Melting the Snow on Hester Street
Melting the Snow on Hester Street
Daisy Waugh
Rich. Beautiful. Damned.Sumptuously evoking the Golden Age of Hollywood, a time when money is built on greed and love can be a trick of the light, Daisy Waugh’s stunning new novel is a compelling portrait of love, fame, and survival.October 1929: As America helterskelters through the last days before the great crash the cream of Hollywood parties heedlessly on.Beneath the sophistication and elegance, Hollywood society couple Max and Eleanor Beecham are on the brink of divorce, their finances teetering on a knife’s edge after a series of failed films. As the stock market tumbles it seems they have nowhere to turn but to the arms of their waiting lovers.Hope is delivered in an invitation to one of the legendary weekend parties at Hearst Castle, where the prohibition champagne will be flowing and the room filled with every Hollywood big-shot around. They cannot resist one last chance of making it.Scandalous, absurdly glamorous, the Hearst party is the epitome of Golden Era decadence, but for Max and Eleanor the time has come to make a decision that will change their future. Will they sacrifice everything for fame and fortune or plunge into their hidden past and grasp one last chance to love each other again?If you love the decadence of 20s America and can't wait for The Great Gatsby film, here's a brilliant book to tide you over…
DAISY WAUGH
Melting the Snow on Hester Street
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013
Copyright © Daisy Waugh 2012
Daisy Waugh asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007431748
Ebook Edition © March 2013 ISBN: 9780007487608
Version: 2014-12-17
Dedication
Darling Bashie,
movie star in the making (maybe)
This book is for you
Contents
Cover (#u34020bca-4eb5-5f4d-8d68-aa318fdae1a6)
Title Page (#uab5d02ac-af97-5191-a64a-b50c30de3e29)
Copyright (#u3721e184-3491-57c5-acd8-a1b19bbc723a)
Dedication (#u928e1ba0-851d-5971-9b08-17946679759c)
Max & Eleanor Beecham’s October Supper Party (#ue72da39c-249c-5fb4-8b87-aceba34a6f65)
Chapter 1 (#ueb1f9c2f-812a-55ad-8a62-1e6134a3a9ae)
Chapter 2 (#uaf475ad7-fa93-58d9-a64b-56c91f184fb7)
Chapter 3 (#ud70330fb-11c0-514d-8da5-706ee5bcadd1)
Chapter 4 (#u6d6361f5-56e5-500a-adbc-8f31c9375d8f)
Chapter 5 (#ue5f6dfdf-e323-512c-b5ad-3f7fb183beb7)
Chapter 6 (#u508431e6-ce7f-5351-8a57-f0e5aee18d61)
Chapter 7 (#ua9aab595-d890-5ed0-b88e-75ed6d22e703)
Chapter 8 (#u56627cd1-29ab-5167-8d7c-f96f0924f204)
Chapter 9 (#uff2f87e7-e120-5434-a320-747b5392d842)
Chapter 10 (#u15539c1d-8eda-5605-964d-f3b874d0620b)
Chapter 11 (#u5b989410-aa34-58f8-bbb3-feb77d624589)
The Nickelodeon on Hester Street (#u310d36fb-b8b5-5092-9803-7894ec0440fe)
Chapter 12 (#u395f7611-99fd-53fd-8225-70abb20670c7)
Chapter 13 (#uf6ede242-ae39-5027-b242-43ec95d13d5f)
Chapter 14 (#u794bb18a-6f65-5991-846c-cc9d1601f9e6)
Chapter 15 (#ub706d608-da60-5a5d-b2af-ebef9d1cdba2)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Divorce Capital (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Floor Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)
Sun on San Simeon Bay (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 60 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 61 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 62 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 63 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 64 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 65 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 66 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 67 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 68 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 69 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 70 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 71 (#litres_trial_promo)
Read on for an extract from Daisy’s new book, Honeyville (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Daisy Waugh (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Max & Eleanor Beecham’s October Supper Party
1
Santa Monica, 17 October 1929
‘What did he say, Charlie? Did he say it was gonna be just f-fine? Did he say it was OK?’
She was sitting at her dressing table, watching Charlie’s approach with anxious eyes, blue as the sapphires round her throat. But Charlie didn’t reply at once. He was thinking how graceful it was, the line of her neck: the nape, did they call it? He was sauntering towards her, across perhaps the most opulent bedroom in America. The sound of softly lapping waves filtered through the open windows and, beyond them, a long white beach gleamed in the early evening moonlight. Not bad, Charlie thought, as he often did. Not bad for a workhouse boy. And a chorus girl not so young as she pretended.
Beneath the sweet smells of her innumerable lotions, and the particular perfume, flown in from the fragrant hills of Tuscany, there was still a faint whiff of newness to the room: new fabrics and paints; new draperies and furniture … Marion’s beachside house (if you could call it a house) was only recently completed. One hundred and eighteen rooms in all, her lover had built for her. Thirty-five bedrooms, fifty-five bathrooms, a brace of swimming pools, a private movie theatre … everything, really, a woman’s heart could desire, so her lover believed. Wanted to believe.
And somehow Marion pulled it off: transformed this preposterous white elephant, into – not a home, exactly, but a place of merriment and warmth. A place where, despite the marble and the gold and the high ceilings and important stairways curling this direction and that, people could have a good time. They could feel relaxed. Charlie Chaplin felt very relaxed. At Marion Davies’s beachside palace. More relaxed, perhaps, than Marion’s long-time lover would have preferred.
But what can you do?
Charlie came to a stop just behind her, and then, absently, he dropped a warm kiss on that part of her – the nape? – which had been so distracting him, and breathed in the familiar perfume.
‘I didn’t ask,’ he replied at last.
‘You didn’t ask? Charlie! Why ever not?’
He kissed her again: inhaled the smell of her skin. ‘You really are … very lovely,’ he murmured.
‘Why didn’t you ask him, Charlie? I thought you were going to do that. Because I’m all ch-changed now, and ready to l-l-leave. You can see for yourself! I thought you were going to ask him!’
‘Well I didn’t ask, I informed. I told him that I would be bringing you along.’
‘No!’
‘In fact – now I think about it, I didn’t even do that … I informed whoever it was picked up the telephone. The maid, I guess—’
‘Oh God. Charlie!’
‘Sweetheart – it’s a small party. Max and Eleanor Beecham are splendid people … Smart people. You know them well enough. What do you think they’re going to say? The biggest movie star in history wants to come to their party, bringing with him the reigning Queen of Hollywood—’
‘It’s not funny …’
‘… The finest hostess, the most beautiful and talented actress—’
‘I’m not laughing, Charlie. Because you’re not being funny. Why’s everything got to be a joke with you?’
‘And a movie star, too – in her own right …’
‘Ha! If you don’t count it’s WR who pays for the movies.’
‘And – without wishing to put too fine a point on it – the beloved mistress of the most powerful man in the most powerful nation … in the world …’
‘Oh Charlie, no he’s not!’
‘Well, you may not think so.’
‘He’s the s-second. S-second most powerful. It’s what he says. After President Hoover. WR says …’
‘HA! He says that, does he?’
‘Because he’s more modest than you are, Mr Charlie Chaplin. So it’s no use your laughing. In any case, I don’t like it when you talk that way. It’s vulgar. It’s not attractive to me. And who says you’re the biggest star in America, anyway?’ She flashed him a provocative smile. ‘Your good friend Douglas Fairbanks certainly wouldn’t agree with you …’
‘Because my good friend Dougie is a fool …’
‘Mary Pickford wouldn’t agree.’
‘She’s a floozy.’
‘Jack Gilbert, John Barrymore, Gary Cooper, Thomas Mix …’
Charlie laughed aloud. ‘Sweetie, you insult me!’
‘… Rudolph Valentino …’
‘Ah! … But you’re vicious, Marion. Merciless. Cruel. Rudy may once have been more adored than I am, but in case you didn’t notice it, honey, Rudy is dead.’
She sighed. Bored of the game, now. ‘Well. I suppose I shall just have to change out of my fancy clothes then. Since you haven’t asked if I can come along. And you can go on your own. See how much I care …’
But Marion did care. More than she would ever let on to anyone: Not to her ageing lover, the newspaper magnate, multimillionaire, and possibly the second most powerful man in America, William Randolph Hearst. Nor even to Charlie Chaplin. Keeper of everyone’s secrets, including his own, and probably her best friend in the whole world. No.
She hated to moan, so she never did. But she was careful. There was never any knowing, even in this crazy town, who thought what about anybody else’s business. With Marion’s standing in Hollywood society being what it was – ever so high and yet ever so low and, frankly, internationally notorious – there was always a risk when she ventured out in public, and she preferred not to go where there might be a scene. As a result Marion rarely attended other people’s parties. And since her own were notoriously the wildest, most extravagant and most glamorous in the city, she didn’t generally feel she was losing out.
Even so, Max and Eleanor Beecham’s annual shindy had quite a reputation, and she’d never been to it yet. The couple had been holding the party at their house every 17 October since the building was completed, eight long years ago. The party was as close to a tradition as the Hollywood Movie Colony yet knew and, for that alone, it would have been treasured. Added to which, people said it was fun.
No one could compete with Marion when it came to scale: the Beechams were too smart to try. Their party was exquisite and select – never more than fifty people, but always the best (in a manner of speaking). Moguls and movie stars. Sometimes even a sprinkling of European royalty. One year, somehow, they’d managed to produce Mr and Mrs Albert Einstein.
Marion Davies imagined, correctly, that she would know just about every person present. Added to which, WR was out of town and she was tired of staying in. She felt like dressing up and getting canned in some decent company.
None of which would have been enough, ordinarily, to make such a difference. But last week a piece of information regarding the Beecham host and hostess had been brought to her attention and, before Marion acted on it, as she longed to do, she wanted to investigate further.
Most stars never touched their fan mail. But it was well known and often commented upon that Marion Davies read and replied to every one. This particular letter had been delivered, along with the usual weekly sackload, to her bungalow at the MGM studio lot. She was waiting to be called onto set, and it was lying at the top of a large pile of unopened letters on her assistant’s desk.
Dear Miss Davies [the letter began], I hope sincerely that you will forgive me for intruding in this way upon your precious time … I have long been a fan of all your movies, and I adored you in Tillie the Toiler …
It was a harmless beginning: crazy, perhaps – because everybody who wrote was crazy – but polite enough. She read on.
… However this is not why I am writing. I have a most unusual request …
After she had finished reading it, Marion wondered if it was luck or something more sinister which had persuaded the writer to approach her for help. For sure, she and Eleanor had been photographed together at a handful of Hollywood gatherings: they were indeed friends, at least up to a point. And they were of similar ages, perhaps a little older than most of the leading ladies. But since they both lied about that, it was hardly relevant.
There were the rumours about Marion, too, of course, which would have made her an appealing target. But the fans shouldn’t have known about them: not even a whisper. The fans shouldn’t have known anything – not about her, nor about Eleanor – except what their studio publicists put out.
Of course it was possible – likely, even – that similar letters were languishing, unread or disbelieved, on the desks of film stars’ assistants all over town. In any case, it so happened that on this occasion, such a letter could not have been better directed.
When Marion read it, it touched a raw nerve: broke open a secret sore. She did something she only ever did alone, and then only rarely: she wept. Not for herself, but for the Beechams. Later, when they came to fetch her onto set, she locked the letter inside a small jewel box and said not a word about it to anyone.
‘What do we know about M-Max and Eleanor Beecham, Charlie?’ Marion asked him suddenly. ‘I mean to say, just for example, do you imagine it’s their real name?
‘Beecham?’ Charlie laughed. ‘It would make them quite a rarity in this town if it were. Why don’t you ask them tonight?’
‘I might j-just do that …’
Charlie let it hang there. She would do no such thing, of course. Say what you like about Marion – and people did – but she was never intentionally impolite or unkind.
Even so, Charlie noted, she was on edge this evening. Something was bothering her. ‘What’s the trouble?’
‘Nothing’s the trouble, Charlie. We can be curious about each other every once in a while. That’s all …’ She stopped. ‘Only, don’t you wonder sometimes, what draws us all to … w-wash up w-where we do? The way we do? The Beechams, for an example. There they are, y’know? Part of the scenery since I don’t even know how long. Can you remember? When you f-first laid eyes on the Beechams? They’ve just been there. Beautiful and clever and on top of the world … But where did they come from?’
‘He was at Keystone when I first came to Hollywood. Playing piano on set … They all adored him there.’
‘Well, I know that.’
‘Then they teamed up with Butch Menken, didn’t they? … They made some very fine movies. Between them. You can’t say they’re not talented.’
‘Of c-course I’m not saying it, Charlie. Max Beecham is terrific. One of the best in the wide world … Everybody knows that.’
‘Let’s not go too far.’
‘Well I think he is. I think he’s a great director, and even if it wasn’t such a hit as some of his other ones, I think Beautiful Day was the best – the best t-talkie – of last year. Including mine – and you didn’t bring any out, Charlie, and I specially said t-talkie – so I can say that. C-can’t I?’
‘Of course you can, sweetheart.’
‘… I also think Eleanor is a g-great actress.’
‘No better than you are, Marion.’
‘But where did they come from? Who in hell are they? They seem so … together. They’ve got that beautiful, perfect house, and everybody knows they just adore each other – they’re probably the happiest couple in Hollywood …’
‘It’s not saying so much.’
‘But you can see the way they look at each other.’
‘They seem …’ Charlie thought about it. ‘They do seem to care for each other. Yes.’
‘And I mean to say they’re a mystery. Don’t you think?’ She stopped. ‘I just wonder …’
‘Wonder about them especially? Or about everyone?’
‘What’s that?’
‘You could ask the same questions about any of us. We all have secrets.’
‘Huh? I thought you and I were pretty close friends.’
‘Of course we are. But we don’t know everything about each other.’
‘I should certainly hope not!’
‘Exactly. We all embellish. It would be dull if we didn’t. Look at Von Stroheim! One of our greatest directors, yes. But do you suppose he’s really a count, as he pretends to be?’
‘Oh, forget it,’ Marion said, suddenly sullen. ‘It doesn’t even m-matter, anyway.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘I shouldn’t have b-brought it up. Eleanor Beecham’s a terrific lady. That’s all I’m saying … Let’s get going, shall we? Are you taking me to this stupid party or aren’t you?
Charlie checked his not-bad-for-a-workhouse wristwatch. Heavy gold, it was. Cartier. A gift from Marion. ‘We’re too early yet,’ he replied. ‘In any case, Marion, the mood you’re in, I’m not taking you anywhere. You’re so damn miserable you’d reduce the entire party to blubbering tears in less than a minute.’
‘Ha! I would not!’
‘Nobody’d want to talk to you.’
‘Very funny.’
‘Except for me of course … I always want to talk to you.’
‘Well, that’s not true— Oh!’ she interrupted herself. ‘But you know what we need, Ch-Charlie?’ she cried, brightening all at once. ‘Cocktails! Don’t you think so, h-honey? Then we’ll definitely be in the mood for a party!’
2
High up in the Hollywood Hills, at home in their splendid Castillo del Mimosa, Max and Eleanor Beecham were nicely ahead of schedule. Between them, as always, they had everything for the evening under good control. Max had paid sweeteners to all the necessary people to ensure the hooch flowed freely all night. Cases of champagne, vodka, Scotch and gin, and the correct ingredients for every cocktail known to Hollywood man had been delivered discreetly in the early hours of the morning, and tonight the place was heaving with the finest liquor money could buy. Al Capone himself would have been pushed to provide better.
Meanwhile Eleanor had seen to it that the halls, the pool and garden were decked in sweet-smelling and nautically themed California lilacs: white and blue – a subtle reminder to everyone of Max’s nautically themed latest movie, Lost At Sea. There was a jazz band running through its numbers in the furthest drawing room, where carpets had been removed and furniture carted away; and in front of the house, on the Italianate terrace, beneath a canopy of blue and white nautically themed silk flags, there stood a long banqueting table. It was swathed in silver threaded linen, with a plait of bluebells curling between silver candelabras. The table shimmered under the marching candles and the artful electric light-work of Max’s chief gaffer – the most sought-after lighting technician in the business – fresh from the set of Lost At Sea.
Eleanor was longing for a drink. But she was of an age now – somewhere in her mid- to late thirties – where even the one drink made her face wilt just a bit, and like any professional actress she knew it well. She also understood how much it mattered. So she was holding out on the liquor until all the guests had arrived and they could move onto the artfully lit terrace.
She was holding out changing into her evening dress, too, for fear of creasing the damn thing. In the meantime – though her short dark hair, shorn into an Eton crop, was perfectly coiffed, and her finely arched eyebrows, her full, wide mouth, her green eyes were perfectly painted – she was still wrapped in an old silk bathrobe.
She had already busied herself with a final, unnecessary tour of the house: just to be extra certain that everything was in place. And so it was. A fleet of waiting staff had already reported for duty and were in the hall, receiving final instructions from the Beecham housekeeper.
And so she stood: at a loose end on her Italianate terrace, gazing at those silken flags, fluttering like bunting in the electric light. They’d been Max’s idea – because of the movie. Had he seen them yet? She supposed not. Eleanor hadn’t realized, when the designers described them to her, quite how low they would hang, nor quite how they would resemble … Gosh, she hated them. But it was too late. It was just too bad. Max had said he wanted them. She wondered if he’d had any idea …
Eleanor had nothing much to do. The last few lobsters were being boiled in their shells in the kitchen: she could hear the squeak. The scream. She could hear the scream and it made her shiver. The cook had prepared the hollandaise – the oysters were set in aspic. It was done. Everything was done. She sighed. Nervous as hell: of course. Nervous as ever – but this time, somehow, she was nervous without being excited. When had this wonderful party – this highlight of the Hollywood social calendar, this manifestation of her and Max’s extraordinary success – when had it lost its magic and turned into a chore?
She wondered briefly, bitterly, was it a chore to Max too? Who the hell knew?
She’d left him upstairs, changing, but she needed to discuss with him various things. She needed to tell him about the problem with the ice sculptures in the front hallway. And she needed to say something about the far arc light, behind the mimosa on the eastern end of the terrace. It looked as if it might be dipping slightly … She wandered up to join him.
He was already bathed and dressed: bending awkwardly over the looking glass at her dressing table, slicking back his dark hair with one hand, smoking a cigarette with the other. He was wearing a white evening jacket and matching, loose-fitting pants. Handsome as ever. It always struck her, even now, in spite of everything, just how handsome he was: fit, slim, well built, dark, elegant – good enough to be a movie star himself, if he’d wanted it. She still loved the look of him. Sometimes. And it still took her by surprise.
‘Hello, handsome,’ she said, putting her two arms around his waist – sensing his body tense at the intrusion, and hating him for it – hating herself for not having remembered, once again, how painful it was, to try to breathe warmth on his coldness. ‘Nice jacket! I’ve not seen that get-up before – have I?’
He glanced at her reflection as she stood behind him; at the green eyes, not really smiling at him. He turned and pecked her on the end of her nose. ‘You’ve seen it often,’ he said smoothly, removing her hands. ‘By the way,’ he added, ‘did Teresa tell you? Chaplin called.’
‘He did?’ She sighed, exasperated. ‘When? This evening? Because if he’s not coming, he might have told us so before this evening.’
‘Sure he’s coming! He called to say he was bringing Marion.’
‘Oh! … You mean Marion Davies?’
‘Of course, Marion Davies. What other Marion?’
‘Well … that’s a bit awkward …’
‘I don’t see why. Marion’s all right.’
‘I didn’t say she wasn’t.’ Eleanor turned away from her husband, sat herself on the edge of the marital bed: a bed so wide they could have fitted a lover in there each, and hardly bumped elbows. She sighed again. Who in hell could she put beside Marion for dinner?
‘I thought it was kind of flattering,’ he said, smiling a little, elegantly shamefaced. ‘Maybe now she’s gatecrashing our party, she and Mr Hearst will finally invite us up to San Simeon.’
‘Hah …’ Eleanor offered up a soft, half-laugh. ‘Yes indeed … Wouldn’t that be something?’
The beauty of San Simeon was legend. The luxury of Randolph Hearst’s fairytale castle 200 miles north of Los Angeles, perched high on a fairytale hill overlooking San Simeon bay was legend, too. But the house parties he and Marion held there were the greatest part of the legend of all – not just in Hollywood but around the world. Invitations were delivered by chauffeur, in envelopes so fine, so deliciously soft and fragrant they might been pulled from Marion Davies’s own underclothing drawer. Nobody turned them down.
‘And in the meantime,’ Eleanor added, ‘I guess I’m going to have to rearrange the whole damn seating plan …’
Max looked down at his wife, watching as she absently gathered the silk robe around her, and crossed her smooth brown legs, one over the other. It shocked him every time, after all these years, but there were moments when her sensuality moved him still. ‘What is that thing, a bath gown?’ he asked her.
She looked down at the robe. Didn’t bother to reply. He’d seen it a hundred times before. And then – yet again – he surprised her, swooped suddenly and kissed her. She moved her face before he could reach her, and his lips caught the edge of her cheek. ‘You’ll have every guy in the place swooning, just as you are,’ he said. And it sounded tender. As if he meant it.
She gave him a tight smile, refused to return his gaze for fear he might notice his effect, the hopeless burst of happiness – and pushed him away. ‘Only, it’s rather difficult, isn’t it?’ she said, just as if he hadn’t spoken, ‘especially with so little notice. Because you never really know who’s going to turn out to be the most terrible bluenose. Not really. The oddest people go funny around Marion … especially after a few drinks. I don’t want her coming to our house to be insulted.’
‘Nobody’s going to insult her,’ he said, turning back to the dressing table.
‘Well. They had better not. Poor girl.’ Eleanor pulled herself up, glanced vaguely around her, sighed lightly ‘… I guess I’d better do something about the seating. Come down, Max. When you can. Come and see. They’ve finished on the terrace. It’s looking …’ She stopped, uncertain how to finish. ‘Have you seen it?’ she asked instead. ‘Have you seen the bunting? The flags?’
‘I have,’ he replied. A short silence. Hardly noticeable. ‘Very nautical,’ he added, with a little smile.
‘Yes. Nautical … Lovely,’ Eleanor added quickly. ‘Don’t you think?’
He didn’t disagree.
She told him about the problem with the ice sculptures, and the dipping arc light in the far eastern corner, but he wasn’t really listening.
‘By the way, El,’ he shouted after her. ‘For God’s sake don’t put Marion beside Von Stroheim. He’s pretty crazy at the moment. And he never could stand the sight of her …’
3
Three hours later, the Beechams’ famous 17 October Supper Party was in full and boisterous swing. Eleanor’s aquamarine satin sheath dress, which brought out the magical green in her eyes had, indeed, become a little creased. And Eleanor knew quite well that after the third glass of champagne – or was it the fourth? – her face was more than a fraction wilted. But, as she kept reminding herself, it didn’t matter. Not any more. In the softly falling terrace lights, and with the liquor freely flowing, no one was going to notice anyway. Everyone was canned. For the hundredth time that evening, she told herself to relax.
There had been an incident with one of the waitresses shortly before the guests arrived which hadn’t helped to ease her mood. But she really ought to have shaken it off by now. These sort of things happened to movie stars all the time. Thomas Mix found one in his bathtub. Gary Cooper (who lived in the house next door) was constantly encountering them roaming his private grounds. Mary Pickford found one splashing about in her swimming pool. It came with the territory … There were always stories of stray fans slipping through the stars’ careful barricades, and it wasn’t the first time it had happened to Eleanor, either. Perhaps, Eleanor considered, if the wretched girl had been anywhere else, holding anything else, on any night but this one, it would have felt less threatening: simply an amusing story to tell. But Eleanor found her right there in the bedroom – standing, guilty as a thief, at the same dressing table she’d left Max at only half an hour earlier. In the girl’s hand was a heavy gold photograph frame; and in her eyes – Eleanor shuddered – dark pools of emotion and fear: all the madness of a fan obsessed. Eleanor had never seen it so close, and it frightened her. She had shouted for help, and within moments, Joseph the houseman had been there, standing beside her, and then, just a little later, Max had come, too. The wretched girl, sobbing uncontrollably, clutching Eleanor’s precious gold photograph frame until it was taken from her hand, had been escorted safely from the property.
It was nothing. A hazard of the job. Poor girl … Max had brushed it off; told Eleanor not to fuss. She should take comfort, he teased, considering some of the notices for her last picture, that there were still fans out there who cared enough to bother. And he was right of course. These things happened.
In the meantime here she sat, the Queen of her own fairy tale. She should try to enjoy it. The evening’s guests were seated at the long banquet table before her, deep in noisy conversation, and from what she could tell, they were happy to be there. The freshly boiled lobster had been eaten and carried away, and so, by now, had all remnants of the perfectly judged, entirely exquisite Beecham Supper Party feast … She could hear the sound of the jazz band filtering delightfully through the open windows. Soon, after coffee, and more drinking, she would slip quietly inside and ask them to snazz up the tempo, and there would be dancing. Everything was just as it was supposed to be. Everything was Lovely.
Eleanor had decided, finally, to put Marion in place of honour, beside clever, gently spoken Irving Thalberg, whom Marion knew well. She had placed herself on Irving’s other side. Not because she liked him (although it happened that she did), but because, as chief executive producer at MGM, the largest and most profitable studio in Hollywood, he was the most powerful man at the table, if not the industry. And since her seven-year contract with the almost as large, but not quite so magnificent, Lionsfiel Pictures was shortly up for renewal, it seemed like a good time to foster relationships with the alternatives.
On her right side she put Douglas Fairbanks, who was tiresome in all sorts of ways, but a big star – and he would have been offended if she hadn’t. Max, far away at the other end of the table, had Gloria Swanson on his right side, for the same reason.
But he must have switched round the name cards on his left, because where Irving’s wife, Norma, was meant to be sitting, there sat none other than Blanche Williams, chief feature writer for Photoplay magazine.
Eleanor knew, because Butch Menken had told her; and Butch knew because … Butch made it his business to know everything. Also because he knew a German actress who lived in the same block, and the German actress had spotted Max going in and out of Blanche Williams’s apartment on numerous occasions. So Eleanor knew. Or she almost knew. And she had known (or almost known) for a couple of years now.
Did Max know she knew? Did he even care? She could never be sure, not about anything, any more, let alone who knew what about anyone else … Christ.
She could leave him, of course. And maybe one day she would. But not today … Eleanor needed to think of something else.
She wondered if Irving Thalberg was aware that her deal with Lionsfiel was up for renewal. Probably not. Should she tell him? Or would it be just too awkward? And if he already knew, would he perhaps suggest she came across to MGM?
Of course he wouldn’t.
Why would he do that? Why would he do that? Perhaps she should boast to him about the fan she’d only just encountered in her own bedroom? He might be impressed. He might even think – Eleanor pinched herself. She was drunk. Any minute now, if she wasn’t careful, she was going to burst into tears.
A passing waiter refilled her glass. She swallowed it back without tasting it, fixed a blank smile to her beautiful, full lips, and allowed her gaze to travel down the table. Stars, stars – and more stars … Buster Keaton and Natalie Talmadge … Gary Cooper from just next door, John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Cecil DeMille … and Mary Pickford, of course, sitting beside her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, because tiresome Douglas would never have it any other way … And sprinkled between the stars were the others: the studio executives, the producers, the writers; all the big cheeses who helped to make Hollywood the money factory it had now become. Yes, Eleanor reassured herself once again, it was a good crowd. She and Max could certainly pull them in …
Everything was just fine.
… Were the flags hanging too low, so close to the candlelight …?
Concentrate.
Max was – was he? – was he running a finger along Blanche Williams’s cheek? He should stop it! She should put a stop—
Concentrate.
Dougie Fairbanks was talking to her. He was saying something as if it were quite fascinating … Someone’s chauffeur had made a killing on the stock market … She hardly needed to listen. These days, everyone knew someone who knew a chauffeur who’d made a killing. In fact conversation around Eleanor’s star-studded banqueting table wasn’t much different from conversation at a million dining tables across America that night. There was only one thing anyone ever seemed to want to talk about any more: who’d made how much on what stock and at what margin … the increase in values of Bethlehem Steel versus General Motors, National Waterworks versus United Founders … The stock market was everyone’s obsession.
Added to which, it happened that the day of the Beecham Supper Party, 17 October 1929, had been a reassuringly good day on Wall Street: an excellent day, after a disconcertingly bad one, at the end of a record-breaking summer. There had been a couple of serious wobbles at the beginning of the month, ‘just to keep things exciting’, Max and his friends confidently agreed, but that morning, newspapers had been filled with the comforting forecasts of the experts:
‘Stock prices,’ declared Professor Fisher of the University of Yale, ‘look as if they have reached a permanently high plateau.’ His respected voice was just one of a chorus of bullish experts, academics, business moguls and financiers, and the markets had taken comfort. Up, up and up went the stock prices again, back on their apparently relentless rise. It meant that anyone who’d put in a call to their brokers before sitting down to dinner – and that included most of Eleanor’s guests and Eleanor’s husband, too – would be wanting to chew over their successes this evening.
But not Eleanor. On this particular night, 17 October, with fifty-one guests to worry about, and a dipping arc light, and Marion Davies, and the flags, and bloody Max, kissing her so tenderly one minute that her heart swelled with hope, and talking so animatedly with Blanche Williams the next, Eleanor was finding the usual subject less than compelling.
‘Well that’s just too fantastic, Dougie,’ she said blandly. ‘He must be one happy chauffeur.’
‘Isn’t it terrific!’ Douglas Fairbanks shouted. Because Douglas always shouted. Because he hated not to be the centre of attention. ‘And isn’t that such a terrific feeling!’ He turned to the rest of the table: ‘Doesn’t everyone think? Don’t you think so, Von Stroheim? Isn’t it great to know we live in a country where your average Joe can turn himself into a millionaire just by … knowing how to do it? Mr So-and-So from Nowheres-Ville can make a million! Just like that! Just like you and me! That’s why I love America!’ He thumped the table with such emphasis it made Eleanor jump. ‘That’s why I’m proud to be an American! Charlie-boy, c’mon. Admit it!’ he shouted. ‘You heard Professor What-Not, Tuesday. You heard what the man said! Are you telling me you know better than the professor from Yale?’
But on this, as Douglas knew well, his friend Charlie Chaplin would never agree with him, nor with Professor What-Not from Yale. Charlie – an Englishman, in any case – was, that night, the solitary voice of caution among them. ‘You know exactly what I think, Dougie,’ Charlie said wearily. He’d said it many times before. ‘You got people making money out of money that never even existed in the first place! It’s a trick of the light, I keep telling you. It’s a whole pile of nothing, built on a mountain of Zilch. It can’t go on.’
‘Aw, Charlie!’ groaned Marion. ‘Don’t go getting started on that again! … J-just nobody wants to hear it!’
Charlie smiled at her. Shrugged. ‘Dougie asked me,’ he said. ‘In any case, I’m only passing on what I’ve been told by the experts …’
‘By ONE expert!’ Douglas Fairbanks shouted. ‘And you know, you keep on about your “expert” like the guy’s some kind of oracle … but he’s a solitary, single voice, Charlie-boy. There’s no one out there supporting him …’
‘There’s going to be a crash.’ Charlie shrugged. ‘It’s what he told me. And it’s going to be catastrophic. It’s only a matter of when … Personally – as you know, Dougie – I’m out.’ He looked up and down the table. ‘I’m guessing I must be the only person round this table without a stock to my name. Ha! Maybe I’m the only person in the entire business!’
‘Butch Menken’s sold out,’ someone commented. Not Eleanor.
‘Butch sold up, did he?’ Charlie said. He looked at Mary Pickford, whose voice had provided the information. ‘When, I wonder? Do you know?’
‘Oh, a couple of weeks back. I considered following him …’ She smiled. ‘Where Butch Menken leads …’ she said.
‘… We all should follow,’ Charlie finished for her wryly. ‘Well. He’s a smart man.’ Eleanor said nothing. She examined the silver-plated dessert fork in her hand, didn’t glance up. There was a tiny lull, hardly perceptible – because of the history: Butch, Max and Eleanor used to be thicker than thieves. It was quickly, tactfully, broken by Marion.
‘Made a killing though, dintcha, Charlie?’ she called out. ‘Every s-single stock he owned. Sold the lot. Pretty much, huh? Imagine it! And now he’s sore, because if he’d stayed in just one more day, or two more days, he would have made another k-killing, same as all the rest of us! Isn’t it so, Charlie!’
‘All I’m saying …’ Charlie paused, sighed, and apparently thought better of continuing. ‘… Just don’t come crying to me when all the money’s gone …’
‘Ha! It wont be for m-money that M-Marion comes crying to you, Charlie boy …’ declared Douglas.
He looked around to collect the laughter – but was met instead with a brief, shocked silence. His wife, beside him, put a quietening hand on his shoulder. ‘Isn’t that right, Mary?’ he said to her weakly.
He was drunk. Clearly. And a fool. Everybody knew it. Even so … Eleanor glanced nervously at Marion.
‘Such beautiful candelabra,’ Mary Pickford said smoothly, in her sweet, steely voice. ‘Tell me, Eleanor, did you pick them up in Europe?’
Eleanor turned to her gratefully. She was about to say yes, to tell Mary a touching story of how she’d discovered them – all eighteen of them – covered in dust in a little antique market on a side street in Roma—
‘Oh, they’re terrific little antiques!’ broke in Douglas. ‘They remind me of a funny incident a few years ago …’
Eleanor longed to lean across and apologize to Marion, but so long as the stupid shoyte continued to jabber at her, it seemed quite impossible.
‘… I had the candelabra in the one hand and there was I,’ he bellowed, ‘a hundred foot up on the rigging, the whole damn thing swaying. Next thing – WHOOSH! … The entire set’s up in flames and I’m thinking to myself – I kid you not – I AM GOING TO DIE! Right here, right now. And I’m dressed as Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest!’
Eleanor, not really listening, offered him only the wannest of smiles.
‘Imagine me, El!’ he cried stubbornly, determined to get a better response, ‘I’m a hundred foot in the air …’ He stood up, grasping the nearest candelabra as he rose, his infuriating, actorish laughter filling the air. He held the flames aloft, waving them this way and that –
‘… I’m holding onto that rigging for grim death! …’
Eleanor watched him. Felt the cold, wet fear crawling slowly over her skin. Felt her lungs tighten, making it hard for her to breath.
She saw only the tip of the candle, the flame, and the tip of the flag …
‘… Next thing, WHOOSH! …’ Douglas shouted.
She sat quite still as he and the light swayed this way and that, from side to side and back again, flickering flame against dainty, deadly silken flag. She opened her mouth to protest …
‘HA HA HA! Can you imagine it, El?’
But she couldn’t hear him any more.
‘There I am. A man in tights!’
Her lungs had filled …
‘In tights, I tell you!’ shouted Douglas, laughing and swaying. She couldn’t breathe …
‘A man in tights! HA HA HA!’
There was a taste of smoke in her mouth, in her throat, and she could feel it … blackening her insides as it burned its path through her chest, scorching, melting, choking –
‘WHOOSH! WHOOSH! FIRE! HA HA!’
And then, somehow, Max was beside her, taking the candelabra from Dougie’s fist, placing it back on the table. ‘Eleanor,’ he said loud and clear, his strong hand on her shoulder … ‘Honey. I think it’s time we were on that dance floor, don’t you? They got the best Charleston playing … can you hear it? … It’s got my feet tip-tapping like nothing else …’
Eleanor smiled. Quickly, gratefully, feeling his touch, willing herself to recover. ‘I can hear it!’ she said, in the mellifluous voice she could use. ‘It’s too perfect! Let’s not sit a moment longer!’ But she was shaking. Max could feel it. He could feel her shoulder convulsing beneath his hand.
He bent across the table and kissed her. There and then. In front of everyone. Someone sighed, ‘Awwww …’, possibly Marion. The kiss lasted a second or two longer than expected, giving Eleanor time to collect herself. Douglas Fairbanks, observing it disconsolately, leaned down to Mary Pickford and kissed her on the lips, too.
‘Mary, my darling wife, I adore you!’ he cried.
‘Oh, for crying out l-loud, Dougie!’ Marion said. ‘P-pipe down for once in your life, why dontcha?’
And then Max and Eleanor pulled apart, Eleanor smiling at her husband. She stood up. ‘I hesitate to imagine what you’ve been discussing at this end of the table,’ Max said to everyone, but looking only at his wife. ‘I’m afraid we’ve been talking nothing but Investment Trusts, down our end …’
‘Eleanor, darling, you can’t even imagine how dull we’ve been!’ drawled Gloria Swanson.
‘Humblest apologies, Gloria,’ Max flashed her a smile. ‘We’ll do better next year, I promise.’
‘Except of course, if we’re to believe Charlie Chaplin,’ Eleanor said, with her lovely light smile, her beautiful soft voice, flirtatious and humouring to everyone around, ‘we shall all be in the poorhouse next year, anyway. There won’t be any parties!’
There followed plenty of laughter, and the scraping of chairs: chairs which, had Douglas bothered to look at them closely, he might have noticed were as familiar as the terrific little antique candelabra, and the terrific banqueting table, too. Every scrap was due to be returned to the studio props department first thing in the morning.
‘No more dullness!’ declared Max, ‘or Gloria Swanson might go home in a sulk. And none of us wants that! It’s a party, for God’s sakes. Added to which – except for Charlie – we all made a fortune today!’
‘God Bless America!’ cried Douglas Fairbanks.
Max ignored him. ‘Let’s dance!’ he commanded. And for a brief, uplifting moment the brilliant director, handsome as the devil himself, and his dazzling movie-star wife, were united again; and they were happy. He squeezed her hand and led her across their nautically themed, Italianate terrace, through the sweet-smelling hallway decked in blue and white lilies, onto the centre of the dance floor … And though they hardly noticed it, alone in their fragile cocoon, the cream of America’s fame and beauty followed close behind …
Nobody talked about Investment Trusts for the rest of the evening. And they danced until five in the morning.
4
Too often, in a soured marriage, such uplifting moments do more harm than good, and only serve to make the thud of the landing more painful.
Max was gone by the time the maid came in with Eleanor’s tea the next day. It arrived on a tray at eleven thirty, with the usual glass of freshly squeezed lemon juice, unsweetened, the usual small pile of pre-selected mail; and a small, square, leather jewel box. She took a gulp of the juice. Shuddered. And opened the box.
Every year, on the morning after the party, he gave her something precious. This – a large ruby pendant in the shape of a heart – was larger and more precious than last year’s jewel; she imagined because of their recent successes on the stock market. And beautiful, too. No doubt about that. Max had excellent taste. She shuddered once again as the last of the juice went down, laid the ruby heart back in its box, set it aside. She could hardly bring herself to touch it. Why a heart, of all things? A heart – how absurd! She wondered – what did he give to Blanche? A ruby pendant in the shape of a goddamn putz?
She laughed to herself, though she didn’t find it funny, and looked about for the accompanying envelope. There was always an envelope. She wished she could ignore it, simply not open it, because what could he say that would ever make it all right again? What could he say that wouldn’t hurt?
Darling,
Another wonderful night!
Enjoy your morning. You certainly earned it.
Your ever-loving,
Max
She put the letter down. Ever-loving. Indeed. Had he forgotten what it was all for? This night of nights? He never mentioned it. Never said a word … Gosh, her head was throbbing so – she must have drunk more than she realized.
She could hear the people downstairs, still clearing away the residue of the party. If she stayed up here long enough, as she fully intended, there’d be no evidence of the party at all by the time she went down there. The bunting, the flowers – the eighteen candelabra, the silver-threaded linen table cloth, the banqueting table, too – all of it borrowed, all of it gone. And she could forget about it until next year came round again. If it ever did.
She wallowed, briefly, in the pleasure of not having to get out of bed. Her last picture only wrapped at the weekend – so she’d enjoyed a few days to herself. And she knew well to treasure them. In fact … she glanced at the post on her tray and saw, with a familiar twist of anxiety, a familiar-looking package tucked away at the bottom of the pile.
Already, then. That was too bad.
There would be a one-page synopsis at the top, first of the plot, and then of her character’s part in it. And through the following eighty-odd pages of film script, her designated role in whatever movie had been chosen for her would have been underlined. And there it would be. No message, no discussion. Just a whole lot of new lines to be learned. And a reminder to Eleanor that, though she may be a star in Main Street America, not to mention in the hearts of the odd stray, crazy fan, at Lionsfiel Pictures she was only an employee – a single, shiny cog in a very large, very shiny machine. It was how the system worked. She did as she was told. They paid her handsomely. Eleanor had learned long ago that you could never win against the might of the Studio.
And no matter what, no matter how good she was, one day, it would surely happen, because one day it happened to them all – and to the women sooner than the men. One fine morning Eleanor would open up that familiar-looking package, delivered to her by her maid on her sunny breakfast tray, and discover that her moment in the limelight was passed. The screenplay’s leading role would not be underlined for her, having been underlined for somebody else – somebody younger, fresher, more beautiful, more alluring, better … It was a morning every contract movie star learned to dread.
Eleanor was – how old? She’d lied about it so often, she honestly didn’t know any more. What did it matter? She still looked young. They could make her look young: with the best flat lighting, she didn’t look a day over twenty-five.
There was absolutely nothing to worry about.
Even so, she chose not to open the package. Not just yet. Instead she leaned back against her lovely plumped-up pillows, on her magnificent, giant bed, in her beautiful sun-filled bedroom; sipped the tea which her maid had delivered, and mulled over the events of the previous evening.
Max was quite right about the party’s success. Except for the unpleasant interlude with Dougie – Dougie, of all people! – and then the dreadful moment with the candelabra, it had been a splendid night: better than previous years, for all sorts of reasons, not least the unexpected presence of Marion Davies. Which was quite a coup, whatever way you looked at it.
Not just a coup: a pleasure.
Marion had pulled Eleanor aside after dinner, pulled her right off the dance floor, thrust a cocktail glass into her hand, clinked their two glasses together, winked at her. And downed her drink in one. ‘That was a lovely thing you did b-back then,’ she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
‘It was?’ Eleanor was confused. She hadn’t done anything. ‘W-what you said to Dougie …’
‘But I didn’t! I didn’t say anything!’
‘I mean to say, the way you looked at him. The way you refused to laugh.’
‘Oh! But I wanted to do so much more! Only I wasn’t sure if you had even heard him, and then I thought it was better not to fuss – I am so sorry, Marion. I can’t apologize enough …’
‘You m-made him feel like a sap.’
‘You think so?’
‘Ha!’
There was a long pause, a peculiar pause, as if Marion were on the point of saying something else, something terribly important. But then, at the last second, she seemed to balk at it. ‘… I just wanted to tell you, th-thank you,’ she said instead. ‘That’s all. And I was thinking. Well, I was thinking it anyway. But I wanted to ask you up to San Simeon. Would you come to San Simeon if I asked?’
‘Of course!’ Eleanor had replied. ‘We would love that, Marion.’
‘Next week or something,’ she mumbled. ‘Real soon. I’ll fix it up for the week after next. Are you free?’
‘Well …’ Eleanor laughed. ‘Absolutely. We’re free. We’ve both just wrapped.’
‘I know you just wrapped.’ Marion winked at her. ‘It’s too perfect, isn’t it? Next Monday then. How about it? I’ll get a good crowd up, I promise. And I’ll send you all the stuff you need. Tickets and so on … Don’t worry about any of it.’
‘Next Monday … Max will be delighted.’ And then, suddenly, with the smallest hiccup, Marion had lurched forward and enfolded Eleanor in the tightest, warmest embrace. It lasted several seconds. She rested her head on Eleanor’s shoulder, squeezed her, clung to her and then, just as abruptly, released her and without looking at Eleanor again, quickly swung away.
It was, Eleanor decided, looking back, a most peculiar moment and, because of the warmth, one of the high points of her evening. Marion had mentioned the invitation to San Simeon again as she was leaving. She would send a car round with the train tickets later on in the week. So maybe, Eleanor thought – maybe she actually meant it?
Other than that, Marion had kept herself perfectly busy, of course: smooched half the night with Charlie Chaplin, until Charlie spotted the little Von Stroheim protégée, barely in her teens, poor little thing …
She’d danced with Gary Cooper for a while, but he was in the middle of a movie and had slipped away early; staggered across the garden in the moonlight, and taken a back route home through the Beecham grounds to avoid fans at his own gateway. After that, she’d latched onto John Gilbert. It would have been perfect – except of course then La Garbo decided to kick up the usual stink, which was pretty rich, reflected Eleanor, considering Greta hadn’t even arrived with John Gilbert that night. Considering Greta had actually spent most of the night in a hot, dark corner with Miss Lilyan Tashman … Eleanor smiled to herself. Holy cow, if her public could have seen her! If Irving could have seen her! Too bad he’d already left … The girl only had a handful of movies behind her – and not even a talkie among them, yet Greta Garbo acted like the Queen of Sheba.
Eleanor glanced again at the script package on her breakfast tray. Greta was ten years younger than she was, that was the truth. And beautiful. Just too damn beautiful. Nobody could compete. Nobody stood a goddamn chance …
She wouldn’t open it. Not yet.
Her mind turned, before she could stop it, to Little Miss Blanche Williams, chief feature writer –
Much better to open the script.
There it still was, lying there. So what was stopping her? Mermaids had grossed over $1.3 million, for crying out loud.
Meanwhile Greta hadn’t even made the transition to talkies.
Over $1.3 million!
There’d been three other pictures since, of course, each one grossing less than the one before. And then came the last, the real turkey, disdained by viewers and reviewers both.
‘Whatever has become of this once vibrant actress?’ wrote the critic in American Mercury. ‘Eleanor Beecham’s performance is her most dull and lifeless yet. Maybe it’s time the good people at Lionsfiel pulled the curtain on a talent long since spent, before La Beecham’s name becomes a by-word for Films You Definitely Want to Miss!’
Fuck.
Fuck all of them. Eleanor felt sick.
What was Blanche Williams doing, sitting in place of honour, anyway? Why had she come at all?
Because Max had insisted upon it. That was why. He’d told Eleanor he owed it to Blanche, after the write-up Blanche gave his last movie. So maybe he did owe it to her. He owed all sorts of people all sorts of things. He hadn’t invited them and it wasn’t why he invited her. He invited her because he was screwing her. And probably because she insisted on it. And because she had the sort of hold on him any woman has on a man when he particularly, especially, enjoys screwing her.
Eleanor didn’t want to think about that. Not this morning. Not today. She didn’t want to think about Max. She didn’t want to think about the studio. She didn’t want to think about her failing career, her fading looks, her philandering husband …
Deliberately, she turned her mind to Butch.
Sometimes it helped to think about him. But not this morning. This morning his name conjured nothing but guilt and sadness – and a churning of lust – and nothing …
And then unbidden, inescapable, always in her mind, always there, always waiting, came the face of Isha, three years old, waxy with the fever, sobbing –
Only the nice letters made it to Eleanor’s breakfast tray, generally. Invitations were allowed through, and personal notes (and the scripts, of course, because they were unavoidable). And then, every few months – less and less often, actually –
This.
Her heart missed a beat.
5
Eleanor stared at the letter. Postmarked Reno, as it always was, wrapped in the same dull brown envelope, and with no name above the address. She tore it open.
Dear Miss Kappelman,
As one of our most valued clients [she read], I am writing to inform you of sad recent events.
After 25 years’ devoted service to this Bureau, which Bureau, you are no doubt aware, he himself founded, my beloved father sadly passed away last month. Since then, as he and I had always arranged, I have left my employment with Reno City Police and taken up the reins. It is a sad point in time for me, but also a point in time I have long awaited and I am eager for the challenges that lie ahead …
Eleanor skipped on impatiently.
… Madam, you will observe from the enclosed that our rates have increased …
Yes, yes, yes.
… I note that progress in the case has, to date, been somewhat slow. Not least as a consequence of the limited information you have provided. Nevertheless, please rest assured that we are dedicated to discovering the truth, and continue to work tirelessly, leaving no stone unturned. I can tell you that already we are making definite strides forward.
Please do not hesitate to contact me here at your convenience, should you have any questions regarding the case, or should any further information come to light that you feel might aid us in our work. Or, if you would like to pay a visit to us at the bureau here in Reno, I can assure you of a warm welcome. Of course I understand however that it is a long way to travel. In the meantime I will make it my business to keep you abreast of each and every development by post.
I would be grateful if you could attend to the enclosed invoice at your earliest convenience.
Respectfully yours,
Mr. Matthew Gregory
Eleanor reread the letter once, twice, three times, desperate to discover any hidden message behind the lines – but it seemed the more she read it, the more cryptic it became. So Gregory Senior was dead. She had never met him. She didn’t feel much sorrow at the news. Perhaps the new man would be more efficient? He sounded as though he might. He certainly sounded optimistic – didn’t he? Yes he did. And it was wonderful.
Perhaps a fresh pair of eyes might yet be able to see something new, something they had all been missing? Perhaps he truly had made some strides forward? Perhaps … Perhaps … After all, a fresh pair of eyes …
Perhaps, after all, it might even do some good for her to visit him in Reno?
She laughed at the idea. And then suddenly stopped. Asked herself again – after all, why not?
He would recognize her. That was one reason why not. He would know who she was. There would be questions. It would be dangerous … But she would find a way around them, after all these years. Of course she could.
Why not?
Why not indeed? A minute ago it had seemed like sheer madness. Now, suddenly, it was not only possible, but imperative.
She could feel, from nowhere, the slow burning of hope – the faintest trace of the tidal wave she had been keeping in check for so long. She needed to talk to Max. She needed to explain … He didn’t know about Mr Gregory – Junior or Senior. But she would tell him. Now. This morning. She would tell him – that she had never given up. Even if he had.
And he could come with her or not. She wanted him to come more than almost anything. But if he wouldn’t come, she would travel alone. She had waited long enough. Suddenly she could not wait a moment longer.
She called him at work, though she didn’t like to, and was put through to his secretary. ‘Why Mrs Beecham!’ the woman cried when she heard Eleanor’s voice, ‘I’ve been longing for you to telephone us, all this time! Only so I could say to you in person how much I adored your last picture. And I know Mr Beecham mentioned it didn’t do so well as some of the others. Well, I know it didn’t because of course we keep a track on all that sort of thing here. It’s our business, isn’t it? Who’s doing what, where. It’s all madness, isn’t it! But I swear, I thought it was splendid! You had me weeping from start to finish.’
‘My gosh – thank you,’ said Eleanor, with her beautiful manners. ‘That’s so good of you… . Always so good to hear. Thank you … Could you—’
‘And the lilac dress in the final scene! I never saw anything so stunning!’
‘Yes it was a lovely dress—’
‘And how was the party last night? It was last night, wasn’t it? Mr Beecham was pleased as punch with his new jacket – we had the costume girls in doing last-minute adjustments yesterday morning. You should have seen them – running around like little crazy things. Yes, Mr Beecham, no Mr Beecham. Anything for you, Mr Beecham!’
‘Mrs Monroe – Is he about?’
‘Is he about?’ She sounded confused.
‘Only I need to speak to him rather urgently. Could you – can you possibly find him for me? Please.’
‘Well. I can certainly try …’
‘That would be so kind.’
‘But you know he’s not here.’
‘Not in the office?’
‘Why, no! He’s not coming in today. I thought he was with you.’
‘With me?’
Too late, Mrs Monroe realized her mistake.
‘Oh, but what am I saying? I’m nothing but a butter brain, Mrs Beecham! He’s probably in with … probably just bashing something out with Mr Silverman right next door, just like he always is! Shall I take a quick peek? If you wait right there …’
‘No,’ Eleanor said quickly. ‘Thank you, Mrs Monroe. It doesn’t matter at all. I’ll find him later.’
She hung up. Took a deep breath, and another. It was nothing new. There was nothing new about it.
After that, she didn’t allow herself to wallow. Eleanor never allowed herself to wallow. She simply dressed and packed. She fetched one of her personalized cards from the drawer of her dressing table, and beneath their curly, gold-embossed initials, entwined, wrote her husband a note:
Darling,
I called the studio, but you were busy, busy! Mrs Monroe offered to go in search, but then she said you might have gone out of town on reconnaissance and really I couldn’t wait. Darling, you remember I showed you a letter once from a little detective I had found in Reno and you thought so little of him? Well, I never mentioned him again because I knew it made you so cross but I went ahead and employed him, because … well, of course you know why. Matz, he died. But now his son has written, and I think he has somethingimportant to tell us. He has asked me to Reno to meet with him and of course I must go. I will call you the first moment I have any news.
Your ever-loving wife,
Eleana
She placed it, carefully, at a jaunty angle on her sunny dressing table, paused, and looked at it again. She looked at it for a long time.
When had she last called him Matz? Seeing it written, and her own, Eleana, beneath it, took her by surprise; brought a stab of pain. She had no idea what had possessed her to use their old names. She snatched up the card and ripped it into pieces. She opened the drawer, took out a fresh card, and started again:
M,
I shall be gone for a few days. I think it’s about time we talked, don’t you?
E
She placed the card, carefully, at a less jaunty angle, on the same sunny dressing table, pinned beneath the heavy gold-framed photograph. She picked up her bag, leaving the rest of her post unopened, the script unread, the forgotten jewel, more precious than last year’s, half hidden beneath a cold, dry piece of toast. And then she left the house before she had a chance to think better of it.
6
‘It’s probably gonna sound funny,’ Blanche Williams was saying, a couple of miles down the road. ‘But I have respect for your wife. I have a lot of respect for her. I thought she looked just about as classy and dazzling as a girl can look in that emerald-green get-up last night.’
He had his head between her legs; his tongue inside her sweet, juicy knish … Half a second ago she’d been purring like a pussycat … Dammit. He put a soothing hand on her stomach, gave her ass a little pinch, and stayed right where he was, just as if she hadn’t spoken.
But once Blanche started on a topic, as by now he knew quite well, there was rarely any chance of her dropping it.
‘She’s beautiful,’ Miss Williams continued, ‘she’s mysterious. God knows, she’s a terrific actress … at least, that is, when she wants to be. And you know with all that, I got to ask myself –’ Blanche hoiked herself onto an elbow to look at him – ‘what in hell you’re doing spending your time with a Little Miss Nobody like me?’
He paused. Stopped. Lifted his head. ‘What’s that, sweetie?’ he muttered.
‘I was just saying …’
Max gave up. He stretched across her naked body for the cigarette pack, lit up two, one for each of them, and lay back on the pillow beside her. ‘… I heard what you were saying, baby.’
‘So?’
Max exhaled, disguising a small, dull sigh inside the smoke: ‘So … what?’
‘So … what are you kicking around with a dozy little broad like me for? When you have a class act like Eleanor Beecham waiting for you back home?’
It took a beat before Max replied. Blanche noticed it, even if he didn’t. ‘Baby,’ he said, ‘because I love “kicking around” with you.’ He laughed. ‘And you’re hardly “a dozy little broad”.’
‘But you never talk about her.’
‘Why would I talk about her?’
‘Because she’s your wife. Is why. And because I am your lover. And everybody knows you two adore each other. And because of the way you kissed her last night. And the way you two looked at each other. And because I am just jealous as hell. Is why.’
Max smiled into her pretty, honest eyes, and dropped a kiss on her pretty shoulder. ‘You have nothing to be jealous about, sweetheart. If you did, I wouldn’t be here.’ His hand returned to her slim stomach, and slowly continued on down. She paused – before reluctantly pushing his hand away. ‘You’re not being fair, Max.’
‘Baby,’ he murmured, not giving up just yet; nuzzling her neck, returning his hand. ‘… And nor are you … what are you fretting for, hmm? You have nothing to fret about, baby … just enjoy yourself …’
She pushed him away again, with more conviction this time, and climbed out of the bed. They’d spent the whole morning enjoying themselves in her bed already. And much as she would have loved to spend the rest of the day there with him, she needed to check in with the office. She had an interview with a new girl over at Columbia at three o’clock – some soon-to-be-big, Little-Miss-Girl-from-Nowhere, with a freshly invented life story to plug – and the Columbia people were keen for Blanche to do the big write-up. Added to which, she was determined that she and Max didn’t part company without having had at least a semblance of a conversation. In bed, Blanche was more than happy to be treated like a dirty little sex machine. Actually it suited her just fine. But out of bed, there had to be something between them to make her feel like a decent human being again.
Blanche was ten years Max’s junior, easily young enough to produce a litter of children if she wanted them, except she was adamant she didn’t. Her independence, so hard fought and still so fresh, was something she could never envisage surrendering. Blanche was a woman of her time, and proud of it. She paid her own way, made her own path – lived alone in her snazzy little apartment (very ‘moderne’ she told her disapproving family, back home in Oregon), in a spanking new apartment block just above Sunset. She and Max had been lovers, on and off – with two short breaks during which Blanche attempted to wean herself from him – since she interviewed him for the magazine five years ago.
7
Nineteen twenty-four, it would have been. Or thereabouts. Almost a year after he joined Silverman. They met for lunch at Musso & Frank – without the marketing guys, because Max insisted on it. He was supposed to be telling her about his first picture since being lured away from Lionsfiel. The film was called The Girl Who Couldn’t Smile, and it went on to gross more for Silverman Pictures than any movie they had yet released. But Blanche had been instructed by her editor not to ‘go too heavy’ on the new movie angle, since readers were unlikely to be terribly interested, and instead to concentrate her questions on the Big Split.
Max’s move from Lionsfiel to Silverman had astonished the Movie Colony because he left behind not only his long-time producer and friend, Butch Menken; but – even more intriguing, at least to Blanche’s readers – his movie-star wife. Until then the three of them – producer, director and star – had made not a single film without each other. They were a winning formula – no one doubted that, and everyone had always assumed the trio was inseparable.
So Max had talked to Miss Blanche Williams about the Split that Rocked Hollywood (as her magazine later entitled the article). And with or without the marketing men to prompt him, he had stuck to the official version of events. Which, with a few vital omissions, wasn’t, after all, entirely divorced from the truth. And Blanche was a good listener – an accomplished interviewer. Over steaming, unwanted bowls of the famous Musso & Frank pasta, and a bottle of Château Margaux, provided by Max and poured by him, under the table, into Musso tea mugs, Max talked with disarming warmth and eloquence about his sadness not to be working with his beloved wife any longer. He and Eleanor had agreed that the moment had come for them both to spread their wings … It was time for Eleanor to experiment with different directors and, for Max, with different actors and actresses. He didn’t mention Butch Menken.
‘What about Butch?’
‘Butch Menken?’ Max waved a dismissive arm. ‘Butch is a good guy.’
‘That’s what I heard.’
‘But creatively, we had taken it as far as we could. Butch is good guy. I have a lot of respect for him.’
‘So there was no fall-out?’
‘There was no fall-out. Whatsoever. Butch and I remain the greatest of pals.’
‘So the rumours …’
He cocked a smile, looked his little interrogator dead in the eye. ‘What rumours would they be?’
She blushed, which didn’t happen often. His gaze was disconcertingly direct. Made her want to wriggle in her chair. He was, she reflected as she recovered herself, without doubt the most attractive man she had ever had lunch with.
‘Well, the rumours that … Heck, Mr Beecham, I’m sure you know what people are saying! That you dumped him. Despite being the oldest and best of friends. Because he just wasn’t up to it … You had creatively outgrown him.’
‘Ahh. Those rumours.’ He smiled. She would never have known it, never have guessed. Under the table, he refilled her mug with red wine, and felt his heart begin to beat again. ‘Butch is a fine producer,’ he said, making a show of picking his words with great care. ‘It goes without saying. Butch is a good producer. But as filmmakers we were travelling different paths. That’s all. We wanted to make different kinds of movies. And consequently we were finding it difficult to agree …’
In any case, Max explained, redirecting the conversation, the offer to join Silverman Pictures was too exciting to turn down. Joel Silverman had promised him more autonomy, bigger budgets, freedom to choose his own scripts. ‘And I have to tell you, Joel Silverman has kept to his word! Ha! And it’s not so often you hear that said, is it? Not in this town!’
‘But why didn’t Mrs Beecham come with you?’ Blanche persisted. ‘She’s such a great actress. Didn’t you want her to come with you? Or was it her? Maybe she didn’t want to come?’
Max shrugged. ‘Of course I wanted her to come. Of course …
‘But you … Maybe you wanted to create some space between the two of you. Is that it?’ Blanche asked, aware that she needed some sort of explanation for the piece, and that he didn’t seem willing to offer one himself. ‘A separation between work and home,’ she said, already writing it down. ‘Yes. I think I can understand that.’
He didn’t know what it meant, and neither – when she thought about it – did Blanche. What ‘space’ between them? The space between them was already immeasurable.
‘That’s right,’ he said vaguely. ‘Creatively.’
She scribbled it down. ‘And tell me,’ she added, still scribbling. ‘Tell me how it happened. Did the two of you sit down and discuss it? Were there tears? Or was it … kind of civilized? Can you tell me a little bit about how it all went down? My readers are longing to know.’
He looked at Blanche, her honest, pretty face so eager to hear whatever he might say next – no matter what. The problem was, he couldn’t remember. Couldn’t remember having the discussion – or even if there had been one. One day it was the three of them working together. And the next day – nothing. He had left them. Both. And he was on his own.
‘Lionsfiel has always been like a family to her,’ he mumbled. ‘That’s what you have to remember. She was never going to leave Lionsfiel. But –’ he added, looking again into those honest eyes, and feeling suddenly, inexplicably compelled to reciprocate, to say something to her that actually had some meaning – ‘I have to tell you,’ he said, surprising himself, not only by its truth but also by the fact of his sharing it with her, ‘I miss her. I miss having her with me on set. I miss spending my days with her. I miss our working together. There was something very, very wonderful about that …’ He paused, thinking about it: the old days. It wasn’t something he allowed himself to do often. And it hadn’t always been wonderful. Of course not. But there had been wonderful moments. Many of them. ‘I’m not sure I realized quite how wonderful,’ he added, ‘until it was gone … Hey. But that’s life, huh?’
‘It sure is,’ she said, scribbling away.
‘Sometimes,’ he added, unwilling to leave the memories just yet, his mind briefly awash with images from good times, the early days – the old nickelodeon on Hester Street, the journey West, the long, slow climb together, ‘when I contemplate a future, making movies without Eleanor … It’s like imagining a world …’ and he paused, searching for the truth – any truth at all – that he might be able to share with her, ‘… it’s like imagining a world without music. Without birdsong …’
‘That’s very, very pretty,’ sighed Blanche. ‘Gosh. I wish someone would say that about me one day.’
He laughed, tilted back in his seat, looked across at her appreciatively. ‘I’ll bet you have guys murmuring stuff like that in your ear just about every day of your life, Miss Williams,’ he said, and he meant it. She was sweet – sweet enough to blush, he noticed. For the second time, too. He watched as she recovered herself; watched as she busily pretended to scribble in her little reporter notebook …
‘But you have to understand, Blanche – may I call you Blanche?’ He leaned across the table toward her. ‘That in spite of everything – really, everything – I had to go to Silverman. Silverman Pictures are making the most exciting – the best – movies in Hollywood right now. I believe that. I truly do believe that. And I make movies, Blanche. I’m a filmmaker. I’m a director. It’s what I do. What I am. There’s nothing else …’
He stopped abruptly, aware that he was revealing too much. He smiled. ‘Any case,’ he continued, ‘I sincerely hope that when you finally get to see the finished cut, you will agree with me that this new picture has been worth the … the pain …’ He paused. Added, more to himself than to Blanche, ‘And of course it has. You know, Blanche, I think, if you don’t mind my saying it, I think it’s my best picture yet.’
And then, somehow, she had looked up from her notebook, gazed back at him with such smitten warmth, that … in the intensity of the moment, the excitement and passion of talking about his beloved project to such a pretty, sympathetic, innocent, intelligent woman, he’d asked Blanche what she was doing later.
And they had spent the rest of that hot August afternoon in Blanche’s bed.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been unfaithful to his wife. Not strictly speaking – not by any stretch. But (if you didn’t count the move to Silverman Pictures), it was the first time Max felt that he was betraying her. Because Blanche was not Eleanor. But she was quite a find. And Max could appreciate that. And he knew from the very beginning that he would be coming back for more.
That was the last time he talked to Blanche about his wife at any length, or in any detail. And it was difficult for Blanche. Always, very difficult. Because Eleanor was a big star. And, if not classically beautiful – her features were irregular; everything was too large, too vital, too wild – there was no question that she shone. Something shone from her on screen – and in life, too. She was a big star. And – yes – Blanche was right. In a city of cheats and shrews, Eleanor’s beauty, her small kindnesses, her beautiful manners, made her a class act. Nobody had a bad word to say about Eleanor.
Max was very fond of Blanche. Blanche knew that. In fact, he loved her. And she knew that, too. But whereas Max Beecham loved Blanche Williams, Blanche Williams was in love with Max.
So it was difficult for her.
8
‘I bumped into Butch Menken yesterday,’ Blanche said suddenly. Changing tack. She was sitting on the edge of the bed looking vaguely for her clothes.
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ Max replied.
‘Oh, he’s not so bad!’
‘Whatever you say, baby.’
‘And you know what he told me?’
‘Tell me. What did you he tell you?’
‘You don’t know already?’
‘I don’t know if I know. I don’t know what he told you.’
She considered him, the handsome man in her bed, the love of her life, lying there beside her, checking his wristwatch. Already thinking about his next appointment, his next battle, his next … whatever it was he had to do, which had nothing whatsoever to do with Blanche Williams. She was jealous – only a little jealous, she told herself. She was ferociously jealous – and not just of his wife, but of all the beautiful women who surrounded him. To be fair, he had never given her any reason to suppose that his attention wandered. But he cheated on his wife, and that was enough. If he cheated on his wife, why wouldn’t he cheat on Blanche?
She pushed the thought aside. It was pointless. Self-defeating.
‘So?’ Max glanced across at her, noticed her troubled expression. He placed a thumb between her brows and gently creased out the small frown. ‘Baby? You still here? … What did Butch tell you?’
‘Butch told me … only I thought you might already know. Because it so directly affects you. But I guess not.’
‘What?’
‘Well. That Butch is joining you at Silverman.’
Max dropped his thumb, looked at her sharply. ‘Nonsense.’
‘That’s what he told me, Max. He said – because of Eleanor’s role in PostBoy. Being partly the reason … But I’m not sure if I believe that. Except he probably feels pretty bad, with Eleanor being left behind again, after you already did it once … But I’m telling you he’s leaving Lionsfiel and he’s going over to Silverman.’
Max gazed at her. ‘Blanche,’ he said coldly, ‘you’re talking in riddles. What about Eleanor’s role? What has that to do with Butch coming to—?’
‘Butch Menken is joining Silverman as executive head of production,’ she said, patiently, despite his tone. ‘I’m sorry, Max. They should have told you. Joel Silverman should’ve told you. Should’ve … involved you in the decision.’ She leaned over and kissed him, as an apology – for the news itself, and for being the one to tell him. She offered him a perky, uncomfortable smile. ‘So I guess that means he’s going to be your boss.’
Without another word, Max climbed out of bed.
‘Hey! … Max?’
He ignored her.
She followed his naked shape through to the small sitting room, where their clothes were still strewn over the couch. (Scarlet velvet, it was. Very moderne. Her proudest possession.) ‘Max? It’s not the end of the world … C’mon! … You two worked well together before. You made some great pictures together. You, Eleanor, Butch: you were a tour de force. Pardon my French. Gosh – maybe he’ll bring Eleanor across with him. Wouldn’t that be something?’
‘He’s not going to do that.’
‘Well, but he might.’
‘No. He’s not.’
‘Especially now. She has her contract up for renewal. And with the casting on PostBoy, and it all looking so shaky and all … you know?’
‘I don’t, Blanche. No. I don’t know. Unlike you I don’t know everything about everyone else’s business. Because I have enough business of my own to keep me occupied.’
‘It is my business to know everyone’s business. And you benefit from that.’ She told him levelly, her feelings hurt.
Max collected himself. ‘I’m sorry, baby. Of course it is. That was rude of me.’
‘In any case,’ she continued, brushing his apology aside, ‘you and Butch – you worked well together before. Didn’t you? You’ll work well together again!’
He smiled grimly. ‘Somehow I doubt that.’
‘Max – I hate to say it, but you haven’t had a sensation since The Girl Who Couldn’t—’
‘Every film I make is a sensation.’
‘Well, I know that. But you know what I mean …’
‘If by “sensation” you mean “sensational ticket receipts”,’ he said, childishly, as if, in Hollywood, ‘sensation’ could ever mean anything else, ‘well, baby, you go right ahead and say it.’
‘OK, I will.’
‘Because it so happens I’ve had more goddamn box-office hits than just about any other director in this town.’
Blanche, unselfconsciously naked, leaning against the doorframe, watching him dress, wondered, sometimes, what she saw in the man. She sighed. ‘That’s not actually true, Max. And you know it and I know it. And you know I know it. And actually I could give you a list of the ten – hell – the top twenty grossing directors in this town these past two years. You don’t even come close.’
He didn’t reply.
She relented, just a little. ‘OK – 1927, you came close. But we’re near to finishing 1929! That’s almost three years, Max. Don’t pretend you don’t know. I’m only saying, maybe Butch doesn’t have to be such a bad thing for you. What’s the big deal?’
Max didn’t answer. She watched him, shaking out his pants – scowling at them, at her – at everything … And still so damn handsome. She softened, but not only because of that. Because, in spite of everything – his temper, his director’s vanity – he cared so much about the movies he made. It was noble, foolish – doomed. And she sensed that, underneath the machismo and the bluster, he knew it. He was a talented filmmaker, yes. A talented and dedicated filmmaker, whose films would probably one day be forgotten. And she loved him for it.
‘By the way,’ she said, ‘I was touched, you know. When you wore the white jacket last night. Didn’t think you’d do it.’
He chuckled, in spite of everything. ‘The fuss you made about that goddamn jacket. You would have killed me if I hadn’t.’
She’d given him the jacket as a birthday present, way back in May. And then, even before he’d pulled it out from its elaborate ribbon and wrapping, she was fighting with him, working herself into a state about how he’d never be able to wear it without questions being asked, perfectly arched movie-star eyebrows being raised. If he couldn’t even wear a jacket she gave to him, what small space could she ever hope to occupy in his busy, complicated life? All roads led the same way. She tried to stop herself from careering down each and every one of them. But it was hard for her to be in love with him all this time, and never to be making any progress.
‘I thought you looked very handsome in it,’ she said. ‘Eleanor did too, I expect? Huh? What did you tell her? Did you tell her you’d bought it for yourself?’
‘Honey, have you seen my wallet? I could swear I put it on the side here.’ He stopped. He knew he was being rude, again, and he knew she’d done nothing to deserve it. Except he couldn’t stand it when she talked about Eleanor. It made him wilt inside, for both of them: him and Blanche – and for Eleanor, too. It took every grain of good manners he possessed not to put a hand over each ear and walk right out of the room.
Most of all, he wanted to get to his desk, get on the telephone to Butch Menken – and find out what in hell was going on.
Instead, he came across to his lover, took her pretty face in his hands, and kissed her. He said, ‘You’re a girl in a million, Blanche Williams. You really are … But you understand, don’t you? I have to go now. I have to get back to the office. Maybe you’re wrong about Butch …’
But she never was wrong. Not about this kind of thing. ‘Or maybe I can put a stop to it …’
She hesitated because she was not unkind and, in fact, in spite of everything, she bore no bad feeling towards Eleanor. Quite the opposite. She was, if anything, in awe of her. ‘But you should probably know about PostBoy,’ she said solemnly. ‘Before you go charging in there making a scene.’
‘Tell me,’ he said wearily, dropping his hands, ‘about PostBoy.’
‘It’s your wife’s next picture. They sent the script to her yesterday. She will have got it this morning.’
He laughed – impressed, in spite of himself. ‘How in hell do you know this stuff?’
She shrugged. ‘I told you, Butch told me …’ Again, she hesitated.
‘Would you spit it out – please, baby? Put me out of my misery.’
‘Eleanor’s not the lead …’
‘Oh!’ he said, slowly, gave a soft groan. He wondered how Eleanor would take it. Realized, with a small shock, that he had no idea how she would take it. She might even be a little relieved. Either way, the news hardly came as a surprise. ‘Poor El,’ he said.
‘I mean to say, Max,’ she continued, ‘it’s not even the second lead. Nowhere near. The fact is, she’s a great actress, and we all know that. But her numbers have been dropping. People don’t turn out to see her. And they haven’t and you know this, Max. They haven’t, not like they used to – except for Mermaids, not since you left for Silverman. And that’s the fact. And you probably don’t want to hear it. But I’m sorry.’
‘Mermaids was a smash,’ he muttered. Yes, it had been a smash, but everyone knew that it was no thanks to Eleanor. Eleanor might have played the lead, but the notices hardly mentioned her. They were all raving about the new kid on the block, Joan Crawford.
Blanche was right, of course. As usual. Eleanor was half the actress she used to be. Because she didn’t care enough, it seemed to Max. Not about anything, not any more. And if she didn’t care – if she couldn’t remember how far they had come, how hard they’d fought, how tightly they needed to cling on – then why should he fight for her? He felt a prickling, not of pity, but of anger, of rage at his wife, for abandoning him mid-game – mid-everything – when there was still so much to fight for. Perhaps this would wake her up. Perhaps it might shake her out of the torpor. He glanced at Blanche, who was watching him so closely, trying so hard to read something, the smallest clue, from his perfectly unreadable expression. He kissed her. Thanked her for telling him the news – and left the apartment.
Too bad, he told himself, as he started his engine. It was Eleanor’s problem. He would try to help, if she turned to him. Which she wouldn’t, because she never turned to him any more. In the meantime, he had problems of his own.
9
October 1929. As America helterskeltered through those last few ecstatic days of the greatest economic boom in its short history, Hollywood offered a matching heartbeat. In its confidence, its joyous vulgarity, it was a perfect fit for a bold new universe. The Movie Business was big business. Hollywood was the centre of the world: and in Hollywood, just five enormous film studios reigned supreme.
Silverman Pictures, where Max Beecham worked as one of three contracted directors, was not one of those studios. In a good year, it produced no more than ten films (as opposed to eighty or more, for example, over at MGM). Even so, it had a fine reputation. More than any other studio, large or small, it was known for the quality of its productions. Not all Silverman films made money. But once every eighteen months or so, Silverman Pictures produced what Blanche called ‘a sensation’ – a box-office triumph; and that was how, against the giants, it continued to survive.
Its founder, Joel Silverman, had come to Hollywood in 1910 with nothing, so he always claimed, except $100 and ten years’ experience in the scrap-metal business. But he was a man who put more thought, effort and intelligence into a single day than most people put into a lifetime, and he had made a fortune. Along the way he had lost his only son, killed by a German sniper in the swamps at Malancourt just six weeks before the end of the War. Joel Silverman had no other children. Now he only wanted two things: he wanted his studio to make a play for a place in the big league. And he wanted to find a worthy heir to help him take it there, so that one day, before he died, he might consider the possibility of retiring. It was with these two ambitions in mind that he approached Butch Menken.
If Max had been capable of thinking rationally, which on this matter he was not, he would have had to acknowledge that his boss of six years, Joel Silverman, was not simply a clever man, but as sure-footed as any in the business; and that, of all the talent available to him, in Butch he could not have made a smarter choice.
‘Married to the movies,’ Butch used to say, when anybody asked him (as they constantly did) how it was that such an attractive man, already forty and with no shortage of willing candidates, had thus far evaded the efforts of so many beautiful women, and not yet taken a wife. The phrase, glibly reiterated, was truer than he realized: truer than he would have liked to acknowledge, even to himself. Butch Menken’s work was his first passion: the last thing he thought of at night; the first thing he thought of in the morning. It was also true that the only woman he had ever truly wanted for a wife was already spoken for and, try as he might, he could not wean her away.
He was handsome: blond and square-jawed, blue-eyed and broad-shouldered; in manner and in dress he resembled an upmarket East Coast lawyer more than the West Coast movie producer he was. Succinct, soft-spoken, clever, understated in every way, Butch rarely uttered a wasted word, or offered a wasted smile, or moved a well-honed, athletic limb without having a reason for it in mind. Nevertheless, the sheer size of him – he was six foot three – meant that even in a crowded bar, or a large party packed with stars, it was hard not to be conscious of his presence. Added to which, Butch’s reputation was already part of Hollywood legend. It seemed, for the past few years, that every film he touched turned to gold. He had an instinct – verging on magic, so it seemed – for what and who was going to work up there on the big screen.
When Joel Silverman approached him with his partnership offer, Butch was one of six senior producers under contract at the gargantuan Lionsfiel Studios. Which six senior producers (along with thirty junior producers) answered to an executive producer who, in turn, answered not only to the Studio’s founder, but to his two very capable and ambitious sons. Too many chiefs. Whether or not Max chose to acknowledge the fact, it could only have been a matter of time before a man with Butch’s record was lured to a more promising position elsewhere.
On that afternoon, while Eleanor was racing toward Reno, and Max was racing across town from his lover’s bed, Butch was sitting at his desk at Lionsfiel thinking – with quiet satisfaction – about his encounter with Blanche Williams the previous afternoon. She was a sharp enough cookie, and he liked her. But if she thought for one minute she’d wheedled anything out of him he hadn’t expressly intended for her to wheedle, she was a fool. A fool – though she didn’t know it – with a predicament so similar to his. He might perhaps have felt a little human sympathy for her, had it crossed his brilliant mind to do so. It did not.
His brilliant mind wandered, instead, to Eleanor. She hadn’t called. And she must have seen the script by now. She must have seen the small and unflattering role she’d been given – and with just three months before her contract was due for renewal, she would know how it augured for her future at Lionsfiel. So why wasn’t she on the telephone haranguing him, sobbing, begging him to help? It bothered Butch Menken. Under normal circumstances the histrionics of his actresses left him cold – just rolled right off him. But with Eleanor – obviously – things were different.
Like Butch, Eleanor never lost her cool. That was the thing about Eleanor. One of the things. Not once, not in all the years he’d known her. Sometimes, when she was upset, or excited – she shook. Her entire body shook. Which was beautiful. Made her even more beautiful.
Why hadn’t she called him?
He buzzed through to his secretary, asked her to check again that the script had been sent to Eleanor yesterday. His secretary confirmed that it had.
‘And she hasn’t called?’
‘Not to my knowledge, Mr Menken. And I’ve been here by the telephone since nine o’clock.’
‘And it was made clear, which role she was to play?’
‘Yes, sir. Her lines were underscored in red. As usual. I saw it for myself before Mrs Broadbent sent it out, and I was with Mrs Broadbent when she was placing the script in the envelope. Because we were both saying what a shame it was. Because really Mrs Beecham is still so lovely, and it seems such a waste …’
All the staff at Lionsfiel loved Eleanor. They always had. It wasn’t something you could claim about many of the studio’s stars. And it said something about her, Butch reflected sourly. Too much self-control. For an artist. Not enough passion. Always so damn polite – would nothing rattle her?
He returned the handset, brilliant mind briefly befuddled. There was plenty of passion there. He knew it. It was that tension between passion and control, which she no longer revealed for the camera but which had once made her so compelling on screen. It was the same mix which, in bed together, still made her so irresistible in the flesh.
And he should have called her. He should have warned her the script was on its way. Why hadn’t he done that?
Butch glanced at his clean, clear desk: he actually did have five minutes to spare. Why hadn’t he called her? He checked the time on his immaculately unnoticeable $25,000 white-gold wristwatch.
Because he was afraid. And he knew it. Because, in matters of emotion – real emotion, as opposed to the magic created for screen – Butch was lost. Like a child. He simply didn’t know how to deal with it. Not with Eleanor. All the shaking that was going to go on. The passion and control. The swirling, silent hurt, the unspoken accusations. Dammit. Damn her. Damn Max. Damn everyone.
At the production meeting yesterday he’d fought for her. He’d taken on the senior producers, the executive producer, the whole lot of them, one by one. But by then, by the time they told him what was planned for her, Butch had already informed them he was leaving. Their decision regarding Eleanor’s future – or lack of it – was, of course, in large part retaliation for that, and he knew it.
‘Why don’t you take her with you, Butch, huh?’ Mr Carrascosa (Senior) had suggested – sneered, actually: it was closer to a sneer. ‘She’s lost the magic. Lost it so long I can hardly remember she even had it.’
‘But she did have it,’ Butch said defensively, more quickly than he would have liked. She and he – and Max – had together made the finest films. And though the men had gone on to make more hits, not one of the three had made a film of the same quality since the split. He knew it. Everyone knew it. ‘The magic is still there,’ he said. ‘We only need to fix her up with the right director.’
‘So you’ve been saying for some time,’ replied Mr Carrascosa.
Butch had looked across the boardroom table to the Carrascosa Son and Holy Spirit, sitting on either side of their founding Father – but they said not a word. He looked at Mr Stiles, Executive Producer of the studio, and Eleanor’s friend:
‘Tony?’ Butch asked him. ‘She’s still beautiful. She still has so much to offer … Why don’t you give her another chance?’
Tony Stiles shuffled his papers, shrugged, slowly shook his head.
‘Hell, Butch – why don’t you sign her!’ Mr Carrascosa called out again. Pleased with the joke. ‘You’re so goddamn fond of her! … She’s costing us an arm and a leg – and for what? She’s finished here, my friend. She’s all yours!’
Butch smiled at them – one of his rare smiles. They had done it to spite him, without doubt. But they would have found another way to spite him if getting rid of Eleanor didn’t also happen to make good business sense. And the numbers were against her: her age, for one; her ticket receipts, for two. And Butch knew – everyone in the business knew – she just wasn’t as good as she used to be. On set, she was professional. She knew what was her best angle and where the kindest light shone; she knew her lines: like an efficient machine, she did everything right. But the tension was gone. She put no heart into it – and somehow, the camera could always pick it up. It’s what Butch had told her, more than once. He’d said it again only a couple of weeks ago.
‘You have to care, Eleanor. You have to care as Max does. As much as I do. As much as you care about life itself …’
‘Of course I care,’ she’d said – beautiful, trained voice crackling with the sound of caring.
It was Butch, then, who’d shaken his head. ‘I can’t protect you from them, Eleanor. You know that. Not if …’ But he couldn’t bring himself to mention it. Two weeks later, he still hadn’t told her he was leaving the studio.
‘I don’t need you to protect me,’ she said. And then, unkindly – she regretted it at once: ‘I have Max to do that.’
But Max had not protected her. Max had gone to Silverman. The truth of it rang out in the silence. Butch, his own guilt hanging heavily, left her statement unchallenged.
‘In any case,’ she added, and kissed him. ‘You mustn’t worry. I’m tougher than I seem.’ And she smiled, and seemed, to Butch, in that instant, to be quite unbearably fragile. He could protect her. If she would only let him.
He kissed her: ‘Eleanor, things might be going to change for me soon. Everything’s going to change. It’s going to be different.’ He stopped. Still, he couldn’t say it. Instead, to fill the silence, he said: ‘I think you should come live with me …’
Eleanor gave him a throaty chuckle: ‘Watch out, Butch Menken,’ she laughed at him. ‘One of these days I may just take you up on the offer …’
They were in his bed, in his new apartment at the Chateau Marmont, an apartment Eleanor had helped him to arrange. It was a beautiful, sultry afternoon. The ceiling fan had kept them cool and, from behind the half-closed louvre shutters, softening the whir of traffic as it chugged down Sunset Boulevard far below, the smallest, sweetest, softest breezes had caressed their warm, naked skin. They were a little drunk, both of them. And she wasn’t listening. She never listened.
10
Butch looked at his watch. Four thirty in the afternoon already. Even taking into account the party last night, to which, of course, he had not been invited, she must have woken and checked her post by now. Why hadn’t she called?
He should call her. He should tell her he was leaving Silverman – if she didn’t know it already. He should talk to her. There was really no way out of it. He knew that. And so, finally, he geared himself to do it. He would call before Max got home and had a chance to break the news to her himself. He would check up on her, make her feel better, soothe her with promises to help …
Grimly, he leaned to pick up the telephone. As he did so his secretary buzzed through on the intercom. Max Beecham was on the line.
HA! It was, Butch realized, the very call he had been waiting not to take all the long afternoon. All day, actually. Ever since his cocktail with Blanche Williams the previous afternoon.
‘Thank you, Mrs Rowse,’ said Butch, soft and succinct as ever. ‘You can tell the son of a bitch I’m out of town.’
‘Out of town. Right you are,’ Mrs Rowse said primly. ‘Shall I say when you’ll be returning?’
‘Tell him I’m back after the weekend. I’m on vacation.’
‘Mr Menken, you’ll be on a reconnaissance out at Palm Springs this coming Monday. Shall I tell him you’ll be back Tuesday?’
‘You tell him that. And tell him you’ve no idea where to find me.’
‘I’ll do that.’
Butch stood up, feeling satisfied. Trying to feel satisfied. The job was done. The son of a bitch could take care of his beautiful wife himself, for once in his lousy, cheating life. Butch had a date with a cute little actress named … Melanie … No, Bethany. From Savannah. Maybe Charleston.
In any case, he was heading home to shower.
11
On those very rare occasions when Max allowed himself to think about it, the truth seemed to shine out like a beacon: the most immutable fact in the universe. Butch Menken had always been in love with his wife. During all the years the three had been working together, Max used to see Butch, watching her, from behind his clever, blue, predatory eyes. And then Max had moved to Silverman. And because she reminded him of so many things he needed to forget, he had turned away from her long before and he had left the two of them together. He never quite knew how long she held out – not quite as long as he might have hoped, perhaps. They were as lonely as each other. But he knew one thing, always. She never stood a chance.
It was all such a long time ago now. But the months and years rolled by – and he knew the affair rumbled on. Or he didn’t know. But he knew. Because Eleanor almost never mentioned Butch’s name, though they worked together; and because Eleanor lied so well, about everything, always, and because she seemed always to be wrapped in an invisible, impenetrable shell. Just as he was.
After his failed attempt to get through to Butch, Max had thrown down his telephone in disgust and immediately, blindly, stormed along the corridor to fight it out with his boss.
Silverman glanced up from his work as Max burst in. ‘Ha!’ he barked cheerfully. ‘Well, I was wondering when you’d finally show your handsome face in here. And before you even start, Max – listen to me. You’re gonna get used to him. Trust me. He’s good news for the studio. Which means he’s good news for you and he’s good news for me.’ And that was it.
When Max tried to present the case against Butch: that he was untrustworthy and extravagant; that his artistic taste was vacuous and shallow; that the sort of big budget films he produced were anathema to all that Silverman Pictures stood for, his employer and friend held up a hand to shush him. And when that didn’t work, and Max continued shouting, he stood up from behind his desk (something he didn’t do often) and simply pushed him from the room.
‘It’ll be good for us,’ was all Joel Silverman would say. ‘Don’t whine, Max. Men should never whine. Butch Menken’s the best producer in the business. He’s just the tonic we need. And if you cared about this studio as much you ought to, you’d be celebrating. Just as I am. Now go home, Max. Lighten up. Enjoy a pleasant weekend with your beautiful wife … And while you’re at it, would you thank her please for a beautiful party last night. Tell her Margaret wants to know where she found those lobster …’
Max returned to the Castillo not long afterwards. Feeling bruised and foolish, and in a filthy mood, he went directly to his study, where he stayed, hidden away, drinking heavily to dull the myriad of pains – among them the ache, ever present, in the palms of his two hands. It was always more acute when he was tired. He sat at his desk and pulled out the old screenplay, the one he turned to whenever his hands burned, or his heart ached, and which one day he swore he would make into a film. After several hours of failing to make any progress with it, he staggered to bed.
All the time he had imagined his wife’s brooding presence somewhere in the house, and was torn between resenting her failure to engage with him, and delighting in not being required to engage with her. But then the bedroom was empty. And then there it was, the miserable little note:
M,
I shall be gone for a few days. I think it’s about time we talked, don’t you?
E
He stared at it stupidly, mind throbbing, trying to work out what in hell it meant. Time to talk? About what? He was tempted to laugh.
Where did she imagine they could possibly begin?
The Nickelodeon on Hester Street
12
New York City, December 1909
Thick snow had settled above the city grime on Hester Street. During the day, the two had mingled under a million tired feet, and this evening the resulting soup had frozen over once again. Eleana’s boots had been restitched so often there was barely anything left to hold them together. They had sucked in the filthy, icy mire, numbed her feet as she stood on Greene Street – and now, in the steaming warmth of the picture house, they were itching and aching as they thawed. It didn’t matter. Not really. It was such a relief to be inside – somewhere warm and cheerful at last – and with Matz at the piano, smiling at her through the crowd. There was neat gin running warm through Eleana’s veins, and hot potato soup in her belly, and the new movie, Frankenstein, playing on a loop on the screen above her head. Her feet could have detached themselves completely and she might not have complained.
Maybe ‘picture house’ was too grand a name for the place. It was a five-cent Lower East Side nickelodeon, a dirty little store front, nothing more, and nothing like the big, fancy theatres opening further uptown. There was a screen at one end, a hand-turned projector at the other, and not enough benches for the boisterous audience between the two. It was packed, as it was every night, even now, with the garment strike – and thick with the smells of tobacco and sweat, and hot, unwashed bodies.
The projection screen was too small, or the film was too large. Something wasn’t right. As always, at the nickelodeon on Hester Street, the top half of the image was bouncing lopsided off the ceiling. But nobody complained. In the normal run of things, such a detail wouldn’t stop the audience from screaming with merry terror: it was Matz Beekman, up to his tricks at the piano keyboard, who was so blithely sabotaging the mood.
Matz was employed five evenings a week (at seventy-five cents a night) to provide musical accompaniment to whatever film was showing. Tonight he had cast aside the official score, as he did from time to time, and was improvising a comic soundtrack of his own – turning what was meant to be a horror show into a ludicrous romp – and the crowd was loving it. Their bellows of laughter could be heard outside on the frozen street, bursting from the room, beckoning more people to join the hot, boisterous crush. Looking at them all, as Eleana did just then, it would have been hard to guess just what and whom they were up against. The garment workers’ general strike, into its third week now, was more widespread – and more successful – than anyone had expected it would be, including the strike organizers. And now the city authorities were turning savage. In cahoots with the factory owners, they were letting their thugs loose on the picket lines, and for the mass of the Lower East Side, garment-manufacturing centre of the world, life had become not merely a struggle to stay warm and to find enough to eat, but a battle – bloody, violent, lawless. To the hunger and the grind, the anonymity and the squalor, there had been added a tang of actual, mortal fear.
Eleana turned her mind from it, from all of it. Everything to do with the strike, and everything connected with it. She concentrated instead on the here and now: the nickelodeon on Hester Street. And Matz at his piano. And Frankenstein and his monster, bouncing off the ceiling.
The film was only sixteen minutes long and Matz knew every frame. He watched movies differently from other people – with the same concentration and passion that he did everything, but with a filmmaker’s instinct, too; though he couldn’t know it yet. It meant he only needed to watch something once, and he could break it down, scene by scene, shot by shot.
No matter what the film was showing, in just a handful of notes, and simply to keep himself amused, Matz could take possession of it, transform the mood. He could send the audience lurching from horror to tears and then to laughter, and carry every soul in the room with him. It was magical. Matz was magical. Eleana loved him most when he was at the piano, hitting the keys, playing the audience – happy and free. He was a different man from the one who stood on stage at the Union halls and called on his fellow workers to strike, or to keep striking, or to keep up the fighting. She loved him then, too – of course. She loved and admired him in the halls. But she loved and desired him at the piano. He would look up suddenly, in the middle of it all, his audience weeping or laughing at his musical command – he would glance up through the crowd, with that look of ferocious concentration, search out Eleana, catch her eye, and his face would break into a wild grin. Often, more and more often, he would beckon her over, forget the film entirely, and instead start hammering out one of the popular songs, in the hope that she might sing along …
Give My Regards to Broadway …, Take Me Out to the Ball Game … , Keep on the Sunny Side …
The crowd never objected. The regulars would holler for her until she came forward to stand beside him.
She didn’t do much. A song and dance. A little routine. The usual schtick. The sort of acts pretty young girls were running through in cheap bars and crowded nickelodeons all over the city. Except, when it came to it, Eleana was anything but usual. Her dark features were too large to be conventionally pretty, and there was a wildness about her, as if she were permanently searching, in hope and fear – and, above all, in vain – for an exit from whatever situation she was in. She was rough hewn, yet: still only a teenager. But she was beautiful. Matz saw it. The crowd saw it, when she sang. In years to come, the camera would see it. She was as magical as Matz up there, standing by that piano: a born performer. Her rich voice, her expressive face, her timing, her intensity, her humour, her lightness of touch – something and everything about her cast a spell. Matz told her so, endlessly. He knew she was a star, all along. He used to say so. And she must have believed it, just a little, or she wouldn’t have continued to stand up there, night after night. She wouldn’t have followed him to the ends of the earth … And she must have heard the applause, felt the warmth. She loved it back then, in the beginning. It made her feel alive.
Tonight, after she sang, they would be passing a hat for the strike fund. And when Matz stopped playing for the evening, when she’d done her song and dance, and the customers were heading home, she might pull him into the cupboard behind that beaten-up piano. Or he might pull her, probably: either way. It was where the proprietor, Mr Listig, stored any reels of film overnight. Not such a big cupboard then: no space to lie down. But big enough. At the end of the evening they always helped to put the reels away, and then – what the hell? Mr Lustig pretended not to notice. He didn’t care (so long as the reels weren’t ruined). Seventy-five cents an evening wasn’t much, after all, and Eleana didn’t even get that. She received nothing, except a wave-through at the door. A little bit of privacy at the end of the night wasn’t much, but it was a luxury not many young couples enjoyed back then, not on the Lower East Side. The use of his cupboard was a perk of the job.
13
She and Matz had been together for three years by then, since Eleana was fifteen. And Matz was eighteen, perhaps. Or seventeen. Nineteen … Matz always travelled light on such details. Until he met Eleana, he seemed to travel entirely alone. He came to America – he said – ten years earlier, alone with his mother, who had died since, to be reunited with his father, who never appeared at the dock to claim him. It was a daily tragedy in New York back then, when so many thousands of immigrants were pouring in every day.
And, to Matz, it was a mystery still. His father had sent the money home, enough for their passage to join him. It had taken him four years to collect enough together: four long, hungry years, saving, scrimping, living no better than a dog in the Lower East slums.
But when wife and son disembarked at last, the Statue of Liberty behind them, and a free life in the New World in front, he wasn’t at the pier to greet them, and though they waited for three days, returned every morning and every afternoon for many more, he never did come. Matz and Matz’s mother never laid eyes on him again.
So that was Matz.
He couldn’t remember his father, anyway. Couldn’t remember his home country, not really. But he remembered this and that: a grandmother, plenty of cousins, and a great crowd – the whole shtetl, his mother said, turning out to wave them off on their journey. He remembered the ship, and the long days at sea: the cramped, stale air on the lower deck, the seasickness – and the lice inspectors at Ellis Island, who had dragged him off, yanked him, screaming, from his mother’s arms. He remembered the wild, overwhelming relief when he was allowed to fall back into her arms again. He would never forget that.
And then … nothing much. The shock of the Lower East Side. The tenement flats, six storeys high, one after the other to the horizon end, blocking the sun, hiding the sky – and the teeming streets, the dirt, the smell of rotting garbage and horse manure, the roar of metal wheels on cobbled roads, the soot that rained from the elevated trains, the endless noise … And his mother finding work, and then working, and working, and never stopping … Someone used to bring vast bundles of materials to the apartment where they boarded, and then she – and the lady who took the rent, and her three daughters and an old man and someone else, and sometimes Matz, too – would sit in silence, too tired to talk, constructing silken flowers for ladies’ hats, by the hundreds, by the thousands, night after night … Someone took the bundles away when the work was completed, and brought back more bundles: a never-ending stream of bundles, squatting in the space, piled high, stealing the daylight …
What he remembers most is that airless August, when she lay dying.
They were boarding with a family on Essex Street, and the family was kind. There was tuberculosis rampant through the block that summer. With so many bodies existing so close together, when the sickness visited a building, as it did from time to time, it took with it whole families, it swept away whole floors of human life. But on this occasion, in Matz’s small apartment, only Matz’s mother fell prey – and the family they boarded with took pity. They let her stay on the only bed, they moved it to the room with the only window, and for those last few weeks, and even for a week or so afterwards, they wouldn’t take any rent from him, and they fed Matz free of charge.
After that – after that – Matz had survived. That was the main thing. He stole food from the carts on Hester Street, collected coal fallen from the back of the coal carts and sold it, or exchanged it, piece by piece. He constructed silk flowers, carried bundles, took work where he could; did whatever he had to do. And in fact he did far better than simply survive. Somehow, between the struggle to earn enough to eat, the struggle to find a place to sleep, Matz achieved what his parents had brought him to the New World to achieve: there was a charitable night school on East Broadway, founded to help little immigrant boys just like him. Without it, who knows what might have happened?
Matz learned English. He learned to read and write. Learned the piano. Discovered Karl Marx. Learned, above all, that life didn’t have to be this way; that it wasn’t this way for everyone.
When he first came to live at Eleana’s tenement flat on Allen Street – his fifth move in a year – he was a member of the Socialist Party of America, and a vocal and active member of the Garment Workers’ Union. He worked ten hours a day as a cutter at the Triangle Waist Company, already one of the largest and most productive garment factories in the city – where, because his job required skill as well as masculine brawn, he earned $12 a week; three times what the young female machinists were paid, working the same hours. He kept only what he needed to survive, and divided the rest between the Party, the Union, and the little boys on the Lower East Side who roamed the streets just as he had, whose fathers never came to meet them at the dock, whose mothers died of consumption by a small window in a filthy street, in a crowded tenement a world away from home.
That was Matz.
By comparison, Eleana had enjoyed an easy life. Who hadn’t? She was born a few crowded streets away, on Orchard Street, five years after her parents arrived off the ship. By the time she was born, her parents were fully Americanized, and took care to speak to Eleana, almost always, in English. Her sister, two years her elder, died of tuberculosis when Eleana was one. Her father, Jethro, shared a lease on a six-by-four feet pickled food store, in the hallway of a neighbouring tenement block. He died of pneumonia, aged thirty-nine, in the winter of 1905, a year or so before she and Matz met. But Eleana often remembered her father: learned, affectionate and kind, always with the smell of pickled herring hanging over him, and – like everyone she knew – always working.
After he died, life grew much tougher. The shop, such that it was, was quickly appropriated by the other lessee, leaving Jethro’s widow and daughter to fend for themselves: Eleana abandoned her education and set to work making up the family income. Easier than Matz’s life, perhaps. But never easy. Before Jethro died, their tiny apartment had been shared only with one uncle and two cousins. Afterwards, innumerable more were crammed in. The apartment, like so many of their neighbours’, became home and sweatshop both, and a flop house for an ever-changing roster of boarders and fellow workers. They sewed buttons onto feathers, or feathers onto ribbons or ribbons onto hats … Whatever piecework was going, they took it in, and sewed – too tired to talk – and sewed – too poorly paid to stop – and sewed, and only paused to sleep.
It was how Matz first encountered her. Old for her years, and with the roster of boarders always passing through, no longer quite the untarnished maiden of good romantic fiction, a toughened daughter of the Lower East Side, but with a bloom that nothing and no one could dim.
There was a heat between them from the moment they met. No doubt about it. She was fifteen. He was eighteen. Maybe. He came back from the Triangle factory that first night. He sat down at the small kitchen table, where the boarders had to eat in shifts. Her mother passed Eleana a plate of schmaltz – chicken fat – and cornbread, which Eleana set before him without a word. He looked up at her – she looked back at him. If it wasn’t love, it was desire at first sight: hot, thick, rich. They gazed at each other, and felt a rush of something wonderful flow through them. They gazed at each other, in no hurry to look away; allowed their eyes to roam each other’s faces as if they were quite alone in the room, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. After a minute, when the current between them seemed to stifle everything else – and there seemed to be no question where it would lead, Eleana’s mother leaned across from the stove and smacked her soup ladle against Matz’s bowl. That was all. She said nothing. Nobody said anything. And, for the instant at least, the spell was partially broken.
There were eight bodies sleeping in that small and crumbling ‘old law’ Allen Street apartment then. Lower East Side was still filled with them – tenements with conditions so foul, with so little light and space, that they were no longer legal. Slowly, they were being replaced. But too slowly. In this small apartment, there lived five family members, loosely connected – not everyone could say quite how – and three boarders, connected only by the fact of the rent. At the end of each day, ten dog-tired bodies returned from their workplaces to be fed by their landlady: pickled herring and cornbread, pickled herring or cornbread, schmaltz, potatoes … mostly potatoes … Eleven bodies squeezed into the four small rooms: a parlour, a windowless kitchen, two windowless bedrooms. Directly outside ran the track for the Second Avenue elevated railroad, which meant a constant thunder and rumble of passing trains, and cinders from the engines floating through the only window, coating the parlour and everything inside it with dust. There was a water faucet in the hallway and a couple of toilets, which serviced all six floors, all seventeen apartments, each one as crammed as the one above, and the one below, and opposite, and on either side …
They slept sardine-like, side by side on wooden pallets – no room for niceties here; no single-sex wards. On the sixth night, the two of them lay together in the same hot, slumbering room, separated only by a few unwanted bodies, a few feet of space. Neither could have stood it much longer: the proximity and the distance. But Eleana waited, her mind and body restless with longing. She knew he would come to her, and so he did.
Matz clambered over the two sleeping figures between them – Eleana’s young cousin was one, and the other was somebody else. Matz squeezed in beside her. And she regarded him in the semi-darkness. A long time it was they lay like that: a minute or two, or more. And in the beautiful hush, when the noisy world receded, he touched her face – and she touched his, and they saw in each other all that they needed to see, at least for the moment: more than they ever knew it was possible to see in another human being – acceptance, trust, curiosity, desire … Finally, he whispered:
‘You – this moment – no, you, Eleana. This is all I have been able to think of …’
She nodded, curved him a slow, warm smile: ‘I was hoping so,’ she murmured, ‘but my goodness you took your time!’
He laughed – they both did, a whispered laugh – and they made love to each other – they fucked each other – just there and then. Quietly. So quietly. Beside them, the sleeping man – the one who wasn’t the cousin – grunted in his sleep, a half-conscious protest at his small space being disturbed; and shunted up as best he could. But he didn’t wake.
It was a stolen moment: a moment of enchantment and fierce perfection, shared by two people for whom life had only ever offered struggle. It was a moment which amazed them both.
‘Kishefdik!’ Matz whispered. ‘I am a lucky man.’
And she giggled. ‘Kishefdik! Magical. Yes, yes. It was. You are. Let’s do it again.’
He gazed at her, through the tenement gloom. There was a small light shining from the parlour, where a few of them were still at work, attaching mother-of-pearl buttons to a heap of child-sized pantaloons, sixty little buttons an hour, ninety child-sized pantaloons a night, fourteen hours a day. Three dollars more a week. ‘Sheyn maydl, Eleana,’ he whispered, over the hum of the sweatshop sewing machines, the hum which never stopped; over the snores and grunts of his fellow boarders. ‘You’re beautiful … The most beautiful girl I ever saw.’ And she was. He believed she was. Cat’s eyes, green as emeralds, warm as a summer moon; and that soft, smiling mouth, that long slim neck, and those eyes …
‘Your eyes …’ he whispered. ‘All week, all I see are those eyes …’
She didn’t giggle. She looked at him, looking at her, through the tenement gloom. ‘I am not really beautiful,’ she said simply. ‘But you make me feel as though I were.’
That was how it began. And now, three years on, Matz still worked at the Triangle Waist Company factory during the day and, five nights a week, he worked (though it hardly counted as work) at the Hester Street nickelodeon. During the strike, of course, he and Eleana earned nothing from the factory. But thanks to the nickelodeon, they were better off than many. They had moved to another apartment on the same street, no less cramped or dark or crumbling, and even smaller than the last, but without the elevated railway right outside the window, at least, and with fewer roommates. They lived with Eleana’s mother, Batia Kappelman, and Eleana’s pregnant cousin, Sarah Kessler, and Sarah’s brown-eyed baby Tzivia, and (sometimes) with Sarah’s husband Samuel Kessler, who came and went. There was also, temporarily, a greenhorn boarder living with them, a cousin of Sarah’s, fresh from the old country and still finding his feet.
And best of all, of course, there was a daughter, Isha. Two years old – eighteen months older than her cousin Tzivia. The girls were as alike as two peas in a pod, so their grandmother always said. But of course they weren’t. In any case, Matz and Eleana quietly, confidently noted, Isha was not like anyone, not really. She was their golden child. She could walk and talk already, and she had a smile that could melt all the snow on Hester Street, and eyes as wild and green as her mother’s. Her parents wanted nothing less than the world for her: but a different world – one that was kinder and fairer, and which didn’t smell of pickled herring and horse manure and rotting vegetables. And where food was plentiful and the air was clean, and where their baby girl didn’t have to fight for every soot-filled little breath, and wheeze through every airless night, but where she could sleep comfortably, breathe easily, and know that she was safe.
Isha was never strong – not from the first day. But she had bright green eyes, like her mother, and thick dark curly hair, like her father. And laughter that was so easy, so warm, so infectious, it lightened the burden of all and any who were lucky enough to hear it.
So. They were blessed. They had a roof over their heads and enough food on the table – always enough for Isha, and enough, just about, for them. Unlike his fellow strikers, Matz still brought money home from his work at the nickelodeon and there was just enough, after he had given half of it away, to pay the rent. Better than that, in the apartment they shared with only five others, it had been agreed that when the strike was over, and the greenhorn had found his feet, Eleana, Matz and Isha would have a room of their own.
14
Last night, as she had been making her way home from the Greene Street picket line, Eleana had been approached – ambushed, rather – by Mr Blumenkranz, one of the supervisors at Triangle and someone who, when she wasn’t striking, she was forced to deal with on a daily basis. He was a small man, no taller than Eleana, in his late forties, with an unhappy wife at home. Mr Blumenkranz was standing in wait for her, hiding behind a stationary coal cart, because he sensed, quite rightly, that if Eleana had seen him she would have quickly turned and walked the other way. He fell into step as she bustled by, causing her to jump, and offering her no choice but to acknowledge his presence. She glanced about her, unhappy that anyone should spot her fraternizing with the management, and tried to walk on by. But he was quite determined.
‘Eleana!’ he said, panting slightly to keep pace, struggling for a foothold on the ice.
‘Good evening Mr Blumenkranz,’ she replied, cool but polite, not glancing at him, walking faster. Since when, she wondered, had he thought to call her Eleana?
He rarely bothered to learn the machinists’ names – not first names or second names. Most came and went so fast, why would he bother? But there was generally one girl who caught his eye, whose name he always remembered. Eleana was the one. Everybody noticed it. All the girls. And Matz, too. Mr Blumenkranz’s crushes were a long-running joke at Triangle. Sometimes the girl he fixated upon simply left. Couldn’t cope with it. Sometimes, when they wouldn’t submit to his advances, he fired them. Sometimes they accepted his little gifts, his offers of money and stayed for a little while. Until they were fired. Sometimes, rumours circulated about a girl getting herself in trouble. One way or another, nothing good ever seemed to come of his crushes. To their recipients, it was generally deemed, they were less of a blessing than a curse.
But Eleana was clever, in her quiet way. And somehow she had survived Blumenkranz’s cloying attention for longer than the rest, while still keeping him at bay. Her pleasant refusal to engage with him, her ability to slip so innocuously through his fingers, only left him panting for more. Mr Blumenkranz had taken to standing behind her as she bent over her sewing machine, which whirred from the same motor under the same floorboards and at the same speed as the machine beside her, and the machine beside that, and all two hundred machines on the factory’s eighth floor …
‘Ah, Miss Beekman!’ he would sigh, above all the racket of the whirring. ‘A born machinist, if ever there was one!’ As if that were any kind of compliment. And he would turn to the rest of the row, heads bowed, necks and backs twisted over their work: ‘If only all you girls could work as efficiently as the lovely Miss Beekman!’
She corrected him once. ‘It’s Mrs Beekman, Mr Blumenkranz.’ Though, strictly speaking, it wasn’t. She was still Miss Kappelman. She and Matz weren’t yet married. It was something Eleana’s mother protested about from time to time. But somehow they had never quite got around to it. There was always something else more urgent to be done, some other more essential way to spend the time and money.
Mr Blumenkranz knew perfectly well she lived with Matz Beekman the cutter – Union sympathist and nothing but trouble, as far as Blumenkranz was concerned. If he could have his way the man would be fired. But a good cutter was hard to find. And everyone knew, Matz was the best they had. So Blumenkranz ignored Eleana’s comment. He laid a plump, yearning hand on her thin shoulder. ‘Continue your work like this, Miss Beekman,’ he said to her, ‘and before long we shall make you head of the line!’
Head of the line. Meant an extra $1 a week.
‘Head of the line, Miss Beekman! I don’t need to remind you – it’s another dollar a week!’
She let his hand rest on her shoulder – glanced across at Matz briefly, at the far end of the same floor, where the cutters stood. But Matz was oblivious – busy with his knife, slashing away, muttering Marxist revolution into the ear of the cutter beside him. She let Blumenkranz’s finger touch the skin at the top of her neck. Felt nothing – not a shiver of revulsion, because after all, the moment would pass.
When he finally wandered away, Dora, working beside Eleana, glowered at her closest friend.
‘Dershtikt zolstu vern!’ she said furiously. ‘You’re such a fool.’
‘You think so?’ Eleana giggled. ‘Why’s that? The stupid man is driving me crazy!’
‘“Miss” Beekman. “Mrs” Beekman. Who the hell cares? Not you! That’s for sure. Or you might have done something about it.’
‘Oh!’ Eleana tutted mildly. ‘For sure I care.’
‘Blumenkranz adores you, Miss Eleana Kappelman. You’re his One and Only.’
‘Nonsense! Shh!’
Dora chortled. ‘For sure – you’re his Chosen One, Ellie! The Only Girl for Him.’
‘Shut up, Dora!’
‘He loves you better than his own life!’
‘You’ll have us both fired!’
‘Carry on treating him as you do, Eleana, and pretty soon you shall be out of a job. That’s for certain.’
Eleana tipped her head to imply disagreement, but said nothing.
‘You want another a dollar a week? Or don’t you?’ her friend burst out impatiently.
‘Of course I want an extra dollar a week.’
‘Because if you don’t want it, “Mrs” Beekman, I surely do! Mr Blumenkranz can call me anything he likes! I’ll take an extra dollar for it, gladly.’
‘I’m sure you would, my friend,’ Eleana smiled.
‘You think I’m a kurve? Very well. Perhaps it’s so. I am a survivor. That’s what I am.’
‘And a kurve,’ Eleana added, laughing now. ‘And I shall tell your mama, too. The very next time I see her.’
Dora smiled. ‘You think my mama was any better in her day?’
‘Well … yes, Dora.’ Eleana looked at her, quite startled. ‘Indeed I do! And you know it too! You’re mother is a good woman.’
‘Well, Eleana, and so am I. That is exactly my point. I, too, am a good woman. And so are you. But a “good woman” needs to survive. And these are different times. This is America. Life isn’t what it was in the Old—’
‘Oh, please don’t start …’
It wasn’t that Eleana disagreed with her. Far from it. She only wished that all roads, all conversations – everything – didn’t have to lead to the same point. Dora’s socialism was becoming more irksome, more all-consuming than even Matz’s.
Nevertheless, Eleana didn’t correct Mr Blumenkranz again. She put up with his calling her Miss Beekman, leaning over her shoulder so his warm breath ran damp down her spine, and always smiled brightly when he passed. By the time of the strike neither the salary raise, nor the promised head-of-line advancement had materialized. On the other hand, she still had a job at the factory.
And here he was still, all these months later, slip-sliding after her over the ice as she returned from the Greene Street picket line. ‘Wait, Eleana!’ he panted, skidding in the frozen grime. ‘Can’t you stop a moment? I have something terribly important—’
‘I have to get home, sir,’ she said, still walking. ‘I have a small daughter waiting. Unless …’ Away from the factory floor, in these teeming streets, it was harder to hide her disdain. She threw him a glance, mid-stride. ‘Unless of course you have a message for the workers?’ She smiled at him, without warmth. ‘In which case, I’ll be sure to pass it on.’
‘Not for all the workers. No.’
‘Oh. Well then.’
‘Eleana.’ He took hold of her sleeve and pulled her to a halt. She might have snatched it back. She fought the urge. Because – even now, in the street, with the pathetic, pleading look in his eye, he was still powerful. The strike would not last forever, and there was the life beyond it to consider, when Mr Blumenkranz would once again be standing behind her, his hand on her shoulder, his finger on her neck – choosing whether to fire her, or to make her head of the line.
‘What is it, Mr Blumenkranz?’ she snapped.
He seemed surprised, as if he hadn’t really expected her to stop. ‘I have an offer for you,’ he said. ‘I wrote it down …’ He fumbled in the pockets of his thick winter coat. Eleana, standing still and wearing a jacket far thinner than his, began to shiver. ‘Wait a moment,’ he mumbled. ‘Wait there …’ But the paper could not be found, not in all the many pockets of his thick, warm coat and, finally, he abandoned the search. ‘I simply wanted to say … that you’re better than all this! It is irresponsible nonsense, what you are engaged in, and you can do better, Eleana. Much, much better.’
‘Better than what?’
‘Look at you – so cold. Your coat is so thin.’
‘Certainly it is thinner than yours.’
‘Eleana, my dear, you know you cannot win. None of you can win!’
‘Several other factories have already settled. You know they have.’
‘But not Triangle! Mr Blanck and Mr Harris have both said that they will fight you to the end. And they can because they have the rescources, and they have done so and, trust me, they will continue to do so. They will keep the factory working with or without you. They will never accept the Union. Never.’
He looked up at her, spotted the split-second of uncertainty in her eyes and, instinctively, he pressed his advantage. ‘But I could help you,’ he wheedled. ‘If you would allow me, Eleana, I could help you. Did you have breakfast this morning? I’ll bet you didn’t.’ His eyes were on her lips. ‘I can organize a payment. For you. It would be our secret, just between us. I can do that … if you are willing …’
‘What sort of payment, Mr Blumenkranz?’ she asked him politely. ‘Tell me, sir. What did you have in mind?’
But he didn’t hear her, not properly. He was gazing at her lips, and imagining himself, with his arms around her – pushing her back into the alley, right there, behind the rubble, the pile of rotting … whatever it was, and pulling up her skirt – and he couldn’t do all that and listen properly, not at the same time.
‘… Fair pay for all,’ she was saying. ‘Union recognition. Fewer hours for all of us, Mr Blumenkranz, not just for me. It cannot continue …’
‘But I can help you,’ Mr Blumenkranz pleaded. ‘You look hungry. Eleana. Of course you are hungry! What are you living off, while the strike is on? You cannot live on ideals! And nor can your child. Think of your child! Do you need money? I can give you money. How much do you need?’ Again, he was fumbling in his pockets.
But this time, when he looked up, she was gone; vanished. And he was standing alone on the bustling, noisy street. Yearning. Burning.
Such is the lot of the small, plain man with an unhappy wife and a hateful job: neither in one camp nor the other, neither rich nor poor, and in thrall to a young woman who despises him, to whom he has promised a dollar-a-week raise, and from whom, until recently, there had rarely been anything but smiles. No wonder, by the following morning, after he’d tossed and turned and failed to sleep on her rejection, while his unhappy wife snored foully beside him – no wonder he was angry.
15
It had been agreed by strike organizers that the pickets should, as far as possible, consist of young and attractive women workers whose suffering elicited better public sympathy, and that the striking men would be more usefully put to work behind the scenes. So it was that the following morning Eleana was due back on the picket at Greene Street, outside the workers’ entrance to her own factory. Meanwhile, Matz intended to spend the morning flitting between picket lines city-wide, informing strikers of the Union meeting later that day, boosting morale with his eloquent passion and, above all, keeping an eye on the police – who were less liable to erupt into violence when there were men about.
Eleana hadn’t intended to mention the incident with Blumenkranz, but as she and Matz were leaving the apartment that morning – without breakfast, and with a sickly daughter clinging tearfully to Eleana’s neck, the thought flitted through her mind: if she’d said yes to Blumenkranz, how different things would be. There would be breakfast for everyone. And a good breakfast for Isha. There might be a new coat for Isha, too; and warm blankets, a new coat for herself, and even for Matz. She spoke over her daughter’s small, frail shoulder without pausing to think of the consequences:
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/daisy-waugh/melting-the-snow-on-hester-street/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Daisy Waugh
Rich. Beautiful. Damned.Sumptuously evoking the Golden Age of Hollywood, a time when money is built on greed and love can be a trick of the light, Daisy Waugh’s stunning new novel is a compelling portrait of love, fame, and survival.October 1929: As America helterskelters through the last days before the great crash the cream of Hollywood parties heedlessly on.Beneath the sophistication and elegance, Hollywood society couple Max and Eleanor Beecham are on the brink of divorce, their finances teetering on a knife’s edge after a series of failed films. As the stock market tumbles it seems they have nowhere to turn but to the arms of their waiting lovers.Hope is delivered in an invitation to one of the legendary weekend parties at Hearst Castle, where the prohibition champagne will be flowing and the room filled with every Hollywood big-shot around. They cannot resist one last chance of making it.Scandalous, absurdly glamorous, the Hearst party is the epitome of Golden Era decadence, but for Max and Eleanor the time has come to make a decision that will change their future. Will they sacrifice everything for fame and fortune or plunge into their hidden past and grasp one last chance to love each other again?If you love the decadence of 20s America and can't wait for The Great Gatsby film, here's a brilliant book to tide you over…
DAISY WAUGH
Melting the Snow on Hester Street
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013
Copyright © Daisy Waugh 2012
Daisy Waugh asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007431748
Ebook Edition © March 2013 ISBN: 9780007487608
Version: 2014-12-17
Dedication
Darling Bashie,
movie star in the making (maybe)
This book is for you
Contents
Cover (#u34020bca-4eb5-5f4d-8d68-aa318fdae1a6)
Title Page (#uab5d02ac-af97-5191-a64a-b50c30de3e29)
Copyright (#u3721e184-3491-57c5-acd8-a1b19bbc723a)
Dedication (#u928e1ba0-851d-5971-9b08-17946679759c)
Max & Eleanor Beecham’s October Supper Party (#ue72da39c-249c-5fb4-8b87-aceba34a6f65)
Chapter 1 (#ueb1f9c2f-812a-55ad-8a62-1e6134a3a9ae)
Chapter 2 (#uaf475ad7-fa93-58d9-a64b-56c91f184fb7)
Chapter 3 (#ud70330fb-11c0-514d-8da5-706ee5bcadd1)
Chapter 4 (#u6d6361f5-56e5-500a-adbc-8f31c9375d8f)
Chapter 5 (#ue5f6dfdf-e323-512c-b5ad-3f7fb183beb7)
Chapter 6 (#u508431e6-ce7f-5351-8a57-f0e5aee18d61)
Chapter 7 (#ua9aab595-d890-5ed0-b88e-75ed6d22e703)
Chapter 8 (#u56627cd1-29ab-5167-8d7c-f96f0924f204)
Chapter 9 (#uff2f87e7-e120-5434-a320-747b5392d842)
Chapter 10 (#u15539c1d-8eda-5605-964d-f3b874d0620b)
Chapter 11 (#u5b989410-aa34-58f8-bbb3-feb77d624589)
The Nickelodeon on Hester Street (#u310d36fb-b8b5-5092-9803-7894ec0440fe)
Chapter 12 (#u395f7611-99fd-53fd-8225-70abb20670c7)
Chapter 13 (#uf6ede242-ae39-5027-b242-43ec95d13d5f)
Chapter 14 (#u794bb18a-6f65-5991-846c-cc9d1601f9e6)
Chapter 15 (#ub706d608-da60-5a5d-b2af-ebef9d1cdba2)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Divorce Capital (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Floor Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)
Sun on San Simeon Bay (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 60 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 61 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 62 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 63 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 64 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 65 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 66 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 67 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 68 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 69 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 70 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 71 (#litres_trial_promo)
Read on for an extract from Daisy’s new book, Honeyville (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Daisy Waugh (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Max & Eleanor Beecham’s October Supper Party
1
Santa Monica, 17 October 1929
‘What did he say, Charlie? Did he say it was gonna be just f-fine? Did he say it was OK?’
She was sitting at her dressing table, watching Charlie’s approach with anxious eyes, blue as the sapphires round her throat. But Charlie didn’t reply at once. He was thinking how graceful it was, the line of her neck: the nape, did they call it? He was sauntering towards her, across perhaps the most opulent bedroom in America. The sound of softly lapping waves filtered through the open windows and, beyond them, a long white beach gleamed in the early evening moonlight. Not bad, Charlie thought, as he often did. Not bad for a workhouse boy. And a chorus girl not so young as she pretended.
Beneath the sweet smells of her innumerable lotions, and the particular perfume, flown in from the fragrant hills of Tuscany, there was still a faint whiff of newness to the room: new fabrics and paints; new draperies and furniture … Marion’s beachside house (if you could call it a house) was only recently completed. One hundred and eighteen rooms in all, her lover had built for her. Thirty-five bedrooms, fifty-five bathrooms, a brace of swimming pools, a private movie theatre … everything, really, a woman’s heart could desire, so her lover believed. Wanted to believe.
And somehow Marion pulled it off: transformed this preposterous white elephant, into – not a home, exactly, but a place of merriment and warmth. A place where, despite the marble and the gold and the high ceilings and important stairways curling this direction and that, people could have a good time. They could feel relaxed. Charlie Chaplin felt very relaxed. At Marion Davies’s beachside palace. More relaxed, perhaps, than Marion’s long-time lover would have preferred.
But what can you do?
Charlie came to a stop just behind her, and then, absently, he dropped a warm kiss on that part of her – the nape? – which had been so distracting him, and breathed in the familiar perfume.
‘I didn’t ask,’ he replied at last.
‘You didn’t ask? Charlie! Why ever not?’
He kissed her again: inhaled the smell of her skin. ‘You really are … very lovely,’ he murmured.
‘Why didn’t you ask him, Charlie? I thought you were going to do that. Because I’m all ch-changed now, and ready to l-l-leave. You can see for yourself! I thought you were going to ask him!’
‘Well I didn’t ask, I informed. I told him that I would be bringing you along.’
‘No!’
‘In fact – now I think about it, I didn’t even do that … I informed whoever it was picked up the telephone. The maid, I guess—’
‘Oh God. Charlie!’
‘Sweetheart – it’s a small party. Max and Eleanor Beecham are splendid people … Smart people. You know them well enough. What do you think they’re going to say? The biggest movie star in history wants to come to their party, bringing with him the reigning Queen of Hollywood—’
‘It’s not funny …’
‘… The finest hostess, the most beautiful and talented actress—’
‘I’m not laughing, Charlie. Because you’re not being funny. Why’s everything got to be a joke with you?’
‘And a movie star, too – in her own right …’
‘Ha! If you don’t count it’s WR who pays for the movies.’
‘And – without wishing to put too fine a point on it – the beloved mistress of the most powerful man in the most powerful nation … in the world …’
‘Oh Charlie, no he’s not!’
‘Well, you may not think so.’
‘He’s the s-second. S-second most powerful. It’s what he says. After President Hoover. WR says …’
‘HA! He says that, does he?’
‘Because he’s more modest than you are, Mr Charlie Chaplin. So it’s no use your laughing. In any case, I don’t like it when you talk that way. It’s vulgar. It’s not attractive to me. And who says you’re the biggest star in America, anyway?’ She flashed him a provocative smile. ‘Your good friend Douglas Fairbanks certainly wouldn’t agree with you …’
‘Because my good friend Dougie is a fool …’
‘Mary Pickford wouldn’t agree.’
‘She’s a floozy.’
‘Jack Gilbert, John Barrymore, Gary Cooper, Thomas Mix …’
Charlie laughed aloud. ‘Sweetie, you insult me!’
‘… Rudolph Valentino …’
‘Ah! … But you’re vicious, Marion. Merciless. Cruel. Rudy may once have been more adored than I am, but in case you didn’t notice it, honey, Rudy is dead.’
She sighed. Bored of the game, now. ‘Well. I suppose I shall just have to change out of my fancy clothes then. Since you haven’t asked if I can come along. And you can go on your own. See how much I care …’
But Marion did care. More than she would ever let on to anyone: Not to her ageing lover, the newspaper magnate, multimillionaire, and possibly the second most powerful man in America, William Randolph Hearst. Nor even to Charlie Chaplin. Keeper of everyone’s secrets, including his own, and probably her best friend in the whole world. No.
She hated to moan, so she never did. But she was careful. There was never any knowing, even in this crazy town, who thought what about anybody else’s business. With Marion’s standing in Hollywood society being what it was – ever so high and yet ever so low and, frankly, internationally notorious – there was always a risk when she ventured out in public, and she preferred not to go where there might be a scene. As a result Marion rarely attended other people’s parties. And since her own were notoriously the wildest, most extravagant and most glamorous in the city, she didn’t generally feel she was losing out.
Even so, Max and Eleanor Beecham’s annual shindy had quite a reputation, and she’d never been to it yet. The couple had been holding the party at their house every 17 October since the building was completed, eight long years ago. The party was as close to a tradition as the Hollywood Movie Colony yet knew and, for that alone, it would have been treasured. Added to which, people said it was fun.
No one could compete with Marion when it came to scale: the Beechams were too smart to try. Their party was exquisite and select – never more than fifty people, but always the best (in a manner of speaking). Moguls and movie stars. Sometimes even a sprinkling of European royalty. One year, somehow, they’d managed to produce Mr and Mrs Albert Einstein.
Marion Davies imagined, correctly, that she would know just about every person present. Added to which, WR was out of town and she was tired of staying in. She felt like dressing up and getting canned in some decent company.
None of which would have been enough, ordinarily, to make such a difference. But last week a piece of information regarding the Beecham host and hostess had been brought to her attention and, before Marion acted on it, as she longed to do, she wanted to investigate further.
Most stars never touched their fan mail. But it was well known and often commented upon that Marion Davies read and replied to every one. This particular letter had been delivered, along with the usual weekly sackload, to her bungalow at the MGM studio lot. She was waiting to be called onto set, and it was lying at the top of a large pile of unopened letters on her assistant’s desk.
Dear Miss Davies [the letter began], I hope sincerely that you will forgive me for intruding in this way upon your precious time … I have long been a fan of all your movies, and I adored you in Tillie the Toiler …
It was a harmless beginning: crazy, perhaps – because everybody who wrote was crazy – but polite enough. She read on.
… However this is not why I am writing. I have a most unusual request …
After she had finished reading it, Marion wondered if it was luck or something more sinister which had persuaded the writer to approach her for help. For sure, she and Eleanor had been photographed together at a handful of Hollywood gatherings: they were indeed friends, at least up to a point. And they were of similar ages, perhaps a little older than most of the leading ladies. But since they both lied about that, it was hardly relevant.
There were the rumours about Marion, too, of course, which would have made her an appealing target. But the fans shouldn’t have known about them: not even a whisper. The fans shouldn’t have known anything – not about her, nor about Eleanor – except what their studio publicists put out.
Of course it was possible – likely, even – that similar letters were languishing, unread or disbelieved, on the desks of film stars’ assistants all over town. In any case, it so happened that on this occasion, such a letter could not have been better directed.
When Marion read it, it touched a raw nerve: broke open a secret sore. She did something she only ever did alone, and then only rarely: she wept. Not for herself, but for the Beechams. Later, when they came to fetch her onto set, she locked the letter inside a small jewel box and said not a word about it to anyone.
‘What do we know about M-Max and Eleanor Beecham, Charlie?’ Marion asked him suddenly. ‘I mean to say, just for example, do you imagine it’s their real name?
‘Beecham?’ Charlie laughed. ‘It would make them quite a rarity in this town if it were. Why don’t you ask them tonight?’
‘I might j-just do that …’
Charlie let it hang there. She would do no such thing, of course. Say what you like about Marion – and people did – but she was never intentionally impolite or unkind.
Even so, Charlie noted, she was on edge this evening. Something was bothering her. ‘What’s the trouble?’
‘Nothing’s the trouble, Charlie. We can be curious about each other every once in a while. That’s all …’ She stopped. ‘Only, don’t you wonder sometimes, what draws us all to … w-wash up w-where we do? The way we do? The Beechams, for an example. There they are, y’know? Part of the scenery since I don’t even know how long. Can you remember? When you f-first laid eyes on the Beechams? They’ve just been there. Beautiful and clever and on top of the world … But where did they come from?’
‘He was at Keystone when I first came to Hollywood. Playing piano on set … They all adored him there.’
‘Well, I know that.’
‘Then they teamed up with Butch Menken, didn’t they? … They made some very fine movies. Between them. You can’t say they’re not talented.’
‘Of c-course I’m not saying it, Charlie. Max Beecham is terrific. One of the best in the wide world … Everybody knows that.’
‘Let’s not go too far.’
‘Well I think he is. I think he’s a great director, and even if it wasn’t such a hit as some of his other ones, I think Beautiful Day was the best – the best t-talkie – of last year. Including mine – and you didn’t bring any out, Charlie, and I specially said t-talkie – so I can say that. C-can’t I?’
‘Of course you can, sweetheart.’
‘… I also think Eleanor is a g-great actress.’
‘No better than you are, Marion.’
‘But where did they come from? Who in hell are they? They seem so … together. They’ve got that beautiful, perfect house, and everybody knows they just adore each other – they’re probably the happiest couple in Hollywood …’
‘It’s not saying so much.’
‘But you can see the way they look at each other.’
‘They seem …’ Charlie thought about it. ‘They do seem to care for each other. Yes.’
‘And I mean to say they’re a mystery. Don’t you think?’ She stopped. ‘I just wonder …’
‘Wonder about them especially? Or about everyone?’
‘What’s that?’
‘You could ask the same questions about any of us. We all have secrets.’
‘Huh? I thought you and I were pretty close friends.’
‘Of course we are. But we don’t know everything about each other.’
‘I should certainly hope not!’
‘Exactly. We all embellish. It would be dull if we didn’t. Look at Von Stroheim! One of our greatest directors, yes. But do you suppose he’s really a count, as he pretends to be?’
‘Oh, forget it,’ Marion said, suddenly sullen. ‘It doesn’t even m-matter, anyway.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘I shouldn’t have b-brought it up. Eleanor Beecham’s a terrific lady. That’s all I’m saying … Let’s get going, shall we? Are you taking me to this stupid party or aren’t you?
Charlie checked his not-bad-for-a-workhouse wristwatch. Heavy gold, it was. Cartier. A gift from Marion. ‘We’re too early yet,’ he replied. ‘In any case, Marion, the mood you’re in, I’m not taking you anywhere. You’re so damn miserable you’d reduce the entire party to blubbering tears in less than a minute.’
‘Ha! I would not!’
‘Nobody’d want to talk to you.’
‘Very funny.’
‘Except for me of course … I always want to talk to you.’
‘Well, that’s not true— Oh!’ she interrupted herself. ‘But you know what we need, Ch-Charlie?’ she cried, brightening all at once. ‘Cocktails! Don’t you think so, h-honey? Then we’ll definitely be in the mood for a party!’
2
High up in the Hollywood Hills, at home in their splendid Castillo del Mimosa, Max and Eleanor Beecham were nicely ahead of schedule. Between them, as always, they had everything for the evening under good control. Max had paid sweeteners to all the necessary people to ensure the hooch flowed freely all night. Cases of champagne, vodka, Scotch and gin, and the correct ingredients for every cocktail known to Hollywood man had been delivered discreetly in the early hours of the morning, and tonight the place was heaving with the finest liquor money could buy. Al Capone himself would have been pushed to provide better.
Meanwhile Eleanor had seen to it that the halls, the pool and garden were decked in sweet-smelling and nautically themed California lilacs: white and blue – a subtle reminder to everyone of Max’s nautically themed latest movie, Lost At Sea. There was a jazz band running through its numbers in the furthest drawing room, where carpets had been removed and furniture carted away; and in front of the house, on the Italianate terrace, beneath a canopy of blue and white nautically themed silk flags, there stood a long banqueting table. It was swathed in silver threaded linen, with a plait of bluebells curling between silver candelabras. The table shimmered under the marching candles and the artful electric light-work of Max’s chief gaffer – the most sought-after lighting technician in the business – fresh from the set of Lost At Sea.
Eleanor was longing for a drink. But she was of an age now – somewhere in her mid- to late thirties – where even the one drink made her face wilt just a bit, and like any professional actress she knew it well. She also understood how much it mattered. So she was holding out on the liquor until all the guests had arrived and they could move onto the artfully lit terrace.
She was holding out changing into her evening dress, too, for fear of creasing the damn thing. In the meantime – though her short dark hair, shorn into an Eton crop, was perfectly coiffed, and her finely arched eyebrows, her full, wide mouth, her green eyes were perfectly painted – she was still wrapped in an old silk bathrobe.
She had already busied herself with a final, unnecessary tour of the house: just to be extra certain that everything was in place. And so it was. A fleet of waiting staff had already reported for duty and were in the hall, receiving final instructions from the Beecham housekeeper.
And so she stood: at a loose end on her Italianate terrace, gazing at those silken flags, fluttering like bunting in the electric light. They’d been Max’s idea – because of the movie. Had he seen them yet? She supposed not. Eleanor hadn’t realized, when the designers described them to her, quite how low they would hang, nor quite how they would resemble … Gosh, she hated them. But it was too late. It was just too bad. Max had said he wanted them. She wondered if he’d had any idea …
Eleanor had nothing much to do. The last few lobsters were being boiled in their shells in the kitchen: she could hear the squeak. The scream. She could hear the scream and it made her shiver. The cook had prepared the hollandaise – the oysters were set in aspic. It was done. Everything was done. She sighed. Nervous as hell: of course. Nervous as ever – but this time, somehow, she was nervous without being excited. When had this wonderful party – this highlight of the Hollywood social calendar, this manifestation of her and Max’s extraordinary success – when had it lost its magic and turned into a chore?
She wondered briefly, bitterly, was it a chore to Max too? Who the hell knew?
She’d left him upstairs, changing, but she needed to discuss with him various things. She needed to tell him about the problem with the ice sculptures in the front hallway. And she needed to say something about the far arc light, behind the mimosa on the eastern end of the terrace. It looked as if it might be dipping slightly … She wandered up to join him.
He was already bathed and dressed: bending awkwardly over the looking glass at her dressing table, slicking back his dark hair with one hand, smoking a cigarette with the other. He was wearing a white evening jacket and matching, loose-fitting pants. Handsome as ever. It always struck her, even now, in spite of everything, just how handsome he was: fit, slim, well built, dark, elegant – good enough to be a movie star himself, if he’d wanted it. She still loved the look of him. Sometimes. And it still took her by surprise.
‘Hello, handsome,’ she said, putting her two arms around his waist – sensing his body tense at the intrusion, and hating him for it – hating herself for not having remembered, once again, how painful it was, to try to breathe warmth on his coldness. ‘Nice jacket! I’ve not seen that get-up before – have I?’
He glanced at her reflection as she stood behind him; at the green eyes, not really smiling at him. He turned and pecked her on the end of her nose. ‘You’ve seen it often,’ he said smoothly, removing her hands. ‘By the way,’ he added, ‘did Teresa tell you? Chaplin called.’
‘He did?’ She sighed, exasperated. ‘When? This evening? Because if he’s not coming, he might have told us so before this evening.’
‘Sure he’s coming! He called to say he was bringing Marion.’
‘Oh! … You mean Marion Davies?’
‘Of course, Marion Davies. What other Marion?’
‘Well … that’s a bit awkward …’
‘I don’t see why. Marion’s all right.’
‘I didn’t say she wasn’t.’ Eleanor turned away from her husband, sat herself on the edge of the marital bed: a bed so wide they could have fitted a lover in there each, and hardly bumped elbows. She sighed again. Who in hell could she put beside Marion for dinner?
‘I thought it was kind of flattering,’ he said, smiling a little, elegantly shamefaced. ‘Maybe now she’s gatecrashing our party, she and Mr Hearst will finally invite us up to San Simeon.’
‘Hah …’ Eleanor offered up a soft, half-laugh. ‘Yes indeed … Wouldn’t that be something?’
The beauty of San Simeon was legend. The luxury of Randolph Hearst’s fairytale castle 200 miles north of Los Angeles, perched high on a fairytale hill overlooking San Simeon bay was legend, too. But the house parties he and Marion held there were the greatest part of the legend of all – not just in Hollywood but around the world. Invitations were delivered by chauffeur, in envelopes so fine, so deliciously soft and fragrant they might been pulled from Marion Davies’s own underclothing drawer. Nobody turned them down.
‘And in the meantime,’ Eleanor added, ‘I guess I’m going to have to rearrange the whole damn seating plan …’
Max looked down at his wife, watching as she absently gathered the silk robe around her, and crossed her smooth brown legs, one over the other. It shocked him every time, after all these years, but there were moments when her sensuality moved him still. ‘What is that thing, a bath gown?’ he asked her.
She looked down at the robe. Didn’t bother to reply. He’d seen it a hundred times before. And then – yet again – he surprised her, swooped suddenly and kissed her. She moved her face before he could reach her, and his lips caught the edge of her cheek. ‘You’ll have every guy in the place swooning, just as you are,’ he said. And it sounded tender. As if he meant it.
She gave him a tight smile, refused to return his gaze for fear he might notice his effect, the hopeless burst of happiness – and pushed him away. ‘Only, it’s rather difficult, isn’t it?’ she said, just as if he hadn’t spoken, ‘especially with so little notice. Because you never really know who’s going to turn out to be the most terrible bluenose. Not really. The oddest people go funny around Marion … especially after a few drinks. I don’t want her coming to our house to be insulted.’
‘Nobody’s going to insult her,’ he said, turning back to the dressing table.
‘Well. They had better not. Poor girl.’ Eleanor pulled herself up, glanced vaguely around her, sighed lightly ‘… I guess I’d better do something about the seating. Come down, Max. When you can. Come and see. They’ve finished on the terrace. It’s looking …’ She stopped, uncertain how to finish. ‘Have you seen it?’ she asked instead. ‘Have you seen the bunting? The flags?’
‘I have,’ he replied. A short silence. Hardly noticeable. ‘Very nautical,’ he added, with a little smile.
‘Yes. Nautical … Lovely,’ Eleanor added quickly. ‘Don’t you think?’
He didn’t disagree.
She told him about the problem with the ice sculptures, and the dipping arc light in the far eastern corner, but he wasn’t really listening.
‘By the way, El,’ he shouted after her. ‘For God’s sake don’t put Marion beside Von Stroheim. He’s pretty crazy at the moment. And he never could stand the sight of her …’
3
Three hours later, the Beechams’ famous 17 October Supper Party was in full and boisterous swing. Eleanor’s aquamarine satin sheath dress, which brought out the magical green in her eyes had, indeed, become a little creased. And Eleanor knew quite well that after the third glass of champagne – or was it the fourth? – her face was more than a fraction wilted. But, as she kept reminding herself, it didn’t matter. Not any more. In the softly falling terrace lights, and with the liquor freely flowing, no one was going to notice anyway. Everyone was canned. For the hundredth time that evening, she told herself to relax.
There had been an incident with one of the waitresses shortly before the guests arrived which hadn’t helped to ease her mood. But she really ought to have shaken it off by now. These sort of things happened to movie stars all the time. Thomas Mix found one in his bathtub. Gary Cooper (who lived in the house next door) was constantly encountering them roaming his private grounds. Mary Pickford found one splashing about in her swimming pool. It came with the territory … There were always stories of stray fans slipping through the stars’ careful barricades, and it wasn’t the first time it had happened to Eleanor, either. Perhaps, Eleanor considered, if the wretched girl had been anywhere else, holding anything else, on any night but this one, it would have felt less threatening: simply an amusing story to tell. But Eleanor found her right there in the bedroom – standing, guilty as a thief, at the same dressing table she’d left Max at only half an hour earlier. In the girl’s hand was a heavy gold photograph frame; and in her eyes – Eleanor shuddered – dark pools of emotion and fear: all the madness of a fan obsessed. Eleanor had never seen it so close, and it frightened her. She had shouted for help, and within moments, Joseph the houseman had been there, standing beside her, and then, just a little later, Max had come, too. The wretched girl, sobbing uncontrollably, clutching Eleanor’s precious gold photograph frame until it was taken from her hand, had been escorted safely from the property.
It was nothing. A hazard of the job. Poor girl … Max had brushed it off; told Eleanor not to fuss. She should take comfort, he teased, considering some of the notices for her last picture, that there were still fans out there who cared enough to bother. And he was right of course. These things happened.
In the meantime here she sat, the Queen of her own fairy tale. She should try to enjoy it. The evening’s guests were seated at the long banquet table before her, deep in noisy conversation, and from what she could tell, they were happy to be there. The freshly boiled lobster had been eaten and carried away, and so, by now, had all remnants of the perfectly judged, entirely exquisite Beecham Supper Party feast … She could hear the sound of the jazz band filtering delightfully through the open windows. Soon, after coffee, and more drinking, she would slip quietly inside and ask them to snazz up the tempo, and there would be dancing. Everything was just as it was supposed to be. Everything was Lovely.
Eleanor had decided, finally, to put Marion in place of honour, beside clever, gently spoken Irving Thalberg, whom Marion knew well. She had placed herself on Irving’s other side. Not because she liked him (although it happened that she did), but because, as chief executive producer at MGM, the largest and most profitable studio in Hollywood, he was the most powerful man at the table, if not the industry. And since her seven-year contract with the almost as large, but not quite so magnificent, Lionsfiel Pictures was shortly up for renewal, it seemed like a good time to foster relationships with the alternatives.
On her right side she put Douglas Fairbanks, who was tiresome in all sorts of ways, but a big star – and he would have been offended if she hadn’t. Max, far away at the other end of the table, had Gloria Swanson on his right side, for the same reason.
But he must have switched round the name cards on his left, because where Irving’s wife, Norma, was meant to be sitting, there sat none other than Blanche Williams, chief feature writer for Photoplay magazine.
Eleanor knew, because Butch Menken had told her; and Butch knew because … Butch made it his business to know everything. Also because he knew a German actress who lived in the same block, and the German actress had spotted Max going in and out of Blanche Williams’s apartment on numerous occasions. So Eleanor knew. Or she almost knew. And she had known (or almost known) for a couple of years now.
Did Max know she knew? Did he even care? She could never be sure, not about anything, any more, let alone who knew what about anyone else … Christ.
She could leave him, of course. And maybe one day she would. But not today … Eleanor needed to think of something else.
She wondered if Irving Thalberg was aware that her deal with Lionsfiel was up for renewal. Probably not. Should she tell him? Or would it be just too awkward? And if he already knew, would he perhaps suggest she came across to MGM?
Of course he wouldn’t.
Why would he do that? Why would he do that? Perhaps she should boast to him about the fan she’d only just encountered in her own bedroom? He might be impressed. He might even think – Eleanor pinched herself. She was drunk. Any minute now, if she wasn’t careful, she was going to burst into tears.
A passing waiter refilled her glass. She swallowed it back without tasting it, fixed a blank smile to her beautiful, full lips, and allowed her gaze to travel down the table. Stars, stars – and more stars … Buster Keaton and Natalie Talmadge … Gary Cooper from just next door, John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Cecil DeMille … and Mary Pickford, of course, sitting beside her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, because tiresome Douglas would never have it any other way … And sprinkled between the stars were the others: the studio executives, the producers, the writers; all the big cheeses who helped to make Hollywood the money factory it had now become. Yes, Eleanor reassured herself once again, it was a good crowd. She and Max could certainly pull them in …
Everything was just fine.
… Were the flags hanging too low, so close to the candlelight …?
Concentrate.
Max was – was he? – was he running a finger along Blanche Williams’s cheek? He should stop it! She should put a stop—
Concentrate.
Dougie Fairbanks was talking to her. He was saying something as if it were quite fascinating … Someone’s chauffeur had made a killing on the stock market … She hardly needed to listen. These days, everyone knew someone who knew a chauffeur who’d made a killing. In fact conversation around Eleanor’s star-studded banqueting table wasn’t much different from conversation at a million dining tables across America that night. There was only one thing anyone ever seemed to want to talk about any more: who’d made how much on what stock and at what margin … the increase in values of Bethlehem Steel versus General Motors, National Waterworks versus United Founders … The stock market was everyone’s obsession.
Added to which, it happened that the day of the Beecham Supper Party, 17 October 1929, had been a reassuringly good day on Wall Street: an excellent day, after a disconcertingly bad one, at the end of a record-breaking summer. There had been a couple of serious wobbles at the beginning of the month, ‘just to keep things exciting’, Max and his friends confidently agreed, but that morning, newspapers had been filled with the comforting forecasts of the experts:
‘Stock prices,’ declared Professor Fisher of the University of Yale, ‘look as if they have reached a permanently high plateau.’ His respected voice was just one of a chorus of bullish experts, academics, business moguls and financiers, and the markets had taken comfort. Up, up and up went the stock prices again, back on their apparently relentless rise. It meant that anyone who’d put in a call to their brokers before sitting down to dinner – and that included most of Eleanor’s guests and Eleanor’s husband, too – would be wanting to chew over their successes this evening.
But not Eleanor. On this particular night, 17 October, with fifty-one guests to worry about, and a dipping arc light, and Marion Davies, and the flags, and bloody Max, kissing her so tenderly one minute that her heart swelled with hope, and talking so animatedly with Blanche Williams the next, Eleanor was finding the usual subject less than compelling.
‘Well that’s just too fantastic, Dougie,’ she said blandly. ‘He must be one happy chauffeur.’
‘Isn’t it terrific!’ Douglas Fairbanks shouted. Because Douglas always shouted. Because he hated not to be the centre of attention. ‘And isn’t that such a terrific feeling!’ He turned to the rest of the table: ‘Doesn’t everyone think? Don’t you think so, Von Stroheim? Isn’t it great to know we live in a country where your average Joe can turn himself into a millionaire just by … knowing how to do it? Mr So-and-So from Nowheres-Ville can make a million! Just like that! Just like you and me! That’s why I love America!’ He thumped the table with such emphasis it made Eleanor jump. ‘That’s why I’m proud to be an American! Charlie-boy, c’mon. Admit it!’ he shouted. ‘You heard Professor What-Not, Tuesday. You heard what the man said! Are you telling me you know better than the professor from Yale?’
But on this, as Douglas knew well, his friend Charlie Chaplin would never agree with him, nor with Professor What-Not from Yale. Charlie – an Englishman, in any case – was, that night, the solitary voice of caution among them. ‘You know exactly what I think, Dougie,’ Charlie said wearily. He’d said it many times before. ‘You got people making money out of money that never even existed in the first place! It’s a trick of the light, I keep telling you. It’s a whole pile of nothing, built on a mountain of Zilch. It can’t go on.’
‘Aw, Charlie!’ groaned Marion. ‘Don’t go getting started on that again! … J-just nobody wants to hear it!’
Charlie smiled at her. Shrugged. ‘Dougie asked me,’ he said. ‘In any case, I’m only passing on what I’ve been told by the experts …’
‘By ONE expert!’ Douglas Fairbanks shouted. ‘And you know, you keep on about your “expert” like the guy’s some kind of oracle … but he’s a solitary, single voice, Charlie-boy. There’s no one out there supporting him …’
‘There’s going to be a crash.’ Charlie shrugged. ‘It’s what he told me. And it’s going to be catastrophic. It’s only a matter of when … Personally – as you know, Dougie – I’m out.’ He looked up and down the table. ‘I’m guessing I must be the only person round this table without a stock to my name. Ha! Maybe I’m the only person in the entire business!’
‘Butch Menken’s sold out,’ someone commented. Not Eleanor.
‘Butch sold up, did he?’ Charlie said. He looked at Mary Pickford, whose voice had provided the information. ‘When, I wonder? Do you know?’
‘Oh, a couple of weeks back. I considered following him …’ She smiled. ‘Where Butch Menken leads …’ she said.
‘… We all should follow,’ Charlie finished for her wryly. ‘Well. He’s a smart man.’ Eleanor said nothing. She examined the silver-plated dessert fork in her hand, didn’t glance up. There was a tiny lull, hardly perceptible – because of the history: Butch, Max and Eleanor used to be thicker than thieves. It was quickly, tactfully, broken by Marion.
‘Made a killing though, dintcha, Charlie?’ she called out. ‘Every s-single stock he owned. Sold the lot. Pretty much, huh? Imagine it! And now he’s sore, because if he’d stayed in just one more day, or two more days, he would have made another k-killing, same as all the rest of us! Isn’t it so, Charlie!’
‘All I’m saying …’ Charlie paused, sighed, and apparently thought better of continuing. ‘… Just don’t come crying to me when all the money’s gone …’
‘Ha! It wont be for m-money that M-Marion comes crying to you, Charlie boy …’ declared Douglas.
He looked around to collect the laughter – but was met instead with a brief, shocked silence. His wife, beside him, put a quietening hand on his shoulder. ‘Isn’t that right, Mary?’ he said to her weakly.
He was drunk. Clearly. And a fool. Everybody knew it. Even so … Eleanor glanced nervously at Marion.
‘Such beautiful candelabra,’ Mary Pickford said smoothly, in her sweet, steely voice. ‘Tell me, Eleanor, did you pick them up in Europe?’
Eleanor turned to her gratefully. She was about to say yes, to tell Mary a touching story of how she’d discovered them – all eighteen of them – covered in dust in a little antique market on a side street in Roma—
‘Oh, they’re terrific little antiques!’ broke in Douglas. ‘They remind me of a funny incident a few years ago …’
Eleanor longed to lean across and apologize to Marion, but so long as the stupid shoyte continued to jabber at her, it seemed quite impossible.
‘… I had the candelabra in the one hand and there was I,’ he bellowed, ‘a hundred foot up on the rigging, the whole damn thing swaying. Next thing – WHOOSH! … The entire set’s up in flames and I’m thinking to myself – I kid you not – I AM GOING TO DIE! Right here, right now. And I’m dressed as Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest!’
Eleanor, not really listening, offered him only the wannest of smiles.
‘Imagine me, El!’ he cried stubbornly, determined to get a better response, ‘I’m a hundred foot in the air …’ He stood up, grasping the nearest candelabra as he rose, his infuriating, actorish laughter filling the air. He held the flames aloft, waving them this way and that –
‘… I’m holding onto that rigging for grim death! …’
Eleanor watched him. Felt the cold, wet fear crawling slowly over her skin. Felt her lungs tighten, making it hard for her to breath.
She saw only the tip of the candle, the flame, and the tip of the flag …
‘… Next thing, WHOOSH! …’ Douglas shouted.
She sat quite still as he and the light swayed this way and that, from side to side and back again, flickering flame against dainty, deadly silken flag. She opened her mouth to protest …
‘HA HA HA! Can you imagine it, El?’
But she couldn’t hear him any more.
‘There I am. A man in tights!’
Her lungs had filled …
‘In tights, I tell you!’ shouted Douglas, laughing and swaying. She couldn’t breathe …
‘A man in tights! HA HA HA!’
There was a taste of smoke in her mouth, in her throat, and she could feel it … blackening her insides as it burned its path through her chest, scorching, melting, choking –
‘WHOOSH! WHOOSH! FIRE! HA HA!’
And then, somehow, Max was beside her, taking the candelabra from Dougie’s fist, placing it back on the table. ‘Eleanor,’ he said loud and clear, his strong hand on her shoulder … ‘Honey. I think it’s time we were on that dance floor, don’t you? They got the best Charleston playing … can you hear it? … It’s got my feet tip-tapping like nothing else …’
Eleanor smiled. Quickly, gratefully, feeling his touch, willing herself to recover. ‘I can hear it!’ she said, in the mellifluous voice she could use. ‘It’s too perfect! Let’s not sit a moment longer!’ But she was shaking. Max could feel it. He could feel her shoulder convulsing beneath his hand.
He bent across the table and kissed her. There and then. In front of everyone. Someone sighed, ‘Awwww …’, possibly Marion. The kiss lasted a second or two longer than expected, giving Eleanor time to collect herself. Douglas Fairbanks, observing it disconsolately, leaned down to Mary Pickford and kissed her on the lips, too.
‘Mary, my darling wife, I adore you!’ he cried.
‘Oh, for crying out l-loud, Dougie!’ Marion said. ‘P-pipe down for once in your life, why dontcha?’
And then Max and Eleanor pulled apart, Eleanor smiling at her husband. She stood up. ‘I hesitate to imagine what you’ve been discussing at this end of the table,’ Max said to everyone, but looking only at his wife. ‘I’m afraid we’ve been talking nothing but Investment Trusts, down our end …’
‘Eleanor, darling, you can’t even imagine how dull we’ve been!’ drawled Gloria Swanson.
‘Humblest apologies, Gloria,’ Max flashed her a smile. ‘We’ll do better next year, I promise.’
‘Except of course, if we’re to believe Charlie Chaplin,’ Eleanor said, with her lovely light smile, her beautiful soft voice, flirtatious and humouring to everyone around, ‘we shall all be in the poorhouse next year, anyway. There won’t be any parties!’
There followed plenty of laughter, and the scraping of chairs: chairs which, had Douglas bothered to look at them closely, he might have noticed were as familiar as the terrific little antique candelabra, and the terrific banqueting table, too. Every scrap was due to be returned to the studio props department first thing in the morning.
‘No more dullness!’ declared Max, ‘or Gloria Swanson might go home in a sulk. And none of us wants that! It’s a party, for God’s sakes. Added to which – except for Charlie – we all made a fortune today!’
‘God Bless America!’ cried Douglas Fairbanks.
Max ignored him. ‘Let’s dance!’ he commanded. And for a brief, uplifting moment the brilliant director, handsome as the devil himself, and his dazzling movie-star wife, were united again; and they were happy. He squeezed her hand and led her across their nautically themed, Italianate terrace, through the sweet-smelling hallway decked in blue and white lilies, onto the centre of the dance floor … And though they hardly noticed it, alone in their fragile cocoon, the cream of America’s fame and beauty followed close behind …
Nobody talked about Investment Trusts for the rest of the evening. And they danced until five in the morning.
4
Too often, in a soured marriage, such uplifting moments do more harm than good, and only serve to make the thud of the landing more painful.
Max was gone by the time the maid came in with Eleanor’s tea the next day. It arrived on a tray at eleven thirty, with the usual glass of freshly squeezed lemon juice, unsweetened, the usual small pile of pre-selected mail; and a small, square, leather jewel box. She took a gulp of the juice. Shuddered. And opened the box.
Every year, on the morning after the party, he gave her something precious. This – a large ruby pendant in the shape of a heart – was larger and more precious than last year’s jewel; she imagined because of their recent successes on the stock market. And beautiful, too. No doubt about that. Max had excellent taste. She shuddered once again as the last of the juice went down, laid the ruby heart back in its box, set it aside. She could hardly bring herself to touch it. Why a heart, of all things? A heart – how absurd! She wondered – what did he give to Blanche? A ruby pendant in the shape of a goddamn putz?
She laughed to herself, though she didn’t find it funny, and looked about for the accompanying envelope. There was always an envelope. She wished she could ignore it, simply not open it, because what could he say that would ever make it all right again? What could he say that wouldn’t hurt?
Darling,
Another wonderful night!
Enjoy your morning. You certainly earned it.
Your ever-loving,
Max
She put the letter down. Ever-loving. Indeed. Had he forgotten what it was all for? This night of nights? He never mentioned it. Never said a word … Gosh, her head was throbbing so – she must have drunk more than she realized.
She could hear the people downstairs, still clearing away the residue of the party. If she stayed up here long enough, as she fully intended, there’d be no evidence of the party at all by the time she went down there. The bunting, the flowers – the eighteen candelabra, the silver-threaded linen table cloth, the banqueting table, too – all of it borrowed, all of it gone. And she could forget about it until next year came round again. If it ever did.
She wallowed, briefly, in the pleasure of not having to get out of bed. Her last picture only wrapped at the weekend – so she’d enjoyed a few days to herself. And she knew well to treasure them. In fact … she glanced at the post on her tray and saw, with a familiar twist of anxiety, a familiar-looking package tucked away at the bottom of the pile.
Already, then. That was too bad.
There would be a one-page synopsis at the top, first of the plot, and then of her character’s part in it. And through the following eighty-odd pages of film script, her designated role in whatever movie had been chosen for her would have been underlined. And there it would be. No message, no discussion. Just a whole lot of new lines to be learned. And a reminder to Eleanor that, though she may be a star in Main Street America, not to mention in the hearts of the odd stray, crazy fan, at Lionsfiel Pictures she was only an employee – a single, shiny cog in a very large, very shiny machine. It was how the system worked. She did as she was told. They paid her handsomely. Eleanor had learned long ago that you could never win against the might of the Studio.
And no matter what, no matter how good she was, one day, it would surely happen, because one day it happened to them all – and to the women sooner than the men. One fine morning Eleanor would open up that familiar-looking package, delivered to her by her maid on her sunny breakfast tray, and discover that her moment in the limelight was passed. The screenplay’s leading role would not be underlined for her, having been underlined for somebody else – somebody younger, fresher, more beautiful, more alluring, better … It was a morning every contract movie star learned to dread.
Eleanor was – how old? She’d lied about it so often, she honestly didn’t know any more. What did it matter? She still looked young. They could make her look young: with the best flat lighting, she didn’t look a day over twenty-five.
There was absolutely nothing to worry about.
Even so, she chose not to open the package. Not just yet. Instead she leaned back against her lovely plumped-up pillows, on her magnificent, giant bed, in her beautiful sun-filled bedroom; sipped the tea which her maid had delivered, and mulled over the events of the previous evening.
Max was quite right about the party’s success. Except for the unpleasant interlude with Dougie – Dougie, of all people! – and then the dreadful moment with the candelabra, it had been a splendid night: better than previous years, for all sorts of reasons, not least the unexpected presence of Marion Davies. Which was quite a coup, whatever way you looked at it.
Not just a coup: a pleasure.
Marion had pulled Eleanor aside after dinner, pulled her right off the dance floor, thrust a cocktail glass into her hand, clinked their two glasses together, winked at her. And downed her drink in one. ‘That was a lovely thing you did b-back then,’ she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
‘It was?’ Eleanor was confused. She hadn’t done anything. ‘W-what you said to Dougie …’
‘But I didn’t! I didn’t say anything!’
‘I mean to say, the way you looked at him. The way you refused to laugh.’
‘Oh! But I wanted to do so much more! Only I wasn’t sure if you had even heard him, and then I thought it was better not to fuss – I am so sorry, Marion. I can’t apologize enough …’
‘You m-made him feel like a sap.’
‘You think so?’
‘Ha!’
There was a long pause, a peculiar pause, as if Marion were on the point of saying something else, something terribly important. But then, at the last second, she seemed to balk at it. ‘… I just wanted to tell you, th-thank you,’ she said instead. ‘That’s all. And I was thinking. Well, I was thinking it anyway. But I wanted to ask you up to San Simeon. Would you come to San Simeon if I asked?’
‘Of course!’ Eleanor had replied. ‘We would love that, Marion.’
‘Next week or something,’ she mumbled. ‘Real soon. I’ll fix it up for the week after next. Are you free?’
‘Well …’ Eleanor laughed. ‘Absolutely. We’re free. We’ve both just wrapped.’
‘I know you just wrapped.’ Marion winked at her. ‘It’s too perfect, isn’t it? Next Monday then. How about it? I’ll get a good crowd up, I promise. And I’ll send you all the stuff you need. Tickets and so on … Don’t worry about any of it.’
‘Next Monday … Max will be delighted.’ And then, suddenly, with the smallest hiccup, Marion had lurched forward and enfolded Eleanor in the tightest, warmest embrace. It lasted several seconds. She rested her head on Eleanor’s shoulder, squeezed her, clung to her and then, just as abruptly, released her and without looking at Eleanor again, quickly swung away.
It was, Eleanor decided, looking back, a most peculiar moment and, because of the warmth, one of the high points of her evening. Marion had mentioned the invitation to San Simeon again as she was leaving. She would send a car round with the train tickets later on in the week. So maybe, Eleanor thought – maybe she actually meant it?
Other than that, Marion had kept herself perfectly busy, of course: smooched half the night with Charlie Chaplin, until Charlie spotted the little Von Stroheim protégée, barely in her teens, poor little thing …
She’d danced with Gary Cooper for a while, but he was in the middle of a movie and had slipped away early; staggered across the garden in the moonlight, and taken a back route home through the Beecham grounds to avoid fans at his own gateway. After that, she’d latched onto John Gilbert. It would have been perfect – except of course then La Garbo decided to kick up the usual stink, which was pretty rich, reflected Eleanor, considering Greta hadn’t even arrived with John Gilbert that night. Considering Greta had actually spent most of the night in a hot, dark corner with Miss Lilyan Tashman … Eleanor smiled to herself. Holy cow, if her public could have seen her! If Irving could have seen her! Too bad he’d already left … The girl only had a handful of movies behind her – and not even a talkie among them, yet Greta Garbo acted like the Queen of Sheba.
Eleanor glanced again at the script package on her breakfast tray. Greta was ten years younger than she was, that was the truth. And beautiful. Just too damn beautiful. Nobody could compete. Nobody stood a goddamn chance …
She wouldn’t open it. Not yet.
Her mind turned, before she could stop it, to Little Miss Blanche Williams, chief feature writer –
Much better to open the script.
There it still was, lying there. So what was stopping her? Mermaids had grossed over $1.3 million, for crying out loud.
Meanwhile Greta hadn’t even made the transition to talkies.
Over $1.3 million!
There’d been three other pictures since, of course, each one grossing less than the one before. And then came the last, the real turkey, disdained by viewers and reviewers both.
‘Whatever has become of this once vibrant actress?’ wrote the critic in American Mercury. ‘Eleanor Beecham’s performance is her most dull and lifeless yet. Maybe it’s time the good people at Lionsfiel pulled the curtain on a talent long since spent, before La Beecham’s name becomes a by-word for Films You Definitely Want to Miss!’
Fuck.
Fuck all of them. Eleanor felt sick.
What was Blanche Williams doing, sitting in place of honour, anyway? Why had she come at all?
Because Max had insisted upon it. That was why. He’d told Eleanor he owed it to Blanche, after the write-up Blanche gave his last movie. So maybe he did owe it to her. He owed all sorts of people all sorts of things. He hadn’t invited them and it wasn’t why he invited her. He invited her because he was screwing her. And probably because she insisted on it. And because she had the sort of hold on him any woman has on a man when he particularly, especially, enjoys screwing her.
Eleanor didn’t want to think about that. Not this morning. Not today. She didn’t want to think about Max. She didn’t want to think about the studio. She didn’t want to think about her failing career, her fading looks, her philandering husband …
Deliberately, she turned her mind to Butch.
Sometimes it helped to think about him. But not this morning. This morning his name conjured nothing but guilt and sadness – and a churning of lust – and nothing …
And then unbidden, inescapable, always in her mind, always there, always waiting, came the face of Isha, three years old, waxy with the fever, sobbing –
Only the nice letters made it to Eleanor’s breakfast tray, generally. Invitations were allowed through, and personal notes (and the scripts, of course, because they were unavoidable). And then, every few months – less and less often, actually –
This.
Her heart missed a beat.
5
Eleanor stared at the letter. Postmarked Reno, as it always was, wrapped in the same dull brown envelope, and with no name above the address. She tore it open.
Dear Miss Kappelman,
As one of our most valued clients [she read], I am writing to inform you of sad recent events.
After 25 years’ devoted service to this Bureau, which Bureau, you are no doubt aware, he himself founded, my beloved father sadly passed away last month. Since then, as he and I had always arranged, I have left my employment with Reno City Police and taken up the reins. It is a sad point in time for me, but also a point in time I have long awaited and I am eager for the challenges that lie ahead …
Eleanor skipped on impatiently.
… Madam, you will observe from the enclosed that our rates have increased …
Yes, yes, yes.
… I note that progress in the case has, to date, been somewhat slow. Not least as a consequence of the limited information you have provided. Nevertheless, please rest assured that we are dedicated to discovering the truth, and continue to work tirelessly, leaving no stone unturned. I can tell you that already we are making definite strides forward.
Please do not hesitate to contact me here at your convenience, should you have any questions regarding the case, or should any further information come to light that you feel might aid us in our work. Or, if you would like to pay a visit to us at the bureau here in Reno, I can assure you of a warm welcome. Of course I understand however that it is a long way to travel. In the meantime I will make it my business to keep you abreast of each and every development by post.
I would be grateful if you could attend to the enclosed invoice at your earliest convenience.
Respectfully yours,
Mr. Matthew Gregory
Eleanor reread the letter once, twice, three times, desperate to discover any hidden message behind the lines – but it seemed the more she read it, the more cryptic it became. So Gregory Senior was dead. She had never met him. She didn’t feel much sorrow at the news. Perhaps the new man would be more efficient? He sounded as though he might. He certainly sounded optimistic – didn’t he? Yes he did. And it was wonderful.
Perhaps a fresh pair of eyes might yet be able to see something new, something they had all been missing? Perhaps he truly had made some strides forward? Perhaps … Perhaps … After all, a fresh pair of eyes …
Perhaps, after all, it might even do some good for her to visit him in Reno?
She laughed at the idea. And then suddenly stopped. Asked herself again – after all, why not?
He would recognize her. That was one reason why not. He would know who she was. There would be questions. It would be dangerous … But she would find a way around them, after all these years. Of course she could.
Why not?
Why not indeed? A minute ago it had seemed like sheer madness. Now, suddenly, it was not only possible, but imperative.
She could feel, from nowhere, the slow burning of hope – the faintest trace of the tidal wave she had been keeping in check for so long. She needed to talk to Max. She needed to explain … He didn’t know about Mr Gregory – Junior or Senior. But she would tell him. Now. This morning. She would tell him – that she had never given up. Even if he had.
And he could come with her or not. She wanted him to come more than almost anything. But if he wouldn’t come, she would travel alone. She had waited long enough. Suddenly she could not wait a moment longer.
She called him at work, though she didn’t like to, and was put through to his secretary. ‘Why Mrs Beecham!’ the woman cried when she heard Eleanor’s voice, ‘I’ve been longing for you to telephone us, all this time! Only so I could say to you in person how much I adored your last picture. And I know Mr Beecham mentioned it didn’t do so well as some of the others. Well, I know it didn’t because of course we keep a track on all that sort of thing here. It’s our business, isn’t it? Who’s doing what, where. It’s all madness, isn’t it! But I swear, I thought it was splendid! You had me weeping from start to finish.’
‘My gosh – thank you,’ said Eleanor, with her beautiful manners. ‘That’s so good of you… . Always so good to hear. Thank you … Could you—’
‘And the lilac dress in the final scene! I never saw anything so stunning!’
‘Yes it was a lovely dress—’
‘And how was the party last night? It was last night, wasn’t it? Mr Beecham was pleased as punch with his new jacket – we had the costume girls in doing last-minute adjustments yesterday morning. You should have seen them – running around like little crazy things. Yes, Mr Beecham, no Mr Beecham. Anything for you, Mr Beecham!’
‘Mrs Monroe – Is he about?’
‘Is he about?’ She sounded confused.
‘Only I need to speak to him rather urgently. Could you – can you possibly find him for me? Please.’
‘Well. I can certainly try …’
‘That would be so kind.’
‘But you know he’s not here.’
‘Not in the office?’
‘Why, no! He’s not coming in today. I thought he was with you.’
‘With me?’
Too late, Mrs Monroe realized her mistake.
‘Oh, but what am I saying? I’m nothing but a butter brain, Mrs Beecham! He’s probably in with … probably just bashing something out with Mr Silverman right next door, just like he always is! Shall I take a quick peek? If you wait right there …’
‘No,’ Eleanor said quickly. ‘Thank you, Mrs Monroe. It doesn’t matter at all. I’ll find him later.’
She hung up. Took a deep breath, and another. It was nothing new. There was nothing new about it.
After that, she didn’t allow herself to wallow. Eleanor never allowed herself to wallow. She simply dressed and packed. She fetched one of her personalized cards from the drawer of her dressing table, and beneath their curly, gold-embossed initials, entwined, wrote her husband a note:
Darling,
I called the studio, but you were busy, busy! Mrs Monroe offered to go in search, but then she said you might have gone out of town on reconnaissance and really I couldn’t wait. Darling, you remember I showed you a letter once from a little detective I had found in Reno and you thought so little of him? Well, I never mentioned him again because I knew it made you so cross but I went ahead and employed him, because … well, of course you know why. Matz, he died. But now his son has written, and I think he has somethingimportant to tell us. He has asked me to Reno to meet with him and of course I must go. I will call you the first moment I have any news.
Your ever-loving wife,
Eleana
She placed it, carefully, at a jaunty angle on her sunny dressing table, paused, and looked at it again. She looked at it for a long time.
When had she last called him Matz? Seeing it written, and her own, Eleana, beneath it, took her by surprise; brought a stab of pain. She had no idea what had possessed her to use their old names. She snatched up the card and ripped it into pieces. She opened the drawer, took out a fresh card, and started again:
M,
I shall be gone for a few days. I think it’s about time we talked, don’t you?
E
She placed the card, carefully, at a less jaunty angle, on the same sunny dressing table, pinned beneath the heavy gold-framed photograph. She picked up her bag, leaving the rest of her post unopened, the script unread, the forgotten jewel, more precious than last year’s, half hidden beneath a cold, dry piece of toast. And then she left the house before she had a chance to think better of it.
6
‘It’s probably gonna sound funny,’ Blanche Williams was saying, a couple of miles down the road. ‘But I have respect for your wife. I have a lot of respect for her. I thought she looked just about as classy and dazzling as a girl can look in that emerald-green get-up last night.’
He had his head between her legs; his tongue inside her sweet, juicy knish … Half a second ago she’d been purring like a pussycat … Dammit. He put a soothing hand on her stomach, gave her ass a little pinch, and stayed right where he was, just as if she hadn’t spoken.
But once Blanche started on a topic, as by now he knew quite well, there was rarely any chance of her dropping it.
‘She’s beautiful,’ Miss Williams continued, ‘she’s mysterious. God knows, she’s a terrific actress … at least, that is, when she wants to be. And you know with all that, I got to ask myself –’ Blanche hoiked herself onto an elbow to look at him – ‘what in hell you’re doing spending your time with a Little Miss Nobody like me?’
He paused. Stopped. Lifted his head. ‘What’s that, sweetie?’ he muttered.
‘I was just saying …’
Max gave up. He stretched across her naked body for the cigarette pack, lit up two, one for each of them, and lay back on the pillow beside her. ‘… I heard what you were saying, baby.’
‘So?’
Max exhaled, disguising a small, dull sigh inside the smoke: ‘So … what?’
‘So … what are you kicking around with a dozy little broad like me for? When you have a class act like Eleanor Beecham waiting for you back home?’
It took a beat before Max replied. Blanche noticed it, even if he didn’t. ‘Baby,’ he said, ‘because I love “kicking around” with you.’ He laughed. ‘And you’re hardly “a dozy little broad”.’
‘But you never talk about her.’
‘Why would I talk about her?’
‘Because she’s your wife. Is why. And because I am your lover. And everybody knows you two adore each other. And because of the way you kissed her last night. And the way you two looked at each other. And because I am just jealous as hell. Is why.’
Max smiled into her pretty, honest eyes, and dropped a kiss on her pretty shoulder. ‘You have nothing to be jealous about, sweetheart. If you did, I wouldn’t be here.’ His hand returned to her slim stomach, and slowly continued on down. She paused – before reluctantly pushing his hand away. ‘You’re not being fair, Max.’
‘Baby,’ he murmured, not giving up just yet; nuzzling her neck, returning his hand. ‘… And nor are you … what are you fretting for, hmm? You have nothing to fret about, baby … just enjoy yourself …’
She pushed him away again, with more conviction this time, and climbed out of the bed. They’d spent the whole morning enjoying themselves in her bed already. And much as she would have loved to spend the rest of the day there with him, she needed to check in with the office. She had an interview with a new girl over at Columbia at three o’clock – some soon-to-be-big, Little-Miss-Girl-from-Nowhere, with a freshly invented life story to plug – and the Columbia people were keen for Blanche to do the big write-up. Added to which, she was determined that she and Max didn’t part company without having had at least a semblance of a conversation. In bed, Blanche was more than happy to be treated like a dirty little sex machine. Actually it suited her just fine. But out of bed, there had to be something between them to make her feel like a decent human being again.
Blanche was ten years Max’s junior, easily young enough to produce a litter of children if she wanted them, except she was adamant she didn’t. Her independence, so hard fought and still so fresh, was something she could never envisage surrendering. Blanche was a woman of her time, and proud of it. She paid her own way, made her own path – lived alone in her snazzy little apartment (very ‘moderne’ she told her disapproving family, back home in Oregon), in a spanking new apartment block just above Sunset. She and Max had been lovers, on and off – with two short breaks during which Blanche attempted to wean herself from him – since she interviewed him for the magazine five years ago.
7
Nineteen twenty-four, it would have been. Or thereabouts. Almost a year after he joined Silverman. They met for lunch at Musso & Frank – without the marketing guys, because Max insisted on it. He was supposed to be telling her about his first picture since being lured away from Lionsfiel. The film was called The Girl Who Couldn’t Smile, and it went on to gross more for Silverman Pictures than any movie they had yet released. But Blanche had been instructed by her editor not to ‘go too heavy’ on the new movie angle, since readers were unlikely to be terribly interested, and instead to concentrate her questions on the Big Split.
Max’s move from Lionsfiel to Silverman had astonished the Movie Colony because he left behind not only his long-time producer and friend, Butch Menken; but – even more intriguing, at least to Blanche’s readers – his movie-star wife. Until then the three of them – producer, director and star – had made not a single film without each other. They were a winning formula – no one doubted that, and everyone had always assumed the trio was inseparable.
So Max had talked to Miss Blanche Williams about the Split that Rocked Hollywood (as her magazine later entitled the article). And with or without the marketing men to prompt him, he had stuck to the official version of events. Which, with a few vital omissions, wasn’t, after all, entirely divorced from the truth. And Blanche was a good listener – an accomplished interviewer. Over steaming, unwanted bowls of the famous Musso & Frank pasta, and a bottle of Château Margaux, provided by Max and poured by him, under the table, into Musso tea mugs, Max talked with disarming warmth and eloquence about his sadness not to be working with his beloved wife any longer. He and Eleanor had agreed that the moment had come for them both to spread their wings … It was time for Eleanor to experiment with different directors and, for Max, with different actors and actresses. He didn’t mention Butch Menken.
‘What about Butch?’
‘Butch Menken?’ Max waved a dismissive arm. ‘Butch is a good guy.’
‘That’s what I heard.’
‘But creatively, we had taken it as far as we could. Butch is good guy. I have a lot of respect for him.’
‘So there was no fall-out?’
‘There was no fall-out. Whatsoever. Butch and I remain the greatest of pals.’
‘So the rumours …’
He cocked a smile, looked his little interrogator dead in the eye. ‘What rumours would they be?’
She blushed, which didn’t happen often. His gaze was disconcertingly direct. Made her want to wriggle in her chair. He was, she reflected as she recovered herself, without doubt the most attractive man she had ever had lunch with.
‘Well, the rumours that … Heck, Mr Beecham, I’m sure you know what people are saying! That you dumped him. Despite being the oldest and best of friends. Because he just wasn’t up to it … You had creatively outgrown him.’
‘Ahh. Those rumours.’ He smiled. She would never have known it, never have guessed. Under the table, he refilled her mug with red wine, and felt his heart begin to beat again. ‘Butch is a fine producer,’ he said, making a show of picking his words with great care. ‘It goes without saying. Butch is a good producer. But as filmmakers we were travelling different paths. That’s all. We wanted to make different kinds of movies. And consequently we were finding it difficult to agree …’
In any case, Max explained, redirecting the conversation, the offer to join Silverman Pictures was too exciting to turn down. Joel Silverman had promised him more autonomy, bigger budgets, freedom to choose his own scripts. ‘And I have to tell you, Joel Silverman has kept to his word! Ha! And it’s not so often you hear that said, is it? Not in this town!’
‘But why didn’t Mrs Beecham come with you?’ Blanche persisted. ‘She’s such a great actress. Didn’t you want her to come with you? Or was it her? Maybe she didn’t want to come?’
Max shrugged. ‘Of course I wanted her to come. Of course …
‘But you … Maybe you wanted to create some space between the two of you. Is that it?’ Blanche asked, aware that she needed some sort of explanation for the piece, and that he didn’t seem willing to offer one himself. ‘A separation between work and home,’ she said, already writing it down. ‘Yes. I think I can understand that.’
He didn’t know what it meant, and neither – when she thought about it – did Blanche. What ‘space’ between them? The space between them was already immeasurable.
‘That’s right,’ he said vaguely. ‘Creatively.’
She scribbled it down. ‘And tell me,’ she added, still scribbling. ‘Tell me how it happened. Did the two of you sit down and discuss it? Were there tears? Or was it … kind of civilized? Can you tell me a little bit about how it all went down? My readers are longing to know.’
He looked at Blanche, her honest, pretty face so eager to hear whatever he might say next – no matter what. The problem was, he couldn’t remember. Couldn’t remember having the discussion – or even if there had been one. One day it was the three of them working together. And the next day – nothing. He had left them. Both. And he was on his own.
‘Lionsfiel has always been like a family to her,’ he mumbled. ‘That’s what you have to remember. She was never going to leave Lionsfiel. But –’ he added, looking again into those honest eyes, and feeling suddenly, inexplicably compelled to reciprocate, to say something to her that actually had some meaning – ‘I have to tell you,’ he said, surprising himself, not only by its truth but also by the fact of his sharing it with her, ‘I miss her. I miss having her with me on set. I miss spending my days with her. I miss our working together. There was something very, very wonderful about that …’ He paused, thinking about it: the old days. It wasn’t something he allowed himself to do often. And it hadn’t always been wonderful. Of course not. But there had been wonderful moments. Many of them. ‘I’m not sure I realized quite how wonderful,’ he added, ‘until it was gone … Hey. But that’s life, huh?’
‘It sure is,’ she said, scribbling away.
‘Sometimes,’ he added, unwilling to leave the memories just yet, his mind briefly awash with images from good times, the early days – the old nickelodeon on Hester Street, the journey West, the long, slow climb together, ‘when I contemplate a future, making movies without Eleanor … It’s like imagining a world …’ and he paused, searching for the truth – any truth at all – that he might be able to share with her, ‘… it’s like imagining a world without music. Without birdsong …’
‘That’s very, very pretty,’ sighed Blanche. ‘Gosh. I wish someone would say that about me one day.’
He laughed, tilted back in his seat, looked across at her appreciatively. ‘I’ll bet you have guys murmuring stuff like that in your ear just about every day of your life, Miss Williams,’ he said, and he meant it. She was sweet – sweet enough to blush, he noticed. For the second time, too. He watched as she recovered herself; watched as she busily pretended to scribble in her little reporter notebook …
‘But you have to understand, Blanche – may I call you Blanche?’ He leaned across the table toward her. ‘That in spite of everything – really, everything – I had to go to Silverman. Silverman Pictures are making the most exciting – the best – movies in Hollywood right now. I believe that. I truly do believe that. And I make movies, Blanche. I’m a filmmaker. I’m a director. It’s what I do. What I am. There’s nothing else …’
He stopped abruptly, aware that he was revealing too much. He smiled. ‘Any case,’ he continued, ‘I sincerely hope that when you finally get to see the finished cut, you will agree with me that this new picture has been worth the … the pain …’ He paused. Added, more to himself than to Blanche, ‘And of course it has. You know, Blanche, I think, if you don’t mind my saying it, I think it’s my best picture yet.’
And then, somehow, she had looked up from her notebook, gazed back at him with such smitten warmth, that … in the intensity of the moment, the excitement and passion of talking about his beloved project to such a pretty, sympathetic, innocent, intelligent woman, he’d asked Blanche what she was doing later.
And they had spent the rest of that hot August afternoon in Blanche’s bed.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been unfaithful to his wife. Not strictly speaking – not by any stretch. But (if you didn’t count the move to Silverman Pictures), it was the first time Max felt that he was betraying her. Because Blanche was not Eleanor. But she was quite a find. And Max could appreciate that. And he knew from the very beginning that he would be coming back for more.
That was the last time he talked to Blanche about his wife at any length, or in any detail. And it was difficult for Blanche. Always, very difficult. Because Eleanor was a big star. And, if not classically beautiful – her features were irregular; everything was too large, too vital, too wild – there was no question that she shone. Something shone from her on screen – and in life, too. She was a big star. And – yes – Blanche was right. In a city of cheats and shrews, Eleanor’s beauty, her small kindnesses, her beautiful manners, made her a class act. Nobody had a bad word to say about Eleanor.
Max was very fond of Blanche. Blanche knew that. In fact, he loved her. And she knew that, too. But whereas Max Beecham loved Blanche Williams, Blanche Williams was in love with Max.
So it was difficult for her.
8
‘I bumped into Butch Menken yesterday,’ Blanche said suddenly. Changing tack. She was sitting on the edge of the bed looking vaguely for her clothes.
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ Max replied.
‘Oh, he’s not so bad!’
‘Whatever you say, baby.’
‘And you know what he told me?’
‘Tell me. What did you he tell you?’
‘You don’t know already?’
‘I don’t know if I know. I don’t know what he told you.’
She considered him, the handsome man in her bed, the love of her life, lying there beside her, checking his wristwatch. Already thinking about his next appointment, his next battle, his next … whatever it was he had to do, which had nothing whatsoever to do with Blanche Williams. She was jealous – only a little jealous, she told herself. She was ferociously jealous – and not just of his wife, but of all the beautiful women who surrounded him. To be fair, he had never given her any reason to suppose that his attention wandered. But he cheated on his wife, and that was enough. If he cheated on his wife, why wouldn’t he cheat on Blanche?
She pushed the thought aside. It was pointless. Self-defeating.
‘So?’ Max glanced across at her, noticed her troubled expression. He placed a thumb between her brows and gently creased out the small frown. ‘Baby? You still here? … What did Butch tell you?’
‘Butch told me … only I thought you might already know. Because it so directly affects you. But I guess not.’
‘What?’
‘Well. That Butch is joining you at Silverman.’
Max dropped his thumb, looked at her sharply. ‘Nonsense.’
‘That’s what he told me, Max. He said – because of Eleanor’s role in PostBoy. Being partly the reason … But I’m not sure if I believe that. Except he probably feels pretty bad, with Eleanor being left behind again, after you already did it once … But I’m telling you he’s leaving Lionsfiel and he’s going over to Silverman.’
Max gazed at her. ‘Blanche,’ he said coldly, ‘you’re talking in riddles. What about Eleanor’s role? What has that to do with Butch coming to—?’
‘Butch Menken is joining Silverman as executive head of production,’ she said, patiently, despite his tone. ‘I’m sorry, Max. They should have told you. Joel Silverman should’ve told you. Should’ve … involved you in the decision.’ She leaned over and kissed him, as an apology – for the news itself, and for being the one to tell him. She offered him a perky, uncomfortable smile. ‘So I guess that means he’s going to be your boss.’
Without another word, Max climbed out of bed.
‘Hey! … Max?’
He ignored her.
She followed his naked shape through to the small sitting room, where their clothes were still strewn over the couch. (Scarlet velvet, it was. Very moderne. Her proudest possession.) ‘Max? It’s not the end of the world … C’mon! … You two worked well together before. You made some great pictures together. You, Eleanor, Butch: you were a tour de force. Pardon my French. Gosh – maybe he’ll bring Eleanor across with him. Wouldn’t that be something?’
‘He’s not going to do that.’
‘Well, but he might.’
‘No. He’s not.’
‘Especially now. She has her contract up for renewal. And with the casting on PostBoy, and it all looking so shaky and all … you know?’
‘I don’t, Blanche. No. I don’t know. Unlike you I don’t know everything about everyone else’s business. Because I have enough business of my own to keep me occupied.’
‘It is my business to know everyone’s business. And you benefit from that.’ She told him levelly, her feelings hurt.
Max collected himself. ‘I’m sorry, baby. Of course it is. That was rude of me.’
‘In any case,’ she continued, brushing his apology aside, ‘you and Butch – you worked well together before. Didn’t you? You’ll work well together again!’
He smiled grimly. ‘Somehow I doubt that.’
‘Max – I hate to say it, but you haven’t had a sensation since The Girl Who Couldn’t—’
‘Every film I make is a sensation.’
‘Well, I know that. But you know what I mean …’
‘If by “sensation” you mean “sensational ticket receipts”,’ he said, childishly, as if, in Hollywood, ‘sensation’ could ever mean anything else, ‘well, baby, you go right ahead and say it.’
‘OK, I will.’
‘Because it so happens I’ve had more goddamn box-office hits than just about any other director in this town.’
Blanche, unselfconsciously naked, leaning against the doorframe, watching him dress, wondered, sometimes, what she saw in the man. She sighed. ‘That’s not actually true, Max. And you know it and I know it. And you know I know it. And actually I could give you a list of the ten – hell – the top twenty grossing directors in this town these past two years. You don’t even come close.’
He didn’t reply.
She relented, just a little. ‘OK – 1927, you came close. But we’re near to finishing 1929! That’s almost three years, Max. Don’t pretend you don’t know. I’m only saying, maybe Butch doesn’t have to be such a bad thing for you. What’s the big deal?’
Max didn’t answer. She watched him, shaking out his pants – scowling at them, at her – at everything … And still so damn handsome. She softened, but not only because of that. Because, in spite of everything – his temper, his director’s vanity – he cared so much about the movies he made. It was noble, foolish – doomed. And she sensed that, underneath the machismo and the bluster, he knew it. He was a talented filmmaker, yes. A talented and dedicated filmmaker, whose films would probably one day be forgotten. And she loved him for it.
‘By the way,’ she said, ‘I was touched, you know. When you wore the white jacket last night. Didn’t think you’d do it.’
He chuckled, in spite of everything. ‘The fuss you made about that goddamn jacket. You would have killed me if I hadn’t.’
She’d given him the jacket as a birthday present, way back in May. And then, even before he’d pulled it out from its elaborate ribbon and wrapping, she was fighting with him, working herself into a state about how he’d never be able to wear it without questions being asked, perfectly arched movie-star eyebrows being raised. If he couldn’t even wear a jacket she gave to him, what small space could she ever hope to occupy in his busy, complicated life? All roads led the same way. She tried to stop herself from careering down each and every one of them. But it was hard for her to be in love with him all this time, and never to be making any progress.
‘I thought you looked very handsome in it,’ she said. ‘Eleanor did too, I expect? Huh? What did you tell her? Did you tell her you’d bought it for yourself?’
‘Honey, have you seen my wallet? I could swear I put it on the side here.’ He stopped. He knew he was being rude, again, and he knew she’d done nothing to deserve it. Except he couldn’t stand it when she talked about Eleanor. It made him wilt inside, for both of them: him and Blanche – and for Eleanor, too. It took every grain of good manners he possessed not to put a hand over each ear and walk right out of the room.
Most of all, he wanted to get to his desk, get on the telephone to Butch Menken – and find out what in hell was going on.
Instead, he came across to his lover, took her pretty face in his hands, and kissed her. He said, ‘You’re a girl in a million, Blanche Williams. You really are … But you understand, don’t you? I have to go now. I have to get back to the office. Maybe you’re wrong about Butch …’
But she never was wrong. Not about this kind of thing. ‘Or maybe I can put a stop to it …’
She hesitated because she was not unkind and, in fact, in spite of everything, she bore no bad feeling towards Eleanor. Quite the opposite. She was, if anything, in awe of her. ‘But you should probably know about PostBoy,’ she said solemnly. ‘Before you go charging in there making a scene.’
‘Tell me,’ he said wearily, dropping his hands, ‘about PostBoy.’
‘It’s your wife’s next picture. They sent the script to her yesterday. She will have got it this morning.’
He laughed – impressed, in spite of himself. ‘How in hell do you know this stuff?’
She shrugged. ‘I told you, Butch told me …’ Again, she hesitated.
‘Would you spit it out – please, baby? Put me out of my misery.’
‘Eleanor’s not the lead …’
‘Oh!’ he said, slowly, gave a soft groan. He wondered how Eleanor would take it. Realized, with a small shock, that he had no idea how she would take it. She might even be a little relieved. Either way, the news hardly came as a surprise. ‘Poor El,’ he said.
‘I mean to say, Max,’ she continued, ‘it’s not even the second lead. Nowhere near. The fact is, she’s a great actress, and we all know that. But her numbers have been dropping. People don’t turn out to see her. And they haven’t and you know this, Max. They haven’t, not like they used to – except for Mermaids, not since you left for Silverman. And that’s the fact. And you probably don’t want to hear it. But I’m sorry.’
‘Mermaids was a smash,’ he muttered. Yes, it had been a smash, but everyone knew that it was no thanks to Eleanor. Eleanor might have played the lead, but the notices hardly mentioned her. They were all raving about the new kid on the block, Joan Crawford.
Blanche was right, of course. As usual. Eleanor was half the actress she used to be. Because she didn’t care enough, it seemed to Max. Not about anything, not any more. And if she didn’t care – if she couldn’t remember how far they had come, how hard they’d fought, how tightly they needed to cling on – then why should he fight for her? He felt a prickling, not of pity, but of anger, of rage at his wife, for abandoning him mid-game – mid-everything – when there was still so much to fight for. Perhaps this would wake her up. Perhaps it might shake her out of the torpor. He glanced at Blanche, who was watching him so closely, trying so hard to read something, the smallest clue, from his perfectly unreadable expression. He kissed her. Thanked her for telling him the news – and left the apartment.
Too bad, he told himself, as he started his engine. It was Eleanor’s problem. He would try to help, if she turned to him. Which she wouldn’t, because she never turned to him any more. In the meantime, he had problems of his own.
9
October 1929. As America helterskeltered through those last few ecstatic days of the greatest economic boom in its short history, Hollywood offered a matching heartbeat. In its confidence, its joyous vulgarity, it was a perfect fit for a bold new universe. The Movie Business was big business. Hollywood was the centre of the world: and in Hollywood, just five enormous film studios reigned supreme.
Silverman Pictures, where Max Beecham worked as one of three contracted directors, was not one of those studios. In a good year, it produced no more than ten films (as opposed to eighty or more, for example, over at MGM). Even so, it had a fine reputation. More than any other studio, large or small, it was known for the quality of its productions. Not all Silverman films made money. But once every eighteen months or so, Silverman Pictures produced what Blanche called ‘a sensation’ – a box-office triumph; and that was how, against the giants, it continued to survive.
Its founder, Joel Silverman, had come to Hollywood in 1910 with nothing, so he always claimed, except $100 and ten years’ experience in the scrap-metal business. But he was a man who put more thought, effort and intelligence into a single day than most people put into a lifetime, and he had made a fortune. Along the way he had lost his only son, killed by a German sniper in the swamps at Malancourt just six weeks before the end of the War. Joel Silverman had no other children. Now he only wanted two things: he wanted his studio to make a play for a place in the big league. And he wanted to find a worthy heir to help him take it there, so that one day, before he died, he might consider the possibility of retiring. It was with these two ambitions in mind that he approached Butch Menken.
If Max had been capable of thinking rationally, which on this matter he was not, he would have had to acknowledge that his boss of six years, Joel Silverman, was not simply a clever man, but as sure-footed as any in the business; and that, of all the talent available to him, in Butch he could not have made a smarter choice.
‘Married to the movies,’ Butch used to say, when anybody asked him (as they constantly did) how it was that such an attractive man, already forty and with no shortage of willing candidates, had thus far evaded the efforts of so many beautiful women, and not yet taken a wife. The phrase, glibly reiterated, was truer than he realized: truer than he would have liked to acknowledge, even to himself. Butch Menken’s work was his first passion: the last thing he thought of at night; the first thing he thought of in the morning. It was also true that the only woman he had ever truly wanted for a wife was already spoken for and, try as he might, he could not wean her away.
He was handsome: blond and square-jawed, blue-eyed and broad-shouldered; in manner and in dress he resembled an upmarket East Coast lawyer more than the West Coast movie producer he was. Succinct, soft-spoken, clever, understated in every way, Butch rarely uttered a wasted word, or offered a wasted smile, or moved a well-honed, athletic limb without having a reason for it in mind. Nevertheless, the sheer size of him – he was six foot three – meant that even in a crowded bar, or a large party packed with stars, it was hard not to be conscious of his presence. Added to which, Butch’s reputation was already part of Hollywood legend. It seemed, for the past few years, that every film he touched turned to gold. He had an instinct – verging on magic, so it seemed – for what and who was going to work up there on the big screen.
When Joel Silverman approached him with his partnership offer, Butch was one of six senior producers under contract at the gargantuan Lionsfiel Studios. Which six senior producers (along with thirty junior producers) answered to an executive producer who, in turn, answered not only to the Studio’s founder, but to his two very capable and ambitious sons. Too many chiefs. Whether or not Max chose to acknowledge the fact, it could only have been a matter of time before a man with Butch’s record was lured to a more promising position elsewhere.
On that afternoon, while Eleanor was racing toward Reno, and Max was racing across town from his lover’s bed, Butch was sitting at his desk at Lionsfiel thinking – with quiet satisfaction – about his encounter with Blanche Williams the previous afternoon. She was a sharp enough cookie, and he liked her. But if she thought for one minute she’d wheedled anything out of him he hadn’t expressly intended for her to wheedle, she was a fool. A fool – though she didn’t know it – with a predicament so similar to his. He might perhaps have felt a little human sympathy for her, had it crossed his brilliant mind to do so. It did not.
His brilliant mind wandered, instead, to Eleanor. She hadn’t called. And she must have seen the script by now. She must have seen the small and unflattering role she’d been given – and with just three months before her contract was due for renewal, she would know how it augured for her future at Lionsfiel. So why wasn’t she on the telephone haranguing him, sobbing, begging him to help? It bothered Butch Menken. Under normal circumstances the histrionics of his actresses left him cold – just rolled right off him. But with Eleanor – obviously – things were different.
Like Butch, Eleanor never lost her cool. That was the thing about Eleanor. One of the things. Not once, not in all the years he’d known her. Sometimes, when she was upset, or excited – she shook. Her entire body shook. Which was beautiful. Made her even more beautiful.
Why hadn’t she called him?
He buzzed through to his secretary, asked her to check again that the script had been sent to Eleanor yesterday. His secretary confirmed that it had.
‘And she hasn’t called?’
‘Not to my knowledge, Mr Menken. And I’ve been here by the telephone since nine o’clock.’
‘And it was made clear, which role she was to play?’
‘Yes, sir. Her lines were underscored in red. As usual. I saw it for myself before Mrs Broadbent sent it out, and I was with Mrs Broadbent when she was placing the script in the envelope. Because we were both saying what a shame it was. Because really Mrs Beecham is still so lovely, and it seems such a waste …’
All the staff at Lionsfiel loved Eleanor. They always had. It wasn’t something you could claim about many of the studio’s stars. And it said something about her, Butch reflected sourly. Too much self-control. For an artist. Not enough passion. Always so damn polite – would nothing rattle her?
He returned the handset, brilliant mind briefly befuddled. There was plenty of passion there. He knew it. It was that tension between passion and control, which she no longer revealed for the camera but which had once made her so compelling on screen. It was the same mix which, in bed together, still made her so irresistible in the flesh.
And he should have called her. He should have warned her the script was on its way. Why hadn’t he done that?
Butch glanced at his clean, clear desk: he actually did have five minutes to spare. Why hadn’t he called her? He checked the time on his immaculately unnoticeable $25,000 white-gold wristwatch.
Because he was afraid. And he knew it. Because, in matters of emotion – real emotion, as opposed to the magic created for screen – Butch was lost. Like a child. He simply didn’t know how to deal with it. Not with Eleanor. All the shaking that was going to go on. The passion and control. The swirling, silent hurt, the unspoken accusations. Dammit. Damn her. Damn Max. Damn everyone.
At the production meeting yesterday he’d fought for her. He’d taken on the senior producers, the executive producer, the whole lot of them, one by one. But by then, by the time they told him what was planned for her, Butch had already informed them he was leaving. Their decision regarding Eleanor’s future – or lack of it – was, of course, in large part retaliation for that, and he knew it.
‘Why don’t you take her with you, Butch, huh?’ Mr Carrascosa (Senior) had suggested – sneered, actually: it was closer to a sneer. ‘She’s lost the magic. Lost it so long I can hardly remember she even had it.’
‘But she did have it,’ Butch said defensively, more quickly than he would have liked. She and he – and Max – had together made the finest films. And though the men had gone on to make more hits, not one of the three had made a film of the same quality since the split. He knew it. Everyone knew it. ‘The magic is still there,’ he said. ‘We only need to fix her up with the right director.’
‘So you’ve been saying for some time,’ replied Mr Carrascosa.
Butch had looked across the boardroom table to the Carrascosa Son and Holy Spirit, sitting on either side of their founding Father – but they said not a word. He looked at Mr Stiles, Executive Producer of the studio, and Eleanor’s friend:
‘Tony?’ Butch asked him. ‘She’s still beautiful. She still has so much to offer … Why don’t you give her another chance?’
Tony Stiles shuffled his papers, shrugged, slowly shook his head.
‘Hell, Butch – why don’t you sign her!’ Mr Carrascosa called out again. Pleased with the joke. ‘You’re so goddamn fond of her! … She’s costing us an arm and a leg – and for what? She’s finished here, my friend. She’s all yours!’
Butch smiled at them – one of his rare smiles. They had done it to spite him, without doubt. But they would have found another way to spite him if getting rid of Eleanor didn’t also happen to make good business sense. And the numbers were against her: her age, for one; her ticket receipts, for two. And Butch knew – everyone in the business knew – she just wasn’t as good as she used to be. On set, she was professional. She knew what was her best angle and where the kindest light shone; she knew her lines: like an efficient machine, she did everything right. But the tension was gone. She put no heart into it – and somehow, the camera could always pick it up. It’s what Butch had told her, more than once. He’d said it again only a couple of weeks ago.
‘You have to care, Eleanor. You have to care as Max does. As much as I do. As much as you care about life itself …’
‘Of course I care,’ she’d said – beautiful, trained voice crackling with the sound of caring.
It was Butch, then, who’d shaken his head. ‘I can’t protect you from them, Eleanor. You know that. Not if …’ But he couldn’t bring himself to mention it. Two weeks later, he still hadn’t told her he was leaving the studio.
‘I don’t need you to protect me,’ she said. And then, unkindly – she regretted it at once: ‘I have Max to do that.’
But Max had not protected her. Max had gone to Silverman. The truth of it rang out in the silence. Butch, his own guilt hanging heavily, left her statement unchallenged.
‘In any case,’ she added, and kissed him. ‘You mustn’t worry. I’m tougher than I seem.’ And she smiled, and seemed, to Butch, in that instant, to be quite unbearably fragile. He could protect her. If she would only let him.
He kissed her: ‘Eleanor, things might be going to change for me soon. Everything’s going to change. It’s going to be different.’ He stopped. Still, he couldn’t say it. Instead, to fill the silence, he said: ‘I think you should come live with me …’
Eleanor gave him a throaty chuckle: ‘Watch out, Butch Menken,’ she laughed at him. ‘One of these days I may just take you up on the offer …’
They were in his bed, in his new apartment at the Chateau Marmont, an apartment Eleanor had helped him to arrange. It was a beautiful, sultry afternoon. The ceiling fan had kept them cool and, from behind the half-closed louvre shutters, softening the whir of traffic as it chugged down Sunset Boulevard far below, the smallest, sweetest, softest breezes had caressed their warm, naked skin. They were a little drunk, both of them. And she wasn’t listening. She never listened.
10
Butch looked at his watch. Four thirty in the afternoon already. Even taking into account the party last night, to which, of course, he had not been invited, she must have woken and checked her post by now. Why hadn’t she called?
He should call her. He should tell her he was leaving Silverman – if she didn’t know it already. He should talk to her. There was really no way out of it. He knew that. And so, finally, he geared himself to do it. He would call before Max got home and had a chance to break the news to her himself. He would check up on her, make her feel better, soothe her with promises to help …
Grimly, he leaned to pick up the telephone. As he did so his secretary buzzed through on the intercom. Max Beecham was on the line.
HA! It was, Butch realized, the very call he had been waiting not to take all the long afternoon. All day, actually. Ever since his cocktail with Blanche Williams the previous afternoon.
‘Thank you, Mrs Rowse,’ said Butch, soft and succinct as ever. ‘You can tell the son of a bitch I’m out of town.’
‘Out of town. Right you are,’ Mrs Rowse said primly. ‘Shall I say when you’ll be returning?’
‘Tell him I’m back after the weekend. I’m on vacation.’
‘Mr Menken, you’ll be on a reconnaissance out at Palm Springs this coming Monday. Shall I tell him you’ll be back Tuesday?’
‘You tell him that. And tell him you’ve no idea where to find me.’
‘I’ll do that.’
Butch stood up, feeling satisfied. Trying to feel satisfied. The job was done. The son of a bitch could take care of his beautiful wife himself, for once in his lousy, cheating life. Butch had a date with a cute little actress named … Melanie … No, Bethany. From Savannah. Maybe Charleston.
In any case, he was heading home to shower.
11
On those very rare occasions when Max allowed himself to think about it, the truth seemed to shine out like a beacon: the most immutable fact in the universe. Butch Menken had always been in love with his wife. During all the years the three had been working together, Max used to see Butch, watching her, from behind his clever, blue, predatory eyes. And then Max had moved to Silverman. And because she reminded him of so many things he needed to forget, he had turned away from her long before and he had left the two of them together. He never quite knew how long she held out – not quite as long as he might have hoped, perhaps. They were as lonely as each other. But he knew one thing, always. She never stood a chance.
It was all such a long time ago now. But the months and years rolled by – and he knew the affair rumbled on. Or he didn’t know. But he knew. Because Eleanor almost never mentioned Butch’s name, though they worked together; and because Eleanor lied so well, about everything, always, and because she seemed always to be wrapped in an invisible, impenetrable shell. Just as he was.
After his failed attempt to get through to Butch, Max had thrown down his telephone in disgust and immediately, blindly, stormed along the corridor to fight it out with his boss.
Silverman glanced up from his work as Max burst in. ‘Ha!’ he barked cheerfully. ‘Well, I was wondering when you’d finally show your handsome face in here. And before you even start, Max – listen to me. You’re gonna get used to him. Trust me. He’s good news for the studio. Which means he’s good news for you and he’s good news for me.’ And that was it.
When Max tried to present the case against Butch: that he was untrustworthy and extravagant; that his artistic taste was vacuous and shallow; that the sort of big budget films he produced were anathema to all that Silverman Pictures stood for, his employer and friend held up a hand to shush him. And when that didn’t work, and Max continued shouting, he stood up from behind his desk (something he didn’t do often) and simply pushed him from the room.
‘It’ll be good for us,’ was all Joel Silverman would say. ‘Don’t whine, Max. Men should never whine. Butch Menken’s the best producer in the business. He’s just the tonic we need. And if you cared about this studio as much you ought to, you’d be celebrating. Just as I am. Now go home, Max. Lighten up. Enjoy a pleasant weekend with your beautiful wife … And while you’re at it, would you thank her please for a beautiful party last night. Tell her Margaret wants to know where she found those lobster …’
Max returned to the Castillo not long afterwards. Feeling bruised and foolish, and in a filthy mood, he went directly to his study, where he stayed, hidden away, drinking heavily to dull the myriad of pains – among them the ache, ever present, in the palms of his two hands. It was always more acute when he was tired. He sat at his desk and pulled out the old screenplay, the one he turned to whenever his hands burned, or his heart ached, and which one day he swore he would make into a film. After several hours of failing to make any progress with it, he staggered to bed.
All the time he had imagined his wife’s brooding presence somewhere in the house, and was torn between resenting her failure to engage with him, and delighting in not being required to engage with her. But then the bedroom was empty. And then there it was, the miserable little note:
M,
I shall be gone for a few days. I think it’s about time we talked, don’t you?
E
He stared at it stupidly, mind throbbing, trying to work out what in hell it meant. Time to talk? About what? He was tempted to laugh.
Where did she imagine they could possibly begin?
The Nickelodeon on Hester Street
12
New York City, December 1909
Thick snow had settled above the city grime on Hester Street. During the day, the two had mingled under a million tired feet, and this evening the resulting soup had frozen over once again. Eleana’s boots had been restitched so often there was barely anything left to hold them together. They had sucked in the filthy, icy mire, numbed her feet as she stood on Greene Street – and now, in the steaming warmth of the picture house, they were itching and aching as they thawed. It didn’t matter. Not really. It was such a relief to be inside – somewhere warm and cheerful at last – and with Matz at the piano, smiling at her through the crowd. There was neat gin running warm through Eleana’s veins, and hot potato soup in her belly, and the new movie, Frankenstein, playing on a loop on the screen above her head. Her feet could have detached themselves completely and she might not have complained.
Maybe ‘picture house’ was too grand a name for the place. It was a five-cent Lower East Side nickelodeon, a dirty little store front, nothing more, and nothing like the big, fancy theatres opening further uptown. There was a screen at one end, a hand-turned projector at the other, and not enough benches for the boisterous audience between the two. It was packed, as it was every night, even now, with the garment strike – and thick with the smells of tobacco and sweat, and hot, unwashed bodies.
The projection screen was too small, or the film was too large. Something wasn’t right. As always, at the nickelodeon on Hester Street, the top half of the image was bouncing lopsided off the ceiling. But nobody complained. In the normal run of things, such a detail wouldn’t stop the audience from screaming with merry terror: it was Matz Beekman, up to his tricks at the piano keyboard, who was so blithely sabotaging the mood.
Matz was employed five evenings a week (at seventy-five cents a night) to provide musical accompaniment to whatever film was showing. Tonight he had cast aside the official score, as he did from time to time, and was improvising a comic soundtrack of his own – turning what was meant to be a horror show into a ludicrous romp – and the crowd was loving it. Their bellows of laughter could be heard outside on the frozen street, bursting from the room, beckoning more people to join the hot, boisterous crush. Looking at them all, as Eleana did just then, it would have been hard to guess just what and whom they were up against. The garment workers’ general strike, into its third week now, was more widespread – and more successful – than anyone had expected it would be, including the strike organizers. And now the city authorities were turning savage. In cahoots with the factory owners, they were letting their thugs loose on the picket lines, and for the mass of the Lower East Side, garment-manufacturing centre of the world, life had become not merely a struggle to stay warm and to find enough to eat, but a battle – bloody, violent, lawless. To the hunger and the grind, the anonymity and the squalor, there had been added a tang of actual, mortal fear.
Eleana turned her mind from it, from all of it. Everything to do with the strike, and everything connected with it. She concentrated instead on the here and now: the nickelodeon on Hester Street. And Matz at his piano. And Frankenstein and his monster, bouncing off the ceiling.
The film was only sixteen minutes long and Matz knew every frame. He watched movies differently from other people – with the same concentration and passion that he did everything, but with a filmmaker’s instinct, too; though he couldn’t know it yet. It meant he only needed to watch something once, and he could break it down, scene by scene, shot by shot.
No matter what the film was showing, in just a handful of notes, and simply to keep himself amused, Matz could take possession of it, transform the mood. He could send the audience lurching from horror to tears and then to laughter, and carry every soul in the room with him. It was magical. Matz was magical. Eleana loved him most when he was at the piano, hitting the keys, playing the audience – happy and free. He was a different man from the one who stood on stage at the Union halls and called on his fellow workers to strike, or to keep striking, or to keep up the fighting. She loved him then, too – of course. She loved and admired him in the halls. But she loved and desired him at the piano. He would look up suddenly, in the middle of it all, his audience weeping or laughing at his musical command – he would glance up through the crowd, with that look of ferocious concentration, search out Eleana, catch her eye, and his face would break into a wild grin. Often, more and more often, he would beckon her over, forget the film entirely, and instead start hammering out one of the popular songs, in the hope that she might sing along …
Give My Regards to Broadway …, Take Me Out to the Ball Game … , Keep on the Sunny Side …
The crowd never objected. The regulars would holler for her until she came forward to stand beside him.
She didn’t do much. A song and dance. A little routine. The usual schtick. The sort of acts pretty young girls were running through in cheap bars and crowded nickelodeons all over the city. Except, when it came to it, Eleana was anything but usual. Her dark features were too large to be conventionally pretty, and there was a wildness about her, as if she were permanently searching, in hope and fear – and, above all, in vain – for an exit from whatever situation she was in. She was rough hewn, yet: still only a teenager. But she was beautiful. Matz saw it. The crowd saw it, when she sang. In years to come, the camera would see it. She was as magical as Matz up there, standing by that piano: a born performer. Her rich voice, her expressive face, her timing, her intensity, her humour, her lightness of touch – something and everything about her cast a spell. Matz told her so, endlessly. He knew she was a star, all along. He used to say so. And she must have believed it, just a little, or she wouldn’t have continued to stand up there, night after night. She wouldn’t have followed him to the ends of the earth … And she must have heard the applause, felt the warmth. She loved it back then, in the beginning. It made her feel alive.
Tonight, after she sang, they would be passing a hat for the strike fund. And when Matz stopped playing for the evening, when she’d done her song and dance, and the customers were heading home, she might pull him into the cupboard behind that beaten-up piano. Or he might pull her, probably: either way. It was where the proprietor, Mr Listig, stored any reels of film overnight. Not such a big cupboard then: no space to lie down. But big enough. At the end of the evening they always helped to put the reels away, and then – what the hell? Mr Lustig pretended not to notice. He didn’t care (so long as the reels weren’t ruined). Seventy-five cents an evening wasn’t much, after all, and Eleana didn’t even get that. She received nothing, except a wave-through at the door. A little bit of privacy at the end of the night wasn’t much, but it was a luxury not many young couples enjoyed back then, not on the Lower East Side. The use of his cupboard was a perk of the job.
13
She and Matz had been together for three years by then, since Eleana was fifteen. And Matz was eighteen, perhaps. Or seventeen. Nineteen … Matz always travelled light on such details. Until he met Eleana, he seemed to travel entirely alone. He came to America – he said – ten years earlier, alone with his mother, who had died since, to be reunited with his father, who never appeared at the dock to claim him. It was a daily tragedy in New York back then, when so many thousands of immigrants were pouring in every day.
And, to Matz, it was a mystery still. His father had sent the money home, enough for their passage to join him. It had taken him four years to collect enough together: four long, hungry years, saving, scrimping, living no better than a dog in the Lower East slums.
But when wife and son disembarked at last, the Statue of Liberty behind them, and a free life in the New World in front, he wasn’t at the pier to greet them, and though they waited for three days, returned every morning and every afternoon for many more, he never did come. Matz and Matz’s mother never laid eyes on him again.
So that was Matz.
He couldn’t remember his father, anyway. Couldn’t remember his home country, not really. But he remembered this and that: a grandmother, plenty of cousins, and a great crowd – the whole shtetl, his mother said, turning out to wave them off on their journey. He remembered the ship, and the long days at sea: the cramped, stale air on the lower deck, the seasickness – and the lice inspectors at Ellis Island, who had dragged him off, yanked him, screaming, from his mother’s arms. He remembered the wild, overwhelming relief when he was allowed to fall back into her arms again. He would never forget that.
And then … nothing much. The shock of the Lower East Side. The tenement flats, six storeys high, one after the other to the horizon end, blocking the sun, hiding the sky – and the teeming streets, the dirt, the smell of rotting garbage and horse manure, the roar of metal wheels on cobbled roads, the soot that rained from the elevated trains, the endless noise … And his mother finding work, and then working, and working, and never stopping … Someone used to bring vast bundles of materials to the apartment where they boarded, and then she – and the lady who took the rent, and her three daughters and an old man and someone else, and sometimes Matz, too – would sit in silence, too tired to talk, constructing silken flowers for ladies’ hats, by the hundreds, by the thousands, night after night … Someone took the bundles away when the work was completed, and brought back more bundles: a never-ending stream of bundles, squatting in the space, piled high, stealing the daylight …
What he remembers most is that airless August, when she lay dying.
They were boarding with a family on Essex Street, and the family was kind. There was tuberculosis rampant through the block that summer. With so many bodies existing so close together, when the sickness visited a building, as it did from time to time, it took with it whole families, it swept away whole floors of human life. But on this occasion, in Matz’s small apartment, only Matz’s mother fell prey – and the family they boarded with took pity. They let her stay on the only bed, they moved it to the room with the only window, and for those last few weeks, and even for a week or so afterwards, they wouldn’t take any rent from him, and they fed Matz free of charge.
After that – after that – Matz had survived. That was the main thing. He stole food from the carts on Hester Street, collected coal fallen from the back of the coal carts and sold it, or exchanged it, piece by piece. He constructed silk flowers, carried bundles, took work where he could; did whatever he had to do. And in fact he did far better than simply survive. Somehow, between the struggle to earn enough to eat, the struggle to find a place to sleep, Matz achieved what his parents had brought him to the New World to achieve: there was a charitable night school on East Broadway, founded to help little immigrant boys just like him. Without it, who knows what might have happened?
Matz learned English. He learned to read and write. Learned the piano. Discovered Karl Marx. Learned, above all, that life didn’t have to be this way; that it wasn’t this way for everyone.
When he first came to live at Eleana’s tenement flat on Allen Street – his fifth move in a year – he was a member of the Socialist Party of America, and a vocal and active member of the Garment Workers’ Union. He worked ten hours a day as a cutter at the Triangle Waist Company, already one of the largest and most productive garment factories in the city – where, because his job required skill as well as masculine brawn, he earned $12 a week; three times what the young female machinists were paid, working the same hours. He kept only what he needed to survive, and divided the rest between the Party, the Union, and the little boys on the Lower East Side who roamed the streets just as he had, whose fathers never came to meet them at the dock, whose mothers died of consumption by a small window in a filthy street, in a crowded tenement a world away from home.
That was Matz.
By comparison, Eleana had enjoyed an easy life. Who hadn’t? She was born a few crowded streets away, on Orchard Street, five years after her parents arrived off the ship. By the time she was born, her parents were fully Americanized, and took care to speak to Eleana, almost always, in English. Her sister, two years her elder, died of tuberculosis when Eleana was one. Her father, Jethro, shared a lease on a six-by-four feet pickled food store, in the hallway of a neighbouring tenement block. He died of pneumonia, aged thirty-nine, in the winter of 1905, a year or so before she and Matz met. But Eleana often remembered her father: learned, affectionate and kind, always with the smell of pickled herring hanging over him, and – like everyone she knew – always working.
After he died, life grew much tougher. The shop, such that it was, was quickly appropriated by the other lessee, leaving Jethro’s widow and daughter to fend for themselves: Eleana abandoned her education and set to work making up the family income. Easier than Matz’s life, perhaps. But never easy. Before Jethro died, their tiny apartment had been shared only with one uncle and two cousins. Afterwards, innumerable more were crammed in. The apartment, like so many of their neighbours’, became home and sweatshop both, and a flop house for an ever-changing roster of boarders and fellow workers. They sewed buttons onto feathers, or feathers onto ribbons or ribbons onto hats … Whatever piecework was going, they took it in, and sewed – too tired to talk – and sewed – too poorly paid to stop – and sewed, and only paused to sleep.
It was how Matz first encountered her. Old for her years, and with the roster of boarders always passing through, no longer quite the untarnished maiden of good romantic fiction, a toughened daughter of the Lower East Side, but with a bloom that nothing and no one could dim.
There was a heat between them from the moment they met. No doubt about it. She was fifteen. He was eighteen. Maybe. He came back from the Triangle factory that first night. He sat down at the small kitchen table, where the boarders had to eat in shifts. Her mother passed Eleana a plate of schmaltz – chicken fat – and cornbread, which Eleana set before him without a word. He looked up at her – she looked back at him. If it wasn’t love, it was desire at first sight: hot, thick, rich. They gazed at each other, and felt a rush of something wonderful flow through them. They gazed at each other, in no hurry to look away; allowed their eyes to roam each other’s faces as if they were quite alone in the room, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. After a minute, when the current between them seemed to stifle everything else – and there seemed to be no question where it would lead, Eleana’s mother leaned across from the stove and smacked her soup ladle against Matz’s bowl. That was all. She said nothing. Nobody said anything. And, for the instant at least, the spell was partially broken.
There were eight bodies sleeping in that small and crumbling ‘old law’ Allen Street apartment then. Lower East Side was still filled with them – tenements with conditions so foul, with so little light and space, that they were no longer legal. Slowly, they were being replaced. But too slowly. In this small apartment, there lived five family members, loosely connected – not everyone could say quite how – and three boarders, connected only by the fact of the rent. At the end of each day, ten dog-tired bodies returned from their workplaces to be fed by their landlady: pickled herring and cornbread, pickled herring or cornbread, schmaltz, potatoes … mostly potatoes … Eleven bodies squeezed into the four small rooms: a parlour, a windowless kitchen, two windowless bedrooms. Directly outside ran the track for the Second Avenue elevated railroad, which meant a constant thunder and rumble of passing trains, and cinders from the engines floating through the only window, coating the parlour and everything inside it with dust. There was a water faucet in the hallway and a couple of toilets, which serviced all six floors, all seventeen apartments, each one as crammed as the one above, and the one below, and opposite, and on either side …
They slept sardine-like, side by side on wooden pallets – no room for niceties here; no single-sex wards. On the sixth night, the two of them lay together in the same hot, slumbering room, separated only by a few unwanted bodies, a few feet of space. Neither could have stood it much longer: the proximity and the distance. But Eleana waited, her mind and body restless with longing. She knew he would come to her, and so he did.
Matz clambered over the two sleeping figures between them – Eleana’s young cousin was one, and the other was somebody else. Matz squeezed in beside her. And she regarded him in the semi-darkness. A long time it was they lay like that: a minute or two, or more. And in the beautiful hush, when the noisy world receded, he touched her face – and she touched his, and they saw in each other all that they needed to see, at least for the moment: more than they ever knew it was possible to see in another human being – acceptance, trust, curiosity, desire … Finally, he whispered:
‘You – this moment – no, you, Eleana. This is all I have been able to think of …’
She nodded, curved him a slow, warm smile: ‘I was hoping so,’ she murmured, ‘but my goodness you took your time!’
He laughed – they both did, a whispered laugh – and they made love to each other – they fucked each other – just there and then. Quietly. So quietly. Beside them, the sleeping man – the one who wasn’t the cousin – grunted in his sleep, a half-conscious protest at his small space being disturbed; and shunted up as best he could. But he didn’t wake.
It was a stolen moment: a moment of enchantment and fierce perfection, shared by two people for whom life had only ever offered struggle. It was a moment which amazed them both.
‘Kishefdik!’ Matz whispered. ‘I am a lucky man.’
And she giggled. ‘Kishefdik! Magical. Yes, yes. It was. You are. Let’s do it again.’
He gazed at her, through the tenement gloom. There was a small light shining from the parlour, where a few of them were still at work, attaching mother-of-pearl buttons to a heap of child-sized pantaloons, sixty little buttons an hour, ninety child-sized pantaloons a night, fourteen hours a day. Three dollars more a week. ‘Sheyn maydl, Eleana,’ he whispered, over the hum of the sweatshop sewing machines, the hum which never stopped; over the snores and grunts of his fellow boarders. ‘You’re beautiful … The most beautiful girl I ever saw.’ And she was. He believed she was. Cat’s eyes, green as emeralds, warm as a summer moon; and that soft, smiling mouth, that long slim neck, and those eyes …
‘Your eyes …’ he whispered. ‘All week, all I see are those eyes …’
She didn’t giggle. She looked at him, looking at her, through the tenement gloom. ‘I am not really beautiful,’ she said simply. ‘But you make me feel as though I were.’
That was how it began. And now, three years on, Matz still worked at the Triangle Waist Company factory during the day and, five nights a week, he worked (though it hardly counted as work) at the Hester Street nickelodeon. During the strike, of course, he and Eleana earned nothing from the factory. But thanks to the nickelodeon, they were better off than many. They had moved to another apartment on the same street, no less cramped or dark or crumbling, and even smaller than the last, but without the elevated railway right outside the window, at least, and with fewer roommates. They lived with Eleana’s mother, Batia Kappelman, and Eleana’s pregnant cousin, Sarah Kessler, and Sarah’s brown-eyed baby Tzivia, and (sometimes) with Sarah’s husband Samuel Kessler, who came and went. There was also, temporarily, a greenhorn boarder living with them, a cousin of Sarah’s, fresh from the old country and still finding his feet.
And best of all, of course, there was a daughter, Isha. Two years old – eighteen months older than her cousin Tzivia. The girls were as alike as two peas in a pod, so their grandmother always said. But of course they weren’t. In any case, Matz and Eleana quietly, confidently noted, Isha was not like anyone, not really. She was their golden child. She could walk and talk already, and she had a smile that could melt all the snow on Hester Street, and eyes as wild and green as her mother’s. Her parents wanted nothing less than the world for her: but a different world – one that was kinder and fairer, and which didn’t smell of pickled herring and horse manure and rotting vegetables. And where food was plentiful and the air was clean, and where their baby girl didn’t have to fight for every soot-filled little breath, and wheeze through every airless night, but where she could sleep comfortably, breathe easily, and know that she was safe.
Isha was never strong – not from the first day. But she had bright green eyes, like her mother, and thick dark curly hair, like her father. And laughter that was so easy, so warm, so infectious, it lightened the burden of all and any who were lucky enough to hear it.
So. They were blessed. They had a roof over their heads and enough food on the table – always enough for Isha, and enough, just about, for them. Unlike his fellow strikers, Matz still brought money home from his work at the nickelodeon and there was just enough, after he had given half of it away, to pay the rent. Better than that, in the apartment they shared with only five others, it had been agreed that when the strike was over, and the greenhorn had found his feet, Eleana, Matz and Isha would have a room of their own.
14
Last night, as she had been making her way home from the Greene Street picket line, Eleana had been approached – ambushed, rather – by Mr Blumenkranz, one of the supervisors at Triangle and someone who, when she wasn’t striking, she was forced to deal with on a daily basis. He was a small man, no taller than Eleana, in his late forties, with an unhappy wife at home. Mr Blumenkranz was standing in wait for her, hiding behind a stationary coal cart, because he sensed, quite rightly, that if Eleana had seen him she would have quickly turned and walked the other way. He fell into step as she bustled by, causing her to jump, and offering her no choice but to acknowledge his presence. She glanced about her, unhappy that anyone should spot her fraternizing with the management, and tried to walk on by. But he was quite determined.
‘Eleana!’ he said, panting slightly to keep pace, struggling for a foothold on the ice.
‘Good evening Mr Blumenkranz,’ she replied, cool but polite, not glancing at him, walking faster. Since when, she wondered, had he thought to call her Eleana?
He rarely bothered to learn the machinists’ names – not first names or second names. Most came and went so fast, why would he bother? But there was generally one girl who caught his eye, whose name he always remembered. Eleana was the one. Everybody noticed it. All the girls. And Matz, too. Mr Blumenkranz’s crushes were a long-running joke at Triangle. Sometimes the girl he fixated upon simply left. Couldn’t cope with it. Sometimes, when they wouldn’t submit to his advances, he fired them. Sometimes they accepted his little gifts, his offers of money and stayed for a little while. Until they were fired. Sometimes, rumours circulated about a girl getting herself in trouble. One way or another, nothing good ever seemed to come of his crushes. To their recipients, it was generally deemed, they were less of a blessing than a curse.
But Eleana was clever, in her quiet way. And somehow she had survived Blumenkranz’s cloying attention for longer than the rest, while still keeping him at bay. Her pleasant refusal to engage with him, her ability to slip so innocuously through his fingers, only left him panting for more. Mr Blumenkranz had taken to standing behind her as she bent over her sewing machine, which whirred from the same motor under the same floorboards and at the same speed as the machine beside her, and the machine beside that, and all two hundred machines on the factory’s eighth floor …
‘Ah, Miss Beekman!’ he would sigh, above all the racket of the whirring. ‘A born machinist, if ever there was one!’ As if that were any kind of compliment. And he would turn to the rest of the row, heads bowed, necks and backs twisted over their work: ‘If only all you girls could work as efficiently as the lovely Miss Beekman!’
She corrected him once. ‘It’s Mrs Beekman, Mr Blumenkranz.’ Though, strictly speaking, it wasn’t. She was still Miss Kappelman. She and Matz weren’t yet married. It was something Eleana’s mother protested about from time to time. But somehow they had never quite got around to it. There was always something else more urgent to be done, some other more essential way to spend the time and money.
Mr Blumenkranz knew perfectly well she lived with Matz Beekman the cutter – Union sympathist and nothing but trouble, as far as Blumenkranz was concerned. If he could have his way the man would be fired. But a good cutter was hard to find. And everyone knew, Matz was the best they had. So Blumenkranz ignored Eleana’s comment. He laid a plump, yearning hand on her thin shoulder. ‘Continue your work like this, Miss Beekman,’ he said to her, ‘and before long we shall make you head of the line!’
Head of the line. Meant an extra $1 a week.
‘Head of the line, Miss Beekman! I don’t need to remind you – it’s another dollar a week!’
She let his hand rest on her shoulder – glanced across at Matz briefly, at the far end of the same floor, where the cutters stood. But Matz was oblivious – busy with his knife, slashing away, muttering Marxist revolution into the ear of the cutter beside him. She let Blumenkranz’s finger touch the skin at the top of her neck. Felt nothing – not a shiver of revulsion, because after all, the moment would pass.
When he finally wandered away, Dora, working beside Eleana, glowered at her closest friend.
‘Dershtikt zolstu vern!’ she said furiously. ‘You’re such a fool.’
‘You think so?’ Eleana giggled. ‘Why’s that? The stupid man is driving me crazy!’
‘“Miss” Beekman. “Mrs” Beekman. Who the hell cares? Not you! That’s for sure. Or you might have done something about it.’
‘Oh!’ Eleana tutted mildly. ‘For sure I care.’
‘Blumenkranz adores you, Miss Eleana Kappelman. You’re his One and Only.’
‘Nonsense! Shh!’
Dora chortled. ‘For sure – you’re his Chosen One, Ellie! The Only Girl for Him.’
‘Shut up, Dora!’
‘He loves you better than his own life!’
‘You’ll have us both fired!’
‘Carry on treating him as you do, Eleana, and pretty soon you shall be out of a job. That’s for certain.’
Eleana tipped her head to imply disagreement, but said nothing.
‘You want another a dollar a week? Or don’t you?’ her friend burst out impatiently.
‘Of course I want an extra dollar a week.’
‘Because if you don’t want it, “Mrs” Beekman, I surely do! Mr Blumenkranz can call me anything he likes! I’ll take an extra dollar for it, gladly.’
‘I’m sure you would, my friend,’ Eleana smiled.
‘You think I’m a kurve? Very well. Perhaps it’s so. I am a survivor. That’s what I am.’
‘And a kurve,’ Eleana added, laughing now. ‘And I shall tell your mama, too. The very next time I see her.’
Dora smiled. ‘You think my mama was any better in her day?’
‘Well … yes, Dora.’ Eleana looked at her, quite startled. ‘Indeed I do! And you know it too! You’re mother is a good woman.’
‘Well, Eleana, and so am I. That is exactly my point. I, too, am a good woman. And so are you. But a “good woman” needs to survive. And these are different times. This is America. Life isn’t what it was in the Old—’
‘Oh, please don’t start …’
It wasn’t that Eleana disagreed with her. Far from it. She only wished that all roads, all conversations – everything – didn’t have to lead to the same point. Dora’s socialism was becoming more irksome, more all-consuming than even Matz’s.
Nevertheless, Eleana didn’t correct Mr Blumenkranz again. She put up with his calling her Miss Beekman, leaning over her shoulder so his warm breath ran damp down her spine, and always smiled brightly when he passed. By the time of the strike neither the salary raise, nor the promised head-of-line advancement had materialized. On the other hand, she still had a job at the factory.
And here he was still, all these months later, slip-sliding after her over the ice as she returned from the Greene Street picket line. ‘Wait, Eleana!’ he panted, skidding in the frozen grime. ‘Can’t you stop a moment? I have something terribly important—’
‘I have to get home, sir,’ she said, still walking. ‘I have a small daughter waiting. Unless …’ Away from the factory floor, in these teeming streets, it was harder to hide her disdain. She threw him a glance, mid-stride. ‘Unless of course you have a message for the workers?’ She smiled at him, without warmth. ‘In which case, I’ll be sure to pass it on.’
‘Not for all the workers. No.’
‘Oh. Well then.’
‘Eleana.’ He took hold of her sleeve and pulled her to a halt. She might have snatched it back. She fought the urge. Because – even now, in the street, with the pathetic, pleading look in his eye, he was still powerful. The strike would not last forever, and there was the life beyond it to consider, when Mr Blumenkranz would once again be standing behind her, his hand on her shoulder, his finger on her neck – choosing whether to fire her, or to make her head of the line.
‘What is it, Mr Blumenkranz?’ she snapped.
He seemed surprised, as if he hadn’t really expected her to stop. ‘I have an offer for you,’ he said. ‘I wrote it down …’ He fumbled in the pockets of his thick winter coat. Eleana, standing still and wearing a jacket far thinner than his, began to shiver. ‘Wait a moment,’ he mumbled. ‘Wait there …’ But the paper could not be found, not in all the many pockets of his thick, warm coat and, finally, he abandoned the search. ‘I simply wanted to say … that you’re better than all this! It is irresponsible nonsense, what you are engaged in, and you can do better, Eleana. Much, much better.’
‘Better than what?’
‘Look at you – so cold. Your coat is so thin.’
‘Certainly it is thinner than yours.’
‘Eleana, my dear, you know you cannot win. None of you can win!’
‘Several other factories have already settled. You know they have.’
‘But not Triangle! Mr Blanck and Mr Harris have both said that they will fight you to the end. And they can because they have the rescources, and they have done so and, trust me, they will continue to do so. They will keep the factory working with or without you. They will never accept the Union. Never.’
He looked up at her, spotted the split-second of uncertainty in her eyes and, instinctively, he pressed his advantage. ‘But I could help you,’ he wheedled. ‘If you would allow me, Eleana, I could help you. Did you have breakfast this morning? I’ll bet you didn’t.’ His eyes were on her lips. ‘I can organize a payment. For you. It would be our secret, just between us. I can do that … if you are willing …’
‘What sort of payment, Mr Blumenkranz?’ she asked him politely. ‘Tell me, sir. What did you have in mind?’
But he didn’t hear her, not properly. He was gazing at her lips, and imagining himself, with his arms around her – pushing her back into the alley, right there, behind the rubble, the pile of rotting … whatever it was, and pulling up her skirt – and he couldn’t do all that and listen properly, not at the same time.
‘… Fair pay for all,’ she was saying. ‘Union recognition. Fewer hours for all of us, Mr Blumenkranz, not just for me. It cannot continue …’
‘But I can help you,’ Mr Blumenkranz pleaded. ‘You look hungry. Eleana. Of course you are hungry! What are you living off, while the strike is on? You cannot live on ideals! And nor can your child. Think of your child! Do you need money? I can give you money. How much do you need?’ Again, he was fumbling in his pockets.
But this time, when he looked up, she was gone; vanished. And he was standing alone on the bustling, noisy street. Yearning. Burning.
Such is the lot of the small, plain man with an unhappy wife and a hateful job: neither in one camp nor the other, neither rich nor poor, and in thrall to a young woman who despises him, to whom he has promised a dollar-a-week raise, and from whom, until recently, there had rarely been anything but smiles. No wonder, by the following morning, after he’d tossed and turned and failed to sleep on her rejection, while his unhappy wife snored foully beside him – no wonder he was angry.
15
It had been agreed by strike organizers that the pickets should, as far as possible, consist of young and attractive women workers whose suffering elicited better public sympathy, and that the striking men would be more usefully put to work behind the scenes. So it was that the following morning Eleana was due back on the picket at Greene Street, outside the workers’ entrance to her own factory. Meanwhile, Matz intended to spend the morning flitting between picket lines city-wide, informing strikers of the Union meeting later that day, boosting morale with his eloquent passion and, above all, keeping an eye on the police – who were less liable to erupt into violence when there were men about.
Eleana hadn’t intended to mention the incident with Blumenkranz, but as she and Matz were leaving the apartment that morning – without breakfast, and with a sickly daughter clinging tearfully to Eleana’s neck, the thought flitted through her mind: if she’d said yes to Blumenkranz, how different things would be. There would be breakfast for everyone. And a good breakfast for Isha. There might be a new coat for Isha, too; and warm blankets, a new coat for herself, and even for Matz. She spoke over her daughter’s small, frail shoulder without pausing to think of the consequences:
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/daisy-waugh/melting-the-snow-on-hester-street/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Daisy Waugh
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв
О книге: Rich. Beautiful. Damned.Sumptuously evoking the Golden Age of Hollywood, a time when money is built on greed and love can be a trick of the light, Daisy Waugh’s stunning new novel is a compelling portrait of love, fame, and survival.October 1929: As America helterskelters through the last days before the great crash the cream of Hollywood parties heedlessly on.Beneath the sophistication and elegance, Hollywood society couple Max and Eleanor Beecham are on the brink of divorce, their finances teetering on a knife’s edge after a series of failed films. As the stock market tumbles it seems they have nowhere to turn but to the arms of their waiting lovers.Hope is delivered in an invitation to one of the legendary weekend parties at Hearst Castle, where the prohibition champagne will be flowing and the room filled with every Hollywood big-shot around. They cannot resist one last chance of making it.Scandalous, absurdly glamorous, the Hearst party is the epitome of Golden Era decadence, but for Max and Eleanor the time has come to make a decision that will change their future. Will they sacrifice everything for fame and fortune or plunge into their hidden past and grasp one last chance to love each other again?If you love the decadence of 20s America and can′t wait for The Great Gatsby film, here′s a brilliant book to tide you over…