Mammoth Titan had assembled us, a collection of stars (that is, those few Mammoth Titan players that people might recognize plus those of us who weren’t recognizable but were nice to look at), publicity flacks, and hangers-on to urge the citizenry to do right by Our Boys and Uncle Sam. We got no money for this — our duty — but we did get the free ride and all the gravy we could stomach.
I was there because Cal said he’d gotten me the part of the threatened peasant girl in Night of Dr. Jekyll, never mentioning that this trip was part of the fine print. I was a real catch. Not only had I done a lot of work for Mammoth Titan (through no fault of my own) but I could play the piccolo part of “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”
See, there was only so much train to go around, so the president hated to put a band on board, too. There was usually some kind of reception band in the towns where we stopped, but anyone on board who intended to sing had to have an ensemble they could depend on. This also cut down on the number of cars on the train, the amount of coal, and so forth; the president can be very patriotic when it involves being cheap. We were all pulling together to knock down Mussolini. Only he was doing it from his office back home, and we were doing it on the road. Gee, I’d have gone to my music lessons more willingly as a kid if I’d known that one day I’d be using my piccolo to smash Panzers.
Of course, everybody with any claim to stardom demanded a private Pullman. The president announced first that private cars would go only to those of his stars whose Mammoth Titan careers had netted a minimum of a million dollars for the studio. We’ve been around too long to fall for that; we argued him down to four hundred thousand. Even then, only one Mammoth Titan performer qualified. She hadn’t even applied for the private car. But her mother saw to it that she got one.
George shoved mailbags aside with his feet as he carried two trays of “food” down the center aisle. Mrs. Marr came after him, dragging The Child Star along behind. We all sat up a little, and smiled. Mrs. Marr had much to say in the casting of Baby Eloise films.
“Good ovation, wasn’t it, Eloise?” asked Olivia.
“Nice crowd,” Velvet agreed. “They loved you.”
The Child Star blinked. “Yes,” she said.
Baby Eloise was a moonfaced ten-year-old with a voice like an angel, dimples to make combat veterans weep in their foxholes, and a smile that would melt Hitler’s heart. She displayed none of these for us; chirps and charm are rationed for use in movies like Baby Eloise Beats the Saboteurs.
Mrs. Marr moved on behind George, the two of them vying for the deepest scowl. “I should ask her about my children’s book,” murmured Sissy. “She’s a children.”
“You’re writing a book?” Olivia inquired, eyes opening almost as wide as Sissy’s.
“A children’s book,” she repeated. “The Teddy Who Wanted to Be a Bear.”
Velvet stirred her supper a little with a fork. “No problem,” she said. “Just take off the teddy.”
Sissy’s head went back a little as she tried to figure this out. “Oh!” she exclaimed, finally. “Velvet, you have such a one-piece mind!”
Mrs. Marr, at the end of the club car, heard this and sniffed. We were not, obviously, fit to associate with The Child Star. George got the door open somehow, and they disappeared into their private coach.
As a matter of fact, we aren’t fit to associate with The Child Star. We’re known as starlets, but that’s courtesy; we’ve been starlets since talkies came in. What we really do around town is get photographed, primarily from the neck down. More marketable faces are pasted over ours, so that anyone who can act but has what the wardrobe mistress calls “figure deficiencies,” and which the president describes more flatly, need not disappoint her fans when she’s on a magazine cover.
Oh, I could tell you who pads more than her shoulders, and who has me standing in for her in those pictures on barracks walls. But I won’t because eating regular is addictive and I’ve got the habit bad. I’ll save it all for my autobiography, Beauty and the Bust. But you’ll have to wait until anyone who can sue me is dead. By that time, anybody who’d be interested will have kicked off, too, so you may never find out.
Anyhow, in return for the way we stick our chests out, we’re allowed to call ourselves actresses and stroll around the ranch house in those Western fillers. Sometimes men with monocles or buck teeth tie us to fiendish devices. Most recently, I had played the romantic interest of a ventriloquist’s dummy in the serial Cal Ryder and the Hidden Voice. But I spend most of my professional life lounging around in a velvet bathing suit.
Laszlo and Jim, two men who deal in these pictures for Mammoth Titan, entered with their own saucers of gravy. Jim set his down on the table across the aisle, and lit a Fleetwood. He liked a little cigarette ash in his gravy: good training for army food, he said. I don’t know if the military will get desperate enough to take him.
He blew the smoke at me and intoned, “Ya eedmo Ob-Ararat!”
“Thank you,” I said. “Rehearsing my lines will take my mind off what I’m eating. Think they’re really going to make that Jekyll movie, Laszlo?”
Laszlo scowled; he’s important enough that jokes about the studio are subversion, to him. “You want to walk home?” he demanded.
“I don’t want to go home at all,” I told him. “I have to pay for the gravy there.”
The conductor bustled back through the car. George was so perfect he could have been supplied by Casting: white hair, little white mustache, uniform polished and in perfect repair. But he came with the train. He was a Railroad Man to the bone, with forty years’ service. His only flaw was that he hated people — movie people, anyway. Not that movie people gave him lots of encouragement to change his mind.
“Be a doll, George, and take this back, would you?” drawled Velvet, pushing her plate at him.
He dodged it, not even looking at her, and rolled along, grumbling, “ ‘Fetch salt and pepper, take my plate.’ Be rinsing out their step-ins for ’em next.”
“Hey, I charge for that!” Velvet called after him.
The only person George ever accommodated was The Child Star. Jim figured it was because she was the only real star on the train, but I thought George just took her youth into account. He assumed she’d grow out of this movie business and get into honest work.
“Don’t you agree with me in that tone of voice!”
The sound of the penalty for agreeing with Mrs. Marr rang through the club car not once but several times. It should have warmed the cockles of my heart, but we just sort of lowered our heads and ate faster. We had been through this all before.
“Is she whacking The Child Star again?” inquired the refined tones of Jewell deChante, entering the car a step ahead of George and his salt and pepper shakers. “Let’s throw them both off the train, huh? Peace in our time?”
Aside from the crime of having the train’s only private car, Mrs. Marr had snubbed Jewell more than once. And, after all, Jewell was the ranking grownup star in the excursion. We knew this was so, for Jewell had admitted it herself. (She did not admit that she needed this trip, as she was having a difficult war. She had specialized in exotic vamps and was now considered too foreign-looking to play homegrown heroines and too sinister for the heroines of the Resistance.)
She was really much too important to be seen talking to us, but for the moment we were united against a common enemy. She glanced down at the letters all around us.
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you girls about the letters I’ve been receiving. Is there room for me at your table?”