Hollywood, 1934
Whispers
The trip to Hawaii had cleared her head, Lola told me when she called again. She understood things better now, and not just regarding her and Cedric. She’d done some thinking, come to some realizations, and now she was ready to get back to work. William Dieterle was going to star her in Madame Du Barry.
“And you know, Mara, I can’t trust anyone else with my hair. Please!”
Marie wasn’t happy about my taking a couple of weeks off, but she finally agreed. I told Lola she could count on me.
I’ll try to piece together what happened that day, the first day of filming, as Lola walked to the lot. I wasn’t with her because I was already in her dressing room, getting ready to pin up her hair, but she described it to me more than once. Anyway, this is how I imagine it.
7:15 a.m.
Tiny pebbles press against her soles. Sharp, irregular pain radiates from the balls of her feet to her arches. At times, it’s so intense that Lola wants to scream. The bottoms of her dainty sandals seem to be made of film.
“Oh God,” she moans. “This is hell!” But she has to keep walking. She can’t be late for the seven thirty shoot. She limps along the construction path that leads to the set, choking back tears and struggling to block out the throbbing. It’s like treading on a hobnailed roller. “Serves me right,” she mutters. Vogue was showing strappy sandals worn over sheer silk stockings. They’d looked adorable on the page, but they turned out to be instruments of torture.
Actually, though, the foot pain is the least of it. For weeks now, she’s been haunted by something else, something less tangible. By sounds. By words that bruise. Words that seem to float on the breeze, at first almost inaudible: “Foreigner! Mexican!”
A whisper. A suggestion. “Foreigner! Mexican!”
She stops and shakes off her sandal. Her feet pulsate from the balls to the heels. The seam of her stocking cuts into her flesh. She turns her toes under and stretches her arches, a move she uses to relieve foot cramps from dancing. She glances behind her and sees a cluster of chorus girls giggling and twittering. Are they gossiping about her? she wonders. No, they don’t appear to notice her. The reproach seems to come from elsewhere—from the trash cans, from under the benches, from around the bushes. “Foreigner! Foreigner! Mexican!”
Lola stops and looks for a place to sit down. She has to get off her feet, if only for a moment. She finds a bench, slips off her sandals, and massages her toes.
“Foreigner! Mexican!”
What has happened? One minute she’s the erotic icon of Hollywood, the next, just some wetback!
She digs her thumb into her outer heel. She needs to understand what’s happening to her career. After Bird of Paradise, gossip columnists started writing that she was box office poison—incapable of drawing an audience and making money. If she doesn’t make money, the studio will have no use for her. Cedric has tried to reassure her. No one has a quarter for the movies these days, he says. Besides, all those prudish ladies in the Midwest are handing out leaflets in the church vestibule condemning the immorality of Hollywood.
“People are still going to theaters,” she counters. “After all, they’re going to your movies! What’s happening is that the country is turning xeno...xeno...”
“Xenophobic. That’s the word you’re looking for, darling. I don’t think you need to worry,” he always reassures her. “You’re still the industry’s Latin sweetheart.”
He sounds patronizing. She hates it. It’s easy for him to laugh it off, she thinks. He’s just won an Oscar for The Merry Widow!
Cedric just doesn’t get it. A new narrow-mindedness is taking root. Politicians. Certain intellectuals. Even industry insiders. Cedric is white and at the top of his career. He’s oblivious to the racism creeping into the media. She’s dark, at least by white standards, and hypersensitive. It’s hardly subtle, she thinks. Photoplay has been printing articles all year about how foreigners are overrunning Hollywood. Why so many foreign extras? complain fans. “I do wish these foreign actors would watch their accents!” says a letter to the editor in Photoplay. Another reader grumbles: “Americans can play Frenchmen, Spaniards, or Russians just as well as foreigners!” Furthermore, “these foreigners have no sense of decency! That Austrian hussy Hedy Lamarr romps around naked in Ecstasy!” But what about the all-American Clara Bow? thinks Lola. You can’t get more naked than she is in Hula!
Demands for censorship are growing. Sexy and sultry are being replaced by all-American apple-pie goodness. Wholesome is the word of the day. Films like Bird of Paradise are being derided as Hollywood filth.
7:18 a.m.
If she runs to the set barefoot, Lola thinks, she’ll tear her stockings. “This is a punishment,” she tells herself. “I’ve betrayed my upbringing, God, and even Sister Madeleine.”
She imagines the old French nun sitting in a movie theater, staring at the screen, as Lola’s naked body glides through liquescent celluloid and slithers like a water snake under the froth and foam of the waves. “Bon Dieu!” Sister Madeleine chokes back the words. “Mais c’est affreux! C’est scandaleux!” In spite of her aching feet, Lola laughs.
Even though Bird bombed, RKO took a chance and signed her for Flying Down to Rio, and at least that one made money. A silly film. Thoroughly predictable. Thoroughly successful!
But Carla Myer’s review in Star World had her worried.
The amazing new dancing team, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, flew across the floor like fairies. Whether swaying to the samba or pulsating to a mambo, the couple kept spectators’ eyes riveted to the screen. In one extraordinary scene, Miss Rogers flies through the clouds sitting astride an airplane. In another, a bevy of gorgeous chorus girls dances on the wings. Dolores Del Rio, who plays a Brazilian society girl, was lovely, as always.
“Was lovely, as always?” That’s all she had to say about me? thought Lola. What about my dancing? What about my acting? In the whole damn review, only one sentence! The supporting actors stole the show! The whole country was in love with Fred and Ginger.
She glances at her watch. It’s after seven twenty. She’ll be late. Warner Brothers has given her one last chance: the starring role in Madame Du Barry. She can’t just waltz onto the set any time she pleases like a spoiled diva. But her feet refuse to be forced back into the sandals.
At this point, I’m already on set. I’ve prepared the powdered wig with fore-tresses piled high and delicately placed mouton curls along the sides. All I have to do is pin up Lola’s hair, place the wig on her head, and secure it with bobbies. But where is she?
Somewhere on the grounds, struggling to calm her nerves, it turns out. Workmen are sawing and hammering, and the noise makes Lola’s head throb. She smells the odor of fresh stucco and burning paper mingled with the acrid stink of sweat. Her sweat. She showered and perfumed her body in the morning. How could it be that she smelled like a panhandler? What if someone stands close to her? What will they think? The exquisite Dolores Del Rio reeks like a rotting carcass!
7:26 a.m.
“Move!” she orders her body. She forces herself to stand. She hobbles forward, then collapses back onto the bench.
Is it because I’m Mexican? she asks herself. Is it because people say that Mexicans are Communist agitators?
She’s seen photos of American workers standing in breadlines. In the newsreels she’s seen activists urging out-of-work men to take back the factories by force. “Fight—Don’t Starve!” they scream. She’s seen mounted cops smashing heads with nightsticks, releasing tear gas, making mass arrests, and sometimes even killing demonstrators. The newspapers say all this violence is the fault of foreigners. Foreign agitators. Foreign workers who take Americans’ jobs. Foreigners like her.
Lola forces herself to focus on walking. She shoves her swollen, inflamed feet into her sandals and takes a step. A stone like a nail cuts into her sole. She ignores it and pushes on.
7:31 a.m.
Dieterle is positioning the cast for the Versailles ball scene. “Louis XV, here. Girls, there.” Scores of extras with skirts like inverted pastel beach umbrellas move into place. Lola flings off her shoes. The dresser fastens her crinolines. I pin her wig in place. Dieterle is busy with Reginald Owen, who plays Louis. He is showing him how to walk up the stairs so that the cameras can achieve both the long shot of the palace and the short shot of the king emerging from the crowd into the center of the frame. The film is all frills and froth, but it’s what audiences want, and Dieterle aims to please. He’s one of those Germans who, like his friend Marlene Dietrich, escaped the rising tide of Nazism back home. Dietrich had made it big with films like The Blue Angel and Morocco. Dieterle was convinced he could do the same.
He’s ready for Lola. I push her onto the set. She crawls into Owen’s lap and mouths teasingly, “To me, you’re not a king, you’re just a man.”
“The folks will eat it up,” laughs Dieterle. “Just leave a second more after ‘not a king.’ Very coquettish, very insinuating, very suggestive.”
“To me, you’re not a king...you’re just a man,” Lola repeats breathily.
Once the day’s shooting is over, I accompany Lola back to her house. The girls are still at their grandmother’s. Lola goes into the kitchen and dumps her sandals into the garbage.
“Madame Du Barry won’t save my career, will it?” she says. “It’s rubbish.”
I shrug.
“There’s a lot of bad feeling about Mexicans right now,” she says. “There’s always been resentment, but now it’s intensifying. I hope things don’t get rough for Gabe at MGM.”
“He hasn’t said anything,” I say. “But I’ve heard words—beaner, wetback. I’m nervous, too. I’m especially nervous for the children. They’re dark, like Gabe.”
“Mara, do you think that in ten years anyone will remember drivel like Madame Du Barry? At least, you’re doing something important.”
“Combing out ladies’ hair?”
“Raising a family, creating something for the future.”
It’s the first time I’ve ever heard her say anything like that. Suddenly, I realize how deeply she’s hurting.
“You have a family,” she says. “I have nothing.”
I look around at her Lalique statues, her chrome furniture, the expensive avant-garde paintings on the walls, her husband’s Oscar standing on the mantel. What can I say? It’s true, I think. She has nothing.