Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (24 page)

"Also remember the political situation," Charles continued. "The House Un-American Activities Committee and the antitrust suits. I'm sure those seemed more important to the studio than what we were doing."

Again he had a point. If Jill remembered correctly, the HUAC hearings about Communist sympathizers in the film business had been held in 1947, so by the summer of 1948 the blacklists would have started. If politically suspect screenwriters wanted to work, they too were having to dupe the studios, using "fronts" to write behind. Moreover, the antitrust lawyers in the Justice Department were pressuring the studios to sell their theaters, to separate production and distribution from exhibition. These legal efforts would ultimately prove the death of the studio system.

As bad as the political situation must have seemed to the studios, the economic outlook was worse. The G.I., who in 1946 was back home, courting, taking his sweetheart to the movies, was by 1948 married, with a baby on the way and no money to spend on a movie ticket.

It could have been Bix's moment.

"But what about the shooting scripts you were using in April?" This was the part of Doug's story that had made the least sense. "Why were they on the plane in August?"

"Alicia was working on them," Charles answered easily. "They were a mess, with pages and pages of rewrites; every one was different. Even the master script didn't have everything in it. When it became clear that we weren't going to use much of it anymore, she wanted to sort through the mess and get one clean copy so at least we'd have a record of what we had done. It was an admirable effort, but clearly we would have all been better off if she hadn't attempted it."

"So there was a lot of rewriting going on during the April shoot?" That was as Jill had guessed.

"Oh, God, it was endless, total chaos. Imagine Phillip writing a movie."

Phillip? Jill could not imagine Phillip writing a screenplay at all. He was a man of action. "So Bix and Phillip were a lot alike?"

"Gracious, yes. We were all up there, playing ourselves. That's what made it such a lark." He shook his head sadly. "We were so young."

But he had just said the atmosphere had been unsettling and isolated. How could he also say the filming was a lark? Jill was filled with a hundred badgering questions—surely he could remember filming some scenes that did not appear in the final version, surely he had some sense of any difference in tone or atmosphere between the two versions, surely, surely, surely—but his tone of gentle elegy made questions impossible.

The kitchen door opened. "I can make more coffee," Mrs. Ringling said.

The men shook their heads and Jill spoke. "But won't you join us? I'd like to hear what you have to say about this."

"What
I
have to say?" Mrs. Ringling shook her head. It was hard to believe that she was well into her eighties. She and Charles seemed to be the same age. "No, young lady, you don't want to hear what I have to say."

"Why ever not?"

"Because I've got no truck with this business of glorifying the war, whether it's those big-bosomed historical romance books or that silly re-enactment thing they had over the weekend."

"You don't approve of that?" Jill asked.

"Approve of it?" Mrs. Ringling snorted. "I grew up in Richmond. We lived across the street from the Confederate Home, and I'd go over there and hear those old soldiers talk. They'd have tears in their eyes, talking about the boys who had died. And we'd go to the cemetery, and there would be children there, fourteen-, fifteen-year-olds,
children.
I can't see having a party to celebrate that."

"People like to dress up in costumes, Gran," Doug said mildly.

"Then let them be witches at Halloween. I see these healthy young girls pretending to be fancy Southern belles, when the real girls were dead of typhus or widows at seventeen. I read in the paper this morning that silly Lonnie Simpson said he had been born in the wrong century. If so, he was right lucky because Lorraine had a terrible time with him, and had he been born in this right century of his, he would have been born dead and would have taken his mama along with him."

"That does take the fun out of it," Jill acknowledged.

"Fun! Beats me why people think the Civil War would have been such fun. I had two boys in World War II, and then Ward went to Korea, and not a one of them came home and said it was fun, but at least they came home. It's been forty years, and I still think about my Bix almost every day, and I can't imagine those Civil War mothers were any different." She blinked almost as if she were going to cry. Then she straightened angrily and started fussing with the coffee cups. "Why did you get me started on this? You know how I hate it."

Doug went over to his grandmother and put his arm around her. "You're a silly old woman." His voice was not as rich as his uncle's. It didn't have an actor's polish, but it was full of warmth and life. This man loved his grandmother. Jill had never known her grandmothers. "It's all right to cry. We won't tell."

Mrs. Ringling blinked harder and tried to shove Doug away, but he was taller and stronger and so kept a grip on her, dropping a kiss on her beautiful silver hair.

"Will you let go of me?" she demanded. "How am I going to get these dishes done with you hanging on me like an overgrown toddler?"

"Do you mind if I show Jill the letters?"

"If that's what it takes to get rid of you."

"I'm serious, Gran. I won't show them to her if you don't want me to."

"Now why should I mind?" Mrs. Ringling was determined to be her stoic self again. "You know where they are."

Doug let go of his grandmother and motioned to Jill. She followed him toward the staircase. "What letters are these?" she asked once they were past the landing turn.

"Bix's. He wrote them during the war."

Doug opened the door to a white-walled bedroom. A walnut dressing table stood between the windows. Doug moved aside the little vanity stool and pulled open one of the table's drawers. He took out a thin packet of letters and handed them to Jill. The envelopes were faded; the top one had red military markings.

She sat down on the bed and took the letter out of the first envelope. The handwriting was tiny, but so crisp and unslanted that it was as legible as typescript.

Somewhere in England

Dear Mother and Father, The nice lady—

Jill stopped reading. "This isn't Phillip's handwriting."

Doug drew back. "No, of course not. It's Bix's. He wrote it during the war. It had nothing to do with the movie."

"I know that. But a minute ago Charles just said that they were all playing portraits of themselves, that Bix was Phillip. And this isn't how Phillip would write. His handwriting would be loose and careless, flowing, scrawling."

"You believe in handwriting analysis?"

"Not in the extreme, no. But this—" she gestured down at the letter—"is a very distinctive hand, and whoever wrote it wasn't Phillip. The people at the re-enactment said that Bix didn't make one mistake in the movie. I'd believe that of the man who wrote this letter. I wouldn't believe it of Phillip. Nor can I imagine him mastering the kind of detail necessary to pull off this secret-script stunt."

"Bix did get captured during his first engagement, just like Booth said Phillip would."

"But that wasn't necessarily his fault," Jill argued. "The two wars were different. Bix wouldn't have had a fine Virginia horse to gallop away on. Anyway, Bix got captured before he wrote the movie. Perhaps he was making fun of himself." Jill shrugged. "But I don't know what point I'm trying to make. I'm certainly not claiming I know everything about Bix by looking at his handwriting for twenty seconds."

She picked up the letter again.

"Wait a minute."

She looked up. "Yes?"

"It's funny you should say that about Bix not being Phillip. I know this sounds strange, but I don't really like Phillip."

"You don't like Phillip?" She marveled. "Isn't that heresy?"

"I don't say it much... and maybe 'like' is the wrong word. I don't respect him. You meet a guy like him out on the court, and he's a piece of cake to guard. It doesn't matter how good his basic skills are. He has no subtlety. He might as well be wearing turn signals."

"But that was Phillip at the beginning of the movie. He grew, he changed."

"Yes, but it was a matter of making one tough decision and sticking to it. He stuck to it well, but once he had made that choice, he didn't have any others. The last few times I've watched the movie, I wished we saw more of Booth, more about what he was going through... but maybe that's just because I'm a coach and so I'm interested in how a group of men relate to their leader."

"Don't you admire Phillip at the end? For leaving?"

"Not necessarily. Who's to say that Booth and Mary Deas are going to be happy together? I wouldn't want a wife who was pining after someone else. Don't you think it might have been more interesting if Phillip said, 'Look here, I was a rat, I'm sorry. I wish it were different, but it ain't. We can't turn back the clock.'? Who owns Briar Ridge and who loves Mary Deas are treated as the same question. She gets turned over like a piece of property."

"Is this a feminist interpretation of
Weary Hearts?
That might have made for an interesting movie, Doug, but not one that I would have loved."

He smiled ruefully. "Maybe that's why no one has ever asked me to write for the movies."

His smile was one Phillip never would have had. "It must be strange to look so much like someone and then not really respect him."

"You've got it wrong. I don't look like a character in a movie. I look like my uncle Bix, and him I respect plenty."

Jill nodded, silently apologizing.

Until now Doug had acted as if his resemblance to Bix was nothing more than an odd wrinkle in his love life. But it couldn't be that simple. What would it be like to resemble someone who had died before you were born? Would it seem as if he had had to step aside to make room for you?

She spoke. "Tell me, when you were growing up, how did you feel about looking like Bix?"

He shrugged. "For the longest time I thought everyone was crazy. Here I was, nine years old. I couldn't see any resemblance between me and a grown man. But it did make me feel kind of a connection with him. Not quite that he was up in Heaven watching out for me, but something along those lines."

"So how do you feel about him now?"

"Now? If he's still up in Heaven watching out for me, he's not doing such a great job. Maybe he needs to visit the neighborhood optometrist."

"Be serious."

"I can't be. I don't know how I feel... creeped out that he died at twenty-eight, I guess."

"That is pretty creepy," Jill agreed. She was twenty-eight. "To what extent do you identify with him?"

"Identify with him?" Doug looked a little blank, and Jill reminded herself that he was not in therapy, he hadn't spent a year thinking about these things.

But he tried. "I don't know how to answer that. There are differences. He was an actor, I'm a ham. He was athletic, I'm an athlete. We're both middle brothers, but he had two brothers, I have four sisters. He was Tom Sawyer—people say that over and over—full of schemes and tricks and plans. No one ever says that about me."

Except the athletic director of Maryland Tech... he implied that you were chock-full of schemes and tricks and plans.

But Jill was not going to introduce that subject. It needed to come from him. She waited a moment and when he said nothing, she picked up the letters.

Somewhere in England

Dear Mother and Father,

The nice lady at the Red Cross tells me that they notified you that Son #2 is alive, well, and in an English hospital, surrounded by pretty nurses. I'm told I can add little else, just that the Germans had me and now they don't. Being captured so early in one's career doesn't seem particularly meritorious, but during basic they told us that if captured, we were to cause lots of trouble, and in that, as you can imagine, I distinguished myself.

I'm fine. There's a little question about the mobility of the fingers on my right hand, and so a shy young lady with a delicious accent is teaching me to type. Surely piano playing would have the same effect, but apparently the army needs typists more than piano players. I hope that's not a military secret.

I know my little stint as a missing person left you sick with worry; believe me, it was involuntary. What do we hear from Charles?

Love, Bix

The next letter was typed.

Washington, D.C.

Dear Mother and Father,

What do you think of this fine typing? A pity it wasn't Charles who learned to type as his handwriting is so of-the-moment.

All my moaning about sitting behind a typewriter is another case of Bix-overreacting. I would be gloriously happy if that was any way to feel in the middle of a war. I'm working—mostly typing—for Colonel Frank Capra of Hollywood. He directed that movie
It Happened One Night
that we all liked so much and is now making movies for the war effort. Most of the unit is back in Hollywood. I don't know how I slipped in, but I'm not going to ask for fear it was a mistake.

Washington is crowded, crowded, crowded. I share a bed with a fellow who works a night shift. We've not met each other, but he seems a fine sort. I left him some Ringling apples and a few of Mother's cookies so he thinks I'm a fine sort, too.

Love,

Bix

P.S. I wish I could get these cameramen out to the Valley. They don't believe me when I tell them how beautiful it is.

Washington, D.C.

Dear Mother and Father,

I've dispatched a personal ambassadorial corps to persuade Charles that the censorship regs do not prohibit him from writing home. A group of entertainers is off to England to perform at the bases. Some of them know some of us, which is how I met them. Our best hope is a lovely girl named Alicia Burchell, who would, I am told, have a great future except that she may be too tall. I told her that my heroic brother is a great mountain of man, and she promises to look him up... providing that the looking will indeed be "up."