The Garden on Sunset Read online

  CHAPTER 8

  It wasn’t until after Marcus had enrolled in a one-week intensive course at the Melrose School for Efficient Typewriting that it occurred to him that maybe Kathryn had only been kidding about his becoming a picture play writer. She’d taken him by surprise, but the more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. Imagine his father’s reaction when he saw his son’s name up on the movie screen: WORDS BY MARCUS ADLER. Would that be enough to change his mind?

  He pulled open the door of Classroom B to find the room almost full. The teacher’s sullen gray suit matched the paint on the walls. She stood at the front of the class with the posture of a ballerina in a back brace and turned around dramatically to look at the clock on the wall behind her. It was less than a minute till one.

  “As I was saying,” the teacher projected like a midway barker, “it is essential that you are seated at your typewriting machine before this clock strikes the hour.”

  By six P.M., Marcus’ shoulders, elbows and knuckles were a twinge away from seizing up altogether. All day long, AAA, SSS, LLL, KKK — they’d learned twelve letters in five hours. When the clock chimed six times, Mrs. Frobisher ended the day with a curt instruction to be ready at one P.M. tomorrow, sharp.

  It had been chilly inside, despite the sun that shone through the narrow skylights. The gray walls didn’t help much; they were the gray of battleships and jail cells. If the place had more bars over the windows and fewer typewriting machines, it could’ve been the lone jail cell in the McKeesport police station. Marcus looked out the window, instead of Melrose Avenue he saw his high school stadium, all lit up like it was the night his father and the mayor had caught him with Dwight. He pushed the memory out of his mind as he held the door open for the last of the girls in the class when he heard a voice behind him.

  “I’m so glad you waited for me.”

  Marcus turned and met a smiling young man with a full face with soft corners, a brown fedora jammed onto his head. Marcus smiled back. They headed up the corridor together.

  “I was so relieved when you showed up,” the guy said. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, a couple of years older than Marcus. “I did not want to be the only guy in that class. Let me guess: a writer?”

  “Aspiring,” Marcus said.

  “Novelist? Playwright?”

  “I want to write for the pictures now that they can talk.”

  “Me too!” The guy gave Marcus a friendly punch to the shoulder. “The name’s Hugo Marr. Hey, you got somewhere you need to be? How’s about we get a bite to eat?”

  Marcus hesitated. His funds were dissolving at an alarming rate. Every dime counted until he could get a job, but a couple of the writers at the Garden of Allah told him that no studio would hire him until he could type.

  “My treat!” Hugo said. “Come on, I know a great diner just off La Brea. The Fog Cutter. You’ll think the mashed potatoes were whipped in heaven by angels.”

  By the time Marcus knew Hugo Marr wasn’t lying about the potatoes — they were fluffier than the cotton candy at the Pennsylvania State Fair — he’d learned that Hugo was the son of Edwin Marr, a cinematic genius worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, if Hugo was to be believed.

  “He doesn’t go in for this talkies stuff.” Hugo held up a bunched fist. “‘Ruination! Ruination!’ That’s his favorite word right now. He spends a lot of time running around proclaiming, ‘Talking pictures will be the ruination of the art form!’” Hugo laughed gently. “I don’t agree with him, though. I think talkies are the future of pictures. You’ve seen The Jazz Singer, right? Sensational, right? I can’t wait to hear what John Barrymore sounds like. And Greta Garbo. And Norma Talmadge. And Billie Dove! She’s one of my favorites. I can’t wait to hear what she sounds like. Hell, I can’t wait to hear what they all sound like!” He swiped up the last of his meatloaf’s tomato sauce with a piece of bread and popped it into his mouth. “And with any luck, they’ll be saying my words. Hey! And yours too, huh?”

  Marcus felt like a phony. He looked across the table at the son of a big-time Hollywood director. Who am I to think I could write anything worthy of John Barrymore or Norma Talmadge? Just because I spent my teenage summers scribbling stories in five-and-dime notebooks? This town is probably chock full of real writers, ones with published novels and plays on Broadway. Exactly how many gallons of gall were flowing through my veins when I decided I’d be a writer for the talking pictures?

  “Maybe they will,” Marcus replied. “But in the meanwhile, I need a job.”

  “I know how that feels,” Hugo said.

  “You? But isn’t your father . . . ?”

  “My dad’s way of doing things is the old way. Which is to say, the hard way. No help. No leg up.”

  Sounds familiar, Marcus thought. “Strict, huh?”

  “On a good day. The only thing he ever gave me was advice. He said to me, ‘Nobody takes a writer seriously if he can’t type.’ So here we are.”

  “Do you have a regular job?” Marcus asked.

  Hugo opened his dark leather satchel and drew out a copy of the Los Angeles Times. He turned to the Entertainment section, folded it in half and then in half again, and dropped it in front of Marcus. He pointed to an ad for The Road to Romance featuring a photograph of Ramon Novarro in profile with his dark hair slicked back and his mouth curled up in a knowing smile. He was even more handsome than he had been in Ben-Hur.

  “You heard of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, right? Down on Hollywood Boulevard?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “It opened up a few months ago. Talk about a movie palace. All decked out oriental-style. You’ve never seen anything like it. I just got a job there. Head usher. What a shame we didn’t meet a week ago! I coulda got you a job, too.”

  Marcus had seen Ben-Hur dozens of times. He couldn’t get enough of Ramon Novarro up there on the screen. He managed to pull his eyes off the ad and let them wander down the page. A familiar logo caught his eye above the words “NOW HIRING.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Kathryn rearranged Tallulah Bankhead’s fan mail on the dining room table. It had to look just right.

  “Are you fiddling with all that stuff again?” Gwendolyn asked from the doorway of the bedroom of the villa they now shared.

  “I want it to look like it’s a lot of work.”

  “It is a lot of work. Tallulah Bankhead gets a ton of fan mail. Extraordinary, really, considering she hasn’t made a picture in ten years.”

  “These letters aren’t from movie fans,” Kathryn said. “Most of these people saw her onstage.” She combined a couple of stacks of letters into one tall pile and shifted her typewriter to face the front door.

  Gwendolyn picked up one of the letters. “Why are so many of them on lavender note paper?”

  Kathryn eyed her seventeen-year-old roommate. This wasn’t the time to explain about lavender and women who preferred the company of other women. Her mother would be here in a few minutes, and she had a big impression to make. Kathryn watched the clock skip another minute closer to twelve. “Gwendolyn, honey, I don’t want to throw you out of your own home, but you did promise . . . ?” She pointed to the clock.

  Gwendolyn apologized, dropped the letter and picked up her handbag. “The new dress turned out well, even if I say so myself.”

  It had been two weeks since Kathryn had approached Gwendolyn with the suggestion they pool their resources and move into a villa together. They’d both been locked away in their tiny hotel rooms that seemed as dingy and suffocating as possible. If they opened their doors for air, they were met with a procession of peering gents, their brows greasy with anticipation.

  It was Gwendolyn who had suggested that she could pay a little less rent by sewing a new dress for Kathryn each month. She displayed her wardrobe as proof of her skill; she had made pretty much everything in it. The girl’s handiwork was top-notch so Kathryn agreed to a sixty-forty split of the rent.
By the end of the first week, a dressmaker’s dummy had appeared in the kitchen and a brand new dress — the rose-quartz one she wore today — was ready a week after that. Turns out that sewing wasn’t the only thing Gwendolyn could do; she was a heck of a good cook as well, which suited Kathryn just fine. She’d left school before domestic arts classes came in, which left her bereft of the skills most girls were proficient at by the time they were Kathryn’s age. Watching Gwendolyn stitch up a new suit made Kathryn feel woefully inadequate until she reminded herself that she was a working girl at heart, and had never been able to muster much enthusiasm for cooking succotash or attaching Peter Pan collars.

  Gwendolyn hadn’t been gone a minute when there was a knock on the door.

  Kathryn hadn’t expected that specific smile on her mother’s face. Francine only wore that smile when she had secured an audition over the discarded body of a potential rival. Seeing it now threw her.

  “Kathryn, darling,” Francine greeted her grandly. “Come here and let me give my daughter a kiss.” When Kathryn wavered, Francine stepped through the doorway and embraced her, pressing their cheeks together. She let go and swept into the villa. “Why, this is . . . charming.” The pause before the word ‘charming’ said everything Kathryn needed to know. Francine made straight for the bedroom and looked at the two single beds with a nightstand between them. “May I ask who lives here?”

  “I do, mother.” Where were the reprimands for the months of silence? Where were the teary demands of how she could treat her poor mother so heartlessly? Where were the remonstrations for walking out without a backward glance?

  “Alone?”

  “I live with a friend.”

  “Friend?”

  Francine had tried to teach her daughter that any girl within a seven year radius of Kathryn was to be considered The Enemy. Any one of them could pluck from her grasp the chance at stardom that they had worked and schemed and chiseled and scrimped for all these years. They must be regarded as the snakes they would surely reveal themselves to be.

  “I’ve made lots of new friends since I arrived here. My roommate’s name is Gwendolyn.”

  “Gwendolyn? Is she as lovely as her name?”

  Kathryn thought of Gwendolyn’s enviably creamy skin, her charm school posture, her impressive bosom and of the way her gentle green eyes looked at someone like they were the only person south of Canada who mattered. In the aspiring movie star department, Gwendolyn was everything that Kathryn wasn’t, and Francine would hate her for it. “Yes, she is.”

  “Fresh off the bus, I expect. A head full of dreams and no clue —” Francine cut herself off. “Would some tea be too much to ask?”

  While the water boiled, Kathryn made a show of moving all the letters and papers to the far side of the table and onto the two spare seats, but Francine failed to ask about them. In the afternoon sunlight, Kathryn could see that her mother had tried too hard with her makeup. It was slathered on thick, the circles of rouge painted on like dolls’ cheeks. Her lipstick was a shade darker than her dress and she’d missed the edge of her lips by an embarrassing margin. Tiny globs of too much mascara had bound her eyelashes together like baby spiders caught in their own webs. Mother and daughter sat down to tea and shortbread; it was a minute or two before either spoke.

  “This is all very lovely,” Francine said, “but it’s time you came home.”

  Kathryn braced herself. “I am home, Mother.”

  “I fought tooth and nail to secure that audition for you at Paramount. They didn’t want to see you; told me they had seen enough girls.”

  “Because they probably had.”

  Kathryn had risen on the morning of the Paramount audition and gone through the ritual of every other audition morning. She showered and dressed in just the right outfit, set her hair in just the right way, and headed out to the streetcar stop. But when the Red Car came rattling up Hollywood Boulevard, she found herself cemented to the sidewalk.

  When the streetcar was out of sight, Kathryn wandered to the Top Hat Café up on Sunset. She’d passed it a million times, but that day she went in on the trail of a dead ringer for Theda Bara. Kathryn followed the woman inside and ordered a chocolate malted milk for cover, sneaking glances until she was sure it wasn’t Theda Bara after all. By the time she was halfway through the malt, she’d decided that she loved chocolate malts more than she loved acting, and she proceeded to have not one but two — and a slice of lemon meringue pie, the devil be damned. She walked into her mother’s apartment to announce that she’d skipped the Paramount audition. A doozie of an argument erupted–Francine’s fury was cutting and cruel and took even Kathryn by surprise–so she packed two suitcases and headed west, past where the pavement ended, and checked into the first hotel she came to: the Garden of Allah.

  “Kathryn, my darling, what’s going on? What was all that talk about not wanting to be an actress? Of course you do. We both do. It’s what we’ve been working and slaving for all these years. How can you throw it all away?”

  “Throw what away? What do we have to show for seven years of trudging from studio to studio, office to office, agent to agent? Nothing, Mother. Nothing! I’ve never won any audition or booked any job. And that’s because I’m no good.”

  Francine was incredulous. “Are you drunk? Is that it? Because I passed a rather motley rabble near one of those bungalows out there, and they were clearly drunk as lords.”

  Kathryn leaned in. “Mother! I never wanted it in the first place. All that came from you. I have other things I want to do. Like get a real job. Lead a normal life.”

  “You’ve never had a job. What are you going to do with yourself?” Francine made a dismissive shrug.

  “I have a job.” Kathryn swept her hand across the mounds of mauve papers. “I manage all of Tallulah Bankhead’s correspondence.”

  “Tallulah Bankhead? That actress who’s always drunk, and running around saying the most scandalous things? And anyway, how could you do such a job? You can’t even use one of those.” Francine flicked her wrist toward the typewriting machine.

  “Fifty words a minute,” Kathryn said.

  Francine stared at the typewriter as though she’d never seen one before. Kathryn leaned back in her chair to let the news sink in. Kathryn let several moments tick by before she said in a voice, carefully calibrated for maximum impact, “I’m very happy now. I have a good job with decent pay. I have a lovely roommate and a very nice place to live.”

  An eruption of male laughter burst through the kitchen window. “And then, and then,” one of them said, barely able to catch his breath from laughing so hard, “the dame set fire to the guy’s trousers while he was still in ‘em! He never saw her again!” The men — likely the drunken lords — were close to choking on their laughter.

  Francine looked from the typewriter to the fan letters to her daughter, confused. “All this looks like a lot of work. It must take up a lot of time. When will you find time to go on auditions?

  CHAPTER 10

  Gwendolyn stopped twenty feet down Sunset Boulevard from the main gate of Warner Brothers studios. Kathryn’s T-straps looked much better with her new daffodil-yellow dress than either pair of her own pumps, but they were half a size too small, which made walking like a glamour girl an acting lesson in itself. She gave her feet a minute’s rest before she presented herself to the guard.

  “Your name?” he asked.

  “Gwendolyn Brick.”

  He ran his finger down a list of fifty or sixty names twice. “You’re not on the list,” he told her.

  “I must be. Please check again.”

  “I got no Gwendolyn and I got no Brick. If you’re not on, then you’re not in.”

  “In that case, I need to speak to Bill Brockton. If you could —”

  “Brockton no longer works here.”

  “But I —”

  “You need to step aside.” He motioned for her to make way for a couple of arresting redheads who’d appeared behind her. Gw
endolyn watched as they gave their names and the guard directed them to soundstage number six, then she tried to approach the guard again. “Don’t make me be rude, toots,” he told her. “Just run along.”

  Gwendolyn backed off along the sidewalk and leaned against the twelve-foot wall that encircled the studio like a prison barricade. Bill Brockton was her only way in, and if he was no longer working there, she was out.

  She watched a gorgeous brunette in a brown pinstripe alight from the Red Car and be waved through the gate. Gwendolyn was about to give up and head home when a pack of sailors rounded the corner. They strolled past her, shooting her appreciative smiles. She smiled at each one, hoping some girl in some faraway port would do the same for her brother. Gwendolyn hadn’t put up a fight when he’d asked her to forge Mama’s signature on his navy papers the day after the funeral; it was all he’d ever wanted to do, for as long as she could remember. She watched the sailors make a right turn into the studio lot. “Oh for goodness sakes,” Gwendolyn muttered, “they’re not sailors at all; just a bunch of extras in costume.”

  Gwendolyn began to miss her brother, Seaman First Class Montgomery Brick. Tall, gangly Monty with his silly grin and his sillier cowlick that wouldn’t stay down for love nor Brilliantine. He’d make her see the bright side of missing an audition with a Hollywood studio for the second time in two months. He’d have her laughing before she could say “swab the decks.”

  Wait! Just hold on a cotton-pickin’ second. Where the heck did those extras come from? Gwendolyn walked to the corner and looked up the street. Halfway up the block was a sign over a doorway. She hurried toward it.

  COSTUMES – MAKE-UP – HAIR

  Studio Employees Only. All others proceed to main gate on Sunset Boulevard

  She tried the doorknob, but of course it was locked. She knocked and a pretend policeman opened up. Another extra.