Everything and More (15 page)

After a long minute’s darkness to allow the audience to dissolve its somber mood, the curtain edged apart on a living-room set.

Marylin was alone onstage. She wore a red sweater and pleated plaid skirt, saddle shoes. The lights picked up the gold glints in her hair as she hunched over a very large, thick book. Waiting until the scattered applause had faded, she ran a finger across the page, lifting her head to frown with her painted eyes.

Without saying a word, she had limned the dumb bobby soxer. She
was
Vera the adorable dimwit. After a perfectly timed pause, she hurled the encyclopedic tome to the boards, and while the audience roared with laughter, she turned on a prop radio. An instant too late the “Hut Sut Song” blared. Marylin bounced around center stage doing a gay little solo jitterbug as she sang the mindless words in her husky little voice.

In less than ninety seconds alone on the stage, she had stamped an evanescent lightness on the evening.

Poor Tommy Wolfe overturned a prop chair and drew hoots of laughter which demoralized him into going up in his lines. The inadvertent clangor of the air-raid alarm, a repetitive series of three blasts of the bells, jarred the others into going up in
their
lines. Nothing could dismantle the joyous, comic mood set by Marylin.

Among the shaky, made-up high-school kids, she played Vera with the authority of a star.

Roy found it impossible to believe that this ebullient dummy lighting up the stage was Marylin, Marylin who yesterday had wept her private tears, then crumpled on her bed as if her delicate bones had just been stretched on the rack, a silent misery that had caused NolaBee to dart continuous worried glances at her.

The first-act curtain brought thunderous applause. The bustling Minute Maids sold well over the two thousand dollars’ worth of war stamps and bonds that had been set as the entire year’s quota for the junior class.

The response to the final, second-act curtain was yet more electrifying, a hooting, stamping, whistling pandemonium. “Vera, Vera, Vera,” the audience chanted when the cast stepped forward to take their group bows. Curtain call followed curtain call.

NolaBee, Joshua, Althea, and Roy forced their way amid the congratulatory throng to the green room.

Backstage, there was an orgy of kissing, giggling, hugging by
Miss Nathans, the stage hands and cast. Marylin, in her sweat-drenched costume, was the center of weeping girls and swains with shy, adoring eyes. She radiated excitement, her heavy stage makeup glowed.

BJ had her partisans, too. Joshua shoved them aside to lift his plump, large-boned daughter from the dusty boards in a great bear hug.

“By God Almighty, Beej, I better look to my laurels!”

“Daddy, you know the lines that got the biggest laughs were yours.” BJ, having something to brag about, suddenly turned modest.

NolaBee was embracing Marylin. “My baby. I was so proud.”

“A star was born right on our own Beverly High stage,” said Roy, her wisecracking tone sinking timorously downward. Marylin’s performance had awed her: it was as if superhuman plasma had been injected to blaze within her sister’s veins.

“The rest of the show was lousy,” said Althea. “But you were something else, Marylin.”

Marylin turned her gaze on her sister’s odd friend. “Why, thank you, Althea. But all of us were super—until that darn air-raid alert went off.” Her vivid smile showed this was not intended as a reproof, but as a generous sharing of success with her fellow thespians.

Joshua draped his thick arm over Marylin’s shoulders in a demihug. “And as for you, star lady, I’m dumbstruck!”

“It was a great audience, Mr. Fernauld.”

“Great audience, bull! You were magnificent, you quiet little thing, you! God knows why I’m so astonished—I’ve been around enough top actors to know it’s basically an introvert’s business.” He released her. “Has your mother told you about my nefarious wheeling dealing?”

Marylin turned to NolaBee. “Mama?”

The small brown eyes glinted with triumphant secrecy. “Mr. Fernauld’s ruined the surprise.”

“But—” Marylin started. She was interrupted by a surge of the ecstatic crowd as a fresh wave of admirers fell on her.

“I reckon we’ll have time to talk about it when we celebrate,” NolaBee called over the shrilling. “Mr. Fernauld is taking all of us to the Tropics.”

*   *   *

Sugie’s Tropics on Rodeo Drive was one of the movie hangouts often mentioned in the columns of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. To the open lanai and the famous Rain Room came Errol Flynn
with his jailbait cuties, Tyrone Power, Robert Taylor, Johnny Weissmuller, Ida Lupino, Hedy Lamarr, Ingrid Bergman—all of them.

The restaurant was dimly lit, and though Roy craned her neck it was impossible to see if any stars were hidden in booths behind fake palms and ferns. Joshua ordered enormous platters of crisp fried shrimp, richly meaty spareribs, and rumaki. Roy, who had never eaten Chinese food, devoured most of the plump, bacon-wrapped chicken livers.

NolaBee, BJ, Roy, and Althea (who was spending the night at the Waces) leaned over the table in a postmortem of
Vera,
their excited voices rising above the blare of the band’s continuous reprises of “Sweet Leilani” and “The Hawaiian War Chant.”

Marylin was silent, swirling the ice in her ginger ale. Her extravagant vivacity had drained and her lovely features were tired and sorrowful.

A camera girl wearing a flowered sarong stood over their table. “How about a picture?”

Joshua glared up morosely from his third bourbon.

But NolaBee said, “It’d be a right nice memento of the night for the girls.”

So the four crowded together on one side of the curved booth. Roy and Althea wet their lips in a glamorpuss way, BJ pushed a heavy black strand of hair into her pompadour, and Marylin formed her beautiful smile a shade mechanically.

The flash bulb flared, and the photographer inquired, “How many copies?”

“Six,” Joshua said. “One for everybody.”

When they were again spread out in the booth, NolaBee lit a cigarette, blowing a smoke ring. “My, Marylin, aren’t you the teeniest bit curious about the surprise?”

Marylin looked at Joshua. “Mr. Fernauld, you said you had been wheeling and dealing?”

“Of course you know who Art Garrison is, Marylin?” Joshua asked, and without waiting for a reply, continued. “Art Garrison is founder and great white chieftain of Magnum Pictures.”

“Magnum!” BJ cried. “That sausage factory!”

“Pardon me, Miss Beej Know-it-all! Okay, I grant you Magnum’s not Metro or Fox or even mine own Paramount, but it rates about with Columbia and it’s miles above Republic. The point is that Art Garrison is my buddy, my poker buddy. Last week I let him win two pots in succession, then prevailed on him to set up a screen test.”

NolaBee gave her throaty chuckle, Roy gasped, and Althea and BJ stared admiringly at Marylin.

She clasped her empty glass with both small hands.

“No need to be nervous,” said Joshua, his booming voice strangely gentle. “All it means is that Art’ll arrange for some footage of you so he can see how you photograph.”

“Marylin, just what you’ve been longing for,” said NolaBee. “Aren’t you going to thank Mr. Fernauld?”

“After what I saw tonight,” said Joshua, “Magnum will be thanking me.”

“No,” Marylin whispered.

“What?” NolaBee’s voice broke with surprise.

“I can’t.”

Joshua said, “Sure you can. I never saw anyone with more of the right stuff. Talent oozes from your pores. All you need is an agent with clout, somebody to speak up for you. Leland Hayward is like a brother to me.”

“I know why you’re doing this,” Marylin said in a rising tone. “You’re paying me off, aren’t you?”

“Marylin!” NolaBee cried. “You apologize right this minute!”

Joshua downed his fresh drink in one gulp. Wiping a thick knuckle across his lips, he said, “I owe you one, yes. I damn well owe you a big one.”

“What . . . what happened wasn’t anybody’s fault but mine, Mr. Fernauld. I’m not going to see Mr. Garrison.”

“What are you saying?” Agitated, NolaBee pushed over the empty coconut shell in which her drink had been served. After years of dreams, plans, hard work, and privation, she had arrived at the promised land, and her entry visa was being revoked by a few words. “Joshua, you saw her. Tell her again. If anyone belongs on the screen, it’s Marylin!”

“I said no, Mama!” The muscles below Marylin’s cheeks were working. “Roy, Althea, let me out.
Let me out!”

The younger girls slid hastily from the booth, and Marylin ran toward the door. NolaBee trotted after her.

BJ, having read Linc’s stories, by now understood that Marylin’s love for Linc had been far from unrequited. “Talk about rushing things, Daddy. Mother’s right, you are beset by impatience. Why on earth didn’t you give Marylin some time?”

“My generosity is terrible and swift,” he said sourly. “Party’s over, girls. Get a move on.”

A wind had come up, rattling the floodlit palms outside the Tropics.
In the protection of the entry, NolaBee was talking with low vehemence to Marylin.

As the others emerged, NolaBee turned to Joshua. “Marylin has something to say to you.”

“Mr. Fernauld,” Marylin murmured, “I’m sorry I jumped on you like that. You’re giving me a wonderful opportunity and I’m very grateful.”

“Your first instinct to refuse was impeccable. The industry’s a zoo. You have to be equipped to bull your way through the sh . . . through the mire.”

“I’ll work very hard,” Marylin said.

“I reckon the surprise was too much,” NolaBee said. “What with the excitement of BJ’s play and all.”

Marylin nodded, the antithesis of that bouncy, dumb little chick she had played. Her real self was a tenderly vulnerable Puccini heroine, and Joshua’s penetrating eyes rested another moment on her.

The group drifted down the curved ramp, waiting quietly on the sidewalk. On this, the four hundred block of Rodeo Drive, empty lots gaped like missing teeth between exclusive specialty shops and old frame houses that had become business places. The Henry Lissauer Art Institute, one of the remaining houses across the street, showed a bluish light upstairs.

As Joshua’s big Lincoln was driven around from the parking lot, the photographer rushed through the bamboo-covered door. “Mr. Fernauld, Mr. Fernauld!” she called, brandishing a sheaf of palm-imprinted cardboard folders. “Mr. Fernauld, here’s your photographs.”

  
13
  

Art Garrison, an energetic near-dwarf, pretended omniscient knowledge of film but ran Magnum by playing his hunches. He watched the test of the girl Joshua had suggested (doubtless another of the big,
talented bastard’s on-the-side cuties) with a justifiably sour expression. A terrified, badly made-up amateur mugged and waved in grandiose gestures to an invisible audience. Even while the projector whirred, Garrison’s minions were scabrously remarking that this bimbo couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag. They winced silently when their liege lord ordered the test run again.

She doesn’t photograph all that badly, decided Garrison. Nice bone structure. And those big, frightened eyes pull at your guts.

Leland Hayward, one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, had been coerced by his client—and friend—into becoming the novice’s agent: under routine circumstances anyone represented by Hayward commanded the tops in salary. But he, too, had viewed the depressing screen test. The contract negotiations took less than five minutes. Hayward accepted, on Marylin’s behalf, every studioslanted clause of Magnum’s boilerplate.

Two days after Beverly High closed for summer vacation, NolaBee signed her full name to her minor daughter’s seven-year, six-month-option contract. It was the closest thing to slavery permitted in the United States.

As far as the Waces were concerned, Marylin had fallen into a fortune. Her first year’s salary, a hundred and fifty a week, was exactly triple what NolaBee earned (without overtime) at Hughes, but before Marylin could cash her paycheck it was eviscerated by her agent’s ten percent, her Screen Actors Guild dues, withholding taxes, and enforced contributions to Community Chest and Red Cross, a weekly War Bond. She needed clothes—Magnum demanded that its starlets look glamorous at all public functions—and a used Chevy for the drive to Hollywood.