Chapter 18 Mountains Made of Clouds #2
Betty sets her fork down. Her tears stopped. “You were there?”
“Valentino was at Frank Campbell’s funeral home for days. There were riots, people smashing windows and fighting with police just to see him. And it was hot. Women killed themselves when he died.”
“I heard. Two girls in Japan jumped into a volcano.” Betty glances over her shoulder. “I know he was married, twice, but sometimes I’m not sure he even liked women.” She lowers her voice. “Lavender marriages, that’s my guess.”
The term used for marriages that cover up homosexuality. “Could be.”
“And Mussolini sent four fascists to guard the body? You saw them?”
“They were right there, giving the salute next to the body. But they were actors. Hired by Campbell’s press agent.”
“No, they weren’t! Were they?”
Frankie lifts the window shade to peer out. The sun, Betty claims, gives her a headache, so now and then, she draws the shades down. “It was all an act. There were rumors that Valentino’s body was in some back room and they put a wax replica in the casket.”
Betty sets a glass paperweight on top of a stack of papers. Inside the glass, orange, pink, and yellow flowers bloom. “And people think Hollywood’s the only one pulling stunts like that.”
“The explorers who came to America lied to get people here. They called swampland fertile soil. And the Boston Tea Party was a publicity stunt. Needing good publicity’s as old as time. Hollywood doesn’t have a corner on that market, we just do it better.”
“You’ve spent far too much time with Nico.”
“You really don’t know when he’s back?”
“He said later. You could try him on stage four. Oh God, Frankie, I heard someone refer to the project as the new Dede Domenico film. How can anyone even say that before June’s funeral?”
But Frankie doesn’t stay to commiserate.
Soon she’s on her bike and whizzing past clusters of men in suits and costumed actors smoking and mouthing lines and one even sitting on a step, staring at the sky as if reading words.
She passes the mill that’s loud and choking with sawdust, and then Sound Alley, where musicians score films and Foley artists improve and replace everything from doors sighing open to screams to dogs barking to the sound of running through leaves.
At last she’s at the stages, and carefully creeps past the one where horses have been running, bolting, really, from inside to out so the camera can capture just one moment of a race.
Next to that building is one with the number four at the top, faded in the bright sun.
The red light flashes, which means they’re filming.
She waits patiently. When it’s safe to enter, she carefully steps over the cords and wires and navigates equipment and people until she turns the corner to the set and finds herself in the midst of a tenement. She freezes.
A wall missing plaster. A floor, splintered and paint spattered.
A tiny bathroom with a stained porcelain sink and a toilet with an aluminum pail beside it.
Her heart has begun to pound. There’s another room with stacks of old newspapers.
Cardboard boxes as chairs and what looks like a wall made of nailed-together sheets of plywood and other wood scraps.
A wave of nausea overcomes her, because she knows what’s next.
Sure enough, the wall becomes a sheet. And at the end, there’s a window that might as well be a glimpse straight into her heart, because around its frame is a string of plastic morning glory vine.
When a man beside her angles a light just so, the windowsill flares with brightness, and there they are, hearts carved into the wood.
This is her life. Details she’s only ever told Jack—not because she was ashamed but because she was protective.
Her mother. All her mother’s efforts at caring for her and keeping her safe.
All of it, recreated by people who don’t know, who don’t care, whose only goal was to capture the look of being poor.
They never considered the life behind these details.
Intense emotions can turn physical. It’s something she first discovered when her mother died and Frankie’s skin went cold and her legs wouldn’t stop shaking.
Now this happens again, only with heart-pounding nausea.
Taking a few steps back, she looks for a place to sit—on the floor, a chair, anywhere—but then loses the energy to do even that. She crouches where she is, faint.
Feet race past her. Barely, she looks up, at a gaffer’s legs and then his hands as he adjusts a light. “What project is this?”
“You didn’t see the door? Moving Up.”
Moving Up, the film Jack’s friend, Milton Ewing, wrote. Since Jack’s involvement was minimal—he’s not starring in the film—and more a favor to his friend, Frankie never paid it much attention. “What’s it about, in a nutshell?”
The guy looks at her as if suspecting she’s pranking him, but then perhaps recognizes her. “A poor girl in New York marries a rich man on the Upper East Side. That’s a rich area in Manhattan—”
She’s up and turning away. She doesn’t want to hear more.
It’s never about money until it is. And it always is, Jack told her. It’s a quote I gave Milton.
And here before her is what he truly gave Milton: her life.
Finding her way outside, she’s just opened the stage door as the assistant director yells, “Let’s go again—places, everyone!
” There is a blast of light. A slap of daytime.
It’s a smash cut, harsh sunlight and truth.
She sits on a step and lowers her head. Did he not care enough to understand that her memories and stories of her past are her, and worth protecting?
He would be furious if she passed along the details of his life, if she relayed stories he’d told her in confidence.
And though she tells herself it shouldn’t be a big deal, that it was over anyhow, it somehow feels different from past letdowns.
Bigger. Like someone who’s only ever seen flat land learning that the first mountain they finally glimpse is made of clouds.
The worst thing is she knows he doesn’t think she’s with him for the money—she’s made it clear she prefers the cottage in Venice to the mansion in Pasadena, and sandwiches in bed over steak on porcelain—but what is truly heartbreaking is that he thought so little of her that he’d reduce her to a story he heard, to details he passed along without thought.
After everything she’d said about her mother, all that she’d revealed, he was careless.
He allowed her childhood to be turned into a joke.
“Any news?” Nico. The soundstage door closes behind him. “You okay?”
The truth is, she’s the one who handed over her life. She’s the one who failed her mother and the reason her mother’s attempt at beauty is now a sad display meant to evoke pity. Looking up at Nico, she squints hard against the sun. “I need to know about Fred.”
Nico’s eyes widen at her tone. “Sure, follow me.”
The lot is busy, and they have to pause to let a tour group pass.
A group of showgirls with pluming feathers rounds the corner.
What else did Jack take? She’s afraid to read the script.
When they pass by the start of the New York City back lot, she tries not to look, but a trace of white catches her eye.
Nico notices her take in the scene. “In this movie, it’s a week after a storm hit. They nailed it, that old-snow look. They really did.”
Dirtied white cotton batting edges the sidewalks and stoops.
All at once, she sees the glimmer of melting snow on a sun-warmed sidewalk, and her mother crouching down to point out the tiny rivulets that formed in the ice.
It’s a miniature Alaska, she said about a place she’d only ever seen on a map.
Big fields of ice and melting waterfalls. Everything shines. Can you imagine?
“And lookee there,” Nico says, pointing. The cat. The black-and-white one with six toes on each foot. It’s perched on an apple crate, eating a bowl of tuna someone left out. “Told you it’s fine. Not a better place in the world to be. So that night. Fred was with Jack, in Malibu. He’s our alibi.”
Frankie looks away from the cat, who actually looks as though it’s put on weight. “He hasn’t been accused, right?”
“Not out loud. But like I said, it’s always the husband.”
“You said the first thing they do is look to the husband or boyfriend. You didn’t say it is.”
“I’m not saying it is now either. Just that it’s a matter of time till they come after him, and we need to be ready, because it’s looking like Tank’s alibis are checking out.”
Frankie stops walking. “They are?”
He motions her forward, but she won’t move.
“Look, our alibi’s also gonna hold, so what does that tell you about alibis?
I’d bet my house that the person who shot her was either Tank or some jerk who had nothing to do with anything and just wanted the necklace.
But we need to be ready for them to come after Jack.
And we are. Readier than we thought. Already had reports of champagne brought in to Malibu and security by the road, the works.
O’Shea saying he dropped him off. It was all in place.
We just needed one person to say he was with Jack in Malibu. Playing cards.”
“It couldn’t be you?”
“I was at the premiere till late. People saw me. That’s hours he’d be unaccounted for. I needed someone who could say they were there when Jack got in and can say that Jack stayed put. And Fred, I understand, just went through a breakup. A little guy time fit the bill.”
“And you trust Fred that much?”
A man in the distance raises his hand, waving to Nico before he starts walking toward them. Nico lowers his voice. “What I trust is how much he wants what we’re offering him.”
“And what’s that?”