Chapter 4 1964
The following afternoon, still short of answers to my money problems, I go out into the September sunshine.
It’s that glorious time of year when the heat gentles, the wildfires relent, the grapes taste like candy, and you think life will always be this sweet and free from fires.
I want to swim before cocktail hour begins, but last night’s parties must have been Prohibition era–themed because instead of napping, everyone’s by the pool.
Wearing a bikini and holding a book she isn’t reading is the girl I saw in the lobby yesterday. Bob Ashenhurst is in the cabana beside hers.
Damn.
“Pete!” he calls to Peter Oldham, a leading man who makes box-office gold.
Peter lopes over and the men shake hands.
“Martini?” Bob asks, holding up a bottle of vermouth.
Peter pulls up a cabana. More cabanas slide over to join them because how can anyone resist the King of Hollywood in conversation with a prince?
Bob starts to tell the story of how he found this kid working in the prop shed at the studio and had him do a screen test and, that day, purely by accident and circumstance, Peter Oldham, silver-screen heartthrob, was born.
Everyone’s heard it before. But they all listen because Bob tells it so well, drawing out the moment when he waited with all his fingers crossed to see if the kid looked as good on-screen as he did running skulls back and forth to the set of a horror movie.
Suddenly, everyone’s eyes move left, following the movement of a woman along the path—Calliope Burns in green velvet hot pants.
I fling myself into her arms and beneath the perfume, the hairspray, and the cigarettes, I catch the memory of morning breath and pajama parties.
“You’re ungluing my eyelashes,” Calliope says, dabbing her eyes, then slipping her arm through mine.
We don’t have to say where we’re going—our bodies lead us to that little room in the Marmont’s rear end, uninhabited now, but lived in by the ghosts of three girls who once lay in a bed together, dreaming. The bed is still there, so we wriggle onto it.
“I’ll order mint juleps from Schwab’s,” Calliope says. “For old time’s sake.”
She picks up the phone and puts on her husky actress voice. “This is Miss Calliope Burns. I’d like two mint juleps and two burgers with fries and extra ketchup brought up to my old room, please.”
Order placed, she turns to me. “I’m dying to know if you’ve seen Theo Winchester.”
“I thought he stayed at the Beverly Hilton?”
Calliope grins. “He bought the Chateau Marmont.”
Holy Mary, Mother of Jesus, I’ve lamed the person whose charity my aunt and I are relying on.
Theo Winchester—or Win, as everyone calls him—is a rock star, that new breed of man whose music makes you feel as if he’s reached into your chest, wrung out your heartache, and set it to music.
A man who doesn’t just stand on a stage and sing; he tosses guitar chords into the crowd like they’re filthy invitations.
He has dark hair. Pouty lips. He’s the man from the stairwell. And I doubt he’s the kind of guy who’ll let a penniless former star who hasn’t paid rent for years, and her niece as well, stay at his hotel for free.
“I need a job.” I flop despairingly onto my back. “Babysitting isn’t enough.”
“Do you want me to get you an audition?”
“God no! For what part anyway? The duckling with no hope of ever being a swan?”
“That’s not true,” Calliope scolds. Then she frowns.
“Besides acting, what other jobs are there for an LA girl? Or any girl, for that matter.” She ticks them off, doesn’t even need a whole hand of fingers.
“Secretary. Maid. Waitress. Salesclerk. You’re too smart for those.
And you need to go to college to be a nurse or teacher. What else?”
We sit there, unable to come up with anything.
“Well,” I say, trying to smile, “at least now they’ve passed the Equal Pay Act, I’d get paid the same as a man if I could come up with something.”
“But men aren’t maids at the Marmont or salesclerks at Bullock’s.
So equal pay is just another lie. As if anyone would ever pay me as much as Peter Oldham when we’re in a movie together.
” Calliope flops onto her back too. “It’s like what that book said—the Betty Friedan one you made me read.
The women are trapped in their husbands’ homes, mopping floors.
Which is why they need movies. You know, I thought maybe—and in some ways I hate thinking it—that after Marian died, the era when all you could be was a wife who believed that if she got her Sunday roast and her hair just right, her husband wouldn’t cheat on her is over.
Marian was the poodle-skirted, tiny-waisted, cleavage-powered fifties.
But I hoped that with Win’s music and The Monolith’s music, with tights and no garters, with equal pay and the pill, a new era’s arrived.
But”—she sighs—“here we are. Poor Marian.”
The overdose death of screen queen Marian Monti last year hit everyone, but especially the women of Hollywood, who believed it was deliberate rather than accidental.
That she didn’t want to be the figurehead of vapid blondes.
No, Marian wanted a quiet place where she could paint the sky.
“It’s always different,” she told me when I asked her why all her watercolors were of the sky.
Now she lives up there, destined to be forgotten in a few years’ time.
Calliope opens her purse, takes two pills out of it, pops them in her mouth, and swallows. “I have a headache,” she assures me when I frown.
Headache. I remember the girl in the lobby. “Does Theo Winchester have a daughter?”
“Well.” Calliope leans in. “Whether she’s really his daughter isn’t certain, but a woman he dated as a teenager died in a car accident a few months back and she left him a fourteen-year-old in her will, claiming she was his.”
“Another orphan.”
“Who the gossip columnists say has been kicked out of Hollywood High for bad behavior. Meaning she most likely is Win’s daughter.
Have you seen him yet? I can’t tell whether he’s devastatingly sexy or quite ugly.
He has one of those faces. Like an eagle—all gothic and stern, but your eye just wants to stare anyway.
Stormy thoughts and brooding brows. Don’t you think? ”
A knock interrupts my laughter. The boy from Schwab’s gapes at Calliope like he’s just seen his first Playboy centerfold.
After he deposits the food and drinks on the dresser, she signs a napkin for him and he runs off looking like he’s going to need a moment to himself in the phone booth before he can return to work.
Calliope and I only stop giggling to stuff the burgers in our mouths. We chew contentedly, then I ask what she’s been up to.
“Debating how many fractions of an inch of areola should be permitted on-screen in a millisecond most people will miss.” Calliope flicks her cigarette lighter with irritation.
“When I sat up in bed after my fake lovemaking, an unscripted rim of pink could apparently be seen. It delighted the director, but the producer is scared of the censors, the pearl-clutchers, and the husbands of the pearl-clutchers, who’ll question my morals in mixed company but jerk off to the memory in the shower.
I told him that if he was so concerned about nipples, he should have given me something to cover them under the sheet.
If you’re going to play the game, at least own up to the fact that you’re playing it. ”
She swallows half her mint julep. “It’s so hard to see that it couldn’t possibly contravene the Production Code.
But nobody’s sure if barely visible areolas will pull in the crowds or deter them.
For a town where sex will get you more than a thousand-dollar bill, there’s a hell of a lot of pretending nobody gets screwed.
The thing that irks me is that it’s a damn good film.
And I’m damn good in it. But my areola will forevermore be the subject of attention. ”
The Production Code, otherwise known as the Hays Code, is a set of rules drawn up thirty years ago by a priest, of all people—a priest in Hollywood, an idea that stretches the imagination more than a movie about male virgins.
The Code sets out what is and isn’t allowed on-screen, its goal to ensure that movies don’t corrupt anyone.
But on the first floor of the Chateau Marmont, there’s a library that could tell you a different story.
“Do you ever get tired of it?” I ask, putting my burger down and studying her face, which is even more hyper-beautiful than it was seven years ago.
“I’m so tired I could sleep for one hundred years.”
It’s the reference to a fairy tale that does it. Makes me remember the other trope we spoke about a few minutes ago: the orphan.
I jump up, collect my fries and Calliope’s, which I know she won’t eat. “I have an idea that might earn me some money.”
I lead the way to the small penthouse on the sixth floor, which people have started calling “Calliope’s Room”—having your moniker attached to a Chateau Marmont room is a surer sign of celebrity than a star on the Walk of Fame.
Once there, Calliope reaches into the nightstand and takes out three more pills.
“I’ll call the doctor,” I tell her.
“I’m fine.” She shines her famous smile. “I’ll stay in bed and read scripts. I need something to change my bio from Academy Award nominee to Academy Award winner.”
“You know that everyone loves you.”
“They love to look at me. But do they love me?”
I can’t believe that Calliope Burns could ever lose faith in herself. Before I can remind her what she said to me on our first sleepover, she says, “Enough about me. Tell me what you’re up to.”
I fill her in, then point to her wardrobe. “To pull this off, I need to borrow a shirt. Everything I have is too plain or too bright. Nobody ever leaves in-between colors behind.”
“Go to a shop. You don’t have to wear everyone’s leavings.”