“My first time?” Quickly, she dipped her head, praying that Harry wouldn’t see the panic in her eyes. The memories came unbidden: the dull thud of her stepfather’s heavy tread in the hall, the click of the doorknob as it turned. No, she told herself firmly. That happened to someone else. But the other times, the years at Olive’s house, well … maybe if she just tried, if she could just forget hard enough, a year from now they would have happened to someone else too.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Harry was saying, although he was blushing. “With the right person, it can be beautiful. Being with someone who”—he hesitated—“who really knows you. Who knows everything about you. And loves you, for everything that you are.”
Everything? Amanda thought ruefully.
“I want to give that to you, Amanda,” Harry was saying. His open, hopeful face shone with love. “When you’re ready. I want to be your first.”
Leave it to Harry Gordon to want the one thing she couldn’t give him.
The Olympus soundstage was a huge, windowless barn big enough to hold an airplane, or maybe two. Painted black all over. Lights dangled from the ceiling; wires were taped haphazardly across the floor. Men swarmed all around, tools strapped to their belts, fussing and cursing over towering pieces of odd machinery the likes of which Margaret had never seen before. This is the place, she thought with a shiver of terrified excitement. The place that will decide my fate.
A stagehand directed her to the makeshift wardrobe department, a corner sectioned off with some curtains and a sheet of plywood. In a folding chair beside a single full-length mirror sat a middle-aged woman with a cigarette between her lips, a tape measure draped around her neck, and a red scarf tied around her head, its ends pointing upward like the ears of an alarmed terrier.
“Yummrrtsst?” the woman said as Margaret tiptoed inside.
“I’m sorry?”
With great reluctance, the woman removed the cigarette from her mouth and set it carefully on the edge of an ashtray already overflowing with lipstick-smeared butts. “You the test?” She raked her eyes over Margaret yet managed to betray not the barest flicker of interest.
“Yes. I’m—”
“You’re late.”
“I’m sorry. The gentleman who was showing me around was called away, and I’m afraid I got a little bit lost.” And a little bit almost killed by a projectile telephone, she thought, but it seemed wiser not to mention that.
“You shouldn’t be late. They don’t like it.”
“No, but …” Margaret felt her cheeks begin to color. “It’s not too … I mean, they haven’t called off the test, have they?”
The woman shrugged. “As far as I know, I put you in a dress, I send you out there, I go to lunch. Next time, don’t be late.”
“I won’t be, I promise. I’m Margaret, by the way.” Margaret extended her hand. “Margaret Frobisher.”
“Good for you. My name’s Sadie. Sadie the Wardrobe Lady. It rhymes, so you can remember it.” With a grunt of effort, the woman heaved herself from her chair and over to a clothes rack. Unzipping a large garment bag, she pulled out a floor-length yellow sprigged muslin with enormous leg-of-mutton sleeves and a stiff collar, the kind of dress that was in fashion when Margaret’s grandmother—or maybe her great-grandmother—was young. “Here you go. They wanted you in something period, so I pulled period.”
“This?” Gingerly fingering the bright yellow fabric, she looked down at her chic fitted suit. “Are you sure I can’t just wear what I have on?”
Sadie grinned, exposing a set of magnificent gold molars. “Not unless you don’t mind looking like your armpits just went to the bathroom.”
Margaret crossed her hands defensively over her chest, hiding the damp patches of nervous sweat she could suddenly feel under her arms. “It’s hot today.”
“Honey, I don’t judge. The things I see in this place? Please. You could walk in here with a lizard’s tail, I wouldn’t blink an eye. Besides, what is it they say? Horses sweat, men perspire …”
“Ladies only glow,” Margaret finished. It was something her mother said. Oh God. Mother. How was she ever supposed to have her suit cleaned without her mother finding out? She poked at the yellow dress again. “Are you sure it’ll fit?”
“Eh, you girls are all the same size.” Expertly, she hustled Margaret out of her blue suit and hat and into the dress. Margaret looked at herself miserably in the mirror. The lacy collar was dangerously tight. She was nervous enough without worrying about being strangled to death by her costume. And the sleeves … well, the sleeves were something else. The sleeves looked like zeppelins ready to take flight. If she could somehow manage to set them on fire, she could go on Halloween as the Hindenburg disaster.
“She is almost ready?” Without bothering to knock—although to be fair, Margaret thought, on what door?—a little old man stuck his head through the dressing room curtains.
“Just about,” Sadie replied.
“Good. Get her out here, please. We have very little time.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Kurtzman.”
Tell Kurtzman you need him to direct. Margaret suddenly remembered what Larry Julius had said on the phone that day. “You’re Raoul Kurtzman? The director?”
“Quite so. At your service.” He gave her a short bow, punctuated by a smile that did not quite reach his eyes. Margaret had always imagined a movie director as an imperious figure, the sort to crack a riding crop against his polished boots as he strode around the set, haughtily barking orders at his cowed underlings. But the small bespectacled figure standing before her, his remaining strands of white hair plastered against his skull, spoke softly in a thick foreign accent that made him difficult to understand.
“I’m so sorry about being late—” Margaret began.
The director silenced her with a hand. “This is not what she is wearing, surely?”
“Yep. She really looks like her, don’t she? More than any of the others.” Like who? Margaret thought. What others?
“My dear woman, she looks like a banana.”
Sadie put her hands on her hips. “Look, Mr. Kurtzman, I ain’t no Edith Head. You said period, I gave you period. Period.”
“Surely we have something more appropriate. One of the original Chesterfield costumes, perhaps.”
“Chesterfield? You mean Diana?” The words were out before Margaret could stop them, but neither Sadie nor Kurtzman seemed to be paying the slightest attention.
“Mr. Mandalay doesn’t want those used for tests,” Sadie said.
“Something else, then. Something more … how do you say it? Sedate.” He shuddered. “I just can’t bear the abomination of this yellow on the screen.”
“Then I guess you’re in luck,” Sadie replied testily, “because the last time I checked, in America, the pictures is still in black-and-white.”
Mr. Kurtzman let out a truly majestic sigh. “Very well, Sadie. I’ve no wish to waste any more time on these trivialities. You, Fräulein …”
“Frobisher,” Margaret said quickly. “Margaret Frobisher.”
Again, he seemed not to register the fact that she had spoken. “Anyway. Here is the scene you must play.” He held up a packet of pink carbon-copied pages. “You are in the role of Lady … what’s she called … Lady Olivia.” He gazed at Margaret impassively over his half-moon glasses. “A most tragic character. At this moment in the scene she is making her eternal goodbye to Lord Gregory, who is her lover, with whom she shares a great passion. You know what I mean by this passion? You have felt this before?”
Margaret frowned, remembering those few minutes on the golf course with Phipps McKendrick. She’d been awfully excited—even passionate—about the idea of kissing him before it happened, but once it did, it had been sort of horrible, really. Having to sit there pushing his hands back from places they didn’t belong while his tongue just lay there against the top of her mouth like a slab of wet sponge. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Hmm.
” Raoul Kurtzman looked unconvinced. “Well, Lady Olivia has a great passion for her lover, but her evil guardian has falsely accused him of murder.”
“Oh no!”
“Oh yes. He says if you go through with the wedding, your lover goes free; if not, he will die. But they have deceived you, and even after your marriage your lover still rots in jail. You are thinking this is the last time you will ever see him, for tomorrow he must meet the executioner and bravely die.”
“And in the end? Is he saved?”
Raoul Kurtzman shrugged again. “At the last moment, the king pardons him, the evildoers are punished, and the lovers sail off together to the New World.”
Margaret shivered with delight. What a romantic story! Exactly the kind of picture she and Doris would blow their weekly allowance seeing three times in the theater. “It sounds wonderful.”
“It’s garbage,” Raoul Kurtzman said. “But you must make me believe it. And then you will be a big star.” He dropped the papers in her lap. “We roll in fifteen minutes. Find a way to break my heart.”
Two hours later, Margaret had come to the sad realization that if she was breaking Raoul Kurtzman’s heart, it was for all the wrong reasons.
Not that she wasn’t trying. But every time he called action, it seemed she was looking into the wrong camera, or looking too directly at the right one. It was as though she’d been thrown headfirst into the deep end of a pool. Sink or swim. And Margaret was definitely not swimming.
“Chin down!” Through his director’s megaphone, Raoul Kurtzman’s soft voice had transformed into a menacing bellow. “Now turn your head to the right. Your other right! And don’t forget to hit your mark.”
The lights were blinding. In the glare, she could barely make out the short flight of steps she was supposed to walk down, let alone her “mark,” the tiny cross of red tape on the floor she was supposed to stand on to make sure she was correctly framed in the shot. The soundstage was boiling hot. She could feel the sweat pouring down her forehead.
“No squinting! What is this with your hand over your eyes?” Kurtzman shouted through his microphone. “I assure you, Fräulein, there are no Indians coming over the horizon! Oh, cut. I said, cut!”
And so the huge camera would have to shudder to stop, and start again with a labored whir, and the kid with the slate board would storm out to announce another take while glaring at Margaret as though she’d just murdered his dog.
The last thing anyone seemed concerned with was her actual acting. The director himself offered her little guidance in that capacity except to point out where the cue cards were and ask her, somewhat disconcertingly, if she could read.
“You’d be surprised,” he had muttered darkly, in response to her puzzled nod. “And remember, you must speak softly. This is not the theater, you understand? You must take care not to overpower this mike.”
“Mike?” she asked innocently. “Is he the actor who I’ll be playing the scene with?”
That had given them all a nice, cruel laugh. But in fact, the person with whom she was playing her ludicrously romantic scene was not an actor at all. Instead, reading the role of Lord Gregory was a morbidly obese man named Elmer, who sat in a severely overtaxed folding chair just off camera, haltingly speaking Lord Gregory’s florid lines in a kind of high-pitched whine, like a mortally wounded Mickey Mouse.
“Oh, Lord Gregory,” she intoned, trying desperately to ignore the fact that her scene partner was picking his nose as industriously as if he were digging for diamonds. “How I loved you. How I still—”
“Your eyes are unfocused!” Kurtzman shouted. “It is ruining the shot. Look at Elmer. Speak to Elmer.”
Dane Forrest, Margaret thought with every fiber of her being. Pretend Elmer is Dane Forrest. But it was to no avail. After eighteen takes, it seemed as if Elmer were everywhere. His voice was stuck in her ear like the refrain of some horrible song. She was beginning to forget that she had ever seen a man besides Elmer in her entire life.
“One more take,” Kurtzman said. “Then we are out of time.”
The sullen boy with the slate came forward. “Frobisher screen test, take nineteen,” he said to the camera.
“Lights,” Kurtzman called. “Camera.”
“Rolling,” came the response.
Margaret took a hoarse breath and pressed her hands against her tight bodice, hoping to massage away the butterflies. Come on, she thought. Make this one count.
“And … action.”
“Gregory!” She rushed down the stairs, nailing her mark. Triumph! “Oh, my darling, what have they done to you?”
There was a horrible popping sound as a shower of sparks fell to the stage, and the room went black.
“Cut! Damn!” Kurtzman shouted. “Damn, damn, damn!”
“Blown fuse,” came an irritated voice from somewhere high in the rafters. “We’ve got to fix it before we keep shooting.”
Kurtzman groaned. “How long?”
“Ten minutes, maybe fifteen.”
“All right.” Sighing, Kurtzman raised the megaphone to his lips. “Fifteen, everyone. Strict fifteen. Then we come back and put this thing out of its misery.”
There was a fresh burst of activity as the crewmen descended ladders, lit cigarettes, wound and unwound great coils of snaking cord. In the bustle, no one seemed to notice the small forlorn figure in yellow quietly making her way to the door.
She knew she should go back to the dressing room. Go over her lines, walk through her blocking, touch up her makeup, anything that might help keep her most cherished ambition from slipping forever from her grasp.
But all Margaret wanted was to take a last long look at Olympus before she lost her chance to be a part of it.
I’ll be like a camera, she thought as she walked outside, breathing deeply in the orange-scented air. She would make a memory of the towering stages and mysterious equipment and the people moving swiftly and purposefully, each with an indispensible part to play, and remember how she’d almost been one of them. Her own private movie she could watch in her mind’s eye when she was back in Pasadena, feeling her soul wither from the inside out, slowly and fragrantly, like fruit left too long on the vine. She could close her eyes and see Olympus, and the image would last her the rest of her life. Then the tears came thick and fast, and she couldn’t see anything at all.
“And they say it never rains in Southern California.”
The man’s voice was so strangely familiar that Margaret opened her eyes.
And her jaw dropped.
It was Dane Forrest.
Dane Forrest, the movie star.
Dane Forrest, whose glossy eight-by-ten photo hung above her bed at home.
Dane Forrest, who had featured in practically every daydream she’d ever had to do with getting married—and more than a few that had been a lot less ladylike.
Dane Forrest, the lover and rumored fiancé of the mysterious Diana Chesterfield.
And here he was, talking to her.
“You … you’re …”
“Too much of a gentleman to walk past a lady in distress without offering some form of assistance. Or maybe just an irredeemable busybody you should tell to get lost. But either way”—he pulled a large white handkerchief from his pocket and held it out to her—“I thought you could use this.”
Margaret accepted the handkerchief and held it against her face. Limes, she thought. It smells like limes. And pine needles. And something else, something dark and manly that she couldn’t quite identify and wasn’t sure she ought to. “Thank you. That’s very kind.”
“You mind?” He sat down on the empty spot on the bench next to her.
She had only seen him once before in color, that night outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater, when he’d looked as if he’d rather be anywhere else in the world. The night Diana went missing, she thought. Close up, his dark hair looked lighter and softer, falling over his forehead in a boyish wave. Without the heavy makeup of the screen, his skin was ros
y and deeply tanned. Margaret had always thought his eyes were blue, but as the light fell over his face she could see that they were green, shot through with a golden hazel.
“Not going great, huh?” Dane said.
“What?”
“The screen test.”
She gasped. “How did you know?”
“Well, I know what going great looks like, and believe me, this isn’t it. Unless you’re one of those Method actors from New York and you’re just gearing yourself up for the big waterworks by reliving the day your beloved goldfish died.”
“Not that.” Margaret smiled in spite of herself. “I meant the screen test.”
“Well, you’re on stage fourteen, aren’t you?” Dane gave her one of his famous grins and gestured toward the number on the wall of the soundstage. “Screen tests are about the only time they get this old ruin up and running. And the dress, well …” He grinned again. “Let’s just say that’s a very screen test dress.”
“It’s awful, isn’t it?” Margaret looked at the soaking handkerchief, streaked with sooty smudges of mascara. “I must look awful.”
“You think I would have stopped if you did?”
“You’re teasing me.”
“Would that I were so clever. But actually, it’s just dumb luck my handkerchief and I managed to happen by. I drove in this morning from Malibu, clearheaded, lines learned, only to find out the shooting schedule on my latest desert epic has run into a bit of a sandstorm, if you will.”
“Not The Pharaoh’s Serpent?” Margaret had read all about Dane’s new movie in Picture Palace. He was supposed to play an archaeologist who uncovered a jeweled serpent that sent him back to the time of the ancient Egyptians.
“That’s right. Please don’t tell me you’re some kind of Hollywood insider.”
“I just read the trades, that’s all,” Margaret said proudly.
“And you seemed like such a nice girl.” Dane shook his head. The soft forelock of hair fell into his eyes, and Margaret had to fight the urge to smooth it back with her fingers. “Well, what the trades won’t tell you,” Dane continued, “is that von Steinbach decided to hold up the next three days of production on account of the slave girl costumes weren’t up to snuff. Although if you ask me, I think the problem was the slave girls themselves. No prospects for old Steinbach there.”
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