The Great Pretenders

by Laura Kalpakian

  Everywhere here I see the African students and their girlfriends in their colorful clothes. Africans from Algeria and Senegal and Ivory Coast have their own cafés and restaurants, and white people eat there too. No one thinks anything of it. Here, when a bunch of us, white and black, are at a café, people just say les americains, not black or white. At the Ivory Coast café two weeks ago I saw Jerrold Davies and his wife, Annette. I had a long, lively evening with them. They thought for sure you were with me. I had some explaining to do. The truth was hard to tell.

  I’ve found a little Left Bank theater that shows old movies with subtitles in French so I’ve finally been to your Church of Rick and Ilsa. I saw Casablanca with French subtitles. I saw it three times. At that same theater, I saw a lot of the films you’ve talked about. Jerrold and I and Annette went together to see The Ice Age that won him the 1940 Oscar. Watching these old movies is walking through your past, Roxanne, your imagination.

  Jerrold lent me this typewriter, and he’s given me part-time work helping out on the set of The Oubliette. I’m grateful for the new experience, and the little bit of extra money means I can stay in Paris and finish my book. For the first time in my life what I write has to come to me, not me going to it.

  Terrence

  What a wonderful reunion he must have had with Jerrold! The truth was hard to tell . . . Oh, Terrence, what truth did you tell them? That we loved each other, and that fate or circumstance or cruel people intervened? Or that we loved each other, and you were facedown on the porch, mistaken for a thief on the day you came to break up with me?

  I read his letter so many times the ink smudged from my tears. I kept it under my pillow at night and in my pocket during the day. But within days my initial joy, relief shriveled when I realized there was no suggestion whatever that he would be coming back. He would not be coming back. Did he have someone else? Someone new? When I read that letter truthfully, I mean, telling myself the truth, I knew that Terrence, in moving to Paris, in writing the book he had wanted to write, had crawled out of the ruins of life in LA. He had found a new life. Clearly, he went out with new friends, black and white, and no doubt there were women. There was absolutely nothing in his note to suggest his heart was breaking over me. My heart was breaking over him. I needed my own oubliette.

  One afternoon I took this tissuey aerogramme and put it in a big manila envelope, alongside Julia’s plain wedding ring and the lock of hair from the first Aaron Greene. I took the cache of letters Terrence wrote me from Alabama, the two photographs of us, and the gold bracelet he had given me at Christmas, put all this in the envelope, and sealed it. I drove to the bank, where I placed it in the safe-deposit box that held Julia’s diamond choker, the diamond ring, the ruby earrings, the rope of perfect pearls, and other relics from the past, from a life I needed to forget, a life no longer my own.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  How could this meeting be anything but bad news? So bad Carleton Grimes felt it had to be delivered in person? I assumed he set this meeting for late, six o’clock at the Paragon commissary, because he didn’t want to be seen publicly with me. I parked the MG and found the commissary; the place was closing, so I waited at an outside table where low, flowering hedges bristled with twittering sparrows. I felt like one of those dull birds, though I wore silk trousers, a silk blouse, and a much-needed spray of Panache. It was the first time in weeks that I’d left Malibu except to go to the movies, the grocery store, or Irene’s house. Oddly, Gordon and I are actually getting along better than we ever did. Maybe misery loves company. Gordon is pretty miserable these days.

  I saw Carleton from afar, and he waved. After the obligatory and totally insincere Hollywood hug, he said, “My wife wants to know if our affair ended badly.”

  “Everything that ends, ends badly. I speak from experience. Please tell your wife she’s stuck with you, but I thought you were a terrific lay.”

  He chuckled. “Come, let’s walk to my office.” We strolled between the massive soundstages, mostly empty this late in the day. As I’d come to expect from him, Carleton chatted obliquely: He missed New York; California has climate but no weather (a distinction, I confess, lost on me). Then, somehow without my quite knowing how, the conversation moved to “You have quite the talent for trouble, Roxanne. I guessed as much when I saw you in that red dress, but I wouldn’t have guessed you to be keeping a love nest with a Negro agitator.”

  “He was a reporter, not an agitator. And please, spare me the love nest. It sounds squalid. My affair with Terrence Dexter was not squalid.”

  “But it was scandalous.”

  “Only because people are narrow-minded.”

  “Yes, you offended the little corsets of conformity we all wear. Everyone gets along by sharing certain prejudices.”

  “Well, I don’t share them.”

  He got out a cigarette. “I suppose Leon was horrified.”

  “Leon is not speaking to me.”

  “He should have been more forgiving of your love life. His was a scandal for a long time, though people will forgive adultery—maybe not the wife,” he added, “but in this business, no one really cares if you’re faithful or not. The Motion Picture Alliance is much less likely to forgive him for producing a film by a writer he had fired, a script”—he paused—“sold to him by his own granddaughter, who must have wanted him to look foolish or hypocritical.”

  I could feel the birthmark, my whole face, flushing with shame. And regret. I had nothing to say in my own defense.

  “That disclaimer that Empire published in the trades, that was pretty disingenuous, don’t you think?”

  I shrugged, and put on my sunglasses.

  “Leon’s patriotism blinded him to a lot of things,” Carleton went on. “Leon is something of a dinosaur. Meaning no disrespect.”

  “None taken.” Where was Carleton going with this?

  “This is a new era.”

  “Really? It feels like the same old lousy era to me.”

  “The picture business makes itself afresh every ten years or so. If it didn’t, we’d still be back with silent films and Mabel Normand throwing pies in Fatty Arbuckle’s face. Every new era means you have to ask new questions. Who’s going to the movies, now, in nineteen fifty-six? Better yet, who is not going?”

  I thought about this as we walked. “Well, the people who have to get up every morning and go to the factory, they stay home watching television. Like pigeons on a roost,” I added with an internal nod to Thelma. I stopped and turned to him. “So who is in the theaters, Carleton?”

  “The kids, teenagers, young people. They have money. They have cars. They have time. They want to get out of the house and go to the movies. These kids don’t give a damn for Communism. They want sexy stuff. Look at Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, Rock Around the Clock, To Catch a Thief. We don’t need Jesus Christ, pharaohs, and ten thousand extras for this audience. We need to make new kinds of pictures, like Adios Diablo.”

  “Really, Carleton? Teenagers coming to see a film about Mexico in nineteen fifteen? I mean, yes, it’s a great picture, but you think kids are going to care about the Mexican Revolution? Meaning no disrespect.”

  “None taken. Adios Diablo is going to be a coup for us next year. Oscar fodder. Why do you look surprised, Roxanne? It happened for High Noon, didn’t it? A little Western no one paid much attention to until suddenly, wow! Everyone sees it is a masterpiece!”

  “It can happen again,” I agreed, though I didn’t actually believe that was true.

  “Did I tell you I went down to Mexico myself? The shoot was way over budget and going on way too long. I wanted to have a personal look at the damage.”

  I was glad he was on my left so he could not see the birthmark flush with color while he talked at length. The set was chaotic. The delays had already doubled the cost of the picture. Some of these delays were the result of clashing
egos and power struggles. Some had to do with acts of god, bad weather, and bad behavior, even rampant Montezuma’s revenge among the cast and crew. While my own innards roiled, I commiserated without asking questions. Any minute now the accusation would unfold.

  “You’ll never guess who was on-set down there. Not on the payroll, mind you, but on-set. Simon Strassman, remember him?”

  “Sure. I haven’t seen him in years.”

  “Yes, that’s what he said. He said you two were great pals when you were a kid. He has a very high opinion of you.”

  “How could he? I was just a kid.” I stumbled in my high heels, and Carleton caught my arm. We had come to the Paragon executive offices, a stolid-looking brick building from the forties that now, only ten years later, looked totally passé and boring. It was late, nearly seven, and the place was deserted, the staff gone except for the security guard, who stood up when Carleton entered.

  “My offices are on the second floor,” he said as we started up a utilitarian staircase.

  Just for a moment the thought crossed my mind—it was well after hours, and the building was deserted; was Carleton about to make an Irv Rakoff move on me? I didn’t know him personally, and perhaps he had affairs, but surely Carleton would never sink to assault.

  We walked through his secretary’s office, and he opened the door to his own. I took off my dark glasses. I could not believe my eyes. There, sitting across from the desk, was Simon Strassman.

  He resembled one of those old walruses with a drooping gray moustache, fat rolling off of every limb; even the pouches under his eyes were puffy and fat. I had not seen him since . . . I couldn’t even remember. Though he was deeply tanned, he still looked pasty. His eyes were clouded, milky with cataracts. He rose to his feet with wheezy difficulty, but he opened his arms to me and called out my name. To be in his embrace was to be, fleetingly, a child again, with all those old certainties and comforts.

  “But, Simon! What are you doing here? You shouldn’t be here! If they know you’re here, they’ll—”

  “Let them!” Simon made one of the big, expansive gestures I so well remembered. “Let the flying monkeys come after me. I have grandchildren I’ve never met! I have grandchildren who won’t remember me at all if I die in Mexico. No, really! Let them put me in prison. How bad can it be? I’m an old man. I don’t care.”

  “But Leah?”

  “Leah flew up. She’s with Susan. Carleton was good enough to bring me back in his great big limo. We sailed through the border, and all the guard said was ‘Yes, sir.’ Not a single question.” Simon gave an asthmatic chuckle. “Oh, Roxanne, I asked Carleton to set this meeting up. I just had to tell you how much it means to me, you can’t even imagine, no really, you’re too young to imagine! What it means to me to see the sets for Adios Diablo, to see the picture I saw in my head there in front of my eyes. Adios Diablo is the best picture I’ve ever written. Hell, it’s like nothing I’ve ever written. That’s what I got out of my five years in Mexico. A great picture and a liver that’s failing me.” He guffawed like this might actually be funny. “Sam Pepper, he’s the new John Ford. You heard it from me! John Ford’s at the end of his career, and Sam Pepper is on the way up! And Art Luke! Oh, Roxanne, you found the perfect guy to front for me. He’s an irascible SOB. Just like me. We were the three musketeers!”

  “They were,” said Carleton, easing back in his chair. “In Mexico they all drank too much and talked too much, and each seemed to think he had personally settled the West. They wore out the typewriter ribbons making rewrites, putting in more sex, more violence, more . . . what’s the word I want?”

  “Dash,” said Simon. “Art and I, we’re going to write another great picture together. Even if I’m in prison.”

  Carleton walked to the glass cabinet, took out a bottle of Rémy Martin and three cognac glasses; he poured us each a splash. “To Adios Diablo!” We clinked glasses. “We’re thinking about putting Simon’s name on the credits, Roxanne. After Art’s name, but right up there on the screen.”

  I lowered the glass from my lips. Surely I had misheard. “What?”

  Carleton repeated himself, and across from me, Simon beamed like a big fat Buddha.

  I said, “Are you out of your mind? Hedda Hopper will tear you to shreds. The American Legion will picket the theaters. The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals will see to it your actors never work again! I’m talking about the careers of everyone on the picture, the actors, the writer, the director. Even the script girl will never work again!”

  “She’ll be okay,” said Carleton. “She’s Mexican.”

  “And a little beauty,” said Simon.

  “I don’t think you know what you’re saying,” I insisted. “They’ll destroy you personally. They’ll come to your home with red paint and the carcasses of dead dogs, believe me!”

  “They might try to destroy me, us,” said Carleton, “but I’m not such an easy target. For one thing I’m a lot younger than Leon, than Jack Warner and the rest of them, and my family are all WASPs from Connecticut. I wasn’t here during the union turmoil in the thirties, the strikes, the informing, making propaganda films during the War. I’m a different generation of studio head. If the unions have to be dealt with, it’s just part of the cost of doing business; it’s not ideological for me. I didn’t sign the Waldorf Agreement. Nine years is a long time to be settling old scores, selling out friends, painting one another Red, just to be able to work.”

  “Ask Dalton Trumbo,” Simon muttered. “Ask Ring Lardner and Adrian Scott.”

  “But all the studio heads signed the Waldorf Agreement,” I insisted. “Even Paragon.”

  “Noah Glassman died last year. I’m in charge now.”

  “Yes, but the rest of them haven’t backed down.”

  “It was an agreement, or a declaration, or a statement—no one’s quite sure what to call it. But it definitely is not a legally binding contract, especially not binding on me. The Waldorf Agreement never had the force of law, but as I said, everyone gets along by sharing certain prejudices. It was impossible to test in the courts, because, well, who had the endless legal resources to fight the studios?”

  “And Dalton, Adrian, Ring, and the others, the Ten who took their First Amendment rights all through the courts,” Simon said, “look where they ended up. Federal prison.”

  “It’s time to test the Waldorf Agreement in the court of public opinion,” Carleton went on. “For years now, you could get irrevocably smeared if just your name even appeared in Red Channels, or crossed someone’s lips in a Congressional hearing. The only way you could defend yourself against libel was to testify in front of the Committee. The very people who held all the power. Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.” Carleton put his feet up on the desk and looked thoughtful. “I’m going to take a different avenue. Think of me as Gary Cooper in High Noon. Will Kane, out there, one lone, handsome guy striding toward his destiny.”

  “Yes, Carleton,” I reminded him, “and everyone deserted Will Kane. He was left all alone!”

  “It’s true, with Simon’s name on the screen, there’ll probably be threats, but at least if my experiment fails, I won’t be going to federal prison.”

  “Simon will.”

  “So what? In Mexico I was committing slow suicide, and I didn’t even know it. Leah was dying, and she didn’t even know it. Now we’re alive again, we’ve got our daughters, our grandchildren. If I’m arrested, the prison doctor will have to take care of my liver.” This thought made him burst into laughter, and he and Carleton both lit cigarettes.

  “There’s another side to this too.” Carleton brought his feet down. “With Simon’s name on the credits, there will be lots of screaming in the press, lots of . . .” He brushed his Errol Flynn moustache and smiled.

  “Publicity. You sly old fox.”

  Carleton chuckled. �
�I want you to be part of this, Roxanne. I want your input. It’s only fair. There’s a risk to you too. It’s public acknowledgment that Art Luke was a front. The Granville Agency repped him.”

  “Well, I’m not an agent anymore. The Granville Agency doesn’t exist. What does Art say?”

  “Art fought in the Pacific. He’s a brave man. He’s agreed.”

  I finished off the brandy. “I’ve spent the last year having the FBI camped on my street and putting a matchbook in the door when I leave the house. I’ve been afraid that my phones are tapped. I’ve been afraid to be seen in public with a man I loved. I’ve been reviled by his family and shunned by my own. I’ve been called filthy names by strangers. I’ve cowered behind the bathroom door because vandals were attacking my house. I’ve lost everything, but at least now I don’t have to be afraid anymore.”

  “What are you going to do next?” asked Carleton. “Someone as clever as you must have plans.”

  “I have no idea what I’ll do next, but I have about six months to find out before I either go mad or go broke. Whichever comes first.” I surprised myself with this admission. Candor doesn’t come naturally to me.

  Someone knocked timidly at the door, and when it opened, Leah Strassman poked her head in and smiled. Leah had always been stylish and petite, with strong features and jet-black hair. Now she was tiny and hawklike, her hair a dull salt-and-pepper, and her clothes fit her like a rumpled pillowcase. The years in Mexico had taken a terrible toll on both of them. We three had a great, tearful, heartfelt reunion while we lamented what had happened to Max, though at least I could tell them he’d found work in England, writing on The Adventures of Robin Hood. Leah offered the hope that maybe one day Max could come home again. I didn’t contradict her, but I knew he hadn’t any hope of that, not unless, like Simon, he resigned himself to the possibility of prison, and Max would never do that to his wife and son.