Bandbox (28 page)

But the actress gave no sign of being annoyed. For twenty minutes her conversation had been jolly as could be. Though born to showbiz, Blanche liked straying from the topic at hand to talk about her feckless, funny husband, Mickey, with whom she’d had a swell time for years, though by Blanche’s cheerful admission they probably had Reno in their future. Mickey was show-business, too, of course—a director—and the way Blanche spoke about him made Becky picture Cuddles standing beside a camera with a megaphone. In fact, the star’s breezy, confidential manner soon inspired Becky to impart her own worries over how the real Cuddles was getting on back at the office in this time of crisis.

Blanche sighed sympathetically: it was always one thing or another, wasn’t it? Whatever happened with
The Green Hat
, she expected to be back on stage, or even in vaude, a year from now—not because she didn’t have the voice for sound; it was the whole style of talkies acting that seemed wrong for her. “And you know what?” she said to Becky. “If I wind up behind the girdles counter a couple of years from now, that’ll be okay, too!”

She was still laughing when the maître d’ brought Dorothy Gish to the table.

“Thanks so much for coming!” said Becky, standing up to offer the second actress her gloved hand.

“You really want to be with a couple of whores?” asked Miss Gish, in quite a deep voice, provoking laughter from Blanche, who understood the reference to their having played both Anna Christie and Nell Gwynne.

Becky had read that Dorothy, who’d lately been working in England, was the more raucous of the Gish sisters. She lived up to this billing throughout lunch, razzing Blanche when the other star elaborated for Becky on the difficulty of acting in sound pictures. “Oh, crap, Blanche. Lillian says they’ve
never
been able to act over at MGM, not unless they had music on in the background. I’m not joking,
dearie,” she added for Becky. “The phonograph would be going round the clock just to put an expression on the actors’ kissers.”

Miss Gish ordered two bottles of white wine for the table. Blanche, noting Becky’s Prohibition-induced surprise, reassured her: “Oh, no one worries about such things out here, darling.” Two movie queens and their companion could have whatever they wanted, even at high noon. So Becky set her glass to the right of her reporter’s pad and asked what Hays’s men had against
The Constant Nymph
and
The Green Hat
.

“We need the ladies to be running things,” declared Dorothy. “You know, my sister directed me once. Either of you ever see
Remodeling the Husband
? It was like doing a play in a girls’ school.
Marvelous
time had by all. Frances Marion did the script. You know, she’d be good with your
Hat
, Blanche.”

Miss Sweet topped up her own wine glass. “All girls? I’m all for it. On both productions. How about you, honey?” she asked Becky. “Want to come in on it? You can handle the press.”

From Frances Marion and script girls and censors the conversation moved on to Pickford and Griffith and the actresses’ favorite leading men: Ronald Colman for Blanche, William Powell for Miss Gish.

“You’ve both also worked with Howard Kenyon, haven’t you?” asked Becky.

The two fairly fizzed with approbation of that brawny swashbuckler.

“Such a darling man,” said Dorothy Gish.

“Of course,” added Blanche, “he could fly
without
a trapeze.”

Dorothy nodded. “Kissing him was like kissing your brother.”

“Your sister, actually,” argued Blanche. “Not Lillian. You know what I mean.”

Dorothy paused before exclaiming, with a full silent-screen shudder:
“Oh, that dreadful woman!” She clarified things for Becky. “Not Lillian. That awful LaRoche person he married.”

“A beast,” Blanche concurred. “Where were Fatty and his Coke bottle when we needed them?”

Becky, a bit stunned, succeeded in saying: “I’m supposed to try to see her while I’m out here. My editor wants her for one of our covers.”

“Ask her about
The Warrens of Virginia
,” suggested Blanche. “She was an extra on it—in nineteen
fifteen
.”

“Ask her about blackmailing poor Howard,” said Dorothy. “When she wanted his name and the publicity that marrying him would bring.”

“I’m afraid those aren’t questions that would get me onto the set where she’s working,” said Becky.

“What’s the picture?” asked Dorothy.

“Wyoming Wilderness.”

“She plays the wilderness,” said Blanche.

“Always above the title, always under the director,” added Dorothy.

“Can we help, honey?” asked Blanche.

Becky smiled and said thanks anyway, but a couple of hours later, back at the Roosevelt, lying on her bed and actually having to run the electric fan against the afternoon heat, she decided that Miss Sweet and Miss Gish
had
helped, by providing inspiration. She’d fallen in love with both of them and their gumption. They made her want to get to the bottom of Will Hays’s dirty Teapot Dome dealings, and to save this cover story on the horrible Rosemary. Becky realized she was excited the way she’d been that afternoon at the
Graphic
, though this time she was out not to save Cuddles’ bacon but to bring home her own. And that was a perfectly fine end in itself, she decided, still feeling the effects of the wine and wiggling her just-polished toenails in the breeze of the fan.

She reached for Newman’s notes on Rosemary, which Nan had airmailed
to the hotel ahead of her train. They weren’t much, mostly questions to himself (“Lost Years—1904–06?”) and lists of Rosemary’s rough, idiosyncratic slang, but you could see him sketching out some vision of the star who’d laid him low:

Oh, these college men and their one classics course. Stuart wouldn’t have gotten very far with this, drunk or sober, thought Becky. But at a second glance, she decided
she
might get someplace with it. She took a pair of manicure scissors from her purse and clipped this paragraph of fragmentary musings away from the even less coherent notations that surrounded it; and then she took a Hotel Roosevelt envelope from the desk drawer. She would messenger these handwritten variations on the theme of Rosemary to the set of
Wyoming Wilderness
—and make the actress think that Newman was staying at the return address. She would even put a date and time on the envelope, and the word
LOUNGE
as the location for an assignation “Newman” was proposing. If Rosemary showed up, Becky would come clean and play on the star’s mercies, however small an orchestra those might comprise. She would recite the dire facts of Newman’s current condition. If Rosemary was still as smitten as rumor had it—and if renewal of Newman’s attentions could be made to depend on her assent—she just might agree to do the story and cover shoot after all.

On Friday, March 2, Paul Montgomery began setting up his office at
Cutaway
. He’d ordered himself a new monogrammed desk calendar, and after personally picking it up at Dempsey & Carroll decided to detour past Malocchio on his way back to Lexington Avenue. Sure enough, peering in over the café curtains, he could see Harris and Spilkes sitting down to lunch. Paulie looked at his watch and figured he had just enough time to make the stop he needed to at
Bandbox
, so he hotfooted it down to the Graybar.

“Pssst,” he called to Chip Brzezinski from the stairwell at the back of the fourteenth floor. Daisy, sitting on the other side of the fact-checkers’ bull pen and looking rather wan, gave no sign of hearing anything.

“Hey, Chipper,” whispered Paulie to the approaching Brzezinski. He clapped him on the back. “Getting ready to have your own office?”

Chip grunted. “We’ll see.”

“The right surroundings are important,” said Paulie, easing into his avuncular mode. He’d cleaned out his
Bandbox
office on Monday night when nobody was around. Before leaving the building, he’d put his letter of resignation on Harris’s desk. Its text was full of gratitude and sorrow—about how terrific the last few years had been; how wonderful the opportunities he’d been granted; how, alas, his own gifts were too modest for what lay ahead: “I’m not sure I can pull my weight over the threshold of achievement this magazine is approaching.” So, he told Joe, he would retreat to more modest ventures while remaining a happy, awestruck subscriber to Harris’s monthly miracle.

On Wednesday, Jimmy Gordon had announced his hiring at
Cutaway
and offered to pay his English travel expenses.

“Here,” said Paulie, handing Chip two keys. “You should encourage Max to use my old office, not Newman’s, when he’s around.”

Chip looked puzzled.

“My old desk can be locked,” said Paulie. “Newman’s can’t. Give Max this key and tell him it’s because you know what sensitive stuff the Shepard search may turn up.”

“What’s the second key for?”

“A duplicate. For you. So you can check on what he puts into the desk.”

The Wood Chipper was wondering exactly how much more spying he was going to have to do for Jimmy before he got his reward. It didn’t surprise him that the answer seemed to be plenty, but he wouldn’t have figured Montgomery had the balls for this sort of thing.

Paulie read his look. “I know it
seems
underhanded, but Chip, I’m doing this as a
citizen
. One who’s concerned about how Joe and the rest of them may be defrauding not only readers but the police department, too.”

Chip snorted, before shoving both keys into his pocket.

“Good man,” said Paulie.

There was a second reason for Montgomery’s stealthy appearance on fourteen. Knowing what his shift from one side to the other must look like, Paulie needed to convince himself that he still possessed the admiration of each editor, secretary, and messenger at what was now his old magazine. Calculating that he still had some time before Harris and Spilkes returned, he beat a quiet path to the Art Department, where Norman Merrill was executing a beautiful sketch of some socks and garters.

Paulie shook his head. “You’re Daumier and Rockwell Kent rolled into one, Mr. Merrill.”

The illustrator said nothing for a moment, just went on drawing,
while Paulie wondered, with some upset, whether Joe had issued an edict against anyone here even saying hello to him. But then Mr. Merrill identified the source of his mute consternation, by pointing toward the open door of the Fashion Department, where three Waldo Lindstrom lookalikes, all large, blond, and lantern-jawed—though lacking the hint of depravity that made Waldo such a success with the reader’s subconscious—were preening and posing like motorized sculptures.

“It’s a sort of audition,” said Mr. Merrill. “For the replacement.”

Richard Lord and Gardiner Arinopoulos circled the young contenders, whose aura of Michelangelene masculinity faded a bit when one of them was heard informing another, with high-pitched excitement, that his “
best best
friend” had just gotten a part in the chorus of
Rain or Shine
.

The other responded in an equally tremulous register: “That’s such a darb!”

Paulie squeezed Mr. Merrill’s pencilless hand and said: “This magazine doesn’t need any of ’em. All it ever needed was your imagination.” He waited for the illustrator to say thanks, as well as something by way of congratulation on this new job at
Cutaway
that everyone had been talking about. But Mr. Merrill only smiled. Unseen by Paulie, who was already looking around for other sources of approval, he began drawing a long water moccasin beside the human ankles he’d just sketched.

Paulie thought about going into Copy, but his better instincts made him doubt the reception he would get from Nan. So he decided it was time to ascend the stairs from fourteen to eighteen, and after one last quick look around he was gone.

Had he summoned the courage to enter Nan’s department, he would have found Allen Case nervously watching the clock. It was almost time for him to slip across the East River for his appointment inside that warehouse of cruelty. His friend from the
American
wouldn’t pledge to do a story, but he’d at least promised to be waiting for Allen outside the place’s wire fence.

Allen paid no attention to Nan, who was on the telephone with Stuart, telling him not to bother with any more Dew-ol’s tonic but to make sure he had some of the milk and pie she’d brought over late yesterday afternoon. “And I’ve got some really good news,” she added. “Art Murphy over at
Catholic World
will be happy to see you next week. He says they can use somebody for a couple of months to fill in for a man who’s having a gallstone removed. The atmosphere there is very quiet, and I said you’d be wonderful at the work.”

After Stuart’s weakly grateful reply, she asked if he’d like her to bring down the last pass of page proofs for his Washington column. She could come straight from work on the subway; it would be no trouble. Waiting for him to respond, she tried to convince herself there was no risk of disappointment. Even if Stuart didn’t reciprocate her feelings, worrying about him was nicer than worrying about the subway strike (pending), the subway slasher (caught), or the subway fare (soon sure to go to seven cents).

“You would?” said Nan, rather surprised. “Oh, grand, I’ll bring them.”

The prospect of this errand was still not so delightful as what occurred next: Stuart’s asking how her cousin, the one with the new baby, was getting on. Blushing with pleasure over the personal, cozy nature of the question, Nan answered: “May’s just fine. The two of them come home from the hospital tomorrow.” She chatted on for a few minutes about the baby’s prodigious lung power and May’s older boy, almost ready for school, and how she still couldn’t—could he?—get used to the idea of hospital-born babies. She was amazed by how at ease she’d begun to feel talking to Stuart, almost as comfortable as she felt talking in
front
of Allen, who even when not preoccupied, as he seemed to be today, tended to ignore words emanating from a species he regarded as largely unimportant.