The Biograph Girl

by William J. Mann

  He’d arrived at St. Vincent’s about six months after Jean had taken over from Anne Drew. Despite a mastectomy, Anne had been told the cancer had recurred. It had spread throughout her body. Jean found herself not only taking over at St. Vincent’s, but becoming Anne’s chief caregiver as well.

  “What would I do without you, Jeannie?” Anne would ask each time Jean showed up at the old Victorian house they shared, paid for by the order, a jar of chicken soup and The Hartford Courant in her hands. She’d sit by Anne’s bedside until the other woman had finished her soup. She’d read to her, comb her hair, help her wash her face when she was too weak to make the walk to the bathroom.

  “Anne,” Jean had said that terrible golden spring morning. The sun had filled the room. Outside the buds on the trees had burst into lush green life. “What are you doing out of bed?”

  Jean was fully dressed by then, sitting on the edge of her bed, tying her shoes. But Victor lay behind her, his brown nakedness covered only by a thin white sheet. Anne had said nothing, just turned on her heel and walked—with supreme difficulty—back down the stairs. Only then did the screaming start.

  Jean has never known why Anne came upstairs that morning. She hadn’t been upstairs in months. She was too weak. They had been very quiet, she and Victor. Anne couldn’t possibly have heard them. They had come through the back door the night before. Victor waited meekly on the couch while Jean first checked on Anne. Her friend was sound asleep; Jean kissed her lightly on the forehead and pulled up her sheet. Then, her heart high in her ears, she led Victor upstairs.

  He’d been a junkie. She would’ve bought the condoms even if he hadn’t been. The fact that his records indicated sero-negativity for HIV wasn’t enough to assuage her concerns for safety. She had thought through everything before saying yes—all of the risks, all of the eventualities. It was only after months of his gentle caressing of her hair, his entreating protestations of love, that she had decided to go ahead.

  She knew, of course, there was a chance they’d be discovered. And if that happened, she was prepared to accept whatever sanctions were doled out.

  “I have no regrets,” she told Anne simply. She had loved Victor almost from the day he first arrived at St. Vincent’s. She saw Jesus in his eyes, in the way he talked, in the way he moved his hands. She would hold him, night after night, as he cried in cold terror, wanting the drugs, needing them, begging her for them.

  “We’ll get through this, Victor,” she promised. “We’ll get through to the other side.”

  She prayed for guidance, of course, and the answer she seemed to get—over and over—was to trust her own heart. That’s all we can rely on, in the end, Anne herself had told her so many times.

  She tried to dissuade herself nonetheless. Oh, Jean, it’s only your hormones, raging against the approach of middle age, fearful of never being satisfied before it’s too late. You can’t go ahead with this. This is breaking too many boundaries. Your heart is wrong.

  But she could never convince herself of that.

  The heart is never wrong.

  Her particular affection for Victor was noticed by the other residents. That was unavoidable, she assumed. But it wasn’t until afterward that she learned the extent of their talk.

  “I didn’t want to believe the stories!” Anne cried. She stood from the couch, but had to steady herself against a chair to keep from falling. “I said it couldn’t be true.”

  “It wasn’t,” Jean told her. “Not until last night.”

  “And all along I thought you were sincere,” Anne said bitterly.

  “Anne! How have I been insincere?”

  “Pretending to care about me.”

  “Of course I care about you! My, God, Anne!”

  “Don’t speak of God to me,” Anne spit at her. “Don’t speak to me at all—ever again!”

  She ordered her out of the house. The next day Anne Drew—her dearest Anne Drew, her mentor, her guardian, the woman who had done more than anyone else to shape her life, her vision, and her work—reported her to their superior and to the board of St. Vincent de Paul’s.

  She was jealous, Jean came to realize. She was jealous of Victor. It wasn’t the vows. It was that somehow Jean’s love for Victor threatened her love for Anne. Sister Anne Drew had always seemed so wise to Jean—far more wise than Jean ever hoped she might become. But Jean realized then that even the wisest people can sometimes fail to grasp the simplest truths.

  Within a month Jean had been transferred to St. Mary’s—an assignment she would never have pursued. She was dumped into the lap of luxury with wealthy old white people and a gaggle of retired nuns—even the help were years older than Jean. No temptations here. St. Vincent’s was turned over to a group of sisters with no experience. It broke Jean’s heart, but she took her punishment—for she had acknowledged all along that listening to her heart might come with consequences.

  One month after Jean left, Victor died of an overdose. They’d never had a chance to say good-bye. The day of his funeral, Anne died as well—in a hospital bed and not at home as she had wanted. She died in the middle of the day, while the staff was busy with lunch, with no one around her. She had steadfastly refused to permit any visits from Jean.

  In the end, Jean firmly believes, it wasn’t the cancer that killed her.

  It was her heart.

  So she had no one left. No one except Flo.

  And she wasn’t going to lose her too.

  “What are you going to do?” she asks Richard, stopping him as the group files out to leave.

  “Dig in,” he said. “Start researching to see what I can discover.”

  “You’ll try to prove it on your own, you mean.”

  He sighs. “Sister, I don’t want to hurt Flo. But I can’t just walk away from this story.”

  They don’t say anything more. She nods good-bye to Anita and Rex, who follow Richard out the door.

  “Sister,” Ben Sheehan says.

  She looks at him and smiles. He does have Victor’s eyes, even if they’re blue. “Yes, Ben?”

  “I want you to know something,” he tells her. “I will do everything in my power to protect Flo. No matter what Richard turns up. I mean that.”

  She clasps his hand. She feels her instincts about him validated. “Thank you,” she says emotionally.

  He smiles. “There are ways of Flo telling her story on her own terms, you know,” he says. “We don’t need reporters.”

  She nods, although she’s not quite sure she understands.

  “I’ll do what I can,” he promises.

  She thanks him again. Then they’re all gone.

  She trusts me, Ben thinks. That’s good because she doesn’t trust Richard anymore.

  “I hate to admit it, hon, but you were right,” Ben whispers to Anita, slipping his arm around her waist as they walk back to the car. “This is perfect. This is it!”

  “You’re going to do it? Make a movie about Flo?”

  “Keep quiet,” he says. “I don’t want Richard or Rex to hear.” They’re ahead, unlocking the car. “Richard’s screwed up his chances for getting back in, being so hard-assed and all. But I think I got the Big Nun to trust me.”

  “What about the unanswered questions?”

  “We’ll get to them,” Ben says.

  “Well, Richard should write the screenplay. He’s doing the research.”

  “All in good time, sweetheart. I’m not letting my brother determine how we go forward here.” Richard, with all his superior airs. Richard, with all Mom’s gilded promise.

  “You just listen to Richard, Benjamin,” Mom’s saying. “He’ll show you the way.”

  Only once had he cracked, showed Mom the pain he felt when she said things like that. “I can find my own way, Mother,” he insisted. “Can’t you ever give me any credit?”

  She laughed—laughed, as if he’d told her some hilarious joke and she’d just gotten the punchline. “Oh, Benny,” she said, full of mirth, “you can
hardly find your way around the block.”

  Ben stops. Anita looks up at him. “This is going to be my show from here on in,” he vows. “Richard would just antagonize Sister Jean further. We’ll do it my way. Or else it’s not going to get done.”

  Anita just keeps looking at him.

  Ben laughs. “This is it, babe. What we’ve been waiting for. This is going to be big.”

  Summer 1935

  Flo.

  Wake up, Flo.

  Molly?

  Flo, wake up.

  Molly? Is that you? I can’t see you.

  Here, Flo. Here I am.

  Oh, Molly. It’s been so long. You used to come to me more often. I haven’t seen you in so long. Oh, but you’re still so pretty. Just like you looked that day. Oh, Molly, I’ve thought about you every day since. Every single day.

  And now they’ve been asking about you. Wanting to know if I knew you. But how could I tell them? I haven’t, you know. I haven’t told them a word. I know how hurtful that would be for you. I’ve never told, Molly.

  Never.

  They wouldn’t understand anyway. They didn’t know you. How lovely you were. How guileless. They never knew the fidelity in your eyes, the conviction. How strong your faith—in the world, in yourself.

  In me.

  “When I was ten years old,” Molly told me, the very first day I met her, “my father locked me in the outhouse for three days.”

  She sat on the edge of my bed, her feet barely touching the floor. She shivered in her yellow gingham dress. I sat beside her, wrapping my arms around her slight frame as she told her story.

  “My sisters taunted me through the little moon-faced opening all three days. ‘Molly-Olly on the tolly,’ they’d chant. My mother was too drunk to notice I was gone. Three days I was in there. Three whole days. And it was August, Flo. Hot. Hazy-air kind of hot. Hot-bug-chirpin’ kind of hot. Oh, boy, and the outhouse stank like the dickens. Sometimes I had to push my nose and mouth down through the dirt under the wood of the back wall just to get a breath.

  “When Papa finally let me out, I remember rubbing my eyes because the sun was so bright and I’d been in the dark for three days. He gave me an ice cream cone—blackberry walnut, I remember. Oh, boy, did it ever taste good. Papa told me he loved me, and I promised him from then on I’d be the best girl in the world.”

  “But what had you done, Molly?” I asked, her tiny hands clasped in mine.

  “I’d said a bad thing.” She rested her head on my shoulder. “I’d said, ‘Bloody balls.’ Even now, saying it to you, I feel filthy, like I got tar on my tongue.”

  Poor girl. I reached up to stroke her long, silky hair.

  “Papa would say it when he was shoeing the horses and he’d hammer his thumb by mistake. ‘Bloody balls!’ he’d shout, and we’d all run into the barn. ‘Bloody balls! Bloody balls!’ So when Mama fell on me that day, stone drunk, as we were carrying eggs back into the house, I said it. There were smashed eggs everywhere. Mama was facedown in the yolk and the mud. ‘Bloody balls!’ I shouted as loud as I could. And so I spent three days in the outhouse. I’ve never said it again—not till now.”

  I felt her tears on my neck.

  “Bloody balls,” she said again, quiet this time.

  She was just a girl from Red Oak, Iowa—a teenager when I first met her. She was standing in the wardrobe closet imagining she was a star, holding up one of Garbo’s gowns from Anna Karenina in front of her, bowing to herself in the mirror. I’d only been on the lot myself for a week. She was, as they say, fresh off the bus.

  How she got the job at Metro wasn’t hard to discern. Lots of girls landed places on the lot by sleeping with studio underlings. It wasn’t anything they needed to be ashamed of, since so many did it. I, of course, hadn’t needed to rely on such shenanigans. I doubt, first of all, that any of those underlings would have been interested in a swap with me. I was there, instead, on the good graces of Mr. Louis B. Mayer, who remembered The Biograph Girl in her days of glory and took pity on her current destitution.

  But Molly had had no glory days. She was, however, pretty and soft, and not above getting her way through the only means she knew.

  “I ran away from home when I was fourteen,” she told me, sitting there amid the costumes of so many dreams. “I had no money. I wanted to be a dancer. There was a theater in Omaha that hired me. I danced in the chorus. And did other things, too.”

  I could well imagine. How many men had there been? Enough certainly to make her an expert on getting ahead. But not too many to dim her sincerity, her absolute ingenuousness. Despite everything, Molly was still an innocent, a babe.

  Oh, yes, she enchanted me. True, she looked like Linda, so blond and pale, with such translucent eyes. But she reminded me of myself, too—or rather, of the Florence Lawrence who existed in those early, hopeful, hungry days before St. Louis. The girl who lived for the applause. Molly didn’t have the smarts or the resiliency of Florence Bridgewood, but she had the grace and the charm—and the ambition—of The Biograph Girl.

  “How did you end up out here?” I asked her.

  She smiled. “All roads lead to Hollywood, I guess. I saved up for train fare from Omaha to Dallas, then joined a company that was heading west. Thirteen cities in nine weeks. I learned how to dance very quickly.”

  “I know the life,” I told her.

  “One of the dancers was working at Warner. He introduced me around, and I ended up here. You know.”

  Oh, I did.

  “Flo,” she told me, suddenly filled with a glow so bright I’d swear I could see an aura around her. “I want to be a huge star. It’s all I’ve wanted ever since I was a little girl. I’d sneak off the farm and walk the seven miles into town. There was a little theater there—the Lyric. They had plaster angels out front and the most beautiful red velvet curtain inside. It was like nothing else in Red Oak, which was so gray and so flat—nothing red about it and not so many oaks. I’d run off to the Lyric as often as I could. Chancing a whipping from Papa was worth it to see Gloria Swanson or Leatrice Joy or—Garbo.”

  She pressed her face into the satin brocade of Garbo’s gown. She was too young to remember me on the screen. She hadn’t even been born at the time of the fire. I reached over and stroked her hair. How I loved to do that. So soft. So blond, as mine had been.

  “And your family?” I asked. “They must wonder what’s become of you.”

  She looked up at me. “They’re probably glad I’m gone. Papa said I was too much of a dreamer for them. A changeling child. Left on their doorstep. Not one of theirs.”

  No, not one of theirs. Not possible. Such a sweet child.

  Sweet—sweet like—oh, how did the words go?

  Her face it is a fairy, that the sun shone on—

  For bonny Annie Laurie …

  “I’m going to be a big star, Flo,” she promised me that day, interrupting my reveries. “A big, big star. You’ll see.”

  There were so many girls like Molly. You saw them everywhere. Walking onto the lot, in herds like skittish deer. Fresh-scrubbed faces and checkered blouses, well-turned calves and high-heeled shoes. All wanting a piece of that elusive glory we’d unknowingly begotten, like medieval alchemists, in that little studio at Number 11 East Fourteenth Street. All of that seemed so long ago now. A world none of them knew.

  I’d sit there and watch them stream through the gates. Some had appointments, but many more were empty-handed and absurdly sanguine. None of us from the old days spoke of them. We just watched them come in, all big eyes and tremulous smiles. I once saw a young girl approach Flossie Turner and ask her where she could sign up to be in the movies. Dear old Flossie had just embraced her. Reached out and wrapped her arms tightly around her, hugging the slight, pitiful bird to her breast.

  Later, I’d say to Flossie that if all those sweet young things were laid end to end—oh, but I’ve told you that already, haven’t I?

  In my first weeks on the MGM lot, I’d sometimes
get lost in its vast-ness. This was during the height of the studio’s “golden era,” remember—a time when whole lives were spent behind its walls. In truth, it was indeed a small city, self-contained and self-sufficient, with its own security force, fire department, grocery store, and pharmacy. Four thousand people worked behind those enormous Corinthian columns running along Washington Boulevard. There were acres of sound stages: rows and rows of them, befitting the description “film factory.” The stars’ dressing rooms—often as elaborately designed as their homes—lined the property. Cutting through the center was the gargantuan pool with its wind-whipping devices used to create the illusion of the sea.

  Oh, and the back lot—the sets of Old Heidelberg still stood from The Student Prince, and the dingy waterfronts from Anna Christie still evoked O’Neill. I’d watch as Johnny Weissmuller swung across the Tarzan river on a vine. Occasionally I’d wander down an avenue of brownstone facades, thinking I was back on Fifth Avenue in New York. But I’d turn a corner and find myself in nineteenth-century London or the Wild West or ancient Babylon. I’d knock on the plaster and get a hollow sound: This was the make-believe truth we’d invented.

  That first day, I was nearly run over by a property man.

  “Out of the way, out of the way,” he had yelled.

  “Excuse me, sir,” I chided, “but you don’t need to be so rude.”

  “Ah, shut up, lady and move yer ass,” he barked. “Garbo’s coming through.”

  I pulled into the shadows, and there she was. Almost gliding on the air as she passed down the stairs. She was surrounded by an entourage of hairdressers and costume people, all chattering like chipmunks, but she was silent. She breezed by in a filmy white gown that lifted in the air as she walked.

  She looked so sad. Garbo. I read once where Clare Boothe Luce called her a deer trapped in a woman’s body living resentfully in the Hollywood zoo.