CHAPTER SEVEN

Los Angeles, 1946–47

Kathleen and I played as much tennis as we could the summer before we entered our sophomore year at Saint Ann’s. She was working now, dishing out sandwiches and ice-cream sundaes at the soda counter of the Thrifty Drug Store across the street from Carl’s Drive-Inn, on the south side of town. I thought that was exciting, but Mother shook her head when I told her, murmuring that poor Kathleen shouldn’t have to work at such an early age. But she obviously had to help her mother make ends meet.

My friend shook those springy red curls of hers and laughed when I told her what Mother had said. “Your mother’s smart; she probably shops at the May Company,” she said. “Anyway, I like having a job. And with this one, I get free hot-fudge sundaes, so what could be better?”

I nodded agreement, wishing I could get a job, too. Anyway, she had weekends off.

“Look,” she said one Sunday at our pool, pulling a stack of magazines out of her canvas gym bag. “I get these, too—just to borrow.”

My eyes popped. There they were, crisp and inviting, all the latest movie magazines—one copy each of our favorites, and they wouldn’t cost us a penny?

“My boss said they’ve got to be returned in perfect shape,” Kathleen said, grinning. “Great, huh? Much better than dozing over Silas Marner.”

“Great” was hardly a big enough word. The magazines would cut into our weekend tennis playing, but for three sunny months, my friend and I had free access to every bit of gossip about Hollywood that we could ever want.

We sat together on weekends by the side of our blue-tile-lined pool, flexing bright red toenails, smearing thick dabs of white zinc oxide on our noses and plenty of shiny baby oil on our arms and legs.

I paid little attention to my mother. She would sit at the opposite end of the pool, wearing a dopey-looking black bathing suit, with a floppy hat covering her eyes, reading the newspaper and listening to some symphony on her portable radio. She seemed somehow to be fading, I thought once, and sleeping more. Father had brought the radio home for her when she told him she’d rather listen to broadcasters than talk to people during the day. She wasn’t making many friends in our fancy neighborhood—I knew that. I didn’t realize at first that the social ascendancy both my parents were hoping for probably wasn’t going to happen anyway. My father’s role in the industry was vital, and his efforts could make or break careers, but he said it best. “Actors will kill for a publicist as good as I am,” I heard him say to Mother, “but they won’t invite us to their dinner parties.”

“Doesn’t your mother swim?” Kathleen asked curiously as we emerged from a dip in the pool one afternoon.

“She doesn’t want to get her hair wet. Can you imagine?” I said, rolling my eyes. And then I would forget her. Kathleen and I would settle into our beach chairs and begin inhaling the stories brought to us by Photoplay and Screenland and all the other magazines—including the names of the bright-faced, handsome, or beautiful stars who filled their pages. Here we were, considering ourselves almost grown-up, and it was like playing with paper dolls again.

I remember, one hot day, chortling with Kathleen over a breathless account of a party billed as the Paper Costume Ball. Arlene Dahl, we learned, dressed up as a papier-mâché señorita and then worried all night that someone in the crowded room would get too careless with a match. Betty Hutton wore a dress made out of playing cards, and Paulette Goddard had fashioned her dress out of milk cartons. Jeanne Crain wore a “priceless white mink” lined with wallpaper. “Be nonchalant,” advised her designer. “Don’t wear it, Madam—drag it!”

We found that hilarious. “I’d like to see what Ingrid would wear,” Kathleen said. I shook my head. “That’s not her kind of party,” I replied. “Not somebody who can play Saint Joan.”

Kathleen nodded agreement. Ingrid, after all, would next year be taking on the part she had dreamed of for her entire career; that’s what my father reported. “Going from playing a nun to playing a saint,” he announced, almost rubbing his hands together in satisfaction. “Nobody can beat her at this point. She might as well convert now; Catholics already feel they own her.”

But there was something going on, some new undercurrent. One lazy Sunday, my father, clutching the newspaper, came over to my mother at the pool, leaned over, and murmured something. Mother’s hand went to her throat. “Oh no,” she said, her eyes wide with what looked like fear. “Gabriel, I—” They both saw me watching at the same time and swiftly pulled apart. Father strode back into the house, ignoring me. His expression was strange—dark and still.

I wanted to ask what was going on. But Mother buried herself in her newspaper again, clearly in no mood for questions. That annoyed me. But pretty much everything about Mother was annoying me at the time. And that odd expression on Father’s face stopped me from asking him.

Kathleen and I sat rapt in a dark theater a few days later watching Ingrid in Notorious, a story that presented moral ambivalence in a way neither of us had seen on film before. I wanted to talk about it with my father, but he still seemed tense. I finally got up the courage to ask him if anything was wrong, given that he had taken to pacing the house late at night. His eyes widened. He laughed and ruffled my hair. “Something wrong?” he said. “Nothing important at all, worrywart. Just that, on this movie, Ingrid’s got a tricky sell.”

Even I could see that. Playing the daughter of a convicted Nazi spy, Ingrid is recruited after the war by a U.S. agent, Cary Grant, to spy on Nazis in postwar Rio—and instructed to reignite her romance with a top Nazi, played by Claude Rains. Even though she is in love with Grant, she follows orders—pretending to be in love with Rains—and helps destroy a dangerous spy ring.

When Kathleen and I went for sodas afterward, I was wondering, soberly, how Ingrid could do such an awful thing, even though all came out right in the end.

“But that’s really not Ingrid,” Kathleen reminded me.

“Well, I know that,” I said hastily. We agreed that life was about compromise, maybe even moral compromise. How sexual compromise fit in, we weren’t sure, but what mattered most was the greater good. It sounded right at the moment, as we sat there on the bar stools at the drugstore, sipping chocolate sodas. We were working now at trying to figure a lot of things out, and not spending all our time just poring over the movie magazines.

It was true, our country had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the A-bomb ended the war, didn’t it? The reason we did it was to save lives that would have been lost in an invasion. So did that moral good cancel out the moral evil of killing so many people?

Cautiously, I ran that reasoning by my mother. Mistake. Just as I figured, she wasn’t interested in exploring morality in any free-range way. Plus, she had seen Notorious, too, and her instruction was not about bombs. “Marriage was flouted in that movie, and you know marriage is a sacrament,” she said quietly. “And moral compromise is a sin, and God will punish it. Don’t ever lose sight of what you’ve been taught, Jesse.”

“But what if I have trouble believing all of it?” I asked.

Mother stared at me. She said not a word, just got up from her chair and vanished into the kitchen.

I thought a lot about that. I wanted to talk about it with my father, but it was becoming harder to get his attention. Lots of money was flowing in, and he was usually very busy. But it wasn’t just his job, I was sure now. He was attending meetings late at night, mostly of the Screen Writers Guild, coming home tired and strained. I started paying more attention to the news, especially stories about fights between the labor unions in Hollywood and the movie producers. The papers were saying that communism was secretly taking over Hollywood; that people with the power to write important movie scripts were dangerous, that they could send hidden messages to moviegoers, no matter what the movies were about.

I wondered—wouldn’t they be dangerous, if they were out to overthrow our government? I raised my questions timidly one night.

Father ‘s gaze was weary but patient. “They’re getting to you, too?” he said. “Look, there are people too afraid of boogeymen to remember that this country, damn it, is a democracy that values free speech. It’s right-wing types here and in Washington who don’t want anything getting in the way of their gaining power and money who are feeding that fear. If anybody speaks up for giving ordinary Joes a better break these days, he’s a communist.” He stopped, looking at me closely. “Am I loading you up with too much here?”

“No,” I said. “I’m learning.”

A few days later, I heard the front door slam. Father walked in, frowning, and threw a copy of The Hollywood Reporter on the dining-room table with such force it knocked over a candlestick. “It’s wide open now. They’re naming names, these spineless jerks.”

“Who are they accusing?” Mother asked in a tight voice.

“Dalton Trumbo, Lester Cole, Howard Koch—”

“What happens now?”

“Hearings in Washington, in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. You want a moral issue? This is the one to think about now.” He sat down and stared directly at me. “If Hitchcock were making Notorious in today’s climate, it wouldn’t be about Nazis, it would be about some of the people I work with. If these red-baiters keep it up, there won’t be a Bill of Rights anymore. Did you see what Adolphe Menjou said? He wants all communists sent back to Russia. And Gary Cooper? He says he’s rejecting scripts that have ‘communist ideas.’ At least he didn’t name any names.” He slammed one fist into the other palm, and I jumped.

He turned to my mother. “Vannie, I have to go talk to these guys—”

She gave him a brisk nod. “I’ll keep your dinner warm.”

I sat there, deeply shaken. Was this going to hurt my father? Why was he so involved? Perspiration was breaking out on my forehead; my heart was thudding. Staring after him as he left, I asked Mother the only question that, for me, mattered.

“Father isn’t a communist, is he?”

“No, Jesse.” Said firmly.

I took a deep breath. Finally, a much-craved black-and-white answer from Mother.

Days later, the blacklist was initiated. And the ten writers—the Hollywood Ten—who had resisted HUAC were indicted for refusing to testify.

I kept trying to push worries away, even as my family’s old exuberance faded. Mother was still sleeping a lot, but she would mix the cocktails each night when Father came home, and we would sit together, as usual. I could sometimes convince myself that all was well.

Kathleen and I tried hard to take a break from puzzling over the political issues swirling around us, turning instead back to the movies. We went from talking about the Hollywood Ten to sighing over the erotic kiss shared by Ingrid and Cary Grant in Notorious. What better example of playing by the rules and breaking them at the same time?

We thought the joke Alfred Hitchcock played on Joseph Breen was hilarious. That pursed-lip enforcer of the Hollywood Production Code had decreed no kiss on screen could last longer than three seconds.

“Three seconds?” my father chortled. “Look, Jesse,” he said, pulling Mother toward him. “I’m going to demonstrate. Isn’t this romantic?” He touched Mother’s lips with his for exactly three seconds and pulled away. “That’s a hummingbird kiss,” he said, laughing.

Alfred Hitchcock dutifully adhered to the rule in Notorious by having Ingrid and Cary Grant brush lips, then obediently pull back after three seconds—only an inch or two, with an assistant director standing nearby hoisting a stopwatch to call a halt.

A few murmured endearments…then Ingrid and Cary moved close again, to share another three-second kiss. Parting; a whispered exchange; then another kiss. And another…

I was dizzy when it ended, that kiss—because it lasted almost three full minutes.

“Look,” Kathleen said, pointing to her copy of Photoplay. “Hedda Hopper is calling it the longest kiss in film history.”

She turned the page, and we scanned the lingerie ads. Kathleen told me the trick to wearing a rubber Playtex girdle was to turn it inside out first and sprinkle it with talcum powder. Best not to wear it on a hot day, she advised: you could smell the rubber.

We did learn a lot from each other—and from our magazines, which we continued to devour throughout high school.

We were sitting outside one day toward the end of our sophomore year, flipping through Screenland, and suddenly we stopped. “Look,” Kathleen breathed.

We were staring at a full-page, full-color photo of Ingrid encased head to foot in medieval armor. She was gazing resolutely into the distance, holding her sword high. “Coming: Joan of Arc, starring Ingrid Bergman.”

That was all the ad mentioned.

“She looks beautiful,” I said. Soon we would be able to see her in what would surely turn out to be her greatest role.

“And determined,” Kathleen added softly. “She knows how to be what she wants to be better than anybody.”

She closed the magazine and gave it to me. I stacked it carefully, almost lovingly, with all the others. We stayed silent as we stared out over the rippling water and lush bougainvillea vines lining the flagstone path around the pool. We didn’t have the language for it then, but Ingrid was more to us than just a revered star—it was her ease, her naturalness. Her ability to make decisions on her own, the idea she seemed to embody of what independence for a woman could be. We mulled that over, an idea half formed.

My brain felt peaceful, blank for the moment; I was taking a pause from growing up. Those magazines—those deliverers of the raw material from which we were building our own stories—comforted me with their proximity. To open one was to gain access to the personality quirks, the likes and dislikes, the sexual allure of the stars. We could safely ignore or celebrate them. We could wish we had Ava Gardner’s sultry, smoky eyes or sigh over Clark Gable’s muscular arms, or talk about which brand of tampons we should try next. But there was one star we could count on to see us through.

“She looks great in armor,” I said. “But it must be hot to wear.”

Kathleen giggled. “Probably not as hot as a girdle,” she said. She glanced at her watch. “Gotta go,” she said. “I’ve got night shift this week.”

“Maybe some famous director will discover you, like Lana Turner at Schwab’s.”

“Famous directors don’t buy sodas at Thrifty’s in my neighborhood.”

“Well, if they saw you, they would,” I said loyally.

My father agreed one Sunday to join us at Mass if Mother didn’t insist he wear a tie. She was pleased; she thought he spent too much time brooding over the movie censors’ banning the newly realistic movies coming in from Europe. Joseph Breen had denounced The Bicycle Thief, refusing it entry, calling it glorified theft.

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” he said to me as we waited. “But I’ll tell you this—the battle lines with the Legion of Decency are growing wider. Though some of it is still funny.” He rattled off a list.

A dog wetting on the floor in The Best Years of Our Lives had to be cut from the film. A commode in a jail cell could be glimpsed in The Paradine Case—out it went. The word “brothel” couldn’t be used—it had to be “a high-class roadhouse” or “speakeasy.” Joan Crawford couldn’t be the mistress of a politician in Flamingo Road—she had to be married. And on it went.

Darryl Zanuck was even ordered to alter the script of Gentleman’s Agreement—the heroine could not be a divorced woman. That would be “tacit justification for divorce.” In the ensuing uproar, Zanuck refused, and got away with it.

“So he won, right?” I said as Mother adjusted her hat. I loved the fact that, more and more, Father talked to me like an adult.

“He won one round,” Father said. He looked distracted. He was rarely without a cigarette clenched between his lips anymore. “But people aren’t going to the movies the way they used to.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “They’re moving to the suburbs, maybe going bowling or to the racetrack—we don’t know. And the censors are making it worse. They’re too powerful; they can break any studio that doesn’t comply with their rules.”

“Gabriel, don’t forget your Sunday missal,” Mother said soothingly.

He stared at her with a blank expression, and I wondered if he had even heard.

“What do people like Breen think the world is about?” he muttered in the car. “It’s absurd—according to the damn censors, nobody is divorced. Nobody has an abortion. People who are married don’t have affairs, Christians never marry Jews, and even married couples sleep in separate beds.” He ground the cigarette out in the already jammed car ashtray. “Where does the Legion of Decency think their next generation of Catholics is coming from?”

I laughed and glanced at Mother. A frozen smile—there were so many like that now—tugged at her lips.

Mother pulled her Persian lamb coat tight, almost protectively, around her frame as the three of us entered Saint Ambrose, our new, much fancier church in Brentwood. A towering brick edifice, it blazed with modernity—beautiful but, to me, cold. All the marble statues of the saints and the Holy Family held their arms straight by their sides, like soldiers ready to march off to war.

“Gabriel, promise to be civil,” Mother whispered.

“No problem,” he said.

Father Nolton, one of the younger priests, strode out onto the altar, gave the tabernacle holding the Holy Eucharist a brisk nod, genuflected, and got down to business. He was a stalwart conservative who preached against loose morals, condemned birth control, and scoffed at the idea of anti-Semitism, declaring it didn’t exist. He deplored any question of modernizing the Church. And he had been known to suggest that clergy who supported more liberal views were flirting with communism and endangering their immortal souls.

Father Nolton moved quickly through the opening prayers. In record time, he was ascending the pulpit and opening his Bible to a page marked by a red velvet bookmark.

Today it would be the Gospel according to Saint John. Something benign, about good works and loving God.

He began calmly, soothingly, thanking the good ladies of the parish who had carried off a successful campaign to raise money for a new church organ. He made a gentle joke about how much better the congregation would sound once the new organ was installed. A few smiles; a titter or two.

“And now let’s talk about the misconception that we are no longer at war—that, because the Allies defeated Nazism, we are at peace,” he began. “I wish with all my heart I could say that is true.” He paused, looked down as if to muster strength, then up, directly at the congregation. “The truth is, we are at war. We, the Catholics of America, are at war with the vulgarity, the immorality, and the sinfulness of a grotesque land of perverted entertainment—the land we call Hollywood.”

My father’s expression didn’t change, but his entire body stiffened. So much so that I feared that if I touched him it might be like poking cement.

It was time to unsheathe our swords, Father Nolton said. Time to fight back. “Know this: Hollywood is flinching. The cowards of the industry, the communists, quail before the Legion of Decency, and we will win. Keep your hard-earned cash at home. Don’t dig in your pockets to sit in a grimy movie theater showing actors and actresses engaged in filthy—”

Father sighed, an almost imperceptible sound. He cast a glance of regret at my mother, stood up, stared at a startled Father Nolton, then walked out of the church. People gasped. Mother bent her head forward, and I didn’t know whether to be ashamed or proud. Not everything from Hollywood was immoral. And I didn’t like Father Nolton anyhow. I started to get up, to follow Father, but she cupped her hand gently over mine and I felt her plea. I stayed put.

He was sitting in the driver’s seat of the car, slumped down, looking exhausted, when we left the church after Mass.

“You planned to walk out,” my furious mother accused him as we got in the car. There were tears in her eyes. “You shamed me, Gabriel. You underscored your superiority by showing contempt for Father Nolton. You set us up in there. Have you thought about that?”

“Vanessa, I’m sorry, I had no intention of hurting you. But don’t you see what these people are doing? This is about a lot more than cleavage and calling a whorehouse a whorehouse. Didn’t you hear him call us communists? You know what that’s a cover for? They hate the Jews; they fear anything and anybody who isn’t like them. And Washington? The House Un-American Activities Committee—look what they’re doing to writers—”

Mother clapped her hands over her ears. “Stop it,” she screamed. “It’s my church, it’s my pastor, so go walk out on somebody else. Don’t leave me trying to look people in the eye who feel sorry for me!”

Father sat back, stunned, as if she had physically slapped his face. “Vanessa?” he said.

“You do not respect me.”

“Oh God, not true.”

“You care about the people you are in charge of tarting up at the studio, not me.”

His voice sharpened. “I’ve been a good provider; give me that.”

Mother, stop, I pleaded silently. Stop. You know how; he doesn’t.

“You wouldn’t bother staying home on the weekends if there weren’t a swimming pool.”

“Fuck it,” he said.

He waited, but there was no response.

With a sharp thrust, he pushed in the ignition key and the car engine rumbled to life.

I tried to make myself as small as possible in the backseat, wishing I could disappear. This was not a real place; surely, what just happened was a scene that would be recut immediately.

I wanted no contradictions, no puzzles to be voiced and hurled by my parents. Are we all like this, we children who would give anything to hold the structure of family together—with tape or string or paper clips; with tears or kisses or acts of loyalty? And how do we choose sides when all choices carry both truths and lies?

I waited for Mother to reach out to him, to put a hand on his shoulder, to suggest we stop for a Frosty Freeze or something, so I could breathe deep again.

She stared straight ahead all the way home.