In the Beauty of the Lilies

by John Updike

  She had become a comedienne by letting herself be infected with Crosby’s marvellous lazy lightness, in banter that felt ad-libbed even when carefully rehearsed. Unlike her other leading men, Crosby owed little of his success to physical handsomeness. He had conquered the worlds of radio, recording, and film with sheer performance; as a boy in Spokane, he excelled at any sport he took up, and was so clever at school the Jesuits had hoped to make a trial lawyer of him. The aging crooner’s occasional flashes of impatience and coldness did not alienate her. A certain inhuman efficiency had to lie at the heart of such achievements. She observed in him what she already sensed in herself, the danger of becoming a performer purely, of coming alive in proportion to the size of the audience, and being absent-minded and remote when the audience was small. She knew enough Irishmen—Patrick, for one, and the bachelor algebra teacher back in Basingstoke, Mr. O’Brien, and Spencer Tracy and Donald O’Connor, and indeed until the emergence of the Jews hadn’t the Irish been the soul of American entertainment?—to understand how an unflappable charm and wit could enwrap a pinched, rigid private morality, a spoiled priesthood. She, too, had her religion. She had trouble understanding how people could doubt God’s existence: He was so clearly there, next to her, interwoven with her, a palpable pressure, as vital as the sensations in her skin, as dependable as her reflection in the mirror. When, in the wake of her dawn risings, she submitted under the merciless make-up lights to the probing, licking, stabbing ministrations of greasepaint sponge, eyebrow pencil, and eyelash brush, and let her hair be tightly drawn around the horrible dead-looking rats—those hairy net sausages she had once found in Ama’s bureau drawer—to form her Gibson-girl pompadour, and her waist was cinched into the boned corset and every pleat and velvet ribbon of her lace bertha and shirred and flounced hobble skirt was smoothed and pinned into perfection, and her dog collar of brilliants and pearls was hooked snug around her throat and her high hairdo precariously topped with a large black velvet “Gainsborough” hat trimmed with ostrich plumes, then Alma held herself in the back of the Lincoln limousine that carried her from the makeup rooms to the sound stage like a sacred statue, her weight balanced on one buttock on the seat’s edge, her gloved fingertips braced against the back of the seat to minimize the pressure that might wrinkle or disarrange a single fold of cloth, her eyes held wide open under the load of cream and kohl and belladonna, her painted lips ajar and unspeaking, and eased herself out of the limousine to offer up with a static priestly reverence her image to the cameras.

  Yet sixteen months were to pass before she made another film. The critics applauded the new, light, “good” Alma DeMott, but the public was not so sure. Casey and His Strawberry Blonde, as the remake was lengthily retitled, was not the box-office smash it needed to be in this era of soaring costs and budget overruns. A sprightly, singing, Technicolor innocence was not enough to bring the public in from the steady drizzle of television. Musicals, except for M-G-M’s cut-rate series of Presley vehicles, were a thing of the past. So, in a strange way, were film goddesses; women, however gorgeously shadowed and intricately vexed, had lost their sway over the box office, perhaps because housewives were staying home, tending the electronic fires. Phenomena like Garbo and Crawford and Greer Garson required the complicity of discontented, dreaming women. Despite the growing stir of Fifties feminism, American women of the Depression and the war had had more practical equality, more of the stature that earning power brings. The scripts Columbia offered Alma held ever smaller and more disagreeable female parts, in a poisoned male world where Tony Curtis licked Burt Lancaster’s boots or Ben Gazzara invited homosexual bullying at a military school. She complained to Arnie, “Bring back the Communists—at least they could write parts for women. The scripts now are all by kids, writing for kids.” Including, she did not add, the curly-haired kid she was living with.

  Arnie and Alma were lying naked together in his suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, since the young scriptwriter, Matt Lazlo, had moved into her house on Montevideo Drive and hung around “working” all day. Her beloved agent puffed a semi-medicinal Salem to hide his embarrassment over his impotence, which they had spent a sweaty hour proving to themselves. He would have it, and then his mind would begin to wander, back to Scarsdale or the MCA offices in Rockefeller Center. Or was it her mind that began to wander, at the very moment when his prick was growing slightly harder in her mouth? It was one of those surprisingly dark-skinned pricks Mediterranean men have, as if grafted from an African race. Though ritually circumcised, it tasted rancid. Its spark had become very delicate, and needed a concentrated passion to flare up. Like a camera, it sensed any faking. With her young lover, Alma’s mind could be a million miles away and he would come off in three minutes and think she was the greatest lay since Cleopatra. “Babe, the industry’s all shook up,” Arnie explained, relieved to be performing with words. “There’s no such thing as a sure thing any more. Even Esther Williams bombed for M-G-M, and then that big proxy fight. When you got mutiny on the flagship, the whole fleet’s in trouble. Pickford and Chaplin have sold out of U.A. Hughes made a mess at RKO and sold out. Warner’s sold off its library. TV’s the buzzard, we’re the carcass. CinemaScope’s pooped. People get bored with gadgets; they even got bored with sound, at first. The old hardball guys, the guys with a nose for the public, are dying. Mayer, and now your guy Cohn.” He snorted, and hot cigarette ash toppled into his gray chest hair, sending up a scent of singe. She was thinking she’d love to get into the bathroom for some mouthwash. “That was a funny gag,” Arnie said, “about Cohn giving people what they want. But so many showed up at his funeral because they knew it was their funeral.”

  “I liked Harry.”

  “I know you did. He liked you. Nice Gentile girls that wouldn’t fuck him, he had a great respect for.”

  “Who says I didn’t fuck him?” Perhaps jealousy would rouse him. Her sexual failure rankled. It was like a flop at the box office; your whole self was on the line. Men might think they were crazy for virgins, but in her Hollywood experience what turned men on was a woman they knew had been used by other, bigger men. A way of getting in touch: channels.

  “My friend of a friend says.” He sucked smoke down twice and let a thin yellow-blue vapor bounce out with his words. “Don’t tell me I was misinformed.” She squeezed Arnie’s muscleless bare arm, in amused salute to the Bogart echo. He mistook perhaps the message behind the squeeze, and announced, staring at the ceiling, “Speaking of dying, Alma, count me in. My doc says my cardio-vascular system is that of an eighty-year-old man. And my grandfathers on both sides lived to their nineties, back in Poland.”

  “There’s a price I guess for leaving Poland.”

  “Helluva price for staying, too.” To bring them back from these abysses he sighed and said, “You’ve done great, kid. I’m a hundred percent proud of you. A scruffy kid from Delaware without even a straight nose at first.”

  She toyed with the frizzy gray hair above his ear, a translucent ear with its own silky coating of colorless fuzz. “Then how come I’m not working?”

  “That’s the reason. You’re a star. Your price has gone too high.”

  Thirty-five hundred a week had years ago become too little; there had been two renegotiations, and two idle threats of suspension, and at last Columbia had released her from the final year of her contract. She was on her own, in a game whose rules were changing fast, with an agent who couldn’t even focus on getting his prick up.

  “Then couldn’t you lower my price?”

  “Honey, it’s not that simple. It wouldn’t be fair to our other talent. We come down on you, it throws off the whole scale. The town’s lousy with bargain hunters as it is.”

  “Arnie, I’ve got to keep working. They’ll forget me.”

  “It takes a little time to forget. You’re only twenty-eight. Listen, Alma. Here’s what’s happened. The studios turned out a lot of crap, but they hired, and those they hired they kept at work—grips, stunt guys, continuity g
irls, carpenters, everybody right up to the top. They brought a star along, and once you were up there they experimented a little, to see how far you could stretch and keep your audience. The audience showed up, week after week, Westerns, thrillers, A, B, they didn’t much care. You know what the banks used to figure?—that any film, no matter how lousy, would make back sixty percent of its cost. So any picture you always had sixty-percent backing, no questions asked. All that’s gone. Product’s down from five hundred films a year to two hundred. The studios are relics. What’s going to be left is deals—independents and agents. MCA had a third of Hollywood signed up already, and Stein and Wasserman have bought up contracts as the studios began cutting people loose. We got more talent than we can sell. We’re supposed to do what the studios used to do. But those are big shoes. We don’t have their plants. They don’t have their chains. Actually, don’t be surprised if MCA doesn’t wind up buying a studio. We just formed Revue Productions, to make series for TV. Hey—how’d you like to be on TV again, till we find a package big enough for you? That Strawberry Blonde—you were overwhelming. You made Der Bingle look dead on his feet.”

  The image made Alma feel slightly guilty and sick. “I don’t want to go back to TV. TV is for midgets who never quite made it here in Hollywood; I’d as soon go back to playing summer stock. Am I that washed-up? When did it happen? How, Arnie? I’m only twenty-eight!”

  He sighed one last lung-deep plume toward the ceiling and put out his king-sized cigarette in an ashtray on the glass table at his side of the king-sized bed. “I gotta give up these things. O.K. Listen. Alma. We’re working for you day and night. Be a little patient. Take a vacation, take some guitar lessons. Go to a dude ranch. You could lose an inch or two off your waist, I was noticing.”

  His words added to the irritation of her stirred-up, unsatisfied sexual desire. At least Matt always finished her off, with his tongue or hand if he had to. He was a European gentleman in that, even if his scripts did seem adolescent—espionage, science fiction, all-male technology wars. Arnie had closed his eyes. Staring up at the white, sparkle-plastered ceiling, Alma drew imaginary diagonals with her eyes from one corner to the one opposite, and then made an X, though the far corner was cut into by the walls of the luxurious bathroom, whose whirlpool tub was mauve and sunken and whose glass shelves Arnie had already loaded with a standing army of pill bottles. This lack of a fourth corner struck her as bad luck and gave her a shiver of dread. “I think it was a mistake to make a musical,” she said. “It’s made me harder to typecast.”

  “Well,” Arnie said, his eyes unopening, “you couldn’t keep playing rebellious kids forever. Be patient, babe.” He sighed and got out of bed and wearily stood, looking more hunchbacked than ever. His useless liver-colored prick hung heavily below his white puff of pubic hair. Beyond his silken ear, turned abruptly blood-red by a stray sharp beam of afternoon sun, some flaw in the calm California day, as tightly sealed on the other side of the hotel window as a diorama, permitted a frond of a palm in the foreground feebly to lift, like the dying hand of an overacting extra in a scene of battlefield carnage.

  It was no time to be patient. Already in the mirror the line of Alma’s jaw was unclean and flesh was closing in on her eyes. In her anger with Arnie she got herself pregnant, by the scriptwriter boyfriend, Matt Lazlo, the Matt short for not Matthew but Matthias. His parents were Hungarians who had come to California in 1921, escaping from the anti-liberal, anti-Semitic excesses of the first years of the Horthy regency. His father, György Lazlo, a professor of music back in Szombathely, found work as a piano tuner and teacher in Pasadena. Matt had grown up as a California golden boy, drifting into the arts and scriptwriting. Alma’s marriage to him did not last long—none of her early marriages did. Her husbands were envious and abusive, one trait leading to the other. Matt melted away more amiably, less graspingly, than the first, or the third, a rock instrumentalist for a group that never quite jelled. Alma had little patience with husbands and lovers—after such a childhood dose of adoration, she was quick to decide that she wasn’t being loved enough.

  Her only child, a son, was born in April of 1959, the same year her career entered its second, triumphant, platinum-blonde phase with the (considering that this was still the Eisenhower era) daring and somewhat feminist sex-comedy Cream Cheese and Caviar, opposite Paul Newman. Calling her solemn-faced infant Clark was not, in view of Gable’s sudden death in the following year, auspicious. As Gable had lived by acting, so he died by it: it was said that doing his own stunts and putting up with the drug-addled Marilyn Monroe while shooting The Misfits in desert heat killed him. But the Sixties were to be a good decade for death. Arnie Fineman died the same year, in his sleep at home in his Scarsdale mock-Tudor, and Ama the next, with Daniel Sifford and John Kennedy following in 1963.

  Among the many roles that Alma undertook, motherhood proved one of the few for which she was clearly miscast. The boy grew from being a winning, timid, rosy-cheeked toddler to a rather sullen, bland loser, with little of the Wilmot sense of election or the Lazlos’ continental flair. He had the small wary features and stocky build of his grandfather Teddy, whom he loved. He was never able, in the scrambling, structureless Hollywood scene, to find his niche. He had a non-coöperative streak. His mother’s fame enabled him to get jobs in agencies and on independent production teams but some quarrel or missed appointment invariably balked his progress. There was more than the usual number of problems with girls, drugs, and wrecked cars. Alma was relieved, really, when in 1987 Clark, while working as a ski-lift operator for his great-uncle Jared in central Colorado, fell under the spell of a very religious mountain-man called Jesse Smith and joined his supposedly utopian commune, called the Temple of True and Actual Faith. A move so odd, she reasoned, must gratify the need to distinguish himself that any son of hers of course would have. Off her hands, and into God’s. So be it. Good riddance.

  iv. Clark/Esau/Slick

  There isn’t an awful lot to say about me,” Clark would say, making an acquaintance, to fend off the oppressive, overshadowing fact, which came out sooner or later, that he was Alma DeMott’s son. Son and only child. “Oh, she did the best she could,” would be his answer to the inevitable question. “I didn’t see her much except on weekends. She was out of the house before I’d get up for school and a lot of times didn’t get back till I was in bed. People don’t realize how hard these poor stars work; the poor saps are slaves. Even weekends, there were things she had to do—special appearances, charity crap, interviews, trips to New York to be on some talk show. After her original agent died—he was a pretty laid-back guy from what I gather—she got this purely West Coast woman agent, Shirley Frugosi, who was ruthless. She had Mom hopping all the time—London, New York, Rome, wherever she could get up a little publicity hustle. And then, when she was home, Mom I mean, she had to keep going to these parties and stuff where it would be helpful to be seen, with a lot of these L.A. drunks and deadheads. Mom went, but you could never say she was a drinker. That was really the main thing that soured the marriage with Rex—Rex Brudnoy, the rock singer, you’ve probably never heard of him—that, more than the groupies and the fact that her career hit some kind of a wall in about 1969 and his never did get off the ground. In Hollywood you can maybe have one flop in a marriage but you can’t have two.”

  Rex would have been out of bed for a couple of hours by the time the driver had dropped Clark off after school at Beverly Vista Elementary and they would have a game of Wiffle Ball with a plastic orange bat out on the flat part of the lawn, beside the concrete pool. Rex had played on his high-school team back in Texas before dropping out and becoming a musician and he could tell Clark just the kind of fungo he was going to hit to him: This’ll be a high one. Here comes a line drive. Start stretching, Superguy, I’m going for the fucking fences. Rex called him Superguy as a joke based on Clark Kent’s being Superman. Looking back, Clark supposed that Rex was the closest thing to a father he had had. He was wiry and athletic i
n his motions but not tall—no taller than Mom, really, when she had on heels. His beard was black and patchy and smelled of beer and an incenselike sweetness. He was generally stoned, Clark supposed now, but it never seemed to affect his Wiffle Ball skills. When, after he had let Clark make his five catches, his turn came to take the field, he could make the most amazing grabs, of screamers whistling at his feet or twisting pop-ups which more than once Rex snagged on the edge of the pool or beyond, falling in with a splash that lifted a great scatter of small green balls of water into the dry California air. He would come up out of the water displaying the perforated white ball daintily in his hand and his drenched beard all in little wet points around the neat white teeth of his casually triumphant grin and the hair on top of his head showing in his soaked strands that it was thinning; Rex was going bald and still his group, Brudnoy and His Boys, couldn’t get onto the charts, couldn’t get out of the rut of dates in dives in Santa Monica and Redondo Beach where after midnight the kids kept screaming and dancing themselves blind no matter what you did as long as the drummer kept up a beat. Though Mom’s name had gotten them sessions at Decca and Columbia the records didn’t take off, people said they sounded like the Beatles without Paul’s wistful appeal or John’s sardonic edge or the Stones without Mick’s fury or the Monkees without the cuteness or Led Zeppelin without the balls. It was no life, Rex confided to Clark. Straining every night to pull out of himself the personal electricity to connect with a mob of kids stupid with pot was wasting him away, making him thin as a long-distance runner. When the group came around to the house in the afternoon sunlight you could see how small they were, how slight, however long their hair was and woolly their beards; in their purple tank tops and leather vests they were boys, kids looking for a break, kidding each other for Clark’s benefit though he was just ten, their eyes sideways on him to check out his reactions, and talking to Mom politely as if she were an older woman, which she was, actually. She had been thirty-one when she married Rex and he twenty-five. Once, when about sixteen, Clark had asked his mother why she had married Rex and then stuck with him until 1970, by which time he had become a very pathetic drunk. She had given him a look, like And who the hell are you?, with those famous long eyebrows arched under her cap of carefully tousled platinum hair, and told him calmly, “Rex was all cock.” Clark didn’t think then or now that this was a suitable thing to say to a son, even a son growing up and accumulating some experience of his own. It shocked him, it stuck in his mind: he could still see her, her flat defiant calm way of saying it, implying, Get off my case, kid, the long red nails of her hand aligned around a Virginia Slim uncoiling blue smoke into the air next to her ear. The white edge of her ear protruded a bit through the bleached feathers of her hair. Cartoons of her always emphasized the cup ears but when you were with her they just seemed to fit her face, which could look homely or tired but never lacked life, a kind of hungriness he could never blame her for, it was so simple and innocent.