Starstruck

by Rachel Shukert

  “Yup, and I’m telling you she ain’t been seen since. Not here, not at the studio, not nowhere. Think about it, sugar. A dame like Chesterfield, sure, she ain’t exactly a social animal. But with a new picture out, it’s a different story. She’s out dancing, dining, you know, living it up. Believe you me, she gets around plenty when she needs the press. But the past six weeks, zip. Nada. A feature in Picture Palace, sure. They probably put that to bed months ago. But not so much as a mention in the comings and goings. You’re such a big fan, you musta noticed. And if you don’t think something smells fishy about that, then I got a piece of the Pacific Ocean to sell you. It smells plenty fishy too.”

  He’s right, Margaret thought with a start, her hand flying back up to the comforting smoothness of her little pearl pin. Diana has been awfully absent from the gossip columns lately. That was one of the more infuriating things about the picture rags. You’d blow your allowance in anticipation of an exciting new cover story about one of your favorite stars and then realize it was exactly the same article you’d read three months ago, just with the name of the old movie swapped out for the new one. “You don’t … you don’t think something’s happened to her?” Margaret asked.

  “I don’t think,” the soda jerk said. “I listen. And there ain’t been a word from the studio to listen to, which, let me tell you, says a whole hell of a lot.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as Leo Karp himself don’t have a clue where on God’s green earth she is.…”

  “Anything else?” Margaret was starting to worry.

  “Or they’re hiding something so bad even the very best liars in the business ain’t got a matchstick’s chance in hell of figuring out how to cover it up. And if they can’t cover it up, it’s because that something …” Looking around, he leaned in closer. Margaret, steeling herself against the rotten-milk breath and the pale eyeballs all but burning a hole in the front of her sweater, edged toward him. “That something is irreversible. Something like …”

  Gravely, the soda jerk drew a chocolate-flecked index finger across his Adam’s apple.

  “All right, Wally, I think you’ve scared the poor girl enough.”

  In her terror—when she glanced down, she noticed that her knuckles had turned white from clutching her pearls—Margaret had failed to notice the man sitting at the other end of the counter, calmly smoking a cigarette behind the latest Variety, so crisp and fresh you could probably still smell the sharpness of the ink wafting from the pages.

  “Mr. Julius!” Wally the soda jerk’s face turned as white as his apron. “I … I didn’t even see you there.”

  “So I gathered. I was wondering what a fella had to do to get a cup of coffee around here. I was beginning to worry I’d have to turn myself into a beautiful blonde. And I’m afraid peroxide wouldn’t do a thing for my complexion.” The man grinned, a diamond pinky ring flashing as he brought a hand up to his swarthy cheek. Margaret suddenly had the feeling she’d seen him somewhere before. She was sure he wasn’t an actor, and with his heavy features, pencil-thin mustache, and wide-shouldered double-breasted suit, he hardly looked like the kind of fellow she’d see having after-tennis cocktails with her parents at the Pasadena Country Club. But judging from Wally’s panicked reaction, the man was clearly a “somebody.” The only question was which “somebody” he was.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Wally gasped. “One coffee, right away, sir. Only …” Pressing his thin lips together, he stole a last desperate glance at Margaret. “Only she has to pay for that magazine, see! I ain’t running no—”

  “Lending library. So I heard.” With a chuckle, the man dug a handful of change from the pocket of his gray silk suit pants and deposited it on the counter with a dull thud. The pile of silver was so bright and sparkling new Margaret suspected you could almost see your face in it. She reflexively averted her eyes, as her mother had taught her to do in the “most unladylike” presence of cold hard cash. But she’d counted at least five silver dollars.

  Poor Wally, she thought, watching from the corner of her eye as the soda jerk frantically scooped up the coins before the high roller could change his mind. That’s probably more than he makes in a whole week.

  Before she could utter so much as a thank-you, the man put down his paper and moved a couple of seats over until he was sitting next to her. “You mustn’t mind Wally. He’s harmless enough. Just looking to pitch some woo your way.” His tone was pleasant, but his eyes were hard. Not cruel, exactly, but something about the unsentimental shrewdness of his expression made him seem as though he’d be tough to shock. Or, for that matter, to impress.

  “Pitch some … woo?” she repeated, bewildered.

  “Sure, kiddo. You know. Float you some sweet talk. Hit you with the big come-on.” The man cast a nonplussed glance over at the defeated Wally, who was desultorily flicking a wet rag against the malt machine at the other end of the counter. “But look, I can’t say I blame the poor sap for trying. You’re quite an eyeful. A real knockout, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  “Oh, you don’t need to put on that modesty song and dance for me. You may be young, duchess, but I can’t believe you don’t get that sort of thing all the time.”

  Twisting her pearl pin, Margaret blushed furiously. Unlike most of the other girls she knew, she wasn’t particularly vain. She had never asked for charge accounts at I. Magnin or Saks Fifth Avenue, and according to the inimitable Miss Schoonmaker, in whose odious Poise and Presence class at the Orange Grove Academy for Young Ladies she would be prancing around with a stack of books balanced on her head right now if she weren’t playing hooky at Schwab’s, she usually went around looking as though she “wouldn’t know a curling iron from a five iron.” Yet to plead ignorance of the simple fact of her beauty—the buttery hair that fell sleekly to her shoulders; her wide, silvery-blue eyes; the sculptural cast of her sloping cheekbones—was disingenuous at best. She might deny she was beautiful, but there would still be the stares to deal with: the knowing winks from boys whose tongues would turn to wood when she tried to talk to them; the guilty leers from her father’s stodgy friends and the subsequent chilly smiles of their disapproving wives. But this flashy, fast-talking stranger sitting uninvited beside her, casually lighting another cigarette from the still-burning end of his last, talked about her looks in the same tone he might use to talk about the weather. His disinterest was strangely comforting; it made her feel she could trust him.

  “Well, he’s got a pretty morbid way of doing it,” Margaret said.

  “You’ll get no arguments from me. But at least now I get to be a hero.”

  Is this a come-on after all? The soda jerk was one thing, but this man was old enough to be her father. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “What I mean, duchess, is that I’m delighted to inform you that good old Wally, the Mata Hari of the Malt Machine, is one hundred percent wrong as usual. Your Miss Chesterfield’s not been bumped off or knocked off or shuffled off or any other off. Aren’t you relieved? Now go on. Smile. I bet a smile from you would be something to see.”

  “But if no one’s seen her in weeks …,” Margaret began, “I mean, how can you be sure?”

  “Perhaps I ought to be a gentleman and introduce myself,” the man said, putting out his hand. “Larry Julius. Director of the publicity department at Olympus Studios.”

  “You!” Margaret suddenly realized where she’d seen the man before. “From the premiere! You made the announcement about Diana.”

  “Don’t hold that against me. I’m not much of an orator.”

  “But … you must know where she is! You do, don’t you?”

  “Maybe.” Larry Julius looked thoughtful. “If you were Diana Chesterfield, where would you be?”

  “In New York, rehearsing a glamorous new play on Broadway,” Margaret replied dreamily. “Or in Paris, shopping for all the latest couture fashions. Or in England, at the stately home of a handsome and fabulo
usly rich duke who wants to marry me but I’m not sure I want to give up my career.”

  Larry Julius laughed. “That all sounds lovely. I’m sure she’s doing one or all of those things.” He knows, but he’s not telling me, Margaret thought, but something sharp in his tone warned her not to press any further. Stubbing out his cigarette, Larry gazed pensively at Diana’s photo in the still open copy of Picture Palace for a moment before looking back at Margaret.

  “You an actress, kid?”

  “No,” Margaret said, eyes wide with surprise. “I’m from Pasadena.”

  Larry Julius’s hoot of laughter was so loud and startling that Margaret almost knocked over her chocolate soda again. “ ‘I’m not an actress, I’m from Pasadena!’ That’s good. I’m going to have to remember that one.” Still chuckling, he reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket, extracting an engraved gold case, which he opened with a smooth click. “I’ll tell you what, kiddo. I like you. You got something, some fire under all that finishing-school class. Maybe this is crazy, but if you ever get a yen to see how that little mug of yours would hold up in front of a camera, you let me know.”

  If nothing else, a childhood of interminable Rotarian dinners and country club dances had taught Margaret how to tell when a business card actually meant business, and the one Larry Julius pressed into her hand was about as business as it got. Cream-colored, almost too thick to bend. The name embossed richly in swooping black Aviator typeface. And at the very top, engraved as deeply as if it had been carved by the finger of God himself, a picture of a lightning bolt crowned with a wreath of laurel. The same one that swooped grandly across the screen, accompanied by a majestic fanfare of trumpets, every time the lights came down for a picture starring Diana Chesterfield or Dane Forrest or Jimmy Molloy.

  The logo of Olympus Studios.

  “You think I could be in the pictures?” Margaret squeaked. “Me?”

  “Well, let’s not get carried away.” Larry Julius held up his hands. “All I’m talking about is a test. You call up my office, say, ‘Hello, this is …’ ”

  “Margaret. Margaret Frobisher.”

  “Frobisher?” Larry Julius made a face. “We can fix that. You call that number and we’ll take it from there. I’m not making any promises. But from the looks of you, unless the camera magically reveals you’ve got a set of antlers and no arms or legs, I think you’ll be all right, kid.”

  Margaret suddenly felt dizzy. This was the sixth time so far this school year she’d worked up the courage to skip out on her afternoon classes and make the long journey by streetcar from Pasadena to Hollywood. She’d get off at the Hollywood Boulevard stop and find a ladies’ room somewhere to change clothes. She’d go in looking like a schoolgirl in the navy boiled wool uniform of Orange Grove (which was based on those of its sister academy in Scotland and which no one had ever thought to adapt to the Southern California heat) and emerge a sophisticated starlet in the outfit she’d stashed that morning in her schoolbag: a snug cashmere sweater, a slim pencil skirt, a healthy pucker of the Helena Rubenstein Chinese Red lipstick her mother had strictly forbidden her to wear. She wouldn’t do anything special, just sit around at the soda fountain at the Formosa or Schwab’s or John’s Cafe drinking Cokes and reading magazines until she ran out of money, or walk up and down Highland looking at the palm trees. Sometimes she’d even spot a movie star in the flesh: George Brent working his way through the tuna salad platter at Schwab’s, Jackie Coogan reading comic books off the rack, Ann Sheridan combing her famous red hair in the backseat of a car.

  But the whole time, in a deep, dark corner of herself she scarcely dared visit, Margaret was hoping that someone would notice her. That someone important would see that she was more than just some silly teenage fan, staring and squealing and trying to get up the nerve to ask for an autograph in the little yellow leather album Doris had given her for Christmas. That just like Ann Sheridan or Joan Crawford or Diana Chesterfield, Margaret Frobisher could be a star.

  “Do me one favor, huh, kid?” Larry Julius was saying, draining the last of his coffee. “Now I’ve put the idea in your head, don’t go waltzing off to Paramount or MGM, seeing if they’ve got an eye out. You’re a lady, aren’t you?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Good. Because every girl we got at Olympus is a lady, and if she isn’t, we turn her into one. And we’ve got a saying: ‘A lady leaves the dance with the one that brung her.’ You got me?” He peered at her intently. “Say, duchess, you look pale. You feel okay?”

  “Yes. I mean … it’s just …”

  “Spit it out, kid. You ain’t cracking up on me, are you?”

  Margaret squeezed her eyes shut tight for a moment, trying to collect her thoughts. “It’s just … it can’t happen like this, can it?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like this.” Margaret gestured toward the counter. “I mean, you can’t be a schoolgirl drinking a chocolate soda one minute and a star the next. Things like that don’t happen in real life. Things like that only happen in the movies.”

  Larry Julius put on his hat. “This is Hollywood, kid. Who the hell knows the difference?”

  Amanda Farraday looked like trouble. That was what folks had been saying ever since she was a little girl back in Oklahoma.

  She was Norma then, Norma Mae Gustafson, the redheaded daughter of the town drunk. By the age of twelve she already had the kind of body that made the matrons in the front pews of the clapboard church cluck their tongues in disapproval. By the time she was thirteen they’d put that clucking to words.

  “Watch out for the Gustafson girl,” they’d say to their sons and brothers. Even their husbands. Even their fathers, if the old coots looked like they were getting any ideas. “That Gustafson girl looks like trouble.”

  They were still saying it, for all she knew, but she wasn’t around to hear them. She’d gotten so tired of hearing it that she’d run off at fourteen, with no more than the dress on her back and a pickling jar filled with cash from doing things she’d rather not recall, and by doing more of the same, and with no more in her belly most nights than grit and fear, she’d made her way west to Hollywood. But even in the movie colony, where bodies and faces like hers were scarcely in short supply, she knew folks were saying it still.

  Harry Gordon had said it, the first time they met, in the casting office in the Olympus lot. It had been just a few weeks ago, but it seemed like a year. Her skin was as soft as silk now, her copper hair sleek, her tapering fingers perfectly manicured. The body, a touch more fashionably slender than in the Oklahoma days, had been encased in a black silk dress that cost a hundred dollars. There was no trace of the rough farm girl who had drawn stares and hisses when she walked down the main road in town every day, and who had cowered on her straw-stuffed mattress every night, hoping her stepfather would come home too drunk to bother her instead of hollering about how the Bible said that since her mother had gone and died, it was Norma’s duty to take her place. She knew what he meant by that, and even now it made her shudder to think of it. She had a new name, a new identity, a new life.

  And still, Harry Gordon, the young writer once called “the fiercest and freshest voice of our age” by no less an authority than Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, had raked his eyes from the tip of her expensively shod toe to the crown of her shining hair, and murmured, “Here comes trouble.”

  She was reading for a bit role in a gangster picture he’d done some rewrites on; he—in one of the series of degrading errands he was forced to run in his role as a glorified, and gloriously overpaid, script assistant in Hollywood—was delivering the pages. She didn’t get the part, not that day.

  But she got something better. She got Harry.

  “Oh boy,” Harry had said again, after their chaste first kiss outside the Top Hat Café that night. “I’m in trouble now.”

  Funny, Amanda had thought at the time. Because in all of her eighteen years of life, the only person her astonishing looks had
ever brought trouble upon was herself.

  Well, not anymore, thought Amanda as she pulled her pearl-gray Packard convertible into Olive Moore’s pink gravel drive for what she hoped would be the very last time. From now on, things are going my way.

  It wasn’t dark yet, but the party inside Olive’s house looked as though it had been going for hours. As she entered the parlor, Amanda heard the pop of a fresh champagne cork, sharp as a gunshot, followed by a chorus of raucous cheers. A plump man in a tailcoat was sprawled across the red velvet love seat as three girls coiled around him, like serpents in satin. Another drunken customer—a small-time producer, Amanda thought—was passed out on the floor, snoring fiercely beneath a pile of feather boas. A washed-up crooner pounded out a popular tune at the white lacquered piano. He seemed to be having a little trouble keeping focused with Dot, a brassy blonde in a lurid violet gown, warbling along at the top of her lungs, although to be fair, the problem wasn’t so much with Dot’s singing as the fact that she was lying directly across the keyboard.

  “I can’t give you anything but love, baby,” Dot bellowed. “That’s the only thing I’ve plenty of, BAAAAAAABY!”

  She kicked her leg up in the air, sending an unbuckled evening slipper flying across the room, where it narrowly missed Amanda’s head.

  Amanda sighed as she ducked. She could hardly pretend to be shocked at a scene of debauchery. After three years at Olive’s house, a girl got used to anything; Lord knew she’d seen worse. But now, with her new life, and Harry, beckoning on the horizon, it all felt so pointless, so embarrassing, so dirty. Once, Olive’s house had seemed like a refuge. Now it was just another place she had to escape to get where she was going. Just like Hollywood Boulevard, and the dance hall in Nevada, and the orphanage in Denver, an unbroken line reaching all the way back to Oklahoma. Amanda was always on her way somewhere. Sometimes she thought that feeling of moving forward was the only one she trusted. She just wondered whether she’d know when she was there.