The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (36 page)

THE SCENE WAS this: Cocoanut Grove, Saturday night, packed so tight you had to hold your drink practically in your armpit, and the band loud enough that you gave up on conversation and nodded whenever you heard a voice just in case someone was talking to you.

You never went to the Grove on the weekends if you had any kind of self-respect at all—by 1934 all the stars had turned their backs on the Grove and fled to the Sidewalk Café, where they could drink themselves onto the floor without any prying eyes. The reporters had given up trying, and now they came to the Grove to dig up dirt on the third-rate bit players.

It was fine for the bit players, but I had some prospects.

Well, one picture. It hadn’t done well. I knew they were talking about putting me on pity duty with the melodramas that shot in four days on the same set. No extras, no stars; nothing to do but come to the Cocoanut Grove and look around at the bit players you were going to be stuck with for the rest of your life.

“You need a friend in the studio, fast,” said Lewis. “Come down to the Grove with me. There’s bound to be someone.” I nursed my Scotch and grimaced at the crowd for an hour, looking for a studio man I could talk to.

None. Damn Sidewalk Café.

I was on my way across the floor to leave when the music ended, and the dance floor opened, and I saw Eva.

She’d been dancing—strands of her dark hair stuck to her shining brown skin, a spiderweb across her forehead. If she’d been wearing lipstick it was gone, but her lids were still dusted with sparkly shadow in bright green and white that shone in the dark like a second pair of eyes.

I saw her coming and held my breath. I could already see her at the end of the lens—turning to look over her shoulder at the hero, giving him a smile, tempting him to do terrible things.

“You should be in pictures,” I said, and it sounded like a totally different line when you meant it.

Her audition alone got me into Capital Films for a feature with her. I knew it would.

There was no point in making her into an ingénue (exotic and ingénue did not mix), so we went right to the vamp. I made her a fortune-teller in
On the Wild Heath
. She captivated the lord of the manor, put a curse on him when he scorned her, and got shot just before she could lay hands on the lady of the house.

The Hollywood Reporter
called her “Exotic Eva” in the blurb—couldn’t have planned it better—and went on for a paragraph about the passion in her Spanish eyes. They wrapped with, “We suspect we haven’t seen the last of this sultry siren.”

Capital signed me for another flick, and started making us reservations at the Sidewalk Café.

Eva wore green satin that matched her eyes, and as we danced under the dim lights there were shimmers of color across her skin.

“I think I love you,” I said.

She said, “You would.”

It sounded ungrateful, but I let it go. There was time for all that; right now, our stars were rising.

Capital didn’t want her being a heroine yet. (“Keep her mysterious,” they said. “The fan magazines can’t even tell if she’s really Mexican or if it’s just makeup. It’s perfect.”)

I made her a flamenco dancer next, in
Stage Loves
.

The lead, Jack Stone, was nothing much—I was doing the studio a favor just having him—but at least he looked properly stunned whenever she was in the frame.

Originally Stone’s theatre patron was going to seduce her and leave the virginal heiress for a life with the variety show, but word came down that Capital was going to start getting strict about the Production Code, so the hero sinning was right out.

So instead Eva seduced the patron, and got strangled by the jealous stage manager in the last reel.

(The poster featured her bottom left, with a banner: “Eva Loba is Elisa the Spanish Temptress—She drives the men to crimes of passion!”)

The new script must have worked just as well; the studio asked for two more movies as soon as the film was in.

After the Sidewalk Café one Sunday I drove her home, to some bank of stucco apartments in a no-man’s-land north of the city.

“We have to get you a better place if you’re going to be worth photographing,” I said. “I’ll talk to the studio.”

“You shouldn’t,” she said. “I like it here.”

“But the cameras don’t,” I said, and cut the engine.

I helped her out of the car. Her skin was shining in the light, and her sharp green eyes were captivating, and I felt like some poor sucker lord of the manor for letting her get to me like this. I should know better. My head was swimming; I wanted her, I needed her.

Before she was steady on her feet, I pulled her roughly against me.

She took a breath. Then for an instant she was in two dimensions, flat enough for the streetlight to bleed through her like a stained glass window, and before I could even really understand what I was seeing the world had snapped back into place, and there was a flurry of jewel-colored bodies and sharp green wings.

They scattered, and I was left with a satin dress in my hands, blinking at the startling-white impressions of two hundred vanished birds.

My first thought was,
Something terrifying has just happened
.

My second was,
The girl knows how to make an exit
.

Eva was set to play Ruby, the sultry Latin dancer in the musical of the month (
Down Mexico Way
, maybe, or
You’re Lovely Tonight
, musicals all look the same to me). I wasn’t directing, but it was common knowledge that I was bringing her up the ranks, and if she didn’t show, it wouldn’t look good for me.

But when I got to the set the next morning she was already there and in costume, practicing the steps on the nightclub set with her partner.

I didn’t dare push it with him right there, so I watched quietly from behind the camera all morning, until the director called lunch and the crew scattered.

She stayed where she was, and for a moment I thought about how to keep the cameras rolling in case she did it again. (I couldn’t help it; a director’s always looking for the shot no one can top.)

“You look like you have something to say,” she said, folded her arms.

I kept my distance. If it wasn’t on film, there was no point in provoking her.

“Where did you learn to do that?”

She smiled thinly. “It can’t be taught. It’s just something you are.”

“No, I didn’t mean—where did you
come
from?”

“Nogales.”

That wasn’t what I meant, either. “But there had to be some reason you showed me and not anyone else,” I went on.

She looked at me, frowning, like I was some kind of idiot instead of the guy who had built her career from the ground up.

“I’m here to be an actress,” she said. “I’m not doing any of this for you.”

I let it go. It wasn’t the time to argue facts.

I said, “We could make a movie about it. I could build the whole plot around you, a leading part. Something from the Arabian Nights!” I paused, overcome with the image of pasha’s throne room and storyteller who" has a trick up her sleeve.

“Just think,” I said, “we could show everyone what kind of star you can be.”

“No.”

That stung. You’d think she’d have taken a starring role from the guy who knew how to direct her. “But imagine it,” I pleaded. “Forget the
Reporter
—this would be history! This town would never top it. We’d go down in the record books with the shot no one could ever figure out.”

She narrowed her eyes. “No one would believe it.”

Who cared what anyone believed so long as they paid to see it
, I thought.

I said, “I can make people believe anything.”

Then the crew was filing back in, and the director wanted to see her, so I let her go.

I stayed all afternoon to watch her backstage-at-the-contest scene (I was a better director than the music man), and to think how best to go about getting hold of that moment again.

She was too caught up in the thrill of it to remember who had given her the first shot; she didn’t understand how I had built up her audience, that was all.

At least she didn’t have much of a part in the musical. When she came back to me for her next contract, I thought, we’d have another talk about who makes a star.

The weekend the musical opened, the
Reporter
wrote her up as “Eva with the Ruby Throat” (I laughed—what were the odds?), and the studio sent her to the Trocadero alone, without telling me.

Turns out they had engineered a romance for Eva with Paul Maitland over at Atlas Pictures. He was marquee material—his last gig had been
Ivanhoe
, and they were talking about him for
Robin Hood
next. He was light in his loafers, though, so someone at Atlas had struck a deal with Capital to get curvy little Eva on his arm but quick.

They had arranged for Maitland to be waiting just under the canopy, so
that when Eva slid her arm into his, an enterprising photographer could get a decent shot before they ducked inside.

And plenty did.

The
Reporter
ran two pictures of them on the front page: one of them arm in arm, and one of him kissing her goodnight at the curb, his arms around her. The gossip column squealed—“Sultry Spanish Siren Seduces Arch Aristocrat!”—and wondered when they’d have the pleasure of seeing them together on the screen.

She really was good at what she did. The way she looked at him in those pictures—if you didn’t know, you’d think she’d loved Paul for years.

But now I knew better, and all I could do when I got the paper was stare at Maitland’s arms around her waist and wonder what he was going to do when she turned into a flock of birds and vanished.

She didn’t vanish.

The contract she signed for the Maitland affair must have been stellar, because her next two pictures went to other directors, and every time I picked up the
Reporter
there was a picture of her, her jewelry shimmering in the flashbulbs.

At first it was always with Maitland, and I didn’t like it, but I could understand. There were terms in her contract she had to fulfill.

But sometimes she was alone. Those I hated, those snaps of her standing in the doorway of the Brown Derby or the Trocadero like she had sprung up there all by herself, like she knew something the world didn’t know, like she had made this happen all on her own.

I knocked out two movies that year: a detective picture and a turn-of-thecentury romance. The romance took off (“Starmaker Strikes Again!”), and soon I could get into the Trocadero no matter who I had on my arm.

I never went alone; when you had as many movies under your belt as I did, it wasn’t hard to find a woman who would appreciate it.

(Eva rarely appeared where I was going. I suspected the studio had arranged things that way.)

I read up on the ruby-throated hummingbird, just on a whim. Turned out she wasn’t lying; the Aztecs had used them as talismans because of their power. Maybe that really was just something you were.

I saw the scene unfold in front of me: an ancient stone temple, a hundred wailing warriors, a human sacrifice loved by the gods who exploded into glittering birds. I’d have to put in some explorers (for moral perspective, the Code was pretty clear on that), but it could be a spectacular movie if only she’d agree.

Capital called me in. They wanted a historical epic, and they wanted me.

Right there in the office, I pitched them
Lord of the Birds
. Exotic siren, cast of thousands, dancing girls and bloody battles and history coming to life.

“I have an effect no one’s ever dreamed of,” I said. “People will wonder about it for a hundred years.”

They upped my budget on the spot, asked me who I wanted most.

“Eva,” I said.

The office men loved it, of course. They knew who made a star.

Lewis called from Legal. He told me Eva had a competing contract offer from Atlas Films that she was willing to take rather than be in a movie of mine.