Free Dropped Names by Frank Langella

kisses him full on the mouth.
    â€œHe got me the cover. The goddamn cover. Esquire. And he’s got plans. Wait till you hear.”
    We sit down to lunch at a barely set glass-top table on the patio. Plastic plates, paper napkins, a pitcher of water. An angry young Spanish girl brings out a tray of cold cuts, a loaf of white bread in a stack, and a large bowl full of lettuce. There are bottles of salad dressing and mayonnaise on the table. During lunch, Rita’s mood turns sullen and morose. She sits quietly, bent over her plate. She has kicked her shoes under the table and a butter knife dangles listlessly in her hand. Her savior regales me with stories of his future plans for her. A film in Europe, a book deal, photo spreads for a magazine, a TV show, Carson wants her. Rita is listening hard, her face staring down into her lap as he praises her legendary beauty. “Look at her,” he says. “Look. No surgery and still gorgeous.”
    She raises her head, tosses back the once luxurious mane, stares at him, her smile wide and radiant. “Have some salad,” she says.
    â€œNo, love, I’m fine.”
    â€œAw, come on, you want some salad.” She lifts her leg, the caftan rolling back to her thighs, exposing her, and puts the heel of her foot into the large plastic salad bowl, then pushes it under his nose.
    â€œTake some,” she says. And he does.
    I leave the table with a made-up story about an afternoon meeting and she follows me out to the car. “You can’t leave, baby. I gotta have a man with me.” She again comes into my arms and kisses me. “Let him think it,” she says. “Let him think we’re together.” I open the car door, get in, roll down the window; she leans into me. “What do you think of my savior?” she asks.
    â€œRita, be careful. He doesn’t seem like the most honest guy—” But she cuts me off, her voice soft, low, and modulated. “Frankie, he’s all I got.” I am never to see or speak with her again.
    S everal months later there she is on the Christmas cover of Esquire, looking like a waxen image of herself, smiling and confident, her arms wrapped around a Santa dummy, once more facing a lying camera. None of her savior’s promises come true and he fades from her life, as did almost every man she ever knew. As did I. Our film is an embarrassing disaster and the last movie she ever makes. Her physical body passes out of existence on May 14, 1987, but Rita’s essence had faded from the frame long before.
    T onight, almost forty years after I left her life, there she is in black-and-white on my television screen. And the camera’s lie is actually welcome and soothing. Her beauty is staggering. Her sultry voice, her body, the way she moves close to a man, the sway of her hips as she drunkenly belts out “Put the Blame on Mame” stop time and obliterate what had been our reality. Her acting is honest and true. A thoroughbred, desperate to be taken seriously, cursed with a divine beauty, who could not find a man to desire that beauty as only a part of the whole woman.
    Near the end of Gilda , it seems she has lost Glenn Ford forever because he believes her character is what she has been pretending to be: a loose woman out for a good time with as many men as she can find. Feeling profoundly alone and misunderstood, sitting at a bar, shyly smiling at the bartender, her face full of loss and vulnerability, she is hauntingly lovely. The bartender asks: Would you like, perhaps, a tiny drink of Ambrosia suitable only for a Goddess?
    In the movie’s final moments, the villain is killed and the lovers reunite.
    â€œLet’s go home,” Rita says to Glenn as they face a new sunrise.
    T hose nights we spent together in Mexico, she’d say:
    â€œPut all the lights out, Frankie, and open the shutters.”
    And by the light of candles and fire, she would once again become the legendary