“Not everyone. And I have a poor track record with deranged women. Some of your other friends know her better. Lydia, for one.”
“God, no,” Jimmy moaned.
Tansi turned to me. “Jimmy just broke up with Lydia, also in the movie. Lydia Plummer.”
I smiled, “You certainly do move through a crowd, Jimmy.”
He didn’t answer. “Madama…”
Mercy, firm, rigid. “Jimmy, if talking to Carisa would help, I would. But she’s obviously got some obsession here. And what if there really is a baby?” Jimmy shook his head, denying the possibility. “Let Jake Geyser and Jack Warner take care of this. They have experience with this kind of tomfoolery. After all, need I point out, Hollywood is built on blackmail and threats and rumor? They must have ideas, no?”
Tansi lit a cigarette. “I agree. Stay away from her. If the press got wind of this, my God! It’ll go away. It has to. Jimmy’s name must be kept-well, pure.”
Jimmy’s eyes got wide. “Pure?” Sarcasm in his voice; bewilderment. He looked at Tansi, and I realized he didn’t care for her. Worse, he probably rarely knew she was in the room, this drab, pencil-thin woman with fluttery nerves and bird-like gestures.
“Yes, pure. Like it or not. My job is to secure your image.”
Jimmy made a sudden click-click-click sound, his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Madama,” he pleaded.
I looked at her. “Mercy, you seem so set in this matter. Is there something you’re not saying?”
Mercy just shook her head.
“But if this-this Carisa knows you…”
Tansi looked horrified. “Edna, my God. I can’t believe you’d suggest talking to this woman. This is like stoking a fire. Making her think we’re taking this seriously.”
“We have to take it seriously,” I insisted.
Tansi wasn’t happy. “She’s a failed actress living in tenement in the worst neighborhood in L.A. Out of a job, nothing. Should we send a Warner Bros. limo to her doorstep?”
Jimmy, restless, zipped up the red jacket to his neck, stood and looked down at us. A little unsteadily, he backed up, toppling a chair, and, in a melodramatic gesture, he moved his hand out toward us, a slicing gesture, cutting-a signal of leaving. He backed off, and disappeared through the kitchen.
In my darkened suite at the Ambassador, I lay in bed, unable to sleep. This was to have been a celebratory visit to Hollywood. My arrival during the final days of shooting, the ceremonial gesture of Jack Warner and George Stevens, who’d already confided that the film was wonderful-a blockbuster, they promised. A Hollywood high mark; enduring, legendary. But now this. I closed my eyes. Images of Jimmy Dean at the dinner table, the swagger, the pouting, the enigmatic shifts in conversation. My God, this debacle of the poison letters. Probably a cavalier Casanova violating this poor woman’s trust. A gigolo. A failed actress with the impossible name of Carisa Krausse playing a sullen Mexican servant in my movie. Jimmy Dean, this girl and that. Kiss this girl, hug that one. Leave them behind. The pretty boy hero, girls strewn at his ankles like leaves swirling at the base of an autumn tree. Look at Tansi, wormwood spinster with crimson nail polish, eyes aflutter; that sensible woman I’d known as a young girl. Even Mercy, another smiling supplicant. Even me. Caught by him, fascinated by the enigma, entangled now. Something wrong about the boy. Whole parts of him left untouched, ignored, avoided. Well, it was Jack Warner’s problem, and that toady Jake Geyser-another simpering fool. Let…
The phone rang. I jumped, glanced at the clock. Midnight. Twelve o’clock. Three a.m. back in New York, where I belonged among the cosmopolites. In my own bed on the Upper East Side. I fumbled at the nightstand.
“Hello.”
Silence.
Louder. “Hello.”
A sputter. “Well, I was telling you the truth, Miss Edna.”
My head cleared. “Jimmy?”
I heard him clear his throat, then a stifled snort. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s all right.”
“Do you believe me?”
In the darkness of the room, everything around me unfamiliar, I listened to the tinny, faraway voice. For a second I imagined I was hearing a little boy’s voice, so high and breaking; wavering, pleading. Startled, I found myself breathing hard. “Jimmy.”
“Something horrible is gonna happen, Miss Edna.”
“Like what?”
Silence. “When people push me, things happen.”
I felt a chill up my spine.
“You know, I don’t know how I’m supposed to take care of things by myself. Everybody expects me to make it on my own. I can’t do this on my own. They don’t realize…” The words stopped abruptly. I heard noise behind him, not too far away-drunken revelry, shrill laughter, a snatch of jukebox music. Papa loves mambo. Mama loves mambo. Bar noises.
“Jimmy…”
Then I realized the line was dead.
Chapter 3
As I sipped tepid coffee and munched on dry cinnamon toast in the coffee shop the next morning, I was paged and found myself talking to Jack Warner. Idly, I’d been reviewing the breakfast served me at the posh Ambassador. I’d already returned the pancakes, deeming them desiccated shoulder pads from an abandoned Joan Crawford dress. I’d maintained the milk for the coffee had turned, the butter clotted, lumpy and discolored. I’d resigned myself to anemic toast and decided breakfast would have to wait until New York-Molly’s toothsome French toast, made from thick slabs of homemade bread, with real maple syrup the color of precious amber. Out of season strawberries, plump and scarlet and juicy, probably flown in from California. All my life, I thought suddenly, I travel, travel, travel; all my life I want to hurry back to New York City, where, staring out from the fifteenth floor, I announce royally that I despise it to the marrow of my being. Well, we always hate the thing we love too much.
Jack Warner, crisp and authoritarian on the phone, said there was a meeting at ten. His office. He said he’d provide breakfast. I winced.
“Something’s come up,” he said.
“I know about the letters to Jimmy Dean.”
“I know you do,” he said, flatly. “I’m sorry, Edna. It’ll be handled promptly.”
Promptly? The first letter arrived three or four days earlier. What passes for promptitude out here in the land of lights, camera, inaction? “Jimmy says she’s lying about the…” I looked around, glancing at the other diners, themselves intent on wolfing down indigestible and sickly gray eggs…“matter. At hand.”
I could almost hear Warner smoking-the intake of cigarette smoke, the raspy cough. “Things are different now. I got a letter yesterday,” he said. “This one was addressed to me.”
Back in my room I dialed Mercy’s number. Though she lived with her husband outside L.A., Mercy was subletting a small efficiency near the Burbank studios. A convenience, she said. She despised the expansive L.A. freeways, jumbled with traffic most mornings and afternoons; she dreaded the dreary fogs that sometimes settled in during the late summers, a haze that covered the steamy avenues. She liked her hideaway, a stone’s throw from the soundstage. She answered on the first ring, and I told her about Warner’s call. “I’m not surprised Carisa has the nerve to include Warner in her scheme,” Mercy said. “One night, after sipping too much brandy at some party, she told me the only way to make it in this business was to get to know Jack Warner himself. She said she had his private home number, but was saving it. She had big plans.”
“She was already an actress.”
Mercy scoffed. “You’re using the word generously, Edna.”
“But she got roles.”
“No, Edna, like most bit players, she was just there-like a newspaper left on a breakfast table.”
“So she thought she had a future?”
“What bit player doesn’t? She said all she had to do was fall into his path, and he’d spot her talent.” Mercy chortled. “She thought discovery was the art of timing.”