Judith Krantz

by Till We Meet Again

  She mopped her eyes and blew her nose, still quivering with diminishing sobs. He stood with his back toward her, looking out the window at the planes that were landing one by one. Sunday fliers reluctantly returning to earth. Finally she was able to speak.

  “Can I go home now?”

  “No, you cannot. Not until we have a clear understanding. Why did you do those loops?”

  “I was feeling … happy.”

  “So you decided to stunt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you do so many loops?”

  “It felt so good. I loved it.”

  “Do you promise never to do it again?”

  “I promise.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Mac! I swear I won’t. How can I convince you? I’ve learned my lesson—I’m not a liar, don’t you trust me?”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t think you’re dishonest, I think that you truly believe you won’t stunt again, but one day, somewhere safe, when you know that I’m two hundred miles away, the temptation will be too strong and you won’t be able to resist it. Now that you’ve started, you won’t be able to stop. I know a thing or two about that. It’s bound to happen, no matter what you say.”

  “I can’t stop you from thinking whatever you want to think,” Freddy said miserably. This meant that he’d never let her use the Ryan again. She’d be back flying the slower, less powerful Taylor, if he even let her use any of his planes.

  “Aerobatics is a science, Freddy, not a dumb-ass whoop and a holler. Recklessness is intolerable. Unpardonable. Unforgivable. Aerobatics requires more work, more repetitive precision practice, than any other form of flying.”

  “I understand. Mac, I wouldn’t dream …” Freddy began hopelessly. He quirked a cynical eyebrow at her.

  “You wouldn’t dream? That’s exactly what you’d do. I know you too well, kid. If there’s one thing I can count on, it’s that you’ll dream. I’ll teach you aerobatics. It’s the only way to make sure that the next time you pull something like you did today, you’ll know what the hell you’re doing.”

  “Mac?… Mac?”

  “Now, get the hell out of here. Go home.”

  As he watched Freddy drive away, McGuire thought that he had never come so close to hitting a female in his life. And when she’d cried so terribly, he’d never wanted to comfort anyone so much. Christ! That kid was more trouble than she was worth. But damn, those loops had looked good. And if he didn’t teach her aerobatics, someone else would.

  10

  EVE riffled through the pages of the morning newspaper as she relaxed in the sunny breakfast room. Paul had left for the Consulate; her two daughters were at school; the efficient staff in the kitchen was already busy with preparations for the luncheon she was giving today for a number of the ladies of the French community; yesterday she had arranged the roses from the garden, and placed them throughout the house, so that, for the moment, she could give herself up to the idle pursuit of the news of the world, or at least that view of the world that the Los Angeles paper considered important.

  It was May of 1936. France was paralyzed by strikes after the electoral victory of the Popular Front, whose members included a surprisingly large number of Socialists and Communists; Mussolini’s war against Ethiopia was over, and an Italian viceroy ruled over millions of miles of North Africa; Hitler’s Wehrmacht had occupied the formerly demilitarized zone of the Rhineland in defiance of the League of Nations, a move that was roundly condemned by Belgium, England, France and Italy, although nothing whatsoever was done to stop him. In Los Angeles, the front-page news was the marriage of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Lady Sylvia Ashley.

  With relief, Eve turned to the story of the wedding. Here was a woman who, according to rumor, was the daughter of a footman, a woman who had briefly been a “starlet,” whatever that might have meant, in a London theatrical revue, and then managed to marry the heir to the title and fortune of the Earl of Shaftsbury. Now, eight years later, divorced from Lord Ashley, she had just picked off one of the greatest movie stars in Hollywood.

  Eve bent in fascination over the newspaper photo of the civil wedding in Paris. Lady Ashley had supreme elegance, one couldn’t deny it. Her pale wool coat was trimmed with a huge capelike collar of dark sable; the corsage of four giant orchids she wore was pinned below an enormous diamond and pearl necklace; her fingernails were painted as dark a red as her smiling lips. Under thinly plucked eyebrows her eyes were long and almost Oriental. In spite of her classic features she couldn’t be called truly beautiful, and Eve saw a coldness in her face. Next to her, a deeply tanned Fairbanks beamed with the unmistakable joy of a man who has obtained his heart’s desire.

  The couple was triumphant. They had risen effortlessly above the scandal of Fairbanks’s divorce from Mary Pickford, cruised the world in his great yacht for a year before they married, and the wages of their behavior were adulation and envy. Eve wondered, as she studied the photograph of a woman so visibly wrapped in luxury and adoration, so coveted by men that they’d do anything to have her, just how many of the American housewives who would profess themselves shocked by this marriage would willingly trade places with her. Millions? Tens of millions?

  She threw the paper in the wastebasket. Times had changed, standards had changed, and she, who had been so severely judged, must make an effort not to become too judgmental herself.

  On the other hand, there were Delphine and Freddy, and if she need have no opinion on the Sylvia Ashleys of this world, she had a duty toward her daughters. Delphine had floated so easily through the years that had been, for Eve, full of repressed rebellion. Delphine was, she had to admit, something of a frivolous, self-indulgent child with the suppleness of a born coquette, but there wasn’t a single mean element in her personality. She was a virtuoso in dealing with the male sex, yet she didn’t seem to take an easy pleasure in making a man suffer because of her. She was an affectionate, mercurial girl; capricious, yes, but essentially good. Admittedly, Delphine didn’t seem to have any strong moral convictions, but at her age, in this particular city, did anyone?

  Eve missed Delphine, who had gone to live at her sorority house at UCLA. Paul had wanted her to live at home during college, but the campus was really too far away for daily trips back and forth. In any case, it seemed to Eve that her elder child would be much happier surrounded by girls of her own age. If she lived at home, she’d miss the chance to make really good friends, and, so they said, it was those college friends that you kept throughout life.

  She was deeply glad that Freddy was still in high school. When her younger daughter went to UCLA next fall, Freddy too might join a sorority and want to live there, but Eve hoped secretly that she wouldn’t. She hated the American system against which one couldn’t protest that sent children away almost automatically, but at least Freddy wouldn’t want to go to college anywhere too far from her precious Dry Springs airport.

  On the other hand, she worried that Freddy was missing so much of the glorious fun of being young that Delphine was having. She couldn’t think of a close girl friend that she had made during her school years—except, of course, that imaginary one in Beverly Hills. Her interests were just too different from those of her peers. She seemed so young to be driven by a passion for aviation, too young to be so single-minded. If only Freddy were a little more like Delphine, and Delphine more like Freddy.… You’re a silly woman, Eve told herself, and went into the kitchen to make sure that all was proceeding properly. Thank heaven, she thought, as she began to inspect the finger bowls, the hostess at a luncheon wasn’t required to wear a hat, unlike the guests. It was one less thing to worry about.

  Delphine put out her cigarette and looked around the bedroom of her best friend and sorority sister, Margie Hall. The room, expensively and newly redecorated entirely in pink and white, was a temple to unsullied maidenhood. It didn’t go with Margie’s short, chrome-yellow curls, her voluptuous young body, or her sassy green eyes, but as Margie said,
if it kept her mother out of her hair, she could endure the decor.

  Margie’s mother had just been divorced for the third time and married for the fourth. This was the third time that Margie’s room in her Bel Air home had been redecorated since she and Delphine had become friends six years ago. It was the former Mrs. Hall’s method of comforting her daughter for any emotional pain she might be feeling, and as far as Margie was concerned, it was certainly a more acceptable way to be treated than to be asked to sympathize. And perhaps the next divorce would bring a decorator more in tune with Margie’s tastes.

  Margie’s mother was in Europe, on her most recent honeymoon; her father, according to rumor, was in Mexico, but he hadn’t been heard from in years. The married couple who ran the house and asked no questions were, as usual, listening to the radio in their quarters over the garage. Delphine and Margie were settling down to one of their frequent “sleep-overs,” for which Eve had given approval to their sorority’s house mother.

  Eve could hardly disapprove of Margie merely because of her disrupted home life or her lively coloring. According to the nuns at Sacred Heart, whom Eve had questioned, Margie Hall was obedient, punctual, polite and a hard worker who got acceptable marks. High-spirited, yes, but considering the mother, it was a blessing that she wasn’t a child who was easily depressed. The hair? Well, it was natural, not dyed. Unfortunately noticeable, perhaps, but there was nothing that anyone could do about it.

  If Eve had been given a guided tour of Margie’s bower, she would have known that her uneasy instincts had been sound. Margie had ten times as much makeup as Delphine owned, stashed away in her fluffily draped dressing table. Her closets contained an astonishing number of elaborate and fashionable evening dresses, evening cloaks, and high-heeled shoes, all of them designed for a mature young woman, not a girl of eighteen. In a secret compartment of Margie’s pink and white desk, there was a large hoard of cash, the proceeds of the many times the two girls had gone gambling with their male escorts in the illegal joints that flourished all over Los Angeles, under a city administration that grew more corrupt every year.

  These two gorgeous creatures definitely brought them luck, a growing number of men about town used to tell each other. Margie and Delphine were highly decorative mascots, to whom their escorts slipped bills of large denominations with instructions to keep their winnings, and to come back for more if they lost. Delphine kept all the clothes she bought with her winnings in her friend’s closets.

  Bootlegging had ended with Repeal, and now that people could get a drink without risk, the gambling craze was bigger than ever. Anyone with the right connections could win or lose a great deal of money in dozens of places on the long strip reaching from the well-appointed clubs of Sunset Boulevard to the shacks at the beach and continuing right out to sea, where water taxis shuttled back and forth to the gambling ships Monte Carlo and Johanna Smith.

  In the clubs where Delphine and Margie were familiars, champagne and caviar were on the house, and everyone who entered had to be in evening dress. There were whispers that the Eastern mob was taking over West Coast gambling, which only added to the allure of the forbidden activity.

  Delphine had, of course, made arrangements to ensure her parents’ ignorance of her nightlife. It was impossible to have her dates pick her up at the sorority house. The sharp-eyed, suspicious house mother, Mrs. Robinson, would have been on the phone to her mother in an instant if she had seen Delphine going out with anyone but college boys, fumbling, often penniless kids of Delphine’s own age. These boys had quickly become far too young and too unsophisticated for her to bother about.

  The two girls were inseparable. They were both able to keep their grades at an acceptable level by helping each other through exams, even though they went out dancing and gambling three or four nights a week. Only near dawn did they end the evening with scrambled eggs at Sardi’s. Afterwards their dates deposited them back at Bel Air for a few hours’ sleep before classes began. Frequently they cut classes, since they both had the ability to memorize easily, and could make up the work they had missed in a few days of studying.

  On Saturdays, Delphine and Margie took their gambling money and made the rounds of the best department stores, gaily treating themselves to new clothes and lingerie, feeling superior, over a late lunch, toward the other girls in their sorority, whose idea of a good time was to go to a football game, and afterwards drink a cup of rum-and-fruit-juice punch in a fraternity house with a bunch of undergraduates.

  The two friends held each other’s heads when they’d had too much to drink; tested new hangover remedies together; never minded trading dates because one man was so much like another; gave each other advice on the newest hairdos and the latest slang; did each other’s toenails; compared kissing and petting techniques, and warned each other against men who tried to get them to “go too far,” for they were still “nice” girls and their virginity was important to them.

  Their favorite topic, the one they couldn’t seem to let alone, and the only part of their life that was less than ideal, was the unavoidable fact that they were merely extras to the central drama that took place nightly in the restaurants and nightclubs of Hollywood. They weren’t movie stars themselves. No matter how pretty or well dressed they were, no one stared at them and asked for their autographs. They circulated with familiarity in the world that the rest of the country only read about in the movie magazines, on which so many people were fixated, but it was one thing to be recognized by the headwaiter at the Coconut Grove and another thing to be mobbed by fans and photographers.

  “Try to look at it this way,” Margie offered. “If a picture of you did appear in the papers, your folks would lock you up on bread and water.”

  “If I had my picture in the papers it would be because I was famous,” Delphine argued, “and my parents couldn’t do a thing about it.”

  They were both silent in the face of this indisputable reasoning. They both knew actors, but none of them were more than bit-part players. The men who had the money to take them dancing and gambling were young bachelors who were businessmen during the day—the actors were only invited along because of the aspiring starlets they brought with them.

  “Cheer up, Delphine,” Margie advised, taking five hundred dollars out of their stash and separating it into two equal piles. “Movie stars have to get up much too early in the morning and they’re always falling in and out of love, which, you’ve got to admit, is a trap for anyone who wants a good time. Now, I don’t know about you but I’ve got nothing to wear tonight, and we’re wasting time sitting around feeling miserable because you aren’t Lupe Velez and I’m not Adrienne Ames, or is it the other way around?”

  “Your taste stinks, Margie. Myrna Loy for you, Garbo for me.”

  “Come on, hon, we have a big night ahead—after dinner we’re going out to the beach—there’s a new floating casino that’s just opened twelve miles off Santa Monica Bay, and everybody who’s anybody will be there. Delphine! Stop brooding … it’s shopping time!”

  Freddy was early for her lesson, but McGuire motioned her to stick around while he talked to his visitor. Freddy had met the man before. Swede Castelli was in charge of all stunt coordination at the relatively small I. W, Davidson studio out on Pico. Frequently he’d drive out to Dry Springs to consult Mac about the problems that presented themselves in making yet another World War flying film, for which the public had such an appetite.

  Terence McGuire had been a twenty-two-year-old war hero when the Great War ended in 1918. He’d come home from France believing firmly that the future of transportation lay in the air, and had discovered, after making a number of disappointing attempts to start a small airline, that no manufacturer was even building planes with the capacity to make long flights between major cities and carry a payload of passengers. If people wanted to travel, they used the railroad.

  Finally McGuire had faced reality and sunk every penny he had left into a Curtiss JN-4. He’d earned a bare living w
ith the sturdy little ship, working at fairgrounds, where the landing field might be a baseball diamond, a racetrack or even a cow pasture. After doing an exhibition of aerobatics, he’d taken up passengers for a spin, at five dollars a head, but the day came when people were only willing to pay a dollar a ride.

  The novelty had worn off aviation barely twenty years after the Wright Brothers had made the first powered flight. The army and the navy weren’t interested in maintaining their air arms, and for a man who could not imagine working at anything other than flying, the only solution was to go to Hollywood and become a professional stunt pilot for the movies.

  For years he’d worked out of the Fox Studios, where fifteen movie companies made their headquarters. There, his skill, his nerve and his youth had been freely and gaily expended in the company of men like himself, men who were willing to work for pay that ranged from a hundred dollars to fly upside-down only inches above the ground to one thousand five hundred dollars to blow up a plane in the air and bail out of it. No stuntman ever made a dime unless his life was at risk, and they earned every cent they made with their bodies. McGuire had flown with Dick Grace and Charles Stoffer, with Frank Backer, Lonnie Hay, Clement Phillips, Frank Clark and Frank Tomick; with Dick Curwood and Duke Green, with Maurice Murphy and Leo Nomes and Ross Cook, and, by 1930, among the dozens of friends he’d made, only a few of them were still alive. Not one among them had died a natural death. They had lived gaily, valiantly, from day to day and died, almost as if by choice, in their youth.

  It was then, with the opening of a new decade, when he realized how many of his bantering, uncomplaining friends had lost their wagers with death, that Terence McGuire had taken the money he’d saved and opened a flying school.

  It was strictly a matter of percentages; all of the dead men had been superb pilots, and he knew that his turn had to come up sooner or later. He’d walked away from over three dozen carefully engineered crashes, but he’d had his share of broken bones.