Eight Girls Taking Pictures (14 page)

Though Clara never cared for jewelry—her ideas of beauty would always lie elsewhere—nor would she ever be tempted to spend her money on such expensive accessories (all her money would go to living, helping friends, the Communist Party, and buying a pair of cameras—not necessarily in that order but close to it), she loved the Tower of Jewels. Which is how, as she sat on the edge of the pool, she came to say what she said aloud, without thinking that anyone was listening: “This building makes me think that anything is possible.”

“Yes,” said the man beside her.

The surprise of someone not only listening but responding to her comment made her turn her full attention to Laurent Cluzet, noticing the narrow mustache running the length of his lips; the small bit of beard on his chin; his tall, slender, long-legged frame. Having partially folded himself up, he possessed an almost frail quality, as if he were the male version of a model in a Pre-Raphaelite painting. He wasn’t so much androgynous as slightly asexual; his rather formal, fussy clothing, a study in late-nineteenth-century aesthete styling, bordered on the theatrical. None of which bothered Clara, who was becoming a popular Italian theater actress and was therefore used to everything being a little larger than life.

It may be possible to measure a life by the times, places, and circumstances
where you hear the word
yes.
Sometimes there is nothing so terrible as hearing “yes” when asking a question to which you don’t really want to hear an answer (“Do you love her?”). But other times, “yes” is the perfect answer (“Do you love me?” “Do you want to come with me?” “Shall we meet here again tomorrow?” “
Yes.
”).

“Clara,” Laurent later asked, “shall we meet here again tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

They met by the tower during the day. They strolled the nearby Avenue of Palms, and the Court of the Sun and Stars. Laurent bought Clara lemon ice and sailed with her through the Tunnel of Love in Toyland. They climbed a hill above the Marina to watch the fifty-four searchlights hitting the jewels as they moved in the night breezes, their little mirrors and facets bending the light back into the sky.

 • • • 

The closing of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, coinciding with the end of 1915, saw a dismantling of all those fabulous pavilions and halls.

On the day the tower was to come down, Clara told Laurent that she had to rehearse a new musical, which wasn’t true; she didn’t want anyone to see how unbearable it was for her to see it go. Maybe she was attached to the tower because she attached it to Laurent, whose ideas of art and beauty and a bohemian life coincided with her own. The association was so strong that it seemed likely that, when the tower disappeared, so would he.

But Laurent didn’t go away, and, three years later, he handed Clara a box the size of the palm of her hand. Inside was one of the rubies, nicked in two places, from the Tower of Jewels, with a note that read,
I know you would rather have this than an engagement ring. Come with me to Los Angeles and be my wife.

In the six years since they’d met, and three years since they’d moved to Los Angeles, Clara had been working in the movies while Laurent drew,
and designed fabric. They were content with their lives and each other. They had their bohemian friends, their fashionable address, their unconventional marriage, which was unconventional in that they never legally married yet considered themselves wed. Clara took Laurent’s name to convince his family, to whom marriage mattered.

As Clara sat on the low oak branch thinking about dinner, a rather small, slight man caught her eye. He was leaning against a tree not far from where Clara sat. He looked to be on the young side of thirty, despite his deeply receded hairline and funny little mustache. As she studied him, she noticed an expression of deep interest in the goings-on of the film set, as well as a touch of coldness about the mouth. This combination of curiosity and a bit of a chill pulled her attention; it was so different from Laurent, who was so sweet that it was sometimes challenging to think of him as a lover and not a brother.

Who wouldn’t be fascinated by the forty-acre movie lot, which consisted of scenery flats, mocked-up locations, prop rooms, wardrobe rooms, carpenters putting up this and taking down that? And then there were the animal actors that lived there full-time: lions, leopards, elephants, bears, parrots, chimpanzees, three zebras, and a few dogs. Plus, the mustachioed man appeared very taken with the director’s increasingly excited conversation.

When the participants in the dispute finally stomped off in opposite directions, the small man disengaged his attention to notice Clara, who meant to look away but instead smiled. He returned the smile, igniting a low-level heat. Like many pretty girls, Clara had seldom been bold because she never really had to be. But she now found herself moving off the low branch with the intention of introducing herself to this man whose smile had caused such an inner disturbance, only to be intercepted by one of the movie assistants telling her they were ready to begin.

And when she had finished with her scene—the one where she, the beautiful Mexican maid, is mistaken by the hero for the lady of the house—the small, slight man was gone.

The Afternoon of the Leopard
was Clara’s second starring role and her fourth film. Her previous acting experience had been in the popular Italian theater of North Beach in San Francisco, where she had been in melodramas, operettas, and vaudevilles—many of them overwrought and mediocre to terrible. Clara was already feeling the constraints of sentimentality in the scripts, much in the same way that, as a model, she was beginning to chafe at pictorialism in photographs.

A famous woman photographer, Jane Reece, had traveled to California on a vacation from her Ohio portrait studio. Upon meeting Clara and Laurent, she immediately asked if they would be willing to pose for her. Clara was dressed like the sort of California Indian being repressively, unendingly converted by the Franciscan fathers who dotted the length of the state with their missions.

With Laurent, Miss Reece went straight to the source, depicting the tall, lean young man as Jesus.

“Jesus,” said Clara under her breath when she saw the print. All that soft-focus, painterly nonsense with the camera; Clara hated it from the start. In the same way she had grown tired of Hollywood’s insistence that she play the Exotic Girl in her harem costume or a traditional Oaxacan blouse and skirt, the fiery señorita in a mantilla, the shoeless Greek island girl.

She was always the siren, the sex goddess, the vamp, the temptation, the poor choice, the thief of every man’s morality. At least when she was acting in the Italian theater she was seen as an actress, someone with the skill to portray a range of characters, and she did such a fine job that the North Beach audiences loved her.

In San Francisco, Clara modeled for a controversial statue of a naked woman. Then she posed nude for another photographer. And, like many beautiful women who want more than admiration, she was conflicted about her beauty. She devoured books and ideas; was a playful conversationalist; wore imaginative, stylized clothing sewn by her own hand. People lined up to buy the little fabric dolls she made as a lark. The attention her looks brought was intoxicating because it made so many things so much easier, except for the knowledge that it could not last.

Men were drawn to Clara because of her appearance, but they fell for her because of her goodness and her mind.

As far as movies went, she didn’t want only to be the one who made someone’s pulse race: She wanted to make art.

When she was on the set, she often observed the camera operators, the way they counted to themselves to time their shots, the way they adjusted the lighting or studied the angles of her face. Her father had been a mechanical engineer and a machinist and an inventor, and she was her father’s daughter.

Which is why the man with the mustache, more intrigued by the makers of the movies than by the actors, had caught her eye.

The Cluzet apartment was in the Bryson Building, one of the newest and most elegant apartment buildings in Los Angeles. Their sizable studio was on the sixth floor, four stories below the baroque ballroom that Mr. Bryson had built for sixty thousand dollars, and six marble stairways up from the lobby of potted palms where “Blue Ali Baba oil jars were dotted around, big enough to keep tigers in,” as Raymond Chandler wrote. There were Moorish archways, stone lions, a blue carpet, a birdcage elevator.

Laurent, with his dogged devotion to all things “beautiful,” including Clara, often chose her clothes to complement the romantic apartment. Everything for Laurent was stage dressing; in this way, he was perfect for Hollywood. Clara shimmered in ocean colors, her upswept hair dotted with tiny rhinestones, bits of sparkle that made it appear as if a constellation were tangled in the strands.

Since the door of the studio always stood open on these evenings, there was no sound of it opening or closing to announce the arrival or departure of guests. Someone once asked the Cluzets if they were ever worried about someone walking off with their belongings, and they replied that they didn’t believe in possessions.

Actually, this was what Laurent said in answer to a newcomer to that night’s party—a prematurely bald man with a funny little mustache who
entered the apartment accompanied by a second man, and a very pretty woman named Marguerite.

The mustachioed man, whom Clara recognized from that day at the studio three weeks ago, said, “Oh, are possessions now a religion?”

“Only if you live in America,” said another guest, a foreign-looking man dressed like a banker.

“Now, see, this is what I don’t understand,” said the mustachioed man to his female companion. “Everyone acts as if there’s no wealth anywhere but in the United States, as if we’re the only people on Earth who enjoy it.”

Marguerite smiled a knowing smile. “I wasn’t even born here,” she said, “and I think I understand your own country better than you.” She removed her hat, handing it to Laurent as she smoothed down her hair. Clara admired the cut and quality of the woman’s clothing, the beauty of the embroidery along the hem of her long jacket and her sleeves.

“You should listen to Marguerite,” said Laurent to the mustachioed man of his female companion. “Not only is she sophisticated, magnificent, well-read, and well-lived”—he lightly tapped her hat on the chest of the mustachioed man—“but she is the most terribly spiritual genius.”

“Listen to you,” said Marguerite, laughing. Clara loved Marguerite’s laugh, which always sounded to her like tiny Christmas bells.

The women kissed in a belated greeting, Clara turning toward the second man, who had come in with the small mustachioed man and Marguerite, extending her hand and saying, “I’m Clara Cluzet.”

“Madame Cluzet,” said the man without the mustache, “Jack Hartmann. Visiting from Berkeley.”

“My family lives in San Francisco,” said Clara. “North Beach.”

“That’s how I know you!” said Jack Hartmann. “You were with
La Moderna
, weren’t you?”

“You know Italian theater?” said Clara.