Happy Little Bluebirds

by Louise Levene

  ‘Madagascar?’ she mused aloud.

  ‘Madagascar?’ Conrad Dengler’s deck shoes had made no sound on the room’s thick carpet. ‘Madagascar? That’s most interesting. Why do you say that?’ His voice was low and urgent and his eyes darted to each side of the room like a silent screen villain about to whisk a Gish sister into white slavery.

  ‘It looked like a perfect solution at one time, didn’t it?’ he smiled. ‘It would have solved a difficult situation, don’t you agree?’

  Before he could say any more, they were joined by a worried-looking Joseph Weiss. He was sure Mrs Murdoch was not interested in African geography. Cedric Sedgwick’s record was still playing and Weiss raised hands and eyebrows to invite her to dance with him but his move was intercepted by the tall, pink-jacketed man who grabbed hold of Evelyn and kissed her wetly on both cheeks.

  ‘Evie, darling!’ His loud voice was a strange mix of Balliol and Budapest. ‘You look marvellous!’

  Zandor Kiss put a pink cashmere arm around her waist and magicked her away from Weiss and his friend in a sort of syncopated wiggle.

  ‘You follow well, Mrs Murdoch. You rumba? Everyone should rumba. My Miss Cavendish back at the office will see to it. They have a man right there at the studio. Little dago – Gonzales? Morales? That guy could teach a cripple to rumba,’ promised Mr Kiss. ‘Very easy: a little like a paso doble’ (as if that explained everything).

  He stopped dancing as soon as they reached the terrace, giving a final half turn so that he had his back to Joseph Weiss. ‘So, how come you know the Kraut?’

  ‘On the train,’ breathed Evelyn, matching his hugger-mugger tones. ‘Told him I was in voice culture.’

  ‘Very good, that we can fix. Maybe we can have you coach the McGee girl. I want her talking like Anna Neagle. Is your house OK? Mamie Silverman is a very nice lady. Very – what is the word?’

  ‘Szimpatikus?’

  ‘Exactly! Crazy like an Albanian donkey but szimpatikus.’

  Keeping her voice low she asked if he had any idea when Colonel Peyton would be returning. Kiss gave a slow shake of the head and put a finger to his lips. The Colonel was a very busy man.

  ‘But if I’m supposed to be his assistant …’

  ‘This town is full of weasels. You can be useful, you can listen; you can come to things like this and listen.’

  ‘Yes, but what am I to do the rest of the time?’

  Kiss took her hand and began absently polishing the back of it.

  ‘What does anyone do in this place? You’ve seen the studio: all those offices, all those pretty telephones. What do any of them do? Read some scripts. Make a few notes. You know shorthand? Make it up. Look busy. Have you read the Mars book?’

  Evelyn said that she had and reminded him that she lived in Woking.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Woking? It’s one of the towns attacked in the novel.’

  He shook his head. ‘Not any more. We cut Woking. We’d have the Legion of Decency on our backs. Minds like sewers, these Decency people. Anyhow, we’ll find you plenty to do. They’re having a meeting in PZ’s office at eleven o’clock tomorrow. The Kay kid can bring you. You can be consultant – like on your business cards.’

  ‘But surely that would mean treading on the toes of all the other writers and consultants?’

  Mr Kiss made a dismissive gesture with his hand. She wasn’t to take any notice of those farkuk. He obviously hadn’t expected her to understand him and he looked at her blush in surprise.

  ‘It said “conversational Hungarian” on your papers. What kind of conversations were you having, Mrs Murdoch?’

  ‘My school’s singing teacher was originally from Györ. He didn’t like the English very much.’

  When she arrived back at the bungalow the terrace was clear of mud and weeds, a pair of steamer chairs had been angled to face the sunset and a splendid Bonnard landscape had been hung on the newly painted wall opposite her bed.

  Friday’s LA Times was on the kitchen table. There was a three-column photograph of the smashed interior of St Paul’s Cathedral on its front page. ‘Offering from Mars,’ read the caption. ‘The beautiful high altar in London yesterday desecrated by raiding planes as silent Nazi missiles fall far and wide.’

  Chapter 8

  Felix Kay was wearing a less Mad Professor jacket than usual when Evelyn arrived at work the next day and was straightening his tie and combing his hair in the mirror behind the office door.

  ‘We’re seeing Kiss and the big cheese at eleven,’ he explained.

  At exactly five minutes to they walked across to the executive building where Kiss’s personal secretary, Della Cavendish, was at her desk about to wrap a slim jeweller’s box in a sheet of Japanese paper. The gift tag read ‘To Darling Rindy from Uncle Zandor’. Miss Cavendish wasn’t at all happy about it. The child was way too young for that kind of thing. She snapped open the leather case and held a rivière of pale-green stones up to the light.

  ‘They’d match your eyes,’ oozed Felix.

  ‘Didn’t think I was your type, Mr Kay.’

  Her face resumed its all-purpose smile as she turned to Evelyn.

  ‘Mrs Murdoch, isn’t it? I remember buying the dress. Zandor said I was to give you Miss McGee’s address and phone number.’ She took an index card from her blotter. ‘And he had me call Mr Morales about some dancing lessons. He’s got a two-hour slot after lunch.’

  One of Miss Cavendish’s telephones began ringing. She put a hand over the receiver.

  ‘PZ’s still tied up in another meeting so nobody’s here yet.’ Miss Cavendish suppressed a yawn. ‘Maybe you could wait outside, Mr Kay? Work on the tan? Rest your sex appeal?’

  They took a seat facing the office window. Axminster lawns were ringed by formal flowerbeds planted with toy-like standard roses, each bush cunningly grafted so that the blooms were half red, half white like a ready-made set for Alice in Wonderland. On the rust-coloured soil beneath the plants a team of Japanese gardeners were grubbing up perfectly healthy pansies ready for the autumn switch to begonias.

  A half-familiar face was practising golf shots on the lawn. He squinted across at them to check their status then resumed his manoeuvres, taking care to remain in clear view of the office windows. He then began doing surprising things with a set of dumb-bells.

  ‘Funny place to exercise. Is there not a gymnasium for that?’

  ‘Who’d see him? Poor guy gets typecast as college professor, lab-coat types. It happens when they wear glasses.’ Felix gave the man a long stare. ‘I guess he’s gunning for an action picture.’

  There was an urgent rap on the glass from Miss Cavendish.

  The corridor leading to PZ’s suite was lined with photographs. Everyone at eye level was a star but there were lesser mortals down by the skirting boards and up near the ceiling. Felix raised a scuffed suede foot and pointed to a picture in the bottom corner: a military-looking chap sporting dog’s-tooth checks and an Errol Flynn moustache.

  ‘HP takes a good picture, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Cutting it very fine, Mr Kay.’

  A woman in a trim brown tailor-made and horn-rimmed spectacles was standing by the door to the inner office carrying a pile of yellow folders. The door read ‘PZ Homberg, Chief Executive’. Evelyn rubbed experimentally at the letter C as she passed and the wafer of gold leaf wrinkled readily across the polished maple veneer.

  PZ’s private desk was high up on a dais at the far end of the room with the usual bank of snapshots (was there anyone anywhere who hadn’t met Charles Lindbergh?). There was an American flag on a short pole, a brass outline of the United States tooled into the wall behind the desk and a row of wall clocks: Los Angeles; New York; London; Berlin; Bombay; Sydney. London was ten minutes slow.

  A conference table ran the length of the room and had been laid for a three-course meeting, each place supplied with blotter, notepad, pencils, water jug and a crystal ashtray the size of a hubcap. Half a dozen men drifted in
but lurked by the picture window, seemingly reluctant to commit to a seating plan.

  The woman in brown, Trudi Hansen, PZ’s ‘executive secretary’, knew their little game only too well.

  ‘Do sit down, gentlemen.’

  She herself remained standing at the top of the table and there was an awkward musical-chairs moment while they all jockeyed for seats – near but not too near.

  ‘The important thing is to stay out of spitting distance,’ warned Felix.

  No sooner had the last man taken his place than the far door opened to reveal Zandor Kiss, Ted Monroe, Walter Kramer and a tall, dark man in rimless spectacles smoking a long cigar: PZ Homberg.

  ‘You kidding? He’s on my Drop Dead list. Actually he’s top of my Drop Dead list – and there’s some stiff competition.’

  The head of Miracle Studios wore a well-cut flannel suit and a necktie of dull grey silk, a lawyerly subfusc entirely at odds with his manner. He took in the placement at a glance and immediately strode to the wrong end of the table, signalling Miss Hansen to join him. Zandor Kiss bagged the chair to his right and pulled up another for Miss Cavendish who sat at his elbow, pen poised. Ted Monroe, oblivious to any pecking order, took the empty chair next to Evelyn and immediately poured himself a glass of water and loosened his tie. Mr Kramer sat at the other end of the table and lit the first of ten cigarettes. He remained silent for the entire meeting but made the occasional note with a gold fountain pen (‘look busy’).

  ‘OK people! What we got? Trudi?’

  Miss Hansen consulted the first of her yellow folders.

  ‘They’ve had some early snow up in Vermont so now The Lady and the Lumberjack is five days behind schedule. Eighty per cent of the work has been done in the studio but Dolores Del Ray was flown up for two days of exterior shots by the old swimming hole – the swim itself is being done right here in the tank – but then they got the two inches of snow.’

  PZ was unimpressed by the delay. What were they paying the writers for? Write some snow.

  ‘Way ahead of you, PZ.’

  Ted Monroe skimmed a few paper-clipped sheets across the table’s high-gloss surface.

  ‘We change the swimming hole to a ski lodge – that way we can still use the log cabin. The second unit got some footage of the snowfall and Wardrobe have sent up some winter sports outfits and a sable coat.’

  A small man in a bow tie and a diamond-patterned sweater pulled some sketches from a portfolio.

  PZ appeared unconvinced.

  ‘Can she ski, even?’

  ‘For eighteen hundred a week she can ski.’

  Miss Hansen thought not.

  ‘Miss Del Ray has a “No Dangerous Sports or Activities” clause in her contract. She broke her ankle trying to ride a camel in that Von Blick thing she did and her agent isn’t taking any chances.’

  ‘The McGee moppet’s playing the kid sister. She can definitely ski,’ said Felix. ‘She skied in that Santa Claus picture.’

  ‘OK, but what about the bathing suit? Publicity was dead set on the bathing suit. The magazines have the photos already.’

  ‘She can wear tight pants and a fancy sweater,’ said Monroe. ‘A tight fancy sweater. We’ll see her getting off a sledge or a snowplough then along the path, enter the old log cabin mid-shot, shrug off the sables –’ Ted Monroe rolled his shoulders and puffed out his chest suggestively ‘– then we unleash the pedigree Pomeranians.’

  ‘Greyhounds’d be better,’ said Felix. ‘More class.’

  ‘Listen, they could be raccoons for all the camera will see of them. We’ll be zooming in for the close-up: a snowflake on her frozen cheek … maybe we’d better make it a low-necked sweater …’ Monroe paused mid-flow. ‘Always assuming that the snow holds. If not, run with the swimming-hole idea. She OK with swimming, or is that too dangerous for her?’

  Miss Hansen signalled to an underling who scuttled back to the main office in her high-heeled shoes. There was the shriek of steel filing-cabinet drawers as the relevant contract was whisked from the archive and brought back for inspection.

  ‘Swimming is OK,’ read Miss Hansen, ‘but no high diving, no water ballets and her hairdresser to be on permanent standby.’

  ‘I wish I had her agent,’ laughed PZ. ‘OK, run with the snow thing but make it snappy and get them to send a daily weather report. What’s next? Ted? Any more of those treatments we talked about?’

  PZ and the great American public were very taken with the whole fish-out-of-water comedy format in which an aristocratic female was brought to heel by a man in a checked shirt (her comeuppance usually featured mud and a lot of torn lace) and the studio was keen to feed the appetite it had created. Duchess in the Dirt was due to start shooting the following week and Countess in Calico was also in the pipeline. Ted Monroe wondered aloud if the same gag would work with a male lead? Maybe an older guy plus a pair of juveniles – The Duke Goes West? Some English bozo pitches up in New Mexico, the Rolls-Royce breaks down, he high-hats the local talent and ends up in a horse trough – plus the cowboy gets the girl. It could be a vehicle for Games, he thought, or possibly Frobisher? Ted Monroe could see Baines Frobisher in a horse trough.

  ‘You and me both,’ agreed PZ. ‘Did we find a part for him in the toga picture?’

  Miss Hansen consulted her notebook.

  ‘Games to play Caligula, Frobisher as Uncle Claudius, two hundred pairs of sandals and about a mile of bedsheets – Von Blick’s got a Harvard Latin professor on the payroll.’

  ‘Prestige pictures are a pain in the ass,’ sighed PZ. ‘Let me see something on that Duke idea by Friday, Ted. How’d The Cowboy and the Countess go down?’

  ‘They had a preview out in Barstow last week,’ said Miss Hansen, pinging the elastic from two piles of index cards and passing them to her boss.

  PZ flicked through the pasteboard comments in the first batch.

  ‘“Funniest movie I ever saw”,’ he read. ‘“Laughed so hard I peed in my girlfriend’s hand”.’

  An awkward, snuffly moment while sniggers were swallowed.

  ‘How about the current version of Knights of Love?’

  ‘Not so good.’

  Miss Hansen lowered her glasses and read from the top few comments.

  ‘Eighty per cent not in favour: “About as sexy as a stained-glass window. The no-good, cheating dame should learn to speak English. My girlfriend and I lost interest after twenty minutes. Any more movies like this and I’ll have to marry the bitch.” The general feeling was Not Enough Sex.’

  ‘Sounds to me like they supply their own,’ said PZ, waving the cards away. ‘It’s easy to overreact to a bunch of cards – everyone thinks they know better – but nobody ever had a hit with twenty per cent approval. What are we doing to fix it? Zandor?’

  ‘Sex, we’ve got –’ Zandor Kiss nodded to a publicity man who handed round photographs that featured a pouting, wimpled Miss Malo displaying un-Arthurian amounts of décolletage ‘– and Von Blick is going to be reshooting the love scenes with some new dialogue from Mr Kay here.’

  He signalled to Miss Cavendish who dealt everyone a few foolscap pages and PZ’s rimless spectacles flashed as he compared the old scene with the latest rewrite.

  ‘We need to do something about that “cheating dame” thing,’ mused Felix, ‘make Guinevere more sympathetic.’ He paused for the briefest moment. ‘Maybe she should have a casket on the table with some baby shoes she’s been knitting: one made, one never finished? She could take them out and fuss with them a little then lock them back in the box? The music will do the rest. Every mother in America will get the message: Arthur doesn’t cut the mustard.’

  ‘That ought to get it,’ nodded PZ. ‘Nice job, Felix.’

  Felix seemed taller suddenly.

  ‘OK, OK, OK. Now, Zandor, what’s happened with that British Air Force doco idea you pitched us? Lions in the Sky? They win the war yet?’

  Zandor Kiss said that he was flying back to London later in the week and had
meetings lined up with the British War Office about making a film showing the day-to-day running of an RAF squadron.

  ‘Easy on the war stuff but everyone loves airplane pictures.’ PZ turned to Ted Monroe. ‘Work up a treatment – plenty of aerial stunts. One page, not too much dialect and –’ he jabbed his cigar towards Kiss ‘– no Krauts.’

  ‘OK. New business? Trudi?’ An impatient nod to Miss Hansen.

  ‘The new scenario for the Martian picture. Mr Kiss to present.’

  Zandor Kiss placed his fingertips on the table’s edge and closed his eyes (Ted Monroe rolled his).

  ‘We hear the orchestra. An unearthly sound: strings – maybe a theremin?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘New electric thing,’ said Felix. ‘Very high-pitched, sounds like Deanna Durbin in a tight girdle.’

  PZ shrugged and signalled to Kiss to continue.

  ‘The camera zooms in through the cockpit of a spaceship – pilot’s point of view. There’s a panel of buttons and speedos and above them, through the window, we see the Earth getting closer and closer. Then we pull back and see a wrinkled claw come into shot and move one of the levers.’ Kiss opened his eyes and his voice grew louder and more dramatic. ‘The claw lets go the lever and points out of the window in the direction of the Earth, then it balls into a fist and we hear someone say, “You are an inferior race.”’

  ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute. You got the Martians talking English? You sure about that?’

  ‘We could use Esperanto,’ suggested Felix. ‘Worked fine in Codename Ramona. That way the only people we offend are the Esperanto people.’