“Mr. Wilkie,” said Leon with a tight jaw.
“What’s wrong with Melvin Grant?” asked Florence. “He’s been your attorney for eons.”
Leon did not reply. I too said nothing, though I knew very well why Julia chose someone else to represent her interests. Melvin Grant would protect Leon even if it meant protecting Denise Dell as well.
Our driver stopped in front of a dingy, four-story building. The street was packed with big cars illegally parked, and uniformed chauffeurs who stood by their vehicles, smoking. “We must be late,” Gordon remarked. “It looks like everyone else is here.”
“Well, they can’t start without us, can they?” asked Leon.
We stepped out, evading winos who sidled up, panhandling, though they retreated when Leon exited the Bentley. Leon has always exuded authority with his erect, even regal carriage, broad brow, horn-rimmed glasses, his ring of wiry gray hair, and his elegant suits. We walked single file to the door, gingerly sidestepping wads of snot, old chewing gum, and cigarette butts. Florence and Irene pulled their fur coats close at the throat. I hate fur coats; I’m too young to be taxidermied. But like everyone else, I’m wearing unadorned black—black coat, black Dior suit, black gloves, black hat and handbag.
At the elevator an old Negro slid aside the metal grille. “Goin’ to Mr. Wilkie’s office, yes? All you fine folks goin’ there today,” he said as he punched the buttons with knobby, arthritic fingers. He stopped at the fourth floor and pointed to a door that read Arthur Wilkie, Attorney at Law.
Mr. Wilkie’s secretary, a withered woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Wilkie, greeted us at the door and offered to take our coats, but we all declined. She asked if we wanted coffee or tea, and we declined. She led us down a dirty hall to a conference room where the ghosts of a hundred thousand cigarette butts lingered and dust motes caught the morning light. We were seated at a long table where places had been reserved for the six of us. I knew, or recognized, most of these over-upholstered ladies and gentlemen from Los Angeles arts foundations Julia had long supported. I certainly did not know the five well-dressed Negroes, though I had seen them at the funeral. They all sat together, their faces dark masks of discretion. Beside the old gent in the wheelchair was the man who had thought to bring the umbrella. He was not wearing sunglasses today. His face was so beautifully sculpted it ought to have been on a medallion. He and I were the youngest people here and our eyes met briefly before everyone turned their gaze to Mr. Wilkie, who began with conventional condolences.
Mr. Wilkie was small, disheveled, nervous, the carnation in his lapel the more pathetic for its being so wilted. Speaking in a high-pitched, hurried voice, not the sort to instill confidence, he rattled over as much background as was necessary for people to understand Mrs. Greene’s estate. Before she left for Paris she had taken steps to untangle many of her own assets from those of her husband. “Her interest in Empire Pictures, the house at Summit Drive, and other properties held in common with Mr. Greene, the house at Tahoe, the Malibu—”
Leon coughed in a way that only Leon can.
Mr. Wilkie quickly wrapped up the list of those jointly held items, concluding, “Those properties are not under discussion. Today we are allocating Mrs. Greene’s personal estate.” According to the wishes expressed in her will, the first bequest was the furniture and antiques in the Parc Monceau apartment in Paris, and the Matisse on the wall there. Those she left to Jerrold Davies “to help finance his next picture,” said Mr. Wilkie, reading from the document. He said he would contact Mr. Davies in Paris.
I stifled a smile. From the grave Julia was poking Leon in the eye again. However, Leon kept his gaze on a fly buzzing near the Venetian blinds. But when the next item was read—a big fat bequest to the NAACP—Leon and all the arts people drew a great, collectively horrified breath and stared at the Negroes. Leon coughed repeatedly, like he might choke. Gordon turned to him, murmuring something to the effect of Did you know . . . but Leon ignored him and turned to me, muttering the same question. No, I shook my head, and whispered, “Honest. I had no idea.” And honest, I didn’t. Julia did not share Leon’s staunch anti-Communist ideals, but the NAACP? That was shocking!
The man in the wheelchair introduced himself as August Branch. He was bald with a round face and round body, and wore a bow tie. His voice had a Southern lilt as he thanked Mr. Wilkie and spoke at length of Julia’s generosity over the years. If he noticed that Leon flinched, he gave no indication. “Mrs. Greene’s long support for our Cause has been invaluable. On behalf of the NAACP and speaking as editor of the Challenger, I want to assure you that her generous contribution today will help racial equality prevail.” The young man beside him leaned in and murmured in a low voice. Mr. Branch nodded. “Thank you, Terrence. Ladies and gentlemen, I am reminded that we have editorial deadlines to meet, and I’m afraid we must leave. The press waits for no man.”
As he and his whole delegation rose and left, they each offered somber condolences to Leon. Leon nodded grimly. No one shook hands.
After they were gone a general murmur of indignation ensued, and there was a good deal of coughing and lighting of cigarettes as Mr. Wilkie went on detailing much smaller bequests of money to the various arts foundations Julia had favored and fostered. The rest of it came to me, some in a trust I could not access till I was thirty, some in a lump sum that took my breath away. Julia divided her jewelry collection between me and Irene, though I got the diamond ring, the diamond choker and bracelet, the ruby pendant and earrings, the long rope of perfectly matched pearls. My mother, Florence, got Julia’s fur coats. An odd bequest, another poke in the eye, I assumed, for Florence’s having always been so nasty about my birthmark, especially since Florence has lived in the Bahamas since 1946.
Late this afternoon Florence and Walter will catch a flight back to the Bahamas, and I won’t have to see them again until I get married. Which I do not plan on doing. Maybe ever. When I told Julia I would never marry, she just laughed and said, “When you really do fall in love, Roxanne, I want to be there to see it. You will fall so hard, you’ll make Cyrano and the original Roxanne look like cynics.” Well, maybe, but honestly, why marry? Give me the lyrics of Ira Gershwin and the immortal lines from Casablanca any day. (I could recite the airport scene verbatim from the time I was twelve.) My parents, between them, have six marriages. Jonathan’s parents have eight, that we know of. Julia and Leon’s marriage endured, but it certainly wasn’t a thing of beauty. Marriage has little to recommend it, that I can see, other than a mortgage and the missionary position.
The driver took us all back to Summit Drive. Irene and Gordon got in their teal blue Cadillac and drove home. Florence, leaning on Walter’s arm, went up the broad staircase to their room. Leon and I looked at each other, alone together for the first time since I had returned from Northern California.
“I have something to tell you,” I said, taking a deep breath.
Behind his glasses, his eyes narrowed. “Not today, Roxanne. Whatever it is. Not today.”
“Today.”
His voice lowered to a growl. “It can wait.”
“It’s not about Denise Dell, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”
“I am not afraid.”
“Then hear me out. It’s important.”
“I’ll join you in the library in twenty minutes.” He turned and left.
I took off my hat and carried my gloves and walked among the drooping floral funereal tributes that had been moved from the cemetery to the Summit Drive foyer, a room with thirty-foot-high ceilings and marble floors, grand as any hotel foyer. Despite the vastness, there were so many flowers that the odor of their decay floated like miasma. The most gaudy of the displays had a card that said, Vice President Richard M. Nixon and wife. The rose-studded wreath was from my father, Sir Rowland Granville, London. After he left California, Rowland never forgot my birthday, and always sent me some extravagant
gift at Christmas, but I didn’t actually see him again till Julia and I stopped in London on our way to Paris. He was playing Malvolio in Twelfth Night, an absolutely astonishing actor, and a very charming man, kind, attentive, even courtly to both of us. I liked him, but I couldn’t really bring myself to call him Daddy, and I couldn’t abide his snotty third wife. Her name is on the card too. Lady La-Di-Dah Granville.
I started up the grand staircase lined with dark, ornately framed seventeenth-century paintings. All thirty-five rooms of Summit Drive are furnished with the detritus of ruined aristocrats, art and furniture that had been collected and shipped by Leon’s agents in Europe before the War. As a child I thought nothing of this regal magnificence. Now, I find it stifling, as if the large, hoary hand of the skeletal past wants to throttle me. In Paris, the past and present are all mixed up, and I could live there happily in both. But Summit Drive is like a museum, like Citizen Kane’s Xanadu, though not quite that garish.
The library was my favorite room among all the thirty-five, filled with my most cherished childhood memories. Aside from the dark, heavy Flemish tapestries across one wall it was actually airy, comfortable, with roomy wing chairs, and bookshelves full of first editions. This is the room where my grandparents sat through many dolls’ tea parties and never so much as blinked with restlessness. In this room Leon sat me on his lap and read to me: Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, and Alice in Wonderland. He had such a rich, wonderful, rolling voice. This is the room where as a child I sat in on long story conferences with Leon, with Max Leslie, Simon Strassman, Nelson Hilyard, and Jerrold Davies. Half a dozen other writers came and went, but these were the core Empire writers, men who had brought the studio to its great heyday in the thirties and forties, who made millions laugh and cry with their words,
I remember those brilliant evenings as generalized sensations filtered through a fog of cigarette and cigar smoke, with the clink of ice in long-ago glasses, the splash of the soda siphon, the crack of pistachios, and the rumble of their deep, masculine laughter as yellow chalk dust floated down from the chalkboard where they kept their collective notes. Pads of yellow paper lay about, the pages ruffling, filled with words and doodles. They brought in an upright piano for Nelson Hilyard to pound out impromptu scores. Max and Simon would jump up from their chairs and enact scenes. Simon, in particular, despite his great weight, was a limber mimic and known to take the floor lamp in his arms as if it were a heroine, speaking words of passion to her while we laughed and laughed. I was enthralled there in the rowdy company of writers who would scribble, debate, cast, pour another drink, flip the pages on their pads, and start all over again. Their talk was salty, often raucous. These men were free-wheeling storytellers, and funny as hell. Their fingers were stained blue with ink and brown with nicotine, but they proved to me, even then, and I was just a kid, that work and joy could be synonymous.
Jerrold Davies always had a director’s eye for timing. Timing was everything to him. Simon Strassman was known for his big, bold dialogue, Westerns, pirate stories, tales of derring-do. Max Leslie wrote bright, witty comedies. Nelson Hilyard, probably the most brilliant of them all, was known for his deep, sensitive dialogue; if he were still alive, Nelson would be writing for actors like Monty Clift or Marlon Brando. The movies Leon and these men created kept audiences coming back year after year, earned a few Oscars, brought Empire renown and profits. While the rest of the world (I later learned) was suffering through the Depression, I was hoisted to the top of the library table at the age of nine or ten to do a tap dance as Nelson pounded out “My God How the Money Rolls In” on the upright and we all sang the ribald verses.
Now, the library was silent, no upright piano, the chalkboard long gone.
I cringed a little to remember that this was also the room where I waited with two cops who brought me and Jonathan home after I rolled the Packard down a ravine driving just a little bit drunk. Maybe more than a little bit—and we had open containers of beer. I was sixteen. When the cops shone their flashlights down the ravine and into the car, Jonathan and I were shaken, but unhurt. The Packard is a big, heavy car, and it too was unhurt, though the passenger side was badly scraped and scratched. Once the cops realized who we were, they put us in the squad car and brought us to Summit Drive. Leon and Julia came into the library wearing dressing gowns (they would never wear anything so banal as bathrobes) and glared at us while the cops related our sins. The cops took their payment and left. No unseemly charges were filed. Julia took Jonathan home to his father’s house (also on Summit Drive) and I stayed in the library to face Leon’s wrath. When he finished with me, I was filled with remorse, and was basically locked in a tower for the next six months.
Clarence knocked and entered, interrupting my thoughts. He carried a tray with sandwiches, a bottle of white wine, and a pot of tea, and set the tray on a table that had framed, signed photographs of Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, Leon’s special friends and political allies. Leon especially admired Nixon, a fellow Californian, and the feeling was mutual. Leon and other Hollywood ultraconservatives, including Hedda Hopper and Gary Cooper, had been invited to the Republican convention in Chicago last summer, and Leon would have gone to the inauguration earlier this month if Julia had not so inconveniently died.
“Clarence, what happened to everyone who used to work here?” I asked. “Everyone is new. Except you.”
“They have been replaced,” Clarence said in his stentorian fashion. He had the gravity of a college president on graduation day.
“I know Denise and her mother moved in after we left for Paris,” I declared dramatically. “Did Denise fire them because they were loyal to my grandmother?”
Clarence’s sphinxlike expression did not alter, though he paused to consider his words. “New staff was preferred. However, Mr. Greene knows I am indispensable.” He turned and left.
I eyed the sandwiches. I was actually starving, but you grow up in Hollywood, and you learn early on that you do not want to have stuff caught between your teeth when you’re about to make a life-changing speech, a gesture so grand it must not be tarnished in any way, which is what I was about to do. Like Joan Fontaine in Jane Eyre telling Orson Welles, No! she won’t live with him and be his mistress! Would Joan have eaten a crumpet before that speech? I sipped the wine and wondered briefly if everything important to me had to somehow first happen on film. The thought prickled, but I was spared any further discomforting introspection because Leon opened the door.
“What is it that can’t wait, Roxanne?” He sat behind a desk that once belonged to a French abbé.
I placed the wineglass on the table. “I don’t want to go back to Mills College.”
Surprise briefly lit his face, but he was a master of concealment, and immediately he looked merely studious. “Julia would be so disappointed to hear you say that. She believed in higher education for women. She chose Mills herself.”
“Julia’s dead,” I said, hoping to be cruel. “I don’t want to go to Mills.”
“All right, then. Something closer to home? UCLA? USC, perhaps?”
“I don’t want to go to college.”
“Something further away. NYU? Columbia?”
“You’re not listening, Leon. I don’t want to go to college.”
“You have to be educated.”
“To do what? Can you really see me conjugating French verbs for a room full of high school students?”
“There are many fields open to women nowadays.”
“Name one.”
Leon pondered this while he regarded me intently. He was unaccustomed to being challenged. Small wonder. For thirty-five years he had run Empire Pictures, and few had challenged him and fewer yet had bested him. “An education will broaden your horizons.”
I thought that was a pretty weak comeback, but I didn’t say so. I was on a mission here.
“You should return to college. That French finishing
school was a waste of time and money in my opinion. What did they teach you of any use?”
“How to handle men. Every woman needs to know that.”
He clearly meant to say something tart, but thought better of it. “If you don’t want to go to college, what do you envision for your future?”
“Whatever I do, it will have to be here, in the picture industry. What else am I fit for? What else do I know? I can’t be an actress.” Reflexively I touched my right cheek.
“You are beautiful, Roxanne. Don’t let anyone tell you any different.”
I might have teared up. All my life Leon and Julia have told me I am beautiful. But I thought of Bette Davis and kept my resolve. “I’m not thinking of the future right now. I’m thinking of the present, and I’m only certain of one thing, and that’s that I don’t want to live here with you.”
“Where do you want to live?” he asked, ignoring my pointed exclusion.
“Not here.”
“This is your home, Roxanne.”
I sat in one of the wing chairs in the best L’Oiseau d’Or posture I could muster. I was trembling with suppressed emotion, and blurted out, “Then why has Denise Dell been living here since Julia and I went to Paris?”
“I thought this wasn’t going to be about Denise.” He rose, came round the desk, and took a seat opposite me, so close he took my hand. “Roxanne, Honeybee, I’m sorry you feel this way. I don’t think Julia would want you to leave Summit Drive.”
“I will only stay here if Denise Dell leaves.” There! Joan Fontaine could not have done better. This moment called for panache—the real thing, not just the cologne I was wearing.
Leon meditated on this. He withdrew his hand. He said at last, “I suppose you are old enough to make your own choices. I just hope they will be good choices and reflect well on me and on Empire Pictures.”
The Great Pretenders Page 2
