Starstruck (24 page)

Harry laughed. “And did you?”

Amanda took a deep breath. “Well, I eventually got a job.”
You could call it that
, she thought. “And the first time I got paid, I bought a new dress from Woolworth’s, a plaid taffeta, purple
and green. Shoes too, to match, and then I splurged on a lipstick at Bullocks. It cost fifty cents and came in a beautiful gold case. And I got all dressed up and walked over to Wilshire and walked into the first store I saw. A jewelry shop.”

She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, summoning the memory. “I stood there at the counter, proud as a peacock in my new Woolworth’s dress, waiting for the salesgirl to bring me whatever I wanted to see. Like a lady.” With a hard swallow, Amanda shook her head. She hated this part of the story. “Well, that salesgirl looked at me like I was something she scraped off the bottom of her shoe. It was like she saw right through me. She knew I was just a cheap little piece of Oklahoma trash who’d gotten above herself. Didn’t say hello, didn’t ask if she could help. Just stared at me until I was too embarrassed to stand there any longer.”

“That must have been terrible,” Harry said softly.

“It was one of the worst afternoons of my life,” Amanda whispered. Even now she could still feel her cheeks burning with the shame of it. “But at least I got a good long look at what was in those glass cases. Diamonds and rubies and pearls, on beds of black velvet. I know it sounds crazy, but standing there in that stupid loud taffeta dress, which I’d spent all my money on and was now too ashamed to wear, I looked at that velvet and I thought, ‘Black. I’m going to wear black.’ ” She looked up at Harry, tears glistening in her eyes. “No one can feel ashamed in a black dress. It doesn’t matter if it cost one dollar or a thousand. You might look dull, you might look serious, you might look sad. But one thing you won’t look like is an ignorant little hick from Arrowhead Falls, Oklahoma, who a salesgirl can treat like a dirty old shoe.”

Harry’s eyes were very bright as he took Amanda’s hand and squeezed it, hard. “Thank you for telling me that.”

“You’re welcome,” she said quickly. The waiter, arriving with their drinks, saved her from having to say any more. Seizing her martini by the stem, Amanda took a long, restorative sip. “Okay, buddy,” she said, feeling steadier. “Now it’s your turn.”

“My turn?” Harry looked puzzled.

“Didn’t you have something to tell me?” she asked pleasantly. “That’s how you made it sound on the telephone.”

“Aha.” Waggling his eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx, Harry took a small sip of his drink. “If you mean to suggest, my dear Watson, that I would need a special reason to escort you to an establishment at which the price of a simple chicken dinner for one could feed a hungry family of five for a week, then congratulations, because you are absolutely correct.”

Amanda smiled. Despite its faux French menu and the swanky cream-and-gold interior—not to mention the high-stakes gambling tucked discreetly away in the back room—the Trocadero was actually one of the more reasonably priced places on the Sunset Strip. God help Harry if she ever managed to drag him to the Cocoanut Grove or the Vendome. He’d probably drown himself in the lobster bisque. “Well, what is it?”

Harry’s face was lit up like a candle. “It’s good news. Very, very exciting news.” He paused dramatically, taking another sip of Scotch. “As of this week, I will no longer be Harry Gordon, nominal screenwriter, glorified errand boy, and knock-around slob. No, no.” He puffed out his chest proudly. “I am going to be Harry Gordon,
actual
screenwriter, with an actual, genuine, honest-to-God movie to my name.”

“Harry!” Amanda squealed. “You don’t mean—”

“That’s right. As of tomorrow,
The Nine Days’ Queen
officially goes back into production.”

Amanda felt her jaw practically drop to the floor. “They found
Diana
?” she gasped. “Diana’s back?”

“Even better.” Harry beamed, pointing in her direction. A burst of desperate, unreasonable hope suddenly surged through Amanda.
Me?
she thought, with joyful disbelief.
They’re giving the part to me?
“Look over there.”

Deflated, Amanda followed Harry’s extended finger to the doorway, where a phalanx of photographers, like musicians directed by some invisible conductor, had suddenly converged. Through the blinding flash of popping lights, Amanda caught a glimpse of Jimmy Molloy’s grinning face. Beside him stood the dark outline of a slim blonde in a silver dress, her face shrouded in a gauzy evening veil. Standing regally at attention, her pale hair gleaming white, she lifted the veil and turned her face toward the light. Amanda couldn’t hold back her astounded gasp. She looked so much like Diana it was like seeing a ghost.

“Margo Sterling,” Harry said proudly. “Pretty amazing, don’t you think?”

“Smile, Margo,” Jimmy muttered through his clenched teeth. “Smile for the nice men.”

Obediently, Margo turned up the corners of her painstakingly painted mouth, careful to keep her chin tilted down and her cheeks held in, the way her smiling instructor had shown her.
A smiling instructor
. He had been waiting outside her bungalow the moment she’d returned from her fateful audience
with Leo Karp, ready and eager to tell her that her right incisor was deformed and her eyes crinkled unflatteringly, so she must always be careful not to smile too wide. After mercilessly coaxing her lips and cheek muscles through a variety of iterations, all of which seemed to have their own unsettling name—the Princess Pout, the Girl-Next-Door Grin, the Southern Belle Simper—they had finally settled on a bemused Mona Lisa Smirk, which radiated oodles of glamour and absolutely no joy.

“That’s a good girl,” Jimmy muttered as flashbulbs popped all around them inside the Trocadero. “Now turn. Let them get a good shot of the dress.”

Even with the double-layered rubber girdle she was wearing, she felt as though her dress were bursting at the seams. “I can’t breathe,” she murmured back to Jimmy. “I feel like a trussed chicken.”

“Darling, don’t be silly.” Jimmy replied smoothly, expertly pivoting her to the front again. “It’s only how you look that matters.”

Isn’t that the truth
, Margo thought. Nothing had prepared her for the scrutiny she found herself under as Jimmy Molloy’s latest sweetheart and Olympus Studio’s newest star. The smiling instructor had just been the tip of the iceberg. Experts descended on her normally quiet bungalow, day and night, each one eager to perform a dizzying and (she was assured) highly necessary array of beauty treatments and therapies. The “improvements,” as they were called, had one major element in common: each one was more painful and invasive than the last. A team of hairdressers peroxided and straightened her hair. Makeup artists plucked and waxed her eyebrows until beads of blood stood out on her brow. A team of dressers had wheeled in rack after
rack of heart-stoppingly stylish clothes personally selected by Rex Mandalay, the young Australian genius newly in charge of Olympus’s wardrobe department.

“There must be some mistake.” Margo had gasped for breath as Rex gave the zipper of a tiny lavender column of bias-cut satin a last futile tug.

Rex snorted. “I’ll say. You’re going to have to reduce.” He was wearing pants as tight as a ballet dancer’s.

“Reduce?” Margo looked down at her body, packed like a sausage into the minuscule gown. “But most of these clothes wouldn’t fit a child!”

“The camera adds ten pounds,” Rex said, “which means you need to lose twenty. I’ll tell the commissary to start you on the official studio diet. Grapefruit for breakfast, a very small steak for lunch, nothing for dinner. No bread, no sweets, and absolutely no eating between meals. The weight will come off in no time.”

I’ll starve
, Margo thought helplessly.
They’re trying to starve me to death
. “And if it doesn’t?”

“Then you’ll go to the studio doctor and he’ll give you some pills.”

Margo thought of Gabby and the vials in her handbag. “No,” she said firmly, “no pills.”

Rex shrugged. “I suppose you could always have your bottom ribs removed.”

Margo yelped. “Why on earth would I do that?”

“Everyone’s doing it now, now that the waist is back. There’s a marvelous man in the Bahamas who did the Duchess of Windsor’s.” Thoughtfully, Rex placed a hand on each side of his own slim midsection, squeezing the sides into a tapering V.
“Something to think about. Mark my words, this time next year, the wasp waist will be back with a vengeance.” Stepping closer, he peered into her face with an appraising look. “We might do something about your nose as well.”

“My nose?” Margo repeated. “What’s wrong with my nose?”

“The tip is a little on the bulbous side. And there’s a bump, right here.” His finger felt like ice as he tapped it. “You might not notice now, but on the screen you see every little imperfection. There’s a man in Berlin who could do the job, if we can get you over there before they start another war. It would really look much better on camera.”

On camera
. Everything was for the camera. She wasn’t Margaret Frobisher anymore; she wasn’t even really Margo Sterling. She was a thing on display, powdered, primped, and starving, in a dress that didn’t fit, on the arm of a man she didn’t love. The camera ruled them all.

“Aw, shucks, I knew Margie was the girl for me the first time I saw her,” Jimmy was saying now as a man from the
Hollywood Reporter
scribbled notes in his pad. “And then I just did what any fella would do. I wooed her. Sent her present after present, each one nicer than the last, until she finally said she’d be my girl. And the best part is, you and the folks at home can read all about it, just as soon as the newest issue of
Picture Palace
hits newsstands next week.” He chuckled heartily, jiggling his arm around her waist. “Isn’t that right, honey?”

“Sure,” Margo said, gritting her teeth at the memory of that asinine photo shoot they’d suffered through the day before. Jimmy, mugging wildly in a Santa hat, while she pretended to unwrap box after box, oohing and aahing over the contents—an enormous stuffed panda, a string of pearls, a white mink
cape, all of which would be promptly returned to the studio’s props department as soon as the photographer left. Jimmy, who was drinking heavily and prone to disappearing for long periods of time between shots, had barely spoken to her, except to tell her and anyone else who would listen what an idiot he felt like. That was what
Picture Palace
would hold up to its readers as the epitome of young love. To think she actually used to take that stuff seriously! She’d had more romantic afternoons at the dentist’s office.

“Culminating with a pony, is that right?” the reporter asked.

Jimmy nodded proudly. “A genuine Thoroughbred California palomino. To match her beautiful hair. We’ll be posing for photographs with it up at the stables in a few days, so stay in touch with the press office before all the good shots are taken.”

“And what about you, Miss Sterling?” asked a woman in a purple dress. “When did you realize how you felt about Jimmy?”

When Leo Karp sat me down in his office and told me it was either Jimmy or my job
. Helplessly, Margo cast an eye around the supper club, trying to stall for time. Like an iron filing to a magnet, her gaze was drawn directly to Dane Forrest.

Of course he’d be here
, she thought bitterly. He was standing next to a table, his arm around a peroxided blonde in a blue fox stole. Margo had never seen her before, but even from across the room it was clear she was not the sort of girl who would ever darken the doorway of the Orange Grove Academy. The blonde was laughing uproariously at something Dane had said, throwing her head far enough back to make sure he got a good look down her red sequined gown. He glanced up as he pulled out a chair for his companion, and for a single, breathless moment, Margo thought he caught her gaze. Even from all the
way across the room, she could make out the deep green of his eyes.

“Miss Sterling,” pressed the woman. “How did you know Jimmy was the guy for you?”

The words fell out in a tumble. “I’d loved him ever so long, from the pictures. And then we met by chance my first day on the lot. I was awfully scared, and he was so kind. I felt as though he understood me. As though we could understand each other. As though I could tell him anything and he’d understand.”

“Not bad,” Jimmy murmured, so only she could hear. “Not bad at all.”

“How about a kiss?” asked a reporter.

“Sure!” Jimmy said. “Whaddya say, honey? Aw, look at the kid, she’s shy.”

Dane had his arm around the blonde again. He was staring into her eyes with that special attentive gaze that made you feel like you were the only girl in the world. He had looked at Margo that way. And Diana.
And who knows how many other hundreds of girls
.

Suddenly, Dane was gone. Jimmy’s face loomed before her, blocking her view. “Come
on
, Margo,” he hissed. “Just one. For the
camera
.”

Oh God,
no
. They were kissing. They were actually
kissing
right there for everyone to see. And of course, the flashbulbs were popping away.

Under the table, Gabby dug her fingernails so hard into her palms she thought she would draw blood. She almost hoped she did. She imagined the blood running warm and sticky and red
down her wrists, smeared thickly all over the front of her white taffeta dress. It would be like something out of a horror movie, like the Bride of Frankenstein. Then maybe her outsides would match the way she felt inside.

America’s Sweethearts. America’s Cinderella Lands Prince Charming
. The day those headlines started running was one of the worst of Gabby Preston’s young life. Maybe
the
worst, if you didn’t count the day her sister Frankie ran off. While all those little nobodies out there were swooning over the photo spread of Jimmy in white tie and tails, laughingly pretending to fit a glass slipper on a ball-gowned Margo’s dainty foot, all Gabby could see was the boy she’d danced with, daydreamed of, even thought she
loved
for more than a year, proclaiming his undying affection for her best friend.
Best friend
. That was a laugh. Some friend Margo had turned out to be. It was like Viola always said. In show business, the only real friend you had was yourself.