by Janet Dawson
“Got a good haul from that woman who collects musical stuff,” Chaz said. “This other one-sheet is Judy Garland, too, from In the Good Old Summertime. Two inserts, one from Weekend in Havana with Alice Faye. That’s a find. The other insert is from Gigi. Some lobby cards from a couple of Doris Day movies. And a title card from Royal Wedding with Fred Astaire. The woman who sold me the stuff gave me the name of another Garland collector who has a poster from Meet Me in St. Louis.”
As they stood together on the sidewalk, I shifted position and took several more photos of the trio with my cell phone, working the buttons as though I was sending a text message. Luckily none of them noticed me. They were intent on their conversation, and the merchandise in the back of the vehicle.
“What about the Hitchcock collection?” Raina asked. “I was hoping you’d get some of that.”
“Struck out.” Chaz picked up the Alice Faye insert. “The guy didn’t want to sell.”
“There’s a problem with that,” Henry said. He picked up one of the boxes and disappeared into the shop.
Present tense, I noticed. As though the problem, whatever it was, still existed. Henry and the Makellars finished unloading. Then Raina put a hand on her husband’s arm. “Middle of the afternoon. I need my caffeine fix.”
“Same here. I’ll make a Peet’s run. The usual?” She nodded and Chaz glanced at Henry, who stood in the shop doorway, looking preoccupied. “Hey, Henry, I’m going for coffee. Want anything?”
Henry shook his head. Then he went back into the shop, followed by Raina. As Chaz started down the street toward the Peet’s on the corner I quickly retrieved a book from the front seat of my car, the Norma Shearer biography I’d bought at the store on Wednesday. It might be good camouflage. When I entered the corner shop Chaz was looking at the pastry offerings. I got into line behind him and bumped him slightly, making sure the cover of the book I held was visible.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said.
He turned and gave me a full-wattage smile that extended to his hazel eyes. Up close he was good-looking in a roguish, frayed-around-the-edges way. “No problem,” he said. He glanced at the book I was carrying. “Hey, Norma Shearer. One of the greats.”
“I love old movies,” I said. “And I just adore The Women with Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford.”
“Oh, yeah. What a cast. Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, Joan Fontaine.”
“Don’t forget Marjorie Main,” I added. “I’m really interested in old Hollywood, that Golden Era of the thirties and forties. There’s this new shop down the street that has books and posters from those years. That’s where I picked up this Shearer biography.”
Chaz gave me a twinkly smile, turning up the charm. “You’re talking to the right guy. I own the shop.”
I noticed he didn’t mention his wife. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring either. “What a great location. Across the street from the movie theater. The city did such a wonderful job of restoring it. So many of the old movie palaces from the thirties have been torn down. I’m glad this one is still here.”
“Yeah, the theater’s beautiful. And the location, well, it can’t be beat. Lots of street traffic. That’s what you need in retail. Plus, the theater is showing classics as well as current movies, so that helps business.” He offered his hand. “I’m Chaz, by the way.”
“Jeri.” I shook his hand.
The woman in front of him moved away from the counter. Chaz stepped up, ordering a latte with a double shot, a cappuccino, and two brownies. He paid for the items, then stuck his wallet into his pocket and moved aside to wait for his coffee order.
It was my turn at the counter, so I ordered a latte and paid for it. Then I joined Chaz. “What else do you recommend? Books, I mean? I recently read a really interesting book about the studio system, The Glamour Factory by Ronald Davis.”
The young woman behind the counter called Chaz’s name and he picked up his order. “Try The Star Machine by Jeanine Basinger. That’s more recent and it’s really good. I think we may have a copy in the shop. If you’ll stop by, I’ll look for it.”
“Thanks,” I said, not committing myself. The smile he gave me as he left bordered on flirtatious. Raina must have her hands full with this guy, I thought.
Chapter 5
Seeing Aunt Dulcie was like seeing a very good copy—though not quite the same—of my grandmother. They were sisters, after all. Dulcie, the youngest of Grandma’s siblings, was now the same age Grandma had been when she died. My great-aunt had aged since the last time I’d seen her. Wrinkles furrowed her sweet-natured face and her soft, gently curling hair was white and thin. Dulcie’s blue eyes were just as sharp as they’d ever been, though. I greeted her with a hug and admonished myself for letting so much time lapse between visits. It’s best to go and see people while they’re alive, rather than wait and find yourself attending their funerals.
Pat and Bruce Foxworth, Dulcie’s daughter and son-in-law, had both retired from their professions. Now they grew apples and pears on their farm near Graton, a small community in western Sonoma County. As I left the nearby town of Sebastopol and drove north on Highway 116, I saw orchards stretching on either side of the road. I looked forward to the harvest of sweet, crunchy apples. The first to ripen would be Gravensteins, then an array of varieties through the fall until the season ended in December. I was partial to Northern Spies and Rome Beauties myself.
I turned left and headed west on Graton Road, past homes and then a three-block cluster of businesses, then into a landscape of gently rolling hills. I turned right onto a gravel driveway, parked at the side of the two-story house, and got out of the car. Mabel, a dog of indeterminate parentage, barked a greeting as she walked up and gave me an olfactory once-over. I scratched her floppy ears and she wagged her tail.
“Hey, there,” my cousin Pat said, coming out the front door onto the porch. She was the youngest of Aunt Dulcie’s three children, now in her sixties, short and trim, with salt-and-pepper curls springing out around her head. She hugged me and ushered me into the house. “I hope you brought an appetite. Bruce and I fixed a sumptuous brunch, if I do say so myself.”
“Sounds great,” I said. “All I had before leaving home was coffee.”
Out on the patio, we savored the food, the fine June morning, and the view of the coastal hills to the west. As we talked about family, hummingbirds darted around the roses in the garden. We worked our way through omelets stuffed with cheese and vegetables, thick crisp slices of bacon, and a coffee cake with a crumbly topping of cinnamon, sugar and walnuts. The coffee cake tasted a lot like the one Grandma used to bake. Must have been the same recipe, I thought, or the coffee cake was flavored with nostalgia.
When we finished our meal, we lingered over coffee. Mabel stretched out in a sunny spot and woofed softly, twitching her paws as she chased rabbits in her dreams. Then Pat and Bruce gathered dishes onto a tray and carried them into the kitchen, leaving me to talk with Dulcie. I poured myself another cup of coffee and steered the conversation in the direction of old-time Hollywood and Grandma’s small role in the movie business.
Dulcie smiled, remembering. “Jerusha enjoyed herself so much. She was excited about being in the movies, even if they were little parts. I enjoyed it all vicariously, in her letters. Why, she was in Marie Antoinette. It was a big, prestige production at MGM, with a huge cast and lots of gorgeous costumes. And the stars were Norma Shearer and John Barrymore. Oh, I was impressed. We all were.”
I smiled, remembering Grandma’s story about Barrymore making a pass at her on the set of that movie, back in 1938.
“Her first movie was in nineteen thirty-seven,” Aunt Dulcie said. “An Andy Hardy picture, with Mickey Rooney. She used to tell stories about what a cut-up that boy was. After that, Jerusha was in all sorts of movies: comedies, dramas, Westerns, musicals. She could sing and dance, you know. First she was an extra, then she had speaking roles, bits, they call them. She was in several Norma Shearer movies. We both were
big fans of Norma Shearer, the queen of the MGM lot. So you can imagine how thrilling it was when Jerusha wrote and told me that she was working at MGM, with Norma Shearer. When I think of the stars your grandma saw in Hollywood during those five years, people like Clark Gable, Irene Dunne, Tyrone Power, Greer Garson.”
“What do you recall about the last couple of years Grandma was in Hollywood?” I asked. “The years right before she left to marry Grandpa? That would be nineteen forty-one and nineteen forty-two.”
Dulcie thought for a moment. “Well, Jerusha met your Grandpa Ted in the summer of ’forty-one. He knew right away that she was the girl for him. But she wasn’t quite ready to leave Hollywood. I know they argued about it. They even broke up at one point, in the fall, I think. But they got together again, in December. After Pearl Harbor. A lot of men joined up right after that. Your Uncle Fred joined the Army then, and your Grandpa Ted joined the Navy, December of ’forty-one, right after Pearl Harbor. Early in ’forty-two he was in training down in San Diego. They wanted to get married before he shipped out. I think by then Jerusha was ready to chuck Hollywood and settle down. She’d had her fun, but five years was enough.”
Or something had happened, I thought. Like Ralph Tarrant’s murder. I wanted to push away that thought, but I didn’t. Instead I asked, “Had something happened, other than the war, to take the bloom off the rose?”
“I think it was mostly the war.” Aunt Dulcie’s face looked pensive. “Pearl Harbor was such a shock. When I look back, I guess it shouldn’t have been. The war in Europe had been going on for more than two years. It was in the newspapers and on the newsreels, what with Hitler invading Poland and France. And even before that, when the Japanese invaded China, all the reports of that horrible massacre at Nanking. I remember hearing people say they hoped we’d stay out of the war. We couldn’t, though. We should have known what was coming. But even so, Pearl Harbor was a shock. We were finally at war, and our boys were dying overseas. The news was all bad that first part of nineteen forty-two. Being an actress in Hollywood must have seemed unimportant to your grandma, what with Ted in the Navy and ready to go to the Pacific. I remember he gave her an engagement ring for Christmas.” She smiled. “But there was something else about those last few months in Hollywood. I had the impression something was troubling your grandma, something on the home front. But I just don’t remember. Maybe when you start reading the letters you’ll figure it out.”
“Shall we go look at the letters, then?” I stood and held out my hand, helping Dulcie up from her chair. She moved slowly, troubled with arthritis in her joints, but she didn’t need the assistance of a cane or a walker. The house was large, two stories. Pat and Bruce’s bedroom was on the second floor, but Dulcie had a big suite of her own on the first floor. Her bedroom held a double bed, dresser and chest of drawers, the tops crowded with photos of her family. Just past the bathroom was a door leading to a smaller room, where I saw a sewing machine and shelves holding baskets of colorful fabric. Dulcie was a longtime quilter. I had always admired the craftsmanship of the bright red-and-yellow Sunbonnet Sue quilt on her bed. Even now she was piecing a quilt top, triangles of blue and purple floral-print cloth.
Dulcie settled into a low, wide-bottomed oak rocking chair near the window and waved her hand at a closed door near the bed. “The letters are in that walk-in closet. When I moved out of my house in Novato, some of my grandkids helped me organize them by year into storage boxes. In fact, my great-grandson Trevor did a school report using your Uncle Fred’s letters from the front. Of course I have every single letter he ever wrote me.” She smiled and her blue eyes looked a bit moist. “I do miss that man. We had a good life together. Anyway, Jerusha wrote me such nice long, newsy letters. I’m glad I kept my letters, even if they do take up space. They’re a link to the past. Sometimes I read your grandma’s letters. It’s just like being in the same room with her.”
I opened the door to the roomy walk-in closet. One wall held a rail where Dulcie’s clothes hung, with shelves below holding her shoes. Floor-to-ceiling shelves had been installed on the other three walls, holding photo albums and boxes, the kind used to store photographs, sturdy cardboard with colorful printed designs on the exterior and a place for a label in front. I read a few of the labels, hand-printed with names and dates. One section of boxes had Uncle Fred’s name on them, starting with 1942, the year he’d met Dulcie. I scanned the boxes until I found several with Grandma’s name, starting from 1937, the year Jerusha Layne went to Hollywood, and going on till the year my grandmother died.
Early this morning, driving north from Oakland to Graton, I’d told myself I was only going to read those letters Grandma had written to her sister in 1941 and 1942. This was an investigation, after all. I was looking for any mention of Ralph Tarrant, the actor murdered early in 1942. But now I opened the lid to the box labeled JERUSHA 1937 and pulled out the first letter. The envelope was faded and yellowed, with a three-cent stamp in the upper right corner, a faint postmark dated July 1937, and my grandmother’s handwriting addressed to Miss Dulcie Layne in Jackson, California. Waves of nostalgia and loss washed over me. I missed Grandma, our visits to the race track, our forays out to Brentwood during the summer to get produce for canning, our long talks about anything and everything. I opened the envelope flap and pulled out the letter. I read the words Grandma had written to her sister that long-ago summer, and I knew exactly what Aunt Dulcie meant. It was like having young Jerusha Layne in the same room with me.
I had to read all the letters. I carried all the boxes containing Jerusha’s correspondence with her sister out of the closet, stacked them on the floor in the middle of the bedroom, and sat down cross-legged on the carpet. I opened the lightweight laptop computer I’d brought with me, to take notes, and turned it on. When I removed the lids from the boxes, I gently fanned the tops of the envelopes inside. The dates on the postmarks were faded but readable. The letters had been filed in chronological order, which suited my purpose, and I thanked Dulcie’s grandchildren for their organizing job.
Jerusha wrote long, newsy letters, the kind to be savored, the sort of letters people don’t write anymore, since the advent of e-mail. She had an eye for detail and great skill at describing what was going on in her life. Her handwritten words provided me with a glimpse of what life was like back then, as the country edged slowly out of the economic hardships of the Great Depression toward the trauma and devastation of World War II.
I read Jerusha’s accounts of her arrival in Hollywood, where she got a small room in a boarding house. Then there was a detailed and amusing description of her very first, and very brief, role as an extra on the set of You’re Only Young Once, part of the Andy Hardy series. The amusing part of the letter dealt with some of the antics of MGM’s young star, Mickey Rooney.
I glanced up at Aunt Dulcie. She dozed in her rocking chair, her blue eyes closed, her wrinkled old face tilted to one side, the skin furrowed into little hills and valleys. I smiled and went back to the letters. Over the next hour or so, I read steadily, taking notes, moving through the correspondence written in the summer and autumn of 1937, through 1938 and into 1939, the year of Gone with the Wind and other great movies such as Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and The Women with Norma Shearer. Jerusha had worked as an extra and bit player in some of these, including the Shearer film. She sometimes had to take temporary jobs, clerking in a store or typing in an office, just to keep money coming in. But her movie work at various studios steadily increased, feeding her hopes of a career as an actress. I enjoyed her accounts of her day-to-day life. Jerusha commented on everything from the cost of living to the beautiful dress Marion Davies wore the day Jerusha saw her at Metro, posing for pictures outside a soundstage, with L. B. Mayer on one side and William Randolph Hearst on the other.
Nineteen thirty-nine was also the year World War II officially started, and in the months leading up to Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September of that year, Jerusha
also commented on politics and news of the day. She always read the newspapers and listened to the radio news, I recalled, and watched TV news in her later years. I’d had many long discussions with her about current events and politics. I looked up from a letter Jerusha had written in early September, mentioning the newly declared war in Europe. I remembered what Aunt Dulcie had said about the shock of Pearl Harbor.
The boarding house where Jerusha lived seemed to have a revolving door as hopeful young girls like Jerusha Layne came to Hollywood to try for movie stardom. Her comments about her fellow roomers were, depending on the circumstances, poignant and amusing. And Jerusha’s description of her boarding house landlady made me laugh out loud. The woman was a salty dame who’d worked in silent movies back in the early days, doing slapstick comedies for director Mack Sennett at Keystone Studios.
I’d been making notes as I read Jerusha’s letters, looking for information about her roommates. Finally I found a familiar name—Pearl Bishop. It was at the boarding house, in the fall of 1938, that Jerusha met Pearl, her future roommate at the bungalow. The first time I saw Pearl mentioned in one of the letters, she was working steadily as an extra and bit player at Republic Pictures, one of the leading studios on Poverty Row, a collection of small, mostly short-lived B-movie studios producing low-budget films, although Republic went on to bigger movies after the war. When Jerusha met her, Pearl was working on a movie I’d never heard of, though with Outlaw in the title I guess it was a Western.
