Starstruck (37 page)

Awkwardly, she reached into the pocket of the faded calico dress, eager for something to do with her hands, and felt something soft. It was a square of white cloth, clean and folded and smelling of lavender.

A handkerchief
. Margo smiled.
Just like he’s always given me
.

Silently, she held it out to him. They stood for a long time, and when at last his shoulders stopped trembling, she brushed his arm, just so he’d know she was there.

Absently, he reached for her hand. “She was pregnant, you know.”

“Oh.” What else could she possibly say? “I see.”

“She couldn’t have it. The studio wouldn’t let her. She was at the height of her career, in the middle of her busiest year yet. And what’s more, she was unmarried. Every contract player at Olympus, no matter how big or small, has a strict morality clause in their contract. Standard policy. Ever since the Hays Code went into effect.”

Margo nodded. The office of Will Hays, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, acted as Hollywood’s all-powerful, if self-appointed, censor, policing every picture a studio released for any hint of what it deemed “immoral” content, a monitoring that all too often carried over into the public—and sometimes private—lives of its stars. “I know. It’s something Mr. Karp is very keen on pointing out.”

Dane gave a rueful laugh. “They’re almost never enforced, of course. I mean, no adultery, premarital sex, excessive drinking, homosexuality …” He shook his head. “There wouldn’t be an actor still working in Hollywood. Mostly, the studios just use them to intimidate people into doing as they’re told. But for a star to have a child out of wedlock … well, that’s different. Much harder to hide. And if it ever got out, there wouldn’t be a theater in America willing to show her pictures. Her career would be over for good.”

“That’s horrible,” Margo said.

“It’s just how it is.” Dane gave his eyes a final, matter-of-fact wipe. “And look, she’s hardly the first actress to find herself in that kind of trouble. There are ways to handle it. Nobody’s going to buy the old this-here-baby-I-just-happened-to-adopt
story anymore, not after that stunt Loretta Young pulled with Gable. But there’s a clinic just south of Santa Barbara, not too far from here. Safe, discreet, expensive. The sensible girls go up there on a Friday and make a weekend of it.” He smiled sadly. “But Diana never was a particularly sensible girl.”

“You mean she wanted to have it?” Margo asked, wide-eyed.

Dane shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know what she wanted. I’d been away on location for a few days. We were supposed to have dinner the night I came back. I went over to the house to pick her up and found her lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs.” A choke of a sob crept back into Dane’s throat. “I still don’t know what happened. I don’t know if she fell, or if she did it on purpose … if she was trying to get rid of it herself, or even …” He shook his head again, as if to defend against the horrible thought.

“So what did you do?” Margo asked.

“What do you think I did? I called Larry Julius. He was on the scene in five minutes flat. Private ambulance and everything. After all, we couldn’t run the risk of information this juicy falling into the hands of the wrong paramedic.” He barked out a bitter laugh.

“Oh, Dane.” She didn’t know what else to say.

“I didn’t know she was pregnant until they told me at the hospital. She lost the baby, obviously. Fractured her ankle and one of her wrists.” Dane sighed. “But the real problem was with her head.”

“You don’t mean … brain damage?”

“Nothing that wasn’t damaged already. The first few days in the hospital, she wouldn’t speak. And then when she started
talking, she couldn’t stop. Raving for hours about people who were out to get her, seeing things that weren’t there. She was convinced the studio had put some kind of radio in her head so they could listen in on her conversations, maybe even read her mind. Don’t think I didn’t see a little lightbulb go on over Larry Julius’s head when she came out with that one.”

“The doctor called it a full psychotic break,” Dane continued, “so we brought her up here. And since then, it’s been pretty much the same. Sometimes she seems fine, other times … well …” He shook his head. “I’m glad today wasn’t one of those times.”

“You mean today was a
good
day?”

“Today was a happy medium.”

Margo shut her eyes, struggling to take in everything Dane had just said. “But I still don’t understand,” she said. “Why all the secrecy? Why not just tell the press the truth from the beginning?”

“The press? Are you
serious
?”

“Well, not the whole truth, obviously,” Margo amended. “But why not say Diana’s recuperating from an accident, that she’s not well—”

“Because
The Nine Days’ Queen
was already in production!” Dane shouted. “Because the studio had two million dollars riding on her snapping out of it. And in the beginning, we all thought she might. Later, when it became clear that wasn’t going to happen …” He looked over his shoulder, at the empty spot on the grass where Diana had sat. “That’s when Larry Julius had the idea to gin up the mystery angle.”

“But why?”

Dane gave her a sorrowful smile. “Because he found you, Margo.”

“Me?”

“Diana’s replacement. If he could keep up the public’s interest in Diana, he could keep interest going in you. Either you became a moneymaking property in your own right, or the stage is set for Diana’s magnificent comeback, the likes of which has not been seen since the resurrection of Christ. He could save the movie. He could protect the studio.”

Diana’s replacement
. So it was true. She heard Leo Karp’s voice in her head: “If Diana were here, what would we do with you?” Diana Chesterfield had been her idol, her inspiration, the woman she had dreamed of becoming one day. Well, that day was here. And the woman she’d adored was the one who could take it all away. Should Diana recover, they would never be the glamorous best friends of Margo’s girlish daydreams, shopping and going on double dates and having glitzy adventures all around town.
They’d make us destroy each other
, Margo thought,
or be destroyed
.

Dane was staring bleakly out at the ocean. “If only she’d
told
me,” he said. “If only I’d known. I could have helped her. I would have done anything for her. I would have talked to the studio, given her money,
anything.…
”

“Why didn’t you
marry
her?” It was crazy to be furious at the man she’d been pining over for months for failing to make an honest woman of her greatest rival, but her rage on Diana’s behalf, at the terrible turn of fortune that had bound their fates together, knew no bounds.

“Marry her?” Dane looked as though she had just placed a loaded gun against his temple.
“Marry her?”

“It would have been the decent thing to do,” Margo insisted. “The
right
thing. It would have fixed everything. She could have had the baby; you could have gone on with your lives—”

“It wasn’t my baby.”

“She could have—” Margo stopped midsentence, looking at Dane with her mouth agape. “What? What did you say?”

“It wasn’t my baby. And I couldn’t marry Diana, even if, God help me, I wanted to.” Dane began to laugh, a horrible, anguished laugh that racked his body. “You see, Margo, Diana Chesterfield was never my lover. Diana Chesterfield is my
sister
.”

M
argo felt her legs give way. The ground came up to meet her, and she gripped the grass tightly with both hands, as though it were the last thing tethering her to the earth. “Your sister,” she repeated dully. “Diana Chesterfield is your sister.”

Dane nodded grimly. His face was deathly pale. “Yes.”

“But you were in love.” Margo felt a balloon expanding rapidly inside her chest. “You were her … her …” The balloon popped. “Who
are you
?”

“Margo, let me explain.”

“What kind of sick,
twisted
—”

“Margo, please! You can’t scream here!”

A flock of nurses were already barreling toward them, white-aproned and ready for action. Dane caught her hand tightly before she had a chance to protest, and together they walked quickly to the farthest end of the lawn, where a grove of trees
surrounded a small artificial brook. Beside the brook was a limestone bench with a well-worn seat.

“Sit down,” Dane said.

“No, thank you.”

“Please.” Dane’s eyes were clear and sad. “The story you’re about to hear is extremely difficult for me to tell. When I have finished, you will be one of only three people in the world who knows it, and one of them is currently babbling in the loony bin. And so I would appreciate it if you would stop looking at me like I’m some kind of monster.”

His hands were shaking.
He’s terrified
, Margo thought. No matter who Dane was, or what he had done, her heart went out to him.

“I’m listening,” she said quietly.

Dane took a deep, ragged breath. “You know, I’ve imagined telling you this story many times. Now that you’re here, I don’t even know where to start.”

“Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

“Fair enough.” He took another deep breath. “I don’t know if I ever told you this, but I was born on a farm.”

“So was Diana,” Margo said. “Owen told me at the stables.”

“Well, that would make sense, wouldn’t it?” Dane said drily. “Our father was a small-time farmer. My mother was a mail-order bride, of sorts. Came from Sweden with her parents when she was a kid, wound up in Missouri. Her parents died of diphtheria, and she couldn’t pay the taxes on their farm, so she answered an ad my father placed in the
Kansas City Star
.” He smiled. “She looked just like Diana. When she sent my father her picture, he could hardly believe his luck.”

Margo smiled. “Did she tell you that?”

“She never told me anything. The old lady who came over from the neighboring farm to deliver me forgot to wash her hands first. Childbed fever, they called it. My mother was dead within the week.”

“Oh, Dane. How awful.” It was a ludicrously inadequate choice of words.

“Diana—her name was Dinah then—was four. But from that moment on, I was her baby, and she was my second mother.”

“And your father?”

“My father went from being a man who liked his liquor to being the town drunk. At least, that’s what Diana said; I never knew him any different. It was Prohibition, so he brewed his own whiskey from his corn. Drank his own crop, and then some. The farm had been in the family since the Homestead Act. Then poof, it was gone.” Dane flashed a bitter grin. “We beat the foreclosures of ’twenty-nine by at least five years. The Cudahys were always pioneers.”

“Cudahy?”

“The family name,” Dane said. “You are speaking to Ernest Woodrow Cudahy, originally of Hillsboro, Kansas.”

Ernie
, Margo thought suddenly. “Diana called you Ernie.”

“Always. She was never crazy about the name Dane. She thought it sounded too made-up, too fake. Do you?”

Margo shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I’m used to it now.”

“I’d be careful about that if I were you,” Dane said darkly. “A person can get awfully used to fake things around here. Anyway,” he continued, “after the farm debacle, Pa thought we might see how things treated us out west.”

“And you wound up in Los Angeles,” Margo finished.

“Right. We stayed in rented accommodations—and by that,
I mean it was a flophouse. The drunks across the way gave Diana such a hard time she was afraid to go to sleep. She found work from time to time cleaning houses, and I would go along with her, and knock on all the doors in the neighborhood until we found someone who would give me a couple of dimes to do some little odd job. But any money we earned, Pa would drink right up. So eventually, we just started to spend it on ourselves. We’d go to the movies, or spend a whole day’s wages on candy. Once Diana got a seventy-five-cent tip from a house she was cleaning and she spent it all on a single lipstick. I can still see it. It came in a beautiful gold case with a little mirror inside. The way she carried on when she brought it home, you’d have thought it was a rope of diamonds.” He smiled at the memory.

“Anyway, we’d been out here for almost a year when Pa disappeared. Went out to the bar one night and never came back. A week later a man from the city morgue showed up to ask if we could come identify his body.”

“You must have been devastated.”

“You know, it was almost a relief. It was just the two of us then, the way it should have been, with no one to get in our way. It certainly changed things for Diana. She was seventeen, and she was so beautiful.” Dane looked off into the distance, as though the young Diana had just materialized before him. “There was a woman named Olive Moore …”

Olive Moore
. The name sounded strangely familiar, as if Margo had heard it in a dream. “Who is Olive Moore?”

“Someone Diana once knew. It doesn’t matter,” Dane said. “The point is that there’s always a way for a beautiful girl to make money in Hollywood. Eventually, she heard through the grapevine about a job as a singer at a nightclub on the Sunset
Strip, and from there, an Olympus scout saw her and brought her in for a screen test. They signed her up as a contract player, twenty dollars a week. To us, it might as well have been a million. And after she’d built up a bit of a reputation with a few small roles, she figured this picture business was such a cinch, even her useless baby brother might as well get in on the racket.” He shook his head. “Somehow, she got me a screen test, although she didn’t tell anyone I was her brother; she wanted them to think she was recommending me on talent.”