Hollywood Buzz (18 page)

“Miss Cochran still hasn’t given her blessing.”

Sam looked disappointed.

My ego got the best of me. “She’s bound to say yes. Meantime, we can shoot the ferrying sequence. I was approved to fly the P-51.”

The grand announcement was out, now I was committed. I could hope the saboteur would be caught before the time slot I’d reserved for showing off the P-51. I glanced at my watch: approximately forty hours from now.

Sam snapped to life. “Great! When?”

The food on the table was all but forgotten as I filled him in on the arrangements that had been made for Saturday at March Field. A current of excitement ran between us as we automatically began plotting out the details of how the segment should unfold for the shoot. A screenplay, Sam informed me as we jotted down notes and ideas on a spare paper placemat, was actually a series of directives—a one-of-a-kind manual for the director and actors to follow as they transposed the script to the screen.

A boon to my apprenticeship, there was a format to follow. An added bonus—the structure wasn’t as foreign as I would have expected. I’d used a similar process in composing brochures at Midland.

After sketching the whole thing out in more detail on yet another fresh mat—including rough scene description, music and voice-over direction—we relaxed against our respective benches, satisfied we’d covered most of the particulars.

“Congratulations are in order.” Sam tipped his bottle in my direction. “We just completed writing our first scene together.”

The milestone had an interesting ring. We chinked glass to bottle, then I took a sip of beer as Sam took another serious slug.

Novara had charged us with organizing “the works,” so, though not ordinarily his duty, Sam promised that first thing in the morning he’d contact the person responsible for getting a film crew scheduled for the shoot. For my part, I agreed to finalize arrangements with the March Field staff.

Sam had a trace of a smile on his lips and a look of admiration in his eyes. “You’re quite a woman, Pucci. I’m impressed.”

I felt the blood rush to my cheeks under his gaze. Not sure how to respond to the compliment, but hoping for more, I lowered my eyes, fixing them on the peas and peanuts dotting the plate before me.

“I’m serious,” he added softly. “You chased after that soldier who dropped the tubing from the catwalk.” He shook his head, smiling. “That was something. Then you finagled an advanced fighter for this film. Not many men could have pulled that off. You’re attractive, smart, capable…Much more so than I would have expected.”

The attention and intensity of his gaze were getting to me. I squirmed. The moment I’d hoped for earlier this evening was here, but now I was unsure about encouraging his advances. Temporizing, I asked Sam to tell me about his childhood. He signaled May Lee for another beer—I would have declined the offer
if
he’d thought to ask me—then began his story.

Sam, like me, was an only child. His father died when he was a boy, and his mother, a seamstress, also deceased as of a year ago, had to work long hours to support the two of them. Her profession frequently brought her to the movie studios where she created and fitted costumes for the stars. As there was no one to keep an eye on Sam when he wasn’t in school, many times she brought him along. To amuse himself while she sewed, he read or made up stories and wrote them down.

In high school, Sam won an academic scholarship to the University of California, Los Angeles campus, where he decided to be a writer. Since he’d made a number of friends at the studios where his mother worked, he was able to get a research job at MGM that eventually led to writing screenplays. It was a way to make a living doing what he loved, until he could afford to write at “a more literary level.”

Sam spoke freely about the past—the latest beer may have helped—and I enjoyed listening. We shared some common experiences and interests conceived from our lonely childhoods and a love of reading and writing. I felt some of my ambivalence give way.

“Enough about me,” Sam said turning his attention back to the dishes on the table. “Time for you to learn how to put together a serving of
Mus
é
e
Pork.”

I wasn’t hungry anymore and, of the platters of food on the table, that dish was the least appetizing of the lot. A gruesome mound of unidentifiable items, it contained numerous spindly things Sam said were mushrooms, but which I was convinced were really slimy slugs and tiny octopi.

Still, like the good soldier I was trying hard to be, I went along, first laying a pancake on my plate, then smearing it with dark plum sauce, then adding a sprinkling of scallions and, finally, scooping on a small pile of the jumbled dish. The idea was to flip in the two sides, tuck the ends to the center, and make a kind of burrito of the whole mess. Wouldn’t you know! My first bite dribbled and a splash of plum sauce landed on the bodice of Della’s dress. Not only that, the innards of my “meal pod” tasted cold, oniony and oily.

Sam, contrite over the stain on my bosom and my now downcast spirit, offered to pay for cleaning the dress.

“The color blends,” I said graciously. But my mood was definitely down. In a moment of pique, I decided to test Sam again. “Say, do you like to fly? I heard Frankie took someone up with her the day before she crashed. The someone was likely from your film crew. Was it you?”

Behind the steel rims, the puppy dog eyes blinked. “Nooo…”

May Lee chose that moment to plop several cartons for leftovers on the table. I wasn’t the least bit interested in lugging even one of them home.

“Dessert?” May Lee queried.

Sam turned to me. “We still need to come up with a plan for incorporating those other ideas, right?”

He was talking about the scenarios I’d proposed to replace the frivolous scenes that made up a good portion of the current version of
Sky Belles
. Testimonials, interviews, charts of facts and figures depicting the contributions we’d made to the war effort. Brody had agreed to the ideas in principle, but it was our responsibility to see that they were carried out. No small task. Each concept needed to be treated individually. That meant—while we’d completed a detailed outline for the ferrying segment—we still needed to hammer out similar summaries for each of the other proposed scenes.

Sam smiled and added, “How about going to my place for dessert and at least getting started?”

I checked my watch. It wasn’t that late and I wanted to have a rough shooting script and schedule in front of Novara. Besides, my gut was telling me Sam knew more about what happened to Frankie than he was letting on. Strike while the iron is hot.

“Great, let’s do it.”

Holding out a wad of cash, Sam said, “May Lee, would you please pack up a box of –”

Not fathoming a word that followed, I watched May Lee.

After she left, Sam said, “Guess I haven’t been such a good dinner companion, have I?”

His eyes were doleful, his hair disheveled, and, for some inexplicable reason of the heart, my attitude toward him softened. Maybe it had to do with “the something vital” he might know about Frankie.

I shrugged. “Guess we’re both carrying around some heavy baggage at the moment.”

Sam looked at me the way people look at you when you say something they didn’t think you could possibly know. Then his face brightened. “Let’s get going.”

***

Sam lived only a few minutes from May Lee’s in a neighborhood that was neat and quiet. Many of the modest bungalows we passed driving along the tree-lined streets were already dark. In others, pulled shades reflected a coppery glow of silhouettes of family life. At Sam’s instruction, I pulled the Packard to the curb.

The carry-out boxes had been propped between us on the drive over. I eyeballed the seat for seepage as we divvied them up for transport inside. It was a relief to find none.

The top was up and the smells of whatever we’d eaten were so pungent they’d permeated the car’s interior. I left the driver’s side window open a crack. I cringed thinking what the stuff must be doing to our insides.

Sam lived in a tiny Spanish-style bungalow. Painted light yellow with white trim, it had arched lead-paned windows and a tile roof. A porch light glowed softly, illuminating the front of the house lined with shrubs. Chest-high rosebushes bordered the sidewalk leading to the front entrance. We followed the path, the intense perfume of the roses overtaking even the cooked cabbage odor of the leftovers we carried.

The living room was to the left, directly off the entry. Distinctively decorated in sparse, modern furnishings, it was not how I would have envisioned Sam’s taste. The room’s most prominent piece was an L-shaped red velvet couch in a tubular aluminum frame. It faced away from us, in the direction of a fireplace set in the stucco wall. A glass-topped brushed metal coffee table was positioned in front of the sofa. The pieces sat atop an area rug composed of dark geometric patterns. Two chromium-plated pole lamps with pleated shades were positioned on either end of the sofa.

“
Bauhaus
,” Sam said, a sweep of his arm indicating he was referring to the furniture.

One of the pole lamps had been left on. Sam turned a dimmer device, softening its glow, then walked to the fireplace. Perching the cartons temporarily on the nearby built-in bookcase, he began stacking logs and kindling on the grate while explaining that Bauhaus was the school of design behind the clean-lined modernist furniture. He confided that he’d gotten the hand-crafted pieces “for a song” at the house sale of a bachelor actor who’d joined the Marines and was being shipped overseas.

While Sam looked pleased as Punch with the bargain, I couldn’t help wondering if anyone else had even shown up for the sale. The pieces really looked uninviting.

“Go ahead. Have a seat. Get comfortable,” Sam said, lighting a match.

I dropped onto the couch and was pleasantly surprised. The velvet cushions were indeed comfy. Settling into the crook of the L, I felt the urge to kick off my shoes and put my feet up. I resisted. Sam’s last moments with Frankie were foremost on my mind. I was determined to stay alert.

A dark marble statue of a Samurai warrior, sword drawn, rested on the coffee table. Across the room, a flame leaped in the hearth as the kindling caught.

The bookcases on either side of the fireplace were flanked by windows. I observed the books, bric-a-brac, and Philco radio on the shelves while Sam gathered the cartons. To his right was a small dining area that was actually an extension of the living room. At the center of a glass top table sat a typewriter; next to the typewriter, a silvery gooseneck lamp. Portions of the dining table’s glass surface not covered by the papers strewn across its surface gleamed in the light from an overhead chandelier. The table’s aluminum cylinder design was repeated in the four Bauhaus chairs surrounding it. The seats and backs of the chairs were black leather.

“Sorry for the mess,” he said, passing through the dining area, dimming the chandelier. “My home office.”

From my cozy corner of the couch, I watched Sam disappear behind a curtain of silvery beads, then took another look around. Velvet floor-to-ceiling drapes mounted across one wall’s center were a curious feature. It was an interior wall; there was no window. Had they been hung to cover a piece of artwork? I gauged the width of the wall. Maybe. But it was also possible that—given the thickness of the wall—the drapes covered a recessed nook.

I heard running water and the clink of dishes in the kitchen behind the curtain of beads. My visual survey flipped back to the typewriter on the table. A piece of paper sticking out suggested Sam had been called away, midsentence. What had he been working on?

“People deserve their privacy,”
the ingrained pesky voice leftover from my rigid PK upbringing chided. “
You’ve done enough snooping for one day.
”

At the table, I saw that Sam had been staring at the proverbial blank page. A nearby folder beckoned. Before the censorious voice could tickle my scruples again, I flipped it open.

This was my evening for black and white glossies. Only these weren’t of individuals. They were fuzzy aerial shots of trees and possibly a river. Squinting in the dim light, I tried to understand what I was seeing.

A sudden flourish of rattling beads at my back made me jump. I managed to hang on to the photographs, barely.

Sam was at my side, holding a large tray. He nodded at the images. “Stock footage for an upcoming shoot.”

“Ah,” I said my cheeks hot.

It was an occasion the PK voice in me would be reveling in for months. It couldn’t wait. “
You should have listened,”
it chimed in that grating sing-songy tone I hated. “
How will you get him to tell you about Frankie? There’s no way he’s going to trust you now.
”

Sam continued with the tray to the coffee table. The platter held a Japanese tea service and a half dozen or so miniature custard tarts. Set in strawberry-pink pleated paper cups, the Chinese dessert looked festive, indeed.

Now if only I could recapture the conviviality we’d built up to in our last moments at May Lee’s.

The fire had waned while Sam was in the kitchen. I watched while he completed a vigorous pumping of the bellows to fan the fingers of flame. He’d removed his tweed jacket and his shirt revealed the kind of shoulders I liked. Broad, tapering into a narrow waist above long legs.

Time to prove the pesky voice wrong. I walked toward the fireplace, determined to find a way to get him to open up. But how?

I needn’t have worried.

He turned from the hearth and reached for the radio. He twisted the knob. The smoky, world-weary voice of Marlene Dietrich crooning
Falling in Love Again
filled the softly lit room.

Sam came toward me. The flickering fire cast his angular face in a flattering glow of shadows and golden light. “Dance?”

He folded me into his arms, holding me so close I felt his heart thumping against mine. We moved slowly, shuffling in a small circle near the fireplace to Dietrich’s gravelly lyrics. “Men cluster to me like moths around a flame…”