The Missing Person (16 page)

Nothing came of it. The whole idea of the stage and the school terrified Franny. She was like a bather at the edge of a cold ocean who is persuaded, against her will, to test the water and then, chilled at the first touch, retreats to the warm beach. A few days later she told Arnold she had to fly back to Hollywood for retakes on the picture she had just finished. Mollie was always to remember her secret plans for Franny Fuller with regret and some guilt. It was a conspiracy she had entered into with herself, to use Franny for her own ends. She felt like a philanthropist who plans to leak to the press the extent of his charitable contributions.

Franny was in Hollywood when Arnold Franklin, miserable in New York without her enlivening beauty, flew to the Coast, rented a car, and drove to Beverly Hills. He found her lying out beside her half-empty swimming pool, asked her to marry him almost at once, and then flew home, full of delight with her agreement that she would come to New York for the ceremony when the retakes were completed.

From
The Fabulous Franny Fuller
(As Told to Mary Maguire):

My marriage to Arnold Franklin, the famous poet, was a great day in my life. I went back East as soon as
Pot of Gold
was finished. Arnie and his whole family, except his father who had to work that day, met me at Idlewild Airport. I loved his mother at first sight—she was so warm and kind to me. From the very first, his sisters, Lucille and Ruth, treated me like one of the family.

There was a crowd of reporters at the airport. They took pictures of us all, Mrs. Franklin kissing Arnie, and Arnie and me kissing, and Arnie's sisters kissing him. My hair is blown every which way in those pictures and the sun strikes Arnie's glasses and makes him look blind. But we both look happy. And we were!

We drove into New York in the airport limousine because the Franklins had no car and Mrs. Franklin said that taxis were too expensive on the Island. I remember that Arnie got mad at a man sitting behind us who kept poking his head forward. Arnie shoved him back and told him to mind his own d——business. I thought Arnie was going to hit him! I could see how much he loved me! That day I really felt good about everything!

We stayed at the Plaza, where I always used to stay, because the Franklins only had a small apartment in Brooklyn, and Arnie's house was lent to a friend. But we went there for most of our meals. How Mother Franklin could cook! The first night we were there, I met Arnie's father. This was harder than meeting his mother. His father is a very quiet man and I couldn't tell what he was thinking about me. He worked downtown, he said, where he was a salesman for a knit-goods company. He shook hands with me when we met and seemed very reserved toward me, I thought. I didn't know whether it was because I wasn't Jewish or because I was in the movies or because he disapproved of the way I looked. I did try to dress right that evening, high-necked, loose dress and all that. But of course I didn't come out looking like Lucille or Ruth. I felt that in Mr. Franklin's eyes something was wrong with me somewhere. I made up my mind that I was going to win him over!

The wedding was held in a reception room at the Pierre. Arnie had made all the arrangements. I wore a light-blue dress—after all, I'd been married before and so had Arnie, who wore a new light-gray suit he'd bought at Brooks Brothers. Lou Price said he thought I should wear white, but I didn't want anybody to think I was trying to be something I wasn't. Arnie looked wonderful in his light suit, more like a Californian than a New Yorker.

His father wore a dark suit and didn't seem happy, but the rest of the family were swell to me, really swell. I met all Arnie's aunts and uncles and his cousins and their children before the ceremony. Arnie's grandfather didn't come. Mr. Franklin said he wasn't well. Arnie seemed upset that he wasn't there. I have never met him. I've heard he's very old and almost blind and was once a famous religious scholar, or something like that.

We were married by an old friend of Arnie's mother, a cantor. I couldn't understand any of the Hebrew in the ceremony, but I enjoyed it all. There seemed to be a mystery about that language. Very few people there knew what the cantor was saying, I thought. But everyone listened very respectfully. Lou Price was Arnie's best man. Since he was the one who introduced us, it was wonderful to have him there although he looked funny, being about half as tall as Arnie. The Cairnses were there too, old friends of Arnie's from the theater whom I knew too—I once visited some classes at their school and enjoyed them very much.

During the ceremony I thought about Eddie Puritan and wished he had been alive to come. I loved that guy. I suppose Lou Price must have been thinking about him too because he looked sad a couple of times. I wished I'd thought to ask Dolores Jenkins, my stand-in and friend, to come East for the wedding. Except for Arnie and Lou there was no one there I really knew.

The Franklins were wonderful to me. Mrs. Franklin said she thought of me as a daughter. Mr. Franklin didn't say much, but I think that was because he didn't like all the fuss the press was making outside the door where Arnie and Lou had insisted they had to wait until after the ceremony was over. There was a wonderful supper after the wedding. After it was all over we had only a week before I had to get back to Hollywood to start work on a new picture. So Arnie and I drove to his place in New Hampshire.

He had a lovely old farmhouse there, very old, but he'd fixed it up and it was very comfortable. We stayed there for six marvelous days. We were divinely happy. A couple of reporters followed us there from New York. Arnie made an agreement with them: If they could take some pictures of us, me in jeans and a work shirt and Arnie cutting wood, the kind of pictures they seemed to want, they would go away and not bother us again. They took some great pictures and then they left.

We walked a lot in the woods, Arnie taught me to cook some of the things he liked to eat, and we talked and talked. It was a divine time and, as I've said, I've never been happier.

But like all good things it had to end. Arnie was beginning to work on a long poem. He told me something of what he wanted to do in it. It was fascinating for me to be in on the beginning of a great thing like that. At the end of the week we drove to Boston and I flew back to Hollywood. Arnie had to go to New York to see a publisher who wanted to bring out a book of his poems. He promised to join me in Beverly Hills in a few days.…

Arnold Franklin went to Hollywood to be with Franny. The reasons given by his agent, Lou Price, to Mary Maguire, suited the American dream of marital bliss and success into which the press had cast Arnold and Franny. By good fortune, reported Mary Maguire, Franny's contract to do a new picture had coincided with the offer made to Arnold Franklin to write a scenario from one of his plays.

FF
,
ARNIE
,
OK PIX
,
Variety
reported. Mary Maguire made an ecstatic lead paragraph out of it:

DELIRIOUSLY HAPPY
,
ARNIE FRANKLIN FOLLOWS FF TO COAST FOR START OF HER
THE LONELY ONES
.
HE WILL DO THE SCRIPT FOR HIS OWN NEVER-PRODUCED PLAY
.…
FF WILL WORK AGAIN WITH HER FAVORITE
(
SHE SAYS
,
BUT WE KNOW BETTER
)
COSTAR BROCK CURRIER
.…
THE PRESS IS DELIGHTED WITH FABULOUS FRAN'
S NEW NAME
.
NOW THEY CAN WRITE FFF
…
OR EVEN FFFF
,
FOR FABULOUS ETC
.
FRANKLIN
.

Activity in Hollywood's studios was hectic when Arnold arrived to begin his sentence, as he referred to it, as a screenwriter. Heads of the little city-states which each studio constituted felt, unanimously, that the fierce realities of the war demanded more “upbeat” entertainment for “our boys” overseas. While these pictures were in the works some leading men left for the services, and some female stars donned elegant uniforms in which to travel to entertain soldiers and sailors “live,” or in which to sell war bonds to well-to-do war-industry workers.

Hollywood responded to overseas death and destruction with musical accounts of gay shore leaves, filled with dancing sailors and obliging, tap-dancing beauties. Bored homefront audiences loved them, the more absurd and unlikely the better, and attendance records, even at afternoon performances, were at an all-time high, reported Mary Maguire, in those words.

Hollywood and Beverly Hills shocked Arnold. Lou Price had warned him about the untidiness of life on the Coast. But he was unprepared for the lack of visible day-to-day progress in the lives of the people he met. Scenarios were written, scenes shot, sets and costumes designed, and background music composed: these things he knew happened, but he had no idea when all of it was accomplished.

Everyone was constantly out of their own houses or away from their offices “for the day,” visiting other people's swimming pools, lying in redwood loungers in wet bars at the back of someone else's beach house. Or, it seemed to him, everyone was in automobiles, snakelike lines of them on the way to another house, to “The Club,” to a preview, to Ciro's or Romanoff's. “You go on ahead, we'll follow,” was the substitute Hollywood sentence for “goodbye.” Arnold found himself perpetually following someone he knew only slightly to a place he'd never been before in a car to whose other occupants he was a total stranger.

In the early months of their marriage, when friends and acquaintances were often at her house, Franny seemed content. She didn't say much, but she liked the house to have other people in it, especially at night when she had trouble sleeping. This came as a surprise to Arnold. In New York he had known her to sleep interminably, and he had worried that she was ill. At first Hollywood seemed to awaken and exhilarate her. She wanted to “show” him her friends. It turned out that her friends were far less interested in him than she had thought they would be. After the first polite exchange, they would turn back to talk movie gossip with Franny.

Arnold felt pigeonholed, filed away under “Franny's husband,” of the same order of things as Franny's electric organ which, in fact, had arrived at Fullerton (the synthetic name bestowed on her house by Premium's publicity department) at the same time as he had, a wedding gift from the Price Agency. No one who visited them could play the instrument, nor could Franny. Arnold tried, fitfully, but hated its fraudulent tones. For him it became another of those vestiges of movieland's civilization that filled the houses he visited: the Pla-Pal Prohibition hidden bar-radios to which no one seemed to listen, elaborate electrical devices for mixing drinks that no one wished to waste time with, and gardening tools of such ingenuity and complexity that the Japanese gardeners found them intimidating.

These unused machines offended Arnold's sense of strict economy. He spent the little time Franny permitted him alone trying to follow the optimistic directions that came with the electric organ. The brochure read: “With just a few minutes' practice and the ability to follow the numbers of the chords, anyone can learn to play this magnificent organ at the first try.” He never progressed much further than the first set of chords.

Confusing as this way of life was, after a little while Arnold was able to bring some personal order out of it all. When everyone started off, in a great burst of energy and hilarity, for Another Place, he would manage, in the confusion, to be left behind, go to his typewriter, and turn out some dialogue for the script he was trying to complete. With the legend of Scott Fitzgerald in his memory, he worried about drinking and “not producing.” He welcomed any sudden turn in the social tide that moved people out of Franny's house and off to some Other Place. He had no trouble with the technique of preparing a movie script after spending some days with writers from the studio and reading a number of their finished scripts. His trouble was in finding enough consecutive time in which to produce something that seemed to him to have value.

But, in the long run, his adaptation to the Hollywood environment proved insufficient. Fanny changed as soon as shooting started on
The Lonely Ones
. Fanny: Arnold found himself calling her that once he learned it was her real name. Introspective as he was, he never tried to explain this usage to himself. The beautiful woman Franny receded into Fanny, the child he had begun to know best. She stopped seeing her friends, she came home from the studio exhausted and often, strangely frightened. She lost the delightful exhibitionism that had made her such a joy to be with in public, the sly wiggle of her bottom, the flash of her innocent and radiant smile, the sway of her walk. She turned back in upon herself—and him.

For the first weeks of shooting she worked hard and, it seemed to Arnold who sometimes came over from his office to watch her, did very well with the part of Robin, a tough, dockside girl in love with a murderous labor-union leader. One night he woke to hear her crying in her sleep. Next morning she said she was sick and could not go to work. From then on, and until the destructive cycle had run itself out, a major part of Arnold's days and nights were spent in an effort to get her to “do” something, get up, go to the Studio, go to sleep, eat, or refrain from eating (ravenously) sweets or the same food repetitively day after day. For days she ate nothing but minestrone soup which she insisted Olivia buy for her in an Italian place near Hollywood. She would not eat Olivia's homemade variety.

Getting her to the Studio now was an achievement in subtle persuasion and logistics. Keeping her there often meant he had to stay with her, doing almost nothing himself because he could not learn to write or rewrite amid all the clutter and noise of a Hollywood stage.

Arnold noticed that Franny seemed affected by the presence of strangers watching her on the set. He talked to Reuben Rubin, the director, about excluding them while she was working. Reuben looked at him oddly, as if Arnold were making the request out of a perverse need, perhaps a jealousy, of his own. But Reuben ordered that no visitors be admitted to the set. For a while this exclusion seemed to help, until Franny's period of almost marathon nonsleeping began again. Then her nerves seemed to rise to the surface of her skin. The least sound disturbed her, making her forget her lines or her instructions about movement. Sleeping pills put her to sleep, temporarily, until early in the morning. Four weeks after shooting had started Arnold had trouble waking her because she'd taken four pills the night before.