Somebody's Darling

by Somebody's Darling (retail) (epub)

  From that beginning—it was eventually discarded—grew a nice little script about fucked-over wives. Pete was the salesman, Anna his bedraggled, frenetic, resilient but ultimately desperate spouse. At the climax of the picture she comes to the car lot in disguise, buys a shiny new Chevy, and runs her husband down while he’s doing a TV spot: the male chauvinist gets his just deserts. For my taste it was a trifle too pat, but then it wasn’t my movie.

  This being California, where no publicity can hurt you, they had no trouble persuading the very dealer who inspired the script to let them shoot on his car lot. When Jill showed me the rough cut, over at Paramount, I knew old Aaron had got a real bargain. It only cost a little over a million, about a third of what Sherry Solaré would have cost all by herself.

  It was odd that Jill had become a director. For one thing, she had no vanity, and directors need vanity, the way fish need gills. For another, she had always seemed to treasure her solitude, yet directors have no solitude. They live amid a mob, like politicians. Finally, there was her excessive sense of responsibility. I wouldn’t have thought she would want to be responsible for a million dollars of someone else’s money—but I guess I was wrong. Maybe I didn’t know her as well as I liked to think. She wasn’t twenty-four any more—a lovely but introverted girl who really only liked to draw. She was thirty-seven, and faced with impending fame.

  I, on the other hand, still seemed to be faced with a couple of unwavering gray eyes.

  “What? I’ve forgotten the question,” I said, stuffing my face.

  “I think you’ve started living in the past,” she said. “Half the time you don’t keep up with what we’re talking about.”

  “I could be living in the future,” I said.

  “If it’s the future, then you’re just thinking about screwing some rich girl,” she said. “I guess that’s why you agreed to go to New York. You probably have a few back there that you need to go see.”

  I decided to be honest, if only for the novelty.

  “Honey, I haven’t been to New York in twenty years,” I said. “Why would anyone take me to New York. My last trip was to Point Barrow, Alaska, when we did Igloo. Several years before that I got to go to Argentina, because Tony Maury insisted on making Gaucho’s Gauntlet.”

  Even as I said it, it occurred to me that there was a disconsolate Betsy Rousselet O’Reilly, somewhere in that neck of the woods. We had had a couple of friendly chats.

  “You didn’t guess the real reason I agreed to go,” I said. “I might as well tell you. It’s because of Variety.”

  Jill looked blank.

  “I’m talking about the magazine Variety,” I said. “Not variety as in the spice of life. You know those little boxes they have in the magazine? The four categories that tell you who’s going where: New York to L.A., L.A. to New York, U.S. to Europe, and Europe to U.S. I’ve never had my name in those little boxes. It seems little enough to ask in the way of recognition, considering that I’ve spent damn near my whole life in this industry. Maybe if I go with you I could even get it in twice, once under L.A. to New York, and once under New York to L.A., when we come back. I think that would be sort of romantic.”

  Jill was silent, looking at me. It was different when she was silent than when she was just quiet. Usually she was quiet—that was her manner, and I was very comfortable with it. But when she dropped from quiet to silent, something less comfortable went on. Her silence had a frequency all its own, one that I could never endure for very long. It was like one of those dog whistles that make a sound only dogs can hear—a sound that cracked eggs, or something. I was the egg Jill’s silence usually cracked.

  “Stop it,” I said. “I was kidding. I was just kidding. I don’t really care whether I get my name in Variety or not.”

  She shrugged that off. Accidentally, I had touched her sympathies. The thought that a lifelong drudge in the hemp mills had never had his name in the trade paper of the hemp industry cut her to the heart. A susceptibility to such small poignancies was one of her real assets as a director, but in day-to-day life such susceptibility had its drawbacks.

  “You take things too seriously,” I said. “I would get a kick out of seeing my name in one of those little lists, but it’s no big deal. Half of me doesn’t give a shit.”

  She sighed, disgustedly. At least it was a sound.

  “The whole business makes me tired,” she said. “I almost wish I hadn’t made the picture.”

  Indeed, she looked tired—there were little dark circles under her eyes. She had the look of a woman who was tired of her life. I could understand it, too. Her life was demanding without being very exciting, and fatiguing but not particularly satisfying. Part of it was her fault, for taking things too seriously, as I had just said. It meant an unending sequence of moral tangles, a maddening snarl of ethical string. No matter how hard she tried, things never quite came right.

  “The fun part of this movie is all over,” she added, pursing her lips.

  She was right about that. The awful tedium of publicity lay ahead of her. Only a few ego-kings enjoy that part of it.

  “I’m going,” I said. “I’m going. Cheer up. We’ll have some fun. Just tell me where you’re staying. Maybe I can get a room down the hall.”

  “At the Sherry-something,” she said. “You can just have a room in my room. I believe I have a suite at my disposal.”

  “Come on,” I said. “You’ve got to try and be conventional for a few days, for the sake of your picture. You can’t go housing a bloated old type like me, no matter how big your suite is. I’m too old to be a gofer or a lover, and I’m not your father or your uncle. If I stay with you the press won’t know what to make of things, and that’s fatal. The press must know what to make of things. If I stay in your suite everybody will just think we’re fucking, and how will that look?”

  Jill brightened a little. She gave me a defiant look. “Oh, well,” she said. “So what? If I’m a big director I guess I can be permitted a weakness for old farts with potbellies, can’t I? Just forget about a room. The studio can take care of it.”

  “You’re a naive child,” I said. “I work for Warners, remember? This is a Paramount extravaganza. Just because you’re about to make them millions doesn’t mean they’re going to want you treating your kooky friends to free hotel rooms.”

  Of course she disregarded my measured analysis of the situation vis-à-vis rooms. She glanced at me and made a disgusted little motion with her mouth. Then she went back to looking out at the Strip.

  “You wouldn’t stay in my room anyway,” she said. “I know you. You want a room of your own, just in case you stumble over a debutante.”

  3

  WHEN IT CAME TO MEASURED ANALYSIS, JILL WAS ON A par with me. She had me cold on the room situation, as far as that went. What she probably didn’t realize is that she had hit on the phrase that best describes my method with women—if it can be called a method. I stumble over them.

  One of the reasons I still live in L.A. is because it literally teems with women. One can stumble and fall almost anywhere in L.A. and land on a woman. I’ve done it time and again, and often, if I’m lucky, I even stumble over ladies who haven’t been in town too long. Ladies who have resided here for ten years or so I try not to stumble into—like other flora of the desert, those ladies will have grown thorns.

  But when women first get to town the sun and the breeze and the relaxed, undemanding patter of Hollywood talk has a tranquilizing effect. Sometimes this effect lasts three or four years, interrupted only by periods of gnawing, puzzled loneliness. The gnawing and the puzzlement are apt to be especially pronounced if the lady comes here from the East—that’s the American East—due to the level-of-taste factor. During these first years the nice, newly arrived women can be counted on to be extremely companionable, and on the whole I’ve done pretty well with them, thanks to my vulnerability and my obvious helplessness. Few women can resist helpless men: what a focus it gives them for their talents.
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  With that in mind, I’ve always studiously avoided learning how to do anything more complicated than making drinks. In the very old days I used to try and attract women by demonstrations of superiority, but all that got me was an occasional masochist. It was my beloved wife, Claudia, the serial queen, who convinced me that in the male inferiority is by far the more attractive quality.

  I was broadly inferior to Claudia, but she adored me. She was an Olympic swimmer, for one thing. Her performance in the Olympics was overshadowed by Johnny Weissmuller’s, and he went on to overshadow her in pictures too, but she could swing through the vines with the best of them; besides which, she could cook, decorate houses, grow flowers, and do a lot of other things. I couldn’t touch her: not in talent, not in human ability, not even in spirit. By the time we met I had published a couple of thin, affected novels, given up, and was doing hack work around the studios, writing Westerns, jungle movies, serials, shorts, and propaganda pictures. It wasn’t destroying my sensitive, artistic soul, either, because I didn’t have one. I was just lucky enough to have found a craft I liked, at which I was reasonably competent. Claudia talked for a time about my writing a really good novel, but I think it was only because she liked to hope that I might someday grow up.

  In the end I did grow up: as she was dying. Up until then it had been unnecessary, maybe even undesirable. I remained her roaring boy, lover, wayward son, whatever.

  A year or two after her death, when I grudgingly went on to other ladies, I seldom, if ever, found that I needed to feign inferiority. In most cases, I was inferior. Of course I was smarter than a few of them, but that didn’t help me much. Women know precisely where intelligence fits in the scale of human values. It may occasionally get you a meal, but it won’t get you fucked. There are always more powerful factors at work, such as beauty and ugliness, dependence and independence, greed and need. I’m usually inferior in every visible way to the smart, expensive ladies I keep company with, and yet they continue to waft down upon me, one after another, like discarded garments.

  It drives Jill mad. She doesn’t understand what they see in me that they can’t seem to see in their handsome, well-kept husbands.

  But then I’ve never been sure that Jill has ever been attracted enough to have any understanding of attraction. She may not realize that passion is usually answering some important question. In the case of myself and women who are seemingly far too good for me, the question it answers is whether there is anything real except beauty and money. At least that’s the question it answers for the ladies. For me the question is more like “What am I going to do without Claudia?” The ladies are only a temporary answer, but if you repeat a temporary answer often enough, it acquires a degree of permanency. And a degree is certainly all I expect.

  The fact that these young women, with their trim ankles, high cheekbones, good educations, bright eyes, little bosoms, and expensive clothes, keep coming to my bungalow and often to my bed, despite the fact that I’m old, fat, often drunk, beneath them on the social scale, and in love with a dead woman, only increases Jill’s impatience with her own sex. Their foolishness drives her up the wall, and my willingness to assist them in their obvious folly is a constant bone of contention between us.

  Human unreason is Jill’s bête noire, as I often point out. I think sometimes she doesn’t know what heat there is in incongruity. I get a certain mileage out of incongruity, but in fact my success with women—modest as it is—is due to nothing more than a capacity for attention. This capacity is not mysterious, but it is rare, in a man. I like to think it is particularly rare in Los Angeles, but I really don’t know that. It may be just as rare everywhere. Maybe the truth is that only men like myself, who have nothing else to do in life, can afford to pay serious attention to women.

  The moment I realized I wasn’t a real writer and thus had no important artistic task to perform, I became a serious ladies’ man—although for twenty-five years I was a ladies’ man with only one lady. I became a kind of Proust of women, with every tit and giggle tucked away in my memory somewhere. Claudia and I met at Republic, when I was writing an episode or two of the Nyoka serials she was in. We had breakfast together at Schwab’s a few times, drove out to Santa Monica once or twice on Sunday, to see the waves, and from beginnings in no way original or even very intense found ourselves in a marriage that grew like a great book, filling twenty-five years with many thousands of elaborate and subtle details. They were not all happy details, of course. Some years were not all that well-written, one might say. Claudia had three affairs, for example, whereas my philandering, during the whole of the marriage, boiled down to a one-night stand in Carson City. But then no idyll is a great book, nor any great marriage an idyll.

  I came away from her grave with a lot of memories, and with the ability to pay attention to women—an ability that’s kept me in company ever since. It brought me Jill, for that matter. When she came to work at Warners, not long after her Oscar, she still looked like a girl who wasn’t ready to leave junior high. I had known her slightly for several years, through Tony Maury, but only slightly. We didn’t share the same weaknesses, which is how people usually make friends, in Hollywood or elsewhere.

  Once she got to Warners, we soon developed a serious weakness for one another. It started, of course, with me being chivalrous. I kept noticing her in the commissary, a skinny girl with short hair, invariably wearing jeans, sneakers, and a jogger’s sweat shirt. Just as invariably, she would be being pestered by three or four men.

  Jill might not vary, but the men did. In my view they constituted a potpourri of the worst assholes on the lot, an eclectic mixture of would-be studs. Socially, they pretty well covered the spectrum, from grips and prop men and boom operators all the way up to perhaps the second level of executives. In fact, the first time I met Preston Sibley III he was pestering Jill, and him fresh off the plane from Locust Valley.

  I took in the situation at a glance—as they used to say in the pulps—and the situation was that a lot of horses’ asses were pestering the one creature in the world that they should have known they were not equipped to deal with: an intelligent woman. When pressed, I can be as impatient with my sex as Jill is with hers. It was obvious that none of the pesterers would have had the faintest idea what to do with her if they could have attracted her, but, perversely, they kept right at it, as if she were the only woman on the lot worth their time.

  In those days she was far too shy and polite just to tell them to fuck off—she still is, as far as that goes—so her lunch hours at Warners consisted mostly of parrying unwanted sexual thrusts. It seemed to me to be a boring way to spend lunch, so I presumed on our mutual friendship with the infamous Tony Maury and began inserting myself at her table. Then I would either tell loud, labyrinthine stories about the old days, or launch into a little lecture about the latest serious book I had read reviews of—The Origins of Totalitarianism, perhaps—all this to the great annoyance of the would-be cocksmen.

  To my surprise, Jill enjoyed my stories. She liked hearing about all those happy, hard-drinking boys I used to know, the fellows who would have made Hollywood great if they could have. More surprisingly, she enjoyed my little lectures too. Half the time she even went and read the damn books, and then came back and put me to shame, or at least forced me to bullshit rather skillfully. She was curious about everything, but particularly curious about people. Why did they do the things they did?

  She seemed to think I might know, and in all likelihood I encouraged her to think so. There’s nothing more tonic to an aging man than a bright, gray-eyed student who appears to be completely taken in by whatever false wisdom or learned nonsense he may feel like babbling.

  This time it worked out well, though. By the time Jill realized that I was an old fraud, rather than Socrates, she loved me anyway and it didn’t matter. Besides, the cocksmen soon decided that the prospect of fucking her wasn’t worth having to listen to me—particularly since it was a remote prospect at best. In no t
ime at all we had a table to ourselves, and I guess we still do.

  “Remember our days at Warners?” I said, smiling.

  “Sure,” Jill said. “You drove off all my would-be boyfriends with your pontificating. Who knows what I missed because of you? I might have managed to want one of them, eventually.”

  “You had true respect for me in those days,” I said. “You thought I knew everything about life.”

  “Yes,” she said, shaking her head quickly, with some force. It was an old mannerism, that headshake, and meant that she was utterly convinced about something—as if fate were a long flight of stairs down which she could see to the very bottom. Meanwhile, she put her hand over her coffee cup, to discourage the lurking Oriental.

  “Is that a floating yes?” I asked. “Are you affirming life, like Molly Bloom?”

  “Yes, you do know everything about life,” she said. “You just won’t tell me very much at a time. It’s your hook. If you told me everything you know, then I wouldn’t need you any more, and I might go off and leave you. Then you’d be stuck with all your little friends. How would that be?”