Missing Reels (16 page)

Miriam took her first sip. “You’re an old-movie buff.” Ceinwen nodded. This didn’t seem to be going as well as it could have. “I’ve met a few over the years. I don’t think many of them go so far as to wear the old clothes, though. Especially not at your age.”

“You’d be surprised,” said Ceinwen, seizing a chance to push the conversation somewhere better. “Vintage is really popular.”

Miriam sighed. “You seem like a nice girl. Really. But if you think I’m some treasure trove of movie lore, you’re wrong. I was a seamstress. Mostly I saw the costumers. When I saw the stars, it was just fittings. Good morning, are you sure this seam is straight. Can you take the bodice in. When will this be ready. Good night. I never did hear much gossip and what I did I’ve probably forgotten. It’s been more than forty years.”

This was uncomfortably close to what Ceinwen had, in fact, been hoping for all these months. But it still felt unfair to both of them. “I thought you seemed interesting before I had any idea you’d ever been near Hollywood.”

“That’s nice to know. Unfortunately, I’m not. I’m a widow living alone on the Lower East Side. I play mah-jongg with some friends uptown. Sometimes we go out to dinner. I read books and I go to museums and lectures. I don’t even go to the movies anymore.”

She was starting to feel peeved. She’d brought Miriam her best scarf and in return she was getting Irish coffee and a talk about how boring the woman’s life was. “I haven’t asked you about Garbo or Joan Crawford or anything, and I wouldn’t.”

“Garbo was a Sapphic.” Sapphic? Who says Sapphic? “Crawford was gracious but she hated Norma Shearer and we had to be careful to schedule their fittings so they couldn’t possibly run into each other. Is this anything you haven’t read before?”

“If I were going to ask you about the old days, I wouldn’t ask you about MGM,” retorted Ceinwen. “I’d ask you about that.” And she turned and pointed to the silver-framed picture on the table.

“That’s what you were looking at last time.” Miriam set her cup in its saucer and crossed her legs at the ankle, a ladylike pose Ceinwen had never learned to maintain. “You saw that photograph, with me in costume, and decided I’m a forgotten star. Like
Sunset Boulevard
. You must have seen that one?”

“Of course.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint you, but that isn’t the case either. No mansion, no chauffeur, no stardom. I had only one part where I was on screen for more than a few minutes, and the movie is long gone.”

“Lost?”

“Has been for decades. I don’t think there’s many people alive who ever saw it. I’m not Louise Brooks. Nobody’s going to ask me to write for the
New Yorker
.”

Ceinwen twisted toward the picture again. “I don’t know any Emils from the silents,” she said. “Except Emil Jannings.”

Miriam began to laugh. It was the first laugh Ceinwen had ever heard from her, and it was wonderful, a low-pitched vibrating cackle. Even her laugh was elegant. And it went on and on, until she picked up her napkin and wiped her eyes with it. “You looked this up, did you? And that’s what you came up with? I inscribed a photograph with love to Emil Jannings? Have you seen his movies?”

“Sure I’ve seen them,” said Ceinwen, too sharp, but her viewing chops were being maligned. “I saw
The Blue Angel
like everybody else.” Miriam started laughing again. “I didn’t think it was him, but he’s the only Emil in any of my books. I figured your Emil wasn’t an actor.”

“No. No, he wasn’t an actor. And he’d have given you what-for if you compared him to Jannings.” She folded the napkin and laid it beside her cup. “He was a director. German, like Jannings. That was all they had in common, I assure you.”

“Your Emil directed your movie. The one that picture’s from.”

“It was a publicity shot. But yes.”

Her coffee was almost gone, and Miriam wasn’t offering any more. That didn’t seem promising. She kept her cup in her hand, to signal she was still drinking from it and shouldn’t be thrown out just yet. “What happened to him?”

“He died in a car accident. About a year after the picture was finished.” Then, as if to fend off a follow-up, “He was driving drunk. People did that in the twenties, too.”

“I’m sorry.” For the first time, she considered that Miriam might feel about Hollywood as she did about Yazoo City.

“It was a long time ago.” Back to the “sorry-to-disappoint-you” voice. “Don’t worry, I don’t go all weepy every time I hear his name.”

“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I’ve been trying to see some silents lately. I’ve never known anybody who made one. I wanted to hear what it was like.”

“Moviemaking’s dull. That’s why the stories you hear are all about what goes on off set. It’s Christmas night. I would think if you weren’t with your family, you’d be off with that young man I met.”

She set the cup down; if Miriam wanted her to leave now, at least she could go back upstairs and cry. “We broke up.”

Miriam reached over and patted her shoulder. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be tactless, truly. So that’s why you’re asking about Emil. You want to hear that life goes on. That sort of thing.”

She hadn’t expected the pat, but she didn’t want the pity. “If I want to hear that time mends broken hearts or whatever, I can talk to my roommates. They’ve been telling me that for two weeks.”

“That’s good of them. But they’re wrong.” Miriam gave no indication she thought this was bad news. “You sweep the pieces into a corner. And after a while they stay put.” She set down her cup and poured in a little more brandy. “You really do want to hear about it, don’t you. You want to hear about this old movie nobody’s ever seen. You even brought me a bribe.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be a bribe, exactly.”

“No, that’s bad of me, it was very kind. This was your own scarf, wasn’t it.” She tried to think of a plausible denial but Miriam didn’t pause. “And if I don’t tell you the whole story, you’ll be back at Key Food, wanting to carry my groceries up four flights again until you wear me down. You’ll be at my door on Lincoln’s Birthday, ready to give me a stove-pipe hat.” She poured some more coffee into Ceinwen’s cup. “I guess I’d better go ahead and indulge you before you go to any more trouble.” She added some brandy. “I’d tell you it’s a long story, but I get the feeling that’s what you want.”

She picked up her coffee so fast she sloshed a bit into the saucer, and said, “All the best stories are long.”

Miriam smiled. “You’re a romantic.” She looked past Ceinwen, at the picture on the table. “You tell me something first. Were you always pretty?”

Ceinwen hadn’t felt pretty for more than two weeks, and not that often even before, but a good guest doesn’t whine to her hostess. “No. I was skinny as a kid and way too pale and I had glasses and it took a while for the gap in my teeth to close up. Then my eyes got better and so did my looks, I guess. Nobody thought much of me in Mississippi. They like ’em tan and athletic down there.”

“They liked them plump and hearty in Milwaukee when I was growing up,” said Miriam.

It wasn’t Kansas City, but it was close. “I wouldn’t have guessed Milwaukee.”

“Why not? It was quite a sophisticated town in those days, at least for the Midwest. They tell me it isn’t as nice now.”

“Nobody liked your looks in Milwaukee?”

“Oh, I wasn’t the fashion, but people liked the way I looked. I wasn’t one of the ones who start out plain and blossom.”

“Yeah, I guess that was me.”

Miriam tucked her legs up on the sofa. “Me, I was always pretty. I got tired of it early on. Just about the first thing I can remember is people stopping Mother in the street to tell her how pretty I was, and Mother talking and talking to them about my eyes and my bones and my hair. I heard it so much, it got to be like someone noticing I had teeth. Mother had been a beauty herself, but she had me late in life, after they’d just about given up on having any children at all. By the time I reached my teens, her looks were mostly gone and she’d gotten stout.”

“My grandmother used to say that when people can’t stand their own looks anymore, they gussy up the kids.”

Miriam nodded. “It’s natural. But Mother took it further. She kept entering my photo in contests, wanted me to do amateur theatricals and plays. Father wouldn’t have any of it.”

“Didn’t approve of actresses?”

“No, he did not. And his word was law. But the year I turned fourteen there was diphtheria going around. Mother didn’t catch it, she never caught anything, but Father caught it, and he died. And I got it too, and I was terribly sick. My hair fell out. I remember Mother standing over me and at first I thought she was feeling my forehead for fever, but she was running her hand over my scalp, trying to see how much hair was left. It did grow back, but it took almost a year. My hair had been pin-straight before, but it grew in with a wave, and when it started getting thick again she’d brush it and say maybe diphtheria was a stroke of luck. The sickness hadn’t changed my face at all, and curly hair was much more fashionable. Meanwhile I’d been out of school so long I had to repeat the year.

“And of course with Father gone she could enter me in as many fool things as she liked. She kept making me do plays, but I was lucky to get the ingenue and sometimes I didn’t even get that. Then I won a beauty contest in Milwaukee. I’d placed second or third in a few before, but this was a big one, city-wide. Mother figured it would give us some kind of entree in Hollywood.”

“You didn’t want to go?”

“Heavens no, but there was no question of trying to talk her out of it. I refused one beauty contest and she took to her bed. I was ungrateful, I didn’t love her, I was trying to kill her. She carried on for a week until I finally gave in. After that I tried sabotage. They’d tell me to smile and I’d bare my teeth. I’d slouch when I was supposed to be graceful. I’d fake stage fright. I don’t know where I went wrong with that last contest, but somehow I did win. And there we were in Hollywood, with probably a thousand other girls from a thousand other contests. Didn’t matter to Mother. As soon as we got off the train she started gushing on about the sunshine and the oranges and the ocean. I had to wear a hat to ward off freckles, citrus still gives me an acid stomach and neither one of us could swim. I don’t even like stucco. But she sold our fur coats the first week we arrived, and I knew what that meant. We had to stick around until she came to her senses.

“Every little bit part I got made her think I was ripe for discovery. She took me to every casting call. I even met with Chaplin.”

Now that was impressive. “How did it go?”

“Badly. Like everyone else we’d heard he liked girls innocent and young. I was eighteen, and that was actually a bit old for him, but Mother thought I was a sure thing. Then when he came in I crossed my legs at the knee, pulled my hem up a bit and asked him for a cigarette. Mother tried to tell him I didn’t smoke and this was my idea of being comical, but he couldn’t get me out of that office fast enough. I think that was the closest she ever came to slapping me.”

She couldn’t believe it. “Why? Why did you blow it like that? It was Chaplin.”

“Because I knew how it would go. At best I’d get another bit, like all the other bits I got now and again. Simpering on the sidelines, handing the star her powder puff. Only if it was Chaplin it would be worse, because Mother would be more sure than ever that I was going to be a big noise. I knew it wasn’t going to happen. And I was getting letters from my friends in Milwaukee, and they were going to parties and getting engaged, and some girls were even going to college. And Mother and I were living in furnished rooms, and every day we weren’t on set waiting for my few pitiful shots we were in offices, standing in line with girls my age, a lot of them with parents just like mine.”

“Stage mothers.”

“They’re a cliché, I know, but Mother was as typical as they come.” She paused and smoothed a lap crease, then continued, a little more gently. “That isn’t fair. Believe it or not she was better than most. And what people don’t mention is that the girls were just as bad. They wanted to be stars, too, and they hated any competition. It wasn’t as though we offered one another any comfort. I tried to befriend a few and gave up.

“So it had been about a year and Mother got wind of a new project over at Civitas. It was a small studio but the head, Frank Gregory, was trying to make it bigger. And he’d brought over a director from Ufa to make a costume picture. It was going to give them some prestige, some clout with the big boys. Nobody here had seen this fellow’s movies, he’d only made two as director, but whatever Gregory’s people saw in Germany they liked.”

“Did you like them?”

“I never saw them. After the war I thought I might get a chance, but they’d been stored in Berlin.”

Ceinwen thought of the aerial shot of Berlin in
A Foreign Affair
, not a building intact, and didn’t have to ask more.

“When Mother heard Emil Arnheim was casting she sent him my pictures and the next thing I know she’s shoving a book at me, which she’d certainly never done before, and demanding that I read it because I have an interview with the director who was going to film it. An old Gothic romance called
The Mysteries of Udolpho
, which even then hardly anybody had read. And everyone thought the choice was crazy, because it’s a perfectly terrible book.”

“I read that one. I liked it.”

“I can’t imagine why. Most people know it only because Jane Austen made fun of it.”

“
Northanger Abbey
. That’s why I read it. But I still liked it. I thought,” said Ceinwen, trying to phrase things with finesse, “it had a lot of atmosphere.”

“What sort of atmosphere?”

“It was sexy,” admitted Ceinwen. “To me at least.”

She’d never seen this before—Miriam was delighted. “That’s what Emil thought. Sublimated sex, the whole thing. He thought he could bring that out in the movie, and he wouldn’t have to bother with the prose, which didn’t exactly sing on the page. I didn’t know that, of course. I just knew Mother wanted me to read it. Which I did, although I skipped big sections and snuck my own books between the covers when she wasn’t looking. And then when I went to meet Emil, I wasn’t supposed to tell him I had read the book, because that would look overeager, but I should be as much like Emily St. Aubert as possible. I had to remember to be sweet and high-toned and I’d better not embarrass us by talking about Milwaukee or modern authors. If he asked me if I had read the book, I was to say no, and bring up Ouida and Baroness Orczy. Then he’d think I was too romantic to be ambitious.”