All That Glitters (75 page)

One afternoon I stopped by after a grueling rehearsal; we hadn’t been long at work when the telephone rang: for me, she said, and handed me the receiver along with a look. She didn’t care what it was, you were with her and she wanted every minute of your time, the whole enchilada, rag, bone, and hank of hair.

“Belinda-baby?” she said meanly when I hung up.

“As a matter of fact, no, it was my dentist, changing an appointment on Friday.”

“Don’t go!” she commanded, fixing me with her rigid index finger. “Go to Dr. Millsap, he’s the absolute best in the city, he even does Garbo.”

When I said I was perfectly happy with my own dentist, she got smartie-pants, made another grimace, then leaned forward and blew a huge cloud of smoke in my face; her little joke. “What now, scribe of mine? What shall I talk about as the evening grows later and my brain grows fuzzier?”

I made no suggestion, but let her follow her own meanderings. Pretty soon she fell into a sentimental vein; she was full of the old MGM days, all good stuff, and I didn’t have to guide or steer her at all. She growled and gnawed her words, the expletives and four-letter jobs exploded on all sides, and it was all going onto tape “for posterity.”

As she talked she went on sipping her vodka. The more she drank, the less discreet she became and the more slangy her talk, the less cultured her accents. I was amused, for one of the things I’d always enjoyed noticing about her was the eternal struggle against her background. Yet struggle to hide it though she might, like murder it would out, willy-nilly.

“Y’know what Frank used to say?” she asked rhetorically. “You must have heard him. ‘Don’t let the bastards get you.’ Good advice, if you ask me. They’re bastards all right, they’ll chop you off at the knees if they feel like it. They’re all great white sharks out there; the big fish eat up the little ones; then the little ones get big and grow teeth and they eat up the next batch. You don’t meet any nice ones, ones you want to remember. I’ve been in the business for fifty years and I tell you for a fact, I don’t know how a movie ever gets made, some of the assholes they’ve got working on them. The minute you drive through the gate somebody’s trying to jerk you around, swear to Christ.”

She blatted on about Hollywood and how much she hated it until she subsided, more from weariness than contempt for the place. I saw what it was: Hollywood didn’t want her anymore. She was stuck up here in her ivory tower and the movies just didn’t give a rat’s ass. Louis B. was dead and she knew a boy who used to empty the wastebaskets at MCA and now that pimply office boy was a hotshot producer with an Oscar to his credit. He didn’t want her, they didn’t want her, no one wanted her. And while I was forced to agree that much of what she said held truth, it was simply the way the Hollywood cookie crumbled.
Sic transit gloria Claire.

I
even thought I knew what was coming next; I was right: “If Frank were alive he’d show them, see if he wouldn’t. He’d find me a part, he’d have me up there, he’d… Or, shit, maybe he wouldn’t,” she broke off philosophically, and you had to respect her for that.

“You’ve never stinted at praising him, have you?” I said.

She gave me an indignant look. “What the hell do you think I am, anyway? I believe in giving credit where credit’s due. I owe Frank Adonis a lot. If he hadn’t taken me to Metro, God knows how I’d have ended up at AyanBee. That joint folded so quickly. And if, after I left MGM, Frank hadn’t got Sam Ueberroth to give me
Wages of Sin
, would I ever have won my Oscar? Answer: no, Claire dear, you would not have won your Oscar. You would be singing ‘Abide with Me’ with the goddamn Salvation Army.”

“While we’re on the subject,” I prompted, moving the recorder closer and leaning to check the amount of tape in the cassette, “what about your getting that Oscar? Just what help was Frank in that matter?”

Instantly she became furious. “Look,
buster
, let’s just can the crap, okay? Let’s just can it for all time, huh? If you or any other bozos think Frankie or anybody else snapped his fingers to get me my Oscar, that’s pure crap. Nobody ever got Osky for me except me!
I
got it, it was all mine, I won it fair and square, I don’t care what anybody says.” Obviously I had pushed a button and I decided to let her get it all out. “True, I wasn’t going to finish the picture; I was sick and I just couldn’t face going to the goddamn studio. If you remember, I was married to Skylar at the time and Skylar—he—he—made me terribly nervous, he used to belt me around sometimes, I wasn’t sleeping and I’d lost a lot of weight, but—
I won that fucking Oscar for myself
!
Wages of Sin
is the best damned performance I ever gave; it was my apogee, they said in
Time
magazine, and I’m proud of every second I’m on that screen.
That’s
the
real
Claire Regrett. That’s what I wanted to be. An actress! A goddamn good one, too! And if they didn’t think so, well, they wouldn’t have voted for me, would they? So why the hell do people still say I didn’t really win it, or that it should have gone to Belinda that year? Or that Sam bribed his way to win? Bullcrap, my fine man, pure bullcrap!”

She sat back with crossed arms, stubbed out her butt, and tossed me her lighter to perform service. I shied and put my hands behind me.

“No help from me,” I said. We’d already been round the subject of her incessant smoking.

“Well, screw you, buster. You’re not my guardian, you know. You’re only my biographer. Ask me something. Anything. I’ll give it to you straight arrow.” She lit her own cigarette and squinted at me through the smoke. “What’re you thinking, anyway? That I’m a bitch in heels? You always get that look on your puss. Like you’re sniffing something out, like you’re analyzing me, like you’re going to take a scalpel to my hide. I gotta tough hide, baby, you better believe it. I’m a fuckin’ Sherman tank!”

“Nice to meet you, Miss Sherman. Suppose you tell me one or two things about number three on your marital Hit Parade.”

“Number—? Let’s see….” She counted on her fingers. “Perry, one; Skylar, two—why, you must mean Yves. Yves wasn’t a husband, he was an aberration, the reason girls leave home. I used to call him my dwarf; I wanted him to have a hump, and a wart right here. Ugh.” She touched the end of her nose and I conjured up that round, plump, blue-bearded visage of Yves de Gobelins, the phony count, would-be international financier, and general all-purpose prick. Claire groaned aloud.

“Frankly, I’ll never know what I thought I saw in that gnome. I was crazy to marry him, but he was the biggest con-artist in the world. Any woman married to that one was better off dead.” She eyed me through a thick cloud of cigarette smoke, then waved it away as if to see me better. “We had a row over you after that time you lunged at him on the set. He didn’t like you one bit. But don’t take it personally, he was a
very
odd type, Yves. And short people can get awfully mean.”

“How much did he lose you on that perfume deal?”

“Oh-h God, thousands.
Millions.
I never knew what hit me when the auditors started coming out of the woodwork. He’d skimmed off the whole company. Left me with a ton of debts. I broke my ass paying them off.”

“How would you say Yves stacked up against the others? Frank, for instance?”

“Frank?” She widened her eyes and craned her head back in mock surprise. “Are you out of your gourd? Listen, baby, there’s one constant in this life, and that’s that there was never
anybody
better than Frankie when it came to the ladies’ hour. Absolutely no one, no one ever came close, I’ll go on record on that. But Yves ran him a close second. In the sack he was something else, I kid you not.

“But
he
was the one who wanted to marry
me.
He kept chasing me; you remember how it was in all the papers. He wanted to show me off and use my name to get his picture printed. Anyway, besides the sex, he sort of intrigued me. He was interesting in a way lots of American men aren’t. He had this sense of mystery about him, like you could never know everything about him, so there wasn’t any point of trying. He thrilled me, and I had this feeling of something dangerous around all the time.”

“But who said you had to stay married to him? Why didn’t you just dump him?”

She laughed that wicked, snarly laugh of hers. “Believe me, I tried to! But when I told him I was fed up with him and wanted a divorce, he just stood there and laughed at me. That popeyed little midget laughed at me! Right then I knew I was in real trouble. He started having me followed, he’d make threats, he beat me up really bad, I was scared. And I don’t scare easy.”

“What sort of threats?”

“He said he’d pay someone big bucks to throw acid at me and disfigure my face. Then he threatened to have my kneecaps broken with a baseball bat. He even threatened to put me in a box and have me dropped into the Pacific—alive! He got me so scared I couldn’t sleep or work or do anything.” I watched the flood of emotions that played across her face as she spoke. “He also threatened to blackmail me.”

“What did he have to blackmail you over?”

Her mouth twisted down in a scarlet grimace. “That’s for me to know and you to find out. Anyway, there was the business of all the money. My hard-earned bucks! He was bleeding me dry. He just wanted more and more of everything, and the more I gave him, the more he demanded. All for Marie-Claire Parfums Incorporated. He didn’t know the first goddamn thing about operating a big company like that, so he ran it right into the ground. Any time he needed cash to gamble with, he’d just go to the bank—my bank. He had some weird system of double-entry bookkeeping that nobody but him and this weasely accountant seemed to understand.”

“That’s how he ended up in prison, right?”

She laughed again and I picked up the deadly irony in its sound. “Not exactly,” she said shortly. “He got sent up because that was probably his destiny. Plus which, he had some unlooked-for assistance.”

“Mm-hm? And what was that?” I asked carefully.

“Poor Yves, he went to the slammer because that’s where he belonged. But he probably never would have done a day’s time if—certain steps hadn’t been taken to ensure this.”

I cocked an ear. “Can you be more explicit?”

She eyed me with suspicion. “Will this go in La Book?”

“How can I tell until you tell me? Come on, Claire, don’t beat around the bush, out with it. What are you talking about?”

The tip of her tongue slicked around the curves of her lips. “Well, Ma taught me never to talk ill of the dead because they can’t talk back, but Yves is another story. Don’t say you heard it here, but it’s a fact that he was railroaded into the can. I’m not kidding. There was this certain party you and I used to know who was able to arrange such things. He set up a trap and Yves walked straight into it.”

“Are you telling me he was framed?”

“Like the Mona Lisa. Did you ever hear of Frankie’s friend, Al ‘Vegas’ da Prima?” I allowed as how the name was not unfamiliar to me. “Well, Vegas and his pal Ears Satriano arranged the whole thing. They put the finger on Monsieur Yves and he got sent up. Alcatraz, just like Humphrey Bogart. Now, if he’d been a good boy, he might have got out on parole, but he was a naughty boy.”

“You’re saying he got what he deserved?”

“Look, as far as that little Frog was concerned, I could be in a cement suit by now if it wasn’t for Frankie and his pals. It was him or me, you could say.”

This was an unexpected revelation, one I doubted I could use, however. This was not the kind of stuff that movie-star autobiographies usually were made of.

“Yves was probably the biggest mistake of my whole life,” Claire went on. “Look, I’m not bitter, I’m really not, but I’m damned if I’ll go on letting everybody take advantage of my good nature. All those Hollywood putzes, those crummy bastards who think they can just shove you around and walk all over you. Nuts to the whole bunch! And double-nuts to anyone who thinks any dame who comes along is fair game, just another roundheels pushover. That’s what they decided I was, just a pushover—all you had to do was push me down and there’d be a Simmons mattress under me.”

Her lip curled and she actually seemed to spit; her teeth were bared like a cat about to pounce.

“Huh,” she expostulated, “they say I was a cast-iron bitch, with ice water in my veins. Well, maybe I was—now and then. I had to be. To get anywhere you goddamn well have to be—out there. You have to learn to give as good as you get, and, believe me, I did. They say I had balls—nobody who’d been to bed with me would ever have said that, but what the hell—and a lot of the time I clanged when I walked, I gotta admit. But only because I
had
to. It’s a man’s world, right? Anyway,” she concluded, “if Frank had some unsavory friends, well, who doesn’t, if it comes to that? But I wasn’t sorry when Bugsy got shot. I think Bugsy would have got Frank into a lot of trouble if he’d stayed alive. And by God—!”

With no warning she jumped up, grabbed my hand and dragged me across the room, flung open the door, and pulled me out onto the terrace to the parapet. We stood there, looking downtown over the park to Central Park South. She planted her feet and raised a fist and shook it at the glittering panorama of lights. “I licked you, you bastards!” she shouted. “I said I’d lick you and I goddamn well did!
Bastards
!
I licked you
! Now you can all go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut! Bless you, darlings—bless you all, my darlings.”

Laughing, crying, throwing kisses, posturing outrageously, she was tight as a tick, partly illuminated by the light from indoors, partly by the bright moonlight overhead.

“‘O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father, and refuse thy name; or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, and I’ll no longer be a Capulet.’”

Jesus, I thought, she still remembers Juliet’s lines; what a bear-trap that brain of hers was. When I remarked on her memory, she gave me that smug look and said, “Of course I remember. I’ll never forget. It’s the greatest failure of my life that I never was brave enough to get out on a stage and play fucking Juliet. What a little pisser
she
was!” Then she gave me her wistful smile, corrugated her marble forehead, and modestly dropped her head, the way you would to smell the roses, but there weren’t any roses to smell. “Shakespeare doesn’t come easily to most Americans, I guess.” I knew this for a fact, having myself had a go at the Bard and tripped on his iambic pentameter.