by Jane Allen
Then some wag publishes a little item to this effect: “What actor’s surprise success has gone to his head causing him to drop what prominent producer’s secretary like a hot potato? Incidentally, if rumors mean anything, she was instrumental in helping him get there.”
It is one thing, I discover, to luxuriate in private over a thwarted love and another to have it broadcast to the public. Everyone in the studio, according to their individual bent, either treats me to a nauseous solicitude or comes over to me with some very snide cracks. Prominently among the latter is this blonde, Maxine Stoddard, who is very annoyed because I have the job she wants. She openly crows at my defeat.
Our office boy consoles me with his own peculiar philosophy. He says outright that I am much too good for an actor and I ought to be relieved it has turned out this way. Amanda decides that glamour is maybe all right for a date but a plumber’s assistant lasts forever. Only Jim flatly refuses to regard me as an object of pity or mirth.
Perhaps it is well for me that my private life becomes public, for then I have to face the issue squarely. I give some earnest cogitation to this male-female problem and arrive at the conclusion that I am not the type for protracted tragedy. The role just won’t fit. Some people might accuse me of being emotionally shallow and lacking in the profounder feelings, but I have a peculiar intuition that most gals who cry their havoc to the skies are merely enjoying the spotlight. What do you think?
Despite my amorous vicissitudes, production goes on. We rush the revised edition of our picture before the camera. Fortunately for S. B., our director, Monk Faye, has cannily foreseen some such contingency and filmed a flock of close-ups of Bruce about which the boss knew nothing. So it is a simple matter in some major scenes to substitute a close-up of Bruce for a close-up of Sarya, and while Sarya is mouthing a few lines, we merely hear her voice, while we are really engrossed in looking at Bruce. That, my dear, is how stars are made.
For the rest, our new writers, unhampered by Mr. Skinner’s ideas of an Academy winner, turn out a really literate job. So cunningly is the script evolved that we do not need Sarya for retakes and much to S. B.’s relief, she can luxuriate in splendid grandeur at Arrowhead happy in the thought that her brilliant future is being coddled by Sidney.
The world premiere is set for the Cathay Circle. This means we think our picture is good enough for road-show prices. The masses will have to stew impatiently for a look at it until we have exhausted the pockets of the privileged classes.
Although the handling of a premiere belongs to the Publicity Department, all hands are on deck to make it the biggest, the gaudiest, the most colossal affair ever. This involves a high-pressure campaign calculated to whet the appetites of the paying public into a screaming frenzy to witness the spectacle. The catch in this is that it is practically impossible for the layman to purchase a ducat to the premiere as the motion picture fraternity has the monopoly for the night.
However, the bosses of the picture industry are not without charity, for we erect a temporary row of grandstands, built to accommodate hundreds of sightseers. Thus for the modest sum of fifty cents you may witness the parade of the Hollywood great and near-great as they troop into the theater. Of course you don’t get to see the picture but what do you expect for four bits? The whole pageant is really an excuse to let the film people indulge in their favorite pastime of dressing up and showing off.
On account of this is a Sidney Brand production, we are assured of a wholesale turnout because Sidney is a big man in the industry and it pays to indulge him and then, on the other hand, there is a chance he may be slipping and you might get in the first snicker.
Paring down the royal list to see who will and must be invited to Sidney’s own levee following the premiere, is also something of a chore. This festivity, which is to take place in a private room of the Trocadero, is sort of like a wedding where only picked members of the family attend. Jim and I, alone out of the office staff, are included in this exclusive list, but we do not fool ourselves that it is because we rate, but simply because it is part of our jobs—Jim to referee the post mortem publicity value; me to be on hand in case the boss needs me.
However, I am never one to quarrel with motives for I am frankly pleased at the chance of a binge myself. Eric, the designer, and I go into a huddle about the clothes problem and he chooses for me from Wardrobe a luscious gown in striped slipper satin together with a modest little finger-tip cape of mink, so I will do the studio proud.
I will have to confess at this point a most gratifying sensation that when I next encounter Mr. Anders, I will be dressed to the teeth. I know this is small of me and utterly female but it is very consoling for there is nothing like the glitter of glad rags when a girl has been jilted.
The eve of the big day I find myself alone at the office to attend to last-minute detail. Selma is giving a dinner party and for this once Sidney attends on time. Bud and Amanda, who have snagged a pair of tickets, rush home early in order to groom themselves for what Amanda terms a “formal” affair.
I have a tray sent up from the commissary and bathe and dress in S. B.’s private bathroom. Eric has been foresighted enough to include lace panties, satin sandals and even a pair of gossamer hose. I feel a little like Cinderella for all my trappings have the enchantment of unfamiliarity. With one last satisfied glance into the mirror I trip out into my office and there find a florist’s box. Nestling in the tissue is one orchid of speckled yellow on velvety brown.
All my life I have wanted to be a girl who gets orchids so you can imagine my feelings. The card in the box reads:
“It reminds me of you, especially the freckles, Jim.”
I wave my magic wand and presto, there is a Packard limousine awaiting me at the office door. This, too, belongs to the studio but is mine for the night. If I think I am going to make the grand entrance in all my finery, I am very much mistaken. The chauffeur is stalled at Wilshire Boulevard and McCarthy Drive by a host of cars, sirens, and pressing mobs making further passage impossible. I decide that it will be simpler if I take to my feet.
I alight to face a ferocious jungle cannibal, holding aloft a spear, his painted face thrust forward threateningly. I start back nervously; then realize that this is merely a living model, posed in a shell lighted from within. As I traverse the drive I pass a line of such shells, all encasing living models who represent characters from Charleston to the coast of Africa and back again.
My progress becomes increasingly difficult as I approach the theater, the mobs surging thickly in and around, cutting up a frightful din and hubbub, despite the frantic police guards. Glaring arc lights flood the circle and from the tower of the Moorish cinema temple a revolving beam plays ceaselessly on the heavens.
Several costumed flunkeys are unrolling a rose-colored carpet covering the theater walk and about a block of the sidewalk. Banked on either side of the theater walk are great baskets of flowers.
As I make the carpet, I cause a minor flurry.
“Who is she?”
“Aw, she’s nobody.”
“She’s pretty, though,” I hear one charitable soul allow.
I am seized with a nervous panic. The carpet stretches on interminably, it seems. Boom! A flashlight bursts in my face. But it isn’t for me. It is for royalty walking abreast of me. As I travel on, flashlights exploding to the right, flashlights exploding to the left, my composure is utterly shattered.
Then I spy a familiar face near the box-office and in my relief quicken my steps. It is Jim standing guard over the hullabaloo, looking extremely distinguished in his dinner jacket. As his face breaks into a welcoming grin, I feel as though I have come home. He reaches for my hand and draws me beside him whispering, “You’re a sight for sore eyes, Maggie.”
I feel a stinging sensation on my eyelids as though I am going to cry. Women are such nitwits. We choose the m
ost irrational moments to wax emotional. Me, I’m no different from the rest.
A roar of applause breaks forth. A long expensive automobile has just disgorged Hollywood’s most publicized happily married couple.
Flash! And then I see Myrtle all done up in chiffon and white fox furs preening very happily before a flock of cameras. Beside her stands Tom Dillon grinning self-consciously.
“Hi!” she yells. “Isn’t it all too wonderful? You look grand. Where did you get the duds? Isn’t Tom a scream in tails? Whoo! what’s that?”
It is another wild outburst caused by the advent of Sarya. She is with three male escorts and between them shows off to her tropical best in silver lamé with sable bands.
“Hello, everybody,” she coos over the microphone. “It is all so wonderful but then I think everything in America is wonderful….”
Myrtle clucks sympathetically.
“It’s too bad she won’t be here long. Europe won’t look good after this. Well, see you in the movies, Madge. ’Bye, Jim.”
By now there is a stream of long, glistening cars, all spewing their quota of highly perfumed stars and stiff-bosomed escorts. Loud and furious waxes the tumult. A swanky, low job in baby-blue paint rolls up. Out steps Bud, in a tuxedo of eccentric cut, assisting Amanda to the sidewalk. Up the aisle they swagger. I begin to think that perhaps all this uproar is justified if only to provide this proud, blissful moment for Bud and Amanda. When they greet me, Bud whispers in an aside that a guy who didn’t pay up on a racing debt let him have the swell chariot.
Randolph Scott, Carole Lombard, Adolph Zukor, Virginia Bruce, Mary Brian, Jean Arthur…actors, producers, directors by the gross pour down the aisle to the ever deafening chorus of cheers and yells. Then my boss elects to appear, Selma in her chinchilla wrap, and a party of people with them.
Jim steps out of line to do his duty and cajoles S. B. over to the mike.
“Hello, folks,” Sidney greets them coyly. “I wish you were all here so that we could together be thrilled by what I know is a magnificent picture. However, it isn’t me you want to hear from so I’ll introduce Bruce Anders, star of That Gentleman from the South, who is the real hero of this occasion.”
It is only then that I notice Bruce lurking beside Sidney. The blonde clinging to his arm and looking tenderly at him is, dear, no other than my friend, the fishwife, whom I met at my debut in the Cocoanut Grove! Hollywood is a small place.
I know you are wanting to get a load of how I think and feel at this point. Well, did you ever have a bad dream and wake up to laugh at your foolish fancies? That’s about the sum and total of it for Mr. Anders looks vaguely like someone I once knew. The familiarity is, however, fleeting.
Only Jim, as he steps back beside me, is real…and now everything is beautifully, blindingly clear to me. I want to blurt out to him, “Look here, a very queer thing has just happened. It’s really quite wonderful. I adore the way your hair stands up on end, the way your eyes crinkle when you smile. I even like that jackdaw strut of yours. In fact, I like every foolish thing about you. In other words, toots, I love you.”
And he would say, “Madame, you have absolutely no sense of the fitness of things. What do you expect me to do about it now?”
“That’s what is so swell about it,” I would respond. “You don’t have to do a single blessed thing except hold my hand and look at me the way you do and make me realize that you are here and I’m beside you and all is very right with the world.”
Flash! I am roused out of my reverie. The crowds are applauding Bruce as he leaves the microphone. He is bowing gracefully. S. B. motions us to join them. He wants Jim and me to go ahead to the Trocadero after the premiere to see that everything is in order.
“Hello, Palmer. Hello, Madge,” says Bruce. “This is all very exciting, isn’t it?”
I wish him every success.
“You know, you should really have been up at the mike with me.” He laughs nervously. “Come to think of it, I really owe this all to you, Madge.”
“What do you mean you owe it to her?” says my snoopy boss.
Jim interrupts quickly, “It’s time to go in, S. B.”
Inside the theater the second act of the comedy is in full swing. The befurred and bejeweled ladies are still strutting self-consciously for Hymie Fink is doubtless lurking somewhere. Mr. Fink is a curious figure in the film capital. He pops up at all functions to take candid camera shots. It wouldn’t do to let down a minute while he is around. In fact, we don’t let down until the lights are doused.
That Gentleman from the South is now cinema history so let it suffice that the applause is more spirited than ever, that a new star skyrockets in the Hollywood heavens, and that once more Sidney Brand proves incontrovertibly that his touch is infallible.
When the last finis is written upon the screen, Sidney and Bruce are mobbed by well-wishers while Jim and I round up the studio Packard.
“Did I tell you,” remarks Jim as he helps me into the car, “that you are probably the most ravishing creature I’ve ever seen?”
“Thanks,” I say, “but it is Eric who rates the compliment.”
“No, Maggie,” he disagrees. “There’s an extra special shiny look about you tonight.”
“All the better to dazzle you with,” I mumble a bit shakily.
“Maggie!”
Jim’s hand tightens like a vise on my arm.
I look squarely up at him. My face must be a dead give-away for immediately I am engulfed in the most undignified but entirely satisfying embrace.
It is some minutes before I gain my breath to tell Jim of how it all happened to me and want to know how he knew about himself. He confesses it was Christmas night when he blundered like such an idiot and was very tight but wanted desperately to let me know how he felt, and I thought he was clowning and what hell it was for him when he thought I cared for Bruce, and how we will have a house in the hills and I will learn to cook and everything will be swell.
By then we are at the Trocadero and it is two very disheveled people who alight from the car. We don’t give a damn what people think and walk in hand in hand like the babes in the wood.
Mr. Brand’s party is in a room off the bar. We do not have any time for ourselves for the hungry guests are already beginning to pile in, and in lieu of the hosts, we greet them and make them feel at home, at the same time interchanging unashamedly glad little looks with each other and isn’t it curious how at a sacred time like this your tummy feels most affected for mine is lurching about crazily as though it were a separate entity.
There are no trumpets to announce the arrival of the really important people, but Hymie Fink heaves into sight so they can’t be far behind, which proves to be true for Sidney, Selma, Bruce, the Blonde and their entourage make their triumphant entrance.
Jim seizes this opportunity to grab me by the hand and duck out from the mob and upstairs to where the music is playing. It is with a shock that I realize as long as I have known Jim, I haven’t danced with him. I really couldn’t tell you even now whether he’s good or not although at one time those things were vastly important to me. All I know is that the music is wonderful; that we manage to keep in step; that I am the proudest, happiest woman in that room or anywhere else.
“You smell awful good,” I purr happily, rubbing my nose against his coat lapel.
“That’s what they all tell me,” he boasts. “It isn’t my looks—it isn’t my charm. It’s always that heavenly smell of me that does them in.”
“I wish,” I say, “you would cease using the plural. It takes all the starch out of me.”
“So you’re going to be like that, eh? Well, we might as well take a firm stand now. I expect three nights out every week….”
“Only three,” I break in. “That’s mighty handsome of you, pardner.
”
“And don’t interrupt me. I haven’t finished. I’m spending those nights out with—my best girl.”
His arm tightens around me.
“Meaning me,” I say blissfully.
“What do you think?”
The dance over we go into the bar downstairs, Jim insisting we toast the occasion with a champagne cocktail. He’d rather not use Sidney’s.
We have clicked glasses and taken our first sip when one of the waiters from the Brand party approaches me and informs me that S. B. wants to see me.
It is with high good humor for once that I approach my boss. I am thinking it would be a nice gesture to make to let him know about our approaching nuptials. I have to tell someone or bust and it might as well be S. B., so I do not notice for the moment that his face looks like a thundercloud.
“Oh, Mr. Brand,” I burst out. “We—Jim and I—are going to be married.”
The boss takes this big. He looks at me, at Jim, then back again to me.
“I don’t believe it,” he says but there is no humor in his voice. Even in my condition I am aware he is being deliberately insulting. Instinctively I reach for Jim’s hand.
“I’ll admit it’s difficult to believe,” says Jim with a forced lightness, “but it’s true.”
“Things must be getting tough for you, Jim, if you have to really marry a girl.”
I feel Jim stiffen.
“You wanted to see me about something, Mr. Brand?” I ask.
“I certainly do. When people work for me I expect them to give me their loyalty—their complete loyalty.”
“What has that got to do with me?” I ask perplexed.
“Just this. I don’t hire people to knife me in the back….”
“Why don’t you come to the point, Brand?” raps out Jim. “What’s on your mind?”
“Who tipped off Anders that I wanted to get rid of him?”
“So what?” says Jim bristling. “You wouldn’t have been celebrating here tonight if she hadn’t.”