Stars Over Sunset Boulevard

by Susan Meissner

  “You know your father,” Cora replied, and then she looked away quickly, as though she wished she had thought of something different to say just then.

  Violet lifted her bag out of the back as well, and Audrey shut the trunk with a gentle thwack. “Merle is my uncle,” Audrey said to Violet. “He farms, too.”

  “You gals don’t mind sharing your old room, do you?” Cora asked as she turned toward the house. “The twins each have their own room now, so I’ve lost a guest room.”

  “Is that what you still call it? My old room?”

  Cora offered a half smile that was difficult to read. Audrey wondered if it meant No offense, but we actually don’t call it anything.

  “We’ll be fine anywhere,” Audrey said.

  Inside, Cora led them past the big kitchen that had been Audrey’s mother’s favorite room in the house, past the dining area, through the living room that now sported a magnificent Christmas tree, and then down a central hallway that led to all the bedrooms. They passed several closed doors before Cora stopped at one and pushed it open. Inside the room a new four-poster bed with matching nightstands dominated the space. Where Audrey’s childhood dresser had been were two padded armchairs with a table between them. Slate blue accented with white made up every thread of fabric in the room, from the bedspread to the rug and the draperies.

  “I like what you’ve done with this room,” Audrey said as she surveyed the decor.

  “Oh?” The single word was clothed in doubt.

  Audrey turned to her stepmother. “I really do.”

  The two women stared at each other for a moment before Cora seemed to accept Audrey’s words as truth. She thanked Audrey for the compliment.

  “What can Violet and I do to help you with dinner?” Audrey set her bags on the bed. Violet followed suit.

  “I’ve only to put the ham in the oven. Everything else is done,” Cora said. “Why don’t you and Violet take a walk in the orchards? It’s a beautiful afternoon. Be a shame to waste it sitting indoors. I told your father to be home by five. You’ve plenty of time for a nice stroll before then.”

  Audrey and Violet made their way back outside. The dogs, eager to be anywhere with anyone, pranced ahead of them as the two women walked across the gravel to the closest row of trees.

  “Sorry about the awkwardness. Inside, I mean,” Audrey said. “Most of the time Cora and I get along all right.”

  “You two aren’t close?”

  “She and my dad had just met when I moved to Hollywood and I don’t get back here very often. I really don’t know her well.”

  “Oh,” Violet said, obviously unsure what to say next.

  “I’m actually okay with that, Vi. And she is, too. She’s taken over my mother’s house and we both know she has. Cordial distance is how we deal with that. Don’t worry about it.”

  They entered the orchard.

  Violet scoped the endless rows as they walked. “I’ve never seen so many plum trees all in one place.”

  “When they’re in bloom, it’s as though you’ve been transported to Eden. I used to put the blossoms in my hair.” Audrey breathed in deep. “I loved playing in these rows. I could pretend to be anything I wanted to out here.”

  They walked in silence for a few moments. It was so nice having Violet there, but the hours between now and when they were to get back on the train already seemed long and complicated.

  “Are you wishing you didn’t come?” Violet asked, as if she had read Audrey’s thoughts.

  Audrey’s laugh was slight. “Maybe. It wasn’t always like this for me. Before my mother died, I was happy here. But when she got sick . . . I don’t know. My father became one of those people who stop learning how to handle great disappointments. Life is full of them, as I am sure you know.”

  “Yes. I know,” Violet said.

  “My mother’s death wasn’t the only big disappointment to come his way. There were other ones. And when they came, he just stopped trying to find a way to live with them.”

  “He remarried, though.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you don’t like Cora?”

  Another few moments of silence followed as they walked. “I don’t dislike her,” Audrey finally continued. “It’s just . . . women have a way of making a house their own. Everything that was my mother’s or that reminded me of her was taken down and given away or put away when Dad married Cora. I can’t even feel my mother here anymore.”

  Audrey and Violet emerged from the orchard and into a clearing. A long, skinny building with repeating doors and windows met their gaze. One of the dogs trotted to a door, sniffed its edges, and then scampered away.

  “What is that?” Violet asked.

  Audrey stared at the building. “A bunkhouse. For the fruit pickers. They come from Mexico and they go from farm to farm during picking season. They sleep there at night. It’s empty right now.”

  “Oh. Like a dormitory. How long do they usually stay?”

  Audrey closed her eyes for a moment as a flood of memories began to crowd in around her: The aroma of corn tortillas sizzling on outdoor brick ovens. The rapid and beautiful language of the workers. Checked shirts drying on makeshift clotheslines and their raven black hair and straw hats. Hearing their laughter at night when the workday was done, and the sweet notes of someone playing a guitar and singing . . .

  “Audrey?”

  She opened her eyes. “They stay until it’s time to move on.” She turned from the building. Violet took a step forward to peer through a dust-covered window, wondering what the bunkhouse rooms looked like inside.

  Audrey was suddenly filled with a strange need to be understood, to have a confidant. Especially there at home. “My father sent me away because I was pregnant,” she said.

  Violet turned to look at her.

  “I had fallen in love with one of the pickers. His name was Rafael. I wanted to run away with him.”

  Violet blinked. “What happened?”

  Audrey shrugged, as if such a languid movement could ease away the weight of old sorrows. “My father found out and had Rafael deported to Mexico. He told Rafael that if he ever returned to the United States or tried to contact me again, he’d have him sent to prison for what he had done to me.”

  Violet sucked in her breath. “Oh, Audrey!” she murmured.

  “I never saw Rafael again. I didn’t know how to even look for him. Aunt Jo said it would be best if I let him go, just like I had to let the baby go. I had a little boy, Violet. With black hair. I saw him before they took him away.”

  Violet’s eyelashes were now silver with tears. “I can’t even imagine how hard that must have been.”

  Audrey had never had anyone say such words of consolation to her and a wave of emotion swept across her. Not even Aunt Jo had said what Violet had just spoken.

  “It was terrible.”

  They stood in silence for a moment.

  “I was young and stupid, I know. But I thought I was in love.”

  Another stretch of silent seconds passed.

  “And that’s why you never went back home, isn’t it?” Violet said after a pause. “Because of what your father did?”

  Two tears began to slide down Audrey’s cheeks. She let them fall as she shook her head. “In the beginning, yes, I was mad at him. But I was too young to marry and be a mother. I was little more than a child myself. And I didn’t love Rafael as much as I loved the feeling of being wanted. He never would have slept with me if I hadn’t encouraged him to. He was starving for affection just like I was. After a while I understood this. Having Rafael taken from me wasn’t the only reason I stayed away.”

  “Then . . . why did you?”

  “My father didn’t really want me to come back, Violet. He still doesn’t.”

  Violet shook her head, lost in bewilderment. “But why?
Why wouldn’t he want you to come home?”

  Audrey looked down at the ground, peppered here and there with pickers’ footprints from the last harvest. “Aside from the fact that I disappointed him, I think I remind him too much of my mother.”

  “But if he loved her, how can that be a bad thing?” Violet pressed.

  Audrey inhaled heavily, preparing herself to say the words she hardly ever said. “Yes. If he loved her.”

  “You . . . don’t think he did?”

  “I think it was complicated, his love for her.”

  Violet stood speechless beside her for several seconds, and Audrey felt as if she had ruined the Christmas mood. She was about to apologize when Violet filled the silence.

  “But even if that’s true, what does that have to do with you?”

  Audrey turned from the bunkhouse. The relaxing atmosphere of the orchard was morphing into a fog of old wounds. She reentered the plum trees so that they could head back. “Anytime I came here for a visit I would ask myself that. And that’s why I stay away. It’s easier for us both.”

  Violet fell in step with her. “You’ve never asked him?”

  “He refuses to talk to me about my mother.”

  “Make him!”

  Audrey grinned at Violet’s naïve vehemence. “Well. You can lead a horse to water, you know.”

  “Make the horse thirsty and then he’ll drink!”

  The tension in the air around her seemed to dissipate and Audrey laughed despite the subject matter. She laced her arm through Violet’s. “And to think I wanted you here with me so that I wouldn’t have to think about any of this.”

  They started to walk back through the bower of overhead branches, and the dogs raced ahead, as if they knew Christmas Eve dinner was not far off. Audrey could tell Violet was contemplating what she had told her and was ruminating on the wrongness of it, but she said nothing else and Audrey was glad for the silence as they walked. The two women emerged from the orchard as a truck was pulling into the carport next to the Cadillac. Her twin stepbrothers hopped out and the dogs ran to meet them. Her father got out on the driver’s side.

  “That him?” Violet asked.

  “Yes.”

  Leon Kluge had started to reach into the back of the truck, but then he caught a glimpse of Audrey and Violet moving toward him. He stopped for a moment, and pulled out two lengths of pipe as long as his arm from the truck bed. The twins also saw her and Violet. They stood up straight from patting the dogs to watch them approach.

  Sam and Gordon both said hello when the two women were close enough to speak. Of the two fraternal twins, Sam looked the most like Cora. Gordon was very much the image of Audrey’s father. At twelve the boys already stood a head taller than her. They seemed glad to see her.

  She greeted them both and then turned to her father. He stood near the back of the truck with the two lengths of pipe in a loose grip with one hand.

  “Merry Christmas, Dad.”

  He fumbled with what he carried and then he stepped forward to kiss her on the cheek, holding the tubes at an awkward angle. The metal pipes clanked against each other.

  When he stepped back, Audrey introduced Violet to him.

  “So good to see you, Audrey,” he said then. “How was the ride up?” He hoisted the pipes into a better grasp.

  “It was very pleasant,” Audrey answered. “Thanks.”

  “Nice afternoon for a walk in the orchard.” He walked forward a few steps to set the pipes against the exterior wall of a small shed next to the carport.

  “It was.”

  He turned back to Violet. “So. You’re from Alabama, then? And what brought you all the way out to California?”

  The weight of all the words Audrey and her father needed to say to each other and didn’t seemed to hang between them like one of the movie sets on the back lot that pretended to be something it wasn’t.

  Violet began to tell Audrey’s father about meeting Mr. Arnow at the audition for the role of Scarlett O’Hara as the five of them walked to the house, the dogs skipping toward the kitchen door.

  Hollywood

  March 9, 2012

  Christine runs her fingertips across the hat’s brim. A thin line of discoloration circles the wired fabric, evidence that the last person to wear it had done so under the exacting heat of a bright light.

  “Scarlett number thirteen? Are you thinking what I am thinking?” Stella, standing next to her, gapes at the hat in Christine’s hands.

  “Sure looks like it.”

  “How in the world did this family end up with a hat from Gone With the Wind? Shouldn’t it be in a museum or something?”

  Christine turns the hat back over, marveling at her sudden desire to eat macaroons with a glass of milk. “Old movie props get bought up all the time by private collectors.”

  “But to have something as valuable as this just sitting in a hatbox, where silverfish and moths could have their way with it. Who would do that?”

  “I’ve seen this hat before,” Christine says absently.

  “Everyone who has seen Gone With the Wind has seen it before.”

  A wave of nostalgia, hazy and undefined, falls across her and Christine brings the hat close to her face to breathe in its musky scent. “I mean, I have held this hat before.”

  The memory is stronger now. In her mind’s eye Christine sees the hat sitting on a chenille bedspread, along with umbrellas, stacks of books, holiday decorations, and other attic treasures. A TV is on in another room set to KTLA, and she hears the scattered dialogue between Major Nelson and Dr. Bellows. In the hallway, stairs have been lowered from a hole in the ceiling, and a man in a uniform is ascending them. She was afraid of the man because he was there to kill a nest of rats in the attic.

  “I was watching a rerun of I Dream of Jeannie, and there was a man in the attic laying down rat poison,” Christine says.

  “What?”

  The memory begins to fade but not before she recalls there had been someone with her. The elderly next-door neighbor who had been her babysitter the year she was in first grade.

  “Do you want to try it on, Chrissy? You can if you want. Just this once.”

  And she sees her small hands reaching for it.

  1939

  FIVE

  Mid-January 1939

  Violet looked up from the pages of shorthand on her desk and massaged the back of her neck while sneaking in a yawn. All around her the others in the secretary pool were busily tapping away at their typewriters, including Audrey in the far corner by the window. The cacophony of hundreds of keys striking their cylinders seemed louder today. She and Audrey had stayed up too late the night before, drinking and playing Pitch with Bert, Jim, and a script girl named Louise, who won nearly every hand. Violet wasn’t used to entertaining on weeknights the way Audrey was. Getting up in the mornings after crawling into bed at midnight was taking a toll. “You’re only going to be young once,” Audrey had said, when Violet had commented about their eventful social calendar. If Audrey wasn’t asking friends over to the bungalow, she was going out with them and taking Violet with her, partly for the camaraderie but more so for the connections she wanted to make with industry insiders who frequented the same nightclubs and restaurants. Being visible was how a person got noticed, she said.

  She and Audrey had been out on the town or entertaining at the house nearly every night since they’d returned from Christmas at the farm. And what a strange holiday it had been. There had been words between Audrey and her father; that much had been clear. Violet had awakened Christmas morning to the sound of raised voices. But by the time she had gotten out of bed and grabbed a robe, Audrey was in the kitchen alone and her father was visible through the window above the sink, striding purposefully toward a farm building outside. Audrey and she had stayed only for breakfast and presents, then left on the noon tr
ain, instead of on the four o’clock. When Violet had asked Audrey if she wanted to talk about what had happened earlier that morning, she had shaken her head.

  Violet couldn’t help but assume that Audrey’s current busy schedule left little time for dwelling on the situation with her father back home. Who could blame her? Violet’s parents didn’t dote on her, but she was sure of their love and affection. They still hoped she would tire of Hollywood and return home.

  Audrey had not spoken further about what she’d told Violet out by the Kluge bunkhouse, either; it seemed a thing that aspiring actress Audrey Duvall had not experienced. Violet didn’t know if even Bert knew. And, truth be told, Violet had her own reasons for not wanting to bring up the bunkhouse conversation now that they were back home. She had no desire to talk about the baby Audrey had borne all those years ago and given away.

  Violet pulled her hand away from her neck and repositioned herself in her chair. She had a mountain of dictation to get through.

  She’d just set her fingers to the keys when she heard the supervisor of the secretary pool call her name. Mrs. Pope was walking toward her with Miss Rabwin, David Selznick’s executive assistant, whom Violet had not yet met in person. Marcella Rabwin, who looked to be about Audrey’s age, moved quickly and decisively. Violet’s immediate thought was that she had forgotten to attend to something important and Selznick was upset with her.

  “This is Violet Mayfield,” Mrs. Pope said when they arrived at her desk. “Violet, this is Marcella Rabwin.”

  Violet rose unsteadily to her feet. “How do you do, Miss Rabwin?” Her unease must have been obvious.

  “Don’t worry—no one is angry with you,” Mrs. Pope said. “Miss Rabwin is in need of an assistant for our new technical advisor and she wants to talk to you.”

  “Oh?”

  “I hear you were born and raised in the South,” Miss Rabwin said. “And you graduated from secretarial school?”

  “Yes, ma’am. That’s correct.”

  “We need someone from the pool who can assist Miss Myrick every hour that she’s at the studio, for the duration of the shooting of Gone With the Wind.”