“But, Mr. Margolies, I don’t know if I can do it,” Margo said, her heart pounding. “We’re in a rush. . . . We have important business to attend to in Miami . . . family matters, you understand.”
“That’s of no importance. I’ll find you an agent . . . we’ll send somebody. . . . Petty details are of no importance to me. Realestate, I suppose.”
Margo nodded vaguely.
“A couple of years ago the house where we’d been living, it was so lovely, was washed clear out to sea,” said Agnes breathlessly.
“You’ll get a better house . . . Malibu Beach, Beverly Hills. . . . I hate houses. . . . But I have been rude, I have detained you. . . . But you will forget Miami. We have everything out here. . . . You remember, Margo dearest, I told you that day that pictures had a great future . . . you and . . . you know, the great automobile magnate, I have forgotten his name . . . I told you you would hear of me in the pictures. . . . I rarely make predictions, but I am never wrong. They are based on belief in a sixth sense.”
“Oh, yes,” interrupted Agnes, “it’s so true, if you believe you’re going to succeed you can’t fail, that’s what I tell Margie. . . .”
“Very beautifully said, dear lady. . . . Miss Dowling darling, Continental Attractions at ten. . . . I’ll have somebody stationed at the gate so that they’ll let your chauffeur drive right to my office. It is impossible to reach me by phone. Even Irwin can’t get at me when I am working on a picture. It will be an experience for you to see me at work.”
“Well, if I can manage it and my chauffeur can find the way.”
“You’ll come,” said Margolies and dragged Irwin Harris away by one short white flannel arm into the diningroom. Welldressed people stared after them as they went. Then they were staring at Margo and Agnes. “Let’s go to the dogwagon and tell Tony. They’ll just think we are eccentric,” whispered Margo in Agnes’s ear. “I declare I never imagined that Margolies was him.”
“Oh, isn’t it wonderful,” said Agnes.
They were so excited they couldn’t eat. They drove back to Santa Monica that night and Margo went straight to bed so as to be rested for the next morning.
Next morning when they got to the lot at a quarter of ten Mr. Margolies hadn’t sent word. Nobody had heard of an appointment. They waited half an hour. Agnes was having trouble keeping back the tears. Margo was laughing. “I bet that bozo was full of hop or something and forgot all about it.” But she felt sick inside. Tony had just started the motor and was about to pull away because Margo didn’t like being seen waiting at the gate like that when a white Pierce Arrow custombuilt towncar with Margolies all in white flannel with a white beret sitting alone in the back drove up alongside. He was peering into the Rolls-Royce and she could see him start with surprise when he recognized her. He tapped on the window of his car with a porcelainheaded cane. Then he got out of his car and reached in and took Margo by the hand. “I never apologize. . . . It is often necessary for me to keep people waiting. You will come with me. Perhaps your friend will call for you at five o’clock. . . . I have much to tell you and to show you.”
They went upstairs in the elevator in a long plainfaced building. He ushered her through several offices where young men in their shirtsleeves were working at draftingboards, stenographers were typing, actors were waiting on benches. “Frieda, a screentest for Miss Dowling right away, please,” he said as he passed a secretary at a big desk in the last room. Then he ushered her into his own office hung with Chinese paintings and a single big carved gothic chair set in the glare of a babyspot opposite a huge carved gothic desk. “Sit there, please. . . . Margo darling, how can I explain to you the pleasure of a face unsmirched by the camera? I can see that there is no strain. . . . You do not care. Celtic freshness combined with insouciance of noble Spain. . . . I can see that you’ve never been before a camera before. . . . Excuse me.” He sank in the deep chair behind his desk and started telephoning. Every now and then a stenographer came and took notes that he recited to her in a low voice. Margo sat and sat. She thought Margolies had forgotten her. The room was warm and stuffy and began to make her feel sleepy. She was fighting to keep her eyes open when Margolies jumped up from his desk and said, “Come, darling, we’ll go down now.”
Margo stood around for a while in front of some cameras in a plasterysmelling room in the basement and then Margolies took her to lunch at the crowded restaurant on the lot. She could feel that everybody was looking up from their plates to see who the new girl was that Margolies was taking to lunch. While they ate he asked her questions about her life on a great sugarplantation in Cuba, and her debutante girlhood in New York. Then he talked about Carlsbad and Baden-Baden and Marienbad and how Southern California was getting over its early ridiculous vulgarity: “We have everything here that you can find anywhere,” he said.
After lunch they went to see the rushes in the projectionroom. Mr. Harris turned up too, smoking a cigar. Nobody said anything as they looked at Margo’s big grey and white face, grinning, turning, smirking, mouth opening and closing, head tossing, eyes rolling. It made Margo feel quite sick looking at it, though she loved still photographs of herself. She couldn’t get used to its being so big. Now and then Mr. Harris would grunt and the end of his cigar would glow red. Margo felt relieved when the film was over and they were in the dark again. Then the lights were on and they were filing out of the projectionroom past a redfaced operator in shirtsleeves who had thrown open the door to the little black box where the machine was and gave Margo a look as she passed. Margo couldn’t make out whether he thought she was good or not.
On the landing of the outside staircase Margolies put out his hand coldly and said, “Goodby, dearest Margo. . . . There are a hundred people waiting for me.” Margo thought it was all off. Then he went on, “You and Irwin will make the business arrangements . . . I have no understanding of those matters. . . . I’m sure you’ll have a very pleasant afternoon.”
He turned back into the projectionroom swinging his cane as he went. Mr. Harris explained that Mr. Margolies would let her know when he wanted her and that meanwhile they would work out the contract. Did she have an agent? If she didn’t he would recommend that they call in his friend Mr. Hardbein to protect her interests.
When she got into the office with Mr. Harris sitting across the desk from her and Mr. Hardbein, a hollowfaced man with a tough kidding manner, sitting beside her, she found herself reading a three-year contract at three hundred a week. “Oh, dear,” she said, “I’m afraid I’d be awfully tired of it after that length of time. . . . Do you mind if I ask my companion Mrs. Mandeville to come around? . . . I’m so ignorant about these things.” Then she called up Agnes and they fiddled around talking about the weather until Agnes got there.
Agnes was wonderful. She talked about commitments and important business to be transacted and an estate to care for, and said that at that figure it would not be worth Miss Dowling’s while to give up her world cruise, would it, darling, if she appeared in the picture anyway it was only to accommodate an old friend Mr. Margolies and of course Miss Dowling had always made sacrifices for her work, and that she herself made sacrifices for it and if necessary would work her fingers to the bone to give her a chance to have the kind of success she believed in and that she knew she would have because if you believed with an unsullied heart God would bring things about the way they ought to be. Agnes went on to talk about how awful unbelief was and at five o’clock just as the office was closing they went out to the car with a contract for three months at five hundred a week in Agnes’s handbag. “I hope the stores are still open,” Margo was saying. “I’ve got to have some clothes.”
A toughlooking greyfaced man in ridingclothes with light tow hair was sitting in the front seat beside Tony. Margo and Agnes glared at the flat back of his head as they got into the car. “Take us down to Tasker and Harding’s on Hollywood Boulevard . . . the Paris Gown Shop” Agnes said. “Oh, goody, it’ll be lovely to have you have some new clot
hes,” she whispered in Margo’s ear.
When Tony let the stranger off at the corner of Hollywood and Sunset, he bowed stiffly and started off up the broad sidewalk. “Tony, I don’t know how many times I’ve told you you couldn’t pick up your friends in my car,” began Margo. She and Agnes nagged at him so that when he got home he was in a passion and said that he was moving out next day. “You have done nothing but exploit me and interfere with my career. That was Max Hirsch. He’s an Austrian count and a famous poloplayer.” Next day sure enough Tony packed his things and left the house.
The five hundred a week didn’t go as far as Agnes and Margo thought it would. Mr. Hardbein the agent took ten percent of it first thing, then Agnes insisted on depositing fifty to pay off the loan in Miami so that Margo could get her jewelry back. Then moving into a new house in the nice part of Santa Monica cost a lot. There was a cook and a housemaid’s wages to pay and they had to have a chauffeur now that Tony had gone. And there were clothes and a publicityman and all kinds of charities and handouts around the studio that you couldn’t refuse. Agnes was wonderful. She attended to everything. Whenever any business matter came up Margo would press her fingers to the two sides of her forehead and let her eyes close for a minute and groan. “It’s too bad but I just haven’t got a head for business.”
It was Agnes who picked out the new house, a Puerto Rican cottage with the cutest balconies, jampacked with antique Spanish furniture. In the evening Margo sat in an easychair in the big livingroom in front of an open fire playing Russian bank with Agnes. They got a few invitations from actors and people Margo met on the lot, but Margo said she wasn’t going out until she found out what was what in this town. “First thing you know we’ll be going around with a bunch of bums who’ll do us more harm than good.” “How true that is,” sighed Agnes. “Like those awful twins in Miami.”
They didn’t see anything of Tony until, one Sunday night that Sam Margolies was coming to the house for the first time, he turned up drunk at about six o’clock and said that he and Max Hirsch wanted to start a polo school and that he had to have a thousand dollars right away. “But, Tony,” said Agnes, “where’s Margie going to get it? . . . You know just as well as I do how heavy our expenses are.” Tony made a big scene, stormed and cried and said Agnes and Margo had ruined his stage career and that now they were out to ruin his career in pictures. “I have been too patient,” he yelled, tapping himself on the chest. “I have let myself be ruined by women.”
Margo kept looking at the clock on the mantel. It was nearly seven. She finally shelled out twentyfive bucks and told him to come back during the week. “He’s hitting the hop again,” she said after he’d gone. “He’ll go crazy one of these days.” “Poor boy,” sighed Agnes, “he’s not a bad boy, only weak.”
“What I’m scared of is that that heinie’ll get hold of him and make us a lot of trouble. . . . That bird had a face like state’s prison . . . guess the best thing to do is get a lawyer and start a divorce.” “But think of the publicity,” wailed Agnes. “Anyway,” said Margo, “Tony’s got to pass out of the picture. I’ve taken all I’m going to take from that greaser.”
Sam Margolies came an hour late. “How peaceful,” he was saying. “How can you do it in delirious Hollywood?” “Why, Margie’s just a quiet little workinggirl,” said Agnes, picking up her sewingbasket and starting to sidle out. He sat down in the easychair without taking off his white beret and stretched out his bowlegs towards the fire. “I hate the artificiality of it.” “Don’t you now?” said Agnes from the door.
Margo offered him a cocktail but he said he didn’t drink. When the maid brought out the dinner that Agnes had worked on all day he wouldn’t eat anything but toast and lettuce. “I never eat or drink at mealtimes. I come only to look and to talk.” “That’s why you’ve gotten so thin,” kidded Margo. “Do you remember the way I used to be in those old days? My New York period. Let’s not talk about it. I have no memory. I live only in the present. Now I am thinking of the picture you are going to star in. I never go to parties but you must come with me to Irwin Harris’s tonight. There will be people there you’ll have to know. Let me see your dresses. I’ll pick out what you ought to wear. After this you must always let me come when you buy a dress.” Following her up the creaking stairs to her bedroom he said, “We must have a different setting for you. This won’t do. This is suburban.”
Margo felt funny driving out through the avenues of palms of Beverly Hills sitting beside Sam Margolies. He’d made her put on the old yellow eveningdress she’d bought at Piquot’s years ago that Agnes had recently had done over and lengthened by a little French dressmaker she’d found in Los Angeles. Her hands were cold and she was afraid Margolies would hear her heart knocking against her ribs. She tried to think of something funny to say but what was the use, Margolies never laughed. She wondered what he was thinking. She could see his face, the narrow forehead under his black bang, the pouting lips, the beaklike profile very dark against the streetlights as he sat stiffly beside her with his hands on his knees. He still had on his white flannels and a white stock with a diamond pin in it in the shape of a golfclub. As the car turned into a drive towards a row of bright tall frenchwindows through the trees he turned to her and said, “You are afraid you will be bored. . . . You’ll be surprised. You’ll find we have something here that matches the foreign and New York society you are accustomed to.” As he turned his face towards her the light glinted on the whites of his eyes and sagging pouches under them and the wet broad lips. He went on whispering squeezing her hand as he helped her out of the car. “You will be the most elegant woman there but only as one star is brighter than the other stars.”
Going into the door past the butler Margo caught herself starting to giggle. “How you do go on,” she said. “You talk like a . . . like a genius.” “That’s what they call me,” said Margolies in a loud voice drawing his shoulders back and standing stiffly at attention to let her go past him through the large glass doors into the vestibule.
The worst of it was going into the dressingroom to take off her wraps. The women who were doing their faces and giving a last pat to their hair all turned and gave her a quick onceover that started at her slippers, ran up her stockings, picked out every hook and eye of her dress, ran round her neck to see if it was wrinkled and up into her hair to see if it was dyed. At once she knew that she ought to have an ermine wrap. There was one old dame standing smoking a cigarette by the lavatory door in a dress all made of cracked ice who had xray eyes; Margo felt her reading the pricetag on her stepins. The colored maid gave Margo a nice toothy grin as she laid Margo’s coat over her arm that made her feel better. When she went out she felt the stares clash together on her back and hang there like a tin can on a dog’s tail. Keep a stiff upper lip, they can’t eat you, she was telling herself as the door of the ladies’ room closed behind her. She wished Agnes was there to tell her how lovely everybody was.
Margolies was waiting for her in the vestibule full of sparkly chandeliers. There was an orchestra playing and they were dancing in a big room. He took her to the fireplace at the end. Irwin Harris and Mr. Hardbein who looked as alike as a pair of eggs in their tight dress suits came up and said goodevening. Margolies gave them each a hand without looking at them and sat down by the fireplace with his back to the crowd in a big carved chair like the one he had in his office. Mr. Harris asked her to dance with him. After that it was like any other collection of dressedup people. At least until she found herself dancing with Rodney Cathcart.
She recognized him at once from the pictures, but it was a shock to find that his face had color in it, and that there was warm blood and muscle under his rakish eveningdress. He was a tall tanned young man with goldfishyellow hair and an English way of mumbling his words. She’d felt cold and shivery until she started to dance with him. After he’d danced with her once he asked her to dance with him again. Between dances he led her to the buffet at the end of the room and tried to get her to
drink. She held a scotch and soda in a big blue glass each time and just sipped it while he drank down a couple of scotches straight and ate a large plate of chicken salad. He seemed a little drunk but he didn’t seem to be getting any drunker. He didn’t say anything so she didn’t say anything either. She loved dancing with him.
Every now and then when they danced round the end of the room she caught sight of the whole room in the huge mirror over the fireplace. Once when she got just the right angle she thought she saw Margolies’ face staring at her from out of the carved highbacked chair that faced the burning logs. He seemed to be staring at her attentively. The firelight playing on his face gave it a warm lively look she hadn’t noticed on it before. Immediately blond heads, curly heads, bald heads, bare shoulders, black shoulders got in her way and she lost sight of that corner of the room.
It must have been about twelve o’clock when she found him standing beside the table where the scotch was. “Hello, Sam,” said Rodney Cathcart. “How’s every little thing?” “We must go now, the poor child is tired in all this noise. . . . Rodney, you must let Miss Dowling go now.” “O.K., pal,” said Rodney Cathcart and turned his back to pour himself another glass of scotch.