A Touch of Stardust (6 page)

“You’re not unhappy about that, are you? This gives you a nice edge, but I’m sure Doris would love to stick you back into the mimeograph room. She was not pleased about losing both you and Rose at one whack.”

“I’m thrilled, Andy.” She meant it fervently.

Andy looked at her with an expression she couldn’t quite fathom. “I like bearing you good news,” he said.

It didn’t take long. Rose was called for her screen test only two days later.

Julie scrambled to help her get ready, both of them breathless and nervous. “Green eye shadow,” Julie advised, remembering Vivien Leigh’s makeup. “Lots of it.”

When they reached the soundstage, which was cluttered with hovering cameras, they saw a row of bright-faced women sitting in chairs, all dressed in Civil War gowns of the 1860s.

“An assembly line,” Rose murmured, and some of the light faded in her eyes.

Julie thought she recognized Paulette Goddard, who Andy said was still Selznick’s favorite for the part. But maybe it was Jean Arthur—Julie wasn’t sure. Sitting in a canvas chair behind the cameras was David O. Selznick, tipped back, glasses on his nose, staring straight ahead. Once, he glanced at his watch. Julie could have sworn everyone around him began moving faster.

“Rose Sullivan.”

Rose squeezed Julie’s hand and, following an assistant, walked through a door leading to the wardrobe department.

Only minutes later, she emerged, caught Julie’s eye, and gave a wide smile.

Julie gasped. Her friend looked beautiful. Wardrobe had dressed her in a cream silk gown with a frothy tulle bodice cut very low, and Julie could see the modest Rose trying discreetly to pull it higher. She shook her head warningly in a quick motion, and Rose dropped her hands.

Do it their way. That’s what the two of them had whispered to each other late into the night. “The truth is, I have nothing to lose,” Rose had said, sounding far more sensible than Julie feared she would be if she were the one trying out for the part.

Again someone called out Rose’s name, beckoning her onto the set.

Rose lifted her head high and walked gracefully before the cameras, appearing totally serene. A slightly bored-looking actor playing Ashley for the screen tests stepped up next to her.

“Okay,” Selznick said. His voice was strong and brisk. “Rose—it is Rose, right?—in this scene, you are confessing your undying love for Ashley Wilkes, exposing your heart and soul. We’re only doing one take per actress, so let’s see what you can do.” He signaled his assistant. “Roll cameras,” he said.

The clapperboard went down.

Rose clasped her hands together, looking up at the stand-in, bursting with barely contained emotion. “I am in love with you, Ashley,” she began.

The cameras rolled for fewer than five minutes, but it was long enough to impress Julie. Rose, without artifice, had transformed herself for those brief moments into Scarlett O’Hara. She really
was
a natural actress. Had Lombard sensed that?

“Thank you, young lady,” Selznick said when the cameras stopped. “We’ll get back to you. Next!”

And that was all.

Those first weeks working for Carole Lombard increased Julie’s heart rate permanently, she was sure of that. To be around such a
whirlpool of energy was to spin in the dizziest orbit she could ever imagine. She had no chance to slip into melancholy at Christmas, what with helping Carole swathe her trailer in festive red and green garlands and trying to keep propped up a slightly dizzy-looking tree adorned with lights and mounds of tangled tinsel. She was grateful to be able to pour out the stories to Andy. Not every night, but often now they had dinner together, either at Chasen’s or at the cozy greasy spoon with sticky menus. Julie loved both. Andy would chuckle as she described how Carole burst through doors rather than walk through them. How she laughed, how she swore—as
Life
magazine put it—with “the expletives of a sailor’s parrot.” How she got up earlier than everybody else and played tennis with such ferocity she almost always won; how she never stopped moving. Her idea of a personal assistant was someone who paid her departmentstore bills, bought her Kotex, booked manicures, fed gossip queen Louella Parsons a few bright tidbits every week, glared at reporters during newspaper interviews, read to her, ran errands for Clark, and was ready for any kind of assignment at all.

That included negotiating with Gay’s Lion Farm for the rental of a lion for her party, maybe a mountain lion—preferably on a leash? Like the one Herman Mankiewicz rented when the Columbia University football team played in the Rose Bowl? (“His alma mater, you know; the fight song is something like ‘Roar, lion, roar.’ If they don’t have one, tell them a goat will do as well. Honey, whatever it is, will you pick it up?”)

Andy loved that.

Carole surprised Julie one afternoon. “Any chance I can read some of your work?” she said.

“I have some essays; they’re not really complete,” Julie said, flustered.

“Well, get moving. You’re too smart to be fielding Louella Parsons and hauling goats around town for very long.”

She brought some material the next day, blathering something about how these were drafts, works in progress, that sort of thing, until Carole cut her off.

“Cripes, your English teacher liked it, right? Don’t apologize in advance, just read.” Carole did her usual, flopping down on the sofa, closing her eyes, and putting her feet up.

Julie chose a treatment for a story about a campus murder endowed with what her professor had called “unusual plot twists” that got her an A in his class. It didn’t sound so great as she read. It sounded schoolgirlish.

She finished and put it down, annoyed with herself for ever having boasted to Carole about her writing prowess.

“Not bad,” Carole said calmly. “Want to practice? Try writing a scene for
Gone with the Wind
. Lord knows, David has everybody else in town working on it.”

“Are you serious?”

“Why not? Be audacious. You don’t have to show anybody unless you want to. And don’t wring your hands over it—it’s not all about writing something brilliant. You have to put together a good act. Inhale the damn thing. Then become it. Hell, that’s what actors do.” She looked steadily at Julie, her expression thoughtful, and changed the subject. “Are you related to the Crawfords who used to own half of Fort Wayne?” she asked.

Julie flushed. She didn’t want to be labeled again; she had spent enough time living down her lineage. She nodded reluctantly.

“Well, well. I’ll keep your secret, dear.”

“I don’t have a secret,” Julie said, startled.

“You’re trying to unstick yourself from a pretty important and stodgy family and figure out your own life, am I right?”

“How do you know?”

“Honey, out here, we’re all peeling off something. It’s a toss-up over who has the most baggage—a high-school dropout like my Clark, or a girl from Smith.”

The next evening, Julie ran the idea by Andy of writing a
Gone with the Wind
scene, knowing he would listen, but not sure whether she would get a funny, cynical response that would make her laugh. He had been too busy for dinner the past few days, and she missed him. Some dispute between the Screen Writers Guild and the studios, he said. Ostensibly about pay. Whether the communists were infiltrating the guild was the real issue. “We weave in and out of the real world in this racket,” he said with a shrug. He was obviously not interested in saying more. The first day of principal shooting was rapidly approaching, and he was absorbed with work. Part of his job was tracking and organizing production logistics for the movie, and she could see the strain on his face.

He did listen, nodding with the gravity of any one of her professors, making no disparaging comments this time about a writer’s fate.

“Carole’s a smart broad,” he said.

“Is that a compliment?”

“You better believe it.”

She felt emboldened. “What about me?”

“If you weren’t, I wouldn’t be wasting my time with you.”

“And if you weren’t smart and funny and kind, I wouldn’t be wasting my time with
you
.”

A ghost of a smile—a flicker of that elusive shadow she could never quite pin down. “Good girl,” he said.

It was late by the time Andy drove her home, taking the long way, along the undulating road known as Mulholland Drive, high above Sunset Boulevard. He had lapsed into silence. It was as if he were somewhere else, and she wondered if something had gone wrong between them.

“Andy, are you here?” she said, touching his shoulder after several moments of silence had gone by. “Everything okay?”

Without comment, Andy steered the car into a clearing that overlooked the lights of the city on one side, the San Fernando Valley on the other. He pulled on the brake. She loved this view—the sweep of the city, the glittering lights all the way to the unseen night sea at the horizon. She loved smelling winter wildflowers scattered
through the dry brush. But right now her heart was hammering in a peculiar way, and she waited.

He clicked off the ignition. “I’m worried about
Gone with the Wind
.”

She felt a guilty surge of relief. “What’s happened?”

“I’m not sure this movie is ever going to get made,” he said slowly. “Selznick is brilliant—he’s the best in the business—but his need to control everything has gone past rational limits.”

“Isn’t that his strength?”

“Sure. And don’t get me wrong: I love my job. Working with a genius like Selznick is usually just plain fun.”

“Sometimes you hide that well,” she teased.

“I’m part cynic and part schoolboy,” he said with a small sigh. “But I’m worried that he loses perspective.”

“Like when?”

“Biggest one? Ignoring the objections of Negroes—and their papers, like the
Los Angeles Sentinel
. Ever look at it?”

Julie shook her head, feeling guilty.

“It’s not as if they’re all angry because we’re making the movie—hell, Negro actors are thrilled for the work. And their newspapers, organizations—they don’t all want the same thing. But he’s got to listen better.”