“And you, my dear,” Tallulah slurred, “should be the first to plunge one in.” She held up a meat cleaver and it caught the light from the windows in the main house and flared like a flashbulb.
Marcus felt Gwendolyn’s breath in her ear. “I’m going to get our bread knife and pretend it’s Alice.”
“I thought you got your revenge on her,” Marcus said.
“I did, but now I think she had me taken off the books at Central Casting. I never got one lousy call.” The light in her eyes then changed as though she was weighing something in her mind. She pulled him clear of the crowd and guided him to the bench outside his villa. “Can I tell you something?”
“Anything.”
“In a funny sort of way, I’m grateful to Alice. Don’t get me wrong—I hope a crosstown bus whacks her in the rump and then backs up until it breaks her other leg—but I’ve had time to think about everything. And it made me realize I’ve been trying to get into the studios for all the wrong reasons.”
She watched the mob lined up to stab at the Louella effigy, then she smiled and looked back at Marcus.
“All this time, I’ve been fooling myself that I wanted to be an actress, but I realize now what I really wanted was to be a star.”
“What’s the difference?” Marcus knew what the difference was, but wanted to hear it from Gwendolyn.
“An actress wants to create. She’s an artist. But a star just wants to be noticed.”
Marcus slid his arm around Gwendolyn’s shoulder. “Oh, my dear sweet pea. With your looks, and the way you dress and carry yourself, trust me: you have been noticed.”
Gwendolyn shook her head and smiled weakly. “No, I’ve been lusted after. And that’s peachy keen as far as it goes.” She pushed out her chest. “Menfolk have been hankering for me since these puppies started to sprout. But that’s not what I mean.”
Gwendolyn paused. Her eyes were now on Errol Flynn, standing at the outer edge of the crowd with David Niven; they both held pocketknives in their hands. Errol was dressed all in white but for a splotch of red wine down the side of his tight shirt.
“So learning about all of Alice’s shenanigans made you realize this?” Marcus asked.
“Ain’t that a kick in the pants?” She paused, her eyes still on Errol. “Well, that and sitting on the set at Warners. We were waiting for the director to say “action” on the last take of the day when it occurred to me that this was all I ever really wanted. The chance to walk into a theater and look up at the screen at myself and think, Wow! Look at you, holding your own against Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre. And once I’ve done that, I can happily go sailing off into the sunset.”
“What a shame you didn’t figure this out ten years ago,” Marcus said. “You might have saved yourself a lot of time and effort.”
“And embarrassment.” Gwendolyn smiled. “Oh, I know everybody around here thinks of me as the kooky girl with all the nutty schemes.”
“I wouldn’t say that.” Marcus suspected that’s exactly what most people thought, but he could see that the two of them were more alike than he ever realized. For every billboard she’d fallen off and movie set she’d set fire to, he’d broken into a secret script storage room and caused an uproar at Hearst castle. “You’re the big-hearted gal who’s not afraid to go after her dreams,” he told her.
“Oh, I don’t care none,” she said, her holly-green eyes clear with honesty. “I guess I am kinda nutty. The way I figure it, I got me some good dinner party stories to tell when I get to Hawaii.”
Marcus coveted the contented look in his friend’s eyes. She’d figured herself out, and what she wanted—or at least what she didn’t want. It seemed to Marcus that was half the battle.
“What are you going to do about Hugo?” she asked abruptly.
Marcus shrugged. “Maybe Kathryn’s right. I should chalk it up to a learning experience.”
“For what it’s worth,” Gwendolyn said, “I don’t agree with her.”
Marcus stared at her, surprised. “You got your revenge on Alice, even though it doesn’t sound like it brought you any satisfaction.”
“She was trying to stop me from doing something I never really wanted in the first place. And even if I did, what the heck does it matter now? I’m thirty—that streetcar has done run off its rails. But you!” She nudged him with her shoulder. “You’re the real deal. The picture you wrote for Marion Davies? And the one you did with Scott Fitzgerald? To say nothing of Strange Cargo. They’ve all been super. You deserve to have your name up there in the credits, so if I were you, I wouldn’t let anybody stand in your way.”
Marcus leaned over and planted a kiss on Gwendolyn’s cheek. He was about to tell her he wished she wasn’t moving to Hawaii when she walloped him with another question he didn’t see coming.
“Who’s Doris?”
His mouth dropped open. “Where did that come from?”
“Kathryn told me about that night at the Oscars. She was coming back from the ladies’ in time to see you chase after some girl, calling her Doris. Apparently, you bring her name up a lot when you get really plastered, too.”
Marcus watched Tallulah’s mob hack at the scarecrow. He could almost feel each blow. “Doris is my sister.”
He’d never spoken about the family he’d been forced to leave behind when his father ran him out of McKeesport. It was too painful, too wrenching, so he’d done his best to not dwell on them. But no amount of booze or anonymous sex had ever wiped them away. They’d always lurked in the back row, refusing to leave the theater of his mind.
He pictured Doris’ freckled face with her gappy teeth and the ubiquitous hair ribbon tied to one side. “I was the oldest and she was the youngest. She’d follow me around everywhere. I used to call her Shoupy the Shadow. I know how crazy this sounds—she was ten years old when I left—but lately everywhere I go, I think I see her.”
Gwendolyn ran her finger along the edge of the wooden bench. “Ever thought of writing to her?”
“Nah. She’d be married with a bunch of kids by now. Besides, she probably doesn’t even remember me.”
“You think you’re that easy to forget?” Marcus smiled for the first time in too long. “Speaking as a sister, if I’d lost Monty and umpteen years later I got a letter from him, nothing would make me happier.” The crowd vented its bile with another roar. “And speaking as a friend, I think you shouldn’t let Hugo get away with whatever it is he’s up to.”
“HEY!” Kathryn stood thirty feet away, near the edge of the group. She held a cleaver in her right hand and waved it to get the two of them to join her. Her face was flushed with the same indignation as the horde around her.
Marcus studied Tallulah’s effigy. Superimposed over the frowning black crayon face, he pictured Hugo staring back at him, his lips curled up in a condescending snarl.
Agnes grabbed the pocketknife out of Bertie’s hand. “Citizen Kane is the best goddamned movie ever made!” she declared. “If Louella Parsons is so blind or just so damned stupid she can’t see that, then the bitch deserves to die!” She plunged the blade deep into Louella’s chest.
The crowd cheered its approval—more than a couple of dozen people were now scattered under the Alla tree next to the pool. The slanting late-afternoon light had ebbed into a fiery dusk and lights from inside the villas flickered on, one by one. A few chrome hipflasks were being passed around, fueling the wrath. Somebody handed Tallulah a length of twine; Dottie’s husband knotted it around Louella’s neck and slung it over one of the stronger branches.
Dottie laughed. “We’re just a couple of flaming torches away from a Frankenstein movie.”
Agnes Moorhead led the battle cry. “Stab the witch! Stab the witch!” and the whole crowd chanted along with her.
But Marcus knew the Parsons effigy could easily have been Hearst, which would have served the same purpose. The procession of people who streamed through the Garden of Allah’s ever-revolving doors all had one thing in common. Th
ey were here to make art, be it with words, costumes, actions, light, or music. That’s what was really igniting this crowd’s ire. Hearst didn’t care two figs for free speech or art. All he and his studio overlord cohorts cared about was newspapers in hands, butts in seats, and coins in vaults. Whether Orson Welles had made a great movie or not wasn’t the point; the point was that he should be allowed to bring to the screen whatever film he felt moved to. Marcus’ heart quickened at the thought of William Tell sitting on his coffee table. No other movie he’d worked on made his pulse throb the way William Tell did.
“It makes me no different from Welles.”
Kathryn turned to him. “What did you say?”
Marcus contemplated the cleaver in her hand, then evoked Hugo’s face over the Louella effigy. He grabbed the cleaver from Kathryn and swung it above his head. As he felt it sink into the stuffed pillow case, he let out a harsh, guttural grunt. I can’t let him get away with this.
CHAPTER 41
Kathryn leaned against the dark teak paneling and ran her fingers along the string of pearls around her neck, wishing she’d put more thought into her shoes. Three-inch heels had been a terrible choice for lurking like a mugger behind an enormous ostrich fern in the clubby foyer of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
As the summer of 1941 wore on, it looked like Citizen Kane was going to lose money, and nobody was happier about that than Louella Parsons. Every day, Parsons took the opportunity to quote disappointing box office figures, a dip in RKO stocks, or some difficulty Orson Welles was having in putting together his next project.
Then overnight, it was like someone had pulled a switch and the bad guy in all this was Kathryn Massey. The allegations of Kathryn being a tramp, an adulterer, a drunk, a Communist, and a lesbian resurfaced in Louella’s column. It wasn’t a full-frontal attack like her initial salvo, but Louella was taking pot shots, as though Kathryn’s reputation was a row of tin cans lined up along the back fence and Louella had been given a BB gun for Christmas.
None of it came as much of a shock. Between the ugly encounter with Hearst in the Biltmore elevator and the Louella Parsons effigy party, Kathryn pretty much saw it coming.
That party quickly took on legendary proportions. Everything seems funny after half a dozen drinks, especially a Louella Parsons effigy stuck with every sharp-edged implement within a twelve-block radius, including a garden hoe and two billiard cues. By the time the sun dawned on Sunday morning, most of the crowd was intact, albeit in varied stages of inebriation. They cheered when Dorothy Parker and her husband produced champagne and a tray of croissants they’d ordered in from Schwab’s. Kathryn made a couple of pots of coffee and Lillian Hellman swiped a stack of cups from the restaurant up in the big house. In the end, everybody sat around and watched the shredded effigy drift around the pool.
Kathryn and Roy were talking about it over fried chicken at the Wilshire Brown Derby one night after her Biltmore Hotel plan did the trick. She damn near fell out of the booth when Roy admitted he agreed with Orson that it wasn’t her legitimacy as a journalist that Louella was disputing. Kathryn told him it was ludicrous to think she was illegitimate “in that way,” and even if that were the case, it was absurd to think Louella would know it and not she. Kathryn knew she’d gone too far when she labeled Roy “as ridiculous as Orson”; the night ended with a stony goodbye.
That was two weeks ago, and Kathryn hadn’t heard from Roy since. But she had time to consider the possibility she’d yelled at the wrong person. Through her network of waitresses and valets, she learned that the right person to yell at had her hair done every Friday morning at nine in the beauty parlor of the Beverly Wilshire Apartment Hotel.
At just after ten o’clock, Kathryn spotted a hatless Louella totter past her. She stepped out from behind the fern.
“I need to have a word with you.”
Louella sniffed. “But I don’t need to have a word with you.” She walked around her and Kathryn grabbed her by the shoulder. It sent Louella off balance and she stumbled for a moment, but righted herself before she ended down on the pink and gold terrazzo floor.
“Unhand me!” Louella waited until a pair of mink-wrapped hotel guests walked past. “I might have guessed that roughhousing was more your style.”
Kathryn let go. “I’m sick of this tirade you’re directing against me.”
Louella cast her eyes down one side of Kathryn and up the other. “Hmm.” She sneered and turned to leave.
Kathryn stepped in front of Louella with her arms stretched out to block any chance of escape. “All these insinuations about me. I’m a drunk? And a Commie? It’s got to stop, Louella, and I mean all of it.”
The finger Louella poked at Kathryn was starting to gnarl up with arthritis. “Don’t tell me what I can and cannot do.”
She pushed Kathryn’s arm out of the way and headed toward the tall glass doors leading out onto Wilshire Boulevard. Kathryn made a grab for Louella’s wrist but just missed it, and Louella pushed open the door and stepped into the September sunshine. She headed to the curb and looked back along Wilshire for a taxi.
“You can’t keep attacking me in print like this,” Kathryn insisted. The old biddy made a tsking sound and started walking east. “It’s not necessary, Louella. It’s not professional, and it’s not true. Stop being such a—”
Louella swung her rattan handbag so fast, Kathryn didn’t see it coming. It landed right below her sternum and knocked the wind out of her. Louella hadn’t even broken her stride.
“You—goddamned—skunk—”
Kathryn didn’t think Louella heard her until the woman demanded, “What did you call me?”
“You heard me,” she panted. “You’re a skunk, Louella, which is pretty tame, considering what you called me in your column the day of the Kane premiere.”
“I’ve never used any of those words!”
Kathryn caught up with her in half a dozen strides. “Of course you didn’t, that would be libel.”
“I simply write what I think.” Louella kept her eyes forward.
Kathryn grabbed her by the elbow and yanked her around so they were facing each other. “You think I’m a lesbian?”
“Birds of a feather.” Louella’s beady eyes now had Kathryn fixed in their gaze.
“What birds?”
“You used to work for Tallulah Bankhead, who we all know will sleep with anyone regardless of marital status, morals, or gender.”
“And I suppose I’m a Communist because I live at the Garden of Allah—Nazimova is my neighbor, and she’s Russian?”
Louella jutted out her chin. “I don’t have to justify anything I write, especially to the likes of you.” She went to slug Kathryn with her handbag again, but it was a halfhearted effort. Kathryn easily blocked it with her fist and Louella’s bag went flying across the sidewalk, hit the display window of a furniture shop, and dropped to the ground.
Louella muttered an exasperated “Oh!” and went to retrieve it.
Kathryn followed. “Nobody believes a single damned word of it,” she said.
The glare between them burned as the traffic along Wilshire whistled past them. Louella lifted her arm to hail a cab. “I am not blind to the obvious fact staring me in the face like a plate of fricassee.”
A part of Kathryn had always regretted not fighting back that day in the Bullock’s Wilshire tea room. She slapped Louella Parsons across the face with all the force she could muster.
Louella staggered into a palm tree, recovered quickly, and struck Kathryn so hard that Kathryn’s felt pillbox hat flew into the gutter. Kathryn dodged a kick to the shins and swung her handbag over her head before she brought it down on the back of Louella’s neck.
Louella grunted like a warthog. “BITCH!” She grabbed Kathryn’s necklace and gave it a vicious yank. Kathryn lurched forward, watching her pearls scatter across the sidewalk. She spun around as Louella turned her back to march down the street, and without giving it any further thought, lifted her right foot a
nd kicked the old hag squarely in the ass, propelling her into the side of a gunmetal grey Hudson parked at the curb. But she miscalculated, and the momentum toppled her onto her knees. She needed a moment to catch her breath, and when she looked up, she saw Louella waving at the cab. Louella turned around and stood over Kathryn.
“What you fail to grasp,” she said grandly, “is that I am a very loyal person. I work for Mr. Hearst; it is my job to defend him. With this whole Citizen Kane business, I’ve simply been doing my job. Perhaps your time may be better spent figuring out where I got my information.”
Kathryn was on her feet again, dusting herself off. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Louella’s lip curled upwards with just enough of a sneer to make an impact. “I am not your enemy.”
* * *
Francine’s tiny bungalow sat among a stand of towering bamboo and exploding bougainvillea in a calm, almost serene row of similar cottages that ran along the back of the Chateau Marmont. Kathryn knocked a second time but still there was no answer.
“You here to see your ma?”
Kathryn spun around to see Carla Slotkowski, the Marmont’s head of housekeeping. She was a square-faced German immigrant with plow-pushing arms who’d held her position since the hotel opened in the late twenties. “You can always rely on Carla, Francine had told her once, “whether it’s for an extra bath towel or an honest opinion.”
“Your mother came off her shift a half hour ago, so she should be on her second brandy and ginger ale by now.” She strode up to Francine’s door and knocked loudly. “Fran? You in there?”
There was no answer. Carla grunted and pulled a huge ring of keys from the pocket of her black twill apron. She jingled the keys around until she got to the one she was looking for, slid it into the lock, and opened Francine’s front door. “If I see her, I’ll tell her you’re here,” she said, and headed back to the main building. She hadn’t gotten far when she turned around. “They should give Louella Parsons the firing squad. The things she says in them papers.”
Citizen Hollywood (Hollywood's Garden of Allah novels Book 3) Page 29
