all my life.”
She blinks at him. “What?”
“It’s from My Darling Clementine .”
“This isn’t a joke,” she says quietly.
“I’m sorry.”
“Fuck it.”
“I’m sorry.”
She lapses into a deep silence. “Fuck it.”
105.
She says, “I was twenty-nine, about to turn thirty, which in those days was like being, well, practically like being the age I am now, ha. He was thirty-nine, an actor—a married actor … you knew that was coming, didn’t you? … big actor of the day though I don’t know how many remember him now … couple of Oscar nominations, even some loose talk about him for the Monty role in Sun , but Monty was in the middle of his hot streak and this other actor, his hot streak was ending. Boxing picture, Lana Turner picture, crazy Joan Crawford picture where he played, uh … a violinist? Or … and this big prestige picture about anti-Semitism everyone was talking about … So the world saw this guy who seemed on a hot streak when, really, everything was coming apart. A few years before, he and his wife lost their little girl, to a sore throat , if you can believe it—so his marriage was falling apart and he and I were sleeping together and it was all very hot hot hot going cold cold cold, dead cold, cadaver cold, and if the public didn’t know, well he knew and I knew and Hollywood knew and the House Un-American Activities Committee, they sure well knew. Someone’s been drinking my drink,” she says suspiciously, holding the bourbon glass up to the dim Nickodell light, then dropping her head back again on the red upholstery behind her and Vikar can’t tell if the bourbon is making her memories hazier or bringing them into focus, “… all falling apart … ran Ingrid out of the country for having a baby by a husband that didn’t happen to be hers—well at least he was a husband, hey, Vikar? somebody’s husband—ran out Orson for having been a loose cannon ever since they wheeled him on deck, ran out Chaplin for his politics or for not paying his taxes or liking his girls too young or take your pick or take the whole lot. The courts made the studios sell off their theater chains, people were hauled in front of Congress for being stupid enough to attend some meeting fifteen years before, then there was television which as far as the studios were concerned was worst of all. Night Jules died, not long after I finished Sun , he was in New York and called me here in L.A. and I could tell he was in trouble. I got the next plane out. Never belonged to anything in his life let alone anything political, it wasn’t his style—didn’t know any names to name but wouldn’t have named any if he had, of course, and they knew that, of course, and while the Committee’s about to charge him with perjury he’s also getting it from the other side, the lefties who’re pissed at him for testifying at all, including his wife, she’s busting his balls too. Got to the city about one in the morning, let myself in the flat there in Gramercy Park that a friend kept for us in her name, I could smell the liquor and cigarette smoke and I could hear him sleeping and I curled up and went to sleep next to him and sometime in the night I woke and he hadn’t moved and I knew he wasn’t sleeping anymore. So-called ‘confession’ on the desk, though nothing was confessed. Paramount got some of the other studios, UA, Zanuck over at Fox, to circulate this story he’d died in bed with, I don’t know, a stripper or something, in order to protect me, and in some state of stupefaction—and I do mean stupe, Vik—I let them do it and that’s my cross to bear. So when all that’s going on, you’re not thinking too much about whether Place in the Sun is going to make it to Movie Valhalla, and the last thing you’re thinking is twenty years later you’re going to run into some guy with a scene of it on top of his head.”
106.
She looks straight at him and suddenly seems very sober. “A sore throat,
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