The gravel of the driveway was littered with cars, plain, early-model Fords, and I could see my mother begin to frost at the prospect of a wasted night. Many of the cars were occupied, rocking gently like dinosaur eggs or steaming from the inside, all five windows milky as cataracts. As we passed one, a couple, wet and rumpled, burst out of its cabin in a warm sea-scented fog. Both the man and woman wore little black plastic chip-like mustaches that clung to their upper lips by a tiny claw pinched to their septums. At the entrance was a bin of these little mustaches with a sign admonishing each guest to Nehmen jetzt eine! (Take one, now!) Parody is the last station on our trip toward dismantling fear, and it seemed imperative that everyone be in on the joke.
“Stick this on,” my mother said, shoving the hard plastic square up my nose. “Part of the deal is you can’t be a fucking wallflower all goddamned night, get it?”
“You just added at least a foot to the tree,” I said, adjusting the plastic square.
We moved into the throng of bodies expelling opinions, laughter, smoke. Children raced through the larger legs and torsos, expert, as always, at such work. They had fists full of cake or flailing slices of cold meat, hit-and-run scavengers. One had even found a half-drunk bottle of rye. One boy, a plump little thing dressed as a pint-size de Gaulle, sized me up and promptly threw a slice of bologna in my face.
“Oh, Maddy’s got a crush!” my mother jeered as she disappeared into the fray.
I removed the thin slice of composite meat. Not having a handkerchief, I began to scrape the residue from my face with my fingers.
“Who knew young love could be so tenacious?”
I was offered a worn but laundered handkerchief from a young man who did not look it. His head was large but well shaped, the bald dome crowing like a pregnant belly. He wore glasses and spoke with his lips covering his teeth, an affectation of many European immigrants who had yet to amass enough spare capital to indulge in straight, white American teeth.
“Curt,” the young man said, offering me his warm hand.
“Maddy,” I said, taking it.
“Pleasure,” he said, bowing slightly, and that was all I needed to know to assume his origins.
“What part of Germany are you from?” I asked.
He blushed. “Is it so apparent?”
“Only to one from your homeland.”
“But you barely have a trace of accent.”
“I’ve been here many years,” I said.
“Surely not so many. Are you here with your parents?”
“My mother. She’ll blow soon. And like the white whale announce her location as a challenge. One need only be patient.”
“She sounds enchanting.”
“If you like whales.”
We had moved to the drinks table by this point and I stood quietly while he poured himself a Scotch and me a glass of watery purple liquid. We found seats on a beleaguered love seat. He reached over to me and gently removed my mustache.
“Unless you’re planning on invading Poland this evening,” he said.
“I forgot I had it on.”
We circled the niceties, as well-bred Germans are wont to do. But when my last name was finally revealed, his formality shattered.
“Oh, sweet merciful Jesus, no!” he shouted. “Not the Maddy Ulm? Not the infamous Vampire Girl of Universal City? Not the Phantom of Stage Twenty-eight? My God, child. You are a legend on the lot. You should hear the accomplishments ascribed to you.”
I was shocked but curious.
“Tell me,” I said, trying to smile indulgently. At that moment, a flurry of green cocktail olives rebounded off my forehead. The plump little de Gaulle snickered from his blind behind an ottoman and ran for cover, hoping, I assumed, that I would follow.
“More of Cupid’s tender darts?” Curt said, laughing.
“Please continue.”
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have a bit of fun with him? He seems lively.”
“I’d much rather hear about my legend.”
“Well, the stories are ludicrous but vastly creative. Apparently you were an intimate of the infamous Lon Chaney, Man of a Thousand Suitcases . . .”
“Faces,” I corrected.
“Ah. That makes more sense. Anyway, seeing you now it’s clear that’s an obvious fiction. But some say you actually were instrumental in the cutting of his Phantom.”
“Interesting.”
“Others say you were the real genius behind Dracula. But I have seen that picture and understand genius as applied to that endeavor only in the broadest context.”
“Prudent.”
“There are others. I think the most interesting is that you were the model for the famous Frankenstein makeup. Can you believe that? I’m sure Mr. Pierce would find that rumor of particular interest.”
“Incredible. I look nothing like him,” I said, laughing as convincingly as I could. I was amazed at the veracity of everything he told me but, of course, I remained silent. “Where did you hear these . . . pearls?” I asked, taking a nauseating sip from my cup of purple.
“The bit about Chaney came from his son, Lon Jr. I’m working with him on his next picture. I must say he wasn’t my first choice.”
So Creighton had grown up, changed his name, and entered the game after all. His father would be furious.
“What’s the picture?”
“Get ready and don’t laugh,” he said, settling his glasses firmly on the bridge of his nose. “You know what? I should preface this by saying I am a real writer. My original draft was really far more Kafkaesque than the middling tripe they’ve forced it into.”
“Don’t tell me. Your story is about the corruption of man. How an average joe can be hideously transformed by pervasive and intolerant forces beyond his control. The good German who wakes up one morning to find himself a monster.”
“That’s uncanny. How could you know that?”
“Simple. You’re a good German boy fleeing the Nazis. What else would you write about?”
“You don’t suppose him turning into a wolf is too obvious a metaphor?”
“Too obvious to whom? The typical American hausfrau and ten-year-old boys? Which, if you’re under contract to Universal, will be your prime demographics.”
“So you know the hell I’ve been going through.” He grinned wearily.
“Only that they probably loved your original concept but felt the ideas to which you so tastefully alluded to in your original draft could be better served if seen in a more obvious and, hopefully, profitable stop-frame metamorphosis.”
“Oh, it’s so humiliating.”
“Your bosses have never been big on subtly, trust me. I sense a lot of fur in your future, mein Freund.” For a moment I reflected wistfully if coldly on Chaney’s plans for his wolf transformation. “Just remember yak hair is the key.”
“Christ.” He moaned with a smile.
“Don’t despair. You’ve most likely compromised yourself into a very lucrative franchise.”
“What the hell have I gotten myself into? The whole thing is devolving daily into this great steaming pile of superstitious hog shit.”
“I don’t know if I’d call it superstitious, exactly.”
“Don’t tell me a cynical girl like you believes in werewolves.”
“People had a sensitivity to such things in my village.”
“You must have been very small.”
“I remember they would draw the pentagram in white chalk on their front doors as protection against such creatures.”
“A star?”
“Yes. Symbol of the faithful.”
“Faithful to what?”
“The old gods. The gods of the skalds.”
“Vikings?”
“Visigoths, actually. Werewolves, as they are commonly called, were really berserkers, members of the fighting elite. It was told that as a last line of defense they could turn themselves into wolves. A small pack of them was said to be able to destroy an entire R
oman legion. The white star was to remind them of their roots, that the people who had drawn such a star were of the same faith as they, had the same allegiance to the old gods. And so might be spared.”
“This is fascinating. Especially that stuff about the star. People in Europe right now are dying, marked with a star. How do you know all this?”
“My grandfather. And his, and then his, and on back. Everyone knew these stories in my village. We had a wolf’s skin the size of a man over our mantel that was said to be one of their pelts.”
“I thought the berserkers were just militant fanatics who could swallow their tongues and go into furious trances. Probably an allusion to some psychotropic substance taken in the heat of battle to increase ferocity.”
“The wolf is the last vestige of our indigenous self.”
“How old are you?”
“Ageless,” I said, grinning behind my drink. I hadn’t had a creative adult conversation like this since I’d worked with Chaney.
“You’re giving me the heebie-jeebes. Is that correct?”
“Heebie-jeebies,” I said, smiling.
“Those too. Jesus, kid. You need to lay off the grape juice.”
“There was a saying in my village, a kind of poem, really. You see, the ignorant set all cautionary thought to rhyme. It’s so they don’t forget how miserable they are. How did it go? Even the man who loves his gods / And burns the willow bark / Must avoid the night when the moon is full / Lest the werewolf steal his heart.”
“The full moon? I never heard that before.”
Suddenly, my face exploded with a burst of clammy white cake and green frosting.
“Eros is back at his trebuchet,” Curt said.
“Excuse me, but this must end.” I shot up from my seat and was on top of the badly winded boy in seconds. “Where’s the fire, shit pins?” I demanded, bending a pudgy arm behind his back.
“Oww! Lay off!”
“Only if you lay off air-dropping the appetizers.”
“What? Get off me!”
I reluctantly let him up. His lip quivered as he rubbed his shoulder.
“That’s not how you get a girl’s attention.”
“Who says I want your attention?” I had forgotten how tediously defensive children could be.
“Listen, if I agree to have one drink with you will you promise to leave me alone for the rest of the evening?”
“A drink?” he asked, blinking. “You mean like a juice or a pop?”
“Anything. A beverage. A little conversation, then no contact either personal or in the form of projectiles. That is my offer.”
“You won’t play Seven Minutes in Heaven?”
“I don’t know what Seven Minutes in Heaven is, but I suspect it has little to do with one’s final reward.”
“You talk stupid.”
“Forget it,” I said, getting up.
“No. It’s okay,” he said, grabbing my arm. “We can have a drink. I think your talk is funny.”
Luckily I was spared his company.
There was an incredible rise in voices. I jostled through the bodies, toward where the voices were the loudest. I saw the flushed skin of my mother tower above the jeering heads of the crowd as she stood, topless, on a grand piano. Two shirtless men, in bow ties only, bent their pale backs over half the keyboard each and began playing a very bluesy rendition of “Bei Mir Bist Du Schon.” My mother stepped out of her skirt to high cries and swung the flimsy garment over her head before launching it into the crowd. As she sang, I couldn’t keep a nugget of pride from lodging in my throat. She was wonderful.
CHAPTER 53
I got my tree, all seven feet of it. I spent six hours weaving multicolored lights through its fragrant branches, lights I had purchased along with a few ornaments and a box of tinsel at the Woolworth’s on Hollywood Boulevard. I had seen it begin to work its slow and delicate magic on my mother, who would drift into the living room, completely nude, for various assessments, most of which were vague grunts that could not be completely confused with disgust. But now that it was nearing completion, she became more vocal.
“You’re not using real candles? What kind of German are you?” she said, crossing her arms over her ample breasts.
“Why don’t I just douse the whole thing in gasoline and throw lit matches at it? What’s the matter with you?”
“I remember trees like that when I was a girl.”
“I thought your family feared the winter solstice as the death of the sun or something and spent the winter months cloistered in the dark, spitting into corners.”
“You make fun, but I remember a winter, many years before you were born, when my father took me to Ulm. There was a huge silver-point fir in the middle of the dry-goods shop. A magnificent thing, as high as a roof beam. With real candles clipped to every branch. I watched for an hour while the shop owner’s wife lit every one. And when she finished, she gave me a gold paper crown and a tiny piece of rock sugar. I’ll never forget it. When I mentioned I might like a tree like that in our house, my father beat me with his shoe and locked me in the cupboard. Trees were not to be enslaved in the worship of the one God. He had very particular beliefs about such things.”
“Is that why you hate Christmas?”
“It’s why I never allowed myself a fondness for it.”
She came closer to me and I could see tears in her eyes.
“You’ve done a beautiful job, Maddy. Perhaps a little less tinsel next year, but beautiful.”
It was strange to think of her as some hipless child, flat and scrawny with no sexual hammer, capable of anything as useless as wonder. She had this way of having one believe she had always been the way she now appeared. Seeing her softened was almost too much to bear. So I resisted an embrace and smiled back at her moist face. The moment was mercifully broken by the ringing of the phone. She answered, looking at me while she spoke. Then she held the receiver out to me and I took it. It was Curt, the owl-eyed writer of werewolf tales, inviting me to the lot for lunch. It seemed the fates of celluloid horror were not finished with me quite yet.
CHAPTER 54
I must admit the proposition of returning to the lot held none of the vindicated glory I had hoped for. I surmised my conversation with Curt had sunk yet another of my untenured hooks into him. He saw in me what all the others had seen, a way into the crypt of the uncanny that would not leave him looking foppish. Most likely he had already incorporated a few of my carefully dropped crumbs. The star and the poem (which was a pure fabrication on my part), perhaps. I figured we’d talk shop for a few hours and maybe he might convince his keepers to toss me at least my old day rate.
The guard at the gate knew my name. Not in the glow of some fond personal recollection or by my reputation. He had merely looked down to his list, found the words there, like hundreds of others, and given me directions to the Welsh moors. My favorite sets have always been exteriors. Landscapes of inner space, they are always more dreamlike for being by necessity purely artificial. This one, where the werewolf would do most of his leering and strutting, was beautiful. Sparse trees and low rocks, a slight rake up to the cyclorama where a leaden sky was painted. They were using the high condensing foggers, and a bit of residual mist spilled languidly through the carefully hidden nozzles. A perfect killing floor. Curt was sitting in a chair behind the director, next to an enormous bearlike man wearing paw-shaped socks and gloves with sharp nails.
“Maddy,” Curt said as I passed. “There you are. Sorry I couldn’t be here earlier. Have you shown yourself around?”
“Just a bit.”
“I was able to incorporate some of the things we talked about.” Here we go, I thought to myself. Another round with Universal’s little go-to ghoul.
“Marvelous,” I said dryly.
“I wanted you to meet Lon. He’s been asking all kinds of crazy questions about you and so I told him I would bring you to the set.”
So that was it. That was why I had been summoned. C
ynicism always hides hope. And once that’s gone, nothing is left but the void. It’s the one vacuum nature cannot be bothered to fill.
Lon stood up and shook my hand. He was an enormous man. In his face of what I assumed to be yak hair and a black rubber nose, he looked truly feral. He fumbled to remove his lower plate of canines before speaking.
“It’s a real pleasure, Miss Ulm,” he said with earnest. “I really appreciate you coming all the way down here.”
“My pleasure, Mr. Chaney.” In his eyes was the same boy I remembered from that horrible hospital room. The fractured lump on too small a stool. The boy of all back and no front.
“Pop just told me so much about you . . . Well, I was wondering if we could meet sometime. Not here, away from all this craziness. Somewhere we could talk. Would you be all right with that?”
“I’m sure I’d love to.” What in the hell did we have to talk about?
“Great, I’ll have it arranged.”
And that was that. Interview concluded. I supposed I could have stayed, watched the scene quicken to life. But I had made my contribution and wanted desperately to leave.
On the drive home, I became aware that my contributions were becoming increasingly brief. Perhaps I had come a dreary full circle, where ambition in one as young as I looked was as ridiculous as that same ambition in a woman of my actual years. But I wasn’t quite prepared to accept that insight.
CHANEY’S SECRETARY CALLED ME ONE SATURDAY MORNING AND TOLD me in spritely tones that Mr. Chaney expected me to meet him that afternoon at one thirty. It was an order barely disguised as a request. A real Hollywood pro, this girl. So I agreed, confused yet strangely convinced of the subject of our conversation. I had lived the life he should have lived with his father. Even a warmed-over piece of that might be some comfort.
The venue for our meeting was the Van de Kamp’s at Ivar and Yucca. A diner in the shape of a windmill, it seemed the perfect setting for a seemingly innocent creature’s demise. He sat at a back table, unrecognized, wearing round dark glasses and a gray fedora, a cup of coffee growing cold before him. He stood when I arrived and removed his hat and glasses, taking my hand. His face was puffy, too much booze or emotion or both. When we sat, he put the dark glasses back on.
Only the Dead Know Burbank Page 29