From the Teeth of Angels Page 6

  God bless the rape victim. Stabbed soul who’s seen a face up too close to ever forget it, felt the groping hands, the heat of the breath, known no power and no hope. Who cannot go to the bathroom or welcome a lover there again without remembering, Once my body was not mine. Someone wrong took it and never gave it back. God bless you. I know what you know.

  I called Arlen and, genuine friend that she was, she flew east immediately to be with me. Demanded I come back with her, come and sit in the sun and do nothing as long as I liked. She would take care of everything. She described life in Los Angeles as a mix between The Dating Game and the greatest meal you ever ate. I didn’t understand what she meant by that, but what was the alternative? Graduate, and when the two black eyes had healed again so I wouldn’t have to explain anything, go home and live? Everything I knew was finished; what I’d lived and trusted was either over or dead.

  Arlen was between movies then and spent too much of her time ferrying me around, showing me the sights, and trying to perk me up. The irony was that, after two weeks in California, my spirits didn’t need lifting anymore. I was delighted to be there, eager to know as much about the place as I could and how it worked.

  Through a friend of hers, I got a job as a publicist at a movie studio. It was interesting work, frantic and oddly fulfilling. I made friends, worked hard, started dating again.

  At Arlen’s insistence, I continued living with her. We were entirely comfortable with each other and, as is often the case with people whose careers are meteoric, she liked being with someone who knew her from back when and loved her still.

  She made Lazy Face and Mother of Pearl back to back. The critics dismissed her as one-dimensional and flavor of the year. They said it was easy to mistake her intensity for conviction. They said she was simply lucky; so far she’d worked only with great directors who were able to take her under their wing and show her what to do. Oh, yeah? To the dismay of her agent, Roland Jacobs, she agreed to make The Kingdom of Jones with an obscure English director. He thoroughly botched the film, but not her performance. When she came home from shooting on location in Austria, she told me she’d fallen in love with Vienna and, when she had enough money, was going to buy a house there.

  One of the few things I could not understand about my best friend was her taste in men. While we lived together we talked endlessly about what made up Mr. Perfect. We were in almost total agreement about his qualities, but then she would become involved with either the strangest or most boring male. Rock stars with more tattoos than brains, actors or executives who looked in the mirror too much and had seizures if there wasn’t a telephone nearby. We double-dated a lot, and dinner conversation invariably revolved around new diets or tax shelters, new wonder(ful) drugs or personal gurus. I told her she could do much better than that and she agreed, but then another one would roll up to our door in a vintage Cobra and the de rigueur palomino haircut.

  While she was filming in Austria, I began going out with her agent, Roland. He was quite a bit older, which made me hesitant at first when things between us went from fun to very nice to something-is-happening-here.

  When Arlen returned and I told her what was going on, she hugged me and said she was jealous. I asked if she and Roland had ever gotten together, but she waved it away with a smile. “I wish! No, I made a pass at him a long time ago but in the nicest possible way he said I wasn’t his type. You’re a lucky girl.”

  The only story I want to tell about the man I married has to do with the first time we made love. All my life I have had a very irregular period, so irregular that I always carry tampons in my purse. God knows, I would not have finally agreed to join Roland on the horizontal that night if I’d known it was going to arrive. But arrive it did and embarrassed the hell out of me. Normally that sort of thing didn’t bother me, even with a new lover. Love me, love my body and how it works. But come on; going to bed with anyone the first time is a fragile moment. Multiply that by a hundred when you’re going to bed for the first time since you were raped.

  Right in the middle of a welcome and wonderful time, both of us suddenly felt wetter than we should. The lights were off. I reached across, turned them on, and screeched. My bed looked like a massacre. Blood was everywhere. I leaped up and ran to the bathroom for a towel or wet sponge or just to get out of there and hide. Standing on the cold white tiles of the clean bathroom floor, I hung my head and chanted, over and over, “I don’t believe this. I can’t believe this happened now!” When I had the courage to return to the bedroom, Roland was already balling up the sheets he’d stripped off the bed and was whistling to himself. When he saw me, he dropped the bundle of white on the floor and spread his arms like an opera singer. “I love dramatic women!”

  The next morning he had to leave very early for a meeting. A couple of hours later when I opened the front door to pick up the newspaper, a large empty box of Tide laundry detergent filled to bursting with a hundred red roses was there on the step. The note taped to it bore Roland’s abominable handwriting, in a quote from Anna Karenina, my favorite novel: “His heart stood still at the nearness of his happiness.”

  Some months later Arlen asked if I would consider becoming her personal manager, professional adviser, whatever I wanted to title it. The salary would be three times what I was making and the work as she described it would be challenging but not difficult. Much of it was similar to what I was doing at the studio. Still, I was initially hesitant. But I knew, through living with her, that the more famous she became, the more puzzled and disturbed she was by a world that never stood still long enough for her to stop being dizzied by it. From me or someone else, she definitely needed help.

  At the dinner where Roland was supposed to help me decide whether or not to take the job, he proposed marriage instead. He said at that particular moment he didn’t care about the fate of Arlen Ford; he cared about us, and that was all he wanted to discuss. I said I already knew I wanted to marry him and had for a long time. Which shut him right up. But later, after we had hugged and toasted each other many times with good champagne, I returned to the subject by quoting the adage about choosing your job more carefully than you do a spouse because you’ll be spending more time with it.

  Of course there were dangers involved, especially now that Roland and I were going to marry and the connection between the three of us grew even more intimate (or claustrophobic). However, in the end I said yes, for all the obvious reasons, but mainly because Arlen said she needed me and meant it. Never for an instant had I forgotten what she’d done when I needed her most. I would give the job a try. At the end of six months, if it wasn’t working, either of us could push the ejection button. But she asked for a full six months. She believed it would take at least half that time for us to get used to working with each other, then another three months to get used to working together against the world. Six months.

  It turned into seven years. In that time, among other gulps and hurrahs, I learned two things. One, be suspicious of anyone who uses his or her middle name in a professional capacity: Mark Gary Cohen, Susanne Britanny Marlow, Blah Blah Smith. For too long it seemed that any time we had contact with one of these trilogies it came to nothing but disaster. The doctor who delivered our son had three names and I almost died because of his incompetence. Poor Arlen got involved with several three-name producers and the resultant films were debacles or were forgotten in a week.

  The other thing I learned was when something drops, never try to catch it before it hits the ground. Let it fall. If you don’t, you’ll catch the wrong part or edge and hurt yourself. Naturally this applies to both objects and people, including me. In those seven years, I had an affair and would not listen to my good husband, who kept trying to catch me as I fell into dishonesty, ugly silliness, and making those who loved me suffer. It ended only when I realized I was about to smash onto a floor of terminal selfishness and desire. I survived, but didn’t deserve to.

  So it was ironic that I was the one who kept trying to ca
tch Arlen as she fell in so many different ways. The movie world is made up of fabulously successful people who never believe their victories are genuine. Judging from the enormous and often instantaneous turnover of fates in those high places, they’re right to be unsure.

  I particularly remember going with Arlen to a party at Malibu Colony jam-packed with the famous and powerful. The biggest shots gravitated to the living room. At first glance it appeared to be a relaxed gathering of the gods in jeans, swapping funny tales about the business. Yet all of them wore a kind of tensed-jaw, ready-to-spring expression. Their stories were great, but each one had to be bigger or funnier than the last. These people weren’t listening to one another; they were planning what to say next time they held the floor. It was exhausting to see them all straining for love and attention. It was as if they were trying to suck every bit of air out of the room. I stood up and went outside.

  Sadly, Arlen was one of those straining people. She had begun as an actress who made it on talent and beauty. But then the movie community, and later the world, said, That’s fine but what else do you have? She was indignant. I’ve given you everything I am. Where do you get off asking for more? They were silent, but the time came when her new films didn’t do so well, and people quickly began talking about her in the past tense.

  She panicked, and her personal life began careering around like the ball in a pinball game. There were bad, self-destructive love affairs, which in one case resulted in her spending three weeks in a rehab center for cocaine abuse. And other unbelievably wrong decisions that led to ugly celebrity behavior; she was on the covers of sleazy magazines that cater to the failed, the furious, and the miserable. The photograph of her coming off a plane at Rome airport with an ugly snarl on her face and an arm cocked to punch the photographer… Was that really Arlen Ford the movie star? Looking so old and hysterical? The woman we all once wanted to be or have? Falling without trying, she gave them what they wanted. Enough to make them indignant and fascinated with her again, but now for the wrong reasons. She showed she was human, and we’re always more comfortable with people than with gods.

  The grand finale came not from death or drugs but a tuna fish sandwich. One night after returning from a party, Arlen switched on the light in her living room and discovered a middle-aged woman sitting on the sofa holding a wrapped tuna fish sandwich in one hand and, in the other, the crowbar she’d used to break into the house. “You’re so skinny in your films, Arlen. I knew you’d want this. Eat it.”

  There was no place left to hide, not even her own home. So she luckily did something very smart: dropped out for a year, moved to her beloved Vienna (alone), and went house hunting. She bought an enchanting Jugendstil jewel on the outskirts of Weidling, a sleepy little village about six miles from Vienna. Her place sat on a hill in the middle of a vineyard with a panoramic view of the Danube. It was lovely but in appalling condition, and by the time she finished renovating it, Arlen had spent almost as much for the repairs as for the house itself.

  Her letters from that time (at the beginning she forbade us from calling unless it was an emergency) were only about rebuilding a house in a foreign country whose language you barely understood. She dyed her hair henna, wore no makeup, and enrolled in a beginner’s German Course at Berlitz four days a week. When she wasn’t overseeing repairs or studying verb tenses, she drove all around Austria in her new car. Her descriptions of buying wine in small towns on the Hungarian border, with names like Rust and Oggau, were classic. She ate wild boar on a snowy December evening in a Tyrolean restaurant that dated back to the fifteenth century. She floated down the Danube in a kayak past castles and a ruin where Richard the Lion-Hearted had once been held prisoner. She was stopped on narrow mountain roads by horse-drawn hay wagons or farm children leading their herds of fat cattle, bells clanging, slowly across her route. Friends were townspeople, the couple who ran the local Tabak, an old man who raised hawks in the Wienerwald.

  Some people there knew who she was, most didn’t, but from what she wrote, none of them cared. One of the good things about living there was that Austrians were generally unimpressed with celebrities, unless they were famous conductors or opera singers. Leonard Bernstein and Jessye Norman were mobbed for autographs on the street; Arlen Ford was not. She loved that. In one of her letters she said, “Sometimes living here I feel like a child hiding from my parents under the bed covers. I know they’ll be angry when they find me, but until then down here it’s cozy and safe. I get the feeling if I just stay still and don’t move, maybe they never will find me.”

  Wishful thinking. Her disappearance was quickly noticed, and rumors started flying. After the one about her committing suicide (they hadn’t found the body yet), Roland issued a press release saying only that she was very much alive and well and was traveling in Europe. People believed what they wanted. One whisper had it that she was at a rehabilitation center trying to kick a drug habit, another that she was dying of cancer at the Mayo Clinic. One rumor even said she was married and living in Oslo. I sent that clipping. Her response was “At least they got the continent right. Please ask your husband if he thinks married life in Oslo would be a good career move for me.” We worried about her, but also believed she was happy far away in her new anonymous life.

  While she was gone there was certainly no lack of offers of work. Roland sent innumerable Federal Express letters to Vienna describing the many different roles being offered, not to mention the princely salaries that accompanied them. Her answer was always no. She was too content, too involved in work on the house, not ready to come back yet. One of the few times she called us, I asked point blank if she thought she would ever be ready.

  “Don’t scold me for being happy, Rose. If you do, you’re not my friend.”

  She was right and I felt contrite, until I realized I hadn’t asked the question in a scolding tone. I simply wanted to know if she would ever return to acting. Since Roland had been listening in on an extension, I checked with him to make sure my voice hadn’t had anything hard or accusing in it. Agreeing with me, he said he thought her remark came from guilt at having dropped out of a life so many millions of people would love to have.

  “Yeah, but that life was destroying her. She didn’t have anything left.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. Don’t forget that guilt keeps score. She’s happier now in one way, but we both know the woman’s talent and potential; no matter how fulfilling it is to repair a door or plant roses, something in her is probably howling to act again. The more talented they are, the more voices are inside disagreeing about what they should be doing.”

  “That’s sick! Why should anyone feel guilty for being happy?”

  He came up and put his arms around me. His familiar and beloved smell was suddenly there, as was his heavy chin on my shoulder. “Real happiness doesn’t last long. If it goes on any longer than a week or a month, all our bad parts start shouting something’s wrong here. Fire! Man overboard! Call the cops!”

  I was nose to nose with him. “Do you believe that?”

  He kissed me. “Yes, I do. We want happiness, and we work hard to get it. But when it comes, we end up looking over its shoulder for the bill or—”

  I hated the thought. He was absolutely right but I hated it. To stop whatever else true and horrible he was about to say, I put a hand over his mouth, then my mouth against my hand. We stood looking at each other until he closed his eyes.

  When the repairs on her house were finished, Arlen invited us to spend a few weeks in Austria with her. As usual, Roland was working too hard and said it was impossible for him to leave. I blew my top and gave so many good reasons why we should go that it shamed him into a compromise—a ten-day trip to Europe.

  We flew directly to Vienna, where we were met at the airport by a curiously subdued Ms. Ford. Both of us had expected her to be exuberant, full of the lust for life and energy she had lost in California. It was only logical to expect it after reading her sparkling letters from here
. But driving back to town, she was quiet and almost monosyllabic when answering a question. I was torn between wanting to see the sights and immediately getting all the news from the new Arlen Ford. I kept looking to see if her face showed any clues. Her hair was a shock and an indication of something. I just couldn’t figure out what. She’d cut it short as a man’s, and looking at her new profile, for a few beats you really didn’t recognize the famous Arlen Ford. The lines on her face hadn’t disappeared but had softened, despite the fact she wore little makeup. Lines come from making the same faces a hundred thousand times. Whatever had been happening to her in this European life, she was not making the same faces here as she had in Hollywood. I thought she looked more beautiful than ever.

  As we drove along the Danube a few miles from her place, Roland slid forward on the back seat till he was right behind me and said, “You don’t sound different, Arlen, but you do look slightly more saintly. Probably from all this spartan living you’ve been doing.”

  She glanced at him in the rearview mirror and pursed her lips. “There’s so much going on that I have to tell you about. You know how much I love the two of you, but it feels strange having you here. You guys are American and L.A.; this is Vienna. I feel I’ve been living in a cloister all these months and this is the first day I’ve been allowed visitors.”

  “Yeah, to us Hollywood types you’re Ford, the movie star. But to Vienna, you’re Sister Marie Thérèse in the cloister.”

  “Exactly! Well, not exactly, because Weber Gregston’s at the house. He’s been here a few days. Broke into the cloister and pulled me out before you arrived.”