Crowned Heads (2 page)

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 through 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? …

Barry waited for the tide of questions to ebb, then asked soberly:

“Marion, you really want the story? The whole story?”

“I
want
it.”

“Then I’ll give it to you.”

“Nice Barry.”

“Nice Marion. But let me preface it by telling you three things. You won’t believe it all, even though my facts are unassailable. You’ll be flattered, because I’ve never told another person. And you’ll be very angry, because you can’t use it.”

“Can’t use it?” Her nostrils widened; she tossed back her hair. “Then what good is it to me?”

“I haven’t any idea. You asked me for Fedora stories, and I’m willing to give you a great one. But only here, and only now. Afterward you have to forget it. Otherwise you’d scoop my book.”

Deflated, Marion drew back against the pillows in ill-disguised frustration. “Why tell me at all?”

“I thought, out of the whole thing, you might glean a few little things you could use, the kind of ‘sidelights’ you were talking about. If we’re friends—and I hope we’re friends—I’m going to use you as my patsy. A dry run, if you like. Only a few people other than my editor know anything about what’s in this manuscript, and he thinks I made most of it up. Come on, don’t look so disappointed. You want to hear or not?”

“I am disappointed—and yes, I
do
want to hear. Go ahead. Start.”

“In twenty-five words or less—right? It’s not quite that easy. How much do you
really
know about her?”

As a good newsperson, Marion thought she had done her homework well, having spent the afternoon going through the files her staff had brought in for an initial survey. “Well,” she began, “I know her father was a grocer and her mother was a milliner—”

“Wrong on both counts. He was a schoolteacher, she was a washerwoman. Fedora told me so herself.”

“On Crete?”

“No. At the Louvre, thirty years ago.”

“You’ve known her that long?”

Barry nodded. “Right after the war. She was living in Switzerland with the Sobryanskis until after V-E Day, then she stayed in their Paris house, the one Cole Porter used to have, in Rue Monsieur. I was living around the corner, in Rue de Babylone, and I used to see her sometimes. One day she spoke to me in the Louvre. I never learned why, really. She’d come to see the ‘Mona Lisa.’ What does this line mean to you?” He quoted:
“‘Rien d’ailleurs ne rassure autant qu’un masque.’”

“‘Nothing provides as much assurance as a mask.’ Colette, isn’t it?”

“Very good. Colette, yes. Fedora quoted it to me. That was her, you see; she, too, had a mask.”

“You mean her need for privacy?”

“I mean her whole life.”

“What
was
true about her?”

“Very little, actually.”

Marion had the sense to realize that in Fedora’s case facts were of little consequence. For two reasons. First, it was not the reality of Fedora that mattered; nobody was ever much interested in her vital statistics. What was interesting was the myth, and few myths are made of facts. Second, the facts were mostly wrong to begin with. To prove the point, Barry went over the list he had taken from the New York Public Library, biographies ranging from ho-hum to what-else-is-new? They raked over the old stories and rumors—the double love triangles and mysteries, the character of the sinister Dr. Vando, the seemingly eternal presence of Mrs. Balfour, Fedora’s friendship for the Sobryanskis, mother and son, wife and husband—all relying heavily on early studio biographies based on information supplied after her meeting with Maurice Derougemont, and as he himself had later admitted to Barry,
*
they were as much a figment of his imagination as were the plots of the numerous pictures they made together.

The one book doing any sort of justice to its subject was the well-known Arthur Tole biography,
*
a carefully written and annotated work with a good sense of place and time, and even of the woman herself. It was published the year following Fedora’s last, never completed, picture,
The Dying Summer,
and appeared to be as accurate as possible, at least regarding her films. Barry’s hard-cover copy was well worn, and from it he now drew out and handed to Marion a typewritten page, which reproduced the biographical material concerning Fedora’s films that is found at the end of the Tole book.

It read:

FEDORA FEDOROVNYA (Maria Katrin Fedorowich)

Born November 7, 1895, Tiflis, Georgian USSR

GERMAN-LANGUAGE SILENT FEATURES
(Impro-Berliner Films):

Der Grimme Sensenmann
(released in USA as
The Grim Reaper
), 1916;
Der Heirats-antrag (The Proposal),
1916;
Die Zuchthäuslerin (Prison Woman),
1917;
Zigeuner (The Gypsy),
1917;
Auf Schlittschuhen (On Ice Skates),
1918.

E
NGLISH-LANGUAGE SILENT FEATURES:

Zizi
(A&B 1919),
The Phantom Woman
(A&B 1920),
Palmyra
(A&B 1920),
Sorry She Asked
(A&B 1921),
Rumored Affair
(A&B 1921),
The Fatal Woman
(A&B 1921),
Thaïs
(A&B 1922),
Sins of the Mother
(A&B 1923),
Without Remorse
(A&B 1924),
Judith and Holofernes
(A&B 1924),
Impératrice
(A&B 1925),
Queen Zenobia
(loanout, Par. 1925),
A Woman’s Past
(A&B 1926),
Madame Bovary
(A&B 1926, abandoned),
Ophelie
(A&B 1927).

E
NGLISH-LANGUAGE SOUND FEATURES:

The Sorrows of Marta Lange
(A&B 1928),
The Red Divan
(A&B 1929),
Adrienne Lecouvreur
(A&B 1929),
Aphrodisia
(A&B 1930),
Theodora of Byzantium
(A&B 1930),
The Daughter of Olaf Ruen
(loanout, MGM 1931),
Elizabeth of Valois
(A&B 1932),
Tsarina
(A&B 1932),
Madagascar
(A&B 1933),
Andromeda
(A&B 1933),
Sappho
(A&B 1934),
Espionage
(A&B 1934),
The Travesty
(A&B 1934),
The Player Queen
(A&B 1935),
La Gioconda
(A&B 1935),
Tsigane: A Gypsy Story
(A&B 1936),
The Voices of Joan of Arc
(loanout, RKO 1936),
The Mirror
(A&B 1937),
The Three Sisters
(A&B 1937),
Madame de Staël
(loanout, MGM 1938),
Night Train from Trieste
(A&B 1938),
The Duchess from Dubuque
(A&B 1938),
The Miracle of Santa Cristi
(Samuel L. Ueberroth Productions, released through UA 1955; cameo role),
The Blue Nile
(Samuel L. Ueberroth—Carlo Umberti—Illumina Productions, released by J. Arthur Rank 1957),
Madeleine Pomona
(MGM, filmed at Elstree Studios, London, 1959),
From the Shores of the Caspian
(Universal-International 1961),
Ophelie
(remake, Warner Bros. 1963),
Mother Russia
(Crown Films Ltd. 1964),
The Lynx
(Sagittarius Productions 1966),
Monte Carlo Lady
(Fox 1968),
For Lovers Only
(Columbia 1968),
The Swag
(Columbia 1969),
The Dying Summer
(MGM 1969, uncompleted).

Marion hazarded that this information seemed accurate,
*
and that the book was a notably honest attempt to render a true picture of Fedora. Barry agreed only partially: the discovery that she was born not in Russia but in the Georgian Caucasus near the Black Sea was a clever piece of detective work on Mr. Tole’s part, but it still fell rather short of the mark. To hint at the quality of the other books, Barry pointed out that one listed her as a Pole, another as a Latvian, while a third gave her birthplace as Smolensk. So wide was the variance of “facts” concerning Fedora.

The more realistic ones now offered by Barry were those, he said, he had ferreted out during his stay on Crete, this only fourteen months earlier. As he had stated, Fedora’s father was not a grocer but a schoolmaster, nor was her mother a milliner, but a laundress whose unfortunate illness and subsequent aging caused Fedora so to fear the ravages of time. True, the family was poor, but the young daughter never totted up accounts payable for cheese, as screen-magazine articles had reported. Nor was her name ever Fedorova or Fedorovskaya or Fedoro; it was Fedorowich. This was changed by the German film producer Improstein when he brought her to make her first films in Germany.