LITMIR.BIZ

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dropouts?

      ‘So you fell for him and you had his baby, where did … where did Jack come in?’

      ‘I already knew Jack. He … saved me from a very awkward situation, but that’s the kind of person he is. As you know.’

      ‘Why didn’t the man marry you?’

      ‘He was already married.’

      ‘You could have got rid of me.’

      When Ruth gives you her straightest look you don’t doubt her word: ‘I never, never for one moment thought of abortion, I promise you that. I wanted a child.’

      ‘His child.’

      ‘My child.’

      ‘Darn lucky you had Dad around.’

      Ruth was relieved to hear the ‘Dad’ and ignored the puerile sarcasm. Marisa knew better than to say outright, ‘I want to see him.’ In that respect, only apparent indifference could protect her, but she didn’t find indifference easy to fake. She tried, ‘Haven’t you got a picture of him?’

      ‘No. How would your father like that?’

      ‘He isn’t my father; I wish he was. I wish you hadn’t told me.’

      Ruth sighed and shook her head. ‘If you knew how we’ve argued. Argued, discussed, agreed, disagreed – around and around, never-ending.’

      ‘But you’re glad you did it.’

      ‘It’s a weight off my mind; I can’t pretend it isn’t.’

      ‘Off your mind and onto mine. You must have thought how it would be for me.’

      ‘Of course we did. But isn’t the truth always better if … if it can be told?’

      ‘No, lies are better.’

      ‘Oh my dear …’ She held out her arms and Marisa let them enfold her. She intended to play this right. At the feel of those arms, which had always been there when she needed them, she felt the press of tears, but she was damned if she was going to cry in front of either of them. Tears were a form of acceptance, and she was accepting nothing.

      Jack, home from another preproduction meeting, found her staring blankly out of her bedroom window. He said, ‘It doesn’t matter, my dear, please try to see it that way. We’ve always loved you and we always will. It’s just … we couldn’t bear cheating on you.’

      She looked at his handsome square face, tanned and healthy, curly hair graying at forty-seven, and said it again: ‘I’d rather be cheated. Maybe it’s easier for you, it sure as hell isn’t easier for me.’

      ‘But it was right. In the end you’ll see that, and we’ll all be … We’ll be closer because of it.’

      ‘I hope so. What do I call you?’

      ‘Oh for God’s sake, Marisa, don’t overplay it. You call me Dad, Father, just as you always have.’ She accepted the flash of impatient anger – he didn’t suffer fools gladly; she admired that, it kept you on your toes; kept cameramen and actors, and more particularly wayward actresses, on their toes too. She could feel her love for him trapped inside her. OK, how was she going to let it out of the trap?

      When he’d gone she raised her eyes and stared at the famous ‘Hollywood’ sign, deep in thought. As usual, a small group of the faithful were toiling up Griffith Park towards it, and as usual a small group of guards had gathered to send them packing – in case any of them had fire, explosives, or even suicide in mind.

      Like many other younger movie people touched by success, Jack and Ruth Adams had never even considered living in Beverly Hills, but had taken to the real hills of old Hollywood where so many of the old and great names had once lived. After them came the realtors and ‘Hollywoodland’. How many of the devotees who regularly photographed one another with the sign in the background knew that this modern Mecca had been erected to advertise a housing development? And what did it matter in a town where fairy tales are all and the truth less than nothing? Lop off a last syllable and you have a myth.

      So, gazing at ‘Hollywood’, Marisa wondered who would remember her mother’s past, who would know? Well, for a start there was Ruth’s own mother, Corinne. She would certainly know but, as certainly, would refuse to say; and would at once report to her daughter: ‘You’ve told her, haven’t you? Nothing else could make her ask questions like that. What a mistake – why do you never listen to me?’ Or something along those lines. Anyway she no longer lived in Los Angeles but had gone back to New York: ‘I know it may be dangerous but no more dangerous than LA, and at least it’s alive.’ She was a jaunty old girl. When you’re seventeen, sixty-six is a great age. No, Grandmother was out. Who then?

      Seventeen years ago, or around then, her mother had been an actress, not, she often said, a very good one. Jack disagreed: she was good all right, but she’d never had the essential overriding ambition, and no chutzpah. Ruth invariably replied that in any case it was a matter of simple arithmetic: two show-biz careers into one family don’t go. As for ambition and chutzpah, yes she must have lacked both because she was a happy woman.

      Who would have known her in those days? Adult faces flitted through Marisa’s mind, parental friends who had come and gone while she played house with Joanne under the bougainvillea on the other side of the pool – while she stood before the bedroom mirror wondering if she would ever reach sixteen. She hadn’t even been interested in the ones who had since become famous.

      But wait a minute! There was a couple who came to dinner every now and again. Hadn’t they once been agents? Hadn’t names flickered around the table? ‘Whatever happened to … ?’ ‘Didn’t you handle … ?’ The kind of show-biz gossip which makes the young, if present, tune out. Sagging old faces, she could almost see them now. They must have been agents, they must have ‘handled’ Ruth Shallon, as she then was, or they wouldn’t be friends, people who came to dinner as opposed to the rabble which attended the twice-yearly free-for-all around the pool. They had a Dutch name – Van-Something. Van-What? There couldn’t be many Vs in the red book which lay beside the phone in the hall. There weren’t, and there were only two Van-Anythings. The first lived in Amsterdam, the second was VanBuren, Henry and Barbara, Sunset Palisades. Marisa knew Sunset Palisades, one of her school friends lived out there in summer: nothing to do with the Boulevard, a new development way north of Malibu, north of Zuma: big houses on ledges, cleverly concealed one from the other by means of earth moving and skillful planting. Sounded kind of retired, but you could never be sure.

      Was there still a VanBuren Agency? Yes there was, but a call confirmed that Henry and Barbara had sold out long ago, to the mega-operation Dermott-MacNally; they had probably been unable or perhaps unwilling to cope with the new Hollywood, which was really the old Hollywood wearing a different hat and a funny nose. OK, definitely retired. Now, how do you approach mother’s old retired friends, almost certainly old agents, without setting off the jungle drums? You make up a story; doesn’t have to be a good one, not in Southern California where anyone will believe anything, in fact crazy is better.

      She found Henry and Barbara VanBuren next day, Friday, living in a splendid modern house with its feet, or anyway its private steps, in the ocean. Like many elderly people who have led active and interesting lives at the center of the whirlpool, they were bored to find themselves placidly rotating at its lazy outer edge. They had their golf, he had his fishing, she had her weaving (beautiful things), they both had their old friends, a few of whom like Ruth Adams had once been clients. Having met them, Marisa couldn’t wait to get away from them, they depressed the hell out of her, and it was their careful politeness, eagerness to please the young in their old age, which depressed her most. Handsome, healthy, well-to-do old Californians, into their seventies with nowhere to go.

      ‘You see,’ she heard herself saying, ‘I had this great idea. I should have done it on her fortieth but I guess her forty-second will be just as good.’ She intended to give her mother a surprise, a real This is Your Life, wasn’t that a fabulous idea?

      The

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