FOUR
“Alan Marshall is a cowboy star,” Casey said. “You weren’t joking or anything.”
“Of course not.” Conrad Hart gave his hat to a young woman, who whistled her appreciation at his pajamas and dressing gown. “Why would I joke about something like that?” He led Casey into a large room that seemed incredibly small, mostly because it was jammed with weirdly dressed people.
“This house!” Casey had to shout now if he wanted Hart to have even a hope of hearing him. “This isn’t exactly what I envisioned a cowboy living in!” Alan Marshall evidently didn’t hold with the mock-Andalusian architectural motif that dominated the wealthy suburbs of Los Angeles. The exterior of his house looked like a Hollywood art director’s idea of something Shakespeare might have called home.
“Perhaps it would help if you knew that Marsh was born in Connecticut and that he learned to ride a horse as a show-jumper!” Hart grinned. “He’s only a little more of a cowboy than you are!” Hart grabbed a glass from a passing tray and handed it to Casey. “You’ll be jake on your own, right? I see some people I have to talk to.” Without waiting for a reply, he waded into the crowd.
Casey took advantage of the situation to reconnoiter the house and the people in it. There seemed to be hundreds of people jammed into the room in which Hart had abandoned him; their costume ran the gamut from formal white tie and tails to the gaudiest of pajamas. One man wore a bathing suit, which looked especially incongruous given that he also wore black dress shoes and was smoking a pipe. A couple of the women were even wearing trousers; Casey couldn’t recall ever having seen a woman thus dressed before. As if the talking—shouting, really—wasn’t noisy enough, a quartet in the far corner honked out something that might have been jazz but which mostly just added a tenor register to the din.
There wasn’t a single person he knew to talk to, and only one face he recognized from High Risk: Richard Armstrong, already—or still—drunk, gesticulated wildly to a darkly unhappy looking man Casey thought might be John Gilbert. His uncertainty on this score quickly became a motif: from time to time Casey thought he recognized someone he’d seen on a movie theater screen, but without the benefits of costume, lighting, and silence, it was impossible to be sure. Instinctively he knew that even were the likes of Chaplin attending, he’d never know them.
“Hey, fly-boy!” A soft hand dropped onto his shoulder.
Casey turned to find Lily Cross behind him, a glass of champagne in each hand. “Good evening, Miss Cross,” he said. “I take it you’re enjoying yourself.”
“Oh, balls,” she said. “Call me Lily, damn it. After all, we crashers ought to stick together.”
“Crashers?”
“I don’t know about you”—Lily drained a glass, then tucked it into the belt of a passer-by’s Japanese-style robe—”but I sure as hell wasn’t invited. Extras at Hollywood parties are like Jews at Chicago country clubs—excluded with all of the force of the law.”
“But you’re not an extra. Didn’t they say the other night that you had a contract now?”
“Don’t let that fool you, Casey. For the most part those people are only as friendly as it helps them to be. And my contract isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on unless I do well and get noticed. As far as everyone here is concerned, I’m an extra until High Risk comes out. And even then I can always wind up like Belinda Moore.”
“The woman you were joking about at Hart’s place.”
“The one I replaced. You knew that, right?” Casey nodded. “They ended her contract. They can do that, you know. We don’t have any choice in terms of the pictures we make, but at any time they can suspend us or just kill our contracts. That’s what they did to Belinda. She had a couple of years at Monarch and didn’t get anywhere. The fan magazines ignored her, and so did everyone else. So just like that she’s gone, and I’m this month’s beauty-contest winner. If I don’t attract the right kind of attention, I’ll go the same route she did.”
Lily drained her second glass in one convulsive gulp. “I hear that Belinda couldn’t even get through the front door at L-Ko Pictures. When even Poverty Row is closed to you, you’re through in the movies.”
Casey took a healthy swallow from his glass. Its contents seemed intended to be gin. “Forgive me for saying this,” he said, “but you’re a rather cynical young woman.”
She laughed. “And you’re an astonishing stick for such a handsome man. Come on; let’s go find me another drink.”
Casey followed her out of the large room and through a succession of equally crowded but smaller rooms to a dining room whose table was surmounted by a buffet of astonishing breadth. There were things on the table that Casey didn’t have a hope of identifying. His stomach didn’t care, and growled in eager anticipation. At a sideboard surmounted by galvanized-steel buckets full of ice, a young man in a poorly fitted tuxedo dispensed champagne—well, something bubbly, at any rate—from unlabeled green-glass bottles. Casey set his gin on the sideboard and took two glasses from the young man. He handed one to Lily and carefully tasted the other. The wine was a bit yeasty, but nowhere near as unattractive as the chalky whites of wartime northern France. Grateful, he left the gin behind.
“So how do you like making talkies?” he asked. Desiree had seemed unenthusiastic, possibly afraid; but she was a veteran; perhaps the younger actors and actresses felt differently.
“I think I’ll like them just fine,” Lily said. “I don’t have any trouble talking. Unlike some people I could name.” Her champagne glass was empty again, and her eyes seemed a bit wilder to Casey. “Speaking of which,” she added, “just how well do you know Howard Hughes, anyway?”
“For God’s sake,” Casey hissed at her. “Why won’t you people leave me alone about that? It’s not something I’m especially proud of, and I’d just as soon not discuss it. Not even as a favor to your boyfriend Straebo over there.”
“Let’s get one thing straight,” Lily said, and now the fun was gone from those eyes. “Jerry Straebo is not my—wait a minute. Did you say there?”
“Yes. He’s just out in the hall.”
“Shit!” Lily shifted from side to side, as though looking for a trench to dive into. “Has he seen me?”
“No,” Casey said. “At least, I don’t think so. He’s got his back to us.”
“Wonderful.” She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. “If he asks, you haven’t seen me. Enjoy the party, Casey.”
Next Prologue Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three
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