Well, say what you might, Claire was always good copy. By now her humble origins had been so often chronicled they were stamped in the public consciousness like the discovery of Peking Man or the Scopes Monkey Trial. Everybody knew how she’d started as a salesgirl at a hosiery counter, how she’d been one of Frankie Adonis’s first dates, how he’d got her interested in show business and then left her for Babe Austrian, how as a result Cora Sue Brodsky had suffered a bad setback, but how, refusing to buckle under, she’d made up her mind to be as big a star as her rival.
It wasn’t just a story, it was a whole Scandinavian saga, and, give or take a stretch or two, pretty close to the truth. There was a “holiday” in Florida to get her nerves settled, then the trek to California and the movies. Who is there who doesn’t remember even today how after an endless train ride she’d arrived broke, supported herself washing dishes in a Chinese dig-in at night, and during her days had sought employment at the studios, where, luckier than thousands of other hopefuls, she played her first role, at AyanBee, having been taken under the wing of no less a patron than the noted producer Sam Ueberroth. A steady stream of parts brought her to the attention of a favorable public. The name Cora Sue Brodsky was dispatched to limbo and she became Claire Regrett, the name of the character she’d played in that old Warner Baxter movie I’d seen the preview of as a boy, after which she was on her way up, up the ladder of success. Thanks to a push from Viola Ueberroth, this bright-eyed newcomer wound up with a contract at MGM, where she next appeared in another Fedora film, The Daughter of Olaf Ruen, whose Coming Attraction I could recall having seen at Poli’s Theatre as a boy.
It was no secret that Claire and I went way back—not that she’d remember it, but I did. It was one of those formative experiences that you don’t forget; for the first time it gave me an inkling of what it was like to get up on a stage and perform, and after that taste it was the smell of the crowd and the roar of the greasepaint for me. This unexpected encounter took place back during the war, when I was a sailor in the navy. It was just before the conflict ended, after they bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We’d come into San Diego and the USO was putting on a live show on the deck of one of our largest flat-tops. One of the stars was Madame herself, who was then married to Skylar McCord, and she had him in tow. First they brought her out; she acted really nervous up there in front of so many men, but we gave her lots of whistles and applause, and when she settled down she sang “My Blue Heaven” for us. Not bad. Not good, but not bad. Then she danced, sort of. No Ruby Keeler she, but she sure knew how to milk an audience. She had a filmy dress on, and the breeze kept blowing its skirt around, showing off those great gams. Then she asked for a volunteer to come up and dance with her. Numbered checks had been handed out and I had the winning number. My buddies practically threw me up there beside her.
“Can you dance?” she asked, giving me that big red smile. “A little,” I said. The band kicked off, I grabbed her, and away we went. I was a jitterbugging fool but she kept right up there with me. When we finished she looked the worse for wear, but she was game, I’ll say that; she really gave her all for the servicemen. We were a hit, no doubt of it. Next came Skylar, muscles and curls and 4-F, lots of flashy white teeth and shoulder pads in his houndstooth sports jacket. They did a patter routine; the jokes were corny but he got a couple of laughs, though we wondered why a polo injury had kept him out of uniform. Later, when the show was breaking up, they told me she wanted me to be in a photograph with her. The admiral was in it, too—me, Claire, and the Sixth Fleet Commander—and they sent the picture to the hometown papers. I shook the admiral’s hand, and then McCord’s, and when it came to her she bussed my cheek again for the camera. “Bless you, darling,” she said in that deeply meaningful way of hers. I still have the shot in a beat-up old shoebox somewhere, yellow with age.
I was to encounter her yet again, this time on a strictly professional level, and the shower of “bless you”s was once again like the rain in Spain. This was three or four years after I’d landed in Movieland. Frank had got me a lead on an important dramatic TV show, the star of which was none other than Madame herself. The trade press was full of it: Claire Regrett had signed to do TV; she’d “gone over to the philistines.” Still a star after almost twenty-five years, she’d recently made the industry sit up and marvel at her willingness—nay, eagerness—to take on the world of television, and in its primitive format of half-hour black-and-white anthology stuff, a grueling rehearsal schedule. But Claire was pleased to be a pioneer (some said an apostate) and wrangle with the new medium, and her name was still of sufficient candlepower that I was more than happy to attach my wagon to it. I mean, Claire Regrett! She was a star.
I’d left my house with a good margin for error, but due to a blowout I was late by fifteen minutes. The director had convened the cast around the table for the first read-through, and he himself was reading my part. As I came through the door it banged loudly and everyone looked up. Claire was mighty grim.
“Ah, here is our missing actor,” said the director, a quiet, amiable man I’d worked for previously. “Come and meet Claire.”
“Good morning,” sang the star from the head of the table. It was that movie voice I knew so well, clipped, and phony as a plaster saint in Little Italy. “Let me guess—you had a flat tire.”
“As a matter of fact—” I began, but got no further.
“Oh, come on-n-n,” she said, with obvious disbelief, rolling those big eyes heavenward, “surely you can do better than that.”
“I probably can,” I replied, “but it happens to be the truth.”
She raked me up and down with a look freighted with suspicion. “Really? Did you hurt yourself?” she inquired, taking in my distraught appearance. My left arm hung at my side, wrapped in a beach towel from the trunk of my borrowed machine. While I was changing the tire, the axle had slipped and the handle sprang on my wrist. It hurt like sixty and I supposed it was sprained. Ignoring her, I told the director I’d take over the reading and afterward I thought I should go to the studio infirmary.
“Oh, you really are hurt, then.”
I quoted from Browning. “‘Nay sire, I am killed’; and smiling the boy fell dead.” And in front of God and Claire Regrett I fainted dead away.
They told me later that she cringed and wept while the doctor worked on my arm, and afterward she was contrite as only she could be. Nothing was too good for little Charlie. She had my dressing trailer brought in from the street and set up next to hers, and it was chicken-soup time all the way.
Our little TV tale was one of sex and murder, a sort of Postman Always Rings Twice in which a greedy wife and her younger lover intend murdering her older professor-husband and getting their hands on his insurance money. We had a mere twenty-three minutes of storytelling time and that was it, hello-goodbye. But she went at it hammer and tongs, as if she were playing Lady Macbeth, exploring her every motivation with the director, trying to scrape the barnacles of cliché from the dialogue and finding ways of making the material more interesting: She suggested that her part needed a little speech in which she could exploit her impoverished background and win sympathy for her character, essentially an unsympathetic one. Her “little” speech resulted in a two-page exposition in which she revealed that as a child she’d lived in a tenement on Skid Row, and contained deathless lines like “I never even had a doll. Every little girl wants a doll, but we were too poor.” And “When I began to blossom forth I could tell from the look in my stepfather’s eye that he had designs on me.” When the director attempted to reason with her she became mulish, so we shot the speech anyway, even though I knew it would eventually end up on the cutting-room floor.
At noon of the first day she poked her head into my dressing trailer to ask how I was feeling. We chatted a bit, touching on this and that, until she gave me one of her puzzled looks and said, “Say, where do I know you from, anyway?” She batted those eyes at me, searching my face as though for clues. When
I replied matter-of-factly that I’d once danced with her on board a navy flat-top her eyes sprang a leak. “That was you? That funny sailor with the cowlick? Oh, my darling, how wonderful to come across you again this way!” Grabbing my hand, she dragged me all around the set, actors, producer, director, telling the story of the jitterbugging gob. “Well, it certainly is a small world, isn’t it?” she concluded.
I concurred that that was about the size of it.
I was pretty hot stuff that day.
Claire was a real pro. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you the same thing, and if you were a pro, too, you earned her respect. She was a star but on the set she was trying hard to be an actress, to show her best. She’d established her standards of hard work and she demanded that everyone on the set live up to them. She buttered her bread at every turn, making little personal remarks to the gaffers up on the grid, blessing them, too, or saying wasn’t her key light a bit too hot? There wasn’t a blessed thing she didn’t know about film. The same wasn’t to be said, however, for her acting, which was a sort of tired retread of what she’d been doing for the last fifteen years, the Spider Woman filled with lust and murder, the crisp, honeyed tones, the Beverly Hills matron dodge, the white-walled tires, monogrammed pocketbook and Hollanderized fur stole. And she wore rocks the size of grapefruit. In the long shots she had on the famous trademark ankle-strap shoes, switching to bunny slippers for the close stuff.
No, the acting was strained, standard MGM fare. I recalled Dore’s once saying, “Claire’s idea of good movie acting is being able to shift your scalp on cue.” I was later to hear others on this subject. Though they, too, had worked together, Maude Antrim had never regarded Claire as much of an actress, only a bundle of assimilated reactions to a given stimulus, invariably the wrong one. You seldom heard Maude discuss acting in the technical sense—motivations and sense memory and nailing down your reaction. Rather, she talked of hitting your marks and finding your key light and knowing your lines and were the stocking seams straight?, of truck pauses and footlights and upstaging; those were her things—flat-out, simple, no-crap things.
Here’s what she had to say about Claire’s performances. She acted “in quotes,” she put “the dummy” in front of her, she hid behind “a cardboard cut-out of herself,” and she committed the most heinous of acting crimes—she “indicated,” a fault in which the actor merely pretends the emotion he doesn’t feel. Maude used to call Claire a “dry well”—she cried buckets but never produced a tear, only “indicated” that she’d cried. Poor Claire—she wanted to be a good actress, but wanting wasn’t enough, you had to be it. And sniffing and snotting into a monogrammed hanky wouldn’t do.
“There was one movie part Claire could play to perfection,” I remember Maude commenting. “The tart with a heart of gold—because that was she herself and she understood the character. But when she tried playing Tess Trueheart or Lady Jane Grey, forget it. Claire was not born to the farthingale or the fan.”
But here she was, giving us another of her Westchester matrons in a basic black nothing by Givenchy and her “good” diamonds. There wasn’t much juice in her, she was indicating like hell, and to rev herself up she was nipping at the hundred-proof vodka.
It was during this period that we saw the start of her heavy drinking. She was still married to the poor man’s Peter Lorre, Yves de Gobelins, that short-legged, popeyed bogus offshoot of the French nobility (le Comte de Gobelins, as he registered at hotels; some believed he actually manufactured antique tapestries) who hatched the disastrous perfume scheme that helped Claire lose so much of her money. The scent christened “Jeunesse Dorée” was known worldwide, but famous in a far different way than Chanel No. 5 or Joy de Patou was famous. Rather, it was notorious, with further shocks to come as bit by bit the story of Frenchy’s handling of Claire’s monies was disclosed.
Certainly Yves came in for his share of attention; and with a wife like Claire, why not? We used to laugh when Dore referred to them as “Madame and Yves.” Gobelins’s hold on her was that of an octopus, and when he visited the studio she became agitated, even angry, then relieved when he departed. But he was on the set at all hours; I’d see him lurking back there out of the light, his eyes glinting, the cheeks—always gunmetal blue from a fast-growing stubble, he couldn’t get from morning to evening without a second shave—sucked in, assessing; impeccably dressed, a sort of forties floorwalker style, even the boutonniere but without the pearl-gray spats—and too short for his own good. I knew she liked tall men, she said they forced her to keep her chin up, but this guy was a real troll. The wardrobe girl said she’d never seen a guy who gave her the creeps like this one. We thought he was exercising some kind of sinister control over Claire, though how such a strong-minded woman would take that crap off some popeyed Frog dwarf was beyond us.
But Frenchy wasn’t long for the world, as we all know. When he got sent to Alcatraz for invasion of the federal mails and assorted bits of graft and other felonies, he went up for a four-year stretch; but he never made it out again. The story was strictly headlines. Unpopular with his fellow inmates, Yves found life behind bars a hard scrabble deal. His duties partly entailed an occasional stint in the prison laundry, where one evening his carcass came to light at the bottom of the steam transformer, looking like a New England boiled dinner, the skin flayed off his parboiled flesh, his lobster-red head unrecognizable. Dommage.
Watching Claire sneak a quick shot of vodka now and then, I decided she deserved a boost, being married to a guy like that. Everybody knew about this surreptitious tippling, people had been talking about it for years; her hairdresser, her makeup man, the director, even the producer, they all knew. She kept little Dixie cups of blue label Smirnoff strategically tucked away behind things on the set, making believe they were only water, and I’d catch her hiking one back before a take.
One day they were setting up for a scene where we had a heavy clinch on a bearskin rug in front of a fireplace, and when it got around to my closeup, with the camera set behind her and over the shoulder on me, she said, “Raise your chin a little,” then lifted it herself. Her peremptory air annoyed me, and I said with some sullenness, “The shot’s on your back, how do you know where the camera is?”
“Baby, I can smell it,” was her brusque reply. “I’ve been making love to the camera for a lot of years and, believe me, it treats me better than most of the men I’ve made love to.” She reached out and touched my cheek, an affectionate gesture, but the makeup man later told me that hubby Yves had picked up on it from the shadows and had spat, with a “merde” for me to boot.
Later, when we were getting warmed up for a take, the all-important clinch became a problem of sorts. I got at her with a good healthy smooch and she yanked back as though I’d copped a feel or something. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.
“Kissing,” I said. “It’s in the script.”
She looked appalled. “You can’t kiss me like that. Keep your lips closed; this program goes into family homes, you’ll offend mothers and fathers.” This, from Hot Lips Houlihan herself.
The next time we tried the kiss, I managed it as prescribed—the way I’d kiss a maiden aunt on her annual visit. After every take I’d shoot the director a questioning look, but he’d just cross his eyes and say nothing. Later, when I went to him, he explained that, being studio bred, Claire had been taught not to kiss with open lips since it was against the old Hollywood Code. Yet, as everybody knew, she’d been on more beds than a Wamsutta sheet. Where did she draw the line? At the television sets along the Platte River, evidently.
We finally got a printed take, but as I got up from the bearskin I caught Yves out of the corner of my eye. He glared, then disappeared inside Claire’s trailer; next day when she arrived on the set she wore a wicked shiner. I happened to be at the water cooler when she came in through the door and I got a good look at it.
“Jesus, did that son-of-a—”
She put her fingers to my
lips to shut me up. “Okay, Galahad, no heroics. Get me Lou quick, will you?” She ducked into her dressing room and I went to find her makeup man. Lou couldn’t completely hide the bruise, and when the director saw the damage he was furious. He had to change his entire day’s setups.
Then, after having scored points, I was so foolish as to get Claire pissed off at me. It was the last day of shooting, and as I passed her door at lunchtime she crooked her finger at me. “Darling, I’m having just a few close friends in when we wrap. Nothing fancy, but of course you’ll come. Champagne, some hors d’oeuvres? I made them myself. We can mess around till flight time. Sound like fun?”
“Gosh, Claire,” I blurted, “I can’t. I’ve got something on.”
I’ll never forget the glazed look that came over her face. It froze blue, like a Maine pond. Her whole body tautened, and the lips formed that famous movie mouth. “Oh.” Quick and sharp. “Well. I’m sorry you’re so busy.”
I knew right away I’d made a gaffe. My whole career now had wings on it and was flapping out the window. The director came to me. “What’d you say to her?” I told him what had happened. “Jesus, can’t you do something?” he pleaded. “I’ve still got sixteen set-ups before we wrap.”
Jenny was expecting me to pick her up at the airport, but I made a call and arranged for a friend to do it. I wrote a note of explanation for Jen, then went and rapped dutifully on Madame’s door.
“Come.”
“Say, Claire, I got out of my thing later, and if the invitation’s still open I’d like to come.”
She melted like a stick of butter on a hot griddle. The huge eyes teared; she patted my cheek gratefully. “How nice, darling. And how enchanting of you to change your plans just for me. I hope I haven’t loused things up for you.”
“No, not at all,” I lied. “And I want you to know I’ve really enjoyed working with you.”