“Yessir,” said Harris. “He may be late, but there he is.” He directed Rosemary LaRoche’s attention to George M. Cohan, now sitting down at his regular corner table in the Oak Room.
“Yeah,” said the film star, peeking through the smilax-wrapped trellis that shielded her from too much public view. “Give my regards to Broadway. Fuck Broadway,” she declared, before putting a last bite of strip steak into her mouth.
Disappointed at the failure of what he had hoped would seem an authentic New York treat to this sun-bronzed captive of the film colony, Harris tried soothing her. “Of course,” he said, recalling a fragment of autobiography she’d imparted during the soup course. “You’re remembering those shortsighted rejections when you were trying to get started here.” He sympathetically imagined the scene. “A beautiful girl being mistreated by those Broadway wolves.”
“Wolves?” cried Miss LaRoche, tossing her napkin onto the remains of the steak. “In the whole six months I was up here, I never met one who wasn’t a nellie. I practically shoved my melons into their kissers, but you’da thought they was live grenades the way those guys would flinch. Here,” she said, extracting for a third time the small silver flask she kept in her garter. “You’re still not completely thawed.”
After his enforced walk from the office, and having puffed his way past the skaters near the fountain, Harris had arrived at the hotel exhausted. He now accepted a little dividend in what he and Rosemary and the waiter were pretending was his water glass. Her Hollywood hooch was a lot better than what he got from the countess back at the office, and when Rosemary swung her legs out from under the table to replace the flask inside her garter, there was the visual bonus of her splendid right thigh.
“Bingo,” she said, upon accomplishing the storage. Once more Harris was face-to-face with her blond bob, stratospheric cheekbones, and blazing green eyes, which were bordered by the faintest tracery of wrinkles. He was more smitten than he had imagined, or Betty had feared. For the past hour and a half, the more profane this siren got, the more courtly and avuncular he’d found himself becoming.
“Terrible, isn’t it?” he said, raising his glass. “The lengths the law makes us go to to disguise a civilized habit.”
“Sounds like you’re hoping for another flash,” said Rosemary, snapping her garter.
“No, no,” said Harris, innocently wounded. “I’m just remembering a time when you could see men come in here holding tumblers of whiskey, not pieces of ticker tape, when they sat down to their lunch.” It would soon be a decade since the adjoining Oak Bar had been turned into an E.F. Hutton office.
“Don’t knock the market,” said Rosemary. “The week I dumped that no-good-nellie husband of mine I found out that his money-man had quadrupled everything he’d been holding in the space of a month. Half and half? Hell, we split it double and double!”
Harris ignored these financial loaves and fishes. He could only marvel: Howard Kenyon—that cinematic sheik, that heroic screen doughboy, that movie-palace pirate … was a feygele? Why, he wondered, was she telling him this? Did she just assume that he’d be too scared to print any of the beans she was spilling? He tried looking further into those green eyes, and he hit an emerald wall.
“So let me tell you how you’re gonna shoot me for your cover,” said Rosemary.
Harris came out of his frightened revery. “Actually, Miss LaRoche, that’ll be up to Mr. Lord, whom you’ll—”
“You’re gonna have me on a couch with just a fancy silk sheet covering my hoohah and melons. My wrists and ankles are gonna be tied together with pearls. I got a picture called Chained coming out around the time you’ll be getting your show on the road, and I’m gonna need people to think this crummy masterpiece is a little hotter than it is.”
“Was the director a nellie?” It was all Harris could think to say.
“Worse,” said Rosemary. “A gentleman. Of course, you are, too. But in the best sense of the term. Which is why I know you’ll be square with me. I get a nickel on each thirty-five-cent copy you sell above a hundred thousand.”
Harris chose to concentrate not on the meaning, but the mere sound, of what she was saying. Where had he heard such a voice before? On the rodeo cowboy Bandbox had once let loose in the city for a babe-in-the-metropolitan-woods piece? No, it was too deep, and not quite twangy enough. On the old lady he and Betty had met last winter down at the Vinoy Park in St. Petersburg? The one who’d actually been born in Florida? No, not enough syrup. And the way Miss LaRoche said “term”—didn’t it sound faintly like “toim”? Whatever head she might have for figures, this dame didn’t add up.
“I’ll have to talk with Mr. Burn, my publisher,” Harris finally said.
“You do that, ’Phat. Otherwise we got no deal. Hel-lo,” she then uttered, without a pause to mark the shift from business to pleasure. “What have we here?” She parted the smilax once again. Harris stretched his neck to get a look at the gentleman checking his overcoat with the girl at the entrance. A good-looking fellow, even if he was in need of a hair-combing and—
Rosemary LaRoche had him so agitated that it took several seconds to realize he was looking at Stuart Newman.
“That’s your writer, Miss LaRoche. I asked him to join us for coffee.”
Staring at Newman with her fierce green eyes and smile, the actress said to the editor: “You’re goddamned right it is.”
Newman approached the table, trying not to recall a long-ago bender that had ended here at the Plaza in a broom closet on the eleventh floor.
“Stuart!” cried Harris. “Come meet Rosemary LaRoche.”
Newman took his last steps with a certain hesitation, trying to guess why the boss was looking at him as if he’d already accomplished something wonderful.
The actress put out her hand. Newman, uncertain for a moment what to do, finally took hold of it and brought it to his lips. Harris thought this tough-talking cookie might swallow his man in two bites, like a second order of strip steak. But in a soft little voice, creme-filled with vowels from yet another indeterminate part of the country, Rosemary LaRoche purred: “Mr. Newman is très, très charmant.”