It was all so amazing she had to pinch herself to believe that it was real. Yet here she was, Mary Lou Trescher, on a movie set, watching a Remy Lelourie picture being made. Reginald Trescher, her second cousin on her daddy's side—who had worked for the electric company until by some miracle he had landed a job working the Cutlass set lights—had used his connections to get her a pass into the warehouse this morning, so that she could watch them shoot the sword fight scene.
The other Fantastics were all just going to be so jealous when they heard. Mary Lou wanted to rush out right now and tell them what she was seeing and doing, even though nothing much had happened yet. A few men walked about, carrying clipboards and picking their way through the heavy electrical cables that snaked all over the floor. A small orchestra was tuning up their instruments; Reggie had told her they played mood music suited for each scene to inspire the actors. Someone turned on a giant fan and the sails flapped and waves splashed up over the ship's rails, but after a few moments of that the fan was turned off.
Seven cameras on tripods had been placed around the ship, and a bearded man dressed in an open-necked shirt, jodhpurs, and riding boots kept going from one to the other, peering through the viewfinders with a monocled eye and making notes on the scenario he carried rolled up in his hand.
Her cousin Reggie had pointed him out to her as the famous German director Peter Kohl. Reggie had said Mr. Kohl was a man painstaking with details: clothes, makeup, lighting—it all had to be just so, which was why everything was taking so long. “It takes us hours,” Reggie had said, “just to set up and shoot a couple feet of film.”
What Mary Lou most wondered, though, but hadn't dared to ask, was why Mr. Kohl had dressed himself to look like he'd just gotten off a horse when they were making a pirate movie.
So far Mary Lou had only gotten a glimpse of Remy Lelourie herself, when the movie star had stuck her head out the door of her portable dressing room and asked if they were ready for her yet. The dressing room itself was a marvel, for it was on wheels. It made Mary Lou think of the Gypsy wagons she had seen in countless movies.
After several more long minutes when nothing was happening, Mary Lou drifted over for a closer look at one of the cameras. It was smaller than she would have imagined, not much bigger than her school satchel, but with two spools the size of phonograph records fastened onto the top.
“Touch that and you're dead.”
Mary Lou nearly leaped out of her skin, and then she nearly fainted when she turned and got a look at the man who had spoken. She thought for a minute he was wearing costume makeup, or a mask, so hideously scarred was half of his face.
If he was insulted by how she was staring so wild-eyed at him, he didn't show it. It was hard to tell from his expression, for the skin on the scarred side of his face was thick and stiff as leather. “I'm Jeremy Doyle,” he said. “The chief cameraman of this extravagant fantasy. And that's my camera you were about to touch without permission.”
Mary Lou stuttered an apology. She was having a hard time deciding where to look. It seemed an insult to look away, as if she couldn't bear the sight of him, and yet to look at him was to give the impression of staring. It seemed that whatever she did, look or not look, was liable to hurt his feelings and then suddenly it struck her: this Jeremy Doyle had said he was a cameraman. A cameraman. Somebody…who was it? Hedda Hopper? Norma Shearer? had been discovered sipping a nectar soda in a drugstore by a Warner Brothers cameraman.
So she made herself look at this cameraman full in his scarred face and held out her hand, palm-side down. “Mary Lou Trescher,” she said, and then she gave him the jaded flapper girl pout that Remy Lelourie had made famous in Jazz Babies. “I was only trying to amuse myself while I waited for something to happen. Are movie sets always this dull, Mr. Doyle?”
His mouth screwed into a fearsome grimace, and it took Mary Lou a moment to realize it was his version of a smile. “Listen to yourself. You're not going to tell me you don't find this glamorous.” He waved his hand, encompassing the set, and as if it had been a cue, the banks of incandescent lamps in back of the pirate ship flooded on, bathing the deck in a wash of white light.
Mary Lou's breath left her in a soft sigh, for what had seemed spectacular before was now otherworldly. The open warehouse rafters faded away, and the cables and dollies and folding chairs and arc lamps—they all disappeared and suddenly she was a lady pirate at sail on the high seas.
She felt the cameraman's gaze on her and she blushed, although she was pleased, too, of course, for it must mean he thought her pretty. Of all the girls in the Fantastics, Mary Lou was the one everybody said most looked like Remy Lelourie.
“Oh, Christ,” he said. “Now I suppose you'll be packing your bags and running off to Hollywood.” He reached around her and did something to his camera, snapping a cap off the lens and winding a crank. “Let me give you some advice, baby doll, even though you won't take it and you sure as hell won't like it. The studio lots are already full of girls like you, with your simpering lollipop faces. I can tell right off you haven't got what it takes to make it, so save yourself the price of a train ticket and a broken heart.”
Mary Lou stared at his ravaged face, hurt and stunned breathless, and then something seemed to crack loose inside her and her eyes welled with tears.
“I knew you wouldn't like it,” he said, and he turned on his heel and walked away from her.
Mary Lou took off running in the opposite direction. Tears blurred her eyes so, she nearly ran smack into an open door. She stopped, her chest heaving with pent-up sobs, trying to hold back the tears with her hands and getting mascara all over her white gloves, when she realized that the door she'd almost run into was Remy Lelourie's dressing room. The movie star was not inside, but Alfredo Ramon's dressing room was pulled up next to it and its door was also open, just a crack, but enough for Mary Lou to climb the two steps and take a peek. She almost gasped aloud at what she saw.
Cutlass's leading man was leaning against a beautiful cherry wood dressing table, one heel braced on a small red and blue Oriental carpet, the other leg sharply bent at the knee. The sleeve of his black pirate's shirt was rolled up, and his bare arm rested against his thigh. His fist was clenched, the sinews rigid. Rubber tubing bit into the muscle of his forearm. He was injecting something into his wrist with a hypodermic needle.
His full lips fluttered with a sigh as he pressed down on the plunger. His head fell back, his eyelids squeezing shut, and his face tightened as if in a rictus of pain. He stayed that way, frozen, except for the shudders rippling over his taut muscles and the harsh shocks of his breathing.
After a while his breathing eased and he straightened slowly. He untied the rubber tubing and pulled the glass syringe out of his arm, dropping it on the dressing table, shaking his hand. He turned his head, and the blurred focus of his eyes brightened with amusement. “Hey, baby, what're you looking at?”
Mary Lou's face burned with embarrassment because she thought he was talking to her, but then she realized it was Remy Lelourie, who must have been standing on the other side of the partly closed door, for he said, “Come on, Remy, don't frown like that. You'll put lines in your beautiful face and it is such a beautiful face, too. More beautiful even than mine, I think…Or maybe not.” He laughed suddenly, wildly. “Whooh. This horse I scored is something else. You sure you don't want some?”
Remy Lelourie came further into the room, enough for Mary Lou to see her now. She was wearing her pirate's costume: black satin shirt, tight black leather pants, and knee-high boots. She had a sword buckled around her waist. A bloodstained bandage was wrapped around her head.
“God, Freddy, we're about to go at each other with swords and you're flying to the moon. Does Peter know you're using again?”
“He doesn't care.” His words were slurred, but an edge was there, cutting through. “You're the box office, baby. 'Long as you behave, everything is copacetic.”
Remy started to turn away from
him but he grabbed her arm and jerked her back around to face him. “Are you fucking him yet?”
She tried pulling free of him, but his grip tightened. “Freddy, don't be like this.”
“The last picture we made together, you started out in my bed and ended up in his. I was thinking that maybe this time if you started out in his, you'd end up in mine.”
“Freddy, you are being pathetic. Let go of me.”
He looked down at her with half-open eyes, the flesh beneath his sharp cheekbones quivering with tiny tremors. Then he dropped her arm and took a step back.
Mary Lou barely got down off the stoop and around the corner of the wagon before Remy Lelourie came through the door.
A heavy hand fell on Mary Lou's shoulder and she whirled so fast she almost stumbled. She half expected to see the cameraman with the scarred face, back to torment her some more, but it was her cousin Reggie.
“Hey, why so jumpy, kid?” he said, laughing. “They aren't real pirates, you know. Come on. I'll introduce you to Miss Lelourie.”
“No, Reggie, wait. What are you doing? She's a movie star, for God's sake. We can't just go right up to a movie star like she's just any-old-body.”
Reggie wasn't listening. He was pushing her forward and calling out to Miss Lelourie, and before Mary Lou had time to take a breath she found herself standing in front of an honest-to-goodness movie star, shaking the woman's hand, and mumbling something that sounded incoherent even to her own befuddled ears.
Remy Lelourie seemed smaller than she did on the screen, but her face was almost too beautiful to be real. No, not so much beautiful as something else. Looking into that face reminded Mary Lou of a summer thunderstorm, of that first instant after the lightning strikes and the air is alive with electricity, and you wait with tingling breath-held anticipation for the explosion of thunder that is coming, and the pouring rain.
“I'm so glad Reggie thought to bring you here this mornin', Miss Trescher,” Remy Lelourie was saying in a voice that was husky and surprisingly shy. “Make sure he puts you right up in front of the set, where I can see you. I'm going to need a friendly soul out there cheering me on when they all start to bully me for missing my marks.”
Mary Lou doubted that Remy Lelourie had ever missed a mark in her life. She wanted to say something to that effect, about how much she admired Miss Lelourie's talent and how she'd seen every one of her films at least a half dozen times each, but she couldn't seem to unlock her jaw and get her tongue to move.
“Breathe,” Reggie said in her ear, but Mary Lou couldn't seem to do that either.
Miss Lelourie had leaned in to her and looked about to say something else, when her attention was caught by Peter Kohl, the director, who bore down on her, his jutting, pointed beard leading the way.
“Remy, Remy, my beautiful, fiery pirate. There you are.” The director's gaze passed over Reggie and Mary Lou as if they were no more than props on his set, and fastened onto the face of his leading lady, warm and intimate, and more like that of a loving father than a man who had apparently once shared her bed.
“Now, this is what I want from you, Remy darling,” he said. He draped his arm over her shoulder, steering her toward the ship. “You are angry, and the anger is like an inferno inside of you. You are an outlaw. An outlaw who has undergone moral reparation of a sort, this is true, for you are in love. In love!” He flung his arms out in a flamboyant embrace of the word, held them in the air a moment and then let them fall with a sag of his shoulders. “But, still, you are an outlaw. Let me see the outlaw, darling. Let me see it.”
To Mary Lou's surprise Miss Lelourie turned and smiled at her before allowing herself to be led away by her director. Mary Lou hesitated, not sure if she was supposed to follow, and then she got the strangest feeling that someone was watching her.
Alfredo Ramon leaned against the door to his dressing room, looking handsome and piratical. His dark eyes stared at her wide open, intense and unblinking, like those of a cat about to pounce on a mouse. Mary Lou wasn't sure, though, if he was really looking at her or simply through her.
She started to smile at him and then she remembered suddenly how she had spied on him while he'd been thrusting that needle into the bulging blue vein in his arm. She looked down at her feet, instead, feeling vaguely ashamed, and when she looked back up again, he was gone.
“Hey, let's go, kiddo,” Reggie said, grabbing her arm and pulling her along after him. “Are you putting down roots? We're about to shoot.”
Remy Lelourie walked across the gangplank and climbed onto the ship's poop deck. She simply stood there, with her arms down straight at her sides and her head slightly lifted, and though Mary Lou could see no overt change in her expression, her very presence seemed to alter from the inside out, and suddenly it was all there, in her eyes and mouth, in the set of her shoulders and the arch of her neck. She was a pirate, an outlaw.
Peter Kohl had been watching her through a camera's viewfinder and now he stepped away from it and clasped his hand over his heart in a mockingly dramatic gesture that seemed oddly sweet. “Lieber Gott, Remy darling. You have slain me.”
She broke the pose in an instant, becoming herself again. She leaned over the rail, laughing at him. “You mustn't succumb to my charms yet. The picture's only half finished.” She lifted the edge of the bloodstained bandage and scratched her scalp. “Why am I wearing this thing around my head?”
“Because you are wounded, Remy darling.”
“Peter, darling. I was stabbed in my arm, not my head. I distinctly remember being stabbed in the arm.”
He came to the edge of the giant tank and stood staring up at her, with his hands on his hips. “But the bandage around your head looks so romantic. What is a bandage around the arm? Nothing. A bore. Leave it as it is and we'll worry about fixing things later.”
He picked up a megaphone from off his director's chair, and somebody yelled out, “Ready on the set.” The orchestra launched into “The Ride of the Valkyries.” The giant fan started up, and waves slapped against the sides of the ship, the sails billowed. Somebody yelled, “Smoke! Let's have some smoke!” and the fireworks man shot smoke bombs over the masts, and a white haze began to drift through the rigging.
Remy Lelourie laughed and drew her sword, and magic happened.
Remy Lelourie knew that a scene was working when she could feel herself being seduced by the magic of her own image in the camera's eye. She gave herself to the camera, gave every breath and drop of sweat, pried herself wide open for the camera. She loved the camera with a hungry, grasping, needy love, and the camera responded by loving her back.
They did twelve different takes: all with long shots, mid shots, and close shots, the seven Mitchell cameras all grinding away simultaneously, shooting hundreds of feet of black and white film. Then Jeremy Doyle climbed on board and did the innovation filming with his 35mm Eyemo handheld camera, lying on the deck on his back and shooting up, climbing up to the crow's nest and shooting down, dangling from the ship's rail by his legs and shooting sideways—while she and Alfredo Ramon clashed swords and romped across the deck again and again, leaping over broken spars and burning hatches, and swinging from the rigging, and Peter Kohl conducted the tempo like an orchestra leader, moving it up, bringing it down.
Light from the mercury vapor tubes bounced off the overhead diffusion screen, turning the ship's deck into a sauna. Smoke from the bombs and hot ash from the Klieg lights floated through the air, turning their eyes red and swollen and searing the breath from their lungs. By the fifth take, Freddy was so badly winded his breath was singing and he was cursing under his breath in his nasal Bronx accent.
“Cut,” Peter finally bellowed through his megaphone. “That, ladies and gentlemen, is a wrap.”
Jeremy Doyle swung down off the rigging, landing feet-splayed in front of her. He was holding his camera, Remy realized, the way she had held the sword.
She pulled off the bandage and tilted her head back, pushing her finger
s through hair damp with sweat. “Well, Jere?” she said, smiling, exhilarated, still half in the part. “Was I enough of an outlaw, do you think?”
The cameraman gave her his fearsome, lopsided grin. “A real firebrand.”
Laughing, she blew him a kiss as she trotted down the gangplank.
Peter Kohl was pacing the edge of the tank, blue penciling the photoplay, already preparing for Monday's filming. He was vibrating now with nervous energy, which meant that he was feeling good about the scene they'd just shot. After a string of flops, he needed this movie, needed it badly, and the more brilliant the daily rushes were looking, the more scared he became that something would happen to ruin it all for him.
Remy took a slow, circuitous route back to her dressing room, stopping to thank everyone who'd been involved in the shoot. Her skin itched beneath the heavy makeup. She was dying to get her hands on some cold cream.
The smell hit her in the face when she opened the door to the little caravan. Crushed rose petals—hundreds of them, it seemed—were strewn all over the floor, filling the small space with their sweet, overripe smell. And written in lipstick across the dressing table mirror in that same elaborate hand:
Are you scared yet, Remy?
Mary Lou Trescher was amazed at how fast the studio emptied out once the shooting was done. It was barely coming on to lunchtime when the last bank of lights was shut down and everybody who was anybody had already disappeared into their dressing rooms and offices. Reggie told her that later this afternoon, after the film was processed, they would all get back together again to watch the dailies, which meant, he said, that they were going to screen the footage just shot that morning.
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