Melting the Snow on Hester Street Read online

  So he climbed into his car and drove – nowhere and everywhere – zigzagging on a drunkard’s mission. He almost hit someone on his way out – another dumb broad, leaping out at him: one of these days one of them was going to get killed. One of these days he’d get a plaque made: Gary Cooper Lives Next Door.

  But not tonight.

  Tonight, he drove to the filthy little hostel in downtown LA where he and Eleanor had stayed all those years ago, black smoke still clogging their lungs. Perhaps he would find her there?

  But he couldn’t find her there. The building was gone.

  He drove up to the old studio at Edendale, where it all began, their dizzy journey to the dizzy heights … and then he drove back to Hollywood, to the bungalow on Poinsettia, where they were living when they signed the contract – him and her and Butch Menken. It was where they were living when they finally got married, and where they were living when they built the Castillo … Perhaps she would be waiting for him there.

  But she was nowhere.

  So he drove on, west again. Back towards home. That was the intention, but then somehow he found he’d pulled up outside Butch’s apartment block. He parked the car by the main entrance and waited. It was a stupid idea. He hated it, every minute he sat there; despised himself. Butch wasn’t home. The porter had already told him. Butch was somewhere else, with Max’s wife.

  The vigil kept him busy at least. It kept him away from the Castillo and its silent telephone and it kept him away from Blanche. Some small grain of chivalry told him how important it was that he didn’t involve her in any of this. So he sat, biting his nails, nursing his aching hands and imagining Eleanor as she had been, as she was right now. This minute.

  He woke in the early dawn, neck stiff, head throbbing and like a homing pigeon, he drove towards the only place he could bear to be: his desk at Silverman Pictures.

  18

  At the sight of Joel Silverman’s Bugatti in the parking lot he felt a sour, unhappy twist. His sprightly, unsympathetic employer – whom, until yesterday, he’d believed was his unquestioning ally, was the last person on earth he wanted to deal with that morning.

  He was tempted to drive away – but to where? Where else could he go this morning? He needed to be at his desk. It was the place he felt the safest, always; the only place where he was able to think.

  So he parked up beside the Bugatti and headed across the sunny courtyard, hoping against hope and all experience that he might slip into the building, and past Silverman’s door without being noticed.

  ‘Max Beecham!’ bellowed Silverman with the customary vigour from his desk, a room and two half-open doors away. The sound of his voice made Max wince. ‘I thought that was your filthy, dishevelled shape I spotted shambling across my parking lot this early morning!’

  Max wondered if he could perhaps tiptoe on past the door, pretend he hadn’t heard him.

  ‘No good cowering out there, Max! I’ve seen you! Get on in here!’

  It was a long, wide room. A vast room, actually. Joel, not tall by any stretch, sat at the far end of it, a large window looking out over the barren Hollywood hills behind him, and an impressive walnut desk in front, oval, with solid gold edging, and the size of a large dining table. He looked small and neat behind it. His walnut-coloured oval head was perfectly framed by the matching, high-backed, gold-edged walnut throne. He sat quite still: a small, dense bundle of power and energy, watching Max as he loped unhappily towards him, not quite the angry man who had barged in to his office yesterday.

  Joel sniffed the air. ‘I can smell the liquor on you from here,’ he said. ‘What in hell did you get up to last night? You look like a tramp.’

  Max gave a careless shrug and flopped into the seat opposite him. ‘What’s up?’

  Joel considered him a moment or two. ‘Everything OK?’

  ‘Everything’s fine.’

  ‘You’ve been watching the markets?’

  Max shook his head.

  ‘Bad day yesterday … It’s going to be bad again today …’

  Max said carelessly. ‘Maybe Charlie’s right.’

  ‘Charlie Chaplin is always right,’ Joel said dryly.

  ‘Ha! Ain’t that just so …’ Max should call his broker. He would do that. Later.

  Joel shook his head. ‘I hope you got yourself covered, Max, my friend. It’s not going to be pretty today. I’m selling. Selling out. Just put in the orders …’

  ‘It’s only a hiccup,’ Max said automatically. ‘It’s what everyone’s saying.’

  ‘You read the Post yesterday? And the Times? … It’s time to get out, I’m telling you. The party’s over. Take my advice. Charlie’s right. Butch Menken is right. Take the hit. Make a loss if you have to. Sell while you can.’

  But Max didn’t want to talk about the markets. He didn’t want to talk about Butch. He didn’t want to sell. He gazed out of the window. Sulky. Nervous. He should call his broker. ‘Beautiful morning,’ he mumbled. It was all he could think to say.

  ‘What are you doing in here on a Saturday, anyway? It’s seven o’clock in the morning.’

  Max looked at Joel. ‘I could ask you the same thing.’

  ‘You could …’ agreed Silverman.

  ‘But I didn’t.’

  ‘Ha!’

  Max gave him a thin smile. They liked each other. Trusted each other, up to a point – more or less. There weren’t many you could say that about in this town.

  ‘It’s good you’re here, anyway,’ Silverman continued. ‘I was looking at the test audience feedback from Lost At Sea.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Joel studied him, his difficult son: ‘You thought I wouldn’t see them?’

  Max shrugged: ‘I’m doing a second screening.’

  ‘What? Just like that? With no changes?’

  ‘No changes.’

  Joel sighed. ‘They didn’t understand the end. No one understood the end.’

  ‘They were morons.’

  ‘All audiences are morons,’ Joel said.

  ‘Not the audiences I want.’

  ‘Then pretty soon you won’t have any audiences.’

  Max didn’t reply. He looked over Joel’s shoulder at the hills beyond, and wondered where his wife was.

  ‘Also …’ Joel hesitated. ‘Max, I have to tell you that Butch Menken has taken a look—’

  ‘He what?’

  ‘He came in and took a look at a couple of things …’

  ‘Oh come on! You showed him my movie without telling me?’

  ‘And he agrees … with me. It’s a good film. Nobody’s arguing with that.’

  ‘That’s mighty good of you both.’

  ‘But Butch and I agree—’

  ‘Butch-and-I-agree …’ Max mimicked him childishly.

  ‘—that we need to go with the test audience.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, Max. That’s right.’

  ‘Dammit, Joel, I know what I’m doing. The audience we had was the wrong audience. We should have done the screening after work – it’s not a movie aimed at dumb broads with nothing to do all day except ruin my test screenings. Of course they didn’t like it! It’s about men at sea. Fighting.’

  ‘Also … we got feedback from the Catholic League of Ladies.’ Joel continued.

  Max held his throbbing head, and groaned.

  ‘They don’t like it.’

  ‘Oh. You don’t say.’

  ‘They don’t like the tone.’

  ‘They never like the tone!’

  ‘They don’t like the whole idea of the mutiny. It upsets the—’

  ‘Oh come on!’

  Silverman shrugged. ‘They’re going to push for every state censor in the country to ban it. They want it banned. Max, I don’t have to tell you what that means. We’ve got to change the end.’

  ‘We can’t change the end!’

  ‘And the middle. And the beginning. We can’t put it out like it is – because nobody’s going to take
it. Not a theatre outside Los Angeles. We have to take the whole thing apart and re-edit. So.’

  He waited for Max to say something. Anything. But Max didn’t oblige. ‘So …’ he said again. ‘Max? What have you got?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Silverman shook his head. ‘Not good enough. Monday morning. You, me and Leeson. Get Leeson back in for a re-edit. We’re going back to the beginning. Going through everything you and Leeson cut out and we’re putting it back in again. In the right order, this time. And don’t tell me it’s impossible because I’ve seen the dailies. We have at least three different movies in the can.’

  ‘On the floor.’

  ‘We need to pick it all back up off the floor. And stick together the version that won’t give the Catholic dames any nightmares …’ Joel paused, looked briefly sheepish. ‘Butch wants to stick in some singing numbers,’ he added. ‘Which means a few days reshooting …’

  Max opened his mouth.

  ‘Enough,’ Joel Silverman snapped. ‘Enough, Max.’

  ‘Joel, this is the best movie I ever made. It’s the big one. If this one’s not a hit …’

  ‘You said that about the last one.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘And the movie before that. Enough. Max, I like you. You know that. I love you. I love your movies. But we got stock prices dropping like a stone. We got the economy on a precipice here … No more risks. No more. This is not the time. We need a hit. You need a hit. Go home to your wife. Take a bath, for God’s sake. Come back Monday morning with a new attitude. We’re starting again.’

  19

  They had come to Reno together eleven years ago. It was a month after the War had ended and the first and last time she had ever visited. She and Max, with new identity papers, new contracts with one of the largest studios in Hollywood and an undreamed-of fortune in the bank; they had travelled across this same desert to this same small city at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains, to tie the marital knot – quickly, quietly – and at last.

  As Eleanor sat quietly in her first-class carriage, she tried not to dwell on the previous visit. What a magical, delusional journey it had been; she and Matz with the world at their feet – all the hope they had carried with them then.

  Hope, she reminded herself, which wasn’t quite extinguished. Not yet. Not for her, or she would not be returning today. With or without Matz. Max. She was here in Reno again, full of hope – not to marry anyone, nor even to unmarry them, she assured herself. No.

  Divorce may not have been what brought Eleanor to Reno. But it tended to be the reason most people in the Reno-bound first-class train carriages made the journey. A city in the middle of nowhere: 500 miles from Los Angeles, almost 3,000 miles from New York, it had little else to recommend it.

  Reno, Nevada was famous for only one thing. It was the Divorce Capital of the World, and it had been for several years. Mary Pickford planted the fact onto the national consciousness when she came to Reno to take advantage of the state’s uniquely liberal divorce laws, back in 1921 (only to return to Hollywood a few days later and marry that silly fool Dougie Fairbanks, Eleanor reflected; there was no accounting for taste). Until then, to most people, if they had heard of it at all, Reno represented nothing more than hicksville: a dusty pit stop for cowboys and silver prospectors.

  By 1929 the streets twinkled with electric lights, gleamed with slick, modern luxury hotels, fashion stores, smart restaurants, casinos and expensive lawyers’ offices. Movie stars, society figures, anyone who could afford it: they all came to Reno to avail themselves of Nevada’s divorce laws, and the city had grown rich off the back of them.

  Outside her train window, dawn broke on a new day. The long miles of desert scrub which Eleanor had been gazing on, unseeingly, through most of the night and through first glimmers of sunrise, had turned abruptly into the brutal green lines of suburban gardens, and the train was slowing to a stop. Eleanor had been dressed for hours – drinking coffee; staring into the darkness. She had barely slept with the thrill of what the next few days might yet bring.

  Alone in her carriage in the middle of the desert, in the middle of the night, anything had seemed possible. But now she was here, the station platform awaiting her, and she wondered what madness had possessed her to come. It was a wild goose chase, one which Max had turned his back on long ago. Damn him. But she couldn’t do it. For her, the search would never end.

  Nervy as hell, she pulled her hat down onto her head, hid her eyes behind sunglasses – red from lack of sleep this morning; permanently red, in any case, like most movie actors’, because of the harsh klieg lights the studios used for filming. She wrapped a silver fox fur around her chin – unneeded in the desert warmth, but it hid her face – and regretted very much having employed a detective agency in a city where reporters lurked on every corner and waited to greet every new train that came in.

  Too late. It was done. There was no turning back. Employing an agency in Los Angeles would have been difficult, for fear of her identity being discovered: not only by the press, but by Max, who had expressly pleaded with her not to do it. New York would have been the obvious choice of course, except back then – God, even yesterday morning – she had still hoped, one day, to win Max over; that this day would arrive, and that Max would have been beside her.

  But Max could never have come back with her to New York. So here she was in Reno, alone. It was Saturday morning. She’d called the bureau from the station, before her train rolled out of Los Angeles, and it had been really very obvious that Matthew Gregory had not been expecting to hear from her. He sounded quite put out. He had apologized – profusely – and explained to Eleanor that under no circumstances would he be available until after the weekend.

  She might have turned back at that point. She considered it, but not for long. The train ticket was bought, after all. The note to her husband was written. She had left the house. The decision, put off for so long, had finally been made.

  And now here she was in Reno. She would spend the weekend alone, gathering her thoughts, and go to the bureau first thing Monday morning.

  20

  Gregory had taken a private apartment for her in the Riverside Hotel, a hotel Eleanor already knew by repute. Conveniently close to the courthouse (not for Eleanor, but for most of its clientele), the Riverside was the finest of a fine crop of hotels in the Divorce Capital of the World, and it had been designed, Gregory assured her, with client discretion uppermost in everyone’s mind.

  Her rooms were booked under the name of Miss E. B. Kappelman. Of course. For the same reason she had employed a detective agency five hundred miles from her and Max’s home. Kappelman was the name she used in all her business dealings with the Gregory Bureau. And Mr Gregory’s father had died, she assumed, none the wiser as to her true identity. She wondered what were the chances of Mr Gregory (Junior) meeting her in the flesh and failing to recognize her. Was it possible?

  She didn’t venture beyond the Film Colony much, not any more. Her studio contract, like all star contracts, dictated so much, from her clothes and hairstyle to the words she spoke in public, with whom and where, that it would have been almost impossible for her to lead a more ordinary life, even if she’d wanted to, and even without her famous face. Eleanor lived, for the most part, in a studio-choreographed bubble, and usually she forgot it was a bubble. It was her life.

  But last night the ticket collector had asked for her autograph. So had the boy who brought her tea and biscuits in the first-class carriage. And of course, only the night before there had been the incident with the waitress in her own bedroom. It was possible that Gregory Junior would not recognize her. But it was unlikely. And she needed to be prepared for that.

  In any case she was tired of the evasions, and tired of making no headway, and tired of living in false hope. How could the case proceed when she kept so much back from her own detective? Gregory’s father had charged her thousands of dollars and uncovered nothing new. Now she had travelled all
the way from Los Angeles to meet with the son, in the hope that he might, by some miracle, do better. Gregory Junior needed to know the truth. Something of the truth. Something. She smiled to herself, though she didn’t know why. Come Monday morning, he was in for quite a surprise. She dreaded it.

  21

  At five minutes to nine on Monday morning, Matthew Gregory sat at his father’s desk – his desk, now – gazing unhappily at the paltry array of papers related to the Kappelman case: papers so haphazardly organized and in such slim supply it made Matthew feel almost ashamed. He had not expected the client to reply to his letter, let alone to take him up on the – foolish – suggestion that she travel to Reno to discuss the case with him in person. But so it was. She had made the wretched journey, and he needed to make the best of things. Miss E. Kappelman was an excellent client. The bureau’s best, actually. Not that it was saying much.

  On the telephone she sounded sweet, he thought. Nervous. Classy. And full of hope. Almost as if …

  He realized it immediately after he had posted the stupid thing. He realized it again – and with a vengeance – when her telephone call came through. He should never have sent her the letter. What had possessed him? It had been madness to stir the peaceful waters. He could ill afford to lose such a client – especially now, with stock markets behaving so erratically and the agency in hock, and his late father’s broker calling in more margins every day.

  Matthew Gregory glanced nervously at the stock-ticker in the foyer, just beyond the glass doors of his own office. A small glass dome perched on a brass base, with a thin strip of ticker tape snaking from it, the contraption spewed the latest stock prices in an apparently unending stream of symbols, most of which Gregory never could quite recognize. They came direct from the Wall Street stock exchange, and kept on coming, ticker-tacker-ticker-tacker – for as long as the market was open – longer, if trading was heavy. Sometimes it took a while for the tape to catch up.