Love Me (6 page)

That was all Amanda needed to see.

Gleefully, she planted a huge smack on the smudged leaf of
paper and laid it on her pillow as carefully as if it were a sleeping child. Then she walked back to the wardrobe and took a good, long look in the mirror for the first time in weeks.

Her figure, always fashionably slim, looked scrawny. Her bright hair was disheveled and desperately in need of a wash. Her once creamy skin was deathly pale, and there were violet bags under her eyes from endless tears and sleepless nights.

But
, she thought as she hauled her battered Louis Vuitton monogrammed steamer trunk from under the bed,
all that can be fixed
.

She’d eat a few big meals, rich with butter and cream. Her hair would be perfumed and set. As for her famously gorgeous face, all it needed was a little rouge and powder and a few nights of good sleep.

And I’ll sleep now
. Wherever she wound up that night, she’d sleep like a baby.

Because everything was going to be all right. The evidence was right there, literally in black-and-white.

Harry Gordon was still hers.

And all she had to do was turn herself back into the girl he’d fallen in love with. She’d make him forget all about her past. She’d make him remember that she was the answer to all of his prayers.

It wasn’t going to be easy.

But like her old flame Dane Forrest had once told her, “In Hollywood, all the real acting happens offscreen.”

“H
ow come you never let me drive?”

“Because,” Viola Preston said tersely, struggling to pilot the unwieldy Preston family Cadillac along the winding road that led to the gates of the studio. “You don’t know how, and you don’t have a license.”

Gabby pouted at her reflection in the rearview mirror, smoothing her unruly curls with her hand. “I could get one. I’m sixteen. And I
do
know how to drive. I had to drive that old jalopy in
Farm Fancies
, remember? All I’d have to do is go down and take the test.”

“And when are we supposed to find the time to do that?” Viola shook her head. “You’re scheduled to the hilt as it is. The only time you’ve got free for months is the middle of the night, and I’m pretty sure the Department of Motor Vehicles isn’t open then.”

“We could ask them. You never know, they might make an exception for an Olympus star.”

Viola chuckled indulgently. “An Olympus star doesn’t drive herself. An Olympus star has a chauffeur.”

“I suppose that’s you. In which case, where the hell is your little hat?”

Viola smiled. “Just remember, Gabrielle, to keep your eye on the prize. We’re just about there.”

They were turning onto the studio lot now, and Gabby marveled, as she often did, at her mother’s uncannily cinematic sense of timing. Even now, there was something about entering Olympus, about being waved through its glittering pink stone gates with their famous iron doors wrought with an elaborate motif of stars and moons and lightning bolts, that made Gabby feel like it was all happening, like everything was suddenly within her grasp. Like all of her dreams were about to come true.

Especially today. Today, she was going to sing for the first time with Eddie Sharp.

It made her laugh now to think what a bitch she’d been about listening to his record. Because the moment she’d gotten over herself and plunked it on the turntable, it was as if her entire world had changed. Gabby closed her eyes for a moment, savoring the memory of the first time she’d heard the plaintive, almost human wail of the clarinet, of the drumbeat that sounded so much like a racing heart. The swinging numbers made you need to dance; the slow ones made you want to weep. It was like the music she’d been waiting for her whole life.

There was a lot Gabby didn’t know. She had never really been to school, could barely read and write, couldn’t do much
with numbers besides figure out how to deduct an agent’s percentage. Sometimes she thought she didn’t really get
people
very well, didn’t understand why they would tell a lie or why they got so mad when you said something aloud that everyone already knew.

But Gabby Preston knew music. She understood it the way she understood that she was happy, or sad, or hungry. She could tell when it was right and when it was wrong as effortlessly as telling green from red or as someone—someone who wasn’t her, anyway—might recognize the letter
B
and know what sound it made. And she could tell that Eddie Sharp understood it that way too.

So they would understand each other. They were going to be
incredible
together. Already Gabby had listened to that record,
Sharp Turns Ahead
, twenty, maybe thirty times, working out harmonies and counterpoints, going crazy over how perfectly the velvety tone of her voice blended with the warmth of Eddie’s clarinet. It was a match made in music heaven. There was a Jewish word she’d heard Mr. Karp use when he was in one of his sentimental moods, saying how something was destined, ordained by God—
beshert
, she thought it was. He’d been talking about the budget for the latest Jimmy Molloy musical, but it was a good word nonetheless, a good word for how she felt.

Gabby and Eddie were meant to be. It was fate. He’d see that right away, she was sure of it, and maybe when his band went on tour that summer, he’d take her with them.

God, wouldn’t that be something?
On tour with a band, traveling on her own, playing a million different clubs in a million different cities. Big clubs with women wearing diamonds and men wearing black tie; small clubs that were no more than a couple
of field hands drinking corn whiskey in overalls at a splintered table—it didn’t matter. For the first time in her life, Gabby would be doing exactly what she wanted to do, which was
sing
. No more hideous dance rehearsals that started at dawn and didn’t end until every muscle in her body was screaming with agony. No more hair ribbons and ringlets and frilly little-girl dresses; no more pills to keep her thinner than was humanly possible. She’d be doing the one thing she could do better than anyone else. She’d be a star, and when—
if
—she finally came back to the picture business, it would be on her terms, as a woman who’d traveled, had adventures, had lovers (the fact that the picture of Eddie in last month’s issue of
Picture Palace
seemed to get cuter every time she looked at it didn’t hurt any either). Hollywood would look at her and see a woman who had
lived
.

Not
, Gabby thought darkly,
a girl who has to have her mother drive her everywhere
.

Viola unsteadily piloted the big Cadillac down the narrow brick street lined with jacaranda trees that led to the rehearsal complex behind the studio commissary. A burly man with the build of a gorilla greeted them at the doorway.

“Miss Preston.” He nodded at Gabby, dropping ash from his cigar all down the front of his spread-collared sport shirt. “They’re expecting you. Go right in.”

“Thank you.”

Viola started to follow her through the doorway. The man held up a meaty hand. “Not you. You can’t come in.”

“What?” Viola’s eyes, lined with the same heavy kohl she’d been wearing since the Roaring Twenties, when the Egyptian vamp look was the bee’s knees, narrowed with rage. “What are you talking about?”

“Just what I said. This is a closed rehearsal.”

Viola sputtered, “But … but don’t you know who I
am
?”

“Lady, I don’t care if you’re Eleanor Roosevelt, Eddie Sharp rehearses with musicians only. If you ain’t a musician, you ain’t coming in. Them’s the breaks.”

“Well.” Viola looked around, as though at any moment she expected someone to come bursting out of the bushes to tell her this was a prank. “Well. I want to speak to the music department. I want to speak to Herman Steiner.”

“Talk to whoever you want,” the man said, in as airy a tone as a six-foot-four gorilla could muster. “I don’t know about any Herman Steiner. I work for Eddie Sharp, and how he wants it, that’s how I fixes it.”

“Well,” Viola repeated. “We’ll see about that. Come along, Gabby.”

Gabby snatched her hand out of her mother’s grasp.

“I would, but it’s getting late, Vi. Why don’t you just go? I’m sure it’s only a misunderstanding. By the time you get back, we’ll be all rehearsed and you can tell us how swell it sounds.”

With a final scowl, Viola stormed off in the direction of Mr. Steiner’s office. She was wearing a net hat dotted with small white blossoms that stood out vividly against her bright red hair, making her look for all the world like a plump spotted mushroom from a Walt Disney cartoon. The gorilla stepped aside to let Gabby through, and as she squeezed past him, she could have sworn she saw him wink.

Meant to be
, Gabby thought. Wherever he was, Eddie Sharp understood her even better than she dreamed he would.

Studio 16 was one of the larger practice rooms on the Olympus lot, big enough for a rehearsal piano with plenty of room
to tap, but Gabby had never imagined what it would look like playing host to a twenty-piece orchestra. The scene inside was chaos. Black instrument cases were stacked haphazardly on every available surface; a forest of metal music stands, some overturned, spilled reams of annotated sheet music onto the floor. The musicians, seemingly oblivious to the mess, stood around the room in groups, thick blue clouds of cigarette smoke forming as they talked and laughed and argued, occasionally bringing an instrument to their lips to tootle out a note or two, as if to prove a point.

But which the hell one is Eddie Sharp?

Smoothing her dress nervously, Gabby spotted a tallish figure at the far end of the room with his back to her. He sported a black porkpie hat tilted at a rakish angle and had a thick blue winter scarf made of some kind of fuzzy cashmere material wound snugly around his neck. He was speaking animatedly to a group of men clutching brass instruments. They seemed to be hanging on his every word.

Bingo
, Gabby thought.

Her excitement mounting with every step, she walked toward the broad back and cleared her throat loudly.

The man turned around. Gabby gasped. Clearly, she had made a mistake. First of all, this guy was holding a saxophone, and Eddie Sharp didn’t play the sax.

Second of all, Eddie Sharp wasn’t black.

“Gabby Preston!” the man exclaimed, flashing her a smile that made his eyes crinkle around the edges in a way that was disconcertingly adorable. “You’re here. Sorry, you’re catching us on one of our breaks.”

“That’s all right,” Gabby said, flashing her dimples to try to
disguise her surprise—the last thing she wanted to do was to make the poor guy feel self-conscious over her mistake.

Yet surprised she was. Not at seeing a Negro sax player—God knew there were plenty of those. But here at Olympus, it wasn’t exactly your usual bowl of chicken soup, so to speak.… Olympus, like all the major studios, put famous black performers into its so-called race pictures, designed for Negro audiences. Some producers, like David O. Selznick, had even begun to give them bigger roles in mainstream films—word on the street had it that Hattie McDaniel was going to be so good in his
Gone with the Wind
that she might even be in contention for an Oscar next year … that is, if the Biltmore would allow her to attend a ceremony. But to have a black performer play a servant in the film adaptation of a bestselling book was one thing; to have one playing alongside white musicians in a band was quite another. Not that Leo Karp had anything against Negroes. But like practically ever other studio head in Hollywood, he was a Jew, and in the eyes of bigots like Father Coughlin and the Ku Klux Klan, that already made his products suspect, so Mr. Karp, with a worship of Traditional American Values that bordered on fetishistic, was even more wary of integration than most. As far as Leo Karp was concerned, politics were politics and business was business, and he was in the business of giving people what they wanted and making money doing it. An integrated picture might be banned from playing in half the theaters in the country, and if it couldn’t play in the South, it might as well not play at all.

“That’s all right,” Gabby repeated. Her smile was starting to stiffen. She tried to refresh it by thinking about things that made her happy, like her acting coach had taught her when she
first came to Olympus.
Puppies
, she thought.
Driving lessons. Lemon meringue pie. Singing. Gershwin. Eddie Sharp
. “That’s perfectly all right.”

“Glad to hear it.” The man’s smile didn’t look the slightest bit feigned. “Well, I think we’ve been breaking long enough. We can get this party started any time you want. Your song’s all set.”

“My song?” Gabby’s rictus smile crumbled. She hadn’t told them what she planned to sing—hell, she hadn’t decided herself. “What do you mean, my song?”

“The one Eddie marked up for you.” He shuffled through a packet of paper on a nearby music stand and handed her a creased sheet. “You read music?”

“At least as well as I read English.”

Technically true
. Gabby snatched the paper from him, willing herself to make sense of either the tangle of notes or the tangle of letters dancing before her eyes on the page, with no hope of her brain ever catching up to them.