Authors: Thomas Tryon
“What couldn’t? You and Frank or you and Hollywood?”
“Both—either—I don’t know. I just wanted everybody to be happy.”
“And afterward—after Frances had died—you didn’t go to Frank.”
“I couldn’t. After Bud died that way I promised myself I wouldn’t see Frank anymore. And I didn’t. I would never marry him, it would be too terrible—to be happy because Bud had killed himself for me. I would have kept to my vow, too—but then Mother died and I didn’t know how to handle it. All I felt was this awful emptiness, a void. The tunnel was all dark. But that day at the post office, I’d met Frank again. There he was, as if someone had just picked him up and set him down in my life again, as if he was
supposed
to be there. Suddenly I didn’t feel so empty, didn’t feel so alone. I felt safe again. And I clung to him, clung so hard, I put everything I had into it, but all the time I guess I knew.”
“Knew what, April? What did you know?”
“That something was going to happen. Only I never—I n-never—Oh God, please don’t make me talk about it anymore, I don’t want to—I can’t.” She began to sob, her shoulders shaking, and I sat with her hand in mine. I slipped my arm around her shoulder and after a while she took my handkerchief and blew her nose, then, surprisingly, gave a little snort of ironic laughter.
“Crazy, it’s all crazy. I’m crazy and the world’s crazy, too. The other night Ida put a bag over her head and suffocated herself. Is that what I should do, I wonder? I could probably find a bag somewhere.”
“Don’t talk like that, damn it!”
“Don’t be mad at me, Charlie,” she whispered. “Be my friend.”
“I
am
your friend! Believe it. April, I am!”
She paused to think. “Were you here earlier?”
“When?”
“When I woke up in the hammock. They were putting on the play. Was that you?” I nodded. “Did you bring me chocolate filberts?” I nodded. “It was you, then. I thought it was. Were we talking? A long time?”
“Quite long, yes.”
“I wanted to tell you then. Only I was afraid.”
“It doesn’t matter, you’re telling me now.”
I was about to ask her something else but they were blinking the porch lights and I knew it was time. She had to go in. No more Easter eggs, no more bunnies, no more talk. Just good night, goodbye, till the next time, like always. It never changed, not really. Even with this burst of talk, of real communication, things weren’t changed so far as her getting out went.
“Want me to come in?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s all right,” she said. “I guess I know my way. I should by this time.” She smiled wryly and touched my arm. “Thanks, Chazz. You’re really a good Samaritan. I hope the gods smile on you.” She leaned and kissed my ear, lightly, then slipped away from me. April. April Rains.
“I’ll be seeing you,” I promised. She drew herself up and jerked a nod, drawing the points of her collar together at her throat. “Don’t worry, I’ll still be here. I’m not going anywhere, am I, Mrs. Kraft?” She turned to address the matron, who had come out of the building, her uniform exceedingly white in the shadowy dark.
“We’ll hope you’re better so you can go somewhere,” said Mrs. Kraft. “Anywhere you want to. Where would you like to go, April?” she asked, holding the door open.
I missed her answer, and wondered what it might have been. But I already knew the real answer. I’d been given these twenty, thirty minutes, all right, but there wasn’t ever to be much more. April Rains had already gone to the place where she was going.
I gave a light beep on the horn, waved at her back as she slipped inside, Mrs. Kraft holding the door for her, April’s head darting as though fearing some blow. The door shut and the porch light went out. I got into my car and headed for the gate.
“Everything all right?” asked the genial guard. I nodded matter-of-factly and passed through. As the gate closed behind me, I looked back at the building that had swallowed her up, wondering which window was hers. At that moment a light came on in a third-story window and I told myself that one was it. I pictured her getting ready for bed, pictured her alone in that room, with a chipped chair painted institution green, a fakey Indian bedspread, a framed reproduction on the wall in Maxfield Parrish blue. No, they probably don’t have Maxfield Parrish blue at Libertad.
The broad bleak landscape lowered with darkness, throbbed and seethed with loneliness. The molded hills rolled away against the patch of sky where the sun had died. My mind’s eye saw my friend, poor gray creature split like a hewed log, half this, half that, nothing good, nothing ahead. I thought about all the years I’d been doing this, making this solitary pilgrimage to nowhere for nothing, and I felt a tug, even a sob, regret sharp as a knife, unearthly desolation.
Was this what you got for trying? She had tried, a valiant effort. A pretty girl folks would go to see, healthy and wholesome, buttered popcorn in the mezzanine on Saturday night. Her prints went down in Sid Grauman’s forecourt, she won the Look Award for Most Promising Newcomer, the Photoplay Award, all of those silly but gratifying medallions to receive which you put on your spangly dress and fox furs and they curl up your hair all to hell and gone. America’s true royalty. But at what a price? Don’t tell me it was because she loved a married man, don’t tell me it was because she wanted to give Frankie a son and heir and failed, I won’t buy it. ’Twas the beasts killed the Beauty. It was Hollywood did her in.
Anna. Anna-banana. Now she was alone. Alone, Anna; alone, April. Maybe that’s the way it had to be, but I didn’t want to believe it. My heart was overflowing with bitterness and resentment, and as the feeling mounted in me I found that I was driving twenty miles over the limit. I slowed as I saw lights in the rear-view mirror; no cop, though, only another motorist going faster as I brought the needle down to 55. I didn’t go home the same way I had come, back through the San Fernando Valley, but instead continued west on the Ventura Freeway until I hit the Pacific Coast Highway and veered south. On my left rose the granite, heavily muscled shoulders of the ancient California headlands that angled sharply down to the sea-level flats, rain-rutted cliff’s of decomposed granite, said to hold firm under stress. To my right lay the sea, a broad flat plane of darkening water that stretched into the fleeing day that raced from the horizon straight to Singapore. It was not yet suppertime, and under the purple-and-gold sky I could make out darkened forms along the beach: a man, a woman, a tall boy, younger children, a wet hairy dog, plodding member of the family; silhouettes only, formed but featureless, each with its particular and incisive gesture, silent figures in a darkening landscape, actors on a vast empty stage. Silent pictures.
I fine-tune the radio and light a cigarette (I quit, a hundred times I quit; now I smoke, and I love it!). It’s as if she’s here with me in the car, beside me in the other bucket, yet I know where she is really, behind the green waffled grille on the third floor, folding down her bedspread. I watch the road ahead, the lights that have come on in my rear-view mirror, I take in the long stretches of empty beach as they flash by, darkening, melancholy, unpeopled, fraught with a sense of end-of-the-world-ness, that old California earthquake syndrome, every Angeleno’s fantasy, in which the whole state falls into the Pacific and drowns.
Then my peripheral glance is galvanized by a sight I had not thought to look upon, not so soon, wildly bizarre in its odd, quirky appropriateness, as if it’s been planned by some superior intelligence: two of them, a pair, centaurs, those man-horses, prey of the Lapithae, banished from Thessaly lo these thousands of years since and now come to California, here beside the dark waters of Ocean Pacifica, to live among the nutburgers.
I wanted to stop but couldn’t, I was traveling too fast, but still I held them in my view, man-horse,
homo-equus,
creatures of the Thessalian plain with their manes and hoofs and windswept tails, their human-animal passions, their anthropomorphic lusts, their horse-tears, man-and-maid tears, tears of salt and rue.
One by one in the moonlight there
Neighing far off on the haunted air
The unicorns come down to the sea.
Fairy creatures from a dream zoo, whisked into fragile life out of the glassblower’s wand, seen for seconds only on a beach in the blue-black dark 7.6 miles from a madhouse. The unicorns come down to the sea, those solemn, crystal-horned creatures of myth and fancy, figments of man’s imagination, and in seconds the fog rolls in off the water like a gray plague, a movie-fog generated by special-effects men, obliterating sea, sand, creatures, all.
In another minute I knew I’d been seeing things. Everybody knows there are no unicorns; not in this life. Only the hope of them, and that hope blessed small.
A
S A BOY, I
used to get a thrill on Monday nights when that crisp, patrician voice of Cecil B. De Mille would come over CBS radio to proclaim
LUX… PRESENTS…
HOLLYWOOD
!
What those three ringing words meant, only those who likewise heard the Lux Radio Theatre can know. It was true: a soap manufacturer was presenting to the radio-listening nation the glamorous Hollywood everybody worshipped and adored and couldn’t know enough about. In a brief fifty minutes they’d wrap up the whole sad tale of
Dark Victory
or
Stella Dallas
, tears, sobs, and all, at the end of which C.B. would come on and chat intimately with the stars, Stanwyck or Davis or whoever, and you felt sure that, while broadcasting, Stanwyck was wearing a slinky satin dress and fox furs (she wasn’t) and that Davis had a block-long limousine waiting to take her out dancing (she didn’t). Magical place names like “Hollywood and Vine,” “Del Mar,” and “Trocadéro” and “Lucey’s” and “Toluca Lake” and “Culver City” and “La Brea Tar Pits” sent tremors through you. You got glimpses of the real thing you’d already discovered in such movies as
A Star Is Born
, or in the MGM newsreel when they concreted Mickey Rooney’s footprints at Grauman’s Chinese. Out in Hollywood everything appeared to have streamlined curves—buildings and women alike; it was all chrome strips and restaurants built to look like men’s derbies or club sandwiches without the mayo, and the smogfree California air was filled with the promise of orchids and diamonds: the Land of Dreams. Just follow the Yellow Brick Road with Judy, leave Kansas and Auntie Em behind and come, not to emerald Oz but to silver Hollywood, where you, too, could press your hands and feet in wet cement.
Well, don’t kid yourself. It’s gone now; it’s all gone. I don’t mean just Grauman’s, I mean Hollywood. Tinseltown. Glitter City. Ham Burg. As gone with the wind as, well,
Gone With the Wind.
The
place
is there, five square miles of it, eight miles from downtown L.A. as the crow flies. Look on the movie-star maps, you’ll still find it, but don’t look for Carole Lombard’s house, don’t look for Dolores del Rio’s or John Barrymore’s, don’t look for Bill Powell’s. The houses may be there still, only Carole ain’t home, Bill won’t answer the door, Dolores blew town years ago, Barrymore—forget it; they all went with the wind, too. The nights no longer twinkle and shine when the stars come out—the movie stars, that is. The air no longer exudes that heady, sweet perfume, nor does it bear upon its breath the sultry strains of Latin music along the Sunset Strip; Lina Romay does not shake her fringes while Cugie caresses his pet Chihuahua. No, no, all that is gone and will not come again, nothing will bring back those golden days, nothing will even nearly approximate them. Those were the days of cream and butter, these are the days of skim milk and oleo. Somewhere along the line Hollywood got real, got grim.
Even most of the old-timers who are still with us have left—New York, London, Paris, Palm Springs; no one in his right mind sticks around Tinseltown unless he has to. One of the few who never left—and never would—was Maude. She’d never have even thought of living anywhere else than Sunnyside, and since that grand old house had been built for her (the only house in town to have a musicians’ gallery high above the grand salon) and she was happy in it, why should she go? She wasn’t really a part of the Hollywood scene, hadn’t been for thirty years or more. She just sat up there on her hill looking down on the world, letting it all pass by, watching the snows of yesteryear melt away. She’d become a fixture, though she hated anyone to say so. “Sounds like I should be brass-plated and clamped to the wall of a De Mille bathroom,” she said. But it was true; she’d lived in filmland since 1919, which was a scant thirty years after Mrs. Horace H. Wilcox dubbed her citrus ranch “Hollywood.”
By the century’s turn Mrs. W’s dusty acreage was already being profitably subdivided into building lots and its population was numbered in the five hundreds. By then there were two-story houses, telephone poles, shady trees, and some signs of city life—though few of moviemaking. Not yet had the movie cameras rolled at Biograph, at Selig, at Bison, at IMP. Not yet did the Hollywood Hotel sprawl at Hollywood and Highland; not yet did young Capra, young Ford, and their cronies gather at the downtown Alexandria Hotel; not yet was there a “Hollywood,” the dream factory; not quite yet. But everything was set and waiting, a whistle-stop town basking in the orange- and lemon-fruited orchards, waiting with its Irving Berlin skies, its fleecy pink clouds, its caressing palms, its seashore where Sennett beauties would romp and bounce along the sands and the saxes would wail in the dance halls on the pier, everything just waiting for the celluloid to roll.
Oddly, at the very time that Hollywood was poised to meet its destiny, back east the sovereign state of New Jersey seemed a pretty fine moviemaking place itself, and there a blonde-haired child from Bayonne was helping to mold movie history. Maudie Fagan was the daughter of an Irish tavernkeeper and one day when she was seven years old she was approached by a man in the street who spoke to her those oft-quoted words, “How’d you like to be in pictures, little lady?” And in no time, the little lady was. It was her fate, in the person of Al Christie, an early celluloid cowpoke turned director.