A Touch of Stardust (25 page)

“Oh, fuck that. Ask for the moon, why not?”

“We haven’t talked lately.” Julie’s stomach ached, thinking about that. Or maybe it was the Scotch. “And maybe you’re wrong about Frances Marion. Maybe she read my script and thought it was total trash.”

“You’re on your own with Andy, but I told you, you’ll hear from Marion.” Carole squinted, trying to see into the bottle of Scotch. “It’s empty,” she said in surprise. “Should we open another one?” She stopped, listening. “I hear something.”

Julie nodded. “I thought it was my ears.” The room was spinning.

“I think it’s the phone.” Carole started to get up and fell back down onto the rug. “My legs aren’t working,” she said, giggling. “Well, I can still crawl.” Slowly she made her way to the telephone stand in the hall and tugged at the cord. The phone toppled to the floor. Carole picked up the receiver, holding it upside down at first, then cooed, “Hello?”

She listened. “Well, of course she’s here,” Carole said. “I’ll tell her. What time? Who is this? The maid, honey.” She hung up and crawled back to the rug.

“Speaking of the devil. That was Frances’s secretary. She wants you to attend a story conference tomorrow morning in the Writers’ Building at MGM. Nine a.m.”

“That was for me?” The room swayed. Julie tried to stand up, but collapsed like a string doll. “They like my script?” She could hardly form the words.

“Well, put it this way—you have been invited to your first literary dissection. Now you will see how the creative process really works. Congratulations!” Carole struggled to her feet, pulling at the
buttons of her well-worn gabardine pants. “These things are getting tight,” she muttered. “Honey, it’s time for the champagne. Just a little.”

Carole’s words floated in Julie’s befuddled brain. She heard the champagne cork pop and felt the bubbles tickling her nose as she and Carole hoisted stemmed glasses this time. Carole was laughing and chattering, even as Julie, the room swaying even more, puzzled over one word. Dissection?

The morning sun was moving relentlessly upward. Julie stood staring at herself in the bathroom mirror of the Encino house. Before her, a can of Barbasol shaving cream and two toothbrushes—one red, one yellow—sat at attention on a thin glass shelf, signaling the beginnings of serious occupancy. No array of cosmetics yet; no brushes and creams and salves—those were all still in the Bel-Air house.

Was Carole the red one? Or the yellow? Julie ran her tongue over the mealy fuzz in her mouth; it made her think of mold. She gagged.

So this was what a real hangover felt like. She’d been high before, a little drunk, kind of tipsy, but never with an aftermath like this. Her mother would be in despair. Her daughter, the nice young Smith graduate, was truly, horribly hung over. Naturally—she was living in a city of sin. Julie frowned, pressing her forehead against the cold mirror over the bathroom sink. Had her mother ever actually said that? She couldn’t remember. Well, anyway, she thought it.

Julie blinked, trying to clear the red from her eyes. What time was it? There was no way she could have made it back to the boarding house last night. Carole, all apologies, had given her a pair of pajamas to wear; they enveloped her. Were they Clark’s? “They’re the ones of his I could’ve worn if I’d played Claudette Colbert’s part in that damn movie,” Carole told her with a giggle. “Good night.
Set the alarm. Take my car. Wear something in my closet, but don’t wake me up.”

She then weaved upstairs and threw open the bedroom door, waking what sounded like a surprised Clark. Julie heard her giggling, teasing; then Clark’s gruff, sexy baritone. The door closed.

Now all Julie could think of was brushing her teeth. I’m sorry, Carole. I’m sorry, Clark. She reached out for the yellow toothbrush, squeezed some Pepsodent onto the bristles, and brushed with one goal: get rid of the mold.

The sun glanced off the windshield of Carole’s car as Julie drove to the MGM studio, the light stinging her eyes. She would never touch Scotch again, she vowed. She would never drink a glass of champagne again. Please, she would promise anything to make this appointment on time and standing up straight.

Finally, she was in Culver City, and there it was ahead of her, the central entrance to MGM Studios. Very grand—formidable. It made Selznick International look like a dollhouse. She parked on the street and presented herself to the uniformed attendant inside the guardhouse. He was wizened, dried up from too much sun. His hat, which once might have fit, settled low over his brow. He surveyed her with a critical eye.

“One of Marion’s girls?” he said, raising his eyebrows.

“I have an appointment for nine o’clock.”

The guard glanced at the clock behind him. It was now a quarter to nine. Julie felt a dampness under her arms and hoped she wasn’t ruining Carole’s green jersey jacket. He seemed to be thinking it over, playing with her. “Well, okay,” he said, after perusing a sheet of paper. “You’re on the list. Go to the Writers’ Building. Room 632. It’s a good walk down that way.” He pointed.

Julie didn’t care how she looked; she ran. Past a pair of clowns in full makeup, lounging against the side of a building, puffing away on cigars. Past a cluster of women in bright ballet costumes, practicing
turns and pirouettes. Past a freckled teenager wearing braces and a cap pushed back on his head—was it Mickey Rooney? Hurry, hurry. She didn’t know who would be there, what was supposed to happen; all she knew was, she had received a summons that might change her life.

The door to Room 632 was ajar. Julie hesitated, then stepped in. Half a dozen men sat around a long table covered with ashtrays full of cigarette butts. The walls, indifferently painted at some point in the past, were streaked with smoke stains. Frances Marion wasn’t there; no women were in the room.

“Miss Crawford? Sit down, young lady,” said a rotund man squeezed into an expensive suit. His hair, thin and graying, was combed carefully over an oily scalp. He did not stand up, just waved her to a seat next to him. His mouth somehow smiled while the rest of his face didn’t move. He looked down at a stack of papers in front of him. “We’ve read your script. A lot of talent here, right?” He surveyed the others at the table.

“You said it, Abe.” A man sitting across from her was nodding so vigorously that his head looked as if it might come loose. His complexion was sallow, the color of thin chicken broth. He was drumming a yellow pencil against the table with jittery fingers. “Wish we had the money for it.”

Julie sank into the seat next to the man named Abe. “It’s a very contained story, a love story,” she said quickly. “It wouldn’t require expensive sets.” She knew a little something about that, having watched the creation of
Gone with the Wind
, she reassured herself.

They looked at her blankly, as if she hadn’t spoken.

“I could see Hepburn in this,” said a third man, sitting at the end of the table, cradling a cup of coffee. His face was puffy, his eyes bloodshot. He looked as if he, too, might have finished off a bottle of Scotch last night.

“She’s box-office poison, too smart-ass,” said Abe, thumbing
through the script. He stopped and looked up at Julie. “Can you write for men? It’s action, drama—not dialogue, you know.”

“I think so,” Julie said, wondering what that meant. “I’m sure—of course I can.”

A fourth man, sitting at the end of the table, stared down at what Julie assumed was her script, shaking his head like a doleful coroner performing an autopsy. “We need a good detective story. No, we’re
desperate
for a good detective story. Something gritty. Can we fold a murder in here?”

This time it was Julie who looked at all of them blankly.

Abe said, “This is very L.A. But we need more sophistication. I don’t want to see any goddamn palm trees.”

“Actually, this is set in the Midwest,” Julie interrupted.

“Manhattan?” said the man drumming with the pencil. “We could do Brooklyn or Coney Island. Maybe a murder on a Ferris wheel?”

“Christ, no,” said Abe. “There’s no audience for Brooklyn.” The drumming stopped immediately.

“What we need is a corpse rouger,” the coroner broke in.

“What’s that?” Julie asked.

“Somebody who can pump life into a dead script.”

Surely she had heard wrong. “Are you saying—”

Abe brightened. “If I can just jump in here for a minute, I think what we need is a good woman’s tearjerker. Broken love, a murder—juicy.”

“That’s it, Abe.” Everyone around the table nodded in unison.

“Well …” The man named Abe was pushing back from the table, signaling an end to the meeting. “How’s three hundred for six weeks?”

“What?”

Again, it was as if she hadn’t spoken.

“You okay with that? Wonderful! Welcome to the MGM family,” Abe boomed, standing up. “We’ll get this set up. Nice to have you on board.” He reached out a hand. “Better check in with Marion before you leave.”

Dazed, Julie took his hand, mumbled her goodbyes, and walked back out into the narrow corridor. Somebody would point the way.

“Miss Crawford? Miss Marion’s expecting you,” said a crisp-looking receptionist as Julie approached her desk. It had taken ten minutes of wandering from floor to floor to locate the right office, which, when she finally found it, was smaller than she had thought it would be.

Marion sat at a narrow, highly polished desk filled with papers. A transom window was open, but no breeze was circling today. Surrounding her in casual clutter were boxes of what looked to be scripts; behind her were shelves filled with randomly stacked books and several family photographs in gold frames.

“Some of us around here still read,” she said with a smile, as Julie’s gaze rested on the books. She waved her to a seat. “You’ve had your baptism of fire, or at least one of them,” she said. “And you survived. Abe Goldman—he’s a production head, by the way—gave me a quick call. He liked the way you stood up for your script.”

“But he didn’t want to talk about it,” Julie said uncertainly.

“That’s the way it works.” Frances Marion leaned back in her chair. “Abe wants to
think
he values independent writers—encouraging creativity and all that—but, just between us”—she actually laughed—“he rules in a small universe, and values mostly his own opinions. Sound familiar?” She arched an eyebrow, but kindly. “Julie, you’ve been offered a job—just for six weeks, but you will know what you want much better after that than you do now.” Her voice took on a wistful edge. “It’s very different from what it used to be. Nowadays, you knit your story all day, and people like Abe unravel it every night.”