Happy Little Bluebirds

by Louise Levene

  Chapter 6

  The swastikas were much harder to see by the time Evelyn had mastered the gears on her borrowed car the next morning and she and the studio driver headed down the hill and into the traffic on Sunset Boulevard. She could imagine Silas nagging as she drove (‘keep left; check the mirror’), sense him wincing in anticipation whenever her foot pressed the accelerator, but her test drive went smoothly enough and the man in the peaked cap and brass buttons had been surprised by the ease with which she reeled off the route he showed her – ‘My old lady can get lost in her own driveway.’

  The noticeboard next to the second-floor office at Miracle Studios had four names slotted into it: T. V. Monroe, F. S. Kay, C. M. McAllister and H. P. Peyton (this last sign written in a slightly different hand). The door was held open by a small stack of scripts. A female voice, very angry, rather shrill, could be heard from the stairwell. How come this dame was getting her own office? How come Peyton got his own goddamned office? Mr HP fancy-pants Peyton had only shown up for a week or three at a time and yet there was a corner office with his name on it. And now this English dame was going to waltz right in? Not if she had anything to do with it. No key: no office. There was the sound of a door being locked.

  Evelyn took a silent step back and watched the scene play out through the hinge of the open door. The long room was lined with Venetian-blinded windows and filled with large steel desks. There was a (now locked) door in one corner and the prime space in the other was taken up by a writing table heaped high with unopened post. The shelves behind it were untidily filled with scripts and reference volumes bookended by a tennis racket and a set of gaily painted Indian clubs. On the wall beside it was a dartboard with a pockmarked photograph of Hitler pinned over the bull’s eye.

  The complaining voice belonged to a smart-looking typist type in a tight-fitting dress with a detachable pilgrim collar. She wore very high heels on very large feet and enough cosmetics to grease a Bren gun. Her hair had been elaborately arranged so that two brown Chelsea buns were perched on either side of her head like mouse ears. Evelyn thought of Alphonse and his little steel styling comb and wondered what time she got up in the morning.

  The girl’s remarks were addressed to Felix Kay who was lounging in a captain’s chair with his feet on the desk blotter, a long, brown cigarette in the corner of his smile. He was wearing the previous day’s blazer and flannels but his soft felt hat had been replaced by a pink chiffon wimple. The matching bodice and kirtle had been tucked into the open neck of his shirt and flowed down to the chequered linoleum floor. The girl brandished a plywood broadsword and poked him in the chest with it.

  ‘And what’s with the fancy dress?’

  He flicked the ash from his cigarette, pulled a wisp of chiffon across his face and simpered from behind it. ‘I told them I was only doing the rewrites for Knights of Love if I could get into character. They’re sending a roast ox and some wenches over this afternoon.’

  He opened a red-bound copy of the script and began acting out a scene to himself from a sheet of typed foolscap tucked inside, a fruity English baritone alternating with a maidenly falsetto.

  ‘My queen!’

  ‘Lancelot! Lancelot, my prince!’

  ‘Tell me you didn’t write that.’

  ‘You wound me, fair maiden. PeeZee wrote it. “Felix baby,” he says, “could you lemme see a rewrite on that bedroom scene?” Sure, I say, exactly how would he like it rewritten? “I don’t know,” says PZ. “I haven’t read it yet.” Can you believe that? I sweat a pint of O negative redoing the love scenes, rush them over to his office in record time and the guy doesn’t even turn the page. Then he dictates this junk to his stenographer, fires off a memo or three, gets them to shoot it and then wonders why the scene is lousy. And the worst part is I can’t change a word of Lancelot’s dialogue because Lancelot is up in the desert making Rodeo Romeo and is unavailable for further shooting.’

  ‘You should be flattered he asked you at all – especially after the job Ted Monroe did on that jungle picture. Didn’t have to reshoot a single scene: did the whole thing in the cutting room just the way PZ used to. Guy’s a magician.’

  ‘Meaning I’m not?’

  Felix swivelled his chair and spotted Evelyn in the doorway.

  ‘Mrs Murdoch! Good morrow!’

  The girl was all smiles suddenly. The kind of smile you might give a dentist. There was lipstick on her teeth and one of her maxillary premolars had a gold inlay.

  ‘Why hello! You must be Mr Kiss’s little friend: Mrs Murdoch from Woking. He says we’re to take extra special care of you. What a darling dress. It’s English, isn’t it? I can always tell.’ Her accent was inching east as she spoke; she even dropped the ‘r’ from ‘darling’.

  ‘We had heaps of fun when HP was here. Did you ever see him do the double rumba samba? He’s a knockout. Come right in, make yourself at home.’

  ‘Do you think I might have a cup of tea?’

  It was clear from the other woman’s face that Evelyn had dropped a brick of some kind. Evelyn gave an uncertain smile. ‘Or coffee? If that would be easier.’

  ‘Yes ma’am –’ the sneeriest hint of a curtsey ‘– coming right up.’

  The typist vanished into the kitchenette on the landing and began slamming cupboard doors. Felix Kay looked at Evelyn and slowly shook his head.

  ‘Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Connie won’t have liked that.’

  Not a typist at all, as it turned out, but the C. M. McAllister on the noticeboard. A writer, rather a good writer (or so Felix Kay said), and now rather a cross one.

  ‘Oh dear.’

  The telephone on his desk rang. Yes she had arrived. Yes, he would pass on the message.

  ‘Mr Kiss left word that you were to have the full studio tour,’ said Felix, pulling off his costume. ‘Connie’s taking you – we tossed a coin. You’ll watch a bit of filming, see all the sights, grab some lunch, then you’re to head back to Bel Air and get ready for the big Kramer birthday party this evening. Kiss will see you there if his flights all connect. Gotta go. I’m due at Stage Eight. Kiss wanted the second unit to add some food close-ups to the banqueting scene in Knights of Love and rumour has it they’re roasting a swan. Cheerio!’

  He grabbed his hat from the stand, blew Evelyn a kiss and charged off down the stairs.

  Big Kramer party? Evelyn thought of the still-unexplored shopping bags on the bedroom floor and sipped nervously at the coffee Miss McAllister had given her.

  ‘What sort of party is it? Formal?’

  Miss McAllister hesitated.

  ‘More black tie than white, I should say, but pretty swanky. Did you come prepared or do you want I should ring Wardrobe?’

  Evelyn shook her head, struggling to recall the studio’s shopping list. ‘Faille (blue)’ could well be a frock of some kind …

  ‘All ready for the grand tour? We’ll take your car. It’s sure to be nicer than mine. Your man Peyton had a Cadillac.’

  The studio chauffeur had told Evelyn to leave her car directly in front of the Writers’ Block, a three-storey building got up to look like a New York tenement, complete with fire-escape ladders and neon signs at each end. One read ‘Acme Steam Laundry’ and the Chinese characters running down the opposite corner actually said ‘Cheap funerals’ but the Chinese extras hired for Rickshaw Romance and its sequel Mandarin By Moonlight had been much too amused to point this out to anyone.

  ‘The whole thing’s thatched and half-timbered on the other side,’ said Miss McAllister. ‘Did you see Young Elizabeth? Saves on set-building.’

  A wall of cypress trees screened this multipurpose structure from the rest of the complex, which had been built in the Moderne style and then royal iced with shimmering vanilla stucco. The sound stages and office buildings had the tidy unreality of an architect’s model but in the far corner of the lot behind another line of trees a standing set offered a whole fake city of house and shop fronts. The plate-glass facades of the lawyer�
�s office and drugstore would all look solid enough on screen but when Evelyn peeped inside she saw that the whole block was hollow, roughly criss-crossed with supporting beams like the makeshift innards of a helter-skelter. Huge cables snaked across the road, feeding the massive lights that perched above the cornices. On Main Street a pair of sign-writers were at work rebranding the painless dentist as a hat shop ready for Duchess in the Dirt.

  There was a real dentist (or a sign pointing to one) and a florist, a gymnasium, a laundry, a foundry – even a private fire station watched over by a 100,000-gallon three-legged water tank which hovered above the two scarlet engines like a Martian waiting to strike.

  The rest of the 60-acre site was dominated by the sound stages, their featureless walls like the windowless back ends of an English cinema. Here and there a staircase could be seen tiptoeing up the side. The doors at the top were there so that the lighting men could access the higher levels within, said Miss McAllister, but there was something oddly surreal about those little doors to nowhere, like a gateway in a dream.

  A dozen warpainted and feathered Red Indian tribesmen sailed by in a pedal-powered yellow charabanc which was saving them the long, hot walk from Wardrobe to Wounded Knee. In a shady corner, a wigless Cavalier from a Civil War epic lounged against a fire hydrant chewing gum and reading a comic book. Down a side alley, half-hidden by a lean-to, the town sheriff and a knight in armour were sharing an unscripted kiss.

  Showing Evelyn something in production was easier said than done, Miss McAllister explained, because the bigger stars tended to throw a tantrum if ‘civilians’ were smuggled on set.

  ‘But we can go see the pulled scenes from Knights of Love – anyone asks, tell them Kiss sent you.’

  In the warm dark of the screening room a dozen technicians and rewrite men were watching Magda Malo’s next movie. After a batch of takes showing Sir Mordred going through his close-ups, the projectionist loaded the love scene that Felix and PZ Homberg were having so much trouble with. The camera panned silently across Queen Guinevere’s Technicolor chamber, lingering lovingly on the stained glass, the blazing torchères, the bearskin rug, the four-poster bed, before swimming in for a close-up of the main attraction.

  Queen Guinevere was discovered in a bower of rayon roses wearing an emerald gown so closely upholstered to her shape that Evelyn expected to see bullion fringing round the hem, a line of brass-headed tacks down the back seam, antimacassars over her knees. The actress greeted the advancing camera like a long-lost lover, lips parting an all-important fraction of an inch, lustrous green eyes growing wide and wet.

  Evelyn had learned from Deborah’s Photoplay that the ‘Budapest Bombshell’ had made quite a sensation in Otto Von Blick’s Cairo Boulevard and had been signed by Miracle in the belief that she would be a cinch for Guinevere.

  The blonde on the screen was not happy. The dewy-eyed queen vanished the moment the actress had delivered her line, her own personality coming down over her face like a safety curtain. She had been made to shoot her scenes out of sequence (‘Von Blick he is neffer doing this’) and all of her lines were fed to her piecemeal by her dialogue coach. Being unfamiliar with Arthurian legend, she remained completely in the dark about the impending plot twists. ‘I don’t get it. Do I luff Arthur or the other guy?’

  Guinevere’s confusion was not helped by the fact that Lancelot was twenty miles away at the studio’s ranch in San Fernando valley making a new Western so her cues had to be fed to her by the director, off-camera, in a deadpan Mitteleuropean accent.

  ‘My Kveen!’

  You could hear the technicians on the set laughing at his delivery but Guinevere’s madonna-like maquillage didn’t move a muscle.

  ‘Lancy-lot,’ she purred. ‘Lancylot, my pwince. You came.’

  ‘She can speak English,’ conceded the man working the projector, ‘good mimic anyway but Vivien Leigh won’t be losing any sleep.’

  In the far corner of the room a shirtsleeved Felix Kay was jotting down fresh dialogue on to a yellow foolscap notepad.

  ‘Is there much more of this schlock? My banquet awaits.’

  On the screen the director’s voice was saying, ‘That was first-rate. Eppsolutely first-rate, Magda my love. But we go for one more take to be safe, yes?’

  At the stroke of twelve the screening-room technician shut down the projector and switched on the lights. Felix Kay had already dashed away to his roast swan and Miss McAllister had what she called a working lunch to go to and abandoned Evelyn at the entrance to the commissary.

  By the time Evelyn had negotiated a sandwich (White? Brown? Rye? Pumpernickel?) and driven back to Writers’ Block, Felix Kay was once again seated at his desk, spreading that morning’s paper (‘Chamberlain Resigns but Plaints Go On’) across his blotter and carefully unwrapping the two half lobsters he had liberated from Stage Eight.

  ‘The swan turned out to be plaster of Paris but everything else was real. Most of the time those big banquets you see on screen are just a lot of piped potato and a pig’s head from the props department but your Mr Kiss always likes “authentic”. It’s like a Jewish wedding over there. Is lobster kosher? I guess I could ring my mother but then what if it isn’t? Bang goes my lunch.’

  Evelyn pulled out a chair and began nibbling on her sandwich.

  ‘We should fix you up a desk.’

  Felix Kay had begun clearing a pile of scripts and dictionaries from an unused table when Evelyn strolled across to the locked inner office. Its key was in her bag but instead of using it she reached a hand up to the door jamb and retrieved the duplicate from where the unimaginative McAllister female had hidden it. Always assume.

  The sunlit room was smoothly panelled with bird’s-eye maple. The matching desk, a tone poem of caramel curves, was roughly four times the size of those in the outer office and was importantly bare except for three gleaming telephones (one black, one white, one red) and a Rotadex filled with HP’s Hollywood contacts. A card in the XYZ section contained a nameless number with a Plaza exchange. Under the blotter Evelyn found a hand-coloured photograph of Lady Genista Broome in pearls, feathers and armpit-length gloves: her presentation photograph. Someone had inked a little moustache over the smile.

  There was a copy of War of the Worlds on the shelf with many useful underlinings – ‘What have we done – what has Weybridge done? Everything gone, everything destroyed’ – and an angry nib had filled the margins with notes in block capitals. ‘Start here’ had been written next to the opening of the first Martian cylinder on Horsell Common. Not a bad idea.

  Felix, who had finished his lobster, entered the room, lay down full-length on the green plush daybed under the window, lit a cigarette and began blowing smoke rings.

  ‘PZ had all the writers’ couches taken out a few years back – “you sleep on your own damned time” were his exact words – but your guy wasn’t gonna take that lying down. A few well-chosen words on the phone to Kiss’s office and this beauty was bussed over within the hour. I think it had a starring role in Those Brontë Girls: Emily and Anne both wheezed their last on it.’

  Miss McAllister, a trifle unsteady on her heels after her working lunch, was watching them from the doorway.

  ‘I see you’ve made yourself at home.’

  ‘It seems Mr Peyton is likely be tied up on another project for the foreseeable so I thought I’d install myself here for the time being.’

  Evelyn took the cover off the typewriter which stood on a small wheeled table to the side of the main desk and tried to feed a piece of Miracle letterhead between its rollers. The little bell thingy kept going ping in a very irritating way.

  Miss McAllister raised her eyebrows.

  ‘You don’t type? Even Peyton managed that much.’

  ‘Never felt the need,’ said Evelyn, stabbing experimentally at one of the keys. ‘I’ve always used a bureau for that kind of thing but I expect it’s different for writers. I could have a go, I suppose … It can’t be that hard, can it? If a man
can do it? Show me where the paper goes.’

  ‘Maybe some other time.’ Miss McAllister squinted at her wristwatch. ‘You should maybe think about getting back to change fairly soon, Mrs Murdoch dear. The Kramer party starts at seven. Should be a super evening.’ She smiled and strolled across to the desk and began opening and closing drawers, flicking idly through the papers the Colonel had left. Was she looking for something?

  ‘Will you and Mr Kay be at the party?’

  ‘Sure. We’re the parsley round the real guests. Wouldn’t miss it for the world: imported wines, very swish.’

  ‘Could you let me have the address?’

  ‘No need. Kiss’s minions are sending a magic carpet: six thirty sharp. That should give you plenty of time to get all gussied up. You could shower even …’

  Someone had repaired the guttering above the front step of Evelyn’s bungalow. The filthy sitting room was still a wilderness of garden bric-a-brac but the main bathroom now had hot water and had been cleared of paint pots. The rakes and hoes had been removed from the closet where the studio’s choice of evening gowns were now hanging from the brass rail like bias-cut butterflies.

  Evelyn twisted her hair into Alphonse’s tortoiseshell comb and dabbed her mouth with the little carmine stick then stood before the cheval glass in her dressing gown and held each dress up in turn. The beige-coloured one was a near-perfect match for her unsunned skin. The blue was more forgiving but it was impossible to fathom the cat’s cradle of straps across the back and in the end the white satin was the only one with fastenings she could understand: a twenty-inch row of tiny silk beads that ran from between the shoulder blades to the small of the back. She had only managed to fumble six of the buttons into their loops when a car horn sounded. She held the dress around her and stuck her head out of the front door.