Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (22 page)

Sally, however, was not happy tied to one man,
and so we were divorced on April 12th, 1960, just three months after the
marriage. I did some drinking and troublemaking around that time, and lost my
job, and a Night Court judge suggested I might be better off if I rejoined the
Navy, which I did on November 4th, 1960, five days before my twenty-fourth
birthday.

From then on, my life settled down. I became a
career man in the Navy, got into no more marriages, and except for my annual
Christmas letter from my mother in Pennsylvania I had no more dealings with the past. Until October 7th, 1974, when an event occurred that knocked me right over.

*

I was assigned at that time to a Naval Repair
Station near New London,
Connecticut, and my rank was Seaman First Class. It was
good weather for October in that latitude, sunny, clean air, not very cold, and
some of us took our afternoon break out on the main dock. Norm and Stan and Pat
and I were sitting in one group, on some stacks of two by fours, Norm and Stan
talking football and Pat reading one of his magazines and me looking out over
Long Island Sound. Then Pat looked up from his magazine and said, “Hey,
Orry.”

I turned my head and looked at him. My eyes
were half-blinded from looking at the sun reflected off the water. I said,
“What?”

“You never said you were married to Dawn
Devayne.”

Dawn Devayne was a movie star. I’d seen a
couple of her movies, and once or twice I saw her talking on television. I
said, “Sure.”

He gave me a dirty grin and said, “You
shouldn’t of let that go, boy.”

With Pat, you play along with the joke and
then go do something else, because otherwise he won’t give you any peace. So I
grinned back at him and said, “I guess I shouldn’t,” and then I
turned to look some more at the water.

But this time he didn’t quit. Instead, he
raised his voice and he said, “Goddamit, Orry, it’s right here in this
goddam magazine.”

I faced him again. I said, “Come on,
Pat.”

By now, Norm and Stan were listening too, and
Norm said, “What’s in the magazine, Pat?”

Pat said, “That Orry was married to Dawn
Devayne.”

Norm and Stan both grinned, and Stan said,
“Oh, that.”

“Goddamit!”
Pat jumped to his feet and stormed over and shoved the magazine in Stan’s face.
“You look at that!” he shouted. “You just look at that!”

I saw Stan look, and start to frown, and I
couldn’t figure out what was going on. Had they set this up ahead of time? But
not Stan; Norm sometimes went along with Pat’s gags, but Stan always brushed
them away like mosquitoes. And now Stan frowned at the magazine, and he said,
“Son of a bitch.”

“Now, look,” I said, “a joke’s
a joke.”

But nobody was acting like it was a joke. Norm
was looking over Stan’s shoulder, and he too was frowning. And Stan, shaking
his head, looked at me and said, “Why try to hide it, for Christ’s sake?
Brother, if Yd been married to Dawn Devayne, I’d tell the world about it.”

“But I wasn’t,” I said. “I
swear to God, I never was.”

Norm said, “How many guys you know named
Ordo Tupikos?”

“It’s a mistake,” I said. “It’s
got to be a mistake.”

Norm seemed to be reading aloud from the
magazine. He said, “Married in San Diego, California, in 1958, to a sailor named Ordo Tu—”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I was
married then to, uh, Estelle—”

“Anlic,” Pat said, and nodded his
head at me. “Estelle Anlic, right?”

I stared at him. I said, “How’d you know
that name?”

“Because that’s Dawn
Devayne, dummy! That’s her real name!” Pat grabbed the magazine out
of Norm’s hands and rushed over to jab it at me. “Is that you, or isn’t
it?”

There was a small black-and-white photo on the
page, surrounded by printing. I hadn’t seen that picture in years.

It was Estelle and me, on our wedding day, a
picture taken outside City Hall by a street photographer. There I was in my
whites—you don’t wear winter blues in San Diego—and there was Estelle. She was wearing her
big shapeless black sweater and that tight tight gray skirt down to below her
knees that I liked in those days. We were both squinting in the sunlight, and
Estelle’s short dark hair was in little curls all around her head.

“That’s not Dawn Devayne,” I said.
“Dawn Devayne has blonde hair.”

Pat said something scornful about people
dyeing their hair, but I didn’t listen. I’d seen the words under the picture and
I was reading them. They said: “Dawn and her first husband, Navy man Ordo
Tupikos. Mama had the marriage annulled six months later.”

Norm and Stan had both come over with Pat, and
now Stan looked at me and said, “You didn’t even know it.”

“I never saw her again.” I made a
kind of movement with the magazine, and I said, “When her mother took her
away. The Navy put me on a ship, I never saw her after that.”

Norm said, “Well, I’ll be a son of a
bitch.”

Pat laughed, slapping himself on the hip. He
said:

“You’re married to a movie star!”

I got to my feet and went between them and
walked away along the dock toward the repair sheds. The guys shouted after me,
wanting to know where I was going, and Pat yelled, “That’s my
magazine!”

“I’ll bring it back,” I said.
“I want to borrow it.” I don’t know if they heard.

I went to the Admin Building and into the head and closed myself in a
stall and sat on the toilet and started in to read about Dawn Devayne.

*

The magazine was called True Man, and the
picture on the cover was a foreign sports car with a girl lying on the hood.
Down the left side of the cover was lettering that read:

WILL THE

ENERGY CRISIS

KILL LE MANS?

°°°°°°°°°°

DAWN DEVAYNE:

THE WORLD’S NEXT

SEX GODDESS

°°°°°°°°°°

WHAT SLOPE?

CONFESSIONS OF A

GIRL SKI BUM

Inside the magazine, the article was titled,
Is Dawn Devayne The World’s New Sex Queen?
by Abbie Lancaster. And under the title in smaller letters
was another question, with an answer:

“Where did all the bombshells go? Dawn
Devayne is ready to burst on the scene.”

Then the article didn’t start out to be about
Dawn Devayne at all, but about all the movie stars that had ever been
considered big sex symbols, like Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe and Rita
Hayworth and Jayne Mansfield. Then it said there hadn’t been any major sex star
for a long time, which was probably because of Women’s Lib and television and
X-rated movies and looser sexual codes. “You don’t need a fantasy
bed-warmer,” the article said, “if you’ve got a real-life bed-warmer
of your own.”

Then the article said there were a bunch of
movie stars who were all set to take the crown as the next sex queen if the job
ever opened up again. It mentioned Raquel Welch and Ann-Margret and Goldie Hawn
and Julie Christie. But then it said Dawn Devayne was the likeliest of them all
to make it, because she had that wonderful indescribable quality of being all
things to all men.

Then there was a biography. It said Dawn
Devayne was born Estelle Anlic in Big Meadow, Nebraska on May 19th, 1942, and her father died in the Korean conflict
in 1955, and she and her mother moved to Los Angeles in 1956 because her mother had joined a
religious cult that was based in Los Angeles. It said her mother was a bus driver in
that period, and Dawn Devayne grew up without
supervision and hung around with boys a lot. It didn’t exactly say she was the
neighborhood lay, but it almost said it.

Then it came to me. It said Dawn Devayne ran
away from home a lot of times in her teens, and one time when she was sixteen
she ran away to San Diego and married me until her mother took her home again and turned her over
to the juvenile authorities, who put her in a kind of reformatory for wayward
girls. It called me a “stock figure.” What it said was:

“…a sailor
named Ordo Tupikos, a stock figure, the San Diego sailor in every sex star’s childhood.”

I didn’t much care for that, but what I was
mostly interested in was where Estelle Anlic became Dawn Devayne, so I kept
reading. The article said that after the reformatory Estelle got a job as a
carhop in a drive-in restaurant in Los Angeles, and it was there she got her first crack
at movie stardom, when an associate producer with Farber International Pictures
met her and got her a small role in a B-movie called
Tramp Killer
. She played a
prostitute who was murdered. That was in 1960, when she was eighteen. There was
a black-and-white still photo from that movie, showing her cowering back from a
man with a meat cleaver, and she still looked like Estelle Anlic then, except
her hair was dyed platinum blonde. Her stage name for that movie was Honey
White.

Then nothing more happened in the movies for a
while, and Estelle went to San Francisco and was a cashier in a movie theater. The article quoted her as saying,
“When ‘Tramp Killer’ came through, I sold tickets to myself.” She had
other jobs too for the next three years, and then when she was twenty-one, in
1963, a man named Les Moore, who was the director of
Tramp Killer
, met her at a
party in San Francisco and remembered her and told her to come back to Los
Angeles and he would give her a big part in the movie he was just starting to
work on.

(The article then had a paragraph in
parentheses that said Les Moore had become a very important new director in the
three years since
Tramp Killer
, which had only been his second feature, and
that the movie he wanted Dawn Devayne to come back to Los Angeles for was
Bubbletop
, the first of the zany comedies that had made Les Moore the Preston
Sturges of the sixties.)

So Dawn Devayne—or Estelle, because her name
wasn’t Dawn Devayne yet and she’d quit calling herself Honey White—went back to
Los Angeles and Les Moore introduced her to a star-making agent named Byron
Cartwright, who signed her to exclusive representation and who changed her
name to Dawn Devayne. And
Bubbletop
went on to become a smash hit and Dawn Devayne
got rave notices, and she’d been a movie star ever since, with fifteen movies
in the last eleven years, and her price for one movie now was seven hundred
fifty thousand dollars. The article said she was one of the very few stars who
had never had a box-office flop.

About her private life, the article said she
was “between marriages.” I thought that would mean she was engaged to
somebody, but so far as I could see from the rest of the article she wasn’t. So
I guess that’s just a phrase they use for people like movie stars when they
aren’t married.

Anyway, the marriages she was between were
numbers four and five. After me in 1958, her next marriage was in 1963, to a
movie star named Rick Tandem. Then in 1964 there was a fight in a nightclub
where a producer named Josh Weinstein knocked Rick Tandem down and Rick Tandem
later sued for divorce and said John Weinstein had come between him and Dawn
Devayne. The article didn’t quite say that Rick Tandem was in reality queer,
but it got the point across.

Then marriage number three, in 1966, was to
another movie actor, Ken Forrest, who was an older man, a contemporary of Gable
and Tracy who was still making movies but wasn’t quite the power he used to be.
That marriage ended in 1968 when Forrest shot himself on a yacht off the coast
of Spain; Dawn Devayne was in London making a picture when it happened.

And the fourth marriage, in 1970, was to a Dallas businessman with interests in computers and
airlines and oil. His name was Ralph Chucklin, and that marriage had ended with
a quiet divorce in 1973. “Dawn is dating now,” the article said,
“but no one in particular tops her list. I’m still looking for the right
guy,’ she says.”

Then the article got to talking about her age,
and the person who wrote the article raised the question as to whether a
thirty-two year old woman was young enough to still make it as the next Sex
Goddess of the World. “Dawn is more beautiful every year,” the
article said, and then it went back to all the business about Women’s Lib and
television and X-rated movies and looser sexual codes, and it said the next
Superstar Sex Symbol wasn’t likely to be another girl-child type like the ones
before, but would be more of an adult woman, who could bring brains and
experience to sex. “Far from the dumb blondes of yesteryear,” the
article said, “Dawn Devayne is a bright blonde, who combines with good
old-fashioned lust the more modern feminine virtues of intelligence and
independence. A Jane Fonda who doesn’t nag.” And
the article finished by saying maybe the changed social conditions meant there
wouldn’t be any more Blonde Bombshells or Sexpot Movie Queens, which would make
the world a colder and a drabber place, but the writer sure hoped there would
be more, and the best bet right now to bring sex back to the world was Dawn
Devayne.

There were photographs with the article, full
page color pictures of Dawn Devayne with her clothes off, and when I finished
reading I sat there on the toilet a while longer looking at the pictures and
trying to remember Estelle. Nothing. The face, the eyes, the smile, all different. The stomach
and legs were different. Even the nipples didn’t remind me of Estelle Anlic’s
nipples.

There’s something wrong
, I thought. I wondered
if maybe this Dawn Devayne woman had a criminal record or was wanted for murder
somewhere or something like that, and she’d just paid Estelle money to borrow
her life story. Was that possible?

It sure didn’t seem possible that
this
sexy
woman was Estelle. I know it was sixteen years, but how much can one person
change? I sat studying the pictures until I noticed I was beginning to get an
erection, so I left the head and went back to work.

*