The Opiate, Summer Vol. 18
The Ragdoll Cipher Actress Hasn’t Learned the Lines You’d Like to Hear: Alfred Hayes’ My Face For the World to See Genna Rivieccio
“I
t will shock you how much this never happened,” Don Draper once said to Peggy Olsen as a means of convincing her to forget all about the baby she would give birth to only to abandon it for the sake of her career. “For the sake of one’s career,” in fact, is the crux of why so many people find themselves in unpleasant moral gray areas, isn’t it (ahem, Mark Zuckerberg)? The same goes for the nameless screenwriter of Alfred Hayes’ 1958 novella, My Face For the World to See. A screenwriter who finds himself in the odd position of needing to rescue a drunken and drowning aspiring actress from the ocean at a quintessential Hollywood party that “lasted too long.” Hence its devolution into such theatrics. Though knowing from observing her that her movements had all the makings of a suicide in it, he does not bring it
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up when she inevitably ends up calling. Ostensibly to “thank” him, but he knows better. She smelled that he might have clout at the studio (as if a screenwriter ever does) and perhaps thought that hanging about with him might do her fledgling career some good. But oh how it does just the opposite for her as she grows that pesky word, “attached.” Or so our Screenwriter thinks. For it is when she finds out that he’s been married for fifteen years and has a daughter that a certain resigned acceptance washes over her. Yes, this has happened to her before. No, she’s no stranger to pain. What girl is, really? Least of all one who has been trying for years to make it in the game of Hollywood. Yet for as many warnings and cautionary tales that it has inspired, one can never know just how bad, how soul-crushingly painful, it can be until she’s
