All That Glitters (81 page)

“After they were finished on whichever their movie was, they went back to their cubicle to wait for the next one. And while they were waiting they could all mingle together and get to know each other, they could dance and kiss and make love—there was even this big pool in the tent so they could wear their bathing suits and go swimming. It was the most glamorous thing in the world. It used to make me so happy to think of living in that white tent.

“Then, when they got old and were dying, somebody came and took them away to this place out in back of the tent and dumped them on this big trash heap that was there, and then when nobody was looking, they’d put out their hands and float away. They’d be carried back up into the heavens and there the star that had dimmed before would brighten again. And the stars would stay bright forever and all the people who were still alive on earth would look up and remember them….”

She trailed off, then darted me a sheepish little smile and drew the covers over her face. Lowering them again, she asked, “Isn’t that silly? I was only seven or eight, but it’s funny how I always remembered it.”

“You must have wanted it a lot. To be a star.”

“You have to, you know. I never wanted anything so much in my life. I really couldn’t believe it would happen, but I kept hearing this little voice somewhere….” She was quiet for a moment and I had to prompt.

“What did it say, this voice?”

“I’m not sure, but something like ‘Do it, Cora Sue, do it, you can do it, and don’t worry, everything will be all right.’”

“And so you did it.”

“Yes. I did it.”

“Have you always heard that voice? Do you still?”

“Not always. It stopped. One day I suddenly realized I wasn’t hearing it anymore. It had left me. But you know, the wonderful thing—I got them both back, my faith and my voice, too. Yes, I can hear it these days. Not very loud, but I can hear it.”

“What does it say now?”

“Same thing. Everything’s going to be all right.”

“Good. You keep listening, it knows what it’s talking about.”

She smiled again; her lids drooped, closed; I tiptoed out. In the passageway I came across Mrs. Conklin taking off her coat.

“How is she?” she asked.

“She’s all right. Just corked off.”

She walked me to the door. “Sometime get her to tell you about the big circus tent,” I said as I rang for the elevator.

“You mean where all the movie stars live? Goodness, I know all about that tent. She’s told us all a hundred times. Good night, now, sweet dreams.”

I buzzed for the elevator, and when it came, the operator apologetically handed me a sheaf of badly soiled glossies, speculating as to how they’d blown off the terrace. The doorman had collected them out on the street; there were others blowing all over Central Park West, and should he send the porter to gather them up? No, I said, it wasn’t necessary. There were plenty more where those came from.

Leaving the building, I could see the photographs scattered everywhere, face-side up and down, caught, like pamphlets after a parade, in the street gutters and in the branches of the trees. Those smiling red lips, those big brown eyes… S-T-A-R.

April Fool. I ask myself again, will there ever be a book? I cry on the shoulder of Miss U, who got me into this mess to begin with. “Don’t worry, dear,” Vi says, “you need a rest, then you can get back on it. Sweetie, you don’t know what you’ve missed!” (Ah, do I not? Viola reports that Claire invited her friends—Viola, the Sadikichis from downstairs, the Steins from upstairs—and read them a chapter or two—or ten or fifteen. That must have been quite an evening; happily, Belinda and I were in the country eating our curds and whey.) The thing’s a “treat,” Vi says.
Loved
the part about the catfight in Loper’s dress salon. Only this time Claire’s the winner and all-time champion, not Angie. So much for truth.

My screenplay’s done, the film’s in pre-production. I’m outlining another book;
not
biographical. On Saturdays and Sundays Belinda’s leaving hobnail prints all over the golf course. I chop wood and get muscles—a few small ones. Spring’s around the corner; the weeping willows are greening, always the first to show a leaf. The country’s fine, calm and placid; too placid. I hanker for the bright lights. I miss them. Woody Allen doesn’t have the only patent on The Big Apple. Sometimes I think of “Manhattan Tower,” that forty-year-old chestnut concocted by Gordon Jenkins and recorded on Capitol Records, that rousing paean to big-town highlife in a Manhattan highrise:

No-ah
,
oh-oh No-ah
,

Get out the glasses
,
get out the ice
,

’Cause we’re havin’ a party

And the people are nice.

Like the guy in the song I’m lured back, always back, to my Manhattan tower, my piece of real estate that’s part of the Big Apple skyline. It seems to me the lights shining from my penthouse windows are part of the whole picture. If I’m not around to turn them on, people could be missing those lights.

So much for trips abroad, trips to California, trips anywhere. I’m back.

The first familiar face I stumble across in the street is herself, Viola Ueberroth. She seems glad to see me. Why aren’t you in L.A., I ask? Why aren’t
you
? she counters. We abandon Bonwit’s for the Four Seasons and a pow-wow. There’s lots to palaver about. With Vi there always is.

Since lunch was her idea—I really haven’t time for lunch today—I order well and expensively and will enjoy seeing her pick up the check. I seem to recall another lunch, right over there by the fountain, a lunch for which I am still owed. Vi is occasionally neglectful, especially in money matters.

Over my steak tartare a host of names was arrayed before me. It seems sometimes that the whole world of show business in all its ramifications grows out of Vi Ueberroth’s personal and private knowledge of that world, which she seemed to have hiked onto her shoulders like a female Atlas. From the pink stucco villas of the Springs of Palm to the walnut-boiseried offices of Beverly Hills to the storied penthouses of Manhattan, Vi knew what film projects had been given their start dates, which wives were dumping their husbands and taking which Impressionists with them, which husbands were screwing their secretaries or the stars of the movies that had got their start dates, if Burt Reynolds was at present bankable, what was to become of Robert Evans, and if the holograph was going to make it as the latest entertainment wrinkle. Ah, sweet Viola, my love, while you live, Louella Parsons is not dead.

She saved the best—or worst—for last. It was over the chocolate mousse cake that there fell from her lips the fatal name of Claire Regrett.

“Yes?” I said, sitting up brightly, paying attention. “I was just about to ask.”

Viola drooped her lids and wagged a solemn head at me. “Oh dear, you’ve no idea what I’ve been through with that poor creature. It’s so sad, really,
terribly
sad. You’d scarcely know her, she’s changed so much.”

“Changed how?”

“She’s
très malade,
dear. Between you and me, this must be the end.”

Right away I started feeling guilty. “Is she seeing a doctor?”

“You
know
she won’t have a doctor. It’s against her religion.”

“Do you see her?”

Vi nodded. “Much as it distresses me. It’s all I can do to go up there, honestly. She’s like a gothic movie. She slops around that penthouse with no one but that poor Ivarene to look out for things. And,
dear
, you can’t imagine the scene I witnessed last week. Up I went, and what do you think? When I came in, I glanced through to the living room and I saw this character sitting in this wheelchair, staring out the window. He was wearing dark glasses, and hadn’t the faintest idea who he was. Can you guess? Of course you can’t. It was Natchez, dear. Natchez Calhoun. He had a beard and his hair had all gone stark white. He could have been Santa Claus, dear.”

“What was he doing there?”

“Well, when I pressed Claire for details, she confided that he’d recently been released from a hospital down in Virginia. He was stony, he’d lost all his money and was now nearly destitute. The poor man was living over there on West End Avenue with some relative, and once every couple of weeks she invited him to the apartment and cooked dinner for him. The place positively reeked of liver and onions.

“‘Natchez is seeking his peace with God. I’m trying to help him,’ she told me. ‘He likes me to read from the Book of Common Prayer. He likes
Peanuts
, too. We’ve really become quite good friends again.’ Now,
what
do you think of
that
, dear?”

I subsequently discovered that Claire wasn’t merely cooking for her ex-husband but was shelling out to the relative for his upkeep, as well as paying a share of his medical expenses. This news struck me profoundly; it was so unlike Claire, that old Claire, Miss Clutch. But, then, I decided, it was quite in keeping with the new one.

I rang her up, then went to see her and was shocked by her appearance. I don’t know what I’d expected, but not this, this little old lady with a dowager’s hump, splotched skin, her hair piled up like a washerwoman’s. She resembled nothing so much as a shrunken doll in the old drip-dry housecoat she’d put on.

The plain fact was, Vi was right—she was dying. She should have been in a doctor’s care, certainly; but there wasn’t a chance of that, she still wasn’t seeing any doctors. She was determined to rely only on her faith and the dictates of Mary Baker Eddy. Hazel Conklin had pleaded with her to check into a Christian Science nursing home where she could have proper care, but Claire was having none of that. She intended staying in that apartment until they had to carry her out on a door.

As the springtime waxed, I was making frequent pilgrimages across the park to Claire’s. My main worry was my quandary about the book. It seemed to me a lost cause, impossible to finish, though she and I both maintained the fiction that it would one day see the light of day. But each of us realized that this was an unlikelihood, that the spotty assortment of pages hardly constituted a book and could be regarded only as a by-fits-and-starts account of a life without shape or form, rhyme or reason, a life that had gone into limbo and now would never be pegged or nailed down. These days she was more reclusive than ever. She saw the Sadikichis, trading dinners, and the Steins, joining them for a “musical evening.” Few others got past the doorman. She’d changed her telephone number and given the new one to only a chosen few, me among them, but I seldom made use of it. “Why don’t you ever call?” she’d say. “That’s why I gave you my number, so you could get me, but you never do.” She knew that telephoning as a pastime was not my thing, I generally avoided the instrument like the plague, but this hardly served as an excuse where she was concerned. So to please her I’d ring up when I was having a soak in the tub or at some other reasonably convenient time. The trouble was, once you had her on the line you couldn’t get her off, and I perceived that the telephonic connection between us was a kind of lifeline, that I couldn’t just cut her off short or say there was somebody at the door. And so I disciplined myself to undergo these “little chats” and actually got to the point where I enjoyed them. She could be very funny sometimes, and somehow these days her tongue didn’t seem to be as acid as before; in fact she made me laugh a lot. And as she talked and as I listened, the more I came to realize that something was working changes in her. At age seventy-one, Claire Regrett had mellowed out. All her sharp edges seemed to have been sanded off and nicely rounded, the hard ceramic aspects of her softened to the clay they had been fired from. Her touch was light, that sharp, garish quality evaporated, her rigidity become malleable; something innocent, even childlike showed itself in both word and action. Claire sweet? It’s true, she was.

The thing that struck me the most was the sense of inner peace she’d achieved, the feeling that she had reached the end of a long and difficult journey, and that with the end in sight she could easily afford to let the world go by. Even the timbre of her voice had altered now; it was feebler, yes, but also softer, warmer, as though nothing in the world could ever persuade her again to raise it for any reason. Her spirit had become tranquil, and if she was living on borrowed time, she had no wish to go dashing around trying to make the most of every last hour left her. Rather, she had shifted her gears into
LO
. She treasured her solitude, listening to music that pleased her, reading books, visiting with a few close friends, talking about cooking, flower-gardening, clothes, needlework.

In my heart I felt shamed. I recalled word for word that ugly scene when she’d hectored me about my not liking her, and I’d jumped all over her. Or the time she drove me over to Brooklyn; I ought then to have seen what was real as well as what was not.

There was also the business of her will. Whatever she left would be divided equally between Mrs. Conklin and Ivarene Hawkins, the rest to go to the favored charities as specified in the will. I couldn’t help thinking that if she’d died ten years earlier, all that money would have gone toward building herself a pyramid! With a good view of the river.

So a far better Claire, but still no book. “How’s it coming?” my friends ask, and when I give them That Look they pat my back and say, “We know.” Fuck they do. By now you’d think Claire had ground out every last morsel of information, every tidbit of gossip any book could hold; but no. It’s still only a collection of assorted anecdotes. Meanwhile, I grasp at straws.

“Tell me one thing. If you can,” I ask one day, seeking an end to the torture.

“I can’t, don’t ask,” she says. She’s as weary of it all as I am.

“Sure, I know, but try.”

“Go on, then.”

“What was it like? What was it really, really like? The essence of the whole thing. Being a Hollywood star?”

“There isn’t any essence. Making movies hasn’t an essence—except when they stink, then they have
lots
of essence.”

“Can you boil it down for me, the total experience? Isn’t there one nugget, something you really feel about it? For example, Barbara Stanwyck once said it was like living between the pages of
Modern Screen
.”