The Missing Person (17 page)

His role now expanded from that of social companion to solitary, day-and-night nurse. He told no one, not even Keith Andrews who came to the house often because he was handling Arnold's business affairs “from this end,” as he said, Lou Price having declared he would operate only from New York. “I despise Hollywood, I can't breathe there,” he claimed.

Arnold knew his reticence about Fanny's life was due to an odd kind of pride. He could not help feeling that if she did not sleep or eat properly it was, in some way, his failure. Looking at himself as he dressed in the morning (from the day he arrived he had been upset by the number of mirrors in his bedroom, in all the bedrooms in Beverly Hills, he surmised, and not only in bedrooms but also on every available wall in spaces where, back East, paintings would ordinarily hang), inspecting his thin legs and arms, his inconsequential body diminished by his large head, seeing at close range myopic eyes and high forehead that marked him as “intellectual,” he would probe for the source of this feeling. Was it possible that he had been propelled this far into a fantastic existence by his pride in possessing this extraordinarily lovely child? Did she raise him up out of his ordinariness, metamorphosizing him into the American ideal of manhood? Was it (the thought chilled him) that walking, figuratively, two steps behind her, sitting close to her in her living room and listening to the foolish, self-absorbed chatter of her friends, he took on, in their eyes, a reflected glow, a halo of masculine conquest? Did he consent to live this Alice-in-Wonderland existence because, in spite of all the craziness, he felt more a man than he had ever been before?

He had married every man's dream, had acquired Eve for himself alone, the Cleopatra, the Helen of epic poetry, even though he alone knew he could rarely keep her awake long enough to make love to her or, when she was not drugged into a marathon sleep, get her into bed at all. He had climbed a mountain occupied by gods, heroes, and leading men. On this level what
he
was or had done meant very little. Who, in the mythical kingdom of
Photoplay
, Grauman's previews, adulatory audiences, semiliterate studio heads, and gossip columnists, had heard of him or had read his poetry? Fanny was the plum he had picked off, the prize he had won in a unique public contest. The world granted him a heavyweight crown, golden gloves, whatever else the champion was given.

Arnold suffered intensely, more without Fanny than when he was with her, because her presence evoked both his pride and, more and more often, his pity. Left alone, he pitied himself, and that was hard to bear. His work suffered from the synthetic nature of the assignment the Studio had given him. As unproductive weeks went by and he began to balk at the number of new scenes and rewritten lines required of him, the film's producer, impatient with the delays, ordered two veteran studio screenwriters to “assist” him. They were professionals who could produce scenes on demand, correct the poet's technical errors with dispatch, smooth over his blunders and ignorance by their experience and facility.

At first this relationship with the Two Competent Young Men (the producer had described them in this way and so Arnold referred to them for the duration of the picture) was agreeable. Of course, they knew Who He Was, and had read, or at least said they had read, his work. But after the first respectful pleasantries had been exhausted, their relationship veered in another direction. Firmly, they expropriated his play, then his script, and finally his confidence in himself. He felt like a by-the-week renter on a beach inhabited by all-summer residents. In a short time the Two Competent Young Men had made him feel like an incompetent illiterate. He couldn't wait for the picture to be finished so he could return to his old, productive ways, hidden away out of the hideous California sun in the dark house on the north side of Washington Square, sans pool, sans suntan, cocoa-butter smells, sans breakfast with the newspaper wit and wisdom of Mary Maguire.

He was never able afterward to remember the exact moment when the pleasure of being married to Fanny started to diminish, when delight in having captured the American Dream Girl gave way to apprehension about what he would do with her, and how he would survive her shriveling aura. His sense of triumph had been acute but short-lived. As early as the blissful days at the farm, when he had thought that, if they stayed long enough, Fanny would tell him more about herself than she had so far, he had sensed that something was wrong.

“Why do you want to know all those things, Arnie?”

“About your mother and your schools and such? Aren't they the kind of things you wonder about—you know, your wife's vital statistics and all that?”

“Most of it's in the fan magazines.”

“Well, yes, the authorized version, but not what things mattered to you when you were growing up. Or hurt, or hindered you. What you thought about your parents. I don't know anything about you except that you talk very little and are very beautiful and that I love you and you say you love me.”

She whispered, “I do, Arnie,” in her famous voice. It was her screen sound, half-swallowed, sexy, and provocative, effectively turning away his interrogation. But underneath her professional delivery of the line Arnold sensed her need for protection from the facts about herself, her cry for help. Once before, when he took her walking through the New Hampshire woods, he had heard the same cry. They went into a stream, he swimming to the deep center, she wading on the shallow edge. Suddenly he heard her cry out, “Arnie!” He swam over to her and stood up. She clung to him in terror, standing there frozen in the shallow water. He picked her up and carried her to the bank. She would say nothing about what had frightened her. From that time on, he tried to catalogue her habits and her fears, her curious life customs, her ways of advancing toward him, her methods of retreat, so that he could anticipate the crises that resulted from the unexpected, and from his unpreparedness. When she laughed he waited for the tears to come; in her deepest sleep he saw the signs of approaching, inevitable insomnia. As time went on, he attributed these transitions to the price she had to pay for being forced to embody in public all the yearnings for perfection of a daydreaming society. She became the natural and inevitable host to the private flaws in that perfection.

Of all her difficulties Arnold found it hardest to understand her distaste for sex. Her attitude toward activity in bed was the antithesis of her public self. Brimming with visible sexual energies, her breasts uncontainable in the slinky clothes she habitually wore, she was an undulating invitation, a pied piper's come-on, to every American male. In bed, she became a hostile Puritan, rigid with distaste for prolonged fondling, disliking the precoital rituals so essential to Arnie's own success in the act. She wanted it to be over fast, when she permitted it at all, not because she could not wait for her own pleasure but because her dislike of the whole procedure was so intense that she could bear just so much of the activity, and no more.

Early in the evening, dressed in a black chiffon nightgown, robe, and black fur mules, her hair a great blast of light in the sober disguise of her voluptuous body that her night clothes represented, she would begin to run through her catalogue of reasons for not having intercourse with him. The list was varied, covering every excusatory situation from sickness to weariness, in all degrees, from the natural cycle of feminine anatomy to headaches caused by nerves, nerves caused by conditions on the set during the day, the smell of his pipe, the humidity. In certain kinds of weather—overcast or too sunny, rainy or intensely hot—she felt particularly unwell. She took aspirin in grape juice and gin for many of her “conditions” (she had latched on to the word when she once heard someone talk about a heart condition), and other pills to sleep. Her favorite for staying awake was Benzedrine, which she used mornings when she had to be on the set early. Sometimes she took too many of these, and in unusual exuberation she would call her stand-in, Dolores Jenkins, and tell her to hold the fort, she was working on her part at home and would be in later.

To her public she presented a portrait of perfect health, an earthy, joyous spirit spilling over into girlish stunts, impromptu dancing, and liberal outbursts of kittenish good humor. Only Arnold knew the truth. He felt he was becoming a historian of them. Worse, he was beginning to feel that this was his sole function in their marriage, that he had been forced into this activity by his love of this sick, famous child and by his unseemly pride at having won her.

Alone in her own rooms at the other end of her rambling house, Franny suffered intense insomnia. But in Arnold's bed, in his arms and without sex, she would fall instantly into a sleep so deep that it was impossible to waken her. Wide awake, exposed to extreme and painful need by her presence, he would often play out the entire sex act upon her inert body, feeling like an expert bridge player driven to solitaire. After a few such experiences the sham pleasures of solitary orgasm began to diminish. He felt only the violations to his sense of himself that they caused. Ultimately, it would be impossible to distinguish between what he was “doing” to her at these moments, and his boyhood practices upon himself or even, he grimly acknowledged to himself, necrophiliac acts upon which Krafft-Ebing had been so explicit, in Latin.

Once her acquaintances stopped arriving and departing, Franny's house began to resemble a sanatorium, a clinic constituted for the sole end of preserving the Star and, only incidentally, Arnold Franklin's wife. When he married her, he had suspected what the order of their roles would be. But so confident did the
fact
of the marriage make him that he was able to delude himself into thinking he might be capable of reversing the order or, at least, of equalizing it. It had not worked. In six months, the Star, poor Franny and her private troubles, inadequacies, and rare public appearances, had obliterated the new Mrs. Arnold Franklin and all but extinguished, he had come to think, Arnold Franklin himself.

5

The Stand-in

Dolores Jenkins lived in the heart of downtown Hollywood in a four-room apartment above a Viennese bakery. The rooms were hers, and her mother's, in a way that few Southern Californians knew: They had lived in the same place for twelve years, renting it when they first arrived in the city and settling their small collection of family furniture and belongings there. Dolores never thought about moving. She had arrived in Hollywood with hopes for a career as an actress in films. She was too intelligent and too realistic to believe for very long that she was intended for miraculous stardom, but she clung to the hope that perhaps good minor parts might be offered to her.

Unlike many of the Golden Girls she was to encounter who were never able to abandon their dreams for stardom in order to earn even a modest living, Dolores settled for a job as a waitress in a studio commissary. She made enough to support herself modestly. After the first period of disillusion, that was all she asked of the outlandish Production that was Hollywood.

Dolores's mother, Billie-Jo Jenkins, was a widow, a tall, spare, sternly religious, barren-looking southern woman. Her husband had died so soon after their wedding that he had left barely a mark on her memory. To her mind Dolores might have been not so much conceived during a sexual encounter as carried into life from a competent but undisturbed egg, given birth to, and then reared as her exclusive product.

Billie-Jo was a nominal Catholic. Her faith tended to bolster her conviction of her undisturbed purity. She developed a comfortable, virtuous forgetfulness that “the act” had ever happened to her. Her brief contact with her husband, whom she had married for now forgotten reasons, had not interested her in the slightest; she had no desire ever to repeat the experience, even in memory. She settled into grateful widowhood, her baby daughter proof to the outside world of her respectability. At least once, she had tried It.

Now she considered men to be auxiliaries to her comfort. They existed to hold her bundles on buses when they did not give up their seat to her, they were asked to repair light fixtures and plugs in her apartment, and to fix the toilet when it overflowed. They were services rendered to her, naturally, since she was a woman. She managed on occasion to appear fragilely feminine and southern, weak and somewhat helpless—her Alabama accent contributed to the effect—but under it there lived a single-minded, unsexed woman who bent the world and her daughter to her purposes.

The Jenkinses had arrived from Anniston with very little money and high hopes for Dolores's success. Billie-Jo found a job almost at once in the basement corset department of the May Company. She “worked” heavy women into girdles. Seduced by her soft, lady's manner and subservient air, women let themselves go under her sympathetic efforts on their behalf, easing their difficult passage into new “garments,” unaware that she despised them.

Billie-Jo used her store discount to furnish their apartment. Everything in it was in some way nicked, scarred, or stained, because she could not bring herself to pay even the employees' discount price for new furniture. She waited until floor samples, bearing the scuff marks of passing customers, were offered at half price or less. Living in a city known for its excesses, her mentality was framed by the contrary triumphs of getting along respectably on very little. She knew that ordinary persons in Hollywood existed in this manner, below the glittering surface of the place, and she was proud to be one of them. She never regarded objects as “soiled” as the sale announcements did, but accepted them willingly because they were what she called dirt cheap, the bargain marked down.

As Billie-Jo grew older, what had once been a necessity became for her a positive joy. She loved the contest with the cost of living she had entered into, feeling an almost suffocating delight every time she managed to outwit the price tag. Her pleasure was intense, one month, when she received a bill from the May Company that failed to show a purchase she knew she had made. When the grocery clerk left out of his tally an item she had purchased, or when she was given a few cents too much in change, she was overjoyed. She gloried in rescuing an unmarked three-cent stamp from a letter to use it again. Like an invading army that lives off the land and relishes its ingenuity, Billie-Jo spent less and less money in Hollywood and gradually came to feel that, despite the disappointment of her hopes for her daughter, her occupation of the city was being supported entirely on the almost-free opulence of its careless superfluity.