The Garden on Sunset

by Martin Turnbull

  CHAPTER 26

  Gwendolyn caught a single poppy seed in her fingernail and scraped it along the starched white tablecloth to the base of her fork. She picked out another and pushed it next to the first. Only forty-three seeds to go. She knew the exact number because she had just scraped each poppy seed, one at a time, to the base of her teaspoon. Ten seeds later, she checked her wristwatch. One-thirty. The waiter appeared with a sympathetic smile. “More bread?”

  She smiled sadly. “I don’t think he’s coming. Do I owe you anything?”

  The waiter shook his head. “He should have his head examined for standing up a tomato like you.”

  She smiled her thanks and shrugged her shoulders. Well, if that don’t beat all, she thought. Here I am, a cigarette girl ready to outsmart a studio executive at his own game, and he doesn’t even show.

  She picked up her handbag and was standing up to leave when a voice behind her said, “Thank goodness you’re still here.” Anderson McRae appeared in front of her, windswept and out of breath. “My automobile clapped out on me all the way down past Wilcox. I am so sorry to have kept you waiting.” He patted down his hair, called the waiter and smiled at Gwendolyn as he ordered two cups of London tea. His eyes began to wander around the room, taking in the details that Gwendolyn had studied for half an hour.

  Lunch at the Montmartre Café was McRae’s idea, and Gwendolyn was excited to meet him there. The Montmartre had been Hollywood’s first nightclub a decade or so ago. Movie magazines eagerly reported whenever Rudolf Valentino won tango competitions or Joan Crawford out-Charlestoned everyone in the room. Such was its fame that Gwendolyn Brick in Hollywood, Florida, had known everything there was to know about the Montmartre Café long before her train pulled into the Southern Pacific station.

  But as she waited for Mr. McRae to show, she realized that while McRae was half an hour late, she was five years too late. California’s relentless sun had faded the burgundy velvet curtains framing the windows over Hollywood Boulevard. The tired lace sheers were the color of soured milk. Even the burgundy-flocked gold wallpaper was dowdy and old-fashioned now, as fussy and out of date as the chandeliers.

  The waiter appeared with a matching pair of cups and saucers and took their orders; lobster salad with Roquefort dressing for him, cream cheese and tomato sandwiches with a side of coleslaw for her. McRae raised his teacup and said, “Here’s to faded velvet.”

  Gwendolyn took a sip and immediately spat it out. “I thought you ordered tea!”

  “I did.”

  “This is no tea! This tastes . . . like . . .”

  “Gin. Beefeater, from London.”

  Gwendolyn pushed the cup and saucer away from her with a disapproving face. “If this is what gin tastes like then they were right to outlaw it.”

  McRae blushed so deeply that it was almost endearing. “I’m so very sorry,” he stammered. “I assumed that a girl like you —”

  “Like . . . me?” She shot him a glare designed to hook him hard and make him squirm.

  “What I mean is a girl who works where you work —”

  “Prohibition is still on, last time I looked.”

  Gwendolyn had always been in two minds about Prohibition. The temperance movement was largely driven by women ground into perpetual poverty by their lousy husbands drinking away the contents of every pay packet. As the daughter of a hopeless lush, Gwendolyn couldn’t help but sympathize. On the other hand she was enough of a realist to know that banning something like booze was a colossal waste of time and effort. But it wasn’t in Gwendolyn’s immediate interests for McRae to know that.

  “Yes, yes, of course. I ought never have presumed.” He called the waiter over and ordered Gwendolyn a lemonade.

  “May we talk business now?” Gwendolyn said.

  McRae broke out into that rarest Hollywood phenomena–a smile which didn’t look like it was practiced in front of the mirror. “Not one for small talk, are you?”

  “This is a business luncheon, is it not?”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  Gwendolyn looked at Anderson McRae, in his meticulously pressed charcoal gray suit and his cobalt blue tie with matching pocket square. Had he guessed that she’d arrived at this luncheon fully prepared to comply with whatever overtures a man like him was bound to make? The trick was to make him think that he had painted her into a corner. She swiped away her poppy seeds. “Why did you tell me to give my name as Corinne Grimes? Why couldn’t I give my actual name?”

  “Sorry for the intrigue,” McRae said. “I’m always on the lookout for new faces, and I give my card to a lot of people. I use a code to keep track of where I met them. Corinne Grimes tells me I saw you at the Cocoanut Grove. It’s just a memory jogger.”

  “I see,” Gwendolyn said, “I thought perhaps you’d already decided to change my name.”

  “I’d never do that. Gwendolyn is too lovely a name to lose, and it suits you perfectly. I’d fight tooth and nail any front office bonehead who thought we should change you from a Gwendolyn to a Corinne.”

  “How very gallant of you, Mr. McRae. I thank you.”

  Gwendolyn let fly with one of her giggly laughs that always seemed to impress guys, but it flew on right past McRae. He adjusted his perfect Windsor knot. “Let’s not waste time playing games,” he said, suddenly serious.

  The waiter placed McRae’s lobster salad in front of Gwendolyn. It reeked like a hamper full of gym socks. McRae swapped their plates and she stared at her sandwich for a moment. She came here to play the game the way the men play it. This is a business, she’d told herself on the Red Car the whole way up Hollywood Boulevard, and in business, people scratch each other’s backs all the time. Nothing personal; just business. And besides, this McRae fella wasn’t altogether repulsive. Far from it, in fact. He dressed well and had a decent haircut and a professional shave, so he was likely to have clean sheets on his bed. Plenty of girls have done a lot more for a lot less. But now that she was seated opposite him, and the moment had arrived for push to come to shove, she doubted that she had it in her. No! She scolded herself. You’re a career girl. She put her sandwich down.

  “So, this is the usual Hollywood back-scratching routine, right?” she said.

  McRae swallowed a bite of lobster he hadn’t finished chewing. “Excuse me?”

  “You have what I want: entrée into a Hollywood studio. And I have what you want.” She pushed her bosom his way and wondered what color his bed sheets were.

  The man’s eyes widened and his face blushed deep red. Tiny beads of sweat broke out along his hairline and they each caught the light of the grimy chandelier over Gwendolyn’s left shoulder. Gwendolyn thought, Oh my goodness, have I just shoved my bust in the face of the only moral casting director in Hollywood?

  McRae dropped his lobster fork into his salad. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

  “You’re head of casting at RKO.”

  “Yes, that is true. But my reputation usually precedes me.” He pressed his forehead with his napkin; it came away blotted with sweat. “I thought everyone knew I’m the one guy in casting who girls like you are safe from.”

  Gwendolyn felt the heat from the blush blooming on her cheeks. So this guy was like Marcus. Not that she was sure Marcus was queer but in the four years she’d known him, she’d never seen him pursue a woman. “Oh. I see.”

  He offered her a relieved smile and dug into his salad again. “Good. I’m glad we got that out of the way. Now that we’re on the level, there’s something I need you to do for me.”

  Gwendolyn felt herself land back on square one with a thud. She couldn’t imagine what kind of favors she’d have to do for guys who didn’t want to sleep with her. “And what might that be?”

  “I have a friend in need.”

  Of course you do, she thought ruefully.

  “This is going to sound tacky, but I can assure you it’s not. Well, perhaps it is. But there is no requirement for you to . . . how shall I put
this?”

  “Put out?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So this is not a casting couch situation?”

  “No, Miss Brick, I give you my word, it is not. My friend has discovered that his wife has been cheating on him since their honeymoon, and he wants to divorce her. His wife’s family is old money, though. Blue Book, society. They’re not about to admit that their golden daughter is at fault, so they’re laying a bunch of cash on him to testify he’s the one who strayed. But of course there must be proof that he’s stepped outside the bonds of matrimony and —”

  Gwendolyn held up her hand to stop him. “I get it. You need me to pose with your pal to make it look like he’s being caught in the act.”

  He grinned sheepishly. “Something like that.”

  “And in return, you will . . . ?”

  “I hold a key that opens all sorts of doors.”

  Gwendolyn gave McRae a tight smile and wondered if girls who wanted to break into the millinery business had to go through this hooey.

  CHAPTER 27

  Marcus knew that between the bank closings, job losses, and bread lines stretching from Culver City to Canada, 1932 had been pretty dismal, and he had been pretty lucky. He still had his job, a roof over his head, and enough to eat, which put him ahead of millions of Americans. All the same, he was depressed to end 1932 without publishing a single story. He believed the one about the stagehand would be the one to break him through the brick wall of Nope, but everyone had knocked it back, even the Detroit Athletic Club News. How fussy, he mused, could they choose to be?

  His family had been on his mind lately, too. How were they faring? Five kids were a lot to feed. Did any of them wonder how he was getting on the same way he wondered about them?

  Gwendolyn was working and Kathryn was at the new Rodeo Drive Brown Derby–she’d wrangled a one-night job so that she could stalk Billy Wilkerson some more–so Marcus found himself alone on New Year’s Eve and decided to end the year with a quart of Portuguese gin and wake up in 1933.

  Marcus was plunking ice cubes into a tumbler when Tallulah Bankhead rapped on his door. She swept into his room in a long gown of dark red silk and a double strand of pearls that reached her waist. “This is your lucky night!” she declared, tossing back her teak brown hair before it got caught up in her lipstick. “I need an escort for tonight, and I could think of nobody better than vous.”

  “I’ve kind of got plans —”

  “Whatever they are, they won’t be as much fun as the evening I’ve got in mind.” She cast her gaze around his cramped room and landed on the bottle of bootleg. “Is that gin?” She grasped her pearls. “Real gin?”

  “It had better be, for the price I paid.” Marcus considered the full week’s worth of tips he’d forked over to Bob Benchley’s bootlegger was a sound investment in unconsciousness.

  She grabbed the bottle like it was an oxygen tank at the bottom of the Pacific. “Oh, my darling man, this is gold!”

  Marcus looked at Tallulah and wondered if Kathryn had sent her over knowing that he’d be spending the evening alone.

  Tallulah couldn’t pull her eyes from Marcus’ bottle. “Whatever you paid for it, I’ll repay you, plus five dollars and all your drinks at B.B.B.’s.”

  “Who is B.B.B.?”

  Tallulah stared at Marcus slyly. “Oh, come now, Marcus, my darling, let us not be coy. We both know that I know that you know all about B.B.B.’s Cellar.”

  Marcus held Tallulah’s eyes as long as he could, trying to decipher her meaning. He couldn’t. “I really don’t.”

  She tucked the bottle into the crook of one arm and wrapped the other around his neck. “In that case, you gorgeous, darling man, it’s high time you did.”

  Like most speakeasies, B.B.B.’s Cellar didn’t want to be found. There was no sign on the door, no window, no indication that it even existed. Tallulah led Marcus down the shadowy concrete steps and opened a heavy door onto a packed, smoky room humming with boozed-up chatter. A thunderous WHACK! greeted them. Marcus jumped and Tallulah laughed throatily along with the crowd. “Your intention was to get hammered tonight, wasn’t it?” Marcus looked around and saw small wooden hammers on every table.

  “Yoohoo!” Tallulah called to a round-faced blond with his back against the wall.

  His date was a pretty brunette whose jaw line, Marcus decided, must be the envy of every man in the place. Next to her sat a man with dark, slicked-back hair and an ill-fitting suit. He was handsome in a pale, underfed sort of way and was surveying the room the way a shark surveys a school of tuna. The blond guy beckoned them over.

  As Tallulah and Marcus threaded their way to her friends, everyone picked up their hammers again. WHACK! A pair of heavyset women with cropped hair and unplucked eyebrows filled the doorway. This business with the hammers was unnerving.

  Tallulah introduced Marcus to William Haines. Marcus raised his eyebrows and shook the man’s hand appreciatively. Haines was a hugely popular actor who’d left MGM abruptly the year before and, despite the media uproar, no one was sure why. “You know Joan, don’t you?” William said, introducing his date. Joan Crawford extended her hand and Marcus shook it gladly. Tallulah tucked in next to Joan and they put their heads together, chatting and laughing. William introduced the shark as Howard; he perused Marcus and returned to his school of tuna.

  A waitress brought two more hammers and took their orders. Marcus turned his hammer over in his hands. This isn’t the evening you had planned, he told himself, but it could be a whole lot better if you decide to enjoy yourself.

  Haines leaned in so Marcus could hear him. “It’s a B.B.B.’s tradition,” he said. “Every time someone comes in, you bang it as loud as you can. It’s awfully disconcerting when you’re the one being hammered, but it’s hysterical when you’re not. And you’re just in time to catch Karyl Norman,” Haines added brightly, like he was imparting a delicious secret.

  “Who’s that?” Marcus asked.

  “She’s only the greatest entertainer of her generation,” Haines said. “In her field. We’re here tonight because I have the inside scoop that Karyl is going to do Joan in rain!”

  Marcus wasn’t sure what that meant, but Joan looked like she was having a good time. She sat back from the table and took long drags from her cigarette. Her hair was a shade Marcus had never seen before, somewhere between brown and black. It was bobbed and softly marcelled at the sides. Her mouth was wide and seemed to be permanently arranged in a furtive smile. Her gorgonzola-blue eyes were huge and unblinking, as though she didn’t want to miss a moment.

  A round of drinks arrived — something dry that resembled brandy, but not closely enough to make Marcus glad he’d sold Tallulah his gin. The lights dimmed and the crowd cheered as a pink spotlight lit the tiny two-foot-square stage. A tatty olive curtain parted for a creature the likes of which Marcus had never seen. She stepped into the light and the crowd greeted her with a deafening WHACK!

  She was tall and commanding, more like a general than a speakeasy entertainer. She wore a knee-length black and white checked dress with large triangular lapels framing an impressive bosom. As the crowd drenched her in whoops and whistles, it occurred to Marcus that this Karyl Norman was dressed as Joan Crawford in her latest picture, Rain. Marcus didn’t have the heart to look at Joan.

  Karyl raised her arms, and the pianist pounded out the opening chords of that new Ethel Waters song Marcus had been hearing around the Garden lately, “Stormy Weather.” The performer had a deep voice, quite powerful, and easily managed to fill the room. At the word “rainin’,” the hammers walloped anew. The whole thing struck Marcus as a little cruel. The critics had blown Rain their collective raspberry and it had notoriously–and very publicly–flopped. He stole a look in Crawford’s direction and was surprised that her smile was as broad as the Hollywoodland sign. Karyl followed “Stormy Weather” with “I Found a Million Dollar Baby in a Five and Ten Cent Store” and “I Need a Little Sugar in my Bowl,” then l
eft the stage to a raucous tidal wave of hammer blows.

  As she was leaving, a group of swells in tuxedos entered the room and Marcus did a double take. One of them was Ramon Novarro.

  It had been more than two years since that night on the Montfalcone. Marcus had managed to convince himself that he didn’t mind that nothing had come of their fleeting encounters. It was enough to have met him, he told himself. But seeing him standing in the doorway, slim and dashing on New Year’s Eve, made Marcus reassess all those furtive trysts with men whose names he’d learned not to ask, and whose faces he’d learned not to see. Who was he trying to fool? Admit it, he told himself, you’ve been dreaming for this moment. Marcus silently blessed Tallulah Bankhead and sat up straight in his seat.

  “Look, there’s Ben-Hur,” Tallulah cried.

  “Don’t you mean Ben-Her?” Billy Haines asked.

  Joan Crawford elbowed Haines in the side and he howled. “Must you be like that with everyone?” she asked. “I’ve met Ramon a whole bunch of times. We did that picture together, Across to Singapore, remember? He’s very nice. Let’s invite him over.”

  “Where’s he going to sit, Joan?” Haines gestured around their packed table. “On your face?”

  “I think he’d much prefer Marcus’,” Tallulah said. Everyone laughed, including the shark, who hadn’t said a word yet. “Oh, come on,” Tallulah said, playfully slapping Marcus on the arm, “you wouldn’t say no to an invitation like that, would you?”

  Marcus felt the color drain from his face. This room was full of queers, he realized. Not all queers meet behind bushes and at the end of damp, dark alleys. They have their own speakeasies where they can be with their own kind. He felt like he was watching the Red Sea part. How did I not know this? He wiped the bathtub brandy from his chin and turned to Tallulah, pointing to the tiny stage. “That woman wasn’t a woman, was she?”

  Haines let out a gleeful yip and collapsed in giggles. Joan leaned forward and said, “Oh, Tallulah! You might have warned him.”