Love Me Read online

  Instead, he found himself pulling over outside at Barney’s Beanery. Even a coffee shop had to keep a bottle of something stronger behind the counter, he reasoned, and it was so near to closing time, the place had to be almost empty. Safe.

  The only car in the parking lot was a little dove-gray coupe with a black silk scarf draped over the dashboard, a trace of familiar perfume wafting out the open window.

  Why not? Dane thought. He had to be with someone tonight.

  She was sitting in a booth in the back, an untouched pot of coffee in front of her. Her hair was copper; her face was white.

  “Amanda.” Dane felt alive with possibility. “Fancy seeing you here.”

  “Oh, Ernie.” She looked up at him with eyes that melted his soul. “From now on you’d better just call me Ginger.”

  Sixteen

  The impending Sterling/Forrest nuptials took over Hollywood, just like they were supposed to. All anyone could talk about was the Wedding of the Year.

  The breathless details, filtered carefully to the magazines by the publicity office, were on everybody’s lips, everywhere from the opulent gambling tables in the back room of the Clover Club to the bare-bones lobby of the Central Casting office: Margo’s four-carat emerald-cut diamond engagement ring, custom-ordered from Cartier in the same style as the (admittedly much bigger) one the former Edward VIII had given to Mrs. Simpson. Dane’s absurdly romantic proposal, which apparently involved about a thousand pale pink tea roses and a moonlit ride on Abraham and Sophie, the two Olympus horses devoted Sterling/Forrest watchers knew the couple had been astride when they’d had their first reported lovers’ spat during the filming of The Nine Days’ Queen, now under limited rerelease as The Picture Where It All Began. The planned honeymoon trip to Paris, paid for personally by none other than Mr. Karp, where the stunning Mrs. Forrest would first come face to face with her specially made haute couture trousseau, also—it was reported—courtesy of Uncle Leo.

  “A Fairy-Tale Wedding for a Fairy-Tale Bride,” said Photoplay.

  “Lucky in Life, Lucky Love,” advertised Modern Screen.

  Picture Palace took a longer view: “Margo Sterling Is Living the Dream of Every Girl in America.”

  Still, this was a town whose principle industry was the manufacture of illusion. The citizens of Hollywood were all too aware that things were not always what they seemed. There were always plenty of cynics eager to burst even the prettiest bubble. Rumors abounded that the dashing Dane—who frankly had a bit of a reputation around the gin joints of Sunset Strip—was perhaps not dashing quite as … eagerly to the altar as the Olympus publicity machine might have you believe. The most tenacious know-it-alls were already eagerly examining Margo Sterling’s enviably slender waist for the telltale thickening that must have sealed the deal.

  Some of the lesser—and less studio-friendly—gossip rags were running a story with the sensational headline “Inside Margo Sterling’s Dark Past,” which used as its main source a Mrs. Phipps McKendrick, née Evelyn Gamble, a “young Pasadena society matron” who relayed “in the strictest of confidence” how Margo, in a former life, “had always been a troublemaker, terribly fast with boys” and how Mrs. McKendrick hoped marriage might reform her old friend and at last provide some relief to her poor parents, who had been “just heartbroken since she callously abandoned them to pursue a life of hedonistic pleasure on the silver screen.”

  “Can you believe this?” Margo had hissed to Dane as she pulled the smudged clipping from her purse on one of their rare nights together since the studio had laid down the law about just the level of blameless chastity they expected from their blushing bride. “Abandoned them? Is that what they call being disowned these days?”

  “I don’t know what you’re getting so upset about,” Dane said, downing his martini in one gulp. He’d been drinking a lot lately. “Just forget about it. I don’t know why you even look at that stuff in the first place.”

  “She’s always hated me,” Margo fumed. “She married Phipps, she’s got everything she ever wanted, and still she’s trying to ruin me.”

  “Who?” Dane looked confused.

  “Evelyn Gamble. From Pasadena. The one I told you about, who used to be so appalling to me at school? She was there that awful night, the one when I ran into you late at Schwab’s?” Margo shuddered, unwilling to go on. Dane gave her a blank look. “Forget about it,” she said finally, disgusted.

  Then there was the matter of the other story floating around, one made all the more unpleasant by the fact that it was probably true: that on the night Dane Forrest was supposedly proposing on horseback to the swooning Margo Sterling, making all of her dreams come true, he had actually been spotted in a back booth at Barney’s Beanery (not a very sexy alliteration, true, but there you have it) with an ethereally beautiful if grimly white-faced Amanda Farraday.

  Was he giving his mistress the brush-off? Simply continuing something that had been going on the whole time? Or—tantalizingly—starting something up? All speculation—and like everything, it depended on who you asked—but it was generally agreed that they had looked awfully cozy working their way through the better part of a bottle of Scotch.

  The gossip about Amanda’s nocturnal activities had reached the lady in question by way of the loathsome Mildred, the down-the-hall tenant at the boardinghouse, who seemed finally to have figured out just who her glamorous neighbor was. Gleefully, she recounted all the different hypotheses “you know, going around the inside circles.”

  “Well, I guess now I know why you got all these fancy outfits,” Mildred chortled. “But if you’re screwing some big movie star, what the hell are you doing in a dump like this? Guess you ain’t very good at it. Send him over to me when he’s sick of you, will ya? I’ll show him a thing or two.”

  For her part, Amanda had been sufficiently horrified by the story to call Margo immediately—if you could call it “immediate” when you had to wait in line for half an hour to get a crack at the phone.

  “We just happened to run into each other and had a drink,” Amanda said when she finally reached Margo after eleven tries and enough nickels to keep her in coffee and milk for a week. “I’d had a hard day, and Dane was kind enough to listen. I swear nothing more happened than a handshake goodbye before we climbed into our separate cars. There’s nothing more to it than that.” She’s got to believe me, Amanda thought. And even if she doesn’t, at least it’s the truth.

  But Margo was dismissive. “There’s no need to explain or apologize. In fact, I’m glad you called,” she continued. “I’ve got something to ask you, but I wasn’t sure how to reach you.” She paused for a moment, almost as though she were reading from a script. “I wondered if you’d like to be one of my bridesmaids.”

  “Jeepers,” Amanda said, temporarily transformed back into Norma Mae Gustafson, Oklahoma hick, from the shock. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. The studio thinks it’s a good idea.”

  “But do you?”

  Margo sighed. “Why would it possibly matter what I think?”

  Larry Julius’s hands are all over this. It was, Amanda had to admit, a brilliant strategy. What better way to explain away a late-night meeting with another woman than for that woman to be publicly affirmed as an extra-special super-close best-best friend of the bride? They could have been huddled in that booth planning a surprise for Margo, or better yet, celebrating the fact that the proposal they’d dreamed up together had gone off without a hitch. It was the perfect cover, so perfect that Amanda knew her participation in what was fast becoming the Wedding of the Decade was absolutely nonnegotiable.

  Joining Amanda in the highly visible bridal party was Gabby Preston, an obvious choice given her previously established—if privately rocky—friendship with Margo, and the fact that her star was undoubtedly finally on the rise. Ever since her performance after the Oscars last month, Gabby was nearly as ubi
quitous in the Hollywood press as the frenzied speculation over the contents of Margo Sterling’s wedding registry. Reams of paper and whole segments of radio shows were devoted to wondering what Gabby would do next. Would she make a picture? Release an album? Both?

  And just what was the nature of her relationship with that fast-talking, fast-living bandleader Eddie Sharp, with whom she’d been running around town suspiciously often of late?

  Eddie Sharp’s girl. Quite a leap for someone who just two short months ago had been barely allowed to be seen in public without sausage curls and a sailor suit.

  Rex Mandalay was designing the wedding gown, of course. As for the Paris trousseau, it was currently being fitted to the headless dressmaker’s dummy marked “Margo Sterling” in the costume department of Olympus—a shrewd customer like Leo Karp was hardly going to shell out thousands of dollars for haute couture when he could have the seamstresses already on his payroll knock off reasonable approximations of whatever was in Vogue that month.

  But Larry Julius’s surveys of the public showed that the “average American woman,” whoever she might be, would like at least one aspect of the “royal wedding”—as onlookers were beginning to call it, only somewhat facetiously—that she could “relate to”; therefore, it had been decided that the bridesmaids’ gowns would be selected off the rack in a splashy shopping trip cum photo shoot that would be the latest installment in the breathlessly chronicled journey to the altar. Margo and her Doting Bridesmaids. Laughing, gushing, pink-cheeked, and full of hope. Just like any other group of girlfriends in America with an unlimited budget and access to the most exclusive by-appointment-only bridal boutique in Beverly Hills.

  “Look at us,” Gabby crowed. She and Amanda were crowded into the dressing room of Madame Nicole’s Salon Parisienne, the two of them swathed in enough pink tulle to outfit a corps de ballet of obese ballerinas. “More likely than not, they’ll build a whole picture around us. A brunette, a redhead, and Margo’s blonde. One of each. Believe me, around these parts, that’s what passes for a great idea.”

  Oh, please, Amanda thought. Please let Gabby be right. Anything to stay an employee of Olympus Studios for just a few months longer, get a few more paychecks, have a few more precious weeks before they came to haul her off to debtor’s prison. Do they even still have those?

  Outside the door, a crew of burly photographers were laying waste to the shop, moving whatever they had to to get the right shot. Madame Nicole’s anguished cries came through the slatted door. “Mais non, mais non! Not zee Louis Quatorze armoire!”

  “Lady, it’s blocking the sight line,” came the gruff reply. “We’ll put it back when we’re done.”

  “But eet eez très delicate! Please be careful! Zat armoire eez worth more zan all of you put togezzaire!”

  “Togezzaire,” Gabby snorted, mocking the distraught woman’s heavy French accent. “You know she’s from Cleveland, right?”

  “Not really?”

  “That’s what Rex Mandalay says. He used to know her back when she worked the men’s counter at the old Hamburger’s Department Store. Salon Parisienne.” Gabby sniffed. “The closest she ever got to Paris is selling a necktie to Maurice Chevalier.” She maneuvered around Amanda, examining her reflection critically in the three-way mirror. “Get a load of this. Can you believe the size of this thing?”

  Amanda reached behind to pat the huge bow at the back of her own dress, its stiffened wings reaching inches past the confines of her waist. “It is going to make it kind of hard to sit down.”

  “Sit down? Are you kidding me? We look like we could set sail.”

  There was a sharp rap on the door. “Girls! Are you ready in there?”

  Normally, a specialist operation such as this would require a senior-level flack such as Stan, Viola Preston’s on-again off-again beau with the unpronounceable last name, or even Larry Julius himself. But the aggressive femininity of Madame Nicole’s domain had proved too much even for seasoned pros such as they, and instead, they had Florence Pendergast running the show. A spare, thin-faced woman constantly exhaling cigarette smoke through the veil of her hat, making her look like some sort of horror-movie special effect, the ambitious Miss Pendergast was one of the few women in the Olympus press office and was determined to make a success of the awesome responsibility with which she had been entrusted if it meant keeping them up all night and smashing Madame Nicole’s shop to smithereens.

  “I don’t know. Are we?”

  “Very funny, Gabby. The lights are all set up and boy, are they hot. We’ve got to get the shot before they set the curtains on fire.”

  “Zut alors!” Madame Nicole made a strange whinnying sound.

  “Now, we want to get a shot of you two coming out of the dressing room, when Margo sees you for the first time. Kind of a play on the first time the groom sees the bride. We’re using that as an image reference.”

  Gabby rolled her eyes.

  “So whenever you’re ready,” Miss Pendergast continued, “just come out the door and we’ll snap away. Side by side. Big smiles, please. Make it dreamy. As though you’re imagining what it’ll be like for you one day, when it’s your turn to walk down the aisle.”

  Amanda looked doubtfully down at her enormous skirt, as wide and unyielding as a basketball cut in half. “I don’t think we can both fit through the door.”

  “One at a time, then. Come on. Hurry, please.”

  Gabby sighed. “Well,” she said, “I guess we can’t stay in here forever.”

  Grimacing, the girls maneuvered themselves one by one out of the dressing room and into the blinding light of cameras, the metallic popping of the flashbulbs punctuated by Madame Nicole’s small shrieks as the shower of heated glass fell on her cream velvet carpet. Margo Sterling, looking fresh as a daisy in a lemon-yellow silk dress and a chic Marlene Dietrich beret, sat on a pale peau de soie tuffet, a teacup poised daintily on the way to her lips.

  “Well?” Margo asked when the photographers stopped to reload. Miss Pendergast had set about comforting the now-hysterical Madame Nicole. “What do you think of the dresses?”

  Amanda bit her lip, half trying to think of something nice to say, half trying to stave off the sudden wave of nausea. She’d been feeling sick to her stomach an awful lot lately.

  Gabby, as usual, was not so reticent. “Margie, you can’t seriously be … serious.”

  Margo’s face fell. “What … what do you mean?”

  “They’re huge, for starters. You saw, we could barely fit through that door. How are we going to walk down the aisle? We’ll put someone’s eye out with these bows. It’s like we’re wearing wings. And the skirt? It’s so big a family of four could camp out in it. For all I know, they are. There’s so much room under here I’d never know they were there.”

  Amanda stifled a laugh. Gabby was right. I could rent out space under here, she thought. Make a buck or two as a landlady.

  Margo scowled. “They’re supposed to be big.” A hard edge had crept into her voice. “They’re modeled after the gowns Walter Plunkett is designing for Gone with the Wind. Madame Nicole says hoopskirts are going to be all the rage next year, after the movie comes out, and I’m going to be the first to have them in my wedding.”

  “Well, hoop-de-doo,” Gabby said. “You’re not the one walking around wearing an open umbrella, Margie.”

  Margo stiffened, preparing her response. Amanda watched the two of them anxiously. Normally, this was the point in any verbal disagreement when Gabby’s eyes would begin to shine with the unnatural brightness that meant she had taken one too many green pills and was spoiling for a fight, but today, her expression was glazed, her voice strangely calm. What the hell is she on? Amanda wondered. And can I get some?

  “Amanda?” Margo said coolly, her eyes never leaving Gabby’s. She seemed as perplexed as Amanda by Gabby’s mellow expression. “Do you feel the same
way?”

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” Amanda lied. “Whatever you want, it’s your wedding. Only …” She trailed off, hesitating.

  “Only what?”

  “… only I just wondered if maybe they came in another color?”

  A muscle jumped in Margo’s jaw. “I already ordered pink flowers. And the studio likes Gabby in pink.”

  Gabby groaned. “Tell me about it.”

  “I know, I know that. I just wondered … if there was anything else you were maybe considering …”

  “I’m not letting you wear black,” Margo said shortly. “It’s a wedding, not a funeral.”

  “Of course, I know that. I just thought, maybe a lovely soft gray—”

  “What, so you can match your car?”

  “Blue, then. I thought you loved blue.”

  “No good.” Margo shook her head. “The pictures in the newspapers will be black-and-white, and blue photographs as white. Didn’t you see Wallis Simpson’s dress? She was wearing that gorgeous dress in robin’s-egg blue, and then Life didn’t tint the pictures and everyone who saw it made fun of her for trying to pass herself off as some sort of virgin bride.”

  “You’re wearing white, aren’t you?” Gabby said meanly.

  Margo’s jaw took on a funny set. “I’ve never been married before.”

  Amanda sighed. “Look, it’s your big day, Margo. What you say goes.” All three of them knew what a load of bull that was, but it seemed like the thing to say. “Maybe Gabby could wear this color, and I could do a soft lavender or something? It’d look the same in pictures. Pink is just such …” She paused, searching for the right words. “Such a difficult color for redheads.”

  “You’ve worn it before,” Margo said crossly. “You showed up at Mr. Karp’s wrap party for The Nine Days’ Queen in that pink gown.”