Lawford looks up.
Prima leans to Celia. “You gonna be famous one day, kid. I can smell it.” He heaves himself up and makes for his wife.
Ten
LATE THAT NIGHT, WHEN MARCELLA CAME IN, I WAS SITTING at her desk, one hand on her computer mouse and one holding up my chin. She tossed herself on the couch, throwing her legs up and over the back.
“Hey,” I said distractedly.
“Are you still up? It’s what …” And she held her watch up to her face. “Ten after five? Can you read this?” She pointed her wrist across the room.
“Twenty-five after two,” I read from the screen.
“Pretending to be a pedophile so you can get a date with a cop?”
“I was getting the lyrics to ‘That Old Black Magic’ and I found this old Vegas site. It’s got every hotel ever built, what they looked like, what the restaurant specials were. It even says what acts were performing in whatever year you want to know.”
“Sounds very exciting.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Is that a rhetorical question?”
“I even found Annie West—my mother’s old roommate. On the Silver Slipper page. In 1960 and then again in ’63.” I looked back at Marcella. “I’m going to try and see her again tomorrow, so I was doing some research.”
Her hand lolled to the coffee table and picked up the writing tablet. “What’s this?”
I got up and strode over to her as nonchalantly as possible and whisked it out of her fingers. Sitting down beside her, I glanced over my handwriting and set it in my lap. “How’d your date go?”
“Who’s Tiny and Gladys?” she asked, grinning.
I shrugged. “Nobody.”
Kicking off her sandal, she needled me in the ribs with her big toe. “Come on. Who’s Tiny and Gladys?”
“Tina and Glenda. Nobody. A couple girls I thought my mother might’ve known. Reading these books and talking to Annie today … I’m trying to piece Mum’s story together kind of.”
“So, you’re just making shit up?”
“No. I read a book by this mob chick and she started out when she was fifteen or something being a beard for mobsters—you know, so it would look like they were on a date when the guys were really discussing big drug deals or whatever. I got the impression from Annie that my mother did that for this Teddy guy. She didn’t even sleep with him.” I looked down at the pad and flipped a page.
“Speaking of which, it turns out he knows the guy who directed Long Road to Heaven.”
“Who?”
“The cardiologist. —Hey, bunny-bunny …” She wiggled her toe into my ribs again. “Could you make us a vodka cranberry?” I got up and meandered to the kitchen, carrying my notes with me. “The vodka’s in the freezer. The cardiologist knows him. He also did Dire Break last year. Did you see that? Fucking brilliant.”
I dropped ice in the glasses. “There’s still sangria left.”
“No, I need vodka! Use the martini glasses. It was huge: number one for a month or something. Anyway he’s having a party. And he’s single. Just broke up with his wife last month so him and the cardiologist have been commiserating. Shaker’s over the thing.”
“I’m making them Bond style.” I poured vodka and juice in equal parts and stirred. Walking back to the couch, I set one down in front of her and sipped the other as I sat. “You don’t like the cardiologist anymore?”
“Ach.” She swung her legs around and sat up so she could hold her drink. “We haven’t even fucked and we’ve been out, like, four times including tonight. He wanted me to stay over. But I stayed over there last week and the dumb shit gave me some sweats and a T-shirt and fell asleep with me in a hammer-lock … his goddamn cat kneading my head. He says he hasn’t been able to sleep since his wife left him and so I’m supposed to lie there like Raggedy Ann? I like you so much, I don’t want to have sex too soon and ruin things, he says. Faggot.” She picked up her purse and rooted around before she dumped it upside down on the table. “Where the hell …?” She opened her wallet and a cheque along with her driver’s licence fell to the table. “I called him a few times when he was in New York last week so he gave me a cheque for my phone bill.”
I glanced at the driver’s licence: Erin Marcia Wood. “I didn’t know you took George’s name.” I didn’t bother mentioning her mutation of Marcia.
“Better than Slaker. I think the cardiologist is a damn Christian too. Can you believe this bloody fundamentalist revival? They’ve got bands in the churches now and it’s a big multimedia extravaganza. And most of them are, like, twenty or something.”
Leonard crept to mind, raising his eyebrows, saying, I told you. She doesn’t mean any of it, I thought in response. She just likes a good story.
The next day I drove back to Annie’s, armed with a box of chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies, the envelope of pictures, the photo album, the writing tablet, a couple of biographies and a notebook I’d picked up along the way. The heat rose steadily the farther I got from San Francisco and, by the time I reached Danaville, I wished I’d left the top up and put the air conditioning on instead. I’d worn the blue dress I bought the day before and my arms and thighs were turning pink.
Coming up her front steps, I changed my mind and decided to get the drop on her around back again.
She wasn’t in her garden. The sliding glass door into her kitchen sat open and I poked my head in. “Annie?” Several pages of a letter sat unfolded on the table beside a couple of thick letter-size envelopes and a shoebox. “Annie?” I stepped onto her kitchen floor then thought better of it and put both feet back outside. Crazy old bitch might come at me with a tire iron. The toilet flushed and feet creaked overhead then down the hall stairs. “Annie?”
“Yes.”
“Vivian. From yesterday.”
“Yes?”
Seeing her face fall a little at the sight of me, I turned up the wattage and held out the box. At the table, she began stuffing pages back into their envelopes. “I wanted to say thank-you,” I said, watching her chuck the envelopes into the shoebox. “For the time you spent with me yesterday. I brought some cookies from the bakery.”
She patted the lid down on the shoebox and set it on a chair on the other side of the table before looking up. The suspicious squint in her eyes softened a little as she looked at the bakery box. “Ah. Well, that was nice of you.”
“I wanted to tell you, too, I was on the Internet last night and I found this Silver Slipper site and they mentioned you. It was kind of cool seeing your name and I thought, wow, Annie must have some amazing stories and pictures and stuff from those days. Look at what I printed off the site.” I held up the pages.
She tilted her head and took them. Her eyes zoned in on where I’d highlighted her name.
“Hope you like chocolate-chip oatmeal.” Pulling the box string, I opened the lid and let the scent waft.
“Mmm,” she said, looking up, “don’t those smell good.”
“You were quite the star. You must have danced everywhere.”
“Well, sure. Those were some days.” Her eyes were back on the printout.
“I found a site about Cuba in the fifties too and Miami and the girls who went back and forth …”
“Oh yes. Before Castro screwed up the whole thing. You want some iced tea?”
“That’d be lovely. May I come in?”
“Sure, sure. Have a seat.” I set the cookies on the table as she shuffled over to the counter still reading the Web site pages. She took out a couple of daisy-covered glasses. “Oh yes, I remember this girl,” she said. “She danced in Havana too. Beautiful hotels down there. It was bigger than Vegas. And everyone would come: doctors and movie stars and politicians even. Those were the days.”
“You must have met so many famous people.”
“Ohhh, yes.” She filled the glasses under the ice maker on the fridge door. “I should get my scrapbook.” She poured from a pitcher on the counter. “What’s that?” she as
ked, looking at the notebook I’d taken from my bag.
“I wanted to make notes so I wouldn’t forget what you tell me.”
“I had a student interview me a few months ago. She was a granddaughter of one of my neighbours and she knew I danced burlesque. I’m proud of it. Why shouldn’t I be? It was for a paper she was writing and then she published the story in the newspaper too. A picture and everything.”
“Wow.”
“Well,” she said, setting a glass of tea in front of me, “this gal said burlesque is making a big comeback and the young ones are making their own shows like they used to have in the theatres. But it’ll never be like it was.”
I took a cookie, pushing the box toward her. “I read that John Kennedy used to hang out in the Havana casinos and in Vegas before he was president. Did you ever see him?”
“Oh sure. He was friends with a lot of those fellas. Frank Sinatra … and the sister, Pat Kennedy, was married to Peter Lawford. When they had their big show at the Sands, Sinatra had parties for him and they would invite a lot of the showgirls. They liked pretty girls around.”
“Did you go to any parties with Kennedy?” I asked, munching and scribbling the odd word in my book.
“Uh-huh.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “I had a little tryst with Frank Sinatra, you see, so I got invited to a real nice one, one night. All the girls liked Jack. Tempest Storm had a fling with him. I wouldn’t’ve minded myself.”
“Did my—did Celia?”
“No.” She pushed out her bottom lip and shook her head. “She didn’t care for him.”
“Why?”
The corners of Annie’s mouth dropped into a god-knows mug. “She could be kind of proper sometimes. She came from that sort of uptight family, up in ah … I wanna say Rochester, no … ah … Scarsdale. Yeah, it’s very bourgeois up there.” She ducked her head as she chuckled. “Celia was seeing this beatnik fella for a while—except you weren’t supposed to say beatnik, you had to say beat or else it showed you were square—and he called her bourgeois all the time and she’d get very touchy about it and she said to him one time, The only people who say bourgeois are bourgeois. I thought that was very funny. He was from the same type of family as hers but he liked to affect this low-down coloured talk. A lot of the fellas did, ’specially if they were into music.” Her hand drifted to the shoebox and sat on the lid a moment. I reached into my bag. Setting Judith Exner’s book on the table, I pushed it toward her. “Did you ever meet her?”
Annie looked at the cover. “I don’t …” Squinting suspiciously again, she read the quote: “I knew them when the dream of Camelot was real …”
“She went by Judy Campbell then,” I said.
“Yes.” She nodded slowly. “You’re reading this, huh?”
“Did you ever meet her?”
She nodded again and looked at the back cover. “We knew many of the same people.”
“That stuff about the FBI sounded scary. Did she ever talk about it?”
Annie put the book down and reached for another cookie. “She thought the whole world was jealous because she was so damn beautiful or something but she was really just a pain in the ass. She thought nobody knew about her and Kennedy but everybody knew. Everybody knew about him and Monroe too. And Jayne Mansfield and Angie Dickinson. She was at that party, Angie Dickinson. I think. She was in town anyway. That’s where Celia met him but she didn’t like him.”
“Kennedy? Who did she like? The beatnik guy?”
“He was later. She had a big crush on Dean Martin. But I don’t think he was there that night. She got disappointed when he wasn’t there.”
“So they were lovers, her and Dean?”
“Oh no. She wanted to be though. She even came with me when the guys had their show in Miami so she could see him. I was headlining at the Gaiety then—where Zorita used to dance.”
“Who’s Zorita?”
“Who’s Zorita?” Annie repeated, flabbergasted. “What do they teach you kids? Zorita and her snake. You know! She was in that movie, I Married a Savage. I met this young gal who told me that when she was a kid, her mother was a stripper and she used to hang out backstage. Zorita would say to her, Hey kid, you got your ice-cream money today? and she’d say no. Zorita’d go get her snake, take her by the hand into the club, walk up to a table with several couples at it and say, Give me a buck for the kid or I’ll throw the snake on the table! After three or four tables, Zorita’d wrap the snake around the kid and she’d take it back to the dressing room.”
“Was Celia stripping then, when you were in Miami?”
“No, no. She was trying to be a singer but she didn’t have much direction, just drifting around with me—I made her audition for a musical when we got back to New York so she’d stop moping. A tribute to Carmen Miranda. She got it too.”
“Wow. A Broadway show?”
“Off-Broadway. This crazy producer that had a thing for Carmen Miranda financed it. What was his name? Stark—Michael Stark. Celia wore a wig and pretended to be Portuguese because that’s what he wanted. She used a fake name too, Rosa something.”
“Rosa Ramos?” I blurted. I dove into my bag and pulled out the mini-album, flicking to the shot of the sandwich board outside the theatre. For the Love of Carmen. I slid it over. She picked it up and held it away from her eyes. “Where’d you get this?”
“It was in my mother’s things.”
She grunted. “Rosa Ramos. Just as well no one knew her real name. Tanked. Carmen’s corpse was barely cold and this goon was trying to do a musical about her.”
I imagined my mother with fruit on her head. “Why was she moping? Because of Dean?”
“Everything. No job, no man … I know lots of times when he wouldn’t come down to the parties, he’d say it was because he had a girl up in his room but really he was just watching westerns. Shirley MacLaine even says that in her book. You read her book?”
“Judy Campbell says that too. She said he wasn’t very virile.”
“Oh sure, just because he didn’t want to get in bed with her. I think he was plenty virile, he just wasn’t a skirt chaser. He always thought his wife was foolin’ around on him.”
“Campbell said he used to enlist her to spy on his wife.”
Cookie in her mouth, Annie nodded and pointed toward me until she swallowed. “Same with Celia. He wanted her to call his house in the middle of the night. He was a strange cat. He might’ve even done that with Shirley MacLaine, I can’t remember.”
“I guess the rest of the world never knew about Campbell and Kennedy until they made her testify.” Annie stared at the photo of her and Celia by the pool. “Like my mother,” I added. “Didn’t they try to make Celia testify against John Rosselli?”
Annie put her hand to her forehead as if she were experiencing heatstroke, closed the album.
My mind dashed for a change of subject. “Did she ever see her stepfather again?”
“I, I’m … She didn’t want to see him.”
“Did something weird happen between them?”
“No …”
“He must’ve tried again if he found her once.”
“She didn’t get along with either of them. That’s enough now.”
“I didn’t mean to … Can we look at your scrapbook?”
“I have things to do.” She reached down for her cane. “I’m busy. And you shouldn’t come back again because I won’t be here. I’m going out of town tomorrow to visit my daughter.”
She was kicking me out for good. My eyes started to brim with tears before I could get a hold of myself. “I didn’t mean to offend you. We can talk about whatever you want.”
Hearing the croak in my voice, she let the cane drop. She squinted at me. “What are you getting all weepy about, I’ve got things to do, that’s all.” She raised her hands and let them drop on the table, muttering, “Christ in a crapshoot … Listen, she was fine. She did some singing and then she spent time in San Francisco being a beatnik an
d then some singing striptease and she quit. And had a baby. That’s all there is. I—” Her hand moved to the shoebox again. “Okay, listen. Maybe you should …” She fidgeted with a ragged corner of the top. “I found these in the basement because you got me thinking again and I read them last night. Maybe you should take them.” She lifted the box onto the table and set her fists on top. The two of us stared at it. “She wrote me quite a lot from San Francisco so maybe you can get to know her like that. And then you’ll feel better.” Her hands dropped on either side of the box and she pulled it to herself. “I went a little cracked when my mother died too.”
I sat in the car in front of Annie’s with the shoebox in my lap. Glancing at the house I wondered if she was really going to see her daughter or if she just wanted me to disappear. The old cardboard gave under my hands and I loosened my grip a little. Lighting a cigarette, I flipped open my cell phone and realized I’d turned it off the night before. I pressed it into life again.
Two messages. From Frank. He sounded smashed out of his tree. “Who do you think you are? When I met you, you were depressed and nowhere and I gave you happiness and compliments and picked you up till you felt better and now … (indiscernible slur) got a little money in your pocket … (indiscernible slur) … it’s fuck off, Frank … don’t need Frank anymore. No business with Frank. Fuck you.” Click. I saved it for posterity. Message number two: Frank. “Vivian! Pick up the phone! Pick up … I know you’re there. You think you’re such hot shit? There’s girls lined up to get with me, lined up … (slur slur).”
A beep came through. I answered. “Viv?” Frank, live.
“Hey.”
“I think I left you a message last night. I was drunk and…”
“I’m heading home tomorrow.”
“You are?” He sounded relieved. “I’m sorry I haven’t been very understanding about what you’re going through, it’s just that—when you’re fucked up, I’m fucked up. It’ll be better when you get home.”
“Yeah.” I ran a hand over the shoebox as though it were a kitten. “Have you ever dated a stripper?”
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