“One forty-four Monovale Drive,” I said.
“That’s in Beverly Hills,” he said, matter of factly.
“If you say so.”
I climbed out of my raincoat, folding it up and easing it into my overnight bag; anticipating warmer weather here, I’d taken the lighter coat, but was already warm in spite of it. The sun was bright in a blue sky, bouncing off the asphalt, slicing between the fronds of palm trees. This was California, all right.
“What street is this?” I asked, after a while. This seemed to be a central business and amusement district-shops, movie houses, office buildings, some of the latter approaching skyscraper stature (if not Loop skyscraper stature).
“The Boulevard,” he said. He wasn’t friendly; he wasn’t unfriendly.
“Hollywood Boulevard?”
“Right.”
I’d thought people might sleep till noon out here, but I was wrong. Either side of the Boulevard was busy with folks sauntering along looking at each other and themselves, reflected in the shop windows, where fancy displays showed manikins wearing expensively informal clothing, the latest polo shirts and sport jackets for men, sporty blouses and slacks for women, earlier examples of which the window-watchers were already wearing, white their predominant color. A few years before, I’d been in Florida; this seemed much the same, and not just because of the sun and pastel art-deco look-the spirit here was similarly that odd combination of sophistication and naivete I’d noticed in Miami.
Not that I wasn’t impressed.
“That’s the Brown Derby,” I almost shouted, pointing over toward the east side of Vine Street, where a great big hat squatted. Chicago’s Brown Derby was just a building.
“Sure is,” the cabby said, blase.
Pretty soon he turned off on a side street, into an area of stores, taverns, small hotels, motor courts, drive-in markets, apartment houses. We passed green parkways, pepper trees, palms. A pastel rainbow of stucco bungalows, white, pink, yellow, blue, with tile roofs, often red.
Then we turned onto a major thoroughfare. “What’s this?”
“Sunset Boulevard.”
Soon, he condescended to inform me, we were on the “Strip”: he pointed out such movie-colony night spots as the Trocadero and Ciro’s and the Mocambo. Many buildings along the Strip were painted white with green shutters, housing various little shops with windows boasting antiques or couturiers or modistes and other French-sounding, expensive-sounding nonsense, and restaurants with Venetian blinds protecting patrons from the glare of sun and passersby.
Hollywood was every bit as strange a place as I’d expected. Later that day, in another cab, I’d pass a small independent movie studio where chaps in chaps and sunglasses and Stetsons, and girls in slacks and sunglasses and bright kerchiefs (protecting their permanent waves) were standing at a corner hot dog stand either flirting or talking shop or maybe a little of both. The hot dog stand, of course, looked like a great big hot dog. Giantism was big out here: fish and puppy and ice cream cone buildings, mingling with papier-mache castles. It was like the ’33 World’s Fair, but screwier. People ate in their cars.
Right now, however, I was in a cab winding its way through the rolling foothills of Beverly Hills, on which were mansions, luxuriating behind fences in the midst of obscene green lawns, two stories, three stories, white Spanish stucco, white English brick, yellow stucco, red brick, you name it. The rich north suburbs of Chicago had nothing on these babies.
“This is Robert Montgomery’s house,” the cabby said, breathlessly, pausing before entering onto the private drive.
“So what?” I said, unimpressed.
After all, what was it to me? Just another rambling two-story Colonial “farmhouse,” white frame and brick, surrounded by a rustic rock garden, perched on a hill against a horizon of more hills. Hell, there’s one of them on every third corner back in Chicago.
He took me up the winding drive, up the sloping lawn. Plenty of trees, too, and not a palm in sight. Clearly this Montgomery was a guy with dough who wasn’t afraid to spend it. Clearly, too, this was a guy who’d rather not be in Hollywood, to the point of reinventing the place into New England.
I got out of the cab and handed in a sawbuck to the guy, saying, “Keep it.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Do you know Robert Montgomery?”
“We’re like this,” I said, holding up crossed fingers.
“I’m an actor, too,” he said, earnestly.
“Aren’t we all,” I said, and turned my back on him and went up the sidewalk.
I knocked on the polished white door, and soon it swung open and a small, attractive woman in her thirties, with light brown hair and a fine smile, greeted me, smoothing her crisp print dress, blue on white, as she spoke.
“You’d be Mr. Heller,” she said.
I had my hat in my hands. All I could think of was I hadn’t brushed my teeth since that goddamn sixteen-hour plane ride.
“Yes I am,” I said, the soul of wit.
“I’m Mrs. Montgomery,” she said.
I hadn’t taken her for a servant.
“Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”
She offered me her hand and I accepted it, a smooth, cool hand which I gently grasped rather than shook.
“Please step inside,” she said, taking my overnight bag (although I could use the toothbrush therein about now) and she stepped graciously aside and then I was in.
The hall was knotted pine, and the smell of pine was in the place too; it brought to mind Pegler’s aftershave, which was fitting I suppose, since Pegler brought me here. Mrs. Montgomery paused to gracefully point toward an elaborately framed picture that seemed a little out of place, amidst the otherwise early American trimmings of the place: a bunch of royal-looking dopes in a carriage.
“This picture is a special prize,” she said. “We were in England at the time of the Silver Jubilee, and this is a signed copy of the Jubilee picture. Painted by Munnings.”
“By Munnings. Really.”
“Yes. That’s Queen Mary and King George V on their way to Ascot. And there in the carriage are the Prince of Wales and his brother who became, of course, King Edward VIII and King George VI, respectively.”
“Of course.”
A stairway curved gently to the left; also opening to the left was the open-beamed dining room, where dark mahogany early American furniture was surrounded by wallpaper brightly depicting scenes from the Revolutionary War, redcoats and bluecoats cheerfully fighting. I guess I knew who Queen Mary and King George V would’ve rooted for. At a bay window, next to sheer ruffled curtains, sat a small oval table. At the small oval table sat Robert Montgomery. He was reading the Daily Variety, a cup of coffee before him.
“Mr. Heller’s here, Bob,” Mrs. Montgomery said, and Montgomery rose and smiled. It was the same urbane smile I’d seen in any number of light comedies; it was also the same urbane smile of the killer in Night Must Fall.
He was about my size, six foot, and weight, one-seventy, casually attired in white shirt and brown slacks; and, like me, was in his mid-thirties or so. His eyes were blue and his hair brown, and he wasn’t strikingly handsome, exactly-it was one of those faces that seemed soft and strong at once-but you knew you were in the presence of somebody.
We shook hands. He had a solid, strong grip, and his hands were not the smooth movie-star hands I’d expected; this man had, at some time in the not too distant past, worked a real job.
“Please join me,” he said, gesturing to the chair opposite him at the small oval table, and he sat down, and I sat down.
“We waited breakfast for you. Is French toast all right? Orange juice and coffee?”
“Sure. That’s very gracious of you.”
He folded the Variety and put it to one side of his place setting; only his coffee cup was before him-he really had waited to have breakfast till I got there.