In the time it had taken to knee a jackass in the balls, Gwendolyn’s hopes for Fox Fanfare had plummeted from “How exciting!” to “What a nightmare.” She had left the studio assuming a “You’re fired” telegram would be waiting for her at the Garden, but by the time the following Friday morning had rolled around again, she’d heard nothing. She had walked onto the set expecting to spot Hurley’s over-stuffed silhouette lurking beyond the cameras, but he hadn’t been there. Nor was he around the following week, or the week after that.
He appeared during the second week in January just as fan mail had started to arrive, mostly from women complimenting her wardrobe and asking which stores she shopped at. With help from Billy Travilla’s battalion of seamstresses, she’d come up with most of the designs herself. As flattering as this fan mail was, it offered little in the way of job security. So she wasn’t quite prepared for Titus Hurley to approach her and say, “You’re becoming one of television’s fashion icons. Keep it up, my dear. Good job!”
By the middle of February, ratings had started increasing and Hurley showed no signs of pulling any more grabby-grabby stunts. She was just thankful that she’d dodged a bullet by keeping her trap shut.
Gwendolyn set her pocketbook and hat on the counter and, as she waited for her makeup guy, Baines, she read Kathryn’s scoop that Darryl Zanuck was leaving Fox to live in Europe with his protégé, Bella Darvi.
“Hello!” Rex’s cheerful voice filled the dressing room. A Marilyn Monroe knock-off with a faintly mocking smile sauntered behind him; she fell against the doorjamb chewing a cud of Juicy Fruit.
“This is Felicity,” Rex said, “our new cue card girl.”
“What happened to Phoebe?”
“Run off to marry a sailor from Kentucky, which is what happens when you go out for a drunken night on the tiles in Long Beach. She calls it a ‘whirlwind romance.’ I call it a ‘fiasco in the making.’”
Gwendolyn told Felicity that she was pleased to meet her, but received a popped gum bubble in reply. She told Gwendolyn “I’ll see you out there” in a tone that implied Gwendolyn should consider herself lucky.
“And now,” Rex continued, “on to more exciting news. Management has bought some new cameras, which means the lights don’t have to be so bright. Velda the Vampire is history!”
Without the draconian mask of makeup troweled on like marzipan, Gwendolyn stepped onto the Fox Fanfare set without feeling like some misbegotten member of the living dead. She could breathe! When Rex approached her to go through the three facts for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, she found it hard to concentrate.
“The Fox executives were so impressed with Elia Kazan’s direction that they wanted to reshoot the movie in Technicolor, but Kazan refused.”
“Got it.” I don’t think I’m even going to sweat.
“This is Gene Kelly’s favorite movie.”
“Okay.” What a relief!
“Peggy Ann Garner received a juvenile Oscar for her performance—are you listening?”
“This new makeup!” she exclaimed. “I feel like a different woman.”
The ten-minute bell rang across the soundstage. Felicity’s platinum-blonde hair was hard to miss as she took her place beside the cue cards table. Gwendolyn cupped her hands around her mouth and called out, “Don’t be nervous, honey. Because if you are, your hands will shake, and I won’t be able to read a word!” Felicity replied that she wasn’t the nervous type so there was nothing to worry about.
When Rex started counting down from ten, Gwendolyn marveled at how calm she felt without that abominable war paint. No underarm sweat stains; no shortness of breath. The red light on the top of camera one shone brightly.
“Hello, Los Angeles, and welcome to Fox Fanfare. And boy, do we have a great show for you tonight.”
Gwendolyn glided through her welcome speech and narration of the behind-the-scenes footage of Fox’s next big release: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel. By the time they returned from the ad break to introduce A Tree Grows in Brooklyn with the prepared trivia, Gwendolyn was almost giddy with enthusiasm.
“And welcome back,” Gwendolyn told the camera. “Before we air tonight’s movie, I want to share with you some fun facts that you might not know.” Felicity let the first cue card fall to the floor. “The director John Ford knew the real Wyatt Earp personally when he was a young lad.” John Ford? I thought Elia Kazan directed this movie. “And always claimed his staging of the gunfight for this picture—” Gunfight? In Brooklyn? “—was how Earp had explained it to him. And let’s face it, you can’t get a more accurate eyewitness to the OK Corral than—WHAT THE—?”
In a rush of agonizing bewilderment, Gwendolyn realized that she’d been prattling on about the following week’s presentation. Felicity had held up the wrong cards, making Gwendolyn look like a dippy birdbrain who didn’t know what she was doing. And she had almost said “hell” on television.
She felt herself blush. “I’m so very sorry, folks.” Felicity stood still, not checking her cards or rearranging them, but staring blankly at Gwendolyn, her mouth drooping open. “Get a load of me, gibbering on about My Darling Clementine when that’s next week’s feature. Meanwhile, back to Brooklyn and a specific tree that grows there. Let me first tell you—” Felicity had completely given up on her cue cards, forcing Gwendolyn to wing it. “—A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the all-time favorite movie of Fred Astaire. No, wait. That’s not right. It’s Gene Kelly. Yes! A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is Gene Kelly’s favorite movie. Or is it Frank Sinatra’s? Hmmm. I’m thinking of Carousel, which Frank Sinatra was originally signed to star in.”
Rex stood off to the right making a slashing motion across his neck. She was more than happy to stop her ludicrous monkey-jabber.
“How about we just roll the movie?” she told camera one. “From 1945, here is Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”
The Nickodell restaurant on Melrose Avenue seemed a safe haven for a mortified television hostess. It also helped that the Nickodell’s doubles were more like triples.
“I feel like I’m still blushing,” she told Rex.
“You are—but it gives you a rosy glow.”
“I’d like to give that Felicity a rosy glow.” Gwendolyn swilled a mouthful of Seagram’s 7 Crown; the tension whipped up by the last couple of hours began to bleed away. “Where did you find her?”
“Management sent her.”
“To sabotage us?”
“Stop it, Miss Paranoid. This is live television—la merde was going to hit le fan sooner or later and quite honestly, better now while we’re still small fry.” Rex started toying with a Nickodell book of matches, his breath coming in short, hiccupy pants. “Tell me—that photo you keep in your makeup vanity, the one with you and Kathryn Massey.”
Gwendolyn cast around the room, surprised how busy it was for ten o’clock at night. Since television had started replacing nightclubs, restaurants like these now emptied out earlier. “The one on the diving board?” she asked. “It was taken at the Garden of Allah. Kathryn, Marcus, and I, we’ve lived there for years.”
“Marcus? Is that his name? The guy in the photo?”
“We were celebrating his getting booted out of MGM.”
“You threw a party for him getting fired?”
“It was more of an ‘I quit before you fire me’ type situation.”
In the months they’d worked together, Gwendolyn hadn’t quite been able to figure out her director. He wore no wedding ring, nor was there any mention of wives or girlfriends.
She raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Are you interested?”
Rex smiled quietly. “I’m happily ensconced in that department.”
A pair of young women in fur stoles they probably hadn’t bought themselves made a giggly entrance designed to turn heads. Most of the patrons resumed their meals but the halo of platinum hair captured Gwendolyn’s gaze as they threaded their way toward the bar. Someone called out “FELICITY!”
So I’m Paula Paranoid, huh?
Felicity and her friend deposited themselves on a pair of bar stools and got flirty with the bartender.
“What’s his last name?” Rex asked.
“Who?”
“Marcus. It’s just that he looks so familiar.”
“Most people recognize him from when he told the House Un-American Activities Committee to take a running jump. It’s Adler, by the way.”
Two more figures appeared at the restaurant’s entrance; the one in brown tweed looked like a three-hundred-pound sausage crammed into a two-hundred-pound skin. They bypassed the maître d’ and headed straight for the bar.
“I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” Gwendolyn said.
Rex looked up from his menu. “What’d I miss?”
“Mister Girdles joining Miss Cue Cards at the bar.”
Gwendolyn saw only polite handshakes and tight smiles, but after tonight’s shambles, she’d kick herself if she didn’t investigate further. She slipped out of the booth and wove a circuitous path around the perimeter of the room, her eyes glued to the foursome. As she drew close, Sausage Man dropped his gold cigarette lighter on the black-and-burgundy-striped carpet. She was close enough to catch the lewd tone as he cracked an off-color joke. Felicity and her friend laughed vacantly as he bent down to retrieve the lighter.
The chances of Gwendolyn and Felicity ending up in the same bar were slight, but Felicity and Hurley meeting for the first time tonight? Those chances, Gwendolyn decided, were tissue-paper thin.
The Garden of Allah was fairly quiet for a Friday night, at least compared to the old days when the party would just be getting started. As she drew closer to her apartment, she saw someone crouching down to slip a piece of paper under the door.
“Marcus, honey, what are you doing?”
He straightened up. “You’re not going to believe what I just found.”
She inserted her key into the lock and opened her door. “Does the name Rex Halliday ring a bell with you?”
“Your director?”
“He saw our diving board photo and said you looked familiar.” She deposited her pocketbook onto the dining table. It was late and those three double Seagram’s had been one and a half too many. She shucked off her hat. “Can this wait till morning?”
He produced an envelope. “Remember how on the night of the Wrong Door Raid you took one of my old cameras with you and pretended to take photos of Sinatra and DiMaggio to intimidate them?”
Gwendolyn looked at Marcus’s envelope. “What of it?”
“The Hollywood Hotel is being torn down this summer and I planned to take photos of the old place. But I wanted the prints to have an antique feel about them, so I pulled out my old camera—the one you had that night.”
“I used it to scare them. It was just a prop.”
“I always keep film in my cameras. You never know when you’re going to want to capture a moment.”
A ripple of apprehension pricked Gwendolyn’s scalp. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“It’s remarkable how much detail you captured in such a low-light environment.”
She ripped open the flap of Marcus’s envelope and took out a dozen prints. The top one showed Frank Sinatra with his famous crooner lips pulled back into a snarl, the tendons along his throat straining as he screamed. The second one caught Joe DiMaggio swinging his baseball bat above his head, his lips bunched together, and his nostrils flared. The next one captured private eye Barney Ruditsky pushing against the chest of some other guy Gwendolyn barely recalled.
“Are they all like this?”
“Wait till you see the one of Sinatra and DiMaggio screaming at each other. They look like they can’t decide whether to punch each other’s lights out or get a room at the Shakin’ Sheets Motel.”
Gwendolyn kept flipping until she found it. Their faces were inches apart with mouths wide open like a pair of German Pinschers eager to breed.
“The negatives are in there, too.” Marcus got up from the table. “How you captured them in a meager porch light makes them rather miraculous.”
“But I wasn’t even trying!”
A cheeky smile split his face in two before he kissed her good night on the top of her head and saw himself out. Gwendolyn stayed at the table, turning over the photos one by one. Balled fists. Neckties skewed. Eyes bulging with fury. And Joe DiMaggio’s damned baseball bat.