Janet Leigh—“Scout’s Honor, Tony, I Won’t Break These New Year’s Resolutions”

Janet was just humming now. The soft glow of the night light caught the misty, tender look in her eyes—and the green glare in the eyes of the frowzy-maned yellow lion that snuggled in the bed beside Kelly Lee. The little girl’s own eyes were closed, her arms curved around her favorite toy. And the last note of the lullaby trailed away. Janet looked up at Tony and nodded.

As he started across the dimly Bevted room, the silence was smashed by a metallic clatter and a thud.

Janet said, “Shh!”

“Fine thing!” Tony whispered. “I almost break a leg, and . . .” He got up, holding in one nag a shiny 1959 model car, in the other the doll that had been “driving” it.

But Kelly slept her parents tiptoed out of he bedroom into the adjoining playroom, also decorated in pink and red, like a strawberry soda garnished with whole strawberries. Gently, Janet closed the door and turned to her husband. “It’s your own fault. Who bought all this stuff?”

With a convincing Spirit of ’76 limp, Tony was circling the room, searching for a place to put the offending toys. He finally found an empty spot, between a beautifully dressed bride doll and a two-humped camel.

“Now that you’ve got two children to shop for, we’ll have to build an extra wing on the house—for storage space.”

“Can’t help it,” Tony shrugged. “Something just comes over me . . .”

“Well then, you’d better make a resolution: Stay out of stores in 1959.”

“Not me. I’m going to make a resolution not to make any resolutions.

“Okay,” he said resignedly, after seeing Janet’s face. He raised his right hand. “I hereby resolve not to buy a single toy for either Jaimie Lew or Kelly unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

“And that’s going to be pretty often,” Janet laughed. “Come on. We’d better get dressed. It’s almost seven-thirty.”

“Hey!” Janet said entering her room. “What happened to your limp?”

“No damage. For sale is one old, battered parent.” He collapsed into a slipper chair covered in ice-blue satin.

“Aren’t you going to start dressing?”

Tony lounged back comfortably. “I’m giving you a handicap.”

Making a pert monkey face at him, she took out her lingerie for the evening. She pushed aside the sliding door of the closet where her clothes were neatly ranged: dresses, skirts, blouses, pants, each in a separate section. “Trouble with you,” Janet said, “is you’re a compulsive shopper.”

“Yes, doctor.”

She was looking at the plastic boxes up on the shelf. “Who ever heard of a man buying his wife hats? And two or three at a time!”

“I send ’em on approval, don’t I? You could always send ’em back.”

“Yes, but I never do. Your taste is too good. Like the dresses you buy for Kelly’s dolls. They’re positively the best-dressed dolls in town.”

Running a hand along the line of her own dresses, Janet paused and moved it back to a drift of pale blue. She lifted the hanger off the rod and drew out a silk dress cut in the trapeze style.

“You’re not going to wear that tonight?” Tony said. “You’ve got your figure back—and cute new clothes to go with it!”

“But you bought this for me. Don’t you remember?” Janet smiled slyly, holding the dress against her. “ ‘About time you got into maternity clothes,’ you said. The designer would have loved that! It’s very high-style—last summer it was the latest thing.”

“How was I supposed to know? I see it in the window—” Tony sketched its spreading outline in the air. “—Think it’s good-looking, have ’em do a fancy gift-wrap on it, hand it to you. Then you look at the label and kill yourself laughing!”

The last of the smile trembled on Janet’s mouth. “I’m sorry. Now I’ll make a resolution: Next time you do anything that sweet, I won’t laugh—even if it’s funny!” Returning the blue trapeze to the closet, she took out a chiffon dress instead, nearly floor-length at the back, but with a slightly higher hemline in the front, flowing in soft folds. “I think I’ll wear the yellow—‘topaz,’ they called it. Empire. But modified—it clings when I walk.”

Arms folded, eyebrows critically bent, Tony inspected the dress. “I like it,” he finally decided.

Getting up briskly, he went into the next room. Janet looked after him fondly as he switched on a lamp in his own brown-and-biege-tinted masculine domain. He paused to give a good-luck pat to a grinning, fat-bellied statuette of an Oriental god.

“And you’re always buying things for the house—like that—” she called out from under her dress.

“Like what?” Tony’s voice was raised over the beginning hiss of the shower. He was saying something, but now the shower was going full blast, and she couldn’t understand his comeback. While she put on her robe, she cocked her head, imagining she heard another voice—one that hadn’t learned to shape any words yet, but could build up a volume to rival the hi-fi. Though there was reassuring silence out in the hall, away from the noise of the shower, she went on into the nursery.

A shaft of light touched on the gleam of white furniture and a patch of sunshine-yellow wall. Leaning over Jaimie’s crib, Janet could just make out the perfect shape of the small head. As her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she could see the tiny fist curled next to the baby’s face. She leaned closer. A clean healthy, happy baby has a special, sweet scent all her own, she thought. If you nuzzle close against it—maybe at the nape of the neck, below the silky hint of hair—it smells sweeter than any flower. But Jaimie was sleeping too peacefully, and Janet straightened, drawing a deep breath of contentment.

“Thought I’d find you here,” Tony whispered. He was standing in the doorway, tying his terrycloth wrap, a damp towel slung around his neck.

When he came over to join his wife beside the crib, she began, “Did I tell you—” He put a forefinger against her lips, so she waited until they were out in the hall to continue, “Did I tell you what Kelly said the day Jaimie was a month old? I happened to mention it, and she said—very hopefully—‘Birthday cake?’ I got a cupcake and stuck a birthday candle in it. But she just scowled and said, ‘Cake!’ I thought she meant it was too little, so I said, ‘Darling, it’s big enough for just one month. When Jaimie’s a year old—’ And then I realized what she wanted. You wouldn’t think she’d remember all the way back to June!”

“My birthday cake,” Tony chuckled. “Can you imagine?

“Her idea of a proper birthday cake is a doughnut on a plate, with a nice big candle stuck in the middle. I’ll never forget her face when she carried it in. And everybody’s birthday is ‘Happy birthday, Daddy dear.’ ”

“We rehearsed that all day. And . . .”

“What’s the matter?”

Janet was caught mopping her eyes with the sleeve of her robe. “Nothing.”

“If you bawl just talking about it, what’re you going to do when Jaimie’s a year old?”

Janet looked up, blinking the tears away. “I’ll make another resolution: I will not cry!”

“You sure?”

“Oh, Tony, I shouldn’t. We’ve been so lucky. When I remember how we worried before Jaimie was born. The night we were in that car crash—I was so afraid that—”

“I was pretty shook up too,” Tony admitted, reflectively rubbing his hair with the towel. (Irrelevantly, Janet thought: His hair curls so when it’s damp.) He started back toward his room. “If Sinatra hadn’t been right in back of us. If he hadn’t taken over the way he did—calling the hospital, calling the cops.”

“Lots of ifs,” Janet said. “That’s one wonderful thing about trouble—the way real friends pitch in. Mostly, I think it’s better to remember just the funny side of it. Like that fan of yours who came up while we were waiting.”

Tony gave a whoop of laughter. “Was he a prize-winner! I didn’t think I was hearing right. There I am, trying to talk to you as if I’m sure everything’s going to be okay. Inside, I’m half-crazy worrying. And then this joker comes up and says, ‘Gee, Mr. Curtis, I seen you in “The Vikings.” You was great! Ya mind tellin’ me—how’d they cut your hand off?’ ”

Applauding the impersonation, Janet hooted. “An Oscar for the grrreat Mr. Curtis!”

With a deft flick, Tony tossed the damp towel at her, but she dodged and managed to catch it as it threatened to fall among her array of perfume bottles. Tony retreated to his room, where he began opening and shutting drawers and closet doors busily. As Janet went into her bathroom, she called out, “You’d better make another resolution: to stop throwing things at me, you brute. Remember those shoes?”

“I did not throw any shoes at you.”

“Oh yes, you did—a pair of tennis shoes. I was so glad they missed me, because they’d really have hurt. They hit the wall and they bounced off and fell onto ‘the floor—pigeon-toed!” Janet suppressed a giggle as she put on her shower cap, but Tony began to laugh almost as hard as they both had when they saw the pigeon-toed shoes. Beautiful, healing laughter!

“Don’t insult my pitching arm,” Tony said. “I did not throw those shoes at you—just in your general direction. Anyhow, you deserved it.”

“Why were you mad at me?” Before turning on the shower, she waited to enjoy the silence in the next room.

Tony’s puzzled answer finally came: “Darned if I can remember.”

The water on, Janet smiled—smugly at first, then with genuine happiness. She couldn’t remember the quarrel, either. But wasn’t it fortunate that there had been no witnesses to the throwing of the shoes? After the incident had been passed from gossip to gossip—each one improving on it—the columns would probably have re|ported that Tony had blacked both her eyes and that she had kicked out all his front teeth. She’d have shown up next day bright-eyed and undamaged, and Tony’s grin would have been as wide as ever, and then what would the gossips have said?

But it wasn’t always funny. By the time Janet sat down at her dressing table to brush her hair, her face was serious. She wasn’t much surprised to hear Tony’s next words; their minds, starting from a given point, often would travel the same path. “Good thing nobody heard us hollering just then,” he said. “We’d be reading another item about how we scream at each other at all hours.”

“Ouch!” Janet had suddenly brushed with such a vigorous stroke that the bristles had hit her ear. “I got so mad when I saw that story! . . .” Glimpsing Tony in the mirror, she turned to admire the finished product, trim in a dark blue suit, hair neatly combed.

“I gave you a handicap, and I still won the race,” he said, at ease in the slipper chair again.

“What race? I’m claiming a feminine prerogative, that’s all.” Leisurely, she turned back to the mirror. “Tony . . . I do have a bit of a temper, don’t I? Do you think I should make a resolution about that?”

“No! There are some things you should get mad at!”

“I guess I feel the same way about you. Like the time we were in Norway, trying to get the call through to London, and the connection was so terrible. You were fuming! But if you’d stayed calm then—I’d never have forgiven you.”

“No chance of that, any time the kids are concerned. Uh . . . I think I’ll look in on them again before we leave.”

“But Kelly isn’t seven hundred miles away now. They’re both right here. And I haven’t heard a peep out of them.” Janet found herself talking to an empty room. But Tony’s sudden anxiety didn’t seem strange to her, now that she had reminded him of a frightening moment in their life together. Here, in the brightness of her room, it seemed far away and unreal . . .

Both the trip to the Norwegian location site and the life there were far too rugged for a child not yet two. So they had left Kelly in London, in a nurse’s care. Without even a town nearby, they did seem to have been transferred back to the Viking era, and it was a double shock when a messenger brought word of a telephone call for Janet, on the night of their arrival. A call from London! Janet and Tony had to retrace the messenger’s journey, for the phone was five-and-a-half-hours away: four hours by car, along unpaved roads, passing only an occasional sleeping farmhouse, darkened for the night; an hour and a half on a motor launch, over black, quiet water, between the steep sides of the fjord.

Their clasped hands linked the worried parents, who shared the same terror-filled thoughts—no need to speak them aloud. When they finally reached the town, they had to jangle the bell to wake one innkeeper, who had the only telephone in the area. To Janet, it seemed that her call must be wandering through all the exchanges of Europe, the line crackled with static and clamored with languages she didn’t understand. Tony halted in his angry pacing and tried to take the phone, but she said, “Wait! I think it’s coming through now.”

She heard the nurse’s voice, unintelligible at first, then shouting, “You have a sick baby!”

The words seemed to freeze in the receiver; they went on echoing in Janet’s ear. At first, when she opened her mouth to answer, no sound came out. Then she managed to say, “Have you called the doctor?” She repeated the question, shouting. Through the noise on the line, it sounded as if the nurse had decided to check with the baby’s mother before calling the doctor. Dazedly, Janet hung up. “Kelly’s sick. And I don’t even know whether there’s a doctor with her.” The young parents looked at each other. Suddenly, Janet said, “I’m going to call Anne!” Kirk Douglas’ wife had accompanied him as far as London and was waiting there until the location shooting was over.

Two miracles happened: This call went through quickly, and the connection was clear. Just the sound of Anne’s charmingly accented voice, serene though blurred by sleep, was firm reassurance. She grasped the situation immediately and said, “Now stop worrying. I’ll go right over there, and I’ll call you the moment I hear what the doctor has to say.”

They waited. The sun rose over the dark, stony hills and touched the white, neat town. Sympathetic, the innkeeper’s wife made hot coffee for them. And then bit serious,” Anne’s sensible voice said. “Just an upset stomach.”

“But you’ll keep looking in on her?”

“Of course I will.”

Two weeks lay ahead of them. Two weeks in this remote place. Two weeks before they’d see Kelly again, in Dinard, France, where the nurse would take her if she’d fully recovered.

“Sound asleep—both of ’em. Kelly’d wriggled out of her covers, but I tucked her in again.”

At the sound of Tony’s voice, Janet was startled into realizing where she was now and what she was doing: standing in front of her mirror, putting on a last touch of lipstick, wearing her new dress.

“Turn around. Let’s see this great creation.” Obediently, she turned, and Tony nodded approval. “Good color—goes with your eyes and your hair.” The subtle shade accented amber highlights in her hair and golden sparkles in her eyes. “It’s topaz, all right. If you’d dropped a hint, I’d have gotten you some real ones for Christmas.”

“I like this better.” She flickered her hand so the light would catch the facets of the diamond Tony had given her, a carat for every pound Jaimie weighed at birth (6 pounds, 12 ounces). Engraved inside the cocktail ring was the date of Jaimie’s birth, “November 22, 1958.” Affectionately, Janet curved her other hand over the precious ring.

“Let’s go. Are you ready?”

“I just have to get my wrap.”

Downstairs, the children’s nurse was waiting. Both asleep, Tony reported.

“Enjoy the party,” the nurse smiled.

Against the color-accented black and white of the modern living room, the tree and the Christmas greens struck a note of the traditional. Janet brushed a hand across a glittery gold ornament as she passed. When we take these down, we’ll have to figure out something to keep Kelly’s mind off it.”

“She can look forward to next year.”

“A whole year, Tony? That’s all of eternity to a little girl, no matter how fast it’ll go for us.”

“Faster all the time. Sometimes I wish we could kind of slow down and appreciate everything.”

As he closed the front door behind them, Janet turned to look at the wreath, at the graceful, New Orleans-style grillwork around the doorway, upwards at the darkened second floor. “Everything we have,” she said. “Our children, our home, our friends . . . each other. Tony, I want to make another resolution: not to forget all the ways God has blessed us.”

“I’ll go along with that,” he said.

THE END

—BY DOROTHY DAY

TONY AND JANET CO-STAR IN U-I’S “THE PERFECT FURLOUGH,” AND HELL BE SEEN AFTER THAT IN U.A.’S “SOME LIKE IT HOT.”

 

It is a quote. PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 1959