Naked in the Promised Land

by Lillian Faderman

  “Diamond Lil,” I chuckled to myself in algebra class, snug in my slob disguise. I loved that name.

  When I was with my Geller’s gang, Fairfax High School was my shameful secret, because I could never let them know I was a kid. Sometimes I woke from a nightmare as if I’d been dropped into a pit: They’ve discovered the truth. “She’s only fifteen years old!” Babette points a shaming finger at me, and the others hoot, even Simone: “Baby, baby, kindergarten baby!”

  Okay, the less I talked the better: I’d be a silent, smoldering beauty. I was an actress, and I could act any role I wanted.

  “How’s your new job,” Stan asked.

  “Fabulous,” I drawled, a mysterious smile playing around my lips. End of discussion. A snake vanishing between two rocks.

  The truant officer came to our apartment two or three times. “Well, your daughter had twelve absences last month.” I heard the precise nasal voice addressing my mother the first time. I peeked out from my room and saw the woman’s lace ruff collar and tight blue-gray hairdo that sat like a helmet on her head, and I dashed back to my bed on noiseless tippy-toes. I buried my head under the pillow, simulating the high snores of deep sleep, but she didn’t barge in. Should I be scared? Could they really throw me in jail? Or reform school? They probably thought I was an immigrant girl, poor family. They wouldn’t bother with me much because they’d figure Id be sixteen soon enough and quit to get married.

  “She hasn’t been feeling good,” my mother said, excusing me another time.

  “Then you need to take her to a doctor, and she has to bring a letter from him to school. In America, children have to go to school,” the truant officer lectured, enunciating carefully. “She can go to work or get married or whatever you want her to do when she’s sixteen.”

  “Okay,” my mother said, tremulous before American authority. “I’m gonna tell her to get better.” My mother screamed at my door when the truant officer left: “Lilly, what’s the matter with you? You want to make me sick?”

  “Leave me alone,” I screamed back. “I know what I’m doing.”

  I hated it when the truant officer came to see my mother, who’d then get hysterical, but I couldn’t bear to drag myself to school in the morning after I’d stayed out until 2 or 3 A.M. And I wasn’t learning anything from the teachers anyway. I’d sit in the back of the class and read plays. No one stopped me, or even noticed, and I could finish almost three a day. I knew more about Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Maxwell Anderson, and William Inge than anyone at Geller’s.

  Algebra—D, my report card said, English—C, Geography—D, History—D, Latin—F (why in the world had I taken Latin?). But what did it matter? I only had a few more months to go, and then I could quit school and devote myself to my acting career.

  Though I now gave my mother new things to worry about, the truth was that as soon as she’d married Albert, her old madness vanished—maybe because she didn’t have to work anymore in an unventilated sweatshop, on her feet with her arms extended all day long; maybe because she didn’t have to see the Hungarian woman and hear the tragic stories of lost brothers that made her think of her own; or maybe it was just that now she had new responsibilities—shopping for food, cooking supper every night—and they took up a lot of space in her mind. Whatever it was, though my mother never looked happy, she wasn’t running around the room naked either, pulling her hair and screaming “Hirschel!” How could I not be grateful to Albert for that?

  In other ways, though, her life was still horrible. I knew from the movies and the songs she’d loved and the way she’d pined over my father for all those years after he betrayed her that she’d been a very romantic, very sexual person. But I couldn’t imagine her making love with my stepfather. Did they ever have sex? On the nights I was home I listened from my bed, curious and ready to be repelled, but no sounds came through the thin plasterboard that separated the two bedrooms except for Albert’s wall-rattling snores and my mother’s tossing and turning, her pillow or head hitting the wall.

  On weekend mornings I was often awakened by Albert’s voice from the kitchen: “Nu, are you gonna deal today or tomorrow?” Then a long silence. “So, your turn! Am I playing this game by myself or with somebody else?” Then with passion: “Hah, I got you!” and I could hear him slam his victorious cards on the table. Did they play gin rummy instead of having sex? Why, oh why, had she made me push her into this? Why, why, with all her voluptuous beauty, wasn’t she able to get Moishe to marry her?

  During the week, the minute Albert came home from work he sat at the kitchen table, dealt out a solitaire hand from his grubby deck, and waited for my mother to deposit his food in front of him. When she stood beside him with his plate, he pushed the cards aside to clear a space and lifted his knife and fork without a word, without a nod of acknowledgment. What if he goes crazy again and does something violent to her? But he never did. He wasn’t a normal person, but he worked and brought home the money, and she cooked his suppers. It was a businesslike arrangement. They never talked.

  I never talked either when I was home for supper. The table was silent except for Albert’s chomp and slurp and my mother’s crunch and crack. It was her sounds, even more than his, that grated in my ear, set my teeth on edge, like steel screeching on steel. Sometimes, sitting there at the table, I hated her with a visceral fury that made me clench my fists. Why hadn’t she managed to make her life any better? I would never lead a life like hers! But my hatred was followed almost always by a gush of pity. I’d loved her so passionately once, when we were the center of each other’s world. And now she was stuck.

  We never walked arm-in-arm anymore, the way we used to on the streets of the Bronx or East L.A. We never went anywhere together anymore. “Mother and daughter,” we’d said in New York. I tried not to let myself think about it. Whenever I remembered I felt a claw in my gut, but I could escape in my mind by thinking about Geller’s and my friends and my hoped-for career. I had to make my own life.

  ***

  “I hear that William Morris himself came to see Anna Christie here last month, and he actually signed one guy on,” somebody whispered on audition night, the first time I went to Geller’s.

  “Elia Kazan was in the audience a couple of years ago. That’s when he discovered Eva Marie Saint here,” somebody else whispered.

  Did we all wait with secret hope after each performance for the fabulous knock on the dressing room door? “William Wyler’s out front and says he has to talk to Lil Foster!”

  But though we were practically next door to them, the big shots weren’t coming around to the school productions. So where did they find their talent? How did you get discovered? I still hadn’t a clue, and there was no one at Geller’s to advise us. We took classes and were on our own. Jack Lord auditioned the students, but then, like a god in a mechanistic universe, he virtually disappeared. We joked about the appropriateness of his name.

  I’d thought, the night of my audition, that I’d already been discovered by E. J. Smith because he worked in a talent agency and told me I was terrific, but he never said anything more after that night. What could it hurt to talk to him now? “Oh, that’s when I was at the Mel Kaufman Agency. I quit there,” he told me when I asked how I could get an appointment. “I’m trying to get started someplace else. But you can just go into the Mel Kaufman Agency on your own. Take some photos,” he said easily.

  “Did you go?” he asked weeks later when we ran into each other in front of Geller’s. I’d given up right away because I had no money for professional photographs. I’d seen the kind you were supposed to take around with you. Gloria had had some done. “Publicity pictures,” she said they were called: black-and-white glamour shots, moody large eyes staring intently into space, glossy wet lips. The photos were backlit, with shadows that spoke of high drama and mystery. She told me what they cost. A fortune.

  “If you need pictures, I’ve got some ideas,” E. J. said. His close gaze made me feel prickly, and I wa
s still intimidated by his large, white-blond goyishness, but I stayed to listen. “I know this guy who’s a photographer, likes to do pinups on the side.” I must have looked startled because E. J. spread his fingers upright in a gesture that indicated nothing to worry about. “Very professional stuff,” he said with a businesslike air. “I know he’d trade publicity stills for a couple of hours of a pinup shoot. He’ll give you what you need.”

  I said nothing as E. J. tore the title page off the typescript he was carrying, Tennessee Williams’s Baby Doll, and scribbled a name and phone number on it, then stuck it in front of me. For a second I hesitated, but I’d seen pinup photos of Betty Grable. A backless bathing suit, long legs ending in high heels, a bright smile over her shoulder, flirting with the camera. It would be just one more role.

  I wore Simone’s harlequin capris and plastic see-through platform heels to the shoot in Wes Martin’s studio. Framed portraits adorned the windows—a glowing bride in miles of swirled white satin, a pouting little redheaded boy holding a puppy, a debutante looking fresh and virginal. “Miss Foster?” Wes Martin asked, coming out from another room when I opened the door that made a buzzer ring. He was wearing gray work pants and a workshirt with rolled-up sleeves, a thin, balding man with an efficient air.

  I can do this, I assured myself. “Gigi,” I ad-libbed. “My professional name is Gigi Frost.” Lillian Foster or even Lil sounded far too serious for a pinup model.

  “Let’s try a few shots in the outfit you’re wearing. Looks great.” His smile was impersonal.

  The poses I took weren’t much different from the ones I’d practiced in the mirror at Fanny’s from the time I was eight years old: hands on hips and chin tilted down, a “come hither” expression in my eyes; arms in the air, an ecstatic expression on my lips; a cross-legged pose, back arched and chest forward, a naughty-girl moue on my face. Then in his tiny bathroom I hung my capris and cotton pullover on a hook, folded my panties and bra and placed them on the floor, and changed into my two-piece bathing suit.

  “Okay. Okay. Okay,” he said to each new pose I struck with his umbrellas and scarves and ukuleles. It was fun, I thought, surprising myself at the flirty way I could be with a black box. It wasn’t me—it was some glamour girl, or rather it was me playing the role of a glamour girl.

  “Now can we take just a few figure shots?” Wes Martin said.

  “Like the first ones?” I asked, meaning the harlequin pants and high heels, standing full-figure instead of seated or kneeling.

  “No,” he said. He glanced sharply at me, and his pale cheeks became pink. “‘Figure’ means ‘nude,’ ‘no clothes.’” He seemed as embarrassed as I.

  Nude. He wanted me to take my clothes off in front of him? I hadn’t been completely naked in front of anyone since I was a baby. What if my mother or Rae saw nude pictures of me? “This is what a Jewish girl does?” Rae would yell. My mother would bawl.

  But how would they ever see them? Why shouldn’t I let him take some “figure” photographs, as he called them. I needed those publicity pictures if I was really going to make the next step in my career, and I could see there was nothing to fear from Wes Martin. Hadn’t Marilyn Monroe gotten her start that way?

  “There’s a big towel in the bathroom you can use for a wrap. I’ll set up a plain white background, okay?”

  The air felt cold when I removed the white towel from my torso and stood on the huge sheet of heavy background paper. As the big lights warmed my nipples and my belly, my teeth stopped their little castanet clacks, but I couldn’t shift my eyes to look at him. Nor could I flirt with the camera now. Naked, I posed sedately, as I imagined an artist’s model would. “Good job, good job,” he said, still entirely businesslike, to every new pose I struck. Then, “That’s three rolls. Great!” And I went back to the bathroom to dress as he set up the lights for the glamour head shots I needed to take to the Mel Kaufman Agency.

  A week later, I returned for the contact sheet he’d made of twelve head shots and fifteen eight-by-tens of the one he thought was the best. I held the photo up gingerly, by the edges, delighted. I looked like a film noir actress.

  “Would you like to see some of the pinups?” he asked matter-of-factly.

  “No, that’s all right,” I cried. The memory of my nude posing had really agitated me, bothered me all week, as though I’d let myself be robbed of something. I hurried out of the studio as quickly as I could; but with the publicity photos in the cardboard envelope that Wes had given me, I soon pushed the nagging scruple aside. I’d needed professional pictures to hand to an agent, and now I had them. Good ones.

  I stared at the eight-by-ten again as I sat alone on the back seat of the bus. No, I didn’t look like Elizabeth Taylor, I thought, critical now, a little disappointed. But still…

  I studied the picture for days. Something was very wrong. My nose. Where it should have been button or turned up, like Debbie Reynolds’s or Doris Day’s, like all the noses of the most popular actresses of the 1950s, it had a bump and it was too big. It was my mother’s nose. I’d always thought she was so beautiful, but now I saw that I wasn’t at all beautiful. Not with that nose.

  I’d known girls at Fairfax High who started the school year with convex noses, and before the first semester was over their noses were concave. A “nose job,” it was called, plastic surgery. “A lot of girls are doing it,” I heard someone whisper when Annette Kessler came back to school after a week’s absence, looking like a movie star.

  “I’ve got to ask you something important,” I told E. J. when he wanted to see the publicity stills Wes Martin had taken. Who else could I ask about what it takes to make it in Hollywood? “Do I need plastic surgery on my nose?”

  He gave a low whistle and studied me judiciously, cupping my chin to turn my head left and then right in profile. “You’re talking about a lot of money there,” he said, “but I’ll tell you, there’s something you can do that’s much cheaper.” He slipped an arm around my shoulder as though we were good friends. “For your teeth.”

  “My teeth?” I’d never thought about them.

  “They’re called Hollywood veneers. A dentist fits them on you, and it gives you a perfect smile. You just slip them off when you eat or sleep. They cost something like a hundred bucks.”

  I laughed an exasperated laugh. I didn’t have even one buck.

  “Look, if you didn’t mind the session with Wes,” E. J. said, “I can put you in touch with this agent, Andy, who books only pinup and figure. You can make a hundred bucks in a few hours’ work. Do yourself a favor.” He smiled, showing his own big pearly teeth.

  I slipped into the women’s dressing room the instant he walked off and studied myself in the mirror, forcing my lips into a jack-o’-lantern grin. I said the alphabet slowly, exaggerating each letter, to see how I looked to people when I talked. He was right. How hadn’t I noticed my teeth before? They were hideous hobgoblin teeth pointing every which way, yellow, uneven, crowded like grave markers in an ancient cemetery that I’d seen in a photograph.

  Pictures of young women in various stages of undress plastered the walls of Andy’s Santa Monica Boulevard office, and scattered on his desk were glossy black-and-white photos of women—in tiny bikinis, in baby doll nightgowns slipping off a shoulder, in sheer peignoirs that were molded to breasts and stomachs and thighs, in nothing at all, the pubes covered only by a beach ball or a coyly raised knee. He was a smiley man, about sixty, with a beer-belly and a fluffy Santa Claus beard. “Let’s see what you look like, little darlin’,” he said. “You can get undressed over there.” He waved toward another room.

  I looked at him blankly, suddenly scared.

  “There’s a robe in there. Just wrap it around you and come on out,” he said a little impatiently. “Nobody bites around here.”

  I could give it up, I thought as I walked to the dressing room. What had I wanted this for in the first place—a Hollywood career? My mother and I had dreamed it together, but those dreams were
finished.

  Yet what was there for me if I didn’t become an actress? It was the only goal I’d ever seriously thought about, and I was good at it. Everyone said so. I couldn’t give it up now.

  I undressed in front of the full-length mirror that leaned against the wall in the dressing room. How dirty my bra looked. I couldn’t remember when I’d last washed it. It was the only bra that I owned, and one strap was held up with a safety pin. I wadded it and shoved it into my large purse, then wrapped the flimsy nylon robe around myself and stepped out quickly.

  “Okay, little darlin’.” Andy motioned me mechanically to a raised platform. “If you’ll just drop the towel, please.” He switched on two large, blazing photography lights and adjusted their beams to aim at me. “Now, turn sideways.”

  I posed, smiling with closed lips.

  “Outstanding,” he now cried, accenting the first syllable, “Absolutely outstanding!”

  Back in the dressing room I pulled my blue sheath over my naked skin, shivering as though all my synapses were exploding like cherry bombs. “I can put you to work right away,” Andy called at me. “Mario Parma does spreads for mags—King, Adam, first-rate stuff—and he’s always looking for new faces. Fifty bucks a day, and he’s the one pays my commission, not you. Should I give him a call?”

  Magazines. Girlie mags, they were called. I’d seen them on Hollywood Boulevard newsstands, and the pimply boys and round-shouldered old men who leafed through them. But my mother and Rae read only the Forward, the Yiddish newspaper that they bought in little Jewish grocery stores. They’d never go to the newsstands that sold those magazines. Fifty dollars a day. That was almost as much as Albert earned in a whole week.

  “Sure,” I answered as I stepped out of the dressing room.

  Andy wasted no time. “I’ve got something new and fantastic for you,” he said into the receiver of his black telephone. “Gigi Frost’s her name. Incredible! About 38-21-36. Right?” He confirmed it with me.