Things in Glocca Morra

by Peter Collier

  “It is to his shame that one of the reasons he did not come back was what he called my mother’s ‘bad blood.’ My mother took revenge by calling us by her father’s Jewish name. That is why I am Valentina Moretti and not Valentina Fortunato.”

  She stopped to glare fiercely at Jack, as if he were responsible for her inability to stop talking.

  He tried to josh her out of it: “Is this the Italian evil eye we hear so much about?”

  “If I were to give you malocchio,” she answered sharply, “you will feel it and you will be cursed until you do this to break the spell”—here she bent slightly and held out a hand in which her index and pinkie fingers were extended and her middle and ring fingers curled into her palm under her thumb.

  She abruptly went outside and walked down to the water.

  “Get ready in case she decides to swim out to God again,” Jack said to me as we watched. But after standing at the ocean’s edge for a couple of minutes Val returned to the house.

  “These are my very last words about him.” She lit another cigarette and slumped back down on the sofa. “In October, about two years before today, the Germans and their criminal Italian friends are ready to begin the collection of Jews, starting in Trastevere and then across the river. Many go to churches so friendly priests can convert them. This is not for me. I never before felt like a Jew but at this moment I want to shout it in the streets and refuse absolutely to un-Jew myself. In any case, the Germans are not stopped by this stratagem of conversion for long. Men and boys who say they are Catholic must lower their pants for proof by foreskin. The Church saves some who come for sanctuary but gives up others.

  “At this time, my acting troupe at university produces our one performance of Agamemnon that we have been practicing with the certain knowledge that they will soon come for us too. And they do. My mother and I hide with Roman friends who live in Suburra for almost a month. We are finally picked up when a neighbor sells us to a group of squadristi for six thousand lire.

  “We are sent north to a place called Fossoli di Carpe that was a prison for English soldiers captured by the Italian army in North Africa but is now a place to gather Italian Jews until the trains are ready to take them to Poland.

  “The day we arrive we have to stand at attention before the German commandant. His name is Rilke. He comes to stare at me particularly when we assemble. After a long watching, he shakes his head and says, ‘Another Jew, such a nuisance,’ and walks away.

  “The commandant became fixed with me…”

  “Fixated?” Jack asked.

  “Yes, he became fixated with me. Most of the German officers simply take the women at the camp they wanted and rape them, carefully washing themselves afterward to remove all scent of the parasitic vermin. But this Commandant Rilke was too vain for that. He thinks I should fall to him without being forced because of his great sexual charm. What I decided was to allow him to caress my breasts and kiss my shoulders but nothing more. His touch was like swallowing arsenic, but I felt rewarded at the end of our encounters to see him bent over with thwarted desire and to know that he knew he had been brought to this state by a Jew.

  “As I have already said to you, my mother was sent to Poland in a cattle car that pulled up on our railroad track just after the beginning of 1944. I would have to invent in my imagination what then happens to her if not for a woman called Francesca Lazzarini who comes to find me after liberation. Francesca and my mother become friends in the camp and sleep together in one bunk where the lice attack like Hitler’s Wehrmacht. The two of them make a dough from sawdust and leaves and tiny pieces of sugar beets they find buried in the ground and bake it into little loaves that make them starve more slower. They promise each other that if only one survives she will find the other’s family and tell them everything. My mother did not survive but Francesca does. She finds me and tells what number was tattooed on my mother’s arm and these other things.”

  “You were lucky to make it,” Jack said with genuine relief when she paused to light another cigarette.

  “Lucky?” She gave a wan smile. “Perhaps. But not just lucky. At Fossoli, the Ebrei misti are taken last—the ones of mixed parentage like me. There is also the fixation of Commandant Rilke, who refuses to abandon his plan of seduction. And because I have studied at university, I was given the job of organizing records. This was so the people who opened the cattle cars could write in their book who it was they were giving a tattoo and then soon giving the shower. I would have been put in a cattle car too when no more records were needed, but I was rescued before this happened.”

  “By U.S. soldiers?” I asked.

  “No, by the Italian fighters of the Resistenza. Early one morning in February of last year, I am getting water from the well and suddenly guns are firing everywhere.”

  She leaned forward to look closely at Jack. “This is what I believe you have been particularly wanting to hear.

  “As I look at the partigiani pulling down the barbed wire, I see my father. It was an older face now than the one in the photographs in our parlor, but I would know it anywhere. I am shocked. Why has this man come from the safety of America to this dangerous place?

  “He was not the leader of the group and not as young as the others. They have berets but he wears a hat with a feather like the Alpini. Guns are exploding. I fall down and cover my head. When I look up, he is shooting a German guard near me with his rifle. The bullets tear little holes in the back of the guard’s uniform when they come out.”

  “I knew about what he did after Sicily,” Jack said, “but not about this. He was a hero.”

  Val gave him a pitying look. “I would ask you not to praise him too highly. My father is a person who may surprise you by his bravery but surprise also by his cruelty. He admits that many of the things he has done in his life were evil, although he tries to apologize by saying that they don’t represent him as he really is. When he tells me this, I reply to him that we are not who we say we are; we are what we do.

  “I know little about his actions as a person of crime but what I do know makes me ashamed. Yet I cannot deny him. He gave me life twice—once through his seed and then again as this man who came to Fossoli to save me.”

  By this time she was so pale she appeared to need a transfusion. A concerned look came across Jack’s face, and he stood up, ready for the story to be over. But she wanted to finish.

  “When the Germans are all dead or run away, he tries to put his arms around me, but by then I am thinking: Where are you when Franco is made to march into the snows of Stalingrad? Where are you when my mother and I are hiding from the Germans in Rome? Where are you when they put her on the train?

  “There are no more guards so I just walk out the gate. I did not ask permission. He starts to follow, but I turn around and shake my finger to him. Oh no you don’t!

  “I walked for two days. As I reach a place with umbrella pines on both sides of the road, I see things on the ground beside the paving. At first I think they are melons. But as I come closer, I realize they are the heads of dead Italian collaborators who have been buried alive. Dogs have chewed on them.

  “I am given a ride by American soldiers in a jeep—the first one I have ever seen—all the way to Rome. These are the GIs who teach me about hock a loogie. They take me to an officer in the U.S. Army who gives me work as a translator, which I am glad for because it brings money and makes my English better. I am living by myself now in our old apartment. That is where Francesca Lazzarini manages to find me many months later.”

  “You were hiding from your father?” Jack asked.

  “Yes, from him and other things. But he finds me in Rome just as he finds me in Fossoli. By then he has discovered that I was an actor at university. He tells me that he will bring me to America to be in the moving pictures and we will live here happily ever after, as the children’s books say.

  “On the ship taking us to New York he is charming and reassuring. I try to ask him seriously about the e
vil he has done, but he only tells me that he has been a ‘tool of necessity’ all his life. I ask myself, what can these words even mean? He is a stranger, but I have no one else left in this world so I make the decision to allow him to love me.”

  At this point, she crushed her half-smoked Chesterfield in the ashtray, crumpled the half-full pack and threw it in a wastebasket, saying with distaste, “I will stop smoking now forever.”

  TEN

  Jack had flirted irregularly with the idea of being a writer since his final year at Harvard, when his senior thesis about the gathering storm in Europe was published as Why England Slept and became a low-level bestseller in 1940. But while he was glad to see his legend inflated and to one-up his brother Joe, he also knew his father had made the book a success, getting Arthur Krock, his lackey at the New York Times, to act as Jack’s rewrite man, agent and publicist.

  His nebulous literary ambitions had gone dormant during the war, and he had initially taken the job with Hearst only to keep his father off his back. But now that he was dimly visualizing a future with Val, he began to think seriously about actually trying to make it as a journalist.

  For the first time since I had known him, he forced himself to get up before eight. He established a routine in which he did his reporting in the mornings, came home in the early afternoon to write for a couple of hours, then dictated his copy over the phone to New York so he could spend the evening with Val.

  A lot of his work resulted in three-column-inch filler pieces that didn’t deserve more space than that. But some of his writing was lively, insightful and clear-headed.

  As he burrowed deeper into the issue of Hollywood’s labor warfare, he saw the studios’ dilemma. However unsavory and costly the bribes they had been paying Geist, the status quo this larceny purchased at least kept their trains running on time. If they recognized Selkirk’s Association of Studio Employees they would lose these advantages, but the widespread innuendos about the producers being in bed with the Mob would end and perhaps they could hold off state legislative watchdogs who had been salivating at the prospect of a big investigation of Hollywood for years.

  Jack was secretly rooting for Selkirk because he was the underdog and the bold persona he had created made him good copy, and more practically because Jack didn’t think he could win. He had two or three more interviews with him in the weeks after the “War at Warners,” as the conflict we had driven into on Labor Day was now being called. One of his pieces—written after he joined Selkirk in the cockpit of a light plane he flew over an ASE picket line at Fox so he could lash out at the studios’ collusion with Geist’s “criminal enterprise” over loudspeakers tied to the wings—made the front page of the San Francisco Examiner, flagship of the Hearst news empire, and was syndicated in all the Hearst papers. Jack was proud enough of the lede to have it framed and sent back to Hyannis: “It was a Piper Cub, not a P-51 Mustang, and we were dropping leaflets, not bombs. But the payload was still incendiary and it made a direct hit in the newest front in the war being fought on the West Coast for control of the entertainment industry….”

  One afternoon in late September, Selkirk stopped by the beach house with some documents concerning the IBTA’s financial corruption that Jack had asked him about.

  Jack invited him in along with his two longshoremen bodyguards, but Selkirk said, “No, they aren’t housebroken yet,” and made them wait on the porch.

  He looked around appreciatively at the living room and its ocean view. “Wonder how the poor people are doing.”

  “Earned by the sweat of my brow,” Jack pretended to be insulted.

  Selkirk came close and made a show of examining his forehead: “I don’t think so.”

  I pulled a beer out of the refrigerator and offered it to him.

  Selkirk shook his head, “Better not. I’ve got to meet one of Zanuck’s guys at Fox today—behind the scenes, of course—so I need to keep my wits about me.”

  Jack took the beer, opened it with a church key and forced it on him. Selkirk said, “Up the revolution!” then drained it in a single long guzzle. He toyed with the can while we sat at the kitchen table talking about subjects ranging from the upcoming World Series between the Tigers and the

  Cubs, to Selkirk’s growing up in Australia, which he described as “a cowboy movie with horses and guns and wide-open spaces just like yours, but without the one crucial element—the guys in white hats and black hats.”

  “No cowboys and Indians in the Soviet Union either,” Jack needled him.

  “No,” Selkirk chuckled. “There it’s Cossacks and serfs.”

  He was totally at ease with himself, virile and amiable—Jack’s kind of guy.

  After half an hour of chitchat, he stood and stretched, and did one jumping jack as a pun. “That one’s for you,” he said to Jack, then headed out the door

  Jack followed him out and yelled, “Dasvidaniya!”

  “See you in the funny papers,” Selkirk replied as he drove off with his bodyguards stoically crammed into the back seat of his little Chevy convertible.

  But as much as Jack enjoyed their badinage and admired Selkirk’s talent for agitprop, he was under no illusions about his politics. While he wasn’t as heavy-breathing an anticommunist as the Old Man, who had blandished J. Edgar Hoover so constantly about “the red menace” that the FBI chief appointed him a special agent for Massachusetts, Jack was also under no illusions about the USSR. I remember one prewar family discussion when the Old Man and Young Joe were having a slightly nonsensical argument over what was the worst thing Lenin had done—wiping out the kulaks or killing the Tsar and his family—and Jack spoke up with a certainty that silenced them both: “No, the worst thing Lenin ever did was Stalin.”

  He felt that the Party had played a particularly rancid role in the film world during the time of the Popular Front and was now trying to protect the gains it had made then. One of the pieces he wrote during this time was a profile of John Howard Lawson, onetime head of the Screen Writers Guild and still the CP’s point man in Hollywood. In their interview, Jack got Lawson to acknowledge that some of “his” writers did an entire script just to be able to insert a few seconds of “progressive thinking” into a film, usually aiming for the most expensive scene so it wouldn’t be cut. The piece quoted a comment that Lawson had carelessly made to Jack: “We tell our people that even if you’ve got a non-speaking role as a bystander wearing white flannels on a country club veranda, try to look decadent and to convey attitudes about the evils of the class system.”

  One morning when Jack finally got a go-ahead for an interview he’d been trying to set up for a couple of weeks with Paramount’s legendary Adolph Zukor, I decided to go watch Val film a scene on location in Bunker Hill. During the war, the government had required the studios to shoot over half of each film outdoors to save on building materials for sets. That order had recently been rescinded and most movies were headed back inside, but Frank Talbert wanted some exteriors in the decaying area to help establish Tomorrow’s dark mood.

  The estates built in Bunker Hill forty years before by some of LA’s early entrepreneurs had once been the crown jewels of the city’s architecture—Queen Anne Victorians with gingerbread bric-a-brac and scrolled porches—but when the realities of city life got too close for comfort in the mid-Twenties, these men of wealth and power had moved on to Beverly Hills and other more protected venues. Their old mansions were remodeled into a warren of bleak one-room residency hotels and taxi-dance halls populated mainly by single men who congregated on the sidewalks like a surrendered army.

  Bunker Hill’s deterioration was the perfect metaphor for Tomorrow’s themes of venality and betrayal. The voice-over of another noir shot there around the same time called it “once a choice place to live but now a place for people with no other choice.”

  Since rubbernecking at location shoots was a spectator sport in Southern California, Talbert had stationed a “director” with a megaphone and a cameraman and a dozen mill
ing extras at an intersection a half mile away. While a crowd gathered there, he was free to set up his scene in which Glen Dobbs and Lily Fontaine are walking down Third Street and then, realizing that they are being followed by a pair of thugs, try to get away by running down a steep stone staircase to Hill Street below.

  Because he was shooting their escape close up, Talbert asked Val and Payne to do the scene without stunt doubles. She immediately said yes. Payne seemed to have doubts; he joined her only to keep from looking like a weakling.

  He was right to be concerned. Even though they started by taking it easy, the momentum built as they headed down the stairs made them lose control. At one point Payne stumbled and probably would have bounced his face on the stone if Val hadn’t grabbed his arm and managed to keep him upright. Their out-of-control descent gave the scene exactly the authenticity Talbert had been hoping for, and by the time they reached the bottom of the stairs and the cameras stopped rolling he was smiling broadly. The crew cheered as Val flexed her biceps like a bodybuilder while Payne sulked on the sidelines.

  When I left the shoot, she was still in high spirits and gave me a big smack on the cheek. But she showed up at the beach house a couple of hours later in a black mood. Jack wasn’t home yet, and she paced around the living room for several minutes before dropping into one of the sofas.

  I started to speak, but she gave me a fierce look that chiseled her face even more finely: “I am not talking about it, Billings. Don’t ask me. It is too embarrassing.”

  So I kept silent, and after a moment she said, “Okay, I will tell you. After you left, Mr. Talbert takes me aside and says that he liked my bravery in going down stairs but there is a problem. I say what. He says that people who see this film will not accept that I am a person who can sell sex for money. He tells me that I appear too much the good Catholic girl for this to be believed and we must do something.”