What Movies Made Me Do

by Susan Braudy

  I wondered if she ever found herself in a hotel room with men who reminded her of her girlfriends’ fathers or her own. Or did they resemble boys back home? Didn’t she miss necking in the back seat of cars? How many men had she been with? Did she make them wash each time? Did she keep a record? How long had she been at it? The strange colognes and sweats would make me gag.

  Right after my marriage broke up I got into purposeless sexual encounters with new men. I hadn’t had to work hard. I pumped my pelvis, I kept breathing heavily. We believed or pretended to believe we could have relationships. But this girl was not pretending in that area. Did she fake passion when she kissed strange men?

  Two weeks after I saw her, I was eating my daily tuna fish sandwich on toast and yelling into the phone at a literary agent who wanted too much studio money for a great screenplay about a spy at a secret Yale society. My secretary had quit and I was frantically interviewing candidates from the personnel office.

  But I was in a great mood because Barry and I had made up a silly fight and taken a tour of the new computer room at his Princeton lab. Spread on my knees were résumés, memos, incoming calls, and half of the sandwich.

  When she waltzed in, I knocked everything off my lap. Paper flew over the rug. She leapt down and gathered it up with one sweep of her arms. I felt sorry for her sake that I’d recognized her.

  She dropped the pile of skewed pages on my knees. I pulled the sandwich out.

  Her mouth curled up at one corner and she winked a blue eye at me. “Lunchtime?” She poked at one of my fat roses in the old oriental vase, causing a shower of petals. She looked very clean without rouge. She had the kind of broad cheekbones and high forehead above a small Wasp nose that could easily be transformed in six years’ time into one of those hostess faces on the society pages.

  But she was on a different track. I knew she was a rebel.

  “You’re lucky to work here,” she said, walking securely on flat navy shoes to the windows. I punched a blinking line. “Sit down.” I was reading her résumé and cradling the telephone at my neck. The chairman of the parent company was inviting me to a press meeting to discuss a Christmas release date for the Jesus film. The page said her name was Rosemary Lund, born in a suburb of St. Paul, age twenty, one year at the University of Minnesota and one year at a secretarial school. She had worked two summers on a fishing boat in Lake Michigan. Her interests were movies and running and animals and cooking.

  A rubber stamp and initials showed the personnel office had verified education, employment claims, and addresses. I kept my eyes on the page. Suddenly my curiosity felt prurient. Why did I want to know about women who push further than I do? Why do I want to understand how free a woman can be before she crosses a line and hits real danger?

  “How long you been in the city?”

  “Two and a half weeks,” came the sweet-child voice.

  Her arms were crossed in front of her chest, a headband restrained her bright hair. She was wearing a navy dress with a little navy overjacket buttoned up to the white collar. She had perfect lined-up girl teeth, white suburban American pearls, the kind that cost a fortune in milk and cheese products.

  “You like New York?”

  “It’s better than home.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “More stuff going on.”

  One of Hogarth’s sketches of a deformed prostitute with blackened teeth flashed through my mind. I hung up the phone. “What do your parents say about you coming to New York?”

  She shrugged again. “Nothing.”

  “They know you’re here?”

  “Sure,” she said, and looked intense.

  “What’s your father do?”

  “Vet.”

  “Pets?”

  “He used to do farm animals, but our town’s suburbs now.”

  “Your mom?”

  “She does his appointments and she gardens.”

  I was feeling dizzy. “Please close the door,” I said. I couldn’t think of one person who’d approve of hiring an aspiring baby hooker as an executive secretary.

  She swaggered across the silver-and-blue dragon on my rug and turned the doorknob. “You must make a lot of money,” she said wistfully.

  “That’s between me and my supervisor.” I smiled to show there were no hard feelings.

  “Who’s that?”

  “The studio president.”

  “His office got this view?”

  “His office is in Burbank.”

  “Is that in New Jersey?”

  “California.”

  “Oh, wow, far away, hey?” A midwestern kid locution that touched me.

  I gave her a giddy grin and I decided to hire her. It wasn’t just her salvation, it was mine. I give money to an Israeli hospital, I donate blood twice a year. I help a network of friends and they love me back, but my life wasn’t exactly good works. In New York and especially in the film business, relationships are mutually exploitative.

  I wanted the job of saving this strapping midwestern girl. I was feeling crazy. I never had any children. I would have had to give birth at nineteen to be her mother. I was picturing a deathbed scene, a summing-up, when I might die a little easier because I had adopted her. My life would have had more sharing. It was not an average morning and it made me weepy.

  I stood up; pages fell again. She leapt for them, arranging a stack next to me on the couch. I had a purely practical thought. My former secretary had been rich and disloyal. If I rescued this girl, she would be loyal to me.

  I sat back down. She pushed her knees together and sat down slowly opposite me, on the edge of the black Eames lounge chair.

  “What about a job?” I asked.

  “Sure.” She had her hands folded on her knee. She was looking out the windows. “I want the job a lot.”

  “First you see this doctor.” I was pawing around in my shoulder bag.

  The girl was as tall as me, nearly five feet nine and big-boned. I looked into her eyes, blue eyes, almost albino. She looked so helpless I wanted to weep for her. I wished I was that innocent. I could see clear through her pale eyes. Like nobody in my family. We are brown-eyed, full-lipped, with strong dark hair. I was afraid I was losing my marbles, dropping papers and making secret adoptions. But I would never have a real hospital scene surrounded by proud relatives, and suddenly I didn’t mind.

  “You sign a paper promising me things,” I said formally. She was folding my doctor’s embossed card over and over. “You take money only from this company, and a major part of your job will be to represent us as a great place to work.”

  “Why do I have to sign?”

  “A secretary guards her boss’s secrets and makes the boss look good.” She looked questioning. I leaned forward. “Show business beats hooking.”

  Her head jerked.

  I started counting the fingers on one hand. “No diseases,” I said, “and you’re invited to parties because you answer phone calls from movie stars. You get pushed around, but your life is private. You make three times what a secretary makes on Wall Street. You brag to your parents about seeing unreleased movies. Someday you could even help make a movie you believe in.”

  “Who told you?” She was blinking down at my sneakers in a daze.

  “I saw you sidling down Central Park South.”

  “I don’t sidle,” she said.

  “How long were you at it?”

  “Two cruddy nights.” Her round face flooded with blood. It was the appropriate modest response, about sixty seconds too late. Not a hopeless case.

  “Those shoes were a disaster,” she said, and then came a squeaky chuckle. She pulled off one navy pump and I saw a Band-Aid on her big toe.

  “Why did you do it?”

  She raised her hands and her eyebrows helplessly. “I saw Jane Fonda in Klute.”

  “What do you want to be in five years?”

  “I don’t want to be an actress; they just sit around in trailers.” She giggled nervously. �
�I want to learn how to make movies.”

  “It’s not easy.”

  “I get the picture.” She looked directly at me, her hands on her hips, elbows out, like a jock. “I’m not that dumb.”

  “You’re not?” I raised both eyebrows. “You were selling yourself pretty cheap.”

  “I was asking three hundred dollars,” she almost shouted.

  “How many hundred?”

  She traced the carpet with the round toe of her shoe. “What if I wasn’t?”

  “People come to this city to sell things. They get rich, they get by, they have a great time, or they go home. It’s stupid to sell everything for so little.”

  She bit down over her lower lip. “Sex isn’t such a big deal,” she said.

  At her age, I said the same thing, but for different reasons. I had necked with one boy and I was going to marry him.

  “You’re too young to know,” I said, struggling for some kind logic. “Your sex life will be fine if you pep down. You may marry some sweet guy who’ll get you aspirin in the middle of the night and keep your secrets and support you. Or you live on your own, maybe have a boyfriend who listens to you and who hasn’t promised to take care of you if you get sick and poor but he hugs you and loves you and you live your own life in a way only really rich women did in the past.”

  “You married?”

  “Divorced.”

  “You happy about things?” she asked defensively.

  “Pretty much.” I thought about how I tell bedtime stories to Barry’s youngest boy—but I only get to see him on holidays. He has Barry’s brown eyes.

  “I don’t want to be scared,” she said sadly.

  I had reached her.

  “Four hundred a week to start,” I said, “but you get typing skills in five weeks or you’re out. With typing you get another fifty a week. And you’ve got no job security.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You have to be polite, and have a helpful attitude, and it’ll be fine.” I smiled and glanced at my watch. “I got work to do.”

  She was frowning, her pale eyes almost closed, she was listening so intently. She began buttoning her coat. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “Beats me.” She was twisting her mouth from side to side. “You’re so square.”

  “Not that square.”

  “Why, then?” she asked.

  “Because I don’t understand you,” I said slowly, “but I once tried to break some rules and I wish somebody had helped me out. People have to help each other out or else things get dumb.”

  She was as embarrassed as I was. Both of us just stared at the huge white screen at the other end of the office.

  Afterward she went to school at night for three months to improve her typing. I made the company pay. I am strict. She was supposed to wear stockings if she wore skirts. She was forbidden to use street slang. She wasn’t supposed to drink at our evening screening parties, especially after she was written up in a gossip column after her first one. She’d put pink peonies in a vase, set up the bar, welcomed guests, and slugged back three warm vodkas in the first hour. I was speechless for a full minute after she threw her arms around a man in his seventies who had been a production assistant on Gone With the Wind. “You work in Hollywood?” she asked him. “You got a casting couch? You’re my kind of guy. I’m going to be famous.”

  One morning last month I was making the turn down my corridor, waving and smiling, when a stream of eager chatter wafted from Rosemary’s office. It wasn’t like her to idle away time. She had notes to type from my combative late-night meeting with a screenwriter who wanted to remake How to Marry a Millionaire.

  I brushed past a short gentleman with fat cheeks and thin red hair who was settled in Rosemary’s spare leather chair. I stuck out my hand. He wore gold spectacles over huge swimming blue eyes and a green plaid suit.

  “Meet my dad.” Rosemary’s eyelids dropped and her face was full of color.

  I clapped my hand over my mouth. “God, I thought you were my first meeting, excuse me.”

  He smoothed the felt hat on his head and said, “I’m in the way.”

  “No, please, Dr. Lund. Are you visiting long?” No way I could tell him Rosemary was my fantasy kid. Nobody in their right mind would say look, Dr. Lund, I never gave birth, so I sort of adopted your daughter. I brought her Tylenol and a sandwich when she twisted her foot running and had to stay home. I helped her shop for her first good silk shirtwaist dress to wear to screenings. I picked out the floral curtain material for her bedroom. I am proud of her. She has introduced me to a boy, a bearded medical student who doesn’t have her zest, but he does have, she tells me, a very high IQ.

  “You out running your dog this morning?” he asked. “I hear he’s real frisky.”

  “Yeah, but he’d do better in the country,” I said apologetically.

  Then I had a flash of something like competition. I had done a damn good job of maternal caring for Rosemary. He was thin-lipped, a Methodist, I imagined, and he probably believed Rosemary was working for the devil: a divorced woman with no household except a dog, no front yard for the dog, and in the movie business.

  “Rosie tells me you know Cary Grant,” he continued. I recognized the long midwestern vowels that sounded like the words were reluctant to get out of his mouth.

  “Not really.”

  “She does,” Rosemary said proudly, “she gets calls on the telephone.”

  “Business calls.”

  “You won an award from The Wall Street Journal.” He nodded proudly to Rosemary. “She sent on the article.”

  “That’s nice.” I felt a warmth from him, and pictured myself leaning over to hug his neck. Rosemary was holding her forehead. “Dad, come on, she knows what she’s won.”

  “She told me she helped out with new calves,” I said.

  He glowed. “Well, not so much anymore, but I remember days when she stayed with me till dark. That was before they started building tract houses on the farms. Remember, Rosie?”

  “Right,” she said sharply.

  “Your family come up much from Philadelphia?” he asked me.

  “No, not much.”

  “More lively for you here in New York”—he looked at her out of the corner of his eyes—“but harder on them.”

  “When did you get into town?” I asked him softly.

  “Last night. Mother and I are on our way to see some cousins back in Oslo, and I wanted to surprise our Rosemary.”

  “It’s nice you could come,” I said. “Rosemary, go on, take your father out for lunch.”

  She hit a few keys of her typewriter. “Well, I got lots to do, Dad, maybe later on.”

  “No, no,” I said, “you go.”

  He crossed his legs and looked me full in the face. “This child, now she’s always been something.”

  “The shy retiring type,” I said dryly. He and I exchanged quick nervous smiles. I bet he was more comfortable with animals.

  “Both of you better knock it off,” she said.

  He shifted in the chair. “Not that she didn’t have potential.”

  I was beginning to get a pleasant flush around my shoulders.

  “We appreciate your—” he began.

  “I’m sitting here”—she smacked the keyboard of her typewriter—“and you guys are talking like I’m in the Bronx.”

  “Sorry, Rosie,” he said. “But I promised Mother to thank this lady for giving you this opportunity.”

  I grinned at them. “Rosemary does a good job,” I said slowly. By now her face was beet red, except for the high golden white skin of her forehead, giving the impression of a round ripe peach. Her eyes darted at me.

  “Of course, we’re working on the chewing gum,” I added.

  Her father shook his head. “Girls in offices don’t chew gum.”

  She chortled. “She chews it herself.”

  “Not in front of my boss.” I tried to stop grinni
ng at her dad. “I’m happy to meet you.” I was happy even though I’d never get to ask him questions about whether her kindergarten teacher liked her, and how she picked fights as an adolescent. I knew Rosemary had turned a sharp corner and her family realized it.

  Rosemary swiveled around. “Hot water with lemon and bran muffin on the sofa.”

  Her dad pinched the rim of his green hat. I had to ask him. “Does she take after you?”

  “Well, my wife and I hoped she’d teach Sunday school like her mother, but Rosemary never sat still.” He folded his hands. “I guess we raised her by the book.”

  I stared at his fingers, touched by the feeling in his voice.

  “What book is that?” she asked, her voice trembling with arrogance and something underneath that was much more vulnerable.

  “The Good Book,” her father answered. He looked from me to her and back. “She ever say how she ran away from a strict Christian home?”

  Rosemary looked stricken.

  “She didn’t have to.”

  “We were too hard on her,” he said, pulling his legs back so I could walk by him, “but it was all we knew.”

  Three

  Sound track ringing telephones, speeded camera tight on growing heap of cardboard coffee cups.

  It was almost noon. I was drinking too much coffee and dictating a budget memo to my boss about Anita’s all-night shooting when Rosemary grabbed my blinking private line and started speaking to an operator loud and slow. I knew it was Israel. “She’s just down the hall,” Rosemary said before she covered the receiver and thrust it at me. “Paul Riley,” she hissed.

  My stomach felt like somebody stuck pins in it. Paul, our production manager, would know what was really going on. I flew to North Africa with him and Anita to scout desert locations. He wore black tee shirts with the sleeves rolled up to show off his muscles, and he complained constantly about his alimony payments and his women problems, but he had put twenty movies in the can.

  “Where is she?” I didn’t have to ask why he hadn’t reported her; Anita had gotten to him with her fancy artistic passion. He probably loved the way she cursed like one of the guys and treated him like a coy geisha.