Stars (The Butterfly Trilogy) (40 page)

     But Andrea had discovered that agreeing to help Larry didn't mean actually working
with
Larry, which was what she had hoped for, but rather her taking his screenplay and redoing it on her own. But she didn't mind. She was in love. There was a real man in her life at last, and the prospect of meeting with him again fueled her creativity at the typewriter.

     They met again at Ship's, where the individual toasters at each table were a hit with the local college crowd. Andrea made sourdough toast for Larry while she explained what she had done with the screenplay.

     He thanked her eloquently and promised to call.

     He didn't. At least not until three months later when, once again out of the blue, Andrea's phone rang and she answered it and heard the voice from her sexual fantasies saying, "Hi, it's me," as if they'd sat in Ship's just the night before. "I'm really sorry I haven't called, but I've been so busy. I quit my job at the Spaghetti Factory and got myself an apartment in Hollywood on Fountain Avenue."

     He told her the progress of the screenplay. "They expect the release date to be sometime next summer. But hey, guess what! They want me to write a sequel."

     "Oh, Larry, that's wonderful."

     "Boy, I just can't bear the thought of doing it without you, you know? It's like I've come to think of you and me as a team. What do you say we join up and become partners?"

     Andrea couldn't believe what she had just heard—"team," "partners"—it was almost like a marriage proposal.

     "Yes," she said so quickly that it knocked the breath out of her. "Yes, I'll be your partner."

     "You see, Miss Bachman," Beverly said from behind those huge sunglasses, "Marion Star was betrayed. By Hollywood—by the men who used her. I would like Mr. Wolfe's movie to vindicate her."

     Andrea, who knew all about betrayal, wondered why Beverly Burgess felt so passionate about it. Had Beverly been betrayed at some point in her life by a man?

     "I'll do what I can," Andrea said, baffled by Beverly Burgess's passionate defense of a woman she had never met.

     "I grew up hearing sex sounds coming from my parents' bedroom," the words in faded ink read. "My father, Earl Winkler, had a voracious appetite; my mother's duty was simply to comply."

     Andrea was reading Marion Star's diary in a small, quiet, library-like room in the Castle called the Chinese Room, where Marion Star used to hold mah-jongg parties. She and her guests—Mary Pickford and Clara Bow had been regulars—would dress up in silk kimonos and play through the night. The room's special attraction was an eight-inch jade sculpture in a display case: it resembled an erect penis, and it was said to have been a gift to Marion from Alla Nazimova, exotic silent screen star. Guests at Star's came to the Chinese Room to ogle at the exotic sex toy or to write letters at one of the several private writing desks. Or simply to read, as Andrea was doing, curled up in a leather wing chair, deeply engrossed in Marion's story.

     "I can't recall what my mother looked like when she wasn't pregnant. Her body was always stretched and swollen, always hidden beneath baggy dresses. I wonder if she would have been slender; did she have nice curves, was she feminine? And I remember that she always limped and she was always tired so that I had to do most of the work around the house and see to my brothers and sisters, because Momma was so worn out. After Joey was born, I overheard Momma beg my father to leave her alone. He didn't, and she had three more babies after Joey. She was thirty-eight when she died of complications from a miscarriage. That was the year I ran away from home. I was fifteen and I knew all about sex. And its power.

     "It was not until some years later that I learned that my mother's miscarriage had not been an accident of nature. She had caused it herself."

     A couple came whispering into the Chinese Room, disturbing Andrea as they walked past, heading for the infamous jade gadget. The man murmured, "I heard that John Barrymore once..." He dropped his voice. Then
said, "In this very room." And his female companion giggled. Andrea turned the page and continued reading.

     "The day I met the famous movie director Dexter Bryant Ramsey, I was seventeen years old, it was ninety degrees in Los Angeles, and I was about to freeze to death, trapped in a huge block of ice.

     "When I had first arrived in Hollywood, I got a room at the Salvation Army Hotel for Women on Gower Street. My roommate, Greta, was struggling to get into the movies; it was she who warned me about casting couches. 'Every man in this business is after just one thing,' she said. Greta worked at the Coconut Grove, and she got me a job there as a hat check girl. I didn't work the coat room for long, however, before I was promoted to working in the show. The Grove put on fabulous floor shows that consisted mainly of nearly naked girls on elaborate floats. They didn't dance or anything. The only talent required was to sit or stand in a seductive way.

     "The night Ramsey saved my life, I was supposed to ride out on the float encased in a block of ice, completely naked. They assured me that I would be okay, since the hollow center was heated by a hidden electric coil. I didn't want to do it; I was afraid. But I was told that I shouldn't complain since I was going to be the star of the show. And I didn't like the nudity, either, even though the other girls weren't going to be wearing anything more than a few daisies.

     "So I climbed a ladder and lowered myself into the ice. I was scared. And it was so cold. Greta made me feel better when she said that even though the ice was transparent, you couldn't really see anything. The show started and the float was pushed out onto the floor. The audience went wild when they saw me. Men literally jumped out of their seats when they realized I wasn't wearing anything. The problem was, our float caused such an uproar that nobody noticed how badly I was shivering. The electric coil had failed and I was starting to freeze. My head was near the top of the hole I stood in, but when I tried calling out, no one could hear me because the orchestra was playing and the customers were all shouting and whistling.

     "The float did a slow turn, and I became more and more frightened. My feet went numb, and my skin seemed to burn where it touched the ice. I started to scream. I tried to climb out, but there wasn't enough room to move my arms. There was the audience—I could see them through the ice—
laughing and clapping and excited by the spectacle, and I realized in terror that I was going to freeze to death before the show was even over.

     "And then suddenly a man was climbing onto the float, scattering the other girls and their daisies. He made his way to the top of the ice and reached in, grabbed me under my arms, and pulled me straight out, quickly wrapping me in the heavy topcoat he had been wearing. The crowd went wild. They must have thought it was part of the act. I remember that he rushed between the tables, carrying me, and then out a side entrance; then we were in the back of a limousine and I couldn't stop my teeth from chattering. But he gave me some brandy from a silver flask and kept saying, "There, there, you're all right,' in this lovely, rich, deep voice. And then he took my face in his hands and seemed to study me. He said, 'Christ,' and I burst into tears.

     "I didn't know at the time that my rescuer was one of the biggest men in Hollywood. I had seen his movies back in Fresno; Dexter Bryant Ramsey was known for making big-budget spectacles with lots of costumes and sets and thousands of extras. When I awoke the next morning in his Benedict Canyon home, in a big bed with satin monogrammed sheets, he brought me breakfast—caviar and champagne!—and assured me that I had slept alone, that he had spent the night in a guest bedroom. He sat on the edge of the bed and said, 'You're very beautiful, do you know that?' And then he said what I suppose every seventeen-year-old girl dreams of hearing: 'I'm going to make you a star.'

     "Dexter took me everywhere with him after that: to a séance at the house of Rudolph Valentino whose spirit guide, Black Feather, spoke to us; to gambling ships anchored off Santa Monica, just beyond the three-mile limit; to Tuesday nights at the Trocadero and Sunday afternoons watching polo in the Brentwood wilderness. He introduced me to a world I had never dreamed possible, where a three-thousand-dollar hand-beaded evening gown lasted for the duration of one party and was then discarded; a world where cars were upholstered in the skins of rare snow leopards and toilet seats were made of solid gold.

     "Ramsey made me over. He hired Hollywood's top makeup artist to create a 'look,' a man who had perfected his craft by preparing San Francisco's
most expensive prostitutes for their high-paying clients. Between him and Ramsey they decided that I should be a sex symbol. Just as Mary Pickford strove to maintain her image of virginal innocence—off-screen as well as on— so was I made to cultivate an aura of raw sexuality and immorality. That was when Ramsey gave me my new name, Marion Star, because he said Gertrude Winkler did not sound like a sexpot. Everywhere we went—parties, restaurants, movie premieres—Ramsey observed men's reactions to me and took notes. Then we would come home and he would instruct me in how to walk, how to speak. Whenever I asked him when he was going to put me in one of his movies, he would say, 'Be patient.'

     "But patience, when you're eighteen, is a foreign word. I wanted to be an actress, but even more, I wanted my handsome Dexter Bryant Ramsey to make love to me. In all this time, even though I lived with him, he never once touched me, so that I was beginning to wonder if he ever would."

     Andrea closed the book. She had a sudden compulsion to see what the author of this extraordinary diary looked like. Remembering the small theater on the second floor, where Marion's movies ran continuously, she packed up her things and left.

     Andrea was able to stomach exactly ten minutes of the classic silent film
Her Wicked Ways
before she had to leave the theater in disgust.

     The scene that drove her out showed Marion, nineteen years old and naked, taking a bath in a transparent tub full of champagne. She was surrounded by men, all of whom were fully dressed. Her character was a supposedly "liberated" young woman who got her sexual kicks from teasing men. But when the camera panned in for close-ups, when Marion was clearly supposed to look coy and conniving, there was a glimmer of fear in her eyes.

     Andrea took to the cold night in fury, following the narrow paved path from the Castle to her bungalow, bent forward into the cutting mountain wind as she thought about what she had learned today from Beverly Burgess, from Marion's diary, from the movie. Now she knew why Beverly was so passionate about Marion being treated decently in Larry's screenplay. She shuddered to think of
Her Wicked Ways.
Such exploitation! That poor girl, nineteen years old, used, manipulated, prostituted by the man she loved.

     It was all Andrea could do to keep from going straight to Beverly and saying, "Listen, don't worry. Larry isn't the writer, I am. And I'll see to it we tell Marion's real story."

     But she couldn't tell Beverly the truth just yet, not until she saw the culmination of her months of carefully orchestrating her revenge against Larry. Mr. Yamato was due to arrive from Tokyo in four days, bringing with him his generous financial backing for Larry's movie. They were to meet here at Star's; Andrea was to have a proposal ready. But what neither Mr. Yamato nor Larry were aware of was that they were both in for a surprise.

     Because of what Larry finally did to her eight months ago.

     A gust came up so powerfully then that Andrea had to turn her back to it. And as she briefly faced the Castle, seeing it through the increasingly heavy snowfall, she thought she saw, up on the floor that wasn't shown on the plan, a figure standing at one of the windows, watching her.

T
HIS TIME THE TELEPHONE WAS PICKED UP AFTER ONE
RING
; the call was expected. It rang on a special line, because it was a special number; only two people in the world had access to it.

     
"Philippa is staying at the Century Plaza Hotel," a voice said. "But tomorrow she leaves for Palm Springs. She's called an emergency meeting of the board. Everyone will be there."

     
"Is she aware of anything?"

     
"I don't think so...not really."

     
"Make sure it stays that way. Keep on her trail; don't lose her. And if you don't have a gun, get one."