On Wednesday, costumes had been needed for cavalry, peasantry, Romans, slaves, aristocratic dinner guests, and Roman soldiers – not to speak of thirty horses from Chatsworth Livery, and Socrates the Elephant. The cavalry, Emma guessed, had been mostly the known ‘riding extras’ and set them aside for last. Three Roman soldiers, ten male peasants, four male slaves, and three dinner guests had needed ‘extra large’ costumes. She copied the names, and when Millie finished the most recent batch of martyrs and brought the slips in to the back office, Emma said, ‘Mrs Katz—’
‘Millie!’ the woman corrected her with a wave. ‘For God’s sake, call me Millie. You call me Mrs Katz and I’ll think you’re talking to my mother-in-law, God forbid!’ And she made three tiny spit-noises to avert so evil a possibility.
‘Millie,’ Emma corrected herself. ‘And please, call me Emma … Bless you for letting me check this list! When you have a moment – and only when you have a moment, I see you’re run off your feet here! – could you take a look at these names and let me know which ones are regulars? Are they people you knew by sight?’
The shrewd, dark eyes twinkled. ‘Mr Gumshoe finally caught on that anybody could walk onto the lot claiming to be an extra, did he?’ She took the list, pulled a pencil out of the tight, dark bun of her hair, and scratched off twelve names. ‘Guy you’re lookin’ for white or black, honey?’
‘White.’ It hadn’t occurred to Emma to ask Madison about this, but upon reflection she felt sure the man would have mentioned it, or Cornero would have, had Gross been a man of color.
Millie scratched out two more.
A Roman soldier, four peasants, and a slave were left.
The Empress Valerna stared down from the marble height of the Imperial Box at the Coliseum (which occupied most of what had been her garden the previous week), surveying with haughty scorn the 5,000 square feet of empty sand where the Christians would be standing in two hours. ‘Come on!’ Madge exhorted her. ‘These are people who’re always telling you what an evil slut you are! These are people who’re getting what they deserve for being so fucken good all the time! Lemme see that contempt!’
Zal’s assistant Herbie Carboy – like an undernourished scarecrow in a glaringly checkered vest – darted in front of Zal’s camera with the leader board. This was take six. The camera itself hung in mid-air, mounted on a crane about two yards in front of the Imperial Box. Just out of the shot-line, the Rothstein Boys struck up Saint-Saëns’ ‘Rouet d’Omphale’. ‘Camera!’ yelled Madge. ‘Action!’
Kitty bulged her eyes and bared her teeth. ‘Well, fools,’ she snarled. ‘Where is your Redeemer now?’
‘Cut! C’mon, Kitty, you’re gonna watch ’em die, you’re not gonna eat ’em!’ Madge swept her arm in the direction of the imaginary martyrs. ‘It’s the Pettingers down there, an’ they’re beggin’ you for mercy!’
Emma returned to the base camp just within the big doors, where Chang Ming and Black Jasmine rushed to the ends of their leashes, licking their noses in adoration, and stood up against her knees to be patted. The ‘Rouet d’Omphale’ revived like the curl of a breaking wave, and a moment later Madge shouted, ‘Yeah! That’s it! You’d spit on ’em if you weren’t a lady!’
‘Well, fools,’ cried Kitty, ‘where is your Redeemer now?’
It was another two hours – closer to tea-time than lunch, though Emma unpacked her own sandwich and her thermos flask of tea at one thirty – before Kitty came down from her box, accompanied by Nicky Thaxter, in a golden wreath and the gold lamé toga which made Emma cringe. No, no, even Mr Pugh should know they didn’t have gold lamé in Rome! ‘What can I get you?’ she asked, rising.
‘Gin.’ Kitty collapsed into her chair. ‘And lots of it!’
‘Make that two, darling.’ Nicky hung his wreath over a corner of the magazine rack.
Emma unpacked the glasses from Kitty’s picnic basket, set out the thermos, then went to the table by the stage door and brought them sandwiches. As she was loading up the plate Zal’s voice asked at her elbow, ‘What’d you find?’
‘Six extra-large extras whom Millie Katz didn’t know,’ said Emma. ‘A soldier and a slave in Rome, four peasants in Ruritania.’
‘Shouldn’t be hard to count.’ Zal’s face was beaded with sweat, despite the kerchief he’d tied around his head under his cap. Unlike Kitty and Nick, he hadn’t had anyone from make-up fluttering over to him to touch up powder and Motion Picture Yellow between shots. ‘We’re gonna do the Christians long-shots this afternoon, and nothing scheduled for tonight, may wonders never cease. Can you be back here at eight? It’s all indoors tomorrow. Nick gets to strangle Kitty and after thirteen takes to get the chariot scene right this morning I don’t blame him one bit. God knows how long that’ll take.’
‘You’re exhausted—’ Emma began to protest, and Zal grinned.
‘Hey, I’ve been waiting for weeks for a chance to take you to the movies. I just didn’t think I was gonna have to run the projector myself.’
Emma chuckled, and started to shake her head again, but Zal’s face turned quietly grave. ‘After what happened Saturday night,’ he said, ‘I don’t think we can wait.’
‘No.’ Emma touched the scab on her temple where the shot-in window-glass had cut it. ‘No.’
For almost another hour Madge rehearsed the martyrs being brought into the Coliseum while Zal and Emma, Kitty and Nick, joked and flirted over gin, tea, and sandwiches. Most of the morning had been spent filming the lions as they’d snarled and paced behind the barred grate at the side of the arena. ‘Come on, Madge,’ Gren Torley had coaxed, ‘the poor guys are starving!’
‘Good,’ retorted Madge. ‘I want ’em to look starving! If they eat now they’ll fall asleep on me, and we gotta have ’em lookin’ mean in the background.’
Herr Volmort, more than ever resembling something that had crept out of a sepulcher in the middle of the night, descended on the base camp, to powder the Imperial couple and touch up their hair (‘Does that spit-curl look the way it did this morning, darling?’ inquired Nick anxiously), and Emma was left alone again, with Buttercreme and Black Jasmine on her lap and Chang Ming panting happily at her feet.
The lions glared at the tiny dogs. ‘Yeah, I’m sorry, boys,’ Torley apologized, and put his hand through the bars to scratch Big Joe’s ear. The lion licked his hand disconsolately.
Among the extras, Darlene Golden seemed to shimmer like an orchid in a bed of geraniums – a portion of the morning, between lions, had been spent filming close-ups of her, reacting to the Evil Valerna’s triumphant scorn. Zal checked the reflector dedicated to keeping a luminous aura on the beautiful slave-girl’s face and hair, and gave Herbie a brief lesson in its more subtle effects. The Rothstein Boys left their pinochle game behind the dais, and now plunged into ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, as the Christians filed onto the bloodied sands of the arena to meet their destinies. At the top of the stairway, the Temptress of Babylon flung back her head with a victorious sneer. ‘Well, fools,’ she cried, for the two hundredth time that day, ‘where is your Redeemer now?’
‘You’re crowding up back there!’ roared Madge. ‘What’d I tell you about crowding up? Anybody’d think you wanted to get chomped by those lions!’
The Christians retreated into the passageway.
Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war …
‘Action!’
‘Well, fools, where is your Redeemer now?’
‘You frikkin’ idiots, stop at the frikkin’ tape! We’re payin’ for those cats, we gotta see ’em in the background!’
The Christians retreated into the passageway again.
‘Action!’
‘Well, fools, where is your Redeemer now?’
Among them, Darlene looked sulky whenever the camera wasn’t actually rolling. Emma noticed that Frank Pugh did not put in an appearance on the set.
At four, she hooked up the leashes on all three dogs, and took them for a stroll around the Hacienda.
Returning, she met Kitty and Nick in the stage doorway, both resplendent in gaudy kimonos, his more vivid than hers. (That gold lamé must be excruciating under the lights …) Kitty flung out a hand, tossed her head, sneered at Emma and cried, ‘Well, fool, where is your Redeemer now?’
‘In the office,’ returned Emma, curtseying deeply. ‘Preparing the paperwork to send you to Hell, your Majesty. Do you need help getting changed?’
By the time Emma had gathered all Kitty’s usual impedimenta and arranged with one of the guards to have it taken to the car, Kitty had changed clothes, cold-creamed the camera make-up from her face, and completely reapplied foundation, powder, rouge, and kohl, despite the fact that she was going straight home. She was just putting on her mascaro when Emma climbed the steps to the temporary dressing room – shivering a little, still, as she passed the door of the suite in which Rex Festraw had died.
‘Peggy’s going to meet us at the house, darling,’ announced Kitty. ‘I’m too absolutely ruined to do anything but play a little pinochle, but she’s stopping at Lee Chang’s, so we’ll have a decent supper anyway … Did you find out anything last night?’ she added, as they descended to the car. ‘I’m sorry I was too devastated this morning to ask. We didn’t finish filming until nearly midnight, and if I ran down that corridor once I ran down it three hundred times …’ Beneath the flawless concealment of foundation and powder, Emma could see the smudges of exhaustion under the huge, brown eyes. ‘Did you have a nice time? Isn’t Ambrose a pet?’
‘Mr Crain is a lovely gentleman.’ Emma smiled. ‘And a very nice dancer.’
‘I must say I like a man with a little more oomph,’ admitted Kitty, slipping in behind the Packard’s leather-upholstered wheel – which was, Emma reflected, putting it mildly. ‘But at least he doesn’t step on your feet, like Tor would – you remember Tor Westlake, darling? That absolutely divine looking creature at Monarch? I was utterly ready to fall passionately in love with Tor until he stepped on my feet dancing …’
‘I felt a little sorry for him,’ said Emma softly. ‘Mr Crain, I mean. He sounded so wistful, when he spoke of … well, not his family, but a family.’
‘I’d take almost any family,’ declared Kitty, ‘over that pack of ghouls he’s told me about. I thought I was bad, asking for two hundred dollars a month in alimony even if Clayton was a lot fonder of his valet than he was of me – though I will admit Duke was gorgeous! But I didn’t take away Clayton’s home, which I probably could have, if we’d really gone to court over it …’
She shook her head, pushing aside the recollection of her most recent spell of matrimony. ‘And anyway, I wouldn’t have done that to his mother. Clayton’s mother is the sweetest person …’
Emma tried to estimate when this interlude could have been, as Kitty went on, ‘Did he tell you about his villa? It’s in the National Forest. He showed me pictures – of the way it looked when it was in Italy, I mean, before they took it apart. You’ll love it, dear! We’ll leave the minute the picture is wrapped.’
‘I’m sure it’s beautiful.’
And I may not see it. I may be on a train heading east – heading home. Thinking … What? Thinking, ‘Whew, that’s over. I shattered the mirror and sailed down the river to Camelot and here I am, wet and bedraggled, going home at last to Shalott … Going home at last to Ithaca.’
Kitty swung the big car up Ivarene, and her red mouth, more generous than the fashionable Cupid-bow pout in which it was painted, tightened. ‘I just hope … Well, that somebody finds out about what really happened. About who really sent me that note that was supposed to be from Eliot, and who brought Rex out here from New York, and why they wanted to shoot him in my dressing room. I mean, it’s all very well to have everyone thinking what a femme fatale and woman of mystery I am … Oh, Emma, did I tell you? Desiree Darrow planned to fly a golden aeroplane over Venice Beach and toast everyone there in champagne, only she got Jackson White – the stuntman – to teach her how to fly and wrecked his plane before she even got it off the runway … and nobody even mentioned her, in letters to the editor or anything, and Jackson is just furious. And she got two black eyes out of it and California Studios has had to put back filming Maiden of Paris for a week …’
Her sparkling glee faded suddenly. ‘But the thing is, I want to know, one way or the other. I need to know, because once someone starts doing crazy things because they’re jealous, they only get worse. And I don’t want to spend the next five years looking over my shoulder every time Frank starts to think I might be seeing someone like Ambrose. Or Dusty over at Fox. Or Kenny at Independent.’ She sighed. ‘Or whatever-his-name is, that beautiful waiter at the Townhouse …’
It was on Emma’s lips to say, I think Mr Crain loves you … But she didn’t. So far as she could tell, Kitty’s abiding emotional love was reserved for her friends, and her dogs, not for the regiments of men she flirted with, danced with, slept with, and discarded like laddered stockings. And why not? she reflected. Kitty’s extraordinary beauty, Jim had told her once, had made her little more than a commodity since the age of fourteen. If she’d been plain, he had said, a little sadly, our parents wouldn’t have cared much where she went, or with who. But because of how she looked, they treated her like she was a bitch in heat. They’d lock her in at night, pound her with every story in the Bible – Eve and Jezebel and Potiphar’s trampy wife – every time she’d look at a boy in the street …
No wonder she distrusted love.
And why, perhaps, she failed to recognize it in men.
Peggy Donovan – laden with cardboard cartons of Chinese food and blithering with news about the new picture she would be starting at Enterprise next week – was waiting for them on the porch. Emma shared a little egg fu yung with them, fed the dogs, and left the two actresses and three Pekinese together as the sun was westering to walk the three-quarters of a mile down to Vine again, to take the streetcar to the studio. The last of the Christian martyrs were departing – traces of blood and arena sand in the edges of their hair – but the gates were still open. Arnie the night guard greeted her with a wave. Zal, looking like ten sweaty miles of bad road, greeted her with a grin and a kiss as she entered the little screening room at the back of the Hacienda. ‘Our girl all right?’
‘The plan is for her to spend the evening playing two-handed pinochle with Peggy Donovan and go to bed early.’ Emma followed the cameraman down to the three rows of seats that occupied the center of a chamber which had clearly started life as a dining room. ‘Something I wouldn’t mind doing myself. I hope to goodness they don’t have four gins apiece and suddenly decide it’s a good night to go to the Coconut Grove.’
‘You can’t be her mother,’ pointed out Zal.
‘No.’ Emma sighed, and relaxed. ‘Nor would I want to be.’ She sank into the chair, glad of the room’s quiet. Glad of the stillness of the lot outside in the mild spring twilight, save for the rumble of far-off traffic on Sunset Boulevard. ‘And under ordinary circumstances I wouldn’t think twice. But …’
‘Kitty Flint’ – Zal used her legal name – the name of her most recent husband – ‘has a brain the size of a fingernail-clipping, but she knows how to take care of herself. And I’m pretty sure she knows how much use Peggy Donovan would be to her in an emergency. Now sit down,’ he added, ‘and let’s see what we’ve got for last Wednesday.’
He retreated to the projection room, switching off the lights as he went.
Emma had seen dailies before, the raw hanks of moving imagery from which stories were later woven by the editors. It was rather like watching the filming that afternoon: dozens of nearly-identical scenes, of Dirk Silver and his cohort arriving at the empress’s garden, of Dirk (a.k.a. Marcus Maximus) gathering Valerna in his arms while she fought against him and against her own passions. Of Valerna in her garden, coming upon the beautiful Philomela also (albeit unwillingly) in Maximus’s arms, slapping her and condemning her to die. Over and over and over again. The beautiful
Philomela flinched before she was slapped. The beautiful Philomela’s hair got caught in one of the empress’s bracelets. One of the Praetorians in the background scratched his armpit. There was a coffee cup on the plinth of the statue of David (Emma didn’t know which was worse – the presence of the cup or the presence of a Renaissance statue in first-century Rome).
Two of the slaves were big men, well deserving of the appellation ‘XLge’.
No Roman was nearly that size.
Then over an hour of watching the mob of peasants outside King Romberg’s palace. They rattled scythes and cleavers and clubs, and shouted for the blood of the stinking aristocrats, until the cavalry charged in and scattered them. Larry Palmer was a much more laissez-faire director than Madge Burdon – or there was less precision required in the teeming mob – but he had two or three wide shots in which the camera panned the mob assembled in the courtyard. Emma easily spotted the three ‘XLges’.
Someone – Emma checked her notebook when the lights went up, and identified the name of the missing Extra-Large Praetorian as Eddie Crump – had checked out cuirass, helmet, cloak, shield, and greaves, and had not reported for duty. He’d checked them back in at three forty-five, an hour and a half before any of the other Praetorian extras had.
‘I saw him,’ she said suddenly, as Zal appeared in the projection-room door. ‘When we were looking for Kitty. He was over near Wardrobe with the peasants.’
Zal raised his brows.
Scandal in Babylon Page 19
