Double Feature
Page 17
I couldn’t talk any more. I turned away, staring out the side window at the rain, looking at my future. How different it would be from my past. All my cleverness, buried inside a stone.
Staples was still marveling over my final deduction. “You really are something, Carey,” he told the back of my head. “In a lot of ways I don’t care for you very much, but you sure are one hell of a detective.”
ORDO
ONE
My name is Ordo Tupikos, and I was born in North Flat, Wyoming on November 9th, 1936. My father was part Greek and part Swede and part American Indian, while my mother was half Irish and half Italian. Both had been born in this country, so I am one hundred percent American.
My father, whose first name was Samos, joined the United States Navy on February 17th, 1942, and he was drowned in the Coral Sea on May 15th, 1943. At that time we were living in West Bowl, Oklahoma, my mother and my two sisters and my brother and I, and on October 12th of that year my mother married a man named Eustace St. Claude, who claimed to be half Spanish and half French but who later turned out to be half Negro and half Mexican and passing for white. After the divorce, my mother moved the family to San Itari, California. She never remarried, but she did maintain a long-term relationship with an air conditioner repairman named Smith, whose background I don’t know.
On July 12th, 1955, I followed my father’s footsteps by joining the United States Navy. I was married for the first time in San Diego, California on March 11th, 1958, when I was twenty-one, to a girl named Estelle Anlic, whose background was German and Welsh and Polish. She put on the wedding license that she was nineteen, having told me the same, but when her mother found us in September of the same year it turned out she was only sixteen. Her mother arranged the annulment, and it looked as though I might be in some trouble, but the Navy transferred me to a ship and that was the end of that.
By the time I left the Navy, on June 17, 1959, my mother and my half brother, Jacques St. Claude, had moved from California to Deep Mine, Pennsylvania, following the air conditioner repairman named Smith, who had moved back east at his father’s death in order to take over the family hardware store. Neither Smith nor Jacques was happy to have me around, and I’d by then lost touch with my two sisters and my brother, so in September of that year I moved to Old Coral, Florida, where I worked as a carpenter (non-union) and where, on January 7th, 1960, I married my second wife, Sally Fowler, who was older than me and employed as a waitress in a diner on the highway toward Fort Lauderdale.
Sally, however, was not happy tied to one man, and so we were divorced on April 12th, 1960, just three months after the marriage. I did some drinking and trouble-making around that time, and lost my job, and a Night Court judge suggested I might be better off if I rejoined the Navy, which I did on November 4th, 1960, five days before my twenty-fourth birthday.
From then on, my life settled down. I became a career man in the Navy, got into no more marriages, and except for my annual Christmas letter from my mother in Pennsylvania I had no more dealings with the past. Until October 7th, 1974, when an event occurred that knocked me right over.
* * *
I was assigned at that time to a Naval Repair Station near New London, Connecticut, and my rank was Seaman First Class. It was good weather for October in that latitude, sunny, clean air, not very cold, and some of us took our afternoon break out on the main dock. Norm and Stan and Pat and I were sitting in one group, on some stacks of two by fours, Norm and Stan talking football and Pat reading one of his magazines and me looking out over Long Island Sound. Then Pat looked up from his magazine and said, “Hey, Orry.”
I turned my head and looked at him. My eyes were half-blinded from looking at the sun reflected off the water. I said, “What?”
“You never said you were married to Dawn Devayne.”
Dawn Devayne was a movie star. I’d seen a couple of her movies, and once or twice I saw her talking on television. I said, “Sure.”
He gave me a dirty grin and said, “You shouldn’t of let that go, boy.”
With Pat, you play along with the joke and then go do something else, because otherwise he won’t give you any peace. So I grinned back at him and said, “I guess I shouldn’t,” and then I turned to look some more at the water.
But this time he didn’t quit. Instead, he raised his voice and he said, “Goddamit, Orry, it’s right here in this goddam magazine.”
I faced him again. I said, “Come on, Pat.”
By now, Norm and Stan were listening too, and Norm said, “What’s in the magazine, Pat?”
Pat said, “That Orry was married to Dawn Devayne.” Norm and Stan both grinned, and Stan said, “Oh, that.”
“Goddamit!” Pat jumped to his feet and stormed over and shoved the magazine in Stan’s face. “You look at that!” he shouted. “You just look at that!”
I saw Stan look, and start to frown, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Had they set this up ahead of time? But not Stan; Norm sometimes went along with Pat’s gags, but Stan always brushed them away like mosquitoes. And now Stan frowned at the magazine, and he said, “Son of a bitch.”
“Now, look,” I said, “a joke’s a joke.”
But nobody was acting like it was a joke. Norm was looking over Stan’s shoulder, and he too was frowning. And Stan, shaking his head, looked at me and said, “Why try to hide it, for Christ’s sake? Brother, if I’d been married to Dawn Devayne, I’d tell the world about it.”
“But I wasn’t,” I said. “I swear to God, I never was.”
Norm said, “How many guys you know named Ordo Tupikos?”
“It’s a mistake,” I said. “It’s got to be a mistake.”
Norm seemed to be reading aloud from the magazine. He said, “Married in San Diego, California, in 1958, to a sailor named Ordo Tu—”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “I was married then to, uh, Estelle—”
“Anlic,” Pat said, and nodded his head at me. “Estelle Anlic, right?”
I stared at him. I said, “How’d you know that name?”
“Because that’s Dawn Devayne, dummy! That’s her real name!” Pat grabbed the magazine out of Norm’s hands and rushed over to jab it at me. “Is that you, or isn’t it?”
There was a small black-and-white photo on the page, surrounded by printing. I hadn’t seen that picture in years.
It was Estelle and me, on our wedding day, a picture taken outside City Hall by a street photographer. There I was in my whites—you don’t wear winter blues in San Diego—and there was Estelle. She was wearing her big shapeless black sweater and that tight tight gray skirt down to below her knees that I liked in those days. We were both squinting in the sunlight, and Estelle’s short dark hair was in little curls all around her head.
“That’s not Dawn Devayne,” I said. “Dawn Devayne has blonde hair.”
Pat said something scornful about people dyeing their hair, but I didn’t listen. I’d seen the words under the picture and I was reading them. They said: “Dawn and her first husband, Navy man Ordo Tupikos. Mama had the marriage annulled six months later.”
Norm and Stan had both come over with Pat, and now Stan looked at me and said, “You didn’t even know it.”
“I never saw her again.” I made a kind of movement with the magazine, and I said, “When her mother took her away. The Navy put me on a ship, I never saw her after that.”
Norm said, “Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch.”
Pat laughed, slapping himself on the hip. He said: “You’re married to a movie star!”
I got to my feet and went between them and walked away along the dock toward the repair sheds. The guys shouted after me, wanting to know where I was going, and Pat yelled, “That’s my magazine!”
“I’ll bring it back,” I said. “I want to borrow it.” I don’t know if they heard.
I went to the Admin Building and into the head and closed myself in a stall and sat on the toilet and started in to read about Dawn Dev
ayne.
* * *
The magazine was called True Man, and the picture on the cover was a foreign sports car with a girl lying on the hood. Down the left side of the cover was lettering that read:
WILL THE
ENERGY CRISIS
KILL LE MANS?
* * * * * * * * * *
DAWN DEVAYNE:
THE WORLD’S NEXT
SEX GODDESS
* * * * * * * * * *
WHAT SLOPE?
CONFESSIONS OF A
GIRL SKI BUM
Inside the magazine, the article was titled, Is Dawn Devayne The World’s New Sex Queen? by Abbie Lancaster. And under the title in smaller letters was another question, with an answer:
“Where did all the bombshells go? Dawn Devayne is ready to burst on the scene.”
Then the article didn’t start out to be about Dawn Devayne at all, but about all the movie stars that had ever been considered big sex symbols, like Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth and Jayne Mansfield. Then it said there hadn’t been any major sex star for a long time, which was probably because of Women’s Lib and television and X-rated movies and looser sexual codes. “You don’t need a fantasy bedwarmer,” the article said, “if you’ve got a real-life bedwarmer of your own.” Then the article said there were a bunch of movie stars who were all set to take the crown as the next sex queen if the job ever opened up again. It mentioned Raquel Welch and Ann-Margret and Goldie Hawn and Julie Christie. But then it said Dawn Devayne was the likeliest of them all to make it, because she had that wonderful indescribable quality of being all things to all men.
Then there was a biography. It said Dawn Devayne was born Estelle Anlic in Big Meadow, Nebraska on May 19th, 1942, and her father died in the Korean conflict in 1955, and she and her mother moved to Los Angeles in 1956 because her mother had joined a religious cult that was based in Los Angeles. It said her mother was a bus driver in that period, and Dawn Devayne grew up without supervision and hung around with boys a lot. It didn’t exactly say she was the neighborhood lay, but it almost said it.
Then it came to me. It said Dawn Devayne ran away from home a lot of times in her teens, and one time when she was sixteen she ran away to San Diego and married me until her mother took her home again and turned her over to the juvenile authorities, who put her in a kind of reformatory for wayward girls. It called me a “stock figure.” What it said was:
“…a sailor named Ordo Tupikos, a stock figure, the San Diego sailor in every sex star’s childhood.”
I didn’t much care for that, but what I was mostly interested in was where Estelle Anlic became Dawn Devayne, so I kept reading. The article said that after the reformatory Estelle got a job as a carhop in a drive-in restaurant in Los Angeles, and it was there she got her first crack at movie stardom, when an associate producer with Farber International Pictures met her and got her a small role in a B-movie called Tramp Killer. She played a prostitute who was murdered. That was in 1960, when she was eighteen. There was a black-and-white still photo from that movie, showing her cowering back from a man with a meat cleaver, and she still looked like Estelle Anlic then, except her hair was dyed platinum blonde. Her stage name for that movie was Honey White.
Then nothing more happened in the movies for a while, and Estelle went to San Francisco and was a cashier in a movie theater. The article quoted her as saying, “When ‘Tramp Killer’ came through, I sold tickets to myself.” She had other jobs too for the next three years, and then when she was twenty-one, in 1963, a man named Les Moore, who was the director of Tramp Killer, met her at a party in San Francisco and remembered her and told her to come back to Los Angeles and he would give her a big part in the movie he was just starting to work on.
(The article then had a paragraph in parentheses that said Les Moore had become a very important new director in the three years since Tramp Killer, which had only been his second feature, and that the movie he wanted Dawn Devayne to come back to Los Angeles for was Bubbletop, the first of the zany comedies that had made Les Moore the Preston Sturges of the sixties.)
So Dawn Devayne—or Estelle, because her name wasn’t Dawn Devayne yet and she’d quit calling herself Honey White—went back to Los Angeles and Les Moore introduced her to a star-making agent named Byron Cartwright, who signed her to exclusive representation and who changed her name to Dawn Devayne. And Bubbletop went on to become a smash hit and Dawn Devayne got rave notices, and she’d been a movie star ever since, with fifteen movies in the last eleven years, and her price for one movie now was seven hundred fifty thousand dollars. The article said she was one of the very few stars who had never had a box-office flop.
About her private life, the article said she was “between marriages.” I thought that would mean she was engaged to somebody, but so far as I could see from the rest of the article she wasn’t. So I guess that’s just a phrase they use for people like movie stars when they aren’t married.
Anyway, the marriages she was between were numbers four and five. After me in 1958, her next marriage was in 1963, to a movie star named Rick Tandem. Then in 1964 there was a fight in a nightclub where a producer named Josh Weinstein knocked Rick Tandem down and Rick Tandem later sued for divorce and said John Weinstein had come between him and Dawn Devayne. The article didn’t quite say that Rick Tandem was in reality queer, but it got the point across.
Then marriage number three, in 1966, was to another movie actor, Ken Forrest, who was an older man, a contemporary of Gable and Tracy who was still making movies but wasn’t quite the power he used to be. That marriage ended in 1968 when Forrest shot himself on a yacht off the coast of Spain; Dawn Devayne was in London making a picture when it happened.
And the fourth marriage, in 1970, was to a Dallas businessman with interests in computers and airlines and oil. His name was Ralph Chucklin, and that marriage had ended with a quiet divorce in 1973. “Dawn is dating now,” the article said, “but no one in particular tops her list. ‘I’m still looking for the right guy,’ she says.”
Then the article got to talking about her age, and the person who wrote the article raised the question as to whether a thirty-two-year-old woman was young enough to still make it as the next Sex Goddess of the World. “Dawn is more beautiful every year,” the article said, and then it went back to all the business about Women’s Lib and television and X-rated movies and looser sexual codes, and it said the next Superstar Sex Symbol wasn’t likely to be another girl-child type like the ones before, but would be more of an adult woman, who could bring brains and experience to sex. “Far from the dumb blondes of yesteryear,” the article said, “Dawn Devayne is a bright blonde, who combines with good old-fashioned lust the more modern feminine virtues of intelligence and independence. A Jane Fonda who doesn’t nag.” And the article finished by saying maybe the changed social conditions meant there wouldn’t be any more Blonde Bombshells or Sexpot Movie Queens, which would make the world a colder and a drabber place, but the writer sure hoped there would be more, and the best bet right now to bring sex back to the world was Dawn Devayne.
There were photographs with the article, full-page color pictures of Dawn Devayne with her clothes off, and when I finished reading I sat there on the toilet a while longer looking at the pictures and trying to remember Estelle. Nothing. The face, the eyes, the smile, all different. The stomach and legs were different. Even the nipples didn’t remind me of Estelle Anlic’s nipples.
There’s something wrong, I thought. I wondered if maybe this Dawn Devayne woman had a criminal record or was wanted for murder somewhere or something like that, and she’d just paid Estelle money to borrow her life story. Was that possible?
It sure didn’t seem possible that this sexy woman was Estelle. I know it was sixteen years, but how much can one person change? I sat studying the pictures until I noticed I was beginning to get an erection, so I left the head and went back to work.
* * *
All I could think about, the next three days,
was Dawn Devayne. I was once married to her, married to a sexy movie star. Me. I just couldn’t get used to the idea.
And the other guys didn’t help. Norm and Stan and Pat spread the word, and pretty soon all the guys were coming around, even some of the younger officers, talking and grinning and winking and all that. Nobody came right out with the direct question, but what they really wanted to know was what it was like to be in bed with Dawn Devayne.
And what could I tell them? I didn’t know what it was like to be in bed with Dawn Devayne. I knew what it was like to be in bed with Estelle Anlic—or anyway I had a kind of vague memory, after sixteen years—but that wasn’t what they wanted to know, and anyway I didn’t feel like telling them. She was a teenage girl, sixteen (though she told me nineteen), and I was twenty-one, and neither of us was exactly a genius about sex, but we had fun. I remember she had very very soft arms and she liked to have her arms around my neck, and she laughed with her mouth wide open, and she always drowned her french fries in so much ketchup I used to tell her I had to eat them with ice tongs and one time in bed she finally admitted she didn’t know what ice tongs were and she cried because she was sure she was stupid, and we had sex that time in order for me to tell her (a) she wasn’t stupid, and (b) I loved her anyway even though she was stupid, and that’s the one time in particular I have any memory of at all, which is mostly because that was the time I learned I could control myself and hold back ejaculation almost as long as I wanted, almost forever. We were both learning about things then, we were both just puppies rolling in a basket of wool, but the guys didn’t want to hear anything like that, it would just depress them. And I didn’t want to tell them about it either. Their favorite sex story was one that Pat used to tell about being in bed with a girl with a candle in her ass. That’s what they really wanted me to tell them, that Dawn Devayne had a candle in her ass.
But even though I couldn’t tell them any stories that would satisfy them, they kept coming around, they kept on and on with the same subject, they couldn’t seem to let it go. It fascinated them, and every time they saw me they got reminded and fascinated all over again. In fact, a couple of the guys started calling me “Devayne,” as though that was going to be my new nickname, until one time I picked up a wrench and patted it into my other palm and went over to the guy and said: