To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie

by Ellen Conford

  I opened my movie magazine and began to read the article about Kim Novak and how almost everything in her house is lavender. It’s her trademark, but I knew that already.

  She said she wasn’t ready to think about marriage yet, she was just starting on her career, and everybody had big hopes for her after Picnic.

  “When I get married, it’ll be for keeps,” she said.

  I shut the magazine. That’s what I would say when they interviewed me for Photoplay. I feel exactly the way Kim Novak does about marriage.

  When I get married, it’ll be for keeps.

  We stopped for supper at Sal’s Roadside Rest in Medford, Pennsylvania. The driver told us we wouldn’t stop after that until we were in Ohio, which would be in the middle of the night. The driver seemed to know the lady behind the counter, but he called her Winnie, not Sal, so I didn’t know if she was the owner or just a waitress.

  Everybody wanted to use the rest rooms, including me, so Winnie took all the orders and people waited in line to get to the bathroom.

  The diner had counter seats and booths. I ordered a chopped-steak platter with French fries and lettuce and tomato, plus a Coke and a piece of apple pie and ice cream. Winnie said I ought to try their special, which was sweet-and-sour pot roast with noodles and cabbage, but that was $1.25 and the chopped steak was only 85¢. Since I didn’t know how long it would take me to get a job in California, I figured I ought to be as thrifty as possible.

  While I waited to get into the rest room, I noticed that there was a jukebox over in the comer, and even though I was “pinching pennies,” I couldn’t resist putting a nickel in to hear Elvis sing “Heartbreak Hotel.” After all, I told myself, I had just saved all that money on food, so I could spend just a nickel to hear Elvis sing my favorite song. Who knew how long it would be until I got a radio?

  The music blared out and I stood next to the jukebox and sort of swayed in time to the rhythm. I love the beat of that song, and it’s hard to keep still with the thump, thump, thump of the guitar practically punching you in the stomach.

  Winnie was putting plates of food on the counter and scowling. She looked over at me and shook her head. “I don’t know how you can listen to that screecher,” she said, talking over the music. “You know what Sal calls him?”

  I wanted to listen to Elvis, not Winnie, since I had just spent one of my hard-earned nickels on him, so I just shook my head.

  “Elvis the Pelvis.” Her mouth twisted in a sort of sarcastic smile. “Isn’t that something?”

  I wonder if she thought Sal made up that nickname. I’d only heard it about three hundred times before. Probably two hundred of the times I heard it were when Uncle Ted was teasing me about liking Elvis.

  I smiled, as if I really thought it was something, and kept tapping my hand against the side of the jukebox until the record was over.

  I wished I could hear it again, but Winnie waved me over to the counter, holding my plate of food up for me to see.

  I was so hungry I must have broken all the records at Sal’s Roadside Rest for speedy eating. The chopped steak was like hamburger without a roll, but the apple pie was really delicious.

  Mrs. Durban sat on one side of me at the counter. She was having the special sweet-and-sour pot roast and telling Winnie how good it was.

  On the other side there was a woman with a baby in her arms, who had been sitting at the back of the bus. Winnie heated up the baby’s bottle in a pot of water.

  Everybody put tips down on the counter for Winnie, so I realized I had to too. Mrs. Durban put down two dimes. I hadn’t figured on tips, and I realized then there might be a lot of extra little hidden expenses I hadn’t figured on before this trip was over.

  I went to use the rest room, and put on fresh lipstick and touched some pressed powder to my nose and chin. I really would have liked to put on all new makeup, but there was just this tiny mirror over the sink, and no counter to put stuff on, and the light wasn’t even any good for makeup.

  I reached for the envelope with the money in it, and decided I’d better keep it in my wallet. It would look pretty strange to take money out of an envelope every time I had to pay for something. I was just switching the money from the envelope into my wallet when the woman with the baby came into the bathroom. Only she didn’t have the baby with her.

  I quickly stuffed the wallet into my pocketbook.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “I didn’t know there was anyone in here.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’m finished.”

  I wasn’t sure, but I thought she was looking at me kind of suspiciously. I crumpled the empty envelope and tossed it into the metal trash bin under the roller towel. I tried to look casual about it, and I guessed it was okay, since she was already in the john and closing the door behind her.

  Mrs. Durban was sitting at a booth, giving the baby its bottle. I paid Winnie for the food and put 20¢ down next to my plate when she was at the cash register.

  “Five minutes, Venida,” Mrs. Durban said. “We’ll be leaving in five minutes.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  Five minutes was just long enough to play “I Was the One,” which is the flip side of “Heartbreak Hotel” on the jukebox, but I decided that what with the extra expenses I hadn’t counted on, I’d better not. I told Mrs. Durban I’d see her on the bus, and went outside.

  I showed the bus driver my ticket and he nodded and I went back to our seat. I’d left my movie magazine on it, and my hatbox was in the rack right over it. I sat on the aisle seat until Mrs. Durban came onto the bus. She insisted that it was my turn to take the window.

  “It’s pretty country around here,” she said. “You’ll see some nice farmland. It’s going to be dark pretty soon anyway, so we might as well not change seats anymore.”

  It was pretty. We passed a lot of farms, all flat and stretching out for miles, but with mountains way beyond in the distance. I even saw some horses and a couple of windmills, which didn’t look anything at all like the pictures of windmills in Holland you always see.

  It all looked so peaceful and quiet, and private, so different from Robin Lane, where rows of houses were practically rubbing up against each other so that when you looked out your bedroom window you looked right into your neighbor’s bedroom window.

  I wondered what it would be like to live on a farm, to live someplace where when you looked out your window you saw cows and horses and mountains and fields like checkerboards, brown dirt, then green, then gold, then brown dirt again. And all that space, all that privacy, to do whatever you wanted without anyone around to watch you, without anyone you had to talk to just because they happened to be in their backyard at the same time you were in your backyard.

  I thought it must be very peaceful.

  I knew Hollywood would certainly not be anything like that, but I thought, maybe if I really made it big, I could afford to buy myself a farm. I know there are plenty of farms in California, plus ranches and orange groves, etc., and maybe I could buy a farm and go there for weekends, or between movies or something. That would be where I could rest and be alone, away from the “hurly-burly” of the movie business, and the pressure of fans always following me around trying to get my autograph.

  Of course, I didn’t think I would find “autograph hounds” too hard to take. I thought it would probably be a long time before I got tired of them. Like William Holden says, “It’s when they stop asking you for your autograph that it should bother you.”

  But being a movie actress is hard work, like getting up at six A.M. or even earlier and working till five or six at night. It really isn’t all glamour and premieres and movie-magazine interviews. I’m not kidding myself about that. So I probably would need a nice, quiet place to “get away from it all,” and a farm might be just the thing.

  It would be a great place to do magazine stories, too. Lots of good picture possibilities: riding my horse around the farm, or milking a cow, or maybe just leaning against one of tho
se rail fences in a sunsuit, enjoying Nature.

  It was getting dark. You could hardly see out the window now. Mrs. Durban had dozed off again beside me, her head tilted to one side. She didn’t look very comfortable. I leaned against the window and closed my eyes.

  Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke up and found we had stopped. Most of the lights in the bus were dim. I glanced out the window and saw we were in some sort of terminal or station or something, because there were other buses on either side of us.

  Mrs. Durban was gone. This must be Springfield, where her son and grandchildren lived.

  Now that I had the whole seat to myself, I was tempted to lie down. I could, if I scrunched myself up so that my knees were against my chest and my head right up against the window side, but I was afraid of ruining my dress. It had to last four more days, and I thought it must be getting creased enough just sitting on it all these hours.

  And I was so tired I didn’t seem to be having any trouble sleeping sitting up, so I just leaned my head against the window again and closed my eyes. I never even knew when the bus started up.

  I woke up all cramped and achy. My neck felt stiff and my head was kind of fuzzy. It was really early in the morning, I could tell. The sun wasn’t out all the way yet, and through my window the flat, empty miles of green seemed to be half in the shadows.

  I had no idea where we were, but it was hot. This early, I thought, and already so hot. The bus was very quiet. Almost everybody was still sleeping, or at least not talking. I looked around and saw that the woman with the baby was gone. I guess she’d gotten off in Springfield too.

  I looked toward the driver’s seat and saw that the bus driver had different color hair. I realized the first driver must have finished his work for the day, and gotten off at Springfield, because, after all, how could one person drive all the way to California and go without sleeping for five days?

  I didn’t know when we were going to stop for breakfast, but I figured it couldn’t be too soon, since it was still so early. I thought, I must look an absolute fright; I hadn’t even washed my face since yesterday morning.

  I stood up on shaky legs and stretched to reach my hatbox in the rack over my seat. I would put on all new makeup, check my hair, maybe dab a little cologne around my neck and chest, which might make me feel cooler.

  I opened the hatbox and got out my round makeup mirror, which has one side magnifying and one side normal. I did look awful—especially on the magnifying side.

  I wiped cold cream all over my face to get the old makeup off, and wiped it with tissue. All the stars use cold cream to take their makeup off, because they say soap is too harsh on the skin. But I like to wash my face with soap at least twice a day. Even though I don’t have oily-type skin there is no point in asking for trouble.

  I patted my neck and the part of my chest down to the top of my dress with tissues and splashed cologne on. A good thing to do in the summer to keep cool and help you stay fresh is to keep your cologne in the refrigerator, so it feels deliciously icy every time you dab it on your body, but of course, this was a Greyhound bus and there was no refrigerator to keep my cologne in.

  So it didn’t make me feel all that cool when I put it on, but I did feel fresher. I couldn’t take a shower, of course, and the idea of not being able to take a shower for five days bothered me, but I decided that the minute we stopped for breakfast I would go into the rest room and at least wash under my arms and put on some more Mum.

  My hair looked okay, except for my angel wings, which were going a little limp in the heat, and the one on the right was sort of squashed from leaning against the window all night. But the French twist was okay as far as I could tell, with only some wisps coming down on the bottom against my neck.

  It is not the easiest thing in the world to put on makeup in a moving bus, but with the extra room on the seat, I could at least spread out a little and take my time.

  My friend Judy can put on lipstick in a moving bus without even looking at a mirror and I’ve never been able to understand how she does it. Every time I ask her she says, “I don’t know, I guess I just know where my lips are.”

  Anyway, I managed, and trying to get my lipstick on in a moving bus, even with a mirror, made me think of Judy and how bad she was going to feel that I had gone off without saying good-bye, or even hinting about what I was going to do.

  I don’t have a whole lot of friends. I had to go to a new school when I moved in with Aunt Grace and Uncle Ted, and it takes a while to get to know people. And I was never sure I wanted people to get to know me all that well, because as far as I could tell, I was the only person who didn’t have a mother and father, or at least one parent, and I didn’t like the idea of everybody knowing I was a foster child and asking a whole lot of questions. Which they would if I got too friendly with them.

  And besides, like I said, the kids in school are very immature. They don’t have a goal like I do. They don’t do anything with their lives but study and go to dances and go on dates and giggle about boys who are just as immature as they are. So we really don’t have much in common.

  But Judy knew about Aunt Grace and Uncle Ted taking me in right from the beginning, because she and her parents go to the same church, and they came over to meet me the first month I lived on Robin Lane.

  Judy likes movies too, and we both kept scrapbooks and traded pictures that we didn’t want for pictures we did want, except James Dean, because we both collect him. And even though she didn’t know I was going to California now, she knew that I wanted to be a movie star, and she was sure I had the looks and talent to “make it big.”

  I could talk about feelings with her too, and she was the only person in the world I could do that with. Of course, I couldn’t tell her everything, especially about Mr. Framer and Mr. O’Connor and definitely not about Uncle Ted, because she’d think I was really terrible, even if none of that was my fault.

  But I could tell her other things about how I felt and what I dreamed of, and she would tell me her secrets, and I found there were lots of things I thought about and wondered about that couldn’t have been so strange, because Judy had the same thoughts.

  Anyway, that’s why I felt really bad going off without a word to her, but when I wrote to her from Hollywood, after I was established, I knew she’d understand and forgive me.

  Especially if I invited her out for a double date with Tab Hunter, who she thinks is absolutely fabulous!

  I finished with my makeup and closed my hatbox with a sigh.

  It was the best job I could do, considering.

  The sun got brighter and hotter, and there were no more shadows on the grass. I began to see cows and more windmills and farmhouses back from the road. The barns were all red, just like the pictures of barns you see, only a couple of them had signs on the side, with a picture of an Indian girl and CALUMET BAKING POWDER painted on them. I thought that was very unusual, having an advertisement on a barn.

  Finally we stopped.

  There was a big sign that said SLEEPYLAND MOTEL AND RESTAURANT and a big parking space right in front of the restaurant part, with two round gas pumps next to the road. The motel part was stretched out behind the restaurant, this whole bunch of cabins that looked like they were made of logs, all connected in a sort of U-shape.

  The driver got off the bus and said we’d have forty- five minutes to eat and do whatever we had to do. I took my hatbox with me because I wanted to do more “freshening up” in the bathroom.

  When I got inside the restaurant, which also looked like a log cabin, only bigger than the motel rooms, there was a line that I knew must be for the rest rooms. I was glad I had put on makeup on the bus, even if I didn’t do the greatest job in the world. I’d hate to have anyone see me looking like some of those women lined up for the bathrooms looked.

  There was a red-headed lady behind the counter taking orders. I ordered the special breakfast, which was hotcakes, juice, and coffee or milk. The waitress asked me if I wan
ted the deluxe, which came with sausage and was 20¢ extra, but I said no. Every penny counts, I reminded myself.

  There were booths here too, and though there was no big jukebox, like in Sal’s Roadside Rest, there were those new little ones right in the booths, with rows and rows of selections to choose from. I slid into a booth and flipped through the titles, not really meaning to play anything, just curious to see what records they had here. Wherever “here” was—I still didn’t know.

  When I saw they had Elvis’s brand-new hit, “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You,” I just couldn’t resist. It had only been out for about a month, and I hadn’t gotten to hear it too many times yet, and who knew when I’d get a chance to hear it again?

  And besides, I’d saved 20¢ by not getting sausage with the pancakes, so I was still really being thrifty and saving 10¢ anyway, even though these new little jukeboxes cost a dime to play instead of a nickel.

  I reached into my pocketbook to get a dime. I felt around, but there was so much stuff in there, I couldn’t get to my wallet. I started taking things out and lining them up on the table: my compact, my lipstick, tissues, my pink scarf, the sunglasses with the white plastic frames I’d gotten at Woolworth’s, my pad and pencil for letters to my mother and Judy.

  Faster and faster I grabbed for things, and the more stuff I took out, the more frantic I got. I should have been able to get to the wallet by now. I should have been able to feel it in there. I didn’t remember putting all this stuff on top of it anyway. I’d switched my money from the envelope to the wallet and paid Winnie for my supper from the wallet, and I didn’t remember taking anything else out of my bag after that. So the wallet should have been right on top.

  Except, it wasn’t.

  I stretched the bag all the way open and looked inside.