“Much better,” Marcia announced.
Gwendolyn opened her eyes to see the makeup girl smiling before she swiveled Gwendolyn back toward the mirror. What Gwendolyn saw in the reflection rendered her breathless.
“You like?” Marcia asked.
Is it the lighting in here? Gwendolyn wondered. The makeup? She pressed her hands together. “I’ve never looked quite like this before,” she whispered.
“It’s my job to make you look like a movie star.” Marcia bent over so that her face was next to Gwendolyn’s. “And you,” she whispered, “look like a movie star. Break a leg, honey.”
Marcia turned around to sort out her brushes and rouges while Gwendolyn continued to stare at her own reflection. How had Marcia sculpted her face like that? Her cheeks were like Garbo’s, her eyebrows like Crawford’s, and her lips like Bette Davis’. If Mama could see me now.
“Is a Gwendolyn Brick in here?”
Gwendolyn could hardly bear to take her eyes off the mirror. I’ve never felt so glamorous in my life. She glanced at a skinny guy holding a clipboard in the doorway. “I’m Gwendolyn.”
“I’m Stanley Salomons, we spoke on the telephone. Follow me, please.” He marched out of the room at a pace that left Gwendolyn scurrying to keep up. “I hope you’re a quick study,” he told her over his shoulder. “You need to learn your lines by the time we get to the soundstage. Here’s the first one: ‘That’s my sister for you. Efficiency is her middle name, and I can’t begin to tell you how annoying that is.’”
He led her over to a makeshift dressing room constructed in the corner of the soundstage. He’d written out her lines on a piece of paper, and handed it to her as he introduced the costume assistant, a middle-aged woman with a pencil stuck behind each ear. She pointed to a darling dress with a pattern of large lilacs on an off-white background. The sleeves were puffed out slightly and the skirt flared out from the waist. Gwendolyn put it on. “This thing couldn’t fit me better if I’d made it myself,” she told the costumer. The woman pointed to a pair of matching suede shoes.
Gwendolyn repeated her lines while she followed Stanley to an office set. On the left-hand side was a large smoked-glass window with the words SPADE AND ARCHER stenciled in reverse lettering. A secretary’s desk sat to one side; Lee was already seated at it.
Someone got onto a megaphone. “Mr. Huston? She’s here.”
Long-faced and intimidatingly tall, a guy in his mid thirties walked toward her, smiling as he reached out to shake her hand.
“Gwendolyn, isn’t it? My name is John Huston. I’m the director. I can’t thank you enough for making it here on such short notice. You’re replacing a rank amateur who didn’t even tell us she’d broken her leg.”
Huston pointed to the chair placed on the other side of Lee’s desk and called for the crew to clear the set. As Gwendolyn approached the desk, Lee asked, “Have you met Peter Lorre?”
A moon-faced man with bulging eyes Gwendolyn recognized from the Mr. Moto films bowed. “Hello,” he said in an oddly leering voice, and stepped aside.
“And this is Humphrey Bogart,” Lee said.
Bogart was dressed in a double-breasted pinstripe suit and a fedora with the brim folded down slightly over his face. “You live at the Garden of Allah, don’t you?” Gwendolyn was unsure how to interpret the twinkle in his eye.
“Why, yes,” Gwendolyn replied. “How did—?”
“I stayed there for a while when I was shooting The Petrified Forest. I noticed you floating around. I’m sure you get a lot of faces roaming through that joint.” Gwendolyn nodded. He smiled and said, “You look great, by the way. The camera’s going to eat you up.”
An assistant director called out, “Clear the set, please. This is a take.”
The overhead lights burst to life.
“You know your lines, sweetie?” Lee asked. Gwendolyn told her she did, but admitted she didn’t know her cue. Lee assured her the scene was fairly straightforward. “Bogart and Lorre come in through that door. Bogart gives you the once-over and he’ll turn to me and ask if there have been any messages. I’ll reply with ‘They’re on your desk as always, sugarcoated and everything.’ And that’s when you say your line.” Lee gave Gwendolyn an appreciative once-over. “He’s right—the camera’s going to eat you up.” She gave Gwendolyn’s hand a squeeze.
Marcia appeared with a brush in one hand and a frown on her face. “Those bangs.”
As Marcia fussed around with her hair, Gwendolyn realized that if she could get to see herself on the big screen just this once, then she could leave Hollywood a satisfied woman. And if she could do it over Alice’s broken leg, then all the better.
“There,” Marcia said. “Ready!” she called out into the darkness behind the curtain of light.
When the cameraman told Huston they were rolling, Gwendolyn felt a surge of enthusiasm stream through her body. She pressed her quaking hands together and tried not to think of all the harebrained attempts and sour disappointments she’d had to endure over more years than she wanted to count.
“Actors, this is a take. And . . . action!”
* * *
A thousand nights ago at a Garden of Allah party thrown to celebrate the third day of the third month of nineteen thirty-three, someone told her, “Sometimes you find yourself in front of a camera with a hundred people looking at you, a million kilowatts of light burning on you, in a costume so uncomfortable that you’d rather be walking on hot coals, and in makeup so heavy you can barely breathe. And yet, despite all those obstacles, you hit your mark, your lines come out at the right volume and with just the right nuance, and you know what to do with your hands. It’s like a Beethoven symphony.”
Gwendolyn discovered just how that felt when Humphrey Bogart opened the door to Sam Spade’s office, strode onto the set of The Maltese Falcon, and gave her the once-over.
CHAPTER 40
Marcus answered the knock on his door to find Kathryn and Gwendolyn standing on his front patio. Kathryn held a bottle of Four Roses whiskey in her hand.
“For me?” He ushered them inside.
Kathryn said nothing as she headed over to his kitchen counter.
“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” Marcus asked Gwendolyn.
Gwendolyn still radiated the glow of her day in front of the Warners cameras. She floated like cotton candy onto Marcus’ sofa. “Some things are more important than slinging tobacco to schmoes who think you’re part of the furniture.”
Marcus shifted his gaze back to Kathryn. She’d opened his cabinets now and was pulling out suitable glassware. Something was going on, and he suspected he knew what it was.
Since Ramon’s admission that he’d brought someone home from Italy, Marcus had been on a sexual binge. He avoided Café Gala and the Waldorf—the LAPD could raid those places at any time, and if you were netted in their roundup, your name appeared in the paper and you kissed your career goodbye. He stuck to shadowy back alleys, wind-swept wharfs, Griffith Park hiking trails, Pershing Square bushes, and deserted beaches. He could tell the military guys by their haircut. Grease monkeys held the smell of gasoline on their skin. Office workers had the smoothest hands. Doctors and lawyers gave themselves away by the cut of their Brooks Brothers suits. Nobody offered their name. Nobody wanted to get a cup of coffee afterwards. Nobody even said thanks. Nobody was there to be nice, they were just there to be friction.
And all the while, he kept repeating to himself what a sailor—the very first guy he’d gone to bed with—had said to him once: We’re queers. We don’t get to have dates any more than we get to have marriages or relationships or love. This is it, so learn to like it like I have. As far as Marcus was concerned, he’d tried love with Ramon, but look where that got him. The sailor was right, he concluded. All we’re entitled to is a daisy chain of faceless guys, well-practiced in the art of one-handed undoing of trousers. It wasn’t even like he enjoyed it, particularly. It was more of a compulsion, like how he imagined smoking opium.<
br />
After weeks of furtive tumbles and breathless couplings, Marcus ran out of gas. Almost overnight, he faced the fact that while a sex life of anonymous encounters was better than nothing, it was only a narrow step up, and even then, only when the weather cooperated.
These days, Marcus spent most nights at home listening to chatter and laughter wafting up from parties around the pool and games of canasta and charades in the villas around him, but he was unable to muster the enthusiasm to join them. He passed his evenings reading the longest novels he could find: Proust, Dickens, Tolstoy.
He’d just finished the fourth volume of Remembrance of Things Past when the girls knocked on his door. He watched Kathryn pour whiskey into the two largest tumblers she could find and fill a third one with Coca-Cola. She joined them at the sofa and handed them each a drink.
“I see what you’re doing,” Marcus said. “This is like when Gwennie was down in the dumps over her Scarlett screen test. But honestly, while I appreciate the gest—”
“It’s not the same at all.” Kathryn clinked her tumbler against his and took a deep gulp. “It was obvious what was going on with Gwendolyn, but with you? We have no idea and we’re not leaving until you spill it.” Marcus tried to find a polite way to tell the girls to get lost but he hesitated so long that Kathryn continued. “So, is it work? Being stuck in the B Hive? Is it the Judy Garland thing? Because it’s clearly a terrific idea and you shouldn’t give up on it.”
“Is it Ramon?” Gwendolyn asked. “Is it still Ramon? Oh, sweetie.” She cupped his face in her hands. “You’ve got to let that one go.”
“It’s not Ramon,” Marcus said from inside his whiskey tumbler. “Not completely.”
“So what is it?”
For the first week after his visit to the Remington Morgue, the William Tell outline sat on Marcus’ bedside table. Night after night it glowered at him. You going to let Hugo get away with this? it seemed to say. What about revenge? What about comeuppance? Are those balls in your fancy silk boxer shorts, or just marshmallows?
The night he heard it whispering, “You really are just a spineless cream puff of a fairy, aren’t you?” Marcus snatched it from the bedside table and took it into the kitchen. He intended to throw it into the trashcan, but somehow it ended up on top of the refrigerator, where it still sat.
Marcus took the script from the Frigidaire and dropped it on the coffee table. Kathryn leafed through it. “I thought you said William Tell was a dead duck.”
“William Tell wasn’t abandoned because nobody could make it work!” The words erupted from Marcus like water from a burst pipe. “The project was handed to Hugo, who told me he and six other guys couldn’t make a go of it, so it was dumped. But look at that outline. Nobody else’s names are on it. No notes, no suggestions, no revisions. Taggert’s signature isn’t even his.”
“So what does all that mean?” Gwendolyn asked.
“It means Hugo took the best idea I’ve ever had and buried it.”
Kathryn arched an eyebrow. “Why would he do that?”
Marcus could feel all the unexpressed fears and anxiety he kept stifled beneath booze and Proust come spilling over into his living room. “I’ll bet my last dime that whatever Hugo’s reasons are, they’re everything to do with advancing his career and stopping mine in its tracks.”
“So confront him,” Gwendolyn said.
“I’m afraid he’s my Alice Moore,” Marcus confessed, “and that he’s been sabotaging my career all along, just like she’s been doing to you. It never would have occurred to me if you hadn’t learned what Alice was up to. And if it’s true, it means he’s been playing me for a sucker this whole time, and I can’t even be trusted to choose my own friends.”
Kathryn dropped William Tell on the coffee table. He knew what she was thinking: he’d chosen her and Gwennie as friends, and that had worked out pretty well.
He flopped backwards into his chair and wished his cigarettes weren’t all the way in the bedroom. “When is all this going to get easier?”
Gwendolyn stifled a laugh. “Since when is any of this supposed to get easier?” she asked. “If you want easy, then get a job at a ball-bearings factory. Or better yet, join the navy. You get up, they tell you what to do, you go to bed, no thinking necessary.”
“What am I supposed to do now?” Marcus ran his fingers through his hair. “I had to tell Hooley I’d spend time with him at his lonely old post and help him with crossword puzzles just so he’d give me the key to the manuscript morgue. I didn’t really expect to find William Tell down there, but I did. How can I sit and let it gather dungeon dust? It’s too good an idea.”
“If you confronted him, he’d just lie,” Kathryn said. “Put it down as a learning experience, vow to never trust Hugo again, and move on to your next terrific idea.”
Easier said than done, Marcus thought.
“Listen,” Kathryn said, grabbing up their whiskey glasses, “we came here with the express purpose of getting you to join the human race again, so I say—”
A thunderous cheer boomed outside. The three of them jumped to their feet and headed for the kitchen window. Near the pool, a dozen people clustered around someone holding up a large doll.
“Is that Tallulah?” Kathryn asked. A deep, throaty laugh echoed off the villa walls around the pool. “What is she holding?”
Marcus pointed out a slim figure in a sundress of dark- and light-blue stripes. “And Melody Hope?”
“And beside her, the big girl in red,” Gwendolyn said. “That’s Bertie Kreuger.”
“You know Bertie?” Marcus asked.
“She’s at the Grove a couple of times a month. Big tipper. You know her?”
“She’s Melody’s neighbor.”
“The maneater who jumped you?” Gwendolyn turned away from the window. “Wherever Bertie is, there’s usually something outrageous going on. We have to go down there and see what’s up.”
They exited Marcus’ villa in time to see Tallulah Bankhead lead the crowd into a chant that sounded like a pack of drunken geese who had trouble finding a rhythm.
It took Marcus a moment or two to notice how many of them were holding weapons. A couple of people had carving knives. Someone had an ornate sword that looked like it was pilfered from a prop department. Donnie Stewart held up an ice pick; the woman next to him had a corkscrew in one hand and a garden trowel in the other.
So much for the quiet night at home with Proust, Marcus thought.
He trailed behind Gwendolyn as Kathryn led them around to Melody and tapped her on the shoulder. “What’s all this?”
Melody’s face lit up. “Tallulah!” she called out. “It’s Kathryn! She’s here!”
Marcus felt a pull on his arm. “Hiya, tutti-frutti!” It was Bertie. “Nice to see you again.” For a loaded heiress, Marcus didn’t think Bertie had much dress sense. Her cherry-red outfit could have come from the J.J. Newberry five-and-dime on Hollywood Boulevard. It didn’t sit too squarely across the shoulders and it made her generous hips look extra wide. But her smile was genuine and she seemed sincerely glad to see him. “Say,” she nudged him, “that plot you and Mel were cooking up with Mayer, did it work out?”
Marcus seesawed his hand. “Sort of.”
“That’s super!” she said. “Mel tells me you’re a hell of a writer.”
“Kathryn?” Tallulah’s voice bellowed over the din. “Let her through!”
The crowd parted, leaving a path to Tallulah and Agnes, who played Orson Welles’ mother in Citizen Kane. They were holding up a lumpy, four-foot-tall lady scarecrow made of pillow cases stuffed with balls of paper. Someone had outfitted it in a horrible orange-and-green-checked dress and plopped an old straw hat on it.
“What on earth—?” Kathryn asked.
“You remember Aggie, don’t you?” Tallulah said. Her words were slurred and loud, her eyes glassy and slow to blink. “Look at what we made!”
A hoarse titter rippled through the crowd.
&nb
sp; “What is it?” Kathryn asked.
“It’s an edgifie!” Tallulah declared.
Agnes, every bit as plastered as Tallulah, started to laugh so hard she could barely hold up her side of the scarecrow. “Of Louella Parsons! Isn’t it hilarious?”
Dorothy Parker stood behind the scarecrow clutching her current dachshund, a patient pooch named Robinson who seemed unperturbed by the drunken ruckus churning about him. Next to Dottie stood her husband, Alan Campbell, who led the crowd in another round of whoops and hollers, almost drowning Tallulah out.
“Aggie and I,” Tallulah said, “met up today for a very, very late breakfast.”
“More of an afternoon-tea-slash-breakfast,” Agnes put in.
“Before we knew it, Dottie and Alan had joined us, and we all got to talking about that ridiculous item in Louella’s column. The one where she called you a floozy, a Commie, and a lezzy. We all howled with laughter. I mean, really! You? Of all people?”
“We got all riled up.” Dottie started stroking Robinson’s head so hard he started to whimper, but she didn’t seem to notice. “The crabby old cow is entitled to her opinion about whether or not Kane is a decent movie, and I know it’s her job to be loyal to Hearst and all, but she crossed a line.” She gripped the arrow slung through her belt as though it was the most natural thing in the world.
“Yeah!” Agnes pumped her fist into the air. The group followed her lead.
Tallulah continued, “So we came back here and made a dummy of Louella Parsons out of some old pillow cases—”
“Don’t tell management,” Dottie stage-whispered.
“Yeah, keep it under your hat,” Tallulah said. “And now we’re going to hang the ol’ bitch from one of these trees and stab her with everything we’ve got.”
“Like a voodoo doll!” Agnes declared.
“More like a doo-doo doll,” Dottie said. The horde cheered.
Citizen Hollywood (Hollywood's Garden of Allah novels Book 3) Page 28
