Starstruck

by Rachel Shukert

  But she didn’t seem to need any. She stared straight ahead, clear-eyed and unblinking, like some warrior queen fearlessly surveying the oncoming hordes. Yep, this one had some steel in her spine, all right. Steel, Larry thought suddenly. She was going to need a new name for the pictures. What about Steele?

  No, that didn’t sound right. Too masculine, too unforgiving. This dame needed something classy, something that sounded expensive. They couldn’t use Gold—for obvious reasons—or Silver …

  “Sterling,” Larry said aloud.

  She turned to him, a marvel with her clear, dry eyes. “What did you say?”

  “You need a new name. What about Sterling? Margaret Sterling.”

  “Margaret Sterling,” she said, trying it out.

  “Sounds good, right? Like one of those dames you might come across in finishing school.”

  “Margo,” she said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Margo. For the first name. It’s an old nickname of mine.…” She trailed off. “And I think it’s better. More unusual. Margo Sterling. People will remember it.”

  Larry grinned. His whole press team couldn’t have come up with anything more perfect. Boy, this kid was something else, all right. “I can already see it in lights.”

  In Olive Moore’s day, the movie magazines had been such anemic little things. Printed in black-and-white on cheap newsprint and bound as roughly as though they’d been stapled together in someone’s dirty basement. But the fresh new copies of Picture Palace and Modern Screen and all the others that now littered the surface of her mahogany desk were glossy, and filled with as many full-color glamour shots and painstakingly art-directed photo spreads as an issue of Vogue. The first week the houseboy delivered them to her office, she felt almost intimidated by their gleaming, expensive newness. Her Hollywood days were long behind her now; weeks went past when she didn’t think about them at all. The magazines seemed to bring it all back: the sting of having been left behind, the pain of seeing the world she had known and loved continuing so swimmingly without her. No wonder she’d never tried to look at them before.

  She had steeled herself to continue, and as the weeks receded into the past, the hurt did too. Besides, how else was she supposed to see how Amanda was getting on? If she was making a splash in Hollywood, setting tongues wagging and checkbooks flipping, or if she was likely to come crawling back any day now with her tail between her legs? Either way, Olive figured, she’d rather be prepared.

  So far there hadn’t been much: just a tiny cheesecake photo of Amanda in a swimsuit in Photoplay when Olympus first announced her as a new contract player and a casting roundup in Picture Palace that said Amanda would be playing a gangster’s moll in some small picture. Every once in a while, there was a blind item in one of the gossip columns mentioning a ravishing redhead in black seen out to dinner at Chasen’s or the Brown Derby, usually on the arm of some powerful man or other, which Olive would read with a kind of grim satisfaction. Good girl. Doing what I taught her. Still, they were hardly the clippings of a girl who was taking the town by storm.

  For so many girls, fame and fortune were only the beginning of the story—first-act stuff, as Amanda’s screenwriter might say. They were certainly no guarantee of a happy ending.

  Just look at poor Diana. There it was, the lead story in the week’s edition of Picture Palace:

  DIANA CHESTERFIELD OFFICIALLY DECLARED MISSING AFTER LENGTHY ABSENCE. Friends and Family Frantic over Screen Queen’s Disappearance. “We’ll Do Anything to Bring Her Home,” Vows Olympus Studios Chief, Offers Hefty Reward for Star’s Safe Return.

  Hefty reward. That was a laugh. Olive would have bet a pretty penny that old Leo Karp wouldn’t be parting with any of his money soon. The only people with any information on the whereabouts of Diana Chesterfield were the ones busily covering just what those whereabouts might be, and they were undoubtedly on the studio’s payroll already. As for anyone else who might have any pertinent information about the vanished star, the only reward they were going to see was a one-way ticket out of town, and maybe a broken leg to go with it. If they were lucky.

  Poor Diana. Olive shook her head sadly, drinking in Diana’s face, as young and lovely as the day they’d first met. It had been ages since Diana had confided in her. They’d talked about everything in those days. But Diana had left Olive behind. Just like Amanda, Olive thought. Just like everybody in this whole stinking town. Fools. Trying to outrun themselves. Thinking that if you just forgot about your past, your past would forget about you. And where did it get you? Where had it gotten Diana? She’d heard all the rumors, of course; Olive was always hungry for information where Diana was concerned. An overdose, a crack-up, even foul play: knowing Diana, they were all equally possible. Whatever it was, the fact that a story like this had been allowed to go to press confirmed its seriousness. The studio was in full damage-control mode, trying to turn lemons into lemonade. It was a classic Larry Julius move, perfected back in the twenties, when wild young stars with too much power and too much money were dropping like flies. A stopgap measure until the businessmen moved in with the talkies and realized that if you only paid a star fifty dollars a week, she couldn’t spend five hundred on cocaine, and if she did anyway, you could profit from the scandal. You ginned up the mystery for a few weeks, sold a million magazines—with a sizable kickback to the studio. In the meantime, you trotted out a few shiny new stars for the plebes to go gaga over, some young, malleable kids you could underpay and overwork, and in six months—hell, in three—no one would even remember the tragic starlet. Eventually, her story might be resolved in a three-line item (or a three-line obit) stuck in the back of a magazine or newspaper, or in a studio press release, but by then, no one would be looking for it.

  Still, there was something in the Diana story that gave Olive pause. An ugly little reference at the very end:

  In the wake of such fearful uncertainty, we must thank heaven for small mercies: at least Dane Forrest seems to be taking the disappearance of his longtime paramour in stride. As he danced and drank the night away at the Cocoanut Grove last Friday with a bevy of beauteous brunettes, a certain blonde couldn’t have seemed further from his mind.…

  What a dirty trick. Olive couldn’t help admiring the malignant smoothness of it all. Not exactly defamatory—in fact, it was probably true—but whoever had written it knew exactly what he was doing. The picture magazines, like the pictures themselves, thrived on the power of suggestion. It was a very short step from suggesting that Dane perhaps wasn’t quite as sad and concerned as he should be over Diana’s disappearance to insinuating that he might have had something to do with it.

  Had he? He’d certainly come a long way from the shy, stammering farm boy Olive had known, but even then he’d had a knack for getting himself in the damnedest heaps of trouble. Clearly, he’d gone and done it again. Somebody, perhaps somebody very powerful, had it in for Dane. She would have warned him to watch his back, but it had been years since Dane Forrest had returned one of Olive Moore’s phone calls.

  Olive turned the page. Printed in huge curling script that took up nearly half the page, the headline might as well have been accompanied by the fanfare of trumpets and the fluttering of seraphim:

  Is this the most beautiful girl

  in the United States of America?

  Olive almost laughed aloud as she read the first paragraph proclaiming the arrival of the Olympus starlet everybody in Hollywood was talking about. Margo Sterling. So this is Diana’s replacement. Quickly, she skimmed the article, written in the Olympus press office’s trademark breathless style: how the Sterling girl had been plucked from the debutante doldrums and was destined to dazzle audiences the world over with her beauty and breeding; how she was a natural honey blonde; how she loved horses, chocolate-chip ice cream, and the American way. Boilerplate stuff, really, with scarcely a word changed from the press release, and so boring. In Olive’s day, the studio had claimed that all the young actresses were
lost Russian princesses or the escaped concubines of evil Arabian sheikhs. Larry Julius is slipping, she thought with a snort as she turned the page to reveal the girl’s photograph.

  Her jaw dropped.

  Hands shaking, Olive turned frantically back to the article, this time devouring each word with rabid attention. The name meant nothing, of course; Olive herself had been christened after the first tree that fat producer had seen when he’d looked out the window of his office. But the details: A California native. A dizzy debutante. They were maddeningly vague and fictional, but then … that face. That searching, hopeful, lovely face. A face she somehow felt she knew as well as her own.

  Olive closed the magazine. She walked over to the bar, poured herself a giant glassful of sherry from the decanter, and drank it off in one gulp. Her hands were still shaking, so she poured herself another one and drank that too.

  Then she walked back to her desk and picked up the telephone. “Burbank 6452, please.” She waited as the operator connected her, nervously fiddling with the little gold-and-pearl circle pin she wore pinned to her collar.

  “Amanda, dear!” she said, when the girl answered. “How lucky to find you in. This is Olive Moore.… Now, there’s no need to take that tone, I simply want to see how you are.… Good, I’m very glad to hear it. Now, listen, dear, I needed to ask you something.… No, not that.… You remember I told you that at some point I might need a favor from you? Because I’m afraid that time has come.” Olive gave her gold pin a final twist. “I need you to find out everything you can about this Margo Sterling.”

  There was only one thing wrong with the famous Cocoanut Grove nightclub at the Ambassador Hotel in Hollywood: it looked so much like something out of the movies, it was hard to remember it was a real place.

  Swaying palm trees strung with thousands of tiny white lights seemed to grow directly out of the floor, forming a sparkling green canopy beneath the graceful Moorish arches. Beside the polished dance floor was a mirrored stage, complete with a twenty-one-piece orchestra and a beautiful singer draped in silver sequins and blue gardenias. The midnight-blue ceiling was painted to look like the night sky, complete with hundreds of twinkling stars. But the real stars, of course, were below, gliding between tables, glittering on the dance floor. Women dripping with diamonds, men in dinner jackets as white as their gleaming toothpaste smiles.

  It was a beautiful room filled with beautiful people, and tonight, for the first time, Margo Sterling was one of them. She practically had to pinch herself to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. If only Gabby weren’t in such a foul mood, she thought, everything would be perfect.

  From the moment Margo had moved into the small bungalow on the studio lot, Gabby Preston had been a constant presence, phoning several times a day with some new piece of gossip, turning up at the door at odd hours bearing various small “housewarming” gifts: a bouquet of orange blossom cut from the trees outside, a lemon cake baked by Viola, even a worn record player and a stack of old 78s. Margo was grateful. The little gifts and incessant chatter made the stark bungalow, with its smudged walls and furnishings that had seen generations of hopefuls come and go, seem almost like a home. Better yet, they helped to shut out the increasingly terrifying fact that she had walked out of her safe life with no idea what the future would hold. She was on her own now, but with Gabby there, she didn’t feel so alone.

  Still, Gabby’s high-octane personality could be a little exhausting, and thanks to Dr. Lipkin and his miracle pills, her grasp on the concept of waking hours, as opposed to sleeping hours, was creative at best. It had been barely light that morning when Gabby had turned up at Margo’s door, practically climbing out of her skin with excitement. “Did you hear? We’re going out together on an engagement tonight! Aren’t you excited?”

  “I might be,” Margo had said, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, “if it weren’t five o’clock in the morning.”

  “But a real engagement! I could just die!”

  “Wait.” Margo scowled sleepily in confusion. “An engagement? You’re getting married?”

  “Honestly, Margo, sometimes I think you don’t know anything. An engagement is a night out on the town. The studio arranges it all. They choose your escort, dress you up in the most gorgeous gown, and send you out to one of the glamorous, exclusive places where all the stars go, and the next day your picture is in all the papers and everyone is talking about you. I’ve been on one or two before, of course, but only early in the evening, and always with Viola, which makes it all about as magical as a sack of lard. But not tonight! Tonight she’s got to stay at home and knit, and guess who my escort is going to be!”

  Margo blinked.

  Gabby couldn’t wait. “No, you’ll never guess, I’ll tell you. It’s Jimmy! Jimmy Molloy!”

  “Well, that’s just swell,” Margo said. Swell was about as enthusiastic as she could get before breakfast.

  “Swell isn’t the word for it! It’s positively stupendous! I told you they’re putting us together! It’ll be announced any day, I’m sure of it. I can see the headlines now.” Eyes shining, Gabby swept her hand through the air, across an imaginary front page. “Olympus’s Singing Sweethearts Blow Up Box Office. No,” she interrupted herself. “Singing Steadies. That’s better than sweethearts, don’t you think? More grown-up.”

  “Do I have an escort?”

  “Don’t you ever open your mailbox? Of course you do. You’re being escorted by Larry Julius, and don’t you dare look disappointed,” she said, wagging a finger at Margo’s obvious dismay. “You don’t think he bothers with just anyone, do you? The studio couldn’t give you a bigger stamp of approval if you walked in on the arm of Mr. Karp himself. By this time tomorrow, we’re going to be the two most envied girls in Hollywood.” Beaming, she hugged herself. “I could die of happiness!”

  But now that they were at the Cocoanut Grove, Gabby looked anything but happy. Her small face was a thundercloud under a hairdo of beribboned sausages as she reached over to seize a handful of the silken skirt of Margo’s dress, nearly knocking over the waiter who was opening the champagne for their table.

  “That’s pretty,” Gabby grumbled.

  In truth, Margo’s dress was a lot more than pretty. After the banana dress incident, Margo had been a little apprehensive at seeing Sadie on her doorstep with a garment bag, but all her doubts had vanished the moment she saw the bias-cut satin gown with a plunging back in a shade of silvery blue that matched her eyes. The studio had lent her a delicate sapphire bracelet with earrings to match, and to one of the shoulder straps, done in a contrasting black velvet, she had affixed her little pearl pin. It was startlingly chic, more like something out of a fashion magazine than what your typical flashy Hollywood starlet would wear.

  “Yours is nice too,” Margo said, with as much enthusiasm as she could muster. Gabby had been coaxed, clearly against her will, into a frilly concoction of apricot tulle with a stiff crinoline skirt, the kind of dress a child might wear to a fancy party. “You look really pretty.”

  “Don’t patronize me. I look like one of those creepy legless dolls Viola hides the extra roll of toilet paper under in the bathroom.” Gabby’s face crumpled. “Why do they make me wear these stupid baby dresses? Why can’t I have a dress like yours?”

  “Image, darling,” Jimmy Molloy answered, politely holding out to the girls his gold cigarette case, which Larry Julius promptly declined on their behalf. “You can’t go full glamour like the duchess here. You’re Everyone’s Kid Sister. But don’t you worry, honey pie. There’s a lot of money in being America’s Sweetheart. Isn’t that right, Margo?” He winked at her.

  Margo wasn’t quite sure what she thought of Jimmy. He was certainly awfully friendly, kissing her hand when they’d met and making a big show of pretending his eyeballs were popping out of his head when he saw her, like a wolf in a Tex Avery cartoon. But there was something a little bit strange about the way he never seemed to turn off.

  “And, Gabby, you just be a go
od girl and do what the nice men tell you,” Jimmy said, chucking her on the chin. “Before you know it, you’ll have enough dough in the oven to get yourself a Schiaparelli for every day of the week.”

  “I don’t need a shopperelly.” Gabby pouted. “I just want a pretty dress.”

  “A Schiaparelli is a dress, silly.” Grinning, Jimmy curled his finger below his nose like a Gallic mustache. “She is all zee rage with the haute monde in gay Paree.”

  “Oat mound? What on earth is an oat mound?”

  “Haute monde. It means ‘high society’ in French,” Margo said, instantly regretting it when she saw the humiliated look on her friend’s face. The last thing she wanted to do was show Gabby up in front of Jimmy. “They probably only put you in that dress because they couldn’t find anything else to fit you,” she added quickly. “You’ve lost so much weight.”

  Gabby’s face lit up. “Do you really think so?”

  “I know so. If I didn’t know better, I’d be worried.”

  Gabby beamed, smoothing the cloth of her dress over her svelte waist. Her hands, Margo noticed, shook slightly. “Yeah, well, now my chest is gone too. Just my luck. As if I didn’t look young enough. Next time you see me, they’ll probably have me in a baby bonnet.”

  “Look over there, Margo,” Larry Julius interjected. With a subtle tilt of his cigarette, he indicated a raven-haired beauty draped in white silk and about fifteen ropes of huge black pearls gliding toward an adjacent table. “Hedy Lamarr. See the way she moves? Now, that’s the way you make an entrance.”

  “And look over there.” Gabby smirked. Obviously, Viola had never told her it was rude to point. “There’s that Amanda Farraday.”