Miss Delores gave Gwendolyn’s suit the once-over. “Our in-house models can present anything you see here on the floor. All you need do is ask.”
Gwendolyn thanked the girl with a smile, then moved onto a strapless calf-length gown of purple silk so dark it was almost licorice black. Its full skirt was made for sweeping and swirling on the dance floor of the Hollywood Palladium, but the bust seemed tricky. She ran her finger along the inside seam of the décolletage to get a sense of the stitching. She could barely feel where one panel ended and the next one began.
Stepping back for a better view, she murmured, “Oh, yes, I could whip you up in an afternoon.” She opened her purse and pulled out the tape measure she’d started keeping with her. A girl never knew when she might encounter the muse.
As Gwendolyn measured the waist to the bust line, she saw an odd little fellow staring at her from the other side of the gallery. The lighting in Bullocks Wilshire was judiciously indirect; much of it glowed from inside giant clamshells sculpted into the pillars, and this guy stood below one of them, observing her closely. He was in his mid fifties, possibly older, and not very tall, barely five foot four. He was balding—he had only a third of a head of hair—and he peered at her through round spectacles, but he was nattily dressed in a pressed gray suit and a black-and-red-dotted necktie.
Gwendolyn snuck the tape measure back into her purse and offered the little gentleman her sweetest smile. Time to leave.
She strode down the center aisle, her heels clicking on the marble floor so loudly they all but drowned out the gentle chamber music playing over the PA. She realized she’d entered the perfume section when she walked into a cloud of Chanel No. 5. She slowed her pace to breathe in the jasmine, rose, and sandalwood. She’d never been able to afford it, so she soaked it in whenever possible.
When Gwendolyn opened her eyes again, she realized the little man in the gray suit had followed her. She picked up her stride but found herself passing a display of nylon stockings, and Monty’s advice came back to her.
“If I were a dame,” he said that day at C.C. Brown’s, “I’d be buying every pair of stockings I could lay my hands on. Nylon is real versatile. The military uses it to make ropes, tires, tents—the list is endless. It’ll be one of the first things they’ll ration. Mark my words: go out and buy every pair you can afford. They might be the last you’ll see for a long, long time.”
She doubted she could afford even the cheapest pair, but she wanted to throw the chap off her trail. She bent over the glass cabinet and studied the artful layout.
“Hello again.” It was Miss Delores. Her knowing smile lingered. “These start at seventy-five cents a pair, and go all the way up to fourteen dollars.”
“Fourteen?” Gwendolyn gasped. “For one pair of stockings?”
“Japanese silk.”
“I can’t imagine you sell too many of those.”
“Since Pearl Harbor, nobody wants anything to do with Japanese merchandise. I’m surprised we still bother to display them.”
The odd little gent edged his way into Gwendolyn’s peripheral vision, hovering like a suspicious seahorse under one of the clamshells behind the scarf counter.
“I’ll take three of your seventy-five-cent pairs.”
The redhead withdrew three sets of stockings from a drawer behind the counter, carefully folded them in white tissue paper, and enclosed them in a flat box. By the time Gwendolyn had paid, the gent was two clamshells nearer and closing in. She thanked Delores and hastened for the door.
“Oh, miss! MISS?”
Gwendolyn ignored him and marched through the door to the portico. A magnificent art deco mural on the ceiling over her head glowed greens, blues, and reds.
The man dashed around to stop her. “I’m sorry,” he panted, “but do you have a moment?”
Gwendolyn eyed him warily, allowing him a brusque nod.
“Thank you so much.” He spoke in a mid-Atlantic accent, the type usually adopted by people of good breeding back East as though they’d been raised in Britain. “My name is Dewberry.”
His handshake was surprisingly manly, and reminded her of one of the few pieces of advice her mother gave her about the opposite sex: Only trust men who shake your hand with confidence.
He nodded toward the store. “I’m sorry if I appeared to be hunting you back there, but I wanted to be sure my instincts were spot on. I’m Bullocks Wilshire’s senior women’s-wear buyer. I like to think I know well-crafted apparel when I see it.”
He clearly wasn’t upset about her tape measure. “I’m sure you do,” Gwendolyn murmured.
“This suit you’re wearing.” He waved his hand up and down her outfit. “It has the most excellent lines. I’d bet my last dime you didn’t buy it in California.”
She glanced down at her turquoise suit. “No, I didn’t.”
His eyes widened. “I knew it. Europe, am I right? Schiaparelli?”
“As a matter of fact, Mr. Dewberry, no. But I’m flattered you think so.” She pulled at the bottom of her jacket to straighten out its silhouette. “I made this myself.”
Dewberry’s self-satisfied smile faded. He crossed his arms. “Using whose pattern?”
“I don’t use patterns.” Gwendolyn couldn’t hold back the proud smile blooming onto her face. “I’ve never really needed them.”
“Extraordinary.” He reached toward her, then checked himself. “I’m sorry, do you mind if I feel the underside of the lapel?”
Gwendolyn had lived at the Garden of Allah long enough to know a come-on when she saw it, but she sensed only professional admiration. Good golly, Gwendolyn thought, Elsa Schiaparelli! She leaned toward him and watched him run his fingers down the left lapel of her jacket. She silently thanked heavens she’d taken the time to line it with satin.
“May I ask your name?”
“Gwendolyn Brick.”
“Miss Brick, I don’t suppose you’d be interested in coming to work here at Bullocks Wilshire?”
It was all Gwendolyn could do to stop her mouth from falling open. Lately, the newspapers had switched from reporting how Angelenos were abandoning the area, to how the cost of housing in Los Angeles was bound to leapfrog with the influx of workers needed to fill the factories that were being converted to wartime requirements. Rumor was rife that rents at the Garden of Allah were about to jump.
“What sort of job?”
“What do you do now?”
Gwendolyn decided it wouldn’t hurt to stretch the truth just a little. “Cigarette girl at the Cocoanut Grove.”
Dewberry’s face lit up. “So you know how to sell. Excellent!”
Gwendolyn wasn’t sure what a floor girl’s hourly wage was, but surely seamstresses earned more. Every extra dollar she could sock away would put her into Chez Gwendolyn that much sooner. “But Mr. Dewberry,” she said, “you’ve seen my handiwork. Surely I could be of more value to Bullocks than just standing behind some counter.”
He shot her a not-so-fast-there-missie look. “Strict company policy. All staff members commence on the floor. That way you learn the business from the ground up.” He pulled a card from the breast pocket of his jacket and handed it to her. “But after that? Why, anything’s possible.”
CHAPTER 5
Monty stood at the front door of Kathryn and Gwendolyn’s villa, looking striking in his white linen uniform with epaulettes, gold buttons, and a black-rimmed cap. He was off his crutches now and the bandages no longer showed through his pants. The only sign he’d been through anything was the scar on the right side of his face.
Kathryn’s eyes drifted over his uniform. Did he have to wear that? Tonight? I’m still recovering from this afternoon.
“Something wrong?” Monty asked.
“I—er . . . ” The rest of her sentence drifted away like a soap bubble.
Kathryn hadn’t meant to leave the telegram on the kitchen table for her mother to find. She knew Francine was coming over for tea; she knew the telegram was some
thing she needed to approach with tact and delicacy; and she knew the information she was after wouldn’t come easily.
Four or five hours weren’t enough time for Kathryn to forget the way Francine had held up the telegram by two fingers as though it carried the bubonic plague—You want to explain this?—before letting it fall to the table.
Kathryn had served tea and cupcakes, but everything sat on the table untouched. She realized if they were going to have this conversation, she was going to have to start it.
“I got curious,” she told her mother, “about my past, my father. It’s only normal to want to know about that kind of stuff.”
Silence.
Kathryn motioned to the telegram sitting between them. “Most people take that information for granted, but I realized that I knew nothing about my past, so I went looking. That’s as far as I got.”
More silence.
“So, if your maiden name was Caldecott,” she persisted, “where did Massey come from? Was that his name? Come on, Mother, you’ve got to give me something. Anything. Please?”
Francine made a have-it-your-way tsking sound. “I was on the train heading out here, and I was thinking how I needed a new name when the train passed one of those signs: ‘You are now leaving the great state of Massachusetts.’ The name Massey popped into my head; it seemed as good as any.”
Kathryn felt let down. Her name didn’t belong to anybody—it was just made up. No wonder we ended up living in Hollywood. “So,” she prodded gently, “if Massey wasn’t my father’s name, what was it?”
“I don’t see the point of all this,” Francine’s voice was rising in pitch with every word. “It was all so long ago and has no bearing who you are tod—”
“Mother, please. Throw me a bone here, will you?”
Francine took a very long moment to sip her tea. Just when Kathryn thought she was going to have to insist, her mother said, “I can’t tell you what his name was. The fact is I never did know it.”
Kathryn absorbed the shock of her mother’s admission. “Never?”
Francine clasped her hands together in front of her. “It happened at the Boston Cotillion. I was a debutante. It was all very grand, very exciting. I noticed him immediately. Terribly handsome in his military uniform, all white linen and gold braid. We flirted and flirted until he coaxed me outside with the promise of a cigarette. This was back when women smoking were considered indecent, and we all felt so grown up that night.”
Francine halted her narrative, her eyes on her interlaced fingers. “I think the cigarette was laced with something. Opium, I suspect.”
“OPIUM?!” After everything she’d seen in Hollywood over the past twenty years, Kathryn had come to doubt that she could be scandalized by anything or anyone, let alone her own middle-aged mother.
“My dentist used it all the time,” Francine said matter-of-factly. “At any rate, I was feeling all floaty and dreamy. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, my lovely dress had grass stains and the handsome boy in white had disappeared. Two months later I found I was pregnant. That’s all I can tell you, Kathryn.” She glanced at the telegram next to the cupcakes. “That’s the most succinct description I can think of for your father: Not applicable.”
Monty’s discreet cough brought Kathryn back to her front door.
“You—what?” he prompted.
Get yourself together. You’re supposed to be showing the guy a night on the town. “I was just wondering where I put my handbag.”
She disappeared inside, scooped up her purse, and rejoined Monty on the landing at the top of the stairs. “Shall we?”
* * *
Kathryn’s second sense about a breaking story was triggered when she heard from one of her tipsters—a room-service waiter at the Ambassador—that the newly hitched Mickey Rooney and Ava Gardner were back from their honeymoon and planning a big entrance at Ciro’s.
As it happened, Ciro’s was where Kathryn had promised Gwendolyn she’d take Monty out for a night on the town while Gwendolyn was stuck at work doing her first inventory check. It couldn’t have been more perfect. Plus, she wanted to take advantage of her Ciro’s expense account while she could.
The whole staff was still reeling from the layoffs Wilkerson announced a couple of weeks after her meeting. Twenty staff members—most of whom Kathryn had worked alongside for the past seven years—were let go. The cuts had left a bleeding swath across the office—journalists, photographers, typesetters, advertising sales. Nobody at the Hollywood Reporter felt safe anymore. Kathryn feared it was just a matter of time before her boss sold Ciro’s, too.
The maître d’ showed them to Kathryn’s favorite table, one in the corner that afforded a good view of both the stage and the crowd. Ciro’s lighting shone from upward-facing lamps, from behind tall banquettes, and hidden in the curved ceiling. The only people who stood in direct light were the performers; everyone else glowed in the most complementary illumination on the Sunset Strip.
They ordered a couple of drinks—whiskey for him, a sidecar for her.
“You can’t go wrong with the veal scaloppini, or the coq au vin bourguignon,” Kathryn said. “I bet you don’t find either of those in the mess hall.”
“Sure is a whole lot better’n what I’m used to.” Monty reached over to light Kathryn’s cigarette, then lit one for himself.
“I can’t imagine you’re in any great rush to get back.”
He shrugged. “Fact is, I kinda miss it.”
“But you barely escaped with your life.” Kathryn took in the gold braiding looped around Monty’s shoulder and thought about her father.
Monty cracked a shy grin that must have melted the hearts of half the girls between Guam and Manila. “I miss my buddies, the camaraderie, you know? And now that we’re at war for real, it makes all that training and discipline mean something. For guys like me, it gives us a reason to get out there and fight the way we’ve been trained. I was all ready to hightail it up to Santa Barbara!”
All week, the papers had been screaming reports that a submarine had surfaced off the coast of Santa Barbara and fired a couple of dozen shells at a nearby oil refinery. They hadn’t done any damage, but it made already jittery Californians paranoid that they were next.
A wave of hushed whispering washed through the crowd. Kathryn looked at the maître d’s podium to see Mickey and Ava pausing at the door. Mickey wore a grin so wide it just about split his face in two; Ava was a vision in soft pink ruffles and pearls. But Kathryn wasn’t expecting the couple standing beside them: Louis B. Mayer with a rising actress/dancer named Ann Miller.
Miller had built a name for herself in a series of low-budget musicals at Columbia, and yet here she was making an entrance on the arm of MGM’s head honcho. Kathryn felt her possible scoop swell into a double. She watched the foursome wend their way through the thicket of tables.
“Those two couples important?” Monty asked.
“One of them runs the biggest studio in Hollywood.”
“The short one? Or the really short one?”
Kathryn playfully slapped his arm. “Oh, come on, even you know Mickey Rooney when you see him.” The orchestra started playing “In The Mood.” Kathryn asked, “You any good on the dance floor?”
Monty’s smile pushed his scar out of sight. “I’ll let you be the judge of that.”
Ciro’s floor soon filled with couples, including the famous foursome. Kathryn figured if they were close to Rooney and Gardner when the music stopped, she could say hello. Maybe she could suggest they swap partners so she could get some sort of scoop out of Mickey. Or if they were close to Mayer and Miller, she could squeeze him for insider gossip about MGM poaching the dancer from Columbia. Either way, she might dig up something her biggest rivals—Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper, and Sheilah Graham—hadn’t found.
But when “In The Mood” came to an end, they weren’t anywhere near either couple. The band started an up-tempo version of “Take The A Train,” and Monty
took advantage of the full skirt of the purple silk calf-length gown Gwendolyn had recently made for her. He swept and swirled, spun and dipped her like a pro.
“Say, you’re pretty good at this,” Kathryn said.
“Googie gave me lessons. Told me girls can’t resist a guy who can hold his own on the dance floor.”
“How about you maneuver us over to the guy with the glasses cheek-to-cheeking the gal with the black hair. You see, he’s married and—”
She felt Monty’s body stiffen and his black patent leather shoe scuff her ankle. He scowled at her with his eyebrows knitted together and chin jutted forward: exactly the same puss she’d seen on Gwendolyn.
“You want to sit down?” Kathryn suggested.
Back at the table, their waiter appeared. Monty didn’t care what they had, so Kathryn did the ordering. It wasn’t until the waiter departed that Kathryn felt the awkward silence chilling the table.
“What’s the matter?” she asked him.
“You always like this?”
“Like what?”
“Is it always work, work, work with you? Don’t you ever go out to a nice joint and just enjoy yourself?”
“Of course. It’s just that—”
He went to light a cigarette but stopped himself. “I guess places like this just ain’t my speed.” He dropped his matchbook onto the table without offering to light the cigarette she withdrew from her own packet.
Kathryn executed a quick survey of the room. Rooney and Gardner were back at their table, hand in hand, their faces so close together they were practically touching. Mayer and Miller were still dancing; Miller was doing her best to keep Mayer’s eyes on her. Kathryn had all the information she needed.
“I owe you an apology,” she told Monty.
“You got a job to do; I get it.”
“I wanted to give you a memorable night on the town, but I never thought to ask what you wanted.” She leaned in. “How about we eat our dinner, then ditch this ritzy joint for a spot that’s probably more your speed?”
* * *
The shimmering lights of Los Angeles spread out in front of them until they met the blue-black ink of the Pacific. They blinked in the crisp February night air as the low hum of traffic rose up the sides of the canyon.
Searchlights and Shadows (Hollywood's Garden of Allah novels Book 4) Page 3