—Hollywood—
A Starr Pictures poster circa 1955, which his oldest sister Margarita would take out of its frame in her father’s movie house and keep, rolled up, for many years. In it, an artfully rendered color painting of her brother, Emilio Montez O’Brien, working under the name Montgomery (“Monty”) O’Brien, as a private detective, in rumpled trench coat and bent-brimmed felt hat, a busty Jane Russell brunette in a torn dress facing him with a gun, the electrified caption reading: “She was passion gone wild!” And: “A Private Eye under the spell of love!” The poster commemorated one of the four pictures in which he played Lance Stewart, private detective, in his decline.
She would remember that he had also made, for the same studio, two Tarzan films, Tarzan in the Land of No Return and Tarzan in the Opal Kingdom—the kind of pictures that her poor, talented brother had taken for the money in 1955–56.
***
During the first five years of his time in Hollywood, he would appear in forty-two films. For the family, they were years of absence (and not because they missed his physical presence, as he would fly back East as often as possible for the holidays, but because, far off in that different world, the Emilio they had known had begun to change). He’d worked steadily, marching through the tedium of Gallant Heart for M-G-M and graduating some three months later into the romantic second lead in a film called A Springtime Love, also for M-G-M. Both pictures did badly. His notices had been good, however, and he made some money, so he drifted from M-G-M into work for other studios, playing two- or three-day bit parts under heavy makeup: a Napoleonic lieutenant, a knight of Richard the Lionhearted in the time of the Crusades (and, in the same film, a Saracen horseman), an American Revolutionary under the command of General Washington, among many others. He played gangsters, cowboys, and once, hired to work in a movie about Billy the Kid, he played a deputy sheriff.
Now and then a better part would come along.
Years later he would belabor himself most for having taken the Tarzan roles. (As a much older man, he read a television review: “Tarzan again, on a vine, yoiks!”) In 1952 he made his best movie for Starr Pictures, a low-budget affair called On Saint Anne’s Street, about a handsome Catholic priest, Father Byrne, who falls in love with one of his parishioners. An unconsummated love on the screen that had been, however, continuously consummated offscreen in his trailer: he had fallen in love with the actress, Hedda Holmes, who played the role of Mary. (That affair started because of their desolate loneliness between takes, he staring at her, she smiling. And then one day he invited her to lunch in his dressing room. Eating salad, Emilio, in priestly garb, started to kiss her, and she, in the midst of swallowing a piece of lettuce, kissed him back.)
Ten weeks to shoot, that movie made money. Because his character ultimately resisted temptation (the Conference of Catholic Bishops had put it on their recommended list), in the fadeout the priest, having told Mary that their love is impossible, watches her meeting up with a nice guy on the street; the camera then follows him into the interior of a church, where he kneels in prayer, contemplating a crucifix above the altar, a heavenly choir swelling, and the camera fading out on the crucifix as the chamber fills with a light as blinding as love. The New York Herald Tribune called his performance “elegant and biting.” After playing unnoticeable secondary roles, Emilio had suddenly found himself lauded; a year later (1953), he made a second Father Byrne movie, The Boys of Amsterdam Avenue, but that film, about the priest’s good work with a band of street urchins, was bereft of passion and a love interest, and it did not fare as well as its predecessor.
But it, too, made money and was popular enough with the public that for the first time he began to receive fan mail, mostly from young girls. Some letters were mundane and some outrageous—letters of proposal and letters in which he was propositioned—but he answered each with a signed photograph, hiring a secretary to mail them out all over the country. (During his biggest month, in June 1954, he received 1,220 such requests; during his worst, in February 1957, eight.)
—Stardom—
Still, he’d started to feel like a star. He posed for cigarette and automobile ads, and now and then he would be asked to escort some rising young starlet to a Hollywood premiere, or some ladies’ club in San Francisco or Seattle would invite him to speak at a luncheon. He bought a little bungalow, not far off Sunset Boulevard, in West Hollywood, where he would meet reporters. Two photographs—one of himself as a teenage boy posed with his family (“Monty’s folks”) in front of the house in Cobbleton, another as a GI during the war—found their way often into his life stories. Few profiles of Emilio ever went very far into his family past, though some reporters worked in the fact that his mother, Mariela Montez, was a “lady from south of the border,” one writer using that item to explain why he, an Irishman, had Latin-lover appeal. Because he was one of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors, there were always snippets of gossip about him. He’d been linked romantically with a number of starlets: Randy Jenkins, Betty Reed, and Vida Ramsey, among others—actresses with whom he’d fall madly in love for a few months, before a kind of femininely-influenced fatigue would settle on his heart and he’d move on.
While he was not always confident about his acting abilities, he had come to know something about seducing women. His movies, bad or good, made little difference when it came to his personal appeal. Whether attending a party at the Brown Derby or in some producer’s house high in the hills overlooking the city, he’d always meet someone. Even when he was shooting a film, getting up at five in the morning, he would often end the day taking someone to bed, his eyes heavy and his mood cantankerous for the next day’s shoot. He bedded down so many women in that time—actresses, extras, stand-ins—that on many a night he not only forgot his original aspirations but began to forget his family: his mother and father and his fourteen sisters. Though he had been conscientious about writing and calling his sisters, the very fact that he missed them so made him, on bad days, feel resentful. Slowly, his contact with them faded—partly because of his work schedule and partly because he had become quite an active man about Hollywood—dwindling to the occasional late-night telephone call and then, for months at a time, nothing at all.
(Even when he flew back East, during the happy time of Christmas, there was a new remoteness about him that confused his sisters. Polite, respectful, and ever generous—for he would make epic shopping trips in Manhattan and come back to the apartment on West End Avenue or to the house in Cobbleton loaded down with expensive gifts—he seemed all the same to have lost his ability to appreciate the simple enjoyments of affection that had so marked his youth.
He did not like discussing his career, preferring to talk about the movie stars he had met: Cary Grant was a gentleman, Mickey Rooney was funny, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were “gems.” He was friendly with Errol Flynn, who would sometimes spot him in a crowd and cheerfully call out, “Hey, chum, over here.” They’d shake hands and clink champagne glasses, Flynn still “gorgeous” and always with a young woman on his arm. They met at a party in 1951, and Mr. Flynn, talking about many things, drifted into the subject of Cuba, where he had spent much time. He reminisced about his “splendid” days in Havana, where he was a friend of Hemingway, and Emilio told him his mother was Cuban. Errol Flynn felt no deep nostalgia for his past, but that night he told Emilio, after many drinks, “I’ll never forget my amorous adventures in the arms of the beguiling Cuban ladies,” and this somehow made Emilio all the more like Flynn. From that time on, Flynn, who liked to keep an entourage, would call up his new “chum” and invite him along on his outings about town. He would see other movie stars—Fred MacMurray, Claudette Colbert, James Mason, and Laurence Olivier—chatting in a corner, and he even met Joel McCrea, who looked him over and said, chewing on a cracker slathered with caviar, “You know what, you look like a cousin of mine,” then walked away. All this excited Emilio, but after a time he became so accustomed to these famous people that their company beg
an to mean nothing to him and his eyes would scan the room for unattached women.)
His sisters loved his stories, but they were worried about his life out there: Was he eating well? Was he working too hard? Gloria took the solemnness of his moods to mean that he needed someone like her to take care of him, and on each of his visits she would offer to come out and keep house for him, but he’d always explain that things were quite all right. Knowing of his romantic proclivities and the brittleness of his heart, Margarita thought quite simply that what he needed was to settle down, a sentiment shared by the others. Patricia kept to herself the thought that her brother’s moods were due to some unconscious awareness of a dreadful future personal loss (in dreams, she would see fire), while Violeta, ever flirtatious and vain, thought mainly of herself, reveling in his company, especially when he would accompany her to town. His musical sisters, Maria, Olga, and Jacqueline, were always happy to see him, and, knowing enough famous people themselves, and having seen what sometimes happens, simply hoped the trappings of his profession would not go to his head. The others, like the plump Irene, simply loved him. And yet they noticed he seemed troubled.
Even his mother, off in her own world, sensed this. She would watch him sitting pensively out on the porch and wonder just what her son was thinking, whether he was unhappy because he was too famous or whether he was so sad because he was not famous enough. What was it with the boy?
Although he was not yet thirty, he felt a vague disappointment with the way his life was turning out. He’d remember the days of aspiration, when he had first daydreamed about acting and perhaps making a movie, as having been very sweet—the hope much more glorious and fulfilling than the actual deed. As for matters of the heart, which also weighed on him, he felt nostalgic (and would to his last days) about the first loves of his life, and his more recent romantic escapades seemed to him like mad dashes to re-create those simple joyous moments; or perhaps he had never gotten used to living in the world itself, far removed from the potent love of his sisters, who smothered him, for so many years, with affection. Whatever the cause, a kind of torpor and a feeling of inadequacy as a man, movie star or not, would overwhelm him at times, and he would grow impatient with his days of idleness and look forward to getting back to work.
—Visits, 1953–54—
Helen and her husband and two children came out to see him in Los Angeles in 1953, and he had taken them around the city and up into the hills in his shiny Cadillac and onto the set of one of the pictures he was working on, a pirate adventure starring Burt Lancaster. He would remember their visit as being most pleasant. The kids in particular were enchanted by the activity on the sound-stage sets and by the notion that perhaps they were around real pirates, and Mr. Lancaster himself sat the boys down and amused them by juggling four rubber balls. The studio photographer, as a favor to Emilio, or “Montgomery O’Brien,” had photographed him with his beautiful sister Helen and her family, on the mock deck of a ship, a picture that turned out quite nicely. He had to admit that he liked to come home and find them waiting for him, but was a little put off by the incredible stiffness of the kids, who referred to Helen as Mother, as in “Mother, may I have a glass of juice,” and he found her a little too reserved with her own children. He was surprised by his own fondness for them; they called him Uncle and that had made him happy and determined to amuse them even when he felt exhausted after a long day’s shoot. He’d sit on the rug of his living room in front of his radio and television set, performing sleight-of-hand tricks (something which was very successful with women, for on occasion he would pull from their sweaty navels a pair of earrings or from the beautiful wreath of their pubic hair a pearl necklace). While wondering if what he really needed in life was a home and children of his own, he had enjoyed their company, driving them out to the beach on his days off and dozing on the sand, content to hear their voices around him.
Helen wanted to make the rounds of the most exclusive nightclubs and eateries of the city, and Emilio, ever the sport, could not refrain from paying every one of their bills, even though he knew his brother-in-law, with his yachty face and perpetual sunny cheeks, was a millionaire. And though he had been surprised by his sister’s formality and realized that he did not really know her—she was fifteen years older than he—Emilio was touched by her concern for him. By the end of their ten-day visit, Emilio, “sans women,” as his friend Flynn would say, began to feel a little impatient, though their presence had released him from his feelings of solitude, that sensation which he simply equated with being a man. And he nearly cried—why, he did not know—when at the airport his sister Helen gave him a long and sustained hug. He had watched her, in her Dior outfit, making her way to the airliner, amused by how a sister, remote and distant in one moment, could become in another so important to one’s life. And when her children, in their blue suits and caps, waved ecstatically at him, off to spend the rest of the summer in Newport, he blew them a fond and avuncular kiss.
The following autumn, his oldest sister, Margarita, came to see him. By then she had graduated from college (at the ripe age of fifty). Grand parties had been held in New York and out in Cobbleton, which he did not attend. She arrived buoyantly happy with a certificate to teach Spanish. And she had just returned from a triumphant first journey to Europe, having traveled through Spain, where she found herself involved in an autumnal romance. At that time, she exhibited the physical propensities of their mother, having aged little. She liked to wear a big sun hat, and in her tight polka-dot dress (and girdle), and with her good figure and unlined face, she did not seem much older than a woman of thirty-five. She brought her movie-actor brother a bottle of Spanish brandy as a gift, and because she arrived in California not more than a week after her return home from Europe, she was bursting with the energy of one who has passed successfully through the fire of a new and dazzling experience.
Ever since childhood, Margarita would refer to her brother as “hermanito,” as Emilio, as “sweetheart,” but her time in Spain had inspired her to call him “mi vida,” “my life.” He had picked her up at the airport, puzzled by the glow about her. As he sat beside her in his automobile, it seemed as if some unknown scent was rising off her skin, as if she’d just come from a spice-ridden country, and he realized soon enough, recalling his own past, that she was scented with the fragrances of Europe and perhaps of love. That Sunday morning he drove her to a restaurant, and he was so happy to see her that, though he had to get up early the next day, he’d inaugurated a series of visits to different restaurants and bars around town. By the time they made their way to his bungalow, the world, for both of them, seemed aglow with the sweet promise of the future. On his back patio he opened a bottle of Spanish brandy and there they enjoyed the nearly Persian pleasures of the afternoon, a happy time, during which Margarita related that she was newly in love.
During her travels in Spain, and after a happy week along the south coast, she boarded a train to Valencia to see the orange groves outside that city, and there, while dining in a little restaurant, she met Luis, the owner of an automobile mechanic shop in Havana, who had been visiting relatives in Andalusia and was heading north to Barcelona. Watching her dine in a restaurant, he was amused by her befuddlement over the outrageous anatomy of a pomegranate that she ordered as dessert, smiling and saying to her in Spanish, “You mustn’t eat the seeds, just the soft flesh.” With a pomegranate of his own, he’d demonstrated the correct manner in which to eat that fruit, and soon enough he joined her at her table.
The night Margarita recounted to her brother the story of her romance, she asked Emilio about his life, commenting astutely that whenever she had seen him back East he always seemed preoccupied.
“Work, that’s what I mainly do,” he said to her. “People think making pictures is easy, but, really, you have to put up with so much… Seven or eight takes. If that goes well, then four different angles of each shot… and, under the hot lamps, you have to look as if it’s the most natural thing in
the world.”
“But,” she asked, “isn’t it a pleasure?”
“No, it’s a living.”
(He said this, longing for his joyous apprenticeship days performing onstage.)
A long silence.
“Well, cheers,” she had said. “Or, as they say in Spain, Salud!”
And they toasted each other.
Curious about her brother, and with her own head filled with so many happy sentiments, she could not help returning to the subject of love. She started to chainsmoke Chesterfields and asked him: “Do you have someone now? Someone to take care of you?”
“No.”
“Well, is there anyone who interests you?”
“No.”
She blew a plume of smoke toward a cluster of roses, some wilting, some alert and blossoming.
“But don’t you think, mi vida, that it would be a good thing?”
Just then he threw a fit, repeating, “No, no, no!” and he went to take a shower, leaving Margarita alone. She sat there, sipping at her brandy, thinking about her years of marriage to Lester Thompson, that loneliness—vivid, enchanting, and excruciating—coming back to her in a moment, and she had laughed to herself.
***
She’d also remember her brother’s little surprise. Early one day he asked her if she would mind if a friend joined them later for dinner. She was to fly back home the next day and he had decided that they would celebrate her last night with dinner at Ciro’s. She was sitting on his couch in a flowery dress, reading a newspaper, when her brother’s friend, Mr. Flynn, followed him into the living room. Her brother, beside himself with wicked glee, said, “Errol, may I present you to my sister Margarita.”
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Page 34