Two Nights at the Oscars

When Carole Stephens accompanies her son to the Oscar Ceremony, an event occurs that will bring her back to the following year's ceremoney

Two Nights at the Oscars

By Robert D. Winthrop

 

Carol Stephens Warden was happy to at last be under the hair dryer, free from the incessant prattle of her hairdresser. She loved Katie, her Oklahoma-born beautician, and usually she enjoyed hearing the gossip Katie passed on. But today she wanted to be left alone. She needed time to be with her own thoughts. Under the whir of the dryer, she tried to concentrate on the coming evening’s events, but her mind seemed to want to dwell on an unforgettable night of nearly a year ago.

 

On that occasion she had dressed her own long, blonde-gray hair after her son had surprised her by asking her to accompany him to the Academy Awards ceremony. At first she felt as though she might be his second or third choice, but he had assured her that she was his first choice and that he had waited until the last minute in order to surprise her. Had she not impressed upon him that women did not like  surprises and that she needed time to prepare for such a momentous occasion?

 

In preparing for that night she had frantically searched through what remained of a scant array of evening dresses until she found one that would fit her more mature figure. Thinking that you can’t go wrong with basic black, she discovered a lacy dress that she had worn to a dinner some years earlier. With no time to visit a beautician, she had braided her long hair and twisted it until it was a crown above her still beautiful face. Trying to remember how professionals had done her makeup in past years, she applied foundation, rouge, and lipstick sparingly so as not to look as if she were trying to be thirty years old again.

 

She had known for two months that her son, Franklin, had been nominated for an Academy Award in two of the music categories: Academy Award for Best Original Score and Academy Award for Best Original Song. She wondered if his success might ameliorate some of the bitterness she had caused by her hours of cajoling, threatening, and pleading that he continue with his music lessons during the years when he longed to be out of doors with his friends. Was this to be their reward for the thousands of dollars she had spent on more expensive teachers as his ability on the piano increases?

 

Still unmarried at 38, Franklin had long ago given up plans to be a concert pianist. His career had been an uphill climb. Despite graduating from Julliard, he had been relegated to playing in piano bars and accompanying various performers until he was in demand by some of the biggest cabaret singers on the West Coast. All the while he was composing various forms of music: sometimes a song for one of the performers, sometimes a concerto or parts of a symphony. His big break had come when the producer of an independent movie company had asked him to compose the music for a sci-fi thriller. Critics had agreed that his music was an important part in maintaining the suspense of the movie’s plot. Work in several other films followed. As a composer/lyricist, he had received high kudos from critics who remarked on the beautiful metaphors and clever rhymes of the lyrics he wrote for the original song category.

 

The night of the Oscars that previous year they had arrived in a taxi at the theater where the ceremonies were to take place. Feeling like fish out of water, they made the long walk down the red carpet.  Although there were dozens of people being interviewed, no one approached them.

After being shown to their seats, she and her son waited nervously as she looked at the dozens of movie people surrounding her. Although Franklin had pointed out who many of the nominees were, she found that she recognized very few of them. She had not seen many recent movies, preferring to watch the older ones on Turner Classic Movies.

 

The announcements of the winners in her son’s categories came late in the program after various groups and individuals had presented their interpretations of the four songs that were nominated. Her son had not been pleased with the rendition of his song, She’ll Never Come Back. Carole had sat silently while Franklin chatted with the people sitting near her. At last the winner of the Best Original Score was announced, and it was not her son. She saw the disappointment on his face, but she was unable to bring forth any suitably consoling words. One more chance, she thought. She held her breath as the presenter of the next Oscar opened the envelope. “And the winner of the Best Original Song is Franklin Stephens Warden for She’ll Never Come Back.” Her son quickly embraced her and hurried to the stage. After kissing the beautiful woman who handed him the Oscar, Franklin had paused briefly and then read a list of the movie’s producers, director, singers, and stars that he wanted to thank.

 

After folding the piece of paper containing the names, he looked into the camera and spoke, “There is one more person that I want to thank the most. She is the one who insisted that I continue with my piano lessons the many times I wanted to quit. She is the one who went without in order to pay for my music lessons. She is the one who read poetry to me instead of bedtime stories. She is the one who insisted that I try for a scholarship at Julliard, and she is the one who stood by me when no one else believed in me. She is the one who gave up a wonderful career to raise me. And she’s here with me tonight. She is my wonderful mother, Carole Stephens Warden. Most of you will remember her as Carole Stephens the beautiful blonde star of over twenty movies in the 60s and early 70s.“

 

The cameramen frantically searched for Carole in the audience until they came to rest on the 70-year-old face, a beautiful visage with tears streaming down despite the smile she tried to effect. The audience, most of whom had ignored her throughout the evening all turned to see her. Some faced their companions and asked, “Who is she? Do you remember her?” But there were many in the audience who did remember�"men who had secretly loved her and women who wanted to be like her. One by one, and then as a group, they rose to their feet and applauded loudly. After nearly 40 years, her relative anonymity had been broken and she was a deer caught in the headlights. She collapsed into her chair, sobbing with a mixture of embarrassment, pride, and happiness.

 

Her reverie of the year before was interrupted as the hairdresser removed the dryer, combed and sprayed her hair. “I know that you were nervous when I told you I was going to cut your hair, but just wait until you see it. You are going to love it.” Carole was dubious, but she wanted to believe what the hairdresser was saying. “You just wait over there, and Judy will be right with you.” As she waited for the cosmetologist, her memories continued as she remembered that evening a year ago.

 

At a party after the Oscar ceremony she had been once again overwhelmed with the attention she received. She forgot that she was now, to put it kindly, a plus-sized woman and not the willowy, husky-voiced siren of 40 years ago. One person after another reminded her of some scene in a long-forgotten movie that they remembered. Once again she was Carole Stephens, movie star.

 

Later in the evening after her son had gone off to pose for photographers, she was approached by a short, swarthy man who introduced himself as Victor Suarez. “May I have a word with you?” he asked. She smiled and invited him to sit at her table. “I don’t know if you know of me, but I am a movie director. I had some success as a director in Spain, and now I am trying to establish myself in America.” Carole continued smiling, but she was unable to remember any of his work. “Do you recall,” he asked, “the story that was on all of the news a few years ago about a man in Detroit, a German immigrant, who was believed to have been a ruthless guard at one of the death camps during World War II?”

 

“Yes,” she replied, “I remember that very well.”

 

“I am making a movie about how he was found out, and about his trial and the witnesses who testified. We are nearly finished filming, but I have one very important role to fill. We have tested several women for the part but they did not prove to be suitable. I remembered that in Alas, Paris, Alas you were very good with a French accent.”

 

She smiled at the fact that he remembered a not very successful movie. “When I saw you with your hair fixed just as you have it tonight, I thought that you had just the look that I have been searching for. I want you to play the wife in the picture. It’s not a big part, but it is an important part. You would need to speak with a German accent, but I know that you can do it.  You learned to speak with a French accent; you can learn to speak with a German accent. I know you can.” He paused and looked at her pleadingly. “Would you consider doing this part, and may I send you a script?”

 

She was completely taken aback. Her first reaction was to shake her head and tell him no. Could she still act? What would her fans think of a fat, wrinkled old woman when they remembered her as the glamorous blond of the 60s? “Please,” he implored, “think about it. You would need to learn only a few pages of dialog and it would entail just a few days shooting.”

 

Completely confused and overwhelmed, she agreed to read the script, more to get out of a difficult situation than to actually consider such a move. As they were driven home after the party, she did not mention the encounter to Franklin for fear that he might insist that she take the job.

 

Unable to sleep, Carole lay awake, counting all of the reasons that she should not read for the part in Mr. Suarez’ movie. If she were to leave any lasting impression, she wanted people to remember her as she had been at the height of her career. She thought of how awful Bette Davis had looked in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? She remembered how sad it was to see Betty Hutton in her later years when Robert Osborne on TMC interviewed her. But then she was reminded of  Rosemary Clooney and Barbara Cook who went on singing long after their bodies were no longer trim. And their fans had adored them.

 

The next day the script arrived. The scene involved the wife of the accused man being interrogated by the prosecutor. The wife tells the prosecutor how she and her husband had left Germany after the war, using an assumed name, a change her husband told her was necessary because he had been in the German army. She explained how they had come to settle in Detroit; how her husband had found work and that they had no children. Then the prosecutor bore down on her, asking what she knew about her husband’s activities during the war. She told him that she knew nothing except that he had been in Poland and that she had worried every day for his safety. She was an important witness, and the prosecutor believed that she was the key that would verify that he was indeed the butcher that witnesses claimed him to be. The prosecutor recited incident after incident of her husband’s cruelty to the Jews and others in the prison camp. The wife continued to deny any knowledge of his wartime activities and began, instead, to feel that she too had been a victim, that she had made love to, cooked for, and sheltered such a madman. As she read, Carole began to feel a strange empathy for the woman. What if she is telling the truth? What would it be like to find out that the man you loved was a mass murderer?

 

Thinking back Carole tried to remember how she had learned a French accent for the movie many years before. There had been a man from France who was a hairdresser. She had asked him to read some of her lines. Then to his amusement she had tried to copy his accent. They both had laughed until they cried at her attempts, but she had practiced over and over until the accent was acceptable to the director.

 

And then Carole began to wonder what made a German accent different. She thought of the German officers in old movies and of the comic accent of Schultz on Hogan’s Heroes. She recalled that Germans pronounced a w as a v, but what else? Then she was reminded of a German woman who lived in her condominium complex. How did that woman pronounce words in English? Carole could not recall explicit examples, but she knew that the woman had difficulty with certain sounds.

 

“What,” Carole had asked herself, “if she asked the German woman to read the script into a tape recorder? Would she be willing to do this for Carole, and would Carole be able to imitate the accent?” She rose from her chair and began to look for the small recorder she used to listen to books on tape.

 

Knowing that there was little time before she would be asked by the director to read for the part, Carole left her apartment, knocked on the German woman’s door, introduced herself, and told her why she was there. The German lady, Gerda Schroeder, was excited to meet an actual movie star and immediately agreed to go to Carole’s apartment and read the part. Carole served her coffee and cookies and after a brief conversation, consisting mostly of questions from Gerda about life in the movies, Gerda read the script into the small tape recorder.

 

After the German lady had gone back to her apartment, Carole listened to the recording. Gerda had read the part without emotion; Carole would need to supply that. At times Gerda’s pronunciation of the English words was almost unintelligible. Carole decided that she would concentrate on the most obvious parts of the German accent, not trying to imitate every sound.

 

Carole went over the questions concerning how the woman came to believe that her husband had duped her. Had all of the people who had come into contact with this man been fooled? Had they come to believe that this fatherly fat man who grew roses and attended church regularly was actually the sadistic guard at the camps?

 

Carole found the wife’s protestations of not knowing about the man she married were completely believable. Carole knew what it was like to be betrayed, lied to and deceived. She remembered why she now lived in a small apartment instead of in the Beverly Hills mansion that she had once occupied with her son and husband. Had she not made love to, cooked for, and bore a child for a man who had foolishly invested her money and then left her for a younger woman? She quickly dismissed the bitter feelings from her mind. She would let the tears and vitriol come out when she read for the director.

 

The audition for the part went extremely well. Victor Suarez was pleased, both with Carole and with himself for finding just the woman to play the part. Watching and listening to her, he completely revised in his mind the manner in which he would shoot the scene. When filming began a week later, Carole was prepared. Every line was etched into her brain so that her mind was free to concentrate on the emotions that welled up in her. The director kept the camera on Carole’s face, using only the voice of the prosecutor off-camera. Even during long pauses as Carole and the character she was portraying gathered their thoughts, the camera never wandered. The few pages of dialog became minutes of the woman’s protestations of innocence and more minutes of agony as she asked herself how she could have been so misled. Did her husband have any hidden letters, orders, or computer messages? Had he ever talked in his sleep? Had he ever turned off the TV when there was programming about the Holocaust?

 

Inside her head, Carole was asking, “Had her own husband ever hinted in any way that the investments were in trouble? Were there any signs, any gossip, that he was being unfaithful? Had she been remiss in not taking more of the responsibility in managing her affairs? Had she spent too much time caring for their son when she should have been more attentive to her husband?”

 

After two days, Carole’s work ended and the director declared that the movie was now ready for editing. Suarez congratulated Carole, and the entire production crew applauded her for a job well done.

 

In the next several months, Carol submitted to a few interviews for mainly minor publications but mostly her life returned to what it had been before: bridge games with people in the complex, occasional dinners that she prepared for her son, and less frequent dinners out with him. Since winning his Oscar Franklin had become very much in demand and he spent many hours in his apartment and in studios composing and recording his music. Occasionally Carole would hear his song being broadcast on the radio and a smile of joy and pride would light her face.

 

Carole knew that Victor Suarez had been very pleased with her performance and he had spoken about her to various members of the press. But she regarded her performance much as she had looked back on the many roles she had played in movies when she was young. It was a job and she hoped that she had done it well.

 

Sometime after the movie opened, she and Franklin had sneaked into a neighborhood theater to see the film for the first time. She found herself unable to fairly judge her performance, but Franklin told her that she was great. “I’m not just saying this as your son, Mother. You were awesome. You were so convincing. And where in the heck did you learn to speak like that? You could have scared me into practicing the piano if you had barked orders with a Nazi accent like that.”

 

Again Carole’s concentration was broken as Judy, the cosmetologist, arrived to do her makeup. “Tonight’s the big night, eh, Mrs. Warden?” Judy asked. “Yes,” replied Carole, “Can you make me look twenty-five again?”

 

Carole had been immune from most of the buzz going on in Hollywood, and Franklin was too single-minded to know what was happening. In the months following her work on the movie, the only changes in her routine were visits to Weight Watchers meetings and to different areas of the grocery store where she bought fruits and vegetables instead of the starchy boxed dinners she had been eating. On these visits she avoided the areas of the store that displayed the many varieties of wine that she had come to depend on in her lonely hours.

 

So, it was not until a morning the following January that Carole turned on the news to find that she had been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. At first she thought that someone had made a mistake; maybe there was an actress with a similar name. But then the phone rang and it was Franklin. “Do you have room on your mantle for two Oscars?” he asked.

 

“Oh, Franklin,” she whispered, “Can it be true? It was such a small part and there are so many good actresses nowadays.”

 

“It’s true, Mom,” he shouted, “and this year I’m going to be your escort. Your sorta-famous and somewhat-solvent son is going to buy you the most beautiful designer dress the Oscars have ever seen.”

 

For the final time, Carole’s thoughts were interrupted, “Okay,” said Judy, surveying the work she had done on Carole’s face. “Now you can have a look.” She turned the chair around so that Carole was facing the mirror. The hairdresser had not changed the color of Carole’s hair, but she had cut it into a beautiful shoulder length creation that framed the face that had graced so many magazine covers “back in the day.” Carole was amazed at her own transformation and tears began to well in her eyes.

 

“Uh-uh,” said Judy. “No tears. You’ll ruin your mascara. Oh, Mrs. Warden, you do look so lovely. How can they not give you an Oscar, even if for nothing more than your beautiful looks?”

 

That evening Carole and Franklin were on the red carpet for nearly half an hour. Everyone wanted to interview them. She was asked time and time again, “Who are you wearing?” The wording of this question bothered her, but that was what all of the interviewers asked.  Fashioned by an up-and-coming designer, Carmen del Lago, Carole’s gown was indeed a beautiful shimmering blue creation, set off with sparkling stones around its high neck. The frumpy has-been of a year ago was now a confident, conversational woman as trim as she was in her movies forty years earlier. Franklin beamed with pride as well wishers in the crowd yelled “Way to go, Franklin,” and “We’re pulling for you, Carole.”

 

The Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress was announced early in the program. Brad Runyon, the previous year’s Best Supporting Actor read the names of the five actresses who had been nominated as their pictures appeared on the screen behind him. Then he slowly opened the envelope containing the name of the winner.

 

“And the winner is…” He paused and looked at the envelope again, “Carole Stephens in The Past Catches Up. Franklin threw his arms around his mother and held her tightly. “You did it, Mom; you did it!” he screamed. “Go get your Oscar.”

 

Carole walked slowly and regally to the stage to receive her statuette from Runyon. As she stepped to the microphone, she paused to survey the huge array of talented people before her. “Thank you so much,” she said. “This is such a surprise and such a great honor. I am overwhelmed. Of course, I want to thank Victor Suarez, my director and the man who re-discovered me. And, of course, I must thank my wonderful, talented son, Franklin Warden, whose music you honored last year and who has been my rock these past difficult years. I love you, son.”

 

Carole then went on to thank several other people connected with the film. “In conclusion,” she said, “I would like to think that this award is your way of saying what someone said rather ungrammatically in the movie Fantastic Four, ‘YOU DONE GOOD, KID.’" And she blew them a kiss as the audience again rose to their feet and she was escorted offstage.

 

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