Chapter 18
Chapter 18
The gossip columns went wild. Costume designers weren’t usually the subject of such gossip, but no one had ever moved so quickly from sketch artist to the head costume designer, and Flavio was beloved and famous. Everyone assumed that she’d either slept with Higgy Braxton, or blackmailed Flavio, or otherwise organized his downfall. How else had a woman won the job so quickly?
Photoplay hinted that someone— ??perhaps an ambitious assistant??? —had alerted Braxton to Flavio’s predilection for betting the horses at Santa Anita or Hollywood Park. Confidential was less subtle. ??Rumor has it a certain single-named Costume Designer owed money to his up-and-coming assistant, and she called in his debt. The new star has made a bigger bang than the A-bomb!??
Modern Screen only wrote, ??Lena Taylor is the new Head of Costume Design at Lux Pictures, and former head Flavio is out! Sources say that after Susan Hayward requested Miss Taylor for Oh Oklahoma! studio head Higbert Braxton fired the twenty-year veteran.??
She should have expected it, given the speculation when Flavio made her his assistant, but she hadn’t. “Ignore it,” Flavio told Lena at the time. “It’s only a matter of time before Hedda Hopper finds another hidden communist among the stars and everyone forgets all about this. Anyway, it will only bring more customers into my shop.” He planned to open a place in Beverly Hills, very exclusive, catering mostly to the stars, and Lena could tell he was relieved, but still she felt horrible about the whole thing.
“I don’t like people thinking I pushed you out.”
“Lena,” he said carefully. “Let them think it. Let them believe you’re a barracuda. It can only help you.”
“They can think me a barracuda. I just don’t want them to think I betrayed you after you’ve done so much for me.”
He smiled as he packed the last of his things into a box. “You and I both know the truth. The others don’t matter. It’s a blessing really. My severance will pay off Scotty, and all is right with the world.”
Yes, he was relieved, but Lena thought he looked sad too. Twenty years ending so abruptly, and in such a way.
It didn’t take her long to realize that she bore the brunt of it. No one would believe anything bad about Flavio, but they certainly believed it about her. In the beginning, she was too busy to notice, really, and the box office and the reviews for Oh Oklahoma! were so good that she shrugged off the snippy comment in Louella Parsons’s column in the Los Angeles Examiner about the ??lackluster?? costumes by the ??notorious Lena Taylor, whose rise at Lux Pictures has been most extraordinary?? —the movie was set on a wagon train, for God’s sake, the characters stranded in Indian country. It had taken weeks to dye and wear the pioneer dresses and sunbonnets so they looked appropriately weathered by the elements, and not a single scene required a ball gown or anything approaching fashion.
But the comments kept coming. As the months passed, her name appeared more and more often in Photoplay or Motion Picture Magazine , invariably accompanied by an adjective like notorious or infamous . It troubled her—not just the spite, but the fact that she was now so ... visible. But nothing had happened, not for years now. If she had not forgotten Rome, it appeared that Rome had forgotten her. Maybe ... maybe she didn’t have to worry so much? Maybe she could relax? She was the head costume designer at Lux Pictures now. Maybe being so high profile could no longer hurt her. Maybe it helped her instead.
“Does all the talk bother Braxton?” Paul asked her.
“I think he likes it. He laughs whenever he sees me. ‘Oh, there she is, the notorious Lena Taylor!’” She imitated Higgy’s brusque manner of speaking.
Paul laughed. “Have any of the stars refused to work with you?”
“God, no. I’m busier than ever. You know how it is in Hollywood. They love to say they’ve worked with me. Then they can add to the gossip.”
“It hasn’t kept anyone from working with Lux that Steve can see. He says it’s getting harder and harder to get in there.” Steve Jameson was Paul’s agent, and he was shopping around Club Medusa .
“Did he send Medusa to Higgy?”
“Last week,” Paul told her.
“Could you imagine it? If I got to costume your script?”
He laughed again and held her close. “How would we work together, I wonder?”
“Perfectly.” She nuzzled his chest. “Like we were made for each other.”
His hand went to her hair. “I hope you’re right, because I got the word today. Braxton bought it.”
“Paul!” She nearly jumped out of bed. She threw a pillow at him. “You jerk! Why didn’t you tell me right away?”
He grinned. “I liked the suspense.”
“Oh my God! We have to go out. We have to celebrate. Ciro’s—or ... or the Cocoanut Grove—”
“What about right here?” he suggested, reaching for her. “Let’s not go all Hollywood yet, sweetheart. It’s just you and me, let’s just stay that way for a little bit longer.”
Something in his voice made her pause. “What is it?”
“It gets complicated from here on out. I just ... I don’t know.”
“You’re nervous.” She marveled at it. She’d never seen him nervous before.
“A little.”
“It’s a bold premise,” she said. “Four women opening a nightclub on their own. But it’s brilliant. They won’t want you to change it too much. I know they won’t.”
He pulled her back onto his chest and kissed her forehead. “I guess we’ll see, won’t we?”
“I won’t let them.”
“Sweetheart, we won’t have a choice if we want it to go ahead. Usually I don’t care. It’s what happens. I just ... I’ve never written anything I cared so much about before.”
He was adorable when he was uncertain. She eased her leg over his hips until she was half covering him. “I’ll be there to help you through it, though it will break my heart if they change a word.”
“Really? Well, don’t worry. I won’t let anyone break your heart,” he assured her.
“I’ll hold you to that,” she whispered against his mouth.
It was impossible to worry when everything was going so well, and it was exhausting to be concerned about her past when she was so busy at Lux. The gossip about her “meteoric rise” died down as Paul’s film entered preproduction. Maybe she had nothing to worry about anymore. Maybe Rome was truly behind her. Maybe no one cared.
She pushed her unfinished piece of chiffon cake across the table toward Flavio and said, “The Brown Derby is usually crawling with gossips, and yet there’s not a single one here today to note us having lunch together.”
Flavio took a bite of her cake. He was such an elegant man that even the way he wielded the fork had style. “No one cares that we’re friends. Only that we’re enemies. Besides, the columnists are all on their best behavior. They’re still smarting over the Mitchum lawsuit, and it’s not as if there isn’t plenty of dirt all over Hollywood. Costume designers are small fry, especially if they keep their noses clean—which I assume you have? Or has my good influence waned since I’ve been gone?”
She laughed. It was true that Robert Mitchum suing Confidential for a million dollars had put a crimp in the magazine’s style. He’d lost the suit, but only on a technicality. “Maybe Confidential is smarting, but I don’t think the other gossip magazines are too concerned.”
“You should be happy they’ve grown tired of you.”
“Oh believe me, I am. I just get anxious when everything goes well, you know?”
He gave her a wry smile. “Enjoy it while it lasts.”
“I’m trying to. Besides, I’ve got all I can do now that production is starting on Paul’s movie. There’s a new censor I have to meet in a few hours. I don’t have a good feeling about him. I was hoping maybe ...”
“What? That you would somehow avoid having a censor? What did I miss? Is the world so changed?”
“It’s just ... it’s Paul’s. I’m feeling very proprietary.”
“Ah. Yes, of course. Have you given him my congratulations?”
“You can give them to him yourself. He’s coming to your party tonight.”
Flavio grinned. “Has he proposed yet?”
“Flavio—”
“Dear God, how long does he mean to wait? It’s been, what ... I can’t even count the years. You’ll be an old woman before long.”
“It’s fine,” she assured him. “I like things the way they are.”
“I see.”
“I do. Really.”
“Um-hmm.”
Lena felt herself flush and looked into her cold coffee.
He shook it away. “My dear, ask that man to get you a diamond. It’s absurd that he hasn’t. What’s he waiting for?”
Flavio did not know the truth, of course, and Lena wasn’t going to tell him, as much as she trusted him. Harvey and Charlie had offered to look into the divorce laws for her, but she was too worried—even just suing for divorce, regardless of whether she had to find Walter, and regardless of the technicality of her name change, would catch the eye of some private detective or gossip columnist, and the fact that she’d been Elsie Gruner when she’d married him would lead anyone curious to ... too many places she didn’t want them to go.
So now, she deflected. “You’d love the screenplay. You would. It’s such a beautiful story. A woman inherits her uncle’s failing café and turns it into a successful nightclub with the help of all these other women. It’s powerful and dramatic and funny, and—and—”
Flavio put down his fork and sat up straighter, devoting his entire attention to her. He had always known when to really listen.
“—he understands so well what women want, and if some idiot censor ruins it, I’ll have to kill him.”
“I’m sure Paul knows—as do you, my dear—the realities of this business. If they screw it up, he’ll just write it again and again until someone gets it right.”
Lena laughed softly. “You’re such a cynic.”
“I’ve been here a long time. An ice age really. You’re still just a baby.”
“Not really. Not anymore.” She shook her head wistfully. “And Paul’s not that pragmatic, either, you know. He has such high hopes for the film. Anyway, I’ve got to go. I’m supposed to meet this censor at two.”
“What’s his name?”
“Michael something—Runyon. Michael Runyon.”
“Never heard of him.”
“I told you he was new. Hopefully he’ll be a little stupid too.” She reached for her purse.
Flavio waved her away. “This one’s on me. You get the next one. I’ll see you tonight. Don’t be late or you’ll miss the champagne.”
She blew him a kiss and hurried from the restaurant to her car. The Los Angeles sun beat relentlessly upon the roof, and the inside was sweltering. She took a deep breath of heated new leather upholstery and traces of L’Air du Temps, reveling in it for just a moment before she cranked the window. She’d had the car for several months. It was a 1954 Chrysler New Yorker Deluxe Newport in a peacock blue, and she loved it. The only thing in her apartment she cared about was her jazz collection, but this car felt like the embodiment of her career. How far she’d come from a pig farm in Zanesville. Sometimes she thought of how the artists at Larry Lipton’s would sneer at her love for such a material possession, but when she drove the Chrysler, she was truly Lena Taylor, head costume designer of Lux Pictures.
When she reached Culver City, and the long, peach-colored stucco administration building, she parked at the sign with her name on it and headed into the costume department. She’d no sooner stepped inside than her head of wardrobe, Connie, came rushing over. “Where have you been? We’ve had a crisis.”
As if there wasn’t one every day.
“They dyed the georgette the wrong green.”
“How wrong is it?”
Connie grimaced. “Lime instead of emerald. It will look terrible with Bunny’s skin.”
Lena stripped off her gloves and shoved them in her purse. “They’ll have to re-dye it.”
“There’s no time. They shoot the scene this afternoon.”
“No one checked the color before they made the dress?”
Connie bowed her blond head. Her updo was so loose it looked ready to fall, the sign of a hot and frustrating day. “They did. Somehow they had the wrong swatch.”
Lena followed her assistant to the room where the dress hung, looking even more yellow than Connie had described it. Barbara Sweetin, the actress who would be wearing the dress, had dark auburn hair and milky pale skin. The dress would make her look sallow, and it would be worse with the lights they used for Technicolor.
Lena swore beneath her breath. “How long do we have?”
Connie checked her watch. “Three hours. I can maybe get us a half hour beyond that.”
“Get Sammy.” Lena fingered the delicate georgette. “And bring every dark green dress we have from stock that’s not twenty yards with a crinoline. And Bunny’s dress form.”
“Lena, there’s not enough time.”
“There has to be enough time,” Lena said grimly. “Find me a dress and I’ll redesign it. Sammy can alter anything. Get him in here. We’ll both have to help.”
“But you have that meeting with the new censor.”
“I’ve an hour until then. Meet me in the sewing room.”
She was twenty minutes late to her meeting with Michael Runyon. Her beige dress was covered with tiny bits of green silk lint that she hadn’t had time to brush away, and strands of her blond hair fell into her sweaty face. She rushed to the room where her secretary, Shirley, had put him, already apologizing, feeling worse when he swept her with a pale blue gaze and smiled, saying, “They did tell me you were a very busy woman.”
“I had a last-minute emergency,” she explained.
He stood and offered a hand, which she took. “Michael Runyon.”
“Lena Taylor.”
He wore a dark Brooks Brothers suit. Unexceptional shoes. His hair was blond and wavy, Brylcreemed into submission. But for the suit, he looked like Higgy’s type, as if he should be in the mountains somewhere bagging antelope or whatever mountain men did. Not really the kind of man she’d expected.
“This is simply a formality,” he assured her. “I’m sure you already know all the rules.”
“No navels. No cleavage. I’m very familiar with the Hays Code. This isn’t my first film, Mr. Runyon.”
“Have you worked with George Gardner before?”
George was the director Higgy had hired for the film. “Yes, I know him. He’s perfect for Club Medusa . I don’t imagine there will be any problems. He’s approved the costumes already.”
Runyon gave her a strange look. “Didn’t they tell you? It’s not called Club Medusa now. It’s been retitled.”
Paul had said nothing. Neither had Higgy. “To what?”
“The Doom of Medusa.”
“ The Doom of Medusa ? But ... that hardly sounds ... triumphant.”
Michael Runyon looked sympathetic. “It’s like any film, Miss Taylor. Changes are just part of the process. I will want to take a look at the costumes.”
“Yes, of course.”
“You’ll have them tomorrow morning?”
“They’re already finished. Most of them.”
“Good.” The production censor went to the door. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Miss Taylor. I’ll see you here at eight a.m. sharp.”
Shirley poked her head in the door. “Lena? We just got a call from Tom over on soundstage three. Miss Hayward is complaining about her shoes. Should I send one of the girls?”
“No, I’ll go.” Lena put Michael Runyon out of her mind, and headed to soundstage three.