Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  “No.” She looked at her wrist, frowning. She shook her head. “No one is scurrying any more, Lieutenant. They’re all on board by now. They’re all waiting. It’s just you and me now.”

  The hydroterra pumps kicked on to reverse the irrigation flow. The ground beneath them shook and stuttered until the pressure equalized and the artificial hydraulics of the planet sent water and nutrients to other places. They looked at each other until the shaking stopped. Elena’s eyes were the first to break away. He lunged for her with his words.

  “We could have been happy here.”

  “No. It’s all dying. Nothing is sustainable. Not with sufficient yield. Not with sufficient nutrition. We failed out here, Lieutenant. UNIX will send another team out in fifteen years. Twenty years. Just for one last look. Just to say our race did not give up. But we both know it’s dead out here. Rock under glass.”

  “I’m not talking about that. We could have been happy. You and me. It’s not enough to transplant the species. But it would support us for forty lifetimes. We could have been happy.”

  “No.”

  “I want to be able to talk to you. On the way back. I want to convince you that I’m the same man as before. The man you loved. The man you promised you would never leave. Will you at least allow that? It’s a long trip home. Will you allow me to try?”

  “No.”

  “No? I can’t see you? I can’t talk to you?”

  “No.”

  “For God’s sake why, Elena? Why? Will it be easier for you that way? When we dock and they come to take me? When they ask you to testify? When they ask you to watch them pump the poison into my veins? Will not talking, not listening, make all of that easier somehow? Will isolating me help to unburden your conscience?”

  For an instant, for a single flicker of time, she seemed to weaken. Her eyes, those bottomless blue wells, seemed to moisten in the scouring light. He had found, at last, a chink in her armor. She was still there, inside that suffocating uniform. He surged into the breach.

  “You can’t do that. Not to me. You love me. I know you do. And you know better. You know I will not survive. If you shut me out, the only thing you will have left to deliver to justice will be my corpse. What will that accomplish? Elle? What would that accomplish? You may as well just kill me now. You may as well just leave me here.”

  She rose silently, looking down at him as if from a very great height, well beyond his reach. And when she spoke, it was as if the words fell like heavy rain.

  “Yes,” she said. “I may as well.”

  CHAPTER 46 – Tilly

  The first time I met Milton Chenowith, he took me out for drinks at the Viper Room, a club on the Sunset Strip formerly owned by Johnny Depp. We waded in through the froth and sat and ordered. I went prepared to talk about the business of agency contracts. Milton, of course, would get to that in his own time. Instead, he nodded discreetly at the stars in their private constellations and shook hands with the who’s who. He pointed to where he had been sitting on Halloween night 1993 while Depp was up on stage performing and River Phoenix was outside on the sidewalk succumbing to a lethal dose of heroin and cocaine. He threw back martinis and told me stories about Hollywood and its people. People like John Wayne and Lauren Bacall and Johnny Carson and Humphrey Bogart. He told me the story of young Peg Entwistle like he had lived to watch it all unfold personally. I was dazzled.

  He liked to call Hollywood a town. Mostly, this was just Milton polishing his anachronistically avuncular charm. But he was not entirely wrong. A place is a town for reasons wholly independent of its lack of area sprawl, its population density, its relative affluence, its commercial sophistication, or the fragmentation of governmental services and structures. Those are the measurements of cities, where social cohesion is a function of ever more complex economic and legislated relationships.

  A town, by contrast, is bound together by a common and enduring understanding of itself, even if that understanding is largely mythic. A town has a self-concept – an identity – usually simple enough to fit within a single thought and yet complicated enough to incorporate elements of both self-glorification and self-loathing.

  As Milton well knew, the identity of a town is affirmed and enforced through the stories it tells to itself, about itself, sustaining and nourishing on its own lore; a rich, perpetually-steeping stew of hard fact, magical coincidence, apocryphal serendipity, aggrandizement, romanticized tragedy, and wishful redemption. On the spectrum of human associations, a town more closely resembles the family than it does the city. Los Angeles is a city. Miami is a city. New Orleans is a town. The Columbus of my youth was a town. America is a town.

  And, as Milton liked to remind me, Hollywood is a town.

  Peg Entwistle, born Millicent Lilian Entwistle, was a blonde, bright-eyed Welsh stage actress who emigrated to America with her widower father when she was eight and grew up to build a name for herself on Broadway. When she was sixteen, Peg enrolled in Henry Jewett’s Reparatory School in Boston, where she performed in productions of all of Ibsen’s plays under the direction of none other than the great Blanche Yurka. In one of those plays, The Wild Duck, Peg played the character of Hedvig, a young girl whose father learns of her mother’s infidelity with his own benefactor. When the cuckolded father grows sickened by the sight of Hedvig, suspecting that she is not actually his child, the emotionally abandoned Hedvig kills herself with a bullet to the heart.

  By all accounts, Peg’s performance as poor Hedvig was magnificent. A girl in the audience roughly the same age as Peg turned and declared to her mother: “I want to be exactly like Peg Entwistle!” Two years later, Peg was turning out solid work on Broadway and, true to her word, the girl in the audience was herself hired by Blanche Yurka to play the role of Hedvig in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. Her name was Bette Davis.

  In 1932, the New York Theater Guild brought Peg Entwistle out to Hollywood to play the comely but sincere Geneva Hope in a Romney Brent play called The Mad Hopes with Billie Burke and Humphrey Bogart. While working on the production, Peg lived with her aunt and uncle in a small house only a few blocks from the southernmost reaches of Griffith Park; as the crow flies, only about four miles from where I lived roughly three-quarters of a century later.

  Every morning, when Peg stepped out of her uncle’s home and looked up Beachwood Drive to the west, she could see the famous Hollywoodland sign glinting in the sun atop Mount Lee like a copse of strange metallic trees. It was as though the sign was a beacon that young Peg had felt in her marrow her entire life. It may as well have been her name up on that hill.

  The Mad Hopes was a smashing success and within days of the production ending, RKO Pictures was on the phone recruiting Peg to audition for what would be her only film role: a David O. Selznik psychological thriller called Thirteen Women starring Irene Dunn and Myrna Loy. Had Angus Mann been there with me that evening in The Viper Room listening to Milton tell Peg’s story, he would certainly have noted that the movie Thirteen Women was based on a book – a novel by Mr. Tiffany Thayer featuring a debaucherous plot of sex and death calculated to raise eyebrows at the unvarnished candor of his descriptions. Angus would not likely have mentioned that Selznik’s movie, which was terrible, was still better than Thayer’s novel, which reeked of Thayer’s primary interest in causing a stir. Of Thayer, Dorothy Parker once drolly noted in a review in The New Yorker: “he is beyond question a writer of power; and his power lies in his ability to make sex so thoroughly, graphically, and aggressively unattractive that one is fairly shaken to ponder how little one has been missing.”

  I confess to having spent more than a few moments of my early screen career, in the quiet tidy of my Glendale home, thinking about Peg Entwistle, who, while she was living just a few miles to the west, had helped to bring Thayer’s novel to the screen. Entwistle had played the character of Hazel Cousins, one of thirteen sorority sisters hoodwinked into killing themselves or each other by Myrna Loy’s character, whom the sisters had cruelly exclud
ed in school for being a mixed-race Javanese-Eurasian. In Thayer’s novel, Hazel was actually a lovelorn lesbian who, abandoned by her lover and suffering from tuberculosis, starved herself to death in an asylum. The Hazel Cousins adapted for the screen by Selznik and brought back to life by Peg Entwistle, is married. She ends up stabbing her husband to death and is sent off to die in prison.

  What was it, I have asked, that attracted young Peg Entwistle to the role in the first place? Was there nothing better? Nothing bigger? Was Hazel Cousins the Sienna Pryce of her day?

  Or was there something about Hazel – if not Hazel of the movie, then the Hazel of the novel – that called to Peg? Something she could not escape? When Peg went to bed at night, did she lie awake and see Hazel’s face on the ceiling? Was Hazel’s voice that velvet growl from out in the tall grasses that Orin Twill, before I was ever in the business, had warned me about? A voice calling your name every night when it’s dark and quiet and all of your other names are asleep? Hollywood knows the name you call yourself, Orin had said. It knows what you need. Before Hazel, had it been Hedvig’s voice calling to Peg? Was it the same voice? Was it Peg’s own voice that she heard, welling up from someplace deep inside?

  There was no one to answer those questions for me. Not Milton Chenowith, who was not interested in the story to that psychological depth. And certainly not Peg Entwistle, who, in September 1932, after having been fired by RKO Pictures, and shortly before Thirteen Women was released, wrote her aunt and uncle a note, left the house on Beachwood Drive, turned west, and finished her life’s journey up to the metallic forest glinting in the moonlight atop Mount Lee. Hollywoodland.

  As the moon climbed its way above Hollywood, Peg climbed up a workman’s ladder that had been left propped up against the Hollywoodland sign. What she thought to herself as she took in that view is anyone’s guess. I will not put thoughts in her head. But whatever her thoughts, they would be her last. Peg leapt – from the letter H – a hundred feet down into a ravine. The note she left for her aunt and uncle read: “I am afraid, I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain. P.E.”

  The day after Peg’s death, a letter arrived from the Beverly Hills Playhouse inviting her to audition for the lead role in a new play. The lead character in question commits suicide in the end. There is no doubting that the universe, in its relentless drumbeat messaging to each of us, has its own momentum. It cannot stop on a dime. In Peg’s case, that last drumbeat became an echo.

  I remember that Milton had found something vaguely sinister in the prevalence of the letter H in the Entwistle saga, ticking them off on his fingers: Henry Jewett, Henrik Ibsen, Hedvig Ekdal, Hazel Cousins, Harold Entwistle, Hollywoodland.

  He was also intrigued by the subterranean connections that are part of the root structure beneath towns of all sizes. For instance, Peg Entwistle was briefly married to an actor, Robert Keith. Keith was a steady character actor in dozens of films, including Fourteen Hours in which he played the father of a suicidal son. Unbeknownst to poor Peg Entwistle, Robert Keith had a secret son from a previous marriage and owed a small fortune in back child-support. Peg divorced him within two years and then killed herself three years later. Robert Keith’s son, Brian, grew up to be an actor, famous for his portrayal of Uncle Bill in the television series Family Affair. Brian Keith had a daughter, Daisy. Had the Entwistle-Keith union lasted, and had Robert Keith been forthcoming about Brian’s existence, Daisy might have been Peg Entwistle’s step-granddaughter. Fate, alas, had other plans. Daisy killed herself in 1997. Her father, Brian – America’s Uncle Bill – killed himself two months later.

  Much of Peg Entwistle’s performance in Thirteen Women was cut after the first test screenings met with poor reviews. RKO Pictures subsequently declined to renew her contract. Then she climbed the letter H. She was cremated and Hollywood rolled on.

  Her ashes were spread in Glendale. Not Glendale, California where I lived. Glendale, Ohio; a short two-hour drive from where I was raised. Her ashes were spread on the grave of her father, who must have wondered from the very soil I have walked upon as a child, what Hollywood would make of his daughter.

  The name on the family gravesite where Peg and her father were laid to rest, belonged to the father of Peg’s stepmother, Lauretta Ross. His name was H. Milton Ross.

  H. Milton Ross was also the brother of Yvette Ross, who married to a Californian banker named Henry Chenowith. Yvette and Henry Chenowith had a son, Henry Milton Chenowith, who grew up to be a well-respected talent agent representing some of the biggest stars in the golden age of cinema, including John Wayne and Grace Kelly.

  Milton had finished his drink and winked, waving his glass in the air.

  “And in his later years he represented none other than Tilly Johns, one of the freshest acting talents Hollywood had seen in a very long time. So, my dear,” the waitress had blown by, snatching the glass from his fingers without slowing, “let’s talk about your future in this town.”

  * * *

  For my use while my broken Miata was in the shop, the insurance company delivered a replacement car to my front door: a basic model, dingy white Honda Civic. I might have complained. I might have at least asked for a convertible model. It seemed so ordinary and unbecoming a Cecil Abrams, Darnell Lewis almost-co-lead actress. Sienna Pryce would not be caught dead in a white Honda Civic.

  And yet, when the agent at my door handed me the keys, I could not bring myself to complain. It – the car, not the agent – looked so unassuming and loyal. It was the dowdy best friend in every romantic comedy ever written that loved me for who I was and always knew the right thing to say when the chips were down. It was the ill-mannered, heart-of-gold detective or the shell-shocked, reformed alcoholic bodyguard from the wrong side of the tracks sent to protect me from a lifestyle more dangerous than I knew. Hollywood would not be looking for me in a Honda Civic.

  When I did not return his phone calls, Simon Hunter came by the house the day following the Fox 11 news coverage of my sex video debut. Apparently, my pre-broadcast wisecracks over coffee about killing myself had left an impression. That he was inclined to think I was capable of such a thing was insulting and only served to emphasize that the damage done to my reputation might be something I should consider was worth a bullet to the head. Or a leap from a ladder.

  He apologized sheepishly. Then the Civic on the curb sunk in. Simon pulled his sunglasses down with one finger and looked from the car to me and back again.

  “That?” he said. “That is what they gave you? They expect you to actually …”

  I shrugged.

  “Tills… it’s ghastly. This won’t do.”

  “It runs. It gets me from here to there. It’ll do, Simon.”

  “I’m more worried now than ever,” he said. “I’d kill myself with a dull spoon if I had to climb in and out of that shabby rattrap every day. A sex video is nothing compared to the car, Tills. Really. Let me drive you. I’ll be your chauffeur until your saucy little Miata is out of the shop. Poor thing, bitten by a minivan.”

  “No. Sweet, but no.”

  “Then let me raise some Cain at the insurance company. At least let’s…”

  I cut him off and went back inside, letting him follow and fret over other ways that he might be of assistance in my hour of need, not seeming to mind that he was no longer my agent. Simon’s romantic designs were barely concealed. He was too timid to make them explicit and I was not interested in pointing them out, so his intentions lurked clumsily behind the veil of every sentence, large feet protruding out from beneath the curtains. I think he imagined that the Fox 11 broadcast would lead me headlong into isolation, and that he might just be the only person in my life on whom I could lean.

  If so, then it was a silly thought. My phone rang constantly. Even people with whom I had little or no relationship reached out to be remembered, insisting that they believed nothing of the story, urging me to adopt their various life-wis
e perspectives, demanding that I not let any of it get me down, offering me their semi-precious time to talk about it. Invitations to lunch cropped up like weeds at my feet. If anything, I longed for the very social isolation that Simon assumed would enhance his prominence.

  That afternoon I lunched alone, invisibly, in the front seat of my nondescript loaner sitting in the parking lot of a drive-through burger joint. The burger, a double with onion rings and a soda, was wonderfully, irresponsibly disgusting. It transported me back to high school, skipping class to meet Kevin Klarr at the auto parts store where he worked and then driving out to the empty corner of some parking lot with a bag full of greasy fast food. We would eat and listen to The Clash or The Ramones and make out and talk about just how outraged my father would be if he knew what I was doing. Actually, we probably did not talk so much about my father. The vagaries of memory are running loose in this old brain. Whether or not Kevin and I actually spent time imagining my father’s reaction, I certainly did so on my own. It gave me a strange sense of freedom to be where I was not supposed to be, mashing lips with a college drop out.

  It was an entirely counterfeit freedom, of course. I was no more free sitting in Kevin Klarr’s tricked-out Pontiac, making out in a waft of greasy meat, than I had been sitting at a desk in Wilson J. Wilson High School listening to a teacher rattle on about Christopher Columbus. Both places, both activities, were ultimately determined by my father. But the thing I felt seemed like freedom. That was how I interpreted it. That is what I called it. That was how I defined myself.

  When I had finished, I sat and watched the others, at least a dozen of them, sitting alone in their cars eating and listening to their radios. I wondered about their lives. I wondered about what bothered them. I wanted their problems.

  I searched the Internet on my phone, looking for articles that shared the words Tilly, Zack and sex. I did not have to search very hard. There were hundreds, dozens of which seemed to relate to recent events.