I'll Cry Tomorrrow Page 14

  Then I was running screaming through the streets, blood blinding my eyes. Next thing I knew I was in St. Vincent’s Hospital. Dr. Francis Thomas, a surgeon, was stitching my scalp.

  I signed a warrant for Mark’s arrest, Dr. Thomas giving his testimony to the police. Amy Ford, a friend, rented a room for me in her hotel. For two days I was afraid to show myself on the streets. I hid behind drawn blinds, drinking, afraid to think, drinking to blot out what had happened to me. On the third morning there was the sound of a huge body hurled against the door, a thunderous crash as it broke down—and Mark was in the same room with me.

  He was cold fury. “You’re sitting down and writing the District Attorney that you were dead drunk when you signed that warrant. You want to withdraw the charges and tear up the warrant.”

  I sat, transfixed with fear. Suddenly he grabbed my arm, and with all his 210 pounds bearing down on me, twisted me to my knees. I couldn’t scream because his free hand was clasped over my mouth.

  “I’ll kill you,” he said between his teeth. He increased the pressure on my arm. “Will you write the letter?”

  In agony I tried to gasp “yes.” I managed to nod, and slowly, he let me up.

  The District Attorney called us both in, together and then separately. I repeated the letter’s assertion. 1 wanted to withdraw the complaint because it wasn’t true. I was jealous of Mark, I said: I had accused him of the beatings in hope the police would make him quit philandering.

  “Mrs. Harris,” the District Attorney said to me, slowly. “I must warn you. I hope what you are now stating to me is the truth. Because if you keep withdrawing these charges, when the day comes that you really need help, you 11 not be safe in any state in this country. The record you have made will count against you.”

  I clung to my story. I was telling the truth. How did I explain the bruises? I fell down. My balance, as they well knew, was sometimes precarious. And the weird, patched hair-do, the result of Dr. Thomas’ stitches? A beauty operator had burned me with a permanent wave machine, I said.

  What does it all matter, I thought. I deserve no better than Mark. He is the measure of what I have become.

  CHAPTER XVI

  I WAS too helpless to think of a way out immediately for myself. But something had to be done about Sonny. One day he proudly began to show how he had been taught as a Boy Scout to make his bunk. Unpredictably, this infuriated Mark. He pulled the boy away from the bed so violently that the child fell. “You don’t make it that way, Sonny,” he snarled. “You make it this way. And you know why? Because I say you make it this way.”

  Again, when I took the child to a movie and returned twenty minutes late, Mark, drunk as usual, grabbed me by the hair and pulled me down to my knees.

  “Ever see a bum, Sonny?” he sneered. “This is what a bum looks like.” Sonny stood paralyzed with fright.

  I waited until Mark was mellow with brandy one afternoon. Then I suggested, “Let’s send Sonny to a boarding school where he’ll get the training he needs. You want him to have that big physique you have, don’t you? He’ll get it there.”

  Mark agreed. I enrolled Sonny in a nearby military school. It was lonely without him, but at least I would see him week ends. But soon I was deprived even of that. Mark started meeting his son Friday afternoons and taking him to a friend’s home. I was a bad influence—that was the only answer I could elicit when I asked where Sonny was.

  When I persisted in my questions, Mark grew ugly. He had been drinking a great deal. One night I awoke screaming. He was beating me. A vise of excruciating pain gripped my chest, and I blacked out. Sometime during the morning I was speaking weakly on the telephone to Dr. Thomas, begging him to come over. Every breath seared my lungs: I was breathing fire.

  “You have five broken ribs,” he said, after he examined me, “I wasn’t drunk, Doctor,” I moaned. “He started it while I was asleep. He beat me unconscious while I was sleeping.”

  “Lillian,” Dr. Thomas said quietly. “You must do something or sooner or later this maniac will kill you.”

  When he left, I thought, as well as I could think: what was there to do? I was not even safe with the police. Hadn’t I signed a warrant, hadn’t a doctor given evidence—and look what had happened. There was no way out. Or I was too confused to think of one.

  I realized that I was slowly disintegrating as a human being. I was paralyzed, without will or direction—paralyzed by my drinking, my misery, by the frightening combination of events that seemed conspiring with almost human intelligence to destroy me.

  It had to come to an end.

  One Friday night Mark vanished with Sonny. He was seen at a Hollywood nightspot and reportedly Sonny was sleeping at the home of a blonde nightclub hostess with whom Mark stayed.

  Acting on a hunch, I gathered enough courage to go to an address I found written on a slip of paper in Mark’s bureau. A buxom blonde greeted me. Sonny was there. After the first few icy moments, she explained that Mark told her I was constantly in a stupor, and Sonny was not safe with me. “I’m surprised to see you up and about,” she added.

  “I’ve been having a terrible time,” I told her. “It’s true I’ve been drinking, but it’s Mark who has the drinking problem. Along with that, he seems to be a paranoiac. He’s calm one moment and mad the next. Look what he did to me.” I opened my dress and showed her my bandaged ribs.

  “Mrs. Harris!” She was horrified. “I wouldn’t have believed—”

  As in a third-rate thriller, the door opened and Mark walked in. He bore down on me. “You drunken slut,” he rasped, “I’m taking you to the corner of Hollywood and Vine and I’ll teach you how to show yourself. I’m going to strip every inch of clothing from you.”

  The blonde screamed. “Mark, you’re crazy!” He pushed her roughly aside, pulled me out of the house and forced me into his car. As we drove, he began ripping at my clothes. At Vine Street I managed to open the door, almost tumbled out, and ran sobbing to the nearest taxi. “Hurry, please, for God’s sake,” I gasped. “My husband is going to kill me.”

  We had not yet begun to move when Mark laid his hand on the driver’s arm.

  “Look, Mac,” he said, lowering his voice confidentially, “my wife is very drunk and she doesn’t know what she’s doing. You can see what she’s done to her clothes. She’s just come out of an insane asylum and it looks as though she’ll have to go back.”

  The driver looked at me, frantic and shaking, and then at Mark, calm and self-possessed.

  “Excuse me, Buddy,” he said to Mark. “I thought you were going to harm her.” He put his hand back and opened the door. He looked at me through the rear-window mirror. “You better go with your husband, lady.’

  Our landlady was bending over me next morning in the apartment house, shaking me and shouting that it was a shame to have people like me on the premises. She had heard the racket the night before, but hadn’t interfered because she thought it was a husband-and-wife spat. “But just an hour ago your husband phoned me from out of town and asked me to look in on you,” she said. “I didn’t tell him you had another man here last night, but all I have to say is, it would have served you right if I did!”

  My eyes were black, my lips were swollen, I was one mass of pain, but the landlady wouldn’t believe my explanation that Mark drove me home, sneaked out the back way after beating me, and then telephoned her.

  I could not argue with her. A refrain drummed in my brain: I’ve got to get out, I’ve got to get out. I managed to pack an overnight bag, and went to Amy’s apartment. I threw all caution to the winds. What could he do that he hadn’t done before? I telephoned a lawyer to start divorce proceedings and to hire a bodyguard for me. Then, accompanied by a policeman, I returned to our apartment.

  Ringing the bell, even pounding on the door, was of no avail “We’ll have to break it down, then,” the policeman said.

  He stepped back a few paces, when the landlady joined us.

  “She’s no good, offi
cer,” she snapped, flinging a look of utter contempt at me. “She has the sweetest husband in the world but she’s always passed out in there. This woman is no good. I’m telling you.”

  “All right, lady, you’ve told me, now you go about your business,” the policeman said.

  He broke down the door, with the help of the handyman in the building. We walked into the kitchen, then the living room. Mark appeared from the bedroom, a puzzled expression on his face. “I’ve been asleep,” he said, as if collecting his thoughts. “What seems to be the trouble, officer?”

  “Asleep with all that noise?” the policeman demanded. Mark nodded.

  “You’re awake now. Pack your things and get out.”

  My husband took on an injured air. “You’re not listening to her, are you, officer? This is an awfully sick woman. She is out of her mind.”

  “Tell that to the court. You’ve got to leave these premises and keep your hands off her—”

  Mark’s face was beginning to show storm signals, and I hid behind the policeman, who turned to me. “Now, lady, don’t you be afraid—”

  Mark lunged at me.

  Without a word the cop jabbed him in the side with his stick. “Get out of here before I take you in!” he roared. Mark threw a venomous glance at me and left.

  For the next week I ventured out only with my bodyguard, although most of the time I tried to blot out everything with alcohol. Then I had a recollection of my lawyer calling to say that I could dismiss my bodyguard, because Mark had gone to Chicago. A few days later the doorbell rang while I was talking with Johnny Ford, Amy’s 22-year-old brother. I opened the door.

  Mark walked in. He hadn’t gone to Chicago after all! “Get out, Johnny,” he said. “I want to talk to Lillian. I’ll be downstairs in a few minutes.”

  “Don’t go, Johnny,” I cried.

  “Get out of this room or you will be killed,” Mark said quietly.

  “Johnny—” I pleaded.

  Mark turned to me. “What’s the matter, you sleeping with him?” I thought desperately, was he going to involve this boy in our divorce suit? “You better go,” I said, and Johnny, white-faced, left.

  Mark sat down on the lounge, crossed his legs comfortably, and smiled. “You think you’re going to have everything your way, don’t you?”

  “No, I didn’t think I was going to have everything my way.”

  “Come here, I want to talk to you.”

  “What for?”

  “Just come here, I want to talk to you.”

  Perhaps I can humor him, I thought fleetingly, as I approached him. As I came near him, he suddenly drew his right knee back, and viciously plunged his shoe into my stomach, driving me backward across the room into another chair.

  I lay there, retching, gasping for breath. For a timeless moment we stared at each other.

  The telephone on the stand next to me rang. Slowly, like a sleepwalker, I answered it. “Yes,” I managed to say.

  “Lillian, it’s Amy. Everything all right?”

  “Amy, would you please—” I began. I wanted to complete the sentence with “come over right away.” But Mark grabbed the phone and before I realized what happened, he was using it to club me savagely on my arm, on my elbow, beating me again and again, from wrist up to shoulder, from shoulder down to wrist, methodically, steadily. In a daze of agony I heard Amy’s voice, thin and anxious, emanating weirdly from the rising and falling instrument. “Lillian! Lillian!”

  Mark stopped beating me. “Everything’s fine,” he said casually into the mouthpiece. “She’s just so drunk she passed out.” He replaced the telephone.

  I was slumped in the chair, more unconscious than conscious, my right arm dangling. I heard Mark in the bedroom. Was he searching for liquor? Then, no sound for minutes. Perhaps he had blacked out. Perhaps I could telephone for help—

  Laboriously I lifted the receiver with my left hand. There was a noise. Mark had rushed back into the room. He grabbed a long black address book off the stand and whipped me across the face with it. Pain tore at my right eye: warm blood gushed over my cheek. The wire edging of the back of the book had ripped open the right eyelid.

  “You think you’re going to get help,” Mark said clearly. “I’m not through with you yet.”

  I ran wildly toward the window to scream for help, perhaps to hurl myself through it. He seized me from behind, dragged me into the bedroom, and threw me to the floor. As I lay there, he opened the closet, pulled out my clothes, and began ripping them. In a frenzy he tore and pulled until everything was in shreds. He looked about him like a madman for a moment. Then he grabbed a suitcase, dumped its contents on the floor, and swept into it my perfumes, my jewels and my furs. He ripped out the drawers of my vanity, found an envelope containing several hundred dollars, and pocketed that. Then, methodically, he tore into tiny bits everything he knew I treasured—David’s photographs and letters, photographs of Katie, Ann and myself as a child star, postcards and mementos I had kept through the years. He began kicking me. Mercifully I blacked out.

  I woke to agonizing consciousness. It was dark. My right arm lay useless at my side. I crawled to the telephone and called an ambulance. At St. Vincent’s Hospital, Dr. Thomas took over—for the third time. He only shook his head as he worked, giving me opiates for the pain, treating my eyelid and the livid contusions on my arm, breast and stomach. The police interviewed me, photographed my bruises for use in prosecuting Mark, and advised the hospital they wanted the X-rays for evidence.

  The District Attorney visited me.

  He spoke briskly. “This girl began divorce proceedings. She thought she was perfectly safe. Now look at her. I want her husband brought in.”

  This time Mark really had flown to Chicago, taking Sonny with him. Extradition would take time and money, and my funds had dwindled shockingly. “I know this man,” I told the D. A. “We will get him with his own help. He’ll call me sooner or later.”

  He called me from Chicago. The old charm came gushing over two thousand miles. It was an incredible conversation. “Mommy, what can I say? Liquor made me do what I did. Besides, we’re in trouble. Sonny came down with diphtheria. I should never have taken him away from you.”

  “That’s all right, Mark. You put Sonny into a hospital and come out here and we’ll see what we can do.”

  “Fine, I’ll be right out. You know I love you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Will you tell the police to lay off extradition? I’ll come in myself.”

  “All right, Mark.”

  A week passed. No Mark. Two weeks later—another call from him. He had been in the hospital with Sonny all this time, he said. Not until another month had elapsed did he arrive. Sonny, of course, was not ill and had never been. Mark had waited so that by the time the trial was held, my bruises would have healed. When he landed at Los Angeles Airport, he was arrested and charged with felonious assault with intent to kill. Conviction meant three to ten years in jail.

  Next day, he was out on bail and telephoning me. He was only human, he had the frailties of a man who was in love and mad about me and sick about himself … I must see him.

  “O. K., Mark,” I said. “Come over.” It happened to be the night before the case came up.

  If I had it in my heart to pay him back in full, I would have prepared more fully than I did. To touch him now would be unclean, even to revenge myself on him was to humiliate myself. But I bought a monkey wrench just large enough to fit into my handbag, and asked three friends—Peter Burke, a song writer, Lewis Williams, a pianist, and Johnny, to be at my apartment earlier in the evening.

  “There’s only one way to handle a guy like that,” Johnny said. “Take him out in the alley and give him the beating of his life.”

  I shook my head. I wanted no more scandals. This was between Mark and me.

  Presently the bell rang. “Hello, Mommy.” It was the old Mark. He appeared a little startled to find a welcoming committee, but his self-possession
returned immediately. “How do you do, gentlemen?”

  “I thought we might go for a ride, Mommy,” Mark began.

  “Oh, we can do that later,” I said. “Sit down and relax.”

  He took a chair. Peter stood a little to his left, Lewis a little to his right Johnny stood behind him.

  “I’d like a drink,” I said. “Wouldn’t you, Mark?”

  He nodded. “Sure,” he said. “Sure, Mommy.”

  I poured myself a drink in the kitchenette, mixed a tall highball for Mark, and returned to the living room.

  “I remember, Mark, how you gave me a drink in Chicago once,” I said. “It was scotch and soda. It was like this.”

  I threw the contents into his face.

  He looked at me uncertainly, pulled out a handkerchief, and laughed. “Mommy, darling, are you drunk?”

  “No, darling, I’m not drunk. I just have a good memory.” With all my might I gave him a backhand across his face, my ring gashing his cheek. He began to bleed. Sputtering and howling, he made a grab for me. Peter and Lewis pinned his arms, while Johnny got his head in a hammerlock.

  “You remember the kicks on the shins—do you know how it feels? It feels like this—” I kicked him on the shins, and kicked him again.

  He howled. “You bitch—”

  “You remember how you beat me black and blue with the telephone, and how you split the top of my head open in the shower? Remember how you laughed because I always carried a drink for us in my bag? Well, I’ve got something for you in my bag now, too.” I lifted my bag with the wrench in it and brought it down hard on his head.

  The blow dazed him for a moment: he was crying and begging. “Boys, this is a sick woman. I love her. She’s crazy, why are you letting her do this to me? She’s crazy.”

  “Now, boys,” I said, and I was amazed at my own audacity. “I’m going out for a ride with this man. And he is going to do everything I say. He’s going to be a little lamb, because the case comes up tomorrow. Aren’t you going to be a little lamb, Mark?”