Starstruck (17 page)

Hardly
.

“While I have known for some time of Margaret’s vanity and … shall we say … 
unbecoming
ambition, I told myself that this was simply a young girl’s fancy, and that when the time came she would put such childish, selfish things aside and do her duty to those who gave her a home. Instead, by consorting with you and others of your … your
persuasion
, she has severely jeopardized her future, and made a mockery of all that Mr. Frobisher and I have offered her.”

“Hear, hear,” Mr. Frobisher said.

“Quiet, Lowell.” Mrs. Frobisher turned to her daughter. “Margaret, I put it to you. You have heard Mr. Julius’s offer. If you want to go with him, we will not stop you, but we will wash our hands of you.” For a moment, the icy film over her eyes suddenly seemed to thaw, giving her a vaguely haunted look, as if she were looking at something terrible that only she could see. “You will be on your own, without support or family. Should you wish to return to us or to Pasadena at any time, you will find the door firmly closed.”

“Or?” Margaret whispered. Her throat was dry.

“You may stay,” Mrs. Frobisher said simply. “We will do whatever we can to repair your damaged reputation. We will bring you out in whatever way is available to us. In return, you will do your duty. You will behave like a respectable young woman. No movie magazines, no truancy, no late-night disappearances from dances with young gentlemen.” Margaret blushed. She hadn’t realized her mother knew about the Phipps McKendrick episode. “You will obey us unquestioningly,” Mrs.
Frobisher continued, “until you are married to an appropriate young man. And you will put all thoughts of
Hollywood
”—her mother almost spat the word—“out of your head forever.”

Here it was. The choice that a small part of Margaret had always known she would one day have to make: the choice between who she had always been, and who she had always longed to be.

She thought of her life in Pasadena. Her house. Her friends. She thought of how her father used to push her so high on the rope swing in the backyard she could almost touch the branches of the eucalyptus tree with her toes, how her mother had held her in the water when she taught her how to swim. She imagined herself as the calm, smiling wife of Stephen Van Camp or Frederick Harrington or Phipps McKendrick, living in a beautiful house, arranging flowers in a crystal vase, receiving a chaste kiss from her tired husband as she greeted him at the door with his whiskey and slippers at the end of a long day. She imagined walking in the park with Doris, the two of them pushing their babies in carriages as they gossiped about who was having an affair with his secretary, who was secretly living apart, who was soon to be blacklisted from the next benefit committee or party or ball.

Then she thought of Olympus, of the magical world behind its shining gates. The hushed frenzy of the soundstages, the shady bungalows containing the secrets of the stars. Gabby Preston’s big eyes and infectious laugh and mysterious pills, and Raoul Kurtzman’s world-weary shrugs, and Sadie the Wardrobe Lady’s coral-stained cigarettes. She thought of Amanda Farraday slinking across the commissary floor in her black suit, like a black widow spider hunting her newest prey. She thought
of Diana Chesterfield and the mysteries her disappearance held. And she thought of Dane Forrest, the most alluring mystery of all.

“Well, Margaret?” Mrs. Frobisher cleared her throat. “What will it be?”

No tears. Not a single one.

Larry Julius had never seen anything like it. The day he’d left home you could hear his mama’s anguished wails all the way to Fourteenth Street. Sure, he knew these fancy-schmancy society types could be pretty cold fish, but disowning an only daughter without so much as a sniffle? As though it were all just an unfortunate inconvenience; as though they were getting rid of a cook who had burned the roast one too many times. And the words that woman used!
Lived with us for seventeen years … those who gave her a home
. Not once did she use the word
daughter
. Not once did she so much as mention the word
love
. It was all very upsetting, not to mention suspicious. When it came to smelling a rat, Larry Julius had the best nose in the business. And his nose was telling him that something was very, very rotten in Pasadena. He just didn’t know what.

The girl sat beside him in the backseat of the Phantom, perfectly quiet, the glow of headlights and the shimmer of moonlight illuminating her soft yellow hair. Larry had to fight a sudden, wild urge to throw his arms around her and hold her tight. Not in a romantic way; he wasn’t a cradle robber, for God’s sake. He just felt as if someone should show the poor kid some affection.

But she didn’t seem to need any. She stared straight ahead,
clear-eyed and unblinking, like some warrior queen fearlessly surveying the oncoming hordes. Yep, this one had some steel in her spine, all right.
Steel
, Larry thought suddenly. She was going to need a new name for the pictures. What about Steele?

No, that didn’t sound right. Too masculine, too unforgiving. This dame needed something classy, something that sounded expensive. They couldn’t use Gold—for obvious reasons—or Silver …

“Sterling,” Larry said aloud.

She turned to him, a marvel with her clear, dry eyes. “What did you say?”

“You need a new name. What about Sterling? Margaret Sterling.”

“Margaret Sterling,” she said, trying it out.

“Sounds good, right? Like one of those dames you might come across in finishing school.”

“Margo,” she said suddenly.

“What?”

“Margo. For the first name. It’s an old nickname of mine.…” She trailed off. “And I think it’s better. More unusual. Margo Sterling. People will remember it.”

Larry grinned. His whole press team couldn’t have come up with anything more perfect. Boy, this kid was something else, all right. “I can already see it in lights.”

I
n Olive Moore’s day, the movie magazines had been such anemic little things. Printed in black-and-white on cheap newsprint and bound as roughly as though they’d been stapled together in someone’s dirty basement. But the fresh new copies of
Picture Palace
and
Modern Screen
and all the others that now littered the surface of her mahogany desk were glossy, and filled with as many full-color glamour shots and painstakingly art-directed photo spreads as an issue of
Vogue
. The first week the houseboy delivered them to her office, she felt almost intimidated by their gleaming, expensive newness. Her Hollywood days were long behind her now; weeks went past when she didn’t think about them at all. The magazines seemed to bring it all back: the sting of having been left behind, the pain of seeing the world she had known and loved continuing so swimmingly without her. No wonder she’d never tried to look at them before.

She had steeled herself to continue, and as the weeks receded into the past, the hurt did too. Besides, how else was she supposed to see how Amanda was getting on? If she was making a splash in Hollywood, setting tongues wagging and checkbooks flipping, or if she was likely to come crawling back any day now with her tail between her legs? Either way, Olive figured, she’d rather be prepared.

So far there hadn’t been much: just a tiny cheesecake photo of Amanda in a swimsuit in
Photoplay
when Olympus first announced her as a new contract player and a casting roundup in
Picture Palace
that said Amanda would be playing a gangster’s moll in some small picture. Every once in a while, there was a blind item in one of the gossip columns mentioning a ravishing redhead in black seen out to dinner at Chasen’s or the Brown Derby, usually on the arm of some powerful man or other, which Olive would read with a kind of grim satisfaction.
Good girl. Doing what I taught her
. Still, they were hardly the clippings of a girl who was taking the town by storm.

For so many girls, fame and fortune were only the beginning of the story—first-act stuff, as Amanda’s screenwriter might say. They were certainly no guarantee of a happy ending.

Just look at poor Diana. There it was, the lead story in the week’s edition of
Picture Palace:

Hefty reward
. That was a laugh. Olive would have bet a pretty penny that old Leo Karp wouldn’t be parting with any of his money soon. The only people with any information on the whereabouts of Diana Chesterfield were the ones busily covering just what those whereabouts might be, and they were undoubtedly on the studio’s payroll already. As for anyone else who might have any pertinent information about the vanished star, the only reward they were going to see was a one-way ticket out of town, and maybe a broken leg to go with it. If they were lucky.

Poor Diana
. Olive shook her head sadly, drinking in Diana’s face, as young and lovely as the day they’d first met. It had been ages since Diana had confided in her. They’d talked about everything in those days. But Diana had left Olive behind.
Just like Amanda
, Olive thought.
Just like everybody in this whole stinking town. Fools
. Trying to outrun themselves. Thinking that if you just forgot about your past, your past would forget about you. And where did it get you? Where had it gotten Diana? She’d heard all the rumors, of course; Olive was always hungry for information where Diana was concerned. An overdose, a crack-up, even foul play: knowing Diana, they were all equally possible. Whatever it was, the fact that a story like this had been allowed to go to press confirmed its seriousness. The studio was in full damage-control mode, trying to turn lemons into lemonade. It was a classic Larry Julius move, perfected back in the twenties, when wild young stars with too much power and too much money were dropping like flies. A stopgap measure until the businessmen moved in with the talkies and realized that if you only paid a star fifty dollars a week, she couldn’t spend five hundred on cocaine, and if she
did anyway, you could profit from the scandal. You ginned up the mystery for a few weeks, sold a million magazines—with a sizable kickback to the studio. In the meantime, you trotted out a few shiny new stars for the plebes to go gaga over, some young, malleable kids you could underpay and overwork, and in six months—hell, in
three
—no one would even remember the tragic starlet. Eventually, her story might be resolved in a three-line item (or a three-line obit) stuck in the back of a magazine or newspaper, or in a studio press release, but by then, no one would be looking for it.

Still, there was something in the Diana story that gave Olive pause. An ugly little reference at the very end:

What a dirty trick
. Olive couldn’t help admiring the malignant smoothness of it all. Not exactly defamatory—in fact, it was probably true—but whoever had written it knew exactly what he was doing. The picture magazines, like the pictures themselves, thrived on the power of suggestion. It was a very short step from suggesting that Dane perhaps wasn’t quite as sad and concerned as he should be over Diana’s disappearance to insinuating that he might have had something to do with it.

Had he?
He’d certainly come a long way from the shy, stammering farm boy Olive had known, but even then he’d had a
knack for getting himself in the damnedest heaps of trouble. Clearly, he’d gone and done it again. Somebody, perhaps somebody very powerful, had it in for Dane. She would have warned him to watch his back, but it had been years since Dane Forrest had returned one of Olive Moore’s phone calls.

Olive turned the page. Printed in huge curling script that took up nearly half the page, the headline might as well have been accompanied by the fanfare of trumpets and the fluttering of seraphim:

Olive almost laughed aloud as she read the first paragraph proclaiming the arrival of the Olympus starlet
everybody
in Hollywood was talking about.
Margo Sterling. So this is Diana’s replacement
. Quickly, she skimmed the article, written in the Olympus press office’s trademark breathless style: how the Sterling girl had been plucked from the debutante doldrums and was destined to dazzle audiences the world over with her beauty and breeding; how she was a natural honey blonde; how she loved horses, chocolate-chip ice cream, and the American way. Boilerplate stuff, really, with scarcely a word changed from the press release, and so
boring
. In Olive’s day, the studio had claimed that all the young actresses were lost Russian princesses or the escaped concubines of evil Arabian sheikhs.
Larry Julius is slipping
, she thought with a snort as she turned the page to reveal the girl’s photograph.