Getting Garbo (9 page)

Because from where I'm sitting I can see her. But she doesn't see me.

Kim Rafferty is standing near the elephant with a guy who must be the elephant wrangler. He's wearing a turban and Nehru jacket like Punjab in the
Orphan Annie
comic strip. She's wearing a swimsuit, tighter than the one on the billboard, covered in silver spangles like a bareback rider in the circus. The elephant is naked except for a small two-seater basket strapped on his back and a banner across his belly proclaiming: TRAPEZE—Variety Boys Club Benefit.

A local TV audience participation show is in progress. I'm part of the audience. Up in the top row of the bleachers. In a loose windbreaker, oversize Italian sunglasses and a tweed Irish hat. So far nobody's recognized me. Now Kim is on camera, plugging the opening of Burt Lancaster's circus movie.

That's the latest item making me crazy. Does Burt have something to do with my getting snared by the private eye? Was she working for him then, too? Is Burt colluding somehow with Addie? Does that make any sense? I'm totally confused. Not to mention pissed off. Got to look at the likelihood I was betrayed by Kim. So am I here to confront and accuse? Or to give her a chance to explain—better yet, deny. Go ahead, bitch, convince me. And no more lies! Do I want to clobber her or kiss her? See? Queasy.

With the emcee's unctuous help, Kim is awarding a few seats to the gala premiere of
Trapeze.
Plus an extra-special prize. An elephant ride, right here, today! She reaches in the fish bowl, reads off the name of the lucky kid, who jumps up and races forward.

The wrangler signals with a steel-tipped pointy stick and the elephant kneels down. Kim climbs into the small basket on the elephant's back. The wrangler hands the kid up to her. They get set. Then the wrangler gestures. With a traffic-stopping trumpeting cry, the elephant rises to full height. The kid is thrilled and waves to Mommy and Daddy. Kim waves to the camera from way-y-y up there. The elephant, on cue from the wrangler, does a once-around the stage area. Despite her ear-to-ear smile, I can see Kim is scared shitless. The crowd applauds. The show goes to commercial. Quickly, the wrangler gets them both down and off the elephant.

She disappears around a corner of the building. I scale down the rear of the bleachers, drop to the ground, follow her path behind the building. She's still there. All by herself. Puking her guts out. I hand her my handkerchief. She takes it without seeing who's giving it to her. Then she does.

“Hi, Roy.” Sees through my disguise. A wan smile.

“Hi, Kim.” Not Chris. This is Kim. Whoever the hell she is. But you can't yell at somebody who's heaving. She looks awful. I take back the hanky, dip it in a bucket of water. Probably the elephant's. Gently, I cool her brow. She's ashen.

“Scared of elephants, huh?”

“Nah. Scared of heights.”

“Then why'd you take this job?”

She looks at me as if I'm a dunce. “For the money.”

• • •

“Wondered if I'd ever see you again,” she says.

We're in a window booth at Denny's on Sunset, across from the TV station. She's just stepped out of the rest room wearing her street clothes. Tan slacks, white hunter's blouse with epaulets on the shoulders and shotgun shell loops on the breast pockets. She has her lipstick stuck in one of the loops.

“You look like you're about to lead a safari.”

“Ungawa!” she says. “Onward into darkest Hollywood!”

Forced smiles. Awkward. The waitress brings our order. Coffee and a bear claw for the lady, iced tea for the gent. She doesn't touch her food. I start playing with my ice cubes. Neither of us seem to have a way to really start talking to each other.

“Last time we were together,” she offers, “we were calling each other Bob and Chris.”

“Yeah. I liked them. Too bad they never existed.”

More silence. Then. “How'd you find me?”

“Doesn't matter.”
Clink
go the ice cubes. Then I make eye contact. Trying to peer into her soul. If she has one. “Look, I just want to ask you one question and I'm gone.”

“The answer is yes. I set you up. And I'm sorry I did.”

So we just look at each other for a moment. Then I say, “For the money.”

She doesn't break eye contact. Give her that.

“Well, I hope you got paid well. Because you did a great job. If you ever need a recommendation, as an actress or as a hooker—”

I'm getting up. She grabs my wrist. Strong grip.

“I'm not a hooker!”

I shake her hand loose. Feel like busting her face. “Could've fooled me. Remember what we did together, all night, in our little love nest—while your photographer pal played Watch the Birdie?”

“That was my choice. I didn't have to.”

“How's that again?”

“I was supposed to get you to pick me up—which wasn't that hard—and phone in where we shacked up. After that, all I had to do is get the two of us naked long enough for the photos. Sleeping together was just…well, it was my spur-of-the-moment idea.”

“Because it made for better pictures? Might earn you a bonus?”

“Because I liked you. I've never screwed anyone for money.”

“You don't do what you did to guys you like.”

“That's what I'm ashamed of.”

She lets go of my wrist. I consider. Finally sit again. Can't hurt to listen.

“When they hired me to do it, I told myself it's just another acting gig. And I was kind of desperate; I'd just been hit with a big car repair bill. So I figured, why not? Play the school marm from Alhambra. But I didn't count on you turning out to be a nice guy. I—apologize. I'm very, very sorry.”

I believe her. I know, I know. That's what I said when she acted like she didn't know who I was when we met in Romanoff's. But unless she's the greatest actress since Garbo, she's telling me straight this time. I mean, what's in it for her to con me now?

Okay, let's put it to the test. I ask her for the rest of what she knows and she tells me.

She got the elephant riding job through an ad agency; no, she's never met Burt. And she was hired for the Romanoff's caper by the red-haired snooper. A number of candidates were interviewed. All in search of the girl most likely to entice me. Kim wasn't told what the “role” was until after she'd been selected. When they'd been prepping a while, the snooper mentioned that he'd had me under surveillance for weeks but nothing had happened. They were under pressure to get things moving. So now they were going to make it happen.

“And how did that freckle-faced fucker know what kind of woman I like?” Polish head-slap time. “Addie told him, right?”

“Your wife rehearsed me. Trained me. Sort of like Eliza Doolittle in
My Fair Lady.
She told me what to say and how to say it. How to dress. What you like and what you don't like.” No wonder she reminded me of Addie when we first got together. “She said I caught on fast. ‘Kim,' she'd say, ‘you're absolutely perfect. You are going to be the girl of his dreams.'”

How do I feel hearing all this? In a crazy way it lets me off the hook for all the lousy things I've done to damage my marriage. This really takes the fuckin' cake. Compared to Addie, I was just a kid getting his hand caught in the cookie jar. Succumbing to hot-blooded temptations now and then. What she did, though, is really cold. Premeditated. Viciously calculating. She conspired and manipulated and used our most intimate secrets to betray me. And for what? Money.

Hearing Kim tell it is sort of like sitting in a sauna. Every sentence she utters, my temperature leaps up a notch. Soon I'm way past steaming. When Kim tells me the stuff about Addie designing her as the girl of my dreams—by that time, I am molten. I want to scald Addie. I want to shake her until her fillings fly out. I want to put my fingers around her throat and squeeze and squeeze. I want to kill her. But I don't have to. That's why I have a lawyer.

I woke up this morning thinking of Greta Garbo. No wonder, because that's who I fell asleep to last night on
The Late Show,
watching on the small black-and-white TV set on the shelf in my room. Mother was out on the town with a bunch of “the girls” from the bank, somebody's birthday, an excuse for them all to get bombed at Trader Vic's. So I bolted my door and watched
Ninotchka.
That's about the only Garbo movie they ever show on TV.

People who remember her think she's become a recluse, but that's not true. Garbo moved to New York when she retired from the screen, so we'd see her all the time, the Secret Six, we'd spot her window shopping on Madison Avenue or coming out of the Museum of Modern Art, but when you asked her for an autograph, she'd never ever sign, she'd just walk right by you like she didn't even hear and grab a cab and be gone. But we'd keep trying, only now there's a whole new generation of collectors who don't even know enough to wish they could get Garbo.

It makes me sick. Well, maybe not that specifically, but something does—sick to my stomach. I barely manage to unbolt my door and hotfoot it to the bathroom. Thank god Mother's not in there. She's left for work already, so I can heave to my heart's content. What did I have to eat last night? Oh yeah, after Podolsky and I saw this double feature at the Nu-Art Theater of
A Place In The Sun
and an old 30s version of the same story, Dreiser's
An American Tragedy,
which was nowhere near as good, then we went for pizza on Pico Boulevard and Podolsky insisted on adding anchovies, so here I am, upchucking to beat the band. Try thinking of something else, think of Monty and Liz, the movie's still good as the first time I saw it in New York, and that, of course, reminds me of Billy…

• • •

Charming Billy—his last name is Elgort—wore a sailor suit when he came collecting, but he wasn't in the U.S. Navy. He belonged to a Sea Scout unit where he lived in Sheepshead Bay near Coney Island. Charming Billy looked old for his age, which is actually the same as me; we were both sixteen going on seventeen back during the icy-windy winter I'm talking about, and unless you know better, his uniform looked real. Some of the big stars who wouldn't sign for the rest of us were patriotic enough to make exceptions for our boys in the service. That's how he got Jean Arthur and Charlie Chaplin and Ingrid Bergman, although even the uniform didn't work on Garbo. Maybe if she thought he was in the Swedish Navy. And the Bergman thing backfired on him. Someone, I suspect Podolsky, told Ingrid that Charming Billy wasn't really in the Navy. So the next time she saw him, Ingrid demanded that he tear her signature out of his autograph book and give it back to her. You win some, you lose some.

This frosty early December evening, Charming Billy and I are waiting together on a super-star mission. We're huddled in the darkened doorway of the closed flower shop a few yards up from the entrance to the Sherry Netherland Hotel on Fifth Avenue at 59th Street, where Cary Grant is staying. We're freezing so we're hugging, actually we're grinding our crotches against each other and it's kind of the first real sexual experience I've had. We're doing lines from
A Place In The Sun
to pass the time. It's the scene where Montgomery Clift meets Elizabeth Taylor and we're getting each other pretty hot.

“Hello,” I say. Cheek burrowed into the shoulder of his pea coat.

“Hello,” he says. Bump. Grind.

“Why're you all alone? Being exclusive? Feeling blue?”

“I'm just fooling around. Maybe you'd like to play?”

Podolsky snickers. I forgot to mention he's jammed in the doorway with us. Reading the
New York Post
by the light from the street lamp. Pretending to ignore us. We ignore him.

“You're Angela Vickers,” Charming Billy, who kind of looks like Robert Wagner, says in his best hesitant-sensitive Monty Clift voice. We all love Monty Clift; we know where he lives, in an apartment on East 54th Street near Lexington with his acting coach, Mira Rostova. “I read about you in the papers.”

“Yeah, Liz baby,” Podolsky growls, “I read you've got the biggest tits in Hollywood.”

Charming Billy snickers. Because I haven't got anywhere near what Liz has got. But I grind my pelvis against his to get him to concentrate. He's got a boner. I can feel it.

“What else do you do?” I ask him.

“The usual things,” Monty says.

“You look unusual,” Liz says. Definitely a boner.

“First time anybody ever said that,” he says.

“Because you always look like a fuckin' fairy in that sailor suit,” Podolsky says. His face still buried in the newspaper. “Hah! Sidney Skolsky's column says Tab Hunter sleeps in the nude.”

“With his dog Butch,” Charming Billy adds. He laughs and breaks apart from me. He pumps his arms. The wind is blowing unobstructed at us across from Central Park. “God, I feel like an Eskimo. C'mon, Cary, time to descend from your luxurious penthouse. A deal's a deal.”

We've cut a deal with Cary Grant. At least we think we have. Les Noonan, a feisty little teenage dynamo from Union City, New Jersey, who resembles his favorite, Jimmy Cagney, handled the negotiations on our behalf. Cary Grant has been in town for almost a week; we've all seen him around town a bunch of times and he hasn't signed for anyone yet.

Les prides himself on being the best in the Secret Six at breaking down a star's resistance. Once he chased Lana Turner's limo on foot up Park Avenue from the Waldorf Astoria on 50th Street, knocking on her window every time the limo stopped for a red light. At 72nd Street she surrendered and rolled the window down and signed his book. “When I touched the aluminum frame around the limo window to take back my book,” Les loves to recall, “sparks flew. Tsst! Static electricity, I guess. But it was like a magic sign, celebrating the occasion.” Poor Lana, she never stood a chance.

Les has taken it upon himself to break the Cary Grant impasse. I'm sure it wasn't designed that way, but the Sherry Netherland Hotel is a bastion against collecting. Only one revolving door into the lobby and the front desk faces the only elevator bank (with a uniformed Starter on duty) so there's no sneaking in side doors and going up back elevators out of sight of the front desk like at the Plaza, the Waldorf, the Ritz Carlton, the St. Regis, or the Essex House. Not at the Sherry Netherland.

So Les Noonan took the bull by the horns. He just phoned and asked for Cary Grant and, lo and behold, Cary Grant himself answered. Les identified himself as an autograph collector, “one of the little monsters who've been trailing you around town, Mr. Grant.” That got him a chuckle so Les rolled on: “This situation is very uncomfortable for all of us, Mr. Grant. We don't enjoy intruding on your privacy and we certainly don't want to hound you, but we're really the best at what we do, and we've gotta get your autograph, so what're we going to do?”

Cary Grant said, “Why do I suspect that you have a solution in mind?”

Les confessed he did. “Suppose we leave our autograph books at the front desk in your hotel tonight. When you come down, you sign 'em all and get it over with. That doesn't draw a crowd like it would anywhere you start giving autographs in public, and then we all go our happy ways.”

Cary Grant laughed. That bubbly Cary Grant laugh, Les reported to the rest of us. “Charming,” he said. And we had a deal.

I know what you're thinking. This violates the basic precept of the Secret Six, that you have to see the star sign your book for it to count. But Les has devised an answer to that, too. While we're freezing in the doorway outside, Les is inside the busy travel agency on the corner, hidden in one of the phone booths that has a view through a door with a glass window into the lobby of the Sherry. When Cary Grant emerges from the elevator, he'll see him and signal us. In fact, that's what's happening right now.

Les comes running like Paul Revere spreading the word. “He's in the lobby, he's in the lobby,” he yells to us, frozen like icicles in our doorway. He spreads the word to Pam O'Mara, Tillie Lust, tall-skinny Freddie Tripp, and the others hiding in alcoves and risking hypothermia farther up the street.

We can't gather in front of the hotel entrance and just look in through the revolving door because of the particularly nasty doorman. So we all rush across Fifth Avenue, dodging traffic, to our pre-scouted vantage point: behind the statue of General Sherman on horseback on the west side of Fifth Avenue. Directly facing the entrance to the Sherry. And inside, at the front desk, in unmistakable profile, is Cary Grant at the front desk. Pen in hand.

“He's signing my book,” Tillie says.

“Bullshit, that's my book!” Podolsky say.

“Doesn't matter,” adjudicates Pam O'Mara. “He's signing. It's our books. We can see it. It counts!”

“Fuckin' A,” Les Noonan shouts. Everybody starts pounding Les on the back, jumping up and down, Charming Billy whirls and kisses me. It's my first kiss, next to the statue of General Sherman and across from where Cary Grant is signing my autograph book, and Charming Billy is copping a feel and we're all so gleeful and when Cary Grant comes out of the hotel we all yell his name and he smiles and blows us a kiss across Fifth Avenue before he climbs into his waiting limo and drives off.

Les trots across the avenue against the lights and retrieves our autograph books from the hotel desk. He dodges a honking bus as he brings the books back to us and everybody's gloating, “Look, he wrote our names, and good luck!” so I'm the only one who glances back over at the entrance to the Sherry and sees Roy Darnell coming out. He went in about an hour ago with a gorgeous blonde who's the Debutante of the Year, according to
LIFE.
Roy's alone now, but his hair is wet and slicked back like he just took a shower, and he gets into a cab and takes off.

• • •

Now it's New Year's Eve, only a few weeks after the Cary Grant triumph at the Sherry Netherland. There's snow on the ground and a party in progress at Pam O'Mara's apartment. She's recently moved into one of the walkups a few doors away from the “21” Club on 52nd Street. We're all envious of her. Pam can wait outside for the hard-drinking stars like Bob Mitchum, Franchot Tone, and Brod Crawford to close the bar at “21” and still be home in two minutes.

Tonight is special. Everyone's at the party, maybe sixteen, eighteen of us, jammed into Pam's tiny apartment, including Tillie Lust, lanky Freddie Tripp, Podolsky of course, Charming Billy (in civilian clothes), boisterous Les Noonan, cadaverously-thin Alabama-bred Abe Franks, Arleigh, our communications central. There's the twins who are actually cousins: Jimmy Quick (a fast-talker) and Johnny Click (with a flash-camera, even tonight); Rose Kaplan, our “mole” who works at UA; and Marco Ortiz, the self-styled “Latin From Manhattan” (Hell's Kitchen, actually) who speaks good Spanish plus passable Yiddish and Italian that makes him invaluable when chasing international stars. Although we're bound by our common infatuation with the stars, until now the Secret Six has been all business. We've spent hundreds of hours together in various combinations, lurking in strategic doorways and outside sundry posh spots, but tonight's our first purely social event.

It's funny to see us all gathered in one place. Everyone feels kind of awkward. Without stars to keep an eye out for, we have to look at each other and, to be honest, as a group we're kind of on the geeky side. Pam has music going on the hi-fi. Jane Froman (her favorite) singing “Blue Moon” and “With A Song In My Heart.” Frankie Laine (Les's favorite) singing “Two Loves Have I” and “Jealousy.” It's easier to dance to Jane Froman than Frankie Laine, but hardly anyone is dancing. It's like a junior high school dance. Boys on one side of the room, girls on the other. There's punch (without punch) and hard stuff for those that want it, plus cold cuts, but no one's eating yet (except Podolsky). Pam O'Mara suggests we divide into teams for a game of charades and it's a great ice-breaker. We're acting out famous movie lines like “Here's looking at you, kid” and “Smile when you call me that.” Podolsky shines on “You can't send a kid like this up in a crate like that.”

Charming Billy has been drinking Cuba Libres and pours me a stiff one. We sip, then slip away together on a business call. There's a young actress appearing tonight on
Philco Playhouse,
which is being telecast only a few blocks away at NBC in Radio City. Word is she's leaving for Hollywood to make a movie at Fox with Richard Basehart, and neither Charming Billy nor I have her. Who knows, she may turn out to be something. We stroll through the night streets, crunching snow underfoot, holding hands like boyfriend-girlfriend. It's the first time we've been alone together (without Podolsky, even) since the doorway at the Sherry Netherland. As we approach the RCA Building, we stop to admire the huge lighted Christmas tree and watch the skaters on the ice rink below. We're leaning over, cheek to cheek. The cold air nipping at our faces. He turns his face and lightly kisses me on the lips.

“What's that for?”

“New Year's Eve.”

“It's not midnight.”

“Why wait 'til the last minute?”

We skip, I mean it,
skip
down the street to the entrance to NBC and just as we get there the actress we're looking for comes out with her co-star on the show, who happens to be, you guessed it, Roy Darnell. He's been doing a lot of “live” TV. They both have traces of grease paint behind their ears and their heads are real close together and they're laughing as we approach them.

“Here's my girl Reva,” Roy says. “Why aren't you out at a party?”

“I am, I mean, we are, Billy and me—few blocks from here,” I stammer. “We just came by to see you guys.”