Lone star

iron stove build and that bobbed Anita Loos hairdo. Had Jimmy invited her? Or had Tansi convinced her to come along, acting as her protector since she’d engineered Nell’s departure from the Studio Club?

“Jimmy said to bring Nell,” Tansi told us. “At first she said no, but I told her she can’t hide away in her room. This is Jimmy’s new apartment we’re going to see.”

Nell said nothing, but looked bored, actually yawning and staring out the window.

Tansi talked as though Nell were not there: “Nell is part of the Beatnik crowd that hangs out at some cafe near Pershing Square.

Nell said nothing. Then, out of the blue, “Jimmy plays the bongos.”

I stared, transfixed. I caught Mercy’s eye. “Bongos?”

“He’s very good.” Mercy was savoring this.

“You’ve heard him?”

“I have,” Nell answered.

I enjoyed the leisurely ride out of L.A. into the twisting lanes and woods of San Fernando Valley. It was a cool night, and the air seemed to hum. Once there, we trudged up a narrow lane to what struck me as a rustic hunter’s lodge, hidden under dense shrubbery, wild eucalyptus, sagging palm trees. I smelled ripe lemons. Jimmy rushed down to greet us, dressed in tight jeans and a white T-shirt, a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve. He gallantly took my elbow, escorting me. “My hideaway,” he said.

Inside, manic and bouncing around the huge room, Jimmy pointed to a balcony, where, he said, he slept on a mattress on the floor, where he could gaze down at a seven-foot rough-stone fireplace that covered one wall, above whose mantel was a gigantic bronzed eagle, grotesque and garish, wings extended, with menacing talons. “I’ve named him Irving,” Jimmy said.

Scattered around were bongos-I feared a concert of discordant, horrible music-piles of hi-fi recordings, cameras, books, tape recorders. On one wall tacked-up bullfighting posters, frayed at the edges. This was a young man’s room. Here and there were ungainly heaps of discarded clothing, underwear, rumpled trousers, all pushed into corners. There seemed to be packs of Chesterfields everywhere, all opened, all missing a few cigarettes, each one with a box of matches inserted under the cellophane. As we walked around the rooms, music blared from speakers suspended high on the walls. Mercy begged him to turn down the volume, which he did reluctantly.

I was drawn to a corner where an easel rested. He was in the middle of executing a lovely pen-and-ink drawing, a young girl’s face, gentle and quiet: an amazingly calm visage in a room designed for chaos. And behind the easel a small, black walnut table, on which, to my abject horror, rested the incomplete (but recognizable) sculpture of my own granite head.

“For God’s sake, Jimmy, throw a sheet over that. Would you have your guests flee into the night?”

He grinned.

The music still bothered me. “What is that?” I asked.

“African chants.”

“Could you turn it off?” Tribal music, insistent, the drums beating mercilessly, the wails floating over reiterated beat; rawness, aching and sensual. Hardly party music. More appropriate for a soundtrack to a Johnny Weissmuller movie. Ape man, and boy. Swinging on vines.

Jimmy slipped on a recording of Doris Day. “For you.” He bowed. Still inappropriate. Sappy, saccharine, painful.

Some guests sat on a threadbare sofa. I recognized Patsy D’Amore, owner of the Villa Capri. Three other men, waiters and kitchen staff, I was told, sat with him, in a line-thin, quiet men who sipped wine and stared straight ahead. They looked as unhappy to be there as I felt. Was this the party? The four men, silent, listening to an ebullient Jimmy, and four women, myself one of them-the venerable novelist.

This was hardly right, downright untoward, this freakish grouping. Nell, as short as a child but gaudy in her danse macabre makeup and shellacked Garboesque demeanor, was the sudden cynosure of the leering men, as she sat yoga-fashion on the floor. I wondered what her relationship was with Jimmy. Tansi had said she was not really part of his crowd. He had no interest in her. Yet Jimmy touched her on the shoulder when he walked by her, and she smiled at him. In the shadowy light of the room, she looked exotic, mysterious; and I supposed men might be caught by that allure. When, at one point, she wandered into the small kitchen-“Jimmy has the greatest lemon trees out back”-my suspicions were confirmed. Nell had been there before.

Polly and Tommy walked in. They’d obviously had yet another spat. Or, at least, Polly was the battler. Her face was flushed, the mouth set, the eyes hard. Tommy seemed nonchalant, spirited. He looked like he’d been drinking. I caught a few of Polly’s spat-out words: “I warned you last time.” But I’d come to expect the eternal warfare of those two sad souls. They seemed to crave it, thrive on it; battles royal, then making up, a dynamic that served as glue for an unhappy love story.

I sipped tepid white wine in a jelly glass. That seemed to be all Jimmy had available for his guests. Nothing to nibble on. The music came to an end. Silence in the room.

Sal Mineo appeared on the threshold, looking as if he’d come to the wrong address. Behind him, nudging him into the room, was a stocky man dressed in a lime-green shirt, a man with no neck and a spindletop wooly haircut. I couldn’t remember his name though I’d met him a half-dozen times. An assistant director. Sal smiled at me, and then sat by himself in a corner, looking very much the misbehaved schoolboy, sans dunce cap. He spoke to no one, not even to his director-friend.

Tommy and Polly sat next to each other, up against each other, and didn’t move. I watched the young couple, especially when Jimmy neared: Tommy getting tense, Polly softening her hard eyes. Jimmy whispered something to them and both smiled.

Jimmy got tipsy and climbed up the balcony, where he located and displayed Marcus the Siamese cat, who’d take shelter behind the mattress. “Performance time,” he bellowed. He removed his horn-rimmed glasses. We’re now all a blur, I thought, much the way he wants the world to be-blot out the harsh, linear lines, fog over the faces of people who can get to you. “The greatest poet in the world,” he announced, “was from Indiana.” I rolled my eyes: he couldn’t mean-

Yes, he did, indeed. “James Whitcomb Riley, Hoosier hick like myself, an old geezer who never met me, but he wrote about me.” And then, to my amazement, he recited verbatim Riley’s lines:

I grow so weary, someway, of all things

That love and loving have vouchsafed to me.

Since now all dreamed-of sweets of ecstasy

Am I possessed of: The caress that clings-

The lips that mix with mine with murmurings

No language may interpret, and the free,

Unfettered brood of kisses, hungrily

Feasting on swarms of honeyed blossomings

Of passion’s fullest flower-For yet I miss

The essence that alone makes love divine-

The subtle flavoring no tang of this

Weak wine of melody may here define:-

A something found and lost in the first kiss

A lover ever poured through lips of mine.

When he finished, the room was silent. I glanced at Tansi, who seemed to be weeping. Jimmy himself, hanging precariously over the balcony with a mewing kitten cradled in his arms, seemed suddenly embarrassed. Then, his lips trembling, his eyes closed, his free hand fluttering in the air, he said, “I don’t know why I do things.” He fell back onto the mattress, out of our sight.

We stood there, all of us, stunned, silent, heads inclined toward the balcony. Scraping sounds, gurgling noises, a faint meow, a raucous laugh. He stops time, I thought. He deliberately tilts the earth upward, bending the axis, dislocating longitude. In the stillness I could hear Tansi’s labored breathing, a cigarette smoker’s whistling squeak.

Suddenly, all our inclined heads swiveled as one to the doorway where Liz Taylor stood, bathed in the shrill honey-yellow glare of the outside light; just stood there, and in that moment seemed to take possession of the room. A statue, elegant really. And so dangerously perfumed and lipsticked and coifed that the line of dumbstruck