Lone Star (21 page)
Alva stood up. “We gotta go.”
Alyce jumped up.
“You’re making us nervous,” Alva looked to the doorway. “What does this have to do with James Dean?”
“I don’t know.”
“I thought you were going to tell us stories.”
“I did, didn’t I?
They looked at each other. “We don’t know if you like
him the way we do.”
“Of course I like him.”
Alva, panicking, “We don’t know if we believe you.”
Jimmy invited some friends to his new apartment in Sherman Oaks. “It’s not a party. I don’t like parties,” he told me on the phone. “But I got this cool new home.” I had to attend, he insisted. “You got to, Miss Edna. My new place is where I hide away from the world.”
“You’re not exactly hiding if you throw a party.”
“It’s not a party.”
He was making last-minute phone calls. He begged Liz Taylor until she said she’d stop in. She had another obligation. Mercy balked, but Jimmy persisted. I asked him if he’d invited Rock Hudson. “That famous star of
I Was a Shoplifter
?” To my bafflement, Jimmy explained, “One of his early classic roles.” I kept saying no. Nighttime parties, unlike the serene afternoon luncheons and the genteel dinner parties I hosted, were for the young. But Tansi, all a-titter, finally convinced me; and so Mercy picked me up at the hotel and then Tansi at her apartment on Santa Monica Boulevard.
Tansi was waiting at the curb, and with her was Nell Meyers. That surprised me. Well, maybe this party was not so bad an idea after all.
Tansi was dressed in gold pedal-pushers I deemed too young for her; a white puffy blouse, cinched at the waist by a huge gold belt; and she wore a nail polish so loud it called attention to her bony, unlovely fingers.
I smiled at Nell, who didn’t smile back. She fascinated me, this young girl new to Jimmy’s world. Script girl to the stars, the Bohemian with her all-black outfits and her Garboesque makeup, both at odds with her squat, cast-iron stove build and that bobbed Anita Loos hairdo. Had Jimmy invited her? Or had Tansi convinced her to come along, acting as her protector since she’d engineered Nell’s departure from the Studio Club?
“Jimmy said to bring Nell,” Tansi told us. “At first she said no, but I told her she can’t hide away in her room. This is Jimmy’s new
apartment
we’re going to see.”
Nell said nothing, but looked bored, actually yawning and staring out the window.
Tansi talked as though Nell were not there: “Nell is part of the Beatnik crowd that hangs out at some café near Pershing Square.
Nell said nothing. Then, out of the blue, “Jimmy plays the bongos.”
I stared, transfixed. I caught Mercy’s eye. “Bongos?”
“He’s very good.” Mercy was savoring this.
“You’ve heard him?”
“I have,” Nell answered.
I enjoyed the leisurely ride out of L.A. into the twisting lanes and woods of San Fernando Valley. It was a cool night, and the air seemed to hum. Once there, we trudged up a narrow lane to what struck me as a rustic hunter’s lodge, hidden under dense shrubbery, wild eucalyptus, sagging palm trees. I smelled ripe lemons. Jimmy rushed down to greet us, dressed in tight jeans and a white T-shirt, a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve. He gallantly took my elbow, escorting me. “My hideaway,” he said.
Inside, manic and bouncing around the huge room, Jimmy pointed to a balcony, where, he said, he slept on a mattress on the floor, where he could gaze down at a seven-foot rough-stone fireplace that covered one wall, above whose mantel was a gigantic bronzed eagle, grotesque and garish, wings extended, with menacing talons. “I’ve named him Irving,” Jimmy said.
Scattered around were bongos—I feared a concert of discordant, horrible music—piles of hi-fi recordings, cameras, books, tape recorders. On one wall tacked-up bullfighting posters, frayed at the edges. This was a young man’s room. Here and there were ungainly heaps of discarded clothing, underwear, rumpled trousers, all pushed into corners. There seemed to be packs of Chesterfields everywhere, all opened, all missing a few cigarettes, each one with a box of matches inserted under the cellophane. As we walked around the rooms, music blared from speakers suspended high on the walls. Mercy begged him to turn down the volume, which he did reluctantly.
I was drawn to a corner where an easel rested. He was in the middle of executing a lovely pen-and-ink drawing, a young girl’s face, gentle and quiet: an amazingly calm visage in a room designed for chaos. And behind the easel a small, black walnut table, on which, to my abject horror, rested the incomplete (but recognizable) sculpture of my own granite head.
“For God’s sake, Jimmy, throw a sheet over that. Would you have your guests flee into the night?”
He grinned.
The music still bothered me. “What is that?” I asked.
“African chants.”
“Could you turn it off?” Tribal music, insistent, the drums beating mercilessly, the wails floating over reiterated beat; rawness, aching and sensual. Hardly party music. More appropriate for a soundtrack to a Johnny Weissmuller movie. Ape man, and boy. Swinging on vines.
Jimmy slipped on a recording of Doris Day. “For you.” He bowed. Still inappropriate. Sappy, saccharine, painful.
Some guests sat on a threadbare sofa. I recognized Patsy D’Amore, owner of the Villa Capri. Three other men, waiters and kitchen staff, I was told, sat with him, in a line—thin, quiet men who sipped wine and stared straight ahead. They looked as unhappy to be there as I felt. Was this the party? The four men, silent, listening to an ebullient Jimmy, and four women, myself one of them—the venerable novelist.
This was hardly right, downright untoward, this freakish grouping. Nell, as short as a child but gaudy in her
danse macabre
makeup and shellacked Garboesque demeanor, was the sudden cynosure of the leering men, as she sat yoga-fashion on the floor. I wondered what her relationship was with Jimmy. Tansi had said she was not really part of his crowd. He had no interest in her. Yet Jimmy touched her on the shoulder when he walked by her, and she smiled at him. In the shadowy light of the room, she looked exotic, mysterious; and I supposed men might be caught by that allure. When, at one point, she wandered into the small kitchen—“Jimmy has the greatest lemon trees out back”—my suspicions were confirmed. Nell had been there before.
Polly and Tommy walked in. They’d obviously had yet another spat. Or, at least, Polly was the battler. Her face was flushed, the mouth set, the eyes hard. Tommy seemed nonchalant, spirited. He looked like he’d been drinking. I caught a few of Polly’s spat-out words: “I warned you last time.” But I’d come to expect the eternal warfare of those two sad souls. They seemed to crave it, thrive on it; battles royal, then making up, a dynamic that served as glue for an unhappy love story.
I sipped tepid white wine in a jelly glass. That seemed to be all Jimmy had available for his guests. Nothing to nibble on. The music came to an end. Silence in the room.
Sal Mineo appeared on the threshold, looking as if he’d come to the wrong address. Behind him, nudging him into the room, was a stocky man dressed in a lime-green shirt, a man with no neck and a spindletop wooly haircut. I couldn’t remember his name though I’d met him a half-dozen times. An assistant director. Sal smiled at me, and then sat by himself in a corner, looking very much the misbehaved schoolboy, sans dunce cap. He spoke to no one, not even to his director-friend.
Tommy and Polly sat next to each other, up against each other, and didn’t move. I watched the young couple, especially when Jimmy neared: Tommy getting tense, Polly softening her hard eyes. Jimmy whispered something to them and both smiled.
Jimmy got tipsy and climbed up the balcony, where he located and displayed Marcus the Siamese cat, who’d take shelter behind the mattress. “Performance time,” he bellowed. He removed his horn-rimmed glasses. We’re now all a blur, I thought, much the way he wants the world to be—blot out the harsh, linear lines, fog over the faces of people who can get to you. “The greatest poet in the world,” he announced, “was from Indiana.” I rolled my eyes: he couldn’t mean—
Yes, he did, indeed. “James Whitcomb Riley, Hoosier hick like myself, an old geezer who never met me, but he wrote about me.” And then, to my amazement, he recited verbatim Riley’s lines:
I grow so weary, someway, of all things
That love and loving have vouchsafed to me.
Since now all dreamed-of sweets of ecstasy
Am I possessed of: The caress that clings—
The lips that mix with mine with murmurings
No language may interpret, and the free,
Unfettered brood of kisses, hungrily
Feasting on swarms of honeyed blossomings
Of passion’s fullest flower—For yet I miss
The essence that alone makes love divine—
The subtle flavoring no tang of this
Weak wine of melody may here define:—
A something found and lost in the first kiss
A lover ever poured through lips of mine.
When he finished, the room was silent. I glanced at Tansi, who seemed to be weeping. Jimmy himself, hanging precariously over the balcony with a mewing kitten cradled in his arms, seemed suddenly embarrassed. Then, his lips trembling, his eyes closed, his free hand fluttering in the air, he said, “I don’t know why I do things.” He fell back onto the mattress, out of our sight.
We stood there, all of us, stunned, silent, heads inclined toward the balcony. Scraping sounds, gurgling noises, a faint meow, a raucous laugh. He stops time, I thought. He deliberately tilts the earth upward, bending the axis, dislocating longitude. In the stillness I could hear Tansi’s labored breathing, a cigarette smoker’s whistling squeak.
Suddenly, all our inclined heads swiveled as one to the doorway where Liz Taylor stood, bathed in the shrill honey-yellow glare of the outside light; just stood there, and in that moment seemed to take possession of the room. A statue, elegant really. And so dangerously perfumed and lipsticked and coifed that the line of dumbstruck men, positioned on the sofa, seemed frozen in a kind of saliva-drooling awe. Really, I mused, for God’s sake. She wore a satiny black cocktail dress, clinging, sequined, with a diamond necklace and on that wrist a diamond bracelet. Jack Warner’s bauble.
Behind her stood two paper-doll cutouts, an interchangeable young man and young woman, both in tweedy suits and horned-rimmed eyeglasses.
She spoke into the silence. “Where’s Jimmy?”
From the balcony Jimmy, unseen, cried, “Liz, you came to my party.”
Liz didn’t know where to look. “I told you I would.” A voice that was curiously Southern in texture, lilting, sweet.
Liz looked around and caught my eye. She nodded. But her look swept the room, and her eyes narrowed. “Jimmy, you lied to me.”
A pause. Jimmy’s drunken titter. “I lie to everyone. It’s my job.”
Liz fumed. “You said everyone from
Giant
would be here. George and Chill Wills…and…” She nodded over her shoulder. “I had them drive me here, knowing I’d be late for a house party an hour from here…” Her face closed up, furious, tears in her eyes. “Why do you do these things?” She drew her lips into a tight line.
At that moment one of the men on the sofa—one of the waiters from the Villa Capri—stood, dizzy with drink, emboldened, and sputtered, “Miss Taylor, I…” Suddenly, the room seemed to unloosen, relax. Mercy turned to me, Tansi took a step forward, Tommy and Polly walked away from each other. But it was all jerky, unsure movement, like a mechanical toy that wanted oil. It clearly alarmed Liz who, glaring one last time at the now-silent balcony, turned and fled the house, leaving a cloud of gardenia perfume that covered us like bedroom fantasy.
Silence. Then Tansi sputtered, “Well…”
Mercy whispered, “I love a woman who knows how to enter a room.”
I whispered back, “Anyone can enter a room, Mercy. The secret is knowing that when you leave that room, you take all the oxygen with you.”
No one moved. Jimmy clamored down and seemed surprised people were still there. “Was Liz actually here?” No one answered him.
I faced Mercy. “When can we leave?”
Tommy belched, made a drunken apology. He ricocheted his way to the bathroom, headed first in the wrong direction. So he’d never been there, I realized. On his way back, he carried a black-and-white photograph in a gold-gilt frame. Face flushed, hands shaking, he waved the photograph at Jimmy.
“What?” asked Jimmy.
“Why do you have this picture of you and Max Kohl on your wall?”
Jimmy squinted, pushed his glasses up his nose. “I dunno. At some bike race,” he mumbled. “Like we raced in that competition outside of Salinas.” It was a snapshot of Jimmy and Max, both on motorcycles, both staring into the camera with insolent, hardened glares, looking like twins in worn leather jackets. “It’s me on my bike. It ain’t nothing.” He shrugged.
Tommy shook. “I don’t see any pictures of high-school chums here, Jimmy.” Sarcastic, sloppy. “Just that creep who scares everybody that bumps into him.” Polly, holding his forearm, her nails into his sleeve, kept whispering, “Enough, for God’s sake. Do you
know
how you’re coming off?”
Quietly, almost to himself, Jimmy muttered, “Maybe because we never were high-school buddies.”
Then Jimmy left the party. He simply did a half-bow, almost regal, and walked out his front door and didn’t return. Tansi joined me and Mercy, so close I could smell her perfume.
“Mercy,” I said, “let’s leave.”
Tommy was confessional now, hiccoughing his way through forbidden tales. “Max Kohl,” he kept yelling, louder and louder. He spun tales of Jimmy’s dark, clandestine life, a life squandered in the shadows of Hollywood valleys and hills. Polly couldn’t shut him up, and I didn’t want him to. Something was being said here. Tommy faced me. “You know why Carisa died?” He paused, looking from me to Tansi to Mercy. “It wasn’t the money or even that baby. That baby could have been a dozen different guys’ baby. Jimmy never
slept
with her, you know. The real reason was that she was going to expose his filthy sex life. That’s why, I’m telling you.” He went on. “It was Josh and Carisa who plotted revenge. Jimmy threatened Carisa. He got scared. Don’t forget Fatty Arbuckle, for Christ’s sake. Scandal’s gonna kill him.”
I broke into the rambling speech. “So you’re saying Jimmy killed Carisa?”
Tommy, blurry eyed, “I ain’t saying nothing. About
that
. I’m saying that Jimmy shouldn’t have a picture of him and that…that…man Max on his wall. It’s not…”
