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“Blue says domestic is shit,” Jacob said. “I want Italian marble.”

“You know what that costs, Jake …”

“Jackie, I don’t give a fuck what it costs, I want Italian marble,” Jacob said.

“Who the fuck’s going to know it’s Italian or not?” Jackie Heller said.

“I’m going to know, Jackie. Blue’s going to know. Chuckie’s going to know. My friends are coming to this joint …” Jacob paused, his face mottling with rage. He hefted a piece of marble, as if testing its capacity to be a weapon. “My friends are coming to this hotel”—a subtle change,
joint
to
hotel, joint
belonging to the old Jacob King,
hotel
to the new—“and my friends are the kind of people who know the difference between fucking domestic marble and fucking Italian marble, you fucking understand that?”

It was the first time Chuckie had ever seen the volcanic side of Jacob King’s temper, the side people talked about when he was not around. He thought Jacob was going to brain Jackie Heller with the piece of marble, and Eddie Binhoff seemed to think so too, moving into Jacob’s path to prevent an assault if one came.

Jackie Heller took a deep breath, not a man to give up easily. “It means we’re going to have to reorder.”

Jacob watched Blue as she wandered away into the framed corridor of the adjacent building. She grabbed an unfinished upright and began to swing around it as if it were a maypole. “Then reorder, Jackie.”

“We don’t just give this stuff here back, Jake. And it means another delay.”

“Jackie,” Jacob said, once more back in control, and in control even more dangerous, it seemed to Chuckie O’Hara, with every word a warning. “Just do what you’re told.”

“Jacob,” Blue Tyler suddenly moaned. She was sucking on a finger.

“What’s the matter, what happened?” Jacob King said.

“I have a splinter in my finger,” Blue Tyler said, holding her finger out to him. “Kiss it away.” She fell into the lascivious movie pout Chuckie O’Hara had shot so many times, tears gathering in the corner of her eyes. She always could cry on cue, fifteen takes with never a miss, and cry again in all the coverage. With most actresses he would say, Think of something sad, but never with Blue, if the script said cry, she cried. What dark thoughts brought her so easily to tears he did not wish to know. It was enough that she did it. “Then we’ll do something dirty later that Chuckie doesn’t know how to do.” She paused. “At least with a girl.”

Jackie Heller looked at Eddie Binhoff, whose face betrayed nothing. Jackie seemed at the point of apoplexy.

Jacob King squeezed Blue’s finger until a spot of blood appeared, then removed the splinter.

“Jacob,” Blue said, licking her finger, “you think this ceiling’s maybe … a little low or something?”

Jacob looked up, then stood on his tiptoes, and finally jumped, pushing the flat of his hand against the ceiling.

It was too much for Jackie Heller. “That ceiling is here to stay.”

“What do you mean, the ceiling’s here to stay?” Jacob King said.

“I mean, the whole building is framed at this height,” Jackie Heller said. “You didn’t like how high the ceilings were, you could’ve changed the fucking plans. Two months ago is when you should’ve done it, not now, it’s too fucking late, that’s a fact.”

“If you raise it another foot,” Blue said serenely, “you wouldn’t get that … that Brooklyn tenement feeling.”

Jacob examined the ceiling once more. “Raise it another foot, Jackie.”

“Jake.” Jackie Heller was almost pleading. “You want me to tear the whole place down and start over, because she says it looks like a fucking tenement? In Brooklyn? Where she’s never even fucking been?”

“I grew up in Brooklyn, Jackie. Tear it down. Do it right. It’s simple.”

“For your information,” Blue said to Jackie Heller, “I did P.A.s for
Carioca Carnival
in Brooklyn. So there.”

“P.A.s?” Jackie Heller said after a moment. “I don’t know P.A.s.”

“Personal appearances,” Blue said. “No wonder the ceiling’s so low, you don’t know anything.” She turned her back to Jackie Heller, and said, “Jacob, I’m hungry, can’t we go get something to eat?”

It was during dinner downtown at the Bronco that Blue let slip she was going back to work. Jacob had wanted to go to the Fremont, but Blue refused, she said it was awful, and Jacob said how did she know, she had never been there, and Blue said she’d been there the night Carole Lombard’s plane crashed, and it was a bad-luck place, and she wasn’t going to eat there, if
Jacob wanted to eat there, he could eat there alone, she’d have dinner with Chuckie.

“Chuckie,” Blue said over her shrimp cocktail, “the new script doesn’t work, have Moe put that fat writer on it, Sonya whatever her name is.”

“What new script?” Jacob King said.

Blue looked at Chuckie, then at Jacob. “Arthur’s sent me a script. I mean, I haven’t even really read it yet.

“All the way through,” she added evasively when she sensed her denial was not playing. “I just know the story. I mean, this could be the crossover picture.” She was talking fast now. “This could be where I grow up. So when I’m thirty-five years old, like you are—”

“You going to direct it, Chuckie?”

Chuckie sliced his steak and nodded.

“Maybe I can produce it, then,” Jacob King said suddenly. That Blue had not told him about the new script now seemed secondary. “When the hotel’s finished, I’m thinking of branching out. Into new areas. I’d like to produce, I think I’d be good at it.”

“Jacob, you don’t even know the story.”

“So tell me the story.”

“Well, in it I play this musical comedy star, see, queen of Broadway, everybody claps when I walk into Sardi’s, blah blah, and I fall in love with a big-time mobster, see, and there’s this great scene when I’m in my dressing room, opening night, flowers, telegrams, blah blah, and my maid—who loves me like a mother, black-mammy Hattie McDaniel type—she tells me he’s been killed. Mob shoot-out. Big tragedy. Love-of-my-life-type thing. Camera comes in close on me, putting on my makeup—”

“No close-up if you’re having your period,” Chuckie O’Hara said lightly, watching Jacob’s face.

“—and what happens is, I go on with the show,” Blue said, pressing on. “Triumph. Great reviews. ‘Last night on the stage of the Belasco Theater a legend was born,’ et cetera. And only
I know the price I paid. I live with the tragedy. Do you love it?”

“It needs work,” Chuckie said.

“Jacob, aren’t you going to tell me what you think?”

“You lost me after ‘he gets killed,’ ” Jacob King said.

The announcement that Blue was to star in
Broadway Babe
was big news in the trade papers,
BLUE TYLER SET FOR
BROADWAY BABE, BROADWAY BABE
MARKS CAREER SHIFT FOR BLUE, AND BLUE TYLER—YESTERDAY’S BABY, TOMORROW’S BABE
were three of the front-page headlines I found in the microfilm room at the UCLA library. The press conference announcing the new picture was held at the Brown Derby, with Blue and Chuckie taking questions and posing for photographers, and Jacob King so discreetly in the background he was not mentioned in the news stories. J. F. French was nominally the host, but it was Blue’s moment, Chuckie remembered, and she made the most of it. She was clearly in charge, a child-woman with the movie star’s contempt for the reporters who covered the Industry, free to be outrageous because she knew that nothing outrageous she said would ever be printed in their newspapers.

It was like I wasn’t even there, Chuckie said. And thank God for that, because I was afraid someone might ask me about the hearings, and whether I was going to be called or not. If Moe had heard the rumors, and I’m sure he had, Lilo had a tap on the Committee, of course, he never let on. I suppose it was a collateral benefit of having my leg blown off. That meant I couldn’t have been a Communist. But Blue was simply off-the-map that day. I think that as Jake was becoming more circumspect, she was taking on a little of his wildness, and she was wild enough to begin with.

“Blue,” a reporter asked, “you’ve been working steadily since the age of four, so you must really like to work, is that right?”

Blue Tyler shielded her eyes from the flashbulbs. “Like to work?” She giggled. “Let me put on my Industry spokesman
face.” She knit her brows. “I want to be known as the hardest-working star in this Industry to which I owe so much, and which gives so many people a release”—she paused, then giggled some more—“from their drab, unhappy, crappy, shitty little lives. Jesus, you guys are trying to make me sound like fucking Loretta Young—”

A studio press agent interrupted, trying to restore some kind of decorum. “What Blue means is that for the first time in the history of Cosmopolitan Pictures—”

“What Blue means,” Blue Tyler said, “is what Blue just said.” She peered at the press agent. “Stanley, what are you making that cutting gesture across your throat for? Are you trying to cut me off? These reporters are my friends. They’re not here just to stuff their faces with Cosmo’s booze and some lobster Newburg. You are my friends, aren’t you, guys?”

The reporters laughed.

“What Blue means is that for the first time in the history of Cosmopolitan Pictures—”

Another question broke through the press agent’s spiel. “Blue, do you have any hobbies?”

“I like to drown cats.” She gnawed on a fingernail and stared lewdly at the questioner. “And fuck. I really like to fuck.”

The publicity man was sweating profusely, the stains creating moons under the arms of his jacket, trying to prevent the press conference from further deteriorating into chaos. “… a former child star emerges …”

Nobody was listening. It was now just a question of how far she would go. “Are you at all spiritual, Blue?”

“I pray all the time,” Blue said. “Just the other day, I went into Good Shepherd Church in Beverly Hills. I’m not even Catholic, but I got down on my knees and I prayed that Mr. French … you all know J. F. French …”

J. F. French raised a hand holding an unlit Havana cigar.

“… what girl hasn’t been down on her knees for Mr. French.”

There was loud laughter from the reporters.

J. F. French stared impassively at Blue, then walked to the banquette where Jacob King was sitting by himself, toying with a drink.

“What did she tell you about me?” J. F. French said, the color rising in his face.

Jacob suppressed the urge to ask what Blue might have told him that made Moe so suddenly angry. It was something to remember. “Nothing.”

“Good.” J. F. French seemed satisfied. “Some people are ungrateful in this business. Ingrates. You got to watch out for them.”

“You mean Blue?”

“Not Baby Blue,” J. F. French said. “She’s a good little girl.” He rolled the unlit cigar under his nose and contemplated Jacob King. “So tell me, how’s the hotel business? A little more complicated than”—he hesitated—“than what you used to do.”

Jacob let the remark pass. “I’m thinking about producing, Moe,” he said casually. “I was thinking I’d produce Blue’s next picture after
Broadway Babe
. And I deliver her to you. She remains exclusive with Cosmopolitan Pictures.”