Tales of Hollywood 1:

Winnie

Winnifred. They called her Winnie. At least that’s what the little daisy-adorned plastic nameplate read above her heart. She always thought it should say Losey or Loosey, how Ricky Ricardo addressed Lucy.

Lucy was a Winnie and Winnie was a Losey. Lucille Ball had won everything: two swell husbands, a couple of kids, millions upon millions. Winnie even read that Lucy was the producer of the original Star Trek and Mission: Impossible.

Winnie had russet hair, also tinted, long shapely legs, and a good sense of humor. She too was originally from upstate New York, near Oneonta rather than Jamestown. And she too had come to Hollywood. But she never won anything.

Once a man had asked if her name was short for Edwina. She said, “No, Winnifred.”

She wished she had said yes. The man was a casting director. Maybe he would have been intrigued by an Edwina, but not a Winnifred.

She was popular with the kids who ate at the deli, who often joked with the affable redhead behind the counter. But none of them took her home anymore. She had been heading home alone in her 1994 Mercury Capri convertible for the last eleven or twelve years.

Home. She never expected it to be that. When she rented the place thirty years prior, she thought it would be a short-term dwelling, what the real estate agent called “a career girl’s flat.” She had liked the sound of that, that he called it a flat rather than a studio or an efficiency.

She could have been a career girl. She had taken typing in high school. But the Sophisticated Secretaries temp agency lady said Winnie had to trim her elongated talons for the work, and she had refused, also figuring she’d never gather any real exposure in an office.

At least in a restaurant, though not an upscale one, but right on Sunset, she’d chance an opportunity to meet some bigwigs, movers, and shakers, whatever they call such people. Agents. Managers. Producers.

And she had met them. But it never went further. During her first years at Irving’s, some had called her “good-lookin’”, even “hot”. But none ever took her up on it. Never for more than one night, anyway. These men had admired her breasts, she remembered. They were still quite firm and high, even now, despite the change.

She didn’t miss the sex. It was never for her. Always for them. She missed a warm body sharing her full-sized Serta mattress. And the noise from within as opposed to the noise from outside.

She’d owned a parakeet for a few years. But the poor thing electrocuted himself on the wires linked to her Fax machine. It was her fault for not caging Mr. Peepers when she was out.

Her parents were dead now, buried in Oneonta, and her brother was somewhere in Canada. She had a couple of half French-Canadian nephews, now men in their 30s, but she hadn’t even seen a photograph of them in a decade. Maybe they were parents now.

Her friend Fran from the deli had moved to a retirement community in Panorama City. Winnie hated the term retirement community; it was sort of like calling a sparse piece of furniture a “home entertainment center.” Anyway, she wasn’t ready for a retirement community.

Lucille Ball had never moved into a retirement community. She lived in a Beverly Hills mansion with her second husband, played demon games of Backgammon, sometimes slurped Bourbon, and eventually, her aorta gave out at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, a half-mile from Winnie’s home. They said she never recovered from Desi’s death a couple of years before hers.

Winnie was still young. You had to be 60 to dwell in the retirement community and she had three years too few.