Citizen Hollywood (Hollywood's Garden of Allah novels Book 3)

by Martin Turnbull

  As often as she’d served most of these guys at the Cocoanut Grove, Gwendolyn hadn’t thought much about what it might be like locked in a room with them. Seeing so much power and influence huddled together at the one table was more intimidating than she’d anticipated. She pressed her left hand against a stomach skittish with butterflies.

  Mae had her eyes trained on Zanuck like he was the only person in the room. Gwendolyn had seen that look chiseled into the eyes of nearly every woman accompanying a man of power into the Cocoanut Grove. Back the hell off, sister, she thought. This one’s mine. Go find your own damn meal ticket.

  She wondered if Mae knew she was only here because Zanuck had requested her. How would she react if Zanuck showed Gwendolyn more than passing attention? Gwendolyn presented his gatekeeper her sweetest smile. “Fishing for a contract at Fox?”

  Mae snorted and the resolute look evaporated. “Oh, Christ no, honey. I’m past all that now. Me and Darryl, we go way back. The rest of them is all yours. Play your goo-goo eyes right, you could get somewhere. Wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened.”

  The joking around the table dissolved once Zanuck had dealt the hands, and the rest of the world faded away. The men studied their cards, chomped on their cigars and grunted under their breath like cranky trolls.

  Whenever someone’s glass sank to the last quarter, Gwendolyn and Mae took turns doing the loop—strolling around the table at a respectful distance lest one of the players suspect them of sneaking a peek. Each time she circled the table, it felt more and more like her career was circling the drain. To stop it from forever gurgling down the S-bend, she was going to have to get Zanuck to notice her. And to do that, she’d have to go through Mae. Invariably, one of the men would raise his glass for a refill but none of them smiled or thanked her.

  Card games at the Garden of Allah were nothing like this. There was always someone joking or singing. But these high-stakes players with ten-dollar minimums and hundred-dollar chips sucked all the fun out of it. The tension in the room left her short of breath. The players were so focused on their cards that they barely acknowledged she was there, let alone paused long enough to take in how delicious she looked in her silk dress. Still, this game had the signs of being an all-nighter, so Gwendolyn figured sooner or later they’d have to get up, if only to pee.

  As midnight approached, Mae beamed like a jack-o-lantern. “It’s your turn to loop the loop.”

  Gwendolyn was three quarters around the table when she noticed a small dark glass bottle in Mae’s hand. She watched Mae pull out an eyedropper, squirt the contents into one of the drinks on her tray, and put it back in her bag. Twenty seconds later, that drink sat in front of Zanuck.

  Gwendolyn felt a film of sweat break out across her forehead. She made another round of the table. As she collected an empty glass and a full ashtray, she tried to make eye contact with Zanuck, but the man was too engrossed in his game. There must have been several thousand dollars in the pot, and only two guys had folded.

  Zanuck went to take a mouthful of his spiked drink, but saw something in his hand and put it down again. Mae chewed on her lower lip. Gwendolyn ran out of reasons to hover near the table and returned to the buffet.

  “MAE!” Zanuck barked. Mae jumped.

  “I’m right here.”

  Zanuck kept his eyes on his cards. “Getting close to sandwich time. Make sure there’s ham. Baked. French mustard. Rye.”

  Mae hurried back to Gwendolyn and whispered into her ear, “He always wants ham when he’s about to lose a stack of dough.” She kept her face a picture of blandness, but the sneer in her voice was unmistakable and Gwendolyn didn’t know what to make of it.

  As soon as Mae strutted out of the room, Gwendolyn scurried to their handbags at the end of the buffet. She opened Mae’s and spotted the small bottle. She pulled it out and looked at the label: Coprinopsis atramentaria. Below it, someone had written in pencil Tippler’s Bane.

  When she heard a rush of restaurant sounds pour into the room she hid the bottle behind her back, but it turned out to be the bartender with more mixers and ice.

  She pulled him aside. “You ever heard of Tippler’s Bane?”

  “Sure.” He widened his eyes. “It comes from an ink cap mushroom.”

  “What’s it used for?”

  “Not used for anything; it’s poisonous. Not fatal, ’less you use too much. But it’s bad, especially if you mix it with booze. Causes upchucking like you’ve never seen.”

  “Ice!” Giesler barked.

  Gwendolyn approached the table, her mind awhirl with possible reasons Mae would want to poison Zanuck. It wasn’t hard to imagine Zanuck screwing a girl like Mae and then screwing her over. That scenario had probably played out a dozen times a week since the dawn of the movies, but, Gwendolyn thought, that was an awful lot of stuff Mae had squirted into his drink.

  Zanuck reached out and wrapped his fingers around his glass as she re-iced Giesler’s drink and made her way around the table. She kept trying to catch Zanuck’s eye, but he didn’t look up. One of the guys said, “Hey, Zanuck, you plan on making a move sometime before my five-year-old graduates?”

  Zanuck looked up from his cards and caught sight of Gwendolyn’s face. He narrowed his eyes, trying to figure out how he knew her. Realization dawned on him, and he offered her a slight nod. In return, she bugged her eyes wide open, raised her eyebrows as high as she could, glanced down at his drink, then back up to his face. Very discreetly, she shook her head from side to side.

  She continued her loop around the table and Zanuck’s eyes followed her. She plopped an ice cube into his drink just as the door swung open and Mae reentered the room.

  Gwendolyn managed to whisper, “Don’t drink!” but it came out hoarse and hurried and she wasn’t sure he heard her.

  Zanuck threw his cards on the table. “I’m done playing charades.” He pushed himself back from the table, took a deep drag of his cigar, and stood up. He wasn’t tall—Gwendolyn guessed he barely made five and a half feet—but when he stretched and puffed out his barrel chest, he looked like he could play Tarzan. “I need a break from—” he glanced at both girls, “—all this,” and left the room.

  Max Arnow and the Warner Bros. guy continued with the game. Mae leaned into Gwendolyn. “If I was you, I’d focus my attention on Arnow. The girl who did this the last time ended up with a year’s contract at Columbia. I saw her in the new Blondie picture. She’s pretty good, too.” Mae’s gaze flickered back to the exit.

  Zanuck reappeared and walked straight to Mae. “Could I trouble you for a fresh drink?”

  Mae’s eyes fell to the empty glass in Zanuck’s hand. “Sure thing.” As Mae turned her back to him to fix a new drink, Zanuck looked at Gwendolyn. It was as though he were still playing poker—a mask of clay.

  Then one of the men at the table said, “Holy mackerel, Fitts, you don’t look so good.”

  “I don’t feel so good, neither.” The DA had a solid, square face punctuated by a large roman nose, but his cheeks had turned bright red. He leaned back in his seat, holding his stomach, and started to breathe heavily. “Jesus.”

  Zanuck called out, “Are you going to be—”

  Fitts made a gurgling sound, then a walloping load of projectile vomit arched over the poker table and splattered across it. Everyone shoved backwards. The poor guy unloaded another stomachful with such force that he landed on the floor, still puking.

  Zanuck spun around and slapped Mae so hard it knocked her off her feet. “You fucking little BITCH!” Zanuck pointed to the man sprawled out on the floor. “That was supposed to be me, wasn’t it? WASN’T IT?”

  Gwendolyn grabbed a couple of the towels from the buffet and rushed over to Fitts, who looked like a scarecrow with the stuffing pulled out of him. She knelt down and started to dab at his suit; the guy stunk of vomit and sour food. “I think he needs to be taken to the men’s room,” she said to nobody in particular.

  Arnow helped Fitts to his feet
, slung an arm around his shoulder, and led him from the room. Mae was still on her knees, whimpering, and with a hand pressed against her face. Zanuck turned to Gwendolyn and fixed her with a stare so intent that she retreated a few steps, then he turned abruptly and followed Fitts and Arnow out of the room.

  Gwendolyn got to her feet and picked her way over splotches of vomit. “It’s okay,” she told Mae, “he’s gone now.”

  The left side of Mae’s face was tomato red, her cheeks streaked with mascara. She kept her eyes on the carpet. “Lemme give you some advice, dearie. If you ever get the chance to have an affair with a studio boss, just know it’s always about him. You don’t get no say in nothin’.”

  She tried to dry her eyes with the back of her hand but only smeared her mascara into larger blotches. When she struggled to her feet, she found she’d split a seam in her super-tight dress from the armpit down to her hip. Gwendolyn suddenly felt sorry for her and was about to offer to fix her dress—the split was a clean one and wouldn’t be much trouble to mend—when she saw the smirk in Mae’s eyes. You dumb broads are all the same. You’ll learn too late, same as me.

  After Mae left the room, Gwendolyn grabbed a towel from an ice bucket and had started to wipe the wall clean when somebody thumped the door open so loudly it made her jump. Zanuck strode toward her. She’d just seen the guy knock a girl off her feet, and as he came nearer, she could feel his aura of don’t-mess-with-me power crowd her. He wasn’t even forty yet, but he seemed much older. She felt the edge of the side table press against her hip.

  He thrust a piece of paper toward her. “That’s a direct line to my senior secretary. I’m going on a moose-hunting trip in Canada, then I’m in New York for a board meeting. I want you to call me, but not until October.” His scowl deepened. “You need to be blonder. But not obviously blonder.” He let out a satisfied hmmm. “And when you call, tell her you’re phoning me about the face. You got that? The face.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The tension around the MGM writers’ department spilled out into the studio, but not because of Taggert’s threat. By the middle of September, war had officially broken out in Europe, and although the US had declared its neutrality, many people doubted it would hold. Around the studios, everyone was chewing over the question of how the government might view movies during wartime. Would they be deemed a frivolous waste of precious resources that could be put to better use making uniforms, parachutes, and aircraft tires? Or would the studios be called on to make flag-waving, patriotism-raising, hero-glorifying movies to help the war effort? The latter scenario would mean a bonanza of work, but if the government decided movies were superfluous, it could lead to hundreds or maybe thousands of people soon finding a pink slip in their pay envelope.

  When a late-summer heat wave broke out across Southern California, the temperatures inside the soundstages steamed toward a hundred and fifteen. Sets shriveled and buckled, film stretched and broke in the middle of scenes, and makeup dripped from famous faces. After five straight days of this, Mayer decided nothing productive could be done under such conditions and he closed the studio down at lunchtime on a Friday.

  Marcus was packing his briefcase and looking forward to falling into the Garden’s pool when Hugo appeared at his office door.

  “You’re not planning on heading inland, are you?” Hugo asked. “It’ll be much cooler at the ocean.”

  Marcus had known for a month now that Hugo’s was the last submission on Taggert’s desk. Each day, he came to work expecting to be told of Hugo’s dismissal, which would relieve him of the duty he felt to tell Hugo himself. But each day passed and nothing was mentioned. Marcus looked at Hugo’s eager face and realized it was time someone told him that the guillotine might be hanging over his neck.

  * * *

  The streetcar to Santa Monica Beach was packed with Angelenos every bit as damp as Marcus, but block by block, the temperature dropped palpably. By the time they got to the Santa Monica Pier, it felt at least fifteen degrees cooler.

  Marcus and Hugo battled their way toward the beach but found the broad tract of sand densely packed with bodies, towels, and umbrellas. All they needed was a place to dump their jackets so they could wade into the water, but a plot bigger than a drink coaster was nowhere in sight.

  “I know where we can go,” Hugo said.

  He led Marcus north along Ocean Avenue past the string of weatherboard hotels facing the shoreline. By the time the twenty-minute hike ended, their neckties were off and their jackets were slung over their arms. Hugo pulled open the door to a nondescript one-story building with no signs or windows. The door was painted white like the building but was weather-beaten around the edges.

  Marcus peered into the murky interior and made out a large aquarium along one wall and fishing nets and buoys strung up along the ceiling. Hawaiian music strummed in the background.

  Hugo left Marcus at a cocktail table and soon returned with tall drinks garnished with bright orange Polynesian flowers. He clinked his glass against Marcus’. “Bottoms up!”

  Marcus took a sip: pineapple, passionfruit. Not bad. His eyes adjusted to the dim lighting and he realized that the only patrons here were men. “Where are we?”

  “This is called the Friendship,” Hugo replied. “It’s where people like us can come and, you know, make friends.”

  Realization descended on Marcus. “Is this what I think it is?”

  Hugo raised his glass. “Well, I doubt this cocktail could get any fruitier.”

  Gay bars in Los Angeles could be—and routinely were—raided by the police. Such raids led to names listed in the paper, jobs threatened, lives ruined. Marcus could scarcely believe Hugo would be so cavalier about something so perilous. He felt a cold sweat break across the back of his neck, and it must have showed.

  “Relax,” Hugo said. “We’re outside the LA city limits. Way beyond the reach of the LAPD. This place has never been raided.”

  “I can’t believe you’ve endangered us like this.” Marcus leapt up from his bar stool but Hugo grabbed his forearm.

  “Honestly, Marcus, there is no chance—”

  “Didn’t you see that bit in the LA Times last month? The guy from RKO and the guy from Warners, they got arrested in some place down on Wilshire.”

  Hugo let out a bitter sort of laugh usually heard on death row. “I didn’t have to read about it. I was there.”

  “What?!”

  “I took a chance bringing you here. A huge chance.”

  “You sure as hell did.” Marcus slammed his half-finished drink onto the cocktail table. “One of my neighbors knows that RKO guy. He got fired from his job and evicted from his apartment.”

  “I brought us here so we could talk,” Hugo said. “I mean really talk. I’ve known you now for what, ten years? I want us to be honest with each other and admit our parallels.” He lit a cigarette and offered the pack to Marcus. “You remember that day last winter when you came to my place? When I picked up some god-awful flu?”

  Under the pretext of bringing Hugo some chicken soup, Marcus had snuck back some letters written in Spanish he’d found there. They looked suspiciously like love letters between Hugo and Ramon. Turned out they were nothing of the sort, but while he was looking for a way to put them back where he found them, Hugo kinda-sorta admitted to being queer and let on that he knew about Marcus, too. Marcus hadn’t seen the revelation coming and was so panicked that it must have shown on his face, because Hugo changed the subject. They’d never spoken about it since.

  Marcus looked around the bar to escape Hugo’s steady gaze. He recognized the looks on these men, that same hope mixed with expectation he’d seen often enough behind park bushes and in public bathrooms. But that was before he’d become one half of “Marcus and Ramon.” Marcus returned to Hugo’s spongy face. Even in this shadowy lighting, he could see it had gone pale. A blue-toned light shone off Hugo’s sweaty forehead.

  Hugo started blinking rapidly. “Did I just go out on a limb and th
en hand you the buzz saw?”

  Marcus felt the wave of panic start to subside. It washed over a surge of admiration for Hugo’s courage.

  “Look, if I’ve assumed the wrong thing about you,” Hugo stammered, “then leave your drink on the table and walk out of here.”

  Marcus stared at Hugo, glanced down at his drink, then looked up again. He brought the glass to his lips and sucked at the straw until what was left of the passionfruit cocktail disappeared.

  “I believe,” he told Hugo, “it’s my turn to buy the next round.”

  * * *

  Seven glasses were lined up across their table like a firing squad. Hugo had insisted the busboy not take them away, claiming it was just something he’d liked to do ever since he saw guys at the Cocoanut Grove do the same thing. Something about the tracking of progress.

  Over six glasses of Honolulu Lulus, they compared notes on guys they’d seen around the studio and laughed over missed opportunities they’d been too scared to initiate. That kind of stuff was furtive, shameful, and the thought had never entered Marcus’ head that he could talk like this with another queer before. Even at the free-for-all Garden of Allah, the subject remained circumspectly tacit. It was both a thrill and a relief to be able to do it now.

  When the bartender delivered their seventh round, Hugo clinked Marcus’ glass and exclaimed, “Here’s to honesty!”

  Marcus took a quick sip, then paused before confessing, “I’ve got a secret.”

  Hugo leaned back, his face full of expectation, but said nothing.

  “I have a lover.” A flurry of pride swirled up through him. He’d never said those words out loud before.

  A smile broke out on Hugo’s face. “You don’t say?” He reached over and punched Marcus on the shoulder. “Good for you.”

  “It’s Ramon Novarro.”

  Hugo held the smile on his mouth but it faded from his gaze as Marcus’ news filtered down through the layers. Eventually, he said, “I don’t suppose he landed on your doorstep one day, unannounced, and then did something bold?”