by Paula Fox
Kay rented a house on Beechwood Drive, not far from where I had lived briefly years earlier. I didn’t spend much time there either.
Every evening, she drank herself into insensibility after she had taken her little dog for his walk. One night she returned, her hair and clothes rumpled, a look of soused outrage on her face. She shouted to me that a man had bitten her on her left breast. “Well,” she cried, “what do you think of that!”
“I don’t know. How can I know anything at all?” I said, and burst into tears myself.
She sobered up as I broke down. Dank air was blowing through the window; rain was coming. For the first time, I glimpsed my whole life. What a sinkhole! I recalled good periods, good times, but they weighed little against the bad. What bleakness! What awful struggles just to stay afloat!
She poured me a drink and I gulped it down. Then another. At once I was fiery with liquor. I saw everything with such clarity. The scene I had made was the only way I could confide my bewilderment—and I’d got her attention for once.
But all that came to my mind was how I had not come to Uncle Elwood’s defense when my mother’s second husband had said, in a quarrelsome voice, “What kind of a name is that? Blooming Grove, for crissakes!” And when my father had asked after “Uncle Corn-beef.” They had both been deep in their cups at the time. I saw liquor’s benefit; it made everything come into the present. No time passed. Time stood still.
* * *
The next morning, I wrote a note to a Las Vegas gambling club I had heard of, asking for the job of “house shill.” Several days later, I received a reply from the club owner. It said there were no openings, but from now on I would be wiser to call the position “house dealer” rather than “shill.” That is, if I meant to write to other gambling clubs for work.
* * *
I had a brief disastrous marriage to an actor I had met at International House. He had come to California on a ship. He was part of the crew, what was called then an “able-bodied seaman”; it was his regular work. He was almost twice my age. He said we’d better get married, and I could think of no alternative, though I didn’t like him very much.
I was underage, so I was obliged to get parental consent. It took me several days to find out where my father was living and write to him. He sent me a telegram that included his permission and the words “if that’s what you want.”
We were married by a judge in Los Angeles City Hall. By then he had found a cheap place to live on Hollywood Boulevard, at the very end before it went into a tunnel and emerged on the other side into the city.
The room, which came with kitchenette and bathroom, was skimpily furnished and gloomy. I knew nothing of domesticity. When he sent me out with a handful of bills, I went into a food shop and bought sausages in pastry, what the clerk who waited on me called “toads in blankets.” He made a scene when I returned with them and asked me if I knew nothing. Of course I knew nothing.
I would have been one of those children found in a wilderness, written about in case histories, if it had not been for Uncle Elwood; I had learned civility and kindness from him. I knew how to behave in parlous circumstances, to temporize and compromise, a lesson taught me by my father. From my mother I had gained the knowledge of how to contend with the madness of people. And from black servants, I had learned what justice was.
A few days later, after I had brought home the toads in blankets, I found a job as a waitress in a Greek café. The actor picked me up after I had worked there a week and we went into Los Angeles. I thought he was going to take me out to dinner. Instead, he took me to a bus terminal, where he boarded a bus bound for New York City.
He had saved that news for the last ten minutes. He was to join the crew of a merchant ship hound for Murmansk in the Soviet Union. He would be gone for months.
The thought of returning alone to that room was intolerable, but I played dead, like a possum. I stood by the looming bus, watching shadowy figures find seats through dusty windows. I couldn’t see my new husband. It was as though he’d vanished.
* * *
I didn’t have time to think much about the actor’s abrupt departure. The restaurant where I worked was a meeting place for caddies from the golf courses around Hollywood and wanderers with movie ambitions from all the states in the union.
A redheaded man came in every day, headed for the jukebox, put in a coin, and selected the same record, a Sibelius piece, Finlandia. He sat on a counter stool, listening to the music and making a somewhat theatrical display of his response.
I constructed hundreds of shrimp cocktails during the time I worked for Gus, the owner of the restaurant. During the days, I wasn’t lonely. But at night in the furnished room, my solitariness spoke from the unmade bed, the rickety table, the small frying pan on a greasy burner, the few articles of clothing scattered about on the floor. In the closet hung the blue tweed suit I was still saving for a special occasion—of which there was none.
* * *
One evening I called Vincent Lawrence from a telephone in the corridor. I had found his number in a frayed phone book hanging by a chain. He told me to take a cab to Arizona Canyon, where he lived; he would take care of the fare. He was surprised to hear from me. He didn’t know I had returned to California.
His house was large; a narrow brook ran through the grounds. It reminded me of the waterfall I had fallen into years before. The unlocked door opened to a wide hall and a circular staircase. The Lawrence family were at the dinner table. Vin smiled up at me as I stood hesitantly in the door to the dining room. Then he covered his face with a large linen napkin. As he spoke, his breath fluttered the cloth. It was his version of a scene.
Some members of his family were there, including his sister-in-law September, as he had nicknamed her. His wife, South, also renamed by him, and two of his three children were there; they kept their eyes on their plates. It was September who had irked him. Mild sarcasm, as I learned from my occasional visits to him over the years I spent in California, was the only expression of anger he permitted himself. That, and a certain eccentricity, as with the linen napkin hiding his face.
He abruptly rose and held out his hand to me. “Come on, pal. We’re going upstairs to have a powwow.”
I followed him to the stairs, up them, down a hall, into his bedroom, where he handed me two acts of a play he had written. I noticed holes in his blue sweater. “What do you think about it?” he asked, after I had read the neatly typed script. I had not been asked my opinion on anything since Balmville days.
* * *
I met an old actor from the silent screen when he came into the Greek restaurant. It was midafternoon. We got to talking. He worked in the wardrobe department of Warner Brothers studio now, and referred to himself as a wardrobe mistress. He had always wanted to be called mistress. When he was younger, he had longed for beautiful young men, but two had blackmailed him, he told me.
He called me sister and we planned to meet for supper at some other place. After we’d eaten, I was able to persuade him to stay in the room with me. We huddled together on the bed, two orphans of the storm, he observed.
* * *
I went on working for Gus until the actor-sailor-husband returned. As it turned out, he hadn’t gone to Murmansk but to a safer, closer port. We moved into a small apartment on Ivar Street about to be vacated by another actor and his wife. They were old acquaintances of my husband’s from the days of the Federal Theater, when they had worked in the cast of Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock.
Before he left, a suitcase in either hand, the vacating actor grinned at me, remarking that the mattress of the bed had seen good service and was ready for more.
I flushed. Was the whole world grinning and fucking? Didn’t sex need the privacy the actor had invaded? Wasn’t an illusion of exclusivity the essence of sexual life? He might just as well have moved the seat of the toilet up and down, saying it was ready for more action.
* * *
I met other acquai
ntances of my husband’s—some called themselves progressives, some were Communists. Equality for black people, an astonishing thought in those days, drew me to the Communists. I went to a fund-raiser for the party. It was given in a town on a lake. I met a black textile worker from the South. There was a moment when he and I stood on a deck and talked. He was shy and sweet-natured, I thought. I looked at his face and wondered if the scars on his cheek were from a beating he had undergone. But he said, No, it had been a car accident. He had been on a picket line, though, when his factory went on strike, and he had been beaten by the local sheriff.
* * *
One night my husband got drunk. At some moment during the evening, someone slipped a photograph under the front door, taken by a street photographer, of a woman I knew, holding my husband’s arm. I showed it to him. He told me he was taking her to Palm Springs for a few days. I protested. He picked up a flimsy chair and broke it across my back. I fled into the dark. Where would I go?
Gus, the man for whom I had worked until recently, might still be in his restaurant. I found him standing behind the bar, cleaning up after the day’s customers.
He hugged me and said I could spend the night at his apartment, where he lived with his ancient Greek mother. I slept on a couch. The next day I went back to Ivar Street. My husband was gone. There was a note from him on a table. I’m taking a ship out of San Diego back to the East Coast. I’m spending a few days in Palm Springs before that. It was signed, With love.
* * *
It was true that I was domestically undereducated, but I could get jobs.
I worked for a magician and was sent on an errand to deliver a book to Orson Welles, who would be at the Brown Derby. Armed with a purpose, I inquired of a man standing at the bottom of a curving flight of stairs in the restaurant where I might find Mr. Welles. He smiled and pointed up.
At the top of the stairs, a group of men made way for me, and at their center I saw Orson Welles, young and thin, smiling at me somberly, provocatively. I gave him the book and left.
* * *
I worked in a ceramic factory, where I painted sleeping Mexicans on pitchers and vases. Sombreros covered their faces and they leaned against giant cacti.
I taught dancing at Arthur Murray’s until the place closed down for lack of customers. Everyone, I thought, knows how to dance in Hollywood.
I found a vile job in a storefront business where three fat men played craps all day long, rolling the dice on a desk pushed to a wall. Behind them, in another room, eight Mexican girls and I sat at bins sorting rivets the men collected weekly at airplane plants.
During the fifteen-minute break in the mornings, I remember how we gathered in front of the store, smoking cigarettes, and how the girl who had brought them crumpled the empty pack and said, “No more. We got to go back in.”
We were paid by the weight of the rivets sorted out from dross.
I had heard about labor unions. I looked up the CIO in a telephone book and went to a local office.
I didn’t know if there was a special way to speak with the union official in whose glum office I sat. I told him about the dim bulbs over the bins, the breaks, even those for our lunch, which lasted only as long as it took to smoke a cigarette before we were summoned back by the three men, and last, the pay. I fell silent, my head filled with half thoughts: the official’s face, his gray skin, his poker face, exploitation of workers. He rose to his feet and said, “We’ll look into it.”
I went back to the rivet store where, in order to take the morning off, I had pleaded illness. The pile in my bin was higher. The girls greeted me in Spanish, asked after my health, and said they were sorry I had been sick—they had missed me.
A few days later, when I arrived at seven in the morning, the store was closed up, and the three men and my fellow sorters were gone.
* * *
I rented a room in a house in a nondescript neighborhood, part of the Los Angeles sprawl already beginning then. An elderly woman and her embittered, divorced daughter with two young children owned it. I had a spacious, comfortable room. My wardrobe had increased to include a skirt, underwear, a pair of tennis shoes, and a cotton blouse. I still had the blue tweed suit that I had worn day after day in the LA dress shop.
Among the people I now knew was a Hungarian refugee who had set out to make her fortune designing clothes. She had rented an empty store on Hollywood Boulevard for an evening’s show of her work. She asked me and another young woman to volunteer our services by modeling her fashions. She required Betty and me to cover our nipples with bits of adhesive and then dressed us in two of her many outfits, some of which still had basting thread on their seams.
Betty, who worked in a movie studio for a company run by Orson Welles, lived in a nearby apartment, so we went there during an hour’s break in the show. She was elegant and slender, the first pretty “progressive” I had met.
As she unlocked her door, I glanced down the hall. Looking only at a key he was about to insert into the lock of another door was a familiar face and figure. Betty whispered to me, as we entered a big living room, that she was used to seeing him. He had a girlfriend in the building. It was Harpo Marx.
Daddy had told me he’d once had an office next to the Marx Brothers at some film studio. He’d heard them playing craps all day long instead of working on their scripts. The rattle of dice is like no other sound, he said, and it echoed through the cheap thin walls.
Late in the evening, after the showing of the Hungarian’s line of clothing, I left. From down the street, I heard an actor’s agent I knew slightly calling my name. I walked toward him, and the brightness from a large glass window of another storefront where an art show was being held. He invited me in.
As I entered, I spotted John Barrymore at once. He was yellowing with age like the ivory keys of a very old piano. Maybe his drinking, as well as the years, had aged him too. He was sitting on a couch around which art lovers of the screen world were flowing in a constant stream, looking mostly at each other.
Barrymore was surrounded by four or five young women. I didn’t give myself time to think—otherwise I wouldn’t have done it—but walked directly to him, saying, “I bring you greetings from Kay M—.” He looked up at me and waved the girls away.
He wanted to know how I’d met his old friend. I told him about driving to California with her, leaving out her drinking. He was kindly and quiet-voiced with me. After our brief conversation, he left with his bodyguard, a man who took care of him when he went on one of his drinking binges, I heard later. A short obese man called out, “Good night, sweet Prince.” Barrymore gave him a dark look and turned in my direction. “Good night, lass,” he said.
He reminded me of my father, not in his looks but in his voice and style and servitude to alcohol.
* * *
The post office sent me a notice that they were holding a package for me, LIVE GOODS, I think it said. I stopped by the local branch to pick it up. My father had sent me an infant alligator in a small crate. It was perhaps a foot in length.
I was so disappointed I nearly wept on the spot. But then a wave of laughter broke over me. It was the last thing I needed.
I named it Dolores and kept it in the backyard for a few days. Members of the family I was living with came out to look at it every so often. I finally gave it to a supplier of animals to the movies who lived in the neighborhood.
* * *
One idle afternoon, I telephoned Republic Studios. I didn’t call a second time, but they phoned me after a few weeks. I attributed it to movie perversity. By the time they called, I had gotten still another job reading South American novels for Warner Brothers, turning in triplicate reports written on a borrowed typewriter as to their film possibilities.
The paper quality of the books varied from country to country. I recall how thin and silky the Chilean pages were, yet not transparent. I was paid six dollars a book and given six or seven novels a week. It wasn’t bad pay for those days.
* * *
One evening I went out with a Mexican girlfriend to a restaurant and nightclub. I danced for an hour or so with John Wayne, who was very young and handsome and thin and talked to me in a companionable way on the dance floor about the movies, or, as it was called, “the industry.” He hadn’t yet become a star but he was on his way. He liked all things Mexican: food, ambiance, women.
There was a party given in the neighborhood, to raise money for a Spanish refugee organization, in a house very like the one I lived in. We all went to it, the elderly woman, her divorced daughter, even the two children. I wore the blue tweed suit.
We could barely squeeze into the narrow hall, it was so crowded with people. In the living room, a group was gathered around two card tables upon which were soft drinks and a half-empty bottle of gin. A man with a small-featured intense face was holding forth in a voice that sounded like flowing gravel. He was smiling wryly, perhaps at himself.
Allen Adler was his name, and he told me he had a cleft palate, which I had guessed.
Would I go with him to the Garden of Allah and meet his cousin? He was so genial, nearly affectionate, I agreed at once. I didn’t know what the Garden of Allah was or where it was or who his cousin was, but I wanted to hold on to the atmosphere, like a spotlight of energy, that he breathed.
The Garden of Allah turned out to be a collection of bungalows where noted people stayed, those who were only passing through Hollywood on their way to other better places, those who were waiting to take screen tests, and those on alcoholic binges. I suddenly recollected as we drove on our way that my father had said he had once stopped by there and left a five-dollar bill on a bureau in a bungalow rented by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was lying on the bed nearly passed out. He had lifted his hand weakly as Daddy left.
A nimbus of illuminated dust made a halo around a tall lamp outside of a large bungalow. Inside, in the living room, was Allen’s cousin, Stella Adler, her husband, Harold Clurman, a playwright, Clifford Odets, and a heavily made-up young blond woman named Carol, who, Allen whispered to me, must have fallen in love with her rouge pots. I sat down on a sofa next to Stella, who encouraged me by patting the seat cushion next to her with a smile that promised intimacy. She was refined and at the same time raffish, and her voice was full of depths and fluting melodies.
