All That Glitters (79 page)

This was a Claire I hadn’t known or even envisioned. She really rose to the occasion, displaying a brand of spunkiness I never knew she possessed. She didn’t utter a word of complaint, was sweet to the nurses, tolerant of inconvenience—the cast itched and I brought her a Chinese bamboo scratcher. She was philosophical about her plight: she didn’t want to be in the hospital, but she had no choice; she was determined to make the best of things. The presence of a famous star in Room 811 considerably energized the hospital’s routine. The nurses thrived on all the excitement, and the parade of celebrated faces in and out of 811 added to the
frisson
of glamour and show-biz spice that floor nurses love. By the time she left to go home, her cast bore thirty-seven famous signatures.

When she was safely returned to her apartment, I initiated a fairly regular series of visits, always bringing along my tape recorder so we could resume our sessions. I’d pull up the roomy, tufted Napoleon III boudoir chair and set the apparatus on the vanity bench close to the bed and push the
ON
button and she’d start talking.

Though she’d been putting on her brave show, once she was in her own bed again and enjoying the privacy of her home I was dismayed to see how quickly she reverted to type. She became tetchy and irascible, inclined to petty fault-finding and occasionally behaving so impossibly that I simply packed up and left; not even intimates such as Mrs. Conklin and Ivarene escaped her wrath: the meal tray wasn’t set right, flower petals had dropped on the bureau top, the flowers hadn’t been watered, her meat was overcooked, there was music coming from somewhere, couldn’t somebody do something to shut it up?

Hazel Conklin was in frequent attendance, sitting bedside and talking in that sweet, soft voice of hers, then slipping quietly away like a little mouse. And when Claire became agitated, forced to remain immobile because of the fracture, I could see the anxious expression creep upon her and I knew she was fretting but didn’t want anyone to know. And there now arrived an added affliction, and a serious one: insomnia, which wreaked its own havoc on her, physically and mentally. By the sheerest of coincidences, I, who lived across the park in the East Seventies, could stand in my library, where I worked, and by means of my “cityscape” telescope I could see clear across Central Park to her apartment, and I’d see that light burning. She’d taken up reading as a serious hobby and sometimes, working late myself, or coming in with Belinda from an after-theatre supper, I’d see that the light was still on. Occasionally I’d call her up. “What are you reading?” She’d tell me, with no prologue and no surprise at my call. She’d chat, I’d respond, then we’d say good night. Not one of those hour-and-a-half phone calls for which she was famous, but brief and to the point.

By now I felt I knew her well enough to tackle a crucial—and delicate—issue. One afternoon I said, “Listen, Claire, there’s one thing we’re going to have to deal with here, and we may as well get it out of the way now, rather than letting it go until later. Are you game?”

“Game? I don’t believe I know what you mean, Charles,” she answered stiffly. She’d had a few drinks that day, and when she was under the influence she invariably referred to me as “Charles”; it seemed to fit her inflated sense of dignity. “I hope you’re not going to press me. I’m not well, you know.”

“You know what I mean,” I persisted. “About the movie.”

She was off wool-gathering, staring at the ceiling. “Movie? Whatever movie do you mean?” she asked in her archduchessiest voice. “I made so many.”

“I’m talking about the monochrome movie. The one you’re supposed to have done that was shot ‘all blue.’”

“Oh. That.” Her look darkened slightly. “Claire Regrett’s alleged porn epic, you mean. All right, buster, now I see what you’re getting at, go ahead. Go ahead and ask me. No holds barred. If you think it’ll get you anywhere.”

“Well—did you make one? Or more than one? And if you did, what were the circumstances?”

Now the scowl returned to crease her brows and her lip curled. “All I’ve got to say is, fuck you for openers. That goddamn story’s been dogging me more than half my life. I’ve done some dumb things in my time, but I wasn’t ever that dumb—or that hard up for cash. There’s not a foot of film ever exposed on me that wasn’t shot on a legit Hollywood set or in my own backyard on a Kodak, and that’s the truth. If you don’t believe me, you know what you can do.”

“Sure I believe you. But you once mentioned that Yves threatened you, and yet you never told me what kind of blackmail. I thought maybe—well, was it this blue movie?”

“I told you, there
is
no movie! And if I
had
done this famous epic, do you think I’d have let my own husband look at it? Listen, buster, I’ve heard stories like that about myself since the Year One. It’s like that ridiculous story that used to go around about Shirley Temple being Kate Smith’s baby. It really makes you stop and wonder where stupid things like that ever get started. What moron makes them up? Are they just joking, and then with repetition people start believing them?” She took a handkerchief and did a thorough job of blowing her nose. “It must be this permissive age we live in,” she went on. “A girl doesn’t have to show tits and ass to get the point across. And a guy doesn’t have to flash the family jewels in the camera’s face, either. It makes me sick to see the way pictures have degenerated into filth and idiocy that no one wants to go see. Who wants to pay dollars to watch the crap these Hollywood fly-by-nights are grinding out? Those guys are robbing their own bank, believe me, and I wouldn’t walk to the corner to see a one of them.” And on and on she went—with no further word on the matter before the court.

I excused myself to go to the bathroom.

The time came when I had to go west again. Leaving Belinda in New York, I flew out to talk about writing a script. I had planned on a month’s stay, but one became two, two three, with only quick weekend junkets to be with Belinda, and it was Christmastime before I could resume New York living.

While I was gone, I’d often thought about Claire and her offer to let me off the hook, thinking how strange it was that, after all the trouble and misery she’d caused because of her book, she was now willing to forget the whole thing. From L.A. I’d kept in touch with her by phone and the occasional hastily typed letter, but even with the best of intentions, my schedule prevented me from really keeping up with her.

Belinda and I spent Christmas in Connecticut, and as soon as I came into town I called across the park to discover Madame’s current state of health, but there was no answer. No Claire, no Ivarene, no Mrs. Conklin, nobody. I pondered the problem for a moment, then dialed information and asked for the number of Hazel Conklin. When I rang her up, I received no answer. A few hours later I tried again.

“Hello?” said that pleasant voice. I gave my name. “Oh yes, of course I remember you!” she exclaimed, “I suppose you must be calling about our friend. Was there something I can do for you?”

When I said I’d been trying to raise somebody at Claire’s, Mrs. Conklin explained that Claire and Ivarene had gone to the movies. “At the Regency. A double-bill of
Wages of Sin
and
The Ladies’ Hour.
They should be back before long. I shouldn’t worry if I were you.”

I asked about the state of Claire’s health and was assured that she was doing as well as might be expected. There’d been an alarming hike in her blood sugar and a diabetic situation was developing. It was her refusal to take insulin that was causing the problem. “… but we have that more or less under control for the moment,” Mrs. Conklin ventured.

“And what is her ailment called?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“Well, as we know, her pancreas isn’t healthy; in fact, it’s badly inflamed.”

“How do you know, if she won’t have a doctor?”

“She let Dr. Sadikichi have a look. But no hospitals, no insulin. It’s the drinks, of course, all the years.”

I knew that pancreatic malfunctioning could be the sequel to heavy boozing, and when I expressed surprise that Claire was still downing the vodka, Mrs. Conklin interrupted me, saying, “Goodness, that’s right, you don’t know. She isn’t drinking anymore. She’s taken the Pledge.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “Don’t tell me she went to A.A.?”

“Nothing of the sort,” Mrs. Conklin assured me. “She simply stopped, just like that. It was like turning off a faucet. One night she said to Ivarene, ‘I quit,’ and that’s exactly what she did.”

So Claire’s bar was closed for the duration. This at least was heartening news, and I went to sit in my library, watching across the park to see when Claire and Ivarene got home. Around ten I saw the lights snap off in the library, which meant they were back. I was too tired to call, but I did phone the following day. Ivarene urged me to hurry over—Mrs. Conklin had told her I was in town. I went to make my command appearance.

She was waiting for me in the library, where, in the light of day, she looked more haggard and hollow-eyed than I’d ever seen her. I felt sorrier for her than I would have imagined possible, and I wanted to say something, do something—anything to make it easier for her. Still, she was showing pluck, and I stood in silent admiration of her quiet tenacity, the gritty discipline with which she ruled herself. She was every bit as formidable as before, yet the sound of angel wings was definitely beating in my ears, just as it must have been in hers.

I was surprised at the way so much of her former glitz and glamour had gone by the board, how much bark had peeled off that old tree, enough to make an Indian canoe. Was it possible that Our Lady of the Anecdotes had mended her ways? When I commented to Mrs. Conklin on this remarkable change, she smiled and nodded. “Yes, I know, Ivarene and I often talk about it. Claire’s problem is that she’s recently been quite overcome by her own incipient love of humanity. She’s groping with the peculiar notion that people are nice, that she herself might even be nice—and that others might even like her. What do you think of that?”

“The thing is,” I said, “she can’t imagine that she’s in the least bit related to the rest of the human race.”

Mrs. Conklin nodded sagely. “She’ll come to it. Most people do when—”

“When what, Mrs. Conklin?”

“Say ‘Hazel,’” said Ivarene, “she doesn’t like being called Missus. She means when the Angel of Death is hovering over the house.” There was a moment of silence while each of us considered the prospect that loomed before us.

Claire was at one and the same time far more independent and yet more dependent on the little “family” she’d gathered about her. That I now found myself part of such a family was surprising, yet I forwent a number of other pleasures in order to stand by. And we got back to work. By dint of keeping my seat glued to the chair, it looked as if we might actually prevail and La Book see publication at last.

“One thing I’m curious about,” I remarked one day, pursuing a gap in her story that I hoped to stitch together on the literary sewing machine. Claire was curled in her fireside chair, with the dog on his cushion at her elbow. The Mendelssohn Violin Concerto was softly playing; snow was falling outside, while a flock of birds pecked hungrily at the feed Claire had had put out for them. She looked at me from behind her glasses and smiled acknowledgment.

“When,” I asked, “did you get this feeling for religion? I mean, you were brought up in the Jewish faith. Then you were thinking of turning Catholic. When did you become a Christian Scientist? Or were you always one?”

“No, I wasn’t always. It’s only recently that I’ve been investigating it again, after God knows how long. Let me go back. Way back, I mean. It was on that train trip I told you about, my first one—when I met those five marines. Sure, that was all fun while it was going on, but afterward I started getting really depressed, thinking, Is this what’s going to happen to me, am I just going to go around taking on servicemen? I suppose, if you really sort things out, that cross-country train trip was one of the most eventful in my whole life.”

“In what way?”

“Because of this really incredible thing that happened. That’s when I really got some true religion, a feeling there really was a God. Everybody kept talking about when we’d be coming over the Rockies, there was this pass—the Donner Pass, it turned out to be, where they ate all those people, cannibals—and it had begun snowing hard outside. They wouldn’t let our train try the Pass until daytime, so we pulled into this jerkwater town where they took on coal and water, and they told us we could get off the train and go to the hotel if we liked.

“The guys said they wanted to treat me to a good meal, sort of a thank-you present. I really felt down in the dumps, but I went along to the hotel and we ate in the Moose Room—lots and lots of antlers. Anyway, there was this one couple, real squares, they’d got off the train, too; they looked like farmers—or what I thought farmers looked like—and they kept glancing over at our table, nosy as can be, and I really got a bug up my ass about them, because I thought they must know I’d been screwing these guys in the smoker. They kept on staring and I could tell they were dumping on me, saying all these lousy things about my morals. I couldn’t eat a thing.

“Later, when I was going to the john, I passed close by their table and I decided to tell them off. ‘Well, I certainly hope you lowlifes got a load of me and my friends all right,’ I said. Then I went to the john and when I came out I sat in this chair made out of steer horns, and I was thumbing through some old magazines when I saw the couple standing in the doorway, staring at me again. I really got mad, so I slammed down the magazine; then they came over and sat down near me. This geezer up and says something like, ‘Excuse me, I’m afraid we’ve been staring at you, and I’d like to tell you why.’ So he explains that his wife and he both think I’m the spitting image of their daughter, who’d drowned in this accident a long time ago. The woman—their names were Pollard, she was Annie—she comes over and shows me this photograph of the daughter. Her name was Amy, and damned if she didn’t look like me, kind of.