The Missing Person (2 page)

The talkies provided Mary Maguire with a new, rich theme: the loss of Greatness through inadequate vocal cords of silent Stars. She celebrated the fallen idol, Willis Lord, who had been struck down from his screen heights by a high-pitched, almost effeminate voice. Made a sad laughingstock of in the first scene of his first talking picture, his tense, castrato tones accompanied his passionate glances and wide, fevered gestures. Embarrassed laughter was filling balconies and boxes of Roxies and Rivolis in every city in the United States, Mary Maguire reported. No longer could he hide behind the italics of amorous titles. The squawks of unperfected sound machinery and his own frightened voice had betrayed him, and rendered the Great Favorite foolish. His career was ended, his contract (said to be the largest in Culver City) threatened:
“Have heard nasty rumors that Joe Pinsky and the other lions at MGM are trying to buy back the Lord's contract which still has three years to run. But the Great Lover refuses to be silenced,”
wrote Mary Maguire.
“Washed up …?”

The moguls had their ways. Lord's strong, evocative name was dropped from publicity announcements of new pictures, the face known to millions as the apogee of the Latin Lover's—the tight, black mustache, the triangular black brows, the patent-leather hair parted perfectly in the middle of the high white forehead, the glowing, ardent eyes, and the sudden, bewitching smile—vanished from the adulatory pages of
Modern Screen
.

“Where has WL gone?”
asked Mary Maguire in a question that could only be called rhetorical.
“No one sees him in his old haunts. Was not at the jam-packed Pickford birthday party. Can it be he is taking voice lessons from the impeccable Coleman?”
No one knew. In one cruel sonic stroke, the brilliant Star had disappeared into silent outer darkness and was seen no more.

“Sad,”
wrote Mary Maguire.

But, it must be said, Mary Maguire could, on occasion, report on success. Delphine Lacy: in her vast hunger for gossip Mary Maguire was single-handedly responsible for the creation of her legend. She became, under the columnist's skilled hand, an introspective solitary, the lover of classical music played on her mammoth Capehart phonograph in the deep privacy of her windowless tower study. A close reader of Schopenhauer and Freud, living alone in her house that resembled a fortress rather than a California mansion, a building decorated by four towers with crenelated tops, an escarpment running from the elevated first floor almost to the high gates: so Mary Maguire described her and her place. The French star became a symbol of all Hollywood was not: secret affections, existing only in rumor, the possessor of an inner life rich in European culture, it was said, the inhospitable owner of a vast and protected estate, three Great Danes that roamed the lawns without her, and a 265-horsepower Duesenberg in which only the chauffeur was even seen. She became the perfect movie paradox: famous yet private, beautiful and single, celebrated but never seen in public. It was let out from studio publicity sources that her heart had been broken by the cinematic failure of her longtime costar Willis Lord, but no one ever caught a glimpse of them together.

The heated rumors of their affair slowly died away; her legend grew and prospered.

And what of Mary Maguire herself? Did the sad stories she wrote for her millions of readers affect her? She had to acknowledge, in the few moments before and after daily mass she allowed for introspection, that she had become hardened to human misery, that her youthful mercy, nurtured by the daily sight of her declining parents, had given way before avalanches of glittering star-histories. She cared, not for personal fates but for sticks of copy.

Was she lonely in her emotional sclerosis? If she was she did not notice it, for her name, her byline everywhere, made it easier to be a single woman in the capital of couples. She moved through dinner-dances, supper parties, lavish lunches and dinners, cocktail parties—broad, full-bosomed, aging, her tightly curled still-red hair perfectly matched to her red lips—without any companion except her knowledge of Who She Was and the instant recognition granted her by the people whose careers she chronicled.

The prolific celebrator of failure began to “do” books, full-length biographies. She was especially skillful when she was able to inject inspiration into her “lives.” The down-and-out Star who has lost her looks and her way gets religion, or AA, or Faith in Herself. Fans appreciated this kind of glamorous, elevated inspiration. They were lifted up by the vision of how far the Star could fall. It confirmed their belief that salvation is possible only by means of simple, self-administered spiritual strength. Because they themselves had some connection, no matter how tenuous and sentimental, with a church, they enjoyed the spectacle of the Great One finding the Path, ever since the time that Mary Pickford, full of dimples, wrote a book urging her huge following to Try God.

Mary Maguire's most successful book was
The Fabulous Franny Fuller
(As Told to Mary Maguire), written at the height of the Star's career. When she could be persuaded to sit down for any period of time and talk, Franny Fuller had told Mary Maguire something of her life story. Mary took her monologues down in shorthand, about her childhood and adolescence, about her first marriage to Dempsey Butts, the football player. Franny told why she had let the photographer take that famous picture of her naked to the waist, posed as the figurehead of a yacht, the one that was made into postcards the year before she signed her first contract. She told about Eddie Puritan, who “found” and named her, about her great friend and stand-in, Dolores Jenkins. She spoke (reluctantly) of Arnold Franklin, the poet she had married after her divorce from Butts. In passing, as if it was no real part of her existence, she mentioned her habit of disappearing, her “escapes,” as she called them.

Mary Maguire took Franny's flat details and made them exciting. She showed Franny sitting on the fifty-yard line Sunday after Sunday watching Demp play, even attending afternoon practice sessions at his training camp. But Mary Maguire was too intelligent not to guess the truth (which she wisely suppressed), that football was a complete mystery to Franny Fuller, as much a mystery to her as were Iowa-born Demp and his family. Franny never understood why they all cared so much about the game and about each other. She had sat in the stadium worrying about her hair tangling in the wind, about the cold, about chilblains, and her good clothing being ruined on rough, dirty seats.

Mary Maguire understood, indeed knew, more than she wrote. She realized (but never put in the book) that Franny Fuller had no idea why she was there, or who she
was
as she sat in the stadium with the other players' wives, or after the game in the restaurant, with all the Buttses who came from Iowa for a game every year, pounding each others' shoulders and buttocks and asking her, “Wasn't he
great?”

Franny told Mary Maguire that the better everyone seemed to feel when they were together at summer training camp or on those Sunday evenings after games in the fall, the worse she felt, as if maybe the sun had gotten to her. While they all talked at once to each other, Franny was silent, remembering things like how Jean Harlow had died from sun-poisoning. She was afraid to watch games played outdoors. But all Mary Maguire wrote was about how Franny went to the games, watched Dempsey quarterback his team, sat with the other wives, and cheered.

Franny told her about the nun, the Parish Visitor, who came to the door the evening Franny took too many sleeping pills. As Mary put it for Franny, “That holy woman saved my life.” Franny mentioned Ira Rorie the Negro, and his Cadillac. But Mary didn't go on to tell about how Franny stayed with him for more than a week. She decided Franny's fans weren't ready for that kind of fact. Premium Studios, which had asked to have a last look at Mary's manuscript in return for providing all the still shots for illustrations that she wanted, would have hated it. Mary explained to Franny that to men she was a princess: pure, in a spiritual way. In the book Mary made Ira Rorie out to be Franny's chauffeur.
If he ever sees that book
, Franny thought,
it will give him a laugh
.

At the end of the biography, Mary Maguire wrote about what acting in the movies meant to Franny Fuller. Nothing of what she wrote came from the interviews. Franny could never have voiced those elevated sentiments. She didn't know they existed. Mary wrote that Franny prepared herself for weeks for her parts. She went to the library, her book reported, to look up details about the character she was preparing to play. She read four historical books before she played Madame Pompadour in that musical. She studied up on the twenties when she was going to play the girlfriend of one of Al Capone's mob.

In the book Mary Maguire attributed this cerebral approach to Franny's having married a poet like Arnold Franklin.
That's a joke
, Franny thought when she read it.
Arnie did that kind of thing, not me
. Franny once told Keith, Arnie's agent, that Arnie couldn't move his bowels without reading about it first and then checking in another book to be sure he was doing it right.

Mary Maguire managed to mythologize almost everything there was to tell about Franny Fuller. She wrote that Franny believed she was an actress, that she was
acting
in her pictures.
But she is wrong
, Franny thought. That shadow was really Franny Fuller up there, or more accurately, Fanny Marker, finally getting a chance to show herself, much larger than reality would permit, on the screen, the shadow she'd been since she was fourteen, the dumb, beautiful, desirable blonde elevated into flat immortality on celluloid, with blue ponds for eyes and a pool of blood for a mouth. The Real Thing, not an actress, a silhouette named Fanny Marker, now changed to Franny Fuller.

The terrible thing was (and only Fanny Marker knew this at first) was that it was all there was,
all
of her. Even bringing to bear the ambitious zeal of a conquistador's search for gold, nothing more of her could be discovered. Her admirers, indeed her lovers and husbands, should have known. But they were all deluded by the glow of her face into believing that behind it was a person. It was only a surface, a front, a face as empty of structure and furnishing as the back side of a movie set. Everyone thought that under that face painted on by make-up artists, those twin peaks pushed out toward the customer in the theater and legs photographed from under the floor level to make them look eight feet long, there was a real woman. But all there was (and Franny Fuller knew it too well) was a surface created by Cinemascope, a filmed penumbra shot flat out of a projector onto a mammoth and hospitable screen.

Fanny Marker looked very much like all the girls Hollywood attracted, the ones who paraded in beauty contests in their home states, high-kicked in chorus lines in Broadway musicals, danced with customers in the big, dimly lit bars and dance halls in every large city in the country. Franny recognized herself as one of them. She suspected they were all related, sisters in passivity, girls who could never resolve anything for themselves because they had never been told it was possible. They differed from men who were able to think things up for themselves and then make them work. The world paid attention when men chose to be something, strove toward a goal they had set. Franny believed that all women were like her, waiting for the Great Something they had dreamed about all their lives to happen to them, to be done to them, to arrive.

True to her credo, events came to Franny as she waited for them, her drifting, dazed self biding its time. She had known this self since her girlhood. But everyone kept telling her she really was Someone because she looked the way she did. There were times when she was able to forget her secret knowledge that there was no direction to her days, no meaning to her beautiful face, that in the long catalogue of human beings she was a missing person.

Realizing this, when no one else did, neither Demp nor Arnie nor Dolores nor even Mary Maguire, Franny felt black despair spread through her, like night coming down through Coldwater Canyon. She was filled with the stifling fear that someone would find out about her, and realize her absence. There was no Franny Fuller, no FF as the columnists and the advertisements called her, making her seem important, as if people could recognize her by her initials alone. When she was fourteen she had dreamed about having just one name, like Garbo: Laverne or Melinda. But the Studio thought it had a great thing going when Mary Maguire in her column first called her FF.
Well, at least
, Franny thought,
it's better than Fanny Marker
.

2

The Movie Actress

Fanny Marker grew up in Utica where she was born. Most of her girlhood was spent dreaming. The dream started when she understood that she was beautiful. She was born that way, had been beautiful, her mother said, from the moment she laid eyes on her in the hospital. Once, on request, she gave
Photoplay
a baby picture of herself. (It has been reprinted many times since.) Sitting on a gilt throne in front of a fake palm tree, Fanny is pressing a pudgy finger into a fat cheek. The baby-faced little girl smiles charmingly. Her other hand is playing with a golden ringlet that has escaped the pile on her head.

Fanny didn't remember the day the picture was taken. But she remembered Jerryboy who was living with her mother years later. He would take his finger with its black, squared-off nail and push it hard into her cheek. It hurt, but he would laugh and say, “You won't get far with that one dimple.”

Fanny moved through her childhood in a daze of visions of beauty. She worked at the other cheek with a sharpened pencil point until it cut the skin, but another dimple never developed. Later she learned from the beauty-hints column in
Silver Screen
to draw on a black beauty spot there. Perc Westmore said it was good, the magazine reported. It worked fine, drawing attention to the one she already had, making it more interesting. But in Jerryboy's time, when Fanny was fourteen, her beauty began to be more than a baby picture on the dresser. Her mother looked at her hard, sometimes, when Jerryboy fooled around with her and poked at her like that. It was fear, not pleasure, that Jerryboy's look made her feel.