“I haven’t even opened the blinds or turned on the lights. I’ve just been lying here thinking about…”
And for several paragraphs she told me, quite explicitly, what she had been lying there in the dark thinking about.
I pressed my ear to the door.
I could hear people moving in the corridor outside. And I could hear voices.
“Come over here, darling. Where are you?”
Obediently I made my way toward the voice. I was doing fine till I knocked over a lamp.
She laughed.
“Maybe I better turn on the light. Just for a tiny second.”
“Uh-uh,” I said, as forcefully as possible.
“Aren’t you the cutest!”
I moved toward her and after a moment a hand reached up out of the darkness and touched my face. “There you are!”
The hand caressed my face and stopped suddenly.
“Sweetie, you know Dr. Bryson told you to wear your glasses. Why haven’t you got your glasses on?”
“Dark,” I whispered. “Don’t need ’em.”
Then she pulled my head down and kissed me. It was a long, honeymoon-like kiss.
There was a kind of madness about it.
It didn’t seem real. It wasn’t happening.
Then her hand took my hand and conducted it very carefully beneath the sheet.
I tried to take my hand away. She held it there.
“Lady,” I said, “please don’t scream. But I think you ought to turn on the light.”
She gasped.
I heard her fumbling for a moment and then the lights came on.
She was a rather pretty blonde girl. About nineteen or twenty. She had pretty, wide blue eyes.
She looked at me sitting on the edge of the bed holding a gun in one hand and her in the other.
Her eyes widened even more. Then she closed them, gasped and fainted.
I put the gun in my pocket, crossed the room, and darted out the door.
A uniformed policeman and a man from the hotel were standing in the corridor.
“Thank God,” I said. “Can you help me? My wife has fainted. Is there a doctor in the hotel?”
“What’s the matter, mister?” The cop looked at me suspiciously.
“My wife has fainted,” I said. Then I managed to stammer boyishly, “It’s our honeymoon, officer. I’m afraid we got a little overexcited.”
I pushed the elevator button hysterically.
“Will you give her first aid, Officer? I’ve got to get her some brandy. She has these attacks sometimes. Brandy is the only thing that can help.”
The cop peered into the room. She hadn’t moved. The sheet was almost all the way off.
“O.K.,” the cop said, rather cheerfully, I thought. “You get some brandy. I’ll see what I can do. Take it easy.”
The elevator doors slid open and I got in.
“Ground floor, please,” I said.
On the ground floor I walked briskly through the lobby and out to the street.
I walked very fast for several blocks. Then I got on a bus. I got off the bus and got into a cab. I could not think of where to tell the cab driver to take me. Rockefeller Center was the best I could think of.
I stood for almost an hour watching the skaters down in the Plaza. For a while I stood there trying not to think about anything. Then I began to think about Janis.
Chapter Eleven
I had met Janis Whitney at a party.
It was a terrible party. A lot of unemployed and largely unemployable actors were gathered at somebody’s apartment on West Fourth Street.
The same faces you met all day long. At lunch in the mirrored basement at Walgreen’s on Forty-second Street. And in the afternoons in agents’ and producers’ offices.
Some of the faces we knew in those days-it was the winter of 1940-have since become well known. Janis was one of the fortunate ones.
But for every successful Janis there were fifty girls whose names I have forgotten who quietly gave it up and went back to wherever it was they’d come from.
It’s hard to say what makes a Janis different from the others. Luck, maybe. But I doubt it.
Talent? Possibly. But a lot of the others whose names I’ve forgotten were talented too. I think it’s something else. I think it’s some kind of drive. An almost monomaniac desire. A willingness to sacrifice your life, your youth. Anything. Everything.
I don’t think Janis could tell you herself. I don’t think the question has ever occurred to her.
I’d seen her, before the party, once or twice in offices. I even knew her last name. I don’t think anyone at the party actually introduced us.
When we left the party we walked all the way uptown from Fourth Street. We held hands and I kissed her lingeringly at her door.
Then I said to her, “Say, what the hell is your name, anyway?”
I’m a little embarrassed to remember that line today. It was the tag-line of the first act of “Stage Door.” At the time it seemed very apt and very witty and very tender.
I was proud of having said it at the right moment. I was twenty-two years old.
It lasted all that winter, and in July Janis went away to summer stock. We picked up again in the fall, but there was something different about it now. I had stopped saying things like, “Say, what the hell is your name, anyway?”
Janis had been promised tests by both Fox and the company that finally hired her. She was very tense that fall and one night in my apartment she began to cry. She couldn’t stop. Finally I had to walk with her to St. Vincent’s, where they gave her a sedative.
Janis was the most beautiful girl I’ve ever known.
We tried to write after she left for California but neither of us was a good correspondent.
I saw her first picture. She had a bit part in a Cary Grant movie. She was only on the screen twice. Once for about a minute. And once for about half that long. I read somewhere that they got over fifteen hundred letters about her from those two short scenes.
After that, though, I didn’t go to see her pictures any more. I couldn’t take it.
I threw the cigarette away and walked slowly to Sixth Avenue. I stopped at the newsstand on the corner and bought a paper. Then I went into the drugstore, sat at the counter and ordered coffee. I looked through the paper. I wanted to see if there was anything more about the accident at the gay Fifth Avenue party. There wasn’t.
And it was too early for there to be anything about the big agent from Hollywood who had handled so many big people.
I turned the pages of the paper.
I was not really reading, just turning the pages, when the name jumped out at me.
I’d just been thinking about her and it seemed funny to see her name.
It was in the amusement section. A big, half-page ad for the picture that was opening that day at the Music Hall. “Two a Day,” a musical extravaganza (it said) in new, glorious Technicolor. With that pretty young man who is always in Technicolor musicals, an ex-Broadway comedian, and Janis Whitney.
I had a hunch. Perhaps I’d find Janis on a busman’s holiday.
I finished the coffee and began walking the two blocks up Sixth Avenue to the theatre.
The picture was on when I came in.
