Stars Over Sunset Boulevard

by Susan Meissner

  “Come back home to Montgomery!” her mother had pleaded.

  “Come back home to what?” Violet had responded. “There’s nothing for me there.”

  Daddy had asked what California had that Alabama didn’t. She hadn’t known how to express that Hollywood didn’t have expectations of her.

  Or sad memories of what might have been.

  “I suppose they miss me,” Violet answered.

  Audrey cocked her head. “So, what made you come all this way, if you don’t want to be a star?”

  But Violet’s reason was too personal to share with a virtual stranger. She was not going to tell someone she’d only just met that fully realizing she could never have the life she’d been raised to live and wanted to live had sent her scrabbling for a new foothold on a meaningful existence.

  “I was ready for a different life with new opportunities,” Violet said, with a slight shrug of her left shoulder.

  For a stretched moment Audrey stared at her. “Then you came to the right place,” she finally said. “Are you allergic to cats?” She took a long pull on her cigarette.

  Violet shook her head.

  “You don’t have any furniture, do you?”

  “Just a suitcase. I’ve been staying at a hotel.”

  “The rent is sixty dollars a month. Plus half of the utilities.” Audrey dropped the stub of the cigarette to the pavement and ground it out with her shoe. “My place is a bit out of the way. Eight miles by way of bus and the red car. It’s a very pretty neighborhood, though. Close to the hills and the Hollywoodland sign. It was my aunt’s house. But now it’s mine.”

  “The red car?”

  “The trolley. The streetcar. It’s a good thirty minutes getting there in the morning and just as long or more at night. Still interested?”

  “Yes. Yes, I am.”

  Audrey smiled. “I’m on loan to one of the assistant art directors the next few days, so how about you meet me out front at quitting time? We can take the red car together so you can see the place and decide.” She rose from the bench, clutching the magazine and the handbag. “C’mon. You don’t want to be late getting back.”

  Audrey strolled confidently to toss the wax paper into a trash can some yards away and Violet had to quicken her step to catch up. Audrey’s attention was fixed on the people they passed, some wearing elaborate costumes, some street clothes, some moving leisurely, some rushing as though desperate to catch a departing train. A few of these people Audrey greeted by name; some she did not. But everyone was given a look.

  • • •

  At a few minutes after five, Violet was at the front gate, waiting for Audrey to join her. When fifteen minutes had passed and there was still no sign of her, Violet was ready to assume she’d been forgotten. She had just decided to head back to her hotel when she saw Audrey walking slowly toward the gate, in the company of a man in a suit. They were laughing as they sauntered in her direction. He broke away before they reached the gate to head to one of the sound stages.

  “Sorry about that,” Audrey said easily when she reached Violet. “But that fellow is not one to rush away from. Ready?”

  They set out toward the Pacific Electric trolley stop, alighting onto a Venice Line car seconds before it set off east toward the Hollywood foothills. The streetcar had made a few stops before the two women were able to find two seats together. They sank into the last double seat at the rear.

  “So, have you lived here a long time?” Violet asked as they settled more comfortably.

  Audrey looked out the window at the passing scenery. “I suppose I have. I came when I was sixteen to live with my aunt.” She turned with a half grin on her lips toward Violet. “I’m not from here, either. I was raised four hours north on a plum farm. I’m a farm girl.”

  The image of stunning Audrey Duvall as a pigtailed tomboy in dungarees made Violet smile for only a second. Sixteen seemed a young age to have left home. Violet’s own parents had been distraught when she told them she was heading to Hollywood, and she was a grown woman.

  “And your parents let you come?” Violet asked.

  Audrey laughed lightly. “My father pretty much insisted on it.”

  Sorrow and disappointment laced Audrey’s words despite the grin. Violet was instantly curious to know what had happened between Audrey and her father. But it would have been rude to ask.

  “And your mother?” Violet said instead.

  Again Audrey’s gaze turned to the passing sights on the street. They were leaving the dull and drab neighborhoods of Culver City, where the studio was located, and entering the charm and glamour of Hollywood. “She died when I was ten.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Audrey was quiet for a moment. “I don’t have any regrets about coming to Hollywood, but I do wonder sometimes where I would be right now if my mother had lived.” She turned her head to face Violet again. “Do you ever wonder what your life would be like if different things had happened to you?”

  Violet thought of her childhood friends back home who were all engaged, married, or pregnant, blissfully enjoying the existence she had always pictured herself living. It was such an ordinary life, but she had wanted it. She still wanted it.

  “All the time,” Violet answered.

  The streetcar stopped and a dozen passengers around them maneuvered their way off the trolley. A few others boarded.

  “So . . . you never wanted to go back home?” Violet asked, hoping she wasn’t prying. But she needed to know. She had left home, too, and she wanted to know what made a person decide to remain so far from it.

  “I had my reasons for staying here,” Audrey said after a pause. “First of all, Aunt Jo was happy to have me, and second, my father remarried and his new wife was a complete stranger to me. And third, I got discovered.”

  “Discovered?”

  She turned to Violet and a look of sweet reverie swept across her face.

  “I almost starred in a movie when I was eighteen. I would have, if silent films hadn’t died away.”

  “Really?”

  Audrey leaned her head against the back of the seat. “I was working at a coffee shop on Vine, and one morning I was waiting on a man who was a Hollywood talent scout. He told me I looked just like Lillian Gish, and he asked me if I had ever thought of being in the movies.”

  “You do look like Lillian Gish!” Violet said. “I knew you looked familiar to me.”

  Audrey smiled. “Well, I hadn’t to that point imagined being a professional actress, but I knew I could be one if I wanted to. And the thought of being a sought-after star sure beat pouring coffee and taking orders for pancakes. Aunt Jo wasn’t overly in favor of it. She had lived in this town all her adult life and she wasn’t too keen on me getting sucked into the movie industry, but she knew it was my decision. I signed a contract to be represented by Mr. Stiles. He paid for acting lessons and a new hairstyle. And he bought me fancy clothes so that when he arranged for screen tests, the casting directors wouldn’t see some girl from the Central Valley they didn’t know; they’d see Lillian Gish. He got me a few bit parts, but finally, after a year, and after all the money Mr. Stiles had spent on me, I was cast in the lead for a movie based on the life of Pocahontas.”

  She paused a moment and Violet could tell something bad had happened.

  “But,” Audrey went on, “before they even started filming, The Jazz Singer came out. Do you remember that movie?”

  Violet shook her head. She wasn’t sure she did.

  “It was the first movie with sound,” Audrey went on. “Suddenly, all the movie producers wanted to make talking pictures. The director of the Pocahontas movie quit to make a talking picture with someone else. The financial backers left the movie, too, to put their money into productions with sound. The movie was scrapped. Mr. Stiles tried to get screen tests for me for other pictures, but I ha
d such a deep voice, no one wanted me. Stiles finally let me go, and that was that.”

  The streetcar rumbled on for a few moments before either one of them spoke.

  “But you stayed here,” Violet said.

  “I wanted to get back what had been taken from me. For a very short while I had been treated like a queen. It’s intoxicating to be treated like you’re a rare gem. There’s no other feeling in the world like it. I tried for a couple of years to get another agent and another part in a movie. It was . . . It was not a great time for me. And I’ll just leave it at that.” Audrey shook her head as if to dislodge a cobweb that had fallen onto her. “Then my sweet Aunt Jo got sick and died. She left me the bungalow, so it was even easier to just stay. By this time I’d figured out that I wasn’t getting anywhere with my career and I was going to have to do something different. I decided to get a job at a studio, so that I could be visible to all those men who had the power to change my life. Those people all have secretaries. And they are all fiercely dependent on their secretaries. So I taught myself typing and stenography and got a job at MGM, and then when Mr. Selznick left MGM to start his own studio, I came with him.”

  “And?” Violet said.

  “And what?”

  “Has it worked? Being around all those studio people?”

  Audrey frowned slightly. “You mean, is it working?”

  The streetcar squealed to a stop and a host of passengers jostled around them as they got off.

  “I guess.”

  “Of course it’s working. Do you think I would still be there if I didn’t think it was?”

  Violet wished she hadn’t asked. Words escaped her as she wondered if she had just blown her chance of rooming with this woman. And she liked Audrey. Something about her made Violet think old hopes could be given new shapes.

  Audrey looked intently into Violet’s eyes. “You don’t just throw in the towel after a couple years here. This is not the kind of town to be in if you’re going to give up easily.”

  Violet felt her face bloom crimson. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to insinuate—”

  “No, I know what you meant. You want to know if working as a studio secretary for the past seven years has paid off for me. You’re thinking it should have by now.”

  “No, I just—”

  “And I want you to know that you can’t give in too soon here. You have to be smart. Clever. Patient. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

  Violet nodded in assent even though she wasn’t sure what she was saying yes to.

  Audrey took Violet’s hand and squeezed it. “Don’t forget I told you this. This is the city where everything is possible if you are patient. Don’t forget it.”

  She sounded like a wise old sage giving counsel to a pilgrim preparing to embark on a difficult and harrowing journey.

  “I won’t,” Violet said, and she knew she would not.

  The streetcar lurched forward toward the foothills and the Hollywoodland sign as the first two stars of the night sky pierced the lavender horizon.

  TWO

  Dusk had settled over the hills as Audrey and her potential roommate stepped off the bus. A chilling wind had also crept over Hollywood. They started down Franklin Avenue to walk the four blocks to Audrey’s bungalow, and pulled their lightweight coats tight around their middles.

  Audrey glanced at the woman who walked beside her. Violet Mayfield seemed nice enough. A bit naïve, but in a sweet, comical way. Pretty but not beautiful. Charming but not alluring. Funny without trying to be. And a bit of a risk taker to have come so far from home without knowing a soul. Audrey found that reassuring. And though Violet was a good eight years younger, she had hinted that she was hungry for success in life, just like Audrey was. Yet unlike Audrey, she had no desire to be an actress, and this, too, was comforting. Most of the single women in Hollywood looking for a room to rent wanted exactly what Audrey wanted. A fellow aspiring actress would surely make for a terrible roommate.

  Her previous renter, a former script girl at Selznick named Dinah, had gotten married in July to a dentist she’d met at the Cocoanut Grove. Audrey had been with Dinah the night her roommate met the man she would marry. Audrey and Dinah had gone to the fashionable nightclub—in satin and sequins—because Audrey knew that a certain assistant producer from Warner was a regular there on Friday nights. Audrey had met the dentist first and then had introduced him to Dinah so that she could subtly work the room without him on her arm. But the producer hadn’t made a showing that night. Afterward, and as the months wore on, Dinah had been almost apologetic that she’d won the well-to-do dentist when Audrey had “had him first.”

  Dinah had never quite understood that Audrey wasn’t looking for a husband. She was looking for the man who would discover her the way Stiles had.

  Audrey hadn’t been in a great rush to replace Dinah. The rent checks had been nice, but since Audrey owned the bungalow free and clear—the nicest thing Aunt Jo had ever done for her, among a string of nice things, was will her the little house—the extra money wasn’t essential. But it was a bit lonely out on the edge of the city. All the clubs, theaters, and restaurants were a good ten blocks away. Aunt Jo’s cat, Valentino, was only so much company. And while Audrey invited friends over often enough, it was too quiet and subdued when everyone left, and there was no one to talk to in the morning or sit next to on the bus and streetcar.

  She liked having companionship in the house.

  Her closest friend, Bert, whom she had known since her earliest days at MGM and who had also come over to Selznick International when she did, would have been the perfect roommate choice if only he wasn’t a man. Not only was he polite and decent, but he would’ve also been able to tackle all the spiders, trim the bushes in the yard, fix the perpetually leaky faucet in the bathroom, and scare away would-be Peeping Toms. And since he worked in wardrobe at Selznick, he could have ridden the bus and streetcar with her. Bert was the most genuinely thoughtful person she knew in Hollywood, probably because, like her, he wasn’t from there. He’d been born and raised in Santa Barbara. But a male roommate was out of the question.

  If only appearances didn’t matter.

  She laughed out loud at the thought of steady Bert Redmond, the bighearted little brother she never had, explaining to his widowed mother that he’d moved to a new house and had a new roommate and her name was Audrey.

  At the sound of her giggle, Violet looked over at her, surely wondering what she had missed.

  “Sorry,” Audrey said. “Just thought of something funny. It’s nothing.”

  They walked in silence for a few steps.

  “It’s nice out here,” Violet said, taking in the lay of the quaint shops, the older couples walking their dogs, the grocers bringing in their sidewalk displays for the night, the teenagers on bicycles heading home for dinner. “Even if it is a bit out of the way.”

  “You can almost forget that just a mile behind us are streets that never sleep,” Audrey said, nodding toward the lights of Sunset and Hollywood boulevards off in the distance.

  They turned up a side street with stucco houses on either side. A mother stood on the doorstep of one of the homes with a toddler on her hip and a dish towel over her shoulder, calling out into the twilight for an older child to come in.

  Violet’s gaze seemed to linger on the mother, and then on the place where the woman had stood after she’d stepped back inside her house.

  “So, did your aunt work in the movie business, too?” Violet asked when the house and the mother with her children were behind them.

  “Not hardly,” Audrey answered. “She married a man from Los Angeles who was a professional gambler, for lack of a better word. She met him at a casino before I was even born. I think her job was keeping him out of trouble.”

  “Oh.”

  “Apparently Uncle Freddy habitually made a lot of money and habitually lost i
t. I never met him. He got himself killed when I was still little. Luckily for Aunt Jo, it was after he had just made a lot of money. She bought the bungalow with what he had hidden in their apartment and lived off the rest so she didn’t have to worry about taking a job at the library that barely paid her anything. My father wasn’t too impressed with whom his older sister had married. He’s always resented the fact that when he expected me to come back home to him, I didn’t. I stayed with Aunt Jo.”

  “So why did he send you to live with her, then?”

  “Let’s just say it was convenient for him.”

  Violet opened her mouth to say something else, but they had arrived at the bungalow and Audrey filled the momentary silence. They could have that conversation later, if they had it at all.

  “Well, here’s the house,” she said.

  The bungalow, like many of the other houses on the street, was Spanish themed, one of the three architecture styles allowed in the bedroom community of Hollywoodland, with white stucco walls, a red tile roof, arched doorways, and terra-cotta pots of geraniums happily blooming on the porch, even though it was December. She slipped her key into the lock and they stepped inside.

  Audrey hadn’t replaced any of the furniture since Aunt Jo’s death six years earlier. There had been no need. Jo had bought only quality pieces with the money she had found hidden in the floorboards of the apartment. There was a long sofa, coffee table, two armchairs, a Victrola, and a dining room set Audrey never used. The yellow-and-white-tile, eat-in kitchen had a door that opened onto a shaded patio and a laundry closet in the corner with an electric clothes washer. Two bedrooms, a bathroom, and the ten-year-old tabby cat completed the interior.

  “This would be where you would sleep,” Audrey said as she showed Violet the room that had been hers before Aunt Jo died. There was a bed, a dresser, and vanity inside. Lacy blue curtains hung at the windows. A hooked oval rug lay in the middle of the floor. A painting of the ocean decorated the longest wall. “It’s fully furnished, as you can see, so it’s a good thing you’ve only got a suitcase.”