Crowned Heads

by Thomas Tryon

  There was a particular reason she had chosen Boca de Oro, which had nothing to do with its obvious physical attractions. It had been her hope that she would be invited to race with her friends the Sandlers on their yacht, the MorryEll, from La Jolla to Cabo San Lucas at the tip of Baja California, and from there to Acapulco. Not that Lorna especially enjoyed sailing, but one of the members of the group was a man in whom she had for some time been interested. The hoped-for invitation not materializing, she had decided to arrive well in advance and surprise the sailing party when they put in at Boca.

  She had plenty of time to get herself in hand. The doctor was correct, her nervous crisis had been coming on again for some time, but with the sun, the sea, and some quiet, she would condition herself, and when her friends arrived she would be in the pink. All that was required was that nature should do its work, that she eat and sleep and relax. No one knew where she was, not even her son or daughter, her doctor or her attorney; only her best friend, Nan Pringle. She found it an agreeable condition, knowing there were no telephones to bother her; no lunch engagements to keep; no psychiatrists’ appointments to remember; no letters arriving with disturbing news. The weather was practically guaranteed, and by the time the MorryEll put in she would have a very nice tan, thank you. Just getting on the plane had given her a sudden surge of relief, as if when the rubber wheels lifted from the runway she had become a disembodied spirit and that spirit were racing away, somewhere ahead of her, leaving behind those multitudinous heaps of problems, irksome, annoying things. She couldn’t imagine what had made her do such a silly thing, setting fire to the curtains, and she had herself one last good cry—she was certain it was the end of those lachrymose fits that burst on her at the most inconvenient times—and felt buoyant and forward-looking. The past was the past, and once the Sandlers et al arrived, she hoped they would bear her away again under white sails to who knew what, but surely not inconsiderable, joys. All she had to do was get hold of herself.

  She really must.

  She hated the name. Lorna Doone. When her teachers called on her she had shrunk with embarrassment. In grammar school the other children had called her Lorna Dumb or Lorna Doom. Then one day in the A&P she passed a pyramid display of Lorna Doone cookies, on sale. She stole a box. On the wrapper was a picture of a pretty girl, and the cookies were buttery and sweet. She brought them home and asked her mother if she was named after the cookie. No, from a book, her mother told her. Lorna found the book at the library; it was by Blackmore, the Victorian tale of an English country girl who survives a clan feud, inherits land and titles, and marries the man she loves. In time the real Lorna identified herself with the original heroine, and thought it was all very romantic. Then, on another day, in a stationery store where they sold French records and periodicals, the saleswoman, having learned her name, asked if she was related to the star. What star? Eeraynee Doone. Lorna had never heard of Eeraynee Doone. Turned out it was Irene Dunne; Miss Dunne became her idol. From there on, given the book and the movie star and the cookies, her name didn’t sound so dumb to her. She took boxes of the cookies to school and displayed them prominently on her desk, and found the boys stopping by to be offered one. Soon they were all calling her “Cookie,” but she knew it wasn’t the cookies they were after when they whistled “Lookie, lookie, lookie, here comes Cookie, walkin’ down the street.” She knew what they were after, and she knew she had it.

  Since babyhood her hair had always been blond; since childhood she had always been told she was pretty. Pretty enough to be in the movies? Certainly. It had not been difficult. The distance from Santa Monica, where she was born and brought up, to Burbank, where she was first put under contract, was less than twenty miles. At fourteen she was a baton twirler with the band at Santa Monica High; she wore a white helmet decorated with gold feathers, a short, flirty costume, and white kid boots. She had the best legs of any of the girls, and all the boys said they were sensational. Her marks were not good. She did the lindy hop to “And the Angels Sing” and “Elmer’s Tune.” At UCLA, after the war, she was still twirling a baton for the Saturday afternoon games. She wore a Ginger Rogers pageboy with her hair parted on the side and held with a silver barrette, and cashmeres, and plaid skirts, and imitation pearls. All the boys were still after her, and they listened to “Racing with the Moon” by Vaughn Monroe; but her marks were still not good. Then her picture was on the cover of Look, heading a feature called “Vets Go Back to School … with Girls.” She and nine other beautiful coeds had been picked by the editors to illustrate the article. The agent Viola Ueberroth brought the picture to the attention of a studio executive, a test was arranged, and she was signed at Warners. She had no training and got little help, but they put her in a picture with Dolly the Talking Cow. Her mother, Selma, had told her she was just a dumb bunny and to keep her mouth shut or people would find out how stupid she really was. She did what they told her to. In the studio commissary she would see Alexis Smith, who was working with Cary Grant; and Lauren Bacall, who was working with Humphrey Bogart; and Bette Davis, who was working with Glenn Ford. Lorna was working with a cow.

  After that she did a small part in Nora Prentiss, with Ann Sheridan, a small part in Flaxy Martin, with Virginia Mayo, a small part in The Adventures of Don Juan, with Errol Flynn. Her mother worried about her working with Flynn; there’d been the statutory rape scandal, and Selma didn’t want him “in like Flynn” with her daughter. Lorna said oh, no, Mr. Flynn was a very nice man, a gentleman. Shortly after that, Warners dropped her. She went to RKO. Went to Columbia. Went to Fox. She did twenty-seven pictures between 1948 and 1953, all B’s. She was always terrified of the camera, never knew what she was doing, she moved where the director told her, said the lines the way the director told her, and if she was required to cry, they blew glycerin in her eyes.

  Ann Sheridan was the “Oomph Girl”; the studio flacks decided to push Lorna as the “all-American Cookie” and couldn’t you just eat her all up, mmmmm. Privately she thought of herself as Lorna Dumb. The image of the “all-American Cookie” somehow eluded her. But through trial and error she had concocted a screen persona out of fragments of other personalities, actresses she had watched and who seemed to have something. She always thought of people as “types”: there was the “sexy type,” the “outdoor type,” the “lady type.” She wondered what type she was. The cute type, they told her, the adorable type. You know—“all-American Cookie”? Oh, I get it. But she wasn’t sure. She pieced herself together the way a film cutter puts together a picture, from snippets—a gesture here, a hairdo there, a way of wearing a flower, a penchant for mantel leaning, a manner of sweeping into a room as if she weren’t terrified, and what didn’t work for her she quickly scrapped: Joan Crawford’s ankle-strap shoes, Marie Windsor’s pompadour or Jane Wyman’s bangs, Stanwyck’s walk, Paulette Goddard’s eyebrow arch. The year she’d been named one of the Deb Stars by the make-up artists and hairdressers at the Palladium, she didn’t bother with tiaras or a crown that lighted up by means of concealed batteries hidden under a peplum, the way Lori Nelson had, but simply asked the hairdresser to give her a Grace Kelly French twist and had Wardrobe lend her elbow-length white kid gloves, and she maintained an enviable decorum while the rest gushed like the starlets they were. If Hitchcock needed a new Grace Kelly, here she was, Martha Hyer notwithstanding. She had a little sewing lady on Cynthia Street who could copy anything and run it up on her Singer, and you could be sure the darts would be in the proper places. Publicity was all right, but she had never gone in for gimmicks. Let Debra Paget stick her T-bird all over with plastic jewels, let Vicki Dugan wear a dress cut down to the cleft in her buttocks, let Jayne Mansfield cavort in her pink shag-rugged bedroom, let Debbie Reynolds sell Girl Scout cookies. She maintained an expression that was cool, aloof, even a trifle prissy, but it spoke volumes to the right observer.

  She married to get away from her mother. He was a cameraman, Harvey Lacks (Lorna Lacks was a very bad name). Harvey was the
type person who wanted to adore you, and he thought she was the most beautiful creature he’d ever photographed. He lusted after her at breakfast, would come home from the studio at lunch to have her, would be waiting for her downstairs before they went to a party. They were living in the San Fernando Valley then, in a really sweet ranch-style home, and when she came down he would look at her on the landing, and she was so beautiful he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He would get her on the couch, then the floor, literally tearing her clothes off, and they would never get to the party at all; when he was through with her, her make-up was a mess and her hair, too, to say nothing of the clothes. It was legal rape, she thought.

  After Harvey came “Brownie” Brown (a little better, Lorna Brown), a packager of frozen foods. They had two children, Jeffrey and Carrie; eventually broke up, reconciled, took a “second honeymoon” cruise to the South Seas and Far East, broke up again, divorced. By that time she’d worked her way back from Van Nuys to the other side of the hill; from ranch style to English Tudor. Then there was Cape Cod, followed by Southern Plantation. There were plenty of men: Jerry the jockey, who used to hit her; Wes the stunt man, who hit her harder; and Stan the baseball player, who didn’t hit her but would have liked to. In between, an assortment of musicians, small-time directors, actors. She hadn’t really known any of them, any more than they’d known her. Why was it always so difficult for someone really to get to know her? Somehow it didn’t matter in the end; she was a rolling stone, and what moss she gathered was mostly accidental. She did, however, learn to do centerpieces out of vegetables—flowerettes of broccoli and cauliflower, and little cherry tomatoes for accent. Pillar to post, man to man, and she kept looking for the one she could really love, really respect, really worship, but somehow it never panned out. She was a man’s woman and she needed a man to tell her what to appreciate; she never dared laugh at the theater until he laughed first and then she knew it was all right. One of them—Brownie, she thought it was—said she’d invented herself, which was probably as close to the truth as she could get. Eventually she was hidden away in the hills behind a wall, where she was maintained in style by a famous industrialist-movie producer notorious for his eccentricities and the women he kept hidden behind walls in the hills; Lorna knew of at least three others in similar situations. She didn’t care; the checks came, the bills were paid; she saw him seldom, and she had a Georgian silver tea set on the sideboard and original oil paintings.

  Through Viola she met Sam Ueberroth. He was an important man, up by his bootstraps and his sister Viola’s help, but people said he was a cold fish. He told her he liked her class, would put her in a picture, an A. She moved out of the industrialist’s house to an apartment, where Sam could visit her when his wife wasn’t looking. One night at Ciro’s she was overheard from a partially open telephone booth: “Listen, Sam Ueberroth, if you don’t give me that part, the fuck’s off!” She was very angry. The part was that of the girl in The Miracle of Santa Cristi. She got the part; afterward she got Sam.

  She had done nothing but B’s—oaters, cops and robbers, and programmers—and now she had done her first A. The picture was religious, but hardly faithful to the book. Fedora’s presence in her comeback role as the Virgin caused a sensation. The premiere was at Hollywood’s famous Carthay Circle and she had swept under the long canopy in a Jean Louis strapless and a white fox, and Steve Allen interviewed her on TV. She was “very excited,” she “knew it was going to be a wonderful evening,” and afterward the audience had risen en masse and applauded the actors. Irene Dunne, who was a good Catholic, said she had been greatly moved, and Louella Parsons, who was gooder because she was converted, wept positive buckets. Later, at the post-premiere party, Louella poked her face between Willie and Bee Marsh’s heads for the photographers: The Three Converts. Lorna envied them their faith.

  She intended to retire and become a Brentwood matron. Sam had bought a large house, she wore Chanel suits and good jewelry, drove a Mercedes and carried status pocketbooks. She involved herself in Good Works.

  Acting had never been an end with her, but a means to an end. She was never good at equations, but one she knew: Work + Bed = Success. Success = Fame = Happiness. For men she had filled as many beds as there were to be filled. She hopped in and out and in again without chagrin; remorse she never knew. With her fine, supple body, and her voluptuous breasts that tipped provocatively upward, and her legs that seemed to go all the way up to her armpits, she had done all right. Still, she wasn’t terribly happy. And then, somehow, Stan the baseball player had come back into her life, and Sam threw her out. After that she had her first nervous breakdown.

  Selma had already had hers, six or seven of them. Lorna’s poor mother was halfway between Culver City and Beverly Hills, the same distance between sanity and madness, in a “home” on Motor Avenue, behind a wire grille. She couldn’t remember anything that had happened since Eisenhower was president and Perry Como was on TV. When the astronauts went to the moon and she watched it on television, she maintained that it was a fake and had been staged in a New York studio; anybody knew that men couldn’t go to the moon.

  Lorna did not permit herself the luxury of feeling sorry for herself, about either her family or her own lack of success with husbands and men in general. She never thought the world owed her a living. She assumed this task herself, but because she lived for the future (believing she had not lived in the past), she did not realize she was not living in the present. In the thirties she had dreams, in the forties she worked hard and faithfully, in the fifties she got her big chance, in the sixties it somehow all went sour, in the seventies—a big question mark. She asked herself those questions any thinking person asks:

  Who am I?

  What am I doing here?

  Where am I going?

  Is there more?

  She asked, but found no answers. She thought it all rather funny; had been good at laughing at herself, until her breakdown. Then she had become frightened and had skulked away to Menninger’s, where they tucked her into bed and a doctor came and talked to her.

  She had already begun manifesting “odd” behavior patterns. She had been swiping things from stores since grammar school; once she’d been caught, and it had terrified her that Selma should find out. Still, it was a thrill. Only her friend Nan Pringle had known of this aberration, and had cautioned her: what kind of headlines would it make? She would go into Bullock’s gift department with a shopping bag, and start loading things into it. If a salesperson asked if she wished to be helped, she replied airily, “No, thank you; just looking.” The swag was monumentally stupid, things she didn’t want or need. Once she stole a bottle of expensive perfume from a countertop and when she got it home she discovered it was a display item, filled with colored water. She was furious, wanted to return it and demand her money back.

  Then, one day, she had noticed one of her gowns hanging on a closet door. The skirt was tulle, and for no reason she touched a match to the hem to see what would happen. It went up like a shot, singeing the front of her hair so she had to cut bangs again. But she liked the sensation of fire, and she would toss lighted matches into the paper-towel containers in ladies’ rooms, and leave the place in smoke. Or she would drive through the alleys that ran behind the streets in Beverly Hills, touching off trash cans with lighter fluid, then wait to hear the sirens.

  She went back into analysis, and a nice new doctor dredged up enough of her childhood to determine that she had a condition of hyperkinesis, which meant simply that she was the victim of senseless and uncontrollable urges. The cure: love and understanding. Lorna could not resist the impulse to laugh in his face. He was good, that doctor, but not so good that he could resist her body; she invited him to her place, he succumbed, it became a futile relationship, she left analysis again.

  When money ran short she got into the habit of kiting checks and it provided problems for her business managers. The checks were usually for small amounts, so she was never prosecuted, but i
t was embarrassing. The time came when the money Sam had settled on her ran out; she called Vi and said she wanted to go back to work. Vi was kind, said she’d look around, came back with the answer that things were difficult just now. Lorna saw what that meant: nobody wanted her. Naturally, the problem was Stan. Though they only saw one another privately, word had got about in certain quarters. Still, they wanted her on Hollywood Squares, for scale. Then, almost apologetically, Vi came up with an offer to do a series of commercials for Perkies, the pop-up breakfast tarts. She became known as the “Perkies girl,” friendly and ladylike, with just the touch of class to push the fake blueberries that were inside the “mouth-watering” tarts. Then she made that oh-so-foolish scene at the Biltmore Hotel, in front of the whole baseball team, and when the scandal hit the papers she was finished with her sponsor. “Tart’s tarts” they called Perkies; and then the fire. Nan Pringle had told her about Boca de Oro, and though there was no money in her account, she kited one more sizable check, devil take the hindmost, and flew away. Behind her was one burned bridge after another; ahead, the abyss. She did not know why she did the things she did, or neglected the things she did. She did not know why she suffered anguish, felt afflicted, sensed hopelessness. All she knew was that things had a way of not panning out, and that she was becoming terribly afraid.