Love Me Page 7

  And besides, it wouldn’t be for much longer. She’d read in Variety that Harry had just renegotiated his contract with the studio; he must be making a mint by now. Once they were back together, he’d bail her out. Even if they didn’t move in together right away, he’d find her a better place to live, maybe even talk the studio into giving her a bungalow like they did Margo Sterling. Harry would take care of her. She was sure of it.

  Parked on a crumbling corner next to a broken parking meter licked with rust, Amanda’s gleaming dove-gray coupe looked as out of place as her Parisian hatboxes and monogrammed trunks piled on Mrs. O’Malley’s uneven floor. Slipping behind the wheel, Amanda breathed in the rich scent of the burgundy leather seats, which still smelled new after almost two years. She ran her hand over the gold initials embossed on the highly polished door of the glove compartment:

  A L F

  Amanda Louise Farraday. A name—a person—she had invented all by herself, out of nothing. If Harry and I get married, I’ll have to change the monogram, Amanda thought with a giggle. Another name, another identity to slip into as if it were one of her black silk gloves. She was sure it would fit her just as well.

  Amanda drove. Slowly, the shabby buildings and crumbling streets gave way to neat little homes with orange trees in their well-kept yards, then gated mansions with sprawling emerald lawns dotted with palm trees, until the glittering paved expanse of Wilshire Boulevard stretched out before her. She pulled into the long circular driveway of Bullocks, enjoying the luxuriant crunch of the gravel beneath her tires. A uniformed valet jumped out to greet her. She dropped her keys into his outstretched hand and smiled graciously at the doormen as they ushered her through the glass-and-travertine doors into the lobby.

  Maybe it was silly, but Amanda thought there was no place on earth that made her feel as safe as the Bullocks Wilshire department store. She loved the slippery floors of pale Italian marble, the immense art deco ceiling mural depicting planes, trains, and automobiles in a colorful paean to the steady thrum of optimistic American progress, the polished nickel columns and shining glass countertops in which one could catch a reassuring glimpse of oneself looking appropriately stylish and busy and important.

  It was as if nothing bad could ever happen to you there, as though the cares and worries of the world were gone with a whisk of the revolving doors, like water past the rudder of a ship. A department store was beautiful and calm, filled with beautiful and calm people harvesting the beautiful fruits of their labor in the hushed reverent tones of visitors to an art museum.

  With one important exception: in this art museum, everything was for sale.

  “Miss Farraday!” the salesgirl exclaimed as Amanda stepped out of the polished mahogany elevator and into the designer salons of the fifth floor. “It’s … it’s you.”

  “Hello, Annette,” Amanda said warmly. “How nice to see you. It’s been a long time.”

  “It certainly has.” Nervously, the girl’s fingers flew to the ruffled collar of her starched white blouse. “Is there … is there something I can help you with?”

  “There is.” Amanda graced the girl with her best haughty, impersonal smile. Somehow, the expression made her think of Diana Chesterfield, although God—and Amanda—knew that Diana was no more to-the-manor-born than she was. “I’m looking for a new evening dress. Something rather spectacular, if you can swing it.”

  “Any special occasion?”

  Amanda examined her nails with studied nonchalance. “Oh, only if you consider the Oscars something special.”

  “I … I see,” Annette stammered. “In that case … I’d …”

  “You’d what, Annette? Spit it out.”

  “I’d better get my manager,” Annette said finally. “Just wait here.”

  Great. Amanda pursed her lips with impatience as the girl fluttered anxiously away. This is going to be trickier than I thought. Bracing herself, she tightened her grip around the packet of paper she clutched along with the slim patent-leather pocketbook in her left hand.

  “Miss Farraday.” Mr. Pierre, the designer department manager who seemed convinced that his sparse pencil mustache made him a dead ringer for Ronald Colman, strode across the plush velvet carpet, stroking the white carnation tucked in the buttonhole of his morning suit with long, manicured fingers. “A pleasure.”

  “And for me.”

  The manager let a terse smile play over this thin lips. “Annette tells me you’re looking for something rather special.”

  “Isn’t it silly?” Amanda clapped a small hand fetchingly to her collarbone, letting out a silvery peal of laughter. The modest hand flutter to the décolletage was one of Olive Moore’s patented maneuvers. If only she could see me now. “The Oscars are just days away, and I’ve just been so busy running around like a chicken with my head cut off that I’ve completely forgotten to do anything about a gown. I mean, I don’t suppose you even have anything left, do you?”

  “That depends.” Mr. Pierre sniffed. “Is there anything in particular you had in mind?”

  “Well, now that you ask”—Amanda looked up at him through her eyelashes—“there was a ruched green velvet Molyneux in this month’s Vogue I thought might do the trick.”

  “Not black?”

  “I thought it might be fun to branch out a little.” Amanda let her smile deepen. “And besides, it’s a very deep green.”

  “I see.” Having stroked his boutonniere to the point of disintegration, Pierre moved onto his mustache. “Miss Farraday, much as it pains me to say this, there is the small matter of an outstanding bill.”

  Come on, Ginger, Amanda thought grimly. It had been ages since anyone had called her by the fake name she’d used when she was working for Olive Moore, and even longer since she’d thought of herself that way. But an occasion like this seemed to call for all the duplicity she could muster. Show ’em what you’re made of.

  “Oh!” she gasped prettily, letting her freshly moistened lips fall open the Olive-recommended one inch. Not so far as to spoil the shape of your mouth, and enough to keep your bottom teeth covered. No one, Olive said, wants to see your bottom teeth. “My goodness! Mr. Pierre, I can’t tell you how mortified I am. Like I said, I’ve just been so busy lately I’ve completely neglected my correspondence. I’ll write you a check this instant for the full amount.”

  “Miss Farraday—”

  “No, I insist! Just let me find my checkbook. …”

  Carefully, Amanda deposited the newspaper on the nickel counter, careful to make sure the headline about her and Harry at the top of Louella Parsons’s column was clearly visible as she made a big show of rooting around in her pocketbook. Mr. Pierre’s beady eyes flickered toward it immediately, like a moth drawn to a flame. Success!

  “Miss Farraday … ,” he repeated, holding up his hand.

  “Oh no!” Amanda wailed, like a woman who’d lost her best friend. Careful, kiddo, don’t overdo it. “I can’t believe it! I’ve left my checkbook at home. And this is the only day I have free until Oscar night.” She let out a sigh, expertly strangulated, with just the barest threat of tears. “Oh well. I suppose I’ll just have to wear an old gown, then. My escort will have seen it, of course, but maybe he won’t remember.”

  Mr. Pierre’s eyes were glued to the newspaper item. “And your escort is … Mr. Gordon, I presume?”

  “Well.” Amanda dropped her gaze demurely to the counter, lowering her voice to a shy hush. “I’m afraid I’m not quite at liberty to say. You understand. But let’s just say I’m relieved he’s not … materialistic. New York playwright and all that.” She let one expertly shadowed eyelid fall in a slow wink.

  That was all it took. “Miss Farraday, I believe we can help you.”

  “Really!” Amanda squealed with glee, clapping her pocketbook to her breastbone. “You will?”

  “Certainly.” Mr. Pierre let out a decis
ive grunt. “After all, you are one of our most valued customers. What’s a few dollars and cents between friends?”

  “Mr. Pierre, it’s like you read my mind.” Her voice was a feline purr.

  “Good.” The manager beamed. “Now, we do happen to have the green Molyneux you mentioned in stock, but if you have decided to consider color, there’s a burgundy Mainbocher we’ve just got in that might be sublime. And of course, that’s not to discount Madame Chanel, whose newest collection needs a lean silhouette. But of course, the Parisian designers don’t come cheap—”

  “Mr. Pierre,” Amanda said happily. “I’m entirely in your hands.”

  The only thing that matters is that I look like a million bucks.

  Seven

  The eleventh annual Academy Awards had no official host.

  It was the first time this had ever happened, and nobody was quite sure how. Some spoke in hushed tones of a bitter intra-Academy feud; smug insider types were spreading stories about individual studios pushing so hard for one of their stars to be named emcee that the Academy had finally thrown up its hands, King Solomon–like, and refused to choose anyone at all. Others, of the inveterate gossip variety, claimed the organizers had gone down a list of possibilities, each of which had proved too old, too boring, too unreliable, or too drunk to be trusted onstage.

  Whatever the reason, it was abundantly clear that no one was steering the ship. The atmosphere in the ballroom of the Biltmore Hotel was practically anarchic. Whole categories were skipped. Confused—or tipsy—celebrities wandered across the stage, looking embarrassed and desperate, as though they’d gotten lost on their way to the bathroom. At least three times the proceedings came to a halt so that the next presenter (and in one case, the recipient) could be tracked down at the bar.

  For Margo, the chaos simply seemed to add to the surrealism, the sense that the whole evening was like something out of a dream. She thought she’d been in Hollywood long enough not to get starstruck anymore, but no red-carpet premiere or Holmby Hills wrap party could have prepared her for this.

  This was the Oscars.

  Clark Gable and Carole Lombard were here, getting the stink eye from Joan Crawford, who was hanging on the arm of Franchot Tone. Katharine Hepburn was whispering something in Spencer Tracy’s ear, much to Mrs. Tracy’s visible chagrin. Leo Karp was sitting with Louis B. Mayer, who wasn’t drinking, and Harry Cohn, who was. Greta Garbo was there. True, she wasn’t actually speaking to anybody, but she was there.

  “If the Germans dropped a bomb on the Biltmore right now, they could wipe out the whole movie business, just like that,” Gabby whispered across the table, a mischievous gleam in her eyes.

  Margo and Gabby hadn’t been quite as close lately—the stunt Gabby had pulled last year making sure Margo caught her “boyfriend” Jimmy with his boyfriend in much more intimate circumstances than Margo had ever seen him made it a little hard to trust her—but Margo was glad she was there. She was glad they were all there, in their little Olympus enclave: Gabby and Jimmy; a preternaturally calm Larry Julius, his only concession to nerves the endless parade of smoldering cigarettes he kept inserting into the expressionless mask of his face; Dane, who was, of course, a shaking, trembling, nervous wreck; Gabby’s mother, dressed to the nines in some sort of bizarre ensemble of ostrich feathers dyed a violent purple and—to Gabby’s tremendous embarrassment—flirting outrageously with Larry’s (ironically) ostrichlike assistant, Stan. Harry Gordon, although he looked markedly downcast, even before he lost, and his mother, a plump gray-haired lady with a European accent who every few minutes proclaimed she was about to faint with pride—but impressively, never did.

  And what about my mother? What would she be like if she were here? Helen Frobisher’s pale image swam unbidden into Margo’s mind. The blond chignon with not a hair out of place, the icy blue eyes, the slim, manicured hands that were always cool, yet strangely comforting …

  Her train of thought was interrupted by Dane’s clammy hand squeezing hers. “You look beautiful,” he muttered mechanically.

  “So you told me.”

  “I did?”

  “About a hundred times.”

  Poor Dane. His gaze looked almost haunted, fixed on something none of the rest of them could see. He’d barely even glanced at her when she’d floated down the stairs at the house in Malibu in the blue hydrangea dress two weeks of deprivation had finally let her squeeze into.

  All that grapefruit for nothing, she’d thought. But it hadn’t all come to naught. There’d been enough camera flashes in her vicinity to guarantee that, nominee or no, she’d have her picture in more than one newspaper tomorrow morning, and as for her effect on the players of Hollywood, Mr. Walt Disney himself had materialized before her, stroking his chin thoughtfully with an ink-stained finger and murmured: “Blue. Interesting. You look like a fairy.”

  “He’s looking for inspiration,” Gabby said. “Didn’t you hear? He’s notorious for it. Rex Mandalay practically had a fit when he saw Snow White and her dress looked exactly like one he designed for Olivia DeHavilland when he was at Warner Brothers. Rex wants to sue.”

  “Come on. You can’t sue over a dress design on a cartoon.”

  “Oh please, Margo, this is Hollywood. You can sue someone who said they’d pay for lunch and then skipped out on the bill. You just have to decide if it’s worth making a point. And the hell of it is, Rex would win too, if Karp would let him take it to court. But he won’t. The dreaded negative publicity.”

  Gabby’s eyes were unnaturally bright tonight. Clearly, she had decided chemical intervention was the only way her Oscar night was going to be quite as peppy as she wanted it, and she was putting the booze away at a pretty impressive rate too. God help me, Margo thought, if she gets sick she’s on her own. I’m not taking her to the ladies’ room to wash the puke out of her dress. She’s her mother’s problem.

  “Besides,” Gabby continued, the words tumbling out at an increasingly rapid pace, “as long as Rex Mandalay is under contract, every single sketch, every scrap of fabric, every goddamn thought in his head is the absolute property of Olympus Studios. Karp owns him, lock, stock, and barrel, just the same as he owns us. Rex just has a nicer dressing room.”

  “Oh, Gabs, come on,” Jimmy said. “You don’t really think that.”

  “Don’t I? Why would I say it, then? And why would I be performing tonight like a trained monkey with some overrated bandleader I’ve never even rehearsed with if I didn’t have to jump whenever he said so?”

  “Still,” Jimmy said uneasily, “he’s just doing his job. You make him out to be some kind of slave driver.”

  “Oh no,” Gabby said sweetly. “That’s not my intention at all. Mr. Karp is the slave owner. My mother is the slave driver.”

  Viola’s head jerked up. “Gabrielle. Please.”

  “That’s not my name,” Gabby snapped back. “And what would you call someone who profits off the unpaid labor of another human being? I may not have been quite as good a student as Margo here—not that I ever had the chance—but it sure sounds an awful lot like slavery to me.”

  Viola’s face, already rouged a bright red, turned purple. The table held its collective breath, braced for the shock of a mother’s terrible wrath.

  It was another mother who saved them.

  “Sha, everybody, sha,” Harry’s mother interrupted, waving her hands in the air with unperturbed annoyance, as though Gabby and Viola were nothing but a couple of buzzing flies at an outdoor picnic. “Shut your mouths already and let an old lady hear what’s going on, for once in her life. Spencer Tracy on the stage, can you believe it? That Sadie Gorenstein in her lifetime would see such a thing, who would have thought it was possible!”

  Cracking his first smile of the night, Harry patted her hand. “Gordon, Ma, it’s Gordon. You have to excuse my mother,” he said, looking around the table. “She’s not accustomed
to drinking champagne.”

  Bette Davis was announced the winner of the Best Actress award, to no one’s surprise. Watching the great star, dressed in black silk trimmed with an odd little stole of white feathers, march unsmilingly and determinedly across the stage to pick up the second statuette of her unsmiling, determined career, Margo felt herself relax at last. So it was true. Davis’s Oscar was a fait accompli.

  It made Margo realize what a long shot her hopes had been for this year, how many rungs she still had to climb. She hadn’t lost anything or disappointed anyone; she was simply at the start of a very long road, a road most people would never even be able to find on a map. Somehow, this made her feel better—not just better, in fact, but great. For the first time since the nominations had been announced, she felt free, and she found herself on her feet, whistling and cheering with the others as Bette Davis finished thanking Jack Warner and took her final bows.

  Spencer Tracy guided her toward the wings and stepped back to the microphone, tripping slightly over the cord as he did so. Maybe he and Gabby will be sharing a bathroom stall later.

  “And now,” the star announced, slurring his words slightly, “the Best Actor category.”

  Under the table, Dane’s broad, slightly clammy hand found Margo’s.

  “To present the award,” Spencer Tracy continued, mopping the sweat off his forehead with the palm of his hand, “we have a very special surprise … ah … presenter. Someone we all love very much, and who we haven’t seen for a very long time. Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce, or rather reacquaint you with, a wonderful actress and very dear friend … Miss Diana Chesterfield!”

  Miss Diana Chesterfield.

  It was like seeing a ghost.

  Time seemed to stop. You could practically hear the sound of your own churning organs in the previously boisterous room as the great star floated toward the microphone, her expression serene. Her face was pale, but there was no trace of the mad, ruined girl Margo had seen ranting in a wheelchair at the sanatorium all those months ago. With her hair like spun gold, nodding regally in a white satin gown trimmed with snowy ermine, she looked like a storybook princess, like someone out of another time.