The Garden on Sunset

by Martin Turnbull

  Remember, Jakie, a son is a son, no matter if his papa throws him out a hundred times.

  “Oh, Father,” he whispered, “Another half hour and you’d never have known. You wouldn’t have seen me with Dwight.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut so hard he could see geometric patterns flash like fireworks. The pyrotechnics faded and in their place was his father. Roland Adler’s face was long and narrow and pinched from years of frowning. His hair was thick but had long gone gray, the color of garbage can lids and gun powder. Marcus could see his father’s flinty blue eyes as he gave his son a final shove into the train. “And don’t come back here until you’ve —”

  But Marcus never heard the rest. The steam whistle lopped off the end of the commandment and the train slowly pulled out of the station. Marcus stood in the doorway and shouted, “Don’t come back until I’ve what?” but his father didn’t hear him.

  In the bathroom stall of the Warner Brothers Theater on Hollywood Boulevard one month and two thousand miles later, Marcus repeated the question: Don’t come back until I’ve what?

  “There you are!”

  “Sorry, girls.” Marcus avoided looking at his new friends lest they spot his bloodshot eyes. He faced the curved staircase that enveloped the tallest indoor fountain Marcus had ever seen. “Let’s go get some coffee.”

  The ten o’clock session had already begun, so the foyer was fairly deserted. It was all decked out in black and white marble that ran the length and breadth of the entrance and a good dozen feet up the walls to a gold-leafed ceiling and a pair of crystal chandeliers ten feet tall. There was certainly nothing like this back home.

  How ironic, he thought. I spent my whole childhood feeling like I didn’t fit in, like I didn’t belong in that no-account backwater. How many nights did I lay in bed thinking surely, surely, surely I was destined for bigger things in brighter places? And yet now that I’m gone, all I can think of is how deeply I miss it.

  “Are you okay?” Kathryn asked, frowning.

  “Bad dinner. All gone now. Better out than in.”

  They were on the sidewalk in front of a huge poster for the movie they’d just seen, a drawing of Al Jolson in blackface and a white bow-tie. His white-gloved hands were outstretched and begging for acceptance. Marcus let his gaze wander back into the theater’s foyer. A small woman in dark purple lace and a matching hat was gazing up at the poster for Love, the new Greta Garbo/John Gilbert movie. She looked vaguely familiar.

  “The truth is, I’m having a fairly strong reaction to that movie,” he said.

  “Half the country is,” Gwendolyn added, but in a tone that indicated she really didn’t understand why.

  “I think I know what it is,” Kathryn said. The electric light from inside lit up Kathryn’s pale face. She didn’t sport the Californian tan he’d noticed on nearly every other girl here, but her dark chocolate hair and bold red lipstick made her look striking. “I had the same thought.”

  “You did?” he asked.

  She nodded. “When I heard Al Jolson speak on screen for the first time, I thought, So that’s how he sounds? But then I thought, Somebody’s got to have written those lines. With pictures being silent, nobody really cared what the actors were saying. But if talking pictures take off —”

  “They’ll never take off,” Gwendolyn cut in. “I think that movie columnist in the Examiner, Louella somebody-or-other, I think she’s right. It’s just a gimmick.”

  “But if they do take off, somebody’s got to write the words the actors say. Just like in a stage play,” Kathryn said.

  “You’ve got a point,” Marcus allowed. He looked back at the woman in the purple lace. Where had he seen her before?

  “I knew we’d had the same thought!”

  “Which was?” Gwendolyn asked.

  Yes, Marcus wondered. Just what is this same thought we’ve both had?

  Kathryn smiled and poked him in the chest. “That’s what you should do. Write plays for the talking pictures.”

  “You’re a writer?” Gwendolyn asked.

  He looked at Kathryn, startled. How the hell had she seen his stories? When his father had given him fifteen minutes to pack, they were the first things he’d shoved into his suitcase. Those stories he’d spent summers upon summers scribbling down in his room when his father thought he should be out hunting owls were the last things he wanted to leave behind and the first things his father would’ve set fire to. But he hadn’t told anyone here about them.

  “I like to write short stories,” he allowed.

  “Ha! I knew it!” Kathryn said. “I can recognize a fellow writer when I meet one. You’re so well mannered and reserved. All the quiet boys I’ve ever met have been writers.”

  “You write, too?” Gwendolyn asked Kathryn. “I had no idea I was in the company of such talented folks.”

  “I plan on being a journalist, like Nellie Bly,” Kathryn said. “But you —” she poked Marcus in the chest again, “you’ve got ‘picture play writer’ written all over you.” Then she frowned. “Now that pictures can talk, they’re going to have to come up with a better title than ‘picture play writer.’”

  Marcus nodded and looked back for the woman in lace, but she had disappeared.

  CHAPTER 6

  Kathryn’s money was running low. For the past couple of years she’d been squirreling it away as she plotted her escape from the motherland, but it wasn’t going to last much longer.

  She absently turned another page of the Los Angeles Examiner and stared across her patio table at the Black Sea-shaped pool, letting her mind wander to Marcus. She’d only told him to become a picture play writer because he’d looked so stricken and woeful, and had found herself prattling on and on about talking pictures and plays and dialogue and vocabulary. “I should have kept my mouth shut,” she murmured to herself. “How about you stick to the problem of your own career?”

  It was all very well to want to be a courageous girl reporter, but by the age of twenty-five, Nellie Bly had published an exposé on life inside a women’s lunatic asylum and made it around the world faster than Phineas Fogg in Around the World in Eighty Days. But all Kathryn had done was get dragged by her mother from dance class to acting class to one useless audition after another. She wasn’t pretty enough to play the romantic lead, or kooky enough to play the best friend, or cute enough to play the kid sister. She wasn’t even ugly enough to play the enemy. For seven years she’d had to follow her mother to every studio in Hollywood and had never gotten a bite. It was a colossal waste of a childhood.

  But no more! Kathryn had staged her exit. She would never go back to her mother’s termite-infested apartment. Her hotel room may be darker than midnight in hell’s basement, but it was hers and hers alone. Still, she’d have to get a job soon.

  But the newspaper business was such an old boys’ club. Elbowing her way in would be tantamount to breaking into First National Bank in broad daylight with a cowbell tied around her neck.

  “Holy crap!”

  Kathryn watched as a woman’s hand lowered an enormous martini glass to the patio table. There was a chip in the rim that looked like it could do some damage. An alarmingly pale woman with half-closed eyes plunked herself down next to Kathryn. Her dark hair was parted at the top of her head and flopped down around a long face with a pointed chin. She made a grand to-do of prying open her eyelids and moaning as though she bled from every pore.

  “Darling, please do me the greatest favor and reassure me that it is well past the cocktail hour.”

  “It’s not quite one o’clock yet.”

  “I’m talking Greenwich Mean Time, naturally.” The woman cast a bleary glance over the newspapers. “Good lord, if these are the Saturday papers, I can’t imagine how thick the Sunday ones will be.”

  “These are the Sunday papers.”

  The woman took a long sip of her martini. “Tell me, how does one procure the Sunday papers on a Saturday?”

  “This is Sunday.”

&
nbsp; The woman reared back. “But what happened to Saturday?”

  “That was yesterday.”

  The woman paused to consider that she’d missed an entire day, then shrugged. “Not the first time that’s happened. Tell me darling, what’s your name?”

  “Kathryn Massey.”

  “I’m positively charmed to meet you. The name is Tallulah.”

  “Oh!” Kathryn exclaimed. “Tallulah Bankhead!”

  Miss Bankhead reached into an enormous aubergine shoulder bag that matched what was left of her nail polish and pulled out a silver cigarette case. It caught the afternoon sun and reflected into Kathryn’s eyes as she flipped it open and offered up a row of slim white cigarettes.

  Kathryn smiled and took one. “I enjoyed you in The Trap.”

  Tallulah seemed startled. “Good heavens, even I’d forgotten about that one.” She reached back into her bag for a fat wad of envelopes bound with a length of pink lace that looked like it had been torn from a French negligee. She tossed it onto the table. “Thank you. That was very kind of you to say. If perhaps unlikely.”

  “You out here to make a picture?” Kathryn asked.

  Miss Bankhead pulled the lace off the bundle of envelopes and started flipping through them. She sucked her cigarette down to its tip and slurped at her martini. “No, no, just checking the lay of the land, so to speak. I was at one of Eva LeGallienne’s parties back in New York and I met a theater director there. Sweet man. George Cukor. Heard of him? No, I hadn’t either. At any rate, he pressed me to come out here and snoop around for work.”

  “Any luck?”

  “To be honest, I’ve hardly seen the light of day. The gin out here is simply too marvelous for words. Takes the edge off the cocaine which, I’m sorry to say, is disappointingly average.” She pushed the letters across the table and let out a low sigh. “Fan mail. So tedious.”

  “You get fan mail?” Kathryn asked.

  “I’m Tallulah Bankhead, my pet, not Lady Fucking Macbeth.”

  “What I meant was that they pass your fan mail on to you?”

  “Nobody else wants it. Hell, I don’t even want it, but these little darlings . . .” She waved her talons across the scattered pile of letters. “They did take the time to commit pen to paper.” She gave a half-hearted cough.

  Kathryn picked up the nearest letter. The envelope was tinted a light lavender color and smelled of some sort of flowery perfume.

  “Violets,” Tallulah explained. “Every other one positively reeks of violet water.”

  Kathryn stared thoughtfully at the letters. “Do you answer them?”

  “The odd one, perhaps. Far fewer than I really should. Oh, what I wouldn’t give for someone to answer them for me.”

  “How much would you give, exactly?” Kathryn asked, her wheels turning.

  Tallulah let out a deep belch. “The absolute earth! What a burden that would lift from my slender shoulders. Don’t get me wrong: without fans, how would someone like me earn her way in Russian caviar and Hungarian water crackers? But dear God in heaven, so many. And so frequently. This is just the start.”

  “I can do it for you,” Kathryn said.

  “Can you type?”

  “Up to fifty words a minute.”

  Just don’t ask me why I can type so fast, Kathryn thought. She didn’t want to admit the hours she’d spent typing out every Nellie Bly article she could find, pretending she’d written them herself.

  Tallulah slapped both hands on the patio table. “How does thirty dollars a week sound?

  Kathryn barely kept her mouth from falling open. She was going to ask for twenty. “That’ll be just fine.”

  “Just one more question, if I may?”

  “Shoot.”

  Tallulah Bankhead lifted her enormous chipped glass. “How are you in the martini-making department, darling?”

  CHAPTER 7

  Bill Brockton turned out to be the sort of guy that people want to race to the nearest restaurant and fill up with potatoes and sour cream, fluffy biscuits awash in gravy, a mountain of fresh corn and a whopping slice of chocolate cake. The veins on the guy’s hand stuck out like drizzled strawberry sauce and his cheeks looked like they’d been hollowed out with an ice cream scoop.

  He smiled weakly at Gwendolyn and held his business card between his fingertips like he was afraid to touch it. He studied it longer than Gwendolyn ever had, then studied Gwendolyn even longer. “Come with me,” he murmured.

  He didn’t say another word until they were deep within a cavernous warehouse on the Warner Brothers lot. It was a good fifty feet tall and more than two hundred feet long, with a concrete floor and a single barn door to let in light. It was empty except for a team of workmen at the far end securing mattresses to the walls.

  Gwendolyn and Brockton watched the men struggle with a mattress. “Now that we seem to be in the business of making talkies,” he said, “we have to soundproof all our production stages, or the microphone will pick up every sneeze and hiccup in a three-block radius. Where did you get my card?”

  When Gwendolyn said the name ‘Eugene Hammerschmidt,’ Brockton winced.

  “Is he . . . still alive?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Exactly what do you know?” Once Gwendolyn was through explaining how she met Eugene, he asked, “And the money?”

  She considered her options. Should she confess that Eugene had only taken five hundred bucks and left her with thirty-five hundred? And if she did, would he demand she give it back? A girl’s got to eat, she decided. “Money . . . ?”

  Brockton sighed.

  He took her elbow and guided her back outside. A troupe of Middle Eastern slave girls glided past, their skirts slit all the way up to their hipbones. When they were thirty feet from the studio gate, Brockton said, “I want to thank you for taking the time to come down here and tell me that The Hammer’s okay.”

  Gwendolyn could smell another brush-off coming her way. “He told me to tell you tarnish. I suppose that’s some sort of code word?”

  Brockton smiled. “Yeah. A few years ago, we made a Ronald Colman picture here called Tarnish. It was about all sorts of people getting into all sorts of trouble. It became our in-joke for ‘Oh boy, am I in a jam!’ We figured we needed a code word once we started running bootleg around here, so we agreed on tarnish. At any rate, thanks again for dropping by.”

  He started to lead her back toward the gate, but Gwendolyn didn’t move. Brockton wrinkled his brow and shifted his weight onto the other foot.

  Gwendolyn crossed her arms knowing full well how much it lifted her bust. “Eugene promised me that if I were to contact you, and present you with your business card, and tell you the word tarnish, that you would get me a screen test.”

  “He knew better than to promise something like that.”

  “His bootlegging bosses — your bootlegging bosses — were knocking on his front door. I was the only one there who could stall them while he snuck out the back. He said that if I lied to his bosses, he would make it worth my while. He promised me you could arrange a screen test.”

  Brockton interlaced his fingers and pressed his palms to the top of his red hair. “You’re a very pretty girl, and I wish I could get you a screen test, honey, I really do. But you might as well ask me to crown you the queen of England.”

  “Eugene promised on his mother’s life.”

  “God damn it! If I was so important around here, do you think I’d be one of the schmucks hauling the bootleg? I’m just a lackey.”

  Behind Brockton a studio security guard waved through a dark blue automobile. It was longer than most and gleamed in the Hollywood sun. Gwendolyn had no idea if it was the same vehicle parked out front of Eugene’s house–the good lord knew she was no expert on anything with wheels–but as it drove past them, a last-ditch opportunity conjured itself like a genie.

  She pulled her lips into what she hoped was a knowing smile and pointed. “Do you see that there car?” she asked Broc
kton. By the time he turned around, it was no longer in sight. “It was the one parked out front of Eugene’s house that day.” Gwendolyn gave Brockton a once-over and marched after the car.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Brockton demanded. The tremor in his voice was all she needed to hear. God only knew what she would’ve said to the inhabitants of that car if he let her get that far. She was almost relieved when he grabbed her wrist and spun her around. She shot him her best Gloria Swanson glare.

  “Jesus!” he exclaimed under his breath. “Could you just — okay, okay. You girls don’t ever make it easy on a guy, do you?”

  “I took The Hammer for his word when he promised —”

  “All right, all right already! Here’s what I can do. And this really is the best I can do, take it or leave it. We’re gonna be holding a closed open call. That’s when we ask talent scouts to send along anyone they feel might have potential, but who is currently unsigned and not represented by any agent. I’m going to give you the name of a talent scout — Beau Gussington. Can you remember that?”

  “Of course! How do I contact him?”

  “No need to do that. I’m going to put you on the list. You just be sure to show up at the front gate, ten o’clock, February thirteenth. And do not be late.”

  It was more than Gwendolyn had dared hope for. She softened her face into a smile and offered her hand.

  He took it, and shook it limply. “You look mighty fine in that dress, by the way. It’s as good a choice as any to wear to the call.”

  Gwendolyn considered telling him that she had made the dress herself and had finished it that morning, but decided against it. Us movie stars, she told herself, must maintain an aura of mystery.

  She waved to the guard on her way out of the studio. Just an hour ago, she’d been a nobody with a cheap business card. And now? A little voice inside her head, sounding suspiciously like Mama’s, told her that she wasn’t nothing but a scheming actress who wasn’t above an ugly bluff. There was no telling what she’d do when she got in front of the cameras.