Screwball

Screwball

by

Leslie S. Talley

I see in the paper where my ex-husband died yesterday—William Powell, star of The Thin Man series in the Thirties and Forties. He was ninety-one. The paper describes him as “charming, urbane, witty, debonair.” He wasn’t so God-damned debonair at home, let me tell you. All he wanted to do when he came home from the studio was collapse. Husbands weren’t my strong suit. If I hadn’t had to cut short my war-bond tour to check on what that bastard Gable was doing during my absence, I wouldn’t have died in that plane crash in 1942.

In case you haven’t guessed, I’m Carole Lombard—the wise-cracking screwball comedienne of the Thirties. I didn’t know it myself until a couple of years ago when I stayed up to watch the late, late show with my roommate.

You’ll love this, Gen. It’s a scream,” my roommate assured me.

I missed the credits. I was in the kitchen, fixing us a snack. Since Barbara and I had moved to an apartment off campus, we had taken to watching old movies late at night accompanied by beer and nachos. So the movie had already started when I got back to the living room. And there I was on the screen. And there was my ex-husband, Bill Powell as My Man Godfrey. I knew him—his voice, his mannerisms. I grabbed the back of the reclining chair to steady myself. The other hand holding the TV tray shook visibly, and foam cascaded down the sides of the frosted mugs. Barbara jumped up quickly and took the tray from my slackened grasp.

“What’s wrong, Geneva?” she asked in a voice of concern. “You look…strange.”

I felt damned strange. The room whirled like a globe that has been given a tremendous spin. I felt…disembodied. My physical body was standing in the living room; my mind was in limbo somewhere. “I’m o.k.,” I mumbled and sat down abruptly in the recliner. I brushed aside Barbara’s questions and exclamations with, “I’m just clumsy, that’s all.” I was mesmerized by what was taking place on that screen. The movie was familiar, though I’m sure I had never seen it before. Snatches of dialogue poured from my memory. At one point I remember thinking, ‘They’ve cut out a scene.’

Funny that it was Bill Powell that triggered my memory and not Clark Gable, the great love of my life. I had even watched Gone with the Wind a few years previously, too. Nothing.

I never told anyone, especially Barbara. After that, I read everything I could lay my hands about her (me). I wasn’t even tempted to confide the secret of my identity. In the first place, most people would scoff. Oh, maybe not openly, but they’d think I was a weirdo. Secondly, it was a delicious secret I didn’t want to share with anyone.

That’s the way things stood when my roommate hauled me to a Carole Lombard Film Festival. I balked. I had no desire to attend a public showing of my work. Don’t get me wrong—I like to watch myself on the screen. But privately.

      “Come on, Gen,” Barbara said coaxingly. “It’ll be fun. You know how much you liked the Bogart Festival”

      Barbara and I have roomed together for three years. She is a good kid, but somehow since I found out my identity that’s how I think of her—as a kid. If I had lived, I’d be seventy-five, for Christ’s sake! What an appalling thought!

      Also, since I found out who I am, I find myself deferring to Barbara. Maybe I’m trying to make it up to her for deceiving her, I don’t know. Anyway, my refusal to attend the festival was pretty half-hearted. Barbara talked me around easily. She’s good at that: she’s a psychology major. I wonder what she’d think if she knew. Bet they didn’t teach reincarnation in Psych 202.

      Barbara and I form a sharp contrast to each other. She is a brunette with the feathered hair falling in her face. She emphasizes her enormous brown eyes with tons of mascara and eye shadow. She wears a lot of blush, but seldom wears lipstick. She is nothing like my dearest friend Fieldsie from my past life. Fieldsie was a plum, jolly girl whom I met when both worked silent films for Mack Sennett. Sennett was the guy who made the Keystone Kops, remember?

      Unlike Barbara, I am blond as I was before. I like to think I still have the Lombard profile. I know I have the high smooth forehead and wear my hair away from my face to emphasize it. I favor a bright red lipstick because that’s what I’m used to. At least I don’t shave my eyebrows and then paint them back on in a thin line. I have to make some concessions to the Eighties.

      Neither do I object to pouring my carcass into skin-tight Jordache jeans. I never wore a bra back then, either, so that doesn’t bother me. So if you had seen Barbara and me on our way to the festival that Saturday morning, you wouldn’t have detected anything unusual about me.

      When we walked into the lobby of the fifty-year-old movie palace, I stopped abruptly and clutched Barbara’s arm.

      “Ow! Quit digging your fingernails into my arm!”

      “Brian’s here,” I said in an undertone.

      “Where?” she asked, craning her neck and giving little leaps to see over people’s heads.

      “Don’t be so God-damned obvious,” I cautioned her.

      “Who is he with?” she asked, still scrutinizing the audience, but more subtly. “Oh, God, he’s got the wimp with him! Why does he hang out with such a loser?”

      There was no time to say more. Brian and his friend, Timothy the Wimp, hailed us and made their way through the crowd to our sides. Brian is in my Literary Analysis class. When I see him, I’m all Geneva. I don’t feel like his grandmother!

      Brian is about 6’1 with curly brown hair and hazel eyes. He looks like a basketball player who has been lifting weights on the side. Actually, he’s on the Swim Team, President of Student Council, in the Drama Club, and the most popular guy around.

      I don’t think it detracts from his image to hang around with Timothy. His attitude is, “Hey, I’d like you to meet my friend Tim.” Tim isn’t really a bad-looking guy—when he’s not standing next to Brian. It’s just that he has this habit of waxing intellectual. If he’d keep his mouth shut. People might like him better. He wears big horn-rimmed glasses and slicks down his hair. He favors wearing vests and bow ties, too, which makes him look like a Quiz Kid. Barbara says he’s insecure, but then Psych majors think everyone is insecure. They may be right.

      Somehow, (I don’t know who suggested it), we agreed to go in together to see the first movie, No Man of Her Own, the only film I ever made with Gable. Barbara took Brian’s arm in a proprietary way and marched off with him. The little bitch better check her bed before she climbs in it tonight, I thought darkly.

      I managed to wangle a seat on the other side of Brian. On my left was Tim, lecturing away at my elbow on the genre of the screwball comedy. I would have upchucked if I had been paying any attention to him. The snatches I caught were mainly about my comic genius and what a serious business comedy was. Maybe so, but I made pictures because it was fun. If I hadn’t had a ball doing it, I wouldn’t have been in the business.

      The lights went down just then, and the movie began. Gable and I made this film in 1932. I was married to Bill Powell at the time, and Gable was married to Rhea Langham. There was not a flicker of the later spark that ignited between us. We enjoyed each other, and we worked well together: that was it. The fact that we were both married wouldn’t have stopped Gable for an instant, but it did me.

Afterwards we all trooped across to the little pub on the other side of the street, to study our programs over beer and pretzels/ The waitress came to take our orders while we bickered amiably over whether to see My Man Godfrey or To Be or Not to Be at 12:30.

“Scotch on the rocks,” I said absently to the waitress.

“I mean—that’s what she drank. Carole Lombard,” I said desperately. “Me? Oh, no, I’ll have a beer.”

The waitress came back with four Pepsis and a bowl of pretzels. We all eyed our Pepsis gloomily. Barbara glared at me.

Brian pretended not to notice. “Why do you want to see To Be or Not to Be, Geneva? My Man Godfrey is her most famous film.”

“I’ve seen it,” I said. “And To Be or Not to Be was supposed to be way ahead of its time.” Not to mention the fact that it was released posthumously; I wanted to see how it turned out.

“I wonder what it was like to make love with Clark Gable,” Barbara said dreamily. He was o.k., I thought dispassionately, once he got going. Getting him interested was the main hurdle.

“Why did you guys come to the festival?” Barbara asked.

“Are you kidding? Tim responded. “Brian’s an old film buff.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Brian said with an embarrassed laugh. “Tim’s the real buff. He can tell you what year they were made and who directed them. I’m just a Lombard fan.”

My heart leaped. A real-life fan sitting right across the booth from me. I was tempted. Believe me, I was tempted.

“How did you come to light on Lombard?” I asked.

“I had to read a biography in the eighth grade. My mom happened to be reading one on Carole Lombard. Her language was pretty salty, you know? So, I thought if I had to read a biography, it might as well be spicy!”

Cussing was my trademark. It all started when I was an ingenue on the lot. I used to get pinched black and blue and propositioned by everyone from producers to prop men. So I asked my brothers to teach me some of the off-putting words from their vocabularies. I rarely curse in mixed company today. In the first place, it would take more than a vulgarity to stop the guys of today. A crack over the head with a weighted ash tray is more the ticket. And secondly, I wouldn’t exactly be unique in this day and age. A woman cussing has definitely lost its shock value. Maybe I should cultivate a pure, virginal air. That would be different.

“After that,” Brian continued, “I watched for old Carole Lombard movies on the Late Show. Tim, what do you think of doing a Lombard vehicle for the Drama Club?”

“I don’t know, Brian. Her pictures are pretty dated.”

Dated! The little shit! I almost let him have it, right then and there. I controlled myself. “I think her pictures are startlingly contemporary,” I said, between my teeth. “The heroines are all independent, spirited, liberated. Her pictures were ahead of their time, really.”

“The screwball comedy was for a Depression Era audience that needed escapism,” Tim intoned.

“Don’t you think today’s audiences need escapism?” I countered, “what with inflation and the threat of nuclear war?”

“Atta girl, Geneva,” said Brian, applauding. “Look at all the kids who showed up at the festival at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning. I think we could do a revival of something like My Man Godfrey.”

“Who in the Drama Club could handle Lombard’s role, though?” Tim mused. They both stared off into space. When their eyes focused again, both gazes had crystallized on me.

“You know, Gen,” said Brian slowly, “you look like her. I wonder why I never noticed it before.”

“You’re right, Brian,” said Tim/ “She’s got the forehead.” He touched my chin with his forefinger and gently turned my head to the side. “And the profile.”

I felt like I was suffocating. All at once, I had to get out of there. “Well,” I said hurriedly, gathering up my handbag, “we’d better hurry if we want to make My Man Godfrey.”

I thought you wanted to see To Be or Not to Be.” Brian protested.

“Changed my mind,” I said over my shoulder.

“About halfway through Godfrey I developed a headache. I would have slipped out of the theatre, but Brian insisted on walking me back to my apartment. Barbara gave me a look that didn’t look good for our future relationship. I know she thought I had employed the oldest trick in the book.

Brian didn’t renew the subject of my playing Lombard for the Drama Club. He sensed the subject was taboo, even if he didn’t understand why. A very perceptive guy, Brian.

We talked on unexceptional subjects: our backgrounds, our classes.

“How did you come by the name Geneva?” Brian inquired.

“I was born in Switzerland.”

He grinned sympathetically. It could have been worse. They might have named you after the Matterhorn!” We both laughed immoderately: it broke the tension.

“There’s a Jean Harlow Film Festival next week,” he said, hurriedly. “If you’d be interested in going.”

Poor Jean. She had been billed as a sizzling sex symbol. Actually, she was just a loving, uninhibited girl. She died tragically at the age of twenty-six.

“Or maybe the Tracey-Hepburn Festival the week after,” he said, sensing my reluctance,

Spence. One of Clark’s best friends. Gone now. All of them—gone.

I stopped and turned to Brian. I smiled waveringly.

“Actually, Brian, I’m a little burned out on nostalgia right now. Why don’t we go see the new Selleck flick?”

“Sure,” he said, relieved. “Gosh, I thought it was me you didn’t like.”

“Oh, no,” I said, fixing an earnest gaze on him. He gulped. Yes, he did, really! God, I haven’t lost it! Eat your heart out, Barbara!

I know now I can’t go back It’s too painful. But—who knows? Maybe I’ll major in theatre. After all, it’s a shame to waste all that experience.