Eve in Hollywood

by Amor Towles

  Alice opened wide the translucent lids of her amphibian eyes.

  —Young lady! said Evelyn’s mother, her face as pink as her ham.

  And Evelyn’s father? He simply looked forlorn.

  So, in order to spare him the discomfort of administering a reprimand, Evelyn pushed back her chair and sent herself to her room. But as she climbed the stairs, she smiled to hear Aunt Polly declaim:

  —Well, I never!

  Now that, thought Evelyn, was an expression that Aunt Polly had every reason to make use of.

  •

  AS EVE FINISHED HER Coffee, a dark green Packard pulled to the curb and its chauffeur leapt from the driver seat in order to open the passenger door.

  —Sorry, Miss Ross, he said. I had to go to three newsstands to find it!

  —No problem, Billy. Thanks for running it down.

  Once in the car, Billy handed the latest issue of Gotham into the back, and Eve made herself comfortable. The lead story was an exposé on the knuckleheads who’d vied to build the tallest skyscraper in the world. The drawing on the cover showed the Empire State Building in a boxing ring with its gloves in the air as the Chrysler Building lay flat on its back—and Sigmund Freud looked on from a ringside seat.

  Eve laughed out loud.

  That image had Katey’s fingerprints all over it!

  As Eve turned through advertisements in search of the cover story, Billy gave three quick glances into the rearview mirror.

  —Are you headed back soon, Miss Ross?

  —What’s that, Billy?

  —I was just wondering if you’re headed back to New York?

  —Oh, I’m not much for heading back, Billy.

  He gave what looked like a nod of understanding and then he stole another few glances in the mirror, apparently in the mood to converse.

  Eve closed her magazine.

  —How about you, Billy? How are things down at the Corral?

  He pulled himself up by the wheel.

  —Jim-dandy, Miss Ross. You know that niche I was telling you about?

  —Sure, Billy. I remember.

  —Well, I think I found it!

  A sandy-haired kid with no idea of how good-looking he was bound to become, Billy was one in a million. The real McCoy. Having herded cattle with his pa back in West Texas, he had come to L.A. at the age of fifteen with a small-time rodeo and then stumbled into pictures when demand was on the rise for men who could fall off of horses. He was just getting his start, you understand (as he was the first to tell you), but he had already charged with the cavalry across a river, over a hill, and through a canyon on the way to the Alamo and the Battle of Bull Run.

  An old-timer named Skilly Skillman had apparently taken Billy under his wing. He’s the one who had advised Billy that he needed a niche. Something that would set him apart and get him front and center—right in the crosshairs of the camera. Skillman’s route to the close-up had been through the saloon window. Sure, he could tumble down the stairs or get clocked on the noggin with the rest of them. But when it came to being thrown through a window, no one was his equal. He was the undisputed king of defenestrations.

  Eve could hardly wait to hear what Billy’s route was going to be . . .

  —For me, he explained, it’s gonna be the heel-hooker.

  —The heel-hooker?

  Billy nodded with enthusiasm as he veered around a cab.

  —That’s when you’re ridin’ at full gallop . . . And you get an arrow in the chest, see . . . And instead of fallin’ clear of your horse, the heel of your boot gets hooked in the stirrup . . .

  Billy passed his right hand slowly in front of the windshield, as if he could see his body being dragged through the dust toward the setting sun.

  Heck. Eve could practically see it too.

  —You can’t beat a man who’s found his niche, Eve admitted with a smile.

  —No ma’am, said Billy. I suspect you can’t.

  Then he gave the rearview mirror a few more glances like he’d just had a notion.

  —You know what, Miss Ross? Why don’t you come down to the Corral? Then you can see it for yourself!

  Now it was Eve who was sitting up.

  —That’s a hell of an idea, Billy. Why don’t you hand me the book.

  Billy leaned to his right, took the pad from the glove compartment, and passed it into the back.

  Eve turned to the fourth page—the one which was titled SIGHTS TO SEE BEFORE I LEAVE L.A. Surveying the list from top to bottom and the little green checks that marked her progress, Eve felt a great sense of satisfaction—which, come to think of it, was pretty hilarious when you considered the aversions of her youth.

  Eve couldn’t pinpoint when her suspicion of lists began, but it must have been early. Maybe as early as seven or eight . . . In the basement of St. Mary’s . . . where she and the rest of the second graders memorized the Ten Commandments in Latin as their parents dozed to Father O’Connor upstairs.

  Soon after that came the Twelve Apostles—with the Thirty Presidents close on their heels. The Seven Deadly Sins. The Five Hundred Rules of Grammar. And that list of all lists: the forever unfurling one that Ol’ Saint Nick used to separate the naughty from the nice.

  Yep. In Indiana, a young girl had good reason to suspect that lists were the foot soldiers of tyranny—crafted for the sole purpose of bridling the unbridled. A quashing, squashing, squelching of the human spirit by means of itemization.

  In search of refuge, at the age of seventeen Eve began stopping in at St. Mary’s on the way home from school to light a candle and mutter a prayer. Three months (and sixty nickels) later, Eve’s parents actually agreed to send her to Switzerland for a year. They even acted like it was their idea! But when Eve finally arrived at the académie, and opened the trunk that had been sent in advance, there on top of a lifetime supply of white buttoned blouses was a handwritten list of Ten Things a Young Lady Should Remember When Traveling Abroad.

  Naturally, in the heat of the moment this discovery was irksome. But upon reflection, it was the perfect surprise with which to start her excursion. For having smoothed the pleats of her skirt, Eve sat at her desk, corrected her posture, and proceeded to tear her mother’s list into five hundred pieces.

  Which is actually much harder than it sounds!

  The first two hundred tears come rather easy. They’re like pulling the drumsticks from a well-roasted turkey. But thereafter, the scraps of paper that you’re rending are less than half an inch square. To execute five hundred individual tears requires the delicate finger-work and otherworldly patience of those who scratch the names of angels on the heads of pins.

  But, if Eve couldn’t pinpoint when her suspicion of lists began, she could remember exactly when it ended: She was somewhere in the interminable majesty of the American West, sitting in the dining car of the Golden State Limited, reading a detective novel.

  The Crimson Gown . . .

  Living up to the promise of its cover, the story began brightly with the strangling of a starlet. In the pages that followed, the nasty particulars of the victim’s rise to fame were slowly revealed. Piece by piece the lonely detective puts the sordid puzzle together. But only in chapter nineteen does it finally dawn on him that the hands around the starlet’s throat in chapter one had been those of the Oriental chanteuse whom he’d fallen for in chapter five.

  In chapter twenty-two, when the detective makes his way to the chanteuse’s apartment at one in the morning, she opens the door dressed in the prefigured gown. With a bow, she offers him a chair and pours him a whiskey. He consumes it at one gulp. Then with grim determination, he lays out the elements of the case against her—the primitive means, the engineered opportunity, the convoluted motive. It’s time to go downtown, Baby, he says at last, and rises to his feet—only to waken eight hours later on the floor of the empty apar
tment.

  Gripping his head, he stumbles down the stairs. In the lobby, he stops to grab the old Chinaman at the desk by his truncated collar, demanding to know where she is.

  —She gone, the Chinaman says.

  —Gone where?

  —Gone back. To Forbidden City . . .

  With this news, our hapless shamus reels into the street, headed for the local precinct; or a bar; or maybe a bridge! Eve couldn’t say. Because her thoughts, having already ditched the detective, were on the trail of the chanteuse. Having made the journey across the Pacific on a rusty freighter and disembarked on the rickety docks of Shanghai, Eve followed the glamorous fugitive through a pair of intricately carved gates into a maze of gamboled roofs and red lacquered lattice a thousand years old . . .

  The Forbidden City, had thought Eve. Now, that sounds like a place worth going to!

  —Excuse me, she said to the kindly looking stranger across the table. Would you happen to have a writing instrument handy?

  Armed with the stranger’s pencil, Eve flipped to the blank page that is always hiding at the end of a book like the unprepared kid at the back of the class. Across the top of the page in large capital letters she wrote PLACES TO GO, and then commenced to itemize:

  1. The Forbidden City

  2. Timbuktu

  3.

  After Timbuktu she paused. She bit the pencil’s eraser, at a loss for a third locale.

  At a loss for a third locale? she chided herself. The world is big. It’s bigger than a bread box!

  So, Eve closed her eyes and imagined that she was looking down at the earth from the heavens. She watched as the bright blue marble turned so dependably, bringing each continent successively into view. And there, below the parting clouds, a destination presented itself: Istanbul. And then another. And another. In fact, so quickly the destinations came, the kindly stranger’s pencil could barely keep up.

  3. Istanbul

  4. Cairo

  5. Havana

  6. French Polynesia

  7. The Taj Mahal!

  Lists aren’t so bad, Eve realized. They didn’t have to be a catalogue of matronly constraints. They could just as easily testify to plans and intentions. A celebration of the not yet done. Of what thou shalt.

  It really just depended on which side of the pencil you were on.

  On her first night in residence at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Eve asked her waiter if he could spare a pencil and pad. Then under the hotel’s palmy moniker, in honor of her proximity to Hollywood, she itemized a list of her favorite improbable motion picture conclusions. The next night (at the Cocoanut Grove), it was a list of the town’s dullest leading men. In the nights that followed, as she dined across the city alone, her narrow little pad proved a boon companion. And when fellow hotel resident Prentice Symmons expounded on all the sights that Eve should see before she left L.A., she made a list of those.

  That list, originally comprising ten items, was quickly expanded to fifteen; and then to twenty. So in what little space she had left at the bottom of the page, Eve scratched in number twenty-one: Watch Billy do a Heel-Hooker. Then she closed her compendium and gave it a satisfied pat, just as Billy was pulling into the visitors’ lot.

  The lot was bordered with palms—those fantastical trees that seemed to be cultivated everywhere in California despite providing so little in the way of shade. Billy scooted around the car to open Eve’s door. As she climbed out, he stood with his posture impressively upright and his gaze fixed on some point in the distance. It must have taken all of his presence of mind not to salute.

  —How long will you be, Miss Ross?

  —To tell you the truth, Billy, I have no idea. Do you think you can wait?

  —You betcha!

  Following a prominent path through the palms, Eve soon came upon a clearing in which grazed a small herd of one-story buildings. Eve had been to the studio a few times before in order to visit Olivia on the set, but she had never been to this particular spot. Since there were no signs and the buildings looked identical, Eve figured she’d have to start knocking on doors. But just as she prepared to eeny-meany-miney-moe, from behind one of the buildings came a barefooted boy in a floppy straw hat with a fishing pole propped on his shoulder . . .

  CONSTANCY.

  That was the whole problem with Aunt Polly’s worldview. An unflinching unwaveriness was the single trait that she presumed the Good Lord valued over everything else. But all you had to do was answer your telephone once in a while to see that constancy had nothing to do with it.

  What God liked most was surprises. He liked up-endings and reversals. Empires that overreached, and fortunes bet on black, and vows of eternal devotion founded on a glance. Maybe it was due to some All-Knowing sense of Fair Play; or maybe, He just got Bored. But when it came to the cautious and considered endeavors of men, the Divine was sure to flummox.

  How else to make sense of the kindly Marcus Benton and his out-of-the-blue invitation to a tête-à-tête? With his mussed up hair, wrinkled shirt, and vaguely familiar demeanor, Eve was inclined to like him from the start—but she couldn’t have guessed in a million years what he wanted.

  And if, as Mr. Benton began to lay his cards on the table, Eve had any remaining doubts as to the importance of Surprise in the workings of Providence, the Good Lord dispelled them in His inimitable style with the throwing open of a door and the barging in of a latter-day Napoléon.

  For despite all the laughs that they had shared over Livvy’s stories from the set, Eve hadn’t really understood what her friend was up against until the Emperor started talking. With his two-cornered hat on his head and his little hand tucked in his coat, he launched into a zingy description of Hollywood full of fifty-dollar phrases like: Titanic personalities and innermost humanities. Clearly, he was partial to a full-blown soliloquy, but it didn’t take long to get the gist of his message: that his irreplaceable genius was under constant threat from the essential fallibility of those in his employ.

  Mr. Benton (who had obviously heard versions of the speech before) let his attention wander toward the rays of light that angled through the window shade. Somewhere outside a bird marked the dwindling day with a warble, which seemed to provide him momentary relief from his employer’s oratory, presumably by recalling some afternoon in a distant and more sensible time.

  As Napoléon began to elaborate for no one’s benefit but his own, Eve felt a surge of sympathy for Mr. Benton. He suddenly had the look of a stranger in his own office. And that’s when she realized why his demeanor had seemed so familiar: It was the same as her father’s. Sitting behind their well-meaning piles of paper in their well-appointed offices, they both had good reason to let their minds wander.

  Napoléon was standing now. He summed up smartly, took Eve’s hand, and then disappeared through the door, drawing the curtain on the conversation that he hadn’t been invited to in the first place.

  •

  WHEN EVE EMERGED FROM Mr. Benton’s office a few minutes later, rather than return to the Packard she headed straight for the back forty to find Olivia on the set. In a few hours they would be meeting for dinner at the Tropicana, but Eve couldn’t wait to relay this turn of events. On the rolling lawn that rested gracefully between the majesty of Tara and its fields in high cotton, Eve would describe her meeting with Napoléon word-for-word, and Livvy would bust her bustle with laughter.

  But as Eve came around the corner, she was startled to find the plantation desolate. Overnight, the trees had been uprooted, the grass singed, the peacocks scattered, and the stables now listed like a ship that had run ashore. Without a living soul in sight, the scene gave an irrefutable impression of abandonment. But when Eve crossed the porch and opened the front door, she found the entrance hall teeming with craftsmen.

  Standing halfway up the staircase, a young man gently dented the banister with a ball-peen hammer as
his colleague scuffed the treads of the steps with a pumice stone. To Eve’s left, a lanky technician with an elaborate apparatus on his back—like that of an exterminator—was spraying a tainted liquid onto the bright floral wallpaper to create the impression of water stains, while another fellow brushed sepia around a taped-off square to form the ghostly shadow of where a framed work of art once had hung.

  Eve passed through the entry into the inner chamber and paused beside a vandalized portrait in order to watch a man in bifocals carefully cracking a mirror with a jeweler’s hammer.

  It was all so breathtaking.

  Presumably, Selznick imagined that these technicians worked for him—that they followed his instructions and fulfilled his plan like his fitters and gaffers and grips. But Eve could see in an instant that these were a different class of men. Like the archangels, these artisans had come to dismantle the utmost accomplishments of mortal men. Working with at least as much ingenuity as the finest of engineers, they were slowly undoing what pride and ambition, wealth and tradition had assembled with such self-conscious care.

  As Selznick had gone on and on about his professional prowess and the artful execution of his films, Eve’s natural inclination had been to dismiss his every word. But, perhaps the megalomaniac had been onto something. Not what he thought he was onto. At least, not exactly. The notion that every little person involved in a picture could ruin it was just plain loony. But maybe there were some—a select few at large among the multitudes—who in the guise of fulfilling the Emperor’s plan could actually play an instrumental role in the grander design of the Great Bamboozler.

  —We’re glad to have you on board, Selznick had said to Eve.

  And maybe the feeling was mutual.

  Eve turned around and headed back outside onto the lilting porch. Rather appropriately, Selznick had built O’Hara’s plantation house on the highest point of the back forty, and as Eve looked off into the distance, she found herself thrilled by the view. Not by the sun, which was sinking somewhere over the Pacific; nor by the isolated lights in the valley, which had begun to flicker in domestic tranquility. What gave her that tingling feeling was the recognition that for as far as the eye could see, there was no skyline to speak of. No high-rises, no office towers, no bridges imposing themselves upon the horizon.