Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures

by Emma Straub

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

In 1920, Elsa Emerson is born in idyllic Door County, Wisconsin. Her family owns the Cherry County Playhouse, and Elsa relishes appearing onstage, where she soaks up the approval of her father and the embrace of the audience. But when tragedy strikes her family, acting becomes more than a child's game of pretend. Elsa marries and flees to Los Angeles. There she is discovered by Irving Green, one of the most powerful executives in Hollywood, who refashions her and renames her Laura Lamont. Laura experiences all the glamour and extravagance of the heady pinnacle of stardom in the studio-system era, but ultimately her story is a timeless one of a woman trying to balance career, family, and personal happiness, all while remaining true to herself.

Release date: September 4, 2012

Publisher: Riverhead Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

THE NURSEMAID

Fall 1941

The studio lawyers made everything easy: Within two years of her initial contract, Elsa was divorced and Laura had never been married. Gardner Brothers represented both Laura and Gordon, though it was easy to see whom the bosses favored. Who was Gordon but a sidekick, a bit player? Louis Gardner arranged to help Laura ?nd a bigger house, perfect for her and the two girls and one nanny. It was so easy to change a name: Clara and Florence became Emersons, as they should have been from the start. Elsa couldn’t believe she’d ever let herself or her daughters carry the name Pitts. The lawyers never charged Laura for their time: It was all in the contract. No one in the papers asked the questions Laura thought they might: If you’ve never been married, where did these two girls come from, the stork? Questions that did not follow the script were simply not allowed. The divorce had been Elsa’s idea, which was to say it had been Laura’s idea too. She found that there were certain activities (feeding the children, taking a shower) that she always did as Elsa, and others (going to dance class, speaking to Irving and Louis) that

she did as Laura, as though there were a switch in the middle of her back. The problem had been that neither Elsa nor Laura wanted to be married to Gordon, who wanted to be married only to Elsa. Before the girls were born, Gordon seemed happy enough for Elsa to be an actress, but not when she was the mother of his children.

Clara spent her days in the on-set school with all the other kids, though Florence was only a baby and stayed home with Harriet, the nanny, who was the ?rst black woman Laura had ever really known and charged as much per week as the lead actors at the Cherry County Playhouse. Harriet was exactly Laura’s age and had a kind, easy way with all three of the Emerson girls. The new house was on the other side of Los Feliz Boulevard, on a street that snaked up into the hills. Sycamore trees hung low over the sidewalks, and Laura loved to take long walks with Harriet and the girls, pointing out squirrels and even the occasional opossum. Grif?th Park wasn’t technically Laura’s backyard, but that was how she liked to think of it. She went to every concert she could at the Greek Theatre and at the Hollywood Bowl, which wasn’t often but often enough, and far more often than if she had stayed in Door County, Wisconsin. She sat outside, under the stars, with all of Los Angeles hushed and quiet behind her; Laura felt that she was once again sitting in the patch of grass outside the Cherry County Playhouse, and every note was sung just for her. One evening, a secretary found Laura on her way from the day care to dance class, and stopped her in her tracks. Irving Green had a box at the Hollywood Bowl, and wanted Laura to be his date for the evening. It was never clear how Irving came to possess all the pieces of information he did, just that he was very good at ?nding things out and holding them all inside his brain until he needed them. Laura said yes, which neither pleased nor surprised the secretary, and Harriet stayed home with the girls. Irving and his driver came to pick her up at six, before dusk, and they sat in near silence until they reached their destination, which gave Laura ample time to examine the inside of the automobile, which was the ?rst Rolls-Royce she’d ever seen up close. When they arrived at the Hollywood Bowl, ushers quickly showed them to their seats, which were inches from the stage, so close that Laura could have reached out and grabbed the ? rst violinist’s bow if she’d had the urge. A few minutes in, an usher hurried over to Irving’s side, whispered in his ear, and they ducked out again. Laura fussed nervously, sure that everyone in Los Angeles was staring straight at her, wondering why she’d been chosen as his date at all, and sure that he probably wasn’t coming back. When Irving returned a few minutes later, he said only, “Garbo,” as if that were all that was necessary, and it was.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Laura said, in between movements. The seats around them were empty; the Bowl wasn’t always full, she knew from her time in the cheap seats several hundred feet from where they were sitting, but even so, Laura imagined that Irving was behind their seclusion, that he held unseen power here as on the lot. “Why ‘Brothers,’ when it’s only Louis? Isn’t that misleading?” She blushed at her wrong choice of words—she hadn’t meant misleading, which implied that Louis, their boss and Irving’s mentor, was hoodwinking the audiences. She’d meant secretive, or goofy, even, something that she hadn’t communicated. Laura was nervous whenever she was alone with Irving, whether it was in his of?ce or the few times she’d seen him walking purposefully around the lot. There were things everyone on the lot knew about Irving, things Laura had overheard: He’d been sick as a child, and there was something wrong still, a weakness in a ventricle (so said Edna, the costume assistant) or a lung (so said Peggy, a devoted gossip). Laura didn’t think she’d ever be bold enough to ?nd out the truth. Eating together was the worst: Irving hardly touched his food, swallowing tinier bites than Laura knew was possible and pronouncing himself stuffed. The desire for him to like her was so strong she could barely think. Laura thought of the ?rst time they’d met, and how silly she’d found all those actors pretending to examine their shoes when all they really wanted was his attention. Now she was just as guilty. He was a father ?gure to all of them, and most of the actors weren’t afraid to get scrappy with their siblings.

“Oh,” Irving said, “that. I told Louis I thought it sounded better.”

The orchestra began playing a selection from Così fan Tutte. Strings soared up into the sky, and Laura felt as if the entire park were ?lled with bubbles. She laughed and turned her head toward the sky, as if the stars would laugh back at her.

“That’s rich,” Laura said. “That’s rich.”

Irving reached over and put her hand in his, never turning his eyes away from the stage. His skin was soft and not nearly as cold as she imagined it would be, and even though Laura’s hand began to perspire, Irving didn’t pull away. Laura knew that from the cheap seats, the Hollywoodland sign was visible on the hills behind the dome of the Bowl, and she felt it there, ?ashing in the darkness like an electric eel. They sat quietly for the rest of the concert, ostensibly listening to the music, though Laura could hear nothing except the sound of her own heart beating wildly within her chest. Garbo may have been on the phone, but Laura was there, right there, sitting beside him, feeling the bones in Irving’s surprisingly strong grip.

The ?rst starring role Irving gave to Laura was in a ?lm with Ginger, Kissing Cousins—they played sisters, which made them both squeal with excitement. Laura was blond and Ginger was red, which meant that Ginger was the saucy one, and Laura was the innocent. The sisters were from Iowa and had moved to Los Angeles to be stars. It was a simple story, with lots of ?irting and costume changes. Laura’s favorite scene involved the girls dancing clumsily around a café, threatening to poke the other patrons’ eyes out with their parasols. She loved being in front of the camera, loved the weight of the thick crinolines under her dress, loved the elaborate hats made of straw and feathers. Acting in an honest-to-goodness motion picture was the ?rst thing Laura had done that made her think of Hildy without feeling like she’d been socked in the jaw—Hildy would have loved every inch of ?lm she’d shot, every dip and twirl, and that made Laura feel like she would have done it all for free. Of course she would have! Every actor and actress on the lot would have worked for free; that was the truth. Gardner Brothers didn’t know the depth of desire that was on its acres, not the half of it.

There were differences between acting onstage and on-screen; Laura felt the gulf at once. At the playhouse, choices were made on a nightly basis, always prompted by the feelings in the air, by the choices made by the actors around you. There were slight variations, almost imperceptible, sometimes caused by a tickle in your throat or a giant lightning bug zipping across the stage. On ?lm, choices were made over and over again, a dozen times in a row, from this angle and that, with close-ups and long shots and cranes overhead. The movements were smaller, the voice lower. Laura beamed too widely, sang too loudly. Everything had to be brought down, and done on an endless loop. She and Ginger skipped in circles for hours, it seemed, their hoop skirts knocking against each other like soft, quick-moving clouds hurrying across the sky.

Kissing Cousins was a modest hit, and though the critics called it “a lesser entry into the Johnny and Susie canon, though without the star power those two pint-sized powerhouses might have lent,” moviegoers responded to Laura’s sweetness on-screen. She got fan mail at the studio: whole bags of letters from teenage girls who wanted to know how she got her hair to do that, what color lipstick she liked best. One boy wrote and asked her to marry him. She kept that one; the rest she passed along to the secretaries at the studio, one of whom was now devoted just to her and Ginger, the new girls in town. Irving and Louis had her pose for photos—a white silk dress, gardenias in her hair—that could be signed and sent out to her fans. The dress was the most expensive thing Laura had ever felt against her skin, and she wore it for as long as possible before Edna asked for it back. Laura had fans: a small but growing number. Irving Green and all the imaginary Gardner Brothers brothers made sure of it.

On top of the dance classes (Guy, chastened by the girls’ newfound success, left them alone in the back of the class, and they did improve, slowly, at both the ronds de jambe and the poker faces necessary to survive the class period), Laura and Ginger were now required to shave their legs on a regular basis and to visit the beauty department for eyebrow and hair maintenance, which they were not to attempt on their own. Ginger had to use a depilatory cream on her faint mustache. Laura felt sheepish about all the primping, though she enjoyed the attention. She was most comfortable in a pair of pants and tennis shoes, walking through the dry Grif?th Park trails, with all the city laid out below her, still full of nothing but possibilities. It was the opposite of her parents’ land, at least at ?rst, where Laura knew every knot on every tree. There was still nature to discover in the world, an endless laundry list of sun-seeking plants and trees.

Ginger moved in a few houses down, and on the weekends the two women would often meet in the street, Clara running around their legs and Florence staggering back and forth between them. It was as though they were any two women in the world, generous with gossip and cups of tea. It wasn’t until some of the other neighborhood women began to gather on their front steps across the street to watch these interactions that Laura and Ginger moved their dates inside. It wasn’t a bother—who wouldn’t have noticed if two movie stars took a walk down the street together? Laura understood. This too was her job now, being Laura Lamont off the set as well as on. The children called her Mother or Mama, her parents and Josephine called her Elsa in their letters, Harriet called her Miss Emerson, and Ginger called her Laura, which was what she called herself. The trick seemed to be commitment: Elsa Emerson was a good Wisconsin girl. Laura Lamont was going to be a star.

Gordon stayed in their old house, a ?fteen-minute walk down Vermont Avenue. He saw the girls infrequently; at the beginning it had been once a week, but it was now no more than once a month, and never without supervision. Those were the lawyer’s rules. Laura would have been more generous, but the agreement was not up to her.

When he rang the bell, Clara ran into the kitchen and hid behind Harriet’s slender legs. “It’s okay,” Harriet said. “He does anything funny and I will knock him sideways.” She cupped Clara’s head with her palm.

“He won’t, though, will he?” Laura said. “I just don’t know.”

“Probably not,” Harriet said. “But if he does, sideways.” She nodded con?dently, as if only just truly agreeing with herself. “You should answer that, before he changes his mind.”

Laura picked up the baby and answered the door.

The rumors were everywhere at the studio. It was no crime to drink to excess; everybody did it, even Johnny, the boy wonder, who was so popular at the Santa Anita racetrack that he had his own viewing box. But nobody did it as often as Gordon. Sometimes Laura overheard other people talking about Gordon in the commissary, some young man dressed like a gondolier or an Indian chief, new faces who didn’t know she and Gordon had ever been married. The word was that he’d started doing other things too. There was a group of jazz musicians who had played a couple of parties on the lot. People said they’d seen Gordon with them out at night, places he shouldn’t have been. But then why were you there? Laura wanted to ask. How do you know so much, then? But she didn’t. Gordon Pitts was just another star in the Gardner Brothers galaxy now; why should Laura Lamont care about him? Sometimes she had to remind herself that the woman Gordon had married no longer existed. In some ways, she really had let Elsa Emerson stay on that bus—when her feet hit the California ground for the ?rst time, something inside had already shifted. Gordon wanted to be an actor, yes, of course he did, but not the way Laura did. He saw it as a fun job, a step up from working in the orange groves or at the grocery store. It was being far away from home that mattered most. There was nothing frivolous in Laura’s decision to leave Door County, no matter how quickly it had come about, even if she hadn’t quite been aware of it at the time. It was just something she had to do. Gordon could understand that about as well as he could understand how to engineer the Brooklyn Bridge. Some things were beyond his ken.

With Gordon at her door, though, it was harder to dismiss him. She saw the dark skin under Gordon’s eyes, black and pouchy. His shoulders rounded forward, as if the weight of the visit were already pulling him toward the ground. Laura stepped out of the way, inviting him in. Gordon shuf?ed past Florence and gave her toe a pinch. She howled, her tiny mouth a perfect circle of misery. Laura felt the sound deep inside her chest.

“Sorry,” Gordon said. His voice was low and scratchy, as though he’d been up all night talking.

Laura tapped a cigarette out of her pack and sat down in the living room, facing the still-whimpering Florence outward, toward her father. She gestured for Gordon to sit opposite her, and held her unlit cigarette over the baby’s head. It felt funny to have an ex-husband, a person out there in the universe who had shared her bed so many nights in a row and was now sleeping God knew where, and with God knew whom. Laura always assumed that she would be like her mother, and sleep alone only when her husband’s snoring got too loud. Instead, she was only twenty-two, and already groping around in the dark alone.

“Harriet?” Laura called into the air. She and Gordon sat in silence waiting for Harriet to come and take the baby away. Laura watched Gordon’s face as he stared at Florence. She’d just woken up from a nap and still had her sleepy, cloudy expression on.

“Is it true?” Gordon asked.

Harriet walked in and plucked Florence off Laura’s lap. She gave Laura a look that said, Just holler, and retreated toward the girls’ bedroom. Laura appreciated Harriet’s loyalty. So often it was just the two of them with the girls, a female family of four, and Harriet was protective of all of them in equal measure. Even though it had been only a few months, their time together had been so concentrated, so intimate, that Laura felt that Harriet knew her better than Gordon ever had. Laura waited until they were gone before responding, and even though she knew what he was referring to, Laura said, “Is what true?”

The living room wasn’t ?nished yet. There was a long, low sofa, and two high-backed chairs to sit on, and a coffee table, and a couple of lamps scattered around the room, like a half-built set, a facsimile of a lived-in space. There was an untouched chess set that the girls were always grabbing at, lamps that hadn’t been plugged in. Laura wondered whether her house would ever feel the way her parents’ house did, like no one else could have lived there and found everything. She wanted secret drawers and hidey-holes. Maybe when Clara was older, or when Florence was older—they were so close in age, like Josephine and Hildy. They would do everything together, the three of them, a package deal. She had a ?ickering thought about Irving, and whether he liked children. She hadn’t asked—why would she? It seemed presumptuous, when he had so much else to do.

“I mean about you and Irving Green.” Gordon could barely spit out the words.

Laura lit her cigarette, sure that the thought had registered on her face. Some thoughts burned too brightly to conceal. Laura tried to shift her attention to her cigarette, to the feel of the paper between her lips, and the bits of tobacco that landed on her tongue. “What about me and Mr. Green? He’s my boss, just like he’s your boss, Gordon.”

“He pays for this house, doesn’t he?” Gordon stood up and started walking the length of the room with his hands clasped tightly in front of him.

“He pays for your house too!” Laura tapped the end of her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray.

“But you’re sleeping with him.” Gordon stopped. He had his back to Laura and was looking out the wide window onto the street. The jacket Gordon was wearing had a small hole in one sleeve, and Laura couldn’t stop looking at it. All he had to do was ask—either her or the girls in wardrobe at the studio—and the hole would be gone in ?ve minutes. Had he not noticed? Or did he notice and not care? The ?rst time she’d gone in to meet with Irving, when her life with Gordon was still held together with pins, Gordon had stared at her getting ready, wearing a dress borrowed from Ginger, and then he’d told her she’d lost too much weight. Gordon had never wanted two actors in the same house, not really. He wanted a wife who sat on a kitchen chair and stared at the clock while he was gone. Sure, that was what most men counted on when they married, but Gordon had sworn up and down that he was different. No matter what whispered hopes they’d shared in the earliest weeks of their marriage, Gordon wanted to be married to another actor the way he wanted to be married to a gorilla—he just didn’t. It would never have worked; that was what Laura told herself. Their divorce wasn’t her fault, no more than Gordon’s drinking was.

Even so, Laura felt sorry for Gordon, staring at the hole in his sleeve. She perched her cigarette in the ashtray, its small smoke signal still reaching for the ceiling, and walked over to her husband. Her former husband. The lines were blurry—if they’d never been married, were they ever really divorced? There had been so many papers to sign, so many layers of con?dentiality promised. Laura couldn’t keep them straight. It wasn’t as though Gordon wanted custody of the girls—that was never a question. The girls belonged to Laura. She sometimes thought that she could have willed them into being all by herself, without a man’s help, if given enough time. And it wasn’t as though Gordon really loved her, either. They’d both imagined more for themselves, a real Hollywood-type romance, with ?owers and kisses underneath a lamppost. But he had believed her all those years ago, when they were sitting at her parents’ house, and she’d decided that he was the one. Gordon-from-Florida had bought every line. It wasn’t the loss of his own profound love that he was mourning, it was the loss of his belief in hers. Laura walked over to Gordon and put her arms around his waist, laying her body against his spine. He hadn’t known she was playing a part. Laura had always thought that, over time, the act would soften into the truth.

“I’m not,” Laura said. Louis Gardner had a wife, Maxine, and two plain-looking daughters, both of whom were enrolled in secondary school at Marlborough. Maxine always looked uncomfortable in furs and dresses with sequins on them, but Louis would drag her out anyway. People at the studio said horrible things, compared the three Gardner women to farm animals, though the girls were nice enough. Louis had been married for twenty-?ve years already, and Maxine predated any success. They’d worked at silent-?lm houses together in Pittsburgh. Laura couldn’t imagine Louis as a young man, without any of the trappings of power he surrounded himself with now. She imagined him like a paper doll, always the same, no matter the year, with little tabbed suits and ties to fold around his body. That was the kind of marriage she could have had with Gordon, if she’d been content to stay home. Irving Green had never been married—he wasn’t so much older than Laura, only in his early thirties, still a young man, despite all his success. He’d been too busy to get married, Laura thought. Plus, he’d never met the right girl.

“It’s okay,” Gordon said, without turning around. “I would too.”

Somewhere in the house, Florence wailed. Laura felt the nubby wool of Gordon’s jacket against her cheek. His body stiffened—the babies had not been his idea, as they hadn’t been hers. The girls had arrived, as children did, whether or not they were invited. Was that it? Maybe it wasn’t the drinking, or the fact that he and Laura had little in common except their shared desire to leave their hometowns and live big lives. Maybe it was that there were children, two tiny people who had not existed in the universe before. Laura felt sorry for Gordon; she could feel how badly he wanted to bolt, how unnatural it all felt to him. Some people couldn’t take care of a dog, let alone a child. Gordon seemed more and more like he was one of those people, doomed to always have empty cupboards and no plan beyond his evening’s entertainment.

Gordon shrugged out of Laura’s arms and walked himself to the front door. It was his last visit to the house, and more than ten years before either Clara or Florence saw their father in person again, and by then they needed to be reminded who he was.

Irving Green had an idea every thirty-?ve seconds. Laura liked to time him. Sometimes they were about her career, but sometimes they were just about the studio—he wanted to bring in elephants for a party, and offer rides. He wanted to hire a French chef for the commissary, to make crepes. Had she ever had a crepe? Irving told Laura that he’d take her to Paris for her twenty-?fth birthday. They hadn’t slept together yet; Laura hadn’t lied. But she would also be lying if she said she didn’t see it coming, cresting somewhere on the horizon. She’d heard things about his previous ?irtations, including Dolores Dee; there were so many pretty girls around, how could she expect to have been his ?rst temptation? And Laura wasn’t interested in being anyone’s ?ing. Before anything happened—before Paris, before sex—she would be a star, a real one, and there would be a ? rm under standing of exactly what was going on. Elsa hadn’t become Laura to become someone’s wife, and Irving had promised, though not in those exact words. What he’d actually said had more to do with what he wanted to do with Laura once she was his wife, and they were living in the same house. It made Laura blush even to think about it.

Irving had a part in mind, a movie about a nurse and a soldier. Nothing like the last movie. Ginger was a comedienne; that was what the studio had decided—let her stick with the funny stuff, the Susie and Johnny business. She did pratfalls and made goofy faces. Laura was something else—she was a real actress, Irving was sure. The movie was a drama about love torn asunder by war. No dance numbers, no parasols. He told Laura that she would have to dye her hair a good dark brown, the color of melting chocolate. As if she had a choice, Laura said yes, and started that night painting her eyebrows using a darker pencil.

He wanted to watch the hair girls do it. The hairdressers were used to Irving sitting in on important ?ttings with Cosmo and Edna, the costume designers, but it was unusual for a simple dye job, and made Laura even more nervous. Florence was so young—what if she didn’t recognize her? What if Clara hated it? When Laura told Ginger what they were planning to do, Ginger screwed up her face and shook her head. “Nope,” she said. “You’re a blonde, inside and out. This is just weird.” But Laura didn’t have a choice, and didn’t struggle when Irving led her to the chair by her elbow.

“Dark,” he said to the girls, who were already mixing a bowlful of nearly black goo. “Serious.”

“Scared.” Laura had never been anything but a blonde. Dark-haired people stood out in Door County like people who were missing a hand. Almost all of the natives were blond and fair, Norwegian or Swedish blood pumping strongly through their American veins. If she went back now, her mother and father would pause at the door, their hands still on the knob, unsure of whether or not to let her in. She locked eyes with Irving in the mirror. Bright, naked bulbs ringed his face like a halo, which seemed funny. Irving wasn’t an angel; he was a businessman, the ?rst she’d ever really known. Even though Irving was physically small and slight, with his famously bad heart ticking slowly inside him, Laura never thought of him that way—he had the con?dence of a lumberjack, or a lion tamer, or a black bear. Laura trusted him implicitly. If he wanted to dye her hair himself, she would have let him.

“This is going to be good for you,” Irving said. “You have to do it, Laura. I know it, trust me. This is going to be what sets you apart. Think about Susie—that’s a blonde, all surface, all air. You’re something different. You’re better.” He looked to the girls and nodded. “Do it.”

Laura shut her eyes tight and waited for them to start. The dye was thick and cold against her scalp, the way she imagined wet cement might feel. It didn’t take long, maybe an hour. One of the girls, a tiny blonde with rubber gloves up to her elbows, told Laura to open her eyes. First she held out her hand, and Irving took it, giving her ?ngers a quick squeeze.

“Look at yourself,” he said. “Laura Lamont, open your eyes.” His voice was gentle; he liked what he saw.

Laura blinked a few times, and focused on the stained towel in her lap, her free hand clutching at her dress. She looked up slowly, and by the time she made it to her own face in the mirror, she knew that Irving had been right. Her skin had always been pink; now it was alabaster. Her eyes had always been pale; now they were the ? rst things she saw, giant and blue.

“Wow,” she said, turning her head from side to side. “Look at me.” She covered her mouth with her hands, embarrassed at her own reaction.

Irving was already looking. He bent his knees to crouch beside her chair.

“Look at you,” Irving repeated. He kissed her on the forehead, and then on the mouth, and the girls pretended to be occupied in the back of the room. Irving’s lips were stronger than Laura anticipated, and pressed against her with the force of a man who had kissed many, many women before, and had no doubt in his own abilities. She closed her eyes and made him be the one to pull away. Once Irving straightened up and ran a hand over his hair, the hairdressers still tittering and chatting and washing things in the backroom sink, he helped Laura to her feet. Five-foot-seven when barefoot, Laura was taller than Irving by a few full inches, more in her high heels. Irving didn’t seem to mind, and so neither did she. In fact, Laura never thought about their difference in size ever again. It wasn’t every man