A Shadow on the Sun

by Francis Cottam

  ‘None of which is your daughter’s fault.’

  ‘What irritates me about the young is that they always pick the fashionable causes. It’s more to do with peer group competition and crushes on rebellious writers and actors than it is to do with principles.’

  ‘She’s eleven years old, Julia.’

  ‘And I’ll be putting up with it until she’s twenty and decides that children of her own are a more alluring prospect than slogans and street barricades.’

  ‘She may not come to that conclusion,’ Bill said. ‘If she starts to believe what you say about her.’

  Julia watched the road. She threw her cigarette out of the window and settled back in her seat. ‘You’re right, of course. I’m much too hard on her. I love her more than anything. I want so desperately what’s best for her. I want her to turn out right.’

  ‘Valedictorian prom queen?’

  She twisted and looked at her sleeping daughter and smiled. ‘Healthy,’ she said. ‘Happy.’ She turned back again and leant against Bill’s arm and put her head on his shoulder. ‘I do try.’

  ‘You know what I always say, Honey.’

  ‘What do you always say, Bill?’

  ‘You don’t try, you don’t fail.’

  They laughed together, comfortable with each other and with their old cliché, the car steadily devouring the road, Bill glad that he had said what he thought needed to be said. But he couldn’t help a song lyric nagging at his mind, and it wasn’t one of Hank Williams’ lost, plaintive appeals to fate. It was a song from a Fred Astaire musical from the years before the war. It was the Irving Berlin song, ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance’, and it was the first line that insinuated itself, in Fred’s familiar voice, over and over again into his mind. There may be trouble ahead, Fred sang. And Bill thought there almost certainly would be.

  The years following the war were not what Bill would have called dignified or hopeful years in American political life. This was true even though the history of the Republic had always featured its share of corruption and injustice. Johnson and Harding had only been the most indiscreet of the several dishonest incumbents to embarrass the office of the Presidency. Government integrity had frequently been sullied by treaties solemnly sworn and swiftly reneged on out of nothing other than naked greed. And there were always people possessed of sufficient hate and prejudice to make populist demagogues a danger. Before McCarthy there had been Huey Long and bigot and radio star Father Charles Coughlin.

  But something was different now. America should have emerged from the war with pride. The cause was noble and the victory unambiguous. War output and technologies had made the economy strong and confident. The trouble was that the new balance of world power was such an uneasy one. Russia was volatile and its communist ideology aggressive and expansionist. Winston Churchill had coined the term the Cold War. And that had generated its own lexicon with American foreign policy experts talking about such dangerous phenomena as spheres of influence and the domino effect.

  And the missile gap.

  It was the bomb, of course, that made the outlook so sombre. It was the bomb that cast its horrible pall over the hopes of the world. And while Russia schemed and scientists toiled to turn deposits of uranium into deadlier payloads, buses were burnt in the South because coloured children were permitted to take them to integrated schools. And in the senate a bully banged a gavel with a mallet and spewed paranoid lies about the threat from within. No, Bill did not think the years of McCarthy and Little Rock a happy or optimistic time in American political life. The period lacked dignity. It lacked hope. And if Julia was disdainful of it, wasn’t that her perfect right?

  In criticizing her daughter, Julia had condemned Natasha’s radicalism as a chic choice rather than a choice of intellect or conscience. Bill thought the judgement harsh but probably true. Natasha was a precocious kid and teen rebellion had come early to her, as most things did. But he had trouble, if he was honest, thinking any kind of politics chic. Certainly the subject was seen to possess no glamour in Hollywood. In the year Bill argued with Julia on her balcony, On the Waterfront and Carmen Jones were among that year’s major film releases. It could be argued that one dealt with union corruption and the other brought coloured lead actors into the mainstream for the first time. Bill would have thought both those claims disingenuous. The first of the two films was far more revolutionary for the style of acting Brando brought to the lead role than for anything it said about work practices on the New York docks. The second, when all was said and done about Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge, was a musical. And the big box-office performers that year were Rear Window and the smash hit 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. What the audience most wanted on their screens wasn’t Brando’s washed-up boxer fighting graft. It was Kirk Douglas grappling bravely with a giant rubber squid.

  Bill would remember 1954 as the year that Natasha Smollen first became interested in the issues and ideas that would come later to consume her. But he also saw the first signs that Julia wanted to both give and get more from life than the comfortable living she was earning.

  She had been drafted in to do some emergency surgery for Billy. Wilder on his movie Sabrina after Cary Grant abruptly pulled out of the project and was replaced by Humphrey Bogart.

  Watching the movie in later years, Bill suspected that Bogart was already ill by the time of the Sabrina shoot. Certainly he was tired and his tired performance reflected the fact. Julia was more withering in her criticism. They saw the finished cut in a preview hosted by Wilder and the applause that followed the final fade seemed spontaneous and genuine enough. But afterwards, over drinks, Julia said that her work on the picture had been like bandaging up a patient who was already dead.

  ‘Holden was okay,’ Bill said.

  ‘Callow,’ Julia said. ‘Under-rehearsed. Bill Holden is having an affair with Audrey Hepburn. If he thought sleeping with her was a practical substitute for working on their lines together, he was wrong.’

  ‘Bogart?’

  She shrugged. ‘Bogart is Bogart. But he is a mature leading man and Hepburn is an ingénue. He looked more like her grandfather than a realistic suitor.’ She looked around the bar they were in. It was filled with firm-bodied, flawless young women out for an evening with men who looked like their grandfathers.

  ‘It’s this town, I suppose. For a particular type of girl, the men who are powerful here have a particular allure. It doesn’t matter what they look like or even what they say. But it isn’t like that in the rest of the country.’

  ‘You think a romantic comedy the right vehicle for exploring the demographics of modern dating?’ Bill was fifty-four, the same age as the century, and Julia was thirty-seven. And he was touchily aware of the fact.

  Perhaps she guessed his thoughts. It wouldn’t have been the first time. ‘Maybe it’s the genre that’s the problem,’ she said. ‘I don’t find romantic comedy very convincing.’

  ‘You think it trivial. You think working on trivia demeaning.’ He sipped at his Martini. It was dry and strong in a properly chilled glass and his fourth since their arrival. He wondered why it wasn’t hitting the spot. ‘You want to work in theatre?’

  ‘It isn’t the work, Bill,’ she said. She looked restless. Her eyes went again around the room and she shrugged her shoulders under her velvet stole like someone struggling slightly for air. ‘I’m very fortunate. It isn’t the work.’

  The bar they were in was a cocktail lounge on Hollywood Boulevard. They were seated four or five tables away from a raised dias with a pianist who tried to play in the style popularized by Oscar Peterson. There were cigarette girls behind trays of their wares lit by neon tubes that cast a ghoulish light on their made-up, smiling faces. For no obvious reason they were trussed in red bodices with corset laces up the back and berets like the one sometimes favoured by the actress Veronica Lake. There were mirrors on the walls in frames sculpted from fruit in wax or plaster or painted papier mâché so that your reflection stared back a
t you out of plaits of bananas and pineapples. They had chosen it because of its proximity to the preview theatre in which they had endured the movie together.

  ‘What are we doing in here, Bill?’

  ‘Having a good time.’ He winked. ‘Waiting for the cabaret.’

  They waited for the cabaret. And it was terrible.

  And then in 1957 Julia found her cause, and with it, her calling.

  He’d seen the Kennedy book, Profiles in Courage, in her book case, the single volume of political philosophy jostled and cramped and very likely depressed by all the gloomy, pessimistic nineteenth-century novels she seemed to like to read. He took it out and flicked through it. He had heard little about the Catholic senator with the millionaire father except that he had been some kind of war hero and had gone into politics as a surrogate for his dead brother.

  ‘Have you read this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the author interests me.’

  ‘Is it any good?’

  ‘Up to a point,’ she said. ‘But I think what he has to say about the future is more interesting than the way he pontificates on the past.’

  ‘He hasn’t exactly set the senate alight.’

  ‘I met him at the weekend. And he had plenty to say.’

  It had been at a barbecue hosted by Peter Lawford. Bill had been invited too but had been away that weekend. He’d been fishing, which was his shorthand, or code, for trawling the red-neck bars of Arizona, quenching an insatiable thirst for beer and rye chasers and sometimes getting into trouble with those locals resentful of anyone to whom they weren’t linked by a defective gene pool. He’d recently bought a Jeep to facilitate these fishing trips. But even with his telescopic rods strapped to the sides of the Jeep in their expensive cases, he wondered just how secret his real destination could be. He came back from his fishing trips reeking of booze, raw knuckled, layered in desert dust and bar-room bruises. He was too old for this shit, he kept telling himself. Much too old. But he didn’t know where else to go with his anger and frustration at the things about his life he so despised. It was demeaning, truly demeaning in the way that Julia had meant it, criticizing the three-week drunk he’d gone on all those years ago. And his drunken, delinquent desert odysseys had become addictive of late. He no longer kidded himself it was just letting off steam. There was more to it than that. But he hadn’t worked out what. And until he did, he wouldn’t be able to work out how to stop. Besides, he wasn’t hurting anyone except himself. Other than himself, it wasn’t as though he was really letting anybody down.

  Julia had her own independent, abundant life. She did not need old Bill. The Peter Lawford party at which she had met Jack Kennedy was convincing evidence of that.

  She hadn’t dated much during her years in Hollywood, he knew. Her romantic life was not much discussed between them. He would not have been comfortable with the subject and she was far too discreet. But he guessed from how often she was alone and odd remarks made by Natasha that there was no significant man in her life. She hadn’t lacked for suitors once the dyke rumours were dismissed. He did not honestly know why she had failed to meet someone she could care for. Her years of convalescence were surely over. He did not think she was a hard person to find attractive, or to love. She only really talked about it once with him, when she stopped dating an actor she had been seeing. He was a spectacularly handsome man, athletic and about as popular as any man could be who inspired, without effort, the envy he did in other men. He pursued Julia with charm and persistence and flowers. But she never seemed more than lukewarm about the mention of him. And their relationship petered out almost before it properly started. Bill didn’t ask, but on this occasion, Julia told him anyway.

  ‘He always plays the hero,’ she said. ‘His problem, where I’m concerned, is that I have encountered the real thing.’

  ‘And he doesn’t measure up?’

  She smiled. ‘Only in the pictures. In the pictures, he does.’

  But she had friends who were men. There were facets to her that most men found alluring. He asked Sinatra, once, what it was he so much liked about her.

  ‘If I tell you, Bill, you’re sworn to secrecy,’ he said.

  ‘You can trust me, Frank.’

  ‘You’re a lawyer, Bill. I can’t. That’s why you have to swear.’

  ‘I swear.’

  ‘She never flirts with me,’ Sinatra said.

  ‘Come on, Frank.’

  ‘Never,’ he said. ‘That’s what I like about her, Bill. She’s unique.’

  She went to the Lawford party and Frank and Sammy were there and Leonard Bernstein and Mailer and Hepburn and Monroe and others, most of them in a marquee Lawford had thankfully thought to have pitched, because rain hissed out of a pewter sky that showed no sign of clearing. The guests were enjoying themselves anyway. At a table at one end of the marquee, Sinatra had organized what he called children’s activities, which basically meant a high-stakes poker game. At the other end of the tent, Sammy Davis taught dance routines and conjuring tricks to the children their famous parents had brought along. Outside, a few people braved the rain in scattered groups while table umbrellas dripped a fringe of droplets onto them. Julia said hello to people and commiserated with the already tipsy host about the rain. Then she helped herself to a glass of rum punch and looked for a vacant table outside. There was the odour of cigar smoke in the tent. It was not strong, but it was persistent and a smell Julia habitually avoided for the dark memories it kindled in her. She found a table and sat and sipped her drink, squinting, for a hint of light, at the sky. There was none.

  ‘And that’s when he came over,’ she told Bill.

  He was alone. Rain darkened the shoulders and lapels of his grey sack suit. He had his hands thrust into the coat pockets in a gesture that to Julia looked awkward and shy. He was tall and thin and had poor posture and a dense thicket of reddish brown hair brushed too low across his forehead. He was not handsome. He was not handsome the way you saw men every day in the business she was in. But it was hard to take your eyes away from him. He was compelling, particularly when he smiled, which he did quickly, as though doing so made him self-conscious so that he had to get the smiling business over with. He shook hands formally and introduced himself and asked her permission to join her at her table.

  ‘I’ve read your book,’ she told him.

  He said he was flattered. And they talked for half an hour before Sinatra and Lawford came over and took him away to introduce some casino people keen to meet him from Las Vegas.

  ‘He’s going to be president, Bill.’

  ‘There’s a surprising number of guys in very softly upholstered rooms.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Think they’re Napoleon.’

  ‘He is, though.’

  ‘An Irish Catholic president?’

  ‘Meet him and see. He’s marked for something. I think for greatness.’

  Bill had never seen her like this. ‘I bet he was tough on Russia. Talking to a Pole?’

  ‘He isn’t cynical at all.’

  ‘He’s a politician.’

  ‘He has strength, Bill. I don’t mean the physical kind. He’s quite hesitant in his movements and much too thin. But he has steel in him. And he has grace.’

  And he sure as hell has your vote, thought Bill, who had never seen Julia so alive to any subject outside Natasha. He didn’t know what to make of it. It had come so unexpectedly. It was like some kinds of religious conversion he had read about. It was like she had been exposed to the power of revelation. He didn’t know whether to be happy or alarmed for her. He didn’t know Kennedy, had never met him, although he supposed they must belong to some of the same clubs. Then again Kennedy had been a Harvard man and Bill had gone to Yale.

  ‘I want to do this,’ Julia said. ‘I want to do something worthwhile.’

  ‘Do what, exactly?’

  ‘He gave a short speech at the Lawford house. He delivered it in
the marquee and had to contend with bored children, confined by the rain, bickering at his feet. Also Lawford, who was drunk, interrupted a couple of times with what he thought were witticisms. Kennedy laughed off the noise and the interruptions. But the speech itself was poor. If he could get the passion of his conversation into his speechmaking, then his speeches would be wonderful. And I think I can help him achieve that.’

  ‘You’re going to work for him?’ Bill was incredulous.

  Julia nodded. ‘Voluntarily. Someone from his office is going to call me.’

  ‘Don’t hold your breath,’ Bill said.

  But somebody did call. Ted Sorensen called the following week and Julia was invited to Hyannis Port to discuss the collaboration further. By this time Bill had done some research on Kennedy. It was preliminary stuff, but the one constant that kept coming up was the presidential hopeful’s track record with women. Bill felt obliged to caution Julia. She was a grown-up girl and tough, but he didn’t want her savagely disabused of her new ideals at the compound owned by the Kennedy family on the seashore in the East.

  ‘I’ve heard all that stuff too,’ she said. ‘But he’s invited Natasha along. This is an opportunity for me to do something I can be proud of. I’m going, Bill. Natasha too. We’re going.’

  She rang off, then, called away to help Natasha with an essay her daughter had to complete before their departure for Massachusetts. Natasha was fifteen now and the precocity had not dulled. But her mother had a gift for languages and could help her with her French assignments and Bill thought help with homework was one way in which Julia ensured she stayed close to her sometimes wilful and secretive girl. Bill was in his den. He still had the phone in his hand. He would, habitually, have held a drink in the other, were it not holding a copy of the Kennedy book, which he had now read himself. Profiles in Courage had earned its author a Pulitzer Prize. Well, it had earned Jack Kennedy a Pulitzer Prize. There was a widely held belief that the book had been written on his behalf, probably by the loyal and erudite Sorensen. Or maybe the book was the work of the loyal and erudite Arthur Schlesinger. When it came to aides, Kennedy certainly had a following among the loyal and the erudite.