Earl flew to Europe and appeared in Switzerland, where he renounced his U.S. citizenship and became a citizen of the world. A month later, he was living with Orlena Goldoni in her Paris apartment. She’d become a big star by then. I suppose he decided that since there was no point in concealing their relationship anymore, he’d flaunt it.
Lillian stayed in New York. Maybe Earl sent her money. I don’t know.
Peron came back to Argentina in the mid-1950s, along with his peroxide chippie. The Fear moving south.
I made pictures, but somehow none of them was the success that was expected. Metro kept muttering about my image problem.
People couldn’t believe I was a hero. I couldn’t believe it either, and it affected my acting. In Rickenbacker, I’d had conviction. After that, nothing.
Kim had her career going by now. I didn’t see her much. Eventually her detective got a picture of me in bed with the girl dermatologist who came over lo apply her makeup every morning, and Kim got the house on Summit Drive, with the maids and gardener and chauffeurs and most of my money, and I ended up in a small beach house in Malibu with the Jaguar in the garage. Sometimes my parties would last weeks.
There were two marriages after that, and the longest lasted only eight months. They cost me the rest of the money I’d made. Metro let me go, and I worked for Warner. The pictures got worse and worse. I made the same western about six times over.
Eventually I bit the bullet. My picture career had died years ago and I was broke. I went to NBC with an idea for a television series.
Tarzan of the Apes ran for four years. I was executive producer, and on the screen I played second banana to a chimp. I was the first and only blond Tarzan. I had a lot of points and the series set me up for life.
After that I did what every ex-Hollywood actor does. I went into real estate. I sold actors’ homes in California for a while, and then I put a company together and started building apartments and shopping centers. I always used other people’s money-I wasn’t taking a chance on going broke again. I put up shopping centers in half the small towns in the Midwest.
I made a fortune. Even after I didn’t need the money any more, I kept at it. I didn’t have much else to do.
When Nixon got elected I felt ill. I couldn’t understand how people could believe that man.
After Mr. Holmes got out of prison he went to work as editor of the New Republic. He died in 1955, lung cancer. His daughter inherited the family money. I suppose my clothes were still in his closets.
Two weeks after Earl flew the country, Paul Robeson and W E. B. Du Bois joined the CPUSA, receiving their party cards in a public ceremony in Herald Square. They announced they were joining the protest of Earl’s treatment before HUAC.
HUAC called a lot of blacks into their committee room. Even Jackie Robinson was summoned and appeared as a friendly witness. Unlike the white witnesses, the blacks were never asked to name names. HUAC didn’t want to create any more black martyrs. Instead the witnesses were asked to denounce the views of Sanderson, Robeson, and Du Bois. Most of them obliged.
Through the 1950s and most of the 1960s, it was difficult to get a grasp on what Earl was doing. He lived quietly with Lena Goldoni in Paris and Rome. She was a big star, active politically, but Earl wasn’t seen much.
He wasn’t hiding, I think. Just keeping out of sight. There’s a difference.
There were rumors, though. That he was seen in Africa during various wars for independence. That he fought in Algeria against the French and the Secret Army. When asked,
Earl refused to confirm or deny his activities. He was courted by left-wing individuals and causes, but rarely committed himself publicly. I think, like me, he didn’t want to be used again. But I also think he was afraid that he’d do damage to a cause by associating himself with it.
Eventually the reign of terror ended, just as Earl said it would. While I was swinging on jungle vines as Tarzan, John and Robert Kennedy killed the blacklist by marching past an American Legion picket line to see Spartacus, a film written by one of the Hollywood Ten.
Aces began coming out of hiding, entering public life. But now they wore masks and used made-up names, just like the comics rd read in the war and thought were so silly. It wasn’t silly now. They were taking no chances. The Fear might one day return.
Books were written about us. I declined all interviews. Sometimes the question came up in public, and I’d just turn cold and say, “I decline to talk about that at this time. My own Fifth Amendment.”
In the 1960s, when the civil rights movement began to heat up in this country, Earl came to Toronto and perched on the border. He met with black leaders and journalists, talked only about civil rights.
But Earl was, by that time, irrelevant. The new generation of black leaders invoked his memory and quoted his speeches, and the Panthers copied his leather jacket, boots, and beret, but the fact of his continuing existence, as a human being rather than a symbol, was a bit disturbing. The movement would have preferred a dead martyr, whose image could have been used for any purpose, rather than a live, passionate man who said his own opinions loud and clear.
Maybe he sensed this when he was asked to come south. The immigration people would probably have allowed it. But he hesitated too long, and then Nixon was President. Earl wouldn’t enter a country run by a former member of HUAC. By the 1970s, Earl settled permanently into Lena’s apartment in Paris. Panther exiles like Cleaver tried to make common cause with him and failed.
Lena died in 1975 in a train crash. She left Earl her money.
He’d give interviews from time to time. I tracked them down and read them. According to one interviewer, one of the conditions of the interview was that he wouldn’t be asked about me. Maybe he wanted certain memories to die a natural death. I wanted to thank him for that.
There’s a story, a legend almost, spread by those who marched on Selma in ‘65 during the voting rights crusade… that when the cops charged in with their tear gas, clubs, and dogs, and the marchers began to fall before the wave of white troopers, some of the marchers swore that they looked skyward and saw a man flying there, a straight black figure in a flying jacket and helmet, but that the man just hovered there and then was gone, unable to act, unable to decide whether the use of his powers would have aided his cause or worked against it. The magic hadn’t come back, not even at such a pivotal moment, and after that there was nothing in his life but the chair in the cafe, the pipe, the paper, and the cerebral hemorrhage that finally took him into whatever it is that waits in the sky.
Every so often, I begin to wonder if it’s over, if people have really forgotten. But aces are a part of life now, a part of the background, and the whole world is raised on ace mythology, on the story of the Four Aces and their betrayer. Everyone knows the Judas Ace, and what he looks like. During one of my periods of optimism I found myself in New York on business. I went to Aces High, the restaurant in the Empire State Building where the new breed of ace hangs out. I was met at the door by Hiram, the ace who used to call himself Fatman until word of his real identity got out, and I could tell right away that he recognized me and that I was making a big mistake.
He was polite enough, I’ll give him that, but his smile cost him a certain amount of effort. He seated me in a dark corner, where people wouldn’t see me. I ordered a drink and the salmon steak.
When the plate came, the steak was surrounded with a neat circle of dimes. I counted them. Thirty pieces of silver. I got up and left. I could feel Hiram’s eyes on me the whole time. I never came back.
I couldn’t blame him at all.
When I was making Tarzan, people were calling me wellpreserved. After, when I was selling real estate and building developments, everyone told me how much the job must be agreeing with me. I looked so young.
If I look in the mirror now, I see the same young guy who was scuffling the New York streets going to auditions. Time hasn’t added a line; hasn’t changed me physically in any way.
I’m fifty-five now, and I look twenty-two. Maybe I won’t ever grow old.
I still feel like a rat. But I only did what my country told me.
Maybe I’ll be the Judas Ace forever.
Sometimes I wonder about becoming an ace again, putting on a mask and costume so that no one will recognize me. Call myself Muscle Man or Beach Boy or Blond Giant or something. Go out and save the world, or at least a little piece of it.
But then I think, No. I had my time, and it’s gone. And when I had the chance, I couldn’t even save my own integrity. Or Earl. Or anybody.
I should have kept the dimes. I earned them, after all.