Starstruck

by Rachel Shukert

  “I’m listening,” she said quietly.

  Dane took a deep, ragged breath. “You know, I’ve imagined telling you this story many times. Now that you’re here, I don’t even know where to start.”

  “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

  “Fair enough.” He took another deep breath. “I don’t know if I ever told you this, but I was born on a farm.”

  “So was Diana,” Margo said. “Owen told me at the stables.”

  “Well, that would make sense, wouldn’t it?” Dane said drily. “Our father was a small-time farmer. My mother was a mail-order bride, of sorts. Came from Sweden with her parents when she was a kid, wound up in Missouri. Her parents died of diphtheria, and she couldn’t pay the taxes on their farm, so she answered an ad my father placed in the Kansas City Star.” He smiled. “She looked just like Diana. When she sent my father her picture, he could hardly believe his luck.”

  Margo smiled. “Did she tell you that?”

  “She never told me anything. The old lady who came over from the neighboring farm to deliver me forgot to wash her hands first. Childbed fever, they called it. My mother was dead within the week.”

  “Oh, Dane. How awful.” It was a ludicrously inadequate choice of words.

  “Diana—her name was Dinah then—was four. But from that moment on, I was her baby, and she was my second mother.”

  “And your father?”

  “My father went from being a man who liked his liquor to being the town drunk. At least, that’s what Diana said; I never knew him any different. It was Prohibition, so he brewed his own whiskey from his corn. Drank his own crop, and then some. The farm had been in the family since the Homestead Act. Then poof, it was gone.” Dane flashed a bitter grin. “We beat the foreclosures of ’twenty-nine by at least five years. The Cudahys were always pioneers.”

  “Cudahy?”

  “The family name,” Dane said. “You are speaking to Ernest Woodrow Cudahy, originally of Hillsboro, Kansas.”

  Ernie, Margo thought suddenly. “Diana called you Ernie.”

  “Always. She was never crazy about the name Dane. She thought it sounded too made-up, too fake. Do you?”

  Margo shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I’m used to it now.”

  “I’d be careful about that if I were you,” Dane said darkly. “A person can get awfully used to fake things around here. Anyway,” he continued, “after the farm debacle, Pa thought we might see how things treated us out west.”

  “And you wound up in Los Angeles,” Margo finished.

  “Right. We stayed in rented accommodations—and by that, I mean it was a flophouse. The drunks across the way gave Diana such a hard time she was afraid to go to sleep. She found work from time to time cleaning houses, and I would go along with her, and knock on all the doors in the neighborhood until we found someone who would give me a couple of dimes to do some little odd job. But any money we earned, Pa would drink right up. So eventually, we just started to spend it on ourselves. We’d go to the movies, or spend a whole day’s wages on candy. Once Diana got a seventy-five-cent tip from a house she was cleaning and she spent it all on a single lipstick. I can still see it. It came in a beautiful gold case with a little mirror inside. The way she carried on when she brought it home, you’d have thought it was a rope of diamonds.” He smiled at the memory.

  “Anyway, we’d been out here for almost a year when Pa disappeared. Went out to the bar one night and never came back. A week later a man from the city morgue showed up to ask if we could come identify his body.”

  “You must have been devastated.”

  “You know, it was almost a relief. It was just the two of us then, the way it should have been, with no one to get in our way. It certainly changed things for Diana. She was seventeen, and she was so beautiful.” Dane looked off into the distance, as though the young Diana had just materialized before him. “There was a woman named Olive Moore …”

  Olive Moore. The name sounded strangely familiar, as if Margo had heard it in a dream. “Who is Olive Moore?”

  “Someone Diana once knew. It doesn’t matter,” Dane said. “The point is that there’s always a way for a beautiful girl to make money in Hollywood. Eventually, she heard through the grapevine about a job as a singer at a nightclub on the Sunset Strip, and from there, an Olympus scout saw her and brought her in for a screen test. They signed her up as a contract player, twenty dollars a week. To us, it might as well have been a million. And after she’d built up a bit of a reputation with a few small roles, she figured this picture business was such a cinch, even her useless baby brother might as well get in on the racket.” He shook his head. “Somehow, she got me a screen test, although she didn’t tell anyone I was her brother; she wanted them to think she was recommending me on talent.”

  “And no one suspected?”

  “Why should they? Nobody knew us. She’d changed her name by then. She’s so fair, like our mother. I’m dark, like Pa. I’m younger, of course, but I was always big, so we look about the same age. She tested with me. Some early version of that same scene you and I did.”

  “Lord Gregory—”

  “And good old Lady Olivia.” He sighed. “We had a good laugh about it afterward, having to play this ridiculous love scene. But obviously, I hoped for the best. Ha. Be careful what you wish for …”

  “Because you just might get it,” Margo finished.

  “The unofficial motto of this town,” Dane said. “Next thing you know, we’re in Leo Karp’s office, where he tells us he wants me to star opposite Diana in her new picture.”

  “An Affair of the Heart.” It was one of Margo’s favorite films. She and Doris had seen it four times in the theater.

  “ ‘Just look at you two!’ ” Dane imitated Mr. Karp’s gushing tone. “ ‘So natural together! Like you’ve known each other all your lives!’ ” He shook his head in disgust. “If ever there was a time to come clean, that was it. But I don’t have to tell you how persuasive Leo Karp can be.” He gave Margo a meaningful look. “Besides, we figured he’d kick us both to the curb. And after where we’d come from, what we’d been through … Never be poor, Margo. Poverty does terrible things to you. You’ll do anything, literally anything, not to go back.”

  He shook his head sadly. “Diana was awfully clever about it, though. Whenever there was a love scene in the script—and believe me, when we first started shooting, there were a lot of them—Diana would say to the director, ‘Darling, wouldn’t it be so much sexier if we just leave it all to the imagination?’ The Hays Office never had a stauncher advocate than my sister on that picture.” Dane laughed. “It was a box-office smash. Diana was nominated for an Academy Award.”

  “America’s Most Stylish Sweethearts,” Margo said, quoting the caption from the Picture Palace cover that had graced her bedroom wall a lifetime ago.

  “You got it. We were contracted for three more pictures together. A screwball comedy, a musical, and a historical epic. All romances.” Dane looked stricken. “But Diana was making three thousand dollars a week and I was making close to that. Three thousand dollars a week. Three times as much as our father had ever made in a year.

  “We might have been able to deal with it, if it hadn’t been for Larry Julius and the press office. Remember, none of them knew the truth. Diana and I were costars, we were always out together, so why shouldn’t we be having a torrid romance? So now, not only were we supposed to act like lovers on-screen, we were supposed to keep it up offscreen as well. The box office went through the roof. Diana bought a mansion in the Hollywood Hills. I bought a stable full of horses and a garage full of cars. I had everything I’d ever dreamed of. And all I had to do was spend my life pretending to be passionately in love with my own sister. Can you believe it?”

  Margo winced. The whole thing was so craven, so cynical, and yet, after everything she’d learned of Hollywood, of the charade she’d been ordered to act out with Jimmy, so plausible. “Every word.”

&n
bsp; “I suggested staging an elaborate breakup. Letting a photographer catch me coming out of a hotel with another girl. But Diana was no dummy. The studio had invested millions of dollars in marketing us lovebirds to the unwashed masses. If she was ever going to break out of the gilded cage, it was going to have to be on the wing of someone not even Leo Karp would dare to question.”

  “Hunter Payne,” Margo whispered.

  “Things got serious fast,” Dane said. “Diana came to see me just a few days before … before she was hurt. Her eyes were shining; she was dancing around the living room like a little kid. ‘He’s going to marry me, Ernie,’ she kept saying. ‘He has to.’ I didn’t realize it at the time, I was so stupid. But it was because she was pregnant.”

  “Then what went wrong?”

  “He’s already married,” Dane said flatly. “It wasn’t like Diana to be so naïve, but desperate people believe what they want to believe. All I know is when I went back to her house to pack up some of her things, I found two telegrams from New York. The first was dated just two days before the accident.”

  “And what did it say?”

  “ ‘Get rid of it.’ ”

  Margo felt the color drain from her face. “No,” she whispered. Dane’s face was hard. “He’s succinct, you have to give him that.”

  “And the second telegram?” Margo whispered.

  “Even shorter: ‘Or else.’ It was wrapped around a money order for a thousand dollars.”

  “And you think that was the last straw?” Margo asked.

  Dane nodded. “Diana could deal with a man being callous, even cruel. But to enclose payment, as if for … services rendered”—he spat the words hatefully—“would have been too much to bear. It would have brought back a lot of painful memories, of a time when there was nothing she wouldn’t do for money. And it would have seemed to her that nothing had really changed. That no matter where she lived or what car she drove or what kind of clothes she wore, to a man like Hunter Payne she still was nothing but a little whore. She should have killed him.”

  “But instead, she tried to kill herself.”

  Dane turned to her. His gaze was so intense Margo nearly looked away, but she forced herself to meet his eyes steadily. “So now you know. And believe me, I won’t blame you if you decide you want nothing more to do with me. But at least you know why I went so crazy when I saw you with Hunter Payne.”

  “Because of what he did to Diana.”

  “Because he doesn’t deserve you,” Dane said simply. “Because you’re different, Margo. You don’t have that emptiness at your core, that terrible need that eats away at you until there’s nothing left. I had it. Diana has it. Everybody in this whole damn town has it. But not you. You don’t need anything. You’re a whole person, Margo. A real person.” He looked up at her, with a gaze that pierced her heart. “And I couldn’t bear the thought of lying to you anymore.”

  Margo’s heart was pounding. She felt as though a dam inside her had burst. “You’re wrong,” she whispered. “I need things.”

  “You do?” Dane was very close to her now. “What do you need?”

  Margo closed her eyes. There were so many ways to respond to that question, so many answers that would all be equally true.

  But for now, Margo Sterling gave Dane Forrest the only one she knew he wanted to hear.

  “You.”

  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 combed the sky. Camera flashbulbs popped. The marquee of Grauman’s Chinese Theater was ablaze with light.

  And up the crimson carpet paraded Hollywood’s brightest stars.

  Clark Gable. Carole Lombard. Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, ignoring each other, as usual. Spencer Tracy. Olivia de Havilland, gazing adoringly at Errol Flynn. Gabby Preston in white, beaming on the arm of Jimmy Molloy. Amanda Farraday close behind them, pale and wraithlike in darkest black. John Barrymore, a little unsteady on his feet. Marlene Dietrich in top hat and tails.

  Roaring with excitement at every new arrival, the teeming crowd basked in the reflected glow of the blazing marquee:

  MARGO STERLING DANE FORREST

  IN

  THE NINE DAYS’ QUEEN

  “What do you think, duchess?” Larry Julius asked as the gleaming limousine pulled up to the curb. He reached across the leather seat of the limousine to give her knee a squeeze. “Ready to face the lions?”

  She’d been speaking to journalists since the crack of dawn. Rex Mandalay himself had seen to her hair and sewn her into her gown. Congratulatory flowers practically buried the new silk brocade living room set in the bungalow. There were so many telegrams from well-wishers and social climbers littering the front step that she’d almost missed the funny little envelope at the bottom of the stack.

  It had no return address, no name, instead marked with a single initial, written in a swooping, unfamiliar hand:

  There was no note, no hint of explanation. The envelope contained a single thing, a tiny miracle. Returned to her as if by magic.

  Her little pearl pin.

  Just who had hunted it down on that Pasadena lawn, who had seen to it that the pin was delivered to her today of all days, she couldn’t begin to guess. All she knew was that it was clearly someone who cared about Margaret Frobisher very much.

  She was wearing it now, pinned inside her dress. No one but her would know it was there, pressing against her heart.

  “Are you ready, duchess?” Larry repeated.

  She peered out the window at the scene before her. Her name, blazing in lights. Dane Forrest, poised in front of the huge carved doors like a groom awaiting his bride. The sea of anxious faces staring hungrily at the car, wanting to look at her, to touch her, to see if she was made of flesh and blood like them. If she was truly real. She narrowed her eyes, and for a moment, she almost thought she saw the blurry shapes of two young girls, rapt with need and wonder, forcing their way through the crowd.

  “Yes, Larry. I’m ready.” Her sphinxlike smile was vague and benevolent and not quite of this world. It was the smile of a star.

  Larry Julius nodded to Arthur. “All right. This is it.” The chauffeur opened the car door.

  And Margo Sterling emerged into a blaze of light.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This might be the best chance I’ll ever have to quote the opening lines of the Academy Award acceptance speech I’ve been practicing since I was a child: “What a surprise! I really wasn’t expecting this. I don’t even have a speech prepared. And there are so many people to thank! I hope I won’t leave anyone out!”

  Thank you for indulging me. But there really are so many people to thank, and I really do hope I don’t leave anyone out. First among equals (of which she has few) is my beloved agent and dear friend Rebecca Friedman, without whom none of this would have happened. And by “this,” I mean everything. Gratitude beyond gratitude to my brilliant editor, Wendy Loggia, whose wisdom, insight, skill, and patience are truly wondrous to behold. And thanks to everybody at Delacorte Press, especially the lovely Krista Vitola.

  Out in the movie colony, enormous thanks to Shari Smiley, Elizabeth Newman, Kerry Foster, and the incredible Alex Block, who is more than just one of the good guys—he’s an inspiration. Thanks to my L.A. families, both biological and spiritual: Lauren Marks, Suzanne Marks, Tony Nino, Michael Nino, Ariel Shukert, and Jeff Wienir. Thanks to all the usual New York cast and crew, who know who they are, and to my parents, Marty and Aveva Shukert, who throughout my childhood never suggested that there were better ways to spend my time than staying up all night watching old movies—for example, sleeping.

  And most of all, thanks to Ben Abramowitz, my favorite leading man.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Rachel Shukert is the author of Everything Is Going to Be Great and Have You No Shame? She has been fascinated by the Golden Age of Hollywood since she w
as a girl, when she used to stay up all night watching old movies and fall asleep the next day at school. Rachel grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and graduated from New York University. She lives in New York City with her husband. Visit her at rachelshukert.com.