Suspicious Circumstances (5 page)

‘Oh, Nickie, I suppose I’ve got to now.’ She looked agonized. ‘I always wanted to anyway because you and I are as one, but the Old Girl made me swear not to breathe a word.’

‘Needless to say. You should have heard her just now lying herself blue in the face.’

‘Now, Nickie,’ said Pam, inevitably standing up for Mother. ‘You know it isn’t lying with the Old Girl. She’s the most wonderful woman in the world. It’s just that she didn’t want you to be worried when there wasn’t any need. But, my dear, if you knew what really happened — it was ghastly, absolutely ghastly.’

I leaned forward on the voodoo drum, which wobbled precariously.

‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Tell me it all from the beginning.’

And this is what happened on the night of the plunge. At least, it’s what I gathered from Pam’s somewhat chaotic description.

The first ‘ghastly’ thing, according to Pam, was Ronnie’s passion for Mother. Apparently, until Operation La Mann, Ronnie’s idea of womanhood had been restricted to the Normas and the little starlets, and the shock of being exposed to Mother in all her selfless magnificence was far too much for him. After Sylvia La Mann had finally been hurled into Outer Darkness, Ronnie just tagged around after Mother looking like a besotted St Bernard, and what made it even more ‘ghastly’ was that Mother refused to notice she was being worshipped. Deep in her second crusade, Operation Norma, she went serenely on being Norma’s oldest and dearest friend, arranging little intimate get-togethers, for the three of them so that Norma and Ronnie could ‘find each other’ again and then, on top of it all, forcing Ronnie to give Norma the Ninon de Lenclos role.

He hated the idea, of course. Addled with passion though he was, he still had enough sense to realize that Norma playing Ninon de Lenclos was the quickest method ever devised for turning six million dollars into dross. But Mother plugged on and on until, one day about two weeks after I’d left for Paris, she swept triumphantly home to Pam with the great news. Norma was to play Ninon. She would renounce the bottle; she would reduce; she would take Seventeenth-Century French Deportment lessons from a divine little Hungarian whom Mother had found in Santa Monica. They would start shooting in six weeks’ time.

‘Think, Pam. All that trouble with Sylvia turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Now dear Norma has the chance of a whole new career.’

Poor Pam, whose nerve-ends by then were raw and bleeding, snapped, ‘Wouldn’t it be more constructive for a change to think about a whole new brilliant career for the One, the Only, the Incomparable Anny Rood?’

And, exasperation giving her courage, she poured out the whole truth of our financial status. This didn’t daunt Mother at all. She merely drifted to the piano and played a tune with one finger — probably the terrible bit of Grieg she always played.

‘Dear Pam, there’ll be plenty of time to think about ourselves when we’re quite, quite sure that Ronnie and Norma are happy again.’

After that, she refused to see Ronnie for almost a week, although he was calling her every five minutes. ‘My job is done, Pam dear,’ she said, but, instead of looking for work, she just barged around on another spree of good deeds. First, she flew to Las Vegas to be godmother to the baby of an immensely important gangster called Steve Adriano who doted on her and owned half Las Vegas. After that, she hooked up with Billy Croft, the boy genius of the musical-comedy world, and took a busload of Mexican orphans to the San Diego zoo, where she was photographed on a camel with the smallest and most orphaned orphan perched precariously on the hump in front of her.

It was excruciating for Pam, who never for a moment forgot we were teetering on the lip of the bankruptcy crater.

And then — four days ago — Pam and Mother were in Mother’s bedroom one evening answering fan mail when Delight switched Ronnie’s call through to them. Mother took it.

‘Yes?’ she said. ‘What, dear? … No, no, no. I’ve never heard anything so outrageous … What? No, no, of course I wouldn’t dream of it. No, wait. Don’t do anything until I come. We’ll all come. ... They’re out? Well, I’ll make supper. She’s got to have some supper. Do you have cheese? … Good, good … No, dear, I said, no, no.’

She put down the receiver.

‘Pam darling, we’re all going to Ronnie’s for supper. His help is out and I’ll make a divine fondue. All of us. You, me, Uncle Hans, Gino.’

Pam knew it was a crisis because of the divine fondue. When Mother got her Swiss Hausfrau jag on it always boded no good.

So she said, ‘What’s happened?’

And Mother, looking as if Danny Boy was being played very softly on a Hammond organ, said, ‘Norma’s drinking again. Think of it. With everything
réglé
for her new career, drunk! Ronnie says She’s swollen up in the face. Ronnie says she looks like a hoot-owl. Ronnie says that even I would have to agree that Ninon de Lenclos can’t be played by a hoot-owl. And…’ She paused. ‘This is the worst part. You know how emotional he is. He’s in such a rage that he says he’s through with her, through as a man and through as a husband and through as a producer. She’s all yours, Anny, he said. You can present her to the San Diego Zoo as the only sweatered hoot-owl in captivity. And furthermore…’ Here, at her airiest, she picked up one of Pam’s replies to a fan letter … ‘he begs me, he beseeches me to play Ninon instead.’

Pam, of course, was in a transport of delight. ‘How marvelous! All our troubles are over.’

But her heart sank when she looked at Mother because Mother was all lovely compassionate friendship and reproach. ‘Darling Pam, you don’t imagine I accepted. Ninon is dear Norma’s one chance for a new life. I would no more snatch the part from her than I would snatch a crust from an orphan.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Pam, ‘all you’d do with an orphan is to give it a ride on a camel.’

Mother rose above that. ‘At least Ronnie hasn’t told her yet. So she need never know. We must go, all of us, and make her realize how self-destructive this gin habit is. We must go, all of us, and make Ronnie see once again where his duty lies.’

So there it was. By six o'clock they were all, including Tray, jammed into the Mercedes and hurtling off to save poor Norma from the self-destructive gin habit.

It was a fiasco from the start. Norma, deep in the gin habit, was the one who happened to open the door. Indeed, said Pam, she was swollen in the face and everywhere else too. She stood weaving in the front hall by a huge Juan Gris which Ronnie had just bought, with the huge staircase winding up behind her as if at any minute Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in top hats were going to swirl down it doing the Piccolino.

And she said, ‘Why, look who’s here. The Legend. Hi, oldest and dearest legend — do me a favor, will you? Take your familiars, go borrow a swimming-pool — if there’s anyone left in Hollywood who’ll lend you anything, which I doubt — and go jump in it.’

Mother, being Mother, just beamed and tried to enfold her in a fond embrace. Ronnie, looking distraught, hurried up then.

‘Norma,’ he said. ‘I told you to go to bed.’

‘Bed!’ said Norma. ‘Off hand, I’d have thought that was about the last place in the world you’d want to find me. Beds are for the Who-Is-Sylvia-What-Is-She’s of this world and for the Little Anny Roodys.’

And then she fell flat on her face and passed out.

Ronnie and Gino carried her upstairs and laid her out on a bed. Then they all, including the cheese, went down to the pool house because Mother preferred the chafing dish down there. The atmosphere, apparently, was highly charged to say the least of it, Uncle Hans and Gino and Pam being hangdog, Ronnie rather high himself and in a tizzy, torn between hopeless passion for Mother and rage with Norma, while Mother, in an apron with Scotties all over it, bustled in and out of the kitchen, chattering, being gay, enlisting aid, making charm and saying, ‘Dearest Norma, she’ll be all right again the moment she gets some food inside her.’

Pam said she found herself thinking of Norma’s stomach with all the gin and the melted cheese writhing together inside and it gave her the screaming mimis.

After about an hour of it, Ronnie could stand it no longer. ‘Anny,’ he said, ‘listen to me. You’ve got to let me get rid of her. She can’t play Ninon de Lenclos. Ninon de Lenclos is a historical monument in France. If Norma plays Ninon de Lenclos, the French will declare war on us five minutes after the premiere. Anny, please, please, Anny, you play it. I’ll pay you anything. The biggest salary you’ve ever got, plus a percentage. Anny…’

But Mother just bustled and did fatal things with her eyelashes, raising and lowering them like Venetian blinds, and patted his shoulder.

‘No, Ronnie darling, poor Norma is your wife and my friend. We must help her. She’s unhappy, insecure. It’s up to us,’ etcetera.

And Ronnie groaned and obviously he could hardly bear it because the eyelashes were doing such things to him and he wished he was dead.

It was about eight-thirty when finally Mother came out of the kitchen again and said, ‘Pam darling, it’s all ready. Run up to the house and get Norma. She’s had her little nap by now.’

Pam was, of course, terrified at the prospect of getting Norma and, as it happened, she didn’t have to because she showed up then. She was still weaving, apparently, but she was a little more with it. She made it past the edge of the pool and peered at them all under hooded, hoot-owl lids. Then she gave a terrible melodramatic sniff and clutched her hand against her sweater.

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘what is this divinely familiar fragrance? Can it be that the Legend is delighting us with yet another of the inimitable brews from her old Swiss cauldron? A tangy, zestful, cheesy tit-bit guaranteed to corrode the intestines of even a William Tell? Why don’t you yodel, darling, too, and garland your hair with sprays of edelweiss?’

Norma’s flow of invective was really her strongest point and only Mother could have gone on from there. But she did, of course, and they all got dainty striped napkins and salads and relishes and hot bread. Then she brought out the fondue in the huge steaming copper chafing dish and personally scooped out the first portion and carried it over to Norma.

‘Here, Norma dear, you must keep up your strength. You’ve got your career to consider now.’

And Norma looked at the plate of fondue and then looked at Mother. ‘Thank you, darling,’ she said, ‘but if I want to drop dead, I’ll do it my own way. Being a cooking fatality doesn’t appeal to me.’

And then, with an awful lurch, she got out of the Finnish chair she’d slumped into, swung at the plate of fondue with her hand and sent it splashing all over the blue and white Puebla tiles where Tray, who apparently had been surprisingly good up till then and should have known better, started lapping it up. By then, Pam said, she wasn’t a hoot-owl any more, she was one of those terrifying owls with ears which swoop by night on their prey.

‘Okay,’ she said and she flourished an arm like Mark Antony inflaming the Plebs in the Forum, ‘The time has come to make a speech. The time, the place — and the girl, if indeed she can be called a girl.’

Ronnie jumped up and shouted, ‘Norma.’

She ignored him and repeated, ‘The time has come for a speech. Speech. I have a philandering husband. Okay. He philanders from coast to coast, even stooping so low as to philander with a British-type so-called actress by the name of Sylvia La Mann, which is philandering more or less at its crummiest level. Okay. For all I care, he can continue to philander with almost anything in and out of skirts. But at one point I draw the line. Here is my line. I will not have my husband philandering with the oldest living motion-picture actress next to Clara Kimball Young and furthermore I will not have the oldest living motion-picture actress coo over me and be a spotless angel and nuzzle me with little friendly nudges and stuff me with lethal Swiss goodies out of the honeyed sweetness of her heart when all the time this oldest living motion-picture actress, be she Bulgarian, Rumanian, Swiss or Eskimo, is sneakily, schemingly, underhandedly, Swissishly trying to steal my husband, who is a bum anyway, who is …’ She swayed … ‘who is furthermore…’

They had all been sitting, paralyzed, looking at her. Then suddenly Ronnie snapped. Ronnie, who was wildly temperamental, was always snapping. He clutched at his hair and screamed.

‘Enough. I won’t. I won’t. I won’t. I’ve had enough. I won’t.’ He flung out his finger at Norma. ‘Consider yourself fired as Ninon de Lenclos; consider yourself divorced as a wife; consider yourself, as far as I am concerned, the last woman on earth.’

He swung around to Mother then. ‘Anny, dearest Anny, don’t pay any attention to this sweatered serpent, this oomph-owl. Take the part, I beg you, I implore you, I beseech you — take the part.’

And then, to Pam’s utter astonishment, Mother made the switcheroo of all time. Pam thought it was the insult to the fondue that did it, because Mother had a very Swiss feeling about her fondues. If even Mr de Mille were to criticize them, he’d be her enemy for life. In any case, she just stood looking at Ronnie, then very slowly she turned on Norma a long, reproachful glance.

‘I have tried,’ she said. ‘As heaven is my witness, I have tried for old time’s sake to be a good friend to you, Norma Delanay. But now at last I realize there is no one — no one in the world — who can help you. I wash my hands.’

She turned back to Ronnie then, doing the washing-of-hands bit. ‘very well, Ronnie dear. This is all my fault. I urged you to do this for Norma against your better judgment. I see now that I was wrong. And the least I can do, to show you how truly sorry I am, is to take the part.’

Pam’s hopes surged up all over again, but they subsided almost instantly because of Norma. Giving her greatest interpretation to date of the Double-Crested Long-Eared Screech Owl, she lurched towards Mother and then stopped dead.

‘So,’ she said. ‘Not only my husband but my part. You steal not only my husband but my part. You steal…’

And Ronnie broke in, shouting, ‘Shut up. Terrible woman, you’re out, out, out, ultimately out. Shut up.’

And Norma got immensely grand then, Pam said. She clutched for the pearls around her sweater, missed them and then got them and elegantly crooked her little finger through them.