FORMATTED FOR READING ON CELL PHONE ONLY

Love Comes Down Like Death On Fierce Wings Swooping.

The Hollywood Golden Age, 1930-39

To be published in 2011.

The Fever Wind

1

There are reasons to live and reasons to die. And sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between them.

Out in the desert a silver train is racing across the wasteland of the Mojave plateau towards the lushness of Los Angeles.

Time passes. The losses add up. You come to know the slow crushing of the heart. You find out all about dreams and how they die.

Until one day there are just no reasons enough left to go on. Nothing really moves us anymore, nothing really persuades. Nothing lightens the dying heart, now turned to cold stone marble like the heart of a statue.

Leigh sits alone in silence by her swimming pool. She watches the glow of fire on the hills surrounding the city. Each night the horizon of fire is burning larger and closer, each night she spends alone drinking and watching it burn is making her heart more desolate, more like the desert plains she has seen outside the city, stretching out a thousand miles. From her pool terrace she can see the city lights of Los Angeles spread below her, as if she owns the entire city. Each light is a heartbeat, each light is a dream. Down there people are dreaming of the view from this pool terrace that is hers. And yet she owns nothing except the emptiness spreading through her beating heart.

In the saloon car of the speeding silver train Kurt looks out towards the burned out mountains which shelter Death Valley from view. He has always loved it out here in the desert, always loved the barren integrity of the landscape. The treeless ocher mountains of fractured rock, crumbling timelessly in the heat, the clear blue sky arching over the naked shimmering wasteland.

Twenty years ago he would drive out here all night from Los Angeles with a bottle of bourbon and walk out on the pure white soda flats at dawn to drink it.

Then he would go home and write.

We are engulfed in losses we cannot bear. The lost loves. The dead friends. The parents and children we once reached out for but who now are no longer.

The light dying, the warmth in the heart fading away. The quiet sickening of the soul. And each passing day takes another small piece of what was best in us.

Time stealing us all away.

Until what we once were becomes only a faded memory of our youth.

As unreachable and distant as the moon.

Leigh sits in the darkness by her swimming pool watching fire burn the dried out chaparral on the desert hills. She is thinking about her marriage which is also surely burning to the ground. The fire has been circling the city for five days and her husband has not been home for three of them. They say the fire may burn all summer, there is no water in the hills to put it out. There has been no rain for months and months, she cannot remember the last time the air was wet and soothing.

And now she finally knows her husband will never come home to her as a husband. Watching the fire these nights has made her understand that he has never loved her. She has married into luxurious servitude. He has captured her. A man like her father.

Hollywood.. Hollywood.. Hollywood..

Just the sound of the word can make you dream. It can lift you up, weightless and floating like a child. It can fill you with a vision of an enchanted life. A life honied with beauty. With laughter and sensualism. A life adorned with graceful lovers and voluptuous loves. A life undiminished by losses and the slow slow sickening of the soul..

Leigh listens to the lush ripple and splash of her pool fountains and it soothes her. She loves the sound of the flowing water in the darkness. Around her the garden sprinklers patter water on the thick foliage of her garden, on the gleaming oily wide leaves of the banana plants, the swooning giant ferns and dwarf palms, the avocados and lemons and pomegranates. There is no desert here on her hilltop. Here there is no possibility of fire.

Hollywood is where dreams go like elephants to die. And when our dreams die, then we quietly die too. That’s when you are old. That’s the first day of being old. When you rise in the morning and the dreams are no longer there. And when you thank Christ that they no longer are there, that’s when a man is ready for the ground.

She was his lover but she was not his equal. His cynicism shocked her because she was still only a girl. But that was in another world. Then Los Angeles was far away and Leigh knew nothing of love and what it could do to her. To anyone.

Love is just a pretty little song to take the pain and ugliness away.

He said.

Smiling.

It is June, 1939 and Kurt West is returning on the Super Chief to Los Angeles, a city he once fled to save his life and his writing talent. A city which has already broken him once and could easily do so again. A city he hates and adores like a cruel and irresistible lover.

On the train Kurt sits writing in his leather bound notebook. He has been here in the saloon car for most of the thirty odd hours that he has been streaking across the country from Chicago. He is always amazed by the immense rolling emptiness of America, always finding it a country so vast and barely conquered that a man surely could not run out of possibilities in it. And yet he has. Now he is returning to where he once ran out of chances before.

But they made it glorious. Hollywood is a vision made of ambition and dreams. They made an art for the poor, a fountain of dreams to inspire the ordinary lives of ordinary people. Fine extravagant dreams told by visionaries and madmen out of greed and lust.

In our minds, movies are memories of things that never happened to us. The lives we desired but could never have. To be an American is to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one. It is the movies which imagine our destinies for us.

It is Hollywood which has made the American dream, and the American dream which has made Hollywood. Like lovers bound together thrashing. They were all tailors and shoeshine boys and laundry girls before they went there. Hollywood made them into goddesses and emperors. They built it out of nothing but desert dust and mirage and good luck. They drove it forward on sex and greed and ambition. And then on champagne and morphine and madness. It was a gold rush for dreamers. They built their palaces and pools and filled them with champagne. As long as there were dreams, there would be champagne. It was a looter’s paradise, like all America was before it.

It is a mirage built by ravagers.

Kurt sighs and tosses his fountain pen down on his writing notebook with disgust.

‘Shit,’ he says wearily.

He listens to the rhythmic rattle and pulse of the train. It has been a long long time since he has liked anything he has written. Kurt closes his leather bound journal, lights a cigarette and inhales deeply. He’s not sure he can make it all the way to Los Angeles without a stiff drink. He plays with the idea in his mind like a secret seduction. He knows one drink will lead to many more and these drinks will certainly kill him this time. That is what the hospital doctors in Paris said and he has no reason to doubt them.

Nine o’clock in the morning. If I was in Paris I’d be drunk by now..

Kurt swallows another painkiller against the dull ache in his side, pain smoldering in his disintegrating liver which has mutinied against him, realizing with surprise that he has grown used to it.

The presence of death. I have grown used to it..

Kurt has seen better days and he knows they are not going to return. As a writer and a man he has seen the days come in with passion and seen them go in drunken exhaustion. Now he is in his mid-forties and he is worn and wounded. He might not look that old but he feels it. As if his body is full of cobwebs. His face like a worn suit. Even so, he tries to always be pleasant, as if he is quietly amused by the brutality of life. He has always been a cynical man, at least since the day he realized that his youth was over and things would never be as they had promised. Not for him nor for anyone. He has never lacked a sense of comic irony. Sometimes he cannot help but think that life itself is poorly written.

Kurt knows he gives the appearance of the well-abused recovering alcoholic that he is. A man who has been hit by a train. He feels burned out and tired of living, like a candle flame which is low and flickering out. It is as if he has something missing in him now, something that once was his and inspired him, a piece of his soul gone which can never be replaced. He has seen things from which he can never recover and he knows it. He does not expect to recover any more.

Kurt turns and looks thoughtfully out of the train window at the familiar desert. The gleaming stainless steel Super Chief is thundering on rails from Chicago to Los Angeles, taking him across a burned out desert wasteland towards a last chance he does not want.

Facing Hollywood again without even a drink..

‘Shit,’ he says aloud.

2

At the new Union Station Kurt steps down from the train carrying his battered suitcase. Immediately he can smell the perfume of oranges floating in the dry air.

Los Angeles.. Still the fever in the air.

Fever coming off the desert like a bad and endless dream.

He looks around the crowded platform, a lazy palm is wind-stilled against a perfectly cloudless blue sky, the new stucco clock tower of the station is brilliant white in the sunlight.

Los Angeles.. Blue sky and burning air.

Heat and silence.

Death by sunlight.

Down the platform Kurt can see Jerry Steinman and a woman looking at him uncertainly, as if they are not quite sure whether it is him or not. Jerry looks older now but well- preserved, tall and handsome, in his mid-thirties now. He is dressed like a clean executive rather than the shabby writer he was when Kurt last saw him ten years ago. The woman is well-dressed and around thirty, good enough looking to be very attractive in any town but this. Both of them look like studio people.

Jerry is still hesitating, not quite sure if this worn man is really Kurt, it has been ten years and he has heard rumors around town that Kurt has been drinking himself to death in Paris for years.

Finally Kurt waves to assure them and to show some life so that they will not worry about the ridiculous amount of money they will be paying him to write nonsense for a childish popular musical.

Now Jerry energetically makes a beeline for him.

‘Is that you Kurt?’ he says warmly.

‘What's left of me.’

Jerry laughs and gives him an enthusiastic handshake, he’s delighted to see him, even though he looks bad. Jerry has always admired Kurt unreservedly, admired his truly exceptional talent for writing. When Jerry was a struggling writer he deeply appreciated the way an important and successful screenwriter like Kurt encouraged him and treated him as a younger brother, even though he was not in the same class as a writer. Kurt had it and Jerry didn’t, some are touched by the grace of God and some are not and there is nothing more to say about it.

‘Welcome back to Hollywood,’ Jerry says.

Kurt nods, too tired to fake any enthusiasm for it.

‘You look..’ Jerry says, trailing off as he searches for an appropriate word that won’t hurt or insult.

‘Older?..’ Kurt says, helping him.

‘You look just great Kurt.. Great. It's good to see you. Ten years gone by God,’ Jerry says sincerely.

‘Have you any idea how much it cost me to get to look like this? Bourbon isn't cheap in Paris nowadays,’ Kurt says good-naturedly.

Jerry laughs again, Kurt could always make him laugh with his dry cynicism. Now he seems wounded and beaten but still all right. Most of all Jerry is relieved to hear he is still sharp. His studio career depends on Kurt being all right, or at least still being able to write a script. Bringing him back to Hollywood on a rich contract is Jerry’s idea. He guessed that Kurt had to get out of Europe anyway, with war on the horizon, and Jerry needs a good writer locked up in his pocket if he is to transform himself into a successful producer. Ideas are the currency of Hollywood and a person who can create them is a prize.

‘This is Marge Sanderson,’ Jerry says, ‘Marge is my colleague at the studio.’

Marge shakes Kurt’s hand, she has a firm and dry hand, businesslike. Kurt wonders if she is an executive in production, if so then she is the first women he has ever seen with that seniority. Usually they are only story editors, even though they are far better than the men above them, and do the work the men are credited for.

‘I'm please to meet you,’ she says, money in her voice. ‘I’m the Head Story Editor for the Zalnick Unit.’

Kurt nods, realizing now that it is Jerry’s work she is doing, while he takes the credit and the promotions.

‘Jerry's told me all about you,’ Marge smiles smoothly, faking warmth but showing teeth.

‘That's a pity. Once the mystery's gone that's it, they always say,’ Kurt says pleasantly. In his experience even business women love to be flirted with.

Marge Sanderson is a Pasadena patrician, a very well-bred and groomed daughter of old California money. She's tight and repressed and ambitious, all business and cold threat. Already Kurt knows he will never try to seduce her.

Jerry puts his arm around her shoulder affectionately, ‘Marge and I are engaged to be married, just so you know.. So keep your hands off her.’

They both laugh, Kurt is surprised but carefully conceals it. Kurt is one of the few people who has always known that Jerry is a homosexual. Also that he is guilty and anguished enough about it to cover it up by making a marriage as a public show. Jerry’s career must be firmly on the rise now.

‘Well it'll be nice to see some kissing around the office,’ Kurt says, unsure what else to say.

‘Come on, the car's out front,’ Jerry says with the enthusiasm of a kid. Just being with Kurt makes him feel young again.

‘Take his suitcase Jerry,’ Marge instructs him, making it sound more like an order than a suggestion.

Jerry energetically takes Kurt's suitcase and they head off down the platform.

She barks. He jumps..

As they walk Marge studies Kurt closely, calculating whether he is a homosexual competitor for Jerry’s affections. Jerry has assured her otherwise but Marge knows of Jerry’s boundless admiration for Kurt, she knows everything about Jerry’s sexuality and she has decided that she is going to straighten him out even if it kills him. She has never been much interested in sex herself and she sees no reason why Jerry cannot live similarly.

‘So you finally gave up writing kid?’ Kurt says as they go.

Jerry told him this in the letter he sent to Paris, offering him a new contract at the studio. Kurt decided to accept the contract only because he had nothing better to do in Europe. Other than to try and stop being an alcoholic and then survive a relentlessly approaching world war which would certainly begin with a Nazi invasion of his own city.

Still, Hollywood only just won out on balance, he would have taken on alcoholism or world war before Hollywood, but he finally persuaded himself that the two of them together were just too much trouble for a man that tired and drunk.

‘Ah.. my writing,’ says Jerry sadly, ‘I finally realized I was a hack. ‘Not like you, I read your novels. Beautiful, just beautiful. The real thing Kurt. I was so impressed you went off and really wrote them. Every writer in town always talks about doing it, but you really went off and did it.’

Kurt laughs dismissively, ‘Yes well.. I could hardly believe it myself. You'd be amazed how little it's possible to earn with a well-received novel. The better the writing, the less you earn.’

Jerry laughs and looks over at Marge, at once relieved to see she is smiling. Kurt has passed the first test, he is not an alcoholic derelict.

3

Leigh Anaton can feel the sweat running down her back, soaking her blouse and the tight red skirt of her trampy gangster moll costume as she shimmies across the wood floor of the main dance rehearsal studio on the MGM lot. When she dances like this, hard and long, she feels as if her whole body is without boundaries, as if there is no limit to her being that separates her from the world. As she moves she feels as if the swinging beat of the Gershwin music is inside her, as if it is moving her body without any help from her. As if she is made of pure flowing water.

Leigh is long-legged and curvaceous, when she moves she has the athletic grace of a young animal. When she dances she has a flowing sensualism that arouses the senses. Leigh Anaton is like leggy sex in motion, is what the New York Times theater critic said about her the last time she appeared in a small featured role on Broadway.

Leigh laughed madly when she read it, but it was enough to persuade her husband that she was finally ready to come to Hollywood. Even the great Lewis Zalnick was impressed enough by her dancing to declare her ready for her debut as a star in his motion pictures. Even if it meant that he had to start pretending to be her husband.

Now she is twenty-five and the moment of stardom is upon her at last. Now there are few who doubt that she will be a celebrated movie star before long.

Leigh has wished for this ever since she was a little girl in the Midwest. A middle-class dancing girl with such heart-stopping raven-haired and alabaster-skinned beauty that she has been groomed for movie stardom for fifteen long years. Most of her life. Kept like a prize orchid in a sheltered greenhouse. Groomed in dress and poise, in deportment and self-containment, she has become so expensively dressed and styled that she seems far more worldly and sophisticated than she really is. She has been shaped by parents and husbands and designers until she has almost lost herself in her polished refinement. Her face has been manicured for elegance until it has become divine. The face of a goddess, a woman that men will kill to have and to own.

When Leigh looks at her own face in the mirror now, she does not recognize it. It has a perfection she has never felt. Now it is only a place for her to hide. Safely concealed inside it she desperately holds on to her last lifeline to herself, the way she feels when the music plays and she is turned into flowing water moving effortlessly through space. Without this there will be no way back, there will only be a lifetime of watching people crumble with intimidation before her face, of watching lust and greed and ambition light up their eyes when they see her.

As Leigh shimmies sideways across the dance studio, she catches her high heel on an uneven floorboard and tumbles full length on the floor.

‘Shit,’ she says laughing and rolling on to her back to stare at the ceiling.

Herman Weill, her rehearsal pianist stops playing immediately. Herman is in his early thirties, he is tall and handsome and a brilliant musician, a Jewish composer in exile from the Nazis. He is a famous man in his native Germany, but for survival he has been reduced to playing the piano for a young dancer being groomed in rehearsal for a Hollywood musical. He has never felt so demeaned, and even worse, he has fallen hopelessly in love with her. And it dangerous to covet the jewel of a powerful man who can destroy his life at will.

‘Are you alright Leigh?’ Herman asks in his thick German accent.

‘Yes I'm fine. I'm only bruised from top to bottom,’ Leigh says, sitting up unharmed.

‘They shouldn't be making you dance in those impossible shoes,’ Herman says sympathetically. Herman is always sympathetic towards Leigh, he spends his days in a dream, watching her dance only for him, as if he is her secret lover. When he is drunk he leans over her sorrowfully and tells her she is his magnificent moving creature, and she laughs and gently tells him to go home.

‘Are you sure you weren't a little slow that time Herman? It seemed slow..’ Leigh says, teasing, still sitting on the floor. His solemnity always makes her feel like teasing him, then he will always laugh when he realizes that she likes him. She knows he is madly in love with her and she is not without mercy.

‘My tempo is never slow,’ he says without realizing he is being kidded, ‘In Germany when you play slow, the Nazis cut off one of your fingers.. See?’

Herman holds up and wiggles all ten intact fingers.

Leigh laughs, it is very rare for Herman to make a joke.

‘Then I guess it must be me then,’ she says, pulling off her tight high-heel shoe to check her foot. Her white ankle sock is soaked in blood around the toes, Leigh thinks nothing of it, she has seen this a hundred times. She holds her breath and forces the shoe back on.

Leigh gets up and pauses, standing in front of the window, looking out on to the studio lot. Outside on the street her husband, Lewis Zalnick is flirting with two scantily-costumed chorus girls. The girls giggle and wiggle compliantly as he casually strokes their backs while he talks. Making clear to all that he can have them at will. He is a very powerful producer, one of the biggest in all Hollywood and this is how ambitious young girls always behave when he reaches out to fondle them. If Zalnick likes what he sees, a waitress can become a princess overnight.

Zalnick is sleek and well-groomed, almost fifty but still vital and attractive, his hair thick and graying, his skin scrubbed and smooth and pampered. His manner has the ease of an experienced womanizer, of a man who carries the power to transform any girl’s life, and full knowledge of the effect this has on young girls with nothing to offer except themselves.

As Leigh watches the chorus girls make eyes at her husband, the door opens and Marta Marakova bustles in excitedly, throwing her bag carelessly on to the bench, pulling off her robe and revealing herself ready to rehearse in a tight gangster moll costume which matches Leigh’s.

‘Sorry I'm late darling!’ she says brightly to Leigh,‘I was busy getting such a fucking. I'm not sure I can dance another step.’

Leigh laughs, she loves Marta’s vitality, she hopes she might have half as much when she is Marta’s age.

Marta is in her early forties, she sometimes will reluctantly concede when she has been drinking. Normally she claims mid-thirties, but everyone knows she has already been a movie star for twenty years, one of the very few to have remained a star when the silents ended and the talkies took over. Not just a star, a movie goddess, glamorous and flamboyant and adored all around the world. Now she is moving into the twilight of her career, something she does not care for one bit. These days she is forced to play supporting roles to younger actresses and that hurts her, for unlike Leigh, rarely do they have her talent or charisma.

But underneath the wild flamboyance Marta is a kind person, she likes Leigh and she is giving her all the support she can, something unusually generous for one actress to offer another. Marta is giving Leigh more support even than Leigh’s husband is paying her to give.

Marta kisses Leigh hello, co-starring in the picture and dancing here together most days has made them good friends. Leigh is sweet and Marta is glad of it because she has never seen anyone dance like Leigh can, and she does not want to be humiliated in front of the camera when they must dance in the production numbers together. Marta already knows quite well that Leigh is holding back from dancing at her best so that Marta can keep up. She has been secretly watching the dailies, when Leigh is dancing alone the screen is on fire with sensual grace and magic.

‘I'm sorry sweetie. Have you been here long?’ Marta says, pretending guilt she doesn’t feel.

‘We are already finished now,’ says Herman brusquely. He never falls for Marta’s charm, instead he always tries to protect Leigh from Marta’s casual self-absorption.

‘That long?.. Well then, we'll just have to start over again won’t we?’

Marta has been a movie star for a long time and she expects simple obedience from the minor employees of the studio. A single complaint from her would see Herman off the lot and unemployed, something he desperately cannot afford.

Marta laughs, ‘First Hitler plaguing you, and now me.. Poor Herman..’

Herman makes a face at her, he knows she is not an ill-natured woman, even if he considers her full of herself.

Marta lets the matter pass as she notices Leigh looking out the window thoughtfully at Zalnick below with the chorus girls. She saw him from her car on the way in and she knows exactly what is happening out there. On every studio lot all day long it is the same, sex is being traded for ambition.

‘Hey. Stop looking at that. Don't be a little fool. Turn a blind eye,’ she says maternally.

‘It's not easy,’ Leigh says somberly, wondering if she ever loved him.

‘You knew Zalnick was like this before you married him,’ Marta says, calling him by the name is is known around Hollywood by everyone except Leigh and his many ex-wives.

‘I didn't know this,’ Leigh says truthfully. She only thought he was a wonderful kind man, like a rich uncle who would make her girlish dream of dancing for the world come true.

Marta isn’t a romantic, she well knows the commerce of love in Hollywood.

‘Well everybody else did honey. You should have asked around. I think I may even have had him myself once when we were both coming up..’

Leigh gasps, ‘Marta Good Lord! That's shocking!’

Marta laughs, in comparison to other actresses Leigh is still so absurdly guileless, still a Midwestern girl. It is the advantage of having a powerful husband, of never having been on the bottom where things are bitterly tough and the fighting is always dirty. It would take a lot more than that to shock almost any girl in town with a union card.

‘How else is a broad going to get to the top darling?’ says Marta mischievously.

‘I mean you shouldn’t tell somebody that about her husband,’ Leigh says, still unsettled.

Marta laughs and hugs her, realizing that incredibly, Leigh still believes in marriage like a small town girl might.

‘Oh don't worry, it was before you were born dear. I might be wrong anyway, I'd have to check my old diaries. And I probably didn't enjoy it anyhow.’

Leigh laughs too, she adores Marta and always has, ever since she was a child and watched her dance at the picture matinées on Saturdays. Now she can hardly believe she is her friend.

‘You are so shocking Marta. You don’t know how to behave like a normal person.’

‘And thank God for that darling!’

Marta takes her by the shoulders, suddenly serious, ‘Listen honey, he married you. That's all you need to remember. And once this picture is out and you're a big star he'll be down on his knees begging you for forgiveness. And to be in his next picture for cheap.’

‘I hope so,’ Leigh says thoughtfully.

She has often wondered about this during the five years of their marriage, if her stardom would mean that she would no longer be treated as his obedient child. But now she only hopes that it will bring her husband back to her.

‘There is no question about it Leigh. You will be an important star,’ Herman says firmly.

‘See,’ says Marta, ‘Even Herman knows a star when he falls in love with one.’

Herman blushes and clangs a discord on his piano to show his displeasure with Marta. She only laughs, Herman is so stiff that annoying him is irresistible fun.

Leigh turns to Marta, trying to spare Herman an awkward moment, ‘So you're telling us you used to like to sleep with men?’

Marta is a discreetly notorious lesbian but among industry friends she doesn’t bother to conceal it. On the lot she is powerful enough to control resentment, even though public exposure would certainly end her career. Fortunately the press have a professional code of conduct that prevents them from exposing public figures for their sexuality. Over the years she has seen some veiled fan magazine references to her occasional mannish dress and her frequent nightclubbing with girl pals, but her several marriages of convenience have stemmed any growing rumors.

Marta shrugs, ‘When I was starting out.. I didn't always have as good taste as now. But nobody can say say I never gave the boys a fair chance.’

‘As long as they had the 25 cents,’ Herman quips nastily.

Marta laughs unconcerned, Herman is hurt and it takes more than that to offend her.

‘Okay, let's get dancing honey,’ she says to Leigh, ‘We’ve got money to make here, so get your moneymaker moving. You too Beethoven.’

Marta slaps Leigh's bottom good-naturedly and Herman begins playing the Gershwin dance number again for them as Marta pulls Leigh into line alongside her.

4

In the back seat of the studio convertible limousine, Kurt and Jerry and Marge light up cigarettes as they relax, looking out at the passing orange groves. The trees are heavy with green oranges beginning to gain color. When they are fully orange they will scent the air and make it heavy and sensual.

Kurt stares at the orange trees, he has always found them beautiful and sybaritic, Los Angeles has always seemed to him like a sunlit garden and it is the only thing he has missed of it, the iridescent light casting on the deep green foliage.

Even the light is lush and luxurious here.. Seductive light.. Made of money.

‘So how are things in Paris Mr. West?’ Marge asks, shaking him from his brief nostalgia.

‘Call me Kurt won’t you?.. In Paris things are bad and getting worse. I doubt the peace will hold much longer.’

Jerry nudges him, ‘That's why you're better off here in Hollywood.’

‘Well,’ Kurt says unconvinced, ‘Certainly if Chancellor Hitler starts a war in Europe I'd only be getting in the way.’

‘He wouldn’t dare attack Hollywood,’ Jerry says laughing. ‘He wouldn’t last a week here. Zalnick alone could handle him.’

Kurt turns to Marge, wanting to know the lie of the land at the studio, where the power lies and who must be satisfied with his writing before the fat checks are signed. ‘So did you read my novels too Marge?’

‘Yes I did. I thought they were very finely wrought.’

‘Everyone at the studio thinks you're a genius,’ Jerry says brightly, trying to encourage him.

‘That has never stopped a studio from meddling with a writer’s work.’

Marge and Jerry exchange a glance, Kurt is very hard to read and even harder to manipulate.

Jerry takes the lead, ‘So listen, are you ready to get to work doing some good writing for us? We badly need some good gags right away for the scenes we're starting with reshooting.’

Kurt knows how to deal with studio executives, they are as easy to read as children. Like children they always want everything.

‘Frankly I've felt funnier,’ he says, ‘I wish you'd told me you wanted good writing before I signed the damn contract.’

Jerry laughs but Marge doesn’t.

‘Can I ask you Kurt,’ she says, ‘Purely as a professional matter you understand.. Are you still drinking?’

Kurt doesn’t like the question but knows it is a fair one under the circumstances.

The studio is paying him to produce ideas and an alcoholic only ever has one idea on his mind; where to find the next drink.

‘Nothing but water. My doctor says it’s drink only water or I won't last a year. My liver's a coward it seems. It’s abandoning me.’

‘Let me tell you, you made the right choice,’ Jerry says, apparently hoping that Kurt will catch some of his enthusiasm.

‘I'm still making up my mind about that,’ Kurt says flatly. ‘Have the driver pull up at Schwab’s drugstore will you? I need cigarettes if we're going to a story meeting.’

Kurt stares out at the orange groves again. The groves are beautiful and Los Angeles is as good place to die as any.

5

On sound stage twelve at MGM studios, Lewis Zalnick is striding through the dark hanger-like building towards an elaborate and glamorous nightclub stage set on which a chorus line of boy dancers in tuxedos are tap dancing to a lush orchestral playback of a Gershwin song.

Zalnick exudes power and intimidation. As the senior producer at the studio, one of the very few to have his own production unit, he is powerful enough to have virtual autonomy. Now that Irving Thalberg has been dead for three years, Zalnick is only answerable to the head of the studio, Louis B. Meyer, who trusts him implicitly. MGM is much the largest studio in town and this makes Zalnick one of the most powerful men in all Hollywood. He is smart and forceful and manipulative, but also charming and seductive when it suits him. He likes to get his way and he always does. Around town he is a legendary producer and womanizer in equal measure, and he has been for twenty years already. Actors and directors and writers know that Zalnick can make them or break them on a whim. They fear him for it and that’s exactly how Zalnick likes it.

On the set the camera crane swoops in on the smiling boy dancers as they tap in their elegant top hats and tails, all waving their shiny canes around like magicians.

Suddenly two of the dancers crash awkwardly into each other and stop dancing, throwing the entire chorus line into disarray.

Stefan Curtiz, the director, stands by the camera sighing in frustration.

‘Cut! Cut there boys.. What happened there? Heavens to fucking betsy..’

Stefan is a middle-aged Hungarian émigré with a thick accent, he's an important director, talented and successful enough to be trusted with the largest of productions despite his obvious homosexuality. Although homosexuality is quite common around town, particularly among the talent, it is looked upon publicly with disapproval, as something not quite trustworthy. No-one who wishes to have a successful career dare flaunt it openly in the industry. Hollywood runs on sex and if sex cannot be used to influence a person then they are clearly unreliable. And it is one more thing that must be kept from the public, like the adulterous affairs and the drugs and the abortions.

Like everyone else, Stefan does everything he can to conceal his taste for boys so that he can find work on dramatic and adventure projects without making the more masculine actors uncomfortable. Around town he has become known as a specialist women’s director and that is dangerous for his career. Nevertheless he is highly paid and highly respected for what he can do with women. He can make them beautiful and desirable, he can make then act well and win awards, and he can make them into stars.

Zalnick arrives at the set just in time to see the chorus line collapse into boyish giggling and ruin the take. He turns forcefully on Stefan.

‘What the fuck is going on Stefan?’

Stefan fears Zalnick, he believes it is possible that Zalnick is not beyond making a physical assault on him if he is sufficiently displeased with the way things are going.

‘The boys made a mistake Zalnick. That's all. They’re excited.’

Zalnick examines the chorus line, ‘Just how many goddamn sissies have you got up there? It looks like a Sunday party at your pool house.’

‘I do not wish to discuss this,’ Stefan says firmly, his prissy tone peeking through his thick accent. Even though Zalnick knows every detail about him, Stefan is very circumspect about making his private life public on the set.

Zalnick fixes his eye on Stefan, he can see the fear in him, ‘Oh you do not wish to discuss the sissies? This is the Zalnick Unit, you know what people are calling us? The goddamn Fairy Unit. Replace them, I don't want anyone dancing in my line who looks like a fucking sissy.’

Zalnick stomps off into the darkness of the cavernous sound stage, Stefan turns dismayed to Zalnick’s sympathetic young assistant, Gloria, who is standing with her clipboard ready to take down Zalnick’s every command.

Gloria laughs at Stefan’s dismay, the order is so obviously impossible that Zalnick must know it. Without the sissies there are no dancers for hire at all in Hollywood.

‘That won't be easy to do Stefan, Gloria says sweetly, fairly sure that Zalnick is only showing Stefan who is the boss,‘You’d better look for some dancing cowboys.’

‘Gloria!’ yells Zalnick without turning round.

Gloria jumps at his voice and quickly runs off after him.

‘Just ignore it..’ she whispers to Stefan as she goes.

Stefan sighs, there is hardly a boy dancer in town and possibly not even the whole world who is not homosexual. He sighs again and turns to the chorus boys.

‘You're supposed to be actors.. Act like men.’

When Kurt walks into Schwab’s drugstore he recognizes the smell of it as if it has only been ten days and not ten years since he was last here. Tobacco, coffee, malt, the cheap perfume of desperate actresses. Smell is always the most certain memory of all.

When he comes to the counter for his cigarettes he notices Sidney Skolsky the gossip columnist is still sitting on the same stool as always, as if the ten years have simply dissolved away. It is Sidney who has made Schwab’s famous across the country by writing his newspaper column here at the counter and mentioning the drugstore daily. Kurt notices he looks old and exhausted, like a cadaver propped up at the bar, as if he is having trouble believing his own lies about the endless glamor of show business.

It kills everyone sooner or later. It looks as if it’s about sex but in the end it’s always about death.

‘You still sitting here Sidney?’ Kurt says pleasantly, knowing that he has already recognized him. A long time ago they moved with the same fast nightclub crowd, in another life when they were both still alive.

‘Never saw any good reason to move.. What you doing back in town?’

‘I heard they'd struck money. Thought I'd come back and stake a claim.’

‘Is it true you're rewriting on the new Zalnick musical at Metro?’

‘That’s what they say.’

‘They bring you in to save it?’

Kurt laughs. It’s true and everyone knows it, but a rumor of trouble would be the kiss of death for the picture. Kurt knows not to answer him.

‘Must be a big picture..’ Sidney says, fishing for tidbits, ‘They've been shooting what? Six months already?.. Marta Marakova and some hot new starlet?..’

‘So they say,’ Kurt says, aware a wrong word could cost him his job.

‘I heard they were in trouble?..’

‘They are now they’ve got me working on it.’

Sidney laughs, ‘See you around West. Call me here if you get any good scoops for me. If we publish, we pay.’

Kurt laughs,‘Stay here by the phone. I’ll call you inside the next ten years.’

Across the street from Schwab’s on Sunset Boulevard, Jerry and Marge are waiting in the limousine at the curb for Kurt to return. Marge fans herself against the heat with a newspaper, it is forecast to be almost a hundred degrees today and she is wearing a linen business suit.

‘You think he can still write?’ she asks Jerry.

‘Yes. When we were both at Warners, before he walked out, he was one of the very best in town.’

‘That was a long time ago. And he's been drinking, he still is for all we know.’

‘He won't let us down Marge. I told him I was taking a big chance on him. I trust him.’

‘He doesn't look very well to me. He looks pale.’

‘He's stopped drinking, he said so. He just traveled all the way here from Europe. He just needs some sunshine that’s all. We'll get Gloria to look after him and get him outdoors, she’ll cheer him up. His agent, Ross Leland, told me some woman in Paris broke his heart, that's probably why he was drinking. She died or something I think, the agent said he was very upset about it.

Marge is still not convinced about the whole business, she wonders if her ambition hasn’t got the best of her judgment. She has never considered Jerry to be much of an executive, she has always been forced to carefully guide his opinion.

‘I hope you know what you're doing,’ she says, ‘Zalnick doesn't like screw ups one bit.’

‘Don't worry sweetie, he's a huge writing talent and he can take us both right to the top. If you want us to start producing our own pictures then he can give us a script, just like that,’ Jerry snaps his fingers with a pop. ‘Whoever controls good material controls Hollywood. You know that.’

‘I know honey, it's just he doesn't look to be that reliable. For us to be so dependent on him..’

Jerry watches across the street, Kurt is coming out of Schwab’s. When the blinding sunlight hits him he looks beaten and worn.

Kurt stands on the sidewalk looking around, he knows this strip of Sunset like the back of his hand, the bars and the nightclubs and the restaurants. This is the heart of Sunset Boulevard, his old stamping grounds. This is where he was young and successful, where he chased women and drank champagne. It has hardly changed at all since he last saw it.

He looks towards the Chateau Marmont Hotel, up ahead where the road curves left at the new Players Club.

Sunset Boulevard, embalmed in merciless flat light.

‘Sunset Boulevard goddamn,’ he says, finding it hard to believe that he’s really back again. Stranded in the burning air.

He looks into the distance, a horizon of brown smoke is staining the blue sky over the coastal Santa Monica mountains.

Fire in the hills..

The Studio

1

On the huge MGM lot the limousine moves slowly down the streets between the great sound stages. Kurt looks around contemplatively, he has so many memories of this place, he was once a carefree young man here, with fortune and success ahead and nothing to stop him.

Even though it’s hot, the streets are still energized, business is booming, production is high and there is work for the extras and bit players. Now bunches of them are strolling towards the commissaries for lunch, one group is costumed as Roman centurions, another as American Indians, there are baseball players and skimpily dressed chorus girls in sequins wandering around chattering. Kurt has always loved the mad circus of the business.

A man passes, comfortably carrying a large fake tree on one shoulder, his young assistant follows carrying a huge fake rock the size of a car on his head. Kurt laughs as they pause to let a man pass leading a train of drowsy camels.

It’s such a beautiful madness still..

Suddenly an attractive young girl jumps up on the running board of the slowly moving car, it is Gloria Sanderson, Zalnick’s assistant, bursting with energy.

‘Hiya Sis!’ she yells energetically at Marge, surprising her. Gloria is youthful and lively and pretty and personable, a perfect contrast to her older sister Marge, who always seems inert beside her. Gloria is twenty-one and full of beans, a sweet and smart kid who is liked by everyone on the lot.

‘Hello Gloria,’ Jerry says, happy to see her, ‘This is..’

‘Kurt West!’ Gloria says exuberantly, beaming at him. ‘I'm Gloria Sanderson, Marge's attractive yet somehow still unattached younger sister.’

Gloria smiles flirtatiously and offers Kurt her hand. Kurt smiles and shakes it. He likes Gloria already, she is a breath of fresh air.

Kurt laughs, ‘Oh you'll get snapped right up. A fast talker like you.’

‘Let's hope so,’ Gloria says cheekily, ‘Or are you making me an offer? I must say it seems very sudden Mr. West.’

Kurt laughs again, her verve is the best thing he’s seen for months.

‘Gloria's mad about your novels,’ Jerry says, trying to encourage their connection.

Gloria is suddenly more earnest, careful not to seem shallow or dizzy, ‘I really think they're touched with greatness Kurt.’

Kurt laughs at her solemnity, ‘Oh me too. Definitely.. Absolutely splattered with greatness.’

‘Knife In The Heart is practically my favorite book in the whole world,’ Gloria says sincerely.

‘You don’t look like that depressive a girl.’

Gloria laughs in delight, she is thrilled to be flirting with a writer she so admires, ‘You shouldn't have come back to Hollywood,’ she says sincerely, ‘You're too good for it. You should be writing great novels, not crummy musicals.’

Marge turns on Gloria with a severe look, ‘Gloria don't interfere.’

Gloria shuts up immediately. Marge is her boss and she has influence with Zalnick, enough to have her fired. Gloria blushes with the humiliation of Marge’s dismissive tone, showing Kurt her lowly position in the company.

Jerry absently turns to look at a handsome sissy boy dancer walking past in a tuxedo. He smiles flirtatiously at him, distracting Marge from Gloria.

Marge looks annoyed and Kurt at once realizes the whole story between her and Jerry. It is a madness of cross purposes and impossible desires.

Kurt turns encouragingly to Gloria who has fallen silent, ‘You can still say some more things about my books being great though. That would probably be alright.. Huh Marge?’

Kurt deliberately elbows Marge in the ribs as if they are old drinking buddies out on a lark. Gloria laughs, she knows that Marge hates to be treated so indecorously, Marge has always valued her dignity. Marge doesn’t answer or laugh, satisfying Gloria immensely.

‘You're just the way I imagined you'd be,’ Gloria says to Kurt, cheered again. Already she likes him a lot and is ready to flirt madly.

‘Where's Zalnick? At lunch?’ Marge asks her brusquely.

‘Yes. He's in a foul mood. Same as usual. Drop me off at the sound stage will you?’

Copyright Lee Vidor, 2010. All rights reserved.

Love Comes Down Like Death On Fierce Wings Swooping.

The Hollywood Golden Age, 1930-39

To be published in 2011.

Next Page / Previous Page