Getting Garbo Read Online Free PDF Page A

call with Room Twenty-Two-Twenty. It was that easy in those days, and we had it down to a science.
    We were like a shadow army and we knew everything about the stars, often before anyone else. We’d be waiting and watching late at night at the Pierre Hotel for Mario Lanza or the Plaza for Susan Hayward, when two other celebs married to two other people would come smooching out of a cab and into the hotel (sometimes it’d be two guys). Days, maybe weeks or even months later, the gossip columns might pick up the news, but the collectors knew it first. We talked among ourselves, but we never told anyone else. Spencer Tracy would stop off in town and always stay with Katharine Hepburn in her apartment overlooking the East River, then she’d drive him in her station wagon to catch the 20th Century Limited out of Grand Central. We’d be there, but we kept the stars’ secrets.
    We felt as if we were part of their world. Sure, we knew we were just on the fringes, but everyone else was on the outside. It was kind of our duty, our responsibility, to protect them from prying eyes and narrow minds. They were stars and couldn’t be judged by the same standards as everybody else.
    â€œReva, look at that!” Podolsky yells at me across the portico.
    I’m just getting Jane Withers’s autograph; who knew she was still even alive? But I look in the direction Podolsky is pointing. Another second and I’d’ve missed the sight of the night: runty little Frank Sinatra, costumed and made-up as a Navajo Indian, hassling and suddenly leaping up to swing a roundhouse right like a tomahawk at mountainous Sheriff John Wayne. He only succeeds in knocking off his ten-gallon hat. Fearless Frank is obviously pissed at the Duke—probably about politics, money, or women, what else would they have to argue about?—but Wayne shoves Sinatra, who falls on his keister, and then dozens of people intervene, making it the second one-punch battle I’ve seen today.
    Later, as he walks me to the bus stop, I tell Podolsky, “You know, I still blame myself.”

4
Roy
    I’m the lead item in Sheilah’s column the next morning—her on-the-scene exclusive, of course. Roy Darnell swears eternal love for wife, Adrienne Ballard, chic Beverly Hills interior decorator to the stars, as process server slaps him with divorce papers. Darnell, known in Hollywood as Roy the Bad Boy, mixes it up in street brawl outside Romanoff’s.
    Okay, Sheilah. Close enough for jazz.
    The New York Daily Mirror gives me the entire front page of their tabloid:
    WIFE CHARGES ADULTERY!
    TV’S JACK HAVOC CAUGHT
    WITH HIS PANTS DOWN?
    The ratings on my show go up three share points the next night.
    â€¢ • •
    Nathan Curtis Scanlon chortles. You read about people chortling, but Nate Scanlon is the only person I know who actually does it. The laughing lawyer. An overstuffed, smallish man with a graying spiky crewcut. Enthroned in his also overstuffed armchair behind his oversized desk. Not a sheet of paper on it. Just the small stack of 8x10 glossies Addie gave me. Nate is leafing.
    â€œHmmm.” He turns one of the photos sideways, then upside down. Really studies it. “Don’t you have back trouble?”
    â€œOccasionally.”
    â€œI can see why.” There he goes again. He’s chortling. I’m burning. Waiting for his expert legal opinion. For which I’m paying a fortune per hour.
    â€œNo question about it, laddie,” he finally pronounces. “The little lady has got you by the gonads.”
    He isn’t talking about the lady in the photos. He means Addie. Addie wants blood. Guess whose? And the thing about Addie is that she always gets what she wants.
    â€œSo what do I do?” I ask.
    â€œWe can fight her. Every inch of the way. Drag our heels. Withhold tax returns, bank accounts, contractual information. Muddy the financial waters. But…eventually we’ll