In the Beauty of the Lilies

by John Updike

  “O.K., O.K.,” Arnie Fineman said, in this high office where the Venetian blinds turned the sun into stripes and there were signed pictures of stars on the walls just as in her bedroom. “Now pucker.”

  “P-pucker?”

  “Make a mouth at me. What the frogs call a moue. Pout. Think kiss, Esther. Think melting point. You’re creaming in your pants.”

  She put her hands on her thighs and bent her body into an S to bring her face down to Arnold Fineman’s level, blushing and feeling humiliated that Patrick had to watch this. She feared that such a display would put him further off heterosexuality. But then with a little push of inspiration from behind she got into it, shuddering her eyelids at half-mast and thinking directly into Fineman’s face, You little kike shit, some day you’ll pay for this.

  Fineman gingerly smiled. She saw he had a motherly, worried side. He was not only short but so stooped in the shoulders he looked hunchbacked. “O.K., Esther—good try. Great try. You could use more upper lip. Maybe you can do it with lipstick. And the hair—we gotta take it in some direction or other. Your boyfriend here says you sing. Give me a song.”

  “With no piano?”

  “I’ll hum along. Only don’t make it ‘Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.’ Jesus.” The song saturated the air this plangent December; it was hard to chase the tune from her mind. “Mule Train” and “Ghost Riders in the Sky”—one of the girls at the Barbizon could do a very funny Frankie Laine, with a hair-dryer as a microphone. “ ‘Some enchanted evening,’ ” Fineman began in a surprisingly rich baritone, “ ‘you vill see a straaanger.…’ ”

  “ ‘You will see a stranger,’ ” she chimed in thrillingly, amazed that he hit upon an operatic song. They carried on the duet until they ran out of words, and straggled off into laughter. “O.K., O.K.,” he said. “Deanna Durbin you ain’t quite, but I’m sold. As far as I’m concerned we’re in business. Fifteen percent off the top from you, from me lots of hustle and a screen test as soon as we can rig it. The studios are panicked right now—box office is down, bad press is up—but when haven’t they been? From where I’m sitting, you’re special, Esther. Satin skin on an iron frame, not-bad knockers, and eyes like they haven’t seen since Pola Negri. The nose—yeah, well, they can smooth it out with make-up and lights. Only one other thing I don’t like. The name. Who the hell’d ever shell out fifty cents to see Esther Wilmot? She sounds like a Sunday-school teacher. Let’s think about this. Sit.”

  As she sat there, her satin cheeks burning with the abrasion of his rough praise, so that she felt a pressure in her face as if dangling upside down on the playground jungle gym, Fineman stared and absurdly opened his mouth like a baby bird, making the halting sound “Ah … ah …”

  “Anna?” Patrick suggested.

  “We call my grandmother Ama,” she said.

  Fineman’s lips closed and he announced, “How about Alma? You look like an Alma to me. Sweet but sexy. Kind of mysterious-European, yet salt of the American earth. Alma. It’s yours. It’s all yours. Can you think of any other Alma who’s a star?”

  “A star?” she asked.

  “What else?” asked Arnie. “Is it bit parts you want?”

  “Does it sound a little … Negro?” Patrick asked.

  “Let it; hell. One look, they see she’s not. Alma Wilmot. No, terrible. Wilmot, will not. Wilmot will not do. No, no, Nanette. Any ideas, you two?”

  “It would be nice,” said Esther, “to keep something of my real name. I don’t want to … my family …” Those little white faces, watching her rocket go up, getting smaller and smaller, the state of Delaware just a sliver, its round head buried in Pennsylvania’s underside like a leech. She thought of the du Ponts, so grand, so distant from little Basingstoke.

  “De … de …” she said.

  “De Mille, de Havilland,” Patrick prompted, trying to be helpful.

  “DeMott,” she announced.

  “Spell it,” said Arnie, not convinced.

  “Capital ‘D,’ no space, capital ‘M.’ Alma DeMott.”

  He was writing it out. “Mutt, demote, I don’t know, kid.”

  “It’s right,” Alma insisted. “Surely I have some say in my own name.”

  “Let’s sit on it. We’ll discuss it at dinner tonight. Twenty-One, on Fifty-second, sound O.K. to you?” Arnie remembered Patrick’s presence, and, standing hunched and looking toward him with a grimace of politeness, said, “Unless …?”

  “Oh, no, that would be lovely,” Alma intervened. “He’s not … He’s my cousin.” She had stopped herself from saying, Not one of us.

  But he was, he was one of the family she was deserting, even in name.

  As it happened, Alma would play opposite, within the next few years, both Gary Cooper and (in new wide-screen CinemaScope) Clark Gable. She was virtually unknown and cheap, and in those early years of the Fifties, as the great studios were slowly disintegrating, proven stars had begun to demand such large fees that corners had to be cut on the budget elsewhere. Both Coop and Gable had turned fifty in 1951, and it was not then as clear as it later became that male film stars from the classic Thirties era had no end to their careers but death. These screen gods had human worries. Cooper had a bad back, which the action scenes aggravated cruelly; he had an ulcer and arthritis. His Catholic wife was refusing to give him a divorce, and he was not finding much ease in his overpublicized affair with Patricia Neal. He seemed bone-tired. There was in his gentle, courteous treatment of Alma on the set the weary proficiency of an angelically handsome man who had handled in his days more pretty young women than he could count or remember. Accustomed to making an impression, she was offended, down deep, and became almost contemptuous. There was a quiet about Cooper, and a taciturn passivity in the hands of the director, that approached stupidity. Alma, even as a novice, established herself as a resister on the set, an actress with her own ideas and her own image to foster. As ardent on the seventh take as on the first, she felt in Cooper’s arms the full edge of her much greater youth and energy and desire. Yet, seeing the first rough cut of the film (they would never let an ingenue see the rushes) and then the final product at the premiere, she was astonished at how Cooper dominated the screen—at how his leathery face, with its baleful Nordic eyes and slightly frozen mouth, so inert-seeming in the cluttered glare of the sound stage, possessed a steady inner life beside which her own apparition was flickering, nervous, discontinuous. She heard traces of her Delaware vowels and saw a shining fright in her eyes. The director’s and film editor’s ability to shape her performance, to whittle it after the event, by their editing of the footage, amazed and maddened her, until Coop told her, one long lunch break as he drove her out to Malibu in his famous silver Jaguar, “Don’t fight it, Willie.” He had found out her real name and teased her with it. “Trust the machine. Else you’ll get an ulcer bad as mine. Hundreds of folks have a job that feeds into a motion picture. You’ve seen it—eighty men to do the sets and lighting alone. Your job is, know your lines and show up fit two hours ahead of camera call.” He reached over, while the wind rushed past and the sun beat sparkling dents in the Pacific below, and cupped his hand around her skull in its fluttering bandana and gently shook it back and forth like a container. “That’s all you’re responsible for, what’s inside you and what comes out. Let Production do the rest. Tell yourself they know what they’re doing, even when it seems they don’t.” They—the inscrutable and myriad powers, the production chiefs and assistants and directors and script girls and electricians and cameramen and focus pullers and costumers and make-up artists, who processed their faces and sighs onto thousands of screens. In afterthought he said, “For a job, it don’t pay half bad. Beats being a ranch hand, I can tell you that. Must beat something back in Delaware.” And with the merest self-mocking twitch of those immobile lips he actually added, “Yup.”

  Gable was more engageable—a woman’s man who had climbed up from Ohio’s oil fields on a ladder of female sponsors, beginning with his stepm
other. He flirted with Alma, turning on that slowly spreading smile like a ruthless squeeze of superior strength. A few times, in the thirsty, dusty weeks of the Nevada location shoot, he slept with her, like a sleepy lion obliging a female cub. But the times didn’t add up to anything more; there was in Gable a loneliness too big for Alma to begin to fill. Where Cooper was a sublime accident, who had cartooned and ranched and bummed about before backing into acting as a crowd extra, Gable had never been anything but an aspiring actor. He thought in billboard terms. He had loved Lombard; in a Hollywood that had matched him with its every giantess from Jean Harlow to Ava Gardner, Lombard, all soft gay golden toughness, a foul-mouthed publicity hound and frenetic practical joker, had been his heart’s match, and she had smashed herself against a mountain while trying to sell war bonds. He had been so long a star he had forgotten how to find mortal satisfactions; in his loneliness he finally found a wife on a sufficient scale of glamour, the widow of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., with the heavenly name of Lady Sylvia Ashley, and knew three weeks after the wedding that he had made a critical casting mistake. He was suffering the financial pains of their divorce wrangle while he and Alma co-starred. Ever since the war, his hands had a palsied tremor which had to be hidden from the cameras. Gable was unduly dependent, Alma felt, on the approval of lesser men—the technical riffraff of grips and stuntmen that accompanies a film crew into the desert—and on whiskey; in the morning, his breath, locked into his mouth by his false teeth, stank with the fumes of last night’s bonding jaunt to the bars of Elko. But his breath didn’t show on film; what showed was—blown up by CinemaScope to the size of Egypt’s Sphinx—the peerless straight brow, the shapely fierce eyebrows, the sense of a benign force that had wedged those cheeks and lips and chin together into such a pure harmony, male beauty without a touch of the other, feminine kind. Alma liked to play with his ears, which protruded even more than her own. He called her Al, she called him Pops. Both Coop and Clark were two years older than her father, and helped her understand him, as a man of a generation tempered in hard times. Beasts of burden all but a few of them, they were unable to explain themselves and unapologetic about the lack; sons of an America where the Bible still ruled, they were justified in all their limitations by the Protestant blessing bestowed upon hardship and hardness. With Gable and Cooper, this bleakness was sexy, though her father had never struck her as so. He was the least sexy man she had ever known.

  At the “21” Club, once a speakeasy and still a low crowded place, with model airplanes and other wartime souvenirs cluttering the ceiling, her future was coming close but not yet arrived. One of Arnie Fineman’s first questions had been, “How do you feel about television?”

  “I hate it,” she said hastily, a silver gimlet having already slipped down her throat. She didn’t know how to drink but had the idea, from overhearing Aunt Esther and Uncle Peter talk, that gin drinks didn’t put on weight like whiskey did.

  “Why is that?”

  She realized she just loved the movies and hated anything that was hurting them the way television was. “It seems cheap and ugly,” she said. “It’s l-like r-reality, only it’s in a box and has commercials.”

  Arnie put his plump hand, broad and uncallused like her father’s but manicured, over hers. Reddish hair sprouted glinting between his knuckles. He wore a glossy black stone in a chunky ring on one finger and a broad band on another, a wedding band, she realized. He said, “Hate it, love it, it’s here to stay, and it eats up bodies, babe. It’s a quick way to get a girl exposure. Has Wexler had you do any commercial spots?” When she said no, he said, “I’ll talk to him. Millions see these damn things. Also, there’s a lot of drama on, night and day. Not bad experience, and you’re in and out in a week or two. You rehearse, you do it, you walk away. Like Hollywood in the old days. Hollywood’s slowing down. Even with the contacts, it takes a month of begging to get a screen test. Let’s not just sit around on our pretty little asses, huh?”

  She felt the second gimlet twisting agreeably within her. The level of raucous male conversation in the restaurant seemed to rise and uplift her drifting body. The little gimcrack airplanes on the ceiling banked and as if under a high sun she basked in the realization that her new agent would take more masterful care of her than Wexler ever had, or faintly pathetic Patrick, and that to all of the questions Arnie would pose this evening she would answer yes.

  He had a little in-town apartment on West Sixty-sixth Street, where he stayed some nights while his wife and two teen-age sons held the fort out in Scarsdale. She was fascinated overhearing his phone call home explaining the sudden business that would keep him in town; it was like being behind the set during a play, and wondering how anybody out in the audience could believe it, it was so obviously fake.

  She made television commercials demonstrating the new Electrolux, making easy strokes back and forth and showing how the alternate brushes and nozzles were compactly stored within the wheeled cylinder. Dial soap and Nestlés Quik were among the new products she dramatized for a minute or two, in live commercials. For the former, she daringly undertook a shower, produced from a perforated bucket under the hot lights, clad below in the bottom of a bathing suit and above in an abundance of lather, turning her breasts away from the camera, its tiny red eye burning as it licked her up. Those early television studios were makeshift and drab—addresses in the vicinity of the Chrysler Building or Union Square, up six flights in a freight elevator and down a linoleum-floored corridor with custard-yellow walls. Everybody seemed, like her, to be not long out of high school. Not all her assignments were in Manhattan. For a small station in Bridgeport she performed with Pillsbury cake mixes, while an off-camera announcer explained the miracle of their ease—“no more wasted kitchen hours slaving with flour and sugar, butter and eggs! Throw away that tired old eggbeater!!”—and at another, in Newark, she was the middle of a trio of models illustrating the range of Miss Clairol tints. For some weeks she was a candidate for Miss Rheingold, and her face, in a fussy good-girl perm that just covered her ears, hovered like a blimp above Times Square. Minute Rice, Corningware—Arnie was afraid of her being typecast. “No more food, for Chrissakes,” he decreed. “Your image will get to be a drudge. It’ll get fat.”

  “It’s my grandmother in me,” Alma explained. “Oh, how I used to love being in the kitchen with her! When she’d let me stir and taste the icing, I felt so responsible!”

  Arnie found her roles in the television dramas that were proliferating night and day. Lux Video Theatre, Goodyear TV Playhouse, Robert Montgomery Presents—she was called a few days before the show aired, to be a hat-check girl, a troubled young nun, a “daffy” roommate, a distraught wife, the cool and calculating “other” woman. Rehearsals were hectic and few; and were sometimes confined to the morning before the play went on. She learned to memorize dialogue swiftly, and to rememorize it when the director changed it all around ten minutes before air time. People held up cards spelling out your dialogue in large letters behind the cameras, but it was a mistake to focus on the prompt card and ignore the face of the actor supposedly engaging your passion. One of the few times she stuttered on air was when a man held her cue card upside down. Alma almost never stuttered, except when she remembered she was Essie. There was an urgent forward flow of television action and passion that didn’t allow for self-doubt. Drinks spilled, lines were garbled, phones failed to ring on cue, paintings fell off the wall when a door was slammed; it didn’t greatly matter. The drama was being flung into living rooms where drinks were being spilled, people were getting up to go to the bathroom, children were noisily fighting, dogs were at the door begging to be let out. Television was people; an insidious mutually forgiving dishevelment permeated the studio, with its flimsy pseudo-rooms and its tangle of snaking cables just off camera. It was a far cry from the luxurious polish and perfection of Hollywood films as Essie had viewed them back at the Roxie.

  Arnie at last did secure her a screen test with Columbia. He had an in with
a man who had an in with Harry Cohn. “Even so, kid, these things take time. The bigger they are, the less they like being rushed. And Cohn, let me warn you, in an industry loaded with crude and ruthless pricks, is absolute tops. Every year he would get the Oscar for biggest bastard.”

  Alma had never flown in an airplane before, and not only was she terrified but she didn’t understand how to let the tray down when the stewardess came clinking along the aisle. Arnie had come with her, and his friendly red-haired paw reached across to undo the latch, and he murmured to her explanations of why the plane’s propellors kept changing pitch and why the whole thing, a long can with them in it, kept tilting and dropping. Her stomach cried out that God had left her, He didn’t exist, she was going to fall to the earth below as from a hideously tall tree and never be any more than the nameless girl in the Pillsbury ad. She should never have aspired to this height. Her bra felt soaked; she was lactating acrophobic sweat. Arnie gruffly murmured, “It’s like waves in the ocean, babe. You can’t see them, but they’re there. Air is like water, always moving. But this aluminum boat we’re in—hey, these DC-9s are solid.” He rapped on the curved wall beside his little chilly oval window and it gave off a dull, padded sound.

  But Los Angeles itself—the palm trees, the pink low houses, the Spanishness, the endlessness, the air like the air of a late-spring day in Basingstoke only purged of the chill that would gust in off the Delaware—enchanted her. The city as its sections flowed one into another was as full of people and stores and cars as any city in the East but strained clean of the grit back there, the history and industry. There was nothing old except the Spanish names and the La Brea Tar Pits, which did exist, on Wilshire Boulevard just as they said on the Jack Benny program, where mentioning them had always gotten a laugh; all the names and places on Jack Benny were here, including the towns called out by the railroad announcer’s voice: Anaheim, Azusa, and Cucamonga. And the Brown Derby and the big letters posed raggedly on the hillside to say HOLLYWOOD. Hollywood was almost a little town like Basingstoke. She was not prepared, though, for the width of the streets and sidewalks and the winding palm-lined streets of Beverly Hills, where there was no live person in sight but Japanese and Mexican gardeners wheeling dead palm fronds out from behind hedges of oleander and fuchsia. The big half-hidden tile-roofed houses looked owned but not lived-in, like movie sets. The wealth here was gentle wealth, humorous wealth even; these fortunes derived from art and illusion and personal beauty and not, as back home, from cruel old riverside mills manufacturing some ugly and stupid necessity like Trojans or bottle caps.