She told me she hadn’t thought much of Halliday when she first saw him. He was too pretty and flashy. She assumed he was one of those young actors who liked to dress like gangsters, because he was certainly too good-looking to be anything else, and Peter Lawford had come in right behind him, and she’d wondered if they were together, but when Halliday had seen her, he’d stopped, and Lawford had gone right around him, giving Rebecca a wink as he went by. Peter Lawford was always sweet and she didn’t believe the stories about him. Halliday walked up to the window, and she saw he had a ring on every finger. His blonde head was bare and he wasn’t wearing a coat. Well, here it comes, she thought.
He reached into his pocket and took out a pair of sunglasses. “I’d like to check these, please,” he said.
Halliday’s voice didn’t fit the rings or the clothes. His mouth was nice, too. He was with two other men and one of them laughed, but he didn’t seem to notice. She said yes sir and hesitated, then picked up the glasses by the bridge and took them back to a cubbyhole. He thanked her when she handed him the ticket and said his name was Lance, and what was hers, and would she be on all night? She said she would. “Bad luck for you,” he said. “But nice for me. Maybe I’ll see you on the way out?”
“I expect you will, sir,” she said.
After he went in to dinner, she went back and looked at the sunglasses sitting in the middle of the cubbyhole. They looked silly there.
She picked them up and tried them on. They were still warm from his pocket.
He and his friends came back through a little after midnight, just as the second show was starting. He said Hello Rebecca and she went back and got his sunglasses. “Can I have the ticket as a souvenir?” he asked.
The tickets were just heavy pasteboard, printed with H. Hover Presents. You still caught hell for losing one. “Of course, sir,” she said.
“It would be a better souvenir,” he said, “with your phone number on it.”
One of his companions laughed and was about to say something, but the blonde man looked around this time, and they all got quiet.
She agreed to meet him at Chasen’s on her next night off. He’d wanted to pick her up, but she told him she always drove her own car, so if she had to she could always get in it and drive home. She was sorry, but that was her rule. He nodded and said that was sensible for a girl like her, who turned all the men into wolves. It was a slick answer but it didn’t sound slick. It sounded sincere. She said, Oh, was she turning him into a wolf?
“It’s touch and go,” he said. “But I got willpower.”
She’d always wanted to go to Chasen’s and order something fancy, but afterward she couldn’t say what the food was like or who was in the room, because she was falling. I asked what they talked about and she said it didn’t matter what they talked about. Then she said, well, movies. They’d both thought To Catch a Thief was excellent. They agreed that you didn’t get much better than Cary Grant. Halliday liked the way Grant was out of the cat burglar business and living in high style, but still keeping his edge. Rebecca said, what did you think about where he drops a casino chip down this French girl’s front? It was awful but not the way Cary Grant did it. No one on earth wore clothes like Grace Kelly, but Rebecca didn’t know why men were so wild for such an obvious iceberg. He said, we all think we’re just the guy to warm her up. He said he’d been a little worried about Hitchcock after Rear Window, and she said what do you mean, that was a wonderful movie. She’d wanted to nurse Jimmy Stewart herself. He said Jimmy Stewart had been a sorry little punk. “Oh,” she said, “so they should have cast you instead?”
“I’m not an actor,” he said. “You thought I was?”
“Of course.”
“Well, I guess I did, too, once. Well, what if I did? You got to take your shot.”
“That’s right.”
“Can’t just spend your life wondering. And now I don’t have to wonder, and, ah, and boo hoo hoo. But it got me out of this stinking little town I come from, so I ought to be grateful.”
“That’s the way I look at it,” she said.
“What, you too?”
“Of course me too.”
“You too, huh? And they haven’t given you anything? Huh. All I can say is, you couldn’t be trying very hard. I’ve never seen a girl with more on the ball than you have. You radiate it.”
“Why thank you very much I’m sure.”
“I’m serious. I’d think you’d go big around here. There’s a million girls in this town, but there aren’t any of them like you. You couldn’t really be giving it a shot. You must’ve just been the queen back wherever you came from.”
“They fussed over me a bit,” she said, “and what would you happen to know about wherever I came from?”
“Well,” he said, “it’s obvious.”
“You mean you used to be king back wherever you came from.”
“I don’t know about king. I played some football. All right, I guess I got fussed over. You know, it was a pretty good town. I dunno why I hated it so much.”
“Because they thought they owned you,” she said.
“You’re right. That’s just what it was.”
“They love you and they brag on you, and they talk about you to each other all the time, and the more they think you’re wonderful, the more they think they own you.”
“I know. You can’t go anywhere without hello to this one and that one, and each time they’ve got to make you stand there and chat and answer questions. It’s not just you, of course, it’s how everybody’s got to talk to everybody, but you think, okay, that’s another fifteen minutes of my life. And fifteen minutes and fifteen minutes and pretty soon it’s seventy years and you’re dead.”
“They think they’ve got some sort of claim on you. Every last one of them.”
“I swear to God, it’s supposed to be only old men who think about time going by, but when I was a kid I never thought about anything else. There was this guy named Maitland who used to be the big football hero, and everybody in town could tell you every damn detail of his big touchdown against Endicott, even people who hadn’t been goddamn born then could tell you, and we all sort of pointed him out and wasn’t he great. And he was forty-five years old or something and standing behind the counter at Maitland and Son. And he was the Son, and all there was to say about him was the big game thirty years ago, and I thought, Kill me first. Just give me a rope and a chair.”
“And they can’t believe you don’t want that too. They hate you for wanting things they don’t want. When you tell them you’re actually going?”
“Ah, Jesus,” he said, laughing.
“You see? You know. They’re all so nice, and they guess there aren’t any girls in Hollywood as pretty as their little girl, and they’re already proud in advance of how their hometown girl made good, but they hate you. They hate you because you’re saying nothing they’ve got or could ever give you is good enough.”
“It isn’t, either. That’s the sorry truth, it isn’t.”
“And then you get here,” she said.
“Yes,” he said gently, “and then you get here.”
It was so wonderful, she told me, to meet someone you never had to explain anything to. Not that they didn’t spend the evening explaining themselves anyway.
The only thing was, she couldn’t help worrying about the expense. “What do you care about things like that?” Halliday said.
“Oh ho, Mr. Big-What-Do-You-Care. Well, I suppose I shouldn’t have said anything but I can’t help thinking about it. It’s all very nice of you, all this. I’m afraid I’m somewhat broke.”