Everything and More (21 page)

On June 19, a joint Magnum-Paramount publicity release announced that the juicy plum had gone to a newcomer who had felicitously changed her name to Rain Fairburn.

Marylin, who heard the news only a few hours before the release, envisioned Leland Hayward conniving like a demon to get her this role. Her gratitude to her agent was tear-drenched and slightly overwrought.

She concluded with, “I’ll do everything I can to live up to your faith in me, Mr. Hayward—I can’t put into words how very much I appreciate your faith in me.”

“Don’t thank me, honey, thank Joshua. He told Frank Freeman he wouldn’t renew with Paramount if they didn’t borrow you for the part. He told Freeman you
were
Rain, he ranted, he stormed. He bulldozed. A powerhouse, that’s Joshua when he’s hot after something. Thank him.”

“I guess he explained about me and Linc?” she said. “He’s doing it for Linc.”

Leland Hayward gave her an enigmatic smile and said nothing.

*   *   *

At the end of June, Marylin’s option was again picked up, and she received the stipulated two hundred a week. (Paramount was paying Magnum twelve hundred a week for her services.) Though the
Island
royalty checks had not yet started to flow, Marylin had received a
substantial hunk of cash for the movie rights, enough for NolaBee to quit Hughes and to make a down payment on a small wrong-side-of-the-tracks Mediterranean-style house on Crescent Drive—the place was going for a bargain price because it was adjacent to the parking lot of Ralphs supermarket.

Marylin spent little time there. Her life had become an unending cycle of rising in the dark, working with nervous intensity through the day, arriving home to choke down the soft eggs that a concerned NolaBee poached or boiled, then falling into her bed with muscles aching and brains ajangle to study her lines for the next day. A grimly isolate existence analogous to a jail sentence.

Her puerile inexperience, the demands of being in front of the camera almost continuously in a major high-budget feature, the never-ending fusillade of half-truths and outright fabrications about Rain Fairburn (her!) emanating from the columns and radio slots of the gossip queens worked to pathological effect: she moved in a daze of sheer animal terror.

The film’s director, Bentley Hendrickson, a soft-spoken, mustached homosexual, not unreasonably resented a borrowed newcomer being foisted on him, resented that magazine writers and photographers were permitted on
his
set to interview this pretty, totally incompetent nonentity. He would drawl out a stinting word or two of directorial advice to the other actors, seasoned craftspeople all, then slouch in his canvas director’s chair offering Marylin no palliative word of encouragement, no constructive criticism. He ordered retakes, up to fifty of them, for her scenes.

To Marylin these scenes were a nightmare parody of her times with Linc. She was too paralyzingly close to her role. For once she could not bury herself in her work.

Every move she made was wooden.

Bentley Hendrickson’s bitchily exaggerated ennui, the executive producer’s iciness as he looked directly at her when he repeated how far behind schedule they lagged, the crew’s hostile witness to her eternal inadequacy, were unbearable. At times she froze with humiliation and grief. Shivering uncontrollably, she would rush from the set to the converted trailer that was her dressing-room.

By the end of the second week she was reduced to a terrified, nearcatatonic wreck.

On the following Monday the first scene scheduled was Rain hearing by telephone that her lover is sailing. Lamentably evocative. Marylin huddled in the trailer-dressing room, ruining the makeup artist’s labors with a torrent of tears.

The second assistant director knocked to tell her they were ready for her.

“Be right there,” she said in a muffled voice.

Fifteen minutes later, still in the trailer, she was repeating the identical words to the first assistant. This time her voice rose a hysterical half-octave.

A few minutes later, without a knock, the door opened. Joshua filled the metal door frame—he had to bend his shock of gray hair to enter. The trailer shook as he crossed the threshold.

She sat up, jerkily dabbing at her eyes. “Joshua.”

He was producing a pint of Southern Comfort from a paper bag. “You look in desperate need,” he said.

“Yech. Put that away. I’ve got the stomach flu.”

“Flu, bull! What you have is a massive, full-blown case of camera jitters.”

“I don’t!” she burst out, then crumpled back on the daybed. “Yes! Yes I do! All those people out there depending on me! Joshua, I’m no good, I never was. You’ll have to get Mr. Hayward to withdraw me from the film—I’m positive Paramount wants to replace me. Magnum won’t pick up my option! And I’m glad, glad!” The words raced out, high-pitched, near-demented. “I don’t belong in movies, I shouldn’t even be an extra. I don’t have what it takes!”

He was pouring Southern Comfort into her water tumbler.
“Mea culpa.
What a horse’s ass am I, not to have foreseen the difficulties involved for you in this part.”

“I’m not an actress.”

“You’re an actress to the bone. Listen to me, Marylin. That scene you’re meant to be playing is a close-up. A close-up shows mental processes.” He thrust the glass into her hand. “Down the hatch.”

The smell was nauseating, like sweetly rancid straw. “I’ll throw up.”

“Marylin!” he commanded roughly.

She gulped. The cloying liquid went roughly down her throat, and fresh tears wet her eyes.

“Thinking,” Joshua said. “Thinking. That’s the long and short of your scene.”

“But—”

“But nothing. I should know, I wrote the damn script. A close-up. Listen to me, Marylin, I repeat what is graven in stone. A close-up is to show the audience a thought. You can think, I goddamn know you can think.”

“Think? I’m so stiff with fright that my mind’s ready to shatter like
glass. Ask Mr. Hendrickson—” She clutched at the glass. “Joshua, he hates me.”

“That’s his
shtick,
he stands aloof from his actors until they give a performance for him.” He poured a little more liquor in her glass. “Let me pass on a trick that I used when I was a brash young writer pitching stories. I’d face those fat producers, my guts griping with anxiety, and imagine them in their big chairs, smoking their big cigars, wearing long johns.”

The Southern Comfort had ignited a comforting warmth behind Marylin’s breastbone. “Long johns?” She giggled.

“Red long johns. With flaps in back.” He gestured with a raise of his hand that she drink again. This time she sipped. “Marylin,” he said, “this is your picture, you
are
Rain, and we both know it. Hendrickson can go screw himself—I hear tell that is his true preference anyway. So think of him jerking off in his red long johns.”

At the lewd mental picture, she blushed and giggled again.

“Better?”

“Tight,” she said.

“Nothing wrong with being a little snookered on the set—not too much, but just enough to unwind.” He put his arm around her, drawing her down the trailer steps. She sat on a stool, letting the Southern Comfort’s warmth spread through her as the makeup man did repairs. Drawing a breath deep into her abdomen, she moved onto the brilliantly lit circle.

A half-hundred highly skilled professionals stared at her. Bentley Hendrickson sighed and leaned back.

Panic leaped onto Marylin like a tiger.

Then she saw Linc’s father, a massive figure of strength, winking at her as he tapped his thigh.

They’re all wearing long johns, she thought. Itchy red ones. Her body relaxed. She murmured, “Ready.”

A special-effects man started the telephone ringing. She reached for the instrument, thinking, thinking of the primal desolation of those minutes when Linc had informed her of the
Enterprise
’s sailing. Tears came into her eyes. She let them ooze down her cheeks.

She couldn’t tell if she was projecting as much acting skill as a papier-mâché doll, but for the first time since she had started
Island,
she understood what she was doing.

“Cut. Print it,” Bentley Hendrickson said in a soft, drawly voice. He rose from his canvas chair, coming over to hand her a box of Kleenex. “I seldom use a first take, but that was perfect, Miss Fairburn. Perfect.”

Joshua, lowering his
Hollywood Reporter,
winked again. Marylin flashed him a look of gratitude.

After that she was able to go onto the set every day and draw on her too-poignant memories. Joshua often came over from the Writers Building. She was too strung out to go to the commissary for lunch, so he would order the thick sandwiches for which Paramount was famous, sharing them with her in the trailer.

One evening when they were viewing the rushes, he said quietly, “You’re beautiful—but then, so are a lot of girls.
You
have that extra magnetism—God alone knows what it is, and no mortal’s put a name to it. When you’re in the frame, you draw the eye. That, little Marylin, is what makes a star.”

She stared up at the screen, unable for the life of her to comprehend what Joshua meant. All she saw was her own enormous image making crucial blunders in every movement.

*   *   *

At the end of shooting, Joshua sat next to her in the studio projection room while the Paramount executives watched a screening of the rough cut of
Island.
Marylin had not realized until now how much of herself the camera had captured. She saw a young girl dancing with her lover under flickering lights, saw her wild flight through empty streets to be with him one more time, saw her brave face shatter into grief as he went toward his ship. Around her she heard muted sobbing and the loud blowing of a nose.

“The End” appeared on the screen.

There was a moment of hideous silence; then applause burst out.

“A shoo-in for Best Picture of the Year!”

“We’ve got a smasheroo!”

“And what about Magnum? They’ve got some winner in that girl!”

“A sensational find, that little peach, luminous as Ingrid, more gorgeous than Lana. Magnum’ll clean up with her. She’ll put Garrison’s half-ass outfit on the map.”

Bentley Hendrickson leaned over from the row behind to take her hand and kiss it. “You blazed like a comet up there.” By now there had formed a thin sheen of professional friendship between them, yet even so she did not know how to respond to his softly respectful tones.

After a few minutes she whispered to Joshua, “Can we leave?”

“Why not?”

“You’re the writer, you work here at Paramount with these people.”

“So what?” he said. “Come on.”

It was a cool, damp September night and the few lights on the studio street shone through the mist with rainbow halos.

A couple were walking by: “That little Fairburn girl can act rings around Vivien Leigh. . . .”

That little Fairburn girl. Me, Marylin thought. They’re talking about
me
in the same breath with Vivien Leigh and other stars. Elation warmed her briefly; then she discounted the remark as she had discounted the praise in the projection room. This was Marylin’s first time to catch the brass ring, but tonight, as for the rest of her life, her humility about her craft made any compliment, however sincerely made, sound false in her ears.

“Hear that?” Joshua asked.

“People feel obligated to say something nice at studio screenings.”

“We’ll have to do something about that ego,” he chuckled, taking her arm. “You know what else they’re talking about?”

“Linc’s book. Your wonderful script.”

“They’re talking about Joshua Fernauld making a horse’s ass of himself mooning around the set with a girl nearly thirty years younger than he is.”

She eased from his grasp. Despite her staggering guilelessness, her youth, her inexperience with any man but Linc, she had sensed with a remote part of her mind that Linc’s father had fallen for her. Now shame crept through her. Indefensible, disgraceful, that she had not attempted to avert his desire for her. She could not conceive of his emotions as being anything more than the hots. Everyone in the Industry knew of Joshua Fernauld’s libidinous forays on young actresses. (Linc had been bitter on his mother’s behalf and BJ, her friend, sometimes made vaguely embarrassed boasts about “Daddy’s little romances.”)

“Well?” Joshua drew her into the shadowy doorway of the Accounting Building.

Well? she thought. Briefly her mind filled with a not-quite-recapturable remembrance, the tremulous moment when Linc had kissed her outside apartment 2B, the scent of the wiry lemon tree. . . . Her lips parted softly.

“He’s dead,” Joshua said, his voice a harsh lament. “There is no commingling between the quick and the dead. The movie should have been catharsis enough. You should be over him by now.”

“Are you?” she whispered.

His arms went around her, a tactile force pressing her against his tall, thick, warm body. Resting his cheek on her hair, he touched her
neck lightly, tenderly. “Marylin, I loved my son, I still love him—would that I had died for him. But he’s dead.” The words rumbled within his chest, reverberating against her body. “I’ve wanted you since I brought back his stories and you were so broken and lovely in that rag of a bathrobe.”

She felt not the least desire for Joshua—indeed, with him “it” seemed incestuous, ugly, wrong—yet she
had
clung to him during the filming. I owe him something, she thought. Another, lesser thought flashed: at least I don’t have to explain about Linc and me.

When Joshua bent his mouth on hers, she kissed him back.

He drove her along Sunset to a nearby motel with a blinking green sign: The Lanai.

When he took her in his arms, she realized he was trembling all over. He kissed her with reverential tenderness, the kiss turning unequivocally lustful. He toppled with her onto the firm double bed, undressing her, exploring her innermost recess until she was physically ready.

He made love with an experience that lasted until she murmured that she had come enough—which was true, orgasm had followed orgasm, yet they were physical quivers, not the haunting, lingering seizures that now existed only in her dreams.