The Missing Person Read online

  There was no way. Gin was his mirror and his curtain, the flagon he offered to memory, the obliterator of his passion for fame. In two gulps, it carried him from the pain of his failure to the private pleasures of forgetfulness. He carefully hoarded what was left of his fortune in order to buy the magical mash and juniper berry, drank it slowly, reserving more solid swallows for his solitary evenings. Social, mannerly sips he kept for his cherished weekly dinners with his old friend, Delphine Lacy. During the day he assigned himself one taste, as he called it, an hour, enough to maintain the level of his self-regard. By means of such strategies, augmented by interminable games of solitaire, he had come through the years between his former eminence and his present obscurity.

  He lived in a small, anonymous bungalow between the county line and Culver City. His house was ringed on all sides by others just like it in what was referred to as a bungalow court. From his kitchen window he could see the MGM skyline: battlements, towers, the spires of temples and the tops of skyscrapers close to the tips of minarets. It had been years since he had worked among those hollow structures, worked anywhere for that matter. And because friendships in Hollywood were spawned on contracts and levels of achievement (few Stars he had ever known fraternized with bit players or extras) he had abandoned his circle, those who had crossed the perilous Red Sea from silent films to talkies, even those, like him, who had failed the passage, and fallen into oblivion.

  All except Delphine Lacy, a Frenchwoman whose father had some Irish roots. She was in her late thirties, tall, angular, with an almost androgynous body and a low, controlled, French-accented voice which Americans found intriguing. It was this voice as much as the mystery of her sexless body that allowed her to survive the coming of sound at the end of the twenties. Delphine Lacy’s habitual look of profound sadness endeared her to the cheery Americans of the jazz age, as well as to the pessimists of the Depression. Her much-publicized preference for private life, her aversion to the tricks and games of publicity, paradoxically, made her an object of intense curiosity to her fans, and to the avid editors of movie magazines.

  Delphine Lacy and Willis Lord had made three silent films together at Premium. Indeed, as a result of carefully planted studio rumors, they were believed by the public to be lovers in what Hollywood liked to call real life. Willis Lord wanted very much to believe the rumors, even though he was aware they had been designed to promote Passion Flowers and The Baron and His Lady. He tried to advance his amorous cause with the beautiful but distant French star. Delphine, amused by his boyish ardor, listened to his plea but would have none of him as a lover. She claimed she had another, very secret, alliance. Willis was to learn this was her way of turning away pressing suitors. For the public, however, the hints of the Studio had proved persuasive. Their fans believed that the screen lovers gazed at each other with genuine love, carried over from the reality of their lives. Audiences settled back to watch, believing they were being made privy to the true romance of the private bedroom.

  Willis looked forward all week to Friday, when Delphine would bring to his house a wicker hamper full of food and cook French dishes from her Gascony childhood. He sat at the kitchen table watching her, following her as she moved, in her loping, angular yet graceful way, from the cutting board to the stove. As she worked they talked, always of the past. Delphine brought to her friend a carefully censored version of Studio news of the past week: of their old acquaintances in the business who had died (for Willis rarely read newspapers and never the obituaries) and of the pictures that had flopped, an American word Delphine always smiled at as she pronounced it: it made her think of dank hair or the ears of a rabbit. She dwelled on box-office disappointments and studio trades, avoiding talk about success and progress of careers. She had learned that such subjects depressed him, made him even more silent, and destroyed his mood for the rest of the evening.

  Willis’s contributions to the conversation had been prepared during his long weekly silences. He liked to dredge up the buried fate of someone they had both once known.

  “Rex Ingram,” he said, as they sat in the living room waiting for dinner to cook, drinking the first glass of white wine from the bottle Delphine had brought. “Do you remember the picture he directed called Trifling Women?”

  “No, I think not. I remember him only as Valentino’s director in The Four Horsemen, and I once met Alice Terry who was his wife, I think. She was in that picture with Rudi that was reissued in the late twenties. I thought it was marvelous. Marvelous.”

  Willis nodded. “Yes. Both times. First in 1922 and later in 1926, the reissue. Both silent films. I saw each of them twice. They will never remake The Four Horsemen with sound, you can be sure,” Willis said, grimly.

  “Of course you are right,” Delphine said, to comfort him.

  “But I wasn’t thinking of that picture. Trifling Women was strange. Ingram wrote it and then directed it. A man I knew named Ed Connelly was in it. One of its main characters was a huge chimpanzee who lived in a great dark cellar. The man who owned him was mad and lethal, as I remember. The chimpanzee was named Joe Martin. Connelly told me that Joe Martin fell in love with Barbara La Marr, the leading lady and, toward the end of shooting, would not let any of the men in the picture near her. They had to cage him when he wasn’t involved in the scene.”

  “How strange,” said Delphine.

  “More than that. Ed said there was a scene in which he gave Barbara a necklace. The chimpanzee was so furious he leaped away from the trainer and almost choked Ed. Ed never forgot it.”

  “Were they shooting at the time? Did the camera get any of it?”

  “No, the camerman was so frightened he kicked over the tripod. Too bad. It might have made a wonderful scene.”

  Delphine laughed. Bearing the wine bottle and her glass before her she moved toward the kitchen. “Lordy, my true love. I must do something in here. Bring your glass and join me.”

  Lord sat forward for a moment, staring at his dim, destroyed face in the mahogany surface of the coffee table. Only a silent picture could have in it a monkey who loves a woman, he thought. Why did they give up all that … possibility?

  “Lord,” Delphine called.

  He picked up his glass. “I’m coming.”

  The wine that evening was especially good, a lovely Volnay Delphine had chosen to accompany her chicken dish. As they sat at the kitchen table, she toasted their long friendship. He countered with a toast to the jealous ape, and then they both laughed.

  “On the set yesterday I talked to a woman, a dresser I think she is, who had known Marie Prevost,” said Delphine, regretting at once that she had used the words “on the set.” But she went on: “Do you recall her?”

  “Of course. She was a victim of sound.”

  “Did you ever hear the details of her death?”

  “I think not.” Willis filled his glass. “Tell me.”

  “Well, of course, I cannot tell if it is all true, but this woman says that Prevost had this little dog. She locked her door in some cheap hotel in Hollywood, and began to drink from three bottles and to take some pills a doctor had given her to sleep. No one thought to look for her for four days, and when they did they found her little dog standing guard over her half-eaten body.”

  Willis took a long swallow of wine.

  Then he said: “Mae Marsh, remember her? Whatever happened to her?”

  Delphine shook her head. “I have no idea.”

  Willis said: “That story about the ape lover made me think of a picture I saw her in. She was a wild girl dressed in feathers and her best friend was a bear.

  “She never did too well once Griffith began to fail. But she made some fine pictures. Can’t remember them all, but I do remember The White Rose, in which she played a lovely mistreated southern girl. Griffith liked that kind of delicate heroine whose strength was her goodness. I saw that picture many times.”

  “I did not see her that I remember. But I often think of Novarro in A Lover’s Oath …”


  “His real name,” said Willis very carefully because his lower lip was growing stiff with drink, “is Ramon Samaniego, did you know that? He is Mexican, not Spanish as his fans think.”

  “So? I did not know. But I thought he was very good in Ben Hur. Wonderful. Like some Roman divinity.”

  “You know why, Delphine?” Willis asked, very quietly.

  “Because he was a very fine actor?”

  “No. Because that picture was silent. He was a foreigner, and had only a little English, but it did not matter. Because the stupid noises of animals and chariots and whips, and the inane chatter of gladiators and charioteers could not be heard. The idiot noises of lips sucking together during a kiss were not audible. Only the vision of a beautiful and brave man. Braver and bigger than the people in the theater knew themselves to be, showing them what he felt with his face, his body. That was what acting was. Now actors talk, and lose their divinity, their elevation, in a way. People who have to listen cannot dream, cannot be entranced, cannot worship.”

  Delphine was silent.

  “Silence brought us into a kind of communion. Noise—sound—talk—destroyed it. I am relieved to be away from all that—pandemonium, that acoustic hell.”

  Delphine said: “Is the chicken too heavy with sauce?”

  Willis did not answer. He was thinking of the carnivorous fate of Marie Prevost, his mind moving in its customary backward and vertical shuttle.

  He picked at his food. His left hand held his wine glass and he took long draughts from it, then filled it quickly.

  “Try some of the good chicken, my love,” Delphine said, ignoring the shaking of his hand as he poured from the bottle, and the little spots of color that appeared on the linen mat at his place. “You must eat more, you know, to stay well.”

  He smiled at her, a look full of gratitude for her presence in his kitchen. She could not bear to insist further about the food. He said nothing, and stopped pretending to eat.

  Delphine said: “Lord, dearest, do you remember that we said we might go to that late party for Premium’s star, what’s her name, I don’t quite recall. It might be pleasant to get out a bit. Would you care to go?”

  Willis said: “I don’t think so. You go, love. I won’t mind.’

  But neither of them went. They sat together in companionable silence, she consoling him with her calm, beautiful eyes, he enveloped in his satisfying haze of gin and the distant past.

  In three years Franny Fuller had become “a household name,” Mary Maguire said. The Studio had long ago legitimized the affectionate diminutive bestowed on her by Eddie Puritan; the formal name was abandoned.

  Franny’s acceptance by the American public was immediate and enthusiastic. A man named Simon Sais (“Ha! ha! Hard to believe, huh?” he wrote to Franny) who had a fleet of trucks in Duluth, Minnesota, started a Franny Fuller Fan Club within six months of her first big role. Soon there were twelve such clubs around the country, the largest in Venice, Florida. Corresponding secretaries of the clubs wrote every month to their Star, informing her of their activities (picnics for members and their families, exhibitions of their scrapbook collections, matinee parties to her pictures, and evening gatherings to display and trade still photographs of Her). A fan club member in Martinsburg, West Virginia, wrote to her every day including Sunday: the press of letters from him, and all the others, and the requests for autographed photographs, became so great that the Studio hired a full-time respondent to handle Franny’s fan mail.

  Her appeal at the box office surprised even the Premium moguls who had planned a modest advertising campaign to familiarize the public with her person. It never proved necessary. After her first appearance, at the announcement of a new picture, lines would form, stretching like a great snake around the Loew’s Premium Theater in New York, the Criterion in Chicago, the Paramount in Los Angeles. Theaters in smaller cities and towns would be crowded with customers long before the trailer, the Pathé News, and Popeye the Sailor had played themselves out.

  Simon Sais wrote to inform Franny that Tess had been held over at the Zenith in Duluth for seven weeks. “We go every Monday night—twenty-two of us—and we are so glad they have not changed the show.” Silver Screen, usually the springboard for rising stars, responded to Franny Fuller’s exuberant, paying fans by a series of articles on her, each one outdoing the other in extravagant praise and almost wholly invented biographical detail.

  She was famous. Premium Pictures was enriched. The secret lives of her fans were expanded by their dreams and fantasies, their social lives by club gatherings to talk about her and gaze at her glossy image.

  As Franny flourished, Eddie Puritan declined. His face seemed very gray to her. He was always tired. He would fall asleep in a chair in her living room and sleep there all night. When he woke in the morning his eyes were brighter, his face a little less pale. He smiled at himself for having conked out that way, his wide, boyish, red-gummed smile full of gold flashes. He said, “See ya, Franny,” and went home to sleep some more.

  A doctor told Eddie he ought to go to the hospital for a checkup. When Franny went to visit him there (gathering together all her courage because she was afraid of hospitals and the sight of people suffering), he was lying in bed with a tube in his arm and a pipe running into his nose. Something was dripping into his vein from a bag hanging over his bed. Lou Price was there, dancing around the bed like a frenzied dwarf, making feeble vaudeville jokes, trying to distract Eddie. Once outside Eddie’s room Lou’s manic look became strained. He told Franny that Eddie had cancer in his blood.

  “His chances are not too swift,” he said, and looked as if he were about to cry.

  Once more Franny went to visit Eddie in the hospital. She saw very little of his smile or his flashy teeth. Then, in a few weeks, he seemed to get better. When he was able to leave the hospital, Lou took him back East. Franny was working on location in Nevada at the time and did not get to say goodbye to him. He died in New York, very fast. She never forgot him, even when her fortunes had moved far ahead of where Eddie Puritan could have taken them. Her mother had lowered her, judged her, found her no good, worth nothing. Eddie had seen beyond her outside and persuaded her of her own substantial reality. True, in his eyes she had caught an appraising look, but it was different: there she read his high estimate of her. She believed it, for a while.

  All that came to an end with Eddie’s death. After he was gone, she felt herself slipping, changing, falling. Pictures of her satisfied men’s needs, the fumblings in the dark for the secret things men do, alone and in private places, to themselves and to women. The shadow of herself up there belonged to their fast, wet dreams. Men stuck her picture in their footlockers or tacked it to the inside of their college desks or pasted it up on locker doors in gyms. She imagined she could see her name FRANNY FULLER painted across their hot eyes as they looked at her. She was this thing men paid to look at in the dark, their hands twitching at the sight of her, their peckers stiff against their flies as they watched her shadow.

  Eddie Puritan, the agent of her real self, the slate man for all her inner takes, was the only one (until she married Dempsey Butts) who thought Fanny Marker was a person. And then, of course, he died.

  3

  The Quarterback

  Dempsey Butts was a small, lithe boy, twenty-two years old when the Mavericks of San Francisco signed him up a week after his graduation from college. He hated the idea of going to the West Coast to play football. But he had a passion for the game, and for the kind of solid, out-of-doors, sweaty, hard-pounding, second-effort life he’d been taught to respect by his family who were his other passion.

  Dempsey’s father, Wendell Butts, was the Sunday minister of the Open Bible Church. The rest of the time he farmed three hundred and fifty acres of feed corn and soy beans, and raised Poland China pigs. Dempsey’s mother, Emma, was a pale, slight stick-figure of a woman with a wilted, unsubstantial body and a thin, kindly face. She had been the daughter of a farmer and
was now a farmer’s wife as well as the mother of four loving and athletic sons. The effort of all her roles seemed to have consumed her until there was little left but her small bones, her pale wrinkled skin, blue-veined legs, and gallant, fragile, bony head. She was less a woman than a sparrow. She fixed on her husband and her “boys” the bright beam of her birdlike eyes, loving everyone she looked upon. They in turn respected and loved her frailty and treated her like a convalescent.

  The Buttses’ two-story white-frame house with a green veranda that went around three sides, ringed by a few wind-breaking cedars, three silos, and huge white barns, was the hub of their lives. There they slept and ate, played and rested, joshed, and said their prayers, and asked their little concerned questions of each other: “Better today, Maw?” and “Still hungry, son?” and “Any of that plum jam left?”—loving queries that made up most of their conversation.

  Their house was a good quarter mile from their nearest neighbor’s; it was, somehow, self-sufficient. Everyone in it felt surrounded by warm, protective mutuality. Before the family settled down at any gathering, for a meal or on the veranda in the early evening where they told jokes or made farm plans or gossiped about the outside world, they went through a familial ritual of checking: “Did the bandage hold right on that ankle, Tun?” or “Pretty good day for drying, Maw?” and “Find the stuff from the store I picked up, Dad?”

  The Buttses were selfless, generous people who took on a strong sense of themselves only when they were assured of the wholeness and safety of those around them. The climate of the family was masculine, all the children being boys. This accentuated the small flame of frail femininity that burned in Emma Butts. Gentle, almost humbly ashamed of their gross good health and utile bodies, the Butts men hovered over their wife and mother, carrying things for her, waiting on her, in a synecdoche she always used when describing them, gratefully, to the neighbors, “hand and foot.”