Through the tangle of dancers, Gwendolyn could see Kathryn and Quentin with their heads pressed together, watching her.
“And if I do?” Gwendolyn pitched her question with What’s in it for me? bravado.
“You get to keep your job.”
“Is my job at Fox dependent on doing you favors?”
“Everybody’s job at Fox is dependent on doing me favors. But don’t worry. I keep a detailed score card up here.” He tapped his graying temple. “Memory like an elephant.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, sir. And thank you for the waltz.”
He bowed his head gallantly. “Miss Brick.”
Gwendolyn skirted the periphery of the dance floor, unsure what she should say to Kathryn and Quentin when she got back to the table. Halfway there, Judy and Leo glided past her. They slowed long enough for Judy to call out, “I’m having a marvelous time!”
Gwendolyn smiled and waved. For all his virile posturing, Zanuck had revealed himself to be the sort of person who put more stock in his feelings than she would have guessed. She had no idea how to convince Clark to hear Zanuck out, but her own gut instinct told her that until she did, she ought to keep mum.
CHAPTER 16
After weeks of filming at Cinecittà, The Barefoot Contessa relocated to a mansion with a pair of fifteen-foot wrought iron doors set into a white stone archway that Marcus knew would make an arresting backdrop.
He felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Ava in a snug coat of dark gray with large buttons across her torso. It would contrast perfectly with the pale stone behind her.
Ava twirled around, flaring the bottom of the coat. “Do you think they’ll let me keep it?”
He loaded a fresh roll. “There’s a difference between ‘stealing it’ and ‘forgetting to return it.’”
“Hmmmm.” Ava ran her hand down her side.
He raised his camera. “Mind if I take a couple of shots?” A large copper vase sat in an alcove built into the wall. It held a tall fern with spindly shoots and spiky leaves that quivered in the cold breeze.
Ava posed in front of the stonework; the mid-morning light slanted onto her face. “Heard from Kathryn lately?”
“Not in a couple of weeks. Why?”
“I think I screwed up.”
He prodded his chin to show her she needed to lift her face half an inch. “Why is that?”
“She asked me to convince Winchell to call her. Turns out, my charms ain’t so red hot when I’m drunk off my ass. Please tell her I’m sorry if I let her down.”
He guided her shoulders until they were at right angles to the wall. A wave of homesickness washed over him when he smelled Gwennie’s fragrance. “You often wear that, don’t you?”
“Oh yes, I love it. I was livid when Bullock’s stopped stocking it.”
A barrage of voices filled the still air. “AVA! AVA! AVA!”
There was no such thing as a typical scattino. Some of them were wild-eyed youths, barely out of high school, willing to jump any fence or hang from any rooftop to get a good shot. Others looked like war vets whose scoured faces had witnessed the worst that the human race could dish out. The rest of them hovered somewhere in between, wearing their fastidiously pressed One Good Suit as they tore around dusty streets. In the time Marcus had been in Rome, he’d noticed that they’d lost their good-natured camaraderie now that the plethora of magazines offered decent fees.
Fifteen of them were now approaching the low brick fence that bounded the mansion’s grounds. “MIA BELLA AVA!” they shouted, “MIA BELLA AVA!” and fluttered a jumble of bright red, yellow, and green handkerchiefs.
An assistant director appeared. “We won’t get any shooting done until we can get these guys to disperse, so Mank wants Ava inside.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” Marcus slung his camera strap around his neck and marched toward them. “Sorry, guys,” he told the group in his best Italian, “but Miss Gardner will be shooting indoors for the rest of the day.”
A current of resentment rippled through the gang. One of them spat on the ground and hawked up a word that carried the weight of a cutting insult.
“Only one exterior shot today.” He pointed out a sleek European convertible loaded with luggage parked off to one side. “Signorina Gardner and Signore Brazzi walk from the car to the door, turn to take in the view—”
A red ball splattered Marcus’s shoulder. The scattini laughed as the stink of rotted tomato reached his nose. As the chorus of sniggering died down, someone taunted, “Invasore americano.”
“American invader?” Marcus shouted in English. “Who said that?”
Emilio Conti sauntered forward. “You Americans, you come to Italy with your directors and your scripts and your stars and your crew. You make your pictures here because it is cheap. You wave your almighty American dollar in front of us like we are grateful peasants!”
The men started nodding and echoing specific words like a Greek chorus. “Cheap!” “American dollar!” “Peasants!”
“When will MGM and Twentieth Century-Fox come to Italy to shoot a movie with an Italian director?” Emilio started punching the palm of one hand with the fist of the other. “We have Rossellini! De Sica!”
Someone behind him yelled out “Fellini!” and someone else, “Visconti!”
“But you keep all the best jobs for yourself!” Conti pointed at Marcus’s camera. “And now they bring their own scattino.”
“I’m only here because of the Fratelli di Conti!” Marcus said, switching to Italian. If he was going to swing their opinion, he knew he’d have to do it in their language. “I’m still in Italy because the Contis tried to cheat me out of a pile of dough. I was forced to fight them for my money but have I seen one lira? Meanwhile, what am I supposed to live on?” Marcus should have known better than to trust Napoleon’s assurance that he’d have his money by Christmas.
The resentful agitation Conti had whipped up began to subside.
“So yes, I take photos to sell to the magazines because I want to survive. Do you gentlemen want to know why Emilio Conti hates me? It is jealousy. I am the one who took those pictures of Sophia Loren.” Several jaws dropped. “I took Look’s photos of Ingrid Bergman, as well as Ava Gardner and her mysterious Italian lover. I am Lo Scattino Americano!”
Marcus saw a shift from outrage to begrudged admiration in the faces opposite him.
“You are americano,” Conti said. “You do not belong here.”
“I propose a bet,” Marcus said. “Let us see who can get the first photo of La Speranza into Epoca.” The mention of Melody’s nickname generated a chorus of hushed whispers. “If I win, you will get your brothers to pay up the money they owe me within one week of publication.”
His challenge sparked a glint in Conti’s eye. “And if I win, you must depart Italy immediately.”
If Marcus accepted Emilio’s terms, it could mean leaving Rome without ever seeing his money. It was a chance he was willing to take.
“I accept.”
* * *
Melody’s intercom chimed four times before it roused a response. “Who the hell is this?”
Her tone softened at the sound of Marcus’s voice. She buzzed him in and opened the door wearing a red silk top and emerald cotton bottoms, no slippers, and hair that hadn’t been brushed in a couple of days.
“I’ve got a question to ask you,” he said.
“Shoot.”
“Are you La Speranza?”
Her response was a shy smile that didn’t last long. She pulled him inside and flopped onto her sofa. “When I first got here, I went the whole hog, publicity-wise. I was everywhere, always on display, but that kind of stuff gets old. So I decided to change my image. Add a bit of mystery. It worked for Garbo.”
“But surely they’ll want you to do P.R. on Metropolitana,” Marcus said. “They’ve built the whole movie around you.”
“They’ve pushed back the start date. I suspect your copyright showdown has gummed up the
works.”
“You want to help un-gum them?” Marcus asked.
A flare of the feisty spirit that American moviegoers had fallen in love with back in the thirties resurfaced. “What have you got in mind?”
“Pose for me like Ava did.”
“WHAT?”
“And beat Emilio Conti at his own game.”
“What game?”
Marcus told her about the bet he’d made with the self-proclaimed number one scattino in Rome. By the time he finished, Melody was on her feet, roaming around for cigarettes. “Oh Marcus, you shouldn’t have.”
“He’s a mean little shit.” He joined her in the kitchen and offered her a Camel. “You said so yourself that day we met at the café.”
“That twerp needs taking down a peg or two, but you’ll need to find some other way to do it.”
“It’s you or nothing.”
“Sorry, Marcus. I’d love to help you out, but no dice.” She took a deep drag. “I bought a new coffee pot because apparently I make terrible coffee. My downstairs neighbor told me it’s ‘jesterproof’ but I assume he means ‘foolproof.’”
“Is it because Emilio is one of the Conti brothers, and they’re your bosses?” Marcus could feel his ten grand slipping away. “Metropolitana is a break from those costume dramas, and you don’t want to endanger what could be a big boost.”
“It’s not that. Well, partly.” She stirred the coffee grounds around the tin can as some sort of fight played out on her face.
He stilled her hand. “Forget I brought it up. Let’s change the subject. Tell me about Trevor Bergin. What’s he up to?”
She straightened, relieved that they’d moved onto a safer subject. “Cross of Light and Lady and her Blade were big hits. Then he had a few duds. But now he’s in Greece on a seven-month shoot playing Paris in an epic called The Grief of Achilles. Last I heard, he was on some Greek island having the time of his life shooting arrows all day long.”
“I’m glad to hear that.” Marcus commandeered the coffee scoop. “Let me show you how Signora Scatena does it. First of all—”
“I had a baby.” She kept her focus on the half-burned Camel between her fingers. “Italian men are such flirts—you must know that by now.”
Marcus pictured Domenico’s face. “I do.”
“It was a regular textbook romance that started on Rome Burns. Banter led to flirting. Flirting led to stolen kisses and whispered sweet nothings behind sets. The sweet nothings led to . . .” She see-sawed her hands.
“Getting knocked up?”
“I launched myself into an affair with my eyes open—as well as my legs. I barely made it through shooting before I started to show. After that, I put myself into seclusion for the rest of my pregnancy.”
“That’s why you became a recluse?”
“It was his idea, because of course he was married as well. Oh yes, it was the full cliché!” Her voice had taken on a hysterical edge. “I hid myself away and waited for a little girl with the most delicate fingers you ever saw. They let me hold her for all of thirty seconds, then some bitch of a nun whisked her away.” She stubbed out her cigarette in a dirty saucer.
“That must have been awful.”
“Yeah, it was. But I didn’t have much choice. These Catholics don’t look too kindly on sex outside of marriage, or abortion, or unwed mothers.” Melody pulled another cigarette from the packet Marcus left on the counter. She tapped it several times but didn’t light it. “My second-wind Italian career has been all kinds of wonderful. If I mess this up too, I’m really screwed. By the time I gave birth, he’d unearthed Metropolitana and laid out this strategy that involved me going into seclusion and later reemerging with a new persona.”
“The father? What’s he got to do with Metropolitana?”
She let out a jagged sigh and crossed past him toward the picture window with the view across the Tiber. “He was the producer on Rome Burns.”
“That was a Fratelli di Conti film, wasn’t it?”
“Yuh-huh.”
“You had an affair with one of the Conti brothers?”
“Yuh-huh.”
“Please don’t tell me it was Emilio.”
“UCK!” Her disgust was so palpable it would have been funny if this had been a scene from His Girl Friday. “That pipsqueak? Give me some credit.” She flopped down on the sofa beside him and let out a long, wet raspberry. “It was Napoleon. I know what you’re thinking. Napoleon Conti has an ego the size of the Vatican, and thinks nothing of screaming the roof down to get his way. But he wasn’t like that with me. He was kind and gentle and funny and romantic.”
Marcus pictured the humorless bastard with the Caesar complex. “Until he got you pregnant.”
Melody jackknifed into an upright position. “Much to my parents’ eternal disappointment, I’m not the white-picket-fence type. Motherhood was never on my agenda, and I refuse to feel guilty about that.”
Marcus was still juggling the conflicting images of Napoleon the bully with Napoleon the romantic. He risked a placating hand on her knee. “It sounds like you were railroaded.”
Melody fiddled with a loose thread until she’d started to unravel the hem of her collar. “I was okay about giving up the baby until I came home to this empty apartment. He left me alone with nothing except my thoughts and regrets.”
Marcus knew what came next. He’d written this scene in two or three movies. “Did you start drinking again?”
“Honestly, I tried not to. But there’s no Alcoholics Anonymous over here; they expect you to pray the thirst away. So yeah, I hit the bottle. Oh, Marcus, I was a mess. Drunk and depressed and mean and resentful as hell.”
“Because the Conti brothers took away your choice?”
She prodded an accusing finger at him. “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to get me to turn against the Contis so that you can win your dumb bet.”
“Doesn’t mean I’m wrong, though.”
She plucked the loose thread from her collar and wound it tightly around her left index finger. “I’ll have you know that I got myself off the bottle.” The thread broke and she flicked it away. “Napoleon came to visit me a couple of months later. It was in the morning so I wasn’t completely bombed. Said he had this new picture.”
“Metropolitana?”
“He told me how it was a chance to break out of the sword-and-sandals trap but only if I stayed in seclusion and got my act together. Then, when Metropolitana was ready to shoot, I could emerge as The New Melody Hope. He had this whole moth-cocoon-butterfly metaphor; it was very convincing.”
Marcus pictured Napoleon Conti shoving his poetic moth-cocoon-butterfly theory down her throat until she cried uncle. “I’m sorry I missed it.”
“If it wasn’t for Napoleon rescuing me with Metropolitana, I might still be sitting here getting plastered morning, noon, and night.”
Outside Melody’s living room window, a juniper tree held a nest of European robins chirping together. It was an unpleasant, discordant sound that reminded Marcus of the scattini posse he’d faced on the Contessa location.
“So, to recap,” he said, “he seduced you, knocked you up, and forced you into surrendering your baby, which sent you on a months-long binge, but he’s your knight in shining armor because he wanted to cast you in his movie?”
“When you put it like that . . .”
“How would you put it?”
“I wanted to do Metropolitana. Desperately. It was my chance to reinvent myself—oh, stop it!” She slapped the upholstery as she jumped to her feet and disappeared into the bedroom.
The European robins stopped squawking as though the sound effects department had flipped a switch. The apartment filled with silence except for a methodical whooshing sound in the bedroom.
Marcus ventured as far as the doorway. Melody stood in front of a large semicircular vanity mirror, pulling a brush through her hair with gritted-teeth ferocity. “What are you doing?”
“Calming my
self,” she replied. “I found it helpful after I came out of the hospital.”
“Lookit, Mel,” he said, attempting to calm the mood with nonchalance. “I’m sorry if I upset you. I hate seeing you being taken advantage of—”
“I’m not mad at you.” Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! She swapped to the other side of her head. “I’m mad at myself for being so gullible.” Whoosh! Whoosh! “For being such a wooly-headed puppet.” She threw the hairbrush down; it hit the glass top with a loud crack. “Knight in shining armor, my ass!”
“All I meant was—”
“I have a slutty dress that makes my boobs look huge. Shall I put it on?”
“They’ll need to recognize you, so no turban or sunglasses.”
“Give me five minutes to change.” She kicked him out of the room with her bare foot and slammed the door in his face.
CHAPTER 17
Kathryn turned onto Petit Drive and thought it was odd that she’d encountered Clark Gable at nightclubs and premieres, and interviewed him on the sets of his movies, but had never visited his house, nestled high in the Hollywood hills above Encino.
She pulled up at number 4525. Leafy trees lined the red-brick driveway leading to an unpretentious ranch house. The press had dubbed it “The House of Two Gables” after Gable and Lombard got hitched, and somehow the name had stuck, even after Lombard’s death and Clark’s subsequent marriage to and divorce from Sylvia Ashley. Beyond a pair of whitewashed gates lay a path of large pale flagstones to a long porch that ran along the house to an open door.
Oh, I see. It’s his sanctuary.
In her most recent column, BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH ’54, Kathryn had talked about how the sands under Hollywood’s feet were shifting at an ever-faster pace.
In the same month that Errol Flynn had left Warner Bros., Hollywood’s first official censor, Will Hays, had died, and the Academy had given his successor, Joseph Breen, an honorary Oscar before he retired. Over at MGM, Dory Schary was cleaning house with the vigor of a German hausfrau. Greer Garson—gone. Van Johnson—gone. But it was Gable’s departure that had made Hollywood rear back.
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