20th Century Un-limited

by Felice Picano

  “Oh isn’t that wonderful,” Sue-Anne said when she saw the card. “Isn’t it wonderful, Chris?”

  Hank turned about ten shades of red from carnation pink to magenta in that many seconds. I knew I’d lost him as a potential boyfriend, stupid me. But then, I’d always suspected he’d been hiding the fact that he was a flaming hetero anyway.

  11

  The party house was one that Billy Haines was renting while Paul Feher added to his famous Stanley Ave. home murals. This was a big ranch set on a large corner property several streets away from what would soon be the extension and the guest cottages of the Beverly Hills Hotel. There were already a dozen cars parked around the property when we arrived; eventually there would be twenty-five or more.

  The double front door was wide open when our director, William Seiter, and I entered together. I had told him I was invited and he had declared, “You are not going into their home alone.” Fine with me.

  The interior was wide open on both sides of the foyer with what looked like two living rooms, already filled with people. Music from a phonograph was playing on one side—was that Jolson singing?— and on the other side, people were at the piano singing and fooling around.

  I knew that Haines would soon become a decorator full-time and that his boyfriend Jimmie Shields already was one, but this pared-down décor was hardly the grand, Graeco-Roman with spots of Chinoiserie style they’d become known for. Here was natural stone, colored wood, and light-colored upholstery: the SoCal Ranch style.

  I also noticed that there were three men for every woman, and the latter tended to be in single among a group of men.

  “Don’t wander too far,” Seiter warned. “You shouldn’t even be here tonight.”

  “I was in the Merchant Marines,” I lied, glibly. “Remember? I think I can handle myself.”

  “It’s not you I’m worried about. It’s your reputation… Hi, George. This is George Cukor, the highest paid movie director in Hollywood,” Seiter added, chugging the long arm of a man with oddly shaped, curly black hair, wearing a tan sweater over brown slacks and smoking a cigarette in a long amber holder. Another known Homo I already knew. “He’s hot as hell now, thanks to his hit movie made from—of all the books you didn’t read in high school, David Copperfield!”

  Seiter introduced me: “This brat is Christopher Hall, who is actually thirty years older than he looks.”

  I spied our host, Billy Haines, sitting on the counter bar between one living room and what must have been a serving pantry. He was wearing a strange short-brimmed hat with bright blue ribbon around it maybe two-thirds of its height, showing it off. Seiter went toward that group.

  “Supposedly all the rage, in New York,” Cukor said with a soigné accent. “A Pugaree hat. Who did you say was your lover, Mr. Hall?”

  “Mahatma Gandhi.”

  “I see you aim high. But isn’t Gandhi celibate?”

  “Would you be celibate if you were my boyfriend?” I asked back.

  “Point taken.”

  Thom Rafferty arrived where we stood, holding drinks.

  I sniffed. “Could they afford the gin?”

  “They easily could. You, however, cannot. George, I see you’ve met our newest addition?”

  “Mr. Hall was describing various postures from the Kama Sutra to me,” Cukor said in a bald-faced lie.

  Rafferty looked perplexed. Like most people in ’35, he’d never heard of the Indian book of amatory postures.

  “I was pointing out to Mr. Cukor,” I added, “that most of those erotic maneuvers require the attendance of a small water buffalo and a liter of clarified butter.”

  “Sounds like you’re already friends!” Seiter said, rejoining us.

  “We might be,” Cukor said, extending a languid hand for me to shake. “But I think I’d have to get up a great deal earlier in the morning to stump this lad.” He smiled a sort of downcast smile and looked at me suddenly, and then bent down and to one side of me. “Now, that’s a good angle for this one, Willy. Look!”

  Seiter joined him bending down and they had me move my head to one side an inch and then had me turn my body an inch, going “Ah!” and “Even better!”

  When he moved away Cukor said to me, “Aufwiedersehn, schatzlein! I’ll see you in the movies!”

  “Au revoir!” I replied.

  “Hold still, Chris,” Seiter said. “Look at him now, Thom.”

  “I do see.”

  “Gosh, I wish I had Cukor’s eyes,” Seiter said. “He can see 360 degrees and top and bottom too, all at the same time.”

  “I’ll say. Can you use that angle later?” Rafferty asked.

  “I thought in the letter scene!” Seiter mused.

  “What letter scene?” I asked.

  But no one answered me, and they went on talking, so I wandered off to the piano and then to the library, inspecting their bookshelves.

  No one else I.Q.-tested me. I did meet a great many people and spoke with them and I would let Seiter and Rafferty talk about me—and Sue-Anne. If neither of them added her name, I invariably did. Leave ’em guessing.

  Crawford arrived with two fellows, both of who looked big, straight, horny, and half-drunk. Robert Taylor arrived, looking more stunning than on the screen with a so-so pretty girl on his arm who was more interested in him than he was in her. He looked me over very carefully indeed, and I found myself more or less striking poses back for his greater edification: lots of poses; everything short of Madonna’s Vogue video. But Taylor remained with his date and left with her after only fifteen minutes or so.

  “What was that all about?” I asked Jimmie Shields, who had caught most of it.

  “Difficult to say. He might have been sizing up the competition.”

  “Yeah, right! He’s a foot taller!”

  “Not quite. Cukey says you’re a great wit, for one so young.”

  “I’m just good at the art of the riposte.”

  “An art not to be sneezed at, Christopher, is it? Great name! Now you’re going to spoil everything and tell me it’s real.”

  “As a matter of fa—”

  “Oh!” Shields’s attention flew to the front door. “And here. At last. Is—Archie!”

  “Archie” was Cary Grant. Outside the still-ajar double doors I could see someone else hurrying up the entry pathway behind him, even taller, blond, with a perfectly gorgeous tanned face and smashing pale blue eyes.

  Shields and “Arch” hugged and bussed each other.

  “Where’s the new meat?” Grant asked in his characteristically deep growly voice. “Oh, my! I didn’t see you there!” he said to me in a much higher voice.

  “Christopher Hall,” Jimmie intro’ed me. “Real name. New at MGM. And as brand new as new meat ever gets around here.”

  Grant had fixed his amazingly large, dark eyes upon me, in some kind of pre-hypnotic gaze, when I moved aside a bit, enough to see my all-time idol while growing up, his buddy and no doubt his date tonight too, Randolph Scott, just lightly holding on to Grant’s linen-jacketed shoulder while saying hello to other people.

  “Hi!” Scott said, and I reached past Grant for his big hand with its little thicket of blond hair and I almost wouldn’t let go.

  “But…he’s a child!” Grant made a big act of pushing me aside. “Don’tcha know, Jimmie, children always steal scenes from you.”

  “Not from Fields they don’t,” I said.

  “He’s got you there, Arch.”

  “Yes, yes,” Grant explained carefully to us all, “but I’d have to grow at least three more inches to my nose.” He drew his own out with two fingers, overillustrating his idea, overacting the entire bit, in fact, and I remembered he’d been a vaudeville star first: a clown.

  “You’ve got a wonderful nose. Don’t touch it,” Jimmie said. “Right, Rand?”

  “Right,” Scott answered, distracted. “Where’s the bar? We drove from the beach with the top down and I’m parched.”

  I joined them at the bar a
nd Seiter arrived to re-introduce me.

  “See,” I said mostly to Scott, “I’m a grown-up. Anyway, I’d never dream of competing with you. Either of you,” I said, I thought more to Scott.

  Grant, however, answered. “We can’t be too careful,” enumerating: “Jackie Coogan. Jackie Cooper. And now that escapee from a crib, what’s her name, Rand? Oh yes! Shirley Temple! They’re all taking money out of our pockets with both hands.”

  A half hour later the party was in full swing. I’d ended up near the doors because all the cigar and cigarette smoke was so thick that it was choking me. No one smoked in L.A. in 2010 or if so only outside, on the streets. Then Haines closed those doors. He explained why: “The neighbors! The noise!” So I ended up stepping outside the back door, where I’d seen people going before.

  The rear of the single-story house showed the shallow vee of the two wings on either side of the big back lawn, with its rectangular, white stone terrace and twisted metal, white wrought-iron lawn furniture, and big rectangular swimming pool. Beyond it, in the shadows of the trees over and behind, stood a pool house with hanging curtains of interpolated panels of patterned satin and pleated gauze material, all of them shivering in the light breeze.

  It was one of those uncharacteristically warm spring L.A. nights in which the fog hung low to the ground, but above it the stars were all out, and because the place was so much less populated than seventy-five years later, I could see a great many stars and could even recognize constellations.

  I popped into a chair and put my feet up onto a low, wrought-iron table and for a minute or two I stopped and just absorbed it all: the night, the laughter from inside, the music, the handsome movie stars, the cats going at it in some nearby alleyway. Barely a whoosh of auto traffic, and no decibel-drenched helicopters chugging by, two by two, headed to a car chase on the upper 405.

  There was noise behind me and I turned to see a young bartender setting up an outdoors bar. He kept coming and going indoors with glasses and bottles. Evidently this wouldn’t bother the neighbors.

  Once when he was indoors and I was alone, I heard what I thought was a groan and then two voices from another direction.

  I stood and followed the sounds: around the side of the pool.

  There was a streetlight that periodically and only a little lighted the pool house’s evidently open, deep interior, but with the breeze and the trees and the curtains all moving, I had to stand very still in the right place to see anything at all.

  Then I did see a glint, then I saw the glint again, and then I realized that I was looking at a hand with a big ring on it. But the hand was curved around something dark. I started hearing groans again, a lot more regularly, and I edged forward more, and now I saw it was curved around the figure of a man wearing a lighter shirt and darker pants, and two hands were placed, gripped really, around those pants at hip level. And then I recognized the ring as Thom Rafferty’s fat silver high school ring, with a big shiny sapphire in the middle.

  Very quickly now, the fellow standing gave the characteristic moan of someone trying to keep an orgasm from getting too loud, and his figure shook, visibly shook. Then the ring was gone, the hands were gone, and there was a laugh, a word spoken low, and the man standing turned and raced around the pool and into the house, almost crashing into the bartender, who was coming out with a bucket of ice.

  I tried moving back, but Rafferty seemed utterly unfazed that I’d caught him, as it were, in flagrante. I’d vaguely recognized the other fellow from the party.

  “And there you are,” Thom said.

  So I played it utterly blasé myself. “And there you are, too.”

  He moved us toward the bar.

  “I thought you’d be here with Billy Bartlett?” I said. The bartender was forlornly gazing inside through the angled, cottage-crossed panes of the kitchen windows to where the party was happening. Thom tapped on the table and ordered for the two of us, directing him to “make the second one weaker.”

  While Haines’s outdoor bartender was bent down looking for limes, I straightened out Rafferty’s collar.

  “Lipstick on your collar told a tale on you!”

  “What did you say?”

  “Or in this case, semen on your collar. An old song,” I said, though it wouldn’t be written for twenty years, then to be sung by Connie Francis. “We were talking about Billy Bart…”

  Rafferty moved me away from the bar. When we reached the other side of the pool, we sat and he said in a hoarse whisper, “Billy is over!”

  I was processing that statement when he added, “Billy made a large tactical error…”

  “Don’t stop now,” I prodded.

  “…when he had Henry and Jane moved to the back line.”

  “Why? Did her rich uncle kick up a fuss?”

  “Oh, no. It’s better than that,” Rafferty said, enjoying himself and tasting his drink. “We’ve been looking at rushes for the past two nights.”

  “‘You’ meaning, ‘you fellows in the suits’?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And?”

  “And Bartlett looks bad. Six o’ clock shadow even through the makeup. Looks thirty. Dances like a whale. Milly looks skinnier than Olive Oyl. She dances like a wounded elephant.”

  “Oh no! Don’t tell me they’re shutting down the movie and canning us all?”

  “Not quite, sweet Christopher Hall. Because guess who does look good—well, better than good. Guess who can dance or at least fake dancing well enough? Guess who looks like a half-pint Ginger Rogers? And guess who else looks like a baby John Gilbert with legs? That’s right, Sweet Sue-Anne, and Dapper Dan himself.”

  “Surely you jest!”

  I was hoping he’d say “don’t call me Shirley,” but that movie was forty years to come. Instead he said, “The camera loves you two. It loves her. It ah-dores you! It’s undeniable. So…We’ll finish this film, and we’ll juice up your two parts with a new scene or two or three and we’ll cut Billy and Milly’s parts back a scene or two or four. Thus getting audiences ready for—ta dum!—Schiller and Hall in the next: who knows what the next teen stupidity to come out of our Scripts department will be titled?”

  This explained “the letter scene” Seiter and Rafferty had mentioned, for which Cukor had just given my director the lighting cues. Evidently one of the new scenes I or Sue-Anne and I would be shooting.

  I wanted to say, but wait a minute, this shouldn’t be happening! Because in 2010, Sue-Ann Schiller and Christopher Hall are not a name. Not a team. They are not anybody in movie history.

  Instead I said, “Does Billy Bartlett know any of this yet?”

  “No-oo! Seiter will film all their scenes, and then film all your new scenes without Billy’s knowledge, and then Seiter and I and the editor will make the new film in the cutting room.”

  Shark in sharkskin all right!

  “So, Billy will know when?” I asked. “At the premiere?”

  “If he’s invited,” Rafferty said, and I thought, ice water in the veins.

  But it did explain something: why Thom Rafferty, who clearly was attracted to me, didn’t make anything like a move on me. Someone—not Frances, but someone at the studio—had said “lay off this one, Raff.” And Thom knew where his bread was buttered.

  I clinked my glass against his and said, “Well! This has been most informative, Mr. Rafferty. I’m awfully glad I came tonight.”

  “You’re taking this bit of subterfuge rather well, Christopher. What are you going to do,” he asked, “now that you know?”

  “Me? Not a thing,” I made big innocent eyes at him. “I’m just a Tool of Fate.”

  “Well, and maybe a Tool of Marketing?”

  “A Tool of Fate and a Tool of Marketing,” I added. “The one problem I will have to deal with at some point will be with Saint Susan-Anne of Miss Irene’s Hotel for Women, who will fall over herself weeping and geschrei-ing alongside the victims of this particularly backhanded, if rather spectacular if
I do say so myself, purge!”

  “She’ll care? She’s the genuine item?” he asked.

  “She is completely so. She is a doll. While I…well, let’s just say I’ve been around.”

  “Don’t tell me your stint in the Merchant Marines prepared you for this sort of thing?” Rafferty said.

  “Thom, I don’t think being in Caligula Caesar’s palace court would have prepared me for this sort of Byzantine plotting.”

  He laughed. “You’ll do all right, kid. Because you don’t take any of it that seriously.”

  “Just show me the money, honey!” I said and cracked up.

  As we entered the house through a back door and darkened little mudroom, he moved in quickly and bussed my cheek.

  “First and last time,” he said. “So I can say I was the first one. Because, Christopher Hall, you’re going to be a star!”

  12

  Two days later I had left Jonah in the lobby of the Alsop reading a copy of Popular Mechanics when we all returned from Anderson’s Diner, but he was already gone when I got back down there not five minutes later. Sid and Ducky, Jonah’s roommate, had no idea where he’d gone.

  “Where does he go all day?” I asked.

  “Beats me!” Ducky said.

  “Don’t look at me!” Sid replied, aggrieved.

  Pops chose that moment to inform us that room number 225 was moving out and there would be a full room empty at the end of the week. Did any of us want it?

  “You two have been waiting longer than me,” I pointed out.

  “Not this month, Pops,” Sid said, holding out empty trouser pockets. Ducky said the same.

  “Hank is working now. Do you think he’d mind if I moved out?”

  “Ask him,” Sid suggested.

  “Pops, can you hold that room a day for me?” I asked.

  “Sure, kid.”

  “By next month I’ll be able to afford my own too,” Ducky said. “If the Bulldogs keep me in training.”

  We both assured Ducky that they’d keep him in training.