AS MUCH DRAMA AS STERNBERG, DIETRICH, AND JANNINGS GENERATED on the screen, in the studio, and in their private lives, it often seemed as if the world-famous lived less dramatic lives than the servants with whom Sonya and I spent so much of our time.
Our nurse Wilma had been our substitute mother while Ad occupied herself with her Godmothers’ League, her birth-control clinic, her Friday Morning Club, and Hollywood’s first progressive school.
While Mother was busy with her life, Father with his, and I lived my intense existence with Maurice at school and on the tennis courts, there were two lonely souls in our household: Sonya, of whose presence Father seemed almost totally unaware, and Wilma, who was never able to make the adjustment from New York to Hollywood. Back east she had had family and friends, but here among the palm trees, the orange blossoms, and the wide-open spaces of early Hollywood she felt painfully uprooted and homesick. I had outgrown Wilma. And Windsor Square was so quiet that little Sonya could play safely with Marjorie Lesser and the daughters of other movie producers without Wilma’s having to take her to a park. Besides, with separate rooms for the three children, and Ad’s youngest brother Sam now in residence, there was no longer room for Wilma in the main house, so an apartment had been set up for her over the garage. The work on it was done by the studio carpenters and electricians, and probably charged to studio overhead, a form of corruption that Hollywood had winked at from the beginning.
I don’t know exactly how it began—I was too much concerned with my own problems of growing up at the time—but somehow Wilma became involved with one of the studio electricians, a big, ruddy-faced, healthy-looking fellow whose name was George. Wilma had always been a stay-at-home: Even on her days off she hadn’t seemed to know what to do with herself in Los Angeles. Her problem (I would learn later) was her color, that lovely light coffee-color that I had always found so appealing. Too light to feel comfortable among black people, she was still too dark for the whites.
When she developed a relationship with the big electrician, I felt a twinge of ambiguous jealousy I wasn’t able to put into words. I long ago had outgrown Wilma and hardly had time to talk to her with all our activities. But children, like cats, seem to be born conservatives. They want to keep their world exactly as they discovered it. I wanted Wilma to go on living in her apartment over the garage. I didn’t want her going off with any man.
One day when I came home from school I heard Mother talking to her in the library. I lingered in the hallway, at first not meaning to eavesdrop but then held by their conversation. They were talking about George, or rather, Mother was talking and Wilma was listening.
“Wilma, I know he says he loves you, and he wants to marry you,” Mother was saying, “but your parents are giving you the right advice. Even if you tell him you’re—” there was a discreet pause—“what your background is, and he says it doesn’t matter, believe me in time it will. Especially if you have children. And they turn out to be—well, the color of your sister. Or your father. It might not matter to people of intelligence and education. But is it fair to the children themselves? They could go through hell, raised out here in a white neighborhood. And sooner or later, it’s bound to affect your relationship with George.”
There was a soft protest from Wilma—always so gentle and passive—and then I heard quiet crying. I peered in. Wilma had her head on Mother’s shoulder. It looked like one of those four-handkerchief scenes from an Eddie Goulding movie. Except that there weren’t any colored people in the movies unless they were dancing and singing as in King Vidor’s Hallelujah!, or in there for watermelon jokes like Stepin Fetchit (born Lincoln Peary).
Wilma must have accepted Mother’s well-meaning if negative advice. For I became aware of the fact that George wasn’t calling on her anymore. She was totally “ours” again. When I came home from school I would often see her on the little balcony over the garage, slowly rocking back and forth, nodding at me with a smile of gentle resignation. She would sometimes call down to me and I would go up and tell her how school was going, or about some new movie I had seen. She seemed quieter than ever, and then she slipped into some mysterious sort of illness. She was steadily losing weight. It was as if the light was slowly flickering out of her. And then one day I heard that Wilma was very ill and that she was leaving us, going back to New York where her family could take care of her.
Thirty years later, Wilma might have been able to settle down with George and make a life of her own in southern California. But in the late Twenties (and after), Hollywood was as lily-white as Mississippi. There was no place in the life pattern for a serious light-colored girl like Wilma. How many other Wilmas must there have been, lost between an alien white culture that would not accept them and an underground black culture yet to be discovered.