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The Great Pretenders

Page 12

by Laura Kalpakian


  “That was Elliott Dunne on the phone. They’re buying both of them! Fly Me to the Moon and You Make Me Feel So Young! And,” I crowed, “they’re paying five thousand each!”

  “Five. Thousand. Each!” Thelma stood up, hooting, and we linked arms and did a little victory dance we’d devised whenever we got a sale, even for Dragnet, until Thelma stopped dancing, and frowned. “Five grand is nothing compared to what Max used to get.”

  “But it’s more than Charlie ever dreamed of!” I insisted. “And they want to give Charlie a studio contract, a three-year contract! To come work at the studio! Oh, Thelma! We’ve never had a writer get a three-year contract! I’m going to call Max right now!”

  “No. Don’t call from this phone,” Thelma cautioned.

  “Right. Okay. I’ll call Charlie and tell him the good news. You cancel everything for the rest of the day. We’re locking up and driving out to Riverside with some French champagne!”

  I returned to my office to get my keys, when the phone rang. “Granville Agency,” I said jauntily.

  “You have done quite the coup, little sister,” said Irene, her voice tense, her words terse. “Gordon’s just told me they bought your two pictures, the so-called Charlie Frye comedies.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I read them last night, Roxanne. I’ve met Charlie Frye, remember? So I know for a fact that Charlie wouldn’t know wit like that if it tickled him in the testicles.”

  I laughed out loud. “Oh, Irene, how can you talk about testicles? Of course Charlie—”

  “These were written by Max Leslie, a Communist, and it’s no good pretending they aren’t.”

  “Max isn’t a Communist. He quit the party in thirty-nine when—”

  “Spare me the history lesson! How can you be so reckless? Why are you doing this?”

  “Well,” I offered with a bit of sass, “I thought I’d just see which of Leon’s two passions would win out. If he loves John Wayne and Richard Nixon more than he loves Denise Dell.”

  “And now you have your answer. So what? What in the hell have you proved? Who have you hurt? What have you done, Roxanne?”

  Silence lingered between us. I was stunned at her anger. Irene always kept her calm.

  “If anyone ever finds out—oh, and they will, somehow—can you even imagine what will happen to Leon? The American Legion will attack him like he was Iwo Jima.”

  “The scripts are perfect for Denise,” I said in my own meager defense.

  “One day you will get caught out in one of these foolish gestures, and the world will deal with you unkindly, and you will have only yourself to blame.” She hung up.

  “Who was that?” Thelma called out from the front room.

  “No one,” I replied.

  * * *

  • • •

  Word of the Granville Agency’s success rippled everywhere. I sold three more scripts from different writers that same week (albeit all to television). Telegrams fluttered in, delivered sometimes three or four at a time, congratulating us. Our phone rang off the hook. People offered praise, some of it laced with snide asides: Charlie Frye? The guy who wrote Return of the Cat People now had a dual-picture deal with Empire and an actual three-year paying contract as well? Amid this flurry of praise when I came into work mid-morning about ten days later, I was surprised when Thelma looked up from her typewriter with a peculiar expression on her face.

  “You have a visitor.” She nodded toward a woman sitting on our couch, her shoulders hunched.

  Kathleen Hilyard, once a glamorous, high-kicking, long-legged dancer, sat before me. I scarcely recognized this wisp of a woman. Her hair was clipped close to her head, her face lined. She wore a nun-gray dress with long sleeves, little white gloves, and sturdy shoes. “Forgive me for just showing up, Roxanne.”

  “Mrs. Hilyard—Kathleen—there’s nothing to forgive.”

  “Bachman. I’m Kathleen Bachman now. My maiden name. I took the girls back to Phoenix and we had to change our name. Nelson . . . his . . . well, the disgrace, you know? The Oscar Nelson won for The Ice Age, I have to keep it hidden in a drawer. We can’t even speak of him to anyone. It’s very hard on the girls.” She knotted a handkerchief in her gloved fingers.

  “It was tragic, Kathleen.”

  “I’m a manager in hosiery now,” she said with some dignity. She put her hand on an elaborate hatbox that had Goldwater’s in fancy lettering on it. “Ironic, isn’t it? I left Phoenix in nineteen thirty-six to come to Hollywood and be a dancer like Ruby Keeler, and I went back fifteen years later the wife of a suicide. However, I’m not here to dwell on the past. I’m thinking of the future.” She picked up the hatbox and put it in my hands. “Marian called me with the great news. Yes, I know they’re in Riverside. I’ve known for a while. You made them so happy, Roxanne, and I thought, I mean, Marian too, she thought, we both thought—” Kathleen cleared her throat. “Nelson was such a fine writer.”

  I walked over and placed the hatbox on Thelma’s desk. “Kathleen, the kinds of dramas Nelson wrote, no one’s doing those now. There’s no The Best Years of Our Lives, or How Green Was My Valley. His great, Oscar-winning film, The Ice Age, would never get made now. Everyone wants epics or musicals so bright they hurt your eyes.”

  “On the Waterfront did a clean sweep at the Oscars this year. Look, please, please, Roxanne, just read these. My girls are teens now—they’re hoping to go to college. They ought to have something from their father’s estate, something from his long career.” She gulped with emotion.

  “Nelson’s name can never go on anything ever again,” I said, regretting the cruel finality of it, but what other choice was there?

  “I don’t expect his name to be on it. Someone else’s name. A front. Like you did for Max. No one else would know.”

  “Then what can your daughters be proud of if they can’t say it’s their father’s work?”

  “They would know. We would know. There’s six scripts there. The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is the best thing he ever wrote. It will kill you, it’s so . . .” Kathleen bit her lip, collected herself, and placed one gloved hand primly over the other. “Two of these scripts aren’t even finished. Nelson was in such despair for a long time. Especially after the Committee came after Simon and he had to leave the country. Nelson and Simon were true comrades. Nelson was dedicated to social justice. He was a good man, and a good father, no matter what else he was.” She rose, walked to the desk, opened the box, and lifted the scripts out of rustling tissue paper, as though they were newborn babes. “It’s wonderful work. He really was so very talented, you know. I’ll accept whatever you say, Roxanne. I just ask that you read them. Please.”

  “You came all the way from Phoenix to bring me these?”

  “I should have called ahead. I’m sorry. I thought if I saw you . . .”

  “Can we get you something, Kathleen? A cup of tea, maybe? Coffee?”

  “A drink?” said Thelma.

  “No. Thank you. I have to get back home. I have to catch the afternoon train.”

  “You want a ride to Union Station?”

  “I came here in a cab. I can take a cab back. Could you call me one, Thelma?”

  Thelma reached into the drawer and took out her purse. “I’ll drive you.”

  I said goodbye to Kathleen, then took the box, the scripts, the tissue paper into my office and started to read. I could hear Nelson’s voice on every page, could all but hear his hands fluttering over the keys of the upright piano. I knew the very sort of music he would have played. The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea was an especially moving story, a drama that might suit Maurice Allen’s talents. That is, if he chose to do it.

  I walked to the window and opened the curtains to the spring twilight. If I could go back to my child-self, how could I possibly tell that little girl, One day these men who seem to you like big fri
endly giants, who seem so brilliant, who create so many stories from their own great imaginations, one day they will need you, Roxanne. One day there will be no one to protect them, to advocate for them, except you. How could I possibly have foreseen that those men who basked in the protection of the great studios—studios that had laid garlands at their feet, given them grand homes and gleaming swimming pools, glamorous cars, powerful friends—that all that would have dissolved? How could they—how could I—ever have guessed that their gifts would be devalued and their names tarnished, that of those glory days and gala nights, nothing would remain? HUAC had swooped down on Hollywood like the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz. Those like Vic Hale who atoned by abasing themselves went on working and became virulent in their own defense. Those who didn’t suffered, sinking into obscurity or fleeing like refugees. Whatever choices they’d made, they were all diminished now, and they would never be golden again.

  * * *

  • • •

  When I was looking for a lawyer for the Granville Agency, I wanted someone independent, someone to read contracts and keep secrets. Not someone old like Melvin Grant who had ushered his clients into Congressional hearings and on to disaster. Not someone too cozy with the studios. Not someone whose standing in a big corporate firm might be instantly improved if he were to let some bit of information drop to another colleague. I knew that Julia had trusted Mr. Wilkie, but my needs were not her needs. Jonathan recommended his attorney, Adam Ornstein. Adam had the gravity of a rabbi. He had two doors to his office, like a psychoanalyst: one you went in, and one you went out. This was a man who understood secrets.

  I spent the morning going over several of my writers’ contracts with Adam, then returned to Clara Bow Drive in time for my one o’clock appointment. Thelma and I made sure that no one else but she and I would be in the office. Maurice Allen was early, and the ashtray in front of him was full of butts when I walked in.

  We went into my office, closed the door, and after the obligatory prelims—how wonderful our lives were going, the usual artful pretense—I had only come to the word discretion when Maurice raised a hand.

  “I think I know what you’re going to ask me, Roxanne. Who is it?”

  “What makes you think . . . ?”

  “Because you wanted to see me in person and in private. Because fronting for blacklisted writers is the new Hollywood vice—not as pervasive as adultery or drugs, but just as wicked, and even more risky.” He blew a smoke ring.

  “Nelson Hilyard.”

  “Hilyard was a homo, wasn’t he? Not a Red.”

  “He was a Red too,” I said.

  “Great.” Maurice stubbed out his cigarette. “I’m in. I need the money. I don’t have any politics other than that.”

  “Don’t you want to read them first?”

  Maurice shrugged. “Give them to me, I’ll read them, but I can tell you right now, I’m happy to pick up the pen that once wrote The Ice Age, even if he was a Commie and a homo. I need the credit, Roxanne, I need the money. I need to get the hell out of Poverty Row and television. I don’t want to go back to New York as a failure.”

  “Remember—you tell no one.”

  Maurice rose and picked up the envelopes that held Nelson’s scripts. “I hear Charlie’s moved out of that Hollywood dump, and he’s renting a place right on the beach in Venice, and he has a new car. I suppose all his success is something on the same order.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, silence is my middle name,” said Maurice on his way out the door.

  It was true that before the ink on his Empire contracts had even touched the page, in a burst of elation, Charlie had moved to a beachside apartment in Venice, bought a new custom surfboard, and put a down payment on a 1950 Buick Roadmaster station wagon to carry it in. But privately, success had had a strange, unlooked-for effect on Charlie Frye. His supreme surfer confidence withered, and his inner anxieties suddenly surfaced. I was the only one he could turn to, and though I saw less of him now (I’m pretty certain he was out impressing other women), turn to me he did. He would call me, sometimes late at night, sometimes in the middle of the workday, demanding that I drop everything and attend to him, assure him, prop up his ego, assuage his fears.

  Charlie’s needs reached a new, exasperating peak the day before we were to have a celebratory lunch with Elliott Dunne. I held the phone to my ear and played with a pencil while he nattered on for twenty minutes, anxious and needy. I broke the tip of the pencil. “Listen, Charlie. Tomorrow Elliott Dunne is going to give you the key to the Writers’ Building at Empire Pictures. This is your great chance to be the screenwriter you always wanted to be. Don’t screw it up. We bought you that nice new suit and tie. Tailor-made, remember? The same tailor Leon goes to.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you just wear that, look handsome, and let your wit and good humor shine through.”

  “What if I can’t?”

  “I’ll see you at Pierino’s at one o’clock.” I hung up, irritated. More than that: angry, really. If I’d loved Charlie I would have been more supportive. But I didn’t love him, and I never would. Constantly stroking his ego made me too tired to stroke other things. I couldn’t go on waving pom-poms and bouncing away to John Philip Sousa.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Fate had something else in store the next morning. I went out to the Silver Bullet, and it only barely coughed to life. I knew (bitter experience) better than to turn it off until I got to Reg’s Auto Repair in the Valley. Wishing I’d been brought up to pray, I urged the MG along the back roads.

  Reg is a displaced Brit with smoke-stained fingers, bad teeth, a thin nose, and bright blue eyes. He only works on foreign cars, specialty cars, and fussy and unreliable sports cars. Like mine. His place, a big dusty lot overhung by eucalyptus trees and aged sycamores, takes up an acre in what was once a chicken ranch. I had the MG’s top up so I wouldn’t get blown to bits, but when I stepped out of the car, dust, no doubt left over from the chickens, swirled up and coated my white shoes. In the small office an open window let in a dry breeze, ruffling the receipts and invoices, and girlie calendars that were pinned to the wall. A colored man reading a newspaper leaned back in the desk chair, his feet up on the desk, resting atop the phone book. He bent the page and looked over it.

  “Where’s Reg?” I asked.

  He waved in the general direction of the garage outside and returned to his newspaper.

  Why didn’t he get up and go find Reg for me? He didn’t even look up again. Cursing him under my breath, I stomped through the dusty yard as my shoes turned a dingy brown. In the big garage where the mechanics were all bent over the engines of sports cars, I stepped into a grease puddle. “Reg! Reg!” I called again over the clang of tools and an unseen radio playing Hank Williams. “Reg! I need your help!”

  Reg emerged from under the hood—the “bonnet,” he would have said—of a Triumph. He wore oil-stained overalls and wiped his hands on an oil-stained rag. He plucked a cigarette out of his mouth and grinned at me. “Miss Granville. Oh no, more trouble with the Silver Bullet?”

  “I’m in a hurry, Reg. Really. You have to look at it right now. I have a lunch date at Pierino’s and I have to be there. I can’t be late.”

  “Let’s have a look at her.” Cars were always female to Reg. He walked out with me, opened the MG’s hood, and poked about, muttering to himself. He tried to start it, to no avail. “Sorry, Miss Granville, it’s the electrical system. It’ll take me a couple of days. Parts, you know. Hard to come by.” The colored man strolled out of the office, and Reg turned to him. “Your Porsche is ready, Mr. Dexter. I’ve just asked Bob to take it round the block once, just to be sure all’s well while I do your paperwork.”

  “Thanks, Reg,” said Mr. Dexter without a glance at me.

  Blood pounded into my face from embarrassment, lighting up my birthmark. Everything I
’d assumed was wrong. The Negro man did not work here. He was a customer. He carried a sport coat over his shoulder; he was well dressed, certainly not in greasy overalls, but I had not seen that behind the newspaper. Moreover, something about him was oddly—not familiar, exactly, but, well, something . . . I said again to Reg that I had to have the car, and I had to have it fast. “I have a very important lunch appointment. I need to be there.”

  “Sorry, miss. You know what these electrical systems are like.” He began explaining how English cars used two six-volt batteries and American cars used one twelve-volt and . . .

  I just wanted the damn thing to run, to be reliable. Too much to ask of a British car. I regretted not driving a Cadillac like everyone else. A cab into the city would cost me a fortune, more cash than I had with me.

  Reg went into the office, and Mr. Dexter came up to me. He was tall, broad-shouldered, solid, his hair cut short and close to his head, his skin a deep mahogany. His large dark eyes were expressive and flickered with mirth. Then he was instantly serious. “Where is your appointment?”

  “Pierino’s on La Cienega.”

  “I know where Pierino’s is. My Porsche is done. I’ll drop you off there if you want.”

  I flushed even more deeply. “Thank you.”

  “Of course, the Porsche is a sports car, no back seat.” He frowned, as though puzzled. “You’ll have to sit beside me. You can’t pretend I’m your chauffeur.”

  “That really won’t be necessary,” I replied with what I hoped was dignity.

  Mr. Dexter went into the office with Reg, and one of the mechanics drove into the wide yard in a cream-colored Porsche convertible spewing dust all around, coating my navy blue suit and my white gloves.

  Reg and Mr. Dexter came outside, and Reg held the Porsche door open for me as I lowered myself into the leather seat. I wanted to ask the driver to please put the top up, but something about him did not invite the asking of further favors, and besides, I was still smarting from my awful gaffe.

 

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