Girl of My Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page B

the fuse.” “You think you can cold-cock this mess in a couple hours and then amscray?” That was the way even typewriters talked in those days. “Won’t get the girl if I don’t give her chocolates,” I said. “That’s all you know,” said the Royal.
    â€œPage thirty-two, third act,” the Royal warned, “we need eight pages to the mark Littlewits likes to see in his treatments. What’s Nora gonna do?”

4
    Fame: A Lamentation
    â€œTa-ra-ra-boom-de-yay, here comes our Joel McCrea, his star shines night and day, Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-yay!” Mossy’s crier ushered special guests into the party as they descended the steps from the foyer to the long living room that had been turned into a ballroom by Jubilee’s prop department. “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-yee, let’s welcome Edward G., hope he’s not mad at me, ’cause if he is I’ll flee.” The crier, who accompanied himself on an accordion, was an assistant producer named Teet Beale. His face looked as if it had been stomped on yet he had clearly spent the afternoon in a Jubilee makeup room. High arched, plucked eyebrows, hair dyed the red of an ace of diamonds. Beale had the performed jolliness of a court jester who knows of an impending beheading that hasn’t been announced yet.
    This was my first big-name Hollywood festivity, the first time I’d been at Mossy’s house in the three years I’d worked, off and on, for him. The word “party” applied to the evening not as a merry gathering but as an ecclesiastical chain of command from the cardinal on down. The guests were less a cast of characters in any particular production than a directory of those who had caught and held and in turn craved Mossy’s attention. They looked as if they belonged on a Quattrocento canvas that included everyone who was anyone in Florence. Mossy himself had yet to put in an appearance at his own gala; he was said to be upstairs.
    With no one paying attention to me, I looked around. The place was lavish, of course, Spanish colonial for a grandee at least, perhaps a prince. Yet I had the sense of rooms that were the outcome not so much of furnishing as looting. The style was imperial arriviste, with everything, from pictures to couches, appearing to have come from boxcars that had been uncrated that morning. The walls held Van Ruisdale, Giorgione, Van Gogh, Renoir, Manet, each one plaqued with the artist’s name and dates as if it were in a museum but with an effect more aggressive than informative.
    Guests floated by me snatching canapés from the trays of Filipino houseboys, engaged not really in conversation but in ultimatum. “You’ll have to choose, Lansing, between this town and me because I can’t stand it here anymore, fetch me a martini.” “Get me Loretta Young and you can have anyone you want.” Two men in doublebreasted suits were trading movie stars as if they were playing cards or hog futures. “I’ll give you Shearer for Talmadge but you have to send her back eight weeks maximum. Thalberg will insist.” A sleek high-cheekboned woman cast a frozen look at her weary ascotted watery-eyed husband whose hand was in the crotch of the scared brown boy who was passing escargots. “Oh Roo Roo,” he said, “don’t be so Oyster Bay.” And the most familiar refrain: “I’ll never work with either of them again and that’s final.”
    The room was filling up with both failure and conspiracy, neither of which I could recognize on this Saturday evening in my yearning twenties. I was so surrounded by what I took for success I was blind to everything but what shone. I felt green and dumb, as if I’d been in Hollywood three days instead of three years. Guests were auditioning for other guests’ opinions as well as their absent host’s; here was where you found out where you stood on the weights and measures