All That Glitters (82 page)

“She was putting them on. Barbara always loved putting them on, it’s the Brooklyn in her. ‘Every minute of every day, boys, just like
Modern Screen.
Nurse, will you please take the baby, I have a dress fitting.’”

“Come on, be serious.”

“I am, darling, I am.” Her look sobered and she shook her head slowly, thinking. “Nobody who hasn’t been through it can possibly comprehend it. You really had to be there, you know?” She spoke the words ruefully, as though forty years of international stardom was indeed a heavy burden for a girl to carry.

“Does that mean you didn’t enjoy it?”

“Sure I enjoyed it, do you think I’m a total fool? But—” She stopped suddenly, reining in on her thought.

“Go on, what were you going to say?”

“Hell, I don’t know.” Again the weary note crept in. “Sometimes it seems as if my whole life’s been nothing but one big mistake. I used to wonder sometimes why I even bothered getting up in the morning, I was bound to go out and make fifty bad mistakes before lunch. I tried not to, I made a real effort to conduct myself rationally and properly, and I really wanted to love people and to have them love me. I’ve spent half my life looking for love, for that one man to come along and love me the way I thought I should be loved—only it never happened.” Her smile was self-deprecating. “I don’t know why, it just didn’t. I got on the best way I knew how. I thought that if I worked hard and paid strict attention to my job, that would be enough to do it, but I found out it wasn’t. I was loyal to the studio, I gave it my all for all those years; then when the chips were down, I found myself out on my ass in the snow. Is that all there was? I got to keep the hatboxes? People are cruel—they love to hit you when you’re down. Sure I was a bitch sometimes, but we all were, we had to be—iron fists in velvet gloves. We took it on the chin so we kicked ’em in the balls. You get to the point where the limo and the best hotel suite are important and they better have the fucking fruit bowl on the table or look out, manager! You get what you can while you can before they take it all away. Dore called me Miss Clutch—you bet I clutched! I clutched like hell—I had to.”

“Dore knew that.”

“I guess he did. I’d really like to see Dore again, I’d like to tell him—oh, never mind….”

“No, wait—what would you tell him?”

“Well, I think I might tell him how much I appreciated all the things he used to do for me, and that I’m sorry for the way I walked all over him. I really did. I used him, I really put the screws to him, then I just kicked him out. He tried to see me, to write to me, but I wouldn’t, I just turned him off. He really needed me, you know. He died in obscurity, on that damned chicken ranch of his aunt’s, down there—Texas or someplace? No, Arizona, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Near Yuma.”

“Dore thought he could really be a big name in show business. Too bad, it just never happened. And—this is a big laugh—he used to say he wanted to be buried right next to me—at Forest Lawn. I used to think that was such a laugh—crazy Dore buried in all that Hollywood splendor.

“Of course, he
was
terribly amusing.” Suddenly she broke out in a peal of laughter. “Did he ever tell you how he broke up my dinner party for Noel Coward? He got into blackface drag with a maid’s cap and came in with the entree and I never noticed a thing until he goes and drops this huge platter on the floor and when he bent over to pick it up—you can imagine. He was bare-assed—
white
bare-assed.”

I gave no sign of ever having heard this story before.

“And the nun—you
must
have heard about the nun—”

Yes, I allowed as how I knew all about Dore’s infamous nun.

“But he wasn’t the only one I treated shittily, don’t think he was. I turned my back on a lot of people who’d meant something to me, even when they were reaching out to me. I always wanted to help people, and there they were, wanting to be helped, and I didn’t—I couldn’t—I never even recognized the fact that they wanted my help. God, I was a wire-wheeled bitch.”

“And are you still?”

“I… I don’t know… do you think I am?”

“Not that I’ve noticed. Not lately.” She took this in thoughtfully, and I was pleased to see she found no quarrel with my words. “Claire—would you like me to tell you something interesting about Dore Skirball? Something only a few people know about?”

She turned those eyes on me and nodded. “Yes, please,” she said meekly.

“He didn’t die the way you think,” I began. “Not in obscurity, not down on the chicken ranch with Aunt Bob. Dore Skirball died one of the most famous people in the world.”

“You’re joking—Dore famous?”

“Yes. And do you want to know where he’s buried? He’s planted in back of Paramount, at Hollywood Memorial Park. In a granite tomb. A tomb marked…”

As I spoke the name aloud she stared, shaking her head in disbelief. It was quite a moment. For another hour I talked my way through the details of the masquerade, Dore’s joke on the world, revealing how with Frank’s help he had created something that was as much his own creation as Claire was Cora Sue’s. At the conclusion of my tale she whooped with glee.

Yes, the Iron Maiden had mellowed for sure.

“Boy, was I wrong!” she exclaimed. “When we finish my book, you should think of writing that story.”

I took it as a measure of her newfound peace of mind that she accepted the story at face value, simply acknowledging it as one more manifestation of the oddities abroad in the world—God’s world, as she looked on it. It occurred to me that the old Claire might never have believed a word: Dore Skirball as Babe Austrian? Ridiculous!

The next time we were together, however, I thought she seemed restive, and as I observed her more closely, I could see how she was controlling an ill-concealed anxiety; this puzzled me, since until now she’d shown such tranquility, as if everything worth the worry now lay behind her. I pretended not to notice; I went to have a word with Ivarene, and when I got back to the bedroom, the look was more pronounced.

“I guess I’m all set,” I said offhandedly, “but I’ll be back. Is there anything you wanted to say before I go?”

She’d been looking at me but now she shifted, deliberately avoiding my eyes.

I came and sat down again. “You can tell me, you know. If you want.”

She looked more anxious. “Will it go in the book?”

“Not if you don’t want it to.”

“No, I don’t. But I want you to know. It’s something I’ve been keeping from you. From everybody, actually.” Her fingers tugged at the bedclothes. Should I, shouldn’t I? she was asking herself. I waited, allowing her to make up her own mind. Finally she sighed and said, “I guess I should get it off my chest. God knows there isn’t much time left. Can you stay a while longer?”

I said I could, wondering what this confession would bring.

“It’s about Oscar.”

“What about Oscar?”

“He doesn’t belong to me. He never did. Not from the night they gave it to me.”

“Wait a minute—are you saying your Academy Award doesn’t belong to you? Whom does it belong to, then?”

“Belinda Carroll. Don’t look so surprised, it’s true. It should have gone to Belinda, she earned it. I got it because someone cut a deal for me.”

I scoffed. “What do you mean, ‘cut a deal’? People don’t cut deals for Oscars. Remember Price, Waterhouse?”

“Maybe so today, but in the old days… Sit back and put your feet up, and Auntie Claire will lay it on you.”

I sat back, though I didn’t put my feet up, and geared myself for what was to be the last of Scheherazade’s tales, the denouement to a longstanding mystery, as if now, at the end or close to the end, she was sufficiently open to reveal a secret that must have been a torture to her for too many years even to think about.

“Sham, it was all sham. I never won it, not really. It was all Bugsy’s doing, you see.”

I was baffled. “Bugsy
Siegel
?”

“I never could stand the guy; he gave me the creeps with those ice-blue eyes, and I don’t care how he charmed the ladies, he was a killer. Even back in New York he was a killer, and I knew enough about him then to send him to Sing-Sing for life. I couldn’t stand being around him, not then, not later. He came to me one night at a party, in Vi’s garden this was, and he told me he wanted me. I laughed in his face. I said, ‘You couldn’t get Cora Sue Brodsky, you sure as hell aren’t going to get Claire Regrett.’ He just gave me this iceberg stare and promised that he would, and he started telling me what he was going to do when he got me in bed. I told him he’d end up with a girl from Madame Barratt’s before he saw that day. He said, ‘One of these days you’ll come begging for it, you’ll say, “Gimme it, Bugsy,” and it’ll be okay, I’ll still give it to you.’ I ran inside, and when Frankie found me I was crying. He asked what was wrong, I wouldn’t tell him. Next thing I knew he and Bugsy were in the garden scrapping—that fight you always read about.”

“Go on, what happened then?” I asked. She dragged on her cigarette, then let the smoke curl out her open mouth.

“What happened was this. Nobody ever expected much from
Wages of Sin
, but when I got nominated and I saw there was a real chance for me to win, I went to Bugsy. He was up in Vegas, so I flew up there. I asked him to come to my room and I told him—I said—oh God, I hate this—”

“You told him you wanted the Oscar, was that it?”

She nodded. “I said if he’d fix it for me—and he was in a position to—he could have whatever he wanted from me. It was the moment he’d been waiting for, to slap me down. ‘What makes you think I still want you?’

“‘I haven’t changed that much, have I?’ I said.

“‘Maybe
I
have,’ he said. He was playing one of his games, he wanted to make me squirm and crawl. Finally he agreed—but not for the price he’d stated—not for
just
the price. There was one more stipulation. He said that I couldn’t ever see Frankie again, that I had to promise to cut it off with him and make him stay away.” She gulped and pushed back her hair in the mirror. “So after all those years he was getting back at me for those days in New York when I was plain Sadie Glutz and wouldn’t let the bum near me.”

“What did you do about it? The deal, I mean?”

“What do you think I did? I wanted that damn statue. I knew it was now or never, I wouldn’t get a chance like this one again. He was one of the lousiest guys I’d ever been to bed with. The funny part was, I never had to get rid of Frankie, because when Frankie found out what I’d done, he wouldn’t come near me anyway. Frank, you see, was going hell-bent for leather to swing the MGM block of votes to Belinda; he was determined that his blue-eyed little baby was going to cop it.

“But came the night…” She described that famous evening, that was supposed to be the greatest moment in the life of any movie actress, how she’d heard her name announced, which had catapulted her out of her seat and sent her rushing down the aisle, swept along on the applause, up the steps to the stage, where the presenter stood grinning and holding out the gold statuette, how she had taken it in her hands and clasped it to her breast and, sobbing, had bent to the microphone and said, “This is the only guy I’ve ever wanted to sleep with.”

How the audience had gasped and waited for more, how she’d triumphantly carried Oscar to the Governor’s Ball, then how, at home alone, she’d sat and cried over the statuette, knowing he didn’t really belong to her but to Belinda, and how for all the years since, the knowledge had eaten away at her, body and soul.

“And the worst thing was, I lost Frank because of it. He never spoke to me again until years later. He and Bugsy made it up, but I was off his list.”

I asked her why, if she felt like that, she hadn’t returned the statuette to the Academy.

“How could I? They wouldn’t have accepted it unless I told the truth. And if I had, the boys would have come after me with a gun. I didn’t want to end up in the Tujunga Wash.”

She got up and walked to the window, where she stood staring moodily out at Central Park. “Funny, isn’t it, how you can want and want something so much and then when you get it it doesn’t mean much at all.”

Busy gathering my things together, I had my back to her, then I heard her voice: low, sultry, movie-Claire. “Hey, take a look, baby.” I turned to see her leaning provocatively against the jamb, with the fold of her housecoat pulled back, showing off her leg in the classic show-biz stance. “Not bad pins for seventy-one, huh?” she growled.

“You better believe it,” I replied with a show of enthusiasm. “In fact, damn good.” True, those underpinnings were indestructible.

She laughed sardonically. “Before long, I won’t be needing them anymore.”

“Well, you can always have them bronzed and leave them to a museum.”

“I may just do that,” she said. I smiled and turned to go, but her next words halted me. “Wait a minute, laddie. Before you get out of here, there’s something else I’ve decided to tell you. I wasn’t going to, but what the hell, I was up all night thinking it over. I told you a lie—the same lie I’ve been telling the world for fifty years. Protecting the image, y’know? Playing goddess, all the time goddess.”

“Are you saying the goddess has feet of clay?”

“Does she ever. Do you know what I’m talking about?” I didn’t, but was all ears. “One of my movies, one of the real early ones. In fact, the earliest. And I don’t mean the one with Fedora. They didn’t make this movie at AyanBee, they shot it in a hotel in Brooklyn. Don’t look so dumb, you know what I’m talking about.”

“
Maid’s Night Out
?”

“That’s the one, bubbie. I thought I’d go to my grave before I admitted it, but—now you know. Do with it as you will. Claire’s famous blue movie. The old story, I needed the dough. Some girls will do a lot when they need money.”

“So will guys. Don’t sweat it.”

“At my age? Not likely. And I’ll tell you something else. I did the whole damn thing on my back, you know.”

I turned back and stared at her. She nodded slowly as if to acknowledge what she had said.

“What?”

“You heard me. I said I did it all on my back.”

“You—did…?”