Love and War in California

by Oakley Hall

  When Soldiers’ Monthly folded, about Christmastime, I received my discharge. In New York City, I enrolled at Columbia University for two semesters on the GI Bill to get my B.A.

  Tully lived in New York City, in the Village, and wrote for the Village Voice and a number of small, lefty political journals. He and I had several barroom evenings in Manhattan. He did love to regale an audience with his testimony, or the lack of it, before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He had not had to go to jail.

  At Columbia I began working on a novel, for which my carefully preserved carbons and recollected letters to Bonny and others were a great aid. B.A. in hand, I enrolled as a graduate student in the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, along with a regiment of World War II former soldiers, sailors, and fliers working on war novels. With a contract and an advance from Random House, I married a young woman, Norma Stowe, from my agent’s office and spent a year in Cuernavaca (cheaper living in Mexico) finishing revisions.

  Publishing wisdom in the late forties held that novels of World War II would not be acceptable by the public until at least ten years after the conclusion of the war, as per the huge success of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front after World War I. My novel, Staying Alive, was published in 1954, the wartime romance of an idealistic American soldier and a young Frenchwoman, whose head had been shaved by partisans for her affair with a German officer, against a background of the Battle of the Bulge.

  The novel’s sales were disappointing, and I came to look upon it as a sentimental melodramatization and a canard upon a young Frenchwoman who had treated me better than I deserved and been lied about and insulted for her pains.

  2

  In 1958, when my second novel, my San Diego novel, my big novel, Gates of Bone, was in press at Random House, Norma and I were living in San Francisco. I knew from sources that Bonny was a doctor in ob-gyn practice nearby in Palo Alto. She and her husband, a surgeon, had a kid. So did Norma and I, a boy named Jonathan.

  Pogey, married, no children, was an executive of a huge construction corporation in Dallas. We exchanged Christmas cards, with brief annual notes.

  Stan Takahashi had enlisted in the Army when the Nisei in the Relocation Centers had been allowed to do so. He lost an arm in Italy and became a medical researcher for one of the big drug outfits in Buffalo, New York. I never saw him again, after Bonny’s and my visit to him in his concentration camp.

  I had also lost track of Calvin King.

  Elizabeth Fletcher was often in the news. As a protégée of Errol Flynn’s, she danced in three successful motion pictures. She married a studio executive, Martin Ayoob, had a child by him and divorced him, married a hotel heir, Nicky Billings, and divorced him to marry an actor named Brian Forman, whom she divorced under messy circumstances.

  Errol Flynn died in 1959 at the age of 50. The death certificate indicated as the causes of death myocardial infarction, coronary thrombosis, coronary atherosclerosis, and liver degeneration and sclerosis, although it was widely believed he had killed himself overdosing with morphine—gone off the taffrail like Martin Eden. The rumors that he had been a Nazi spy followed him to the grave.

  In 1957, I had returned to San Diego for my father’s funeral, thankful that he had not lived to see how I had mistreated him in Gates of Bone.

  Nor would Bonny, Pogey, or Liz be pleased by characters in Gates.

  The novel was what is called a bildungsroman, a narrative of a young man’s youth and education. No doubt it melodramatized my youth, as my first novel had melodramatized my war experiences. In the ending Lyn and Jack were reunited, their misunderstandings on hold in a grand, and for that time shocking, sex scene. “Marred by the creak of bedsprings,” the New Yorker reviewer was to cluck, although the sex scene took place in a car, not on a bed. The final scene had the lovers parted by the war, with a good hope that they would be reunited.

  There were some good reviews, and the novel spent ten weeks on the the New York Times best-seller list. It was nominated for, but did not receive, a Pulitzer. There was a film option. Gates of Bone didn’t make me rich, however—nor famous, except in San Diego, where I would never live again. There were controversies over it in the San Diego newspapers and letters to the editor, and it was denounced from the pulpit in my hometown as “a libel on San Diego’s youth.” (Nothing quite so bracing to an author as a denunciation from the pulpit!) I received some fan mail, assured by correspondents that “That’s the story of my life!” enough times to make me think I had indeed brushed universal themes of the Depression and the war. The novel stayed in press for many years. As the British critic Cyril Connolly was to insist, a novel still in print ten years after its publication had become a classic. Gates was to become a classic.

  It had not yet been published, however, when I saw Bonny again.

  Chapter 15

  1

  1958

  I sat at the bar of the Pacific Tennis Club in San Francisco on a Saturday morning, listening to the plock of tennis balls outside the floor-to-ceiling windows and regarding my sweaty countenance in the mirror behind the bar, where Joe the barman polished a glass. My singles opponent, a younger-than-I lawyer, had headed for the dressing room, having whipped me in straight sets.

  I rubbed the scar just above my knee, amused at my tendency to limp when losing at tennis.

  The women’s foursome from Court Three, part of a member-guest tournament, surged into the bar from the stairs, young women with trim legs, three of them with real estate hairdos, the fourth with blond hair in a bun and wisps webbing over her forehead, whose backhands-down-the-line I had been admiring, and who was Bonny Bonington aka Barbara Rothenberg, M.D.

  Mutual glances followed by cool smiles of greeting.

  “Hello, Bonny,” I said.

  Nodding, smiling, she passed on along with her group. Glancing back at me, she said, without inflection, “Hello, Payton.”

  She’d be thirty-five. How well I remembered that left-handed backhand that had cost her father a lot of money.

  She was in that position I remembered from wartime girlseeking, the targeted one surrounded by a defensive cordon of other females, so you had to figure a way to flush her out of the pocket.

  My wife was still in action on Court Five, identifiable by her long-brimmed white cap.

  One of Bonny’s foursome was Betty Warloe, with whom I had some acquaintance. Bonny gave me an arched-eyebrow glance when I came over. Slick of perspiration on her chest, breasts poking at her white shirt, fine down of blond hairs on her tanned arm.

  “Betty,” I said, “could I have a few words with this lady? We are old friends from San Diego.”

  Bonny rose and waited to be directed. I was acutely conscious of the memory of her with Johnny Pierce in the Caff at San Diego State on the morning after Pearl Harbor.

  With a slight pressure on her damp back, I pointed her to the second table down.

  Seated opposite her, I searched her face for signs and portents.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Still wondering what it was all about.”

  “Oh, Payton; after all these years?”

  “Still wondering after all these years. I was grateful for your letters, but I must say that they were not your letters.”

  She looked into my eyes. “They were always merry and bright, were they not?” she said.

  “I didn’t get the telegram you sent in January until five months later. In April.”

  She tipped her head to one side. “I apologize for that moment of panic,” she said. “I was sure you were in the Battle of the Bulge. Were you wounded? I thought you must’ve been wounded.”

  “I was. Nothing to brag about.”

  Her partners at the other table were regarding us with interest. Some of the ladies at the Pacific Tennis Club had read my novel.

  “But what changed you?” I said. “You had some kind of experience or epiphany that changed you int
o an absolute tower of determination to get your medical degree and to be Barbara, and to hell with old boyfriends. What happened?”

  She gazed into my eyes, frowning delicately.

  “I had a date with someone out in East San Diego,” I went on doggedly. “I believe I parked my car near Alice Hoagland’s house, where Liz was staying. Where some observer must have reported it to you.”

  Bonny shook her head. The corners of her lips tucked in, as though she were going to smile. But she didn’t smile.

  “All I did with Liz was drive her to LA and deliver her to Errol Flynn’s.”

  “Liz the movie star.”

  “Yes.”

  Bonny gave a crisp shake of her blond head. “Congratulations on your novel, Payton. I’d read some of the early parts in your good letters.”

  I could feel my face heat up at the thought of her reading Gates of Bone when it was published, in October.

  “Your husband’s a doctor, too?” I asked, though I already knew that.

  “He’s an orthopedic surgeon.”

  “You live in Palo Alto?”

  “Down the Peninsula.”

  “Kids?”

  “Two girls. And you?”

  “A boy, and one on the way.”

  “Congratulations, Payton,” she said again.

  “Tell me, was it your mother?”

  “I think I must get back to my ladies. It was nice to see you, Payton.”

  So she left. Nice legs, slim hips. I had learned nothing.

  * * *

  My wife glanced appraisingly at my first love when I pointed her out, at lunch with her foursome. Norma’s long-billed cap lay on the table before us. Her face was slick and whitish with sunscreen.

  “Good hair,” Norma said.

  She patted my arm. She was two months along on a second child.

  I phoned Betty, whose guest Bonny had been. Bonny was a friend of a friend. She and her husband were both in practice in Palo Alto. They were both graduates of Stanford Med. I still had found out nothing.

  * * *

  I had been happy to settle anywhere but San Diego, and San Francisco was Norma’s hometown. Weezie had moved to Hawaii. My mother lived in Palm Springs with her husband, a retired Army colonel with some family bucks. I drove an MG, Norma a Mercury station wagon. We frequently visited Norma’s parents in Marin County, who loved their bright grandson Jon. We were a happy, bourgeois family, living on my advance on Gates.

  May 18, 1958

  Dear Bonny,

  Proust (the author of Remembrance of Things Past) says that one’s every love affair is a reflection of his first one. You were my first real love affair, but I can’t say that my other love affairs (not so many as all that) have been such a reflection. However, the characters of my new novel, coming out in the fall, reflect Proust’s dictum.

  I wonder what you will think of Gates of Bone. There are characters you will recognize: Lyn and Jack, Virginia and Dakin and Eve. Parents.

  If you have read Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (The Last of the Mohicans, etc.) you will have noticed that Cooper’s “good” girls are fair, his “bad” girls dark. I have followed his formula. In Gates, Lyn is fair, consequently “good.” Virginia is dark, hence “bad,” i.e., at least more free and easy morally than my “good” girl, although not so free and easy as Eve Corey, who is meant to be the shocking far-out frontier-marker. These characters are based upon people you will recognize, including yourself. They are deeply involved in the theme, which is an obsession of mine you will remember.

  Flannery O’Connor, referring to a writer’s available material, says that any writer who has made his way through childhood has material enough to last his lifetime.

  So in Gates you will see not only character but plot derived from our relationship.

  This letter is my apology for the big sex scene. Your mother will find it shocking. Maybe you will, too. I apologize for the Abba-Zabba Bar sequence. There will also be friends and acquaintances who are going to choose to think it really happened. Of course it did not, and all I can do is rationalize it as a literary necessity.

  Thanks to you for the material upon which my forthcoming novel has been nourished. I will write no more fiction. I am embarrassed that my fiction has been dependent upon the exploitation of my friends and lovers: on a Frenchwoman with whom I had the affair described in Staying Alive; upon a romanticization of our affair in Gates. Indeed, upon my friend Pogey Malcolm, who must recognize himself as Chad in Gates. Upon my father, whom I abused unforgivably. Indeed, this all must be looked upon as a betrayal of personal ties, as the sin of turning human beings into things. As I say, I will write no more lies, and, since as you may remember it has been my desire to make the world a better place, I will from now on turn what talents I have to nonfiction. You may take this as a compliment, and as an apology.

  Regards,

  Payton

  That letter was never sent.

  1965

  That year my little family was facing the shorts, so I took a job teaching a writing seminar at UCLA. Gates of Bone still had a cult following in Southern California, and I fitted right in to a comfortable slot as a visiting writer. I commuted home to San Francisco on weekends to be with my family, for Norma didn’t want the children’s schooling disarrayed by a move to LA.

  A writer knows that if he goes to New York something advantageous may happen to him just because the local powers become aware of his existence. So is it also with Hollywood, where the fact that I was in LA caused my agent to make some phone calls. Presently he was dickering for a film option on Gates of Bone. I had a meeting with the prospective producer, who was not a fountain of enthusiasm for the novel, but who told me Elizabeth Fletcher was hoping to see me while I was in Los Angeles.

  And so it was that I called upon Liz in her Italianate mansion in Bel Air.

  Drinks were served by a pretty young maid in a proper maid’s costume with a lacy apron. Liz and I drank mimosas. She finished hers in two gulps and ordered another. She was between husbands and didn’t wish to talk about any of them. Dinner was served by a young Mexican waiter who bowed a lot. With dinner Liz drank kir royales. She was a champagne girl, and why not? After dinner we went for a swim, Liz naked and sleek, what I could see of her by moonlight, as though she were still in her twenties, and then to bed in the pool house. The bed was occupied by ghosts, Liz’s, mine, and others’. Between bouts she directed me to open a bottle of champagne from a little refrigerator set into the wall. I wondered whether the pop of the cork marked the start of a race or an execution.

  I supposed it was some sign of consequence that I could enjoy the favors of a major motion picture star in her boudoir, but none of the pleasures of my life had ever turned to shit so fast.

  It came to seem to me that Liz, and not Liz so much as some complicated image of Liz in my mind, a stew of emotion, sensation, visual erotics, remembrance, willfulness, and sibling rivalry, had hung over my life like a dark angel. Dark! Liz dark and Bonny fair, the dark and the light. I had never understood my obsession with her, which Bonny must have realized. Certainly I had attended all her films, the dancing ones when she had partnered Harrison Kelly, the dramatic ones, and now the coasting ones of the height of her reputation. I had long realized that, as a writer, I was a finishing-freak; a writer, like a lexicographer working his way from A to Z, had to be such a completion-nut. So my affair with Liz was finally rounded off, as it seemed my affair with Bonny would never be.

  * * *

  The pool house was furnished with living, sleeping, eating, cooking, and bathroom accommodations. In the morning I sat across from Liz sipping mimosas at a marble-topped table set in a window that looked out through diaphanous curtains that stirred in a little wind off the ocean, over the swimming pool to the greenish sea of smog that was the LA Basin.

  Liz had bathed and wore a white terrycloth robe and a towel wrapped like a turban over her hair. Her face was luminously pale, rather small-eyed without m
akeup, but her sculptured cheekbones and the sweet folds of her lips were classically beautiful.

  I felt scruffy and unshaven in my gray flannels and limp white shirt. I had had from her information that confirmed what Esther Carnes had implied, that it was Liz who had insisted that Richie hire the private detective to investigate Val’s past.

  “I didn’t think he was going to do anything about her! He just dithered. I was so mad at him! And David was mad at him. David depended on him!”

  She had never seen Pancho Hagen again.

  This was Hollywood, where sex as well as lunch is only a prelude to talking about properties, roles, and money. She was interested in the role of Eve in Gates of Bone. United Artists would option the film rights for her.

  “Payton,” she said firmly, “you have to change some of the Eve scenes. You know, she’s very hard, she’s self-centered, she’s had to be! But you will change her, won’t you?”

  Some abysses were deep and some were shallow, and in Hollywood shallow abysses were followed by deeper and deeper ones.

  “That’s a different book from mine, Liz,” I said.

  “But I want to make Gates!”

  “Eve as the bad girl is the key to the story!”

  “She can think she’s been so bad, she can say so—Jack can think so, too! But we have to know she hasn’t been. That she did it all for Christy.”

  That wasn’t the Eve of Gates that I had conceived, and Liz was too old for the role, twice as old as Eve would have been, twice as beautiful also, and too important. But if I signed an option with United Artists and the studio exercised it, Eve was not my property anymore. I knew that a film often required a stronger and simpler dramatic line than that of the novel from which it was adapted, as well as the support of a bankable star, and of course if Liz were to star in Gates, she had to be the heroine.

  “I can’t do it, Liz.”

  “Toby thinks we should hire an experienced dramatist, Payton. I so hoped you could do it.”