Stars Over Sunset Boulevard

by Susan Meissner

  She is not Mrs. Redmond.

  “How very kind of you to return the hat,” the woman says. “Please come in. I hear you used to live next door when you were a child. How remarkable.”

  Christine steps inside and hands over the pink-striped box. “Yes, I did. A long time ago. It was just for a year.”

  The woman smiles wide as she stretches out her hand. “Elaine Garceau. Friends call me Elle.”

  “Christine McAllister.”

  “So very nice to meet you, Christine. Please have a seat. While I still have one to offer you.”

  They sit down on the sofa. All around them are boxes. Some are full; some are not. Some are taped shut and ready for whatever is to happen next.

  “So, you were six when you and my mother were neighbors?” Elle asks.

  “Yes. During first grade. We moved to Laurel Canyon when I was seven and then to Bel Air. Your mother made the long hours my parents worked back then enjoyable. She would bake something wonderful and then we’d sit and watch old TV shows while she told me about all the places in the world she had been to. I think there was an actress on those old shows who was her favorite. Your mother always liked it when one of her episodes came on.”

  “Audrey Wainwright?”

  Christine didn’t know the name. “Maybe.”

  “They were lifelong best friends, my mother and Audrey Wainwright. They met on the set of Gone With the Wind. They were both studio secretaries back then.”

  “Oh!” Christine looks down at the hatbox.

  Elle follows her gaze. “They stole that hat from wardrobe. Lucky for them, there was a spare for the rest of the filming.”

  “So that really is Scarlett O’Hara’s hat from the movie?”

  “It really is.” Elle reaches into a cardboard box near the couch that is half-full of pictures and artwork. She pulls out a framed black-and-white photograph and hands it to Christine. Two women are standing arm in arm. One of the women is Mrs. Redmond long before Christine knew her. Their clothes are 1940s style.

  “I have some dresses just like these in my shop,” Christine says.

  “Cute, aren’t they? My dad took this picture. He was a wildlife photographer. Birds, mostly. That’s Audrey Wainwright before she was a TV star. Wasn’t she beautiful? And that’s my mother. All three of them worked on the set of Gone With the Wind. My father was employed in the wardrobe department, hence access to the hat. But he apparently wasn’t an accessory to the crime. He didn’t know they’d made off with it. I’m not sure he ever knew.” Elle laughs lightly.

  Christine hands the photograph back to her. “Did your mother ever tell you what made them take it?”

  “She told me it was just a silly thing they did one night when they’d had too much to drink. I think the real reason was just between them. A secret thing between friends.” Elle places the photograph back in the box. “Audrey died ten years ago. Her passing was very hard on my mother. It was hard on all of us. We were all very close to her.”

  “I’m so sorry. And when did your mother pass away?”

  Elle looks up from the box, surprise etched on her face. “My mother isn’t dead.”

  Christine is wholly unprepared for such news. “She’s . . . she’s not?”

  “No. She just celebrated her ninety-sixth birthday a few months ago here in this house. Just before I moved her out of it. She lives in West Hollywood now, in an assisted-care facility, probably not very far from your boutique.”

  For a second Christine is too stunned to speak. “She’s been here in this house all this time?”

  “Mom moved in right after my dad died, almost thirty years ago. It was Audrey Wainwright’s bungalow, but she let my mother live here and then left it to her in her will. Mom was able to manage on her own until just recently. I’ve held off emptying it until now because it was rather sad having to move her out. She loved this house. Her age finally caught up with her, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh.”

  Christine is about to ask if it would be possible to visit Mrs. Redmond when Elle speaks.

  “Christine, would you like to come with me and my granddaughters to see her right now? I told her I’d bring the hat by when it was returned to us. She’s been anxious to see it again. I’m afraid she may not remember you, but you never know. Would you like to join us?”

  “Very much.”

  • • •

  Half an hour later Christine is following Elle and her granddaughters down a carpeted hallway in a facility that looks and feels more like a Mediterranean resort than a nursing home. The textured walls are painted a creamy shade of pumpkin, and an aroma of citrus, clove, and sandalwood tumbles about them as they walk.

  Elle looks back at Christine. “By the way, Mom still calls me Lainey, even though I haven’t gone by that nickname in fifty years.”

  “My mom still calls me Chrissy.”

  The two women share a smile as Elle stops at the second-to-the-last door. She knocks once, opens the door, and pokes her head in.

  “Mom, it’s Lainey. Are you dressed? We’ve brought the hat. And a guest.”

  Christine follows Elle and the granddaughters inside.

  On one side of the room is a large picture window, an armchair, a TV, a tiny kitchen area, and a mirrored closet. The other is dominated by a hospital bed; a second, smaller window; and, in the bed, propped up with pillows, a fragment of an old woman.

  Her paper white skin and hair are thin. Even her bones appear to be thin. She looks as if she might be able to fly away if she could lift her delicate arms and move them up and down. The only part of her that doesn’t look ancient and decrepit are her gray-blue eyes.

  Christine knows those eyes. “Hello, Mrs. Redmond,” she says.

  “Who are you?”

  A slight Southern drawl coats the woman’s words.

  “Mom, this Christine McAllister. You babysat her many years ago when you came back to Hollywood to live in the bungalow.”

  “Christine who?” She frowns.

  Christine moves closer to her. “Christine McAllister. I lived in the house next door, Mrs. Redmond.”

  Mrs. Redmond stares at her, ancient brows puckered. “Just call me Violet. You make me sound like an old woman when you call me Mrs. Redmond. How do I know you again?”

  Christine breaks into a wide smile. “You used to watch me after school.”

  Violet narrows her eyes. “Christine. You liked macaroons.”

  “Yes! You baked wonderful things but the macaroons were the best.”

  “Christine owns a vintage-clothing shop, and that’s where the hat ended up. Isn’t that amazing?” Elle says.

  Violet cocks her head in wonderment and gawks at Christine. “You had the hat?”

  “No, Mom. It just got sent there by accident with all those old clothes you had at the bungalow. Christine brought it back and told me she knew you. You let her try on the hat once. She remembered it.”

  “Is Audrey with you?”

  “Audrey’s in heaven, Mom.”

  Violet swivels her head toward Christine. “Audrey runs a home for unwed mothers out of her villa in Italy. Did you know that?”

  “I didn’t,” Christine says.

  “Bert and I came out every summer to help her. And then it was just me who came out. Is Bert here?”

  Christine casts a glance at Elle. She is opening the box and withdrawing the hat. Then she places it on her mother’s lap. “Here’s the hat, Mom. Has it been a while since you’ve seen it?”

  The old woman looks at the hat. “A long while.”

  “Je peux l’essayer, Grandmère?” one of the granddaughters asks.

  “In English, Michelle,” Elle says.

  “Grandmother, may I try on the hat?”

  But Violet has a distant look in her eyes. “Do you know what Mammy sa
id to Scarlett before she yanked down those curtains?”

  “Mom?”

  “She said, ‘You been brave so long, Miss Scarlett. You just gotta go on bein’ brave.’ That’s what we did, didn’t we, Audrey? We learned to be brave when it was easier to be afraid.”

  The room is quiet.

  “Mom? You all right?”

  Violet looks up from the hat on her lap and her gaze travels to her great-granddaughters. “Which one of you wants to wear this hat?”

  “I do!” both girls say.

  Violet reaches with a shaking hand for her bedside table and a pair of cuticle scissors. She turns the hat over in her lap and begins to snip away the label that reads Scarlett #13.

  Christine, shocked, is slow to react. “Mrs. Redmond, are you sure you want to do that?”

  But even as she asks, the little label flutters to the carpet.

  “Here you go.” Violet extends the hat toward the girls. The younger one takes it gleefully. “Go play now,” she says.

  The girls take the hat and scamper to the mirrored closet door on the far end of the room.

  Christine bends down to pick up the faded tag.

  “Mom, do you really want the girls to play with that hat?” Elle asks.

  “I would have given it to them sooner but I had forgotten where I put it.”

  Christine extends the label toward Elle.

  “No, no. You can keep that,” Violet says to Christine. “They don’t need that. You take it.”

  Christine hesitates but Elle nods, and she drops the label into her purse.

  “Now open the window there, Lainey. I like to have it open when the sun goes down and the stars come out.”

  Elle opens the window nearest the bed, and the late-afternoon air is full of birdsong.

  Violet turns her head toward the sound.

  “Do you hear that?” she says to Christine.

  “The birds?”

  “That’s a nightingale. Did you know a man shipped one hundred nightingales to California from England for a gentleman’s park? In 1887. Did you know that?”

  “I didn’t,” Christine replies.

  “That man just opened the cages and let them go free. One hundred of them! Bert found out about it when he was preparing to teach a class at the university. You would have thought he’d won a million dollars that day.”

  Violet leans forward in her bed. “Do you hear it? Isn’t that the most beautiful sound in the world?”

  She waits expectantly for Christine to answer, her eyes shining with anticipation and delight. Behind them the little girls are laughing and posing at the mirror, pretending they are famous.

  “Do you hear it, Audrey?” Violet says.

  Christine nods. “I hear it.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My deepest thanks to:

  Ellen Edwards and Kendra Harpster at NAL and my agent, Elisabeth Weed, for expert guidance, insights, and advice; author friends Rene Gutteridge and Susan May Warren for encouragement along the way, and James Scott Bell for all the Old Hollywood particulars and the best pastrami sandwich ever at Langer’s Deli on Alvarado; Annette Hubbell and Skot and Amy McCoy for the most amazing research day in Hollywoodland; Becca Peterson and Steve Auer of the Culver Studios for helping me imagine the long-ago Selznick International days and allowing me to walk the lots; Culver City historian Julie Lago Cerra, and Marc Wanamaker from Bison Archives for assisting me with nailing down the little details; Jim Bunte and Steve Crise of the Pacific Electric Railway Historical Society; Robert Houston and Gwyn Houston at Joyride Vintage in the Orange Circle; Steve Wilson, Curator of the Film Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, and coauthor of the beautifully designed book The Making of Gone With the Wind; Susan Lindsley for compiling the diaries and letters of her aunt, Susan Myrick, so that the rest of the world can peek in on them; Siri Mitchell and Mary Demuth for the French phrases; my mother, Judy Horning, for her careful proofreading; God for giving me a love for story and the inspiration and confidence to tackle the blank page, every day, over and over; and to you, dear reader, for allowing me literary license here and there as I took the facts I gleaned from many of these wonderful people mentioned above and crafted a story that begins with truth, but onto which I imposed the question What if?

  A CONVERSATION WITH SUSAN MEISSNER

  Spoiler alert—A Conversation with Susan Meissner and the Questions for Discussion that follow tell more about what happens in the book than you might want to know until you read it.

  Q. What inspired you to use Scarlett’s hat from Gone With the Wind to tell a story about female friendship?

  A. I’ve long been a fan of Gone With the Wind. I’ve read the book only once, but I’d probably seen the movie a dozen or more times before I decided to write Stars over Sunset Boulevard. Margaret Mitchell’s legendary novel is not often described as being about friendship, but the more I’ve watched the film, the more I’ve seen how incredibly deep and complex Scarlett O’Hara and Melanie Hamilton’s relationship is. I wanted to explore the layers of their friendship as depicted in the movie, and I especially wanted to study how these two literary characters at first glance seem to be polar opposites but are actually both fiercely loyal and unafraid of making hard choices to protect what and whom they love. Scarlett’s curtain-dress hat is to me emblematic of what dire circumstances can lead someone to do when what she loves most is in danger of being ripped out of her hands. I knew I could use Scarlett and Melanie’s fictional friendship as a template for telling a story about two studio secretaries who, like Scarlett and Melanie, are not as different from each other as we might first think, especially when their separate longings collide.

  Q. By the end of the novel, I was deeply moved by all that Violet and Audrey have come to mean to each other. I wanted to immediately contact all my best friends in person to tell them how grateful I am for their presence in my life. Is the novel, in part, your tribute to your own friends?

  A. It is first a tribute to friendship itself. It is the most remarkable of human relationships because it is completely voluntary. Violet muses late in the book on this very thought: that we are bound by blood and vows to other deeply close relationships, but we get to choose to keep loving our friends, day after day. Or to stop loving them. There is no civil code that demands we stay friends—no pledge is given; no papers are signed; no vows are spoken. And yet most of us have friends whom we love as deeply as those people we are legally and morally bound to. I know I have friends like that. I love writing novels about relationships, and there is no relationship quite like friendship.

  Q. What do you find especially appealing about Hollywood during its golden age, and the films that were made then?

  A. There was a magical quality about Hollywood in its golden years. It was a dream factory in the 1930s and ’40s, a place that produced in fantasy what people imagined life could be like as they stoically moved on from the horrors of the First World War and then the demoralizing years of the Depression. The golden age of Hollywood was a chance to indulge again in beauty and wonderment after death and then deprivation. This era also interests me because Hollywood’s golden years ended so suddenly and without any warning. After World War Two, most in Hollywood thought they could just pick up where they left off before the war started. But the advent of television just a few years later would change everything. The beginning of World War Two was actually the beginning of the end of the golden age and no one really saw it coming.

  Q. Where did you find such detailed information about the making of Gone With the Wind? Did anything you discovered particularly surprise you?

  A. Every day that I spent in research I found new details that amazed me. The filming began in January 1939 and the movie premiered just eleven months later; that detail floors me. The fact that the script kept changing up until the last few weeks of shooting, that five t
housand separate wardrobe pieces were made, that it is still the most iconic film ever produced, are just a few of the myriad fascinating particulars about Gone With the Wind. There were a number of little things I learned about the film that didn’t make it into my novel, such as Scarlett’s first wedding night scene, which was edited out, in which she makes Charles Hamilton sleep in a chair across the room, and the scene in which Ashley’s father, John Wilkes, dies in her arms. The book that was most helpful to me was Steve Wilson’s The Making of Gone With the Wind. It is a beautifully composed book with wonderful photos and text, published by the University of Texas at Austin. The university’s Harry Ransom Center owns much of David O. Selznick’s studio archives and a number of Gone With the Wind costume pieces, including the curtain dress and its hat.

  Q. Where did the idea to include the nightingale spring from? Is it true that one hundred nightingales were shipped to California from England in 1887, as Violet says late in the book?

  A. Hans Christian Anderson’s story “The Nightingale” was a favorite of mine as a child, so I’ve wanted for some time to incorporate that fable into the story threads of a novel. I love the idea from the story that the magnificent mechanical bird can satisfy the emperor for only a limited time. In the end, it is the plain brown nightingale that the emperor loves most and longest, and that bird is always meant to be free.

  It’s quite possible that a hundred nightingales did make it to California in 1887. I found an answer to a query in a 1902 edition of the avian-themed periodical The Condor that states a bill of lading existed for one hundred nightingales shipped out of Southampton, England, and bound for New York. The nightingales were reputedly ordered by a man who wanted them for a gentleman’s park in Santa Barbara. Did those birds arrive in California? Were they released? Did they survive and multiply? I don’t know. But I had the wonderful opportunity as a novelist to imagine in the pages of Stars over Sunset Boulevard that they did.

  Q. What do you hope readers will take away from the novel and remember long after they’ve finished reading?