Happy Little Bluebirds

by Louise Levene

  The second Manila wallet contained a letter written on pistachio-coloured writing paper engraved ‘From the desk of Walter Grendon’ inviting Evelyn to ‘one of my four o’clocks’ on Sunday week.

  The third wallet contained a long and extraordinarily detailed memo from PZ Homberg to Zandor Kiss which had been copied to practically everyone in the studio. He was still very worried about Knights of Love. Yes, the rewritten dialogue read well enough but the back-and-forth chat between Lancelot and Guinevere was going to look ‘cutty’. Von Blick should make the scene 70 per cent on Miss Malo with Hooper off-camera. The second of twelve long paragraphs focused on Miss Malo’s make-up which may have been ‘just dandy’ for the villainess/vamp in Cairo Boulevard but Guinevere should look more wholesome: ‘Tone down the lipstick or the audience is going to side with Arthur.’

  A Miss Della Cavendish, Mr Kiss’s personal secretary (and personal shopper), had sent another copy of the H. G. Wells novel with a note inside explaining that Mr Kiss would be in Washington until the weekend but hoped to catch Mrs Murdoch at Cedric Sedgwick’s Sunday kipper party. Meanwhile, she was to liaise with Felix Kay on possible War of the Worlds treatments in readiness for the story conference with PZ on the 14th.

  Felix had had the same memo. He brought his coffee into Evelyn’s office.

  ‘The studio has had the rights to this Wells book since ’26 – they bought a whole bunch of novels when the talkies came in – but it never happened and then your friend Peyton suggests it and Kiss reckons the time is ripe. He’s given PZ a one-page outline but he wants us to work up the cute-kid angle.’

  ‘Cute-kid angle? It’s about a middle-aged man.’

  ‘Not now it isn’t. They needed to find something for little Rindy McGee, help her break out of B-pictures before she gets too old to lisp. You’ve seen her stuff?’

  ‘Er, not really my cup of tea.’

  ‘Me neither but she gets more fan mail than the rest of the studio put together.’

  Rindy was the only child of a bit-player calling herself Bitsy Devine, Felix explained. Mrs Devine had planned her daughter’s screen career from the womb and had picked out a name to match. But the agent she found reckoned that nobody ever had an adult career with a name like Baby Devine – except maybe in stag pictures – and had rechristened the child Dorinda McGee. Curls, dimples and a flair for acrobatics had made ‘America’s Pussycat’ an immediate hit.

  ‘They say she’ll be twelve next birthday but she’s seven for professional purposes,’ said Felix. ‘PZ says it’ll all be over once she gets a brassiere.’

  The studio was making the most of the time remaining and any number of pre-existing narratives had apparently had golden-haired children insinuated into their storylines (Florence Nightingale had acquired a niece). H. G. Wells’s eyewitness account of the razing of the Home Counties was to be recast with a small child who was heading across country with a performing dog to find a big sister who had been trapped by the Martians.

  ‘A performing dog?’

  ‘They have a dog on contract: yappy thing, about yay big, crooked ears, made quite a hit in a two-reeler called Brandy Goes West. “Brandy” doesn’t play too well in the Bible belt so they’re trying to think of something else. The smart money’s on Biscuit.’

  ‘Will the dog still do as it’s told with a new name?’

  ‘Who knows? His trainer does it all with hand signals so I guess the name’s no big deal.’

  Felix closed the connecting door to the main office and led Evelyn over to the window.

  ‘The dog isn’t the only thing getting a new name. Anything with “World” and “War” in the title is gonna be a red rag to the Senate Committee and they’re already on Kiss’s case. The old silver fox probably reckons the kid and the dog and a new title will throw them off the scent so no one will notice the whole plucky-little-nation-withstanding-menace-from-the-skies schtick he’s got in mind, but he’ll have to get up pretty damned early to get it past Kramer and PZ. They’re dumb but they’re not stupid and they aren’t interested in being held up for “Incitement to war”, cute kid or no cute kid. They already had a pretty close shave. Did you see Kiss’s Spanish Armada movie? That little black moustache on the King of Spain? No wonder the Nazis have got him on that list of theirs. I think the moustache was your guy Peyton’s idea. Very forceful personality. He some kind of army type?’

  Evelyn met this with a resolutely dead bat.

  ‘Surely not. He’d be in uniform somewhere.’

  There was a sharp knock at the door. Miss McAllister had brewed Felix a fresh cup of coffee (Evelyn had ceased to exist). She peered over Felix’s shoulder.

  ‘You working on that Martian thing? I saw Ted Monroe reading that.’

  Felix waited until she had closed the door before letting out a heavy sigh. ‘It would have been kind of nice not to have Monroe breathing down my neck for a change. He and I started at Miracle on the same day but he was the one who “connected”. He’s a good writer but most of his best work is done after hours. He and PZ play backgammon and blackjack together. You ever play with a real card brain?’

  Evelyn shook her head (now was perhaps not the moment to explain that games of chance were Frowned Upon).

  ‘Before he and PZ are halfway through a deck Ted will know the odds on every ace. Cleans him out every time. Doesn’t make him a better screenwriter but you know …’ he hesitated ‘… it kind of does. Suddenly he’s PZ’s golden boy. They go to the fights, play golf at the Hillcrest. PZ even talks about optioning that book he wrote. Can you imagine anyone making a movie of that prime piece of dreck?’

  There was a faint raccoon-like rustling outside the office door at floor level. Evelyn opened it to find a workman in Miracle overalls with a hodful of paints and brushes and little sheets of gold leaf in tissue paper. The man squatted back on his milking stool and resumed work on the glass. ‘H. P. Peyton’ was rubbed clean with the merest lick of white spirit.

  ‘What do you want on here, ma’am?’

  Evelyn handed him one of the cards reading ‘Special Consultant’.

  ‘You and everyone else in the place.’

  Felix retrieved his cup and headed for the door.

  ‘I’ll rough out the H. G. Wells with kid and dog. You keep on with the book and think beautiful English thoughts that we can throw at the art department and we’ll try and run it by Kiss at the Sedgwick party.’

  Evelyn pointed out that she hadn’t been invited.

  ‘Don’t be so Briddish. It’s open house. Drive over and pick me up and that way we can arrive together. Sedgwick won’t mind. Besides, he’ll have seen you schmoozing with Von Blick and he’s probably dying to be the scheming count in The Borgia Pearl. Cedric can play that kind of thing in his sleep.’

  Felix Kay’s house – ‘Skywater’ according to the mailbox – was not shipshape. The plans for the building, displayed in a frame in the hallway, showed a Modernist greenhouse set in a tidy forest of weeping figs. The architect had staggered the two-storey structure so that its flat roofs would form shallow rectangular puddles to reflect the surrounding trees and sky. His line-and-wash idyll showed the owners seated at an open window, downing cocktails, reading Cocteau as they enjoyed the scents rising from the sunken herb garden.

  On sunny days – and most Los Angeles days were sunny, after all – the house retained something of the fantasy but on Sunday morning the overflows of the roof-ponds had filled with autumn leaves and water was coursing down the walls and seeping through the bitumen into the rooms below. The sunken herb garden had become a slimy sea of dead leaves and liverwort and the front door was reached by a wobbly workman’s plank.

  Evelyn found Felix Kay re-siting one of the zinc pails dotted around the sitting room. The bucket gave a painful clang against the poured-concrete floor.

  ‘Interesting house.’

  ‘I’m minding it for a friend. It’s very German School: early Günther Fink – a little something from his supremacist peri
od. There was a piece in the Atlantic about him. He likes everything to have a flat roof whatever the climate; he built a pair of houses up in the Rockies a few years back – they aren’t there now: you’d think a guy from the Alps would know better. He hates the whole inside/outside thing so you get a lot of glass and a lot of water: “Ze house is not a shield but a membrane” –’ Felix Kay did a very good German accent ‘– a permeable membrane, in this particular case. Suits me, though: my pal was planning on selling the place but the tin pails put the buyers off and I get to stay a while longer. It’s a good location – no pool, sadly. He really wanted a swimming pool but Fink told him swimming pools were bourgeois. That guy really knows how to hurt.’

  The sitting-room walls were a greyish-beige, as if the owner had fired the decorator at the undercoat stage. There was very little furniture, all of it ugly – but Evelyn was used to ugly furniture.

  All of the chairs at her mother-in-law’s house were of an uncompromising, almost skeletal form. Shortly after her sons were married Mrs Murdoch had had a sudden urge to update the family parlour and a group visit to one of the big London stores was arranged. The furniture showroom was a sea of moquette and cretonne and chintz piped with endless caterpillars of fluffy braid. These unfamiliar comforts were all arranged in companionable roomscapes on the sales floor. Sometimes one of the armchairs in a group would be noticeably larger than its round-shouldered overstuffed wife. Sometimes there was a stool to match, as if they had been breeding.

  Encouraged by the commission-hungry salesman, Mrs Murdoch had agreed to try out his ‘Excelsior Suite’. The chair had a softly angled velvet back (a slippery slope) and she had lowered herself suspiciously into its red plush embrace but rose to her feet almost immediately. ‘Oh no! No no. No thank you’ – a look of reproach at a man who could countenance earning a living selling something that would keep a good Christian woman’s spine so perilously far from the straight and narrow.

  Mrs Murdoch would probably have approved of Günther Fink’s plushless interior – as would Silas. Silas had preferred hard chairs. Evelyn could imagine him, straight-backed in the corner of that putty-coloured room (not reading Cocteau) on a chair that appeared to have been fashioned from matchwood and an old tweed skirt. There were big brown geographical watermarks on the room’s low ceiling. Evelyn reached up to the sodden plasterboard panels with her fingertips, tracing a large stain shaped exactly like the Isle of Wight.

  ‘Not much of a day for a party.’

  ‘The guy on the radio promised sunshine by lunch.’

  Cedric Sedgwick’s cosy Beverly Hills retreat had been concocted in the Tudorbethan style with half-timbered walls and barley-sugar chimneys.

  The sun had come out as promised and the guests were poised by the open French windows in their white flannels and buckskin shoes waiting for the croquet lawn to dry off. A tall young man smiled at them from the doorway.

  ‘Come and meet Fox,’ said Felix. ‘Foxton Meredith? Plays Galahad in the King Arthur movie? We saw him at the train station. Fox and I were at college together.’

  Sir Galahad was being stroked and petted by Myra Manning, his new best friend from the Hollywood Examiner. Early reports on his performance in Knights of Love had been good (so good that some of his scenes had been cut to avoid upstaging the leads) and Miss Manning was keen to get a story. More roles were talked of and signet-ringed hands slapped his slubbed-silk back as guests passed to and from the buffet at the far end of the Olde English drawing room.

  Felix was wearing the same old weekday blazer and a shirt that looked as though it had been ironed in the dark by a drunk but even Evelyn could see that his friend’s wardrobe was in another league. His jacket was palest fawn and his necktie, a cubist study in chartreuse and gold, seemed to have been picked to match his pale-green eyes. The tie was loosely knotted, giving him a raffish, almost schoolboyish appearance. Although no taller or slimmer than his friend, his easy stride gave an illusion of height and he fell into poses with greyhound grace.

  How did she do? He took Evelyn’s hand in a firm, frank grip, his face registering warmth and interest for an invisible camera. He smelled deliciously of a lemony cologne. His sex appeal was clearly something that required constant exercise – like a throwing arm, or a springer spaniel – and he set about winning her over with professional skill. Such a becoming dress – perfect for that English complexion. He was so glad Felix had finally gotten someone sympathetic to work with. The green eyes were unnaturally bright, thought Evelyn: a two-martini glitter – maybe more than two martinis …

  ‘I was talking to Myra – you know Myra, don’t you?’ He turned the beam of his smile towards Miss Manning who was looking beadily around the room and scribbling into her notebook with a silver pencil.

  ‘She’s a few stories short of a column this week, Mrs Murdoch. Maybe you and me should elope.’

  The actor had turned back to Evelyn to deliver his line (first the eyes, followed by the slow turn of the head) then looked above and behind her, scanning the room for a gracious means of dispensing with her company.

  ‘Oh dear. Poor Felix,’ said Fox Meredith suddenly.

  Felix was over by the piano talking to an older man. He had produced a paperback from his pocket but the man was moving away from him rather hastily without taking the book. Meredith took him by the arm but although his tone was sympathetic he was obviously exasperated by his friend’s lack of savoir faire.

  ‘Now wasn’t the time, old man. You can’t expect the guy to buy the book at a kipper brunch. I told you I’d talk to him. He’ll be at the club later. Smile! It’s a party, remember. Let me get you another drink. Better still, you go and get Mrs Murdoch another drink. I ought to mingle.’

  Meredith’s smile brightened again as a tall man in a candy-striped blazer and cricket clothes entered the room.

  ‘My liege!’ A mock bow.

  Had Raymond met Evelyn? Raymond Games; Evelyn Murdoch. Mrs Murdoch was over from England working at Miracle. Raymond was King Arthur in Knights of Love.

  ‘How do you do, Mrs Murdoch?’

  The actor was famed for his diction and he spoke very slowly, like a wound-down gramophone, clearly relishing his own enunciation.

  ‘Do you want to be in movies, Mrs Murdoch?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Mr Games.’

  A lightning change of tack.

  ‘As a writer, I mean. Or continuity perhaps? I’ll wager you have very sharp eyes. Pretty eyes.’

  His hand came to rest on an area roughly two inches below the small of her back.

  ‘Telephone me.’

  The actor reversed smoothly out of shot and twirled into the arms of Myra Manning but Raymond Games was old news and the columnist used her kiss on his cheek to check on some new arrivals over his shoulder: two men in yachting blazers had come in, both tall, both dressed with too much care – like a music-hall double act that might break into a soft-shoe routine at any moment. One of them was Joseph Weiss.

  He had not seen Evelyn. She moved over to the buffet table where two women were gossiping in an audible whisper.

  ‘But he was married!’ protested one. ‘They had twin boys, for heaven’s sakes.’

  ‘Sure they did,’ laughed the other. ‘She set the alarm clock. First thing in the morning he wouldn’t care if she was wearing a side-saddle. Didn’t you see House Beautiful? There was a piece about their bachelor beach house. “A very economical arrangement”, apparently.’

  ‘Economical? That’s a new word for it.’

  An Englishman in club colours was fastidiously dissecting a sandwich to remove all trace of tomato – ‘They’re bad for my ulcer’ – while his companion began lifting dish covers with either hand as though he were about to play ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ with giant cowbells.

  ‘I thought we were supposed to be having kippers.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd. Have you ever cooked a kipper? Ghastly pong and every cat for miles around. Poor Cedric tried it once and Myra Manning ne
arly choked on a bone. People were queuing up to thump her between the shoulder blades. Not a mistake you make twice.’

  On the far side of the room a tall, silver-haired man in a pink Norfolk jacket had arrived and was holding court with a group of blazered studio executives who were all nodding their heads in agreement. The man waited while one of them relit his large cigar then smiled across to Evelyn and beckoned her to join them. She was about to go over and investigate but found her path blocked by Joseph Weiss.

  ‘Mrs Murdoch! I told you it was a small world.’

  He turned to his companion.

  ‘Conrad, you must meet my new friend from the Super Chief. Mrs Murdoch is over here working with Miracle Studios: Evelyn Murdoch; Conrad Dengler.’

  One sensed, rather than heard, the click of the heels.

  ‘Guten tag.’

  ‘Very well, thank you.’ (Not caught out that easily.)

  Their host was putting a record on the Victrola and his guests eagerly cleared space for dancing. In the confusion, Evelyn escaped to the library nook, which was cosy with club fenders and fire irons and a pair of antique globes with bottles inside. The walls were lined with Harris tweed and tiled with framed snapshots. A handsome bronze of a horse’s head had been trepanned between its ears to support a brass light fitting and placed in the centre of a pietra dura table depicting a bouquet of parrot tulips in a mosaic of lapis, jasper and malachite. Evelyn took careful hold of the lamp in order to move it aside and admire the stone flowers but the horse was held in its place by the electric cord which fed through the statue into a dime-sized opening drilled through the stone. She looked down at the floor but there was no flex there either. Another hole drilled through the carpet? Through the floorboards? Through the centre of the earth? As a child on a beach at Worthing she had once tried to dig through to Australia. What was Hollywood’s antipodes? She prodded her forefinger at one of the globes, mentally skewering a knitting needle through California and wondering where the point would emerge.