Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
LORENZO STUDIOS
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA
MAZELLE WASHINGTON’S CLOSED EYES WERE her shield. Without light, Mazelle tried to filter out the sounds around her too. If she sat still, she could hear her own heart beating. Mother had taught her the trick long ago. But sounds bled past her wall of concentration.
“Turn up six. No, seven. All I see is a shadow in an apron.”
Bill, the lighting guy. He’d called the harsh arc lights nigger lights once and would never do it again after the way she’d set him straight for all to see, mouths agape, but Mazelle wished he’d been fired.
Lorenzo made the usual excuses about how it was just a figure of speech and Bill was awful sorry he’d upset her, but Bill never looked awful sorry.
This was the third picture she’d starred in and Bill couldn’t be bothered to light her face properly.
“Where the hell are Nancy and Carl?”
Sharpe. His voice had been buzzing in her ear since she was seven, so she would recognize it in her sleep.
Mazelle was surprised that she and Sharpe could look each other in the eye, given how he’d likely tried to warn her away from Lorenzo.
Knowing better hadn’t prevented either of them from taking Lorenzo’s checks, apparently.
“They’re still in makeup,” the PA said, that new one. “Touch-ups.” Mazelle couldn’t remember his name, and if he was anything like the last PA, she wouldn’t need to. The draft had cost them three already, along with half the rotating crew.
Mother had pinned her hair in a demure style and Mazelle did her own makeup, a lesson she had learned from singer Herb Jeffries, so typically she was the first cast member on set.
Mazelle perfected closing her eyes to mute the sounds because she hated waiting.
Her whole life was waiting, and now she was waiting for the most overpaid actors in the business.
All Carl and Nancy did on take after take was scold and complain, while she carried every scene, but they fussed over themselves like they were Bogart and Bergman.
If only Sharpe would take command like Victor Fleming and stop coddling them—
“Go tell them some of us want to go home sometime tonight,” Sharpe said. “And tell them it’s coming from me.”
“Yessir.” The PA was running, his feet pounding across the wooden stage.
Mazelle almost released a gratified sigh at the authoritative clip in his voice.
Sharpe’s aw-shucks persona had worked on Li’l Gumshoes, but if the cast and crew saw him as a pushover, it was only a matter of time before everybody would start calling her “Mazy” off camera instead of “Mrs. Washington Harris”—because that was how they saw her, their object of amusement—and she might slap two or three of them and make the papers.
More and more, Mazelle felt the urge to hurt someone.
Her fists were curled even now. It was harder to wait when her back throbbed from yesterday’s fall down the stairs, pretending she’d slipped on a banana peel.
The edge of one of the wooden steps had caught the small of her back with just enough pressure for her to hear a tiny pop.
Aspirin took most of the bite out of it, but her back was still talking to her.
The longer she sat still, the more her back talked.
Papa had warned her she might ruin her back with her pratfalls. He was only fifty-five and already using a wheelchair, a steady deterioration of his spine. You don’t watch out, show business will kill you in pieces, he said. And the audience will love every minute of it.
Mazelle heard Mitch, the prop master, moving the kitchen table slightly, a couple of items clattering to the tabletop.
He liked to give her long lectures on how to use simple props, but her closed eyes told him she wasn’t in the mood for a meeting.
She knew what to do better than he did, since she choreographed her own scenes.
Better than Sharpe, that was for sure. But Mitch was waiting for her attention.
The sound of his breathing was too close to her ear.
“Thank you,” she said, dismissing him. Finally, he left with an annoyed grunt.
He thought he was out of her earshot, but she heard his whisper as he departed. “Bitch.”
Mazelle’s fists tightened, her nails pressed to her flesh so hard that she was forced to loosen her grip.
She was mortified to notice that her eyes were stinging with tears beyond her eyelids, fighting for release.
She didn’t want to give a damn what that glorified toymaker thought of her—or anyone she worked with, except sometimes Sharpe—but Mitch had hit his mark.
Bitch was Richard’s pet name for her when he was in one of his moods.
After a year of marriage, her honeymoon was long over.
Richard Harris was barely at home, and when he came back she couldn’t wait for him to leave.
Turned out he brought home the sarcastic mean streak she’d noticed with restaurant waitstaff and his colleagues, never imagining he would lose the molasses in his voice with her so soon.
Maybe Mother was right, although she hated to admit it—he knew she was an actress and hadn’t objected when she kept her stage name publicly, but his ego wasn’t strong enough to be married to a star.
Mazelle had never seen anyone go from hot to cold so fast after the success of Lazy Mazy Meets a Zombie, which did so much better than her first Lazy Mazy picture after that sweetheart Mantan Moreland appeared in a small role.
She’d had to leave her own premiere early because Richard claimed he was tired, so she’d missed her chance to greet so many friends who had come to support her: Hattie and Butterfly and Eddie Anderson.
She’d later learned from the trades that James Mason and Chaplin had attended her premiere too, but she’d missed her chance to see them because of Richard, a story she bitterly shared with Hattie—who understood too well because of her own rage at being excluded from the Gone with the Wind premiere in Atlanta because of segregation.
And the shameful way she’d been treated at the Oscars despite her historic win, seated alone with her agent and escort instead of with the rest of the cast.
But segregation was a mightier dragon to slay: At least Hattie hadn’t allowed her light to be dimmed by a mere man.
Mazelle couldn’t remember what she had ever seen in a gigging musician whose only aspirations were to play another night and drink himself to sleep.
She’d been only twenty-one when they met, but how had she been so foolish?
That damn saxophone, that was it, the sound of liquid lovemaking.
Mazelle almost smiled when she thought of the sultry sounds Richard breathed into that sax, the easiest part of him to love.
If only all musicians were as beautiful on the inside as their performances.
Or actors, for that matter. Maybe Richard knew her secret: She wasn’t sure she had ever loved him. Attraction and love weren’t the same.
“Mazelle.”
Her eyes snapped open. She didn’t know how long Sharpe had been calling her name, prodding but polite.
The lights trained on her made her blink before she could make out Sharpe standing over her in the room’s glare.
Nancy and Carl finally had made it to the set, standing in the wings in cocktail attire.
The set was a simple kitchen, supposedly in a rented New York brownstone.
The painting through the windows depicted the city at twilight, the lighting diffused and dim, although it was after dark in the real world.
Mazelle tried never to tire of the cleverness of artistry in picture making, with budgets so much bigger than play producers to create such decorative lies.
Sharpe’s eyes and face were gentle to compensate for the slight irritation in his tone, another of his lessons left over from Li’l Gumshoes. “Ready?”
She gave him the dazzling smile that put him at ease. “One take and we go home.”
But Sharpe wasn’t at ease. “How’s your back?” he asked quietly.
“I’m unbreakable, darling.” They both pretended her answer meant Swell.
Sharpe’s eyes lingered so long that she could see him calculating his concerns for her back with his bigger concerns over production delays.
When he’d asked her yesterday if she would need a day off after her fall, he couldn’t hide his relief when she insisted she didn’t.
Her back throbbed worse now than it had then.
Sharpe squeezed her shoulder with gratitude. “You’re the pro of pros.”
“Tell me something I don’t know. But I’ll take it, thanks.”
Carl and Nancy resented her friendship with Sharpe, and she glanced up and saw them staring with the same frowns she remembered from the envious stage moms on Li’l Gumshoes, wondering why the little colored girl and her dog were stealing their child’s spotlight.
White folks never would be satisfied to play second fiddle to Negroes.
Mazelle thought it would take more than Hitler and Japan to force most white people to accept that Negroes were just as good as they were—and sometimes better.
Shoot, being outshined was their biggest fear of all, no matter what they claimed about superiority.