Chapter Seven
They would be filming at Ojai. Jacy decided to drive out there at night, which proved to be a mistake. Movie makers often chose the desert for filming extra-terrestrial sequences because it could so easily be made to look other worldly. The landscape looked the same for miles in every direction, however and even with the help of highway signs, she lost her bearings. Twice she had to stop at sleepy little gas stations and ask for directions.
The production company had provided a grouping of Quonset hut type structures for the cast. Jacy found hers small and cozy, little more than a bedroom with a kitchenette attached. When she lay down for the night, she thought about Warberg’s comments from the other night. Didn’t like men? Was it just his ridiculous opinion or an even more absurd rumor that had cost her jobs in the past? And what difference did it make? She had managed to remain single but it wasn’t for lack of opportunity. She received at least seven marriage proposals per year, not counting the dozens that streamed in continually through the mail. The mental torture of it exhausted her and she soon fell asleep.
She dreaded coming face-to-face with Warberg again the next morning at the script conference. As drunk as he was, he may not even remember their conversation. So she chose to act as if it had never happened. In the trailer office adjoining the sound stage a catering company had delivered a breakfast spread with Danishes, pastries, donuts, sliced pineapple and orange sections along with gleaming urns of coffee. Warberg was crouched down helping himself to a cup. When he noticed her looking down at him he looked up and smiled weakly.
In the double-wide trailer they had placed long folding tables and chairs in a square pattern. Rohrig, Warberg, a couple of writers and a casting girl Jacy had never met sat at the front beneath a simplex clock with a large white face and bold, foreboding hands. “First order of business,” Rohrig said “is that we welcome Miss Jacy Rayner as our newest cast member.” Everyone applauded. “Now as you can see,” he went on, “we have the scripts hot off the presses. These will carry us through a couple of episodes. But today we have to think of where we will go with our new Empress Tigra character. Where will she take us?”
A long silence followed, causing Jacy to shift uncomfortably, glancing at the clock. She looked at Warberg and Rohrig. She noticed a slight riffle of anxiety cross the director’s craggy features before Warberg offered: “Powerful. Bold. Yet with a soft, vulnerable side.”
Jacy allowed a chuckle to escape. “Are we talking about the ruler of an entire planet,” she asked “or the head of the PTA?”
Warberg squinted when he looked back at her. “Haven’t you read any of the script?
She’s secretly in love with Vantage. I realize you’d probably want to play her as an icy, methodical war monger. Or mongress, whatever the right word is.”
“She has to be pure evil,” Jacy said, “but she can also be sensual.” She had crossed her legs and kicked the top foot out at the director and the male lead, allowing her slip-on pump to dangle off her toe. Rohrig looked down at her legs.
“I don’t know exactly what you’re getting at,” Warberg said, “but it won’t work.”
“Why not? It could shake things up.”
“We have sponsors,” Rohrig put in. “The viewers will be able to relate to the story of romance triumphing over conflict. Over disagreements. Over differences.”
“Like ‘The Taming of the Shrew’?”
The men in the room looked at each other.
“Have you guys looked at a calendar recently? This is the sixties. Things are changing. Viewers are changing. They’re not going to buy this Flash Gordon stuff. You know who your viewers are? Kids. Young people. Teenagers and twenty-somethings who are terrified that a bunch of paranoid congressmen are going to force them to go to war on the other side of the world. No. Tigra’s going to be pure evil.” She had been gesturing with her rolled-up script copy, but once she said her piece she slapped the stack of papers down onto the tabletop. Then silence.
Jacy noticed small veins flaring on the sides of Warberg’s temples. His brow furrowed and he raised a finger, starting to speak. Rohrig reached out with an arm to quell him. On her director’s face she saw the same smug smirk they always wore just before wielding their power.
“Jacy, what project were you on before you came here?” Rohrig asked.
His use of her original name disoriented her. She shrugged, replying “You know. That cowboy movie in Italy. Some guy named Clint Eastwood was in it.”
Rohrig nodded, gazing thoughtfully toward the ceiling while Warberg looked agitated, his lips and tongue active. “And what was it before that?” he went on.
“You know. The Steven Blade thing. Do you mind if I ask where we are headed with all of this?”
Rohrig smiled. “Before Steven Blade. What were you doing?”
Jacy sighed. “I was on Broadway. And I did a few guest shots.”
“When were you on Broadway, hon?”
“You must know. What point are you trying to make?”
“Which couple of years?”
“Okay,” she sighed. “‘59 and ‘60. You must be trying to tell me that I don’t have any business coming in her and telling you how we should do the character.”
“Well, we want you to be happy. We want our sponsors to be happy. And most of all we want our viewers to be happy. We’ve thought this through in lots of detail, and we feel that once you’ve been with us for awhile and you’re comfortable with the character, then we’ll welcome your input and suggestions for furthering her.”
“I should hope so. I’m going to be the one playing her.”
“But for now, we’ll proceed according to plan. Are we on the same page now?”
Jacy paused long enough to notice Rohrig lean in to her slightly. “Yes,” she said softly.
Rohrig clasped his hands together. “Okay, it’s settled,” he said, patting the script copy. “Let’s get on with it..”
They only had to go over a few more items and then the conference was over. Jacy had sat in the chair nearest to the door. Just as she cleared the threshold and the door started to close behind her, she heard Warberg hiss “God damn it! Why doesn’t she just do what she’s told?”
Out on the blacktop she lowered down into the driver’s seat of her convertible and slid behind the wheel. Just as she inserted the key into the ignition, a shadow crossed over her arms and lap. The mid-day sun turned him into a silhouette, but she could recognize Neil Neiman’s form standing over her. “Hi,” she said.
“What you did in there, it took guts. Rohrig was impressed.”
“Thanks.” She twisted the key, hearing the first metallic grunts of the ignition.
“I mean it,” Neil persisted. The engine kicked in, and he had to talk over it to finish the thought. “It may not look like it, but he was impressed.”
“We’ll see.” She gunned the engine and her tires kicked up gravel while she sped toward the wardrobe trailer on the other side of the sound stage. When she parked over there she entered the flimsy door of the structure and a few seamstresses and a heavyset woman stirred behind a counter, as if they had been expecting her. At the end of the counter she saw a mannequin with a leopard skin suit draped over it. A helmet-like headpiece perched atop the head. Jacy approached it and ran her fingers over the material, studying it.
A small woman, whom she later learned was the department head, cringed, sheepishly looking up at Jacy from behind bespectacled eyes. Pointing at the headpiece, Jacy said “Where’s my hair supposed to come out of this thing?” She stood on tiptoe to glance around it and discovered that it was a hood, attached to a cape.
The wardrobe head glanced at one of her assistants, a mousy girl with auburn hair and wide, pale blue eyes looked at each other. “Well there is no opening,” she said.
Jacy let go of the head piece and it dropped down onto the linoleum floor, the cape fluttering after it. “I want to be able to use my hair,” she said, softly. “Do I even need a head p
iece at all?”
“Well, the character’s name is Empress Tigra,” the department head said meekly.
“Then I could just wear ears, couldn’t I?”
The wardrobe head shrugged, and her eyes dilated behind the thick glasses. “You’re going to have to take that up with the costume designer.”
“Well then get the costume designer in here.”
Moments later a foppish looking man with a big belly and hands raised in a defensive gesture of exaggerated daintiness entered the room. His name was Rick and brought along the rest of the costume. It featured built-up shoulders on a jacket-like bodice and stripes running from the outside downward.
To emphasize her point by flicking a finger at it, Jacy said “I’m not wearing this.”
Rick said “Per Mr. Rohrig, there has to be a crown and there has to be shoulder embellishments as an indicator of rank.”
“I’m the ruler of an entire planet,” she said. “Who gives a hang about my rank?”
Rick shrugged. “Well it’s what he wanted. You’ll have to ask him why.”
“If he wants a rank,” she said, “I’ll sew them on somewhere.”
Rick flashed a confused, knitted brow look. He glanced at the uniform he held in his arms, with the sewn-on appliqués. “What do you mean?”
“I’ll make my own costume.”
Rick’s lip quivered ineffectually while his pale eyes widened. “You can’t do that. There’s only two days until rehearsal. Rohrig won’t like it.”
“Oh well,” Jacy said. She strode out of the building and jumped into her convertible, trying to remember the best fabric people and costume designers she knew of, envisioning the Empress’ costume. How did they know what an Empress was supposed to look like, she thought. A pie-plate space ship that could travel at the speed of light and across the boundaries of time? Machines that could scramble a human body into a mass of electrical charges, transmit them over thousands of miles, then reassemble them at a new location?
Later in the afternoon she wound up at Gilda’s shop in Burbank. She had found bolts of two-way stretch nylon in a muted, tan-and-black striped pattern which pleased the eye much more than the shocking orange bodice they’d tried to foist on her at wardrobe. Years before, Gilda had literally sewn Jacy into the patchwork maillot she’d worn in the Broadway show “Howie in the Hills.” This time she handed her the fabric and said “Just make it into a body stocking. Gilda gestured her to step onto a platform so she could get measurements. She called out numbers in Creole to a pigtailed teenaged girl with a writing pad. “Put all the seams in the back,” Jacy said. “Dip the neckline a little low, but not too.”
Gilda knelt down beside her, shaking her head while she wrapped the measuring tape around Jacy’s calf. “I’m not sure the country is ready for this,” she said.