Rock Hudson’s publicist had called twice, trying to set up a luncheon. I’d resisted but Tansi, walking in as I was stumbling through an excuse, mumbled in a tinny, schoolmarm voice, “Oh Edna, you have to, it’s Rock Hudson.” I found myself grinning. And, oddly, I agreed to a hasty lunch in Jack Warner’s private dining room. Now, sitting with the brilliantly handsome man in that quiet chamber, platters of untouched food delivered to us by obsequious servers who promptly bowed and disappeared, I stared across the table. I wondered why I’d taken an instant dislike to him. Steely eyed, suspicious, Rock stared back, a sliver of a smile on those beautiful lips.
“You seem uncomfortable.” His voice was throaty, a careful mannered drawl, rich and full.
“I’ve never really liked very, very tall men. You notice I’m very small.”
Suddenly he roared, Texas-style gusto, probably learned from my novel, his hand slapping his thigh. “And I thought you didn’t like me because of my personality.”
“I don’t know you, personally, that is,” I said evenly. “All I know is the matinee idol up there on the screen.”
“And that’s not me?”
“Do you believe it is?”
Again, the mesmerizing eyes, the purposely jutting chin, the graceful turn of the long rugged body in the Texas millionaire denim shirt. “There is someone called Rock Hudson, you know.”
“He’s an invention.”
He smiled broadly. “True, but I don’t remember the other person. That bumbling, frightened, wide-eyed lad from Winnetka, Illinois, named Roy Fitzgerald.”
“You like your success?”
“Of course.”
“Is that why we’re having lunch, so you can assure me that you’re happy in your celluloid world?”
A long silence, Rock playing with a fork. He put it down. “Jimmy Dean,” he said, finally.
“Magical words, no?”
“Not to me. I hear he’s seduced you into his fragile web.”
I laughed. “Good God, Rock, give me some credit.”
He held up his hand, palm out. “I don’t care about Jimmy, Miss Ferber. I care about this movie, and what he’s capable of doing to it. Sinking it. Giant is a milestone for me, a film that’s moving me one more step away from B-movie oblivion. That’s where I was three or four years ago. Jimmy’s playing fast and loose with his fame. I don’t. I’ve worked hard. I’ve bowed and scraped and played the game. I’ve totally embraced this invention-as you call it-called Rock Hudson until it’s cash at the bank.”
“You’ll still be a star.” My hand dramatically swept from his face down across the table.
“Not if the movie is killed.”
“No one is killing the movie. Not on my watch.”
Rock sat up, sucked in his breath. When he spoke his words were clipped, his face scarlet, his dark eyes piercing. “I think he’s a murderer. I do.”
“Rock, for heaven’s sake.”
“There’s something wrong with him. You know, Miss Ferber, in Texas we shared a house. He was a filthy pig, he was brazen, he was purposely rude and foul. Christ, he spit on the floor, he,” a pause, “did a lot worse things, I tell you. In Texas, working with George Stevens, we sensed-I sensed, Liz did, so did others-that here was our future. This movie would always say something about us. But Jimmy acted like it didn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters to him.”
He frowned. “He puts his private life out there. Everyone can talk about it, mangle it.”
“And you don’t?”
He looked alarmed. “Only I’m in control of my private life.” He drew his lips into a thin line. “That’s why it’s dangerous to get close to a guy like Jimmy.”
“You might be colored by the same brush?”
He hesitated. “Exactly.” Then he smiled. “No chance of that. He hates me. I hate him. If I have to talk to him, he refuses to answer me. A baby boy, a slaphappy puppy.”
“This doesn’t make him a murderer.”
“Miss Ferber, one thing I know that some folks around here don’t know is that it can all disappear in a flash.” He pointed around Jack Warner’s well-appointed room with the plush gray carpeting, the cascading draperies. “I fought my way here. I’m not gonna let it vanish. Warner has to play this murder his way.”
“What if Jimmy is innocent?”
That seemed to surprise him. “The Jimmy Deans of this world are always guilty of something.”
“Have you no sins?”
“Rock Hudson is an invention, as you said.” He grinned. “He’s been created without sin.”
“That’s not answering my question.”
He faltered. “I just want to do my job, Miss Ferber.”
I pushed some food around my plate. Neither of us had touched the lunch. “Well, I respect that.” And my words made him smile, sit back. “It’s how I got where I am, too.” We looked at each other a long time.
For some reason now, idly, he started to ramble on about acting-serious acting, he said-about dreaming. Especially dreaming, the will-o’-the-wisp vagaries allowed by unpredictable fortune. His early days, waiting for a break, his numbing work as a truck driver. I sat back, charmed by the warm-water flow of words. The more he spoke, the more he sounded like a schoolboy-some lonely fourteen-year-old kid, a feckless dreamy kid, cruising down a back lane on a clunky bike, hurling newspapers onto whitewashed porches and emerald-green lawns enclosed in picket fences. The modulated voice disappeared, and what surfaced was a curious mixture of laid-back Midwest twang and jittery teenage angst. I marveled at the transformation. And, emphatically, I liked it.
His stories reminded me of an Appleton, Wisconsin boy I remembered from Ryan High School days-a gangly, long-limbed boy whose name I’ve forgotten but whose presence has stayed with me. A boy on the high-school stage, acting a piddling role in A Scrap of Paper, his quivering voice and jerky body at odds with the ferocious hunger in his eyes, the fire there, the desperate desire to be away from the parochial town, to be out there in the world, magnificent on some city on some hill. So I felt then that I knew Rock in a way he’d probably forgotten. And the more he talked, the more I realized I couldn’t dislike him. That was too easy. I didn’t want to pity him either because so much of him struck me as so hollow, vain, lost. No, the fragility he refused in himself was what made me smile now.
So we talked about his role as Bick Benedict, about Giant, and he talked about So Big, which he said he’d read and loved. And when I stood up to leave, he said, “I’ll be in New York this fall. Can we have lunch, you and me?”
Standing, facing him, I nodded. “Of course. My pleasure.”
“Thank you.”
In the hallway I closed my eyes, still thinking of that shy boy from my high school days.
“I may actually learn to like Rock Hudson,” I told Mercy when I saw her in her dressing room.
“Oh, no, he charmed you.”
“No, Mercy, I just allowed myself to be charmed. That’s different.”
Later, resting at my hotel, I opened my door to face a dapper-looking man in formal attire-though the tie was slightly askew-a courtly-looking gentleman, graying at the temples. A sheepish grin on his face. Jimmy bowed to me, in costume as the middle-aged Jett Rink, the oillionaire in decline. They’d shaved his temples to create a receding hairline, and the makeup attempted to suggest a dissipated, unhappy man. I wasn’t convinced-he looked vaudevillian stock character, some clown in a monkey suit.
He looked over his shoulder, feigning nervousness. “I escaped for the afternoon. Stevens thinks I’m in my dressing room. My scenes were done this morning, but he likes us to be around in costume to flatter his ego.” He handed me a crumpled newspaper. “This is for you.”
“Come in,” I said. I’d been reading a novel by Sloan Wilson. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Annoyed at its prosaic style and its ugly view of the world, I was looking for an escape. “Come in.”
He fell into a chair, drew his legs up to his chest, wrapped his arms around them.
I unfolded the paper and found myself staring at a small, amorphous piece of clay, an embryonic torso, clay twisted into arms and legs and a narrow, long protuberance that, perhaps, would become a head. An incomplete body, some surrealistic object, a figure suspended between creation and fruition. I held it, wondering what to say.
“I made it for you,” he said, finally. “You like it?”
“Yes. I didn’t know you sculpted.”
“I do a lot of things.” He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s, like, anonymous man. You got to do the rest of the work yourself-create a life for it in your head. Like I imagine you do when you write characters like Jett Rink.”
“Is that why it has no face?”
“You’re missing the point,” he said. “Faces get in the way of things. Look at me. Everybody keeps telling me I’m…I’m gorgeous. You don’t know how sick that makes me feel.”
“It’s a gift.”
“Or a curse.”
“It’s your point of view, Jimmy.”
A broken smile. “Exactly, I guess. That’s the point of my statue there. See? Point of view.” He withdrew a folded piece of paper from his breast pocket and handed it to me. I unfolded it and found myself staring at a remarkable likeness of my own head, ancient and large, with a mane of teased white locks, and fiery, hard-as-nails eyes.
I gasped. “My Lord. Me?”
He grinned. “You.”
“This is very good. I mean, I don’t like any pictures of myself-never have. But this is startlingly true.”
“You have a great head on that tiny body. It dominates. It’s there, like a monument.”
“The missing figure from Mount Rushmore.”
“It’s a sketch I’m doing for a sculpture I’m working on-of you.”
“Thank you.” I waited. “Jimmy, where do you find the time?”
“I never sleep. I feel like I gotta keep moving. I feel like there’s a wall out there and I keep nearing it. It’ll stop me.”
“Are you talking about fate?”
“Yeah, fate. Maybe.” He banged his head, as though rattling his brain. “I read a lot about the Aztecs. I’m a bad reader and I go slow. Like a page a day. But they had this cool sense of doom, you know, from what I’ve read. Like they tried to make the most of whatever time they had on earth. The Aztecs, well-I want to live my life like they did. Hard driving, filled up.”
“You’ve made a good start. You’re young and famous. At what? Twenty-four?”
“It means nothing. I’m not famous inside. Movies lie. You ever see Sunset Boulevard, when it came out a few years back?” I nodded. “Well, I’ve seen it over and over. I watch Gloria Swanson, old, you know, and there she is, walking down that final staircase and she says that I’m-ready-for-my-close-up line. Well, I’ve already had my close-up scene. At twenty-four.” I started to say something, but he held up his hand. “No, let me finish. But the line that always gets me is when she says: ‘I’m still big, it’s the pictures that got small.’ Whenever I hear that, I think, wow. That’s not me, can never be me.” He breathed in, closed his eyes. “So now I’m on the big screen, and I’m big, big, big. So big, you know. But I think, I’m still small, even though my pictures got big.” Then, as if jolting himself from a reverie, he sat up. “Enough.”
“Jimmy, there’s nothing wrong with fame.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s what I hungered for. How can there be anything wrong with it?” His voice was ironic and slurring. He stood. “I gotta get out of here. I gotta make the scene with Ursula Andress for some photographer.”
“I understand she’s beautiful.”
“Sure is. A hell-fire, too. Studio set us up, originally, one of those phony lovey-dovey things. But we hit it off, strangely, and now we’re really dating,” he stressed the word, “as opposed to being seen together.”
“Hell-fire?”
“We do battle, her and me. She’s got a temper, like me. I’m learning German so we can fight in her own language.”
I waited a second, then said, “You don’t hit her, do you?”
Jimmy squinted, interlocked his fingers and stretched out his arms. “People been telling tales about me, Miss Edna?”
“I heard…”
He sucked in his breath, breathed out, making a bubbly sound. “Sometimes things get a little heated, and, like something rises in me, so red-hot I’m about to burst, and I lash out.”
“You should never hit a woman.”
“They hit me, too, you know.”
“Still, a man has an obligation.”
“Pier Angeli used to slap my face. I’d slap her back. Lord, Natalie Wood slapped Sal Mineo one afternoon. That surprised the hell out of him.”
“Why?”
“He was, I don’t know, being a pest and she was having a bad day.”
Jimmy got quiet. I watched him wither, sink back into a seat, pull his knees up and wrap his arms around them. I waited. He was staring at his knees.
The phone rang, and I jumped. It had rung a few minutes before Jimmy arrived and I’d ignored it. Now, flummoxed, I went into the bedroom to answer it. It was Tansi, eager to talk. “I’ll call you back,” I told her. “Jimmy’s here.”
“There?” Tansi exclaimed. “Why?”
“I’ll call you back.”
But when I returned to the living room, Jimmy was gone. As I sat down, I glanced at the table where I had laid Jimmy’s gift, the statue without a face. It was gone. He’d taken it back.
Tansi, when I reached her-her line was busy, and I got irritated-wanted to know what Jimmy was doing, but I dismissed her curiosity. “He dropped off a drawing he’d made.”
“Of what?’
“No matter, Tansi.”
“Stevens was looking for him. Everyone made excuses.” She waited for me to answer, but I kept quiet. “Edna, I just have to tell you about a lunch I just had. With Nell and Lydia.”
“I thought Nell moved in with you, and Lydia was angry, hurt.”
“That’s it exactly. You see, Nell is a sweetie, a little too young and naive maybe. So after she moved out and Lydia had that nasty tantrum, Nell started feeling funny about it. She doesn’t like to hurt people’s feelings, of course. So she asked me to help, and I said-how? I didn’t know what to do…”
“Tansi, get on with it, please.” I was impatient, looking at the spot where the odd statue had rested. He’d even taken the newspaper he’d used to wrap it in.
“So we three had lunch at this jazz club on the Strip. Chatting, clearing the air, Nell apologizing and saying she had to get on with her life. She wanted no hard feelings.”
“And how did Lydia take it?”
“Well, that was odd, really. At first she was cold, distant. She even made a crack about how chubby Nell is, how she could never be an actress looking like that. Imagine! Then she seemed to just relax. She said it didn’t matter any more. You know what she said? ‘We were really never friends, just roommates.’ That was a little hard, I thought, but Nell just nodded, happy to be forgiven.”
None of this was earth-shattering revelation or headline news. Lydia and Nell talk, bold face print. L.A. Times. “So they really didn’t iron out differences?” I said, bored. “Just quietly walked away from each other.”
“I suppose so.” I could tell Tansi didn’t like my facile summary.
“Seems unnecessary to me.”
“I mean-it was a bizarre lunch. I felt I was in the middle of a novel.”
The Woman in the Gray Flannel Life.
“Did Lydia talk about the murder?” I interrupted.
“Of course, we all did. But Nell said very little. You know how she told everyone she thought Lydia killed Carisa.”
“And yet you had a delightful lunch?”
“Well, she didn’t accuse her at the table. I know Nell was afraid Lydia might have heard what she’d told people, but Lydia never mentioned it.” Tansi quipped, “That would be hard for the digestive system.”
“Truly,” I agreed. “Murder while the ketchup oozes onto the table.”
“Lydia changed at the end, though. Strange. She drank too many cocktails, which I paid for, by the way. Nell and I each had a couple of their famous Manhattans. Lydia kept drinking, and the lunch ended in shambles. I mean, she was the one who brought up the murder, and then she started to sob. But then it was all about Jimmy. And it had nothing to do with Carisa. Once Jimmy entered the conversation, everything was about him. Lydia said she was afraid of Detective Cotton.”
“Why?”
“The way he interrogated her, I guess.”
“Well, is she hiding something?”
“I don’t know. But Nell, I learned, seems to have a crush on Jimmy. It’s charming.”
“So do you.”
Tansi laughed. “Of course, we all do, Edna. But I have more of a professional obligation to him. He can be very nice and…” On and on she went. Call it what you will, Tansi Rowland, I thought, but you’re as smitten as a love-starved spinster dreaming of Clark Gable sans undershirt in It Happened One Night. Which, admittedly, is not hard to do. I’d been there myself, unexpectedly, sitting in a dark movie theater in New York on a chilly fall afternoon. But that was years back. Now, ancient as dust, I could only recollect, albeit faintly. I was the lifetime spinster, by choice.
“So how did it end?” I wanted to hang up the phone.
“Lydia said she was going home to nap. She was weeping at the end but, well, that was because of Jimmy, not us.”
I considered that the only ones viewing the lunch as salutary were Nell and Tansi. Lydia, perhaps, had a different slant; a woman driven to despair by their words and their presence.
“But I think she’s getting over Jimmy,” Tansi said. Over the phone lines I heard Tansi laugh. “The last thing she said was that he’s as good an ending as any other man.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“I took it to mean she was going to forget him.”
Yet the Lydia who phoned me later that night was hardly the woman Tansi described. I heard hysteria, sputtering, inarticulate words. At first I had no idea who was calling me, until Lydia, in a moment of lucidity, mentioned that lunch with Tansi and Nell. “We talked of you,” Lydia said, “and Tansi said you were a good friend and I thought of you because I had to call someone.”
“Tansi told you to call me?”
Slurred speech, rambling. “No, she said she calls you. You’re always a comfort. Jimmy says he calls you, stops in. He told me. Everybody talks to you. You are the lady novelist.” The epithet made me wince. What was going on here? “And I just dialed the Ambassador, and now you’re on the phone with me.”
My lucky day, I thought. But maybe a good thing. I hadn’t really talked to Lydia Plummer, who seemed somehow to figure in the murder. Friend of Carisa, ex-roommate, inheritor of Carisa’s two boyfriends, Jimmy and Max Kohl. And, more importantly, famously accused of the murder itself-by Nell, charming luncheon companion. Schemes of revenge (maybe with Josh) against Jimmy.
But Lydia made little sense. I waited, hoping for something lucid to emerge, though, as the minutes went by, I despaired of that random morsel. “Would you believe…a part for me…the…only time…Jimmy said he’ll take care of it…and someone…well…just that it was…I don’t care…perhaps you know…do you know…” On and on, drunk, most likely; in a narcotic stupor, maybe. “You know…Carisa was my enemy but…but what really gets me…just think about it…Jimmy leaving me. Me. Leaving me.” She started to scramble the words, then dissolved into sobbing. “Carisa, yes, doomed…a witch you know…but me?”
I got tired of the sloppy emotion. “Lydia, perhaps you need rest. Go away. Go back home.”
“Home? I burned those bridges…bridge…Tansi told me to stop blaming Jimmy. But Jimmy is to blame…you know…you…behind every bad story in Hollywood sits Jimmy. Carisa told me…”
“What?”
Lydia suddenly seemed to focus. “You know, I thought nobody knew about the letter I wrote to her. All those threats.”
“Jimmy’s letter?”
“I said mean things about her and Jimmy. Nasty. Those lies Carisa spread. I told her to stop it. About Jimmy and his biker friends. Even Max. All the rumors about Jimmy at strange parties in the Valley. Jimmy is not like that. I wanted her to leave me and Jimmy alone.”
“You sent a letter to Carisa?”
“Max Kohl told me things, and I wanted to hurt…”
“You sent a letter?”
“Carisa kept Jimmy from me. I hated her.”
“Lydia, slow down, please. What letter are you talking about?” I was frantic.
“Nobody knew I sent that letter, and now it makes me look like a killer.”
“What did Detective Cotton say to you?” Another bit Cotton kept from me. So he’d unearthed another missive. What was with this young crowd, firing off letters like verbose Edwardian correspondents? Jimmy’s letter, threatening Carisa; now Lydia’s, threatening. They bed one another down, I thought cynically, and then spend hours writing angry letters to one another.
“How was I supposed to know he found that letter? It was my secret. I told no one. Carisa called me and said…” Her voice trailed off.
“What exactly did you say in that letter?”
“I told you…everything.” She was fading, drowsy, out of steam.
“How was it a threat?”
“I said I’d hurt her…you know…it’s just something you say to scare…”
“What did Cotton tell you?” Obviously more than he told me.
“What?” Out of focus.
“Lydia!”
Silence. A hum. I was listening to a dial tone.
The phone woke me up, and I glanced at the clock. One in the morning. Good grief, what was wrong with these people out here? Back East I got my solid eight hours a night, faithfully; a walk in the morning, maybe one at night, rain or shine. And so to bed. I was not myself without the requisite hours.
But at one a.m. the phone needed to be answered. Groggily, “Yes?”
I heard Tansi’s teary voice. “Oh, Edna,” she said, “I know it’s late but I had to tell someone.”
I tried to focus in the dim room. “Tansi, what is it?”
“It’s Lydia. She killed herself this evening. Jake Geyser just woke me up and then I told Nell and she got hysterical and…”
“What happened?”
“It seems Max Kohl found her. He was supposed to meet her in the lobby, but she didn’t answer, so he slipped upstairs when the clerk wasn’t looking, and she was dead. And the police called Warner’s and…”
“So Max was in her room?”
“He called the police. They found drugs.”
“Are they sure it’s a suicide?” I said.
“What?”
“I mean, why did they say it was a suicide?” I thought of my earlier conversation with Lydia. Maybe it was an accidental overdose.
Tansi paused. “I don’t know, Edna. That’s what Jake just told me. He woke me up. Why?” Then, her voice shaky, “Oh my God, Edna, you don’t think…no…it couldn’t be murder.” A deep intake of breath. “Could it?”