She reached the crest, where Mulholland Drive traced a meandering line, and braked for a moment to take in the vastness of the Valley. The citrus orchards that once carpeted the land as far as the eye could see were giving way to a patchwork of suburban neighborhoods built to accommodate the postwar boom.
Ruby Courtland was the Tramp of Manhattan. Kathryn knew that this sort of information could come in handy, but she balked at pointing the finger at a woman whose Achilles’ heel was that she behaved like most men. Girls aren’t tramps all by themselves, and Leilah was in hot water because she was guilty of making a buck out of helping men behave like men. Guys who sleep around are Casanovas; if women do it, they’re just cheap. This is nearly the 1950s, for crying out loud. Isn’t it time we heaved those old rules out the window?
A skunk raced from behind a manzanita and scuttled across the bitumen as a Cadillac careered around the corner and roared past Kathryn, missing the critter by inches. She watched the skunk freeze up, then slowly continue its route to the safety of the other side and disappear behind a flowering rhododendron. Kathryn let out the handbrake and pointed her blue coupe into the Valley.
* * *
The security guard told Kathryn that Miss Davis left word that she was looping dialogue. It was already past four when Kathryn found the recording studio and let herself in.
A couple of men were seated at the control booth. One of them was the director, King Vidor. Kathryn was surprised to see him there. Vidor was big man on campus, having directed more than his share of important pictures. The chore of redubbing poorly recorded lines with an actor was considered assistant director stuff, especially as—according to Bette—Beyond the Forest was “an undercooked, overstuffed turkey.” Maybe he was there because this was Bette’s final task after nearly twenty years.
Bette was in a small booth, earphones perched on her head, her eyes trained on the screen in front of her. Vidor leaned into his microphone.
“That’s not quite it. Come in a split second earlier, please.”
Bette nodded without taking her eyes from the screen.
Vidor pressed a button. Bette appeared on the screen in a preposterously dark shoulder-length wig that would have looked more at home on Dolores del Río. On Bette, it just looked ten years too late. A chime rang out, then three beeps.
Bette leaned into her microphone. “I can’t stand it anymore!”
King Vidor conferred with his technician, who nodded his approval. “That’s it, Miss Davis. You’re free to go.”
Bette removed the headphones, smoothed out her hair, and picked up her handbag. By the time she exited the booth, both men had left.
Bette jutted her chin toward the door. “Did you see that? My last task on my last day on my last picture and the bastard didn’t even say goodbye.”
“Maybe he—”
“Nobody’s said jack shit to me.”
“They’re probably waiting until you’ve finished—”
“No ‘Best of luck, Miss Davis.’ No ‘It’s been grand working with you, Miss Davis.’ I’d settled for a ‘Kiss my ass, Miss Davis,’ but I’m not holding my breath.”
They walked into the warmth of the late afternoon. A matronly woman with a tape measure around her neck and arms loaded with black nuns’ habits waddled a few yards ahead of them.
“I must have made a dozen pictures with that one,” Bette said, “I’ve met all her kids and her grandkids. Signed every request for an autograph she’s put in front of me. Did she even so much as look in my direction?”
“Maybe she’s not aware that this is your last day.”
“Ha!” Bette barked. “The entire studio knows this is my last day.”
“And nobody’s wished you well?”
“A few have, sure. But I was expecting . . .” She watched the studio workers bustling about their jobs, her face falling into a glum scowl. She lifted a shoulder. “I’m no longer queen of the lot.”
“But you didn’t want to be,” Kathryn reminded her. “You’ve fought to break free of Sing Sing.”
Bette laughed. “You’re right! Why am I wallowing? The queen is dead. The crown’s already been handed on to my successor.” She hooked her arm through Kathryn’s. “And brother, Doris Day can have it.”
Kathryn thought about those four Beverly Hills wives back at the Polo Lounge, with their superfluous degrees in art history, their mink stoles from I. Magnin’s, their wedding albums stuffed with bridesmaids and their interminable bridge parties, and wondered why she’d been jealous of their insulated lives for even so much as a split second.
“I’ve just come from lunch at the Polo Lounge with Winchell.”
“OH MY! I do want to hear about that. Preferably someplace dark and dim.”
“Ever been to the Sahara Room at the Garden of Allah?”
“Just what the doctor ordered!”
“Get in.”
Kathryn backed out of her parking space and headed for the exit. As they approached the security barrier, Kathryn hit the brakes. “One final look?”
“Did you hear that line I looped just now?”
“‘I can’t stand it anymore.’”
“My sentiments exactly.” Bette waved her hand at the guard to raise the gate. “Drive on, MacDuff.”
Kathryn pulled out of the studio lot just as the last of the sun ducked behind the hills, leaving a sky flecked with purple and gold. She kept an eye on her passenger, wondering if she might be tempted to take a parting peek at the place she’d called home for almost two decades, but Bette Davis kept her eyes fixed on the road ahead.
CHAPTER 28
Early in the summer of 1949, Gwendolyn hid Magnificent Obsession in the narrow space behind her headboard and tried to forget that she was sleeping next to a powder keg.
Chez Gwendolyn bustled with customers most days, but if sales started to flag, she’d subtly spray the store with Sunset Boulevard. Customers invariably remarked on it, launching Gwendolyn into her sales spiel, and the cash register would sing like Dinah Shore.
She also had an attentive boyfriend who’d fashioned her life into a dreamy blur of dinners, picnics, and movie dates. Nobody at the Garden gave two hoots that she was dating a much younger guy, and she didn’t give two hoots if she caught some malicious glances. But Zap did. He’d ask her a little louder than necessary, “Have you seen that new movie, The Giggling Gigolo?” On such evenings, his lovemaking took on a more vigorous brio.
It turned out that Zap had a penchant for making love in adventurous places. Shadowy alleys got him especially worked up—like the one out back of the Warner Bros. Theater on Wilshire. After seeing Flamingo Road, they were filing out of the place when Zap pressed his hard-on against her backside. “They have an alleyway.” She hadn’t encountered such an enthusiastic lover since Alistair Dunne, and it was thrilling to have someone so bursting with passion.
But as lovely a summer as it had been, down in the murkiest corners of her mind, Leilah’s stack of cards lurked.
For a while she toyed with the idea of knocking on the door of each customer and giving them their cards. If they put a match to them, then they would be guilty of destroying evidence. But surely word would get back to Leilah or the vice squad, so she did nothing . . . until Zap appeared at her store with a copy of the Examiner and a scared-rabbit look on his face. He laid the paper on her counter.
WB SECURITY CHIEF ARRESTED OVER BROTHEL SCANDAL
“Aiding and abetting, huh?” Gwendolyn said. “They must be spitting mad. Is there enough to make the charges stick?”
“The DA says the lynchpin would be your client cards—”
“Leilah’s cards.”
“—and the paper suggests that Clem’s arrest is the prosecutor’s attempt to force the cards out into the open.”
“But Leilah and Clem think they’ve been burned.”
“If they believe Winchell, which assumes Winchell believes Kathryn.”
Gwendolyn strummed her fingernails. “So I’m back
at square one.”
“You still hold all the cards—literally.”
“Oh, Zap, this is no joke.”
He ran his hand up her arm. “Just trying to inject a little humor.”
“I wish I could just make them all disappear.”
“Speaking of disappearing, I see you’ve mowed down the competition.”
“I’ve what?”
“Zanuck’s old squeeze. The one with the French name. Her store’s emptier than a kosher deli on Yom Kippur.”
Gwendolyn dashed out the door. Yvette’s was deserted—no racks, display cabinets, mirrors. Even the sign was gone. She drifted back to her store.
“That whole setup was weird,” Zap said. “I never did trust her.”
Gwendolyn realized that she hadn’t, either.
“You want me to go in there and snoop around?” he offered.
“What are you going to do? Break down the door?”
Zap pointed to the ladder Marcus climbed up to get into the crawl space. She wondered now if Yvette broke into Chez Gwendolyn using her ladder.
Zap scaled the rungs and disappeared through the trapdoor.
She let a few minutes tick by, then climbed the ladder and poked her head through the hole in the ceiling. A faint shaft of light penetrated the dark. “Zap? Are you there?”
“You rang?” Zap stood at the base of the ladder, grinning like a monkey.
She started climbing down. “Where did you come from?”
“Her door wasn’t even locked.” He held a crumpled matchbook out to her.
“You went through her trash?”
“The trash can was all she left behind, and it’s lucky I did.”
She took the matchbook from him. “The Flaming Rose, 1905 Sunset Boulevard. That must be near downtown.”
A smirk curled Zap’s lips. “It’s right near Aimee Semple McPherson’s old temple.”
“Have you been to this—” she read the name again “Flaming Rose?”
His smirk softened into an indulgent smile. It had been a long time since Gwendolyn had felt like a noob.
“It’s a hooker hangout,” he said. “Sort of a sisterhood thing, I guess.”
Gwendolyn pictured a college sorority, but with fishnet stockings and much shorter skirts. “So if Yvette had a Flaming Rose matchbook, then . . .” The thought of seeing the inside of a shady hooker bar thrilled her in a twisted sort of way.
“You’re not thinking of going down there, are you?” Zap asked.
“Naturally you’d come with me, but we’ll do better if we brought someone along who knows the lay of the land, so to speak. I know just the gal. Have you met Arlene in Villa Twelve?”
“One of your neighbors is a hooker?” Zap looked so scandalized that Gwendolyn almost laughed.
“I do live at the Garden of Allah, you know.”
* * *
Arlene Curtis had led an interesting life, even by the Garden’s standards. Her parents’ passing put her so deeply in debt that she’d resorted to making “the quickest buck available to a single girl short of gold-digging her way into the Jonathan Club.”
Marcus met her when Eddie Mannix took him to a cathouse on his fortieth birthday. He’d picked the least battle-hardened girl in the place, a young ingénue called Opal, whose real name was Arlene. When he learned that she was halfway through legal secretarial school, he finagled her a job at MGM, and before long, she moved into the Garden. It wasn’t until much later that Gwendolyn learned that the cathouse where Arlene got her start belonged to Leilah O’Roarke.
Arlene was in the middle of her après-work sherry when Gwendolyn and Zap arrived on her doorstep. When Gwendolyn filled her in and showed her the matchbook, Arlene snorted.
“That’s where Leilah got her start. She ran her first operation in the back room, managing her stable of OGs.”
So Leilah and Yvette know each other? Why am I not surprised? “OGs?”
“Outcall girls. Real high-class. Very pricey. She sent them out on appointments at one of the hotels where Leilah had an arrangement.”
“Did you ever go there?” Zap asked.
“To the Rose? Once or twice.”
Gwendolyn folded her hands as if in prayer. “Will you take us there now?”
Arlene flipped the matchbook through her fingers. “You think maybe this Yvette woman was one of Leilah’s OGs?”
“I believe in connections more than coincidences.”
“But what is it you think Yvette’s connected to?”
Arlene hadn’t been around when Doris discovered the cards, and Gwendolyn believed the less people knew, the better, but she figured this girl had already seen it all.
Arlene shook her strawberry blonde curls when Gwendolyn was done telling her about the cards and their connection to the recent break-ins. “It’d sure explain a few things.”
“So you’ll take us?”
“It’s awfully seedy. You might want to brace yourself.”
* * *
The Flaming Rose sat one block north of the Angelus Temple in a stretch of pawnbrokers and fifty-cent barbershops. It was one of those bars with no windows facing the street—just a brick wall in dire need of a paint job. Over a black door, in place of a sign, there was a small picture of a faded red rose engulfed in flames.
Zap pushed it open. “Ladies of the night first!”
Gwendolyn nudged him. “Remember, you’re our muscle. If things get dicey, your job is to vamoose us out of here intact.”
The interior was every bit as murky as Gwendolyn expected. The bar ran along the left-hand wall with wooden stools that probably hadn’t seen daylight in a dozen years. Along the opposite wall sat a line of eight small square tables. None of them matched, nor did the chairs. They were all battered relics, many of them held together with ragged strips of duct tape and punctured with cigarette burns. They looked wobbly as hell.
Gwendolyn felt Zap’s lips against her ear. “This is where barflies come to die.”
It was nearing six o’clock; all the stools were occupied, mostly by women clustered in twos and threes. They looked up to see who’d walked in, gave them the once-over, then returned to their conversations. Every one of them had caked their faces in makeup and cinched themselves into tight outfits that showed too much cleavage.
“Do you recognize anyone?” Gwendolyn asked Arlene.
“Nope. Let’s take that table in the corner and figure out a game plan.”
The hangdog bartender—unshaven, with greasy hair and teeth too straight and white to be his own—approached them. “You three in the right place?”
“I’m looking for Bunny,” Arlene told him.
He pushed his cigarette to the corner of his mouth. “Platinum-blonde Bunny?”
“Uh-huh,” Arlene replied, all casual as you please. “She still come in?”
The bartender nodded. “What’ll it be?”
They ordered a round of beers.
“Bunny’s nice,” Arlene said, “for an over-the-hill hooker. When I was working the house above the Strip, she was the oldest girl there. She’d get the virgins who couldn’t afford much or the guys with a mommy fixation, but even I knew she couldn’t last much longer. She’d worked for Leilah for fifteen years, but do you think she even blinked before putting poor old Bunny out to pasture? Not a chance.”
“What makes you think we’ll find her here?” Gwendolyn asked.
“I bumped into her over the zippers at Kress’s five-and-dime a couple of months ago. She told me working the streets is a whole lot tougher than a brothel, but it’s the only thing she knows. She said to me, ‘At least I have the Flaming Rose. I remember thinking, God, is that place still open?”
The bartender delivered their order with a bowl of heavily salted peanuts. “How long should we give her?” Gwendolyn asked. Her rickety chair was sticking to her dress for reasons she didn’t want to contemplate.
“Until we can’t stand the taste of this turkey piss any longer.”
A h
and-lettered flyer tacked to the wall caught Gwendolyn’s eye.
CHERRY TAN
SEAMSTRESS—COSTUMES
ANY STYLE
MEN & LADIES & IN BETWEEN
The “& IN BETWEEN” piqued her curiosity. She went to the bar and asked the guy about the flyer. He pointed to a door at the rear.
Back at the table, Zap offered to go with her, but Gwendolyn told him to keep Arlene company.
The door led to a short corridor, which opened onto a windowless room with a low ceiling, twice the size of her apartment. Six industrial sewing machines were set up in two rows of three; bent over each of them sat a diminutive Asian woman sewing together panels of sparkly orange material.
Gwendolyn knew a Licketysplitter outfit when she saw one. “Is Cherry Tan here?”
A woman at a machine in the last row stood up. She was barely five feet tall, but possessed a bulldog sturdiness to her: thick neck, hunched shoulders, and a don’t-screw-with-me scowl. “Me,” she said.
As Gwendolyn walked down the center aisle between the whirring machines, Cherry closed her fist around a pair of scissors. Gwendolyn stopped in front of her machine and planted her hands on her hips. “I’m Gwendolyn Brick.”
Cherry’s suspicion mutated into recognition, then shifted into comprehension. “You no how I picture.”
“You put me out of business.”
Cherry lifted one of her broad shoulders. “I make for less money. Not personal. Only business.” She narrowed her eyes and started nodding. “I see your work. Customers show me. You very good.” She turned to the seamstress to her right and rattled off a speech. The only word Gwendolyn caught was her name. The other woman, taller than Cherry but much older, addressed Gwendolyn in a rapid-fire foreign tongue.
“She says you famous in lady-men. She try to make lady-men costumes like you because you make the best.”
“Tell her thank you.”
“She also say you work here too?”
Gwendolyn’s resentment began to melt. “Thank you, but no.”
“Pity. We have too many works.” Cherry nodded her head toward the Flaming Rose. “We make costumes for them too. You know. Girls who sell.” Her eyes took on a mischievous gleam as she cupped her breasts and hoisted them up. “Big! Big! Big!”
Twisted Boulevard: A Novel of Golden-Era Hollywood (Hollywood's Garden of Allah novels Book 6) Page 19