Citizen Hollywood (Hollywood's Garden of Allah novels Book 3) Read online

  “That’s not what I asked.” Hoppy watched Hugo stop for a chat with Jimmy Durante’s stand-in. “I was around when his father was a big cheese. Meanest old bastard you ever met. Hell of a director, great instincts, but Jesus! An ego the size of the Grand Canyon. Double-cross you soon as look at you.”

  “I don’t think Hugo’s quite as bad as—”

  “And I don’t think apples ever fall far from the tree.” Hoppy kept his eye on Hugo. “We need to yank something out of our asses big enough to knock Taggert on his. They’re pulling down the apartment building next to my place at the moment and the goddamn noise is enough to wake King Tut from the dead, so if your place is free, count me in. I’m all for bouncing ideas off each other but I don’t want Junior around when I do.”

  * * *

  Marcus lived in one of the thirty two-story duplex villas scattered around the Garden of Allah. The villas themselves were spacious, but had been hastily constructed so the walls tended to be regrettably thin. Marcus’ new upstairs neighbor, a taciturn Romanian cellist with the Universal Studios orchestra, started to play “Orpheus in the Underworld” on his gramophone just as three purposeful knocks rat-a-tatted Marcus’ door.

  Marcus pulled the door open to find Hoppy on the landing with a picnic basket in one hand and a black leather briefcase in the other. Hoppy raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Offenbach, huh?”

  Marcus shrugged. The neighbor only played this stuff on Saturday afternoons, and only when he was sure his fellow Garden of Allah’ers had woken from their Friday night overindulgences.

  Marcus pointed to the picnic basket. “What’s all this?”

  “Brain food.” Hoppy handed it over and looked around at the uncluttered living room. He nodded approvingly. “Nice light you got in here.”

  Marcus had been in this villa for less than a month, and had been lucky enough to nab one that overlooked the pool and caught the afternoon sun. It filled with warm and gentle early-summer light, a relief after the dark, cramped room he’d had up in the Garden’s main building. Writing Strange Cargo had earned him a sizeable jump in pay, but he’d waited to move until he turned in the screenplay and was sure it wasn’t going to be thrown back in his face. A fresh coat of light caramel paint on the walls had been his first priority. The smell of it still lingered in the air.

  Marcus took Hoppy’s basket and opened the flaps to find apricot Danishes, half a dozen cinnamon donuts, roast beef sandwiches, chocolates, root beer and Orange Crush, and two bottles of red wine. “All this is for just the two of us?”

  “You got rid of Junior, didn’t you?”

  Marcus didn’t want to believe Hugo would steal their ideas, but this might cement him to the A-list and he didn’t want to take any chances. Coming up with an original idea was no guarantee he’d get to write it. Nor was it a guarantee he’d get the screen credit for it. Until he got his name on a picture, nobody back home would know he’d landed on his feet. It was time to play No More Mr. Nice Guy.

  He smiled at Hoppy. “It’s not hard to fake the flu over Western Union.”

  Hoppy pulled large sheets of white paper and a fistful of sharpened pencils out of his briefcase. “I’ve already got my idea,” he said. “Typed it up this morning and dropped it off at work on the way over here. Taggert’s got a locked box on his desk marked ‘IDEAS FOR MONDAY,’ so I guess it’s no bluff.”

  Marcus asked, “You trust me enough to tell me your idea?”

  Hoppy didn’t hesitate. “Remember I told you yesterday that tearing down the apartment building next door is making enough noise to wake King Tut?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Turns out, the guy who found Tut’s tomb had funding for only one more expedition when he hit the jackpot. His sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, had a daughter, a.k.a. the love interest. Throw in a rival team of archeologists, an enormous prize for the first person to find the tomb, an ancient curse, and hey presto! You’ve got yourself a movie.”

  They cleared Marcus’ dining table and laid down a sheet of blank paper. “Witness, if you please, the Hopper Technique in action,” Hoppy said. “Taggert wants a costume drama, right? Different costume, different era.”

  Each of them grabbed an apricot Danish with one hand and a pencil with the other and embarked on a whirlwind tour through history: the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, Age of Enlightenment, French Revolution, American Revolution, Russian Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, Rome, Greece, Ancient Egypt, Victorian England.

  “And what’s a story without people?”

  Cleopatra, Henry VIII, Napoleon, Columbus, da Vinci, the Medicis, the Borgias, Louis XVI, Elizabeth I, Robespierre, Richelieu.

  As they worked their way through a second cup of coffee, a third Danish, a fourth donut and God only knew how many See’s Candies’ nut chews, the lists grew and shrank, names got added, crossed out, moved around. Marcus had never worked like this, but it made the hairs on his arms stand up. The answer lay among the scribbled names and dates; he felt like an archeologist with a pencil for a shovel.

  Somewhere between da Vinci and Richelieu, he found himself thinking about his family. He wondered what they’d say if they could see him now, pencil in hand, dreaming up something that could end up starring Myrna Loy or Walter Pidgeon or Robert Taylor.

  Within a couple of hours, they’d covered the tabletop with lists and names, lines and arrows, and started to wonder if everything and everyone had already been done. Claudette Colbert had been Cleopatra in 1934. Charles Boyer was Napoleon a couple years back in Conquest. Charles Laughton, who had been Henry VIII in 1933, was currently filming The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Warner Bros. was about to come out with The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, starring Bette Davis and Errol Flynn.

  If it hadn’t been done, it was because either there was not enough drama to the story or the main character was so evil that the audience would never be sympathetic. So they stuffed themselves with more cake and chocolate, and washed it all down with coffee and red wine, and went at it again while the sun crept along the carpet toward them.

  Shakespeare, Goethe, Michelangelo, Catherine the Great, Anglo-Saxons, the Marquis de Sade, Dickens, Swift, Tolstoy.

  The two of them sat in silence, staring at the list, willing for a name to jump out at them. As they did, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture started to drum the ceiling.

  “Hold the presses!” Hoppy said, and pointed a finger upwards. “Tchaikovsky. Talk about a life chock full of drama and unhappiness. Plus, he was a tormented genius. Add him to the list.”

  There was a knock on the door. Hoppy headed into the bathroom. “If it’s your upstairs neighbor, tell him thanks for the inspiration.”

  Marcus laughed as he swung open the door, but then his mouth, still tingling with orange pop, went dry. In front of him, close enough to touch, stood Ramon Novarro.

  “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  Ramon walked through the door without waiting for a reply.

  Overhead, the 1812 Overture started to gather momentum.

  “This is a surprise,” Marcus said, crossing the living room to be closer to the man whose charisma was filling the room. With his sleek Latino looks and noble profile, the guy had once been MGM’s most popular actor, but those days were behind him now. For years, he and Marcus had stumbled into and out of each other’s lives, always with a meaningful look or a flirty line. There’d even been a slow, delicious kiss once, but Marcus had given up hope that he and Ramon might get to scratch their mutual itches. Ramon had always been Marcus’ One Who Got Away.

  Without warning, Ramon grabbed him by the shirt and slid his hand to the back of Marcus’ head, pulled their faces close and pressed their lips together. Ramon’s tongue pushed into Marcus’ mouth and explored every corner it could find. As the 1812 Overture reached its climax, Marcus could feel the urgency of Ramon’s body against his and he couldn’t help but press his mouth harder against Ramon’s full, soft lips.

  No More Mr. Nice Guy, Marcus
thought. Why should it just apply to my career? If I’m going to go for it, I’m going to go for everything.

  “Beethoven! He had a dramat—oh!”

  Marcus yanked away from Ramon’s grasp, flummoxed at having forgotten Hoppy. He felt his face burn.

  “Hoppy!” Ramon exclaimed.

  “Ramon, you old sexy Mexy, you!”

  The two of them shook hands. Ramon smiled at Marcus, not the least embarrassed. “You are friends with Hoppy?” Ramon asked. “This is muy bueno. There were not many people at MGM I could trust, but Hoppy was always at the top of the list. Sometimes he was the only person on the list!” He turned back to Hoppy. “Right, mi amigo?”

  Hoppy looked at Marcus, but Marcus couldn’t dissect his inscrutable smile.

  Marcus stared at Ramon and thought, Just when you finally come along and do what I’ve been hoping you’d do for more years than I want to count, you have to go and do it in front of someone from the studio? Will our timing never be right?

  A new overture started upstairs: The Marriage of Figaro.

  Ramon spied the large sheets of paper on the table and exclaimed, “But you are working! Please forgive me. I took a chance Marcus would be home.”

  “Alone,” Hoppy added.

  “Sí. Alone. I shall interrupt you no further.”

  Marcus wanted Ramon to stay and Hoppy to go, but the thought of Taggert’s locked box kicked him in the keister.

  “Another time, perhaps?” Ramon pulled a calling card from the breast pocket of his jacket and propped it up on the bookshelf, and Marcus watched him let himself out. He hoped he would turn around and shoot him a significant look, but he didn’t.

  Marcus returned to the table and pretended to study the lists as Hoppy lit up a Chesterfield.

  “Never saw that coming,” Hoppy said.

  There was no hatred in his voice, no resentment, no fear, no violence. It was like he’d said, So, you like peanut butter, huh?

  “Give me one of those,” Marcus said. He lit up and they smoked in silence thicker than stew until the words burst out of him. “We’ve only kissed once, but before we got to take it any further the Long Beach earthquake hit.”

  “Six years is a long time between smooches,” Hoppy observed.

  “I haven’t laid eyes on him in maybe two years.” Marcus contemplated his front door. “That was a real surprise.”

  “Yeah well, do any of us really know anybody as well as we think we do?”

  “I hope that didn’t make you uncomfortable.”

  Hoppy waved away Marcus’ concerns. “I realized years ago that if you can’t stand fairies, then don’t come work at the studios.” He tapped on his wooden leg. “And besides, I’m in no position to complain about the shameful way I get treated sometimes if I go and treat other people in the same manner.”

  “Figaro” finished with a lone violin note.

  “And anyway,” Hoppy added, “Tchaikovsky was a fairy and it didn’t stop him from creating some of the finest music in the history of the world, did it?”

  “The Hays Office would never let us make a movie about Tchaikovsky and his lovers.”

  Hoppy shrugged. “So we change a Joseph to a Josephine and a Yuri to a Yana. Those who don’t know are none the wiser, and those who are wiser don’t care none.”

  The neighbor’s gramophone started up. Marcus pointed at the ceiling. “Don’t you just love the Lone Ranger theme?”

  “Philistine!” Hoppy’s pencil hit Marcus squarely on the cheek. “That’s the ‘William Tell Overture,’ and you know it.”

  They listened to it build to a crescendo. As the final chord rained down on them, Marcus and Hoppy turned to each other at the same time.

  “WILLIAM TELL!”

  CHAPTER 3

  The Chateau Marmont cast a wide shadow across Sunset Boulevard, but it didn’t do Kathryn Massey any good. If she stood in its tempting shade, she couldn’t see who came and went through the heavy wooden doors that guarded the hotel’s entrance.

  Kathryn wrote a gossip column for the Hollywood Reporter, and while she would have preferred to write more legitimate industry news—the threat of communism, union strikes, the conundrum of artistry versus commercialism—she had to admit that writing gossip came with a seductive measure of power. Or at least it would, if she could regain the standing she lost during an ill-advised stint at Life magazine. It had seemed like a smart move at the time, but quickly proved to be the worst thing she could have done.

  She’d crawled her way back into her boss’ good graces with the scoop of who’d been cast as Scarlett O’Hara, but that was yesterday’s news now. Kathryn needed a zinger to put her back in business, and it was the promise of one that kept her standing in the Angeleno July sun.

  Kathryn’s mother, the head telephone operator at the Chateau Marmont Hotel, had accidentally let on that the enfant terrible of Broadway and radio, Orson Welles, had sneaked into Hollywood ahead of schedule to get the lay of the land. Kathryn was the only one who knew this, but it was all she knew. She needed to get to him before the press laid siege.

  Her own siege dragged into its fourth hour and she had nothing but a welt of sunburn across her neck to show for it. This is all very well, she thought, but I have a column to put together. She was about to pull out her notebook when a tall figure in shirt sleeves and sunglasses emerged from behind the gates. She followed him at a cautious distance as he sauntered east along Sunset to Schwab’s Pharmacy.

  Perfect!

  Inside the soda fountain, she spotted Welles sitting with his back to her and walked past him to the telephone booths at the rear, where she dialed the Garden of Allah and asked for her own villa.

  “Hello?”

  “Gwennie! I need you to come to Schwab’s.”

  “When?”

  “Right now. Are you decent?”

  “Decent enough for Schwab’s.”

  “Get here as soon as you can. I’m going to need you to play along with everything I say, no matter how crazy it may seem.”

  She hung up the receiver and took a deep breath to quell her nerves. The last thing she could afford to do was spook Orson Welles. Rumors had started to swoop around the Reporter’s offices that layoffs were imminent. The way her boss, Billy Wilkerson, gambled cash by the truckload, nobody could take their job for granted.

  She smoothed down her auburn hair and slid into the empty booth facing Welles. She watched him light a cigarette and drop the matchbook.

  The bell on the front door tinkled and Gwendolyn appeared. Even flustered, puzzled, and minimally made up, she looked like a million-dollar blonde. She slid into Kathryn’s booth with her back to Welles and raised her eyebrows.

  “Rose!” Kathryn called out to the waitress. “Two coffees when you’re ready.” She turned to Gwendolyn. “I finally found out where she’s from.”

  Gwendolyn frowned at Kathryn. Kathryn mouthed, Say something!

  “Oh yeah? Where?”

  “Kenosha.”

  “Where’s that?”

  Kathryn flung her arms out and raised her voice a notch. “Exactly! What good is that sort of information without the state? So I said, ‘Kenosha where?’ They didn’t know.”

  Welles tilted his head toward them.

  “Kenosha sounds Jewish,” Gwendolyn ad-libbed. “New York state, maybe?”

  “Sweetie, you’re thinking of kosher. Finally I was getting somewhere, and now another dead end.” Kathryn let out a groan.

  Welles slid out of his booth and took a couple of steps toward her. Kathryn held her breath and peered up at his wide, handsome face, and into the dark eyes that seemed to be daring her to look away.

  “Allow me to put you out of your misery.” His voice was deep and resonant, the type that could effortlessly carry to the back rows of Broadway’s largest theater.

  “My misery?”

  “I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation.”

  He smiled at her and Kathryn felt herself melt just a little. He
was imposing, all six feet of him, but it was more than just his height. He glowed with an aura of personal power so palpable that Kathryn felt like she could reach out and run her fingers through it.

  “Kenosha is in Wisconsin,” Welles said. “South of Milwaukee, right on the lake.”

  Wide-eyed, Kathryn asked, “Are you sure?”

  “Quite positive. I’m from there myself, originally.”

  “Wisconsin, huh? Thank you very much. I’m most grateful to you.”

  She watched him retreat to the rear of the store and step into a telephone booth.

  “Oh my heavens!” Gwendolyn pressed her hands to her substantial chest. “Was that Orson Welles?”

  Kathryn nodded and glanced over at the phones. Welles had turned toward the back wall and was engrossed in conversation, so she slipped out of her seat and picked up his discarded matchbook. It was from a bar near the Hollywood Hotel called Don the Beachcomber.

  “What did I just get roped into?” Gwendolyn asked.

  Kathryn looked at her roommate. “Let’s call it part one.”

  * * *

  The bar was shrouded in semidarkness and teeming with steamy South Seas exotica. Artificial rain pitter-pattered on the fake corrugated-iron roof, and a jungle of potted palm trees let out a delicate scent that Kathryn imagined Fiji might smell like.

  She’d planted Lenny, a laconic freelance photographer/legman she occasionally used, at Don the Beachcomber every afternoon since the Schwab’s encounter. Don’s was exactly the dimly lit sort of place a guy like Welles would hide out in until he was ready to make his splashy Hollywood entrance. Plus, they were infamous for a drink they’d invented called the Zombie—after a couple of them, that’s what you became. She’d almost given up when she got a call from Lenny telling her Orson had just walked in and was sitting in the Cannibal Room.

  The Cannibal Room was really just the back half of the bar. Its walls were painted sooty black, and papier-mâché bones tied with fishing wire hung from the ceiling like the remains of forgotten actors and sidelined writers. Wacky jungle music plinkety-plunked through speakers hidden in the shadows. A few other patrons were seated at tables dotted around the room, but Lenny wasn’t hard to spot in the plaid jacket she’d told him to wear. He’d parked himself at a table not far from where Welles sat alone with a mess of pages spread out before him. Kathryn positioned herself at Lenny’s table so Welles had a side-on view of her.