West of Sunset (5 page)

His instinct was to wait a safe interval and follow her, but was that what she wanted? She'd said goodnight, after a fashion. Maybe this was all part of the chase. Dessert was being served as they suffered yet another speech, the waiters reaching past them to set down plates. Across the table Dottie was watching him. He nodded for coffee, stirred in a spoonful of sugar, but after a few sips relented and excused himself as if he needed to use the restroom.

He'd given her enough time to leave, if that had been her intent. If not, she'd be waiting for him in the lobby.

He strode up the ramp and through the arch of crossed palms, the words of the speaker nattering at his back. Besides the shoeblack at his stand and the woman manning the cigar counter, the lobby was empty, its wall of phone booths dark. He crossed beneath the chandeliers to the main entrance, a valet anticipating him, holding the door open.

Again, no one. He scanned the parking lot for motion, then Wilshire. Above the red neon topping the crown of the Brown Derby, searchlights scissored against the dark sky.

“Car for you, sir?”

“Just getting some fresh air.”

As a last resort he detoured down the hall to the restrooms, stopping at the cigarette machine for an alibi. In the mirror his mouth was grim, his bow tie cockeyed. Despite his excitement, he was disappointed. Too soon the night, which might have taken them anywhere, was over.

Dottie noted his return but didn't comment on it. He opened his new pack of Raleighs and lit one, wondering if the girl was purposely feeding this craving in him. Was she just a flirt? That she was engaged mystified him. Maybe this was a last fling, a final reckless gesture at his expense. There was still another speech to be endured, and more dancing, but it all seemed pointless. He wanted to go home and burrow under the covers in his tuxedo and sleep. Instead he drank his coffee, lukewarm now, and clawed at a corner of his sheet cake with his fork, already fretting over when he would see her again.

Felicitations on this most auspicious day,
he wrote Zelda.
May your returns be multitudinous and joyful. I hope you enjoy the pastels. I remember how you loved the Redons glowing in that black room in the back of the Louvre. If you need more, or anything for your art within reason, I've replenished your canteen, so please don't hesitate. All is well here, just settling to the task. Attended a compulsory function at the Cocoanut Grove the other night and thought of our evenings and mornings there. If I weren't so aware of time and our own ghosts floating about the halls I would say nothing has changed. The ocean on a calm day is still the color of your eyes. The hope now is that Scottie will see you and make a stop in Montgomery before heading out here, and I, Metro Goldwyn and Mayer all permitting, will return in September so you and I can take a few days together at the shore. Know that I think of you often and tenderly, and remain, in this bright, forsaken place, Your own Do-Do.

M
ornings, by design, he woke at five. He loved the newness of the day, the hungover quiet of the Garden broken only by the plashing of fountains, birds twittering in the hedges. Over the years he'd watched Hollywood devour his friends from back East, sapping their nobler ambitions as it filled their pockets. The heat was as much to blame as the money, the whole city drowsy with a subtropical languor. After a shift in the Iron Lung, even he was tempted to loll around the pool and do nothing. Dottie and Benchley and Sid could afford to slough off, with their Guild cards and laundry lists of credits, but he still needed to sell stories to pay the bills.

His plan was to get up early and do his own work while he was fresh, except he hadn't honestly slept in years, a side effect of his Cokes and his smoking. The bed he and Zelda once shared languished in storage outside of Baltimore, likely full of mice by now. At night he relied on two Nembutals and a few teaspoons of chloral hydrate to soothe him. In the morning, standing before the medicine cabinet, he washed down an equally necessary pair of Benzedrine, and soon evened out again. He shaved and showered, whistling ditties of his own invention, put on his suit as if he were going to work, made himself a pot of coffee, hung up his jacket and sat down at the kitchen table to write.

For three hours he wrote badly, rushing things, frustratingly aware of the ugly clock above the sink, sometimes stalking out to his car in a rage because he'd had to leave in the middle of a scene, and yet every morning he managed to produce a couple of pages. They might be rickety, but he had the eye and the patience of a professional used to fixing worse. As with his Grandmother McQuillan's black pudding, nothing was wasted. If a scene didn't play, he took the good lines and saved them in his notebook for later. The one thing he could trust in this world was his sensibility. If he had failed his talent, as Ernest held, it had not been through under-use, but, rather, as he thought some mornings, his heart galloping from too much coffee, the opposite. Like an athlete, he had trained himself, day after day, and trusted that when he came to the arena he would naturally perform. He'd been doing it since before the Armistice, even when Zelda fell apart, and now, alone, saw no end, no respite. He was terrified he would die, pencil in hand, leaving an unfinished sentence and Scottie a legacy of debt. These still mornings in the kitchen were a kind of penance meant to exorcise that fear. When he was working, it worked. It was when he stopped that the world returned, and his problems with it, which was the reason he worked in the first place. He was a writer—all he wanted from this world were the makings of another truer to his heart.

The story he was working on was a burlesque about a man who wakes up one morning to find a noose cinched tightly around his neck. The man realizes that the rope attached to the noose runs across the room and out the door of his apartment and down the stairs of his building, so he gets up and follows it in his pajamas. Outside, the man sees the rope goes to all the places he frequents—the newsstand, the grocery, the tavern—crossing and recrossing the street so cars and buses and trolleys run over yet never sever it. The rope wraps pythonlike around light poles and fire hydrants and mailboxes. So far that was all he had, but the possibilities were legion, and driving to work, he happily searched La Cienega for details to use.

His second week at Metro his car had been towed. Eddie Knopf had neglected to tell him parking was a privilege of the stars. Since then he'd found a dirt lot across the boulevard for fifteen cents which the day players used, entering the side gate each morning with the hopeful hordes. Unlike all of his hall mates except Oppy, who never seemed to leave, he was punctual. Eddie's door was closed, but as he walked past he liked to believe his diligence was being tallied toward some future reward. In his Frigidaire of an office he lifted a brace of Cokes out of his briefcase and set them next to the air vent, then sat down at his desk with pencil and paper to ply his trade, shivering like Bob Cratchit.

A Yank at Oxford
was a patch job. A simple fish-out-of-water conceit with high-toned scenery, the original novel had been improved upon by a succession of writers responding to producers' notes, adding larger and larger climaxes to satisfy some crude concept of drama. It was all fistfights and mistaken identities, an insult to the most casual moviegoer, let alone the dons of Oxford. Beyond the problem of Robert Taylor trying to play twenty years younger, who would buy, for instance, that any student, no matter how drunk, would be fool enough to sucker punch the dean of students at a party, then accuse his rival and, merely because he was English, be believed? Or that our hero's girl, who knew he was innocent, would break off with him, only to return, cheering him to victory during the big finale of the track meet? It made no sense, yet because it was his first assignment, he threw himself at these absurd scenes, trying to find a hidden inner logic that might knit them together.

“You can't spin gold out of shit,” Dottie said, leveling a scathing look at Alan, and though it wasn't lunchtime, Scott wondered if she was drunk.

“What did they ask for?” Alan asked.

Eddie had told him to punch up Robert Taylor's dialogue, make it tougher, snappier.

“Then do that,” Alan said.

He did, slowly going through the whole script, pacing, playing Taylor's scenes to the boulevard and the pictures on the wall, and gradually it began to take shape. The story didn't need to be consistent, only the hero. Everyone and everything else existed merely to reveal his true character, which, at the end of the picture, after the obfuscating plot, proved to be that of the star himself.

“We need more of the girl,” Eddie said during their first story conference. “Forget the set-up, forget him—it's a romance. That's gotta come first. We don't got that, we got bupkis.”

Because he saw Sheilah as the girl, he thought it already worked. He studied the scenes between them coldly and discovered he was wrong. She was shy and bookish, a don's daughter despite her good looks. She had none of Sheilah's charm or elusiveness, none of her toughness. To remedy that, he made her a fencer, introducing her in a new scene. Now they met cute in the gym. Walking along, the hero snared an errant foil she'd struck from an opponent's hand. He noticed her raven hair fanning out behind her visor and waited, as she disarmed her opponent again, to catch a glimpse of her face. When he'd finished the scene, he was pleased. The delay would make the audience curious, as well as adding a hint of mystery. The payoff would be the actress's face, utterly fresh, since this was her U.S. debut. Like Sheilah she was a Brit, and irresistible in a dark way. He kept her headshot above his desk for inspiration—Vivien Leigh.

His own curiosity was about to be quelled. His downstairs neighbor Eddie Mayer knew Sheilah's agent, and through a complicated back-and-forth, arranged for the two of them to have dinner, with one condition: that Eddie play chaperone.

To Scott, it was a victory. She could have just said no.

He asked Bogie where they should go.

“You want to make yourself look good,” Bogie said, “take her to the Clover Club. It's pricey, but the food's swell and the band's smooth, plus there's always some action in back.”

“She's not that kind of girl,” Mayo said.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“She's a lady. She's going to be a duchess or something.”

“Not if our boy has anything to say about it. Ain't that right, Fitz?”

“We're just having dinner.”

“Sure,” Bogie said. “You just want to make sure everything's gonna be hunky-dory, I know how it is. I been to dinner a few times myself.”

Bogie offered him the use of his new pinstripe suit, and his car, a fat DeSoto, but he could see, with a writer's built-in prescience, how that would eventually become a lie. Eddie said he could drive, but that too was somehow less than honest. As if the date were a test of his honor, Scott would drive his own car and wear his own clothes, and if they weren't good enough for her, so be it. He was prepared for her to say that the most they could be was friends. Knowing he shouldn't be seeing her in the first place, he'd already accepted defeat.

Her place was up in the hills above Sunset, a salmon-tinted villa overlooking the bowl of the city, golden with the day's end. They were early. Like the chaperone he was playing, Eddie accompanied him to the door, then let Scott ring the bell. Though the sun wasn't quite down, the outside light popped on. She'd been waiting for him. Standing there empty-handed, he wished he'd brought flowers, a possibility he'd initially vetoed and still considered too pushy. He thought he should be doing this by himself, not attended by a familiar. He should have begged off, held out for a better chance. He should have given up completely. Faced with the fulfillment of his most tenuous, ill-conceived desire, he was second-guessing everything, and then the door opened and she smiled and gave him her hand and her cheek to be kissed and she was just as thrilling and regal as he remembered.

“You found me.”

“We did.”

She wore a pearlescent silk blouse and dove gray skirt under a short black Oriental jacket, and in what might have been a concession to his height, flats. She still had her ring.

“Hello, Eddie,” she said, as if amused by his presence.

“Evening,” Eddie said, then tagged along after them to the car.

Scott opened the door for her and handed her up. The awkward formality of the situation appealed to the gallant in him, whose sense of etiquette harkened back to Miss Van Arnum's and the ice cream socials of Buffalo.

“Why, thank you, kind sir,” she said, tucking in her skirt so he could close the door.

His manners were learned, hers innate. Her every look, her every gesture was meant to put him at ease. He intuited that she'd grown up around money.

“Is this your car?” she asked.

“It is.”

“It has character.”

“It has the indispensable quality of being paid for.”

“I thought perhaps your Rolls was in the shop.”

“So you've had one then,” he said.

“I can't say I've had the pleasure.”
Cahn't.

“What do you have in your garage?”

“You'll laugh.”

“I promise not to.”

“A Ford.”

“With character.”

“I'm working on it.”

They'd reached the foot of her street and were idling at the stop sign, waiting to take a left on Sunset. “You have to stick your nose out, otherwise you'll never get across. That's it. Go quickly. They'll stop.”

As he pulled out, another car almost broadsided them, honking as it shot past. Scott refrained from giving him a Roman fig.

“Are you always such a cautious driver?” she asked when they were safe.

In back Eddie laughed, and Scott found him in the mirror. “Around here you have to be.”

“It's true,” she said. “The drivers here are a menace.”

Widely known to be mob-owned, the Clover Club was only a couple of blocks down Sunset, a prisonlike edifice built into the hillside. Save a strip of windows on the third floor, the front was blank to keep the police from raiding the place too easily. A ramp of a driveway circled around back, where two bouncers in suits guarded a canopied entrance. The cars in the lot reflected the club's clientele, gangsters and show people. The first open spot he saw was next to a forest-green Rolls. He pulled in beside it to keep the joke going.

“Not in the shop,” she noted.

“Not my color.”

“Nor mine.”

She waited for him to come around and let her out. He offered his hand, and again she gave him hers, a wordless gesture intimate as a kiss, even with Eddie rolling his eyes behind her. She moved like a dancer, a loose-limbed precision that snapped the bouncers to attention. He wouldn't have been surprised if she'd spent a season with the ballet, perhaps as a teen, before she'd bloomed. Zelda had never had the height or the upright carriage. He could see it in Sheilah, and remembered his own boyhood poise lessons, balancing the city directory on his head as he tightroped across the parlor.

“Evenin', Miss Graham,” one of the torpedoes said, holding the door for her.

“Good evening, Billy,” she nodded. “Tommy.”

He'd forgotten, this was her world. He was the greenhorn.

At the bar they ran into Bogart and Mayo. “Well, well, what a surprise.” Bogie broke into a smile and rose, offering his stool to Sheilah. “You kids have time for a drink? I've been telling Mayo what a swell writer you are—not you, Eddie, I mean Fitz here. Better'n Hemingway, and I mean that. What'll you all have?”

While the banter was improvised, Scott asking for a Coke was scripted, as was making Eddie's rye a double. Sheilah sipped her sherry, pinching the stem of her glass as if she were at charm school. As always, they talked shop. Rumor was, Metro was bringing in Mervyn LeRoy for
The Wizard of Oz
. Sheilah knew that Bogie had worked with him on Broadway.

“Smart cookie. Knows his way around a big number.”

“Scott says you're gonna be a duchess,” Mayo said wetly. “Wha'zat like?”

Above her permanent smirk, her eyes swam, unfocused, and he flashed on a frightening thought. He could not recall ever seeing her sober.

“A marchioness,” Sheilah said. “It's intimidating for a lifelong commoner like myself.”

“A marionette? Doesn't sound that fun to me.”

“Easy, Sluggy,” Bogie said.

“What? 'm asking a question. You're no Prince Charming yourself.”

“And that,” Bogie said, taking her arm, “is our cue. You kids have fun now.”

“That was interesting,” Sheilah said upstairs as they waited for a table.

“She's always like that,” Eddie said.