He was playing to the camera, swinging me around like some dosie-do barn dancer. I let him, intoxicated, but wary.
“Rope tricks,” he announced, laughing, as he proceeded to twirl a lariat, rodeo style, the sloppy ovals he created lingering in the air like dusty rings blown by cigarette smokers. “I learned this in Marfa. That, and the insatiable mating habits of jackrabbits.”
He insisted on teaching me to twirl a lariat, standing behind me, holding my elbow and wrist, spinning out the thick rope like a spider launching a filament. I was awkward and a little embarrassed. I’d not even told my own doctor about the growing weakness in my shoulders, those sharp pains, but I played along, gamely. Under his tutelage, I actually hurled out the rope, and Jimmy yelled, “Whoa, little doggie.” Which made everyone, including me, howl. The photographers were savoring this. Exhausted, I begged respite, and Jimmy, the cavalier gentleman with an arm around my waist, led me to a chair, the one marked EDNA FERBER, in fact.
“You’re a real cowgirl.” He politely kissed my hand.
“Sure, Annie Oakley with a blue rinse and rhinestone brooch.” Though, I admit, my heart raced. I was loving this.
Flushed, I surveyed the room. Rock Hudson, standing in a doorway, was frowning. Behind him, George Stevens, arms folded, watched, quiet-his face set. Rock leaned into Stevens, who nodded up and down. Again, I told myself that they were right. Of course they were right. Jimmy was impossible. A boy so easy to condemn, yet so easy to forgive.
Frankly, I was baffled by my own behavior here. This was not like me. I’d long ago dismissed frivolous behavior from my life, and there were days I felt I’d even relinquished my sense of humor. There were days when everything bothered me, made me testy. There were weeks when I was filled with nameless rages, feuding with my old friends, with family. I wrote damning letters to people who once loved me. Well, I didn’t like being old, old. I didn’t like the fact that my New York friends were all old, old. Now-here was this Jimmy, a wood sprite, Ariel, genie in a bottle. He got me laughing, stupidly, unexpected, and from the depths, and I was out of practice. The muscles at the corners of my mouth ached.
After the press disappeared-oddly, they’d all forgiven Jimmy for being late, backslapping, making wild promises to him, one even promising to accompany him to a car race-the room went quiet. Suddenly Jimmy started walking in circles; fretful, nervous, unable to settle. Tansi and I sat, like jurors in a box, as Jimmy hummed and grumbled, yet could not stop moving. He looked unhappy.
Jake Geyser had monitored the brilliant spectacle from a distance. He glowered like Cotton Mather wagging a bony, blackened finger at the depraved souls of Salem. He strode across the room. A man used to compliance, he’d been given a task he never sought: herding in the recalcitrant actor and, worse, dealing with blackmail, threats, and vitriolic letters. His was probably a world of brandy snifter decorum, golf engagements on forest-green courses, of Sundays in the park with a tweedy wife and a passel of obedient, if stymied, children. Not in the job description-this-this rebel. Hollywood, as he knew it from the star-system days of the forties, was Clark Gable or Humphrey Bogart or Joan Crawford or Katherine Hepburn-as efficient as office machinery.
He spoke through gritted teeth. “Jimmy, your lateness throws off a whole schedule.” He waited. “Mr. Stevens is fit to be tied.”
Jimmy was quiet too long, and everyone waited. Standing a couple of feet away from the steel-jawed Jake, the slovenly Jimmy seemed to coil downward, a spring unhinged, and the lariat he still gripped floated menacingly in the space between them.
Jimmy looked into the stern, unyielding face. A half-smile. “Well,” he slurred, in an exaggerated Texas drawl, “if he’s fit to be tied, I got me here a right appropriate lasso.” He spun the rope outward, and it brushed Jake’s jacket. Jake jerked back. Jimmy squinted. “You know, as an Indiana farm boy, used to the smells and mayhem of barnyards and hen coops, I’d have to say that you are easily recognizable as a horse’s ass.”
The two men stood there, hating each other. Those nearby squirmed, uncomfortable. Fascinated, I watched the dynamic, though I was unhappy with this ridiculous Mexican standoff. Men at their silly games. You first. No, you first. Come outside and I’ll…
Jake, the unpracticed combatant, sputtered, turned and fled the room; Jimmy threw out the lariat, high above his head, floating the ropes, attempting some exquisite and perfect circle. It fell to the ground. He looked at me. “I read that DaVinci could draw a perfect geometric circle freehand, without a compass. Tell me I can’t make this rope do the same.” Again, he hurled the lariat pell mell over his head, but the circle he created was lopsided, sloppy, and the rope fell onto his shoulders, so he stood there, perplexed, looking like a man who’d just failed to hang himself.
I kept glancing at Tansi, who had positioned herself on my left, her elbow bumping mine. She was breathing hard, and I marveled at the spectrum of shifting emotions that glided across her features. The eyes that followed the crestfallen and embittered Jake to the door were triumphant, her enemy bested. Her lips were drawn into a tight, compressed line, but there was glee in her eyes-a shimmering that scared me. But when Tansi looked back at Jimmy, standing there like a dumbfounded circus clown, the rope looped over his neck, Tansi’s eyes glazed over, and she looked like she was afraid. Not of him, but for him. She made a tsk ing sound, and I caught her eye.
“Nobody understands him,” she said.
“I believe I do,” I answered.
The air went out of the room. Mercy insisted we needed coffee. “I’m from Kinsman, Illinois. Population 164. In my blessed Papist household we addressed any problem with pots of hot, brewed coffee, so strong it corroded our Catholic soul. That was, of course, before I discovered liquor.” She squired us out of the building, across the cement walkways that connected the various soundstages, and out the front entrance, to the Smoke House, a sandwich-and-coffee eatery by the front gates that served as a hangout for the Warner crew and performers. “This is where we live,” Mercy told me. Tansi, like an obedient dog, followed, unhappy. Leaving, we spotted Jake on the telephone, and, looking at the taut tendons in his beet-red neck, I understood how furious he was.
Seated, with coffee, I said, “That was not a good moment.”
“Honestly,” Tansi fumed, sitting back, “Jake is so…”
Mercy interrupted, “Tansi, you have to stop apologizing for Jimmy.”
“I’m not. It’s just that Jack Warner told me…”
“Tansi, Jimmy was wrong this afternoon. Plain wrong.”
Tansi stared into her lap.
Silence. I examined a mountainous cheesecake under glass, dripping with glazed strawberries. In a frosted glass case a stainless steel bowl contained wavy whipped cream, stung by the cold. Perhaps a nibble, a taste. I stopped looking.
Staring at Tansi’s stricken face, Mercy changed the subject, talking about her husband Fletcher, a weekend trip they were planning to San Francisco-a brief respite to see friends. Tansi relaxed, and I decided I would have the cheesecake. Tansi lit a cigarette, expelled the smoke, and I surprised myself. I craved a cigarette. Tansi made a joke when Mercy said her husband, though tolerant of her being an actress and gone for weeks at a time, often told strangers she was a cruise ship entertainer. “At least,” Tansi quipped, “he didn’t say you were the beleaguered assistant to a tight-fisted film mogul. That’s one more euphemism for the oldest profession on earth allowed a woman.”