Everything and More (35 page)

“We don’t rightly know,” NolaBee said. “She started to cry after she got here, and she just keeps crying.”

Mrs. Cunningham’s right eye twitched. “My poor little girl, that’s not like her at all. Thank you so much for your kindness to her.”

Althea was crouched on the bed like a sphinx, her head bent between
her arms, while Joshua, behind her, massaged her quaking shoulders. As her father came in, she raised up, holding out her arms.

He half-knelt to clasp her. “Toots, toots, it’s all right.”

Mrs. Cunningham had halted at the door. “What is it, dearest?” she asked. “What happened?”

“I . . . went to the institute.” Her gasps increased.

“Hush,” said Mr. Cunningham. “You’ll tell us later.”

Between them, the Cunninghams supported their hysterical child out of the house. Althea’s sobs had ceased when they reached the car.

*   *   *

After she got into bed, she rested her splotched and puffy face against the pillows and received her parents.

Her father said, “You were gone so long, nearly all day. We’ve been crazy, toots.” He perched on the end of the bed—he had pulled over one of the prettily upholstered slipper chairs for his wife. “Where were you?”

Within Althea’s brain prowled the intense pain of the peroxide blonde’s disclosure. Someone else had to share the torment. “It’s too horrendous.”

“You can tell Daddy and Mommy,” said Mrs. Cunningham.

“I drove down to the beach and sat on the palisades thinking,” Althea said tonelessly. “Then I went over to the institute.”

“Why there?” asked Mr. Cunningham. The beruffled bedside lamp cast an odd, divisive shadow across his narrow hawk’s nose.

“I wanted to talk to Mr. Lissauer about this idea I had for a seascape. He pretended to be really interested. He invited me inside to talk. Everybody had left, we were all alone. And then . . .” She shuddered.

“Go on, dearest,” said Mrs. Cunningham.

“He started kissing me. He doesn’t look it, but he’s strong, so strong. He pushed me down on the floor—”

“That filthy refugee bastard!” Mr. Cunningham jumped to his feet. “We should never have let any of them in!”

“Did he . . . harm . . . you?” asked Mrs. Cunningham, moving to kiss Althea’s cheek.

“Not the way you mean, but I trusted and respected him—he was my
teacher.
It was so cruddy . . . so ugly . . . having to fight him like that. Somehow I managed to push him off and run to the car.” She gave a shudder. “I felt dirty, ashamed—Oh, I don’t know what I felt. I wasn’t thinking at all. The Waces lived close, so I drove there.”

“My poor precious,” sighed Mrs. Cunningham. “And nothing more happened?”

“Isn’t that enough?” Althea’s eyes closed. The Mozart was fading, fading into inaudibility. “Mommy, Daddy, will you stay with me until I go to sleep? . . .”

The Cunninghams sat on either side of the bed until Althea slept, then they moved to the upholstered window seat, Mr. Cunningham fiercely clutching his wife’s hand. There was no need for subterfuge or hiding their innermost secrets. They had an enemy that they could face and destroy together.

*   *   *

The following morning, two Beverly Hills police officers spent less than five minutes in the upstairs office of the Henry Lissauer Art Institute with its founder. They were waiting for him downstairs in the dusty hall when the sharp report rang out. Students burst from the ell-shaped studio, watching while the two policemen shouldered down the locked door. The office with its student paintings reeked with the acrid odor of gunpowder. Smoke still hung in the air above a World War I Mauser that lay next to the body.

That particular day, August 6, a bomb weighing four hundred pounds was dropped on Hiroshima, exploding with a destructive power greater than twenty thousand tons of TNT, brazing the sky over Japan with the light of a hundred suns. It goes without saying that this miracle bomb crowded the story of the art teacher’s death from the news.

Althea, with her parents on the
Super Chief
speeding eastward for a recuperative stay at her grandmother’s Newport “cottage,” Eastwind, did not hear of Henry Lissauer’s suicide until three years later.

Best Actress Nominees: Jeanne Crain
(Pinky);
Olivia de Havilland
(The Heiress);
Rain Fairburn
(Lost Lady);
Susan Hayward
(My Foolish Heart);
Deborah Kerr
(Edward, My Son);
Loretta Young
(Come to the Stable)

—
Motion Picture Academy Awards, 1949

Former GI’s have bought homes at record pace.

—
Caption under aerial photograph of Levittown,
Life,
March 31, 1949

The volcano that bubbles continually on Stromboli, the tiny, northernmost of the Lipari Islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea, is nothing compared to the lava of endlessly flowing gossip surrounding Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini. The latest rumor has it that Miss Bergman is expecting.

—
KNX News Broadcast, August 5, 1949

Ingrid Bergman, who has been admired and respected in this country, has saddened and disappointed her legions of fans by her infamous behavior. Our hearts go forth to her suffering husband, Dr. Petter Lindstrom, and to her innocent daughter. It would be the gravest injustice to the moral standards of this great nation to permit this foreign national to return.

—
speech read into
Congressional Record
on August 23, 1949

  
31
  

Marylin’s alarm buzzed and she squashed down the gold button without opening her eyes. Luminous green hands would only tell what she already knew, that the ungodly hour was 5:35. Shooting would begin on the
Versailles
set at nine, and Marylin, scheduled for the first scene, must be at Magnum by seven on the dot for her elaborate transformation into an
ancien régime
glamour girl. (If it weren’t for the powdered wig she would be wearing today she would have had to arrive an hour earlier for a stint with the hairdresser.) Joshua clutched his arms around her, planting a sleepy kiss on her lips. “Angelpuss,” he muttered.

“Have to get up. . . .”

“Adore you.” Tightening his grasp, he bussed her again; then his arms loosened, and he gave a shuddering snore.

Marylin, yawning, padded to the bathroom. Joshua’s three Oscars gleamed on their shelf above the toilet—the one on the left he had accepted this year, 1949, for Best Original Screenplay,
Thus Be It Ever.
Shucking her nightgown, she adjusted the gold-plated faucets of the outsize shower that her predecessor had planned with the finicky, exacting care that showed in every detail of the Tudor-style house. It had never occurred to Marylin, raised by NolaBee—an exuberantly uninterested housewife—and lacking any sense of rivalry with Ann Fernauld, to make changes in wife number one’s
chef d’oeuvre.
The decor as well as the household arrangements continued as before, with a business manager paying the bills and Percy and Coraleen holding the domestic reins in their capable brown hands.

Cold water sluiced over Marylin. She shivered, her mind clearing.

In her dressing room she selected a sheer summer blouse with a pretty red striped dirndl, calf-length in the New Look, thrusting her bare damp feet into red Capezio ballerina slippers, combing her long brown hair back into a ponytail. The mirrored walls reflected her, diminutively exquisite, remarkably unchanged from the huge-eyed girl who had reluctantly entered Beverly High as a freshman.

Billy must have been on the ready for her door to open. In cowboy hat and seersucker cowboy-imprinted pajamas, he burst from his room. She knelt, kissing the warmly pulsing milk-scented neck as she lifted him.

“Whew! You weigh a ton. Soon you’ll have to pick me up.”

“That’s what you always say,” he said.

“It’s true.”

“Yeah, when?”

“Already I can’t make it down the stairs with you, can I?” She carried her son into his toy-lined room, putting on his bathrobe.

Billy had inherited her changeable aquamarine eyes. His small button of a nose had a hint of a bump, a possible indication that it would beak out luxuriantly like his father’s. Other than these genetic endowments, Billy was Billy. A thin, wiry little boy with a narrow, humorous face and thick, curly blondish hair that threatened to turn brown.

While Marylin ate half a pink grapefruit centered with a maraschino cherry, rye toast, and overmilked coffee, Billy bounced around the breakfast room regaling her with a monologue about the new hamster that he and Joshua had bought at the Beverly Hills Pet Store. “A rat, that’s what Ross calls it,” he said, raising his eyebrows in quick, humorous scorn at his young Scottish nurse’s ignorance. “Hah, I told her! Rat!”

Marylin’s sparkling eyes followed her son. Billy was her joy and delight, her compensation for marriage to an older husband who elicited her affection, her admiration, even her passion, but never her love. For Marylin Fernauld, love eternally drifted with warm currents in a barnacle-encrusted TBM.

“Come on up to my room, you can hold him,” offered Billy magnanimously.

“Tonight.” From the three-car garage came the smooth throb of a well-tuned engine. Reluctantly she set down her napkin. “There’s Percy.”

“So what time’ll you be home?” Billy demanded.

“Mmm, around six.”

“So late? You need a new contract.”

She burst out laughing. Joshua, in this precise belligerent disgust, would decry the velvet-lined jail cell that was her seven-year contract with Magnum. Her salary had reached its maximum of three-fifty a week, and more often than not Art Garrison refused to loan her out to Fox, Metro, Paramount, Warner’s for twenty times that. She was bankable, which meant those cold-eyed New York financiers would melt when it came to lending Magnum the wherewithal to shoot a Rain Fairburn film. (Marylin, who was far from the only star thus contractually trapped, didn’t really care: Joshua earned big bucks and her salary more than adequately supported the small house on Crescent, as well as putting Roy through UCLA.)

She and Billy went into the hazy morning, where she smothered his squirming, protesting face with good-bye kisses. He was waving his black cowboy hat as the big postwar Chrysler pulled away.

While Percy steered smoothly along Sunset toward Hollywood, she sat in the backseat murmuring her lines, occasionally halting to thumb through a small worn leather notebook for a self-written character note. Though everyone else recognized in Marylin that inexplicable and undefinable phenomenon, star quality, she herself didn’t believe in it. She worked endlessly and hard on every role.

At the intersection of Fairfax, she glanced around. A small dark blue coupe was keeping pace in the next lane. In the mist she was unable to see the make of the car.

She returned to her script.

As Percy eased the car below the arched iron letters
MAGNUM PICTURES
, a dark coupe halted on Gower Street outside the gate. Was it the same car? The question fluttered momentarily; then she forgot it.

On the north side of the private road loomed two enormous new sound stages: both had been constructed with profits from Rain Fairburn movies.