All That Glitters (85 page)

Had she licked them? Sure she had. Licked the whole world, if it came to that. Success, fame, it was all hers. Tomorrow, more headlines. She’d ridden the Hollywood merry-go-round, caught the brass ring which entitled her to a couple of free rides; she’d lived to see Tinseltown hit the pavement like a dead stegosaurus, while the studio that had made her turned out bubble-gum flicks and crumbled around the edges in the Culver City sun. It was a lot to think about.

Yawning, I went inside to my room. As I sat on the edge of the bed and took off my shoes, I looked out through the big window, and my eye was again attracted upwards, where a solitary star glowed more brightly than its fellows. Had that star been there earlier or had it just appeared? I couldn’t tell. I snapped off the light and lay back, keeping the star within my line of vision. It pulsed and throbbed against the dark sky, as if sending secret messages. I knew what the messages were. And as I dropped off to sleep I heard a voice, hers or mine I couldn’t tell, but it was there.

“
Bless you, darling
….” it said.

That was the end. But even dead she made big news—her picture, circa age sixty-five, was on page one of
The New York Times
, while the
Post
gave her a whole banner line:

CLAIRE IS GONE

with many pictures and a four-column obit. In the
News
, Liz Smith reviewed the forty-year career and had nice things to say. There would be no service, only a cremation and private burial.

I went. I was surprised at how few people were there, but it was out of town and probably inconvenient. Maybe she’d wanted it that way on purpose. Far from dreams of glorious Forest Lawn, she’s buried in the cemetery of a little church up in Connecticut, in the village that she’d loved when she was married to Natchez. Since then I’ve made a point of going through there once or twice to take another look at the gravesite. Once I found the local graffiti artists had been hard at work: emblazoned on the simple stone I read, in lipstick yet, “We loved you Clare.” Not so hot in the spelling department, but the sentiment was plain. I left the words to weather out; maybe they’re there still.

I felt her passing keenly, I can honestly say I did. In my mind she’d joined the others whose lives had touched me in one way or other, Babe and Dore, Frank, Frances, April, Maude, God rest her. And if Claire was where my fancy had allowed me to place her, up there in the sky, what more fitting spot?

When I went back to the Coast, Blindy was waiting. We drove up to Carmel and got married, honeymooned in San Francisco, at the St. Francis. I’d never thought about it until she mentioned the fact; we were having breakfast in bed and she turned to me to ask, “Didn’t you honeymoon here once before?”

“Sure,” I said without blinking an eye, “but that was down in seven-oh-eight and the room wasn’t on the Square.” I really had forgotten, and Belinda was much amused, only asking if I’d made a reservation for the next time.

That afternoon, when we were walking around, we went into a bookstore and a clerk asked me when the Claire Regrett book would be published. Unhappily, I had to report that it wasn’t ever coming out, and I said it with regret, forgive the pun. Despite all our labors, somehow the whole thing just didn’t pull together. There were a lot of Claires in there, maybe too many; they clashed and the story came over as spurious. I’d failed to find the heart of it, but as they say, “Heart’s hard.” I told my editor I’d do another one in its place. This is it.

You can’t write intelligently about Hollywood; it’s just writing about dreams, there’s not much flesh there, only fantasy. It’s a fantasy, even now, in this latter age of cable and MTV. But we have a VCR, you probably do, too; we put on old Claire Regrett movies and Belinda movies and Maude and Crispin movies, and Babe movies, April movies, Fedora and all the rest, their movies—we watch the screen over the tips of our toes, we seldom go out on the town. If by chance I happen to be over in Hollywood, I’ll wander in to take a look at Grauman’s forecourt. They’re all there, in cement, and I look at the names and the footprints, then I look at the faces of the people, the tourists from Keokuk and Duluth who’ve come in their Hawaiian shirts and Bemberg sheers to gawk and stare at the cement iconography. I’m not putting them down, Keokuk and Duluth, or the people, either; those folk are
interested
, they care, that’s the main thing.

They go back to Duluth with stories about the glittering stars in the sidewalks, the breath of romance under rustling palms, tales of an old real estate sign above a cactus patch where a movie blonde threw herself down in despair, of the star dust that fell from the sky in lieu of tears.

Pretty soon it’ll be the hundredth anniversary of the name Mrs. Wilcox gave the waving barley fields and orange groves that started the whole thing, and pretty soon the earthquake will come—the
BIG
one, number ten on the Richter—and the whole of California west of the San Andreas Fault will have broken off and dropped onto the Continental Shelf, leaving a jagged edge of decomposed granite, a couple of gas stations, and an army of signs warning “Slide Area.” Our Peg Enwhistle’s real estate sign will have disappeared, too:

“
My name is Hollywood
,
city of cities
:

Look on my works
,
ye Mighty, and despair
!”

Nothing beside remains
…

Maybe it really will be gone-with-the-wind time, when a hollow wind will whistle through the dead sound stages, when the desert tumbleweeds will bumble along the empty streets and the last foot of printed celluloid will have fallen to dust. Or maybe it was never real at all, maybe it was only a dream, the kind of tinsel and cellophane dream that slips away little by little, no matter how hard you try holding onto it—and you know in your heart of hearts it could never have been real.

It couldn’t have been—could it…?

Thomas Tryon (1926–1991), actor turned author, made his bestselling debut with
The Other
(1971), which spent nearly six months on the
New York Times
bestseller list and allowed him to quit acting for good; a film adaptation, with a screenplay by Tryon and directed by Robert Mulligan, appeared in 1972. Tryon wrote two more novels set in the fictional Pequot Landing of
The Other
—
Harvest Home
(1973) and
Lady
(1974).
Crowned Heads
(1976) detailed the lives of four fictional film stars and
All That Glitters
(1986) explored the dark side of the golden age of Hollywood.
Night Magic
(published posthumously in 1995) was a modern-day retelling of
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to
MCA Music Publishing
for permission to reprint an excerpt from song lyrics “Manhattan Tower” by Gordon Jenkins. Copyright 1946, 1953, © 1956 by MCA Music Publishing, a division of MCA, Inc. Copyright renewed 1973, 1981 by MCA Music Publishing, a division of MCA, Inc. Rights in the United Kingdom administered by
MCA Music, Limited.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 1986 by Thomas Tryon

Cover design by Kathleen Lynch

978-1-4804-4237-5

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com