name to something both more unwieldy, what with the hyphen and all, and less accurate, as the recipe remained unchanged—had only sold this product under this label and in this container for a single year … t
he year preceding my own birth.
Climbing up on a convenient stepladder, and incidentally providing a dandy view to anyone lying beneath it had there been such a person present—hello, Sprout!—a slow-motion picture actress fetched the beer can down from the shelf. In a doozy of a daze, I reached into my capacious décolletage, now moving up and down like a matched pair of creamy concrete mixers as a result of my rapid gasps, to fish forth on its ribbon the rusty old church-key can-and-bottle opener that I had carried with me since I left Jolene. Hardly daring to believe that my fingers and hands were performing the task that my own stunned eyes were observing them to perform, I fitted the opener’s triangular end to one of the triangular apertures cut into the top of the can.
They matched. They matched perfectly. There was no doubt in my mind that this can opener had opened this beer can.
Behind me, I heard Mr. Willingham’s voice: “Oh, well, what the hell. I guess that’s it for that, huh?” When I turned, he stood before me in shirttails and boxers, evidently having come home early for what both ant and drumstick used to call an indoor picnic lunch in happier days. On his face, the remnants of a cheerful grin were fading; from his hand, my Dresden shepherdess’s crook clattered to the floor.
I swallowed hard. “Mr. Willingham,” I said, “are you my true Poppa?”
“Sort of. That is, I’m one of them,” he said. “We never really did figure it out to anyone’s satisfaction, least of all your Momma’s. Horspis sold those things in six-packs, you know.”
“She told me you were dead.”
“That’s because some of us are,” he said. “I’m just one of the ones who’s still around. And will be for a while, God willing, since my work here is far from done.”
“And,” my voice trembled, though whether with hurt or indignation I am not sure, “have you known this the whole time you’ve been repeatedly bestowing your not inconsiderable God-given endowment upon my grateful little college of one?”
He went from looking wolfish to looking sheepish. “Well, yeah,” he said. “I do feel kind of crummy about it sometimes, usually while I’m shaving. That’s why I’ve started this beard, but I’m only human. Jesus God, have you ever looked at yourself naked? Have you ever read the size tag on your bra and asked yourself just what those numbers mean?”
“Not to disregard what I believe is the intended compliment,” I said, “but it has just become problematic for me to remain under your Moorish roof.”
His face fell, and he punched a nearby armoire. “Aw, damn “ he said. “I knew that’s what would happen. This just sucks. Why didn’t I toss that beer can out years ago?”
“Yes,” I said, on the verge of tears, “why didn’t you? Everything was going so well!”
“I’ll tell you why. It’s because I loved your Momma, that’s why. I bet we all saved ‘em—Bill Faulkner, Tex, everybody.” He looked suddenly worried. “Hey, you’re still gonna do Every Girl Is an Island, though, aren’t you?”
“I am under contract to Y. Avery Willingham Productions, and I consider myself a professional,” I said. “But things personal are over between us, Poppa mine.”
“Not even one more swing on the chandelier for the road? Come on. It’s Pilar’s day off.”
“Not one,” I said.
Briefly, Mr. Willingham looked crestfallen. But then the old cheerful glint came into his eyes.
“Say,” he said, “I’ve got an idea. You don’t happen to know where your sister Suzannah is, do you? I bet she won’t mind. Hell, you know what she’s like—you’ve seen The Puerile Maid, although not nearly as many times as I have.”
“Is she your daughter too?” I gasped. Though of course she would have been, as we were twins.
“You all are,” he said. “All of you are all of ours. Bill, me, Tex, Frank Tashlin … all of us. Sometimes we hated ourselves for it, although maybe not quite as much as our wives did. Put it this way: we weren’t throwing skillets at our own heads as soon as we got home. But we just
couldn’t find any women like you in real life.”
Once the filming of Every Girl Is an Island was complete—in a rare stint at Zuma Beach, standing in for a mythicalacious Pacific archipelago, rather than the mock Old West of Griffith Park, where our shoestring productions had often bumped up against no fewer than three other Grade-Z Westerns in progress, amid any number of high-school field trips to the Planetarium and furtive homosexual getting-to-know-you sessions in nearby cars; we’d borrow each other’s horses, and press the high-school students and the homosexuals into service as acned Indians or supercilious pairs of homesteaders—my duties to the Y. Avery Willingham organization were discharged in full. I had already moved from the Hollywood Hills to a small white house with blue trim in Echo Park. Now, having found myself an agent, I set about offering my services to Darryl Zanuck, along with any other studio not run by a chuckling, voluble, incest-crazed blood relative.
To my chagrin, however, the offers were few. I began to suspect that, unbeknownst to myself, I had either been a beneficiary of nepotism or was perceived as such, and in Hollywood the latter may well do more damage than the former. Having more or less run out of options, I had just signed to appear in a vapid situation comedy about some castaways when the telephone rang in my small Echo Park home. Assuming it was my agent calling back with more fine print for me to chew on, I picked it up; and here I reach the apotheosis of my tale.
As it turned out, it was my agent—a fellow who put me in mind slightly of a younger, more gullible, New Testament edition of Mr. Gagilnil, with whom I had long since lost touch. Giggling and nervous, for Swifty Lazar he wasn’t, he announced that he had just secured me the opportunity of nine lifetimes, at least if I could be ready to depart for an unspecified location, dressed in my sultriooshiest gown and smelling like a spice shop, within the hour.
“Aw, Slowy, don’t tell me Mr. Zanuck wants to see me now;” I moaned. “I’ve already signed the contract to do Gil-”
“No, this isn’t a movie part.” He giggled again. “It’s better, lots better. I can’t explain, so just get ready. I’ll pick you up at six.”
Mystified, I disrobed and ran a bath, idly doing jumping jacks and deep-knee bends to pass the time as the tub filled. Coiffed, gowned in shimmering white, jeweled and perfumed, I was straightening one of the pictures of lilies with which my Echo Park house was decorated when the doorbell rang. Smirking like a guilty schoolboy as he ran a finger around his collar, my agent took me by the arm to escort me to a waiting limousine. This only deepened my confusion, as I knew perfectly well that Slowy couldn’t afford a limo, certainly not one this big, long, and black. With momentary apprehensiatiousness, I checked to see if its hood perchance sported a massive set of antlers, and to my relief saw it did not.
Once the limo door opened and I scooted in, however, I discovered that I was not its only passenger—any more than I had been in my, our, Momma’s womb back in Jolene. Stacked like a fire sale at the International House of Pancakes and adjusting her skin-tight black gown to cross a pair of legs long enough to pass for the Chrysler Building in inverted alabaster duplicate, my sister looked as unaccustomed as ever to doing anything sitting up. At once beneath and amid the anarchic brunette coils and masses of her coiffure, her green eyes glittered with the same all too explicable hostility that I could feel my own gaze returning.
“Hello, Suzannah,” I said coldly.
“Leavin’ the little gold man at home tonight, Sis?” she sneered, with a drum roll of her lacquered fingernails upon her thigh. “Or has he run back on his little yaller legs through the streets to Bette Davis’s house with panic in his little yaller eyes, havin’ dee-duced he must of been the victim of a kid-sis-nappin’?”
“Being five minutes older ain’t nothing to brag on,” I said.
“Being about five yards smarter is, sister mine.”
“You two know each other?” said Slowy as he got in with us, his surprised tone not entirely lacking in a certain idiot gle
e. He really wasn’t much older than a sprout, I thought; no wonder I’d wound up with nothing but a sitcom.
“Somewhat,” I said frostily.
“Somewhat,” Suzannah said icily.
We had not seen each other since the world premiere of The Puerile Maid in a warehouse in San Pedro two years previous, which I had prevailed on Mr. Willingham to escort me to for old times’ sake—not that he was disinclined, soon afterwards obtaining a private print of it to run off whenever I was busy with tight-costume fittings at the YAWP studios. As the movie uncesspooled, I had been unable to prevent myself from watching my sister’s performance with a critical eye, considering the different ways in which I, Gagilnil’s original choice, might have interpreted this or that aspect of the role. Evidently, the novice director had lost control of his star, for unless my recollections of the original scenario deceived me Suzannah had added a good deal of improvised business of her own, of a sordid lubricity that put my former employer’s rather trite imaginings to shame: a classic case of the tail wagging the doghouse, you might say. Yet we had not exchanged a word either before the screening or after it, stalking out instead past the two flashlights that Gagilnil had hired Homer to keep waving in crisscross patterns outside the door to climb into our separate cars with no more than a single fiery glance of mutual hatred.
“So what you been up to?” I asked.
As if they were five tiny scarlet mirrors embedded in her fingertips, Suzannah was contemplating half her nails. “Puttin’ on Chanel lipstick right after suckin’ Woolworth’s cock,” she said, which even I had to admit did evoke Hollywood in a nutshell. “You?”