Margo was dizzygiggly drunk when she found that the Filipino and Sam Margolies had disappeared and that she and Si were sitting together on the couch that had the lionskin on it. “So you’re going to marry Sam,” said Si, gulping down a glass of champagne. She nodded. “Good girl.” Si took off his coat and vest and hung them carefully on a chair. “Hate clothes,” he said. “You must come to my ranch… Hot stuff.” “But you wear them so beautifully,” said Margo. “Correct,” said Si.
He reached over and lifted her onto his knee. “But, Si, we oughtn’t to, not on Sam’s lionskin.” Si put his mouth to hers and kissed her. “You find me exciting? You ought to see me stripped.” “Don’t, don’t,” said Margo. She couldn’t help it, he was too strong, his hands were all over her under her dress.
“Oh, hell, I don’t give a damn,” she said. He went over and got her another glass of champagne. For himself he filled a bowl that had held cracked ice earlier in the evening. “As for that lion it’s bloody rot. Sam shot it but the blighter shot it in a zoo. They were sellin’ off some old ones at one of the bloody lionfarms and they had a shoot. Couldn’t miss ’em. It was a bloody crime.” He drank down the champagne and suddenly jumped at her. She fell on the couch with his arms crushing her.
She was dizzy. She walked up and down the room trying to catch her breath. “Goodnight, hot sketch,” Si said and carefully put on his coat and vest again and was gone out the door. She was dizzy.
Sam was back and was showing her a lot of calculations on a piece of paper. His eyes bulged shiny into her face as she tried to read. His hands were shaking. “It’s tonight,” he kept saying, “it’s tonight that our lifelines cross… We are married whether we wish it or not. I don’t believe in freewill. Do you, darling Margo?”
Margo was dizzy. She couldn’t say anything. “Come, dear child, you are tired.” Margolies’ voice burred soothingly in her ears. She let him lead her into the bedroom and carefully take her clothes off and lay her between the black silk sheets of the big poster bed.
It was broad daylight when Sam drove her back to the house. The detective outside touched his hat as they turned into the drive. It made her feel good to see the man’s big pugface as he stood there guarding her house. Agnes was up and walking up and down in a padded flowered dressinggown in the livingroom with a newspaper in her hand. “Where have you been?” she cried. “Oh, Margie, you’ll ruin your looks if you go on like this and you’re just getting a start too… Look at this… now don’t be shocked… remember it’s all for the best.”
She handed the Times to Margo, pointing out a headline with the sharp pink manicured nail of her forefinger. “Didn’t I tell you Frank was watching over us?”
HOLLYWOOD EXTRA SLAIN AT PARTY
Noted Polo Player Disappears
Sailors Held
Two enlisted men in uniform, George Cook and Fred Costello, from the battleship Kenesaw were held for questioning when they were found stupefied with liquor or narcotics in the basement of an apartment house at 2234 Higueras Drive, San Pedro, where residents allege a drunken party had been in progress all night. Near them was found the body of a young man whose skull had been fractured by a blow from a blunt instrument who was identified as a Cuban, Antonio Garrido, erstwhile extra on several prominent studio lots. He was still breathing when the police broke in in response to telephoned complaints from the neighbors. The fourth member of the party, a German citizen named Max Hirsch, supposed by some to be an Austrian nobleman, who shared an apartment at Mimosa in a fashionable bungalow court with the handsome young Cuban, had fled before police reached the scene of the tragedy. At an early hour this morning he had not yet been located by the police.
Margo felt the room swinging in great circles around her head. “Oh, my God,” she said. Going upstairs she had to hold tight to the baluster to keep from falling. She tore off her clothes and ran herself a hot bath and lay back in it with her eyes closed.
“Oh, Margie,” wailed Agnes from the other room, “your lovely new gown is a wreck.”
Margo and Sam Margolies flew to Tucson to be married. Nobody was present except Agnes and Rodney Cathcart. After the ceremony Margolies handed the justice of the peace a new hundreddollar bill. The going was pretty bumpy on the way back and the big rattly Ford trimotor gave them quite a shakingup crossing the desert. Margolies’ face was all colors under his white beret but he said it was delightful. Rodney Cathcart and Agnes vomited frankly into their cardboard containers. Margo felt her pretty smile tightening into a desperate grin but she managed to keep the wedding breakfast down. When the plane came to rest at the airport at last, they kept the cameramen waiting a half an hour before they could trust themselves to come down the gangplank flushed and smiling into a rain of streamers and confetti thrown by the attendants and the whir of the motionpicture cameras. Rodney Cathcart had to drink most of a pint of scotch before he could get his legs not to buckle under him. Margo wore her smile over a mass of yellow orchids that had been waiting for her in the refrigerator at the airport, and Agnes looked tickled to death because Sam had bought her orchids too, lavender ones, and insisted that she stride down the gangplank into the cameras with the rest of them.
It was a relief after the glare of the desert and the lurching of the plane in the airpockets to get back to the quiet dressingroom at the lot. By three o’clock they were in their makeup. In a small room in the ground floor Margolies went right back to work taking closeups of Margo and Rodney Cathcart in a clinch against the background of a corner of a mud fort. Si was stripped to the waist with two cartridgebelts crossed over his chest and a canvas legionnaire’s kepi on his head and Margo was in a white eveningdress with highheeled satin slippers. They were having trouble with the clinch on account of the cartridgebelts. Margolies with his porcelainhandled cane thrashing in front of him kept strutting back and forth from the little box he stood on behind the camera into the glare of the klieg light where Margo and Si clinched and unclinched a dozen times before they hit a position that suited him. “My dear Si,” he was saying, “you must make them feel it. Every ripple of your muscles must make them feel passion… you are stiff like a wooden doll. They all love her, a piece of fragile beautiful palpitant womanhood ready to give all for the man she loves… Margo darling, you faint, you let yourself go in his arms. If his strong arms weren’t there to catch you you would fall to the ground. Si, my dear fellow, you are not an athletic instructor teaching a young lady to swim, you are a desperate lover facing death… They all feel they are you, you are loving her for them, the millions who want love and beauty and excitement, but forget them, loosen up, my dear fellow, forget that I’m here and the camera’s here, you are alone together snatching a desperate moment, you are alone except for your two beating hearts, you and the most beautiful girl in the world, the nation’s newest sweetheart… All right… hold it… Camera.”
Newsreel LXIII
but a few minutes later this false land disappeared as quickly and as mysteriously as it had come and I found before me the long stretch of the silent sea with not a single sign of life in sight