Liz was eventually whisked away, waving goodbye, as cameras popped. Then everyone waited, impatient. Mercy brought me coffee, sitting with me and chatting. George Stevens appeared and disappeared, in doorways and out. Hedda Hopper said she had to leave; another engagement called. This was not good news. She was just too powerful a woman to insult. Her gossip columns could make or break a career. I looked up and pointed. “Well, here he is, finally.” I was relieved, as though Jimmy could now escape Stevens’ wrath.
Mercy shook her head. “No, that’s Tommy Dwyer, his buddy.”
The young man neared, a young girl on his arm, the two of them trailed by another young woman. Both women were dressed in evening gowns with ostentatious necklaces, bracelets. Texas gaudy, I figured. Oil money Baroque. Bit players in the Jett Rink banquet scene. Tommy, I realized, was a painstaking carbon copy of Jimmy, albeit a slightly chubby version, his hair blonder, his carriage too precise, with none of Jimmy’s insolent slouching. Tommy was dressed in a red-nylon jacket similar to the one I had seen on Jimmy. Reading my perplexed expression, Mercy explained that it was a uniform Jimmy established in the soon-to-be-released Rebel Without a Cause: the T-shirt, the black penny loafers, the swept back hair, the cigarette, and that glorious red windbreaker. Tommy now puffed himself up like a carnival huckster, yelled hellos to other actors. Leaving the two women, he walked up to Mercy. “Jimmy didn’t show?”
“Not yet.”
Mercy introduced him to me. “Tommy grew up with Jimmy in Fairmount, Indiana.”
Tommy beamed. “A year behind him in high school. Knew him to say hello to. I bumped into him in New York when I moved there. He was trying to be an actor. Me, too. Everybody in New York wants to be an actor. We spent the whole of one long afternoon watching Monty Clift in A Place in the Sun in Times Square. Over and over. I couldn’t get him to leave. We had the best time. Then, you know, Jimmy came out here for East of Eden.” It had a rehearsed, rushed sound to it. He seemed ready to add to the dreary biography, but the look on my face stopped him.
I didn’t like his voice-cracking, flat, boring. Worse, the eyes now darted, furtive, from me to Mercy, then to the whole room, squinting, watching. For Jimmy? Close up, he was a pale reflection of Jimmy. He was just there, like a potted plant. “I stopped in to see Jimmy,” Tommy said, “but, well, Jimmy is Jimmy.” He looked back and motioned to the young woman he’d walked in with. “That’s Polly, my girlfriend. From New York, too. I trailed Jimmy out here, and she trailed me.” He laughed, waved at her. “She’s in for a costume fitting.”
Polly seemed content to stay back with the other woman, both standing with folded arms. I found myself wondering about the second woman, who looked peevish. “And who is that other girl, who looks so unhappy?”
Tommy chuckled a little too long, ending with a rough phlegmatic cigarette cough. “That’s Lydia Plummer, who was Jimmy’s girl for about a month. She wanted to make it last forever. She’s got a speaking line in the banquet scene. Two words.” He motioned both women over, but George Stevens was suddenly back in the room, thundering. The two women hugged the back wall, uncomfortable, anxious to leave. Tommy, a little nervous, excused himself. He said to Mercy, “We don’t belong here today. Tell Jimmy I’m looking for him. He ain’t answering the phone.”
When Tommy left, I asked Mercy, “Why does he dress like Jimmy?”
“Because, sadly, he wants to be Jimmy. He thinks he can be the next James Dean.”
“And how does Jimmy feel about that?”
“Hard to say. He’s gone out of his way to plead for parts for Tommy and Polly. They’re like leeches. He got him to play a ranch hand in Marfa, but Tommy couldn’t stay on a horse. Still, you see him in a couple scenes. Polly was there, playing one of Bick’s party guests. She had a line, but lost it in a script edit.”
“So what does he do?”
“When he’s not making believe he’s an actor, he parks cars in the lot across the street from the CBS Radio Studios on Sunset. The same lot where Jimmy parked cars before he went to New York.”
“And they’ve remained friends?”
“Sort of.”
“That’s not really a testimonial.”
“Something’s been happening with Jimmy’s crowd,” she said, slowly.
“New faces?”
“Not so much new, but old ones disappearing.”
“And that includes Tommy and Polly? And, I gather, this Lydia Plummer, who seems to have come here today to look distraught.”
Mercy nodded. “Exactly. Jimmy seems to be trying to get distance from Tommy. Jimmy is on the verge of being the next major star. He knows it. He wants it. He’s gonna have to leave people behind.”
“That sounds cruel, though perhaps necessary.”
“Very necessary, so far as Jimmy is concerned. Look, Edna, Tommy’s a drain. And this red nylon jacket is the last straw. Pathetic copycat. But Jimmy’s been leaving people behind for years. He stops thinking about people he’s friendly with, and then they’re gone. Jimmy’s loyalty takes him only so far.”
I looked to the doorway. I wanted to see Jimmy walk in.
The news people and the photographers were packing up, and George Stevens stormed around, a big, blustery heap of a man, shaking with fury. “I sent a car to his new apartment in Sherman Oaks. No Jimmy. No one has seen him.”
I kept my mouth shut. Stevens apologized to me, gallantly, but I waved my hand. But clearly it did matter to the officious Stevens, a taskmaster, a man who approached his movies with a sense of sheer professionalism, everything in place, no room for moodiness or spurts of juvenile behavior. Jimmy was a schoolyard bully making his own rules. I touched him on his sleeve. “The film is important, George, not a picture of me with James Dean.”
Stevens spoke too loudly. “But that’s what I ordered.”
I shrugged.
Stevens leaned in. “You know, I’ve written a memo listing every late or missed shot, every sullen remark, even his stupid rudeness to a crew member. And I’ll tell you, Edna. I’ll never make another movie with him. Never.” He half-bowed, a sort of Prussian stiffness that struck me as anachronistic-I’d seen silent-era German directors do likewise, Josef von Sternberg, for one-and left the room.
Tansi watched him leave. She came over to me, hurt in her voice. “No, he’ll never make another movie with you,” she whispered to his retreating back. “I’ll be his choice not to.”
Chapter 4
“Miss Edna.” A voice boomed behind me. Jimmy arrived two hours later. I’d just returned from lunch with Mercy and Tansi.
“Of course,” Tansi mumbled. “Now he arrives.”
Jimmy stood there, nonplussed, inhaling a cigarette, while Tansi, frantically dialing numbers from a book she carried, managed to get some photographers and reporters, lingering on the lot, back into the room. Jimmy was at his most gracious, greeting me as though he’d never met me before, then smiling for the cameras, flirtatious, mischievous, circling me like I was a delightful prey, putting his arms around my shoulders, whispering. The photographers loved it.
I loved it. In spite of myself.
Jimmy had arrived as Jett Rink-the young wildcatter, worn denims and scuffed boots and ten-gallon hat, dipped low on his forehead. He was the rangy, belligerent ranch hand, seething with resentments, falling in love with Bick’s wife, and not yet the cruel and despotic oillionaire of JetTexas Oil.
As the photographers snapped pictures, Jimmy charmed and insinuated. He danced on chairs, he whooped and hollered. He sang a cowboy tune in the twangy, nasal Texas accent he’d mastered for the role. Everyone grinned. At first, I was alarmed by his manic performance, but finally I relaxed. This was no errant schoolboy, some Peck’s Bad Boy for a disaffected generation of post-war lost teenaged children. This was a self-absorbed lad, himself his best and most tantalizing subject. True, his moods were explosive and extreme. A troubled boy, certainly. But watching him unfold himself, like a tentative flower, petal by petal, unsure but seeking the overhead noontime sun, I realized there had to be a strain of purposeful scheming in him, a force that competed with some natural orneriness, some tractor-pull stubbornness. This boy of the Midwest soil, this dervish, this carnival showman, this brilliant hayseed.