Crowned Heads

  Crowned Heads

Thomas Tryon

This book is for Arthur and Edward

Contents

Fedora

Lorna

Bobbitt

Willie

Salad Days

About the Author

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown

Henry Iv, part Two

Fedora

FEDORA WAS DEAD, AND who could talk of anything else? Including the entire staff of Good Morning USA, whose producer wanted a twenty-minute air-time recap of the extra'southward illustrious career, with "fresh angles" and "a new slant." Marion Walker wondered what there was to say about Fedora that hadn't already been said. Every bit hostess of the morn network TV show, Marion helped the nation get started every mean solar day, its matutinal mixture of brains and beauty. Though she had interviewed Kissinger and Teddy Kennedy, she had never interviewed Fedora; few in the world had. Its most celebrated screen actress, Fedora was also its Great Enigma, just Marion knew someone who supposedly had talked with her recently, Barry Detweiller. Barry knew everybody: Sinatra was a crony, so was John Lennon. He drank with Teddy White, lunched with Jackie, dined with Clare Luce. His credentials were impeccable. He'd had a highly regarded by-line with Life, had published several books, including a novel, his name meant an of import story, and he was a good news reporter. Marion knew if anyone could help her information technology was Barry. She telephoned him at domicile, where he was reputed to be holed up, finishing a new volume.

"Barry … Marion. I want to talk about Fedora."

"Sure thing, Marion. Get alee."

"I mean I want you to talk to me most Fedora."

"What practice I know near her?" Barry asked innocently. Marion'southward reporter's instinct told her it was an innocence built-in of knowledge.

"You lot saw her recently, didn't you, on Crete? There must be a few sidelights you could requite me, couldn't yous?" Marion was using her well-nigh persuasive tone. In her line of work information technology seldom hurt to exist a woman, nor was she a woman to accept no for an answer.

"Well, permit's see," Barry said. "Which sidelight practise y'all desire? Sidelight A—Fedora uses Camay soap for the await of dazzler? Sidelight B—Fedora sleeps in the nude? Sidelight C—"

"Barry, I want something for a story. A fresh angle, a new slant."

"Oh, slants and angles you want. How well-nigh the triangle? Mother, son, Fedora. Or the other triangle—son, wife, Fedora? Or how about the sinister Dr. Vando, who looks like Lionel Atwill and gives her injections of sheep semen in his mysterious laboratory?"

"Barry, I haven't time, I actually haven't…. I desire a story."

"Oh, a story. I see…. Well, let'south think a infinitesimal here—there must exist a good one somewhere. Yeah, I think I've got one. Sure, okay, fine. Come along to me for drinks about seven. We'll have dinner—"

"I can't."

"Y'all can't? I thought you wanted a story."

"I practise, but—" She was checking her desk calendar; ending her list of many appointments was: "8:00 p.m./Sills/Siege of Corinth." "Beverly's singing at the Met. I've got to hear her; she's coming on the show next calendar month. How almost lunch tomorrow?"

"No die. I'm flight to London. But I'll tell you this—" He lowered his voice confidentially. "Information technology's a terrific story."

"Really terrific?"

"Really terrific."

"I'll be there." Beverly Sills and The Siege of Corinth would have to wait; Marion would switch her tickets. Fedora didn't die every day of the week.

Barry's apartment was in the East Seventies, and the garrulous taxi driver who took Marion there that spring evening was swift to point out in his hearty Brooklynese that Fedora had once been his rider, and had she "evuh seen huh in Ophelie?" Aye, Marion had seen Ophelie; not the silent version—she was too immature—only being one of Fedora'south best-loved films, the sound remake was often on the Late Show. "Huh foist talkie—I seen it in '29, an' I seen huh last in '69. Whadda bomb—dey killed huh wit' bad pitchuhs. But howdya figure—forty yeahs on the screen an' even so a lookah? My old lady nevuh looked dat skillful at thoity. Don't tell me dat Vando guy didn't do numbuhs on huh."

Exactly what "numbers" the mysterious Portuguese doctor had "done" on Fedora was only one amongst the items Marion wanted to quiz Barry about. Though the actress had been hidden from its sight for many years, the world seized on any scraps of news concerning her, and all anyone could talk about was her death yesterday in Menton, France.

"Y'all liked her?" Marion asked the commuter.

"Lady, I woishiped huh."

"Why?"

"Grade. She had course. I don't care what no one says about huh, whatevuh crazy things she done. I loved huh. Ev'ybody did." Thus spake the man in the street.

To show that celebrity makes itself felt even amongst its staunchest decriers, the cabby had stock-still a rose over his rear-view mirror as a floral tribute, mark how infinite and long-lasting was the power of her name, the magic of her art. Neither the cabby nor Marion had always known a world in which there was no Fedora. Marion considered the fact: George Washington had refused a crown (the wisdom of this was debatable to some), but given that America's true royalty is crowned from the court of Hollywood, then in that ersatz monarchy Fedora was queen; she had outshone all and outlived near, though whether past purely natural causes remained equally yet undiscovered.

Barry's living room was what she expected: hardly neat, but a man'due south identify, a writer'south place, lots of shelves with books, magazines, newspapers, manuscripts, file drawers; a few handsome touches, skillful antiques mixed with sturdy merely comfortable pieces, and over the mantel, unmistakably, a portrait of the lady in question, Fedora herself. Barry was easy and relaxed and prepared to be a good host. He suggested some vino, she accepted. The bottle was produced, cooling in a bucket Vouvray pétillant, he announced, a naturally semi-sparkling, dry white, and Fedora'southward favorite.

"Oh?" Marion stabbed him with a quick look. "How practice yous come by that information?"

"She told me herself."

"And the portrait?"

"That's some other story."

Marion put on her glasses and examined the painting closely. "It's her to the life. Who did it?"

"Every bit you come across, it's unsigned. Only it was painted in the Dakota." The Dakota was ane of New York's venerable landmark apartment buildings. Barry explained that he had known the girl who had owned the painting two decades earlier; information technology had hung in her apartment until at her decease it had passed into his hands. Now, reframed and dramatically lighted, it formed the focal indicate of the room. Technically, it was non particularly well painted, simply Marion recognized immediately how, like Fedora herself, it manifested an aura of mystery and romance. She was posed on a gilt-and-blackness-striped couch of faintly Empire design, one manus resting against a hip, the other supporting the caput. The background was an almost grisaille rendering of a large apartment interior, room after room receding dimly, each elaborately decorated with bombé chests, crystal chandeliers, candelabra blazing with candles. Fedora'southward costume was a many-ruffled, high-collared white peignoir; Marion remembered it as the i Cyril Leaf had designed for Ophelie, which Leaf had personally loaned for the Diana Vreeland exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, "Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Blueprint."

Marion said information technology was Fedora to the life, though the features were heavily stylized, the nose was as well long, the optics were too large, too heavily lidded. They gazed past one with an idle, well-nigh vacant stare; but information technology was Fedora'south hauteur, all right. The mouth was thin and darkly red, not sensual but provocative—the renowned "Mona Lisa" look. The hair was arranged carelessly, simply with a sense of period, the way Fedora had worn information technology in the motion picture.

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Barry pointed out to a higher place the table serving as a bar a small framed document. Anile and important-looking, with an embossed official seal, it proved to be a annotation in Italian, addressed to Fedora, professing admiration for her talent and beauty and hoping she would 1 day visit Rome, where the writer would have the privilege of meeting her personally. It was signed "Mussolini."

"Information technology must be worth a lot of money," Marion said, awed in spite of herself.

Barry laughed. "Exactly what the person who gave information technology to me said."

"Fedora?"

"Mrs. Balfour."

"Ahhh—the ubiquitous Mrs. Balfour." Like most people, Marion was acquainted with the name. Mrs. Balfour had been the inseparable companion of Fedora for many years. "She gave it to you?"

"For services rendered. A ransom, actually."

"Where and to whom?"

"That's two too many questions for openers. You sound like a lawyer."

"I'1000 only asking."

"I last saw Mrs. Balfour on Crete, at the countess's villa."

"That would exist old Countess Sobryanski?"

He nodded, and reached for the wine from the bucket. He filled their spectacles and held the bottle of Vouvray then Marion could read the label.

"Fedora told yous it was her favorite?"

"One of them. Did you recognize the music on the hello-fi when you came in?"

"No. What was it?"

"The Baltic Symphony—a particular favorite of Countess Sobryanski. As a matter of fact, it was beingness played a lot at the villa when I was there…. Wait a infinitesimal, I've got some noshes in the fridge." While he went back to the kitchen, Marion stole a look at the table where a typed manuscript lay, bound past an elastic band, but without a title page. Surreptitiously she leaned and read the first line: "She was called the Perfect Work of Art—" Marion straightened as Barry returned with a try of hors d'oeuvre. She adapted her glasses, took out a pad and pencil, and struck a businesslike mental attitude on the sofa.

"Your new book?" she asked, glancing at the manuscript every bit if for the first time. Barry smiled, nodded, offered her a canapé and a napkin. "Nonfiction or a novel?" she continued casually.

"My editor says information technology's both, only that it has too much romance for anything since the Brontë sisters. Actually it'southward nigh Fedora."

"Oh? You've been writing about her, then? Some other biography?"

He chuckled. "In that location are a lot of them, aren't at that place?"

"Is information technology juicy?"

"Of class."

"A scandal?"

"Some might think and then." He picked upwardly the manuscript, hefted it, then dumped it into Marion's lap. "Why don't yous simply take it dwelling house and read information technology? It'll save me a lot of talking."

"May I?" She looked again at the summit page.

He grabbed it dorsum and returned it to the tabular array. "No, yous may not. And you won't demand to take notes."

"I always accept notes."

"Not this time." He had gone to the window and stood looking out at the garden; an ailanthus was turning a feathery green, and shrubs were bursting with white blooms. Marion put bated her pad and pencil, took off her glasses, and waited. He said nothing, seemingly lost in idea. She felt a growing exhilaration and excitement at the prospect of the disclosures he was about to make, and yet she could sense that he wanted to prolong the effect of his big moment. It was something like knowing the whereabouts of the bones of Peking Human being, or holding the key to the fourth dimension.

Which in a way information technology was, dealing every bit it did with time. Anyone acquainted with the merest facts of Fedora's history must realize, as Marion certainly did, that in some vague and foreign mode "time was of the essence." Where fiction had become fact and fact fiction no one was whatsoever longer able to tell—unless information technology was now to be Barry Detweiller—but the single obvious fact was that Fedora's career had spanned a catamenia lasting from silent pictures well into the age of wide-screen stereophonic films. She had remained at the summit of her artistic powers, her beauty, her youthfulness, for half a century; not an impossibility, except for the fact that she had not aged to whatsoever noticeable degree. Dr. Vando was said to be at the bottom of this mysterious all the same essential fact, all the same just as essentially, no one had e'er been able fully to explain it.

Of her early contemporaries and peers, every bit Barry at present pointed out, who was there still living? Lillian Gish. Gloria Swanson. Janet Gaynor. A scattering of others. Joan Crawford had all the same been Lucille Le Sueur, an unknown Charleston cup winner, when Fedora was a star in silents. When Stanwyck matured to an old lady in And so Large (with Bette Davis every bit the tender ingenue), it was Barbara's eighth feature; Fedora had shot over a score by and then. Davis made her first moving picture at Universal in 1931, a studio not even in beingness when Fedora was a leading lady at AyanBee. Carole Lombard was only a Sennett bathing beauty when Fedora had played in four pictures. Harlow was expressionless in 1937 after a career spanning less than a decade. Swanson, peradventure Fedora's nearest contemporary, did only eleven audio pictures, Fedora 3 times that number. Dietrich was "box office poison" when Fedora was packing houses with a major success a year. Garbo left the screen at thirty-six and never returned, while Fedora was all the same playing leading romantic parts into the late 1960s.

Barry had turned and was staring musingly at the manuscript on the table; to prompt him on his fashion, Marion asked:

"What began it all? Your fascination with her? You are fascinated, you lot know."

He shrugged and took the social club chair. "I don't know, really; information technology only … started."

"When was the showtime time you ever saw her?"

"I was most vii, I think. And it wasn't in the movies."

"In person?"

"Who ever saw Fedora in person in those days? Not in Villanova, Pa., you didn't meet Fedora in person. It was an ice cream parlor, where they'd taken me after Sunday school. Nosotros got Dixie cups, and I wanted chocolate. I pulled off the hat, which was covered with chocolate ice foam, and licked it, and who appeared from below my tongue simply Fedora. Information technology was a nevertheless from Tsarina—yous know, Catherine the Great? Someone said, 'Oh, you accept Fedora,' and I said, 'Who's Fedora?' I'd never heard of her. Just I liked the way she looked. When Madagascar came to boondocks I told my mother I wanted to see it. She said no, it was a grown-ups' flick. I carried on until she finally agreed to take me to a matinee, but I never got to see the end of information technology."

"Did you walk out?"

"Non exactly. When I came across Fedora years subsequently, I told her the story. We were talking about her films and I mentioned that I'd liked Madagascar, simply hadn't seen the last function. She asked why not. I said, 'Remember the scene with the native uprising, and yous and Willie Marsh were near to exist slaughtered?' 'I remember,' she said. 'Well,' I said, 'you were both in this room at the elevation of some stairs—I think it was in a plantation house—and the natives broke in below and they were brandishing clubs and axes and spears. Then they went charging upward the stairs and started breaking downwards the door and setting burn to the place. You were behind the door.' 'Yeah,' she said, waiting. I said, 'I got so scared I wet my pants and my mother had to accept me out.'"

Marion shrieked with laughter. "Y'all didn't tell that to Fedora!"

"I did. She wasn't amused. But I didn't do information technology intentionally. I thought it was a funny story. I wasn't thinking about the historic period affair at all."

"What did she say?"

"She gave me that narrow-eyed look and said loftily, 'I see. You must have been ver-r-ry youn-n-ng,' dragging out the words in that Russian drawl. My mother told me I wasn't going to run across any more than movies like Madagascar. And then La Gioconda came to Philadelphia. Kids didn't get to see Fedora movies, usually, they were too sexy, merely Mona Lisa was 'historical' and they took our whole class out of school, stuck usa on a bus, and sent u.s. to the movies. When it was over we were supposed to become to the Fels Planetarium to get more civilization, but some of us hid in the dark and sat thro

ugh the co-characteristic, a B comedy with Florence Rice, and then we saw Fedora once again.

"At that place was a poster stand up in forepart of the theater and when we left I tore the affiche off and ran with information technology. You've seen the shot?"

"The Da Vinci painting with Fedora's confront superimposed, wasn't it?"

Barry nodded. "I tacked it on my sleeping room wall. Information technology stayed at that place for I guess about x years, until I went in the service. My mother threw it out so. Merely at some point a friend had taken a crayon and drawn a mustache on it. It fabricated me then goddamn mad."

"It sounds like you fell in honey with her."

"Nosotros were e'er falling in beloved with movie stars then. My brother wrote Lana Turner's name in wet cement afterward the cellar drainpipe was excavated. But Fedora—you didn't autumn in love with just her face. You fell in love with all of her—her vocalism, her body, her talent, her gestures, everything about her that is and so familiar, merely and then …"

"Enigmatic?"

"Clichés? From you, Marion?"

"Sorry." She tossed dorsum her pilus with the gesture that was probably more than familiar to more viewers than all Fedora's gestures in all her films. "But she was an enigma, and you must have solved it, or you wouldn't be writing ane more book almost her."

"I never thought I'd be writing near Fedora. Then after I began writing mag pieces, it became a kind of dream to do i on her, but I didn't want to do it without interviewing her, or someone who knew her actually well."

Marion glanced again at the manuscript. "You lot must take finally gotten your interview. That'southward more than a magazine piece."

"I got my interview, but not the mode y'all'd call back."

"Did you become all the answers?"

"All the ones that matter, at any rate."

Marion leaned eagerly to Barry, rapidly raising a alluvion of questions, names, events. Was Dr. Vando a quack? Was it true most the sheep cures? Did he operate on her optics to make them larger? What was the Hollywood gossip concerning Count Sobryanski, and his mother, the dowager countess, who had been with Fedora and so much? Did Barry subscribe to the monkey gland theory? Was it true she became fond to hashish at the count's dwelling in Kingdom of morocco? …

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