“While we’re on the subject,” I prompted, moving the recorder closer and leaning to check the amount of tape in the cassette, “what about your getting that Oscar? Just what help was Frank in that matter?”
Instantly she became furious. “Look, buster, let’s just can the crap, okay? Let’s just can it for all time, huh? If you or any other bozos think Frankie or anybody else snapped his fingers to get me my Oscar, that’s pure crap. Nobody ever got Osky for me except me! I got it, it was all mine, I won it fair and square, I don’t care what anybody says.” Obviously I had pushed a button and I decided to let her get it all out. “True, I wasn’t going to finish the picture; I was sick and I just couldn’t face going to the goddamn studio. If you remember, I was married to Skylar at the time and Skylar—he—he—made me terribly nervous, he used to belt me around sometimes, I wasn’t sleeping and I’d lost a lot of weight, but—I won that fucking Oscar for myself! Wages of Sin is the best damned performance I ever gave; it was my apogee, they said in Time magazine, and I’m proud of every second I’m on that screen. That’s the real Claire Regrett. That’s what I wanted to be. An actress! A goddamn good one, too! And if they didn’t think so, well, they wouldn’t have voted for me, would they? So why the hell do people still say I didn’t really win it, or that it should have gone to Belinda that year? Or that Sam bribed his way to win? Bullcrap, my fine man, pure bullcrap!”
She sat back with crossed arms, stubbed out her butt, and tossed me her lighter to perform service. I shied and put my hands behind me.
“No help from me,” I said. We’d already been round the subject of her incessant smoking.
“Well, screw you, buster. You’re not my guardian, you know. You’re only my biographer. Ask me something. Anything. I’ll give it to you straight arrow.” She lit her own cigarette and squinted at me through the smoke. “What’re you thinking, anyway? That I’m a bitch in heels? You always get that look on your puss. Like you’re sniffing something out, like you’re analyzing me, like you’re going to take a scalpel to my hide. I gotta tough hide, baby, you better believe it. I’m a fuckin’ Sherman tank!”
“Nice to meet you, Miss Sherman. Suppose you tell me one or two things about number three on your marital Hit Parade.”
“Number—? Let’s see….” She counted on her fingers. “Perry, one; Skylar, two—why, you must mean Yves. Yves wasn’t a husband, he was an aberration, the reason girls leave home. I used to call him my dwarf; I wanted him to have a hump, and a wart right here. Ugh.” She touched the end of her nose and I conjured up that round, plump, blue-bearded visage of Yves de Gobelins, the phony count, would-be international financier, and general all-purpose prick. Claire groaned aloud.
“Frankly, I’ll never know what I thought I saw in that gnome. I was crazy to marry him, but he was the biggest con-artist in the world. Any woman married to that one was better off dead.” She eyed me through a thick cloud of cigarette smoke, then waved it away as if to see me better. “We had a row over you after that time you lunged at him on the set. He didn’t like you one bit. But don’t take it personally, he was a very odd type, Yves. And short people can get awfully mean.”
“How much did he lose you on that perfume deal?”
“Oh-h God, thousands. Millions. I never knew what hit me when the auditors started coming out of the woodwork. He’d skimmed off the whole company. Left me with a ton of debts. I broke my ass paying them off.”
“How would you say Yves stacked up against the others? Frank, for instance?”
“Frank?” She widened her eyes and craned her head back in mock surprise. “Are you out of your gourd? Listen, baby, there’s one constant in this life, and that’s that there was never anybody better than Frankie when it came to the ladies’ hour. Absolutely no one, no one ever came close, I’ll go on record on that. But Yves ran him a close second. In the sack he was something else, I kid you not.
“But he was the one who wanted to marry me. He kept chasing me; you remember how it was in all the papers. He wanted to show me off and use my name to get his picture printed. Anyway, besides the sex, he sort of intrigued me. He was interesting in a way lots of American men aren’t. He had this sense of mystery about him, like you could never know everything about him, so there wasn’t any point of trying. He thrilled me, and I had this feeling of something dangerous around all the time.”
“But who said you had to stay married to him? Why didn’t you just dump him?”
She laughed that wicked, snarly laugh of hers. “Believe me, I tried to! But when I told him I was fed up with him and wanted a divorce, he just stood there and laughed at me. That popeyed little midget laughed at me! Right then I knew I was in real trouble. He started having me followed, he’d make threats, he beat me up really bad, I was scared. And I don’t scare easy.”
“What sort of threats?”
“He said he’d pay someone big bucks to throw acid at me and disfigure my face. Then he threatened to have my kneecaps broken with a baseball bat. He even threatened to put me in a box and have me dropped into the Pacific—alive! He got me so scared I couldn’t sleep or work or do anything.” I watched the flood of emotions that played across her face as she spoke. “He also threatened to blackmail me.”
“What did he have to blackmail you over?”
Her mouth twisted down in a scarlet grimace. “That’s for me to know and you to find out. Anyway, there was the business of all the money. My hard-earned bucks! He was bleeding me dry. He just wanted more and more of everything, and the more I gave him, the more he demanded. All for Marie-Claire Parfums Incorporated. He didn’t know the first goddamn thing about operating a big company like that, so he ran it right into the ground. Any time he needed cash to gamble with, he’d just go to the bank—my bank. He had some weird system of double-entry bookkeeping that nobody but him and this weasely accountant seemed to understand.”
“That’s how he ended up in prison, right?”
She laughed again and I picked up the deadly irony in its sound. “Not exactly,” she said shortly. “He got sent up because that was probably his destiny. Plus which, he had some unlooked-for assistance.”
“Mm-hm? And what was that?” I asked carefully.
“Poor Yves, he went to the slammer because that’s where he belonged. But he probably never would have done a day’s time if—certain steps hadn’t been taken to ensure this.”
I cocked an ear. “Can you be more explicit?”
She eyed me with suspicion. “Will this go in La Book?”
“How can I tell until you tell me? Come on, Claire, don’t beat around the bush, out with it. What are you talking about?”
The tip of her tongue slicked around the curves of her lips. “Well, Ma taught me never to talk ill of the dead because they can’t talk back, but Yves is another story. Don’t say you heard it here, but it’s a fact that he was railroaded into the can. I’m not kidding. There was this certain party you and I used to know who was able to arrange such things. He set up a trap and Yves walked straight into it.”
“Are you telling me he was framed?”
“Like the Mona Lisa. Did you ever hear of Frankie’s friend, Al ‘Vegas’ da Prima?” I allowed as how the name was not unfamiliar to me. “Well, Vegas and his pal Ears Satriano arranged the whole thing. They put the finger on Monsieur Yves and he got sent up. Alcatraz, just like Humphrey Bogart. Now, if he’d been a good boy, he might have got out on parole, but he was a naughty boy.”
“You’re saying he got what he deserved?”
“Look, as far as that little Frog was concerned, I could be in a cement suit by now if it wasn’t for Frankie and his pals. It was him or me, you could say.”
This was an unexpected revelation, one I doubted I could use, however. This was not the kind of stuff that movie-star autobiographies usually were made of.
“Yves was probably the biggest mistake of my whole life,” Claire went on. “Look, I’m not bitter, I’m really not, but I’m damned if I’ll go
on letting everybody take advantage of my good nature. All those Hollywood putzes, those crummy bastards who think they can just shove you around and walk all over you. Nuts to the whole bunch! And double-nuts to anyone who thinks any dame who comes along is fair game, just another roundheels pushover. That’s what they decided I was, just a pushover—all you had to do was push me down and there’d be a Simmons mattress under me.”
Her lip curled and she actually seemed to spit; her teeth were bared like a cat about to pounce.
“Huh,” she expostulated, “they say I was a cast-iron bitch, with ice water in my veins. Well, maybe I was—now and then. I had to be. To get anywhere you goddamn well have to be—out there. You have to learn to give as good as you get, and, believe me, I did. They say I had balls—nobody who’d been to bed with me would ever have said that, but what the hell—and a lot of the time I clanged when I walked, I gotta admit. But only because I had to. It’s a man’s world, right? Anyway,” she concluded, “if Frank had some unsavory friends, well, who doesn’t, if it comes to that? But I wasn’t sorry when Bugsy got shot. I think Bugsy would have got Frank into a lot of trouble if he’d stayed alive. And by God—!”
With no warning she jumped up, grabbed my hand and dragged me across the room, flung open the door, and pulled me out onto the terrace to the parapet. We stood there, looking downtown over the park to Central Park South. She planted her feet and raised a fist and shook it at the glittering panorama of lights. “I licked you, you bastards!” she shouted. “I said I’d lick you and I goddamn well did! Bastards! I licked you! Now you can all go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut! Bless you, darlings—bless you all, my darlings.”
Laughing, crying, throwing kisses, posturing outrageously, she was tight as a tick, partly illuminated by the light from indoors, partly by the bright moonlight overhead.
“‘O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father, and refuse thy name; or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, and I’ll no longer be a Capulet.’”
Jesus, I thought, she still remembers Juliet’s lines; what a bear-trap that brain of hers was. When I remarked on her memory, she gave me that smug look and said, “Of course I remember. I’ll never forget. It’s the greatest failure of my life that I never was brave enough to get out on a stage and play fucking Juliet. What a little pisser she was!” Then she gave me her wistful smile, corrugated her marble forehead, and modestly dropped her head, the way you would to smell the roses, but there weren’t any roses to smell. “Shakespeare doesn’t come easily to most Americans, I guess.” I knew this for a fact, having myself had a go at the Bard and tripped on his iambic pentameter.
“Listen, Charlie, let me tell you something, screw the iambic pentameter, know what I mean? Who needs it? Not me. I’m a star. You understand that word. I may not have been a lot of things, I may have come from shit, but I’m a star! Not too many of those around these days. I don’t mean these piddling little quacks and creeps today, I mean the old-time, old-style STAR. Five-pointed and it makes a gorgeous light. That’s the prettiest and the greatest four-letter word in the English language, get me?”
I decided to play with her. “What about l-o-v-e? It has four letters, it’s a pretty word.”
“Oh yeah? Let me tell you something about l-o-v-e. It’s nice, but, believe me, it doesn’t hold up. Maybe they should have given it more letters or something, but when you come down to it, s-t-a-r is more important and it lasts longer. They don’t put your name up there in lights for being in love. I’ll take the star every time.”
“Why not love?”
“I couldn’t make it work, you know? I was always looking for Mr. Right, only I was always Miss Wrong. Who can figure?”
“Did you think Skylar was Mr. Right?”
“Bet your ass. Or I’d never have married. And I never should have. What a b—” She closed her lips and shook her head as if shutting out the memory, but I wanted her to go on.
“I remember the pictures of the wedding,” I prompted to get her started. “In Vi’s garden, wasn’t it? The rose arbor?”
The look she gave me was clabbered milk. “Pretty Jesus, do we have to talk about that?” She blew out smoke and took a sip of her drink. “I suppose we do. Okay, baby, crank up the Victrola and Momma will play the record. Only I warn you in advance, the record’s cracked.”
We “repaired” (her word) to the library, her sanctum sanctorum, and as she plunked down she tossed a look toward the bar and, taking my cue, I went and poured her a vodka over ice, then joined her. It was half-past twelve, well past my witching hour, but I felt I was on the trail of something here and I really pressed. In seconds I had my recorder ready for more of Madame’s deathless words. She handed me the generally accepted rundown on the gent in question, Skylar J. D. McCord III. Of course I already knew the oft-told story of how they’d met at a dinner party at Merle Oberon’s house, and how in the space of four hours he’d swept Claire off her feet. Skylar was the scion of a wealthy department-store family in town, and he had a long history of playboy wildness. Due to a polo injury (he’d got his skull cracked by a mallet and wore a steel plate in his head), during the war years he was 4-F and available, and any girl’s bait. Besides being a super polo player, he was also a tennis ace of considerable merit, as well as a trophy-winning golfer. He could usually be seen tooling around town in a lowslung convertible with balloon tires, wide sidewalls, white leather upholstery, and a robin’s-egg-blue paint job. He combed his hair with a center part the way Scott Fitzgerald used to, and had been the figurative if not the literal death of many a Los Angeles lovely. His pals referred to him as “The Cherry Picker.”
He asked Claire to marry him and she said, Sure, why not? Since her wedding to Perry had been an elopement, this time she insisted on doing it up big with a full-blown ceremony and reception. Vi helped her arrange things, even to planning her wedding dress, which was designed by Edith Head herself.
There was lots more cutesie fan-mag stuff, pictures of the two sweethearts peeking through big hearts of paper carnations, cuddling under furs in a box at the Hollywood Bowl, and like that. This was one of Claire’s avowed domestic periods; she was always being photographed in ruffles and dirndls and platform wedgies, or in a gingham apron, rolling out a pie crust for the magazines. They talked a lot about how many babies she and Sky were going to have, and she was keeping one of the bedrooms in reserve to make over into a nursery. You never saw candids of her anymore unless Sky was included, flashing that big Hardy Boy grin as he hugged her or sat her on his lap.
When she did a USO stint and visited the troops, there was Sky right at her side. She’d get him up onstage and he’d crack his corny jokes, but the boys ate it up. He did it that night in San Diego, on the deck of the aircraft carrier, when I’d been lucky enough to get a ticket for the show and I danced the Lindy with Claire. After that I went back to sea, and during that time I read that she’d had a miscarriage and she and Sky had separated. Shortly thereafter she put on a big hat and went to court in Santa Monica to get her divorce, and was quoted as saying, “We’ll always be friends.”
“Yeah, friends,” Claire growled. “With friends like him, who needs enemies?” She sprang up and went to the mirror over the bar and began inspecting her face as if to be sure she had remembered to put it on. The pause stretched out, to say the least, as she began stalking about the room like a tigress. I shut off the recorder and waited. She looked over at me as though making up her mind about something, then she strode back to her chair and flung herself into the seat.
“We can talk about something else, if you want,” I suggested tactfully, seeing how upset she was.
“What the hell, we may as well get the bastard out of the way. It still makes me sick every time I think of him. I grew to hate him so.”
“Not friends?” I ventured tactfully.
“You catch on fast, baby. Definitely not friends. I despised him then and I hate him now—no, take it back, take it back—I won’t let mysel
f hate anyone. I believe some Divine Power meant him to come into my life at that time, though I’m damned if I know why. Anyway—” She drew a deep breath and held it for a couple of beats, then expelled it and recrossed her legs; “Today I guess it probably doesn’t seem like much, considering all the medicine and drugs they have to cure things, but at the time, back in the forties, it was a big deal. People just didn’t get things like that, not public figures like me, not movie stars anyway.”
“What things?”
She widened her eyes at me, then dropped the bomb. “Things like syphilis.”
I stared in astonishment. “Skylar McCord gave you syphilis?”
“You’re goddamned right he did! Here was dear old Claire trying to make like the best little wife in the world, playing Betty Crocker, cooking his dinner, working my butt off to keep him happy and occupied, and he goes out and gets a big dose of boom-chick-a-boom-chick from this Mexican broad he met at the fights—at the fights, mind you! And he comes home and passes it on to me.”
This was astonishing; I’d never had a hint of this, not from Vi, not from anyone. How had it been kept hushed up all these years?
“What did you do?” I managed.
“What would you have done—what would anybody have done? I went to my doctor; he did the test and it came out positive. It was the only time in my life I ever failed. I was thinking of ways to do myself in. I couldn’t bear the shame. I kept seeing the headlines: ‘Claire Regrett Dies of the Clap.’ Oh, I tell you, it was all so sordid. He almost ruined me. I’m not kidding—after all my work, after I was finally getting someplace, that big collegiate fucker almost finished me off! I kicked him out that night, and next day I had all the locks changed. I wasn’t going to have that diseased leper back in my house, not if he had to sleep in the streets.”
“What did he say?”
“Said he was sorry, didn’t know how it ever happened, he’d been faithful, never played around—maybe he’d caught it off a toilet seat! What a laugh that was. I said, ‘Look, schmuck, we’re not talking crabs here, we’re talking major major.’ He tried talking me out of it, said he’d never do it again—can you imagine him doing it again? He even gave me an expensive piece of jewelry—it’s the only time in my life I sent back a diamond bracelet. I was doing Wages of Sin and couldn’t leave town; otherwise I’d have got out of there quick. I began to lose weight, the director was worried, the cameraman said he couldn’t shoot me, I looked so awful. Finally they shut down and gave me a couple of weeks off. Catch syphilis and they give you ten days in Borrego Springs.”