Kathryn strummed her nails against the top of the desk in the corner of her villa. “For crying out loud,” she yelled at her telephone, “ring already!”
She should have been at the office showing her face. ‘Out of sight, out of mind,’ and all that. Especially for men like her boss, who always had a thousand concerns preoccupying him.
Why am I making excuses for Wilkerson? After twenty-five years, I should be the first one he’d come to when the scandal of the decade erupted. But nooooo.
She snatched up her cigarettes; there were only two left in the packet. Smoking eighteen of them since five a.m. wasn’t good. Neither was Lana’s daughter stabbing Johnny Stompanato. But Wilkerson sending Mike Connolly to the coroner’s office to hear the verdict was worse.
Stompanato’s death had everything: a glamorous movie star, her brooding mobster boyfriend, and a knife-wielding teenager. The tornado of rumors and theories roiling through Los Angeles showed no signs of abating: Could fourteen-year-old Cheryl Crane really stab that six-foot-plus thug? Or had Lana gotten her fill of being roughed up and fought back, then shanghaied her daughter to take the fall knowing that she’d be tried as a juvenile and avoid the death penalty? Or was it a mob hit? Now that Mickey Cohen was out of jail, was he taking revenge on his ex-bodyguard?
The coroner’s report would be the thrilling denouement to the weeks of breaking news and insider gossip. But then Wilkerson had chosen Connolly to represent the Reporter at the press conference. It was a stinker of a move that burned Kathryn’s innards.
Officially it was because he wanted her to focus on their campaign to break the Breen Office and end the blacklist. Granted, there were signs of progress. Independent producers were less willing to bow and scrape to a bunch of old-fashioned prudes, and there was a growing reluctance to adhere to a blacklist started for reasons that were becoming more and more implausible.
Wilkerson wanted Connolly to focus on the tawdry, muckraking type of journalism that the Turner-Stompanato affair generated. “Leave Connolly to deal with the lurid sideshow stuff. It’s what he’s good at.”
Kathryn hadn’t been fooled for a second. Sex goddesses (or their daughters) who stab mobsters spawned the sort of headlines that people turned to first. Kathryn knew that; Wilkerson knew that; Connolly certainly knew that.
Her cigarette lighter slipped out of her hand. It hit the desktop with a jarring crack and probably dented the oak. The big boys club stretches from coast to coast. Ovaries need not apply.
But that didn’t mean she was out of the loop entirely.
For more years than Kathryn could count, Lenny Schultz had been her legman, stringer photographer, messenger, secret keeper, clandestine snooper, and all-round doer of tasks no matter how fuzzy the legalities might be. And it was Lenny’s call she was waiting on—but where was he? The coroner’s press conference had been called for eight-thirty. It was almost nine now. Had no verdict been rendered?
She eyeballed the near-empty packet of Chesterfields lying on the desk. She desperately wanted another one but her mouth tasted like swamp water. It was far too early for a drink and she was too jittery for coffee. She decided on tea and was filling her kettle when a silhouette popped up behind her kitchen curtain. The kettle clattered against the sink, denting its side as Kathryn backed away.
She heard a feminine laugh. “When did you get to be so jumpy?” The voice sounded familiar but she couldn’t quite place it. “I’ve flown six thousand miles to say hello. The least you can do is let me in.”
Kathryn opened her door to someone she hadn’t seen in years. Melody Hope’s time in Italy had burned away the moonstruck look that used to fill her face. There was a sharpness to her now, an astuteness more often seen on Joan Crawford or Rosalind Russell, and it suited her.
Kathryn welcomed her with a hug. “Are you back from Europe for good? Or just passing through? My goodness, look at you!”
The Melody Hope of The Blushing Bridesmaids and I Spy with my Little Eye would have spun around and said, “In the flesh and twice as fresh!” The version standing in Kathryn’s kitchen simply sighed. “I couldn’t stay away any longer.”
“Marcus told me that those Roman Empire movies were huge hits.”
“Yeah, they were. And the one we made out of his short story, Metropolitana, did great. But . . .” Another sigh, deeper this time, longer.
“But home is home?”
Kathryn told her to sit at the table as she made tea and pulled out the leftovers of a honey spice cake she’d baked the previous weekend. Still stewing over her silent telephone, she let Melody chat about her life in Rome: Cinecittà, scattini, Frederico Fellini, espresso, linguine with clams, limoncello.
“It all sounds marvelous,” Kathryn told her.
“Marcus leaving Rome to come back here got me thinking.”
“You must have missed him. God knows I did.”
“Actually, it was you who inspired me,” Melody said.
Every day, Kathryn felt her territory being annexed, inch by inch. Patrolling the borders was exhausting but if she didn’t, another chunk of her standing would be clawed away. Then another. And another. “What did I do?” she asked Melody.
“Your campaign! Down with the Production Code! Down with the blacklist! Killing two dinosaurs with one stone. I always admired your chutzpah but this time you’ve outdone yourself. Marcus has been sending me copies of the Reporter so I’ve been following your progress. Technically, I’m still blacklisted, like everybody else in Red Channels, but sooner or later somebody’s got to stand up and say, ‘Enough is enough.’ And it was you!”
Melody’s admiration felt better than a swimming pool on a sweltering summer’s day. “You’ve come back to resurrect your career?”
“If I can. And if I can’t, I’ll be one of the troops rallying around you, helping you fight the good fight.”
Kathryn laughed. “You are hereby designated Troop Number One.”
“You’re not doing this alone, are you?”
Kathryn glanced at the phone. Had Mike headed Lenny off at the pass? Kathryn doubted it. Lenny was street-smart shrewd. Maybe he hadn’t been able to talk his way in. She felt the fangs of paranoia puncture her confidence.
“No,” she told Melody. “I now have you.”
Melody read the tremor of apprehension that passed across Kathryn’s face. “Why isn’t everyone in Hollywood rallying around you?”
Kathryn stirred the tea leaves puddled at the bottom of her cup and wondered what a fortuneteller would make of them. “I have a theory.”
Melody sat up straight in her chair. “This I gotta hear.”
Kathryn took her through the appearance of the Harrison list, and how nothing had come of it until Haynes popped up with his holier-than-thou condemnations.
“So this Haynes guy is behind it all?”
“It’s a pretty strong hunch. And I think that people are backing off because they don’t want to rock the boat. At least, not that boat. Studios don’t protect their stars like they used to. There are no fixers anymore, nobody jumping in to pay off the cops or get judges to look the other way. Twenty-five years ago, somebody at MGM would have made this whole Lana Turner thing vanish and Joe Public would’ve been none the wiser. But Confidential came along and torched all those drawbridges.”
Melody fixed her with a steely glare. “You got that list handy?”
When Kathryn returned to the table and unfolded the paper, Melody’s eyes halted halfway down. “Sallie Odair,” she said, scornfully. “She was the school bully who made my life miserable all through fifth and sixth grade, so that’s the name I gave when I went to see him.”
Kathryn retrieved the list. “We have something in common.”
“You?!”
Kathryn stuck out her hand. “Pleased to meet you, Sallie. Call me Lorelei Boothe.”
“No!”
“My stake in this is personal.”
“We need to do something.”
“Are you sure you’ve got the stomach for it? This could get ugly.”
“After the buckets of crap that life has thrown at me?” She let out a long, disdainful Pffffft. “I’ve dealt with a whole lot worse than these knuckleheaded jackasses.”
“I’m glad to hear it, but let’s save that for another day. We need to get you back into the Hollywood social swing. A bunch of us are going to Mocambo tonight. Bette Davis is about to fly to Europe to play Catherine the Great in a movie about John Paul Jones, so it’s sort of a farewell. And for Mocambo, too. They haven’t announced their closing, but Ciro’s is gone and Las Vegas gets the big names now, so we figure the writing’s on the wall. You in?”
Melody gave her a canny wink. “I’m all in.”
With its exuberant explosions of cherry reds, butterscotch yellows, and jade greens, Mocambo had always been the wild-child sister of the more elegant Ciro’s.
“I’m going to miss this place,” Kathryn told Bette.
Bette held out her flute for a refill from the magnum of champagne she’d bought for the table. “It’s not gone yet.”
Marcus pulled the bottle from the ice bucket. “Bet you twenty bucks it won’t still be here when you get back from Spain.”
“I’ll only be gone three weeks,” Bette said.
“We can up it to fifty if you like.”
Kathryn looked around the table to Nelson, Gwendolyn and Chuck, Marcus and Rex, and realized that all three of them were in relationships at the same time. She couldn’t remember that ever happening before.
She raised her glass. “I’d like to make a toast. Here’s to—”
Nelson distracted her with a theatrical throat-clearing and jutted his head toward the maître d’s podium, where a large party had gathered. Two men jostled to the front. The appearance of either of them could spoil the evening, but together? In the same group? It was enough to boil her blood. But she was mid-toast and her whole table was looking at her.
“Here’s to happiness,” she said. “May it stick around for a long time to come.”
Bette snorted into her flute. Her turbulent marriage to Gary Merrill was unraveling to a brawl-ravaged end. In the cab ride, Bette had shrugged off her appearance in John Paul Jones as a glorified cameo but added, “It’s work. I have mouths to feed. I can’t afford to be proud.” Rumors about an affair between Gary and Rita Hayworth had started to swirl lately and Kathryn suspected that she’d taken this job to get away.
The house band started playing the most ubiquitous song of the year: “Volare.” The lyrics were in Italian so nobody knew what the song was about, but the tune was so infectious that audiences couldn’t help but rise out of their chairs. Half the people in Mocambo headed to the dance floor.
“Shall we take a spin?” Nelson suggested.
Kathryn tracked the other group’s progress as they weaved through the labyrinth of tables. “Sweet Jesus,” she said under her breath. “They’re going to be right next door.”
“Why do you think I asked you to dance?”
Vincent Haynes was a morally intransigent Bible-thumper with the face of an Easter Island statue. An evening out with him promised all the hilarity of the Spanish Inquisition. Mike Connolly, on the other hand, was a party hound who’d never met a bottle he didn’t like. His ability to ingratiate himself was equaled only by Moll Flanders, Casanova, and the Whore of Babylon. Kathryn couldn’t imagine two people with less in common.
“Thanks, but I want a front row seat for this circus.”
The last time she had seen Haynes, he’d been holding a sign that predicted Hollywood would send everybody to hell if the Production Code wasn’t restored. And yet, here he was sitting at a Sunset Strip nightclub with a guy who was his polar opposite.
“Do you think it’s a ‘know thine enemy’ type of move?” Kathryn asked Nelson.
“He doesn’t look too comfortable.”
Haynes wore the pinched smile of a guy who’d sat in something Rin Tin Tin had left on the sidewalk. Connolly grandly ordered several bottles of Veuve Clicquot, then launched into a loud story about interviewing Elvis Presley the day before he entered the army. Haynes sat immobile but his eyes darted around the nearby tables.
Marcus finished his drink. “I bet he’s planning his escape route in case Sodom and Gomorrah gets to be too much.”
The noise in the club dimmed as the orchestra bandleader announced a break. For all his shortcomings, Mike Connolly was someone who knew how to read a crowd. He raised his voice to address the stacked blonde to his left. “I got the Presley interview because his manager heard that I am now the most influential columnist in Hollywood.”
“You are?” the blonde cooed. “More than Louella Parsons? Hedda Hopper? Sheilah Graham?”
“More than anyone.”
Kathryn jumped to her feet. Nelson tugged her down and asked her if she was sure. She pulled her arm free of his grip and stood again. “Excuse me?” Years of being on the radio had trained Kathryn to project her voice. “That bit about you being the most influential columnist in Hollywood might make for great nightclub chit-chat but I don’t think so, Mr. Connolly.”
“Depends on how you measure it,” he shot back.
“We each write six columns per week, so you cannot claim to have the highest readership.”
“You’re assuming that everyone reads both columns.” His declaration felt like a frying pan to the head. “And besides, I didn’t say ‘most read.’ I said ‘most influential.’ Big difference.”
Nelson urged her to resume her seat. Half the place was looking at her but this wasn’t her first nightclub fight, nor was it likely to be her last. If Nelson wanted to be with her, this sort of skirmish came with the territory.
“You can’t calculate it like television ratings,” she shot back, “so don’t go around claiming—”
“The advertisements on the page where my column appears go for twenty-seven percent higher rates than the ones next to yours.” Connolly raised his glass in a cheers-to-you-and-screw-you-too salute. “Wilkerson has to charge more for those ads because he pays me forty-two percent more than what he pays you. The costlier ads appear on my page. Those ads are for the heavy hitters, ergo . . .”
If he’d only mentioned the advertising rates and left it at that, without including their salary disparity, Kathryn might have sat down and simply fumed for the rest of the night. But he hadn’t. She marched up to him. “We need to talk.”
He took a maddeningly long sip of his drink. “I’m with friends. It’d be terribly rude of me—”
“You. Me. Outside.” She headed for the door that led to the restrooms. She could hear his footsteps behind her. The chatter and music died down as the door swung shut behind them. A sign on a door at the end of the corridor read Emergency Exit Only. One night not long after the war, Bugsy Siegel had appeared at Mocambo and she hadn’t wanted to deal with him. Her waiter had shown her this route, which led to the back alley.
She stepped outside. Connolly followed her at an unhurried pace. “You gonna tell me to put up my dukes and we’ll have this out man to man?”
She spun around. “How long have you known about the gap in our pay?”
“My asking price was simply what I felt I was worth, plus a little wiggle room.”
“And he agreed? Just like that?”
“Didn’t bat an eyelid. And you want to know why?” Kathryn didn’t, but knew she had to. “Wilkerson knew I would be worth every penny. Not immediately, but now he’s real glad he brought me on board.”
The stink from the Mocambo’s trashcans wafted across them. Kathryn wanted to move farther down the alley but sensed that she needed to hold her ground. “And how do you know that?”
He angled his body away from her but stuck his face in real close. “You’ve fallen behind the times, Kathryn.”
“My fight to end the blacklist and overhaul the Production Code is about as current as it could—”
“Sinatra asked me for help getting the lead in Some Came Running so I made calls. You should see the thank-you gifts he’s been showering me with. Does anyone come to you for help like that any more?”
The realization that she was no longer the mover-and-shaker who people came to stung her to the core. She pointed inside the building. “What’s with you and Vincent Haynes? You know who he is, right? And what he stands for?”
“He’s a religious conservative. We have a lot in common.”
“Like what, for instance?”
“In my public life, I make no bones about my Catholicism—”
“OH, PLEASE!” Kathryn’s voice echoed off the brick wall behind Connolly. “You’re about as Catholic as Fanny Brice. You harp on about it in your column but you could drink John Barrymore under the table. And I’m guessing you’re not exactly the Virgin Queen when it comes to anonymous pick-ups.” She lifted her hand to quash his protest. “Truly, I do not care what you do in your private life. But your public life is your column, and your column is in the Hollywood Reporter. What you do affects me. To be seen at a place like this with someone like Haynes, in full view of people we work with and write about, sends mixed messages and I’ve been around long enough to know—”
“STOP RIGHT THERE!” he shouted. “You can shut your big fat trap right now, lady. You think me and Haynes are just some public-consumption-only puppet show? Did it ever occur to you that I disagree with your campaign?”
Kathryn stared at him. The thought had never entered her head.
“For the record, I do not want to see movies with blatant nudity, miscegenation, drug use, women getting raped, women having abortions, and whatever else Otto Preminger and his anti–Production Code cronies want.”
“You want the Code to stay in place?”
“I want it strengthened.”
“And the Legion of Decency?”
“Where do you think I met Haynes?”
“You’re a member?”
“Let me tell you, we intend to fight you with every weapon at our disposal. And I’m not talking about standing around with placards and signs, either. I got a hold of a list that’s going to blow the lid off everything.”
A cold shudder shook Kathryn to her core. “That list came from you?”
“You’ve seen it?” He fixed her with a wary eye as he regrouped, then gave a slight shrug. “I shouldn’t be surprised. You’ve been doing this job since the silent days.”
If she’d had her handbag with her, she would have clocked him over the head with it. But all she had was her open palm so she slapped him across the face. He gaped at her, shocked, then started to smile, so she slapped him again, harder. It sent him reeling against the grimy brick wall.
“You’re on it, aren’t you?” He threw his head back. “Get a load of Miss Prissy and her high-horse speechifying. Which one are you? No, no, let me guess. Emily Stroup? Leona Farr? Sallie Odair? Ann Sullivan?”
He’d even taken the trouble to memorize all the names.
The cause of her nightmare had been working three desks away and she hadn’t suspected. Even your intuition needs a booster shot. Standing in this back alley with its gloomy shadows and its garbage stench, she had no biting comeback. No cutting retort. No moral superiority. Just the sense to know when to retreat. She couldn’t even summon up a dirty look, so she turned her back to him and walked away.
“I can get the Legion to ban any movie I want,” he called after her. “All I have to do is pick up the phone. Can you do that, Miss Snooty McStuckup? CAN YOU?”
Kathryn reached the exit and pulled at the handle. The door was heavier than she remembered but she couldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her struggle with its heft. She let out a near-silent groan as she pulled it open. Without turning around, she reached back and flipped her middle finger at him, retracting her hand before the door slammed shut.