City of Myths

by Martin Turnbull

  “Mind if I gatecrash?”

  * * *

  Twenty-four hours later, Marcus was back at Melody’s front door. She pulled him inside. “Remember Old Lady Crabapples I was telling you about?”

  “In the penthouse?”

  “She fell down the stairs! She and her horrible son—he looks like a second-string Mafioso gun-runner—they had a terrible row. Screaming, yelling. At one point, she opened up her front door, leaving us no choice but to eavesdrop.”

  “He pushed her down the stairs?”

  “She pushed him—or tried to, but lost her balance and ended up ass over teakettle all the way down. And they’re made of marble so you can imagine the state she was in by the time she hit the bottom.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “They carted her away in an ambulance.” She rubbed her hands together. “I’ve had my eye on that place since the week I moved in.”

  Marcus looked around at Melody’s apartment. Compared to what he was used to, it seemed palatial. “But this is lovely. Do you really need anything bigger?”

  She gave him a friendly swat. “I can move in up there and you can move in here. We’d be neighbors. Wouldn’t that be terrific?”

  “Yes,” he replied, guardedly, “but what might be even more terrific is if you were able to do Darryl Zanuck a favor.”

  Melody pulled an Ugh! face. “Why would I do that?” Her doorbell rang. She ran to the door and pulled it open. Hoppy wore his professional pleased-to-meet-you smile. It dropped away when he spotted Marcus.

  The intervening ten years had scored deep creases into each side of his mouth and across his forehead. What was left of his once-luxuriant brown hair was now thin and gray, and hovered over his scalp in wisps that caught every draft. The skin under his chin hung like old elastic and his teeth had yellowed from too much smoking.

  But his eyes were clear and his smile genuine.

  “Marcus!”

  “Hoppy!”

  The two men wrapped their arms around each other while Melody clapped her hands like a little girl. She sent them to the sofa to catch up and headed into the kitchen to make coffee.

  Marcus’s exit from MGM after his HUAC testimony in Washington and his inclusion in Red Channels had been so public that Marcus didn’t need to fill Hoppy in on much more than his circuitous route to Rome via Quo Vadis and Three Coins.

  “And what about you?” he asked Hoppy. “I guess you’re not at Columbia anymore. Are you freelancing? And Jim? How’s he doing?”

  Hoppy’s face crumpled at the name of his long-term partner. “You didn’t hear?”

  “After I left MGM, those studio friendships sort of fell away.”

  “Poor old Jimmy. He loved heading up the writing department, so life was never the same after he quit.”

  There had been aspects of the job Marcus enjoyed, but it was hardly a bed of rose petals—especially when Hurricane HUAC hit town. “What happened?”

  “He got some jobs here and there, but they petered out once he started hitting the bottle.”

  “He was always a drinker.”

  “But not a scotch-in-the-morning-coffee drinker. It went from bad to worse until he was diagnosed with cirrhosis. I thought he’d give it all up but he went on one suicidal binge after another. By that stage, it was just the two of us; no social life, no friends. Him drinking and me wishing he’d stop, but he never did.”

  “God, Hoppy, I’m so sorry to hear that. I wish I’d known. I’d have called.”

  Melody set down a tray with coffee and butter cookies. “People like that don’t stop unless they want to,” she said. “I ought to know—I was one of them.”

  “After I buried him, I tried to get my old life back on track but it wasn’t the same game anymore, so I put my shingle out as a script doctor.”

  Marcus sipped Melody’s coffee. It was dark and bitter—not unlike her Hollywood experience. He added three lumps of sugar and forced it down. “Has the doctoring worked out?”

  Hoppy clamped a hand on Marcus’s knee. “That’s what you should do. The screenwriters who didn’t get their throats slit by the blacklist are okay, but the new ones coming up, they’re not so hot. You and I used to churn out script after script, learning on the job what worked, what didn’t, and why. You wouldn’t believe what they pay me now to fix their pile of dog turds.”

  Marcus held up the Metropolitana script. “Like this?”

  “I read it for the first time on the flight over.” Hoppy pulled a pained face and looked at Melody, who was perched on the edge of the occasional chair at the end of the table. “You were right to put your foot down.”

  “Thank you!” She turned to Marcus. “Go ahead, tell him.”

  Hoppy met Marcus’s eye warily.

  “This screenplay,” Marcus said, “doesn’t belong to MGM.”

  “But I picked it up from them en route to the airport.”

  Marcus took Hoppy through the circumstances from twenty years ago.

  “They never renewed the copyright on your story?”

  “Nope.”

  Hoppy started to giggle. “Two of the biggest players in the movie business in both America and Italy, and you’ve got them over a goddamned barrel. You’ve made this trip worthwhile, Marcus! I wouldn’t miss this for the world.” Hoppy hooked an arm around the back of his chair. “Here’s what you need to know: like so many movies being made today, Metropolitana is a complicated web of financing. MGM is footing forty percent of the film in exchange for one hundred percent of the non-European distribution rights. The other sixty percent comes from an Italian film company called Fratelli di Conti.”

  “As in ‘Emilio Conti’?” Marcus asked.

  “Yep!” Melody toyed with the ruby ring around her right-hand pinkie. “He’s the fourth Conti brother. The other three are the Conti triplets, whom the newspapers dubbed ‘miracle babies’ because they were born to a woman who was declared infertile. They’ve been famous all their lives and now have this production company. They’re aggressive as hell.”

  “And you’ve got ’em with their pants down,” Hoppy added. “Are you sure nobody ever contacted you about renewing the copyright?”

  “Yes, but maybe we should double check?” Marcus thought of Arlene Curtis back at the Garden. “I know the girl who is the secretary to MGM’s chief attorney.”

  “A guy by the name of Tanner?” Hoppy asked.

  “I think so.”

  “He had an acrimonious falling-out with Dore Schary and left the company. I wonder if he took your friend with him.”

  “She’s only a cable away.”

  “But if you’re correct,” Hoppy said, “they’re in flagrant violation of copyright. MGM and Fratelli di Conti are about to start shooting a picture they have no right to film. This is priceless!” He slapped the expensive upholstery; a plume of dust motes shot into the air. “You could take them to the cleaners.”

  “Everybody hates the Conti brothers,” Melody added. “They’re the Warner Brothers of Italy. The rule is, Never trust a Conti. Those pricks will turn on you using anything that comes to hand. Most people here would love to see someone stick it to them.”

  “You’re planning on staying in Rome for a while, aren’t you?” Hoppy asked.

  Marcus thought of Signora Crabapples. Getting into Zanuck’s good graces would be a smart career move. “I’ve got a few details to tie up.”

  “Good, because you’d have to stay here until all this gets sorted out.”

  “Isn’t that what lawyers are for?”

  “Hoppy’s right,” Melody said. “The case will go before an Italian judge. You’re a foreigner, so you’ll have a hard time convincing the court to find in favor of you over the Conti brothers. It’ll be almost impossible if you’re not there in person.”

  Marcus forced down Melody’s coffee—it was like drinking liquid asphalt.

  “You need to make these fuckers pay through the nose,” Hoppy persisted. “And I mean every goddamned nickel
you can squeeze out of them.”

  But I’m one penthouse away from flying home and picking up my life again.

  Marcus thought of the hell that the studios had put him through since the HUAC decided to rout out suspected Commies with a scorched-earth policy. And not only the humiliating televised hearing in Washington, but the blacklisting, the graylisting, Red Channels, and the McCarthy witch-hunts.

  And who’s to say that Zanuck will have anything waiting for me back home? Only one thing in Hollywood is guaranteed—and that is that nothing is guaranteed.

  He snapped his head up with a knowing wink. “I’m in.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Gwendolyn thrust her fingers into the patch of bare earth outside her villa. She angled her face over her right shoulder and told Arlene, Doris, and Bertie, “I haven’t done this since we had the victory garden. I forgot how cold the soil is.”

  Bertie lowered the bag of bulbs onto the gravel path. “I like a cocktail party as much as the next girl, but when we were all working together in the victory garden, I loved the camaraderie. Neighbors getting together, growing vegetables, watching them sprout, getting muddy as hell. God, it was fun! I’m so glad you suggested this.”

  Gwendolyn wiped the sweat off her forehead, leaving a wide swath of dirt across her face. The loamy smell filled her lungs. “We’ve left it so late in the year. I feared nothing would grow in November.”

  “Tulips are a hardier flower than they look.” Doris peered into the hole Gwendolyn had made. “It needs to be deeper; otherwise, they won’t survive the winter.”

  “The guy at the nursery promised me that we’ll be treated to a whole rainbow come March and April.” Bertie opened the brown paper sack and started laying each bulb out on the lawn like it was a precious egg.

  Gwendolyn excavated more earth, not daring to look at her nails. They were going to take forever to clean, but that’s what Sunday afternoons were for. Twentieth Century-Fox had extracted more than their pound of flesh for one week—especially after Loretta Young and Billy Travilla started battling for her time.

  “I am your number one priority,” Loretta instructed. “You tell him, ‘No, Mr. Travilla, I’m sorry but first I must finish Miss Young’s gown.’ You must be firm with people like that. Otherwise, they’ll walk all over you.”

  But how was Gwendolyn supposed to respond when Fox’s top costume designer had said, “Marilyn’s being difficult about a dress I’m working on for her next movie. Could you spend this afternoon with her and try to talk her into this design I’ve come up with?” Especially when the boss had specifically asked her to keep tabs on Marilyn.

  Gwendolyn had managed to juggle both camps so that each of them got what they wanted, but only by disobeying an unbreakable commandment: Thou shalt not take work home with you.

  At first it was only panels of material that needed stitching together, but as the Millionaire premiere loomed closer, her smuggling escalated to full dresses.

  Life became a marathon session at the sewing machine followed by hours on her knees in front of the dress form. As the Indian summer of October started to cool, Gwendolyn became preoccupied with the thought of feeling dirt crumbling through her fingers, to smell its rich fertility. She wanted to take a seed or a bulb or a twig and watch it flower.

  She had all but forgotten the old victory garden patch until one day it caught her eye. Six years after wartime rationing had ended, it was now an abandoned expanse of weeds with a single shriveled, undernourished cucumber sitting among the foliage like a Japanese soldier who refused to believe the war was over.

  A plan to reconnect with Mother Earth took hold, and now they were on their hands and knees, scraping away the soil with their bare hands, filling their nails with dirt, and staining their clothes.

  “Hey Gwennie,” Bertie said, “when do you think—holy mackerel!”

  Gwendolyn dug into the ground again. “Don’t tell me you found something else you hid during the war. I thought we got everything.”

  All three girls stiffened into place, their eyes glomming onto a tall figure in a gray Homburg sauntering down the path. Gwendolyn clambered to her bare feet.

  Clark Gable took a step closer. “The guy at the front desk said I’d find you here.” He gave the others a cursory glance. “He didn’t mention that you were in the middle of—”

  “We’re planting tulips!” Doris blurted out.

  “How can I help you?” Gwendolyn asked.

  Hesitation played on his lips. “I was hoping for a moment of your time. In private?”

  Each of the three girls looked at Gwendolyn with the same What the hell? expression.

  “Ladies, if you’ll excuse me, please.” Gwendolyn picked her way out of the flowerbed, brushing away the dirt. They had taken the trouble to moisten it first, so it clung to her dungarees and one of Marcus’s old flannel shirts. By the time they reached her door, she wasn’t much cleaner, so she told Gable to take a seat on the sofa. “I should at least wash my hands and face.”

  “Not on my account, please.”

  She pointed to the gown hanging on the dress form in the corner of her living room. “On the account of that.”

  After a mountain of discarded sketches, Gwendolyn and Marilyn had decided on a strapless dress made from nude crêpe, overlaid with white lace. Marilyn didn’t mind that it was made of leftovers from a dress June Haver had worn in The Girl Next Door, but she did protest that it didn’t dazzle enough. So Gwendolyn had brought the gown home and spent the previous day embellishing it with enough sequins to give the girl a hernia.

  Travilla would have a conniption fit if he knew it was here, but the gala was less than a week away and Marilyn would be showing up on Monday for a final fitting. Gwendolyn couldn’t take any chances that it might get dirty; the smallest speck of muck would show up like an ink stain. Maybe this wasn’t the best weekend to go burrowing around in the dirt, after all.

  In the bathroom mirror, a filthy street urchin from one of Dickens’ more depressing novels stared back at her. “Won’t be long!” She scoured as much grime from her hands and face as she could inside fifteen seconds and ran her fingers through her hair. She went to apply a smidge of lipstick, but the guy had already seen her at her worst, so what the hell.

  Gable sat on her sofa, his Homburg balanced on one knee, a foot jiggling up and down. She joined him, but not too close. His easy smile had a nervous edge that even an actor of his skill couldn’t mask.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Gable?”

  “First off, it’s Clark, okay?”

  His aftershave balm had a dark, musky scent. It had been so freshly applied that she could tell he’d only shaved in the past hour or two—and she’d hung around enough actors at the Garden of Allah to know that not having to shave on their one day off per week was a luxury.

  “I’ve come to see you about a delicate matter.” He curled his lips to start talking but the right words failed him.

  “I’ve got whiskey and vodka,” she said, “or I could probably scrounge up some scotch if that’s your preference.”

  “Thank you, but I need to do this sober.” It took him a couple more attempts to gather himself together. “I hear that you work at Fox, making gowns for Loretta Young’s television show.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’ve become friendly with her daughter, Judy.”

  Neither Victor Marswell in Mogambo, Blackie Norton from San Francisco, nor Rhett Butler would be sitting here with his right leg bouncing in agitation. All three of them would have been able to meet Gwendolyn’s eye, but instead, Clark kept his gaze averted.

  So those rumors are true. “Yes, that’s right,” she told him. “Judy decided college wasn’t for her so she’s been at the studio. Between Loretta and Travilla, I’m run off my feet, so she’s been quite a help to me. Why are you asking about her?”

  She tried to keep her face neutral but it proved difficult with that sardonic glimmer in his eye.

  �
��I suspect you know.” The strain in his voice told Gwendolyn that this wasn’t about what she needed to hear but what he needed to say. “Judy Lewis is my daughter.”

  The three girls outside started to giggle and yip from what sounded like a mud fight.

  “Are you sure you don’t want that drink?”

  His mouth stayed mute but his eyes begged for a whiskey.

  “Four Roses on the rocks?” By the time she returned holding a pair of tumblers, a trace of Rhett Butler had returned to his face.

  “Does everybody know?” he asked her.

  “About you and Judy? I remember some gossip when Loretta announced that she was adopting a baby girl. But you know how it is—there’s always one rumor or other doing the rounds and it usually turns out to be so far removed from the truth that it’s barely worth the breath it took to repeat it.”

  “But you knew what I was going to say.”

  The guy wasn’t here because he was passing by and thought he’d drop in, so Gwendolyn set his drink down on the coffee table and closed the space between them. It was a trick she’d learned from Kathryn to encourage more intimate confidences. “I will confess that when I met Judy for the first time, I did look for signs of you in her face.”

  “Did you see any?”

  Gwendolyn nodded.

  “I’m glad.” He smiled gently.

  “Clark, you’ve obviously got something on your mind.”

  He gulped down half his bourbon in one mouthful. “I have a pal who works in lighting at Fox. He was at MGM for years. Great guy. Solid as Plymouth Rock. We sometimes get together to shoot the breeze. He told me Judy’s been hanging around the studio and that she’s often seen with the knockout who does her mother’s wardrobe. The two of them have lunch together at the commissary.”

  As a forty-three-year-old woman who worked in an industry where thirty was considered passé, Gwendolyn was flattered that someone had called her a knockout.

  “You’ve sought me out to . . .?”

  The Rhett Butler smile faded as his dark eyes took on a granite veneer. “Loretta has kept Judy and me at arm’s length. She’s had her reasons and I understand them, so I’ve kept my distance. Reluctantly, I want you to know, but I’ve tried to be respectful.”