by Whitney Otto
Nothing, however, outshone the Tower of Jewels: a 435-foot-tall structure with a ground-floor archway resembling the Arc de Triomphe—that is, if the arc had held a stack of progressively smaller round tiers like a collection of fancy hatboxes. Each level was adorned with smooth Italianate columns, carved Japanese eaves, Moorish arches, or a wraparound terrace that held an assembly of gold statues, star maidens in diamond diadems. An enormous sphere rested upon another enormous sphere at the top.
It wasn’t the star maidens and architectural details that made the tower extraordinary—it was that each tier was wrapped in imported cut-crystal “gems” of ruby, emerald, sapphire, aquamarine, citrine, and diamond, backed with tiny mirrors and hung from individual brass hooks that allowed them to shimmer and knock against each other when caught in the bay breezes, eventually causing the smallest, most inconsequential damage to the gems. It was the way the sunlight refracted through the jewels, and the way the fifty-four searchlights took over for the sun each night.
On her day off from I. Magnin’s luxury department store, where she was both seamstress and model, Clara sat on the edge of the large reflecting pool that faced the tower. The pool, an exaggerated affair with its stone globe in the center, accurately depicting the land and water masses of Earth with a mythical rider bearing two angels blowing trumpets and spewing water upon his shoulders, was crowded around its perimiter with exhibition visitors having a rest. Clara sat among them, flanked on one side by one of the dozen fish statues situated around the perimeter and, on the other, by a young man.
Though Clara never cared for jewelry—her ideas of beauty would always lie elsewhere—nor would she ever be tempted to spend her money on such expensive accessories (all her money would go to living, helping friends, the Communist Party, and buying a pair of cameras—not necessarily in that order but close to it), she loved the Tower of Jewels. Which is how, as she sat on the edge of the pool, she came to say what she said aloud, without thinking that anyone was listening: “This building makes me think that anything is possible.”
“Yes,” said the man beside her.
The surprise of someone not only listening but responding to her comment made her turn her full attention to Laurent Cluzet, noticing the narrow mustache running the length of his lips; the small bit of beard on his chin; his tall, slender, long-legged frame. Having partially folded himself up, he possessed an almost frail quality, as if he were the male version of a model in a Pre-Raphaelite painting. He wasn’t so much androgynous as slightly asexual; his rather formal, fussy clothing, a study in late-nineteenth-century aesthete styling, bordered on the theatrical. None of which bothered Clara, who was becoming a popular Italian theater actress and was therefore used to everything being a little larger than life.
It may be possible to measure a life by the times, places, and circumstances where you hear the word yes. Sometimes there is nothing so terrible as hearing “yes” when asking a question to which you don’t really want to hear an answer (“Do you love her?”). But other times, “yes” is the perfect answer (“Do you love me?” “Do you want to come with me?” “Shall we meet here again tomorrow?” “Yes.”).
“Clara,” Laurent later asked, “shall we meet here again tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
They met by the tower during the day. They strolled the nearby Avenue of Palms, and the Court of the Sun and Stars. Laurent bought Clara lemon ice and sailed with her through the Tunnel of Love in Toyland. They climbed a hill above the Marina to watch the fifty-four searchlights hitting the jewels as they moved in the night breezes, their little mirrors and facets bending the light back into the sky.
• • •
The closing of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, coinciding with the end of 1915, saw a dismantling of all those fabulous pavilions and halls.
On the day the tower was to come down, Clara told Laurent that she had to rehearse a new musical, which wasn’t true; she didn’t want anyone to see how unbearable it was for her to see it go. Maybe she was attached to the tower because she attached it to Laurent, whose ideas of art and beauty and a bohemian life coincided with her own. The association was so strong that it seemed likely that, when the tower disappeared, so would he.
But Laurent didn’t go away, and, three years later, he handed Clara a box the size of the palm of her hand. Inside was one of the rubies, nicked in two places, from the Tower of Jewels, with a note that read, I know you would rather have this than an engagement ring. Come with me to Los Angeles and be my wife.
In the six years since they’d met, and three years since they’d moved to Los Angeles, Clara had been working in the movies while Laurent drew, and designed fabric. They were content with their lives and each other. They had their bohemian friends, their fashionable address, their unconventional marriage, which was unconventional in that they never legally married yet considered themselves wed. Clara took Laurent’s name to convince his family, to whom marriage mattered.
As Clara sat on the low oak branch thinking about dinner, a rather small, slight man caught her eye. He was leaning against a tree not far from where Clara sat. He looked to be on the young side of thirty, despite his deeply receded hairline and funny little mustache. As she studied him, she noticed an expression of deep interest in the goings-on of the film set, as well as a touch of coldness about the mouth. This combination of curiosity and a bit of a chill pulled her attention; it was so different from Laurent, who was so sweet that it was sometimes challenging to think of him as a lover and not a brother.
Who wouldn’t be fascinated by the forty-acre movie lot, which consisted of scenery flats, mocked-up locations, prop rooms, wardrobe rooms, carpenters putting up this and taking down that? And then there were the animal actors that lived there full-time: lions, leopards, elephants, bears, parrots, chimpanzees, three zebras, and a few dogs. Plus, the mustachioed man appeared very taken with the director’s increasingly excited conversation.
When the participants in the dispute finally stomped off in opposite directions, the small man disengaged his attention to notice Clara, who meant to look away but instead smiled. He returned the smile, igniting a low-level heat. Like many pretty girls, Clara had seldom been bold because she never really had to be. But she now found herself moving off the low branch with the intention of introducing herself to this man whose smile had caused such an inner disturbance, only to be intercepted by one of the movie assistants telling her they were ready to begin.
And when she had finished with her scene—the one where she, the beautiful Mexican maid, is mistaken by the hero for the lady of the house—the small, slight man was gone.
The Afternoon of the Leopard was Clara’s second starring role and her fourth film. Her previous acting experience had been in the popular Italian theater of North Beach in San Francisco, where she had been in melodramas, operettas, and vaudevilles—many of them overwrought and mediocre to terrible. Clara was already feeling the constraints of sentimentality in the scripts, much in the same way that, as a model, she was beginning to chafe at pictorialism in photographs.
A famous woman photographer, Jane Reece, had traveled to California on a vacation from her Ohio portrait studio. Upon meeting Clara and Laurent, she immediately asked if they would be willing to pose for her. Clara was dressed like the sort of California Indian being repressively, unendingly converted by the Franciscan fathers who dotted the length of the state with their missions.
With Laurent, Miss Reece went straight to the source, depicting the tall, lean young man as Jesus.
“Jesus,” said Clara under her breath when she saw the print. All that soft-focus, painterly nonsense with the camera; Clara hated it from the start. In the same way she had grown tired of Hollywood’s insistence that she play the Exotic Girl in her harem costume or a traditional Oaxacan blouse and skirt, the fiery señorita in a mantilla, the shoeless Greek island girl.
She was always the siren, the sex goddess, the vamp, the temptation, the poor choice, the
thief of every man’s morality. At least when she was acting in the Italian theater she was seen as an actress, someone with the skill to portray a range of characters, and she did such a fine job that the North Beach audiences loved her.
In San Francisco, Clara modeled for a controversial statue of a naked woman. Then she posed nude for another photographer. And, like many beautiful women who want more than admiration, she was conflicted about her beauty. She devoured books and ideas; was a playful conversationalist; wore imaginative, stylized clothing sewn by her own hand. People lined up to buy the little fabric dolls she made as a lark. The attention her looks brought was intoxicating because it made so many things so much easier, except for the knowledge that it could not last.
Men were drawn to Clara because of her appearance, but they fell for her because of her goodness and her mind.
As far as movies went, she didn’t want only to be the one who made someone’s pulse race: She wanted to make art.
When she was on the set, she often observed the camera operators, the way they counted to themselves to time their shots, the way they adjusted the lighting or studied the angles of her face. Her father had been a mechanical engineer and a machinist and an inventor, and she was her father’s daughter.
Which is why the man with the mustache, more intrigued by the makers of the movies than by the actors, had caught her eye.
The Cluzet apartment was in the Bryson Building, one of the newest and most elegant apartment buildings in Los Angeles. Their sizable studio was on the sixth floor, four stories below the baroque ballroom that Mr. Bryson had built for sixty thousand dollars, and six marble stairways up from the lobby of potted palms where “Blue Ali Baba oil jars were dotted around, big enough to keep tigers in,” as Raymond Chandler wrote. There were Moorish archways, stone lions, a blue carpet, a birdcage elevator.
Laurent, with his dogged devotion to all things “beautiful,” including Clara, often chose her clothes to complement the romantic apartment. Everything for Laurent was stage dressing; in this way, he was perfect for Hollywood. Clara shimmered in ocean colors, her upswept hair dotted with tiny rhinestones, bits of sparkle that made it appear as if a constellation were tangled in the strands.
Since the door of the studio always stood open on these evenings, there was no sound of it opening or closing to announce the arrival or departure of guests. Someone once asked the Cluzets if they were ever worried about someone walking off with their belongings, and they replied that they didn’t believe in possessions.
Actually, this was what Laurent said in answer to a newcomer to that night’s party—a prematurely bald man with a funny little mustache who entered the apartment accompanied by a second man, and a very pretty woman named Marguerite.
The mustachioed man, whom Clara recognized from that day at the studio three weeks ago, said, “Oh, are possessions now a religion?”
“Only if you live in America,” said another guest, a foreign-looking man dressed like a banker.
“Now, see, this is what I don’t understand,” said the mustachioed man to his female companion. “Everyone acts as if there’s no wealth anywhere but in the United States, as if we’re the only people on Earth who enjoy it.”
Marguerite smiled a knowing smile. “I wasn’t even born here,” she said, “and I think I understand your own country better than you.” She removed her hat, handing it to Laurent as she smoothed down her hair. Clara admired the cut and quality of the woman’s clothing, the beauty of the embroidery along the hem of her long jacket and her sleeves.
“You should listen to Marguerite,” said Laurent to the mustachioed man of his female companion. “Not only is she sophisticated, magnificent, well-read, and well-lived”—he lightly tapped her hat on the chest of the mustachioed man—“but she is the most terribly spiritual genius.”
“Listen to you,” said Marguerite, laughing. Clara loved Marguerite’s laugh, which always sounded to her like tiny Christmas bells.
The women kissed in a belated greeting, Clara turning toward the second man, who had come in with the small mustachioed man and Marguerite, extending her hand and saying, “I’m Clara Cluzet.”
“Madame Cluzet,” said the man without the mustache, “Jack Hartmann. Visiting from Berkeley.”
“My family lives in San Francisco,” said Clara. “North Beach.”
“That’s how I know you!” said Jack Hartmann. “You were with La Moderna, weren’t you?”
“You know Italian theater?” said Clara.
“A little.”
“Are you an actor?” asked Clara, though she was thinking that Jack was really too tall to be anything but a character actor, in the same way that she was too Italian, too darkly beautiful to be anything but someone’s mistress, the one who ruins but seldom wins the leading man.
Jack laughed. “No, no. I’m a photographer.”
“I should’ve guessed,” said Laurent, “since you came here with Marguerite.”
“Really,” Marguerite said, “you think because I take pictures I consort only with other photographers? I like to think my social life is a bit broader than that.”
“And you are?” Clara asked the mustachioed man.
“Morris Elliot,” he said.
“I remember you from the movie studio. I was sitting on the branch of a tree.”
“And I remember you, Madame Cluzet. The Afternoon of the Leopard,” said Morris Elliot.
“Yes, The Afternoon of the Leopard. So what is it that you do when you aren’t visiting film sets?”
“What made you think I was visiting?” asked Morris.
Clara laughed. “I work there, and I feel like I’m visiting. It’s that sort of profession, you know, where your job lasts only as long as the movie.”
“I’m a photographer,” said Morris.
Laurent laughed. “Of course you are!”
Marguerite rolled her eyes, smiled. “Morris has a portrait studio in Tropico—a very good one in fact.”
“Well,” said Laurent, threading his arm through Marguerite’s and simultaneously pressing Clara’s inner wrist to his mouth, delivering a light kiss, “why don’t we go and find something very good to drink? And you”—to Marguerite—“can tell me more about all the nonphotographer friends you supposedly have.” He dropped Clara’s hand as he, Marguerite, and Jack Hartmann (“It’s all good to drink, if you ask me”) went to the rolling bar cart near the window.
Once they were left alone, Morris said to Clara, “I take it you don’t like acting in the pictures.”
“No,” she said.
Morris said nothing but kept his eyes on Clara. Though he seemed to lack a kind of natural warmth, he didn’t come across as unfriendly. Clara recognized the same engaged curiosity that she had noticed on the set; he appeared intelligent. Perhaps it was the way he studied her that undid her. The look, the intelligence; there was no prurience in his questions, no searching for a nugget of gossip or the unintentional confession.
“I don’t think that I’m expected to act.”
“What do you think you’re expected to do?”
“Be beautiful and exotic and dangerous.” Clara took a sip of her drink. “It isn’t interesting.”
Morris took the glass from her hand, sipping before returning it. There was no presumption in the act; in fact, it was so intimate, and natural, so provocative that Clara’s pulse sped up.
“Why not come by my studio sometime? I’ll let you rescue me from the hell of baby photographs and Los Angeles matrons in soft focus.” Now he did smile. It was a lovely smile. “Please say you’ll help a modern man imprisoned in all that romantic dreck. I could be mistaken, but I think you need rescuing too.”
Though he stepped no closer, Clara felt as if he were whispering in her ear when he said, “You are no more a creature of an Edenic past than I am. Men are confounded by your figure and your face, and decide that you aren’t a modern woman but someone more primitive, more elemental. It must make you feel as if you aren’t th
ere at all, waiting for them to see you.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
She thought of Laurent and his endless pursuit of what he called “absolute beauty,” something he demanded from all things in their lives. It didn’t matter if it was Clara’s clothing or the furnishings of their studio in their very beautiful building. His wardrobe, his sketches, his poems, their love. It all must be romantic. It must be Beauty and Art. Her fleeting thought was how long it had been since she was with a man who wanted her, not his idealized version of her. Theirs was an almost sexless love, but she seemed to be the only one who knew it.
“My husband has an ‘intentional disregard for the modern spirit of this age.’ ”
“My wife is impossible.”
She said to Morris, “I’m not sentimental.”
Morris said to her, “Neither am I.”
“Mexico,” said Laurent one night in the aftermath of one of their parties—months following the party where Clara and Morris first spoke. “I plan to leave next month,” Laurent said. “Then, when Clara finishes this last movie, she will join me. Can you imagine an art school where everything is free, for Mexicans and foreigners alike—tuition, board, room, paint, canvas, models, all free—no entrance exam. One must study, that is the only requirement. After ten years of war and unrest, it is wonderful.”
The little group of remaining guests—Morris Elliot, Marguerite Mahler, Pablo Martín, Xavier de Sica, and Erik Norman—reclined in various positions atop the thick Persian area rug in the nearly empty studio. Because of the lack of furniture, Laurent and Clara had splurged on the “good” rug and an assortment of large pillows. Those encrusted with tiny mirrors were really for show, as anyone who ever tried to use one quickly discovered.
