The Magnificent Esme Wells

by Adrienne Sharp

  “Who used to be there?” I asked, pointing at the ghost letters of Apartment A.

  My mother squinted. “Jean Harlow.”

  Harlow was dead then two years. But there was no such shadow by Apartment C. No white lettering either.

  “Who’s going there?” I asked, pointing at the blank space.

  “I bet it will be Judy Garland,” my mother said.

  So Judy Garland’s name might soon fill the blank space by the words Apartment C. Judy Garland. She’d had a horrible name before she changed it: Frances Gumm. Sounded like something you chewed and spit out, stuck under a table. Judy Garland who might be in C had been just one of the Gumm Sisters in vaudeville, Baby Gumm, and Lana Turner in A had been a regular teenager sipping a Coke at the Top Hat Café. I knew all the stars’ stories because my mother had told them to me, made them my bedtime stories when she tucked me in, more to amuse herself, of course, than me. Who, really, was Clark Gable, my mother had said, but a nobody from Ohio who had fixed his teeth and taught himself how to talk in a lower register, with a first wife who was more a mother than a wife, much older than Gable himself, who had come all the way out here just to be an extra in an Erich von Stroheim film. Nobody. An extra.

  And then they all had screen tests.

  Step One to stardom.

  The step my mother had the toe of her shoe on. Or was determined to get her toe on. After that, the pictures made them all into somebodies. Which was what my mother was determined to have happen for her.

  That’s when I said, “Maybe it will be you, you in Apartment C.”

  A ploy to get back into her good graces after my debacle with Buzz.

  I got what I wanted. She looked down at me and gave me one of her rare smiles, rare for these days, rarer still for it to be aimed at me.

  Last year, my mother and I had actually gotten inside the Star Suites, into the dressing room of Clark Gable, once a nobody, Apartment A, on the first floor. Gable had invited everyone on the set that day over to his suite to listen to the World Series on his radio, and my mother had gone over to the Commissary, to the newsstand where my father was taking bets on the game, and fetched me. Gable had been nice to me, calling me “honey” and pouring me a soda, and I understood then I served as my mother’s sidekick and bait, the little girl who disarmed the prey I emboldened her to stalk.

  So. Why were we here? Who were we stalking? Whose Star Suite were we trying to ambush today?

  I didn’t have long to wonder.

  Robert Taylor’s.

  Taylor was playing an officer in a new picture the second unit had just started filming and my mother wanted to test for it. In Waterloo Bridge, Taylor falls in love with a ballerina named Myra during World War I, the ballerina to be played by Vivien Leigh, whom Mr. Mayer admired so much in the soon to be released Gone with the Wind. Myra had a ballerina friend from the dance troupe named Kitty and my mother felt she would be perfect for that role, much better than Virginia Field, whom Louis B. Mayer was planning to cast.

  All became clear to me. My mother was in the lobby of the Star Suites to lobby Robert Taylor.

  “I just want to ask him a favor.”

  I frowned but she ignored me.

  Robert Taylor’s dressing room was on the second floor, Apartment F, but we knew he was there because we could hear him talking on the telephone, the rap rap rap of his voice followed by a pause and then rap rap rap. How did my mother know she’d find him here right now? Witch! Or maybe she was just a fortune-telling gypsy herself!

  We stepped outside a moment to the little landscaped walkway, my mother looking up at Taylor’s cranked-open windows, her dress blowing in the wind, garters exposed, head tipped up, plotting. I knew her face. At least it wasn’t painted black today. Maybe she’d do better with Taylor than she had with Buzz.

  “Okay,” she said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to go up there and knock on his door and when he answers, you tell him you’re looking for Mickey Rooney, that you’re filming Debutante with him and he asked you to come by and run some of your lines together. I’ll be right behind you and when he tells you Rooney isn’t here, I’ll come up and apologize for you and then I’ll take it from there.”

  The ruse was ridiculous—there was no way Mickey Rooney would want to run lines with a child, even if I were in the picture—but I knew protest was useless. Besides, I owed her. Because I’d ruined her chances with Buzz, I was obligated to help salvage matters.

  “Come on,” my mother said. “Move.” And she opened the door to the vestibule.

  I trudged up the stairs, my mother a few steps behind me. At the end of the hall, she hung back and shooed me forward with one hand. I stomped forward and knocked on the door of Apartment F.

  “Yes?” said a man’s voice and then footsteps over carpet and the door was opened and there was Robert Taylor, The Man with the Perfect Profile, the nickname the press had given him, looking down at me.

  The apartment behind him was all wood paneled, with a wooden-shuttered standing screen before plaid curtains making the apartment even darker and quieter. Over the low sofa hung two big framed lithographs of horse heads. One horse head faced the other across their frames as if they were lonely for each other. “Don’t tell your father he likes horses,” my mother would say, later, “or he’ll pester Mr. Taylor for a bet,” as if what we’d done today hadn’t been pestering.

  All of Robert Taylor’s ashtrays were filled high with cigarette butts, probably the Luckies he got gratis, my mother said, also later, because he shilled for the company. I had seen the ads, the colored illustration of the movie star’s smiling face and the words “Robert Taylor tells how his throat picked Luckies—a light smoke.” He was incredibly handsome. A real movie star. Not a B movie star. Not at all a regular person.

  He had been talking on the telephone while sitting on the sofa, and to answer the door, he had left the receiver off the hook. “What is it, sweetie?” Robert Taylor said to me with his movie-star mouth.

  What did I look like that day? What outfit had I selected for myself, what ornamentation for my hair, what color painted on my bedraggled little nails? About one thing I can be certain: my face was unwashed.

  “I’m looking for Mr. Rooney,” I answered, immediately forgetting the rest of my mother’s script, but it didn’t matter because my mother was coming right up behind me, her heels going click click click, putting her hands on my shoulders as if to stop me from bothering the great man, as if she hadn’t been the one to send me right up to the threshold in the first place.

  “So sorry to interrupt you, Mr. Taylor,” she said. “Mr. Rooney wanted my little sister to run some lines with him. She’s working on the new Andy Hardy picture.”

  “Is that right?” said Mr. Taylor, looking down at me.

  I nodded, immediately feeling the discomfort I always felt when my mother announced to anyone that I was her little sister, the discomfort of guilty collusion made worse now by the banishment of my father and my mother’s reversal from mother and wife into the young daughter of Sy Wolfkowitz, time sucked backwards so strangely in its bed that I believed I might actually be my mother’s sister, my grandfather’s other daughter. I felt something ping painfully in my heart and I tapped my chest to make it stop. I knew this was just acting, not real, a small scene in which I had my own part, as did my mother, and Mr. Taylor.

  “I think he’s still on set,” Mr. Taylor said. “Lot Two.”

  My mother lifted a hand to fan herself as if she were warm and said, “Whew! We didn’t know it was so far from Lot Two. We should have taken the trolley.”

  I stared up at my mother. We hadn’t been anywhere near Lot Two.

  But she seemed to know what she was doing, because Mr. Taylor was inviting us in to sit down for a minute and offering my mother a drink, and after a few more quick words into it, hanging up the telephone receiver. He had found something more interesting than his phone conversation. Specifically, Dina Wells.

 
But I, given the way she had lately been treating my father, found her flirtation with Mr. Taylor objectionable. My father had shaved the ring from her finger, yes, but he had not unmarried her. I began to wish for the hundredth time that I wasn’t here. I’d wanted to go with my father today to the house he was painting, but he’d told me I’d only be bored, that sitting there among drop cloths and paint buckets and rollers was nothing like enjoying the amusements of the track. Or maybe there was another reason my father didn’t want me there. Perhaps he didn’t want me watching him paint walls, bossed around by a Wolfkowitz foreman, to whom he could only say, Yes, sir.

  He came home every day in the late afternoon, exhausted, after having risen so early, returning to us with hands shellacked white as if the paint had run down his arms instead of onto the walls, his hair speckled, his elephant-sized coveralls dribbled and daubed, his work shoes myriad colors. He would leave those clothes and shoes by the back door, use the shower in the house as a guest would, and then retreat to the garage out back, taking his dinner plate with him. My mother paid him just that much attention—a dinner plate. His garage light was usually out before my own bedroom lamp. I knew because I spied on him from my bedroom window.

  So for all these reasons, I refused to look at my mother now, refused to be a full participant in the caper she had dreamed up today. I’d kept my face turned from her on our long trek across the lot to here. Not that she’d noticed. My mother was transformed by her quaff at the flask of possibility, and she pulled me along, ignoring my complaints.

  She sat down on the sofa beneath the horse heads and looked over at the end table, which was piled high with scripts. She smiled and raised a hand for the glass Mr. Taylor offered her, her forearm strung with bracelets that slid and clanked against each other flirtatiously as she did so. Unconsciously, I raised my hand and made my bracelets do so as well.

  “Is that the script for Waterloo Bridge?” she asked, nodding at the pile. “I just love the writer who did that. I think he’s a genius.”

  I doubted she had any idea who had written that script. I had never heard her mention a writer’s name in my life. It was always Lana Turner, Norma Shearer, Myrna Loy, Joan Crawford. And we had never walked by the Writers Building to stare longingly up at its windows, the way we did these Star Suites.

  “Really?” Mr. Taylor said, putting one foot up on his little coffee table. He wore cuffed trousers like my father, or as my father did before he started wearing painter’s coveralls. “I love Sam Behrman, too. He wrote some great lines for Queen Christina.”

  “He really did,” my mother said, taking a sip of her drink, which was not water, but something darker, probably whiskey.

  I squinted at her and she saw me looking and waved her hand in my direction to get rid of me, extra baggage now that I had done my job.

  “Sweetie, why don’t you go downstairs and play on the grass? It’ll be just a minute until my head clears and you don’t want to be cooped up in here.”

  No, I didn’t. And I didn’t want to leave her there, either, but Mr. Taylor said, “I’ll look after her, honey. I won’t let her faint.”

  So there was nothing for me to do but leave her to her disloyalty to my father. And Mr. Taylor’s to his wife, at that time, Barbara Stanwyck. Maybe she was even the one he had been talking to on the phone! But my mother and Mr. Taylor were smiling at each other, clearly making a party of two, so I went outside and ran down the stairs to the little garden area. The grass was all staked off with wire curlicues or landscaped with flowering plants. The grass was just for looks, like everything else on the lot. There was nowhere to play but the street, so I stood in it, at a loss, looking up and down its length.

  And that’s how I happened to see Mr. Mayer in his vest and tie and suit and trademark round-eyed spectacles riding the trolley away from Lot Two where Andy Hardy Meets Debutante, the picture I was allegedly a part of, was filming today. And where Mickey Rooney was. There, not here. As my mother well knew. Mr. Mayer had probably gone there to take a look at the shoot.

  My mother had told me that Mr. Mayer was always inordinately interested in the Andy Hardy serials. If a writer dared create a scene in which Andy played a prank on his parents or refused to eat his supper or mouthed off at his mother, Mr. Mayer would cross those lines out with his Eversharp blue pencil. It was supposed to be small-town Carvel, small-town America. Wise Judge Hardy. Maternal Mother Hardy. Good boy Andy. A place where wives slept side by side with their own husbands, not someone else’s. The perfect, peaceful life neither Mr. Mayer nor any of his fellow moguls running two steps in front of a pogrom had ever had. I understood his penchant for comfort and order, which I had little of right now, either, on Soto Street in Boyle Heights.

  In fact, if I had courage enough to disobey my mother, I’d leave her and this scrap of lawn behind me in a snap, clamber onto the trolley Mr. Mayer had just exited, and ride the car until it headed around again to that sweet spot on Lot Two. I knew the route. I’d ridden the trolley often enough with my mother. I’d even memorized the sign that hung above the driver:

  Do Not Get On or Off

  Moving Train

  Use Buzzer

  I’d jump off at Carvel. Population 25,000. The Debutante shoot would be taking place right there, right now, on New England Street where Andy Hardy and Betsy Booth and Polly Benedict all lived. Behind the camera, canvas chairs with the actors’ and the director’s names on them would be scattered about beside wooden towers on wheels with white screens mounted on their tops to bounce the light and two big cameras on a long crane, beneath which two men sat on built-in chairs. A tripod with a long crane and a microphone at the end of it would be operated by another man, and cables would lie everywhere on the ground by a long track made of railroad ties. Judge Hardy and Andy would inevitably talk together earnestly, the judge giving Andy advice, which, of course, Andy would take, before both of them went home to Mrs. Hardy’s hot dinner. And then at the end of the day, the cameras and chairs and screens and booms and cables would be packed up, and the houses and stores would be left to themselves. And even though I knew very well that behind the doors to those homes, just like the doors to the stores, lay nothing whatsoever at all—the interiors were all shot on soundstages—I somehow still believed that if I pushed open the door to Andy Hardy’s house, I could take up residence there, with that better family, that better mother.

  But I did not jump on the trolley. I just stood on the walkway outside the Star Suites, waiting for my own mother.

  21

  My mother’s screen test was six minutes of black-and-white celluloid, a scene from almost the very end of Waterloo Bridge, where Robert Taylor as Colonel Roy Cronin, searching for his beloved, confronts her friend Kitty in the small London apartment the two women share. Myra, his fiancée and ballerina cum prostitute, has gone missing and the officer believes Kitty knows where she is.

  Costumed in garb so drab it must have pained her—she was supposed to be poor and struggling, though her coiffure was magnificent as there was a limit to how downtrodden Mr. Mayer’s goddesses were allowed to appear—my mother faced Mr. Taylor, who had a pencil-thin moustache spirit-glued to his face and who stood opposite her on a small kitchen set on one of the smaller soundstages on the lot. At first, there was just some posing for the camera, my mother instructed to turn her beautiful face this way and that, and then the two actors ran the scene. Take One. Take Two. Take Three.

  My Mother

  Roy, can you take it? No matter what you find out about her?

  Robert Taylor

  What are you hinting?

  When they filmed the scene, I thought my mother’s gestures were large and fabulous, and Mr. Taylor’s were way too small, as were the tics in his expressions, which I could barely see. He was bland and unreadable—what was the matter with him?—and she was impressively alive and dramatic. That’s what I thought until I saw the rough cut later in the edit bay, after the film had been developed and its development fixed
by its various chemical baths in MGM’s Film Lab Building. That’s when I discovered my mother was clearly chewing the scenery and Mr. Taylor was utterly authentic. Where Robert Taylor was smooth and buttery, my mother was over the top, her body stiff, her voice forced and shrill, everything about her expressions stagey and unwatchable. She was overusing her face, as if she were a silent screen star who had to do it all without words. And under the sustained glare of the lens, she didn’t look as pretty on the screen as she did in real life or as she did when the camera flicked by her in one of Buzz’s dance numbers. In fact, she looked a little like Virginia Hill.

  That my mother would not be extraordinary in everything she did was a revelation to me. I always thought that if she just had a chance to showcase her talents, she would be magnificent. And that if someone just took the time to look at her, really look at her, he would be entranced. As the camera would be. But exactly what the camera will love is always a mystery. Some performers who look barely interesting at all become vivid on the screen, but then, inexplicably, other actors find their beautiful faces flatten out like the dullest wallpaper. And, obviously, my mother needed some acting lessons.

  Mr. Mayer watched the test in the same projection room where he watched the rushes of Andy Hardy. My mother had often pointed out to me the portico at the top of the columns at the east gate which concealed a bridge from Irving Thalberg’s old offices to the projection room, the bridge Thalberg had crossed every evening before he died, to watch all the film shot each day, a pedestrian bridge christened the Bridge of Sighs by the nervous, hand-wringing directors. No hand wringing for my mother. She was sure Louis B. Mayer would settle into his seat with the great California light pouring in and watch her face eight feet high on the screen and fall in love with her and make her a star. Mayer had a great sixth sense at picking actors who could be fashioned into movie stars, a talent he would continue to exercise throughout the forties and early fifties, believing in Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly before anyone else did. This was my mother’s time to be believed in, to be picked, and to be fashioned.