“Tansi, don’t be a foolish woman.” The words came out too harsh, too strident. Tansi looked hurt, and I considered apologizing, then changed my mind.
“Foolish? Edna, how could you?”
“I’m just trying to be truthful with you, Tansi. I’m your friend.” But I looked at Jake, who was not an old friend, now glowering, his eyes dark with anger.
“That’s hardly the way friends talk, Edna.”
Jake smirked. “Don’t you find it strange that you and Mercy McCambridge have spent a lot of wasted time running around and making fools of yourselves? Cotton told me you and Mercy visited the super. Even, I guess, harassed his granddaughter.”
Tansi shook her head. “I can’t believe you’d go
there
.”
“It’s not the black hole of Calcutta, Tansi. It’s L.A., the dark side, the…”
“I wouldn’t be caught dead there.”
“No one is asking you to go there.”
“You know,” Jake said, “we do have a police force.”
I smiled. “Which, I gather, you’re not very fond of at the moment. Or have you changed your mind?”
“I have meetings.” He stood. “James Dean is safe.”
Tansi echoed, “Safe.” She stood.
Jake headed toward the doorway. “You don’t understand, Miss Ferber. James Dean is no longer a person. He’s now a property.” With that, he left the room.
Wildly, insanely, I flashed to Jett Rink, the helter-skelter wildcatter of
Giant
, that handsome, madcap boy who becomes so rich and powerful that he abandons his moral compass. Property, oil wells, ranches, Reata, Texas. A wasteland of black gold. Vast stretches of dried-out dead land, parched under crimson noontime sun. Buffalo grass where no buffalo roam. Jett becomes the land and the oil under it: in the process he loses his soul. Jett Rink, James Dean: property.
Furious, I managed to stand, grab hold of the table’s edge. “That’s a cruel thing to say about anybody.” But I was speaking to the door he’d closed behind him.
I sat in the blazing sunshine at a patio table at the Smoke House, staring across the street at the Warner Bros. Studio entrance. By myself, and comfortable. No, I told this person and that one, no; I want to be alone. Pursued by people—Rock Hudson, dressed as Bick, walked by with an assistant director, paused, debated joining me, but then kept moving—I’d fled the soundstage, slowly moving my way to the restaurant. An old woman in a gigantic red sun hat trimmed with garish bluebells, something I’d appropriated from wardrobe, thanks to Mercy’s intervention. “Edna, you’re going outside with no hat? This will have to do. Everyone will think you’re a bit player. It’s too hot out there.” She positioned it on my head, chuckling in her gravelly, cigarette voice. So now I sipped a glass of minty iced tea slowly, meditating. I was happy being alone, despite the circus hat I had to wear.
I was bothered. Tansi’s misguided pique, her rigid personality; and Jake, that weasel. And Jimmy, the luck of the roaring scamp, the boy wonder everyone wondered about. Jimmy and his cryptic talks with me. Who were these elusive, mysterious souls he favored in the long, long hours of night?
The waiter appeared, and I nodded. Yes, another iced tea. No, nothing to eat. I reached into my clutch and extracted one of Jake’s cigarettes. I despised the man, and yet I joyfully, gladly appropriated his cigarettes. I struck a match, lit the cigarette, but barely inhaled the smoke. In the still California afternoon, the hum of unseen freeway traffic beyond some stucco-and-tile buildings, the presence of a single jagged cloud in the unblemished blue sky. I closed my eyes, and relaxed.
I heard a rumble near the studio gates, and, turning, spotted Jimmy tearing out, breakneck speed, on his motorcycle, turning the corner so fast he seemed momentarily parallel to the all-too-close asphalt pavement. A black leather bomber jacket, black boots, a pair of military style goggles on his eyes, doubtless covering those horn-rimmed eyeglasses he was always losing or breaking. He looked very militaristic, the red-blooded Eisenhower soldier liberating Europe.
As I watched him leave, I noted Alva and Alyce Strand on the sidewalk, looking after him. Bounding from a crouching position, they tottered after the disappearing bike, and I wondered whether Jimmy’s crazed getaway was an attempt to ditch the pesky fans. Then, out of breath, the twins stopped, not far from my table, and stupidly waved after him.
I called to them. “Come here.” They hurried over. I reminded them that I’d been at Googie’s with Jimmy. “I’m Edna Ferber.”
“We know you,” Alva said, “because James knows you. He talks about you.”
“You
talk
to Jimmy?”
They looked at each other. “No, but we hear things. We ask questions.”
“Sit down.” I motioned toward empty chairs.
They shook their heads. They were frightfully identical, the boy and the girl, with shocks of sandy blond hair, with gawky faces and marble eyes. Both clowns. That lamentable gene pool was starved and desolate. Their parents must have been brother and sister. I shivered at the thought.
Alyce glanced at her brother, her eyes panicky. “No, we have to go.”
“Go where?”
She pointed, melodramatically. “We follow James.”
“And where has he gone?”
They looked at each other. “We guess. Sometimes we’re right, sometimes wrong.”
The other picked up the thread. “Sometimes we sit for hours, waiting. And he never shows up.”
Alva grinned, “Mostly we hang out near the studio.”
“We think we know where he’s going today.”
“Yesterday for two hours he sat on his bike in front of the apartment of that girl who died?”
“Lydia Plummer?” I exclaimed.
They shook their heads: “No, Carisa Krausse. Just sat there. We sat far away and watched him sit there. He looked so sad. He never moved.”
“How do you know he’s going there now?”
“We don’t, but he’s headed like in that direction.”
With that they scampered off to a battered car, fenders bent and antenna crumpled. In seconds they were lumbering past. A squeaky horn blew. Alva waved. They were deliriously happy. And decidedly insane. The by-product of a world of celluloid and ticket-stub heartache.
I wondered. Maybe. Just maybe.
At the studio gates, where a small gaggle of autograph-seeking tourists routinely gathered, a vender hawked Glamorland maps of the homes of the stars. I commandeered a yellow cab. I recalled Carisa’s street, not the number, but figured, once there, I’d know where to go, though the driver looked none too happy with that destination. This was foolhardy, I told myself, and surely a waste of time. But I was not concerned with tracking Jimmy—no, I was curious about Alva and Alyce Strand. Simpletons maybe, but something one of them said—
Sometimes we sit for hours
—intrigued me. I needed to talk to the freakish pair. Perhaps they were the elusive, unexamined witnesses to some key evidence. Perhaps they were the truly bit players in the awful Hollywood caper.
The cab cruised to a stop at the corner of Carisa’s block and I spotted Jimmy in front of Carisa’s apartment, perched on his bike, just sitting there, arms folded, looking asleep, head bent. Surely, I wondered, he can’t sit there for hours? An odd sight: the melancholy mourner, keeping watch. The last keener at the funeral. I paid the fare and got out, a matter of feet from Jimmy.
He was watching me, even though his head was bowed. I walked up to him, feeling especially foolish in the ungainly red sunbonnet, all those bluebells on it, an old lady carrying a purse and wearing a dress I actually bought to wear to the Bucks County summerhouse of Dick and Dorothy Rodgers. It was a frilly wide-skirted cotton smock, with redundant periwinkles aplenty. And here, in down-and-out Skid Row, the stench of greasy food from a hot dog stand, and nearby the burned-out shell of an old car, windows smashed and resting on axles—I looked stupendously out of place. It’s the hat, I thought. Why am I wearing this horrible hat? Passersby might see me as a mad homeless woman who’d doubtless rifled through some abandoned chest of period finery and emerged on the street to scream at the endless flow of traffic.
“Jimmy.”
He shook his head back and forth. “Miss Edna, you really do surprise a boy.”
“It’s you who surprises.”
Quizzical, raised eyebrows, eyeglasses slipping down his nose, “Yeah?”
“Loitering here in front of Carisa’s apartment. It’s a little macabre, no?”
“I find it’s a good place for me to think about things.”
“What things?” I drew closer. I noticed he was sweating.
“Lydia.”
“So you come here to mourn Lydia?”
“It all started here.”
“What did?”
“Carisa dead, Lydia dead. Things happen in threes, you know. Am I going to be the third?” He stared up and down the street, as though watching for someone.
“Why do you say that?”
“What is the thread that goes from Carisa to Lydia to me?”
“Why does there have to be a thread?”
He sighed. “I don’t want to talk about this.” He stared up at Carisa’s window. “Not here. This is where I come to be quiet.” Abruptly, he started the bike, and a dissonant, coughing roar deafened me. I backed up and he raced away, pulling into traffic so abruptly a car slammed on brakes. A horn blared. The driver, a boy with sideburns and a duck’s-ass haircut, screamed at me, “Your son’s an asshole.”
My son. My beloved son. “True,” I answered, calmly, touching my eccentric hat. “This wasn’t what his father and I hoped he’d become.”
The driver, startled, gave me the finger and sped on.
I do so love L.A., I told myself.
“Can you believe that driver?” a voice yelled, and I jumped out of my skin. Alva and Alyce Strand were beside me, so close I could smell their garlicky breaths.
“Are you going to chase Jimmy now?” I didn’t know which one to look at.
“Why?”
“Well, I want to talk to you.” I spotted a restaurant across the street. “Can I buy you lunch, a soda, something?”
They looked at each other. “No.” They turned away.
“I want to share stories about James with you.”
Swiveling to face me, they beamed. I saw a bubble of drool at the corner of Alva’s mouth. I feared they might hug me.
The restaurant was a seedy, dimly-lit eatery, more hash-house tavern than hamburger haven, with a weathered oak bar and a few rickety tables by the front window. In back, through a partition of suspended beads, was a dance room, with a jukebox. Empty now at midday, the place probably thrived at night, derelict though it was. I’d never know. It was called Ruth’s Grill, and the daytime menu consisted of hot dogs and cheap Mexican food. The nighttime menu over the bar listed rib-eye steak and barbecued chicken. The Strands and I took a table by the window, and Alva said the hotdogs were wonderful, but suggested we skip the enchiladas. I had no desire to sample any of the offerings. They’d spent hours sitting there, they confessed, nursing lemon phosphates while waiting to see whether James Dean would show up to visit Carisa Krausse.
I ordered a coffee but its resemblance to the La Brea Tar Pits suggested I’d best leave it untouched.
It was easy to entertain the bubbly twins, at least for a few minutes, while they dipped and twisted in the chairs, constantly gazing out the grimy window, as though Jimmy might return. I regaled them with an innocent—and largely fictitious—take on Jimmy’s horseplay, his zany life. No violation of privacy. I’d garnered all of it from the exaggerated press releases Warner’s supplied to Hedda Hopper and others of her ilk. The Strand twins, though they probably already knew (and relished) every morsel, nevertheless begged for more. After all, here was a legitimate companion of James Dean, the novelist herself, authoress of
Giant
and other works they’d never heard of. And I called him Jimmy.
I, the veteran interviewer, with miles of soul-numbing Republican and Democratic Presidential Conventions under my younger belt, segued neatly into the events of the murder. After all, we sat across the street from the murder scene. So they chattered freely about their encounters with Jimmy, and nothing they offered was news to me. I was beginning to get depressed. For two inveterate watchers, they seemed to register very little. Days were blurs, times indefinite, hours merging daylight with evening; yes, that day, or was it…no…maybe…really, he was here twice…it’s hard to keep track…but he had the station wagon not the…never the sports car…On and on. I got tired.
Sitting back, my head against the plate-glass window, I kept listening.
Alva asked for another drink. I ordered it. Alva said would I mind if he smoked. I nodded. Go ahead. He offered me one. I took it, fiddled with it, and the boy lit it for me, very gentlemanly, but then I realized it was stale, and put it out in the ashtray. His sister Alyce was shaking her head. “What?” I asked. Alyce muttered something about ladies not smoking.
Ladies, I thought, need to smoke when the conversation bored so thoroughly, massively.
Alva blew smoke into my face. “That other guy is a pest, though,” he said.
I sat up. “What other guy?”
“You know, from the studio.” He described Jake Geyser, imperfectly. “He looks at you like you’re a bug” and “He talks like he’s a prince or something.”
“What about him?”
“A couple times when we waited here, we’d see this guy. Like he was checking up on James.”
“Did you talk to him?”
Alyce responded. “Yeah. He told us to get lost. He’d call the police if we kept hanging around James. He was here more than James. The guy would be around, like watching.”
“He acted like he was his guardian or something,” Alva noted.
“James has a right to go anywhere he wants.”
Alva nodded. Alyce nodded.
I nodded.
“I mean,” Alyce went on, “he looks angry a lot, like he was going to punish him.”
Doubtless he wished he could. Puritan stockades on the town green; whippings; Chinese water torture; his face on the cutting room floor.
“What about Carisa Krausse? Did you talk to her?”
“No, we don’t like James’ girlfriends.”
“Did you ever see Carisa with Jimmy?”
Alyce whispered, “No, but we knew he went to see her. We saw him walk in there. And we’d see her around the streets.”
They looked at each other, confused. “The last time we saw her was here. Right here. In this restaurant. This table.”
“You were in the restaurant?” I asked.
They shook their heads, no. “We were walking back and forth on the sidewalk and I looked in. She was sitting right where Alyce is, that seat, facing out to the street.”
“Alone?”
“No, she was talking to some friend of hers, some girl.”
“Are you sure it was Carisa?”
“Oh, yeah, she had that look, you know.”
“What look?”
“Hollywood movie star, the makeup, the hands holding the cigarette in the air, the…the…chin up, the smile.”
But Alva interrupted, “But she wasn’t smiling, Alyce.”
Alyce nodded. “That’s right. She was angry about something.”
“How could you tell from outside?”
“Because when I spotted her, I said to Alva—she’s in there. And maybe James is with her, but it was just this woman with her. But she was waving her arms, and her face was all…” She stopped.
“Contorted.” He finished.
“Contorted. You could tell she was yelling. And her girlfriend was yelling back. I could see her shaking her head back and forth, like no, no, no, no, no. You know.”
“Then what happened?”
“Nothing. We left.”
“Did you recognize the woman she was with?”
“No. It was Carisa Krausse I watched.”
“Were you here on the day Carisa died?” I asked.
They looked at each other. They nodded.
“What did you see?”
They stiffened. “Nothing. We didn’t stay. I mean, we came here because we thought we saw him driving this way, but everything was real quiet here. So we just left.”
“We wanted to get back to the cocktail party in case he went back.”
“So you saw him leave the party earlier?”
They nodded. Alyce said, “That’s why we thought he was coming here.”