“An hour or so. Want to get something to eat after? There’s something I need to tell you.”
A lump instantly formed in Violet’s throat. “Are you . . . going to ask me to find a new place to live?”
A tender smile broke across Audrey’s face. “No, Violet. I’m not.”
“All right, then.”
An hour and a half later they were sitting at a booth at the Pig’n Whistle on Hollywood Boulevard, after ordering plates of fish and chips.
“Look,” Audrey said, after the waiter had left. “I know you meant well the other day. I do. And I know I didn’t handle it gracefully when I first found out. But I know why you did it. And even though I wish you hadn’t, I know you wanted to make me happy.”
Audrey’s words were salve on a wound. “I’m so sorry I embarrassed you, Audrey. I’d give anything to take it all back.”
“I’m the one who’s sorry. I am sure I hurt you with what I said. And I wish I could take those words back, too. You’re a good friend, Vi. I haven’t had many of those in my life. Sometimes I forget you are different from most people I know here.”
“I am?”
Their drinks arrived—two Coca-Colas with splashes of rum—and they each took a sip.
“Hollywood is full of people with dreams, and most of the time that makes it an exciting place, but it can also make it a lonely place,” Audrey said. “In this town, you can be in a room full of beautiful people and still be alone.”
“I really had no idea you didn’t want to be in this movie,” Violet said.
“It’s not that I don’t want to be in Gone With the Wind, Violet. It’s . . .” Audrey’s voice broke away as she searched for the right words. “It’s that I don’t want to spoil it.”
“Spoil Gone With the Wind?”
Audrey smiled. “No. The magic. I don’t want to spoil the magic. You don’t make serendipity happen. Your friends don’t make it happen. It comes to you when you are in the right place at the right time. It happened to me once before, and that’s how I know it can happen again. The first time, I was just where I’d been destined to be. It was as if my mother had been looking down on me from heaven that day and moved everything into place for me. I could practically feel her there in the coffee shop when Mr. Stiles discovered me. I don’t know how to explain it, but I sense that’s how it’s going to happen again. I tried it the other way. I had screen tests after I lost the picture. I put myself forward with all those anonymous hopefuls in Central Casting. It didn’t work. Don’t you see? That way is not in the stars for me. I need to be like I was when I was a teenager.”
“A waitress in a coffee shop?”
Audrey laughed at her naïveté. “It’s not about the coffee shop, Violet. It’s about who goes to the coffee shop expecting to get just coffee.”
“So being a secretary at Selznick International instead of an extra is like being a waitress in a coffee shop?”
Audrey lifted her drink to her lips. “Something like that.”
“So, what are you thinking will happen?”
Audrey drank from her glass and then set it back down on the table. “I’m thinking what happened before will happen again. If I just do my part, someone with the power to change everything is going to find me, when all they were expecting to find was a cup of coffee.”
“I . . . I don’t think it works that way for most people who want to be an actress.”
“I’m not most people. I’m just me.”
“What if it never happens?”
“Aunt Jo told me once that if something’s meant to happen, it will.”
The waiter arrived with their food and they were quiet for a moment as they began to eat.
“Did you always want to be a Hollywood star?” Violet crunched a french fry.
Audrey paused a moment before answering. “I’ve never really wanted to be a star. I just want to be wanted the way they are. Do you see how people fight over them? Mr. Selznick simply had to have Clark Gable to play Rhett. Had to have him. He was willing to hand over the movie to have him, Violet. That’s how badly he wanted him for this film. He gave away half the profits to MGM so that they would release Clark Gable from his contract so that he could play Rhett. Can you imagine being wanted that way? Can you imagine what that must feel like?”
Violet could supply no answer. She couldn’t imagine it. But her silent wonder surely led Audrey to believe she could. Audrey nodded as though Violet had answered, Yes, I can absolutely imagine it. And it’s wonderful.
TEN
April 1939
Audrey doubted they would be able to hear the melodic trills of a songbird over the clatter of the streetcar, honking taxis, and the music floating out through nightclub doors, but Bert was strangely optimistic as he walked just a few feet ahead of her and Violet, his head tilted slightly upward.
The April evening on Sunset Boulevard was warm and fine and alive.
Bert had suggested a nightingale hunt that afternoon at lunch, and this time Audrey had said yes.
“But let’s bring Violet,” she’d said. “She would enjoy it, I think. And I’d like to do something nice for her.”
A month had passed since Violet’s awkward meddling. The Twelve Oaks barbecue scene had long since been shot with much studio fanfare and apparently a shortage of pretty girls. Audrey had typed the memo herself. Selznick had been unhappy with the “homely” extras Central Casting had sent him for the barbecue scene. She counted her lucky stars that she hadn’t been thrown in with that lot of so-called unattractive women. The rumored homeliness of the female extras hadn’t mattered so much for filming the frenzied evacuation of Atlanta, of course, a complex affair as Violet had described it, with explosions and mayhem one minute and then drowsy calm and inactivity the next. The Atlanta Bazaar scene had been reshot, too, Fleming style, with less of an eye toward authenticity and more emphasis on spectacle, but with the same unremarkable extras from Central. Audrey was happy to have missed out on being in all three scenes and wouldn’t have wanted to be cast in them if she’d been asked.
Bert was amenable to Violet coming along to hunt for the elusive nightingale, and Violet had been as enthused as a schoolgirl when Audrey asked her on the streetcar bound for home if she wanted to go with them.
“You do know in all likelihood we probably won’t find it,” Audrey had said.
“I don’t care,” Violet had answered. “It just sounds like fun. Looking for something that’s not supposed to be there.”
Audrey was actually glad an impromptu invitation had come up for that evening. Vince, who was still feeling bad about the embarrassing lunch at the Wilshire, had recently met a new talent scout that he thought Audrey should meet. He and his fiancée had been planning a party that Audrey would be invited to, but it had fallen through when Vince was called away to an important meeting in San Francisco. Strolling Sunset, looking for a songbird, was far better than sitting at home, thinking about a hoped-for introduction that wasn’t taking place.
Bert turned toward them now, his face beaming. “The first time I heard the nightingale, it was in the fronds of that tree.” He pointed to a large potted palm as he approached the corner of Sunset and Wilcox five or six buildings away. “I’m pretty sure I heard it again at the next corner, too.”
Audrey linked her arm with Violet’s, charmed by the general tone of Bert’s delight. His animated wonder was like a tonic, in light of recent events. “So, has Bert told you what the big deal is with this nightingale?” she murmured to Violet.
“They don’t live in the United States,” Violet replied at full volume, obviously proud she remembered this detail.
“Indeed. They are interlopers just like you and me, Vi. This little thing came a long way to get where it wanted to be. And of all the places to go it came to Hollywood! That’s my kind of dreamer.”
“Oh, he couldn’t h
ave flown here all the way from Europe,” Bert said with a laugh, any deeper meaning to Audrey’s words lost on him. “Someone had to have brought him over.”
“And then they just let him go?” Violet frowned. “That seems a little cruel.”
“I can think of worse things than being set free,” Audrey said softly.
“The sad thing is,” Bert continued, “he won’t have anyone to mate with. I think that’s why I’ve heard him singing. The bird’s looking for another nightingale. He’s singing for her. Calling out to her.”
“On Sunset Boulevard?” Violet asked, wide-eyed. “In the middle of a busy street?”
Bert shrugged. “He must have heard something here that sounded like another nightingale, and so he keeps coming back to find that other bird. He doesn’t know that he probably won’t find it. He just knows that he must keep trying. It’s in his nature.”
A wisp of a memory fell over Audrey at that moment, vivid and sweet. She suddenly recalled her mother sitting on her bed as she tucked Audrey in, and told her a story.
“Once upon a time there was an emperor who lived far away in China, and in his beautiful garden there was a very ordinary nightingale. . . .”
“My mom told me a story once about an emperor and a nightingale,” Audrey said, almost to herself, as the remembered moment swirled about her.
Bert dropped back a step to join Audrey and Violet, pleasure in his eyes. “I know that story. That’s a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen.”
“I think I read that one when I was a child,” Violet interjected, but her tone was one of doubt.
“It’s about an emperor who learns there is a plain brown nightingale singing in his garden, and that everyone raves about,” Audrey went on. “He commands the bird to his court to sing for him and it does. But then he receives a mechanical bird as a gift, right?”
“Yes.” Bert’s gaze was only on Audrey. “The mechanical bird is magnificent and sings whenever the emperor turns its key. No one listens to the plain nightingale anymore, even though the mechanical bird can only sing the one song. Everyone is so taken with the jeweled bird, the plain nightingale is banished from court. Years later, the mechanical bird has stopped working and the emperor is dying. Then he hears his old friend the living nightingale singing just outside his window. Her beautiful songs chase death away, and the emperor demands she stay perched at his side always. But she convinces him that she sings only to give pleasure to those who will listen, and she asks for nothing in return except her freedom.”
“Yes,” Audrey whispered. The single memory of her mother was now fuller somehow, as though Audrey had just remembered a thousand moments with her mother instead of one. “I think my mother loved that story.”
“It’s . . . it’s such a lovely tale. You tell it wonderfully, Bert,” Violet said, but a second passed before he seemed to have heard the compliment.
“You’ve heard a nightingale before, haven’t you? In the wild,” Audrey said to Bert. “That’s how you know what it sounds like. That’s how you recognized the one you’ve heard here.”
“I have.” Bert’s voice was laced with the same kind of remembered tranquillity. “My dad and I spent two weeks in Europe the summer I was thirteen. We heard one singing at twilight in the Black Forest in Germany. The sound of it brought my father to tears.”
They were now at the intersection. Bert looked up at a stocky palm planted in a massive clay pot. Its fronds extended from its tall trunk like bizarre windmill blades. People passed the three of them, laughing and talking. Someone was playing a jazz piano in a club across the street.
“I heard the nightingale here,” Bert said. “In this tree.”
For several long moments they stood, heads bent back a bit, their ears straining to catch the faintest sounds of a songbird’s call to its soul mate.
The highest fronds on the tree swayed on the curl of a breeze and were lifted upward. The night sky above was diamond speckled, glittering with a dusting of unearthly brilliance.
“I can almost imagine I hear it,” Audrey said as she closed her eyes against the cold beauty of the stars shimmering over Sunset Boulevard.
Many minutes passed before Violet said she was freezing, and perhaps they could go to a club to get a drink and come back another time.
The image of Audrey’s mother had receded back to its dark resting place while they had been listening. That, the absence of the bird, and the failed party at Vince’s left Audrey feeling chilled and empty.
“I have a better idea.” She waited for a lull in traffic and then led them across the street to a liquor store. Inside she bought whiskey, sweet vermouth, and bitters and placed the bottles inside her oversized purse. They walked back outside and she hailed a cab.
“My treat,” she said as they climbed into the vehicle. She instructed the driver to take them to Culver City.
An hour later the three friends were inside the darkened wardrobe building at the studio, drinking slightly mixed Manhattans out of coffee cups as they sat on the floor against the wall, surrounded by ruffled gowns and Confederate war uniforms stained with counterfeit blood.
It had been easy convincing the guard at the gate that they had unfinished duties for the next day’s shoot. Pockets of people worked the midnight hours all the time during the height of filming.
Audrey, now on her third cocktail and enamored of the costumes all around them, turned to Bert. “I would love to have your job.” Her words sounded slushy in her ears. “I’d take your job over mine in a blink if things were different.”
“Different?” Bert mumbled.
“This department wouldn’t work for me,” she said, the alcohol in her veins making it difficult to gesture in a way that included the entirety of where they sat. “This is not a coffee shop.”
“Coffee shop,” Bert echoed, a frown on his face.
“Violet knows what I mean, don’t you, Vi?’
Violet’s head lolled a bit to the side as she leaned against the wall. “And this sure isn’t coffee,” she said as she stared at her mug.
Audrey stood on unsteady feet and walked toward a display of items that waited in readiness for morning light. She reached for Scarlett O’Hara’s feathered, curtain-dress hat on a shelf and set it on her head; it had been used in filming earlier in the day and was still out of its box for the next day’s shoot. She fit the strap under her chin and let the gold, fringed tail trail down her right shoulder.
“All these dresses and hats and hoops,” she said dreamily. “They take you to another place, another world. They can make you believe in an instant you’re not who you’ve always been.”
Bert gazed at the hat on Audrey’s head, half admiring how it looked on her and half concerned, perhaps, that it was no longer on its shelf. It was difficult to tell.
“They’re just costumes, Audrey,” Violet said. The word came out coshtumes.
“They are not. Don’t be so unimaginative, Violet.”
“That hat suits you, Audrey!” Bert said, saluting Audrey with his cup.
Audrey scanned the room for a mirror. There was none. No one tried on clothes in the storage room. “I’ll have to take your word for it, Bertie.”
He laughed and closed his eyes. “Bertie. My mother used to call me that.”
“I like Bertie,” Violet said, and then swallowed a sip from her cup.
“You know, sometimes you just have to do what you must to get what you want.” Audrey fingered the hat’s soft fringe that fell past her collar to her breast and, underneath that, her beating heart. “If you must have the three hundred dollars to pay the taxes on Tara, then you do what you have to. You just do it. Everyone knows that. Even Melanie Hamilton knew that.”
Violet looked up at Audrey with a furrowed brow. “Melanie never would have done what Scarlett did. Stealing her sister’s fiancé like that.”
“Oh, really?” Audrey said, grinning. “Think you know Melanie, do you?”
Violet considered Audrey’s question for only a moment. “She wouldn’t have done it.” Her words slurred off her tongue.
“Is that what you think? She wouldn’t marry a man she didn’t love to save her home and all the people in it? You don’t think she would have done whatever she had to do to hold on to what she loved?”
Violet swished her head back and forth. “Scarlett was the conniving one; Melanie was the good one.”
Bert opened his eyes, interested, it seemed, in the little debate.
Despite the three Manhattans she’d consumed, Audrey felt invigorated with the hat on her head and Violet’s challenges before her. “And good people never do false things, eh, Vi?”
“Of course they don’t.”
“So when Rhett Butler makes up a story that Ashley was at a brothel with him instead of at a raid on Shanty Town, and Melanie not only owns the lie but embellishes it, that’s not doing what she has to do, even if it is false?”
Violet struggled to form words. “That . . . that’s different. Ashley had been shot and—”
“Ashley was on that raid. It was illegal, what he did. People got killed. And sweet Melanie lied about it.”
“To save her husband!”
“So, you agree with me!”
Bert was staring at her now in drunken awe. Violet gazed away into the darkness, a look of puzzlement on her face.
“You see?” Audrey said as she readjusted the hat on her head. “Sometimes you have to do something drastic to keep what is yours.” She leaned over, holding the hat on her head, and lifted her drink up off the floor. She downed the rest of its contents and then studied the empty vessel in her hand.
“Give me your cups,” she said to Violet and Bert, as she reached for the whiskey bottle.
And they did.
ELEVEN
When Violet awakened, her first thought was how painfully thirsty she was. With her eyes still closed she groped for the glass of water she usually kept by her bedside, but it wasn’t there. Her head was pounding, but she forced her eyes open. The bedside table wasn’t there, either.
Stars Over Sunset Boulevard Page 10