“Is that ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ I hear in the background?”
I hotfooted it over to the hi-fi and turned it off in the middle of the march, then ran into the bedroom and grabbed a T-shirt. I couldn’t imagine talking to Thelma naked.
“Is Charlie there?” she said when I returned to the phone.
“Well, yes. It’s Saturday night. I mean, Sunday morning.”
“I have an important message for you. I’m coming over tonight to talk to you about something important, and you need to be alone. Do I make myself clear?”
“Are you a Soviet spy?”
“Roxanne, please go find your underpants and your brains, and put them both on.” And with that, she hung up.
Brewing coffee in the kitchen, I could see George and Mildred Wilbur out walking on the beach with their dog. They waved at me in their sickly, middle-aged fashion. Bruno, the huge, stupid, loving, gorgeous Irish setter, barked at me to come out and play. George called him back and told him to heel. Bruno, eager to please, did so.
I opened some windows to let the stale air out, and when the coffee was done, I started to take a cup out to the porch before I remembered I was only wearing a T-shirt. The Wilburs wouldn’t much like that.
I went into the bathroom and took a shower, where I made a lot of noise—flushing the toilet, slamming the towel cabinet door. Nonetheless Charlie only just rolled over on his back when I came back into the bedroom. I raised the shade, and sunlight fell across the bed, glowing on his long, tanned legs. Grinning, he pointed to his upthrust dick, the ornament of the brilliant white patch between his tanned hips and his muscled thighs.
“No. It’s nearly noon. I’m throwing you out of the house. I have work to do.”
He sat up, drew me toward him, and held me, murmuring against my throat, “I like you better when you’re all woman and not part agent.”
“But if I were all woman, you wouldn’t eat.”
“I barely eat now.” He released me. “I should be earning fifteen hundred a week, not a measly two fifty a pop for an episode of Dragnet. Why did Larry Sanford turn down Return of the Cat People? It was perfect for them.”
“Larry missed his chance,” I replied, never having told Charlie the truth.
“Why can’t you get me something that’s not television and not Poverty Row? What about my Coast of Heaven? You’ve read it. You know it’s as good as On the Waterfront or Rear Window.”
“I’m going to trust your own good sense that you know that isn’t so.”
“But it is!”
“It needs polish. I keep telling you, it needs polish.”
“You know I’m the best of your writers. I’m certainly the best of your lovers.”
“Time to go,” I said, freeing myself. I reached in the drawer for my lacy, satin lingerie and then pulled on a pair of pedal pushers and an oversized USC T-shirt.
Charlie got up, put on his swimming trunks, and took his surfboard out for a quick dip, returning an hour later, salt-splashed and glowing. He left his surfboard leaning against the porch rail, collected his clothes, got in his beat-up ’48 Dodge, and drove back to his Hollywood hovel on Sycamore Street. I never stayed at his place, not after I saw the Murphy bed and the cockroach.
Like the rest of America on a Sunday night, I had Walt Disney’s Disneyland on the television when I heard footsteps coming upstairs to the high porch. A knock sounded at the door, and I opened it to find Thelma, and with her, to my utter surprise, was Max Leslie. He was grizzled, paunchy, and pale. His hair was too long, and his shoes were scuffed, and he was stooped in a way I did not remember. Behind his glasses his hazel eyes were ringed with dark circles, and his manner was subdued. I hardly recognized this man who had once filled Leon’s library with words, laughter, and cigar smoke, with antics and ideas. He apologized for coming, and I protested, “No, I’m so happy to see you!”
Max gave a slight laugh. “I doubt that’s so.”
“No, it’s true! I just can’t believe it’s you!!” I felt like a child, lying shrilly to avoid getting in trouble. I showed them both to the small sofa and sat across from them in the overstuffed chair. “Everyone thinks you’re in Mexico. How long have you been back?”
“Better you don’t know.” He had a long, appreciative look around the walls, taking in the framed movie posters, two of them films he wrote. “You’re looking swell, Roxanne. Marian sends her love.”
“Oh, give her mine too!” I got a bottle of Scotch and three small glasses and poured us each a splash. I noticed the briefcase at his feet. “How was Mexico?” I asked, instantly wishing I had not.
“A hellhole. By the time Marian and I got down there, all our friends who had been there a couple of years were drinking too much, sleeping with one another’s wives, rehashing tactics, the Fifth versus the First. Stalin versus Trotsky. The meaning of the Nazi-Soviet pact. Was Albert Maltz’s nineteen forty-seven recant a real recant? Simon is killing himself with drink and party politics, he . . .” Max seemed about to say more, then didn’t. He bolted the Scotch.
“Where are you living? Maybe I shouldn’t ask.”
Max and Thelma exchanged glances. “Marian and I have a little rented clapboard house in an old neighborhood in Riverside, sixty miles east of here,” said Max. “Out back we have a view of the alley and the neighbor’s trash cans. Marian has a vegetable garden, and she fusses over whitefly and leaf rot.”
“And Norman?” I asked, half-afraid to hear the answer. “How is he?”
“How is he ever?” Max sighed as though pulling some sorrow up from his solar plexus. “Mexico was hell. Marian went half-mad with missing Norman. Especially after her sister died and there was no one to go visit him. Now that we’re back here, we go to see him four, five times a week. He’s in a nice place in Riverside, but it costs a lot to keep him there.”
“I’m so sorry, Max.”
“You had nothing to do with any of this.”
“But Leon did.”
“Then let him apologize,” Thelma snapped.
Max’s whole body seemed to sag, and his gaze rested on the old upright piano, but I felt he was looking into some long-distant past I could not share.
“That piano looks like the one Nelson used to play.”
“That’s what I thought too.”
“You still play?”
“Now and then. I don’t want to forget everything I once knew.” The silence between us prickled with the unsaid. “It’s dreadfully out of tune.”
He placed a hand over the briefcase. “I have an enormous favor to ask of you, Roxanne. As an agent. As a friend. I guess you know what it is.”
“Max, if I can help you in any way, I will.”
“Listen carefully, Roxanne,” said Thelma.
“If you’re found out, you’ll come under the scrutiny of the Red hunters, the Un-American bloodhounds, the FBI. So I do not ask this lightly. Whatever you decide is fine with me. Really.”
“Why don’t we turn on a record?” suggested Thelma, getting up and bringing down the bamboo shades.
I went to the hi-fi and lifted off the album of John Philip Sousa marches. (I sure as hell didn’t want to have to explain that!) Frank Sinatra’s Songs for Young Lovers was nearby—not exactly suitable, but so what? I returned to sit across from them.
“Everyone knows the rumors,” said Max. “Writers get blacklisted and the studio revenues go down, and sometimes even the studios collude to put another name on scripts so that writers can go on working. That’ll never happen at Empire, and Empire is the only studio I ever worked for. Only studio Nelson or Simon ever worked for. I’ve heard that Empire sold off the old Western lot last year.”
“Empire isn’t making Westerns anymore.”
“They’re building tract houses where the Western lot used to be,” said Thelma. “They’re building tract houses ever
ywhere. Someone offered my brother five hundred thousand dollars for his farm.”
Max poured himself another Scotch. “I told Thelma I didn’t want to come to you, but you’re the only one I can turn to, Roxanne.”
“And I told Max you make your own decisions,” said Thelma.
“Roxanne, if I don’t write, something inside me dies. I learned that much in Mexico. I’ve got two brand-new scripts here. I think they’re good. I’m hoping that you’ll read them and think they’re good, and maybe give my work to one of your young clients. A decent writer. He puts his name on it. He takes the credit. We all split the money. I’m sorry to ask at all, but I’m desperate to make some money. All our savings are gone. If I could do anything else but write, I would, but I can’t.”
“Maybe you could go to England. I’ve heard lots of blacklisted writers are doing well there,” I said. “Maybe not well. But they’re working. Or Jerrold in Paris! He would love to see you, I’m sure of it.”
“I can’t go to England. I can’t go anywhere. I can’t leave Marian, and she can’t leave our son. If I don’t get some money, Norman will have to move to a public insane asylum. That would kill my wife.”
Sinatra crooned, filling up the silence. “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” seemed all the more poignant. Finally I said, “It’s so unfair, Max. You’re the screenwriter always known for sparkling wit and the funny lines and madcap stories.”
Max shrugged as though dusting defeat from his shoulders.
“If you decide to do this, Roxanne,” said Thelma, “and I do mean if—really, if you don’t want to, we all understand the risks—but if you do, then we need to find a writer we can trust.”
“There is no one we can trust,” said Max, “present company excepted. We have to take a chance.” He ran his hands over his face. “I’m still under subpoena, and if the FBI finds out I’m not in Mexico, I could easily be indicted for contempt of Congress. They can revoke my passport. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be comic. It would be a comic movie full of misunderstood intents.”
“A movie like you would write.” I rose, took the needle off the record, and turned off the hi-fi. “Leave the scripts with me. I’ll read them. Still, I mean, the kind of witty comedies that you wrote, who’s doing those now? No one. Everyone’s flinging themselves into musicals or biblical epics, extravaganzas they can splash across the screen in Cinerama or VistaVision and Todd-AO, 3-D, or any of the other cinematic marvels the studios are flogging.”
“Movies people can’t watch at home on that little grainy-gray box,” said Thelma.
“Exactly. These big glamorous pictures, well, look at last year’s The Egyptian or The Sign of the Pagan, they’re terrible, but they’re making money, and that’s the only standard. Sadly.”
“I saw Banner Headline,” said Max, shaking his head. “Vic Hale and Phil Tobin might be all-American, but they’re sure turning out limp-dick pictures. These, at least”—he nodded toward the briefcase—“these are charmers, like the old Cary Grant comedies. But I don’t expect miracles, Roxanne.” Max got slowly to his feet. “I’m grateful for whatever you can do. Truly grateful. And if you decide it’s too risky for you, I still thank you.”
I promised to read them and get back to him. I walked them outside, said good night, and watched them go down the steps. I stood there for a while longer, watching the waves roll in and fling themselves on the moonlit beach like true believers fling themselves into causes lost before the tide changed, ebbed, and went elsewhere.
Chapter Eleven
Despite its sexy name, Clara Bow Drive was an uninspired residential street of houses that all looked alike. The sole grace was a line of still-spindly jacaranda trees lining the parkway between street and sidewalk. Between the sidewalk and the two-bedroom stucco house we rented there was a thick line of six-foot oleander bushes that shielded us from view. Once you walked inside, the eye went directly to the modern art I had all over the walls. Big, clean bands of color, work by artists I’d met at Casa Fiesta who lent me paintings that would otherwise be stacked in their studios. The rented furniture too was clean and modern. On a more utilitarian note, the house had a washer in the back porch and a clothesline in the backyard. Thelma and I both did our laundry at work.
Thelma’s office was the front room, and she looked up from her typewriter when I walked in late Monday morning. “Well?”
“I loved them both.” Max’s scripts were witty Empire comedies in the best tradition. Fly Me to the Moon was about a highly intelligent young woman lab assistant, Maisie, who falls in love with her boss, the brilliant scientist Dr. Bleeker, who is so completely wrapped up in his work, he has no thought or care for anything or anyone else. Clever Maisie invents a series of electronic signals so that Dr. Bleeker thinks he’s getting messages from the moon, and Maisie helps him “translate” them. Love and hilarity ensue. You Make Me Feel So Young was Miracle on 34th Street without Santa. “They’re both fine, frothy pictures. Amazing that Max can write something so sparkling under the circumstances.”
“Oh, Roxanne, this will make Max and Marian so happy!”
“Did the songs come first, or the stories?”
“Max said he had notes for these stories for a long time. But when he heard that song, ‘Fly Me to the Moon,’ the whole thing came together in his head, and he wrote it in a couple of days. He wrote them all longhand, like he always does, and I typed them for him. I knew we could trust you.”
“Of course I can be trusted. Max and Marian have been dear friends since I was just a kid.”
“Who will you offer them to?”
“Empire. We’ll offer them to Empire!”
Thelma’s face fell. “Are you feeling all right, Roxanne? Got a fever? Food poisoning? PMS? Empire is not what Max had in mind.”
“Think of it as a coup for irony! Max is a writer. He would appreciate the irony. A bright comic film like this is the perfect follow-up to Banner Headline—which, by the way, is not making anywhere near the box office Leon hoped for, given all the money he threw at it. Vic Hale can’t write decent comedy. Max Leslie is a genius. Besides, I have a new contact at Empire, Elliott Dunne.”
“Aren’t you listening to me? Leon would recognize this instantly as Max’s work. Leon would . . .” She floundered, seeking some adequate description. “Gordon and Leon will read these and know they belong to Max. No, you should take them somewhere else.” When I failed to reply, she pleaded, “You’re not serious, are you?”
“Oh, but I am. I read these last night, and I kept thinking of everyone Leon cast off, cast out without a shred of loyalty. Not just Max! I kept remembering when Kathleen Hilyard called us in Paris, and Julia trying to calm her, and when she finally understood that Kathleen was telling her that Nelson had killed himself, shot himself in their bedroom, then Julia started shrieking. I remembered the letter Julia got from Simon and Leah that they were in Mexico, and how Simon made a big joke of it, the señoritas and muchachos and how there were so many Reds in Mexico City they had their own Rojo Fiestas. I remembered Jerrold, laughing, and telling a French director how it took him a year to learn to toss his hat on his Oscar in that crummy Left Bank apartment. They all made light of what they went through, because they are big-hearted, but we, Julia and I, we knew the truth of it. I thought on all that, Thelma, and I just got angry all over again. I couldn’t sleep. I mean, for twenty years these writers made Leon rich, they made Empire great, and he had his lawyers terminate their contracts in twenty-four hours?”
Thelma was thoughtful. “You might be too hard on Leon. He wasn’t alone in what he did.”
“You, of all people, can say that? He fired you for nothing more than being Max’s secretary.”
“You don’t know what it was like. You weren’t even here. You were in Paris. You can’t imagine what it was like for the rest of us in fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two. Before that, everyone thought, oh, the Fir
st Amendment! We’ll stake our very lives on the First Amendment, and in nineteen forty-seven all those big-time actors—Bogart, Bacall, Paul Henreid, and the rest of them—they all flew to Washington to show moral solidarity for the Hollywood Ten. They were there, in the audience for the hearings. Great theater! The Hollywood Ten were so witty, so many clever retorts to the Committee’s questions. And then, you know what? That slimy Parnell Thomas, the chairman, indicted them for contempt of Congress. They appealed through the courts, still believing in the First Amendment. But the courts supported the Committee, and by nineteen fifty the Hollywood Ten were in federal prisons. So when the Committee hearings started up again, here in LA, everyone was too afraid to do anything at all. People would cross the street to avoid being seen talking to anyone who had even a blush of Red. It could be your brother, your best friend, your ex-wife, and you’d still cross the street. It was like living in a pressure cooker. If you didn’t want your career shredded, your life ruined, if you didn’t want to see your work, your reputation smeared, to see your livelihood disintegrate in front of your eyes, then when the Committee called, you stepped right up and vowed your allegiance to the Motion Picture Alliance for American Ideals. You kissed the flag and pressed it to your bosom. And if the Committee asked if you were once a Communist, you said yes, and if they asked who else was a Communist, you coughed up names like the goddamned phone book. And if you didn’t, then you could flush your life, your work, your reputation right down the cosmic toilet. I’ll say it again. Leon Greene was not alone in what he did, and Jerrold and Simon and Nelson knew it. Max too.”
“I can’t believe you’re defending him!”
“All the studios fired anyone who didn’t cooperate with the Committee.” Thelma took out a match and lit her cigarette. “Take these comedies to Paragon. They’re a smaller studio, like Empire. They’re perfect. You said you met Carleton Grimes the other night, their new managing director.”
The Great Pretenders Page 10
