by Maureen Lee
‘It was the waiting that did it.’ He had dark, smoky eyes, hollow cheeks, and a wide, thin mouth that twitched slightly in an answering smile. His body moved with the lazy grace of a cat.
Nelson flounced away close to tears when Conrad Abel said impatiently, ‘Come on, let’s get started.’
They were born to dance together, the producer realized after a mere few minutes. When she danced with Herbie, it was Anne who led, Anne who had the personality that inspired her partner to greater things, but with Flip Ungar, neither led: they inspired each other. There was a sexual chemistry between them. Herbie was the boy next door; Flip was the predator looking to get his partner to bed.
Conrad Abel rubbed his hands together gleefully. He’d always deeply resented giving the part to Herbie Blinker, even though it had been his own weakness had led him to do it. This would be one in the eye for Herbie’s old man.
Lizzie brought the paper into the den for Ollie to see. It was the East Coast Herald and mainly dealt with matters in New York. ‘Read this,’ she said, pointing to a small item on the arts page:An understudy filling in for a performer with a sprained ankle is hardly worth a reviewer’s comment, except when the understudy puts in a performance of such calibre as can be found in Roses are Red at the Classic Theater on 42nd Street. Flip Ungar (standing in for the injured Herbie Blinker), partners the superlative Anne Murray, treating the audience to a display of such sublime perfection that it lifts the soul. It is rare for two dancers to be so in tune with each other as Murray and Ungar . . .
‘Shit!’ Ollie laid the paper down. He’d already got the picture and there was no need to read any more.
‘Let’s hope Herbie’s ankle gets better soon,’ Lizzie said dryly, ‘or he’ll be out of a job.’
‘Over my dead body,’ Ollie growled.
Lizzie left. Ollie put his head in his hands and thought about their son. It had been a relief when, at an early age, Herbie had said he wanted to go into show business, preferably as a dancer. He was unlikely to set the world alight with his brain. Not even the most experienced tutors his father engaged could make him as interested in conventional lessons as he was in clothes, movies, and the theatre. There was no point in sending him to college. With Ollie’s wealth, he could have funded the most up-to-date gymnasium or the best-stocked library in the country and got Herbie in that way, but his son wouldn’t have emerged one whit cleverer than when he went in.
Ollie wasn’t the sort of parent who believed in making things tough for their kids. If Herbie wanted to be a dancer, then a dancer he would be, and Ollie would do everything in his power to smooth his path.
At sixteen, Herbie went straight from high school to Peggy Perlmann’s academy in Hester Street. Peggy had been honest right from the start. ‘He’s exceptionally good-looking, has loads of personality and plenty of talent,’ she’d told Ollie. ‘I’m sure he’ll make it into the chorus of the top shows. He might even be picked for a solo spot if he’s lucky.’
From that, Ollie took it that there was little chance of Herbie becoming a star. He just didn’t have it in him: the extra shine, the final bit of polish that separated the mundane from the uniquely talented. He felt disappointed, both on his own and Herbie’s behalf. A dancer sounded much better than a chorus boy.
Anne started at Peggy’s during Herbie’s second year. She had the extra shine, the final bit of polish in spades. And she was capable of lifting Herbie to her own dizzying level. Seeing them dance together had made Ollie wonder if they could be launched as a couple: Herbie Blinker and Anne Murray - Blinker and Murray.
When Tamara had approached Lizzie about Anne moving in with them, it had seemed like the answer to a prayer. He liked Anne, she was a sweet kid, and once she was living under his roof it seemed quite legitimate - responsible, even - to look after her career. He had engaged an agent, Joe Squires, and impressed upon him that Herbie and Anne were a team. They came together like coffee and cream. Neither could be booked without the other.
Now all Ollie had to do was make sure it stayed that way, except Herbie had sprained his ankle, and he couldn’t very well demand that Anne be withdrawn from Roses are Red until the ankle got better. It worried him that one of these days, someone like that creepy producer, Conrad Abel, would advise her she could do much better with another partner.
The sound of applause was still ringing in his ears as Conrad Abel made his way along the dusty passage to his office beneath the stage. He felt exceedingly pleased with himself. Roses are Red was a trite show, but his daring in engaging the astonishingly gifted Zeke Penn had lifted the production out of the ordinary. Now the pairing of Anne Murray with Flip Ungar was attracting attention. After the piece in the East Coast Herald, the demand for tickets had increased and quite a few reviewers were coming back for a second look.
‘Good evening, Mr Abel,’ a voice said from behind.
He turned to find himself being followed by a rotund individual in evening dress. ‘Mr Blinker!’ He stood aside to allow the man into his office, which was hardly bigger than a cupboard. Every single inch of wall was covered with posters. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I’ll not beat about the bush,’ Blinker said in a flat, unemotional voice. He put a white envelope amidst the papers on the untidy desk. ‘There’s a thousand bucks in there. I want that Ungar chap out of the show. Tomorrow, Anne can go on with the chap from the chorus, whatever his name is.’
‘Nelson.’
‘That’s right, Nelson. I don’t know how long my Herbie’s going to be out of action, but I’ll give you another thousand for every week you do without him.’
The producer shook his head. ‘I don’t want your money, Blinker. I wouldn’t have taken it that other time if I hadn’t been in such a hole.’ It was the first and only time he’d done such a thing and he hadn’t touched a playing card since. He felt a spurt of anger at the cheek of the man. ‘How dare you come here telling me what to do with my own show,’ he said hotly.
The anger was wasted on Blinker, who just glowered. ‘Two thousand, then.’
‘I wouldn’t do it for ten thousand, not even a hundred,’ he sneered. ‘I thought Ungar was the right choice months ago when he auditioned.’ He’d loathed turning the young man down in favour of the only moderately talented Herbie. Ungar’s girlfriend had tried the old trick of seducing him, but she was just one of a long list who’d done the same. He took the sex when it was offered, but it was rare a girl got what she was after.
‘Have you got kids, Abel?’ Blinker enquired in a friendlier tone, a touch wheedling, as if he were trying to reach Conrad through his heart, unaware the producer didn’t possess the sort of heart that could be reached by anything on earth.
‘Not that I’m aware of.’
‘If you had, wouldn’t you do everything in your power to help them make a success of their lives?’
‘It all depends,’ said Conrad Abel. He was enjoying their positions being reversed. ‘If a kid of mine wanted a part in one of my shows, they wouldn’t get it in a million years unless they were up to it. The general public pay good money to visit the theatre and they’re entitled to the best there is. Do you seriously think Roses are Red would still be running if the entire cast were made up of second-raters like Herbie? It’d have closed within a week. As for my career, it’d have gone down the toilet a long time ago.’
Blinker winced. ‘I could have your legs broken, Abel,’ he said threateningly.
‘I know,’ the producer said with a cynical smile. ‘Better still, you could have Flip Ungar’s legs broken so he’ll never dance again. If you get rid of enough competition, your Herbie could well get a part on his own accord. Oh, and forget about Anne. It won’t matter that she’s never stretched, never dances with someone of the same calibre. Just use her as you are now, as one of the props to help your Herbie’s pathetic career. You might like to tell your precious son that it’s no use him expecting to come back when his ankle’s better. The part’s been filled by a real danc
er and it’s going to stay that way.’
Ollie was in his den, his feet on his desk, chomping on a big cigar. He wrote the word ‘Hollywood’ in the air with smoke, though the H had disappeared by the time he wrote the D.
He’d always wanted to go to California and get involved in the movies. Some of his business friends swore they were the coming thing and the theatre was quite likely to die on its feet in the not-too-distant future. He’d commission a writer to come up with a movie script for Herbie and Anne, demand it be done by yesterday. It was a way of getting Anne out of the clutches of Conrad Abel and avoiding Herbie being embarrassed when his ankle was better and he expected to return to Roses are Red. And it wouldn’t hurt to get himself out of the way of that investigation into City Hall. He’d feel safer on the other side of the country. And that was a real good idea he’d had about Herbie and Anne getting married. Lev hadn’t been all that enthusiastic when he’d come up with the idea at Christmas, but he hadn’t been against it either.
Chapter 10
It was like a scene out of . . . well, a movie. Levon watched Anne and Herbie being filmed from the other side of the heart-shaped pool. The cameraman’s head was bent over the view-finder, shielding it with one hand, while turning the handle with the other. Another camera filmed the wedding guests coming and going through a white flowered arch. Waiters hovered on every path and corner with trays of pink champagne - how Ollie managed to break the law so openly, he would never know. Prohibition was still in force. Someone very important must have been persuaded to turn a blind eye.
Quite a few of the guests were household names - no doubt the unfamiliar ones were producers and directors. After all, this was Los Angeles and Hollywood was only a few miles away. Levon recognized quite a few faces: Douglas Fairbanks, for instance, more handsome in the flesh than on the screen. The woman in the floaty blue outfit and big sunglasses was his wife, Mary Pickford, and the one draped in leopard skin - despite the heat - was an actress who’d just arrived from Germany and was reputed to have had five hundred lovers.
‘All at the same time?’ Levon had quipped when told this startling fact, to be met by stony-faced silence from an avid fan, who clearly fancied being the five hundred and first.
So far, it had been the strangest weekend of his life and quite likely to get even stranger. He’d flown - actually flown - from Newark to Los Angeles in a Fokker plane that normally carried mail. It had taken more than fourteen hours and was an experience he would prefer not to repeat, although he would have to tomorrow if he wanted to get home. He could always return by train, which would take several days, but at least he’d feel safe, even if business would suffer from his long absence. It depended on how courageous he felt when the time came.
He felt conspicuously alone, one of the few people present not connected with show business. It had been all right on the plane. Peggy Perlmann had been invited to the wedding, as well as some of the youngsters who’d been at the academy at the same time as Anne and Herbie, and the Blinkers’ daughter, Mabel, who had driven down to New York from Washington with her husband, Kurt, and their two children - the children had been the only ones who’d enjoyed the flight.
Tamara had been invited, but Levon hadn’t shown her the invitation. He was confident she wouldn’t come, yet at the same time worried that she might. A trip by private plane to a Hollywood wedding would be hard for most people to resist and would certainly give her something to boast about to her numerous friends.
But Anne and Tamara hadn’t come face to face since they’d lived in the apartment in Grammercy Park. Levon had no idea if Anne bore a grudge for having been so unceremoniously evicted when Tamara judged she’d served her purpose - he didn’t know if Anne was capable of bearing a grudge - but reckoned her wedding day wasn’t the time to find out. Moreover, Tamara would want to bring John. Lord knows what sort of effect the sight of her five-year-old son would have on Anne when she’d done her very best to pretend he didn’t exist. He’d told his wife he was visiting Ollie for business reasons.
The newly married couple were posing for the photographers, who were circling around them, cameras held like weapons, in the hope of getting a good shot. Ollie had invited representatives of every newspaper, every agent, every single person who was likely to give Anne and Herbie’s wedding publicity. It was all tied in with a movie he had planned.
And as if the plane journey hadn’t been strange enough, Los Angeles was just as odd: unnatural in Levon’s view. The single-storey house that Ollie had rented was set on a hill amidst an exotic garden planted with palm trees and bushes with blooms as big as faces. In the distance, the Pacific Ocean gleamed a silvery turquoise, in contrast to the Atlantic, on the East side, which was usually the colour of mud. The grass was too green, the sun too big and hot in the too blue sky. The house itself was as pink as a baby and set like a blancmange on the top of the hill. Last night, Levon had slept in an entirely white room with lace curtains and lace covers on the bed. It had its own private bathroom, also all white.
The women appeared to guard their complexions from the cruel heat, but nearly every man had a glorious suntan. Levon thought he must look pale and sickly beside so many healthy, brown-skinned males with their flashing white teeth.
A woman caught his arm. ‘Darling, were you in Hangman’s House with Victor McLaglen?’
‘No, madam,’ Levon replied courteously.
The woman frowned. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Positive.’
‘Do you know if Mr McLaglen is here today?’
‘I’m afraid I wouldn’t recognize him if he were. I don’t belong to the . . . film industry,’ he added lamely after the woman had rudely walked away without waiting for him to finish.
‘Lev!’ Lizzie Blinker shoved her arm inside his. ‘It’s lovely to see a familiar face. I’m fed up shaking hands with folk I don’t know from Adam.’
‘How did Ollie manage to make friends with so many people so quickly?’ Lev asked. ‘There’s hundreds of guests and you’ve only lived in Los Angeles for a couple of months.’
‘You and Peggy are the only real friends. Ollie put someone in charge of the wedding arrangements and told them to invite everyone who was anyone in Hollywood. Fortunately, only about a quarter came or we’d be overrun. ’ She squeezed his arm. ‘Are you happy for Anne, Lev? I know you look upon her as a daughter.’
Levon glanced at Anne. She and Herbie were still posing for pictures. They were standing on a round, white platform and looked like figures on a giant cake, laughing and holding hands. ‘She looks happy enough,’ he said to Lizzie. ‘Herbie, too.’
‘Yes, but are you happy, Lev?’ Lizzie persisted.
‘I suppose so.’ He wasn’t sure. Ollie had said Herbie needed encouragement to ask Anne to marry him. It had seemed funny to Levon at the time and still did. Herbie was a handsome, healthy young man of twenty-two and, if he was in love, shouldn’t have needed encouragement. He and Anne had lived under the same roof for over five years and were fond of each other, there was no doubt about that. But in love? Levon wasn’t sure.
‘We’ll look after her, Lev, I promise,’ Lizzie said. ‘Anne’s not exactly your average young woman and she needs looking after. Don’t you agree?’
‘Well, yes.’ There still seemed something not quite right about it.
He thought the same thing later when Anne and Herbie began to mingle among the guests, eventually arriving at him. Instead of Anne flinging her arms around his neck as she usually did, she merely kissed his cheek. He was convinced there was something in her beautiful eyes, right at the very back, a lost, scared look that worried him. Had Ollie pressurized her into marrying his son?
‘Congratulations, darling. And you Herbie.’ He shook the young man’s brown hand. ‘I hope you’ll be very happy together.’
‘We will, Lev,’ Herbie said confidently as he led Anne away.
Levon spied Peggy sitting at a table alone, a bundle of spangled pink net with a pink flower in h
er voluminous red hair, attracting a great deal of admiring looks from the men in the vicinity. With a sigh of relief, he quickly went and sat beside her before someone else got there before him. ‘I thought you’d be making contacts and that sort of thing.’ He waved his hands vaguely.
‘Oh, Lev, I feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland.’ She seemed as pleased to see him as he was her. ‘These people terrify me. I can’t wait to get back to New York where everyone’s more civilized. I hope Ollie keeps an eye on Anne or she’ll be eaten alive.’
‘What makes you say that?’ he asked, alarmed.
‘Well, this company he’s making the movie with, they turn out complete trash,’ she said darkly. ‘Ollie seems to think if he’s putting up the money, they’ll do as he says. If he wants a nice, tasteful musical with Anne and Herbie as the stars, he’s gonna have a battle on his hands. All Hughie Vandervelt is interested in is making a quick buck. He owns the company, if you didn’t know.’
Levon felt even more alarmed. ‘Does Lizzie know about this?’
‘I’ve no idea, but Lizzie has complete faith in Ollie. Let’s hope it’s justified.’
Despite this worrying news, Levon was very conscious of Peggy’s luscious red lips and plump white arms. Her face shone with perspiration and tendrils of red hair curled around her ears and clung to her glistening brow, gathering in little clumps on her long, white neck. She was like a goddess, a magnificent pagan goddess. He recalled how smitten he’d been when they first met.
‘You look extremely beautiful today, Peggy,’ he murmured.
To his surprise, her face turned almost as red as her hair. ‘Why, Lev, you’ve never said anything like that before.’
‘I’ve thought it,’ he confessed.
She looked at him provocatively through lowered lids. ‘I’ve always considered you the handsomest man I know.’