The Song Is You Read Online Free PDF Page B

his apartment first for a cocktail. They’d had whiskey sours and Hop, mostly joking, angled to try to begin and end the evening right there on his sofa. Jean had yawned and wondered aloud if he really had any idea at all where the interesting people would be. That was what she’d said, “interesting.”
    “What she means is famous,” Iolene had said, sitting back and raising one sparkling leg over the other.
    “What I mean is important,” Jean corrected. With another yawn, she looked over at the side table and the set of framed photos on it. Nodding to one, she said, “This is your wife?”
    “Can’t say I know any important people,” Hop said, talking over her question. “But I know they like to roll in the mud as much as the rest of us. More, really. So let’s go to the mudhole, ladies.”
    Because he did know of a place that, thanks to a backroom betting parlor and hash den, was lately drawing some of the biz’s more adventurous types.
    “Make it happen for us, big boy,” said Jean, smiling for the first time. And, as she did, she was suddenly jaw-achingly pretty. Well, gosh darn.
    It had been late, later than late, and they’d racked up quite a tab at the Eight Ball, a sweat-on-the-walls roadhouse in a dark stretch of nowhere just east of civilization. By eleven, they’d collected a shabby but starry group. Iolene and Jean—Jean and Iolene, one of the men sang drunkenly—seemed to know everyone. But Jean never seemed satisfied, was always looking over heads, even famous heads. At one point, Sammy Davis Jr., bandleader Artie Shaw, and director Howard Hawks were all crowding into their table, pushing drinks on the girls, including a new fetch, a knockout white-blonde. Iolene, drinking only a few sips of Rose’s lime juice and soda all night, mostly sat, smoking Julep cigarettes one after the other. Jean imbibed at a more social pace and played it bright-eyed, leaving the full-on sprawling party-girl routine to the blonde who, Jean confided, was a burlesque performer at the Follies Theatre, where her stage name was Miss Hotcha. “What else could it possibly be,” Hop had sighed, shaking his head and smiling wistfully at her.
    Jean kept flipping her matchbook over and over in her hand.
    “Who you waiting for, Legs?” Hop had said to her, winking. “Clark Gable don’t make it out to places like this.”
    She’d looked at him long and slow and it was as mean and sexy a look as they could give, these girls. It was scorching.
    “She’s waiting for her new fella,” Iolene whispered in his ear, lower lip nearly pulsing against it in the crush of the booth. “She thinks he might come.”
    Before Hop could ask who the fella was, Miss Hotcha had pushed her tight little thigh against his, leaned on his shoulder, and began singing “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl” in his ear. It was a very good night, he thought. Very good night, boy-o.
    It was close to one o’clock when the biggest stars yet strode into the creaking, blaring roadhouse. Marv Sutton and Gene Merrel. Hollywood’s premier song-and-dance duo. Suave Sutton with his buttery baritone and dreamy-eyed Merrel, voice like sweet ice cream, both of them acrobatic, athletic dancers with pretty faces that could be plugged into any picture formula: two Broadway hoofers and one luscious blonde, two baseball players and one sultry brunette, two cadets and one fiery redhead. It was simple, and it worked over and over again. Sutton, the charmer who got the girl, dancing in glorious tandem with the angel-faced Merrel, who watched him get her. Seven, eight years ago, they were swinging it for peanuts in East Coast nightclubs. Next thing, they’re movie stars.
    Drinks were now on the house, bottle on the table, thanks to Sutton and Merrel’s own personal studio press agent, Bix Noonan, who kept the liquor flowing freely, kept the boys happy. Hop might well have stayed were it not for Miss Hotcha. Before he knew it, he was caroming along the Arroyo Seco