The Missing Person (6 page)

Franny rested her head against the velvet shoulder of her partner who had told her when he cut in that he was Lord Essex, almost a contemporary of her Hester Prynne. The softness against her cheek, the guarded lights shining through the fluttering leaves of the trees, champagne moving through her veins and charging her skin, Eddie Puritan surely somewhere nearby loving her purely because she was, he made her feel sure, lovable and pure (he who had brought here all these famous people to honor her, as he had written in the invitation to the party): all this warmed the dark and empty core of her being, even as the black, imminent decline she felt on the edge of diffused through her senses.

She was desperate to find Eddie. At last she spotted him, standing in a corner of the garden talking to Lou Price and a woman dressed as a nun. Franny broke away from Lord Essex without saying anything to him. She had the feeling she had to move fast, as though whatever was inside her was in danger of leaking out, like those dolls whose split seams let out their stuffing.

Eddie took her hand and offered it to the nun. “This is Franny Fuller, Lillian. She's my client, my friend, my girl.”

He turned to Franny. “And this—well, you must know. Remember
The White Sister?”

Franny nodded. “Oh yes. I know you, Miss Gish. I saw all your pictures in—back home.”

Lillian Gish smiled and patted her hand.

Franny nodded, feeling awkward in the presence of the famous face she had seen only on Utica screens. Then she turned to Eddie and asked: “Where are Delphine Lacy and Willis Lord? I thought you said they were coming. Are they here somewhere?

Eddie said: “I doubt they made it. Although the Studio assured me they'd come. Too bad. I would like to have had them meet you.”

“Me?
Oh no. I just wanted to see them in person. I used to dream about …”

She stopped, suddenly thrown back hard on the cobbled coast of her Utica dream world. The blackness advanced with the pain of those memories. She had not thought of that gray world since her transmigration into Hollywood sunshine. She watched as two women dressed as gypsies claimed Lillian Gish, submerging her in loud, extravagant cries, taking her away toward the supper tables.

Eddie nudged Franny. “See that kid over there? She's the new child star at Fox.”

Franny saw a little golden-ringleted girl in patent-leather pumps, a short pleated skirt, and a white frilled middy blouse. “Who's she dressed up to be?”

“Shirley Temple, I suppose. Which is pretty funny when you think that's who Fox hopes she will rival. Actually, she's almost fifteen. They've given her the idiotic name of Honey Moon.”

Eddie took Franny's arm and propelled her along toward a group standing beside the punch bowls. At the center of the ring of men was a tall, elegantly dressed woman who seemed to be wrapped in black satin. Her head thrown back, a cigarette holder in the corner of her mouth, she was filling the air around her with smoke. In her hand was a half-full champagne glass. Her eyes were closed.

“Miss Gibson,” said Eddie. “Have you met Franny Fuller?”

The woman opened her eyes, startlingly blue and blank. The men around her stepped back respectfully.

“No,” she said, closing her eyes again. “I have not. On the other hand, has Franny Fuller met Gloria Gibson?”

Franny said quickly: “Delighted.
Really.”
She started to add that she had seen all her pictures but stopped.
That seems to be all I have to say to anyone here
, she thought.

Gloria Gibson smiled, pulled hard on her cigarette holder, and looked at no one. She pointed to one of the men dressed in the coarse jersey of a gaucho, his chest and shoulders broad and hard, his red hair cropped close to his head. “Meet my new husband,” she said to the smoke-filled air.

The band started to play again, soft wailing music from
The Ziegfeld Follies of 1921
. The gaucho put his arm around Franny's shoulders and said: “Let's dance.”

On the floor couples watched as he led her through a series of intricate steps. She followed, weary and almost without will, drugged by the music and the champagne. The gaucho spun her around; in the whirl she heard the low lament of the music and her mother's voice over the tenor's:
He's my ma-a-an, he's my ma-a-an
, the saxophone wailed with the tenor, and her mother sang along.

Franny dropped her arms, looked toward the outer darkness at the edge of the dance floor, at the retreating lights in the trees. As the darkness seemed to break its bounds and move toward her, she turned away from the gaucho, walked through the other dancers, and vanished into the black garden.

Since Willis Lord's abrupt disappearance from the MGM lot, he had lost his taste for the public, and for the present. He lived alone with his immaterial past, his omnipresent fantasies, his liquor, a man of famous shadows reduced to anonymous existence. Alcohol had whittled away at his classic profile, giving it the rough outlines and uncertain curves of caricature. His nose was now dented and pinched, his sleek cheekbones turned concave, his once precisely trimmed mustache grown careless, ragged, and gray. The strict black hairline for which he had once been so celebrated had begun to retreat to reveal a flat plain of ridges and yellow skin. Hard liquor had taken root in his organs, twisting the twin plum-colored sausages of his liver into stones. Urinous yellow water had replaced his blood, he believed; bile ran riot in his veins, discoloring his skin.

Five years ago,
Their Marvelous Night
had been taken off the nation's screens by a distraught producer. Joe Pinsky heard his investment in the Great Silent Lover disappear under the choruses of customer laughter. A doctor had warned Lord, who tried to drown out the derisive sounds with gin: “Give up the sauce, my man.”

There was no way. Gin was his mirror and his curtain, the flagon he offered to memory, the obliterator of his passion for fame. In two gulps, it carried him from the pain of his failure to the private pleasures of forgetfulness. He carefully hoarded what was left of his fortune in order to buy the magical mash and juniper berry, drank it slowly, reserving more solid swallows for his solitary evenings. Social, mannerly sips he kept for his cherished weekly dinners with his old friend, Delphine Lacy. During the day he assigned himself one taste, as he called it, an hour, enough to maintain the level of his self-regard. By means of such strategies, augmented by interminable games of solitaire, he had come through the years between his former eminence and his present obscurity.

He lived in a small, anonymous bungalow between the county line and Culver City. His house was ringed on all sides by others just like it in what was referred to as a bungalow court. From his kitchen window he could see the MGM skyline: battlements, towers, the spires of temples and the tops of skyscrapers close to the tips of minarets. It had been years since he had worked among those hollow structures, worked anywhere for that matter. And because friendships in Hollywood were spawned on contracts and levels of achievement (few Stars he had ever known fraternized with bit players or extras) he had abandoned his circle, those who had crossed the perilous Red Sea from silent films to talkies, even those, like him, who had failed the passage, and fallen into oblivion.

All except Delphine Lacy, a Frenchwoman whose father had some Irish roots. She was in her late thirties, tall, angular, with an almost androgynous body and a low, controlled, French-accented voice which Americans found intriguing. It was this voice as much as the mystery of her sexless body that allowed her to survive the coming of sound at the end of the twenties. Delphine Lacy's habitual look of profound sadness endeared her to the cheery Americans of the jazz age, as well as to the pessimists of the Depression. Her much-publicized preference for private life, her aversion to the tricks and games of publicity, paradoxically, made her an object of intense curiosity to her fans, and to the avid editors of movie magazines.

Delphine Lacy and Willis Lord had made three silent films together at Premium. Indeed, as a result of carefully planted studio rumors, they were believed by the public to be lovers in what Hollywood liked to call real life. Willis Lord wanted very much to believe the rumors, even though he was aware they had been designed to promote
Passion Flowers
and
The Baron and His Lady
. He tried to advance his amorous cause with the beautiful but distant French star. Delphine, amused by his boyish ardor, listened to his plea but would have none of him as a lover. She claimed she had another, very secret, alliance. Willis was to learn this was her way of turning away pressing suitors. For the public, however, the hints of the Studio had proved persuasive. Their fans believed that the screen lovers gazed at each other with genuine love, carried over from the reality of their lives. Audiences settled back to watch, believing they were being made privy to the true romance of the private bedroom.

Willis looked forward all week to Friday, when Delphine would bring to his house a wicker hamper full of food and cook French dishes from her Gascony childhood. He sat at the kitchen table watching her, following her as she moved, in her loping, angular yet graceful way, from the cutting board to the stove. As she worked they talked, always of the past. Delphine brought to her friend a carefully censored version of Studio news of the past week: of their old acquaintances in the business who had died (for Willis rarely read newspapers and never the obituaries) and of the pictures that had flopped, an American word Delphine always smiled at as she pronounced it: it made her think of dank hair or the ears of a rabbit. She dwelled on box-office disappointments and studio trades, avoiding talk about success and progress of careers. She had learned that such subjects depressed him, made him even more silent, and destroyed his mood for the rest of the evening.

Willis's contributions to the conversation had been prepared during his long weekly silences. He liked to dredge up the buried fate of someone they had both once known.

“Rex Ingram,” he said, as they sat in the living room waiting for dinner to cook, drinking the first glass of white wine from the bottle Delphine had brought. “Do you remember the picture he directed called
Trifling Women?”

“No, I think not. I remember him only as Valentino's director in
The Four Horsemen
, and I once met Alice Terry who was his wife, I think. She was in that picture with Rudi that was reissued in the late twenties. I thought it was marvelous.
Marvelous.”

Willis nodded. “Yes. Both times. First in 1922 and later in 1926, the reissue. Both silent films. I saw each of them twice. They will never remake
The Four Horsemen
with sound, you can be sure,” Willis said, grimly.

“Of course you are right,” Delphine said, to comfort him.

“But I wasn't thinking of that picture.
Trifling Women
was strange. Ingram wrote it and then directed it. A man I knew named Ed Connelly was in it. One of its main characters was a huge chimpanzee who lived in a great dark cellar. The man who owned him was mad and lethal, as I remember. The chimpanzee was named Joe Martin. Connelly told me that Joe Martin fell in love with Barbara La Marr, the leading lady and, toward the end of shooting, would not let any of the men in the picture near her. They had to cage him when he wasn't involved in the scene.”

“How strange,” said Delphine.

“More than that. Ed said there was a scene in which he gave Barbara a necklace. The chimpanzee was so furious he leaped away from the trainer and almost choked Ed. Ed never forgot it.”

“Were they shooting at the time? Did the camera get any of it?”

“No, the camerman was so frightened he kicked over the tripod. Too bad. It might have made a wonderful scene.”

Delphine laughed. Bearing the wine bottle and her glass before her she moved toward the kitchen. “Lordy, my true love. I must do something in here. Bring your glass and join me.”

Lord sat forward for a moment, staring at his dim, destroyed face in the mahogany surface of the coffee table.
Only a silent picture could have in it a monkey who loves a woman
, he thought.
Why did they give up all that … possibility?

“Lord,” Delphine called.

He picked up his glass. “I'm coming.”

The wine that evening was especially good, a lovely Volnay Delphine had chosen to accompany her chicken dish. As they sat at the kitchen table, she toasted their long friendship. He countered with a toast to the jealous ape, and then they both laughed.

“On the set yesterday I talked to a woman, a dresser I think she is, who had known Marie Prevost,” said Delphine, regretting at once that she had used the words “on the set.” But she went on: “Do you recall her?”

“Of course. She was a victim of sound.”

“Did you ever hear the details of her death?”

“I think not.” Willis filled his glass. “Tell me.”

“Well, of course, I cannot tell if it is all true, but this woman says that Prevost had this little dog. She locked her door in some cheap hotel in Hollywood, and began to drink from three bottles and to take some pills a doctor had given her to sleep. No one thought to look for her for four days, and when they did they found her little dog standing guard over her half-eaten body.”

Willis took a long swallow of wine.

Then he said: “Mae Marsh, remember her? Whatever happened to her?”

Delphine shook her head. “I have no idea.”

Willis said: “That story about the ape lover made me think of a picture I saw her in. She was a wild girl dressed in feathers and her best friend was a bear.

“She never did too well once Griffith began to fail. But she made some fine pictures. Can't remember them all, but I do remember
The White Rose
, in which she played a lovely mistreated southern girl. Griffith liked that kind of delicate heroine whose strength was her goodness. I saw that picture many times.”