Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (6 page)

A
t a year old, Clara had only blond wisps of hair, but enormous green eyes like a cat’s, almost perfectly round. Between her two parents, Gordon had more experience onstage, and therefore he had signed up with Central Casting and went to most of the calls, where he and all the other men of his description would line up outside the gates of the studios and wait to be seen, one by one. Gordon promised that Elsa could go when she was ready—and after all, someone had to stay home with Clara. Though each job made Gordon a little money, it was by no means enough to hire someone to watch the baby. Their rent was late as often as it was on time, and Elsa found that most of the acting she did was in telling the landlord that the check was on its way.

The house was in Los Feliz, on the east side of Los Angeles, a few blocks from where the Disney animators had been working on
Snow White
, and close to a handful of studios. Elsa and Gordon didn’t mind being far from the ocean. “I never went to the beach when I lived in Florida,” Gordon said, to anyone who would listen. “Why would I go now?”

Being in Los Angeles wasn’t so different from sitting in the grass behind the Cherry County Playhouse—everyone was an actor, even the waiters in the restaurants and the mailman. Every woman she met lived at the Hollywood Studio Club, which was where Elsa would have wanted to live if she weren’t married. Certainly all the men lining up for the open calls listed in
Variety
seemed like men Elsa had known all her life. She often thought how much her family would enjoy it, and wrote to them telling them so, but Elsa knew that the one member of her family who would have jumped on a train to come and join her was the one who had been dead for almost a decade. Her mother wrote back with details of the landscape—the flowering rhododendrons,
the magnolia’s short window of glory, the small, sharp waves on the lake—but said little else. Her father wrote about plays and actors and always told Elsa how much she was missed. Josephine never wrote at all, but sent packages filled with crumbling cookies on Elsa’s birthdays, which Elsa knew was expensive, and therefore thoughtful. Even though the playhouse had always made the Emersons enough money to live on, they were by no means rich, and it felt extravagant to receive a tin of cookies when so many people were out of work in Los Angeles. Elsa spent most of her time walking up and down her street, pointing out the palm trees and the cockeyed succulents growing crookedly out of the ground. Every few blocks there was a normal tree, one that wouldn’t look out of place in Wisconsin, and Elsa would pause underneath its branches and explain to baby Clara all about where they’d come from.

Elsa loved being around other actors, even at the giant casting calls that reminded her of docile, herded cattle. The listings were in the paper, and then all you had to do was show up at the gates of the studio, where a waiting crowd had already formed, other anxious young women with big smiles and bigger dreams. She tried out to be a dancer in a Western, a girl in a crowd, barely in the frame. Elsa loved to walk back and forth, pretending to be someone else. The auditions themselves felt like performing in a play, with all the women acting for one another, and Elsa felt invigorated by the camaraderie. She didn’t seem to be what the studios were looking for, though, and went to six open calls without getting chosen once. Gordon tried to be supportive, but he was usually so busy hustling up his own work that he didn’t spend too much time worrying about Elsa.

In the almost two years since their arrival, Gordon had been in three films. Twice he was an extra, and moved through the back of a shot, where he could be seen only from behind, and at a great distance. Elsa told him he was very convincing, and they’d celebrated
with a steak dinner at home, a luxury they couldn’t afford. The third was a bit part as a corrupt prison guard in a Gardner Brothers film, and Gordon had had to walk back and forth in front of an empty cell for two hours, whistling and dragging a baton along the bars. There was one moment when the camera zoomed in on his face, and Gordon no longer looked ordinary. His cheeks were drawn; his eyes were dark. In the ten seconds that the lens lingered on him, Gordon’s prison guard conveyed much more than the script had required. It was as beautiful as a violin solo, an Irish poem. In the Vista Theatre, Elsa had put her hands to her face when her husband appeared on the screen and cried with happiness. His forehead was ten feet high! Gordon-from-Florida! She called her parents to describe every moment, and her father asked her to repeat it again and again, the lead-up scenes, the camera cuts, the fade-in. Every actor they knew told Elsa how excellent Gordon had been in the film; they stopped her on the street to say so. The part couldn’t have been better if they’d let him speak.

Early in their marriage, which was to say within the first six weeks, the couple had engaged in lovemaking with relative frequency, encounters during which Elsa shut her eyes and concentrated very hard on the pleasure she knew she was meant to experience. Gordon’s member was small, or rather Elsa assumed it was, having never seen one before. She knew for a fact that she felt little more than a gnawing tickle when he moved around on top of her, and that seemed proof enough, though she wouldn’t have wanted it to be larger. Once those playful weeks were through, and Clara had taken root deep inside, Elsa had put sexual intercourse out of her mind and left it somewhere on the shelf, in between dental work and inoculation shots, as something to schedule, if done at all. The evening after the opening of his film, however (for that was how they thought of it,
his film
), Elsa invited her husband into her half of the bed, which was divided from his with an elaborate setup of pillows, some of which she had brought all the way from Door County. Gordon was so thrilled at the invitation that the coitus itself lasted less than a minute, and Elsa rolled her husband back over to his side with the satisfaction of a job well done. It was during this celebration of Gordon’s cinematic achievement that Elsa conceived their second child.

T
he fourth film Gordon was cast in,
No Angels Here
, was also a Gardner Brothers film. The producers were so impressed with his prison guard scene that they called him into the main office and had him sign a contract for one hundred and fifty dollars a week. Exclusive! Gordon Pitts was going to be a star in the Gardner Brothers galaxy, a real contract player; that was straight from the mouth of Louis Gardner himself. Elsa wanted every word repeated, every motion, every gesture, and Gordon happily obliged, telling the story over and over again, whenever an opportunity for virgin ears presented itself.

“Louis—you know, Mr. Gardner, but he said I could call him Louis—invites me in, sits me down. The office is huge—huge! Ten-foot-high palm trees in pots. Practically a jungle. Louis invites me in and sits me down. He says, ‘Mr. Pitts, we think you’ve got something special.’ Goddamn!” Gordon paused. This was his favorite part of the story. Gordon’s least favorite part of the story, which he never repeated in front of company, and had in fact told Elsa only one time, drunk and sobbing, was that the entire meeting had lasted just three minutes, and that Louis Gardner had been present for only two of them. The truth of the contract itself was that it was for a bit player,
which meant work but not glory. Gordon chose to see that as a stepping-stone rather than a stop sign, however, and simply forged ahead in his bragging.

They were sitting in their favorite local watering hole, Loopy Pete’s. Pete himself had yet to materialize, but Elsa and Gordon spent a great deal of time with Raoul, the bartender. Elsa was fairly positive that Raoul had heard the story before, but she tried to be a dutiful wife, and so enjoyed being out of the house, and detached from the baby, that she let Gordon continue uninterrupted. The bar was nicely dark, made of mahogany wood and polished brass. It was the sort of bar that Elsa’s father would have found too posh, too expensive, though the drinks were cheap enough that Gordon could afford three, two for himself and one for Elsa. With his salary from Gardner Brothers, they had enough money not to worry. That was a big part of the studio’s promise, Louis Gardner had made clear—his actors were taken care of for as long as they were under contract, which, by law, could be terminated every six months, at the studio’s discretion.

“That’s great, Gordon,” Raoul said. “Congratulations.” He wiped off some glasses with a towel.

Gordon swiveled around on his bar stool, looking for another listener. When he didn’t find one, there being only a handful of people at the bar, and most of them old and devoted drunks, Gordon turned back to Elsa and took her hand.

“It’s really happening, baby,” he said, and lifted her hand to his cold lips. He turned away from the bar and Raoul, who Gordon claimed always looked at Elsa with a wolfish gaze. Gordon wanted to be the only wolf in town.

The Gardner Brothers contract was for seven years. They controlled every part Gordon would have until he turned twenty-seven. Gordon was to report to the studio every day, Monday through Friday, and to sit in his dressing room when he wasn’t needed. There
were acting classes, diction classes, a place to eat lunch, and bicycles to ride around the back lot when there was nothing else to do. To Elsa, it all sounded just like an enormous version of her father’s theater. Gordon didn’t want her to come visit just yet, not until he was settled, but the studio was all he could talk about at home. Elsa could picture every inch of the lot: the grand metal gate on Marathon Avenue, the winding pathways, the buildings dressed up in hollow bricks to look like buildings in other cities. California could be anything: They could even make it look like Wisconsin by tossing shaved pieces of soap into the air and letting them fall down on the actors’ heads as snow. It was magic.

The first film Gordon spoke in was
Country Boy, City Girl
, which starred Gardner Brothers’ reigning on-screen lovers, the youthful and wholesome Johnny and Susie. They’d both been stars since they were teenagers, and had been paired up in so many movies that it was strange when Elsa saw one without the other in the lot. It was like seeing a person with a wooden leg or an eye patch—something was missing. Off-screen, Susie and Johnny were seen dating other stars and starlets, but they weren’t allowed to marry, or to disgrace themselves in public. America wanted them sweet, and so did Louis Gardner. This was in the contract, as it was in Gordon’s. Though her husband railed a bit about the number of points he’d had to agree to—he couldn’t pick his own roles, or work for any other studio, unless Gardner Brothers had arranged the swap—Elsa was secretly delighted by the power of the studio. She understood: This was a factory. Instead of making cake plates or dungarees or drill bits, they made movie stars. It all boiled down to an equation, one too complex for Elsa to imagine, but Mr. Gardner, he knew just what to put in. If Gordon did what he was told, they would get everything they’d ever wanted.

Gordon’s part was as Susie’s friend at the newspaper where she
worked as a secretary. His job was to be less appealing than Johnny at every turn: slightly slicker, slightly rougher, and always less handsome. Of course, Gordon wasn’t actually less handsome than Johnny, who was half a foot shorter than Elsa, and could star in films only with Susie, because she was even shorter than he was, and even then he had to stand on a box. But such was the magic of moviemaking—when Louis Gardner decided that you were a star, you were a star. This was the system, and Elsa was a believer.

L
ittle Clara was an Emerson, fleshy and pink. The Pitts, though Elsa had yet to meet the rest of her husband’s family, were smaller, darker people; according to Gordon, they tended to emerge from the womb with a full head of hair. Clara was a year and a half now and still had only blondish wisps around her crown. She’d gone from crawling around the house to scooting on her bottom, and finally was taking confident steps on her own, which Elsa watched with great interest. Clara gripped the arm of a chair or the lip of a table and raised herself from the ground, legs wobbling. She was getting stronger. Elsa sat on the sofa, a beat-up Chesterfield they’d bought used, and ran her hands back and forth over the leather. It was December, and even outdoors she was wearing nothing more than a shawl pulled around her shoulders. Clara’s feet were bare, and stuck to the wooden floor with each step, making a little
thuck-thuck-thuck
noise. Weather in Los Angeles never ceased to amaze her, though Elsa knew it was a bore to discuss. Sometimes Elsa wondered what her parents had done with her bedroom—whether they’d asked some poor girl from Sheboygan to sleep there, or whether they’d finally turned it back into a closet. She hadn’t asked. She didn’t miss her bedroom, or the pervasive cold, but she did miss the snow, that thick
white blanket that hid everything below the waist. Each winter Elsa thought about going home to surprise her parents for Christmas, but it was too far, and too expensive for them all to go, even with Gordon’s steady paycheck. Elsa might have gone on her own, just her and the baby, but Gordon didn’t think it was a good idea, too many nefarious characters lurking around the bus and train stations. She understood—they would go eventually, the whole family. It would be better that way. After all, the only thing she’d accomplished so far was procreation, which she could have done in Wisconsin. Elsa liked the idea of going home with something more behind her name, something that even Hildy would have been impressed by. She thought of her sisters often, and Hildy most of all. On the days when Clara wasn’t feeling well, and Gordon was gone, Elsa would often imagine Hildy knocking on the door, having been transported to Hollywood instead of heaven, the result of some wonderful glitch in the cosmos.