20th Century Un-limited

by Felice Picano

  “Doesn’t Chris have the biggest brown eyes you ever saw?” Sue-Anne said from the backseat and I could have kissed her.

  “Yessss,” he drawled, adding, “They’ll film wonderfully.”

  “Especially in a close-up,” Frances said. I could have kissed her too.

  He looked me over so hungrily, I expected his tongue to dart out and lick me.

  “Did you get it?” I asked, adding, “The cinder at the edge of my eye?”

  “Yessss!” he drawled and sat back in his chair. Was that wood in his lap, or was he carrying a .38?

  Someone had told Billy Bartlett that he was going to be the youngest MGM star present and he and Milly were dressed to the nines, if dressed a lot younger than their actual ages, unlike me and Sue-Ann. But he soon got over his unhappy surprise when we joined him and Milly inside the big entrance court in front of the theater where a red carpet had been laid out. Frances Wannamaker got Rafferty to describe all four of us as the MGM’s quote Stars of Tomorrow unquote, and so we were all photographed together—a lot! By studio photogs and by the no doubt previously bought-off, fawning, press.

  Before the film, there was a short and two cartoons and only one coming attraction! We took advantage of that to go and “freshen up.”

  I saw Henry in the big men’s room lounge and told him, “Rafferty’s in our row, if you want to switch seats with me and try your luck again.”

  Henry laughed. “You’re wasted in this movie. You should be in vaudeville. You’re a real card!”

  As I came out of the stall, Henry wasn’t there but I noticed a well-dressed African-American man of middle age in the same colors of uniform as the ushers and other theater staff I’d seen so far. He was sitting by the sink, next to a basket of white cloth napkins.

  I went to wash my hands and he leapt up, turned on the faucets, and handed me a little oyster-shell shaped, milled bar of soap. But if that was surprising, I was even more amazed when, after I had rinsed off, he handed me the towel. “I’ll take that, sir,” he said when I was done and took it from me and deposited it into a can I’d not noticed before. Just as I noticed loose change in the basket, he held a little brush up to me. “May I, sir?” he asked, and began lightly brushing whatever might be on my jacket lapels and sleeves. The last time I’d seen this kind of thing was at a debutante ball in Manhattan when I was a teenager, and even then it had been an anachronism. But in a movie theater!

  I realized with a start that this was his job, remaining here in the men’s room all night and helping men clean their hands and jackets and step outside looking good. I felt myself begin to color, and to allay my shame at what I was feeling, I pulled out a dollar and put it into the basket, and turned to leave.

  “Sir!” he called out, and I turned to see him holding out a handful of change.

  He had such a dignified look on his face that I had to stammer, “What is the usual good…?” Good what? Tip? Tariff? Charge?

  He handed me three quarters back and said, “Thank you for your generosity, sir,” and went to open the door for me, and only then did I notice he was wearing sparkling white gloves.

  Out in the lavishly velvet-walled corridor with its Persian carpets and gilded light sconces and spun silver décor, Henry was speaking to someone else that he soon stepped away from. He grabbed me by the shoulder and marched me toward the ladies’ room to meet our dates.

  “You look funny, Hall. Something happen in there?”

  Something had happened in there. For I had suddenly realized that the bathroom attendant was proud of his job. It was a clean job, working at this high-end establishment, filled with white people in the film industry, and he went home proud of the money he earned and of where and how he earned it. He would probably be able to put his children through high school, maybe even vocational school. In this Depression era, it would be a very good job!

  “No. Nothing! Nothing!” I insisted, for the moment devastated.

  There were some things about this time I didn’t think I would ever get used to, things that other people—nice, good, caring people like Henry—didn’t even notice, never mind think odd.

  After the film, I made sure that Henry and Jane joined us when we were paraded past Sam Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer and their wives later on, at the restaurant. Milly and Sue-Anne and Henry were pretty closed-mouthed, but Jane said she had met Mayer before, at a Gilmore wedding, and they chatted. I smiled benignly at all and attempted to look wise beyond my years, without saying anything beyond hello.

  Then my gaydar went on at “full red alert” when our group was approached by two genuine movie stars: Joan Crawford, looking young, thin, soigné, and approachable, with her beau of the night, the top film comedy star of the past several years, William Haines. Behind them was another good-looking man I guessed was Haines’s boyfriend, accompanying Marion Davies, who was glittering with jewelry.

  Crawford buzzed past the MGM bigwigs with a “Hiya, Sam! Hiya, Louis!”

  But if Haines saw them at all, he acted as though he hadn’t but instead slid right past them, with Crawford as his shield, ending up close to where we had moved.

  “Her Nibs show up?” Crawford asked, about the star, Garbo. She looked as though they’d been drinking in the car.

  “Not yet. But she’s due any minute,” Rafferty said. And we heard a hubbub at the front door. Alas, it was only Garbo’s costar, Frederic March.

  “I wouldn’t lay odds on that particular horse arriving at the finish line any time soon,” Crawford said breezily. “Friend a Billy’s here says she’s got serious cunt cramps.” She laughed at her own joke and went on, “But then, my opinion is she always acts like she has serious cunt cramps anyway. No?”

  Everyone enjoyed that. Crawford just then noticed me.

  “Oops. Sorry, Lamb Chop!” To Haines, she quipped, “Let’s get outta here before I corrupt more of America’s youth!”

  Just then two other actresses whose names I didn’t know approached and stole her attention away.

  I watched Haines and Rafferty exchange taut hellos and butched-up handshakes. Haines had been at MGM for years. Rafferty was probably there when the actor was fired for being too homosexual and for not playing the game by making a fake “lavender marriage.”

  “And who is this apparently still uncorrupted and quite sweet-looking American youth?” Haines asked.

  “Young Mr. Christopher Hall here is your biggest fan,” Rafferty suddenly lied, although why I had no idea, probably to keep the star’s attention on me.

  It worked: Haines would not let go of the hand he was shaking—mine.

  “It’s true,” I lied on glibly. Then I added, more truthfully, “But I’m surprised to meet you and see that you are so, well, so well-built, close up!” I added in a lower voice, “The screen doesn’t do you justice.”

  He looked at me then the way hungry rodents usually gaze upon a perfectly aged gorgonzola, but with twinkling rather than feral eyes, and said, “If you want to be in a lot of movies, Christopher, you really have to meet a lot of people in the movies. Of course I’m stuck in Poverty Pictures—true name, Raff, that’s what we’re calling our new studio, Jimmie and me. But you know what?” he added, to me. “I’m having a big party next Saturday night. Everyone who’s anyone—under fifty—will be there. Why don’t you come, Christopher? Thom will tell you where and when.” Only then did Haines let go of my hand and move on.

  I thought: Finally! Some famous fags to hang out with!

  We didn’t eat a thing until most of those “important folks” from MGM were long gone. Then we found a big plumped leather corner booth in Forelli’s and piled in. Frances and Thom meanwhile had their own, more centrally located booth, where they seemed to be busily confabbing. “Business,” Sue-Ann commented.

  “How do you eat wearing all this white?” I asked Henry. I tried putting my cloth napkin in front of my shirt. “With a bib?”

  “Disregard any stains on your shirt,” Jane said. “Especially if the studio
owns the tux.”

  That made it a lot easier. A few other people from the studio—mostly colorless business types I’d never noticed before—were dining nearby with people I guessed to be wives and girlfriends.

  I began noticing other things: all the waiters were white men, even those who bused the tables. I’d begun noticing that kind of thing more and more over the past few days; how white a world it was that I had found myself in. So much so that African-Americans like the Warner’s bus driver and that fellow in the men’s lounge had stood out very clearly. I hadn’t seen anyone Latino or anyone Asian at all! Would it all be like this: lily white? If so, wasn’t this the period that all those Conservative Republicans in 2010 wanted our country to return to? I’m not sure why. I, for one, was already missing the other races and the “color” they brought. Good thing there were some Homos around.

  10

  By Wednesday it was established that Jane and Henry would drive Sue and me partly home to Santa Monica or Hollywood Blvd. and there we would get a trolley or bus or walk the half mile or so farther east through “Downtown Hollywood.”

  That evening we got off before her usual stop at Wilcox Avenue, as I wanted to step into the stationery shop we passed every day.

  Sue-Anne was amenable to the few blocks’ extra walk, and she actually wanted to get a “stationery mailing set” herself. This was a score of sheets of nicely lined, embossed paper, and an equal number of envelopes. One packet even had two-penny postage stamps. “I’m way behind on my correspondence,” she admitted.

  I meanwhile bought an 11x17 inch pad of fifty sheets of different unlined paper, most of it light with a few heavier vellum pieces in the back. Along with those, I bought three pencils with softer-than-number-two lead.

  As we walked on, however, we passed a bookstore, and in the windows were several books, with a sign: “Just Arrived.” The titles were Life with Father by Clarence Day, which would later become the hit movie; God’s Little Acre, by Erskine Caldwell; Taps At Reveille, a collection of stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald; and—noted as “Back in Stock”—James Hilton’s blockbuster best seller that year, Lost Horizon.

  Now, before I’d left 2010, Mr. Morgan and I had discussed the niceties of wealth amassment in the past. He’d said, “I discovered that as long as you do it discreetly, and sort of naturally, it’ll work out. If you go out on a limb and do something big because you remembered some horse that won and made a bundle, you’ll probably lose it again.”

  I’d always collected good old books. What better way to shore up my future than getting first editions of twentieth-century classics. So I pulled Sue-Anne inside the book store, to which she replied: “Who would have thought? He can sing, dance, act, and he reads too!”

  “Don’t be sassy,” I said. But she’d already begun to blush at her outburst.

  She bought books she was “dying to read” by Edna Ferber and Helene Vardis. Helene who?

  I walked out with seven, count them seven, first editions, with a plan to return the next time I got paid and buy another seven. I did not get the Caldwell, and the Hilton in the store I scorned as merely a second edition. But I did pick up the other three in the window, as well as Faulkner’s Pylon, Tortilla Flat by the still unknown John Steinbeck, Hemingway’s reportage in The Green Hills of Africa, and Thornton Wilder’s Heaven’s My Destination. They were each wrapped separately in brown paper, and then wrapped together in brown paper, and all of it was tied together with string that I could hold it by. Total cost: $8.60!

  Before I was done that month, I’d gotten copies myself first editions of Studs Lonigan, T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, Lost Horizon, and Goodbye Mr. Chips, as well as a first edition of Fitzgerald’s All the Sad Young Men and a copy they managed to scare up in the stockroom of the first printing of Tender Is the Night. Also two of Faulkner’s older titles, Sanctuary and Light in August. And to top that off, Burrough’s Tarzan and the Leopard Men and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, all brand new. But it was another new title, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, that would have a bigger impact on me when I finally read it. It was a fantasy about what was going on in Germany and how something like National Socialism might also happen in the U.S.

  “The mystery deepens! Junior turns out to be a scholar!” my roommate declared, and I knew Hank would tell the others soon.

  I’d swept my books into a cardboard carton, kept on the floor by the bed, and I moved the floor lamp away from the door so I could read in bed. But after a few days I found Hank reading the Tarzan book, as well as copies of Black Mask, Amazing—with stories by Del Rey and Campbell—and Weird Tales that I’d bought at the local magazine and newspaper shop. The latter sported Margaret Brundage’s amazing illustrations. Those too would eventually become valuable collector’s items.

  I left the pad I’d bought open with a pencil whenever I wasn’t there because my next victim had already shown himself to me clearly. Not only did Hank Streit carve things out of wood, he also drew things upon any piece of paper that came his way. Using a little stub of a lousy pencil, he’d drawn on napkins from diners that he’d stuff in his jacket pocket, on light-colored or white magazine and catalogue covers; upon anything and everything. What he drew was even better than what he carved: futuristic cars, trucks, busses, trains, houses, buildings, stadiums, skyscrapers, his own versions of the Hollywood Bowl; his own versions of the new Bullock’s department store. He also drew façades and interiors. Some detailed a corner or a cornice or a flower box. He threw away most of what he drew—but I retrieved it and kept it.

  By the end of the second week at MGM, I had a handful of those drawings and the pad I’d left around, which he had sketched in just as I’d hoped he would, filling all but one or two leaves. That morning, I carried the lot of it to work in a paper bag.

  During lunch break I approached the second director, asking who I could show the drawings to.

  “Bring it to Design. I’m going right past there now. I’ll give you a lift.”

  At the rear of the big design building atelier was a long desk, and I laid out all of the pieces I had, and then two fellows working there came by, curious.

  “Not bad. You do this?”

  “My roommate.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Where’s he?”

  “He also carves wood beautifully into little sculptures.” I pulled out the “futuristic Ford coupe” he’d given me and showed it around. “And he’s done carpentry. His family runs a lumber mill. Woodworking is in his blood.” I knew most art direction models in the studio were wooden carvings.

  “Where. Is. He?” a tall pale, gray haired man with thick-lensed glasses very pointedly asked.

  “Not here. Not yet.”

  “Then get him here!” he ordered.

  “Is tomorrow morning okay?”

  “Faster the better. We’re doing twenty percent more sets and models this year than last year. We’re perpetually short of help.”

  “How do I get him into the studio?”

  “The kid needs a hall pass?” one artist quipped.

  “Shut up,” the tall guy barked and went to his table and tore off a piece of MGM stationery. He wrote on top. Appointment. Design. Ten a.m. for— “What’s his name?”

  “Hank Streit. Eee, eye, tee.”

  “Give him this. It’ll get him in.”

  The stationery’s embossed staff read, Owen Barclay—Sets/Art.

  When I showed that to Hank that night and told him what happened, he looked at me in astonishment.

  “Geez, Chris. I’m not good enough for a job like that.”

  “Well, then you will hear that you are not good enough for a job like that in person! Because I made an appointment for you! You are coming with us tomorrow morning. Like it or not.”

  I dressed him the next day and Hank tried to weasel out of coming three different ways and then he argued with me all the way to Wilcox off Fountain, where we w
ould pick up Sue-Ann. When she stepped out of the hotel he quieted down immediately.

  I introduced them, and Sue-Anne, bless her, said, “Everyone loves your drawings, Mr. Streit! It’ll be wonderful if we’re all working together at MGM, won’t it?”

  She flounced on ahead, going to mail a letter.

  Hank stared after her, unbelieving.

  “Coming, Da Vinci?” I asked Hank as I caught up with her.

  Hank was waiting for us outside the soundstage when we broke for lunch some hours later. We invited him to join us at the commissary.

  Sue-Ann flirted with him. He said almost nothing. She pretended he was responding in depth and range. Soon enough I felt de trop and I left them alone. After she’d gone into the “ladies” to clean up, Hank said to me: “Jonah was right.”

  “I fall into chocolate pudding, huh?”

  “Chocolate pudding is right. Moxie is right. Luck is right. All of it is right.”

  “What’s that in your hand?” I asked.

  I took and read. Temporary, free-lance contractor’s agreement.

  “Were you ever going to tell me that Barclay showed some sense and hired you?!”

  “It’s only temporary, and I’m not going to be able to do all that design,” Hank argued.

  “You’d better!” I threatened. “My reputation in this joint is on the line.”

  The assistant director was going past the studio’s main office and I asked him to take Hank to Personnel to have his contract notarized and signed so his salary would be set up correctly. I was beginning to learn the studio ropes.

  “We’ll be leaving around three o’clock today,” I told Hank. “Why not stick around a while and we’ll all leave together? Including Sue-Ann.”

  Hank mumbled some reply for why he couldn’t possibly join us, but I just walked away without listening. And he was there, at 3:21, when we exited. He even had a “temporary employee” decal on a card pinned to his lapel.