The Fame Thief (12 page)

At the age of five, Dolly had discovered that certain sounds streamed colors through the air. The new-leaf green of the sycamores was the color that had curled around the room when her mother listened to classical orchestral concerts on the radio back in Scranton. The strings, in their upper register, produced a vital, living green that she’d never seen in nature until she looked out the window at the sycamores.

Not that she wanted to think about her mother. Mom had finally gone, moved in with the second assistant director who’d picked her up on the Boston Blackie picture, when Dolly was still a minor and the law said that her mother was supposed to be on the set. So Mom was living in Studio City now, and Dolly had her new place—and herself—
to
herself, for the first time in her life. Just her, the gleaming oak floors, the deep, glazed indigo of the tiles surrounding the big fireplace in the living room, and the green music of the trees.

She learned when she was seven or eight not to talk about the colors. They frightened her mother, not so much—Dolly thought—because her mother was afraid her daughter was crazy, but because it might interfere with her becoming a moviestar. Dolly was thirteen before she learned that
moviestar
was actually two words. Her mother had always run it together into three shining syllables with their own color, a kind of light piney brown.
Moviestar
was what Dolly—Wanda back then, of course, Wanda Altshuler—was going to be if she was very good and always did what Mother told her and never asked questions and let Mother choose her clothes and stayed away from Scranton boys and brushed her hair two hundred times a day and didn’t eat enough to get full. If she did all those things, and some others she learned about later, after they came to California, then the future was
moviestar
.

When she first tried to figure out how
moviestars
were different from ordinary people, Wanda pictured them like the men and women she saw in the church windows and the paintings of Bible times, people with a little gold plate shining around their heads. The gold plate announced immediately that these people were different, the same kind of different, she thought, as
moviestars
, shining somehow, less coarse and earthly than those around them.

When she was ten, Wanda learned the gold plates were called halos. When she was sixteen and called Dolly, she learned that
moviestars
not only didn’t have halos but also that they were, by and large, unlikely candidates to earn them.

The only problem with the duplex, she thought, as she allowed the front door to close behind her and entered the cool of the living room, was that there was no gate at the bottom of the stairs. Anyone who knocked on Dolly’s front door was already upstairs, just an inch of wood and a couple of locks away from her. The door to the lower unit was at the foot of the stairs, and the older couple who lived there had declined her offer to put in a gate with a buzzer. They rarely had visitors, they said, and they didn’t want to be running back and forth when people pushed the wrong button.
People
, the old man had said, in words Dolly saw in an unpleasant brown, coming to visit a pretty little thing like you.

She went through the living room with a glance at the trees outside—the sun too high to bring out her favorite colors—and put her bags on the dining room table. Just a few things for the trip: some expensive shampoo, a new hairbrush, makeup, a sweet pair of heels that had been cheap enough to buy on impulse.

She was cutting it close. Less than forty minutes before the car arrived.

She had to shower and dress and pack. Obviously no time to use her new shampoo and dry her hair, which put her slightly out of humor. She hated to go a day without shampooing, even though her mother had told her a thousand times that her hair would go dry and frizzy and then fall out if she didn’t stop
soaping
it so often.

“I’ll wash it twice tomorrow,” she said out loud to the mother who wasn’t there.

The weekend shimmered in front of her, night clubs and
music and big air-cooled rooms and casinos and those … those
interesting
men. Men who had killed people, men other men were afraid of, but who made her feel safer than she’d ever felt in her life. Men who treated her as though a coarse word would chip her. Men who tiptoed around her and took the edges off their voices when they spoke to her, no matter how they treated the other girls.

And she’d get to spend some time with Georgie.

All right. What first? Well, of course, pull the suitcase out of the closet and open it on the bed.

Two people had recognized her in the department store, a new record. She’d signed autographs for them, and then out of nowhere there were a dozen people, all holding out something for her to write on although most of them probably didn’t know who she was. She was going to have to do something about her autograph, she thought, folding clothes and wrapping them in tissue to keep them from wrinkling. The signature she’d been working on for the past year or so was too fancy. Looking at it now, it was almost embarrassing, florid and—and insecure.
Junior-high
insecure. And when, a year or so from now, there were thirty or forty people waiting—or a hundred, she’d seen a hundred or more gathered around for Joan Crawford—it would take far too long.

She’d work on simplifying it while she was on the plane.

She stood there with two pairs of slacks in her hand, trying to decide between them.

Georgie signed his name like lightning. He could carry on a conversation and sign autograph after autograph, as fast as people could hand him the paper. It might be the only thing he knew how to write, but he had it dead to rights. You could even read it. He always carried a pen, too. She’d need to buy a nice pen, silver, like Georgie’s, and keep it with her. It was easier to
do a good autograph with a nice pen. And nice for the fans. It showed that you’ve been thinking about them.

Both pairs of slacks, she decided, and the phone rang.

She folded the slacks carefully and put them on the bed. Just because she had more nice clothes now, that was no reason not to take care of them. The phone was in the dining room, and by the time she got to it, it was on its fourth ring.

“Miss La Marr? This is Patricia at the answering service. Isn’t it a beautiful day? You’ve had five calls.”

“In an hour? My, my. Let me go get a pad, and I’ll—”

The doorbell rang, and then rang again.

“Patricia, I’m sorry, I’ve got someone at the door. I’ll have to call you back.”

She hung up, glanced at her watch—getting pretty late—and went to the door.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me, Dolly,” said a queasy-yellow voice, a voice the color of smokers’ teeth. “Livvy.”

“I’m in a hurry, Livvy. Can’t this wait?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” The door was kicked from outside, down low, not lightly. “Open the door. I’m no more eager than you are to play a long scene.”

“All right, but just for a minute.” She undid the bolts, wishing she had the courage to be ruder.

“I was in the neighborhood,” Olivia Dupont said, as though daring Dolly to contradict her, “and thought we might have a chat. Are you going to invite me in?”

“I suppose.” She stepped aside and Livvy brushed by, shorter, as always, than Dolly remembered her, and dressed for the California summer in a bright floral print sundress and seamed stockings. The seams were perfectly straight, as usual; Dolly figured Livvy’s stockings were too intimidated to go crooked.

“This is cute,” Livvy said, giving the room an uninterested once-over. “A girl alone and so on.”

“Thanks. What do you want?”

“I want to know who’s—” She stopped as the phone began to ring.

“Hold on.” Dolly took the two steps up to the dining room, picked up the receiver, turned so she could keep an eye on Livvy, and said, “Not just yet, Patricia—”

“Not Patricia, Dolly,” a man said. “Tell me, how does Randolph Scott sound?”

“Kind of nasal,” Dolly said. “Like a farmer. Who is this?”

“I meant, how does he sound as a co-star? This is Max, darling.”

“Max.” She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, trying to find the voice. “Oh,
Max
.” She hadn’t spoken to him in more than a year. “So nice to hear from you.
What
about Randolph Scott?”

At the name
Max
, Livvy put down the little piece of ivory she was inspecting and wheeled around to face Dolly, and her eyebrows rose when Dolly said Randolph Scott.

Max hadn’t spoken. “You mean for
me
,” Dolly said, feeling a little slow. Studio heads didn’t call girls at her level and offer them leading men. “For a picture?”

“Well, of course, darling. For a picture.”

Livvy said, making no attempt to lower her voice, “Is that Max Zeffire?”

Max said, “Who’s there?”

“Nobody,” Dolly said.

Livvy said, “
Nobody
?”

“It’s Olivia Dupont,” Dolly said.

“That bitch,” Max said. “Tell her I said fuck her
and
her overbite.”

“I’ll let you tell her yourself. Listen, Max, about the picture—”

“It’s the female lead,” Max said.

Dolly’s heart dropped a few inches, and she put a hand on the table to steady herself. She said, “The lead,” and watched Livvy’s mouth tighten into a straight line. Then she said, “Gosh, Max, I’m flattered, but you’ve got to talk to Lew—”

Livvy said, “You gotta be kidding.”

“Of course, I’ll talk to Lew,” Max said. “I just want to know if you’re interested.”

Dolly took a moment, just enjoying the anticipation, and said, “What’s the story?”

“What’s the—Dolly, it’s the
lead
in a
Randy Scott picture
.”

“If it were the lead,” Dolly said, “you wouldn’t call it a Randy Scott picture.”

Zeffire had been using his mellow, persuasive radio announcer’s voice, but now it tightened a little. “Randy’s top-billed, but it’s the girl’s picture.”

“A western, right? If it’s Randolph Scott? How can a western be the girl’s picture?”

Dolly watched out of the corner of her eyes as Livvy sank to a sitting position on the arm of the sofa. She interlaced her fingers, put them between her legs, and closed her knees. It was an unusually vulnerable position for Livvy.

“It’s a new story,” Max said. “Never heard one like it before, and that’s saying something. Dolly, it
needs
you. It needs somebody who’s dynamite but not a real star yet, because you don’t want to give the end away. Randy’s an old gunfighter, right? Wants to hang them up and farm, and he’s living in a little town, just a dirt road, a general store, and a saloon. Are you with me?”

“Memorizing every word.”

“Funny girl. But you will be. Okay, so a new girl comes to work in the saloon, and she seems to like Randy, all right?
They’re getting acquainted when Randy learns there’s a kid after him—a young gun who wants to take him down. And then, sure enough, a kid rides into town, packing double, and sits around staring at Randy. But Randy won’t put his gun on, and one day he’s in the saloon, talking with the girl, when she pulls a shotgun out from under the bar and blows away the kid, who’s just come through the door behind Randy.”

“So far, not so new.”

“Be patient. Not so new, except for this. The
girl
is the kid who’s after Randy. She gunned the other kid down to get Randy’s trust, but she’s the one who was hired to kill him. Are you following me?”

“You have no idea,” Dolly said. She’d forgotten all about Livvy.

“So she goes home with him to the farm, thinking she’s going to kill him, but they fall in love, and she finally tells him the truth. By then, though, the black hat who hired her has sent someone else to do the job, and in the final shoot-out, she’s on Randy’s side. He wins, but she gets killed, and Randy buries her and puts his guns on and rides off into the sunset.”

Dolly said, “I want it.”

“Everybody’s going to want it, darling. But talk to Lew, and you can have it. I mean, you’ll have to meet Randy, but he’s a sweetheart. Hey, listen, do me a favor. Ask Livvy if she’s read the
Variety
review.”

“You mean, there’s a review in—”

“Just ask her.”

Dolly looked across the room to see Livvy staring at her with an expression of undiluted hatred. “Max wants to know whether you’ve read the
Variety
review.”

“That asshole,” Livvy said.

“I think she has, Max. What’s it say?”

“You’ll love it. It calls the picture a tidy low-budget thriller, says a couple of nice things about Dougie Trent, and Oriole’s script. But then it goes on to say, ‘As the good sister, Dolores La Marr manages to be sympathetic and intelligent at the same time, and she’s on the way to being one of the screen’s great beauties. As the hisser-sister, Olivia Dupont is so convincingly awful that those of us who don’t have the pleasure of knowing her personally will probably think she’s playing herself.”

“Ooohhhh.”

“Talk to Lew, sweetie.”

“I’m going away for the weekend, to Vegas. I’ll call him first thing Monday.”

“Tell him not to hold me up. This’ll make you a star, and he could use another star.”

“Thanks, Max.”

“You were good in the picture, Dolly. I knew it the first time I saw you.
Kid’s got something
, I said to myself.”

Yeah, and you took it when I was sixteen
, Dolly thought, but what she said was, “Talk to you Monday.” She hung up, her head whirling, looking down at her hand on the receiver.

“Well, well,” Livvy said. “Little Miss Marvelous. Max Zeffire calls you at home.”

“I’m in a hurry.” Dolly felt a rush of embarrassment at the pleasure she was taking in the moment. “You must have wanted something, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“I want to know who’s doing your P.R.”

“I’ll bet you do.”

“These reviews. They’re reviewing the movie they were told about, not the movie they saw.”

“Olivia, I have a car coming in ten minutes. Don’t you have an acting class or something?”

Livvy turned back to the shelves beside Dolly’s favorite
window. She picked up one of the ivory miniatures. “Who gives these to you?”