20th Century Un-limited

by Felice Picano

  “You do?” I asked. I still hadn’t figured out his type.

  “You slip in dog-doo and it turns out to be chocolate pudding.”

  “Funny. Well, Jonah and Ducky, I sacrificed to the Goddess this morning and She promised me you’d get parts too.”

  Hank was amused and Ducky had no idea what I was talking about.

  “Not me,” Jonah said. “Other people’s luck doesn’t rub off on me.”

  I was about to suggest he not be so defeatist when Sid showed up, using a piece of cardboard he’d found somewhere as an umbrella, that he left at the door.

  He shook himself like a dog next to the table and then ordered breakfast standing up. When he sat down next to me he said, “Ducky was sure we were goin’ have ta bust you outta Juvie Hall!”

  I put my hands out as though I were being cuffed.

  “They got me, Sid. Took me in a seventeen-foot-long Lincoln.” I rubbed it in. “Automatically locked doors. No getting away. One other backseat passenger. The lovely and talented Sue-Anne Schiller. Obviously an alias, as she was clearly a career criminal, like myself. We were forced to sing, dance, act, and then they made us sign our lives away in some bogus contract. We were marched over to a soundstage and stuck there all afternoon. Sure, they fed us on club sandwiches fatter than my hand with green goddess dressing, but who knew when we’d ever make good our escape or see freedom again? Not to mention your mugs?”

  Hank and Jonah and after a while even Ducky did all they could to not burst out laughing. But I could see that every word was another blow to Sid’s ego.

  “Geez!” Sid said. “What an imagination this kid has. He’s another Edna Ferber!”

  The others exploded at this: food and drink went all over the table.

  “Tell you what, Sid,” Hank said, once he could hold down food again and not giggle. “You shave really close tomorrow and Chris’ll bring you by his director’s office when he goes.”

  Jonah added, “Try to look sweet, Sid, and you just might pass for a particularly perverted teenager.”

  “What a bunch a bananas,” Sid said, not losing his cool. He turned to a man with a newspaper at the next table. “And these are my friends!”

  “Congratulations on your part, Sid,” I said.

  “It’s nothing. They really wanted Lover Boy there.” Meaning Hank. “I’m just along for the ride.” Not a stupid young man.

  “For contrast?” I asked.

  “Something like that.”

  “They picking you up in a limo today too?” Ducky asked. Naïveté was his long suit and it looked good on him.

  “No. My, ahem, talent agent is getting me. At ten!”

  “Will that Sue-Anne be there?” Ducky asked.

  “I guess. She’s staying not far from here. You want to meet her, Ducky?”

  “Ducky likes girls but they make him…nervous,” Jonah said.

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “If I looked like you, Ducks, I’d be dating three girls at any given time.”

  “Not on my bank account, you wouldn’t.”

  “She’s probably staying at Miss Irene’s Hotel for Young Women,” Jonah said.

  “Words uttered by someone who must know every brick in that building’s façade,” I said.

  Jonah blushed. “Well, I have known a girl or two who stayed there.”

  And I realized what it was about him I’d not been able to put my finger on before: he was a cocksman. A quiet and unassuming one, a non-bragging one, but definitely a cocksman. I’d bet he made out like a bandit with those out-of-town girls.

  A friend of theirs, a guy named Russ with lots of almost white-blond hair, came by the table and joked with us. He had a larger “bit” part in Charlie Chan in Paris and knew a couple of the guys in the crew. He mentioned that they were looking for French speakers.

  “Junior here speaks Froggie,” Jonah announced. And before I realized he meant me, he added, “But he’s got an agent.”

  “That’s okay. It’s a legit role.” Russ wrote down my name and said he knew Wannamaker Talent. “You’re kinda young. But who knows?”

  When he’d left, Jonah said, “He’ll get a five-buck tip if they sign you.”

  “Fine with me.”

  Sid muttered, “You do high-wire too? I hear Ringling Brothers is looking for an aerialist.”

  “Except it’s for an aerialist without a net, right?” I asked, and Sid smiled—complicit. So that was it: Sid and I were going to have a friendly-rivals relationship.

  The rain had stopped and the street was misting over when we left the diner. I joined the others headed up to the Warner’s omnibus stop. At the last minute, Jonah begged off saying he felt a headache coming on, joking about “this damn California climate, sunny every day of the week!”

  The bus came not a minute after that, and three minutes later I was back at the Alsop House with a newspaper someone had abandoned in the lobby.

  I mentioned Jonah to Pops, who was awake and listening to The Trials of Helen Kent on the lobby’s console radio, which was about the size of a 1960 Fiat 500 I’d owned in my youth. But once the commercial came on, Pops turned down the volume knob and said, “He didn’t come back. Only you.”

  Leaving me to wonder exactly where Jonah had gone for his “headache.”

  I sat and read in the lobby, waiting for him to come in. The front-page articles were mostly local: Teenage girl didn’t come home. When the Griffith Park Observatory would—finally!—open, in late May. One little article was about drought conditions and high winds in Oklahoma. There was a photo of a huge and ominously black cloud hovering over a tiny shack of a house with a barefoot girl looking up at it. The caption: She’s praying for rain. I was aware that this would soon become the Dust Bowl tragedy, and by next year, that little girl would be one of a million trying to survive on the borders of Kern County in the Central Valley, not that far from where I sat.

  Sue-Anne was already in the front seat of Frances Wannamaker’s Hudson. So I climbed in back. The ceiling of the Terraplane was high and curved in back. I thought that Magic Johnson could be comfortable back here.

  Frances half turned. “I got a phone call just before I left the office. What’s this I hear? You speak French?”

  “Bien sur, madamoiselle. Mais seulement un peur.”

  “That sounds genuine to me.”

  “Certainement, mon cherie! Mon chaufleur!”

  Sue-Anne turned—her pert little mouth open in an astonished “o.”

  “From what Casting at Warners told me on the phone, it’s about five lines in one scene. They’ll probably glue a mustache on your face and put you in a French cop uniform.”

  “Je sera—un flic?”

  “It’ll have to be early in the morning. Since you’ve got eleven o’clock shoots all the rest of the week. If I or someone else can’t meet you, I’ll send a taxi over for you. The pay is hundred bucks flat.”

  “Magnifique!” I said.

  We were stopped at a streetlight. She turned again to face me:

  “Two film jobs in one week your first week in town and you’re cool as a cucumber! Enough to joke about it. In French, yet! You don’t really care one way or the other, do you, Chris?”

  That got Sue-Anne riled up. She defended me, telling Frances how hard I’d worked at the day before rehearsal. “Tell her, Chris!”

  What she hadn’t understood was that for the past few days I was reveling, absolutely reveling, in the health, strength, and especially in the easy dexterity of my new eighteen-year-old body.

  “I think it’s all wonderful for me and for us both, Mrs. Wannamaker. I’m willing to do whatever it is to keep me working and to provide you with your ten percent.”

  One shapely, mostly penciled in, eyebrow lifted and Frances muttered, “Oh, brother! And I thought I had to deal with bad acting at auditions.”

  The car took off again.

  In the backseat I found a copy of Screenplay magazine: on the cover was an idealized illustration of the
head of Greta Garbo. To one side, the cover copy read, Marriage predicted for Garbo!

  I let out a guffaw.

  “What?” Sue-Anne asked and I handed her the magazine. She squealed: “Oooh. I’ll just bet she’s going to marry John Gilbert.”

  “I’ll just bet she’s going to marry Mercedes Acosta,” I said.

  “Who’s he?” Sue-Anne asked.

  “I heard that,” Frances said, trying to act shocked.

  A minute later, she let out a big laugh that she tried to stifle.

  6

  “Cut! That was terrific, kids!” our director said. “Take ten!” And we went to one side of the soundstage where food, and more importantly juice, had been set up. Most of the girls raced to sit on the folding chairs there; they’d been dancing in low heels. Most of the boys wolfed down whatever looked edible. We’d been shooting the scene—an utterly forgettable song-and-dance number along with the “lead couple,” Bill Bartlett and a young woman whose name I didn’t catch—for what seemed to be hours: i.e., since we’d gotten there at eleven that morning. Lots of chatter, and catching up, and complaints among us.

  But I noticed the “star” himself in what looked like animated conversation with the director, and a few minutes later, the set producer joined them and it became even more animated. Finally all of them headed in a direction that I knew was where some of the “kids” went to smoke: outside.

  When they returned ten minutes later or so, they seemed to have agreed upon something. All of them but Billy and the executive producer, who evidently had also joined them, seemed annoyed, biting their lips, looking aside, etc. From which I gathered that the star had thrown a hissy fit and his wish had been granted.

  The script boy came over and tapped me and then Sue-Ann and took us over to the group with our star.

  “Nice work, kids,” our director said. “Tell me, would you two be comfortable moving up in the line and going right behind and to one side of Billy and Milly?”

  That was her name: Milly!

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Isn’t that where Henry and Jane are now?” Sue-Ann asked: the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.

  “And that’s exactly the problem.” Billy came up and joined us, acting all chummy all of a sudden. “Thom and I saw yesterday’s rushes and those kids looked totally out of whack!”

  He meant Thom Rafferty, Frances Wannamaker’s connection at the studio and the executive producer on the picture: i.e., he answered directly to M.G. or M.

  “We thought maybe you kids could try it. We all like your look and your dancing,” Seiter, the director, said. He sounded long-suffering.

  “But aren’t they professionals?” Sue-Ann argued. “We just got here!”

  “Don’t underestimate yourselves,” Billy said. “You kids are terrific.”

  Sue-Anne was about to protest again when I grabbed her hand hard. She shut up and looked at me.

  “We’ll try it out,” I said. Then I added to Billy, “Thanks for giving us the spot!”

  He clapped me on the shoulder and off everyone went.

  The second director then had the less pleasant job of telling Henry and Jane that they were relegated to the back line. I could see Henry doing a slow burn. Jane turned around to hide her tears.

  But we still weren’t ready to shoot. Billy, the director, and the set director went into another huddle, so I grabbed Sue-Anne and marched her back to the ousted couple. Sue-Anne went over to Jane and tried to console her.

  Henry, a good-looking, auburn-haired kid of about eighteen, was evidently still livid.

  “You two can’t dance as well as we can!” he said.

  “No we can’t, Henry, and we both know it too. But that seems to be exactly the point!”

  That stopped him. His face froze up for a second. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you and Jane are so good that you’re showing up those two clod-hoppers! With us next to them, they’ll look like the pros.”

  The look of sudden enlightenment on poor Henry’s face at the iniquity of the world was almost too much to bear. I touched his arm. “I’m sorry, Henry. But don’t worry. You’ll get another chance to shine.”

  Now his face darkened with the realization. I could see Sue-Anne telling Jane the same thing, only she cried even more.

  “It’s because he’s blowing off that exec,” Henry said, his mouth a hard curved line.

  “Blowing off” was a American 30s slang term, meaning not “ignoring,” as I was used to hearing the term in 2010, but instead “blowing,” period.

  “Who is? Bartlett?” I asked.

  “Sure. I saw the two of them in the Derby on Wilshire a couple of nights ago, next to each other, thigh to thigh. He’s blowing off that Rafferty for sure. I had the chance to do it myself, a few months ago, you know.” I just bet he did, handsome as he was. “Rafferty invited me out to a nightclub and all. And stupid me, I turned Rafferty down. Said I didn’t do stuff like that. Not even for a movie.”

  “Well, maybe. But it’s Bartlett’s movie, Henry. He’s got the name.”

  “Betcha he blew off that Rooney guy to get in Mickey McGuire too.”

  So I let Henry blow off—some steam. When he was a little calmer I suggested we go help Sue-Anne with Jane. We’d just accomplished that when we were all called to our soundstage floor marks.

  “I’m really sorry, Henry,” I repeated. “You know I am.”

  “I know. I know. Thanks. It’s my own fault,” he said, ruefully, and he and Jane took what before had been our places.

  “Are you nervous?” I asked Sue-Anne.

  “No, I’m mad.”

  “Then dance, girl! Dance like mad!” I whispered.

  She made a cute smile at that.

  We did okay. At least we didn’t mess up. And the scene took only four more tries before a beleaguered Seiter yelled “cut!” And then the set producer yelled, “That’s it for the day. Tomorrow at eleven a.m.! You’ve got the scene number and page. Costumes at ten a.m.”

  We joined Jane and Henry as they were leaving and we repeated our apologies.

  “I forgot to tell you,” Sue-Anne said to me. “Frances can’t come today for us. And anyway, we can’t have her come get us every day. There’s a studio bus that’ll get us over to a streetcar line.”

  Fine with me. I wanted to process what had happened that day.

  In fact, we were about to step onto the studio bus when a car horn got our attention. It was Henry and Jane in a canary yellow open-top ’33 or ’34 Cadillac convertible with coffee-au-lait fenders. Very nice! They called us over. He was at the wheel, she in the front passenger seat.

  “Where to?” Jane asked.

  “Downtown Hollywood?” I asked.

  “We’re going straight up Crescent,” Henry said. Meaning Fairfax Avenue. “Then turning left.” I.e., probably to Beverly Hills.

  “We can take a Red Car from Crescent and Santa Monica,” Sue-Anne said. She obviously knew the streetcar lines. She joined Henry in front, while I joined Jane in the backseat.

  “Nice car!” I said. “Is this yours?” I asked Henry.

  “I wish! No, it’s Jane’s. Her eighteenth birthday gift from her uncle.”

  “Is it a straight eight?” I had to ask.

  “Vee-eight,” Jane said. “He’s driving because I’m still upset.”

  “Bummer!” I said, then remembering the lingo, added, “You kids got a really bum deal today.”

  “Tell me!”

  “It’s your car, huh?” I said. And once Henry took off, I added, “Is there any way I can butt in on this friendship that you and Henry have going?”

  “You’re pretty fresh, aren’t you?” Jane asked, delighted.

  “Watch out for Chris, Jane,” Sue-Anne said from in front. “And remember: he’s been a sailor and gone halfway around the world.”

  I wanted to correct that and tell them all that I’d gone completely “around the world,” more than once.

  Up close, Ja
ne was good-looking, with more solid and mature features than Sue-Anne and what used to be called “chestnut brown” hair and with big, pretty, green eyes.

  “Jane’s uncle is E. B. Gilmore!” Henry said.

  I’d heard that name.

  “Watch where you’re driving, buster!” she said. Then to me, “I heard you were a Merchant Marine. You don’t look old enough.”

  “I lied.”

  “I guessed you for the lying type too.” Jane continued to flirt.

  “Well, anyway, I’m just flirting,” I said, the obvious. “You know, because you’re pretty and we’re thrown back here together.”

  “Well, don’t stop now!” Jane said, and covered her mouth as she laughed.

  We’d driven east on Venice Blvd., which was only two lanes, and just as I was wondering if I’d recognize anything from my time, the odor of baking bread came my way. “Helms Bakery?” I asked.

  “We’re stopping there,” Jane said.

  We did stop and the girls went in through big, double front doors to the shop to get bread and rolls. I gave Sue-Anne money to get some sweet rolls and doughnuts. After today’s workout I could eat a horse. But I watched as Jane pushed Sue-Anne’s hand proffering the cash away, with a look that said, “What, are you kidding me?”

  “So, you two are an item?” I asked Henry, once I was alone with him in the car.

  “No. I’m nuts about Jane, but she’s still shopping around. She’s looking for excitement. Then she’ll allow her folks to marry her off to some other millionaire.”

  “Yet she dances as hard as any girl there.”

  “Jane’s a trouper.” He mused a little. “I’m not a gold digger. Although, you know, that would make everything a lot easier if I were. But how can I convince her folks?”

  “I understand. My advice is stick around her as long as you can. Maybe once all her excitement is done, she’ll see you still hanging around and figure…?”

  “Nah. That only happens in the movies,” wise Henry said.

  “So her family is rich?”

  “The Gilmores? They own a big chunk of L.A., from Wilshire all the way up to Melrose and over to La Brea. You’ll see. We go right by it.”

  The females went into the backseat together and I contented myself with feeding Henry and myself doughnuts as he turned up Crescent (i.e., Fairfax Avenue, not renamed until the 1950s). After about five minutes, he said, “See, over there!” He pointed left at San Vicente Boulevard. “That’s the Carthay Circle Theatre. We’re going to a premiere there Sunday. You should come with us. Right, Jane?” he yelled.