Oliver and Kathryn peered into the mixing bowl while Marcus lit the pilot light in his oven with a kitchen match.
“Do you think it’s going to work?” Oliver frowned.
“During the war, I made this cake a ton of times.”
“I know, but—”
“Without butter, eggs or milk, it tasted just fine. It can only be better with them.”
Kathryn risked a sniff. “Without a recipe, how are you sure you’ve added the right amounts?”
Marcus elbowed the amateurs out of the way and started aerating the batter. “You just know, you know?”
“No, I don’t.” Kathryn crossed her arms. “I’m a working woman who’s next to useless in the kitchen—”
“—which is precisely why I’m divorcing you.”
Marcus waited a moment before checking to see how his zinger landed. He was relieved to see Kathryn smile. He filled the cake tin with batter and slid it into his oven.
“You ready to talk about it?” he asked Kathryn.
Marcus had been at home reworking a problematic screenplay for Lady in the Lake when he heard Kathryn arrive home from her lunch at the Cock’n Bull. He listened to her stomp around upstairs, slamming cupboards for a while until she started swearing like a longshoreman. He then mounted the stairs and asked her what in tarnation had got her all riled up. He didn’t help her mood when he hinted that perhaps Francine had a point. He left her apartment, telling her she was welcome to talk about it when she was calm.
It took a week.
However, she more than made up for it by arriving with a tray of Marcus’ favorite appetizers—crab-stuffed celery, liverwurst on rainbow rye, sliced tongue, pearl onions—and the three of them decided it was enough for dinner with Marcus’ modified War Cake for dessert.
He set his oven timer to thirty minutes and poured out three glasses of champagne. “So,” he said, “the D word.”
Kathryn tsked. “I’d feel like a failure.”
“But as your mom pointed out, this is Hollywood,” Oliver said. “Lana Turner’s got three under her belt and she’s, what, twenty-five?”
Marcus grabbed her hand and kissed her fingers. “My darling wife, if this were a real marriage, then maybe you’d be right to feel that way. We did this because it suited us. Between your FBI association and my”—he jutted his head toward Oliver— “predilections, we both have skeletons which could threaten not only our own careers, but each other’s. Perhaps we ought to quit while we’re ahead.”
Oliver drained his champagne coupe. “You could get an annulment. Technically, you’ve never actually consummated the marriage, have you?”
After a long pause, they all burst out laughing.
Marcus crossed over to the kitchen to pull out some plates. There was a knock on the door. “Could you get that?” he asked Kathryn. “I’ve already got crabmeat all over my fingers.”
The next thing he heard was Kathryn exclaiming, “Why, Mr. Mannix! What brings you here?”
Marcus and Oliver exchanged looks of panic. Go! Marcus mouthed at Oliver. Bedroom!
“Your husband at home?” Mannix asked.
Oliver dashed into the bedroom and jumped into Marcus’ closet just as the second most powerful man at MGM invited himself in.
Marcus threw his hand towel into his sink and crossed the room. “This is a surprise. Something up?”
“Don’t tell me the studio just burned to the ground” Kathryn let out a nervous twitter of a laugh.
Mannix looked at the coffee table, where three champagne coupes sat amid Kathryn’s hors d’oeuvres. He looked around for the owner of the third glass.
“Our neighbor’s moving out, so a little farewell was in order.” Kathryn said.
“I’m here about an urgent matter.” Mannix took off his hat. “However, we’re gonna need privacy.”
“Our guest has gone,” Marcus said, offering Mannix a drink that was declined.
Kathryn shot Marcus a wide-eyed look: An awful big pile of shit must have hit an awful big fan if HE has come to see YOU and doesn’t even want a drink.
“So what’s going on?” Marcus asked.
“I got some questions to ask you and didn’t want to do it at the studio.”
And apparently, Marcus thought, it’s so urgent that it can’t wait till Monday.
Mannix glanced warily at Kathryn. “We don’t mean to kick you out of your own home, but it’s confidential. Do you think you could make yourself scarce? An hour, maybe?”
“I do believe I have a strong hankering for a Schwab’s chocolate malted, so if you’ll excuse me.” Kathryn picked up her handbag and started heading out, then returned to give her husband a wifely goodbye kiss. As she bent over, she whispered into his ear, “Briefcase!”
Oliver’s light-brown leather briefcase sat against the end of the sofa nearest the bedroom. His name was stenciled in gold leaf above the clasp.
“See you soon, dear,” Marcus said, taking a seat on the far end of the sofa to draw Mannix’s eyes away from the briefcase. “What’s going on?”
“I need to know everything that happened at Konstantin Simonov’s cocktail party.”
Oh Jesus, the Simonov thing again?
Mannix pulled a pad out of his jacket. “First off, why did you go?”
Marcus poured himself some champagne. “I get invited to all sorts of things. I’d never seen a Soviet battleship before. I was curious.”
“You went because you were curious about some ship?” Mannix seemed far from convinced. “Okay, so you get on board. Was Chaplin there?”
“As a matter of fact, yes, he was.”
“How did he behave?”
“He was very cordial—”
“Cordial with who?”
“He came right over to say hello. We met the night of the William Tell premiere. He—”
“How did he seem with the Russians? What about Simonov? And the crew? Did he know them? Was he friendly with them?”
“He was friendly with everyone.”
“Okay, so who else was there?”
“His wife, Oona. And John Garfield, and his wife—”
“Forget the wives. Chaplin and Garfield. Who else?”
“Lewis Milestone.”
The way Mannix bit into his lip and scribbled something on his little pad made Marcus uneasy. This was all leading to something.
“Was there any talk of Communism?”
Marcus wondered if Oliver could hear all of this. “Not around me,” he answered. “But then again, Simonov took me outside at one point to talk about business.”
Mannix shifted in his seat. “What business?”
“The Russian Swan. You know, that Anna Pavlova biopic we’re doing.”
“What’s that got to do with Simonov?”
“It was his idea. The outline we bought was his.”
“FUCK!” Mannix’s face deepened several shades of red. “I’ll take that drink now. Whiskey.”
As Marcus rounded the end of the sofa, he gave Oliver’s briefcase a quick kick, but only managed to get it halfway underneath. By the time he’d returned to the coffee table, Mannix had loosened his collar and was tapping his foot on the rug.
“Surely we could have had this conversation at work,” Marcus said.
“L.B. just learned that the FBI’s got all of Bugsy Siegel’s places bugged, so now he’s paranoid about the studio.”
“That’s a stretch, isn’t it?”
Mannix made a grunting sound like he agreed but wasn’t willing to say it out loud. “L.B. and I were having dinner at Romanoff’s tonight when Hedda Hopper walked in. She made a beeline for us, couldn’t wait to tell us about her piece in tomorrow’s Times about our union trouble.”
Over the past summer, the unions representing carpenters, painters, and set designers went on strike. It was settled after a few days, but not before police squads were called in and the firemen turned hoses on the picketers. Rumors had been swirling around MGM that more trouble was on its way.
“So Hedda’s now on the politics desk?” Marcus asked.
“The bitch has decided to saddle up her high horse and take us to task over our so-called heavy-handed tactics. Now she’s referring to us as Metro-Goldwyn-Moscow. Between Reds in the Beds and Billy Wilkerson’s list of Pinkos, it’s the last thing we need.” Mannix held out his empty glass for a refill. “Then she starts in about this Simonov character.”
Marcus retrieved a bottle of Four Roses and brought it to the table, kicking the rest of Oliver’s briefcase out of sight. “What did she say?”
“First, she had to explain what it was, because she could tell from our what-the-fuck mugs that we were in the dark.”
“She must have got a kick out of that.”
“And then she mentioned your name.”
Marcus felt lightheaded, but not in a champagne-with-a-whiskey-chaser way. “In what context?”
“This.”
Mannix pulled a strip of paper from out of his pocket and handed it over. It was a list of about twenty names, commencing with Lewis Milestone and Charlie Chaplin. Immediately following them was Dalton Trumbo, one of MGM’s best screenwriters—his Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo was one of the highest-praised movies during the war. Then Lester Cole, a screenwriter whose work for studios all over town Marcus had long admired. He ran his eyes down the list. Some names he knew, some he didn’t. He stopped when he got to Ring Lardner Jr. and thought of the conversation Kathryn had with Nelson Hoyt outside the Hollywood Canteen. But it was the last four names on the list that made Marcus twitch: Lillian Hellman, Donald Ogden Stewart, Trevor Bergin, and Dorothy Parker.
Marcus only started breathing again when he realized his own name wasn’t there. “Whose list is this?”
“Hedda’s, but it looks like Wilkerson’s. You see why we asked your wife to leave the room?”
“My name’s not here,” Marcus said.
“That’s what bothered Hedda, seeing as how you were on board that Ruskie tub. That’s when we got into the whole Simonov thing. Who else was there?”
Marcus shrugged. “The rest were strangers to me.”
“What about when Simonov was pitching the Pavlova movie to you? Anyone else hear that?”
Oh boy. I thought I was going to be able to skate past this one.
A rustling noise came from the bedroom, like heavy shoeboxes tumbling over. Mannix’s eyes shot toward Marcus’ closet.
“Is somebody else here?”
“The plumbing,” Marcus said as blithely as he could. He poured some more whiskey. “It’s got a life of its own.”
Mannix kept his eyes on the bedroom.
“Clifford Wardell,” Marcus blurted out.
The name was enough to cause Mannix to lose interest in Marcus’ closet. “What about him?”
“We both got invited because Simonov wanted to offer up his Pavlova idea.”
“What did Wardell think of it?”
“Said it was a piece of crap. That’s how we got it. But it’s shaping up to be a fine picture. Got class written all—”
“Kill it,” Mannix said darkly.
“We’ve spent a decent amount in preproduction.”
“The time to make that movie was when the Ruskies were our allies. Since Churchill dropped his Iron Curtain, those fakakta Bolshies are now the enemy. Cretins like Wilkerson and Hopper have seen to it that anything associated with Russia is now painted with pink and red stripes.”
Marcus thought of his greatest success as a screenwriter. Free Leningrad! was set in Russia during the first part of the war. Were agitators like Wilkerson going to start applying their slanderous labels retroactively?
Mannix squinted over his cigar. “We got any other Russian pictures on the slate?”
Marcus’ mind was hazing over. “I’ll double check on Monday.”
“You’ll go into work tomorrow and triple check,” Mannix told him. “L.B.’s ordered that anything remotely connected with Russia be shut down.”
Ironic, considering Mayer was born in Minsk.
“We need to find a picture with an all-American hero,” Mannix continued. “Tough as nails and braver than shit.” He glowered at Marcus. “I don’t care if you have to pull it out of your ass, Adler, but you need to find us something so patriotic it’ll make every lousy Pinko on the face of the planet shrivel up and die. I’ll be damned if we’re gonna let that bitch call us Metro-Goldwyn-Moscow and think she can make it stick.”
Marcus’ closet emitted another shuffling sound, louder this time. Mannix got to his feet and stepped inside the doorway, cocking his right ear toward the room. “What you got in there? A gorilla?”
“I’ve got exactly the picture we need,” Marcus said shrilly.
“Yeah?”
Marcus hadn’t read Anson Purvis’ The Final Day yet; it was still languishing on the outer edge of his desk because he thought of Wardell every time he reached for it.
“It takes place on the last day of the war. It’s got patriotism, bravery, an American hero, the whole bit.”
“And it’s good?”
It’d better be. “I’ll have a detailed synopsis on your desk first thing Monday.”
Mannix threw back the last of his drink. “All this bullshit’s giving me a fucking headache.” He put on his hat and started for the front door. “Tell your missus sorry to boot her out of her own house.”
“She understands,” Marcus said. “She enjoys her chocolate malteds at—” Mannix slammed the door behind him.
Marcus ran into his bedroom and yanked open the closet door. Oliver toppled out.
“Are you okay?”
“Let’s just say I’m in no hurry to do that again.”
As Oliver hauled himself to his feet, the two of them sniffed the air.
“Do you smell something burning?” Oliver asked.
“My cake!”
They raced into the kitchen and Marcus yanked open the oven door. A bloom of pungent smoke enveloped him as he retrieved the cake tin and set it on the counter. Marcus fanned away the smoke. The edges were moderately, but not irreparably, singed.
“Is it salvageable?” Oliver asked.
“That depends,” Marcus replied, “on whether you’re asking about my cake or my career.”