Getting Garbo Read online

  “I’ll pray that the two of you get together again, Mr. Darnell. You were the Perfect Couple. From the very beginning when you first got together. I remember.”

  Yeah. Sardi’s. New York. Springtime. Golden day. I used to call it the best day of my life. Reva was there. I gaze at the kid’s grief-stricken face and suddenly I’m very touched.

  “You’re very sweet. But, you know, sometimes things change.”

  “No, Mr. Darnell! Not when two people are meant for each other!” A tear slips down her cheek. Someone else is weeping for the end of this marriage besides me. I reach out my hand and brush the tear away.

  “You’re always there, Reva. Thanks. And why don’t you call me Roy? Bet you do when you’re talking about me with your friends.”

  She reddens with embarrassment. Awed by the offer. “Okay. Roy. Good night—and God bless you.”

  • • •

  I’m caught in going-home traffic on the Strip. The forget-me-nots are on the seat beside me. Forgotten. I’m thinking of Chris. Nothing else. Just Chris. I’m still calling her by that name in my mind. I don’t know what else to call her. Anymore than I know where to find her.

  And suddenly there she is.

  I’m on the block past Ciro’s. Bored and irritable, I glance up at a billboard on the corner. Big as a movie screen. A glowingly healthy girl in a very form-fitting black one-piece swimsuit. Kneeling on the white sands of a tropical beach as she rubs Coppertone sun tan lotion on her arm. It’s her. Whoever she is. Smiling seductively down at me. I smile back.

  Now I know how to find her.

  8

  Roy

  I’m running. Sunup was a few minutes ago. First light streams between the spires and towers of UCLA onto the oval track. A handful of us are doing laps. The Dawn Patrol. Mostly students, but outsiders permitted before classes begin. Couldn’t sleep most of the night. Too much going on. So I’m out here, working my body, cleaning out the poisons. I’m here a couple or three times a week, alternating with the gym. I love to trot along and get lost in the crunching sound of my feet on the cinders.

  Behind me I hear a sprinter coming up fast. Glance over my shoulder. It’s my running buddy Burt Lancaster. He’s the only other actor who uses the UCLA track. Matter of fact, he turned me on to it. We met at a party, and I was complaining there’s nowhere to run on the west side.

  I’m in pretty good shape, but Burt’s much better. Look at him now. Backlit by the sun that highlights his long, tousled blond mane of hair. Bounding gracefully like a lion closing the distance on his prey. He overtakes me, we exchange a “Hey.” He slows and we fall in step together. We’re both long-distance runners. Sometimes we talk, sometimes we don’t. Today’s one of the talking days.

  “How you handling it?”

  “Doin’ fine,” I lie.

  “Good man. I was divorced once, y’know. Just a kid. Took me weeks to get over it. Keep busy, that’s the ticket.”

  “Hey, I work in TV. We’re born busy.”

  He laughs. That big ha-ha laugh. Teeth gleaming. “Well, with any luck, you’ll be out of TV soon. I’m waiting for you, kid.”

  In Hollywood, they call Gable the King. But that’s an honorary title, left over from the pre-war years. At this point in time, Lancaster is the king. When TV siphoned off the movie audience, the major studios cut their overhead—and their own throats—by dropping all the contract people. “Hire ’em when you need ’em” became the slogan. But instead, the big stars went into business for themselves. Burt’s been the most successful. His production company has made seven movies, all money-makers. Marty, the “sleeper” of the decade, won this year’s Oscar, and he’s just shot his circus epic, Trapeze, in Paris. A guaranteed hit if there ever was one.

  His company bought the old William Morris Agency building on North Canon Drive in Bev Hills. He invited me over a couple weeks ago. Showing off. But why not? A lobby with a full-wall, two-story bird cage, filled with tiny rare finches and canaries. Original Rouault studies of circus acrobats on his office walls. The executive bathroom adjoining his office has gold-plated fixtures, he boasts. While pissing in the sink and laughing uproariously. Takes me down the halls, tells me who’s where. Clifford Odets, Jerome Weidman, Paddy Chayefsky, A.B. Guthrie, Ernest Lehman, T.E.B. Clarke, Liam O’Brien, J.P. Miller, Terence Rattigan, Ben Hecht. They’re all there, in their offices, typing scripts. He seems as proud of this array of top writers as he is of the birds in the cage in the lobby.

  “Warm up a corner office for me,” I say.

  “We’re gonna own this town,” he promises. “Guys like you and me.”

  • • •

  It’s time to play Meet the Press. We’re back at the courthouse, me and Nate Scanlon. Yeah, the same courthouse where we did the divorce dance. Now we’re not ducking the reporters and photographers. We’ve summoned them. And they’re all here.

  First Nate has me walk with him down the corridor to visit a clerk and officially file the lawsuit. It’s a kick, coming and going. The halls are jammed with felons and their lawyers and their loved ones and the witnesses against them, all milling around waiting for the courtrooms to open. Everybody recognizes me. I mean, heads spin. I’m gracious, friendly, shrug at the impossibility of signing autographs. You can see, I’d be here forever. Wish I could. A bruiser in a tank shirt with a paratrooper symbol and the words “Death From Above” tattooed on his bulging bicep suddenly blocks my way. Could be trouble, I think, looking for a bailiff. The bruiser smiles, two front teeth missing, but declares himself a fan. “Hey, Jack Havoc, why’n’tcha kick some butt and get me outta here?”

  Outside the press has set up a Kodak Picture Point. Nate and I move into position. The courthouse framed behind us. Several microphones in front of us. The classic shot. Ready for the six o’clock news. I look around. Most of the media gathered are not familiar to me. They’re the downtown guys who cover hard news rather than entertainment. But here and there a familiar face. Bob Thomas of AP. Vernon Scott of UPI. I greet the ones I know by name. And Nate Scanlon gets down to business.

  “I have just filed a lawsuit on behalf of Mr. Roy Darnell against Warner Brothers studio asking that his contract be declared null and void because Warners has failed to live up to the terms of the agreement.” He fills in the details, emphasizing the gratitude I feel for the people at Warners who helped create Jack Havoc and underscoring the countless millions of dollars the show is generating for the studio and the network. That Nate, he can talk. I don’t say a word. I’m there as a visual prop. Without me on camera, we might not merit the TV news shows.

  It’s a dangerous game we’re playing. Jack Warner’s reputation in labor relations is legendary. On the theory that “None of these bastards do any work worth a damn during the holidays anyway,” Warner’s occasional present to his employees was to close down the studio and knock everyone off salary before Christmas and then re-hire them after New Year’s. And back in the post-war ’40s, when the craft labor unions went on strike at his studio, Warner trucked in goons from the Long Beach docks to break heads on the picket line. Warners won the strike.

  The press people start to throw questions at me. Nate fields them. “Will the show go off the air?” We have no way of knowing. “Is Warners going to counter-sue?” Ask them. “How much money have you been making?” Relatively little. “But how much?” A wisecracker from the rear shouts an answer for me. “Not as much as he’s gonna make in the movies, right, Roy?” Everybody laughs. “C’mon, Roy, say something,” another guy yells. I step to the microphones. “I want to thank all the fans around the world who have embraced Jack Havoc and hope they’ll understand.” Nate cuts it off there, expresses appreciation for their attention and cooperation and I wave to the cameras as he hustles me away.

  “That went rather well,” he says as we go for our cars in the parking lot.

  “Just the way you said it would. N
ext time write me a bigger part.”

  “Strong, silent men. They’re all the rage in the movies.” He points northeast at the sky. “In about ten minutes, as soon as they start receiving inquiring phone calls from the press, there should be a mushroom cloud rising over Burbank.”

  Nate’s so confident. So why am I worrying about unexpected fallout from our little atom bomb?

  • • •

  “Rafferty,” he says. “R-A-F-F-E-R-T-Y.” Proving definitively that Killer Lomax can spell. He’s reveling in his moment, perching his glasses, which he rarely wears, on the end of his nose as he reads from a notebook. He’s proud that he’s brought back the bacon this time. The Killer takes a swallow of his vodka tonic and proceeds.

  “First name, Kimberly. Calls herself Kim.”

  “Kim Rafferty.” I try the name on for size. It fits.

  We’re celebrating the filing of the lawsuit. Killer was upset that something that big was in the works and he was kept out of the loop. I told him I would have told him if I could have. You know that, sport, we’re brothers. But Nate gave me orders. Let him be pissed at Nate. That’s what lawyers are for. We’re sitting in one of the booths at the rear of Villa Capri, a schmaltzy Italian restaurant in Hollywood. Romanoff’s is closed tonight for a private party, so we came here. It’s one of Sinatra’s hangouts. Used to be Jimmy Dean’s, too. Poor Jimmy.

  When we drove up, several autograph hounds were waiting to pounce. Including Reva. Guess she switched operations from Romanoff’s for the night, too. The other fans were consoling me, What’re you gonna do if you’re not Jack Havoc anymore? And Reva, gossiping on the sidelines with Killer, jumped in. “He’s so much more than just Jack Havoc.” Good kid.

  “Have a look,” Killer says. Pushing an 8x10 glossy across the table to me. Actor’s composite photo. Divided in quarters, featuring varied poses of Kim Rafferty. Grace Kelly ladylike, the way I met her. Plus Dale Evans cowgirl on a split-rail fence swinging a lariat. Swimsuit shot, as on the billboard. And a good straight-on close-up of her face. Just lipstick and a welcoming smile. I gaze at the composite while Killer rattles off details.

  “Member of Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, and some model’s association. Started out as a model for department store catalogs. Sears and Penney’s, lingerie ads and shit like that. Been acting two years. Her agent’s a nobody. Active mostly in commercials. She’s been in a couple of cheapie feature flicks, one of them soft-core. Had a few lines on a Lucy episode. Nothing that amounts to anything yet…”

  He’s behaving like Sherlock Holmes, but once I saw her face on the billboard the rest was easy. I sent Killer to the ad agency, who shooed him along to the agent, and so on. With instructions not to tell any of them who was doing the asking. Say you’re a casting agent, an ex-boyfriend, a process server or something.

  “…she’s not married, does come from Alhambra, dropped outta high school in her last year, owes three hundred dollars on a tired old jalopy, lives right here on Fountain Avenue, a bachelorette apartment, cute word, huh? Augments her income, which is to say pays the bills, by waiting tables at the Hamburger Hamlet on the Strip. She used to be shacked up with a trumpeter who plays at the Cocoanut Grove with Les Brown and his Band of Renown. Kicked him out ’cuz whenever he got loaded he’d belt her black and blue—”

  I cut him off. “Did you keep my name out of this?”

  Killer leans back. Takes off his glasses and sighs. “Roysie. What am I? Some kind of an idiot? I was the soul of discretion, like a fuckin’ diplomat. You woulda been proud of me.”

  He’s fishing for an atta-boy. I don’t know why I won’t give it to him.

  “Is that everything?” I ask.

  “What else you wanna know? Her shoe size, where she shops for groceries, what days of this month she’s gonna be on the rag? Name it, I got it, sport, I—”

  We’re interrupted. By Dave Viola. My un-favorite costar. I’ve seen him drunk before. But never staggering. He looks like he’s been to a wake. Maybe his own.

  “’Scuse me, ’scuse me, hate t’interrupt, gentlemen, but—” swaying, holding a jumbo-size daiquiri “—just wanted to toast your very good health!” Downs a gulp that could daze an ox. Wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, grins his loopy grin, and before anyone can stop him, launches into one of his endless supply of Vegas lounge gags.

  “Guy goes on a cruise to the Caribbean. Missin’ Wendy, the girl he left behind, so-o-o much. Reaches Nassau, gets plastered in a bar, lurches into the john. Starts to take a leak. Notices this humongous black dude standin’ at the next urinal. Glances down and sees the word Wendy tattooed on the guy’s dong. Helluva coincidence, but—hey, he says, my girl’s named Wendy, too! The Dude looks at him, laughs, points at his cock and says, ‘Hey, Mon, what that say is Welcome to Nassau and Have A Nice Day.’”

  Killer laughs. Toilet humor gets him every time. I’ve heard the joke before. “So is there a point to any of this?” I ask Viola.

  “A point…tha’s a good point…glad y’asked. The point is…I never been to Nassau, Roy, so that makes you the biggest prick I’ve ever seen!”

  Killer tenses beside me. I’m relaxed. Who cares what this asshole says about anything? “You’re outta line, Davey,” Killer warns.

  “Me? I’m outta fuckin’ line? I’m not the one who’s puttin’ ninety-seven good people on the fuckin’ bread line! You know I’m right, Killer, c’mon, admit it.” He swivels back to me. “What’re you doin’ to us, man? If you take a hike, they’ll cancel the show. Don’t you know that? Don’t you care?”

  He starts to fling his drink in my face. But Killer is up and at him. Didn’t think he could move that fast. Deflects the glass so it splashes all over Viola instead. Gets a hammerlock on him. Viola whimpers. “Didn’t mean it, no offense, Roy, c’mon, babe, but don’t do it, please, don’t pull the plug on Jack Havoc. The rest of us got nowhere to go if the show dies.”

  “The people with talent will be okay,” I say.

  Viola stares at me until Killer shepherds him away. It’s not hard. All the fight has gone out of him. I reach for the pack of Luckies on the table, pluck a cigarette, stick it between my lips. My hand is steady. Where are the damn matches? Someone reaches out with a light. It’s Killer.

  “Attaboy, ” I say, “you just earned yourself a big fat raise. Effective now.”

  He smiles. “Then let me take a chance and mention an unhappy thought.”

  “Fire away.”

  “You been wondering how Addie’s private eye wound up peeping in your window at the Hotel Bel-Air cottage with his camera that night. Suppose the peeper knew where to look because Miss Kim Rafferty told him.”

  My first instinct, definitely a Jack Havoc impulse, is to fracture him. When in doubt, kill the messenger. But it’s a suspicion that’s been lurking in the back of my mind, too. A possibility I’ve been ducking and rejecting because I don’t want to believe it.

  Now there’s a way to check it out.

  • • •

  The elephant is shifting from foot to foot. Each time, it seems as if the pavement in the KTLA-TV parking lot in Hollywood may split open. Some of the tots in the sunny outdoor bleachers are tossing peanuts. The elephant ignores the peanuts. Maybe the smog from the freeway just below the parking lot is getting to the poor pachyderm. I’m feeling a bit queasy myself.

  Because from where I’m sitting I can see her. But she doesn’t see me.

  Kim Rafferty is standing near the elephant with a guy who must be the elephant wrangler. He’s wearing a turban and Nehru jacket like Punjab in the Orphan Annie comic strip. She’s wearing a swimsuit, tighter than the one on the billboard, covered in silver spangles like a bareback rider in the circus. The elephant is naked except for a small two-seater basket strapped on his back and a banner across his belly proclaiming: TRAPEZE—Variety Boys Club Benefit.
<
br />   A local TV audience participation show is in progress. I’m part of the audience. Up in the top row of the bleachers. In a loose windbreaker, oversize Italian sunglasses and a tweed Irish hat. So far nobody’s recognized me. Now Kim is on camera, plugging the opening of Burt Lancaster’s circus movie.

  That’s the latest item making me crazy. Does Burt have something to do with my getting snared by the private eye? Was she working for him then, too? Is Burt colluding somehow with Addie? Does that make any sense? I’m totally confused. Not to mention pissed off. Got to look at the likelihood I was betrayed by Kim. So am I here to confront and accuse? Or to give her a chance to explain—better yet, deny. Go ahead, bitch, convince me. And no more lies! Do I want to clobber her or kiss her? See? Queasy.

  With the emcee’s unctuous help, Kim is awarding a few seats to the gala premiere of Trapeze. Plus an extra-special prize. An elephant ride, right here, today! She reaches in the fish bowl, reads off the name of the lucky kid, who jumps up and races forward.

  The wrangler signals with a steel-tipped pointy stick and the elephant kneels down. Kim climbs into the small basket on the elephant’s back. The wrangler hands the kid up to her. They get set. Then the wrangler gestures. With a traffic-stopping trumpeting cry, the elephant rises to full height. The kid is thrilled and waves to Mommy and Daddy. Kim waves to the camera from way-y-y up there. The elephant, on cue from the wrangler, does a once-around the stage area. Despite her ear-to-ear smile, I can see Kim is scared shitless. The crowd applauds. The show goes to commercial. Quickly, the wrangler gets them both down and off the elephant.

  She disappears around a corner of the building. I scale down the rear of the bleachers, drop to the ground, follow her path behind the building. She’s still there. All by herself. Puking her guts out. I hand her my handkerchief. She takes it without seeing who’s giving it to her. Then she does.