An Evening of Long Goodbyes (31 page)

If you looked at her life from start to finish, it seemed clear that her marriage to Oleg Cassini was the event that set loose all the other catastrophes that befell her – the initial transgression that woke the Furies until then lying dormant at the edges of her life. Marrying him, in fact, was about the only rebellious thing she ever did. She had been reared to be a nice girl, and she had always done exactly what she was told – living frugally with her mother in Hollywood, sending her pay cheques back to the company her father had set up, catching hell from him for any extravagance: and then Cassini came along.

Oleg Cassini was Russian, the son of a Countess who had fled to America after the defeat of the White Army; he was also a designer and a playboy and had not been to Yale, and as such could not have been further away from what Gene’s parents thought of as a suitable match if they had sat down and planned it. They would not countenance the romance. Gene’s father said that if she married Cassini he would have her declared mentally instable. The studios concurred: and whatever about her parents, in those days no one defied the studios. They had made you, and they could destroy you just as easily. But Gene was in love.

She thought that once they were married, and there was no longer anything anyone could do about it, things might die down; so, travelling in disguise, she and Cassini eloped to Las Vegas. On the night of their wedding Gene came back to Los Angeles, having agreed with Oleg, in the interests of diplomacy, to spend it apart: only to find that her mother had already fired the servants and flown home to New York City. And worse was to come.

Parents and studio now joined forces. Paramount fired Cassini and Gene’s studio, Fox, refused to take him on. Her parents, meanwhile, complained to the press that Cassini had taken advantage of their daughter, and tried to have the marriage annulled. Suddenly the newlyweds found themselves blacklisted by Hollywood society, deserted by their friends. Cassini was still out of work; Gene, on the other hand, was working constantly, and they saw each other increasingly rarely. As the pressure began to tell, her father and mother started calling her up at all hours, trying to persuade her to leave him. In the midst of all this, during the shooting of
Heaven Can Wait,
Gene discovered she was pregnant; and America entered the Second World War.

After so much personal turmoil, the war must have seemed something of a reprieve. Old differences were set aside; the nation busied itself ‘pitching in’. Gallant Cassini joined the cavalry; Gene, like most of the stars, took part in bond drives to raise money for the war effort. She toured around the country, speaking at factories and outdoor rallies. A week before she went down to Kansas, where Cassini’s division was stationed, she appeared at the Hollywood Canteen to entertain the marines. A few days later she was diagnosed with German measles.

She had kept quiet about her condition – the studio would suspend an actress’s salary if she became pregnant on their time. In 1943, the connection had not yet been made between German measles in early pregnancy and brain damage in very young children. Gene gave birth prematurely in October to a baby girl, weighing two and a half pounds. She named her child Daria.

It was a year later that the newspapers picked up on the story of the rubella epidemic in Australia that had apparently produced a generation of severely retarded infants, and Gene began to admit that her baby might not just be a late developer, but was having serious problems. Specialists were called out at great expense (paid for by Gene’s old flame Howard Hughes, then beginning his own retreat from the world after his disfiguring plane crash). They all said the same thing. The damage had already been done, while the baby was still in the womb, and it could not be undone. The best thing for everyone now would be for the child to be put in an institution.

Gene was tormented by guilt and confusion. Hadn’t she always tried to be good? Hadn’t she always done what people asked? What had she done to bring this catastrophe down on top of her and those she loved? She resisted as long as she could; but she was twenty-four years old and after everything that had happened the pressure was too much. Daria was put in a home, where she would remain for the rest of her life with the mind of a nineteen-month-old infant.

One quiet Sunday years later, at a tennis party in LA, Gene happened to be approached by a fan. This young woman was an ex-marine; she said she had met Gene before, at a show in the Hollywood Canteen during the war. ‘Did you happen to catch German measles that night?’ the woman asked. Gene said that she did, as a matter of fact. The woman laughed and said the whole camp had come down with German measles, but that she had broken quarantine, to sneak out and meet her favourite star.

Anyone else would have screamed, or punched her; but Gene, who had been reared to be nice, merely smiled and turned away.

It seemed to me that after that her films became a kind of refuge for her. Not the work, nor the scripts, but the movies themselves: as the betrayals mounted up, as the birth of their child achieved what the combined forces of parents and studio could not and her marriage to Cassini slowly fell apart, it seemed to me that the movies became places where she could hide herself, where she could disappear. Take, for example,
The Ghost and Mrs Muir
, in which she plays a widow who falls for the ghost that haunts the cottage she has moved into. The ghost, played by Rex Harrison, first catches her eye in the form of a portrait in the living room – which seems a neat flip of what happens in
Laura
, where the cop falls in love with the painting of Gene, who has been murdered. People falling for ghosts, people falling for paintings, in more and more of her movies I found this secret tendency elaborated: a tendency for the movies to create spaces for her within them, interstitial spaces of one kind or another – as if, although she couldn’t make the movies hers, she had elicited a secret pact whereby she could escape into them and exist away from life, untouchably, as an image; as if in here, after all, she found her true domain – the illusory, the shadowy, the in-between –

‘Charlie, this is like the fuckin most borin film I’ve ever seen in me life.’

– although much of this was lost on others –

‘Yeah, Charlie, and it’s time for
Hollyoaks
.’

‘Charlie, can you not just let us watch
Hollyoaks
and then you can watch the rest of this thing?’

‘Charlie, we know you can hear us so like why aren’t you sayin anything? Charlie?’

‘Blast it – because I know that once
Hollyoaks
is over you’ll want to watch
Streetmate
, and then
Robot
Wars and then that unconscionable
Dawson’s Creek
…’

‘I don’t watch
Dawson’s Creek
, Charlie.’

‘Well, you were certainly doing a good impression of it the other night. Confound it, can’t you just sit still for half an hour and then I’ll quite happily –’

‘I’d give her one, wouldn’t you, Frankie? Charlie, would you give her –’

‘Look, you scoundrels,’ rising apoplectically to my feet with the rolled-up television guide as though shooing a pack of mangy street dogs, ‘hang it, can’t you just leave me in peace for a few minutes more and then I swear to you I will return your deuced
television
!’

‘All right, all right… fuck’s
sake
…’ The pair of them slunk away to the kitchen, only to strike up from there a few moments later:

‘Hang it, Droyd, I wish to the devil you’d roll up an oul joint there.’

‘Confound it, Frankie, where’s me deuced Rizlas?’

And then five minutes after that:

‘Frankie?’

‘Yeah?’

‘D’you ever see your reflection in a spoon, like, and just for a second you think, “Ah fuck, I’m upside-down?”’

‘Yeah, o’course.’

‘Fuckin scary, isn’t it?’

There was only so much insulation any film could give one, and tonight was the night I reached the end of my tether; I almost heard the snap. As if in a trance I rose from the couch and headed for the kitchen, and it’s quite possible that something terrible might have happened if I hadn’t been diverted by the telephone.

‘Yes, what?
Oh
…’

It was Gemma Coffey from Sirius Recruitment. She had called to offer me a job.

For a moment I was paralysed. Could it really be true? Out of the blue like this? Had the time come at last for me to step up to bat, to play my part in –

‘Charles?’ she said.

‘I’m here,’ I said faintly.

‘Well, can you do it?’

I assured her that I could; I added how grateful I was to her for remembering me out of the millions that came to her door, and that I wanted her to know I
believed
in this job, whatever it was, and would do my level best to help make the dream come true –

She said Good, but all that wasn’t so important with this particular job. ‘It’s only a temporary position, and it’s not quite as glamorous as the ones we discussed. It’s factory work, basically. You don’t have a problem with factory work, do you, Charles?’

‘It’s not a
jar
factory, is it?’ I said, there being only so many ironical twists I was willing to put up with in my life.

Gemma said that it wasn’t, it was a bread factory in Cherry Orchard. I said that in that case, I didn’t have a problem, and that I was just happy to be a part of the Sirius Recruitment team. Gemma sounded pleased, though she pointed out that technically I would be employed not by Sirius Recruitment but by its sister company, Pobolny Arbitwo Recruitment. ‘But that’s not important,’ she said. ‘The important thing is that I’m not going to forget about you out there, Charles. Come through for me and I’m going to find something really special for you.’

I told her she could count on me. She said she knew. She asked if by any chance I spoke Latvian. I said I didn’t. She said it didn’t matter. She gave me an address, the bus route to take, and a name to report to – Mr Appleseed – then we thanked each other and said goodbye.

To think that only a moment ago I had been close to throwing in the towel! Now, as if someone had waved a magic wand, my problems had disappeared; I had been lifted out of the doldrums and my sails filled with wind again.

I forgot all about having it out with Frank and Droyd. Instead, I stood in the living room, stroking my chin and smiling to myself as the good news sank in.
Well I’ll be
, I thought,
the system works
; and Gene’s eye twinkled at me from across the room where she waited, frozen mid-scold, with the ghost.

The following morning, while it was still dark, I set off for my first day of work. I travelled on a bus full of surly men who looked disdainfully at my pristine blue dungarees – a gift from Mother’s poisonous maiden aunt – to Cherry Orchard, a dismal slum which did a passable impression of the middle of nowhere. At first I thought it rather a lark that an industrial park should share the name of Bel’s favourite Chekhov play: however, as with most aspects of my job at Mr Dough, it stopped being funny almost immediately.

When Gemma had told me that I would be working in a bread factory, I had taken it for a slip of the tongue: for everyone knew that bread was made not in factories but in bakeries, by red-cheeked men in tall hats. But I quickly learned that the mistake was mine, because a factory it undeniably was. Everywhere one looked men toiled like pygmies in the mighty shadows of the choppers and slicers, or stood on stepladders, as in some industrialized Hieronymus Bosch painting, stirring with oversized ladles at huge smoking vats. Machinery clanked and moaned; the air churned with bread-dust that mixed with sweat to form a sticky film on one’s skin and collected about the eye-sockets in prickling crescents. From the unseen ovens, the heat rolled in unrelenting waves, turning the floor into a furnace.

I worked in Processing Zone B, as a lowly bread straightener in the Yule Log Division. Yule Log was a Christmas delicacy made from marzipan with a shelf life something like plutonium’s; they enjoyed it on the Continent, or so we were told. There were five of us working in the room, not including Mr Appleseed, and except for Mr Appleseed’s abusive comments no one spoke; we laboured in silence like so many flour-covered Golems, performing the same mechanical motions over and over and over again. My role was to monitor the Yule Logs as they came in from the ovens through the hatch in the wall, removing any defective ones and ensuring that each loaf was sitting correctly on the belt, in a perpendicular relation to the rim, as it entered the sugar-frosting machine. Mr Appleseed had warned of the catastrophic consequences of a loaf entering the sugar-frosting machine in any position other than this one, and Mr Appleseed wasn’t the type of man you liked to cross.

As talking was discouraged in Processing Zone B, it wasn’t for a couple of days that I discovered why Gemma had asked about my Latvian – namely that, apart from Mr Appleseed and myself, the entire complement of Yule Log Division hailed from the town of Liepaja, having been rounded up at a recruitment fair held there by Pobolny Arbitwo, Sirius’s sister company, some months ago. It sounded like a rum sort of arrangement to me, but the Latvians said that many of their kinsmen had come to Ireland to work digging potatoes or cleaning hotel swimming pools, explaining that the pitiful wage they earned here was worth many times more when you sent it back to Latvia, and that as such they were coming out the real winners from the deal. Certainly they were homesick, they said; and their wives wrote letters to say how strange it was in their sorely missed city of Liepaja, with so few men to be seen. But the money they made at Mr Dough was enough to provide for their loved ones, and even set aside a little for their future; and for a modest sum, Pobolny Arbitwo rented them barracks-style accommodation with a microwave oven and comfortable bunk beds.

‘And you don’t mind it? You don’t mind the boredom, or this ungodly heat?’ We were in the canteen, a small cramped room with a table and vending machine and walls painted bilious green to discourage procrastination.