Los Angeles, Retiro San Iñigo, Los Angeles, 1929
Changing Winds
Lolly was an easy baby, and I’d grown used to the routine and the tranquility of my life. The buzz and whir of Gabe’s tools in the workroom. Lolly’s gurgles and hiccups as she nursed. Daily visits from Doña Lupe and Tía Emi, both of whom were gaga over the new baby, even though Tía Emi tried not to show it.
“Shit and piss,” she growled. “That’s all babies are—shit and piss.”
But she’d sit, eyes closed, in the rocking chair Gabe had made, humming the melody to “The Ballad of Miguela Ruiz.”
Occasionally Lola would drop by. Her fancy, chauffeur-driven Studebaker looked out of place parked outside our little house, but Lola didn’t seem to notice.
Her life was as topsy-turvy as mine was calm. Edwin Carewe was furious, she said. First she’d rejected his offer of marriage, and now she was working for his archrival Joseph Schenck, who wanted to buy out her contract. The truth is, I was divorced from all that now. I led a different kind of life now. Lola’s world was no longer mine.
“Ed is suing me for damages!” she complained. “He’s remarried Mary, so it’s not that he still wants me for a wife, but he sees me as a traitor. He says I broke my contract with him! Fortunately, I have a good lawyer.”
“Better yet, you have a good hairdresser!”
“What do you mean!” She was laughing.
“New life, new look!” I whipped out my scissors. “I’m going to bob your hair. A good style changes everything!”
I ran into Ramón Novarro on Las Palmas Avenue, where I liked to stroll with Lolly in her pram on warm afternoons. He lived in Santa Monica, so I was taken completely by surprise when I caught sight of him coming up the street. It was a lovely day, dry and temperate, perfumed by the scent of oleanders.
“What a surprise!” I exclaimed as soon as he was within earshot. “What are you doing in my part of town? And where have you been? In Europe?”
“You’re the one with surprises!” He leaned over the pram to peer at Lolly, who was sound asleep under the frilly pink blanket Tía Emi had sewn for her. “What a little beauty! When did this happen?”
We chatted awhile about nothing in particular. “You’re looking trim,” I remarked. “Not like me. I’m a tub because of the baby.”
“I’ve lost a few pounds. I’m working on a new film, Devil-May-Care. I play one of Napoleon’s handsome young lieutenants, so, you see, querida, I can’t be fat.”
We’d reached the corner. “Want to get coffee?” he asked. He seemed to want to talk.
“It might be hard to maneuver this baby carriage into a coffee shop.”
We sat down on a bench at the trolley stop.
“You know, Mara, the Mexican press ran a bunch of articles about what would happen to foreign stars once the studios started making talkies. According to them, both Lola and I are doomed. Maybe after Devil opens in December, I’ll have to commit suicide.” He was laughing, but I shivered. It didn’t sound like a joke. “I need another hit like Ben-Hur, Mara.” He sounded morose. “And now, my dear friend and business manager, Louis Samuel, just got married and bought a house in Los Feliz. Very fancy. Designed by the son of Frank Lloyd Wright.”
“Married!” I didn’t know what to say. I’d thought that Ramón and Lou were lovers.
“A girl named Grace. He’s happy. I don’t begrudge him anything.”
We sat there awhile in an awkward silence. Ramón’s personal life was not something I felt comfortable talking about. After all, it wasn’t my place to have opinions about what he did in private. He was my friend, and I loved him. I didn’t judge him. Still, I felt sorry about Lou. I could see Ramón was upset.
Motorcars passed, sending billows of black smoke upward into the grayish-blue sky. Horns honked. Trolleys clanged. The stink and the racket were beginning to give me a headache. “I have to get home,” I said finally. “Lolly needs to nurse and be changed.”
But he didn’t get up. “She’s still sleeping,” he said, gazing at her pretty, caramel-colored face. “She looks like a little bonbon.”
“She looks like Gabe.”
“No, Mara. She looks like you.” He smiled and took a deep breath. “Look, you asked me where I’ve been, and I’m going to tell you. After all, you already know all my secrets.” He turned to face me.
“What happened that night at the Independence Day celebration... I’ve already forgotten all about it, Ramón.”
“No, you haven’t. Listen to me, Mara.”
The previous weekend, Ramón had done what he always did when he was down. He threw a few things into a suitcase and got into his car. Then he pulled out onto the highway, the old Camino Real, and drove north. The Los Angeles basin was hazy and heavy that day, but once he got out on the open road, the skies became crystalline. His route took him along the coast, where undulating ripples broke into waves that lapped at virgin beaches. Jets of water like greedy tongues reached, licked, then slackened and fell back. Those were his words: “greedy tongues.” It was like a sacrament, he said—the sand and the sea, engaged in some primal erotic dance. The ocean had been thrusting its arms at the shore since the beginning of time. Reach and retract. Reach and retract. An eternal bolero. Ramón found the rhythms of this perpetual seduction calming, reassuring, and at the same time, exhilarating. The god of the sea would reach out to the goddess of the sand whether Devil was a hit or not. The procreative and creative forces of the universe would continue to pulsate, bringing forth new life.
To the right, miles and miles of shrubbery covered the rocky terrain. Manzanilla, with its hearty oval leaves and bell-shaped flowers, some white, some pale pink, intermingled with chaparral. California lilac stretched out its boughs overflowing with spiny clusters of purple blossoms. Farther north, pines of every type reached majestically upward, while giant sequoias towered over the cars on the road like colossuses.
As he drove up the gravel road to the retreat center, Ramón inhaled deeply and felt the tension drain from his body. The cross on the chapel came into view. Ramón had been visiting the Retiro San Iñigo for a couple of years now—every time he needed to renew his spirit and learn once again to find God in all things. It was a vast, sprawling, forested property with guest rooms in large dormitory buildings and niches for prayer in the gardens and woods. A spiritual seeker could walk the Stations of the Cross or commune with nature among the giant ferns and scruffy shrubs. The Jesuits had bought the property in Los Altos in the early 1920s with the intention to turn it into a kind of spiritual refuge, and in 1925, it opened its doors. Ramón found peace at San Iñigo as nowhere else.
He parked his car in the lot and walked to the chapel. “It was so quiet,” he told me, “so absolutely still, that the chirping of birds and the buzzing of insects resounded in contrast.”
Father Reynoso was waiting for him in the doorway. The two embraced—they were good friends by now—and the priest led him to his dorm room to get settled. He didn’t need to explain the routine in detail—Ramón had made the Spiritual Exercises more than once already—but he did offer him a few reminders. He would spend his days in absolute silence, listening to God within. The Exercises, a system of prayer devised by Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order in the sixteenth century, consisted of a series of meditations on passages from Scripture. The retreatant reads the passage, then pictures the scene in his mind, engaging all the senses, and finally, placing himself in it. By experiencing Scripture in this way—hearing the sound of Jesus’s voice, smelling the scent of his skin, feeling the texture of his robe—the retreatant can connect with God and his own inner fears and longings in a profound new way. Once a day, Ramón would meet with Father Reynoso for a half hour to examine where the Spirit had led him. The Exercises always left Ramón refreshed and restored, and he was looking forward to embarking on the journey. His actor’s brain began to rev up as soon as he laid eyes on the passage. It was like preparing a role. Words became image, and image became reality. His senses went into high gear. Jesus was there, his presence close and palpable, his embrace comforting, his gaze penetrating. Ramón smelled Jesus’s sweat, washed the dust off his sandaled feet. It was powerful, mind-boggling.
As he sat in the chapel, conjuring up Jesus on the road to Emmaus, Ramón was overcome with fear that Jesus would never forgive him, that what he’d done was too awful. He’d gone to a drag show at Pinky’s, taking the actress Elsie Janis along as a cover. He and Elsie had an understanding. She often accompanied him to speakeasies that catered to—he hated to say the word, even to himself—fairies, queers, poofs, inverts. That night at Pinky’s, he was drinking heavily, when he caught the eye of a boy...such a young boy...sixteen or seventeen, maybe.
Walking back to his room in the intense stillness, he felt as though his senses were on full alert. He noticed the bees helicoptering over clover blossoms, a sparrow settling on the shoulder of a statue of the Virgin, the gurgle of the brook, and even fish darting to the surface. Without the distraction of everyday banter, he felt as though he were experiencing life for the first time. Beauty. Longing. Guilt.
“All the din and clatter of ordinary existence buffers us from the reality that surrounds us, and the reality within us,” he told Father Reynoso. And then, he told him about the boy.
“This is where I need to be,” he said to himself afterward, as he lay in bed waiting to fall asleep. “Not on a chaotic movie set worrying about how people like my pronunciation. Or my voice. Or my looks. This is where I really feel at home. Here, with God.”
At last, Ramón was silent. I took his hand in mine and squeezed it.
“Thank you, Ramón,” I whispered. “Thank you for telling me.”
I got up and pushed the pram down the palm-lined streets to our house.
As a little girl, I’d had a crush on Ramón, and I was jealous of Lola for being his cousin. But what I had now was so much better. Ramón was a real friend, someone who confided in me. That’s why I couldn’t bear to see him hurt, and why what happened to him later, many years later, left me heartsick.
Less than a week later, everything changed. On October 29, the citizens of the world awoke to horrific headlines. “STOCKS DIVE!” screamed the Los Angeles Times. “BLACK TUESDAY!” blared the New York Times. “WALL STREET CRASH!” shrieked the London Herald. “DOW DIVES 508.32 POINTS!” screeched the Philadelphia Inquirer. But Lola checked Variety first. “WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG!” read the headline.
Once at the studio, she heard whispers everywhere: “lost everything,” “suicide,” “threw himself out the window.” She began to grow jittery.
“What does it all mean?” she asked me when I came by in the afternoon for coffee.
She turned to her mother. “What does it mean, Mami?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” said Doña Antonia. “Maybe nothing. We’ve never bought stocks. All your money is in real estate. But we’ll have to wait and see.”
The next day, Lola wanted me to go to the studio with her. She was nervous, she said. Couldn’t I go just for a little while? So I wrapped Lolly in a blanket and climbed into the Studebaker. Alfredo drove us to the United Artists lot.
“Max McClelland!” said Ruth, the makeup artist, by way of greeting. “You know, the advance man from over at First National.”
Suddenly, I felt nauseous.
“Well, he always wanted to buy a house in Hollywoodland, in the Hollywood Hills. You know, the fancy community up by the Hollywoodland sign. Well, he finally did it.” Ruth began applying foundation to Lola’s cheeks. “Last night he committed suicide, took out his gun and shot himself.”
I felt my blood freeze and splinter. I sank into a chair to keep from dropping Lolly.
“They say he invested all his money in stocks,” Ruth went on, “and now that Wall Street has gone to hell, he wasn’t going to be able to pay for that big fancy house with tennis courts and a swimming pool. I guess he thought they were going to snatch it all away, so he called it quits.”
Lola was weeping quietly.
“Oh no!” exclaimed Ruth. “I shouldn’t have told you! Now you’ve messed up your makeup!”