Tinseltown Confidential

by Martin Turnbull

  Marcus passed a raised platform where four musicians in smocks and fezzes were seated. He took a seat with his back to the bartender; a pair of soldiers in uniform soon joined him. One of them, barely twenty, moved with the gangly angles of a baby giraffe. Behind him was Freckles, who the union rep had just yelled at. They were soon joined by a fourth, a Gilbert Roland type—if Roland was twenty years older and had spent his life picking fruit by day and chugging liquor by night.

  “Morning, gents.” Roland cracked an affable smile and suddenly looked like the most authentic French soldier on the set. “I see Mr. Pierce is with us today.”

  “Is that good?” the giraffe asked.

  Freckles grunted.

  “He doesn’t stand for any bullshit from management,” the lookalike replied. “He knows how long they can work us without a break, and if they go a single minute overtime, he’ll blow the whistle. Literally. He’s got one under that costume and he won’t hesitate to use it.”

  “But Bogie’s a decent guy, right?”

  “I ain’t saying he’s not. But this is his production company, so he’s got one eye on the script and one eye on the budget. Most producers push their luck, but never when Pierce has his beady little peepers on them. I do hope you remembered to bring your union card.”

  Marcus stopped tugging at his stiff collar. “Why?”

  “I was on a Maria Montez picture last year; you should’ve seen what he did to a poor slave girl when she couldn’t produce her card.”

  “What if I don’t have it on me?” Marcus asked.

  “Why wouldn’t you? It’s a union requirement.”

  “Because I changed my clothes at the last minute and left my wallet in my other pants.”

  Freckles winced. “In that case, if Pierce starts coming around doing a card check, that’s the time you crawl under the table.”

  Marcus nodded as blithely as he could and said nothing more.

  The director and cameraman took a black-haired belly dancer through her seductive gyrations around the set and past the table where Bogie in an incongruous bow tie sat next to an appropriately greasy cohort sucking a cigar.

  Marcus didn’t think Bogie would care about finding him in such reduced circumstances, but Marcus wasn’t sure he was up to enduring that sort of conversation. He kept his eyes pinned on a carved wooden screen at the rear of the set as his tablemates talked about how extras were treated at the various studios and which directors were heartless bastards to the faceless bodies that filled their backgrounds.

  Two hours later, the crew was still setting up lighting and camera angles for the belly dance, and the conversation around Marcus’ table had drifted into a word game called “I’m Going on a Picnic.” The Gilbert Roland lookalike got bored with that and changed it to “I’m Going to an Orgy.” He won the first two rounds and was about to suggest a third when he grimaced.

  “I could tell Pierce was in a pissy mood.”

  Marcus didn’t dare turn around.

  During the word games, a steady stream of crew had disappeared behind the wooden screen and reappeared with tools or props. Marcus was halfway to the exit when a surly assistant blocked his path. “You can’t leave the set. We’re about to start shooting.”

  “But I need to use—”

  “We’ll be starting soon.”

  “What is this, elementary school? I need a hall pass to go to the little boys’ room?”

  “Please return to your table.”

  Pierce was now halfway across the set, checking the four musicians’ union cards. “The men’s room is right around the corner. I’ll be two minutes, tops.”

  The assistant jabbed a pudgy finger past Marcus’ shoulder. “Back to your table. Now.”

  Marcus didn’t want to get Doris into trouble, but he really needed the dough, too. He took the long way back, looping around a plaster column. When he was out of the assistant’s sight, he faked a loud sneeze. Bogie, who had stepped onto the set to confer with the director, caught sight of Marcus as Pierce reached Gilbert Roland, Freckles, and Baby Giraffe.

  Marcus walked toward Bogie with his hand outstretched. Bogie grabbed it and shook it with gusto. “I heard you were back in town.”

  “Sometimes I wonder why.”

  The smile dropped away from Bogie’s face. “You made the right choice. Long term, I mean.”

  “I’m glad you think so.”

  “When you start producing your own pictures, people treat you differently. They show you things that you might not have otherwise seen.” Bogie waited until Pierce walked past them to the final table on the set. “Like lists, for instance.”

  So the graylist wasn’t a term describing a political point of view, but a physical list that some secretary had typed up?

  Bogie presented Marcus with a wry smile. “Is it true Mayer got you onto it?” Marcus nodded. “Makes a guy speculate what he did to get you there.”

  Marcus had often wondered if Mayer had pulled in a favor. Had he threatened someone? Marcus should have asked him at Villa Nova, but Mayer wasn’t in the chattiest of moods that night. “Are you dropping a hint?”

  Bogie shook his head. “No, no. Just wondered. Not that it matters—his days are numbered.”

  The burly assistant approached them. “The director is ready when you are.”

  Bogie thanked the guy and waited till he was out of earshot. “I’m off to the Belgian Congo with Huston and Hepburn soon. Perhaps when I get back, we can have you and Kathryn over to the house. The kid’s nearly two and a half now, running all over like a demon.”

  It was a nice offer, but Marcus knew it was just one of those things people say. As Bogie took his position behind a table laden with food, Marcus returned to Gilbert, Freckles, and Baby Giraffe.

  Freckles said, “If you know Bogie well enough to walk up and say hi, what the hell are you doing here with the rest of us schlubs?”

  Marcus shrugged off the question with a noncommittal smile. Pierce was back behind the bar, the tassel dangling from his red fez bobbing up and down as he polished shot glasses with the intensity of a surgeon.

  To Marcus’ immediate right sat a woman in her late sixties with huge Betty Boop eyes and dyed-black hair marcelled into waves and pinned back with a diamond barrette.

  As the belly dancer whirled and shimmied through take after take, Marcus tried to remember where he’d met the woman before. By the time the cast and crew were dismissed for lunch, he concluded it must have been at a Garden of Allah party. There had been so many over the years that they blurred together like watercolors left in the rain.

  He crossed the Columbia lot to the casting building to see if Doris was available for lunch, but her office was empty, so he left a note and headed to the commissary. By that time, most of the cast had been through the line and fused into groups.

  He bought a deviled Virginia ham and cheese sandwich and searched for a spare seat. A hand shot up over the heads and waved. It was Betty Boop, motioning him to join her.

  “You don’t remember me.” It was more of an accusation than a question.

  He slid his tray onto the table. “I do, but the circumstances escape me.”

  “I used to live next door to your friend Oliver.”

  Even with that, it took Marcus a moment to place her. “Regina, right?”

  She widened her round eyes. “I’m impressed. We only met once or twice.” She stuck out her hand. “And you are—I want to say Malcolm?”

  “Close. Marcus.” Her fingers felt knobby with arthritis. “I don’t remember your hair being so dark.”

  “I was probably a raving redhead when we met. But it looks wishy-washy in black-and-white, so I dyed it.”

  “The marcels suit you.”

  “Pah! What a pain. Takes me two hours, and for what? To sit in the background and watch Bertha the Belly Dancer shake her talents in our face? If this wasn’t the only work I could get, I’d be out of here faster than a jackrabbit with a firecracker shoved up his butt. This i
s your first time working background?”

  “Yep.”

  “Boring as hell, ain’t it?”

  In the years holed up in his screenwriter office, Marcus hadn’t spent much time on sets. There was always another script to finish, and never enough time. He’d heard this work was a whole lot of “hurry up and wait,” but actually doing it was a revelation. “I should have brought a book.”

  She squinted at him as she stirred her coleslaw with her fork. “I always got the impression from Oliver that you were some big mucky-muck. MGM, wasn’t it?”

  “Emphasis on ‘was.’”

  Regina raised her painted-on eyebrows, erasing the crow’s feet from her face. “This cockamamie business sure can be cruel.”

  Marcus hadn’t been too sure about Oliver’s crackpot neighbor when he met her a few years ago. She’d come across as a wacko has-been who’d come to Hollywood with stars in her eyes and ended up facedown in the gutter, missing a shoe, a glove, her best hat, and the last forty bucks in her pocketbook.

  “I think of this cockamamie business more as a game of Russian roulette,” he said. “Sometimes you get to live another day; sometimes you’re being strong-armed through the exit along with the rest of the bums.”

  She crackled a throaty laugh. “Oh, you’re funny! Oliver never told me that. How’s he doing these days?”

  He bit into his ham sandwich to buy time. Was there a Reader’s Digest version of Oliver’s tortuous trek from bucolic sanatorium to Catholic seminary? By the time he swallowed, he decided there wasn’t. “Fine, last I heard.”

  Regina gave a pout that Shirley Temple would have envied. “You two busted up? What a shame. You lonesome?” She opened her purse and pulled out a business card with her name, address, and telephone number printed on it. The name read: Regina La Plante.

  “I thought your name was Horne,” he said.

  “La Plante’s my professional name. Lookit, in a few weeks, there’s going to be a retrospective at the Silent Movie Theatre. You ever been?”

  It was a small neighborhood theater on Fairfax Avenue that specialized in the silent movies everybody else had forgotten. Marcus admitted that he hadn’t.

  “I need a date, and you’re it,” she told him, getting to her feet. “But we better be heading back, otherwise Persnickety Pierce will give us the evil eye, and trust me, you don’t want that.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Gwendolyn had never been one for omens. She thought of herself as a “make your own luck” type of gal. But roaring up Wilshire in her neighbor’s beat-up, prewar Pontiac, she wondered if she should revise her theory.

  The lights at the corner of Wilshire and Western changed to red. Gwendolyn slammed on the brakes, forcing them to squeal like a box of hamsters. She slid her hands off the steering wheel and let them drop into her lap. “It’s only twenty to twelve,” she told herself. “Plenty of time. And it’s not like they can start without you.”

  When she agreed to Maxwell Schofield’s proposal, she hadn’t expected things to move along at such a clip. The contract arrived within four days, and by the following Friday, they’d already set a launch date. Three weeks ago, a special messenger arrived with a mockup of the huge advertisement they planned to take out in the Herald-Examiner declaring August 15, 1951, to be “Sunset Boulevard Day” at all five Bullocks stores, with a splashy event at Bullocks Wilshire that promised French champagne and handcrafted chocolates from Edelweiss of Beverly Hills.

  But Gwendolyn’s excitement took a nosedive when her car refused to start in the Garden of Allah parking lot. She was hurrying back to her apartment to call a cab when she encountered Bertie, who appeared to be getting in from the night before. Gwendolyn didn’t stop to ask for particulars and was about to excuse herself when Bertie offered to loan her car—a big old jalopy that stalled three times between the Garden and Western Avenue.

  Across the street, the sun broke through the clouds. It bathed the blue-green tiles of the Wiltern Theatre in a radiant glow, leaving Gwendolyn to wonder if perhaps she should have chosen something more glamorous than her aubergine and black suit. She’d wanted to look like a serious businesswoman, but now she felt like a funeral director’s widow pulling up in a clunky firetrap that stank of kerosene.

  A banner hung from the Bullocks Wilshire’s first-floor window:

  SUNSET BOULEVARD PERFUME

  NOW EXCLUSIVELY AVAILABLE AT BULLOCKS STORES

  I bet they wish I’d called it Wilshire Boulevard.

  She swung into the parking lot and braked to a screeching halt under the Art Deco porte-cochère. She smoothed her pearl necklace, pulled at her cuffs, and checked the watch. Five to twelve—right on time. No harm, no foul.

  PAH! Omens, schmomens.

  She pushed open the frosted glass doors. The gleaming marble walls, the heels clicking across the tiled floor, and the intermingled scents of a dozen fragrances conspired to fill her with a pang of nostalgia. Suddenly, she felt like Gloria Swanson returning to Paramount in Sunset Boulevard.

  A banner like the one outside hung across the central hall over the same glass and mahogany counter where Gwendolyn used to sell perfume to studio wives and executives’ mistresses. A twelve-inch-tall bottle of Sunset Boulevard and a coordinating eighteen-inch package made for a striking display. But no one was there.

  Where was the champagne? Where were the chocolates? They wouldn’t be anywhere but the perfume department, would they?

  Maxwell Schofield charged toward her with all his Victorian walrusness, his arms outstretched, followed closely by Herman Dewberry.

  “Oh, Miss Brick!” he panted. “Such dreadful timing!”

  Gwendolyn’s hands flew to her cheeks. “Do I have the wrong day?

  “Naturally none of us could possibly have foreseen what’s happened, but nevertheless—” He stopped when Herman nudged him.

  “I don’t think Miss Brick has heard,” Herman said. “About Hearst?”

  Gwendolyn shook her head.

  “William Randolph Hearst died last night,” Schofield explained. “All the journalists and columnists we lined up to cover the big launch, of course they’re all now on the other side of town trying to talk to Marion Davies.”

  “Or the maid, or the undertaker, or the pool man,” Herman added. “Beverly Hills must be a madhouse right now. We were hoping for a big to-do but damned Hearst had the last word, even as he cashes in his chips. I’m sorry but it’s just us—and twenty bottles of Bollinger.”

  Gwendolyn stroked the side of the oversized Sunset Boulevard. “Timing really is everything, huh?”

  The clatter of high heels reverberated against the acreage of black-and-gray marble as Marilyn Monroe tottered toward them in a halter-necked sundress that she’d bought at Chez Gwendolyn several weeks back. Trailing behind her was an attractive woman Gwendolyn didn’t recognize, mid-thirties and sporting a tennis tan. Beside her was a gaunt fellow in a brown suit and a beaten fedora that badly needed steaming.

  Marilyn waved a white handkerchief. “I was afraid I’d miss everything!” She peered around. “Today’s the day, right? The fifteenth?”

  The guy in the fedora snapped his fingers. “Ah! Hearst, right?”

  “You mean nobody came just because that silly old coot died?” Marilyn asked.

  Gwendolyn grabbed her hand. “You did.”

  “Of course! I was your very first Sunset Boulevard customer, remember?”

  Gwendolyn nodded. Back then, Marilyn was just some knockout blonde who bought two bottles as soon as she smelled it.

  “You should’ve told me,” the guy said. “That’ll make great copy for my article.”

  “Are you with the papers?”

  “I’m sorry, everybody,” Marilyn said. “This is Mister . . .?”

  “Arlington. Like the cemetery. From the Herald-Examiner.”

  “But you’re a Hearst paper,” Gwendolyn said. “Shouldn’t you be off somewhere reporting on the boss?”

  Arlington shook his head. “
We can’t fill the entire paper with the old man. And besides, this story’s got great human interest. The girl behind the perfume counter becomes the entrepreneur with her own perfume. It’s like an old Joan Crawford movie, brought to life. Trust me, my editor will be thrilled.”

  Marilyn dabbed her forehead with the dainty handkerchief. “The publicity department at Fox assigned Mr. Arlington here for a sort of ‘day in the life’ piece about me.”

  “You being the first customer for this stuff is perfect!” Arlington exclaimed. “This article’s just about writing itself.”

  “You said you’re from the Herald-Examiner?” Schofield asked. “We’ve taken out half-page ads with your paper starting tomorrow. I don’t suppose you have any sway in placing our ads alongside your article?”

  “I’ll be sure to mention it.” Arlington unhooked the camera slung from his shoulder and suggested a photo with Gwendolyn and Marilyn standing on each side of the display bottle.

  Onlookers started to gather around them. As Arlington snapped a few pictures, Gwendolyn could see that it wasn’t her perfume that was drawing them in.

  A college-aged girl with a long ponytail stepped forward. “Excuse me, but you’re Marilyn Monroe, aren’t you? I saw you in All About Eve and thought you were keen. May I please have your autograph?”

  As photogenic as Marilyn was on the screen, Gwendolyn had always considered her more attractive in person. During her time at the Cocoanut Grove, and later at Bullocks, Gwendolyn had seen that elusive “It” factor in a number of actresses: Garbo, Lana, Rita, Vivien, Ava. And she’d seen it the night Marilyn first came into Chez Gwendolyn.

  But this Marilyn radiated an aura that attracted curiosity from society matrons, teenagers, intellectuals, and trust-fund babies alike. None of them could resist the orbital tug of a woman who was only starting to realize the force of her own gravitational pull. There weren’t as many of them as Gwendolyn had hoped might show up today, but it was better than standing around on her lonesome.