The
girl from Ladies' Home Journal is late. Martha hands me another
drink and reminds me that if I stay out in the sun much longer I will be
red as a tomato by supper. I am contractually obligated to be fair, of skin
and of mind, and so I allow her to raise an umbrella throwing shade over
me and the corner of the swimming pool. I prefer to be in the sun.
All
this lounging about is an artifice, a California script designed to play
out under the obsessive eye of adoring fans everywhere. I have three scenes
to memorize, four parties to attend, a wardrobe to approve, and six more
interviews before the weekend is over. I am due on the set just after dawn
on Monday. I am apparently still expected to offer the allure of an unburdened
lady of leisure, my success having sprung eternal and invisible, an immaculate
conception of celebrity. I am exhausted with boredom.
When
she arrives, Janie from Ladies' Home Journal is just like all the
others. Her hair is bleached, her dress a careful replica of one Natalie
Wood wore last month. She eagerly accepts iced tea despite the fact that
it requires her to balance her notebook on her knee. She tells me that Higher
the Mountain is her favorite of my films.
Addison once
said that the difference between a critic and a sycophant is that critics
pay compliments and sycophants have sentiments. In this, as in nearly everything,
Addison was right. My sycophants are now paid tidy sums by a tight-fisted
banker with a predilection for smooth-faced boys. He keeps my money and
I keep his secrets, and I never rely on anyone I haven't financed to do
me a favor.
Janie has nice,
trim legs, a teasing turn of the ankle that must serve her well. She is
smart enough to put her glass on the Mexican tile and perch with her pen
poised above the notebook, like a cartoon of a lady reporter. I close my
eyes and lie back on the chaise.
"Is it true
about you and Kirk Douglas?"
I open one eye.
"That depends on what you mean by true."
She giggles.
"You and Howard Hughes?"
"Strictly
business."
"You and
Claudia Caswell?" I raise myself on one elbow and casually ignore the
insinuation. She leans forward. "That you two knew each other in New
York?"
"Oh, that."
I relax. "Our paths crossed a time or two." Miss Caswell was just
smart enough to act surprised when I followed her into Margo's powder room,
and not quite dumb enough to tell anyone important. All the same, I don't
appreciate having our names linked. I may have won awards but she has a
world of powerful men willing to wage war over her. "Actually she was
already struggling to be taken seriously," I say. "She couldn't
even land a little role as my kid sister."
"I hear
she's going to marry that playwright."
In New York there
are more eligible playwrights than dime store novels, and the men are worth
only slightly more. I give Janie a nickel of a smile and fan myself.
"Do you
ever still talk to your theater friends, Miss Harrington?"
Last week, Bill's
agent told Zanuck that Bill would rather shoot on Everest than direct my
new picture. It's the closest we've come to speaking in six years. "I
find it rather like corresponding with school chums," I say. "It
feels so very long ago, almost as if I were but a child. Anyway I prefer
the youthful spirit of my Hollywood set."
"You know,
in our January issue we ran a pictorial about Miss Channing's, I mean, Mrs.
Samson's, new nursery."
If I never see
Bill or Lloyd or Addison again I will lose no sleep. But a stray mention
of Margo still makes my throat burn. And yet there she is again and again,
the shadow of Margo, the glamorous success of Margo, the cruel and casual
dismissal by Margo of all my accomplishments. Never has someone who touched
me so little done so much damage to my thick skin.
Still,
I have endured three lectures in a year about my supercilious attitude towards
my early success. I am told movie-goers appreciate humility. I try for something
in between. "Margo was always so good at playing mother hen. I'm surprised
she doesn't have a menagerie."
Janie consults
her notes and bites at her lip. "Can we discuss this new picture of
yours?" She seems embarrassed even to bring it up. Strangely more ashamed
than the subject merits.
"Naturally,"
I say. "What else could have brought you all the way out here? As you
know, I'm sure, it's the story of a young woman, a schoolteacher."
"And you
play the schoolteacher."
I tilt my head
in recognition of her enviable deductive reasoning. "She is engaged
to be married -- Monty Clift -- and is finishing her last term when a terrible
rumor is started about her and her friend."
"That's
Eva Marie Saint's role."
"Right."
I shrug. Hysterical women rarely draw my gaze.
"I hear
the play was quite scandalous. The rumor about the girls, I mean."
"It's certainly
modern. But don't you think we've come far enough to be more straight-forward
about these things? This is Hollywood, after all."
Janie drops her
pencil and bends down slowly to retrieve it. She is bare-legged and has
dark pink impressions on the tops of her feet where other ill-fitting shoes
have rubbed her raw. "But the girls," she says. "They are.
Aren't they a little queer?"
I laugh, the
full-throated chuckle Addison once called leonine. He told me to reserve
those sounds for special, private occasions. "They are rather like
sweethearts, now that you mention it."
"So that's
not -- that's not what the picture is about?"
I touch her arm.
"What kind of thing do you think we're making?"
"Oh, I.
Of course." She blushes and erases something, whisking the shavings
off her pad with a trembling hand.
"Of course,
like any picture, the audience will see in it what they want to see in themselves.
True fans always do."
Janie's flush
spreads down her throat to her chest. She coughs weakly and sucks the last
of her iced tea from the glass. When she has sufficiently recovered, she
says, "At the annual meeting of your fan club, five girls reported
they'd named their daughters Eve. How does that make you feel?"
"Flattered,
of course. Though I can hardly take credit for the name itself. Maybe they
name their little boys Adam, too." I'd rather have no fans at all than
allow them the power of association. But I have learned from my mistakes.
I always do.
Martha rescues
me with a tray of sandwiches and another round of drinks. She is a profoundly
ugly old hag with an impeccable talent for interrupting at precisely the
right time. She's been with me for going on five years, squirrels her salary
away in a tin beneath her bed under a stack of Playboys and has
absolutely no desire to be in pictures. She is the only person on Earth
I trust even a little.
Janie eats stupidly,
if politely, cooing over the avocado as if I had grown it myself. Her platinum
hair is leaking out of her bun, flaxen wisps sticking to the sweat at her
neckline in the afternoon heat. She is more beautiful as she comes apart
and I rouse myself for a few meaningless rounds of small talk. She lives
with an elderly aunt in Glendale, has a distant cousin in New York who made
a telephone call to get her this job, and isn't sure how she feels about
women who set aside success to become mothers. She would love to see my
sitting room.
I have no robe,
but as I haven't come within a yard of the pool one isn't really required.
Janie trails behind me as we make our way back to the house, and I carefully
slow my pace under the dappled light in the hanging garden. She collides
with me, and her hand grazes my bare back as she steadies herself. I turn
and catch her eye over my shoulder. "Better watch your step."
She nods shakily.
The house is
cool, the air almost damp. I make Martha keep the shades drawn just for
this moment, this chilly reception. Janie shudders and rubs her arms. "Cold?"
I ask.
She nods and
hugs herself more vigorously. "Aren't you?" She is staring at
my body, at my bathing suit. I stretch my arms above my head and laugh,
dark and low.
"It's warmer
over here." I perch on the arm of the love seat.
She takes three
steps forward, and when she is within arm's reach, I draw her nearer. She
shivers. Her skin is soft, lightly browned. A small muscle in her cheek
hiccups when I touch her face.
"You're
a modern girl, aren't you, Janie?"
"I -- I
guess so."
"You have
your own career, your own ideas. You think for yourself."
She nods, and
I kiss her hard on the mouth, pressing a hand between her shoulder blades
to keep her close. She gasps and pulls away, shoving me back onto the couch.
I count myself lucky to have avoided being slapped, but even that's not
the worst I've gotten.
"I -- Miss
Harrington! How dare you touch me like -- like you know me."
"Don't be
silly. Everybody does it. Nobody talks about it."
I tuck a stray
curl behind my ear and lean forward to pluck a cigarette from the holder
on the table. The lighter crackles and the paper hisses and burns. The smoke
smells like Margo, sweet and strong.
Janie is standing
with her arms crossed angrily. "You're just a girl," I say. "A
fan."
"A reporter,"
she says, the picture of prim indignation.
"Oh yes,
I'd nearly forgotten. Like to take a picture while you're here?" She
shakes her head no. I tap ash into a porcelain bowl I stole from an otherwise
garish set. "How about an autograph?"
She smoothes
down her skirt. "No, thank you."
"You can
go ahead and let yourself out, then." I cross my legs and relax into
the velvet cushions.
When I open my
eyes, Martha is standing over me, tall and sturdy as a redwood. She is frowning
and holding a stenographer's pad. "That lady left this by the pool,"
she says.
"Well, you
better send it on over to her. We wouldn't want her trying to come up with
her own story, and you know all the studio girls are too busy preparing
for the awards to write something up like usual."
"Speaking
of awards, we have to get your dress fitted."
I stretch upwards
and Martha drapes a robe across my shoulders. "Wasn't that little brunette
from the shop supposed to come by and take my measurements?"
"She's busy."
I light another
cigarette because I know Martha hates the mess they make. "I'm busy,
but I still have to wear a dress."
"She says
she won't stand for being left alone with you."
"Honestly,"
I say, standing to go upstairs for a bath. "You'd think they'd never
been kissed before."
"One of
these days," Martha intones. It is her frequent warning.
One of these
days I'll get myself in trouble. One of these days I'll learn to care. One
of these days I'll get over her.
END.
Credits: Sinead, Ivy, and Jamie are the best fan club a girl and her fannish
obsessions could have. The special edition DVD has some great promo spots
filmed by Bette Davis and Anne Baxter, clearly scripted and nearly in character,
that were especially instructive. The
Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood. A book I found buried at the bottom
of my bookshelf called Hollywood and the Great Fan Magazines. A long time
ago in a class on sexuality, censorship and film, I wrote this very long
paper I apparently think it's funny to include here. The title alone is
worth a laugh: Addison and Eve: Portrayals of Queer
Sexuality in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's film All About Eve. WARNING:
Don't steal whole papers, kids. Eventually life will catch up with you and
you'll really seriously suck at something you should have learned in school
by writing this on your own. And you never know. I may have made a lot of
shit up.