Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

Rachel Gold demands you dance attendance upon her tonight. I shall collect you by taxi at eight o’clock. Dress: tuxedo and shoes. Shine the shoes. Since it is doubtful you own a flannel shoe-cloth, have recourse to the same dirty underwear with which it is rumoured you dry cocktail glasses. Apply polish, rub briskly. To shoes, not cocktail glasses. Comb your hair. Shave.

None of this is negotiable.

Yours,

Rachel

I am going to be questioned about Chance. There is no escaping Rachel Gold’s voracious curiosity. “Describe Mr. Chance using four and only four adjectives.” A parlour game of her invention. Four won’t cover the entire territory, she likes to say, but at least they tell you what you really think about someone. I try it now, while I dress. The four I come up with are obsessive, mystical, eccentric, ruthless. Only one of these adjectives really surprises me. Until this moment, I hadn’t realized I believed Chance was ruthless. The word doesn’t seem to fit a man so shy, but it won’t be dismissed either. Ruthless sticks.

These four adjectives lead me to the noun artist. Maybe Chance is an artist. Three of these characteristics – obsession, eccentricity, ruthlessness – earmark two of Hollywood’s greatest artists, Erich von Stroheim and D.W. Griffith. They are also slowly destroying them. Maybe Chance has the last two ingredients necessary to complete the great artist – mysticism and money.

By now I’m dressed in my shiny tux and my shiny shoes and it’s only seven-thirty. I decide to wait outside. It is a warm evening, the street mostly quiet because it is the supper hour. A few cars pass and a few would-be actresses slink by me on the sidewalk, their hipbones thrust out in the mannequin walk which is à la mode. You can imagine them carrying four-foot-long cigarette holders. Mine is a low-end show-biz neighbourhood of unsuccessful vaudevillians, of young men with sleek hair and pencil-thin moustaches, of dancers who undulate their bellies as extras in Cecil B. DeMille spectaculars, of violin players who saw background music to assist actors and actresses in summoning up the appropriate emotions for scenes of clamorous passion. Late at night my neighbourhood is a scene of strange comings and goings, of cars backfiring in the street at three a.m., of drunken cursing, of bottles breaking on the pavement, of women screaming.

A cab swings to the curb. I open the back door and slide in beside Rachel Gold. “How nice it is to be reunited with an old friend after such a very, very long time,” she says.

“Three weeks.”

She takes a compact out and starts working on herself, trying to obliterate the faint mist of freckles across the bridge of her nose. “Only three weeks? My but how the time flies when one of us is having a good time.”

“Who says I’m having a good time?”

“You always had a good time working for me, didn’t you?”

Her skin is luminous ivory, her eyes almond-shaped, large, very green. The punch of these eyes had been diminished in black and white, but they still managed to win her several small parts in pictures before she decided to write movies rather than act in them. Tonight she wears a silk flapper dress striped in three varieties of green which causes the exact shade of her eyes to alter in sympathy every time she moves.

“Where to, lady?” the cabbie wants to know.

“Cocoanut Grove.”

“Oh, shit.” I put my head in my hands.

“Don’t be like that, Harry. We need to have a serious talk.” She lays her hand on my knee to demonstrate she means it. She shouldn’t do that.

“Right, pondering a stuffed monkey’s ass will turn anybody serious.” I hate the Cocoanut Grove. I hate the famous décor. When maitre d’ Jimmy Manos heard the rumour from Rudy Valentino that the studio was getting ready to pitch the artificial palms used during shooting of The Sheik , Manos snapped them up for his new nightclub. He added a further charming touch – stuffed monkeys that can be run up and down the palms on a string. The worst is when Manos invites male club-goers to “date” the monkeys. The drunken scramble for apes often leads to brawls. The Grove is famous for its punch-ups. The tradition began on opening night two years ago when Jimmy Manos personally cold-cocked two stars; sometimes the personnel of competing studios fight pitched battles on the dance floor.

I’ve only been there a couple of times with Rachel – I couldn’t get past the door on my own – but Jimmy Manos thinks Rachel looks splendid, exotic against the Moorish décor. Rachel is good-looking enough to get in even on a Tuesday night, which is the night to be seen at the Cocoanut Grove, the night when Pickford and Fairbanks, Bebe Daniels, Theda Bara, Gloria Swanson, Pola Negri, Barbara La Marr, Chaplin, Ben Lyon, and Nita Naldi come out in force to judge the Charleston contests and provide wall-to-wall glamour.

But this is a Thursday, so there shouldn’t be too much difficulty in running me by the doorman. The cab pulls up to the Ambassador Hotel and Rachel sashays us into the Grove, gamine face powdered bedsheet white, black bobbed hair vibrating with energy, dynamo idling, the famous Gold electricity just a hum, occasional crackle, spark, as her hips twitch their way through the tables guided by Jimmy himself. Rachel prepared to run full throttle, sending high-voltage bursts clear through the scalp, that blue-black hair standing on end, screaming, Look out! Gold coming through!

Heads turn everywhere. She is beautiful.

The table is not the best – the Grove is full for a Thursday – but it’s private. Rachel pries open her purse and produces two flasks, one of martinis, one of brandy. “Do the honours, dear,” she says, and I pour drinks underneath the table. We stare out at the dance floor, all the pretty little things of both sexes cavorting like mad to dance music dominated by horns. Rachel tosses one leg over the other in a flash of silk stocking and starts it pumping up and down like the handle of a car jack. A hand flies up and grabs a hank of hair which she twists, tugs, tortures – a sure and deadly sign she has something she wants to get off her mind.

“What do you have to talk to me about, Rachel?”

She doesn’t take her eyes off the dancers. “Yesterday, one of the guys from payroll calls Donner to verify whether the cheque he’s cutting you is correct. It’s a big jump – from seventy-five dollars a week to a hundred and fifty dollars. He wants to know whether Donner authorized it. Donner says no, there must be some screw-up. An hour later payroll calls and says, “Sorry to have bothered you. The raise came from upstairs.” She unclutches the handful of hair, turns to me, takes a drink. “It started people in the writing department talking, Harry.”

“Talking about what?”

“They wonder how a title-writer gets his salary doubled. They ask themselves, What’s all that money for?”

“Maybe it’s none of their business what it’s for. Did you tell them that?”

“Some people say it’s snitch money.” She says this in a level voice, waits for an answer.

“Snitch money for what?”

“Some of the boys think you might be giving the names of anybody who talks union talk.” Rachel’s politics are vague, but they’re definitely what people call progressive.

“You’re the only person at Best Chance I’ve ever heard advocate a union. Do you think I sold you out?”

She leans across the table; the white face blazes in the candlelight. “No, I don’t, Harry. But I’m not the one who needs convincing. A lot of people find what’s going on with you strange. They’d like an explanation for it. Maybe you owe me an explanation because I’m your friend.”

“Maybe a friend ought to change her tone if she’s a friend. It sounds prosecutorial to me.”