Things in Glocca Morra

by Peter Collier

  “What did you say?”

  “I say I once was Catholic but now am a Jew.”

  “Then what?”

  “He says that the Jew does not come through. I tell him that while it is true that I have no intimate knowledge of the life of the prostitute, this is because I don’t need such knowledge. I say to him, ‘That is why it’s called acting.’ But he shakes his head and says, ‘You are acting but you do not convince.’”

  “So what will you do?”

  “Mr. Talbert says the studio has arranged for me to see a madame named Temple Rose and get some instruction. Can you believe it?”

  As it happened, I’d seen a slightly facetious but very readable feature story in the Los Angeles Examiner a few days earlier about a woman named Ginger Adams, formerly one of Temple Rose’s “pleasure girls,” in the writer’s inventive phrase, who had filed a lawsuit against her for wrongful termination. There was a large photo of Adams, a big-featured blonde with a beauty mark on her cheek, taken at the court proceeding, with a smaller inset shot of Rose herself, an attractive woman in her mid-thirties with large brown eyes, a retroussé nose and a sly vulpine smile.

  According to the story’s rambling background, Temple Rose’s claim to fame was having noticed that prostitutes had been central figures in movies almost from the beginning—actresses such as Garbo and Janet Gaynor having gotten Oscar nominations for portraying them—so there might be a place for a high-class operation in which sex for hire had some of the chic and sizzle that it does on the big screen.

  She recruited her team from among the hundreds of girls who came to Hollywood from small American towns every year, paid for a screen test, and then became sales clerks or waitresses while waiting for the call that never came. They could be presented as almost-starlets to Rose’s customers, many of whom were associated with the film industry. Rose made telephone appointments for them with men whose backgrounds she checked before allowing them to have a “date” with a member of what the Examiner story called her “harem.”

  She didn’t worry much about the LA cops because she paid them well and was herself, according to innuendoes in the Examiner piece, the longtime girlfriend of a locally famous vice sergeant she had gotten to know when he raided her office a couple of years earlier.

  I offered Val some of these details on the way to the meeting with Rose, but she was not interested in having her slow burn extinguished.

  The office was on the second floor of a tidy three-story office building on Melrose. It had a small reception area that led to a sitting room whose tufted oxblood leather sofas and dark oak had the look of a London gentlemen’s club. As we entered, Rose was sitting at her desk waiting for us with a droll smile, her animated face framed by auburn hair done up in victory rolls. The desk was littered with found objects from the war—a tiny brass model of a P-38, a live .50 caliber shell, a folded fan with Japanese characters inked onto the wooden ribs. There was also a photo of an open-faced young man in Marine dress blues.

  Rose took one look at Val and shook her head in wonder: “They said you were unbelievable, but oh my God, honey, you and I could make millions. Arab sheiks would come here on their chartered airplanes and get down on their hands and knees just to see you up close.”

  Val answered with a look so fierce that it caused Temple to laugh.

  “Just saying, honey. Just saying. I know you’ve already got a job.”

  Val stayed silent with her eyes averted, so Temple kept talking: “They told me you need a little tutorial about the world’s oldest profession. That’s why you’re here, no? To get a little better at creating the illusion?

  “Okay, the first thing to know is that all my girls whistle while they work. You might have read about Ginger, but she was just mad at me because I found out she was a dope fiend and fired her. My girls don’t do drugs. Anyway, they threw that suit of hers right out of court, so that’s that.”

  Still trying to thaw Val, she continued her patter: “By the way, that name they gave you, Delphine LaReve, isn’t going to win any awards for originality. But no matter. Once people get a look at you they won’t care what your name is. That’s the great thing about Hollywood anyway. You can change all the things you carry with you when you get here—your history, your face, and also the name your parents saddled you with. Just toss that stodgy old name in the wastebasket and pick another one that sounds better.”

  She pulled a book out of the case above her desk. “This is Sanctuary by Billy Faulkner.” She flashed its dust jacket and extracted an autographed five-by-seven photo showing the author sitting in a poolside chaise wearing a swimsuit, a sleeveless undershirt and his Mississippi clodhoppers, pounding on a portable typewriter balanced on his knees.

  “When I first got out here in 1939, I was Rosalie Kazak from Omaha. I came because I loved movies. Billy came because he bounced a check for three dollars at an Oxford liquor store and didn’t want that to happen again. When I met him, he had just done his first script for Howard Hawks—Today We Live. Sometimes he’d come over to my place, all very platonic, with a flask of bourbon and his pipe and sit around griping about Hollywood, which he still to this day calls ‘the plastic asshole of the world,’ though he’s done well enough for himself that he now has a place over at the Garden of Allah.

  “One day not long after we first met, he looks at me and drawls, ‘Kazak … now that’s awfully Central European, don’t you think? Calls up a picture of people standing around on street corners wondering who’s going to hand out the bread and when the secret police will arrive. And while I suppose there’s some virtue in having a palindrome for a name, if I was you I’d try for something a little more euphonious and easier on the imagination.’

  “So he gave me a copy of this book and told me that the girl in it is named Temple and that this is a good name even though she’s not a good girl, and that I might be more successful if my name was Temple Rose, say, instead of Rosalie Kazak. I made the change the next day and it worked. Voila! A new me!”

  She must have seen a dubiousness on my face I didn’t realize it was conveying. “You think that someone like me couldn’t possibly know a great writer like Billy? If so, that’s because you don’t know Hollywood. This is a small town inside a big city. Everyone is connected. The big-timers to the minor-leaguers; the makers to the takers; the evil ones to the good—what few of them there are. Hollywood has its kings and queens, but it also catches all kinds of common people in its spider web.”

  She then turned to Val: “You’re not going to find any stuffy little back rooms with daybeds here, honey. Just me and my desk and a couple of filing cabinets and a telephone. Here’s how it works. A customer—let’s call him John—rings me and says, ‘You have any recommendation about what I should read tonight?’ I say, ‘Oh yes, John, several good ones. But I know from your reading history that there’s one in particular you might like. It has an interesting heroine who engages in some surprising plot twists. She’s about five foot six, a statuesque brunette with a creative personality.’”

  I couldn’t help laughing, causing Val to stare daggers at me.

  Temple continued, “John will ask where he can get a copy and I’ll say, ‘There’s a bookstore at the corner of Sunset and Vine and you can find it there right in the window. You’ll recognize it by the cover showing the heroine looking very alluring in a lavender dress and a mink stole. You should be there by 9:30 because that’s when the store closes.’”

  Val had her question ready before Temple finished: “Why do they do it, these girls?”

  “No ladies of the night in Italy?”

  “There is war there,” Val replied. “War makes people very desperate.”

  “Desperation is always the fall guy,” Temple swiveled her chair back and forth in semicircles. “People like to think that girls like mine have this job because of the father who died in an industrial accident and left the family penniless; or because of the uncle who shows up for dinner and a piece every night; or the
beloved boyfriend who turns out to be a fancy man in disguise.

  “Such things happen. Tragedy is in the air we breathe. But it’s also just a fact of life that some girls like to file index cards for a living and some girls would rather fuck.”

  Seeing Val flinch, she pulled an oversized scrapbook from a drawer and set it on the desk, riffling the pages to show closeups of her girls. The photos were hand-colored and looked like high school graduation portraits—blondes, redheads, brunettes—a wholesome fantasy world of possibilities. Associated with each was a ledger page filled with columns of numbers.

  “All the girls get a Wasserman every month, and we keep them right here on file for customer viewing. They’re all clean as chrome and doing pretty well for themselves. Here are the financial records for ‘Amber,’ for instance. You can see how much she has made over the last year and see too that she has kept a good chunk of it. She has a nice little Plymouth coupe, a one-bedroom apartment just off La Brea, and $800 in a savings account. And she’s taking some night classes. Might even have read one of Billy’s books, who knows?”

  A man wearing a wide-shouldered suit and a fedora whose snap brim shadowed his face entered the office without waiting for a response to his brief knock.

  Temple walked over to him and took off his hat, holding it with her fingertips while giving him what began as a chaste peck and ended with her darting a saurian tongue over his top lip.

  “This is Jimmy,” she presented him to us. “Does he have cop written all over him or what?”

  “Jim Adcock,” he shook my hand and gave a little bow to Val.

  Then he looked at Temple Rose: “I had a minute and I thought you might be free for a quick coffee. I can come back later.”

  “I’ll just be a little bit longer.” She took Val’s hand and led her toward the sitting room. “Why don’t you boys stay here and spit and shuffle your feet and tell lies about your sex lives while we ladies finish our conversation in private?”

  When the women had taken seats in the adjoining room, Adcock perched on the corner of the desk. “Temple’s really something, isn’t she? And I’ve got to say your girl is an absolute sweet potato.”

  “She’s not mine. I’m just the escort. Warners sent her over to get some advice on preparing for a part.”

  “Nobody better than Temple to help if it involves the man-woman thing,” the cop said as a doting smile pacified his craggy face: “We met when Vice got an order to come over here to try and bust her. But look around you: it’s clean as a stationery store in here. We came up with nothing. I was ready to leave. But one of my guys figures he’d at least get a little feel for his trouble so he tells her he’s sorry, but he’s got to pat her down. As he knelt to do her legs he started running his hand up the inside of one of her thighs. She gave him this cutting look and said, ‘I’d be careful up there if I were you. It bites.’ That cinched the deal for me.”

  We had chatted for about twenty minutes when the women emerged from the sitting room, their arms hooked, Temple continuing their conversation: “… so while we have what you might call ‘tricks of the trade,’ the basic fact to understand about this job—a fact all my girls understand very well—is that men simply can’t help themselves. Utterly incapable of restraint. I’ve always wondered if the male black widow thinks it was worth it when the female is biting his head off after they finish.”

  Temple noticed that the photo on her desk had caught Val’s eye. “My little brother Kenny.” She gnawed at her bottom lip. “He was killed at Okinawa.”

  Tears began spilling out of Val’s eyes.

  “You too?” Temple asked.

  Val nodded, unable to speak.

  “A brother?”

  Val nodded again, her chin quivering.

  Temple reached for her and held her in a tight hug before pushing her back at arm’s length to look deeply into her face. “I’d like to see you again. We wouldn’t talk about business. We could just talk about life. Life with a capital L. Would that be all right with you?”

  Still teary, Val nodded. Temple kissed the tips of her index and middle fingers and brushed them over Val’s cheek as we headed out.

  On the way home, Val was chatty and at ease. She wasn’t ready to try to get inside a high-class call girl’s skin, at least not the way the method actors who arrived in Hollywood a few years later probably would have done. But she was more confident about playing the part, and gave a sultry smile when we turned onto our driveway.

  “Mr. Talbert will be very surprised by the terrible things of sex Lily Fontaine will now do.”

  ELEVEN

  For a week or so, when Hollywood’s labor war seemed to be drowsing, Jack and I made the long drive to Warners every day to pick Val up at the end of shooting. Several times I thought I saw the same black Buick Roadmaster dodging in and out of traffic behind us.

  “We’re being tailed.” I twisted around to look out the back window when I saw it again one afternoon. “I’m sure of it. That Roadmaster is back there again.”

  “I don’t see anything.” Jack gave a blasé look in his side mirror. “It’s probably just your imagination, which might be more hyperactive than usual because of excessive seminal retention. There are a lot of Buicks on the road.”

  “Maybe it’s Fortunato.”

  “Even if it is, which I doubt, Val and I are both free and white and twenty-one.” He was exasperated now. “We’re on a pretty good run and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t fuck things up with your dire imaginings.”

  He must have felt bad because a few minutes later he told me that he’d rented a cabin in the San Bernardino Mountains for the weekend and I was invited.

  “Myself, I’d prefer a twosome, but Val wants you to come with us. She’s worried that if we leave you alone again, you might decide to drop the electric heater in the bathtub. You can reprise your immortal role of Billings the chauffeur.”

  “At your service, Sir.”

  They had already taken off for a couple of weekends in Palm Springs, just the two of them, staying at the Hotel Del Tahquitz, which was run by Fritzi Ridgeway, an old-timer who had starred in silent horse operas with William S. Hart and had a bit role in Tomorrow.

  Jack liked it there, particularly after he ran into Bob Hope one morning while buying a donut. Val liked it too, but wanted to experience something more “primitive.”

  “She’s all fired up because she thinks this cabin will be like the Alaskan shack where Charlie Chaplin eats his shoes in The Gold Rush,” Jack said. “She says that all Italians love that movie.”

  On the drive up into the mountains he congratulated himself that the place had cost him only seven dollars for the weekend, but when we got our first look at the cabin at the end of a rough dirt road, I heard him mutter, “I paid too much.”

  It had one large room with two iron-frame beds and one naked light bulb dangling from the ceiling. The kitchen consisted of a sink with a pump handle and a small stove running off a propane tank standing near a gamy outhouse in the back yard.

  Val bounced on one of the beds as Jack inspected the corners of the room for scorpions. By the time we had unpacked, I noticed that the two of them were locking eyes.

  “There are lots of great hiking trails,” Jack said to me.

  “You mean here’s-your-hat-what’s-your-hurry?”

  “Something like that.”

  I put an apple in my pocket, filled my thermos with what we had been told was pristine spring water and took off.

  Indian summer was on the warpath in early October, even at three thousand feet. Hiking up a steep path, I noticed that the forest floor was littered with deadfall and mentally audited the area for fire trails.

  After about half a mile I crossed over the ridgeline and followed the trail down the other side of the mountain. Eventually I came to a shaded spot where a large pine had been felled sometime in the past and now lay in a decomposing column with tumors of amber resin beading up on the bark. Its stump served me as a resti
ng place. A lizard skittered in the leaves near my feet. I heard a shrill piping overhead and looked up to see a hawk balancing on the thermals like a tightrope walker.

  I had brought a letter from Kick that arrived a couple of days earlier to read again. She had taken a flat in London after feeling like “a ghost” for the last few months at Chatsworth, the ancestral Cavendish estate, where the wife of her late husband’s younger brother had now succeeded her as the Duchess-in-waiting of Devonshire and would someday be in charge of the manor’s 126 rooms.

  “Today was wonderfully warm for a change,” she wrote in her backhanded scrawl. “I felt like a butterfly coming out of the chrysalis and decided to flutter off for some shopping. I bought the most cunning yellow sleeveless dress and put it on right there in the shop and then wore it all around Kensington for the next couple of hours. I felt like I was thawing after being frozen for the past year. Billy wouldn’t mind, would he, Lemmy?”

  I sensed that she had begun the next leg of her journey, although I couldn’t have imagined that over the next couple of years she would become a leading member of the London smart set, featured in a picture spread in Life magazine that showed her heavily made up in a shimmering blue cocktail dress, drinking a sidecar and smoking a Gauloise in a holder as long as the one Audrey Hepburn later waved around in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

  Nor that she would embark on an affair with Lord Peter Fitzwilliam, Catholic but divorced, who, at a net worth of some 45 million pounds, was one of the richest men in England, although for Kick his attraction was his person, not his money. Shortly after they began seeing each other, she called me over the quavering transcontinental line and talked for a long time in a jaded, slightly drunken voice I’d never heard from her before about how she had been such a fumbling sexual naïf with Billy that when he asked her for a blowjob on their wedding night she had actually held his cock in her hand and blown on it. But now, she said, she had learned what love was: “repeated doses of Peter.” The pun on Freud was a sign of how far she had come.