Authors: Thomas Tryon
“Yes, dear, of course, you’re perfectly right. Let Auntie Vi have another little talk with her….”
I left Vi prepped to leap into the breach, and later on I got a message on my machine saying Claire wanted to see me on the morrow’s eve, after rehearsals would be convenient. As I made the pilgrimage across the park, I did some heavy thinking, but nothing had really changed, and I could only reach the old conclusion: it was my responsibility to keep her satisfactorily muzzled, and to see that Maude was given no reason to spin in her grave. Truth I wanted, yes, but not at the price of blackening Maude’s or Belinda’s name. I’d stab Claire first.
The same immaculate black woman who’d admitted me the last time did so again, taking the trouble to introduce herself. “I’m Ivarene; I expect we’ll be seeing a lot of you.” Claire came in, wearing fall-down clothes: black jeans and shirt, cordovan boots, a billed cap, no makeup, no jewelry; her high-tech look. As always under such conditions, her individual features appeared overscaled, exaggerated into the newspaper caricature we knew so well. It’s a wonder Gutzon Borglum didn’t place her among the great Mount Rushmore heads; it was always that kind of face to me. Tonight, I quickly realized, she wasn’t playing star with the capital “S,” she was the Little Match Girl.
I followed her into the den, which I hadn’t seen that first day with Belinda and which she was eager to show off. It turned out to be the trophy room as well and, Jesus, did she have the trophies! Every award including Oscar was there, and an oversized golden banana made of satin sat in a corner. There was a shelf of Paddington bears as well, chairs upholstered in fake leopard or maybe ocelot, a neon sculpture, bad Victorian bric-à-brac, worse 1910 department-store pieces in golden oak, a not-old patchwork quilt on one wall, and on another a corny collection of reproduction soda-fountain mirrors with menus printed on them.
There were other notable items as well: an assortment of framed letters from famous folk through the decades, Noel Coward, Amelia Earhart, Lindbergh, Admiral Byrd, Lowell Thomas, J.F.K., Arturo Toscanini. Then she was leading me by the hand along the bedroom passageway, on whose walls was hung an awesome display of celebrity glossies, each one autographed to her.
“I call it my Memory Lane wall,” she explained as we moved along.
Next she showed me the living room, about the size of Grand Central Station, where on the piano she displayed her “special gallery.” In silver frames there were portraits of more famous folk, Alphonso of Spain, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt, even a small portrait in oils on an easel of Claire herself, which she said had been “essayed” by darling Noel when she’d visited him in Jamaica.
It was all very fascinating but not really fodder for our work, and I was anxious to get down to the job. When I asked where we would talk, she led me back along the same passageway to the library, with a fireplace and a suite of worn velvet chairs, deep and comfortable, upholstered in a rich plum color. “I bought these out of the MGM auction,” she explained. “They were made for my penthouse in
The Ladies’ Hour.
Comfy, aren’t they?”
I concurred, taking the nearest chair and setting out my equipment and a fresh cassette.
“Vi says you weren’t pleased with the tapes,” she began, assuming an attractive pose and arranging her hair in a nearby mirror. “I spill my guts out for him and he doesn’t like it. He thinks it’s too tame, too namsy-pamsy, too airy-fairy.” She laughed as if to herself. I wasn’t in on the gag.
“What’s the joke?” I inquired.
She shook her head wonderingly. “You don’t get it, do you? You just don’t get it. People simply don’t understand what it’s like to be a famous person. Did you know? Adela Rogers St. Johns called me the most famous movie icon of my generation.”
“Didn’t she like Garbo?”
Claire bolted upright and drilled me with a tigerish look. “Garbo’s different. And she hasn’t worked in forty years, she’s famous in another way. But when you come right down to it, I have the same trouble opening up as Greta does. Can you imagine ever being tired of who you are? That’s the way I think it is with Greta, that’s the way it is with me sometimes.”
I nodded, thinking how for those forty years that Garbo had been a recluse, Claire had been currying favor with the public, offering herself up as a burnt offering in the incensed rites of fame and fortune.
She lit a cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke, like Mount Saint Helens. Then she swirled the cubes in her glass, drained it, and went to the bar to fix herself another. When she returned, she picked away an imaginary fleck of tobacco from her lower lip. Raising her chin to just the right angle to take up the slack under the jaw, she contemplated the ceiling, as if thereupon she could see the scene she was about to paint for me. I clicked on my cassette recorder.
“So, you really want it, hm?” she demanded, her eyebrows arching. “The
facts
, as you call them? All the garbage? Okay, buster, you asked for it, you got it. You just check your little tape recorder there and sit back, because Momma’s going to give it to you straight, without the chaser. Straight as a die. Where’ll we start? Not at the beginning, that’s too boring; I showed you the beautiful slum I lived in as a girl. Now let’s pick it up somewhere after Frank gave me the brush-off. You heard the part about my sister and me moving to Florida ‘for my health’ after Frankie dumped me. Well, he did dump me, that much is true, but the rest isn’t, it’s all a crock. There wasn’t anything wrong with my health, I just needed to turn a buck. Plenty of bucks. The old lady was in the hospital with a goiter, so Bella and I got our asses on the Miami Express. We didn’t take berths, just seats in the chair car. Then, on the trip, we’d work the club car.”
“Work?”
“You’re getting the picture, baby. Bella and I were the make-out sisters, and, let me tell you, we made out. There’d be some butter-and-egg man with his cigar and stock-market report and we’d come in and he’d start eying us. I’d show him a little leg, he’d ask to buy us a drink, we’d get chummy, you know the bit. And believe me, little Cora Sue and her big sister did all right.”
“You mean you were hooking on the train?”
She barked a laugh. “Hooking, but with style. Strictly a class operation, no duds or hicks, only guys with a jingle in their jeans. Most of those guys were rolling in dough; they were happy to meet a couple of girls with a well-turned leg and fun ideas.”
“What did you do when you got to Miami?”
“Sometimes, if we hadn’t done too well on the run, we’d head right back for New York and then make another trip down on the next train. Or if we’d done okay, we’d meet our gents at whatever hotel they were staying at. A couple of times we got invited over to Cuba. Havana was a wild town in those days, and we’d have a ball. There’d be hotcha parties, all the champagne you could drink, the ponies would be running at the track, and we could go to the casinos any time.”
“Did you win a lot?”
“Won some, lost some, you know how it goes. Sam was one who took me to Havana. Sammy was a high roller.”
“Sam who?” I asked innocently.
“Sam Ueberroth, who the hell else?” She saw the look of disbelief on my face. “I know everybody thinks we met in Hollywood, Vi included, but it really wasn’t that way at all. We met on the Bluebird, in the club car, just like I met all the other guys. He was going to Florida for his health—I guess they were all going there for their health. Sam was all alone and we got together. He says to me, I’m a producer, movies, Hollywood, and I think to myself, Sure, Mr. Bigshot, go wax your mustache. But when he really lays it on, I start to think, Hey, baby, you got a live wire here. By the time we get down to Miami, Sam’s telling me he wants to put me in the talkies. So I sort of moved in with him, then he takes me over to Havana on this yacht some friends have, he buys me a couple of trinkets and this really elegant dress, stockings, like that, then when he’s on his way home he says I should look him up when I get back to New York.
“Hell, I wasn’t about to let this big fish off my hook, so I tell him I’m coming back to town with him. Off we go, back to New York. No sooner there than Sam slips his leash and the next thing I know he’s scrammay-vooed back to the Coast. I had to stick around town because of Ma, but Sam had given me about two hundred bucks, gratis, and he says he’s serious about putting me in the movies. You could have bowled me over with a feather.”
“So off you went? Just like that?”
“Pretty much. I caught the train out of New York and I’m in the day coach. I’m thinking, if I could just turn a couple of tricks on the way, why not try it? I mean, a train’s a train. Only this trip I’m not making out at all. I’d had this lousy cold, and I lost some weight, so maybe I wasn’t looking my best. You remember my telling you about the Boy Scouts on the train to the Coast?” She laughed. “Well, I made all that up. What it was, they were boys all right, and they were in uniform, too, but they weren’t Boy Scouts, they were U.S. marines—five of them. They were in the day coach, too, and after a while we got real friendly. We didn’t have any private compartment to fool around in, but we had the last three seats in the car and we had some blankets. The boys fixed up this sort of tent thing. You’d have never known what was going on under there unless you really looked, and, well, you can figure out that scene, I guess.”
“Could you be a little more graphic, just for the record?”
Claire got as graphic as only she could be graphic. It made a vivid picture, and it all went down on the cassette. She took another drink, paused to grind out her cigarette and light another. “What’ll we talk about now?”
“Tell me something about Sam and Viola,” I suggested.
“Oh, Sam, Sam was such a putz in those days. But he was kind of sweet, too. You know what a hound he always was for the girls. He was just sitting waiting for little Miss Claire to pull into the station and get off the train. He sent Osky Hamburg down to meet me; there was bug-eyed Osky with his jug ears and this big bouquet of wilted flowers. He drove me to my hotel and got me all set up, and that afternoon he took me to the studio. Sam was leaning out the window with this big cigar in his mouth and this leer on his face. He chucked Osky out, then he swept me up and dumped me on the couch and started unbuttoning his fly. That old leather couch must have been a hundred years old, and he really got down to business. Kept telling me how he was going to put me in his next picture and make a big star out of me.
“Of course, he didn’t mean a goddamn word of it. He’d just given me the fare out so he could keep me around to screw. What a rat. But it was through Sam that I met his sister. Vi was the charm, believe me.”
I knew that Claire’s career had got a boost from Viola Ueberroth, who’d also found Fedora on that trolley car out to the beach, but I was never aware of just how much she’d had to do with Claire’s rise in films. Apparently Vi saw something in this raw, untrained creature that she believed could be made into a valuable property. She persuaded Sam to stick her in a picture, after which she carefully observed how Claire attracted some audience interest. Her second part was that of the waitress in
Olaf Ruen
, whence came her new name.
“Whose idea was that anyway, the name?” I asked.
Claire laughed. “Mine, baby, nobody else’s. I give credit where credit is due, but believe me, that change was all my own idea. By that time I had a little apartment over on Hyperion, close to the studio. In those days the whole place was practically all orange groves and turnip fields. You could see clear to the mountains, and hardly a house in between. Sam got me the apartment; he liked having me close by so he could stop in. He also gave me a private dressing room on the lot, where he’d visit me whenever he got the urge.”
“Did Vi know what was going on?”
“Hah! That’s a hot one. Vi always knew everything that was going on. And she had the inside track with Frankie, so that helped. Vi might be my agent right then, but I knew that one day Frankie and I were going to be a team again.
“Anyway, because of Pauline—Sam’s wife, what a pill
she
was, a real pain in the ass—he used to talk about dumping her and marrying me, but I knew he was just bullshitting me. I thought, ‘Sam, never crap a crapper,’ you know? Anyway, we always kept things quiet because he was married and all, and if it had got out it would have been bad for both of us. Pretty soon I was doing four or five pictures a year and climbing up. Then I met Crispin Antrim. We’ve—um—pretty well covered that episode, haven’t we? Let’s press on.”
I asked her how things stood with Frank when she got there.
“Things stood zilch with Frank. Frankie didn’t know little Cora Sue was alive.”
“Did you try to get in touch with him?”
“Yeah, sort of. What a laugh, I thought I’d show myself and he’d come running, I’d snatch him right out from under that plump pigeon of his; but no dice. One day I ran into them at the track and he doesn’t even introduce me to her. Frankie never gave me the time of day till Sam took me over to Metro; then he’d put the Babe on ice and was hot to trot again. Trouble was, he starts in with Frances, too. Now,
she
was a big hole in the road; I mean, she had blood in her veins like the bluing Ma used for the Monday wash. But she never knew what was going on with Frank and me when he’d come by my place at five for a nice ladies’ hour before going home to the ball and chain. Frankie’s problem was, the ball and chain were twenty-four-carat gold and he was always a sucker for the bucks and the bluebook.”
“How did you feel about starting up with him again?”
“Hell—for Frankie I’d have laid my back on a bed of nails like a swami. And as for Frances, I figured if he wants that icicle in his bed, okay by me, let him.”
“You really loved Frank, did you?”
“
Ohhh
, Frank. He was my
guy
! I don’t care about all those lousy broads he had, he was
my
guy. Ohh, what a man. There was nobody like him. He was sure there the day they were giving it away—he got it
all.
Looks, brains, he had the best case of street smarts I ever saw. Nobody wore the duds like he did—he looked divine in white tie and tails, the swanky way they used to get got-up. Did you ever notice his eyelashes? They were the longest, thickest, curliest—all the girls envied them. I’d of married him in a second if he’d ever asked me. He never did, though. But that didn’t keep me from loving him. Our affair went on for a long time—nobody knew, but we stayed hot for thirty years. He’d stop by my house late, around eleven or so, and he’d start pulling my clothes off and we’d get down to business right there on the living-room rug—God, he was hot.