The Great Pretenders

by Laura Kalpakian

  “And now?”

  My shoulders sank, and for the first time I uttered the words, “I’m wondering if maybe it was a foolhardy gesture.”

  “Why did Leon buy them? The man who makes everyone in a ten-mile radius sign a loyalty oath? Leon should have taken you to the woodshed and given you a good whupping, but no, he offers your writer two pictures and a three-year contract? Crazy.”

  “Thelma thinks it’s so they can keep Charlie close by. Keep an eye on him.”

  “Everything you’ve said about Leon Greene, one thing we know for sure, he ain’t stupid. He knew, didn’t he? He guessed Max wrote these. Why would he buy these scripts?”

  “For Denise. Denise wanted them. I have to admit, they are great roles for her.”

  “Does Denise know Max wrote them?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Leon might have told her.”

  “He’s too proud to admit to a weakness. Any weakness. And he would see it as weakness that he chose to please his young wife, and never mind his sworn allegiance to the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.”

  “Does anyone else know?”

  “Maybe Gordon guessed. But he’d never part with any secret that could hurt Leon.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Well, you and me and Thelma. And Max and Marian, and Charlie, and Maurice, and Kathleen Hilyard.” I did not include Irene, who had guessed.

  “And Jonathan?”

  “No. I’d never tell Jonathan. He’s too free and easy, and he has too many parties.”

  “But did he guess? Jonathan got the role of Professor Bleeker. He knows Max Leslie’s work, doesn’t he?”

  “He does, but Jonathan . . .” How to say this without looking disloyal to my oldest friend, and the only friend who knew about Terrence and me. “There’s lots he doesn’t notice. He’s not exactly astute about anything outside of himself.”

  “They call that being egotistical.”

  “I’m used to it. It’s just who he is. No one’s going to change him. He’s like my brother. You can’t change your brother.”

  “Don’t I know it.” He rose, came to me, and took me in his arms, held me close, his cheek against my hair. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Liza Jane. It all sounds pretty rickety to me. I hope it doesn’t crash around your ears.”

  There in his arms, though the beat of his heart comforted me, I thought just the same about the famous house of straw and how little it would take to blow it apart. I had more to lose now.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Though the filming was taking place in exotic locations far distant from Hollywood, that summer everyone was abuzz with talk of the massive costs of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. Terrence and I, however, asked each other more plaintively, where is it in the Ten Commandments that we should not be allowed to fall in love? How had we so completely transgressed? We were forbidden to each other, not like adulterers skulking behind their spouses’ backs, but by pressures, dogmas, assumptions, openly hostile undercurrents we could not fight. On our own beach (for that’s how we thought of it, our very own beach, our own waves, our own horizon where the sun went down every night for our own pleasure and delight), the sight of the two of us together made other people walking the beach stare as though we were freaks or look away as though we were lepers. The pinch-lipped, fig-faced Wilburs never failed to bristle with spite, and they never once spoke to Terrence. When he and I were together publicly, we somehow roused deep, endemic anger in our fellow mortals who clearly felt they could revile us with impunity. Sometimes they would look at us as if they would just as soon throw us both to the ground and kick us as give us the time of day. Sometimes they muttered ugly things. And sometimes outright aggression popped out of people’s pores like sweat. This was entirely new and scary to me, but Terrence, I quickly saw, had navigated it all his life. I had new understanding of the necessity for The Negro Motorist Green Book for travelers, but there was no guide for lovers of different races to tell them where are the safe places, where might they be allowed just to love each other as ordinary people and not black and white.

  One evening he picked me up at work, and we went to a dim little bar off Venice Boulevard for a drink before he had to return to the Challenger. We’d no sooner walked through the door than the bartender called Terrence a vicious name, and me a worse one. Terrence jumped, as though he’d been goosed, and marched me out of there so fast my head started to spin.

  “Are you going to take that?” I demanded as he opened the door of the Porsche, shoved me in, and slammed the door. “Are you going to let that bastard talk to us like that? Who does he think he is?”

  Terrence got in the Porsche and sped away. He did not answer me till I again demanded why he hadn’t stood up to that bastard.

  “Did you see his hands?”

  “His hands? No. What’s that got to do with it? He—”

  “His hands were under the bar. Ten to one he had a gun under the counter. And he would have used it and been proud of himself.”

  “No. That’s not possible.”

  He glanced over at me with a look of near desperation. “This isn’t a goddamn movie, Roxanne, where you walk down the street at high noon, and make fine gestures, and in The End the good guys win while a bunch of trumpets play in the background. Shit like that will get you killed. It will sure as hell get me killed.”

  There was nothing I could say to that. I did not recognize the danger that Terrence instantly sensed because I had no frame of reference at all. After all, in the movies I had never seen a white woman and a black man out together, arm in arm. Of course I hadn’t. There never was such a scene. There might not ever be such a scene. The Hays Code did not allow miscegenation on the screen. Miscegenation. Is that what we were doing? What an ugly word. So ugly that even the scandal rags that had excoriated Diana Jordan hadn’t used it, preferring to highlight a blonde actress and her black lover. Miscegenation. As he drove me back to Clara Bow Drive, I tried but could not think of a single movie or play or novel where a white woman and a black man defied custom, expectations, and fell in love. None except Othello—a tragedy.

  * * *

  • • •

  If we wanted to go to a movie, Terrence and I had to buy separate tickets, apart from each other, enter separately after the lights had gone down, sit together, and leave separately before the lights came up. And at that, especially in a crowded theater, we attracted unwanted attention just sitting side by side. We couldn’t eat a meal at the Farm Café, or anywhere near Clara Bow Drive, without nasty looks seasoning every bite. We found a couple of restaurants in Chinatown, dark, quiet, painted in red and black and gold, with little glass wind chimes that tinkled with the breeze of every passing waiter. No one in Chinatown cared who we were, since we weren’t Chinese. Neither of us had ever eaten Chinese food, and we both liked it, and we learned to use chopsticks. We drove to Baja for a couple of weekends, and there we could go wherever we wanted, dance to our hearts’ content, and not attract any special notice (except for nasty looks from the border guards). Jonathan insisted everything would be fine at Casa Fiesta, reminding us that Clayton Strong and his girlfriend sometimes showed up at the parties. But Clayton’s girlfriend wasn’t white, and I reminded Jonathan that when Bongo and those two actors saw Diana and Booker together at the Comet Club, what did they do? They bolted, afraid to be anywhere near a white woman who loved a black man. By the end of the summer, Terrence and I agreed it was easier to stay home, to keep to ourselves.

  We made an exception when the Comet Club reopened months after the raid, an important night on Central Avenue. The club was packed and pulsating with excitement that night, full of white and black patrons, and the band was in fine form. Terrence and I got a few odd looks when we came in together, though we were not the only interracial couple, and that eased my mind a bit.

&nb
sp; We joined a big group crowded round a single table. Clayton and Rita, Ben Tupper from the Challenger and his wife, Terrence’s sister Coralee and her husband. Coralee was cool to me, not at all chatty and friendly, as she had been before Terrence and I were a couple. Her husband was a small, lithe man who did not talk, just quietly grooved to the music. We all applauded wildly when Booker soloed. Everyone commented how the Comet Club was the same old place, as though the raid had never happened. But for me, things were decidedly different.

  Jaylene stepped out and, with a nod to her musicians, performed George Gershwin’s “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing.” She made the song—sung by a man in Porgy and Bess—the saddest any woman could imagine, as though it were a dirge for her and a warning for me. As Terrence and I danced, my head against his shoulder, I glanced over at Jaylene, and though her concentration on her song never wavered, I saw a light flash in her eyes and a quick, grim curl to her lips.

  After her set I excused myself to go to the women’s bathroom, where an older woman—a total stranger—snapped at me, calling me an ofay bitch, and others, also strangers, applying lipstick in the mirror, shot me looks meant to slay. Maybe they were friends or admirers of Jaylene. Maybe it was because I was clearly Terrence’s date. Maybe it was because I was the only white woman in the bathroom. I certainly didn’t let on that I was shaken, but I was, and I guess I knew now what it was like to be judged solely for the color of your skin.

  I returned to the table and felt suddenly self-conscious about the music itself. West Coast Cool, progressive jazz, would never speak to my deepest instincts. Of the music that Terrence loved, I preferred the hymns and the old songs he played on Nelson’s upright. I could not truthfully groove to what the Comet Club adored.

  The band took its break. Booker Dexter strolled over, drink in hand. Coralee jumped up and hugged him. He pulled up a chair, wedging himself between me and Terrence, and sat down. I could feel him looming over me in a way that had nothing to do with his height. He accepted everyone’s enthusiastic praise in a surly way. I saw Terrence and Coralee exchange a look of unease. “What do you see in her, Terrence?” asked Booker.

  “Stay cool, daddy-o,” said Terrence.

  Booker grabbed my jaw, turning my head sharply. He ran his hand roughly over my stained cheek. “Always wanted to do that. Feel it.” He picked up his drink, his cigarettes, and left us.

  Terrence rose, kicked his chair back, and followed. I sat there stunned. Everyone was stunned. A great silence descended on all of us in the midst of the crowd and the smoke and the noise.

  “Booker’s unpredictable,” said Coralee, putting her hand over mine in a way unexpectedly tender.

  “He’s a drug addict,” said her husband. “It’s true, Cora, and you know it.”

  At the bar, Booker and Terrence spoke angrily, their voices rising and then falling into a growl. When he returned to the table, Terrence took my arm and steered me from the smoky murk of the club into the warm summer night, where panhandlers beseeched us for money.

  “It was nothing, Terrence,” I said as I stumbled behind him.

  “It wasn’t nothing to me!”

  “It’s all right.”

  “It’s not all right!” We got into the Porsche. The engine roared and the dash lights played over his somber face as he gunned the motor and pulled out. “Booker didn’t used to be like that.”

  “Then maybe he didn’t mean it.”

  “Of course he meant it! And I just had to stand there and watch him. I hate standing by! I stood by while Daddy took after my mother, slapping her around when she got too uppity. Mama would say, ‘Oh, he doesn’t mean it.’ But he did! He meant it! I was just a boy, and wanted to jump him and fight him, but my sisters held me back, said there was nothing I could do, so I just witnessed, and I been witnessing ever since. Even for the Challenger, I’m nothing but a goddamned witness, just there to watch and report and never act. I hate being powerless, a powerless witness to what heroin has done to my brother, and now, here, I’m powerless when I see what he did to you.”

  “He didn’t do anything to me,” I insisted. “My mother was forever taking my face in her hand and asking what is this, and how does it feel, and can we get rid of it. It’s happened before. It’ll happen again.”

  “Not with my brother, it won’t. We’re not going back there.”

  “I don’t want to cut you off from your family.”

  He gave a deep, throaty, scoffing laugh. “You think the whole tribe of them haven’t chewed my ear? You think they haven’t been telling me from day one that I gotta give you up for my own good? They’re like the Hallelujah Fucking Chorus, girl! Wailing warning and hymns of doom. My aunts, my sisters! And Clarence! Oh you should hear Clarence Goodall on the subject of Miss Roxanne Granville.” In the light from the dashboard I saw his jaw tighten. “Last time I saw him, Clarence handed me a pair of white gloves and told me to wear them when my black hands touch your skin.”

  I was appalled to hear this. I could so picture Clarence’s cold correctness. “You never said that they knew about us.”

  “Oh, they know! My family, my friends, they don’t need no Secrets of the Stars to be up on all the gossip. In my family, everyone’s doings get poured out with your morning cup of coffee. I been taking shit about you all summer long.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why should I? Just to make you unhappy? Your people sure as hell don’t know about me, do they? And you don’t need a diploma to guess what they would do, what they would say. What would they say, Roxanne?” he demanded, glancing over at me. “Really. I’m asking. What would they say?”

  “Their wrath would be . . .” When I thought of Leon’s response, the image that leapt to mind was Godzilla destroying Tokyo.

  He turned his gaze back to the road. “Well, I’m not giving you up, no matter if Ruby and Clarence, Coralee and all the rest of them think that the butler’s nephew shouldn’t be sleeping with the little princess of Summit Drive.”

  “Please don’t call me the little princess. It makes me feel stupid, and I’m not.”

  “You’re not stupid,” he said, taking a deep breath, “you are beautiful and brave, and I’ve never met anyone like you.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “You know I do.”

  “And I love you. Isn’t that all that matters?”

  “No, and you are crazy to think so.”

  “I’m only crazy for you, Terrence.”

  “Well, sign us both up for the loony bin, Liza Jane.”

  “As long as we have a room together,” I added, hoping to elicit a smile from him, but silence crackled between us. Anger bristled off of Terrence like static on a radio. After a while I said, “The world is never going to be kind to us, honey. I guess we need to accept that, and live around it.”

  “Can’t ever live around it, Liza. It’s there, like a great big pothole in the road of life.” He put his hand over mine. “Loving someone, it’s like you dance along this fine, smooth, paved road, and then, oh shit, you stumble, you fall into a pothole, and the person you love helps you out, and you’re both the stronger for it. And if you’re not stronger for it—the both of you—then you might as well pull up your pants and go home.”

  PART III

  The Red and the Black

  1955

  Chapter Eighteen

  They say that all the world loves a lover, so perhaps that’s why that summer of 1955 everything I touched seemed to glow. No longer Granville’s Folly, my little agency enjoyed a spate of good news, sale after sale for my clients who were moving out from Poverty Row productions. (Poverty Row itself was rapidly withering, thanks to television.) Television was still my writers’ bread and butter, but I snagged a fine coup with Maurice Allen’s—that is, Nelson Hilyard’s—The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. I sent it to MGM, to Jonathan’s odious father, Mr. Moore. (I stil
l think of him as Mr. Moore, though I’ve known him all my life.) When he called to say he wanted to meet to discuss the script, I insisted on meeting him at a restaurant—and not one that was part of a hotel. (From the actresses he’d invited to his hotel suites, to the script girls he’d accosted in on-set trailers, his reputation was whispered among women all over Hollywood.) We met at Ciro’s, and I must say, he treated me with nothing worse than dripping condescension. However, he was brimming with excitement for The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. He had a director in mind! Ambitious casting in mind! He wanted to meet the writer, Maurice Allen.

  When we all three had lunch, Maurice conducted himself like one cool cat, which is to say, the jaded New Yorker he truly is. After that, of course, it was all hurry up and wait, but the contract with MGM did wonders for Maurice’s generally caustic personality. He rented a house in the Hollywood Hills with a pool and a view. His mother left New York and moved in with him. Kathleen Hilyard (whom I called from a phone booth) was so delighted she wept with joy.

  One night in late July, the Saturday before they would commence filming Fly Me to the Moon, Leon threw a soiree under the stars at Summit Drive. I attended with Jonathan, and we were stuck for what felt like hours talking to Mr. Moore who (surprise, surprise) actually had kind words to say about Jonathan’s upcoming starring role. Jonathan’s father could do to him what my mother did to me, and it wasn’t pretty. Denise Dell came to our rescue, taking Jonathan’s arm and saying she wanted to dance with her leading man.

  I took the opportunity to escape Mr. Moore, though I shortly found myself marooned instead with Elsie O’Dell, who mentioned sotto voce that today was Denise’s birthday. She was thirty. Elsie must have been pretty soused to part with that fact. No actress will ever willingly acknowledge a birthday. Look at Mary Pickford. She stayed in ringlets, hair bows, and flounces till she was old enough to be someone’s granny, and then she simply vanished and became part of Hollywood’s collective unconscious. Denise waved to her mother from the garden tier above us. Elsie rose to join them. “Are you coming, Roxanne?”