by Anne Girard
When Harlean came home after a full and exhausting day of work on a film called Why Be Good?, Chuck was waiting for her at the door in a stylish black suit and crisp red necktie. He was holding a huge bouquet of white orchids. In that moment, he looked every bit the matinee idol Harlean had seen around the studio lots. She felt an overwhelming rush of tenderness and love.
“What’s this for?” she asked as he pressed a kiss onto her cheek.
“Can’t a fella dress up now and then for his doll? I’m taking you out,” he said.
“Oh, Chuck.” She was exhausted and all she wanted to do was soak in a hot bath and go to bed. But seeing the look in his eyes, Harlean didn’t dare admit that. “So, where are we going?”
“How does the Del Monte strike you?”
“The speakeasy over near the boardwalk at Venice Beach?”
“That’s the one.”
“I thought that place was impossible to get into.”
“Ivor’s got a pal who knows the bartender. He’s gonna let us all in.”
He seemed genuinely excited by the adventure he had planned for them.
She decided, as Chuck kissed her again, that they could do with a night of fun together, even if they would have to be with Rosalie and Ivor. Harlean was not a great fan of Ivor’s monosyllabic responses when he spoke, and his general disdain for literature as “pointless.” But the prospect of something daring, like an evening at a speakeasy, suddenly filled her with renewed energy and brought the color swiftly back to her cheeks. She wrapped her arms around his neck and let him kiss her more wantonly.
“Where are Mommie and Marino?”
“Out buying a bed for their new place.”
“Who needs one of those when you’ve got a car?” she giggled.
“Beds do come in handy, though.”
“So how was your day? What did you do while I was away?” she asked him, intent on changing the subject, and because she truly did want to know.
They walked together into the kitchen so that she could put the flowers in water.
“What I did was I missed you—and I went downtown to buy you flowers.” The playful evasion of anything more did not concern her because she could see that he was happy.
“Anything else?”
“I phoned my grandparents in Chicago, actually.”
Harlean set the flowers down and leaned against the kitchen counter. She pressed her curiosity down so that she wouldn’t ruin the moment by saying the wrong thing. She was still ashamed of herself for what she’d said the last time the subject of his family had come up.
“Oh? How are they?” she cautiously asked.
“My grandma had a nasty fall a few days ago, but Granddad is taking care of her himself, and spoiling her rotten apparently. Just what I’d do for you.”
She heard the slight shift in his tone with the last few words. She knew it was the reference to family, and the tie from there back to his parents that had brought the change. Harlean needed to be careful with this sudden and fragile first step she hoped he was finally taking with her. So she would put it away for now, and keep it safe for him. Hopefully one day soon he would bring it up again, and when he did she would give it all the tender care he so needed.
“How was it to speak with them? I mean, are you okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” he sharply asked, playing it off and shifting things quickly between them. “It was just a phone call after all. Now come on, we need to get changed. We’re running late as it is.”
* * *
Rosalie and Ivor rode with them out to the Venice boardwalk and parked right in front of Menotti’s, a grocery store that was the front for the basement speakeasy. It was a lovely warm late-summer evening.
Harlean was wearing a calf-length powder-blue satin halter dress and strappy heels, and she had dabbed a bit of Shalimar perfume behind her ears. It had always been her mother’s favorite scent but it was hers now, too. Rosalie wore a red beaded dress with sparkly fringe at the knee and a matching plumed headband.
She found it a curious sight to see so many couples in evening attire filing into a grocery store, but the sly grins all around made the prospect of the night ahead all that much more exciting.
Chuck squeezed her hand as they followed Ivor through a back workroom door. Two swarthy-looking male employees of the “market,” both wearing long white aprons, nodded as they passed. One of them winked at Harlean.
As they trooped together down the steep and narrow staircase into the basement, Harlean forgot entirely about the long and tedious day of endless takes, lighting adjustments and wardrobe changes to wait through.
This was pure fun.
After giving the password to a gruff sounding man on the other side of a closed steel door, they waited for what seemed an eternity beneath a single bare lightbulb. Finally, the heavy door was drawn back and laughter and loud, inviting music spilled out around them.
They were ushered inside, and the door was locked behind them by a massive bald man in a dark, pin-striped suit. Harlean felt a shiver when their eyes met for a moment. She wasn’t sure if he would have liked to kiss her or kill her.
She and Chuck were quickly engulfed in the frenzy of the trendy, illegal nightclub, already in full swing. Scantily dressed “flappers,” in fringe with bobbed hair and headbands, were shimmying and shaking in time to the music. Nearby, couples stood chatting with friends, all holding cocktails or glasses of Champagne.
Thick cigarette smoke cast everything in a deep blue haze.
“Come on, y’all, let’s grab that table by the dance floor,” Rosalie called to them over the din of music as she pulled Ivor more deeply into the mix. Chuck and Harlean exchanged a quick glance, then dutifully followed.
The music was so loud—horns, strings and a throbbing base—that all any of them could do was smile and laugh as they wound their way past the bar and through a tangle of waiters and patrons. They went past two men who looked like gangsters, then a couple locked in a passionate, unashamed kiss as they stood and swayed to the music, making a halfhearted attempt at dancing.
There was nothing about this place, Harlean thought, that made her feel the slightest bit comfortable, yet she was loving every moment. All of the tension from the constant friction between her mother and Chuck, for the moment, was forgotten. Seeing him so happy here was blissful to her.
By the time they reached the free table, a Charleston contest was beginning. The flappers were happily pushing their way onto the dance floor beside them as Ivor ordered highballs all around and a bottle of Champagne. The beat of the music was hitting Harlean deep in her chest, making her dizzy, but she savored the wild sensation.
Ivor lit two cigarettes and handed one to his wife in the cliché style of a leading man. Chuck tapped in time to the music on the tabletop and drank his cocktail in one swallow as soon as it arrived. “Come on, doll, let’s dance!” he exclaimed, as he pushed back his chair and stood.
“I still can’t do the Charleston, Chuck,” Harlean yelled back, leaning in and hoping he could hear her over the loud music. “I’m awful at it!”
“Then we’ll just move around and have fun,” he shouted with a wide smile. “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
Because she couldn’t argue with that, she let him lead her into the mix of couples. This was so much fun, and she did so adore him.
After they were predictably eliminated from the competition, they rejoined Ivor and Rosalie, who were kissing almost too passionately for Chuck’s liking, at the table. Harlean knew it because she saw his brief scowl but she was determined that nothing was going to ruin this evening for them, so she reached over, grabbed his necktie just beneath the knot and playfully drew him to her.
God, but he could kiss like nobody’s business, she thought with dizzying delight. She was b
lindly, so wonderfully in love.
“Let’s have some of that Champagne now, shall we?” Harlean suggested lightly.
Chuck poured four glasses of the glistening, bubbly liquid, and Rosalie and Ivor leaned back into the center of the small table, rejoining the conversation.
“What’ll we drink to?” Harlean asked over the blare of a rousing horn solo.
She lifted her glass and everyone followed.
“Since she says we can finally tell you, Rosy landed a walk-on part in a picture!” Ivor proudly announced. “So that’s why we’re celebrating tonight.”
Harlean smiled joyfully and lunged across the table to hug Rosalie. “You minx, why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you, my beautiful little rival, are stealing all the work!”
“I’m not, either,” Harlean laughed and shook her head as they all clinked Champagne glasses and the music flared.
“If we weren’t suited for entirely different roles, Harlean, I’d absolutely hate you.”
Rosalie grabbed her hand then and dragged Harlean back onto the dance floor with a quickly growing group. The song had changed to the jazzy tune “Black Bottom Stomp,” which everyone in the place seemed to want to dance to.
Their moves were a joyful shimmy and bounce to the heavy drumbeat and the wild blare of trumpets. Now and then, they all raucously tossed their arms in the air, reveling in the freedom of the moment, until Harlean felt a man’s firm hand cup her bottom.
For an instant, it shocked her, but of course it was Chuck, she thought. This evening was proving to be far more fun than she ever could have guessed. But when she glanced over, she saw it was one of the men in the pin-striped suits dancing beside her. He tossed her a suggestive grin and grabbed her again as a tangle of arms and hands, and skirt fringe, moved around them.
It only took a blink after that to feel Chuck’s hand tighten like a manacle on her upper arm just before he yanked her back to the table.
“Get your purse. We’re leaving, before I kill the son of a bitch!”
Harlean’s carefree smile fell as she tried to catch her breath and process the swift change in everything around them, beneath the loud, suddenly grating music. A new crowd of revelers surged past them and onto the dance floor as Rosalie came skittering back to the table. Taking one look at Chuck’s furious expression, his body coiled like a spring, Rosalie pressed herself in between them.
“Now, kids, what’s all the fuss? Everyone’s just having fun.”
“No one touches my wife’s ass! No one!”
“Good gracious, is that all?” Rosalie laughed blithely and took a sip of her Champagne. “Come on, everyone is smashed in so close over there. I’m sure it was an honest mistake.”
“I said, get your purse, Harlean.”
“Jesus, Chuck, don’t be such a hothead. The girls were just having some fun,” Ivor interjected.
“Stay out of this or I swear to God I’ll coldcock you right here!”
“It’s all right,” Harlean said, putting a hand on Rosalie’s arm.
She knew it was anything but all right, yet Chuck’s cold stare drove her to do what she could to placate him.
Ivor said they would take a cab home later, and Harlean and Chuck jostled through the crowds to leave. Harlean was glad Rosalie and Ivor stayed behind because she knew the tension in the car would have been unbearable. Besides, the McCrays were their dearest friends in California, and Harlean could not bear the thought that, while tempers flared, Chuck might endanger the close tie the four of them had.
She would get him to calm down once they were alone. She always could.
But when they pulled up in front of the house, she could see the red rage still alive on his face. She hadn’t expected that. His hands were gripping the steering wheel so tightly he looked like he could actually rip it out. He was staring straight ahead, his jaw a rigid line of tension.
Chuck turned off the engine and the headlights, and they were plunged into darkness and shadows from the glow of the moon. The light from the living room lamp they had left on spilled out onto the front lawn.
“Tell me you didn’t say something to encourage that,” he finally said.
“How can you even ask me that?”
“I told you to wear a damn brassiere—at least tonight in that slinky dress, but you wouldn’t do it, would you?”
“So I brought it on myself?” she asked with an incredulous gasp.
He was pushing the line with her and now she was the one struggling to keep calm. Harlean could be an understanding wife but she refused to be a doormat.
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Then what are you saying, Chuck?”
“I see the way men look at you!”
“Grandpa Harlow always says you shouldn’t try to tame a horse by breaking its spirit.”
He looked at her, incredulous.
“What the hell do you need spirit for when you’ve already got a man who loves you?”
“I love you, too, you know I do.” Harlean tried to speak as tenderly as possible even though she was getting angry and frustrated. “But that’s the movie business, men are probably gonna look at me sometimes, Chuck. I just don’t want to stay cooped up here all the time. I actually like working. It makes me feel like I’m accomplishing something all on my own.”
“Standing in a crowd and getting seven dollars a day is accomplishing something?”
“They just paid me ten for the last picture!”
It was a defensive retort too swiftly spoken. She knew it the moment she said it, but she had been trying to convey that, though the progress might be slow, she was getting ahead, and Harlean was proud of that. She watched his eyes narrow. A short silence followed and she knew what he was going to say next even before he said it. “What’d you have to do for the raise, Harlean?”
“Damn you to hell, Chuck McGrew!”
Having known he would say it hadn’t made it easier to bear. Instead, it intensified the hurt. She bolted from the car, slammed the door and stomped across the front lawn.
“Don’t you dare walk away from me!” he shouted, quickly catching up with her.
She stopped and reeled back around, her face full of fury. “Or what? What’ll you do, Chuck?”
“Don’t make me show you!”
“Ivor’s right, you are a hothead, but you won’t hit me so don’t even act like you would!”
When they got to the front door he barred her from opening it. She knew her mother and Marino would be inside. She had seen them through the front window. She didn’t want Mother to see Chuck in a state like this—it would just give her a reason to start up her tirade against him again.
“Stand aside, Chuck. I’m exhausted.”
When he didn’t budge, she looked at him squarely with her own confrontational expression. His anger was not subsiding, and she was furious as well now that he had dared to even hint at using violence with her.
“Why didn’t you tell me you got a raise? Were you ashamed of what you had to do for it?”
“Did it ever occur to you that I got a raise because I’m damn good? That maybe, just maybe, I earned it? That I have talent?”
“You’re an extra, for Christ’s sake! You stand in the background! At least I hope that’s all you did for the raise.”
“Go to hell!” she growled at him as Marino opened the front door and Harlean dashed inside.
“What’s going on?” he asked Chuck as he stood with a drink in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other.
“Get out of my way!” Chuck snarled and pushed past him.
Before both men were fully inside of the house, Jean came out from the kitchen, carrying her own drink from the private stash of alcohol they had brought with them from Chicago. Her blond h
air was pulled back into its usual elegant chignon and she wore a lace apron over a beige dress.
“Marino, what’s happened?”
“The kids appear to be having a spat, dear,” he answered as he closed the door.
Chuck began to shout and pushed two living room chairs out of his path which tumbled to the floor. “Harlean, don’t you walk away from this! We aren’t nearly finished!”
“Well, I say we are!” she hollered from the bedroom. “You’re behaving like a barbarian, and that is definitely not the kind of man I married!”
It frightened her to see him so out of control like this but if she gave in to her fear, Mother would step in and that would make matters that much worse. She was a woman now, a married one at that, and she needed to handle her own problems.
She heard Chuck upend the telephone table in the dining room alcove and everything clattered onto the hardwood floor.
“Marino, for heaven’s sake, do something!” her mother cried.
“Come, my dear, let’s take our cocktails out to the backyard and survey the night sky, shall we?” Marino replied calmly.
“I can’t abandon the Baby when he’s like this!”
“Now, now, cara, you know perfectly well Charles won’t hurt her. Perhaps it is best to give them a moment’s privacy.”
Harlean didn’t hear them after that so she knew her mother must have complied just as Chuck came into the room and slammed the door. He collapsed onto the guest bed beside her, hunched his shoulders and surrendered his face to his hands.
She waited a moment before she touched him. Then she draped an arm tentatively around his neck. His shoulders sagged at her touch. The rage faded away.
“I’m sorry, doll. I don’t know what gets into me sometimes. Just the thought of how other men see you, your body so perfect, and with a face like an angel.”
“That’s quite a compliment.”
“It’s only the truth... I always wondered what you saw in me, honestly, why you chose me. You could’ve had any guy that summer we met. You’re a knockout. No one looks like you. No one ever will look like you.”