I could almost see her in her black skirt and green weskit and gloves, disappearing into the golden fog and emerging on a Hollywood Boulevard full of cars and palm trees and lined with rehearsal halls full of mirrors.
“Anything’s Possible,” the voice-over roared.
The Marilyn was on her feet again and weaving toward the back wall.
“Not that way,” I said, and sprinted after her.
It was a good thing she hadn’t been headed for the screens this time — I’d never have made it. By the time I got to her, she was banging on the wall with both fists.
“Let me off!” she shouted. “This is my stop!”
“The way off’s this way,” I said, trying to turn her, but she must have been doing rave. Her arm was like iron.
“I have to get off here,” she said, pounding with the flat of her hands. “Where’s the door?”
“The door’s that way,” I said, wondering if this was how I had been the night Alis brought me home from Burbank. “You can’t get off this way.”
“She did,” she said.
I looked at the back wall and then back at her. “Who did?”
“She did,” she said. “She went right through the door. I saw her,” and puked all over my feet.
MOVIE CLICHE #12: The Moral. A character states the obvious, and everybody gets the point.
SEE: The Wizard of Oz, Field of Dreams, Love Story, What’s New, Pussycat?
I got the Marilyn off at Wilshire and took her to rehab, by which time she’d pretty much pumped her own stomach, and waited to make sure she checked in.
“Are you sure you’ve got time to do this?” she said, looking less like Marilyn and more like Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver.
“I’m sure.” There was plenty of time, now that I knew where Alis was.
While she was filling out paperwork, I accessed Vincent. “I have a question,” I said without preamble. “What if you took a frame and substituted an identical frame? Could that get past the fibe-op ID-locks?”
“An identical frame? What would be the point of that?”
“Could it?”
“I guess,” he said. “Is this for Mayer?”
“Yeah,” I said. “What if you substituted a new image that matched the original? Could the ID-locks tell the difference?”
“Matched?”
“A different image that’s the same.”
“You’re splatted,” he said, and signed off.
It didn’t matter. I already knew the ID-locks couldn’t tell the difference. It would take too much memory. And, as Vincent had said, what would be the point of changing an image to one exactly like it?
I waited till the Marilyn was in a bed and getting a ridigaine IV and then got back on the skids. After LaBrea there was nobody on them, but it took me till three-thirty to find the service door to the shut-off section and past five to get it open.
I was worried for a while that Alis had braced it shut, which she had, but not intentionally. One of the fibe-op feed cables was up against it, and when I finally got the door open a crack, all I had to do was push.
She was facing the far wall, looking at the screen that should have been blank in this shut-off section. It wasn’t. In the middle of it, Peter Lawford and June Allyson were demonstrating the Varsity Drag to a gymnasium full of college students in party dresses and tuxes. June was wearing a pink dress and pink heels with pompoms, and so was Alis, and their hair was curled under in identical blond pageboys.
Alis had set the Digimatte on top of its case, with the compositor and pixar beside it on the floor, and snaked the fibe-op cable along the yellow warning strip and around in front of the door to the skids feed. I pushed the cable out from the door, gently, so it wouldn’t break the connection, and opened the door far enough so I could see, and then stood, half-hidden by it, and watched her.
“Down on your heels,” Peter Lawford instructed, “up on your toes,” and went into a triple step. Alis, holding a remote, ff’d past the song and stopped where the dance started, and watched it, her face intent, counting the steps. She rew’d to the end of the song. She punched a button and everyone froze in midstep.
She walked rapidly in the silly high-heeled shoes to the rear of the skids, out of reach of the frame, and pressed a button. Peter Lawford sang, ” — that’s how it goes.”
Alis set the remote down on the floor, her full-skirted dress rustling as she knelt, and then hurried back to her mark and stood, obscuring June Allyson except for one hand and a tail of the pink skirt, waiting for her cue.
It came, Alis went down on her heels, up on her toes, and into a Charleston, with June behind her from this angle like a twin, a shadow. I moved over to where I could see her from the same angle as the Digimatte’s processor. June Allyson disappeared, and there was only Alis.
I had expected June Allyson to be wiped from the screen the way Princess Leia had been for the tourates’ scene at A Star Is Born, but Alis wasn’t making vids for the folks back home, or even trying to project her image on the screen. She was simply rehearsing, and she had only hooked the Digimatte up to feed the fibe-op loop through the processor because that was the way she’d been taught to use it at work. I could see, even from here, that the “record” light wasn’t on.
I retreated to the half-open door. She was taller than June Allyson, and her dress was a brighter pink than June’s, but the image the Digimatte was feeding back into the fibe-op loop was the corrected version, adjusted for color and focus and lighting. And on some of these routines, practiced for hours and hours in these shut-off sections of the skids, done and redone and done again, that corrected image had been so close to the original that the ID-locks didn’t catch it, so close Alis’s image had gotten past the guards and onto the fibe-op source. And Alis had managed the impossible.
She flubbed a turn, stopped, clattered over to the remote in her pompomed heels, rew’d to the middle section just before the flub, and froze it. She glanced at the Digimatte’s clock and then punched a button and hurried back to her mark.
She only had another half hour, if that, and then she would have to dismantle this equipment and take it back to Hollywood Boulevard, set it up, open up shop. I should let her. I could show her the opdisk another time, and I had found out what I wanted to know. I should shut the door and leave her to rehearse. But I didn’t. I leaned against the door, and stood there, watching her dance.
She went through the middle section three more times, working the clumsiness out of the turn, and then rew’d to the end of the song and went through the whole thing. Her face was intent, alert, the way it had been that night watching the Continental, but it lacked the delight, the rapt, abandoned quality of the Beguine.
I wondered if it was because she was still learning the routine, or if she would ever have it. The smile June Allyson turned on Peter Lawford was pleased, not joyful, and the “Varsity Drag” number itself was only so-so. Hardly Cole Porter.
It came to me then, watching her patiently go over the same steps again and again, as Fred must have done, all alone in a rehearsal hall before the movie had even begun filming, that I had been wrong about her.
I had thought that she believed, like Ruby Keeler and ILMGM, that anything was possible. I had tried to tell her it wasn’t, that just because you want something doesn’t mean you can have it. But she had already known that, long before I met her, long before she came to Hollywood. Fred Astaire had died the year she was born, and she could never, never, never, in spite of VR and computer graphics and copyrights, dance the Beguine with him.