All That Glitters (80 page)

“So we start talking and I can see they’re really a nice couple. And they don’t know anything about me playing pattycakes with the marines, or if they do they aren’t saying. So, we start getting friendly, and I ask them how they got over losing Amy—they really loved her, you could tell, and they didn’t have any other children. So he explains about how their faith in God got them through it all, and he started talking about this Christian Science stuff. He wasn’t anything like a preacher, but the way he talked, I was impressed, honest. I really liked listening to him.

“Anyway, they said there were seats beside them in the parlor car and suggested I ride with them. That was okay with me, I didn’t want to be with the boys anymore, so Mr. Pollard—Eustace was his first name—he went and moved my luggage while I went with Mrs. Pollard, who gave me the window seat. We spent the night on the train; it was freezing, but they had a blanket and a lantern and we sat there talking all by ourselves. I don’t know how long we were like that, but it was quite a ways.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Oh, lots and lots of things. Mostly about getting on in the world, trying to make something good of your life, about happiness, things like that. Eustace started explaining all about Mary Baker Eddy and some of the things they believed in. I’d never heard of Mary Baker Eddy, but I was interested. And as I listened to them, I just felt this wonderful sense of peace coming over me. Like all the burdens and worries I was carrying just up and evaporated. I felt like I was clean and good, and I could really make something out of my miserable life. Like it could start all over again.

“Next day, when we woke up, it had snowed all over the place. They started shoveling the tracks and then the train started off. We climbed and climbed, slowly, up to the top of the Pass; then through the afternoon we went down. Mrs. Pollard says to me, ‘If you’ve never been to California, you’re in for a treat. By tomorrow you’ll think you’re in the land of milk and honey.’

“And, you know, that’s just what happened. It was so cold and lonesome-feeling up in those Rocky Mountains, I wanted to cry all the time, but when we got down onto the plain of the valley, here was this whole new world. Like the Promised Land. The weather was so nice and warm, not hot but just right, and there were palm trees everywhere and the biggest fields, all planted and green. Alfalfa and artichokes. I didn’t even know what an artichoke was, and Eustace borrowed a pencil off the conductor and drew me a picture of one. My first artichoke. Then we pulled into Oakland and everybody got off, end of the line, and I had to say goodbye to the Pollards, because they were going across the bay to visit San Francisco, where her sister ran this boardinghouse.”

“So you split up?”

“Not right away. They invited me to come and stay for a while. And I wasn’t in a hurry to get down to L.A., so I took them up on the offer. They kept me for eight days, and I was never so happy in my life. They treated me like nobody’s ever treated me before. And Mattie, Eustace’s sister, said nothing but the best would do for me, and I wasn’t even a paying boarder. She was Christian Science, too—she’d actually met Mary Baker Eddy, had pictures and letters—and they’d take me down to Hyde Street to where the meetings were, and I got to meet lots of people and make friends.

“But then I had to leave. I’d called Sam and he was steaming, asking where the hell I am, he’s getting real horny. So I pack up and take the train. They all came to see me off, gave me flowers, a box of chocolates, I cried, they cried, it was a real sad scene. I just hated leaving them.”

“Why didn’t you stay?”

“
Because.
I
had
to go to
Hollywood
.”

I was finding this very interesting. “Why ‘had’ to?”

“Because.” She stared down at her open palm. “I knew it was my destiny. I was being drawn there. Like I was following a star—like the three wise men.”

“Did you keep in touch with them, the Pollards?” I pursued.

“We corresponded for years and years. Annie and I wrote each other all the time. That’s where I got my violet stationery from; it was her favorite shade and she used it herself. And do you know what—after Eustace died, Annie died less than a month later. Just think of it, they’d been married forty-five years, and when he went she made up her mind she’d follow right behind him.

“But you know how it goes. Little by little I forgot all the things I’d learned from Eustace and Annie, and for years and years I never even so much as thought about it. It was only here, in New York City, that I really got into things again. That’s where Hazel came in.”

“How did that happen?”

“Well, I was walking down Fifth Avenue one afternoon and I passed a Christian Science Reading Room, and just for the hell of it I went in. I took some pamphlets from the desk and went to the back of the room and sat there looking through this literature. When I glanced up, I saw the woman behind the desk watching me. That didn’t bother me, but when I was leaving she smiled and said she recognized me. She asked if I was Christian Science, and I said no, not really. Then I happened to mention Eustace’s name. ‘Oh, Eustace Pollard, of course! Please come with me,’ she says and takes me to a corner of the room and there, you wouldn’t believe it, hanging on the wall there’s this picture of Eustace. Can you believe it? He was one of the most famous people in the movement and he’d written all these tracts and works.

“After that I used to stop in from time to time, and that’s where I met Hazel Conklin. She came in one rainy afternoon, her umbrella had blown inside out, and I tried to help her fix it. I saw that sweet face, that lovely smile, and we talked. We became friends right off the bat, and then we found out we lived near each other and we both knitted. I invited her up for tea. She sat right there where you’re sitting, and I realized I’d made an important friend. Hazel Conklin’s a saint, I swear she is.”

This much I’d already figured out. I’d never met a kinder, nicer, more thoughtful woman in my life. And she had a mission in life—to see that Claire Regrett ended hers as easily, peacefully, and happily as could be arranged. There are only ten of Hazel Conklin in the entire world; I was lucky to meet one in my lifetime.

But how long would Claire hold on? Who knew? Sometimes I expected to get the bad news at any moment; other times I thought she might just keep on rolling along like Ole Man River. Tenacious, that was Claire; she’d clawed her way to the top; now with those claws she was clinging to the side of the cliff, with the pit yawning below. I’ve heard people laugh, or anyway titter, at Claire’s religious leanings—“pretensions,” I’ve heard them called. But, look, who is she to be laughed at for her faith? Why shouldn’t she investigate, search, hope, yearn, need? Why shouldn’t she want that thing outside and beyond ourselves that every human being gropes for? Just because she was Claire Regrett, did that mean she didn’t have a soul? I guess people think that if you get as much as she did out of life, you don’t need a soul, but those people are full of shit. Claire dying was a far more interesting specimen than Claire living; at least that’s how I saw it, and if I’d laughed at her before, I wasn’t laughing anymore.

One evening, when I’d spent a couple of hours with her going over some notes and trying to pin her down on a few of the more elusive statements she’d made into the recorder, she seemed especially cranky. We’d been talking about the time she won the Oscar and, as had happened several times before, I could see that she avoided rhapsodizing over that special evening in her life, the triumph that had capped her career. Why, I wondered, did her voice drop, why was she bored, and, more particularly, what was she hiding?

“Your fans will want to know,” I reminded her. She made an exasperated sound, but nothing prepared me for the storm that was in moments to erupt and pass through the San Remo tower like a Kansas cyclone.

“Oh Christ, why don’t they just let me die, then?” she muttered, fretfully toying with the sash of her robe. “Why don’t they just forget about me and let me go, why do they keep trying to get at me? Hate ’em, hate ’em, hate ’em.”

As she muttered, she was staring hard at the gold statuette itself, her face a mask of scorn, as if the winning of a cheap titanium trophy that hundreds of others had won was a self-defeating waste of time. The look in those still-expressive eyes was one of rage mixed with bafflement, disappointment, even desperation, asking what in life was really worth anything. Somewhere along the line they’d all shortchanged her—her mother and stepfather, her sister, Sam Ueberroth, those marines on the train, Louie B., all four husbands from Perry to Natchez, and all the other guys who’d bedded her for the ladies’ hour and then gone home to momma or wifie or to the club. What did it all mean, the eyes wondered, what happened to pie-in-the-sky, her piece of the cake? Where? When? How? Why?

“Frank’s work, all Frank’s work,” she went on in a low, unhappy voice. “Forty years, and for what? As for our little twelve-dollar friend here,” she went on, waving the statuette at me, “
nobody
knows the real story about this little gold-plated bastard.” She paused theatrically, slowly closing the skirt of her housecoat, the eyes glittering, the mouth an ugly grimace. Then the dam burst and it all came pouring out. She brought up her arm and with a burst of violence she sent Oscar crashing against the mantel, where it struck with a metallic sound, then bounced into the air again and fell to the floor. She hurried to snatch it up, then began smashing it repeatedly against the mantel, sobbing with every blow.

I was riveted, yet I did nothing; it was better to let her get it out of her system, whatever emotions were moving her to this appalling sacrilege. At that moment it seemed as if she hated everything in the world; the Oscar had become some bizarre symbol of all her frustrations, all the years of people laughing at her, of disappointments, slights, and hurts, the symbol of Hollywood achievement that she thought she’d pinned down but never really had. I watched her loft the statuette and wing it at her portrait over the fireplace. It struck the canvas, tore a hole in it, then bounced to the floor a second time. She spun wildly around, searching for something else to vent her wrath on.

Leaving Oscar where he lay, she headed for the fireplace, where with one violent sweep she cleared the mantel of its array of bric-a-brac, then seized the fireplace tools from their brass stand and sent them clanging across the room. Next she began yanking the pictures from the wall, hurling them to the floor and stamping on them.

Sobbing, panting, she dashed out into the passageway, where she attacked the trophy wall, tearing from their hooks the collection of framed certificates, plaques, photographs, and other memorials. “Memory Lane” was soon only a bare wall. Then she flung open the office door and went to work on the filing system. Methodically she pillaged it section by section, pushing the buttons so the apparatus revolved, then yanking out the files and flinging them frantically about. There was a carton of photographs in the corner and she lugged it out to the terrace, heaved it onto the parapet, and overturned the contents into the wind.

I’d followed her and stood transfixed by the amazing sight of hundreds of faces—that fabulous face—rising and falling all about me, 8 x 10 glossies with the famous lipsticked smile, the arched eyebrows, those two huge eyes staring out at me, here, there, everywhere. The face seemed to mock the world: “This is where I am, this is where I got to, damn it,” the expression still said. I leaned over the parapet to look down into the street, where pedestrians were peering up, reaching to capture a photograph as it fell toward their outstretched hands.

She’s flipped
, I thought;
she’s flipped straight to Mars.

I turned back inside to find her collapsed in a chair, no longer sobbing, but staring mutely. Her hands hung limp over the ends of the chair arms and every few seconds they’d twitch.

“Claire?” Her swollen lids fluttered. “You’ve cut yourself. You’d better come in the bathroom and let me have a look at that hand.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she returned dully, then got up and wearily left the room. I went after her to find her sprawled on her bed, the blood from the cut running onto the pillow. I wet a washcloth and tried to wipe away the blood; she groaned with impatience and pushed me away.

I went to use the office phone and called Hazel Conklin, who listened patiently, then said she’d come within the half hour.

By the time I returned to the bedroom, Claire was flooded with remorse, and for the very first time I heard her admit she was wrong about something. She was abject over her behavior and seemed afraid that she might lose me as a friend. “I wouldn’t blame you if you hated me,” she said, adding, “I deserve it. I deserve the hate of everyone in the whole world, everyone I’ve ever met. What a mess, what a lousy mess I am.” She lay back against the pillow, spent and exhausted, and in her eyes I saw a desperate pleading to be helped, to be understood. She turned away and stared up at the window; the lights had gone on in the building next door and the stars began to show themselves in the darkening sky.

“‘Starlight, starbright, first star I’ve seen tonight…’” she murmured and folded her hands under her chin in a particularly childlike gesture. She could have been a little girl in bed saying her prayers to her mother.

I leaned down to see which star she was looking at. She stirred under the bedclothes, unlaced her hands, and for an instant her fingers touched the back of my hand. She murmured something in amusement.

“What?” I asked.

“Do you want to know something? I’ve never told anybody else in my whole life, and this is strictly off the record—I don’t want any Panasonic listening in.”

“Okay. I’m listening.”

“Of course you are—you’re always listening—like one great big ear. But after I’ve told you, I want you to forget you ever heard it, understand? I’m going to tell you all about little Claire’s dream of Hollywood—I should say, little Cora Sue’s dream. You remember that fire escape I showed you, where I used to grow my geraniums and raise tomatoes? And how we used to sleep out on hot nights? When I’d be out there and I’d look up at the sky and see all those stars, I used to imagine—now, don’t tell me it’s crazy, I know it—I used to pretend that every one of those stars was a movie star. I believed that every time a star was born—a Hollywood star, that is—the star in the sky would dim. And that meant that the star had come down to earth, where all the movie stars lived together in this big white tent, like a circus tent. Every star had her own little canvas cubicle, and they’d all sit around in there, waiting until they were called on to come be in a movie. There were costumes hanging on the wall, and a makeup table with lots of bright lights and little brushes and pencils and paints and putty noses laid out on a towel, and wigs on a stand, and whatever anyone needed to step in front of the camera.