CHAPTER 9

 

 

Gwendolyn thrust her fingers into the patch of bare earth outside her villa. She angled her face over her right shoulder and told Arlene, Doris, and Bertie, “I haven’t done this since we had the victory garden. I forgot how cold the soil is.”

Bertie lowered the bag of bulbs onto the gravel path. “I like a cocktail party as much as the next girl, but when we were all working together in the victory garden, I loved the camaraderie. Neighbors getting together, growing vegetables, watching them sprout, getting muddy as hell. God, it was fun! I’m so glad you suggested this.”

Gwendolyn wiped the sweat off her forehead, leaving a wide swath of dirt across her face. The loamy smell filled her lungs. “We’ve left it so late in the year. I feared nothing would grow in November.”

“Tulips are a hardier flower than they look.” Doris peered into the hole Gwendolyn had made. “It needs to be deeper; otherwise, they won’t survive the winter.”

“The guy at the nursery promised me that we’ll be treated to a whole rainbow come March and April.” Bertie opened the brown paper sack and started laying each bulb out on the lawn like it was a precious egg.

Gwendolyn excavated more earth, not daring to look at her nails. They were going to take forever to clean, but that’s what Sunday afternoons were for. Twentieth Century-Fox had extracted more than their pound of flesh for one week—especially after Loretta Young and Billy Travilla started battling for her time.

“I am your number one priority,” Loretta instructed. “You tell him, ‘No, Mr. Travilla, I’m sorry but first I must finish Miss Young’s gown.’ You must be firm with people like that. Otherwise, they’ll walk all over you.”

But how was Gwendolyn supposed to respond when Fox’s top costume designer had said, “Marilyn’s being difficult about a dress I’m working on for her next movie. Could you spend this afternoon with her and try to talk her into this design I’ve come up with?” Especially when the boss had specifically asked her to keep tabs on Marilyn.

Gwendolyn had managed to juggle both camps so that each of them got what they wanted, but only by disobeying an unbreakable commandment: Thou shalt not take work home with you.

At first it was only panels of material that needed stitching together, but as the Millionaire premiere loomed closer, her smuggling escalated to full dresses.

Life became a marathon session at the sewing machine followed by hours on her knees in front of the dress form. As the Indian summer of October started to cool, Gwendolyn became preoccupied with the thought of feeling dirt crumbling through her fingers, to smell its rich fertility. She wanted to take a seed or a bulb or a twig and watch it flower.

She had all but forgotten the old victory garden patch until one day it caught her eye. Six years after wartime rationing had ended, it was now an abandoned expanse of weeds with a single shriveled, undernourished cucumber sitting among the foliage like a Japanese soldier who refused to believe the war was over.

A plan to reconnect with Mother Earth took hold, and now they were on their hands and knees, scraping away the soil with their bare hands, filling their nails with dirt, and staining their clothes.

“Hey Gwennie,” Bertie said, “when do you think—holy mackerel!”

Gwendolyn dug into the ground again. “Don’t tell me you found something else you hid during the war. I thought we got everything.”

All three girls stiffened into place, their eyes glomming onto a tall figure in a gray Homburg sauntering down the path. Gwendolyn clambered to her bare feet.

Clark Gable took a step closer. “The guy at the front desk said I’d find you here.” He gave the others a cursory glance. “He didn’t mention that you were in the middle of—”

“We’re planting tulips!” Doris blurted out.

“How can I help you?” Gwendolyn asked.

Hesitation played on his lips. “I was hoping for a moment of your time. In private?”

Each of the three girls looked at Gwendolyn with the same What the hell? expression.

“Ladies, if you’ll excuse me, please.” Gwendolyn picked her way out of the flowerbed, brushing away the dirt. They had taken the trouble to moisten it first, so it clung to her dungarees and one of Marcus’s old flannel shirts. By the time they reached her door, she wasn’t much cleaner, so she told Gable to take a seat on the sofa. “I should at least wash my hands and face.”

“Not on my account, please.”

She pointed to the gown hanging on the dress form in the corner of her living room. “On the account of that.”

After a mountain of discarded sketches, Gwendolyn and Marilyn had decided on a strapless dress made from nude crêpe, overlaid with white lace. Marilyn didn’t mind that it was made of leftovers from a dress June Haver had worn in The Girl Next Door, but she did protest that it didn’t dazzle enough. So Gwendolyn had brought the gown home and spent the previous day embellishing it with enough sequins to give the girl a hernia.

Travilla would have a conniption fit if he knew it was here, but the gala was less than a week away and Marilyn would be showing up on Monday for a final fitting. Gwendolyn couldn’t take any chances that it might get dirty; the smallest speck of muck would show up like an ink stain. Maybe this wasn’t the best weekend to go burrowing around in the dirt, after all.

In the bathroom mirror, a filthy street urchin from one of Dickens’ more depressing novels stared back at her. “Won’t be long!” She scoured as much grime from her hands and face as she could inside fifteen seconds and ran her fingers through her hair. She went to apply a smidge of lipstick, but the guy had already seen her at her worst, so what the hell.

Gable sat on her sofa, his Homburg balanced on one knee, a foot jiggling up and down. She joined him, but not too close. His easy smile had a nervous edge that even an actor of his skill couldn’t mask.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Gable?”

“First off, it’s Clark, okay?”

His aftershave balm had a dark, musky scent. It had been so freshly applied that she could tell he’d only shaved in the past hour or two—and she’d hung around enough actors at the Garden of Allah to know that not having to shave on their one day off per week was a luxury.

“I’ve come to see you about a delicate matter.” He curled his lips to start talking but the right words failed him.

“I’ve got whiskey and vodka,” she said, “or I could probably scrounge up some scotch if that’s your preference.”

“Thank you, but I need to do this sober.” It took him a couple more attempts to gather himself together. “I hear that you work at Fox, making gowns for Loretta Young’s television show.”

“That’s right.”

“And you’ve become friendly with her daughter, Judy.”

Neither Victor Marswell in Mogambo, Blackie Norton from San Francisco, nor Rhett Butler would be sitting here with his right leg bouncing in agitation. All three of them would have been able to meet Gwendolyn’s eye, but instead, Clark kept his gaze averted.

So those rumors are true. “Yes, that’s right,” she told him. “Judy decided college wasn’t for her so she’s been at the studio. Between Loretta and Travilla, I’m run off my feet, so she’s been quite a help to me. Why are you asking about her?”

She tried to keep her face neutral but it proved difficult with that sardonic glimmer in his eye.

“I suspect you know.” The strain in his voice told Gwendolyn that this wasn’t about what she needed to hear but what he needed to say. “Judy Lewis is my daughter.”

The three girls outside started to giggle and yip from what sounded like a mud fight.

“Are you sure you don’t want that drink?”

His mouth stayed mute but his eyes begged for a whiskey.

“Four Roses on the rocks?” By the time she returned holding a pair of tumblers, a trace of Rhett Butler had returned to his face.

“Does everybody know?” he asked her.

“About you and Judy? I remember some gossip when Loretta announced that she was adopting a baby girl. But you know how it is—there’s always one rumor or other doing the rounds and it usually turns out to be so far removed from the truth that it’s barely worth the breath it took to repeat it.”

“But you knew what I was going to say.”

The guy wasn’t here because he was passing by and thought he’d drop in, so Gwendolyn set his drink down on the coffee table and closed the space between them. It was a trick she’d learned from Kathryn to encourage more intimate confidences. “I will confess that when I met Judy for the first time, I did look for signs of you in her face.”

“Did you see any?”

Gwendolyn nodded.

“I’m glad.” He smiled gently.

“Clark, you’ve obviously got something on your mind.”

He gulped down half his bourbon in one mouthful. “I have a pal who works in lighting at Fox. He was at MGM for years. Great guy. Solid as Plymouth Rock. We sometimes get together to shoot the breeze. He told me Judy’s been hanging around the studio and that she’s often seen with the knockout who does her mother’s wardrobe. The two of them have lunch together at the commissary.”

As a forty-three-year-old woman who worked in an industry where thirty was considered passé, Gwendolyn was flattered that someone had called her a knockout.

“You’ve sought me out to . . .?”

The Rhett Butler smile faded as his dark eyes took on a granite veneer. “Loretta has kept Judy and me at arm’s length. She’s had her reasons and I understand them, so I’ve kept my distance. Reluctantly, I want you to know, but I’ve tried to be respectful.”

“You’ve spent no time with your own daughter?”

“We had one shot at it a few years ago. It was a nice visit. I could see she was a good kid even though she was a bit unnerved by having me in her living room.”

“Well, you are Clark Gable,” Gwendolyn chided him.

He shot back a look that said, It’s as much a burden as a blessing. “We jawed for a while, nothing deep and meaningful, but I left thinking it was a nice start and maybe we could develop a relationship farther down the road.”

“But it didn’t happen?”

“It unnerved Loretta and she forbade me to see Judy again. ‘Forbade’ is too strong a word; more like ‘dissuaded.’ I didn’t put up a fight because I thought I could live with that.”

“But you can’t.”

“When Judy was a youngster, sure, but now that she’s becoming an adult, I want more. That’s not so bad, is it?”

In the time that Gwendolyn had worked for Loretta Young, she’d grown to admire how much control the woman exercised over her career and her image. She was that rare Hollywood actress who actively battled against ceding all her power to a husband, agent, manager, or boss.

Gwendolyn could see that Marilyn was trying too, but with sporadic success. She had once lamented to Gwendolyn how she lacked Loretta’s steel backbone. Gwendolyn had tried to point out that she also lacked Loretta’s thirty years dealing with men like Zanuck and Cohn. She may have missed out on A Woman’s World, but she was in there fighting. If Loretta kept her career, image, figure, and stardom under tight control, she probably kept her daughter on an equally short leash.

“No,” Gwendolyn told Clark, “it’s not bad at all.” She thought about the lengths Kathryn was prepared to go to in order to bring about her father’s exoneration. “I think every girl deserves to know her father.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

“But if Loretta’s spent twenty years keeping you two apart, I doubt she’ll be a pushover when it comes to letting you into their lives.”

He started rubbing the palms of his hands down the tops of his legs. “I’ve never insisted on my rights as a father so I don’t know that I can start making demands.”

“What do you want?”

“I thought that maybe you could get us in the same room. It’d give me a chance to watch her being herself.”

“You want me to sneak you into the costume department at Fox and hide you behind a sewing machine?”

“No, not that. But something. I dunno.” He ran a hand over his chin. “I haven’t thought this through very well, have I?”

Gwendolyn’s first instinct was to reach out and hold his hand, but this was Clark Gable sitting next to her, and she wasn’t sure where the lines of etiquette were drawn around a star of his stature. “The problem is that you could walk into a room the size of Gilmore Stadium and everybody would notice.”

“I knew it was a tall order.” He thrust forward and got to his feet. “I’m sorry to have bothered you on your day off—”

“It is a tall order,” she cut in. “But not an impossible one.”

“You got an idea?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean I won’t.”

When Gwendolyn stood up, she spotted three heads silhouetted against the lace curtains pulled across her living room window and wondered how long they’d been watching.