Things in Glocca Morra

by Peter Collier

  Jack and I worked through the meal as if it were a military campaign, while Swanson posed for the nearby tables and the Old Man bore down on Val. By the time Ciro’s special baked Alaska had been eaten, the coffee finished and the complimentary cognac refused, he had his face so close to hers that they could have rubbed noses. He had lowered his voice so I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I saw that Val was listening in the way that children do—totally intent, frowning as she tried to decipher the import of his words.

  “The cobra hypnotizes the rabbit,” Jack whispered to me, but he couldn’t bring himself to object.

  Swanson saw what was happening and rose majestically: “Joseph, we really must be going. I might be reading for a part early in the morning and I want to look refreshed.”

  The Old Man got up reluctantly, said a perfunctory goodnight to the three of us and put a hand on Swanson’s shoulder, guiding her out of the restaurant in a way that made it seem he was pushing.

  Val watched them go with a stricken look on her face.

  Jack asked her what his father had talked about.

  “He said he didn’t think Warners was the place for me,” she answered evasively. “He wants to take me to other studios.”

  “What did you say?”

  “That I have a contract.”

  “And then?” Jack pressed her.

  “He said that contracts can be broken.”

  “And then?”

  “I said we would speak more about it.”

  Now he was concerned. “Why would you do that?”

  She looked away. “He is your father.”

  FIFTEEN

  In early October, Selkirk’s Association of Studio Employees, trying to recapture the momentum it had achieved during the previous month’s “War at Warners,” grabbed headlines again by staging another big demonstration at MGM. The highlight of the festivities came when, in the middle of the violence between cops and the ASE, a handful of the strikers wearing their military uniforms and battle ribbons formed a column and marched through the fray carrying a giant American flag. Whenever the flag approached them, the cops would snap to attention and salute, then resume their hand-to-hand combat with the strikers as soon as the honor guard had moved on past.

  But this battle had the feel of a last hurrah even as it was happening. A few days later, Selkirk was hit with a restraining order to stay away from all the studios, and of course he ignored it. The same afternoon, he showed up at Paramount’s gates with Helen Keller, Judy Holiday and a handful of other stars, including Burl Ives, who sang several exuberant choruses of “Blue Tail Fly,” which the crowd unaccountably interpreted as a protest song.

  Selkirk was arrested and sentenced to a couple of nights in jail. The LA Times buried the story on page five and ran a photo of his arraignment that made him look old and adrift. Clearly the air was going out of his movement.

  “A steep fall in a short time,” I said to Jack as we discussed the article over breakfast.

  He shrugged. “Selkirk’s facing what the Soviets call ‘the correlation of forces.’ The newspapers are bored and ready to move on to the next story. And the studios are deciding that Geist is the lesser of two evils.” He paused, then added mordantly: “Dad strikes again.”

  “You really think he’s playing that big a role? He’s only been here a little more than a week.”

  “Are you kidding? His fingerprints are all over this thing.”

  He was referring to the producers’ reaction to a three-judge federal panel that had just delivered a ruling that the issues between the two unions and the studios should be fully negotiated during a thirty-day cooling-off period, and that the ASE strikers in the meantime should be able to return to work immediately. The studios didn’t argue against it, but said it would be unfair to fire the newly hired replacements, so the reinstated ASE workers, many of them construction supervisors who hadn’t swung a hammer in years if ever, would be reassigned as journeymen carpenters on hot sets. When a large majority of them refused this humiliating demotion, the studios handed them severance checks prepared in advance and fired them for good, all consistent with the court order.

  I thought I might find an indirect way to ask the Old Man if he had really helped design this strategy. But when he showed up in our driveway a couple of days later, Solomon Geist was sitting next to him in the back seat of a gaudy aqua-colored Cadillac, with the scarred Draco driving and his twin brother riding shotgun. I went out to greet Big Joe, but he waved me off, peevishly mouthing through the window, “Not now.”

  I retreated into the house and watched out the kitchen window, expecting that he’d eventually come in and Geist would drive off. That may have been the initial plan, but after twenty minutes of animated conversation between the two, accompanied by chopping hand gestures that spoke a language of their own, the Cadillac turned around and headed back out to the highway.

  A harsh wind rushing in from the Pacific the next day bruised the sky. Jack was “on assignment,” a phrase of trade he had taken to using, and I was vacuuming the living room and hoping for an afternoon burn-off when I heard the LA Examiner thunk against the front door. The headline story detailed why Ike had just fired Patton from his post as military governor of Bavaria, laying out in detail the general’s casual attitude toward denazification and his desire to make confrontation with the Soviets a priority.

  Just below the fold, in the local news slot, was a story about four longshoremen who had been gunned down “gangland style” in MacArthur Park the previous evening. Looking at the headshots of the murdered men, I recognized two of them as the bodyguards that Jack and I had met several weeks earlier when we first visited Selkirk’s office.

  The Old Man was in the middle of our lives now. The three of us never knew when he would show up, but it was always without asking and usually when we thought he was occupied elsewhere. We made detailed escape plans, but he used his secret resources to figure out where we were and then appeared with a little smile of triumph on his face in the middle of our getaway. On the rare occasions when we managed to evade him, it felt as though we’d just tunneled out of prison.

  “Same old thing,” Jack said when I asked him about it. “He’s calling the music and we’re doing the dance. It’s been like that my whole life. Whenever I start to feel that I’m really on my own, he reels me in and I realize that the sense of freedom I’ve had was an illusion because he’s had me on the line all along.”

  Once, we didn’t see him for three days. Then he and Molly suddenly walked into the beach house just when we were sitting down to the dinner Val had cooked, and he began brusquely interrogating us about what we’d done during his absence. After we finished eating, I took Molly aside to ask where they’d been.

  “To the little desert town in Nevada called Las Vegas. It’s a scorched scab of a place, but the Boss thinks it will be something big because wagering is permitted there and the working poor of Southern California might someday come in great numbers, especially if Mr. Ford ever figures out a way to cool the inside of his cars. We were at a building site with little pink flamingoes stuck in the ground to mark the layout of what they say will be a luxe hotel offering the ability to sit in a chair and watch prancing showgirls while playing the ponies wherever they happen to be running anywhere in the country, and to do other things legally that a person shouldn’t do at all. Workers were crawling over this site, and a couple of pistoleros were keeping watch from the battlements. More than this, I cannot tell you.”

  On some of his unannounced visits, the Old Man left Molly behind and brought some anonymous chorine with him, different women with the same ironed platinum hair and blank look of hearing loss. He introduced and then ignored them, focusing instead on Val—sizing her up, monopolizing her conversation, and emotionally manhandling her with his attention.

  When they were standing together, the Old Man would step in a little closer to her, and she would back away. He would then advance into the space she had vacated,
prompting her to retreat again. Before long, they would have moved in lockstep from one side of the living room to the other.

  Sometimes when the Old Man dogged her, she would catch Jack’s eye and give him an imploring look. After a particularly grating encounter he would say, “I’ve got to do something.” But his father was too much for him and he couldn’t bring himself to do anything.

  Val seemed to be sinking back into that self we had first met: often moody and withdrawn, gnawing at her fingernails, moving from lassitude to hyperkinesis with no transition, shadowed by mortality. And I noticed that she had begun worrying at the ghost tattoo on her arm again.

  SIXTEEN

  In mid-October, Talbert set aside several days to film backstory scenes with John Payne and Veronica Lake in La Jolla. Jack was busy trying to document the story of the annual payoffs the studios made to Geist, so Val spent most of her days at the beach house, usually silent and remote, until she suddenly had to leave for some engagement she didn’t talk about when she returned a few hours later on.

  Up to this time, the only women I’d ever really seen close up were the Kennedy girls when Jack and I were kids. But that was sisterly asexuality, even with Kick, although I had desperately wished it could be something more. Watching Val now, as she padded around the house like a jungle cat, had the feel of a first experience.

  Her mundane acts were erotic epiphanies. Hiking the hem of her dress above the triangle of a bare upraised knee to paint her toenails; making a moue in the bathroom mirror when slowly applying lipstick and then finishing the job with a half-sucked fingertip of Vaseline for high gloss; brushing her lavish hair until it crackled with electricity, then gathering it into a snood that looked like an oriole’s nest; working her arms with the slow purpose of a contortionist to reach back and unlatch her bra.

  Once I saw a slice of her nakedness visible in the half-closed door of the bathroom as she stripped to her panties, and then, after shimmying her hips to drop them to her ankles, kicked them up with a toe to catch them in midair.

  She was silent for long periods. When she did talk, it often seemed to be meditative, an attempt to weld together the disparate strands of her life. Once while walking past the painting of her mother that now hung on the living room wall amidst all the nautical objects, she stopped and said abruptly, as if we were in the middle of a conversation, “She didn’t take lover until more than ten years after it was clear that my father would never return. He was a printer named Tomasso Croce. He was a gentle man who loved Charlie Chaplin and would sometimes go hunting with his lupara and bring home rabbits for our Sunday dinner. He cared deeply for my mother. Tomasso’s heart gave up one day while he was waiting for the trolley in Piazza Venezia. My mother never had another man beside her in bed again. It was like she was a virgin once more when the Nazis took her to her death.”

  She slumped down on the sofa, leaned her head back on the neck rest and continued speaking to the ceiling.

  “She made Franco and me costumes so we could do plays in our bedroom when we were little. We both wanted to be other people who might be interesting enough that our father would someday want to be with us. But at university, I act for a different reason as well—to try on other people the way women used to try on the dresses in my mother’s shop. I find that I love especially the heroines in Greek plays we perform because these women know so deeply who they are and that they must follow their heart no matter what the outcome.”

  “I think you were playing one of these women in the film your father made of you.”

  “I forgot that you saw that.”

  “Harry Warner showed it to us because Jack couldn’t stop talking about you after he saw you that first time at the studio’s birthday party.”

  “It was not good, that film. I did not like the photographer my father paid to make it. He was a rude man who was angry that I was speaking English. He wanted me to wear less clothes even than I did.”

  “Jack was transfixed from the moment you came on the screen. We didn’t know what character you were playing, but we couldn’t take our eyes off you, even though the sound was bad and we couldn’t hear what you were saying.”

  “I was saying the last speech of Cassandra in Agamemnon. This is the role I played in the one performance our acting group did two days before the Nazis began the gathering of Jews in Rome. Many students come to see us.”

  “Cassandra is the one who saw the future but wasn’t believed.”

  “Yes, a woman others think is a raving crazy person when she tells the truth. This is Apollo’s curse on her for withholding from him the opportunity of her body. But it is just seeing and not being believed that is her tragedy. It is also having to live day after day with what she knows must necessarily happen to her and never being able to put that knowledge aside even for an instant.

  “In the play, Cassandra has been brought home by Agamemnon as his concubine after watching the Greeks kill her family every one of them at Troy. Life is very bad for her in the kingdom of Mycenae. Because of her special sight, she knows she is to be killed by Clytemnestra along with Agamemnon himself. Imagine knowing you will meet your end alongside a man so evil that he sacrificed his own daughter just to ensure fair winds to the battlefield. But in her last speech Cassandra accepts her unfair fate as the will of the gods. That’s the speech I was giving in the film you saw.”

  Here Val stood up and seemed to grow taller and more regal, as poised as a ballerina. Her face became transcendent as she held out her hands in supplication.

  “Never a bride, never a mother,” she recited, “unfriended, condemned alive to solitary death. What law of heaven have I transgressed? What god can save me now? What help or hope have I, in whom devotion is deemed sacrilege? If this is God’s will, I shall learn my lesson in death; but if my enemies are wrong, I wish them no worse punishment than mine.”

  She remained standing there for a long time, caught up in the moment she had created.

  Then she turned and gave me a penetrating look. “I am sad for you, Billings,” she came closer, “that you will not have a woman’s love.”

  I started to reply, but she put a finger on my lips and then brought my face close for a kiss that lasted just long enough for the tip of her tongue to dart into my mouth like an inquisitive minnow.

  Over in a second and inviting nothing further, it was the kiss of a lifetime.

  SEVENTEEN

  Late the next afternoon, Val telephoned and told Jack that she had an early morning call and would be staying at her Toluca Lake apartment that night. He said he would drive over and stay with her, but she told him it would be hard enough to get up before dawn without having him beside her.

  It was the first time in over a month and a half that they had been apart, and it obviously set him back. He hauled out his portable Underwood and tried to write a story he owed the Examiner. After staring into deep space for a half hour, he put it away and picked up his worn copy of Pilgrim’s Way. But he couldn’t concentrate on that either, and spent the rest of the evening sulking like a rainy-day child.

  The next morning he arranged to pick Val up later that afternoon, which made him optimistic again. He said he’d been doing overtime all week and had a right to skip work, so after breakfast the two of us sat on the deck in our bathrobes playing gin rummy and listening to Artie Shaw records. Jack floated along on a stream of consciousness that meandered from Shaw’s superiority to Shaw, to how Shaw could possibly have managed to get both Lana Turner and Ava Gardner to marry him, to the fact that Val vaguely resembled Gardner but was five times better looking for reasons he was explaining in detail when there was a loud knock at the door.

  “You get it,” he told me. “Probably someone selling encyclopedias. It will give you an opportunity to tell him you don’t need one because you went to Princeton.”

  I opened the door and saw a somber young man dressed in a suit and tie, with a nametag bearing the Paramount Studios logo.

  “Are you John Kennedy?�
�

  “In my dreams.” I pointed at Jack, who by then had come inside to see what was up.

  The kid spoke rapidly, shifting his feet nervously and struggling to look Jack in the eye: “Your father sent me to tell you that when he was leaving Paramount this morning after a meeting someone fired on his car as it was going through Bronson Gate. He’s totally okay and unhurt, he wanted me to tell you, but he’s being checked out at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital as a precaution. The bullet hit the windshield but didn’t touch your father or his driver, who made it out onto Melrose and kept going until he sideswiped another car and hit a fire hydrant. That’s all I know.

  “Your father asked me to come out here and tell you about it in person before you hear it on the radio. He said to tell you to stay put until he gets here. I’m supposed to say these words are underlined, quote, ‘There’s nothing to worry about and do not leave the house,’ end quote. He was emphatic about it. So that’s the message. G’bye.”

  The kid headed back to the company car idling in the driveway, and Jack bolted for his room. He soon came out again still buttoning his clothes and sliding on the floor trying to cram his heels into his loafers.

  “Where are you going?” I asked as he looked for the Zephyr’s keys, sending a pile of papers flying around.

  “To be with Dad. Where do you think?”

  “Didn’t you hear what the kid said? The Old Man wants you to wait here until the smoke clears.”

  “You think I’m going to sit around when my father’s out there getting his ass shot off?” he snapped at me, slamming the door behind him.

  About half an hour later a cab drove tenuously down our driveway and I watched the Old Man step out, look carefully in all directions, ask the cabbie to wait, and hurry into the house with his shoulders slightly hunched as if fearing sniper fire. A white gauze patch with an impressionistic brushstroke of blood was taped to his forehead.