Flicker (30 page)

“Oh, you could just have them.”

“Franny, you don't mean that. That's very expensive equipment.”

“Well, I don't wanna have to sell them. And there's other things too.”

“Like what?”

A teasing, girlish note returned to her voice. “Why don't you come and see?”

“Are there any films?”

“Could be …” And she would say nothing more.

I couldn't tell if Franny was leading me on. But the prospect of getting a bargain on Zip's Century projectors and bringing them back to The Classic was too much to forgo. I was at her house within the hour.

The realtor's “For Sale” sign on the front lawn had a “Sold” sticker pasted across it. There was an ominous piece of oversized earthmoving machinery parked in the driveway that seemed to have the house under siege. Inside, the Lipsky home had lost a lot of furniture. Whole rooms stood vacant, except for miscellaneous packing boxes here and there.

“They're gonna plow the whole place under and build an apartment house,” Franny told me. “Can't hardly wait for me to leave. I got to be out by next week. I'm almost dizzy selling and packing. I don't know where I am anymore.” She looked frazzled, her hair collapsed around her shoulders, her face shiny with sweat. She was a simpler, more honest Franny, and she was easier to like that way.

She was serious about the projectors. She fully intended to give them to me—along with everything else in the projection booth. That included the contents of a small storeroom filled with some good-looking
camera equipment, the last remnants of Zip's career. “You could get a good price for all this,” I told her.

“Yeah, well … I wouldn't feel good about selling Zip's stuff like that, just to strangers. I'd like for you and your friends to have it. Zip never showed his feelings too much, but he liked you. And that woman, Clare, he liked her a lot. What she said to him about his movies, that was the first nice thing anybody said to him in years. Is she your girlfriend, sort of?”

“Well, sort of …”

“Yeah, I sort of guessed.” She made to smother a giggle. “I hope we didn't make her jealous?” Then, quickly sobering up, “She's very smart, I can tell. The intelligent type. Zip was real impressed with her. He told me. I think he'd like her to have this stuff.”

When I entered the projection booth, my eye had gone at once to the high shelf where Yoshi had kept the sallyrand. There was no box there. Surveying the booth, I asked Franny “Do you know where the sallyrand might be?”

“The who?” She gave a puzzled smile, recognizing the name but not the object.

“It's a little viewing device about this big.”

“Oh yeah, that. Sort of like a telescope … ?”

“That's it,” I answered eagerly.

“Zip used to look at movies through it sometimes. God, I don't know where it could be.” She tittered. “I never heard him call it a Sally Rand. Why would he call it that?”

I sidestepped explaining while I searched the booth. I found nothing. Franny could see I was disappointed. I hastened to let her know I was overwhelmed by her generosity. She was offering me a gift worth several thousand dollars. “I don't know what to say, Franny,” I mumbled. “This is very good of you.”

“Oh, listen, I got a good price for the house. This old dump, I thought I wouldn't get a dime. And Zip had something put aside. I don't have to make money on his equipment.” Then, becoming worrisomely coquettish, she said, “Now I've also got something for just you especially.” Taking my hand, she led me out of the projection room and back through the house. We were headed, as I feared, toward the stairs. She detected my hesitation. “Come on, don't be shy. I'm not gonna seduce you or anything. Honest.” But she punctuated the promise with a naughty wink that made me uncertain.

We entered an empty upstairs room where a small collection of
boxes stood near the door. From one of them she withdrew a scroll of paper. “I bet you'd like to have one of these—just for old times' sake.” It was a Nylana poster. She was right. I was supremely grateful to have it. I noticed it was autographed. “To my favorite fan. Kay Allison.”

“Now these books and all,” she explained, sorting through the boxes, “they were Zip's favorite things. Lots of technical books. Some keepsakes. Scrapbooks. Couple of magazine stories on him. Isn't that the sort of thing you're studying in college?”

“Well, yes … more or less. You're sure you don't want to keep it yourself?”

“If I lug it all off to Iowa, it'll just molder away in my folks' attic or something. I'm no reader. And I got my own memories of Zippy, all I need. Maybe you'll find something that interests you. Oh, but this I'm keeping.”

She plunged her hand into one box and pulled out a golden figurine. Zip's Oscar. “I think he'd want me to look after that.” She smiled wistfully. “Sometime I can pretend
I
won it.”

Hesitatingly, I reminded her, “You said there might be some films … .”

She took on a serious air. “Now about that, I got to explain to you. Because I know how you must've felt at the funeral. You see, that was all Yoshi's doing. He just practically idolized Zip. Whatever Zippy wanted, Yoshi was gonna do. Well, Zip told him he wanted those pictures used like you saw. Zippy had that written in his will, even. There was no talking Yoshi out of it. He's such a bossy guy. Him and me, we didn't ever get on so good, you might've guessed. Yoshi had this feeling that he knew Zippy a lot longer than I did, even if I was his wife. Which was true. So when it came to Zip's last will and testament, Yoshi simply took charge as if I couldn't be trusted to do a thing. He made the arrangements with this Japanese undertaker friend of his and everything. I told him I didn't think it was legal just to take Zippy's body like that and burn it. But Yoshi, he had this big grudge against the government, you know why. 'Shit on your laws,' he told me and just went right ahead. All I could think to do was keep my mouth shut and let him have his way. Which I did. Well, now he's moved out, and he won't be any the wiser.”

She stepped across the room and threw open the door of a walk-in closet. Inside, stacked from floor to ceiling, were film canisters, dozens of them. I rushed to examine them and my heart sank. All
the labels I could see read
Nylana. Nylana the Jungle Girl. Nylana and the Cobra Cult.
“Oh,” I said, my voice catching with clear disappointment. “
Your
movies.”

“It's all a big mess, I should warn you,” she explained as she cracked open one of the canisters. “See, I had to do it all so fast and without much light. Yoshi was prowling around the place. I didn't want him to catch me at it.”

“At what?”

“What I did was I put all those movies you and Zip were watching in these cans. And I put all the movies that were in here in those cans … see what I mean?”

“You mean you switched the films?”

“Yeah, that's what I did.”

“So
these
are Max Castle's movies?”

“Yeah. Because I knew you didn't wanna see them burned up. I guess they were some important movies, huh?”

“Oh, Franny, I can't even tell you!”

“So this way, Yoshi thought he was doing what Zip wanted. I hope Zippy wouldn't hold it against me.”

I wanted to take her in my arms and kiss her. Then it struck me. “But, Franny … you let the Nylana films get burned. All your movies. They would be very hard to replace.”

She shrugged. “Oh, come on! That old crap? Who'd want to save that? Listen, those movies are a lot better the way you remember them than they ever really were. God, they were just awful! I was glad to see 'em go.”

Then I did give her a hug. “Franny, I'm so grateful! I can't tell you! You saved the films.”

“I might've missed some. Because, see, it wasn't easy to do. I was working so fast, with the Max movies piled up downstairs, and all these up here, back and forth, up and down. God, I never worked so hard. I kept getting all mixed up. There were so many damned cans! And some of them I couldn't get open, so I left them. And then I had all these reels all over the floor. I couldn't tell one from the other. So I'll bet they're all out of order.”

“But you must have saved
most
of them.”

“I tried to. Of course, I ran out of Nylana reels before I got all the movies switched around, so I had to stick some of the other movies in.”

“What other movies?”

“Oh, Zippy had lots of movies laying around here. Mostly old silent pictures from way back.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know which from which. I just took what I could find so Yoshi wouldn't notice any empty cans. Whatever the labels say, those are the movies I switched over.”

I felt my way into the stacks of canisters at the rear of the closet and rotated some of them here and there to find the names. I spotted a few marked “Chaplin,” some marked “Barrymore.” “What Barrymore was this?” I asked.

“It was called
Don Juan.
Zippy liked that one.”

Then I found several canisters labeled
Greed. “Greed?” I
asked her. “Zip had a print of
Greed?”

“By that German guy—with the neck … ?”

“Erich Von Stroheim.”

“Yeah, him. Zip liked that one too. He got it from Max, who was a friend of Stroheim.”

“You mean one of the films that got burned up was a print of
Greed?”

“If that's what it says on the can.”

“Oh, Franny … do you realize how valuable that may have been?”

“Was it? I didn't know you cared about that one. Zip made me watch it once. It wasn't too good, believe me.”

I didn't argue the point. Instead, I got to work loading everything Franny had to contribute into Sharkey's van. It was a ton of loot. Projectors, cameras, boxes of books, scores of film canisters … they filled the entire interior and the top carrier. Franny was being far too generous. If I had had the money, if Clare had had the money, I would have forced it on her. Yet, as precious a haul as it was, I would have traded all the equipment in the van for the sallyrand. That was the key to the magical kingdom. Where was it now? Before leaving, I made a tour of the house, checking closets, cupboards, drawers, finding nothing. Finally, I left a request with Franny to let me know if it turned up—though I wasn't hopeful. If there was one thing Zip was likely to make sure got destroyed upon his death, it was Max Castle's all-seeing eye. Sliding into the van, I thanked Franny one last time.

“Don't mention it,” she insisted. “You were very, very nice to me, I want you to know. You brought me back some good old memories. Made me feel like a starlet again, you know? I hope you liked it too.”

“I did. Every minute.”

“Nice of you to say so. You know, there's nothing a movie star likes better than a few good fans. Even a little, used-up star like me. How about it?” she asked, putting out her arms. I walked into her embrace and we had one last mushy big kiss. “Wow! That's better than I ever got in the movies,” she said. “And here, I want you to have this too.” She quickly slipped an envelope inside my sweaty shirt. “A surprise for when you get home, okay?”

But I fetched the gift out at the first stoplight I hit heading west on Los Feliz Boulevard. It was a cracked and yellowed photograph. Nylana caught lusciously unveiled in the studio treetops. And it was autographed.

It took weeks to sort out the films Franny had saved for me. When the job was finished, I was delighted to discover she'd made a better job of it than she had realized. She hadn't lost a single reel of a Max Castle movie, but had simply scrambled them around. Her main screwup was to include miscellaneous pieces of other movies, those whose canisters she'd borrowed. That actually amounted to a bonus, a sort of surprise package of film fragments major and minor. There was one long-lost reel of Von Stroheim's
Greed,
some pieces of Murnau's
Sunrise,
and portions of Dreyer's
Joan of Arc
that Clare was certain she'd never seen before. The world's only surviving print of Chaplin's
How Slippery Sam Went for the Eggs
owes its existence to Franny Lipsky's great midnight rescue operation. “I only wish she'd saved more of everything that wasn't Castle,” was Clare's comment. “Sounds as if there were some real gems.” After a few private viewings, Clare and I decided to donate everything besides the Castle films to the UCLA film archives. There was one item in the haul, however, that I decided to keep for myself: five nonconsecutive episodes of
Nylana and the Cobra Cult.
While this was the rarest of the items Franny had preserved from destruction, it was also the least valuable. Yet for me it was pure nostalgic bliss to sit alone in The Classic after hours and see Nylana come to life again. There she was, Kay Allison, as beautiful as ever in her imperiled pulchritude. All mine, though, sad to say, the erotic charge of that once overpowering physique had waned. Was it because I had outgrown the charms of its exaggerated anatomy? Or because I could now claim carnal knowledge of that body in the imperfection of its later years? Perhaps Nylana had simply become too real to be the infinitely malleable fantasy she once was for me.

There was one more prize Franny had managed inadvertently to salvage, though it took me some time to register its value: three partially filled thirty-five-millimeter reels of unidentified outtakes, for the most part so badly over- or underexposed that for minutes at a time as I watched, I couldn't discern more than fleeting ghostly shapes. Where the film brightened enough to reveal more, all I could see was trees: the camera panning trees up close, at a distance, from a high angle, a low angle, moving among them slowly, rapidly. So much for the first two reels and nearly half of the third.