A Touch of Stardust (11 page)

They drove to the boarding house in total silence.

“Goodbye.” She opened the door, feeling proud of herself. She had carried it off. “It was an interesting evening, though I feel I’ve been cast as an extra in a detective story.”

“I’m sorry.” The words obviously came hard to him.

“That’s not enough.”

“I was involved with a friend of hers, and it didn’t work out.” He really seemed to be struggling. “I want to leave it at that, if you’ll let me. It was—bad. Maybe sometime. Not now.”

“But I need to know more now.”

“Sorry.”

She could think of nothing further to say. “Goodbye,” she said again.

“Goodbye, kid.” His jaw set, he turned his eyes to the road. He already had the car in gear.

On Monday, Carole pulled the bright-red scooter resting against the side of her trailer upright and paused, looking back at Julie. “Why don’t you go watch Cukor do the birthing scene? Huge moment, and he’ll get everything possible out of it,” she said.

Julie tried to smile, but without enthusiasm. The chatter all morning on the studio lot had been about Olivia de Havilland’s big scene to be shot today, one of her most important. Julie remembered it vividly from the book: Melanie, carrying Ashley Wilkes’s child, goes into labor just as the Yankees march into Atlanta, and there is no one to help her except a reluctant but determined Scarlett. It would be a harrowing scene, and it had to look authentic.

The actress had never given birth, but Cukor had been working with her for days, calming her, encouraging her. The plan was, he would sit at her feet, out of camera range, and when she needed to scream with labor pains, he would pinch her feet. Hard. It would hurt. And she had agreed.

From what Julie was hearing, Clark wasn’t wrong when he said Cukor favored actresses, and they bloomed under his tutelage.

“I don’t know—” Julie began.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, you can keep an eye on Clark for me. Don’t let the girls flirt with him. If Lana Turner sneaks onto the set, let me know.” Carole tossed this over her shoulder with a grin as she
swung one leg over the scooter, sat down on the seat, and prepared to take off. Julie wasn’t sure if she was joking or not.

“But he won’t be on the set for this one—”

“I know that; it doesn’t matter. I’m just giving you an excuse to think you’re working. And you’ll see some good directing. Cukor could pull a good performance out of a giraffe, I swear. Anyhow, it’s a better way to spend an afternoon than signing pictures of me, right? And you need some cheering up.”

She gave Julie a wink and threw the scooter into gear. “Oh …” She paused, a slight wrinkle on her brow. “Don’t tell Clark I praised George.” Then she took off, hair flying, dodging pedestrians and delivery trucks, waving at everybody.

Julie, watching her go, managed a wave herself. Carole on that scooter was a familiar sight now on the Selznick lot, and everybody waved back at her. She could also sniff out trouble in a swift minute, and had known instantly this morning that Julie was depressed.

“So what terrible thing did Andy do?” she had demanded, while applying a sloppy coat of red nail polish, repeatedly thrusting the brush deep into the bottle and then dabbing it in the general direction of her fingernails. Precision and patience were not Carole’s style.

Julie scanned the array of bottles on the dressing table, hoping to find nail-polish remover, but saw none. “It isn’t anything he did, it’s what he didn’t do,” she began. Recounting the incident, describing Andy’s stubborn withholding of an explanation for what happened, felt somehow flat and pedestrian, like shaking out wrinkled sheets in the light of day. She couldn’t quite muster the level of indignation she had felt initially.

Carole listened closely. “You are upset because he didn’t explain why someone would toss a drink at him? Things get pretty dramatic in this town, dear. Isn’t that up to him?”

Julie felt jarred. “But why would he withhold unless—”

“Unless it was something he isn’t ready to talk about?”

“He treated me like a child.”

Carole had a thoughtful look on her face, as if she was weighing choices. “He’s a decent type, from all I know,” she said. “But he’s
got a history. We all do. And it sounds like he’s not ready to talk about it.”

“But it puts a rift between—” Julie began.

“Honey, would you expect a list of all the women he’s slept with?”

“Of course not. I …” She reached out and pushed back the bottle of red polish as it teetered on the edge of Carole’s dressing table. She shouldn’t have to defend a perfectly logical reaction.

“Then my advice is to leave it alone for now.”

“So why did no one seem surprised?” Maybe that’s what was truly bothering her—everyone knew something, and she was being kept in the dark.

Carole shrugged. “I think I know who she was, actually. She’s pulled that stunt before.” She had lost interest in her nails. “If you want him, go after him. He’s respected and liked by everybody.”

“I don’t know if I do. It’s all too fast.”

“Hurry up and figure it out. Or he’ll get away.”

“You make him sound like a fish.”

“Honey, he is. And it’s a small pond with lots of women fishing, so make up your mind. Whoops, I’m late for the shoot.” Carole jumped up, this time sending the open bottle of polish over the edge, glancing casually as it dribbled down the table’s white eyelet skirt. “Never liked this pouffy white thing,” she muttered. “Looks like something Scarlett O’Hara would wear.”

“Your nails—”

“Makeup will fix them. They don’t really belong to me anyway—they belong to the character I play.”

“I’m probably expecting too much,” Julie said under her breath now, watching Carole chug breezily away. She turned in the opposite direction and trudged off to the soundstage in an increasingly glum mood. That scene at the Mankiewicz party would not have happened in Fort Wayne. But she was in Hollywood now, and the rules
were different. Back home, she would have every right to expect a full explanation. Maybe here she
was
being childish.

She thought back to her conversation with Rose last night. Both of them were in pajamas, each on her own bed, as they talked. She told her eager friend about the dazzling array of guests at the dinner party, about meeting Frances Marion. About swallowing her anxieties and trying not to care about Andy’s refusal to explain. In this setting, she had felt uncomfortably like a college girl again, sharing confidences with a friend in her college dormitory. She had found herself wondering, wasn’t she growing beyond that?

Until Rose brought her wandering thoughts up short. “I think you’re scared of him, and you care more about him than you want to,” she’d said.

“I’m not scared of anybody, certainly not Andy.”

“Oh, don’t bristle. You just need to figure out what you really want here.”

“Have you?” Julie asked. Things were happening fast for Rose. She was about to sign a contract now with Selznick, earning fifty dollars a week and taking diction lessons to scrub away her Texas accent. Every six months she’d get an extra twenty-five dollars a week. Officially, she would soon be a starlet, and pretty soon she’d be able to afford something better than this rooming house. Acting lessons were next, but Julie found it puzzling how unexcited Rose seemed about all her good news.

“Yes, I have,” Rose replied.

Said so calmly. Julie saw the invited question in her friend’s eyes. “You’ve met someone, haven’t you?” she said.

Rose blushed and nodded.

“Is it serious?”

“Oh, I think so. I’m sure he’s ready to propose, and I think I’m going to marry him.”

“Oh my goodness, so soon? How can you be sure?”

“I am,” Rose had answered calmly, lifting her head high. “I knew from the first day we met.”

A sudden stab of envy. “But how can you be so sure?”

“We’re very alike, and he’s from Texas. He’s starting his own construction firm here, like my father,” she said with a contented smile. “I know it’s fast. But I think you will understand when you meet him.”

“What about your career?”

“He’s fine with that, you know, for a little while.”

“Until you get pregnant?”

Rose blushed, but answered soberly: “I’m having fun, and I like what I’m doing, but—you know what Selznick told me? He said my name was all wrong. That it sounded like the name of an Irish scullery maid, and I have to change it. That the minute anyone called me ‘Rosie’ I was finished.”

“They do that a lot, I guess,” Julie said.

“I told Jim—that’s his name—and he said my name was beautiful, that he wouldn’t change anything about me. And I knew then that, well”—she was struggling to find the right words—“most likely, even if I changed my name, I would always be doing tryouts, putting on still-warm dresses that other girls wore.” She added softly, “I can see, that’s the way it works in Hollywood.”

Julie scrambled for words that wouldn’t show her surprise. “I guess I’ve seen you as more like me—” she began.

Rose shook her head. “You’re more ambitious,” she said. “Can we still be friends?”

“Of course we can.”

“You want to be a screenwriter, and I want that for you. But it’s not going to be easy.”

“I know.” Julie couldn’t say the rest of what she was thinking—that she wasn’t ready to give up, not in the least; that she didn’t see herself in Mayer’s writing stable, pounding aimlessly on a typewriter; no, she saw more than
that
ahead.

Rose gently broke her train of thought. “When I say you’re ‘scared’ of Andy, do you know what I mean?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You know—that he might dissuade you from doing what you want. Think about it.”

Julie pondered that question—so engrossed in her thoughts, she almost walked by the soundstage. But there was George Cukor, hurrying up the steps, hands in his pockets, head down. He waved at a gaffer who gave the well-liked director a shout of greeting. Julie hurried in behind him, unsettled by her own distraction. A few moments later and the massive soundproofed doors to the stage would have been locked; she wouldn’t have been able to get in.

She blinked as she entered, disoriented by the sudden darkness of the building’s vast interior, and grabbed for something to hold on to until her eyes adjusted. Those miraculous new boom microphones hung high, ready to move with the actors when filming began. Such a simple technological development, these movable mikes, Andy had told her—but they made it possible for the actors’ movements to look natural on film, a seismic shift in film drama. The set was eerily quiet. All sound seemed sucked away into some sort of vacuum tube as she moved toward the set.

Below the booms, the staircase of Aunt Pittypat’s house. Julie drew in her breath with surprise—this was no façade, it was the believable interior of an elegant home. The banisters were intricately carved. The tall window on the staircase landing was swathed in heavy olive-green velvet draperies. The lighting, the carpeting—everything seemed inviting yet oddly somber, fitting the tense scene about to be played. A person could walk into this re-created entry hall and believe herself in a real room.