Naked in the Promised Land (17 page)

"If you need pictures, I've got some ideas," E. J. said. His close gaze made me feel prickly, and I was still intimidated by his large, white-blond goyishness, but I stayed to listen. "I know this guy who's a photographer, likes to do pinups on the side." I must have looked startled because E. J. spread his fingers upright in a gesture that indicated
noth
ing to worry about.
"Very professional stuff," he said with a businesslike air. "I know he'd trade publicity stills for a couple of hours of a pinup shoot. He'll give you what you need."

I said nothing as E. J. tore the title page off the typescript he was carrying, Tennessee Williams's
Baby Doll,
and scribbled a name and phone number on it, then stuck it in front of me. For a second I hesitated, but I'd seen pinup photos of Betty Grable. A backless bathing suit, long legs ending in high heels, a bright smile over her shoulder, flirting with the camera. It would be just one more role.

I wore Simone's harlequin capris and plastic see-through platform heels to the shoot in Wes Martin's studio. Framed portraits adorned the windows—a glowing bride in miles of swirled white satin, a pouting little redheaded boy holding a puppy, a debutante looking fresh and virginal. "Miss Foster?" Wes Martin asked, coming out from another room when I opened the door that made a buzzer ring. He was wearing gray work pants and a workshirt with rolled-up sleeves, a thin, balding man with an efficient air.

I can do this, I assured myself. "Gigi," I ad-libbed. "My professional name is Gigi Frost." Lillian Foster or even Lil sounded far too serious for a pinup model.

"Let's try a few shots in the outfit you're wearing. Looks great." His smile was impersonal.

The poses I took weren't much different from the ones I'd practiced in the mirror at Fanny's from the time I was eight years old: hands on hips and chin tilted down, a "come hither" expression in my eyes; arms in the air, an ecstatic expression on my lips; a cross-legged pose, back arched and chest forward, a naughty-girl moue on my face. Then in his tiny bathroom I hung my capris and cotton pullover on a hook, folded my panties and bra and placed them on the floor, and changed into my two-piece bathing suit.

"Okay. Okay. Okay," he said to each new pose I struck with his umbrellas and scarves and ukuleles. It was fun, I thought, surprising myself at the flirty way I could be with a black box. It wasn't me—it was some glamour girl, or rather it was me playing the role of a glamour girl.

"Now can we take just a few figure shots?" Wes Martin said.

"Like the first ones?" I asked, meaning the harlequin pants and high heels, standing full-figure instead of seated or kneeling.

"No," he said. He glanced sharply at me, and his pale cheeks became pink. "'Figure' means 'nude,' 'no clothes.'" He seemed as embarrassed as I.

Nude. He wanted me to take my clothes off in front of him? I hadn't been completely naked in front of anyone since I was a baby. What if my mother or Rae saw nude pictures of me? "This is what a Jewish girl does?" Rae would yell. My mother would bawl.

But how would they ever see them? Why shouldn't I let him take some "figure" photographs, as he called them. I needed those publicity pictures if I was really going to make the next step in my career, and I could see there was nothing to fear from Wes Martin. Hadn't Marilyn Monroe gotten her start that way?

"There's a big towel in the bathroom you can use for a wrap. I'll set up a plain white background, okay?"

The air felt cold when I removed the white towel from my torso and stood on the huge sheet of heavy background paper. As the big lights warmed my nipples and my belly, my teeth stopped their little castanet clacks, but I couldn't shift my eyes to look at him. Nor could I flirt with the camera now. Naked, I posed sedately, as I imagined an artist's model would. "Good job, good job," he said, still entirely businesslike, to every new pose I struck. Then, "That's three rolls. Great!" And I went back to the bathroom to dress as he set up the lights for the glamour head shots I needed to take to the Mel Kaufman Agency.

A week later, I returned for the contact sheet he'd made of twelve head shots and fifteen eight-by-tens of the one he thought was the best. I held the photo up gingerly, by the edges, delighted. I looked like a film noir actress.

"Would you like to see some of the pinups?" he asked matter-of-factly.

"No, that's all right," I cried. The memory of my nude posing had really agitated me, bothered me all week, as though I'd let myself be robbed of something. I hurried out of the studio as quickly as I could; but with the publicity photos in the cardboard envelope that Wes had given me, I soon pushed the nagging scruple aside. I'd needed professional pictures to hand to an agent, and now I had them. Good ones.

I stared at the eight-by-ten again as I sat alone on the back seat of the bus. No, I didn't look like Elizabeth Taylor, I thought, critical now, a little disappointed. But still...

I studied the picture for days. Something was very wrong. My nose. Where it should have been button or turned up, like Debbie Reynolds's or Doris Day's, like all the noses of the most popular actresses of the 1950s, it had a bump and it was too big. It was my mother's nose. I'd always thought she was so beautiful, but now I saw that I wasn't at all beautiful. Not with that nose.

I'd known girls at Fairfax High who started the school year with convex noses, and before the first semester was over their noses were concave. A "nose job," it was called, plastic surgery. "A lot of girls are doing it," I heard someone whisper when Annette Kessler came back to school after a week's absence, looking like a movie star.

"I've got to ask you something important," I told E. J. when he wanted to see the publicity stills Wes Martin had taken. Who else could I ask about what it takes to make it in Hollywood? "Do I need plastic surgery on my nose?"

He gave a low whistle and studied me judiciously, cupping my chin to turn my head left and then right in profile. "You're talking about a lot of money there," he said, "but I'll tell you, there's something you can do that's much cheaper." He slipped an arm around my shoulder as though we were good friends. "For your teeth."

"My teeth?" I'd never thought about them.

"They're called Hollywood veneers. A dentist fits them on you, and it gives you a perfect smile. You just slip them off when you eat or sleep. They cost something like a hundred bucks."

I laughed an exasperated laugh. I didn't have even one buck.

"Look, if you didn't mind the session with Wes," E. J. said, "I can put you in touch with this agent, Andy, who books only pinup and figure. You can make a hundred bucks in a few hours' work. Do yourself a favor." He smiled, showing his own big pearly teeth.

I slipped into the women's dressing room the instant he walked off and studied myself in the mirror, forcing my lips into a jack-o'-lantern grin. I said the alphabet slowly, exaggerating each letter, to see how I
looked to people when I talked. He was right. How hadn't I noticed my teeth before? They were hideous hobgoblin teeth pointing every which way, yellow, uneven, crowded like grave markers in an ancient cemetery that I'd seen in a photograph.

Pictures of young women in various stages of undress plastered the walls of Andy's Santa Monica Boulevard office, and scattered on his desk were glossy black-and-white photos of women—in tiny bikinis, in baby doll nightgowns slipping off a shoulder, in sheer peignoirs that were molded to breasts and stomachs and thighs, in nothing at all, the pubes covered only by a beach ball or a coyly raised knee. He was a smiley man, about sixty, with a beer-belly and a fluffy Santa Claus beard. "Let's see what you look like, little darlin'," he said. "You can get undressed over there." He waved toward another room.

I looked at him blankly, suddenly scared.

"There's a robe in there. Just wrap it around you and come on out," he said a little impatiently. "Nobody bites around here."

I could give it up, I thought as I walked to the dressing room. What had I wanted this for in the first place—a Hollywood career? My mother and I had dreamed it together, but those dreams were finished.

Yet what was there for me if I didn't become an actress? It was the only goal I'd ever seriously thought about, and I was good at it. Everyone said so. I couldn't give it up now.

I undressed in front of the full-length mirror that leaned against the wall in the dressing room. How dirty my bra looked. I couldn't remember when I'd last washed it. It was the only bra that I owned, and one strap was held up with a safety pin. I wadded it and shoved it into my large purse, then wrapped the flimsy nylon robe around myself and stepped out quickly.

"Okay, little darlin'." Andy motioned me mechanically to a raised platform. "If you'll just drop the towel, please." He switched on two large, blazing photography lights and adjusted their beams to aim at me. "Now, turn sideways."

I posed, smiling with closed lips.

"Outstanding," he now cried, accenting the first syllable, "Absolutely
out
standing!"

Back in the dressing room I pulled my blue sheath over my naked skin, shivering as though all my synapses were exploding like cherry bombs. "I can put you to work right away," Andy called at me. "Mario Parma does spreads for mags—
King, Adam,
first-rate stuff—and he's always looking for new faces. Fifty bucks a day, and he's the one pays my commission, not you. Should I give him a call?"

Magazines. Girlie mags, they were called. I'd seen them on Hollywood Boulevard newsstands, and the pimply boys and round-shouldered old men who leafed through them. But my mother and Rae read only the
Forward,
the Yiddish newspaper that they bought in little Jewish grocery stores. They'd never go to the newsstands that sold those magazines. Fifty dollars a day. That was almost as much as Albert earned in a whole week.

"Sure," I answered as I stepped out of the dressing room.

Andy wasted no time. "I've got something new and fantastic for you," he said into the receiver of his black telephone. "Gigi Frost's her name. Incredible! About 38-21-36. Right?" He confirmed it with me.

I nodded.
My God, what was I doing?

"Doesn't own a bra," Andy said, looking at the bodice of my blue sheath approvingly. "Doesn't need one."

Mario Parma let me schedule the shoot for the Monday before Easter, though I never told him that I wanted to do it then because I'd be out of school. One day of work turned into a second, then a third and a fourth. Two hundred dollars for four days of work! I signed the release form: "I, Gigi Frost, cede to Mr. Mario Parma the sole, exclusive, and non-conditional right to use photographs taken of me on March 26–29, 1956, for purposes of publication or in any venue he deems fit." Two hundred dollars was a small fortune. I could use the money to get Hollywood veneers and clothes that weren't Simone's hand-me-downs—and who knew what else?

I cashed his check at the Bank of America on Fairfax. Oh, the heft in my hand of twenty new and crisp and green and lovely ten-dollar bills. So I really could have saved my mother from the shop if only we'd been patient for a little longer.

***

"You'll do real good for about three months," Crissy told me. I saw her in Andy's office when photographers came to pick her up for location shoots or when she did a session on the premises. She was a pert redhead who just missed being really pretty by her rabbity front teeth. "They're always interested in a new bod, but once your pictures come out in a lot of magazines, that's the end of it."

"Yeah, it's shits," Olga said in an Eastern European accent. She was Crissy's sidekick, and I never saw one without the other. Olga wore her hair in a single, sleek blue-black pigtail that dangled past her buttocks, but her most startling feature was her eyes: she accented both the upper and lower lids with heavy black liner, which gave her a staring-raccoon appearance. "The only jobs you get are amateurs," she said, "and they don't hardly never pay you more than twenty-five, thirty dollars." She'd been with Andy's agency for about six months.

"You gotta watch out for them too," Crissy said cryptically, looking not at me but at my reflection in the mirror.

"This girl was killed a couple months ago." Olga shook her head ominously, and the pigtail swayed in mournful agreement. "She went with amateur man to shoot in Topanga Canyon, and next thing anybody hear was they find her body, all cut up and scattered round."

"They never got the guy who did it," Crissy said. She and Olga looked at each other and tittered nervously.

"I'll be careful." I shrugged, hiding my horror, half-wondering too if they were just trying to scare off the competition.

"Never let those creeps take beaver shots," Crissy warned me, wrinkling her small nose. "They're not supposed to, but they like to try, and then they sell them illegally."

I arrived at Tom Eakins's studio early, another fifty dollars for a few hours of work. "I hear good things about you," he said, smiling affably. "Gimme a couple minutes to set up the lights. My office doubles as a dressing room, so you can change in there."