Page 11 of A Map to Paradise

10

Melanie stood at the picture window in the front room and watched as a man in a convertible pulled up to the Blankenship house.

He got out of the car and she recognized him. He’d been at June and Elwood’s before, though it had been a while. Max Somebody. Elwood’s agent.

The man strode purposefully toward the Blankenships’ front door.

For a long moment she wished she were sitting on the passenger side of that shiny red car with its top down, waiting for him to complete his business at the house and come back out to his car. He’d then be on his way back to Sunset Boulevard. Or maybe Beverly Hills. It didn’t really matter. She’d want that passenger seat if Max Somebody was headed next to Skid Row, so hungry was Melanie for a break from the tedium of her exile.

She hadn’t been back to Los Angeles since Carson had brought her to this house. Irving and Walt—and Carson, too, for that matter—had all advised her it was wise not to be seen in public, especially back in Hollywood. She didn’t need the press hounding her or asking her questions and then printing things about her that weren’t true and that she hadn’t said, and she certainly didn’t want to make it easy to be served a summons by coming back to LA.

But oh, how she missed the life she’d had to flee. No, the life from which she’d been banished! She’d worked so hard to make it. Given up so much over the last five years. Gone to countless open calls. Accepted stupid, minuscule roles she hated, just to get noticed. Allowed womanizing Neanderthals to patronize and grope and use her just so that she’d be remembered. And to have achieved the career of a lifetime after all that only to have it torn from her grasp?

Melanie pivoted from the window and then sat down under it, for no reason other than she’d not done that yet. She leaned against the wall and tipped her head back. Some days, the unfairness of it all was unbearable. Truly unbearable.

The hoopla surrounding the rooting out of Hollywood communists had been decidedly waning the last few years. Those who’d earlier worried they might be targeted surely felt safer, Carson Edwards especially, though when Melanie had started dating him, she had no idea he probably believed he’d dodged a bullet.

In the months she’d been hiding out in Malibu, Melanie had learned that when Carson’s career was just getting off the ground, he’d dated a folk singer who happened to be an American Communist Party member. There was no reason Melanie should’ve known this; that had been eight years ago and Carson Edwards had dated a lot of people since then. He was famous for it.

But while the newest Hollywood Red Scare was indeed in decline, the studios’ blacklist was still very much intact. Everyone in Hollywood knew that. If a person’s name was on the list, the only way to get off was to testify before the HUAC to clear their name. Clearing a name had become synonymous with naming others. That was something everyone in Hollywood also knew.

Carson had found out right after they’d both been blacklisted that a screenwriter whom Carson was only marginally acquainted with, who’d been on the Hollywood blacklist a long time and who was desperate to reclaim his career, had suddenly decided he’d had enough. The man wanted his life back and to be seen as a part of the solution, not the problem. He’d volunteered to testify. He’d flown to Washington and told the HUAC he’d been na?ve and uninformed—for that brief time in this life—when he was a Party member. He’d gotten caught up in the crusade for equality, not just in the workplace but everywhere, but he learned quickly communism was not the answer to America’s socioeconomic problems. He’d repented for his socialist leanings years earlier. Left the Party. The HUAC could ask anyone who knew him; he’d been open about his leaving. And when the HUAC had next asked him who else had been influenced as he had been by communist thinking, he named names—fresh ones—including Carson, and, by association, Carson Edwards’s current love interest and his closest friends. This testifier said he had seen Carson at Party meetings back in 1948 when he was also there, and several times, not just once. And while he had publicly turned his back on the Party, Carson Edwards never had.

The controlling belief among the members of the HUAC was that there were no good reasons why an American went to meetings of the Communist Party, only unpatriotic, dangerous ones—even if said person didn’t actually become a dues-paying member. In other words, it was safe to assume Carson had gone to those meetings because he’d wanted to be there.

Likewise, there was only one reason why someone like Melanie Cole would become intimately involved with a communist thinker like Carson Edwards.

It was because, as HUAC logic went, she was a sympathizer.

Carson had gotten the phone call that changed everything for Melanie the same day the testimony of this man was made public and every Hollywood studio either read it or heard about it. Melanie was on Carson’s patio that June afternoon, lounging by his pool. Their blockbuster movie had been out for six months, and the studio was putting the final touches on a new script for Carson and Melanie for a film that was supposed to begin shooting on location in Honolulu in three months.

He’d just taken a dip in the pool when he heard the jangling of the telephone, and he’d gone inside to answer it after toweling off, leaving the sliding glass door open behind him.

Melanie had heard him pick up the phone, greet one of their producers by name, and then go quiet. For the next few minutes and until he came back outside and told her what had been said on the other end of the line, all she heard were his words in reply.

“I was only dating a gal who attended those gatherings; that was it,” he’d said in a peeved voice. “She was the one who brought me.”

Short pause.

“I went to a bullfight in Tijuana that year, too,” Carson had said derisively. “That didn’t make me a matador!”

Melanie had sat up in her chaise to gaze at the half-open patio door and at Carson standing just inside in his slightly dripping swim trunks and bare feet. Bullfights? Some girl he dated? What were he and MGM talking about?

She’d watched as Carson ran a hand through his wet hair. “But I wasn’t a member!”

The conversation had gone back and forth with Melanie being only seconds away from learning that in 1948 Carson had attended multiple meetings of the American Communist Party. He had never publicly disavowed his attendance at those meetings before the HUAC. He should have. He’d had plenty of time and opportunity—and reason—to contact them and do so. But he hadn’t, which suggested he was hiding who he was or at least who he’d been. He’d been named by someone. MGM’s hands were tied. There was nothing the studio could do about keeping Carson employed until he also testified before the Committee and set the record straight.

“And name names, you mean.” When Carson had said this, Melanie suddenly knew exactly what they were discussing, and a chill slunk through her despite the day’s heat. Carson had been tagged a Hollywood communist? A ridiculous notion. Inconceivable.

“This is insane,” he’d then said, as though he heard her unspoken thoughts and voiced them himself. “But I was never a member! I told you that. And who cares what I did eight years ago?”

Long pause.

“Are you nuts?” he’d yelled. “Melanie was in high school then! I didn’t even know her.”

And at these words, the subtle chill in her bones had morphed to ice. They were now talking about her.

For the next few seconds, Melanie had heard nothing but the sound of a low-flying two-seater plane high above her, the neighbor’s poodle barking at it, and her pulse thrumming at her temples. Carson was listening, saying nothing.

Then he hung up the phone.

Time had seemed to skid to a halt as she waited for him to come back out. She watched as he mixed two martinis at the bar by the patio door, downed one, and made another in the same glass. He came back outside, the two drinks in hand.

Carson extended one of the cocktails to her but she didn’t take it.

“What just happened?” she’d said, her question little more than a whisper.

He’d set the drinks down on the squat table in between the chaises and then sat down on his lounger next to her. He replayed to Melanie the half of the conversation she hadn’t heard, and she listened mutely, mouth open in disbelief.

She had kept pinching the inside of her thigh as he went on, convinced she had fallen asleep in the warm sun and was having a bad dream. Her thigh became polka-dotted, and still she didn’t wake up and still he kept talking.

And then he’d said it. They’d both been blacklisted.

“It’s nothing, Mel. I’m sure of it,” he’d quickly added. “I’ll call my agent. And my lawyer.”

“I don’t have a lawyer,” she’d heard someone say in a breathless monotone and then realized she’d said it.

“You’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re an Omaha girl as apple-pie American as they come. You’re practically a Girl Scout.”

Melanie had looked down at her revealing swimsuit and painted toenails, the cocktail at her elbow and the obvious fact that she spent more time at Carson’s place than her own, and said, “No, I’m not.”

“So what? This has nothing to do with you. I’ll fix it.”

“How? How will you fix it?”

“Leave it to me. I’m Carson Edwards. I’m not some hapless idiot who doesn’t know which side his bread is buttered on.”

But she had heard unease in his voice, something she’d never heard before.

Carson had looked away from her and taken a long sip of his martini as he stared at the shimmering water in his swimming pool. He was worried.

And this had scared her. Ever since the day she’d gotten the role of Julia in This Side of Tomorrow and she suddenly had everything she’d always wanted, Carson had been the one with all the answers. If she needed advice on how to speak to reporters or bait photographers or ditch overzealous fans, he gave it. If she needed to know how to dress for an event or schmooze with the Hollywood elite or handle studio scuttlebutt, he told her how. If she needed to know what to take seriously, what to have a good laugh over, and what to simply leave at the soundstage door, he told her.

If she’d needed a voice of reason, he was it. If she needed a pat on the back, he provided it.

He had been able to do and give and be what she needed.

“What do we do now?” she’d asked.

He hadn’t answered right away. She could tell he was thinking, assessing, still working things out in his head. That was good. He was plotting their way out of this. A modicum of calm had returned to her.

But when he’d spoken, he did not turn his head to look at her, and the tone of his voice was one she didn’t recognize. “I really don’t know, doll.”

She’d wanted to scream at him then.

Hurl his pretty cocktail glass to the ground and watch it shatter.

And yet she had also wanted him to take her into his arms and tell her she didn’t have to worry. Of course she was no communist. That was as laughable as saying Minnie Mouse was one. She wanted him to assure her they’d be on Oahu three months from then, just as planned, shooting the new movie and laughing about this.

Carson, however, had continued to stare at the water in the pool, at the play of light on its surface, saying nothing.

“Should I call Irving?” she’d asked blandly.

“He probably already knows but, yes, you should call him.”

“Should I go home and do it?”

“Maybe you should. I have calls to make, too.”

Melanie had risen from the chaise on unsteady feet. Nothing seemed real in that moment. Not the heat of the patio stones on the soles of her feet, nor the breeze plucking wisps of hair from under her sun hat, nor the heaviness in her chest.

Carson hadn’t walked inside with her or helped her gather her things. She was grateful he at least came back inside the house minutes later to call her a cab.

When the car came, he opened the front door quickly, as if needing to be alone with his thoughts as soon as possible.

“I’ll call you,” he’d said absently.

“You’ll fix this, right?” she said, desperate to hear him say this again.

“I’ll find a way.” His voice had been void of confidence.

Melanie had turned to step outside and then felt his hand on her arm. She looked up at him.

“Don’t say a thing to anybody about this. Not to your roommates, not to the cabdriver, not to a neighbor, or your mailman, or the guy that cuts your grass. You understand, Melanie? No one. And God, Melanie, no reporters. You understand? Especially not reporters.”

“Why? I’ve done nothing wrong.”

“Because the press loves this kind of dirt. They will only want more of it. Whatever you say, they will use to create more dirt. Trust me. So say nothing. They might even be at your doorstep when you get home. Tell them nothing, Melanie. Not a word. If there are government people wanting to talk with you, say nothing to them, either, not on the phone, not to their faces. Tell them you need to consult with your lawyer.”

“I already told you I don’t have one. And why should I need a lawyer? I haven’t done anything.”

“Maybe…maybe you won’t need one. I don’t know. I’ll find out. Just don’t say anything.”

She’d paused on the threshold as she looked at him, wanting again his kiss, his embrace, his assurance.

“You should go,” he had said. “Remember what I said about the reporters. Just stay at home until I can figure this out, okay? You’re not going to want to be out and about right now anyway. Lay low. I’ll call you.”

When Melanie had arrived home, the neighborhood was quiet; the sidewalks and curbs and her own doorstep were empty. No one was camped outside waiting, and her two housemates were away at their day jobs. She indulged in supposing MGM had discovered it was wrong about her having been named, too, or maybe the HUAC had realized she was not someone they needed to be worried about after all. But the relief was short-lived. By four o’clock that afternoon the doorbell had rung half a dozen times, and each time from her vantage point as she peered from behind the curtain at the front room window it looked like a reporter on the welcome mat, with a photographer standing just behind him. One of these cameramen saw her and focused his lens on her before she could duck away. That picture of a hiding-behind-the-drapes Melanie Cole would find its way to a gossip rag the following day when all of Hollywood was agog about Carson Edwards, his ties to the Communist Party, and the shocking and disastrous influence he’d had on his current love, Melanie Cole. Her dismayed housemate Nadine had brought the magazine home and shown her.

Everything about the photo and the article was wrong. She was not Carson’s “current love.” He didn’t love her and she didn’t love him. And she hadn’t been hiding behind anything. She was inside her house, looking out the window like millions of other people did every day when someone rang their doorbell.

When Carson had called her the following evening, she told him what the article had said and what the caption under the photo had read. He told her to stop looking at gossip magazines and newspapers.

“But they’re talking about us. About me! And none of it is true.”

“And that’s why you shouldn’t talk to the press. Any of them. They don’t want the truth from you. They want to keep the story alive. They don’t care it’s not a true story. Talk to them and you keep the story they want to tell alive. You need to trust me on this.”

She hadn’t cried two days earlier at the pool when the news was fresh and surreal but she cried then. Six months earlier, when the movie had come out, the gossip rags and movie magazines and news outlets had adored her. At least that’s what it felt like. It felt like adoration. Tears slipped down her cheeks and fell onto the phone handset as she told Carson this. She tasted salt on her lips.

“That wasn’t adoration,” Carson had said. “That was greed, Mel, pure and simple. Those people just want to be where the money is. That’s all anybody in this town really wants. They know if they stay close to the cash, close to what people will line up in droves to pay for, the money will start falling on them, too.”

Money. She hadn’t brought up the topic to him yet nor had he to her, not that he would. He had gobs of it. But how long would she last without an income? Without work? How long could she lay low and live off what remained from signing the contract for This Side of Tomorrow ? There wasn’t that much of it left, and no contracts had been signed yet for the upcoming Hawaii movie.

At the beginning of shooting, she’d been careful with what she’d been paid at signing. But Carson and pretty much everyone she knew kept asking her why she was continuing to live like an underpaid glove counter salesgirl. That wasn’t who she was anymore. She’d made it to the venerated silver screen with the new film and there would be other movies to follow. Plenty of them. And as a result, plenty of money. Janet Leigh could easily command one hundred thousand dollars a film. Easily. And Melanie, who Carson said outshined Leigh by leaps and bounds, could expect the same in the not-too-distant future.

Enjoy the fruit of your labor, Melanie! Live a little!

So she had.

She’d gone clothes shopping at the expensive stores and didn’t look at the price tags. She bought big-ticket jewelry, Italian shoes, had multiple manicures and massages, took taxi cabs instead of the Red Car or the city bus, bought French wine and Spanish leather handbags and Swiss confections. She purchased cashmere sweaters, silk blouses, designer evening gowns, and beaded cocktail dresses. She dined out with abandon and invited her housemates to join her when she wasn’t eating with Carson. When he wasn’t pampering her and treating her like a princess, she pampered herself. What her mother made in a year as a veteran elementary school teacher, Melanie spent in six months.

She had figured she had enough to pay for groceries and her third of the rent for the next two months and then that would be it. She’d be broke.

“How long is it going to be like this, Carson?” she’d asked him gloomily. “I need to know how long.”

He had half laughed into the phone. “You think I don’t want to know the answer to that, too?”

His flippant tone had annoyed her. This situation, if it dragged on, wasn’t going to hurt him like it was going to hurt her. He was a millionaire. Couldn’t he see the difference? Besides, it was because of him she was in this mess. Had he really done all he could to free her from this predicament that he had technically caused?

“Why can’t you just do what that man did? Offer to testify and clear your name?” she had asked testily. “Do we really have to suffer like this?”

“And lie like he did? He pretty much accused me of being a card-carrying communist. And he accused you of being in bed with one. He named my closest friends in this town. People who have been kind not just to me but to you, too. People who welcomed you into their homes and onto their sailboats and at their beach cottages as my date. Roger. Stan. Al and Jeannie. Brandon and Anita. He’s putting them through hell just like us. That asshole gave them names because HUAC wanted names. You telling me that’s all right with you? To call out peoples’ names just to have names to give?”

She’d clearly hit a nerve. And she had not asked him to lie. “Carson, look. I—”

But he had cut her off. “If I testify, you can bet your bottom dollar they will call you in to do the same. You want to list all the names of the people you saw when you were on Brandon and Anita’s sailboat? Or when you went to Al and Jeannie’s New Year’s Eve party? Or all those times we met Roger and Stan for drinks and other people joined us? You want to list all the names of all the people I had over to my house while you were there? People who have Oscars on their shelves and the respect of everybody in this business but happened to be seen by you in my company? You want us off the list or do you want to do what’s right?”

He had been angry, maybe not exactly at her, but her question had made it worse. But still.

“Well, what if some of those people actually are communists, Carson?” she had asked.

“Damn it, what if they are?” he’d yelled into the phone. “How you choose to think is your God-given, constitutional right as an American. Didn’t you learn that in high school civics? What they are asking people on that stand is a violation of basic civil rights. Read the First Amendment. We have the right to assemble, the right to discuss political ideas, even if they aren’t popular. The right to dissent if we so choose. You want to talk about who is being un-American, it’s that committee. They have no legal right to ask what they are asking.”

Melanie hadn’t known what to say to any of this. Carson had clearly given the matter a lot of thought, perhaps long before now. When she said nothing, he took an audible breath and let it out just as loudly. When he spoke, his voice was even and controlled again.

“Do you hear what I am saying, Melanie?”

“Yes.”

“Look. We need to agree on this. We need to agree that we’re not going to turn on our colleagues, our friends. Right? We’re not going to do it. Tell me you won’t.”

An uneasy silence had stretched between them when she didn’t answer right away. She wished she could see his face.

“Mel?” he’d said.

“It’s not that I want to, Carson. I don’t. I really don’t. But I need to work. I need money. I’m not like you. I don’t have—”

“Hey. I’m not going to let you starve, Melanie. You don’t need to worry about that. You won’t have to go back to the glove counter at that department store. Not that they’d hire you now anyway. I’ll take care of you. I promise.”

“You…what?”

“I’ll make sure you have whatever you need while we wait this out. Food. A place to live. And a lawyer if you need one. You just need to agree with me that we’re not going to volunteer to say anything. To anyone. It’s the right thing to do.”

“Are you…asking me to move in with you?”

“God, no. That would just make things worse for you. We need to be seen together as little as possible right now. No. I mean I will set it up with my financial guy to pay your rent, your grocery bill, a lawyer’s fees, and so on.”

She had felt her mouth drop open. “For how long?

“I don’t know. As long as it takes.”

“As long as it takes?” she’d echoed, hardly able to conceive of being as dependent as a five-year-old child on Carson Edwards, and for who knew how long? It seemed distasteful. Like she was his…call girl.

“Unless you want to go home to Nebraska and wait it out there,” he’d said.

Irving, whom she’d talked with that first day, had told her going back to Omaha for a while wasn’t a terrible idea, and advised her to maybe come up with a pretense for heading back home for a spell. A sick parent, perhaps. She’d flat out refused to consider it then and had no intention of changing her mind.

“I do not.”

“I didn’t think so. And I’m not sure how that would look anyway. Have you talked to your parents? Do they know?”

Melanie had been putting off that phone call for hours upon hours, loath to make it. “Not yet.”

“You should call them. They need to know not to speak to the press, either.”

“They’re in Nebraska , Carson.”

“Trust me, if this story continues to have staying power in the news, they will find your parents. They will pay them a visit and ring their doorbell just like they rang yours. They need to know not to answer the door.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I’m not. Call them and tell them, Melanie. Okay?”

She had sighed heavily. “Yes.”

“The best thing for you and me to do right now is say nothing publicly and do nothing publicly. No running away like we’re guilty but not being out in the open, either. Lay low, stay low. Hide in plain sight, as they say. All right?”

Her head had pounded with an ache that made her feel like her skull was locked in an ever-tightening vise.

“Melanie?”

“Yes. All right.”

They’d hung up, but rather than make the call to Omaha, Melanie swallowed two aspirin and collapsed onto her bed to lie perfectly still until her headache passed. But she fell asleep.

When she awoke a couple of hours later, Nadine was home early from her job at a boutique clothing store modeling ridiculously priced dresses for wealthy women to fawn over. She was auditioning the next day at Paramount and wanted to run through her lines. Corinne, her other housemate, was also home for the evening after an afternoon of callbacks. Melanie came out of her bedroom to grab a glass of water and found her two friends in a tight conversation at the kitchen sink that halted the second she walked into the room.

“Your parents just called,” Nadine had said quickly. “They want you to call back.”

“We didn’t want to tell them you were asleep at five p.m. in the afternoon so we said you were in the shower. You should probably call them back,” Corinne added.

“Now?” Melanie asked.

“I think they really want to talk with you.” Nadine’s tone had hinted of uneasiness.

“Keep it short, though?” Corinne added with a half smile. “Long distance, you know.”

“I know how much a long-distance call costs,” Melanie muttered, turning for the phone on its little table in the living room.

“We just know money might be tight for you right now,” Corinne called after her.

She had dialed her parents’ number, thinking perhaps it was actually better if they had already heard rumblings of what had happened and had called to find out from her what the truth was, because then she wouldn’t have to spring this terrible, absurd development onto them from out of nowhere.

They had indeed heard rumblings, and not just rumblings. The news of their daughter’s fall from Hollywood notoriety to Hollywood blacklist had been in the Omaha World-Herald on page five. National news. A one-column story, but above the fold. Impossible to miss.

They had been shocked and appalled, devastated, and humiliated.

“Is it true?” her mother had asked, distraught. “Are you a communist?”

“Of course it’s not true!” Melanie had said. “How can you even ask?”

“Is it that Carson Edwards? Is he a communist?” her father had said from the line’s other extension.

“I would certainly know if he was, wouldn’t I? This is a witch hunt, Dad. That’s all it is. I’m completely innocent.”

“Please come home!” her mother had begged.

“I don’t want to look like I’m guilty and running for cover, Mom. I’m guilty of nothing.”

“Except for getting mixed up with the wrong people! A communist, Melanie!”

She had told them she had to go. Her mother was crying. Herb told her to think of her family, her reputation. Her future. She said again that she needed to go, wished them a good night, and hung up.

Melanie had stood for several long moments reminding herself that she was the victim here, not the criminal. She was innocent.

She’d done nothing wrong.

She loved her country.

She was innocent.

She needed more aspirin.

Melanie had gone back to the kitchen for the drink of water and two more Bayer. Nadine and Corinne were still there but seated now at the four-seat chrome and Formica table set against the wall.

Nadine had nodded to one of two chairs across from them.

“We actually want to talk to you, too,” she said.