“These letters seem to be her new exercise in bad timing.” I paused. “Come to the meeting with me,” I said, abruptly.
Mercy laughed. “No, no, no. Oh Lord no. Old Man Warner would flip to see me, a supporting actress, at his table uninvited. You know, when he calls meetings in his own bungalow, no one sits to his immediate left or right, fearful he might ask a question they can’t answer. Sorry, Edna, report back to this private citizen when you leave.” She laughed again, enjoying the moment.
That didn’t make me happy. “Will you be at the studio later today?”
“Yes. Late morning. No shooting today. You’re scheduled to do photo sessions with journalists. Smiling with Rock, schmoozing with Liz, dancing with Jimmy, philosophizing with little old homespun me.”
I groaned. “A wasted day.”
“Don’t you like to have your picture taken?”
Sitting in Warner’s conference room, a Spartan arrangement of long table and straight-backed chairs, with grainy photographs of forgotten movies on one of the walls, I surveyed the group of officious men gathered around me. The War Council, I deemed them: perfunctory, dull-eyed men, in crisp seersucker suits, some with barricades of briefcases and derby hats situated before them. Each man rigid of spine-faces cleared of liveliness, blood. Men who looked like front-office accountants or junior-level bankers; men who looked as though they desired to be elsewhere. Glancing at his wristwatch, one man flicked a piece of inconvenient lint from a sleeve; another seemingly developed an early tic; another man, as round as a bowling ball, with rubicund face, scratched a red, balding, flaked scalp. And the one other woman, Tansi, seated at my right, sprightly this morning in a pastel print dress, white daisies against a light blue cloth, with a string of tiny pearls choking her neck. She looked ready for a picnic.
She nodded at the men, like a hand puppet with loose wiring at the neck. They ignored her. And I suddenly understood Tansi’s nervousness, her twitching. The lone woman in the den of dismissive, self-important men, a woman who’d gained a modicum of Hollywood power, but would never be given equal billing in any of these men’s worlds. I certainly understood that deplorable state: all my life I’d battled the disregard of unimaginative men in power, grotesque lumpen souls who guffawed at their own unfunny lines, who thought their tired insights original. Tansi, when I knew her in New York, the fresh young Barnard graduate, was delightfully cynical, witty, downright funny. So the world of men had hammered that out of her, obviously. On the quicksand battlefield she’d floundered, surrendered. She wasn’t a Dorothy Parker who could best the men she encountered. She wasn’t Jane Addams or Eleanor Roosevelt. She wasn’t, well, Edna Ferber, who brooked no attitude from these lesser lights. I’d have to talk to Tansi about that. Men could be beaten at their own game-you just had to tell yourself it was easy to win.
Seated next to George Stevens, Jake Geyser was speaking, his public voice not East Coast Princeton now but, jumping the Atlantic, decidedly British aristocracy. I concluded he’d been an actor as a young man, probably a servant in those tiresome, English drawing-room comedies. Jake was reviewing the letters, and Warner watched him closely.
“Mr. Warner,” he said, nodding to the boss, “wants to review what we know-have done. About this mess.” He hung on the words, as though they were an unwelcome sentence come down from the Spanish Inquisition. “I’ve telephoned Carisa Krausse again, but the conversation was…unsuccessful.”
“What the hell does that mean?” said Warner. Everyone jumped.
Jake kept going, feebly. “I’ve visited her.” He grinned. “She doesn’t live in a desirable neighborhood. We all know Skid Row-at least from the newscasts-all the drunks, the prostitutes, the pawnshops. I was afraid to park my car.” Kaaaah, he said. Beacon Hill Boston now, perhaps. Lord, he was a smorgasbord of dictions.
“And?” Prompting from Warner.
“Frankly, sir, she’s hard to read. I think a little mad.” Uncomfortable, he looked around the room, as though for support. Nothing, obviously, had been done. “I’m trying to understand what she wants.”
George Stevens thundered, “She wants to sink my movie!” He actually leaned into Jake, who inclined his body away.
“I’m not so sure. I get the sense she’ll go away if she gets what she wants.”
“What, marriage to James Dean?” Tansi offered timidly.
Jake ran his tongue over his lower lip. “She’s hard to read, as I say. She…her conversation is all over the place. I was uncomfortable sitting in her rooms. She lives like a packrat, papers everywhere, clothing strewn about. I felt at one point she’d attack me. I’d have to call the police, but you said,” to Warner, “whatever I do, keep the cops away from this.”
Back and forth. Balderdash, rehashing familiar ground, struggling to find an answer. The toady as purveyor of codswallop.
I interrupted, impatient. “Your letter, Jack?”
Warner looked at me, and seemed surprised I’d spoken-and didn’t look pleased. “Largely illiterate scribbling. I’d like to know who hired her for Marfa, frankly. She doesn’t even punctuate her sentences.”
“I don’t think parsing sentences is why we’re here.” Folderol, I thought, a waste of time.
He held up his hand. “Carisa’s letter to me, like her new letter to Jimmy, outside of its ebb-and-flow grammar, threatens exposure to Confidential magazine. Just an off-hand threat so far, no contact with those bastards. It seems Confidential has tired of beating the Hollywood blacklist to death and even all those racial scandals-what Negro is wooing what white beauty, what blond starlet Sammy Davis is bedding at the moment-and is going after other sordid indiscretion. So I guess Carisa knows that. And, I gather, Jimmy likes to…” he glanced at me, then Tansi, himself now the decorous, polite gentleman…“have his fun.”
Nincompoopism, Hollywood style, dictatorship masquerading as consensus, ending an hour later. “Edna has to meet the press,” Warner announced. Staring at Jake, he told him to take care of business. Jake, his diction suddenly sounding more South Jersey shore than Oxford, sputtered, “I’ll do my best.” The wrong answer, surely, for Warner squinted his eyes and his face got red. I knew Jake’s next job would be waiting tables at Don the Beachcomber, dishing out the moo shoo pork.
As the room cleared out, Warner signaled me to stay. He wanted a “quick word.” He confided, “A bump in the road, Edna, really.” Then Stevens and Warner both spoke at me, edgy, trying to play down the incident. I wanted to get away, frankly. Warner grumbled, “I gave orders for everyone to keep their mouths shut.” Emphatic, deliberate.
I found myself contrasting the two important men. The first time I’d met them, that dinner at Romanoff’s, I’d been intrigued: Stevens, the beefy, affable sort, and Warner, the slender, controlled businessman. They seemed to circle around each other, like cobra and mongoose, respectful but aware that life shifts in a flash. Stevens, for all his blustery confidence, struck me as an overgrown schoolboy, happy with a camera he got for Christmas. Warner, keeping his distance, appeared the grammar-school principal, watching, wary. When he moved, he always seemed to be positioning himself. He’s the director here, I thought. The man conscious of angle and perspective.
Now, both men leaned into me, anxious. Stevens bristled, then blustered, talking loudly, and seemed intimidated by me. But Warner fascinated me, unhappily so; he seemed to speak in a deadly, unlovely drone, matter-of-fact, and, for some reason, he spoke over my shoulder, as to a person behind me. Worse, his eyes suddenly focused-drilling into me-when the subject was the bottom line, the money I’d invested in the movie. Oddly, I thought of a villain out of a nineteenth-century stage melodrama. I sighed. These two men would never be friends in any world other than Hollywood.