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

by Martin Turnbull

  “I’ve only seen the naval base, which is about ten miles down the coast from Honolulu.”

  “So if it’s not in Honolulu,” Kathryn asked, “where is it?”

  “A terrific little spot called Pearl Harbor.”

  “Pearl Harbor,” Gwendolyn repeated. “Sounds like heaven.”

  CHAPTER 34

  It was an unofficial rule at MGM that the main writers’ building was off limits for B Hive worker bees. Marcus suspected it was because management didn’t want its writers comparing salaries, but he knew that if he wanted to sell Taggert on his idea for a new Judy Garland movie, he’d have to play No More Mr. Nice Guy again. He left the Hive on the pretext of seeing the studio nurse and hightailed it to the main building. But Taggert’s office was anticlimactically empty, and he returned to the reception desk.

  “Where’s Taggert?” he asked Dierdre.

  “Are you sure you should be here?” she asked.

  Marcus leaned on her desk and offered her a cheeky grin intended to make her believe he wasn’t cashing in on her good nature.

  Dierdre smiled. “I miss seeing your face around here. You’re one of the good guys.”

  Marcus checked his watch. “Did he say where he was going?”

  “Something about meeting someone out front.”

  “The Washington Boulevard entrance?”

  “I guess. He was in a rush, all discombobulated.”

  Marcus hurried out to the line of columns that announced the MGM studios to anyone driving along Washington Boulevard. They were just a façade, of course, but striking enough, as long as you didn’t inspect them too closely.

  Marcus was still looking around for Taggert when an obsidian-black Ford Phaeton with a white roof pulled up alongside him. A passenger door swung open and a thin guy with meticulously combed hair stuck out his head. “You the chap with the big idea?”

  Marcus nodded. Since when did Taggert drive such a fancypants car?

  The guy jerked his head, indicating Marcus should get in the car and be snappy about it.

  Marcus took the backwards-facing fold-down seat and the car roared into the midday traffic. He flinched when he realized he was in the car with Louis B. Mayer.

  Mayer was nose-down in a pile of papers. He rattled off a rapid series of “Yes!” “No!” “Let me think about it” and “Tell him to go screw himself” to the guy with the neat hair and the nervous twitch. When Mayer was finished with the final memo, he looked up but didn’t register surprise to find Marcus sitting there.

  “Oh, so it’s you.” He turned to the male secretary. “Did you remember to bring the flower?” Marcus said nothing while the guy pinned a flower—not unlike a daisy but with dark-orange petals tipped with yellow—to Mayer’s lapel. “What are these things called again?”

  “I—ah—” the secretary stammered.

  “They’re called zinnias, Mr. Mayer,” Marcus said. Katsu, the Garden of Allah’s Japanese gardener, had taken to planting them this past year.

  Mayer peered at Marcus, his eyes hard as concrete. “Okay, so you’ve got this big idea you want to tell me?”

  Marcus had expected to pitch his idea in the privacy of Taggert’s office. Then Taggert would give him pointers on how to sharpen it before putting it in writing, which Taggert would then haul up the food chain. “I do,” Marcus replied, “but I thought I’d be pitching it to Taggert. He told me to—”

  “That’s all very well, Adler, but sometimes people die.” Mayer twisted his wedding ring around his finger. “God, she was a looker in her day. You’ve never seen anyone like her. I can’t believe she hung herself.” Mayer turned to his assistant. “What time does the service start?”

  “One o’clock.”

  “Her sister, is she still alive?”

  “Rosie?” the secretary asked. “I think so.”

  Mayer hmmed. “Those Dolly sisters, they sure were something.” Marcus saw a nostalgic dusk set in Mayer’s eyes as the tycoon watched Wilshire Boulevard pass him by. “What a life. Fame, beauty, talent, those stage-door johnnies, the car accident. I’m starting to wonder if there’s a movie to be made there.” He snapped himself out of his revelry. “Find out if any of the Dolly sisters are still with us.” Then to Marcus. “Okay, so what’s your idea?”

  Seeing Judy Garland perform at Ciro’s had inspired him to haul out one of his old script ideas, The Making of Merry, and reshape it for Judy. He found it didn’t have the right zing yet, but when Gwendolyn’s distractingly handsome brother told her about moving to a Hawaiian navy base at picturesquely named Pearl Harbor, a firecracker went off inside his head. And when he saw the poster for Ziegfeld Girl playing at Grauman’s, the whole thing fell into place.

  “The title is Pearl Harbor Pearl,” Marcus told Mayer. “The main character is a girl called Merry. Think Judy Garland. She works as a paid companion for four spinsterly old biddies. Merry is twenty but has become as dowdy as the women she works for. Everything changes when one of the old dames wins a trip to Hawaii. When the four spinsters have an afternoon nap, Merry goes to Waikiki Beach, only she catches the wrong bus. She ends up at Pearl Harbor next to the naval base, where she spots a poster out front of a nightclub announcing an amateur singing contest. Secretly, Merry wants to be a nightclub singer, and she goes into a daydream in which Judy sings a love song on the stage. By the time she gets back to the hotel, the spinsters are all of a dither because Merry wasn’t there when they woke up.”

  Marcus eyed Mayer for a reaction but the mogul’s face registered neither approval or disgust.

  “The night of the contest, the spinsters all come down with food poisoning. So Merry rushes to the nightclub but gets cold feet. But the maître d’ convinces her to sing. When he asks her name, Merry thinks about Pearl Harbor and gives her name as Pearl and goes out and sings a wonderful song that brings down the house.

  “Some other stuff happens, but by the end, Merry has become the darling of the US Navy, has her first romance with one of the sailors, and has made the four spinsters see they’ve been holding her back, and everything ties up in a happy ending.”

  Neither Mayer nor his assistant said anything for a pause that spanned four or five seconds but felt like two weeks on an Indian bed of nails.

  Then Mayer said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Marcus could feel all his hopes breaking apart on the rocks of bad timing. He glanced at the secretary, who stared back, slack-jawed. “A new Judy Garland vehicle.”

  “So you don’t know Orson Welles?” Mayer asked.

  “Not personally.”

  “And you don’t have a way of forcing him to give up Citizen Kane?”

  Marcus strained a painful swallow to cover his horror and silently prayed for the hand of God to reach into Mayer’s limousine and pluck him out. “No, sir, I’m sorry, but I—”

  “For Chrissakes. SLICKUM!”

  Marcus heard the pane of glass between the cabin and the chauffeur slide down behind his head. “Yes, sir, Mr. Mayer?”

  “Pull over.”

  The driver nosed the car to the curb. Mayer screamed at Marcus to get the hell out. As he scrambled out of the Phaeton, Marcus tripped on the running board and toppled gracelessly onto the sidewalk. The secretary pulled the door closed and Marcus could hear Mayer. “For crying out loud. And on the way to Jenny Dolly’s funeral, too!”

  The limousine pulled away, leaving Marcus to suck up exhaust as he scrambled to his feet and cast around. A little way down Wilshire, he could see the fence of the Los Angeles National Cemetery, where hundreds of military graves lay in orderly rows. He started heading south along Sepulveda toward a streetcar line that could take him back to the studio. He hadn’t gone a dozen yards when Mayer’s gleaming limo pulled up alongside him again. The window rolled down and Mayer’s round face appeared.

  “You’re friends with Kathryn Massey, right?” It sounded like an accusation.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Can you tell me who Hilary
van Hoss is?”

  The day after the Palladium opening, Kathryn told Marcus about the conversation she’d had with Mayer. He didn’t know what to make of it anymore than Kathryn did. “I know the name, sir,” Marcus replied. “Kathryn’s mentioned her several times.”

  Mayer let out a grunt and told Slickum to drive on. The window slid up as the limo disappeared into the traffic.

  CHAPTER 35

  “And for God’s sake, don’t do anything to embarrass the Hollywood Reporter.”

  Billy Wilkerson’s parting shot from a couple of hours ago still rang in Kathryn’s ears as she exited her cab outside the Gotham Delicatessen on Hollywood Boulevard, six blocks down from the El Capitan Theater where Kane’s premiere was about to take place.

  Since the day of the ambush in Wilkerson’s office with Mayer and Zanuck, Kathryn had pulled back on her support for Orson, weighing her words more carefully. She knew she could handle Louella Parsons, but wasn’t sure she was equipped to take on the four horsemen of the Hearst apocalypse. That day, too, had led to a dampening down of the warmth and trust she had with her boss, which Kathryn regretted. She planned to rekindle things once this whole Citizen Kane thing had blown over.

  She arranged to meet Ritchie a half hour before she was due at the theater. Recently, she’d found a handwritten message slipped under her door at home. He’d asked her to meet him at the Gotham.

  Kathryn breathed in a lungful of pastrami and pickles as she scanned the place. Ritchie was at the take-out counter, leafing out a wad of dollar bills in his hands. His eyes darted to all four corners of the room. “I have some information.” His voice was a thin scratch above a whisper. “It’s about Welles. I was on the telephone with the guy I report to at the FBI. He had to put the phone down at one point, and I overheard a bunch of agents talking. Welles’ name came up.”

  “What did they say?”

  “One of them was talking about how he and his partner paid a visit to a William Alland. I gather he’s in the movie. Anyway, they were instructed to question his homosexual relationship with Welles.”

  Kathryn wanted to laugh. “His what?! That’s the craziest thing I’ve heard all year. Everyone knows Orson’s king of the womanizers.”

  “Everyone only knows what they read in the papers, and Louella Parsons is playing lowball.”

  She sure was. It seemed like every Parsons column carried some sort of jibe, slur, poke, or outright insult directed at either Welles or his masterpiece. “I don’t get it. Why this Alland guy?”

  “He rented a house someplace and Orson moved in.”

  “That’s it? Because he had a roommate?”

  Ritchie shrugged. “Calling someone a homo is like calling someone a Commie. It’s the stickiest mud there is.” The take-out counter girl arrived with several bulging paper bags. “I figured you’d be going to the opening tonight and I thought you might have a chance to tell Welles how down and dirty Hearst is getting.”

  “Thanks, Ritchie, I appreciate it. I know Orson will, too.”

  Ritchie shrugged a You’re welcome and turned to leave. Kathryn stopped him. “And what about you?”

  Ritchie looked at her with plaintive eyes. “The boys don’t like to be kept waiting for their Reubens.” He went to leave and then turned back. “I want you to know I didn’t believe a word of what ol’ Parsons said about you in the Examiner today.”

  Kathryn nodded and watched Ritchie slip through the Gotham’s front doors. He was out of sight before she realized she didn’t know what he meant.

  * * *

  Out on Hollywood Boulevard, Kathryn found a newsboy with the final edition of the LA Examiner. It was past six thirty and she should have been at the theater by now, but she didn’t want to face anyone until she knew what Ritchie was referring to. She retreated to the doorway of a closed shoe store and flipped over the pages until she came to Parsons’ column. Her opening paragraph was the typical round of salvos directed toward the reprehensible creator of The Movie That Shall Not Be Named.

  Paragraph two, however, was a different story.

  I feel I must question the morals of someone whose politics leave room for much doubt, and who has a history of using people to further her own ends. A columnist at the Hollywood Reporter has been pretending to be oh-so-discreet while dillydallying in seedy bars with Hollywood’s current Casanova, especially at his Chateau—“in” at night, “out” in the morning. Casanova got connections in the Hollywood press, and Miss Reporter got the notoriety of being (un)seen with a legendary lothario. Who needs a ring when you’ve got a cabana and a well-stocked bar? If it’s legitimacy our “Boy Genius” is after, it seems a pretty odd choice of connubial-free couplings. Miss Reporter can claim a lot of things, however legitimacy is not one of them. More than one whisper has reached my ears that both their interests lie more with their own kind, if you know what I mean, and I assume you do.

  Kathryn gaped at the paper and wondered if she’d read it right.

  Has Louella Parsons managed to call me a tramp, an adulterer, a drunkard, a Communist, an amateur, and a lesbian—in one paragraph? Was this why there wasn’t any Examiner on my desk today?

  And now she had to lurch into a crowd packed with the elite of Hollywood, knowing that every last one of them had read Louella’s column. She felt like Daniel walking into the lion’s den. But she knew that if she failed to show at tonight’s premiere, then Louella would win, and Kathryn wasn’t about to let that happen. She tore out the page and tossed the rest of the newspaper into a trash can as she marched up to the El Capitan Theater.

  For years, the El Capitan had been the self-proclaimed “Hollywood’s First Home of Spoken Drama.” But lately business hadn’t been so great and the place was rumored to be marked for demolition. When RKO found themselves scrambling to premiere Citizen Kane after most houses turned them down, the El Capitan decided they couldn’t afford not to. Built at the height of the 1920s’ fad for ornately decorated movie palaces, the place was a riot of elaborate Spanish Colonial Revival flourishes, albeit now somewhat weathered and worn.

  Kathryn arrived to find a sidewalk bursting with lucky ticketholders and anxious autograph hounds. She spotted Orson hemmed into a far corner and maneuvered herself closer, trying to attract his attention, but she was just another face in a sea of faces more beautiful and famous than hers.

  Then Delores del Río spotted her. Kathryn doubted Delores would even remember their brief how-do-you-do at Mickey Rooney’s party, but her dark eyes lit up and she waved. Kathryn pointed to Orson, but Delores mistook Kathryn’s intent and pushed forward to meet her in the crowd.

  “What a commotion!” Delores shouted over the din.

  “Orson must be overwhelmed right now,” Kathryn said.

  Delores smiled, all lips and no teeth. “He admires you very much,” she said. “Several times he has mentioned how he appreciates your support of his film. It really is a marvel, no? Much like him, although I don’t think I need to tell you, do I?” She let out a good-natured laugh, but as Delores glanced back toward Orson, Kathryn saw Delores’ face contort into a furious pout in a large mirror on the opposite wall.

  Kathryn’s path around Delores was blocked. “Perhaps it would be better afterwards,” the actress suggested. “He’s very tense.” A loud hoot punctuated her statement: Orson laughing with John Barrymore. “He hides it so well,” she added.

  Kathryn had heard stories of the fiery Latina’s jealousy but hadn’t paid too much attention, putting it down to stereotyping. “I know he’s got a lot going on tonight,” Kathryn said, “but I do want to wish him well.” She watched Delores’ lips tighten.

  An announcement was made that the picture would commence soon and everybody began to make their way inside. Frustrated, Kathryn filed in with the rest of the crowd.

  Orson presented the audience with a polished smile as he took to the stage and positioned himself in front of a microphone. He looked every inch the dashing Hollywood star in his tuxedo, shiny black shoes
, and carefully pomaded hair. But Kathryn knew it was an act when she saw him rubbing the tips of his first three fingers together. She wondered if anybody else in the audience knew it was his secret little giveaway.

  The audience listened attentively to Orson’s heartfelt speech as he admitted that his motion picture had received more than its fair share of attention and said that perhaps now he could relax and let it speak for itself. The speech ended amid a roaring thunder of applause, which he acknowledged with a wave as he walked up the center aisle and exited the auditorium.

  Kathryn expected Delores to follow, but she didn’t. A couple of minutes into the movie, she threaded her way over to the far right aisle and furtively made her way out to the foyer. Orson sat by himself on an ornately gilded bench, lighting a fresh cigarette from the stub of a smoked one.

  “Hello there,” she said quietly.

  He looked up, almost startled. “I didn’t expect to be so nervous tonight,” he confessed. He ran his hand through his hair, making a mess of the pomade. “I feel like a jury of my peers is seated in there.”

  Kathryn sat down beside him. “I was under the impression you considered yourself without peer,” she chided.

  He smiled. “You know what I mean.”

  “You’ve had quite a time of it since I last saw you,” Kathryn said. She asked him about Native Son, a play he’d directed in New York about a young black man living on Chicago’s South Side. The Hearst press labeled it “communistic,” despite the fact that Orson neither wrote the play nor the novel it was adapted from.

  “I want you to know I’ve been very impressed,” she told him. “It takes guts to stand up to Hearst. The way he turned on the pressure with the theater chains, telling them that if they ran your movie, they wouldn’t accept any more advertising. Talk about take no prisoners.”

  Orson shrugged uneasily. “I was lucky RKO decided to convert the New York Palace into a movie house, otherwise we may not have been able to open there at all. Same thing happened here. We very nearly had to cancel tonight.” His eyes began to crinkle as his mouth cracked into a smile. “I’m glad you came.”