A Touch of Stardust (3 page)

“No.”

“Really?”

“Why would I want to be?” she said. “I can’t act.”

“That hasn’t stopped most of the girls out here.”

“At least they’re all gorgeous. I’m not even garden-variety pretty.”

“That may be your good fortune,” he said.

That stung a bit. He could have pretended.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“We’re going to dine with the stars and eat chili,” he said. “At Chasen’s. It’s classic Hollywood, not too many gaping tourists.”

“Are you really that contemptuous? I’m still a tourist, myself.”

“They spoil the story,” he said. Whatever that meant.

Chasen’s was a modest-looking stucco building with a jaunty green-and-white-striped awning, not the type of place she would glance at twice in any other town. They slipped into an oversized booth covered in thick chocolate-brown leather that felt like soft butter. Julie peered around, wondering if she would see any movie stars, and tried not to appear to be looking.

“Think you would have recognized Gable in this setting?” Andy said lightly.

“Sure,” she said, a bit affronted. “I was too flustered up there. I’m really not just a hick from the sticks, or whatever you’re thinking. I go to movies all the time.”

“I don’t think that,” he said. “And I’m not out to mock you. You have a spark to you. I like that. Look, you’re new to town. There’s nothing wrong with being green. Pretty much everybody here was green once.”

She could not imagine that being true of him, but she wasn’t going to say so.

They did eat chili that night. And drank several martinis. And Julie did catch a glimpse of Humphrey Bogart—sitting at the bar, nursing a beer, and slurping spoonfuls of chili from a bowl. But by then Julie was more interested in the man sitting across from her in the booth. All she knew about him so far was that he worked directly for Selznick as an assistant producer.

She told him about growing up in Fort Wayne, graduating last June from Smith College, and going home, resigned to the predict-ability
of soon having a diamond engagement ring on her finger. It was all laid out, really. Her high-school sweetheart, a sweet, affable man, was already scouting neighborhoods for their first home—one big enough, of course, for a family. Christmas would be a really good time for an engagement party. The engagement ring, he declared, would be a full carat, which pleased her mother. He was a man on the way up, but not too ostentatious. What a wonderful son-in-law he would be, her mother enthused. Reliable, a good provider.

And then how jolted Julie was to realize that she no longer wanted the same things he did: That being the wife of a proper lawyer from a good family, totally content to forge a career drawing up wills for rich Fort Wayne people, wasn’t her dream. That being on charity boards providing for the victims of the Depression was worthy, but not enough. Something in her needed to fly. How hard it had been to tell him, and her parents, the truth.

“You felt like a complete jerk,” offered Andy.

She nodded. “Plus, I didn’t know what I wanted.”

“You just wanted to run. No”—he smiled—“fly.”

“Yes,” she said. “Now it’s your turn.”

“Born in Germany, American mother, German father. Parents divorced. Grew up—sort of—in New Jersey.”

“Don’t stop there,” she said, laughing. She loved the energy in his voice.

“Okay. Columbia, then taught awhile, wrote an unpublishable novel, grew bored.” He paused. “My grandparents stayed in Berlin, and my older brother moved to France, married a French girl, and became a citizen. I went over in the summer of 1932 to visit them all, harboring the stupid idea of nostalgic hours of bike riding, particularly through the German countryside. It didn’t turn out that way.”

“What happened?”

Andy looked away. “Nothing much good,” he said.

She wasn’t sure how to respond to that, but he quickly brightened.

“Anyway, I went home,” he said. “I dumped the idea of teaching and moved on to Hollywood, dreaming of glory. Oh, and making some real money.”

His first job was with Louis B. Mayer’s stable of writers. “We were the joke of Hollywood,” he said, leaning his head back, holding a cigarette, blowing wispy smoke rings up to the ceiling. He laughed. “They bunched us together in a room filled with typewriters, and when the signal came that Mayer was approaching, we all started typing. Quite a clatter as we all hit the keys and puffed away. You were fired if your fingers weren’t moving.” He gave a comical shrug. “Mayer never did understand that writers need to
think
once in a while, too. That was it for me. No more writing. So—are you nearsighted or farsighted?”

“What?” He did switch topics a lot.

He pointed. “Your glasses,” he said.

“Oh.” She touched the horn-rimmed frame and told him the truth. “Neither.”

“So why do you wear them?”

“So people will take me seriously, mainly.”

He stared at her. “Around here, everybody is taking their glasses
off
. Are you sure you aren’t waiting for someone to lean over, remove them from your face, and tell you you’re beautiful?”

Why did he try to rankle her every few minutes? “I told you, I want to be taken seriously.”

“What do you want to be taken seriously
for
? And I’m really listening.”

“I want to be a screenwriter,” she said, taking a deep gulp from her martini glass. “And don’t tell me that’s crazy.”

“I’m not laughing,” he said. “What got you to that?”

“Frances Marion.” She paused, waiting for his reaction.

“She was at the top, once. Worked a long time with Mary Pickford. One of the few women still holding on. Good dame, though.”

“You’re not making some dismissive comment?”

“No, I’m not. Frances Marion’s one of the best writers in the business, but it’s tough for women now. There’s a lot of money to be made here, and men are taking over the jobs. That probably annoys you.”

She ignored the gibe. “She came to Smith and gave a wonderful speech. All about taking chances, trying for something different.”
Julie couldn’t possibly convey how the Hollywood writer’s words had inspired her—given her a lifeline, really. Or how appalled her parents were, and how her father roared that she should never have been allowed to go to a women’s college like Smith.

“So you dumped your boyfriend and came to Hollywood. How do you know you can write?”

“I’ve got some ideas. I did some work at school.” She refrained from telling him that her work had won admiring praise from her teachers. A classroom was no credential for Hollywood; he wouldn’t be impressed.

“How did your parents react to all that after getting you tucked up and ready for a good marriage?”

“Not too well,” she confessed. “I’ve got one year to prove I can do something.”

“Then they pull the plug financially?”

“Well, yes. I intend to be fully self-supporting. I’ll figure something out.” The whole truth? If she wasn’t, they would find a way to pull her back home. And she had no intention of going back, which she figured he probably guessed.

He gave her a wry smile as he lifted a hand to signal the waiter to bring yet another round. “One thing you should know up front: most writers you meet in this town are embittered, live in the shadows, are totally undervalued, and have probably never seen a single thing they’ve written make it to the screen.”

“It can’t be that bad or they would all leave, wouldn’t they?”

He raised his almost finished martini, eyes lively, and kissed her glass with his. “Ah, the reason they stay is simple. They write a few second features, get screen credit once or twice—but there’s always the big one just ahead, that plum script that brings an Oscar. Like the donkey, they keep following the carrot ahead of the nose.”

“Andy, you really are pretty cynical.”

“The truth? It’s just a form of self-protection,” he said. “I’m rooting for you.” He looked at her, his eyes thoughtful.

She laughed a lot that night. Andy was funny and smart, and he actually did listen, and she could relax and enjoy herself for the first time since she had stepped off the train four weeks before and found her way to Selznick International.

“What’s the best thing about Fort Wayne?” he asked as he polished off his bowl of chili.

It took a minute. She was still too involved with what was the worst—probably the consistent disapproval of her very proper and dusty-dry relatives. You didn’t ask
why
things were done a certain way in Fort Wayne—like
why
Negroes were expected to “know their place,” or
why
a girl was an old maid if she wasn’t married by the age of twenty. Her mother had almost fainted when she gave away her so carefully chosen but unwanted wedding dress to a classmate.

“Catching fireflies in a bottle on a hot summer night,” she said, and decided it was true.

She told him about her roommate, a girl from Texas who wanted to be a movie star, and how they’d met while they were both trying to fit their hands into Norma Shearer’s prints at Grauman’s Chinese. How they had snagged menial jobs in the studio copying room, but Julie wasn’t fast enough to type stencils for press releases, only to mimeograph them.

“And why is that?”

“I didn’t want to be stuck as a secretary, so I didn’t take typing in school,” she confessed.

He burst out laughing. “Calculated ineptitude—I like that,” he said.

Then it was his turn. He told her he grew up with his nose in books, and cried only once that he could remember, when he was twelve and his dog died. He told her he tried to be popular in high school by telling jokes, and the worst humiliation of his life was when classmates dug into his pockets and found he wrote them all down on scraps of paper so he wouldn’t forget the punch lines. He confessed this in such a boyish way, she felt she was the only one who knew. She loved the way his eyes crinkled up when he laughed.
Most of all, the way he looked at her. There was more there, a play of light and shadow, but for now it was enough to dance happily on the surface, sipping martinis with Andy. Hollywood was scary and exciting, and she had no idea what was to come next. But she was here; that alone was a victory. Her parents wouldn’t approve, but she was pretty sure Andy was the best thing that had happened to her in a long time.

He drove her home; it was quite late by then. She kept the window open, closed her eyes, and inhaled the lush scents of California’s sultry evening perfume. She loved that smell. She knew that, wherever she might be from here on, one faint whiff of anything similar would bring her back in a rush to this night, this night when she first met Gable and Lombard and a man named Andy Weinstein.

She thought he was going to kiss her. Surely he started to, simultaneously turning off the engine with one hand and reaching out to stroke the nape of her neck with the other. She imagined it would be as delicious and heady as the air, and she closed her eyes. She could feel his breath.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said instead. “Nine o’clock, no later. And the woman to see is Doris Finch. Plain-Jane name, smart woman.”

“What?” Julie’s eyes flew open.