Woman Enters Left
Page 1
Woman Enters Left is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Jessica Brockmole
Reading group guide copyright © 2017 by Penguin Random House LLC
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
RANDOM HOUSE READER’S CIRCLE & Design is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
ISBN 9780399178511
Ebook ISBN 9780399178528
randomhousebooks.com
randomhousereaderscircle.com
Book design by Dana Leigh Blanchette, adapted for ebook
Title-page images: © iStockphoto.com
Cover design: Marietta Anastassatos
Cover images: Richard Jenkins Photography (woman), Car Culture Collection / GettyImages
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By Jessica Brockmole
About the Author
Reading Group Guide
Chapter One
1952
Movies always begin with a panorama.
A skyline. A beach. A cactus-dotted desert. Paris, Rome, Honolulu, New York City.
This one opens in Los Angeles.
It’s 1952, and the city doesn’t have much of a skyline. Low buildings squat in front of the Santa Monica Mountains. A few are recognizable. The uninspired bulk of the United Artists Theater. The turquoise-stuccoed Eastern Columbia Building. The highest, the gold-spired City Hall, silhouetted almost alone against the dark mountains.
We zoom in. If not for that opening panorama, it could be any city in mid-December. The cafés, the hotels, the cinemas, the self-important office buildings. The shopwindows decorated with tinsel and artificial snow. It could be New York or Chicago. It could be a studio’s back-lot set. Beautiful and busy people hurry down the streets. They hail taxis, they step from streetcars, they push in and out of buildings. They balance shopping bags and gift boxes. They drop pocket change in red Salvation Army kettles. Everyone has a purpose, guided by an inner stage direction. Businessmen with trilby hats and folded newspapers. Young women with lipstick and slim dresses. Older women with handbags dangling from the crooks of their arms. It could almost be stock footage of Christmas in the city.
But then we see palm trees and sunshine between the garlands and strings of lights. We see lighted signs outside the theaters—the Pantages, the Paramount, the distinctive Egyptian and Chinese. We see the Knickerbocker Hotel and the Garden of Allah, the towered Crossroads of the World, the nine giant white letters so stark against the distant hillside and we know: This isn’t stock footage. This is Hollywood.
A woman enters left.
Already we know she must be our leading lady. She stands out among the generic businessmen and lipsticked women. She doesn’t swing her hips or smile at the passing men. She doesn’t check her reflection in shopwindows. She’s not pretty, if we’re being honest. Striking, maybe. She doesn’t have the lushness of a Lana Turner or Rita Hayworth or the fresh-faced prettiness of a Doris Day. But, eyes forward, shoulders back, she walks with a certainty that is infinitely more attractive.
She’s dressed neatly, in a crisp white blouse and navy suit. The skirt isn’t too short or too long. The jacket is feminine without being fussy. Beneath the turned-up collar of the jacket, she wears a thin scarf the color of daffodils, smoothed down and tied in a square knot. It suggests a man’s necktie. She might have intended that.
Perhaps she’s a businesswoman, straight from a meeting. Perhaps a saleswoman, fresh from landing a big contract. She carries a soft brown briefcase, creased in the corners with use. Even without knowing what she does, we know she’s a woman used to navigating her way through a man’s world.
Her stride is deliberate, forceful, confident—that is, until she approaches an intersection. Here she pauses and looks in each of the four directions. She closes her eyes beneath a streetlamp topped with a decorative metal Christmas tree briefly, as if comparing these two crossed streets against a mental map. With a nod of satisfaction, she continues on her journey.
Eventually she turns off the main street. The sidewalks are less crowded here. All white stucco and red tile, it’s a residential area. This isn’t a neighborhood of mansions, of movie stars and cigar-wielding producers. It’s not marked on any “Homes of the Stars” maps. Its streets are lined with quiet apartments and modest hotels.
After a few blocks, she stops in front of a building painted a brilliant blue and tucked away behind a shady green courtyard. It’s an apartment building, unofficially called the “Blaue Engel,” though Dietrich never lived there. Construction finished the day the movie came out. It’s not as fashionable an address as the El Greco or Hollywood Tower, but its apartments never sit empty for long.
Setting her briefcase on the sidewalk in front of the Blaue Engel, she opens her wide leather handbag and conducts a search. A man with a shopping bag edges around her, as does a woman with a small, furiously yipping dog. The man stares back over his shoulder but, engrossed with the contents of her purse, she doesn’t notice. She finally extracts a lace-bordered handkerchief and dabs at her forehead. It’s not especially warm out. Perhaps she’s dabbing away a headache or a bad day. She refolds the damp handkerchief and glances at a little gold wristwatch. It’s a Longines, slim and coppery. The way she turns her wrist and shakes away her sleeve in a practiced movement, it’s clear she’s a woman with a schedule. Right now she frowns down at the watch. Dropping the handkerchief back into her bag and retrieving the worn briefcase, she heads for the arched courtyard doorway.
The courtyard is leafy and dripping with bougainvillea. It’s a bright, wild backdrop for this woman, in her serious suit and neck scarf. A man in a rumpled black jacket looks up from a potted geranium.
“Louise Wilde,” she says, before he can ask.
The jacketed man dusts off his hands. He eyes her, but there’s no recognition.
She’s been in films since ’39. Two dozen of them, to be exact, nearly two a year. But surely they aren’t his kind of films. This old man, with potting soil under his fingernails, doesn’t go in for frothy pictures about showgirls and romance. The Betsey Barnes series, Tap-Dance to Heaven, Red-Blooded Rita, that new high society picture. All featuring “a small-town girl with big-city dreams,” as the studio is fond of saying, all with a grand makeover scene, all with a husband won successfully by the end. He hasn’t seen them, she’s sure.
The man in the black jacket still waits by his geranium.
“I’m meeting Mr. French,” sh
e adds.
He taps his head. “The lawyer fellow? He didn’t say he was expecting a gal.”
She tightens the grip on her black handbag.
“Well, he’s upstairs.” He pushes open a gate and indicates a set of metal stairs. “Number twelve.”
Louise walks up the stairs by herself. The man has already gone back to his geranium. She finds the door marked “12,” hung with a scrawny wreath. Of course, the door is blue.
For just a moment, she pauses in front of that blue-painted door. It’s been a day and she’d rather be back at home in her bathrobe than here. All morning she’d been at the studio, arguing the new script. Fruitlessly. They’d nodded, smiled, and told her to be on set Monday or else. And then she finds a stack of messages in her dressing room from a lawyer with instructions to meet him at the Blaue Engel. Her fingers twitch for a Manhattan.
Before she can decide whether or not to knock, the door swings open.
Mr. French looks exactly like a lawyer, with a three-piece wool suit and unnaturally white teeth. His hair is dyed and Brylcreemed to within an inch of its life. He’s probably fifty, sixty years old, despite what the pancake makeup under his eyes wants you to think. He’s more Hollywood than she is.
“Mrs. Wilde?”
Her back straightens. “Miss.” Every ounce of that earlier confidence is back. “Miss Wilde.”
“You’re a hard girl to get a hold of.” He peers over her shoulder. “Did your husband come with you?”
“Was he named in the will as well?”
“Ha!” Mr. French flashes another toothy smile. “Of course not. But I just thought—”
“I had many reasons for marrying him. His legal expertise was not one of them.” She draws her heels together. “Shall we get to our business?”
He stares a moment, as though trying to decide whether he’s been insulted or not. “Of course. Yes. Will you come in, please?”
The apartment is small and tidy, with pale yellow walls and a scrubbed tile floor. A tiny Christmas tree, dripping with tinsel, perches on a bookcase in the corner, the only concession to the season. Stepping in, she slips off her gloves. “This is all very surprising. I’m still not quite sure how I merited a mention in Miss Daniels’ will. As I said on the phone, I scarcely knew her.”
“Are you sure?” Mr. French shuts the door behind Louise and goes to the tiny dining table, where he’s left a sheaf of papers and a pair of horn-rimmed reading glasses. “I assumed she was a family friend.”
Louise had grown up in Newark, New Jersey, with a widowed father and far too many games of checkers. The most she could hope for were visits from Uncle Hank, a balding man with a perpetually spotted tie who owned the butcher shop with her father. He came for dinner most Sundays, always with a meringue-topped pie. No other visitors. No family friends, and certainly none as exciting as a Hollywood screenwriter.
“I didn’t know her before I moved out here.” Louise sets her white gloves and handbag on the table. Her briefcase, she tucks under the dining chair. “But, really, I didn’t know her much even after. I met her a handful of times at parties. Once at the Brown Derby. And half a dozen nods passing in the hallway at MGM. I didn’t even know that she lived here at the Blaue Engel until today.”
He’s brought three paper cups of coffee. Obviously he really had expected Arnie to come. And why wouldn’t he? Movieland once described her as the “effervescent muse to Arnold Bates’s genius” and Modern Screen said she brought the “pop and sparkle” into his screenplays. As though she were the pretty and the fun to Arnie’s wisdom. As though their careers were intertwined from the moment they exchanged vows. She’s never effervesced outside of the klieg lights’ glare, but Mr. French doesn’t know that. After all, if you can’t believe the Hollywood rags, what can you believe?
One cup is half-empty, the other two covered with cardboard lids. She wonders how he carried them all from the diner down the street. He opens both until he finds one pale with milk. Clearly that one is for her. He untwists a paper napkin holding two sugar cubes, but she saves him a step and reaches for the other cup.
He raises thick eyebrows. “You drink it black?”
The coffee is tepid and bitter, but she doesn’t relent. “Who doesn’t?”
She sits and crosses her feet at the ankles. It’s the blocking this scene calls for. The leading man, with his important papers and his important news, is the center of this scene. The leading lady—she minimizes, crossing her legs, lowering her shoulders, looking down at her fingers laced around the paper cup. The coffee is awful, but it’s something to hold on to.
Mr. French plays the part of the scene’s hero well. Of course he does, with his artfully arranged hair. “As I mentioned on the phone, I’m Florence Daniels’ executor. You’ve been named in the will.”
Louise hadn’t seen the obituary at first, but she’d looked it up after Mr. French’s phone call. It was brief and effective.
DANIELS, Florence, passed away December 13, 1952, at Mount Sinai Hospital. She was born June 12, 1898, in Orange, New Jersey. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be sent to the Screen Writers Guild. Services will be held at Blessed Sacrament.
“May I ask, how did Miss Daniels pass away?”
“Cancer, I think it was.” He unfolds his reading glasses. “When she made the appointment to draw up the will, she said it was the second time she had imminent death on the schedule and maybe this time she’d just go ahead and do it.”
Louise can’t help it—half of a laugh sneaks out. Mr. French looks suitably shocked. So much for not effervescing.
“She wrote the will herself. Near the end, she wasn’t able to do much, but it’s in her own hand.” He slips on his glasses. “ ‘I, Florence Jane Daniels, being of sound mind and reasonably intact body (minus a wholly unnecessary appendix and twelve teeth), do write my last will and testament, the final act to the screenplay of my life.’ ”
This will is better than most of the scripts Louise is given. “I may not have known her personally, but her sense of humor was famous,” she says.
Mr. French sets down the paper. “The reason I called you here to Miss Daniels’ apartment instead of to my office…Well, you aren’t just named in the will, Mrs. Wilde.” He leans back and rests his hands on his knees. “With the exception of a few small bequests, you are Florence Daniels’ sole beneficiary.”
With a slosh, Louise spills lukewarm coffee down the back of her hand.
He has the good sense to jump up and move the will out of the way, but a trail of coffee runs across the table to her white gloves. He goes in search of a paper towel, continuing to talk to her from the kitchen. “I’ve started probate proceedings. But there should be no contest. That means—”
“I know what that means.”
“Right.” He emerges with a handful of paper napkins, which he passes across the table. “Like I said, there should be no contest. She has no living parents or siblings. And, as you can see, no husband or children. Spent too much time at the studio for either, I imagine.”
She mops at her hand and the table and her sodden gloves. She’s still trying to process his announcement. A woman she’d admired but barely exchanged two dozen words with had just left everything to her.
“Just a few things to distribute, and then the remainder of the property is yours. The apartment here and its contents, her savings, a Schwinn kept down in the gardener’s shed.” He takes a gulp of coffee, scratches his chin, and picks up the will again. “She left a grand to the Hollywood Studio Club. One hundred dollars each to Blessed Sacrament Church, the Entertainment Industry Foundation, the Los Angeles Public Library, and the proprietor of Chen’s Dragon Café. Twenty-six years’ worth of Variety back issues to one Howard Frink. She also left three dollars and…” He squints and straightens his glasses. “Three dollars and an orange sombrero to Miss Anita Loos, ‘to thank her for that rhumba.’ ”
“I was introduced to Miss Loos once. I think it was when she was working
on When Ladies Meet.” She takes another sip of whatever coffee is left in her cup and makes a face.
“Coffee that bad?” he asks.
It is, but she doesn’t want to be rude. “It’s not that. This is just all so strange.”
Mr. French takes off the glasses with one hand and rubs the bridge of his nose. “You might not have known her, but she knew you, and must have thought well of you. Howard Frink was her neighbor for seventeen years, and all he got was a stack of old magazines.”
As she picks up her coffee again, she sees it has left a ring on the table. Though, technically, the table now belongs to her, she feels guilty. When Mr. French turns back to his stacks of paper, she rubs out the ring with her thumb.
“I think I read something about your husband recently.”
She hopes he isn’t talking about the American Legion Magazine piece. Something about Hollywood screenwriters and their “red” pens. Mr. French looks just like the American Legion type. “It must have been something about Korea.” She remembers to smile. “He just came home, you see.”
“That must have been it.” He talks without glancing up from his reading and initialing. “Well, I bet he’s glad to be back. Home cooking sure beats anything army mess serves up. Or was he navy?”
“Neither. He went over as a journalist.”
“Is that so? Well, sounds better than trudging through a jungle, that’s for sure. The whole time I was in the Philippines, I thought about coming home to my wife’s custard pie. Do you make pie?”
“Not often.”
He looks up then and gives a wink. “Maybe now would be a good time to start.”
She can’t think of a response, so just keeps the smile pasted on.
“I have to sort through the things that won’t be staying.” He glances around the room. “Also, I have to find an orange sombrero.”