When Beverly Finley’s mother had her legs broken, reset, and lengthened through an external brace bearing a series of four pins, Beverly endured six months of excruciating screw turns with quiet tears rather than the screams that were actually justified. But now, as Beverly stood tall and stately before the three-way mirror in a white gown not yet her wedding dress, her mother still frowned at what she saw.
“Look at this,” she reached out and pushed at the fabric covered flesh around Beverly’s waist, a motion which made the seed pearls on the bodice gleam in the overhead light. “Have you been sneaking?”
Beverly’s mother, Louisa, wearing a pink pillbox hat and holding a cigarette in one gloved hand, reached up, took Beverly by the chin, and turned her face abruptly towards her own. Louisa’s cigarette was emitting a thin ribbon of bluish smoke that made Beverly‘s eyes water. Louisa misread this welling moisture as tears of emotion and snapped, “Stop sniveling and open your mouth.”
Beverly obeyed, looking down at her mother while still holding her head high, forced up by her mother’s pliers-tight grip. “Tongue right. Now, left. All right. But I better not catch you with food. Water, oranges, and three crackers only. That's it."
A seamstress sat at Beverly’s feet with a fan of green-tipped pins between her thin lips. She worked at Beverly‘s satin hem, clearly trying to be invisible, as if she feared Beverly‘s mother, too.
Louisa had not always been like this, although she’d never been particularly warm to Beverly, even as an infant, when Beverly‘s odors and bald, noisy demands assaulted Louisa‘s sensibilities. Leave me be! I need quiet. Quiet! It’s always what you want, but I‘ve got nothing left for you. Do you hear me? Nothing!
While Louisa had not been a woman to cuddle with Beverly, her only child, she became yet more distant and her patience thinned further when Beverly’s father David no longer came home. Beverly still saw him occasionally, but he avoided any excessive contact with either of them, especially Louisa, who monitored his visits with young Beverly through slit eyes, taking long drags on her cigarettes so that her husband could hear the paper rapidly burning back towards her Charles of the Ritz Bonfire Red lipstick. There was a hostile electrical field that ran between Beverly’s mother and father. Even at four and five, Beverly felt the magnitude of its sharp and angry energy, and she knew to steer clear of it.
Theirs had been an arranged marriage: Louisa, a popular debutante from an upper middle-class family; David the son of a steel mogul and heir to his father’s vast, self-made fortune. David was shown pictures of Louisa, and his father asked David what he thought of her, saying, “Now, isn’t that a choice morsel?”
David shrugged and said, “Sure, I don’t know. She’s pretty.” To which his father replied, “A man needs a pretty woman to plan his parties, run the household, and make his home a welcome place for important guests.”
And again Beverly’s father shrugged, still uncertain, “I guess,” he replied noncommittally.
And then suddenly, before he truly knew what was happening--a matter of weeks only, maybe even days, he couldn‘t remember--David was watching this girl, named Louisa Edwards, walking towards him over a carpet covered with rose petals as he stood waiting at a grand white altar. She was wearing an engagement ring he’d never even seen, an engagement ring sent by his father as a token of David’s “sincere affection” and “intentions,” as the accompanying note, typed by his father’s secretary, had indicated. David saw the girl just once before the engagement, during a tea set up by his father, and it had been an awkward affair, as the pair had absolutely nothing to say to one another. She waited for him to speak, and his mind was racing so fast with panic--sheer animal panic--that he couldn’t latch onto a single worthwhile thought to utter. He saw her little pearl-colored teeth, her curls as perfect as a china doll’s, her baby pink fingernails filed to unsettlingly sharp, if stylish, points. She smiled at him and gamely lowered her eyes, knowing this was the mark of a good girl. But this was not for him. He went to the lavatory once, with the desperate idea of fleeing. But duty to his father led him back to the table, where he sweated through another half hour of discomfort.
All of it had happened so quickly that he only narrowly escaped being beaten by the two brothers of his previous (and more private) companion, a free-spirited girl who had enough money to buy cheap but trendy clothing and hang around outside his social clubs, which is how he‘d met her. The boys, both considerably larger than David, were also waiting for him outside his club, following the announcement of his engagement in the The Detroit News. David had never promised to marry the girl he‘d spent so many hours with, drinking, dancing, laughing, caressing, but she had told her brothers so. Yet, they came not so much to defend her honor as to push their fists into the little rich boy whose father employed their father and into whose factories they would eventually be interred like corpses.
Not long after the wedding, David discovered the error in his father’s belief that marrying an upper middle-class girl was more practical than wedding someone from a more patrician background. His father had wrongly assumed that an upper middle-class girl, while indeed bearing the necessary breeding and education, would not expect too much, would not assume she was entirely free of household duties or childcare, would not anticipate being absolved of the traditional responsibilities of a wife, including playing a charming hostess when called upon. Yes, David’s father had been wrong.
Neither father nor son expected that piles of laundry would grow like geographical accretions in the house, that the kitchen would be cluttered with dirty dishes, that dust that would accumulate like moss on every surface. And there was the wife, sleeping (or perhaps passed out) on the couch when Beverly’s father returned home from a trip. “Housework isn’t what I signed up for when I married you,” Louisa said, when he shook her awake and asked her how the hell things had gotten so bad. Her eyes were hooded with drink, and he could smell the sickening sweet odor of whiskey--a man’s drink!--on her breath. “You own a quarter of the world, goddamn you,” she said, turning her Clara Bow lips away towards the sofa cushions, “You can at least afford to get me a maid.”
“A child will fix her,” said David‘s father, sagely.
“I don’t know, Dad. She get so hysterical sometimes. I don’t think she’d make the best--”
“Nonsense!” his father interrupted. “A child is just what the girl needs. It’ll give her purpose, make her focus on something else besides herself.”
And so came Beverly.
When she was eight or nine, Beverly would meet with her father in the living room of the house Louisa still lived in, a house kept up with maid service by the beneficent but often oblivious grandfather, who felt it was his gentlemanly duty to take care of Louisa and his granddaughter. Now, Louisa would sit somewhere nearby, paging noisily through a Vogue, but no longer looking so intently at the pair. Beverly’s father would search his daughter’s face with his eyes, as if looking for something. Beverly later felt that he was either seeking evidence of himself or the perfidy of her mother. But seemingly satisfied, he would press money into her palm, close the fingers, and ask her to tell no one. “Use it for something you want or need, and let it be our secret,” he told her and then kissed her forehead and stood up to his full height again. And then, usually he would go, without even a nod to her mother, just a chilling glance before turning and walking out the front door.
When Louisa made the decision to ‘fix’ Beverly’s legs, it had nothing to do with their being defective in any conventional sense. Certainly, they worked as legs should and carried the girl around. But Louisa, whom Beverly noticed stared at her calves with an expression of silent criticism as she pulled on her quietly burning cigarette, finally explained that her legs were too short to ever wear high heels successfully. “You must get these little troll legs from your grandfather,” Louisa would say, referring to her father-in-law while pinching the girl’s fleshy calf. “Neither your father nor I have them.”
And so, the surgery was performed on Beverly just after her sixteenth birthday, and she emerged from it in a constant state of pain, which made her nauseous and unable to eat. She dropped nearly fifteen pounds while the screws were turned twice daily, even though she had to lay still for nearly six months. Once, when her mother came into her room and noticed Beverly’s thin wrist on the comforter, the bones protruding so elegantly, Louisa smiled in her prim way. She then touched it with the same hand that held her cigarette--her nails a lustrous poppy red--and said, “good girl.”
By then, Beverly had been given a series of painkillers to ease the ache of her healing bones, a process that was constantly interrupted by the lengthening treatment. When her grandfather saw her, with eyes constantly clouded by tears or unconscious from pain pills, he felt a terrible stab of remorse. It was he who agreed to and paid for the operation, after Louisa went to him to explain how necessary it was: Beverly will walk so much better with it, you understand, dear Mr. Finley. You know how grateful we are for all you do, but this will make Beverly’s life so much more comfortable. It really is necessary. Yes, of course, we‘ll go to any doctor you recommend.
In the months leading up to her debut, when Beverly was able to stand on both feet, a woman came in daily to help her relearn how to use her legs. Another woman called each day for two weeks to teach Beverly posture and how to walk in high heels with a dictionary on her head. Back straight, shoulders back, chest forward. That’s right. Very good.
Beverly began appearing in public in fetching dresses paid for by her grandfather, whose sense of responsibility to the girl grew heavier once he saw the state she had been in the previous year. It was, he felt, an example of what she had probably gone through quietly much of her life. He wanted now to make it up to her, make up all those years of care he’d sent almost dismissively to her mother, which may or may not have actually made it to Beverly. He had his secretary phone the newspaper’s social pages, and they arrived at parties to which Beverly had been invited. They’d been told that there was money in covering Beverly Finley. And would they be so kind as to make her one of the prominent images?
And so it followed that soon, even before Beverly was officially ’launched’ into society, she appeared everywhere. ‘Such a lovely young lady: Beverly Finley out on the town with her mother,’ read one photo caption. ‘Joan Crawford gives Beverly Finley advice,’ said another high-contrast photo-illustration, in which Beverly looked with awe into the intensely arched gaze of Crawford. Soon the fire so quickly lit spread from newspapers to magazines, and it wasn’t long before Beverly and her charming exposed shoulders, bow-shaped lips, glossy hair, and shy, dark-eyed gaze were staring out at readers from the cover of Life. The title story read: “The World’s Most Famous Debutante.”
A reporter, from a publication neither Beverly nor her mother could recall, once stopped and asked Louisa how it felt to be the mother of the most famous girl in the world. Louisa stopped for a moment, not carefully considering but momentarily stunned, as if she only now realized her title--that she was the mother, the elder, not the glowing girl to whom all eyes were now turned, not famous herself--and she suddenly smiled, mechanically, and said three syllables only: “Wonderful,” without any genuine feeling, so that no one approached her again. They got out of her everything they felt they needed to know, not caring about her ability to speak fluent French and read some Latin or crochet lovely spiral-knotted doilies (although she hadn’t done this for decades and might well be rusty) and perhaps the markedly less favorable detail, that she could polish off a fifth of gin alongside any man. And so the reporters moved back to her daughter, who smiled and held her chin up, her neck firmly positioned, so that her hair did not brush against her shoulders and become unsightly. Louisa stepped back, wounded, silently angry, and snarling at her glowing daughter the imprecations: “Just wait! This won’t last. There’s an end to every parade. Then you‘ll know what life is really about.”
But the adulation made Beverly giddy, and her mother’s brooding wrath became less the overriding cloud that darkened her world. The bright lights, the call to pose in an ad for Studebaker, all chased her mother’s moods away. Moreover, she felt she would soon be free of her. Already, Howard Hughes had begun talking with her father, asking if he might meet this “most fetching young lady I’ve begun to see everywhere.” And that could only lead to escape. She imagined him with his dark, lustrous hair, always neatly combed and his heavy black brows, his square and strong-jawed face, so handsome. And here she was, a girl now in league with Hughes’ other women: Jean Harlow, Katherine Hepburn, Lana Turner, and Rita Hayworth. Beverly could barely imagine it.
Louisa, however, continued to go out, now ignoring her daughter’s success entirely. She spent hours with one male companion or another. Some were honest in their advances, others less so. One, in particular, a banker from Montreal, actually presented her with a ring, and the next day, she came into David’s offices to formally request a divorce while wearing the enormous, sparkling, pear-cut solitaire. She trailed the scent of Chanel and also whiskey sours. When David abruptly assented to the legal dissolution of their marriage, Louisa began to crying, tearing the veil-trimmed hat from her head. You never loved me, she screamed, running past his secretary and through the outer office. You’ve always wanted to be rid of me, you lousy bastard.
When she fell on the carpet, he stood in his office doorway and looked at her, his hands in his pockets. “Go home, Louisa, and dry out for Christ‘s sake. I’ll file the papers and get things started.” He shut his office door, and Louisa gathered herself together in front of the secretary, who rustled papers on her desk in order to look busy.
David’s father, who now conducted all his affairs from his four poster bed, where nurses regularly injected him with morphine following his diagnosis with stomach cancer, agreed to let Louisa stay in the grand house until Beverly made her official debut, and then Louisa would have to make other arrangements. No allowance? she said in a high-pitched voice to the maid, who gave her the note, quickly bowed her head, and slipped out of the room. I don’t even get an allowance? I’ll sue, goddamn them. They can’t just toss me out like trash. I gave them a child. A famous girl the whole world knows! She was not wearing the pear-shaped solitaire, for she no longer had it. It had been on her finger a total of nine days, during which time she went without gloves.
The week of the debut, Louisa denied Beverly any significant amount of food and kept her out of the sunlight, with the exception of a wild dash to the chauffeured car for the final fittings of her dress. Water and oranges and three crackers were her daily ration. Look at you, said Louisa to Beverly when she came down for her hourly glass of water, you’re like a little blimp you’re so puffy. You’ll never fit into that dress. Once alone, Beverly regarded her nakedness in the mirror, her lengthened calves, which looked somehow unnatural, her ankles, which were swollen with edema. She did not like what she saw, but still felt her mother was wrong, very wrong and not just about this but about so many things. Still each night, when her mother handed her two diuretic pills, Beverly took them, along with two more pills that allowed her to sleep so the bags under her eyes did not grow heavier.
At Beverly’s final fitting, her mother wore gloves and lit one cigarette from another. Beverly noticed that her bright red lipstick bled into the lines that had begun to form above her lips, and despite all her care in making herself up, furrows had also begun to appear at her brow and at the corners of her eyes. These were wrinkles that no flattering light would forgive. Beverly had not noticed them before: her mother, less powerful, quickly aging, clinging to an authority she no longer had, a false authority imposed by inciting fear. But what leverage now, Beverly thought, with her estranged husband--Beverly’s father--and dying father-in-law no longer willing to support her? Beverly now was the more powerful of the two, and she saw her mother’s stature shrinking--physically.
And when her mother grabbed her chin and demanded she open her mouth and move her tongue to reveal whether she had anything there--a demand intended to humiliate rather than uncover--Beverly blinked back the tears brought on by the tightness of her mother’s grip and the acrid cigarette smoke that stung her eyes. And Beverly said, enunciating clearly as the seamstress continued quietly pinning her hem, “Sit down, mother. This is my show, not yours.”
