Chapter 2 Everyone Holds the Cards to Their Downfall
Everyone Holds the Cards to Their Downfall
Hollywood, CA
An English village with half-timbered houses and climbing roses that reach and stretch in a never-ending bloom.
The Sphinx, steady and silent.
The Eiffel Tower, swooping upright, elegant and pristine.
At RCO Studios, circling the globe is a snap—a slight consolation to Frankie, who’s never left the country and whose only travel experience involved train stations and clouded windows, a downtrodden country and long, dusty roads that snaked empty and endless.
But here, here, she can see the world with the pedal of a bike.
When she takes a quick detour through the Wild West ghost town, she searches for one of the studio cats that lives there, black with a white-tipped tail and six toes on each foot.
But the planked wooden sidewalks are bare.
Only dust and a few streamers left over from a recent wrap party.
A pause by a saloon’s facade, the spot of the second kiss she shared with the man she’s been seeing for seven months.
Her boyfriend—a title she’s only lately and reluctantly admitted to—whose eyes are the same blue as a giant butterfly she saw when she was a child during her one and only time in a museum.
Pinned to a board, the turquoise-blue wings were edged in black.
A Ulysses! a boy beside her said, and she was struck silent because she’d never met a child who had time to learn the names of butterflies.
Ulysses. At first she joked and called her boyfriend Ulysses S.
Grant, but soon the nickname became Grant, as she latched on to a portion of the name that was much more fitting for someone whose voice still sends shivers all through her body.
She tells herself that the fact that they have no future doesn’t matter; after all, people flash in and out of this world so fast that the only thing that matters is now, and the truth is, he is only meant to exist between what should matter in her life—herself and her job—because she learned from her mother what not to do with men.
The problem is that Frankie’s been breaking her own rules.
For the first time ever, she’s been having fun, and fun is not something she’s used to having, or even wanting.
Fun and happiness, lust and craving; all of it is problematic to someone who understands just how easily she could lose everything, and how crucial it is to cherish a job that often feels like hitting the jackpot.
Even if she’s only Nico’s girl Friday, the one whose chance to learn and whose studio perks offset the measly paychecks, she’s part of a world that used to entrance her and her mother, and every day she walks among the stars, witnessing the magic that will spill from a film reel.
Most importantly, though, soon Frankie will be Nico’s associate—a fixer like him—once he can convince the studio that a woman can do the job.
Prop rooms with ceilings crowded with glimmering chandeliers and heavy wrought iron light fixtures.
Walls of oil paintings and shelves of swords.
Rows and rows of statues and tables and sets of fancy china.
There is even a section of taxidermized animals, and a wolf that wears a hat.
The studio has it all, and nothing is as it seems. Normal offices are disguised by all-American-town-square fronts and red, white, and blue bunting, and even the soundstages at the studio are like giant geodes, gray and tan on the outside, while inside they’re bright shocks of ancient kingdoms or cityscapes or even the Grand Canyon.
In one corner there might be stuffed Siberian tigers lit with tripod lamps and, in another, a swimming pool that gleams turquoise under Fresnel lights.
Doesn’t matter how fancy we get, nothing we do will ever beat golden hour, Nico has told her, referring to the time just before the sun sets or after it rises.
Everything is an attempt to emulate what’s real.
In most cases, they do it even better. Recently, the studio’s scenic artists sculpted the Venus de Milo, but added her missing arms. A joke, a gag gift for Nico, who now keeps her in his office, fully clothed.
Everyone’s got a strict morals clause, he said, laughing.
It’s a weekend, so only a fraction of the usual crowd is here, and those present attend to a promotional shoot for their upcoming release Desert Son.
Frankie abandons the search for the cat and decides to take the last minutes of her break in her favorite location: the New York City back lot, streets with fake brick buildings and stoops and fire escapes that were actually brought in from New York.
It’s where she goes to think, and it clears her mind in a way that only home can.
Nico, I work sixty hours a week and still live in an apartment with two other girls, and my towel is always, always covered in pink lipstick, and you know I hate pink.
Nico, I appreciate that the studio pays for my rent and car, but I need a raise.
Nico, I’m not a secretary, but I’m also not your associate. I do the work and don’t get credit.
Nico, I deserve a promotion. I’ve earned it.
Has she been fooling herself that this will happen? You have to know when a dream is just a dream, her mother once said, when they were looking at Christmas window displays and Frankie wanted to go inside the store. Is that what this job is? A dream that’s just beyond the glass?
She leans her bike against a light pole, and faces a restaurant.
The restaurant, in fact. Nico’s cousin’s New York restaurant, the spot where Frankie and Nico met, a restaurant the cousin eventually lost in a card game.
All it took was Nico showing the studio’s scenic designers a photo, and now it’s a chance to visit the past. Do you see what I see?
Nico asked when he first brought her here.
And she’d taken in the green awning and the big bold red lettering and even the brick, which was dirtied to the exact shade of that faraway building, and she saw herself outside the window in a moment of before.
Embarrassed, she swiped at her eyes, feeling memories of her mother and her past and everything she’d turned her back on when she went West. With a quick squeeze of her shoulder, he looked away, letting her cry, just a little, before they got back to work.
People need to be saved from themselves, he often says. Everyone holds the cards to their own downfall.
Maybe she shouldn’t push it. Maybe this isn’t the week, not so close to the Desert Son premiere.
This film release has him tenser than usual, and Frankie suspects it’s because the final film they released in ’32, The Last Chance, was what some called a passion project, something June Finney—their biggest star—wanted to do because the role was intense and challenging and rewarding, but something that made no money.
Jack Sawyer—the studio’s other top name—went along with it because he claimed the script sank its teeth into him, but The Last Chance was a drama and one of the few movies the studio did that didn’t end on a happy note, so while it was critically acclaimed, audiences wanted no part of a story that reflected their own world too precisely.
Next time she gets a craving to act, the head of the studio said about June, make her do a play.
I’ll even pay for it myself. Lord knows it would be cheaper, and at least no one would see it.
Irony was thick in that June’s contract mandates that she only do RCO productions, which excludes plays, and that June, in fact, has no interest in the theatre—Jack is the one aching to get back on the stage.
“I knew you’d be here,” a production assistant says, rounding the corner on his bike, the handlebars a chrome glare of sunlight. He stops by the newsstand, shellacked newspapers glued in place. “They said you’d be in Egypt, and I said no, she goes home whenever she gets a chance.”
Frankie makes a mental note to find a new spot. “What do you need?”
“Aren’t you uncomfortable? There’s a chair over there,” he says, motioning toward a corner café. “So you don’t have to sit on the floor.”
Uncomfortable is trying to sleep wearing all the clothing you own, because it’s that cold.
It’s never having a pillow and sitting on boxes when the chairs get sold and only having cold baths with water that also has to wash the clothes and other people.
Frankie wants to say all that and more, but what she says is “I’m not on the floor. I’m on a step.”
He whistles, as if her logic is too much. “Nico wants you in his office. Now. Or, ten minutes ago, but they sent me to Egypt—”
She doesn’t wait for him to finish. In seconds, she’s rounding a corner by the commissary, startling two women from the photo shoot who are sneaking cigarettes, each in a white blouse and long skirt, their hair tousled as if they’ve just been riding horses.
One is an option girl—someone the studio has under contract for six months with an option to renew—a young woman who’s been planting herself in Nico’s path.
Frankie stands on the bike’s pedals to go faster and is flying past when suddenly someone steps from behind a Ford Model B and right into her path.
She swerves hard to the left. Wobbles and starts to fall. Miraculously, somehow, she rights the bike just in time. When she comes to a stop, she searches for the person she almost crashed into, but whoever it was must have run off.