“It’s back in your camper, Miss DeMott. Shall I run get it?” She had her own attendants now—her own hairdresser, Leonore, and her personal secretary, Paulette.
Zinnemann was still enthusiastic; his violinist’s hands fluttered, and his Viennese accent peeked through. “Vat a goot shport you are. But you nailed it, guaranteed. It’s in the can. Sound says it may have heard a crackle in the boom mike; if we need you to loop, keep your voice down like it was, husky. Piano, but not pianissimo. Like you are shpeaking for your own brain to hear.”
Alma loved the craft of it, using her body with a detached precision, walking to a spot marked with tape without looking at it and saying just the same thing she had said ten times before, and putting the identical passion and verve into it, where she could see her co-stars flagging, getting tired and impatient, losing tempo and relatedness. She felt, coiffed and in costume and make-up, encased in a fine and flexible but impermeable armor; the bright island of make-believe, surrounded by scaffolding and wiring and the silhouettes of those many technicians who operated the equipment, was a larger container, a well-lit spaceship carrying her and the other actors into an immortal safety, beyond change and harm. A cosmic attention beat on her skin as when she was a child God had watched her every move, recorded her every prayer and yearning, nothing unnoticed, the very hairs on her head numbered, Essie and the sparrows sold two for a farthing all over Delaware, brown sparrows rustling in the sparrow-colored underbrush. She had been lifted up from the underbrush to this heaven and she blazed with the miracle of it.
The camera missed no tremor, no blink, no nuance of facial tightening. Nothing was unobserved; even her unconscious thoughts poured out through her skin, her eyes. Though she delved within herself for emotion, she was by training anti-Method; at the school on West Fifty-seventh Street the emphasis had been on outward gesture, the body as a succession of clear signals. “Move distinctly,” one of her instructors, the strictest, Professor Berthoff, would repeatedly say. “Move intelligibly. The audience must know immediately exactly what you are doing. There is no room on the stage for the uncertain, ambiguous movements that in real life we make all the time.” Essie had wondered why anything in real life should be excluded from the stage, but then, when she became Alma, she saw that this clarity makes a refuge for the actors and audience both, lifting them up from fumbling reality into a reality keener and more efficient but not less true. Even the face: acting for the camera, in close-up, was facial athletics, with eyelids and irises and all those little muscles that form a cat’s-cradle around the mouth. From older, wiser stars she had learned how minimal the athletics can be: it is a star’s privilege to be the still center which the supporting actors swirl about, generating the action. Sometimes, when she couldn’t locate through a tedious succession of takes what the director wanted, she would shut down her memories and think of nothing, and something from God would flow into her face from behind, and Zinnemann or Wilder or Walter Lang would cry out from the darkness around her, “That’s it! You’ve knocked it, Alma. Print!”
With the cry “Print!” she would know that once again her poor precious perishable self as of that exact moment had been—unless the director or editor or producer or some studio higher-up fucked with the footage—transported to a realm beyond time and space, into “the can” and thence into a thousand projectors, into a million hearts as impressionable and innocently magnanimous as hers once had been. Since 1950, by one more of her strokes of good fortune, the industry had switched from film based on cellulose nitrate, intensely flammable and prone to turn into chemical mush in storage, to cellulose acetate, which does not burn and will last theoretically forever. Most of Mary Pickford was lost utterly, but the world would never lose Alma DeMott. She would always be there, in some archive or rerun, in eternal return perennially called back to life.
“How many times did you actually kiss him?” Loretta Whaley breathlessly asked her, on one of her rare visits back to Basingstoke. She was talking of William Holden, in a movie in which Alma had played a war wife who is unfaithful to her husband under the illusion that he has been shot down over Guadalcanal; even though it was an honest mistake, she suffers for it. It was 1957 and Loretta had married Eddie Bacheller six years ago and was the mother of two darling little boys, born so close together she could push them up and down Rodney Street in the same stroller.
“Oh—a hundred.”
“A hundred? How could you stand it?”
“It’s not easy, they keep making you do it over and over again. Sometimes a door slams off the set or the actor hiccups or the dolly pusher misses his cue and it’s not your fault, but you have to go back at it as if kissing this strange man’s face is something worth dying for, ’cause you know that’s what the script calls for, you’re going to die in the last reel.”
“Oh, Essie!—Alma. How does it feel?”
“After a while, like nothing much,” she told her, a bit spitefully. “The older stars are very strict, they never open their mouths, it’s like kissing a zipper; but the younger ones, like Holden, they can French, though the camera isn’t supposed to see too much of it. Like there never should be any spit show.” In some corner of herself she was jealous of Loretta; these two toddlers, round-faced and shiny-eyed, gazed up at their idiotic mother in her cheap polka-dot sundress as though she was half the world. They had Eddie’s cheerful trusting temperament, and that fine apricot-colored hair the Bachellers had. Essie had always rather liked Eddie, not only because his older brother worked as usher in the Roxie. That day on the bleachers she would rather it had been Eddie than Benjy, who had had a mean streak and now was drinking so much, Loretta told her, he had been fired from Sturgis’s Garage; their parents were real upset but couldn’t do a thing with him. Junie Mulholland had married a boy from St. Georges, and Fats Lowe, who had seemed the most stick-at-home meatball possible, living with his drunken mother in a one-story house almost out in Niggertown, had “hit the road,” as he told people, and was out in Oregon somewhere, bumming around and taking drugs, people said. He was going to hell in a handbasket, just like his ma, but over an improved highway.
“I mean,” Loretta insisted, “doesn’t it get you all hot and bothered? I know when Eddie and I—”
Alma didn’t want to hear it; she turned her back, there on the sunstruck sidewalk squares near where Addison’s Drug Store had displayed its two old-fashioned vials of iodine-pink and watery ink-blue. Old Seth’s widow had sold the store to the Rexall chain when he finally died, and the plate-glass window held a curved pyramid of cartons of L & M cigarettes and a cardboard woman in only a towel smilingly holding a Schick electric razor against her bare shin. Alma’s abrupt half-turn of her body felt to her like an invisible scythe extending out into the hazed late-summer sky above Basingstoke. Even naked of her make-up and costumes, she had more definition, more visible edge, than these shapeless shuffling others who had frightened her that day she first went to the movie alone and then, when she came out, looked like a herd of bumbling blind cows. Halfway down Rodney Street, the Roxie had Funny Face on the marquee, and this added to her irritation. Alma had felt snubbed by Audrey Hepburn at one of Joe Mankiewicz’s parties—all that fey European dimply charm, so darling and pure, here in Hollywood for just the lark and the dollars of it. The highly refined Mrs. Ferrer had stiffened when Alma was introduced, and held out, with a flare of her eyes, a slender tentative hand as if a bit fearful of being contaminated by the bushy-haired heroine of gritty movies from King Kong Cohn’s asphalt jungle. From the other side of the industry’s tracks. As if that were all Alma had done and could do. She took it out on Arnie: “If all Cohn can think of for me is one more stripper in one more pathetic Bus Stop–type tearjerker, if all he can think of me is to out–Baby Doll Baby Doll—Why wasn’t I considered for the Natalie Wood part in The Searchers?—I’d look a damn sight less phony in a squaw outfit than she did. Why can’t I do another musical? I can sing rings around that Hepburn. Get me something fluffy.” Th
e complaints and battles rattled on in her head, even here in remote Basingstoke.
“I know when Eddie and I,” Loretta was going on, “are watching television, the boys asleep finally, and we start foolin’ around—”
“Loretta,” Alma said decisively. “Filming a romantic scene isn’t fooling around. It’s work, hard work. Sometimes it takes several days of shooting to get footage from all the angles, to do all they’ll need for the montage. Your main emotion gets to be a feeling of protectiveness toward the guy stuck there with you under all those lights, especially if he’s old enough to be your father. It’s supposed to simulate fucking but you don’t fuck around.” In Hollywood “fuck” didn’t hide in the shadows of the language but named a fundamental process, a common coin of the realm.
Loretta couldn’t be derailed, any more than she could be dissuaded twenty years ago from telling Essie the entire story of One Hundred Men and a Girl. “I mean, what happens if, while you’re stimulating, the guy—?”
“You work around it,” Alma said, grateful to see in the corner of her vision an autograph-seeker approach, with that characteristic hesitant yet inexorable gait.
“Miss DeMott, I don’t mean to intrude into your privacy—”
“Oh, shit, come right ahead,” Alma said, irritated to the point of screaming by thoughts of Audrey Hepburn and Natalie Wood.
“—but I know your folks so well, your father’s been our mailman as long as I can—”
“He’s everybody’s mailman,” Alma told the young man. “He even used to be my mailman.” The interloper held out an old fountain pen. She scrawled her signature, which got bigger every day, over a grubby newspaper clipping from the Wilmington News-Journal he had brought up to her, a ridiculously exaggerated account of the local furor caused by those few seconds of exposure in Safe at Your Peril, something he had saved as a dog saves a grubby slobbered-upon bone; yet she took care to cross the two “t”s. She believed in not letting standards slip—you saw it again and again in Hollywood, a little drinking habit leading to a weight problem and memory gaps, one little pop at lunch leading to a couple and a wasted afternoon on the set for a crew of fifty, an occasional sleeping pill turning into a continual daze, one hack job taken purely for the money starting a director on the skids, one less-than-professional performance tainting an actress’s name throughout the industry. She kept herself professional, trim, sober, taut. Not for nothing was Alma a Calvinist minister’s granddaughter. She looked at her index finger; as she had suspected would happen, the creep’s fountain pen had leaked.
“Jesus, I just loved you in Colored Entrance, but Safe at Your Peril, wow, I think I must have seen it a dozen times—” This was so excessive, even for an enamored fan, that she at last tried to focus on him—he was tall and pale and wet-lipped and made to look even more cretinous by the green plastic sun visor and the plaid Bermuda shorts. You never used to see a grown-up wearing shorts on Rodney Street. The man was young but old enough to know better. His shoulders and arms were sunburned pink, his eyes were pale and apologetic, and she recognized something in him, some fallen distinction: he had a sheepish stale scent of downscaled expectations, of genetic washout. Yes: he looked, only taller and duller and less self-disciplined, like whey-faced Mr. Phillips, who used to own the Basingstoke Savings Bank and was the superintendent of the Sunday school. This must be his son, Wayne Junior, whom Essie had last noticed when he was a lumpish thirteen or so and she was in her senior year, going back and forth to New York. The bank had been absorbed by First Delaware and the son had become an Alma DeMott fan.
“A dozen times?” she said. “Didn’t you get bored?”
“No, Jesus, Alma, never—every time through, I see something new. The way, for instance, in the scene with the gun, with just that little flicker of your eyes, hardly even a flicker, more like a blip in your pupils, I can see you thinking, Well, death wouldn’t be so bad. And then he plugs you, right in the gut.” She had a lot of queers and misfits in her fan club—the same types as were morbidly fascinated by Garland—and at times they irritated her.
“It was very nice to meet you,” she said, in the level tone that sent all but the most deranged stalker packing, and turned her shoulder on him, and again had that sensation of invisible rays from her body sweeping like a scythe across the sky.
Wayne Junior retreated down Elm Street, clutching his carefully scribbled-upon piece of newspaper, but Loretta was still there, demanding her prerogative as one who knew her when—as, indeed, her best friend, insofar as fanatically dreaming Essie had had friends. Standing ignored in the hot sun on the corner across from Pursey’s Notions and Variety Store, her boys in their stroller beginning to whine and quarrel, Loretta had felt snubbed and become spiteful in turn. “And you know, of course,” she told Alma, “about Jamie Ingraham—how he’s married this lovely blonde girl from Brandywine, her father’s very high up in one of the Du Pont divisions. They have a little baby girl already.”
And yes, shrewd stringy-haired overweight Loretta was right, this did hurt, the image of Jamie impregnating a lovely well-born blonde, not in the back seat of his father’s blue Chrysler but in a wide bed blessed by all the powers of church and corporation.
At home, when Alma described, with omissions, her encounters downtown, Momma said, “Yes, poor Wayne is a little impaired. I remember his mother carrying him, Danny was already toddling so you must have been five or so, and there was a scare that Basingstoke Savings would go under to the Depression, and I wonder if that didn’t pinch off the fetus.”
“Mother! What a ridiculous theory!”
“Well,” Momma said, swinging with her infuriating hopping gait around the kitchen table (her limp was getting worse with age) to check on the turkey roasting in the oven, “you haven’t had the experience yet of carrying a child, and believe me there is communication, from about the fifth month. The little thing is listening to your thoughts, and letting you know about it.”
Ama, sitting idle at the table, said in a shaky voice, “Clarence used to say, if the baby cried while being baptized, it meant the parents had a good love life.” Ama had turned ninety in May. Alma had wanted to come to the birthday party, but she was on location in England, doing a tearjerker, But Now Is Forever, set in the American Midwest. Shooting in foreign studios, with smaller foreign crews working at less than Hollywood union scale, had become the latest maneuver in an industry desperate over its dwindling audiences and blockbuster flops. But the outdoor scenes in But Now Is Forever had been plagued by rain, and in any weather the sky was wrong, loaded with hurrying British clouds, and the highways were miscast as American roads, even when all traffic had been blocked off so the rented American automobiles could drive on the right; after the cost of constructing an American-style roadside café and a piece of a spacious Midwestern Main Street had been calculated in, it would have been cheaper to stay on a Burbank sound stage, with a week’s worth of location work in Kansas. Like a gambler growing desperate, the industry was making silly mistakes. Aside from the dismal English weather, Alma had found Frank Capra, aged twenty years since the glory days of Mr. Deeds and Lost Horizon, capricious and corny-minded; the kind of moral ambiguity and wary, wounded pessimism that Alma DeMott represented had no place in his sentimental concept of America. He directed her to lighten up. “Let the audience know you love the bastard, down deep. When sparks fly, that’s love.” Old-hat folk psychology. Alma was tired, in any case, of playing “gutsy,” suffering women; she knew she could do a musical sexier than any that poor dazed Judy or one-dimensional Doris could whip up. Feeling guilty, Alma had run into Harrods and sent off to her ancient grandmother for her birthday present a sumptuous black cashmere greatcoat with wide sleeves, stand-up collar, and slashed pockets. Seeing Ama now, she realized the coat had been not only too stylish but too big; her, remembered as enormous, ancestor had shrunk, and even her head of hair, gray with a few pallid streaks of chestnut, had become skimpier, so the old lady’s scalp showed through in the har
sh overhead kitchen light.
Yet she still made Alma laugh. “Why, Ama, what a racy thing for Grandfather Wilmot to say!”
“Oh, yes,” Ama said, in a voice that if Alma closed her eyes sounded through its quavers like the voice in which Ama used to read little Essie and Mr. Bear their bedtime stories, “he was a normal man. At those church socials back in Jackson Bluffs he had to fight the ladies off, and not all of them unmarried either. He wouldn’t have been one of those who preached against my own sweet granddaughter for showing the whole world what it knew she had anyway, a cute little backside.”
Was this going to be what Alma was remembered for, that fleeting nude scene in Safe at Your Peril? It had roused protests and cost bookings throughout the Bible Belt, though not as many as the interracial kiss in Colored Entrance. It made the star impatient and weary to hear her films mentioned in this her old home; they had been made so far away, in another climate and time zone, and their challenges and triumphs were so hard to grasp without the technical background, and without understanding how embattled and ingeniously self-regarding the art of the cinema was, that she would rather her family would pretend they didn’t exist. It was bad enough for Daddy and Momma to show up dutifully at the Roxie, where they said the heads of the audience these days were sometimes few enough to count, but it carried family piety to an obscene length for them to drag dear shrunken Ama down there, subjecting the ancient lady to two hours of simulated love-frenzy and of the increasingly graphic male violence that was another aspect of Hollywood’s attempt to update its product, to shave away at the Production Code, to offer the public something, besides distorting width and flashy color and blaring stereophonic sound, that they couldn’t get on the cozy little screen at home. Internationally public as it was, Alma’s film career embarrassed her here in Basingstoke—her instinct was to hide it, as something private and shameful and impossible to explain, just as her daydreams in childhood, and her masturbation and then her experiments with the opposite sex, had been. Mentioning her movies at this kitchen table was, she irrationally felt, poor taste on her family’s part.