“Of course you can. Shall I call for tea? Or are you more of a coffee girl? Something stronger, perhaps? Cary’s wet bar is stocked better than the Biltmore Bowl.”
“I appreciate the gesture, but I don’t feel comfortable accepting this money.”
He seemed genuinely confused. “You want to open your own store, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
His smile was charming, but dangerously rakish.
“Does it really matter where the funds come from?” His voice was Don Juan smooth now.
“It matters a great deal.”
“Why?”
“I’ve been around long enough to know that money like this never comes without strings.”
“Strings, huh?” A gold square box engraved with an intertwined pair of H’s sat on the patio table. Hughes flipped it open and offered her one of the cigarettes inside. She shook her head, but he took one and lit it. “Precisely what sort of strings do you think they are?”
“I can rattle off half a dozen without even thinking.”
“I’m listening.”
“Lana Turner, Yvonne de Carlo, Linda Darnell, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Cyd Charisse.”
“Ah! Those sorts of strings.” The scars slicing his face distorted his smile, but it was still remarkably disarming.
Gwendolyn could feel the heat of a blush flaring out from under her. “I’m just trying to avoid unnecessary entanglements.”
His smile became a giggle, which he tried to suppress—halfheartedly, it seemed. She was on the verge of standing when he said,
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to laugh.” He tilted toward her. “If I could convince you that my motivations were not about tempting you into the sack, would you accept it then?”
This’ll be worth the cab fare. “Give it your best shot.”
“I have to warn you, it’s not what girls like you want to hear.”
Girls like me? She gestured for him to continue.
“The thing is . . . you’re just too . . . old.”
Gwendolyn fought to regain her composure. Howard Hughes will bed anything in a skirt, but not me? Because I’m too old? At thirty-seven?
Howard chuckled nervously. “You look like you want to stab me in the throat.”
“Do you blame me?”
“I didn’t tell you that lightly, but I wanted you to know my intentions are honorable.” He paused for a moment. “There’s another reason I want you to have that money.”
She withdrew a cigarette from his golden box and held it out for him. “Should I brace myself?”
He lit it for her with a matching lighter. “You could easily have handed Linc Tattler over to Bugsy Siegel to save your own skin, but you didn’t, and I wanted to show my appreciation.”
“What’s any of that got to do with you?”
“Before your boyfriend left town, he came to see me. He told me about a file box belonging to Leilah and Clem that had come into his possession. He said it had dozens of index cards detailing all her clients. He said my name was in the box, and he rattled off enough dates and girls to convince me. He said he was planning on taking it out of the country with him, and then he was going to burn it.” Howard raised an eyebrow. “I don’t suppose you know if he did?”
Gwendolyn wondered why Linc would go to the trouble of taking that box with him if he was only going to burn it later. Was it insurance in case someone had arranged to have him stopped at the border? She decided it was impossible to know at this point, and with Siegel gone, what did it matter? She shook her head.
He grimaced. “Pity. As far as I can tell, he paid a visit to every chump in the box and alerted them to how the O’Roarkes had been keeping records.”
“Bugsy Siegel was real keen to track Linc down,” Gwendolyn said.
Howard nodded soberly. “I suspect Siegel somehow knew Linc had all that information and wanted it to blackmail every mover and shaker in town.”
Gwendolyn fell back into her chair and started to fan herself with her gloves. Why didn’t Linc tell me all this?
“The point is,” Howard continued, “Linc kept his trap shut, Siegel never tracked him down, and you didn’t lead him to Linc. So this here five grand was my clumsy way of saying thank you without having to bring up all this sordidness.”
He was looking at her so intensely that Gwendolyn had to turn away. Her eyes fell on the check. Five grand. Together with my Licketysplitter money, Chez Gwendolyn could actually become real. All I have to do is say thank you. And yet somehow she couldn’t convince herself to reach across the table. Providence usually came with consequences.
He slid the check across the glass until it lay in front of her. “Tell you what, how about you take it with you today, stick it someplace safe, then tell me your decision on November second.”
“What’s happening then?”
“It’s when I’ll be conducting the test flight of my Hercules down in Long Beach. I want you to be my guest. Come down, watch the flight, and give me your answer then. How does that sound?”
Gwendolyn was no longer sure she could return the money. “That sounds fair.” She popped open her purse and slid the check inside. “I’ll see you there.”
He fell back into his chair, smiling.
Gwendolyn leaned forward. “And seeing as how you were kind enough to be as blunt as a hammer with me, I must now repay the favor.”
His hand held the gold cigarette lighter halfway to his mouth. It stopped, shaking slightly. “Shoot.”
“It’s Cary.”
“What about him?”
“He wants you to get the hell out.”
* * *
It was a long, steep walk down Benedict Canyon Drive to Sunset, where Gwendolyn would have any hope of flagging down a cab. By the first curve in the road, she wished she had selected more sensible shoes that morning, but how was she to know that she’d be leaving Cary Grant’s house on foot? She wondered, too, if perhaps she shouldn’t have declined Howard’s offer to have Cary’s driver take her back to the Garden. But she needed time to think about what had just happened back there.
It’s not what girls like you want to hear.
She realized this was the first time she’d been rejected because of her age. She didn’t think she looked thirty, let alone thirty-seven, and she certainly didn’t feel any different than she had at twenty-one.
“Gwendolyn Brick,” she declared out loud, “when Howard Hughes thinks you’re too old, you really are past it.”
She dropped her handbag on the sidewalk and plunked her rear end on the edge of the curb, held her face in her hands, and laughed and cried and laughed and cried.
CHAPTER 43
Kathryn knocked on Marcus’ door. When he opened it, she pressed her finger to his lips. Given the recent tension between them, she knew it was a bold move, but desperate times called for audacity. He’d been the Rock of Gibraltar the night they learned of Nelson’s banishment, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was relieved Nelson was out of the picture. Knowing that Nelson sacrificed his career for her shook her to the core, and suddenly she missed him dreadfully.
“I want you to come with me,” she told Marcus. “Now. Are you free?”
He nodded, with unblinking eyes, wary but hopeful.
It was October now, two months since that night at Wesley Hoyt’s store. The following day, she presented him with a special bottle of Four Roses she’d tracked down. The guy at the liquor store on Wilshire assured her it was from the final batch they produced before Prohibition officially kicked in. This brought about a tacit détente, and since then they’d danced around each other like ballerinas in barbed wire tutus, but it wasn’t enough. She missed their intimacy as desperately as she missed Nelson.
When he grabbed his hat and coat and asked if he’d need his car keys, she told him yes. They were driving past the Elizabeth Arden salon on the Sunset Strip before he asked where they were going.
“To a meeting of the Committee for the First
Amendment.”
He let out a terse “hm.”
“When you testify to the HUAC, the people at this meeting will be the ones cheering you on.”
After suffering through a summer of the HUAC’s rabid headline-hogging, screenwriter Philip Dunne and directors John Huston and William Wyler decided they’d had enough and formed the Committee for the First Amendment. Word reached Kathryn that the next meeting was at Ira Gershwin’s home in Beverly Hills that night. She wasn’t sure if it was invitation only, but it was worth a shot.
Boisterous conversation poured through the open windows of 1021 Roxbury Drive as they walked up the flagstone path. Kathryn’s heavy-handed tap on the silver knocker brought Paulette Goddard to the door. Her “Oh!” suggested she was surprised to see them standing there, but she stepped back and let them in. She pointed to a pair of white louvered doors on the far side of the marble and chandelier foyer. “Bar’s on the left.”
They walked into a living room that was easily four times the size of Kathryn’s entire apartment. A Chagall dominated the room from above an ornate mantle and a picturesque pumpkin display filled the fireplace below.
Someone had artfully arranged a maze of sofas, love seats, and occasional chairs, all upholstered in autumnal colors, from the red of Japanese maples to the dark greens of a Pacific Northwest fir. Congregating around the furniture in bunches were some of the most prominent people in Hollywood. The huddle to Kathryn’s right included Danny Kaye and Edward G. Robinson, deep in conversation with Frederic March and Rita Hayworth.
Past them, by Gershwin’s floor-to-ceiling teak bookcase, stood Judy Garland and Groucho Marx. Kathryn nudged Marcus. “Let’s break some ice with Judy and Groucho. I haven’t seen him since the Go West premiere.”
But they were still picking their way through the crowd when William Wyler pinged his martini glass with a spoon. “I think it’s about time we started,” he announced. “We do have an agenda, so unless somebody has a particularly urgent concern they want addressed, we can—”
“YEAH!” a voice pitched over the crowd, stopping all conversation cold. “I’ve got an issue, and I think it ought to be dealt with first.”
All eyes turned to Edward G. Robinson. At a diminutive five foot seven, he was hardly the shortest star in Hollywood, but his magnetism ballooned to occupy a space twice his size.
The actor used his fat cigar to point at Kathryn. The bodies closest to her inched away silently. Marcus stayed put, but she sensed him stiffen.
“The whole point of this meeting is that we get to express our frustrations over what’s been going on,” Robinson said, his eyes unforgiving. “But now I see we’ve got Billy Wilkerson’s handmaiden in our midst, and suddenly I’m not so sure I can speak my mind as freely as I’d like.”
“Eddie,” Wyler said, “I’ve never met Miss Massey myself, but she’s got a reputation that hardly—”
“I want to hear what she has to say,” Philip Dunne announced.
Kathryn considered his recent The Ghost and Mrs. Muir screenplay was about as close to perfection as one could get, and she was disappointed to hear his wary tone match Robinson’s. She felt the heat of forty pairs of eyeballs on her, and decided to play offence.
“More than half the people here know me personally,” she said, rotating slowly to survey the crowd. “Either from interviews, or on my radio show, or from some party or other. So I must say I’m disappointed that my motives have come into question here.”
The room was graveyard silent. She glanced at Marcus to gauge how she was doing, but his face remained inert.
“Believe me,” she persevered, “I am as horrified as any of you with my boss’ views. If you’ve read my column, you’ll know my stance in this situation, but for those who haven’t, allow me to state it as clearly as I can. As far to the right as Billy Wilkerson sits on the political spectrum, I sit on the left.”
Kathryn’s stomach dropped a hundred feet when she realized what she’d said. The far-left equivalent of Wilkerson’s right-wing stance wasn’t bleeding-heart liberalism, but the extremity that encompassed anarchists, subversives—and Communists.
The only sound was the sonorous ticking of a grandfather clock in some other room.
Please, dear God, will somebody say something? Anything!
Gershwin’s front door slammed. Humphrey Bogart appeared through the louvered doors with Lauren Bacall trailing him. He stopped when he realized he’d walked into a packed room where nobody was talking.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“I’m defending my right to be here,” Kathryn said, “to a bunch of people who seem keen to pronounce me guilty by association to Wilkerson.”
Bogie raised his eyebrows, slow and wary, as he looked around the room. Bacall stepped to one side to let Gene Kelly hobble into view on the crutches he needed after recently spraining his ankle in rehearsal.
Bogie said, “Maybe what they’re really wondering is, Are you here as a concerned citizen, or as a responsible member of the press?”
Bless you, Humphrey Bogart, for inserting “responsible” in that question.
“Both,” Kathryn said, ‘but I’m starting to feel like this is Salem, and I’m Abigail Williams.”
“She’s right about one thing,” Dunne said, “this whole stinkpile shows every indication of deteriorating into a witch hunt. Billy Wilkerson has been fanning the flames of this fire—”
“He’s the one who started it in the first place!” someone interjected.
“The things he’s said in his column have been malicious and incendiary,” Dunne continued, “and will end up costing people their livelihoods if we don’t fight back.” A murmur of approval swelled across the room. “What troubles me is that it’s Wilkerson who pays Miss Massey’s salary, so at the end of the day, she owes her allegiance to—”
“May I say something?”
It was Marcus. Kathryn looked at him. Please don’t let me hang out to dry.
“My name is Marcus Adler. I head up the writers’ department at MGM. I am here because I’ve been subpoenaed to testify at the HUAC hearings in Washington next month.”
The morning after the subpoena, Marcus had reported what happened to Mayer and Mannix, who told him it was no big deal. All he had to do was parrot the company line—and tell nobody about his summons. They wanted the drama of the HUAC’s first surprise witness to be an MGM’er. He promised he would, so this announcement was a major transgression, but Kathryn could see it gave her instant credibility.
“I didn’t know about tonight’s meeting,” Marcus continued, “until Kathryn knocked on my door an hour ago. She insisted we come here, and when I asked her why, she said, ‘Because when you testify, those people will be the ones cheering you on.’ Those HUAC pigs want us to suspect each other. They’d love nothing better than to see accusations of disloyalty and sabotage flying around town. If this committee is going to achieve anything, then everybody needs to start rowing in the same direction, because we have everything to lose.”
Bogie started to clap—slow and rhythmic, like a metronome. Lauren joined him, then Gene Kelly. On the other side of the room, Frank Sinatra was the next to add his support, picking up the pace. One by one, each member of the Committee for the First Amendment added to the applause until Ira Gershwin’s living room was filled with approval.
* * *
Marcus switched on his headlights and waited for Judy Garland to pass before pointing his car toward Sunset.
Kathryn settled back in her seat, still buzzing. She felt like she had the energy to run all the way home. “That sure was a hell of an evening, huh? So many articulate and savvy people, and so passionate and united over an issue. Did you read in the Examiner last month when it quoted that freshman congressman who just joined the HUAC?”
“Richard Nixon?”
“Yeah, him. What a weed. He said the HUAC will uncover the ‘Red network’ and names will be named, and the whole thing will be ‘sensational.’ Someho
w, I don’t think he quite reckoned on the Committee for the First Amendment. Did I tell you Wilkerson and I have been fighting over my pro-freedom-of-speech columns? Oh boy, but my boss sure can swear a blue streak. When I told him I want to be in Washington for the hearings, he said there’s no value in a trip like that. I nearly threw his telephone at him.”
“Do you miss him?”
The unexpected turn left Kathryn confused. “Wilkerson? I did when he was in Paris, but now I sometimes wish he hadn’t hurried back so fast.”
“I meant Hoyt.”
Marcus’ voice was low and measured. She briefly considered downplaying how she felt, but decided that would be disrespectful to both men. There’d been enough lying in Hollywood over the past year. “Yes,” she told him, “I miss him terribly.”
Marcus let a block or two slip past. “Have you been sleeping with him?”
She kept her eyes fixed on the deserted boulevard stretching before them. “I’m not going to answer that.”
“On the grounds it may incriminate you?”
“On the grounds that it’s none of your business.”
Without warning, Marcus veered the car to the curb and pounded the brakes, his hands clenched around the steering wheel. “Since when is your life none of my business? I thought there were no fences between us.”
“And I thought I had your unconditional support,” she shot back.
“You do.”
“I did . . . until I found myself in a situation that you didn’t approve of. It’s not ideal, I know that. But when love comes along—”
“So it’s love, is it?”
The scorn in his voice felt like a slap.
“Heading that way.” She chose her words prudently. “I don’t dispute for a minute that you had every right to be suspicious of a guy like that, but after hearing what happened between him and Hoover, I’d have thought you’d give him some credit, if only for getting you out of the Mandeville raid.”
“I still say he did it to further his own aims.”
“What he did was save your career!” Suddenly it felt stuffy inside Marcus’ car. She cracked open her window and let the cool October air breeze in. “And now he’s probably saved mine—and, may I add, at the expense of his own. Jesus, Marcus, you make him sound like he’s Goering or Himmler or somebody.”
Reds in the Beds Page 29
