Somebody's Darling

by Somebody's Darling (retail) (epub)

  “Fortnum and Mason!” Leon said. It was the strongest language he allowed himself.

  “I like that,” he said, tucking his key back into his lapel. “I think I’ll go try it on Alexandra.”

  In a twinkling, he was off.

  I could see Jill across the room, surrounded by a hedge of tuxedos. While I was watching her, Folsom appeared out of nowhere and grabbed my sleeve.

  “Hey, don’t grab my sleeve,” I said.

  “Didn’t wanta lose you,” Folsom said, positioning himself a few steps away. His dandruff had not improved. While I was trying to figure out what he thought he was up to, Jill suddenly appeared.

  “I’m in over my depth,” she said. “Will you come to Elaine’s? There’s going to be a party there. Then we can go home together.”

  She looked at me a little defensively, as if I would probably be mad at her for having this new status. Being so new to status, she exaggerated its moral significance. I certainly didn’t care that she had it.

  “Of course I want to come to the party,” I said. “Am I supposed to go with you, or what?”

  “You can if you want to ride in the limo with Abe,” she said, which settled that.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll get a cab and beat you there.”

  She suddenly gave me a big hug. It was strange to feel her cheek against mine—I guess I still like to think of her as a girl, but her cheek smelled like a woman’s cheek. Then she went away, causing the hedge of tuxedos to take to its feet and double back in her wake.

  10

  IWAS OF HALF A MIND NOT TO GO TO ELAINE’S, DESPITE MY promise. It would be more relaxing to go to the hotel, send Jill a message, and get sleepy drunk. She would be too surrounded to miss me, anyway.

  But then there was no telling when I’d, get back to New York, and it was the most famous literary bar in America, a kind of descendant, I gathered, of the Closerie de Lilas. I might as well see it, even if it was full of Hollywooders.

  First, though, I went over to the coatroom and amused myself for a few minutes by watching ladies put on fur coats. Some of the older ladies were very meek and proper, in relation to their furs. They put them on circumspectly, making sure that the skins hung right. Others, mostly the younger ladies, just shrugged them on and strode off. Their casualness bordered on recklessness, which bordered on sexiness, in my book. I could have watched the ladies putting on their fur coats all night, but of course the pleasure was ephemeral. In a few minutes there was nothing in the coat-room but a few overcoats whose owners had been too drunk to remember them. They may well have hung there for years.

  I had been too proud to put my old green overcoat on over my tux, so when I finally stepped out of Lincoln Center I became a flash-frozen screenwriter. The curb lay across an Arctic waste of sidewalk. Ladies in furs were walking merrily across it, arm in arm with gentlemen no more warmly dressed than myself—the sight made me feel silly, but no less cold.

  Fortunately there was a taxi waiting, warm as an igloo or warmer. “Elaine’s,” I said to the driver. He was young, brown, and apparently scared. He started at once. I was vague as to the actual location of Elaine’s but assumed all taxi drivers knew it.

  “Elaine’s,” I repeated, for good measure.

  “Egypt,” the driver said cryptically, racing along. Before I knew it we were headed down Broadway. Vague as I was, I was pretty sure Elaine’s wasn’t on Broadway. Also, I didn’t know what the driver might have meant when he said Egypt. For all I knew he had set off to drive to Cairo. The inside of the cab was plastered with signs exempting him from every imaginable responsibility.

  “Elaine’s,” I said a third time, and added “Upper East Side.” I felt sure that was right.

  The driver paid no attention at all. Clearly he had a destination fixed in his mind. I sat back and tried to enjoy the ride. After all, I was having an adventure in a New York taxi, a common theme in movies of my era. Life was taking in after art again.

  The adventure went on for quite some time. We passed through what I felt sure was the Village, but the driver showed no signs of stopping. When he did finally stop we were in front of an immense building. The driver looked back at me and smiled—his brown eyes shone with triumph.

  “Whirl’ Trade Center,” he said proudly.

  Obviously he had concluded it was where persons in tuxedos belonged. Not wanting to disappoint him, I got out. Seconds later, I caught an uptown cab.

  “Elaine’s?” I said hopefully.

  “Eighty-eighth and Second,” the driver said. “You’re lucky you found me. There’s been a decline in da profession.” The cabbie was so gnarled he looked like a root.

  “I was beginning to suspect that,” I said.

  “Yeah, these Vietnams,” he said. “Get in the car with one of them an’ you’re lucky not to end up in Jersey.

  “Being from California, you probably don’t know da tricks,” he said. “I’ll show you da tricks.”

  He had me uptown in something like eight and a half minutes, a dazzling display of virtuosity, particularly coming from a root with a green cap on. At the slightest sign of sluggishness on the part of the traffic he hit his horn, wiggling through several near-jams with no use of the brake at all. Pedestrians seemed to sense that something implacable was bearing down on them. Wary as Mohicans, they hung back.

  “Geez, da limos are here tonight,” the cabbie said, when he screeched to a stop. “Do you woik in da movies?”

  “When I woik at all,” I said. I had handed him a bill, but he hadn’t handed me back my change. Instead, he fixed me with a hard eye.

  “Got a favor,” he said. “My wife, she’s bored, you see. Why is she bored? That I don’t know. After all, every day, who knows what can happen? She could get raped, she could get moidered, but it don’t help, you see. The thrill’s worn off. So she’s a typist, you know—retired. What do you think she does, to get herself less bored?”

  “She probably writes screenplays,” I said. “Either that or she plays canasta.”

  His little rootlike face twisted into a smile. I saw a couple of teeth.

  “No canasta,” he said, and without further ado he plopped a fat green screenplay into my hand.

  “She wants it to be a movie, you see,” he said. “You woik out there, maybe you can help. Just take it with ya, maybe pass it around. Let some of da big shots see it.”

  “Oh, well,” I said. “What’s it about?”

  “She don’t want me to read it,” he said, a little sadly. “She’s afraid I’ll be ashamed of her if it don’t read so good. All I know is it’s about da Bronx. I don’t guess nobody’d want to see a movie about da Bronx, but I ain’t in da business. All she wants is for somebody in da business to give it a look.”

  I glanced at the title page. The screenplay was called The Rosebud of Love. That the wife of a root could think in terms of rosebuds was kind of touching. I liked it. Maybe it was just the property for Leon O’Reilly.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll take it along. Just don’t get her hopes up too high.”

  “Maybe just high enough that she don’t trip over them,” he said, handing me my change. We shook hands, and he was off.

  Elaine’s seemed to be a maelstrom. A lot of people were bunched around the bar, looking anxious. They looked like the people you see in ticket lines, trying to get tickets for sold-out football games. At the sight of me in my tuxedo, with a big fat screenplay under my arm, they melted away. Probably they had been forced to melt away several times during the evening. It seemed clearly recognized that screen persons should have rapid access.

  Before I was really prepared for it, I found myself face to face with Elaine herself, mater aeternitatis of the New York, if not the international, literary scene. She seemed benign—perhaps concluding at a glance that I would hardly be likely to cause her trouble. When I told her I was with Miss Peel’s party she led me right along. I didn’t see any writers, but then writers photograph terribly and never really look
like their pictures. I could have tripped over one and not known it.

  Elaine led me to a room where the movie party was being held. Again leopards came to mind—not because Elaine was much like a leopard, and I am not much like Dante, either, but I had only to glance into the room to know that it was the sort of place where one would get more respectful attention if one were being led by a leopard. Elaine declined the role, and vanished. I stepped into the party and vanished too. A few eyes looked up when I entered, but they did not light up with recognition. I felt a little spectral, or astral, or both.

  Jill sat with her back to me, between Abe Mondschiem and Bo Brimmer. She was talking to a man who squatted by her chair—I couldn’t see his face, but he was big. Jilly was at the table, listening to Lulu Dickey. Swan Bunting stood behind her, waiting for her to finish her anecdote so he could rush home to Sherry. Preston Sibley, of all people, was sitting next to Lulu. Peter Falk got up just as I entered and moved over to a table from which issued a wild babble—the fun table, clearly. Around it were Bertolucci, Antonella Pisa, some unidentified girls, Andy Warhol, a number of young men who looked like well-barbered rats, Jean Joris-Mallet, and Romy Schneider.

  The space between the tables—not that there was much of it—was filled with a Sargasso Sea of wavy people, invisibles like myself. There were minor actors, PR men, lawyers-cum-producers, reporters, editors, editors’ girl friends, reporters’ girl friends, and, I judged, anyone who could slip in on the coattails of someone legitimately famous. Through this swamp of safari jackets slipped the waiters, skillful as Cajuns in pirogues, carrying food to the tables. Why they bothered I don’t know: the scene was far too hectic to eat in, unless one were Jilly Legendre, who could eat anywhere, anytime. Maybe the food was all for him.

  When Peter Falk got up I started for his chair, but long before I got there a girl not unlike Page sat down in it and began talking to Preston Sibley III.

  To my horror, I saw that it was Page, taking a seat by her husband. She had been mixed in with the mob of editors’ girl friends, and I hadn’t noticed her. Preston looked a little tight and Page very lit up. Page was physical as a puppy, and immediately started to play hands with Preston, only Preston wouldn’t play.

  She hadn’t spotted me, so I stepped back a few steps to try and decide if I wanted to be spotted. I felt outraged at the lack of justice in this world, the almost total absence of order, stability, and appropriateness. In my imagination Page had been at Tahoe for the last two days. In a properly ordered world she would be, in fact, where she was in my imagination—not in a New York bar with both her husband and her lover.

  While I was absorbing that shock, the man Jill was talking to pivoted a little in his squat and I saw that it was Owen Oarson, an ex-All American-cum-producer. That was bad news. I knew Owen a little, from some poker games we had both attended. He had come to Hollywood as a PR man and ended up a gambler, but probably he still harbored delusions about producing pictures. He had a smart lip and he knew his poker, but nobody I knew had ever taken him seriously as a producer. Or as anything else, except an ex-All American, from Texas Tech, I think. I saw that he was looking up at Jill gravely and intently, ignored by everyone at the table except her. He had no status whatever, and had zeroed in on the one person in the room who was likely to treat him like a human being. Jill was talking rapidly. She might be the woman of the moment, but it was clear that the moment had already chewed her up and spat her back. At a table with egos around it the size of Lulu’s and Bo’s, Jill would be lucky to get someone to bring her a glass of water.

  The sight of Page had affected me like a car wreck—adrenaline rushed out from whatever glands were keeping it. That was one shock. The sight of Jill in rapid, intense conversation with Owen Oarson was another. I hardly knew what I felt, beyond a far-reaching apprehension. In order to collect my wits I went back out to the bar and got a Jack Daniel’s, my worry drink. Then I returned to the party and lurked in the general vicinity of the ladies’ room for a while, hoping Page would come by on her way to powder her nose. It was a vain hope—Page had no need to powder her nose. While I was waiting, Anna Lyle came out.

  “Hey, Joe,” she said.

  “Hey,” I said. “Where’s Pete?”

  “In the sack, probably. He met someone he took to.”

  “Who are you with?”

  “I believe I’m unescorted,” she said. “I’m not being mobbed, either.”

  “Let’s pretend we’re together,” I said. “If anybody asks who I am, tell them I’m Saxe Gotha.”

  “Who’s he, some stunt man?” Anna asked, not very interested in my subterfuges.

  “Look at those people,” she said, pointing to a table in the rear. Five or six men and two or three young girls were sitting at it.

  “None of their heads are shaped right,” Anna said, going to the heart of the matter, as she perceived it.

  Indeed, the males of the group did seem strangely off-plane. They were dressed in Levis or fatigues and wore cowboy boots or sneakers, and managed to look, collectively, as if they were waiting for Fritz Lang or somebody to pop them into an Expressionist film, something full of shadows and tilts and mirror shots. They were drinking rhythmically and glaring at the Hollywood tables as if their mere presence was an affront.

  “Oh,” I said, recognition dawning. “It’s obvious. Those are the writers. I knew they were here somewhere. The one with the teenager licking his ear is Wagner Baxter.”

  Anna dreamily scanned the group again. “They look like they had difficult births,” she said, dragging me over to the head table.

  By the time we got there the composition of the table had changed somewhat for the better. Abe had moved to a corner table, with one or two publicity people and a Frenchman in a mink coat who was probably his coke connection. He was winking at a young TV actress named Mercy Merker, who was at the next table—Mercy wasn’t winking back, though.

  Anna took Abe’s chair, which put me right next to Page. If you’re going to be reckless, be reckless, I decided. She turned from playing hands with Preston, took one look at me, and began to giggle. She had a kind of husky giggle, very affecting. Obviously she had been smoking pot all afternoon with some of her friends and hadn’t the slightest self-consciousness about being sandwiched between her husband and her lover.

  “I didn’t know you were here,” she said happily. “You look wonderful in that tuxedo. You look like my uncle in Philadelphia.”

  “Christ, you’ve got forty-two uncles in Philadelphia,” Preston said, shaking my hand. He probably supposed he knew me from somewhere, and I let him suppose it.

  “Oh, Uncle Farjeon,” Page said.

  Jill turned briefly and took note of my proximity to Page. Owen Oarson was still looking up at her, waves of yearning radiating from his face like heat from an electric heater. It was embarrassing to be near somebody who wanted to be accepted that badly. But Jill wasn’t embarrassed. Anna, who had probably never heard of Owen, asked him to pull up a chair.

  “Thank you, Miss Lyle,” he said. He got a chair. Bo Brimmer glanced around irritably, conscious of an alien presence within his aura. He ignored Owen but extended a small hand to me.

  “Hi, Joe Percy,” I said. I decided not to try to pretend to be someone named Saxe Gotha, although I could have fooled everybody but Bo.

  “He lives in the Hollywood Hills,” Anna said, as if that would identify me.

  Page emitted what would have been peals of giggles, if her giggles hadn’t been so husky. Preston looked annoyed, at having a wife who couldn’t hold her marijuana. Jill wore my sapphire as if it had belonged to her forever. After one look, to see if I was in one piece, she decided to observe strict neutrality—probably because she was more interested in Owen than in whatever trouble I had gotten myself into. She turned back and resumed her conversation.

  “Ah, yes,” Bo said, when I mentioned my name. “You wrote Neilsen’s Hope. Lovely film. And didn’t you work on Long Trail A-Winding?”

>   “Sure, Maureen O’Sullivan,” I said, as if that meant something.

  Lulu Dickey, who was on my left, was strangely silent, and even the usually loquacious Jilly, with his fine idiomatic grasp of several languages, was not talking much. The two of them were hunched together, hogging the tablecloth. It occurred to me suddenly that Jilly had a finger up her. None of the other tables even had a tablecloth. I considered dropping my lighter so I could look under the table and confirm my suspicions, but I didn’t smoke, or have a lighter.

  “My goodness, they favored us with a tablecloth,” I said.

  “Ah insisted,” Bo said.

  “We are drinking champagne,” Preston said.

  Page drank what champagne was left in his glass and casually held up the glass, her head tilted back and her wet little teeth shining. A waiter deftly filled the glass.

  “Me,” Lulu said suddenly, holding up her glass too. I would never know about my suspicions.

  “I thought Swan was very low tonight,” she added, after a sip of champagne. Jilly evidently had no interest in Swan, or in us either, because he hiked his chair around so he could become part of the continental table.

  “Swan hardly spoke to me,” Preston said. “I can’t be sure Swan likes me. I mean, we’re doing their picture—I hope he likes me.”

  He excused himself and went to the men’s room. He had hardly disappeared into the crowd before Page began purring like a kitten against my neck. No one took the slightest notice.

  “I think Swan was very low,” Lulu repeated. Obviously, she wanted the matter discussed.

  Bo’s little rabbit face turned her direction briefly, but he didn’t say a word.

  “You’re not fair to him,” Lulu said. “He’s really very insecure.”

  “Swan Bunting is about as insecure as a bronze statue of Cecil Rhodes,” Bo said crisply. Having been a Rhodes scholar, he was in a position to know how insecure such statues were. His Southern accent vanished, as it sometimes would, to be replaced by something more Oxbridge.