Kathryn let go of Nelson’s hand and grabbed Doris’s arm as they walked out of the auditorium of the Vista Theatre and into the foyer.
“I’ll never doubt you again. Nobody’ll remember Rock Around the Clock in five years’ time but it does capture the here and now.”
“So you’ll write about it in your column?” Doris asked.
“You bet I will.” Because boy, do I love writing about low-budget teen pics as though they’re Hollywood’s savior.
It had been three months now, and Kathryn’s pay discrepancy still chafed at her ego. But she wasn’t sure what to do about it. Wilkerson was entitled to pay whatever he wanted and she couldn’t blame Connolly for snapping up the enormous carrot Wilkerson had dangled in front of him. If she was going to get paid more, she would have to earn it. All over again. Evidently, her achievements of the last twenty years amounted to a thimbleful of So What?
The Zanuck scoop had been tailor-made for her purposes but Wilkerson had gone in for a hernia operation the day after it came out. His recovery had been painfully slow, so by the time he was back on deck, her moment had passed.
When Doris tried to convince Kathryn that she would be the first columnist to herald Rock Around the Clock’s landmark status, Kathryn doubted she was in any position to pick and choose her scoops. Plus, Columbia was putting on a post-screening cocktail party so it wouldn’t be a complete waste.
Kathryn surveyed the usual mix of cast and crew, P.R. flunkies, and assorted hangers-on who’d been promised domestic champagne and smoked gouda on Ritz crackers. There was no sign of Louella Parsons or Hedda Hopper, though. Nor Sheilah Graham, Army Archerd or Mike Connolly. It wasn’t much but at least she had this one to herself.
Nelson and Marcus appeared with champagne flutes in hand. As they passed them around, Gwendolyn turned to Kathryn, her face full of uncertainty. “There’s a woman in red near the concessions stand. Do we know her?”
Kathryn stole a glance at the solitary figure with a matching pocketbook, remarkable only in how she hugged it to her side, as though she feared pickpockets. She looked close to sixty but had managed to hold on to her slim waistline. She neither smiled nor frowned as she picked her way through the chattering crowd toward them.
As the stranger approached, Kathryn decided to let her speak first. When she did, it was Gwendolyn she addressed. “Do you remember me?”
“I’m sorry but I don’t.”
“I’m Guinevere Brykk. B-R-Y-K-K.”
Doris nudged Gwennie. “And your name is Gwendolyn Brick! How curious!”
The name meant nothing to Kathryn but it sparked a flicker of surprise in Gwendolyn. “Of course.” Her voice was now dreamy and far away. “You must forgive me. It’s been, what, twenty years?”
Kathryn prided herself on her ability to recall names—how could she forget someone called Guinevere Brykk?
As the crowd around them grew more animated thanks to the free-flowing champagne, the air between Gwendolyn and this woman thickened.
“Are you still a nurse, Miss Brykk?” Gwendolyn asked.
“I retired just recently.”
“And that doctor you worked for, the one who had offices in Chinatown—” Gwendolyn shot Kathryn a heavy look “—is he still in practice?”
Kathryn wondered why Gwendolyn would ever have needed to visit Chinatown. That part of the city wasn’t terribly safe for a single, pretty white woman—“OH!”
“You were the patient, weren’t you?” Guinevere Brykk’s cool Pacific blue eyes had softened.
“I believe so.”
August 3rd, 1935 was a date Kathryn had relegated to the farthermost recesses of her memory, where days best forgotten could be boarded up and painted over. From that day to this, she’d never needed to recall the details of her abortion; her hands grew damp at being confronted with it now.
Nelson looked from Gwendolyn to Guinevere, then to Kathryn. “What happened twenty years ago?”
“Distant past,” she told Nelson.
“Actually, it’s not,” Guinevere said.
Kathryn lobbed Marcus a meaningful look. He knew a get-your-sister-out-of-here expression when he saw one. He suggested to Doris that it was time for another round of drinks and gently steered her away.
Kathryn sought out Nelson’s hand and interwove her fingers through his as she turned to Guinevere. “I’m not going to like what you’re about to say, am I?”
“When I saw you just now, I felt I couldn’t leave without warning you.”
“About what?”
“You remember the doctor I used to work for, Dr. Harrison?”
“Vaguely.” Harrison had done the best he could with the tools at his disposal, but they were barely adequate. Consequently, Kathryn had spent much of the week that followed adrift in a haze of pain and uncertainty.
“Not long after your visit, we moved to Pasadena, where Dr. Harrison built a respectable name for himself—until about a year ago, when he suffered a heart attack. I was left to deal with his patient records. He was meticulous that way so there were boxes and boxes of them. Until I could establish how long I needed to keep them by law, I put them into storage.”
“Why are you telling us this?” Gwendolyn asked.
“A few months ago, the storage facility was broken into.”
“Those records were stolen?”
“What worries me is that Dr. Harrison saw a number of prominent film industry women.”
“But surely nobody gave you their real name,” Kathryn said.
“I doubt it,” Guinevere replied, “but it’s a long list.”
Gwendolyn’s eyebrows shot up. She turned to Kathryn. List?
“Not an actual list, per se,” Guinevere said, “but a whole bunch of the records from those years went missing.”
The muscles around Kathryn’s throat tightened as that sealed basement doorway began to crumble. “Oh, there’s a list, all right.” Her temples throbbed. “Remember the one that sounded familiar?” she asked Gwendolyn.
“Lorelei Boothe?”
Kathryn jerked a thumb toward herself.
“I didn’t want to alarm you,” Guinevere whispered, “but I thought you ought to know.”
Kathryn told her, “I’m very glad you did.”
Guinevere smiled faintly and melted into the crowd.
“Can I assume,” Nelson said, breaking through the queasy silence, “that this Dr. Harrison was an abortionist?”
Kathryn searched for signs of disgust, rejection, or judgment, but saw only a hint of what she hoped was relief that he now understood the conversation.
She nodded. “Which means the other names on the list are fakes, too.”
“Given by half the stars in Hollywood,” Gwendolyn added.
“That list is probably the start of a blackmail campaign.”
“There was one name on Zanuck’s list that checked out,” Nelson said.
This was news to Kathryn. “Which one?”
“Suzanna Morris. She’s dead now, but in the mid-thirties she was a minor contract player at Columbia.”
“Well, then,” Kathryn said, waving to Marcus and Doris, “I need to pay a visit to Mister Harry Cohn.”
Kathryn took note of the blinding white desk, the snowy carpet, and the alabaster upholstery on the pair of visitor chairs.
Cohn motioned for her to pick a seat. “Something wrong with my office?”
“It reminds me of Mae West’s apartment at the Ravenswood. Is that where you got the idea?”
It was common knowledge around Hollywood that when Cohn had visited Benito Mussolini, he’d loved the guy’s all-white office so much that he’d ordered a do-over when he got back to Columbia. And that was fine in 1933 before Il Duce aligned himself with Hitler and everything went to hell. By referencing Mae’s penthouse at the Ravenswood Apartments, Kathryn was giving him an out, but the guy merely reached for a cigar.
“Storm Center. What do you want to know?”
Bette Davis’s new movie was merely the pretext Kathryn had used to hook an audience with Cohn. Even though Bette’s career appeared to be grinding down to a long, slow whimper, she was still big enough to get Cohn excited.
Kathryn pulled a notepad from her handbag. “It struck me that this is a very timely picture.”
“I agree, but I want to hear what you think.”
“Bette plays a small-town librarian who finds herself branded a Communist when she refuses to withdraw a controversial book from her shelves. In other words, it’s about censorship. Let’s not forget, you released The Man with the Golden Arm without the Code’s seal of approval.”
He prodded his Montecristo toward Kathryn. “A million-dollar budget against a four-million-dollar box office. The Production Code can shove their rules up their ass, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Same goes for the Legion of Decency? I expect your job would be a whole lot easier without them hindering you?”
Cohn spat a flake of tobacco out the side of his mouth. “Where do those people live? Eighteen fifty-six?”
The sunlight from the window behind him shone through his ears; Kathryn could see them getting redder.
“So with Storm Center, you get to tell moralistic puritans that you’ll make your movies your way and no nay-saying is going to dictate how you do business.”
She’d made him sound like he was leading the charge against the outmoded censorship that manacled the hands of all moviemakers. He pounded his desk with a clenched fist. “Those narrow-minded prigs aren’t going to tell me what I can and can’t do.”
She opened her purse. “I wish more men had your backbone. All it takes is one person with the guts to say ‘Screw you!’” She pulled out a typed sheet of paper and slid it across. “Can I get you to take a look at this?”
He looked at it but only for a second or two. “You’re the one who sent me this list?”
“No. This is a copy of Zanuck’s.”
“He got one too?”
“When did you get yours?”
“Couple of months ago.”
“Did you recognize any of the names?”
“I threw it away.”
Had Kathryn Massey not been so experienced in the art of reading people, she might have missed the momentary hesitation before Cohn spoke.
“Do you remember a Dr. Harrison?”
“Should I?”
The absence of a split-second hesitation was equally telling. “Did you ever send anyone to Chinatown? Girls who needed the services of a sympathetic doctor—”
“What the hell kind of game are you playing? Get the fuck outta my studio!”
“This isn’t what you think,” Kathryn added quickly. “I’m on that list.”
His body relaxed. Barely an inch, but it was enough. He re-read the names until he reached the second-to-last. He looked up at Kathryn, wary as a cornered polecat.
“Suzanna Morris.” He said the name slowly as though he was rolling it around his mouth.
“So you remember her?”
Cohn bunched his fists together. “I didn’t get her in the club; it was one of my execs. Not that I blamed him—she was a knockout. But dumb as a sack of ping-pong balls. I’m not surprised she didn’t think to give a fake name. After she had that operation, she kind of went off the deep end, sanity-wise. I felt bad about that for a while.”
“Zanuck’s now playing lovebirds with Bella Darvi in the south of France so he doesn’t give a flying fig,” Kathryn said, “but someone’s out to play hardball. Those women have a lot to lose if it becomes known that this is an abortion list. I don’t know who’s behind it, but it looks like they’re prepared to take on Harry Cohn.”
“You got any theories?”
“Right now, my money’s on the Legion of Decency.”
Cohn gawked at her, his maw half-open. “How do you figure?”
“If Hollywood does away with the Production Code, it makes the Legion largely irrelevant.” She gave him a chance to picture himself unfettered by the Code’s long list of don’ts. “I’m going to keep digging, but I’ll feel more secure if I know that you’ve got my back.”
“You’re quite the digger, aren’t you?”
“I’m working with a private eye who really knows his onions.”
Cohn stood abruptly. “Kim Novak is waiting for me at the commissary; I have to go before she storms out in a big fucking huff. But let me assure you. Whatever I can do to help, I will.”
She stood and told him that she’d be in touch.
On the other side of the door, his secretary laid down her Saturday Evening Post. “He didn’t swear too much, I hope.”
Kathryn smiled. “Would he be Harry Cohn if he didn’t?”