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She was not yet beautiful. Good-looking enough, but not THE FACE people know and worship any chance they get. That all came after her mother died in our senior year. Arlen returned to school stricken by the loss and utterly, overwhelmingly beautiful. Don’t ask me how it happened. I believe most people turn into adults when they reach puberty, while others change because of love or adversity. Arlen Ford became the face that launched all the ships because of the death of her mother. I would swear to that. I vividly remember her walking into our dormitory room that Sunday night after returning from the funeral. She was all loss and havoc, sorrow and anger too. But like macabre artistic fingers, those bad things somehow combined to sculpt her face into the one we adore now.
She quit school a month later. So little time to go till graduation, but no matter: one Saturday she packed a bag, gave me a hug, and said she had had it. She was leaving. She’s been impulsive as long as I’ve known her. Trusts her instincts but is also willing to accept any consequences. I like that. I like it in anyone. It ain’t how high you jump, it’s how you land. No matter how this woman has landed over the years, she has always accepted full responsibility.
She was eighteen, beautiful, and broke. First she went home to her father in Manhattan, but on hearing she’d quit school, he (understandably) hit the roof. They had a vicious fight that ended with her moving out. The first time she called me, she said she’d gotten a job as a saleswoman at Bloomingdale’s in the pillow department and was living at the YWCA. I was totally impressed and terrified for her. Selling pillows and living at the Y? She was either crazy or an enviable character straight out of one of those 1940s’ screwball comedies: A Barbara Stanwyck or Jean Arthur “gal” who spoke fast and smart and got the job done superbly. But even hearing about this drastic change in her life, I never really doubted she would succeed at what she wanted. She was my best friend and I honestly believed we special ones could do anything. That’s the real joy of being young—pure dumb faith. There’s no way we’re going to fail at what we choose to do with our lives.
By the time I graduated, she had already met and moved in with Nelson Crispi. Isn’t that a great name? He worked at the Strand Book Store and wanted to be a playwright. He was the one who got her into books. Before, she’d read only for school and then the occasional mystery novel or thriller while on vacation. Nelson gave her a lasting love and hunger for literature that was invaluable in more ways than one.
When I visited them in their Houston Street walk-up apartment in New York that summer, we drank Medaglia D’Oro coffee thick as fur which they brewed on their tiny stove in a weirdly shaped coffee pot Nelson had bought in Italy. According to him, it was the only way to make it.
I was so jealous and impressed! We were all about the same age and I had lived with Arlen until only a few months before, but both of them seemed so much older, so sophisticated and in the know. They talked about life in Manhattan and people they knew. Actors, poets, a rich woman who kept a live fox in her apartment. New movies, great cheap restaurants they’d discovered. Fellini, Lermontov, the Second Avenue Delicatessen… All the passwords to the other side of life where the glittering secrets were. I wanted to roll this knowledge, these titles and names and places, off my tongue too, like Nelson, like Arlen. They weren’t showing off; they didn’t need to, because this was only life as they were living it and they were simply describing it to me. I was jealous as hell, of course, yet I loved them for this knowledge and unconscious cool.
Also for the first time in my life I recognized a tangible tightness in the air around them, if I can call it that. And i
What on earth could be better than that? She’d been right to leave school. I was the fool. The blindered goody-goody who did what she was told, got good grades, and already woke up in the middle of the night in a fever wondering what to major in at college. The result? In the fall I’d be sitting in a classroom yet again, this time for four more years. Of what? Arlen would be living in wonderful New York doing compelling things, making love at all hours of the day and night with her writer-paramour… while I studied verb tenses or geography, or sat in the student center on a Saturday night wishing to God in Heaven that I had a date. A date! How could I ever take that nonsense seriously again after seeing this? Here was my best friend with her own lover and apartment and a life that scoffed at vacations and fraternity parties on the weekend.
I returned home both elated and miserable. I would go to college to satisfy my parents, but if it ever pissed me off for one instant, I’d pull an Arlen and leave. I knew people in New York now. I carried that knowledge within like a lucky charm in the pocket you can’t help touching every few minutes. Arlen was my talisman and example; she was the way life should be.
We kept in close contact. Through those phone calls and, later, our endless letters I heard about her adventures, various lovers, travels, discoveries, and eventually her being discovered.
There has been a lot written about how Arlen Ford was discovered, most of it silly or maliciously wrong. This is how it happened, plain and simple. Nelson read an ad in The Village Voice about an open casting for a low-budget film that was going to be shot on the Lower East Side. Talk about the right place at the right time! The film turned out to be Weber Gregston’s first, The Night Is Blond, and although she’d gone along to it with her boyfriend more as a joke and to see what a movie casting was like, Arlen landed a small role. A few years later in an interview, Gregston said he noticed her because of the way she crossed the room the first time he saw her.
“God knows she was beautiful, but more than that, she was one of those charismatic presences you’re forced to watch when they enter a room. The magnetism’s that strong. They can stand there doing nothing but you’ve got to watch.”
If you know anything about Arlen’s life, you know things got better and worse at about the same speed from here on. She began taking drama classes and loving them. Then Nelson went into turbo-boost paranoia-jealousy overdrive about her sudden success. If anyone should have understood what was happening, why the world was suddenly paying attention to his girlfriend, it was this guy, because no one was a greater Arlen fan than Nelson Crispi. But I think by then he was so in love with her that he simply did not want to share her. Which was a very wrong move on his part because she was already way beyond that. She didn’t use him as a stepping-stone (as his nasty book on their relationship snivels), but once he became an impossibly a
One winter’s day there was an urgent knock on my dormitory door and there she was.
“What are you doing here?”
“I came up for the big game.” She opened those miraculous black eyes even wider than usual. “Didn’t I? Isn’t there one this week? This is college. There’s always a big game going on!”
We stayed up late filling in the blanks of our lives for each other and laughing. She’d met so many people in New York and done everything I could imagine doing. But the irony was that, despite all the wonder and excitement of life in New York, she had a terrific time being a plain old college girl with me for a week.