Everything and More (50 page)

Marylin promised to see to the flowers.

So the wedding ended up half-Wace, half-Beverly Hills. Two thin, nervous men perched tall, festively elegant arrangements of white chrysanthemums in every available cranny of the small house, then set about concealing the weedy carelessness of the backyard with a truckload of clay pots that overflowed with white blossoms—shasta daisies, marguerites, azaleas. Three bartenders in red jackets lined up rented glasses on the quilted leather bar that Abbey Rents had deposited on the patio. NolaBee, in her careless, vital way, crowded the sideboard and old round table that had come from down home with a conglomeration of dimestore bowls and cracked Haviland platters. By 2:30 the living room, dining room and garden were jammed with guests holding drinks.

Among the KayZee alums were all eleven of Roy’s pledge group with husbands and small children. BJ and Maury Morrison disgorged a station wagon full of their children and his parents: it turned out that the senior Morrisons knew the Finemans from some kind of Jewish organization. Montgomery Clift, who was in Marylin’s new movie, appeared briefly, sending ripples of excitement through the gathering, as did Susan Hayward. Roy was a favorite at Patricia’s, and the staff showed up en masse, the black father and son who worked in the stockroom wearing handsomely tailored dinner jackets. Old chums from Beverly High like Janet Schwarz Fetterman, Heidi Ronoletti Hanks, and Bitsy Bennet Kelly brought their spouses. A sculptor friend of Gerry’s lounged on the patio wall in his blue jeans. A gang of children led by Billy (hyperactive as if he had never hovered near the Great Divide) made constant forays on the buffet table.

The string trio that Joshua had commandeered from Paramount wove the disparate groups together with the sweet, tender ripples of “Ich Liebe Dich” and “Träumerei.”

Most eyes followed Marylin—Rain Fairburn—as she bent her lovely, luminous face to reassure her little daughter, Sari.

The honorary flower girl, Sari clutched her basket of white rosebuds as if for salvation. The mass of people terrified her. Except for her enormous, expressive brown eyes, Sari was a funny-looking little kid, all bones, sharp angles, and clouds of curly dark hair.

Sari’s emotional responses lay naked on the nerves of her skin. She was incapable of learning the evasions that even children her age, four, have inevitably taken on as protection against the painful pricks of life. This day, she clung too adoringly to her immediate family, backing off in frightened confusion from the other guests’ greetings and alcohol-scented kisses.

At this nontraditional wedding, the bride and groom circulated among the guests before the ceremony. Roy, her eyes incandescent below her smartly feathered little cocktail hat, her curves encased by pale turquoise peau de soie designed by Mollie Parnis that was the Finemans’ wedding gift—introduced Gerry to the mob. He had on the same checkered sport jacket that he had worn when Roy met him on the Île St. Louis—NolaBee had failed to convince him to buy a suit. Despite this lack of groomly modishness, he was going out of his way to be amenable, teasing NolaBee—he would, he insisted, have picked her over either of her girls if she’d given him a tumble—laughing at Billy’s bathroom humor, discussing art with the studio wives.

Roy kept patting his sleeve and gazing into his wide, smiling, satyr’s face. For the rest of our lives, she would think, catching her breath. For the rest of our lives. She loved every one of the guests—and felt immense pity for them. Not a person here—not a person on earth—could have experienced this exaltation.

At 4:30 Judge Dezanter showed up. Tall, round-shouldered, and seventy, he immediately stood Gerry and Roy in front of him.

Guests crowded around, and a fat, perspiring Paramount still photographer climbed on the low wall for a clear view. There was a chorus of shush, shush.

Judge Dezanter, displaying such white, straight teeth that they must be dentures, inquired of Gerry, “Do you, Gerrold, take Roy Elizabeth as your wife?”

“I do,” Gerry replied in a clear, quiet tone.

The big white smile turned on Roy. “Do you, Roy Elizabeth, agree to take Gerrold as your husband?”

The bodies surrounding Roy seemed to press inward, the faces were wiped blank of features—she could not recognize her mother or sister. I should let him off the hook, she thought in her sudden claustrophobic panic. Let him free.

The judge’s pale lips closed over his teeth. He gave her a questioning look.

“I do!” she cried. It was not her voice but a loud, frightened gabble. Gerry had to hold her spastic hand in order to slide on the narrow gold band.

By the power vested in him by the state of California, Judge Dezanter pronounced them man and wife.

Billy Fernauld applauded.

The newlyweds shared a glass of Mumm’s, the studio photographer recorded it, then snapped Roy Horak cutting the first slice of the many-tiered cake from Hansen’s.

It was time for Roy to get her short, matching jacket. Marylin, holding Sari, went with her sister into the bedroom. The quiet, cool air retained a faint hint of the Shalimar that Roy had spread on herself before the party.

Marylin set Sari down, and the child grasped her mother’s slender, shapely thigh through cream-colored silk. “Mommy, it’s nice in here. Can’t we just stay?”

“For a while, Sari.” Marylin opened her little beaded purse to take out a check. “Here’s another present.”

“Marylin,” Roy protested, “you already gave us the sterling.” Chantilly by Gorham, service for twelve, including shrimp forks and iced-tea spoons.

“The silver’s from the Fernaulds. Joshua, Billy, and—”

“Me,” whispered Sari.

“That’s right,” Marylin said, bending to kiss her daughter. “This is just from me.”

Roy picked up Sari, pressing her cheek against the fine-spun dark hair to control her tears. “I don’t deserve a sister like you,” she mumbled.

“Money’s the easiest thing to give,” Marylin said, continuing to extend the check.

“I meant, how did I ever get into a family with someone like you, sweet and gentle? I’m such a monster.”

“What sort of nutty talk is that?”

“I’ve always been jealous of you.”

“Oh, Roy, how
dumb.
You’re way cleverer than I am—look at how well you’ve done at Patricia’s. You know everything there is to know about business. Everybody likes you.”

“Sure, I’m a great kid. Just not very . . .” Roy’s voice cracked, “. . . lovable.”

Sari’s thin litttle arms tightened around Roy’s neck. “I love you,
Auntie Roy,” she said in her small, whispery voice, which was like Marylin’s. “I love you a million times.”

“And I love you so much I could eat you up,” Roy growled in the child’s smooth neck, then she took the check. It was made out for $5,000. Five, thousand, dollars! Her income for a year. “Marylin, I can’t take this.”

“I want you to have a nest egg, something to fall back on.”

Roy set Sari down. “Then this isn’t for Gerry?”

Coloring, Marylin said, “You.”

“It’s just not fair!” Roy said hotly. “The way you and Mama hold it against Gerry that his family are blue-collar workers.”

“My feelings have nothing to do with his family.” Thick lashes veiled Marylin’s incomparable eyes. “But you’re so wild about him, and sometimes he’s . . . sort of nasty to you.”

Voices, laughter, and the string trio’s arrangement of “September Song” sounded through the windows.

“I didn’t mean that the way it sounds,” Marylin’s beautiful mouth curved pleadingly. “But, well, you’re my little sister, and I thought if maybe you had something of your own, you wouldn’t be such a doormat.”

“Doormat? That’s how it is for us ordinary girls. We have to work at keeping a man happy because we’re not the most beautiful woman alive, not the object of millions of men’s desire, not an old man’s darling—”

Marylin gave Roy a stricken glance.

“I’m sorry,” Roy said huskily. “That was a nasty dig, really nasty.” She injected humor into her voice. “See what I mean? Unlovable. Marylin, I do appreciate the check, it’s wonderfully generous. But I have to put it in a joint account.”

Marylin started to speak, but the door opened and above the party roar BJ said loudly, “So this is where you are!”

Never a sylph, BJ had gained a good twenty-five pounds since Beverly High, and below her royal-blue taffeta the Merry Widow corset that constrained her bulk through the waistline, thrust her breasts upward and her ample hips outward. Otherwise she was the same BJ, with messy black hair and her too-orange lipstick eroding on her big warm smile. On the shelf of her bosom rested a large diamond-paved Star of David.

BJ stroked the dark hair of her spidery little stepsister. “Hello, Sari, babes,” she said, and put an arm around her beautiful young stepmother.

Each still considered the other her best friend. While Marylin had
never confessed that her love for Linc remained the wellspring of her being—BJ, after all,
was
Joshua’s daughter—BJ accepted this love as a constant. She lent Marylin her mail with Italian postmarks.

BJ, glancing from Marylin’s pallor to Roy’s reddened face, asked, “Hey, have I barged in on something private?”

Marylin, the actress, recovered first. “Private? What sort of question is that from one of the family?”

“To tell the truth, BJ,” Roy blurted out, “I came for my things, and Marylin followed me with some sisterly words about the holy estate of matreemonee.”

“You want
my
advice?” BJ asked. “Whip him into shape quickly. That Gerry Horak’s been a bachelor ages too long. They get spoiled and mean.”

Roy glanced around at the opened packages. “Maybe somebody’s given me a cat-o’-nine-tails.”

“You’re a real character, Roy,” BJ hooted. “Who knows, maybe there is one in the loot.” She added in a rueful brag, “Lucky you, you didn’t get thirteen percolators like we did.”

When they emerged, the party was breaking up and Gerry and Joshua were standing arm in arm near the living-room fireplace. Joshua had taken off his sports jacket, and his shirt was pulling out in the back of his ample-waisted trousers. His hair was grayer now, and the grooves in his tanned face deeper, extending his look of dominance. He was pouring Scotch into the highball glasses they both held.

“How,” Gerry asked, “did I ever get a hotshot movie writer-dash-director for a brother?”

“And how did I ever get a hunky painter.”

“The main question is, how did two slobs from the bottom drawer get hooked up to these two classy little Southern belles?”

NolaBee came over, blowing her customary cloud of smoke. “It’s time for the bride and groom to be leavin’.”

“Now you’re talking,” Gerry retorted, with a wink.

NolaBee chuckled. “Don’t you get smutty with me around, else I’ll have to paddle you.”

“Yes, Mama,” Gerry laughed.

It was amazing to Roy how her mother had drawn this son-in-law she had so recently rejected into the whirling orbit of her personality.

Gerry wrapped an arm around Roy’s waist, and they went out the front door, ducking through the hail of rice that BJ had just distributed from an Uncle Ben’s box. Somebody had knotted a traditional string of cans to the Thunderbird’s rear bumper.

A few blocks away Gerry braked to untie their clattering train. When he returned to his bucket seat, Roy leaned over to kiss his cheek. “It was a lovely wedding, wasn’t it?” she murmured.

“Terrific, terrific.”

There was a harsh note in his voice that Roy tried not to let herself question. Marylin was right. She had to stop noticing her new husband’s every arrant mood and worrying about it. He started the car again, and she sat back in the bucket seat, looking up at the one star in the soft Beverly Hills twilight.

Starlight, star bright, grant the wish I make tonight. Let me be a good wife, let me make him happy. . . .

Death came to world-famed conductor Carlo Firelli in the midst of a recording session on March 20 in Milan, Italy. Born Charles Frye in Birmingham, England, 1872, he changed his name but kept close to his working-class origins by refusing knighthood. Considered by many to be the greatest conductor of his age, he conducted the world premieres of works by Verdi, Puccini, Mahler, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Richard Strauss. He is survived by a son, Carlo Firelli II, fourteen (by his second wife, Althea Coyne Cunningham, granddaughter of Grover T. Coyne).

—Time,
March 23, 1958

Today we are taking you to the secluded Mandeville Canyon estate of Mr. and Mrs. Joshua Fernauld. He is an Oscar-winning director and writer; she is known to her fans all over the world as Rain Fairburn. They have lived here eight years, since the birth of their second child, Sara—known as Sari to the family. Hello, Joshua, Rain, Billy, and Sari.
 . . .

—
Edward R. Murrow,
Person to Person,
May 1958

This Nina Ricci, all in shocking pink, has the full blouson top with a wonderfully slender gored skirt. Ladies, this is the look we’ll be watching for this spring.

—
Roy Horak at a Patricia’s fashion show for the City of Hope luncheon at the Beverly Wilshire, November 10, 1958