Crowned Heads
Thomas Tryon
This book is for Arthur and Edward
Contents
Fedora
Lorna
Bobbitt
Willie
Salad Days
About the Author
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown
Henry IV, part II
Fedora
FEDORA WAS DEAD, AND who could talk of anything else? Including the entire staff of Good Morning USA, whose producer wanted a twenty-minute air-time recap of the actress’s illustrious career, with “fresh angles” and “a new slant.” Marion Walker wondered what there was to say about Fedora that hadn’t already been said. As hostess of the morning network TV show, Marion helped the nation get started every day, its matutinal mixture of brains and beauty. Though she had interviewed Kissinger and Teddy Kennedy, she had never interviewed Fedora; few in the world had. Its most celebrated screen actress, Fedora was also its Great Enigma, but Marion knew someone who supposedly had talked with her recently, Barry Detweiller. Barry knew everybody: Sinatra was a crony, so was John Lennon. He drank with Teddy White, lunched with Jackie, dined with Clare Luce. His credentials were impeccable. He’d had a highly regarded by-line with Life, had published several books, including a novel, his name meant an important story, and he was a good news reporter. Marion knew if anyone could help her it was Barry. She telephoned him at home, where he was reputed to be holed up, finishing a new book.
“Barry … Marion. I want to talk about Fedora.”
“Sure thing, Marion. Go ahead.”
“I mean I want you to talk to me about Fedora.”
“What do I know about her?” Barry asked innocently. Marion’s reporter’s instinct told her it was an innocence born of knowledge.
“You saw her recently, didn’t you, on Crete? There must be a few sidelights you could give me, couldn’t you?” Marion was using her most persuasive tone. In her line of work it seldom hurt to be a woman, nor was she a woman to take no for an answer.
“Well, let’s see,” Barry said. “Which sidelight do you want? Sidelight A—Fedora uses Camay soap for the look of beauty? Sidelight B—Fedora sleeps in the nude? Sidelight C—”
“Barry, I want something for a story. A fresh angle, a new slant.”
“Oh, slants and angles you want. How about the triangle? Mother, son, Fedora. Or the other triangle—son, wife, Fedora? Or how about the sinister Dr. Vando, who looks like Lionel Atwill and gives her injections of sheep semen in his mysterious laboratory?”
“Barry, I haven’t time, I really haven’t…. I want a story.”
“Oh, a story. I see…. Well, let’s think a minute here—there must be a good one somewhere. Yeah, I think I’ve got one. Sure, okay, fine. Come along to me for drinks about seven. We’ll have dinner—”
“I can’t.”
“You can’t? I thought you wanted a story.”
“I do, but—” She was checking her desk calendar; ending her list of many appointments was: “8:00 p.m./Sills/Siege of Corinth.” “Beverly’s singing at the Met. I’ve got to hear her; she’s coming on the show next month. How about lunch tomorrow?”
“No dice. I’m flying to London. But I’ll tell you this—” He lowered his voice confidentially. “It’s a terrific story.”
“Really terrific?”
“Really terrific.”
“I’ll be there.” Beverly Sills and The Siege of Corinth would have to wait; Marion would switch her tickets. Fedora didn’t die every day of the week.
Barry’s apartment was in the East Seventies, and the garrulous taxi driver who took Marion there that spring evening was swift to point out in his hearty Brooklynese that Fedora had once been his passenger, and had she “evuh seen huh in Ophelie?” Yes, Marion had seen Ophelie; not the silent version—she was too young—but being one of Fedora’s best-loved films, the sound remake was often on the Late Show. “Huh foist talkie—I seen it in ’29, an’ I seen huh last in ’69. Whadda bomb—dey killed huh wit’ bad pitchuhs. But howdya figure—forty yeahs on the screen an’ still a lookah? My old lady nevuh looked dat good at thoity. Don’t tell me dat Vando guy didn’t do numbuhs on huh.”
Exactly what “numbers” the mysterious Portuguese doctor had “done” on Fedora was only one among the items Marion wanted to quiz Barry about. Though the actress had been hidden from its sight for many years, the world seized on any scraps of news concerning her, and all anyone could talk about was her death yesterday in Menton, France.
“You liked her?” Marion asked the driver.
“Lady, I woishiped huh.”
“Why?”
“Class. She had class. I don’t care what no one says about huh, whatevuh crazy things she done. I loved huh. Ev’ybody did.” Thus spake the man in the street.
To show that celebrity makes itself felt even among its staunchest decriers, the cabby had fixed a rose over his rear-view mirror as a floral tribute, marking how infinite and long-lasting was the power of her name, the magic of her art. Neither the cabby nor Marion had ever known a world in which there was no Fedora. Marion considered the fact: George Washington had refused a crown (the wisdom of this was debatable to some), but given that America’s true royalty is crowned from the court of Hollywood, then in that ersatz monarchy Fedora was queen; she had outshone all and outlived most, though whether by purely natural causes remained as yet undiscovered.
Barry’s living room was what she expected: hardly neat, but a man’s place, a writer’s place, lots of shelves with books, magazines, newspapers, manuscripts, file drawers; a few handsome touches, good antiques mixed with sturdy but comfortable pieces, and over the mantel, unmistakably, a portrait of the lady in question, Fedora herself. Barry was easy and relaxed and prepared to be a good host. He suggested some wine, she accepted. The bottle was produced, cooling in a bucket Vouvray pétillant, he announced, a naturally semi-sparkling, dry white, and Fedora’s favorite.
“Oh?” Marion stabbed him with a quick look. “How do you come by that information?”
“She told me herself.”
“And the portrait?”
“That’s another story.”
Marion put on her glasses and examined the painting closely. “It’s her to the life. Who did it?”
“As you see, it’s unsigned. But it was painted in the Dakota.” The Dakota was one of New York’s venerable landmark apartment buildings. Barry explained that he had known the girl who had owned the painting two decades earlier; it had hung in her apartment until at her death it had passed into his hands. Now, reframed and dramatically lighted, it formed the focal point of the room. Technically, it was not particularly well painted, but Marion recognized immediately how, like Fedora herself, it manifested an aura of mystery and romance. She was posed on a gold-and-black-striped couch of faintly Empire design, one hand resting against a hip, the other supporting the head. The background was an almost grisaille rendering of a large apartment interior, room after room receding dimly, each elaborately decorated with bombé chests, crystal chandeliers, candelabra blazing with candles. Fedora’s costume was a many-ruffled, high-collared white peignoir; Marion remembered it as the one Cyril Leaf had designed for Ophelie, which Leaf had personally loaned for the Diana Vreeland exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, “Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design.”
Marion said it was Fedora to the life, though the features were heavily stylized, the nose was too long, the eyes were too large, too heavily lidded. They gazed past one with an idle, almost vacant stare; but it was Fedora’s hauteur, all right. The mouth was thin and darkly red, not sensual but provocative—the renowned “Mona Lisa” look. The hair was arranged carelessly, but with a sense of period, the way Fedora had worn it in the movie.
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Barry pointed out above the table serving as a bar a small framed document. Aged and important-looking, with an embossed official seal, it proved to be a note in Italian, addressed to Fedora, professing admiration for her talent and beauty and hoping she would one day visit Rome, where the author would have the privilege of meeting her personally. It was signed “Mussolini.”
“It must be worth a lot of money,” Marion said, awed in spite of herself.
Barry laughed. “Exactly what the person who gave it to me said.”
“Fedora?”
“Mrs. Balfour.”
“Ahhh—the ubiquitous Mrs. Balfour.” Like most people, Marion was acquainted with the name. Mrs. Balfour had been the inseparable companion of Fedora for many years. “She gave it to you?”
“For services rendered. A bribe, actually.”
“Where and to whom?”
“That’s two too many questions for openers. You sound like a lawyer.”
“I’m only asking.”
“I last saw Mrs. Balfour on Crete, at the countess’s villa.”
“That would be old Countess Sobryanski?”
He nodded, and reached for the wine from the bucket. He filled their glasses and held the bottle of Vouvray so Marion could read the label.
“Fedora told you it was her favorite?”
“One of them. Did you recognize the music on the hi-fi when you came in?”
“No. What was it?”
“The Baltic Symphony—a particular favorite of Countess Sobryanski. As a matter of fact, it was being played a lot at the villa when I was there…. Wait a minute, I’ve got some noshes in the fridge.” While he went back to the kitchen, Marion stole a look at the table where a typed manuscript lay, bound by an elastic band, but without a title page. Surreptitiously she leaned and read the first line: “She was called the Perfect Work of Art—” Marion straightened as Barry returned with a try of hors d’oeuvre. She adjusted her glasses, took out a pad and pencil, and struck a businesslike attitude on the sofa.
“Your new book?” she asked, glancing at the manuscript as if for the first time. Barry smiled, nodded, offered her a canapé and a napkin. “Nonfiction or a novel?” she continued casually.
“My editor says it’s both, but that it has too much romance for anything since the Brontë sisters. Actually it’s about Fedora.”
“Oh? You’ve been writing about her, then? Another biography?”
He chuckled. “There are a lot of them, aren’t there?”
“Is it juicy?”
“Of course.”
“A scandal?”
“Some might think so.” He picked up the manuscript, hefted it, then dumped it into Marion’s lap. “Why don’t you just take it home and read it? It’ll save me a lot of talking.”
“May I?” She looked again at the top page.
He grabbed it back and returned it to the table. “No, you may not. And you won’t need to take notes.”
“I always take notes.”
“Not this time.” He had gone to the window and stood looking out at the garden; an ailanthus was turning a feathery green, and shrubs were bursting with white blooms. Marion put aside her pad and pencil, took off her glasses, and waited. He said nothing, seemingly lost in thought. She felt a growing exhilaration and excitement at the prospect of the disclosures he was about to make, and yet she could sense that he wanted to prolong the effect of his big moment. It was something like knowing the whereabouts of the bones of Peking Man, or holding the key to the fourth dimension.
Which in a way it was, dealing as it did with time. Anyone acquainted with the merest facts of Fedora’s history must realize, as Marion certainly did, that in some vague and strange way “time was of the essence.” Where fiction had become fact and fact fiction no one was any longer able to tell—unless it was now to be Barry Detweiller—but the single obvious fact was that Fedora’s career had spanned a period lasting from silent pictures well into the age of wide-screen stereophonic films. She had remained at the height of her artistic powers, her beauty, her youthfulness, for half a century; not an impossibility, except for the fact that she had not aged to any noticeable degree. Dr. Vando was said to be at the bottom of this mysterious yet essential fact, yet just as essentially, no one had ever been able fully to explain it.
Of her early contemporaries and peers, as Barry now pointed out, who was there still living? Lillian Gish. Gloria Swanson. Janet Gaynor. A handful of others. Joan Crawford had still been Lucille Le Sueur, an unknown Charleston cup winner, when Fedora was a star in silents. When Stanwyck matured to an old lady in So Big (with Bette Davis as the tender ingenue), it was Barbara’s eighth feature; Fedora had shot over a score by then. Davis made her first film at Universal in 1931, a studio not even in existence when Fedora was a leading lady at AyanBee. Carole Lombard was only a Sennett bathing beauty when Fedora had played in four pictures. Harlow was dead in 1937 after a career spanning less than a decade. Swanson, perhaps Fedora’s nearest contemporary, did only eleven sound pictures, Fedora three times that number. Dietrich was “box office poison” when Fedora was packing houses with a major success a year. Garbo left the screen at thirty-six and never returned, while Fedora was still playing leading romantic parts into the late 1960s.
Barry had turned and was staring musingly at the manuscript on the table; to prompt him on his way, Marion asked:
“What began it all? Your fascination with her? You are fascinated, you know.”
He shrugged and took the club chair. “I don’t know, really; it just … started.”
“When was the first time you ever saw her?”
“I was about seven, I think. And it wasn’t in the movies.”
“In person?”
“Who ever saw Fedora in person in those days? Not in Villanova, Pa., you didn’t see Fedora in person. It was an ice cream parlor, where they’d taken me after Sunday school. We got Dixie cups, and I wanted chocolate. I pulled off the lid, which was covered with chocolate ice cream, and licked it, and who appeared from beneath my tongue but Fedora. It was a still from Tsarina—you know, Catherine the Great? Someone said, ‘Oh, you have Fedora,’ and I said, ‘Who’s Fedora?’ I’d never heard of her. But I liked the way she looked. When Madagascar came to town I told my mother I wanted to see it. She said no, it was a grown-ups’ picture. I carried on until she finally agreed to take me to a matinee, but I never got to see the end of it.”
“Did you walk out?”
“Not exactly. When I came across Fedora years later, I told her the story. We were talking about her films and I mentioned that I’d liked Madagascar, but hadn’t seen the last part. She asked why not. I said, ‘Remember the scene with the native uprising, and you and Willie Marsh were about to be slaughtered?’ ‘I remember,’ she said. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you were both in this room at the top of some stairs—I think it was in a plantation house—and the natives broke in below and they were brandishing clubs and axes and spears. Then they went charging up the stairs and started breaking down the door and setting fire to the place. You were behind the door.’ ‘Yes,’ she said, waiting. I said, ‘I got so scared I wet my pants and my mother had to take me out.’”
Marion shrieked with laughter. “You didn’t tell that to Fedora!”
“I did. She wasn’t amused. But I didn’t do it intentionally. I thought it was a funny story. I wasn’t thinking about the age thing at all.”
“What did she say?”
“She gave me that narrow-eyed look and said loftily, ‘I see. You must have been ver-r-ry youn-n-ng,’ dragging out the words in that Russian drawl. My mother told me I wasn’t going to see any more movies like Madagascar. Then La Gioconda came to Philadelphia. Kids didn’t go to see Fedora movies, usually, they were too sexy, but Mona Lisa was ‘historical’ and they took our whole class out of school, stuck us on a bus, and sent us to the movies. When it was over we were supposed to go to the Fels Planetarium to get more culture, but some of us hid in the dark and sat thro
ugh the co-feature, a B comedy with Florence Rice, and then we saw Fedora again.
“There was a poster stand in front of the theater and when we left I tore the poster off and ran with it. You’ve seen the shot?”
“The Da Vinci painting with Fedora’s face superimposed, wasn’t it?”
Barry nodded. “I tacked it on my bedroom wall. It stayed there for I guess about ten years, until I went in the service. My mother threw it out then. But at some point a friend had taken a crayon and drawn a mustache on it. It made me so goddamn mad.”
“It sounds like you fell in love with her.”
“We were always falling in love with movie stars then. My brother wrote Lana Turner’s name in wet cement after the cellar drainpipe was excavated. But Fedora—you didn’t fall in love with just her face. You fell in love with all of her—her voice, her body, her talent, her gestures, everything about her that is so familiar, but so …”
“Enigmatic?”
“Clichés? From you, Marion?”
“Sorry.” She tossed back her hair with the gesture that was probably more familiar to more viewers than all Fedora’s gestures in all her films. “But she was an enigma, and you must have solved it, or you wouldn’t be writing one more book about her.”
“I never thought I’d be writing about Fedora. Then after I began writing magazine pieces, it became a kind of dream to do one on her, but I didn’t want to do it without interviewing her, or someone who knew her really well.”
Marion glanced again at the manuscript. “You must have finally gotten your interview. That’s more than a magazine piece.”
“I got my interview, but not the way you’d think.”
“Did you get all the answers?”
“All the ones that matter, at any rate.”
Marion leaned eagerly to Barry, quickly raising a flood of questions, names, events. Was Dr. Vando a quack? Was it true about the sheep cures? Did he operate on her eyes to make them larger? What was the Hollywood gossip concerning Count Sobryanski, and his mother, the dowager countess, who had been with Fedora so much? Did Barry subscribe to the monkey gland theory? Was it true she became addicted to hashish at the count’s home in Morocco? …