A long silence, the three of us sitting there, with me staring across the table at the frozen, hardened face of the woman I knew as a child, a young girl, a young woman. Tansi, daughter of one of my oldest friends. Tansi, rigid now. Silent. Finally, she growled, ready to defend herself. But the lips quivered, the iron resolve shattered; the hands suddenly darted to her face, and she covered her eyes. When she removed her hands, her eyes were misty, frightened. She swallowed, then tossed her head back and forth, and sort of smiled.
“My God, Edna, my God.”
“Tell me, Tansi.”
“I
had
to do something. Don’t you see?” She waited.
“Tell me, Tansi. I
don’t
see. This is impossible for me to see.”
Tansi’s hands were shaking. Mercy reached across the table and touched the back of one wrist, a loving, comforting gesture. But Tansi recoiled, as from snakebite, and tucked her hands under her armpits.
“I had to. To protect Jimmy. Somebody had to. Nobody was doing anything. Jake was playing games, back and forth, going nowhere. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Those letters scared me. Warner kept telling Jake to take care of it. It drove me mad. Jimmy’s so helpless, a boy, a child. He’s…gentle. He’s not built for this. I’d watch him and see the sadness, the hurt. You all see it, Edna. Everybody does. He can’t help himself. He told me that story of his mother dying and how he couldn’t do it alone, and my heart broke. And so I knew Carisa would do him dirt. I knew her, you know. I’d seen her in Marfa. She was all over him, just horrible. He couldn’t stay away from her. It was me who got her fired. She had to go. And then the letters started arriving.”
“But the studio was handling it, no?” Mercy said.
“No, they weren’t. They didn’t
understand
Carisa. Before she left Marfa, I talked to her, so I knew she was crazy. I knew what she was capable of. Not the money, not the baby. She wanted to
destroy
Jimmy Dean. The public James Dean. James Dean: the best thing that ever happened to Hollywood. Look at him—sensitive, moody, beautiful, talented. You know, I can’t tell you how kind he was to me in Marfa. And here. Only a woman could understand the kind of hatred Carisa had for him after he left her. Warner, Jake, they thought cash and threats would do it…”
“So you went there?”
“It took all I could do to drive into that neighborhood. You can imagine. I was scared to death. Everyone in Hollywood always warns you about Skid Row. I’d never been there. But I went one afternoon, after the first letters, found the apartment, but she wasn’t home. So I wrote a harsh letter and left it under her door—scribbled, dumb, angry. I said some dangerous things. But I said, Call me. I gave my number. Call me. We need to talk. And God, the stuff I said in anger. I just scribbled nonsense. Call me. And she did. She said my letter was sufficient for a lawsuit against Warner. It scared me. I went back there, and yes, we sat in that restaurant—that grimy bar and grill with the filthy tables and the greasy men, and she laughed at me, at first. She said I was one of Jimmy’s patsies, some sex-starved spinster who he could wrap around his finger and she’d had enough of it. She knew things about him, she said, dirty things, things he’d done with…with people. I tried to talk sense to her. Why hurt him? He’s on the verge of being one of the great actors of our time. Like Cary Grant. The next Montgomery Clift. Brando. But she kept laughing, and I wanted to kill her. I realized I was in too deep now, pleading with her, but then she quoted from my letter. ‘Wait till Warner hears about
this
,’ she said. ‘You’ll be out of a job, baby.’ And the more I pleaded the more she laughed. She said she was going to
Confidential
magazine. Then she got mad, wild, screaming at me. I had to run out of the place.”
“The matchbook?”
“I never thought about it. I remember smoking cigarette after cigarette. Her, too. Both of us like furnaces.”
“But why did you go after the cocktail party?”
“I knew Jimmy wanted you to go,” she looked at Mercy, “and you said no. But I saw you were intrigued, Edna. That’s why I said stay away. I didn’t want Carisa telling you all those garbage stories, the filth about him. And I didn’t want any mention of my stupid letter. Then that day that last letter came—the threat to talk to
Confidential
. After Jimmy ran out of the party, I decided to slip out, unnoticed. I figured he’d go there, to her. I sat there in front of her place, furious with Carisa, and I saw Tommy, that fool, running out. I hid my head but he wasn’t looking. Then the Strand twins, like frantic cockroaches, ran by, looked up at the apartment, and then ran off. It seemed like everything was going crazy. I was so angry. I went in, up the stairs, pounded on the door. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, opening the door. ‘The woman who will never get into his pants.’ That’s what she yelled at me. ‘What is this—visit Carisa day at the Warner Bros. Studio? Am I on the bus tour?’”
For a moment Tansi’s hands covered her face. “I pushed my way inside—yes, I was dressed for the party—and stormed around. She stood there laughing. ‘Look at you, all gussied up from prancing around in a party dress that would be old on a fifteen-year-old girl.’ Stuff like that. Then she said, ‘It’s no use. I got money from that eunuch Jake. Lots of money. Men are stupid. But money can’t buy me. I have a story to tell!’ Blindly, I swear I didn’t know what I was doing, I picked up that statue and threw it. Somehow it slipped, hit her in the shoulder, and she fell and hit her head. You know, it happened so fast. I just stood there.”
“She was unconscious?” From Mercy.
An awful silence. “I could see she was dead. All that blood. Just like that. It happened so fast. I, like, woke up, Edna. And I’m staring at a dead woman. I rushed around the apartment, thinking that no one knew I was there. All that clutter, that paper. A packrat. I remembered my letter, the things I said. I just panicked, opening drawers, and I found stacks of letters, one bunch in a rubber band. And on the top was my letter, folded inside the envelope I’d left it in. She’d scribbled on it in pencil, SAVE. In capital letters. That scared me. SAVE, she’d written. I grabbed that bunch of letters and put them into my purse. And then I left. No one was around. No one.”
“And Lydia’s letter was there?”
“That was stupid of me. I burned my letter, of course, and the others, one of them Lydia’s, which I read first. And then, when we were having lunch, the subject of the letters came up, and I’m staring at Lydia who’s been drinking, and I went on about the letters to Jimmy and Warner and talked of Jimmy’s nasty letter. I said Carisa should have been used to getting threats by mail. After all, Lydia, I said, there was yours, your accusing letter. I said it right to her. I realized my mistake, I couldn’t believe the words came out of my mouth, but I kept talking about Cotton and his investigation, and Lydia got drunker and then she went home. I could have slapped myself, but I thought—no one knows.”
“Tansi, you should have come forward…”
“No,” she said. “I couldn’t.”
“What if Jimmy had been arrested?” Mercy asked.
“Oh, I knew he wouldn’t be. Warner would take care of that. It had to be Max Kohl or Lydia. Either one. When Lydia died, everyone was safe. I put the idea that it was Lydia in Nell’s head earlier and that was that. Jimmy, well, the studio would never let him be charged with murder.”
She stopped. The word “murder” stayed in the air, and she trembled. “Oh, Edna, what do I do? It was an accident. It just happened. She fell…”
“But you hid it from Detective Cotton.”
“I know, I know, but I couldn’t face it. Now what?” She sucked in her breath. “Somebody had to do something, for God’s sake. Jimmy can’t help himself. No one would ever
accuse
him because there was no reason for him to hurt her because it would
hurt
his career. And his career is who he is. He’s an actor. You watched the dailies, Edna. Jett Rink. You wrote Rink before you knew Jimmy. Like a genius.”
“What if Lydia had been arrested?” Mercy insisted, breaking into Tansi’s ramble.
But Tansi wasn’t listening. “You know what happened in Marfa? I’m running errands for Stevens, nonstop, but at night Jimmy’d sit with me, talk to me, tell me about his mother, Fairmount, his motorcycle, his nephew Marcus, his dreams. Just talk, talk, talk. The Little Koffee Kup, with two K’s. The barbershop, the drug store. And then the stupid Carisa mess started. I’d warned him when he first started looking at her. She was playing a Mexican cook and goofing off. Stevens said get rid of her when I told him. I did, gladly. But she’d already started causing trouble for Jimmy. Tantrums, crying. Once she slapped him. He slapped her back. She said she’d kill him. Then we got her out of there, shipped her to El Paso, back to L.A. Jimmy was happy, but he told me that she would be a troublemaker. And do you know what I said to him? I’ll take care of it. I had no idea what I was talking about, but I meant it. Being around him does that to people. You’ve seen it.”
I watched her eyes get cloudy, dreamy. “The night she was gone, everyone was playing Monopoly or playing records or something, and Jimmy said let’s go for a ride. He took your old rattletrap car, Mercy, since Stevens took away his car for speeding. And we drove out under the Texas night sky, way out among the brush and the jackrabbits, and we sat in the car and talked and talked and talked. For hours. I mean
he
talked—the way he does. I just sat there. I couldn’t take my eyes off his face. And he had this six-pack of Lone Star beer, and we drank them all in Coca-Cola cups, there, under the stars, and munched on boxes of crackerjacks he got from someone. When I started to hiccough from that beer, he leaned over and kissed me on the mouth. He just did it. Once, quick. There I am hiccoughing like a fool, and he kisses me on the mouth. James Dean. Jimmy. And I smelled his stale tobacco breath, his beery breath, that raw smell, and then, you know, he just started up the car, glanced at me with a sliver of a smile, and he dropped me back to the hotel.”
I’d been sitting at Mercy’s kitchen table for hours, a lazy afternoon spent watching her make dinner. Outside it was raining, a drizzly L.A. rain, a foggy low-lying mist settling over the lemon grove I could see just beyond the kitchen door. I found it tremendously relaxing, this drifting afternoon, as Mercy deftly chopped glistening stalks of celery, garish carrots, red potatoes, overripe tomatoes, tossing the colorful piles into a large cast-iron pot, already simmering on the stove with crackling, diced onions in lemony butter. Mercy’s soup—“my passion,” she told me, “my love.” A concoction to be blended with chunks of blood-red beef cubes, heated until the flavors merged, announced themselves to the small room, and served with a loaf of dark bread rising in the oven.
I started to cry. For three days, since the arrest, I’d been in a trance, airless, hidden away.
Mercy turned from the stove where she was dipping her nose to breathe in the oregano and garlic she’d just tossed in. “Edna.”
I shook my head. “No, it’s all right.” And it was. It was all right because justice, though relentless, had been served.
How close Mercy and I had become! The company of women, I thought. How do men do it, with their distances, their reserves, their denials? Civilization needs forthright, strong women. How else to survive, to guarantee the passing on of feeling, caring, passion, decency? They do have madness to deal with, women do. I looked at Mercy: a woman half my age, with the throaty whiskey voice, a woman not beautiful but whose face held such character, such resonance. We understood each other. Tacitly. Deliberately. Exquisitely.
I smiled.
“Now what?” Mercy smiled herself.
“I’m feeling a bit melancholy. These past days have been so sad.”
Yesterday I sat in the Blue Room, guarded by a nervous Jake who seemed lost without his feisty ally. I smiled at George Stevens who thanked me. He was happy. Jack Warner was away at a meeting but Jake handed me a note.
I told you there was nothing to worry about. In Hollywood there’s always a happy ending
. Furious, I crumpled it up. There was a note from Rock, away at the same meeting with Jack.
I was wrong. I’m sorry.
That note I folded and tucked into my purse.
Liz Taylor, dressed in a puffy white linen dress with an apricot scarf around her neck, slipped into the room so softly she seemed a wispy summer cloud. Her violet eyes flickered, and she leaned in, touched me on the shoulder. “It wasn’t supposed to end like this.” I couldn’t interpret the look on her face; the delicate corners of her mouth drooping melodramatically though her eyes—that almost unreal violet tint—seemed faraway. I said nothing. Was this the actress in one more final scene? I didn’t understand Hollywood, never would, didn’t want to. Not this world where lines were scripted for you, collectively rewritten: polished, deleted, giddily celebrated. Just like the people who spoke them. Who were the people who delivered them?
But Liz had a kindness about her, a bittersweet gentility. I sensed a decent human being here. She smiled wistfully, her salutation. Two men and a woman—their faces dull as cardboard—rushed in, as though they’d misplaced a precious jewel and now had found it, and immediately closed in on her, but never touching, whispering about appointments and obligations. She stared at them, her chin set, then moved seamlessly out of the room. Her perfume lingered.
I shook my head. “I’m thinking about Liz Taylor.”
Mercy nodded. “A beautiful woman.”
“There are always too many people around her. She’s never alone.”
Mercy tapped the ladle against the steaming pot. “Alone she might be forced to face the glossy eight-by-ten photograph they’ve turned her into.”
“You know,” I said, “one afternoon I was passing by the commissary, and I saw Rock Hudson sitting by himself, alone at a table, hunched over some papers.”
“So?”
“He just sat there, this—this
presence
. All these people walked in, crew people, secretaries, best boys, worst boys, I don’t know. And no one approached him.”
“People don’t dare.”
“But why?” My voice was rising. “Over and over he looked up as folks neared, passed by, as though he were expecting someone. He’s one more Jimmy Dean, hungry for attention and recognition, but scared of it. Because…maybe because…he doesn’t quite know the rules he now has to play by. He looked so…so isolated there. He’d planted himself in the middle of the room, as conspicuous as a noonday sun, and he waited. He looked like a shy schoolboy waiting to be picked for sandlot baseball, but only if they made
him
the star player.” I paused. “You know, Mercy, they’re all up there on the screen and everyone embraces them, that frozen image, but then they sit in a cafeteria and begin to fall apart.”
Mercy laughed. “Good God, Edna.”
“This movie, my romantic story of Texas opulence and penury, has allowed them to avoid looking at themselves. One more chapter in avoiding the awful mirror. Here, in paradise, Jack Warner tells us that we shouldn’t remember Carisa or Lydia. And even dear Tansi.”
Mercy was silent a long time. “It’s just Hollywood.” Flat out. Final.
I nodded. “I was planning to convince Tansi to return to New York. Back there she was spirited, witty. The years in Hollywood made her high-strung, brittle, kowtowing to an ego-mad man like Jack Warner, who wields power like a fist in your face, or Jake Geyser, a toady who mimics his superiors. She lost her bearings here.”
Mercy sighed. “So you really think she did all those things to serve the company? She really believed she was saving Jimmy’s future?”
I shook my head. “No, not really. She told herself that. She did it out of some peculiar loneliness—some aloneness, maybe—that comes from living here among the cannibals. Mercy, she did it for her idea of love.”
“What will happen to her?”
“Well, I’ve had one very angry phone call from her mother. She’s quite the battalion of a woman, that one. She blames me. She’s already lined up an army of high-priced New York and L.A. lawyers—funded by her ex-husband, Tansi’s dipsomaniac father. His millions will save her. I can’t imagine she’ll ever do prison time. There’s so much money there, and power. Probation, perhaps. Petrified Tansi need have no fear. She’s already made bail, of course, and is nowhere to be found.”
“I thought it peculiar that the newspaper talked of Detective Cotton solving the crime, ‘following leads that culminated in the arrest,’ and so forth. That struck me as duplicitous, a cavalier dismissal of your work.”
“Septuagenarian spinsters, albeit with spunk and gumption, and a tiny withered Jewish lady at that, are not supposed to step into his bang-bang-you’re-dead world. But Detective Cotton did assume control when I called him that afternoon, with Tansi sitting with you just ten feet away. In tears. Both of you.”
“I go to sleep thinking of it. It haunts me, her shriveled, empty face.”
“You know, Detective Cotton sent a dozen roses to my hotel. That was a surprise. Of course, each night they droop a little more, shedding perfumed petals. When I fly out tomorrow, I expect the carpet will be covered with browning petals.”
“You’re really anxious to get back home?”
“I am and I’m not. Alaska looms before me like a desolate wasteland. I’ll be flying there again, stuck in snow drifts when it’s a teeth-chattering one-hundred degrees below zero.” I sighed. “L.A. will seem a paradise.”
“Come back to visit.”
“Of course. But I have to do
Ice Palace
.” I bit my lip. “I suppose it will be my last novel.”
Mercy looked at me sideways. “Edna, you probably said that back in the twenties when you finished
Show Boat
.”
I grinned. For a moment I imagined myself back in Alaska, my vision colored by these last days in California. I knew my heart beat differently now.
Mercy pointed to a stack of books on a side table, all wearing glossy dust jackets, a tower of neatly stacked volumes. “Thank you,” she said. Earlier I’d arrived with copies of my novels, and, a little sheepishly, had inscribed them to Mercy, each one with a different inscription. In
Giant
I’d written, “You did not fail him.” That’s all I wrote, and Mercy smiled.
“Did you hear from Jimmy?”
“No,” I said. “They’re shooting every day now—the last scene. He couldn’t…”
“Still, he could have called you.”
“There was a small drawing left in my hotel mailbox. It’s a picture of a boy’s face, and it looks, I suppose, as he did as a young boy: bony, intelligent face, the eyes, the lips—embryonic idol, that one. A boy in what looks like a confirmation suit, with slightly mischievous eyes. He signed it ‘Jim (Brando Clift) Dean.’ It’s beautifully innocent and simple. I’m happy to have it.” I thought of Rock and Liz. “What will happen to these young, beautiful people?” I said, suddenly. I looked into Mercy’s face. “And you? Out here, among the cannibals.”
“Me, I hide away, look at it all cynically, and probably will dissolve into booze and multiple marriages.”
“Don’t say that,” I warned.
“We pay a price. We’re a patchwork quilt of publicity shoots. Actors have a short shelf life.”
“A lot of this scares me to death. You know, my novels have romantic characters, Mercy. Beautiful, willful women and gorgeous, though horribly flawed, men. But they’re…creations. Here, they use real people who seem unaware that, well…the inevitable arc of rise-and-fall is built into this dreadful illusion.”
“What’s going to happen to
him
?” Mercy asked. “Could he end up lounging with other stars at the Beverly Hills Hotel swimming pool, waiting to be recognized?”
“I don’t want to think about that. It scares me even worse.”
“I’ll never understand him.”
I stood up, walked to the window. The rain was stopping. I saw a pale blue sky; the eucalyptus and lemon trees gleamed and shimmered in the yard’s sudden light. “He’s all that we think he is. Nothing more.”
“Nothing more?”
I turned and faced her: “But that’s enough.”