The Song Is You

by Megan Abbott

  And then that day, a day that seemed like one more flossy strand of gossamer, easily flung off. A ten-minute interview with Lauren Bacall about her wardrobe choices for Key Largo, then Gil Hopkins —”Hop”—was back in the makeshift alley with Moe and Leo and Stu, throwing dollars down and losing big.

  Two girls were hanging around smoking and watching the dice. A colored girl, Iolene, who sang in the movie, and an extra, a sloe-eyed white girl wrapped tight in a palm-frond bra. Next to Iolene’s sly grin and browned-butter looks, the white girl nearly disappeared, save the crinkling hula skirt and the brick-red pout—a little bored, a little agitated. They were complaining about being summoned for an evening shoot that ended up being called off on account of a leading lady in the hospital with a bad case of the DTs. Both girls had canceled dates for nothing.

  “Take some, nice and easy, honey.” Iolene passed the joint that one of the boys had offered her to her friend. “You look like you need it.”

  The white girl took the joint and jabbed it between her lips, but her eyes were on Hop.

  “You’re the pits,” she said, shaking her head. “I never saw a worse crap shooter.”

  Hop rose from a half-squat and shrugged. “The one thing your mother never taught me.”

  She laughed, joint cradled daintily in her mouth. “I guess I could show you a thing or two.”

  “That’s all you need,” Iolene said, taking the joint back. At first Hop wasn’t sure if she was talking to him or the girl. “You got enough trouble with fellows number one, two, and three.”

  “Maybe,” the girl repeated, stroking her fronds with a mix of meditation and provocation.

  “I don’t have to be number four,” Hop said, throwing down the last of his bills. “I’d settle for three and a half.”

  Iolene grinned. “Only a half, huh? That sure is a pity,” she said with a wink.

  “It’s my secret shame.” Hop grinned as Stu threw the dice. He came up empty again.

  The girls both laughed, but he wasn’t sure if it was at his joke or his loss.

  “So, which one of you is buying me a drink,” Hop said, eyeing them.

  Stu smirked. “It ain’t gonna be me,” he said, picking up his money.

  “Why just one of us?” the white girl said, eyes glazing over from the reefer.

  “Okay, but I only cadge drinks from friends. Or at least acquaintances,” Hop said, pulling on his suit jacket.

  “Jean,” she said, the joint dropping her voice a register, turning it throatier. “I’m Jean. And you know Iolene.”

  “That I do.”

  Two Years Later — September 1951

  Cloquet

  “Hop, you have no idea how rough it is,” the actress said, lighting a match off the bottom of her shoe like the slickest of New York bookies.

  “I know, Barbara. Believe me.”

  “Here I got one guy in love with me—Franchot—he reads Zigmund Freud to me while my head’s in his lap, and I got another guy, Tom, muscles like poured concrete, who’d just as soon gut Franchot as give up one night with his chin nestled in my thighs. Why make it either/or? Why not both?”

  Her lips curled into a smirk and he couldn’t help but laugh. She did, too, like a horse. On her it was inexplicably sexy.

  “I understand, Barbara. I really do. More than you know. But you got a dozen columnists chasing this story.”

  She tapped her cigarette on one silky knee. “Fuck, Hop, what do I care? I’m having a ball. It’s not like I compete with Loretta Young for parts. I play hookers, molls, pinup girls.”

  Gil Hopkins, late of Cinestar, had been at this new job for twenty months or more and it was getting almost too easy. From movie-mag reporter to studio publicity man in one easy step. And now his days were spent stroking actors and actresses, working the press, attending premieres, tape cuttings, and champagne-bottle breakings at every place from Grauman’s to the Queen Mary to grocery stores in Van Nuys. He’d spent just three weeks knocking out press releases before proving to the big guys how smooth his tongue was. Now he was the one they went to. Or one of them, at least.

  This case with Barbara Payton was standard issue. Her two actor-beaux—past-his-prime FranchotTone and B-movie-nobody Tom Neal —engaged in an embarrassing dust-up on the front lawn of her apartment building. The “Love Brawl” made headlines everywhere and was only the most recent in Barbara’s string of public incidents —the affairs with married actors, the romance with Howard Hughes that led Universal to cancel her contract, and the capper: her grand-

  jury testimony providing an alibi for a dope dealer accused of murdering an informant. Things were getting pretty complicated for Barbara. And Hop’s studio had her on loan for a just-wrapped movie, Wronged Heart. Before the Tone-Neal fracas, they’d considered buying out her contract and had promised as much. But not now. Hop’s job was to oh-so-gently push her back to Warner Brothers.

  Hop hadn’t bothered with Tom Neal, a side of beef in tight pants. But he’d worked Franchot Tone a bit. Over the last week, he’d carried on several soulful late-night conversations with the long-faced, highbrow actor.

  “What do I care what they say?” Tone had confided. “Don’t you see? I love her. Love that darling girl.” And it was no surprise to Hop. Tone had long had a taste for beauties whose hems were still wet from the gutter. Even Joan Crawford, whom Tone married when she was Hollywood royalty, came with the richly thrilling backstory of a pre-fame gold-standard stag film, a seven-minute loop Hop himself had seen at more than one Hollywood party. It had been shown so many times at so many different gatherings that it had taken on the quality of a ho-hum home movie trotted out one too many Christmas mornings.

  When he’d talked to Tone, the studio was still weighing their options vis-à-vis La Payton. But today they said, Give her the air. Hop’s mission was simple: Cut ties, but do it sweet and soft enough to avoid lawsuits, and keep the door open in case the scandal dies or takes a nice turn.

  “Promise nothing. Let her know her future isn’t with us. But don’t tip your hand,” Hop’s boss had told him, with a wink and a nudge.

  Not one to skimp on the kiss-off, Hop escorted Miss Payton from his two-by-four office to a nearby nightspot, ushering her to one of the small, round mahogany booths in the back, the ones with the small baby spotlights that dropped onto the center off each doll-size table. The restaurant was so dark and the tables so low that you had to crouch forward from the tufted leather seats: to see each other or, with its high ceilings and Nat King Cole vibrating, to hear each other. It was a place tailor-made for fugitive encounters.

  Barbara’s button nose, pert and bunnylike as any Midwestern cheerleader’s, curved into the baby spot and above it her incomparable white-lashed black eyes batted.

  “Bringing me here, Hop, what’s a girl to think? Are you trying to screw me or to screw me?”

  “Exactly,” he said, and smiled, resisting the urge to tweak her nose as it crinkled in amusement. He was still practicing his approach in his head and she was already pushing him to the windup. What the hell, here goes:

  “All I’m thinking is this, my girl, all I’m thinking is you and me: we understand things. What I’ve always admired about you—even back in the day, when I made you for Cinestar and gave you that big ‘Next on the Horizon’ spread and christened you ‘Queen of the Nightclubs’—the one that got you that plummy part in Trapped— even back then I thought, ‘Here’s a girl who knows the score, knows it even better than the gray suits at Universal who try to stuff her into every two-bit Tex Williams oater they can find.’ You and me, Barbara, we got that same grand tangle of ambition and battle smarts—like the pep squad,” he said, dabbing her nose with his thumb, “for the nastiest, blackest-hearted team there is: Hollywood. We, B.P., we would and would and would, right?”

  “Would, could, should, whatever you got, Hop. Life’s for the living,” she said, downing her gimlet and running her delicious pulpy tongue across her Minnesota-farm-girl teeth, thick and wh
ite as a bar of Ivory soap.

  “Amen and all right.” He signaled to the waitress for another round.

  “So what’s the bottom line, then, pretty boy? For the ruckus? What did my wayward boyfriends cost me?”

  “You see, that’s what I’m talking about.” He jabbed his finger in her direction. “Straight to the chase.”

  “No finery for me. Besides, your tie looks too spanking-new. Like your shirt still remembers the rayon Woolworth tie that sat there a year ago. Right, Hop?”

  “Actually, gorgeous, the shirt’s spanking-new, too. But the baby-soft flesh underneath sorta recalls, wondering where the Sears Itch went.”

  “Sears Itch. Sounds like something you catch from a sailor on leave.”

  “Scout’s honor, I never met the guy.”

  She laughed with her whole face jumping and reached out to drag her new drink across the tiny table and into her hands.

  “You, Mr. Slick, may be good at the soft touch, but I still want to hear the verdict. Am I kaput, all for an honest affair of the heart?”

  He flicked his finger along the sheen of sweat on her glass. “No way, sis. It’s simple. You clean it up for a little while, close those lily-white gams on set and everything’s apples and ice cream again.”

  “What does that mean exactly, Mr. Slick?”

  “It means we like your face and your voice and your chops and your honey-round bottom. You’d have to fuck all of Actors’ Equity to cancel that. ‘Course,” he said, pretending to look for the waitress as he took a silent breath, “it’s really for your home team to deal with. And we don’t want to interfere with Warner Brothers’ business.”

  He forced himself to meet her eyes and gave her his jolliest smile.

  She nodded her head slowly, trying to read the brush-off. “You’re saying everything’s fine but not so fine that I’m worth the heat. Send me back to Poppa Warner, thanks, it’s been swell.”

  “Not at all,” he said, waving his hand. “We love you, kid. We’ve loved having you here, loved loving you, love to have you back. It’s just that your poppa’s got the gate locked so tight, it’s out of our hands”—he slapped one palm on her leg under the table, light and teasy, there and gone—”as eager as our hands may be.”

  “Gate, huh?” She grinned and placed one drink-wet finger on his wrist. “Feels more like a chastity belt. I didn’t know Poppa cared so much.”

  “Like your old man on your prom night, B.P.”

  “Not my old man,” she said, fingers dancing along the bottom of her empty glass. He signaled for another round. He hadn’t realized he’d be going belly-to-the-bar with a longshoreman.

  “Oh?” he said. This was good. Subject changed easily, no mess, no fuss, and she was already onto that old actress saw-horse—the “my father never loved me” soliloquy. If only he was as good at the kiss-off with the women in his own life. Or maybe he was, really.

  By round five, the cherries-in-snow lusciousness of Miss Barbara Payton practically shimmered with I’m-easy appeal. Thankfully, with drinks, she grew not more soulful but more filthy, like a slurry baton twirler, every red-blooded American man’s deepest dream.

  “So I’m a little slip of a fourteen-year-old and Joyce and I are doing each other’s hair, big sausage-roll curls at the hairline like Ginger frickin’ Rogers in Kitty Foyle. And Joyce’s folks are having a big party downstairs, all fast jazz and roll up the carpeting, a big bowl of Planter’s Punch. Joyce falls asleep just before twelve and I’m lying there in the trundle bed, gotta pee like a racehorse. But I’m scared stiff to go down the long hall to the bathroom in my bitty white nightgown. What if the grown-ups see me? I would just die. Takes me all of a half hour to work up the nerve.

  “Finally, I decide to make a mad dash. So I throw on Joyce’s chenille robe and run quick like a bunny down the hall. Lickety-split.

  “And wouldn’t you know it? Motherfucker, the bathroom door is shut, latched, occupado. I thought I’d piss my pants on the spot. But the door opens and it’s Joyce’s dad, Mr. Magrew. All Brylcreem, Arrow shirt, and smelling like the rubbing alcohol my momma pats on my skinned knees. He’s got a sliver of a mustache like Robert Taylor. He’s a fine one. But he’s got a big red stain on the front of his starched shirt. He laughs when he sees me, says Mrs. Corrigan pressed too close to him on the dance floor and jostled her own drink out of her glass and onto him. Awfully sticky, he says. Planter’s Punch. Maybe you can help me, he says.

  “I’m such a dumb cluck,” Barbara said, shaking her head. “I walk in, he shuts the door behind me. The bathroom is so small that I feel half pressed against him myself. I’m handing him this wet washcloth and stamping his chest and he’s pulling my nightgown up over my legs, past my little hips. Bathrobe—his daughter’s—falls to the floor. I start to push him away. He smiles and grabs the washcloth and tucks it in my little-girl mouth. You hear me, Hop?

  “So he backs me into the tub and fucks me for five minutes, my head hitting the faucet over and over again like a freaking knockout bell. Petals whacked off the rose one by one. I was sure the whole house could hear the clanging. Then he got up, pulled the cloth out of my mouth, ran it along the inside of my legs until it was soaked-through red.

  “And you know what he said, buckling his belt as I lie there, limp as my own rag doll? ‘You’re a delightful girl,’ he said, ‘and I’d like to do this again.’”

  Barbara burst into a peal of hard-won laughter. Hop, one finger around his tight collar, joined her, gulping his drink as she did.

  “Do you believe that fucker? Like we were saying good night after the homecoming dance.”

  “So did he? Do it again?” Hop said, smiling a little queasily at the picture in his head of quavery pubescent and prone Barbara.

  “Three times a week until Lent,” Barbara said, lighting up a cigarette.

  Hop nodded. Then, after a pause, he smiled widely. “You almost had me.”

  Barbara laughed. “Okay, okay. I graduated to captain of the varsity football team after him. He looked like he could take old Magrew. But,” she said, sighing long, “you never forget your first.”

  He’d heard this story—really, this exact story—a hundred, a thousand times before from just about every doe-eyed, apple-breasted starlet he’d ever interviewed, drank martinis with, or taken to bed. Still, it always had its own surprising deathless power to arouse. As it was meant to, even if they didn’t know it (some of them, like Barbara, did). So he’d allowed himself the churning pleasure and waited for a new twist or wrinkle in this rendition—at first waited in vain (hell, he’d even heard the best-friend’s-father-at-a-party story before). Then, she introduced the bathtub. Picturing black-eyed, cotton-haired, puberty-flowering Barbara Payton with her downy legs pressed against the shower, her superb feet squeaking along the tiles as Mr. So-and-So throttled drunkenly away, well, it was… so sue him, accuse him of sexual deviancy, it was awfully nice.

  “You have a phone call, Mr. Hopkins.” A waiter suddenly appeared at his side, shaking him from his reverie.

  Excusing himself, Hop made his way to the restaurant’s secluded coven of mahogany-walled phone booths. The waiter directed him to one, where the earpiece nestled, waiting for him.

  “Turns out we wanna sign her, Hopkins. Fix it.” Solly, assistant head of production. So high up he rarely acknowledged Hop’s existence, even when he was stepping on his feet.

  “Sign her? Sign her? Even if, Solly, even if she wasn’t tramping her way through every production she’s on, she’s on contract with Jack Warner.”

  “We’re gonna buy her. The big guy wants her.”

  “Yessir. But you know, I can get you ten like her in your office in ten minutes.”

  “Listen, kid, the big guy’s decided she’s an ice-cream blonde like he ain’t seen since Thelma Todd first gave him a hot one twenty

  years ago.”

  “What the boss man wants, the boss man gets.”

  “Clean up the mess, kid. Clean it all up nice
and pretty. We got

  things waiting for her. She don’t even know.”

  “Making a late-night date, Hop? I do all the warming up and some other girl gets the hot payoff?” Barbara grinned widely, stirring her drink with one ladylike finger.

  She’s not interested in me, he reminded himself. Sometimes, with these actresses, after a cavalcade of getting-to-know-you drinks, he’d forget. Barbara Payton, for example, had two tastes: dull-eyed muscle men and flush, faux-ivy debonairs. He was a long way from either. Eyes as shifty as a door-to-door and vocab straight out of the Rust Belt—all patter, but hell, his shoulders still resembled the high school running back he’d once been, didn’t they? Fuck. Better switch to beer.

  “Oh no, you know me, B.P. I’ll be tucking in for a night of Rachmaninoff and the latest Edna Ferber,” he sighed. “But, I had this thought… That call was from Doris Day. You know Doris? Well, back in my reporting days, I interviewed her for her part in a little picture called Romance on the High Seas. Knew she’d be big. She just got married a few months back to a hell of a guy. Before, she was always blue over some no-good louse. Today, she sounds like the happiest fucking clam this side of the Pacific.” Easy boy, don’t force it.

  Hurrah for Doris … ,” she said, shimmying a little in her seat to the calypso tune. And far enough gone not to demand too much finesse.

  “It got me thinking about you. You big beautiful doll and the damage that this hit parade of Hollywood types could do to you and that ridiculously beautiful face.”