All That Glitters (28 page)

Who can count those broken hearts of Hollywood? I’ve heard of a famous star of the forties who, suffering a severely altered lifestyle, actually lives out of her car, a vintage Plymouth; not quite a bag lady, but “car lady” is close. I know of another star who ended up waiting tables at a fancy Beverly Hills soda fountain, once serving coffee to the director who’d made her a star. And there’s a third party I know personally, who’s been hidden away in a rubber room for years; bent her mind over a guy she couldn’t have—a married man; bad business. Sure, you know who I mean. Everybody knows about this one; she was a well-publicized commodity about twenty years ago. Hedda and Louella did their work well. That sad tale made good copy, start to finish. But probably you don’t know the whole story. I knew her back in those days, happier, more innocent days; she was a happy girl, for a while, but the world’s taken a turn or two since, and she’s not so happy anymore. Maybe she’d be better off if she’d taken the plunge, like our Peg; who can say?

The thing was, my friend didn’t really want to be a movie star at all, and you just can’t do it that way. You really have to want it. You have to taste, smell, feel, eat, and sleep it. You have to screw your mind onto the idea of stardom, you have to have a built-in set of gauges and meters, little clock faces ticking away in your head, whole sets of gears that mesh and stay meshed. Maybe you go up, you go down, you go up again, like Belinda Carroll; maybe you start your climb at the horizon, you slide up to the zenith of the noon-sky, then you slide down the other side, like Claire Regrett. But you possess that necessary thing that makes a star—you
want
it. You’d kill for it. You’d murder your own mother. You thrive in the limelight, the camera likes you, the front office likes you, the fans like you, everybody likes you, you say yes yes yes, and there you are, one more shining star in the Hollywood firmament. Nobody ever made stardom who didn’t want it. Except maybe April. She
didn’t
want it, didn’t want any part of it. But it happened anyway.

Dusty’s good vibrations

And our imaginations

Can’t go on indefinitely
,

And California dreamin’ is becomin’ a reality
….

The perfect music for a perfect L.A. day is playing on my car radio. You couldn’t ask for much better—just take a look at that sky. Pristine. Not a lot of smog, either. She had a great voice, Mama Cass, really mellow. I miss her.

And California dreamin’ is becomin’ a reality
….

Those were crucial years for me, the mid-sixties; the time of the Beatles, Sonny and Cher, the Mamas and the Papas, the Supremes. Frank had put my career in high gear. I was freelancing the studios, Jenny and I were living in style on Sunset Plaza Drive and dining at La Rue or Scandia weekly. La Rue was at the foot of the street and was one of Frank’s favorite eating spots as well—he used to take Frances there a lot. And, by the weirdest of coincidences, it was at La Rue that Kit Carson first came to light. No kidding, if you can believe it, the famous Kit Carson used to park cars there; that’s where we first spotted him, when he was just plain Floyd Ayres, better known to his friends as Bud. I guess you’re thinking with the way things turned out that he was probably better off parking cars, and I suppose you’d be right. Parking cars might have made him King of the Mountain compared with the way he ended up, but that’s another story. No, it’s not, not really. But at least he’s not at the funny farm, like you-know-who.

The Asylum for the Insane at Libertad, California, may not be the worst place in the world—there are lots of others with far more degrading conditions—but it will do. This is where Anna Thorwald lives and eats and sleeps. Anna has her good days and her bad ones, doubtless more of the latter (how do you have a really good day at Libertad?). In the annals of psychiatry she’s not a classic schizoid case, but she’s an interesting one. Certifiably insane, true, but not a textbook specimen. Little word of her ever leaks out, though for years the various nurses and staffers at the hospital have been offered money to tell all. But they know they’d lose their jobs if they did.

I still go to see her, Anna. Not many people do—she hasn’t any family left, she’s pretty well forgotten by now—but I try to keep my oar in. April meant a lot to me in those days before she came to stardom, and I seem to be all that’s left to her of the Hollywood she was so briefly a part of. It’s not terribly far, the drive is pleasant. You go west along Sunset Boulevard past both Bel Air gates and the UCLA campus, where Anna used to be a student, and then turn right onto the San Diego Freeway going north and head west along the Ventura Freeway. Near Simi Valley you get off and drive some ten miles into the yellow foothills until you get to this place that at one time or another has sheltered several famous personages whose minds have faltered, like Anna’s. She’s been at Libertad for a long time now, she’ll probably stay there to the end of her days—and I have to admit I hope that won’t be too much longer.

To be truthful, I’m not really nuts about this Easter pilgrimage I’m making, but I guess by now it’s become a habit. Easter, Christmastime, her birthday, other occasions, I try to go visit her, never knowing, of course, what I’m likely to encounter. Lately she’s been getting steadily worse, and I find it tough sledding; I guess anyone would. Mrs. Kraft, who’s in charge of administering the place, is a decent soul, and she does the best she can under the circumstances; always optimistic, Mrs. Kraft, but who can be optimistic about this case when it seems so evident that Anna will never get well, never get out of there?

Now I’m coming into Libertad; along about now I usually get this creepy feeling, picturing that grim layout of brick buildings. A necessary evil, I suppose, asylums for the insane; we have to have places like this, every state in the Union must have a couple, but I have such a deep-down wariness of this one. Booby hatches aren’t my thing.

And there it is. Lovely, isn’t it? Looks like a set for
Ramona
or a Cisco Kid movie, all that fake Spanish architecture, arches, red roof tiles, you expect to see people in serapes and sombreros. Just what the doctor ordered for a nice rest away from home: good fresh country air, you get a good night’s sleep here. The chow’s great, too. Shit-on-a-shingle is their stock-in-trade—and if you’re lucky you may get “Jell-O jewels” for dessert. And the whole place, inside anyway, is painted that awful institution green. I think they think it rests the eye or soothes the nerves or something.

I’m taking along some flowers and candy, an Easter lily and chocolate-covered filberts. Sweets to the sweet, nuts to the nuts; Anna is both. I’ve prepared for my visit by accumulating a good hour and a half’s worth of anecdotes and general news, gambits to keep the conversational ball bouncing. It’s not an easy thing, this kind of visit, but I accept it as a kind of obligation. Frank would want it. If I were the one who was dead, he’d do the same for me, I’m sure he would. And I guess it’s just as well that he can’t come to see her anymore.

Mrs. Kraft sees me crossing the parking lot, greets me with a smile. You have to give the old gal credit, she’s not a bad soul; she does her best for the patients, has their interests at heart. She chats at me a few minutes, tells me that Anna has been “in and out” of things all week but is a bit better today, looking forward to my arrival.

I guess I don’t need to describe the “Community Room.” Seen one community room, seen ’em all. The door closes automatically behind me. There’s a regular echo in the room. It’s large and the ceiling’s high and there’s nothing to tamp down the reverberations. You might note that all the windows are well above reach and have metal waffle grilles over them. There’s a sort of makeshift stage at one end and I see a couple of Easter bunnies hopping around (no kidding: pink bunnies with long floppy ears, hopping), and not only bunnies, there’s half a dozen animated eggs with painted bands around their middles. Crazy, I know, but remember, I said it was Easter, and let’s not forget where we are, Jellybean City.

There she is. There’s “Anna.” With all the racket I hadn’t noticed her way over there in the corner. She doesn’t see me, or anyway pretends not to—with Anna you usually can’t tell. The person I’m looking at as I approach is a stranger to me, this woman called Anna Thorwald. There was a time when I thought I knew her pretty well, when she and I were young and the world was that terrific pearly oyster we all want it to be. We were good friends, Anna and I; Frankie and I were friends, she and Jenny were friends, she and I took acting lessons together; it was a kind of mutual admiration society from which we both profited. We held each other’s hands and gassed on the phone and went to Barney’s Beanery for chili and admired each other’s new cars and applauded each other’s progress and were caught up in all the starry Hollywood bullshit. And that was all right because we were all right, our heads weren’t stuck in the sand, we weren’t ostriches, we knew which way was up. We had college educations, good ones, we knew our way around, spoke the King’s English, wore two-tone spectators, and had what lots of other people envied. If we got sucked in by the All-American Dream, well, whose fault was that? It still takes two to tango.

Now
that
lady is
this
lady, and there she is, a wan, dough-faced woman in a drab skirt and a shapeless sweater, with iron-gray hair and sallow skin, who, as I cross the rugless floor of this large bleak gymnasium of a place, sits so awkwardly, crimping the knitted bottom of her sweater between gnarled, nervous fingers. Believe me, this person I do not know well. In the faulty light I peer closer, distrustful of my eyes, of her, of the life she lived that has brought her here to this place. There are things in life that just aren’t fair; this is one.

Her smile is perfunctory, tentative, mere nod to that same shared long-ago.

I go into my act. Here in the Community Room, where the bunnies are bouncing around and the colored eggs are talking falsetto and a briskly determined lady in harlequin glasses waves her palms in tempo, I stick on my smiling cheery face, I tender my Easter greeting and proffer up my little treats with too much false enthusiasm, too little real feeling. Here’s the box of chocolate-covered filberts, a paperback (
Birds of America
), a fluffy pink box containing three bars of the soap she likes, set in little nests of orchid-tinted excelsior, three pairs of L’eggs pantyhose, a Ronnie/Nancy paper-doll book, and so on. (She had asked for a pair of scissors last time, but scissors are
verboten.
I hope she doesn’t mention them.)

First words out of her mouth: “Where are my scissors I asked for? I distinctly said a pair of scissors, remember?” Sheepishly I say I must have forgotten, but she pouts anyway. “I think you’re really hateful,” she says, ignoring the bounty from the shopping bag. I apologize. She frowns, making her face
so
unattractive. That face—Helen’s face—yes,
the
Helen, the one that launched those thousand ships and tumbled the topless towers of Ilium; that Helen—United Artists’ Helen in that sweet summer of Italian madness, the well-remembered Summer of the Purple Grape. Yes, that glorious, smiling, suntanned, all-American face. Has it really turned into this lump of dough?

I look at the doll she has clutched in one hand, the saddest, most forlorn creature in all dolldom. She calls it “Clarabelle,” and she sleeps with it, too. The doctor tells me it’s the maternal instinct being gratified. She says Clarabelle’s father is “Frankie,” which is more or less self-explanatory, I guess.

One thing I do notice today: there’s a tiny glimmer in those dead eyes. Just a glimmer, but I’m grasping at straws. She’s had an Easter card; from Vi. “Thanks, Vi,” I think, “you’re the nuts.” No—I’ll tell you what’s nuts. This is: just the other day Anna’s “roomie,” Ida, stuck a plastic bag over her head and smothered herself to death. On the mirror she wrote “By-by all—write when you get work.” Poor bitch couldn’t even spell “bye-bye.” Where’d she get the bag, anyway? People in this place shouldn’t have access to things like that; they’re as lethal as any scissors—more.

Of course, it was Anna who had to find the dead roomie. In the morning, when she woke up, there Ida was, mouth agape, breathless. Anna had this crazy notion that she’d been wrapped for Christmas—off by about eight months. She complains of the fact that around there people often say or print the word “Xmas.”

“Why is that, I wonder?” she says.

I explain that certain people substitute the “X” for “Christ.”

“Jews, probably,” she reflects somberly. My God, I think, has she become anti-Semitic, too? I open the window and comment on the fine weather we’re enjoying. “We’re having a wet spring. See how green the grass is? It’s emerald. Like Ireland.”

Emeralds or Ireland, she’s not interested. She asks about Jenny, and I have to remind her again that Jenny and I aren’t married anymore. Then I suggest our seeing how things may be outside, a breath of fresh air? By now the room is really getting noisy. Someone’s banging on the piano and two eggs are dueting “Let Me Entertain You.” Seriously. Anna thinks over my suggestion and finally she guesses we can go out. We do.

Mrs. Kraft catches sight of us in the hall and waves, then comes toward us. Mrs. Kraft is “done up” Easterwise, a bunny corsage on her sweater lapel and a fresh hairdo. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking Mrs. Kraft; the place couldn’t get along without Corallee Kraft. She is interested in being shown the various items in Anna’s shopping bag, and exclaims over Ronnie and Nancy in paper-doll form. She volunteers to send blunt-end scissors, the kind we had in kindergarten, with no points. Later.

Outside, Anna and I walk along the cement walk, then cut across the lawn and sit on a rusty glider under the pepper tree where a frayed hammock swings tiredly between it and its fellow. I smile at her, she stares at me. The bright sun brings out all her pallor, her hopelessness, the feeble struggle to go on. Her bitten nails look especially unattractive, her hair is limp and unkempt. But it’s good for her, being outdoors. I can see that right away.