Eve in Hollywood

by Amor Towles

  —You’re right about a Mickey, he found himself saying. On a man of average weight even a five-star Mickey Finn would need ten minutes to do its work.

  The young lady lowered her book in order to eye him over the pages.

  —But a bullet, he said, that’s another thing altogether.

  She put her book on the table.

  —In 1924, I worked with a man in Ventura who was shot in the eye. The bullet glanced off his skull and went out his ear. He drove himself fifteen miles to a county clinic and lived to tell the tale. But Eddie O’Donnell? He got shot by a girl not much older than you with a .22 caliber pistol.

  He held his fingers apart to show her how small that pistol had been.

  —She’d been harboring someone; I don’t remember who. We were just going to ask a few questions, when she plucked the gun from her purse. She was shaking like a leaf. We told her not to do anything that she’d regret; but she just closed her eyes and shot Eddie in the leg. He couldn’t believe it. Would you get a load of that? he said to me. But the bullet had split his femoral artery. And Eddie bled to death right there on the floor of the kitchenette.

  He looked out the window for a moment, the thoughts of Eddie O’Donnell getting the better of him—getting the better of him, after all these years.

  —There’s just no telling with bullets, he said.

  When he looked back, she was taking him in. She nodded a few times to show her consideration for his old partner. Then she stretched her hand across the table.

  —I’m Evelyn Ross.

  She had a fine grip.

  —I’m Charlie Granger.

  She took a new cigarette from the pack and lit it.

  —So, what’s your story, Charlie?

  Then she pushed the pack across the table.

  It was the first time a woman had offered him a cigarette in more than twenty years.

  •

  SO WHAT’S YOUR STORY? she had asked, and that’s what Charlie told her.

  He told her how he and Betty had come to Los Angeles with their baby boy back in 1905, after they’d seen the advert in the Chicago papers looking for experienced officers willing to relocate. And how, when they got off the train, the whole town looked like an outpost for the Pony Express.

  He told her what she already knew—about the rise of the studios and the matinee idols, the mansions and grand hotels. But he told her about the other Los Angeles too. The one that had emerged from the dust right along side the glamorous one and that had grown just as fast, if not faster. The Los Angeles of flatfoots and grifters and ladies of the night; of the shysters and snappers and has-beens. That city within the city that had its own diners and cable cars, its own chapels and banks—that had its own fashioning of failure and folly, and of grace and integrity too.

  When he realized he’d probably gone on too long, he apologized, but she just pushed her cigarettes back across the table. She asked him to tell her about his life on the force, and she listened as closely when he told her about the glamourless day-to-day as when he told her about the front-page felons. And when he told her about the Doheny Drowning, she just lit up with laughter.

  She laughed like young ladies should laugh in kitchens and castles, in Hollywood and Tenafly, and everywhere else in the world.

  •

  WHEN THE DINING CAR was finally empty—after the studious young man had lugged his labors back to his berth and the freckle-faced kid had deftly swept the change that his mother had left for the waiter into his blazer pocket—Evelyn said that she owed Charlie an apology.

  —When you sat down, she said, you looked like a salesman who’d traveled his route ten too many times, and I had every intention of ignoring you. But once you got started, Mr. Granger, I could’ve listened all the way to Timbuktu.

  She patted the table once and stood.

  —I guess it just shows to go you.

  But as she began to walk away, he stayed her progress by reaching for her arm. She looked back and tilted her head.

  —May I ask you a personal question, Miss Ross?

  —Of course, she said.

  —Why did you extend your ticket from Chicago to Los Angeles?

  She showed a hint of surprise and then smiled.

  —To be perfectly honest, I have no idea.

  And he could see it again: that sparkle of having made the decision. A decision that was all the better for having no cause or impetus or subjugation to a grander scheme. And suddenly, Charlie knew that he wasn’t going back to his son’s.

  The young lady didn’t continue on immediately. She lingered for a moment, mulling some quandary of her own as the East grew ever eastward.

  —May I ask you a personal question, Mr. Granger? she said at last.

  —Of course.

  —How does one make a five-star Mickey Finn?

  Prentice

  ON THE SIXTH OF OCTOBER, 1938, at the northeast corner of the swimming terrace of the Beverly Hills Hotel, Prentice Symmons stopped to catch his breath between two chaises longues. He stopped as had Kutozov on the fields of Borodino; as had Washington on the western shores of the Hudson having slipped through the grasp of Howe. Here on the swimming terrace, the sun paused in its course, and the snap of the canopies subsided as Prentice leaned upon his cane.

  In the limpid pool, a starlet swam alone. Her auburn hair was neatly tucked beneath a light blue cap, and her delicate arms parted the water’s dappled surface without a sound. She was this fair city’s newest nightingale. At the four corners of the pool stood cabana boys, each hoping that when she concluded her fiftieth lap she would climb from the water in his proximity so that he would have the honor of bestowing upon her a towel. Not ten years before, when this damsel (or rather, her predecessor) had finished her calisthenics, it would have been toward Prentice that she swam. Calling out some coy remark, she would have splashed him playfully from the pool’s edge before backstroking into fame’s embrace.

  Alas, there is no fixing of man’s position in the system of the heavens, anymore than one can fix the position of a skiff at sea. Alas, yes, alas; but also, avanti!

  —Afternoon, Mr. Symmons, said the boy at north northwest. It was James, the arch one. Afternoon, he said without a modifier while betraying the slightest smile, as if winking at some shared acknowledgment of Prentice’s professional standing. It was a harbinger, no doubt, of the cad’s inevitable successes as a talent agent, or felon.

  —Good afternoon, Prentice corrected as he passed.

  At the edge of the terrace awaited the twenty-six steps to the main floor. They knew as well as he that not a hundred feet away an elevator had lately been installed. But he had no intention of giving them the satisfaction of using it. He brandished his cane once and launched his ascent. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty. It is a good afternoon, he remarked to himself as he crested the top. His daily exercise had been completed, the insolence of the cabana boy parried, the twenty-six steps bested, and it was only half past three.

  Back inside the hotel proper, he smiled when he passed the elegantly scripted sign that pointed the way to the lobby. To refer to that space as a lobby was to commit a crime of nomenclature. In such a room, did Kubla Khan hold court. It was a geographic pinpoint through which within the hour the world would come and go. Misguided financiers newly arrived from Manhattan with a single change of clothes would soon be signing the registry. Delivery boys would be appearing in the nick of time with indistinguishably altered dresses, or with flower arrangements composed like Elizabethan sonnets to express admiration or regret. And the town’s young Turks on their way to the bar would pass the late-lunching Titans they aspired to supplant.

  But as Prentice rounded the corner and passed between the potted palms, the Fates once again laid claim to their supremacy, to their dominion over mortal men. For there, under the painted ceiling, a delicate beauty sat blithely
in his chair—turning indifferently through the pages of Gander, the latest periodical dedicated to the rise and fall of the latest. One could hardly blame her for choosing his chair. It was an inviting chair, plush and well positioned. And she had no reason to know better.

  He stole a glance around the room looking for the desk captain or concierge, both of whom were otherwise engaged. So, letting his eyebrows droop and leaning on his cane a tad more than necessary, he approached.

  —Ahem.

  Looking up from her periodical, the young woman, who had seemed such a delicate beauty from afar, revealed a scar on her face that could have marked the nemesis of Zorro! Her eyebrows rose with a poised curiosity. In the instant, he could see that there would be no appealing to sympathies. He resumed his upright posture.

  —Pardon me for the intrusion, he ventured. But would it inconvenience you terribly to move to this other chair?

  He pointed his cane lightly at the empty seat three feet to her left.

  —My girth, you see, demands unusual quarter.

  She tilted her head and smiled.

  —But they are the same size . . .

  He cleared his throat.

  —Yes. So they are, so they are. And as such, I daresay I could presumably fit in this empty chair. But you see, I am afraid . . . How does one put it . . . ? It is not my chair.

  She laid her magazine in her lap and sat back, as if to say that she was ready to hear his case with unwavering attention. God bless her!

  He adopted the bearing of Cicero.

  —Young lady, he began, though I have stayed in this hotel without interruption for more than one thousand nights, that should not give me claim to special privileges in the lobby. Were you to spend but a single night in the hotel, you would have every right to expect all of its graces. So, I will not appeal to your sense of propriety. What I must appeal to instead is your sense of forbearance. For I am quite simply an aging, overweight oncewas who no longer lays claim to his city’s storied indulgences—other, that is, than to invest the four o’clock hour observing the Turn of the Wheel from this my Elba . . . my fence post . . . my perch.

  The young woman smiled delightfully and shifted to the adjoining chair.

  —You are a woman of great courtesy, Prentice said with a bow.

  —Hardly, she replied. But I’ve got a soft spot for oncewases.

  •

  EXEMPLIFYING THE GRACE OF the well bred, the young woman accepted Prentice’s offer to share a pot of tea and a plate of currant scones with clotted cream and jam.

  —What brings you to California, my dear, Prentice asked as he filled her cup.

  —I’m not sure. I suppose I was in the mood for a bit of adventure.

  —Well, you have come to the right place. Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway traveled all the way to Africa to see the creatures of the wild; to join in the hunt and put themselves in mortal danger. I tell you, they need only have come to this lobby.

  The young woman laughed.

  It was a marvelous laugh.

  —Mortal danger . . . ? she queried.

  —I do not exaggerate. In the coming minutes, you will see predators dressed in coats of fur as thick as an ocelot’s. In the high grass around the watering hole, you will see conniving dogs lying in wait for the approach of young, unguarded gazelles. And every day at five, there is a stampede.

  She laughed again, and he smiled to hear it.

  There was nothing jaded or ugly about her laughter. On the contrary, it was the laugh of one who knows well the foibles of others without begrudging them. It was a tribute to the human comedy—the sort of laugh he had not heard in years, or maybe eons. The sort of laugh that should not be interrupted!

  (A waiter approaching with a plate of tea sandwiches is discreetly waved off.)

  And what a refined sense of curiosity she exhibited in her questions. It was a curiosity one might have imagined in the young Galileo or Isaac Newton. Without a slavish adherence to the faddish certainties of yesteryears (in fact, with an instinctive suspicion of them), she had an interest in the world—and those invisible, immutable laws that actually spin it on its axis and keep us all from flinging into space.

  So, leaving a history of Spanish missionaries and the great migration spawned by Sutter’s Mill to other professors, he told her instead of the founding of Beverly Hills. A desert within a desert, Beverly Hills had lain fallow for a thousand years until Pioneer Oil arrived and drilled deep into the ground in search of petrol only to discover . . . water—that tasteless, shapeless, colorless substance without which, nothing.

  (Prentice gestured to the periphery, indicating by general reference the orange blossoms and honeysuckle that abounded just outside the lobby’s walls.)

  Then he described for her how in 1912 the Andersons secured these ten acres with a million dollars and a dream—a dream to build amidst gardens and bowers, a temporary residence par excellence. And vision had led to vision. For within the hotel’s walls had been imagined Caribbean battles between privateers and Her Majesty’s fleet; the coldhearted dalliances of latter-day Cleopatras; and the all-encompassing charity of a bowler-hatted tramp.

  —Why, not a hundred feet from here Chaplin, Fairbanks, Pickford, and Griffith struck the anvil of artistic independence to forge United Artists!

  Etc., etc., etc.

  Unexpectedly, the young woman repaid him in kind with one of the most fantastic tales of Hollywood that he had ever heard—one that she had learned in the dining car of the Golden State Limited from a homicide detective, no less. And when she stood to go, he roused himself from his chair without his cane in order to take her hand and thank her for a delightful afternoon.

  •

  PRENTICE’S ORIGINAL PLAN THAT day had been to dwell for the hour after tea in the pages of Mr. & Mrs. Lamb. But having completed his daily exercise, waved off sandwiches, and conversed at length with a lovely young woman, when he finally rose to leave the lobby, he felt a sense of élan.

  Why rush back to one’s quarters, he thought? Mr. & Mrs. Lamb were as genteel and sympathetic as any companions known to man. They would be the first to understand the cause of his delay. And with that, he headed out the lobby doors into the aromatic air as an autumnal dusk prepared to shroud the Hollywood Hills.

  Edgar, the bell captain, was patting the roof of a taxicab having helped a guest into the backseat. When he turned to find Prentice before him, he snapped to attention.

  —Mr. Symmons!

  —Hello, Edgar. How are things?

  —I’d say it’s shaping up to be a beautiful evening.

  —I think you’re right, Edgar. In fact, it seems a perfect night to dine at Maison Robert. Could you see if William is free?

  —Yes, sir, Edgar said with verve before jogging off to the lower lot.

  Maison Robert . . . , thought Prentice with the smile of anticipation (as he crossed the drive to the large Tuscan pots where the gardenia bushes bloomed). How excited they would be to see him. Without mention of the months that had passed, and without a glance at The Book, Robert himself would lead Prentice to his old banquette. After cold asparagus soup, Prentice would have the porterhouse steak, potatoes dauphinoise, and a soufflé. Or better yet . . . When the waiter came for his order, Prentice would say: It is up to Bertrand! And when the last morsel had been picked from his plate, he would step once again through the kitchen’s swinging doors to proclaim the only word that applied: magnifique.

  But as he was bending down to savor the smell of the blossoms, he heard the turn of an ignition and looked back to see a black sedan, which had been parked at the end of the drive, slowly rolling forward.

  His heartbeat quickened.

  He was a hundred feet from the lobby door, and no one was about. The sedan continued to advance at its ominous pace. Then, in the very moment its engines intended to race, a man and woman
appeared from the other direction on foot. It was the Sandersons—the fine young couple from Houston who were celebrating their fifth anniversary. They must have just taken an evening stroll among the roses in Municipal Park before returning to dress for dinner.

  From across the drive, they gave him a warm Texas greeting.

  The sedan’s engines idled.

  The Sandersons turned toward the lobby door.

  —Wait! Prentice called. Wait a moment, if you would. I was just headed inside myself. Allow me to accompany you.

  ON THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON when Prentice arrived in the lobby for tea, he was delighted to find the young woman with the scar awaiting him. Her name was Evelyn Ross, lately of Manhattan. When he formally introduced himself, she sat back with a look of self-recrimination, then simply said:

  —Of course.

  Now, having lived in Hollywood for nearly half his life, Prentice Symmons was well acquainted with the feigning of recognition. He was neither insulted by it, nor did he take it too closely to his flattered heart. Rather, he completed the charade by smiling and nodding in the fatuous manner of faded celebrity with the full expectation that conversation could then shift toward politics or other forms of weather.

  But Miss Evelyn Ross commenced to recall six different films in which he had appeared. (By her own admission, she had been sneaking into movie houses since the age of thirteen!) And to her lasting credit, she recalled his career as one who plays a game of memory, rather than one who has been presented the opportunity to fawn. With the occasional tap of a finger to her lip, she reconstructed scenes that he had stolen; she rehashed outrageous twists of plot; and she rekindled romances that never had any business being doused. So complete was her inventory that they both fell silent once she was done.

  Did he miss it? she asked at last. Did he miss the silver screen?

  —Pah, he said with a wave of the hand.

  What he missed was the stage.