My Roommate, Elaine Stewart

I opened the door of my apartment, put one foot inside, and stopped dead. I may be a coward, but I wasn’t going in until I knew whether I was seeing things or not.

I wasn’t. My roommate, Elaine Stewart, was sitting in the middle of the livingroom rug, wearing a pair of black satin slacks, and in her arms she was cradling a baby bear. I was used to the black satin slacks, and I shouldn’t have been surprised by the bear, because when you live with a movie star you shouldn’t be surprised by anything.

It’s like living with an electric spark, a runaway freight train, or the bubbles from a glass of champagne. It’s playing Hamlet at four in the morning in costumes made of colored napkins and swimming by moonlight in the Pacific Ocean. and never knowing what to expect next.

The bear came from a South American admirer—if admirer is the right word. He had flashing

eyes, wavy hair, and a Spanish temper. He met Elaine on the set while she was making Take The High Ground. When Elaine refused to go out with him, he got so angry that he threatened to send her an alligator. I guess he couldn’t find an alligator, so he sent the bear instead.

There was the time I started to take a bath and almost stepped into the middle of the 412 red roses that were floating aimlessly around the bathtub. And there was the time Elaine felt like playing badminton.

The roses were a gift from the Navy. Or rather from a Naval squadron that chose her its queen. Each man in the squadron had sent her a rose, and the only vase Elaine could find that was big enough for the flowers was the bathtub.

The badminton game was played on a rainy, winter afternoon. Elaine just felt like playing badminton. When I stepped over our threshold that day, I stepped smack into the middle of a winning serve. The ball was made from my best cashmere yarn, and the net was yards and yards of red ribbon from candy boxes, and the livingroom furniture was piled on top of everything, including the kitchen sink. Triumphant in the midst of the debris, Eline was beating the tar out of two very self-conscious neighbors.

Badminton in the livingroom and roses in the bathtub don’t add up to peace and quiet. Nice words—“peace” and “quiet,” but they don’t mean much when Elaine Stewart is around. They’re shoved of the way by words like “excitement,” “quicksilver,” “high as a kite,” “low as a snake’s ear,” “unpredictable,” “whirlwind.” And eight hours’ sleep a night is another thing that’s shoved out of the way when Elaine Stewart’s around.

The author, blonde Suzanne Scheirer, prefers to do the driving for herself and impulsive roomie Elaine Stewart; she is often routed out of bed for 3 A.M. spins to the desert or ocean.

There are some people who like to sleep and there are some people who don’t. Elaine fits into the latter category. She thinks that the middle of the night is too nice to waste in sleeping. Half the time she wakes up about two A. M., pulls me out of bed and throws my bathing suit in my general direction. If I’m awake enough to catch it, we drive down to the beach and go swimming. If I’m not, I can usually get her to settle for an hour of gin rummy.

Elaine drives like a devil, particularly in the hours before dawn, and sometimes I just close my eyes and hope that there are no other drivers on the road. When I do, she’s liable to turn the car around and head for the desert. We don’t do anything there; we don’t even talk much. We just sit in the car and look at the stars and wonder how anything can be as beautiful as a desert sky.

Elaine was trying to describe it once, and she came close when she said, “The stars seem to topple out of the sky at you like a three-dimensional movie.”

Sometimes Elaine starts to cry. Then she turns away and looks for her constellation—Gemini. When she can’t find it, she says it’s because this is one of the days that Castor and Pollux have to spend in Hades.

She can point out my constellation too—Sagittarius. She is fascinated by and guided e stars. We’re living together because she’s Gemini, and I’m Sagittarius. They are supposed to blend. They are supposed to blend so well that she is looking for someone born under the Sign of Sagittarius to marry. So far she hasn’t found the right Sagittarian.

Elaine has had her fortune told, her palm read, her tea leaves looked at, her handwriting analyzed, her electric impulses measured, and the bumps on her head read. The first fortuneteller she ever went to—when she was a model in New York—told her that she would get contract and come to Hollywood. His other prediction—that she would marry three times—hasn’t come true yet.

She blames her impulsiveness and unpredictability on the stars. People who are born under Gemini are supposed to be talented, restless, and mercurial. Elaine is all of these. She does everything in cycles. For weeks she’ll date every night. Then she’ll stay home for a month, listening to music, reading poetry, or just talking seriously.

Of course that makes life difficult for me at times. When Elaine is in a “people mood” there may be twenty-two for dinner. If she isn’t, she may not even be home for dinner. And I never know.

I do all the cooking, and I just have to trust to my intuition, since Elaine hasn’t brought home a crystal ball—yet. Sometimes some of the guests eat steak and the rest have hamburger, but it usually works out all right.

Elaine knows where the kitchen is. She even sits down in it and talks to me while I’m cooking. But she looks at the stove as though it were a poisonous snake.

“Cooking would be a wonderful hobby,” she tells me every so often, “if I were all alone in a mountain cabin somewhere, snowed in, with nothing else to do. But I haven’t got enough time now for everything.”

In any case, she loves to eat. If she were left alone, she’d eat nothing but roast beef, malted milks, mashed potatoes, tomato soup—and spinach. She’s wild about spinach and even wilder about tomato soup. I can never let her go shopping by herself, because she’ll forget what we need and come back with one dozen cans of soup.

She doesn’t dislike other foods; she just never thinks of eating them. But she’s willing to eat anything that I’m willing to make. And I must admit I’ve tried some awful experiments on her, including grapes in chocolate. Syrup.

I forgot one thing she likes—ice cream. Preferably chocolate ice cream. She eats it every time she can, even uses it on her breakfast cereal in the morning.

It’s the little things that pile up when you live with a movie star. And when you live with Elaine, pile up is the right word. There are dozens of cakes of soap in the bathroom, because Elaine only likes big, new cakes, and I can’t use up the old soap quickly enough to keep up with her. There are dozens of light bulbs everywhere and dozens of lights on, because Elaine can’t stay home without turning every light in the apartment on. The place looks like a homemade rainbow at night, because Elaine likes her electric lights to be colored—green, blue, yellow, and pink.

And I’m sure that her cavemen ancestors had more stone axes and more clay tablets and more caves than anyone else in the tribe. Because Elaine collects things. It wouldn’t be so bad if she only collected poetry. (Even though that means that | Pd better get to the magazines first. If I don’t I’m liable to find that Elaine has clipped the last page of a mystery story because there was a poem on the other side.)

But she collects bigger things, too. Souvenirs. Records. Letters. She’s got every letter anyone ever sent her, including one from her kindergarten teacher asking her to be a toadstool in the class play.

I counted her stationery once, and she has fifteen different kinds. A few are conservative white. Most of them are red; two are black; and there’s even one that’s red and black. As you may have guessed, red and black are her favorite colors.

“I use the stationery I’m in the mood for,” explains Elaine.

That’s true about nail polish too. And I can usually guess what’s going to happen that night by the color of’ the polish she wears. If she’s going to curl up on the couch and get sentimental, she’ll be wearing pink; if she’s going out, it can be any shade from purple to-platinum; and if she’s wearing green—well, I’d better get ready for a pre-dawn drive to the desert.

The funny thing is that she’s conservative about clothes and jewelry. The only ring she ever wears is an heirloom that was made in Spain centuries ago and has come down from oldest daughter to oldest daughter in her mother’s family. It is a strange ring of beaten silver with five diamonds in the shape of a cross. According to family legend, the diamonds are supposed to sparkle when the true owner meets the man she will marry. According to Elaine, it hasn’t sparkled yet.

I’m surprised at that, because our phone never stops ringing. Elaine doesn’t have a steady. When she’s on a “going out” spree, she’ll date a different man every night for two weeks. Most of the time she and her date go dancing.

But she never can decide what she wants to do until the last possible moment. So no date is ever surprised when he arrives in a tuxedo and finds Elaine in slacks. He knows that she has decided to stay home for the evening, even if she told him on the phone half an h that she’d love to go to Ciro’s.

And there are three boys who’ll never talk to her again—at least not for a few weeks. The first one called at six o’clock one evening.

Elaine answered him with “Call me back at eight-thirty. We’ll do something but I don’t know what.”

Ten minutes later the phone rang again. A different boy, and Elaine told him the same thing. At six-thirty the third call came.

“I’ll know what I want to do at eight-thirty,’’ was Elaine’s answer this time.

At eight-twenty-five she made up her mind.

“Come on,” she said.

She threw me a coat, grabbed my arm, and pulled me out of the apartment just as the phone started ringing. We went to a third-rate neighborhood theatre, ate three bags of popcorn apiece, and saw The Quiet Man for the fourth time.

The occupational hazards involved i living with a movie star are many—but they are not varied. They include pre-picture blues, mid-picture blues, and after-picture blues. When Elaine is in the throes of any of them, she kicks off her shoes, hurls herself face downward onto the sofa, and looks like a cocker spaniel that has just been lost.

“Leave me alone,” is all she says. Except sometimes she adds, “I was awful,” or

“I will be awful,” or “I feel awful.”

When this happened with her last picture, Take The High Ground, I knew exactly what to do. Through trial and error. Because I have tried everything.

I have played her favorite record, “Manhattan Towers”; and I have played her favorite vocalist, Frank Sinatra. They just make her sadder. I have tickled her feet with our only pet, a rubber mouse with long whiskers and red eyes. She only burrows further into the pillows. I have suggested spinach and dancing, water polo and tomato soup. But nothing cures her—nothing except a movie. It must be an old movie that she has seen before, an exciting movie with cowboys or Indians or pirates, and it must be playing in an old theatre where you can buy penny candy and licorice twists next door. In three hours she is cured.

But I don’t think that anything can ever cure her of forgetting. She dreams too much in the sun. Or maybe that’s what made her a star—the dreaming.

She dreams about the sea and the novel she wants to write about the sea one day, and she forgets her lunch and the shopping list. She dreams about her future as a star pinwheeling through desert skies, and she forgets to take the laundry. She dreams about the time her ring will sparkle, and she forgets her purse, or if she remembers that, she forgets her key.

It’s funny sometimes, the way she forgets. There was the night I woke up to hear noises in the living room. Armed with Elaine’s tennis racket, I switched on the lights and prepared to strike. But it was only Elaine, halfway through the window, one foot still on her embarrassed date’s shoulders.

She steadied herself on the window sill. “I forgot my key,” she said.

I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I looked stern.

“I can’t help it. I won’t do it again.”

I started to laugh. I had to. Elaine looked like she always does when she’s forgotten something, like a little girl who has been caught with a hand in the cookie jar. In a minute the three of us were laughing so hard we couldn’t stop.

Of course Elaine mislaid her key again—and again. Now I’m so used to her that burglars could steal anything in the apartment, and I’d just turn over and go back to sleep, thinking that Elaine had forgotten her key.

And there was the night before Christmas. Elaine was flying home to New Jersey late that night and we had prepared to celebrate by doing the town. She had shopped for weeks to get just the right presents for her family. The presents had been wrapped in the stores, but we spent the whole afternoon putting piles of red ribbon all over them. Finally, hot tired, and aching, we stepped back to survey our handiwork. Elaine was so proud—until she started to write the cards and discovered she’d forgotten which present was which.

So the nightclubs got along without our patronage, while the four of us—Elaine and I and our two tuxedo-clad dates—sat under the Christmas tree, surrounded by tons of red ribbon, and rewrapped gifts.

Yes, it’s funny, the way she forgets. But it’s more than funny, too. It means that her feet may be walking along a concrete sidewalk in the city of Hollywood on the planet of earth, but her head is up in the clear, beautiful desert sky, and her hands are reaching for the stars.

THE END

—BY SUZANNE SCHEIRER

It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE DECEMBER 1953