Great Big Beautiful Life(56)
When this conversation would have at least one other person who was, as Mom used to lovingly call him, fanciful. The beach pictures would have almost certainly elicited a reference to a song about nature’s beauty, maybe even a Cosmo Sinclair original, or else a shot of our composting outhouse with a caption about it being his office, most days. Potty humor, dad jokes, old music, and deep laughter. Those are the holes he left behind in our family unit.
The texts peter off, and I fish my notebook out of my bag, popping in my earbuds and queuing up the rest of yesterday’s recording. I’ll want to transcribe everything later, but for now, I just want to let Margaret’s story wash over me again, see what jumps out, and jot down time stamps.
This interview felt so different. Before, she’d been recounting her family’s oral history. Now we’ve reached the part where—as she put it—all of the characters were real to her. People she loved, people she’d fought with, people she’d lost.
She started with her father and mother’s friendship.
Freddy Ives had sent Doris “Bernie” Bernhardt a bouquet to celebrate her new contract with MGM, and they hadn’t spoken again until her first MGM film released.
He’d gone to see it, opening night. Sat by himself in the fourth row, dead center, at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The following Monday she’d walked into her office to find another bouquet and a card.
Realism be damned. You’re going places.
X
F. Ives
She called Freddy to thank him—though she pretended to think his name was Fives, and he went along with it. They wound up on the phone for an hour and a half, mostly talking about the film, but a little about other things too. He updated her on Royal Pictures interoffice drama—who was sleeping with whom; who had found out about it; which A-list actor had most recently shown up to set, still wasted from the night before, and thrown up on a camera while it was filming.
She was surprised by his sense of humor, and when she told him as much, he became uncommonly serious. “You shouldn’t be,” he told her. “I was born into a life where I needn’t take anything seriously if I don’t want to.”
“But don’t you want to?” she asked, and then he had a turn at being surprised, because he found he did.
He took her seriously. He took her work seriously. By then, he’d seen all of her pictures a number of times, mostly from a position of curiosity: Now that he knew they’d been directed by a woman, would he be able to tell? Was it different?
He hadn’t come to a concrete conclusion, other than this: Every time he watched one of her films, he noticed something new.
And this made him better at his job, if only marginally.
The next week, he called her again. The same A-list star had knocked over a full wall in the studio while filming. “Most of his pay is going to his insurance by now,” he said.
They laughed about it together, but it wasn’t entirely funny. Bernie had been let go after over-performing. This man was knocking down walls and still under contract. He was the face, the reason people went to the movies. In Royal Pictures’ estimation, they needed him, whereas Bernie needed them.
Realism.
Freddy knew this, felt it in the long pause after their laughter died down, and wanted to say something about it but couldn’t seem to find the right words. So instead, he asked her if she’d like to go for a walk sometime, and she said yes, and it became a tradition.
A weekly walk.
He dated other women. She dated not at all.
They had hardly even touched, when finally, after eleven months of weekly walks and triweekly phone calls, he had stopped abruptly with an idea, a bolt of lightning, looked her in the eye, and said, “Bernie, I think we should get married.”
And she’d laughed because it was ridiculous, but eventually she realized he was serious.
“Why?” she said.
“Because you’re my favorite person in the world,” he said. “And talking to you three times a week isn’t enough. At least for me. So would you consider it?”
And she said, “Don’t you want to kiss me first?”
He said, “Of course I do, but I thought I’d better see whether you were amenable to the idea first, or you might slap me.”
She told him she would have. And then she stepped forward, set her hands on his face, and kissed him.
It wasn’t fireworks, according to either of them. It was more like slipping into a warm bath. They were engaged for a few months, with no real rush to the altar, until Bernie missed a period and it became obvious it was time to scramble.
The ceremony was small, just a few friends and family, all of them shocked the union had made it to the finish line. The derelict playboy and the shrewd lady director.
They made no sense to anyone except themselves, and later—once Bernie had gotten to know her a bit better—to Freddy’s sister, Francine. But it worked. Bernie moved into Freddy’s wing of the House of Ives. She attended his mother’s charity auctions, and she joined their awkward thrice-weekly family dinners. She played in the family’s expansive orange groves with her husband’s seven-year-old cousin, Ruth, and even came around to calling her LP, the Little Princess, like only family members did.
In 1938, their daughter came, screaming like a banshee, into the world—as was the Ives tradition—at a hospital whose entire upper floor had been cleared for the family.