L.A.WOMAN (13 page)

“Me?” I said, only I was too scared to come out of the bathroom till dusk, and now here he was and this time, thank God, I was depraved.

Ed Lakey at twenty-eight looked just like the dreamboat he had been when he went to Hollywood High—he was six feet two with this straight brown hair and this skin which looked like it would never tan because it was too bloodless—or more like his blood didn't have any red in it—and when he did get tan, it was sort of a pewter shade—as though he were really silver all the way through—but this only made him look scary or scarier, and a thing like that went a long way in Hollywood. Especially if you looked like the boy next door otherwise.

He was holding a
Herald Express
in his hands rolled up like a baseball bat when he saw me and as he recognized me and said, “I waited but you stood me up!”

“Let's have vodka gimlets,” I suggested.

“It's ten
A.M
.” He winced.

“What are you looking at me like that for?”

“Have you done any movies?” he asked.

“Don't tell me you're a producer,” I said, “I'm
from
Hollywood, remember? Besides, I like you already.”

“But I am a producer,” he said.

“Couldn't we have vodka gimlets?”

“Why don't you meet me tomorrow,” he said, “for dinner.”

“Why not lunch? Now?”

“Because,” he said, “I'm leaving for Rome in an hour.”

“Rome?” I asked. “But what about
us?”

“We'll have dinner here,” he said.

He wrote on a card and handed it to me with the words Re Degli Amici scrawled on it as the restaurant in Rome and an official title of Executive Producer for some movie company in Cine Città—and he expected me to drop everything I was doing and go.

“What do I tell my mother?” I asked.

“Tell her I'm going to make you a star,” he explained, waving his newspaper at any objections.

“Are you?”

“Why do you think I wanted you to meet me at Snow White's?” he asked, puzzled.

“For pleasure,” I replied, “so I didn't come.”

“Don't you want to be in the movies?” He frowned like it was frivolous to let love enter your mind when you could work all day instead.

“Do you give head?”

“Do I what?”

“Because otherwise what fun is it?”

(Nobody could ever accuse me of letting my career ambitions interfere with true values.)

“You're obviously not serious,” he sighed, rising to his feet and walking to the Boulevard Raspail ready to make someone else a star. But then he came back and said, “You're the one ingenue who looks French enough I've seen in two weeks here.”

“Me? They think I'm German,” I said.

He lifted me to my feet in one motion, kissing me until Old Spice from his after shave came out of my toes like rainbows and I knew head was the least of my problems. It was all I could do to keep my pants on in broad daylight as it was.

“I've always wanted a vodka gimlet,” I said. “Couldn't we just have one before we're too old?”

“Maybe some coffee,” he said, looking at his watch.

“What's Cine Città like?”

“You're not going to stand me up again, are you?” he asked.

“Now?” I asked.

Since
La Dolce Vita
had come out in 1959 and it was 1961, it was not that great a time for eighteen-year-old girls to ask their mother if they could go to Rome, but after I sobbed for five days on the phone to Germany, my mother said, “Molly is there in case you get into any serious trouble.”

(So naturally I never got caught.)

By the end of twenty-two hours on the train from Parigi to Roma, I was wondering if Ed was worth an entire continent without one burrito, but when I saw him I forgot everything but vodka gimlets.

We drove through Rome in this Alfa (red) from some year or other—a convertible—and the flying statues filled the sky every time we turned a corner except in Perioli where Ed lived which was too American for flying statues.

And except for Cine Città which did not look like San Juan Capistrano (as I had pictured it beforehand) but more like we were lost—which I was sure we were the first time I saw it and Ed stopped, because it looked like a deserted army barracks. Only Ed hadn't been asking directions, he was actually going in.

But it was fun that first day, getting ready for a screen test—dressed up like the Winged Victory (only with a head) and all made up to be a French ingenue—and I was perfectly sure I could float right into the movies—however for the next five hours all I did was sit getting dusty while Ed said I was being “lit.”

“But why don't they just
make
the cameras go and to hell with the light,” I exclaimed.

“Because,” he said, “this has to be right.”

Well, if you asked me, if a person didn't look cute enough to be a movie star without electricians getting their two cents in, the game wasn't worth the candle—only after about a week, when I realized that for every scene these same men took two days to figure out the lights—and it wasn't just me—I began to wonder just what difference lights made that kept rearing its endless interruptions so you couldn't just shoot—you had to come back tomorrow and hope they'd gotten it straightened out. It fascinated me that a person as obsessed as Ed Lakey could wait while the sands of time ran by for some Austrian light fixture coming over the Alps by truck.

In fact, how two such conflicting obsessions as ours could exist in the same line of work I never knew: Ed's, totally committed to a Movie Monk existence, finding out nothing unless it pertained to movies, reading newspapers only for situations which “might make a movie,” looking at girls with that peculiar frame of values and judging them on whether or not they'd stay up all week to finish a movie and were On the Team, or whether they'd insist there was more to life than being rich, famous and immortal; and mine, which was to join the Navy and see the world. I mean, all I really wanted to know was whether I
could
be a movie star—not
be
one.

In the meantime, I lived in Rome where the statues flew in the air like clouds in this
pensione
called the Pensione Angelo where girls like me—starlets—and guys from Boston with guitars stayed and smoked Rothmans all day and walked over to the Rosati Bar every night to drink Campari and soda and where men told me about the reasons they had to leave New York and how they “bought” the Italian telephone operators for fifty dollars a month so they could make thousands of dollars' worth of calls a month. After all, Rome had been depraved for two thousand years and it wasn't
about to slow down just because of the movie business—although if it hadn't had the flying statues, it might have made me homesick for Schwab's.

Ed did make me a star—or at least a star
let
—since although I actually was in movies, I didn't make the kind they paid stars to be in, unless they were over or under the hill (under was what I was).

Ed and I lived together the first week I was there and I was cured of ever wanting to live with him again and I had a pretty good idea that I was right when I was little to think that except for my parents, no two adults of the opposite sex should ever do anything but go for rides in the limo to the country with caviar and champagne, maybe for as long as a weekend perhaps (“There's a Small Hotel” made a big impression on me), but any longer than three days and it was sure to be curtains. The idea that “children needed a father” seemed to be what drove people to doing more than a weekend but, in the first place, who needed children if they were going to cramp your style by needing a father?

Of course, there were times I went to visit friends in the hospital in Rome who had hepatitis or broke their leg (which was practically the only way anybody learned Italian, since unless you got into an accident or were real sick, you hardly ever got into a situation where speaking Italian was a matter of life and death) and suddenly the most footloose vagabonds were totally changed into pillars of the community. Having been taken care of by some girl nobody ever imagined them with overnight, they'd move in with her, get married, and start saying things like “Giuseppa, our maid, is such a jewel.”

But if you ask me, getting hepatitis was just about the only way I'd have been scared enough to learn Italian much less ever live back with Ed no matter how rotten my
pensione
was when it rained. And no matter how he pleaded it was what people in love should do.

The only time I looked at a newspaper in Rome was that summer Marilyn Monroe died all by herself in Hollywood when suddenly she became an indelible missing person on the cover of every newspaper and magazine in the world. It was half my lifetime ago since I'd seen her when I was ten cutting through the smog, but I'd been waiting for her to show up somehow again all that time and suddenly, she just stopped in her frame and her images went on without her. My mother later read a piece somewhere about how Monroe lived in a bungalow on the grounds of the old man, Joe Schenck, who was head of Fox—who'd had sheep's or goat's testicle shots in order to have sex and whom she kept waiting for as long as she could while she stayed in bed with some other guy so the shot would wear off. My mother told me that when she was married to Pietro her friend Billie took her to meet Schenck in this penthouse overlooking the Strip and that he asked Billie to encourage my mother to come back. And later, when getting into the studio orchestra at Fox was impossible because the head contractor was a Stalinist, an old man my mother knew who was a Spanish teacher told her, “You know Schenck? And you don't make him give Mort a job—
go
right over there,” which my mother did. “The first few times I went just to show him my drawings but he wasn't interested in them, only me, so finally I asked him if he would please give my husband a contract. And three days later he called me up and said he had. And the next time I went to see him, they kept me waiting for twenty minutes in the office—which I read was how long Marilyn said it took for those shots to work—and when I came in, I knew something embarrassing was going on so I told him I was late for an appointment and left, but your father's contract was never rescinded—and he worked there for twenty years.” (“What are tits for,” I said to myself, “if not to look promising during business negotiations?”) But the headlines in Italy only said M
ARILYN È
M
ORTA.

“I could have saved her,” Ed said bleakly.

“Oh, everybody thinks that,” I said.

“But
I
could have,” he insisted—and I had a feeling he was right. All Ed ever liked to do was flirt and work and he could do them both at once, so maybe he could have saved her.

“Well, I wish you had,” I said.

“I wasn't there,” he said.

“Nobody was,” I said.

We drove to Milan that day and Ed kept sighing, “But she was on the team.”

(To Ed, the world came in two parts: either you were on the team or not, and if you were on Ed's team, it meant that you had his undying loyalty so that he would always get you parts in films he cast. “Even,” an amazed actor once remarked, “when he doesn't
have
to remember you, he still does.”)

(One night before the Academy Awards Ed told me that if he got it he was going to say, “Well, the team did great this year and if we work real hard, barring accidents, we'll take it again next year.” But he chickened out when he got the actual Oscar and just made the “I want to thank everybody” speech they all did.)

However, as much as loyalty seemed sexy to me and as much as Ed Lakey
was
sexy not just to me but to girls before he told them he was a producer when they simply assumed he was trying to pick them up, by the end of the second year I still couldn't bring myself to stay longer than overnight at Ed's or move in.

“But it's my birthday,” Ed told me, “and besides, your floor is under water.”

“Just when it rains,” I said (although it rained six months a year).

Every so often I would have to go over to the Cravens' and deliver a Christmas present or something for my mother.
After Mitchell was blacklisted and couldn't get work in Hollywood he was teaching in the American School in Rome which wasn't what he did best since he was really a wonderful actor—but the rest of the time I simply blocked them out and avoided that part of Old Rome where I thought I might run into Molly. Shelly was at Berkeley (where I once saw her the time we went to visit Estelle) but if the Cravens had had their way, she would have gone to Smith or Radcliffe and been educated enough for motherhood like everybody from Connecticut was in those days. But usually I forgot to ask my mother how she was since I blocked Shelly out too.

It was the Christmas when Ed had gotten me on the covers of
Epoca
and
Oggi
(for this horrible big-deal B movie promotion we were doing), plus any other stray movie magazine in either four-color or black and white that he could talk into it.

It was freezing rain outside when I arrived at Molly's in person (which my mother insisted upon, otherwise she turned into a snake), and I rang the bell as I shivered under my umbrella.

“Well hello, Sophie Lubin,” Molly said, opening the door to her palazzo apartment (a cheap palazzo).

“Merry Christmas,” I said as best I could. (The funny thing was, I was glad to see her.)

“Oh, are you coming in?”

“Well, I . . .” I came in, otherwise you had to shout.

“I'd offer you a cookie, but I don't want you to get warm or you'll just catch cold because you have to leave right away.”

“Here's your presents,” I said.

“Put them there, they're wet, don't set them down where they'll stain,” she said.