Platinum Doll

by Anne Girard

  She watched the thick furrows over his eyebrows deepen as he eyed her more closely. “That’s an accent you’ve got, all right, pure Midwestern, but nothing as impossible as Greta Nissen. The director I’ve got could work with it. You got any experience?”

  “Mainly extra work, but a couple of two-reelers with Laurel and Hardy, and a scene in Clara Bow’s last picture—the one Jimmy told you about.”

  “So you’re an unknown.”

  “I suppose so,” she conceded, feeling the sting of how sharply he’d said it.

  “Good. I like you better that way. We’ll see how you test.” He was clearly about to dismiss her before he added, “Be on the Hell’s Angels set tonight at seven. They’ll be done shooting by then. Ask for Tony Gaudio. That’s the cameraman who will do your test.”

  With that, Hughes looked back down at his papers.

  Their brief meeting was over.

  “I don’t think he liked me very much,” she said to Jimmy and Ben once she was back outside.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure. He’s hard to read,” Jimmy acknowledged as both actors walked her back to the other soundstage so she could finish out the day.

  “Do you think you can manage an English accent?” Ben asked as they strolled past the dressing rooms building and then a row of offices.

  “I’m not sure. I’ve never tried. But I’m a quick learner.”

  “Well, you’re fast on your feet and real smart, that’s for sure,” Jimmy acknowledged as he wrapped an arm over her shoulder. “The camera will pick that up in no time.”

  “I guess there was a reason this picture has been such a bomb all this time. Hell’s Angels was just waiting for you,” Ben said.

  * * *

  Harlean had no idea what anyone on set thought of her screen test. Tony Gaudio, an intense man with graying hair and round wire-rimmed eyeglasses, used two different cameras as the screenwriter sat nearby with his chin propped in his hand. A prominent scowl marked his expression as she went through the lines.

  The phone rang early the next morning, waking Harlean, who lay with Oscar wrapped into the curve of her neck. The sound startled her because she had quite expected the phone company to have cut her service off by now, and she’d had no time to send in the money from Arthur Landau which she had received yesterday.

  “Miss Harlow, this is Mr. Hughes’s office calling. Can you get here by nine?”

  Harlean glanced over at her bedside clock. She ran a hand through her tangled hair and tried to focus on the time. “That’s in half an hour!”

  “Yes, it is. But Mr. Hughes has a very tight schedule today. If it can’t be nine o’clock, I’m afraid it will have to wait until another day.”

  “No, no, I’ll be there,” Harlean quickly replied. Her curiosity would kill her if she had to wait.

  Once again Hughes barely looked up from his cluttered desk when she entered the office. She was not asked to take a seat. Five minutes later, Harlean walked back to her mother’s car with tears in her eyes, happy she’d asked her to drive her over as moral support for whatever she was about to hear.

  “He gave me the part, Mommie. I got the part!”

  Hughes had told her that she would be the first actress Caddo was going to put under contract. Howard Hughes and his team would be taking full control of her image from this day forward. He had a vision to promote her as an unknown “society girl” that would make her perfect for the role of Helen.

  Jean hugged her daughter tightly, then pulled her out at arm’s length. “What’s the bottom line? How much are we getting paid, Baby?”

  “It’s $150 a week to start, but he says he fully intends to make me a star.”

  “Oh, I knew it! We’ll be rich, then, soon enough! My, this is so exciting.”

  Harlean noticed that her mother said “we,” but after so many months of disappointment, she was determined to overlook that and feel nothing but the thrill of victory at having won a role that half of the girls in Hollywood had coveted.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The next few days were a whirlwind of costume fittings, script consultations and test shots. Harlean rose at dawn and fell into bed exhausted at night. She hardly had a moment to think about anything other than what Howard Hughes and his team wanted from her. She did not even have time to worry, like the rest of the country, over the devastating stock market crash or what that might mean to her grandfather Harlow or to the McGrew estate. She certainly hadn’t any money to lose and for now she was living life one day at a time.

  “What is it, Baby?”

  Her mother stood behind her, wringing her hands, as Harlean closed the front door and turned back around. She was holding a special delivery envelope, proffering it to her daughter.

  “Something from Mr. Hughes?”

  Jean followed Harlean from the front door back into the kitchen with Oscar nipping at her heels. “No, Mommie, it’s not from Mr. Hughes.”

  “Gracious, it’s not about our money, is it? The McGrews haven’t lost our alimony in the crash!” Then a worse thought came to her. “Oh, tell me it isn’t your grandpa, losing everything! After all that frightening stock market business the last week I don’t know how much I could take!”

  It wasn’t about the stock market crash, or about her grandfather, but it might as well have been for the devastation she felt when she opened the envelope. The heading on the stationary read, “McGrew Family Trust.” Harlean sank onto a kitchen chair to read the rest of it.

  “What in heaven’s name has happened? You’re white as a sheet, Baby.”

  A rush of tears clouded her eyes. Oh, Chuck, she thought.

  “The McGrews didn’t lose all of their money but they are stopping us from getting any more of it, Mommie. They are terminating my temporary alimony. Without that I can’t possibly make the house payments on my own, and help you and Marino out, too. Not on what Mr. Hughes is going to pay me.”

  “I thought Charles told you he was giving you the house.”

  “I guess his grandfather didn’t agree.”

  “Well, we will just sue them for abandonment then, since the divorce was his idea. Take them for all they’ve got, and then some!”

  “Stop it, please! I need to think!”

  This was not how she wanted it to be—legal dealings between lawyers, all of it loaded with acrimony chipping away slowly at everything good that had once been between them. But there seemed no other way to remain in Hollywood and pursue this dream on what Mr. Hughes was offering to pay her for now. If she didn’t agree to sue Chuck for divorce—thus requiring the court to award her at least a few more temporary funds to live on while she finished making the picture, and then perhaps a settlement, she would need to return to Missouri. That would mean utter failure. She could not go back now as her mother had once been forced to do. She simply couldn’t allow herself to repeat that bit of history—nor, for that matter, ask her mother to do it with her a second time, now that she was here absolutely dedicated to helping Harlean find roles that would advance her career.

  But it would be cruel to charge him with abandonment. She knew how much that would hurt him. Did he deserve that—from her, most especially when he had allowed her inside the shelter of his guarded heart? This all felt as if it had gotten so far out of hand. Thoughts twined with the emotion of it all, weaving a blanket of confusion across her heart so that she wasn’t certain what to feel or to think.

  Yet Chuck was letting this happen, wasn’t he? It was his inheritance, after all, and he was permitting his grandfather to dictate what became of it after he had given her his word that the house was hers. At first, she thought he had bid her to move back into the Linden Drive house as a way to keep them tethered—to keep a spark of hope alive for them once some of the anger had faded. He knew damn well that this latest move would force her to
sell their home. Here, take it. It’s yours... The key, or the house? Both. And all my heart, too... Clearly Chuck himself bore some responsibility in forcing her hand if she went ahead with this countermeasure.

  As she grew each day in confidence, and a sense of independence, Harlean was realizing that she still fought back only in fits and starts, asserted her desires randomly and not always fully, but one must always begin somewhere with everything, and she was really beginning to grow up. Damn you, Chuck, for even making this an option. Damn you for not fighting harder for me when you had the chance...

  “What grounds do you suggest suing them on if I don’t declare abandonment?” she found herself carefully asking.

  Jean straightened her spine. Her eyes narrowed. “Why, cruelty, of course. I wasn’t the only one to have seen it, Baby. He was awful to you!”

  Awful one moment, achingly tender the next.

  But if she agreed to sue Chuck, and he still didn’t come after her, didn’t put a stop to this, there might be no turning back for either of them.

  * * *

  “Ouch! Watch it, will ya?”

  “Well, hold still,” Rosalie laughed as she poured the bleaching solution over Harlean’s head yet again in what had become a weekly ritual to keep her unique color. “You wanna look gorgeous for your first day tomorrow, don’t you? Can’t have those roots showing!”

  While Harlean enjoyed the distinctive white-blond look of her hair, the burning of the process to achieve it was still brutal.

  “We’ve got to find you a real hair salon soon, so I don’t need to keep being your torturer. I don’t think it’s helping our friendship,” Rosalie chirped. “I’m green with envy, you know. Things are really starting to happen for you.”

  It had been a whirlwind few weeks since Harlean had signed the contract with Howard Hughes. While his publicity team had begun an all-out media blitz announcing that a “Chicago society girl” had won the coveted role of Helen in Hell’s Angels, her personal life continued to disintegrate.

  As she had predicted, Harlean’s marriage, and any idea of reconciliation was rolling away from her faster than a freight train going downhill. Their divorce case was now headed to court, Harlean having charged cruelty, and Chuck was countersuing. She had been forced to sell their Linden Drive home, and at a loss. She wasn’t thrilled to be moving back in with her mother in the interim and living by her rules in that little rental cottage, especially after she had been on her own as a married young woman, but she didn’t entirely mind the change because Harlean hated the loneliness. The silence in that house with so many reminders, like looming ghosts, had become deafening.

  She needed to work and to focus on it to the exclusion of all else.

  “So, have you memorized your lines?” Rosalie asked as Harlean raised her head from the kitchen sink and wiped the dripping solution from her neck and ears with a towel.

  “Mainly. I’m just not sure I understand the character. She’s kind of a tramp, honestly,” Harlean revealed with a sheepish grin. “She goes from man to man, and doesn’t seem to care. She’s the exact opposite of me.”

  “A bit cheeky, is she?” Rosalie giggled, doing her best British accent.

  “I tell you, I think I’m gonna die of a nervous collapse before tomorrow ever gets here. This is a real film, a talkie.”

  “Yes, I know. Everyone in Hollywood knows all about it,” Rosalie laughed.

  “I’m just relieved that Mr. Hughes said the director he hired understands the character because he’s British.”

  “See there? I’m sure he’ll give you plenty of good advice. Nothin’ to worry about. So, have ya heard from Chuck?”

  “Just from his lawyer,” Harlean said sadly. “They are countersuing.”

  “I knew that was a gamble, a way for you to knock some sense into him. Gee, honey, I’m sure sorry. You two had your problems, but I know he loved you. Ivor always talked about how Chuck went on and on about you, how good you were together. He was so happy you were starting a family and all. Well, until your miscarriage.”

  Harlean had not told anyone what had really happened.

  Now there seemed no point in it anyway.

  She glanced up at the clock to see how much time was left before she could rinse. She couldn’t bear to think or talk about any of it any longer. Not Chuck, nor even her first day of shooting tomorrow. It was all making her quite ill. After all, this was not another walk-on role, or a slaptick short, this was a huge gamble for her name, her face and her distinctive platinum-blond hair.

  “You know what I want to do when we get this stuff out of my hair? Let’s go out to Santa Monica and walk on the beach,” Harlean proposed.

  The beach suddenly sounded so freeing to her: the sea air cooling her burning scalp, their toes slipping into the wet sand as the gulls screeched overhead. “Believe it or not, I haven’t been to the beach even once since I’ve been back in California because of how much Chuck hates water now. But it feels like it’s about time for me.”

  “Sure, honey, sounds great, and I agree with you, it really is about time you try a whole lot of new things. You’re young, beautiful and soon-to-be single. But before that, do you have anything to eat around here, I’m starved! And I wouldn’t mind an early toddy or two if you’ve got any of that around, either,” Rosalie said with her usual breezy laugh.

  * * *

  The set was humming with activity all that first day of shooting.

  Hughes’s dogged insistence on altering the project from a silent movie to a talkie had breathed new life into the cast and crew. Everyone seemed excited—all but James Whale. The stiff-spined, slim-lipped British director intimidated Harlean from the first introduction early that morning. He had a volcanic personality so she did her best to stay out of his way during the long, monotonous hours required to set up shots and position the actors in various scenes.

  Even so, Harlean was still hungry to learn every element she could of the motion picture business, so as always she watched intently from the shadows. Only when there was a complete break in the activity did she open the satchel she always brought and allow herself a few minutes of welcome diversion among the pages of her books.

  As the next few days of shooting progressed, she made friends quickly and easily with everyone—except Whale. It was apparent very quickly that he was an unabashed perfectionist, one who ruled the set like a sour-faced boarding school headmaster. Whale made it abundantly clear from the start that this was not a family environment. It was not to be a “Fun Factory” like the one she had known working with Laurel and Hardy.

  This was, he sniped in his clipped British accent, “the big leagues.”

  By the fourth take on her first awkward love scene with Ben, Harlean’s optimism for her place among the cast began swiftly to fade. When Whale’s tyrannical raging at Harlean made her knees go weak, she found it difficult to speak her lines. She was trying as best she could to give him what he wanted—although she had no earthly idea what that was.

  Hooded eyes with a critical stare, and a shock of thick silver hair, intensified his intimidating presence. “Cut! What the bloody hell was that?”

  He bolted from his director’s chair and charged at her. “Are you aware, young woman, how truly irritating your Midwest accent is to the civilized ear?”

  Stricken by the tone he used in front of the cast and crew, she glanced helplessly over at Ben who could only offer a silent shrug. Her throat tightened and her words came out in a tone just above a whisper.

  “I didn’t know I had an offensive accent, Mr. Whale.”

  “Well, you bloody well do, and if you don’t abandon it, this picture is doomed before it starts, and you will be the chief laughingstock among us!”

  As he strutted back to his chair, Harlean bit her lower lip hard to stop the tears that had forced their way into
her eyes. Running eye makeup would only infuriate him more.

  Ben reached over and gave her arm a squeeze with the director’s back to them. “Come on, give it another try. We can do this. Let’s show him,” he said in a low voice that only she could hear.

  Harlean assumed that Whale deemed that take acceptable since he finally moved on to another scene. She allowed herself a single breath of relief as she walked back to the chair where she had left her satchel of books. It was Jimmy who found her there and sat down beside her.

  “Need a pep talk, kiddo?” he gently asked.

  “Will a pep talk make me speak like a proper English girl?”

  He gave her a lopsided half smile. “He’s a brilliant director, but he’s also a pain in the ass.”

  “Seems more ass than brilliant, if you ask me.”

  “Oh, now, come on. Remember, Hughes chose you over every other girl in Hollywood. And everyone says this is going to be a major motion picture.”

  “He only chose me because he had already looked everywhere else. He was just out of time and out of girls, Jimmy, we both know that.”

  “Listen to me. You are Helen. Believe it and everyone else will, too.”

  “I don’t understand her, Jimmy. She’s a tramp and not a very nice one.”

  “If you want my take on it, here’s what I think—Helen needs to exude sexuality, but there needs to be some vulnerability from her, too, and you’ve certainly got those bases covered,” he patiently told her. “Thing is, we need to like her, and root for her—just like I root for you to do well in the role.”

  “I’m just nothing like her,” Harlean said. “I loved my man. He was my one and only.”

  “It’s called acting, kiddo,” he said and gave her a gentle, good-natured sock in the arm.

  “Some of these lines are just so corny,” she softly complained. “How am I supposed to say, ‘Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?’ and do it without laughing? Helen is a caricature to me.”

  “Only if that’s what you bring to her. I’d make her a tenderhearted seductress instead, if I were you. Lord knows it would have been easy enough for you to seduce me,” he cracked.