The Slipper, page 33
Jim left the first of March, and Julie missed him dreadfully. She hadn’t realized before just how much his friendship meant to her or just how much she had come to depend on him. Nothing seemed the same without Jim. The city was bleaker, and there was a great void. It was even harder on Danny. Julie had her rehearsals, the play was opening in less than two weeks, she was frantically busy, but Danny couldn’t understand why his rowdy chum, his buddy, his playmate since infancy was no longer there. Julie explained that he was in California with Auntie No-No and Danny asked if he would be back and she hesitated and told him he would be gone for some time and great tears welled in Danny’s eyes, spilling over his lashes.
The play demanded every minute of her time, and she was able to spend even less time with Danny than before. Julie felt guilty about that. She knew Danny needed her now, needed reassurance, needed to know she wasn’t going to disappear from his life, too, like Jim, but there was nothing she could do about it, not until the play opened. If it was a success, as she had every reason to believe it would be, she’d make it up to him. She’d be able to give up the soap and spend every day with him. That was some consolation as she took the subway down to the Village early every morning and returned late in the evening, totally depleted, weary through and through.
Julie was a nervous wreck the afternoon before the opening. Hank had told them all to stay home, rest, relax, unwind, store up their energy, but she wasn’t able to relax. Danny was with Hannah—she couldn’t possibly cope with him this afternoon, not in the state she was in—and Julie paced the living room, smoking one cigarette after another, desperately wanting a drink but not daring to pour one. If only Nora were here to hold her hand, but Nora was in California with Terry Wood, the script finished now, casting begun. Julie crushed out her thirtieth cigarette and lighted yet another and when the telephone rang she actually cried out. Taking a deep breath, brushing a silvery-brown strand from her brow, she picked up the receiver with trembling hand.
“Hello,” she said.
“One moment please.” A nasal voice. Static. “Julie?” another voice inquired. The static rose like a wave, crested, vanished, and suddenly the line was clear. “Julie, is that you?”
“Carol?”
“It’s me, darling. I just wanted to call and wish you well tonight. You must be terribly nervous—I know I would be—but I know you’re going to be a smash.”
“Carol, it—it’s so good to hear your voice.”
“The play sounds marvelous, darling. I do so wish I could be there with you tonight, but I’ve just started a new film, started it day before yesterday actually, and everything’s wildly disorganized here. I think I must be out of my mind agreeing to work on a film with a director who’s never made a film before and a costar who’s never been in front of a camera in his life.”
“You’re doing the Guy Masson film?”
“The man’s insane, darling. We’re shooting in the park and he’s using a hand-held camera. You’d think we were making a home movie, and the salary is nonexistent. I furnish my own wardrobe—jeans and a tight jersey—and I’m supposed to symbolize innocence or something, the whole film’s full of symbolism.”
“It—it sounds exciting nevertheless.”
“It is,” Carol confessed. “We’re having a ball. We may not have a movie when we’re finished, but we’ll have had a riotous good time.”
“You’ll be marvelous.”
“And so will you, Julie. I want you to know I’ll be rooting for you tonight. I’ll be there in spirit if not in the flesh. I’ll write you a letter and tell you all about Le Bois, and you must write back and tell me all about the opening.”
“I will,” Julie promised.
“Give Danny a hug for me. I miss you.”
“I miss you, too.”
Julie felt better after Carol’s call. She had one small glass of white wine and calmed herself down and finally left the apartment and took the subway down to Christopher Street. Larry gave her a hug and wished her well and Hank grinned and told her they were going to kill ’em tonight and she went to her dressing room to discover a plethora of telegrams and half a dozen lovely bouquets of flowers, from Nora, from Jim, from Carol, from Bob Shippley, from her producers and a small, touching bouquet from Hannah and Danny. Julie sat down at the dressing table and applied Cassie’s garish makeup and put on the short, curly blond wig and then donned the sleazy red-and-purple nylon dress Cassie wore in the first act. Her nerves were frayed. She was terrified and knew she wouldn’t remember a single line, knew she was going to disgrace herself the minute she stepped onstage. She made her way into the wings. Larry squeezed her hand. He was trembling himself. Eileen took her position behind the desk onstage, a battered ledger before her, wooden pigeon holes behind. She looked like someone about to face a firing squad. They could hear a muffled rumble beyond the closed curtains as the audience settled down. Julie longed to flee the theater.
The lights went out. The curtain came up. The shabby lobby of the Robert E. Lee was bathed in a bright glow as Eileen turned a page of the ledger, humming to herself, reaching for her glass of pink gin. Two of the ladies of the evening sauntered in, bickering about a john, and Eileen gave them a fond look and Julie felt nauseous, knew she was going to throw up, knew she couldn’t possibly go on, and she closed her eyes and her cue came and Julie disappeared and Cassie swaggered boisterously into the lobby and looked around and put her hands on her hips and sighed with disgust and said, “It ain’t much but it’s home!” and the laughter came. She was safe. She was home free. It was going to be all right.
The audience loved it. They hooted with laughter throughout. They gave noisy cheers when the reprieve came and Lavinia and the girls were allowed to stay. Applause thundered when the curtain came down. There were seven curtain calls. The audience gave them a standing ovation. They had a great big rollicking hit on their hands, or at least it seemed so until the critics had their say. The reviews were scorching. Walter Kerr confessed that the play was amusing, the cast quite good, but the story was hackneyed, the characters mere caricatures and the laughs cheap and obvious. Clive Barnes found it deplorably old-fashioned and totally devoid of wit or the least relevance. In his inimitable style and with his customary compassion, John Simon savaged it mercilessly and added that, in her garish makeup and blonde wig, “Soap Opera Diva Julie Hammond looks and acts like a shrill drag queen having a bad night at the Baths.” While allegedly literate, sophisticated New York theatergoers might possibly be able to go to the bathroom on their own, they certainly couldn’t purchase a ticket without being told what to see by a small group of critics with their own personal axes to grind. The play was doomed.
Eight nights later a despondent Julie sat in her dressing room, removing her makeup after the evening’s performance. They were already playing to a half-empty house, and they’d be lucky if they stayed open till the end of the month. All that work, all that energy, all that effort, gone down the drain because a few men found the play unworthy of their superior approval. It was like the Christians and the lions. Thumbs up, you live. Thumbs down, you’re eaten alive. Julie wiped the cold cream off and then washed her face with a cloth dipped in water. She was wearing a shabby cotton robe. Her hair was pinned up and covered with the net she wore under her wig. Now she would be forced to sign the new contract with ABC. She had no choice. Two more years of suffering nobly on This Life of Ours. Meg would come out of her coma, and God only knew what would happen to her next.
The dressing room door flew open and Julie was startled to see a radiant Nora, marvelously chic in a red satin de Givenchy with trapeze skirt. Satin rustled noisily as Nora rushed to throw her arms around Julie.
“You were brilliant, love! Positively brilliant! I’ve always known you were a magnificent actress, but until tonight I didn’t know just how magnificent you were!”
“Nora! You—I thought you—”
“I got in this afternoon. I’ve got a tremendous surprise for you, love. Terry’s with me. I’ve forced him to watch the soap for the past two months, and—”
“He’s here? At the theater?” Julie was appalled.
“He’s gone to get our things from the cloakroom. He’ll join us in a few minutes. Julie, he’s been watching the soap every day and tonight he was absolutely mesmerized by your performance. He couldn’t believe he was watching the same woman. I insisted he come to New York with me. I knew if he could see you in this play, see your range, he’d be—”
“Terry Wood’s coming backstage? With me looking like this! I love you, Nora, but sometimes—”
Julie tore the net off her head and unpinned her hair and started brushing it vigorously. The door opened again, and a rotund, moon-faced man came in carrying a gray vicuna overcoat and a gorgeous full-length black sable Julie had never seen before. He tossed the sable to Nora and dumped the vicuna across a chair and, eyes twinkling behind his horn-rims, gave Julie a tremendous smile.
“So we meet at last!” he exclaimed jovially. “I’ve been hearing a lot about you, little girl, and I’ve been seeing a lot of you, too. This one has insisted I watch your soap. Thirty minutes a day, it costs me a fortune, but I watch, I let everything go, I sit in front of the television set, and I say to myself, this girl, she has something. Tonight, I am astounded! She’s the one, I tell myself.”
Julie was standing now, gazing at him with puzzled eyes. Nora was grinning like the Cheshire Cat. Julie longed to slap her.
“Everything’s set on The Slipper,” Wood informed her. “Nunnally’s written a great script. Negulesco is directing. Hope Lange is playing the model and Susan Strasberg is gonna play Billie—remember how great she was in Picnic? Lana Turner is doing a cameo as head of the modeling agency, and we’ve signed Greg Peck to play the older man. The only part we haven’t cast yet is Anne.”
Nora dumped the sable on top of the vicuna and gave Julie another vigorous hug. Terry Wood was beaming now.
“We were looking for someone with that special quality, a young Margaret Sullavan, luminous, sensitive, vulnerable—My God!” he interrupted himself. “Those eyes! They’re gonna photograph like a million bucks. The complexion isn’t so hot, makeup’ll take care of that, but the bone structure is perfection!”
“I-I don’t understand,” Julie said.
“I’ve found our Anne!” Wood announced.
Nora took hold of both Julie’s hands and squeezed them, her lovely brown eyes sparkling with excitement.
“You and Danny’re coming back to Hollywood with me, Julie. You’re going to play Anne. You’re going to take the town by storm. Terry’s gonna arrange a fabulous contract for you at the studio. Carol and I both got the slipper, love, and now it’s your turn! You’re gonna be a star!”
13
A French starlet who fancied herself the new Bardot cavorted on the beach with a lethargic lion cub as a crowd of photographers snapped hundreds of pictures. When her bikini strap “accidentally” popped and her breasts were exposed, more photographers appeared, shouting lustily, snapping away as the starlet pretended to blush. She made an effort to cover her major assets with her arms, but somehow they kept bobbing into view. The lion cub yawned and curled up on the sand and was soon asleep. The sky was a clear blue-white, the Mediterranean a deep azure. Sumptuous yachts were anchored in the harbor like so many floating white palaces, while up and down the Croisette flags of every nation added festive color as they flapped in the breeze. Horns blared noisily as hundreds of Rolls-Royces and limousines and battered taxis inched along in the perpetual traffic jam that plagued Cannes at this time of year. The annual film festival was in full swing. Some 10,000 outsiders had converged on the elegant, ordinarily serene seaside town, many of them in the business of making movies, most of them making deals, a vast number of them simply on the make.
Hundreds of new films were shown here every year, the official entries at the huge, ornate palais, Festival Hall, while countless others were on view at small, dingy theaters on various side streets behind the Carlton Hotel. While everyone breathlessly awaited announcement of the awards, art had precious little to do with it. A Cannes Film Festival award meant big money at the box office, and money was the name of the game. Hollywood moguls and European independents and oil-rich Arabs and Greek tycoons came to talk deals, percentages, grosses, rentals, to brag, barter and bribe, to form new partnerships and dissolve old ones. The press came like a swarm of locusts. Prostitutes of both sexes arrived in droves, international film stars and jet set darlings lending a bright glitter to the motley, perspiring throng. There were round-the-clock parties, in private villas, aboard yachts, in hotel suites and on the beaches, fireworks exploding every night as the madness progressed. The atmosphere was a combination of Mardi Gras, the Fourth of July and a major civil disturbance. The only thing lacking was tear gas. Carol wouldn’t be surprised if that was forthcoming. After four days of this insanity, she would gladly have hurled a few cannisters herself.
If Guy and Jean-Claude and I survive this with all of our limbs intact it will be a bloody miracle, she told herself as she made her way along the beach toward the Carlton Hotel. It was a huge, grotesquely ornate white monstrosity gleaming brightly in the late afternoon sunlight, the official headquarters of the festival, and they were damned lucky to have suites. It was packed to the rafters. Several members of the press corps were actually camping out in the lobby, and getting past them every day was like running a gauntlet. Carol had a shapeless blue-and-purple cotton beach robe over her bathing suit and a purple scarf over her head. She wore dark glasses. Thus far, no one had recognized her this afternoon. They were too busy pursuing Romy Schneider and Curt Jurgens and Anouk Aimée. There had been no press conferences this afternoon, thank God, and she had actually been able to get away from the hotel and get a little sun. Four hours of wandering along the beach by herself seemed like a great luxury amidst all this insane brouhaha.
They had been besieged ever since they arrived. Le Bois was the official French entry this year, and word was out that it was an unquestionable masterpiece, Masson the greatest, most innovative director since D. W. Griffith, Jean-Claude the most exciting film personality since the young Gable, Carol a cinch to win Best Actress. Revolutionary camera angles and zoom shots notwithstanding, Le Bois was actually a simple love story filmed in grainy black-and-white about a naive American girl, Carol, who inadvertently causes the downfall of a breezy, engaging small-time French hood, ex-wrestler Jean-Claude Bresson. The film was poorly lighted, jumpy, technically an inept, amateurish disaster that really did resemble a home movie, yet the French film critics had shouted themselves hoarse lauding its virtues—for reasons that took Carol completely by surprise.
Guy Masson was a Communist. She had known that from the first, had given it not a thought. Half of France was, if not Communist, at least far left, it seemed, and Carol paid no attention to anyone’s politics. During the filming of Le Bois neither Carol nor Jean-Claude had detected the least political content. It was a loosely structured love story with cops-and-robbers overtones, a nouvelle vague version of a Hollywood forties film noir. She was amazed to discover in Cahiers du Cinéma that the film was a vehement denouncement of American capitalism. The girl, wide-eyed, naive, was supposed to represent America and through ignorance and indifference she callously destroys the world-weary, street-wise petty thief, who was supposed to represent Europe. Carol couldn’t see it that way, but the critics cheered and lauded its brave, potent political statement. Anti-Americanism was definitely in now at Cannes, the Far Left holding sway. Glossy, vulgar American films with their garish Technicolor and inane content were invariably dismissed with a sneer. Of late the awards usually went to some dreary Russian epic about a boy and his tractor or a depressing Brazilian tract about disfigured transvestites working as migrant farmers. All this taken into consideration, Le Bois stood a very good chance of winning Best Picture, but Carol knew she hadn’t a prayer of winning Best Actress. She was American, for one thing, and she hadn’t acted at all in the film. She had simply been herself.
Leaving the beach with its starlets, lion cubs, photographers and bronzed hustlers, Carol crossed the terrace of the Hotel Carkon. Every table was occupied. She noticed a grizzled, aged Darryl F. Zanuck sitting with a pompous, pontificating Orson Welles and a bored-looking Juliette Greco. Greco was the latest of Zanuck’s bony European Galateas. After his dismal failure to transform mistress Bella Darvi into a film star—her acting was said to make the perennial starlet Terry Moore look like Sarah Bernhardt—the former head of Twentieth Century Fox had attempted to do the same with Greco. Her films had been as disastrous as Darvi’s. He had recently teamed her with Orson in something called Crack in the Mirror, which he had written himself under a pseudonym. A few of their relatives might have seen it. Everyone else treated it as though it were a contagious disease. Eric Berne had introduced her to Zanuck when he was still head of the studio, but Carol doubted seriously he would remember her. Passing their table, she heard Welles praising his own genius, as he was wont to do. Juliette wearily downed another Pernod. Zanuck stared into space, looking suicidal.
The noise level inside the lobby was even higher than it had been outside on the terrace. Telephones rang. Bellboys scurried around in frantic haste. Voices rose in shrill determination to be heard above the hubbub. Carol spotted handsome actor Stephen Boyd chatting with—yes, it was Hedda Hopper under that preposterous flowered hat. Rumor had it he was sleeping with her. Hedda certainly mentioned him in her column often enough, which would explain Boyd’s attentiveness. With the gradual breakdown of the old studio system in Hollywood, Hedda and Louella no longer wielded the power they had during the golden days, but, like dinosaurs from another era, both still tromped around attempting to terrorize their prey. Most merely laughed at them nowadays.
Carol moved through the luxurious, congested lobby, feeling secure behind her dark glasses. “There’s Carol Martin!” someone shouted, and suddenly she was surrounded by reporters and photographers who seemed to spring at her from every direction, all of them pushing and shoving to get closer. Blazing flashbulbs blinded her. Someone grabbed her arm, whirling her around. Questions were fired at her in French, in English. She felt she was in the middle of a maelstrom, felt faint, felt a panic attack building as faces pink with excitement pushed nearer, as voices rose shrilly, as more questions were fired, more flashbulbs popped.
