Getting Garbo (32 page)

“What big teeth you have,” he says as Little Red Riding Hood.

“The better to eat you with!” the Big Bad Wolf bellows.

And he yanks my leg so that I'm torn away from the ladder.

I'm floating in the air. Then I look down. That's a mistake; it's like in one of the
Tom and Jerry
cartoons when Tom walks off the cliff and he's okay until he looks down and that's when he starts to plummet. Now I'm a skydiver without a chute. Hurtling through empty space. Until I stop. With a tremendous jolt. I've landed on my back on the catwalk.

But the trip's not over. The catwalk tilts precariously from the impact and I'm sliding backward, trying to grab something before I go over the side. There's nothing. I go over. But as I do I manage to grasp one of the guide wires with my right hand. My body is dangling over the cement floor far below. My left hand claws the air in search of another handhold.

And, like Dracula swooping down for the kill, I can see him scooting down the ladder onto the catwalk. Toward me. I'm still swaying in the void, clinging to the guide wire with one hand, desperately waving the other. He's walking closer. I can't get away. Pearl White in
The Perils of Pauline.
Tied to the railroad tracks and here comes the Super Chief. He's right above me. Looking down. From where he's standing, he could kick me in the head or stomp on my fingers. Knock me loose. Finish me off. Or just stand there and watch.

Because one by one, my clenched fingers are starting to open.

“For God's sake, Roy!” I yell up at him.

Just as I lose my grip on the guide wire, his arm shoots out and grabs my left wrist. Pulls me up onto the catwalk. Gentle smile. A Roy smile. I grab hold of a post along the handrail. Hug it tight. Stare at him. “Thank you,” I whisper.

He turns around abruptly. As if someone behind him said something.

He moves off a couple of steps, his back is to me, but I can see his hands gesticulating, imploring: “Jack, I begged you not to scare her.” It's Roy's voice.

But it's Jack Havoc's voice that answers.

“Look, none of us are proud of the way this is going.”

“Then why can't we just stop?”

“Forgive and forget?” Jack Havoc tosses over his shoulder: “Can you do that, Reva?”

“I—don't know.”

“See, Roy, there's an honest kid. She doesn't know.”

He turns to me and it's Roy's face again.

“Reva, say you'll never tell a soul, promise him!”

Before I can answer, the wild Jack Havoc gleam comes back into his eyes. “Sorry, Roy, I can't live with the uncertainty.”

He lunges for me, but he stumbles—it's as if someone deliberately tripped him. He tries to regain his balance, but he can't. He plunges headlong over the handrail, giving the catwalk another terrible shake. I hear him scream as he falls, but I cling to the post during the crazy swaying. Then I hear a sickening thud down below and the screaming stops. When I look over the side, I see his shattered body in the center of the penthouse set. Jack's come home. His arms and legs are twisted and contorted. Like a broken doll's.

“Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

How I wonder what you are…”

—Ann Taylor

It's late winter here in Woodland Hills, but there's sunshine almost every day. We're located in the Valley, off the 101 Freeway, a bit this side of the Ventura county line. The worst of the L.A. rains are usually over by mid-March, and through my window I can see the new foliage sprouting again as lush as the hills of Wales (
How Green Was My Valley
was shot nearby on the Fox Ranch) or the greenery of Sherwood Forest (Errol Flynn made
Robin Hood
just down the road). But Lake Sherwood is now Westlake Village, a major suburban residential community. And Woodland Hills is known, if at all, as the site of the Motion Picture Country Home.

The place where I live.

Look around. Pretty nice, huh? Like an elegant condominium country club. Emerald lawns. Immaculately tended putting greens. Tennis, shuffleboard, a huge swimming pool and spa. Private cottages. Mary Astor, one of the sex queens of the '30s, used to ride a big-wheeled tricycle along the sloping pathways, and I'd sit on my porch and watch her still-gorgeous ass as she rolled by, pumping those pedals. She's gone now. We have our own private theater. The major studios show us many of the new flicks and, of course, we run a lot of oldies. There's a recreation hall, our own hospital, state of the art, let me tell you, and a restaurant—since everyone here had something to do with the Business, we call it the Commissary. Big, cheerful place with food they say is as tasty as Spago. We provide our own dinner entertainment sometimes. Johnny Weissmuller, still living in the past, used to enjoy stripping off his shirt, climbing up on his table, thumping his chest and giving his patented
Tarzan
yodel until the male nurses schlepped him down. He's gone now. It's been quiet lately.

I used to have a fair number of visitors. Bogie and Betty came around in the beginning, but he's gone now, and Betty moved back to New York. Nate Scanlon was a regular every Sunday. He played golf in Calabasas, and he'd drop by afterward. Until Nate had a stroke on the golf course and wound up in the cottage down the row from mine. He's gone now. Merle Heifetz, my P.R. friend from Warners, was good for five, six visits a year. Until he retired and moved to Rancho Santa Fe, but I still get Christmas cards from him.

Kim? Well, she came once, took a good look at me, and said, “Sorry, honey, I can't cut it,” and that was the last of her. Jack Warner used to drive out now and then to donate a new building, and he'd always stop by for a few minutes. He's gone now. Arzy Marshak was a regular for a long time. “You sly sonuvabitch,” he'd say to me with a shit-eating grin, “you got away with it, didn't you?” Arzy's gone now, too, not
gone,
just pulled the pin and went to live in Colorado. Last time I heard from him he was the Sheriff of Ouray County. Ride 'em cowboy!

Who does that leave? You got it. Reva. Ever-ready, ever-steady, ever-lovin' Reva. Guess I ought to fill you in on the gory details. Some of this I can only give you secondhand because I was out of things for a while. But that night, when they scraped me off the sound stage floor—yeah, I can joke about it now—I was in no condition to answer questions. So it was up to Reva to carry the conversational ball. She told the cops what happened. I read about it later in back copies of the
L.A. Times.

She told them how, because she was president of my fan club, I had stopped by her apartment to offer her a job. When she accepted we drove out to the studio to pick up some files. While we were visiting the set, I showed her around. We climbed up the ladder to the catwalk to get a scenic bird's-eye view of the place. She said she tripped and fell off and I leaned over, at great risk to my own life, to save her, which I did, but in the process I lost my own balance and plunged to the ground. She made me sound like a hero, and with that tear-stained, innocent-looking face, who wouldn't believe her?

Certainly not the police or the public. I became a terrific running story, everyone hanging on the daily bulletins from City of Hope Hospital. ROY DARNELL STILL ON CRITICAL LIST. HERO ACTOR'S CONDITION IMPROVING. MORE SURGERY SCHEDULED FOR ROY. MAYOR VISITS HOSPITAL, PRESENTS ROY DARNELL WITH CITIZEN'S MEDAL OF VALOR FOR SAVING LIFE OF YOUNG FAN. AFTER SUCCESSFUL MULTIPLE SURGERIES, ROY DARNELL TRANSFERRED TO MOTION PICTURE COUNTRY HOME.

A success story, that's me.

The wonder is that with all the damage my body sustained, and let me tell you, that'd fill a medical textbook, my face was unmarked. It was the way I hit the ground. Probably actor's instinct. Your face is your fortune. Protect it at all costs.

At first I was a hot item at the Country Home. A celebrity among celebrities. The prettiest staff and permanent residents would fuss over me, vying for the privilege of pushing my chair. But you know how it is, new faces arrive and they get all the attention. After a while I was just another guy around here. Not that I'm neglected; I get all the care and feeding I can handle. Although about eating, there's a fluky thing. As a result of the fall, I lost my sense of taste. For food, that is. Something got knocked loose, I guess, but I'm still a good judge of women and movies. And though people don't talk to me much anymore, I still get a kick out of listening to all the industry gossip. We've got retired script supervisors, makeup and wardrobe people, camera crew veterans, as well as actors, writers, producers, and directors. The average age is somewhere between sixty-five and death—that's a local joke.

For a while after I came here I still wasn't doing very well physically. Then things leveled off, and I've been on this kind of plateau ever since. Don't get better, don't get worse. I went through a period of deep depression until I came to terms with it. I mean, I wanted to die. Fortunately—or unfortunately—I wasn't in a position to do anything about it. Then I became resigned, I guess that's the word, resigned to my situation.

Not that it hasn't been interesting, hanging around like this. If I'd died back then I would've missed a lot. The moon landing. The Kennedy Years. The Beatles. The Flower Generation. The Vietnam War. Watergate. My Lai. The rise of feminism. The fall of Communism. Hard to believe that Ronnie Reagan, who I used to beat regularly at tennis, became President. Or that Frank Sinatra's gone. Or Princess Grace and Princess Di. Or that the World Trade Center towers are gone. Or that movie stars are being paid more than twenty million dollars a picture now. I really missed that boat. But I made it through into the new millennium.

Anyway. Back to Reva. She's here every weekend, bless her, like clockwork. Goes wheeling around the campus with me, gabbing away even though I never answer. Recently she did an absolutely fantastic thing. She waged a letter campaign, getting friends of hers all over the country to mail in requests to the Nickelodeon cable channel, asking Nick At Nite to rerun the original episodes of
Jack Havoc.
It worked!

Now Reva drives out here for an extra visit every time the show is on and proudly pushes me into the rec hall where the whole crowd watches on the big screen TV and cheers. It feels good. I've been here so long that most of the people didn't know who or what I was. Even the cute young nurses ooh and aah over Jack Havoc. Last night one of them said, “You were definitely a stud muffin, honey,” and kissed me on the cheek.

While we're on the subject of Jack Havoc.

He's gone now.

Guess he died in the fall.

At least he's never been inside my head since then.

Although I'm a living testimonial to the skills and persistence of modern medicine, and I'm generally sedated enough so that I don't feel much pain, I am nevertheless what most people would describe as a vegetable. I'm a quadriplegic in a wheelchair who can't walk, speak, stand, or otherwise care for myself. The Man of a Thousand Voices reduced to none. The only things I can do unassisted are swallow, breathe, listen, and think. Oh yeah, I can also blink my eyes. Good for a yes/no exchange, but hard to hold a real discussion. The only good thing is I don't ever get migraines anymore.

Somebody once told me that no one who comes to L.A. ever leaves. Like all those who pursue the Hollywood Dream, I discovered that the thing you think you have been promised isn't necessarily what you get. It's Bogie's joke.
Pincus fuctus.
But I survived. Don't ask me why. Maybe it's my punishment.

I got life.

When I was a little kid living in Brooklyn I went to the Biltmore Theater one Saturday and saw Danny Kaye in
The Kid From Brooklyn.
In a lot of ways I still feel like that little kid, but last week I had to decide whether to take early retirement on my social security pension. I decided to keep on working three more years until I'm sixty-five.

Remember that job I applied for as a messenger at Twentieth Century Fox? Well, they hired me, and I've been there ever since. I'm a department head now, in charge of scheduling all the set construction crews, both features and TV. The salary is good and the perks are great, medical coverage and a 401K pension, plus weekly screenings on the lot. Also, I manage to finagle tickets to the premieres and publicity parties for our jumbo epics. Occasionally I see a familiar face among the fans at the premieres. When they see me, the few that remember me start to shout from the bleachers, “Revahhh, Revaahhh!” And the others who never knew me join in anyway, because I'm told I'm something of a legend among the collectors.

I still look more or less the same, still wearing my hair in a pageboy. I dress better, like a grownup business person. If you get close enough you can see the years, but at a glance from a distance, I look pretty good. Pert. Not pretty. I only looked pretty that one time for that one moment when he made me look in the mirror. But, as the kids say, that was then and this is now.

Mother died in 1967 of cirrhosis of the liver. I'd moved out and gotten my own apartment long before. I'm still in that same apartment, off of Overland near Pico, close to the studio. I drive a fifteen-year-old Mercedes two-seater, the kind Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney used to scoot around Europe in
Two For The Road,
a Fox picture, incidentally. I bought the car used from one of the studio production managers and have babied it ever since. I take good care of my things. I never got married. Just too busy, I guess.

I don't have many friends. A few from Fox, plus Podolsky, of course. Don't have time for more. I work long hours, and there's always so much to do for Roy after work. Shopping, planning, keeping up. Underwear and socks wear out, there are birthday presents, Christmas presents, April Fools' Day presents, Easter presents, Fourth of July presents, and Thanksgiving Day presents to search for. I always try to be a bit offbeat and original, and he appreciates the effort. The Country Home does a terrific job providing the basics, but he deserves some of the frills, too, after all he's been through.

So, for instance, I buy him a yearly subscription to
Daily Variety,
and I tip one of the nurses extra to set the trade paper up for him each morning on a special reading board and turn the pages every few minutes. Then when he's done, the trades are donated to the other residents, which doesn't hurt Roy's popularity around there. Tell the truth, though, he's not very popular. No one's mean to him, they just don't pay any attention to him. Because he can't respond, people tend to assume he can't understand. But he can. He understands everything that's going on. And that's where I try to help out.

Since Nick At Nite started rerunning the
Jack Havoc
shows, fan mail has begun to arrive again. I've had a supply of 8x10 glossies made up and I sign them. No problem. I know that signature as well as my own. Podolsky says I could have a stamp made, but this way it's more personal. “To Debbie, with best wishes from Roy Darnell.”

You're probably asking yourself how I came to terms with what happened between us on that night. When the cops and the press first talked to me, protecting his reputation was an automatic reaction. I never liked anyone speaking badly of him, all that Roy the Bad Boy stuff. But inside myself I was totally confused. I never told anyone else what really happened that night, not even Podolsky. It's our secret. Roy's and mine. He had tried to murder me. But he had also saved my life. Both things were true. It was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I did a lot of reading about split personalities, and he came up like a poster boy for schizoid behavior. I blame Addie for addling his mind—the first time I said that to him, he laughed, well, he can't move those facial muscles, but I could see in his eyes that he thought it was funny—but he
was
addled by Addie's treatment of him. Off his nut. But he came back that night. And he's been okay ever since. I can see that in his eyes, too.

I drive out there every Saturday and Sunday. He's always sitting in his wheelchair, looking toward the parking lot for the first glimpse of me. When we're together, I talk to him incessantly and probably inanely. He seems to like it. The first time I came to visit I brought flowers. I could see his surprise that I'd come at all. That was the day we worked out the wigwag system with blinks for yes and no and even for spelling out a few words. He looked at the big bouquet of flowers and then blinked out: a-m-i-d-e-a-d? I laughed and I could see the flicker of pleasure in his eyes.

Remember the ending of that old tearjerker
An Affair To Remember?
When Cary Grant finds out that the reason Deborah Kerr didn't meet him on top of the Empire State Building was because she had become a cripple? I always wondered what happened after that. I found out. They lived happily ever after. Well, anyway, they did the best they could.

We have our little rituals. I always give him a shave when I come out. They do it on the other days, of course, but he likes the way I do it best. And I cut his hair. Just recently, when I suggested doing the part on the other side, he was nervous, but I persuaded him to let me try it and it turned out great. I've been leaving his hair a little thicker and longer on the crown because it's sparse back there. I haven't told him, why make him worry about getting bald? It may seem silly to worry about appearances, I know that other people just see him as this basket case propped up in a wheelchair. But to me, he's still the shaggy-haired guy who walked out onto the stage of the
Let's Pretend
theater in a black windbreaker and wrinkled pants and work boots. I thought he was a stagehand. I didn't realize he was Prince Charming.

That's what I miss the most. The sound of his voice. But it's not gone. When I concentrate, I can still hear it in my head. I found out the same thing about my autograph books. They're not gone, either. I can still turn the pages of the ones that were burned, using my mind like a Rolodex.

Podolsky wound up working for the Motion Picture Academy Library. Whatever researchers are looking for, he knows where to find it. He's been thanked in the dedication section of so many books about the movies. Podolsky is still a collector, but now he collects videotapes and DVDs by the hundreds. He says he realized that when he was going after autographs, what he really wanted to have was the movies themselves. And with modern technology, now he can.

It was different with me.

So what is the significance of this autograph thing, after all? I've thought about that a lot. Guess it's a kind of proof that you actually saw these great people. Proof to who? Well, that's a little harder to say. Maybe just proof to ourselves that we really exist and we really matter, too, even if it's only through flashes of reflected glory. We wanted so much to be part of that beautiful, exciting, romantic world we saw up on the screen.

I know I tend to see reality in terms of the movies and that's limited and I guess immature. But things worked out so much better than I could have ever dreamed. In fact, I told Podolsky recently that my life turned out to be even better than a movie. I really meant it. And that's the ultimate thing I could have wished for. So maybe I never got Garbo, but there's more to life than that.

I got Roy.