ONE MIGHT PUT ONE’S FINGER inside the Etruscan cinerary urn and wipe the dust of centuries. One might try on the feathered Peruvian burial mask to see if it fit. These lurid curios were for anyone to enjoy. There was but one room that remained locked and unremarked upon; that is, until summer 1935, when Bridey brought me to the threshold with sententious and, to be frank, worrisome fanfare.
She was decked out as if for a premiere, a checked dress with an orange bolero jacket and matching orange hat. From an orange pocket she removed a large key, unlocked the door, and then, with her orange fingernails resting upon the knob, delivered a statement—prepared in advance, one would imagine, though Bridey had a gift of bringing scripted words to life.
“When you first, quote, ‘make it,’ the twelve months that follow are everything. That’s when the studio heads use their big, fancy man-brains to figure out, quote, ‘who you are.’ For an actress, it’s a losing proposition. Should they fail, well, your hit was a fluke and into obscurity you slide. Should they succeed, then you’re really stuck, for now they’ve invented your, quote, ‘formula.’”
“I vociferously disagree,” said I. “Your roles are manifold and mutable!”
“Oh, a girl can wiggle a bit, like a worm on a hook, but she mustn’t delude herself—she’s on their hook, and they’ll make damn sure her formula goes untampered with. If you’re Joan Crawford, you’re the noble clotheshorse. If you’re Ginger Rogers, you’re the tap-dancing paramour. Your next career checkpoint? Your inevitable drop from exhaustion.”
Rest assured, Reader, that the objective to siphon money to Church remained intact. It is just that, month by month, my purpose in Hollywood had begun to broaden, and it was right then, as Bridey deprecated her many triumphs, that I knew I’d become smitten beyond the mercenary rationales of money or even physical beauty. The woman challenged me as no one since Wilma Sue had dared, and that, more than anything since my death, stimulated me toward a sort of life. I resolved to return the favor and help her through any insecurity.
“I do tell you that you work too hard.”
“Yes, but it is in aid of a goal. It used to be, anyhow. For a long while now, I’ve lost my way. But you’ve inspired me, Z. I can’t tell you how much.”
“Me? Inspire you? You are overstressed, all right.”
“You have reminded me that life—my life, anyway—is short. If I am to make anything worthwhile of this frivolous profession, there is no more time to waste.”
The moment required only lowered lights, orchestral pomp, and rising red curtains to be complete. Bridey turned the knob and flung open the door, flattening her melodramatic form across the jamb like the breathless heroine of a silent-film serial.
The reveal was anticlimactic. Not a nugget of El Dorado’s gold, not a hint of Smaug’s riches. It was a stuffy storeroom, bigger than a monkey’s cage yet smaller than a Chinatown flat. Lining the floor and shelves were dusty reams of paper shotgunned with ink type, the lower strata of yellower age than the higher. Stacks of pink and blue carbon copies provided the only variance in color. Placed high upon a shelf, like Sacco and Vanzetti awaiting sentencing, were two doomed typewriters.
“This is quite . . . What I mean is, this is very . . .” I gave up. “What is this?”
Bridey pressed all of her choicest parts against my back.
“A script. Six years I worked on it. Researching, analyzing, revising; days, nights, weekends, holidays; it was everything to me. Then I walked away from it. I thought it had beaten me. But it hasn’t, Z, I know it hasn’t.”
An entire room lost beneath paper like drifts of snow—for a single script?
“If I may ask,” said I, “what sort of script?”
“A screenplay. The screenplay. The one that will change everything, not only for me but for all women. For all pictures.”
Bridey had no equal in chutzpah.
“I am listening, and with an avid ear.”
“I won’t play The Girl forever. You know that’s how they describe female leads? Doesn’t matter if it’s a weepie, a comedy, or a gangster picture, I’m still The Girl, as if my child-bearing organs were my only notable characteristic. A girl, I’ll remind you, is not a woman. She’s only allowed to have girl-sized problems. If I get a pimple, twenty men get on the telephone to discuss the state of my scabbing. If I raise a stink about it, they call it a tantrum and punish me with roles so bad I’d rather shoot myself in the face. Then at my funeral, they’ll say, ‘What a woman!’”
“Well, you must tell me all about it.”
This I said to push along the conversation, for I’d grown alarmed at the ardor with which Bridey fingernailed my back. She rustled me from the room, locked it, and led me by the hand to the library, where she positioned us on the loveseat and lit a cigarette before taking my chilly hand.
“The title: In Our Image.”
“A Biblical reference?”
“Very good, Z. First, a preface. Life revolves around three things. Can you name them?”
“I shall follow my instinct. Lingerie.”
“Close! Sex. What else?”
“How about a thick cut of steak, bloody as war.”
“That’s right, food. You’re good at this. The third?”
“I daren’t push my luck.”
“Too bad, the third one is up your alley: death. The bedroom, the table, and the grave. Nothing else matters.”
It bothered me that I was incapable of partaking in any of the three.
“The plot?” managed I.
“Forget plot. This is a story. The most primal of stories: a woman loves a man.”
“And you would play the woman.”
“As it happens, yes. Now this man, you see, beneath his human clothes, is a wolf.”
I glanced at the bear rug. He looked bemused.
“Is this . . . a fairy tale?”
She puffed at her cigarette.
“Of sorts.”
“Is it for children?”
“It’s for everyone. Shut up and listen. The woman loves her man but decides she cannot stay with him. He is, after all, a wolf and he does what wolves do.”
“Eat babies and such.”
“So she sets to writing him a good-bye letter but has no paper at hand. What she has are calendars—all sorts of calendars. So she rips off a month and uses the back of it for her note, but it doesn’t come out right so she crumples it up and throws it away. She rips off another month, then another, and those months become real, and by the time she’s finished the note she’s crumpled up entire years. She goes outside to deliver the perfect good-bye letter only to find that her wolf has died.”
“Because wolves have shorter life spans.”
“Exactly! But it’s worse than that. All wolves have died, all natural predators, which includes man, by which I mean men—leaving women behind in a world devoid of violence. But is that a good thing? It’s a vacuum, isn’t it? A kind of slow death? So the women begin to create new men by surgically removing from each of them a rib and packing it in clay.”
Dearest Reader, I shall respect your time and skip to the end of this brain-scrambling debacle. Among the impossible set-pieces were three consecutive scenes of unexpurgated sexual intercourse and a sequence in which Bridey’s character goes feral and is trapped by hunters (with wolf teeth, natch). The film’s climax, to be filmed in a continuous ten-minute shot, involved her corpse being disemboweled, divided into cuts of meat, and individually wrapped and sold at a butcher counter.
’Tis a delicate art, being a critic.
“I beg your pardon,” said I, “for I am unschooled in matters of business. But I fear the Hays Code would be inflexible regarding the depiction of animal fornication, much less human.”
She stubbed her cigarette to death.
“It’s only ‘fornication’ if you’re scared of it. In the script I call it ‘carnal knowledge.’ I use the term deliberately.”
“Again, your pardon—one thousand times I beg it. Yet it would seem to me that the ending, too, would need adjusting.”
The widening of her eyes felt like a warning.
“That’s the whole point of the picture. I am chopped into little pieces, like a roll of film, and shipped all over the world to be consumed.”
“Your totality of vision I would not dispute. Which studio, do you think, might permit imagery of such . . . potency?”
“Why do you think I slave as I do? I’ve agreed to twenty-five pictures over the next seven years. Twenty-five more dopey go-rounds as The Girl. By 1942 I will have made MGM so much money that they will not be in a position to permit me anything. They will owe me. Frankly, I expected more understanding from you.”
Ah, but the ruffled feathers of feminine affront were my most comfortable pillows! I’d antagonized gaggles of gals in the past and knew the best tools with which to coo, cajole, and inveigle. Bridey’s barricades were robust but not impregnable, and before long I had her convinced that my enthusiasm for In Our Image was the very marrow of my bones. It was a white lie meant as a heartfelt gift, though it was for Church that I tied the bow. Those paychecks had to keep coming.
“Please,” said I, “may I read it?”
Her fingers flew to her beautiful throat.
“No! Oh, no, no. I couldn’t allow it, it’s not ready. But it will be, Z, there’s no more question about that. A few more years of acting and then I’ll show you—I’ll show everyone—exactly what kind of woman Bridey Valentine is. Can you be patient?”
I’d been dead nearly forty years.
Patience? Yes, I’d heard of it.