The Missing Person Read Free

She cared, not for personal fates but for sticks of copy.
    Was she lonely in her emotional sclerosis? If she was she did not notice it, for her name, her byline everywhere, made it easier to be a single woman in the capital of couples. She moved through dinner-dances, supper parties, lavish lunches and dinners, cocktail parties—broad, full-bosomed, aging, her tightly curled still-red hair perfectly matched to her red lips—without any companion except her knowledge of Who She Was and the instant recognition granted her by the people whose careers she chronicled.
    The prolific celebrator of failure began to “do” books, full-length biographies. She was especially skillful when she was able to inject inspiration into her “lives.” The down-and-out Star who has lost her looks and her way gets religion, or AA, or Faith in Herself. Fans appreciated this kind of glamorous, elevated inspiration. They were lifted up by the vision of how far the Star could fall. It confirmed their belief that salvation is possible only by means of simple, self-administered spiritual strength. Because they themselves had some connection, no matter how tenuous and sentimental, with a church, they enjoyed the spectacle of the Great One finding the Path, ever since the time that Mary Pickford, full of dimples, wrote a book urging her huge following to Try God.
    Mary Maguire’s most successful book was The Fabulous Franny Fuller (As Told to Mary Maguire), written at the height of the Star’s career. When she could be persuaded to sit down for any period of time and talk, Franny Fuller had told Mary Maguire something of her life story. Mary took her monologues down in shorthand, about her childhood and adolescence, about her first marriage to Dempsey Butts, the football player. Franny told why she had let the photographer take that famous picture of her naked to the waist, posed as the figurehead of a yacht, the one that was made into postcards the year before she signed her first contract. She told about Eddie Puritan, who “found” and named her, about her great friend and stand-in, Dolores Jenkins. She spoke (reluctantly) of Arnold Franklin, the poet she had married after her divorce from Butts. In passing, as if it was no real part of her existence, she mentioned her habit of disappearing, her “escapes,” as she called them.
    Mary Maguire took Franny’s flat details and made them exciting. She showed Franny sitting on the fifty-yard line Sunday after Sunday watching Demp play, even attending afternoon practice sessions at his training camp. But Mary Maguire was too intelligent not to guess the truth (which she wisely suppressed), that football was a complete mystery to Franny Fuller, as much a mystery to her as were Iowa-born Demp and his family. Franny never understood why they all cared so much about the game and about each other. She had sat in the stadium worrying about her hair tangling in the wind, about the cold, about chilblains, and her good clothing being ruined on rough, dirty seats.
    Mary Maguire understood, indeed knew, more than she wrote. She realized (but never put in the book) that Franny Fuller had no idea why she was there, or who she was as she sat in the stadium with the other players’ wives, or after the game in the restaurant, with all the Buttses who came from Iowa for a game every year, pounding each others’ shoulders and buttocks and asking her, “Wasn’t he great?”
    Franny told Mary Maguire that the better everyone seemed to feel when they were together at summer training camp or on those Sunday evenings after games in the fall, the worse she felt, as if maybe the sun had gotten to her. While they all talked at once to each other, Franny was silent, remembering things like how Jean Harlow had died from sun-poisoning. She was afraid to watch games played outdoors. But all Mary Maguire wrote was about how Franny went to the games, watched Dempsey