Getting Garbo (30 page)

He struts off to break bread with Andrei Gromyko. But he calls back to me. “Hey, forgot to say. Cops killed that asshole burglar! Mazel Tov!”

• • •

Blessed is the Colonel,
Jack Havoc says.
He taketh away and now he hath given back.

We're on Stage 11. The main
Jack Havoc
sound stage. Stage 12 next door is for the “swing” sets, the temporary sets built for a particular episode, then dismantled and carted away. But Stage 11 contains the permanent standing sets for the show. Permanent, of course, being a relative term. If your TV ratings dipped, the sets and the show and you could be gone overnight.

When we enter, the only light on Stage 11 is from a security stanchion on the floor near the entrance. I go to the electric panel, as familiar to me as the fuse box in my own house, and throw the lever, turning on the house lights. Still gloomy. No one here except Jack Havoc and me. But everything looks the same. My mobile dressing room. With my name still on the door in the center of the big gold star. I have a momentary scary thought.

“Hey, how's everybody in town going to know I'm not blackballed anymore? The Colonel's gotta make some phone calls to—”

He fixed all that just by walking down the studio street with you. In public. Word will be all over town. You are officially back among the living.

Jack Havoc strides forward with that pouter-pigeon shoulders-back-follow-your-chest walk I developed for him. Surveying his territory. The standing sets for the show are Jack Havoc's New York penthouse apartment, the lobby of his East Side building, and the elegant interior of his favorite saloon. It's only been a couple of weeks since I was here, but the sets seem smaller. Like going back to high school and the desks have shrunk.

Jack Havoc feels completely at home.

He reclines comfortably on the Italian suede sofa in the living room of the penthouse apartment. Legs crossed, arms outstretched on the top of the sofa like he's embracing the entire room. Then he strolls onto the balcony. Looks off as if the backdrop is real and he's actually gazing at the lights of the city. He wanders over to the café society saloon set. Perches on his favorite barstool, the one on the far end, back to the wall. Where he can see everything and everybody.

God, I missed this place,
he says.

“Yeah. Lots of memories. Most of 'em bad.”

But not all. Good times, too.

“Remind me.”

C'mon, you enjoyed being the main man.

“That was an illusion. I was a hired hand.”

Not anymore. You heard the Colonel. Comin' back a winner. What you want you got.

“If I come back.”

If? What're you talking about? Why wouldn't you?

“I don't know. Feels like going backwards. Was that what this was all about? Just a negotiating ploy to get a raise?”

You're not thinking straight, Roy. The Colonel needs you and now he knows it. He's offering you the bird in the hand plus the two in the bush. Get filthy rich out of TV and be a movie star, too.

“Well, feels like once I'm out—stay out. Move on. Keep my options open. If John Huston asks me to go to Africa with him, I don't want to have to say, ‘You gotta wait, Johnny, I can't go until my hiatus.' I want to be able to say ‘Yes.'”

But what about me?

That's a puzzler. “What about—who?”

Me. Jack Havoc. Being back here on the lot, I just realized. If you walk away from Warners, I don't exist. No more Jack Havoc. I'm over. I'm dead.

“Now who's talking crazy? You'll be with me wherever I go.”

But I won't be me. I'm just asking you, Roy—think it over before you decide. Sure, the Colonel pissed you off. But now he'll give you free rein. Want to get rid of Viola, and Killer Lomax too? Just wave a pinkie and they're gone.

“Yeah, I guess. But—”

Okay, okay, just think about it, huh? We got a lot to think about.

“Meaning what?”

Now it's his turn to look puzzled.
C'mon, pal, you know what's left on the agenda.

“Been a busy day. Suppose you tell me.”

Little Reva.

“Don't start that again. Everything's copacetic now. The cops are happy, the Colonel's happy. So why do we have to—”

That's why. Because we have to.

“Marshak said it's over.”

He said he was one card away from a royal flush. Reva's that card. As long as she can sing her little song about your comings and goings at the movies during the time Addie was cashing out—

“She wouldn't. I mean, who'd even believe her anymore when—”

With that fuckin' locket to verify the story? Marshak would eat it up.

“They're having a press conference. That officially closes the book!”

There's no statute of limitations on murder.

I hear him. I don't like it. But I hear him.

She's got to go,
he says.

“She's got to go,” I say.

They ought to give me a medal for sitting in this hot ticket booth all day long since the noon show. Of course, I've got an electric fan on the floor. Basically it just stirs the hot air around, but I've rigged up my own version of an air conditioner. I filled two empty jumbo popcorn boxes from the concession stand with ice and put them on the floor with the fan blowing across them. Every little bit helps.

I'm wearing my best outfit today because I went to apply for a job as a mailroom messenger at Twentieth Century Fox. That's usually a guy's job, so I didn't want to wear a skirt, and my usual dungarees seemed too informal, so that left the wool slacks that fit me like a dream, but they're still wool.

Hey, I think maybe I got the job. Fingers crossed. Wouldn't that be cool? Being on a movie lot every day and getting paid for it.

Our theater started playing a new double feature today.
Picnic
and
The Proud and Profane.
The posters both look the same. Bill Holden with his shirt off standing over Kim Novak in one and Deborah Kerr in the other like he's about to jump their bones. Business was good for the early shows. Everybody likes Bill Holden. Particularly with his shirt off.

I'm supposed to finish my shift at five, but Connie, my relief, calls in with an emergency. She has to take her mom to the hospital for a gallstone. She finally shows up at eight, but I can use the overtime, and I run into a piece of luck. Norm, one of the off-duty ushers, drops by to pick up his check, and he offers me a ride home. We walk to his VW bug, and I have the sense that someone's watching, you know, hair on the back of your neck rising, but I've felt like that a lot since that detective came here asking questions I didn't want to answer.

“Know what makes a movie star?” Norm asks. He's not a collector, but he likes analyzing movies. “They never blink. When it's an important moment, you never see them blink.”

“Unless it's like Scarlett O'Hara, batting her eye lashes, flirting.”

“I'm talking about highly dramatic moments. No blinks. Check it out.”

I'd never noticed that before, but as I think back on the high points of my favorite movies, it makes sense to me. Blinking indicates hesitancy or even shiftiness. Not blinking means sincerity or determination. Garbo never blinks. Gable winks, but when the chips are down, he never blinks.

Norm's car radio is on, tuned to KLAC, and now there's a newsbreak. They announce that police have confirmed that the Hollywood Hills burglar, who killed TV star Roy Darnell's wife, has been caught and killed in a high speed chase. I'm stunned. “Didn't you hear that before?” Norm asks. “Been on the radio all day.” I'm flooded with relief. I knew Roy didn't do it.

Norm pulls up in front of my apartment house and I get out. As I walk toward the stairs, I enjoy the moment. It's dusk, the time just after the sun's gone down, but before it's totally dark. The palm trees look charcoal black, silhouetted against the last light of the day. I can smell raked-up leaves burning in the backyard incinerators, mingling with some of the cooking smells from the kitchens of the apartment house.

Not ours, though.

Mother always comes home too pooped from the bank to cook, so she nurses a drink or two until I pull some Swanson's dinners out of the freezer. On the evenings when I'm out, she just boozes until she passes out.

I unlock the door and step inside gingerly. Like Fred and Gingerly. When I was a kid, Mother might be hiding behind the door to pounce and pound me for some sin like not making my bed. Tonight the lights are on in the living room, and I saw the car at the curb downstairs, so I know she's come home.

“Mom,” I call. But she's not here.

My shoes hurt—my new penny loafers with the stack heels that Mother bought for me—and they make me feel like Li'l Abner. I wore them for the interview at Twentieth because the rest of my shoes are sneakers. Before I can kick them off, I hear shuffling on the landing and Mother enters. Carrying her drink in one hand and the empty garbage can from under the sink in the other hand. She bangs into the doorjamb coming through it. Girlish giggle. Really blasted tonight.

“Why hello. And how's the little princess?”

“Hadda work late.”

“Y'coulda phoned. In case I was worried.”

I snort. “About what?”

“If maybe the pirates or gypsies or perverts have snatched you off the streets. The places you go and the company you keep.”

She's worse than usual. Better get some food in her. “Want the chicken dinner or the Salisbury steak?” I'm at the freezer.

“Surprise me,” she says. Shoving the garbage can back under the sink. And giggling again.

“What's so funny?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. Just how some things seem so damn hard, totally out of control, impossible, but—they don't have to be.”

“For instance.” Sliding the TV dinners in the oven.

“How I've been begging you, and praying, that you'll finally get over this insane obsession with the autographs. It's just not normal, Reva! There's no room for anything else in your life. Anyway—” pouring herself more booze “—my prayers have been answered.” Yet another giggle.

“Hallelujah! And what's the answer?”

“Don't mock. Disrespect.” Waving her glass, spilling some booze. “God'll punish you. Not your fault. Head filled with nutsy nonsense. You'll thank me, Reva. Know what the gardeners say, when they're cutting back the rose bushes to a stump? ‘Y'gotta be cruel to be kind.' That's what they say. So I decided to treat you with total kindness. You'll see, you'll thank me later, you will.”

I feel icy. Standing absolutely still. “What have you done, Mother?”

“Asked you a million times, give it up, a grown-up girl like you, chasing cars like a deranged hooker, making a grotesque display of yourself, consorting with the scum of the earth, in order to spend a few precious seconds with the great stars who don't give a flying fuck about anyone but themselves, and now to make it worse, you're in trouble with the police, not once, but twice in the same week, so what choice did I have?”

“Mother,” I repeat, “what have you done?”

“Don't be upset, honey.” She's pleading, really scaring me. “This way there's an end to it, it's the only way, now you'll have time to go to dances, meet somebody, have a family, a life—”

I run to my bedroom door and see that the padlock has been clipped off. It's on the floor. She's invaded my space. I push open the door and instantly spot what's wrong. I turn back to her and our gazes interlock.

“Where are my autograph books, Mother?” The entire shelf is empty.

She giggles again. I rush over and grab her arms and shake her and yell in her face,
“Where are they?”
and I can read the fear in her eyes, as she mumbles, “For your own good...”

“The garbage,” I guess. “You threw them in the garbage!” She ducks her head, so I've got my answer.

I race out the front door. Her voice following me. “You'll thank me someday.” They don't pick up the garbage until tomorrow morning, so there's time, and I take the stairs down two-at-a-time and skitter on the pathway in these stiff new shoes and almost fall on my face, and speed around the corner of the apartment house to the garbage dumpster, and then I see the smoke trailing up into the night sky from the backyard incinerator. Two evenings a week the city allows us to burn. And I know what my mother has done.

I yank open the incinerator door and my reflex urge is to shove my hand inside and save whatever's left, but there's nothing left. Just a pile of ashes, some glowing embers, a few pulsing flames still nibbling on the smoldering covers of my star books, the pages all devoured by the fire, except for a page or two curled into blackened ash. I poke them with a stick and they crumble. I drop the stick and sink to my knees and cover my face with my hands and begin to cry, the kind of tears that rip at your insides and scorch your cheeks. “Mama,” I hear myself saying, “you shouldn't have, Mama, why couldn't you leave me alone...”

Then I'm choked with tears and can't speak. I rock back and forth, weeping as if I'll never be able to stop, and I'm not even aware that there's anyone else here until I hear a voice. The voice I know better than any other.

“Reva…what's wrong? Can I help you?”

And I look up at him. Standing there. Alone. As if he's in my dream.

“Hi, Roy,” I say. Smiling foolish and bleary through my tears. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see you,” he says. “About something special.” And he gives me that smile I love so much on TV, that devil-may-care Jack Havoc smile.