The Patient Lovers—James Darren & Evy Norlund

“I love you, Evy,” Jimmy Darren said. “I love you—and I don’t want to!”

Evy Norlund felt her heart turn over inside her. Those words were the most beautiful and the most cruel she had ever heard. For a minute she wanted to cry. But all she said, in her soft, Danish-accented voice was: “I know, Jimmy. I know. I’m frightened, too.”

They had known each other only two weeks when that happened.

Their love story began in unhappiness, loneliness, and fear. Maybe it had to. Otherwise it might never have begun at all; certainly it would never have grown so swiftly.

Jimmy Darren had good reason to be unhappy. Only a few days before he met Evy, his wife, Gloria, had left him, had taken their little son back to Philadelphia and left Jim alone in the Hollywood house that had never been a real home to either of them. A lot of stories were written afterwards about how the marriage had been shaky for months, how Gloria had wanted an every-day sort of husband who could leave his work at five and come home to an ordinary evening, an ordinary life. The writers explained in detail how this was impossible for Jimmy, who was struggling with the demands of a new career and an exciting new world. They talked about the quarrels and the stormy scenes that always ended with Jimmy storming out of the house to drive furiously through the winding canyon roads till his hot temper cooled off and he could go home again. But what the stories didn’t say was that only a week before the break-up, Jimmy was still telling reporters that his marriage was as wonderful and shiny and perfect as ever—telling them that, and praying that it was the truth.

When the end finally came, it was almost as much a surprise to Gloria and to Jimmy as to the rest of the world. One day they had a marriage—troubled and uncertain, but still a marriage. The next day they had nothing, and Jimmy roamed restlessly through the empty house, asking himself over and over what went wrong, what he should have done.

He was still terribly depressed and lonely days later when his friends urged him to try to forget his troubles with work; to take the acting classes Columbia was offering for its young stars. “You’re the hottest property on the lot,” they told Jimmy. “You owe it to yourself and your studio to buckle down to business.”

So he went to class.

They meet . . .

Evy Norlund went that day, too. She was as lonely and as frightened as Jimmy Darren, she felt as deserted and lost as he did—but for different reasons. She had only been in America for a few months; she had come six thousand miles from her home in Denmark as a finalist for the Miss Universe contest, and she had come all that way just to lose! But it wasn’t losing that Evy minded; after all, she had gained a contract at Columbia Pictures—she was going, they told her. to be a big star.

But Evy Norlund was lonesome. When she and the other finalists had arrived in Hollywood, they were surrounded by people—reporters, photographers, contest officials—and most of all, chaperones. Oh, how those chaperones hovered around the pretty, bewildered girls. Oh, how they loaded them down with do’s and don’t’s—mainly don’t’s.

“Don’t talk to strange men. They’re wolves.”

“Don’t accept any dates. Hollywood men aren’t like the boys you’re used to.”

“Don’t trust anyone but us. This is a crazy town; you’ll just get into trouble.”

“Stick together, girls—don’t have anything to do with strangers.”

A group of American girls might have laughed in their faces. But these girls were strangers, far from home. They didn’t speak much English and all they knew about Hollywood was what they had read—mostly scandal and half-truths. So they believed what they were told. Anyway, while the contest was on, they were too busy for men and too friendly with each other to be lonesome. They had fun.

But now the contest was over, and so was the fun. Some of the girls had gone home, others on tours of the country. The chaperones had left—but their warnings stayed behind.

“Don’t trust anyone. Don’t talk to strangers, especially men.”

Poor Evy Norlund, left alone with her contract, moved into the chaste, old-fashioned Studio Club, and paced her room miserably between studio appointments, wondering what to do with herself. There was no one she could talk to—everyone was a stranger to her now.

She was sure of only one thing. She wanted to succeed in movies. Someone at Columbia told her about the acting class. She had never been on a stage in her life, except as a model or in a contest. So she enrolled, too.

And it was there that they met, in the middle of a studio acting class; there that the spark caught.

Thinking of Jimmy

The teacher took her around to introduce her to everyone. She made the rounds smiling shyly and shaking hands, as Europeans always do when introduced. And finally the instructor said, “Evy—this is Jimmy Darren,” and she found herself staring into a pair of wide, troubled brown eyes.

Of course, she knew who he was; everyone on the Columbia lot expected great things of him. That was why, instead of just shaking hands quickly and moving on, she found herself thinking, He doesn’t look conceited—he doesn’t even look happy—I wonder why. . . .

Jimmy, on his part, was looking down at a tall, slender blonde with the prettiest face and the most wary eyes he had ever seen.

Maybe it was because he was lonely for the touch of a woman’s hand, for the feel of the caresses that seemed gone forever now, that Evy’s hand in his felt so warm, and good, and right. Or maybe he just forgot he was holding it. Anyway, to quote a fellow who was there, “They just stayed like that, looking sort of numb and holding hands, until someone started to laugh. Then they both let go and started to blush. I guess everyone in the room knew even before they did that they were going to fall in love.”

All through class, Jimmy thought about Evy. Not about love, or anything like that—nothing was further from his mind. All he knew was that for a moment, while he held her hand, the lump of ice around his heart melted a little, he had felt almost good for the first time in days and days. He wanted very much to talk to her. Only he didn’t know how to go about it. It was years since he had asked a girl out—all the way through high school there’d been only Gloria, and then they were married. He didn’t know how to go about it.

But he knew he had to try.

So after class, a little awkwardly, he made his way to her, and began to talk. He didn’t know what else to say, so he told her he had a new Porsche.

“You know, the German car.”

“Yes,” Evy said in her gentle voice. “Many persons in Copenhagen, they have Porsches.”

“It that so?” Jimmy said. “Isn’t that interesting.”

They were outside the classroom by then, and he was at a loss again. So he blurted out, “Look—that’s my car—the Porsche—over there. I could take you for a drive in it. I can take you home. Or we could go first for something to eat—”

He stopped, with his heart pounding as if he were just a fresh kid, and waited for Evy to say something. But she was just as baffled as he was. She wanted to go—she was so lonely, and this was such a nice, sweet-seeming boy—but she didn’t dare. She hardly knew him, and he was good-looking and an actor—everything she had been warned against. Finally she shook her head. “No,” she said, hesitantly.

“Then tomorrow?” Jimmy Darren asked. “Tomorrow afternoon—?”

Evy looked again into the warm brown eyes questioning her so anxiously. She thought: a boy who wants to take me out in broad daylight can’t be a wolf. If he still wants me to say yes tomorrow, then I will know it’s all right.

“Maybe tomorrow, Jimmy,” she said at last. “Maybe.”

All right in the daylight

And the next afternoon after class, she let Jimmy lead her to tne shiny black Porsche and help her in. She sat at his side as he drove along the curving miles of Sunset Boulevard, past the mountains and the wooded canyons—and then suddenly she gasped. The Pacific Ocean stretched out before them, blue and shining under the late afternoon sun.

“I had never seen it before,” she told Jimmy, hunting for the right words in a strange language. “Oh, thank you.”

After that, they were not afraid any more. Jimmy drove slowly along the silver ribbon of highway that edges the beach, and Evy looked her fill, and laughed and talked. After a while Jimmy began to talk, too. It was like an orgy of chatter after the long silent days they had both been through. They talked about everything. Evy told Jimmy about her home outside Copenhagen, about her three sisters, her two brothers—and her loneliness for them all. She told him about the times she had been to Paris and other great cities of Europe—but always with a group of friends or other models, never alone She told him how frightened she had been of him, and when the sun finally went down, he laughed and asked:

“Are you too scared to go to dinner with me—now that it’s dark?”

Without hesitation, Evy put her hand in his. “I’m not scared at all, any more.”

And Jimmy felt the cold inside him melt away again.

That was how it began. Ordinarily, the boy might have said to the girl, “We must do this again, next week.” And she would have said, “Yes, I’m busy the rest of this week.” But Evy and Jimmy could not play games. They had told each other too many truths too fast, they had come so close so soon. And they needed each other to drive away loneliness—they had no one else.

So when Jimmy dropped her at the. Studio Club that night, they knew, without needing to say, that they would be together again tomorrow—and the next day—and every day, unless something went wrong.

But nothing went wrong, and at the end of two weeks—two short weeks—they knew they were in love.

That was when the real fear began That was when Jimmy Darren cried out “I don’t want to be in love with you!” and Evy Norlund said, “I know.” Because it was too sudden, too fast, too deep. To Jimmy it seemed almost shameful that two weeks after his marriage ended he could be thinking of a new love; to Evy it seemed that he might be only what Americans called ‘the rebound’—and that her own need for him might be the product of her loneliness and not her love.

And both of them were terribly afraid of making a mistake.

“We could stop seeing each other—” Jimmy said at last.

But that was impossible.

The patient lovers

“There is only one thing to do,” Evy decided. “We will be patient. We will go slowly—very slowly. We will wait and wait till we are not lonely any more, and then, if we still want each other—”

“Oh, Evy,” Jimmy said, “I hope we will!” They sat in silence for a while. Then Jimmy said, with an odd smile, “You know—it’s a good thing a divorce takes so long—isn’t it? Otherwise—”

“Otherwise?”

“We might forget to be patient.”

A few days later, Jimmy’s wife, Gloria, came back from Philadelphia, and moved back into the house in the hills. Jimmy took an apartment in town. Not having to drive so long to get home meant he could spend more time with Evy, but still, he worried about how she would feel about Gloria’s return. He explained it to her very honestly:

“You see, she’s come back for my sake. Her home and her family are in Philadelphia, and that’s where her heart is now. But she came back to Hollywoo’l anyway so that little Jimmy and I could see each other often—she says she doesn’t want us to grow apart.”

To his relief, Evy nodded, understanding. “She must be a wonderful person, your Gloria,” she said. “She must have a loving heart.”

Jimmy’s own heart lifted a mile. “And wait till you see my son, Evy,” he said. “Wait till you meet my boy. You’ll be wild about him. And he’ll love you, too, right away, just wait—”

“Slowly,” Evy reminded him gently. ‘Remember—slowly.”

But the very next week end she went with him and waited in the car while he picked up his son. Then they drove out to the San Fernando Valley where Jimmy’s business manager, John Gross, owns a house and a swimming pool. Evy changed into a sleek black bathing suit, but she didn’t spend the day sitting on a chair, admiring herself. She and Jimmy, Jr. leaped right into the pool and floundered about, splashing and giggling.

“Hey!” Jimmy called from the edge. “My kid swims better than you do! I thought all Scandinavian girls were such big athletes!”

“All but one!” Evy called back.

Later, they changed again, and took the chin out for dinner.

After a while, it became the pattern of their^ week ends—the Saturday swim at John’s house, and then on Sunday another day with his boy, picnicking or driving, or going to the beach.

Jimmy had been right: like his father, Jimmy, Jr. loved Evy from the start.

The weather slowly grew too cold for swimming. By Christmas time Evy was desperately homesick for the cold crisp streets of Copenhagen, and for her family. She and Jimmy decided it would be good for them, too, to be apart for a while The day she left, he drove her to the airport and waited at the gate while her plane took off. On the way back to his car a reporter caught up to him. “What’s with you and Evy Norlund?” he wanted to know.

For a moment, Jimmy considered the old stand-by: “We’re just good friends.” then he made up his mind. “I don’t know whats going to happen,” he said honestly. “It’s too soon to tell. I don’t even have my divorce yet—and it’s all happened so fast. We’re trying to wait and see. Please—don’t make it harder for us.”

The reporter understood. (So did most ot the other interviewers who questioned Jimmy then, and later. No one could help respecting his honesty, and his fears. He and Evy were mentioned together, but no one tried to pry.)

Lonely Christmas

With Evy gone, Hollywood seemed empty to Jimmy. The movie capital bursts with parties, dances and impromptu get-togethers at Christmas, but Jimmy turned all his invitations down. When he wasn’t with his son, he stayed in his little Los Feliz apartment alone, feeling miserable. He tried to spend the time as he knew he should, going over all the pros and cons of their love, testing himself, seeing if he could do without her. But by the end of only the first ten days of Evy’s three-week trip, he knew the answer.

He loved her, and he needed her.

On New Year’s Eve, he couldn’t stand it any longer. He put a trans-Atlantic call through to Denmark. He was going to tell her that he couldn’t wait any longer, that he knew now for sure that their love was real, but at the last moment, when he heard her voice on the phone, he decided not to say so. It wouldn’t be fair to Evy, who was supposed to be working it out for herself. So all he said was, “I miss you so much, baby. I want to be with you—right now.” But he couldn’t help it if his heart was in his voice.

The next day a wire arrived from Copenhagen. I WILL BE LANDING AT INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT THIS AFTERNOON. MEET ME, DARLING. LOVE, EVY.

She had heard everything that he had not said—and her own heart had answered: “I know now, too.”

Since then, they’ve been inseparable. Everyone in Hollywood has seen them walking, talking, holding hands, smiling at each other with new sureness, and great love. All their friends have laughed over Jimmy’s attempts to learn Danish, and over Evy’s accounts of his trans-Atlantic phone conversations with Mrs. Norlund, Evy’s mother, in Denmark.

“Jimmy says to my mother, ‘Hello, Anita,’ and then he talks, talks, talks, in Danish to her. The phone bill goes up and up. Then I get on. My mother says to me, ‘Evy, he sounds so nice, but I don’t understand a word he says!’ “

Often, they double-date with Johnny Saxon and Vicki Thai. One Saturday night they went with them to the Aware Inn, a charming little restaurant that Johnny had discovered, where health foods are served, and afterward to the Via Venita, one of the Sunset Strip coffee houses. Later, they sat in the dim light of John’s living room, dreaming while records played. Suddenly Evy doubled up with a cramp. “Take me home, Jimmy,” she begged. White-faced and frightened, Jimmy drove her back to the Studio Club. “Are you sure I should leave you?” he kept asking. But men are not allowed anywhere in the club except the parlors—still worried, he had to let her go.

At six o’clock that morning, his phone rang. It was Evy. The pains were terrible; she couldn’t stop crying. “Wait for me,” Jimmy ordered. Then he dashed out of the house. It seemed to take forever until he had collected Evy and driven her to the home of his doctor. A surgeon was called in hastily. When the doctors came out of consultation, they found Jimmy waiting. “Drive her to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital—fast,” they told him. “Emergency appendectomy.”

He drove with one hand on the wheel, the other holding Evy’s cold fingers. “It will be all right,” he kept saying. “Don’t be frightened. You’ll be all right.” Until at last, through her own fright, Evy laughed. “Yes,” she agreed, “I will be fine. But will you survive?”

The test

For a while, Jimmy didn’t know the answer. He stayed, shaking, in the waiting room at the hospital while nurses prepared Evy for surgery—then he caught a glimpse of her being wheeled to the elevators. He tried to read a magazine, but his eyes just wouldn’t focus. When it seemed a year had gone by, he walked out of the waiting room. Somehow he found his way to the operating floor. He pushed open the door of a room and saw under the bright lights a cluster of men in white gowns.

“I didn’t know what was going on. I felt my head banging against the door jam—I guess I was close to fainting. Then a doctor saw me and said, ‘What are you doing here? You have no right in here. You’re contaminating the operating room.’ Then the surgeon I had met before saw me. He smiled. He said, ‘Let him stay. He’s worried about his girl. She’ll be all right. We’re almost through now!’ “

They let him stay. When the nurses wheeled Evy back to her room, Jimmy walked alongside. He sat beside her bed all night, waiting for her to open her eyes. Toward morning she did.

Even through the anesthetic, she smiled. “I knew you’d be here,” she said.

“Always, Evy,” he said softly. “Always and always.”

And on the day that Evy walked out of the hospital, well at last, it was the low black Porsche that had brought them together that drove her home.

Both of them knew then that the waiting was over, that the tests had been successfully passed. Both of them knew that from now on, with Jimmy’s divorce finally complete, there would never be again a need for a phone call to summon Jimmy to help his girl in trouble—

From now one he’d be there always—and she would be his wife.

Oh, there are a few more things to be cleared away—Jimmy’s next two movies. All The Young Men and Let No Man Write My Epitaph, are to be finished before the wedding, to make time for the long European honeymoon, the trip to Copenhagen, the sightseeing that they both want. There are the friends and family to be notified officially, the wedding plans to be made. But all those can be taken care of before the first of the year—all those are little things, involving just a little time.

The important thing is that the long wait is over, and with it the fears and the loneliness that brought Evy Norlund and Jimmy Darren together—and then held them apart. All that is behind them now.

The future belongs to the patient lovers.

THE END

Jimmy’s pictures include ALL THE YOUNG MEN, GENE KRUPA STORY, LET NO MAN WRITE MY EPITAPH—all for Columbia Evy’s in Columbia’s THE FLYING FOUNTAIN.

 

It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE DECEMBER 1959