CHAPTER 4
We Cover the Studios: If you like the livelier things in life, this is your meat—some authorized eavesdropping on the sets.
—Photoplay, November 1940
I walked Rosemary’s hill for more than a week before she was found. After the cops dug up her body and smoothed the dirt—after it was flat again—that’s when I stepped around it. I came and left by the club’s side door, and I entered the dorms through the kitchen, but I’d gotten that dirt on my shoes, and dirt like that doesn’t wash off. I already had blood on those shoes, and now dirt, too.
The next morning it didn’t matter. I didn’t need shoes. We shot The Lady Eve on location in the Los Angeles Arboretum, by a pond edge with a skiff and Hank Fonda balanced inside. I was wedged between leafy cannas and a queen palm, behind a wood box that Paramount publicist Miles Abbott said held a snake but sat with lid open, empty. I wore full body makeup and a bandeau top. I carried a spear, and through pepper trees I could see the horses run at Santa Anita. Deep hoof thuds from the racetrack next door rose in the arboretum through my bare feet.
“. . . and I want that snake back, now. You—Amazon Girls. Eyes off Seabiscuit. Bet horses on your own time.”
What snake? I stood in a line of ten Amazon Girls. We all watched Hank in his Amazon gear. Khaki breeches, pith helmet. A beautiful man. Something moved at my feet, and I looked down.
That snake. My grass patch. Little snake flecks stuck dull on the grass at my feet. They caught sun and sparkled. Emma the snake slid by the cannas and disappeared into a fern bank.
From the skiff in the pond, Hank shouted, pointing. “Left, left! Here, Abbott—behind the rock.” Abbott ran to a rock, and I saw Emma’s quick tail flash. Hank called from the skiff, “Abbott! No, stage right. Go slow—she’s shedding. Or molting. What the hell it’s called.”
Then I saw Joe the cop. Sun shone off his black hair. He wore shades, and his cheekbones looked high and shiny, like the Indians I’ve seen on street curbs in Tijuana. Joe wasn’t a cop today. He wore security brown and a Paramount cap.
“Why are you here?” He stopped two feet from me, too close. “After last night. You couldn’t take a day?”
“You think Abbott would give me a day off?”
“Your best friend died.”
“Yeah. Step back, I’m on my mark here. I can’t move. A little more.” I pointed at Hank in the skiff. “You block my view.”
Joe, night cop, thought I didn’t care about Rose. He thought last night was nothing for me, a missed show, no tips. He thought I woke this morning excited to ride the Paramount van from Hollywood to almost the mountains, one girl whispering to another, all looking at me without really looking. He didn’t see that Rose was beside me on the van. She stood next to me in the jungle. Her green neck sputtered blood, and when I turned to her, she vanished.
“Why do you act strange?” he said. “The other girls hate you. These other girls.” The extras, he meant. The Amazons beside me. “If their best friend died, do you think they’d be here today?”
Yes. Maybe they all had dead friends beside them. I couldn’t tell. I knew not one would miss film time and the chance to wear a bandeau in front of Hank Fonda. And what if she did miss? Back to Central Casting and cattle calls and crowd scenes in Air Corps training films. Better to be haunted than looking for a job.
Preston Sturges, director, sat in his chair at the pond. He drank from a flask and yelled to actor William Demarest, “Bill! Before she throws the spear, kick her.”
“Kick her? I won’t kick a woman!”
“She’s not a woman, she’s an Amazon. It’ll be funny,” Sturges said. “You kick her and growl, you know how you do, and say, ‘I’ve got enough woman trouble.’ Then Sweetie puts the wreath on your neck.”
“I’m not kicking a woman.”
“Don’t really kick her,” Sturges said. “Just half-kick her. Then say, ‘I’ve got enough woman trouble.’”
“Sure, and who picks me up when the Amazon kicks back?”
“Growl like that, Bill. Perfect. Where’s the snake?”
Lost snake in the Amazon. Joe leaned in, bent so his lips touched my ear, and his touch made me shudder and wheeze, and he whispered, “I’ll arrest you for murder. At the end of the murderess hall is the door. You only go through that door once. The gas clicks on.”
“There’s the snake.”
“Where?” He jumped.
I’d left my shoes twenty feet from my mark. I had blood on those shoes. Rose’s blood, from what happened on Halloween. Joe would arrest me and take my shoes and find Rose’s blood. He’d match the blood type. He’d take my fingerprints, and he’d match my prints to the room where Rose bled. I’d touched the room all over. Glass, window frame, ladder. Fingerprints and blood. They didn’t mean anything yesterday, before Rose was found. They didn’t mean much this morning, when dead Rose followed me on the van and floated behind cannas and palm trees. But now, if they led to a hall and a gas chamber at the end, the shoes and prints said I was her killer.
Get rid of the shoes. The blood wouldn’t be noticed unless I wore the shoes. They were black, and Rose’s blood had seeped into the crease between leather and crepe sole. I could see the stains if I looked close, and if Joe arrested me, he’d look at everything I’d worn to the Amazon. I couldn’t wipe my prints off the glass and the ladder, too late, but I’d get rid of the shoes.
And then what, walk out of the Amazon barefoot? Joe would find the shoes.
Buy more shoes with no money?
I’d have to steal.
“You’re pushing,” said the Amazon on my left. She hit me with her spear. “You’re blocking Hank. Where’s your mark?”
Through trees in front of me I saw the parking lot, trucks and vans, a pile of stuff we’d left at the edge of the pond trail. A line of shoes, ten pairs, mine with blood in the cracks. My throat had closed, my chest forced little breaths out and in, fast. I’d steal another girl’s shoes.
Not the Career Girls’. They’d know it was me right off, because they hated me. And they never wore black shoes like mine. Their shoes always matched their skirts, like they both dyed their shoes in a big Career Girl pot.
I dropped my spear and hunted for Emma, pretended to hunt for Emma, in back of the Amazons.
Amazon: “Get to your mark.”
Amazon: “He’ll see you.”
Amazon: “Let her get caught.”
They hated me. Stany was my friend, no one knew why, and now a dead girl floated around, so they hated me more. I cut through the trees at the far end of the Amazon line, through two scratchy bushes and rocks that made me hop on each leg. Down by the clearing, Abbott ran between shrubs and palm trunks. Snake here? Snake there? Preston and Bill Demarest argued. And Hank floated in his little boat. Joe. Where was Joe?
I crouched by the pond trail. Each girl had a handbag or sack, a brush, lunch maybe, a pair of shoes on top.
Shoes! It was like a street market. Femme Fatale? Her shoes had fat heels and a buckle with rhinestones. I needed shoes like mine so I could exchange, not steal exactly. Shoes like the Wallflowers’ or Old Maid’s.
No, not the Old Maid’s. Her shoes sat like gray boxes. They hooked on the sides. No man would marry those shoes.
Wallflowers, then. They both had black shoes, one with ankle straps like mine but cuter than mine and newer, and that Wallflower wore glasses, so she’d see half what she needed to. I checked the Amazon line, all girls with spears up, heads down, on snake watch. I lifted my shoes in one hand and duck-walked the shoe line to the Wallflower’s pile. I squatted and grabbed her shoes. Nice shoes, shiny. It hurt to hold them because I had a long, red scab on my palm. A hurt palm, from Halloween.
“The snake’s over here?” Joe stood behind me. I hadn’t heard him come. “Snake in your shoes?” Joe asked. He squatted beside me. He put one hand on my back, above the bandeau, on top of brown makeup base, over two deep scars that rose and sank in skin globs. I have two scars on
my back, souvenirs from my one date with an old friend, and Joe rubbed each of them with his hand. Tears hit the brown base at my eyes, and I wiped them. Now my eyes stung. My chest burned from wheezing, and I had tight skin. My skin stretched under Joe’s hand until I thought it would split, from Joe’s hand out, to each shoulder and around.
He took the Wallflower’s shoes and flipped them. He showed me their insides. “See? No snake. What’s the big C written in here? What are you doing with two pairs?”
“Hold it.” Abbott’s voice, close. “Don’t move. I got her. Farm Girl, out of line. Don’t move, I said. Here—nice Emma, here—Preston, I got her. Got her.”
I dropped my old shoes on the Wallflower’s bag and I stood. I pretended I could breathe.
“Goddamn snake,” Abbott said.
Across the clearing Preston Sturges waved a hand to the pond. “Hanker,” he said. “Ready to shoot?”
Hank waved from the bobbing skiff. All ready in the Amazon.
In front of me, Abbott unwrapped Emma from his arm. He knelt and coiled her in the empty box by my feet. I shifted, and one of my feet hit the box. Abbott kept one hand on Emma and looked at my foot, then up my brown leg, the split skirt, then tummy, bandeau, hair snood, hot warrior face. He frowned. “Don’t move again. Bad enough I have to run after a snake.”
“Ladies!” Sturges yelled into a megaphone. “Lift those spears. You’re getting kicked.”
Through the palms, through the grass, I saw my bag trailing ankle straps. New black crepe wedgies, smudged from the arboretum walk.
* * *
Back at the Gardens in my dorm room, my new bedmate, Madge, answered the hall phone. I had a new bedmate one day after Rose was dug up. No weeds growing here, no sir, not at the Florentine Gardens. We replace girls every day.
I recognized the new girl from the Amazon. She pulled double duty, Paramount and revue line, like other girls at the Gardens. In my room Career Girls shared the second mattress, and a Wallflower slept somewhere downstairs. Now Madge complained, “I get the bad luck bed where a goddamn dead girl slept. Stany’s on the phone. I won’t be your secretary. It’s Stany.” She rubbed Amazon base off her hairline. She pulled the Amazon snood off her hair. She’d told me she was brunette, but I saw puddle brown. I picked up the phone in the hallway.
“Are you standing or sitting down?” Stany’s voice was still new to me, low and smooth.
“Standing,” I said. Every time Stany called, I felt sick and nervous.
“Sit on the floor then. There’s news.”
“Okay, I’m on the floor.” I stood on the hall linoleum. At the hall’s end was a door, like in Murderess Hall. This locked door led to a third floor deck. Someone stood outside on the deck, rattling the knob.
“You’re sitting?”
“I said so.”
“Rosemary was strangled.”
I leaned on the wall. “How do you know?”
“I told you to sit down. Now you’re all weak, aren’t you? Penny, if I suggest that you do something, listen.”
“Strangled?” My hand rubbed the wall. Cracked plaster, cold. Beige paint I could flick off with my nails. Rattle rattle, the doorknob at the end of the hall.
“Maybe wire. Cut her bad. There’s more. I wasn’t on the schedule today, so I thought, hey, make use of my time. What’s the most interesting thing that’s happened this week? Last night, right? And how can I follow that up? I went to the cop station and talked to Detective Conejos. He’s the guy—”
“The detective.”
“Good for you. I talked to him and do you know, he believes me now. He knows who I am. Our friend Joe the cop told him about me. Conejos politely asked if I’d like to watch the autopsy.”
“He let you watch?”
“Perks of a film star. I’ll tell you about it on the way.”
“What way?”
But she’d hung up.
In my room Madge had kicked off her shoes and sat Indian-style on the Career Girls’ mattress. She had fingers in her mouth, ripping off cuticles, little blood pearls around her nails. “Stany wants something from you. Aren’t you worried?”
“What choice do I have?”
“No choice at all. You’ve got to be friends with her. I just think you’d be worried.”
“I won’t tell you,” I said.
“I know. But you’re worried, right? I would be. Downright fucking scared.” She talked odd. Her mouth opened wide, and she made city sounds between sentences: little snorts at the back of her throat that sounded like a car low on gas. She was still talking when Stany parked on Hollywood Boulevard and honked. We heard the horn clear through the walls of our building, third floor, through peeling beige paint, a good two hundred feet from the sidewalk. Nobody told her to stop honking because they saw who she was. Perks of a film star.
CHAPTER 5
Before that pearly freshness of the American girl’s face came an enduring tradition of fastidious care of her person.
—Photoplay, November 1940
Stany kept her left foot on the gas and her right foot on the brake. She didn’t have a third foot for the clutch, so she wiggled the stick between gears. She drove a Ford coupe with the bonnet down, cream-colored, like a good blouse. Her hair looked red against the car’s paint. She leaned across and pushed out the passenger door for me.
“Conejos is waiting, we’ve got to move.” Car in gear, horn honking, gas revving the engine. Stany in traffic. “Preston called, I heard this morning went well. How’d you like Emma? She’s cute, for a snake. Tomorrow I play a scene where I scream because she’s a snake. I told Preston how silly that sounds—me afraid of a snake, imagine. We had garter snakes in Brooklyn and I cut them in chunks and sold them for fish bait. Pretty good bait if you cut them small. But I told Preston I’d scream. It’s his script. What’s that shit in your hair?”
“Brown makeup from the Amazon. It won’t brush out.”
“Sprinkle talc on your hair, wait one minute, and brush again. Talc sticks to the makeup and it comes right out. That way you don’t have to wash.”
By now she’d turned off Hollywood Boulevard and drove toward Los Feliz. I kept my arms crossed because wind came over the windshield and the afternoon was cool, not quite seventy degrees. Stany wore a wool jacket over chinos and didn’t notice. She wore sunglasses too, big, round ones, and I could look across and see her eyes trapped between the lenses and her face.
“Where’s Conejos?”
“Meeting us at the morgue,” she said. “He’s cute, have you noticed? Except he’s fat. That little hair curl on his forehead. Almost handsome. We’re late, but I called him from the studio so he knows we’re still coming. I ran overtime with the dialect coach.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t speak with a fucking English accent. I definitely sound like something, but it’s not English. I told Preston if Cary Grant were my dialect coach I’d learn a lot faster. Oh, you mean the morgue? For the autopsy, like I told you.”
The air got colder. “I thought you went this morning.”
“No, it’s going on now, or will go on, when we get there.”
“Then how do you know Rose was strangled?”
“Conejos says it’s obvious,” Stany said. “Cut through the neck. He’ll show you.”
“Stany, I don’t want to see. I’m not watching Rose cut up on a table. I can’t stop seeing her anyway—”
“Here we are,” Stany said.
The morgue smelled funny. You know how put-up asparagus smells when it’s left on the shelf too long, maybe a couple of years? Then you open the jar and all the spears mush together when they’re poured out. The juice stinks. That’s the smell, some rooms worse, some the light asparagus smell. We walked through room and room and room, led by a kid in blue work clothes who stared at Stany and couldn’t say her name right. Then we walked down a long hall with bulb lights hanging from cloth-covered cords. One spat at us and flicked out. The kid knocked on a door and Conejos
opened it. He smiled at Stany, and then he saw me.
“Why is she here?”
“I brought her,” Stany said.
“She’s a suspect. I’m not letting any suspect watch.”
“I’m a suspect?”
“No,” Stany said. “He’s a kidder. You can watch.”
Conejos set both his hands on the doorjambs, like a brace. “She can’t come in.” Under his arm I saw the room, white enamel table with a white-sheeted lump on top. Two white-coated men stood beside the table.
“I’m a suspect?”
“Stay here,” Stany told me. “Sit on that bench. Relax. I’ll tell you everything.”
The door closed, and I was in the asparagus hall alone with the stammering kid, who shut his mouth now that Stany was gone. He left me there, by a wood bench.
The autopsy took two hours. I could have left, I wanted to. Madge was right, Stany’s friendship made me jump at small sounds. Downright fucking scared. I should have left. I even stood up and thought, as a suspect, I should disappear like most come-and-go girls. They show up with a suitcase in Hollywood, stand in line, smile and con drinks from sailors, dance in the all-girl revue at the Florentine Gardens, or if luck’s really down, at one of those burlesques on Century Boulevard where all the girls wear are balloons and guys buy straight pins at the door.
Pop!
And every Monday they’re at Central Casting with an arm out to push the girl in front. They grab a studio call or they don’t, at the back lot they get picked or they don’t, they stand hopeful on Hollywood and Vine, and when they leave, because most of them do, nobody remembers. Someone like Madge the Amazon steps in to fill the dorm room. If I left, by tomorrow Madge would have a new bedmate.
The Glamorous Dead Page 2