Gwendolyn drove onto the Twentieth Century-Fox lot armed with a newspaper, an impulse, and a strong suspicion.
Not much had changed since her days at the studio. Extras lingered in period costume, carpenters hammered fake brick walls, and orchestra members lugged around their tubas.
On Stage 14, her old Garden neighbors, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, were making the film version of their Broadway hit, The Diary of Anne Frank. Gwendolyn would have loved to see them but she had a show to do in a few hours.
After Gwendolyn had failed to get Ella Fitzgerald on her show, Lucille Ball offered herself up “as a consolation prize.” Her appearance had been a ratings bonanza and now Brick by Brick was seen in eighteen of the twenty-two states west of the Mississippi. It helped blunt the sting. Not completely, but some.
Her morning routine was now spent scouring newspapers for possible guests—not just celebrities with a movie to plug, but people with an unusual accomplishment. Yesterday, Gwendolyn had come across an article in the Hollywood Citizen-News about a new opera called Cabin in the Sky, based on the 1943 MGM picture, hailing it as the most important contribution to American opera since the war. Near the end of the article the journalist got around to mentioning the show’s dramatist: Ambrose Hightower.
The name pinged around Gwendolyn’s mind. There was a Negro who had looked after the coffee pots in the Fox commissary with that name. But could he be the same guy who’d written the new Porgy and Bess?
“Why not?” Chuck had mused over their morning cherry danishes. “Albert Einstein worked in the Swiss patent office before he changed the world. And besides, how many Ambrose Hightowers are there likely to be?”
Not only had this guy created an important new work but he’d done it while toiling away in a studio commissary. Her gut instinct told her to seek him out face to face. So she’d used Travilla’s name to get on the lot.
Other than a new coat of paint, the Café de Paris was much the same. The lunch rush wouldn’t heat up for another three-quarters of an hour so it wasn’t very busy. She spotted him at one of the service centers. The guy’s written the next Porgy and Bess and they’ve got him filling ketchup bottles.
Hightower was very dark-skinned and a little stooped over. His hair hadn’t started to turn gray yet, but it was slightly long, so it frizzed on top. He’d always kept to himself, rarely speaking unless spoken to first.
“Remember me?” she asked him as she approached.
His eyes held a quizzical look. “Yes, of course, Miss Brick.”
“I was hoping I might have a minute or two of your time.”
He waited until she had seated herself at a nearby table before he joined her.
“You are the Ambrose Hightower they talked about in the Hollywood Citizen-News, aren’t you? The one who’s written Cabin in the Sky?”
He started to fidget with the damp rag in his hands. “Yep.”
“That article said you’ve produced a landmark piece of work, but you’re still here?”
He tossed the rag to one side. “Oh, Miss Brick. Most of the world doesn’t care a whit that I’ve achieved my life’s ambition. Nor do they care that it took me near on ten years to do it. To most folks, I’m still just a colored man.”
“You can’t let it sit there in a desk drawer where nobody’ll see it.”
He studied her a moment as though assessing how much he could trust her. “I appreciate your concern but it’s not quite as bleak as all that. Three different theatrical producers have approached me, including one gentleman with ties to the Biltmore Theater. Real enthusiastic he was, too, till he discovered that I was less than creamy cotton white.”
“And the others?”
“One of them bailed pretty quickly. The other?” He sucked air through his teeth and rubbed his jaw. “Said he didn’t care what shade of licorice I am, but my guess is that his backers got nervous about pouring money into a show written by a colored man.”
“Do you know about my television program?” Gwendolyn asked.
“I hear it’s doing real well.”
“It is, but the network prefers to play it safe.”
Hightower twirled a finger in a wide circle. “Just like all studios.”
“I tried to get Ella Fitzgerald as a guest. They shot me down like I was a Messerschmitt over London. But I’d like to try again.”
The wariness in his eyes receded an inch or two. “You’ve got spunk, I’ll give you that much.”
“If I could offer you my show—which I probably can’t, but if I could—what would you do with it?”
She couldn’t blame Hightower if he’d had his fill of white people letting him down, but she could see his mental gears shifting.
“There’s a duet sung by Petunia and Little Joe, called ‘The Only Door into Heaven.’ It’s the least operatic number in the score and I put it in there because every show needs a song with commercial appeal. If you could get two stars to sing it, that might be enough to impress potential producers. But whoever you get, they need to be the type of performers who don’t make white folks want to reach for the lynching rope.”
She thought about Dorothy Dandridge, whom Gwendolyn had known through her store. Kathryn had recently included a squib in her column about how Dorothy was now filming Porgy and Bess at the Goldwyn Studios, which was also starring Sammy Davis Jr. as Sportin’ Life. Kathryn had met Davis when she did The Ed Sullivan Show. That had been a few years ago, but it was a way in.
“What about Dorothy Dandridge and Sammy Davis Jr.? Could they sing it?”
Hightower’s eyes darted around the room as he worked through Gwendolyn’s proposal. “If we lowered the key. But hasn’t the network already said no?”
“Highbrow stuff like opera is an easier sell. I now know why I crashed and burned last time.” Gwendolyn noticed how he kept track of the clock behind her. He might have written the next great American opera, but the man had ketchup bottles to fill. “I didn’t get the endorsement of my sponsor first. If I can go in there and say ‘This is what I want to do and Chesterfield cigarettes are okay with it,’ they’re going to have a hard time telling me to go jump in Lake Hollywood.”
“Well, ma’am,” Hightower said, hoisting himself to his feet. “If you could do that, I’d be mightily obliged.” He reached into the back pocket of his uniform. The wallet he pulled out was ragged around the edges, but the card he produced was pristine. His name, address, and telephone number were printed with black embossed letters. “If anything comes of this, you be sure to let me know.” His tone suggested that he wasn’t holding his breath.
As she watched him move on to the next table on his route, the excitement of her idea began to splinter. She’d never even met the guy that she and Chuck referred to as Mister Chesterfield. Setting up a meeting wouldn’t be too difficult, but she would need an extra-special proposal that Mister Chesterfield couldn’t spurn.
She fingered the edge of Hightower’s card as her mind sprinted through an alphabet of possible snake charmers and stopped when she got to M.
When Gwendolyn heard someone knock on her front door, she looked at her watch. “It can’t be Marilyn,” she told Chuck. “She’s constitutionally incapable of being twenty minutes early to anything.” She wiped her hands on her apron and pulled open the door.
“I’ve got the right day, haven’t I?” Marilyn asked.
“You do.” Gwendolyn ushered her inside. Her simple sky-blue dress with tiny white polka dots flattered her figure and hugged her bust. And her skin was meringue white, as though she hadn’t seen the sun in months. “You’re positively glowing!”
Marilyn let out an exuberant giggle. “I am, aren’t I?”
“From what I hear, the Some Like It Hot shoot has been hell.”
“Poor Billy.” Marilyn tsked. “He must hate me by now. But I don’t care because—” She broke off when she spotted Chuck in the kitchen. Without blinking, she switched on her breathy baby-doll voice. “You must be Chuck.”
“Such a pleasure, Miss Monroe. I have long been a fan of—”
“You’ll have to excuse us. We’ve got girl business to conduct.” She hauled Gwendolyn into the bathroom where she locked the door and whirled around, pressing her knuckles to her mouth. “I’m pregnant!”
That explained the delays on the set. This was the third pregnancy that Gwendolyn knew about. The first two had terminated naturally, leaving Marilyn bereft, but maybe third time was the charm. “Congrats! How do you feel? Are you taking care of yourself?”
Marilyn blinked away her tears. “Yes. Oh, yes.”
“If you’re not up to what I’ve asked you to do this afternoon, don’t feel obligated. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have—”
Marilyn hushed Gwendolyn’s protests with a finger pressed to her lips. She caught her reflection in the bathroom mirror. “Like you said, I’m glowing, and isn’t that what you need? Aren’t I here to be the great, big, irresistible chunk of Camembert for Mister Chesterfield?”
“You are, but—”
“Those corporate guys. A bit of this—” she pulled her neckline down until the top half of her cleavage was exposed “—and they’ll say yes to anything.”
Gwendolyn hoped Marilyn was right, but it took more than the average schmo to become Chesterfield’s West Coast sales manager. Still, Marilyn was the best weapon available and Gwendolyn hoped Mister Chesterfield routed all decisions via the bulge in his pants. “Come on,” she said. “We need to get you in place before the hungry mouse gets here.”
They were still arranging her on the sofa when a second knock on the door announced Mister Chesterfield’s arrival.
“Well, hello!” Gwendolyn exclaimed brightly. “You must be Hudson.” First names were hardly appropriate in a business situation like this, but Gwendolyn wanted to put them on a more intimate footing.
“Miss Brick!” He extended his hand. “Such a pleasure to meet you at last. It shouldn’t have taken this long.”
His hand was firm and warm, if a little clammy.
“Call me Gwendolyn, and please, come on in. You know Chuck, of course.”
Gwendolyn had positioned him at the end of the sofa so that he blocked Mister Chesterfield’s immediate view. He shifted to the left, revealing Marilyn sitting demurely on Gwendolyn’s sofa, smiling like a blonde Greek siren about to lure this unwitting sailor to his doom. She glided to her feet and pressed her arms to her sides—a subtle move that accentuated her décolletage.
“Marilyn,” Chuck said. “I’d like you to meet Hudson Auchincloss.”
She cooed at the mention of his surname. “Auchincloss?”
Hudson took her hand and delicately kissed it. “Sadly, no relation to the Bouvier and Vidal branches of the family.”
Gwendolyn hadn’t heard of anyone named Auchincloss—Bouvier, Vidal or otherwise—so she wasn’t sure how to respond to this corpulent gent who smelled of expensive brandy, sweaty racehorses, and Cuban cigars.
Hudson took the chair opposite her. Of course he did. It gave him a much better view. And why not? He was a man and she was Marilyn.
“We have an idea we’d like to run past you,” Gwendolyn said. “It’s for a guest appearance that could really gain us some traction.”
“I was expecting some shrewd ploy to up our sponsorship with an afternoon of budgets, and balance sheets.”
Marilyn made a performance out of lurching forward. “Ohmygoodness! This is a business meeting and I’m intruding. I should probably go.”
Hudson looked at Gwendolyn with a half-dazed Does she have to?
“I’d like to hear what you think,” Gwendolyn told Marilyn, then turned to Hudson. “If you don’t mind.”
“Not at all!”
Marilyn crossed her legs in a way that inched her skirt upward. “Thank heavens! You see, I’m filming the new Billy Wilder movie right now, Mr. Auchincloss—or can I call you Hudson?”
“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.”
“Well, Hudson, I only get one day off a week, so when I do, escaping the house does wonders for my morale. As you can imagine, I can’t go just any old place.”
“You must get mobbed everywhere.”
“I absolutely do!” Marilyn had slipped into her Seven Year Itch character. From the size of his goo-goo eyes, she doubted that Hudson had realized it was for his benefit. “Gwennie and I have been pals for years; the Garden of Allah is one of the few places where I can truly be myself. But enough of me. Gwennie, honey, you were saying?”
Gwendolyn launched into her spiel, and like any seasoned corporate executive, Hudson kept his face parked in neutral the whole time.
He stared at the Virginia True print hanging on Gwendolyn’s wall. When he spoke again, it wasn’t to Gwendolyn. “I’d first love to hear what Miss Monroe thinks.”
“My word!” Marilyn exclaimed breathlessly. “This notion of not having colored performers on shows hosted by a white person, it’s all such old-baloney nonsense. Sooner or later, someone’s going to do it. The first to break that barrier, they’re the ones who everybody will be talking about.” She turned to Hudson. “Which company do you represent?”
“Chesterfield cigarettes.”
“If you let Gwendolyn do this, Chesterfield will reap untold benefits. The exposure will be enormous!”
“I have to agree.” Hudson smiled the knowing smile of a businessman who knew an opportunity when he saw one.
“So,” Gwendolyn said, “when I take it to CBS, I’ll have your backing?”
“I’ll go you one better. Let me approach the CBS brass.” It was more than Gwendolyn had dared hope for. He stood up. “Could you please accompany me to the parking lot?”
Gwendolyn walked him along the path to where Hudson had parked on Havenhurst Drive. “I’m happy to go to bat for you, but tell me this.” He glanced back at her villa. “Are you and Marilyn Monroe really friends?”
“I used to have a boutique on the Strip. She came in one day to buy some clothes and we hit it off, especially later when I went to work at Fox.”
“And her being here today. Was it really just happenstance?”
The guy was cannier than Gwendolyn had bargained for. She felt her face flush slightly. “Like she said, she can let her hair down here.”
“That’s nice, but you didn’t answer my question.”
“Okay,” she conceded. “Marilyn is a friend, and she does come over here from time to time, but yes, I did recruit her today.”
“You were trying to improve your odds, weren’t you?”
“Something like that. Well, no. Exactly that.”
He surveyed her with unflinching eyes, freezing her in place until he said, “I’m flattered. And impressed.” She began to smile until he added, “And more than a little insulted. But mostly—” he broke out into a roguish grin “—I’m glad you did. My poker buddies are gonna get so damned bent out of shape when I tell them what happened today.” Just as quickly, the grin dropped away. “But don’t try to sweeten the pie with a stunt like that again, okay?” He fished his keys out of his pocket and inserted it into the lock of a gunpowder-gray Cadillac Eldorado. Its slick paint job glowed in the fall dusk. “I’ll be in touch.”
She waved him goodbye as he pulled out of the lot and didn’t stop until the traffic heading south swallowed him whole.