Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (9 page)

Elsa’s favorite class was ballet, which was taught by a Frenchman named Guy who wore all black, with a scarf knotted tightly around his neck, the silk corners flapping against his collarbones as he demonstrated the movements. Elsa liked to be in the last row, near the
corner, though the dance studio was lined with mirrors and there was no hiding from the teacher’s critical eye.

“Aaaand, left toe
point
, left toe
sliiide
, left toe
point,
left toe
sliiide
,” Guy said, marching across the room with his eyes trained on one set of slim ankles after another. Elsa checked her work in the mirror—no, she was on the wrong side again. “This is a simple
rond de jambe
, ladies!
Rond de jambe!
”

Elsa quickly straightened her left leg and drew a circle on the lacquered wooden floor with her pointed toe. The other women in class never seemed to have any problem remembering their rights and lefts.

“Damn it!”

Elsa turned her head, while trying desperately not to lose Guy’s count. She was still fairly new, and he’d been kind enough to ignore her pathetic efforts thus far, but Elsa had seen him snap at some of the other women. She didn’t want that kind of attention. Elsa didn’t harbor any illusions about being a good dancer—Busby Berkeley and his legions of dancers practiced at a studio that bordered Gardner Brothers, and Elsa heard that they brought in an entire orchestra for their rehearsals. Elsa just wanted to stay on her feet. Along the back wall, two women over, Elsa saw a redhead struggling even more than she was. The woman had tied her hair up in two pigtails, which flapped against her cheeks like dog ears with every clumsy
rond de jambe
. She too was on the wrong leg. Elsa smiled, and the woman smiled back and then stuck out her tongue, exhaling extra hard.

“And now the
oth-er
side! Right toe
point
, right toe
sliiide
, right toe point…” Guy walked over to Elsa’s side of the room. She watched him approach in the mirror. When she was looking at him, she couldn’t look at herself, which made the steps seem somehow closer at hand. She felt her leg lock into place, as strong and sturdy as steel. Elsa made eye contact with Guy in the mirror—
See! It’s not so hard!
—
and immediately lost her balance, falling clumsily to the floor. He sneered, disgusted, and walked back toward the front of the room. Elsa watched his narrow, perfectly straight back recede into the more talented sector of the class. In the front row, the women hadn’t missed a beat. Little Peggy Bates, the chatty girl she’d met at the party, was in the crowd somewhere, hoofing away like a professional, and Dolores Dee was in the second row, her buxom frame swaddled in a baby blue leotard. Elsa was mortified.

The redhead scooted over, shoving the leggy women between them out of the way, and helped Elsa up.

“I thought he was going to yell at you,” she whispered. “God, I’m so scared of everyone in this class. I feel like such a bottom-feeder.”

Elsa didn’t know quite what she meant, but she dusted off her pants and said, “Me too.”

“Hey, look,” the redhead said, and fell down in exactly the same way Elsa had, with one leg outstretched like a drunken flamingo.

“Out, out, out!” Guy shouted, and pointed toward the door, cursing in French. The twenty-five other women in the room may have tittered to one another quietly, but not one turned around to watch Elsa and her new friend skulk out the door. It was a room full of actresses, after all, each of them loath to admit that she wasn’t the center of attention.

L
illian Hedges was her given name, though Gardner and Green had already changed it twice. “First I was Lillian Fleur,” she said, in between bites of a roast beef sandwich at the commissary. Elsa looked about for her husband, and was relieved not to find him hovering. She knew better than to look for Irving, who had a private dining room in his office suite and was never seen inside the regular
commissary’s walls. At the next table, two men were dressed like Civil War soldiers, ready to battle with their lunch.

“That’s pretty,” Elsa said. She was trying to be on a strict diet, but it was hard when eating with a new friend. Lillian ate like a longshoreman, not caring whether she sent bits of food sputtering out from between her teeth. Talking to Lillian made Elsa realize how much she missed talking to her sisters, and the easy comfort of another female body so near. Elsa picked at her salad, spearing a single piece of lettuce with her fork.

“Sure, but it wasn’t
me
,” Lillian said. She dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a napkin, and then let her shoulders collapse forward. “Gosh, do I look like a
fleur
to you?” She let out a great big whoop of a laugh. Several people at adjacent tables turned, but Lillian seemed not to notice. One of the Civil War participants was so startled that he knocked his musket to the ground.

“So what’s the name now?” It had been two hours since Elsa dropped off her daughters at the day care. They would be fine a little longer than usual. If Gordon asked, which he wouldn’t, she would just tell him that she’d decided to stay for another dance class. Getting her figure back was important, he agreed. It just didn’t look right for an actor like him to have a heavy wife. Gordon seemed to have conveniently forgotten that Elsa wanted to act too, that they’d made this journey together, that she wasn’t just along to clap at his name on the screen. Elsa folded another lettuce leaf into her mouth. She missed talking to her sisters—even Josephine, who had never had much to say at all.

“Ginger Hedges.” She gestured to her hair. “Because of the red.”

“So he does that with everyone?” Elsa felt embarrassed—she’d imagined herself special. Surely Irving Green didn’t approach every woman he saw with swollen ankles and offer her a new life in Hollywood.
Making actors into stars was one thing, but making a pregnant woman into an actor, that was something different.

“Gardner does, sure,” she said, and Elsa felt a swift sense of relief, for what she wasn’t quite sure. In her imagination, Irving was the harder nut to crack, despite not having his name on the side of the building, and she was glad to have his attention all her own for another moment.

Lillian—Ginger—had an elastic face, and she didn’t miss an opportunity to widen her eyes and stretch her cheeks. She leaned forward and cupped a hand around her mouth. Elsa watched as Ginger’s white blouse dipped perilously close to her roast beef sandwich.

“You never know who’s around here. These publicists will eat your brains if you say too much.” Lillian’s rubbery face relaxed, and Elsa saw that she was older than she was—maybe by as much as ten years. Lillian was probably already thirty, ancient and adult. “Really. They can change anything they want to.”

“Oh,” Elsa said, unsure of how else to respond. How had Gordon made it through unscathed, with a name like Pitts? Maybe it was different for men, who could be any number of things: lumpy, foreign, scarred. Women had only two speeds at Gardner Brothers: beautiful and serious or beautiful and funny. Elsa wondered which one she was supposed to be—probably the latter, as it was easier to fudge the beauty part if you were making people laugh.

When they finished eating, Ginger took Elsa on a tour of the back lot, and she understood, at last seeing it in the daylight, why Gordon was always so reluctant to come home. Some of the sets were always up, as though the studio were going to decide on the spot what to shoot that day. A musical! A romance! A Western! There were whole city blocks built to look like New York and anonymous small towns, picket fences and all. There were alleys that led to nowhere,
and shops with papier-mâché objects in the windows. The wide, empty streets never had any cars on them, but were instead filled with people practicing their lines or teaching one another dance steps. Her father would have loved it.

“So are you an actress or what? I didn’t ask,” Ginger said. They were standing in front of an ice-cream parlor. Elsa recognized it from a Susie and Johnny movie the previous summer—Susie had climbed up on the roof and sung a song. When she was through, she’d slid back down the striped canopy into Johnny’s waiting arms. There was something magical about being inside a place like this, a place where glamour and imagination mattered more than what you’d been called since birth. “I know you’re not a dancer.” Ginger was kidding her again, but Elsa was still thinking about her first question.

“Yes, I’m an actress,” Elsa said, except that the moment the words were out of her mouth, there on that spot on a street that existed only in the movies, she wasn’t Elsa Emerson anymore, at least not all of her. “I’m Laura Lamont.”

“Well, okay, then!” Ginger linked her elbow with Elsa’s, and they walked all the way back to the day-care room that way, in sweetheart position: a pair.

After that afternoon, she was always two people at once, Elsa Emerson and Laura Lamont. They shared a body and a brain and a heart, conjoined twins linked in too many places to ever separate. Elsa wondered whether it would always be that way, or whether bits of Laura would eventually detach themselves, shaking off Elsa like a discarded husk. She thought of the butterflies that floated around her mother’s garden all summer long, their gracefulness belying the fact that they had so recently been another organism entirely. Change was possible, as long as one was willing to stick that first wing out of the cocoon.

T
he studio lawyers made everything easy: Within two years of her initial contract, Elsa was divorced and Laura had never been married. Gardner Brothers represented both Laura and Gordon, though it was easy to see whom the bosses favored. Who was Gordon but a sidekick, a bit player? Louis Gardner arranged to help Laura find a bigger house, perfect for her and the two girls and one nanny. It was so easy to change a name: Clara and Florence became Emersons, as they should have been from the start. Elsa couldn’t believe she’d ever let herself or her daughters carry the name Pitts. The lawyers never charged Laura for their time: It was all in the contract. No one in the papers asked the questions Laura thought they might:
If you’ve never been married, where did these two girls come from, the stork?
Questions that did not follow the script were simply not allowed. The divorce had been Elsa’s idea, which was to say it had been Laura’s idea too. She found that there were certain activities (feeding the children, taking a shower) that she always did as Elsa, and others (going to dance class, speaking to Irving and Louis) that
she did as Laura, as though there were a switch in the middle of her back. The problem had been that neither Elsa nor Laura wanted to be married to Gordon, who wanted to be married only to Elsa. Before the girls were born, Gordon seemed happy enough for Elsa to be an actress, but not when she was the mother of his children.

Clara spent her days in the on-set school with all the other kids, though Florence was only a baby and stayed home with Harriet, the nanny, who was the first black woman Laura had ever really known and charged as much per week as the lead actors at the Cherry County Playhouse. Harriet was exactly Laura’s age and had a kind, easy way with all three of the Emerson girls. The new house was on the other side of Los Feliz Boulevard, on a street that snaked up into the hills. Sycamore trees hung low over the sidewalks, and Laura loved to take long walks with Harriet and the girls, pointing out squirrels and even the occasional opossum. Griffith Park wasn’t technically Laura’s backyard, but that was how she liked to think of it. She went to every concert she could at the Greek Theatre and at the Hollywood Bowl, which wasn’t often but often enough, and far more often than if she had stayed in Door County, Wisconsin. She sat outside, under the stars, with all of Los Angeles hushed and quiet behind her; Laura felt that she was once again sitting in the patch of grass outside the Cherry County Playhouse, and every note was sung just for her. One evening, a secretary found Laura on her way from the day care to dance class, and stopped her in her tracks. Irving Green had a box at the Hollywood Bowl, and wanted Laura to be his date for the evening. It was never clear how Irving came to possess all the pieces of information he did, just that he was very good at finding things out and holding them all inside his brain until he needed them. Laura said yes, which neither pleased nor surprised the secretary, and Harriet stayed home with the girls. Irving and his driver came to pick her up at six, before dusk, and they sat in near silence until they reached their destination,
which gave Laura ample time to examine the inside of the automobile, which was the first Rolls-Royce she’d ever seen up close. When they arrived at the Hollywood Bowl, ushers quickly showed them to their seats, which were inches from the stage, so close that Laura could have reached out and grabbed the first violinist’s bow if she’d had the urge. A few minutes in, an usher hurried over to Irving’s side, whispered in his ear, and they ducked out again. Laura fussed nervously, sure that everyone in Los Angeles was staring straight at her, wondering why she’d been chosen as his date at all, and sure that he probably wasn’t coming back. When Irving returned a few minutes later, he said only, “Garbo,” as if that were all that was necessary, and it was.