Happy Little Bluebirds

by Louise Levene

  Did she have many hobbies, Evelyn asked – a bore’s question if ever there was one – but Rindy McGee was more than happy to boast of her accomplishments. She had mastered five musical instruments, could tap dance, play tennis, ride and ice skate. She hurled a mean lasso and was alarmingly well-versed in circus knife-throwing (this last skill had been taught her by Otto Von Blick).

  ‘I sing, too, and ski.’

  ‘You don’t say.’

  ‘And I can cry real tears any time I want. I just think of the time the puppy got hit by the ice truck.’

  Acquiring so many accomplishments came at a price, however, and her ignorance of regular schoolgirl topics was encyclopaedic.

  ‘I can learn my lines OK, but anything else forget it,’ explained Rindy placidly as they headed up the main staircase.

  ‘You guys go on up and start with the Moses-supposes stuff,’ said Parker. ‘We’ll be right with you. We just need to get a shot of the canoe run.’

  The young star’s apartment ran the length of the house’s attic and was accessed via a concealed door on the top landing which the child opened with a deft dab at the linenfold panelling.

  ‘We had kidnappers when we lived over in Los Feliz,’ Rindy explained. ‘Craven – he’s our butler – scared them off but now Mom isn’t taking any chances. Did you read about the French kid they grabbed? My ransom was going to be twice that.’

  The walls of the hidden staircase were lined with magazine covers: Rindy in an Easter bonnet; Rindy in a cowgirl outfit; Rindy with Santa Claus; Rindy with Charlie Chaplin; Rindy with the President. No Mussolini – not yet at least.

  The long room was half nursery, half boudoir, with a hundred teddy bears, a double bed canopied in pink net and a baby grand piano (did they even make upright pianos in America?).

  Rindy McGee wiped the mud from her face and began changing into a white blouse and flannel pinafore dress.

  ‘The photographer will be up in a minute. You want to freshen up?’

  Evelyn peered at the triptych of Evelyns in the mirror of the pink-flounced dressing table and tucked three stray strands of hair into place. The child gave a hoot of laughter.

  ‘That’s it? Is lipstick against your religion, or something? You look about ninety. That’s what they do for grandmas in the make-up department: just a quick smear of pan-cake then a bit of toothpaste combed through their hair and plenty of No Lipstick. Ages them fifty years. That’s what you look like.’ The baby-blue eyes looked Evelyn up and down. ‘How old are you anyway? Thirty-five? And all that grey … Is that an English suit?’

  But Clinton Parker, who was helping the photographer manhandle his equipment up the stairs, wouldn’t hear a word against Evelyn’s ensemble.

  ‘The suit’s perfect: a little bit of Olde England. The copy will write itself.’

  The photographer began setting up his lights while Parker arranged a pair of giltwood chairs face to face beside the piano.

  ‘Just make your mouth into an O and, Mrs Murdoch, you put your hand under her chin. Here, put these on –’ He produced a pair of lens-less horn-rimmed spectacles from his pocket. ‘Try to look old and grouchy.’ Evelyn caught him winking at Dorinda via the three-way mirror. ‘OK, do your stuff: round tones.’

  Ladylike accomplishments had not been a particular priority at the boarding school that Evelyn’s father had chosen for her but there had been a class called ‘Elocution, Deportment and the Modern Home’ in which the sixth form was taught how to recite poetry, choose soft furnishings and give notice to domestic staff. She had a dim memory of deep-breathing exercises, brown cows and rugged rocks but had prepared for her new role by buying a pamphlet on stage diction in a second-hand bookstore whose shelves were filled with dog-eared publications on voice culture left over from the days when everyone in town was either teaching elocution or learning how to speak. The well-thumbed paperback she had chosen began with the cardinal vowels and worked its way through to lesson twenty (Shakespeare) via pickled peppers and black-backed bath brushes.

  Photographs taken, Rindy McGee sat down at her dressing table and set about removing the fake freckles. A dozen photographs showing all the possible hairstyles for War of the Worlds was tucked around the frame of the mirror: ringlets; a topknot; pigtails. All had been defaced with glasses and inky Franz Ferdinand beards except for one showing the star with hair pulled up into two bunches like the ears on a very surprised spaniel.

  ‘It stinks but it takes years off me, Mother says. Besides, I’ll match my co-star. He’s pretty cute for a dog,’ admitted Rindy, ‘but equal billing? Mother’s mad as hell.’

  ‘I don’t think your mother would like you to say that word.’

  ‘She wouldn’t care. I can do pretty much what I want so long as it isn’t in public. I have to lisp in public.’

  The child was entirely unsurprised when Evelyn told her that there were no dogs or children in the book. Five would get you ten that the original story was bunk, she said. It wasn’t a book once it got sold to the studio: it was a movie and movies were for people who couldn’t read – or so her friend Teddy Monroe always said.

  ‘You see me in Alice in Hollywoodland? That was my first starring role. I was six years old but they put “four” on all the publicity. Teddy did the script on that. Teddy’s a swell guy. He wrote me this.’

  Rindy went over to the piano stool and produced a red folder bound like a script and labelled ‘The Magic Mink by Theodore Valentine Monroe’.

  The magic mink was a fur coat belonging to a wicked stepmother and every night the animals whose skins had made it would come back to life and climb into the heroine’s bed to keep her warm and tell her all about their previous lives in a Russian palace and what the stepmother got up to when she wore the coat. Monroe had illustrated it with his own scribbly line-and-wash: stepmother getting drunk at a society party; stepmother robbing a bank; stepmother in jail. The mink themselves were sketched in scratchy black ink, with fluffy backbleeds of sepia watercolour capturing the softness of their fur. The stepmother’s hair was a crude dab of gamboges, her Cupid’s bow three dots of vermilion.

  ‘Neat, isn’t it?’ Dorinda replaced the book in its hiding place. ‘I told him he should get it published, make it a series. Maybe do one about an alligator purse or something? But he kind of lost interest. Mother hit the roof when she saw it – Mom wears a lot of mink.’

  A black maid entered carrying a large, striped dress box.

  ‘Just put it on the bed, Beulah,’ said the child with a total lack of curiosity.

  Rindy explained that she was being confirmed on Friday week and that there was to be a big party afterwards as it was the day before her birthday and that Evelyn could come if she wanted but if Rindy were Evelyn she’d try to think up a prior engagement.

  ‘It would be neat if you came but it’s sure to be a yawn …’

  Evelyn, slightly at a loss, said surely Rindy would enjoy seeing all her little friends but the child gave a contemptuous snort and said they were just a bunch of studio people’s kids her pressman had invited. None of them was coming to the church beforehand. Half of them were Jewish in any case. Or half Jewish.

  ‘They never say which half. You Catholic?’

  ‘Methodist.’

  ‘Figures. We’re Catholic.’ Rindy pulled a tiny gold and diamond crucifix from inside her blouse and kissed it. ‘Father Mulvey says my talent is an Act of God.’

  Evelyn smothered a smile. Did the Almighty really act in that way? She had always imagined him busy with earthquakes and tidal waves – things one couldn’t insure against. Not tap dancing.

  Evelyn hadn’t intended to take Otto Von Blick up on his invitation, assuming that, like ‘call me’, it was just something people said, but he had personally telephoned to remind her: ‘It’ll be part of your education. You can watch me spin straw into gold.’

  She spent the first hour of Friday morning being photographed for the studio wall – the ‘souvenir’ Kiss had promised her – befo
re strolling the four blocks to Sound Stage Six together with Felix Kay who had offered to keep her company (‘I sweated blood over that dialogue’).

  The original director of Knights of Love had been so enamoured of the Technicolor Camelot the art department had created that all of his love scenes were in mid-shot and (as the amateur critic in Barstow had so rightly said) ‘about as sexy as a stained-glass window’.

  The film had been wrapped over a fortnight ago and the technicians had already struck the set but Von Blick’s close-ups had no need of battlements or staircases (‘a few feathers, some lights, a little smoke’). Camelot was reduced to a Gothic looking glass and a few yards of tapestry and the remains of the more elaborate Arthurian world lay in pieces around the hangar-like room. Just inside the main door the top of the Round Table was angled against the wall, its surface ringed with knightly names gilded into place by the sign-writing team. The names on Arthur’s side of the circle – the side that would face the camera – were all from Thomas Malory: Galahad, Percival, Gawain; but the other half were pure Tinseltown: Sir Grumpy, Sir Sleepy, Sir Dopey …

  The interior of the building was in almost total darkness but over in the far corner, through a jungle of ladders and rigging, Von Blick and his team could be glimpsed like a witches’ sabbath in a focused beam of working light. Queen Guinevere was seated on a gilded plywood throne while a dozen specialists prepared her for close inspection by the cameraman’s two-inch lens. The queen’s loyal page, its sex hard to determine in the red-velvet get-up and yellow wig, was propped against a leaning board blowing bubble gum and waiting for the cue to rush forward with its all-important line (‘My Queen! The King is come!’). Behind the throne, a man with a pocketful of steel combs and a jar of pomade was reglazing the Medusa coils of hair emerging from Magda Malo’s headdress. Meanwhile, the make-up man waited his turn, fiddling with his pots and brushes and harrying his young assistant to find him a smaller sea sponge.

  Running repairs completed, Guinevere resumed drinking iced Coca-Cola through a straw. Thick, soundproofed walls and no windows kept the temperature subtropical. The air was heavy with a sickly, punchbowl smell of lemons from the insecticide used to keep the flies off the actress’s painted skin. Sweat ran down her neck from beneath the heavy golden wig.

  Felix and Evelyn trod water at the edge of the pool of light but Von Blick turned to smile a greeting before picking his way across a floor wormy with black cables like giant liquorice bootlaces.

  ‘Aha! My cleffer English friend!’

  He took Evelyn’s hand and pulled her into the light. The make-up girl in the photographic studio had redrawn her face in a bizarre palette of colours designed to look well in monochrome, but once the shoot was over Evelyn’s black lips and greenish cheeks were wiped away with an oily rag and replaced with a rosy simulacrum of youth and health: lips strawberried over, skin matte and creamy. The girl seemed very pleased indeed by the improvement and gave Evelyn a stick of the stuff to keep. Felix hadn’t noticed the change but Von Blick spotted the Miracle brushwork at once.

  ‘Madame Murdoch here is ready for her close-up,’ he teased away a stray eyelash with his thumb, ‘but Mademoiselle Malo she is not ready.’

  A four-page memo from PZ had been copied to Evelyn (and twenty-seven other people) explaining that they had had a directive from the Hays Office ruling that the neckline of the actress’s slinky green gown was ‘indecently low’. A seamstress with a pincushion attached to her left wrist was making last-minute adjustments with a yard of what might well have been mousseline de soie.

  The director turned to Felix.

  ‘Does that look indecently low to you? You’d see more on the beach but it wouldn’t be fifty feet wide and we have to follow the code here, don’t we, Mr Screenwriter? “Do not make vice attractive, do not make gambling and drunkenness attractive, no prolonged passionate love scenes.” Which leaves us with what exactly? Little Women? Little women –’ the lipsmacking leer of a cartoon wolf in the henhouse ‘– sounds like a stag picture for midgets.’

  ‘Otto? Otto!’ Magda Malo wasn’t getting enough attention. ‘I can’t see you! Who you talk to?’

  The lovely face peered forward and, as her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she spotted Evelyn and Felix lurking behind the cameraman. Her larynx powered up like a siren. Who was that schmuck? They promised her a closed set! It was in her contract! Get her agent on the phone! (Her English was strictly need-to-know.)

  ‘Relax, Liebling. Without this schmuck we’d all be making a silent movie. And you need to be nice to Mrs Murdoch here. We got a memo today. She might be doing your dialogue coaching for The Borgia Pearl and she’s a friend of the big wet Kiss you like so much, so be nice, yes?’

  Miss Malo’s twenty-five words of replacement dialogue had been chalked on a blackboard beside the camera where her lover was supposedly standing. Von Blick had taped a small hand mirror just to the right of the lens so that she could gaze lovingly into her own eyes as she spoke. The director stepped back and made right angles with his thumbs and forefingers to frame the scene then climbed on to his chair and began firing off endearments and instructions to the actress and technical crew in preparation for the take, playing one against the other, flattering and insulting them in their various native languages with the fluency and diplomacy of a Swiss maître d’ in a station hotel.

  ‘How does the ugly bitch look from up there, Federico?’

  ‘Turn your upper body away from me, Liebling, raise your chin three centimetres, drop your voice good and low like this.’ Von Blick sank to baritone. ‘Count to seven and watch that lamp like you couldn’t live without it.’

  After ten more takes the director called ‘cut’, took Liebling’s hand, kissed it and gently pulled her from her seat and stationed her behind the camera. She must humour him. The instant the lights came back up, Von Blick took his star’s place on the Gothic throne and turned to look longingly at his own reflection in the little glass as his rumpled pockmarked face troped irresistibly towards the 300 watts of starlight six feet above his head before delivering the line. Without beauty, without make-up, that slow tilt of the head and the puppet-like drop of the eyelids enabled this middle-aged German Jew to conjure the magical effect he was striving for. Literally a trick of the light.

  Take twenty. Nearly an hour had passed when another stranger entered the charmed circle, shattering the mood. It was Miss Della Cavendish, notebook in hand, who came with an urgent status update on Mr Von Blick’s forthcoming life of the Emperor Caligula.

  ‘Wardrobe are doing a draft budget for Miss Hansen. They need to know how many vestal virgins. The Harvard guy says we only need six but Mr Kiss wired me to check with you.’

  ‘Six!’

  ‘The professor says the Plu-tarch guy is quite specific.’

  ‘Six! Six actual virgins, I could see your problem. Six actual virgins would be a very tall order in this town but this is a movie, Della baby. Six-teen. Minimum. Sixty maybe. And tell them to go easy on the Wardrobe budget if you get my drift.’ He shook his head. ‘Six virgins, he offers me! I’m making an epic here, not a petting party.’

  ‘We finish? We not finish?’ Magda Malo, her face a lovely alabaster icon, impatience on a monument.

  ‘OK, Liebling, back to work. Let’s try a dry take, just an itsy-bitsy rehearsal.’ He reached out to pat her pan-caked cheek but the hand behind his back had its fingers crossed. ‘Tilt head, breathe, smile, look down, look up, say line.’ Von Blick winked at the cameraman and put a finger to his lips.

  ‘Perfect! Cut and print! Danke schön, gentlemen. Bravi!’ A soft, solitary round of applause.

  Magda Malo rose from her throne and went back to her trailer, tailed by Wardrobe, holding the damp green fabric clear of the floor.

  ‘Finally, finally, when it doesn’t matter, she does what matters,’ smiled Von Blick, ‘but we got it in the can. Nobody likes retakes on a finished picture but what they don’t realise is that it isn’t finished till it’s fi
nished.’ He turned to Evelyn. ‘Good to see you again, princess. Are you free on the ninth? I’m having a house-warming. You come, yes? I show you my paintings.’

  The director waved a hand at Felix, registering his frayed collar and flyblown jacket. ‘You be chaperon, Mr Screenwriter.’ The title made Felix sound vaguely important but Evelyn wondered if Von Blick simply couldn’t remember his name.

  Chapter 10

  There was a slow-spreading bloodstain on the lilac silk sofa cushions where a busty young blonde lay, holding an ice pack to her face. Over by the door, her press agent was shouting into the telephone.

  ‘Hello Mrs Ginsburg? Is the good Doctor home? I hate to bother him on a Sunday but it’s kind of an emergency …’

  The press agent put his hand over the mouthpiece as he whispered to a friend at his side. ‘Best thing that could happen. Now she’ll have to have it fixed up. Crazy Danish broad kept insisting it had character. I told her: when they want character they get Barrymore. This Ginsburg guy’s got a whole pattern book: Hedy Lamarr, Colbert, anyone she wants. It’ll be the making of her, mark my words.’

  The glass doors leading on to the patio would normally have been misted with desert dust but a squad of men with chamois leathers from the maintenance company had just finished polishing them to a crystal shine to be ready for Wally Grendon’s famous weekly lunch when poor Miss Larsen arrived and decided to take a turn around the garden. Her host had little sympathy beyond agreeing that it was all ghastly and kept looking at his watch until the men in white coats pulled up in a private ambulance and led the weeping girl away.

  ‘Thank God she arrived early,’ said Wally as he flipped the cushions.

  Evelyn had been in two minds about Mr Grendon’s invitation – she hadn’t even been introduced to the man – but Felix told her not to be a sap.

  ‘I’ll be there, everyone will be there.’