The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 (44 page)

VIII.

P
ITY THE SWINDLER WHO TRIED
to put one over on Bridey. Within minutes of homecoming, she sensed Margeaux's storming of the compound. Bridey was not cross; rather, her brisk manner evinced an embarrassment over the lengths her daughter had gone to avoid her. Nothing more was said of Margeaux until a month later, when I overheard Bridey's end of one of their calls. Before then I'd had no interest in eavesdropping, but now I toed up to a wall well-positioned for espionage and peeked around it.

Scandal rags would have paid good money for a photograph of the invincible Bridey Valentine in a state of such defeat. Her upper body was slumped across a telephone table, hair uncombed, face unpainted, and bundled in a salmon-pink robe.

“I suppose I
did
start smoking at your age but that's beside the poi—. Why, that's a horrid thing to say. Of
course
you will live long enough to care. You're doing so much better, that's what everyone tells—. You're a bright girl with a wonderful future. I don't see why you can't be happy.”

She twisted the telephone cord around her purpling finger.

“If only you would engage with people, participate. You used to twirl your baton, what happened to that? Oh, yes. Well, we can't all be coordinated. What about that play you did in fourth grade? You had so much fun. Well, no, I didn't, and I've apologized for that,
but what would have happened had I come? There would have been questions, it would've become a three-ring—. Baby, I'm
not
being conceited, I'm—”

Vertebrae pressed through her robe.

“I don't expect you to be interested in acting. That was silly of me. I just want—Gopher, I want whatever
you
want. I want you to be happy—healthy and happy. Just don't smoke too much, will you promise? And do what your therapists tell you. And eat right—baby, I'm not saying a word about your weight, but you must read that booklet I sent about moderation. And sleep—are you getting enough sleep? Do you need another prescription?”

Her head of messy hair perked up.

“Why, yes, Z's here. Is there something you'd like me to ask him? Or if you'd enjoy speaking with him personally, I'd be happy to—”

Ten thousand fan letters a week, Americans spraining their wrists to describe the depths of their devotion, and a few muttered words from an unsociable child had rubbled her confidence. I began to look for a hiding place until I heard Margeaux's mortification blaring from the receiver.

“Gopher, Gopher—all right, I won't put him on—I didn't mean to—I'm just trying to—”

Margeaux severed the connection, and it took thumb-screw levels of endurance to ride out the ten minutes that groveled by before Bridey placed the handset into its cradle. When next I dared look, I found her mourning her reflection in the wrought-iron mirror over the table. I knew what she saw. It was early; she was undressed and without cosmetics; she was not armed to hide from herself the truth.

Bridey was thirty-eight in a town that preferred its ingenues still dewed from their buds of womanhood—in other words, my age. She
was furthermore estranged from the daughter whose youth might pull against the ever-nibbling shark of time. Bridey led a life rich of food, rough of tobacco, harsh of alcohol, and late of nights, everything against which she warned Margeaux, and even a face and body like hers could not triumph
ad infinitum
.

Insecurity, as if bid by this bugle, came marching with the September 1936 death of Irving Thalberg. To you the name likely means nothing, but to Tinseltown noblesse, he was “the Boy Wonder,” the humble son of German Jews appointed manager of Universal Studios at age twenty and the driving force behind the MGM dynasty. In hindsight, his sudden death at age thirty-seven was the first spot of tarnish upon a golden era.

Not since Rudolph Valentino's passing had Hollywood so grieved. On the day of the funeral, five minutes of silence were held at every studio in town, and newspapers squared their every inch with mawkish eulogies from the crème de la crème. I cared not one stale fig about a dead executive, but Thalberg had been the orchestrator of Bridey's twenty-five-film plan—upon which rested the eventual fate of
In Our Image
. I offered her encouragements: everything would work out, she was bigger than any one producer, that sort of tripe. She was too smart to believe it.

Bridey recounted the funeral through a veil she refused to remove. The street outside of Wilshire Boulevard Temple had been blocked to accommodate thousands of spectators angling to see the parade of sorrowing stars. Everyone was there and even the squirreliest starlet had been forced to wear inexpressive black. The result was a rare leveling of the field. While the rabbi droned, actresses twisted their necks to gauge the competition. There was no hiding who looked great or merely good, who was laudably young and who was criminally old.

Bridey was sobbing by the time she left—I saw the published photos. She was captioned as bereaving a fallen friend, but that was a stretch. Old age, that rat fink, had crept up on her and stabbed her in the exquisite back. It was fitting, I suppose, that the ambush had happened at a funeral.

She'd slipped the valet an extra twenty to fetch her car first, but it did not arrive before she became entangled in a grapevine that, even at this driest of affairs, bore bruise-colored fruit. Thalberg, the gossipers gossiped, had been sure-footed in his career, but boy, he'd sure made a misstep when passing on the film rights to a book called
Gone With the Wind
.

I'd never heard of it; I assumed it to be the tale of an interesting tornado. I came to find that the book was not meteorological in nature but instead a Civil War tear-jerker. The property had gone to David O. Selznick over at Selznick International, and with Clark Gable anointed as the male lead, Selznick was ramping up a global search for The Girl, or rather, The Girl to End All Girls, if you believed the chatter outside the Wilshire Boulevard Temple.

Bridey, for one, believed it. Every female in town (and likely a few males) wanted the role of Scarlett O'Hara, and as “Scarlett Fever” engulfed Hollywood, Bridey began hauling around the refrigerator-sized novel, breaking the spine like she was killing it, dog-earing pages until they snapped, and cramming the margins with minuscule manifestos regarding motivation. While Bridey was on set I gave the book a whirl but put it down around page eighty-million, even though I was rather fond of Miss O'Hara. She was pompous, duplicitous, underhanded, and randy. What wasn't to like?

By those same yardsticks, it was the role for which Bridey had been born. There was but one niggling issue. By my calculation,
Scarlett O'Hara began the story in her teens and was not a day over thirty by the drop of the final curtain. Believe me, Reader, I did not relish summoning the thunder of a Bridey scorned, but neither could I stomach months of preparation put toward an impossible end.

One explosive afternoon the topic forced itself.

Bridey strangled the most recent issue of
Photoplay
.

“It says right here they've got Norma Shearer doing lighting tests, and she's only a couple of years younger than me! I guess they haven't noticed that Norma hasn't any tits, absolutely none to speak of. The falsies alone will send them overbudget!”

She punted the magazine across the room.

“And Tallulah Bankhead? Why, she's just a watered-down me! And Katharine Hepburn, that grandpa in a dress? It makes my skin crawl! And Bette Davis?
Bette fucking Davis
?”

She looked about, probably for a gun with which to shoot the
Photoplay
dead.

“Calm thyself,” urged I. “There are other roles.”

“Not like this one. This one
makes
me, and it makes my script a reality. I'm not going to sit here and let them hand it to some witless chippy!”

One could not help but recall how Bridey herself had made her name by out-and-out robbing
An Orchid Unknown
from Old Lady Talmadge, but that footnote I kept to myself. Gingerly I proceeded.

“Regardless of outcome, you know that those hussies cannot hold a candle—”

“Oh, don't patronize me. I don't keep you here to kiss my ass.”

“That does not sound half bad.” I winked. “Let us give it a try.”

“You'd like that, wouldn't you? Anything to avoid actual sex. I suppose you'd prefer No-Tits Norma or Grandpa Hepburn.”

“Everything I say upsets you. Henceforth, let us speak only in milquetoast generalities.”

I bent down to pick up the magazine. She booted it out of reach.

“Of course your beloved Wilma Sue never gets older, does she? She's safe from the ravages of age, perfectly, pristinely
dead
.”

Bridey's black eyes blistered. Honed on dozens of sets in dozens of scenarios versus dozens of redoubtable actors, the glower was strong enough to nail me to the wall. Nothing injured me more than base slanderings of Wilma Sue, and Bridey, in her foulest moods, always remembered.

“She wasn't a
goddess
,” said she. “She wasn't
perfect
. You've built a pedestal to this girl like she's the epitome of virtue, when she was every bit as faulted and as foul as me. It's a child's viewpoint, Z. You can be such a child.”

She turned on her black suede heel and cruised from the room. I listened to her clack across a mile or two of flooring before hearing the smart click of the lifted telephone receiver. A savvy hunter, I removed my shoes before pursuing my game on socked feet. The duty I'd taken on, I tried to remind myself, included administering cool water to my overheated female firebrand.

“Overland three-seven hundred,” she barked at the operator. “Yes, hello, this is Miss Valentine. I require you, at once, to connect me with—yes, that's right. Darling, I could not care less if he's busy; interrupt him. Who? I don't care if he's got FDR
in there. All right, listen up, girlie. You tell him Miss Bridey Valentine is on the line and she's beginning to feel, let's say, a nervous breakdown coming on, or perhaps a sunstroke—you know, one of those actressy ailments that can shut down a picture for weeks. Why, yes, dear, of course I'll hold.”

When I retired that night, I did so alone, aside from the annotated
Gone With the Wind
I intended to render into confetti. I did not, though, for as upset as I was, I had to hand it to Bridey—her caveman club still worked. Ten minutes of telephonic tirades had won her an appointment with Selznick for the very next day. I dwelled upon Church, unresponsive to my every cash mailing but no doubt repairing himself toward health. When had everyone begun turning to me, of all people, to maintain mature behavior? Above all, I had to keep the money flowing.

I placed the novel outside Bridey's boudoir, all 1,037 pages intact.

It was a bad sign that she was not carrying the book when she returned the following night. She had frizzed hair and pink skin, evidence that she'd scrubbed away the garish rouge of a twenty-year-old Georgian debutante. We eyed each other, silent as duelists, until she made her way to the library, busied herself at the wet bar, and tossed down her throat a shot of bourbon. She closed her eyes as the antivenom coated her innards. The bear rug, ever mirthful, waited to chuckle at human follies.

“He offered me a part,” said Bridey.

I dropped my corpse onto the loveseat.

“Right there? At the meeting? Why . . . that's remarkable! The magazine said one thousand actresses have read for the part—one thousand! When will it be public? We should take out a full page in
The Hollywood Reporter
, thanking everyone for their belief and trust—”

I, blinkered old nag, quit my nickering upon noticing another three fingers of booze being swallowed, glug-a-glug-glug. Bridey wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and gasped at the corollary gut-fire. She steadied herself against the bar.

“The part of
Belle
,” said Bridey.

This character I did not recall.

“Belle . . . ?”

“Belle Watling.” Glug-a-glug-glug. “The powdered old whore.”

Selznick, hoped I, had removed the breakables from his office prior to Bridey's combustion. Further details dribbled out as she anesthetized herself: how the role was contingent upon a screen test, a process to which she hadn't been subjected since naifhood; how the moguls didn't use to wedge her
into
pictures, they built pictures
around
her; how Selznick had interrupted her impassioned pitch so that he could administer an injection of amphetamines to keep himself “glued”; how the whole thing had been an excuse to put Bridey in her place in a post-Thalberg landscape.

I patted her hand, brushed her hair. I assuaged, I consoled. The evening tilted, lost itself in duration, and sometime during the deadest, drunkest hours, Margeaux's warnings snaked like an arid Baja breeze about the room's keystoned arches, corniced ceilings, and dead bear. Mother, she'd said, was a phony like all the rest; Mother, she'd said, cared only for herself and her image. She was a strange one, our little Gopher, but she was not without insight, as I was soon to discover.

IX.

B
RIDEY INSISTED THAT IT WAS
no big deal. Getting a facelift was no worse than getting your teeth done. Who even remembered Joan Crawford's asymmetrical ivories before she had her jawline straightened? What leading lady hadn't gagged at Clark Gable's tooth rot during a love scene before he had the whole set of them replaced?

My own body brought me regular disgust, and yet I could not stomach her description of the procedure. The crude incisions behind the ears. The stretching of skin as if it were a sheet across a bed. On the day of the surgery I paced the mansion afraid that I might retch the full contents of my stomach—namely, Johnny's golden aggie, a token of another era when science pretended to perform miracles.

Bridey was driven home late the following night to avoid being photographed. When she entered clinging to the chauffeur's arm, I covered my mouth to inhibit a scream. She squinted through the purple custard of two black eyes, her entire face swollen, glossy, and encrusted with blood along the cotton treatments of her ears and jaw. My poor mangled beauty! I took her in my arms, heedless of the staff that watched us, and moaned that we would find a way to reverse the damage, that all was not lost!

It was needless drama. A deep-peel facial treatment was to blame for the burned flesh but it healed rapidly, as did the bruising and
inflammation. Bridey spent half of her recovery in front of a convocation of mirrors and the other half updating MGM on her progress. I hated the surgery the same as I would hate a man who had beaten her, so it was with substantial conflict that I acceded that the procedure had, in fact, rolled back ten years of age.

Her tightened skin widened her eyes so that she appeared as startled by her beauty as I. Emboldened by this cut-and-stitch, she embarked upon a bonanza of self-improvement, from a month-long diet of vegetable broth to a programmed series of enemas. How she strutted about, hips swinging with spunk enough to knock the skull of a decapitated Viking from its pedestal.

The role of Scarlett O'Hara had been awarded to actor Laurence Olivier's wife, an English coquette named Vivien Leigh. But the new Bridey no longer cared. She was nine films into her twenty-five-film contract and rededicated to squeezing the next sixteen for every last award and box office record. She had the face; all she needed was a reason to make people look at it. In other words, she needed a scandal, and no one did scandal better than Bridey.

This time, the scandal was me.

To this day I carry upon my bony back a freight of bitterness. I believed, stupidly, that it was affection that compelled Bridey to ask me, at long last, to leave my Beverly Hills confines and visit her upon the set of her new Western,
Die, Banditos!
That morning I could not knot my tie, and for a blissful few seconds I was an ordinary seventeen-year-old kid, anxious for a date at his first upscale restaurant.

Never shall I forget the surreality of the stroll to Stage 19. Women in towering headdresses commingled with fellows skirted in Egyptian gold. Workers moved bizarre props—a jade jaguar, a giant plaster head, a science-fiction missile—on wheeled pallets. A
cluster of midgets threw dice outside of a stage, while a truck rumbled by with a medieval tower bound for the backlot. I tipped my hat at a lucky fellow tape-measuring the bust of a girl in a flesh-colored leotard. He gave me a quick scan and made, I suppose, a forgivable assumption.

“
The Devil's Henchmen
, right?” He thumbed left. “Two doors down.”

Outside of Stage 19 lounged a rabble of reporters and photographers chewing toothpicks. As one, they gave me a look before judging me inconsequential. I gave them no mind, so eager was I to get my dead flesh out of the heat. Inside it was cool and dark, so long as I stayed clear of the lights aimed upon a saloon set. The surrounding hullabaloo was like Ed Mann's newsreel crew times fifty, bustling with harried technicians all the way up to the catwalks. I felt quite small. Movie people, I'd found, had a knack for that.

Bridey sashayed from the darkness in a plaid frontier dress with fur cuffs, black lace gloves, and a tight black ribbon around her neck. Her baguette of hair bounced about her shoulder as she put my arm across her elbow and steered me back outside. I tried to resist.

“Might we remain inside? The heat is not good for my—”

“I'll simply die without some fresh air.”

The moment we stepped outside, the lazy shutterbugs spat their toothpicks and became a well-trained firing squad, lifting their cameras in unison and blasting. I blinked at the strobe effect and staggered, but Bridey gripped my suit with one hand while daintily touching her breastbone with the other.

“Boys!” scolded she. “I swear a girl cannot enjoy a moment's privacy.”

It was flirty fibbery, frisky fakery, and the photogs scarfed it, laugh
ing and pressing closer, firing their pulses of light off her smooth new face. Bridey, the obvious orchestrator of the event, pouted and kittened, then trilled with laughter when they shouted what they were being paid to shout. My heart, that ball of mud, hardened and sank.

“Who's the Casanova, Miss Valentine?”

“Bridey, is this lucky fella pitching you woo?”

“What's your name, young man? You in pictures or what?”

I tried to enliven my daft look. Bridey made up for my hesitation by embracing me, not as she did in real life, with pelvis a-pushing and breasts a-plumping, but in an exaggerated stage hug capped by the hackneyed finale of her cheek pressed flat against my own.

“His name is Zebulon Finch and I'm simply mad about him! And you can print that: Z, E, B, U, L, O, N.”

I heard the coffin crack of opened notebooks, the dead grass of rushing pencils.

“Miss Valentine! How about a smooch with the new beau?”

Other reporters hoorayed the motion. Bridey dropped her jaw in sarcastic shock before adopting the more familiar suggestive glower. She licked her ruby lips, tilted her face to mine, and drooped backward so that I was forced to sustain her in a romantic dip.

“Someone call Will Hays.” Her murmur was just loud enough for transcription. “I think we might break the three-second rule.”

I'd long prided myself on being an accomplished and unrepentant falsifier, yet this public kiss caused me discomfort. It felt as though our unique affection was shoved through a gristmill to create a more palatable product. Ten thousand photographs later (the final third of which guest-starred the Marx Brothers, who dropped by to make hubba-hubba faces), Bridey patted me on the head and sent me home like a good little boy. And like a little boy I sulked for having received
less than I'd desired. This might be my coming out—the public cotillion long planned by Dr. Leather—but Bridey had choreographed it so as to benefit only her.

Our next stop was Grauman's Chinese Theatre, anchor of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for the premiere of
Take My Wives—Please!
, Bridey's long-awaited slapstick slugfest with superstar Greta Garbo. Because the agoraphobic Garbo was her usual no-show, the twenty-thousand fans focused on Bridey, who led me about like a colt. Flashbulbs popped; I smiled, or tried to. What else did one do in Hollywood? Here was the fame I'd originally traveled west to find.

“Who Is the Mystery Man?” begged the headline of
Photoplay
.

I was not, as speculated, an expatriated prince from some sunless empire.

“What's Going on in Bridey's Love Nest?” demanded
Screen Romances
.

Not much, aside from one-way erotic servitude.

“A Boy-Toy for Bridey: Does True Love Know No Age?” inquired
Hollywood Low-Down
.

Star-fuckers had short memories. No one recalled my newsreel.

It was a cool autumn day in 1938 when a team from
Life
magazine visited the mansion for a six-page photo feature entitled “Relaxing at Home with Bridey Valentine.” She was posed in a series of ludicrous
tableaux vivants
: beaming in the garden with a badminton racket (she had never played); in the parlor running a feather duster over china (are you kidding me?); and in the bathtub, smoldering from within a coat of bubbles (she believed baths were for babies).

I, too, was subjected to staged stupidity. The
Life
squad decked me out in lumberjack flannel and forced me to a kneel atop the accursed bear rug, gripping a log as if I were about to toss it upon the
fire. I held the pose for several minutes while the bear, his glass eyes happy with flame, flaunted his tranquil death.

It was from that locked position, with my last crumbs of pride being lapped up by the bear's indolent pink tongue, that Bridey gave me a look I shan't forget. She was pensive, leaning against bookshelves with her pinky nail bit between her front teeth. I'd seen this look before, usually while she searched photos of herself for imperfections she might crush like roaches.

Despite the fire, flannel, and flashbulbs, I was taken by a chill. This body of mine had long titillated Bridey because of its abnormalities, but her study of me told a developing story. Had not surgery perfected her perfection? Perhaps her lover, already a boon when it came to press coverage, might double his value after benefitting from similar alterations.

“Mr. Finch?” beckoned the photographer. “America's housewives prefer you smiling.”