In the Beauty of the Lilies (38 page)

After the Nevada movie with Gable, she insisted to Columbia on no more Westerns. She was sick of hiding her legs in calico skirts. She had grown up on glamour and knew she could project it. Cohn issued his usual blast of threats and profanity, but in 1953 they arranged a loan-out to Paramount for a musical, with a typically long title of the era,
The Last Time We Saw Topeka
. It was filmed in Paramount’s brilliant answer to Fox’s CinemaScope—VistaVision, whose film fed horizontally and could be projected at variable widths, depending on the theatre’s screen capabilities. It seemed to Alma she and the rest of the cast (Dan Dailey, Vera-Ellen, Oscar Levant, Kathryn Grant, Georges Guetary) were always lining up for wide shots, with those on the ends worrying that they would be cut out of projection on the standard screens that still occupied most of the movie theatres. But no one who ever saw the film (the box office was disappointing) would ever forget Alma’s crooning of “Melancholy Baby”
while stretched out at full length on heliotrope sheets in a dress of scarlet satin slit, it seemed, all the way up her immense white thigh, like a white Caddy fender without the fin. Her strongest impression, however, was made not as a glamour queen but as a fiery waif, a woman wronged and wronging, flawed by more desire and impatience and restlessness than society could accommodate, in those gritty
noir
melodramas whereby smoldering Fifties discontent sought expression—
The Delinquents, Safe at Your Peril, Howl from the Streets, Trouble in Memphis
, and, most daringly,
Colored Entrance
. In this last, she became the first actress to bestow a screen kiss upon a black man, though on his forehead; in
Safe at Your Peril
she risked a brief but breakthrough nude scene, from the back and in an indistinct middle distance, a misty-woods skinny-dip viewed by an escaped lunatic (Richard Widmark) with a bowie knife. In all these roles her hair was left dark, though sometimes short and curly in a poodle-cut, and sometimes with bangs and to the shoulders, with a pageboy roll and a moody Stanwyckish swing and toss.

She had been there, the audiences felt—in the musty back seats of Plymouths, at the lunch-hour sock hops, in the alleyway behind the drug store and the ice-cream parlor, at the edge of town with its stupefying view of rural emptiness. Alma had paid her dues, out in the desolate America of earning and spending and eating and breeding and listening for the music, in a way the princesses Grace and Audrey had not. Kim and Marilyn had paid or were paying theirs, but somehow numbly, with anesthetized blonde wits; it was Alma’s heartbreaking gift to suggest that she was fully aware, knowing more than she could say, more than the script could say, even as the plot demanded that she be cast out—murdered, exiled, imprisoned—for failing to conform. Each movie,
under the Production Code dating back to 1934, was a moral mechanism that had to function toward the elimination of all defective parts. As the Alma-character was borne off by the inevitable censorious rectitude of the script, audiences felt that something precious in themselves was being carried away, in this land of promise where yearning never stops short at a particular satisfaction but keeps moving on, into the territory beyond.

She was surprised at how easily she located in herself a tragic vein, she who had been raised in such a sweet small town, by such loving parents and grandparents. But, when the script demanded she shriek or weep—and not once, but for take after take, until her eyes were red with the salt of tears and her lips sore with being contorted—she was able to worm through her memories and find something terrible and irrevocable enough to feed grief: Momma’s poor stunted foot; Daddy going around and around the town like a stupid wind-up toy because everything else scared him; Ama widowed so young and stirring all those heavy unhealthy sweet things on the stove and stirring by telephone the sickly messes of unhappiness cooked up in her church circles. Grandma Sifford dead of cancer, shrivelling up in her bed like a poisoned aphid, leaving the old farmer to bumble around in his greenhouse alone, the wilts and spots thriving and the putty slowly crumbling from the overlapped panes, everything that needed tending slipping away from him. So much loneliness in living, so much waste. So much unredeemable loss. And the grandfather she had never known fallen into a shining white hole of damnation forever. And pretty-lipped slender-headed Benjy Whaley condemned to life as a grease monkey and knowing just enough to hate his fate, like a zoo animal whose instincts keep telling him there is something beyond
his cage; and Patrick trapped too, though he got better every year at being supercilious and idle, to hide his romantic dreams of being carried off somehow like a bride in a
Redbook
story; and Arnie with his Scarsdale wife and kids and crumbling health, coughing and hardly able to climb a single flight of stairs or get it up for the fanciest call-girl in Manhattan; and poor Mr. Bear with his tiddlywink eyes, always so faithful, always listening to her childish chatter and letting her hug him, hug and snuggle so she could fall asleep, and now up in the Locust Street attic gathering dust and staring at nothing and wondering why that little girl never comes to play with him, never comes to say hello …

“Cut. Print.
Wunderwerk
, Alma. We came in even closer then; your eyes were stupendous.”

She was modest, efficient. “Fred, please—if you decide you need yet another take, I’ll need at least half an hour to cool down my poor eyeballs. Where’s my Murine?”

“It’s back in your camper, Miss DeMott. Shall I run get it?” She had her own attendants now—her own hairdresser, Leonore, and her personal secretary, Paulette.

Zinnemann was still enthusiastic; his violinist’s hands fluttered, and his Viennese accent peeked through. “Vat a goot shport you are. But you nailed it, guaranteed. It’s in the can. Sound says it may have heard a crackle in the boom mike; if we need you to loop, keep your voice down like it was,
husky. Piano
, but not
pianissimo
. Like you are shpeaking for your own brain to hear.”

Alma loved the craft of it, using her body with a detached precision, walking to a spot marked with tape without looking at it and saying just the same thing she had said ten times before, and putting the identical passion and verve into it, where she could see her co-stars flagging, getting tired and
impatient, losing tempo and relatedness. She felt, coiffed and in costume and make-up, encased in a fine and flexible but impermeable armor; the bright island of make-believe, surrounded by scaffolding and wiring and the silhouettes of those many technicians who operated the equipment, was a larger container, a well-lit spaceship carrying her and the other actors into an immortal safety, beyond change and harm. A cosmic attention beat on her skin as when she was a child God had watched her every move, recorded her every prayer and yearning, nothing unnoticed, the very hairs on her head numbered, Essie and the sparrows sold two for a farthing all over Delaware, brown sparrows rustling in the sparrow-colored underbrush. She had been lifted up from the underbrush to this heaven and she blazed with the miracle of it.

The camera missed no tremor, no blink, no nuance of facial tightening. Nothing was unobserved; even her unconscious thoughts poured out through her skin, her eyes. Though she delved within herself for emotion, she was by training anti-Method; at the school on West Fifty-seventh Street the emphasis had been on outward gesture, the body as a succession of clear signals. “Move dis
tinct
ly,” one of her instructors, the strictest, Professor Berthoff, would repeatedly say. “Move in
tell
igibly. The audience must know im
med
iately ex
act
ly what you are doing. There is no room on the stage for the uncertain, ambiguous movements that in real life we make all the time.” Essie had wondered why anything in real life should be excluded from the stage, but then, when she became Alma, she saw that this clarity makes a refuge for the actors and audience both, lifting them up from fumbling reality into a reality keener and more efficient but not less true. Even the face: acting for the camera, in close-up, was facial
athletics, with eyelids and irises and all those little muscles that form a cat’s-cradle around the mouth. From older, wiser stars she had learned how minimal the athletics can be: it is a star’s privilege to be the still center which the supporting actors swirl about, generating the action. Sometimes, when she couldn’t locate through a tedious succession of takes what the director wanted, she would shut down her memories and think of nothing, and something from God would flow into her face from behind, and Zinnemann or Wilder or Walter Lang would cry out from the darkness around her, “That’s it! You’ve knocked it, Alma. Print!”

With the cry “Print!” she would know that once again her poor precious perishable self as of that exact moment had been—unless the director or editor or producer or some studio higher-up fucked with the footage—transported to a realm beyond time and space, into “the can” and thence into a thousand projectors, into a million hearts as impressionable and innocently magnanimous as hers once had been. Since 1950, by one more of her strokes of good fortune, the industry had switched from film based on cellulose nitrate, intensely flammable and prone to turn into chemical mush in storage, to cellulose acetate, which does not burn and will last theoretically forever. Most of Mary Pickford was lost utterly, but the world would never lose Alma DeMott. She would always be there, in some archive or rerun, in eternal return perennially called back to life.

“How many times did you actually kiss him?” Loretta Whaley breathlessly asked her, on one of her rare visits back to Basingstoke. She was talking of William Holden, in a movie in which Alma had played a war wife who is unfaithful
to her husband under the illusion that he has been shot down over Guadalcanal; even though it was an honest mistake, she suffers for it. It was 1957 and Loretta had married Eddie Bacheller six years ago and was the mother of two darling little boys, born so close together she could push them up and down Rodney Street in the same stroller.

“Oh—a hundred.”

“A hundred? How could you stand it?”

“It’s not easy, they keep making you do it over and over again. Sometimes a door slams off the set or the actor hiccups or the dolly pusher misses his cue and it’s not your fault, but you have to go back at it as if kissing this strange man’s face is something worth dying for, ’cause you know that’s what the script calls for, you’re going to die in the last reel.”

“Oh, Essie!—Alma. How does it feel?”

“After a while, like nothing much,” she told her, a bit spitefully. “The older stars are very strict, they never open their mouths, it’s like kissing a zipper; but the younger ones, like Holden, they can French, though the camera isn’t supposed to see too much of it. Like there never should be any spit show.” In some corner of herself she was jealous of Loretta; these two toddlers, round-faced and shiny-eyed, gazed up at their idiotic mother in her cheap polka-dot sundress as though she was half the world. They had Eddie’s cheerful trusting temperament, and that fine apricot-colored hair the Bachellers had. Essie had always rather liked Eddie, not only because his older brother worked as usher in the Roxie. That day on the bleachers she would rather it had been Eddie than Benjy, who had had a mean streak and now was drinking so much, Loretta told her, he had been fired from Sturgis’s Garage; their parents were real upset but couldn’t do a thing with him. Junie Mulholland had married a boy from St. Georges, and Fats
Lowe, who had seemed the most stick-at-home meatball possible, living with his drunken mother in a one-story house almost out in Niggertown, had “hit the road,” as he told people, and was out in Oregon somewhere, bumming around and taking drugs, people said. He was going to hell in a handbasket, just like his ma, but over an improved highway.

“I mean,” Loretta insisted, “doesn’t it get you all hot and bothered? I know when Eddie and I—”

Alma didn’t want to hear it; she turned her back, there on the sunstruck sidewalk squares near where Addison’s Drug Store had displayed its two old-fashioned vials of iodine-pink and watery ink-blue. Old Seth’s widow had sold the store to the Rexall chain when he finally died, and the plate-glass window held a curved pyramid of cartons of L & M cigarettes and a cardboard woman in only a towel smilingly holding a Schick electric razor against her bare shin. Alma’s abrupt half-turn of her body felt to her like an invisible scythe extending out into the hazed late-summer sky above Basingstoke. Even naked of her make-up and costumes, she had more definition, more visible edge, than these shapeless shuffling others who had frightened her that day she first went to the movie alone and then, when she came out, looked like a herd of bumbling blind cows. Halfway down Rodney Street, the Roxie had
Funny Face
on the marquee, and this added to her irritation. Alma had felt snubbed by Audrey Hepburn at one of Joe Mankiewicz’s parties—all that fey European dimply charm, so darling and pure, here in Hollywood for just the lark and the dollars of it. The highly refined Mrs. Ferrer had stiffened when Alma was introduced, and held out, with a flare of her eyes, a slender tentative hand as if a bit fearful of being contaminated by the bushy-haired heroine of gritty movies from King Kong Cohn’s asphalt jungle. From the
other side of the industry’s tracks. As if that were all Alma had done and could do. She took it out on Arnie: “If all Cohn can think of for me is one more stripper in one more pathetic
Bus Stop–
type tearjerker, if all he can think of me is to out–
Baby Doll Baby Doll
—Why wasn’t
I
considered for the Natalie Wood part in
The Searchers
?—I’d look a damn sight less phony in a squaw outfit than she did. Why can’t I do another musical? I can sing rings around that Hepburn. Get me something
fluffy
.” The complaints and battles rattled on in her head, even here in remote Basingstoke.

“I know when Eddie and I,” Loretta was going on, “are watching television, the boys asleep finally, and we start foolin’ around—”