The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (34 page)

"It's hot," Mary observed quietly, and I said, "We'll be indoors soon. You can rest." We both knew by then not to look for movie stars anymore. If stars were in residence at Universal City today, they had no intention of populating this dusty street that did not boast so much as a palm tree.

"Here," Mrs. Hoyt said, turning to another flimsy pine door. "It's the third door after the cross street."

"We'll remember," Lisette said, and Mrs. Hoyt said, "People get lost," making me wonder whom else she had led here, but already she was hurrying us up the wooden step and into the costume shop where half a dozen girls, their hair pinned back from their faces, bent over sewing machines. Most of them wore short chintz work wrappers to protect their dresses, pins stuck haphazardly into the sleeves or hems. Only one girl wore a collared and cuffed jersey dress that must have felt like a quilt in the close room. An electrical fan by the door stirred the air directly in front of it, like a ripple over hot gravy. The light bulb overhead seemed to pulse.

"You girls can work here," Mrs. Hoyt said. "Work orders will be arranged by importance. If one comes in marked with a yellow flag, put down what you're doing and start on the new order."

"Your work could be on the screen before the end of the day," one of the girls said, and Aimée smiled her trillion-watt smile.

"Madame Annelle can help us if we have questions," Lisette said.

"The girls can help you and help look after the little one," said Mrs. Hoyt.

"I thought—Mary can stay with me," I said. "She can work on her sums and letters." Mary had dropped my hand when we entered the sweltering room and gawked at the line of grownup ladies, several of whom wore circles of rouge in the center of their cheeks, just as Mary had lately been drawing. When one of the girls smiled at her, Mary beamed back.

"Hardly," Mrs. Hoyt said. "Our office is no place for a child. The girls here will make sure she doesn't get into mischief."

"Come here, sweetheart." A girl with a flaming red bob beckoned to her. Mary looked at me, and I nodded unhappily. The girl looked nice enough and in an instant had whipped up a cat's cradle from a length of heavy thread. I tried to catch Ai-mée's glance to remind her to keep an eye on the child, but she was goggling at the sewing machine. You'd have thought it was Douglas Fairbanks.

"Madame Annelle is so useful to ask questions of. We would hate to bother the other girls," Lisette said. Did I derive sharp, mean pleasure in watching her stumble toward ordinary politeness? Yes. Yes, I did.

"I have never hired a girl who expected so many explanations. Madame Annelle is coming with me," Mrs. Hoyt said, sweeping me back out the door. I did not presume to know whether she was paying enough attention to see the way Lisette's features sharpened, a dog detecting a smell. I waved to Mary, now sitting on the lap of the redhead.

Mrs. Hoyt hurried me down the street to a different door, with a card reading 4 S
TARS
T
EXAS
? tacked to the door frame. Inside was another broad table stacked with drawings made in Mrs. Hoyt's confident, rapid hand. Two men in shirtsleeves examined them—the first had thin blond hair combed back from his forehead, and the second was small and moist-looking, with a glum mustache and frayed cuffs. He was saying, "Gertrude is a girl of grace. You must lower the waistline. This costume will make her look like a cow."

"If I lower it any more, she'll be wearing her waistline at her knees," Mrs. Hoyt said.

"She has seen these sketches, and she will not wear them," he said. He had the heavy-soled accent that belonged to the movie people who had come to America from Germany.
R
s and
W
s bristled from his speech like a briar hedge. "She is a willow." A
villow.

"Gertrude has been in Hollywood since Edison came up with the electrical socket," said the other man. "She is a redwood."

"Madame Annelle, look at this." Mrs. Hoyt pointed with her cigarette at the drawing, a long frock gathered at the waist with an apron. In the upper corner, a bonnet had been sketched, its brim an inch of starched lace. The absurd accessory, which would shade the sun no better than a cobweb, might show off the actress's face, but its circular shape and blunt proportion would make that face look round as a moon. Mrs. Hoyt must have designed the bonnet in response to more objections from the actress, or from this sorrowful man who was probably her emissary. The bonnet was more objectionable than the high-waisted dress or the silly, dainty slippers drawn underneath. Mrs. Hoyt said, "I have already dropped the waist twice. Explain to these men that it cannot drop farther unless we want our willow to look like a sack of potatoes."

"Perhaps the answer lies not in dropping the waist some more. Two long seams here"—not daring to draw on Mrs. Hoyt's sketch, I drew lines in the air with my finger—"will direct the eye up."

"You would not drop the waist farther?" said Mrs. Hoyt.

"Oh, madame! It is not possible." This was a lie, as were my words about the seams. Not only could the waist be dropped a bit, the dress would benefit. Mrs. Hoyt had placed the gathers just at the spread of the hip, and the effect was bunchy. I had created the same effect for clients whose business I did not care to keep.

"Now will you leave us alone, Emil?" she said to the man, who looked ready to launch another demoralized complaint before the blond man cut him off.

"Go tell your willow that if she wishes to be featured in any future pictures, she will find her way over here and thank Mrs. Hoyt in person."

Emil drew himself up—a small man playing a silly, pompous man. "You will wait a long time for such a moment."

"Don't I know it," said Mrs. Hoyt, who did not wait until Emil's footsteps had died away before she shuffled the drawings and pulled up a fresh sheet of paper. "All right, Franklin, explain to me again how I'm supposed to make eighteen-cent-a-yard cotton look like velvet."

"Not until you introduce me to your helper," he said, catching me off-guard. Usually when my clients' husbands admired me, I felt their weighted gaze long before they offered to see me to the front step, or the garden gate, or the streetcar stop. Franklin had scarcely lifted his eyes from Mrs. Hoyt's drawings, which made his admiration more scandalous and more delightful. A recent editorial in the
Times
had thundered about Hollywood lowering America's morals. George and I took turns reading the editorial in the hugest voices we could muster through our laughter. I had not expected my moral lowering to start so soon.

"Madame Annelle, Franklin Coston. Franklin is the assistant to the director, and it pleases him to find the costumer and make her life difficult."

He palmed back his hair, coating his hand with brilliantine, and said, "
Bonjour, madame.
Perhaps you can bring some respectability to these rooms."

"I see nothing unrespectable," I said, and naturally both Mrs. Hoyt and Franklin said, "Just wait." Mrs. Hoyt went on, "We had one girl in a revue who cursed so fluently Mr. Laemmle accused us of smuggling in a sailor and dressing him up in curls."

"Not just fluently—i nventively," Franklin said. "Some of those phrases will come in handy if I ever get caught in a speakeasy raid. I'll tell you, Madame Annelle, you would have been shocked."

"I don't shock easily," I said. He grinned. Mrs. Hoyt said, "We'll put that to the test," and although I did not pause to name or categorize my feelings, I felt a stab of pleasure, all the more intense because, as George or Lisette might say, a woman whose daughters were running unsupervised through Hollywood had no business feeling pleasure. My emotions bucked like a horse. It was all I could do to hang on.

After Franklin left, Mrs. Hoyt and I worked without interruption, making drawings and discarding them as if paper cost nothing, as if we were paid for the pages on the floor. When I designed for my clients, I copied a shape from a magazine or book, then made incremental changes as I thought about the shape on my client's body. Carefully erasing lines, I would tighten or expand the armhole, adjust the seams down the back, drawing lines lightly so that I might erase them easily. Mrs. Hoyt went through a dozen pieces of heavy stock to arrive at a single blouse, her swift lines cutting through my demure curves and dots and slants. She jotted down measurements as she went along and instructed me to do the same. "I don't even know who will wear this," I said.

"It's the girl's job to fit the costume," Mrs. Hoyt said.

"A terrible job, for a girl with the wrong proportions."

"Wait until we go to the set, and you see the girls whose costumes don't button up the back."

"What do they do?" I said.

"Don't show their backs to the camera."

"I thought"—I said daringly—"I thought that you wanted me to make sure every buttonhole was finished."

"You're not sewing buttonholes anymore; you are designing them. Though not quickly enough."

I bent back to the page, and my mind turned again to Lisette and Aimée, perhaps struggling with a buttonhole at this moment. Neither of them could hope to fit into the costumes Mrs. Hoyt and I were drawing, which would be snug even on my bony frame. Were the girls looking at the dresses they were making, discreetly holding the skimpy bodices to their breasts and seeing how the seams would split? Perhaps today they would vow to skip supper, the first day of many.

I could not keep my mind on them for long. Mrs. Hoyt set a rousing pace, making drawings for one movie, then draping and pinning muslin for another, using one of the dressmaker models in the corner. She approached the fitting as quickly as she did her drawing, and I watched her to see how a single straight pin could represent a seam. Boys kept knocking at the door with fabric, feathers, new work orders. Twice, a girl from the bay of seamstresses arrived with an apologetic expression and a murmured question. I asked the second girl whether Mary was any bother, although it was certainly not wise to remind Mrs. Hoyt of the child. My unease in being separated from her was only slightly allayed when the girl assured me that Mary was a little precious. Then a man yelled from the street to ask how soon the costumes for
Guns of Cheyenne
would be finished, and Mrs. Hoyt looked at me as if I might have an answer for him. By noon, my head banged from the thoughts jostling for room.

Normally, Mrs. Hoyt told me, we would be moving from set to set, but today we needed to stay inside and catch up; she was behind on two different pictures. Hearing me sigh as I struggled to re-pin chintz that had fallen apart twice already, she drawled, "Ah, the thrilling Hollywood life."

"People flock from hundreds of miles away for this," I said.

"To pin chintz?"

"They are following their dreams."

"Bad dreams," she said.

It was an exchange George would appreciate. For years, he had brought home stories for me. Now I would save him stories from my day, bringing home conversations that would interest him as a dog brings home a stick. George, my Helpmeet. No one knew better than I what would make him laugh and what would catch his attention. Even in his resistance to my work, he would like to hear about the closeness of the windowless room, the difficulty of handling bolts of fabric in the crowded space. The sheer plenitude of fabric and trim. When Mrs. Hoyt wanted two more yards of braid for a lieutenant's coat, she told me to tack a card outside the door. Fifteen minutes later a boy arrived with the braid coiled between his hands. "Anything else?" he asked me.

"If I need you, I'll whistle," I said, a line Madame Annelle would never countenance. Thinking of her sour disdain, I whistled a trill of notes. Madame Annelle's excruciatingly tended list of the finest clientele abruptly felt like a product of horse-and-buggy days. Here in Universal City, a girl just needed to be smart. Mrs. Hoyt marked a rather complicated gather at the neckline with a slash of chalk and said, "
Vive la France.
" I had no idea what she was talking about, and I did not care. Meaning and potential meaning flickered around me like the blinking lights of a marquee. I would tell George that, too.

We worked well past noon, my stomach groaning embarrassingly, before she straightened and rubbed an absent-minded hand on her neck, her only sign of fatigue. "The skirts should have been delivered by now," she said.

"The girls may be taking care."

"They'd better take care more quickly," she said, already halfway out the door, leaving me to mark my place with a pin and follow her.

At the seamstress shop, my eyes flew first to Mary, asleep on some scraps. The rank and file of seamstresses sat in an orderly line before their machines, and the pile of skirts on a chair near the door was tidy. Only when I glanced at Lisette and Aimée did I see the tear marks on Aimée's face, Lisette's mouth clamped like a trap.

"Some trouble with thread," said the girl closest to Mrs. Hoyt. Already walking toward Aimée, Mrs. Hoyt said, "Show me."

Mutely, Aimée held up a snarl of fabric, nearly half a yard, full of puckers and snags, the whole piece drawn into a knot at one end. When the thread first started to pull, she must have simply pumped harder. Six-year-old Mary, stitching a blanket for her doll, would not have made such a mistake. "I got confused," Aimée said.

"Oh, for God's sake. Have you ever seen a sewing machine before?" Mrs. Hoyt said, and Aimée flinched.

"At home we were not called on to do a lot of stitchery," Lisette said.

"So it would seem. You don't need to try your hand at it here again."

"Please," Lisette said. "Give us until the end of the day. The way we were raised—we weren't asked to sew."

"On a farm?" Mrs. Hoyt said.

"It was a ranch," Lisette said. "I know it doesn't sound like much out here, but fifteen hundred acres back on the home place meant something. We were more likely to be out all day on horseback with a rifle than at home doing sewing chores."

"You were cowgirls," Mrs. Hoyt said, and Lisette nodded, ignoring the sarcasm. "Even cowpokes know how to stitch up their britches," Mrs. Hoyt said.