Girl About Town

by Adam Shankman

  But he didn’t. He only chuckled to himself and turned once more to the sun streaming through the window.

  After a long moment of silence, she asked warily, “So you think I’m beautiful?”

  “No. Not particularly beautiful. Your mouth is too big and your nose is too small and your eyes are too far apart and your chin is too pointed.”

  “Why, you . . .”

  “A man’s entitled to his opinion.”

  “A goon like you has no class,” she said, forgetting everything Mrs. Wilburforce had taught her about how to be a lady. “You wouldn’t know beauty if it slapped you in the face.”

  “It tried to.”

  “Ha! I thought you said . . .”

  “Well, maybe some people would think you’re beautiful. But you’ve got something better going for you.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “You’re interesting,” Freddie said.

  Lulu opened her mouth to reply and then stopped short. She looked to Freddie like she didn’t know if it was a backhanded insult or the nicest compliment she’d ever gotten in her life. Probably plenty of men had called her beautiful. He wondered if anyone had ever called her interesting.

  Defensively, she said, “Nice. Next thing you’ll be calling me smart. What’s after that, the kiss of death—a good sense of humor?”

  “Tragic, isn’t it?”

  “You think you know me after a few minutes?”

  “I’ve smelled your shoes. That tells me a lot.”

  “Ew. Tells me plenty about you, too.” She forced herself to be calm. “Listen, oddball, do a good job here and we never have to see each other again. On the level.”

  “Incentive for me to fail. What if I want to see you again?”

  Lulu flushed. “Become a rich and famous star and I might just give you the time of day.” The words came out before she had time to think about them. Something about this boy made her feel fluttery in the pit of her stomach.

  “What if I’m just one or the other?” Freddie asked.

  “Then pick rich. It’s much easier. Fame costs too much.”

  “So you couldn’t like a poor boy?”

  “I wouldn’t bother trying,” she said with a toss of her platinum locks.

  “Sometimes you get things without trying for them, as the philosopher once said.”

  “Who is this philosopher you’re always talking about?” she snapped.

  “Murphy B. Murgatroyd, aka Mugsy.”

  “The one who taught you to box? A fighting philosopher?”

  “More of a nursemaid. Is this the place?” They’d come to a big wrought-iron gate with the letters LUX twisted into the metal. The car glided to a stop. An elderly guard built like a fireplug with legs stepped out of the guardhouse.

  “Hello, Gus. This is a new actor,” Lulu said. “Strictly temporary. Says his name is Freddie Van. He’ll be on the set today, and maybe tomorrow, but don’t let him in after that. He doesn’t belong here.”

  The door swung open, and Freddie held out his hand to the guard, who stood nonplussed a moment before shaking it. “Very pleased to make your acquaintance,” Freddie said pleasantly.

  Gus looked at Freddie’s ragged clothes. “I’ve seen ’em come and seen ’em go,” he said. “And this one is more of a comer than a goer.” He nodded sagely. “Listen to him, acting like a jim-dandy when he obviously ain’t had a good meal in weeks. Sounds like he’s got a silver spoon in his yap. You found a keeper, Lulu.”

  She shook her head. “I think you’ve been stuck in that hut too long, Gus. You don’t know what you’re talking about. This guy is an extra at best. He just got lucky today.”

  “A little luck is all this guy needs. See you around, Lu. Glad to know ya, Freddie.” He tipped his cap.

  “Don’t let it go to your head,” she said as they walked to the set of Girl About Town. “He thought Clark Gable would be a flop, and he told me the other day about some crazy redhead named Lucille Ball with a couple of bit parts to her name who he swears is going to make it big. No one wants to watch a kooky redhead. What does Gus know? He still thinks talkies are just a fad.”

  “I won’t get my hopes up. About that, anyway.”

  Freddie looked at her shapely form and sprightly, bouncing walk. “I might get my hopes up about something else, though.” He caught her eye for a second and smiled, which made her feel both uneasy and the tiniest bit elated.

  As he followed her through the citylike streets of the lot, he thought that the last thing he wanted right now was an entanglement. This whole thing was a bad idea. A guy on the run shouldn’t have his face in the movies, even if it was a small part. Freddie was definitely on the lam, as desperate as any criminal. His father would stop at nothing to bring him back. He knew the private investigators must be getting close. And Mugsy, who knew him like the back of his own hairy-knuckled hand, could probably sniff him out eventually, if Freddie’s father had managed to convince him to help. Freddie was an only child, sole heir of his father’s fortune. I do all this for you, his father used to say when he took Freddie on a tour of a refinery or steel mill. It used to make Freddie proud.

  Suddenly he felt a little pang of homesickness, a lingering twinge of love for his father. No, he told himself severely. Not for my father, for the man I believed him to be, once.

  “Wait here,” Lulu told him, and he stood with his hands in his pockets, whistling “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” thinking about the peculiar girl he’d just met. What a whirlwind! What a perplexing mix of traits—vanity and self-consciousness, kindness and quick temper, frivolity and seriousness. He might have dismissed her as just another empty-headed flapper if she hadn’t given Rocco that bracelet. She tried to hide her accent, but when she was upset she betrayed her lower-class origins as clearly as if she were wearing a sandwich board. She was the kind of girl he never would have talked to in his old life. Her kind probably wouldn’t have made it as far as a hat-check girl, he thought. Their spheres never would have intersected.

  Now look at her—a star. But one who understood what desperation could do to a poor man, who knew the value of a second chance. He wished there were more people like her in the world. He’d met some surprisingly decent folks in his travels, but he never thought he’d meet one in jaded Hollywood. Especially one so pretty.

  It made Freddie ponder. He’d followed her to the studio for a lark, because he was lonely and rootless, and yes, he needed the money. As far as he was concerned, this was just another job of day labor. If he could chop wood or milk cows in exchange for food, surely he could act. If he appeared in a movie, he might earn enough cash for hammock on a ship to Hong Kong. By the time the private eyes saw the film, he’d be long gone.

  But now that he’d met Lulu, he had second thoughts. Maybe he could build a new life for himself here, under a new name. He’d thought to make amends for his father’s misdeeds through manual labor. It seemed nobler, somehow, to live by the sweat of his brow than by something like banking or the law. Those professions were overflowing candy stores for the dishonest and greedy.

  Yet what was Hollywood but an industry based on lies? He was fully aware of the irony. Hollywood was an industry, and at the top of every industry was a man who had built his fortune on the backs of hardworking people.

  No, he told himself firmly. I’m definitely leaving the country.

  Lulu bobbed back into view, her deep blue eyes dancing, a smile playing on her lips.

  Only, not quite yet.

  SEVENTEEN

  Lulu vehemently argued her case for casting Freddie. “I’m telling you, Ira, he’s absolutely perfect. Look at him! Young, broken, sad, filthy, disgusting, and pathetic! He’s the absolute gold standard of pitiful scum!”

  “Coming from you, dear lady, I’ll take that as a compliment,” Freddie cheerfully responded.

  They stood in the director’s tiny on-set office, facing off with Sassoon, the producer, and the writer.

  “Lulu, we’re just writ
ing the new scene. The pages haven’t even gone upstairs to the studio. Sure, I get it! He’s nauseating—”

  “This just keeps getting better!” Freddie chimed in

  “But can the bum act? Can he deliver lines? For cryin’ out loud, the guy looks loaded to the muzzle!”

  “Pardon me, but this bum would like to assure you that he isn’t ‘loaded to the muzzle,’ and for your information, I’ve declaimed selections from Shakespeare, Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde. And, I’d like to add, I received high acclaim.”

  Lulu, thinking he was overplaying his role a bit, nudged him sharply in the ribs and whispered, “From whom? The garbage collectors?”

  Everyone else simply stared at Freddie, momentarily dumbfounded by what had come out of the vagrant’s mouth. A little smile crept over Lulu’s rouged lips. This just might work.

  It was at that moment that a young bespectacled production assistant knocked, stuck his head into the room, and asked, “Are we shutting down or shooting, Mr. Sassoon? We’re wondering if we should release the crew or not.”

  Lulu gave Sassoon her most beguiling smile. “Pretty please?”

  “Come on, Freddie. Let’s get you to makeup. Then you can learn your lines while I shoot my next scene. You’ll be up afterward.” Lulu hustled along with the harried production assistant and her new costar.

  “I have to wear makeup? What kind of role am I supposed to be playing?”

  “Everyone wears makeup, kiddo. You’re playing a good-looking but dirty street bum whom my character picks up on a dare.”

  “I’m good-looking?” he asked. He wondered if she realized he was mocking her for asking the same thing earlier. “Funny how that torturous high-heeled shoe is suddenly on the other foot.”

  “No, you’re not, but once the makeup department gets ahold of you, you’ll pass. They’ll clean you up and pancake you. . . .”

  “I thought I was playing a dirty bum. Don’t I already look the part?”

  “Oh, they don’t want real dirt. Actual dirt doesn’t look real enough on camera. You’ll have greasepaint.”

  Freddie had to laugh. What a mythical world, where real dirt wasn’t dirty enough. He didn’t know whether to be disgusted or amused. Ben would have gotten a kick out of it, though.

  “Here are your pages,” she said as another assistant rushed up to them and handed them the rewritten scene, the letters smudged from the fresh typewriter ink. The little dog tried to follow her onto the set, but she shooed him gently back to Freddie. He walked in three circles and lay down, his tongue lolling out, surveying the cast and crew like an old pro.

  A svelte man named Max, with an apron covering his impeccably tailored tan poplin suit, took charge of Freddie and directed him into a small barren dressing room. One assistant ushered him into the shower and instructed Freddie to suds himself from head to toe. Freddie was more than a little shocked at how embedded the filth on him was from the many months of vagrancy, and he luxuriated in the steaming-hot deluge. He was like an archaeological dig, and each new layer of dirt removed revealed some forgotten feature of himself.

  When he’d been completely scoured and sanitized, another assistant applied an astringent, a conditioning face cream that smelled unpleasantly like stale urine, and finally a sort of slick liquid plastic that made his face stiffen. “Takes years off you, love,” the assistant whispered into his ear. Freddie stared at his shining face in the mirror, trying to decide if he really did look twelve.

  Only then did Max, the head of makeup, personally go to work on him. A colored cream gave him the proper complexion, powder dulled his shine, and then, with the exacting eye of a true artist, Max set about painting Freddie’s face with faux dirt. He murmured to himself as he worked. “More on the left side than the right. You would sleep on your left side, yes, so that your right arm is free to fight if there is trouble on the savage streets. You wake, you rub your eyes, and the dirt smears, just so. Now for the fingernails. They are dirty, but you have a nervous habit of picking them, or perhaps you clean them with the tip of your knife, so we apply the dirt, so, and then scrape most of it away again.”

  By the end of the process Freddie was theatrically filthy. “I look quite dangerous,” he told Max. “Except perhaps for the eyeliner. If I had you on the streets, no one would ever bother me. Thank you.”

  Max put his right hand over his heart and gave a little bow, then went to search Lulu’s arched eyebrows for any stray hairs before her next scene. Freddie settled down to watch, and soon Max rejoined him. Though only a few people were to be in the scene, there were a slew of support crew holding lights and microphones, as well as a crowd without any identifiable purpose. Max, who adored the sound of his own voice, began to tell Freddie about some of them.

  “That’s Vasily Anoushkin,” he said, pointing to the man in gray cashmere. “Russian acting coaches are all the rage now. Ooh, look at him scowl at Sassoon! He thinks he should be the director, and in my opinion he’s not wrong. But the ones to watch out for are the ones who aren’t scowling at each other.” He gave an exaggerated gasp. “Speaking of, did you see that look Ruby Godfrey just gave Vasily? Butter wouldn’t melt! She smiled at him like the MGM lion. And if I know her, she doesn’t want to eat him up in the fun way. I don’t know what their battle is, but I can tell it’s brewing. Usually my money would be on Vasily, but look, he won’t even make eye contact with her. I wonder . . .” Max cocked his head, lost in thought. “No, not Vasily,” he decided at last.

  Freddie listened with half an ear to the makeup artist’s gossip. He was far more interested in watching Lulu prepare for her part. She looked so intensely serious, pacing out steps to secret marks on the floor, examining the camera and lighting angles, mouthing her lines under her breath.

  “And there’s Lolly—Louella Parsons to me, because I’m not quite fabulous enough to be at that level of intimate hatred yet. Wait until next year, when my new makeup line is out. She’ll be kissing my . . . whatever part of my anatomy she can reach to get free samples. Like she needs another layer of pancake.” Max babbled on about the most intimate secrets of everyone on set until the director called the actors and crew to their places.

  “What is this scene about?” Freddie asked Max.

  “The devil-may-care society girl is a little tipsy at her boyfriend’s party, and to be cute she decides to play with his gun. Only she doesn’t know it’s loaded, and she almost shoots him by accident.”

  Freddie watched the prop supervisor, a ginger-haired man with a potbelly, put the weapon in a desk drawer. It looked suspiciously heavy. “Tell me that isn’t a real gun.”

  “Oh, it’s real, all right, but not loaded. Fake guns look so . . . fake. We’ll dub the ‘bang’ in later. All very safe. We’re just a bunch of kids playing dress-up and make-believe here.”

  “All the same,” said Freddie, rising, “I’d like to check it out for myself.” He’d handled plenty of guns in his life—skeet shooting by the lake, duck hunting in Connecticut—and he’d swear, from the apparent weight of the revolver in the prop man’s hand, that it was loaded. Or was it just that guns had such a terrible association for him now? Once they had been playthings for an afternoon’s sport. Now he knew them for the deadly weapons they really were.

  While the actors were taking their places and waiting for Sassoon to be ready, Freddie took the revolver out of the drawer. His hands were shaking as he remembered the sound of the gunshot in the closed room, the sight of Mr. Shaw slumping to the ground. But he opened the cylinder and spun it, making sure that every chamber was empty, then put it back in the drawer. He knew he was being foolishly overcautious. . . . Still, the idea of Lulu playing with a gun worried him.

  The prop supervisor squinted at Freddie suspiciously as he walked back to his seat, then checked the gun again. Freddie shot him a smile, which wasn’t returned, and gave a little shrug. Still eyeballing him, the prop man fished a cigarette case from his pocket, then slapped his other pockets for a match.


  “Ruby, ya got a light?” the man called when his pockets turned up empty. Ruby, rolling her eyes, tossed him a matchbook. Freddie absently watched the black and gold square arc through the spotlights. It was a bad throw, though, and skidded by Freddie’s feet. Ever the gentleman, he picked it up, glanced casually at the gold ram’s head embossed on the cover, and pitched it the rest of the way to the prop supervisor.

  His mind easy now, Freddie sat down again and waited for the show to start. He had his lines memorized in moments, and then alternated between memorizing the other parts so he’d know his cues and watching the crew members at work. They were such an efficient team, wheeling massive cameras and adjusting blazing lights to perfection, but they seemed to be having fun, too, laughing and gossiping. It seemed like a nice place to work. I could get very used to this, he thought. I could stay. . . .

  Then he noticed one man who didn’t look like he belonged. At first Freddie thought he might be one of the stars, handsome and aloof. He wore a dark suit, with slicked-back hair and a heavy gold ring on each forefinger. He was a little older than Freddie, maybe nineteen or twenty, yet he carried himself like the master of the world, his chin jutting and his eyes proclaiming ownership of everything he saw. Despite the suit, there was something base and physical about him, something predatory.

  No one else seemed troubled by his presence. There were always executives and the like lingering in the wings to watch their dollars at work, and for the most part the actors and crew ignored them unless specifically asked to entertain them. This man watched one of the actors intently: Lulu. Freddie didn’t think she’d noticed him yet, but he never took his eyes off her, until the moment he grabbed a passing assistant and whispered a question in his ear. Afterward, the man in the suit strolled nonchalantly onto the set and took the gun out of the drawer. Freddie heard the click and spin of the cylinder opening, but he couldn’t see what the man was doing with it. Was he the set safety expert, checking the gun one last time?