by John Rechy
Errol Flynn and Billy Jack elbowed each other playfully, jostling Betty Grable, whose hands flew in horror to make sure her structure of curls was intact. “Watch it, stupids,” she warned.
Glaring at the antics, Hedy Lamarr said, “Lady Star, we were scouting the Boulevard for real talent to consider for petitioners, and I have become of the firm opinion that we are getting entirely too many suicide-petitioners.”
Tyrone Power agreed. “We need more kidnappings.”
“Rapes!” said Errol Flynn.
“Murders,” Betty Grable offered.
Humped over on the floor, James Dean mumbled his secret: “I was murdered. People just think I crashed.”
Pointedly—amid furtive glances—they all pretended not to see Normalyn, although Veronica Lake lifted her wave momentarily to stare at her.
Lady Star called for silence. “We will take under due advicement—”
Veronica Lake covered her ears at the word.
“—the matter of greater proportion in disallowing suicides. Thank you for bringing it to our attention, Miss Lamarr.”
Hedy Lamarr rejected gratitude.
Lady Star walked over to Normalyn and touched her briefly. She paused to gather silence. “We bave a possible candidate for . . . Marilyn Monroe!”
All eyes were on Normalyn.
At Lady Star’s words, as if awakening out of a dream but still wearing the clothes she had worn in it, Normalyn felt a sudden, clear astonishment that she was here. Had she really thought these odd young people would illuminate anything relevant to her? How stupid she had been, how desperate! She judged herself. How lonesome and eager. She walked to the door.
The Dead Movie Stars stared at her like abandoned children.
“Wait,” Lady Starr said in her smallest voice.
“Don’t go,” Billy Jack said, as if she were leaving only him.
Normalyn’s hand was on the doorknob.
Lady Star said, “You need our secrets.”
“Yeah!” Billy Jack agreed.
Normalyn turned the doorknob. “You don’t have any secrets.” All they had were their drab, real lives, which they were trying to abandon while she was trying to find hers.
Firmly adjusting the orchid in her blazing waves of hair, Lady Star posed before her chaise. Her voice was husky, the deepest ever. “Do we have secrets?” she asked the Dead Movie Stars.
Veronica Lake said to Normalyn, “You know why I didn’t marry the man who married Jacqueline Kennedy—Ar-is-to-tle O-nas-sis?” She gave import to each syllable of the name.
“You know how I made fuckin’ sure I’d be acquitted of statutory rape?” Errol Flynn asked.
“You know why my husband really tried to buy up all the prints of my nude movie sequence?” Hedy Lamarr smoothed her inky hair.
Betty Grable held her curls in place. “Know the real reason Alice Faye despised me?”
Tyrone Power said to Normalyn. “You know why the studio wouldn’t let me attend any of Errol Flynn’s movies?”
Lady Star roused James Dean, bunched on the floor.
“Uh, yeah,” he said to Normalyn. “Uh, you know why ‘they’ said I crashed?—who I was, uh, rushing to in my Porsche?”
“And do you know what Valentino did with Nazimova and Winifred Shaunessy?” Billy Jack leered.
“Well, do you, darling!” Lady Star demanded of Normalyn.
Normalyn opened the door.
Lady Star advanced on her. She fired words like rapid bullets: “Do you know what mysterious woman guided Mildred Meadows to the secret clinic where Marilyn Monroe was to lose the child Alberta Holland was determined to protect? Do you!”
Normalyn slammed the door closed. “That’s a goddamned lie! Enid was never Mildred’s ally. And how the hell do you know anything about Enid?”
Lady Star closed her eyes, carefully, so as not to upset her false eyelashes. “I think the orphan told us about her. No, Dr. and Mrs. Crouch did. Maybe Mildred. No, I believe we heard about her from the other petitioner, who’s doing fabulous research!” Then Lady Star said triumphantly: “None of the above, darling! You just told us about Enid.”
Twenty-Five
Normalyn did not respond, not even when the Dead Movie Stars burst into laughter at Lady Star’s verbal pursuit of her. By speaking Enid’s name, she might have sprung Lady Star’s trap—Normalyn suspected Lady Star had known the name all along, had wanted only to enlist her by making her verbalize her knowledge of it. But Lady Star had provided possible connections to the fragmented truth she was gathering. Someone had told her about the events of the movie star’s last crisis. Too, the other youngwoman in close pursuit of the movie star’s life—the same who had accosted Miss Bertha and Mark Poe—might lead her to others. So Normalyn stayed.
Blue in her cone of light, Lady Star sat on her chaise, her command post, and announced to Normalyn, “Darling! You have, with alarcity—”
“—alacrity?” Veronica Lake pondered.
“—with alacrity”—Lady Star glided on—“you have proven yourself a worthy petitioner. You do know something or other about secrets. You have passed our first phase.”
The other Dead Movie Stars buzzed agreement.
“And you may come with us tonight to the Silent Scream Club.”
Normalyn caught Lady Star’s knifing look admonishing the others not to protest the exceptional invitation. There was a reason for this further extension to her. Normalyn said, “I’m not sure I want to come with you.” “The Silent Scream” sounded like an ugly place. Her fear—dammit!—had infiltrated her voice.
“Are you scared, darling?” Lady Star challenged.
Dare! “No . . . I’ll go with you,” Normalyn decided, then added, to thwart any sense of victory Lady Star might attempt to snatch, “And I’ll take into consideration your invitation to attend your next—what do you call those things?—auditions?”
“What the fuck!” Errol Flynn protested her mistreatment of enormous honor.
“The nerve!” said Hedy Lamarr.
“You know how many we reject—?” Tyrone Power was about to add his wrath.
Veronica Lake watched Lady Star slyly.
Lady Star’s raised hand stopped the protests. Heavy-lashed eyes narrowed on Normalyn. “Done, darling!” she agreed. “Tit for tat!” she smoothed the folds of her skirt with grand insouciance.
Step by step. Normalyn frowned at the association. . . . Then she smoothed the folds of her dress. Of course she would not be a “petitioner.” She was here to live—and to discover what “secrets” they did have. Besides, it would be good for Troja and Kirk to miss her.
2
“Here come the creepy Dead Movie Stars!” said a fuschiahaired girl next to a gaunt youngman decorated with plastic chains rouged to look rusted.
“Step aside so glamour may enter—punks!” Lady Star ordered.
Ahead, a narrow corridor smirched by light led into pockets of phosphorescent green and red within the swimmy darkness of a cavernous room, into which Lady Star, escorted by Billy Jack, led Betty Grable, Tyrone Power, Hedy Lamarr, Errol Flynn, James Dean, Veronica Lake, with one eye blinded by hair, and Rita Hayworth, who, having just escaped again from a capturing mother, looked about suspiciously.
Normalyn separated herself slightly from them. In the interim before meeting them at the château for this defying trek, she had gone to a movie. She was so used to Kirk’s old ones that this one looked strange—a hateful attempted comedy with an unfunny actor named Eddie Murphy. Afterward, in a coffee shop dark enough to shield her from attention, she ate hungrily—and resisted the temptation to call Troja, who would have begun to worry about her. Good!
The Silent Scream was situated in the shabbiest heart of Hollywood, near Sunset, in the lower depths of an abandoned porno theater. The whooshing of cars on the overpass of a freeway sliced into heavy-metal sounds shoved from a small elevation by an aggressive band of three youngmen and one youngwoman, all in trashy clothes. Mounted on a wooden
crate, a television set—volume turned off, stations shifting automatically—projected mute images of bright-toothed smiles, freeway catastrophes, cloud formations, game winners and losers, murder, war, terror.
Normalyn stared into the neon-splotched darkness, which pulsed in gasps of dyed light to the shattered music, all within a stench of alcohol and marijuana. Young people leaned against walls, like slightly living props. Swirling dirty-orange lights brushed the darkness with spectral fire. Sliced by cold lasers, youngmen and women danced, twisting as if in pain, the music a rejected antidote.
Two factions mixed here: those in studiedly vulgar attire—girls in mesh, leopard stripes, youngmen in ripped shirts, gruff metallic decorations; and those in attempted “glamorous” costumes from the near past of Hollywood—draped shirts and skirts, cocked and veiled hats. The latter faction was here to emulate and court favor from the founding Dead Movie Stars. Crushed in this color-spattered catacomb, the groups looked like indifferent survivors of separate apocalypses.
Normalyn forced herself to approach the currents of noise and flashing images—the spillage of life! she told herself. A youngman had walked along the corridor with her. Now he was following her. He was slim, wearing battle fatigues streaked in colors and tucked into combat boots, a sleeveless army shirt, a bandanna across his forehead. He did not seem to belong clearly to either faction here—an outsider like her. Normalyn welcomed him, for now.
At the mouth of the huge room, a puny youngman with olive-slicked hair and giant padded shoulders pushed through the crowd to stop Lady Star in her tracks. “Lady Star!” he shouted over the crashing din. “Can I have your autograph!”
“Of course, darling!” Lady Star tried to yell back while maintaining her lowest voice.
Having captured her attention, the fan gasped, “Lady Star, please let me audition again for the Dead Movie Stars. I’ve gotten better, I swear to God, and I know a real tragic scandal about Clark Gable.”
“Out of my way!” A betrayed Lady Star shoved at the youngman, but not before she had taken his offering of several tiny pills. She parted waves of massed bodies.
The sudden center of adulation—and of insults—the Dead Movie Stars posed in a tight group within the vortex of bodies. “They’re scouting for new Dead Movie Stars!” said a thrilled voice. Billy Jack passed a small vial of cocaine among them. “It’s bitchin’ shit, a Robert Mitchum candidate donated it—we might consider him at least for a while.”
He held some powder to Normalyn’s nose. She didn’t want it. The first time had aroused a speedy anxiety. “Go on!” She sniffed, thinking she might be able to flow out of it quickly. She felt the uncomfortable surge of eager energy without goal—and then she was jolted into the throbs of the room. Beside her, the youngman in combat clothes snorted from his own tiny container. Normalyn rejected his further offer.
“You’re the prettiest Dead Movie Star,” the youngman with the red bandanna said to her. He had to shout to be heard.
She could almost believe him! If she was someone else, then she might be pretty. “Thank you!” She yelled words that were incongruous at the Silent Scream.
So were his: “You’re welcome.”
He didn’t fit here at all. Was he, like her, forcing himself to experience— . . .?
Rita Hayworth held a lit joint to Normalyn. “Don’t look at it, sweetie. Puff!” Normalyn did. If Troja and Kirk could see her! She coughed so violently the youngman patted her on the back. He eased the joint away from her and took a deep puff before Rita Hayworth snatched it back. “Who are you?” she derided. “John Wayne?”
Colors in the room had become slightly liquid. In recurring moments of intensified awareness, Normalyn felt herself gentled on smooth waves. Extending out his hands to her as his body swayed, the youngman coaxed Normalyn to dance; his movements were slower, to a different rhythm, than those of the others, who writhed to the anarchy of the music. But Normalyn didn’t know how to dance! The thought occurred as an abrupt intrusion into her decision to do so. Enid had taught her some ballet steps, but she considered herself clumsy. Now her body glided naturally against the loud jagged rhythms, but she remained in the periphery of tinted darkness. The youngman moved deeper into the intersection of lasers, his hands out toward her. “Come on, just follow me, trust me, I’ll guide you.”
Normalyn’s body froze. That exhortation sounded like a command, and it seemed to have come not only from him but from a recent memory. She tried suddenly to locate the origin of this night. It was when Lady Star dared her to join them. Trapped again in suspicions aroused by ordinary words! That would keep her always on the edges, even here in this giant room. Moving cautiously at first, then more easily, Normalyn’s body swayed, began to respond to two rhythms—one turbulent, this room’s; the other smooth, hers.
Then she saw her, a youngwoman forcing her attention by standing very still near her, among twisting bodies. As fiery tongues of light swept over them, Normalyn saw the young-woman’s platinum-blonde hair, the reddened mouth, the beauty spot on her cheek, her body hugged tightly by a dress that forced the illusion of lushness. Nearby, Lady Star nodded at both of them in introduction. This youngwoman was the other “petitioner”! That’s why Lady Star had insisted she come here, to create rivalry. Smiling just slightly, the youngwoman retreated into the churning room.
The youngman in combat clothes leaned over to Normalyn and said, “Cops are gonna bust this place very soon.”
Normalyn reacted in surprise both to the announcement and to its easy tone. “Why?”
“Drugs, minors,” the youngman enumerated. She’d warn the others! But he grabbed her hand. “Come on, I’ll lead you out.” She tried to pull away from his grasp. She shouted to Lady Star— “Leave!”—but her voice was swallowed into the cacaphony of sounds.
Swiftly he led her out through a half-hidden exit behind the platform, into a short underpass of the freeway. On its walls were painted huge figures in bright colors—Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable. Over them graffiti was splashed in black and red.
“I saved you,” the man said to Normalyn. He removed the headband, pushed his hair free. He was older than he had attempted to look inside the darkened Silent Scream.
Normalyn looked beyond the mouth of the tunnel. Nothing was occurring to sustain his prediction of a raid. “You lied to me,” she said.
“Oh, there’ll be a raid all right,” he told her.
Heated wind was rising in gusts, stirring debris in the tunnel. Palm fronds rustled, scratching against the dusty scrim of this strange night, a night that had begun before Lady Star’s challenge at the château. Normalyn still searched its origin. Was it when she had made herself up in Troja’s mirror, with Troja’s makeup?
“How do you know what’s going to happen?” Normalyn asked.
“One guess,” he said.
“You’re a policeman.” Normalyn felt she was in danger, but she did not know of what—as if the danger itself were deciding what shape to take.
“That means you’re safe with me.” He moved closer to her.
Dried palm leaves tossed on the sidewalk. Gray dust sliced the streets, the few passing cars. She tasted dirt. Wind pushed more heat into the tunnel. “Stay away from me,” Normalyn said to the man.
“I saw you snort cocaine,” he said.
“So did you!” she told him.
He shook his head in easy denial. “You did, just you,” he asserted. He placed one hand on her shoulder. “Now what would your family think if they knew you’d been caught in a raid with drugs and—?”
Terror snapped again. Was he really a policeman? Would any car stop if she yelled? She could run, but she did not want to excite with a sudden movement. “I don’t have a family,” she said. “I don’t have anyone.” The last words were not spoken to him.
With one finger the man outlined the features of her face, tracing the makeup. “You don’t have to be afraid,” he said. “I never use force, it’s always willing
.” His Finger touched her lips.
She turned her face from his touch and spat out angrily, “If you knew who my father is!” she warned. Over the wind, which came in interrupted breaths, heavy with dead heat, she heard him say:
“Who is your father, Normalyn? I was sure you had a family.”
“How the hell do you know my name?” She pulled back.
“Marilyn?” the man asked. “That’s who you’re trying to look like for the Dead Movie Stars. And you do—you know that— you really do.”
Now she was sure he was reacting in excitement only to the reflection she had managed of the movie star. She had only imagined he had spoken her name.
“Is your father a powerful man?”
“Yes!”
“Who?”
“Mayor Wendell Hughes. He owns Gibson, Texas!” She would have said Mark Poe, but she had to convey official authority. This man wanted information about her—indirectly, disguising his intentions, his questions, scaring her into answering.
. . . The two men in the park, the man in the hotel! Was she really being followed secretly?
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-one!”
“More like eighteen.”
He knew! “You’re playing an ugly game with me.” She backed away, a foot, another, near the edge of the curb. “If you try to touch me or follow me, I’ll run into the street.”
“I’m not going to follow you.” His icy smile remained.
She ran out of the tunnel, along the block, against gusts of wind and dirt, her feet tangling on a dead palm frond, which curved over. Its spiky edges scratched at her flesh. She ran until she reached a busy intersection. Breathless, she looked back. The man had not followed. She tried to explain away invisible dangers: He was probably a policeman, or using that as a ruse. He had been drawn to the specter of the woman she evoked. He knew she’d seen him snort cocaine, and he believed her when she said Mayor Hughes was her father. There was no further mystery!
Like painted shadows, women now strolled these blocks, lingering within the windy night. Single men in cars circled blocks swept by loose rubble. Normalyn felt as if she had walked into Troja’s past—wearing Troja’s clothes. Perhaps she would be here. Terrified, determined, she forced herself to move along the street. Troja would never again accuse her of not joining “the parade”! Yet she was safe among so many wanderers.
