“I know why you’re doing this,” Marylin said in a rising tone. “You’re paying me off, aren’t you?”
“Marylin!” NolaBee cried. “You apologize right this minute!”
Joshua downed his fresh drink in one gulp. Wiping a thick knuckle across his lips, he said, “I owe you one, yes. I damn well owe you a big one.”
“What . . . what happened wasn’t anybody’s fault but mine, Mr. Fernauld. I’m not going to see Mr. Garrison.”
“What are you saying?” Agitated, NolaBee pushed over the empty coconut shell in which her drink had been served. After years of dreams, plans, hard work, and privation, she had arrived at the promised land, and her entry visa was being revoked by a few words. “Joshua, you saw her. Tell her again. If anyone belongs on the screen, it’s Marylin!”
“I said no, Mama!” The muscles below Marylin’s cheeks were working. “Roy, Althea, let me out. Let me out!”
The younger girls slid hastily from the booth, and Marylin ran toward the door. NolaBee trotted after her.
BJ, having read Linc’s stories, by now understood that Marylin’s love for Linc had been far from unrequited. “Talk about rushing things, Daddy. Mother’s right, you are beset by impatience. Why on earth didn’t you give Marylin some time?”
“My generosity is terrible and swift,” he said sourly. “Party’s over, girls. Get a move on.”
A wind had come up, rattling the floodlit palms outside the Tropics. In the protection of the entry, NolaBee was talking with low vehemence to Marylin.
As the others emerged, NolaBee turned to Joshua. “Marylin has something to say to you.”
“Mr. Fernauld,” Marylin murmured, “I’m sorry I jumped on you like that. You’re giving me a wonderful opportunity and I’m very grateful.”
“Your first instinct to refuse was impeccable. The industry’s a zoo. You have to be equipped to bull your way through the sh . . . through the mire.”
“I’ll work very hard,” Marylin said.
“I reckon the surprise was too much,” NolaBee said. “What with the excitement of BJ’s play and all.”
Marylin nodded, the antithesis of that bouncy, dumb little chick she had played. Her real self was a tenderly vulnerable Puccini heroine, and Joshua’s penetrating eyes rested another moment on her.
The group drifted down the curved ramp, waiting quietly on the sidewalk. On this, the four hundred block of Rodeo Drive, empty lots gaped like missing teeth between exclusive specialty shops and old frame houses that had become business places. The Henry Lissauer Art Institute, one of the remaining houses across the street, showed a bluish light upstairs.
As Joshua’s big Lincoln was driven around from the parking lot, the photographer rushed through the bamboo-covered door. “Mr. Fernauld, Mr. Fernauld!” she called, brandishing a sheaf of palm-imprinted cardboard folders. “Mr. Fernauld, here’s your photographs.”
13
Art Garrison, an energetic near-dwarf, pretended omniscient knowledge of film but ran Magnum by playing his hunches. He watched the test of the girl Joshua had suggested (doubtless another of the big, talented bastard’s on-the-side cuties) with a justifiably sour expression. A terrified, badly made-up amateur mugged and waved in grandiose gestures to an invisible audience. Even while the projector whirred, Garrison’s minions were scabrously remarking that this bimbo couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag. They winced silently when their liege lord ordered the test run again.
She doesn’t photograph all that badly, decided Garrison. Nice bone structure. And those big, frightened eyes pull at your guts.
Leland Hayward, one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, had been coerced by his client—and friend—into becoming the novice’s agent: under routine circumstances anyone represented by Hayward commanded the tops in salary. But he, too, had viewed the depressing screen test. The contract negotiations took less than five minutes. Hayward accepted, on Marylin’s behalf, every studioslanted clause of Magnum’s boilerplate.
Two days after Beverly High closed for summer vacation, NolaBee signed her full name to her minor daughter’s seven-year, six-month-option contract. It was the closest thing to slavery permitted in the United States.
As far as the Waces were concerned, Marylin had fallen into a fortune. Her first year’s salary, a hundred and fifty a week, was exactly triple what NolaBee earned (without overtime) at Hughes, but before Marylin could cash her paycheck it was eviscerated by her agent’s ten percent, her Screen Actors Guild dues, withholding taxes, and enforced contributions to Community Chest and Red Cross, a weekly War Bond. She needed clothes—Magnum demanded that its starlets look glamorous at all public functions—and a used Chevy for the drive to Hollywood.
Those summer months of Marylin’s grooming, NolaBee avidly followed each detail of her elder daughter’s lessons on how to walk, talk, stand, sit, smile, comb hair, apply cosmetics, pose for stills, and address members of the press.
That summer, Roy embarked on a life of her own. Since they had moved to Beverly Hills, she had whiled away the hot, languid days of the long vacations alone. (Marylin had had a summer job at Fran Pallay, the florist.)
That year there was Althea.
Mornings the colored lady, M’liss, would drop her off at the apartment, and the two girls would sit cross-legged on the narrow strip of grass next to the garage, laying out their plans. Some days they elected to simply stay put in the empty apartment. They would pore over NolaBee’s movie magazines for the beauty secrets of the stars: Roy squeezed lemons from the tree, lavishing the juice over her face, her arms, the area of her round little breasts that showed above her swimsuit. “Olivia de Havilland says lemon juice worked miracles on her freckles!” Althea rubbed salt and oatmeal into her face, Claudette Colbert’s prescription for abolition of whiteheads. They washed their hair with the gluey melt of old soap ends in water that served the Waces as shampoo, and afterward Roy brushed vinegar through her stubborn wet hair in an attempt to straighten the despised curls; they exchanged hour-long manicures, keeping the half-moons of their nails meticulously free of Marylin’s Revlon polish. They helped themselves to her new makeup, they used her new calibrated tweezers, they shaved their legs with her razor.
Sometimes they shopped on Beverly Drive, driving the salesladies to near-insanity with their interminable deliberations. Many days they would buy nothing, or they might end up selecting earrings with pendant stars that made a tiny, tinny clatter, or big fabric flowers to adorn their pompadours. Though these items were paid for by Althea, they were common property, to be exchanged freely.
Other mornings they would clamber aboard the crowded Wilshire bus, lurching westward to the section of beach where the Beverly High kids all crowded, Roadside Rest—so named for the ramshackle hamburger stand on the boardwalk. Wearing one-piece white bathing suits similar to the sexy number that Betty Grable had made famous in her pinup, they found space for their towels on the hot, jam-packed sand and perfected an all-round tan by rolling over at the precisely timed intervals when Frank Sinatra’s records changed on the microphoned jukebox. The Beverly High crowd all went to Roadside, and after a cluster of boys dashed by, diving into the dangerous surf, they would ask one another, “Did you see the way Li’l Abner looked at you?”
“He didn’t!”
“He did, I swear he did.”
Their friendship was tight as a bowline knot, whose two ropes must be unraveled in order to come apart. Yet Roy had never visited Althea’s house, had never met Althea’s parents.
Althea spoke of home only in answer to a direct question, and then unwillingly. When NolaBee asked what her father did, she turned away to stammer coldly that he bred collies. Collies! NolaBee also inquired about M’liss, the colored woman. M’liss, Althea murmured, had been her nurse.
Althea’s secrecy sometimes bruised Roy. Wasn’t it the Big Two against the world? They were best friends, weren’t they? Surely Althea could trust her. For the most part, though, Roy staunchly viewed her friend�
��s mysteriousness as something tragically worthy of a royal Russian émigré.
“I reckon you two ought to play over at her house sometime,” NolaBee said.
“Why?”
“Stop frowning, Roy, it’ll give you wrinkles. I’m not criticizing your friend, she’s a right distinctive little girl, and I’m glad to have her here. But hasn’t it struck you as mighty strange that she never invites you to visit?”
“I don’t mind, Mama. Besides, what if there’s . . . something she’s ashamed of?” Roy floundered between steadfastness to her friend and wriggly pleasure in her mother’s interest.
“Ashamed? She has that nice mammy and she went to Westlake School, so her family’s well-fixed. What could she have at her home to be ashamed of?”
“Maybe her father’s a Nazi spy, maybe her mother’s got some dread social disease, I don’t know. We don’t need to go to her place to have fun, so what’s the dif?”
“I reckon it’s a matter of principle,” said NolaBee. With a musing look she went back to straightening the hem of the new white strapless that Marylin was to wear at the Hollywood USO: Magnum sent groups of young actresses to entertain servicemen—and hopefully garner some publicity.
In the morning, Althea would phone to say she was on her way, then Roy would go downstairs and wait. One Tuesday in mid-August when a thin, opaline mist hazed the sky, Roy was settled on the curb, a page of yesterday’s Herald protecting her orange gym shorts, on whose white stripe “R. Wace” straggled in black embroidery.
As the gray Chevy drove up, NolaBee who was on swing shift that month, trotted down from the apartment, her dragon kimono catching behind her on the splintered wooden steps. “Hello, there,” she called to M’liss. “I’m Mrs. Wace, Roy’s mother.” The small, lively brown eyes were snapping, the smile was infectious.
The dignified colored woman beamed back. “Good morning, ma’am. I’m Melisse Tobinson.”
“Would you mind, M’liss, if Roy spends the day at your place, and maybe has a little bite before you bring her home?”
“Mama!” Roy cried. She was conscious of Althea gazing off into space with her most aloofly miserable expression.
“Now, Roy, I can’t be home for supper.” This was hardly unusual: NolaBee rotated on all three shifts. “I reckon M’liss will see to it that you don’t starve.”
“I surely will, Mrs. Wace.”
“You from Georgia, M’liss?”
“Yes, ma’am. And you, too, from the sound of it.”
“Greenward.”
“That right? My aunt’s from Lester.”
The two exchanged genealogies, uncovering the fact that a remote cousin of M’liss’s had cooked for a Fairburn.
“Mrs. Wace, I’ll have Roy back here by ten, if that’s all right.”
“I sure do appreciate this.” NolaBee grinned and hurried up the staircase.
“Why don’t you get your suit, Roy?” Althea said in a surly, inhospitable tone. “We can swim in our pool.”
Roy changed into her good white shorts, shoving her swimsuit in a paper grocery sack. Anticipation pulsed through her, yet at the same time she felt a clamminess under her armpits. Had her mother cut the Gordian knot of the Big Two?
14
Althea was silent, sitting tense and pale between Roy and M’liss as the servant drove them swiftly northward. They crossed the tracks of Santa Monica Boulevard, passing into the territory of money, turning left on Sunset, where two women on horseback clipped along the bridle path. After a couple of blocks they drove north again, upward into the rolling estates of Beverly Hills, winding along an alley where the property was hidden behind high box hedges tangled with oleander. M’liss turned in at a smallish house that faced directly on the narrow street. Roy let out a sigh of relief. Not so snazzy after all, she thought. Ahead of them, barring their way, loomed ten-foot-tall filigreed iron gates. Centering each was an elaborate intaglio with the curlicued name “Belvedere.” Dismay hollowing her stomach, Roy accepted that the Cunninghams had a gatehouse.
M’liss gave two loud honks. A thin old man came hurrying out. “Buenos días, M’leess, Mees Althea.” He saw Roy and broke into a grin that displayed three missing teeth. “Una comadre, ehh?”
M’liss winked. “From the high school.”
He swung open the left gate, and without conversation they curled through a grove of enormous sycamores, emerging into celestial hillocks and meadows where triangular red flags fluttered above ovals so smooth that they appeared gigantic, buffed emeralds. Belvedere had its own golf course! They rounded a bend, passing a peacock imperiously spreading its vivid-eyed tail, coming upon two men sweeping a tennis court. In the distance glittered a swimming pool.
Then suddenly the house was visible.
Roy couldn’t control her gasp. A vast, chastely imposing Georgian mansion whose bricks glowed with a rosy tinge, as if mellowed by slow centuries. Yet this was Beverly Hills, a town incorporated—as Roy had learned in Horace Mann Grammar School—on November 14, 1914. No house here could be as serenely, regally historic as Belvedere appeared. A flock of white pigeons wove through the creamy columns of the entry like a living scarf waved in welcome; then the birds nestled on the slate roof. Everything was still again. In the static moment it seemed to Roy that the entire estate could vanish with a wave of a star-tipped wand.
M’liss, following the gravel drive around the corner, parked near a side door. “Have a fine time, Roy, hear,” she said, and went inside.
The two girls stood awkwardly outside the Chevy, not looking at each other.
After a minute, Althea said in a remote tone, “Since swimming’s on the agenda, shall we head down to the pool?”
The main room of the poolhouse was easily three times as big as the Waces’ apartment; along the rear wall hung watercolors of various yachts in full sail. Roy wondered distractedly if they all belonged to the Cunninghams.
“You take that dressing room,” Althea said, disappearing.
Roy opened the door and was in a kind of boudoir with a white-painted vanity and a couch slipcovered in hunter green and white stripes. She ducked into the enormous green tiled bathroom. Her white swimsuit was still a little damp from yesterday, and as she pulled it over her plump hips, sand skittered across pristine tiles. Scrabbling on her knees, she mopped up the grains with dampened toilet paper. She could feel the blood heating her face, yet her hands and feet were icy.
In her outlandishly romantic imaginings of Althea’s mysterious background, she had never conjured up anything remotely akin to this. She toyed dazedly with the idea that her friend was the child of a housekeeper or servant. But then would M’liss be her nurse? And why would the old Mexican gatekeeper call her “Mees Althea”?
No.
Althea was rich.
Grotesquely rich.
How could you retain a normal friendship, call yourselves the Big Two, in the face of this kind of wealth?
Tugging down the white wool around her thighs, Roy emerged into the main room of the poolhouse.
Althea stood waiting in her white swimsuit, her long slender face set in the disdainful half-smile she showed to those whom she thought had slighted her.
“Hi,” Roy said sheepishly.
Althea nodded.
“Embarrassed silence in the palace of the Sun King,” Roy said. Althea shrugged.
“You didn’t think that was funny?” Roy’s throat was dry. “You’re right. It wasn’t funny.”
Althea said nothing.
“If you want to know the truth, I never even imagined there were mansions like this.”
“I hate this place,” Althea muttered.
“You do?”
“Belvedere,” Althea said venomously. “Forty-three rooms in the main house. Tell me, are forty-three rooms necessary?”
“I guess somebody thought so.”
“A lot of rooms and in not a single one is anyone who cares about me, cares if I’m happy or not,” Althea said bitterly.
&n
bsp; “I care.”
“You?” Althea turned on her in a kind of fury. “Who are you trying to kid?” In Althea’s anger was a bleat she had never let Roy hear before.
Roy’s insecurities lessened, her natural warmth asserted itself, and she put her arm around her friend’s tensed shoulder. “If you’d like to know, I’m terrified you won’t be the other half of the Big Two anymore.”
“Why?”
“I live in a dumpy illegal apartment over a garage, my mother’s Rosie the Riveter. I’m poor, you idiot, that’s why. More people are loathed because they’re poor than because they’re rich.”
Althea sat on the edge of the pool and Roy perched next to her. Staring at the careful pedicure they had worked on yesterday, Roy cleared her throat. “Have you always lived here?”
Nodding, Althea pushed that luscious streaky blond hair under a white rubber cap. “You might as well know the worst. Mother’s a Coyne.”
Coyne. A name commonly lumped with Rockefeller, du Pont, and Vanderbilt.
“A real, genuine C-o-y-n-e?” asked Roy, swallowing.
“One of Grover’s daughters.”
Grover T. Coyne. Roy had learned about him from Mr. Hunt in American history this past semester. In the 1800’s Grover T. Coyne had gathered together one-half of the railroad mileage in the United States, he had watered the stock (Roy had never quite encompassed the meaning of this), he had defrauded the freight shippers by overcharging whenever possible, he had put his competitors out of business by undercutting them, he was the archetype of a robber baron. Was it Commodore Vanderbilt or Grover Coyne who had said: “The public be damned”?
Althea had taken American history the same period: she had listened to the liberal Mr. Hunt’s diatribes against old Grover T. while doodling on the canvas cover of her notebook, a perfect imposture of your average Beverly High frosh.
“Listen,” Roy said. “It could be worse, she could come from Anaheim, Azusa, or Cucamonga.” It was such a feeble joke that she added, “Har de har har.”
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