Weekly Short Story

"Visiting Virginia" by Dan Friedman (continued from the newsletter)

Today, at least, the weather was as strange as I had ever seen it. I had arrived in Southern California four days earlier to beautiful sunshine and a hotel on the Pacific Ocean for a business conference and spent the next three days indoors in meetings and presentations. The sun was finally shining today, Saturday, after several days of rain but I was due to leave on the first flight out the next day and showers still lingered. My mood reflected in the gloomy atmosphere, I debated whether or not to cancel my plans and try to catch an earlier flight home. Ordinarily I’m not the adventurous type and it took a lot of personal courage to muster up a conviction to stay.

While Andy locked his car, I disentangled myself from his front seat and stretched my back and legs. The effect of heavy rain in beautiful sunshine was a hypnotic prism as I gazed out across the lawn and grounds. I don’t know how long I’ve been doing this, a few years I suppose, but there’s always a moment when I step on to the grass that I get a sort of calming sensation. Maybe it’s because I’ve always appreciated the necessity of green space within a city, to allow for a momentary escape from the traffic and everyday business that we tend to go through as creatures of habit. I never cease to marvel at how you can enter these spaces and forget there are so many millions of people on every side of you. That was the feeling I had now, except it included palm trees.

Much smaller than I expected, I thought to myself. I had expected something so much more grandiose, given that this was, after all, Hollywood and I was standing on something akin to sacred ground, especially for someone as steeped in the history of the movies as I like to think I am.

It’s safe to say I learned more from the Zenith in our living room growing up then I did from my parents but I had an enabler. Around my tenth birthday, a bachelor uncle came to stay with us for a few weeks. He was, shall we say, fanatical about movies. He could recite the cast, crew, and inconsequential details of any film ever made, or so it seemed. To this day when I think of him I think immediately of Maria Ouspenskaya. Who you ask? Why, Maria Ouspenskaya who, as everyone should know, played the gypsy woman in the Lon Chaney Jr. Wolfman film. A strange association, but not when you consider that he used her name to “test” me practically every time I saw him. I guess it was his way of making sure I was up to his standards.

Around that same time of his visit, we had gotten our first VCR. A clunky top-loading model that was like the space age as far as I was concerned. The first video tape I ever rented, Star Wars, I watched about eight times before my father made me return it.

My uncle moved in with all of his belongings, which wasn’t much, but happened to include his own private VHS copy of Gunga Din. I won’t say he forced me to watch it, more like he bribed me with ice cream. But that was it. I was hooked. My sister, all of seven, took one look, didn’t see any color on the screen, and departed for better things to do. Me, I stayed until the bitter end. And I usually describe that day as not only the watershed of my life but also my greatest tragedy. Because of it I live, eat, sleep, and dream about the movies. I once had a dream where I came up with a workable sequel to Citizen Kane. Unfortunately, I forgot most of the details by the time I found a pencil to scribble it all down. So it was with no small appreciation for the time and place that I stood in the center of the Hollywood Forever cemetery, final resting place to some of the greatest movie folk that ever had their name flicker across a silver screen.

It was four in the afternoon by the time we got there and the gates closed at five. No matter, I thought. I had plenty of time to hunt down the handful of sites I wanted to see, snap a couple of photos, and get back down to Orange County in time to meet my boss for dinner before I packed for the trip home.

On the drive over, it was a thrill to physically view many of the legendary sites and locations I had read about for years. Andy, I soon discovered, while a tremendous movie fan himself, had no real feel for the history of Hollywood beyond the basics – Grauman’s Chinese Theater, the Hollywood sign looming off in the hills, the usual touristy stuff that everyone flocked to see. Make no mistake, I was interested too but I figured we might as well tread off the beaten path and see where it took us. We had passed by the Hollywood Heritage Museum, housed in the Lasky-DeMille barn and famous for being the very first movie studio in Los Angeles. Just to illustrate our differences, Andy had driven by there hundreds of times without inkling as to what it was. Of course, there was no real reason he should have known except that I am obsessive-compulsive about things like that.

There’s something about Hollywood and the culture, history, and overriding sense of time and place that takes over when you’re there, like a state of mind. Maybe it’s because it’s such a company town and so dedicated to a single industry. Or maybe it’s because the chief exports are fame and celebrity. It seems to me that Hollywood occupies a special pre-conceived place in our collective minds that conjures up certain images. In much the same way that the mention of Brooklyn or London evokes specific feelings and images, so too will Hollywood be permanently etched in our brains. Or maybe it’s just me. It’s possible.

I’ve always been fascinated with the silent film era myself, simply because there were no other vast communication outlets for people to become widely known. Without radio, television, or the Internet, movie stars were recognized because people went to the movies every single week. Even if the audience couldn’t necessarily speak English, they could understand what was going on. It’s a miracle of the pre-modern age that these people were absolutely mobbed every time they went on good will tours or trips abroad. It’s been said that Charlie Chaplin’s popularity in Germany is what prompted Hitler to grow a moustache like the Little Tramp’s. I’ve always wondered if people like Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts shouldn’t bone up on their predecessors a little more. Then they’d have an idea of what it’s really like to be famous.

As I mentioned, I was at Hollywood Forever with a mission. I was able to purchase a map in the gift shop – a telling sign, they charged me five dollars for it. Quickly I identified the sites I wanted to visit. Most of them were people I had admired for years or of whom I was a tremendous fan, others just names I was curious about.

The first and easiest to locate was the tomb of Douglas Fairbanks and I call it a tomb because it was unlike any other memorial or monument in the cemetery that I could see. No mere headstone or mausoleum, Doug was in a brilliant marble crypt with a colonnade, his profile cast in copper above his body, and a long reflecting pool extending forward for what had to be a hundred feet. Like royalty, I thought. And sure enough, if anyone would be considered royalty in Hollywood it would be Fairbanks. I’m not the only one who thought so – a goose had apparently also decided that it was a high-class place and built a nest down by the reflecting pool. I failed to see the warning sign that had been posted but had uprooted in the wet soil until I was well down by the sarcophagus engrossed in getting the perfect photo. She made a charge at me when I meandered too closely for her tastes but fortunately for me I could out-run her. That would have been something to tell – turned into a human sacrifice at the altar for a Hollywood deity by an overprotective waterfowl.

I soon recognized that the cemetery administrators had been very clever. For most of the outdoor sites, they had planted markers by the famous names to facilitate locating them so it became a simple matter to walk around the lake in the center of the cemetery and find them. I took pictures of Cecil B. DeMille, Jayne Mansfield, John Huston, Mel Blanc (and before you ask, his gravestone does indeed say “That’s All, Folks!”) – okay, yes, I didn’t actually take pictures of them, I took pictures of their graves. But I can honestly say I was at most six feet away from them.

It sounds morbid, I know, but I get a very strange feeling when I visit cemeteries or famous houses. I recall visiting Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West and F.D.R.’s home in Hyde Park and getting the same feelings. They were there, even if they weren’t there. It’s even more powerful in a cemetery where I know the mortal remains are lying beneath my feet.

Thanks to the trees and shrubs that pointed the way I had gotten through my list of sites rather quickly and had thirty minutes to spare so Andy and I sort of started wandering around a little aimlessly. There was no time to walk through the mausoleum, although I would have loved to have seen if the famous woman in black was paying a visit to Valentino.

As I was walking closer to the road, Andy strolled toward the lake. I wasn’t paying much attention to him as we were both making our way in the general direction of his car. “Hey!” I heard him call. “Who’s this?”

I looked up to see him standing by one of the narrow evergreens that were serving as indicators for tourists. The map already tucked away in my backpack, I walked over eager with anticipation that Andy had found someone noteworthy. I came up behind where he was crouched on the ground and read the name on the simple flat stone – Virginia Rappe.

For the uninitiated, the name means nothing. To the initiated, it means something. Boy, does it ever. Andy, being in the former group, strolled off toward some other monuments. Myself, I stood in awe. There’s no other word for it.

“Virginia,” I whispered to myself. “Fancy meeting you here.”

What I meant by that, of course, was my pleasure in the dichotomy of someone like Virginia, for all intents and purposes an ordinary girl, set directly between the luminaries of an age. In fact, Virginia formed a neat little equilateral triangle with Marion Davies and Tyrone Power.

A quick summation, based on the version of the story most often told – Virginia Rappe was a young starlet or groupie who, in 1921, was in attendance at a wild party thrown in a San Francisco hotel by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, then one of the top silent film comedians in the industry. Fatty used his size and babyish face to create a lovable buffoonish persona, often teaming with Mabel Normand in a series of quasi-domestic scenarios. It was Fatty who got Buster Keaton started on his way to screen immortality. Anyway, Fatty, so the story goes, decided to take a new car out for a test drive and ended up driving all the way up the California coast. Fade in to Fatty’s hotel suite, booze and debauchery in full flower. Cut to an adjoining bedroom where we find Fatty and Virginia. They are having intimate relations, but it’s unclear if it’s consensual. Cut to a close-up of a Coca-Cola bottle in Fatty’s hand (in some versions it’s a champagne bottle but for the sake of things it sounds more deliciously sordid if it’s simply soda pop). Fatty then does or doesn’t use the bottle as a substitute for his own manhood. The bottle is or isn’t broken. Virginia suffers either a ruptured fallopian tube or a ruptured bladder or, as is sometimes told, she was already suffering from an undiagnosed illness when she walked in the door and the timing was lousy. About the only thing that we know definitively is that she dies from peritonitis not too long afterwards and Arbuckle’s career dies with her. Even though he’s eventually acquitted of rape in a third jury trial after two previous hung juries, he’s done in the motion picture industry. Just like that.

The significance of Virginia, aside from the fact that her life tragically ended before it should have, is that she is more or less the watershed, the source from which all Hollywood scandal emanates down through the years. She’s become sort of a cult figure in the world of tabloid journalism that ripped secrets from the insular world that the studios and their executives created. There are echoes of Virginia in the stories of Thomas Ince, Jean Harlow, Errol Flynn, even Marilyn Monroe. In a way, she’s more responsible for the general public’s general notion of Hollywood than Fairbanks, DeMille, Mansfield, or any of her other neighbors. And I’m standing right in front of her.

It’s with no small amount of guilt that I realized I’m not better than any of the other gossip hounds who use stories like Virginia’s as fodder for their own writings. But then again, we’re also talking about someone who’s famous, relatively speaking, because of the manner in which she died. Talk about a double-edged sword.

When I was a kid, my parents took me on a trip to George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon. There, on the grounds, was the crypt where the father of our country and his wife were interred in a pair of sarcophagi. I remember the feeling of confirmation I felt, that this guy, who was just a picture on a dollar and was someone I had only learned about in history class, could shake hands with me if I were to somehow pop open the lid. That made him real, not just a myth or legend.

To me, standing over Virginia’s grave, I felt the same sort of validation. Sure, I’d seen a picture of her so I know what she looked like – dark hair, full lips, slightly doe-eyed – but up until now she was really just a story I had read about in a book. This was proof, in a way, that she really existed. I know a few people who have issues in cemeteries – they can’t bring themselves to walk anywhere but on the designated paths because of what lies beneath. Quite honestly, I’ve never had that problem. I’d gone so far as to come just shy of picking a blade of grass or taking a little scoop of dirt from a famous person’s grave, a memento with maybe just a little bit of that person mixed in.

Standing there, my sixth sense started to kick in and I got a strange feeling in my stomach, like I was being watched. I don’t pretend to be psychic but I can get very strange impressions from time to time. I’ve been known to fiddle with the dial of a radio and correctly name the song that’s playing an instant before it comes on. I’ve also been able to become a very good card player because I instinctively seem to know the next card to be dealt. So it’s not just a feeling of déjà vu with me. When I get sort of a buzz in my head I tend to listen to it. However, this time this feeling I dismissed as silly, that I was letting my imagination run away with me. Yet, it was still strong enough that I glanced over my shoulder just to be sure. No one was there. The nearest person was Andy, who stood about twenty feet away watching geese swim in the lake.

I thought for an instant about telling her how sorry I was that my first reaction to seeing her gravestone was a sort of glee, like discovering an overlooked treasure. The words were about to come out of my mouth when I caught a glimpse of Andy looking back in my direction and I clammed up with embarrassment.

We always hear about the magic of film, that it preserves images forever so that Gene Kelly is always young and acrobatic as he prances through the raindrops and that’s what we remember, instead of a shrunken octogenarian with a raspy voice and stooped step. But Virginia, someone who was a nobody until she met her end, was never immortalized in that way.

I wondered what Virginia would say now if her spirit could rise up and survey all that has gone on since her passing. I wondered if she was so hungry for fame that she would have willingly sacrificed herself if she knew it meant her name would live on. Is it worth it? Is it ever worth it? I know what Fatty’s answer would be. Then again, I had been standing on this spot for a good five minutes and not one of the other people wandering around with maps in their hands had so much as walked over for a glimpse, so maybe it was for nothing.

It started to rain again, just enough to start water-logging the map but not enough to send me running for cover. The wind blew a wet leaf across my face and I swatted it away. And just like that it stopped.

“Where’s your umbrella?” I called out to Andy.

“In the car. What do you need it for?” he answered. I became aware that the sun was shining again. “Never mind.”

“What’s with you?” Andy asked. This is one of those times I wish I could have seen the expression on my own face. I felt rain running down my face so it may have looked like I was crying.

I told him the story. He was interested, nodding in acknowledgement when I pointed out that we were standing for all intents and purposes, at ground zero. He mildly agreed and started to walk away. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Don’t move just yet.”

I know this is going to sound patently stupid, but I could swear that I heard what sounded like the muffled sound of a woman crying. Then again, it could have been the breeze through the trees or the fountain bubbling up from the lake, but I listened extremely carefully and I’m pretty sure it was crying. I like to think that it was Virginia, bemoaning her unfortunate legacy. She might have been an Arbuckle fan, and circumstances aside, which is a huge assumption, would probably not have wanted to have seen him end the way he did. Or maybe she was just a star struck not-so-innocent girl and it could have been anybody in that room so long as they were in the movies and she’d have gone willingly regardless. After all, the only two people who know what really happened in that hotel are both dead and we have only the version of the one who walked out of the room while alert and breathing. Maybe it was just a series of unfortunate coincidences, or maybe she did end up on the wrong end of a broken bottle.

Maybe those movies where the spirits rise from their graves aren’t wrong. Everything, no matter how fantastic, has to have some small basis in truth. Maybe she’s trying to tell me as much right now while she has my attention. The question is, do I really want to know or am I more in love with the mystery of it all?

“Just sit tight,” I tell Andy again.

“What for?” he answered.

“Don’t you hear something?”

“I don’t hear a thing.” For a guy who writes a lot about magic and the power of names and places he sure doesn’t seem to appreciate the concept. “Why, what do you hear?”

I was about to tell him but then I realized, he won’t get it. First of all, he doesn’t have “the power.” Second, he’s lived here long enough to be inured against the romanticism of the movies. Hell, he works for a studio. That seems to me to be the surest way to have your fires put out. Not that I wouldn’t jump if the opportunity presented itself to me, but still.

Of course, no sooner did this thought cross my mind then I looked up over the tree line to see the Paramount Studios water tower looming over us. It was a cheap thrill, but it was a thrill nonetheless.

 

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