The Great Pretenders

by Laura Kalpakian

  Irene called immediately. She ranted at me for tempting fate and how stupid I was, but when I started to cry, she stopped.

  “He’s gone,” I wept, “and everything we had reduced to vulgar smut. A love nest? I want to throw up.”

  “Go throw up then, and get it over with, for god’s sake. I’m sorry it happened like this, but I’m not sorry he’s gone. You are better off.”

  “How can you say that? I love him, and I don’t know how to live without him.”

  “The world is not well lost for love, little sister. Just ask Cyrano and the original Roxanne. Just like you, Cyrano brought about his own tragedy. This affair of yours was always bound for tragedy, and if you didn’t know it from the beginning, well, grow up! That man was never any good for you. Give it a week and you’ll be glad he’s gone. For god’s sake, use some of that panache you’re always so proud of.”

  I hung up, went into the bedroom, took the bottle of Panache off the dresser, and wondered if it would kill me if I drank the whole thing.

  Late that evening Jonathan telephoned from Hawaii, a crackling long-distance call. For ten minutes he rattled on about his own flourishing career, speaking in a voice so light it blew away like a soap bubble on a spring breeze.

  “Quite the commotion you’ve raised,” he said at last.

  “You heard about it over there?”

  “This is nineteen fifty-six, didn’t you know? We’re no longer relying on smoke signals. Well, don’t worry, when I get back I’ll help you find some nice white boy to marry, just like Diana Jordan.”

  “I hope you’re not serious.”

  “Of course I am! How else is there to brazen it out? Has Leon torn into you yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  Leon did indeed summon me. Even when I was most angry with him I never contested his right to power. No one did. That’s why he continued to hold such power. I dressed carefully for the part. No black penitent for me. I was not sorry I had loved Terrence Dexter. I wore a coral-colored bouffant dress, just to prove I still had panache in addition to the cologne. I did my hair and makeup carefully, even though when I finished and looked in the mirror I knew it was only a performance, pretending to bravery I did not have, pretending not to collapse under the weight of Leon’s disapproval. His rage would be easier to endure than his disrespect.

  Clarence opened the door at Summit Drive, and coral-colored dress notwithstanding, I shriveled under his harsh gaze, his stoic bearing. Wordlessly he closed the door behind me, but he lost his senatorial self-possession, and his breath came in glacial gusts of anger. “I served this house, your family, for thirty-some years! I seen everything that goes on in this house! I kept its secrets, Mr. Greene’s secrets and Mrs. Greene’s secrets—oh yes, she had them! Who do you think introduced her to August Branch? She came to me, told me what she wanted to do, and I helped her do it. She put me in peril, my job in real peril. She knew it too. But I did it for her. I been everything the Greenes needed for thirty years, and I did it with my eyes open and my mouth shut.”

  I was jaw-drop stunned to hear that he had been the link between Julia, August Branch, and the NAACP, and I would have said so, but his escalating fury gave me no chance to speak.

  “When I saw my nephew take up with you, I knew that everything I’ve done for this family, for the Greenes, that all my loyalty was going to be thrown right back in my face. I knew that you would break my family apart. ‘Terrence,’ I said, ‘don’t do this.’ I told him more than once, we all did. We begged him to listen to us. Roxanne Granville is a Hollywood brat, nothing but trouble! She will ruin you, and you will pay a heavy price, heavier than you can ever know.”

  I wanted to lash out, and say, Oh yeah, Uncle Tom? That’s what Terrence thinks of you! But I could not ruin a man’s whole life acting out of anger. I wiped my eyes, careful not to smear my mascara. I kept my voice steady as Bette Davis would have. “Why won’t anyone tell me where he’s gone?”

  “After what you did to him! We’re telling you nothing! Everything I meant for Terrence and Booker to be, to become, to launch them into the world like men, like men, I say! You undid that.”

  “I didn’t do anything! It wasn’t my fault. I’m sorry.”

  “When are you and your people going to learn? We don’t want your sorry. We don’t want your thanks.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, tearing up.

  “No one’s ever gonna tell you where he’s gone, Roxanne. No one. No one wants you near him ever again. You were toying with a real man for the first time in your sorry, spoiled life.”

  “We were in love, we are in love. It wasn’t my fault,” I insisted.

  “Whose fault could it possibly be?”

  I suppose there were three hundred years of answers to that question, so when he turned away I simply followed him wordlessly up the stairs.

  Denise stood poised on the staircase wearing a gingham maternity dress. She was roly-poly, probably put on seventy pounds, and was bloated from the ankles on up. The look on her face was a mélange of menace and disgust. “A Nee-gro, Roxanne? Really. Have you no shame?”

  I started to walk past her with nothing more than Gallic disdain, but all my ungovernable instincts kicked in. “At least I’m not passing off one man’s bastard brat as another man’s child.”

  Clarence turned and walked away. He certainly did not want to hear any more of that.

  Denise paled to the same color as her blonde hair; her mouth opened and she gawped before she managed, “How dare you talk to me like that?”

  “I know Jonathan Moore, and I know he bagged you. That’s his favorite word for the women he’s had. You were bagged, pure and simple.”

  “You shut up. It wasn’t ever like that.”

  “You wanna bet?” I was pleased that I’d hurt her, cruel, small-minded as that makes me. I walked away, realizing I only had so much strength and I’d spent a wad of it with Clarence, and I wasn’t going to squander the rest with that whore Denise Dell, not when I had to face Leon Greene.

  He stood in front of the library’s stained glass windows and held the newspaper in one hand, waving it at me like a matador. “Sleeping with a Negro! Unthinkable! You stupid, reckless girl! Look at what you’ve done!”

  “What have I done? I fell in love.”

  “A Negro! A Negro agitator. And to think, this boy is Clarence’s nephew!”

  “Oh god, Leon! He’s not a boy, and Clarence has nothing to do with it.” The thought suddenly struck me. “You’re not going to fire Clarence, are you? It was all my fault. Clarence didn’t even know,” I lied without blinking, and went on lying. “Clarence never guessed.”

  Leon paused and frowned. “That’s what he said too.”

  “He’s telling you the truth. It was all my fault.”

  “And aren’t you ashamed?”

  “No.”

  “You ought to be. You always act like the rules don’t apply to you!”

  “And who taught me that, Leon?”

  His lip curled. “Don’t blame me for your filthy actions! Your dirty sex secrets. My own granddaughter, sleeping with a radical Negro! Who writes for a radical paper, allied with the NAACP. The Reds are at the root of the NAACP, and—”

  “You know nothing about the NAACP, and nothing about the Challenger, and absolutely nothing about Terrence Dexter, who is a good man, the best man I’ve ever known, the only man I’ve ever known who—”

  “You have flouted the laws of nature and society—you have tainted Empire Pictures with your disgusting sexual antics.” Leon paced the library while I sat depleted and immobile listening to him rant for half an hour about the horrors of miscegenation, and how the NAACP roiled up race relations, aided by the Reds, about how I was no better than that slut Diana Jordan, never mind every advantage, every opportunity he had given me, including the house that I lived in and the offi
ce that I used. Oh, everything he had made possible rolled by like the opening credits with the theme of The High and the Mighty blaring over it. I sat through it all until he said that I had repaid him with malicious stupidity. That’s when I stopped him.

  “It wasn’t malicious stupidity. I loved Terrence Dexter. I still love him, but he has left me, he’s gone, and no one will tell me where or let me talk to him.” I started to cry, and dug in my purse for a Kleenex. “There’s nothing left to lose.”

  “On the contrary. There’s a lot left to lose. Your scandal will smear all over Empire and hurt Denise.”

  “Hurt Denise?” I looked up from my Kleenex. “My heart is broken, my life is in ruins, the man I love has left me.” My voice spiraled upward in disbelief. “And you’re afraid I will hurt Denise?”

  “I don’t want her upset. This pregnancy has been hard on her. Any scandal of yours will hurt her too.”

  “Well, far be it for me to ripple the waters around little Dora O’Dell, the scheming bitch who wrecked your life and marriage—and not because she loved you, Leon! She’s forty years younger than you!—she used you for her career.”

  “You will be respectful of my wife, the mother of my child.”

  Is it your child? The question trembled at my lips, but there are some betrayals you never recover from. I would not do that to him. I loved him too much. For all I knew he had guessed at her affair with Jonathan, and if he had, his pride would never let him admit it, not to anyone, perhaps not even to himself. Denise was having a baby, and Leon would love this child, be a good father. Hadn’t he helped to raise me when my own mother couldn’t stand the sight of me and my father had left the country? This child would be loved. What else mattered? As I slowly got to my feet, I considered telling him about Julia’s note forgiving him, but decided against it. He did not deserve to know he’d been forgiven. After all, he had not called me here to offer forgiveness. And then, I had to admit to myself, that in truth, I had never really forgiven him for loving Denise. Why should he forgive me for loving Terrence? I just said, “Terrence Dexter is a good man who loved me. Why should the color of his skin make any difference?”

  “You sound like an imbecile. You are a stupid, reckless girl, and you will pay for this indiscretion. No one will ever look at you in the same way again knowing you have been to bed with a Negro. It’s disgusting. Your reputation will never recover.” Leon went to the desk where once a French abbé had dispensed wisdom. He stood there, and the expression on his face had sent lesser mortals scurrying for nearly forty years. “I am finished with you, Roxanne.”

  “So at last I get tossed out with the other unfortunate, inconvenient people, like Julia, like Jerrold and Nelson and Simon and Max. Tell me, Leon, did you guess that Max wrote Fly Me to the Moon?” He did not reply, but his jaw went taut, and I ought to have been afraid, but I went on, taunting him. “Did you tell Denise, ‘Look! I love you more than I love J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, and my pals John Wayne and Ward Bond! Pooks loves you more than he hates Communism! Think of it! For you, Denise, Leon Greene would produce a film he knew was written by a man he had destroyed.’”

  He pressed his lips till they were white. “Max destroyed himself.”

  There was really nothing left to say unless I said, I’m finished with you too, Leon, and I could not bring myself to do that. I rose, collected my handbag, and sailed through the door, where I found Clarence right there, listening at the keyhole like a parlor maid in a melodrama.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Charlie Frye’s path to redemption (and revenge) after he was fired by Empire followed the same Shakespearean pattern that had played out in Congressional hearings beginning in 1947. However, Charlie was not called to testify and he took no oaths. No, the scandal of Roxanne Granville and her Negro lover had scarcely waned when Charlie carried the equivalent of a Repent! sign on Sunset Boulevard by abasing himself in print. In the pages of various mags and newspapers his story spooled out like this: Charles David Frye, an aspiring screenwriter and patriotic American, had been unwittingly recruited by his then-agent, Roxanne Granville, to put his name on a script written by Max Leslie—a low-down Red who had shown contempt for Congress and fled to Mexico. Charlie, insisting how truly, tremendously, and deeply he regretted his mistake, swore by the soul of Ayn Rand that there was (somewhere) Red taint, a Communist message hidden in Fly Me to the Moon, a film produced—and personally overseen—by Leon Greene, head of Empire Pictures, stalwart supporter of the Waldorf Agreement, and a founder of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Asked if any other Granville Agency clients were fronting for blacklisted writers, Charlie Frye joined Vic Hale, and many other name-droppers more illustrious than he, and offered up his old comrades from the hungry days at Schwab’s, Jimmy Ashford, Maurice Allen, Art Luke, and “probably lots of others.”

  The scandal with Terrence had indeed hurt my agency, but this was the end. The Granville Agency, three years of my proverbial blood, sweat, and tears, was finished. The phone ceased to ring except for people calling to cancel meetings, cancel contracts, cancel long-standing negotiations, cancel anything in the present or looming in the future. That, or the press asking if I had any comment. I did not. My writers left in such numbers that I thought of lemmings jumping off a cliff. I wished I had taken my attorney’s advice and insisted on signed contracts instead of agreements based on a handshake. But I hadn’t.

  MGM fired Maurice Allen, citing the Waldorf Agreement, though nothing connected Maurice to being a Communist other than Charlie’s accusation. Maurice was philosophical about it. He called me and said he had known the risk when he took it. He had impressive credits now, and he was tired of writing; he wanted to produce. He was taking his mother and returning to New York. Daily, Thelma and I read every column inch of the trade papers like witches pawing through entrails, looking for word that Paragon Pictures had fired Art Luke, or that Gunsmoke had fired Jimmy.

  “It might be different now,” said Thelma philosophically after a few days had passed. “I’m cautiously optimistic. As long as the advertisers stay lined up for Gunsmoke, CBS might not care if Jimmy Ashford fronted for Lenin. Back in forty-seven when all this started, if you didn’t work in the movies, you didn’t work at all. But people aren’t going to the movies like they did then. Audiences are more like pigeons roosting in front of their televisions. TV shows are just a middleman between the products and the pigeons. If Jimmy keeps his head down and his mouth shut and soldiers on, he might be all right. Gunsmoke is doing great. The networks need fodder for their shows, week after week after week.”

  “Look at this.” I tossed Variety over to her. “Charlie’s reward for doing his patriotic duty.”

  “So Irv Rakoff has taken Charlie on as a client. Fancy that.”

  “Yes, I wonder if Irv will snuggle up his dick to Charlie’s tush.”

  We both laughed at that, though it was amazing to me that anything was funny, given our situation.

  Interviewed separately by phone, Denise and Jonathan each were quoted in the press expressing outrage! Had they known Fly Me to the Moon had the least Red tinge, they would not have dreamed of being part of it! Had they known the writer was fronting for a Red, they never . . . and so on. They both blamed me. Denise added a few salty, indignant phrases decrying the betrayal inflicted by a thankless granddaughter on her entire family. Leon offered no public statement. However, Empire Pictures took out full-page ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter in what amounted to the Gettysburg Address of Denials. Empire maintained unequivocally they had no idea their ex-employee, Charles Frye, was anything but who he presented himself to be. In offering himself as a front for another writer, Charles Frye had lied, perpetrated fraud, and that was why they had terminated his services. They reiterated their long-held resolution that Empire would never knowingly have anything to do with anyone of a remotely Communist persuasion, and that Fly Me to the Moon wa
s an outstanding example of good clean American values.

  Not surprisingly, Gordon’s ulcer flared or broke or burst or something awful, and an ambulance was called to Empire Pictures to take him to the hospital and emergency surgery.

  When Irene called me from the hospital, she added, “I’m forbidden to see you, little sister, or telephone or even say your name, and given how sick Gordon is, I think I better go along with this.”

  “Sure,” I said, resigned, and too battered to be more heartbroken. “I hope he gets well. He didn’t deserve this.”

  Irene paused, clearly on the brink of a big fat I told you so . . . But she refrained and said goodbye.

  Hedda Hopper (no doubt thrashing herself for having praised the Granville Agency just a few months before) moved in for the kill about a week after her initial article celebrating Charlie’s patriotic exposé. She inserted a tiny note at the end of her column that the Granville Agency operated illegally out of a house on Clara Bow Drive, a neighborhood not zoned for business.

  “I better call up my brother and see if I can deliver produce again,” Thelma said, tossing the page to me, Hedda’s comments circled.

  “Ask him if he’ll hire me too,” I replied, looking up from the latest issue of the Challenger, where, as usual, I searched for news of Terrence. Jaylene Henderson was going to New York to record with a new label. Booker’s band was coming back after a West Coast tour. The Comet Club had been raided again for drugs. Ruby’s Café advertised their lemon meringue pie. Jackie Robinson got a lot of ink, as did Paul Robeson, as did the Shoe Drive and the ongoing Montgomery bus boycott. Nothing by, from, of, or about Terrence Dexter, whose name was gone from the masthead.

  Tires screeched, and Thelma and I suddenly looked up, alarmed to see an old Dodge pickup truck pull into the driveway, blocking Thelma’s Nash and the MG. Three or four men—maybe fewer, maybe they just moved so fast they seemed like more—jumped out of the pickup. They wore caps pulled down low over their brows and old coats, though it was a warm day. We watched, horrified, speechless, as swiftly and in unison they grabbed five-gallon cans from the truck and quickly flipped the lids off and splashed red paint over everything, covering the big window in front of Thelma’s desk so we could not see anything at all.