Starstruck (22 page)

“My latest acquisition.” Mr. Karp sighed with pleasure. “Ah, but you’re a vision. The photographs don’t do you justice.”

Margo flushed. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me, darling. It’s me who should be thanking you. I get to sit here looking at a glorious girl, while you’re stuck staring at my ugly mug.” He gestured to a white quilted leather armchair. “Won’t you sit down?”

She sat, waiting for Mr. Karp to do the same. Instead, he began to pace in circles around her chair, as though she were a suspect brought in for questioning. Was this some sort of intimidation tactic? Was he stalling for time? Figuring out the best way to give her the bad news?

She couldn’t take it anymore. “Mr. Karp …”

He held up a hand to cut her off. “Miss Sterling, please. I know what you’re going to say. A beautiful new player comes to my own studio, joins my orbit, if you will, and I don’t come to meet her? Of course, I’m a busy man; of course, I have meetings to attend, pictures to produce, papers to sign, money to make. But still, Miss Sterling, I ask you, what way is this for a gentleman to treat a lady such as yourself? You must be furious with me. Particularly under the circumstances.”

She flushed.
What is he playing at? What circumstances?
“Mr. Karp, really—I …”

“Miss Sterling—may I call you Margo?” At last, he sat, leaning toward her with a comically grave expression on his face. “Margo, darling, I’m going to speak frankly. Larry Julius told me about how it was that you came to us. The troubles with your mama and papa.”

“I—I don’t—”

“Please, my darling, there’s no need to explain.” He shook his head sadly. “It’s a terrible thing, to have troubles in one’s family. As happy as we are to have you here with us at Olympus, I can’t help feeling in some way responsible. So I hope that what I’m going to tell you will come as a small comfort to you.”

He’s firing me
, Margo thought wildly.
He’s going to tell me to go back to Pasadena and make peace with my parents
.

“I want you to know, lovely Margo,” Mr. Karp continued, “that I look at everyone, every single man, woman, and child here at Olympus, as if he or she were a member of my own family. I hope, in time, that you’ll be able to think of me like a father. Or maybe more of a grandfather; after all, you’re so young.” He smiled. “But if something or
someone
is troubling you, I’ll do anything,
anything
, within my power to help, just as if you were my own daughter. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Margo whispered.

“And does that make you happy?”

“Yes.” It was the truth. Even if what Mr. Karp was saying was partially for effect, it
did
make Margo feel better to hear it. Maybe she wasn’t about to be fired after all.

Mr. Karp walked grandly back over to his enormous desk
and sat down, his arms crossed over his chest like a benevolent pasha. “I’m very glad to hear that. Because I’m about to ask you for a rather large favor.” He drew a well-worn script from the drawer and slid it across the desk toward her. Margo read the title page.

Mr. Karp peered at her keenly over his glasses, studying her reaction. “You recognize it?”

Margo struggled to locate her voice. “I … it’s … isn’t this the picture Diana Chesterfield was making before she …”

“Before she went on extended vacation, yes,” Mr. Karp said firmly. “And you can imagine how that left us in the lurch. The studio has invested, shall we say,
significant
resources in
The Nine Days’ Queen
. Weepy history pictures with female leads are big business right now. This was supposed to be our answer to
Marie Antoinette
, to
Jezebel
, to that
farkakte
Civil War movie David Selznick claims to be making, if he can ever find the right girl, what’s it called,
Gone with the Wind
. When I first heard that title, I said, what’s the picture about, his bank account? I mean, what kind of
schlemiel
green-lights a picture and blows through a million bucks in preproduction alone, without a star attached? Some people say, who cares, what’s it anyone’s business if some crazy producer wants to ruin himself? Not Leo Karp. Leo Karp says that when one man does bad business, it’s bad for everyone in the business. If it was up to me, I’d have him run out of town.” He shook his head. “Now, God help me, I feel
bad for the poor
schmuck
. Because you do everything right, get the best directors and designers in the business, real
machers
who know how to stick to a budget and do it right, you go into production, everything is perfect, solid, you’re on top of the world, and then poof!” Margo jumped as he brought his surprisingly large fists down on the desk, scattering a pile of papers onto the plush white carpeting. “My biggest star is gone. Three-quarters of a mil already gone in preproduction, budgeted, plus ten grand a
day
it’s costing me to keep it on hold. I say fine, we’ll shut production down, the studio will take a million-dollar loss and Hunter Payne and the banker boys in New York—if you’ll pardon the expression, dear—will have my balls for breakfast, but fine, I’m a big boy, I’ve got deep pockets, I’ll take the hit. And then what do you think happens?”

Margo shook her head in disbelief. Never in her life had she heard someone speak this frankly about money. While money cast its gritty pall over everything and everyone in Pasadena, on the rare occasions when it was actually discussed, it was spoken of in euphemisms, in the same way as death, or illness, or, God forbid,
sex
. As though it were an unseen force of mystical power, a sleeping dragon better left to lie. Leo Karp, on the other hand, had no such inhibitions, throwing out figures with the fiduciary frankness of a riverboat gambler. She was utterly enraptured.

“I’ll tell you what happens,” Mr. Karp continued furiously. “The screenwriter of this white elephant, Harry Gordon, this little Commie
pischer
from New York threatens to sue. Breach of contract, he says. He can’t win, but he can make things pretty difficult if he wants to, make me tie up our lawyers, throw even more money down the toilet for a movie I’m not going
to make. I’ll probably wind up tripling his salary just to shut him up. And I thought Communists didn’t care about money.” Mr. Karp took a fat cigar from the polished humidor on his desk and twiddled it absently in his hand. “It turns out they just don’t care about anyone else’s. So you see, darling Margo, it turns out we’ve got to make the picture anyhow, and I’m an actress down. We’ve got nobody here who can fill Diana’s shoes, and no one who wants to try, so I go to MGM, I say ‘Let me have Katie Hepburn.’ They get all hoity-toity—‘Oh, Leo, at MGM we never loan out our stars to another studio’—and in the very same breath, they offer me Joan Crawford. I say, you’ve got to be kidding. This character in the picture is a seventeen-year-old girl; Crawford is thirty-five if she’s a day, which means she’s forty. He says, it’s Crawford or nobody, so fine, it’s nobody. Paramount, forget about it, the only girl they’ve got who’s not ready for the nursing home is Lombard, and Lombard doesn’t do costume drama. Columbia, please, who am I supposed to put in a ball gown, the Three Stooges? So I ask Jack Warner to help me out, but de Havilland is unavailable, Stanwyck’s all wrong, and Bette Davis is not interested. Not interested!” His jaw dropped in feigned shock. “What is she, crazy? Not interested in the greatest part out there for an actress since
Anna Karenina
? But no, apparently she thinks she’s got the Oscar all sewn up with
Jezebel
this year and she’s not interested in any competing projects.” He snorted. “Well, we’ll show her a thing or two, won’t we, Margo?” Margo hesitated as Mr. Karp paused to light his cigar, unsure whether she was supposed to answer. “Well?” he asked, exhaling a large cloud of noxious smoke. “Won’t we?”

“I … I don’t think I know what you mean, sir.”

“What I mean is, we’ve been reduced to testing unknowns. Just like Selznick, the poor
schmuck
. Young hopefuls, contract players, extras down at Central Casting. Even a few some scouts picked up off the street.”
Or at the lunch counter at Schwab’s
, Margo thought drily. “Maybe twenty, thirty girls in all. Kurtzman—Raoul Kurtzman, that is, the director of the picture—isn’t impressed. Says they reflect poorly on the state of the American actress.” His face darkened. “The guy would be in Dachau right now if it wasn’t for the largesse of this great country and its people, but that’s gratitude for you. Turned up his nose at every girl we tested, except for two.” Mr. Karp put down his cigar. “One of them, Margo, was you.”

Margo felt the blood slowly drain from her face. She gripped the arms of the chair. “Me?”

“We already have you under contract. Raoul Kurtzman has named you his first choice to play Lady Jane Grey,” Mr. Karp said. “And we know you have some chemistry with your costar. And therein lies the problem.” With excruciating slowness, Mr. Karp reached into his desk drawer again and pulled out the offending issue of
Variety
. Very carefully, as though he were holding some kind of forensic evidence, he laid it next to the script. On the bare surface of the white lacquer desk, the headline seemed written in letters about three feet high.

“Mr. Karp,” Margo began. “I can explain—”

He cut her off sternly. “Darling, there’s no need to make excuses. The only thing that matters is what happens next.” Taking off his glasses, he began to slowly polish the lenses with a soft checked cloth, his eyes boring into hers. “Margo. You will
be given the part in
The Nine Days’ Queen
under one condition: whatever is going on between you and Dane Forrest must come to an immediate end.”

Margo felt the tears well up in her eyes unbidden, threatening to spill.
Don’t
, she commanded herself sharply.
Not in front of Leo Karp
. “But there’s nothing going on between us,” she whispered. “Not the way they made it sound.”

“And there never will be,” Mr. Karp said. “Not in the way you hope.”

It was the word
hope
that did it. The tears started to fall, hot and slick, down her nose.

In a fluid, practiced motion, Mr. Karp plucked the white silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and handed it to her.
How many girls has he had crying in front of his desk?
Margo wondered as she carefully wiped her eyes.

“I don’t blame you, my dear,” Mr. Karp said. “I know exactly how irresistible a man like Dane Forrest is to a young girl; after all, we designed him this way. As for his attraction to you—how shall I put this delicately?—you’re certainly his type. But the public would never accept it. Not after this”—he seemed to search for the word—“
situation
with Diana. There would be a terrible scandal. It would sink the movie. It could sink your potential as an actress for good. And on a personal note,” he added gently, “just so you know it’s not all dollars and cents. Dane Forrest is not the boy for you. There are things about Dane, things in his past … well.” With a sigh, Mr. Karp replaced his glasses. “It’s not appropriate to go into specifics in front of a young lady such as yourself. But for your own good, you’re to have nothing to do with him. You’ll star in the picture together. That’s all right, Dane’s a decent actor; there’s a lot you
can learn by watching him. But that’s as far as your relationship will go.”

An image of Dane swam into Margo’s head. She remembered the soaring feeling of being in his arms, the unspoken promises in his warm green eyes. “What will he say?”

“Dane’s already agreed,” Mr. Karp said flatly. “He’s in enough hot water as it is with this Diana business. Dane was in Hollywood a long time before he made it, and now that he has, you better believe he’s enjoying the perks. Trust me, darling, he’s not going to give it all up for one little teenage virgin, sweet as she might be.”

His words hit Margo like a sledgehammer.
A teenage virgin
. She winced in shame. Was that what they thought of her? No wonder Dane had given her up so easily. What use was a girl like that to a man of the world like Dane Forrest? What a fool she’d been, what a stupid, naïve, arrogant little fool, to think he could ever have cared for her at all.

“But there’s exciting news too,” Mr. Karp was saying. “You see, just to be certain that you won’t be tempted, that there can’t possibly be any hint of anything between the two of you, you are going to begin a very conspicuous, very well-publicized romance with someone else.” He grinned. “Jimmy Molloy.”

“Jimmy?”
Margo gasped. “But what about Gabby?”

“Gabby?” Mr. Karp looked confused.

“Gabby Preston. She’s crazy about Jimmy,” Margo protested. “They’re starring together in the new Tully Toynbee movie, and especially after last night, when he escorted her home after …” She stopped herself before she gave away any more details of Gabby’s precipitous departure.
No point getting Gabby in trouble too
.

“Gabby Preston is a little girl,” Mr. Karp said. “Don’t worry about her. We’ll find someone nice for her when the time comes. In the meantime, Jimmy Molloy is the boy for you.”

“But it’s absurd,” Margo pleaded. “I hardly know Jimmy.”

“You hardly know Dane Forrest.”

Margo shook her head. “That’s different.”

“Darling, listen to me.” Mr. Karp came around from behind the desk. “When I was a small boy, long before I came to this wonderful country, I lived in a small village in Russia called Plodov. And in Plodov, as in every village of its kind, there lived a matchmaker, and when it came time for the sons or the daughters of each family to marry, the matchmaker would make for each of them a proper match. My own beloved mother, may her soul rest in peace”—he paused to roll his eyes heavenward—“never even met my dear departed father before their wedding day. Fifteen years old she was, and the night before she was to be married she cried her eyes out. ‘Papa,’ she begged of my grandfather, ‘how can I marry a perfect stranger?’ But she married him, and they had six children and were happy all their days, and all her life she was glad she listened to her papa. Because to do otherwise would have been unthinkable.” Kneeling beside her chair, he took her hands in his. The metal of his thick wedding band felt cold against her skin. “Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Margo?”