Buster never came quietly into the house except when he was unhappy, and to her satisfaction he’d been very noisy of late. She’d hear him a mile away, whistling a tune or yelling at Elmer to let the chickens alone. Tonight he clomped through the door, banging it behind him, in full, off-key voice.
“Oh, we ain’t got dough, no-whoa-whoa,
There ain’t no paint on the bungalow,
What of it?
We love it!”
She stifled a giggle.
“Where are you Nellie Dean?” he called.
“In here,” she said, laughing.
His eyebrows popped when he walked through the bedroom door. “Yellow,” he said, looking around.
“Yellow,” she stated firmly, running the brush along the edge of the crown moulding.
He ambled over and slid a hand up her stockinged calf. She painted a stripe beneath the line she’d drawn under the crown moulding. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to distract me.” She shifted her weight on the ladder.
“Just steadying you,” he said innocently, looking up at her.
“And looking up my skirt.”
He shrugged. “You expect me not to?”
“I expect nothing of the sort.” She painted another stripe.
“Why yellow?”
“It’s for boys and girls. I thought June and Violet might object to blue, and you know Bobby and Jimmy would riot if we went for pink.”
“Surprised you want to be up there after painting sets all day yesterday.”
“Well, their train comes in on Monday. I thought I’d get it ready for them.”
“Why not tomorrow? Or Sunday?” The hand on her calf stroked.
“Practice tomorrow night, remember? And I have to work on my lines Sunday. We open two weeks from today.” She handed the paint bucket down to him. “I’m going to let the first coat dry.”
Buster set the bucket down and helped her off the ladder, though she didn’t need his assistance.
“Still leaves tomorrow morning and afternoon,” he said, putting his arms about her waist and pecking her forehead.
She put her arms around him in kind and looked at him meaningfully. “Maybe I have plans then that don’t involve painting.”
“Oh?”
“How was filming today?” she said. He wasn’t the only one who could play stupid.
He grumbled. “The less said the better.”
It was, she knew, the worst picture they’d given him yet.
Sometimes they’d talk long into the night about the logistics of opening his own film company, what kind of films he’d make and how he’d fashion a new studio. It was an empty dream. Buster figured he could scratch together a team of writers, prop man, costume man, and other salary men, maybe even pay Gabe enough to peel him away from M-G-M, but the big problem was the sound equipment. And he did want sound, just not the constant corny jokes M-G-M insisted on sticking him with. The equipment would cost millions he didn’t have, though, and even if he could afford it, he had never solved the dilemma of who would distribute the films. Still, they both dreamed.
“I’m sorry.” She leaned in and kissed him.
He returned the kiss with fervor.
“Careful, I might get paint on you,” she said, feeling a little breathless despite herself.
He kissed her out the door toward their bedroom.
“The oven’s going to go off any minute,” she said.
“Hmm,” Buster said.
“You don’t want a burned dinner.”
“Hmm.”
She extricated herself from his arms with a parting kiss to his cheek and he whined. “Don’t pout,” she said, as she headed down the hall and to the kitchen. “I told you I have plans tomorrow morning and afternoon.”
“What about tonight?” he said, following.
She looked at the oven timer, saw that only two minutes remained on the dial, and cracked the door. The leg of lamb was brown and glistening, but she judged that it needed a slightly browner tone. She closed the door and set the timer for another ten minutes. “Almost done. You have just enough time to feed the chickens while I set the table. If you help me put the second coat of paint on later, we can talk about tonight.”
He laughed. “You’re a cruel mistress.”
“Mistress?” she said, raising an eyebrow, but she was teasing.
He kissed the tip of her nose. “It’s only a saying, Mrs. Keaton.”
“Go feed the chickens, Mr. Keaton,” she said, and gave his behind a swat as he walked away.
She could hear him singing as she pulled the china out of the cabinets.
“We wear old clothes, we wear old shoes,
We don’t eat nothin’ but Irish stews,
What of it?
We love it!”
Notes: Thank you sincerely to everyone who read and enjoyed this story, and to savageandwise for beta-ing a few chapters when I was a little stuck.
In real life, of course, Buster met and married the gorgeous Eleanor Norris who remained his soulmate until he died, so people might rightfully ask, 'Why rewrite history?'
Well, for many of us female Buster fans, we see the unhappy parts of this beautiful man's life between 1928 and 1933--his alcoholism, his crumbling marriage, the loss of his independence as an actor and filmmaker--and can't help but wish for a better outcome for him.
To be honest, I'm not exactly sure what first compelled me to begin writing this story--and when I began writing I thought it would be a story, not a 150,000-word novel! Buster was a pleasant diversion as the second wave of the pandemic rolled through in late 2020 and I had a vague idea of him having a romantic fling with a girl around the time he lost his studio, but I had not fully realized Nelly as a character yet when I began writing the story. I wasn't even sure if they would sleep together. The story became an exploration of what might have unfolded if Buster had encountered a woman he liked as much as Eleanor in these earlier years. In an odd way, I guess, it was my way of giving that somewhat broken man all those years ago a little bit of happiness.
Not that he was entirely unhappy during those years. As much as he chafed against the MGM films he was obligated to make, they were financially lucrative and he was a very popular star. Obviously money and popularity don't equal happiness, but it seems at first like things weren't all bad for him. I happen to think that his alcoholism didn't really take a hard grip on him until the early 1930s, even though in my story the drinking is a problem as early as mid-1927.
One thing I feel confident of:
Buster simply did not want to leave his marriage. Even though Natalie didn't satisfy his sexual needs after Bobby was born, he loved her and wanted to stay with her. I don't think he knew how to express that he wanted their marriage to last or communicate with her about the other problems (her apparent lack of interest in his career, for example, or his tendency to act foolish and embarrass her), hence the drinking and acting out. You'll note that in this story he never makes a move to leave Natalie for Nelly.
Along the way, I grew fonder of Nelly and more invested in her own modest dreams. Just like Buster, she eventually has to accept that the career she wants is not within reach and make do with something else. I liked writing her family and following her as she grew. She's not a self-insert. I'm not an actor. I definitely don't have a large bosom or beautiful brunette tresses. ;)
If you have any other questions about the story or my writing process, feel free to ask. I will likely write some Buster Keaton one-shots in the future, but for now I have about a million other writing projects to finish--on top of a 74,000-word X-Files fic I'd really like to finish. If you have requests for any particular Buster stories, I will consider them.
Thanks again reading, leaving comments, and providing input! I'm glad that such an obscure fandom gave so many people joy.
The rain came, not a sprinkle but a deluge worthy of Steamboat, and he watched the edifices in his life collapse around him.
First came his marriage. The divorce was just as bad as he’d expected. The flashbulbs went off in his face like fireworks and he couldn’t face court without half a bottle of whiskey to settle his nerves before his arrival every day. He handed Natalie the Villa without a fight, as well as alimony, maintenance for Bobby and Jimmy, and money for a downpayment on a house on the coast as she waited for a buyer for the Villa. It was over with faster that way, and he was apathetic toward the money and the home. There would always be more and another. He did take one bit of Nelly’s advice and insisted he keep the boys on weekends. The court granted this to him, much to the displeasure of the four Talmadge women.
And if he didn’t see much of the boys afterwards, dropping them off at Victoria Avenue with his ma, Louise, and Jingles instead, perhaps he could be forgiven. Parties, premieres, and bridge games still dominated Saturday and Sunday evenings, but more than that there was the aching need to forget, which overruled all else. He could be happy and carefree as long as a bottle was nearby. He could even brush off his financial losses when the market crashed in October, though his financial advisor soberly pointed to numbers and told him that he was all but penniless on paper.
The toboggan was in free fall by then, anyway.
Taking pity on him with the divorce (but foremost satisfied with the profits from The Cameraman and Spite Marriage) M-G-M had given him a whole year off from pictures, and he didn’t know what to do with himself. Film had been his only constant for over ten years. He waited to hit the bottom of the slope, but didn’t. Whenever he felt himself beginning to care about the shambles he was making of his life, he drank all the more.
Nineteen twenty-nine passed like a cruel stranger in the night and then came a fresh new decade for him to screw up. Dorothy got tired of waiting for him to marry her and found a fiancé. The suits at M-G-M gave him the New Year’s Gift of his first talkie, but it was irredeemable swill, though nothing could convince them that it was all wrong for him. That made it easier to show up late or, some days, not show up at all. He was reprimanded in the severest terms.
He didn’t care.
The girls at the bungalow came and went.
When Free and Easy turned out to be a hit, it was worse than if it had been a flop. He knew that he’d never get to make a film his way again; all that the suits had to do was point to the money and the argument was over.
His world shrunk down to the forgetting. He told himself what every drunk told himself, that he could get it under control if he wanted to. He just didn’t want to.
Then it was the day before Christmas, and he attempted a tricky pratfall at the studio party while corked out of his mind.
When he came to, it was in his mother’s bed, his cottony mouth tasting of a sewer and his head throbbing as if it had been fractured with a hammer. When he looked in the bureau mirror, he saw that his aching bottom lip was split down the middle and there was dried blood on his chin and in an aching spot at the crown of his head. He was as thirsty as if he had been wandering the desert for thirty days. His worried-looking ma informed him it was the day after Christmas.
“Don’t drink tonight,” she begged. “Give it a rest, just tonight.”
As much as he objected to the idea, he was too weak and weary to wander far from bed. She brought in a tray with a bowl of chicken broth, a plate of toast, and a mug of black coffee. She spoon fed him the broth as if he were four years old again, and when he’d finished eating he wept on her shoulder.
He had a single glass of bourbon that night and slept like the dead. The next day, she suggested seeing a picture for a distraction. It was Saturday and King of Jazz was playing at Grauman’s.
The film opened—or rather, a giant book on a stage opened—to Paul Whiteman’s fat, simpering face, and he was flung back to the Villa on a May evening. Nelly was dressed in purple, cutting a rug with the blue-eyed singer from the orchestra, and he was surrounded by all his friends in his palace.
He stood up and walked straight out. Before his ma could stop him, he was in a taxi heading back to the bungalow. All he could think about was having a drink.
Myra had been there, or someone who had heard about the episode at the Christmas party, for there wasn’t a single bottle in sight.
For a moment, he considered taking the baseball bat to the empty glass bookshelves again, which had, years ago, been inexplicably replaced. Instead, like a madman, like the desperate drunk he was, he turned the place upside-down looking for a flask. He was certain to find one hidden somewhere, and he did.
But not before finding a piece of steno paper.
At first he didn’t know what it was, then recollection dawned. He’d been there before, Ashbury Avenue in Evanston, Illinois.
He sat down at the table and had a restorative pull of whiskey before taking up a pencil.
It’s been two years. Are you still waiting?
He folded the paper, slid it in an envelope, licked a stamp, and put the flag up on the mailbox. Within an hour, the letter was as forgotten as his troubles.
He didn’t discover the return letter until three weeks later. It was buried in mash notes and other fan letters, and was postmarked the week before. As soon as he saw the return address, his heart thudded.
I don’t have a beau, the reply said. Are you asking?
He went into a shop that sold records that very same day. He listened to various songs on a phonograph in the corner, the clerk made patient by the honor of having a celebrity in his store. At last, he chose one by Meyer Davis’s Swanee Syncopators.
“You ship?” he asked the clerk. When the answer was yes, he said, “Good. I’ve got an address in Illinois for you.”
“This one is a few years old. 1928,” said the clerk, making small talk as Buster handed over a piece of paper with the address written on it.
“Is that right?” he said. “Well, then it’s perfect. That’s the year I met her.”
“Who?”
“My old girl.” He read the label of the record out loud just in case there was any doubt. “ ‘My Old Girl’s My New Girl Now.’ ”
Note: Penultimate chapter, Buster Kittens. Thank you for being on this journey with me and enjoying this very niche fan fiction.
This is me, astonished. Last night I finished "That's My Weakness Now."
I will plan to post the two final chapters between this weekend and next.
As always, if you've enjoyed this story, please comment, share, or tell your friends. I'm feeling pretty wistful that it's done!
Buster awoke unpleasantly the next morning. His chest burned and his head hurt so much, his skull felt like it was cracked. His nose was completely stopped up. He remembered the night before and sat up like a whip had been laid across his body. At first, he didn’t see Nelly anywhere in the room and had the absurd thought that the previous night had been a fever dream. His heart hammered in his chest.
“Nelly?” he said.
Only then did he notice her folded up in the chair, which she had dragged in a corner by the window. The curtains were drawn, but she was using a sliver of light to read a newspaper. She said something as she straightened up and laid the newspaper aside, maybe, “Oh you’re awake.” She came over and sat on the edge of the bed and laid a cool hand on his forehead, then frowned.
“What?” he said. A cough wracked him and he shut his eyes involuntarily, holding up his elbow to shield Nelly from it. When he opened them again, she was holding the hotel stationery out to him.
You might have the flu.
“Might,” he said. His own voice—deepened by the illness and the morning—was distant in his congested ears. He judged that his hearing was slightly improved from the previous day, though not enough that he could hear anything but the faintest trace of a murmur from Nelly.
She frowned and moved his hair off of his forehead so she could feel it again and he was struck by how he’d missed her fussing over him. It felt good, but it was the only thing that did.
On top of the flu or cold or whatever it was, he had a savage hangover; that was the headache and the queasiness that filled him from top to bottom. He hadn’t had a drink since before the play and his nerves screamed for one now. His spirits were also as black as they’d ever been as his drowsiness cleared and his circumstances reasserted themselves. It was as though he’d been dumped at the bottom of a deep earthen pit with no way to scale the walls and could only just make out a small circle of light at the mouth. He could feel himself riding a crest of panic and groped for his cigarettes on the bedside table.
Nelly stood and he looked over his shoulder to see her bend over a tea tray on a cart. Her stockings and dress were back on, her hair pinned back up and make-up reordered. It made him regret that he’d only gotten a few minutes of her in her chemise with her hair down before they’d both fallen into a dead sleep. She returned with a black cup of coffee.
He felt so woozy and ill for a moment that he had to close his eyes. “I’ve gotta have a drink or I’ll puke,” he said.
Rather than frowning at him as he expected, she passed him the stationery. Where is it?
“The booze?” he said. He’d slid a bottle of whiskey in one sock and a bottle of bourbon in the other and put both in his satchel, creating a cocoon of underclothes and other garments to protect them. “Smaller bag. Wrapped ‘em in socks.”
She nodded and momentarily disappeared, then returned with the bourbon. He unscrewed the lid with a shaky hand and dumped enough in that the coffee rose to the rim of the cup. She took the bottle as he took a drink. He swallowed as much of the bitter combination as he could stand and set the saucer and cup on the bedside table, then lit his first cigarette of the day. She set the bottle at her feet and picked up the paper and pen.
I could tell you’ve been drinking a lot.
He almost asked her how, but decided it was probably obvious enough and shrugged. He knew she didn’t like it. “I can handle it,” he said, coughing after taking a drag.
She looked skeptical, but didn’t object. He finished the coffee and cigarette and she fussed over him more, stroking his hair and rubbing his back.
What do you want for breakfast? she wrote.
He thought about it and decided something heavy sounded good. “Steak and eggs,” he said. “Medium, eggs over easy.”
She nodded. Breakfast came and he ate in bed in his pajamas with the tray on his lap, though he could barely taste the food with his nose so congested. Nelly had two slices of toast and an orange juice. The nausea was gone for the time being and his headache was beginning to ease, but only just. The curtains remained drawn, which he appreciated, and Nelly had turned on a bedside lamp. He ate his fill, smoked another cigarette, had more coffee and whiskey, and felt a little better. After he’d coughed up what his chest had filled with overnight, his cough seemed to have eased by a few degrees.
After she cleared his tray, she passed him the stationery. I wrote you a letter.
Misery washed over him. He hadn’t really banked on it, but a sliver of him had hoped that they’d already come to some kind of understanding and could avoid further talk. Last night she’d seemed like the old Nelly he remembered, but in the daylight she had a kind of poise that was new. It was the poise of someone running her own show.
“Alright,” he said, resigned.
He sat on the edge of the bed and she sat next to him, her hands clasped between her knees.
Dearest Buster, went the letter, and he knew then that he wasn’t going to like what was coming.
I woke up early this morning & I’ve done a lot of thinking about what comes next. It would be much easier to tell you everything if you could hear me, but I will try my best to explain with this letter.
The night before my birthday when you gave your big party with Paul Whiteman, I saw you dancing with Natalie & I realized that you loved her. You don’t have to pretend you don’t. I don’t know how long you have been married but I have heard that divorce is no easy thing & I am sure you will not get over it overnight. I feel it is the right & sensible thing to give you time to heal from it. I can hear you saying now in that indignant way you have, ‘How long is that?’
To that I say at least a year. In my heart of hearts I know it would not be good for either of us if you replaced her with me as soon as the papers are signed. It is too much like putting a tiny bandage on a cut that needs stitches. It will bleed through in no time.
You haven’t asked my opinion about what you should do, but if you did, I would tell you to go back to California & face things head-on. I don’t for a minute think you are serious (or if you are you shouldn’t be) about letting her keep your house & your children. You must fight for the things you want. Also, you have a very good deal with M-G-M & you ought to return before they give you the sack. You don’t want to lose what you have worked so hard for. Maybe it isn’t the same as having your own studio but you seemed to get on very well with Snap Shots & I hope you are getting along just as well with your new picture.
I can’t help but think that you may be happy without me once the divorce is well & truly behind you. As you read this now, you are tired, sick, & depressed & you don’t know where to turn. I’m as good as anything. It must not feel like it now, but this pain will pass. On the other side, you may not be the slightest bit interested in a small time stage actress. (I have accepted that I am not going to be in pictures & the theater is the next best thing for me.) I hope I am wrong but I am trying to be realistic.
If a year passes & you find you still feel for me, then I will return to California to be with you. I will not hold you to any promises now. You may drink & have dalliances & whatever you must do to endure your troubles. I can’t make any promises either, but I do know what’s in my heart at this moment. You are in my heart & I couldn’t give a damn about anyone else in the world.
‘Take your share of troubles, take it & don’t complain. If you want the rainbow you must have the rain.’ That’s how the song goes. Well, this is your share of troubles. I may be at the end of the rainbow & I may not. Whatever happens, I am not sorry for our affair & I am glad that it happened.
Truly yours,
Nelly
She didn’t want him. That was all he could think.
He looked up from the letter. “Dontcha love me even a little?”
To his astonishment, Nelly’s expression folded and she burst into tears, covering her face with her hands.
“Ah, hell,” he said. “Don’t cry.” He gathered her into his arms and blinked tears back; he wasn’t happy about blubbering like a baby the night before and didn’t want to repeat the spectacle. Her crying was probably a good sign, one that she did care for him as much as he wanted her to, but he couldn’t feel anything but desolate at her decision, like a hungry dog that had shown up at a warm door and been struck away. She clung to him hard and pressed her face into his shoulder.
Eventually he released her to cough. She pulled away and wiped her tears on her skirt.
He looked down at his hands. A sharp urge to uncap the bottle of whiskey came over him. Of course he didn’t want to leave everything he had to Natalie, least of all Bobby and Jimmy, but to struggle against her would take willpower he wasn’t sure he had. He imagined Dutch, Norma, and Peg in the courtroom with Natalie staring daggers into his flesh, saw the reporters thronged outside the courtroom door ready to report his every sneeze, and figured he didn’t stand a chance. The Talmadges would get what they wanted out of him. They always had in the past. Surrender was the fastest way to put everything behind him.
Nelly nudged her paper into his hands. Of course I do, the words read.
His inclination was to keep quiet and bear his hurt silently like he always did. Somehow, though, a self-pitying “it don’t feel like it” slipped out of him.
She slid her hands into his and squeezed, bringing him back to the present, and her lips found his. It was the first time she had kissed him since they’d made up. Suddenly, he wanted her with an agony that threatened to split him in two, but before he could carry the thought further, a cough seized him. When it was over, he found that she had brought over the VapoRub.
“Again?” he said with a groan. “I smell like a sick ward.”
You should. You’re sick, her piece of paper said. As if her point weren’t clear, she frowned at him.
He surrendered, unbuttoning his pajama top and stripping off his undershirt. He put his hand out for the VapoRub, but she shook her head. She took the jar herself and bent down to smear his chest with the cool ointment. Gooseflesh rose on his arms. She was more thorough than he had been, getting both pectorals and rubbing a generous amount of the stinking stuff into the center of his chest.
“Nelly,” he said.
She looked down at him, but didn’t pause in her activity.
“Nelly.”
He grabbed her upper arms, brought her down to him, and crushed his mouth against hers. His fear that she would resist was quickly put to rest. She matched him for ferocity. Soon she was straddling him in the center of the bed, kissing him for dear life.
“I didn’t pack nothing,” he said, breaking the kiss off with a gasp. “I mean …”
She was pulling down his pajama trousers and glanced up long enough to shake her head.
“I’ll stop if you want me to,” he said.
She leaned over him to grab her pen and paper from the table beside the bed. He held onto her waist to steady her, grasping it with an appreciation he hadn’t had before. The shape of her was so solid, real, and familiar, all he’d wanted for months.
Just pull out. Nelly waited long enough for him to read the words, then tore the paper from his hands and returned her mouth to his.
He was no good with words. He’d never be able to tell her the way that memories of her had floated like an undercurrent through his mind in the quiet moments since he’d last seen her and that he was certain that the answer to all his troubles, at least part of it, lay with her. He tried to show it. He kissed her hands. He pressed his lips to the inside of each wrist. And he tried to show it as he made love to her.
Even with long pauses so he could turn away and cough, it was too brief. He spilled onto the bedclothes, trying to avoid the skirt of her dress; they had both decided without saying anything that removing the dress was too much of a bother given the situation’s urgency. When he turned back, he saw the small dark stains of VapoRub on her dress. She noticed them at the same time.
“Oh well,” she mouthed, shrugging.
He pulled her into his arms and held her fast. As the glow of his climax faded, he felt almost feverish. He closed his eyes. She petted his hair.
He knew he hadn’t changed her mind. Even soft in his arms, she exuded a steely resoluteness. He wasn’t sure how long they lay there. Eventually he found his underclothes and put them back on and Nelly tidied herself up.
They sat side by side on the bed again and he smoked a cigarette.
The paper in her hands said, Did you really mean it when you said I was the reason you fell apart?
He coughed as he exhaled a lungful of smoke. “Yes.”
She looked sideways at him and he could see the disbelief in her face. He took another drag from his cigarette. He couldn’t explain what he meant and he didn’t want to, either. The nearest he could sort it out for himself, it was the way she had been the one dependable bright spot as his studio was yanked out from under him and his marriage took a final swan dive, even if he hadn’t realized it until it was too late.
I have to leave, the paper read. The matinee is at 1.
“Okay,” he said.
She took the cigarette from his fingers, put it in the ashtray, and pressed her hands into his. She leaned her head on his shoulder. Desolation descended on him again. He wasn’t sure he was strong enough to endure everything that lay ahead, but silently he promised himself that he would try.
He would try for her sake.
Notes: I know that Buster and Nelly are in a hotel room during this scene, but I felt like the image of the couple in the park was very suggestive of their conversation. I didn't save the citation, so I don't know the artist. Sorry!
Only two chapters to go, Buster Kittens. If you have enjoyed this story, please share it on social media, with fellow Buster fans, etc.
P.S. I didn't actually think Buster and Nelly would make love in this chapter. Had no intentions of writing a sex scene. Their actions somehow suggested it, though, and there we were.
Chapter 42
Saturday night’s performance was the production's finest so far. Everyone was at their witty best, scarcely a line was missed, and when it was it was quickly recovered. Nelly’s back-and-forth with Eugene had never been so snappy. It seemed the audience had never laughed so loud when she fixed him with a withering look and scoffed, “I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow, / Than a man swear he loves me.” The applause at intermission went on and on. In fact, the only disruption was the barking loud cough of a man in the front row. “God help me,” Leo said backstage between scenes, “I’m going to go down there and choke him with a whole bag of lozenges if he keeps it up.”
She was exultant when Eugene grabbed her hand at the end and they walked to the footlights to bow when the curtain went back up. They stepped back to let the others bow, then joined hands with them for a group bow.
Backstage in the dressing room behind a curtain reserved for Hattie, Faye, and her, she exchanged her pale green Elizabethan frock with the pink trim for a long-sleeved mauve dress with generous ribbon-work at the neckline and cuffs that she’d recently bought to stave off the bitter December air. She scrubbed the thick white foundation from her face and powdered her skin down to a more natural shade while Hattie removed her costume and smoked a cigarette. Faye had a date with her boyfriend and left as soon as she had changed. As with the previous two Saturdays, the plan was for the gang to get food at the Green Door and take the El to the Aragon to dance the night away.
“You girls ready yet?” Harry said on the other side of the curtain as Nelly was touching up her lipstick.
“Hold your horses, I still need to get this clown paint off,” said Hattie.
Nelly stood up to let her take her turn at the mirror and stepped out from behind the curtain.
“Beautiful as always, Beatrice,” said Harry, planting a noisy kiss on her cheek.
“Flattering as always, Don Pedro,” she said, but the attention made her feel good. He was still no less boring, but she felt no desire to stop seeing him as long as the play was going well and his companionship was agreeable within bed and without.
The other cast members joined them one by one after transitioning from costumes to ordinary clothes.
“Hattie, you’re taking quite a long time, dear,” Fred called.
“Kiss my ass!” she replied, and they all fell into stitches.
Their jubilance brimmed over into song. “Who’s that coming down the street? Who’s that looking so petite ...?” Harry began singing, slinging his arm around her.
“Who’s that coming down to meet me here?” Fred chimed in. “Who’s that, you know who I mean—”
“Sweetest ‘who’ you’ve ever seen. I could tell her miles away from here,” they sang in tandem, Fred harmonizing.
“Yes, sir! That’s my baby!” Eugene bellowed.
“No, sir! Don’t mean maybe!” John answered, coming down the hall toward them.
“Men,” said Hattie, laughing and buttoning up her coat as she came out from the curtain.
They headed toward the back door in full voice.
“Yes, ma’am! We’ve decided!
No, ma’am, we won’t hide it.
Yes, ma’am, you’re invited now!”
Nelly joined in another chorus just as they spilled out into the alley, her arm around Harry’s waist. “Yes, sir! That’s my baby! No, sir! Don’t mean maybe!”
She glanced right, the briefest of glances, and saw a figure leaning against the bricks just outside the door, holding what appeared to be a bouquet of floors. In the back of her mind, she assumed it must be an admirer of blonde, curly-haired Hattie, who often had to inform ardent male audience members that she was married. Harry saw the figure too and cocked an eyebrow at her.
“Yes, ma’am! We’ve decided!” Nelly sang, turning left along with the others, but something about the figure troubled her. It almost looked like …
She looked back, only intending to satisfy herself that she was being silly. The figure had left the wall and was retreating down the alley.
“No, ma’am ...” Her voice died in her throat. She would know that walk anywhere. She wriggled out from beneath Harry’s arm as quick as an eel, suddenly desperate. “Wait!” she shouted after the figure.
Harry caught her by the elbow. “Hey, what are you doing? Who is that?”
The figure didn’t turn, but rounded the corner and was gone. All else forgotten, she tore her arm away and looked wildly at Harry for a split second. “I think I know who that is. I have to—don’t worry, I’ll catch up. I’ll catch up with you later. Don’t wait for me.”
She dashed down the alley as fast as she could go.
Behind her, Harry yelled, “Wait!” But his footsteps didn’t follow.
She was in serious danger of slipping on the frozen puddles and half-melted humps of snow turned ice in the night air, but her balance held and her heels didn’t give way beneath her. The alley spat her out in the middle of a crowded sidewalk. Despite the frigid temperature, people were out in droves enjoying the nightlife and the storefronts decorated for Christmas. Probably some of them were the playgoers she had just performed for.
She didn’t see the figure and a woebegone lump formed in her throat. She knew it couldn’t really be him; such scenarios only lived in the likes of Norma Talmadge pictures. Still, she stood on tiptoes and scanned left and right, hoping to see the familiar figure in the froth of people.
The lump grew larger with every lost second. All of the men were dressed similarly to the figure in dark overcoats and fedoras. She’d almost resigned herself to turning back around and catching up with the gang when she saw it at some distance walking west.
A cry ripped from her throat. “Buster!”
Everyone around her stared, but the figure, now a good twenty yards or so ahead, walked on. All social graces abandoned, she bumped and clawed people out of the way, gasping, “Excuse me, excuse me!”
It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be.
She was going to lose it. “Buster!”
The figure still did not turn. Gritting her teeth, she picked up speed. It would be a miracle if she didn’t twist her ankle. At long last, she was able to close the gap. The figure was five yards away, now four, and she shouted as loudly as she could manage, “Buster!”
Again, everyone around her stared except the figure.
Two yards now. “Buster!”
The figure kept making its way forward. Finally, finally, she was close enough to lay a hand on its shoulder. It didn’t feel like Buster’s and she realized a split second before the figure turned how foolish she’d been to believe something so impossible.
The sorry was half out of her mouth when the head lifted and there he was, as unmistakable as Will Shakespeare himself.
There was Buster.
“Nelly.” He looked as startled as she felt. His face was tired and the bags beneath his eyes were as pronounced as she’d ever seen them. He held a bouquet of flowers and a playbill in his left hand, and a fedora was pulled low on his forehead.
She almost threw her arms around him, but the impulse disappeared as a blaze of anger seized her. Everything had been going so well. He had no idea what she’d gone through to get where she had, what she’d done to unlove him. Now here he was again, splitting her heart open.
Struggling to master her feelings, she instead said in a calm voice, “How did you find me?”
He smiled sadly and tapped his ear. “Can’t hear. Caught a darn cold on the train.” His voice was stuffy. As if on cue, he coughed into his fist.
“You were the man in the front row who wouldn’t stop coughing!” she said, feeling dumbstruck.
“Hey, lovebirds. Move it,” a man said, glaring at them.
It brought her back to reality and she stepped off the sidewalk. Buster mirrored her. Despite her shouts, no one had taken notice that the Great Stone Face stood among them.
He cleared his throat. “I messed up. I shouldn’t have tried to find you. Look …”
His words made her miserable. Already she never wanted to let him out of her sight again, but here he was telling her it was all a mistake.
“I shouldn’t have bothered you,” he said, doleful. “You don’t need me dragging you down. Everything’s going so good for you. You should forget you ever saw me. Get back to your friends and boyfriend.” He attempted an encouraging smile, but the effect was tragic.
“God dammit!” she exploded. She blinked back tears of anger. “You don’t get to just show up and disappear. I won’t stand for it!”
He winced. “All I caught was ‘god dammit.’ ”
It was bad enough that this confrontation was happening in a public space when she was off her guard, but even worse that he couldn’t hear a damn thing she was saying. She took off her gloves, stuffed them in her pockets, and dug in her handbag for a pencil. She didn’t have any paper, so she took the playbill from Buster’s hand. She folded the front cover over and wrote on the margin of the second page, Where are you staying?
They needed to go somewhere to talk, that much she was convinced of, but Harry knew her room at the Blackstone well and she didn’t want to risk an interruption if he went looking for her.
Buster glanced down at the message, then at her. “The Allerton, but I’m telling you, you oughta forget it. You were heading somewhere and I interrupted your plans. Forget you ever saw me.” He coughed into his elbow for the space of several long moments.
I will hit you if you say that again, she wrote, with a hand that shook with fury as much as the cold.
He read the sentence and looked at her with a wary expression. She was so angry in that instant, she almost wished he would dare her.
“Well, it’s about two miles that way,” he said, pointing north. Another coughing spell seized him.
She gestured for him to follow her to the curb and put out her hand for a taxi. Within a minute, a black-and-yellow car slowed to a stop in front of them. Buster opened the back door for her. “The Allerton,” he said to the driver, getting in beside her.
She settled into the seat as the cab pulled away and the city lights began flashing by. Even if he could have heard her, she wouldn’t have known what to say. She had dreamed for months of meeting him again, but she never truly thought it would happen. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember what she had imagined herself saying to him. Perhaps she was in shock. They spent the short ride in silence save for Buster’s coughing, and the elevator ride up the tenth floor of the hotel was just as quiet. She was keenly aware of his nearness and their mutual discomfort.
She followed him to Room 1013, hanging a few steps behind him. He unlocked the door and they went inside. She stepped ahead of him and he brushed past her after closing the door. The contact made her heart thump and she realized with dismay that her attraction to him hadn’t faded at all.
The room was small, a single rather than a suite. There was a tiny bathroom just inside the door and a double bed, a coat rack, a bureau, a chair, and a table. She watched him turn on the bedside lamp and a floor lamp by the table. His suitcase and satchel sat unopened on the floor and she wondered if he had come straight to the play without changing clothes. The room certainly didn’t look lived in. She remembered the last time they had been in a hotel room, the scant memory of being sick as he held her hair back from the toilet bowl and her subsequent hangover and shame.
“Gotcha these,” he said flatly, almost as an afterthought, turning around. He held out the bouquet but didn’t meet her eyes.
“Oh.” She took the flowers without thinking, then regretted immediately that she had accepted a peace offering. Red roses, pink carnations, and white baby’s breath were clustered within a paper wrap. The cold had mortally wounded the blossoms and they were limp and bruised. Now that the shock of his presence was wearing off, she was beginning to piece together the story. He had come to see her performance and brought her flowers, but she didn’t know how he could have known about the play. “How did you find me?” she said.
“Huh?”
She raised her voice. “How did you f—” and when he still shook his head she set the flowers on the bedside table, went to the table, and found hotel stationery and a pencil.
How did you find me?
He stood next to her and looked down at the paper.
“Had your folks’ address,” he said. She noticed he was still avoiding her eyes. “You gave it to me that day, remember?”
He didn’t have to elaborate on ‘that day.’ The loss was still imprinted in her mind as if it had been yesterday.
Face flushed and heart beating faster, she scribbled, You met my parents? She could only imagine her mother’s shock and flattery upon seeing the star of Steamboat Bill standing on her front porch.
Buster read the words. “Not your parents, your sister,” he said, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “Well, the maid answered first. I asked for you and she brought back your sis. Bawled me out like the devil. Couldn’t hear what she was saying, but she was angrier than I’ve ever seen a girl. Had to explain that I lose my hearing when I get a cold. Finally she storms back inside and throws this playbill at me. Been in pictures long enough to read lips alright. ‘Take it and go,’ she says. Well, I got the hint then. Picked it up and left with my tail between my legs. I was walking away when I saw it was for a Shakespeare play.”
Nelly’s thoughts reeled. She remembered that Ruthie and Gerald had planned to Christmas-shop for the children after picking her up following tomorrow’s matinee performance, so Sunday dinner at their parents’ had been moved up a day. Though she was angry at Buster, she couldn’t imagine bawling him out. She almost apologized for Ruthie’s behavior, but caught herself, feeling that he needed to know that forgiveness could not be gotten so easily, if forgiveness was what he had come for.
She’s protective of me, she wrote.
Buster sighed. “I know. I had it coming.” He turned away, coughing and coughing into his elbow.
Her heart softened just a fraction. I’m going to get something for your throat, she wrote. She sat on the edge of the bed and telephoned for some tea with honey. “Is there a commissary here? My friend is sick,” she said, as Buster continued coughing. When told that there was, she ordered some lozenges and Vick’s VapoRub to be brought up to Room 1013 with the tea.
Buster unbuttoned his coat, draped it on the chair at the table, and set his hat on the bureau. He came and sat next to her, though he left space between them. He pulled his cigarettes from his jacket pocket and lit one. Smoke rose in the air.
“Guess I owe you an explanation,” he said, still not meeting her eyes and sounding as though an explanation was the last thing he wanted to give. He turned his head and coughed.
All she could think of was the feeling of grasping her castmates’ hands and bowing before the glowing hot spotlights. That was what he was taking from her, whether he knew it or not.
To avoid answering, she stood up and unbuttoned her own coat. She laid it atop his and gathered the stationery and pencil. She pulled the Gideon’s Bible from the shelf of the bedside table for a surface to write on and sat back down on the bed.
“You never cut your hair,” he said. He was finally looking at her, a sad smile playing on his lips.
Her heart wrenched and she looked away. He looked ten years older than the last time she’d seen him. It wasn’t just that the bags under his eyes were puffier, the lines in his forehead seemed deeper as well. There was a shadow of stubble on his face. She wondered how much he’d been drinking. He didn’t smell like booze, but something told her he’d been deeply wed to the bottle since she’d left.
She stared at the stationery, struggling to make sense of his presence. Maybe it would have been better if she had let him go and joined back up with the gang.
“I know it ain’t fair to you,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “As soon as you walked out that door with your friends I knew right then I shouldn’t have bothered you. I’m sorry for that. I shoulda thought of how it’d be for you.” Another coughing fit hit him.
She looked at him and rolled her lips in. He wasn’t wrong.
“Anyway, I guess you probably heard,” he continued, exhaling smoke and clearing his throat. “Nate’s through with me.”
She could only shake her head, stunned. So that was it. The revelation made her feel horrible and sick. He had only sought her out because his wife had left him, not because he’d tried to live without her and couldn’t.
“Really?” he said. “It’s all over the papers.”
I don’t read the gossips anymore, she scrawled. She handed the pad to him.
He read it and looked up. “ ‘Cause of me.”
She nodded, turning away. Her stomach see-sawed.
He sighed. “If I could take it all back, all of it, I would.”
For the first time, she wondered if she would want him to. At first, the pain of losing him made her wish, in that desperate, futile way anyone did when confronted with fierce heartache, that it had never happened and she was still back in California, frustrated in her ambitions, yes, but cozy and content as his mistress. With the balm of time, however, she could see what had been restored to her, her nieces and nephew, her friendship with Ruthie, and her love for the theater.
“It’s too little too late,” he said. “I know all that. That’s why I wish you’d just let me go. Forget you saw me.” He coughed and coughed.
She gave a disbelieving shake of her head. As if forgetting a second time could be so easy.
“I know you’re sore with me,” he said, when the coughing had abated. “You got every right to be.”
She sneaked a glance at him. He’d produced a hotel ashtray she hadn’t seen him take and was tapping his cigarette into it. If he weren’t deaf, she would have told him not to smoke when he had a cough. She would have told him that she wasn’t angry until he had reappeared. At least, she thought she hadn’t been. She wasn’t sure of that now. She settled for a shrug.
“Coming out here, I thought you might be pregnant. I know I just let you skip town and you could have been …”
He looked away and coughed and it struck her then just how much discomfort he was in, far more than she was, although she was scarcely comfortable. She knew how much he detested conflict and couldn’t begin to guess how much it was costing him to sit here and explain himself. Had he really believed that it would be as simple as handing over a bouquet of flowers? Misunderstandings in Shakespeare’s comedies could be resolved with as much, but she and Buster weren’t in a play.
A knock on the door, which he couldn’t hear of course, saved her from having to answer him. She stood and took two quarters from her purse for a tip before answering it. A concierge was standing in the hall with a tea cart. She tipped him, wheeled it inside, and parked it near the bedside table and filled two mugs with steaming tea from the white ceramic teapot. She handed Buster his and he took it wordlessly, his cigarette now stubbed in the ashtray that he’d set at the foot of the bed. Her stomach churned. She’d begun to feel hungry as she’d stepped out into the night with Harry and the gang, but she couldn’t stand the thought of food now. She sipped her tea and Buster sipped his. He coughed and the tea sloshed onto his pants, and she stood and refilled his cup without saying anything. When they were finished, she handed him the small paper bag of lozenges. He fished one out, unwrapped it, popped it in his mouth, and set the bag on the floor. The smell of licorice filled the room.
She took up the pad again, but nothing came to mind. It had always been so easy with him before: easy to chat with him, to hold him in her arms, to laugh at him, to love him.
Busted rolled the lozenge around in his mouth and it clinked against his teeth. She realized she would probably catch his cold in a couple days, and she still had a whole week left of performances not counting the matinee. After a couple minutes of uneasy silence, he rose to his feet and went to his suitcases. She watched him bend down and heard him rummaging in one. When he came back, he handed her a section of the Tribune that had been folded to a particular page. Her eyes immediately tracked to a headline that read BUSTER KEATON SKIPS TOWN AMID DIVORCE AND NEW PICTURE.
Reports coming out of Hollywood assert that frozen-faced comedian Buster Keaton has mysteriously left the city of Los Angeles one week before filming was to wrap on his new picture for M-G-M. His departure coincides with a divorce suit brought two weeks ago by Mrs. Natalie Talmadge Keaton. Mrs. Keaton has alleged adultery against her deadpanned husband, with rumors swirling about town that he was discovered in her bed with another woman the night before the divorce was filed. His unhappy wife also cites mental cruelty, stating that her spouse would disappear for days on end, refusing to tell her where he was going or what he was doing, and humiliate her in front of their family and friends.
Correspondents in the movie capital say that Keaton failed to show up for filming last Monday and M-G-M was unable to reach him at his Italian Villa home. Witnesses describe seeing him board a train headed East shortly after. It is not known where the comedian was heading or when he planned to be back. Some suspect a publicity stunt to win back Mrs. Keaton.
In a statement today, the studio said, “We are not worried about Buster taking a little time off. He has had a busy year and, needless to say, recent upheavals in his personal life have caused him strain. Although our desire was to finish the new picture by Christmas, we have been ahead of schedule and do not in any way feel that the film’s release will be delayed. We respect Buster’s decision and expect him back any day now …”
The article went on for another two paragraphs, but Nelly set it next to her on the bed. Again, she felt sick. She knew when she left California, though she tried not to think of it at the time, that Buster would inevitably move onto other women, but reading about it made her ache with jealousy and anger. She felt ashamed for him, ashamed of him, and bitter all over again.
“Oh Buster,” she said, looking up at him where he silently stood.
“Oh Buster is right,” he said, reading her lips. He paused to cough before saying, “That ain’t even the half of it. I went kinda crazy after you left. Didn’t even try hiding the girls from Nate no more. Even before the big scene with the cops and the detectives, I couldn’t hardly get her to say a word to me. I’ve been catching it left and right from everybody. Constance is apoplectic. Eddie Mannix’s been cooking up stories to cover my hide. Hell, I don’t know if I’ll have a contract when I get back to California. We still got a week to go on shooting and every day I’m gone is costing ‘em thousands. Folks still get their salaries whether I’m there or not.”
As he spoke, he had taken out a cigarette from the packet in his trousers pocket and torn the paper off absently, never lighting it. Now he went to the tea tray and picked up the Vick’s VapoRub, which he tossed casually onto the bed. He started unbuttoning his jacket, then his shirt.
Nelly looked away. It reminded her of the first time he’d undressed in front of her at the foot of the dock and she’d been too shy to look at him. In her peripheral vision, she saw him toss his shirt and jacket onto the bed. After a coughing spell, he sat next to her again and she could smell the mentholated ointment as he unscrewed the jar. She averted her eyes as he applied it, though she didn’t think he’d removed his undershirt. She found herself wishing that she was at the Green Door with the rest of the gang, enjoying a chicken dinner and anticipating a night of dancing and merriment at the Aragon. In her head, a band played “Sweet Georgia Brown.”
Buster stood up and set the jar of VapoRub on the bedside table, appearing briefly in her line of vision. He was wearing his undershirt and she caught a whiff of his familiar cigarettes-and-sweat smell mingled with the ointment. The bed sank as he sat back down.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. He bent over as a cough wracked him. “It made sense when I got on the train. I should have thought more about how you’d feel seeing me again.”
Again, she couldn’t argue with him. She looked down at the pad and pen, which had found their way back into her hands. She couldn’t think of a thing to say.
“I know I said I’d write you. Talked myself into thinking you wouldn’t want to hear from me, I guess. I felt awful for leaving those pictures around and messing it all up for you.”
She looked at him. He was biting his thumbnail, looking fretful. She considered the pad of paper again.
What did you think of the play? she wrote.
Buster leaned over into her space to read the words and her skin prickled.
“What’d I think of the play?” he said, pulling back and looking surprised.
She nodded.
“Well it was alright I suppose, but I couldn’t hear a darn word of it. It was like watching a picture without title cards,” he said. “I did what you said though, I watched the action and tried to figure it out that way. You didn’t like Benedick, but your friends told you he was in love with you so you fell in love back. Don John tried ruining Hero’s reputation. And in the end it all worked out.”
For the first time, she couldn’t help smiling. He had gotten it right.
“I gotta be honest with you, I didn’t much care that I couldn’t hear,” he went on. “You’re great at acting. You did it all by yourself too, just like you wanted.”
Her heart felt like it skipped not one but two measures. She didn’t want to care for him, not when she’d come so far. She squeezed her eyelids together for a few seconds.
“Anyway …” He trailed off and pressed his fingers against a cheekbone and rubbed. His eyes looked shiny. “Anyway, that’s why I shouldn’t have showed up. Everything’s going so good for you. You didn’t need me to barge back in and—” He stopped and said, “Nate says she’s taking the house and the kids, too.”
To her shock, his voice cracked on the words.
“I ain’t going to fight it,” he said. “She can have everything. She can have my—my boys. I guess you think I’m here because I’ve got nowhere else to go, but you’re the reason I fell apart in the first place. I suppose I was thinking I could say sorry and everything’d be okay, but ...”
He turned away from her to hide his tears, but she could hear him begin to weep.
Her own eyes flooded and pen and pad dropped from her hands. “Oh Buster!” she said. She closed the space between them and wrapped her arms around him, unable to be cold-hearted one second longer. “I still love you.” She pressed her face into his neck, her tears wetting his skin. Even though he couldn’t hear her, he seemed to understand because he clutched her against him as he cried. She’d never seen a man cry before. That it was Buster made it ten times worse. “I’m here, darling, it’s okay,” she said, squeezing him back and crying with him. “I’m here.”
It was many minutes before the shuddering of his ribs stopped. She held him throughout, rubbing his back and stroking his hair. At last, he sat back and pulled a handkerchief out of his trousers pocket. She found hers in her handbag, which she’d laid on a pillow earlier without noticing. She didn’t mind that there was a damp spot on her shoulder from his running nose or that he had coughed on her several times. All she could think was that she still loved him and that they would figure things out, somehow, someway. They blew their noses and dried their eyes. Buster stood up and poured himself another cup of tea.
“Here I am with all my bridges burned,” he joked weakly, taking a sip.
She sat with her knee pressed against his as he drank his tea. She was no longer sure what time it was. In a way, she was grateful for his cold. She still didn’t know what she wanted to say to him. Just feeling seemed to be enough for the moment.
I’m going to run a bath for you, she wrote, after they had sat in silence for a few more minutes with only his cough to break it. Hot water will help your cough.
Buster nodded. “Alright.”
In the bathroom, she sat on the edge of the tub as the tap ran and tested the temperature every minute or so to make sure that the water was just short of scalding. Buster came and sat on the toilet seat. He was smoking again.
“You shouldn’t smoke when you have a cough,” she said, before remembering he couldn’t hear her.
“Huh?”
She mimed coughing, taking a drag from a cigarette, then pretended to grind a cigarette underfoot as she shook her head.
“Alright, alright.” He turned on one of the sink taps and extinguished the cigarette in the water. Without any self-consciousness, he started to unbutton his trousers.
She shook her head, but he’d already stepped out of one leg.
“What?” He stepped out of the other leg and coughed.
She shook her head again. She wasn’t quite ready to resume their previous level of intimacy. It seemed too precipitous with their reconciliation so delicate and new. She felt guilty about Harry too, she realized. He had been good to her even if she hadn’t returned the depth of his affection and she owed him a formal break-up before she embarked on any sins of the flesh with Buster. Of course, it was ridiculous to even let her thoughts roam in that direction. She didn’t think Buster meant anything by undressing in front of her, and even if he did he was hardly in a condition to make love given his fearsome cough. She had more to fear from her own desire than his. Though this was all too complicated to explain in writing (and she’d left pen and pad on the bed regardless), Buster appeared to understand and sat back down on the toilet lid, obedient if not quite chaste, clad as he was only in underwear.
When the tub was sufficiently full, she motioned him over. It’s very hot, she mouthed.
“Trying to boil me to death?” he said, tugging his undershirt over his head. Beneath it, he was still beautiful and she kept her eyes above his collarbones after a brief glimpse.
She motioned her head toward the bedroom before leaving the bathroom.
A few moments later, she heard him cry out. “Now I know you’re trying to kill me!” he said.
She laughed for the first time, then remembered Natalie and some of the pain trickled back in. No matter which way she turned after this, more pain was on the horizon and the thought made her feel sober. She dialed the front desk and ordered roast beef sandwiches and soup to be brought up, then sat on the edge of the bed waiting for Buster to be done. Only his coughing broke the silence.
When he came out, his skin was pink, a towel was wrapped around his waist, and the soup and sandwiches were waiting on the tea tray. She thought he was coughing less, but it was hard to say. “Where’d these come from?” he said, motioning at the tray as he walked around the bed. She shrugged modestly and kept her eyes directed away from him as he snapped open his suitcase for a change of clothes. He changed in the bathroom and came out in white pajamas with thin blue stripes, smelling like hotel soap, his feet bare.
“Thanks,” he said, nodding toward the food. In the time it took her to finish half a sandwich, he wolfed down a whole one as well as a bowl of soup. “Something the matter with your appetite?” he said, finally looking up from his plate.
She tore at the corner of the second half of her sandwich and shrugged. The trepidation had crept back on her and she wasn’t feeling hungry anymore.
“Thought it looked like you’d dropped some weight,” he continued, glancing her up and down.
She gave up and set her plate on the tray. Just working on those twenty pounds I need to get into pictures, she wrote on the pad, but the joke fell flat.
“You really going back into pictures?” said Buster. He looked surprised and she could tell he believed her.
“No,” she said, shaking her head.
“Didn’t think so,” he said, sounding a little deflated. He coughed into his elbow, plopped another sandwich onto his plate, and sat back down on the edge of the bed. He took a bite and swallowed before saying, “I know you haven't made your mind up about me. It’s okay.”
She smiled in spite of herself at how well he still understood her and reached out to stroke his damp hair away from his temple.
It’s very sudden, she scribbled. I never thought I’d see you again.
He read and took another bite of his sandwich. “I was talking to Louise—my sis Louise, I mean—when it all clicked.”
She didn’t understand, but nodded.
“I was only thinking about me, though. Wasn’t thinking that you might—” he paused. “Well, I wasn’t thinking.”
That I might have moved on? she wrote.
“No, no,” he said, his half-eaten sandwich abandoned. “Figured it was a possibility. Maybe you were pregnant and your family was taking care of you. Maybe you weren’t and you had a fiancé by now. Maybe you didn’t want to have anything to do with me, maybe you did.” He looked toward the curtained window, his focus distant. “Wasn’t thinking how it would be, you walking out that theater door with your fellow perfectly happy never seeing me again. That’s when I knew it was wrong to try and interfere. I wish I’d just let you be.” He didn’t sound self-pitying, just matter-of-fact.
She considered how to answer. There were mights, maybes, and shoulds aplenty, but for better or for worse they had ended up here.
Well we can’t change it, she wrote. All we can do is decide what to do now.
That decision had hovered over them since they’d stepped into the hotel room. Buster set his plate on the tray and knit his hands.
“I knew what I was gonna say, coming out here, but something tells me you won’t be on board.”
She looked at him, taken aback. Her body seemed to go both hot and cold simultaneously. Was she hearing a proposal?
Not on board with what? Her face was warm.
He shrugged. “Forget it.” They fell back into silence again with only his coughs and the tick-tick of the radiator to punctuate the stillness.
She bent over the pad again. We need to decide regardless.
He looked at the pad. “Well, what d’you want?”
The question gave her pause. I want to finish out the play, she answered, after thinking about it.
“And then?” He bit at his thumbnail again.
I don’t know, she said. She tried to peer into next week or next month, but even tomorrow was opaque.
“You engaged to him?” he said. His expression was blank.
Who? she wrote, though she guessed that he meant Harry.
“The fellow you walked out the back door with. The one who played Don John.”
No and I’m going to break it off with him. Even before you showed up he was dull as dishwater. She gave a wry smile as she passed him the pad.
“Well,” he said slowly, studying her after he’d read her reply, still grave-faced. “What is it? You afraid to go back to California ‘cause of the blackmail? I’ve done a lot of thinking about that, you know, and honest to God, I don’t think it matters none. In fact I’ve asked myself ever since that day why I ever thought it was a big deal. It isn’t. Louise Brooks sued a fellow who took some photos of her in her birthday suit and won. If the girls try anything against you, it’ll never stick.”
She shook her head. I need time to think. Let’s just sleep on it.
“Sleep here?”
She nodded. She could go back to the Blackstone, but nothing said Harry wasn’t waiting there. She could also take a room at the Allerton, but selfishly, maybe foolishly, she wanted this night with Buster.
He rubbed the back of his neck. “Okay.” He nodded. “Not sure I’m in any condition to—well, you know.”
She had to laugh. Is that all you think I think about? When I say sleep I mean sleep. You look like you haven’t slept in days.
“Had a hard time with it on the train,” he acknowledged. “We got in real early this morning, too.”
I’m tired too. It’s been a long day.
He nodded. She reached out and touched his shoulder. “It’s okay,” she said, though he couldn’t hear her.
It wasn’t like the last time she’d stayed with him at the bungalow, when they’d stood in front of the mirror and brushed their teeth together, Buster trying his best to make her laugh so that she would spit toothpaste everywhere. He left her alone as she took her turn in the bathroom. She washed her face, brushed her teeth with a finger and some of his toothpaste, undressed down to her chemise, and splashed a little water and soap under her arms. Exhaustion had crept up on her. She considered her hair and decided just to sleep on it, bobby pins and all. When she walked back into the bedroom, Buster had gotten rid of the tea cart and was standing next to the window with the curtain open, smoking and looking off into the night. He turned around and ground out his cigarette when he saw her.
“Your turn,” she said.
“Huh?” he said, cupping his ear.
She shook her head with a small smile and cocked her head at the bathroom. He disappeared into it. She got rid of her purse, the newspaper, and the ashtray, and lifted the white coverlet and white sheets of the bed. Buster wasn’t long. She could smell toothpaste on his breath as he passed by on his way to close the curtain and turn off the floor lamp by the table. He cleared his throat as he held up the sheets and slid in next to her.
“Aren’t you gonna take your hair down?” he said, sitting propped against his pillow.
She shook her head and grasped for the pen and paper on the bedside table. Too tired and I only have a comb on me.
He looked at her for a few seconds. “I’ve got a brush. Want me to?”
She started to say tell him no, it wasn’t a big deal, but something in the way he was looking at her made her reconsider. She nodded.
He returned a minute later and she sat up straight as he crawled in next to her. He sat with one leg folded beneath him. “Just take out the pins?”
She nodded and bent her head. His fingers searched through her hair and began to pull out pins. They came out easily with no pinching. He stroked a section of hair hesitantly with the brush. She took it from his hand and demonstrated that he could use more pressure. He returned her nod. At any other time, the moment would have been utterly surreal and strange, but she was exhausted both bodily and emotionally. His touch felt good and that was all she cared about.
“Did I get ‘em all?” he asked after a few minutes.
She felt around in her hair and found that he’d only missed three. She showed them to him and he set them on his bedside table.
“Turn back around,” he said. He ran the brush through her hair with a firmer hand this time, but he was still gentler than she was. After every stroke, he caressed her head with his other hand. Her eyes closed. She had been a child the last time someone had combed her hair and had forgotten how soothing it was. She thought she could fall asleep right then and there. “There, how’s that?” he said finally.
“Mmm,” she sighed. She shifted around and met his eyes, and his expression was so honest and vulnerable that she didn’t hesitate to put her arms around him. “I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest,” she whispered in his ear.
It didn’t matter that he couldn’t hear her. He must have known, and that was the thought that carried her off as she fell fast asleep next to him.
Notes: Thank you to @savageandwise for being such a thorough beta. There’s no one else I’d trust to “preview the rushes.” This was such a delicate chapter that I took my time in revising it and substantially altered it from the original version around the same time I’d written Chapter 13, the chapter where Nelly first attends a party at the Villa.
This will be the third-to-last chapter. Though this chapter takes place at the end of 1928 and the photo of Buster is from autumn 1933, I envision that Buster as being the one whom Nelly encountered. Drinking, disheveled, sad, lost.
The penultimate line is delivered by Beatrice to Benedick in Much Ado.
Natalie’s wardrobe would have clothed a thousand empresses for a thousand years. Buster had never really appreciated before just how many outfits she owned. Every color in the rainbow was represented and every fabric too, silk, organdy, taffeta, chiffon, voile, law, and lace. For every dress, there was a pair of shoes: heels, slippers, Oxfords, boots, tennis shoes.
The blonde girl next to him was struck speechless. He’d found her outside of the casting office at the studio a few hours and several drinks earlier and had already forgotten her name.
“This one,” he said, going for the brightest red dress. He pulled it off its satin hanger and draped it over the girl’s arm. “Try it on.”
She looked momentarily uncertain, but obediently hooked her arms behind her back and began unbuttoning her dress. She slipped it from her shoulders and it pooled at her feet. Underneath, she was wearing a light turquoise girdle over a creamy slip. For a moment, he considered abandoning the fashion show and just taking her to bed, but this was important. He nodded at her to continue and she pulled the red dress over her head, tying it at the nape of her neck when she had straightened it over her hips.
“How’s it look?”
“Just swell,” he said. He reached into the row of dresses and grabbed something peach-colored with a transparent black overlay, trimmed with black ostrich feathers. “Now this one.”
She tried it on and posed for him, swishing this way and that. It was a beautiful dress. They were all beautiful. He made her try on a pink one made of Chinese silk, then one of gold lamé. Eventually she just stood there in the girdle with her hands knit in front of her as he made a pile of dresses at her feet.
He felt very good about the task as he went about pulling the nicest dresses from their hangers. It felt like doing laps in the pool or taking a brisk run in the summer air.
“Alright,” he said at last. The pile was as high as her knees now. “These all belong to you now. Let’s get ‘em into the other room.”
They stooped to gather the dresses up and he motioned her to follow him into Natalie’s bedroom. He dumped the dresses in the center of the bed and the girl followed his lead. The bottle of whiskey was where he had left it, on the side table where his wedding picture sat. He topped off both their glasses, knocked his back, then refilled it. He returned to the closet and grabbed two suitcases, which he slung onto the foot of the bed. This accomplished, he handed the girl her glass of whiskey and sat next to her on the edge of the bed. She took a tentative sip, looking at him for instruction.
It was evening now. The drunkenness rested on him like a heavy cloud. He struggled to think of what to do next. Then he remembered the girl. He finished his drink and set the empty glass on Nate’s bedside table, then bent over and fiddled at the girl’s hip with the buttons on the turquoise girdle. She lifted her hands to his belt. They peeled everything off, even their socks and stockings, but it wasn’t any use. He was too drunk. Whether the girl cared, he didn’t know. The cloud was so heavy now that he couldn’t keep his eyes open. He rolled off of her, pulled her into his arms and, half-lying on the dresses, passed out.
“Get up, Buster.”
He opened his eyes. They were filmy and he blinked rapidly, trying to clear them. He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep, but it was evening still; the room was still dark save for soft lamplight. His mouth was dry, he had to piss, and his thirst seemed unquenchable.
The voice was Natalie’s. He raised his head from the pillow and found that she wasn’t the only one in the bedroom. Dutch was standing next to her at the foot of the bed with her arm around Nate’s waist and three men he didn’t recognize lingered there too. Gradually it occurred to him that he was naked. Curled against him in an unconscious stupor, her skin sticky and sweaty where it met his, so was the girl. This couldn’t be right. Natalie and Norma were at Lake Tahoe.
“What gives?” he croaked. As he shifted himself to his elbow, he could feel that he was still blind drunk.
“This is it,” Natalie said.
He didn’t comprehend, but he knew that he’d stumbled into some deep and irreversible danger. Next to him, the girl was stirring. “What’s going on?” she said groggily.
“It ain’t what you’re thinking,” he said to his audience of five. “Nothing happened.” Realizing that the denial wasn’t convincing, he admitted, “I was too drunk.”
“Can you come here, ma’am?” one of the men said. He had produced a dressing gown of Natalie’s and was trying to avoid looking directly at the naked girl.
The girl slid off the bed and her modesty was duly robed.
“Get her a taxi,” another man said in an undertone, and the third man disappeared from the room with the girl.
Buster pulled himself to a sitting position and extracted a pink taffeta dress from beneath him, using it to cover himself. He tried to come to grips with what was happening, but just wanted to go back to sleep.
“What’s with the dresses and suitcases?” said the first man.
He shrugged. The importance was lost.
“He was trying to give them to that slut, I suspect,” Constance said.
He squinted at her. Nothing about the whole scene was making any sense. “Who are these guys?” he said, looking at Natalie.
“Detectives, sir,” said the second man, nodding to the third as he reentered the room. The girl was not with him.
“Mr. Giesler. Mrs. Keaton’s attorney,” the first man said.
Slow comprehension dawned on him. “You set me up,” he said to Natalie.
Constance looked exasperated. “No one set you up, you great buffoon. All we did was keep our distance and watched you hang yourself.”
“Mr. Harris has been following you,” said Natalie. She gestured to the second man.
No one wants to hear my side of the story,” he protested.
“You have no side of the story,” Constance said, snapping.
He opened his mouth, but quickly closed it. Even dead drunk, he could tell he was in serious hot water.
The first man cleared his throat. “Perhaps someone could get Mr. Keaton some clothes,” he said, addressing the second and third man.
Buster submitted. He couldn’t remember where his had gone. They brought him a dressing gown and change of clothing, and he stumbled into Nate’s pink bathroom robed in the dressing gown to relieve himself and get dressed. His head swam and he wished he could think clearly. When he exited the bathroom, Natalie said matter-of-factly, “I’m staying with Dutch tonight. Mr. Giesler will be in touch tomorrow morning.”
He reached for her arm but Constance pulled her out of his reach and glared daggers at him. “Who’s Mr. Giesler?” he said.
“Me, sir,” said the first man.
“Oh, oh. The attorney. Right.” The feeling of danger and doom settled in the pit of his stomach, but he was still having a hard time grasping what was going on.
In the morning, everything became disastrously clear. A knock on the bedroom door woke him. When he answered it, Caruthers was standing there with some papers in his hand. “These just came,” he said. He handed them over along with a cup of coffee and Buster struggled to wrap his head around the phrase he was looking at.
Petition for a Dissolution of Marriage.
I, Natalie Talmadge Keaton, do hereby … He skimmed the rest of the paper, then let it fall from his hands to the bed. He didn’t understand half the legal mumbo-jumbo, but the important parts were clear as day: adultery, sole custody, support in the amount of $300 a month.
He sipped the coffee and tried to calm his racing heart. Natalie had been angry and made rash proclamations before. He just needed to give her some time to cool off. Nevertheless, he called Constance’s apartment as soon as he was finished with his coffee. When there was no answer, he called her seaside house. He called Norma. He called Peg. Nothing. He even called his ma and sis, but neither had seen Natalie.
“Why?” Louise asked.
He swallowed hard. “No reason.”
He attempted to distract himself the rest of the day, a swim in the pool, golf with Tom Mix, a few solo games of billiards. He tried to stay away from the bottle, but his head was throbbing so badly by four p.m. he finally had a few glasses just to make it stop.
The next morning, he drove to the studio. They were filming interior scenes for the yacht sequence, having wrapped up onseas filming the prior week. He wasn’t sure, but the crew seemed to look at him in a funny way. There was definitely something stiff in the way that Sedgwick said hello. When Dorothy pulled him aside to say quietly, “I’m very sorry, darling. How are you doing?” his worst fears were realized and he knew that it was in the papers.
He laughed it off. “She gets like this. She’ll come around.”
Just to be on the safe side, though, he arranged for some publicity photos to be taken the next day during a break from filming. He posed inside the Villa next to an oil lamp burning in a window to show that he was waiting for Natalie’s return, and donned an apron and pretended to cook himself a meal and vacuum the rug just in case the message wasn’t clear that he was suffering dreadfully in her absence. It wasn’t unusual for the Villa to be quiet; there were ten thousand square feet of it after all and the boys were frequently away for overnights with their aunts or playdates with their friends. Yet the quiet was louder than he’d ever remembered it being before.
After shooting that day, he drove to Brentwood and spent a restless night with Dorothy. He was wide awake at four in the morning and Dorothy’s soft snores beside him weren’t why. A telegram arrived for him at the studio mid-morning instructing him to report to the office of Eddie Mannix without further delay. He still hadn’t looked at the newspapers, but there was evidently something in them that required the studio to do some serious explaining on his behalf. He ripped up the telegram, put the pieces in a wastebasket, and went back to shooting. He hid out at Dorothy’s again that night.
Another telegram came from Mannix’s office the next morning. Again he tore it up without reading it, but couldn’t shake off his memories so easily. Seeing Eddie’s name made him remember the little house he’d spent so many months designing and furnishing and Nate’s tightening mouth as his tour of it went on, while the enchanted look on Bernice Mannix’s face spread.
“Looks like it’s yours if you want it, Bernie,” he’d said after they were through examining all the rooms and Natalie had indicated in no uncertain terms that the house was completely unacceptable.
Bernice and Eddie had bought it practically on the spot and were still living there happily ever after—or as happily as Eddie could manage to make it appear. Buster had heard the rumors about the affairs and the beatings same as everyone else. Maybe the transfer of that little house to the Mannixes explained why he hadn’t caught it from Eddie until now. Even someone as good as M-G-M’s number-one fixer couldn’t explain away things like adultery and divorce once they were in the papers, though.
He tried another round of calls that afternoon. A servant answered at Norma’s and said she was sorry, but she wasn’t to say anything to him. No one answered at Constance’s or Peg’s. He arranged to have three phonograph records sent to Norma’s house, “Forgive Me,” “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home?,” and “Oh, How I Miss You Tonight.” The next day, the records were sitting on the front steps of the Villa. He chain-smoked to keep the panic at bay. The bottle or flask stayed at his side. The days dragged by and another weekend. Another set of those ominous papers arrived, this time at the bungalow, and he stuffed them under a couch cushion. Natalie was gone.
Gone. Where had it gone wrong?
He could think of a hundred moments trivial and significant: Peg, Norma, and Dutch buzzing about the home where Jimmy was born, leaving scarcely a moment for him to be alone with Natalie; Bernice Mannix exclaiming over what a beautiful house he had built; kissing Nelly on the Villa lawn that October night; a waterfall of glass spraying out from a bookcase pane in the Kennel. Or maybe it had all gone wrong that day in Joe’s office when he’d been told there would be no more Buster Keaton pictures. Maybe it had all gone up like a cloud of dust settling around a man who’d just survived a house falling on him.
“Maybe it’s the drinking,” Louise suggested. She was sitting in a pool chair beside him.
He thought it was a Monday, but wasn’t sure. He wasn’t very drunk yet, but he was bone-tired and queasy. His throat hurt. He hadn’t been sleeping well. If he didn’t have a few drinks before bed, he’d lie staring at the ceiling unable to sleep, an immovable lump lodged in his throat. For the first time since he’d stood behind a motion picture camera, he no longer cared about finishing a film and had not shown up to the studio. He’d gone down to the pool with a bottle of bourbon to escape the incessant ringing of the phone and was sitting there dangling his legs in the water when his sis had shown up unannounced, calling to him from the top of the sixty white marble steps. She had heard, of course. The news had gotten around.
“What?” he said. He was finding it difficult to concentrate. The hangover that always shrouded him now like an Indian blanket made his thoughts bleary.
“Where it went wrong,” she said. “You were wondering where it went wrong.”
He shook his head. “I don’t understand it. I don’t feel no different about her than I ever did.”
“This isn’t good for you,” she said, nudging the bottle of bourbon with the toe of her shoe.
He gave a bitter laugh and lifted the bottle. “This ain’t the problem, it’s the fix.” He sloshed the contents but didn’t take a drink.
Louise lit a cigarette. He could tell that she was deciding what to say next. They didn’t often speak openly.
“I don’t know if she was ever the girl for you,” she said.
He looked into the lapping water of the pool and felt the lump push its way into his throat, which made it ache more. He knew she was right, but there wasn’t a scrap of comfort in it.
“I was completely true to her,” he said after awhile. “Even after Bobby was born and she didn’t wanna be in the same bed no more. Thought maybe she’d change her mind after he grew up some. I wouldn’t have forced her to have more kids. We didn’t have to have another baby, we coulda prevented it no problem. I just don’t understand why …”
He trailed off. Even if he could trace back all of his footsteps and find out exactly where that first misstep had been taken, it wouldn’t make a difference. She was done with him now and that was all that mattered.
“There’s other women out there,” said Louise.
She was only trying to make him feel better, but he just felt worse. He didn’t want the sizzling young starlets who showed up in his dressing room ready to please him in whatever way he desired. He didn’t even want Dorothy, though he knew full well she was eager to settle down. He just wanted Natalie.
He unscrewed the cap of the bottle and swallowed a mouthful of bourbon. It burned off some of the soreness in his throat. He coughed.
“You could have done everything exactly right and she still wouldn’t have been happy,” said Louise.
Again, she was right. Again, his sadness only worsened hearing it.
“You oughta get a girl who really loves you.”
It was the kind of brash thing a sister could get away with saying. Still, he wanted to give her hell for it all the same. He turned and opened his mouth, and the sideways way she was sitting in the chair flashed him back to a May afternoon he’d almost forgotten.
Nelly was perched sideways in the pool chair and he’d sat next to her. You’re the King and I’m just an orange-seller, she’d said, and stroked his knee. He saw the moment with such clarity it was like coming to his senses after months of amnesia.
“I did have a girl who loved me,” he said. “Few months ago.”
“Oh yeah?” said Louise.
“Yeah. Fixed that with booze too,” he said. “Nate found out.” It was on the side of too candid, but the bourbon had warmed him up.
“Didn’t really fix it though, did it?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he lied. In his memory, glass sprayed from a bookcase pane.
“Buster, you’ve been drinking heavier than you ever have in your life for six whole months.”
He didn’t answer, but allowed himself to wonder where his orange-seller was now, if her name was in bright lights or her stomach heavy with his child. All at once, he wanted to know more than anything. The curiosity was almost uncontainable. Maybe there was sense in what Louise was saying. Maybe it would slough off some of the intolerable pain if he could see her again. Maybe losing Nelly was where it had gone wrong.
Louise left eventually. He stared into the pool for a long time, until the bourbon bottle was half-empty, his thought flickering between the two women. Natalie, Nelly. Nelly, Natalie.
By night, he was on a train moving east.
Note: I know this isn’t quite how Natalie and Buster’s marriage dissolved and the time-frame is certainly is accelerated in this story (1928 rather than 1933), but I think it has the flavor of the real events. Just a few chapters left now.
He slipped. It was as though he was on a toboggan at the top of a snow-covered hill trying to plot the best way down when it teetered and went over the edge. He had no control over its course and could only hope that he wouldn’t hit a tree or a boulder as he sped to the bottom.
On his way down, he ran into Dorothy. She was about the only good thing about the slip. Otherwise, it all stank: Weingarten’s film, Mayer’s lecture about taking the fall for Lew Cody, M-G-M’s refusal to let him make a sound picture, and Natalie’s increasing threats (when he bothered to come home) to leave him. He felt totally powerless over all of it. The Cameraman was a hit but it hadn’t made a damn bit of difference to Thalberg in the end. Lloyd and Chaplin were right after all and he was too late to change it.
So it didn’t seem to matter if it was hard to get through the day without several long nips from the flask that was always in his jacket pocket or that he was never sober after seven p.m. He told himself that everyone drank, and everyone did—at least when the day’s shooting was done and they were at a restaurant or a party at someone’s palace or the bungalow, playing bridge. He was just enjoying himself like everyone else. Maybe it was more difficult to get up in the mornings and maybe the headaches were all but impossible to shake nowadays, but that could have been the long hours of filming.
How fast a person could slip. How fast they could fall.
When had the Talmadges threatened him? Spring? Summer? The months blurred together. The idea that he had once been afraid of them almost made him laugh. He couldn’t remember why he’d been so convinced that some topless photos of a girl and a single a photo of him almost in the buff spelled certain ruination. M-G-M had Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling to sweep all the messes under the rug. If rumors buzzed around about him and Dorothy, well, it didn’t concern him. The Cameraman was making M-G-M an extremely pretty penny and Louie Mayer could kiss his fanny. He was The Boy That Couldn’t Be Damaged again.
It was a Saturday night in November when he realized he’d slipped beyond a doubt. He’d gone to pick Dorothy up from Carmelina Drive and was an hour late for his own party at the Villa. She lived in a humble single-story bungalow which caused him a peculiar twinge the first time he saw it. It looked a little like the first house he’d built for Natalie. It looked a little like Nelly’s castle in the air. There was a small piano by the fireplace, a low sofa where they got up to mischief, and a Victrola painted gold, red, and black. He liked Dorothy tremendously. She was good at bridge, good in bed, and good fun all around, even if she wasn’t good at holding her liquor. When they were both at the studio, she knew not to interrupt him if the dressing room door to his bungalow was closed. Likewise, he pretended not to know that she sneaked over to Tom Mix’s sometimes when Vicki was away. Oddly, the lack of attachment made him like her all the more.
She was drunk already when he arrived. He could tell because she was giggling an inordinate amount and the Alabama accent she worked so hard to suppress was surfacing every few words. It was taking her a very long time to get ready. She lost her lipstick halfway through putting it on, forgot what she was doing, and sat on his lap to neck. She made him a drink, then a second and a third. Finally she put on her heels and said that they could go.
He knew he was playing with fire, showing up to his own party with this glamorous woman who’d left the smell of her perfume all over his collar. The I-was-just-giving-a-co-star-a-ride excuse was as feeble as one of Bobby or Jimmy’s lies when they were caught doing something naughty. He knew it was wrong to deliberately humiliate Nate like this, but he couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t seem to act rationally anymore when it came to her. He knew he was making her more and more miserable, that this wasn’t the path back into her good graces. He just wanted her attention. In some unexamined corner of his mind, he imagined that if he hurt her enough, she’d break down and beg for a reconciliation.
It was only a twenty-minute drive to the Villa, but he was drunk and Dorothy was drunk. He had his hand in her décolletage and her mouth was somewhere not fit to print, and that was why he smashed his car straight into the back of another at a stop sign. It dazed him so much (and maybe the drinks and Dorothy’s lips had something to do with it as well) that he’d only had time to tuck himself back into his trousers before the other driver had strode up to his window to yell at him for wrecking his car and frightening his wife.
“I’m sorry,” he managed.
The anger left the driver’s face as a look of recognition hit him. “You Buster Keaton?”
“He didn’t mean to. We’re doing a picture together,” Dorothy said with a giggle. The neckline of her dress was back in place again, but her cheeks looked flushed even in the dark and her lipstick was a mess.
“It’s me,” Buster said. He rubbed the back of his neck and hoped the guy wouldn’t notice his unbuttoned pants. “I’m awful sorry. I’ll make good on it. I’ll get you a new one, a better one.”
“You’d better, it was new in July,” said the guy, looking them both over. “I’m Lionel Aldrich, by the way.”
Buster looked at him—brown hair, brown mustache—and drew a blank. He was still dazed.
“You know, The LA Times?”
He shook his head.
“I write for it.”
Even dazed, he knew where this was heading. Leave it to him to rear-end a god damn journalist. “Let’s pull off to the side,” he said, noticing headlights approaching from behind them. The front end of his Lincoln and the rear end of Lionel’s Chevrolet were crumpled in like tin cans, but they were drivable.
They stood in the glare of Buster’s headlights and Lionel scribbled notes on a pad of paper. Dorothy leaned into the passenger side of the Chevrolet talking to Lionel’s wife. He knew not to trust journalists but didn’t see any way out of it. They talked about Spite Marriage. He told Lionel about the party. He shivered when the wind picked up. It was cold and he had a sudden memory of Nelly shivering in the grass the previous October and putting his jacket over her shoulders. The cold had bitten through the cotton in his shirt when he’d taken it off, but kissing her there in the grass he’d been suddenly oblivious to the chill in the air. He wondered now what had happened to the jacket, what had happened to Nelly—why he’d let some silly photographs end it with her.
He cut Lionel a check for twice what the car was worth, shook hands with him, and got back into the Lincoln. The buckled hood made it hard to see the road. Dorothy ran her fingers up his thigh and he told her to keep her hands to herself, feeling uncharacteristically sharp.
They walked through the mahogany door like they both owned the place. Some might have pointed out that he actually did, but knew at last that he didn’t. Never had. If his guests were surprised to see Dorothy on his arm, they didn’t say so. She’d gotten her make-up back in order, but they might have both been painted with scarlet letters for as innocent as they looked. He deposited her with Tom Mix and went to find a drink. He didn’t bother looking for Nate. If she hadn’t seen him when he’d walked in with Dorothy, she’d soon find out one way or another.
He never found out what kind of spin Lionel put on the crash, innocent or sordid, but there was a copy of The LA Times on the breakfast table the next morning which told him Nate must have read it regardless. His body was one ripe ache beneath his dressing gown. Every single part of it hurt, down to his fingertips. He must have put his hands out in the impact and jammed them against the dashboard.
Natalie swept into the room as he was tilting a cold pitcher of coffee to a cup. She didn’t look sad and broken as she had on the morning Dutch and Norma had confronted him about Nelly. She looked pale and furious.
He bit into a cold piece of toast. He could only guess she’d forbade the cook not to fix him a hot breakfast.
“Get it over with,” he said, chewing, hurting.
“What am I supposed to say?” she said. She stared at him. He was sure he’d seen more affection in her gaze when she’d laid eyes on the Jerusalem crickets Jimmy and Bobby once let loose in the house. “What could I possibly say that would get through to you?”
He drank his cold coffee and shook his head. Everything ached. He looked away from her eyes and down at the bitten piece of toast.
“If you’re through, say you’re through,” he said.
“I’m getting close,” she warned him.
Beatrice’s life was one big thrill, whether it was having a sumptuous breakfast in her room at the Blackstone with Harry wearing nothing but a robe or going out with “the gang” (how she thought of her fellow cast members) for Chinese food after rehearsals. Beatrice was gay, unconcerned, and somewhat hedonistic. She ate more decadent meals and drank more booze in two months than Nelly had in the previous ten years. She didn’t depend on booze as Harry did, it was simply ever-present at the clubs on Friday and Saturday nights and Harry always had a flask of gin to share. Beneath his handsome exterior, she’d found, he wasn’t confident with women. The gin gave him the shine he felt was lacking. Nelly didn’t particularly like it, but she wasn’t invested in him enough to lecture him on it. It wasn’t just that he drank too much; his humor was lousy. His corny jokes (“What’s the color of wind? Blew!”) made her groan. It was enough for Beatrice that he was handsome and diverting. She didn’t want more. Back home in Evanston reflecting on the days preceding, Nelly would feel a little guilty about stringing him along, but Beatrice never did. Beatrice hung on Harry’s neck while the jazz band played what seemed like, in her liquored haze, an endless loop of “Sweet Georgia Brown” and ended the night with him at the Blackstone or at his apartment on the third floor of a red Victorian row house in North Town, never feeling the slightest prick of conscience.
When Beatrice finally looked out of the wings into an almost full house on Friday the 23rd, she felt as far away from Nelly as it was possible to be. Maybe it was the Elizabethan gown with its heavy shimmering pale green skirt and bodice trimmed in pink and gold ribbon, maybe it was Harry in full Don Pedro costume, peeping over her shoulder, but she felt so queer it was like being outside of herself. She knew that out in the sea of faces rendered shadowy and indistinct by the footlights was Ruth, sitting slightly left of center stage, her only anchor amidst the coat tails, pearls, and furs.
“Nervous?” said Harry.
She turned away from the curtains and he kissed her cheek. “I don’t know,” she said truthfully. She felt luminescent, fluttery, like she might float away like a balloon if someone didn’t tie her down soon.
Yet as soon as the lights went up and she walked out onto the stage with John, Hattie, and Leo (playing the messenger before he drew on his Don John costume) she forgot that there was an audience at all. There was only Don Pedro, Claudio, and Benedick three leagues off and her ambitions of besting Benedick in a battle of words before he could get the advantage of her.
She barely felt how hot the footlights were or heard the audience’s applause. There was a masked ball to attend, a wedding to organize, a foul plot to uncover, a misunderstanding to sort out, and love to pledge.
At the end of nearly three hours, she and Eugene stepped to the edge of the footlights and bowed, followed by Hattie and Fred, then John, Harry, and Leo, then the supporting cast. She had done it. She had done it and it was easy.
An hour hence, they were all at the jazz club on Randolph whose name (Mangioli’s? Morelli’s?) she could never remember. Ruth was spending the night at the Blackstone with her and had tagged along, Violet old enough now to get by with some Clapp’s baby food and goat’s milk administered by the new part-time nanny. The gay atmosphere was infectious and the gin plentiful. Eugene was performing one of his soliloquies for the benefit of the other club patrons:
I do much wonder that one man, seeing how much
another man is a fool when he dedicates his
behaviors to love, will, after he hath laughed at
such shallow follies in others, become the argument
of his own scorn by failing in love: and such a man
is Claudio.
They roared at him when he was finished, clapping for more, and Harry pulled her into his lap to kiss and nuzzle her cheek. Ruthie caught her eye and raised an eyebrow. Nelly held up her hands helplessly.
Some time later, perhaps a half hour, Benedick pulled her off of Harry’s lap into the middle of the floor and gestured for the band to stop playing.
“By my sword, Beatrice,” he remarked in astonishment, “thou lovest me.”
She laughed, not in character yet. He was making her act with him. “Do not swear, and eat it,” she said with a giggle.
“I will swear by it that you love me; and I will make
him eat it that says I love not you.”
They ran through the rest of the scene and she took her second bow of the night as their informal audience applauded them. Laughing, she scooped up another Gin Rickey from the bar as the band launched into a rendition of “Muskrat Ramble.” Ruthie caught her eye again and Nelly joined her.
“Benedick seems like he’s quite fond of you,” she said, looking across the room to Eugene, who had joined Hattie and Fred at a table.
She laughed incredulously. “Eugene? He’s not the kind who goes for girls,” she says. “We’re just pals.”
Ruthie’s features relaxed a little, but not all the way. “Your Harry’s head over heels, though.”
They had spoken about Harry before, but never at any great length. “Is he?” she said with surprise. She was in the grip of the gin and felt that anything was liable to come out of her mouth.
“Don’t pretend you don’t see it,” Ruthie said.
Both of their gazes went to Harry, who was talking to a clarinet player from the band and miming playing the instrument.
“God, Ruthie, he’s so dull,” she said. “I suppose he is in love with me, but sometimes I think I’m going to die of boredom when we’re not in bed. His jokes are just awful.”
“What will you say if he asks you to marry him?”
“Marry me?” she said, now completely taken aback. “We’ve only known each other two months, he’s not going to ask me to marry him.”
At that moment, Harry turned toward her and winked.
“Don’t be so sure,” Ruthie said, giving her a knowing look.
“You heard what Leonato said. I mock all my wooers out of suit. Just look at what happened to Halitosis Harold.”
That made Ruthie laugh, and before long Ruthie was dancing with Leonato himself and they were all very merry into the early hours of the morning that it felt nothing at all was missing from her life, least of all a husband.
WiffleGif has the awesome gifs on the internets. spite marriage buster keaton gifs, reaction gifs, cat gifs, and so much more.
That’s Buster listening at my door to make sure I’m still writing.
Don’t worry, I am. I’m making slow progress on “That’s My Weakness Now.” I just finished part of Chapter 40 (Buster’s POV), but it’s slightly short at 1600 words and I think I’d like to have Nelly’s part finished before I post it, rather than making Nelly’s part Chapter 41. Sorry for the delay. I’m just going to be pretty busy from now until early April. Rest assured I’m continuing to peck away and will finish before the year is out, hopefully no later than early summer!
(If you haven’t read the story yet, you can find all of the chapters here: https://busterkeatonfanfic.tumblr.com/chapters I feel sure you’ll love it if you’re a person who finds Buster Keaton dreamy, compelling, and winsome.)
would I could find in my heart that I had not a hard
heart; for, truly, I love none.”
Nelly smirked at the curly-haired Benedick who looked so confident of himself. She knew how Ruthie would tell her to deliver her next lines: Pretend it’s Buster.
No matter how hard she had tried, she couldn’t resent him as Ruthie did, though. Beatrice was more complicated besides. She scorned love, but Nelly felt she hadn’t ruled it out yet. She enjoyed sparring with Benedick and trying to outwit him, even if he annoyed her. It was in that spirit that she replied:
“A dear happiness to women: they would else have
been troubled with a pernicious suitor. I thank God
and my cold blood, I am of your humour for that: I
had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man
swear he loves me.”
She delivered the lines with a light, amused confidence and a touch of conviviality. Her investment was a strange thing, because not two minutes before she scarcely cared about the audition at all.
“Gerald’s cousin is in the theater in the city,” Ruthie had said the day before. “Mabel. She says there’s an audition tomorrow afternoon for a Shakespeare play. You should go. He mentioned it especially because of you.”
“I know you’re trying to get rid of me,” she’d teased back, “but no. I can’t think of anything I want to do less right now.”
“I know, I know,” Ruthie had said, rolling her eyes. “You’re scared it’s going to turn out like your career in pictures. Well, if they turn you down you’ll be no worse off than you are now, right? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
Sitting in Gerald’s car that morning as he motored into the city, she’d reflected on what a clever rhetorical strategy it had been. She could almost hear Ruthie at seven taunting “Chicken!” and her shouting back “Uh-uh!” and Ruthie saying “Yuh-huh!” After Gerald had driven her down Michigan Boulevard, turned right on Balbo Drive, and dropped her in front of the theater, hours early, she walked east to Grant Park, found a bench, and pulled Warwick Deeping’s Kitty from the bag she had brought with her. There was the faintest autumn nip to the air and the leaves on the trees, though still green, were beginning to look distinctly sallow. She read until noon, walked west again, and had lunch at the Blackstone Hotel dining room. She was still living on what she had saved in California and could afford to treat herself to the rich consommé royale, filet of English sole, and buttered petite peas.
She didn’t even know which play she was auditioning for, so she couldn’t set her sights on a particular part. More to the point, she simply did not care whether she got a part or not. Lately she’d found herself partial the utter aimlessness of her existence. The children were her chief delight and Ruthie was now her friend. Even things with her mother had been less fraught. It was easy to let family dictate the course of her life, and with no ambitions there could be no disappointments. It was enough that she wasn’t the sad, ruined girl she’d been when she’d come back from Hollywood. She wished Ruthie could appreciate that.
“God keep your ladyship still in that mind!” said the curly-haired Benedick. “So some gentleman or other shall ‘scape a predestinate scratched face.”
With those lines lobbed at her, all at once she wasn’t Nelly anymore. She was a young, feminine boy in wig and dress on the stage of the Globe in Elizabethan times. She was Helana Faucit in her swan song as Beatrice, all tumbled brown ringlets and corset-pinched waist. She was Ellen Terry in her cut-velvet dress with the glass beads, looking wry and regal. She was, in other words, Beatrice through and through.
“Scratching could not make it worse, an ‘twere such a face as yours were,” she said, smirking.
Benedick looked momentarily taken aback, but his face quickly spread into a smile. “Well, you are a rare parrot-teacher,” he said.
“A bird of my tongue is better than a beast of yours,” she quipped. She folded her arms in front of her stomach, daring him to say more.
“I would my horse had the speed of your tongue,
and so good a continuer. But keep your way, i’ God’s
name; I have done,” said Benedick lightly.
She shook her head. “You always end with a jade’s trick: I know you of old.”
It was so easy, she didn’t believe it when she received a call at Ruthie’s the next day from Fred Hofelich, the director, who congratulated her and said that rehearsals began September 28th.
It had been a long time since she had imagined herself on a stage as prestigious as that of the Blackstone Theatre. Those dreams had evaporated with the hullabaloo about talkies and fantasies of starring opposite John Barrymore. Yet there she was on a Friday in late September, gazing out onto a sea of empty red-velvet seats of the main floor and two entire balconies, which would be filled in two months with audience members in pearls and tuxedos.
The curly-haired Benedick was Eugene, a homosexual who, more than the others she’d ever known, didn’t care who knew it. He was affable, enthusiastic, and knew which clubs served fine liquor and stayed open until two in the morning. Fred (playing Claudio) and Hattie (playing Hero) were from New York and newly married. Hattie had been a latter-day Ziegfeld girl and Fred was in the premiere of The Play’s The Thing. John, in his fifties and playing Leonato, was from London and a former member of the Stratford-Upon-Avon Players. The other principal cast members—Harry (Don Pedro), Leo (Don John), and Faye (Ursula)—had been in productions at the Palace and Auditorium.
Before Hollywood, Nelly would have felt like a perfect imposter in their midst. Now, she found that when they invited her out to a corner restaurant after the first rehearsal in late September, she could speak airily of John Barrymore and Charlie Chaplin and all the star-related gossip she’d gathered from the canteen. They didn’t need to know how ordinary being a bit player really was. Though Buster was the reason for her decidedly extraordinary time, she didn’t speak about him beyond the lie that she had encountered him only in passing on the set of Steamboat.
Rehearsals were Thursday through Sunday. She rented a suite on the fourteenth floor of the Blackstone Hotel overlooking the inland sea of Lake Michigan. Although she could have doubtless scrounged a better deal if she had looked for one, it was convenient and she wasn’t doing anything with her savings, anyway. The sudden commitment meant that Ruthie had to find a replacement governess sooner than either of them had anticipated, but she wouldn’t hear of her refusing the role. Gerald (though he did drone on about plaintiffs and motions and default judgments on car rides) did his brotherly part and drove her in on Thursday mornings. He was kind enough to pick her up again at six on Sunday evenings so she could spend Monday through Wednesday with Ruthie and the children.
Whenever she stood on the stage sparring with Eugene as Benedick, she felt that she had come back to life. It was as though Beatrice herself was filling her with all of the confidence and charisma that she wished she’d had in Hollywood. She had purpose again. Everything had fallen into place so nicely, in fact, that she was always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
In the second week of October after the Saturday rehearsal, she and the other cast members piled into a single taxi, sitting atop one another in the backseat, and went to a jazz club on Randolph. The city was the city, trams, cars, people, lights, signs, and tall majestic buildings in styles she couldn’t name. The air was rent with car exhaust. The night was cold. At the club they ordered flank steak, cauliflower, and baked potato. The meal came with gin cocktails. There were more gin cocktails. There were stories of plays and adventures in New York and London from Fred, Hattie, and John. The orchestra started up and there was barely silence in between songs for conversation, so they rose and moved to the dance floor. She was wearing her silk peach dress again and her best silk stockings. Over dinner, she had noticed how pleasant Harry was to look at. He was classically handsome with a face that might have belonged to Augustus Caesar or Caligula. When he made no move to excuse himself after their first dance, she didn’t mind. The band played “Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider,” “Paree,” “Singin’ the Blues,” “At Sundown,” and “Valencia.” They danced to all of them together and Eugene made sure they did not neglect the gin cocktails that replenished themselves on their table like magic.
When she stumbled into the street holding onto Harry’s arm, she could see her breath. The moon felt bewitching. Harry put his arm around her waist and she thrilled with it. She fancied herself like Beatrice at the masquerade ball, except her disguise wasn’t a mask but the mien of a confident, carefree, worldly Hollywood actress. She was in the first suit, Shakespeare’s hot and hasty Scotch jig, and exciting. Her heart beat fast. John and Fred insisted that she and Faye take the first taxis that showed up, since it was impolite to leave them potentially unguarded on the streets. At this, she leaned up and whispered something into Harry’s ear. When he slipped into the taxi with her, hooting and laughter erupted from their fellow players.
“It’s only for a nightcap,” she called before shutting the door, laughing just as hard as them.
She and Harry were so bold as to neck in the backseat as the taxi took them to the Blackstone, and to her surprise no one in the lobby batted an eye that there was a man going up to her room with her. The pretense of a nightcap was abandoned immediately. His lips were sour and delicious with gin. It was all so hot and hasty, she found it no trouble at all to tumble into bed with him.
Notes: Sorry you had to wait so long for that chapter!
There are about six to seven chapters remaining. I’m hoping to get back to an every-other-week schedule, but no promises: I have a lot of work to do on other things until at least spring.
Filming for The Cameraman wrapped in late June and to Buster’s surprise the M-G-M brass allowed him to cut it without much interference. He spent July snipping and pasting, then running the edited reels again and again until he was satisfied with what was on screen. He previewed a few rushes for Irv Thalberg and other bigwigs that month. When it came to the dressing room scene, every one of them howled until he thought their sides would split. Irv pumped his hand before he left. “It’s a guaranteed hit,” he said effusively.
A couple weeks later, he cornered Irv at his office, positive that he could leverage the success of The Cameraman for a new picture with Marie Dressler he’d been brainstorming. At the height of the Old West and in search of better opportunities, Marie would make preparations to join a wagon train, but an unfortunate delay would leave her at the mercy of her nincompoop nephew (him) to navigate her west and protect her from wolves, treacherous crossings, and marauding bands of thieves. He hadn’t gotten to the middle or the end yet, but it was a sure winner. He could just see them now, Marie with her stout, imposing figure wrestling a mountain lion into submission with her bare hands while he, the weakling, all but fainted.
Irv heard him out, but Buster realized sinkingly that none of his own enthusiasm was being reflected back at him. He promised politely to give it some serious thought. Buster knew the answer, though.
You’ll lose, Harold Lloyd said in his head.
He gave in and moved into the M-G-M compound after filming at the beginning of August. Partly he was hoping that being an obedient little movie star would convince them to let him do the picture with Marie Dressler, partly he was just sick of locking horns with Louie Mayer over the Grant Avenue bungalow. The new house was a shotgun shack built specially for him. It had white clapboard siding and was only wide enough for a double window and a door. It was sandwiched between Rehearsal Hall A and the Short Subject building where until recently John Gilbert had lived. He had only to walk a few yards and he could see the rear of the buildings in the New York City backlot where he’d filmed that spring. Perhaps the idea was that he couldn’t get up to much mischief in such a little house in the view of so many eyes, but if that was the studio’s thinking, it was sorely mistaken.
Within two days, he had tracked down Gabe and had a sign carved and hung between two porch beams: KEATON’S KENNEL. If they were going to keep him penned inside their fortress like a dog, he wanted it known that he didn’t care for it. He started spending more and more nights away from the Villa and half the time didn’t bother telling Nate what he was doing or when he would be home. At times, the activities keeping him away were innocent enough, bridge games long into the night with the liquor freely flowing. Other times, they weren’t fit to talk about in front of polite company. He didn’t even have to go looking for the girls anymore. Sometimes they’d be waiting on his front steps, other times lingering in his dressing room without any clothes on, such were the perks of being part of M-G-M’s stable.
At first he liked the bungalow. The flow of friends and fellow stars was constant and there was never any shortage of diversions. With Caruthers there to whip up whatever cuisine or drinks struck his fancy, all his needs were taken care of. He got to liking it less, though, when a girl he was petting with on the sofa one July evening in the sitting room pointed to the empty glass-fronted bookcases lining all three walls and said, “You should put some books in there.” Thereafter, he hated the sight of them but couldn’t put his finger on why.
On a night in late August when the party at the Villa was breaking up, he decided to follow Buster Collier back to his house for a nightcap. Louise Brooks was waiting there, her ban from the Villa still effective. She and Buster had started going together again—or so he’d been made to understand by Buster. As far as he had been aware, she was still seeing George Marshall.
“You coming?” he said to Cliff, who was having trouble figuring out which end of his hat should face forward. “Don’t forget this.” He nudged the ukulele case at Cliff’s feet with his toe.
“Am I coming?” Cliff said, his face red with effort. He finally got the hat pointing the right way.
“Where are you going?” said Natalie, appearing in the foyer.
“Uh-oh,” said Cliff.
“To Buster’s place,” he said. He looked over his shoulder at her. She was the color of Cabernet Sauvignon tonight, Cabernet lipstick, Cabernet beaded dress. Even if he hadn’t been in the middle of a comfortable drunkenness, he wouldn’t have been able to figure out why she cared if he stayed out late. Even when he was home, they rarely took breakfast together anymore. He slept late on the weekends and she was always out for afternoon teas or Sunday lunches when he finally pulled himself together.
“At this hour?” she said.
“At this hour,” he confirmed. He turned to kiss her cheek and a spiteful impulse seized him. “I’m sorry, I know you don’t like sleeping without me.”
Her frozen look might have chilled him in the not so distant past. Now he found he didn’t care at all.
“What was that all about?” Cliff said, settling into the passenger seat of his Lincoln. Without waiting for him to answer, he said, “Irene gives me the same grief. Women, though. What can you do about ‘em?” He was having problems with the missus too, Buster knew.
He turned the key over in the ignition and steered the car southeast, then west, then southeast again. In five minutes, they had arrived on North Bedford Drive. He parked on the street near a knotty-trunked palm tree on the boulevard.
Buster Collier and Louise were already inside. A phonograph was playing loudly in the sitting room just beyond the foyer. Louise greeted them with some Gin Rickeys. She was wearing turquoise satin pajamas, the top long-sleeved and the trousers wide-legged.
“Kill that,” Cliff said, uncurling his forefinger from his glass and pointing at the phonograph as they walked into the sitting room. He sat down on the sofa opposite the armchair where Buster Collier was sitting and unlatched his ukulele case. Buster sat next to him and Louise sat on Buster Collier’s knee after obeying Cliff’s request to turn off the phonograph.
“Aren’t we just a merry bunch?” Cliff said.
Buster felt merry enough. He was warm, carefree, and serene.
“To dissipation!” Louise said, raising her glass.
He didn’t know what she meant, but he tapped his glass against Cliff’s and downed the contents. Like a good girl, Louise was soon back with another for him.
One o’clock came and went. They discussed the latest gossip, Frank Urson’s drowning, Joe Schenck predicting that talkies were a fad, an all-talking horror picture being put out by Warner Brothers in September. Marie Prevost was back with her husband. John Gilbert was going with a new girl, an actress named Ina. It was rumored that Jack Barrymore would soon marry Dolores Costello. Harold Lloyd’s mansion was almost completed.
Cliff sang in between lulls in the conversation—
“One of the days when I would yell and cry, my Lovey went away …”
And Louise read from a volume of poetry—
“Oh, is it, then, Utopian,
To hope that I may meet a man
Who’ll not relate, in accents suave,
The tales of girls he used to have?”
They laughed and drank.
And Cliff strummed his ukulele and sang—
“I’ll let her take it right in her hand,
‘Cause I know she’ll stroke it so grand …”
And Louise read—
“The ladies men admire, I’ve heard,
Would shudder at a wicked word. . . .
They do not keep awake till three,
Nor read erotic poetry …”
And Cliff sang—
“The captain said to me, ‘You’re just a little runt.
As long as you’ve been playing you’ve never touched a cunt.’ ”
And Louise read and Cliff sang and two-thirty was not very distant when Buster stumbled outside to take a long leak into the bushes, laughing to himself over the bawdy songs and poetry. He was seriously drunk.
Louise slipped out the back door as he was buttoning up. The moon was a little over a quarter full and beaming whitely through the palm trees. The air was warm and sweet. He hoped vaguely that she wouldn’t try to kiss him. He’d gotten the sense before that she liked him, but she wasn’t his type. She was too young for one, but more than that she was an intimidating combination of sophistication, jadedness, and naïveté he wasn’t keen to get mixed up with.
“Are you okay?” she said, laying a hand on his arm. Her palm was soft and cool.
He risked a look at her. She seemed genuinely concerned and he decided she probably wasn’t trying to seduce him. “What do you mean?” He’d been singing along with Cliff and guffawing at the poetry.
“You just seem a little—” She felt for the word. “Saturnine.”
“Satur-what?”
“You know, melancholic. Down in the mouth.”
He was surprised. He hadn’t been aware of moping.
“Is it Nate?” she said.
Ah. So the rumors had begun. He smiled grimly, thinking of the Talmadges’ publicity campaign.
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to pry.” She linked her arm in his and looked up at the moon. He dipped into his pocket for his cigarettes and lighter and she kept her arm there, friendly, but not flirtatious. He didn’t know what to say. He lit his cigarette.
“Want one?” he said.
“No thank you.”
The breeze carried the smoke backwards. In the thick of his inebriation, he was aware of a heavy sadness somewhere within him. He was impressed by Louise’s powers of observation.
“It’s not as hard as you think, divorce,” she said. “I guess it’s hard enough, though. Not as hard as staying.”
He remembered that hers had only recently happened, June maybe. Her ex-husband had played one of the cops in Tillie’s Punctured Romance. “That so?” he answered.
“How’s Nelly? I thought you would pick her up tonight.”
At her name, a jolt of anguish licked through him. He didn’t know what to say. “She left town,” he said eventually. He took a long drag of his cigarette.
“Why?” She didn’t seem to care that she was prying.
“ ‘Cause of me,” he said. He was too drunk to beat around the bush. “Norm and Constance found out, ratted me out to Nate, blackmailed us, and that was the end of it.”
“I’m sorry.” She leaned her head on his shoulder. “I liked her.”
“Me too.”
There was nothing more to say on the subject, but that sad place in him sagged like a physical weight now. He had been trying so hard to forget. As he smoked, Louise kept her arm in his and hummed. The door opened behind them and they turned. It was Buster Collier.
“I was wondering where you’d both gone off to.”
“Buster had to pee,” said Louise. “And now we’re being mooncalves.”
He walked over to them and kissed her cheek and stood and watched the moon with them as Buster finished his cigarette.
They went back inside, but the gay mood had changed. Cliff was strumming mournfully on his ukulele, singing the saddest version of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” that Buster had heard yet. “Who knows? Someday, I will win, too. I’ll begin to reach my prime. Now though I see what our end is, all I can spend is just my time.”
“You pick one to read now,” said Louise, setting a book in his hands.
He sat back on the sofa looking at it. The tan cover had a burgundy pattern like veins or thin, ropy spatters of blood. He turned to the title page, which told him the collection was Enough Rope and the author Dorothy Parker. He flipped to the contents, looking for a title that stood out and discovering it on the second page of contents. He flipped to page sixty-three.
“Out loud,” Louise prompted. “You have such a nice voice.” She was sitting in Buster Collier’s lap in the armchair.
“ ‘Day-Dreams,’ ” he said. “We’d build a little bungalow, / If you and I were one, / And carefully we’d plan it, so / We’d get the morning sun. / I’d rise each day at rosy dawn / And bustle gaily down ...” He shut the book, realizing what he was reading. For a moment, he felt dizzy. A strange sense of being outside himself struck him. It was as if Louise had scripted it, never mind that she had no way of telling which poem he’d choose or that he was remembering with fierce pain about Nelly’s castle in the air.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“Nothin’ ,” he said. “Just don’t feel like reading’s all.”
“Dream awhile, scheme awhile, we’re sure to find happiness and, I guess, all those things you’ve always pined for …” sang Cliff.
“Give it a rest, Cliff,” he snapped. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Louise and Buster Collier exchange a look.
“Do you want another drink?” she said.
“Let’s have one at my place. The bungalow,” he said, standing up. His head was reeling.
They piled into the Lincoln, Cliff in the passenger seat again holding his ukulele and Louise and Buster Collier tumbled in the backseat. It was a half-hour crawl to M-G-M. He wasn’t quite sure where he was at times and twice turned down the wrong streets. Cliff was still moaning in song, “I can’t make her happy, but I’d love someone to make her happy—that old girl of mine.”
“Can’t you sing something else?” he said, turning so sharply to look at Cliff that the car veered to the right and nearly hit the curb.
“Watch out,” Louise said in the backseat, her voice small and scared, as Cliff shouted “Hey!” in alarm. She put a hand on his shoulder and it brought him back to himself.
“Sorry,” he said, training his eyes back on the road and slowing down. His heart was pounding. It was best just to take it slow.
Obligingly Cliff started scatting and swung back into song. “Oh boy, my Lovey came back. I feel so good I wanna knock wood! Oh jiminy gee, my Lovey came back to me.”
Buster joined him. “I don’t know where she hid or what she did, all I know is she was breakin’ my heart. She returned, her kisses burned, somebody else made her terribly smart …”
A ghost of the good feeling returned and on the next chorus they all bellowed, “My Lovey came back …!”
The night watchman let them through the M-G-M gates, waving them on looking tired and unamused at their revelry, and Cliff began a new song. “Love, love, love, love, what did you do to me? The things I never missed are things I can’t resist,” his cheerfulness restored. Buster hummed along, steering the car southeast along Washington Boulevard. “Love, love, love, love, isn’t it plain to see? I’ve just had a change of heart; what can it be?”
As he slowed the car, scanning for the narrow facade of his bungalow, Cliff’s song hit him like a good one-two punch. “She’s got eyes of blue, I never cared for eyes of blue, but she’s got eyes of blue …”
He pulled the car over and threw it into park, jarring them all forward.
“Easy, Bus,” said Buster Collier.
“Oh my, oh me. I should be good, I would be good, but gee. She likes to bill and coo …”
He slammed the car door behind him, blind with feeling. It was such a strong feeling, he couldn’t even tell what it was.
Louise jumped out of the car, followed by Buster Collier. “Ooh, it’s so cute,” she said, heading up the sidewalk toward the house. She was still wearing her pajamas. Overhead, the moon shone bright as a streetlamp. The ground tilted like the floor of a funhouse as he trailed Louise. He was deeply, deeply drunk . His eyelids felt very heavy. Buster Collier and Cliff’s footsteps sounded behind him on the sidewalk.
It took him several tries to get the key in the door. Hazily, he thought that it would make for a funny gag, a drunk trying to unlock a door. Maybe at gunpoint, sweating as he dropped the keys, tried the wrong ones, and couldn’t find the lock. He could work it into the picture with Marie Dressler.
“She likes rainy days, I never cared for a rainy day …”
They were inside. He flipped on the lights.
“She likes a vestibule, I never stood in a vestibule …”
His bat was resting against the wall and he picked it up. It felt heavy and good in his hands, the oiled wood shining like honey in the dim light.
“Oh gee, poor me. I can hear the clock strikin’ one-two-three!”
He swung it back and slammed it against the glass of the nearest bookcase. The glass burst inward, making a sound like bells. He heaved the bat into the other door of the bookcase. Again and again, he smashed the bat against the bookcases until, looking at all three walls of the room, he was satisfied that every pane had been destroyed.
He could feel his breath coming fast and hard. Cliff had stopped singing. Glass glittered on the floor. The bat fell from his hand and the room lurched.
Before he passed out, he was aware of Louise guiding him to the sofa and putting her arms about him. His face was pressed into her collarbone. “Oh darling,” she said, stroking his head.
He thought he may have been crying.
Notes: Thank you to savageandwise for “previewing the rushes” and helping me work out a couple kinks in this chapter.
I’ve obviously taken liberties with the historical facts here. Buster didn’t move into the second bungalow until 1930. He and Cliff Edwards probably weren’t acquainted until 1929. Although the bookcase scene is based on real events, I don’t know what year or which bungalow they took place in, and obviously Cliff wasn’t there when Buster destroyed them. Likewise, the bawdy songs Cliff sings are later.
The songs that Cliff sings are:
-“My Lovey Came Back”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owOSlJKB4_8
-“I’m Going to Give It to Mary with Love”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Bp4ASEm-ys
-“I’m a Bear in a Lady’s Boudoir”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKtTo4bm12c
-“I Can’t Give You Anything but Love”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUKmLI9gw6g
-“I Can't Make Her Happy That Old Gal of Mine”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TFE4xRSC-Q
-“That’s My Weakness Now”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8rI3i0euVU
Dorothy Parker’s Enough Rope was published in 1926. It was a very popular book and I could see Louise Brooks getting a kick out of it. The poem “Day-Dreams” about the bungalow was a beautiful piece of serendipity. Wish I could say it was planned out chapters in advance, but I was reading the collection and it just jumped out at me: https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/day-dreams-2
Nelly was entertaining June and Eddie in Gerald’s study when her father unexpectedly stepped into the doorway.
“Father.” She got to her feet. She’d been sprawled on the rug playing the Junior Auto Race Game with the children. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“Grampa!” the children cried. They rushed over to hug his leg and tug at his arms.
“I could have telephoned,” he said with a twitch of a smile, “but your mother’s in a terrible temper with Jennie. Apparently the woman spoiled the caramel custard we’re to have for dessert. I’m optimistic it will have blown over by the time I walk back.” He ruffled Eddie’s hair absently.
“Telephoned about what?”
Her father crossed the room and relaxed into the leather wing chair where Gerald did his evening reading. “We’re going to celebrate our little actress tomorrow evening. As a family.” He gave a self-satisfied smile. “At the Varsity, six o’clock. Then we’re going for egg foo young at the Phoenix Inn.” He reached into the breast pocket of his suit and held out a folded scrap of newsprint to her. She unfolded it and her stomach flipped.
BUSTER KEATON AND ERNEST TORRENCE STAR IN
‘STEAMBOAT BILL, JR.’
THE LAUGH FEATURE OF THE YEAR
IT MAY EVEN BLOW YOU AWAY
An unhandsome cartoon of Buster in his sailor suit pulling a smiling girl who didn’t look much like Marion Byron out of a tornado was beneath the credits.
She quickly remembered her acting and steeled her features. “Oh, that’s wonderful!” she said, beaming. She turned to June and Eddie, not knowing if her expression looked entirely natural. “These urchins have me so busy I forgot all about the picture.”
She had not forgotten about the picture.
For weeks she’d been dreading someone in her family suggesting they go see it. She’d been hoping by some miracle that they’d be so tied up with their own lives that it would escape them.
“Can I go?” June said, her voice pitched to a whine as if she knew already that the answer would be unfavorable.
“Me too!” said Eddie.
Nelly wasn’t sure they even understood what a picture was, but they sensed from their grandfather’s tone that it was not to be missed. “I don’t know,” she said, exchanging a look with him which said, Aren’t they something else? “Pictures are for grown-ups. It’s up to Grampa.”
“Please, Grampa, please,” June said, placing her hands on his knees and hopping up and down.
“Please!” said Eddie, jumping in place.
June, who had turned six two days before, would probably be fine, but at not-quite-four, Eddie was the wild card. William looked to her for the answer. Ignoring the curdling sensation in her stomach over the prospect of seeing Buster on screen, she nodded. She was a soft touch.
On the walk to the theater the next night, Ruthie reviewed the rules of conduct with the children: stay in your seat, sit up straight, whisper if you need the bathroom, don’t talk during the picture, and don’t—I mean this—talk during the picture. They’d been drilled several times throughout the day and now said “yes’m” and “no’m” to each severe warning. Violet had been left in the care of one of Ruthie’s maids, Kitty, with goat’s milk to tide her over. Nelly was glad that Ruthie’s warnings and the children’s excited chatter occupied so much of the walk. While she had dressed in her peach silk dress and a nice cloche hat, borrowing a real strand of pearls from Ruthie, the careful touches to her appearance were a masquerade. She felt just as heartsick as she had the previous day. She dreaded having to sit through the whole picture pretending as though she was having the time of her life. She didn’t want to see Buster, the expressions that would now be so familiar to her, the vivid memories of his private company.
When her father drew up to the ticket counter of the Varsity and asked for seven tickets, he proudly told the teller, “My daughter’s in this film.” He gestured to Nelly and she gave an obligatory smile at the girl in the booth, who looked at her with wide eyes and said, “No kidding!”
“No kidding,” William said, as the girl took his five-dollar bill.
“You’re not the lead?” she said, craning her head to try to see one of the posters flanking the triple sets of doors on either side of the booth. Nelly had glanced at the poster as she’d passed and saw that it was another illustration of Buster and Peanuts on a miniaturized steamboat, with Buster holding an inside-out umbrella over her head.
“Oh, no no no no. I was just an extra,” she said, flushing. Her stomach swooped sickly. She’d barely touched breakfast and had skipped lunch.
“I haven’t seen it yet but I’m going to look for you. What scene are you in?”
“It’s really nothing,” she said, her face growing hot. “Buster is walking down the street looking for his girl and I’m in the background going down one of the sidewalks. I’d be surprised if you could tell it’s me.”
The teller slid William’s change and the paper tickets toward him, still looking completely unconvinced by Nelly’smodesty. “That’s awful neat. I’m going to look for you just as soon as I see the picture. Everyone’s saying it’s an awful good one. Did you ever meet Buster Keaton?”
“No. It was a very big production. There were hundreds of us on the set. I only saw him at a distance,” she said, wanting to escape.
“Now Nelly, that isn’t so. You met Mr. Keaton. You said so,” her mother objected.
Nelly’s heart raced. She didn’t want to see the picture. She didn’t want to talk about Buster. She wanted to be far, far away. Before she could say anything, Ruthie took her arm. “She’s just shy about it, is all, and she’s dying to get inside and see the picture. I hope you don’t mind.. Maybe we’ll catch you when we leave.” With that, she marched Nelly through one of the doors.
“Thank you,” said Nelly under her breath, as they entered the theater.
To Nelly’s relief, after the lobby attendant had torn their tickets, Lena’s remarks about not seeing the point in lying about meeting Buster were lost as they pushed through the interior doors into the theater and the children erupted in shrieks of delight. The Varsity was less than two years old and Nelly had only seen a few pictures there before departing for California, but it was as grand as she remembered and grander (she thought) than some of the theaters she had patronized in Sacramento and Hollywood. The auditorium’s blue-velvet seats were centered in what looked like the courtyard of a sixteenth-century French chateau. Plaster reliefs shaped in the white exterior of a chateau with red terra cotta roofs decorated the side walls. Castle turrets rose in the corners on both sides of the stage and the proscenium arch was sculpted in the facade of a castle, with the stage an open drawbridge. The reliefs were studded with sconces that burnt orange as if with true fire and the walls above them were painted dark blue. Minute lights hidden in the upper walls and ceiling above sparkled like stars. The entire effect was so striking that Ruthie scolded Eddie and June only halfheartedly for their outburst.
They found seats toward the front and center, Nelly sitting between her mother and Eddie, with Ruthie and June to her right and William and Gerald to her left. The picture opened with a Laurel and Hardy two-reeler she’d seen before, Flying Elephants. They played cavemen warring for the affections of the same cavegirl. She was too distracted to concentrate on the film, but June sat spellbound and Eddie bounced and flapped his hands. When the short ended, Ruthie dipped into her purse and quietly handed the children a Baby Ruth candy bar apiece. She gave four candy bars to Nelly to pass around. Nelly handed hers back. Ruthie raised an eyebrow and she shook her head. “Stomachache,” she said in a whisper.
Her stomach was genuinely knotted as the title card swam into focus, JOSEPH M. SCHENCK presents BUSTER KEATON in STEAMBOAT BILL, JR., and the organist struck up a cheerful, whimsical tune.
She watched the first few minutes with hot dread. Although the picture was only setting the scene, showing a panoramic view of the river and introducing the other characters, it was somehow worse than seeing Buster off the bat. The anticipation tightened the knot in her stomach. She couldn’t appreciate the realism of the crowds greeting the steamboats (a scene she’d witnessed in person what seemed like years ago) or the street Peanuts whizzed down in her car. The film moved on to a scene of passengers disembarking from a train and Ernest Torrence scanning for his long-lost son, whom she knew would be Buster. She felt faint, as though she were going to be sick.
The train pulled away and there he was, standing on the wrong side of the tracks with his back to the camera in the ridiculous outfit he’d been wearing at their first encounter in his dressing room. She had to blink back tears when he turned around. She’d forgotten how much she missed him. Dozens of memories flooded back, his hands going to his belt buckle in the dressing room, his arm looped in hers as he led her out of the prop house to join the other extras on the street scene, the first dance with him at the Villa, the whiskey and cigarette taste of his mouth during their kiss beneath the stars, the solidness of his shoulder as she cried on it the day she found out about The Taming of the Shrew, his nervous smoking on the car ride to the lakeside cabin, the way he’d pulled her on top of him after they first made love and asked with some anxiety how she’d liked it, his showing up to her apartment in the middle of the night after filming for a month in California, the warmth of his body next to hers in the bed at the bungalow.
Her stomach burnt and she sagged in her seat. The film had barely begun. Two months ago, she would have been delighted for Buster at the audience’s reaction. They laughed at his preposterous outfit, they laughed when the barber whisked his pencil moustache off with the razor, they laughed when he tried on hats, they laughed when he strode onto the rustic steamboat wearing a fancy tailored Navy uniform, but she sat in a state of misery, unable to muster even fake laughter, wishing the children’s joy was infectious. They went into stitches at the hat scene. She tried to think of excuses to leave, but short of becoming physically sick, nothing was plausible. The film wore on. Everyone loved it except for her.
A little over half through, she felt obligated to lean over and say quietly to her mother, “This is my scene.”
“Oh, this is Nelly’s scene,” said Lena to William and Gerald, so loud it was evident she wanted the surrounding rows to hear.
“This is Aunt Nelly’s scene,” Nelly told the children. “Watch the end of the sidewalk.” She pointed. “I’ll be right down there.”
They had done an admirable job of staying relatively quiet to this point, but the sight of the figure on the screen—and really, no one who knew her would be able to tell it was her, she was so far away from the camera—they pointed and shouted, “It’s Aunt Nelly! It’s Aunt Nelly!” She was gone as quickly as she was glimpsed, just two brief shots was all, but the way her family carried it was as though she was the next Bebe Daniels.
“Hush,” Ruthie told the children, but Nelly could hear pride in her voice.
It gave her momentary satisfaction, but that was washed away as more scenes of Buster unspooled. As the picture built toward its climax, she still couldn’t muster any interest. It seemed to last forever. Still the memories came: pushing her broken table against the wall with him so they could do a foxtrot in the confines of her living room, opening a bag lunch he’d had Caruthers prepare for her and finding roast duck and angel food cake, being surprised at devilish things he could do with his tongue when he ducked beneath the bedcovers, watching him stand in the middle of the bungalow acting out gags for Snap Shots, listening to him strum his ukulele and sing “Baby Face.” On screen, he was sliding around on an infirmary bed, dodging falling buildings, and standing nearly horizontal in the wind. She remembered how she’d stood off to the side as the cameras rolled during the facade scene and hoped he wouldn’t be crushed to death. He would have loved the reaction the daredevil stunts were getting, gasps and cries of “Oh my!” The children were clapping and squealing.
Finally, the film was done. Buster rescued Peanuts’ father from the river, was rewarded with a kiss, and went to fish a preacher from the water so they could be married. Everyone in the theater applauded.
The Fosters were bursting with chatter as they stood with the rest of the audience and made their slow way up the aisles.
“That was wonderful, Nelly,” said her father.
“Real fine picture,” Gerald said, shaking her hand.
Even Lena said, “I did very much enjoy that!”
Only Ruthie seemed to cotton that something was amiss. “Sure you’re feeling okay?”
“Fine,” she said. She put on a smile and was relieved that the ticket taker wasn’t in her booth as they filtered out of the theater.
“Now onto the Phoenix!” William said, puffed with success.
The idea of sitting with her family for at least the next hour having to discuss the film was the thing that shattered her brave face. Tears filmed her lower lids and a lump pressed its way into her throat.
“What’s wrong?” said Ruthie, taking her by the elbow.
The tears shivered and rolled fatly down her cheeks. She shook her head. “I can’t go out to eat. I can’t.”
“Why not?” Ruthie looked into her face with concern.
“Why Nelly, what’s the matter?” said her mother.
“What’s wrong with Aunt Nelly?” Eddie asked Gerald.
She could sense a scene coming on. She didn’t want a scene. She wanted to be at home safe in bed crying her eyes out. The tears came fast, dousing her cheeks and chin and upper part of her throat, and her nose began to run. Ruthie put her arm around her shoulder.
“I have a stomachache,” she choked out. “I might be sick.”
“We don’t have to go to the Phoenix. I could run and fetch the car and take you home,” said her father. “It will take me twenty minutes, but if you wait here I can bring the car.”
“No,” she said. “Eddie and June—they’re looking forward.” The tears spilled. “I’m okay. I’m just fine. It’s only my stomach. I don’t want to spoil it for everyone.” She felt like a child having a tantrum, but she couldn’t stop the tears or the attention she was drawing.
“I’ll sit with Nelly for a spell,” Ruthie said firmly. “You go on ahead and I’ll catch up when she feels better.”
“Maybe she ought to be taken home to bed,” said Lena, her forehead pinched. “Anna can give her some peppermint.”
“Mother, it’s just a stomachache,” she managed. “I’m going to be okay.”
With Ruthie’s insistence, the Fosters were persuaded to continue on foot to Davis Street. It was now perhaps a half hour from sunset. The air was warm and the light golden as Ruthie put her arm around Nelly’s waist and steered her left, then left again into the wide alley between the theater and Saville Flowers. Finding a clean spot on the bricks, she pulled her down to the ground with her and extracted a handkerchief from her purse. Nelly was too upset to fret about the silk of her dress snagging on the brick.
Ruthie waited without a word as she finished crying. She was vaguely aware, blowing her nose into the handkerchief and wiping her eyes, that Ruthie had struck a match and was now smoking a cigarette.
She looked over. “You smoke?” she said through her tears.
Ruthie gave a rueful half-smile. “You’re not the only one with secrets.”
It was surprise over this more than anything that staunched her crying. She blew her nose a few more times and opened her handbag to find her mirror. As Ruthie smoked, she drew her eyeliner back on and brushed her lashes with mascara. She scrubbed the watery black tracks of makeup from her cheeks and dusted on some powder. Her face was swollen, but no one would be able to tell she’d been crying unless they looked closely.
“So what really happened to you?” said Ruthie, after she’d stubbed her cigarette out on the bricks. She was trying to sound casual, but her voice was sober, its tone clearly suggesting that Nelly had concealed some dark ruination from her.
Nelly had to laugh. “I wasn’t lying. No one took advantage of me.”
Her sister looked skeptical.
“Well, one night some fellows tried,” she said, recalling the night at the blind tiger. “I got invited to a speak-easy and drank more than I have in my life. They tried to get me into a room with them. They weren’t stars or directors or anything, though, just crew. It was awful stupid of me.”
“My God,” said Ruthie. Her face was pinched with worry. “How’d you get out of it?”
“A knight in shining armor showed up. I don’t remember it. I just remember I woke up in a hotel about to puke my guts out. He got me to the bathroom just in time, then he put me back to bed and he spent the night on a sofa.”
Ruthie’s expression became knowing. “That was Joseph.”
Nelly nodded. She looked down at her feet. She was wearing her Oxfords with the low heel, a habit she’d adopted after she’d started seeing Buster regularly. She wondered whether to be honest with Ruthie.
“His real name is Joseph,” she said after a few moments.
“Whatever do you mean?” said Ruthie, looking at her queerly. “Whose real name is Joseph?”
“It’s Joseph Frank Keaton. Mother called one day and I wanted to get her off the phone. You’d just had Violet. I told her I was having dinner with Joseph. We’d barely even begun seeing each other then, it just came out.”
Ruthie looked as confused as ever, but in a few moments understanding sank in. “You mean Buster Keaton?” she said.
Nelly nodded. “No one calls him Joseph though, not even his mother and father.”
“You were seeing Buster Keaton,” Ruthie repeated in flat disbelief.
“Oh, don’t make me feel guilty,” she said. “I never in a million years dreamed of it. When I went out there I was thinking about John Barrymore. He’s really how this all got started. I wanted to be in this Barrymore picture once we wrapped up with Steamboat and I called Buster—I got his number from Bert, he managed the prop house—I hadn’t seen him in weeks by that time. I felt so foolish after he rescued me at the blind tiger. He sat there watching me throw up, for God’s sake. He even held my hair for me. He told me I took off my stockings and tossed them out the window because I was hot. I was an utter mess. And then I told him he was stupid for doing that scene in the picture where the house falls on him, when we were on set. It could have killed him. It really weighed two tons. So we weren’t on the best footing. The Barrymore picture, though, I heard they were casting and I couldn’t think of anyone else who’d be able to help me get my foot in the door.”
Ruthie was staring at her, stupefied.
“I can go back to the beginning, if you want to hear it,” she said, aware that she probably wasn’t making a great deal of sense.
“Of course I want to hear it!” said Ruthie, squeezing her knee. “I want to hear everything. Every detail. He’s terribly handsome, isn’t he?”
The sun went down and the shadows grew long as she told the story of Buster mistaking her intentions and wounding her feelings when she showed up to his dressing room, the apology that had come in the form of an invitation to be an extra, her rescue from the blind tiger, the angle she’d played trying to land a role in Tempest and the unexpected invitation to his party that had resulted, the kiss underneath the stars, the months of not hearing from him, the collapse of her dream about The Taming of the Shrew, the kiss on her sofa, the invitation to the cabin beside the lake, the things they’d done there both torrid and ordinary, and everything that had come after, down to the ill-fated visit to the Villa while Natalie was away and the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. The shadows grew so long that they moved to an ice cream parlor farther down Sherman Avenue. Ruthie got a root beer float and Nelly drank a cream soda that settled her stomach and prodded at a hot fudge sundae that melted as she finished retelling everything. It felt good to confide in someone after so long. Ruthie listened with only occasional interruptions. Contrary to what Nelly had expected, her demeanor made it plain that she did not disapprove.
When she was done saying what she had to say, Ruthie said simply, “I wish you’d told me before.”
Her sundae was soup by now, but she sipped some of it from her spoon. “I thought you’d be scandalized. I thought you were—well, like Mother I suppose. You’ve done it all as it should be done, by the book.”
Ruthie laughed. “Because I got married too young?”
Nelly took in this eye-opener. “I never knew you thought it was too young. You did what all girls want. The children are beautiful—”
“—and an awful pain in the neck—”
“—and Gerald is—”
“—boring as all get-out.”
“—so good at what he does.”
She stared at Ruthie, whose lips were tight. Although she’d soon realized over the past few weeks that her sister didn’t have it as easy as she once imagined, she’d never thought Ruthie was unhappy.
“He’s a dreadful bore, Nell,” she said, a resigned expression on her face. “All he does is talk about Mr. So-and-So who’s defending Mr. What’s-His-Name and Mr. What’s-His-Name Who’s prosecuting Mr. So-and-So and torts and claims and motions. He’s a cold fish in the bedroom. Sometimes I could just scream.”
She didn’t know what to say.
“I’d rather be a mistress than a wife,” Ruthie continued. “You have it right. Don’t ever go thinking the grass is greener, because it isn’t.”
“I didn’t know,” said Nelly. It was all she could come up with.
“Did you ever consider maybe Buster cared for you more than his wife?” Ruthie said.
“No,” she said, stirring her sundae soup. “I think he cared for me, but now that I think of it I don’t think he ever meant to leave her. Stars get divorced left and right in Hollywood. Nothing would stop him. I saw the way he looked at her at his party. He loves her.”
“Then he’s a coward. If she won’t see to his needs, why does he bother with her? He should face facts. He ought to have stood up to those Talmadges. You’re ten times the catch she is.”
Nelly shook her head, feeling conflicted. “I don’t think it’s that easy. They had him over the barrel with our pictures.” She blushed. She considered whether to tell Ruthie about the picture of Buster. In the spirit of sisterhood, she decided to be open. “I have his still. High up in the closet where the children won’t find it, of course.”
“Oh, you must show me,” Ruthie said, her face lighting up with real eagerness.
Nelly stared at her for a moment, then they both burst into giggles. “It’s so wicked, isn’t it?”
“You could go to the Tribune with it,” Ruthie said with a smirk. “He should have written you. It would serve him right, the coward.”
Even though it was a joke, she said, “I wouldn’t do that to him. And after all, he wanted to find a way to keep it going. I was the one who insisted on coming back home.”
Ruthie glanced around the soda shop as if to make sure no one was listening, although only one other table was occupied and the soda jerk was wiping the countertop. It was close to closing time. “I’m going to say something serious now. I know it will shock you, God knows it’s easier having you around, but don’t be a governess forever. Don’t give up on your dream just because some jealous old actresses chased you out of town.”
Nelly laughed. “I have every chance of getting into pictures as I do marrying Charles Lindbergh. That’s hardly Buster’s fault.”
“So go back to the theater then. You were always so good at it.”
She finally pushed aside her melted sundae. Since she’d been home, she had avoided all thoughts of acting. It would mean facing the aimlessness of her future and the limitations on it. She already knew she would never return to Hollywood. Though her forced exile from California still made her miserable, she could also see things from a practical perspective. The competition simply could not be overcome. Not only were most of the girls prettier, they were frequently more experienced and many were willing to submit themselves to directors and other powerful men for advantages. Of course, even if she wanted to give it another try, she had been blackmailed. Returning to the theater would be a final admission of defeat in her dream of being on the screen.
She also feared that if she returned, she would find it staler than it had been before her departure for California. She had never been very excited about her short-lived role in the Los Angeles Players Company’s production of Twelfth Night.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“I do know,” said Ruthie. The bell on the door of the ice cream shop jingled. “Oh look, it’s Gerald.”
“I was starting to think you’d been abducted,” he said, his brow pinched as he walked over to their table. He looked relieved to see them. “Walked all over creation trying to find you.”
“Don’t be dramatic, dear,” Ruthie said, as he leaned in and pecked her cheek. She rolled her eyes at Nelly.
“How are you feeling Nelly?” he said, sliding into the seat next to her.
“A little better than I was. I had a soda.”
“But didn’t touch your ice cream. We’ll have to get you out to the Phoenix next weekend. The children went mad for the chop suey and egg rolls. I was very sorry you were missing it. Well, we should get going so Mr. and Mrs. Foster know you’re both alive,” he said, laying a hand on her shoulder.
They walked out of the shop with Gerald between them, their arms in his, and he drove them back to Ashbury Avenue. Ruthie caught her eye a couple times and they both laughed. When they had satisfied William and Lena that Nelly was okay, they collected June and Eddie and drove home. Ruthie persuaded Nelly to have a cold chicken sandwich before she retired to bed, exhausted. Yet even after she was under the covers with her teeth brushed and hair braided, she couldn’t sleep. There was too much to think about. For the first time in weeks, she thought for a long time about her affair with Buster. Ruthie had regarded him as a mixture of debonair, villainous, and cowardly. She was almost sorer about his behavior than Nelly had ever been. Her fondness for him had left him blameless after their affair ended, and she considered for the first time whether she should have been angry with him. Ruthie was persuasive. If he truly had cared for her, maybe he should have fought harder against the Talmadges and pleaded for her not to go. And why hadn’t he written?
Then there was marriage in general to ponder. Was anyone actually happy with it or was everyone just having affairs or dreaming of someone else? She even questioned her parents’ marriage. William was in the city most days of the week. Who was to say he didn’t have a penthouse and a mistress there which enabled him to come home on weekends and tolerate Lena and her frothy, excitable ways? Was the choice as bleak as that, being a mistress who was never quite fulfilled or a wife whose husband either roamed or bored her to death? Her mind turned to the theater, too. Would taking a role in a play be an admission of defeat or a triumphant return? She tossed and turned. All she was certain of was that she missed Buster again. Her chest ached with what she’d lost. She fell asleep after midnight, and her dreams were pained.
After his Sunday game of baseball, this one in a lot near Newport Beach with Eddie playing catcher and Harold Goodwin shortstop, Buster pulled a tweed cap low, shrugged on an overcoat, and drove back to the Southern Seas Club. When he entered the suite he was sharing with Constance and Natalie, he found the former holding court with a woman reporter. He held back a sigh as he hung up his hat and overcoat. He’d suspected lately that the Talmadges were undertaking a publicity campaign to head off any rumors of his marital troubles. The Friday before last, Beulah had shown up to the suite to get an article, which was to be syndicated.
“Now Buster,” she’d said, scooting forward on the settee opposite him. “What is your idea of real happiness?”
“A grand slam in the ninth inning,” he’d said, lighting a cigarette.
“I was rather hoping you’d answer seriously,” she’d said.
“Alright, a grand slam in bridge when you’ve been losing all night.”
Beulah frowned. He smoked. Natalie and Constance’s laughter trickled through the open door of the adjoining lounge, distracting him.
“Let’s try again. I thought you might speak to the domicile.”
He’d fidgeted, sure then that Constance had put her up to this. “You want a serious answer?” he said.
“If you’d be so kind as to give one.”
She wasn’t stupid, Beulah. It took real brains to be a publicist and know what the readers would lap up. He knew what she wanted him to say. Real happiness was being a father to two little rapscallions and a husband to the devoted Natalie Talmadge. “My idea of real happiness …” He looked through the door, but the women were out of sight.
“You were a nomad in the vaudeville days,” she’d prompted. “No real home. There must be something to be said for settling down the way you have. Everything you could possibly want. The Villa must fulfill your every dream.”
His mind drifted away from the Villa.
“It’s a ranch home in the San Fernando Valley,” he said slowly, picturing it before him. “There’s an orchard, peach and apple trees. Some cherry trees. We’ll have a cow. I’ll milk her before I leave for the studio every morning. Chickens, too. A whole damn flock. Our own eggs and milk for breakfast. I’ve built a state-of-the-art henhouse that’s fox-proof. I might try my hand at a vineyard. And inside, a floor where you can dance. All the records in the world in shelves on the wall. I’d build the shelves myself.” He’d stopped there.
Beulah had given him the funniest look. Questions had hung in the air as thick as the smoke from the cigarette burning down in his fingers. “Perhaps,” she’d said, “it would be agreeable if I simply wrote the article with what I know of you. After all, we’ve been acquainted for quite a long time.”
He’d crushed out the cigarette and nodded, feeling unsettled by the blurt of honesty. “Okay.”
The article was published on Father’s Day, the syrupiest pap he’d read in years. Distant fields are always supposed to be the greenest, and the world in general is usually credited with wishing for something it hasn’t got, but in my own case, I am happier now than I would be under any other circumstances or in any other clime, it began. Briefly, my idea of happiness is this: to have a happy, healthy family, and to be engaged in work like this. I am grateful beyond words that I have them all.
It ended: So, with (pardon me for boasting) the finest wife, the finest sons, the finest friends and the finest work—helping keep the world in a cheerful mood—I am the most contented man in the world.
“Mr. Keaton,” the new woman reporter said presently. “I’m Elsie McCormick.” She stood up and held out her hand. She’d been sitting near Constance who was sprawled in a settee in getting a manicure from a plain, thin-lipped woman he’d never seen before. Dressed in green silk pajamas, she looked every inch a Roman empress in repose.
“Hello,” he said to Elsie, on his guard. He offered her a stiff smile as he pressed her hand.
There was a knock on the door and Constance called, “Come in!”
“It’s such a pleasure,” she said. The suite was its usual hive of activity. Wherever the Talmadges went, so did comforts and luxuries galore. Fresh arrangements of flowers and new hats littered the small tables that dotted the suite. Even now a bellboy was bringing in a box of chocolates the size of an elephant. Natalie appeared from the next room to collect them. “Hello, Nate,” he said, catching her arm so he could kiss her cheek. She gave him a real smile. She loved this kind of hubbub. He knew it made her feel on equal footing with Norma and Constance.
“I was told you didn’t smile,” said Elsie, settling back into a chair. She was in her thirties, businesslike and Midwestern.
“By who?” he said, though he could guess. He took a chair opposite her and pulled out a cigarette.
“Oh, really. It was only a joke, Buster,” Dutch said breezily, glancing at them.
He could tell from Elsie’s tone that Constance had meant the “joke” to be taken seriously and frowned. The reporter’s questions came one after another in the usual pattern. How did he get the name Buster and what was his real name? Where was he born? When did he first get his start in show business? So he really did smile?
He answered. Harry Houdini. Joseph Frank Keaton. A church. He gave the cyclone story and said he’d first appeared on stage balanced on a platter when he was all of a day old. Even though these were yarns, his pa had always told them in order to drum up extra interest and there was something to be said for keeping tradition going. Yes, of course he smiled and the frozen face wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. For example, people alleged that his teeth were rotten, he was a moron, or was cold and glum. Silence fell in between questions as Elsie scribbled on a steno pad. Constance hummed in an absent way while the woman spread pink lacquer on her nails. A telegram arrived and Natalie was summoned into the room to receive it. “Oh, just Norm and Mama,” she said, when Dutch interrupted the interview to ask who it was from.
There were further questions about Jimmy, Bobby, Natalie, their home, and his salary. He recited the one about Nate giving up a promising career in pictures in favor of staying home to press her husband’s shirtwaists, cook his meals, and raise his sons. It had some roots in truth, he guessed. She’d dabbled in a little of that when they were first hitched, but now the cook, maid, and governess absolved her of homemaking and childrearing. The promising career in pictures was a tall tale and so was the happy little marriage. He wouldn’t dream of telling Elsie that in that very suite, the two sisters were sharing the room with two beds and he was sleeping by himself in the master bedroom. Though he couldn’t sneak girls into his boudoir as long as the Talmadge women were bunking with him, that hadn’t stopped him in the three weeks past from entertaining Gertie the makeup girl, Florence, Clara, and other girls whose names he’d already forgotten at his bungalow or in his dressing room. They had all been good, pleasant girls who never stayed the night or asked more of him than he wanted to give. He wouldn’t tell Elsie this, either.
He did tell her in general terms that the filming of The Cameraman was moving along at a nice clip. It was going so well, in fact, that even pessimistic Buster One wondered if Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd had sounded the death knell for his career too early. It was true that Weingarten was still a thorn in his side, as much of one as Harry Brand had been, and that there were too many suits, schedules, and scripts for him to be at total ease, but he’d managed to wrest back about three-quarters control and figured that was about as good as it would get at M-G-M. They would probably wrap in late July. Another reason for cheer was that enthusiastic reviews for Steamboat rolled in almost daily. The LA Times praised the cyclone finish and said it had the best effects since The Navigator. The Los Angeles Evening Post-Record went further and called it funnier than The Navigator. The Santa Ana Register raved about its originality and fresh gags. Even old Jack Barrymore was moved to comment publicly about how much he admired Buster, throwing out the word “genius.” In response to the excitement of filming and good reviews, his brain fizzed with ideas as it hadn’t since the days with Roscoe. Sitting in the bathtub, shaving, or bicycling the four miles to the Studio Two lot every morning, new gags and novel shots spun through his head. He could barely wait to talk to Irv about the story he had in mind for his next picture, one starring Marie Dressler.
And yet. And yet.
Those two words provoked him in the quiet moments when he wasn’t wrapped up in pictures, girls, baseball, and bridge. He didn’t wonder why; there were plenty of reminders during the dinner parties or premieres when Natalie dressed in her finest and pretended to love him. Buster Two played along with the charade. He hadn’t much choice. But in the quiet moments, Buster One unscrewed the flask. He was coming around to the fact that there was no going back to the way things had once been with her. She would simply never be interested in him in the way he desired, in the way, for the first few glorious months of their marriage, she had been. He saw now that it had been a fool’s errand to try to reconcile with her the previous autumn in the hope of getting that back.
And yet.
During the quiet moments, his mind went back to the night of May 31st seven years ago. He and Nate were alone in their cabin on the train back to California. The porters had pulled down the cushions of their seats while they were at dinner and transformed them into a bed for two. Slipping his robe off and climbing into bed next to her in his pajamas, he was the shyest he’d ever felt with a woman. The lights burned with a dim glow and the room was shadowed. Both of them knew what was expected on a wedding night. He’d been thinking about it since their engagement, but the last time he’d been with a virgin was when he was a virgin himself. He wasn’t sure how to start. It struck him, as he stared up at the polished mahogany ceiling of the Pullman car, that he didn’t know the woman next to him. Not counting the brushes he’d had with her when he was working at Comique or the dates they’d had over the past month, they were strangers.
The train swayed eastward into the night, rocking them back and forth, bumping them together beneath the sheets. He wanted to apologize, but caught himself. It was, after all, perfectly natural for them to touch now. Natalie was stiff, staring at the curtains as if she could see through him. They would be in Pennsylvania by now, maybe Ohio. He sat up and grabbed for the glass of water sitting in a holder near the foot of the bed; his mouth was as dry as a desert. The movement pulled the covers from Natalie. Her nightgown was sleeveless and the color of champagne, with a high neckline. He’d apologized and laid back down, his mouth only slightly wetter from the water.
He remembered talking to her then, but not what he said. It was nervous gibberish. The only thing he recalled for sure was the defining question that came at the end of the babble: “Can I kiss ya?”
They had kissed before, but always chastely. Natalie would press her lips to his, but didn’t seem to know where to take it from there. Afraid of frightening her off, he never showed her what to do next. Now that she was his wife, he was determined to teach her.
She was uncertain at first. He nudged her lips open for a deeper kiss—no tongue, but showing her it didn’t have to be papery. She mimicked him. He ran his fingers through her hair as they kissed. He touched her white throat. Her skin was soft and his pulse thudded. Minutes went by and she seemed to get up some courage. She felt his cheeks and ears with her fingertips. Her hand skimmed through his hair and touched the back of his neck. With the utmost caution, he touched the tip of his tongue to hers and withdrew it to see how she would react. He thought he might die right then and there when she responded with the softest of sighs.
Still he went slow. He traced her body through the silk of the nightgown, staying away from the places he longed to touch most. She wasn’t plump and sturdy like Viola or willowy and strong like Alice, but slender and frail. He could feel every bone of her hip, spine, and shoulders. This was his wife. His wife.
After what seemed like a long time, she asked “How is it done?”
His cheeks were on fire and he trembled. He wanted her as no man had ever wanted any woman, but he knew he must go slow. Some words must have been exchanged, for they removed their pajamas. Natalie was shivering and he rubbed her arm, concerned.
“I’m afraid it will hurt,” she said. “Dutch and Norm said it might.”
“We’ll go very slow,” he promised.
The sheets were pulled down to their waists. She looked at his chest and he looked at hers. Her breasts were small, low-set, and somewhat flat. He touched them and, when she responded favorably, licked them. He kissed her stomach and dipped his tongue in her navel. He ran his fingers over her hip bones. She explored his shoulders, arms, and chest. Finally, he cupped a hand between her legs and wanted to hurrah when he discovered she wanted him.
It was a blessing in disguise that he needed to go slow. He was so keyed up he would have finished immediately at a normal pace, especially because she took his prick in her hand and said, “I’ve never seen one before.”
He rolled on top of her and pushed just the barest inch of himself inside her. She was as rigid as a board and he could feel her holding her breath. He kissed and kissed her, not moving any deeper. “Does it hurt?” he said, fearing the answer.
Her voice was a whisper. “Not as much as I thought.”
He kissed her and touched her breasts until she softened, then tried another inch. Moments later, he was all the way inside her. He stilled, as much for his sake as hers. The train rattled over the rails and rocked them together. He wondered if the sound would be a turn-on from now on. He tried a shallow thrust. “That ain’t too bad, is it?”
“No.”
He kept his thrusts slow and shallow, but even with an attenuated pace he didn’t last very long. He had to grit his teeth as he came, struggling not to go fast lest he hurt her. When it was over, he swabbed her gently with a handkerchief. The fluid came away with a pinkish tinge, but he was gratified to see there wasn’t any real blood.
That was the memory he returned to most in the quiet moments, although there were equally nice ones from that summer going into the autumn. It was his idea of real happiness for a time, even if she didn’t yield to his suggestion about the small ranch in the San Fernando Valley. She never learned to be an adventuresome lover, but he loved her too much to care. She let him make love to her on nights when he wasn’t too tired from filming from dawn to dusk and he thought she enjoyed it. Sometimes, she had corned beef and cabbage or another homey meal ready for him when he dragged himself through the door. She did press his shirtwaists. They talked about the baby they knew would result from their nocturnal activities. By Christmas that year, she was pregnant. It had been a blue heaven, for a time.
“Come in!” Constance yelled at the door, where there had just been a knock.
Elsie looked up from her scribbling and Buster’s reverie evaporated. It was a bellboy with a hatbox. “Mrs. Talmadge?” he said.
Dutch cocked her head toward the doorway of the adjoining room. “I’m not the missus. Hey, Nate!”
“Coming!”
She emerged from the other room with haste in her step and collected the hat box from the bellboy, tipping him a quarter.
“Let’s see what’s inside,” said Elsie.
Natalie removed the lid and angled the box toward them. Within it was a black velvet cloche hat with a medallion of pheasant breast feathers in the center and long tail feathers swooping off to the sides. She stroked them with reverence, looking as proud as a mother showing off a new baby, and Buster was gripped with a thought that chilled him. If he were to lose it all next week and with it the ability to keep her well-stocked in hats, bon-bons, flowers, and new clothes, she would have no reason to be his wife at all.
Notes: The “syrupiest pap” article really was published in the Tribune. It’s pretty obviously not written by Buster and I have a strong suspicion that the Talmadge publicist Beulah Livingstone wrote it. If that’s true, you have to wonder whether it was damage control as Buster’s arrival at M-G-M is where the womanizing seems to have begun in earnest.
The Elsie McCormick article and scene are real, I just embellished it. Buster’s flashback about his wedding night came out of nowhere. A lot of sources state that he and Natalie took a car back to California after their wedding, but I read somewhere that it was in fact a train given the time that elapsed between departure from New York and arrival in LA.
The next chapter is nearly finished, so you will probably get it next weekend.
P.S. Yes, I know the portrait is Constance and Norma, not Constance and Natalie, but it’s a close fit. ;)
Chapter 35
A month went by and Nelly’s tears came infrequently. She rarely tripped over memories of Buster anymore. The pain of losing both him and her dream of being in pictures was increasingly blunted, walled off. She pictured herself penning it in with field stones, daubing the cracks with mud, building the wall higher and higher each day. She was doing alright.
She could thank Ruthie and the children for it. She hadn’t wanted to move in with them, but even a week with her mother had worn on her nerves. So while Ruthie fed the baby and tried to soothe her colicky cries, Nelly taught the children their lessons and minded them throughout the day. June was bright and already knew all her letters. She was sounding out short sentences in primers and getting better at copying words: CAT, BALL, SKY, DOLL, CAR, BAT. Eddie could write his name in spidery, uneven letters, some ballooned in size, others cramped. Both children weren’t very good at their numbers, but it wasn’t the end of the world. Much of the time she just read to them or watched as they played on the lawn or in the room that June and Eddie shared. She gave June Barney the mohair tiger and Eddie his pick of her teddy bears. He chose a medium-sized cream-colored one that she’d called Julius and renamed it Freddy Teddy.
Because music reminded her of Buster, she hadn’t used her phonograph since California. Seeing it on the table in her room for the first time, though, the children begged. Ruthie didn’t own a phonograph (“What for when we have a radio?”) and neither did Lena, who frowned at jazz and had never developed a taste for Stravinsky, Strauss, or Chopin. Nelly caved to their pleas and played them Gene Austin’s “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue.” June insisted on being taught how to operate the phonograph by herself. Although Nelly wasn’t sure she was old enough to be careful, she nonetheless folded her hand over her niece’s and showed her how to wind the machine until the handle caught. She taught her how to extract the shellac record from its paper sleeve and place it gently on the turntable. She showed her the three sizes of needle, soft, medium, and loud, and warned her how sharp the ends were. She revealed how to untwist the bit of metal that held the needle in, carefully extract the old needle, and place it inside the recessed tin for disposal. She showed her how to put a new needle into the tiny hole and tighten the piece of metal back up, and to release the catch that set the turntable spinning. Finally, she taught her how to fold down the metal arm of the machine and drop the nose that held the needle down at the very edge of the record, which brought Bix Beiderbecke and the Frankie Trumbauer’s Orchestra “Singin’ the Blues” to vivid life. She couldn’t help but remember how Buster had walked her through all the steps in much the same way, putting his hand over hers to show her how far to wind the machine and warning her to always change the needle after two plays, no exceptions.
June was in raptures. Every day after math lessons, they took a break and Nelly allowed her to play both sides of one record. Eddie begged to be taught too; Nelly said that phonographs were only for five-year-olds, but that when he turned four in October she’d let him put a record on the turntable and see how it went from there. Unknown to the music-hungry children, who demanded to hear at least two new songs a day, a substantial number of her records remained sitting in a wooden crate in the closet of the second-floor room she occupied at Ruthie’s. She couldn’t bear to hear The Paul Whiteman Orchestra anymore. Stuffed deep in a trunk beneath the records were two other objects that she didn’t want to look at, the photograph of Buster standing in his bathroom in nothing but a strategically draped towel and his best Mona Lisa stare and the navy-blue suit jacket he had tucked around her shoulders the night of his party last October.
Still, progress was progress. She stayed distracted with the children and borrowed stacks of books from the library to keep herself busy during her free evenings, avoiding Photoplay and the gossip section of the newspaper. She had no complaints about the new rhythm of her life until her mother invited Harold Jenkins to Sunday dinner. She followed Ruthie and Gerald into the dining room early on the evening of the tenth, carrying Eddie, and there was the carbuncle himself sitting opposite her place at the table. Aghast, she looked at Lena who sat at one end of the table.
“Nelly,” Harold said, standing up. “It’s sure swell to see you!”
Nelly poured Eddie into the seat on Ruthie’s right and turned just as Harold came around the table to shake her hand. “Oh Harold,” she said. “This is unexpected.” He leaned forward and kissed her cheek before she knew what he was doing. She had half a mind to slap him for his brazenness, but she was angrier at her mother.
“Hello, Harold,” said Ruthie, looking amused.
“How do you do?” said Gerald, shaking his hand. “We’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Have you?” said Harold, beaming. He took Nelly by the elbow and pulled her toward her seat, but she shook him off.
“I’m fine, thank you,” she said, offering her most poisonous smile. When Harold wasn’t looking, she shot a frown at Lena, but her mother didn’t notice.
In addition to his overpowering breath, Harold was no beauty. His hard slab of a face looked like it had been chiselled from granite. Even in an expensive suit with his hair impeccably combed, he was an uninspiring figure. A devout Catholic, he loved to talk at length about the latest spiritual failings of his colleagues and clients at the law firm where he was a junior partner. He knew absolutely nothing about her and had had it in his head for a good three years that she would make the perfect wife. Nelly imagined that Lena still held out hope that her remaining daughter would marry into the Church since Gerald was a Presbyterian.
She pulled out her chair and sat across from him, half-tempted to pretend that she’d only recently been released from an asylum.
“So you just got back from California,” he said, scooting in his chair and smiling.
Nelly’s father walked into the room. She’d only seen him once since being back home. He lived most of the time in the city, too busy with work to come home in the evenings and sometimes the weekends as well.
“Hello, Mr. Foster,” said Harold.
William greeted him in kind and sat at the head of the table. Since Ruthie and Gerald had married, Sunday dinners alternated between their house on Maple Avenue and the Foster home. This week was the Fosters’ turn. As soon as William was seated, Jennie came out of the kitchen and began to lay shallow bowls of soup before everyone. Nelly smoothed her napkin in her lap and tucked in as soon as her soup was put down, knowing perfectly well what a breach of manners it was to start before everyone had been served and hoping her mother would notice. Her appetite had begun to creep back over the past two weeks. No doubt she owed that in part to Eddie and June, whom she chased all over creation in between lessons. She had no intention of answering Harold’s question about California.
“Wasn’t it a lovely sermon this morning?” said Lena to Harold. Nelly looked up and saw her mother give her a sidelong glance as if to say, Manners. She smirked to herself and dipped her spoon into the soup again.
Harold took up the conversation at once. She gathered it was the parable of the mustard seed. All one needed to do was have a single grain of faith and it would lead to heavenly rewards. Gerald and Ruthie listened politely and June and Eddie fidgeted. She noticed her father’s concentration seemed to be unusually focused on the celery bisque. It had never occurred to her that he might not believe what her mother did. Having been away for a year for the first time in her life, her family’s rituals and habits had an element of strangeness to them as they hadn’t before. She’d always been aware that her family was typical and that she was the odd one out with her yearning for the stage, but she’d never realized how strange their ordinariness was. Church, garden clubs, sewing circles, afternoon teas—that was how Lena and Ruthie whiled away the hours.
The main course came, ham with a bourbon glaze with buttered new potatoes on the side. Again, she ate as soon as she was served, determined to put Harold off of courting her once and for all.
“So how did you find California?” he said, as if he’d read her thoughts.
She was tempted to answer with a mouthful of food, but good breeding won out and she swallowed first. “I liked it,” she said, hoping that the intentional lack of details would shut him down.
A smile appeared on his face. “Of course, I’m glad that things took a turn for the worse. You’re better off back here where you belong. Hollywood’s got a long way to go when it comes to morals.”
“Who said it took a turn for the worse?” She set down her fork.
“Oh.” He exchanged a knowing smile with Lena. “Mrs. Foster told me all about it. You came back in a dreadful state. You must have seen what it was really like. The papers are filled with it, you know. All those dreadful divorces and affairs and deaths. I was reading just yesterday about an explosion in a Russian cafe in Hollywood. They say it was an attack on the stars who go there. Charlie Chaplin was there. Of course, everyone knows about him. An adulterer of the first degree. It’s no place for a Catholic girl, Hollywood.”
“Well I danced with him at a party once,” she said, without a second thought. “No, twice. He was a perfect gentleman.”
The conversation screeched to a standstill and she felt more satisfied than she had in weeks. The only sound to hear was the scrape of forks against china. She gave a polite smile at Harold, who was staring at her like a chicken that had been clubbed over the head.
“You danced with Charlie Chaplin?” Ruthie said, leaning past Gerald to give her an incredulous look.
“Yes,” she said, taking a bite of ham.
Harold cleared his throat. “I was simply meaning to say that it’s not a safe place for a respectable woman. I’m sure we see eye to eye on that.”
She smiled and swallowed her food. She was enjoying herself at last. “Who said I’m a respectable woman?”
Harold gaped. Lena spluttered, “Now really, Nelly!”
“I just think that if Harold intends to court me, if he’s to know certain details of my life, he ought to have the full facts.” She widened her eyes innocently and glanced at everyone at the table to see their reactions. Lena was telling her with an expression only mothers seemed to possess not to say another damned word. William was engrossed in his food and showed no intention of intervening.
Eddie poked Ruthie in the arm. “What’s a ‘spectacle woman, Mama?”
Ruthie brushed his hand away. “I’ll tell you later, darling.” Contrary to what Nelly expected, her sister didn’t look mortified but intrigued.
“Come now, I know you don’t mean that,” said Harold, smiling as he regained himself. “You don’t have to try to be shocking simply because you’ve been in Hollywood for a year. I wasn’t implying that you had fallen into vices. Not at all! Your mother told me it was a failed romance. Unfortunately, men without morals—”
A sudden ringing in Nelly’s ears blotted out all other sounds. For a dreadful moment, she was afraid she might swoon. The audacity of her mother to tell Harold anything about her personal business, especially when it came to her love life! When it came to her downfall! Feeling her face grow hot but her courage grow hotter, she composed her face and said quite evenly and serenely, “I’m afraid I must disabuse you of the ideas you’ve gotten about me. You see, I was the one without morals. I knew Joseph was married. I thought it would be better in the end if I came back here and found a respectable man like you.”
William made a choking noise that could have been a cough or a laugh.
“Nelly!” said Lena. Her face was beet red.
Nelly smiled and pushed her chair away from the table. Without looking at Harold’s reaction, she scooped Eddie out of his chair and said, “Come on, I’ll buy you ice cream and teach you about spectacled women.”
“Me too, me too!” June slid feet first out of her chair and crawled out from beneath the table.
Neither child had finished their dinners and Nelly knew she’d be in trouble with Ruthie, but unlike them she was a big girl and could do as she pleased. She took their hands and walked them out the door, telling them to keep their voices down so they wouldn’t disturb Violet, who was sleeping in the parlor in her white wicker basket. They walked the fifteen minutes to Clark Street and enjoyed vanilla ice cream cones while watching the cars drive by. By the time they returned over an hour later, Harold was gone and William informed her that Lena had gone to bed early with a savage headache. Nelly thought she saw a twinkle in his eye. Her walk back with the Henningers to their house was quiet, save for the children’s chatter. She figured she was in for a fiery lecture from Ruthie, but she didn’t care.
Violet sounded colicky again and Ruthie busied herself trying to comfort her, so Nelly put June and Eddie to bed, reading them another half chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh until they fell asleep. She brushed her teeth and hair after she left the children, then retired to her room across the hall. There were seven bedrooms total in the house, which had been built in 1880 by the illustrious Latimers. The patriarch had died in 1924 and Ruthie and Gerald became the house’s second owners. Her bedroom had originally been meant for Eddie, but Ruthie found he wouldn’t sleep unless June was nearby so his bed had been moved into her room..
She got into her nightgown and got into bed and put These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer in her lap. Her mind wandered from the words to dinner and her victory over Harold. She knew that her mother thought she’d gone out of her mind. She didn’t know what her father or Gerald or Ruthie thought. She could picture Gerald pulling her aside at some quiet moment after he returned from work tomorrow and making her promise to set a better example for the children.
She didn’t have to wonder for very long what Ruthie thought. There was a knock on her door.
“Come in?” she said.
Ruthie closed the door behind her quietly. “I finally got Violet down.” She looked tired and Nelly, pitying her, felt a sudden conviction that returning to Evanston had been the right decision. Ruthie folded herself onto the foot of the bed as she had sometimes done when she and Nelly had just turned teenagers, before they’d drifted apart. “You were just saying that to shock Mother, right?” she said.
Nelly closed the book and set it on her bedside table. She drew her knees up. “Which part?”
“About having an affair with a married man.”
Nelly thought about it for the briefest of seconds. She could laugh it off and lie. Pity for Ruthie prodded her toward the truth. “No,” she said. “He was married.”
Her sister raised an eyebrow. Rather than offer an opinion, however, she said, “Was he in pictures?”
This time, Nelly went for a half-truth. “Just an extra. Like me.”
“And you loved him?”
“Yes.” She’d never said it out loud.
Ruthie twirled her wedding ring. “Did you really dance with Charlie Chaplin?”
She smiled at the memory. “I did.”
“How?”
“I went to a couple parties where all the big stars were,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “There was this small man, English. His eyes were very blue. He had wavy hair. I thought he was handsome. He asked me to dance and I hadn’t the slightest idea who he was. He made me guess. I couldn’t believe he was Charlie Chaplin. I always thought the Little Tramp had brown eyes.”
Ruthie shook her head in disbelief. Nelly had known for years that Ruthie was the prettier sister. She had the slim, almost angular figure so many women desired. Her hair was fashionably bobbed. Tonight, though, she looked ten years Nelly’s senior. The area under her lower eyelids was discolored. She was too thin and the bones of her chest were visible at her neckline in the dim light. Nelly’s pity deepened.
“What made it end?” said Ruthie.
“What made what end?”
“Your affair, silly.”
“Oh.” The choice hovered again, the lie or the truth. Nelly lowered her eyes. “His wife and sisters-in-law found out.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me any of this?”
She raised her eyes to her sister’s. “Well, you were so busy with your own life. The children and the house. I thought you’d disapprove.” She knew now from Ruthie’s tone that her assumption hadn’t been true.
“I’m your sister.” Ruthie wrapped her arms around her knees and the shadows changed. Nelly could almost believe she was fifteen now and not the thirty-five she looked just moments earlier.
“I thought you didn’t approve of Hollywood and being an actress,” she said lamely.
“For someone like me, maybe. Not for you.”
“Oh.” She couldn’t think of how to respond.
“Of course, you know I did worry a little,” she said, hesitating. “Everyone’s heard the stories about what girls must do to get ahead. And I remember Fatty Arbuckle. What he did to that girl.”
“Oh, but that didn’t happen. Not in the way they said. She was sick before she went to his party,” Nelly said. “He never hurt her. It was just a horrid rumor.”
Ruthie looked at her strangely. “How do you know?”
She realized she was speaking with Buster’s conviction when he’d told her about Roscoe’s fall from grace. “I had a—friend. Who was friends with him. He said he wouldn’t hurt a fly. It just wasn’t like him to do that sort of thing.” She flushed.
“When you came back …” said Ruthie. She rested her chin on her knees and didn’t go on.
“What?” she said.
“I was afraid something had happened. That you’d been taken advantage of by a director or maybe, I don’t know. You hear such dreadful stories about the things that go on.”
“Goodness no,” she said, a little stunned. “Perhaps that does go on, but I never made it anywhere near that far, far enough to find out. I didn’t get to find out. I was just an extra in two films. Most of the time I handled the props or helped with scenery.”
“You went to parties with the stars, though,” Ruthie said. “How did you …?”
“Joseph had connections,” she lied. “But I asked him from the beginning not to do me any favors. I wanted to see if I could make it on my own. You can see how that turned out.” She gave a short laugh. “I guess it all serves me right and you think I’m wicked, going with a fellow who’s married.”
Ruthie shrugged, her expression inscrutable.
“I’m sorry I made a scene with Harold tonight. I shouldn’t have dragged the children into it. I imagine Mother won’t be on speaking terms with me for weeks.”
That made Ruthie laugh. “Harold had that coming for years! Mother, too. Every time I’d see her when you were away it was, ‘Harold this, Harold that,’ Nelly needing to get married and settling down. I tried telling her he wasn’t for you and that you’re not the marrying kind, but she never listens. Father and I both howled about it after she went up to her room.”
Nelly was gratified to hear that Ruthie and her father were on her side. The comment about marriage niggled her, though. She took a deep breath and sighed. “I don’t know that I’m not the marrying kind, I just haven’t found the right man yet. It’s what I told Bus—” She caught herself. “One of the fellows I was friends with out there. Someday, maybe.” She stretched out her legs beneath the covers; they were getting sore.
“Don’t rush into it,” said Ruthie, pinching Nelly’s big toe. “It isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. They stick you with the babies while they go out and have all the fun. They don’t have to give anything up. Not one damn thing.”
Taking in the bones of her sister’s chest, the circles beneath her eyes, Nelly knew what she meant. “I’m sorry.”
“I wish I’d done some of that before I married Ger. Sown my wild oats. Was he handsome, Joseph?” Ruthie said wistfully.
She swallowed. She didn’t want to think about Buster more. “Very,” she said, hoping Ruthie wouldn’t press her.
“What’d he look like?”
She could pull one of her old issues of Photoplay from the closet. He’d be there somewhere in the pages, looking grave and elegant, his big eyes not telling what he was thinking. Those sober portraits weren’t the real Buster. They wouldn’t show Ruthie his beautiful smile and straight white teeth or the way his eyebrows crept up in the center when he belly-laughed. “Some other time,” she said, feeling her throat tighten. She looked down at her hands, and her eyes and nose stung as tears threatened to come.
“You really did care for him,” said Ruthie sympathetically. She pressed Nelly’s foot.
She nodded, blinking the tears away.
“I need to get some sleep before Violet wakes up again.” The bed lifted as Ruthie slid off of it. She surprised Nelly by kissing her forehead. “Things will get better.”
Nelly squeezed her sister’s hand. “They’re sure to now that Harold’s out of the picture.”
They laughed, and somehow she felt better than she had since leaving California.
Notes: Not much to say about this chapter, except I’m enjoying writing about Nelly and her family.
Here’s the source for the image: https://twitter.com/otma_1917/status/1015264798647508992
Next to California, Evanston was cold. The naked grey branches of the larger trees had their first diaphanous dressings of light green, while the smaller trees were wrapped in sprays of white, purple, or pink. The lilacs that had been full-blown in Los Angeles were only beginning to consider blooming here. All of this Nelly had been able to determine by visiting the window two or three times a day. Otherwise, she kept the curtains drawn. Her head and eyes ached from crying so much and were sensitive to light.
It was Tuesday. That made nine days since she’d seen Buster and three days since she’d been home. She felt turned astern, and being surrounded by the trappings of her girlhood made the sensation worse. Here was the mustard-gold wallpaper with the thin black stripes and the pink and red rose blossoms running down the center lanes. Over there, the white bureau with the oval mirror. There was the bookshelf holding the well-loved childhood books: The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, Heidi, Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, Black Beauty, The Princess and the Goblin, A Girl of the Limberlost. There were the Evanston Township High School yearbooks filled with the scrawled well wishes of fellow students she’d mostly forgotten the names of and girlfriends who had lost touch with her in pursuit of their blue heavens. If she looked in the closet, she would find her collection of teddy bears and Barney the mohair tiger. She had stowed them there at fourteen or fifteen, too big of a girl to have them arrayed on her bed any longer, too little of a girl to let them go for keeps. The closet also held a scrapbook full of playbills, pictures of John Barrymore and other stars cut from newspapers and magazines, and ticket stubs from every picture she’d ever seen with titles in neat pencil beneath. Undoubtedly many of those titles were Buster’s.
Her regression could hardly have been more complete. Having tumbled through the looking glass into Hollywood’s Wonderland, she’d been shoved back where she belonged. Surely there had been other times in her life when she’d felt so utterly ruined, but if so she had forgotten how sharp the pain could be. Day and night, there was no relief. Her career, such as it had been, was dead for good. She’d lost Buster, and having lost him, there was such a vast set of second guesses with which to torment herself that she found it hard to sleep for longer than three or four hours at a time. She should never have stayed overnight at the bungalow, gone to the Villa while Natalie was away, or attended the second party and let Constance Talmadge figure out who she was. She should have never …
Oh, don’t fool yourself, said her cruelest inner voice.
That was the voice that reproached her several times a day for being stupid enough to fall for a married man in the first place. Any idiot could have predicted how it would have turned out.
When she wasn’t wondering what she could have done differently, she was weighing the affair on a pair of scales in her head. On the scale that measured Buster’s fondness for her, she piled the following facts: he had stayed true to her throughout their affair; bought her a phonograph and records; asked her to spent time with him at the bungalow; taught her to play bridge; introduced her to Louise and George Marshall; told his trusted butler about her; had written her from New York; came to see her an hour after arriving home from said city; invited her to his house and showed her around; taken pictures of her; danced with her, sang songs for her, practiced her lines with her; engaged the Paul Whiteman Orchestra especially for her birthday. The scale would droop toward the ground and she would begin to feel consoled, only for an inconvenient fact to splat on top of the other scale and upset the balance: he had broken it off with her and she hadn’t heard a thing from him since. That was the fact that trumped all the others. Even if he had cared, he had decided not to leave his wife or give up his career. The miserable thing was that she understood perfectly. There was no other way for it to be.
A small consolation was that she had gotten her monthlies the day before. On the train, she had worried about being in a condition more than she’d worried about it the entire month. Buster’s assurance that he would help her no matter what meant nothing now that he was far away. Before she had a chance to work herself into more of a state, the familiar red bloom appeared in her knickers and soon enough she was standing at the sink washing the stain out with cold water and soap as she did every month and winding rags between her legs. Her trips to the washroom to refresh her rags and rinse the old ones were her only exercise apart from trips to the window. She hadn’t planned to exile herself, but after those first few hours home, when her tears had been soothed for the nonce by her mother and she’d told quarter-truths—the acting jobs had dried up, “Joseph” had broken it off with her for another girl—she found Lena’s questions and chatter oppressive. The pain was something she wanted to digest in solitude.
Her mother let herself into Nelly’s room every few hours bearing new temptations much as Sam the porter had, carrot soup, chicken on a white roll, chiffon cake, a cranberry mousse. Nelly didn’t have the stomach for any of it and the few bites she swallowed were tasteless and felt like papier-mâché going down. She’d set aside the tray until Jennie came to collect it. The embarrassing arrangement made her feel even more like a child. She’d gone from a self-sufficient woman with a steady boyfriend, career, and home of her own to a cosseted girl indulged by her mother and waited on by a maid. She didn’t know what to do with herself now that her dreams had all gone up in a puff of smoke.
She was in the midst of her endless weighing again when she heard multiple sets of footsteps on the stairs and children’s voices. Before she could as much as sit up, the doorknob turned and the door was pushed open without announcement. Her niece and nephew were the culprits. They hung in the doorway, shy.
“I told you to wait for me,” said Ruthie, the closeness of her voice indicating that she had just arrived at the top of the stairs. “You could have broken your necks tearing up the stairs like that.”
Nelly sat up and groped for her wrap. The intrusion incensed her. She didn’t want the children to see her this way, pale and puffy and fragile. Her tongue felt cottony and her eyes were swollen and sore. Dried tears had made the skin of her cheeks stiff. “I don’t want company,” she mumbled, as Ruthie entered the room with June and Eddie following.
“Well I don’t want all these children, but you don’t hear me complaining,” Ruthie said dryly. She was bouncing a gurgling baby.
June took a running jump onto the bed, crying, “Aunt Nelly!”
“Miss June Doris Henninger!” Ruthie scolded, although it sounded half-hearted.
June put her arms around Nelly’s neck and nuzzled her face into her chest. “Oh, she’s fine,” Nelly said, a sudden love for her niece flooding her. “I missed you.” June giggled and looked up at her, then nuzzled her chest again. Nelly stroked her golden-brown curls.
“You’ve got an awful big box downstairs. Mother said it just arrived. Jennie had to fetch Ferd to carry it in.” Ruthie folded herself into the wicker chair on the other side of the bedside table and continued to bounce the baby.
“It must be the phonograph,” she said.
Ruthie raised an eyebrow. “How much money were you making out there?”
She blushed and looked down. “It’s only a tabletop.”
“Still! What are those? Seventy-five, one hundred dollars?”
“I don’t know,” she said, feeling miserable all over again as she considered the amount of money Buster must have spent on it.
“How can you not know? You bought it, didn’t you?” The eyebrow crept higher.
“I don’t remember.” She pretended to be preoccupied with June’s curls.
Eddie sat on the carpet and rolled around a toy truck. The only sound was June kicking her feet against the bedclothes. It was awhile before Ruthie said, “So why’d you come home?”
“It’s a long story,” said Nelly. Ruthie was one of the last people she wanted to explain her downfall to, with her big tidy house, rich winsome husband, and neatly ordered children.
“I have time,” Ruthie said, bouncing the baby. Nelly realized she hadn’t seen its face.
“Let me see the baby,” she said, holding out her arms.
“Her name is Violet,” Eddie piped from the floor. He stood up to watch as Ruthie rose and placed the baby in Nelly’s arms. June sat back on her heels on the bed.
The baby had hair a shade darker than June’s and wore a simple white cotton gown with lace at the hem. Ruthie hovered for a moment, arranging the baby’s clothing and giving her head a stroke as if to satisfy herself that she was safe in her childless sister’s arms. “She turned three months old last week.”
The baby’s head swiveled to Ruthie. She put a hand in her mouth with a jerky arm and chewed. “She’s beautiful,” said Nelly, feeling awestruck. She stroked the baby’s velvet-soft cheek and fat arm. June leaned in and shook the baby’s free hand.
“June, don’t,” said Ruthie. “Just let Aunt Nelly hold her.”
Eddie was standing at the side of the bed, fingers in his mouth in an unconscious imitation of the baby. Nelly smiled at him and said, “She’s nice, isn’t she?” Eddie nodded dumbly.
She had been so busy chasing her dreams and trying to make something of herself that she’d almost completely forgotten her niece and nephew. She was glad she’d come back before the third one had grown much bigger. She held Violet for several minutes while Ruthie relayed details of the colic, giving her up when the baby began to root against her chest. Ruthie took her back, unbuttoned her collar one-handed, and arranged the baby at her breast. Eddie had gone back to his car and June was playing with the sleeve of Nelly’s wrap.
“What are your plans now that you’re home? Mother says you just sit in here all day and you don’t eat.”
Nelly felt a cloud shadow the buoyant feeling that holding the baby had briefly imparted. She remembered that Buster was gone and the inescapable pain stabbed again. “I don’t know,” she lied. “I’m tired from the train and I have my monthlies too.”
“What are monthlies?” asked June. She was now lying the wrong way on the bed and her feet pounded the pillow next to Nelly.
“If you don’t sit up straight right now, June Doris, I am going to strap you,” Ruthie said calmly. Redirecting her attention to Nelly, she said, “Well, you’re welcome to sit in this bedroom alone until you’re an old maid, but I could use a governess right now.”
Nelly had to smile as Buster’s line about angles went through her head. “You’ll learn about them when you’re older,” she said to June, who was sullenly rerighting herself. To Ruthie, she said, “Who says I don’t have something else lined up?”
Ruthie waved her off and shifted the baby at her breast. “You don’t. You just said you didn’t have any plans. It doesn’t have to be forever, just a month or two until we find someone else.”
“What happened to the one you had?”
“Oh, we had to fire her,” she said nonchalantly. “Please give it some thought. I could really use the help. It can’t be worse than moping in here all day.”
“I’m not moping,” she said, irritated.
“Sure you’re not,” Ruthie said. At her breast, baby Violet loudly smacked. “You’d have your own room, all meals, and we’ll pay you a little too. At least enough you can go out to the pictures whenever you want. We won’t pester you about Harold Jenkins either.”
“I’ll think about it,” said Nelly, even though she didn’t want to think about it. For eleven glorious months, she had been full-time in pictures, even if the balance of that time wasn’t in acting. Her former part-time occupation as a governess had been left in the past where, in her opinion, it deserved to stay. She didn’t want to go back to women’s work, even if it was her own nieces and nephew, and she hesitated to live under the same roof as Ruthie again. They were so different.
“Pllleeease,” said June.
She sighed. “I’ll give it some thought,” she told her niece.
Ruthie said she’d be by the next day and ushered the children downstairs. Nelly burrowed back in bed, the gloom settling back over her like a fug. She missed Buster with such a ferocity she didn’t think it would ever go away. Tears burnt the corners of her eyes. Pictures made the misunderstandings of lovers seem romantic and desirable, but all she wanted was to forget the whole affair and heal as fast as possible. No matter how much she tried though, her mind kept going back to him and the ache didn’t dull.
It was Natalie’s first time at the bungalow.
Constance was throwing a party that night for Norma and Peg before they left for Hawaii the following morning, so she proposed that she and Natalie come into town early to see the bungalow and visit the studios. “Sure,” Buster said. The crew was getting ready for the Newport Bay shoot on Monday, so he wasn’t filming. It was the first thaw since the confrontation over Nelly; he and Nate had been avoiding each other except for when dinner parties and the Sunday barbecues threw them together and they were obligated to carry on like a happily married couple.
The women showed up in cloche hats and knee-length coats trimmed with fur even though it was June and he gave them a tour of his modest accommodations. They remarked on how tidy and cosy it was, but he could see them peering a little too close at everything and knew they were looking for evidence of other women. They wouldn’t find it. He hadn’t come around to the idea of other girls just yet, though he was beginning to get itchy as he did any time he went too long without certain necessities. Occasionally, he would remember Nelly amidst the frantic pace of films, the luncheons of twelve to sixteen people at the bungalow, and the nights of whiskey and bridge and his jaw would tighten. He’d pick up his toothbrush before bed and recall them making faces in the mirror at each other as they brushed their teeth or catch himself waking up in the middle of the night and reaching across the bed for her. Sometimes, he wondered if he should give in to Mayer and just move into the M-G-M enclave like a good little boy since there’d be no danger of running into memories in a new house.
In the second week after Nelly had gone, after he’d sobered up some, he’d had every intention of writing her. The trouble was that everything he could think to say fell so short of the mark he couldn’t bring himself to say anything at all. He’d ruined her career and everything she’d worked so hard for and let her leave knowing that she might be pregnant, not even offering her money for the train. Sorry didn’t come close. He didn’t know what the point of a letter would be, either. We can’t be together anymore, but how are you doing? Sorry I wrecked it all for you. Hope I didn’t knock you up. Yours sincerely, Buster. By the time June rolled around, he’d talked himself out of it, lying and telling himself she’d reach out if she was pregnant. His pop was right. There wasn’t anything to do but move past it.
That morning went by as though Constance had never blackmailed him and he’d never accused her of being a slut. After the bungalow had been appraised, he drove the women to the New York set in his Lincoln so they could admire its scale and examine the colorful wooden head of the dragon that the Chinese people of Los Angeles had lent for the parade sequence. “It’s the second largest they have,” he told them with pride. He peeled up his shirt and undershirt to show them the bruises that dotted his torso from the slugs fired in the Tong War scene the day before. He looked at Natalie’s face for a spark of attraction or at the very least some sympathy for his war wounds, but she showed only mild interest. They drove over to The Tide of Empire set once the women tired of poking around. An enormous miners’ camp sat square in the lot, looking right out of 1849. Remembering the Civil War encampment for The General and its rows of white tents and Johnny Rebs sitting at campfires, he was impressed by the breadth and accuracy of the scene. Allan Dwan came over for introductions and handshakes. “Say, how’d you like to be an extra for the day?” he said. “I bet we can find you a small part.”
Buster liked the idea a lot. When he saw Natalie exchange a disapproving look with Dutch, he liked it even more. A costume girl gave him some baggy trousers, a checked yellow shirt, a dark checked vest, and floppy cowboy hat, and a makeup girl sat him down in a chair to put a goatee and drooping mustache on him and add some strategic makeup to make his face look dirty. He looked every inch a hardscrabble cowpoke.
“Now let’s see,” said Dwan. “We’ve got a part in the script that calls for a drunk to be thrown out of the saloon. How’d that suit you?”
In no time, George Duryea was throwing him out of the swinging doors and he was tumbling head over heels onto his ass. Between takes and camera adjustments, it took about forty-five minutes. He was sweating in a pleasant way when he was done and posed for a picture with Nate, Dutch, Dwan, George Duryea, and Renée Adorée. He sat back down in the makeup girl’s chair to have his face scrubbed down and the hair pulled off his chin and upper lip. She was cute, with a waved blonde bob and plump cheeks.
Looking to make sure Nate wasn’t paying attention, he asked on a wicked whim, “What’s your name?”
“Gertie,” she said, sponging some fake dirt from his forehead.
He searched her face and tried to determine whether she was interested in him. “Me and some of the M-G-M folks are getting together Monday night at my place, if you’d like to come by.” In reality, he had laid no such plans.
Gertie looked down and a smile played on her lips. “Okay.”
“10132 Grant Avenue. Eight o’clock,” he said.
“10132 Grant,” she said.
“That’s right. Monday.”
He got back into his clothes feeling triumphant. Before they departed, Dwan handed him a $5 extra’s check. He laughed. “This is going in a frame on my wall.” When they returned to the bungalow, Caruthers prepared a late lunch. Over green beans and lamb, the women chatted about clothes, the children, and a book Dutch had just read about a lighthouse. Buster picked at his food, not really listening.
Ten days had gone by since his anniversary. He’d always stuck to easy stuff when it came to presents for the occasion, a new fur or some unreasonably expensive jewelry selected by a helpful shop girl who usually had her commission in mind. Natalie used to delight in giving him traditional gifts. The first year was paper, a framed letterpress poem by Wordsworth or Longfellow or someone like that. He no longer remembered the poet or poem, just that it had gone missing years ago in one of their many moves. The second gift was a bespoke shirt of the finest California cotton, followed the next year by wingtip Oxford shoes of kid leather, and silk pajamas from Saks Fifth Avenue the next. Gift number five had been a mahogany smoking stand. Last year’s gift was a cake, which he’d been disappointed in, maybe because it seemed to have taken little thought compared to the previous years’ gifts, maybe because Natalie had left it on the table without fanfare and only bothered much later to wish him a happy anniversary with a single tepid peck on the cheek. This year, he’d been at the bungalow on their anniversary and had not arranged for any gifts to be delivered to the Villa. Similarly, there was nothing waiting for him when he returned home the next night. He tried to remember what the traditional gift for a seventh wedding anniversary was. Salt, maybe, though he thought that arsenic would have worked just as well.
“What are you so glum about?” Constance said.
“What, me?” he said, blinking out of his thoughts. Natalie was looking down at her plate as if she were hardly paying attention. “Oh, I ain’t glum,” he said quickly. “Just tired from the Tong War. I took a hell of a licking.”
He wondered when they would stop treating him like a guilty man. A whole month had passed since Nelly had skipped town, yet they still behaved as though he had her concealed somewhere. He gave up on his lunch and called for Caruthers, who was smoking on the front porch. Barely two words were exchanged before the butler was mixing up a martini. Buster drank it in two gulps, chewed the olive, then cocked his head for another.
By the time the grandfather clock in Constance’s parlor at the Gaylord struck nine, he was ravenous and tucked into his buffet supper with appetite. He’d expected Polynesian grub to be served, brightly colored fish or something with coconuts, but the silver dishes laid on a long table contained the usual French fare of the upper crust, all butter, cream, and potato. Each place setting included party favors of miniature potted palms and candied pineapple. In what was probably an act of deliberate cruelty on Dutch’s part, he was seated between Peg and Norma, whom he mostly ignored in favor of the Brophys and Junior who sat opposite him. Under most circumstances Norma was one of his favorite people to chat with, but he hadn’t forgiven her for the confrontation over Nelly. Ebba was next to Peg and across from Junior. Further down were Buster Collier, Constance, and Nate, while Gil was on Norma’s other side. Fanny Brice, James Cooley, and Roger Davis rounded out the group.
The conversation tripped around, Felstead’s win at the Derby, trans-Pacific airplane flights, and the explosion at the Russian Eagle Café by some mad Russian. Jack Dempsey had been there when the fire had broken out and so had Colleen Moore and Charlie Chaplin, who grabbed a garden hose to try to help firemen put out the flames.
“Renée Adorée was there too. Mentioned it this afternoon,” he said, taking a drink from his glass of Scotch. Even with a full stomach, the martinis he’d had earlier and the whiskey that had chased them were still in hearty swing.
“Renée Adorée?” Norma said, with a slight lift of her eyebrow.
He felt an accusation in her question and bit back a response he would regret.
“He took us to see them shoot their Western picture this morning,” Natalie broke in, coming to his rescue and surprising him. “Of course, he had to get in costume and join them.”
“Made five dollars.” He smiled and swished his Scotch.
“Oh, now there’s a heartbreaker,” said Sedgwick, with a chuckle. “Being unfaithful to us?”
“Naturally,” said Constance. “As Nate can tell you he’s very good at that.” Her joke descended uncomfortably, if it was a joke. Eddie and Ebba laughed, the other guests were silent.
“Don’t spoil your own party, dear,” Buster replied, taking a drink. Outwardly, he sounded calm, but his jaw had tightened.
“How do you feel now that your new picture is done?” Ebba said to Norma, leaning forward.
“It’s a relief, of course, but Gil and I had an awful lot of fun filming it,” Norma said. Gil gave a smile and kissed her cheek.
Suddenly everyone was interested in Norma’s story to the exclusion of other conversation. Eddie raised an eyebrow at him and he shrugged. Constance had been thorny with him before over his extramarital exploits, though this was perhaps the thorniest she’d ever been. It was a wonder she hadn’t dug into him while they were at the bungalow and studios, though she hadn’t been drinking champagne then. He avoided looking at Peg. He decided he didn’t want to find out from her face how much she knew. Even if she didn’t know, she probably suspected enough. He thought of the makeup girl, Greta or Gretchen or whatever her name was, and felt satisfied with himself. He tipped the rest of the Scotch back.
He retired in the lounge with the fellows to smoke cigars and talk about the picture. Gil, James, Roger, and Buster Collier listened as he and Ed Brophy described the dressing room scene. “Oh, it was damn hard to keep from laughing. You should have seen him in there, huffing and puffing and carrying on. I thought he was going to deck me for serious,” Buster said.
“Don’t forget what you did with the swimming pool.” Sedgwick leaned back in the armchair he was sitting in and took a drag from his cigar. “The writers tell him he’s going to get gum stuck to the seat of his drawers and rip them in front of the girl. Big laugh, right? ‘No,’ says Buster. ‘That’s too easy. Not embarrassing enough.’ So he decides he’s going to lose his bathing suit when he dives in the pool. You can’t imagine how many extras we’ve got in that pool, dozens of girls, and there’s Keaton without a damn stitch on.”
Everyone roared with laughter. Buster beamed.
Constance’s butler Richmond refilled his glass so many times he lost count, then Buster Two was in full flourish. He returned to the parlor, where The George Olsen Orchestra was playing on the radio and the women were gossiping, and whisked Fanny Brice into his arms. Of course, he didn’t think of Fanny that way and she didn’t think of him that way, he just wanted to dance and he was still in hot water with the Talmadge women. He hummed along: “Blue skies, nothing but blue skies all day long.”
The next song was Gene Austin’s “Forgive Me.” It would have been fitting to gather Natalie close and sing it in her ear as they swayed slowly on the rug. If they had been alone, he would have. He felt a swoop of sadness at the thought, but forgot it after he took Ebba by the hand and set her giggling by pretending to woo her as Austin crooned sentimentally. When the song was finished and he’d finished his courtship by staggering back on the carpet with his hands clutched to his heart, he saw Natalie’s expression and the tightness of her lips. He was embarrassing her again. His solution was to perform a wild solo Cossack dance to “Hard-to-Get Gertie,” which brought applause raining down on him except from Peg and her daughters.
Gertie. That had been the makeup girl’s name. She hadn’t been hard to get at all.
Sometime later, perhaps it was five minutes, perhaps an hour, he opened a window, wrestled off the screen, and sat in it. He was holding his potted pineapple for reasons unknown. He swung his legs, his heels hitting the stone facade of the building. Constance was talking about him in low tones from across the room. He remembered dangling out such a window with Al St. John during a lunch break at the studio on 48th street, clinging desperately to the window ledge with fingers slipping as everyone in the room panicked, not knowing about the cornice beneath the window. One of the women in the room fainted dead away. He didn’t think it had been Natalie, though she’d struck him as so delicate then that he could see her doing such a thing. He hadn’t taken much notice of her in those early days. She was a wallflower to the bursting peonies that were Dutch and Norma, and besides he and Alice were screwing each other silly when he wasn’t busy eating, drinking, and sleeping pictures with Roscoe.
The potted pineapple was of course much heavier than a baseball, but he still pretended it was one as he hefted it in his right hand and swung it down to the street below where it landed smack-dab on someone’s car, shattering the windshield.
“My goodness, what on earth was that?” Peg said from behind him. “Buster?
“I’m so hot and bothered I can’t tell my elbow from my ear,” he sang. “Suffer something awful each time you go, much worse when you’re near. Here I am with all my bridges burned, just a babe in arms where you’re concerned …”
“Come on, you’ve had your fun,” one of the men said. Rough hands seized him under the arms and pulled him free of the window. He tumbled onto the carpet, a real tumble. He would have protested, but dinner was about to come up. He managed to get to his feet and to the window in time. Someone grabbed him as if to pull him back again but thought better as all that fine French food went spilling down his throat and to the sidewalk nine stories below.
Notes: Most of those were some of my favorite childhood books too. ;) I did not have a stuffed tiger named Barney though.
Please leave a comment and / or reblog if you liked this chapter. Your feedback inspires me to get this story finished, which I will eventually.
She would remember it so clearly. She was stretched out on the sofa reading But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes by Anita Loos, the west-facing window was open, admitting a cool breeze carrying the smell of lilacs, and the radio was playing a Ukulele Ike song. Her mood was better than it had been the day before. She had no plans except to read, study her lines, and maybe treat herself to Street Angel, which was playing downtown at 6 p.m.
A knock on the door made her jump. She didn’t have any time to tell whoever was on the other side that she was coming before there was the rattle of a key turning in the lock. She sat up straight as Buster staggered through the door.
“Goodness, what’s wrong?” she said, throwing her legs over the side of the sofa and setting the book down. As he lurched toward her and sat on the other end of the sofa, she could smell what was wrong. He appeared to have taken a recent swim in a bathtub of whiskey.
“Something happened,” he said without preamble, not looking at her. He took off his cap and played with the brim.
“I’ll get you a glass of water,” she said. Whatever it was, it was bad. She would wonder later why she didn’t guess what it was. It was simply apparent to her that in his state, he was in need of immediate attention. She filled a glass from the tap and set it on the coffee table in front of him. He didn’t touch it. She sat next to him and laid her hand on his arm, but he refused to look at her as he went on.
“I’m awful sorry about this and I just don’t know how to tell you.” His nose sounded plugged and his voice was thick and nasal, his words a beat or two slower than normal. She wondered how much he’d had to drink.
“I hope you didn’t drive yourself,” she said.
He looked at her at last and his eyes were glazed. “Well who else was gonna do it?”
“Your butler,” she said. “You can’t drive like this. You could get in a wreck and hurt yourself. Or someone else.”
“Aw, to hell with my driving. I need to tell you something important.” He looked back down at his hands.
She realized then what it was. “Oh,” she said. Her mind was a blank. There was no before or after, only that moment suspended in time like a dragonfly in amber as she waited for seeming eons to hear what he would say next.
His expression was sorrowful. “The girls found out about us.”
Her heart pounded. “What girls?”
“The Talmadges,” he said. “Natalie’s sisters.”
She knew then by his voice and by the depth of his drunkenness it was over. Later, she would feel surprised by her reaction. She was neither heartbroken nor devastated, she only wanted to soothe him. “How did they find out?” she said softly, but she knew. Somehow Constance had pieced it together after her dance with Buster at the party.
“It’s been going around about you and me. Guess some folks knew about you being at the bungalow and word got around.” His thumbs massaged the rim of the hat.
She put her hand between his shoulders. Eddie Sedgwick. Maybe others too, peering out of their curtains as she hurried into Buster’s car with her head ducked. It didn’t matter. “And they told you it’s her or me,” she said. In her daydreams, insofar as she had allowed herself daydreams, Buster renounced Natalie voluntarily. She’d daydreamed it all wrong.
“Oh, it’s worse than that. I don’t know how to tell you, Nell.”
He’d never called her Nell. She bit her lip, feeling hot and numb.
“You see, about those pictures. I took those pictures of you, ‘member? The girls got suspicious and god dammit they went through my room and they found them.”
Nelly felt the color drain from her face. She rubbed Buster’s back, trying to give him the strength to go on. His voice was so heavy and nasally.
“Must have made them pretty sore ‘cause they say they’re going to take them to the papers if I don’t break it off with you. They’ve got me skewered. Mr. Mayer’s the type who wants all his stars minding their Ps and Qs. No scandals and they know it.”
Nelly nodded mechanically. She felt like she was floating above her body looking down on them both. “It would cause a big scandal if they took the pictures to the papers,” she said.
Buster echoed her nod, sucking in his lower lip. “Uh-huh. ‘Cause they’ve got one of me too. I’d lose everything.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Gets worse.”
Her heart thumped.
“They had you sacked.” His hands clenched over the hat. “There ain’t a fucking thing I can do about it either. I’m real sorry. I hate to tell you.”
Her hand fell from his back. “Oh.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, trying to take everything in. Her head was swimming.
“It’s all my fault. I dragged you into this and now I’ve gone and wrecked it all for you.”
She opened her eyes and he’d turned his head away from her.
“No.” She felt an unexpected courage fill her. He needed her to be brave. She would. She rested her hand on his knee. “It’s my fault too. I knew the risks. It was—well, it was bound to happen. I’ll be just fine.”
Even as she said that, it dawned on her that her options from here forward were limited and menial. As long as the Talmadges held those photographs in their possession, she’d have no chance in pictures. She could always get a job as a typist or a telephone operator, but what was the point of staying in Hollywood to be a typist? How could she carry on knowing she’d fallen so far? Carrying on in the same town as Buster as if nothing had happened? They sat there in silence. She decided. She would be brave for both of them.
“I’ll just go back home,” she said. “Don’t worry, it’s for the best. I don’t want you to get in trouble. It’s not worth throwing anything away for me.”
Looking back at it, she couldn’t believe how calm she was, how resolved. A deep-seated clarity was upon her.
Buster’s face was still turned away, but she could see him swallow hard. “I’ll be fine,” she assured him.
“I don’t like that one bit,” he said, clearing his throat.
“Well, what else can we do?”
He wrung his cap. “Just—cool it for a bit. Take a break for a few weeks. Then we’ll be extra careful. We can just keep it here, at your place. No more’n a couple hours at a time, maybe once a week or something.”
She shook her head. “They’ll be watching you like a hawk now. Then we’re back to square one and they’ll ruin your career. I don’t want you to throw it all away for me. You don’t want to throw it away all for me. You don’t have to pretend you want to. I know you still care for …” She didn’t want to say Natalie’s name. “It’s alright,” she said instead.
“Ah, hell,” he said, squeezing his eyes closed. “What about your career in pictures?” He put his head in his hands. The cap in his right hand shielded his face from view.
Nelly put a hand between his shoulders again. “Let’s be honest,” she said with a forced laugh. “It wasn’t going so well even before this. I’ll go back to the theater. It’ll work out.” She tried to make her voice light and reassuring.
They fell silent again. The radio was playing the Coon-Sanders Orchestra’s “Everything is Hotsy-Totsy Now.” The song was boisterous and happy. Sparrows twittered in the bushes outside the windows. Buster took a deep breath and blew it out heavily. She didn’t want him to leave. She tried not to think about the reality that this was the last time she’d see him. She had to be brave.
The minutes ticked away. The radio played a slow, sultry number from Annette Hanshaw. Just another night, nothing in sight, nothing but grieving. When I go to sleep, memories will creep, making me blue …
She could feel sadness seeping in with each minute. She was in danger of making some kind of irrational plea. “I should pack,” she said. “You need to get home before you get in more trouble.”
Again, every detail would stick in her memory. She walked Buster to the door, but kept him at arm’s length. She knew if she embraced him, she would lose control. He wasn’t crying, men didn’t cry, but he didn’t look like himself at all. His face was dazed, like someone had just punched him in the face. He put his cap on and stumbled as he reached for the doorknob. She told him to drive slowly and watch for other cars. If she could have driven him home herself, she might have considered it, but she didn’t know how to drive. He was almost out of the door when he turned around.
“I can write you, can’t I?” he said, with a sudden passion. He patted his breast pocket for a pen, looking lost.
She nodded. A hard knot had come into her throat and she could feel the reserves of her bravery diminishing. She tore a piece of paper from a steno pad and wrote her parents’ address down as he waited in the doorway. Their fingers touched as she handed it to him. She swallowed. “You drive safely, you hear?” she said, her voice somehow steady, blithe even.
Buster nodded. He looked into her eyes for a moment. Then she was shutting the door and his footsteps were going down the hall. For a whole half hour, she just sat on the sofa feeling stunned. At any moment, Buster would come running back down the hall and pound on the door, telling her he’d reconsidered. When that didn’t happen, she rose after a while and pulled her wardrobe trunk out from a corner and began to gather her clothes.
In contrast to her final encounter with Buster, her last days in Hollywood were indistinguishable. She was so busy, so overburdened and fatigued, her grief was compartmentalized for the time being. There were ads to place for her sofa, secondhand set of china, and other household odds and ends, and knocks at the door to answer as strangers showed up to buy or turn down her possessions; her landlord to notify and her May rent check to hand over even though two-thirds of the month still lay ahead and she wouldn’t be occupying the apartment for it; a telegram to send to her mother and father announcing her return home; a visit to the Los Angeles Players to tell them a sudden death in the family meant that her eager understudy would have to take her place; a decision to make about the phonograph and its two dozen records. There was no room in her wardrobe trunk or suitcases. She thought of leaving them behind, but couldn’t stand the idea.
That was the sharpest memory from that time, arranging to ship the phonograph and records back to Evanston. It was the first time she’d cried since Buster’s visit. She’d knocked on Mr. Hernandez’s door, not knowing who else to trust with one of her dearest possessions. He had always been friendly, though lately she always put down her eyes and mumbled her helloes when they met at the mailbox or in the hall. She wasn’t worldly enough not to be embarrassed by his hearing her in the grip of ecstasy more than once.
“Well,” she said, sitting in one of Mr. Hernandez’s floral armchairs holding the cup of coffee he’d insisted she have. “I’m leaving town.”
Mr. Hernandez was somewhere south of sixty, with a brown, weather-beaten face that added ten years to his age. His father had helped build the railroads in the Sierra foothills and Mr. Hernandez had followed in his footsteps, though in eastern Nebraska. He had come back to his native state for retirement, his two sons having grown up and his wife died fifteen years prior.
“Sorry to hear that. Where you heading?” he said, upon hearing her news.
“Back home to my folks,” she said, uncomfortable that she had an angle with the visit. “That’s why I came by. I’ve got a phonograph, some records too, I can’t take with me and I’m afraid it’s all too heavy for me to carry to the post office. There’s no room in my luggage. I hate to impose, but I’d pay you ten dollars. I don’t like to ask. I never did make any friends here.” She took a gulp of coffee for courage and burnt her tongue.
“I’d be happy to, but what’s the hurry?”
He had, she’d reflected, the older person’s ability to read the young person like a book. It piqued her, but she didn’t want to be rude, especially since he’d just agreed to ship her records. “I’m not having much luck with pictures here,” she said. “Thought I’d go back to the theater for awhile.” She offered an apologetic smile.
“What about that fella of yours?” said Mr. Hernandez, sipping from his coffee. “What’s he gonna do? I seen him once. Looks a lot like that movie fella. Harold Lloyd, I think that’s the one.”
She colored crimson. “Oh, he—” She didn’t know how to finish. Left because he still loved his wife and his two famous movie star sisters-in-law were blackmailing him? She couldn’t tell that to an old man she barely knew. As she struggled to come up with an excuse, she had remembered Buster coming up the hall with a box of birthday cake and the record that read on one side “You Took Advantage of Me.” The sorrow was like a wall of water that rose up from nowhere and slammed her off her feet. She burst into tears.
At one point during the torrent, she was aware of Mr. Hernandez kneeling by the chair and offering his handkerchief and a comforting arm. “There, there. I didn’t mean to upset you. This fella, forget it. Not worth all this. You’re a pretty gal. You’ll find a fella who cares more and this’ll all be forgotten.”
She nodded, agreeing, and cried some more.
The crying had not slowed at all when her train left Central Station and began its eastward trek. With no rent or bills to worry about any longer, she used some of her savings to buy herself the privacy of a bedroom compartment so she wouldn’t have to cry around strangers and face their questions or sympathetic looks. A black porter named Sam attended her. He was alarmed that she wouldn’t eat, and tempted her at regular intervals with grapes, baked chicken pie, and rice pudding with raisins, but food had become disagreeable. She could force only two or three bites. She stared out the window during the daytime and saturated her supply of handkerchiefs with tears. She didn’t know what she was sadder about, her silly dream of becoming somebody on the silver screen—or Buster. It was hard to believe the affair had lasted just three months and that he’d been in New York for a third of it. It felt so much longer, so much more consequential. It seemed like just yesterday that they’d kissed on the lawn of the Villa under the stars; it seemed like a lifetime ago. Her fitful dreams were filled with her own tears and wild pleas. In some, Buster was at a party or premiere with Natalie nearby, laughing for camera bulbs and ignoring her entirely. In others, he was hardened to her. She begged for him back but he wasn’t moved in the slightest. He’d look at her with a stone face and return to whatever he was doing, making it clear that she was bothering him.
She felt like a mummified husk of a woman when the train pulled into Union Station two days later. She’d cried so many tears that her mouth was dry and she was constantly thirsty. What little sleep she’d gotten had not been restful due to her tormented dreams and the thrashing of the train from side to side as it roared through the night. Sam the porter loaded her wardrobe truck onto a handcart and she took the suitcase, and together they made it up to Canal Street. It was almost noon. Sam hailed a taxi cab and helped load her luggage into the taxi, and she tipped him twenty dollars against his protests. To the cab driver, she said, “Ashbury Avenue, Evanston. I don’t care what it costs.” She could have had him take her to the L Stop, but the idea of having to have her luggage loaded and unloaded again exhausted her. The cab driver took her right to the doorstop of the slate blue house with the cream windows and the connected third-story dormers and heaved her luggage up the red-brick drive. She knocked on the door and Jennie answered. When Lena came bustling to the door at Jennie’s call and saw who it was, she squealed and threw her arms around her daughter. Nelly buried her face in her mother’s shoulder and cried.
“I’m home, Mama.”
Buster dealt with the sudden end to his affair with Nelly the best way he knew how, by drinking. He was so plastered by Monday morning that he had Caruthers drive him to the studio. When he swayed his way onto Lot Two, he didn’t care who noticed. He thought he was doing okay holding his own until he dropped a weight on his left foot in the middle of a gag and Sedgwick ordered him to the infirmary, where a doctor iced the swollen appendage, which had already turned blue and green. “You’ve got to be crazy, thinking you can get away with acrobatics when you’ve had this much to drink,” the doctor lectured, the cigarette in his mouth bobbing as he talked. He wrapped the foot tightly in an elastic bandage and told Buster to stay off it for at least the rest of the day. Buster took another nip from his flask as soon as he’d hobbled out of the infirmary, then went and explained the score to Sedgwick. He was in every scene, so there was no point in filming as long as he was out of commission. They called it a wrap for the day even though he knew Weingarten would catch wind of it and give him hell. As he might have predicted, Sedgwick gave him the same lecture the doctor did. “It’s Monday, too. I don’t know what in the hell you’re doing drinking on a Monday morning.” Buster smiled grimly and said nothing.
He did ease off the next morning, though his hangover cried out for something to soothe it. His foot was painful and so swollen he could barely stuff it in his shoe. As they filmed that morning’s scenes, he had to use all his effort not to limp when the cameras were rolling. The pain, the willpower, not to mention the aching hangover, kept his mind off of anything else. That night was a different story. It belonged to Buster One. He invited the whole M-G-M stable to the bungalow and drank to his heart’s content. He couldn’t remember a single thing about the party when his alarm went off the next day, but he was still drunk and had the creeping suspicion he’d only been in bed for a couple of hours. Again, he gritted through the pain in his swollen foot as he dashed around the New York set with his Pathé. As long as he had the film to concentrate on, he didn’t have much room to think about anything else. Well, other than his foot.
After shooting wrapped on Wednesday, Ed Brophy, Buster Collier, and Cliff Edwards, his newest acquaintance, met him back at the bungalow, where Caruthers treated them to steak dinners and as many cocktails as they wanted before they sat down at the table for a bridge game. A couple girls wandered in, budding starlets looking for their “in” into pictures. One sat in his lap and played with his hair, and although he wasn’t much interested in anything having to do with girls, he thought of Constance and Norma didn’t push her away. They couldn’t tell him what to do.
Around midnight, there was a strong knock at the door. He was losing badly to Brophy and owed him at least three thousand dollars, but with as fried he was, it wasn’t bothering him any. “Come in!” he yelled.
The large frame of Edward Sedgwick lumbered into view. He was wearing blue-striped pajamas. Buster blinked at him, confounded.
“Has it occurred to you that you’re supposed to be on set in six hours?”
The girl in his lap giggled and shifted. He caught a whiff of cheap perfume and sweat.
“C’mon, Junior. I didn’t know you were next door,” he protested. “We can keep it down.”
“We’ll keep it down,” echoed the girl.
“No one asked you,” said Buster, scooting up in his chair a little. She was starting to hurt his thighs.
“My sleep’s the least of my worries right now.” The director seized Buster’s cocktail glass and dumped it down the drain.
“Oh brother have you caught it,” said Cliff, with a laugh.
“Put a sock in it,” Buster replied, reaching for the whiskey bottle. That too was contraband for Sedgwick, who upturned it in the sink. The bungalow was still amply stocked with spirits, but Buster got the point. “Alright, alright, we’re calling it a night. You satisfied? This is costing me three thousand clams.”
“Three thousand fifty,” said Brophy in his high-pitched New York brogue.
“Up,” said Buster to the nameless girl, pressing against the back of her waist with both hands. Under Sedgwick’s watchful eye, he cut Brophy a check for his winnings and grimaced at Cliff, his mediocre partner. Cliff just laughed, taking a swig of gin for the road. Pretty soon, he and Sedgwick were almost alone. The girl who’d sat in his lap was the last to leave. She caught his eye as she backed out the door, trying to communicate something. “Get lost kid,” Buster said, by way of farewell. When she was gone, he lit a cigarette and said, “Be sure you mention her to Norma and Constance next time you see ‘em.”
“What in the devil are you talking about?” said Sedgwick, sounding confused. He was standing in the doorway, so big he filled the whole frame.
“Never mind,” said Buster. He took a drag from the cigarette.
“What’s eating you lately?” said Sedgwick.
“Nothing. Just having a good time. Guess I lost track of the hour.”
“No, no, no. You’ve been plastered since Monday. Whatever it is, we can’t make a picture like this. Not when you can hardly stand up straight.”
Buster limped across the room for an ashtray. He couldn’t think clearly and he liked it that way. “I thought I was fine today.”
“You were better than you were Monday, but worse than you were yesterday.”
“I’ll split the difference tomorrow,” he joked. He sank into an armchair and ashed his cigarette.
“Give it a rest. Go to bed.” Sedgwick’s tone was firm.
He left and Buster was too tired to do anything but obey. He brushed his teeth, undressed, passed out as soon as he pulled up the covers.
The hangover was back with a vengeance Thursday and no amount of black coffee could take away its bite, but at least Sedgwick couldn’t accuse him of being drunk. They filmed in the newsroom set and his consolation for the hangover was getting to shatter the fake plate glass (made from sugar) of the entry door several times. After filming wrapped, he took a few swigs from his flask and tucked it into his jacket. For no particular reason, he found himself driving uptown to the small hotel where Joe lived.
“Hey Pop,” he said, when Joe opened the door. One half of his father’s face was covered in shaving cream and the other half was shaved. His tie was looped loosely around his neck, not yet tied.
“Come on in, son,” said Joe. He didn’t seem surprised by the unannounced visit.
Buster walked in. The Yanks game was on the radio and there was a glass of bourbon on the desk.
Joe noticed him looking. “Want a glass of the good stuff?” he said.
Buster shook his head and pulled out his flask, holding it up for him to see. Joe picked up the glass of bourbon and Buster had a pull of whiskey. Joe motioned him toward the bathroom and Buster stood in the doorway as he finished shaving. It was a funny thing. He owed his whole career, in a way, to his pa shaving at a mirror. Back in the Three Keaton days, Joe would lean forward, scraping delicately at his neck with the razor, and the basketball that Buster was innocently swinging on a rubber hose would get closer and closer until it finally popped him in the back of the neck and he’d bash his head into the mirror. Joe would roar, Buster would catch hell, and the audience would be in stitches.
“What’s eating ya?” said Joe. Buster must have looked surprised, because Joe said, “Look, just ‘cause I haven’t lived with ya since you was twenty-one, I can still read ya like a book. You’re my kid.”
Buster took a long swig of whiskey and lit a cigarette before he answered. Might as well come out with it. “I had an affair,” he said. It was the first he’d mentioned it to anyone. “Norma and Nate and them caught wind and so Norma and Dutch blackmailed me into calling it off. Happened Sunday. She had to leave town. She was working for United Artists and they had her fired.”
Joe slopped a wad of shaving cream off his razor and into the sink, and turned to scrutinize him for a few moments. He turned back to the mirror and angled his head, scraping the right side of his jaw. “You want my advice, forget about her as fast as you can. Women are a dime a dozen. You’ll learn to be more careful next time.”
The advice wasn’t comforting, but Buster couldn’t argue with it. As far as he was concerned, Joe had written the book on affairs. It was his old man who’d taught him about Della’s back in the summer before his nineteenth birthday. Buster shrugged in response, taking a drag from his cigarette.
“I can see you’re hurtin’,” Joe said.
Buster found an ashtray on the desk and returned to the doorway.
“I did that a few times,” Joe continued. “Fallin’ in love.”
The child in Buster still didn’t like to hear his father talk about his infidelity. As he’d grown from a boy into a teenager, he knew that Joe stepped out on Myra—and Myra knew it too—but somehow it got under his skin even now. He wondered if Jimmy and Bobby would feel the same way about him once they were grown.
“It goes away after awhile though. Ya get over it. Ya find another one.”
“Uh-huh,” said Buster. He held the smoke in his lungs, wanting the calm of the nicotine to linger just a little longer.
Joe splashed his face with water, patted it with a towel, and dabbed on some aftershave. “If ya want, you can come down to blind pig with me.”
His weeknight routine was unchanged from the latter Three Keaton days. Come five-thirty, he could be found getting ready for a night at the bar shooting pool, playing poker, and getting toasted. The only difference now was that Prohibition had driven the bars underground and the good stuff was scarce at the speak-easies, but Joe didn’t mind moonshine as long as the company was good.
“Nah,” said Buster. All things being equal he preferred to be alone.
“Suit yourself,” said Joe, then, “Oh!” The Yanks had just scored a run against the Browns.
He ended up driving Joe to the bar and dipped into his wallet for a couple General Grants after he parked. “Thanks,” said Joe, pocketing the bills and patting Buster’s shoulder before he got out of the car. He never made a fuss over Buster paying his monthly hotel tab and giving him a generous monthly allowance, but Buster felt his gratitude all the same. He looked ahead through the windshield at his father disappearing into the bar and swallowed against a sudden lump in his throat. More than half-cocked from the whiskey now, he thought of going to Nelly’s to be petted and consoled. When he remembered that her apartment was empty, he squeezed his eyes shut hard and pulled out the flask.
Notes: To get the flavor of what Buster would have sounded like at Nelly’s, I watched parts of What, No Beer? I’m not sure there’s a single scene in that film where he isn’t completely plastered. It’s pathetic and hard to watch.
Buster actually did drop a weight on his foot in May 1928 while filming The Cameraman.
The scene between Buster and Joe Keaton was one of my favorite to write so far. It kind of just came out of nowhere too. I just had this picture of them in my head that I wrote down before beginning the first part of Buster’s section of the chapter.
I’m closer to the end of the story, but I would estimate there’s still a good six chapters to go. Knowing me, this will probably stretch to more like ten to fifteen chapters! We’ll see.
I’ve gone back and changed a couple details in the last chapter for continuity. I’ve done pretty well so far serializing this story Charles Dickens-style, but sometimes I need to tweak details for consistency.
Btw, minstrel music was very popular in the 1920s, but the Coon of Coon-Sanders Orchestra isn't a racial epithet; it's the last name of one of the co-leaders of the band, Carleton Coon (not to be confused with racist anthropologist Carleton S. Coon).
When Buster walked into Nelly’s apartment building, she was on the phone in the hallway. She turned her head at the sound of the door and said, “Oh!” He walked to her and tapped the thin brown paper box in his hands, drawing her attention to it. Inside was a big fat chocolate cake.
“No, it’s just Joseph,” she said to the person on the other line. He raised an eyebrow. “Well, I ought to get going now … Yes I’ll write soon … No, I haven’t yet. Yes, I will. I love you too. Goodbye.” She hung up the phone and turned to him with perplexity written across her face.
“Happy birthday,” he said. “Who’s Joseph?”
“Hush. Get inside before someone catches you standing there.”
Beneath the box was the Paul Whiteman Orchestra’s most recent record, “You Took Advantage of Me,” the one they’d performed during his first dance with Nelly last night, and inside the sleeve a photograph he almost hadn’t developed. He set both box and record on Nelly’s broken dining table, making a mental note to get her a new one one of these days. “How’s the birthday girl?” He turned back to her.
“Oh, just fine,” she said with a smile, although it looked a little strained to him. Her eyes were tired, a milder echo of the hangover he knew was also written across his face.
“Not very convincing,” he said, putting two fingers under her chin and tilting it. Her soft lips pulled his thoughts in a different direction, and her bedroom was west on the route. “Shouldn’t have kept you out so late or letcha drink so much.” He stroked her cheek and looked into her eyes.
She smiled again. This time, there was no question it was forced. His stomach did a mild flip as he recalled their liaison at the Villa a week ago in which he hadn’t used a thin. Maybe she was feeling sick because— He dismissed the thought. It was too early for that. While he wasn’t an expert on the finer points of the birds and the bees always, he was sure things didn’t go that fast. He cupped his hands over her shoulders and gave a little squeeze. “Say, what’s the matter? If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were sad it’s your birthday.”
She shook her head and shrugged. “I’m always sad on my birthday. When I was a girl, it was because I thought it never lasted long enough. I wanted a whole week of birthday. Now that I’m grown up, time goes too fast. I always wonder what I’ve got to show for all those years. Not much.”
“Aw, c’mon. You got plenty. Steamboat opens tonight and you’ve got that Barrymore picture too. And your play,” he said.
She smiled weakly again. “I suppose. Lately I have this feeling that everything I ever try just sort of drains out of my fingers, like water. Maybe it’s just middle age talking.”
“Oh, that’s all bull and you know it.” He kissed her forehead. He didn’t tell her he knew exactly how she felt, his marriage and career in pictures like water through his fingers. Instead, he just said, “You ain’t middle-aged, either.”
“Look where you were when you were twenty-seven, though. You were on top of the world. You were—” She stopped and thought, brow furrowed. “Help me out,” she said with a laugh, when nothing apparently came to her.
He did some quick math. His twenty-seventh year would have spanned 1922 and 1923. Day Dreams, The Balloonatic, and The Love Nest all came out around then. It had all been films in those glorious years, barely a moment’s rest between shooting and cutting. They did The Three Ages in ‘23 he was pretty sure, and they’d definitely done Our Hospitality. Jimmy was still very much a baby and Bobby went from a twinkle in his parents’ eyes to a person whose kicks could be felt through Natalie’s stomach by the time his papa’s twenty-eighth birthday came around in October. There’d been a house in there too, but he struggled to remember which one.
“Doing my first full-length features,” he said, wandering over to the sofa and sitting on the arm. “That was the year we did Three Ages and Our Hospitality. Went to Oregon for parts of Hospitality. We built a real Stephenson’s rocket for it—that was the train. Back then they’d just hook a few coaches to an engine. Stagecoaches I mean.”
“Was that the one with your wife? And it was a little like The General?” said Nelly, sitting on the opposite arm of the sofa.
“Well, not too much like The General,” he objected. “The story’s different. Much different. But yeah, Nate was the leading lady in that one and I grew my hair out for that one too.”
“You must love her very much,” she said politely, giving that same small sad smile.
Understanding hit. He could guess why she’d seemed so sad when she left last night and why she was sad now. They were at a crossroads. Ambling along the path of their affair, he hadn’t seen it coming up this soon. He wasn’t sure he was ready for it. It meant deciding whether to change direction or keep walking along in the same one. Feeling his heart in his throat, he stood back up and went back to the table. He wanted a cigarette. “Aren’t you wondering what’s in the box?”
“Is it cake?” she said.
“Palazzo Bakery. You only get a piece if you guess the flavor though,” he said. He went to fetch a long knife and some plates from the kitchen as Nelly called, “Chocolate!”
He laughed. “Lucky guess.”
At the table, he cut a big slice for each of them. “You forgot the forks,” she said, as he handed her a plate. He set his own plate on the side table and lifted her slice of cake between his fingers and held it to her lips. She giggled and took a bite, getting chocolate icing all over her mouth.
“Guess I'll go get those forks,” he said, planting a big kiss on her chocolatey lips and licking the sweetness from his own as he went back to the kitchen for forks.
Nelly gave a sigh of contentment when she set aside her empty plate. “I could almost go for another.”
“You oughta since it’s your birthday,” he said, taking his last bite.
“Twenty pounds, remember?” she said. She had a straight face, but he could tell she was teasing.
He set aside his plate and jumped on top of her, bouncing her back against the sofa cushions. “Okay, if you wanna bring that up again I’ll make you laugh the weight off.” He tickled her ribs as she squirmed and shrieked and tried to fight him off. He pinned her wrists by her hip with one hand and used the other to assault her underarms and waist.
“Stop!” she said, laughing. “Uncle!”
As soon as he made the amateur mistake of letting go of her wrists, she turned on him, dancing her fingers over his stomach so fast he was caught off guard. He was laughing too hard to grab her hands. Then, as quick as the assault had happened, it was over and Nelly was pulling him on top of her in a heap.
“Mmmmm,” she said, chuckling and rubbing her nose into his throat.
“Mmm?” he said. He tugged on a strand of hair that had come free of her chignon.
“Mmm,” she said. She ran her hand through his hair and upset his hat, which she flung to the floor.
The image of a crossroads floated through his mind again, unbidden. To drive it out, he put his hand under her dress and fiddled with the strap of her garter. She sighed as he unhooked the forward part of her stocking and slipped his hand around to the back of her thigh to undo the other. He did the next two clasps using two hands, and drew off the stockings slowly, appreciating the shape of her legs. She seldom shaved her legs and he liked the hair there, faint brown and baby-fine. For his next trick, he reached back under her skirt and slid a hand inside the leg of her knickers until he found her bare hip. She murmured. He wanted to take her mind off the crossroads too. He stroked her hip with his fingertips, teasing. Slowly, slowly, he slid his fingers into her pubic hair. The hangover that had been beating inside his head was forgotten as all his concentration went to one of his favorite pastimes. He trailed his fingers first over her mound, then down each of her outer lips. Nelly gave a quavering moan. He wouldn’t touch her where she wanted to be touched, though. He circled back to her mound and she pressed her hips forward to receive more of his touch.
“It’s your birthday, you get to call the shots. What do you want?” he said. He drew two fingers down both her lips simultaneously and looked at her face, watched her mouth part. Her only answer was a soft, feminine moan that ratcheted up his own arousal. He withdrew his hand from her knickers and stretched his body on top of hers, making sure that she could feel his erection.
“What do you want?” he asked again, pressing against her.
“You,” she said, opening her eyes a slit.
“Specifics?” he said. He wanted to do what would make her happiest.
“Oh Bus, just fuck me. Please.”
She’d never, ever used that word before. It reduced him to a stick of dynamite with a lit fuse. He stood up to get rid of his pants and drawers, while Nelly pulled up the skirt of her dress and peeled down her white cotton knickers. He’d never put on a prophylactic so fast.
“Don’t hold back,” she said, seeking out his eyes as he put a knee onto the sofa. “I want to be ravished.”
He took his prick in hand and guided the tip into her. He had to think of something else for the first few breaths. Eddie Sedgwick’s face came to mind and that worked. He slid all the way inside her, now not in immediate danger of coming but still not far out of peril. “Give me a minute,” he said, hands gripping her bare knees. He thought of unsexy, ordinary things: the side of bacon he’d had with breakfast, changing the tire of Jingles’ car with him, a new pair of rubber waders he’d bought for fishing. After a minute, he was able to get back down to business. He slid his hands over her thighs and began to make love to her in steady strokes, watching the way her brow creased and her nostrils flared. “This good?”
“Will you go faster?” she said, her hands encircling his wrists. She pulled him flush on top of her.
He laid as flat as he could get, elbows on the sofa cushion and hands over the crown of Nelly’s head, and gave her all he was worth.
“Oh yes. Yes, yes,” she said, the pitch of her voice rising. She sounded desperate. “Harder.”
No amount of contemplating Jingles’ tire could have held him back now. He bore down on her as fast and hard as he could go, and his orgasm came just as quick and hard, one of the best he could remember having. He was aware they were both shouting loud enough to alert every damned neighbor in the building, but he couldn’t help it. He stayed inside her until every residual pulse of pleasure was gone before he pulled out. His muscles went slack and he was surely crushing her, lying on her like he was, but she didn’t complain. He wasn’t aware of falling asleep. The slamming of another door in the apartment building woke him and he startled. He pulled himself to his elbows. “Shit. Didn’t mean to fall asleep.”
Nelly, though, was also blinking awake. “What’s the time? You’ve got to get to the premiere,” she said.
He looked at his wristwatch. They’d only been out ten minutes. “Oh, that’s still a few hours away.” It was only half past four, and the premiere wasn’t until nine.
“How do you think it will go?” she said.
He climbed off of her and went into the kitchen area to dispose of the prophylactic. “Keep thinking it’ll have to be a smash. I said it before, that ending’s second only to The General.”
Nelly disappeared into the bathroom, but didn’t close the door. “Hmm,” she said. He picked up his pants, pulled the handkerchief out of the pocket, and wiped himself off. He was dressed when she returned and smoking a cigarette on the sofa.
“Hmm?” he prompted.
She shrugged. “I think so too, but I don’t have the least bit of experience with audiences. Or critics.”
“Sure you do. Don’t your plays get reviewed?”
“Oh,” she said. “I never thought of comparing them to pictures. They’re so different, aren’t they? The critics were usually on the same page as us and the audience for the most part. The only one that got us panned was Processional.” She stopped to pick up her knickers and began to put them on. “The director was in love with it. Mr. Zweigle. We knew from the get-go the audiences would hate it. It was very—what’s the word. Avant-garde? Abstract? Went whooshing straight over their heads and we ended the run early. It really didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me either. Maybe it would have played better in New York City. I don’t see what’s not to like about Steamboat, though.”
“My production man tried telling me the people whose folks had died in floods would cause trouble for me, that’s why we switched to the cyclone idea,” said Buster. “What I don’t understand is that more lives are lost each year to cyclones. I guess we might get panned there.”
“It will go fine. Everyone will love it,” Nelly said, sitting next to him.
He put an arm around her shoulder, feeling comforted. “Why don’t you go put on the new record I got you?” he said. He’d remembered the extra birthday gift.
She frowned. “You shouldn’t have gotten me another record. You got me a whole band last night.”
“Blah blah blah,” he said, waving her off.
She glared at him in mock anger, but went to put the record on the phonograph that sat on top of her desk. She changed the needle and slid the record from its sleeve. The photograph slipped to the floor as he’d expected it would. He wanted to warn her about it before he left. “What’s this?” She picked it up and turned it over, and her face reddened. “I didn’t think you’d really develop that,” she said, laying it on the desk.
“Just see you don’t leave it lying around for Bradmont or Mr. Hernandez or whoever to see,” he said. He’d never given a girl a naked photo of himself before and wasn’t in love with the notion, but he had so many wicked photos of her now it had seemed only fair to trade her one of him.
“Bradford,” Nelly corrected. “I owe the night to him. He was very good to me.”
Buster still thought she’d been over-cautious bringing Bradford along but didn’t see the point in arguing it. “Who’s Joseph?” he said, since they were on the subject of names.
She blushed as she placed the record into the phonograph. “You. I was trying to get Mother off the phone one day and told her I had a date, but it was the wrong thing to say because then she asked what his name was and said Joseph. It just came out. Now she thinks I’ve got a beau named Joseph.”
“Well you do. Strictly speaking, my name is Joseph.”
Nelly bit her lip, her back to him as she pulled out the arm of the record. The phonograph scratched and hissed to life. Horns and strings rang out. Next to the real Paul Whiteman Orchestra, the recording sounded subdued.
“Charlie Chaplin said he’d see me this week,” Nelly said. “I told him I worked in the prop department at United Artists and he said he’d have to change that.”
He wondered why the change of subject. “That’s good. Ain’t it?” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the music. Charlie had the habit of promising things he had no intention of giving, but he wasn’t going to set her straight.
“I suppose. Shouldn’t I feel more thrilled?” She came and sat on the sofa next to him.
He stubbed his cigarette into the cracked saucer she kept on the side table for him. “Should you?”
“My heart isn’t in Twelfth Night either,” she said fretfully. “At first I thought it was because I didn’t get Viola. You know, because I’ve done Maria before and I don’t have to work so hard to learn the lines. It’s not much of a challenge. Then I thought, I work so much maybe I’m just too tired to do a play right now.”
He noticed her picking the skin around one of her fingers. “What are you saying?”
“Let’s just dance,” she said, grasping his hand.
He stood up and put both hands on her waist. From the phonograph, the singer with the funny name crooned, I’m a sentimental sap that’s all, what’s the use in trying not to fall?
His hangover was placated that evening by two glasses of whiskey before the premiere, which reunited three-fourths of the guest list from his party the night before, Chaplin, Lloyd, Fairbanks, Pickford, and so forth. From their faces, Buster could tell they felt about as wrung-out as he did. Only Natalie didn’t seem hungover, although it hardly mattered. She was so sulky he began to wonder if Nelly’s mood was catching.
With the theater favorably packed with his friends and fellow actors, Steamboat was guaranteed to be a smash hit. That said, Buster could tell fake laughter from real belly laughs. Steamboat’s reception was real. The men in particular found the cycle sequence howlingly funny. The scene with the house drew a collective gasp that satisfied him to his core. Natalie laughed little. He couldn’t figure it out, but was determined not to let her sulkiness get under his skin and basked in everyone’s praise afterwards. There were shoulder claps and back pats galore. Finally he was back to delivering hits again and could go to Irv and tell him to sack the army of writers. It was that thought he slept on that evening.
When he woke up the next morning, the hangover had disappeared and he felt more cheerful than he had in days. He whistled “Daisy Bell” as he dressed. It wasn’t until he’d gotten downstairs that he sensed danger. Natalie was waiting for him in the breakfast room but there was no breakfast on the table. She’d been crying. Her eyes were puffy and she wasn’t wearing any makeup.
“What’s this about?” he said.
Her voice trembled. “We need to talk.”
The four worst words a woman could say to a man. “Okay,” he said, putting his hand on the back of a chair and preparing to sit down.
“I don’t want the help hearing.” She stood up.
He caught her elbow as she came around the table. The crook of her small arm was hot and moist. Dread had replaced hunger in his stomach. They headed for the living room. When he stepped into it and saw Constance and Norma sitting on the sofa with tight, cold expressions, he knew right away what it was about. Constance stood and took Nate from him. Natalie was tucked between her sisters like a chick between mother hens. Buster sat in the armchair diagonal to them, feeling out of his body.
“How’d you find out?” he said. Outwardly, he was calm. Inwardly, his pulse was hammering.
Constance curled a protective arm around Natalie as Natalie dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief.
“It’s been going around a couple weeks, that you’ve had a girl at your bungalow,” said Norma. She twisted a handkerchief between her fingers, but was not crying and did not look as though she planned to.
He tried to remember who knew. Caruthers didn’t count; he’d been entrusted with more sordid details than the affair with Nelly. Louise Brooks and George Marshall knew. From what Nelly had said, Eddie Sedgwick. It must have gotten out through Eddie. He pulled his pack of cigarettes from his pocket and extracted one, concentrating on every detail. It gave him the excuse not to look the Talmadges in the faces for a few moments.
“Norma said you wouldn’t be stupid enough to bring her to the party,” Constance said, voice full of scorn. “I said you would.” Her eyes blazed. “I was right.”
Nestled between her sisters, Natalie sniffled. Even if there had been rumors, he didn’t know how they’d connected him to Nelly specifically. As if anticipating this question, Norma said, “Dutch followed you when you left the party last night.”
“That girl?” Buster said. “No. She’s got a boyfriend.” He didn’t think the lie would get him anywhere, it just came out before he could stop it.
Constance laughed. “That preposterous boy she was with? You could tell from a mile away he doesn’t favor girls.”
He lit the cigarette. He’d forgotten he was holding it. As he took the first drag, he started to formulate a strategy. He would willingly accept whatever punishment they meted out and from now on be more careful with Nelly: no parties, no more overnights at the bungalow, no more being gone for stretches longer than two hours. He avoided looking at Natalie. That chewing guilt was working at him again and he didn’t want to fall into that endless circle of trying to figure out where their marriage had gone wrong. It was her fault things were this way. No, his. No, hers. No, his.
He looked at his sisters-in-law. “So?”
“You know the rules, Bus,” Norma said gently. She looked sad.
He hated the feeling that he was letting her and Dutch down as much as Natalie. He tried not to show it. Blowing out a cloud of smoke, he said, “So I got a little careless. I’ll keep it under wraps from now on.”
Norma shook her head. “You got attached.” When Nate had decided on separate bedrooms and he’d gone to Peg to declare to her that he intended to have his needs satisfied come hell or high water, she had agreed—with the smallest of conditions: keep it discreet, don’t get attached, don’t spend any money.
“Even if I do care for her a little, so what?” he said. “I’ve hardly spent a dime on her. She don’t want that. Told me from the beginning no satin and pearls.” It felt strange to bring Nelly out in open conversation after hiding her for so long.
“You don’t understand,” said Constance. Her eyes sparked.
He looked at Natalie, wedged under Norma and Dutch’s shoulders. He wanted to see how she felt about all of this. She refused to meet his eyes, though, only looked down and wiped at her eyes with her handkerchief.
He scoffed. “Understand what? I get it, it’s an interrogation. I’ve done a lowdown, mean thing to my wife. You want me to apologize and make amends. Well I’m sorry.” As soon as he said it, he was sure he wasn’t. He was only sorry he was careless and they’d caught him. “I have needs. You can’t expect me to go without. Don’t know why we keep going in circles about this.”
Constance reached behind her and flung several pieces of paper at him. Some landed on the coffee table and others on the floor. His brain took a moment to catch up with his eyes. Nelly was staring at them all from the photographs, breasts fully bared, clearly sitting in the Keaton bathtub. In a solitary photo, there he was holding a towel in front of his prick, gazing at the girl behind the camera lens. His heartbeat trilled like a military drum. The last he’d seen those photos, they’d been in his bedside table drawer. He hadn’t bothered hiding them. He hated that his private, intimate moment with Nelly was now seared into the Talmadge girls’ minds. He felt like a scolded, whipped little boy. As with his parents when he was a tot, he knew that nothing he could say to them would convince them that he had a side too. So he didn’t say anything. He looked down at the photos, then up at them. He was grateful for the blank pan that came so easily.
Now Norma stood up and did a funny thing. She gathered all the photos, squared them like a stack of cards, and put them in the little leather handbag at her feet. “I’m sorry,” she said. She did really look sorry as her eyes searched his. “You know the rules. I made some calls this morning. She’s no longer working for United Artists.”
“Huh?”
“We had her fired,” said Constance. She looked smug and triumphant.
Buster sat upright. “You did what?”
“She simply cannot work in pictures any longer. I’m sorry,” said Norma.
“You’ve got no right to do that,” he said, voice rising. “She didn’t do none of this. It was all me. Why’s she getting all the blame?”
“That slut knew you were married,” Constance said. “She oughta have seen it coming.”
He stood up. The cigarette seared his fingers and he dropped it, shaking his hand. It had burnt down without him noticing. “Don’t you call her that word,” he said. “She ain’t like that.”
“I call ‘em like I see ‘em,” said Constance. The expression on her face dared him.
“Buster, the cigarette,” said Norma.
He dared. “You’re the one who’s the slut,” he shot at Constance. “Buster, Jack, Michael, Ricky—want me to go on?”
Constance just smiled. “I’m not fooling around with married men. Nor am I married.”
“Pick up the cigarette, c’mon,” Norma said. “The carpet, you’re ruining the carpet.”
“Yeah? What about Norma? She’s married. She’s going outside her marriage.” He knew even before the protests were out of his mouth that they’d make no difference. The only thing that mattered to them was Natalie. As long as Natalie had been wronged, he could object until the cows came home. He picked up the smoldering butt and ground it out on the coffee table, daring them again.
“Sit down,” said Norma. Again, her voice was gentle. “I’m sorry, but Natalie comes first. You must tell this girl that it’s over.”
“Nelly. Her name’s Nelly.” They must have known her name if they were able to find out where she worked, but it still felt fitting to say it out loud. This was a person they were talking about, not a chess piece to be moved off the board.
“Please tell Nelly it’s over,” Norma said. She looked apologetic.
Buster looked at Natalie. Her head was still down. He wanted to barter with her. Let me keep seeing her. What do you care anyway as long as you have your furs and your fancy parties? He looked at Constance who had a half-smirk on her face, like she knew something he didn’t.
“If I don’t?” He could already tell by the look on Constance’s face that they had him checkmated. He just didn’t know how yet.
“We’ll go to Mr. Mayer with the pictures. It’s as simple as that,” Norma said. She twisted the handkerchief.
He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You’re kidding. You’d ruin my career over something like this?”
“It’s you who’s ruining it, not us,” said Constance.
“What would happen to Nate then, huh? What’d happen to this house? All the parties?” He refused to accept that they’d pull the pin over something so trivial. If there was one thing he was sure Natalie did like about him, it was his handsome paychecks.
Between her sisters, Natalie began to cry audibly.
“We’ll take care of Natalie and the boys,” Constance said, with a dismissive wave.
He considered it. They were both still successful in pictures. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.
“Just tell her it’s over,” Norma encouraged. “We don’t want to go that far.”
He knew too, sure as he knew anything, that they’d make sure Nate got more than her fair share in a divorce. She’d get the house, the kids, and whatever alimony could be squeezed out of him after he was ruined. He felt frozen. Nelly would take him even down-and-out; her line about diamonds and satin wasn’t a bluff. He just didn’t know if he could live with himself knowing he had messed up her career and he couldn’t offer her a darned thing with his gone too. It was selfish, but he didn’t want to give up everything he’d worked so hard for either, the plum gig at M-G-M, the Villa, and most of all his boys.
“Alright. I’ll tell her.”
Checkmate. King vanquished. Three queens crowned.
Note: Well, you saw this coming, didn’t you?
I feel I’ve been rather harsh to Natalie in this chapter, but remember, we’re only getting Buster’s perspective here since none of the story is written from Natalie’s POV. Who knows if Buster really felt so cynically toward Natalie either. I suspect not. He seems to have had a soft spot for her even after their divorce. She did like her material comforts, but as he says in his autobiography, so did he.
I’ll probably go back to a biweekly posting schedule again, so look for Chapter 33 the weekend of the 18th.
