Dazzle The Complete Unabridged Trilogy (70 page)

'Fergit 'bout changin',' Jewel said. 'There ain't no time.' Jewel reached for an apron and looped it over her head.
'T'mara, git on out in the dinin' room. You do all the waitin'
and Ah'll do the cookin, God help 'em all!'

Tamara hurried out the swinging door.

Without Jewel's competence, the dining room had quickly
turned into bedlam.

Despite the rain, a sudden crowd had descended upon the
restaurant. Unfortunately, everyone was in a hurry to eat, and
the weather brought out the worst in tempers. They were the
most demanding customers Tamara had had to serve to date.
She dashed nervously from one table to the next taking orders
and rushing back again with filled plates and pots of steaming
coffee. In her nervousness she dropped one plate of food,
mixed up three orders, and tripped and spilled coffee all over
the guest whose trench coat was hanging by the door. Tamara
stared at him in horror, wishing the floor would open up and
swallow her whole.

'Ooooh . . . I'm
sor
-ry!'
she blabbered in horror. 'I've
ruined your beautiful sweater!' Her face burning scarlet, she
rushed back to the counter, grabbed a stack of paper napkins,
and began dabbing ineffectually at the spreading brown stain
on the man's sweater. Clearly it was ruined. She wanted to
die.

But the man didn't seem to mind. He was staring mesmer
ized at her, as if he'd found a particularly priceless gem.

She stopped dabbing at his sweater and took a step back
ward. She was fast becoming disconcerted by the way he kept
staring up at her.
'
Is something the matter?' she asked shakily.
'I mean . . . other than the coffee I spilled on you?'

Louis Ziolko grinned and grabbed her arm as she was about
to scurry away. 'Hey, beautiful. How'd you like to be in
pictures?'

Chapter 5

International Artists, Inc., had been started eight years earlier
by a husband-wife couple, two disgruntled motion-picture
stars, Laura Banker and Clyfford Shannon. For ten years they
had reigned as
the
show-business couple, the brightest stars in
a dazzling firmament, but even so, they were disgusted with
the roles forced upon them, the hold their previous studio had
on them contractually, and their inability to express themselves creatively. Luckily they had amassed a considerable fortune. Even more luckily, their names were money in the
bank. When it came time to renew their contracts, they figured
that they were far better off starting their own studio than they
were indenturing themselves for another period of five years.

So International Artists, popularly known as IA, was born.
The company, relying on the box office power of its star
owners, became a major success virtually overnight. Then,
three years, seven Banker-Shannon films, and twenty-nine
other pictures later, the world's most celebrated screen couple
died in a fiery automobile crash.

International Artists was left adrift, without a captain at its
helm and minus its two most bankable stars. For a year the
company floundered. The banks threatened to call in their loans. Bankruptcy was visible on the horizon.

The heirs of Banker and Shannon decided to sell.

Enter Oscar Tenney Skolnik.

At age thirty-four, Skolnik was already well on his way to
becoming a full-fledged American legend. It seemed there was
nothing he couldn't do if he set his mind to it. His exploits
were legion. He was the first of the big-time corporate raiders,
and so proud of that fact that he wanted everyone to know it,
unwittingly creating a moneymaking public-relations firm in
the process. He relished giving birth to corporations, pirating companies, building a nationwide conglomerate, gaining ever
more power, and basking in celebrity. He couldn't get enough
publicity. Naturally, there were men richer than he who
enjoyed their wealth quietly, but during those bleak, dark years of the Depression, the multimillions he flaunted fired
the imagination of a depressed, starving public. It pleased him
to no end when he read in the New York
Times
that the new
equation for wealth was 'Skolnik = $'.

Of course, what he didn't advertise was the fact that he
hadn't been born into poverty. Far from it. He'd had a nice head start in becoming wealthy. In 1915, an inheritance of a
quarter of a million dollars was a healthy-enough jumping-
off point—more than enough seed money to sow a sprawling empire. Still, his achievement was astonishing. He had a truly
magic flair for making money multiply. In the fifteen years
following his father's untimely death aboard the torpedoed liner
Lusitania,
the nineteen-year-old Skolnik parleyed his
inheritance into a seventeen-million-dollar fortune, an almost
unheard-of sum. By then, his companies and investments were
such that they would from that point on continue multiplying
astronomically, ad infinitum.

Later, critics and armchair economists would deride his
spectacular successes, pointing out that the achievements were
minimal: the time had simply been ripe for picking up invaluable companies, and investments and financial wizardry had
had little, if anything, to do with it. After all, thanks to the
Depression and the misery of millions, companies were going begging for ridiculously cheap prices to anyone who had any money. In addition, the period following World War I was a
technological wonderland, more dazzling than the previous
ten centuries combined. The world had taken giant leaps for
ward, bursting into a future few people could predict.

But Oscar Skolnik could and did. He was among the first
visionaries to predict the eventual decline of the railroads and
the advent of air travel. Thus he began his own fledgling air
line—Trans US Airways, more commonly known as TUSA—
which began with government-contract mail routes, and in
later decades revolutionized travel and became a mammoth
multibillion-dollar carrier, with its distinctive blue-and-white
planes logging millions of miles each year.

He borrowed liberally from Henry Ford's pioneering
genius, applying the method of assembly lines to building air
craft—Skolnik Aviation.

In 1920 Skolnik had been one of the first men in the United States to foresee the popularity of radio not as a novelty but as
a major business with limitless opportunities. He subsequently
purchased the third licence to broadcast in the United States,
thus creating WSBN—Skolnik Broadcasting Network. In later
years he was to apply his radio know-how to television, with
even greater success.

But above all, Oscar Skolnik was a dedicated womanizer.
None of his myriad business interests or daredevil exploits
could compare with his passion for women. The truth of the matter was that he loved women, all women, but the more beautiful and celebrated they were, the better. Indeed, it was
this passion for the female of the species which first attracted him to motion pictures. Figuring that the film industry was
filled with the most glamorous, sought-after women in the
country, he decided that he should have a film studio of his
own.

As it had in all his other ventures, luck smiled on him in this one. He didn't even have to go through the trouble and
expense of setting up a studio. International Artists happened
to be going begging at just the right time.

Under him, IA was not only saved. With his famous Midas
touch it quickly flourished and became a power to be reckoned
with. Soon he moved his entire business headquarters to Los
Angeles in order to keep his eagle eye on his favourite business
and be close to his beloved women.

It became immediately apparent to him that IA suffered
from one crucial problem. It was missing the most fundamen
tally necessary asset of any film kingdom: a major, full-fledged
female star of its own, one with enormous, surefire box-office
appeal. At first he had managed to get around the problem by relying upon loan-outs from other major studios, but he knew that was no solution. To secure IA's future, he needed his own
Gloria Swanson, his own Greta Garbo, his own Constance
Bennett—or better yet, all three. In the past, IA had depended
too heavily upon its deceased actress and actor owners.
Insecure as only creative people can be, no matter how suc
cessful, they had loathed competition, and had been adamant
about being their company's only major, bankable stars. They
hadn't been about to share the limelight with anyone else.

Now, without any major stars, IA was in peril.

Skolnik had instinctively recognized this problem. However, he hadn't anticipated the sheer difficulty in finding, or
creating, a bankable star. Though he had systematically raided
talent from other studios with promises of huge salaries when their current contracts expired—Louis Ziolko, the celebrated
director from MGM, and Miles Gabriel, the debonair leading
man from Paramount, had been among those, as well as a host
of solid supporting players—IA continuously suffered from the lack of a leading screen siren to pair with Miles. Not that
Skolnik's talent scouts hadn't tried. He'd been kept well-
informed, and knew that his scouts had been everywhere,
turning over any rock where the elusive star he was looking for
might be hiding. Nationwide, they had scoured local theatres,
attended talent contests, beauty contests, and countless fairs.
Either something was lacking in the possible candidates, or
another studio had gotten there first. He had gone so far as to
negotiate for untried but promising new talent from other
studios, prepared to buy out their contracts for far more than
they were worth, but thus far the six starlets he had depended
on had fizzled like defective firecrackers, despite IA's mighty
publicity machine. .

The public simply hadn't warmed to them, and Oscar Skol
nik, unaccustomed to failure, didn't like it one bit. He was
outwardly calm and emotionless, but the very idea of Holly
wood getting the better of him rankled deeply, burned in a
silent rage within him.