The Sharpest Needle Read online

  I was beginning to perspire, but if Edith could take the late afternoon heat, so could I. With another blast of perfume, I scurried after her.

  She kept talking as if my acceptance were a foregone conclusion. ‘I doubt there’s much we can do to assist Miss Davies beyond speaking with the gentlemen who were also contacted by this mysterious Argus. If there is, you may have to carry on alone.’

  ‘The usual forts to hold?’

  ‘There’s always one under siege. Right now, it’s a picture called Remember the Night. Preston wrote the script. It’s delightful, the best thing he’s done.’

  Preston being Preston Sturges, bon vivant and Paramount’s premiere scribe. ‘Tell me it’s a comedy,’ I said.

  ‘It is, but it’s also a love story. About a shoplifter and a prosecutor forced to spend the holidays together. It tugs at the heartstrings in ways I didn’t expect from Preston. And the cast! Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray.’

  Two of my favorite actors, both of whom I’d had the pleasure of meeting through Edith. ‘Sounds like old home week,’ I said. ‘But the production’s giving you problems?’

  ‘Not the production.’ Edith slowed her pace and lowered her voice, lest the bushes we passed have ears. ‘It’s Mitchell Leisen. He’s directing.’

  ‘I’m a fan. He did The Big Broadcast movies and Midnight.’

  ‘Mitch and I have known each other a while. He can be something of a handful, so I’m doing my best to anticipate.’

  For Edith to mention such a difficulty in passing meant it was keeping her up nights. I struggled to think of words of encouragement, as if I had it in my power to buck her up.

  We reached one of the gates leading on to Melrose Avenue. Edith waltzed through it and I expected alarums and klaxons to sound, alerting the Paramount populace that she had left the lot. I was about to ask where we were going – maybe to Oblath’s for a cup of coffee or something stronger to fortify her for battle with Mitchell Leisen – when she changed the subject.

  ‘How have you been? Are you seeing anyone?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure the milkman has been making eyes at me. And I might give the time of day to my newsstand operator. Only has one arm, but does he know how to hit a spittoon.’

  ‘And Detective Morrow? Have your paths crossed lately?’

  Ah, yes. Detective Gene Morrow, Los Angeles Police Department. My once-steady fellow, a man I’d met at the same time Edith had come into my life, and for the same sad reason, the death of my erstwhile roommate. Gene and I had had a falling out, the typical squabble all young couples face: a stolen twenty thousand dollars and the movie made about the theft. No doubt Clark Gable and Carole Lombard routinely faced similar strife. I had rallied to Gene’s cause, but my role in vindicating his name had provoked a chill between us.

  ‘Once or twice,’ I said truthfully, omitting that the occasions we’d gotten together over the past months had felt like they were overseen by an invisible chaperone, a presence inhibiting our usual easy conversation. I finally understood that we were being haunted by our former selves, the ghosts of happier people who had made different choices, spoken other words, and consequently still felt comfortable together.

  ‘Good.’ Edith patted my hand. ‘It’s important to keep the lines open.’ She would continue to push, I knew, as if my relationship with Gene were a dress I hadn’t properly accessorized. When the truth was maybe I didn’t like the dress’s color anymore. Maybe I’d outgrown it.

  Or maybe the truth was I didn’t know what the truth was, and didn’t care to admit it.

  We turned a corner onto Gower Street. ‘I have a surprise for you,’ Edith announced. As we were heading toward Hollywood Cemetery, I didn’t immediately react with glee. Then Edith veered toward the entrance to the RKO lot, which I’d never set foot on before. Edith exchanged words with a guard at the gate. He cheerily waved us through, and that old familiar tingle rose up in my belly like flowers seeking the sun. Once again, I had been vouchsafed a peek behind the curtain, to see where movies were made. It was magic time.

  The long and narrow RKO lot, wedged between Paramount and the graveyard, felt cramped in comparison to the spacious studio next door. But it was also where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced together, so the available room was being used as well as was humanly possible. I periscoped my neck, searching for the talented twosome. Perhaps they needed someone clumsy to waltz past in order to make them look perfect.

  ‘Don’t bother gawking,’ Edith cautioned. ‘You already know who we’re here to see. Half of them, anyway.’

  ‘Half? What do you mean?’

  The answer waved from a doorway. Bill Ihnen had been Edith’s friend and colleague for years, an art director as talented as he was modest. His balding pate glimmered in the sun, yet he hadn’t doffed his nub-tweed tan sport coat with patch pockets. Eagerness crackled around him as he gave us each an affectionate kiss. ‘I was about to dispatch a search party. Ladies, I have someone I’d like you to meet.’

  The cool of the screening room came as a relief. Bill’s demeanor had me feeling antsy, too, so I was surprised to see no one in the theater save for a youngish man wedged uncomfortably into a seat, hair tousled, legs in gray slacks extending into the aisle and ending in a pair of loafers. I glimpsed rolled-up shirt sleeves and a brick-red sweater vest, a blazer flung carelessly over a nearby chair. From behind, he looked like a college student trying to nap on the train home to Mother.

  Then Bill proclaimed, ‘Our guests have arrived,’ and the fellow stood up. He still resembled an ungainly boy, the Mephistophelean beard he’d grown doing a middling job of masking his youth. I recognized Orson Welles at once. The wunderkind, fresh from triumphs on stage in New York City and on radio from coast to coast, had been signed by RKO earlier that summer to conquer his next medium: pictures. His photograph had been in the newspapers every day since his arrival in Los Angeles, sandwiched between Norma Shearer and Helen Hayes at the Trocadero, escorting up-and-coming actress Lucille Ball to a premiere. The gossip columns tracked his every movement, taking pains to mention the absence of his young wife, Virginia. (‘“Allergic to California living,” claims Welles.’) The whole town, it seemed, was waiting to see if the boy wonder would slip on a banana peel. From some accounts, they weren’t above strewing a few in his path.

  ‘At last,’ Welles boomed in that voice I had thrilled to on The Shadow, rattling rafters in adjacent buildings. He bounded over to greet us, all at once startlingly agile, teeth gleaming through the dark growth of beard. The novelist Louis Bromfield, according to the papers, had offered a prize to anyone who ‘accidentally’ burned those whiskers off Welles’s face.

  Bill made the introductions, for which Welles immediately took him to task. ‘Such humility. I can’t abide that quality in anyone, seeing as I’m so sorely lacking in it. Bill’s not telling you why he and I are here. I’m watching Stagecoach over and over. Can’t think of a better picture from which to learn. And possibly pilfer a few tricks. I’m making a point of seeing it in the company of the craftsmen who made it. Bowing at their feet so I may steal their secrets. Bill is tonight’s guest of honor.’

  ‘I was only an associate,’ Bill said softly.

  ‘More of that unbecoming humility. Have you ladies seen the picture?’

  ‘Twice,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll stay for a third time, I hope. Although Bill will be tutoring me over it.’ He shook my hand, his own dwarfing mine. I remembered that this man, who had already accomplished so much, was two years younger than me. I waited for my elderly bones to creak in his velvet grip.

  He pirouetted to Edith. ‘And as a devout follower of your work, dear lady, I want to hear anything you have to say on the subject of costumes. Easily my favorite part of production. They’ve fascinated me ever since we did Julius Caesar at school, and the togas were sheets torn right off the beds. No one could go to sleep until the curtain fell. That’s one way to guarantee an audience.’ His laughter at the memory stripp
ed more years from his age. Eyes alight, shoulders shaking, the very shape of his face seemed to change as he delighted in his own reaction. He no longer resembled an overgrown boy but an enormous baby, albeit one sporting spinach on his chin and cheeks.

  Conversation continued as we took our seats. ‘You don’t have family in Wisconsin, do you, Edith?’ Welles asked.

  ‘I don’t believe so.’

  ‘My great-grandfather was Orson Head. Named after him, you see. As for his daughter, my grandmother, a diabolical woman. Truly. Animal sacrifices on the lawn every Saturday. Upset the neighbors terribly. Let’s pretend that we’re blood kin, with you from a different and far superior line of the clan.’ Edith could only nod in response to his onslaught of charisma.

  Welles then aimed his allure at me, asking what I did. I mentioned Addison and he declared himself an admirer. Somehow I let slip that I’d worked at Tremayne’s Department Store when I first came to Los Angeles, and Welles leaned toward me. ‘There’s something we have in common. As a boy in Chicago I got a job at Marshall Field’s. They dressed me up as the White Rabbit, you know, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Off I’d hop through the store, pulling out my little pocket watch and crying, “Oh, I must hurry – or it will be too late to see the woolen underwear on the eighth floor!”’ He laughed again, with enough force to split his beaming face in two.

  Bill brought up Welles’s plans to mount an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as his debut film. ‘From what I hear, it sounds like an ambitious production.’

  ‘If we get it off the ground. Adapted it before for The Mercury Theater on the Air, so I know it rather well. Updating it to South America today, but making it about Europe. Hitler and that crowd. It’s a fantastic story Conrad wrote. The main character dying with an enigmatic phrase on his lips.’

  ‘That’ll be you, I expect, as Kurtz,’ Bill said. ‘Who’s going to play your Marlow?’

  ‘I am!’ Seeing Bill’s confused face, Welles leaned toward him. ‘I’m quite serious. A putty nose and this beard for Kurtz, freshly shorn as Marlow. Lunacy of the sheerest kind, you’re thinking, and you’d be right. But it’s the only way I know how to work, with my reach exceeding my grasp. And I’ll be learning on the job. Hence today’s lesson.’ He waved at the screen.

  ‘How many times have you seen Stagecoach?’ I asked.

  ‘Easily a dozen, with me picking up something new each time. I missed watching it the last few nights. I was roped into attending one of those star-studded premieres at the Chinese Theater. For The Wizard of Oz.’

  ‘I can’t wait to see that,’ I burbled.

  ‘Walter Plunkett’s costumes must be a marvel,’ Edith said.

  ‘He certainly made more for that film than he did for Stagecoach.’ Welles shook his head. ‘It’s a bizarre experience, being at a pageant like that. The crowds, all those recognizable faces. I wonder if I’ll ever get used to it.’

  ‘You won’t.’ I affected a wisdom I didn’t feel. ‘It’s still strange to me, seeing people from the movies in person.’

  ‘Lifesize,’ Welles intoned.

  ‘Especially ones I grew up watching. Like Marion Davies.’

  I bit my tongue at the precise moment Edith politely kicked me. So much for being discreet.

  Welles, naturally, perked up his ears. ‘You’ve met her? I confess I’m fascinated by her and her world. Hearst. All that money of his stifling her spirit. She’s a terrific comedienne, not that he lets her play those parts.’

  I couldn’t help myself. ‘That’s exactly what I think.’

  A smile creased Welles’s broad face. ‘An old friend of mine – Ashton Stevens, Hearst’s theater critic in Chicago, practically my uncle – taught him to play the banjo, you know.’

  I stared at him. ‘William Randolph Hearst plays the banjo?’

  ‘Ask him for a tune next time you’re at San Simeon. Shall we start the show?’

  The lights dimmed, and Stagecoach hit the trail. At once I was in its thrall, despite seeing it before – and sitting behind Bill and Welles, bent close to one another in consultation. ‘Now the marshal’s office,’ Welles said in what he took to be a whisper. ‘How do you make it feel so rough-hewn and lived-in at a glance?’

  A few minutes later came our first glimpse of John Wayne as the Ringo Kid. ‘By God, what an introduction!’ Welles said. ‘My breath catches every time. That business with the rifle—’

  ‘Yakima Canutt’s idea,’ Bill interjected. ‘Does stunts and directed second unit on the picture. He’d seen it in a Wild West show, spinning the rifle to cock it one-handed. They had to put a ring loop on the gun so Wayne could do it. Even then the barrel was too long. When you watch it next time, you’ll see it’s been shortened.’

  ‘Because who’s looking at the gun when that face is onscreen? A practical piece of magic in plain sight.’ Welles chortled. ‘Every day’s a school day with John Ford, that wily old man.’

  When the film ended, Welles leapt to his feet. ‘Must dash, I’m afraid, make sure my little one is asleep. Bill, I can’t thank you enough. It’s been a positive revelation. Lillian, do tell Addison I’ll make it out to his house for one of his parties quite soon. And dear Edith, it shall be your brain I avail myself of next. Good night, all!’ The last words bellowed to the cheap seats, and Welles was up the aisle and gone, leaving a beaming and embarrassed Bill in his wake.

  Edith turned to me. ‘That man has a bright future in Hollywood.’

  THREE

  Some Southern California mornings dawn so hot and hazy you work yourself into a sweat guessing which clothes will keep you in relative comfort for the long day ahead. I finally selected a lightweight pale green suit with one of the new, shorter skirts. I loved the silhouette, but worried if I sat the wrong way, my knees would be on display. I’d never been a fan of my knees. They do good work, but they’re not Sonja Henie caliber. Still, ease outranked vanity on what promised to be a scorcher.

  My forehead was shining by the time I pushed through Addison Rice’s front door. My funk only deepened when I found Addison in the foyer with a pained expression on his face. I hoped it was because he was perched on a stiff-backed chair I’d assumed was for decorative purposes, because I’d never seen a single human being sitting in it. Then years of rigorous Catholic upbringing kicked in and suggested his grimace was my fault; I’d made a mistake, overlooked some delivery.

  Addison leapt to his feet as if electrocuted. ‘There you are! I’ve been on tenterhooks. How did it go with Marion?’

  I swallowed my sigh of relief. ‘Swimmingly. She even got to visit her favorite camel.’

  ‘Then you and Edith are going to help her.’

  ‘To the best of our ability.’

  ‘Splendid. I couldn’t be happier.’

  I told him I could do with some ice water, and he followed me to the house’s sprawling kitchen. He wore a lightweight blue suit, his periwinkle tie and matching socks disclosing his true fun-loving nature. Addison had made his fortune manufacturing radios and retired to Los Angeles, in part for his wife’s health but primarily to be close to the movies and the stars he loved. In short order, he had established himself as one of the city’s social arbiters. Not because of his wealth or his extravagant parties – although Lord knows they helped – but because of his innate lack of pretension. A self-made man who regarded an actor as an equal was a rare thing, even in Los Angeles.

  I guzzled a glass of water, then poured a second. ‘If this weather keeps up, you might think about opening a lemonade stand in the lobby.’

  ‘Not a bad idea. At the halfway point, to maximize revenue.’ He chuckled as he mopped his brow; Addison tended toward the adipose.

  ‘I’ll be honest,’ I said. ‘Edith and I don’t know how much we can do for Marion, because we’re not completely sure what her problem is.’

  ‘Some vicious letters, isn’t it? A scurrilous campaign to sully her reputation.’

  ‘Yes, but she won’t say what the l
etters refer to, or if it’s true.’

  ‘Then you must respect her wishes. Even if it makes the task a more formidable one.’ He gave the words the force of a fiat. ‘It’s sad that someone who has brought the world such joy could be victimized in this way. I won’t abide it.’

  I grinned at Maid Marion’s sworn protector. ‘She speaks very highly of you.’

  ‘I think the world of her.’ A fierce blush surged through his cheeks as his shoe traced shapes on the kitchen tile, like a bashful boy writing his girl’s initials in the sand. ‘I saw her in the Follies, you know. Maud and I were down in New York and took in the show. She was so lively she made a real impression, even among all the other girls. Then I started seeing her in pictures. Runaway Romany, Getting Mary Married.’

  ‘When Knighthood Was in Flower.’ I sighed. ‘I remember how they made the torches look like they were flickering in color. It was one of the most exciting things I’d ever seen.’

  ‘And Marion’s fencing!’ Addison exhaled with pleasure, as if he’d just completed a sumptuous meal. ‘She’s a huge part of why I fell in love with movies. Then when Maud and I moved here, she made us feel so at home. Invited us to her beach house within days of our arrival, had us to parties. And the ranch!’ Swooning, he gripped the table for support. ‘The weekends we spent there … the place is enchanted. No other word does it justice. The house, the grounds, utterly captivating.’

  He was lost in some distant yet still sharp memory when I asked, ‘Did W.R. ever play the banjo for you?’

  Addison blinked his way out of his reverie. ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve heard tell he plays the banjo.’

  ‘That can’t possibly be true. Can it?’ He shook the question away. ‘Marion was and always will be one of the great hostesses. I mourned that she never came to one of my parties.’

  ‘You’ve tried inviting her, haven’t you? I haven’t sent her an invitation as long as I’ve worked for you.’