“You still have your self-respect,” I offered, uncertain what else there was to say.
“I don’t regret the choice I made to take the Fifth. But it’s only been one day. I might change my mind.”
“Is there some way I can help?”
“No. Thanks. You always were just the sweetest kid, but I don’t want you involved in this. You’re too young yet to have a past you’ll have to pay for, Roxanne, a past you’ll regret.”
“Well, I’ll get older, won’t I?” The water lisped at the edges of the pool, sibilant, like baby talk. “Oh, Max, when I read Hedda’s column today and all those terrible things she said about you—”
“Forget it. Tomorrow that paper will be on the bottom of the birdcage. But I’m still under subpoena. If I don’t leave the country soon, they may take my passport. It’s happened to others.”
“Jerrold told us his passport was revoked after he got to France.”
Max nodded sadly. “Simon and Leah have to stay in Mexico for the same reason. Well, Simon does, and Leah will never leave him.” In the distance a siren sounded. “The FBI are around here for sure. You better go, Roxanne, now before someone sees that smart little car of yours in the driveway and takes down the license plate. You still drive that sweet little MG T?”
“I do.”
“You were a pretty reckless driver, as I recall. Didn’t you roll the Packard down a ravine one night?”
“I’m much more responsible now. That was a long time ago.”
“Yes.” He smiled. “A long time ago. We had some good times then, didn’t we? You know, you remind me so much of Julia. You have her mannerisms. You’re wearing her cologne.”
“Panache.”
“Ah, yes.”
“You’ll give Marian my love, won’t you?”
“Sure.” He waved the bottle of Scotch at me. “Go on now, Roxanne. Thanks for coming.”
I picked up my shoes, though I didn’t put them on. I said goodbye and left him there, and when I got to the gate, I heard a splash, and I turned to see that Max had waded into the pool, fully clothed, and was standing there in the shallow end making patterns in the water with his hands.
Chapter Six
I drove away from Carolwood and up the narrow leafy roads toward the canyons. Between the anguish of seeing Max Leslie and the memory of Irv Rakoff pressed up against my butt, I hated the thought of delivering scripts. I went instead to Irene’s ultramodern glass-and-steel house in Benedict Canyon, where I didn’t even have to knock, I could just walk in and say, “I’m here!”
She was pleased to see me. She’s always pleased to see me. Though she was many months pregnant, wearing a housecoat, and barefoot, with her hair in shiny metal curlers all over her head, Irene looked younger than her twenty-eight years. We chatted inconsequentially as I followed her through the cool, high-ceilinged rooms, the billiard room, the sunroom, and out to the circular flagstone patio, covered with a thick, thorny bougainvillea arbor. Off in the distance beyond the tennis court some men were using bulldozers and pickaxes and tearing up the lawn.
“Did you have a water main break or something?”
“No. Gordon’s afraid the Soviets will set off the bomb, so he’s having them dig a bomb shelter. I told him it’ll have to have enough room for Josefina too.” She nodded toward the pool, where the nanny played with the children. “Gordon says we gave the Soviets far too much when they were our allies, and in Korea—”
“Even the word Korea makes my head hurt.” I felt cross and unsettled. The heat bore down, even through the bougainvillea arbor. “I voted for Stevenson.”
“Don’t tell Gordon that.” She lit up, took a deep drag.
“When do I ever talk to Gordon? To him I’m just your immature kid sister.”
“I have informed him you’re not immature, you’re a romantic with an overactive imagination, and you’ll grow out of it when you get married and make someone a fine wife just like me.”
I’ve no idea how she met Gordon. Polo grounds, maybe? At the country club tennis tournament? Someone’s yacht? He was from Chicago, candidly ambitious, handsome in a freckled, redheaded way, good on the tennis court, and an avid sailor. He was still wearing his naval officer’s uniform at their wedding in 1945. After the War, Gordon didn’t merely go to work for Leon—within a year he became the de facto operating chief of Empire Pictures. He also became the son Leon lost, precious and beloved. Gordon can do no wrong in Leon’s eyes. Gordon’s children can do no wrong in Leon’s eyes. I think Leon must be going blind.
“What are you doing out and about?” Irene lowered her pregnant self on the chaise. I plopped down beside her. “Isn’t it a workday?”
“I’m supposed to be delivering scripts,” I said sourly. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about Irv. “But I’m playing hooky.”
“I’ve never understood what would possess you to want to be an agent, but it doesn’t matter.” She waved a graceful hand, as though dusting cobwebs. “Your career days are coming to a close. It’s time you got married, and I’m looking for your husband. You’re twenty-two, you know. If you don’t marry soon, you’ll fade like a dress left too long on a shop-window mannequin.”
“Is that why you married Gordon? Because you thought you were fading? You are beautiful, Irene! You’ve always been beautiful.”
“Doesn’t matter. A woman has to choose. It’s the one important life choice we get to make, so it had better be good. Gordon was the best-looking and the most persuasive man I’d ever met. We wanted the same things. I knew I could count on him to fulfill for me what I couldn’t do for myself. Look around you, Roxanne. This is all Gordon’s success, and I get to bask in it.” She gazed out over the vast, shady garden, the pale-blossomed crepe myrtle trees lining the paths, the palms, the pool where the screaming three-year-old twins twisted in Josefina’s arms, struggling, flailing with pudgy little fists.
“How can you let the twins do that,” I asked, “and not tell them to stop?”
“I don’t want to undermine Josefina’s authority.”
“Well, I pity Josefina when your next one is born.”
“Oh, save your pity. We’re hiring her sister to come when the new baby is born. They’re happy to have the work. I can’t deal with the kids.”
“I been through your closet, Miz Conrad,” said Eudonna the housekeeper when she brought us two lemonades. “What’ll I do with all the red dresses? Some of them are mighty nice. I don’t think the people who come to the Salvation Army will be wearing Chanel.”
“Keep them, or give them away, I don’t care. Just get them out of the house.” After Eudonna left us, Irene lowered her voice. “Gordon said I had to throw out all my red clothes. You walk into a party in a red dress, and it makes you look un-American. People whisper about you.”
I glanced at the table beside the chaise, where Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead lay, its spine cracked open. “You’re not reading that, are you?”
“I told Gordon, ‘Isn’t it enough that I sat through the movie?’ But he says no.”
“All the characters are insufferable. You wouldn’t want to ride an elevator with them.” I leaned to the side and stuck my finger down my throat.
“Thank god Ayn’s gone back to New York now, but she still lingers here like the smell of an intellectual fart. After you left for Paris, Leon used to host dinner parties for the Motion Picture Alliance people, and Ayn Rand and Hedda Hopper were constantly competing for the most dramatic woman in the room. Exhausting, even just to watch them.”
“Hedda Hopper, America’s basset hound,” I grumbled. “Did you read her long screed about Max in the paper this morning?”
“Someone should have told Max an actor is supposed to deviate from the script, not a writer.”
“You’re not usually that unkind, Irene.” Prickly with heat, I stood, reached up under my skirt, and, n
ever-minding the bomb shelter diggers and the team of Japanese gardeners snipping, clipping, and mowing nearby, I rolled my stockings down my legs, unhooked my garter belt, and let it drop on the ground. I shimmied out of my sticky, silky half slip and sank back into the chaise. “I went to see Max this morning. Someone has smeared the whole front of their house with red paint and poured the rest of the cans in the pool.”
Irene lit up a cigarette and took a satisfying drag. “I’m sorry to hear that. Really, I am, and I know you loved those old writers, and they loved you, but they did it to themselves. They act like martyrs, but they’re not. Melvin Grant set everything up for Max, just like he did for Vic Hale. Executive session in a hotel room, discreet, no reporters, no crowds, just a nice friendly conversation. It was all going to be easy, and then Max took the Fifth. Melvin won’t even defend anyone who takes the Fifth, so you can imagine how that made him look. Whatever you do, don’t mention Max to Leon, and, for god’s sake, don’t tell him you went there. He’s in a rage over the whole thing.”
“How would I tell Leon?”
“He’s coming by to pick me up. We’re going out to lunch.”
“Oh god . . .” I moaned. I could feel my birthmark flushing.
“What is it?”
“The last time I saw him we were the guests of honor at a Philharmonic luncheon where they unveiled the plaque to Julia.”
“And? Please tell me you didn’t make some awful comment about Denise.”
“I didn’t call her a whore, if that’s what you mean. I just said she wasn’t a great actress.”
“Oh, Roxanne, you know Leon thinks she’s Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, Bette Davis, and Vivien Leigh all put together. Well, maybe not Bette Davis. But if you make this into a contest . . . well, Denise has already won, don’t you see? She’s not so bad, really.”
“It hurts me to hear you say that.”
“You are a reckless romantic. I am a married pragmatist.” She blew out a fresh plume of smoke and put her hand over her belly, where the baby kicked. “I’ll be so happy to have my body back once I get through this awful childbirth. Why can’t it be like the scene in Stagecoach?”
“You mean, why isn’t real life like the Hays Code? No swearing, no white slavery, no miscegenation, no venereal disease.”
She laughed. “No nakedness, not even in silhouette, and if two people are on the bed, they each have to keep one foot on the floor, and absolutely no one can get knocked up and have a baby. So in Stagecoach, the married lady’s face contorts, and they cart her off camera.”
“And the next thing you know, without so much as a maternal peep, there’s a clean, sleeping little cherub in her arms.”
“Trust me, the real thing is goddamn messy, bloody, and painful. And the kid they hand you when it’s over? It hardly looks human, much less worth all that work and pain. It’s all gross and disgusting, and then once they’re born, kids are nothing but trouble.”
Eudonna led Leon to the patio to join us, and his face lit up to see me. He held out his arms, and he held me close till I squirmed out of his embrace. “So good to see you girls together, Snow White and . . . her sister,” he said. I assumed he couldn’t bring himself to say the words Rose Red. Too close to Communism. Irene rose, kissed his cheek, and excused herself to get ready. I stayed put. The Japanese gardeners had finished, the children were gone from the pool, the men digging the bomb shelter had taken a break and left the yard.
“Are you coming to lunch with us, Roxanne? Denise will be so happy.”
He must be getting senile, I thought. “No, I just stopped by. I have scripts to deliver to Rakoff/Holtz clients. I have to go.”
“Really?” Leon’s broad brow furrowed.
“Yes. I’m working now, remember? I have been for six months.”
“I meant you shouldn’t be delivering scripts. That’s the errand boy’s job. You should be assisting one of the firm’s partners, getting to know the business.”
“Oh, I’m getting to know the business.” I thought of this morning’s sickening incident. If Leon knew, he would shred Irv Rakoff into a hundred pieces. Or would he? I glanced sidelong at him while he sipped the lemonade Eudonna brought him. Had Leon ever done such a repulsive thing? I knew he’d had affairs, lots of them, but I could not imagine Leon Greene pressing himself up against some unwilling girl as a condition of the job. His essential dignity, his pride alone would have kept him from any such gruesome display of power.
“Why do you look so grim?” he asked.
“I’m tired of serving coffee,” I said, which was certainly true.
“You are serving coffee? Like Clarence? That’s degrading.”
If you knew the half of it, Leon . . . I felt woozy. “Oh, it’s not so bad. It’s like a play. I mean like George Bernard Shaw without the wit. We all have our lines.”
“What kind of lines?”
“Well, Irv says: ‘I’m sure you remember Roxanne Granville,’ and whoever it is says, ‘Yes, of course,’ and I say, ‘Yes, of course, I remember you from—’”
“What? They’re parading you around like a monkey on a string!” He stood and started pacing, always a bad sign. “Don’t you see? How that reflects on you! On us! It’s such an insult! Serving coffee like a maid! Do any of the others serve coffee?”
“No. But they’re all guys.” I was not at all immune to what Leon Greene thought of me. My birthmark suffused with color, and shame overwhelmed me.
“I ought to call Irv Rakoff and give him a piece of my mind. That would get some results!”
“Don’t. Don’t interfere. It’s my job.”
“How could you let them treat you like that and not protest? I didn’t bring you up to accept insults. It’s as much an insult to me and Empire.”
The enormity of the affront, the ongoing, daily affront, racketed through my whole body. The mortifying spectacle! I thought about how many times I’d bent low to lay a tray on the table while Irv and his cohorts looked down my blouse or ogled my backside. No wonder none of the guys got asked to deliver coffee. Oh yes, and I am Roxanne Granville, named for . . . Shame and anger and the desire to deflect humiliation away from myself made me snap at him. “What do you intend to do about Max? Are you going to fire him?”
“I already have,” he replied without a single qualm. “We have to protect our priceless heritage, our American ideals. Max did it to himself. We can’t have Communists, radicals, and crackpots—”
“Leon! I’m talking about Max! He’s not a crackpot. He’s your friend!”
“I have to think of my country. There is a higher loyalty than personal relationships. We must stop the people who want to overthrow the United States government, maybe not by outright revolution, but by something more insidious. A Communist college professor corrupts his students. A Communist author like Howard Fast corrupts his readers. And movies, well, movies are the most powerful medium in the history of mankind. If movies are tainted with Communist messages or propaganda, then America itself is tainted. Moreover, I gave my word. We all did when we signed the Waldorf Agreement. We said we would never hire or keep on the payroll a known Communist.” Behind his glasses his gaze was utterly without regret.
“Julia would spin in her grave if she heard you,” I retorted, picking up my shoes and my clothes.
“And what would she do if she knew you were carrying coffee like a maid? I wonder if she’d think that fine French finishing school was worth it.”
Trembling with rage and shame, for myself, for Max, for Julia and Leon and Empire Pictures—oh yes, I was a daughter of Empire, like it or not—I said goodbye and went into the house. I passed Irene, who was dressed, her hair in a smooth, perfect pageboy.
She took one look at my face. “You did it again, didn’t you?”
“Enjoy lunch with that slut Denise.”
I went into the bathroom to wait till I
could hear them leave. In the mirror I stared at the birthmark that had made my mother hate me. Once when Jonathan and I were kids, we were underfoot on the Western town set. We just joined the extras in front of the sheriff’s office when they called “Action.” But suddenly, some underling, a guy, called out, “Cut!” and strode on-set, took my arm, and yanked me away, saying I couldn’t be there, not with a face like that. Everyone—cameramen, script girls, gaffers, the director—held their breath. Clearly, he didn’t know who I was. Simon Strassman got out of his chair, dismissed that guy, put his arm around me, and told me to go back and play the scene, that I would be fine. Simon told the cameraman to reshoot and the director did not dare object. The director knew who I was. But I could not move, and I could not hide my tears. I could not hide my tears now either. Alone in the bathroom, I started to blubber and cry. Irv Rakoff also knew who I was, and he had not one qualm about pushing himself up against me and putting his lips at my neck and his hands all over my boobs. I splashed water all over my face and came up dripping to look in the mirror and stare at Roxanne Granville, the stupidest girl on the planet.
In the kitchen Eudonna was chopping onions and listening to a Negro preacher railing on the radio. I asked her to turn it down as I picked up the phone and dialed Rakoff/Holtz. I shivered on one of the hottest days of the year, crying because Eudonna’s damned onions were stinging my eyes.
“Put me through to Irv,” I said to the agency operator.
“Mr. Rakoff’s office,” said Bonnie, all crisp business. “Who may I say is calling?”
“Leon Greene’s office,” I replied. “Mr. Greene wishes to speak with him.”
“May I know what this is in regard to?”
The Great Pretenders Page 6
