Los Angeles, January–February 1928
New Identities
How can I ever forget those glorious days? Even now, sixty years later, I feel angels dancing on my shoulders when I think of January 1928. That was the month when Gabe and I were married! The month I became Mrs. Gabriel Estrada.
Dinner with his parents meant that Gabe had finally made up his mind. That was the usual procedure: dinner with the family, father’s approval, formal proposal, wedding to which every living relative and acquaintance would be invited—abuelito, abuelita, Tía This and Tío That, first cousins, second cousins, even ninth cousins living in Oaxaca or Timbuktu.
The question was: What to do about Tía Emi? One “me cago en la leche” to Gabe’s father, and the whole thing could fall apart.
“I told Papá she couldn’t come,” Gabe told me. “I said she worked for a costume designer and was busy all the time, but he wasn’t buying it. ‘You wouldn’t be marrying just Mara,’ Gabe’s father said. ‘You’d be marrying her whole family, and if her whole family is her aunt, we need to meet her.’ I couldn’t get out of it,” Gabe apologized, “so I began to drop hints that Tía Emi was a little...uh...odd.”
Gabe and I would go to mass in the afternoon, then go to Gabe’s house, where Tía Emi would join us. I hadn’t gone to church regularly since I was a child in Durango—Tía Emi had lost her interest in religion long ago—but Gabe came from a churchgoing family.
“Wear a decent dress,” I told Tía Emi. “Remember to brush your teeth, leave your cigarettes at home, don’t be late, and don’t say ‘fuck.’”
“Me cago en la leche,” she growled. “You’ve gotten as uptight as a constipated goose.”
We arrived at the house long before she did. Gabe’s mother, Lupe, was a warm and welcoming woman in her forties, with jet-black hair combed into a chignon. His father, Gabriel, was more reserved—a solid, no-nonsense type who worked with his hands and looked you straight in the eye. During the week he cut wooden beams to reinforce floors and ceilings, on Saturdays he watched baseball, and on Sundays he prayed. He had no patience for bad behavior.
We were chatting in the kitchen when I heard a knock so timid that no one else noticed.
“That must be Tía Emi,” I murmured. Lizards were leaping around in my gut. Gabe went to open the door.
In walked Tía Emi wearing a neatly tailored, drop-waisted burgundy dress, a headband with faux jewels, and chunky, low heels. I recognized the dress as Madame Isabelle’s. The perfume, too—Poème Arabe by Lionceau. I’d bobbed her hair after the housedress-and-pigtail incident, and she’d lacquered it close to her head, à la Pola Negri. She looked normal. Attractive, even.
“Buenas tardes,” said Tía Emi.
During dinner, she hardly said a word, although there were a few close calls. My hands went clammy, for example, when Don Gabriel started asking questions about family history.
“So, Emilia,” he said in Spanish, “how exactly are you related to Mara? Are you her aunt on her mother’s side or her father’s?”
I expected her to say: I’m actually no relative of hers at all. She’s just some kid I got stuck with. Instead, she pretended not to understand.
“Are you her father’s sister or her mother’s sister?” Don Gabriel insisted.
I held my breath. “Su mamá,” she said after a pause.
“He must think she’s stupid,” I whispered to Gabe.
“And her mother died during the Revolution?”
“Before,” said Tía Emi, “antes de la Revolución.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. It was a smart answer. It avoided questions like: Was she pro-Villa or anti-Villa?
Eventually, the conversation turned to baseball, and she sat quietly, laughing when the others laughed, shrugging when they shrugged. She didn’t say me cago en la leche even once.
“Gracias,” I whispered to Tía Emi when we got home.
“No seas cabrona,” she growled. The politest translation I can offer is: “Don’t be an ass.”
Not long after that, Gabe appeared in Madame Isabelle’s living room holding a tiny red box. He opened it and showed me a delicate silver ring with a turquoise stone.
“What took you so long?” I teased.
“I was saving up for the ring.” He grinned sheepishly. “And for later...” He kissed me gently and we both started to giggle. That was the marriage proposal.
I can hardly remember the wedding. My head was in a whirl. I didn’t have bridesmaids and all that. Lola wasn’t there. She was on a publicity tour for Ramona, which was going to open in May. I wasn’t angry because I knew she didn’t set her own schedule. On Gabe’s side, there were about five hundred guests: family, friends, neighbors, the girl who sold burritos after mass at church, the boy who brought the Spanish-language newspaper on Sunday, and all the guys on Gabe’s construction crew from First National. I had six guests: Tía Emi, Madame Isabelle, Marie and her husband, Miss Kathy, and Mr. Edmond.
Afterward, we went back to Gabe’s house, where his mother had cleared out her sewing room to accommodate us until we found a place of our own. The wedding was on a Sunday. On Monday, we went to work.
Early in 1928 I also got my cosmetology license. The year before, the Board of Barbering and Cosmetology had made licenses mandatory. You had to take a pretty hard test, but I studied and passed with no problem. I was proud of myself. Now I could get more money for my services. At the same time, Gabe and Vince started their carpentry business. Don Gabriel gave them some money, and they bought a little house near Sunset Boulevard. It cost over four thousand dollars! The house had four rooms and a shed in the back. In the front room, the boys would set up their store. One of the back rooms would serve as a workshop, while the other would be our bedroom. The fourth room was a kitchen. Vince would refurbish the shed so it could be his bedroom. There was no plumbing out there, so he’d have to come into the house to use the bathroom, but for the moment, it would have to do.
I was too busy setting up house to think much about Lola. She’d told me before she left to film Ramona that she was excited to be playing a tragic heroine instead of a whore, but she was nervous, too. The studios were ruthless, and if your film flopped, they would drop you in a minute. Scarier still, sound pictures were coming. The first talking movie, The Jazz Singer, had been released the year before, and Lola knew that there were plenty of young American actresses with perfect English pronunciation ready to replace her as screenland’s hottest item.
Ramona wasn’t scheduled to open until May, but requests for interviews came pouring in.
“Come with me,” she begged. “I’ve missed you! And besides, my hair has to look good when I talk to the press.”
“No, Lola,” I told her. “I’m too busy now.”
But Lola always managed to get what she wanted, and a few days later, I found myself accompanying her to the offices of Star World Magazine, where the gossip columnist Carla Myer was waiting with clamps and prongs and other instruments of torture to pry information from her prey.
It was a cool February morning, and Lola’s chauffeur, Alfredo, steered the Studebaker through the West Hollywood Hills with expertise. The Star World offices weren’t elegant, but they were located in a tony district favored by movie people. A pathway of cracked flagstones led to the small, drab stucco building. A wannabe building, I thought. A building that yearned for a new coat of paint and a glitzy sign over the door so it could compete with the really glamorous buildings in the neighborhood—the Elizabeth Arden salon, with its bright red awning; the Montgomery Properties Building, with its graceful faux-Greek columns; the Bank of America, with its imposing statues. Carla was just like the building where she had her office. Past her prime, in need of an overhaul, and envious of newcomers.
Carla shook Lola’s hand and looked at me as though I were some peculiar object she didn’t quite know where to put.
“I can wait in the hall,” I said.
Lola nudged me into the office. “Mrs. Estrada is my assistant,” she said. “She will accompany me.” I smiled at the mention of my new name.
The office was small and grungy. Photos of movie stars covered the walls, and old copies of Star World were stacked by a tiny window that faced an alley. Carla pointed to two utilitarian chairs in a corner and nodded for us to sit down. She perched opposite, placing her ample tail on the edge of the seat and leaning forward, as if ready to pounce. She picked up her notepad.
“Usually interviewers meet me at the studio or a restaurant,” said Lola. Her voice was clear and confident.
Carla shrugged to make sure we understood that the remark was of no interest to her.
“So, you play a half-breed in this movie,” she began provocatively.
Lola smiled, opening wide her luscious chocolate eyes. “I see Ramona as a tribute to the indigenous peoples, a romantic mixed-race heroine who loves and marries an Indian man.”
“She was Scottish in the novel by Helen Hunt Jackson,” said Carla. “But I can see why they changed it. You can’t show a white woman marrying an Indian.”
“Ramona lives with her aunt, Señora Moreno, and a cousin named Felipe on a ranch in California, when California was still part of Mexico,” Lola went on. “Ramona is...how do you say...? She is snobbed because...”
“Snubbed. She is snubbed,” said Carla. “The thing is, Miss Del Rio,” she went on. (Stars were always called “Miss,” whether they were married or not.) “The audience knows that both you and your leading man, Warner Baxter, are white, so it’s really not an issue.”
“She is snubbed because she is a mestiza. You know, part Indian and part Spanish. Ramona falls in love with an Indian shepherd...”
“And he cheats on her?” Carla interrupted.
“No, they have a baby, but he and the baby die. And then Ramona...she goes kind of crazy... Felipe finds her wandering through the mountains. She can’t remember anything, so he takes her home, and that’s the end.”
“So, they’re both Indian. Felipe and Ramona, I mean.”
“Ramona is the daughter of a Mexican and a pure Indian.”
“But it’s the same thing, right? How do you feel about playing an Indian? In your last film, The Loves of Carmen, you played a Spaniard, so this is something of a demotion.”
“I’m Mexican,” said Lola, ignoring Carla’s remark. “I’m proud to play a Mexican woman who is the heroine of a lovely romantic story. I want to show Mexicans in a good way. I have some Aztec blood myself, as you can see. I’m not dark for a Mexican, but a shade darker than the average white American. I’m not ashamed of it, Miss Myer. I’m delighted. My skin tone reflects my heritage!”
“Your studio says you’re a Spanish aristocrat!” Carla grinned as though she’d caught her.
“Ed Carewe knows I’m a mestiza,” said Lola smoothly. “He’s part Chickasaw himself.”
Carla raised an eyebrow. Lola had told her something she didn’t know. She paused, formulating her next question. “I hear you sing in this movie,” she said finally.
“Yes, I do. It’s United Artists’ first movie with a synchronized score. It’s not a talking film, but it has music, and I sing the song ‘Ramona.’”
“And the rumors about you and Jaime? I heard you were getting a divorce.”
Now I’ve got her! Carla must have thought. But Lola had been expecting the question. Reporters had been asking about her and Jaime for days.
“We’re going to Hawaii for a vacation. Then, Jaime is going to New York to make a movie with RKO.” Lola stood up. “I really have to be going now, Miss Myer,” she said. “A reporter from Photoplay is meeting me at the Beverly Hills Hotel for coffee and an interview.”
In other words, as Tía Emi would say, “¡Me cago en la leche!”
“¡Cabrona!” Lola whispered as we slipped out the door.