The Missing Person Read online

  When Fanny was leaving next morning, Eddie Puritan was in the lobby, with another man. Eddie introduced him to Fanny as Lou Price, and then he asked her name for the first time. “Melinda Lucienne,” she said. The two men laughed. Lou Price said he was a literary agent, and Fanny laughed. He was about four-feet-eight-or-nine inches tall. She towered over him.

  Lou Price looked up at Fanny. “You know, Melinda, Eddie is what he says he is. I can testify.” Lou said he agreed with Eddie that she was beautiful. Fanny waited for the usual invitation to come back to his place and talk it over, the line that always followed the assurance about her looks. But Lou Price went on looking at her, and then he said:

  “Trust Eddie. He’s a good scout, ha ha.”

  Fanny asked Eddie, “How do you know I have any talent?”

  Eddie Puritan had four gold teeth near the front of his mouth. When he laughed, as if she had made a very funny joke, she caught a gleam of yellow. He said: “Ha ha, I can see you have.” His mouth was red and soft and ripe-looking inside, like a boy’s. When his teeth flashed Fanny found herself staring into it. He said: “No, seriously, I didn’t mean that. I really think you may have.”

  Fanny thought, Well, so … I’ll try it once more for kicks and see if it’s true. Just maybe this guy is the real thing. She told Eddie she had no place to stay in New York and almost no money.

  He said: “Stay with us,” and gestured toward Lou Price. They lived on East 33rd Street in a one-bedroom apartment. All that weekend Fanny slept on their couch that pulled out to make a bed. She signed some papers Eddie gave her, making him her agent. Lou Price witnessed the signing. In their apartment the telephone rang about every ten minutes. Fanny realized Eddie represented a lot of girls who weren’t working at the moment, but even after she found this out she didn’t lose faith in him.

  He told her very little about himself. He had been born in Hollywood, a fact he seemed to find funny. “I’ve only met three other people who were,” he said. “My sisters, and a man who works in set building on the First National lot.” Since grade school he had known he wanted to work in pictures. Act, he had once thought, but no one he applied to would take him seriously. He was granted one screen test when he was eighteen, but his slender body looked matchsticklike on the screen.

  “I almost wasn’t there at all, honestly,” he told Fanny.

  So he settled for being a slate man. He held to the camera a slate on which was chalked the number of the scene. Then he moved it quickly off camera, erased it, and in the darkness behind the camera prepared it for the next take.

  “That’s all I ever did in movies,” he said. “Until now. Now I’m on my way, kiddo. To do something big. With you.”

  Lou and Eddie were the kindest men she had ever met. People later said that Eddie rode caboose on Fanny’s train to success and that Fanny would have become a Star even if Eddie had never set eyes on her. But Fanny didn’t agree with that. She believed his was the magic first touch. Nobody else had ever followed through on their promises. Only men who wanted to lay her looked at her. Eddie acted like she was someone already, someone to be careful with, even take care of. Maybe it was true that he saw her as an investment, but she didn’t think so at the time and that, Mary Maguire wrote in The Fabulous Franny Fuller, helped to salvage her battered sense of herself.

  Eddie Puritan never touched Fanny except to help her into cabs, hold her coat, and take her suitcase from her. He made her feel whole and valuable for a while, not like the others whose eyes always seemed to be examining her parts, like people who buy only the pieces of chicken they like to eat. Eddie thought there was more to her than just her magnificent breasts and backside, her beautiful face and long legs. The others: their eyes would travel up and down her, stopping at the places they liked. They would whistle or pinch her, or make love-taps (they called them) here and there. She’d grown up to believe there was nothing else to know. She had given up on herself.

  At first Fanny did not understand about Eddie and Lou Price. In her travels down from Utica she had never met any men who loved each other, and did not really believe in their existence. She thought they were inventions of the jokes men in the hotels had guffawed at.

  In Hollywood she heard Eddie called a word she didn’t know: “Where’s that nance, your agent?” someone asked her.

  Then she finally understood why Eddie treated her the way he did, doing everything for her and nothing to her. Even then she was grateful. She believed in his real feelings for her, his respect for her. He must see something in me, she thought.

  After Premium Pictures said they liked the still shots Eddie had had taken of her and said they’d give her a screen test if she came out, Eddie and Fanny shared a compartment on the train to Chicago and then to Hollywood. All across the country they played gin rummy, which he had taught her, and talked about what it was going to be like when Fanny was famous. She could not get over his unquestioning faith in her, and the fact that he never once made a pass at her. She always remembered his fidelity and his gentleness when the hounds started coming down on her, and she could have had any agent in the business. He had been willing to work for Fanny Marker. On the train she confessed her real name to him, and by the time they had arrived in Butte, Montana, he had come up with a better one: Frances Fuller.

  He was full of plans, a man who never looked back and so had wiped out of his memory every past disappointment and defeat. From the moment he named her, he never called her Fanny again. His nickname for her was Franny, and when he said it, the flat vowel and soft surrounding consonants rang with love. They talked about the parts Franny would be best in and, even, how she could move easily into character parts when she was older because it was obvious she would make a handsome older woman. They ate their meals together, slept one above the other on the hard, narrow Pullman bunks. All across the country they talked, exploring the strange ways of Stardom, and playing gin rummy for matchsticks.

  In Hollywood Eddie Puritan worked hard for Franny. He gave up his other clients to do it. Although there had been some initial doubts about her weak, undeveloped voice (a sensitive point because studios were still paying off actors who had not survived the transition to sound) her screen test was fine: the wispy voice, carried in its entirety through the insensitive equipment, came out as a half-whispered, sex-laden invitation. After six months Premium Pictures began to give her good small parts. In the second year she was given a role in a picture called The Daughters of Eve. Six very blond girls—sisters from the Ozark hills—came to New York as a hillbilly act. Five went on to fame and all the tribulations of success singing as a group with a big-time jazz band. But Franny Fuller was the one who settled for love and married the charming, steady, adoring young farmer. In the scene which was to make cinema history—and her own career—she stood at the edge of a nightclub stage and breathed up to a handsome suitor in her half-whisper: “What’s your name, fella?” She moved close to him, waiting for an answer, her breasts almost bursting the seams of her dress. In the audience of the dark theater, out of their uncontainable delight, men shouted their own names back at her on the screen. Franny Fuller was made, her flimsy voice at that moment translated into final proof of her extraordinary celluloid sexuality. She was nineteen years old.

  At first, Hollywood fulfilled all of Franny Fuller’s dreams. Her charm, her naïveté, her pleasure at all its curiosities delighted her escorts. Her salary rose with every picture, astronomically, it seemed, so she was able to move every year, advancing from furnished rooms to a furnished apartment, to a furnished house complete with gates and a resident caretaker for the three acres of grass, bushes, and trees that surrounded it.

  “No flowers, please, Mr. Yee,” she told the caretaker who was Japanese and wanted to make beds everywhere of canna lilies and geraniums, peonies and roses. He never questioned her instruction, so she was not forced to give her reason, that she hated to cut flowers or to see them cut, and she dreaded coming upon them dead on their stalks when they
went uncut.

  “Would you object to bushes that flower occasionally, like rhododendrons?” he asked politely. She hesitated and then said no, not knowing what they were.

  The fate of her grounds did not long occupy her attention, for she rarely went out into them. Her first starring role, coincidently, was pastoral. Tess was a well-disguised version of the Thomas Hardy novel. Scriptwriters tailored the role to Franny’s talents and anatomy, moved the scene to the American prairie, and produced a success story in the classic mode: girl of lowly origins wins a visiting Boston Cabot.

  Franny worked long days. Her evenings were full. The novelty of her innocent-looking beauty in Hollywood made her much in demand at dinners and parties. Every evening she had a date, sometimes two, one for dinner, another in the late evening for, on occasion, a screening or preview, and then supper. She passed easily from the eager arms of one escort to another, much as the chassis of a car moves from machinist to mechanic, her person, she thought, assembled, piece by piece, into Someone Important.

  Parties: they were her best time, in the first years. She relied upon Premium’s costume department for her evening clothes because she hated to go into shops. She would have rented everything she wore, if that had been possible. But it was not necessary: Lucretia Horn, the costumer, a dedicated and talented woman who wore mannish suits and pince-nez glasses, appreciated Franny’s exuberant anatomy and provided clothes that contained yet glorified her full, young body.

  To celebrate her ascent to genuine stardom, which meant that for the first time her name would appear above Brock Currier’s in advertisements, on posters, and in screen credits, Eddie Puritan gave a costume party for Franny at his rented house in Malibu. Lou Price, by chance, was on the Coast at the time, and together they made lavish arrangements. A dance floor was laid outside under a rented striped canopy. Caterers set up tables around the periphery under small striped umbrellas, and trees were hung with Japanese lanterns.

  For the occasion Lucretia designed for Franny a subdued floor-length gray cotton gown, with wide white collar and cuffs. Over her drawn-back hair she wore a Puritan bonnet, its small wings flaring out at her ears, the band at the back opening to show her discreet gold bun. The broad band, laid back across her forehead, made her look proud and aloof. On her breast, handsewn and emblazoned with gold thread, was a magnificently embroidered scarlet A.

  It was Lou Price’s idea, Eddie told Franny, seeing her puzzlement. He explained who she was intended to be, and what she had done. Franny liked the story. “Call me Hester,” she told Eddie’s guests at the party, and she moved among them, saying hello and she was very glad they had come, with all the grace and dignity she thought proper for the unregenerate adulteress.

  Everyone was enchanted with her. Pierrots, clowns, Louis the Fourteenth, mandarins, Sherlock Holmes, cut in upon one another as the large jazz band played one nostalgic tune after another. Her partners allowed each other only a few moments with the Puritan sinner in their arms before they moved in to claim her.

  An elaborate champagne supper was served by men in livery from long tables near the dance floor. Franny was escorted to them time and time again by partners who tried to prolong their time with her by offers of food and wine. Each time she accepted champagne from a fresh glass but ate nothing, because complex party delicacies that she could not readily identify confused her and she would not try them. “Hester is tipsy,” she told a vampire with whom she was dancing. He grinned evilly at her and replied: “All the better to drink you in, my dear.” Franny laughed loudly at that, and everyone dancing near her caught the infectious ring of her laughter and laughed with her. She felt exhilarated: no one knew, she thought gratefully, that she had no idea why she was laughing.

  Franny came close to Eddie only twice that night, once to kiss him and thank him for the wonderful party. Later, at one thirty in the morning, when the gaiety was at its height, she looked around for him at the edges of the dance floor and did not see him. For no reason, she felt herself fill with darkness, as though her head had been forced down under a black photographer’s dropcloth. Then, without in the least understanding why it should be so, the dark lifted and she had the sense that she had arrived, at that moment, on the summit of her life’s enjoyment. I will never feel this great again, she thought. She could not fathom why she knew this.

  Franny rested her head against the velvet shoulder of her partner who had told her when he cut in that he was Lord Essex, almost a contemporary of her Hester Prynne. The softness against her cheek, the guarded lights shining through the fluttering leaves of the trees, champagne moving through her veins and charging her skin, Eddie Puritan surely somewhere nearby loving her purely because she was, he made her feel sure, lovable and pure (he who had brought here all these famous people to honor her, as he had written in the invitation to the party): all this warmed the dark and empty core of her being, even as the black, imminent decline she felt on the edge of diffused through her senses.

  She was desperate to find Eddie. At last she spotted him, standing in a corner of the garden talking to Lou Price and a woman dressed as a nun. Franny broke away from Lord Essex without saying anything to him. She had the feeling she had to move fast, as though whatever was inside her was in danger of leaking out, like those dolls whose split seams let out their stuffing.

  Eddie took her hand and offered it to the nun. “This is Franny Fuller, Lillian. She’s my client, my friend, my girl.”

  He turned to Franny. “And this—well, you must know. Remember The White Sister?”

  Franny nodded. “Oh yes. I know you, Miss Gish. I saw all your pictures in—back home.”

  Lillian Gish smiled and patted her hand.

  Franny nodded, feeling awkward in the presence of the famous face she had seen only on Utica screens. Then she turned to Eddie and asked: “Where are Delphine Lacy and Willis Lord? I thought you said they were coming. Are they here somewhere?

  Eddie said: “I doubt they made it. Although the Studio assured me they’d come. Too bad. I would like to have had them meet you.”

  “Me? Oh no. I just wanted to see them in person. I used to dream about …”

  She stopped, suddenly thrown back hard on the cobbled coast of her Utica dream world. The blackness advanced with the pain of those memories. She had not thought of that gray world since her transmigration into Hollywood sunshine. She watched as two women dressed as gypsies claimed Lillian Gish, submerging her in loud, extravagant cries, taking her away toward the supper tables.

  Eddie nudged Franny. “See that kid over there? She’s the new child star at Fox.”

  Franny saw a little golden-ringleted girl in patent-leather pumps, a short pleated skirt, and a white frilled middy blouse. “Who’s she dressed up to be?”

  “Shirley Temple, I suppose. Which is pretty funny when you think that’s who Fox hopes she will rival. Actually, she’s almost fifteen. They’ve given her the idiotic name of Honey Moon.”

  Eddie took Franny’s arm and propelled her along toward a group standing beside the punch bowls. At the center of the ring of men was a tall, elegantly dressed woman who seemed to be wrapped in black satin. Her head thrown back, a cigarette holder in the corner of her mouth, she was filling the air around her with smoke. In her hand was a half-full champagne glass. Her eyes were closed.

  “Miss Gibson,” said Eddie. “Have you met Franny Fuller?”

  The woman opened her eyes, startlingly blue and blank. The men around her stepped back respectfully.

  “No,” she said, closing her eyes again. “I have not. On the other hand, has Franny Fuller met Gloria Gibson?”

  Franny said quickly: “Delighted. Really.” She started to add that she had seen all her pictures but stopped. That seems to be all I have to say to anyone here, she thought.

  Gloria Gibson smiled, pulled hard on her cigarette holder, and looked at no one. She pointed to one of the men dressed in the coarse jersey of a gaucho, his chest and shoulders broad and hard, his red hair cr
opped close to his head. “Meet my new husband,” she said to the smoke-filled air.

  The band started to play again, soft wailing music from The Ziegfeld Follies of 1921. The gaucho put his arm around Franny’s shoulders and said: “Let’s dance.”

  On the floor couples watched as he led her through a series of intricate steps. She followed, weary and almost without will, drugged by the music and the champagne. The gaucho spun her around; in the whirl she heard the low lament of the music and her mother’s voice over the tenor’s: He’s my ma-a-an, he’s my ma-a-an, the saxophone wailed with the tenor, and her mother sang along.

  Franny dropped her arms, looked toward the outer darkness at the edge of the dance floor, at the retreating lights in the trees. As the darkness seemed to break its bounds and move toward her, she turned away from the gaucho, walked through the other dancers, and vanished into the black garden.

  Since Willis Lord’s abrupt disappearance from the MGM lot, he had lost his taste for the public, and for the present. He lived alone with his immaterial past, his omnipresent fantasies, his liquor, a man of famous shadows reduced to anonymous existence. Alcohol had whittled away at his classic profile, giving it the rough outlines and uncertain curves of caricature. His nose was now dented and pinched, his sleek cheekbones turned concave, his once precisely trimmed mustache grown careless, ragged, and gray. The strict black hairline for which he had once been so celebrated had begun to retreat to reveal a flat plain of ridges and yellow skin. Hard liquor had taken root in his organs, twisting the twin plum-colored sausages of his liver into stones. Urinous yellow water had replaced his blood, he believed; bile ran riot in his veins, discoloring his skin.

  Five years ago, Their Marvelous Night had been taken off the nation’s screens by a distraught producer. Joe Pinsky heard his investment in the Great Silent Lover disappear under the choruses of customer laughter. A doctor had warned Lord, who tried to drown out the derisive sounds with gin: “Give up the sauce, my man.”