“I don’t hear anything. He did mean tonight, didn’t he?”
Kathryn pulled out Errol’s note. “It doesn’t specifically say.”
The white door swung open to reveal Errol in a Hawaiian shirt scattered with yellow pineapples, and a pair of unpressed khaki trousers. He had the distracted gaze of a guy who’d started drinking early.
“Someone came!” He raised his hands, forgetting that one held a fresh martini. A couple of olives sloshed out of the glass and onto the brick steps.
The place was rustic, with lots of wood and exposed beams. Several rooms away, a radio was playing Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet, but it was the only sound in the place.
They followed Errol into a long, wide living room. At one end stood a buffet table crammed with food: oysters, shrimp, celery stuffed with crab, Swedish meatballs. Next to that, a bar was filled with several ration books’ worth of booze. At the other end, tall windows looked onto a swimming pool. In the middle was a fireplace, and over the mantle hung a banner with the word CONGRATS spelled out in red slashes of paint.
“Made that myself,” Errol commented. “Waste of time, as it turns out.”
“It was so hard to get a taxi, I never thought we’d be the first to arrive,” Kathryn said.
He held the corner of the banner between his fingers, but didn’t yank it off the wall. “Ever had a recurring nightmare?” His eyes were fixed on the drips of blood-red paint. “I dream that I give a party and nobody comes. I sit in an empty room. Just me and the food, booze, music, all waiting for a bunch of people who never show up.” He let go of the banner and draped an arm around each girl’s shoulder. Kathryn noticed a dab of shaving cream in his ear. “I thought my worst nightmare had come true tonight.” He pulled them closer. “I appreciate you showing up. You gals are the best.”
Gwendolyn unhooked herself from Errol’s arm. “There could be any number of reasons why people aren’t here yet.”
Kathryn followed suit. “This place isn’t easy to find—maybe some of them got lost. Or have another place to go first—you did spring this party at the last minute.”
His eyes, usually so full of mischief and confidence, were heavy-lidded and sour with resentment. “My life has been one shortsighted decision after another, and now it’s caught up with me. I’ve got no one to blame but myself.”
“Or,” Kathryn chose her words carefully, “maybe everybody’s just a little bit late.”
He turned toward the bar, but turned back again, his eyes locked on Kathryn. “You’re always first with the dirt around town. Give it to me straight,” he commanded her. “Am I on the outs with Hollywood now? Is that why nobody showed up? I pushed my luck just that little bit too far, didn’t I? And no one wants to be seen with me. That’s it, right?”
Kathryn wondered if Errol was aware that more than just his personal freedom had been at stake in this trial. A guilty verdict would have loosened a thread that could have unraveled the movie moguls’ control over this town, its politicians, and its judicial system. His not-guilty verdict was a close call for everyone with an interest in keeping the status quo. Maybe they’d stayed home to wipe the sweat from their brows.
“I don’t believe for a minute we’re the only people who’ll show up,” Kathryn announced. “You’re Errol Flynn, for crying out loud. And if we’re it, then screw ’em. Personally, I’d love a drink. One of those martinis would be great, but only if you can haul yourself out of your pity pool long enough to fix one for me, Mister I Didn’t Get Sent To Jail For Ten Years.”
She was relieved to see a roguish smile breaking through. As he crossed over to the bar, Kathryn told him that she couldn’t go to work the next day empty-handed, and perhaps while they waited for the others to arrive, they could brainstorm a memorable quote for her article.
They sat on his sofa and spent the next hour getting tipsy on martinis—even Gwendolyn indulged—and bandied around phrases like “triumph of the American justice system” and “opportunistic moneygrubbers” while leaving unsaid the truth about why he’d had to endure such a high-stakes game of Chicken.
As ten thirty became eleven and eleven drifted toward midnight, the house slipped deeper into darkness, and Flynn grew more and more sullen. The slow recognition that nobody was going to show up ground the conversation into the carpet.
Kathryn cast around for a diversion. “You must have a hell of a view from the pool.”
He escorted them outside, but it was barely worth the effort. With wartime dim-out regulations, the view was reduced to the odd pinprick of light between hefty blots of gloom. They fell into another silence until Errol piped up. “Say, whatever happened to Leo Presnell? Did he ever come across with an offer on The Pepsodent Show?”
Gwendolyn let out a martini’d giggle. “He sure came across with something.”
“Oh, like that, was it?” Errol asked with a chuckle. “I always figured Presnell as being a member of the club.”
“What club?” Kathryn asked.
“The type whose membership is prone to making decisions using a part of his body other than his brain.”
Like my boss, Kathryn thought. Whatever he was using to make decisions, it sure wasn’t his head. Anybody who could get himself into so much debt was a fool. “The Idiot Club?”
She felt her face burn in the moonlight as Flynn stared at her, his mouth hanging open. She scrambled to piece together a hasty apology; after what he’d been through, he didn’t deserve a crack like that. But before she could muster a word, Errol drew in a sharp breath and burst into laughter. It was a belly laugh, sourced from somewhere deep inside, and erupted at such a force that he needed to lean on his diving board for support. It was a while before he regained control.
“I needed that more than you could possibly know.” He kissed Kathryn on the cheek. “It’s time to refreshen these drinks. Won’t be long.”
Gwendolyn declared she needed to find one of the four bathrooms Errol had boasted about, and followed him inside.
The image of Presnell’s barber-shop-shaved, Palm-Springs-tanned face conjured itself in the dark sky above Kathryn. Presnell hadn’t set a deadline, but it had been a couple of weeks and she guessed the offer was dead in the water by now. As flattering as it was, it wasn’t like she’d ever intended to take him up on it. She went to finish off her martini but found the glass dry.
There’s got to be a better way of getting what I want.
She wrapped her arms around herself for warmth against the winter wind blowing up the walls of the canyon below. She contemplated the pockets of inky shadow blotting the landscape below, then headed back inside.
CHAPTER 19
The tombstone read:
HERE LIES BILLY THE KID
KILLED BY PAT GARRETT
JULY 13, 1881
The image gave way to a vista of brush-dotted plains that led to hills scrubbed by clouds sweeping across a New Mexico sky.
As the landscape faded and the closing credits appeared, the lights in George Cukor’s private screening room flickered on.
The first man in the room to speak was Adrian, MGM’s most prominent costume designer. “I was expecting to see more of her tits.”
“With all that fuss over the poster, you’d think that movie was wall-to-wall knockers,” Marcus said.
“Was it just me,” Cukor declared, “or would the relationship between Billy the Kid and Doc Holliday be more at home among this gathering?”
Taggert got to his feet and stretched. “If I were a cynical man, I’d bet that Hughes’ PR stunt was just propaganda designed to camouflage the fact that he was really filming the first homo western.”
The group headed into Cukor’s living room, a large space decorated in shades of apricot: pale for the thick carpet, medium for the wallpaper and lampshades, and a darker tone for the upholstery. Along one wall stood a mahogany sideboard upon which George’s houseboy had set out a late supper.
Donnie Stewart was a screenwriter who lived at the Garden o
f Allah and had written the recent Hepburn-Tracy reteaming, Keeper Of The Flame, which George had directed. “You’ve got to hand it to Hughes,” Donnie said while loading cold cuts, crackers, and olives onto his plate. “I doubt there’s anyone in America who hasn’t heard of The Outlaw. I hear he’s maniacal for detail.”
Taggert grunted. “One of the guys at the Breen Office told me Hughes fought them for a month over a seven-second cut they demanded. And after all that, he’s only going to let The Outlaw run for a month or two in San Francisco before he pulls it out of circulation.”
Sydney Guilaroff, a lanky Brit who was the king wizard of hair at MGM, nearly dropped his plate. “He’s what?”
“They’ve given up trying to figure what’s going on in Hughes’ head.”
It was nice to be around George again. Marcus hadn’t seen him since he joined the army. Naturally, George wasn’t sent to an active front, but was placed in their filmmaking department. He’d recently completed a short film for the Army Signal Corps called Resistance And Ohm’s Law. He assured the group it was every bit as dull as it sounded, but he was happy to be contributing to the war effort.
When George got to Taggert’s glass, he said, “That guy at the Breen Office. His name wasn’t Trenton, was it?”
“Oliver Trenton. You know him?”
George took a seat on one of the tapestry-covered Louis XV chairs and sipped his wine. “We tangled over Her Cardboard Lover.”
The movie was such a bomb that it prompted Norma Shearer to announce her retirement, and George had been tempted to follow suit. His previous movie, Two-Faced Woman with Garbo, had also flopped, and his next effort, Keeper Of The Flame, hadn’t been the smash he’d hoped for. All in all, it was a difficult time for him. Marcus could relate.
Marcus had been consigned to the backwaters, too, even after penning a big success for MGM last year. He’d worked on some A-list projects like the new Garland-Rooney picture, Girl Crazy, but only to sharpen somebody else’s dialogue. Once was bad enough, but he had to do it again for Lassie Come Home and DuBarry Was A Lady.
When he pitched a couple of ideas—one about the Wright Brothers’ flight of the Kitty Hawk, and another about the American doughboys of the Great War—both were rejected. He tried again with an original love story inspired by a drawing of Londoners taking refuge in a tube station, certain that Mayer would go for it, and was shocked when it got nixed.
He couldn’t shake the feeling that this stonewalling was connected with Edwin Marr’s rabid accusations in front of MGM’s executives and marquee names. But it wasn’t like he could waltz into Mayer’s office and demand an explanation, so Marcus resigned himself to hammering away at every halfway decent idea until he came up with such a sure-fire hit that Mayer was forced to forget Marr’s accusations.
“Marcus,” George said, his mouth quivering in uncharacteristic hesitation, “there is something I must share with you.”
Marcus’ eyes jumped around the room, but each face they landed on was blank. “And what’s that?”
“I felt I should be the one to tell Mayer I was joining the army, so I went to see him. I wasn’t in the chair five seconds before I realized he thought I was there to discuss my flops. I felt like I was starting to fight for my career, but then he said to me, ‘Just be glad I didn’t get you to direct William Tell.’”
Marcus tightened his grip around his wine glass. “But it was a huge hit.”
George nodded. “I told him it was a very fine picture which added significantly to the prestige of the studio. He looked at me with those beady black eyes of his and said, ‘Once the pinko bits were taken out.’”
“What?” Taggert jeered. “I read that script half a dozen times myself. There weren’t any Communist—”
“Apparently there was a scene where William Tell makes a big speech. ‘Today it is him with his bow and arrow, but tomorrow it will be the cobbler with his hammer; the day after that, the blacksmith with his furnace.’ He said Edwin Marr had been to see him and told him you were responsible for Hugo’s death and ‘What else could anybody expect from a leftist pinko Communist sympathizer like Marcus Adler?’”
“Excuse me, but since when is being a member of the Communist Party a crime?” Sydney demanded. “Personally, I don’t adhere to Communist political theory—I’m a capitalist through and through—but last time I looked, this is America, and in America we’re allowed to believe whatever we want to believe.”
“I’ve got five words for you,” Taggert said. “House Committee on Un-American Activities.”
“What have they got to do with anything?” Sydney asked. “The HUAC investigates citizens with Nazi ties, not pinkos.”
“That’s where it started,” Hoppy joined in, “but then they decided to probe the Federal Theater Project when someone whispered in their ear that it was overrun with Communists. In their bird-brained minds, it’s a short hop from thinking if the FTP is overrun with Commies, then Hollywood probably is, too. Remember that thing with Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Cagney?”
The summer before Pearl Harbor, some publicity-seeking member of the local Communist Party appeared before the HUAC’s Dies Committee, purporting to crusade against subversives in the government. He stated publicly that Bogart, Cagney, and Fredric March attended secret meetings in Malibu where they gathered to read the doctrines of Karl Marx. His testimony landed all three actors in scalding hot water, and they had to scramble to extricate themselves from controversy. It was a hotly contested issue at the time, and the memory caused a reflective silence to settle on the gathering.
“Mayer thinks I’m some sort of un-American pinko?” Marcus started feeling overheated. “It’s bad enough these days that I’m not in uniform.”
“So then I thought,” George continued, “Mayer knows that Edwin Marr’s a broken-down old has-been, and nothing he says is worth listening to, and I said as much to L.B.” He grimaced. “But timing is everything. The same day Edwin got into Mayer’s ear, the script for William Tell returned from the Breen Office with several notes where they said the story reflected ‘un-American principles.’”
“Kind of ironic,” Hoppy commented, “considering he’s from Minsk.”
Marcus turned to Taggert. “Did you know about this?”
“I didn’t know about the conversation with Edwin Marr. All I saw were Trenton’s notes attached to the script and Mayer’s cuts. I didn’t say anything because you were fixing Girl Crazy. It was falling behind schedule, and I needed to keep you focused.”
The ugly scene Marcus had endured that night at the Carthay Circle started to make more sense. Marcus wondered where that script was now, and if he dared ask Jim for it. He’d be opening a can of slimy, noxious worms for a movie that was over and done with, but Edwin Marr was someone he needed to take seriously.
* * *
A frigid wind blew down Western Avenue from Griffith Park. Marcus tried to ignore the matronly woman standing at the bus stop. Without looking at her, he could feel her scowl. He hated getting that look, so accusing, so judgmental: Why aren’t you in the armed forces? What’s wrong with you?
He took off his glasses and polished them with his handkerchief. I’m patriotic enough to join the Hollywood Writers Mobilization. Nothing’s wrong with me. I probably wrote the speech that inspired you to buy ten more dollars’ worth of war bonds.
It had taken some cajoling, but Marcus had convinced Taggert to dig out the Breen Office report on William Tell. He couldn’t believe the notes in the margins.
UNAMERICAN INFLUENCES
UNPATRIOTIC STANCE
UNACCEPTABLE STATEMENT UNDERMINING AMERICAN VALUES
Ordinarily, Marcus would have passed it around the Garden of Allah and laughed it off over manhattans. But the timing of its arrival on Mayer’s desk got him brooding about this Oliver Trenton guy. Had Marcus done something to him and now he was exacting his revenge by sabotaging Marcus’ best chance at an Oscar nomination? Was he in cahoots with Edwin Marr?
&nb
sp; He lifted his jacket collar against the wind. He knew he was breaking every rule in the book, but he was angry enough to punch a wall. Marcus had managed to wrestle a description of Trenton out of Taggert, and he was fully prepared to have it out with him—damn the consequences.
A minute after six, a huddle of conservatively dressed office workers exited the corner building, but none of them remotely fit Taggert’s description. Marcus jammed his hands into his pockets for warmth and leaned against a telephone pole for shelter from the gusts.
“He looks like the kind of guy who has the neatest desk you ever saw and always cleans the peanut butter off his knife before he eats his sandwich,” was how Taggert described his prey. “About your height, about your age, with a clipped Ronald Colman moustache.”
Someone fitting that description exited the front doors and headed along Hollywood Boulevard. Marcus stepped in Trenton’s path before he could second-guess himself. “Oliver Trenton?”
The man looked up as though he’d been expecting Marcus. “That’s right.”
“I’d like to have a word with you. My name is Adler.”
“I know.”
Marcus had been counting on the element of surprise, but Trenton’s acknowledgment slackened his sails. Taggert was right: the guy in front of him did look like he had the neatest desk in the office. His face was composed of sharp-edged planes, as though he’d escaped from an old German expressionist film.
“It’s about a picture I wrote,” Marcus said.
“Could we get out of this wind, perhaps?” Trenton led Marcus into the doorway of a closed shoe store. “William Tell, right?”
The store light allowed Marcus to see this Trenton fellow more clearly. Taggert hadn’t mentioned how the Colman moustache suited the angular contours of his face. His eyes were hazel flecked with green, and filled with a depth of kindness and understanding Marcus wasn’t expecting. The inescapable truth was that this defender of the Hays Code was damnably attractive.
Searchlights and Shadows (Hollywood's Garden of Allah novels Book 4) Page 13
