by John Updike
Arnie explained to her why she would be a lucky girl to sign up with Columbia. “Listen,” he said, “this is 1951, not 1937. Fox, Metro, Paramount, Warner—they’re all fucked up still from being forced to cough up their theatre chains. Columbia never had any theatres; until the war it was purely B movies and Frank Capra. More important, it’s the only major studio with a practical attitude toward television. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em: Cohn may be an ape but he’s not the dumb ape people take him for. He’s created a subsidiary to make TV movies—Columbia Screen Gems. They finance production with sales of their old movies to television. Clever? Clever. The dinosaurs are giving way to the mammals, sweetheart, and Columbia’s the only studio growing fur.”
For her black-and-white screen test Alma did Sabina’s two concluding speeches from The Skin of Our Teeth (beginning “Mr. Antrobus, don’t mind what I say. I’m just an ordinary girl …” and “Oh, oh, oh. Six o’clock and the master not home yet”) and then sang “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man of Mine.” For her color test, without sound, she chatted with the cameraman as he came in close, manipulating his focus. He showed her how movie cameras work, the two wheels for up and down and sideways, and how when you get to be really good you can write your name with a pen attached to the lens. He asked her out to dinner but she and Arnie had to fly back to New York. After two weeks he brought word that Columbia had pretty much liked what they had seen but the guy who had an in with Cohn reported that Harry had been troubled by her lips—her upper lip, specifically. It was too thin. There was an easy operation, Arnie told her. They inject collagen.
But it didn’t feel easy; she woke in her hospital room with its expensive gray view of the East River and Welfare Island feeling she had been punched in the face, hard, by a telescoping succession of men. While they were at it they had taken two little tucks in her nostril-wings as well, paring them down, and straightened the little bump at the bridge of her nose, just like Momma’s. Wounds heal fast, however, when you’re only twenty-one; on her next flying trip west, all the men’s heads turned when she coolly walked down the airplane aisle to the little blue lavatory, with its whispering toilet. When he saw her, the head of new talent, on orders from above, proposed a seven-year optional contract, beginning at two hundred fifty a week for the first six months and going up to thirty-five hundred a week for the seventh year. She said it sounded nice but she could not sign without her agent’s approval. Arnie had been overworked and under the weather—he kept talking about giving up smoking and had been impotent with her a few times in his place on West Sixty-sixth Street. Alma had flown out alone. The talent head, a man called Max, was impressed by her resistance and after several phone calls told her that Mr. Cohn would like to see her.
Compared to the great acreages that Paramount and M-G-M occupied, the Columbia lot was a modest fourteen-acre hodge-podge bought bit by bit on old Poverty Row, on Sunset Boulevard, between Gower Street and Beachwood Drive down to Fountain Avenue. But Harry Cohn’s own office was huge, and where people pushed the outer door open the paint had been eaten off by the sweaty palms. The room smelled of cigars the way Addison’s Drug Store used to, and this soothed Alma’s nervousness. Cohn, the last of the monster moguls, had turned sixty, and Columbia was riding high for the moment. He was more businesslike and polite than she had expected. He wore a pale-gray suit, his white necktie with its silver scribble no doubt a Countess Mara; a red-bordered handkerchief was artfully fluffed out of his breast pocket. His nearly bald brow was fabulously broad, like that of a bison or rhino, whose lowered head is its fiercest weapon. He stayed standing behind his desk until she took the dove-gray chair an underling held for her. The pugnacious set of his face reminded her of Mr. Horley at the post office—he had been crusty and mean on the outside but had always liked Essie, she could tell, ever since the time he put her in a mail sack and pulled shut the drawstring and told her he was sending her to Cincinnati.
“A lot of young ladies would jump at that contract,” Cohn told her, unsmiling.
“I am jumping, Mr. Cohn,” she said. “But what’s that expression—look before you leap? Your friend Arnie Fineman has been wonderful to me; I depend on him.”
“My friend who?” he asked, and added, “In this business yesterday’s friend is today’s pain in the ass.” His eyes kept flicking, to her new, plumper lip—or was it that she was still self-conscious about it? It felt stiff when she smiled. Harry Cohn tried to smile back. He had a wide wry mouth that related uneasily to the dark flat stare of his beetle-browed eyes. He had had his way so often, he had pushed so many people around, that his expression had become as blank as the end of a battering ram. “Saw your test,” he said. “You can’t act for shit yet, but you’ve got a glimmer of what Rita had—has.” He had still not given up on the disintegrating star who had carried his studio through the Forties. But he was looking for another. He reminded her, as he talked, less of Jeb Horley than of the high-school principal, Mr. Pritchard, with his carefully groomed dwindling gray hair and froglike mouth and crafty way, behind his bossy front, of trying to pick up the secrets the young always have. Mr. Pritchard would turn severe when a boy or girl did something really bad, but then talked about it afterwards with a kind of twinkle. “Flesh is funny stuff,” Harry Cohn announced. “A lot of it, even on a girl you think is a great looker, photographs as pasty dead meat. What you want is flesh with candlepower. Harlow had it. Clara Bow had it. Am I losing you?”
“No. This is interesting, Mr. Cohn. I loved the movies since I was a little girl.”
“I bet you did. You and everybody else. L.A. is drowning in twat, and don’t forget it. Lift your head. Yeah. Good job. Now you got a mouth that goes with your body. And a refined nose. I don’t see you as any Hepburn, I’ll tell you right out. You got an ass; Hepburn never did. One bony broad—who needs more? You’ve got a dirty side, can you go along with that? You’re no God-damn Alice Adams. You got those old-fashioned vamp’s eyes. Your hair—has Arnie or Artie or whoever talked to you about it? It’s that Christ-awful wishy-washy brown.”
“It’s my natural color.”
“Not for me it’s not natural. I see you as an inky brunette, to go with those vamp’s eyes. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We got no contract. Did I tell you, a lot of girls would kill for this contract?”
“I’ll sign the contract, I’m sure. Once Arnie passes on it. But I was wondering, now that fewer films are being made—suppose another studio ever wanted to use me in a picture?”
He relit the big dead cigar in his hand and squinted at her through the smoke. “Then we’d make a deal with our opposites,” he said. “That’s called a loan-out. But you haven’t been in any picture yet. You haven’t posed for a single publicity still yet. You haven’t begun, Miss DeMott, to pay your dues.”
“I know that, Mr. Cohn. I’m very anxious to get started.”
“I mean, O.K., you’ve done some acting on TV. But what’s TV? It’s for kids and paraplegics, that can’t get out of the house to go to the movies.” Alma loved having herself described and discussed, even when the approach was harsh; but she could see the man’s eyes sinking in, weary of her as a subject. “You know what I was doing in 1912?” he asked.
“No, Mr. Cohn.”
“Playing vaudeville with Harry Ruby. Harry Rubenstein. I sang, Harry played ragtime. Before that, I hustled pool and sold hot furs. I was even a trolley-car conductor, till they fired me for raking too much off the fares. They expected a little rake-off, but nothing that ambitious. The joke in my family was they thanked me for bringing back the trolley at night. I’d dropped out of school after my Bar Mitzvah. I had a beautiful voice—tenor. Can you believe that?”
“Yes, I can, Mr. Cohn.”
“First job I had was a singing part in a play, The Fatal Wedding, as a choir boy. Anyway. There I was, hustling, and the movie bug bit me. It bit my brother Jack first. He worked for Carl Laemmle—ever hear of him?”
“No, I don’t think so. I’m s
orry.”
“A great old Hun. I was a song plugger, and I got the idea of plugging songs with movie shorts. I’m on My Way to Dublin Bay was the first—don’t laugh. Theatre owners liked them. Jack and me got Laemmle interested, and one thing led to another. Carl hired me to be secretary, over at Universal City. That’s what brought me out here. I never looked back. The movie bug had bit me, but good. I paid my dues, is the point. We all got dues to pay. Want to sing for me?”
“Sing?”
“Yeah. You know, sing. Belt it out. That phony darky crooning on the test, that wasn’t you.”
Alma stood up and swallowed, trying to breathe from the diaphragm, and gave him the first sixteen bars of “Oh, del mio dolce amor.” Harry Cohn liked it better, she could tell, than the audience in Dover, though he tersely nodded and puffed on his relit cigar, blowing smoke, perhaps accidentally, all over her. “Alma, I got a yacht,” he told her. “You like to come for a cruise sometime?”
“I’d love that,” Alma said. “I’ve never been on a yacht before. Not on any kind of a boat in the Pacific. Would Mrs. Cohn be on board?”
He lowered his head and was like a rhino going to charge. But he then, by some shift in his unfathomable rhino brain, laughed, one dry beat. “Joan,” he told her. “You’d love Joan. She’d like you. She’s always saying she knows there are nice people in Hollywood but she never meets them. My first wife, Rose, was a Christian Scientist. You a Christian Scientist?”
“Oh no,” Alma said, for the first time shocked. Christian Scientists were thought to be quite crazy in Basingstoke—people who refused to call Dr. Jessup even when their leg was broken or they were dying of pneumonia. “I’m a Presbyterian.”
“I bet you are. Well, whatever helps you through the night,” he said, and sighed in dismissal.
Columbia placed her, once under contract, in small non-speaking parts—as a gangster’s black-haired nightclub date in Hayworth’s soggy Affair in Trinidad, as one of the dance-hall “hostesses” in From Here to Eternity, as a motorcycle moll in The Wild One. But it was her two minutes jitterbugging onscreen with a groggy-looking, overweight, over-the-hill Jack Carson (caught on the dance floor while escaping two thuggish hitmen) in a quickie comedy called Sweet and Low that made an impression on audiences. That was followed by her first speaking roles, the haughty salesgirl in the José Ferrer vehicle False Dawn, and Ernest Borgnine’s treacherous, touching Mexican mistress in her first period film, The Gadsden Purchase. This led to her first starring role, opposite Cooper in the less successful High Noon–follow-up, Red Rock Afternoon. As the only woman in the cast—a schoolteacher trying to bring the rudiments of education to Indian children—she was courted and wooed by the film crew to the point that the director complained about circles under her eyes in the morning, and she had a to-do with the fat bitch in charge of make-up. On location there was an away-from-home vacation feeling that could get in the way of the work. Being a star, Alma discovered, was drudgery, tied to the union hours of all the technicians and the teamsters. She had to rise for her seven o’clock make-up call at six, and leave her apartment in West Hollywood just as some of the hookers who lived in the building were returning from Sunset Boulevard. And there were diction lessons, and dance lessons, and posing for publicity stills, and interviews set up with Modern Screen and Screenland, and gruelling hours spent standing in Wardrobe while they poked and prodded for the perfect fit, and more hours under the ungentle hands of the hairdressers—many workdays didn’t end until eight and nine at night. In those days, the film crews still worked Saturdays. She would fall asleep over the script of Monday’s lines, and spend Sunday doing a publicity appearance before a crowd of soldiers about to be shipped off to Korea.
After the Nevada movie with Gable, she insisted to Columbia on no more Westerns. She was sick of hiding her legs in calico skirts. She had grown up on glamour and knew she could project it. Cohn issued his usual blast of threats and profanity, but in 1953 they arranged a loan-out to Paramount for a musical, with a typically long title of the era, The Last Time We Saw Topeka. It was filmed in Paramount’s brilliant answer to Fox’s CinemaScope—VistaVision, whose film fed horizontally and could be projected at variable widths, depending on the theatre’s screen capabilities. It seemed to Alma she and the rest of the cast (Dan Dailey, Vera-Ellen, Oscar Levant, Kathryn Grant, Georges Guetary) were always lining up for wide shots, with those on the ends worrying that they would be cut out of projection on the standard screens that still occupied most of the movie theatres. But no one who ever saw the film (the box office was disappointing) would ever forget Alma’s crooning of “Melancholy Baby” while stretched out at full length on heliotrope sheets in a dress of scarlet satin slit, it seemed, all the way up her immense white thigh, like a white Caddy fender without the fin. Her strongest impression, however, was made not as a glamour queen but as a fiery waif, a woman wronged and wronging, flawed by more desire and impatience and restlessness than society could accommodate, in those gritty noir melodramas whereby smoldering Fifties discontent sought expression—The Delinquents, Safe at Your Peril, Howl from the Streets, Trouble in Memphis, and, most daringly, Colored Entrance. In this last, she became the first actress to bestow a screen kiss upon a black man, though on his forehead; in Safe at Your Peril she risked a brief but breakthrough nude scene, from the back and in an indistinct middle distance, a misty-woods skinny-dip viewed by an escaped lunatic (Richard Widmark) with a bowie knife. In all these roles her hair was left dark, though sometimes short and curly in a poodle-cut, and sometimes with bangs and to the shoulders, with a pageboy roll and a moody Stanwyckish swing and toss.
She had been there, the audiences felt—in the musty back seats of Plymouths, at the lunch-hour sock hops, in the alleyway behind the drug store and the ice-cream parlor, at the edge of town with its stupefying view of rural emptiness. Alma had paid her dues, out in the desolate America of earning and spending and eating and breeding and listening for the music, in a way the princesses Grace and Audrey had not. Kim and Marilyn had paid or were paying theirs, but somehow numbly, with anesthetized blonde wits; it was Alma’s heartbreaking gift to suggest that she was fully aware, knowing more than she could say, more than the script could say, even as the plot demanded that she be cast out—murdered, exiled, imprisoned—for failing to conform. Each movie, under the Production Code dating back to 1934, was a moral mechanism that had to function toward the elimination of all defective parts. As the Alma-character was borne off by the inevitable censorious rectitude of the script, audiences felt that something precious in themselves was being carried away, in this land of promise where yearning never stops short at a particular satisfaction but keeps moving on, into the territory beyond.
She was surprised at how easily she located in herself a tragic vein, she who had been raised in such a sweet small town, by such loving parents and grandparents. But, when the script demanded she shriek or weep—and not once, but for take after take, until her eyes were red with the salt of tears and her lips sore with being contorted—she was able to worm through her memories and find something terrible and irrevocable enough to feed grief: Momma’s poor stunted foot; Daddy going around and around the town like a stupid wind-up toy because everything else scared him; Ama widowed so young and stirring all those heavy unhealthy sweet things on the stove and stirring by telephone the sickly messes of unhappiness cooked up in her church circles. Grandma Sifford dead of cancer, shrivelling up in her bed like a poisoned aphid, leaving the old farmer to bumble around in his greenhouse alone, the wilts and spots thriving and the putty slowly crumbling from the overlapped panes, everything that needed tending slipping away from him. So much loneliness in living, so much waste. So much unredeemable loss. And the grandfather she had never known fallen into a shining white hole of damnation forever. And pretty-lipped slender-headed Benjy Whaley condemned to life as a grease monkey and knowing just enough to hate his fate, like a zoo animal whose instincts keep telling him there is something beyond his c
age; and Patrick trapped too, though he got better every year at being supercilious and idle, to hide his romantic dreams of being carried off somehow like a bride in a Redbook story; and Arnie with his Scarsdale wife and kids and crumbling health, coughing and hardly able to climb a single flight of stairs or get it up for the fanciest call-girl in Manhattan; and poor Mr. Bear with his tiddlywink eyes, always so faithful, always listening to her childish chatter and letting her hug him, hug and snuggle so she could fall asleep, and now up in the Locust Street attic gathering dust and staring at nothing and wondering why that little girl never comes to play with him, never comes to say hello …
“Cut. Print. Wunderwerk, Alma. We came in even closer then; your eyes were stupendous.”
She was modest, efficient. “Fred, please—if you decide you need yet another take, I’ll need at least half an hour to cool down my poor eyeballs. Where’s my Murine?”