Starstruck (5 page)

“But the scar?” The words were out of Amanda’s mouth before she could stop them.

“Never mind,” Olive said shortly. She put the framed clipping back on the shelf. “The point is, my time in the spotlight was through. Still, I thought I’d be all right. Early retirement wasn’t what I had in mind, but I’d made a fair amount of money and invested wisely. Or so I thought.”

Amanda felt a sudden lurch of dread. “And then …”

“That’s right.” Olive nodded. “And then 1929. The crash. Oh, I kept myself afloat for a while, selling off my jewelry, piece by piece. When that was gone …” A shadow crossed her face, and Amanda thought it was the only time she’d truly seen Olive look old. “Well, I made a living selling the only thing I had left.”

“Wasn’t there anyone who could help you?”

“Who?” Olive barked out a short laugh. “There was no Olive Moore in those days to pick lost young things off the street.”

Amanda blushed. “I mean, your family, or—”

“My family disowned me when I went into the pictures. In their minds, being an actress was no better than being a whore. Ironic, isn’t it? As for friends from the old days, well, that’s the thing about this town. Picture people are superstitious. They think failure—and success, for that matter—is contagious. When you’re on top, everyone wants to be your friend. They’d give you their firstborn child if you asked. But when the chips are down, in this town, there’s no such thing as friendship.”

“And love?”

“Believe me, there’s even less of that.”

“Why are you showing me this?” Amanda asked. She was
suddenly furious. How dare Olive mock her one shot at happiness? “Are you trying to make some point? A cautionary tale about not trusting too much in the stock market? Because if that’s the case, lesson learned.”

“You could certainly do worse than to take financial advice from me.” Olive smiled her Cheshire cat smile. “But no, dear, I’m simply reminding you that everyone has a past. And we have no way of knowing when—or how—it might intersect with the present. Or the future.”

“Is that a threat?”

“There’s no need to be so
unimaginative
. I’m simply advising you to look out for yourself. When you’re walking through a nest of vipers, it behooves you to tread carefully. That is to say, give the people what they want.”

“I won’t keep working for you.” Amanda fought to keep calm. “I can’t.”

“No, I think not,” Olive said reflectively. “At least, not for some time. Believe it or not, dear, I’m very fond of you. I’ve no desire at present to stand in your way. But from time to time I may need to ask a favor of you, and I certainly hope that given our previous
relationship
, you’ll find that it’s in your best interest to oblige me. After all, why burn bridges with old friends?”

Amanda felt her eyes sting with unshed tears. Desperately, she looked back to the photo of the young Olive waving to her fans from beneath the blazing marquee. She looked truly radiant, glowing with promise and hope and happiness, and suddenly, Amanda saw for the first time that the young Olive’s hand was tucked into the crook of a tuxedoed elbow.
A man’s elbow
.

The man himself had been carefully folded, or maybe cut, out.

In spite of herself, Amanda felt a flood of compassion for
Olive.
Her heart was broken!
No wonder she was so cynical about friendship, about love. Perhaps the man had been her husband. Perhaps he had left her when her career petered out. It all made sense now. “I understand, Olive,” she said, and impulsively seized the older woman’s hand. “I understand everything. But it’s going to be different for me. Harry loves me. He does. And I love him. We’re going to be happy. I’m going to get everything I want out of life, you’ll see.”

“Amanda, dear,” Olive said, gently pulling her hand away, “who are you trying to convince?”

Honestly
, Olive Moore thought as she watched the girl walk down the steps, her copper hair glinting in the low lamplight,
I should have been expecting something like this
.

Amanda was too beautiful a girl to stay put forever. It was inevitable that she would want more, but Olive had always expected her to be a bit more
sensible
. She had never been fully apprised of the details of Amanda’s former life—the past was not something you talked about at Olive Moore’s house—but it was hardly an unfamiliar story: the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, the drunk stepfather who couldn’t leave her alone. After all that, she’d figured Amanda would want safety, security, the white picket fence. All the hallmarks of respectability.

And yet here she was, just another starstruck eighteen-year-old girl. A girl in love with a boy and the starry vision of herself she saw in his eyes. A girl in love with her dreams, who thought she was willing to give up anything to make them come true.

Well, Olive had been that girl herself once, and she’d learned
that giving things up at the beginning was the easy part. Afterward, when you realized you’d sacrificed all you hadn’t even known you wanted until it was too late: that was what was hard.

Sighing, she switched off the closet light and returned to her ledger, to the list of her girls and how much money each of them had brought in that week.
Lucy: $200; Dot: $205; Claudie: $315
.

These are my children
, she thought. Not the girls: the numbers. The money. Money was the only thing you could count on, the only thing that mattered. Money kept you safe. It could bring people to you, but it could also keep them away. Sure, you could lose it, but unlike a lover, you could always win it back. And when it came back to you, it came back strong. It came back as if it had never left.

Olive allowed herself a small smile as she ran her finger down the neat list of names, until she came to the one she was looking for.

Ginger: $750
.

Olive picked up her heavy fountain pen to strike out the name. She’d be sorry to see her go. The girl was a good earner, no doubt about that. Olive Moore was not a sentimental woman, but she’d meant it when she said she was fond of the girl. Not the way she’d felt about Diana, and not exactly as she might about a daughter, but … still … there was a kind of protectiveness there.…

Olive put down the pen and gulped the rest of her sherry.

She’d leave the roster as it was for now. Just in case Amanda came back.

In Olive Moore’s considerable experience, they always came back.

“M
argie! You’re going to be famous!”

For such a small person, Doris Winthrop had a screech that could wake the dead. Her round gray eyes bulged with amazement as her mouth hung open, revealing a clump of Margaret’s Chinese Red lipstick on her top row of teeth. “I can’t believe it! My best friend is going to be a movie star!”

“It’s just a screen test,” Margaret tried to protest, but she found herself flushing with pleasure nonetheless. Doris’s ability to get completely overexcited about things was one of her best qualities. She was exactly the person you wanted to tell first when great things happened, because you knew she would react in the most endearing way. “And I still have to get my parents to agree.”

“Ugh.” Doris wrinkled her nose. Even in Pasadena, which its denizens liked to say was as stuffy as a head cold, Margaret’s parents were notoriously strict. “I see what you mean.”

“And even if by some miracle they do let me,” Margaret continued, “that doesn’t mean I’ll pass it. After all, I’ve never acted before.”

“What are you talking about? You played Mercutio in
Romeo and Juliet
and Judith Bliss in
Hay Fever
last year at school and you were swell. Everybody said so.”

“That was onstage, though,” Margaret said. “The camera is entirely different. I mean, look at all those great Broadway stars who can’t make a go of it in Hollywood.”

“Can’t make a go of it because they’re uglies up close, and that, Margie, is one thing you’re not. You want to see an ugly? Look at me.” Doris excavated a crumpled handkerchief from the detritus of makeup and movie magazines strewn across the carpet of Margaret’s bedroom and began to rub her stained teeth furiously in the dressing-table mirror. “I can’t so much as get a boy to invite me to
watch
the pictures, let alone be
in
them.”

“Doris, you know that’s not—”

“No, don’t go buttering me up,” Doris interrupted. “I’m actually awfully sore at you. Sneaking off to Hollywood all those times without asking me to come along. What, did you think I’d embarrass you or something?”

“Of course not,” Margaret murmured, although neither of them had forgotten the time Doris had screamed so loudly when she saw Carole Lombard riding on the beach in Santa Monica that the terrified horse had nearly trampled three small children building sand castles nearby. “I just thought you probably shouldn’t miss class, that’s all.”

Doris rolled her eyes. “Don’t remind me. If Mother and Dad
find out I’m failing French, I honestly think they’ll cancel my coming-out ball. And then it’s goodbye to life.”

The coming-out ball
. For Margaret, Doris, and practically every last one of their classmates, the upcoming debutante season was supposed to be the highlight of their lives. In just a few short months, it would begin. A debutante was expected to attend the entire whirlwind of parties and teas and dances, but the personal coming-out ball, in which a girl was officially presented to polite society as an eligible young lady suitable for courting, marrying, and replenishing the ranks of Pasadena’s better families, was the most important night of all. It was a night that could decide the course of a girl’s entire life. True, things had been scaled back in some ways since the Gilded Nineties, when solid gold cutlery and precious gems presented as party favors were the norm. That kind of thing might still fly among the new money crowd in New York, but in ossified Pasadena, whose lofty inhabitants had perhaps been hit slightly harder by the Depression than they cared to admit, such a display would be considered the height of bad taste. Yet to forgo the ritual entirely was unthinkable. After all, if you didn’t have a coming-out party, you’d never get a decent man to propose to you, and—as mothers, teachers, and virtually every other adult with whom an Orange Grove girl came into contact expressed repeatedly in manners both implicit and explicit—if you couldn’t get a man to propose to you, you might as well be dead.

“I told you I’d help you,” Margaret said. “You just need to spend some time on it, that’s all.”

“Oh, it’s no use. It might be French, but it’s all Greek to me.
The whole class is positively idiotic, anyway. I mean, who are we supposed to speak French to in Pasadena? The gardener?”

“You’re good at math,” Margaret said, eager to pull her friend out of this familiar rut. “Great, in fact.”

“Yes, but math isn’t an ‘accomplishment’ for young ladies, is it?” Doris tossed the scarlet-smeared handkerchief back down to the floor. “Oh, and speaking of young ladies and their dubious accomplishments, Evelyn Gamble was going around telling everyone today that you were absent because you had ‘female trouble.’ ”

“She said
what?
” Margaret blanched. Evelyn Gamble was the privileged daughter of Pasadena’s wealthiest family. She was also a six-foot-tall psychopath with the body of a Valkyrie, the brain of a giraffe, and the personality of Vlad the Impaler who never missed a chance to humiliate anyone outside of her tiny clique of appointed lackeys. If Evelyn had started to notice Margaret’s absences and saw an opportunity, it could mean big trouble indeed. “When?
Where?
”

“Oh, in Poise and Presence, mostly.” Doris hooted. “You should have seen the look on Schoonmaker’s face! She went positively white as a sheet.” Thrusting her chin in the air, Doris peered cross-eyed down the bridge of her nose in a frighteningly accurate imitation of their teacher. “ ‘Miss Gamble, I have no females in my classroom, only ladies. And a lady never discusses such matters in the presence of other ladies. Therefore, the only
female
present is you.’ That told her! The whole class was positively in hysterics.”

“Still. I don’t know why she has to be so nasty.”

“Because she’s jealous,” Doris said simply. “She may be rich, but you’re prettier. And you’re the one Phipps McKendrick kept
asking for all the slow dances at the Christmas dance, and that’s not even counting what happened outside on the golf course after.
Which
no one knows about but me,” Doris added hastily. “And Phipps, of course.”

“Well, I’m sick to death of it. And the next time I see her I’m going to give her what for.”

“You’d better start practicing, then. I mean, just think how jealous she’s going to be when she finds you’re going to have a screen test in Hollywood! Imagine all the stars you’re going to see! You might meet Diana Chesterfield!”

“Doris—” Margaret bit her lip. Should she tell Doris what the soda jerk had said about Diana being missing? Doris would never forgive her if she kept something juicy to herself, but then again, Doris had an awfully big mouth, and the whole Diana thing seemed like awfully sensitive information.…