Living With Miss G by Mearene Jordan Read Free Book Online Page B

our
heart-to-heart talks, I began to see that she was dwelling seriously on the
possibilities of marriage to Robert Taylor.
Frankly, I couldn’t stand the sight of him. He didn’t like me either, and he
had not the slightest idea that I knew all about his affair with Miss G. If he had,
he would have rocketed sky-high, because his opinion of “colored” people
hadn’t shifted much since the slave trade was banned.
On rare occasions, he did skip back to our apartment to share Miss G’s
bed, but I crouched like a mouse in my room without his even suspecting my
presence. Oh yes, he talked to Miss G about how unhappy he was in his
marriage and how hard it was to get a divorce. The lengths he went to keep their
romance a total secret were hard to believe.
He was a good pilot and on several occasions flew her out to lonely
farmhouses owned by his friends. And Miss G, quickly realizing where she
stood, said, “Rene, I’m sometimes surprised he doesn’t wear a black beard when
we’re off on a trip.”
It couldn’t last. It was far too fugitive and sneaky for Miss G. She liked
him enormously but was female enough to know it couldn’t last. Taylor had no
intention at that time of changing his lifestyle for Miss G or anybody else. He
was quite content with his public image as a happily married man with a
beautiful film star wife.
I was pleased when her mischievous sense of humor returned and she
surprised me with a statement that I thought meant she had got another lover.
“God Almighty, Rene, do you know what that old man is trying to do to
me?”
“What old man’s doing what to you?” I asked.
“Charles Laughton!”
I remembered that great British film where Laughton, as Henry VIII, was
guzzling greasy chicken legs and throwing the bones over his shoulders to the
dogs, then leering sexily at the cleavages of his sequence of wives before
chopping their heads off. Generally, he was behaving like a dirty old King. I
shuddered to think what he was proposing to do with Miss G.
I said, “You mean he’s……?” I couldn’t imagine what he could be doing. I
should have known from that innocent gleam in Miss G’s eyeballs.
“Every time we get an hour or so break, he takes me aside.”
“And…?” I urged an answer.
“He reads me passages from the Bible,” Miss G explained.
Well, I’d heard all about these sexy clergymen! “You mean he’s a religious
nut, and that he… ?” I sputtered.
By now Miss G was making a choking noise in her throat like a crow
cawing, and I knew I’d been had.
“No! Rene, sweetie, Charles Laughton is a famous and brilliant
Shakespearean actor, and he insists that I have talent. He insists on improving
my diction so I can hit the boards from Broadway to London. Isn’t he a dear? He
really means it. He reads me passages from the Bible and from Shakespeare and
I have to read them back under his instruction.”
If she lost out on her romance with Robert Taylor, she certainly made up
for it with her great friendship with the wonderful Charles Laughton.
When she started her next star-studded MGM production, The Great
Sinner , she played the aristocratic beauty, Countess Pauline Ostrovski, and she
said, “There you are, Rene! Charles Laughton will be proud of me!”
The other stars were Gregory Peck, Melvyn Douglas, Walter Huston, Ethel
Barrymore, Frank Morgan and Agnes Moorehead.
In The Great Sinner , it was Gregory Peck who gained Miss G’s eternal
devotion. She would come back to the dressing room whispering her admiration.
“Do you know what he does, Rene? I sneaked a look at his script and margin of
each page are tiny notes about his part – voice changes, emphasis, mannerisms –
little touches about every scene he plays. I’ve never see anyone so thorough in
my life.”
Miss G, as I have already mentioned, had gone to bed with two out of three
of her last leading men, but Gregory Peck who, as he admitted, certainly noticed
this luminous creature who was playing