Authors: Thomas Tryon
In those days Marilyn Monroe and Shelley Winters were attending classes at the Actors’ Studio, and one afternoon we ran into Shelley on the street. I had played a walk-on in stock when Shelley was the star, and since then we’d co-starred on television, and when she saw Belinda she started screaming how Belinda simply had to come up to the Studio and audition for Lee Strasberg. I had a picture of that and I gave Shelley the high-sign to can it about auditions, but
maybe
Belinda might like to go with Shelley and just
audit
the class. Well, that was fine, so off they went together, laughing and giggling like two schoolgirls.
But the seed was planted and the time came when Belinda did get up and do a job of acting. She really did—a scene from
The Country Girl
, wearing that damn trench coat and the babushka she put on so people wouldn’t recognize her. She wouldn’t take either of them off until Strasberg stopped the scene and asked why she was dressed for outdoors when the action was supposed to be in a theatre dressing room. He made her peel the coat off and reveal herself, and this did something to her; it made her prickly and angry, because she was overweight and trying to hide it. The babushka went, too, and her hair was full of tin curlers, so he made her remove those and comb out her hair during the scene, giving her an activity, and the scene—Odets, but not at his best—really took off. They talked about it for years, Belinda Carroll and her
Country Girl
, comparing it not unfavorably with Uta Hagen’s original.
Then she did a really dumb thing. Maybe she just couldn’t help herself, maybe it was her overwhelming need to be loved, maybe it was just elemental wop-sex, but in any case she got involved with this actor she’d met at the Studio, some guy called Tony Dichi, an arrogant little Italian from the Bronx who thought he was Marlon Brando and did an unholy imitation of him. When he and I met, it was hands off; we both backed away. I knew he was using Belinda, just climbing right up her back, and I despised him for it. He was also screwing her, and I admit it; by then I was jealous; no right to be, but that’s how it was. She and I even had fights about the little squirt, and then for a while we were out of touch, but I heard all the stories. People were talking, and not to Belinda’s advantage. Again I had this impression that she was deliberately trying to do herself in; else why would she have picked of all people this little hard-on with his greaser curls, his blue beard, his Elvis Presley Roman-Greco lips, his muscles, and his leather motorcycle jacket? Later this “individualist” did a movie and a half and then went straight to Zipville.
But the depth of Belinda’s fascination for this little gonzo was all too apparent. Things got worse; finally the column items started to break, and not blind ones, either. She was quoted as saying Tony Dichi reminded her of Frank—because Frank had come from Hell’s Kitchen, too, west of Eighth on Fifty-second; were such things possible in that Eisenhower world? Shelley tried to patch things up but I said screw it, Shell, leave it lay. Lie.
One day I read in the
Times
that Jean Dalrymple had offered Belinda a part in a revival of
The Women
at the City Center, four weeks of rehearsal. She went off to Boston and never came back, not in
The Women
anyway. She’d pulled out of the show after some deep trouble in Beantown and that was it for her name up in lights on Broadway.
When she got back from Boston (in semi-disgrace, though the whole mess was sort of hushed up and made only the Broadway rounds), she was at frayed ends and trouble was still her middle name. Tony Dichi was no longer in evidence, but not long after her return she got involved with some stud who worked in a wire parlor handicapping the ponies, a real bastard. One night when he took her to his hotel she went to bed with him, then tried to roll him; he beat the living hell out of her, she was damn near dead when the cops got there. They hauled her off to Bellevue, of all terrible places, and when they got her stitched back together she was up for grabs. The guy even pressed charges; you remember the headlines on that one. They were going to send her to the Tombs, and I got this lawyer friend of mine to square things and I paid the scumbag to lay off. He dropped the charges; I went and fetched her and took her home. To my place, I mean. This would really make good copy, but what else could I have done? She could hardly walk or talk. I might have called Shelley, but she wasn’t in town.
Ten minutes after I got her inside my apartment Belinda was asleep on my bed. I went around hiding anything that had the least alcoholic content, then hung up her things. When she woke up, I fed her soup from the corner deli and she was like some poor wounded bird, both wings broken, couldn’t hope to fly. She had the TV in there, she was watching Howdy Doody and Gary Moore. Meantime I was on the horn to L.A., keeping Frank up-to-date on things. He asked me if I could put her up for a little while. I did, for four nights, and she damn near drove me crazy. She was becoming this God-awful chatterbox and you couldn’t shut her up, racka-racka-racka all day long. All she wanted to do was sit around and drink and gab, while I got bleary-eyed and wondered what the hell I was doing, trying to help this looney-tune. I didn’t even like her much anymore; she’d taxed me far beyond my strength and I felt helpless. That’s how it is sometimes when the weak ones take over the strong ones and wear them down. I felt sorry for her but she was getting under my skin, and four days at close quarters about did me in.
When I told her she had to move out, she went with no fuss, not back to the Elysée, but to a hotel a few blocks away, not bad but certainly not good. I saw her around the neighborhood from time to time. Drunk she was a mess, but sober she was still an all-right lady, though she suffered from bad hangovers and consequently was often in brittle shape. When she was sober I’d try talking some sense to her, about quitting the booze. I’d try to encourage her, but she’d grow abusive and then she’d get me pissed off. Around this time she wasn’t just Belinda, or I guess what I mean is there were more than one of her—it was Joanne Woodward time and her
Three Faces of Eve.
There was this one I’ve been talking about, the would-be tootsie with too much gas in her tank; then there’d be the one in the torn trench coat and striped babushka taking her wash to the laundromat or shopping in the A & P, no makeup, hair a mess, scuffed penny loafers on her feet, seams not straight, a real blowze, but something friendly and ingratiating about her—nothing of the movie-queen stuff.
Then a lucky thing happened. A woman called Ronnie Alsop lived in the building, a fan of mine, as it happened, a pleasant, middle-aged spinster well on her way to being an old maid; Ronnie was going down to Tennessee to do research for a paper she was preparing on the TVA, and since her apartment was going to be vacant and a pet was involved, she offered the place to Belinda, asking that the cat be fed and the place not get burned down. We jumped at the chance.
Having her own digs seemed to help Belinda, for a while, anyway. The little apartment, conventionally furnished, with a fire escape overlooking a back alley, seemed to suit her. It had forest-green walls, white-enameled trim (badly chipped from wear), and lots of cabbage-rose chintz. There were books and magazines, records, a shelf full of cookbooks, and not a lot of space to worry about taking care of.
We observed certain proprieties: she never showed up at my door to borrow a cup of sugar or a ten-cent stamp; if she wanted me she telephoned first, and she didn’t just crash in on my parties—not that I had many, but some nights after the theatre we’d have small get-togethers, occasionally at my place. It got to the point where I didn’t like to include Belinda, because a drunk is a drunk no matter how famous, and the sight of her plastered all over the davenport wasn’t very pretty. I didn’t see why my guests should be bored by her, even if she’d once been in the Movie Top Ten four years in a row.
Belinda Carroll was a fallen star, no doubt of that, and at that period there was no reason ever to imagine she would rise again. To all intents and purposes she was a has-been, washed up in the business. After the Boston debacle no producer would take a chance on her. When spring was in the air I suggested bringing her to a guy I knew to see if he’d take her on for a summer stock tour; it took me weeks to get her to agree even to see him, and when I finally put the two of them together she waltzed in pissed to the gills, stood there wobbling on her spike heels, only to collapse in a chair. Then she tried to put the make on him, and when he didn’t take to her charms she became insulting and the thing ended in another fiasco. I took him to an expensive dinner by way of thanks, but the damage was done, and Cape Cod did not see Miss Carroll in
Angel Street
that summer.
It wasn’t anyone’s business, but we’d begun sleeping together. Not on a regular basis, but it was probably inevitable that we should, propinquity lending its usual hand. I felt guilty, a little anyway, as if I were taking advantage of a situation, and maybe I was, but not advantage of her. It seemed a natural result that we should make love sometimes after my show, and with Jenny three thousand miles away I fell willing victim to that old dodge, Well, what’s a guy to do?
And it was nice. We’d be in bed, smoking and having a post-coital slug of hooch, the radio would be playing George Shearing, and I’d be thinking, This is wild, I’ve got Belinda Carroll in my arms, I’m making love to her. In one of these intimate moments I told her about the flood in the cellar and the patch of wet cement, the initials in the heart; she started to cry and said it was the sweetest thing she’d ever heard of.
She was getting hung up on me, I could tell, and I told myself I shouldn’t get involved; my friends said it, too. She was in no shape to indulge herself this way, and of course they were right. What she really needed was some solid therapeutic help, but at that time she wasn’t ready for it the way she was later on, when she really got down to brass tacks and joined Alcoholics Anonymous. But I found her a couple of books; crazy to have thought they’d help her, but I was really grasping at straws. I brought her Kahlil Gibran’s
The Prophet
and Erich Fromm’s
The Art of Loving
—this is a laugh, but I even got her to take a whack at old Dale Carnegie—anything that might have given her a toehold, but it never worked; she’d read a few pages and then the book would end up under a pile of lingerie in the corner.
She was an awful slob, too, and while I wasn’t Norman Neatly, I did like things picked up. I had a girl who came in and cleaned once a week and I ended up having her go down to Belinda’s and look after her, while I scrubbed my own toilet and scoured the bathtub. Not a convenient arrangement, to say the least.
One thing: I did get to know her. I did get to look behind the façade of a typical movie star and see the deadly doubts and fears that prey on that kind of personality, spoonfed by the studio so they can’t make up their minds about anything, so they know nothing about the everyday business of living. This was a woman who’d had the adoration of the world, who’d dined with kings and emperors, who had only to crook her little finger at any man and he’d come running. She’d dated Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant and Howard Hughes, but she couldn’t wash out her undies or boil water. I even had to go down and put a fresh roll of toilet paper in the holder for her. It was pathetic, she was so helpless, and it was the studio system that had crippled her. And yet—and yet—she was Belinda Carroll, and I just felt this throbbing, burning need in her, she was so damn sweet and really kind; she knew about giving and not just her body—though she could give plenty of that. But she was never selfish (the only thing she took lots of was my time, but I could be generous, too), and when she wasn’t smashed she was an amiable companion and I enjoyed being around her.
It was at this time that I was given a clearer picture of Belinda’s mother, the terrible Eunice, who, having done everything in her power to push her daughter into the limelight, had turned around and done everything she could to destroy her success. On the one hand she’d mothered Belinda to death and on the other she’d ignored her whenever Belinda needed a mother she could go to.
I never knew the woman—she died of Bright’s disease shortly before I arrived in California back in the fifties, and by then she and Belinda were estranged. She didn’t even say that she was dying, but wrote a letter to be mailed upon her demise. Belinda had kept it and she let me read it. Its impassioned and accusatory lines were as destructive as Eunice could make them—and she was a master. All of her pent-up jealousy over Belinda’s success was there to read (Eunice had once worked with a knife-thrower in a cheap carnival act and she was crazy about show business), filled with acrimony, criticism, and scorn, the sort of letter designed to lay a guilt trip on any sensitive person. It completely repudiated their relationship, blaming Belinda for all of Eunice’s ills and misfortunes, and at the end she said she was glad to be dead because she didn’t care to go on living in a world where there were such terrible people as Belinda Carroll (she hated the name, she said, just as she hated the man who’d thought it up: Frank Adonis was her
bête noire
).
But it seemed to me that, despite everything, Belinda must have retained some filial devotion, since she had with her several keepsakes of her mother: a vanity set with cheap silver backings, and some snapshots, pictures I looked at carefully, studying that rawboned, rubbery face that reeked of the kind of hopeless belligerency you sometimes find in photographs of the lower-class women of Depression America, the Okies out of Steinbeck. The wonder was, I thought, how did the woman ever give birth to such a beautiful child?
Belinda talked about her sister, whom she’d loved and who had died of meningitis at an early age, and her brother, who’d been killed in a strike riot at the Ford plant after being clubbed down by company goons. The loss of these two obviously had affected her own early upbringing and I was inclined to think it also affected her later behavior, both bad and good. Certainly it added to her fear of being alone in the world and her constant need of a man. Even if it was a one-night stand, that would do; she had a horror of sleeping alone.