Maude came tiptoe and, as she kissed my cheek, in return she whispered some words in my ear, words that sent a chill down my back. Her smile remained unchanged as she waved me off and let Ling close the door.
I carried her words with me as I went along the path and down the steps to the Cottage, and I remembered them long afterward, when Sunnyside was no more and Maude only a memory.
“She wasn’t born, you know,” Maude said. “She was hatched from an egg laid in warm sand.”
And I agreed.
CLAIRE
IT WAS WELL AFTER 2:00 A.M., I had heartburn, a headache, and an annoying ringing in both ears. I was thirty-five thousand feet over the Mississippi River on a DC-10, usually referred to as the “redeye,” heading from Los Angeles to New York, where I was about to see a second play of mine be put on the boards.
Thus far our flight was a bumpy one, seatbelts were fastened, and my stomach remained as uneasy as my mind. I got up and went to the john, and on my way back, passing the magazine rack, I pulled out the latest issues of every periodical that looked interesting, all the way down to Business Week and Parents Magazine.
Flipping through the pages of a fashion magazine, I happened across an ad—one for mink furs: “What a Legend Lives For”—and I spotted That Face. There it was, staring out at me, the too-familiar planes and angles airbrushed right down to the bone structure, swathed in gleaming mink pelts, giving the world that “old black magic” look.
Take a guess at how old she is. Hard to say, isn’t it? There were only the slightest traces of crepe around the eyes—those eyes, no longer as large as they once had been, but still Those Eyes. Compelling, demanding, wondering at a world she hadn’t made, with a wounded touch she couldn’t fully overcome. And the wide slash of the well-lipsticked mouth with its exaggerated lipline that for years had been the delight of caricaturists—now those lips that had kissed a thousand men through ten thousand nights showed the barest whisper of wrinkles that not even expert retouching could disguise, the little arroyos that drive a beauty mad with helpless frustration and horror at the creeping, implacable Specter. Time, age, sorrow, loneliness, and unhappiness may have bowed that lily neck, those shining orbs may have wept buckets on and off the screen, murder, pillage, and rapine may have dogged the wake of those size 5 feet encased in their ankle-strap shoes, but by God here she was again, popping up in this slick double-truck ad, the living legend herself. (Was it Dore Skirball who’d said you could kill Claire only by plunging a stake through the heart?)
Beauty in its realest sense is more precious than gold, precious because of its rarity. It’s said that if all the gold in the world were melted together in one solid lump it would form a cube not much bigger than a four-bedroom house of the Dutch-colonial design. And if all the beautiful faces were gathered in one place, what then? How large a space would be required to hold them? Walk down any street in any city on any day and look around you for the faces. You’ll walk a far piece before you come across something only faintly resembling a beauty. Look for a Garbo, a Lamarr, a Colbert—look for a Regrett. I’d hate to hang for the length of time you’d be looking.
In the New York Museum of Modern Art there stands the famous bronze bust by Jacques Lipchitz that, had she never done another thing but sit for the sculptor, would have provided Claire Regrett the fame due such a physiognomy. Hers was not the mere illusion of beauty, hers was the real, the genuine, article, a face famous not only for its individual features but also for the sum total of those parts. That face never dated; no matter what changes were intermittently rung upon it, no matter how it was altered to fit the newest, most up-to-date version of the wearer, it remained instantly recognizable for its nearly half a century in the public eye, despite what seemed a new face for each of her mates—new eyebrows, new lipline, new hairdo, new hair color, the works. She had no time for last week’s news or last year’s model. She made herself over regularly like the latest design hot off the Detroit assembly line. And, as has been pointed out, each make-over, each new transformation, accompanied the shedding of the last husband or lover, shaking out the bedcovers and saying, Get lost, buster. In the thirties, Frank Adonis and Perry Antrim; in the forties, Sky McCord III and more Frank; the fifties, the Frenchman, Yves de Gobelins; the sixties, Quentin “Natchez” Calhoun, while the list of in-between bed pals, the ones she didn’t bother marrying, is long indeed.
As a fabled idol of the silver screen, Claire Regrett was one of the Great Originate—sixty movies, 1932 to 1971, that’s about forty years—but as the subject of an, as they say, in-depth laboratory dissection she was quite another thing. You can take the lady as MGM presented her to us, that gilded, silvered, lacquered, often beguiling creature swanking about in her pet paillettes and her accordion-pleated Adrians, in her horsehair garden hats and egrets, displaying those perfect breasts, those narrow curving loins, the slender flanks that belonged on a jungle cat, and from behind revealed the nether curves of both chops under a swath of gold lamé, a creature hung with the jewels of a Midas (on loan from Fredd Skrebneffsky of Beverly Hills), her hair arrangement manifesting for America’s shopgirls Madame’s latest whim of curl or color. That elegant, square-shouldered, supercharged, slinking, scintillating, fur-cozzened, smoke-belching, eyelash-batting, intensely striving, grimly covetous, hungry, yearning, sex-bait mantrap, and the loving spirit of modern American girlhood, Claire Regrett, née Cora Sue Brodsky of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn’s ex-chorine and movie tootsie and self-incarnated screen Duse.
Claire was one of those historical phenomena produced by the Hollywood glamour mills, a first-magnitude star, a living legend at thirty-five, the Most Photographed Woman in the World, as well known as such contemporaries as Wallis Warfield Windsor, Kate Smith, Shirley Temple, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, or the Dionne Quintuplets. Claire in her own person alone was quintuplets.
How did it come about that a skinny, scab-kneed kittycat from Bensonhurst with no taste, no education, and her hair in turd-curls could invent or at any rate reinvent the film star, that slick vamp who pulled the fans into Loew’s Capitol or the Orpheum, that filled the same balconies in Brooklyn theatres where at fourteen she herself had sat with a dime box of sticky jujubes, her lips black with licorice, getting felt up by the butcher’s boy while she sighed over Aileen Pringle in Dream of Love?
But, by God, in the end I did dissect her. No, take it back; I didn’t, either. I tried to, I damn well did try. Two years of being joined at the hip to that lady wasn’t easy. It’s like the old joke: first prize, a week in Philadelphia; second prize, two weeks in Philadelphia. And if in the end I did fail, whose fault was that, I wonder? I defy anyone to come close to dissecting that specimen, I mean to the point where matters may be understood, conclusions drawn, true and honest opinions formed. As for illuminating her psyche—for God’s sake, leave well enough alone!
This futile endeavor of mine had not been of my own choosing, and I agreed to it for reasons beyond my own comprehension or that of any rational being. By the merest hinge of coincidence, at the time of my L.A.-N.Y. flight I had just spent a good week or more being hounded by a mutual friend about Claire Regrett. This friend was Viola Ueberroth, and she’d been pressing me to do some kind of work on Claire’s latest version of memoirs, an “as told to” job. Frankly I didn’t enjoy being dragged on this little piece of business and I’d laughed in her face. I told Vi flat-out that, however many memoirs Claire might produce, none of them would hold much relation to life as we know it on this planet. Life construed as Claire construed it was life misconstrued. In other words, the truth was not in her.
Yes, it all began in the late winter of 1980 when I got this phone call and heard that familiar fruit-toned voice. “Dear? That you, dear? Vi here.” Here I am, soaking in the hot tub, having just returned from a weekend of skiing at Mammoth Mountain. This is around ten, about an hour before Vi’s usual time for telephoning, and I judge that it may be important. I’m right. It is. She’s asking a favor of me, a big fat one.
Get this: Vi actually wants me to hop on a plane, go jetting off to New York, and talk with Claire Regrett about my “helping her out” with her autobiography. I tell Vi she’s crazy. A guy’d have to be out of his skull to “help out” Claire Regrett in any undertaking, let alone ghost her autobiography, which is what all this came down to. In the first place she’d already published one autobiography, The Stardust Trail. God deliver us from such spurious works of fiction: a portrait of Claire that was as manufactured as she was—from radiator to hub caps, nickel plate all the way. And then there’s that other cutesie little opus she penned, The Glamorous Housewife; subtitled Hints for a Happy Home Life. Claire Regrett may know plenty about glamour, but she knows blessed little about a happy home life—and not so damn much about housekeeping, when you come right down to it.
But Vi feels that the world is ready for the lowdown on Claire Regrett, the real skinny, and she declares that this time the lady is 100 percent ready to tell all. I’ll just bet. Like what happened to that famous blue movie that she reputedly made when she was still Cora Sue Brodsky, that hot item entitled Maid’s Night Out that so many people have claimed to have seen but of which no one has ever come up with a snippet? Lately I’ve seen in a Hollywood scoundrel tome some beaver shots of her from those early days, but for all we know they could be “art studies.” And what about that third husband, Yves de Gobelins, who ended up behind bars and died of a heavy steam-job in the prison laundry? Or—what was in those letters I’d burned that night in the Snuggery at Sunnyside, letters that Maude had gone to such lengths to suppress? The situation was rife, as they say, pregnant with all sorts of possibilities, but I didn’t think for a minute the Claire we all know and love was not going to open her mouth on matters like these. On that I would bet my bottom dollar.
There are things in life one is happy to do for a friend, even eager to do, to show the depths of one’s feelings, to oblige, to tighten the bonds of friendship. But not this. “This” was too much, and no matter how winningly Vi might turn her phrases or tempt me with juicy tidbits, I wasn’t interested in the job. I’m too old and too rich and too respectful of my peace of mind to fall into a bear-trap like this one.
“Why don’t we do your life, Vi?” I suggested instead. “That’d straighten some hair.”
I am omitting Miss Ueberroth’s reply. But she had not done with me yet. Poker player that she was, Vi had cards up her sleeve.
Let’s go back to Claire’s own “autobiography,” composed by her with the admitted help of a Photoplay scribe to whom she claims in the foreword she was persuaded to open her heart. Her bosom, she declared, hid no secrets, her life was an open book to be read by each and every one of her fans, and if you believe that, you’ll believe the moon’s made of green marzipan.
For example, throughout the entire book, every mention of Frank Adonis stamps him as merely as “friend of the Broadway years” who “assisted her” in those early days of Manhattan madness. According to Claire’s Technicolored version of the life that late she led, she and Frank had had a “tiff,” and when he trekked west with Babe Austrian in tow, Claire “willingly admits” that her heart was broken and that she boarded a train for Miami in company with her sister, where she let the Florida sunshine and ripe oranges cure her emotional ills. Less than a year later, so this fairy-tale narrative goes, she followed in Frankie’s footsteps to Hollywood, where Babe Austrian was already starring in her second picture. It hadn’t taken long for Claire to catch up, then overtake her, to become the Celluloid Soap Queen, the lady with the tear in her eye, the sob in her throat, victim of gangsters and crooked magnates, out-of-wedlock parent, the Universal Bosom on which orphans, delinquents, and ne’er-do-wells all could lay their heads, the Poor Pitiful Pearl over whom anyone in heels or jackboots, be he cowhand, gold-rusher, Tahitian pearl diver, southern plantation owner, or African bwana-devil, could walk with impunity, and in the last reel she was guaranteed to dry her extraordinary eyes and come up smelling like an American Beauty Rose.
The day following Vi’s call was the day the Academy Award nominations were announced, and Belinda Carroll’s name among the nominees for best actress was cause for celebration. The Light in the Window, the film she’d completed just before Frank’s death, had been every bit as successful as he’d predicted, but after the tragedy Belinda had again withdrawn from the movie scene, refusing all offers. Three years later, however, the irresistible role came along. Maude and I persuaded her to make The Blue Train, shot on the Côte d’Azur and in London, and Belinda’s role as Lena, the aging, neurotic actress fleeing from life, had been a standout. There were early forecasts of what would happen in the next Oscar derby, and now her nomination had come to pass.
One reason I wanted to avoid the pitfalls of Viola’s proposition was that I’d had a play in and out of my typewriter for the last two years, and this time I had high hopes. I even had a producer—make that two, Feldshoe and Paultz, who’d been running a good track record in the past six or seven years. Tackling Broadway again meant I’d need my wits about me, and I couldn’t see Madame Clutch playing second fiddle to any Great White Way.
A second reason for not becoming involved was my feelings for Belinda. I could just hear what she’d have to say if I told her I was going to “assist” Claire with her memoirs, even in some sort of “editorial” capacity. They were ancient rivals, back to their MGM days, and right now Belinda was flying high, wide, and handsome, while Claire had experienced setbacks and reverses. And though Belinda may have put former feuds behind her, I wasn’t too sure about Claire, who always kept her box of knives well sharpened. Belinda and I were enjoying a far closer relationship than I’d ever hoped for, and now we were to be professionally involved as well, for the leading role in my new play was earmarked for her, though this fact hadn’t been announced.
As for this windfall nomination by the Academy, no one was more excited than I, and as soon as I heard the news I hopped in my car and hied myself over to the Wilshire Corridor, where Belinda was currently leasing a six-room apartment. As she let me in, I could see how overwhelmed she was. I took her in my arms and kissed her, then gave her the flowers I had hidden behind my back.
“So,” I began with a yard-wide grin, “the movie stork is bringing a bundle of joy to your house. How do you like the idea of a little boy named Oscar to put on your mantel?”
She laughed, said I was out of my mind, it was wonderful to be nominated but she wouldn’t kid herself by thinking they’d ever give it to her. Stranger things had happened, I said, secretly wondering if she might not be this year’s dark horse. True, the competition was heavy, but this was an actress who’d been in pictures since 1936, who’d paid her dues, and who’d made a lot of friends along the way. Mightn’t—just mightn’t it happen? I thought so. In token of which I took her to lunch and showed her off. The world was in the Polo Lounge that noontime, and friends and strangers alike stopped by to kiss and congratulate her. In time our conversation, of course, got around to the subject of Viola’s ridiculous crusade. As I had foreseen, Belinda was shocked.
“Are you crazy?” she said. “Why would you want to write her memoirs? I know—you’re contemplating suicide.”
I told her not to joke around, that Vi was serious. Belinda fell silent and I could tell she was mulling it over. Granted, it was a screwy idea, farcical; me, of all people, considering my relationship with Belinda. People had been drawing parallels between the two actresses for years, until the ruts were deep as the Grand Canyon. It was really apples and oranges, but writers loved comparing them, contrasting their careers, commenting on the Antrim connection, Perry married now to Claire, now to Belinda, blowing up the “feud” every chance they got. And there were certain grounds for the comparisons.
Each lady in her time had found her share of misfortune. Other women may experience similar upheavals, but seldom so prominently, not in front of the whole world with everyone peeking in the window, reading newsprint over their morning grapefruit. If Be
linda’s life had been more scandal-ridden, more prominently publicized, if Claire had somehow managed to keep hers more or less limited to the inner circles of the industry, I judged this to be no more than the random fall of the cards. Somewhere it has been written, “It is not enough to succeed; others must fail.” Each actress in turn had watched the other fail while she herself succeeded and succeed while she herself failed. Both were artists of limited range and talent, yet each in her time had risen to the heights of the profession. One difference between them was that Belinda never made mean digs about Claire—at least not in print—but when Belinda was on her downward spiral, Claire had been quick to voice her disapproval publicly. Many people said she’d kicked Belinda while she was down.
So it was no surprise that Belinda failed to take kindly to Vi’s suggestion that I involve myself with Claire; let Claire go out and find an “as told to,” let the shoemaker stick to his last. Practical advice from a practical woman. Naturally, I would abide by her words.
And so, despite Vi’s intermittent urgings, plus a certain curiosity of my own, I remained as resolved as ever to have nothing to do with such a foolhardy plan. Let Claire go her way, let me go mine, and everything would be hunky-dory. But I hadn’t reckoned on unforeseen events. Fate or some other malign agency seemed bent on throwing us together. The plan had been for me to escort Belinda to the Academy Awards, and to the Governor’s Ball afterward, but at the last moment I’d been unable to attend. I had to fly to New York to meet with my Broadway producers.
So here I was, thirty-five thousand feet over St. Louis, winging east, staring at the face in the magazine. That Face. Star of Stage, Screen, Radio, and Television. The Wicked Witch of the West. Miss Everybody’s Dream. The Woman America Respects Most [sic]. The Girl We’d Most Like to Be Cast on a Desert Island With. Rosie the Riveter’s Sister. And “The Luckiest Girl in the World” as in (her quote, and often) “I simply think I am the luckiest girl, etc., etc., etc.”