News from the World (8 page)

FRANCHOT TONE AT THE PARAMOUNT

F
RANCHOT
T
ONE DIED
in September 1968. In 1935, when I was twelve, I saw the actor in the earliest version of the film
Mutiny on the Bounty.
I sat in a dark movie house, my knees pressed up against the unoccupied seat in front of me. Tone played one of the officers who mutinied against the cruel Captain Bligh (Charles Laughton) whom they put overboard into a small lifeboat and abandoned to the open sea.

The crew and officers returned to Tahiti. It was an exuberant story. The great ship moved through the waves, the masts creaked, the sails billowed as crew members shouted across the decks to one another amid ocean spray. Then they were in Tahiti, and Franchot Tone, wearing a sarong, a wreath of large, white-petaled blossoms hanging from around his neck, stood close to a beautiful, young Tahitian woman. Another fleshy fellow in the cast was the star of the movie, Clark Gable, a large man whose acting I found severely limited. I paid him no attention.

My knees slipped down from seatback to floor. I leaned forward, enraptured by Tone, his delicate features, his narrow-lipped mouth, the irony I thought implicit in his remote smile that assured me “I'm superior to all this play-acting . . .” and above all, by what I perceived as his nature, quixotic and spiritual.

I had been struck a great blow by the force of movie love. Later, in 1939, on spring vacation from a Montreal boarding school, I saw Tone in a Group Theatre production of
The Gentle People.

My father, a screenwriter at the time, knew the business manager of the Group, Walter Fried, whom he called “Cousin Wally.” Fried arranged for me to see the play. He smoked cigars, wore a dark fedora, and the top of his shirt was unbuttoned.

On the evening I attended the play, Cousin Wally told me through the box office grill that he had arranged for the cast to meet for drinks in a small frowzy bar across the street from the theatre. Would I like to join them there?

After the final curtain fell, I walked over to the bar, uneasy yet exalted. But Tone didn't turn up, although the rest of the cast were there. I felt a bleak relief at his absence, at the same time disappointment without end.

I had bought a dress for the occasion. “Bought” is hardly the correct word. In those days you could return clothes to stores the next day with an excuse that the dress was too tight, too loose, too anything at all. “Borrow” would be more apt.

Before Act One, I walked down the aisle to my free seat, aware of how people were staring at me. Later, in the ladies' room, I saw in a mirror that I had forgotten to remove the price tag hanging from the back of the dress. People must have noticed the large, white cardboard rectangle, size and price printed on it in big black letters. I was unembarrassed by my emotions that evening; they were all-consuming, and I was barely aware of them. But the tag shamed me. I returned the dress the next morning.

A few days later, I bought a book,
Trivia,
by an English writer, Logan Pearsall Smith, and along with a letter, sent it via Cousin Wally to Tone. As I think back now, it seems to me that Fried was highly amused by the entire incident.

I hardly recall my letter. It was probably an effort to differentiate myself from his other admirers, and to praise the book for qualities that would attest to my own sensibilities. Cousin Wally told me later that Franchot had assembled the cast and read my letter aloud to them.

Yet he answered it. Joy leapt into me when I saw the envelope. His reply was cordial, intimate, I judged. But I was faintly distressed by what I sensed was a distancing sardonic note it had. But what did I expect? Everything, I suppose.

I kept his reply in a file cabinet in the cellar of the brownstone where Martin and I now live, until a decade ago. One morning a local water main burst. A flood resulted and it took many hours for firemen to pump out the six feet of water. Tone's letter was ruined along with other correspondence and some book contracts.

When I was sixteen, I lived with an elderly alcoholic woman, a friend of my stepmother's, who had sent me to California with her.

One rainy afternoon in Hollywood, where we lived, I drove in the rain to a local drugstore to get a prescription for her. As I hastened back to where I had parked, on tiptoe to avoid the deeper puddles of water, a voice from a parked car inquired, “Where are your ballet slippers?”

It was Franchot Tone. My heart raced as I smiled in his direction but I hurried to my car through the rain which had gotten suddenly heavier.

A few years later, back in New York city, I went to see a movie of his,
Five Graves to Cairo,
I think it was titled, at the Paramount Theatre in the Broadway district. The sidewalk was crawling with adolescent girls, agitated, some crying, others laughing, as they left their places in the line to dance a few steps on the street. In that era, there were stage shows in some movie houses. The girls had all come to see and hear Frank Sinatra, a singer. The name meant nothing to me.

I found a balcony seat near three sailors who laughed raucously as they jeered at the teenagers below us in the audience, who were keening and shrieking.

A skinny young man entered the stage as a curtain was parting to reveal the orchestra behind him. He sang, holding on to the microphone, desperately I thought, as though it would save him from drowning among his worshippers. What was it that drove them crazy? Franchot Tone was, after all, a serious actor . . .

The last time I saw Tone was in a small shop on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. The optician who owned it was an old friend, and I had joined him for a brown-bag lunch. We were sitting at the rear of the narrow store, eating sandwiches when Tone, wearing a beret, opened the door and leaned in.

In that first moment of my recognition of him, though like me he had grown much older—I lost my breath. He smiled at me and it was such a lovely smile! All his old charm for me was in it. He asked Lou, my friend, when his eyeglasses would be ready. The optician replied but I couldn't hear language. What I felt at that moment was beyond words. My hearing returned in time to hear Tone's thanks and goodbye to Lou.

Upon first seeing him years earlier, I had been astonished by the emotions his screen presence had brought to life in me. I had loved him, in a make-believe way—the way most emotion begins—for years.

That intensity of feeling prepared me, in some fashion, for love itself, its contrarieties, its defeats, its beauty.

WAY DOWN YONDER

I
N
1942
, WHEN
I lived in the city for many months, New Orleans was an earthly paradise for me. In 2005, it was a dreadful calamity for hundreds of thousands of people because of Hurricane Katrina and still is.

On my first morning there on an autumn day sixty-six years ago, I walked along a street bordering the French Quarter. I spotted a dusty envelope on the ground and picked it up. It was unstamped but had the address of a woman in Baton Rouge. I looked up at the wall of a city jail. The letter, I guessed, had been dropped from a slit window in a cell on a high floor. It was unsealed, and I read it:

How come you was so hard with me? I be here so long without your comfort. How come you didin bring me smokes? Didin I ast you for them? You blame me and blame me and blame me. Im dyin here with nothin to do to pass my time.

It was written in pencil and unsigned. I carried it around with me all day then I sealed, stamped and mailed it.

On my last day in New Orleans the following spring, I went to a department store on Canal Street to buy a pair of stockings. On the first floor, between elevators, I saw two fountains next to each other. Above them, large signs read:
White
and
colored.

In a novel I wrote that was published in 1990,
The God of Nightmares
, I included the text of the letter along with an invented incident that occurs at the drinking fountains. Separate fountains, and the letter, represent to me a large part of the life in the deep south of those days.

Since last September, 2005, I've heard two words repeated in many voices on radio and television news,
Lake Pontchartrain.

It was on the broad steps on the western side of the lake where I occasionally sat with a writer friend, Pat, and his two nearly grown sons. The elder would gradually move away from us until he was sitting on the lowest step close to the grey-blue water that eddied faintly.

I was nineteen. I had driven across the country from California to New Orleans in a second-hand Chevrolet. I had hardly any money and needed a job and a cheap place to live. I don't recall how I found work but I did find a place to live in a former mansion on Royal Street in the French Quarter that had been converted into a rooming house. During the weeks I lived there, I always found the lower steps of the once grand stairway flooded with water. I learned, in time, that it came from a bar around the corner whose toilet had bad plumbing.

I shared a vast room with a woman who had been a member of an acting troupe in her youth. I saw her sober infrequently. She slept mostly, and when she was awake, showed me an elaborate blurred courtesy. I slept in a cot across from her large bed, and before my eyes closed at night, I would stare up at the ceiling far above with its zodiac symbols painted on a dark blue background.

From the balcony off her room, I could see two streetcars rumbling along Royal Street. One carried a sign that read.
Desire,
the other
Piety.
The nineteenth-century railing I leaned against had been designed, I believe, by the iron-maker Samuel Yellen. It was strong yet delicate like iron lace.

I found a job as a file clerk in a government office attached to a huge army installation—a hangar housing experimental war planes. Two months after I got the job, a P-59, taken aloft by a test-pilot, crashed into a meadow near the hangar. The office staff was sent home that day while a medical-technical team extracted the pilot's body and the plane parts from a crater in the ground.

The alcoholic actress became too much for me. Her former husband, a doctor, who would stop by to visit her now and then, introduced me to a couple who lived a few blocks away on St. Ann Street. I moved in with them a few days after our meeting.

Pat and Mary had both won prizes for their first novels but not much money. Mary had to continue her part-time work as a secretary. I met their friends who would visit them during evenings to sit and talk in their plain, underfurnished living room.

A narrow, two-story building, a former slaves' quarter, rose in their wild garden. It contained two rooms, a kitchen on the first floor, and on the second a small bedroom where I slept.

I loved Pat and Mary. I loved their lives, their house, their friends. In the evenings, we often drove to Canal Street in their old car where Pat parked so that he and Mary and I could observe people as they went about their lives, walking and talking peacefully or arguing, even fighting, and look at lighted store windows and cars passing us, all in an atmosphere that was purposeful yet languorous.

When I think about New Orleans, it's not only the fragrance of jasmine that I recall, not only the sound of a jazz trumpet from a Bourbon Street caf
é
, but the city itself, powerfully alive, its uniqueness manifested in every street, in the air itself. And in the French Market down by the Mississippi, a few steps from the small house on St. Ann Street.

In 1942, it was not yet “modernized.” When Pat and I walked there to buy vegetables and shellfish for jambalaya (a regional dish) or something else he planned to cook that evening, the food, fresh as morning, lay in wooden barrows protected from the strong sun by awnings in vivid colors. Decades later I returned to the city for a conference, and the Market's produce lay in cement containers, and no longer suggested freshness and singularity.

When we returned home and unloaded our sacks of food, I would climb up the narrow steps to my bedroom to lie down for a few minutes. The floorboards of the room were old and didn't quite fit together, leaving broad gaps here and there. Pat and I had long conversations through these cracks while he cooked in the kitchen below.

Some afternoons when Pat wasn't at work on his second novel, he would carry an old wicker armchair to the sidewalk in front of the house to spend an hour with his black neighbor who had also brought out a chair.

Pat and Mary's house was the last residence in the white-only district. He and the neighbor spoke companionably together. They only argued when Richard Wright's novel,
Native Son
, was published during the months I spent there.

The friend who had first introduced me to Pat and Mary invited me to observe an operation at Charity Hospital. I told myself I was ready for anything. I said yes.

He introduced me to the surgeon as a “visiting intern.” In the operating room, a nurse brought me a stool to stand on and a surgical mask. I watched the surgery for an hour or so as the patient's guts, released by the scalpel, floated in the air just above his belly. I pretended interest as long as I could but my bold intention to stay to the end of the operation weakened with the passing moments, and I finally asked to leave.

A few days later, the doctor drove me to a beach resort, Pass Christian, on the Gulf of Mexico. He wore a transparent bathing cap, and as we walked upon the sand, it ballooned up and down on his head. We had lunch in a hotel dining room. The waiter was a tall elderly black man who swayed on his feet as he wrote down our orders. I looked down at his shoes and saw how he had cut out holes for his wounded toes. I was very young, but I had waited on tables too. I knew a little about the suffering of waiters' feet.

One morning the three of us, Pat, Mary, and I, got into their car and set off for the Mississippi Delta. They owned a tiny two-room shack in a settlement called Boothville. The walls hummed with the buzzing of bees. The house had become, over the months, a giant honeycomb. Mary wrote and published a story about it: “The Honey House.”

A few months after I returned to New York City, a painter I had frequently seen at Pat and Mary's St. Ann Street house, stopped by a small, borrowed apartment in Greenwich Village where I was staying, with news.

Pat had died the day before in Charity Hospital of a second heart attack. The painter and I stared at each other with grief-stricken faces. We didn't speak for a long time after his words: “Pat is dead.”

His first heart attack, several years earlier, had come about after the publication of his prize-winning novel,
Green Margins
, about the Cajuns of the Mississippi Delta. He had made a trip—one of many over the years—to Boothville, a small Cajun community. Three men grabbed him, took him off to a patch of trees, inserted a hose into his rectum, and pumped air into him for several minutes.

He told me about this ghastly incident in a neutral voice. He understood, he said, why they had done it. They had been “shamed” by his novel, not because it contained any scandal about them, but because it made them feel exposed as a community, because they took pride in their anonymity.

He had been taken to Charity Hospital that evening. The doctors had not thought he would survive. But he did.