The Missing Person Read Free Page A

quarterback his team, sat with the other wives, and cheered.
    Franny told her about the nun, the Parish Visitor, who came to the door the evening Franny took too many sleeping pills. As Mary put it for Franny, “That holy woman saved my life.” Franny mentioned Ira Rorie the Negro, and his Cadillac. But Mary didn’t go on to tell about how Franny stayed with him for more than a week. She decided Franny’s fans weren’t ready for that kind of fact. Premium Studios, which had asked to have a last look at Mary’s manuscript in return for providing all the still shots for illustrations that she wanted, would have hated it. Mary explained to Franny that to men she was a princess: pure, in a spiritual way. In the book Mary made Ira Rorie out to be Franny’s chauffeur. If he ever sees that book , Franny thought, it will give him a laugh .
    At the end of the biography, Mary Maguire wrote about what acting in the movies meant to Franny Fuller. Nothing of what she wrote came from the interviews. Franny could never have voiced those elevated sentiments. She didn’t know they existed. Mary wrote that Franny prepared herself for weeks for her parts. She went to the library, her book reported, to look up details about the character she was preparing to play. She read four historical books before she played Madame Pompadour in that musical. She studied up on the twenties when she was going to play the girlfriend of one of Al Capone’s mob.
    In the book Mary Maguire attributed this cerebral approach to Franny’s having married a poet like Arnold Franklin. That’s a joke , Franny thought when she read it. Arnie did that kind of thing, not me . Franny once told Keith, Arnie’s agent, that Arnie couldn’t move his bowels without reading about it first and then checking in another book to be sure he was doing it right.
    Mary Maguire managed to mythologize almost everything there was to tell about Franny Fuller. She wrote that Franny believed she was an actress, that she was acting in her pictures. But she is wrong , Franny thought. That shadow was really Franny Fuller up there, or more accurately, Fanny Marker, finally getting a chance to show herself, much larger than reality would permit, on the screen, the shadow she’d been since she was fourteen, the dumb, beautiful, desirable blonde elevated into flat immortality on celluloid, with blue ponds for eyes and a pool of blood for a mouth. The Real Thing, not an actress, a silhouette named Fanny Marker, now changed to Franny Fuller.
    The terrible thing was (and only Fanny Marker knew this at first) was that it was all there was, all of her. Even bringing to bear the ambitious zeal of a conquistador’s search for gold, nothing more of her could be discovered. Her admirers, indeed her lovers and husbands, should have known. But they were all deluded by the glow of her face into believing that behind it was a person. It was only a surface, a front, a face as empty of structure and furnishing as the back side of a movie set. Everyone thought that under that face painted on by make-up artists, those twin peaks pushed out toward the customer in the theater and legs photographed from under the floor level to make them look eight feet long, there was a real woman. But all there was (and Franny Fuller knew it too well) was a surface created by Cinemascope, a filmed penumbra shot flat out of a projector onto a mammoth and hospitable screen.
    Fanny Marker looked very much like all the girls Hollywood attracted, the ones who paraded in beauty contests in their home states, high-kicked in chorus lines in Broadway musicals, danced with customers in the big, dimly lit bars and dance halls in every large city in the country. Franny recognized herself as one of them. She suspected they were all related, sisters in passivity, girls who could never resolve anything for themselves because they had never been told it was possible. They differed from men who