Land of Dreams: A Novel (24 page)

“And Franchot Tone—will
he
be there?”

“I expect so, Nan.”

“Oh, it’s nothing to you, boy—you see them all the time—but oh, oh . . . Erich von Stroheim, will
he
be there?”

“They will
all
be there, Nan—it’s no big deal.”

“Leo,” I said, “please don’t talk to Bridie like that.”

I had started to reprimand Leo in a more gentle, pleading tone in recognition of his maturity, but it was proving to be just as pointless an exercise as angrily putting my foot down. Not least because, in the few months we had been here, my opinion had become completely inconsequential to him. It hurt me that Leo no longer valued my views on any subject; if I commented on what he wore, or even expressed a view on a certain film, he would look at me as if I knew
nothing
at all. As a result I was afraid to even broach the subject of what was going to happen, now that the film had finished shooting. I still wanted to return to New York when this movie was over so that Leo could complete his education, and return to Hollywood, should he still wish to, when he was twenty-one. I did not like what was happening to my intelligent, sensitive son. He was becoming spoiled, and especially worrying was his increasingly dismissive treatment of poor Freddie.

Freddie had got himself a job in a real-estate office, which it seemed he had a natural talent for. He offered to move out, but I told him to wait until he had cleared his Chateau Marmont expenses. Touchingly, having a steady income elsewhere seemed to strengthen his commitment to making Leo a star and to becoming Hollywood’s first film actor’s agent.

Since he had moved in with us, I had come to see that Freddie was both a kind and much more sensible young man than his Hollywood aspirations suggested. Especially since my estrangement from Stan, he had adopted something of the role and responsibility of the man of the house—particularly in his protective role toward Bridie.

One day I came into the house and found him standing behind Bridie, who was seated at the kitchen table while he was curling her hair.

“The cheeky pup said I needed a new hairdo,” Bridie muttered, embarrassed by the fuss. “He said he can make me look like Margaret Rutherford.”

“I think we can do a bit better than that, Bridie,” the young man quipped. “Rutherford is a fearsome old battle-ax.” Then he looked at me and winked. “Nothing like you at all.”

“She might not be any great beauty, but her curls are always so
tidy
,” Bridie insisted. “If I could get mine to sit like that, I’d be happy enough.”

“You’re selling yourself short, Bridie,” Freddie said as he expertly slid a long, treacherous-looking pin into a pink roller. “What is it with you Irish broads—always putting yourselves down. You’re a mature, sophisticated woman of the world, Bridie—if people can’t handle how much of a woman you are, well then, more fool them!”

“Get away off out of that, you fool,” Bridie said, flicking the compliment away over her shoulder, although she was bristling with sheer joy at the adulation. For all Freddie’s teasing, you could hear that he meant it and that he had a genuine admiration and affection for the old woman.

Later that afternoon I overheard a very different exchange between my son and Freddie.

“Why do I even
need
an agent?” I heard Leo whine at Freddie. “I mean,
nobody
else in the studio has one. What does an agent even
do
?”

Their conversation was taking place in the kitchen, while I was out on the back step cleaning off a pair of Tom’s boots. I had been shocked by Leo’s hurtful tone toward a man I thought he respected. They did not know I could hear them, so I hung back and listened.

“Well, agents aren’t a big thing right now, I gotta admit that. Hey, you’re probably the only guy in Hollywood right now who has one, and you know what? That makes
you
a special kid. As for what an agent does, well, they look out for you.”

“I don’t need anyone looking out for me,” Leo said.

“Hell, everyone needs someone looking out for them, Leo. What about your mom? You need her, don’t you? I tell you something: she looks out for you, boy—she’s some great lady . . .”

Leo mumbled something I didn’t hear, but I took it as my cue to cough noisily and come back inside.

On the evening of the wrap party everyone was excited, getting dressed up to go out together. A neighbor was coming in to stay with Tom, whose disappointment at being excluded had been compensated for by being assured that he could sit and listen to the radio until after 9 p.m. and feast on as much popcorn as he could stuff into his mouth before then.

Although it was not a formal affair, Freddie had rented tuxedos for himself and Leo. “Trust me—it will make us stand out,” he said, as Leo ran his fingers complainingly under the tight, stiff collar. “There will be a lot of important people there tonight that we need to impress, and we want to make a good impression.” Leo looked uncertain, but Bridie and I made a great fuss of telling him how handsome he looked. Bridie exclaimed loudly when he came into the hallway, “Errol Flynn is only trotting after you—trotting, do you hear me—like a wee baby lamb!” And, despite himself, my increasingly surly teenage son managed a smile.

I wore my good navy dress, again, and Bridie her good Sunday coat and her small pillbox hat, neither of which she planned to remove. She had spent almost the full day in the salon having her hair permed and set, and it curved around her ears under the hat with some style, although her face beneath it was an eerie white, due to the unfamiliar addition of face powder and a smear of dark red lipstick.

As our car pulled up outside, Bridie started to look for her bag.

“I put it here,” she said, looking at the back of a kitchen chair, “it was here, in the kitchen.”

We all had a look around, but it was nowhere to be seen.

“I don’t understand,” she said, and I could see that my poor old friend was getting really distraught. “Somebody must have moved it. Where did it go?”

“Did you go upstairs with it?” I asked. “Outside?”

“No, NO!” she shouted loudly, as if I were accusing her of something. “I haven’t been outside all day. Not once. It’s here, it must be here, I put it
here
!” She banged her fist hard on the table, then flinched and grabbed it straight back to her chest.

“Here it is.” Tom came in at that moment and handed Bridie her big brown handbag.

“Where did you find it?” she asked.

“When you were walking in the garden you put it on the hedge. I saw you, but you didn’t see me.”

If it was true, it was a strange thing for Bridie to have done; and if she hadn’t, it was an even stranger thing for Tom to have lied about. In any case, Tom’s babysitter Julie was waiting in the hallway and our car was outside.

“Come on, Bridie, you have it now. Let’s go.”

But Bridie sat down.

“No,” she said, “send Julie home, I’m staying here with Tom.”

“Don’t be silly, Bridie.” She was being petulant: what was wrong with her? “Come on, I have your bag, the car is waiting—we’re all set . . .”

“NO!” she said, and pulled Tom, a little roughly, into her lap, then cradled him in her bosom and looked away out the window. “Now go—enjoy yourselves.”

It was over. There was no sense insisting any further that she come. I knew by the look of her that Bridie’s mind was made up and there would be no persuading her.

“Come on,” I said to Freddie and Leo, and we went out to the car, dismissing Julie on the way.

In the car I sensed an atmosphere brewing between Freddie and Leo.

“This tux is stupid,” Leo started again. “My friends are dressing up in army costume for the night. I’ll look really stupid in this.”

“All the more reason not to,” Freddie said. “You’ll be glad when we get there. Trust me, Leo, a good suit creates a good impression.”

“I don’t need to create a ‘good impression.’ I’m a
good
actor. That’s enough.”

“Maybe,” Freddie said, placating him, “but I know what I’m doing here. You have to trust me.”

Leo mumbled something that I suspected was quite cruel, and so I did not ask him to repeat it. Was it possible that my gentle, intelligent son was turning into something of a monster? Was this what Hollywood did to people? Or was it something I had, or had not, done?

The party was in one of the studios that was still set up as a war hospital. To add atmosphere, some of the actors were in costume—a few of them wandering around in pajamas with fake blood and bandages wrapped around their heads, laughing, with drinks in their hands. To be honest, there was something vaguely distasteful about it. There was, after all, a war on—although it certainly didn’t feel like that here. The war seemed to have caused little more than the vaguest of inconveniences, and an aspiration to sell movies. Even though all of the planes and many of the trains in our country had been commandeered for war use, Stan was still able to get his tickets for the Met and get us on a flight to New York. If the call to war was heard across America, then the clamor for the glamour of Hollywood was a louder shout.

Freddie was right about the evening dress. The young actors dressed in costume looked like extras, while Leo stood out, like the older men, as one of the lead actors.

As soon as we got inside, Leo waved over at some of his friends, but as he was making a move toward them, Freddie held on to him and said, “Work first, Leo.” He looked around the room, his eyes narrowing as they swept across the milling crowd. “There’s half a dozen—ten at most—players here, Leo. Not as many as I had hoped, but worth a round of the room anyway. When we’ve done them all, then you can go and play.” Then he turned to me and said, “Excuse us, Ellie?” and started to walk my son around the room, steering him away from his buddies and reintroducing them both to the stars of the film, followed by some older, rather reluctant-seeming fat cats, whom I assumed to be studio heads.

One very large man with an enormous cigar actually turned his back when he saw Freddie come toward him, but my son’s tenacious young representative all but caught the man by the tail of his jacket and dragged him into their company. The studio head’s face was dead with boredom as he chewed impatiently on his cigar, but Freddie continued to talk and laugh as if this dreadful old boy was finding their conversation perfectly delightful, all the while with his arm clamped around Leo’s shoulders in a territorial grip. Freddie was, if nothing else, an arch networker. At the end of the conversation he handed the fat old boy his business card and watched carefully as he put it into his jacket pocket; then I saw Freddie write down the man’s number on a scrap of paper. They shook hands, so the conversation certainly ended with more conviviality than it had begun.

With that done, Freddie dismissed Leo, who went flying off to his friends, and came back to give his report to me.

“Ellie, the studio is really impressed with Leo’s performance in the film. I’m certain they will extend his contract to the end of the year, and I am going to start negotiations with them this week to make sure he is given star status, with the appropriate salary, of course.”

“Freddie, I’m not sure that—”

I was going to say it there and then: that I didn’t think Leo was ready to be sucked any further into the Hollywood star system, and that perhaps it would be better all around if he returned to New York and completed his education, then came back here in a couple of years’ time, when he would be that bit older and more mature and better equipped to deal with the lifestyle. The words were forming in my head, but Freddie interrupted me.

“Have some faith, Ellie. Leo is going to make it big, don’t worry.”

And in that moment, surrounded by the loud music and the dancing actors, and the milling executives with their outsized cigars and even bigger egos and the general competitive thunder of the Hollywood roar, it felt as if my objections would fall on deaf and disbelieving ears—would appear petty and ridiculous. Hollywood was too huge and important to accommodate the minuscule demands of personal propriety or a mother’s simple reason. Education and manners? What need was there for either, in a world like this where the artifice of glamour and the pretense of beauty were everything.

“No need to thank me, Ellie—that’s my job,” Freddie said, with a glittering smile as he touched my arm and then excused himself and went back into the fray.

For the next hour or so I wandered about the room on my own, smiling about me, but not engaging with anyone. I was not an actress or a film worker and, as such, I felt invisible. Once I caught sight of a strikingly handsome young man in a tuxedo, his back as straight as a board with one hand in his pocket, standing apart from the other young men with his elegant, confident demeanor, and it was a moment before I recognized him as Leo. Although he was fully occupied he could feel his mother’s warm gaze, and he turned and smiled at me across the room. I felt an ember glow in my heart; whoever this young man was to become, however far he moved away from me, I was helpless in my love for him. I would always be on the other side of the room now—grasping for these scraps of approval, grateful for every smile.

“That was smart,” said a woman who suddenly appeared next to me, “getting him all dressed up like that—really makes him stand out.”

She was about my age and build and was wearing a not dissimilar dress.

“I let my Arnold dress up in costume with the other boys, but he’s just one of the crowd tonight,” she added, puffing hard on her cigarette. “Thanks for the tip,” she added, throwing the bent butt on the floor and stubbing it out with the tip of her scuffed black pumps. “I’ll know next time.” And she walked off.

I wanted to chase after her and explain that I was not like her at all. That I did not care for the Hollywood system and that I wanted nothing more than to return with my son to New York. Explain that it was just the case that Leo was so brilliantly brave and clever and resourceful that he had run away across the whole of America on his own to be here, got himself taken on by the only “actor’s agent” in Hollywood and secured himself a lead role in this film—almost without consulting me. Adding that it was not my concern if my son was so dashingly handsome that he made her mediocre child disappear by comparison, and that it would take more than a tuxedo for
any
of the others to compete with Leo’s talent and charm.