Borrowed Finery: A Memoir (21 page)

He called me
sister
and we planned to meet for supper at some other place. After we’d eaten, I was able to persuade him to stay in the room with me. We huddled together on the bed, two orphans of the storm, he observed.

*   *   *

I went on working for Gus until the actor-sailor-husband returned. As it turned out, he hadn’t gone to Murmansk but to a safer, closer port. We moved into a small apartment on Ivar Street about to be vacated by another actor and his wife. They were old acquaintances of my husband’s from the days of the Federal Theater, when they had worked in the cast of Marc Blitzstein’s
The Cradle Will Rock.

Before he left, a suitcase in either hand, the vacating actor grinned at me, remarking that the mattress of the bed had seen good service and was ready for more.

I flushed. Was the whole world grinning and fucking? Didn’t sex need the privacy the actor had invaded? Wasn’t an illusion of exclusivity the essence of sexual life? He might just as well have moved the seat of the toilet up and down, saying it was ready for more action.

*   *   *

I met other acquaintances of my husband’s—some called themselves progressives, some were Communists. Equality for black people, an astonishing thought in those days, drew me to the Communists. I went to a fund-raiser for the party. It was given in a town on a lake. I met a black textile worker from the South. There was a moment when he and I stood on a deck and talked. He was shy and sweet-natured, I thought. I looked at his face and wondered if the scars on his cheek were from a beating he had undergone. But he said, No, it had been a car accident. He had been on a picket line, though, when his factory went on strike, and he had been beaten by the local sheriff.

*   *   *

One night my husband got drunk. At some moment during the evening, someone slipped a photograph under the front door, taken by a street photographer, of a woman I knew, holding my husband’s arm. I showed it to him. He told me he was taking her to Palm Springs for a few days. I protested. He picked up a flimsy chair and broke it across my back. I fled into the dark. Where would I go?

Gus, the man for whom I had worked until recently, might still be in his restaurant. I found him standing behind the bar, cleaning up after the day’s customers.

He hugged me and said I could spend the night at his apartment, where he lived with his ancient Greek mother. I slept on a couch. The next day I went back to Ivar Street. My husband was gone. There was a note from him on a table.
I’m taking a ship out of San Diego back to the East Coast. I’m spending a few days in Palm Springs before that.
It was signed,
With love.

*   *   *

It was true that I was domestically undereducated, but I could get jobs.

I worked for a magician and was sent on an errand to deliver a book to Orson Welles, who would be at the Brown Derby. Armed with a purpose, I inquired of a man standing at the bottom of a curving flight of stairs in the restaurant where I might find Mr. Welles. He smiled and pointed up.

At the top of the stairs, a group of men made way for me, and at their center I saw Orson Welles, young and thin, smiling at me somberly, provocatively. I gave him the book and left.

*   *   *

I worked in a ceramic factory, where I painted sleeping Mexicans on pitchers and vases. Sombreros covered their faces and they leaned against giant cacti.

I taught dancing at Arthur Murray’s until the place closed down for lack of customers. Everyone, I thought, knows how to dance in Hollywood.

I found a vile job in a storefront business where three fat men played craps all day long, rolling the dice on a desk pushed to a wall. Behind them, in another room, eight Mexican girls and I sat at bins sorting rivets the men collected weekly at airplane plants.

During the fifteen-minute break in the mornings, I remember how we gathered in front of the store, smoking cigarettes, and how the girl who had brought them crumpled the empty pack and said, “No more. We got to go back in.”

We were paid by the weight of the rivets sorted out from dross.

I had heard about labor unions. I looked up the CIO in a telephone book and went to a local office.

I didn’t know if there was a special way to speak with the union official in whose glum office I sat. I told him about the dim bulbs over the bins, the breaks, even those for our lunch, which lasted only as long as it took to smoke a cigarette before we were summoned back by the three men, and last, the pay. I fell silent, my head filled with half thoughts: the official’s face, his gray skin, his poker face, exploitation of workers. He rose to his feet and said, “We’ll look into it.”

I went back to the rivet store where, in order to take the morning off, I had pleaded illness. The pile in my bin was higher. The girls greeted me in Spanish, asked after my health, and said they were sorry I had been sick—they had missed me.

A few days later, when I arrived at seven in the morning, the store was closed up, and the three men and my fellow sorters were gone.

*   *   *

I rented a room in a house in a nondescript neighborhood, part of the Los Angeles sprawl already beginning then. An elderly woman and her embittered, divorced daughter with two young children owned it. I had a spacious, comfortable room. My wardrobe had increased to include a skirt, underwear, a pair of tennis shoes, and a cotton blouse. I still had the blue tweed suit that I had worn day after day in the LA dress shop.

Among the people I now knew was a Hungarian refugee who had set out to make her fortune designing clothes. She had rented an empty store on Hollywood Boulevard for an evening’s show of her work. She asked me and another young woman to volunteer our services by modeling her fashions. She required Betty and me to cover our nipples with bits of adhesive and then dressed us in two of her many outfits, some of which still had basting thread on their seams.

Betty, who worked in a movie studio for a company run by Orson Welles, lived in a nearby apartment, so we went there during an hour’s break in the show. She was elegant and slender, the first pretty “progressive” I had met.

As she unlocked her door, I glanced down the hall. Looking only at a key he was about to insert into the lock of another door was a familiar face and figure. Betty whispered to me, as we entered a big living room, that she was used to seeing him. He had a girlfriend in the building. It was Harpo Marx.

Daddy had told me he’d once had an office next to the Marx Brothers at some film studio. He’d heard them playing craps all day long instead of working on their scripts. The rattle of dice is like no other sound, he said, and it echoed through the cheap thin walls.

Late in the evening, after the showing of the Hungarian’s line of clothing, I left. From down the street, I heard an actor’s agent I knew slightly calling my name. I walked toward him, and the brightness from a large glass window of another storefront where an art show was being held. He invited me in.

As I entered, I spotted John Barrymore at once. He was yellowing with age like the ivory keys of a very old piano. Maybe his drinking, as well as the years, had aged him too. He was sitting on a couch around which art lovers of the screen world were flowing in a constant stream, looking mostly at each other.

Barrymore was surrounded by four or five young women. I didn’t give myself time to think—otherwise I wouldn’t have done it—but walked directly to him, saying, “I bring you greetings from Kay M—.” He looked up at me and waved the girls away.

He wanted to know how I’d met his old friend. I told him about driving to California with her, leaving out her drinking. He was kindly and quiet-voiced with me. After our brief conversation, he left with his bodyguard, a man who took care of him when he went on one of his drinking binges, I heard later. A short obese man called out, “Good night, sweet Prince.” Barrymore gave him a dark look and turned in my direction. “Good night, lass,” he said.

He reminded me of my father, not in his looks but in his voice and style and servitude to alcohol.

*   *   *

The post office sent me a notice that they were holding a package for me,
LIVE GOODS
, I think it said. I stopped by the local branch to pick it up. My father had sent me an infant alligator in a small crate. It was perhaps a foot in length.

I was so disappointed I nearly wept on the spot. But then a wave of laughter broke over me. It was the last thing I needed.

I named it Dolores and kept it in the backyard for a few days. Members of the family I was living with came out to look at it every so often. I finally gave it to a supplier of animals to the movies who lived in the neighborhood.

*   *   *

One idle afternoon, I telephoned Republic Studios. I didn’t call a second time, but they phoned me after a few weeks. I attributed it to movie perversity. By the time they called, I had gotten still another job reading South American novels for Warner Brothers, turning in triplicate reports written on a borrowed typewriter as to their film possibilities.

The paper quality of the books varied from country to country. I recall how thin and silky the Chilean pages were, yet not transparent. I was paid six dollars a book and given six or seven novels a week. It wasn’t bad pay for those days.

*   *   *

One evening I went out with a Mexican girlfriend to a restaurant and nightclub. I danced for an hour or so with John Wayne, who was very young and handsome and thin and talked to me in a companionable way on the dance floor about the movies, or, as it was called, “the industry.” He hadn’t yet become a star but he was on his way. He liked all things Mexican: food, ambiance, women.

There was a party given in the neighborhood, to raise money for a Spanish refugee organization, in a house very like the one I lived in. We all went to it, the elderly woman, her divorced daughter, even the two children. I wore the blue tweed suit.

We could barely squeeze into the narrow hall, it was so crowded with people. In the living room, a group was gathered around two card tables upon which were soft drinks and a half-empty bottle of gin. A man with a small-featured intense face was holding forth in a voice that sounded like flowing gravel. He was smiling wryly, perhaps at himself.

Allen Adler was his name, and he told me he had a cleft palate, which I had guessed.

Would I go with him to the Garden of Allah and meet his cousin? He was so genial, nearly affectionate, I agreed at once. I didn’t know what the Garden of Allah was or where it was or who his cousin was, but I wanted to hold on to the atmosphere, like a spotlight of energy, that he breathed.

The Garden of Allah turned out to be a collection of bungalows where noted people stayed, those who were only passing through Hollywood on their way to other better places, those who were waiting to take screen tests, and those on alcoholic binges. I suddenly recollected as we drove on our way that my father had said he had once stopped by there and left a five-dollar bill on a bureau in a bungalow rented by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was lying on the bed nearly passed out. He had lifted his hand weakly as Daddy left.

A nimbus of illuminated dust made a halo around a tall lamp outside of a large bungalow. Inside, in the living room, was Allen’s cousin, Stella Adler, her husband, Harold Clurman, a playwright, Clifford Odets, and a heavily made-up young blond woman named Carol, who, Allen whispered to me, must have fallen in love with her rouge pots. I sat down on a sofa next to Stella, who encouraged me by patting the seat cushion next to her with a smile that promised intimacy. She was refined and at the same time raffish, and her voice was full of depths and fluting melodies.

They all went back to the subject under discussion, which Allen and I had briefly interrupted, the marriage of Artie Shaw to Lana Turner. Shaw was urging books upon her, lecturing her, hectoring her. Stella held up her pretty hands. “He wants to educate her against her own wishes. What a darling situation!” Then she turned toward me. “
Educate
her,” she murmured in an amused, confiding tone.

I was nearly fainting with self-consciousness in such company, and excited by it, sweating in my tweed suit and not only because of the weather. Stella got up and went into another room. When she returned, she was holding a large photograph of a painting of a dark-haired child.

“My daughter, Ellen,” she said wistfully. I loved Stella at that moment, and I thought to myself that Ellen was the most fortunate of children, the inheritor of every marvelous thing, especially the velvet dress she was wearing in her portrait.

Then she rose again. When she came back this time, she was carrying a blue covert-cloth suit in her arms as though it were an infant.

“May I give you this?” she asked me.

Everyone in the room had fallen silent. Odets hit a piano key softly, middle C.

“I think it’s the right size,” she said.

Harold Clurman nodded his head and smiled at me. Allen said
hurrah,
for no apparent reason. I took the suit.

Elsie and Linda

When Elsie was ninety-two, dying of old age and emphysema, two of my three children urged me to visit her on the island of Nantucket, where, as far as I knew, she had been living for more than three decades. I had not seen her for thirty-eight years.

I wanted to please them. I had no desire to see her. With my permission, my daughter had given her my telephone number. She called me. I heard the old seductive voice, deep and familiar as my own. I felt the same harrowing tension for a moment; then it went, and it was as if I were speaking politely to an utter stranger.

I went to the airport the next day, but Nantucket was fogged in and the flight was canceled. I hardly had the nerve for a second try. But I made it without the nerve. I landed on Nantucket around noon. I took a taxi to her address; the driver was a voluble old bohemian who had lived on the island since the late sixties.

Her house was one of several like it in a new community extending out from the port town. As I got out of the car, I thought of my grandmother, dead and buried without my having been told. “She wouldn’t have been interested,” Elsie had said of me, one of my uncles reported. Perhaps I had deserved it. But not from the woman who was my mother. I looked at the house and shuddered. The door was unlocked.