The Great Pretenders

by Laura Kalpakian

  Jonathan took a vacation to Key West and returned tanned and more handsome than ever. He and I were having breakfast in the dining room of the Culver Hotel, talking about plans for the upcoming premiere of Fly Me to the Moon. At Denise’s insistence, it had been moved to late January. At Leon’s insistence, Gordon was overseeing everything personally, right down to who would be arriving with whom.

  “I’m paired up with Barbara Marsh. Part of the publicity love affair,” said Jonathan, while we waited for our Bloody Marys (a hotel specialty). “I’m the star. I should be able to arrive on my own, but Gordon’s such a skinflint, he won’t spring for two limos.”

  “I sympathize. Gordon insisted I come with Charlie Frye. I fought him on it, but finally I said okay, as long as it’s understood that I’m picked up first and dropped off last. I don’t want Charlie coming to my house ever again.”

  Jonathan’s eyebrow lifted expectantly. “Terrence is in Alabama fighting to keep people off the buses or something boring like that. You could . . .”

  “No, Jonathan. That isn’t going to happen. I’ve made my choices.”

  “You’re going to be faithful to him? Really?”

  “Really. I love him and he loves me, and he’s doing important work there.”

  “Oh, Quacker, I liked you so much better when you were shallow and flip.”

  “You mean more like you.”

  “Exactly.” He blew out a perfect smoke ring. “I’ll be glad when the picture’s finally launched and I can get rid of Barbara. She’s a nice kid, but too inexperienced to be interesting. Soon as I can, I’m on to other lovers.”

  “Like Denise Dell.”

  For the first time since Jonathan was a fat, stuttering boy abandoned by his mother, ignored by his father, and seduced by his stepmother, I saw something like actual pain cross his face. Not thwarted ambition or sulking petulance, but sadness. A look so swift and fleeting that anyone other than I would have missed it altogether. However, he quickly gave an insincere laugh, raised his profile for an invisible camera, and spoke in a voice not at all discreet. “I’d say that’s a rather presumptuous question coming from a girl who has made some very bad choices. Imagine what Leon Greene would do if he knew you and the butler’s nephew were living in sin, if he knew that his granddaughter was no better than Diana Jordan.”

  I could feel my birthmark flushing. “It was just an observation.”

  “You should be less observant, Roxanne. I don’t want to talk about this again.”

  He had made his point, and I let it pass.

  The night of the premiere, searchlights from the Griffith Observatory raked across the sky, lighting it up probably all the way to Catalina Island. As the line of limos inched up before that stately institution, photographers and reporters flocked, and fans pressed against the red velvet ropes that framed a broad red carpet avenue. The publicity campaign for Fly Me to the Moon had been unrelenting, and clearly, it was paying off. The million-dollar endowment to the Observatory itself, announced with great fanfare, had garnered press from as far away as the New York Times, as well as other major papers. Newsmen, photographers, and television cameramen swarmed, eager to share with an adoring world this incredible event: the best publicity money could buy. As our limo pulled up, I thought, well, Gordon can congratulate himself on a job well done, though I recognized (as did he) that this was an applause-fest, and not a true test of the film’s success. That would be decided at the box office.

  I’ve been attending premieres since I was allowed to stay up past eight, so I wasn’t especially excited, but beside me in the back seat of the limo I sensed Charlie’s almost quivering anxiety. I felt for him a sort of solicitude that surprised me. I said brightly, “So when you were warming the counter stool at Schwab’s, did you ever think you would see this night?”

  “Of course I did. But I thought it would be for Coast of Heaven.” He turned away from me.

  “It still can be,” I offered. “Variety said your writing was crisp and witty.”

  “Yes, well, they aren’t my crisp and witty lines, are they? I’m nothing but a stooge for Max Leslie.”

  I glanced at the cap of the driver in the front seat and decided to say no more. When we arrived at the Observatory the driver jumped out and held the door for us. I stepped out into a gaggle of network and local television cameras, radio personalities with microphones, and press people. Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, shooting daggered looks at each other, took up their respective places of honor and smiled like the doyenne-dragons that they were. The renowned Dorothy Parker was on assignment for the New Yorker, and there were less stellar representatives from Modern Screen, Photoplay, and Secrets of the Stars. (Not Al Gilbert; he only did the slimy stuff.)

  When Charlie stepped out beside me I could see on his face—no matter what had brought him here—that he was delighted to be part of this moment. I took his arm with some affection, and we turned, smiled, and waved to crowds lining either side of the broad red carpet while the flashbulbs sparkled, and people applauded our appearance: Charlie, handsome, beaming in his tuxedo, me in a ballerina-length, sea-green chiffon with a long chiffon scarf over one shoulder and the rope of Julia’s pearls gleaming. I wore Terrence’s gold bracelet over my elbow-length, three-button gloves.

  According to Gordon’s careful planning, Charlie and I were among the earlier arrivals—the newsreel, so to speak, before the main attraction. As we started up the red carpet, we turned and waved, absorbing a lot of anonymous attention, and I saw two older women deep in the crowd, two women who were not waving madly or jumping up and down with excitement. Smiling. Marian and Kathleen. They just stood there, like ghosts really, smiling ghosts, and honestly, when the next limo pulled up, they so swiftly melted into the crowd, I somehow doubted I had seen them at all.

  Gordon rose from this limo and offered his hand to Irene, and then to Elsie as each stepped from the car. Gordon wore his worried-cobra expression, and Irene wore a white Balenciaga and sapphires, looking like the proverbial tip of the beautiful iceberg. Elsie still looked like a Victorian sofa. When, following them, Jonathan stepped out of his limo, he took his time absorbing the crowd’s adulation all by himself before he offered his hand to Barbara Marsh, who sat in the back seat, waiting to emerge.

  At last Leon and Denise arrived, bathed in applause. Denise shone in the spotlight, beautifully draped in a coat of white chinchilla; she did not show in the least. Leon in his tuxedo looked as debonair, bon vivant, and sophisticated as David Niven in The Elusive Pimpernel. As part of this glittering exercise, everyone smiled and preened along the red carpet and up the steps into the Observatory, where posters of Fly Me to the Moon adorned the walls.

  When at last the curtain went up on the finished film, there were cute opening credits in keeping with the light comedic touch. It began with a panorama of the Griffith Observatory and a young guide showing a group of eager schoolchildren around. (An odd echo of the tense and intense Rebel Without a Cause.) Fly Me to the Moon was a comedy, and people laughed. The film was supported with a light, unmemorable score by Adolph Deutsch, an old friend of Leon’s. Clever editing obscured some of the difficulties I had seen in the early version. Max’s rewrites had considerably brightened the comedy, and I had to admit that Leon’s addition of the ending scene with Maisie in an evening gown (and handsome Jonathan no longer looking frumpy) was a definite plus. Even Denise’s inability to render scientific dialogue with conviction had about it a sort of charm, and she certainly knew how to flirt with the camera. This audience was ready to love her.

  When the film was over, the applause was thunderous, and Leon stood up, turned around, and gestured with one hand to the lovely Denise Dell, still swathed in her white chinchilla, and with the other to the smoothly handsome Jonathan Moore. They both rose and took many bows to ongoing adulation.

  We all moved into the main lobby, where a chamber orchestra played an up
-tempo “Fly Me to the Moon” followed by a lot of other peppy standards. Champagne bubbled and caviar gleamed. Denise and Jonathan, side by side, collected praise, bestowed smiles, and held hands in victory while photographers snapped innumerable pictures. Leon and Elsie stood at their sides, looking, I must say, like the proud parents of high school graduates.

  Irene, Gordon, and I moved to the edges of the crowd. I said, “I have to admit the movie was funny.”

  “Yes, but what were they laughing at?” Irene asked. “The wit, or Denise’s delivery?”

  “It’s a comedy,” said Gordon sourly.

  “When do you think they’ll publicly announce about the baby?” I said in a low voice.

  “It’ll be a while. Denise is still raging mad at being knocked up.”

  Gordon frowned. “Must you be so vulgar about it?”

  Irene laughed her rippling laugh. “I have four kids. I have a right to be vulgar about it.”

  Sensing that they were hovering on the edge of a full-tilt quarrel, I stepped outside to get some air that wasn’t swathed in cigarette smoke. I thought about Max writing away in that claustrophobic clapboard house that backed up to an alley in Riverside. I thought about Terrence down in Montgomery in his room at Reverend Cooke’s, a gooseneck lamp on his desk, pounding out prose on the Royal. I thought about Simon in Mexico City, about Jerrold Davies now safely back in Paris, working in the apartment where a golden statuette served as a humble hat rack. I thought about Jimmy in his new tract house away from the walnut groves, about Art, who, with the money Paragon was prepared to pay him, was getting ready to move out of the Quonset hut. I thought about Maurice in the Hollywood Hills listening to his mother gripe about bagels. And of course, Charlie here, reveling in glamour and applause. Who would have ever believed that I, Roxanne Granville, would connect all these disparate lives? I stood at the top of the stairs and took a deep breath. The searchlights were all turned off, and the sky overhead was its own starry expanse, with no help from the phosphorescence of Hollywood or Empire Pictures.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The night of the premiere in Los Angeles, January 30, there was a bombing in Montgomery, Alabama. While the leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association, Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke at a big rally, someone threw a homemade bomb into his house, where his wife and baby daughter were. Terrence was at Dr. King’s rally when he heard the news, and he ran to a nearby drugstore to call Ben Tupper, forgetting where he was and who he was, and three men yanked him out of the phone booth, which I guess was for whites only. They kicked him to the curb, and kicked him a few times after that as well. That too went into his story that ran in the Challenger.

  To me he wrote more personally.

  Liza Jane,

  If I’m an outside agitator, well, time to agitate, damnit, and not just watch, witness, and write. I took the extra money the NAACP gave me and bought a prewar Ford. It’s a bucket of bolts, but it runs. I bought it so I can drive to one of the lots owned by black businesses and pick up people and take them to their jobs. I drive. They talk. I listen. Their shoes are wearing out, but not their spirit.

  But that car? That car! Roxanne, that is an experience that’s seared into me for the rest of my life. I bought it off a white man, and god forgive me, I had to promise him, no sir, I wouldn’t be driving no nigras to work. He called me boy. He was toying with me, all along, and finally said he wouldn’t sell it to me because he didn’t recognize me. I wasn’t a local. I sure as hell wasn’t about to show my California license. I had to get Rev Cooke to come down and buy it, and when he showed up, the cracker called Rev Cooke uncle. I wanted to punch his guts out. And I couldn’t allow my face to show that I wanted to punch his guts out. I thought I’d have a hernia I was so goddamned mad. And he was still toying with us, cat and a pair of hapless black mice. After all that shit he put us through, he said that he would only sell the car to a white man. He wanted to be sure it wouldn’t be used as a taxi for blacks who ought to be riding the bus. Rev Cooke telephoned a white pastor here in Montgomery, and he came and the cracker sold it to him.

  Baby, just writing this I feel like I ought to take a shower and wash all that bullshit jive off of me, really, physically off of me. I miss you so much.

  Love,

  Terrence

  PS: I think of my father living here, growing up here, and how going to war, how that must have shaken him to his core. He once said that before he was twenty he had never looked under the hood of a car, never seen anything but down the mouth or behind the butt of a mule. That’s all I know of his Alabama life, but the more I see of the people of Montgomery, the more I want to know. Are these my people even if they’re not my relatives? What brought him to California, and what took him away? It’s late and I’m tired. I’ll write more soon.

  Once he got started driving every day, Terrence’s Challenger stories were, each one of them, like the verse of an anthem. He wrote not just of the MIA and NAACP leaders, of council meetings and the like, but of maids and porters, pastors, mechanics, bartenders and barbers and waiters, of the Montgomery people he ferried in the Ford, people whose indomitable unity gave them courage that was strengthening rather than diminishing with each passing day.

  THEIR SHOES ARE WEARING OUT BUT NOT THEIR SPIRIT

  That was the headline plastered across the Challenger’s front page announcing a Shoe Drive, to collect shoes for the people in Montgomery who were walking back and forth to work. Black churches picked it up, and radio stations too, though not the predominately white stations, nor the television networks. But in the pages of the Challenger, you heard the call, and all over Southern California people emptied out their closets to send shoes to Montgomery. Restaurants and shops and businesses set up pickup bins and started collection jars, Send Montgomery Shoes, to pay the postage.

  I emptied out my closet. Thelma emptied out her closet. I called Susan Strassman, and asked her to call her sister. I did not dare contact Marian, but I wrote a note to Kathleen Bachman, assuming they had some kind of shoe drive in Arizona. I called Reg. I called Jonathan. Thelma cautioned me against asking any of the Clara Bow Drive neighbors, drawing attention to ourselves, but I did call Irene.

  “I don’t want to be involved,” she replied, “but I saw that the Times did an article about your friend’s reporting. ‘Negro Reporter Brings Montgomery Bus Boycott Home to LA.’ He’s made quite a name for himself. You must be quite proud of him.”

  “I’m always proud of him. If he were white, he’d be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.”

  “If he were white,” she replied, “he wouldn’t care who is or isn’t riding the Alabama buses.”

  I personally delivered two big boxes full of shoes (as much as I could fit in the MG) to the Challenger offices. The receptionist thanked me and said that their circulation had doubled since their reporter, Mr. Dexter, went down to Montgomery. “Would you like a free copy of the paper, miss?” she asked.

  “I subscribe. Thanks.”

  I went to Ruby’s and sat at the counter. It was late afternoon, and on the jukebox, the Platters crooned their plaintive “The Great Pretender.” The place was empty except for a group of high school students and two old men playing checkers. Coralee ambled out and asked what I wanted. “A root beer float,” I replied. “I just delivered boxes of shoes to the Challenger for the shoe drive.”

  “Lah-di-dah. You want the Nobel Prize?” She made the root beer float and plunked it down in front of me. “What do you hear from Terrence?”

  “He writes when he can. Calls now and then when he can find a pay phone.”

  “He calls you, and not me or Ruby or my sister?”

  “We don’t talk very long. It’s expensive. Mostly he writes.”

  “He writes you letters and he sends us postcards? We, all of us, we say his name in church every Sunday. ‘O Lord, bless and protect Terrence Dexter while he is b
raving hostile forces there in the Cradle of the Confederacy,’ and we ain’t heard his voice? I call that shameful. Really. Shameful. He oughta know you’re no good for him, Miss Granville.”

  “Please, Coralee, call me Roxanne.”

  “I only call my friends by their first names.”

  “I could be your friend. I want to be your friend. I want to be Ruby’s friend.”

  “Listen to you! The great white hope come down here to bestow us with your friendship. Are we supposed to be grateful?”

  “I don’t want your gratitude. I don’t want anything from you, except that you should believe me when I tell you I love him.”

  “Listen, missy, I never thought I’d be happy to see anyone I love go to Alabama, but if it means Terrence not around you, well then, fine with me. You put him in danger every time you go out with him.” She lowered her voice to a hiss. “Every time you go to bed with him, you put him in danger. Every time you so much as look at him, you’re saying to the world, come and take it out on this black man! Take out all your ugliness. All your fear. You wanna be my friend? You are crazy, girl. You are the living end. Remember Emmett Till.” She ran her rag along the counter with frenzied effort.

  “This is California.”

  “You think that really matters?”

  “Yes. I do. It’s not Alabama.”

  “It’s not the pastures of heaven either, and all god’s children don’t got wings.” She flung down the check on the counter, and as I reached for it, she suddenly gripped my wrist. “If you really loved him, you’d give him up. For his own good. For his own sake.”