Angst and Amaretto.
Maisie / Part Ten / A Light at the End of the Tunnel.
Read part nine–Cuckoo! Screamed the Bird in the Tree. here
“Here’s what we do,” said Maisie. “We each write, say, two-hundred words of story. Into the woods of story we go, swinging our hatchets, beginning to clear a path in one direction or another.
“Two-hundred words in, oh, two days. Plenty of time to come up with a sample of our intention.”
“I need to do my research,” said Bea. “You’re always going on about the joys of preparation.”
This was true. Maisie and Bea had explored every antiquarian bookseller in L.A., focusing on the rituals of mid-east cultures, she frequently cast as exotic princess-priestesses. Having performed with a fiend for research (Ted Shawn) back in her Denishawn days, she’d never lost her love of psychological archeology.
“OK, three days. I don’t want you coming back at me, you didn’t give me a fair chance. Saturday evening we read our stuff, then discuss, defend, all that.”
Bea heads to the den, where reside the complete, or nearly so, works of Elinor Glyn, and a good sprinkling of other popular fiction. She stacks an assortment of titles on the big table. She’ll read the first two-hundred words of thirty books. That’s her plan of attack.
Maisie nests upstairs in her bed, pad and pencil her only tools. She has faith in her unassisted ingenuity.
Saturday at dinner, Bea is quiet. She’s got three-hundred words. She recites them to herself, taking little part in the conversation.
The table is set for eight. Six guests were on hand for the cocktail hour, an institution in the house. Bea’s ceremonious I do hope you’ll join me for a very fine meal was a merry formality. Miranda had already taken a head count.
The table is gay. Dalton just sold a shortie. To be a novelist is his long-term goal. He sees his short stories, and his effort at screenwriting–as I’ve said, half the town has the idea–as skills-builders, until he produces an important work.
Dalton, despite his small success, is down. He’d just lost out on a desirable opportunity. A friend at Warner Brothers has been trying to get him into the story department. It’s not an ideal placement, Warner is a volatile place to work, people come and go with disturbing regularity. (Brian Foy, a producer, was fired and rehired seven times.) Nobody’s safe, not even a big money-maker. (In 1929 they fired Rin-Tin-Tin.)
“I thought you were set,” said Bea.
“That job went to the nephew of a producer,” growled Dalton. “Connections, it’s all connections.”
“I have connections,” said Bea. “Maybe Walter can do something for you.”
“Maybe, but probably not. Warner’s has a circle-the-wagons mentality. Your brother was at Paramount, Goliath to their David. A butt-in by him may do more harm than good. Let’s see what Mizner can do.” Dalton finally cracked a smile. “That was a lucky break. I interviewed him for the Saturday Evening Post. We hit it off. Will tells me, I’ll get you in, don’t sweat it.
“I’ll have another chance. Next time, I don’t go hat in hand. I’ve got to blow them away with my energy. I’ll throw a killer scenario at them. They’d be nuts not to look it over, I’m recommended by their top screenwriter.”
“Damn right! You have energy! You have ideas!” The speech, issuing from Bea’s vicinity, is high, odd, not her voice. Maisie had been picking at her platter, next to Bea’s. She sits on the table, she is a beloved member of the community. Dalton’s quavering comment–he is given to morose moods in which he questions his talent–has lit her fuse, set her off.
“As if anyone who talks to you five minutes can doubt your stupendous potential! As if anyone who reads your stories can doubt your singular ability!”
Bea grabs her, drops her — where’s a handy confinement? — down her cleavage. One hand over a violently objecting bulge between her breasts, the other hand positioned over her lips, she does her best to mask Maisie’s complaints with her own sound effects–energy!–cough! Ideas!–cough! Oh yes-oh yes-oh yes, the oh-yesses excited, high-pitched squeals.
“You all right there, Bea?” asks Dalton. Maisie, ends her unhinged outburst.
“I have,” Bea chokes out, “a terrible scratchy throat. I can hardly talk.”
“Not good,” says Roscoe Huggins. “Get your hiney into bed, lady.”
“I will,” promises Bea, “after our dessert. Amaretto ice cream, that’s what Miranda’s got for us tonight, me lads. Ice cold will feel real good going down this throat of mine.”
Dalton nixes that. “Uh-uh. Miranda will take your ice cream up to you. You’re in a bad way, kid. Go!”
“I’ll go, I’ll go,” croaks Bea. “First, answer me one thing. A scenario. What, exactly, is a scenario? I have an idea, but spell it out for me.”
“First step, an introduction,” says Dalton. “One page, tops. You want to see that before you put time into reading a full screenplay.”
“Fact is, I’m thinking of writing a screenplay myself. Got one underway, actually.”
Dalton shakes his head. “It’s a hard life, Bea. You know that from your brother. What does he have to say about it?”
“Doesn’t know,” hisses Maisie.
Bea, overcome with another coughing fit, pounds her bosom. “This scenario,” she gasps, “is that how Elinor Glyn does it?”
“She kidding us? You’re kidding us, right?” Bea’s dinner companions hoot, but affectionately. This out-of-nowhere interest is certainly a passing fancy. The men feel it fine to be flippant.
“The top-selling sob-sister of the last decade? She can finance a picture herself. She doesn’t need the film-barons but to distribute, except she doesn’t want to go into production like Swanson did.”
“Move books like Sellin’ Elin,” advised Chester ‘Bud’ Budway, “and Hollywood will be on you like a cat on a mouse.” Bea strokes Maisie, who, deeply upset by that remark, has frozen.
“Gotta break it to you kid, to hawk a photoplay is the longest of long shots. Write a best-seller, come at it from that direction. If you got it in ya to be another Elinor Glyn, there’s your best bet to see your name on the screen.” Bea is a voracious reader. When you catch her with a book in her hand, it’s usually a Glyn production.
“The writing life ain’t no bed of roses, is it boys?” The accuracy of the observation is met with grunts of agreement.
“Some few of us extract some sort of living — a dog’s existence, most of the time — from the sale of books with our names on the title-page. Ya gotta be nuts to be a writer.” This opinion is seconded with grim, ain’t-it-th’-truth chuckles.
“Bea,” says Henk Goodwin, “write because you got to, not because you think it’s a swell thing to do. My guess, this is a fad with you. You’re caught up in that I’m gonna be a–name your poison–actor, director, writer, riding around in a Bentley, invited up to Pickfair. Pickfair, for you, maybe. Because of who you are, not what you’ve done. Save yourself a load of grief. Stick to the hand you’ve been dealt.” This piece of advice is half condescension, half resentment. That Bea is from an elite background is well known.
Miranda has been following the conversation from the kitchen. A mother-figure to those calling Holborn their second home, her word is law in that house. She proceeds to pass out bowls of her enriched ice cream.
Coming to Bea, she wags her finger in mock disapproval. “See here, querida,” she scolds, “I promised tu hermano I’d look after you. You haul your ass up to bed now, else no ice cream por tu, mi amor.”
“You first,” said Maisie.
“Uh-uh. You first.”
“I don’t want to intimidate you with my solution. Read.”
Bea sighed, and read.
Vidor Falco, having identified himself to the landlady, was let in. Wait here, he told the young woman who had summoned him to her office, and had accompanied him to Stewart Lane in Santa Barbara.
From the top step he called, Bella, are you in? Reaching the base of the stair, he called again. This time he hailed, Miss Bradshaw, are you well?
Vidor descended into an elaborately appointed room. The cheap-paneled walls were draped with hangings. Curtains of a flamboyant hue dressed a squat, high-placed window. Beneath the window a large plant sat on a small table, growing toward the single beam of life-giving sun. The window looked out upon a weed-strewn back-yard.
Inside, a different story entirely. Exquisite objects studded every surface. Paintings large and small dotted the walls. Intricately patterned oriental rugs dotted the floor. Here and there stood velvet-upholstered chairs with thick cushions, promising a blissful lounge. The opulence was odd, wildly out of place in a basement apartment in a seen-better-days neighborhood.
The room was rather large and, with the one slit of window, dim. The milky globe of a lamp, held aloft by a muscle-bound marble Adonis, shed its radiance with quiet determination. Proceeding cautiously, Falco reached a recess partitioned from the main area by a length of fabric. Sweeping aside the heavy mauve-silk curtain, he spied a piano of polished white wood. Next to the piano lay a white bearskin; on this, face downward, sprawled the body of a woman, one thin arm resting on a pile of tassel-trimmed cushions. She was dressed in sea-foam green, a flowing robe ending in a train that resembled nothing so much as a sea-serpent’s thrashing tail.
From under the left shoulder-blade trickled a thin stream of red, her life-blood soaking into the white bearskin amidst the incongruity of splendiferous furnishings in a damp hole in the ground.
The chickens had come home to roost for the most hated woman in Hollywood.
Bea watched her friend’s eyes for a reaction.
“Tell me something,” said Maisie.
“Absolutely,” said Bea.
“Do you stick a serpent-tailed female into every book you write?”
“Scene-setting, my dear. I believe in scene-setting.”
“The description, overdone, don’t you think?”
“This is my voice.”
“I suppose it is.”
“You don’t care for it.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“So, you do like it?”
“There are things I like about it.”
“Such as?”
“We have an ornately-decorated apartment. Every object adds to the characterization. From that standpoint, this is superior to what I had in mind.”
“What had you in mind?”
“A battered cadaver on a forlorn stretch of beach. The swollen face, unrecognizable. No identification. Jane Doe on a slab in the morgue in La Jolla, a missing scandal-monger up in L.A. Two investigations take time to weave together. Noir, sinister.”
“I love extravagant detail. I call my style baroque.”
“Many would call it schlock.”
“Schlock’s done right by Elinor Glyn. Schlock sells. Don’t knock schlock.”
“She writes romance. We’re writing mystery.”
“Mystery. I can’t get my arms around that.”
“You’re trying to tell me something. Spit it out.”
“I’ve seen the world, swells to what is commonly regarded as the lowest low life. As was said at dinner, if you have it in you to be another Elinor Glyn . . .”
“Yikes!” squealed Maisie. Bea ignored her.
“Glyn knows the carriage trade. Has she crawled through the back streets of Paris? Restored to the place I love best, I’ll teach again, but I’ll also write, under a pen name. Walt will never know, unless I hit big. Then, who cares?
“In Paris I call my life my own. I can slink down an alley to a hot spot, pick up a sweet little someone. I can’t be blatant about it. I have a position to protect. There are limits, even there, to what dance-world doyennes will tolerate. I don’t dare try that here, Walter has creeps watching me. He lured me here to get me away from, ha! Bad influences! The French are broad-minded, long as you don’t make an ass of yourself. I can live with that, but keep-your-head-down-watch-your-step starts to eat at you.”
“I’m with you on that, girl,” sighed Maisie. “I am definitely with you on that.”
“This town, I’m afraid to get close to anyone. I’m depressed. I have to make my own money. Big money, not the peanuts my lectures pay. A screenplay sounds more and more like a losing proposition. I should write a novel, says Dalton. That’s my inclination, always has been. What do I know? Romance. What do I love? Romance. As You Desire Me, you thought it was grand.”
“I did say that,” sighed Maisie. “I did indeed.”
