May 1932, Hollywood
‘Welcome to the land of broken dreams!’
Roger Stamper’s neat jewelled hands spread open in a gesture of welcome, his nails catching the light like shavings of pearl. He was wide and squat and he had a tiny diamond embedded in his front tooth which sparkled mutely, as if embarrassed by itself. His lips were a very soft pink, and glossy, daubed with petroleum jelly and laced with deep vertical creases, like tiger prawns. He gave off warmth and hopefully this was authentic.
‘This is my personal assistant, Mr Étienne Janvier,’ said Bart.
Roger shook Étienne’s hand. ‘Sure is good to meet you. Finally!’
They all laughed. Finally! Oh, it was so funny that they were meeting finally.
‘We’re having an unusually hot May. Been a real bitch on set. Speaking of which …’ Roger clapped his hands together. ‘Let’s get you to set for a looksy-loo.’
‘Marvellous,’ said Bart, following the man through the hotel lobby.
Bart was to star in The Mortician, playing the titular role – the mortician, Edward Crabbe (a part he’d already played on the London stage). It was a macabre story about an isolated, melancholic man who discovers a papyrus scroll rolled up in the oesophagus of a corpse on which is written a few lines of some ancient language – a resurrection spell. He goes on to bring back to life three men, all beautiful and exhibiting a certain masculine vitality and of course it all goes horribly wrong and the three reanimated men turn on him and eventually kill him. ‘Which is to say,’ Bart told Bettina, when recapping the story to her, ‘that the ugly old queer is suitably punished for his transgressions and the status quo is upheld, ta-da!’ The film was based on an English novel called Song of the Mortician which Roger adored, claiming its hidden queer subtext had been instrumental in him figuring out who and what he was.
Inside the car, Roger pressed a button causing a screen to come down between driver and passengers. He lifted up a flap in the seat, pulling out an ice-filled bucket containing champagne and glasses. ‘The Hollywood treatment!’
‘Where’s this moonshine I’ve been hearing all about?’ said Bart, wiping his forehead with a hanky.
‘In the bathtubs of Irish thugs,’ said Roger. ‘So how’s the wife? Jean tells me she’s pregnant again.’
Roger was of course Jean’s producer friend. She’d be at Davenport now, lying on his furniture, eating his food and reaching out with her white claw of a hand to stroke Bettina’s swollen belly. As if she had a stake in what was growing inside.
Bart nodded, drinking. The delicate champagne bubbles were popping against his upper lip. ‘Everything is hunky-dory.’
Roger crossed his legs like a woman, his trousers hitching up to show a salmon-pink sock. ‘Me, I could never do what you did. Couldn’t live with a woman. Not after growing up with six sisters.’
They were driving down a broad road lined with fat palm trees. One tree had a rope dangling out of its thick fronds, and hanging from the bottom of the rope, by its leg, was a baby doll with no arms. The car stopped at an intersection, outside an employment office, and there stood a group of men – white, black, Mexican – wearing baggy brown trousers and white short-sleeved shirts, tieless. A truck pulled up and they started piling into the open back of its cab. Orange-pickers, maybe. How depressing.
‘So how do you find being your beau’s assistant?’ Roger asked Étienne.
Étienne was pressing his champagne flute against his neck. ‘He has always told me what to do. Now I am getting paid.’
‘Oh, I like it!’ said Roger, squeezing his knees and baring his teeth. ‘Jean tells me you’re an artist?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Étienne, evasively.
Étienne had grown weary of the label ‘artist’. With art in general. Back in Paris he’d discovered that a few of his artist friends had died, a couple from alcohol abuse, one from starvation and exposure, two others from TB. He fell back into selling his arse in the back streets of the Quartier Pigalle – on hearing this, Bart took great enjoyment in exhibiting an almost Buddha-like show of non-judgement (he did of course judge, inwardly).
Étienne loved playing with Tabby (he enjoyed the simplicity of children) but the rest of the time he seemed edgy and bored and was smoking more hashish than usual. He’d taken an interest in learning card tricks, which Bart had at first found charming, but now it was just annoying. He carried a pack with him wherever he went and was always dipping into his pocket to retrieve them and practise, even when on the lavatory. ‘Idle hands are the devil’s playground, non?’ he’d say, separating the cards in a blur, trousers around his ankles.
‘Ah, here we are,’ said Roger.
They had pulled up into a vast, sun-bright lot.
‘Is that Kay Francis?’ said Étienne, his nose touching the window glass.
‘No,’ said Roger, following his gaze, ‘that’s a prostitute.’ He leaned forward, hands on his thighs: ‘But what’s the difference, right?’
The hot cab exploded with laughter. Actress, prostitute – what’s the difference? Hahaha. It’s funny because it’s true! Whores as far as the eye can see. Two whores sitting in your car right now. And what does that make you, Roger?
‘I am of course joking,’ he said, wiping his eye with a bejewelled finger. ‘Kay Francis is an impeccable woman.’
Three things he hated about filming The Mortician. Firstly: the make-up. He was up at four every morning and promptly driven to the set, where he had to sit perfectly still for three hours – three whole hours – so that a dullard called Peter could attach prosthetics – a crooked nose and gaunt cheekbones – and then slather on a thick cake of make-up.
The second thing: sobriety. He couldn’t get drunk, not with the early mornings, and he just wasn’t capable of moderate drinking – it’d taken him three decades to learn this sorry truth. He dined with Étienne alone in the evenings, drinking soda water and spearing his salad leaves and poached fish with rising resentment; he’d had to lose sixteen pounds in order to play the role of Crabbe. Meanwhile, Étienne gobbled up sirloin steak and blocks of bread and cheese. Afterwards they’d return to the hotel and go straight to bed, usually too tired to fuck. And when they did fuck, it was perfunctory and rushed; minimal kissing, a race to come first. The last time they’d fucked like they meant it had been in 1929.
The third thing and the worst thing: being away from Tabby. He tried to speak to her on the telephone once, and the second he heard her nasal girl-squeak – ‘Dada, when are you coming home?’ – he’d dropped the mouthpiece and had to lean against the wall to steady himself. It felt like someone had prised open his ribcage and kicked him squarely in the heart.
There were also plenty of things he merely disliked, such as the catering staff, a bunch of old shrews who giggled enigmatically whenever he tried to speak to them, and the ongoing heatwave – it seemed like every ten minutes he had to covertly sneak a hand down his trousers to peel his sticky testicles from his thigh.
There was much to love too. Lillian White, the female lead, for starters. A former Ziegfeld girl, she had bright blue eyes, dyed black hair and immortal skin. She smoked constantly and exuded an aura of sex so potent one could almost smell it. They’d hit it off immediately and spent most lunchtimes together in her caravan. She’d once had a drink thrown over her by Gloria Swanson over a dispute in a poker game (‘I deserved it – I was cheating’) and another time licked Tallulah Bankhead’s left nipple (‘on a dare’). She had a whole bagful of stories and extracted them with wide-eyed zeal, laughing open-throated at each scandalous punchline.
And of course there was Roger. His first day on set Bart had felt overwhelmed by the cameras and the harsh lighting, sweating so much that his prosthetic chin began to slide away. He had no idea what he was doing. He spent lunch break sitting under a cardboard cut-out of a vulture. I can’t do this, he thought, staring unseeing at the sweating tomato slices on his tray. He was going to ruin this whole production. Thought he was good enough for Hollywood, that’s what everyone would think.
Roger found him. He lowered himself to the floor with difficulty and was silent for a long time, his brogues creaking. Finally, he said, ‘Valentino apparently shat his pants his first day on set of The Sheik. Everyone could smell it.’
Bart managed fairly well after that.
Shooting was suspended on the second day due to a rewrite of the script – Roger had met with the board and they’d expressed concern over a certain ‘subliminal element’. They thought Crabbe and his assistant, played by Lillian, should end up falling in love. ‘Some uptight cunts with too much time on their hands are gonna turn my film into dog shit,’ complained Roger. Bart now had to play the role in a way that justified the reciprocated love of a beautiful girl. ‘OK, so our Eddie’s got a face only a mother could love,’ Roger said to him, ‘but so long as you can make it seem like he’d be a good lover, I think we can get away with this. Essentially, I want you to look like you live for eating pussy. You’re hungry for it.’
In a new scene, Bart gazed down at Lillian, hungrily. He gripped her arms and pulled her close. He remembered a time five years ago when he and Étienne had looked at each other like this – they’d been locked inside the bathroom, at a party. Swaying with the drink, they stared at each other murderously, their erections meeting through the cloth of their trousers. They’d stayed like that for ages – genuinely, it’d been close to two minutes, and then, the tension so palpable, so bloody knife-tight, they’d both pounced, kissing messily. Bart spun Étienne around, tore down his trousers and started to lick his arsehole. Something he’d never done, nor had the urge to do, before. It was pure filth.
‘And that’s a cut!’ yelled the director. ‘Beautiful, Bart, real authentic.’
‘Darling, when it comes to uglification, you haven’t a leg to stand on, I’m afraid.’
‘Uglification?’ said Lillian through her perpetual shield of smoke. ‘That even a word?’
Bart shrugged. ‘Well, it is now.’
They were in Lillian’s trailer – that’s what they called them here, trailers – drinking vodka and listening to Lee Wiley on the gramophone. Shooting was to start late the following morning and Bart was taking the opportunity to get drunk. Étienne was lying down in Bart’s trailer with a migraine, a damp cloth over his face and the blinds drawn. He was hoping to take a two-day trip to Las Vegas with one of the set painters the following morning, and feared the headache wouldn’t budge (Bart hoped this would be the case – the set painter, a man, was stunning, and they were getting rather tight). It was raining outside – the first time Bart had witnessed rain in LA. It was a phenomenal downpour, plinking like pennies against the trailer roof, gushing down the windowpanes and covering the lot grounds in a shallow ford.
‘If Roger had his way,’ said Lillian, ‘I’d end up with hair coming outta my chin. And warts. A fucking broomstick, ya know?’
Angry with the studio for ‘de-queering the script’ and wanting to express this as passive-aggressively as possible, Roger had renamed Lillian’s character Beadie – B.D. as in bull-dagger – and had her wearing slacks and less make-up.
‘Stop bloody moaning and drink,’ said Bart.
‘I will not stop bloody moaning. It’s OK for you – you’re married already. How am I supposed to find a husband looking like a clam climber?’
‘Clam climber?’
She laughed hard, snapping her head back. That full-throated roar. ‘I made that up. You like it?’
‘Climber? Why?’
‘Alliteration. And I guess you – ya know – I guess you sort of climb up to it.’ She mimed climbing a ladder with her hands.
‘One might climb down.’
‘Might one?’ she said, imitating his accent. ‘Here, let me top you up.’ He held out his glass and she glugged out two inches of vodka. ‘I’m real glad we got to do this,’ she said, adding a spray of club soda. ‘I can’t call someone a pal if I haven’t gotten trashed with them.’
‘Hear hear!’ said Bart, raising his glass.
‘This is my favourite song. Keep it buttoned till it’s finished.’ She closed her eyes, shoulders rolling along to the lazy string section and then, seemingly bored, turned to Bart and said, ‘You ever done a screen kiss?’
‘This is the first time I’ve done a screen anything. As you know.’
‘What about the stage?’
‘Yes. Many times.’
‘We should practise it,’ she said, taking her silk scarf off and bunching it up with one hand, ‘ready for the shoot.’
‘Oh, I don’t know …’
‘Hey. Don’t get like that.’ She threw her scarf at him – it became unbundled as it flew and drifted down feather-slow onto his thigh. ‘I’m a professional. You think I just walk onto a set and wrap lips with a guy I’ve never wrapped lips with before? I want it to look good.’
He picked up the scarf with two fingers. Lillian’s perfume rose up – a sweet, overpowering musk.
‘I don’t want to sit on your wiener, Mr Big Theatre Man. We’re friends here.’
He downed the rest of his drink. ‘Fine. Do you know your lines?’
She raised her pencil-thin eyebrows. ‘Did I not just say I was a professional?’
He stood up. ‘“Beadie. I don’t know if I can go on any more.”’
‘“You must. Oh, you must.”’
He shook his head. ‘“I thought I could create something perfect – why, Beadie? Why aim for perfection in this imperfect world?”’
She took a step closer to him, wringing her hands. ‘“Because the world is imperfect! You just want to fix what was broken. Oh, Eddie – you have something broken inside of you, we all do.”’ She pressed a hand to his chest. ‘“Won’t you let me try to fix it?”’
He grabbed her by the arms and pulled her in. Gazed down at her. Hungrily. He lurched his head to hers and kissed her lips, swooning his head to the side. She parted her mouth and slipped her tongue in, reaching up to grab his head with both hands. And he couldn’t help it – he kissed back. It was instinctual. It would be rude not to. She pushed him up against the dressing table, his buttocks knocking over perfume bottles and make-up. She slipped her hands under his shirt and ran them up his stomach, to his chest, combing her fingers through his chest hair.
He leapt away, giggling wildly. ‘That wasn’t in the script!’ he shrilled, the skin on his face heating up. ‘You naughty woman!’
She was leaning against her dressing table, palms down, shoulders slumped, breathing heavily. In the position of someone who wished to be fucked from behind … or someone dreadfully embarrassed, gathering themselves.
He poured vodka into his glass and tossed it back. Laughed again. You naughty woman. God.
She turned around finally. Sulkily. Her hair lay in messy damp strands around her face. She parted it with her fingers, nudging it back into place. ‘You don’t like me?’
Bart poured another drink. ‘I thought you knew what I was.’
‘You mean the Frenchie?’
‘Well. Yes.’ He fumbled a cigarette out of his packet.
‘I just figured you went both ways. Your wife’s got a bun in the oven, don’t she?’
He tried to light the cigarette but it dropped out of his fingers, falling into his drink. He took out a fresh one and tried again. ‘I think you’re beautiful, Lilly. But I’m afraid I just don’t feel anything for women. Physically.’
She nodded, processing this. And then she seemed to entirely compose herself, to suck all vulnerability and human feeling back inside herself, and it was as if someone had just yelled, ‘Action!’ Tiger-like, she ambled to her chair. She sat down, crossing one long leg over the other, and looked at him, eyes full of lazy menace. ‘I think you should leave.’
‘Lilly. I do so hope we can still be friends—’
‘I want you out of here.’ Her hands lay perfectly still on the armchair rests. ‘This is a fag-free zone, this place. Beat it.’
‘Oh, come on! You sucked Tallulah Bankhead’s tit!’
‘I said beat it. Before I call security on you.’
He waited for her hard face to melt into a wicked grin – the punchline. But it never came. He snatched up his cigarettes and jacket and left. The rain soaked him through to the skin within seconds.