“Miss Edna.” A voice boomed behind me. Jimmy arrived two hours later. I’d just returned from lunch with Mercy and Tansi.
“Of course,” Tansi mumbled. “Now he arrives.”
Jimmy stood there, nonplussed, inhaling a cigarette, while Tansi, frantically dialing numbers from a book she carried, managed to get some photographers and reporters, lingering on the lot, back into the room. Jimmy was at his most gracious, greeting me as though he’d never met me before, then smiling for the cameras, flirtatious, mischievous, circling me like I was a delightful prey, putting his arms around my shoulders, whispering. The photographers loved it.
I loved it. In spite of myself.
Jimmy had arrived as Jett Rink-the young wildcatter, worn denims and scuffed boots and ten-gallon hat, dipped low on his forehead. He was the rangy, belligerent ranch hand, seething with resentments, falling in love with Bick’s wife, and not yet the cruel and despotic oillionaire of JetTexas Oil.
As the photographers snapped pictures, Jimmy charmed and insinuated. He danced on chairs, he whooped and hollered. He sang a cowboy tune in the twangy, nasal Texas accent he’d mastered for the role. Everyone grinned. At first, I was alarmed by his manic performance, but finally I relaxed. This was no errant schoolboy, some Peck’s Bad Boy for a disaffected generation of post-war lost teenaged children. This was a self-absorbed lad, himself his best and most tantalizing subject. True, his moods were explosive and extreme. A troubled boy, certainly. But watching him unfold himself, like a tentative flower, petal by petal, unsure but seeking the overhead noontime sun, I realized there had to be a strain of purposeful scheming in him, a force that competed with some natural orneriness, some tractor-pull stubbornness. This boy of the Midwest soil, this dervish, this carnival showman, this brilliant hayseed.
He was playing to the camera, swinging me around like some dosie-do barn dancer. I let him, intoxicated, but wary.
“Rope tricks,” he announced, laughing, as he proceeded to twirl a lariat, rodeo style, the sloppy ovals he created lingering in the air like dusty rings blown by cigarette smokers. “I learned this in Marfa. That, and the insatiable mating habits of jackrabbits.”
He insisted on teaching me to twirl a lariat, standing behind me, holding my elbow and wrist, spinning out the thick rope like a spider launching a filament. I was awkward and a little embarrassed. I’d not even told my own doctor about the growing weakness in my shoulders, those sharp pains, but I played along, gamely. Under his tutelage, I actually hurled out the rope, and Jimmy yelled, “Whoa, little doggie.” Which made everyone, including me, howl. The photographers were savoring this. Exhausted, I begged respite, and Jimmy, the cavalier gentleman with an arm around my waist, led me to a chair, the one marked EDNA FERBER, in fact.
“You’re a real cowgirl.” He politely kissed my hand.
“Sure, Annie Oakley with a blue rinse and rhinestone brooch.” Though, I admit, my heart raced. I was loving this.
Flushed, I surveyed the room. Rock Hudson, standing in a doorway, was frowning. Behind him, George Stevens, arms folded, watched, quiet-his face set. Rock leaned into Stevens, who nodded up and down. Again, I told myself that they were right. Of course they were right. Jimmy was impossible. A boy so easy to condemn, yet so easy to forgive.
Frankly, I was baffled by my own behavior here. This was not like me. I’d long ago dismissed frivolous behavior from my life, and there were days I felt I’d even relinquished my sense of humor. There were days when everything bothered me, made me testy. There were weeks when I was filled with nameless rages, feuding with my old friends, with family. I wrote damning letters to people who once loved me. Well, I didn’t like being old, old. I didn’t like the fact that my New York friends were all old, old. Now-here was this Jimmy, a wood sprite, Ariel, genie in a bottle. He got me laughing, stupidly, unexpected, and from the depths, and I was out of practice. The muscles at the corners of my mouth ached.
After the press disappeared-oddly, they’d all forgiven Jimmy for being late, backslapping, making wild promises to him, one even promising to accompany him to a car race-the room went quiet. Suddenly Jimmy started walking in circles; fretful, nervous, unable to settle. Tansi and I sat, like jurors in a box, as Jimmy hummed and grumbled, yet could not stop moving. He looked unhappy.
Jake Geyser had monitored the brilliant spectacle from a distance. He glowered like Cotton Mather wagging a bony, blackened finger at the depraved souls of Salem. He strode across the room. A man used to compliance, he’d been given a task he never sought: herding in the recalcitrant actor and, worse, dealing with blackmail, threats, and vitriolic letters. His was probably a world of brandy snifter decorum, golf engagements on forest-green courses, of Sundays in the park with a tweedy wife and a passel of obedient, if stymied, children. Not in the job description-this-this rebel. Hollywood, as he knew it from the star-system days of the forties, was Clark Gable or Humphrey Bogart or Joan Crawford or Katherine Hepburn-as efficient as office machinery.
He spoke through gritted teeth. “Jimmy, your lateness throws off a whole schedule.” He waited. “Mr. Stevens is fit to be tied.”
Jimmy was quiet too long, and everyone waited. Standing a couple of feet away from the steel-jawed Jake, the slovenly Jimmy seemed to coil downward, a spring unhinged, and the lariat he still gripped floated menacingly in the space between them.
Jimmy looked into the stern, unyielding face. A half-smile. “Well,” he slurred, in an exaggerated Texas drawl, “if he’s fit to be tied, I got me here a right appropriate lasso.” He spun the rope outward, and it brushed Jake’s jacket. Jake jerked back. Jimmy squinted. “You know, as an Indiana farm boy, used to the smells and mayhem of barnyards and hen coops, I’d have to say that you are easily recognizable as a horse’s ass.”
The two men stood there, hating each other. Those nearby squirmed, uncomfortable. Fascinated, I watched the dynamic, though I was unhappy with this ridiculous Mexican standoff. Men at their silly games. You first. No, you first. Come outside and I’ll…
Jake, the unpracticed combatant, sputtered, turned and fled the room; Jimmy threw out the lariat, high above his head, floating the ropes, attempting some exquisite and perfect circle. It fell to the ground. He looked at me. “I read that DaVinci could draw a perfect geometric circle freehand, without a compass. Tell me I can’t make this rope do the same.” Again, he hurled the lariat pell mell over his head, but the circle he created was lopsided, sloppy, and the rope fell onto his shoulders, so he stood there, perplexed, looking like a man who’d just failed to hang himself.
I kept glancing at Tansi, who had positioned herself on my left, her elbow bumping mine. She was breathing hard, and I marveled at the spectrum of shifting emotions that glided across her features. The eyes that followed the crestfallen and embittered Jake to the door were triumphant, her enemy bested. Her lips were drawn into a tight, compressed line, but there was glee in her eyes-a shimmering that scared me. But when Tansi looked back at Jimmy, standing there like a dumbfounded circus clown, the rope looped over his neck, Tansi’s eyes glazed over, and she looked like she was afraid. Not of him, but for him. She made a tsk ing sound, and I caught her eye.
“Nobody understands him,” she said.
“I believe I do,” I answered.
The air went out of the room. Mercy insisted we needed coffee. “I’m from Kinsman, Illinois. Population 164. In my blessed Papist household we addressed any problem with pots of hot, brewed coffee, so strong it corroded our Catholic soul. That was, of course, before I discovered liquor.” She squired us out of the building, across the cement walkways that connected the various soundstages, and out the front entrance, to the Smoke House, a sandwich-and-coffee eatery by the front gates that served as a hangout for the Warner crew and performers. “This is where we live,” Mercy told me. Tansi, like an obedient dog, followed, unhappy. Leaving, we spotted Jake on the telephone, and, looking at the taut tendons in his beet-red neck, I understood how furious he was.
Seated, with coffee, I said, “That was not a good moment.”
“Honestly,” Tansi fumed, sitting back, “Jake is so…”
Mercy interrupted, “Tansi, you have to stop apologizing for Jimmy.”
“I’m not. It’s just that Jack Warner told me…”
“Tansi, Jimmy was wrong this afternoon. Plain wrong.”
Tansi stared into her lap.
Silence. I examined a mountainous cheesecake under glass, dripping with glazed strawberries. In a frosted glass case a stainless steel bowl contained wavy whipped cream, stung by the cold. Perhaps a nibble, a taste. I stopped looking.
Staring at Tansi’s stricken face, Mercy changed the subject, talking about her husband Fletcher, a weekend trip they were planning to San Francisco-a brief respite to see friends. Tansi relaxed, and I decided I would have the cheesecake. Tansi lit a cigarette, expelled the smoke, and I surprised myself. I craved a cigarette. Tansi made a joke when Mercy said her husband, though tolerant of her being an actress and gone for weeks at a time, often told strangers she was a cruise ship entertainer. “At least,” Tansi quipped, “he didn’t say you were the beleaguered assistant to a tight-fisted film mogul. That’s one more euphemism for the oldest profession on earth allowed a woman.”
“Tansi!” I yelled, shocked. But we all started laughing, and Tansi couldn’t seem to stop.
The eatery was largely empty at that hour, but Mercy nodded to some newcomers who strolled in, ordering coffee to go, and I realized one of the two women had been with Tommy Dwyer earlier. What was her name? The one with two words in Giant. Mercy waved them over, but both seemed a little reluctant, looking at each other.
Lydia, I recalled, Jimmy’s most recent girlfriend; that is, his most recently discarded flame. Yes. Lydia Plummer, hovering back in the shadows with Tommy Dwyer’s girlfriend, Polly. Now the women slipped into chairs opposite us, and Mercy made the introductions. “Edna, meet two of the satellites that revolve around Jimmy Dean. Lydia Plummer, still in costume-will they ever film that banquet scene? — and Nell Meyers, who works in the script department.” Both women nodded, then looked at each other. I could see that Lydia did not appreciate Mercy’s comment about her being another moon in Jimmy’s peculiar solar system.
“I can’t stay,” Lydia said, looking at no one. “I’m supposed to be there. They’re reshooting a scene. I have one line and I don’t want to tempt the cutting room floor.” She seemed to be speaking to the far wall, and her eyes looked teary.
Curious, I studied both women. So this was Jimmy’s last girlfriend-this bit player, Lydia Plummer. You saw an eye-catching girl, slender of frame though oddly fleshy, the mouth too large and too pouty, robust painted lips, the eyes already lost in wrinkling, bunching skin. It was hard to read her features, covered as she was in her screen makeup. But I thought her coarse-a roadhouse waitress, perhaps, a buxom Tom Jones barmaid. A little too vacant-eyed. That bothered me. The eyes glassy, perhaps a drinker’s eyes, dim, washed out. I wondered what she looked like without the elegant costume, the trumpery, but I supposed Lydia a prosaic beauty, maybe a high-school belle who was told too often she should be in Hollywood. Stupidly, she bought that Greyhound ticket.
“So you have a speaking line?” My words seemed to startle her. She actually jumped.
Lydia ran her tongue over her lips, moistening them. “One line in Giant, tomorrow a leading role. Look how fast it happened to Jimmy.” The words stretched out, labored over. But she said Jimmy’s name with an icy sarcasm, spitting out the word, and the name hung in the air like a black mark.
Mercy shook her head. “Edna, Jimmy is not one of Lydia’s favorite people these days.”
Lydia grunted. “Swine.” She tossed back her head, and the light caught the gold necklace around her neck. Then, in a quiet confessional tone, the voice now soft and fuzzy, “I just don’t understand why he stopped caring.” Again, she stared at the far wall. Following her gaze, I was intrigued by the sight of the cheesecake.
Nell spoke for the first time. “Lydia, you know how things are.”
A flash of anger. “No, I don’t. Not actually. Only someone who’s never been in love can say that.”
Nell turned red. The two women, I noticed, were a contrast: Lydia, fleshy, grossly sensual, perhaps; a little raw at the edges; a strawberry blonde; and Nell, short, squat really, round like a fur ball, a roly-poly frame that seemed, somehow, block-like, stolid. Perhaps it was the look in her eyes that suggested immobility, a marble glare, humorless. And yet she seemed to be smiling, like she was constantly telling herself a joke she expected no one else to get. A girl perhaps twenty, unpretty in a land where beauty was the name of the game. So she slapped on makeup, heavily so, a feeble attempt to enliven that dull face with powder and eyeliner. The general effect was of a chestnut burr slathered in confectionary sugar. You saw a girl all in black, a beret on her head-eyes darkened with kohl-chalk. She was very Greenwich Village transported to California, land of sunshine. A girl dropped into the wrong geography. No-some ersatz replica of Greta Garbo, an exaggerated approximation of the mysterious Swedish actress. Nell Meyers, script girl as seductress, playing an exotic chanteuse, maybe, waiting to be famously alone. If Lydia seemed garish and effusive, a pretty woman spilling out of her sexuality, then the younger Nell was a shadow, a hidden corner. Lydia was a bar girl with too many drunken nights at gin mills under her girdle. Lydia at middle age would be a Botticelli slattern, all rolling bulge and generous lipstick and five-and-dime perfume. Nell at forty would be a rotund sorcerer with a mosquito-thin voice, sitting on a bar stool saying, “Don’t come near me.”
“What exactly do you do?” I asked her, ignoring Lydia who suddenly seemed lost in her own thoughts.
Nell sighed, “I file scripts.” But she said it with a Garboesque flurry, the lacquered nails fluttering around her face, like wild birds.
Tansi spoke up. “I got Nell the job.”
Nell looked at her, still smiling. “Yeah,” she admitted, “I never ever wanted to work for a studio. My mom and I lived next door to Tansi, before Mom moved back home. I was taking classes at UCLA, aimless, you know. Tansi and Mom played-what? — bridge? Canasta? I never paid attention. So here I am.”
“Nell’s mother is so sweet,” Tansi said. “I miss her.”
“Well, I don’t.”
Lydia looked bored and stood up. “Let’s go.” She turned, forgot to say goodbye.
Tansi spoke up. “Stay a bit, Nell.”
“Love to, but I’m on the clock, you know.” She caught up with Lydia, who was already heading toward the door.
Mercy said to me, “You’ll find this interesting, Edna. Lydia was Carisa Krausse’s roommate a while back, before she moved to her new place. They had a falling out.”
“Over Jimmy?”
“Who knows?”
“And how does Nell fit into all this?”
Mercy shrugged. “Acolytes at Jimmy’s shrine, all of them.”
Tansi interrupted. “Nell met Lydia and Jimmy at a party, and that was the beginning.”
“You don’t sound glad,” I said.
“I don’t like Lydia.”
“Why?”
“There are rumors of drug use, Edna. Her and Carisa, in fact.”
“Tansi, don’t tell tales out of school,” Mercy sharply replied.
“I don’t care. A drinker, too.”
“Stop it, Tansi.” Mercy looked peeved. “You’re not being very nice.”
“I just don’t like her friendship with Nell. Nell is, well, an innocent. I know she’s playing some role in her head. Look at the dumb makeup. But she’s a child. I told her mother I’d look out for her. You know, I got her into the Studio Club on Lodi Street, near Sunset. Edna, it’s a hotel for young girls in entertainment, very safe and protected. One hundred girls, with references. Men can’t get past the lobby. But would you believe dumb fate-her roommate is Lydia, of all people. I want her to move out of the place.”
“That’s her choice,” Mercy insisted, pushing her coffee cup away from her.
Tansi’s voice was too loud. “Lydia is not a good role model.”
Mercy frowned. “Let Nell make her own choices, Tansi.”
“I know. But I promised her mother…”
“I had a mother who tried to run my life for decades,” I declared.
“And what did you do?” Mercy asked.
“Rattled my chains.”
Tansi spoke up. “Okay, okay, I won’t gossip, but I know things. I know that Carisa and Lydia had a fight, and Nell told me she herself was afraid of Carisa’s mouth.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Carisa took a dislike to Nell.”
“Because of Jimmy?”
“According to Nell, yes.”
“You don’t believe her?”
Tansi breathed in. “Jimmy doesn’t chase every girl. He’s not interested in Nell. Men don’t notice Nell, you know. She’s, well, short and…” She stopped.
I sipped cold coffee, placed the cup on the saucer. “Why did Jimmy break up with Lydia?”
Mercy answered quickly. “I’ll tell you what I think. The studio thought he’d look better with Ursula Andress, her in a gown, him in a tuxedo. The two of them having dinner with Bogart and Bacall up in their Benedict Canyon home, Jimmy petting their two boxer dogs. Good camera shot. It’s all publicity.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means a lot of Jimmy’s dating is programmed by the studio. Jimmy also likes to keep his real life private, do things his own way. He seems to have overnight infatuations with each new girl, and sort of sees her for a while.”
“Sort of?” I asked.
“Yes, exactly. Sort of. Once or twice. Lydia for a week or two. Pier a lot longer-and more heartfelt, that one. Maybe a real love there. Maybe not. But yes, sort of. When they call him back, hungry for his love, he’s never home. Out on his infernal bike in the hills. Jimmy is a little confused about things.” She shrugged her shoulders.
“I’m not following this.” I found it difficult to understand the dating patterns of these odd young folks. It was all a tedious muddle to me. But I asked Mercy, “Is Tansi right? Is Lydia on drugs?”
Mercy pursed her lips into a thin line. “Probably.”
“But this is not the reason he left her?”
“Probably not.”
“Then why?” I begged.
Mercy shrugged her shoulders again.
Tansi was frowning. “And you call me a gossip?”
Mercy spoke coolly. “I don’t gossip, Tansi. I just insinuate facts.”