“It’s either that, or I hit the nearest speakeasy and take my chances. Your choice, doll.”
“I — you…”
Grace stammered, then stamped her foot.
“You’re impossible!” she cried.
Frank said, “I’ll get my coat.”
It might not have been Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks’ Pickfair, but Joseph March’s “little house on the beach” remained a sight to behold. Great marble columns supported the roof over the sprawling front porch, which wrapped around one side of the house and became a path to the enormous swimming pool sparkling within view of the Pacific.
“They build the pools first,” Frank said as he pulled the car up on the circular drive. “Then they figure out how much space is left for the house.”
“What a spread,” Grace said.
Frank stopped the automobile in front of a wide set of six marble steps leading up to the front door, which was festooned with stone grapes on the vine. He whistled and killed the motor.
“Now you be a good boy and sit in the car,” she said as she opened the door. “That’s what drivers do and you, my friend, are a driver. Just as you said.”
“Just as I said,” Frank repeated with a knowing grin. “Go on. Get famous.”
“I very nearly am,” she said, and stepped out of the automobile, resplendent in a white silk gown with ruffled sleeves, a string of pearls, and a rosy-pink cloche hat atop her head.
Grace climbed the steps and was met at the top by a tuxedoed colored man who held open the front door and lowered his eyes when she entered the vestibule. She gave him a sharp nod and walked into a white wonderland of stone and glass, twinkling chandeliers and fresh, fragrant flowers in elegant vases. The door shut behind her and the servant vanished from sight just as Jack Parson materialized and exclaimed, “Grace, my dear!”
Jack appeared more refined than ever in a proper suit and tie, and more astonishing yet, he was grinning ear to ear. He stepped lightly over the marble floor to meet her and embraced his starlet with vigor.
“I feel as though I’m about to marry off my own daughter,” he said close to her ear. “A proud papa I am, though. Terribly proud.”
“I’m here to meet a director,” she said with a small laugh, pulling away from his arms. “No one’s brought out the blotter yet, Jack.”
“You don’t know how thrilled he is—thrilled, Gracie — with what he’s seen of our picture. And to be perfectly honest, I’m thrilled myself. Now that I’ve cracked it, I feel more alive than I ever have. I can’t believe I ever doubted it. Angel will never be topped, not by me, anyhow.”
“Why, Jack,” she said with batting eyes, “you sound almost…human.”
“A heartbreaker is what you are. Come, they’re in the projection room.”
“Projection room?”
“This house is a monstrosity. Pagodas, a sundeck — a pipe organ! And the swimming pool you saw from the drive is only one of two. Pictures pay, pretty baby. Just you wait.”
“I’m sick of waiting. Let’s go meet the gang.”
“You said it,” he said with an arm extended for her to follow. “Come on.”
She hooked her arm in his and together they crossed over to the farthest door from the front, their steps echoing hollowly throughout the grand marble vestibule. Behind the door was a narrow hallway that ended at another door. And behind that door was Joseph March’s projection room.
Two raised rows of four red chairs faced the doorway, in which three men sat in the dark with white faces reflecting the flickering screen before them.
“Hold it,” said one among them. “Hold the picture, I said.”
The smoky light emanating from the window above them petered out and the lights came on to fully reveal the movie men. From the trio advanced a short man in a tweed suit who squinted at Grace as he offered her his hand.
“Joseph March,” he said. “Damn glad to know you, Ms. Baron.”
From March’s right, a bald man in round spectacles half-bowed and said, “Alan Rivers. That’s some picture you and Jack are putting together. I can’t say I completely understand it, not with so much left to do I suppose, but it’s a corker.”
“We were just discussing your eyes,” March explained. “One grows so tired of the Pickford model, the ‘Papa, what is beer?’ ingénue. That’s out—”
“—Bow and Bara have proven that much,” Rivers put in.
“Yes, and Louise Brooks. And bankably, reliably, more to the point. This is an industry, after all, and a businessman likes to know what he’s getting himself into.”
“Naturally,” Grace demurred.
Jack cleared his throat and shifted his weight.
“Our boy Jack mightn’t agree,” March said with a chuckle. “Yes, now of course we’re artists in our way, old boy. Don’t pop your collar.”
“They’re a million miles ahead of us in Europe,” said Jack. “The Reds, too.”
March straightened up and shot a look at Rivers, who pursed his mouth and cleared his throat.
“The Reds,” March said. “Well, we’ll get to that.”
“We still produce eighty percent of the world’s pictures,” said Rivers. “Right here in Southern California. There must be a reason for that.”
“Of course there is,” Jack said. “We can shoot three hundred days a year, fourteen hours a day. You can’t do that in Moscow. And the land is cheap as dirt. Any man with a nest egg can start a fledgling studio out here if he’s got half a brain.”
“That’s changing,” said the third man, lighting a cigar and bouncing on his heels. “We have a system in place here, and we intend to solidify it in such a way that American pictures aren’t being made by every Tom, Dick, and Harry — or Vladimir, if you prefer — with access to a motion picture camera.”
“Permit me to introduce our favorite distributor,” Rivers announced, stepping aside to let Grace and Jack see him fully for the first time. “Joe Sommer.”
“Why, Joe!” Grace exclaimed, rushing forward to take his hand. “I didn’t know you’d be here today.”
“Hullo, Gracie.”
“Joe here has a hell of a foothold in the hinterlands,” Rivers said to Jack. “He could play Birth of a Nation to a theater full of Negroes in Michigan and probably fill every seat.”
“I leave the high ideals to fellas like Jack and Joseph here,” said Joe, smiling down at Grace. “You make the pictures better, and I’ll make sure every townie and hick from here to the Catskills gives ‘em a gander — and a dime.”
“Now that we’re all acquainted,” said March with a booming clap of his hands, “I suggest we retire poolside for cocktails and negotiation.”
Over a crumpled copy of Spicy Detective, Frank chain-smoked in the driver’s seat and occasionally glanced up at the white crests of the Pacific barely visible over the slight hill before him. Gulls screamed over the water and a mild breeze picked up, floating pleasantly through the car. Movement to his right caught his attention, and as he tossed his spent end out of the window he glanced over at a well-dressed fivesome settling in a semicircle on the side porch, overlooking the pool. Fine suits and tuxedoes, big cigars and lifted glasses of cut crystal, toasting the day, their success, the brilliant future. Angel of the Abyss and beyond, into permanent memory, beyond even death.
He sighed and dropped the magazine on the seat. He had told a ludicrous pack of lies to Grace, a story concocted straight from the pulp pages he was reading and half a dozen regurgitated gangster shows from the movies. Mexico and heroin and fedora-topped badmen. Frank almost had to laugh. He didn’t have it in him.