I heard a rumble near the studio gates, and, turning, spotted Jimmy tearing out, breakneck speed, on his motorcycle, turning the corner so fast he seemed momentarily parallel to the all-too-close asphalt pavement. A black leather bomber jacket, black boots, a pair of military style goggles on his eyes, doubtless covering those horn-rimmed eyeglasses he was always losing or breaking. He looked very militaristic, the red-blooded Eisenhower soldier liberating Europe.
As I watched him leave, I noted Alva and Alyce Strand on the sidewalk, looking after him. Bounding from a crouching position, they tottered after the disappearing bike, and I wondered whether Jimmy’s crazed getaway was an attempt to ditch the pesky fans. Then, out of breath, the twins stopped, not far from my table, and stupidly waved after him.
I called to them. “Come here.” They hurried over. I reminded them that I’d been at Googie’s with Jimmy. “I’m Edna Ferber.”
“We know you,” Alva said, “because James knows you. He talks about you.”
“You talk to Jimmy?”
They looked at each other. “No, but we hear things. We ask questions.”
“Sit down.” I motioned toward empty chairs.
They shook their heads. They were frightfully identical, the boy and the girl, with shocks of sandy blond hair, with gawky faces and marble eyes. Both clowns. That lamentable gene pool was starved and desolate. Their parents must have been brother and sister. I shivered at the thought.
Alyce glanced at her brother, her eyes panicky. “No, we have to go.”
“Go where?”
She pointed, melodramatically. “We follow James.”
“And where has he gone?”
They looked at each other. “We guess. Sometimes we’re right, sometimes wrong.”
The other picked up the thread. “Sometimes we sit for hours, waiting. And he never shows up.”
Alva grinned, “Mostly we hang out near the studio.”
“We think we know where he’s going today.”
“Yesterday for two hours he sat on his bike in front of the apartment of that girl who died?”
“Lydia Plummer?” I exclaimed.
They shook their heads: “No, Carisa Krausse. Just sat there. We sat far away and watched him sit there. He looked so sad. He never moved.”
“How do you know he’s going there now?”
“We don’t, but he’s headed like in that direction.”
With that they scampered off to a battered car, fenders bent and antenna crumpled. In seconds they were lumbering past. A squeaky horn blew. Alva waved. They were deliriously happy. And decidedly insane. The by-product of a world of celluloid and ticket-stub heartache.
I wondered. Maybe. Just maybe.
At the studio gates, where a small gaggle of autograph-seeking tourists routinely gathered, a vender hawked Glamorland maps of the homes of the stars. I commandeered a yellow cab. I recalled Carisa’s street, not the number, but figured, once there, I’d know where to go, though the driver looked none too happy with that destination. This was foolhardy, I told myself, and surely a waste of time. But I was not concerned with tracking Jimmy-no, I was curious about Alva and Alyce Strand. Simpletons maybe, but something one of them said-Sometimes we sit for hours-intrigued me. I needed to talk to the freakish pair. Perhaps they were the elusive, unexamined witnesses to some key evidence. Perhaps they were the truly bit players in the awful Hollywood caper.
The cab cruised to a stop at the corner of Carisa’s block and I spotted Jimmy in front of Carisa’s apartment, perched on his bike, just sitting there, arms folded, looking asleep, head bent. Surely, I wondered, he can’t sit there for hours? An odd sight: the melancholy mourner, keeping watch. The last keener at the funeral. I paid the fare and got out, a matter of feet from Jimmy.
He was watching me, even though his head was bowed. I walked up to him, feeling especially foolish in the ungainly red sunbonnet, all those bluebells on it, an old lady carrying a purse and wearing a dress I actually bought to wear to the Bucks County summerhouse of Dick and Dorothy Rodgers. It was a frilly wide-skirted cotton smock, with redundant periwinkles aplenty. And here, in down-and-out Skid Row, the stench of greasy food from a hot dog stand, and nearby the burned-out shell of an old car, windows smashed and resting on axles-I looked stupendously out of place. It’s the hat, I thought. Why am I wearing this horrible hat? Passersby might see me as a mad homeless woman who’d doubtless rifled through some abandoned chest of period finery and emerged on the street to scream at the endless flow of traffic.
“Jimmy.”
He shook his head back and forth. “Miss Edna, you really do surprise a boy.”
“It’s you who surprises.”
Quizzical, raised eyebrows, eyeglasses slipping down his nose, “Yeah?”
“Loitering here in front of Carisa’s apartment. It’s a little macabre, no?”
“I find it’s a good place for me to think about things.”
“What things?” I drew closer. I noticed he was sweating.
“Lydia.”
“So you come here to mourn Lydia?”
“It all started here.”
“What did?”
“Carisa dead, Lydia dead. Things happen in threes, you know. Am I going to be the third?” He stared up and down the street, as though watching for someone.
“Why do you say that?”
“What is the thread that goes from Carisa to Lydia to me?”
“Why does there have to be a thread?”
He sighed. “I don’t want to talk about this.” He stared up at Carisa’s window. “Not here. This is where I come to be quiet.” Abruptly, he started the bike, and a dissonant, coughing roar deafened me. I backed up and he raced away, pulling into traffic so abruptly a car slammed on brakes. A horn blared. The driver, a boy with sideburns and a duck’s-ass haircut, screamed at me, “Your son’s an asshole.”
My son. My beloved son. “True,” I answered, calmly, touching my eccentric hat. “This wasn’t what his father and I hoped he’d become.”
The driver, startled, gave me the finger and sped on.
I do so love L.A., I told myself.
“Can you believe that driver?” a voice yelled, and I jumped out of my skin. Alva and Alyce Strand were beside me, so close I could smell their garlicky breaths.
“Are you going to chase Jimmy now?” I didn’t know which one to look at.
“Why?”
“Well, I want to talk to you.” I spotted a restaurant across the street. “Can I buy you lunch, a soda, something?”
They looked at each other. “No.” They turned away.
“I want to share stories about James with you.”
Swiveling to face me, they beamed. I saw a bubble of drool at the corner of Alva’s mouth. I feared they might hug me.
The restaurant was a seedy, dimly-lit eatery, more hash-house tavern than hamburger haven, with a weathered oak bar and a few rickety tables by the front window. In back, through a partition of suspended beads, was a dance room, with a jukebox. Empty now at midday, the place probably thrived at night, derelict though it was. I’d never know. It was called Ruth’s Grill, and the daytime menu consisted of hot dogs and cheap Mexican food. The nighttime menu over the bar listed rib-eye steak and barbecued chicken. The Strands and I took a table by the window, and Alva said the hotdogs were wonderful, but suggested we skip the enchiladas. I had no desire to sample any of the offerings. They’d spent hours sitting there, they confessed, nursing lemon phosphates while waiting to see whether James Dean would show up to visit Carisa Krausse.
I ordered a coffee but its resemblance to the La Brea Tar Pits suggested I’d best leave it untouched.
It was easy to entertain the bubbly twins, at least for a few minutes, while they dipped and twisted in the chairs, constantly gazing out the grimy window, as though Jimmy might return. I regaled them with an innocent-and largely fictitious-take on Jimmy’s horseplay, his zany life. No violation of privacy. I’d garnered all of it from the exaggerated press releases Warner’s supplied to Hedda Hopper and others of her ilk. The Strand twins, though they probably already knew (and relished) every morsel, nevertheless begged for more. After all, here was a legitimate companion of James Dean, the novelist herself, authoress of Giant and other works they’d never heard of. And I called him Jimmy.