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Chapter Eight

THE TOWN WAS SO MISERABLE, even for Texas, that once it had been named “Sour Lake,” nobody had the nerve to suggest it be improved. Or the energy. The energy it took to suggest the town at all was about all the miserable place seems to have once known. Attracting tourists by claiming the healthful waters of the sour lake were a cure was the idea behind Sour Lake, but few were attracted and the entire place would have folded, except so much oil was suddenly discovered (which was what had caused the lake to be sour, it turned out) that the wretched town of Sour Lake was still alive.

And Eugenia Crawley was twenty-three years old and still in it – stuck there in Texas, washing the dishes in her mother’s restaurant where she waited on tables and was wearing a pink checked outfit, a waitress uniform, she’d made herself. She made all her own clothes on the sewing machine, the kind you pumped – anyway, who needed an electric machine in Sour Lake? There wasn’t much reason to sew faster, sewing was all there was to do.

She was engrossed in a serial called The Girl in the Blue Dress which the Beaumont paper was running every day. It was about a girl who’d gone to Hollywood from a small town, determined to become an actress and planning to make herself noticeable by wearing only one color, blue. And every day she waited outside the studio for someone to choose her, to notice her, but they never did. Until finally, she was forced to leave her lodgings and wound up sharing a chaste arrangement with a young man who’d also come to Hollywood to make good and whose tiny Hollywood bungalow he let her share, without the slightest trace of anything vulgar. The platonic nature of their arrangement was a simple fact. That the two of them could live in a place where living together at all was possible struck Eugenia as perfect – a place where no small town restrictions, no gossip, could befoul their fun.

She’d tried to survive a year of life by herself in New Orleans where she had lived as a secretary, working in an office. But the office she worked in went broke and the jobs she tried to find were all hopeless. So she’d returned to Sour Lake and was still in it.

Perhaps she was too scared to leave or too loyal to her mother or just didn’t know where to go anyway, but once she began The Girl in the Blue Dress she found out where to go – Hollywood. Hollywood, where you could do whatever you liked. And nobody noticed.

She had her savings and with the help of a Catholic priest from Chicago who was eager to see that anyone who wanted to leave Texas got out even if he couldn’t, she even was given a ride – he knew someone driving there who would take her, saving her train fare.

She arrived in Hollywood in 1933 and met Billie, a girl the priest knew who was about her age and also there from the South – only Billie was from Beaumont, a place that was the height of sophistication compared to Sour Lake. Except to Billie, who was one of those people just born knowing they’ve got to get out of Texas the quickest they can. And since she was so beautiful, Hollywood was obviously her only true home. Hollywood, she felt, was where she belonged.

She felt this even in Hollywood itself where, a year before, she’d arrived and gotten a job as a waitress and a boyfriend who was a waiter in the Coconut Grove. Her boyfriend, like all the waiters in the Coconut Grove, was Italian. He’d begun being a waiter in Switzerland and at the finest hotels he’d apprenticed since he was twelve. By the time he was twenty he was a consummate waiter and his friend, Pietro, also an Italian, was also fully trained. Deciding to come to America – to Hollywood – instead of going to Venice where the hotels needed fully trained Italians from Swiss hotel dining rooms, they arrived first in Canada and then, crossing the border by night, to America, entering the United States illegally and proceeding to Hollywood at once.

Perhaps Rudolph Valentino had been their inspiration. After all, Valentino had been only a poor boy from Italy too. To poor boys from Italy like Pietro and Alphonso, Billie’s boyfriend, it almost seemed foolish not to go to Hollywood.

Which was why places like the Coconut Grove managed to hire such a finely trained staff – and why a place like Los Angeles, which would hardly seem like the sort of place one would expect to find service so magnificently cosmopolitan, wound up having the kinds of waiters who eventually became maître d’s at the world’s finest restaurants. New York, in fact, is especially full of maître d’s who began in the Coconut Grove as waiters, Italians from Switzerland via Canada by moonlight.

Looking like a hick in her blue dress, Eugenia Crawley carried her suitcase to Billie’s front porch and knocked. But she was so shy, adorable, and sweet that Pietro, Alphonso’s friend and fellow waiter, fell in love with her at once, in spite of her blue dress.

Hardly giving Eugenia a chance to look for a job, Pietro insisted that Eugenia marry him and not get a job, be his wife instead. She didn’t know what to do but say yes. Right off she’d noticed how much like Valentino Pietro looked. His nose was almost exactly identical.

“Yes,” she said.

And when they took a weekend off for their honeymoon and went to Laguna, she returned to Hollywood with her hair a new way and a glow of tan and a new dress – also blue – a dress which he chose for her though, which transformed her into a shy beauty and not a pretty hick at all.

In the dance troupe Lola’s best friend was the Femme Fatale of the century named Estelle Varez, who wasn’t pretty or beautiful or even awake most of the time but really only alive the eight times she managed to get married and divorced. The alimony rolled in.

By the time I met Estelle Varez she was fifty years old and she’d grown as heavy and motionless as the Sphinx. But occasionally she would make up her mind that it was not too much trouble to move. Perhaps consistency demanded that if everything people do was too much trouble, then she had to include doing nothing as too much trouble as well and go make tea. That moment when she rose from her chaise was all I needed to see to know dancing must have rolled off her so obviously that if she even attempted to leap like Goldie the world would end from too broad a gesture. Like that moment with those heaviest boa constrictors when they break out of stony motionless hours or days, suddenly contracting and expanding, making a cataclysmic shambles of their old diamond-shaped skin designs and making mincemeat out of the Physical Properties and Laws of Gravity devised by grave and serious men who insist that everything is dying to fall, to succumb to the earth’s pull.

One time, Shelly, one of my deadly earnest girl friends, trying to determine if Estelle was a satisfactory woman up on current events and what was the latest happening to date, found that not only didn’t Estelle shop, know about austere films, understand that Hellenic was entirely different and better than Hellenistic styles of art, realize the importance of drugs in the treatment of schizophrenia or the whole new field of psychopharmacology opening up, but after a while my friend finally turned cold when it turned out that Estelle hadn’t read Giovanni’s Room.

“Read?” Estelle laughed. “Why should I bother with such foolishness?”

“You don’t read?” Shelly gasped.

“Certainly not,” Estelle replied, peeling a grape in her chaise with her long Lincoln Continental Maroon polished fingernails.

“But books are—” Shelly cried, terror impaling her face into Hellenistic horror rather than classical Greek peaceful beauty like Estelle’s. “—books are necessary!”

“Necessary? What on earth for?”

“You have to read,” Shelly cried, her face stolid as a sleeping boa, “or you can’t learn things.”

“Why should I be expected to do anything. Learn things? Read? I think it’s very silly of you young people these days to expect people – me – to do anything. Very silly. And I must say,” she must have had to add, “very boring and very tiresome of you – those your age I mean – doing all that. Doing anything is really so bad, but you – your generation – you do everything. It must stop.”

“I don’t believe you,” Shelly now laughed, relieved.

“But it’s true,” Estelle said, her thumb impaled in a grape which was blacker than her nail polish, thank heavens. If it were green, Shelly might have never gotten out alive. “All of you doing what you’ll do. Not only is it silly, boring, and tiresome – it’s dangerous, of course, it’s bad and dangerous because you don’t know what you’re doing. But dangerous, bad . . . these things are details. Details give women wrinkles. I’m over fifty and I don’t have one line on my face. Details! Like good and bad!”

“You’re so funny,” Shelly decided, consoled that this nice old lady was only trying to be wicked and witty but didn’t know how.

“No, I’m not,” Estelle replied. Her face settled into a hitman’s closed mask. Not a wrinkle anywhere.

“If I don’t go to UCLA I might come up to Berkeley this fall. I’ll call you, okay? And come over like this to see you again. . . . I like the older generation you know?”

“How on earth can a grown woman spend the fall in a place like Berkeley?” Estelle demanded of me.

“School,” I said. “You know, UC Berkeley? School?”

“Oh, but all fall?” Estelle asked.

“Oh, I’m going to be a lawyer one day,” Shelly smiled. “And help those more unfortunate than myself.”

“And who might that be?” Estelle asked.

“Why, the poor,” Shelly said, dripping brimfuls of her usual Gamma good intentions – the only sorority at Hollywood High that never got laid. “We’ve got to help.” Shelly went on, “I mean, we’ve got to do something.”

“Darling,” Estelle turned to me and said, “I’m terribly sorry but it’s just too much trouble for me to get up. And show you out. Can you show yourselves out?”

“Shelly, we’re going,” I told her.

“Now?” She was in the middle of her first sip of tea and her first cookie.

“Now!” I said. “Hurry up.”

“That’s a good girl,” Estelle called out to me as I left, “and slam the door tight, sweetheart. Lock it!”