Living With Miss G (2 page)

The store across from the Foundry where he was employed would give him
credit so that he could run up a little account there - maybe three or four dollars
a week. They knew exactly how much he was going to make, so I guess that
store was probably owned by the American Car Foundry. I do remember he used
to come home about once a week with a brown paper bag with peanut butter,
sometimes apple butter, maybe peas and beans and bread. When he managed to
get work on a Friday, then there was a real treat. He would bring us goodies like
American cheese, bologna, and a little jar of mayonnaise. We would all be
jumping up and down singing, “Here comes Papa. Here comes Papa!” Food sure
was important and sometimes we didn’t get it. Sometimes we wouldn’t have any
food at all. Maybe we would run out of food the night before, and then the next
day we would know it. Our parents didn’t talk in front of us, but Mama would
just say, “You all stay in bed today. You don’t get up till I tell you.” Then we’d
know that food was pretty scarce or was gone, and she didn’t want us out
playing or working up an appetite.
Miss G had stopped laughing, and was just listening. She put her hand out
and laid it over mine and said, “Rene, we have to feed you up.”
I said, “Miss G, that was a long time ago.”

One Sunday we were driving to Malibu along Sunset Boulevard on a bright
blue sunlit California day. “Let’s go out and have lunch at the pier,” said Miss
G. “Might even take a swim and join the crowd.”

We were always doing that sort of thing, spur of the moment stuff, going
places. Get behind the wheel, point the car somewhere, press the accelerator.
Somewhere here we come!

I’ve always loved Sunset Boulevard. Just the name to start with, and
because it has a real sunset at the end. Bang, right there at the junction lights
there’s Santa Monica to the south, then north to Malibu, where in the evening
time the sun falls over the rim of the world.

It’s where the cowboys got off their horses saying, “I guess that’s it fellas.”
Miss G was wearing her usual casual, day-to-day outfit; a bandana tied
around her hair in a flamboyant bow, a bright yellow blouse, balloon green skirt,

bobby socks and saddle shoes. She was still growing up. She had been dressed
the same way one day previously when I returned home from shopping and
found her fuming.

“Rene, why do I look so young?” she demanded. “I stay up all night
boozing or dancing and I get insulted every minute of the day.”
“Insulted? Who’s going to insult you for looking the way you do?” I asked.
“The bank,” she snorted.
“You’re overdrawn?” I asked seriously.
“No!” she screamed. “I’m not overdrawn. I’m in credit.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“I pushed my check under the grill, and the teller picked it up as if it were a
bit of lavatory paper,” she said. “Then he says, ‘And you’re supposed to be Ava
Gardner?’ By this time, I’m getting indignant and snap, ‘Sure am.’ Do I get my
money? No I do not. ‘Just a minute,’ he says and walked away towards the back
of the bank. He stopped for a moment to talk to some old geezer who gave me a
long distance accusing look. Then he disappeared. In a few minutes he came
back and said, ‘I had to check the signature.’ I’m now boiling. ‘Why?’ I
demanded. He’s still hostile. ‘Because you don’t look like Ava Gardner,’ he
said.”
Miss G was still annoyed. I was gurgling with laughter. “He was dead
right!,” I said. “Miss G, you look like one of the kids swinging out of high
school. You sure don’t look like that sexy babe who was giving George Raft
come-on signs in
Whistle Stop
. It’s playing at every movie house around here. I
bet the poor guy saw it last night; that scene with you in the silk nightie climbing
the stairs; you with your mascaraed eyes and scarlet mouth. He probably stayed
awake all night thinking you were the sexiest girl he had ever seen.”
Miss G began to laugh too and said, “Maybe next time I’ll go in covered in
my movie makeup and he’ll drop dead.”
In those days, Sunset Boulevard was a narrow, twisting, up-and-down
highway, hard against the mountains, and there was not a lot of traffic on it. If
you started driving west at, let’s say Crescent Heights, you’d find the Garden of
Allah, a maze of small apartments and cottages which housed young writers and
directors hoping to make a name for themselves in the film industry. It
disappeared long ago.
Up on the right is the Chateau Marmont, a hotel modeled on some fanciful
French chateau. It is still standing. Proceed along Sunset Strip, and you come to
La Cienega falling away down its steep hill. Soon after, you arrive at the grassy
strip that separates two smooth highways. On either side, there are posh
mansions, and farther along on the right is one of Hollywood’s landmarks, the
Beverly Hills Hotel.
Continue going along Sunset Boulevard until you get to the Bel Air Hotel.
Miss G certainly had a funny story to tell about that place, and she told it often.
“I lived there for a few weeks in 1943,” she explained. “I’d just divorced
Mickey Rooney. For the very first time, I was out on my own. On my starlet
salary of around a hundred dollars a week, with most of it gobbled up by my
business manager and agent, I was pretty broke. The Bel Air Hotel was cheap. I
had also just met Howard Hughes, the richest man in the world, so people said.
He’d met me through a girlfriend of mine who was also a starlet. The first few
times he took me out, I got him mixed up with Howard Hawkes, the famous film
producer. I wondered what the hell Howard Hawkes wanted me for. Then I
found I’d got Howard Hughes, and I knew what his intentions were straight
away. Not that he had any hope. He was tall, sweet, liked staying out late, and
knew all the posh places, but he wasn’t what I was looking for. So as long as he
stayed at arm’s length, that was okay.
“I’d found this room in the Bel Air Hotel, which had originally been a
stable. There were only six or eight rooms. It didn’t even have a restaurant.
Being an ex-stable, it sure did have a whole colony of rats. Having been born
and bred in North Carolina farm country, I was well acquainted with the species.
“Anyway, I hadn’t known Howard Hughes for many weeks, but I did know
that when he sent you flowers, he sure did send you flowers. He didn’t send one
rose, or a dozen, but a hundred! This time he had sent me orchids. Not one
orchid--a hundred orchids--and they filled the bedroom.
“I’m asleep that night and what do I hear? I hear a munching noise. A
bloody rat is eating my orchids! I’m furious! I leap out of bed and grab my
nearest weapon, my tennis racket, and start swiping away trying to knock the
hell out of the rat, or at least get him out of the room. Swish! I missed him and
that’s about fifteen of Howards’s orchids mowed down. Swish again – a fine
backhand – and that’s another twenty or so on the hit list. By the time I’d
finished, Howard’s hundred orchids were a shambles, but I’d beaten the rat and
he had vanished.
“That was a shame really, because I would have allowed him a few
courses. I never minded rats all that much. As I said, as a farm girl, I got to
know rats pretty well. I quite liked their poor little hairless pink babies. How did
they know they were going to be dragged into the world and called ‘Rats?’ They
probably thought they would grow up as pretty little bunnies.”
Onward past UCLA, Miss G is in the outside lane and passing everything
in sight.
“Tell me more about Artie,” I said.
She turned her head and gave me one of her big smiles. “You know, Rene,
until I met Artie Shaw, I had a happy mind, a perfectly contented mind.
Possibly, it wasn’t very brainy, but after all it was my mind. It did what I wanted
and I got along very well with it.”
“You mean to tell me that Artie blew it?” I said.
“Sure did,” Miss G answered. “Not all in one go, and I don’t think he did it
intentionally. He sure did do the Svengali thing; the Professor Higgins in Shaw’s
Pygmalian thing. Quite a few husbands act like that. Don’t kid yourself that men
just think they own women, they know they do! For about the last ten million
years, they’ve been proving that. Nowadays, of course, they use the excuse they
just want to improve us little darlings for our own good, which really means for
their own good.”
“But you loved him from the time you first met?” I asked.
“Totally,” said Miss G. “The chemistry was right. He was twelve years
older than me. He was tall and dark, sardonic and handsome. You know, the
romantic novelist’s crap. He was a famous band leader. That exerted big
leverage. Remember Rene, we were out of our minds with adoration for the big
bands – Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey. I grew up on those
sounds.”
“But you didn’t start an affair straight away?” I asked.
“No. Artie wasn’t a hustler,” explained Miss G. “The quick jump into bed,
that’s just for the common people. Oh boy, what a line he had! Every night we
talked and talked. When I think about it, I wasn’t doing the talking. Artie was. It
was all Artie’s intellectual stream of consciousness. I just sat there wide-eyed
and listened.
“After about eight months with Artie softening me up with his brainy
bulldozing, he decided we’d better get on with the common thing and go to bed
together. We went back to his big Jacobean style house on Bedford Drive and
got into bed. That worked terribly well. So we got married in October of 1945.
“Gee, when I think about it, it’s not so long ago. We spent our honeymoon
in his house. We didn’t go anywhere or do anything. I traveled around with him
doing his one night stands and I enjoyed it. I sat backstage and drank bourbon
and loved it all and had a great time going to Chicago and New York. He played
all the big ballrooms, but mainly it was one-nighters around California.”
“When did it all start going wrong?” I asked.
“It started to go wrong when we got married!” said Miss G. “It was bliss
before that. You know, Rene, at that period in my life I really did want to settle
down and have a child. Artie shook his head very profoundly saying, ‘You are
too young.’ You know, when I think back, I think really all he had in his mind
was that our marriage was never going to work. And he was so stingy – no, let
me rephrase that remark – he was so mean that he was looking for a cheap way
out as soon as we were married.
“Lana Turner and I have had a lot of discussions about lovers and
husbands, usually when we were in the ladies room powdering our noses. We
both agreed that Artie was the meanest man we had ever met. We also agreed
that we were absolutely madly in love with him, but he treated all his women the
same way, about as generously as Scrooge.”
“Miss G, you’re still upset about the whole Artie thing?” I asked. “My
sister Tressie always said he was always putting you down something terrible.”
“That’s right,” said Miss G. “But that was when Artie was through with
me, tired of me, and he could be very cruel when he wanted to get rid of
someone. He had all sorts of egg-head friends, mainly left wing guys who knew
all the answers to the world’s problems and who had written books about them-musicians, writers, professors. I’d try and put in a line occasionally, and there
would be a little titter from under the beards, and Artie would say, ‘Now Ava,
you know nothing about that subject. So why don’t you go and get the maid to
serve the coffee.’ I’d run off like a little serving mat on wheels.”
“You put up with all that?” I asked in an unbelieving tone.
“I loved him, Rene,” Miss G insisted. “I loved him so desperately that I
could stand all the jabs. I thought it was all my fault. I was dim. I was
uneducated. There was no hope of me even staying in the same room as those
up-market professors. I even went to see a psychiatrist to get my IQ tested. He
said that was ridiculous, that I didn’t need a test. I said, ‘I want an IQ test.’ And
I got one. Apparently, I’ve got quite a high IQ.”
“So……,” I said.
“I’ve never believed a high IQ made me any smarter,” Miss G said.
I was to hear this talk from Miss G for the rest of her life. To the very end,
she was lamenting her lack of a college education, a college degree. There she
was, one of the greatest beauties of this century, and one who could more than
hold her own in any company, with absolutely anyone. She had a great gift for
comedy, a warm, richly earthy woman full of love for her friends, children and
animals; and a shrewd nose for the phony and dishonest. And she thought a
college degree mattered!
We drove up the hills and around the curves and I asked, “Artie made a lot
of money?”
“Artie always made a lot of money,” she said. “The Bedford Drive house
was worth a fortune. He sold the house because he thought if we got divorced –
and as I’ve said, I don’t think Artie ever intended to stay married to anyone for
too long – I might get a piece of it. We moved to a little ratty house, out in the
valley. It was when I was doing
The Killers
. It was good for me because I was
only five minutes from the studio.”
“Didn’t you have a say in all of this?” I asked.
“No. Artie ran the show completely,” Miss G said. “I was not really a wife
as wives should be. I had no say in anything. There was a say between my
mother and father. They agreed between themselves their course of action. But
with Artie – no. He went through wives like cold drinks. I was wife number five.
Lana Turner was number three. Artie was searching for film experience with
Lana and I think with me too. His wives sort of matched what he was doing at
the moment. I think I ended his interest in film, at least temporarily.”
We reached the ocean at Pacific Palisades. There were white tops on the
waves, and they were running in fast onto the beach. Kids in bathing suits
festooned the seawall. The sun still shone, dazzling and hot.
“Miss G, do you mean to tell me Artie never bought you anything?”
“He never bought me a stitch of clothing, a skirt, a dress, a sweater, or
lingerie,” she said. .“He did give me a small pair of gold earrings, which I
promptly lost. He never gave me anything after that, but a wedding ring, and
that’s about it.”
For the rest of her life she was going to insist that Artie Shaw was one of
the great loves of her life. Probably he was, but it was a very painful experience.
We cruised along the coast road, passing the bits where the cliffs are
always falling onto the road, and reached the small white wooden fishing pier
that sticks out into the sea at Malibu. We always loved the unpretentious little
restaurant which occupied the landward end. We got a table looking down at the
sand and surf, ordered a bottle of icy cold white wine and touched glasses before
ordering food.
Miss G said, “I’m going out with Howard Duff tonight, Rene, and I might
be home late, or I might not be home at all.”
“Okay, Miss G,” I said.
“Well, what are we going to eat?” she asked.
“Shrimp,” I said. It was a very pleasant meal.
Miss G didn’t come home that night and didn’t come home a lot of other
nights afterwards. Artie Shaw gradually faded from her mind. Tressie’s
medicine—my companionship and encouraging her to date again—had worked.