Twisted Boulevard Read online

  “An editorial?”

  “With a big, brash headline.”

  “For example?”

  She raised her arms, Aimee-Semple-McPherson style. “I’M NO COMMUNIST.” She started pacing Bogie’s trailer. “Explain your position, but no complaints, no apologies, no excuses. You’re about as pro-Commie as J. Edgar Hoover, so say that. But don’t politicize it by talking Democrats versus Republicans; talk instead how this is about American-style democracy. You were exercising your constitutional right to voice your opinion. Okay, so in hindsight, you didn’t go about it in the wisest way.”

  “I thought you said no apologies.”

  “America loves a humble hero.”

  A bell rang out. Bogie stood up and straightened his shirt. “Will you write it for me?”

  An assistant director rapped on the door. “Ready for you in five, Mister Bogart.”

  “It has to sound like you.” The last thing you need is for word to leak out that I ghostwrote your public apology. He shot her a hangdog look. “I can’t write your words for you, but I can help shape them. How about you work up a draft and send it to me?”

  “I’d hug you, but I’d get makeup all over your blouse.”

  “I’ll take my hug later.” She threw open the door. “For now, go be Bogie.”

  Kathryn followed him to the edge of the set, where John Huston was taking Eddie Robinson through the scene. Betty sidled up to her, murmuring, “You did good.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “I know every walk in his book.” She nudged Kathryn’s shoulder with her own. “Whatever you said, thank you.”

  “You might want to hold off thanking me till we see what happens.”

  “There’s something else.”

  Kathryn’s heart gave a little start. “About Leilah O’Roarke?”

  “No. Why? What have you heard?”

  “Nothing that you guys probably haven’t already.”

  “It’s about Max Factor. I was at a meeting there last week to sign a deal shilling summer lipsticks.”

  “Congrats.”

  “Thanks. So when I was there, I overheard the execs talking about how Max Factor is going to start selling Pan-Stik to the public. It’s their first big new product in a while, so they’ve got a lot riding on it. They want to launch it by sponsoring a radio show.”

  “But we already have a sponsor.” For the past few years, Kathryn had been the Hollywood gossip columnist on Kraft Music Hall.

  John Huston turned to them and raised his hand. “Miss Bacall?”

  “They want to sponsor a brand-new show. And for that, they’ll need a host . . . or hostess.”

  As Bacall headed onto the set and took her position between Bogie and Claire Trevor, Kathryn backed toward the perimeter.

  Kraft Music Hall had burned through a succession of MCs since the war ended: Edward Everett Horton, Eddie Foy, Frank Morgan, and, more recently, Al Jolson. Kathryn took pride in being the show’s sole constant, but how much more life did it have left?

  The assistant director yelled, “Quiet, please. This is a take.” One by one, the lights came on until the set was blinding.

  The Kathryn Massey Show, sponsored by Max Factor.

  She liked the way it sounded . . . but the last time she grabbed for the brass ring, she was recruited by the FBI.

  “And . . . action.”

  The camera closed in on Bogie sitting against a banister with Bacall slumped over a step next to him. The camera closed in on her head as Bogie reached over and gently patted her hair, reassuring her that he was still there. Kathryn melted into the shadows until she felt the wall at her back.

  Who’ll be there for me if things go wrong?

  CHAPTER 3

  The perfume dealer standing in front of Gwendolyn smelled of carbolic acid, like he’d spent the last hour scrubbing floors at LA County Hospital. His face was the color of raw donuts and she couldn’t bear to look at it any longer. She shifted her gaze to the bottles he’d lined up along her counter.

  They were eye-catching: some red glass, some green. One had the silhouette of a swan etched into the front, and another featured a sepia shot of the Eiffel Tower with the sun setting behind it. The trouble was, out of ten perfumes, Gwendolyn only liked two, and they came in the plainest bottles.

  “Mister Logan, I don’t—”

  “I haven’t yet mentioned the best part!”

  Back in her Bullocks days, all she’d had to do was sell perfume to the wives and mistresses of Hollywood’s studio execs. She’d never given a thought to the patronizing sales tactics the buyers endured at the hands of half-wits like this lummox.

  “Our sales incentive guarantees you one free bottle of perfume for every hundred you sell. That’s pure profit!”

  It’s just li’l ol’ me here, buster. How many do you expect me to move?

  In the two months since Gwendolyn had opened her store, she’d done fairly well with a steady stream of customers. They were mainly lookie-loos checking out the new girl on the block, but that was okay. She wanted women to think of Chez Gwendolyn as a place to seek out unusual and distinctive outfits not carried by the larger stores. But she couldn’t imagine selling a hundred bottles in a whole year, and she was about to tell him as much when the little silver bell above her front door jingled.

  She was surprised—shocked, even—to see an older gent she hadn’t encountered for quite some time.

  Gwendolyn had spent much of the war dating Lincoln Tattler, the charming but reluctant scion of an upscale haberdasher, Tattler’s Tuxedos. The war years had been rough on both father and son. By the time the Allies dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, Linc had absconded to Mexico and his father had been forced into bankruptcy.

  Horton Tattler’s hair had turned white-gray, his bristling handlebar moustache was gone altogether, and his clothes hung from him as though he’d borrowed them from someone fifty pounds heavier. He carried a cardboard box in his hands. It was alarming to see him so careworn.

  “This is a surprise! And such a delight!”

  “Good afternoon, Logan,” Horton said, his voice thick with irritation.

  “You know each other?”

  “Hello, Tattler. You’re looking . . . ” Logan cast a supercilious eye over Horton’s mismatched suit and didn’t bother to finish his sentence.

  Horton turned to Gwendolyn. “Is he trying to force his wares on you?” She rolled her eyes. “Did he mention they’re so cheaply made that they evaporate within an hour?” He deposited his box at one end of Gwendolyn’s counter. “Let me guess: you only like the one in the red bottle and the one with the zebra stripes.”

  “How did you know?” Gwendolyn asked.

  “They’re the only two worth a good goddamn. He’s forcing you to buy all ten just to get the two good ones because Percival Perfumes has a huge warehouse of this junk out in San Bernardino they’ve been trying to unload since before Roosevelt was elected. Still at it, I see.”

  “I could say the same of you,” Logan started returning the sample bottles to his presentation case “but we all know how well you’ve been faring.” He closed the case with a snap and sauntered out the door without another word.

  As soon as the door jingled shut, Gwendolyn hugged Horton again. “You’re a lifesaver!”

  Horton watched the stink peddler pull into the lunchtime traffic. “The last time I saw that cretin, I threw him out by the seat of his pants.” He cast around the store. “I suspected you had terrifically good taste, and this proves it. Lovely. Just lovely.”

  Gwendolyn wasn’t sure why the approval of this funny little man mattered to her so much, but she misted over at his praise.

  The smile fell from Horton’s lined face. “I’ve come to share some unhappy news, my dear.”

  She stiffened. “Linc?”

  “Yes. He . . . he passed away last month.”

  Gwendolyn pressed her hand on the glass counter and looked hard at the calendar on the wall for a long moment before s
he could speak. She wanted to remember the date on the slip of tear-away paper at the bottom: April 24, 1948. She cleared the sob from her throat. “What happened?”

  “He took a trip down the Amazon. Caught malaria.” Horton reached out to touch her forearm. “Took him down hard and fast.”

  “He was so happy, so relaxed the last time I saw him.”

  “And that’s the way you should remember him.” Horton tapped the cardboard box. “His effects arrived from Mazatlán the other day. This box is for you.”

  Linc had written her name across the top in blue grease pencil. Through a fog of disbelief, she ran her finger along the adhesive tape.

  “This was in a larger box he’d marked In the event of my death,” Horton said. “He must have known the dangers of that part of the world, although why he’d want to put his life at risk is beyond me.”

  “Your son wasn’t afraid of life.”

  Horton let out a quiet moan. “Mine hasn’t turned out remotely like I expected. I’d hoped Linc’s might, but that hasn’t proved to be the case, either.” He took her hand and squeezed it. “Your store is wonderful, and I hope your life is, too, my dear.”

  After he left, the salon felt still as a crypt. She turned on the radio, but Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy” came on, mournfully bleak. She shut it off and reached for a box cutter.

  On the top of the pile inside the box was a menu from the Tick Tock Tea Room on Cahuenga Avenue; the words GWENDOLYN WAS HERE were stamped on it in red.

  When Gwendolyn moved to Hollywood, she’d conceived a stealthy campaign to get Hollywood talking about her. She had a custom stamp made, and carried it around marking menus, coasters, and cocktail napkins in every venue she visited. It was an outrageous stunt, but new girls in town needed to get noticed.

  Things didn’t work out the way she’d hoped, but when she told Linc about it years later, he laughed so hard he nearly ran his car off the road into a Richfield gas station. As he wiped the tears from his eyes, he declared he was on a mission to find one of her GWENDOLYN WAS HERE mementos. He never mentioned it again, and she’d assumed he abandoned the search, but it seemed he’d never given up on her.

  She couldn’t bear to pick it up. She couldn’t even bear to look at it. She slapped the top down and picked up the box. It was heavier than she’d expected. Grabbing the keys from her drawer, she ran to the front door and pressed the CLOSED sign to the glass, and only just made it to the back room before the tears burst from her.

  CHAPTER 4

  Marcus Adler placed three maps on his dining table. The largest one showed Britain and all of Europe; another stretched from Greece to India; the last showed the Simplon-Orient-Express railway from Paris to Istanbul. He laid them out side by side, stood back, then shuffled them around until it looked as though he’d casually tossed them there.

  Marcus had a plan, for which he needed a campaign, for which he needed music and vodka.

  He’d found an album called Twenty Most Popular Russian Gypsy Tunes at Wallichs Music City on Vine Street. Seconds later, an accordion-and-guitar duet called “Korobushka” filled the villa.

  Marcus was more of a bourbon guy, but this situation called for Russian vodka. He pulled a bottle from the freezer and set it on the counter next to a pair of violet-blue shot glasses he’d pinched from Café Gala on the Sunset Strip near Gwendolyn’s store.

  Now all he had to do was wait.

  Seven months had passed since his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee led to his departure from MGM. He’d expected to feel bitter over the way the studio system treated him, but he didn’t.

  Over his twenty years at the studio, he’d watched stars lavish obscene paychecks on sprawling homes, fancy cars, expensive dinners, furs, jewelry, and servants, assuming the tide would keep coming in. Marcus promised himself he’d never make that mistake. As head of the writing department, he could have afforded a Beverly Hills mortgage and a Duesenberg in the garage, but he stayed at the Garden of Allah and socked his money away for that inevitable rainy day.

  And now, if he woke shockingly hungover, he simply stayed in bed until he wasn’t. He had time to scour the newspapers from cover to cover, catch up on his reading, drive down Sunset and swim in the Pacific, and sample every new restaurant and bar.

  Marcus ogled the bottle of vodka with the unpronounceable name and wondered if he should take a nip to calm his nerves. He’d rehearsed his speech while shaving that morning, then again over his fried eggs, a few more times as he swam his fifty laps in the pool, and twice more as he staged his living room like a movie set.

  His clock showed nearly six thirty; Oliver would be home soon. Marcus shifted the bottle and shot glasses to the table and set them beside the maps. He added a brass ashtray but it made the table look cluttered, so he took it off again just as Oliver turned the key in the door.

  “Why are you playing a gypsy death march?” Oliver asked.

  Marcus slid the ashtray back onto the table. Suddenly the music struck him as shrill and grating. He swapped the death march for Jo Stafford. She was sixteen bars into “In the Still of the Night” when Oliver emerged from the bedroom.

  “You’ve got your guilty face on.”

  Marcus pushed his glasses back up his nose. “This isn’t my guilty face.”

  “What is it, then? Because it sure is something.” Oliver’s eyes drifted to the vodka and shot glasses. “Are we celebrating? Did you get a job?”

  Marcus opened the vodka and filled the glasses. “I have a proposition.” He handed Oliver a drink.

  Oliver’s frown melted into a hesitant smile. “Even though we’re technically no longer mortal enemies, I can’t move in with you.”

  From the moment they met, they’d been stuck on opposite sides of Hollywood’s philosophical trenches. It was Marcus’ job to produce a screenplay free of any dialogue, action, or character motivation deemed less than wholesome. It was Oliver’s to enforce the stiff-necked commandments of the Breen Office. Studio writers and Breen Office censors who got personal risked excommunication—except at the Garden of Allah, where no one pointed fingers.

  Marcus refilled their glasses. “I’ve been thinking about next month.”

  “Any particular date?”

  “June thirteenth, as a matter of fact.” Marcus downed his second shot. It was smoother than he expected. He felt it warm his stomach and fill his chest with nerve. “It’s going to be five years.”

  Oliver considered the table display. “Anniversaries are worth celebrating.”

  Marcus picked up the map of Western Europe. “This is going to sound a bit crazy, but promise you’ll listen all the way through.”

  “I’m agog with curiosity.”

  “Okay . . .” The word came out breathless. “Remember when I was in front of the HUAC, and I learned that my father’s family came from a place called Adler?”

  Oliver looked up with the skeptical eye Marcus feared most. Don’t let him interrupt until you’ve spelled it all out. He unfurled the second map.

  “Adler is on the eastern end of the Black Sea. That’s only a day’s drive from Yalta, where Nazimova was born.” He pointed to a spot just north of the Georgia border. “Right there. I’ve researched everything.”

  “You have, huh?”

  “We could take the train to New York, the Britannic to Paris. After a few days there—or a week, if you like—we can board the Orient Express.” He unfolded the brochure and ran his finger down the Simplon-Orient-Express line. “It’ll take us through Milan, Venice, Belgrade, Sofia, and finally Istanbul.”

  “Turkey?!”

  Just keep going. “From Istanbul, we’d take a train to Ankara and farther west to Tbilisi. That’s in Georgia. And from there we can hire a driver to take us to this place, on the coast.” He drew a line with his finger to a dot labeled Gagra. “Adler is only twenty-five miles away, and we’ll have a car and driver, so he can take us there—”

  “To Adler?”

  �
�Uh-huh.”

  “But honey, Adler is in Russia.”

  “Barely inside the border. We’ll go for the day. That’s probably all we—”

  “Jesus Christ! Are you even listening to yourself?” Marcus opened his mouth but Oliver cut him off. “You’re talking about waltzing into Russia like it’s Tijuana.” Oliver backed away from the table. “Russia is now the boogieman. They’re the enemy. We’re at war with them. It might be a cold war, but it’s still war. You heard Truman’s pledge to Congress about containing the Soviet threat to Greece and Turkey. And now you want us to go there? Have you gone soft in the head?”

  Marcus saw now that he should have started by explaining how learning of his Russian heritage had affected him. Not at first, in the glare of the HUAC hearings and the subsequent showdown with his father. But the past six months had given him time to think about who he was, what he wanted, where he was going, and where he came from. Was his name even Adler? The immigration officer at Ellis Island probably saw some long Russian name, like the one on the vodka bottle, and said, “From now on, your name is ‘Adler.’”

  “I feel a hankering.” He knew how woeful he sounded. “More like a pull—a strong pull toward—”

  “Toward what? Career suicide? Because that’s what’ll happen if anyone finds out you’ve been there.”

  “What does it matter anymore? In front of the HUAC and the entire press corps, I was accused of being a Commie largely because I posed for a photograph with Charlie Chaplin and went to a cocktail party on a Soviet battleship.”

  Oliver moved closer. Not near enough to touch, but it wouldn’t take a lot to close the gap.

  “You’re not a member of the Hollywood Ten or even the Unfriendly Nineteen,” Oliver pointed out. “You walking out on the HUAC was hot news for a day or two, but then Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner got up and said what they said, and everybody forgot about you. That’s a good thing,” he added softly. “You survived, so why risk it?”

  Marcus refused to let his dream wither on the vine. He picked up the map of Eastern Europe. “Nobody will know. I spoke to someone whose family lives in Sochi. That’s the next town along the coast from Adler. He said half the time the border guards don’t even turn up for work, and when they do they’re too busy swilling homemade hooch to check for ID. Adler’s just a couple of miles inside the Georgian border. We could even walk there if the driver doesn’t want to take us all the way.”