by James Glaeg
Copyright © 2012 by James Glaeg
Published in the United States of America
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0615612067
ISBN-13: 9780615612065
eBook ISBN: 978-1-62345-383-1
Contents
Chapter One: Planes and Angles
Chapter Two: Looking Glass
Chapter Three: Particles of Light
Chapter Four: Ford Sports Coupe
Chapter Five: Oceans of Print
Chapter Six: Five O’Clock Girls
Chapter Seven: Broken Cobwebs
Chapter Eight: Hypnotist’s Watch
Chapter Nine: House of Monroe
Chapter Ten: Carole Lind
Chapter Eleven: Sacred Space
Chapter Twelve: Cat and Mouse
Chapter Thirteen: Celluloid Kingdom
Chapter Fourteen: Smoke in the Wind
Chapter Fifteen: Black Lace
Chapter Sixteen: Scroll of Life
Chapter Seventeen: Arcing Wave
Chapter Eighteen: Mimosa Blossoms
Chapter Nineteen: Voice from Olympus
Chapter Twenty: Parade of the Stars
Chapter Twenty-One: Artichoke Queen
Chapter Twenty-Two: Blonde of the Day
Notes and Sources
Bibliography
CHAPTER ONE
Planes and Angles
At 20th Century-Fox Pictures on a Tuesday morning in July of 1946, Ben Lyon was surprised out of a daydream. He’d heard a rustle of movement in the room and looked up from his desk. There at the door stood a stunning twenty-year-old blonde who seemed to have materialized out of nowhere. She’d stepped into his office without any appointment—or at least that was the way, years afterward, Lyon would remember their first meeting. He was, at the time, the studio’s director for new talent.
She looked absolutely gorgeous, he would recall. Golden hair falling down to her shoulders. A look of unusual freshness, of childlike innocence. Dressed in a beautifully cut, inexpensive cotton print dress. The executive felt he’d never before seen anyone so attractive.
He asked her to sit down by his desk. “What can I do for you?”
“I want mm—mm—” Her exquisite complexion flushed. Lyon supposed it was because she was struck, like himself, with a feeling they’d met somewhere before. But she tried again and this time completed her sentence with a slight stutter. “I want mm—more than anything to get into pictures.”
Suddenly it flashed on Lyon why she looked so familiar. He slyly rejoined, “Honey, you’re in pictures!”
For her face and figure were already fully on public display as the cover adornments for several gentlemen’s magazines currently on the newsstands. What had specially caught Lyon’s eye was that an unknown girl should have found her way onto three or four of these covers during the same month. He’d also been aware, on picking up one of the issues from the rack, of a certain pleasurable awakening at his pulse even though her expression on the cover had looked rather more sweet than naughty.
The two chatted about her background as a photographer’s model. He carefully ascertained that she’d recently been signed for representation by talent agent Helen “Cupid” Ainsworth. She then read some lines from a sample script for him with no further signs of stuttering. Meanwhile, Ben Lyon—himself once a film actor of no small renown who sixteen years earlier had been instrumental in the discovery of Jean Harlow—studied the girl more closely. Of his conclusions he was later to say, “You can tell with some faces, the way the flesh sits on the bones, the planes and angles. They’ll photograph well.”
CHAPTER TWO
Looking Glass
Ace makeup man Whitey Snyder had seen screen beauties of every description out of makeup before—but never one looking quite so nondescript as the twenty-year-old blonde who appeared at his makeup-room door two days later. She could have been some fresh-faced farm kid who’d just stepped off the train from Iowa or Indiana.
Snyder asked her name to make sure there hadn’t been some mistake. And yes indeed, it was Norma Jeane Dougherty. So he steered her coolly toward a chair while wisecracking to himself silently, Obviously the guys buzzing about her here and there around the lot haven’t seen her yet at five o’clock in the morning!
Nor was the supposedly stunning new blonde done with her surprises for Whitey Snyder. Once seated—and just as if he’d spoken all his unflattering thoughts out loud—she warded him off by thrusting a large black portfolio into his hands while she set about establishing herself in front of the makeup table alone. It soon became astonishingly clear that she wasn’t planning to let the veteran makeup artist touch her face.
The clock overhead indicated barely an hour before the camera had to roll on her tightly scheduled screen test. Snyder saw exactly what kind of train wreck was coming, but for the moment he wisely contented himself with earning his steep paycheck while seated partway down the table paging idly through her book of clippings and magazine covers.
Meanwhile, the girl began her vital preparations by sliding one forefinger with deep concentration back and forth over the surface of the makeup table in a weaving gesture as if to block Snyder completely out of her mind. She next consumed several long moments peering critically at the prosaic face that stared back at her in the mirror. And very gradually, as her hands stirred to the complex motions of her cleansing routines, the signs of an inexorable momentum and purpose appeared, until by the time she finished laying down her makeup base, her entire body had taken on the animation of a Flemish painter in the act of preparing his master canvas. In this attitude she then probed into her bag, at length producing out of it a single, quite ordinary and well-used lipstick brush with which she proceeded to apply, from a series of small pots arranged on the table in front of her, a painstaking assortment of lines and dots and splashes of color to every part of her face.
While the girl worked, Whitey Snyder glanced from time to time with a studied carelessness across into her mirror. Reflected there, the deftness of her handstrokes forced him to admit that she was possessed of uncommon skill at his own craft. Yet notwithstanding a striking transformation gradually being wrought on her previously lackluster features, it rose to Snyder’s level of competence to understand what no girl straight out of print modeling, like herself, ever understood. Which was that makeup techniques capable of working wonders in still photography were apt to be totally wrong for pictures that moved. Particularly if those pictures moved in Technicolor.
Truthfully, with time running ever shorter, Whitey Snyder was toying with the idea of allowing a disaster to happen. After all, he’d been treated with far more deference in his day by legends of the screen who’d needed him far less than did this virtual nobody seated at the mirror next to him.
But two things occurred to make him reconsider.
For one, his furtive glances in her direction had not been lost on her. She’d caught each one of them in the looking glass, meeting his eyes there for an instant and locating in them something which she then seemed to roll over and over in her mind while she continued to work. Many minutes had first to pass, but in time she decided to speak—using only a word or two to start with, and these uttered as though merely to herself, but ultimately proffering more and more of her remarks to the quietly observing Snyder until at last she was laying bare to him all of her deliberations as she manipulated the colors on her face.
Again it felt to Whitey Snyder as if the girl were reading his own crisp, professional thoughts even as they entered his mind. Behind every stroke of her lipstick brush, she had some reason for making it, which she now acknowledged to him in a thin, distracted voice tinged always with a minor note of distress. She needed the right side of
her chin brought out to appear more prominent than it really was. Or she wanted the end of her nose shaded to appear less prominent. There were dozens upon dozens of crucial adjustments needing to be made, and while making them she would take cautious sidelong glances in the mirror toward Snyder, which told him instantly that she did not believe herself attractive enough for the career she was attempting.
So candid an admission, even if an unspoken one, Whitey Snyder had never encountered in these circumstances before. Joined to the plaintive timbre of her voice and to an open-ness—an almost blankness—about her face, it proclaimed a truthfulness of soul that fell on him like a current of fresh mountain air into the close fetid atmosphere of the show-business jungle in which he’d moved and breathed for too long, where modesty was unknown and where people devoured each other like beasts for their pleasure. To Snyder it was enormously appealing—and not least because everything she said was no more than correct. Of all the would-be movie goddesses who’d ever sat in that makeup chair, he couldn’t think of one of them who without makeup had looked quite so much like a passive lump of clay as this twenty-year-old with the long awkward name that tended to slip his mind. Not, to be sure, that any reasonable person would ever have called her downright unattractive. Indeed, she was decently pretty, but in a very plain and not at all impressive way.
The other revelation to unfold—while Whitey Snyder allowed the girl to coax back his sympathies—was what he found in turning over the pages of her modeling portfolio. A Family Circle cover there, from two or three months back, showed her out of doors in a flowery field, wearing a pinafore and bending over a lamb. Captured in her childlike pose was a wondrous freshness of springtime which was all owing, really, to a quality about her face. Similarly, she’d achieved covers—during this present month of July alone—on an astonishing total of four different magazines. Obviously, with names like Click, Pic, Laff, and Sir, these showed her in considerably less than a pinafore. But in each case it was toward her fresh-appearing, singularly open face that the prospective magazine buyer’s eye was actually drawn. And there—to be detected only by such cognoscenti as Whitey Snyder—her cosmetic hand had been masterfully at work. Underscoring certain features, highlighting others, and suppressing or concealing a good many more. Designing a miniature landscape, as it were, worthy of the notice of an MGM, a Paramount, or a Twentieth Century-Fox.
This girl, then—the one in the photographs—was the one whom people were buzzing about in various quarters of the studio. Whereas that other girl—the one who’d stepped into his makeup room at five o’clock this morning—had resembled her not one bit.
Except that now, wonder to behold, as that same girl stood up from the table, she did look almost like the girl of the magazine covers. Almost, but not quite. What might be the factor still missing, Whitey Snyder could not divine. But there was one thing concerning her makeup about which he remained absolutely sure. Right now a Technicolor motion picture camera was going see her as painted up like a clown. And just maybe—Snyder finally decided as the girl hurried behind the partition to get into her waiting costume—it would be better if she learned this lesson on her own.
They appeared on the set with time to spare. Snyder presented the newcomer to Leon Shamroy, the Academy Award-winning cinematographer whom by a miracle Ben Lyon had secured to shoot her screen test. Shamroy took one look at the girl.
“What the hell is that on her face?!” he bellowed. “Did you do that, Whitey?”
Snyder acted as if momentarily caught speechless.
“No, I did it,” came the girl’s voice.
“We can’t photograph her that way! Whitey, take this girl back in there,” growled Shamroy. “Wash this damn stuff off, do her face up right, and then get her back out here!”
Within minutes Whitey Snyder was darting around her chair, solicitously shaping into her face all the very same cosmetic effects that the girl had been striving for on her own. Only to these, his swift hands were now adding the patented blending tricks which he’d perfected over his years of enhancing the Technicolor allure of stars like Betty Grable and Linda Darnell.
Meanwhile, strangely, the girl’s overconfidence had not only been reduced to the degree Snyder had hoped, but it had vanished altogether. The closer her time came, and the readier she appeared for her screen test, the closer she came to the verge of panic.
CHAPTER THREE
Particles of Light
Adjusting his lights on the three phony walls of the test stage, cameraman Leon Shamroy half expected to look up and find the giant figure of Darryl F. Zanuck towering overhead, topped by a giant, squat, mustachioed, cigar-chomping face that grinned down over his giant fingers as they artfully worked everybody’s strings. For what were the persons down below but puppets in Mr. Zanuck’s giant puppet show?
That included Miss Betty Grable, even though right now she was off in New York having the time of her life while under suspension from the studio for refusing to play the offbeat role of Sophie in Zanuck’s dark The Razor’s Edge. But Zanuck was still pulling Betty’s strings. He knew her gambling habits exactly, and he knew that in two to three months he would have Hollywood’s highest-paid star right back on the payroll just in time to start work on Mother Wore Tights.
Meanwhile, that’s what screen tests like this one were all about. There always had to be some blonde waiting in the wings to keep Grable guessing.
A commotion rose nearby as the latest blonde reemerged from the dressing room, properly made up for Technicolor at last. Shamroy turned to look. Teetering on spiked heels while lifting up the hem of her floor-length gown, the girl had managed to trip over a mass of huge electrical cables snaking across her path and had nearly gone sprawling across the floor. Cameraman Shamroy went back to his work on the lights reasonably sure that Miss Dougherty represented no serious threat to Betty Grable.
Minutes later the girl reappeared to his view, flattened out in the glass eye of the camera’s viewfinder. Despite a terrible case of nerves, she looked, in her solid-sequin gown, very pretty of course. Yet Shamroy took note that she was far from the paragon of glamor being touted by talent scout Ben Lyon. Her posture was less than perfect. Her profile was weak, especially on the right side. She also had an unusually shaped nose.
Mr. Lyon himself now stepped into the frame, and Shamroy, seated behind his view-finder, practiced following with the camera as the executive began running the girl through her desired paces. The two stopped at a stool Lyon had just placed in the center of the stage. They turned and hovered over the small table next to it. Then they crossed to a window off to the right. The cameraman, establishing his planes of focus on the test’s subject, observed that whereas Betty Grable would have been smartly hitting her marks while cracking jokes with everyone in sight, this poor girl stumbled alongside Lyon, intermittently sighing, clutching at her stomach with both arms, and emitting the beginnings of words which she appeared unable to finish. “Mm-mm-mo…Di-di-di…Buh-buh-buh…”
Miss Dougherty’s dreadful case of stage fright wasn’t helped by Lyon’s news that the screen test as they’d originally planned it was wholly out of the question. She could forget all about the lines she’d memorized, because there was no actor here to read them with her. Nor would Mr. Lyon feed her the lines, since no sound recordist was on the job to capture them. The all-powerful Mr. Zanuck had been too frenzied with wrapping up his beloved Razor’s Edge even to glance at Lyon’s requisitions for a test. As a result, they had no budget. What vestiges of crew were present Ben Lyon had talked into virtually working on their own time. Everything—the set, the lights, the camera, even their illustrious cameraman Mr. Shamroy himself—had been wheedled and cadged at considerable effort by Mr. Lyon from the interminable tinkering still going on with Miss Grable’s still unreleased The Shocking Miss Pilgrim.
Not that there was a single thing to worry about, Lyon assured the distraught blonde as he handed her a glittering purse into which he’d inserted a pack of cigarett
es and a lighter—because of this wonderful idea he’d had.
“All I want you to do,” he said, bringing his face nearer hers and trying to connect with her frightened eyes, “is to come in that door and then do what I tell you. I just want you to project yourself the very same way you’ve been doing in your still pictures.”
He quickly strode away and called out, “Lights!” Instantly, the make-believe room became as bright as day. The cringing girl disappeared around a wall to take up her position offstage. Lyon nodded to Shamroy as he backed into the sidelines. Shamroy trained his camera on the door and at length signaled to Ben Lyon that he was ready. And Lyon called out, “Action!”
The door opened. Miss Dougherty took one step into the dazzling room and then paused with her hand still on the door handle. Her posture in the shimmering gown had become, unaccountably, as erect as a statue. Her breast rose and fell with excitement.
“Walk across to the stool…” coached Lyon softly.
For a second, the girl responded only by shifting her head slightly to catch a changed gradation of the light while an intriguing expression of doubt passed over her face. Then, as if irresistibly drawn to someone halfway across the room, she stepped forward with an unfolding motion of her entire body that was like the graceful step of a sleek young gazelle. Simultaneously, a smile stole into her face that grew with a sudden force until its unexpected radiance shattered every other thought that had been building in the two men’s minds.
Ben Lyon glowed back at her with surprise and delight. “Now sit down…” he said in a hushed voice.
The blonde insinuated herself onto the stool in a single movement that left the sequined folds of her gown in a striking cascade over the contours of her legs while neatly exposing the extended toes of her spiked shoes.
“Take a cigarette out of your purse and light it…” continued the hushed voice of Lyon.