Lone star

“Edna, I’ve been looking for you.” A deep voice from the doorway. Flat, brusque, gravelly, but oddly melodic and filled with laughter.

I looked up, smiled. “I was wondering where you were.”

I’d met Mercedes McCambridge in New York, a few summers back. The two of us immediately liked each other. Three, maybe four scintillating lunches in New York that summer. A Broadway matinee, a dinner. I’d sent her flowers when she won her Oscar for All the King’s Men. Now Mercedes played the ill- fated Luz Benedict, Bick’s unmarried older sister-a feisty, no-nonsense, rough-and-tumble Texas woman whose sudden death inevitably leads to Jett’s great fortune…and the beginning of his fall from grace. The veteran actress-“Call me Mercy, for mercy’s sake”-was a look-straight-in-your-eye woman, the only women I can tolerate. A woman cut from my own precious cloth. Other women, the coy, flirtatious, frothy girls-especially the weak and martyred patient Griseldas, mooning and hoping for favor, a man’s nod-well, I spit them out like so much bile.

Now Mercy, pushing a youthful forty, reached over to hug me. Dressed in a dull calico flare skirt and a muslin blouse with a corduroy vest (“I’m in costume for still photographs”), she struck me as Annie Oakley, with fierce, intelligent eyes. You saw the wide Midwestern face, the strong carriage, and the nervous gesture of slender fingers casually pushing through uncombed hair. Pioneer woman, with Max Factor rouge and the vaudevillian laugh.

We chatted like old coffee chums, leaning in, small talk about New York friends and acquaintances. Mercy asked about Kitty Carlyle, Bennett Cerf, Dorothy and Dick Rodgers, others. Theater folks, fine people, all. Though I always maintain that I loathe gossip, I yammered on about dinner parties where all the wrong stuff was served-and said. Faux pas among the four hundred, as it were. Mercy also knew Tansi’s mother, Bea Pritchard, who’d once upstaged Mercy in a Broadway outing.

“How is the battle-ax?” she asked me.

I grinned. “Looking for her next husband.”

“It’s hard to believe she’s Tansi’s mother.”

I shook my head. “Oh, but of course, Mercy. The wilder the mother got-remember when she wore that revealing gown to the White House and Hoover got the hiccoughs? — anyway, the more outre her mother got, the more puritanical Tansi became.”

“But she and Jake Geyser will be the death of you,” Mercy said. “Jake is Warner’s menacing bull dog in Oxford camouflage.”

“Which leads me to ask you, Mercy, what’s going on? Jake Geyser and Tansi hinted at some problem that I’m not supposed to know about. Why on earth does Warner have Jake hovering around me like a dazed summer moth?”

“I’m not supposed to tell you. We have orders.”

“But of course you will.”

Mercy’s mouth drew into a thin line, but the corners suddenly turned up, a timid smile, and the eyes had a glint in them. “Of course.”

But we both stopped, almost on cue, and turned to the open doorway. James Dean stood there, leaning against the doorframe in costume: the tight worn jeans, the ten-gallon Stetson on his head, wisps of almond-blond hair over his ears, an unlit cigarette in his mouth. A cocky stance, practiced. Yet on his nose horn-rimmed glasses, incongruous, but oddly appealing. His fingers drummed on the wood frame.

I stared, mute. It was, I suppose, when I thought about it later, a little like looking into the sun, or a cup of cold spring water that slackens a desert thirst. He was, quite frankly, a calculated presence, a deliberate act of utter coolness: the wrestler’s body, so muscular and taut, sinewy through faded denim; and the face-that hint of boyish hair, the strong chin, the half-closed eyes, and the impossible sensual lips. This was either an actor at his craft or, truthfully, the sudden shift of seismic current. Calm down, Edna, I told myself. He’s a boy. He’s an actor.

And short. I’d thought him taller, I’d thought him towering. I was a tiny woman myself, barely five feet, with a big head. He was a small man with a big head. I knew him.

“Jimmy.” Mercy waved at him. “Come and meet Edna Ferber.”

“Madama,” he said to Mercy, using the name he called her in the film. He didn’t look at me.

“Come in,” Mercy motioned.

He seemed as though he intended to walk in, in fact, his feet seemed to move, but oddly his hand rested on the doorframe, a statue, all angle and graceful line. The cigarette twitched in his mouth. He bent in, mumbled.

“What?” Mercy asked.

“I got another letter,” he said, the words clipped, loud and spaced out. He sounded surprised at his own voice, but there was anger there, too. And frustration. The eyes closed, then popped open, and I thought of boys caught stealing apples from a greengrocer’s stand. I expected him to run away. And now he seemed to see me for the first time. “Miss Edna,” he said, slurring the words and half-bowing, the cigarette bobbing.

I didn’t know what to say. “Mr. Dean…” I began.

“Jimmy, ma’am.”

“I saw you on Broadway in The Immoralist.”

He twisted his head, intrigued. “And?”

“You were sadly miscast as the effeminate Arab boy Bachar.” Flat out. Challenging, in control.

He pulled in his cheeks, making his face look hollow, and held my eye. “Which part of me was miscast, would you say? The effeminate part or the Arab or the boy?”

I paused. I had no idea what I wanted to say. I recalled the provocative scissors dance the homosexual houseboy Bachar had performed onstage, a seduction of an ambivalent Michel-a stage bit that garnered him incredible praise. But he had seemed so wrong as the weak, ineffectual but manipulative street urchin. In slippers and nightgown, doing a ballet, flitting and snipping the air with a pair of shiny silver scissors. He was too masculine, I’d thought. But what I wanted to say now was that he’d redeemed himself in East of Eden, that his depiction of the troubled Cal Trask, the bad seed Cain of Steinbeck’s Eden, had been mesmerizing. That was believable-and thrilling. But my throat was dry, and my head throbbed. And by the time I opened my mouth to praise him, he had walked out of the room, just turned and walked away.

When I looked back at Mercy, the woman was laughing softly, and I had trouble looking into her face.

Chapter 2

Mercy told me that Jimmy had received a troublesome letter a week before. “Troublesome?”

She nodded. “Scary.”

And now, she gathered, a new one. All the studio execs, from Jack Warner down, were nervous, though tight-lipped. Mercy had overheard Rock Hudson thundering about it to George Stevens, though he’d looked sheepish when he realized Mercy was nearby. Curious, I began asking questions. I’d always be the insatiable girl reporter from Appleton, Wisconsin. But Mercy just mumbled.

“What?” I implored.

Mercy thrust up her hand, traffic-cop style, and said, “I don’t like to gossip, Edna. It’s some matter with a girl in trouble.” She shrugged. “Young people.” She sighed. “You know.”

No, I didn’t, but I was intrigued, and Mercy seemed on the verge of saying something else, leaning forward. But there was bustling at the door and Tansi, for some reason holding an enormous bouquet of flowers-garish hibiscus at that, a purple so dark I thought of blood clots-sailed in, out of breath, and said they were from a friend’s garden. She’d driven there to pick them. For a second she buried her face in the bouquet, inhaling the heady aroma. I didn’t want them, but Tansi said someone would deliver them to my rooms at the Ambassador. Good, I thought, more dead flowers on my carpet. Browning, curling petals underfoot. The end of a long day at a funeral parlor. I expected a competitive Jake Geyser to march in, maneuvering a wobbly wheelbarrow of bougainvillea, the blossoms bleeding onto his tweedy attire.

Instead, Tansi said, “I saw Jimmy in the hallway…leaving. Did you meet him, Edna? He didn’t even say hello to me.”

“He stopped in,” Mercy said.