Crowned Heads (42 page)

“There must be a lot of burned fingers out there,” he whispered to Nellie. “What do we do now?”

“Why did the good Lord put us here?” she returned joyfully. “Surely not to chase rabbits!” She took his arm and they joined the rest, moving into the blazing lights for the finale. Somehow Bobbitt knew exactly what to do.

T
HE GIRL SHRIEKS. SHE
waves her arms and jumps up and down. She shakes the ends of her ten fingers as though they have been scalded.
Oh!
she hollers;
Oh!
The rest are shouting and stamping their feet. It is pandemonium. Still hopping and jumping, the girl flings herself against the man in his After Six dinner ensemble, the gold jacket with contrasting lapels and a colored ruffled shirt, a bow tie the size of a jumbo Hershey bar, he displaying most of his front teeth, she still shrieking and now clutching the check he hands her, making her …

“Theeee winnnner of twenty-five thousand dollllars on
The Neeeew Trrrrreasure Hunt!
” the host exclaims, and the show fades for the half-time commercial.

“Rubbish,” says Willie Marsh aloud, though there is no one in the room with him. Monday is cook’s night out, and he is alone. He intones a reverent grace over his TV dinner: in the center compartment is Salisbury steak with gravy, in the left-hand compartment, carrots and peas, in the right-hand one, mashed potato, at the rear, apple pandowdy. Terrible food, but food interests him little these days; he has no appetite. On a separate plate is a salad, whose vinaigrette dressing Willie has himself ceremonially prepared from a long-standing favorite recipe. Ahead of him stretches another quiet evening—boring, if truth were to be told. Later he will watch himself on television;
Classic Movies
on the educational network is showing one of his thirties films. He will sit in this same chair, the dogs beside him, and relive old memories. The prospect, however, does not please. He would rather some of his friends came and watched it with him, but the phone has not rung in days. He is still in mourning for Bee, and his friends do not like to bother him. Besides, in other, happier days, Monday nights
chez
Marsh were traditionally sacrosanct, a cutting of strings after the weekend’s social obligations; it used to be his and Bee’s “breathing night”—close, chummy, “pipe and slipper” nights, just Willie and Bee, Bee and Willie. The Marshes at home.

Have it your way with Burger King.
The commercial continues: Willie’s eye wanders haphazardly about the room. All things being equal, it takes no longer for dust to accumulate in Los Angeles than it does anywhere else. He notes with dismay the clouded mirrors, the grimy chandelier, the unpolished crystal bibelots which in another, better, time had sparkled so brilliantly. The day help are negligent without Bee to oversee them. But Bee is dead.

No, he reminds himself—not
dead.
Rather, she has Gone to her Just Reward, has Passed Over to the Great Beyond, has entered the Gates of Heaven, where she stands before her Maker and Redeemer. Willie is a religious person and these simple pieties offer him a measure of comfort. When, he wonders, will he join her? It would require little for him to oblige the Great Beckoning Finger, if it were to summon him; willingly would he go—Bee is waiting for him on the Other Side.

He does not like thinking of what loneliness compels in people, what deeds it brings them to, what fears it breeds. When Bee had been rushed to the hospital he had suffered his first apprehension, then doubt, then a growing terror. He had confessed to a friend that it was the only time in countless years that he would have slept in the house without her; he begged the friend to occupy one of the guest rooms. Now he sleeps each night without her, but neither pain nor loneliness lessens. She is everywhere, Bee. Sometimes he will turn, expecting to see her, hear the voice, will imagine he smells the inimitable scent of her perfume, her Caswell-Massey soap. Now little stirs him, few things interest him, his senses are dulled. During her Buddha period, Bee often used to say that Life is a Fountain; but to his infinite sorrow Willie Marsh has discovered that life is a rope, a long one, whose frayed end he is most assuredly at.

What he has known best is gone; what he has loved best is gone—and this is not merely, not only, Bee. Out there, beyond the sliding glass doors of the game room where he sits, past the lanai, the pool, down along sunset and Santa Monica boulevards, is another world, and he does not like it. A new, alien world, into which he seldom ventures. For Willie Marsh, everything, including himself, is old, but what is not old holds little savor. Haunted by the past, hating the present, terrified of the future, he has hung on, but only by his eyeteeth, and those not his own but an expensive dentist’s in New York. Out there in movieland are strangers; he neither knows them, nor cares to. They are the new ones, the agents become producers, the office boys become moguls. The William Morris crowd no longer wear the black suit and tie that was once
de rigueur
; they favor mauve jacquard double knits and sport shirts, as though they were going to play golf. Willie Marsh was White Tie and Tails; he represented the quintessential charm and grace, the madcap patent leather toe-tapping jazz-bouncing flask-carrying show business royalty of another era. The elite—Cole Porter, Noël and Gertie, Clifton Webb, Bea Lillie, Fred and Adele Astaire—these had been his cronies, when gentlemen stayed at the Ritz, and were swank with white Charvet scarves and
chapeau claques,
which snapped into a top hat with a flick against the open palm.

With devoted canine attention, two Lhasa apsos wait at their master’s feet, hoping for a tidbit. Willie cuts them each a piece of meat and feeds them. In her time, Bee never permitted this, but Willie has a kind heart. His eye travels from the TV screen to the gold urn on the mantel, beneath the portrait of Bee, the famous “Smiling Bee,” as it was called in art circles, painted forty years ago in London. The urn contains her ashes.

It had all happened so suddenly, right after the Big Party. It had been exactly fifty years (and two and one-half weeks) since “Little Willie” Marsh had first set foot on a professional stage, and the honors accorded his golden jubilee had been significant. First he and Bee slipped away while he had his face tucked up, the bags removed from his eyes and what wrinkles the surgeon thought might be managed; Bee added to his wardrobe, and brought him back hale and hearty, ready to tackle the round of magazine interviews, the parties and near-public events, all of which culminated in his bronze star being permanently fixed into the glittery pavement of Hollywood Boulevard (in front of the entrance to a trick-and-joke shop), followed by a stupendous party at the grand ballroom of the Century Plaza Hotel, a full-scale Hollywood production with klieg lights, limousines, full television news coverage, and stars stars stars.

There were numerous after-dinner speeches in his behalf. Shirley MacLaine had introduced the main speakers, whose tributes to “The Grand Old Man of Hollywood” were alternately humorous and touching, Jack Warner for the former, Mervyn Le Roy the latter. It was indeed fitting, yet perhaps needlessly so, that it should be pointed out from the celebrity-studded dais that here was one of Hollywood’s greats. Willie Marsh was loved. He was admired. He was a man of repute. He was one of the true gentlemen in a town where few existed. His benevolence and generosity were widespread but not generally known, Mervyn briefly touching on the aged actress Willie was supporting, the medical bills he quietly paid for ailing friends, the hands given in aid to careers of less stature than his own. Willie blushed to hear the accolade. Many of his former screen leading ladies were present to add to the glamour of the occasion: Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Fontaine, Janie Wyman, Loretta Young. “Missy” Stanwyck (when she was still Ruby Stevens) had danced in the chorus of
In Old Montmartre,
of which Willie had been the singing-dancing star, one of his greatest Broadway hits, and the photographers had had a field day shooting them as they kicked up a few steps. Willie’s speech of thanks was witty and heartfelt, his words brought tears to many in the room, and
Time
had headlined the story “
OLD HOLLYWOOD COMES TO LIFE AGAIN.
” To cap it all, when the audience rose in tumultuous ovation and refused to sit, he’d sung for them—“’Ats Off ter Bobbitt,” from
Bobbitt Royal—
and then reprised his famous tap number “Gonna Dance Off Both My Feet.”

The evening’s triumph was only slightly marred by Bee’s indisposition, but she went gamely through with it. It was not until they’d arrived home that she complained of chest pains. She’d been put to bed, the doctor called, and the following day she was admitted to Saint John’s. The room was a bower of bouquets, the nurses could hardly keep up with the get-well cards, but the simple fact remained that a week later she was dead.

The world agreed, they had been marvelous together, similar in their tastes, their outlooks, and brilliantly complementing each other: Bee a vivacious, clever, moving force in the anthropological structure of Beverly Hills, whose elaborate tribal mores extended all the way across Holmby Hills into Bel Air, even unto Brentwood; Willie urbane, witty, insouciant in the Ronnie Colman–Doug Fairbanks–William Powell tradition. Together they had moved with ease among the glittery, famous movieland aristocracy, of which they were not only accepted but uniquely favored members. If the Marshes were not its king and queen, surely they were an archduke and duchess of Hollywood.

Willie had not got rid of Bee’s things; her vanity table remained exactly as it had been during her life, with the lace runner Grandmother Marshuttes had crocheted over a long summer in Mobile, and the tortoise-shell silver-crested combs that had been a gift of Elsie (Lady) Mendl, and the silver oval frames, which held pictures of Bee and Willie, Willie and Bee, in Venice, at Buckingham Palace, at Merle Oberon’s Acapulco villa, at the Stork Club. Bee’s clothes were still in the closets, her shoes and hats, and her furs remained in storage. He could bear to part with nothing. Since her death he had gone out seldom (twice he had suffered arrest for drunk driving, and in consequence his license had been revoked, which meant he had to be driven), but friends would by appointment wend their way up the hill and pass the evening, cheering his self-imposed solitude with the gossip from The Bistro or Chasen’s; or Viola Ueberroth would carry the news being retailed under the dryers at Elizabeth Arden’s. They were all willing to hear again the familiar stories about the New York days, the London days, the old Hollywood days. The salad days, as Willie called them; “Salad Days”: the title of his still uncompleted autobiography.

The name to begin with had been Marshuttes, William Marshuttes, and as a young actor he had been represented thus in theatrical playbills. Having achieved ill success with it, and following one of Bee’s inimitably clever suggestions, he’d taken the name of Ashton Marsh, and together they sailed third class for England, where he laid on the glib British accent he’d been painstakingly rehearsed in, and several months later, after successively disheartening interviews with West End managements (the London successes came later), they returned from Southampton to New York, first cabin on the
Mauretania,
where, meeting the press at the pier, he masqueraded as the new find Ashton Marshmaine. Bee had thought it not going too far for him to sport a monocle, and to complete the picture there were spats and yellow pigskin gloves. Photos made the Hearst rotogravures nationwide and, dapper English actors being then in vogue, Ashton Marshmaine found immediate employment with Jane Cowl, with Ina Claire, with Helen Hayes. When he saw himself nudging stardom, he announced the fraud at an Algonquin cocktail party, dropped the “Ashton” and the “maine,” and became something of his old self, William Marsh.

He remained a star for many years on both sides of the Atlantic, in musicals, revue, light comedy, and in drama. He had been an equally famous luminary in films, until the unlooked-for but somehow inevitable decline. Never mind, Bee told him, your star will rise again. She saw to it. She arranged a talk with Viola Ueberroth, while he was touring endlessly in
The Red Mill,
and after he succeeded in being cast as Alfie in the Bobbitt pictures, he became famous all over again. It was Bee Marsh who had brought Willie and the theater together at the outset. It was Bee who had urged him to lose his Alabama accent. It was Bee who had seen him trained in singing and dancing, Bee who had decreed his education, who herself had schooled him in matters of taste and discernment, Bee who had obtained for them entrée to the proper doors through which he might pass into the most important offices, the most chic apartments, the most envied homes.

Willie has lived in the same house on Cordelia Way since his and Bee’s earliest years in Hollywood, a large, rambling, indifferently architectured dwelling encompassing many styles and many changes, mostly her ideas. The house stands high atop Doheny Drive, on an isolated knoll that affords all one could wish for in the way of privacy, being at the end of a cul-de-sac, with no neighbors either side, and affording one a 180-degree view, from the city to the sea. The six-o’clock news has predicted showers, but this summer evening is pleasant, balmy even. Below lies the Strip, then Santa Monica Boulevard, then Wilshire, Pico. Outward and away sweeps the vast panorama of Los Angeles, for once clear of smog: a Santa Ana wind has been blowing from the desert for two days, one of the few natural blessings left to the Southland climate.

From his chair Willie can see Catalina Island, and all the way south to Palos Verdes, where the tourists go to view the talking porpoises at Marineland. He can also see the golden statue of Moroni atop the Mormon Temple in Westwood; the figure glints awesomely in the sun, throwing off visible rays, advertisements for those rich and reverent descendants of Brigham Young whose tithed earnings paid for the figure. Willie himself is a generous contributor to the Catholic cause, and in consequence has been honored with a papal title. (Bee had not thought it going too far to have the small coronet embroidered on all his tricot shorts, an understated acknowledgment of the award.) Privately, however, he wishes the cross of the Church of the Good Shepherd, where they “took from” (their little joke together: it meant the church in Beverly Hills in which they worshiped), were larger, a somewhat more prominent contribution to the view. Still, Loretta Young “took from” Saint Victor’s, and you couldn’t see their cross past Tower Discount Records.