The Lioness(17)

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.?.?.

He’d gotten death threats before when they’d been shooting on location, especially the two times he’d agreed to film south of the Mason-Dixon line. There was the cop drama, some of which was set on the Outer Banks off North Carolina, and there were those nightmarish six days when they’d filmed in Mobile. He hoped he’d never have to film again in the South, but he knew that his clout was limited. (How hard had Natalie Wood worked to get the authority from the studio to pick even one of her films? She’d told Terrance it was practically a cockfight when she announced that she wanted to be in West Side Story.) At least he would try never again to film in the South. But Tennessee would always be the deal breaker, his line in the sand: if he was ever sent a script for a picture that was set in Tennessee, either he’d put in a rider that his scenes were to be filmed anyplace but Tennessee or he’d pass. Now that he had moved his parents to California and his sister and brother-in-law lived in Chicago, he was never going to set foot in that state again. He doubted his parents or his sister would either. His parents had gotten a dog last year, an adorable little mutt from the shelter that was part terrier and, they joked, part pig. They doted on that animal like it was a newborn baby and he asked them why they’d never had a dog when he and his sister had been kids, given how much they adored having a pet. And it was only after the question had escaped his mouth that he had the flashback: they had had a dog. And someone had poisoned it. He was too young to have more than vague, inchoate memories of the animal, because he’d been three—maybe four—when someone had killed it, but he’d figured out early on how the dog’s murder had devastated his mother and how he should never, ever bring it up. And soon the memory was buried deep in the sludge of the hippocampus, unrecoverable until his parents, safely in Southern California, had gotten another pet and the lugubrious recollection had been exhumed.

Sometimes he took bizarre comfort from the fact that the local galleries had refused to include his paintings and sketches in their student art shows when he’d been an adolescent because he wasn’t white. His work was good enough, and at the time, when he was thirteen and fourteen, he’d been devastated by the unfairness of it. But, in hindsight, the consolation prize of that discrimination was that instead of growing into a starving painter, he had wound up a pretty damn wealthy actor.

It was only in the last year or so, after Kennedy was shot, that he had begun to take his death threats a little more seriously. Before that, even though he’d grown up with a kid whose uncle had been lynched, he’d written off the always anonymous warnings as the rantings of racist crazies. Why in the world would someone bother to take out an actor? And it hadn’t even seemed logistically possible. He was usually in crowds, and movies had pretty solid security. But then Medgar Evers was shot in his own driveway in Mississippi, and the president was assassinated in Texas—and there were enormous crowds lining the streets in Dallas that day—and so he’d actually informed the police of the two threats he’d received in the last year. Had they viewed them as legitimate and frightening? The cops in northern Vermont had. But the ones in Albuquerque? He was less sure. Nevertheless, the studio had brought in extra security in both cases. He was encouraged to stay inside his trailer in New Mexico for long spells, baking in the tin can that had a small window and a crappy little fan to cool what seemed an increasingly inhospitable oven.

Of all the threats he had received over the years, the most deplorable might have been the ones he had gotten recently, only about three weeks before Katie and David’s wedding. The wedding was going to be at the Beverly Wilshire, and someone from the hotel had leaked the guest list. The press reacted to the idea that Katie’s Black friend Terrance Dutton was going to be among the people in attendance—and, the reporters supposed, whatever Black woman he was dating—with its usual tolerance. Katie was viewed as both headstrong and eccentric, the sort who, if she weren’t an actress, would have been among those people in the North and the East who were regularly riding those buses into the South to face off against the fire hoses and police dogs. But she had gone once. When Terrance had suggested that she and some of their friends take a stand and join a group of freedom riders, she had joined him. But she was the only one. Everyone else had passed. Their excuses, invariably, were work. So, he and Katie had gone alone, getting more threats, and making more headlines. They’d had to stay in separate hotels, but still the gossips had a field day. According to both of their agents, it had probably cost them some roles but perhaps had gotten them others. They’d never know.

In any case, Terrance was on set in August, the month before the wedding, wrapping a drama about a Black family in Detroit that was almost (but not quite) torn apart when the teen son wants to become a recording star instead of following his father into the auto plant. It was the first time that Terrance had played a man old enough to have a teen child. He’d supposed Michigan was safe ground, but the idea that he was going to be at Katie’s wedding had resurrected all the Tender Madness innuendo: the idea the movie had suggested that his and Katie’s characters had kissed and the subsequent rumors that they were lovers, but the scene had been cut.

Which was, of course, precisely what had happened: they had kissed. They had kissed through seven takes and he had taken off her blouse seven times. The director (or, more likely, the studio) had decided to end the scene at the point where it seemed inevitable the characters would kiss, but audiences in places like Spartanburg, South Carolina, or Richmond, Virginia, could tell themselves that Katie’s character had come to her senses. Or, even if she hadn’t, at least they didn’t have to see America’s sweetheart making love with Terrance Dutton.