Great Big Beautiful Life(35)

Four years later, he tried again. Again, they chose someone else.

And while Gerald was still smarting from the failure, Lawrence abruptly fell ill.

Gerald rushed to be at his father’s side, but even on his deathbed, Lawrence had nothing to say to his son. Instead, for several days, he raged and wept and apologized to people who weren’t there. He begged a faceless specter to come home, and then finally seemed to get the answer he wanted. In 1919, at eighty-nine years old, Lawrence found his first shred of peace.

Then he closed his eyes, smiled softly, and took his last breath.

It was as if all the hunger that had lived trapped inside his body slipped out on that last exhale, then snaked its way into Gerald’s lungs, where it writhed and snapped like a viper.

To Gerald, that bottomless pit of a nameless want felt less like hunger and more like rage. An anger so violent he thought it might—would—destroy anything it touched.

For the first time since his teenage years, he stormed into his childhood bedroom and punched the wall. Then he punched it again, and again, until the blood from his knuckles was smeared across the wallpaper.

When Rosalind came to him, he shoved his wife from the room and locked the door, letting the rage consume him. He destroyed his cherrywood dresser. He ripped the drapes from the window. He battered the bedpost until he was too tired to fight anymore, to think anymore, and that was a relief.

He left San Francisco a week after that. He couldn’t stand to be there any longer. Couldn’t stand to be seen, by his wife or his children, or to watch his mother mourn the father who’d never loved him.

He left them, all of them, and went somewhere new, unfamiliar and without ghosts. He was convinced that in Hollywood, he could sweat his fury out like a fever.

But that wasn’t what happened.

His first night in town, at forty-four years old, Gerald Ives fell in love.

He sat in a lounge, sipping a martini, and he looked up at the stage and saw her, lit up like an angel. Untamable red-gold hair. Strange green eyes. A voice like a flame singeing paper.

She was no more beautiful than Rosalind, but she was striking. Her presence not only invited but demanded attention, and it was such a relief to give it, to feel that, instead of a bottomless pit of rage. His want was an ocean he could drown in. Not a lack of something but an excess of it. When she finished her performance, she walked straight off the stage to his table and introduced herself.

Nina Gill had been trying to break into film with about as much luck as Gerald with national politics. Films were still silent then, and half of Nina’s power was in the sound of her voice.

Unlike Gerald, or even Gerald’s wife, Nina didn’t hunger for wealth, power, or change. It wasn’t stardom she was after.

She wanted only beauty and pleasure. And lucky for Gerald, he was an undeniably beautiful man, more so in middle age than he had been in his youth.

As for the pleasure piece of things, he lost himself in his pursuit of it with her. Drinking, dancing, music, sex.

All day long, every minute that she wasn’t with him, he missed her. But when she fell asleep at night—before him, always—his thoughts wandered to Rosalind, which made him think about San Francisco and his old life, and the anger would rise through him again, shapeless and aimless but white hot.

This went on for months. It might’ve gone on much longer if Rosalind hadn’t sent him word that his mother had died.

He knew as soon as he read the telegram that that was the end of it. He’d never go back to San Francisco. Again, his anger rose, but this time there was nowhere to run. So he threw himself back into work.

The First World War was two years over by then and there was talent to be found, money to be made. He needed more than to be drunk and in love. He needed to be busy, worn out.

He bought a burgeoning film studio, Royal Pictures, and put Nina under contract. When her first film came out, a comedy, he filled his newspapers with rapturous reviews of her performance, but it took two more for her star to truly rise.

As the money came back to him—it always did—he began to do something new and novel for Gerald, for any Ives.

He spent it. Not invested, not gambled. Spent. Vengefully.

He couldn’t have the White House? Fine! He built himself a fortress on the California coast and filled it with beautiful, pleasurable things.

He covered the grounds with gardens and citrus trees, threw lavish parties most Saturday nights.

On Nina’s birthday, he brought in elephants and tigers. He invited her Hollywood friends to stay for weeks on end, and they swam drunk and naked in the indoor pool together, beneath a ceiling draped in gauzy fabric.

And they fought. God, did they fight.

Rosalind had never so much as raised her voice to him.

Nina did. Every time she learned of one of his infidelities (of which there were many), she screamed at him, and whenever he suspected one of hers (likely there were none), he screamed back.

They’d fight in front of their friends, throw things at walls, storm onto the grounds and spit at each other. But it never made it to the gossip rags, because by then he owned them all.

So long as his family didn’t have to read about him, about his boundless rage, then it would be as if he no longer existed.

All his fury would burn itself out, without ever touching them.

But of course that wasn’t what happened. Because Nina fell sick.