Starstruck

by Rachel Shukert

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2013 by Rachel Shukert

  Jacket photograph copyright © 2013 by Michael Frost

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-98425-9

  Random House Children’s Books

  supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  To Ben, as always.

  And for my grandma Doris Garland Shukert

  (no relation to Judy).

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  February 12, 1938

  It was one of those nights in Hollywood, the kind that made gossip columnists and newspapermen and the announcers on newsreels say, “It was one of those nights in Hollywood.”

  Searchlights swept the starlit sky. Flashbulbs popped, littering the ground with shattered glass like piles of diamonds. Down on Hollywood Boulevard, the marquee of Grauman’s Chinese Theater was ablaze with light, its copper roof and red lacquer columns emitting an otherworldly glow that gave it the aura of an ancient sacred temple.

  And up the crimson carpet came the deities themselves, wrapped in pale satin and shining furs, striking poses for the photographers, pausing now and then to bestow a ruby-lipped smile or extend a slim gloved hand to one lucky supplicant among the teeming throng of frantic fans.

  Deep within the crush of people shouting and begging and brandishing autograph books, two teenage girls held on to each other for dear life.

  “Margaret!” the smaller one shrieked. “Somebody just pinched me!”

  “Never mind, Doris,” the one called Margaret shouted, expertly twisting her slim body this way and that through the crush. “Just keep hold of my hand. If we get separated we’ll never find each other again.”

  Together, they wended their way toward the front, until at last they had a clear view of the blazing marquee.

  OLYMPUS STUDIOS PRESENTS

  DIANA CHESTERFIELD

  IN

  MANHATTAN MEMORIES

  “Look, Doris,” Margaret said excitedly, despite the fact that her head was being wedged beneath the less than fragrant armpit of a tall man in a damp tweed jacket. “Look at that marquee. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Squashed behind a very fat woman in a flowered dress, Doris jumped as a flashbulb popped right next to her face. “It’s awfully bright.”

  “Well, if you’re a star, you get used to that,” Margaret said. “Diana Chesterfield told Picture Palace that when she was just starting out, she used to practice posing by shining a triple-watt flashlight in her eyes every night in front of the mirror.”

  Turning her face toward the glare of the flashbulbs, Margaret demonstrated her idol’s technique. She had practiced it herself for hours back home in Pasadena.

  “Do you think Mickey Rooney will be here?” Doris asked hopefully.

  “Doris.” Margaret rolled her eyes. “This is an Olympus picture.”

  “So?”

  “So Mickey Rooney is under contract at MGM. At Olympus, instead of Mickey Rooney, they have—”

  “Jimmy Molloy!” Doris’s shrieks of ecstasy pierced the din as Olympus’s biggest musical star cavorted down the aisle, his famously dazzling grin calibrated to a blinding level. Eyes bright below his swooping quiff of ginger-colored hair, he clapped a hand over his mouth and blew a big kiss in the girls’ direction. The photographers snapped away.

  “Oh my Lord!” Doris cried. “I’m going to faint, Margaret. I am positively going to faint! But who’s that girl with him?” Her eyes narrowed jealously.

  Margaret squinted through the lights to where a petite brunette in virginal white lace was signing autographs at the edge of the carpet, just a few feet away from Jimmy. “Oh! That’s Gabby Preston.”

  “Who?”

  “Gabby Preston. Honestly, Doris, sometimes, I think you don’t even read Picture Palace. She’s that singer that Olympus just signed to a seven-year deal. We heard her on the Royal Gelatin Hour on the radio the other day, singing ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me,’ don’t you remember? You thought she was swell?”

  Doris glowered as Jimmy Molloy put his arms around the girl, playfully kissing her cheek for the photographers. “Well, I don’t anymore.”

  “Oh, it’s just for show. They’re starring in the new Tully Toynbee picture together. Actors always go out with their costars for publicity,” Margaret said knowingly.

  “Jimmy wouldn’t do that. After all, he told Picture Palace that his greatest ambition was ‘finding true love.’ ” Doris closed her eyes in a halfway swoon. “Isn’t that the most romantic thing you ever heard?”

  Margaret laughed at her friend. “Really, Doris, there’s no need to be so starstruck. They’re just people.”

  Jimmy and Gabby were halfway up the red carpet when a fresh chorus of screams erupted from the crowd. A gleaming black Duesenberg pulled up, and Dane Forrest, Olympus Studios’ most famous leading man, emerged. Standing at the edge of the red carpet, he cast a moody gaze out at the cheering fans, not even bothering to smile for the photographers suddenly swarming around him.

  Back home in Pasadena, pictures of Diana Chesterfield might cover Margaret’s bedroom walls, but Dane Forrest, in all his brooding, black-haired glory, occupied the otherwise bare place of honor above her bed so he could be the last thing she saw before she went to sleep at night and the first thing she saw when she woke up in the morning. And now here he was, standing ten feet away from her, in the flesh. She didn’t know whether to cry or to scream or to be sick. She felt as if she had just swallowed a hummingbird and it was beating its wings against her chest and throat, frantically trying to get out.

  “Oooh,” Doris murmured teasingly beside her. “Who’s starstruck now?”

  But Mar
garet was hardly the only one. Next to the girls, the fat woman in the flowered dress was so overwhelmed it seemed she was about to collapse in a fit. “Mr. Forrest!” she screeched, her face as red as a strawberry. “Over here! Mr. Forrest! Mr. Forrest! I love you!”

  Yet Dane Forrest seemed to take no notice. Having completed his minute or two of perfunctory posing, he strode purposefully up the red carpet with nary a wave, although he did pass by so close that Margaret thought she caught a musky hint of his cologne wafting from the collar of his immaculately tailored tuxedo. The odor suffused her with such desperate longing that she had to clutch Doris’s hand, willing herself not to faint.

  Doris was less impressed. “What’s his problem? He looks like such a grouch.”

  “Dane Forrest is not a grouch,” Margaret insisted. “He’s brooding and sensitive and he hates crowds, like all real artists.”

  “Well, why isn’t he with Diana, then?” Dane Forrest and Diana Chesterfield were widely recognized as Hollywood’s most beautiful couple, both on- and off-screen. There were regular photographs of them in Picture Palace and Photoplay and all the magazines dining and dancing and looking terribly glamorous and in love. For him not to escort her to such an important premiere was unthinkable. Doris grinned. “Maybe they broke up, Margie. Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”

  “No.” Margaret shook her head. “She’s just making a grand entrance. Look. Here she comes now.”

  At least three spans longer than any of the rest, the approaching limousine was painted the palest, most delicate of eggshell blues. It was a trademark of Diana Chesterfield’s that her cars matched her gowns: a coral-pink Rolls-Royce had echoed the spectacular pink tulle (and even more spectacular pink diamonds) she’d worn to the premiere of Glissando; a butter-yellow Duesenberg had perfectly complemented the confection of golden taffeta and the blonde mink she had donned for the opening night of It Happened in Algiers.

  The photographers held their cameras poised in anticipation. Dane Forrest stood at the doors of the theater like a groom at the altar awaiting his bride. The crowd maintained a reverent hush in breathless anticipation of the descent of its idol from her gorgeous conveyance. Margaret gripped Doris’s hand, her heart swelling with buoyant adoration and furious envy, her knees spontaneously half bending in a kind of reflexive curtsey.

  The car door swung smoothly open.

  And a short, balding man with a pencil mustache climbed out of the car and walked sheepishly to the bank of microphones beneath the marquee.

  In Glendale and Burbank and Santa Monica and Encino and Tarzana and Hancock Park, the folks listening intently on the radio clearly heard the man’s flat voice reading the following statement:

  “On behalf of Olympus Studios, I regret to inform you that Diana Chesterfield is sadly unable to be with us tonight. Miss Chesterfield sends her sincerest good wishes and humblest thanks to all her fans, for whose support and admiration she is eternally grateful. She hopes all of you will enjoy her latest picture, Manhattan Memories.”

  But there in the crowd at Grauman’s Chinese Theater that night, all Margaret Frobisher of Pasadena could hear was the question buzzing on everyone’s lips, as clearly as if the assembled fans had cried out in unison:

  Where is Diana Chesterfield?

  And why would she stand up a man like Dane Forrest?

  “Hey, sweetheart, you gonna pay for that?”

  The rough voice startled Margaret out of her skin. She tipped forward off the vinyl-covered stool, just managing to grab her glass of chocolate ice cream soda before it deposited its half-melted contents all over the freshly mopped floor of Schwab’s Pharmacy.

  “I—I’m sorry?” she stammered. “Pay for … what?”

  The soda jerk tipped his peaked paper cap a few inches back from the expanse of his sweaty forehead. “That rag you got there,” he said, angling his bristled chin toward the open copy of Picture Palace in front of Margaret on the white Formica lunch counter, where the Technicolor visage of Diana Chesterfield gazed serenely from its glossy pages. “I ain’t running no lending library around here, see? You read, you buy. Store policy.”

  He leaned over the counter for a better look at the magazine, so close that Margaret could smell the sour milk and stale whiskey on his breath. Her hand flew to the gold circle pin fastened to the collar of her sweater. A family heirloom, her parents had presented it to her for her sixteenth birthday the year before, and Margaret soon found herself worrying its little cluster of pearls whenever she got nervous. Somehow the feeling of their smooth, cool surface under the tips of her fingers always seemed to calm her down. “Who you got there? Diana Chesterfield?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Always liked her.” The man gave an approving nod. “Nice girl.”

  Margaret gasped. Getting into a conversation with the soda jerk was the last thing she wanted to do; still, she couldn’t keep herself from asking. “You don’t … you don’t actually know her, do you?”

  “Sure do. She’d come in for an egg salad sandwich with french fries every other Tuesday, strict as clockwork. Used to make up her order myself, right here at the counter.” His sharp face took on a dreamy look. “She liked my egg salad, Miss Chesterfield. Perfect ratio of mustard to mayonnaise. That’s the key, see. You gotta get the proportions right.”

  “She told you that herself?”

  “Well, not exactly. She’s one of the quiet ones, you know. Keeps to herself, like. Most of the time she’d send her driver in while she sat pretty in one of them fancy cars of hers. But every so often she’d come in herself with her sunglasses on and sit right on that stool where you’re sitting now.”

  Margaret couldn’t suppress the excited shiver that ran down her spine, despite the soda jerk’s too-appreciative gaze. When she’d decided that morning to play hooky from her afternoon classes to have a sandwich at Schwab’s, she’d hardly supposed she’d be receiving intimate information about the sandwich preferences of her favorite movie star.

  Although Margaret had to admit that after the events—or lack thereof—of the premiere at Grauman’s, it was decidedly unnerving to hear Diana referred to in the past tense.

  “I take it you’re a fan of hers?” the man prompted.

  A fan? Margaret knew practically everything about Diana Chesterfield. She knew her middle name (Constance), her birthday (December 10) and her birthplace (Hampshire, England). She knew her favorite color (lilac); her favorite meal (steak Diane—bien sûr—with potatoes dauphinoise); and obviously, her romantic status. Before Margaret had started high school and thus become far too mature for such things, she’d even been the president of the Official Bellefontaine Street Diana Chesterfield Fan Club. True, the only other member was Doris, who had served as a kind of vice president/secretary hybrid, but she had sent away to Olympus Studios for a special Diana Chesterfield Fan Club President badge, which she kept tucked away in her top dresser drawer, along with her film star scrapbook, the dried corsage from the Christmas dance last year when she’d kissed Phipps McKendrick, and Florence the rag doll, whom she hadn’t slept with since grade school but couldn’t bear to give away. But none of this was anything the soda jerk needed to know about. After all, this was Schwab’s, the unofficial canteen of the Hollywood colony. He might be a working stiff who dished out french fries and strawberry phosphates for a living, but he was serving them to some of the biggest legends in the movie business.

  Margaret decided to play it cool. “Yeah, I guess,” she said. “I mean, I’ve seen all her pictures.” And studied her voice, her walk, her wardrobe, her makeup, and her hairstyle, and can recite every single one of her famous movie moments from memory …

  “The latest one too? Manhattan Mammary or whatever?” He leered.

  Margaret ignored the soda jerk’s crudeness, as she imagined the famously genteel Diana Chesterfield herself did on her infrequent sojourns among the little people. “Manhattan Memories. Yes, I have.” Three times. “Actually, my good friend and I even attended
the premiere.”

  “Oh, pardon me.” The soda jerk held up his hands. “I didn’t realize I was speechifying in front of a … whaddyacallit … a premiere attendee. Don’t tell me you’re an Oscar winner too.”

  Margaret blushed. “No. I mean, we weren’t guests, exactly. We were just standing in the crowd on Hollywood Boulevard.”

  “I heard about that.” The soda jerk smirked. “Nice of her to show up, wasn’t it?”

  “Well, like you said, she’s known for being private,” Margaret said defensively. Plenty of fans grumbled about Diana’s legendary reclusiveness, which the tabloids claimed had grown even more pronounced of late, but not Margaret. In fact, the star’s lack of accessibility was one of the main reasons Margaret admired her. Diana’s mystery made her so glamorous. “Still,” Margaret continued, “it is unusual to miss a premiere like that. I suppose she must have been terribly ill.”

  “That’s one way to put it.”

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  “Whatever do you mean?” With a thrust of his nose in the air and an exaggerated flutter of his eyelashes, he mimicked Margaret’s prim private school elocution. “I don’t mean to be coarse, but let me put it this way, sister: I ain’t expecting Diana Chesterfield to nibble on my egg salad again anytime soon, see?”

  “No. I’m afraid I don’t,” Margaret told him.

  “Look. A job like this, you hear things. Someone’s getting hitched, I hear about it. Someone’s headed for Splitsville, I hear about it. Someone’s cracked up or stepping out or headed for the big house—”

  “You hear about it.”

  “You bet. And what I heard, girlie, is that Diana Chesterfield, Our Lady of the Weepies, went missing the day of that premiere.”

  “That’s not fair. She makes comedies too.”

  “You dumb or something, girlie? I said, Diana Chesterfield is missing, and has been ever since that runner she pulled at the premiere of Manhattan Melodies.”

  “Memories,” Margaret corrected him stubbornly, although she had to admit it was an awfully generic title. “But that was weeks ago.”