Staring into the Klieg lights beyond the pool made
lurid red spots flash in front of her eyes. The moustachioed assistant
director, in white cap, plus-fours and golf shoes that had never known turf,
yelled into his bullhorn. “Ohhhh-Kay. Number ones ready to slide. Quiet on the
set. ROLL ’EM – ACTION!” She launched herself down the waterslide, threw her
arms in the air and beamed, landing in the now rank water which shot up her
nose and made her brain go all fuzzy and her eyes bulge. She swam up,
remembering to smile again just as she broke the surface, where a plastic lily
hit her in the face.
Her momma had been predictably concerned about her
coming out to Hollywood alone, (“Is all that glitters worth worrying me into ma
grave, lil’ girl?”) though she was less innocent than her momma supposed and
less conceited than the local girls had supposed. She could still see their
sneering faces on that dull, languid afternoon she was crowned Miss Texas 1931,
standing there with a sunburst smile but cold with terror inside. The hatred of
her peers drifted up to the platform like a cloud of poisonous sulphur, and she
was glad of the warm breeze whipping wiry strands of her amber hair across her
eyes, hiding the fear she was sure they betrayed. But the talent scout and
photographers saw only that broad, dazzling smile and sun-ripened glow of her
slender limbs, and the telegram from Warner Bros arrived two weeks later.
She’d decided on “Elissa Gray” after the studio
declared her given name too cornfed. Not Grey, but Gray – like a dove-coloured
evening gown or a silvery fox fur. Black sounded too heavy for her and its
opposite hue had been bagged by Alice White. Brown reminded her of the
Hicksville she’d escaped.
Primped, plucked and begirdled, her first part saw her
sneering at Sally Eilers in a speakeasy scene in a film called Feelin’ Tomorrow Like I Feel Today
(“Saaaay sister!”). Three more parts followed, but her spoken lines had
plateaued at five. Now she was a Buzz Berkley girl, she had no lines. But she
did have several close-ups and her highest salary yet. If this kept up, she
could move to a better part of town. But she had a long way to go before she’d
be a neighbour to the leading lady, she of the pot-roast-rounded all-American
face and smooth undulations of peroxide hair ending in clusters of pin-wheel
curls. As American as apple pie. A $9,000 a week apple pie. She shone alright,
and was so American, so unlike the
foreign stars you sometimes saw on the lot who really did have hollows where
their cheeks should be, and under their heavily hooded eyes, too. They walked
with the seductive strut of streetwalkers and the hauteur of empresses.
She and her fellow chorines wore bathing suits of
sequins and transparent gauze that didn’t retain water. To onlookers, it
resembled a two-piece at a short distance. Anklets and a silver skull cap
completed their look. Most of the girls had dimpled cheeks that mimicked their
equally soft thighs, though all their legs were lengthy and tapering. But few
would have made it past Mr Ziegfeld’s eye in New York. They were supposed to
appeal only to the average American boy. Gosh-darned pretty things, but not
quite beautiful. Not disarmingly so - or more so than the leading lady, anyway.
The kind of girls those boys sat in the dark might hope to share a life with. Who
they could court, marry, make babies with (and then . . . what?) Elissa looked
around. She knew one of the principals had been a backline Ziegfeld girl. She
was easy to spot. There she was, her figure astonishing – athletic, yet pliant.
Like satin draped over sinew. Elissa ground her jaw. It felt as though she’d
been chewing gum for 24 hours. She’d thought “face-ache” a comic myth, but the
repeated exhortations yelled through the bullhorn to smile had given her
exactly that. The girls might not all have Ziegfeld figures, but they all had
million-watt smiles. They’d been chosen for the wideness of their smiles as
much as for the length of their legs.
She’d spoken with one of the featured girls the other
day. Her name was Millie and she had a black helmet hairdo, like Colleen Moore,
whose madcap films Elissa had enjoyed at her local picture house back home aged
11, sitting on the tip-up seats with their stiff and cracked maroon leather which
always stuck to her tender pink thighs in the suffocating summers. That was all
of . . . ten years ago, was it? (Only
ten years?) She thought Millie’s bob out of date, but it made her look less
amorphous among the chromium chorus of silvery-blonde heads, plus she had a
speaking part. She fingered the brittle fuzz of her own peachy, tightly
Marcelled, possibly ruined locks.
Elissa had heard all the stories about girls getting a
leg-up from big stars of both sexes. She wanted no part of this. Not because
she was lousy with empty morality, but because she wanted to get there –
wherever there was – under her own
steam. She’d gotten into this paradisical aquacade without compromising herself
and planned to go further on the same merit. Though she realised so noble a
notion might see her carrying cocktails aloft at the Brown Derby rather than
get her name above a title. Sometimes she wondered if she wasn’t fated to
sabotage her chances. She’d never taken stock of her situation, just drifted.
How much she actually wanted all this had only recently occurred to her.
Home was currently a cramped apartment in a one-storey
Spanish Mission-Revival court near the Bunker Hill district. Spare time was
spent out on the patchy, heat-parched grass of the central court with the other
girls, taking sunbaths, painting their toenails and smoking cigarettes while
the gramophone ground out one tinny record after another. In the centre of the
court there was an ornamental fountain which the landlady was touchingly proud
of, though its tiles were cracked and there were often cigarette butts and dead
spiders floating in it. The building itself had lengthy cracks in the outer
whitewashed stucco walls from the Long Beach earthquake earlier that year.
These the landlady couldn’t afford to ignore and fretted over them daily (“Oh,
dearie me, gosh darn diddly, those cracks!”)
“Shimmering” was the word she always thought befitted
her adopted city. Whenever she stepped out of the court, pocketbook in hand,
she’d look down the dusty, sun-baked stretch of Figueroa Street with its row of
cracked palm trees stretching away from her, to the intersection at First
Street, where the streetcars went clanging by, all of it shimmering in the eternal heat, January or July. The light never
failed to astonish her. So fine, blinding, icy, pure. The Los Angeles sun never
seemed like the Texan sun she’d grown up under. Not red and burning, but white
and intense, as if coated in permafrost, turning the skin of her 21-year-old
hands leathery. When the sun set, the sky was burnished with vistas of
scarlet-streaked gold. She’d had to buy some sunglasses with circular lenses.
Everyone here wore them, even if they were already protected from the sun’s
glare by big, splashy hats. Back home, she’d only ever seen shaded glasses worn
by half-blind old ladies who’d been born in the twilight of the civil war and
spent the days driving their bath chairs aggressively down Main Street.
She roomed with a girl from Ohio whose sallow, sharp
features and long face (“Kinda like a skyscraper, huh?”) had condemned her to
crowd scenes in the movies. Not that this seemed to bother her. She was warm,
urbane and dry, and she rarely smiled. She wore her short-sleeved ivory silk
blouse tight, no brassiere and polka-dotted slacks teamed with cork-wedge
heels. She called herself Fritzi Mahone and had an over-dyed, butter-gold long
bob, side-parted and dry and dead as autumn leaves. Elissa envied Fritzi her
confidence though she wasn’t at all sure Fritzi envied her her beauty, even
though the fact of having or not having that could mean the difference between
eating and starving for a girl in this town. Elissa suspected Fritzi had come
out to Hollywood not for stardom, but for marriage to a mogul and was just
biding her time as one of the pancaked faces in the back-lot crowd. Fritzi had
once gotten the two of them an invite to a party in Beverly Hills. They’d been
picked up in a peacock-blue, block-long Pierce Arrow, which made the both of
them giggle, squeal and clap their hands with delight. They were taken to that
neighbourhood where the streets were lined with identical palms shooting 60ft
into the sky and driven past huge stuccoed and colonial-style mansions clad
with cascades of lush pink bougainvillea and sat at the crests of stunning emerald
lawns nourished by ever-spinning water sprinklers. Not a soul was abroad on the
sidewalks. Despite its hushed beauty, Elissa thought the neighbourhood
resembled a gilded ghost town. She was surprised, if not shocked, to see this
earthly paradise accommodating an oil rig at one fork in the road. It was
nothing next to the ones back home, but its incongruity was jolting. It made
her think of home, but did not make her homesick.
At the party, after a couple of glasses of what she
was told was “real” French champagne (“Natch, a pair a’dumb starlets wouldn’t
know all champagne’s French” Fritzi smirked) she noticed Fritzi and several
other girls pairing off with corpulent producers, disappearing up the vast
Mexican-tiled staircase and though various doors. The rest of the guests
clinked glasses, blew plumes of blue, unfiltered smoke into the air, laughed
loudly, talked shop or sophisticated smut. She had sat rigid and alone on a
black leather moderne couch, trying
her damndest to seem glacial, bored and disdainful, like Constance Bennett. But
she was unnerved by an older, immaculate-dressed man, Italian, perhaps, who
began to stare at her. He was built like a bullfrog, his face soft and blotchy,
like a baked apple. According to a drunken redhead with a phoney East Coast
soh-ci-ahrty accent who was probably younger than her, the man was apparently some big noise at MGM. “I make it my
bis-huness to get as close to as many cigar-chompers as pour-sible,” she’d
said, before slipping into slang: “I’m hipped on the subject.” The man kept
staring at Elissa with chill, smokyslate eyes. If he’d moved, it would have
been like a cigar store Indian blinking and juddering to life. Elissa kept
swallowing and felt her eyes and lips getting dry, even imagined she was
twitching. She stood up and walked from the room, stumbling slightly and asked
a butler the way to the nearest bathroom.
The floor-length liquiescent satin
gown she’d borrowed slithered against her thighs as she walked. The nearest
bathroom was bigger than her entire apartment and looked like somewhere a
Pompeiian whore might have bathed, all black onyx and Egyptian chartreuse
marble with gold fittings. She leant against the vanity unit, trying to get her
breath and avoid her reflection, coming at her from several angles. For a
21-year-old starlet, she looked, she thought, tired and strained. God only
knows how she must look to others, then. Good looks weren’t enough on their
own, momma always said. Though she suspected momma was suggesting she add
virtue and pliancy to her arsenal, not sophisticated chat and considerable wit.
Her strained good looks were worth more than her sensitivity here, she
reflected. Eventually, her desire for a cigarette overwhelmed her and she’d
returned to the party to find the man gone and her clutch where she’d left it
on the couch. She later discovered from Fritzi that the man was a mobster, a
hoodlum in a high place. People did as he said, Fritzi told her, especially
girls, and told her some yarn about a party in Chicago where a naked chorus girl
had been dangled out of a 50th floor penthouse window by her ankle
in sub-zero temperatures and had been purple as a choked corpse when he’d
hauled her back in.
They were now being filmed breaking the water’s
surface in sequence. ‘Buzz’, with his bushy turtle brows and the shadow of
stubble blue against his pallid skin, was yelling at them through a conical
bullhorn. “You go under the water and come up SMILING. Y’hear! Start smiling
while you’re still UNDER the water. Now, snap snap snap – right on cue, before
the mas-carra starts to run!”
“ROLL ’EM! Aaaand – ACTION!” Under she went, her smile fixed, the peppery sting of
the water flooding behind her eyeballs. She could make out the beam of the
underwater Klieg light cutting through the increasing murk and thought of the
mote-filled projection beam that would flicker into the Corpus Christi Ritz,
displaying her smiling, sodden face for her momma and all the locals to see.
When she tried to think of how many millions of people would see her face
filling the screen, her mind boggled and went blank. Spanish, Argentinean,
British and French audiences, China, Morocco . . . Her face would be burned
onto people’s retinas. They might see her again in their dreams. People she’d
never, ever meet . . . She thought it funny that she’d be seen almost naked by
so many. Her momma had probably never been that naked after girlhood, even in
private.
The previous day, she and some of the other girls had
been treading water between set ups and talking about how they’d come to
Hollywood. “Oh, you know, age-old story. Encyclopaedia seller came to my ma’s
door, saw me makin’ eyes at him over her shoulder in the hallway and said he
had a second cousin in casting, so thought I’d take the chance . . .” They’d
laughed. Not joyously, but smirking, wry.
She’d noted arch cynicism was the pose among girls in
Hollywood and sometimes adopted it in their company, usually when enjoying a
cigarette outside the soundstage - studiedly disinterested, off-hand, slangy
(‘That punkola creep – he ain’t got a thing to sell me when he’s not on a dancefloor”). They’d lean back against the heat-soaked
soundstage wall, smoking, affecting lassitude. She wasn’t much good at
affecting the pose and knew she’d not yet even learned to comfortably inhabit
her own skin, now going tough and wrinkly in the water. If she wanted a career
getting under the skins of others, she’d need to reverse this. (If she wanted it . . .) Anyway, she
could hardly blame them for toughening themselves in a cut-throat town with
nothing to break their fall. She was kin with them, like it or not. Cynicism
and realism about their chances were the appropriate armour for this battle.
Each day before shooting, they sat around in silky
kimonos while ‘Buzz’ drew diagrams of their water ballet, as he called it, on a
blackboard, jogging their memories over the finer points of the backbreaking
rehearsals. It reminded Elissa of school, and she found herself unconsciously
sitting up and straightening her back, as if anticipating Miss Terran’s
thin-lipped wrath. Buzz’s zeal and precision in describing how the whole thing
would work was militaristic. Maybe a hangover from his fighting days. One of
the girls did say he’d been someone,
though she didn’t know who, in the war. Elissa’s poppa had been someone in that
war, too. She only remembered him in fragments that she’d always hoped would
one day solidify into a whole. A memory of a broad, strong man, lifting her up
as if she were as weightless as cotton candy and nuzzling her against his warm,
stubbly cheek. She didn’t know if that memory was quite real in its details.
Still, there was comfort even in a fool’s paradise.
Such were her thoughts that day as she lay on her back
in the water, glad of the fleeting chance to catch breath, and relieved, like
the other girls, that their faces were unseen in this shot. They were grouped
in three decreasing circles and Buzz and his cameraman, high above them on a
boom platform, zoomed up and away into the dark recesses of the soundstage
ceiling, beyond the lighting rigs, right up through the hole he’d ordered to be
cut out of the roof, through which she could see the ever-azure Angelino sky.
The overhead Kliegs went off as she joined hands with the girls at either side
of her (“ACTION!”) struggling to grasp the fingers of the one to her right and
panicking for a second. (“If one girl messes up, the whole thing’s like a house
of cards in a hurricane.”) They spread their legs until their toes touched. The
girls in dark bathing caps held onto their shoulders began to turn them in
concentric circles. She sensed the underwater lights come on beneath her to
backlight the tableau. “By a waterfall,
I’m calling you-oo-oo-oo!” Damned song. She could hardly distinguish anymore
whether it was coming from the Vitaphone speaker or the recesses of her head.
This scene was almost restful. At first, taking a
water slide had seemed like the most fun a gal could have on a film set, short
of being roughed-up and ravished by Gable. But on the third and fourth
descents, she’d bashed her hips against the sides, resulting in plum-coloured
bruises. She’d later taken in the 30-strong line of girls waiting to see the
on-set medics and instead mentioned it to one of the make-up mistresses who
said, “Don’ worry, honey, ain’t nobody gonna see.” What, nobody was going to
notice her bruises or nobody was going to notice her? Or nobody was going to
notice her bruises because nobody was
gonna notice her? She told herself to quit it. Your grandmother was a
frontierswoman. In another scene, other girls took their turns on the
slides while she ran from behind the cameras and jumped or dived into the foamy
water. They were not to pause as they reached the ledge, which meant she might
land on another girl’s head, or one on hers. That never happened, but there was
so much furious paddling beneath the water, she’d ended up with a latticework
of toenail scratches on her ankles from the other girls. It looked like a pack
of razor-clawed alleycats had taken her calves for hanging Virginia hams.
The magnificent set of the Deco pool made the
soundstage smell like a Turkish bath rather than the usual shellac, which
sometimes sent you nice and dizzy. She was second in a line of three on a
diving board, arms pointed forward. The raw scratches on her ankle smarted and
she bit her lip. They had to reshoot the scene four times that day, owing to
two girls on other diving boards who’d bellyflopped
in the water. Shivering for the fourth take, the girl behind her cussing out
the bellyfloppers, she’d felt a rare flash of temper and vowed to cut the
clumsy pair dead for this if they so much as glanced at her in the changing
room. The skin of one of the girls looked steak-raw and inflamed beneath the
gauze of her bathing suit where her flesh had thwacked the water in place of an
elegant dive. The other’s girl’s sore skin was disguised by her modish ruby-red
sunburn, but she’d been gritting her teeth, bent double and sobbing as the
others tried to comfort her.
Elissa gotten an eyeful of second-billed star that
same day, the one who kicked off the water ballet. When she heard some of the
other gals bitching about this actress, she’d just smiled and shook her head in
mock disapproval, not wishing to join them on that plane. But she’d had to
admit they’d a point when she saw the girl in action, up close. If the girl had
been beautiful or talented in a discernible way. . . But she’d married that ultra-famous blackface
ham and her bean-counting bottom-billed days were behind her. Elissa’s rare ire
rose again and again when she saw the girl, who looked like a wan, startled
rabbit, helped from the water between set-ups and wrapped in a massive
towelling robe from which her tiny head protruded, making her look like she
were enclosed in a vapour bath. All the while, Elissa and the other 100 or so
gals had to perch on the side, displaying legs blotched with red giraffe-prints
from constant immersion. If they couldn’t find room on the edge of the pool,
they’d hold on to the sides or paddle around in their primordial girl soup, now
full of dust and underfoot silt and maybe even . . . She’d heard some of the
girls giggling about getting time-out for the bathroom being no such worry on
this job. One said a Kotex had been seen floating in the pool.
They’d shot the biggest scene - on the tiered
wedding-cake-cum-fountain structure - earlier last week. She’d been on the
bottom tier, legs outstretched. They’d began to ache and stiffen and she’d been
woken in the small hours several times since by an agonizing cramp in her left
thigh, as if her bones were being used in a tug o’ war. When it hit, she’d laid
on her back and grabbed the bedposts behind, gritting her teeth. A few gasps
and groans had escaped through her clamped teeth, waking Fritzi, who looked
over and muttered, “Jeez, Lis. Thought you’d slipped a guy in.”
The sensation of the mechanically spinning ziggurat
had been cause for whooping giddiness at first, but it had palled after many an
hour. She remembered one of the girls directly below her, clinging to the edge
of the bottom tier, back to camera. In an accent thick as treacle she’d said,
“A thawt a was being clevuh, giving ma burth year as naaneen fowteen, so now
they think ahm on’y naaneen, but ahm twenny-wun! They’ve sturk me down heuh
‘cos th’think I’m a minuh! A should try and git thum . . .” A jet of water from
above had blindsided her, cutting off her words as if it was scalding. “Ah, for
Chrissake!” spluttered another girl through her fixed grin.
The jet had missed Elissa, luckily. Was she a lucky
girl, as her momma never tired of telling her in her wearying, lengthy letters?
Perhaps. She’d occasionally had to live on dimpled old oranges and soda
crackers now and then, but never had to, say, cut out streetcars for weeks on
end to afford stockings and cigarettes. She often lay awake at night because of
the reedy buzz of the cicadas, not because of overdue rent. She had never stood
in a breadline, nor had to grift, wear down her last pair of heels on the
corner Hollywood & Vine nor put in repeated phone calls to
Central Casting. But nothing had much changed in two years. That monotony lived
well in Dreamland was a bleak awakening. It was odd, the Depression seemed
barely visible in LA, as if the whole city had decided to eliminate the problem
by pretending it didn’t exist, by ignoring it. Or maybe because this city had
been full of desperadoes since the movies took off that the disappointed and
near-destitute were part of its landscape. New additions to their ranks went
unnoticed.
Thinking of the city . . . the seedy glow of Downtown
Hollywood made her heart race and her stomach churn. The dizzying Egyptian Deco
of Pantages theatre, the riot of neon tube signs that gave the air around them
a fuzzed aureole (‘COCKTAILS 15C’), the unbelievable amount of automobiles and
the miasma of smog they were said to create. Downtown LA had fascinated and
repelled her, with its tamale stalls, burlesque shows and surly-faced,
sloe-eyed Filipino girls coming out of the dance halls in their second-skin
taffeta frocks, reeking of cigarettes, talc and nasty scent. They hung with lassitude
from the arms of their lanky boyfriends, their cheap, Brilliantined permanents
like melting, oiled asphalt. Here, dark seemed to come earlier than elsewhere
in the city and she’d never been down that way since.
She’d responded more to individual places: a diner
fashioned after a jailhouse with waitresses in arrow-print uniforms and
long-linked handcuffs. The booths were set in barred spaces, like cells. She’d
adored the custard-coloured sands of Malibu Beach which felt like slow-burning
coals underfoot and although the enormity and jazzy bustle of the Cocoanut
Grove club had at first terrified her (every movie star alive, drinking,
dancing, laughing, some looking dismayingly plain in reality), she’d loved it
in the end. She’d been escorted by a garrulous boy of Apollonian handsomeness
who indulged his effeminacy when they were alone. He was a friend of Fritzi’s,
one of what she called “the fairy chorus” and they’d drank rum cocktails with
gardenias floating in them. Elissa later once bumped into this boy outside the
drug store on Sunset Boulevard where she’d been idling after a cancelled
casting at the old Warner studios and he’d taken her for coffee and shirred
eggs. Sat at the counter on chromium stools, the boy’s black hair was combed
and oiled so sleekly it looked like a bolt of jet silk. He’d joked about
wanting to “jump on the running board of that divine Richard Arlen!” which had embarrassed her to blushing (an
actual running board, or pansy slang for something else?) She’d switched
subjects and felt like a hayseed for the rest of the day.
There were other
nightclubs and speakeasies that stayed open until the purple dawn, ones that
featured floor shows with convincing female impersonators and others decorated
with tribal masks where you could dance to juddering drums and race music. She
liked a drink and a swell time, but not pick-ups. Just the once. Once more than
back home. Some of her girlfriends had no such moral quandaries, especially
Fritzi, but they’d never embarrassed her by going into detail. They’d teased
her about her shyness, and once, she’d responded with a dismissive handwave and
a Mae West smirk that she was “Slowly learning to unbuckle my Bible Belt.
Y’all… You’ll all be the first to
know when I manage it.”
The assistant director’s voice swelled through the
megaphone and broke her reverie. “Number ones – DIVE DIVE DIVE!” She plunged
into the wash again, now-familiar sensory deprivation and writhing shapes
surrounding her as she pushed churning, dirty water aside and behind and swam
with all that her dwindling strength allowed toward the hulking, blurred bulk
of the underwater camera, sealed in its waterproof straitjacket.
