Twisted Boulevard Read online

  Sitting in his car that first day, Marcus pictured the executive staff meetings, L.B. Mayer at the head of the table, pounding his fist. “Find me better stories! Find me fresh stars! There must be some new angle we haven’t tried!” Marcus surreptitiously parked his DeSoto week after week to watch the embattled ants scurry in and out of the studio. He told himself he’d gotten out while the getting was good, and how this wasn’t his problem anymore. He was free to while away his days doing whatever he pleased instead of pacing the office at night worrying about how to capitalize on the blossoming sultriness of a still-teenage Elizabeth Taylor or how to avoid botching Greer Garson’s streak.

  By midsummer, he was stopping outside MGM a couple of times a week. But recently, he was getting less and less of a kick out of it, and had started to picture his career outlined in chalk on the sidewalk like a murder victim.

  The lights changed. Oliver slammed on the gas, lurching into the intersection.

  “It was just a habit I fell into,” Marcus said lamely.

  “And you’ve never once thought to mention it?”

  “Too embarrassed, I guess.”

  “So instead of going out and hustling up some work, you’ve been loitering around a studio that pushed you out the back door?”

  “I was the one who quit.”

  “Before they fired you.”

  That hurt. “Leave me alone.”

  “You haven’t been blacklisted, so why aren’t you trying to get a job at some other studio instead of making these cockamamie plans—”

  “They’re not cockamamie—”

  “You’re talking about hiring a boat from some Turkish backwater to Middle-of-Nowhere, Russia. And for what?” Oliver jerked the car into the slow lane and revved the engine to pass a pair of motorcyclists. “I know you’ve got a pile of scripts buried in a drawer somewhere. Pull out the best of the bunch, polish it off, and send it out to Paramount, Warners, Fox, and RKO. Remind them that you wrote The Pistol from Pittsburgh and Free Leningrad!, and see who bites.”

  “Now just hold on a minute! You don’t know what’s involved. All you know is your Breen Office rulebook. And anyway—WHOA!” Oliver narrowly missed a jalopy that looked like it was held together with spit and a prayer. “Slow the hell down!”

  Oliver eased off the gas marginally. “You put in nearly twenty years building your reputation, and now you’re throwing it away for no reason.”

  “I’m not throwing anything—”

  “If you want to dribble away the rest of your life, then fine, but don’t expect me to stick around and watch you do it.” Oliver veered back into the center lane.

  “Are you breaking up with me?”

  “I never said that.”

  “You kind of did. And why is this coming up now? You couldn’t just tell me how you felt weeks ago?”

  “Hi, honey,” Oliver sing-songed in a falsetto. “Pass the salt, oh and by the way, I’ve been loitering like a hobo outside MGM all summer. You mean like that?”

  “Dammit!” Marcus slapped the dashboard and braced his feet against the floorboards to steady himself as Oliver rocketed past the hedges bordering the LA Country Club. “I want to see where I come from. Is that so bad?”

  “In this current political climate, yes, Marcus, it’s bad. Very, very bad.”

  “I don’t care!”

  “Well, you should.”

  “I’ll get another career—OLIVER!”

  They plunged into the intersection where Wilshire crossed Santa Monica Boulevard at an acute angle. The traffic lights changed just as an Adohr Dairy milk truck lumbered across Oliver’s path. He pulled a sharp left that threw Marcus against the window, and the rear of the DeSoto hit the front of the truck. Metal pounded against metal with a sickening crunch, pitching Marcus in the opposite direction.

  They reeled toward the fountain on the intersection’s north side and the brakes screeched as the DeSoto thundered into its foot-tall embankment. A wave of ceramic splinters hit the windshield and the passenger door swung open, flinging Marcus from the car. Icy water engulfed him; the shock pulled the air from his lungs; his glasses had disappeared. Concrete scraped against his face.

  He surfaced in time to see the car flipping onto the driver’s side and crashing into the inner pool, spilling out a deluge of more freezing water. The center column topped with a Native American figure keeled over, collapsing onto the front of the car.

  Marcus struggled to his feet, wiping blood out of his eyes. “Oliver? OLIVER!” Somehow, the jets were still spurting in all directions. Marcus pushed against the column but couldn’t shift it.

  The intersection was awash with milk, the road blinding white in the sun. He could see someone running toward him, but his sight was blurred and tinged with pink. Before he knew it, the guy had jumped into the fountain.

  “This column,” Marcus spluttered. “It fell. On my friend. He’s trapped.”

  The man laid his hands against the side of the column. “On the count of three, we’re gonna push.”

  They groaned under the weight of the pylon, but slowly it began to dislodge. Abruptly, it gave way and rolled off the DeSoto. Shards of glass and tile covered the crumpled hood.

  Oliver was sprawled back in the driver’s seat, his face bloodied, his hair matted.

  Marcus reached in through the shattered windshield and grabbed a fistful of Oliver’s shirt. “Can you hear me?”

  Oliver opened his eyes. They were bloodshot and unfocused, but he knew Marcus’ voice. “I’m sorry—I don’t know what—Why is everything so wet?”

  Marcus turned to the other man. “Where’s the nearest telephone? Can we call an ambulance?”

  “There’s a drugstore down on Santa Monica.” The guy took off.

  Marcus turned back to Oliver. “Honey? Honey?” Without his glasses everything was blurry. “Don’t move. Help’s on the way.”

  “I can’t—I can’t—”

  “Stay still. Don’t move.”

  Oliver’s mouth dropped open. “I can’t move my legs. Marcus, I can’t even feel them.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Gwendolyn slid the box of bagels off of the counter at Greenblatt’s Deli and cradled it in her arms.

  Kathryn held open the door. “You got onion and poppy seed, right? He loves those.”

  “One each for us and four for him.”

  They headed back to the Garden of Allah, letting the late Sunday morning traffic sail past them.

  “He looks terrible, doesn’t he?”

  Kathryn nodded. “I suspect he’s drinking more than he’s eating, so let’s force feed him if we have to.”

  Oliver’s legs were broken in eleven places. The surgeon made a big deal about how most of the breaks were relatively clean and should mend smoothly. Oliver was strung up in traction, but refusing to see visitors.

  Astoundingly, Marcus had walked away with only a mild concussion and surface abrasions down the right side of his face. It bothered him that Oliver wouldn’t see anyone, but the staff at Los Angeles General Hospital were sticklers when it came to their patients’ wishes.

  Gwendolyn and Kathryn skirted around the pool and stood in front of Marcus’ villa. He told them last night that he’d leave his front door open when he was up, but it was nearly midday and it was still closed.

  “Should we knock?” Gwendolyn asked.

  “Let’s give him an hour. I’m hoping he actually slept. Can we go to your place? I’m all out of coffee.”

  “Gwendolyn, may I have a word?” It was Manny, the Garden’s front desk clerk.

  “Don’t tell me my rent check bounced!” Gwendolyn laughed to cover her embarrassment. That big-spending blonde back in June had not been a harbinger of things to come, unfortunately.

  “I encountered a couple of shady types lurking around here yesterday,” Manny said.

  “What kind of shady?”

  “Shifty eyes, no necktie, pants that look like they haven’t been pressed all year.”

 
“What were they doing?”

  “Wandering around, making out like they were lost. I inquired if I could help, and they asked me which villa was yours. They spun some story about being from out of town and looking you up on a lark.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” Kathryn said.

  “I gave them the usual speech about the privacy of our residents and escorted them out.”

  “I don’t suppose you saw their car?” Gwendolyn asked.

  “I did.”

  “Chevrolet? Two-door? Red with a dent on the passenger side?”

  Manny stroked his bushy salt-and-pepper moustache. “I didn’t notice any dent, but yes, a red Chevrolet sedan. Gosh, I’m sorry if I was rude to your friends, but they didn’t strike me as being on the up-and-up.”

  “They’re not my friends,” Gwendolyn told him. “But I sure do appreciate you looking out for me. You’re a peach, Uncle Manny.”

  She hustled Kathryn along the path to her apartment, where she deposited the bagels on her kitchen counter and started tapping her key on the white tiling. “I’ve noticed a red Chevy drive past the store a lot.”

  “How much is a lot?”

  “Once or twice a week. I thought I was being paranoid and figured they’re probably just regulars at some store along the Strip. But then I got to work last week and the lock on my back door looked like it’d been tampered with.”

  “Gwennie!”

  “There were these scratches I’d never noticed before.”

  “Someone tried to jimmy it?”

  “Could be. I’m just glad it’s a real sturdy lock.”

  They stared at each other, each reluctant to be the first to say it.

  Finally Kathryn said, “Leilah came to the store; she threatened to ruin you.”

  Gwendolyn stuck her coffee pot under the faucet and filled it with water. “She was upset. Her whole future’s at stake. She probably came after me because she couldn’t think of anyone else to yell at.”

  Kathryn drew alongside her and dropped her voice to a murmur. “You don’t actually have those client cards, do you?”

  “No! Nor do I want them.”

  “But if she’s sent her goons after you—”

  “I’m going to have to convince her that I don’t have them, aren’t I?” Gwendolyn admitted glumly. “But I’ve already screamed at her. And I don’t even know where Leilah’s living now.”

  She went to light the stove when a low rumbling filled the apartment. The china teacups in her cabinet rattled. Outside the kitchen window, a dog began to howl. Kathryn and Gwendolyn jumped into the living room doorway as a framed print of a girl on a swing thumped to the floor. The whole place juddered like a lumbering tortoise, sending the coffee pot skittering across the stovetop.

  As the earthquake reached its peak, a crash of splintering glass burst from the bathroom.

  Then suddenly it was over, and the room was silent again.

  Kathryn let go of the doorjamb. “That sounded like your mirror.”

  “It’s built into the cabinet. That was my perfume allowance for the next two years. Chanel No. 5 and Miss Dior, gone in thirty seconds.”

  “I should go check on my place.” Kathryn laid the Maxfield Parrish print on Gwendolyn’s dining table. “You should open all your windows; your place is going to reek for a month.”

  * * *

  A week after the earthquake, Gwendolyn was dressing a mannequin when Edith Head strode into the store. “I’m pleased to see Chez Gwendolyn survived intact.”

  “Would you believe hardly anything moved in the entire place?” Gwendolyn greeted Edith with a cheek press.

  “And at home?”

  “That was a different matter.”

  “We were down at the house in Laguna, so we didn’t feel it. But we returned home to find we were awash in broken wine bottles.” Edith tsked. “Including a 1922 Château Lafite. Wiard has tried to replace it but those heinous Nazis ransacked the vineyard, so you can’t find it for love nor money.” She pointed to the window display. “I adore that.”

  Gwendolyn was proud of her newest creation: a two-piece suit in light gray merino wool. The extra-wide lapels crossed the chest into a double-breasted jacket, with a matching mid-shin skirt that had a long slit at the back to make stairs easier to negotiate.

  “I spotted it when I was driving home from Warner Brothers last night,” Edith said.

  “Still helping Travilla?”

  Edith threw her hands up. “Bette Davis requested me for this picture she’s working on.”

  “Kathryn tells me she’s most unhappy.”

  “She is, and when Bette’s miserable, everybody’s miserable. My work on that project is done, and I aim to celebrate with—” she faced the window “—that! You really do have the most admirable taste, but perhaps I’m only saying that because it aligns closely with mine. At any rate, I want it, but in deep plum, same shade as your carpet.”

  “Shall I send you samples?”

  “I trust you.”

  Without the windfall from the Alistair Dunne portrait, Gwendolyn wouldn’t have had the means to open Chez Gwendolyn. But without Edith Head’s encouragement, she doubted she’d have ever found the chutzpah to open a store at all. In Edith’s presence, Gwendolyn felt like the bumpkin she’d been when she landed in Los Angeles twenty years ago. And yet Edith had always treated her as a colleague. She wondered for the first time if perhaps she ought to try some advertising.

  Edith squinted at her. “What are you wearing?”

  Gwendolyn looked down at her pleated dress with the square neck. It wasn’t high fashion, but comfort trumped style when she was dressing mannequins.

  “No, dear,” Edith said, “what perfume are you wearing?”

  Gwendolyn reflexively touched behind an earlobe. “Do you like it?”

  “Is it the new Balenciaga?” She leaned in for a deep sniff. “Heaven!”

  Gwendolyn smiled coyly. “I guess you could say it’s mine.”

  Edith stared at her wide-eyed with expectation from behind her blue-tinted glasses.

  “I was at home when the earthquake hit. I heard a god-almighty crash coming from the bathroom: my Chanel No. 5 had smashed into the basin right on top of my Miss Dior. Fifty dollars’ worth of perfume—pfft!—down the drain!”

  “You must have been devastated.”

  “I was expecting a high-hog stink, but when I walked in it smelled rather nice. So I ran right out and bought two new bottles.” Edith didn’t need to know Gwendolyn would be living on beans and rice for the next month. “I started experimenting. One drop of Chanel to two drops of Dior; then two Chanel to one Dior; then two of one and three of the other until I got the ratio exactly right.” Gwendolyn circled her hands to give Edith another whiff. “What you’re smelling is Chanel and Dior mixed with a hint of orange peel steeped in vanilla essence and cinnamon oil.”

  “How clever you are!” Edith pulled at Gwendolyn’s sleeve and breathed in. “I’ve never smelled anything quite like it,” she declared. “So what will the bottle look like?”

  “What bottle?”

  “You’re going to sell it, aren’t you? This could be your signature fragrance. I can see the sign already: Available exclusively at Chez Gwendolyn on the Sunset Strip.”

  Gwendolyn backed off a step or two. “I was just messing about, really.”

  “You worked the perfume counter at Bullocks for how many years? You must know everything there is to know about selling perfume.”

  “Selling, yes, but manufacturing? I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  Edith grabbed a pad of paper. “You’d be a fool to let this slip through your fingers.” She jotted down her measurements. “I’d buy a bottle on the spot.” She pushed the paper toward Gwendolyn. “I’m attending an important luncheon a week from Monday. A coterie of my fellow costume designers are getting together to talk about forming an official guild, and I’d like to wear my new suit.”

  Gwendolyn told her she’d ha
ve it delivered to Paramount by the Friday before.

  After Edith exited the store, Gwendolyn leaned against the counter for the longest time, tapping her chin with a pencil. She’d seen a perfume bottle once in a museum display of pre-French-revolution cosmetics. It was a cross between a pear and Aladdin’s lamp, and made of green glass, but Gwendolyn decided purple might be more striking.

  I could have it packaged in a matching box that ties up with a ribbon. Dark green, perhaps. And I could call it Earthquake—“It’ll send you staggering.” Available exclusively at Chez Gwendolyn on the Sunset Strip. Gwendolyn felt her heart flutter. It might bring customers in.

  She pulled open a drawer and picked up the formula she’d written out for her homemade perfume. She flipped through the pages of the address book in her mind, trying to think of someone who might know how to go about manufacturing a perfume from scratch. She stopped when she came to T.

  Horton Tattler sold exquisitely crafted men’s clothes, and accessories like tie clips and cufflinks. She couldn’t remember if they sold toiletries and colognes, but he was the most likely person she could think of.

  Last she’d heard, he was living at the Hershey Arms—a once-fancy hotel near downtown that was descending into its seedy years. She called and asked to be put through to Mr. Tattler’s room, but the operator told her Mr. Tattler had moved out more than a year before.

  Gwendolyn stood at her counter wondering how much a private eye might cost until a flash of red caught her eye. Not just red, but red with a dent on the passenger door.

  CHAPTER 11

  The towering set of Samson and Delilah reached the ceiling of the tallest soundstage on the Paramount lot. Aqua silk drapes threaded with gold-framed twelve-foot frescoes of pastoral scenes and vines heavy with purple grapes. The enormous backdrop showed olive trees silhouetted against a sunset that deepened into dark cornflower blue. It was Cecil B. DeMille’s first Technicolor movie.

  Kathryn exclaimed, “This is all very striking!”

  The assistant director next to her pulled at a thread in his hand-knit argyle sweater. “Miss Lamarr apologizes for keeping you waiting. This being her first color picture and all, Mister Westmore is taking extra care with her makeup.”