News from the World by Paula Fox

the play. He smoked cigars, wore a dark fedora, and the top of his shirt was unbuttoned.
    On the evening I attended the play, Cousin Wally told me through the box office grill that he had arranged for the cast to meet for drinks in a small frowzy bar across the street from the theatre. Would I like to join them there?
    After the final curtain fell, I walked over to the bar, uneasy yet exalted. But Tone didn’t turn up, although the rest of the cast were there. I felt a bleak relief at his absence, at the same time disappointment without end.
    I had bought a dress for the occasion. “Bought” is hardly the correct word. In those days you could return clothes to stores the next day with an excuse that the dress was too tight, too loose, too anything at all. “Borrow” would be more apt.
    Before Act One, I walked down the aisle to my free seat, aware of how people were staring at me. Later, in the ladies’ room, I saw in a mirror that I had forgotten to remove the price tag hanging from the back of the dress. People must have noticed the large, white cardboard rectangle, size and price printed on it in big black letters. I was unembarrassed by my emotions that evening; they were all-consuming, and I was barely aware of them. But the tag shamed me. I returned the dress the next morning.
    A few days later, I bought a book, Trivia, by an English writer, Logan Pearsall Smith, and along with a letter, sent it via Cousin Wally to Tone. As I think back now, it seems to me that Fried was highly amused by the entire incident.
    I hardly recall my letter. It was probably an effort to differentiate myself from his other admirers, and to praise the book for qualities that would attest to my own sensibilities. Cousin Wally told me later that Franchot had assembled the cast and read my letter aloud to them.
    Yet he answered it. Joy leapt into me when I saw the envelope. His reply was cordial, intimate, I judged. But I was faintly distressed by what I sensed was a distancing sardonic note it had. But what did I expect? Everything, I suppose.
    I kept his reply in a file cabinet in the cellar of the brownstone where Martin and I now live, until a decade ago. One morning a local water main burst. A flood resulted and it took many hours for firemen to pump out the six feet of water. Tone’s letter was ruined along with other correspondence and some book contracts.
    When I was sixteen, I lived with an elderly alcoholic woman, a friend of my stepmother’s, who had sent me to California with her.
    One rainy afternoon in Hollywood, where we lived, I drove in the rain to a local drugstore to get a prescription for her. As I hastened back to where I had parked, on tiptoe to avoid the deeper puddles of water, a voice from a parked car inquired, “Where are your ballet slippers?”
    It was Franchot Tone. My heart raced as I smiled in his direction but I hurried to my car through the rain which had gotten suddenly heavier.
    A few years later, back in New York city, I went to see a movie of his, Five Graves to Cairo, I think it was titled, at the Paramount Theatre in the Broadway district. The sidewalk was crawling with adolescent girls, agitated, some crying, others laughing, as they left their places in the line to dance a few steps on the street. In that era, there were stage shows in some movie houses. The girls had all come to see and hear Frank Sinatra, a singer. The name meant nothing to me.
    I found a balcony seat near three sailors who laughed raucously as they jeered at the teenagers below us in the audience, who were keening and shrieking.
    A skinny young man entered the stage as a curtain was parting to reveal the orchestra behind him. He sang, holding on to the microphone, desperately I thought, as though it would save him from drowning among his worshippers. What was it that drove them crazy? Franchot Tone was, after all, a serious actor . . .
    The last time I saw Tone was in a small shop on Lexington