‘Byron,’ she said, sounding a trifle impatient, ‘come along for heaven’s sake. Surely you didn’t think I was doing all this for the satisfaction of seeing your career develop, did you?’
He did it of course; he went over to the bed and took off his clothes and made love to her, not once, but twice; it was an extraordinary experience, exciting, gratifying, yet utterly without tenderness. He felt himself in thrall, possessed. Her body was neat, hard, voracious; she took command of him, controlling his every movement. He felt at once resentful and oddly charmed; he followed where she led him, waiting, moving, still, released. Naomi came not once but three times; hard, strong, careful orgasms; after the last time, she threw back her head, arched her body, and pulled him down deeper and deeper into her, and said, ‘Now, Byron, now, now quickly,’ and with surprising, almost shocking, ease he felt his body rise, tip, fall into orgasm.
Afterwards, she was brisk, organized, organizing; she smiled at him briefly, approvingly, lifted the house phone, and said, ‘Dinner by the pool, Crossman, half an hour,’ and then, rising from the bed and walking to the bar, poured two large brandies, and brought them over to where he lay. ‘Let us drink,’ she said, ‘to our partnership,’ and drank deeply from her own glass; she did not hand Brendan his, but sat looking at him with an expression of deep amusement in her eyes. He raised himself on to his elbows and watched almost detachedly as she picked up his penis, dipped it carefully in the brandy, and then, bending, began to sip at him, tenderly, carefully, efficiently like a cat with some cream.
He did everything she said: he told Rose that he had to move out, that it was part of his new contract, and endured quite silently her scorn, her amused distaste as she watched him pack, pausing painfully over their joint possessions – ‘Do leave everything, Brendan, I’m sure Miss MacNeice will have a clock, and possibly even a flower vase’ – her deliberate disinterest in where he was going.
Naomi moved him into a penthouse apartment just off Doheny Drive at Sunset and had it decorated by someone called Damian Drake, who Perry Browne had recommended: all white and silver, with mirrored ceilings and black blinds and white carpets and hardly any furniture at all, beyond a very large circular bed, a pair of black leather couches and a sunken bath so big it would have washed half Hollywood, as Brendan remarked to an unamused Naomi. The only other feature of the apartment was a cellar, which as Hollywood’s first Master of Wine he clearly had to have, but which was a minor logistical problem in a penthouse. In the end, Damian constructed a small mezzanine floor shut behind a cellar door on the way up to the roof garden; inside, several hundred empty wine bottles, with cobwebs supplied by the props department, lay and waited for the next photographic session.
Brendan took to his role of wine expert with some difficulty. It was all very well, he pointed out, for Naomi to say it was a great deal safer than surfing, and easier than riding, but at least surfers only had to know a wave from a flat sea, and riders to recognize an Arab from a piebald; he was required to discourse authoritatively on sweets and dries, clarets and burgundies, vintages and vineyards until he felt as confused as if he had drunk his own cellar dry. Nevertheless it was a clever idea of Perry’s and it worked, bestowing upon him exactly the right degree of sophistication and urbanity. Since only a small handful of people in Hollywood had the faintest idea that wine began life anywhere other than in a bottle or that there was more to distinguish/ differentiate between champagne and claret than that opening champagne was noisier, he got along very well. He was constantly being photographed with this or that starlet drawing the cork of that or this wine at public dinners or private parties, or even at the door to his cellar, pronouncing a wine here amusing and a wine there a trifle unenterprising, so that quite quickly no serious gastronomic occasion was considered complete without the attendance of Grand Vintner Byron Patrick, whose career as young male lead at ACI was escalating as satisfactorily and rewardingly as his own cellar.
After the eastern, Brendan progressed to a swashbuckle drama, where he played second lead, that of an eighteenth-century English lord (dressed, he complained, like a complete fool, in claret-coloured velvet breeches, with a fountain of white lace frills at his throat; but the fans loved it, and the magazines compared him to a young Stewart Granger), and thence to what he pronounced to Naomi was a proper part, that of an adulterous charmer in a modern comedy of manners. Naomi told him tartly that a proper part was one which paid the bills: as his contracted salary was now a thousand dollars a week, of which five hundred went winging its way to New York, a great many bills were being paid.
Brendan was perfectly aware of his shortcomings: his talent was modest (as the critics were invariably swift to point out) but Naomi knew what she was doing; his style was exactly right for the time, and his looks were exactly of the style and form that the camera flattered and fawned upon (as his burgeoning fan mail testified). Nevertheless he knew there were at least two dozen other young men, possibly even two hundred, just as handsome, just as photogenic; he owed all his success to Naomi and in return he had to supply certain commodities whenever she wanted them – his company at her side at parties, his charm on tap when she felt low, and his body to assuage her apparently ceaseless sexual appetite. He found, to his own interest and with a degree of self-distaste, that it was quite easy to perform for her, in whatever way she wished, both in and out of bed. He expected to feel worse about it than he did; in the event he looked at the person he was becoming: a plastic pastiche of himself, with an easy, bogus charm and a set of entirely expedient values, and then at what it was accomplishing for him, and shrugged his concern off. There was nobody in the world to care what he was really like, except for Kathleen and Fleur and they were benefiting greatly anyway. He did not even let his thoughts stray in the direction of Caroline: she belonged far into his past now, literally another country, another life. Kathleen wrote to say Fleur was in the school baseball team, and that she had grown about six inches and was turning into a real beauty; Fleur wrote to say she missed him and when was he coming home. Brendan, who was a lousy correspondent, communicated with postcards of Hollywood and told them he’d be home soon. Any thought of having them over to live with him (as he had once imagined he might) was totally out of the question. They would not be able to come to terms with his new life and, besides, Naomi would not have countenanced it. And what Naomi said went.
As he got to know Naomi he did not exactly like her more, but he admired her and found her increasingly interesting; she was quixotic, authoritative, intensely domineering, but she was also emotionally insecure, prone to depression and a chronic insomniac. The only cure for the insomnia was sex: Brendan grew accustomed to being summoned from his bed at two or three in the morning when he slept at the apartment, falling into Naomi’s waiting car and being driven to the house on San Ysedro, where she would be waiting for him, tense, hungry, pacing the library or the pool deck. She would greet him without a smile, without warmth, but would lead him impatiently, imperiously to her room; she was always at her most demanding of him at these times, requiring only speed, a swift release. He would enter her fast, almost brutally, and feel her orgasm rising equally fast and violently. She came swiftly, noisily, tearing at his back with her long red nails, and then lay, panting, her face contorted still, wet with sweat and tears. After a moment or two she began to breathe more evenly and easily; five minutes later she would fall asleep and he was required no more. He found it degrading initially to be used as something little more than a sedative; then as it all became part of the price he paid for success, and security, for himself and Kathleen and Fleur, he adjusted to it as he had to everything else, with his mind firmly away from any moral and emotional implications of any kind.
Naomi did not always want him with her; she had a small posse of men friends but Brendan was young and good-looking and his star was rising, so increasingly he was required to be at her side at the more public and well-attended parties. At first h
e was nervous and ill at ease, particularly at the more orgiastic gatherings; he did not know quite where to look and how to behave as actresses with faces as familiar to him as his own family’s stripped off and swam naked in swimming pools, daring one, two or three men to join them in what was patently sex under the water, or stood on dinner tables, throwing their skirts up over their heads, revealing how true the rumours were that they wore no panties; he was nervous when first confronted by the small anterooms or cloakrooms off many of the ballrooms, dining rooms and halls of the great mansions of Beverly Hills where cocaine was discreetly but freely available, supplied complete with silver straws to anyone who happened to feel a need for it; and he grew positively frightened when at one party (where Naomi was not) he found himself led into a bedroom by two young actresses who removed first his clothes and then their own and proceeded to seduce him while half the rest of the party watched through a two-way mirror.
But he learnt and he learnt fast: he grew to know which actresses were lesbians, and which actors were homosexuals, which ones were likely to wish him to indulge in group perversions, who took cocaine, who smoked marijuana, and therefore the predictable form of many of the parties he was required to attend – and how to handle them. He could look down now on the rather pathetic ranks of the young actors and actresses who were part of the slave system – and whose role was the gratification of the stars and directors, particularly on rainy days, when shooting was limited and slow – but he found himself, with a degree of pleasure, on the other hand, at the receiving end of endless propositioning from young hopeful actresses who would come to his dressing room or would telephone his apartment, offering their services in return for a helpful word in the ear of the director.
He got to know how Hollywood worked, who dined where and commanded the best tables; how Clark Gable always got the number one table at Romanoff’s (an honour previously accorded to the gangster Bugsy Siegel, gunned down nearly ten years earlier, but still a big Hollywood legend); Jack Benny and Lena Horne at the Luau; how James Dean could almost always be found at the Yucca and Gable and Bogey would never miss a big fight at the Legion Stadium on Friday nights. He watched Hollywood genuflect at Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper and fawn at the feet of Elsa Maxwell. He learnt where the women went for their abortions (to one Dr Killkare, he was affectionately known), and for their amphetamine and slimming shots, and which doctors would supply drugs on prescription, and which intensely virile actors were impotent or transvestite or both and which women were nymphomaniacs and which little more than prostitutes. And after a while he loved it all; it was a heady, rich mishmash of a recipe and it was addictive.
Naomi bought him a silver blue Oldsmobile and a mass of clothes from Syvedore’s, on Sunset; she took him for weekends to the Racquet Club at Palm Springs and to stay with friends in the huge mansions on Hope Ranch at Santa Barbara, where he rode the trails (which he thought looked more like film scenery than a lot of film scenery) and dined at Ronald Colman’s one-time restaurant, the San Ysedro Inn, or to Ojai, with its orange and avocado groves which had been used as the background for Lost Horizon. He was popular, petted and praised; he could choose who he wanted to be with and who not, could afford to discard people who seemed disagreeable or tedious, along with his fine clothes and expensive toys; and whenever he felt depressed after going through the dailies, and seeing his acting growing, it seemed to him, increasingly mediocre, he could cheer himself considerably by looking at his photographs and reading the fawning articles about him in either Photoplay or Motion Picture almost every week.
He didn’t exactly believe the articles; but they entered his consciousness none the less.
But there was one lesson he never quite learnt, try though he might, and that was that he should trust no one, and disbelieve everybody. It was against his nature, he couldn’t quite do it. It was all right while he was sober, he could be the smooth sophisticate of the PR handouts, the stories in the papers; but a few glasses of wine, a smoke of marijuana, and he was his old self, the boy from Brooklyn: an easy touch for a loan, a sympathetic ear for a sob story, a helping hand out of a mess. It won him many friends; but it was a danger. It made him vulnerable.
Introduction to chapter on Kirstie Fairfax for Lost Years section of The Tinsel Underneath.
Hollywood destroys many more people than it creates. It may be a cradle of creativity, but it is also a graveyard of hope and innocence.
Kirstie Fairfax, like Brendan FitzPatrick, was lured to Hollywood by an unscrupulous agent, a set of false hopes, a wardrobe full of cheap clothes. She was a beautiful young girl of sixteen when she arrived in Hollywood, with blonde hair, blue eyes and a thirty-eight-inch bust, who had done well at dance classes in downtown Chicago. Not enough to see her on to the silver screen; but she was not to know that.
The agent, one Rod Selway, told her she could make it there and make it big; if she would pay him a mere five hundred dollars to cover his expenses he could ensure her a screen test. Kirstie cashed in all her savings, paid him the money, bought an air ticket, and arrived in Los Angeles late in 1956 with twenty dollars left in the world and an introductory letter to a number of studios. None of whom had heard of Selway, none of whom wished to test Kirstie.
Three weeks later, the twenty dollars all spent, Kirstie found herself sitting in an all-night café, trying to face up to the humiliation of returning home to Chicago, when she was picked up by a talent scout. Or someone she thought was a talent scout. Yes, sure, he said in answer to her question, he’d heard of Rod Selway, he was a good guy, but lacked the contacts. He could get her a test, no trouble at all; and he could offer her temporary work in his club while she waited. Her reputation and her self-esteem rescued, Kirstie went along with him. The club was little more than a brothel; the screen tests few and far between. But she at least had a roof over her head, money, and a good time. For a while she was satisfied.
But she still wanted to be a film star. She knew she could dance, she was sure she could act; she was convinced she had the looks. She took acting and dance classes; and she clawed her way on to the outermost reaches of the Hollywood network. And in a bedroom at a party one night, where she was exercising her considerable talents for oral sex, she met Brendan FitzPatrick.
1960
Bad news does not always come efficiently, rushed over the airwaves, borne by officials, imparted by grave-faced, heavy-voiced authorities; it can arrive hopelessly, messily, in painful disorder, late, distorted, and so doubly shocking. The bad, the terrible news came thus to Caroline; she sat, one early September day, thinking herself to be perfectly happy, believing herself entirely safe, sewing name tapes on to her sons’ clothes, packing them neatly into their school trunks, occasionally glancing out of the window to see her daughter riding (rather nervously and badly she noticed) in the paddock nearest to the house, waiting slightly impatiently through the two o’clock news bulletin for Woman’s Hour to begin. There was an item on it that promised to be interesting, trailered the day before: an interview with a journalist who had written a book about scandals in Hollywood. She always listened to Woman’s Hour when she could; she found it stimulating and amusing, an upturn, a flash of colour in her often monotone day. She was particularly looking forward to the Hollywood item; she had given up hope of hearing anything about Brendan, but her interest in the whole industry had been sparked by her following of his career.
The first time she had encountered Brendan in the pages of Picturegoer she had certainly not been looking for him; but there he had been, on the kitchen table where Cook had left him, smiling, posing with a beach ball and a blonde starlet on an upturned boat, looking a little more solid than she remembered him, and with a haircut that Caroline could only describe to herself as common, but otherwise exactly the same, and she had sat down, weak, shaken, trying to make sense of the caption, which read, ‘Latest heart-throb arrival in Hollywood, Byron Patrick, working out on Muscle Beach helped a
long by Stella Stewart, currently under contract to Universal.’ ‘Byron!’ she said aloud to the picture. ‘Byron? Can’t be. What nonsense,’ but it was so unmistakably him that she waited every fortnight for Picturegoer with a sense of illicit excitement; there was no news of Byron for months after the first time, but then she saw his name at the bottom of a long cast list for a thriller. In the issue after that, there was a picture of him at a restaurant with a starlet called Tina Tyrell, followed by a silence and then quite a lot for a while; indeed he had seemed to be doing rather well and was what the magazines called a box-office draw. She hadn’t been sure what she had felt about that: very little in an odd way; it had all seemed rather impersonal, and she found it hard to equate the handsome, glossy creature with a ridiculous name, playing on the beach with starlets or arriving at premières wearing a white dinner jacket, with the Brendan she had been in love with, the father of her child. She didn’t even feel jealous of, or even interested in, the starlets; they engendered no more emotion in her than if they had been cardboard cutouts – which she supposed they were in a way.
She worried about Fleur, and whether Hollywood was a suitable place for her; but clearly Brendan was earning plenty of money and was providing for her well. She wondered if she might see a picture of Fleur in one of the magazines; they did sometimes show the families of stars and for a while she became rather obsessed with that idea, leafing through them feverishly in search of a little girl with Brendan or Byron (ten, eleven, older than that) with dark hair and wide blue eyes, but of course she never found one. Then she relaxed about that too, relieved even, telling herself it was foolish, that Brendan would have had more sense than to expose Fleur to any kind of Hollywood publicity. But she had become, in a very modest way, quite knowledgeable about the place, which restaurants were where, and who went to them, who was with which studio and so on. Hollywood scandals sounded intriguing and fun.
AN Outrageous Affair Page 15
