Love Me (10 page)

The only thing that matters is that I look like a million bucks
.

T
he eleventh annual Academy Awards had no official host.

It was the first time this had ever happened, and nobody was quite sure how. Some spoke in hushed tones of a bitter intra-Academy feud; smug insider types were spreading stories about individual studios pushing so hard for one of their stars to be named emcee that the Academy had finally thrown up its hands, King Solomon–like, and refused to choose anyone at all. Others, of the inveterate gossip variety, claimed the organizers had gone down a list of possibilities, each of which had proved too old, too boring, too unreliable, or too drunk to be trusted onstage.

Whatever the reason, it was abundantly clear that no one was steering the ship. The atmosphere in the ballroom of the Biltmore Hotel was practically anarchic. Whole categories were skipped. Confused—or tipsy—celebrities wandered
across the stage, looking embarrassed and desperate, as though they’d gotten lost on their way to the bathroom. At least three times the proceedings came to a halt so that the next presenter (and in one case, the recipient) could be tracked down at the bar.

For Margo, the chaos simply seemed to add to the surrealism, the sense that the whole evening was like something out of a dream. She thought she’d been in Hollywood long enough not to get starstruck anymore, but no red-carpet premiere or Holmby Hills wrap party could have prepared her for
this
.

This was the
Oscars
.

Clark Gable and Carole Lombard were here, getting the stink eye from Joan Crawford, who was hanging on the arm of Franchot Tone. Katharine Hepburn was whispering something in Spencer Tracy’s ear, much to Mrs. Tracy’s visible chagrin. Leo Karp was sitting with Louis B. Mayer, who wasn’t drinking, and Harry Cohn, who was.
Greta Garbo was there
. True, she wasn’t actually
speaking
to anybody, but she was
there
.

“If the Germans dropped a bomb on the Biltmore right now, they could wipe out the whole movie business, just like that,” Gabby whispered across the table, a mischievous gleam in her eyes.

Margo and Gabby hadn’t been quite as close lately—the stunt Gabby had pulled last year making sure Margo caught her “boyfriend” Jimmy with his boyfriend in much more intimate circumstances than Margo had ever seen him made it a little hard to trust her—but Margo was glad she was there. She was glad they were all there, in their little Olympus enclave: Gabby and Jimmy; a preternaturally calm Larry Julius, his only concession to nerves the endless parade of smoldering
cigarettes he kept inserting into the expressionless mask of his face; Dane, who was, of course, a shaking, trembling, nervous wreck; Gabby’s mother, dressed to the nines in some sort of bizarre ensemble of ostrich feathers dyed a violent purple and—to Gabby’s tremendous embarrassment—flirting outrageously with Larry’s (ironically) ostrichlike assistant, Stan. Harry Gordon, although he looked markedly downcast, even before he lost, and his mother, a plump gray-haired lady with a European accent who every few minutes proclaimed she was about to faint with pride—but impressively, never did.

And what about my mother? What would she be like if she were here?
Helen Frobisher’s pale image swam unbidden into Margo’s mind. The blond chignon with not a hair out of place, the icy blue eyes, the slim, manicured hands that were always cool, yet strangely comforting …

Her train of thought was interrupted by Dane’s clammy hand squeezing hers. “You look beautiful,” he muttered mechanically.

“So you told me.”

“I did?”

“About a hundred times.”

Poor Dane
. His gaze looked almost haunted, fixed on something none of the rest of them could see. He’d barely even glanced at her when she’d floated down the stairs at the house in Malibu in the blue hydrangea dress two weeks of deprivation had finally let her squeeze into.

All that grapefruit for nothing
, she’d thought. But it hadn’t all come to naught. There’d been enough camera flashes in her vicinity to guarantee that, nominee or no, she’d have her picture in more than one newspaper tomorrow morning, and as for her effect on the players of Hollywood, Mr. Walt Disney himself
had materialized before her, stroking his chin thoughtfully with an ink-stained finger and murmured: “Blue. Interesting. You look like a fairy.”

“He’s looking for inspiration,” Gabby said. “Didn’t you hear? He’s notorious for it. Rex Mandalay practically had a fit when he saw
Snow White
and her dress looked exactly like one he designed for Olivia DeHavilland when he was at Warner Brothers. Rex wants to sue.”

“Come on. You can’t sue over a dress design on a cartoon.”

“Oh please, Margo, this is Hollywood. You can sue someone who said they’d pay for lunch and then skipped out on the bill. You just have to decide if it’s worth making a point. And the hell of it is, Rex would win too, if Karp would let him take it to court. But he won’t. The dreaded negative publicity.”

Gabby’s eyes were unnaturally bright tonight. Clearly, she had decided chemical intervention was the only way her Oscar night was going to be quite as
peppy
as she wanted it, and she was putting the booze away at a pretty impressive rate too.
God help me
, Margo thought,
if she gets sick she’s on her own. I’m not taking her to the ladies’ room to wash the puke out of her dress. She’s her mother’s problem
.

“Besides,” Gabby continued, the words tumbling out at an increasingly rapid pace, “as long as Rex Mandalay is under contract, every single sketch, every scrap of fabric, every goddamn thought in his head is the absolute property of Olympus Studios. Karp owns him, lock, stock, and barrel, just the same as he owns us. Rex just has a nicer dressing room.”

“Oh, Gabs, come on,” Jimmy said. “You don’t really think that.”

“Don’t I? Why would I say it, then? And why would I be
performing tonight like a trained monkey with some overrated bandleader I’ve never even rehearsed with if I didn’t have to jump whenever he said so?”

“Still,” Jimmy said uneasily, “he’s just doing his job. You make him out to be some kind of slave driver.”

“Oh no,” Gabby said sweetly. “That’s not my intention at all. Mr. Karp is the slave
owner
. My mother is the slave driver.”

Viola’s head jerked up. “
Gabrielle
. Please.”

“That’s not my name,” Gabby snapped back. “And what would you call someone who profits off the unpaid labor of another human being? I may not have been quite as good a student as Margo here—not that I ever had the chance—but it sure sounds an awful lot like slavery to me.”

Viola’s face, already rouged a bright red, turned purple. The table held its collective breath, braced for the shock of a mother’s terrible wrath.

It was another mother who saved them.

“
Sha
, everybody,
sha
,” Harry’s mother interrupted, waving her hands in the air with unperturbed annoyance, as though Gabby and Viola were nothing but a couple of buzzing flies at an outdoor picnic. “Shut your mouths already and let an old lady hear what’s going on, for once in her life. Spencer Tracy on the stage, can you believe it? That Sadie Gorenstein in her lifetime would see such a thing, who would have thought it was possible!”

Cracking his first smile of the night, Harry patted her hand. “Gordon, Ma, it’s Gordon. You have to excuse my mother,” he said, looking around the table. “She’s not accustomed to drinking champagne.”

Bette Davis was announced the winner of the Best Actress award, to no one’s surprise. Watching the great star, dressed in black silk trimmed with an odd little stole of white feathers, march unsmilingly and determinedly across the stage to pick up the second statuette of her unsmiling, determined career, Margo felt herself relax at last.
So it was true
. Davis’s Oscar was a fait accompli.

It made Margo realize what a long shot her hopes had been for this year, how many rungs she still had to climb. She hadn’t lost anything or disappointed anyone; she was simply at the start of a very long road, a road most people would never even be able to find on a map. Somehow, this made her feel better—not just better, in fact, but
great
. For the first time since the nominations had been announced, she felt
free
, and she found herself on her feet, whistling and cheering with the others as Bette Davis finished thanking Jack Warner and took her final bows.

Spencer Tracy guided her toward the wings and stepped back to the microphone, tripping slightly over the cord as he did so.
Maybe he and Gabby will be sharing a bathroom stall later
.

“And now,” the star announced, slurring his words slightly, “the Best Actor category.”

Under the table, Dane’s broad, slightly clammy hand found Margo’s.

“To present the award,” Spencer Tracy continued, mopping the sweat off his forehead with the palm of his hand, “we have a very special surprise … ah … presenter. Someone we all love very much, and who we haven’t seen for a very long time. Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce, or rather reacquaint you
with, a wonderful actress and very dear friend … Miss Diana Chesterfield!”

Miss Diana Chesterfield
.

It was like seeing a ghost.

Time seemed to stop. You could practically hear the sound of your own churning organs in the previously boisterous room as the great star floated toward the microphone, her expression serene. Her face was pale, but there was no trace of the mad, ruined girl Margo had seen ranting in a wheelchair at the sanatorium all those months ago. With her hair like spun gold, nodding regally in a white satin gown trimmed with snowy ermine, she looked like a storybook princess, like someone out of another time.

Then, suddenly, the crowd was on its feet. Gabby’s jaw hung down somewhere around her ankles. Mr. Karp was weeping openly, accepting a monogrammed handkerchief from Louis B. Mayer, who, not to be outdone on the sentimentality front, was crying as well. From the corner of her eye, Margo saw Larry Julius’s smug smile, a clear sign of pride at having pulled off such a coup.

Diana’s curving rosebud lips mouthed her thanks, but Margo couldn’t hear her. She couldn’t hear her read the names of the nominees. She didn’t hear the tearing of the envelope, or Diana’s delighted squeal as she read Dane’s name out loud.

All she saw was Dane Forrest leap to his feet without so much as a backward glance. She saw him rush the stage, gathering the golden statuette—
both golden statuettes
, she thought cruelly—into his arms. She saw him sweeping Diana into a lengthy, tearful embrace.

And she saw the gleeful photographers with their flashing bulbs, popping away at the glorious reunion of the dashing Dane Forrest and the gorgeous Diana Chesterfield, America’s sweethearts, back in each other’s arms at last.

Just like something out of the movies.

T
ypical. It was just so typical.

Just when all of Hollywood was
finally
going to devote their undivided attention to Gabby for a change.

She’d been so ready to perform. The dress the studio had “loaned” her was a sickly baby pink, as always, but was significantly lower cut than usual, which might actually convince the assembled moguls that the juvenile property known as Gabby Preston had cleavage that might be advantageously displayed on a more regular basis.

She’d come up with a way to deal with Eddie Sharp—whom she had still not met, let alone rehearsed with. She, Jimmy, and Walter Gould, the musical director of their production unit, had put together a list of songs she’d do and the keys in which she’d do them, and if Eddie gave her any trouble when she presented
them to him, she’d say, “My way or the highway,” just like James Cagney did in that old flick she’d watched in the Main Street cinema on the studio lot.

She’d never been in better voice; her low notes were rich, her high notes were soaring, and everything in between was pitch-perfect and full.

Best of all, the green pills for once were working the way they were supposed to. Mixed with the champagne, the little green darlings were giving her the feeling that she was invincible, that she could—and would—do anything she set her mind to.