City of Flickering Light

by Juliette Fay

“Herbert Vanderslice,” he said, his voice so deep she imagined it might be what a walrus would sound like if it spoke English.

  She held out her hand to shake. “Mil—”

  “Now you’ll be standing with the horse over here, just having a nice time petting him. And then he”—Vanderslice gestured toward the Indian—“you—”

  “Dan Russell,” the man said quickly.

  “Yes, well, you sneak around that side of the house toward her, crouching, sneaking, hands out.” Vanderslice acted this out, and it seemed quite silly, this man in his expensive tan suit and stiff straw hat, stalking along like a thief. Millie knew she shouldn’t laugh, but it was so much nicer to feel silly than faint from stress. She cut her eyes toward Dan Russell, who responded with a frown. Chastened, she folded her lips in and bit down hard.

  “Then you, miss—”

  Taking her cue from Russell, she slipped her name in quickly so the director might at least know who she was in that moment. “Mildred Martin!”

  “You’re going to raise your hands up.” He threw his arms into the air and made a face that seemed more gruesome than afraid. “Then you jump on your horse and ride off. Mr., uh . . .”

  “Dan Russell,” said Millie

  “Yes, he’ll ride after you and shoot a rifle. But it will be blanks, so not to worry. Always blanks. Well, I think that’s enough for now. Let’s get started, shall we?”

  As the director walked away through the dust and rocks in his spotless brown riding boots, Dan Russell said, “Don’t ever do that.”

  Millie spun around to face him. “Do what?”

  “Look at me when he says or does something stupid.”

  “I’m so sorry!”

  He chuckled. “It’s not really that big of a deal. It’s just, if you look at me, then I know that you know it was dumb. Then if I start to smile, you’re going to smile, and then he’ll know we’re laughing at him. Never, ever let the director know you’re laughing, Mildred.”

  “I go by Millie.”

  “I go by Dan.”

  “But that’s your actual name.”

  “Simplifies things, doesn’t it?”

  Millie laughed. It felt so good.

  “Get to work, Millie.”

  “You, too, Dan who goes by Dan.”

  The first time Dan snuck around, Millie suspected he was purposely trying not to be too terrifying, because he certainly didn’t look like any kind of hound from hell. He looked more like he was mimicking Mr. Vanderslice, and Millie almost laughed. But she bit down hard on her lips and made her eyes go wide. When she ran over to the chestnut brown quarter horse and stuck her foot in the stirrup, it veered away from her, leaving her hopping madly after it.

  “Cut!” Vanderslice screamed and walked over to her. “What appears to be the problem, Miss—”

  “Mildred Martin,” she interjected quickly. “The horse is not cooperating—which is not to say she’s a bad horse, just cantankerous. Or maybe she’s having a bad day, for some reason. Could she be hungry? Also, do we know her name? It might help if I could call her by name.”

  Vanderslice heaved an exaggerated sigh. He turned back to the crew and yelled into the megaphone, “Where’s the horse trainer?”

  “He’s dealing with a horse on another set!” came the reply.

  Vanderslice shook his head and muttered, “I am going to fire him six times over.”

  “Might someone have an apple?” said Millie. “Or a pear? Some horses just love pears.”

  Dan Russell walked over. “Sugar,” he said. “There’s some near the coffeepot.”

  “Sugar!” Vanderslice bellowed as he stormed back toward the camera.

  The prop man ran out with the sugar bowl, and Millie poured it into the pocket of her dress and handed it back to him. She went up to the horse and stood a few feet away. “Now, listen, Calliope. I’m going to call you Calliope because no one knows your name, and she was my most beloved horse. But you and I? We’ve got to get ourselves sorted out, and quick. So you come over here now and have a little of this sugar, and you know I have more because you can smell it in my pocket.” She sprinkled a little sugar into the palm of her hand.

  Calliope whickered. Millie whickered back. Calliope took a step forward and so did Millie. The horse reached out her long neck, and Millie slid her hand a little closer. In a swish of the horse’s lips, the sugar was gone.

  “Cut!” called the director. “Very good, very good! We’ll use that!”

  Millie looked over at Dan Russell, leaning up against the shady side of the house, arms crossed against his bare chest. “I didn’t know they were filming!”

  “Be glad they were,” he said. “A take with only you in it is more than atmosphere work. Your pay will go up. Now let’s get this next one done.”

  “Okay, but terrify me this time, will you?”

  “Will do.”

  24

  Motion picture writing is as practical a profession as plumbing, only the plums are bigger.

  John Emerson and Anita Loos, in How to Write Photoplays

  Over the last three weeks, Irene had taken Eva’s confidence in her very seriously. She dragged Millie to the movies every other night and went without lunch to afford it; when she got home, she always made herself write a five-hundred-word synopsis, the standard studio-recommended length, of the plot points. On the weekends, she borrowed copies of plays, such as A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde, from the Studio Club library and wrote out summaries of the action. She read the newspaper every day, and the latest copy of Photoplay magazine. She had practically begun to dream in five-hundred-word format.

  Perhaps most useful was the fact that Irene was actually being paid to read (and then type) scenarios and continuity scripts all day long. She studied them as she tapped away and kept a running list in her notebook of the ones she hoped would be chosen and the ones she deemed too flat, undramatic, rehashed, or out of step with popular interest to make the cut.

  “Your speed is decelerating,” Miss Clemente warned her one morning.

  Irene smiled nervously. “But my accuracy’s improving.”

  “You know how I feel about the importance of speed over accuracy.”

  “I do, yes. I’ll try harder.”

  Miss Clemente’s glare intensified. “And you need a bigger purse.”

  “A bigger purse?”

  “To hide the book Miss Crown gave you that’s forever poking up out of your pochette. I don’t want the other girls getting any ideas. One would-be writer in the typing pool is already one too many.”

  Irene sat on an old bench on Mama Ringamory’s front porch, paging through How to Write Photoplays for the umpteenth time with a flashlight. Ringa insisted on lights out at nine. (Irene suspected it was because the girls who were leaving for “evening work” were gone by then, and Ringa wasn’t making a kickback on the rest, so she just wanted them to shut up and go to sleep.) Irene tried to spend as much time as she could with Millie at the Studio Club between dinner and bedtime, so this was her only chance to read and work.

  For a how-to book, it was a real page-turner, or at least Irene thought so. The writing was smart but accessible, the instructions clear. You didn’t need any particular tools to submit your first synopsis to a studio, it said, except that it had to be typewritten. No chicken scratch.

  I bet Olympic made that rule right after they hired Eva Crown, thought Irene.

  Would-be scenario writers should own a dictionary and have a subscription to one of the fan magazines—it would give invaluable information as to the kinds of stories studios were looking for, because studios wanted whatever the fans wanted. With an eye toward dissecting and analyzing what makes them work, it was imperative to go to the movies as often as possible.

  Irene chuckled. Movie-going as a job requirement? That was okay by her.

  As for where ideas could be found, Miss Loos insisted the question “is probably the mootest of the moot in the scenario game.” They came from everywhe
re: news stories and current movements such as Bolshevism and spiritualism, classic books, plays, poems, and even music. These sources were not to be plagiarized but used as inspiration.

  One should keep a notebook on hand at all times in which to jot down unexpected ideas, otherwise they would be lost. Most importantly, Loos exhorted the writer to “keep alive” by spending time with interesting people, whether smart or just unusual characters, preferably both.

  Irene knew she should go to bed but couldn’t keep herself from rereading the next chapter, “Getting the Story Across,” one more time. Then, of course, she would want to expand on an idea she’d scribbled in her notebook earlier in the day. She toed off her shoes, tucked her feet up under her, and pulled her sweater a little more tightly around her shoulders. It was going to be a long night.

  There had been an item in yesterday’s newspaper that had sparked an idea. The article was so short she would have missed it, but for the headline:

  BABY FOILS ROBBERY

  Apparently over Labor Day weekend, a burglar had broken into a property on Wilshire Boulevard at night. The nanny had heard him coming across the garden shortly after he’d busted the lock on the servants’ entrance gate. She was out there in the dark with her employer’s baby who had the croup, walking him in the cool night air to soothe him.

  The criminal was sent packing when he heard a particularly harsh cough. “I do believe he thought it was the bark of a watchdog!” the nanny stated to the police.

  This was not even worthy of a one-reeler, Irene knew. Though the drama was high when the nanny heard the intruder, that was it. There was only one point of conflict, and it was resolved almost immediately by the baby’s coughing fit.

  But what if the baby hadn’t scared off the burglar? What if he’d grabbed the baby from the nanny’s arms . . . and . . .

  It had to be something unexpected, something that would make the audience gasp in fear and then in surprise.

  What if the criminal was a father with children of his own? They’d had croup before, or maybe one of them even had it that very night. But his baby was sickly because it didn’t have enough to eat. He needed to steal to feed his family . . .

  Why would he grab this other baby? Irene frowned and stared out at Ringa’s overgrown shrubs and patchy lawn.

  To soothe the poor thing himself! The nanny wasn’t doing a very good job. Or it wasn’t the nanny . . . it was the baby’s very young mother who didn’t know what she was doing. And she’d been left all alone because her husband was dead. No! He was out carousing!

  Oh, this is getting good, thought Irene.

  And then she had to laugh. Here she was in the middle of the night by herself, gripped by the drama of her own made-up story, and she couldn’t wait to find out what would happen next.

  After only a few hours sleep, she woke bleary-eyed and nudged an elbow out of her armpit. Jane (or June, or whoever it was who shared her bed now) was a sprawler. Not a cuddler, like Millie, but the kind who invariably got a limb on you. Irene rose quickly, relieved to disentangle herself, but dreading breakfast in equal measure. There were more girls than ever squeezed into the rickety house, and meals were like feeding time at a third-rate zoo, with each hyena snarling and grabbing for what few scraps she could get her paws on. Irene was ready to storm the Studio Club and evict someone bodily, if that’s what it took to get a spot.

  Far more than her own comfort, though, she was concerned about Millie and how much time she spent alone. Millie wasn’t a time-to-herself person like Irene was. She was a more-the-merrier person, and since the incident she’d been particularly fragile. Instead of gradually returning to her usual upbeat, silly self, she seemed to be withdrawing even more, getting quieter, more afraid. Irene decided she would risk Miss Clemente’s wrath and take a little longer with Millie at lunch. Maybe she could get her laughing somehow or distract her from her dark feelings by the story of the croupy baby and the fatherly burglar.

  But at lunchtime, Millie was nowhere to be found. She always made her rounds at the other studios early in the morning so she could be at Olympic in time for Irene’s lunch break, picking up a bottle of Royal Crown ginger ale and a cream cheese sandwich for them to split on her way. She’d found a drugstore that sold them for a nickel, so the whole lunch only cost a dime. Not that they had a dime to spare these days.

  Irene waited at the benches, then took several laps around the studio, but there was no sign of her.

  “Irene Van Beck.”

  She spun around at the sound of her name, and there was Eva Crown, wearing a green cotton dress with a small blue ink stain on one thigh, right where the bottom of the interior pocket must have lain.

  “I hope you and Anita Loos have been getting along well. I see her peeking out of your little purse there.”

  “Oh, yes, she’s brilliant. I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Your note was very nice. I feel fully thanked. And have you been doing any writing yourself?”

  Irene smiled. “Actually . . . I’ve been driving my friends a bit mad, scribbling in my pad all the time, writing down ideas and details. They’re sure they’re the main characters of every story.”

  “Get used to that,” Miss Crown said with a conspiratorial eye roll. “It’s the human condition to think we’re all a little more interesting than we actually are.”

  Irene gripped her purse strap and forced herself to say, “I . . . um. I’ve been working on something.”

  “And?”

  “And, I think . . . I think it might not be . . . completely terrible.”

  “Well, that’s a glowing endorsement! I can see it in large script across the movie poster now.” She gestured in the air. “Might Not Be Completely Terrible!”

  Irene felt herself flush. “I guess it’s hard for me to judge.”

  “Oh, now. I’m just teasing you. And yes, it’s hard for any writer to objectively judge her own work, but we do get a feeling about it, don’t we?”

  Hesitantly, Irene nodded.

  “All right then, what’s your feeling?”

  “I think it’s good.”

  Eva leveled her gaze at Irene. “How good?”

  It was one of the most fitful afternoons Irene could ever remember. Between worrying about Millie and what trouble she might have gotten into and wondering what Eva Crown was thinking about her synopsis of “A Baby’s Cry,” Irene’s stomach felt as if it were filled with molten lava.

  After work she hung around the lot, hoping to intercept one or preferably both of them. A truck stopped just inside the gate, and Irene watched as several cowboys, Indians, and a pioneer family climbed out. Suddenly Millie hopped down, a muslin bonnet bobbing against her back.

  She’s an extra—not wandering aimlessly around Hollywood or loafing with that Agnes! Irene felt relief flood her.

  Millie caught sight of Irene and headed toward her at a trot. Then she stopped suddenly and turned back toward the truck. A man came up behind her, naked from the waist up. Millie took his elbow and tugged him around next to her. He had short black hair and was holding a black tangle in his hands. A wig with a piece of cloth tied around it as a headband. Irene could just make out his face as they came closer. Dan Russell.

  Millie was beaming. “Irene, I worked!”

  “That’s wonderful!”

  “This is Dan Russell. He plays the Indian who captures me. And I got to ride a horse again! A mean one—well, not mean really. Just unhappy.”

  Irene held out her hand to him, and he shook it. “Irene Van Beck.”

  “Pleasure.” His gaze was strange, she thought. Intense.

  “We’re taking him to dinner,” said Millie.

  Irene’s mouth dropped open slightly. With what? she wanted to ask.

  Millie laughed. “Well, to be truthful, he’s taking us, but as soon as I get paid, we’ll give it right back to him.” She turned to look up at Dan. “You trust us for the money, right?”

  Dan chuckled. “Yes, I trust you.”
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  It was agreed that they would meet at a restaurant Dan knew of called The Cottonwood at seven-thirty. That would give Millie and Irene time to go to the YMCA and round up Henry, then head over to the Studio Club so Millie could wash and change.

  “You should change, too,” Millie said as they headed down Sunset toward the Y. The village of Hollywood was so used to seeing people in strange attire, hardly anyone blinked an eye at Millie in the long calico skirt with the bonnet swinging from her hand.

  “I only have one other summer dress, and it’s about as fresh as this one.”

  Millie frowned. “You know you’re a lovely girl, right?”

  “Where did that come from?”

  “It came from facts, Irene. You’re lovely. You shouldn’t act un-lovely so people will leave you alone.”

  “I don’t!”

  Millie shrugged, as if Irene’s protest didn’t change the truth. Then, in typical fashion, she moved on to the next subject that sprang to mind. “Dan’s nice, don’t you think?”

  Irene was still ruminating on the previous subject. “What? Oh. I only met him for a minute.”

  “Well, he’s nice, believe me.”

  Maybe that was what had brought on the comment about acting “un-lovely”—Millie had a little crush and she didn’t want Irene to embarrass her. At least this guy seemed like he might not be a monster. Irene remembered how he’d walked away when Wally was bragging about what he’d done. But of course Millie had no knowledge of that. Maybe her judgment was improving.

  “What makes him so nice?” Irene asked and was stunned by Millie’s answer: Wally on the set, nasty and accusatory; Dan helping Millie calm down, showing her the ropes, helping with the misbehaving horse.

  “I would’ve lost that job inside of a minute if it weren’t for him.”

  He knew, thought Irene. He understood how scared Millie was—and why—and he went out of his way to be kind. In a world that always seemed so full of Chandlers, Barneys, Mama Ringas, and too many Agneses to count, chalk one up for the quiet heroes.

  When they got to the YMCA, Henry was just coming out the door, looking suave in a new suit and recently cut hair. He smelled good, too. When they told him why they were celebrating, his face fell. “I’m so sorry. I promised some friends I’d meet them at the dance at the Hollywood Hotel.”