I pushed some food around my plate. Neither of us had touched the lunch. “Well, I respect that.” And my words made him smile, sit back. “It’s how I got where I am, too.” We looked at each other a long time.
For some reason now, idly, he started to ramble on about acting-serious acting, he said-about dreaming. Especially dreaming, the will-o’-the-wisp vagaries allowed by unpredictable fortune. His early days, waiting for a break, his numbing work as a truck driver. I sat back, charmed by the warm-water flow of words. The more he spoke, the more he sounded like a schoolboy-some lonely fourteen-year-old kid, a feckless dreamy kid, cruising down a back lane on a clunky bike, hurling newspapers onto whitewashed porches and emerald-green lawns enclosed in picket fences. The modulated voice disappeared, and what surfaced was a curious mixture of laid-back Midwest twang and jittery teenage angst. I marveled at the transformation. And, emphatically, I liked it.
His stories reminded me of an Appleton, Wisconsin boy I remembered from Ryan High School days-a gangly, long-limbed boy whose name I’ve forgotten but whose presence has stayed with me. A boy on the high-school stage, acting a piddling role in A Scrap of Paper, his quivering voice and jerky body at odds with the ferocious hunger in his eyes, the fire there, the desperate desire to be away from the parochial town, to be out there in the world, magnificent on some city on some hill. So I felt then that I knew Rock in a way he’d probably forgotten. And the more he talked, the more I realized I couldn’t dislike him. That was too easy. I didn’t want to pity him either because so much of him struck me as so hollow, vain, lost. No, the fragility he refused in himself was what made me smile now.
So we talked about his role as Bick Benedict, about Giant, and he talked about So Big, which he said he’d read and loved. And when I stood up to leave, he said, “I’ll be in New York this fall. Can we have lunch, you and me?”
Standing, facing him, I nodded. “Of course. My pleasure.”
“Thank you.”
In the hallway I closed my eyes, still thinking of that shy boy from my high school days.
“I may actually learn to like Rock Hudson,” I told Mercy when I saw her in her dressing room.
“Oh, no, he charmed you.”
“No, Mercy, I just allowed myself to be charmed. That’s different.”
Later, resting at my hotel, I opened my door to face a dapper-looking man in formal attire-though the tie was slightly askew-a courtly-looking gentleman, graying at the temples. A sheepish grin on his face. Jimmy bowed to me, in costume as the middle-aged Jett Rink, the oillionaire in decline. They’d shaved his temples to create a receding hairline, and the makeup attempted to suggest a dissipated, unhappy man. I wasn’t convinced-he looked vaudevillian stock character, some clown in a monkey suit.
He looked over his shoulder, feigning nervousness. “I escaped for the afternoon. Stevens thinks I’m in my dressing room. My scenes were done this morning, but he likes us to be around in costume to flatter his ego.” He handed me a crumpled newspaper. “This is for you.”
“Come in,” I said. I’d been reading a novel by Sloan Wilson. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Annoyed at its prosaic style and its ugly view of the world, I was looking for an escape. “Come in.”
He fell into a chair, drew his legs up to his chest, wrapped his arms around them.
I unfolded the paper and found myself staring at a small, amorphous piece of clay, an embryonic torso, clay twisted into arms and legs and a narrow, long protuberance that, perhaps, would become a head. An incomplete body, some surrealistic object, a figure suspended between creation and fruition. I held it, wondering what to say.
“I made it for you,” he said, finally. “You like it?”
“Yes. I didn’t know you sculpted.”
“I do a lot of things.” He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s, like, anonymous man. You got to do the rest of the work yourself-create a life for it in your head. Like I imagine you do when you write characters like Jett Rink.”
“Is that why it has no face?”
“You’re missing the point,” he said. “Faces get in the way of things. Look at me. Everybody keeps telling me I’m…I’m gorgeous. You don’t know how sick that makes me feel.”
“It’s a gift.”
“Or a curse.”
“It’s your point of view, Jimmy.”
A broken smile. “Exactly, I guess. That’s the point of my statue there. See? Point of view.” He withdrew a folded piece of paper from his breast pocket and handed it to me. I unfolded it and found myself staring at a remarkable likeness of my own head, ancient and large, with a mane of teased white locks, and fiery, hard-as-nails eyes.
I gasped. “My Lord. Me?”
He grinned. “You.”
“This is very good. I mean, I don’t like any pictures of myself-never have. But this is startlingly true.”
“You have a great head on that tiny body. It dominates. It’s there, like a monument.”
“The missing figure from Mount Rushmore.”
“It’s a sketch I’m doing for a sculpture I’m working on-of you.”
“Thank you.” I waited. “Jimmy, where do you find the time?”
“I never sleep. I feel like I gotta keep moving. I feel like there’s a wall out there and I keep nearing it. It’ll stop me.”
“Are you talking about fate?”
“Yeah, fate. Maybe.” He banged his head, as though rattling his brain. “I read a lot about the Aztecs. I’m a bad reader and I go slow. Like a page a day. But they had this cool sense of doom, you know, from what I’ve read. Like they tried to make the most of whatever time they had on earth. The Aztecs, well-I want to live my life like they did. Hard driving, filled up.”
“You’ve made a good start. You’re young and famous. At what? Twenty-four?”
“It means nothing. I’m not famous inside. Movies lie. You ever see Sunset Boulevard, when it came out a few years back?” I nodded. “Well, I’ve seen it over and over. I watch Gloria Swanson, old, you know, and there she is, walking down that final staircase and she says that I’m-ready-for-my-close-up line. Well, I’ve already had my close-up scene. At twenty-four.” I started to say something, but he held up his hand. “No, let me finish. But the line that always gets me is when she says: ‘I’m still big, it’s the pictures that got small.’ Whenever I hear that, I think, wow. That’s not me, can never be me.” He breathed in, closed his eyes. “So now I’m on the big screen, and I’m big, big, big. So big, you know. But I think, I’m still small, even though my pictures got big.” Then, as if jolting himself from a reverie, he sat up. “Enough.”
“Jimmy, there’s nothing wrong with fame.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s what I hungered for. How can there be anything wrong with it?” His voice was ironic and slurring. He stood. “I gotta get out of here. I gotta make the scene with Ursula Andress for some photographer.”
“I understand she’s beautiful.”
“Sure is. A hell-fire, too. Studio set us up, originally, one of those phony lovey-dovey things. But we hit it off, strangely, and now we’re really dating,” he stressed the word, “as opposed to being seen together.”
“Hell-fire?”
“We do battle, her and me. She’s got a temper, like me. I’m learning German so we can fight in her own language.”
I waited a second, then said, “You don’t hit her, do you?”
Jimmy squinted, interlocked his fingers and stretched out his arms. “People been telling tales about me, Miss Edna?”
“I heard…”
He sucked in his breath, breathed out, making a bubbly sound. “Sometimes things get a little heated, and, like something rises in me, so red-hot I’m about to burst, and I lash out.”
“You should never hit a woman.”
“They hit me, too, you know.”
“Still, a man has an obligation.”