She’s seated in a large plush armchair, wrapped in just her flannel nightdress. Jean had helped her shed her fashionable street clothes, designed exclusively by Donna Karan for her promotional spots in the “Dare to be 100” campaign. Now her feet are barefoot, and Flo’s flexing her toes. “Those heels were tight,” she complained when Jean helped her out of them.
Jean gently rubs Flo’s feet. “Do you feel up for talking a bit?” she asks.
Flo moves her eyes down at her. “All right, missy,” she says. “I know that tone. What do you got cookin’?”
Jean smiles. It makes her happy to hear flashes of the old Flo. The fiery, ornery Flo. Not the lady on TV.
She sits up on the small footrest at Flo’s knee. “Richard Sheehan came by today,” she tells her.
“Richard. How is he? Why has he been such a bad boy and not come to see me? Was Rex with him? Anita?”
“No, he was alone.” Jean looks sincerely into Flo’s eyes. “You trust him, don’t you, Flo?”
Flo nods.
“He told me a police detective wants to ask you some questions.”
Flo shrugs. “Everyone’s been asking me questions for weeks!”
“But this one we can’t control,” Jean tells her, reaching up and placing her hand on Flo’s knee.
Flo shakily lifts her cigarette, which had been burning unattended in the ashtray. Jean watches as she slowly moves it to her lips and takes a short drag. “What does he want to ask me about?”
“Molly,” Jean says.
Flo sets the cigarette back down in the ashtray, then leans her head back and closes her eyes.
“Flo,” Jean says. “You trust me, too, don’t you?”
“Of course I do, Jeannie,” she tells her without opening her eyes.
“Then you need to start giving me all the answers. We’re in too far to go back now. Tell me everything that anyone could possibly ask you about. If we need to come up with a story that will satisfy people’s curiosity, we will—but until you tell me the truth, I can’t help you.”
“In other words, we’d lie?”
“If necessary,” Jean tells her. “If it means … protecting you.”
“Protecting me from what?”
“From … whatever.”
Flo opens her eyes. “Are you afraid they’ll put an old lady like me in jail, Jean?”
“I’m only afraid of you being made uncomfortable.” She reaches up and stubs out Flo’s cigarette in the ashtray. “Let’s start with the fire.”
“The fire?”
“Yes. The one that ended your career in pictures.”
“But I’ve told you about that. The fire got out of con—”
“No, Flo. Don’t tell me what appeared in the fan magazines. Tell me what happened. What really happened.”
Flo lifts her head and looks down at Jean. There’s a strange little smile playing with her lips. “Why, Jeannie,” she says. “You’re not accusing me of lying, are you?”
“No. Just of being clever with the truth.”
Flo laughs.
“You’ve spoken about Charles Woodring and Henry Bolton, Flo. But what happened to Harry? You spoke so much about him, then just stopped. There’s a whole long blank in the recollections you’ve given to Ben, and it starts with the fire. What happened, Flo?”
The old woman once again closes her eyes.
“All right, Jeannie,” Flo says. “But light me another cigarette first.”
Jean obeys. Flo accepts it gratefully, takes a long drag.
“All right,” she says, exhaling smoke. “I’ll tell you what happened. I’ve never spoken of it, not in eighty years. It’s funny—how when you don’t speak of a thing for a long time, you think you’ll forget it. That it will go away somehow, become what you want it to be. But that doesn’t happen. It stays with you, Jeannie, stays right with you, always there.”
She pauses. “Always there …”
Jean watches as Flo’s eyes move off to that place far away.
“There was a fire, Jeannie,” she says. “There really was a fire.…”
Spring–Summer 1915
Yes, there really was a fire. I didn’t make that up. I can still hear it crackling around the old wood, the spits and pops it made as it scampered out of control, up the curtains and across the beams like some living creature. I can still smell the burning nitrate as the flames consumed the film stock. I can still taste the smoke that left me choking for breath. It was all very ghastly and horrified me for weeks. I stayed in bed, unable to move. No, I couldn’t have made all that up. It was far too real.
Oh, but you see, there’s far more—more than the fire, the smoke, the terror in my bed—those things will forever remind me of what else—what else happened in those months ….
Harry. Dear, loyal Harry. Dear, dear, desperate Harry. Ever since I’d come back from Santorini, he’d been terrified of losing me. I could see it in his eyes, in the way he fluttered his hands, in his eagerness to accommodate me in all things. He tried to love me, in his way, but I had changed. If I’d ever sought love in my marriage with Harry, it had ended that day in the ruins of the temple, in the thin brown arms of a Greek fisherboy.
How I despised being back in the studio. It all seemed to bear down around me: the whir of the camera, the sputtering of the blazing lamps. We had a quota to fill for Universal: two films per month. And always, always, there was the pressure to work my way back to the top.
“Number ten, Florence,” Mother would chide. “You don’t want to languish at number ten.”
But the latest Photoplay poll didn’t even include me in the Top Ten. Harry tried to hide the magazine from me, but I found it. “It’s just a temporary lull, sweetheart,” he said. “Wait till you see the new picture I’ve got in mind. Real flames and an exciting rescue! That’ll do it!”
Oh, Harry. I carried his picture in my purse for years. I still have it, you know, in my drawer. I’ll take it out sometimes, look down at him, and wonder if he ever really existed. He’s been dead more than seventy years now. I doubt there’s anyone alive who remembers him. Except me.
I’ll trace the line of his face in the photograph with my finger. Harry loved me, I’ll tell myself. It was love for a fragile, high-strung girl: a girl he could drive around in a borrowed car, a girl he could impress, a girl he could comfort and cajole, a girl whose career could ensure his own. I can’t say he didn’t love Florence Bridgewood. He just never knew her. Florence Lawrence was the only girl he knew, and for her, he would do anything.
And so it was that I hit upon my solution.
My way out.
Perhaps you go through it and you find there is another side. Does it make sensible?
Oh, very much so.
I let Harry in my bed for the first time in over a year. Since coming back from the Greek islands, I was frequently too distraught to permit what we used to so delicately call “marital relations.” But this night, I turned back my satin covers and gestured for him to enter. His face flushed a deep purple, his big Adam’s apple lunging up and down in his neck.
I can still recall that night so clearly. It was around Christmastime. We were all out at the farm in New Jersey. How I loved that place. I wish you could have seen it. I wish I still had my pictures of it. I planted rosebushes everywhere. We raised asparagus—oh, what feasts we had in season! There were three thousand trees: fruit trees of all kinds, apple and pear and cherry. The land reached back into the woods for a full mile.
I remember Christmas there especially. The tall white pines that would reach the ceiling, the circle of pillows we’d place around the tree. Ducks would play his harmonica and I’d whistle to my own accompaniment on the piano. We’d play such games—you know, hiding a prize in a stocking and then hunting the entire farm for it. You should have seen us, climbing up on the haymow and in and out of the stalls of the horses and cows and up in the attic!
But this Christmas was different. Ducks was gone, of course, and I was still too
fragile, too high-strung to be climbing around in haymows. It was a quiet Christmas, but we still had our tree, and Harry bought me lovely gifts. A pair of shoes, a fur coat, a new motor car. There were even gifts from my brother, I think—but Mother chose not to invite poor Norman down from Buffalo for the holiday.
Thinking about it now, I’m quite certain it was Christmas Eve itself that I invited Harry into my bed. It would have been fitting, after all: I had a gift to give him as well. It was a cold night, cold and snowy, I remember that much. The wind was wailing outside our windows and the snow fell six inches in an hour. We kept a fire going all night long in the hearth.
I let Harry penetrate me, his big, wet, sloppy tongue all over my face. I cringed, tightened my fists at my side. There was no passion, no tenderness. I closed my eyes, tried to imagine the Aegean sky, and said a little prayer that Harry’s efforts would take.
A week later, I discovered my prayers had been answered.
I didn’t tell him. Not right away. That was part of my plan. I just kept going into the studio, following his directions, churning out our quota of celluloid.
We began work on a film called Pawns of Destiny. Harry showed me the plans for the fire.
“You’ll come down here, Flo,” he said, pointing on his blueprint. “And, Matt, you’ll come in from here and save her.”
All very simple. Matt Moore was a big tree of a man, broad shouldered, gorgeous. He looked terrific that day in his brown leather chaps and ten-gallon hat. He winked at me and took his place. I gathered my skirts and walked up the short flight of stairs. Harry moved off behind the camera. “Roll ’em,” he commanded the photographer.
Somewhere behind us a prop man lit a trail of gasoline. I heard the whoof as the fire ignited, and I spotted it quickly rising behind a stack of crates. I threw my hands in front of my face for the camera. “That’s it, Flo,” Harry called. “You see the fire and think you’re trapped!”
I ran down the stairs. By now the flames were higher; the smoke filled the room. “No, no,” Harry barked. “Go back and come down again.”
We had to do the scene three times. I was coughing, wheezing. Matt came rushing in, spitting black soot. I was supposed to faint on the second landing. Harry kept calling for me to do it again. The flames were edging closer to me. I could feel their intense heat on my face and hands. My foot broke through some floorboards and I saw flames there. “Do it again, Flo!” Harry shouted, heedless of any danger. “One more time!”
Matt came rushing in again. By now I couldn’t hear Harry’s directions anymore. The only sound was the roar of the flames. Damn him, I was thinking. Why doesn’t he call “Cut?”
Matt tripped, sprawling like a great fallen oak in front of me. I saw a pesky little flame jump from the wall and land on his back. I threw myself at him, smothering the flame, pulling at his chaps to get him out of harm’s way. I cut my neck on a splintered doorframe as I did so. I felt warm blood on my throat.
“No more, Harry!” I screamed, standing up suddenly. I was surrounded by a wall of bright yellow flame. “No more!”
I felt panic grip me. Matt was up, out of sight now, but I felt as if I’d faint right there, facedown into the flames. I heard the spray of water-hoses, the frantic shouts of prop men. I began to scream. I stood there like some crazy Joan of Arc, my hands in my hair, howling.
It made for great footage, Harry later told me.
“You bastard!” I screamed at him when the flames were finally out. “You bastard!”
That Florence Lawrence could find such a voice startled not only him but myself as well. It convinced me that I was on the right path, that my plan would take me back to who I wanted to be.
“Florrie,” Harry said, trying to calm me down. “Sweetheart, you were never in any real danger! I was watching all the time.”
The makeshift building on the Universal-Victor lot was in ruins. Charred black wooden beams still smoked, with prop men spraying them with hoses.
“I could have been killed,” I seethed at him. “Killed!”
“No, Florrie, I was—”
“And you would’ve been my murderer!” I shrieked. The crew looked over at us awkwardly.
Then I began to laugh. Crazy-like-a-loon laugh. I sat down hard in my star’s chair. I covered my face with my hands. Blood seeped through my fingers from the wound on my throat.
“Florrie,” Harry said, trying to soothe me, stooping down beside me.
“And not just me, Harry,” I said all at once, looking up to meet him eye to eye. My laughter ceased. “But your baby, too. You would’ve killed your baby.”
He didn’t say anything. He just continued to stare back at me for a long, long time.
“She’s in no fit condition to have a baby,” Mother sniffed.
“I’ll not hear of any butchers, Lotta,” Harry insisted. “I won’t do it.”
I was in bed. I had a bad case of the shakes, brought on by the aftermath of the fire. I shivered under a mound of blankets, my teeth chattering so loud they could hear me down the hall.
I could hear them, too.
“How far along is she?” Mother was asking.
“Maybe about four months,” Harry told her.
“She can’t have this child,” Mother snarled. “It won’t do to have America’s ingenue a mother.”
“Maybe it’s time for a new image.”
Mother’s laugh was hard. “She’s not even in Photoplay’s Top Ten at all anymore. To take time off now would be disastrous!”
“I’ll not hear of it, Lotta! I mean that!”
“You are a selfish, stubborn man!”
“And you are a pigheaded, greedy sow!”
I just continued to shake under my blankets, unable to get warm.
“My mother and I are going on a long road trip,” I told the reporter. I had greeted her in my pink negligee. Now I lay stretched out on the daybed. “I’ve been very tired, you see, working so much. I just feel the need to get away.”
Mother stood behind me, beaming like a fool, her hand on my shoulder. Harry lurked off to the side, staring out the window.
That’s what they reported. The fan magazines. One reporter wrote:
Poor Florence Lawrence. One expects to find a stately lady whose charm of mature development would compensate for her lack of the first beauty of youth. Instead, one finds a delicate, brittle flower of a girl. It is hoped the trip will do her some good.
I sniffed. “Mature development? The lack of the first beauty of youth?” I threw down the magazine. “Don’t they know I’m only twenty-five?”
“That’s what you were last year, Florence,” Mother scolded. She was reading the Dramatic Mirror. Probably still dreaming of a comeback. Hers, mine, ours. “You can’t stay twenty-five forever. Reporters remember. They have minds for such things.”
I walked over to the French doors that looked out onto my rose gardens. “Suppose they come back? Suppose they come out here and see we haven’t really gone anywhere?”
“They won’t, Florence.”
And they didn’t. I guess things were different then. You could tell a story to the press and they’d accept it. Maybe not believe it, but they’d accept it. They wouldn’t go around trying to prove you wrong, let me put it that way. We told them we were leaving. They ran with it and didn’t bother us again.
Of course, Florence Lawrence’s name wasn’t exactly selling their magazines anymore.
I stood in front of the full-length mirror, my hands on my belly. “It will be a girl,” I told Mother, running my fingers along its shape.
“I should hope so,” she said, turning a page in the Dramatic Mirror. “I wouldn’t want a boy who would grow up looking like him.”
“I’m going to name her Annie Laurie,” I said. “Remember, Mother? How I’d sing the song when I was a girl?”
She remembered. I began humming it, watching myself in the mirror, the way my belly moved when I turned, imagining the child within.
I sent the
maid out to buy clothes for the baby: pink suits lined with lace, adorable little white booties, a frilly bonnet with satin ribbon dangling from its sides. I set the bonnet on the post of my bed and would lie awake at night, the ribbon in my hand.
I admit that I’d conceived the child as a way out of pictures. A way to throw off the yoke, an excuse for retirement solid enough that neither Harry nor Mother could force me back. But something changed as I watched my belly grow. Something deepened.
It’s clichéd to say motherhood changed me. I don’t know what it was exactly. But something shifted inside me. I felt strong again, confident. I rose early, worked the earth, picked flowers and ripe fruit. I found a book of poems and essays that had been Ducks’s. He’d underlined one passage that I read over and over to myself, practically memorized. It was Emerson:
When I go into my garden with a spade and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover I have been defrauding myself all this time letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.
I was close, very close, to my goal—of going back to me. Maybe it was the rosebushes that thrived under my care. Maybe it was the quiet of my farm, the low mooing of the cows as I milked them at dawn. Maybe it was the gentle swish of the trees late at night, with all the windows open, an early summer breeze tickling the curtains. Maybe it was being away from the studio and the cameras and the reporters’ demands. Maybe it was the fact that I’d asked Harry to leave, and I could forget the temperamental actress who once was his wife.
“But it’s my baby, too!” he’d cried.
He said I was being irrational, delusional: reading Emerson out loud to myself in the garden, getting up before the sun to milk the cows when we had hired hands to do such dirty work. He didn’t recognize me, and neither did Mother, who fretted about the “crazy look” in my eyes—my father’s madness, she feared, visiting itself upon me.
I ignored her melodramatics. I promised Harry I’d contact him when the child was born. But in the meantime, his presence distressed me. I played upon his guilt over the fire, told him the sight of him reminded me of that horrible day. He left grudgingly, and I breathed a long sigh of relief.
The Biograph Girl Page 43
