“I could help you look for it.”
Really, she wants an excuse to peek around, to see the life she’s inherited.
He nods. He seems relieved.
She takes the coffee cup to the narrow kitchen and empties it into the sink. A lone saucepan sits upside down on a dish towel. Judging by the pantry, Miss Daniels had subsisted on saltine crackers and peanut butter, raisins, and can after can of tomato soup. A whole shelf of the pantry holds nothing but red and white Campbell’s cans. The fridge doesn’t offer much more—club soda, half a jar of pickled onions, and a paper-wrapped slice of chocolate cake with all of the icing scraped off.
Maybe that’s all Miss Daniels really ate. A Hollywood diet, straight from the pages of Pageant or Photoplay. Louise understands. She’s been on one for the past decade and a half. Shaken egg yolks for breakfast. Single scoops of tuna salad for lunch, poised on a curve of a lettuce leaf. Veal for dinner.
Or maybe Miss Daniels was simply an indifferent cook. Louise can’t see more than salt and pepper in the cabinets. Nothing to suggest culinary brilliance. All she sees in the way of cookbooks is a single typewritten recipe for chicken croquettes tacked inside the cupboard door.
The main room looks more lived-in than the kitchen. Near to the door is the little dining table with two chairs. The lawyer’s papers cover nearly the whole thing. A low sofa strewn with velveteen pillows faces a row of bookshelves and a framed lobby poster for The Temptress. Louise wonders if it was a favorite film or if Miss Daniels had worked on it. She’d made her name in the twenties, after all, working her way up from scenario girl to screenwriter.
Above the sofa is a small, framed painting, done in oranges and aquas and moss greens. In front of a pueblo, two women sit, one combing the other’s hair. It’s a quiet little watercolor, nothing particularly noteworthy. It’s done right on paper with faint hints of pencil lines behind the paint. Somehow, though, it suits this unpretentious apartment.
A small and meaningfully cluttered desk is tucked in the corner, by the window. It’s dominated by an Underwood Champion and scattered stacks of white paper. A few framed photos are propped here and there on the papers. There’s no television or radio in the apartment, but there’s an old crank record player and a modest stack of albums. Mostly old jazz, like Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters.
Louise runs an index finger along the bookshelves. There are few novels, though Miss Daniels seems to have had everything by Elinor Glyn and Radclyffe Hall. Face-out on a shelf is a crisp new copy of The Price of Salt, with a bookmark tucked in halfway through.
Most of the shelves are taken up, unsurprisingly, with black-bound screenplays. One by one, Louise pulls the manuscripts from the shelves and flips through them. She recognizes a few. There, Miss Daniels’ adaptation of Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself. That was the first film that brought her acclaim. And her screenplays for Wild Winds and Such Is Love. Louise remembers seeing Wild Winds one rainy afternoon as a girl and passionately vowing to set off on an adventure of her own one day. Her adventure wasn’t to Africa, but Hollywood felt far enough away to an eighteen-year-old girl with thirty dollars and a whole lot more determination.
Others on the shelves are unfamiliar. Florence Daniels was known for her adaptations of women’s stories, the sorts of films that Cukor or Goulding directed and women flocked to see. But not all of the manuscripts are her well-known adaptations.
Louise takes down original screenplays, unfamiliar, unpublished, unproduced screenplays. She scans the titles, opens the pages, so white they were likely never read. No rings from coffee mugs or smudged fingerprints. These manuscripts hadn’t made the rounds.
They’re stories about women. Women strong and successful, leaving their marks on a world determined to forget them. Women not all too different from Louise and Florence Daniels herself. One is about an actress carrying her performance throughout a tentative marriage. Another about a young mother struggling to hold tight to an almost forgotten girlhood passion. One about two friends dying of, yet living despite, radium poisoning. They’re the kinds of stories Louise longs to see on the screen. Already, she’s casting the screenplays in her head, picturing the blocking, the gestures, the inflections, the sweep of the camera. This one she could see Gene Tierney in. Maybe Constance Bennett. That one, Pier Angeli, with her delicacy and strength. And this one, she decides, could only be Lauren Bacall.
The papers on the desk are scraps of more screenplays, ideas waiting for the rest of their stories. She rifles through the pages, but it’s the framed photographs that catch her eye. Miss Daniels at a premiere with Anderson Lawler. At a costume party with Sonya Levien, both dressed imperiously as biblical queens. Sitting poolside in a group at George Cukor’s in wide flowered pants and a sun hat. Miss Daniels had been an attractive woman.
But one photo doesn’t have other Hollywood notables in it. It doesn’t even include Florence Daniels herself. It’s a little older than the rest, somewhat fuzzy, as though it had been taken with an old cardboard Brownie. The snapshot is of a young woman posed by a desert rock, squinting at the sun. Dark bobbed hair whips out from beneath the scarf tied around her head. She’s pale, either from the sun’s shining straight on her face, the film processing, or the weariness of travel, but she’s smiling. Whatever rock in whatever desert she leans against, she’s happy to be there.
Louise recognizes the woman, though she’s not famous. She recognizes her from another photo, a stiff studio portrait that she knows well. And she should. The portrait, of a couple in modest wedding finery, has sat for the past thirty-two years on her father’s piano.
A thousand thoughts flood her mind, but the first is a wash of relief. There’s the connection. Florence Daniels knew her mother.
Maybe it isn’t too surprising. Dad always said that Mom went to California. Drove all the way across the country, only to die somewhere between here and there. Maybe she reached Los Angeles. Maybe, in her last days, she met a young screenwriter.
She knows she’s wrong the moment she opens the desk drawer. Inside the desk is a large, heavy envelope, and inside that there are more photos.
She spreads them out, straight over the typewriter and the stacked manuscripts. Her mother, forever young in her memory, is in them, but so is a young Florence Daniels. The two women, with arms around one another, are posed against trees, mountains, lakes, and a battered Model T in snapshots of a long-ago adventure. Even without reading the smudged captions on the backs of the photos, Louise knows they are a record of her mother’s final trip.
The last two items to slip out of the envelope confirm this.
One is a lined notebook, like the ones schoolgirls use for compositions. It’s filled with penciled script, sometimes neat and flowing, sometimes cramped with emotion. A makeshift travel journal, dated 1926. She flips pages to see how far it goes. Journal entries fill about a third of it and a sketched-out screenplay fills another third. It’s titled When She Was King, the same as one of the screenplays on the shelf. At the very back of the notebook, past dozens of blank pages, is the single, lonely line, “Holding your hand, I suddenly wasn’t as scared.”
The other volume is a small cardboard-bound book, the kind given out for free as a promotion or advertisement. A little family accounts ledger. This one says “Feldman’s Pharmacy—Sellers of Vit-A-Milk” and has preprinted pages to keep track of weekly budgets and expenses for the year. In the columns are indeed household items, printed in rows of tiny letters: groceries, expenses, planned meals. Sometimes, in the corners of the pages, little sketches in ink, of trees and cars, of a little girl’s face, of windmills and cacti.
But, as she flips through it, she sees more than lists and plans. There are personal notes, notes that stretch and push beyond the succinctness of a household record. Sometimes only a sentence, sometimes a crisp paragraph, they’re little glimpses of the woman behind the housewife.
The lists of groceries, the mundane details about cans of tomatoes and fryer chickens, are written in the
same hand as Louise’s birth date in the front of the family Bible. Unexpected tears spring to her eyes.
“Is everything fine?” Mr. French comes out from the bedroom with an orange-dyed sombrero in his hands.
Louise blinks and starts catching up the scattered photographs. She’d forgotten she wasn’t alone in the apartment. An actress is always on camera. “Yes.” She shakes her head to clear it. “Are you almost finished?”
“I’ve found all of those Variety issues. I’m going to see if the caretaker has a box or two.”
“Fine.” She turns the envelope over to slide the photos back inside. She hadn’t noticed before, but it’s addressed to her, in those same small inked letters. Addressed, but never mailed. “For A.L., who has many journeys ahead of her” is written across the unsealed flap.
Apart from the wedding photograph and the early death, Louise never knew much about her mother. This envelope, with its photographs and makeshift diary, hidden in a stranger’s apartment, holds more of her mother’s story than she’s ever had before.
While she waits for Mr. French to return, she pours a glass of club soda; she doesn’t find any gin. With glass in hand, she sits at the table and opens her briefcase. The script inside, she extracts with two fingers. The Princess of Las Vegas Boulevard. She’d only flipped through it earlier at the meeting. It’s so gaudy and girly she’s surprised the front cover isn’t sequin-studded. She opens to the first page and wishes she hadn’t. Stilted dialogue, right from the start.
She abandons both script and drink and wanders back to the bookcase.
What she wouldn’t give to star in a script like one of these. Stories about smart, daring, resourceful women, doing more than blushing and sighing up at their leading men. She wants one of these roles so bad she can taste it like sugar at the back of her tongue. Drawn by the title When She Was King, Louise takes the screenplay from the shelf. She loves the contradiction and the complete absence of the word “princess” in the title.
Right away, she’s impressed.
The writing is crisp, the dialogue playful. The characters are so real she can almost shake their hands. From the snippets she reads, it’s about two women rekindling a friendship on a drive across the country. There are campgrounds and card games and a very resilient Model T. There are tears and regrets, and also yearnings held tight to the chest. She wonders if her mother’s last trip was like this. She wonders if that’s why Florence Daniels started writing it in the back of her travel journal.
She hears Mr. French’s voice outside and slips the script into her empty briefcase. On impulse she takes another from the bookcase, and then another. She stuffs them in the briefcase until it’s full.
Those few pages of When She Was King had brought up a surge of defiance so sharp she can almost taste it. Two women driving across the country with the same stubbornness that had brought Louise out to Hollywood all those years ago. Back then she’d had a determination that she’d almost forgotten until this moment. “Just like your mother,” Dad had always said. It had taken guts to set off on a journey with nothing but a Model T between you and the unpaved United States.
Mr. French comes in with a cardboard box and Louise latches shut the briefcase. Though it’s all hers, she’s sure she’s not allowed to take anything yet; lawyers thrive on red tape and paperwork. She doesn’t even know why she’s trying to sneak the briefcase full of screenplays out. Maybe because, reading this one, she’s been reminded of Mom and her courage. Maybe it’s because she wants the same courage, through the dialogue of the script and in real life.
She retrieves her coffee-spotted gloves and handbag and says all the right things to Mr. French, hoping he won’t notice that her briefcase has grown in size, hoping he won’t notice the gaping holes in the bookcase. He doesn’t.
It’s not until she’s back out on the sidewalk that she remembers she left the two diaries sitting in the envelope on the desk.
Chapter Two
1952
It’s started raining.
She takes a taxi. With her overstuffed briefcase, she feels almost like she’s setting off on a trip. The cabbie even asks if she’s headed to Los Angeles International Airport. She sets her purse on the seat, brushes rain from the sleeves of her jacket, and gives him an address on Rodeo Drive.
Lights are starting to go on around the city. Hollywood Boulevard is lined in neon signs and electric lights. Every lamppost holds a metal tree blazing with colored bulbs. Strung across the street are bells, wreaths, and incandescent stars. Louise rests her head against the window.
The crowds of umbrellas hurrying home thin as the taxi turns onto Rodeo Drive. The bright glitter of the theaters is replaced by the yellow glow of porch lights. White felt “snow” and strings of Christmas lights skirt the edges of roofs. She loves Rodeo Drive, with its quiet bungalows and old bridle path running straight down the middle of the road. Framed in squares of lighted windows, aproned women stand at ranges, children bend over schoolbooks, and men pour themselves whiskeys.
“Home late for supper, aren’t you?” the cabbie asks, and for a moment she wishes she could give him a different address. That she could point to one of these warmly lit houses and go in to a supper of pork chops or hot pot or whatever was on the stove.
But she doesn’t answer him. The whitewashed bungalow they pull up to is dark. No Christmas lights. No tree framed in the window. It used to have evening primrose and bright yellow geraniums planted in front. Even in the dusk, she knows the porch is in need of a coat of paint. The cabbie turns and seems about to make another comment, but she pays him quickly and exits the taxi.
The house is quiet. She sets the briefcase on the rug inside the front door and steps out of her heels. In her stockinged feet, she walks to the kitchen, leaving rainwater like breadcrumbs behind her. She unpins her white hat—the soaked buckram has gone soft—and tosses it along with her purse and navy jacket onto a kitchen chair. Goosebumps fleck her arms. Only then does she switch on the kitchen lights.
It’s just as she left it that morning. Curtains flap wetly against the open window, her breakfast bowl, still on the counter, is speckled with rain. A saucepan with congealed Cream of Wheat sits on the stove. She swears under her breath, one of those muttered, self-conscious swears her father always uttered. She scrapes the cereal into the trash can and sets the pan in the sink to soak. As she reaches across the sink to shut the window, her knotted scarf dips into the stream of water from the faucet. She steps back and brushes drops from the front of her blouse, and a red light catches her eye. The percolator is still plugged in. She yanks out the cord and burns her hand on the side of the coffeepot. With a dish towel, she pulls off the lid. The coffee is sludge now. Suddenly she wants to cry.
“Where have you been?”
She doesn’t turn around, but dumps the overwarmed coffee into the sink. “I could ask you the same.” She swivels the faucet and watches coffee swirl down the drain. “Why are all the lights off?”
“I didn’t notice it had gotten dark.”
She wishes it were because he’d been writing or typing or even just sitting and reading the newspaper.
“Are you hungry?” she asks, shutting off the water and reaching for the dish towel. “I was just going to…”
But she’s turned and seen Arnie in the doorway. Six in the evening and he’s still in his pajamas.
“You haven’t even gotten dressed today?” She throws the dish towel back onto the counter. “You didn’t eat the breakfast I left, you didn’t shut the window, you didn’t even get dressed.”
He doesn’t answer, just looks away.
She’s spent the day arguing with men who called her “sweetheart” and assured her they had a great role for her involving a ukulele and bikini. What had Arnie done? His pajama shirt is spattered with brown. “I see at least you got out of bed long enough to find the coffee.”
For an instant, she thinks she sees a flash of hurt in his eyes. A flash of anger. But just as quickly,
it’s gone, and his face is blank. When he retreats to the bedroom, she sags against the sink.
She shouldn’t have said that. She knows better.
The day before Arnie arrived back home, her neighbor Pauline had brought over a ham loaf. Pauline was married to a B-list actor, a man who gave up Westerns for the army. Louise wasn’t the sort for neighborly potlucks and bridge games, but Pauline was young and lonely and determined to be nice.
“When Bert came home from Korea, he was different for a while,” she told Louise. They stood on the porch with the towel-covered loaf pan between them. “It wasn’t just losing his hearing. He wasn’t the same man who left.”
Louise could see him over Pauline’s shoulder walking to his car. He’d been back a few months now. He didn’t look any different. You’d never know he was deaf in one ear if he didn’t tell you.
“Oh, everything’s fine now,” Pauline said, maybe a bit too brightly. “Just fine.”
“I’m glad.”
“So, be patient with Arnie.” She passed over the ham loaf. It was still warm. “You might not know him right away. But he’s there, deep inside.”
Be patient. Louise repeated it the whole drive to the airport. Repeated it throughout that first awkward dinner, with slices of ham loaf, thin tomato gravy, and boiled potatoes. Repeated it that first night lying side by side in bed, both holding their breaths, both pretending to be asleep. Be patient.
She tells it to herself now, leaning against the sink in the cold kitchen. Patience. Even though it’s been weeks since he got home. She’s lost ten pounds, which the studio loves, and gained circles under her eyes, which they don’t. She’s been careful around Arnie, so careful about what she says. But all it takes is one long day and she’s forgotten Pauline’s advice.
She takes a deep breath. Putting her hand against her chest, she counts to ten to the rhythm of her heartbeats, the way her dad taught her when she was young and stubborn and prone to foot-stamping tantrums.
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