How do you judge that kind of action? Cooper went on working. Others, who refused to talk, never again set foot on a movie set. Not part of the U.S. political world but from a moral world that transcended it, I was caught between my leftist convictions and my personal ethics, which rejected facile Manichaeanism and, above all, the slightest hint of Pharisaism. Was the case difficult to judge precisely because it stood between bloodthirsty, vengeful, envious, opportunistic squealing and the weaknesses and failures to which, perhaps, all of us are susceptible? Cooper’s moral ambiguity made him more interesting than blameworthy. One among so many people had to be my own double. Who could reassure me that under certain circumstances I myself wouldn’t have done what he did? My entire intellectual and moral self rebelled against the idea. But my sentimental side, human, affectionate, or whatever you’d like to call it, tended to forgive Cooper, just as one day someone else would have to forgive me something. There are people who replicate our weakness because we instantly recognize ourselves in them. Cooper deserved not my censure but my compassion.
Anyway, I was curious about all the people involved in the film, but Diana lost patience with my questions. “Hollywood adores capsule biographies. They save time and, best of all, excuse us from thinking. They let us put on airs of being objective, but actually we’re just swallowing gossip consommé. Marilyn Monroe: a sad, lonely little girl. Irresponsible father. Insane mother. Bounced from orphanage to orphanage. She never should have stopped being Norma Jean Baker. She couldn’t stand the burden of being Marilyn Monroe — pills, alcohol, death. Rock Hudson: an extremely handsome truck driver from Texas. Used to driving the highways by night, he would pick up boys and make love to them. He’s discovered. He becomes a star. He’s got to hide his homosexuality. He’s locked in a closet filled with spotlights and cameras. Everyone knows he’s a queen. The world has to believe he’s the most virile of leading men. Who disillusioned them? Death, death …”
She laughed and poured herself a whiskey without bothering to ask me to do it for her. “Sweetheart, don’t believe my biography. Don’t believe it when they say: Diana Soren. Small-town girl. The girl next door. Wins a competition for the part of Shaw’s Saint Joan. Wins out of eighteen thousand contestants. From anonymity to glory in a flash. A genuine sadist directs the film. He humiliates her, tries to get great acting out of her with his cruelty, but only manages to convince her she will never be a great actress. And that’s a fact. Diana Soren will take any shitty part the studios offer her so she can disguise herself, so the world will believe Diana Soren is just that: only a mediocre actress. Then Diana can dedicate herself to being what she wants to be and no one can impose limits on her …”
I toasted her. “What do you want to be?”
“We’ll be on location for two months.” Her gray (or were they blue?) eyes disappear behind a veil of amber glass. “You can tell me yourself when the time’s up.”
XI
We had dinner with the leading man, the girlfriend, and the director only a few times. Diana loathed that species of utopian colony which tried to reproduce Hollywood life far from Hollywood — a sublimated version, more disdainful, obvious, relaxed, and weary of what North Americans usually look for when they leave the United States. I mean home away from home, Holiday Inns identical to one another, the same towels, the same soap in the same places, the same information, magazines, filters for mental security … The difference between ordinary tourists and Hollywood people is that tourists, despite being afraid, live with the word wonderful on their lips; the world seems fascinating to them, incredible, exotic … but only if they can go back to their home away from home, the Holiday Inn, the same menu, every night. Movie stars, on the other hand, have seen everything, are tired, impressed by nothing. Being on location is a necessary evil — may it pass quickly; let’s kill our tedium with sex, alcohol, gossip, immortality. The combination didn’t surprise me. Sex told us we were alive even if the place was dead. The alcohol replaced the exceptional (because powerful and physical) nature of sex with a vaguely dreamlike, floating state that, as the leading man said, brought everything into present time: Do you realize that? All you need is a couple of martinis for everything that ever happened to you to be happening now…
“What do you mean, sugar? I don’t get you,” said his girlfriend.
“Would you like to be happy all the time?” he asked her, putting a finger under her chin and staring straight into her eyes.
“Well, who wouldn’t?”
“But you’re not, right?”
“So who is?”
“But when you’re drinking, you’re happy …”
“Sure, but I pay for it the next morning …” She laughed like a jackass.
“That’s not the point. You drink and you’re not only happy.”
“No?”
“No. You’re combining all your moments of happiness, as if you were living them all together at the same time, here and now. See?”
“Yeah, I see. Know why I love you so much? Nobody else makes me understand things …”
The actor laughed gutturally and hugged his girlfriend’s reddish head against his hairy chest, which overflowed out of his shirt, red as a bullfighter’s cape. But she shrieked because of the chain that also glittered on the actor’s chest: Ow, it’s hurting me, it’s scraping my eyebrows …
He had taxidermic eyes, and when he looked at her she swooned, saying, I’ve only seen eyes like that in deer trophies hanging in country clubs …
Sex, alcohol, and gossip. If alcohol made us happy, it also loosened our tongues: who was sleeping with whom, for how long, why, what part did they give Lilly, who’d she steal it from, who’s on the way out, who’s rising like the head on beer? Immortality.
“Think Lilly’s going to last?”
“Don’t know. Everything’s relative. Last longer than what?”
“All right, less than the faces on Mount Rushmore, of course.”
“Or more than who, then?”
“Garbo lasted a long time and retired at the right moment. Anna Sten lasted a minute, and they retired her at the right moment. Lupe Vélez lasted a long time but didn’t know how to retire at the right moment. Death retired Valentino when he was thirty …”
“Look, the important thing is not what your place is but how big it is. It’s the space that counts, not the time. A short time but a lot of space — you’ve got it made. A small space for a long time, you’re a poor jerk.”
“Depends on publicity. And talent, of course.”
But with the word talent everyone’s eyes became glassy; they all looked at one another as if they weren’t there or as if they were all glass, like Cervantes’s character, the university graduate who wakes up imagining he’s made of glass. Then it was time to think about sex again, alcohol, gossip, immortality, who’s going to survive, who’s going to last, let’s screw, let’s have a drink, let’s gossip, are we going to last?
I whispered to Diana that all this reminded me of one of the most repulsive institutions in the world, the gringo cocktail party, where no one deigns to concede more than two or three minutes to anyone, not the most fascinating stranger, not even one’s oldest and dearest friend. Yes, you’re made of glass, they look right through you to see who the next favored person is to whom they will surrender a few minutes before offering him a frozen, disdainful face, since of course waiting his turn is the next, et cetera. All of this while balancing a drink in one hand and in the other a Vienna sausage wrapped in greasy bacon, which means one shakes hands with only two fingers and with one’s mouth more puffed out than the cheeks of Dizzy Gillespie playing his trumpet.