Duplicitous Read online

  Sabrina walked in with a cautious smile, anticipating that her presence would help to undermine my relationship with my wife.

  “I haven’t seen you in a while,” Katharine coldly told Sabrina.

  Sabrina gave out with a little laugh. “I’ve been busy, you know,” and holding up her portfolio, she smiled at us both, attempting to break the tension though she knew was just making it stronger.

  “Show them to my husband,” Katharine said, “I’ve seen your work before and, as I’ve told you, I just can’t see how we could fit you in here.”

  Katharine walked across the gallery and Sabrina walked towards me.

  “Don’t mind her,” I told the young woman.

  “Oh, I’m not worried about her,” Sabrina said. “I’m here to show something to you.”

  When she opened her portfolio, I was stunned that a woman so beautiful could also have the talent that she had. My initial fantasies of a fling with the young woman had changed into a working relationship. While she didn't have any work that would fit in the gallery, she had enough talent to introduce her to Hans Dreir, maybe help her get a job doing some drafting for him.

  When Sabrina left, Katharine announced that she’d be leaving too. She had a sudden appointment with a friend that just couldn’t be put off. She was punishing me for my desires while I was expected to tolerate hers.

  “Have a nice day with your friend,” I told her. And when she left the gallery, my anxiety grew and I was pathetic enough to want to chase after her. But I held my needs in check and thought about Sabrina, a much better method of getting back at my wife.

  And I wasted no time. That very week, I set up a meeting with her and Dreir. He was just as impressed as I was with her talent but, at his age, the sex that might go along with Sabrina was of less importance. Sure she was fun to look at but her talent was rare and within days, she found herself working for Dreir.

  Two weeks later, after Katharine learned that her competition was now working on someone with more prestige than her husband, my wife’s antipathy towards the girl seemed to vanish. With a bigger fish for Sabrina to capture, Katharine didn’t seem worried about any danger that Sabrina might have meant to her. As a matter of fact, when Sabrina came to visit, Katharine spent most of her time with the girl. She befriended her as a method of keeping her away from me. Also, as I would come to see, Katharine chose to be a kind of mentor, teaching her as much about manipulating men as she taught her about the gallery business.

  Sabrina was a modern girl with a devotion to an old style of design. Like the Art Nouveau artists were when they started to revolutionize the world around them, Sabrina felt that her work was going to save the current artistic graveyard from obscurity.

  Over the course of the last two years, Sabrina and I became very close. She was there to hold my hand and keep me from my own suicide when my wife took her life a year later. She became a kind of confidant and I did the crazy thing that I always seemed to do with a woman that interested me – I told her the story of my life, the failures, the weaknesses, the dreams partially fulfilled but mostly left smoldering in the dying fire that had been my ambition.

  PARALLEL LIVES

  When I took the latest draft of Sunset Boulevard, I figured it would be good bedtime reading. What I didn’t think it would be was a carbon copy of my life for the past ten years. I read about Norma and her isolation. It made me think about my middle-aged patron, Margaret, who always had the knack and desire to change my fortunes for a little fortune of her own – me.

  Soon after meeting Margaret ten years earlier, our affair began, a mutually beneficial relationship. I pretended that I loved her. She supplied me with paintings to make commissions on. Every night with her, every evening away from my daughter dragged me deeper into increasingly drunken sessions.

  “What is it, darling?” She was sensitive to my frustrations, afraid that her greying blond hair and wrinkled smile was making me lose interest in her. But it didn’t work that way. I rather enjoyed Margaret’s company. It reminded me of the mother that I learned to hate, the one I missed because I was longing for the days when I was an adolescent, the days when my imagination caught hold of me and I could project myself into all kinds of beguiling trouble.

  “Alexander,” she said with a stern imperiousness. I was, after all her protégé. She would help me reach the realm of the society she was basking in. Margaret wanted the attention all of the time. Each moment without my ardor was one in which she had to think about her age, about all the emptiness that filled her cavernous heart, the carcass of dreams that lay on my lap and teased me like a teenage girl. She would always have a rose in her hands, it seemed. She would smell it and sigh, then offer it to my nostrils. I had to smell the aroma of her fantasies, had to kiss her with a passion that was really inspired by my murderous intentions. It was her champagne, heavy doses of it, which kept me complacent, kept me as the companion that she wanted and needed. And I shouldn’t be complaining all that much, she was an acrobat in bed, defying her maturity. She let out with a bonfire of some old kind of passion. It was something I really enjoyed because it placed me on a pedestal. I was like the candles that lit up her room. I was a light that burned with an intensity that made me seem as if I had a constant power to light the way for another person’s soul. Margaret was the reflection of that power. Her guttural laughs were a private confirmation that I had satisfied her in bed, in the bed that was situated in the middle of her Victorian-styled chambers. With Margaret, I could live in a time before I was born, before the blackouts and nightmares had completely overtaken my mind.

  The next day, on the set, I met Gloria Swanson, the actress who was playing Norma Desmond, a character with a powerful resemblance to my own middle-aged paramour. We were shooting the scene where Joe Gillis finds himself hiding his car in what he thought was a deserted mansion while in fact, it was home to a deserted life.

  It was the scene when Gillis enters the estate for the first time that I began to experience my Norma Desmond déjà vu. Margaret also had a grand entrance to her mansion, with stairs ascending to a bedroom, frozen in time like Norma’s. The art director seemed to have lifted things from Margaret’s house, things like the decorous vanity where Norma preened herself and like the vaulted ceiling that made me feel as though I were in the medieval castle of an aging queen.

  I had to snap myself out of the mystic hold that Margaret had over me and get back to the present moment. It was time for the coffin scene where Norma introduces Gillis to her dead monkey, warning him to not charge any “fancy prices just because I’m rich.”

  “Wait a minute,” Gillis said, “You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be big.”

  “I am big, it’s the pictures that got small.”

  We were all in awe of Gloria’s performance. She was playing herself, shamelessly, a ghost that haunted the house of a dead era. Margaret was never so strong a character as Norma but she had the similar delusion of seeing herself as a young woman.

  My Margaret, in her self-deception, saw herself like that fresh rose she toyed with. In her mind, it was 1910 and she was in a sweeping dress that floated over the floor while she flirted with me and teased her way, so she thought, into my heart.

  When I left the set that night, I had another drinking session with Billy, one in which I told him about the remarkable coincidence of working on this particular film. Billy was captivated by my story about my real life Norma Desmond, especially the connection she had to the beginning of Paramount Studios.

  “Good for you,” Billy said as we shared a pitcher of margaritas. “You were thoughtful about the old broad.”

  “I was in need like Joe,” I agreed, “but it was Margaret who drove into my mansion.”

  “Your mansion?”

  “My gallery. The place with a much smaller version of the collection of art that graced Margaret’s home.”

  I elaborated on the story, telling him how Margaret came into my life at just the right time. “And it was no
t only my financial troubles,” I explained, “It was my love troubles.”

  Billy kept staring at me, waiting for me to retell the story he already knew. He knew it was good for me. “Katharine was having an affair, you see,” I told him.

  “And you needed revenge that was lucrative.”

  I put down my drink. “Well, the commission on Margaret’s artworks that I sold kept the door open.”

  “Was it a comfortable door?” Billy asked.

  “In a way,” I answered him. “It was a revolving door, of course.” Billy laughed. “But it wasn’t about to fall off its hinges and there was still some attractive lacquer to make up for its age.”

  Billy slapped his thigh and poured another drink. I enlightened him about my wife’s relationship with my half-brother, that the bastard child was in direct competition with the socially approved son on several levels – for the affections and money of our father, for the affections of my wife and for the passion of our lives, painting.

  “Michel’s paintings had a style that made mine seem old.”

  “And sometimes, the new,” Billy said, “brought out more bucks.”

  “I needed those bucks. My father had cut off his support by then.”

  “But, fortunately,” Billy added, “you had no pride.”

  I grimaced and agreed. “I did what I had to survive. I had a daughter to support, Mara, the only faithful woman in my life.”

  “Your brother’s had quite a run.”

  “Which was paying all the bills for a while.”

  “But not doing wonders for your creative ego.”

  “I always wanted to murder him but then my gallery would close down.”

  “And you’d end up like Walter Neff, remember how he was squashed by the thumb of the woman he committed his crimes with?”

  “Double Indemnity wasn’t quite like my life, Billy”

  “But you lost your woman and your money.”

  “I didn’t lose Katharine entirely.”

  “You lost the reality of Katharine, my friend.” Billy poured me another drink. “You just held onto the fantasy that she was the solution to your misery.”

  “Let’s not forget about Margaret. I also had something on the side.”

  “Like a rat has cheese in a mouse trap.”

  Billy had such colorful ways of describing things. We talked a little longer. I bemoaned my life and Billy kept bringing up my successes. The only one I could agree on, though, was the acquisition of my own Norma Desmond.

  I changed the topic of conversation. I went back to our days at UFA and the atmosphere of impending Armageddon provided by Adolf Hitler and his National Socialists.

  “My uncle was beaten up in the streets, his store destroyed and all his belongings stolen,” Billy told me. “That was the night I knew it was time for me to leave.”

  “I left earlier.”

  “Not only that, you weren’t a Jew.”

  “Jew or not, I suffered as I watched decent people being tormented and raped by the brown shirts.”

  The drinks slowed down as our memories of the holocaust grew. We put the night talk to bed in just a little while and I went home, brimming with the Nazi rise to power in my mind. It was appropriate then that I had a session of hallucinations that night. When I arrived at my house, I was no longer in Santa Monica. I found myself in the darkness of anarchistic Berlin.

  As I stood in front of my house, I could hear an old car horn honking. And the breeze in Santa Monica began to smell like pungent fascist air. It was time for the Weimar Republic to fall apart and it was falling apart in my neighborhood. My hallucinations had caught hold of me again as I watched an old Duesenberg that drove by my house. In it were young and rich Germans, people that had made their money from munitions profits.

  I stayed outside, mystified by the past that was surrounding my present. Did that mean that Katharine was alive, I thought? I wanted to rush inside to see her but I was too seduced by the fact that I was suddenly living in a time warp.

  I walked up the street and, soon, despite the late hour, the nearby park was peopled with a combination of the wealthy and the degenerate. German citizens were surrounding me, speaking in their native tongue. I saw an exquisite woman, dressed in a long one-piece black evening gown, escorted by an elderly gentleman. It was 1930, three years before Hitler took over the country, and I could hear some distant piano playing the music of Kurt Weill. Decadence was victorious and I was thrilled to be alive.

  But soon, that moment of ecstasy was transformed into the beginning of a blood lust. At the extreme end of the long park, a lighted pavilion housed a large crowd that had come to see a man speak. His words started out softly, then, as they grew in hatred, they embraced the entire park.

  “From blood, authority of personality, and a fighting spirit springs that value which alone entitles a people to look around with glad hope, and that is the condition for the life which men desire… First will come honor and then freedom, and from both of these, happiness, prosperity, life: in a word, that state of things will return which we Germans perhaps dimly saw before the War, when individuals can once more live with joy in their hearts because life has a meaning and a purpose.”

  Most of the citizens had, by now, turned towards the short man speaking, the man with the pupils that appeared to be two cannonballs, Adolf Hitler.

  “Do not write on your banners the word ‘Victory’: today that word shall be uttered for the last time. Strike through the word ‘Victory’ and write once more in its place the word which suits us better – the word ‘Fight.’”

  The audience inside the pavilion was cheering but the bulk of the citizens of the park, the ones who had pleasure and peace on their minds, were turning away. They were deaf to the harbinger of doom that cut through the evening night, which brought on the rain that pushed steam up from the pavement.

  A man, standing next to me, a sullen transvestite, revealed his face to me – there was a fire of fear in his eyes, an awareness that things were changing, that his liberty would soon evaporate and the streets would be cleared of the lovely decadent freedoms that we enjoyed back then in Berlin.

  I closed my eyes and when I opened them again, the park was gone. I stood in front of my house and contemporary cars were passing on the street. I heard a solitary foghorn and opened my front door. I would no longer tolerate past realities that affected my mood.

  THE HEIRESS

  After a new day’s work on Sunset Boulevard, I went to Margaret’s Holmby Hills mansion, a short walk from the house that we used to shoot exteriors for Norma Desmond’s haven. Dinner that night was attended to by her own version of Max von Mayerling, the character who protected Norma from the real world. Reginald Jackman was a refugee from British society. He was twenty years older than Margaret and catered to all her needs, one of which was protecting her from the outside world, the world that was devoid of the original landed gentry of Los Angeles to whom she always referred when describing her young life. If she wanted to see them, Margaret could always travel to Rosedale Cemetery, the first landing spot for the deceased of early Los Angeles royalty. But we didn’t go there very often, except a few times to visit her late husband. And every time we did so, Reginald would drive her. While Margaret didn’t have an Isotta-Fraschini like Norma Desmond, she did have an old Packard limousine that served her well as a make believe royal carriage. After all, a British Duke was driving her around, though one whose current holdings were limited to the servant quarters of Margaret’s mansion. Reginald lost what was left of his property during the First World War when the English government took back the endowment that kept Duke Jackman in the style to which he had been accustomed.

  Margaret, now in her late fifties, looked upon our evenings together like sexual tennis. She would serve herself to me and I would volley. While my primary interest was retaining my meal ticket, over the years I had come to care for her welfare and maintained a persistent concern about her mental state. Margaret’s psychologic
al resume listed the fantasies that she had about the world, my favorite and most fearsome was that she had many suitors outside her castle that were waiting in line to take my place if I should ever abandon her. I’m sure that I could be replaced but I was afraid that it wouldn’t be by someone as concerned about her well being. There were several feckless gigolos that might apply for the job but few that would provide her with the compassionate regard that I had for my matronly friend. Margaret was childless and she saw me as her prized possession, someone she had trained to be adept in her peculiar world.

  “Darling,” she said when she saw me, “I’m so glad you got a break from that dreadful job of yours.”

  “It’s not dreadful, Margaret.”

  “It must be. I know it has an aging star in it. Gloria, practically my younger sister, used to go to parties with me and Pola.” Margaret was referring to her younger friend, the silent film actress Pola Negri, a onetime lady friend to Charlie Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch. “I know all about that young demon, Billy, and the practical joke he’s making out of the industry that lifted him out of the gutter.”

  “Billy was hardly in the gutter,” I argued.

  “Wilder is biting the hand that fed him. L.B. thinks he should be run out of town, tarred and feathered.” L.B. was Louis B. Mayer, the King of MGM, at the time the most successful studio in the business.

  I had my soup as we sat in her palatial dining room. I smiled at Margaret’s comments, thoughts dredged up from the older Hollywood society, the same one that Billy was making his movie about. She often dropped names that were anachronisms, members of an ancient culture, some of which, like H.B. Warner and Buster Keaton, were appearing in Sunset Boulevard as the “waxworks,” a club of which Margaret could be the founding member.

  After dinner, Margaret took my hand and escorted me to her latest art acquisitions. She had a buyer who was collecting European masterpieces for her, some of which had a dubious lineage, supposedly on the free and honest market but often works that had been plundered by the Nazis during the war. She wanted me to sell most of them, something that I undertook with a guilty conscience but undertook nonetheless. The commissions on these works would doubtlessly cover the cost of my defense attorney if I ever were arrested for marketing in stolen art.