Graven Images

By Charles E. Miller

Henrietta, the heroine of this story lives in a state of diligent effort, fantasy ambition and ultimate sacrifice of her private life in order to become a known movie star. That is the delusion, to transfer one's immense talent, which she has, into the hands of another person, in her case those beside whom she would attract useful attention, is basis for the belief that they can augment her recognition on the road of stardom. who your seen with that matters," is her working philosophy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 23, 2007
• ISBN: 9781477173060

Charles E. Miller

Charles E. Miller graduated from Stanford University with a degree in English, studying at the late Wallace Stegner’s Creative Writing Center. He believes that literature is the most comprehensive, profound, and mysterious voice of people living their lives. Great creative literature presents multifaceted human problems, failures, and victories.

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Graven Images

Charles E. Miller

Copyright © 2007 by Charles E. Miller.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

i       In The Sheepfold

ii       The Captive

iii       The Stargazers

iv       The Departure

v       Another Torch Is Lit

vi       Lures Of Fate

vii       It’s All In The Legalese

viii       The Fantasy Players

ix       On The Road

x       A Hollywood Bash

xi       The Counterfeit Restoration

xii       The Screen Test

xiii       Cameras … Action!

xiv       It’s A Wrap

xv       Final Rendevousv

METADATA FOR NOVEL

GRAVEN IMAGES

The yen, the desire, the lust for popularity, degrees of ambition, is for folks in the motion-picture making business a delusional quest. To become enriched in life by becoming another person, for howsoever long, is the function of creating a sensational image, a highly popular appeal that demands subjugation of the personality into various states of delusional thinking. The studios exert a powerful influence on the lives of their hired performers, both genders implied.

Henrietta, the heroine of this story lives in a state of diligent effort, fantasy ambition and ultimate sacrifice of her private life in order to become a known movie star. That is the delusion, to transfer one’s immense talent, which she has, into the hands of another person, in her case those beside whom she would attract useful attention, is basis for the belief that they can augment her recognition on the road to stardom. who your seen with that matters," is her working philosophy.

It is a vital and inventive industry, but it is fraught with traps of many sorts, hers being the will first to find and attract attention to her as a beautiful woman, and then as a potential… note almost always… a potential actress for the films

Her hope is, as the jargon went, that she would be discovered. To be discovered by Hollywood she would have to attract attention. She chooses unwisely, I think, those with whom she wants the media, particularly a talent scout—who appears in the story—to find her as prospective talent for films. There is a strong element of chance in her struggle, and she dares to take her chances. That gets to the heart of the story.

Her parents were not role models for her in a positive way; that was a shame. She knows the value of publicity but in her naïveté is unable to manipulate it. That is unfortunate. That she relies so much on fortuitous alliances is irritating. That she strives for her goal yet because of her credulity, her flaw, as it were, that becomes tragic… she is closer to what Playwright Miller referred to as the tragedy of the little man.

She is trained to be an actress. She yearns to be a movie star. They are different media in several important ways. On the stage, the entire player is the performer; in films, the camera also takes a role. On the stage, she lives the life of the character, she is that woman. In films, the fixated film image encapsulates the star in a rather permanent celluloid image that he or she cannot escape. The delusion consists in the metamorphosis by movies of the performer into an identifiable film personality. The actor will often believe in the reality of this image. That is delusional. A few strong-willed actresses have avoided that trap by airing their personal lives. TV presents an out today for those who want to escape the delusion of other-person-identity, as film identifies.

The sadness in Henrietta’s life is that she does not obey her instincts bur rather her false knowledge on how to succeed. It would have been much better for her had she remained on the stage and married Paul with a Priest for a husband. But that’s another story.

I

IN THE SHEEPFOLD

Even her father’s butler, Penrod, told his cronies—which included the family chauffeur and the maid, an Oriental gardener and a Latino Pedro, the caretaker—that Henrietta would become a great star some day. She had always felt stung by the tired, old suspicion that her mother was of a questionable reputation, since Uncle Henry, who had managed the estate on Palm Drive for almost twenty years, had not filled her in on any details of the socially fascinating woman named Mauve, her mother, who had been gone, separated from her husband Craig for almost eight years.

At a christening, as he called it, for one of her father Craig Sejovak’s doctrinaire talent finds, he had said then, at the party before some twenty guests: Monsieur… he liked to use French addresses as poignant and undefining, as he put it, . . . My find, Monsieur Crandre Martinique, fills the bill for the devil in sheep’s clothing.

The party conversation went rather like this, as Henrietta recalled it: Why, when he played the role of Priest in Heaven’s Boundaries, I thought then he had the spark of genius."

But Sejovak, said a favorite grip named Andy invited to the party, The man is a fraud as a Priest but a gemstone as a NASA scientist flunk out. You didn’t know that . . .

How could I be informed… so wisely, Andy? I’m not in touch with space. You tell me.

He told me so himself. Why he almost ruined the Mars project by trying to prove that Mars was not solid…

Like the world is not round . . . he was joking, I’m sure.

He told his scientific brothers that our space vehicle had not crashed on Mars, but on one of its satellites.

And for that… oh, come now, Andy. You may be the world’s finest movie-set grip… but you’re not a scientist!

That is all I heard.

Well, every man is entitled to his opinion. My find is that a schizoid . . . oh, I know that defines a psychopathic category. But the mind does not become ill. It merely redefines categories the psychiatrists accept as anti-social.

A credible theory but has no value, sir. a studio assistant replied. Sejovak welcomed this Socratic dialogue, but never on the set… momentary breaks were strictly for the business of the film.

All men are double-natured. You know that. We have a good and an evil side. We are… double natured, capable of good and evil. Why, the entire movie industry is built on that premise… and the rest of you, I hope you see the nature of the question. Why, you have come to this celebration… and so it is… dressed not in what you really feel but how you think I ought to feel toward you. That is a simple illustration of man’s dichotomy . . . called schizophrenia. A man can hate his paramour, like in… Take it or Leave it… or define evil by the pathetic serial-killer Gambone, yet one, I’ll guarantee you, will find in him an unexpected tenderness. Consider the Nazis—good family men but exterminators of the Jews. Hitler loved Wagner but he hated Gypsies. Lohengrin was a gypsy. Man’s dual nature is our reward, so to speak… our source of inspiration in filmmaking. I hope some of you understand what I am saying. Well, enough of this. Now you know my directing philosophy. A maid came in at this instant with canapés and a servant with drinks, handing them around to the Director Craig Sejovak’s guests who were seated in the guest parlor of his fabulous Beverly Hills home.

Henrietta had overheard all of this dialogue at the finding in party for her father’s discovery of talent. As a director—and the inventor of a special makeup liner-pencil—he was within the parameters of studio policy by holding this simple venue of… studio greeting. She remembered, also, that her mother, Mauve, had not been present at the celebration.

Henrietta’s word for it—kitsch—was the frequent gossip buzzed under the umbrellas at the Rathskeller Cafe on Sunset Boulevard, when all other talk waned and evening ennui set in among the privileged, that is, those with money but unemployed and those without money butlooking as if employed. Few of the truly rich and famous mingled with them there, under the balcony umbrellas. If unkind rumors whispered that her mother had frequented bronze-door elevators of the best apartments in the district, the slander was old-fashioned and marvelously reassuring to Henrietta who, precocious for her nineteen years, knew that simple jealousy motivated such wild talk Yet in her mind there lingered a doubt created by her proximity to the many temptations that the movie colony offered to the innocent heart and mind. She liked to think that she was among these innocents. Innocence was, after all, a matter that issued from guilt, and she had nothing to feel guilty about. She clung to the notion that she was… modern.

Her father could hold his head high. To her he was a superlative director but more important, he had invented a new method f or giving character to the wrinkles on the actor’s face before the cameras and bright klieg lights of a Hollywood movie set. He had invented a sort of grease pencil. Henrietta had always liked to tell her friends when she was growing up at Sycamore High School, and a year or so later, when identified as an habitué at the College Coffee Shop, that her father acted in plays, and that he was also a film Director. To emphasize the theatre presence in the family, she took to wearing tight sweaters and tried to walk in the Jane Russell manner, or what she thought was the Jane Russell manner.

Henrietta grew up fast, but always within herself she fought the exhibitionist nature of her being. Maybe that was her mother’s influence on her, the show-off spirit that was half-blaze and half—contrived, a sort of fakery that lent subtle comedy to her airs while giving her all the more scope for her comic imitations of Hollywood voices and expressive faces, these being one avenue to her popularity.

She remembered one night that her mother had invited her boy friend over to their home on Palm Drive. His name was Ganz Pettit.

You can’t fool me, Ganz… I know you like the palm of my hand . . . an opportunist.

You are my opportunity, Mauve…

I detest flattery, Ganz… to the very core of my being

That explains your disconnection… as it were… from Hollywood. They were enjoying a smoke together on the yellow sofa in the parlor, beneath the oak beams, hearth brickwork and buffalo-head chandelier. There’s a colony that believes in opportunism… not the same thing as opportunity. One can be made up from mud, the other appears as if by luck. One is phony . . . opportunism… the other is… genuine.

The word somehow doesn’t fit you too well, Ganz. I mean, I mean luck…

Oh, I’m saved. I thought you were going to damn me for being a phony opportunist.

How could I do such a thing… Ganz. You’ve too… genuine . . . And so the conversation went as Henrietta vanished from the parlor door. She remembered that her father was away on a location—scouting trip, in Texas.

The Bon Voyage Acting Academy, which she attended evenings, had done little to change her basic nature of a keen perceptive mind mixed with a natural inquisitiveness that could prove dangerous if not guided. A fair-complexioned girl with a lithe grace about her, slender and shapely in figure, Henrietta’s blue eyes and auburn hair shone on the verge of brown. For those near to her it was her quality of a deep resonant and admittedly sexy contralto voice that enchanted the casual ear. She perceived that reality very soon in her school life. Although she possessed a gift for mimicry, she did not really try to cultivate the attention that came spontaneously to her. Indeed she often feared it because, mostly, she was not practiced in the art of subtle deception and a mere intuition warned her against such advances, especially those by her peers. She remembered the night when Ganz, her mother’s lover, had practiced his flattery on Mauve.

But then there was Paul, Paul Brandt, at the acting school who had said to her that she had a seductive, soft and low voice. At the make-up table he had complemented her: Oh, but Henrietta, your beauty stops at the mirror… without your cool voice.

She had turned around and pasted a kiss on his lips with herfingers. You say such things… she had searched for a phrase . . . that are… real, Paul. I love you for that. He saw the tenderfulness of her eyes reflected in the mirror and had spontaneously planted a hiss on the top of her head. She almost smiled.

Those were . . . moments to… treasure, she had thought then. Aware of this enticement to men in her voice, she had practiced it whenever she was alone, which was rarely—for example, in the way that she would say good morning to the waitress at the Big Derby in front of the breakfast-counter crowd. People sometimes had to ask her to repeat what she had said, since her low voice and artificial suavity, all practiced for the right moment, obscured at times the meaning of her words. Henrietta possessed more than her share of a woman’s vanity, thinking, however, that the slightly deaf eavesdroppers might have been pleased by her seductive voice.

Men soon became to her a means to get what she wanted by a clever use of the power of a pleasant, feminine and headstrong authority. She had learned in her adolescent years that having the feeling of an attachment to one man did not satisfy her sensuality, which always lay close to the surface of her behavior. This was true with Paul, whom she genuinely esteemed and had cultivated an affection for. Especially in high school, the feelings were the same. Of the sexual inclination she was well modeled for. Her mother had taught her—by example, remember Ganz Pettit—that sex-control means power over men. Her father, Craig Sejovak, must have perceived that influence when he married Mauve. Men were so simple, Henrietta reassured herself and had often thought so whenever a high school boy friend had tried to date her and she had politely refused him, often to his embarrassment. She liked to embarrass the boys; she had older quarries in mind. Occasionally an older boy, his youthful vitality on display before her eager eyes, was shrewd enough to recognize her need for attention but then ignore his finding—like the ingratiating photographer who had taken her picture while she was just emerging from the Sunset Bouquet florist shop. She had felt at the time that she needed a bicarb for that moment, so unexpected, so adventitious, but when she had found her picture at the top, left-hand column of theHollywood Courier, captioned SCENTED FOR SPRING, she recognized that the publicity was not for her but was meant for the florist. Just at that moment that the photographer had captured her holding a bouquet—a moment that symbolized the power of the image.

Moviestar popularity, she soon realized, was all done with mirrors, with image manipulation, with seeing a face duplicated endlessly, like in the facing mirrors at the beauty salon, until the visage became etched in the reflections of millions of worshippers. That for her was sheer kitsch—a phony arousal of interest and excitement, the goal of Hollywood’s glamorization of escapist American life. This rather lonely girl with the sad, low voice, in training to become a movie actress and possessing a pretty face and eyes that smiled with a gentle dropping of the lids and a cultivated wink for the right occasion was secretly yearning to possess a rich man of intelligence, who could ignite her movie career.

Henrietta had miraculously shed her prudishness, an artful dodge of her circumstances, the punishment for having a conscience, a thing she resented. She assumed that any prudery she possessed came being near to Jason who had used her, he solemnly confessed over a sip of wine in a paper cup sneaked into The Academy one night.

Jason was a prowler. He liked to crash parties if he could. He fancied himself to be a swinger, a developer of high-class real-estate, an arranger of… love. He liked to swagger amid tables at The Cocoanut Grove or The Trocadero Restaurant. Just that momentary attention affected him sexually, as no other public attention did. He found his way into the Academy by way of a notice in the Citizen Courier that auditions were open for a play, to be given at The Bon Voyage Acting Academy for an in-house performance of Much Ado About Nothing. Consequently, he had imported his own wine, found Henrietta and the dressing room area and, with a bold splash of temper, he had intrigued her at once, calling himself A Searcher of Talent, or a talent Scout, the common ID in the Colony.

Henrietta had no defense from this sort of predatory act. She assumed that he was a student whom she had not yet met and so… hesaid that he would let her use his charge-plate. This magnanimity so pleased her that one night, a fortnight after this seductive promise, she enjoyed an evening with him, not in so tawdry a place as a motel, but in the penthouse leased by his film producer father. That seemed to her young mind all so right so modern, so debonair. She had used his charge—plate for a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, one of her father’s favorite tonics. She had never developed the impulse to splurge… yet.

We’re both young, they’ll say we’re too young.

To do what… to get married . . . oh, my God! . . . and why not? I truly love you, Jason, but… How could she say such a thing when she hardly knew him. That was the magic of acting mimicry, what a young female ingénue should say to a young male womanizer.

But what? I’m too poor? I try girls out before asking them to marry me? Just how many times do you think Iv been married, Cookie?—a name of affection he had borrowed for any moment of sensitive rebuke.

It’s just that we haven’t gone together long enough.

So what do you want? We live on a deserted island to find each other? To discover who we really are? He tossed a huge sofa pillow on the floor and flung himself on it as if attempting to elicit sympathy.

Who put that absurd idea into your little head? You know it’s true, Jason. Two people cannot live together unless they know . . .

Know what… their secret lives, their family fortunes! He stood up, turned off the room lights and passed his hand over the window, above the shimmering lights below, as if some sort of oracle about to make declaration, summoning the distracted world to keep silent.

We will find out all we need to know… as time goes by… then we will get along just fine. When she said this she regretted it at once, for the remark amounted to a promise to prolong their relationship beyond a suitable time when they should begin to hate one another.

My father can help you… find a role for you. He’s a big movie producer, let me remind you.

His braggadocio sounded to her like a bribe. She was notlacking in intelligence or in courtesy. She lacked the wisdom of discernment of what choke was right and which was wrong. This emptiness suddenly occurred to her with great astonishment. Her mother had never moralized to her about men, nor had her father sermonized about the wickedness of human nature or the cowardice of wrong choices. Her home life was unallied to the inconvenience of a conscience—as she had admitted to herself. It seemed to her, in retrospect, that the philosophy of chokes without any morality was practical and unemotional, that wisdom meant the exercise of personal choice and a pragmatic destiny. She could then feel free to adapt to whatever role she chose. She was not alone. She did not realize that she was in denial of the tools she really needed for her craft of acting. Mr. Branberry had tried desperately to wed the craft of the actor to the wisdom of conscionable chokes in one’s roles. In this, he had only partly succeeded. Conscience was not the arbiter of the actor’s success, at least not in Hollywood. The arbiter was sensationalism.

It is beginning to sound like the script of a cheap movie," he said after he had rambled on about his own ambition and accomplishments for a man of twenty three. She had not interrupted him

Do you want me—enough? Enough to marry me? she asked at length.

‘What’s that supposed to mean, Henrietta?"

I mean, so that we don’t have to quarrel all the time.

Who said we would?. I’m just a little . . . grumbly at times. he confessed. And besides, if we argue now we’ll damn sure argue when we’re married.

She was beginning to display her ignorance of men, of the world she had come to know from watching movies, and from her classmates at the high school. Her father had never been around her long enough to instill in her any code of manliness or male chivalry What she lad learned about men she had picked up, by inference, from her mother’s phantom life. She felt rather defenseless for a moment, until she remembered that her mother had been right: she had the power of her sexto fall back on. The Acting Academy was different. There the instructor, Mister Branberry, taught you how to keep your poise, how not to overreact, how to find the proper motivation in every spoken word and act, and, most important, how to find the essential you by tests of great moral daring. There was an insidious influence here, she vaguely realized, the absence of honest motives, an emptiness bequeathed to her by her father, who had raised her since her mother’s departure. A strange compulsion to strike, to smite her lover when he overcame her, but she suppressed it.

Indeed, Jason had so cultivated stars in Henrietta’s eyes that she consented to marry him, having goaded him to ask her for her hand; since she was nineteen now she did not need her father’s consent. The precipitous nature of his proposal and her assent issued as from nowhere with a sudden blurring of vision and almost traumatic realization that she had consented. Like a movie star she had agreed to a life-time contract with this young man whom she hardly knew at all.

Dear old thing… They were cozily ensconced in his borrowed penthouse.:

Who’s that? he responded and poured another tumbler of sherry for himself. She covered her glass.

My papa, of course. Oh, he’s such a dear, she lied, and he works like a slave over at the studio.

So does my dad, you know they’re in the same business.

Isn’t that coincidental… , and we’re related to them both!

The two of them, their eyes swimming over the canopy of the night fractured into dazzling lights, kissed again, a most voluptuous kiss, Henrietta thought and allowed herself to be fondled by him with little inhibition. Theirs would be a great marriage, at the church where a Benedictine monk, on a visit to Hollywood had once sat—a pew reserved thereafter only for the most devout. He must sit there himself before taking her to himself at the altar. When he revealed this secret plan to her, its spiritual significance was almost overpowering and tears welled up briefly in her eyes.

Her qualms faded as in a bad dream. How readily her charms had sped to their mark. When they had parted that night she had, with delicacy, slipped her fingers from beneath his moist palm, taking with them the plastic card to his bank account. It was wrong, but why should she care. She possessed his credit card. Yet if she felt this way, enamored of Jason with such ridiculous ease, why should she not feel like a strayed pet penniless, every time she met another right man? That sort of attraction was like having the set lighting good for the scene but the angle of the camera bad. That power which she burned to possess would throw her into the galaxy of stars. Of this she was quite certain. She rationalized that she did not have either the time or the patience to cultivate the luxury of guilt.

And so with trepidation and a hint of eagerness in her remorse for having consented to the marriage, her father, against the anger of Jason’s papa, arranged for them to be married in a small wooden chapel off Hollywood boulevard. Craig Sejovak was a realist even if the groom’s father, Producer Hank Sheffield, still coddled other plans for his wayward son. She invited several of her school mates and two men—friend actors from the Academy to attend the wedding. Jason invited a favorite niece. That was all. The marriage made little news except for a brief column of an inch and a half in the Hollywood Courier. Henrietta thought with a certain studied grandiloquence, How was a girl to mount this breastworks of indifference? For surely, she had thought the Academy would make much of the marriage, the children of two of Hollywood’s best-known directors, now bound by a marriage that was toasted and invited to by their progeny, an event at least equal to the most vehement fist fight between actors among the palm trees at the Ambassador’s Cocoanut Grove, an event for every lobby cabbie to discuss with his fare or by others in the know during their nighttime resuscitation from the agonies of film making. It occurred to her as a shock on the night before their marriage while she lay open-eyed in her bed: the photographers for the slicks! Where were they?

Sejovak had found for them a small, white paintedbungalow. Three weeks had gone by and they had returned from a visit to Yosemite where the waterfalls reminded her of her tears when she accepted Jason. She associated the sweet fragrance of that famous park with the first two weeks of their marriage. Then the clash of their temperaments set in. She had said to him:

You think I’m just another dispsidoo extra on your fathers movie set, Jason?

I saw you. I saw through you at the start.

Oh, you’re so suspicious!

Of what? I figured we could make beautiful music together.

Resentful then, Who’s writing your script? she said, turning her eyes downward to hide her anger.

And to think I could have married… , he sparred.

Who… that Gloria whatsername . . . Swanson? Too old for you, Mugger. Silent movie days.

You’re getting nasty now, my dear.

Don’t you call me your dear. I’m not your possession.

Possess you… like the Hollywood sign? Comedy is not your genre, Henrietta.

You already have, Jason! she shouted with disdain from the kitchen in the rented bungalow off Hollywood boulevard, a dwelling place of significance since it was, symbolically, near to the noise of the grips shifting lights