“I want the cast and crew on the ship within the hour,” Denham ordered, and Preston could see that he’d already moved on. The director had formulated a Plan B, and it was full speed ahead now.
“Carl,” he said, “you can’t do this!”
“Tell ’em the studio’s pressured us into making an early departure.”
Preston’s ears burned with the heat of indignation. “It’s not ethical!”
“What are they gonna do, sue me?” Denham scoffed. “They can get in line.”
Preston caught the toe of his shoe on a sidewalk crack and stumbled a bit, only barely managing to keep hold of the film cans. Denham did not even slow.
“You realize none of the camera equipment’s on board,” Preston said as he hurried to keep up.
Denham wasn’t paying any attention to him. Instead, the man was looking worriedly over his shoulder. Without warning he stepped off the sidewalk and started to cut across the busy road. Preston glanced back and saw Zelman and the other investors in the distance, an angry little lynch mob, and he set off after Denham as fast as he could manage with the film cans.
“We have no permits, no visas.”
“That’s why I have you, Preston.” Denham raised a hand, imperiously flagging down a cab. It cruised up beside them.
“No insurance, no foreign currency…in fact we have no currency of any kind. Who’s gonna pay for the ship?”
Denham yanked open the cab door and hustled Preston into the back, following behind almost before Preston had a chance to slide over to give him room. Preston sprawled across the seat in a pile of film cans.
“Step on it!” Denham told the cabbie as he slammed the door. He shouted out an address, but Preston barely caught the words.
A furious Poehler now took the lead as he, Zelman, and Farragher gave chase. He shouted after them, bellowing Carl’s name as though they were in the army, and Poehler was some kind of drill sergeant. The rear window by Denham was partway open and Poehler grabbed hold of the glass. Carl quickly cranked it closed—the seedy investor yelped and withdrew his fingers.
“Don’t worry, Preston. I’ve had a lot of practice at this. I’m real good at crapping the crappers.”
The cab cruised through the crowded streets of Manhattan. Preston felt his stomach lurch as they rounded a corner, but somehow he managed to sit up straight and get all of the film cans piled in some semblance of order on the seat beside him. Meanwhile, Denham kept on talking about preparations for the film, and for the ship to sail. Preston pulled out his notepad and started scribbling.
“And two dozen of Mr. Walker’s finest,” Denham continued, listing the most vital of supplies for the voyage.
“Red label, eighty percent proof, packed in a crate marked lemonade,” Preston confirmed, jotting it down.
“You got it. And tell Maureen she doesn’t have six hours to put on her face. If she wants to be in this picture, she’s gotta be on that boat.”
Preston hated giving Denham bad news. Plus he forgot…or maybe chose not to listen. He hesitated for an eyeblink before plunging ahead. “She doesn’t want to be in this picture.”
Denham looked at him blankly.
“Maureen pulled out,” Preston said.
“She pulled out?”
“Yesterday. I told you.”
“You said we were shooting in Singapore, right?” Denham asked. “That’s what you told her?”
“But we’re not shooting in Singapore.”
“Goddamn it, Preston!” Denham shouted. “All you had to do was look her in the eye and lie.”
Preston didn’t flinch. He’d grown used to being the object of his boss’s ire. He was more interested in their destination, and now that the subject had come up, he wasn’t going to let it go. Preston had given up a lot to become Denham’s assistant, and he thought at the very least he’d earned the right to be in on the mystery.
“Where exactly are we filming, Carl? The Indian Ocean’s a big place. I just thought you might have a land mass in mind.”
A furtive look came over Denham’s face. “You want to know what’s going on? I’ll tell you.”
Surprised, Preston narrowed his eyes, studying Denham. Waiting.
“We’ve got three hours to find a new leading lady…or we’re screwed,” Denham said, voice edged with cynicism. “Is that enough information for you?”
The director looked away, muttering to himself. It was typical Denham. He lived in a world where he was the star, and everyone else merely extras. But there was passion for the craft in him, and a spark of true genius, that Preston couldn’t help but admire.
“I gotta get to a phone, talk to Harlow’s people,” Denham said, mostly to himself, mind already a million miles away.
Jean Harlow? Preston thought. Who was he kidding?
“She’s busy.”
“Myrna Loy?” Denham replied, thinking, rattling off names as they occurred to him. “Joan Blondell? Clara Bow?” He glanced at Preston. “Mae West?”
“You’ll never get her into a size four. You gotta get a girl who’ll fit Maureen’s costumes.”
Denham’s eyes lit up. “Fay’s a size four!”
“She’s doing a picture with RKO,” Preston said, swaying as the cab took another corner. The whole vehicle rumbled, the engine badly in need of work.
“Cooper, huh?” Denham asked, his expression darkening. “I might have known…”
The cab screeched to a sudden halt in mid-traffic. Denham jumped out. Preston stared at him, utterly baffled. The director shot off instructions to the cabbie.
“I’m telling you,” Preston called to him, “we’ve gotta delay the shoot. Shut production down!”
Denham’s eyes were alight with cunning and mischief. “Not an option.”
“Carl, there’s no time,” Preston insisted.
“For God’s sake, Preston,” Denham snapped, “think like a winner.” He started to turn away.
“Carl!”
Denham looked through the rear window at him. “Call Driscoll. I need that goddamn screenplay!”
The cabbie had been silent throughout their frantic conversation. Now the driver glanced back curiously.
“He’s lost his mind,” Preston remarked to the inquisitive cabbie.
Denham leaned in the window, staring intently at Preston. “Defeat is always momentary.”
He banged his hand on the roof of the cab and then the vehicle was moving again. Preston could only stare dumbfounded back at Denham, who stood in the busy midtown traffic, watching him go, like some naval commander on the deck of his ship, ready to fight on no matter the odds.
Frustrated as he was, Preston couldn’t help smiling.
3
EVENING WAS COMING ON, the sun setting over the buildings of Manhattan. The clock was ticking…and Carl Denham was getting desperate. He had no idea how long he was going to be able to stay ahead of his irate investors. If he’d just run off on his own, they wouldn’t have cared, but he’d taken the reels of film that they’d financed and that was not sitting well with them. Chances were they’d already gone to the cops. Worse yet, he’d blabbed about arranging for a ship so he could go and finish the picture in the tropics.
Zelman might not just assume Denham would still be planning to sail, but he had to seriously consider the possibility.
Time was of the essence.
The problem was that Denham already burned precious minutes talking to a couple of casting agents upon whose discretion he knew he could rely, and came up with nothing. No respectable actress was going to just pack up and get on a ship headed out to the high seas or God knew where on a couple of hours’ notice, and with no idea what kind of film she was really going to be making. The kind of proposition Denham was offering was sure to raise eyebrows, make any girl think the worst.
But he was now out of options, which meant that in his search for a respectable actress, he’d been forced to abandon both the “respectable” and the “actress.” He needed beauty
and he needed daring, and if he could get one with a little talent, that would be a bonus.
Denham strode along a busy sidewalk toward the third burlesque theater he’d visited in the past three quarters of an hour, and this one was the tackiest yet. On the wall outside the venue were photos of semi-naked women clad in only feather boas and peacock fans, gaudy banners proclaiming their names. Miss Lily Rose. Delaware Du Boise. Candice.
The sky had grown a bit darker just in the last few minutes. Dusk had seemed to give way to evening far too quickly.
This was it. Now or never.
He paused on the sidewalk and straightened his tie, trying his best to look presentable. Three girls came from the other direction, moving through the bustle of pedestrians. The girls were headed for the theater, obviously performers on their way to work. Denham appraised them quickly, a pair of big women and the third, petite. There was no way Bruce Baxter was going to be able to carry either of the bigger girls for long, so he set his sights on the smaller one. Denham went after them as they entered the theater.
He reached for the door handle…but something caught his eye. Denham could see himself in the reflection in the glass door, but behind him, the stream of humanity flowing around her, was another girl. Even in the reflection in that dirty glass, she gave him pause.
Denham turned to look at her, and he had to catch his breath. Her clothes were a bit tatty, but her face was luminous, her eyes bright even in the gathering gloom of evening, her golden hair falling around her face as though she was some kind of angel.
Carl Denham wasn’t the kind of man who fell in love with any girl he bumped into on the street (although Lord knows there were plenty to go around). If he were honest with himself, Denham would have said he wasn’t sure he was the kind of man who fell in love, period. What he saw in this one was something else, that indefinable aura, that spark that certain men and women had that let Denham know that on film, and through the camera’s eye, they could be extraordinary.
The girl stood in the middle of the busy sidewalk, entirely unaware that anyone was watching her. She was focused on the burlesque theater, staring grimly at the hoardings, some kind of paper or flyer clutched in her hands. Her exquisite mouth twisted and her eyes gleamed with anger. Abruptly she crumpled the paper in her hands and dropped it in the gutter.
When she started away from the theater, Denham knew he had no choice but to follow.
All that Ann Darrow could think about was that she needed to get as far away from this hole in the wall as possible. There was a small part of her, a little voice inside, that warned her to turn around, to go in and get the job that Mr. Weston had told her about. Take his advice. Take the money, and then forget all about it.
She just couldn’t.
There had been a lot of girls she had known to whom the leap from vaudeville to burlesque didn’t seem very far at all, but to Ann it was the equivalent of vaulting across the Grand Canyon. With the life she’d led, Ann was hardly a prude—sharing a dressing room with dozens of different men and women made such a thing impossible—but she wasn’t some floozy either. Ann might never have made it into legitimate theater…but there was too much pride at stake. She was an actress, dammit, not a burlesque girl. Never a burlesque girl.
No matter how loud her stomach growled—and it was indeed deafening tonight, the hunger pangs clutching at her belly—her basic decency just wasn’t for sale.
But here she walked away from the burlesque theater and the promise of quick money, utterly directionless. Where was she to go? Any day now she’d be thrown out of the room she’d been staying in. She’d had so little to eat today that her legs were buckling from weakness.
Her eyes narrowed as she saw a fruit vendor’s cart on the sidewalk ahead. People swarmed all around it, headed out on the business of their lives, to see family and friends, to dinner or a show, to do all of those things that seemed so foreign to Ann.
She fixed her gaze on an arrangement of semi-ripe apples piled on a tray at one end of the stall, and she thought of Manny, who’d always told her that the first rule of the stage performer’s life was “survive…just survive.”
Her body moved without any further thought, and she began to act. She lifted her chin and performed, taking on the role of a woman who was anything but starving, anything but a thief. The vendor was a foreigner, Greek from his accent, and he was hawking his wares to passersby as she approached, making herself appear carefree, just another girl in the throng.
His back was turned. She slowed down, eyeing the fruit. Now. Her hand thrust out and she swiped an apple from the tray, then slipped it into her pocket, quickly moving on.
A strong hand gripped Ann’s arm. Her heart raced, panic shooting through her. She was spun around as the vendor pulled her hand from her pocket. Her fingers still clutched the stolen apple.
“Are you gonna pay for this?” the swarthy, angry man demanded.
Ann winced from his grip. “Let go of my arm, you ape!”
“You think it is okay to steal from me? Take my apples? Eat my fruit? You know how much money I make this week? Four dollar.”
“That’s a damn sight more than I have!”
The fruit vendor’s hold on her arm tightened, but Ann didn’t flinch this time, only stiffened her back and glared at him. She had learned young what it meant to look out for herself.
“What are you, a joker now? Let’s see how you laugh when I call the cops!”
A few passersby had stopped to gawk at the scene, but she was used to an audience and refused to even glance at them. Then a man stepped out of the sidewalk traffic toward her and the vendor, a stout, dark-haired man with mischief in his eyes. He held up a nickel.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said. “I think you dropped this.”
The diner was one of a thousand in New York City named after its owner—Charlie’s or Mike’s or something like that—but Ann had been so distracted by hunger that she couldn’t recall what it was. At first she’d been hesitant to accept an invitation to dinner from this Carl Denham character, being suspicious as to his motives, but the truth was he seemed kind enough. Ann’s record of judging men’s character was spotty at best, but she figured if Denham wanted something in return for covering for her out on the street, and now buying her dinner, he would have asked her back to his place already. That type of guy couldn’t hide his nature very well.
And after all, there was that rule of Manny’s. Survive.
If he was willing to buy her dinner just to listen to him talk for a while, that was a small price to pay. Her stomach wasn’t going to accept any other opinions at this point.
Now she sat at the table with Denham, digging into the plate of food in front of her, trying to be ladylike in spite of the fact that she was absolutely ravenous.
Denham watched her eat.
“Vaudeville, huh?” he said, picking up the thread of the conversation they’d begun.
Ann nodded, glancing up at him.
“I worked vaudeville once,” Denham went on. “It’s a tough audience. If you don’t kill ’em fast, they’ll kill you. Too brutal for me.”
“Mr. Denham,” Ann said in between bites, “I want you to know I’m not in the habit of accepting charity from strangers, or for that matter, taking things that don’t belong to me.”
“It was obviously a terrible misunderstanding,” Denham said, and his eyes were so sincere she could almost believe he meant it. Except that she was positive it was more that he was simply agreeing with her version of events out of politeness.
“It’s just that…I haven’t been paid in a while,” she offered.
Denham regarded her intensely. But then again he seemed the sort of man who brought intensity to everything. She took another bite.
“Tell me, Ann…may I call you Ann?” he asked, but didn’t slow down to wait for an answer. “You wouldn’t be a size four by any chance?”
Ann paused halfway through the mouthful of food she had just taken. Her appetit
e drained away as a chill passed through her. Apparently her ability to judge men had not improved.
She abruptly stood, her chair squealing against the tiled floor.
Denham’s eyes widened in a kind of panic and he gestured as though to halt her. “Oh, no! God, no, you’ve got me all wrong! I’m not that type of person at all!”
Ann raised an eyebrow. “What type of person are you?”
“Someone you can trust, Ann,” Denham replied with utter seriousness. “I’m a movie producer.”
From his tone, Denham seemed to be expecting the revelation to work some magical transformation on her. But this was one line she had heard before and wasn’t impressed.
“I make motion pictures,” he forged on. “In fact, I’m making one right now. I’m on the level. I mean it, Ann, no funny business. Sit down, please.”
He was just so damned sincere. Reluctantly, she sat back down and drew herself up to the table. There was a wild light in Denham’s eyes, and when he spoke, it was as if he was looking right through her at some faraway place Ann couldn’t see.
“Imagine if you will a handsome explorer bound for the Far East,” Denham began.
“You’re filming in the Far East?”
“Singapore,” he said idly, then forged on. “On board ship he meets a mysterious girl.”
“The size four,” Ann wryly added.
“Exactly! She’s beautiful, fragile, haunted…she can’t escape the feeling that forces beyond her control are compelling her down a road from which she cannot draw back. It’s as if her whole life has been a prelude to this moment, a fateful meeting that changes everything. And then, sure enough, against her better judgment—”
“She falls in love,” Ann put in.
“Yes!” Denham cried, now slightly wild-eyed.
“But she doesn’t trust it,” Ann said. “She’s not even sure she believes in love.”
King Kong Page 3