Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool

by Peter Turner

  ‘Papers, newspapers there.’ He pointed over to a chair.

  Joe sat down to read the Sunday People and I looked through a magazine. Jessie took more ice-cubes up to Gloria, and came down with dirty linen to be washed. My mother wondered if Tim and Paulette would like to eat, so Jessie went back up to the room to ask. She returned to say they didn’t want anything at all. The food was served; we all sat in silence while we ate.

  Throughout the meal I could hear the telephone ‘ding’, the noise it makes every time the receiver is picked up or put back down. Tim would be making calls, making the arrangements for Gloria to leave.

  Paulette came down to the kitchen twice while we were eating; the first time to return the ice bowl, the second to boil up some water.

  Towards the end of the meal, Tim put his head round the kitchen door to ask if he could have a private word with Joe, who then left the table to go away and talk. Jessie helped to clear away the plates and then went back up to Gloria’s room. My mother washed the dishes. My father went to the stores. There seemed nothing for me to do.

  ‘I’m going to drive Tim over to see the doctor.’ Joe returned to the kitchen wearing his coat.

  ‘Why, what’s wrong?’ my mother shouted from the sink.

  ‘Nothing. We’re going over to collect a note from him to say that Gloria has to be allowed to travel on the aeroplane to get back to New York for urgent medical treatment. Tim doesn’t want a problem at the airport.’

  ‘What else has Tim arranged?’ I asked.

  Joe sat down and told us that the flight had been booked; they would be travelling to London on the 6.20 from Liverpool airport the following morning. Then they would be taking a connecting flight from Heathrow to New York where an ambulance would be waiting to meet them.

  ‘Well,’ my mother wiped her hands on the tea towel. ‘I’m amazed that it’s all happening so quickly. I’m surprised the doctor’s allowing her to go. They’re taking a terrible risk.’

  It was time, I thought, for me to take Candy for a walk.

  The park was almost empty. A few kids were playing on the trunks of the fallen trees and a teenage courting couple were sitting on a bench outside the café, which was closed. Candy, obviously happy to be out of the house, ran on ahead, past the bandstand, along towards the slope that leads down to the lake. Then she stopped and waited for me to catch up.

  Halfway along the path around the side of the lake, two figures in anoraks were huddled together, sitting on boxes and holding on to fishing lines. What a ridiculous thing to be doing, I thought, on a cold, wet and unpleasant Sunday afternoon. They didn’t turn round as I walked towards them. They didn’t even notice Candy. They had vacant, expressionless looks on their faces. Maybe they were like me, I thought, just wanting to keep out of their house and content to be killing time. I walked on to Old Nick’s Cave.

  When Candy was exhausted, I sat down on a bench and looked out across the lake. I knew it was raining because I was wet, but I couldn’t see the rain, only feel it on my face; it wasn’t making ripples or patterns on the surface of the water. I sat there for a long while. Only when Candy became restless did I notice that the fishermen were gone. It was time to go home. The nights were drawing in and soon it would be dark.

  ‘You’ve been a long time.’ My mother was down in the kitchen. ‘I’ve made pies.’

  ‘I can’t see Joe’s car. Is he still out with Tim?’

  ‘No, they’ve been back for hours. Everything’s been fixed up. Now Joe’s gone to one of his jobs, but he’s coming back later. Him and Jessie are staying the night, seeing how it’s the last before Gloria goes.’

  ‘Where’s Jessie?’

  ‘She’s having a talk with Paulette.’

  I sat on a chair in the corner, waiting, thinking, waiting for the end of the day.

  ‘She’s not very good at all,’ Jessie announced at about nine-thirty. ‘I just hope she doesn’t get any worse before she has to go. No decision can be a good one. Can it, Peter?’

  ‘No, not really,’ I said.

  ‘Are you going up to sit with Gloria at all?’

  ‘No, not yet.’

  My mother carried on with her ironing; Jessie thumbed through the magazines. I didn’t speak. Nobody said anything. Not until Joe came home, which was after eleven.

  ‘How is everything upstairs,’ he asked.

  ‘Gloria’s not good,’ Jessie answered. Then she started to cry.

  ‘That will have to stop. You’ll put everybody into a terrible state if you start all of that now.’

  ‘Well, Joe. I’m worried about her.’

  ‘And I’m worried too.’ My mother put down the iron. ‘What’s going to happen? I mean what’s going to happen in the morning? Nobody’s told us anything.’

  Just then Tim came into the kitchen.

  ‘Pauli and I have come up with an idea, so I’ve come to put it to you folks.’

  ‘What’s that, love?’ My mother folded a towel.

  ‘Well, Pauli and I thought that the most sensible thing for us to do is to grab some sleep. We’ve got this whole travel operation to handle in the morning. And so I was wondering if anyone else could sit with Mom?’

  ‘I’ll be staying up tonight,’ Joe said.

  ‘And so will I,’ added Jessie. ‘I’ll be with her.’

  ‘Oh well, that will be perfect, if it’s no bother. I’ve arranged for a taxi to pick us up at five-fifteen to take us to the airport. The other thing I wanted to ask is if there’s any possibility of having a wake-up call at approximately four-thirty?’

  ‘Well, you can have an alarm clock. But, as I said Tim, I’ll be staying up tonight.’

  ‘Okay, Joe. That’s perfect, Peter, will you be around in the morning?’

  ‘Yes, Tim. I’ll be around.’

  ‘Okay. Thank you everybody for all that’s been done. I’m going to get some sleep.’ He left the kitchen and went on up to bed.

  ‘Well, I’m ready for the pillow myself. It’s nearly midnight. Ah, look at these.’ My mother picked up the last things to be ironed. ‘It’s Gloria’s white blouse and her silk pyjamas. Poor Gloria.’

  ‘Well, give them to me,’ Jessie said after a short silence. ‘I’ll pack them in her suitcase. I’m going up now to sit with her through the night.’

  ‘No, Jessie, Don’t. Don’t go.’

  ‘But Peter, Gloria’s by . . .’

  ‘No, Jessie. Don’t. I’m going to stay with her tonight.’

  Jessie looked towards Joe, then my mother, before handing me the clothes.

  ‘Okay, Peter. Okay, you go. If you want anything just come and tell me, Joe and I will be sitting down here in the kitchen.’

  ‘You look very tired, Paulette.’ She was standing at the top of the stairs, outside the bedroom door, ‘Why don’t you go to bed?’

  ‘I don’t like to leave her, Peter. Do you think that I should sit up through the night?’

  ‘No, I’m going to be with her. I’ll wake you, Paulette. Goodnight.’

  ‘Okay, Peter. Goodnight.’

  Gloria was oblivious to my presence.

  The change in her was phenomenal. Her body looked smaller, her long slender legs shorter. Her skin turned a ghostly grey.

  She lay breathing heavily, noisily. Her mouth was open wide. At times she would be quiet. Often for quite a while. Then the heavy, noisy breathing would start again and her head would droop to her chest, when she’d gasp and open her eyes.

  I wiped her mouth and bathed her face with a damp sponge, but when she raised her hand, as if to say, ‘That’s enough’, I left her side and sat in the armchair opposite.

  Sometimes I thought she might recognize me. I thought she was trying to speak, but then her eyes would close, her head would go back onto the pillow and she was quiet until the heavy breathing started again. She was like that all through the night. I stayed there watching, sitting in the chair.

  ‘Peter, it’s nearly four,’ Jessie whispered from the doorway. ‘I�
��ve just made a pot of tea. Do you want me to take over for the last half hour?’

  ‘No thanks, Jessie. I’ll stay.’

  ‘Okay, but I’ll be back up very soon.’

  Suddenly Gloria was breathing violently. She was moaning, she was groaning, she was gasping.

  ‘Die. Gloria, die. Please die now. Don’t fight any more. It’s over for you, my darling. I’m sorry, but please don’t go on with this. Die. Please die.’

  She moaned. The light from the lamp flickered. For a second I wanted to put it out.

  She fell silent.

  ‘Gloria.’

  We both gasped for air at the same time, and Gloria opened her eyes.

  ‘Do you know what, Gloria?’ Joe sat at the foot of the bed. ‘You are a very remarkable woman.’

  The room was suddenly crowded. Tim and Paulette arrived, dressed and ready to leave. My mother and Jessie appeared with hot tea.

  ‘Okay,’ Tim announced. ‘What we need to do is get Mom ready to leave. We have a schedule to keep.’ He went and sat down next to Gloria and held her. ‘Mom, I’m going to get you back home, and to the hospital and the doctor you trust. But what you have to do to help me get you there is to give the greatest performance you’ve ever given. Is that a deal?’

  Gloria nodded her head.

  ‘Right, Pauli. Put the light on. Let’s get going. She needs make-up.’

  The overhead light was put on. Gloria moaned and closed her eyes; the light was very bright, she’d been in darkness for most of the week. There was an all-out burst of activity. Everything happened quickly. Paulette applied the make-up to Gloria’s unresponsive face, just lipstick and eye shadow and a bit of colour on her cheeks. Jessie arranged her hair, the back of which was wrapped up in the headscarf, now made into a kind of snood. Tim packed the suitcase with Gloria’s bits and pieces that had been lying about the room.

  ‘What’s she going to wear?’ My mother panicked. ‘She can’t leave in that old nightdress.’

  Jessie picked up the silk pyjamas. ‘These, she can wear these.’

  It was awkward getting Gloria into them because it was difficult for her to move her arms and legs. Gloria was frightened and confused and just wanted to be left sitting in the pyjamas on the edge of the bed.

  Suddenly we heard loud knocking. It was the taxi to take her away. Now there was no turning back. Joe went down to open the door, then returned to take the suitcase and small black hold-all.

  It was impossible for Gloria to step into her shoes, her only pair of shoes, the black suede stilettoes, the ones she liked so much. Instead she was put into a pair of thick woollen socks.

  I quickly picked up the shoes and, before anyone noticed what had happened to them, I’d taken them to the bathroom and put them in a cupboard.

  ‘I want to keep these shoes,’ I thought.

  The silk pyjamas were covered by her short, white fox-fur coat. Now she was ready to go, but it was impossible for Gloria to walk.

  ‘Let’s carry her down the stairs sitting on the chair,’ someone suggested.

  That’s how she left the house.

  I went down the stairs ahead to stop her falling. Joe and Tim carried her on the chair. Halfway down Gloria moaned and shook her head.

  ‘I’ll fall,’ she whispered.

  We stopped.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘She can’t go.’

  ‘Yes, she can, Peter. She must.’

  The taxi man sounded his horn.

  ‘Come on now. We’re nearly there.’

  Soon we were in the hallway. My mother kissed her on the cheek and then she was carried out.

  Putting her into the taxi was difficult. Paulette sat inside with the bags, then we lowered the chair into a horizontal position, and she was passed into the back of the cab.

  Tim sat next to his sister and held on to Gloria on the chair. It was unbearable and terrifying to see her sitting in the back of a taxi, on a dark, misty morning, on the small wooden chair.

  The driver started the engine; slowly they moved away. Joe, Jessie and I followed behind in Joe’s car.

  It was fortunate that the taxi had arrived earlier than expected because the journey to the airport, which normally took fifteen minutes, took almost three quarters of an hour. Gloria couldn’t travel very fast. The macabre procession travelled at a funereal pace. Sometimes Joe would overtake the taxi, or travel alongside it, so that we were able to look through the window, to see that everything was all right. Each time we passed the side of the taxi I would come face to face with the dreadful image of Gloria sitting on her chair, illuminated by the light inside the cab. I could have been watching rushes from a black and white silent film, with Gloria dressed in cream silk and white fox fur, the star – a tragic goddess from the silver screen.

  Joe speeded ahead to the airport. We collected a wheelchair and waited outside for Gloria to arrive. She got there with a few minutes to spare and was quickly transferred from one chair to the other and hurried to the departure gate.

  The small airport was empty. The other travellers had boarded the flight; the plane was waiting for its last three passengers. It was strange that no questions were asked about Gloria, but a few of the airport workers gathered around, curious to find out why a woman in a wheelchair, dressed up in a glamorous fur coat, was leaving in such a hurry.

  Suddenly it was time for her to leave. Joe and Jessie kissed her and then they moved away. I kissed her cheek and held her hand. She winked at me and smiled. We didn’t say goodbye.

  I watched her being wheeled away. I waited by the gate looking after her until she was out of sight.

  Then somebody grabbed my arm: an airport worker, a man in his forties. It took me a few seconds to work out what he was saying.

  ‘Was that Gloria Grahame? Was that the film star?’

  Later that day, a few hours after being admitted to St Vincent’s Hospital, New York, Gloria died.

  * * *

  My mother and father did get to Australia.

  Three days later I was at the same airport, at the same time. They were taking the same flight as Gloria had taken; the 6.20 a.m. to London’s Heathrow.

  My father, wearing his cap, was nervously pacing about, and my mother wearing her headscarf, but dolled up to the eyeballs, was giving me instructions as to how I was to look after the house.

  ‘Make sure that Candy has water in her bowl on the floor by the kitchen sink, and remember that the milkman gets paid on a Saturday.’

  I shook hands with my father and gave my mother a big kiss. Then I left them to board the flight which was to take them off on their long-awaited holiday.

  As I walked away from the gate I was pulled by the shoulder, my arm was almost wrenched from my body. It was the same airport worker who had stopped me three days earlier to ask if Gloria was a film star.

  ‘And who was that one?’ he shouted. ‘Tell me, who was she?’

  I turned round and my mother was still waving at the gate. ‘It’s another one,’ he cried. ‘I recognize the face. Tell me who she is.’

  This time I smiled.

  ‘That one,’ I said, ‘was Hedy Lamarr.’

  Since Then

  Reading my book thirty years after it was first published, what struck me most was how much more I know now about Gloria Grahame’s achievements as an actress than I did then, and also how exciting it has been for me to see her stature grow. Yes, in the 1950s she did achieve Hollywood stardom, and indeed she does have her very own star cemented into Hollywood Boulevard (I’ve now seen it), but when we first met in the late 1970s she hadn’t been in films for many years and so, in England, she wasn’t generally known. If people did recognize her name it was only vaguely and there was a struggle to place her except as a B-movie actress who mostly played a floozy or a gangster’s moll – ‘Did her face get scarred by a pot of scalding coffee? ‘Yes, that was in The Big Heat with Lee Marvin’ – but that perception of her was wrong. It didn’t quite sum her up.

  Thirty years ag
o we didn’t have DVDs, we didn’t have the internet, film blogs, and we didn’t have YouTube. Thanks to all that, I’ve now seen most of her films. When I first met her I couldn’t tell her that I’d seen her in any; except the one about a train crash and a circus and an elephant, which was wedged somewhere in the back of my memory from a rainy Sunday afternoon watching the telly. Of course, now I know that film to be The Greatest Show on Earth, directed by Cecil B DeMille and which was nominated for five Oscars and won Best Picture. A wonderful film, and Gloria’s performance in it playing Angel was stand-out. Her acting style was different, even alternative, and there was definitely something of the mystery about her. Looking at her performances, what sets her apart from most other actors on the screen is that she seems to be the only one who’s thinking her character’s private thoughts. She may be about to say something but, then thinking about it, she may change her mind and decide to say nothing. She’ll just look, think, and leave us to figure her out. Francois Truffaut said of her that she was the only American actress who was a real person on the screen. The film critic Roger Ebert said that there was ‘something fresh and modern about her’, and in a 2015 article about her in the New York Village Voice to coincide with a retrospective of her films shown at the Lincoln Centre, Graham Fuller wrote that she ‘was one of the greatest actresses of mid-twentieth-century Hollywood’.

  Gloria worked for some of the great film directors like Edward Dmytryk, Vincent Minnelli, Frank Capra, Elia Kazan, Fritz Lang, and the impressive list goes on. She made over forty films including It’s a Wonderful Life – in which she played Violet Bick; Crossfire – which she told me was her favourite and for which she was nominated for her first Academy Award; A Woman’s Secret, In a Lonely Place, Sudden Fear, The Bad and the Beautiful – for which she won an Academy Award; The Big Heat, Human Desire, Naked Alibi, The Cobweb, Not as a Stranger, and Oklahoma! – which she told me she just hated because she couldn’t sing, she couldn’t dance, and she couldn’t stand wearing ‘that bonnet’. Gloria worked in films alongside some of Hollywood’s legendary stars; Katherine Hepburn, James Stewart, Lucille Ball, Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart, Charlton Heston, Lana Turner, Joan Crawford; and now, over a thirty-year timespan, I’ve witnessed her take her rightful place among them.