Amy Bloom: Lucky Us

PUDGE NEVER DROVE OVER the speed limit. It took him less than an hour to drive from Hollywood to Malibu and only ten minutes to park his car and trail the two girls walking from Tim’s delicatessen to the beach. He walked north, close to the road, where no one on the beach would notice him. After twenty minutes, he had all the photos he needed. And he knew the pictures were perfect. You can’t really go wrong with a C3 range finder and two beautiful naked girls cavorting on the beach, is what Pudge thought. He didn’t have to do a thing to the pictures. The redhead’s pretty mouth on the brunette’s tit. The brunette and the redhead (not a real redhead, he noticed) taking off their suits and running into the water, their asses bouncing like happy peaches. Pudge did the negatives and the contact sheet and he didn’t wait for the six prints to dry. He laid them on a couple of dish towels on his backseat and drove them over to Hedda Hopper’s office. She made him spread the photos out on her secretary’s desk and she put on her glasses. Hedda Hopper told her secretary to give him fifty dollars.

“Thank you, Mr. Rustin,” the secretary said.

“They’re good pictures,” Pudge said. “You can see everything.”

ROSE KNEW WHO HEDDA Hopper was. Hedda Hopper was not, in Rose’s opinion, the worst person in the world or in America, or even just in Hollywood in 1942. Hedda Hopper hated FDR and she wrote some bad things about Jews that never came to much and she was famous for saying that the civil rights movement was bad for Negroes. Thirty-two million people read Hedda Hopper.

On Tuesday, Hedda Hopper called Rose at her bungalow and invited her to lunch the next day. Rose took off her red nail polish and put on pink. She wore an ivory gabardine suit and a hat and gloves. Hedda Hopper had iced tea and a Cobb salad. Rose wanted a club sandwich but she ordered the same thing. Hedda Hopper passed Rose the Los Angeles Times , folded in half. Inside the fold, there were three photographs of Rose and Iris at Malibu.

Rose said, “If that photographer had stayed another minute, he would have seen me slapping her face. I was never so upset in my life.”

Hedda and Rose looked down at the photographs together. Hedda put the picture of Rose kissing Iris’s breast on top of the pile. She sipped her iced tea and Rose sipped hers.

Rose said, “Honestly, Miss Hopper, I didn’t even know girls like that existed. She asked me if I wanted to go the beach. I thought we were friends. I didn’t know what to do.”

Hedda Hopper didn’t say a thing. She moved her hand so her rings caught the light. She ate a few bites of her salad.

Rose said, “I think girls like her are just ruining Hollywood. They’re just not … not the right kind of people.”

Hedda asked for a little more dressing.

Rose clasped her modest, pink hands in front of her.

“I admire all you’ve done to clean up Hollywood, Miss Hopper. I do. Just the other day — before this, this awful, mixed-up thing, I was saying to Buck, Buck Collins — my fiancé; did you know we’re engaged? We’ve been keeping it a secret, not that we think someone like you would be interested in our little romance — I always say that everyone in the business has an obligation to support the right kind of movies, and the right kind of people.”

Rose called her agent to say that she hoped that something would come of her romantic feelings for Buck and then she took her phone off the hook and was sick for two days. On Thursday, Rose’s picture was in the paper. It was a studio picture of her and Buck Collins, smiling at each other and holding the reins of his beautiful horse, Star. On Saturday, the studio drove her and Buck and a photographer to a bungalow not too far from the Malibu beach and on Sunday, there was a full-page spread of them in front of the bungalow and in front of St. Thomas the Apostle Episcopal Church. Rose held on to Buck’s hand. On the drive back, Buck said, We really should have dinner. We will, Rose said. She put her head against his thick shoulder.

In the article, Hedda Hopper quoted Rose as saying, “When you’re in love, why wait?” Miss Hopper wrote, in the next line, “Why indeed? These lovebirds are ready to bill and coo in their new nest and we wish them all the best!” In the middle of Monday’s column, Miss Hopper wrote: “There is always going to be an unsavory element in Hollywood, women — we certainly can’t call them ladies — of a certain stripe, who may lead young girls into the shady, dangerous parts of our little town. Do the right thing, Mr. Mayer.”

Rose read every word. The head of public relations at MGM would call a man, who’d call a man, and by the time Iris got to the set on Tuesday, she’d be turned away at the gate. The guard would hand her a paper bag with some bobby pins, her slippers, and her silk robe inside it. Iris was about to turn nineteen, and her career was over. Rose had seen it happen to other girls.

She knew better than to call Iris. Iris would apply for all the waitress jobs at the places near the studio, where everyone knew her and liked her, and the manager would give her a free cup of coffee and a slice of pie and Iris would know what that meant. Iris would apply at Ohrbach’s and Bullock’s and the salesladies would take the application and put it on the pile, without a word.

FRANCISCO DIEGO THOUGHT OF HIMSELF AS AN ARTIST. HE’D been putting makeup on beautiful women and pretty girls and some very attractive men for thirty years. He’d done the deep-red Cupid’s bow lips, the delicate pink flush, the Betty Boop eyes, and narrow, penciled-on eyebrows one hair thick, and then the full, slick brows and Maybelline lashes and the big, raspberry eat-me-now mouth. He’d worked with beet juice and talc when he’d had to and he’d drawn stockings on his own sisters’ legs when they couldn’t get nylons. He’d met Max Factor. The late Max Factor had showed him a very good time in a couple of Malibu bars, and, in return, Francisco showed the man a better way to sponge on foundation. He could still do the Charleston with the starlets and arm wrestle with the boys. He loved the girls who, when he cupped their little chins, pointy or round or square as a sugar cube but still charming, their eyes welled up with gratitude. He had made them beautiful when they had just been pretty. He made the rare beauties unforgettable. He had made a sweet stick of a farmgirl into an Egyptian princess and watched her glide onto the set, knowing she now knew who she was.

He loved the boys who would let him love them, who let him fill in the little ginger mustache or the lopsided brows or slip a pad onto the left shoulder and knew he had given them their careers. He even liked the ones whose vanity was legion. A tailor once called him after a big star came in to have the waist on his pants taken in. The star told everyone about his tailoring needs and the tailor told everyone that the problem was not the small waist, but some smallness a little farther south. To be that vain was to be as vulnerable as a woman, is what Francisco thought. He had solved the problem by looking like everyone’s Mexican grandfather. He didn’t color his hair, he didn’t watch his weight. He smoked one cigar a day and he got his cigars from the same place Mr. Thalberg used to. He had seven gray smocks and seven pairs of black linen pants and seven pairs of black espadrilles and dressed up for no one. For some of the actors, coming into the makeup room after six months of unemployment or suspension or being lent out for some piece of crap at First National Pictures, finding Francisco in his trailer, cleaning his brushes, was like catching sight of the lighthouse after months at sea. He took some of the sailors home with him, gave them refuge in his quiet bungalow, in his big lap, in the home-cooked meal, and in his affection, which he made sure had not a single dot or thread of envy or competition in it.