All That Glitters (76 page)

“Listen, Charlie, let me tell you something, screw the iambic pentameter, know what I mean? Who needs it? Not me. I’m a star. You understand that word. I may not have been a lot of things, I may have come from shit, but I’m a
star
! Not too many of those around these days. I don’t mean these piddling little quacks and creeps today, I mean the old-time, old-style STAR. Five-pointed and it makes a gorgeous light. That’s the prettiest and the greatest four-letter word in the English language, get me?”

I decided to play with her. “What about l-o-v-e? It has four letters, it’s a pretty word.”

“Oh
yeah
? Let me tell you something about l-o-v-e. It’s nice, but, believe me, it doesn’t hold up. Maybe they should have given it more letters or something, but when you come down to it, s-t-a-r is more important and it lasts longer. They don’t put your name up there in lights for being in love. I’ll take the star every time.”

“Why not love?”

“I couldn’t make it work, you know? I was always looking for Mr. Right, only I was always Miss Wrong. Who can figure?”

“Did you think Skylar was Mr. Right?”

“Bet your ass. Or I’d never have married. And I never should have. What a b—” She closed her lips and shook her head as if shutting out the memory, but I wanted her to go on.

“I remember the pictures of the wedding,” I prompted to get her started. “In Vi’s garden, wasn’t it? The rose arbor?”

The look she gave me was clabbered milk. “Pretty Jesus, do we have to talk about that?” She blew out smoke and took a sip of her drink. “I suppose we do. Okay, baby, crank up the Victrola and Momma will play the record. Only I warn you in advance, the record’s cracked.”

We “repaired” (her word) to the library, her
sanctum sanctorum
, and as she plunked down she tossed a look toward the bar and, taking my cue, I went and poured her a vodka over ice, then joined her. It was half-past twelve, well past my witching hour, but I felt I was on the trail of something here and I really pressed. In seconds I had my recorder ready for more of Madame’s deathless words. She handed me the generally accepted rundown on the gent in question, Skylar J. D. McCord III. Of course I already knew the oft-told story of how they’d met at a dinner party at Merle Oberon’s house, and how in the space of four hours he’d swept Claire off her feet. Skylar was the scion of a wealthy department-store family in town, and he had a long history of playboy wildness. Due to a polo injury (he’d got his skull cracked by a mallet and wore a steel plate in his head), during the war years he was 4-F and available, and any girl’s bait. Besides being a super polo player, he was also a tennis ace of considerable merit, as well as a trophy-winning golfer. He could usually be seen tooling around town in a lowslung convertible with balloon tires, wide sidewalls, white leather upholstery, and a robin’s-egg-blue paint job. He combed his hair with a center part the way Scott Fitzgerald used to, and had been the figurative if not the literal death of many a Los Angeles lovely. His pals referred to him as “The Cherry Picker.”

He asked Claire to marry him and she said, Sure, why not? Since her wedding to Perry had been an elopement, this time she insisted on doing it up big with a full-blown ceremony and reception. Vi helped her arrange things, even to planning her wedding dress, which was designed by Edith Head herself.

There was lots more cutesie fan-mag stuff, pictures of the two sweethearts peeking through big hearts of paper carnations, cuddling under furs in a box at the Hollywood Bowl, and like that. This was one of Claire’s avowed domestic periods; she was always being photographed in ruffles and dirndls and platform wedgies, or in a gingham apron, rolling out a pie crust for the magazines. They talked a lot about how many babies she and Sky were going to have, and she was keeping one of the bedrooms in reserve to make over into a nursery. You never saw candids of her anymore unless Sky was included, flashing that big Hardy Boy grin as he hugged her or sat her on his lap.

When she did a USO stint and visited the troops, there was Sky right at her side. She’d get him up onstage and he’d crack his corny jokes, but the boys ate it up. He did it that night in San Diego, on the deck of the aircraft carrier, when I’d been lucky enough to get a ticket for the show and I danced the Lindy with Claire. After that I went back to sea, and during that time I read that she’d had a miscarriage and she and Sky had separated. Shortly thereafter she put on a big hat and went to court in Santa Monica to get her divorce, and was quoted as saying, “We’ll always be friends.”

“Yeah, friends,” Claire growled. “With friends like him, who needs enemies?” She sprang up and went to the mirror over the bar and began inspecting her face as if to be sure she had remembered to put it on. The pause stretched out, to say the least, as she began stalking about the room like a tigress. I shut off the recorder and waited. She looked over at me as though making up her mind about something, then she strode back to her chair and flung herself into the seat.

“We can talk about something else, if you want,” I suggested tactfully, seeing how upset she was.

“What the hell, we may as well get the bastard out of the way. It still makes me sick every time I think of him. I grew to hate him so.”

“
Not
friends?” I ventured tactfully.

“You catch on fast, baby. Definitely not friends. I despised him then and I hate him now—no, take it back, take it back—I won’t let myself hate anyone. I believe some Divine Power meant him to come into my life at that time, though I’m damned if I know why. Anyway—” She drew a deep breath and held it for a couple of beats, then expelled it and recrossed her legs; “Today I guess it probably doesn’t seem like much, considering all the medicine and drugs they have to cure things, but at the time, back in the forties, it was a big deal. People just didn’t get things like that, not public figures like me, not movie stars anyway.”

“What things?”

She widened her eyes at me, then dropped the bomb. “Things like syphilis.”

I stared in astonishment. “Skylar McCord gave you syphilis?”

“You’re goddamned right he did! Here was dear old Claire trying to make like the best little wife in the world, playing Betty Crocker, cooking his dinner, working my butt off to keep him happy and occupied, and he goes out and gets a big dose of boom-chick-a-boom-chick from this Mexican broad he met at the fights—at
the fights
, mind you! And he comes home and passes it on to me.”

This was astonishing; I’d never had a hint of this, not from Vi, not from anyone. How had it been kept hushed up all these years?

“What did you do?” I managed.

“What would you have done—what would anybody have done? I went to my doctor; he did the test and it came out positive. It was the only time in my life I ever failed. I was thinking of ways to do myself in. I couldn’t bear the shame. I kept seeing the headlines: ‘Claire Regrett Dies of the Clap.’ Oh, I tell you, it was all so sordid. He almost ruined me. I’m not kidding—after all my work, after I was finally getting someplace, that big collegiate fucker almost finished me off! I kicked him out that night, and next day I had all the locks changed. I wasn’t going to have that diseased leper back in my house, not if he had to sleep in the streets.”

“What did he say?”

“Said he was sorry, didn’t know how it ever happened, he’d been faithful, never played around—maybe he’d caught it off a toilet seat! What a laugh that was. I said, ‘Look, schmuck, we’re not talking crabs here, we’re talking major major.’ He tried talking me out of it, said he’d never do it again—can you imagine him doing it
again
? He even gave me an expensive piece of jewelry—it’s the only time in my life I sent back a diamond bracelet. I was doing
Wages of Sin
and couldn’t leave town; otherwise I’d have got out of there quick. I began to lose weight, the director was worried, the cameraman said he couldn’t shoot me, I looked so awful. Finally they shut down and gave me a couple of weeks off. Catch syphilis and they give you ten days in Borrego Springs.”

She suppressed a sigh and stared somewhere into space. Her revelation explained a number of things to me—the weird behavior she’d exhibited at the time, refusing to see anyone, going into seclusion, and then turning down the next important role that had come of her winning the Oscar that year. This had been regarded as especially peculiar behavior for her, since getting better parts had been the reason behind her leaving MGM in the first place.

“But I really stuck it to Skylar,” she went on. “I sicked Jerry Geisler on him. Jerry’d got Errol Flynn off on his rape charge, and he held Sky up for a million and a half bucks in the settlement. But even after I’d washed him out of my life I still felt dirty, y’know? I had the whole house painted, inside and out, and anything he’d left around I stuck in the trash.”

She fell silent. I stared at her, then away, feeling a sudden wave of embarrassment. Secret Memoirs of a Screen Queen: “And then I got the syph.” These were the confidences the book would thrive on, and it all ought to go in, but I really felt bad for her. She was right: syphilis in the early forties wasn’t syphilis in the eighties. Those were the pre-penicillin days, and the sulfa drugs just didn’t do it.

While I reflected on this and turned over the cassette, I heard her sob; then she began to shake all over. The blood drained from her face, her eyes enlarged, and her breath came in spurts. Certain she was hyperventilating, I started for the house intercom to call a doctor.

“No, damn it! No doctor! No doctor!” she hollered, struggling up from the sofa.

“But you’re ill!”

“
No doctor
!” she ground out between clenched teeth. “Call——” She gave me a number. “Ask for Mrs. Conklin.”

I dialed the number and spoke with the practitioner I’d met in the hospital. “It’s all right,” she said calmly, “just say I’m on my way.”

I hung up and tried to make Claire comfortable until the buzzer rang and the doorman said a visitor was on her way up.

Hazel Conklin was one of those sweet, for-real candy-box grandmothers, a kind of Spring Byington type, with a bright, lively air, and you had the feeling she knew more than she let on. Her coat was already off as she greeted me and hurried to Claire’s side.

“If we could just get her into the bedroom, where she and I can talk quietly,” she suggested. “Can you lift her? No, Claire, don’t try to walk,” she said, “let him do it.”

I bent and picked Claire up, blanket and all, and carried her toward the bedroom while Mrs. Conklin hurried ahead.

“Oh, put me down, damn it,” Claire moaned, but her feeble protests were useless. She was weak as a baby.

“She’s all yours,” I said to Mrs. Conklin and got out of there pronto.

Her attack wasn’t severe and she recovered quickly. Mrs. Conklin was much in evidence during those days and I sometimes saw her leaving as I came in. I liked her; she was a nice, square, practical woman and I saw how much Claire depended on her. Fortunately she lived in the neighborhood and was never far away. I felt the better for having her around. There were others available as well, should they be needed—downstairs the Japanese medico Dr. Sadikichi (whom she wouldn’t let near her with a stethoscope) and his wife, and upstairs an elderly couple whose company Claire occasionally enjoyed, the Steins, who were quiet as two mice and disinclined to meddle.

But for me, a newcomer, so to speak, it was never easy. You didn’t just come and go with Claire, you were “there,” bound with hoops of steel. If you wanted her loyalty, you had to prove your own, and I had trouble proving a loyalty I didn’t necessarily feel. She was the bottomless well, the great gaping pit of “I want, I need, I wish, I am.” Gimme, gimme, she always seemed to be saying, fill me up, complete me. I am a holy vessel, meet my requirements and my lips shall smile on you. You will be my chosen one, my darling, and I will bless your name in the years to come, the words writ large upon pages of amethyst stationery engraved with curly initials. Two alabaster arms reaching out, entwining, clutching, grappling, the Spider Woman in Manhattan.

I really wish I could say I liked her more, but the honest fact was that I didn’t. No matter how I tried to add it all up in her favor, it never came out that way, I couldn’t
make
it come out that way. Einstein himself couldn’t have pulled that one off.

I got a breather from Miss Clutch when rehearsals ended and the time came for
Peking Duck
to wend its way to Boston. We spent a month at the Colonial Theatre, playing to packed houses after surprisingly good notices, then brought it in for our Fourth of July opening on Broadway. Suddenly there it was, curtain up, characters onstage, Belinda acting as if she’d sprung full-blown from Jove’s brow. She captured New York, her name in lights made a spectacular gleam on the Great White Way, and, to make a long story short, we were a hit.

I’d invited Claire to the opening, only to have her decline; it didn’t surprise me much, sure as I was that seeing Belinda triumph in my “little play,” as Claire liked referring to it, was too much for her to bear. She pleaded sick, a “
soupçon
of flu” was the diagnosis, and I sent Belinda flowers with a card from Claire, it never occurring to me that, of course, she would want to thank Claire for them. She did, and to my amazement I heard Claire say, “I’m so glad you liked them. Bless you, darling,
mizpaw
.”

And here began a new, happier chapter in my life. Success never hurts, unless you let it. I wasn’t letting it. My joy at having a hit show was overmatched by my knowing I’d pulled it off for Belinda, who shone in it. As soon as she got settled in for a run she gave up hotel living and moved into my place. New York lay literally at her feet, neither of us was too old or too jaded to revel in the whole thing, and as we swung into full summer all I could think was, “Ain’t life strange—ain’t life grand?”

But the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. He giveth a good solid hit that the producers agreed would run two years (Belinda had committed for one), and taketh away my peace of mind, since, my theatrical chores seen to, I was now fully at liberty to attack Claire’s masterwork again.