All That Glitters (21 page)

But you couldn’t keep Belinda down; it became a constant source of amazement to all Hollywood how she managed to get laid out flat, then rise and stand again, and face the cameras, and have another hit. Good story, bad story, the audiences loved her.
I Don’t Care
, the film biography of Eva Tanguay, seemed to put the whole thing in a nutshell. Belinda didn’t care.

Or didn’t seem to. The fact was, she cared too much. But sometimes a person can slip, or fall, and not get up again, just lie there flat out, out for good. That’s how it seemed in the late fifties, when she and her studio of so many years agreed to disagree, and she drove through the MGM gates for the last time, leaving her “Belinda Blue” dressing room to
n’importe qui.
And, just as when Claire Regrett had gone before her, it was the end of an era.

The next time I saw Belinda I was back in New York, having got one of the leads in a new play. Also, through Frank, Jenny had been hired to do the clothes for a costume epic at Fox, and so she’d stayed on the Coast—relieved, I suspected, to be seeing the last of me for a while; we’d been having a bad case of the seven-year jitters. Anyway, I’d lucked out and the play, having garnered some good reviews, was in for a run. I had this sublet over on East Thirty-second Street, and one night after the theatre I’m walking south on the west side of Lexington Avenue when the skies open up with no warning and it begins raining fish. I duck into this little bar, the Nag’s Head—it’s an unpretentious, cozy kind of place, the usual well-Manhattaned characters slouched at the bar, and a friendly bartender, providing you’re not out to burn the joint down or pinch asses or anything; Freddie was his name. I grab a stool till the rain blows over, Freddie makes me a dry martini, and he and I have a chat. He hasn’t seen my show, so I promise him a pair of house seats; he pays. Some guy is noodling the piano in the back and I see this blonde tootsie hanging over his shoulder, picking out notes on his keyboard. Then she slings herself up onto the piano, Helen Morgan style, and starts to sing “It’s a Big Wide Wonderful World,” but real slow and lowdown, sort of the way Streisand does “Happy Days Are Here Again.” This dame’s got a nice smoky tone and good diction, nice mike work, and I say to Freddie, Who’s that? His answer floors me. It’s Belinda.

“But don’t tangle with her,” Freddie says. “She’s a creature of mood; she may take your head off.”

I pick up my drink and move in closer; it’s not easy accepting the fact that here’s this big movie star, twenty-five years of MGMing under her belt, and she’s singing “Big Wide Wonderful World” in the Nag’s Head saloon. And I don’t even recognize the voice. Her hair keeps falling across her eyes and she either kicks it back with a chin jerk or she does this really sensational gesture, slipping her fingers through it and casually drawing it back, only to have it fall again.

After “Wonderful World” she segues into “Gone with the Wind,” not the “Tara’s Theme” of Max Steiner but the Allie Rubel pop number Martha Raye recorded back in the forties,

“
Gone with the wind
,

Just like a leaf
,
you have blown away

Gone with the wind
,

Our romance has flown away.

Yesterday’s kisses are still on my lips
,

I found a lifetime of heaven at your fingertips
,”

a real torchy little number, and Belinda sang it really well, in a voice that by now had acquired this husky, whisky crackle in it.

Later, when she got tired of singing, she sat alone at the far end of the bar, well out of the light, and Freddie angled down and talked a little with her, and I saw her looking my way. Freddie came back and jerked his ear at her.

“She wants ta talk with ya.”

Outside it had stopped raining. I had a radio gig in the morning and I was full of suppressed yawns, but I told Freddie to bring me another martini and I went down the bar and took the empty stool next to Belinda.

“Hi,” she said, putting her hand in mine. It was soft and warm and very small as hands go. She didn’t make a big deal out of anything; I complimented her on her singing, she accepted my praise gracefully, we spoke of Frankie, she cadged a drink from me, then another. I didn’t mind; I enjoyed the idea that I was buying Belinda Carroll drinks.

She banged on in this Old Crow voice, calling out to Freddie for cigarettes, getting up to go to the john, stopping to shmooze with some people on the way back, and all I could think was, This is Belinda Carroll? I wanted to get away, but I was fascinated and I couldn’t leave. She hiked herself back on her stool again and punched my arm.

“Charlie, Charlie—I know all about you. You used to live at the Trianon, din’ you? With my friend Angie?”

“Well, we didn’t exactly live together,” I told her.

“I bet you’d of liked to.”

I agreed.

“Angie’s a good-looking woman. You got a wife still?”

Yes, I said, I had a wife, though I was in need of a pumpkin shell. “There I’ll keep her very well.”

She guffawed at that one. She said she thought a well-kept wife was an attainment. “All wives should be kept well.” She giggled.

Yes, I said, and I guessed she was one who had been. I also knew she’d been a well-kept widow, since it was general knowledge that Perry had left her a trust fund that would see her well off for the rest of her life.

“Where
is
your wife, anyway?” she demanded. When I explained about the movie Jenny was working on, she grew scornful. “Huh—that smells of turkey already, don’tcha think? And I guess I know a turkey when I smell one. God knows I’ve done enough of them.” She slurred her words and kept repeating her gesture of tossing back her hair, but it wasn’t half so engaging as when she’d been singing.

It was getting late. The clock said two-twenty and I was wiped out, but she wouldn’t let me go. She had things to get off her chest; she was like the Ancient Mariner, I the wedding guest, and I was obliged to hear her tale. I didn’t really mind; at her very worst Belinda Carroll was always someone I enjoyed spending time with. I had a private word with Freddie, he got the kitchen to throw a couple of sandwich steaks on, I coaxed Belinda to a booth and tried to get some food into her. She poked at the steak and pretended to eat the sliced tomatoes, and when the waiter brought coffee she turned her cup over and demanded another drink; so it was steak and Scotch.

When I realized she’d eaten all she intended to—it wasn’t much, and the Belinda of that era usually insisted on getting her own way—I suggested cutting things short. Then the real trouble began; she wanted to go on talking, first in the booth, then back at the bar, where Freddie was yawning and rolling his eyes at me to get her the hell out of there.

“Can’t we go somewhere else?” she asked, when we stumbled out into the wet street. I gave her a flat no, I definitely had to be in bed. I asked her where she lived: the Elysée, she said; the Elysée was one of those small but smart East Side hotels; it boasted the famous Monkey Bar, where Nancy Noland used to sing. The Elysée was twenty blocks up Lex, and I wondered what she was doing down in Murray Hill.

Because of the late hour we had no trouble finding a cab, and on the ride uptown she was both humorous and talkative, keeping at me like a bulldog pulling on a rope. “I guess you think I’m a real mess, hm?” she said, powdering her nose in the overhead light. “I guess you’ll be on the horn to Frank, telling him his Blindy’s all screwed up, hm?”

I said I had no plans in that direction and she snapped her compact shut and gave me a sidelong look. Her hip was next to my thigh and I could feel the heat in it through the beat-up trench coat she had on.

“Listen, I was wondering,” she went on. “Could you meet me sometime? I mean, could I see you? I’d like to talk with you. Unless you’re too busy or something.”

I said I had time. “Anything in particular you wanted to talk about?”

“No. Just, you know—talk. When?”

“Whenever you say. Would you like to come see the play some night?”

“I don’t go to the theatre much,” she said. Then added, “But in your case I could make an exception.”

We made a date. I got her a house seat. I paid, she came. I could see that coif of shining blonde hair out there in the dark and I thought, “I’m acting for Belinda Carroll.” The cast knew she was out there, too, and they were all agog, more agog when she came backstage and shook hands and was charming; some change from the Nag’s Head. Afterward I suggested a bite at Sardi’s but she asked for something less grand, so we went to Downey’s and sat in a corner with people looking over at us and talked. She held down her drink intake and was very funny. She kidded about herself and the mess she’d made of things, but she didn’t harp on her woes. Life was a joke, not to be taken seriously, and I thought, “Well, that’s the only way she’s ever going to get through it, so that’s okay.” She told me about her mother, that hectoring harpy Eunice, who’d caused her so much misery when she was young and who’d hated Frank so much; she talked about her kid, Faun, who since the age of ten had been becoming something of a problem even for the formidable Maude Antrim. Of course nothing was suggested as to why Belinda herself wasn’t on the home front, taking care of matters herself, instead of toughing it out in New York. Or, better yet, why wasn’t the kid here with her mommy?

It was odd, or maybe I only imagined it that way, how the conversation kept coming back to Frank. What Frank was doing, what Frank thought about this or that, things she and Frank had done, things Frank and I’d done that she’d heard about—she even made me tell tales about the tour with Babe Austrian the summer Jenny and I met. She obviously needed to talk about Frank, which was fine with me.

Reading between the lines of her conversation, I decided that this was somebody who didn’t like herself very much, who’d lost her self-respect somewhere along the line. She’d cloaked herself in outrageous behavior, but it was a hair shirt she’d put on and I suspected it was giving her a bad rash. She desperately wanted Frank’s good opinion, and I knew she’d been on her best behavior tonight so I’d turn in a good report. I tried to get across the idea that I wasn’t a spy, and she needn’t worry about my squealing to Frank—or anyone else, for that matter.

She asked about Jenny, and that took up time, and pretty soon I was hiding my yawns again.

“Come on,” she said, pulling my sleeve, “I’ve bored you long enough. You’ve got to get your beauty sleep, you have a matinee tomorrow.”

So we went along. In the taxi she was wonderfully sweet as she thanked me for the show and dinner, saying complimentary things that far exceeded either the merits of the play or my performance in it, but it was nice hearing them anyway. We exchanged a friendly kiss at the door of her hotel.

“Good night, brother dear,” she laughed. She went in and I went on. And that, I decided, was to be the extent of our relationship. Oh brother!

I talked with Jenny every day, to find out how things were going out there in Tinseltown, and since there didn’t seem to be anything wrong in saying so, I mentioned that I’d seen Belinda a couple of times, eliciting only the most casual of responses. I’d had the idea that maybe Jenny wasn’t missing me as much as I cared to be missed by my spouse, but I chalked it up to lots of hard work and an overwhelming interest in the production, which despite Belinda’s misgivings was the biggest break Jenny’d had and could possibly make her reputation as a costume designer. But I heard distinct overtones of pique in her response to my mention of Belinda, and the next time it happened she said something like, “You two are quite the pair, aren’t you? You’d better be careful before you hit the papers.”

How could she possibly have known? But there it was, the next Monday, in my friend La Hopper’s column:

What up and coming Frank Adonis client, now treading the boards of Broadway, is seeing what ex-Metro lovely, also an Adonis client? Rumor has it that the lady is auditing classes at the Actors’ Studio, by way of a stage career. Certainly she’s all washed up in flickers. As for the lad in question, his dressy wife is burning at both ends, seen in the Warner Brothers’ Green Room with the studio’s newest Sweater Boy and that same evening at Jack’s-at-the-Beach with same. My spies tell me they were engrossed in deepest conversation.

The publicist for our show was ecstatic about the item and wanted to put it to further use until I told him to lay off. When Jen and I next talked, we joked about it all; the Sweater Boy turned out to be someone we both knew, an actor who was working in the picture, and they’d had a hamburger together, that was all. I likewise soft-pedaled the relationship with Belinda.

Was it a relationship? No. I didn’t think so, certainly nothing to make the papers over. Just as she said, I was her brother, her birthday fell three days before mine, we were fellow Capricorns and had the weight of the world around our necks; albatross time.

We saw each other a couple of more times, but were careful about being noticed. Then I heard on the grapevine that we were deliberately lying low and people were talking, so we said the hell with it and went to Lindy’s for pastrami sandwiches. That episode made Winchell.

We saw more of each other. I’d been gone from New York for some time, many of my old friends were by then working on the Coast, and the place seemed empty to me. Likewise, Belinda had few friends there, and she was lonely, so—we saw each other. It was good, I enjoyed it. We’d meet for a cup of coffee, or we’d walk over to the river. I still like recalling bits and pieces from those days in New York when I was first really getting to know her, the real Belinda, as they say. She really was on the ragged edge, and I liked to think I was giving her something, if only a helping hand. She even stopped drinking so much when she was with me; she’d have a Seven-Up with a shot of angostura bitters—what she called a “Carrie Nation”—and we’d meet at the Monkey Bar or at Goldie’s and share the New York cocktail hour, which in those days was a lot of fun. She liked to dress up for these occasions, put on the dog, and I thought it was remarkable the number of people who’d stop by the table to say hello: Faye Emerson, Maggie McNellis, Yul Brynner, whoever wandered in.