Love Me

M
ovie people were used to being up at the crack of dawn.

The lucky ones—that is, the ones who actually had jobs—were already hard at work at the studios by the time the dazzling California sun came up over the scrubby, green-dotted rock of the Hollywood hills: dressing sets, calibrating lights, tapping out rewrites, stumbling into the makeup department to have their imperfect, human faces carefully assessed, erased, and replaced before the daylight could expose anything the dream factories would rather keep hidden. The unlucky, unemployed majority had seen out the long night and their last dollar in the twinkling row of restaurants and ballrooms lining the Sunset Strip, dining and dancing and drinking away the choking fear that the long-awaited lucky break would never come.

And then there were the others, somewhere in the middle.
Not quite successful but not quite ready to give up, not quite famous but not quite unknown.

They were the ones who were trapped. Caught in a web of work and worry—not to mention the pills, which made the work possible—through which sleep could never quite find its way. Winding up in Hollywood purgatory, a kind of eternal sophomore slump: that was the greatest fear of everyone in the business.

And it was exactly where Gabby Preston found herself now.

Or maybe more accurately,
again
.

It was four-thirty in the morning, but Gabby was still wide-awake. She paced the floor of her bedroom in the house on Fountain Avenue in a well-practiced path, placing one slippered foot in front of the other all the way down the frayed edge of the rose-colored Oriental carpet to the dressing table, where she’d pause to yank up her pajama top in front of the mirror, checking to see if her exposed stomach looked any flatter than it had a minute ago. A quick rearranging of the perfume bottles and lipstick stubs, then over to peer inside the door of her wardrobe, as though some new and exciting purchase might have magically materialized among the collared blouses and sensible skirts hanging in neat rows from the matching hangers.

Next came a desultory shuffle through the albums resting in an untidy stack on the polished cherrywood surface of the RCA all-in-one wireless/record player. It was quite a luxury to have one of those babies all to yourself, but as Gabby’s mother, Viola, had told the keepers of the Olympus purse strings, given the amount of music the studio expected Gabby to learn every week, it was a necessary one.

Finally, she’d flop back on her quilted satin bedspread, where
she’d take a few deep, hopeful breaths before the thrum of her racing heart told her it was no use and the whole pattern began again.

How long had it been since she’d slept? Really properly slept, with dreams and everything, and without needing blue pills to make her eyes close and green ones to open them up again? A couple of months at least. Maybe—probably, if she was being very, very honest—even longer. And the blue pills were barely working anymore. She had gobbled four of them before bedtime last night—her last four—and gotten no more than half an hour’s light nap, tops. It would be hours before the pharmacies opened and she could send Viola out for more.

Gabby picked up the empty glass pill bottle off the dressing table and held it up to the light. A fine residue of blue powder coated the base. She couldn’t stick her finger all the way to the bottom to reach it, let alone her tongue, but if she filled it halfway with water and let it dissolve, she could drink it.

Maybe that would be just enough to push her over the edge into a few precious hours of sleep.

Of course, the powder would be a whole lot more effective accompanied by a nice big glug of gin, but Viola had put the liquor cabinet under lock and key.
Ironic
, Gabby thought,
considering it’s my five-hundred-dollar-a-week salary that’s paying for it all, right down to the padlock
. How would Viola feel if Gabby started rationing the food in the icebox?

Or better yet, if I slapped my own padlock on the door of her closet?
Ever since Gabby’s mother had gotten a load of the bounty in the trunks Amanda Farraday had moved into the spare room—the delicately jet-beaded evening gowns, the close-fitting Paris suits with the raw-silk linings and hand-stitched
seams so tiny and neat you practically needed a microscope to see them—the packages had been arriving from the most exclusive department stores in Beverly Hills. Smart striped hatboxes and stacks of shoe boxes and tissue-paper parcels yielding piles of complicated underthings in slippery French silk. Gabby couldn’t bear to imagine what the hell her mother—who at forty-five was positively
ancient
—thought she was doing with that kind of stuff. She liked even less to think about how much it was costing.

It’ll all be different as soon as I turn eighteen
, Gabby told herself. Then she’d have control of her money, and her life, and Viola would find herself on a budget so fast it would make her curly little head spin.
That is, if I don’t tell her to take a hike altogether
.

It wouldn’t be much longer now. Two years, maybe less, if she could figure out some way to dig up her original birth certificate. Viola had always been a little vague when it came to birthdays, ever since the vaudeville days, when the Fabulous Preston Sisters were known for conveniently being whatever ages the theater bookers and press agents thought would sell the most tickets. According to her official Olympus Studios publicity bio, Gabby Preston, singing starlet of stage and screen, had turned sweet sixteen on Christmas Day, the only birthday Viola had ever let Gabby or her older sister, Frankie, celebrate, since “if it’s good enough for the Baby Jesus, it’s good enough for the Preston girls” and the double billing saved on presents in the lean years besides. In reality, Ethel Ellen O’Halloran, as Gabby had been named at birth, had to be at least a year older. Maybe even eighteen already.

Still, she couldn’t do much without the papers to prove it,
and Viola had probably thrown those in the fire years ago. There wasn’t much Gabby’s mother wouldn’t do if it meant an extra year with her hot little hand in Gabby’s pocket.

Margo Sterling would never have this problem
, Gabby thought.

True, Margo didn’t talk about her parents much—or at all. But Gabby was a close enough friend to know that the incandescent blonde all of Hollywood—hell, all of America—had anointed its latest big-screen queen had grown up with pretty much everything a girl could ask for: a big, beautiful house in Pasadena, a top-notch education at some fancy-schmancy girls’ school, a place in Society (the capital
S
signifying the kind of rich people who would never willingly admit showbiz types into their rarified midst). And that was all
before
she’d seemingly done nothing but shrug her slim shoulders and step straight into the coveted role vacated by Diana Chesterfield in the box-office smash
The Nine Days’ Queen
.

Honestly
, Gabby thought,
it’s like she just said “Oh, all right, I guess I’ll be a movie star today.”

Margo’s romantic life had seemed similarly effortless. She had broken the heart of Jimmy Molloy, Olympus’s biggest star and the man Gabby had desperately wanted for herself—or at least, everyone thought she had, which was the important thing. Now Margo was practically living with Dane Forrest, who was just about the handsomest actor on the planet. Her picture had been on the cover of every magazine in the country. And this morning, by the time her maid had delicately sliced off the top of her soft-boiled egg, Margo was probably going to have an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
Talk about a charmed life
.

It wasn’t that Gabby was jealous of Margo, exactly. It was
just so unfair that it had all been so easy for her. Worst of all, nobody else seemed to mind. You’d think the anxious strivers and class-conscious immigrants who ran Hollywood would resent the entitled nonchalance with which the newest star in the Olympus Studios constellation seemed to grab every available column inch, but no, they just lapped it up as if they were kittens at a saucer full of cream.