Perkins Cobb Revisited

I knew this was a perilous opportunity, even if I couldn't tell whether to be warned or beguiled. I will do anything not to be afraid, or not to have it show. So I said, "Why not?" She gave me an address up above Sunset, and instructed me on how not to miss the concealed entrance. "Come around four," she said, "and we can swim."

My destination was a narrow, winding lane just below the Hollywood sign. The property was cloaked in flowering shrubs, so close to the city yet poised silently above it. The paneled door to the house stood ajar. The interior was Spanish with bare white walls and just a few pieces of outrageously sparse modern furniture. There was a painting on the wall, one of James Stagg's night scenes, with a yellow cab making a U-turn like a smear of mustard. Doors opened to the patio and an intimate oval pool graded in tiny tiles of every shade of blue and green. There was a gentle noise of swimming. But it was not Miss Ortiz in the water. Her Afghan hound--"Laura," I learned--was doing patient laps, her hair spread out like fine fronds, while Graziella, supple and thin, sat curled in a metal chair feeding herself blue corn chips with savage appetite.

You may be interested to know how the briefly fabled Ortiz looked after several years of rest. There is a photograph from the afternoon to satisfy your curiosity. Not that I had made the trip with a camera. Miss Ortiz had one, which, before anything could be said, she held out to me: "Here. Take me. So there will be no doubt."

I could not imagine what suspicion worried her, but I soon discovered there was no measuring her feeling of order breaking down. I did as I was told and took her picture, and this simple absorbing of her appearance seemed to soothe her, in the way a handful of opening peonies might have charmed another hostess. She made me finish the roll, though she did not bother with other poses or attitudes. There was no vanity in her submitting to the lens. Indeed, she regarded the camera with the inquisitive disdain of someone quite ill inspecting an alleged wonder drug, but used to many frauds.

I held the film in my hand and told her, encouragingly, "The first step in the comeback."

"I'm 40, Mr. Thomson. At that age in this city a woman is expected to do the right thing--like Captain Oates, walking out into the blizzard."

A little daunted, I tried to compliment her on the jewel-like appeal of her home.

"Oh, I don't live here," she said, exasperated with my misunderstanding. "I couldn't live here. You don't really get anything, do you? Those writers with the big opinions--they never get anything."

"Well--" I began.

"Writing all that stuff, and not knowing a damn thing!"

"To write is to seek," I supposed.

She would have none of this (though giants of Hollywood have gathered around the same triteness as if it were a Francis Bacon). She stood up, and her sandals snapped at the pool's surround. She lit a cigarette and picked tirelessly at blooms in the foliage behind her. After examining (searching?) each flower's head, she dropped it in the pool until her dog was surrounded.

"You people who write about the business, you're so innocent! Especially when you try to be insiders."

"I am not sure readers want this kingdom to be real. They like to believe the best and the worst."

She stared at me now, as if actually weighing what I had said. I could see the youth still in her, or maybe it was just a David Bailey 1/l00th of drop-dead affront, hands splayed to guard her breasts--you know the shot. "Perkins Cobb used you," was all she said.

"Perhaps, but amiably."

"Amiably?"

"We were friends." I hoped the humble claim might put off her belligerence. A part of me did not want Perk--or my faith--ruined. Yet some pitiless curiosity in me was also ready for the rumor of any evil.

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