Land of Dreams: A Novel (18 page)

“We’ll get coffee here,” Stan said, “if we’re not thrown off set for not looking like genuine New Yorkers.”

“I don’t think that will happen,” I said, “although—come to think of it—I’m not sure about that hat!”

“Cut! Break for twenty.”

The catering stand was suddenly deluged with “New Yorkers” grabbing greedily at the coffee and sandwiches. A man with a megaphone walked past shouting, “All extras to Stage 31—ten minutes. All extras to Stage 31 for hair—ten minutes.”

“We’ll go to the canteen,” Stan said.

“Mam? What are you doing here?”

It was Leo. He was dressed as a shoeshine boy, wearing a scruffy waistcoat and hat, his face dramatically blackened with polish.

“You must be Ellie’s lost son?” said Stan, holding out his hand.

“Who’s
he
?” Leo asked. My cheeks started to burn with embarrassment. I could have slapped him for being so rude.

“My name is Stanislaw Lilius. I am a friend of your mother’s.”

Leo ignored his hand and turned to me.

“What are you
doing
here? We arranged to meet at the front gate.”

His eyes were shining. He was all excited—hyped up by the thrill of the camera, no doubt. I wanted to scold him for his rudeness, but at the same time I didn’t want to draw attention to it, and I didn’t want to look defeated as a mother in front of Stan.

“I was early, so I came through . . .”

“Well, I have to go now to film another scene, so I’ll be late. In any case, Crystal is filming here too today—Freddie will be coming to get her, so I’ll get a ride back with them.” He gave me a cursory kiss, then threw a filthy glance at Stan before running off.

“He is not normally that rude,” I explained.

Stan was charming. “He is young and in love . . .”

When I looked puzzled, he added “with Hollywood. This is a very exciting place, after all.”

“His father died last year,” I said by way of explanation—and only as I said it did I realize that Charles’s death was probably the cause of all this upheaval.

“Oh,” Stan said. “Will we talk about that?”

“I’d sooner not,” I said.

“Dead husbands are for another day then.”

I smiled in agreement.

Stan gave me a tour of the studios, showing me around “Chicago” and “Paris” and more, before taking me to pass a pleasant hour in the canteen. We talked about everything and nothing, until he said, “I must, alas, return to my composing, although you have been such a charming muse that I will work better now—I am sure of it.”

He insisted on having his driver and car take me back to the house.

“The studio must pay, my dear—for everything. That is the first lesson of Hollywood.”

As I was getting into the car I turned to him and said, “I am so glad we met again—and thank you for coming to my rescue outside the fake house. I know you meant to, really.”

“Ah,” he said, “actually, I must confess now that I was watching you from the writers’ office opposite. I use it sometimes for composing. They have that line of houses set up as a ruse for visitors. You would be amazed how many people are drawn to step inside the charming cottage with the pink flowers climbing up its side . . .”

He had such mischief in his eyes that I felt compelled to kiss him warmly on his cheek, then raise my palm to his face to press it fondly.

As the car drove out through the gates and back onto the wide palm-lined streets, I thought that perhaps I might come to like this foolish place called Hollywood after all—and at least some of the people in it.

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

I was dreading Hilla coming to town.

She was coming around Thanksgiving to track down and buy up any interesting work by the Los Angeles artist Rolph Scarlett. I had met him a couple of times in the gallery. A rugged, handsome man, Rolph had been a successful stage and set designer in Hollywood until the mid-1930s, when he had moved to New York to become a “real artist.” His work was brightly colored, chaotic, nonobjective—right up Hilla’s street—so she made him chief lecturer at the Guggenheim Museum teaching new modernist abstraction—if it were possible to “teach” such a thing. I had my doubts. Hilla was so enthused by Scarlett’s work that she had become his greatest collector. Scarlett had sold some work privately during his time in Los Angeles, and she was coming to see if she could track down any of it for the Guggenheim collection.

I had written to her, eventually, telling her where I was and explaining that I would be in Los Angeles for a while. As I knew she would be, Hilla was horrified and called me immediately to try and persuade me, in her forthright Germanic way, to “come home.”

“Your career as a painter is finished, Ellie, if you don’t come back to New York. Whoever heard of a ‘real’ artist working in Los Angeles? Rolph will never go back there—
never
. Who can take somebody seriously in such a cultural desert? A real desert, perhaps. Mexico I could understand, but Los Angeles? What will you paint?”

“Well, I have to be here at the moment, Hilla, for Leo.”

She puffed. Hilla had little to no interest in children generally, and none whatsoever in mine specifically!

Shortly after that conversation I got the call to say that she was coming to LA on her Scarlett expedition just in time for Thanksgiving, although I could not help but feel that the two were connected.

“I will stay with Aline Barnsdall—do you know her? Of course not. She is an ex-employer of Lloyd Wright. They were friends, of course, then he built her a house that she
hated
and they fell out for a while. I need to talk to her and see what happened, as I’ve just got him on board for the new museum. I like him, but I believe he can be difficult, so I need to be prepared.”

Difficult, eh?
That will be a match made in heaven,
I thought, but said nothing. Despite her abrupt manner, Hilla had a way with artists—and Lloyd Wright was certainly that. We all liked and respected her, both as a painter and as a discerning collector, but more important we felt liked and respected by her. She was bossy, sometimes overbearing, but she was always genuine in her best intentions for the art—and the artist.

“You must come and stay with us, Hilla—especially as it’s Thanksgiving.” But I knew what was coming next.

“Is that horrible old woman still living with you?”

Bridie and Hilla did not like each other. Both well-built and forthright women, they were actually very similar, which doubtless fueled their mutual dislike. Hilla, no matter how she dressed, always came across as rather substantial and indelicate, in both appearance and manner. Among the fragile egos and whimsical fashions of the New York art scene, this sturdy, no-nonsense persona gave her a unique, if somewhat intimidating edge. When faced with my housekeeper Bridie, however, it was as if she was looking into a distorted mirror of sorts, and, although Hilla herself could not see why, she just didn’t like being around the outspoken old Irishwoman. Bridie’s dislike of Hilla was much more straightforward, based entirely as it was on blind prejudice.

“I hope you’re not inviting that wretched
German
for Thanksgiving.”

Hilla’s plans to stay with Aline Barnsdall fell through, which was a shame, as I would have liked to have met Aline. I had read an interview with the heiress and arts benefactor in the local paper and she was, by all accounts, a woman ahead of her time. A fiercely independent feminist, a bohemian and a devotee of experimental theater, Miss Barnsdall was also, scandalously, a single mother. Like me—except that she had given birth to her child out of wedlock and, even though both my sons were adopted, I had enjoyed the status of being a married mother of two. Aline now lived in a smaller house than the Lloyd Wright-designed Hollyhock House that she had rejected, and must be in her sixties.

Tom and I walked through Barnsdall Park almost every day, clambering up the steep hills at the side of Hollywood Boulevard—Tom running in and out of the olive trees scattered across the scraggy, sandy lawns—until we would sit on a shallow wall outside the empty Hollyhock House, looking down onto the dusty road below and across at the big movie-star hills. Stan had two friends who were members of the California Art Club, which had been based in Hollyhock House for the past fifteen years, only closing down the year before, partly because their lease ran out, but also because the place was falling in around their ears. The California Art Club focused on figurative painting and landscapes, the kind of traditional work that Hilla had no time at all for, calling it “too much in the past. I have no interest in the past.” According to Stan’s friends, it had been Aline Barnsdall’s intention for the land that she had donated to be developed into an “Art Park” by Los Angeles City Council, with a theater and gallery—but her ambitious plans seemed to have been thwarted by bitter legal wrangling over some small matter.

Land, I understood from my own background in rural Ireland, was seldom as simple a matter as it seemed. I had known farmers who would chop a neighbor’s foot off if he encroached on their property, and elderly brothers fall out—after a lifetime of loyalty—over a square inch of grazing land.

Shortly after reading the interview with Aline I remember sitting on the wall outside the empty building—its fat, sandy walls and decorative turrets were as inviting as its small, dark windows were ominous—and looking down at the city below and, for the first time since I had arrived in California, thinking that perhaps this was not such a bad place to end up after all.

Hilla called the day she arrived and said that she was staying with the Stendhals in their home in Hollywood. Earl Stendhal was a collector of great note, like herself. They had met some years before, and she was anxious to talk to him about Rolph’s work—if anyone knew what had changed hands in recent years, it would be him. I invited her for Thanksgiving lunch and she reluctantly accepted.

She arrived on my doorstep on Thanksgiving Day in a taxi, carrying her suitcase.

“Such a bore,” she said, “we disagreed on everything.”

I was pretty sure the first part wasn’t true, but the second part was.

When I had first encountered Hilla, at an exhibition party in Guggenheim’s suite at The Plaza Hotel fifteen years beforehand, she had seemed to have something of the charming, if somewhat serious, socialite about her. Now, in her fifties, she was becoming somewhat—although I hated to admit it—charmless. Her relationship with Bauer was souring, and yet she continued to be enthralled by him as a man and an artist. I wondered if that was happening to me as I got older. Was I becoming less tolerant, less charming with time? Kicking trees and fighting change, being less enamored with adventure—was this the beginning of my slide into old age? Perhaps losing two husbands within ten years had made me bitter? Or, in Hilla and myself, was I simply observing the wisdom that a woman earns with age? Perhaps the more we see of the world, the less we can fathom its trivial cruelties, the more embittered we become, and therefore the less inclined toward pretense and politeness.

Whatever the case, I was not wrong in thinking that Thanksgiving lunch was going to be hard going, with Bridie and Hilla at the same table.

I took charge of the turkey, but Bridie insisted on doing everything else and, in any case, hovered over me, checking I was doing it right.

“It’ll never brown with that excuse for a spoonful of butter—put a right lump of it in, for pity’s sake—do you know nothing at all!”

“I’m managing fine.” I don’t know why Bridie didn’t annoy me. When I was younger her manner used to both terrify and upset me, but I had become so used to her, even her criticisms—no, especially her criticisms.

“You’d want to be—that was an expensive bird!”

“Jesus, Bridie! Where did all that sugar come from?”

She was spooning cuploads of it into a large saucepan of mashed pumpkin-pie mixture. Coffee and sugar had been rationed for more than a year now. We had managed fine on a half a pound a week, especially as none of us had a particularly sweet tooth except for Bridie, who had compromised somewhat by using honey in her tea and making cakes using sweet apple purée. Like many Irishwomen of her generation who had barely tasted sugar before she reached America, it was a passionate addiction and she complained bitterly about having to restrict her use of it in her cooking. She had gone down from three spoons of sugar in her tea to one, and barely lifted a cup to her mouth these days without grimacing. So it was therefore noteworthy that she had almost a potato sackful of her white drug up on the counter.

“Oh, never you mind . . . ,” she said, pouring a bottle of black porter into a saucepan full of currants and throwing another generous handful of white sugar on top. She was making her Irish porter cake.

“As well as pumpkin pie?” I asked.

“
And
an apple tart,” she said triumphantly. “If we’re going to give thanks,” she added, “I might as well give you something to be thankful for!”

The old woman still had the extraordinary energy that she had arrived on the West Coast with, but although she seemed in good health, I worried that she might be overdoing it. She had not sat down for almost two days, cleaning the house in preparation for this one-meal holiday. When I had pleaded with her the night before to go to bed early, she had snapped, “I’ll not have some uppity Kraut cast aspersions on the state of this house—not that you seem bothered, one way or the other.”

“Where is the sugar from, Bridie?” I had a horrible thought. “You didn’t open the door to some dreadful black-marketeer did you?”

She huffed.

“Oh Jesus, Bridie—you know those guys just come back and back; once you buy one thing off them, they—”

“I’ve been saving it up,” she said. “There, now you know.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You heard me,” she said, “I’ve been putting a bit away every week, stockpiling it for Thanksgiving.”

“But you’ve only been here for a few weeks,” I said, “there’s a half ton of it in that bag.”

“I brought it up from New York,” she said more quietly.