The Song Is You Read online

  “I like damage,” she cooed absentmindedly. “It tingles.”

  “But for how long, B.P.? You’re from what, Wisconsin? Land of milk and … milk.”

  “Minnesota. Cloquet, Minnesota. Land of a thousand lakes. Didn’t you write the studio bio?” she said, straightening in her seat, eyes focusing a little.

  “Right, right. You’re the all-American dream girl, Miss Dairy Princess and pine needles in your hair. Summer picnics and autumn hay rides and winter sleigh rides and spring bike rides and Our Girl of the Frozen Midwest.”

  “You want I should break into ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon’?”

  “A girl like you,” he began, moving right past her sarcasm, confident he was on the right track. Something in her eyes. “A girl like you, she’s not meant for the bruising ride through the darker corners of the Hollywood Hills.”

  “What, you’re saying I should go back to Cloquet? After fifteen years of clawing my way out of that town? I wasn’t going to spend a lifetime of Saturday nights watching my gandy dancer husband trying to win the logrolling championship.”

  “Oh no, no. You can’t leave. We need you, kid. You’re a star in the making, if you can stomach the What Price Hollywood? Cliches. All I’m saying is, there must be a better way for you to live here. Someone to team up with, someone who’ll understand the life and

  also look out for you, and your interests. And you.”

  “I’ve done the sugar-daddy gig, hon. Maybe you heard.”

  He had, of course. Twenty-two-year-old Barbara Payton had taken forty-six-year-old Bob Hope for a rumored thirty grand plus a fabulous, fully furnished duplex apartment on Cheremoya Avenue— all in less than six months. She was no dumb bunny.

  “I don’t mean a sugar daddy, sugar lips. I mean a man who will do right by you. Bells and whistles and rice and the bouquet.”

  “Yeah?”

  He saw the look and knew he’d finally stumped her and her pushed-out siren-red lower lip.

  “And I think Franchot is the fella to do it.”

  “Since when were you hot on him? I thought you wanted me to close my lily-white legs and all that.”

  “I picture something majestic, Babs. You know what I’m seeing?” He grabbed her arms with one hand and gestured widely into the imaginary horizon with the other. “I’m seeing little Barbara Payton in a white lace dress, full skirt, train, the fringe of Minnesota-white bangs peeking out from beneath your grandmother’s Belgian lace veil. I see her walking down the aisle in a little country church, the finest Methodist—”

  “Presbyterian.”

  “—Presbyterian church in all of Cloquet and the county. The townspeople are assembled, Granny in her best Sunday bonnet, the mayor, hell, the governor, and that glorious early winter light streaming through the stained glass.

  “And who should be at the altar, all sophistication and double-breasted dash, and certainly the biggest star to hit Cloquet since Maude Adams did her Peter Pan tour in ‘07? Franchot Tone, of course. And who does he see, through the blinding sunlight, but his bride: this hazy vision in eggshell white, this dark-eyed, sparkling American beauty. And the moment, the locking of eyes between the dapper groom and too-lovely, petal-white bride, is so perfect, so exquisite that many of the guests—even grouchy old Mr. Carnahan, the druggist, and bossy young Miss Harley, the librarian—find tears falling from their disbelieving eyes.

  “It is, Miss Barbara Payton, a moment that will be talked about for years to come, passed down at knitting parties, quilting bees, church socials, and football games until it takes on the sheen of Arthurian legend. The movie king and his rising movie queen.”

  Damn if he couldn’t almost picture it himself. He was half ready to volunteer as best man.

  “Fuck, Hop. You play rough.” A hot tear sprang to Barbara’s eight-ball eyes. And Hop couldn’t hide his smile.

  Driving home, head soft like a melon from all the drinks, he was still smiling. His first opportunity to impress the big brass and it might be a home run. Everything was falling into place.

  Where the fuck did he get that bit about the Belgian lace, anyway? You’re a natural, kid. A natural. The way a shot of a girl’s sandalwood musk could send him into a two-hour single-minded dance of a lifetime for the chance to press his face into the center of that smell—it was the same on the job. He was always ready to take the chance, make the play, show the fellas upstairs that he could plunge his hands straight into the dross for them and still come out clean. Just like when he was a kid, always caught with his mouth on the old man’s bottle of Wild Turkey, fingers in Momma’s purse—she called him Little Jack Horner, forever caught with his thumb in the pie. But why pass up a hot prospect, a sweet deal, all on the chance he might get caught? After all, even then, his baby face, fast tongue —these things could be parlayed. He hadn’t yet faced a punishment so bad it made even the riskiest proposition not worth his trouble.

  At least that’s what Hop thought about himself. His soon-to-be ex-wife, Midge, however, who’d spent close to three years on the blunt end of this worldview, saw things differently.

  “All I see is a guy awfully hot to take knocks,” she’d say. “You just let the punches keep on coming. Don’t flatter yourself by mixing that up with ambition or smarts or charm.”

  His pal Jerry, with far more affection, called him “Slap Happy—or Slap Hoppy.”

  He was feeling so good he thought he might drive by Gloria’s place, say hello. She might be out on a date, but who knows? Worth a try. He owed her a visit anyway, hadn’t seen her in weeks.

  Of course she might be irritated when she saw him. Last time, he’d also come late at night, high and pushy, and even though she was glad to see him, she couldn’t believe it when he got out of bed afterward, buttoned his shirt and pants, and started for the door. Her face knitted together, puckered like a thread, had been pulled too tight. She threw her telephone at him and knocked over her own new chaise lounge from Madame La Foux.

  So maybe not Gloria.

  He could go to Villa Capri, or to Chasen’s for a hobo steak, make the rounds a little. There was a waitress at Villa Capri, Bernadette something, whom he’d taken out a few times. Gorgeous Italian chick

  with big, black-olive eyes and tits like Yvonne De Carlo.

  Yeah, that’d be okay.

  Or he could try to meet up with Jerry, coming off the evening shift at the Examiner. At least four nights a week, he knocked back a few with Jerry Schuyler, his closest friend, with whom he worked side by side through three years of churning out copy for Yank and Stars and Stripes. Over scotch, sometimes a martini, they’d swap stories from the front, just like they’d done during the war. Jerry was the only person in his new life who knew him before he came to Los Angeles. Just possibly, Jerry was the only person who even knew where he was from, or that he was from anyplace at all.

  But then Hop remembered he probably couldn’t see Jerry after all. Jerry was getting pretty hard to see these days, with the new lady in his life. It would have to be Bernadette to help celebrate. He wanted to celebrate all night.

  Sweet Iolene

  The next morning, Hop arrived at his office with fingers crossed about the Barbara Payton deal. Today he’d have to see if what he’d set in motion had any life of its own. This girl wasn’t the most reliable kid in the pen, and he wouldn’t be surprised if she had ended up eloping overnight—with the bartender, Howard Hughes, the Negro parking lot attendant. That one could get into a fresh world of trouble between midnight and seven a.m.

  The press-office secretary, Lil, handed him his morning trade clippings and a few pieces of late-and early-delivery mail. Nothing more about Barbara but a few small fires to put out. An item in Sheilah Graham’s gossip column hinting at an on-set fling between the square-jawed adventure hero and the married actress with twins at home. More “tales of woe” in Louella about poor Gail Russell— thankfully, one troubled actress who was not with his studio. Still, there were a few unnamed “friends” ci
ted in the column that he’d have to check on.

  “Someone’s waiting for you,” Lil said, nodding over to the set of chairs facing her.

  Hop turned. “Iolene,” he said, with a start.

  There she was. Just as filled with slouching, dark-eyed glamour as the last time he saw her, nearly two years before, a different decade.

  “Remember me?” she said, standing.

  “Always,” Hop said, surprised at the itch in his voice. “Follow me.”

  Pressing her copper-colored skirt flat, she sat down in the chair across from him. He gave her a broad smile. Maybe she wanted to charm him into helping her get a job. He hoped that was it, and if it was, he was ready to be charmed. It wasn’t until she lifted her eyes to him, the crinkly veil on her hat rising over her forehead, that he knew what this visit was really about. She didn’t bother to hide the spiny fear in her face.

  “Been a while. You’re over at Columbia now?” He smiled, kept smiling, suddenly self-conscious of everything, from his new shirt and sterling movie-reel cuff links to the picture window behind him, the polished dark oak desk on which he rapped his fingers.

  “You could say so. Not working much these days,” she said, tilting her head and lowering her long lashes.

  “No? You on contract? Because maybe I could call—”

  “Look at the king of Hollywood. Sure look like the Jack now, don’t you?” she said icily, twisting her lips into a knot.

  Hop just kept on smiling,

  Slanting her eyes, she shifted forward and asked in a confiding tone, “What is it exactly you do here, Mr. Hopkins?”

  Hop leaned back in his chair and, out of the corner of his eye, looked out his small window at the back lot. He felt a twitch in his eye.

  Putting on his game face, he looked her in the eye

  “I’m a fireman.”

  “Come again.”

  “I put out fires. I start fires,” Hop said, warming up to the line. “A

  little of both.”

  Iolene gave him nothing, not even a glimmer. The shiny clicks and levers that moved so easily for him with the likes of Barbara Payton were useless here. Instead, she snapped back, “Not the same fires?”

  “Not usually, no. Ideally, at least.”

  “Tell me, Mr. Hopkins, would you start a fire just so you could put

  it out?”

  “Now that’s an idea.”

  She paused a second, as if deciding whether to tussle or not. Then

  something unfolded in her eyes, something unpleasant.

  “You’re really hitting on all eight now, eh? I know all about you, Mr. Hopkins. I got you coming and going. What I could tell—it got you far with your bosses, but maybe other people would be less impressed.”

  “Oh.” Hop set his hands on the edge of his desk to keep himself steady. Something felt funny, something he could just about taste. “That’s it, huh? Looking for a touch?” he said, as tough as he could, although he couldn’t seem to stop himself from swiveling back and forth in his chair.

  “No touch, Mr. Shark Skin. That’s not me. And you don’t get off that easy.”

  “Who does, Iolene?” he said, treading water, unsure where she was going but wanting to play it for all scenarios.

  “You remember what happened that night. You were there, right in

  the middle of it. I saw you, and you saw everything.”

  Of course he remembered.

  “Okay,” he said, nodding, businesslike. “Let’s talk. Meet me at the

  bar around the corner, the one with the green menu board out front. Twelve o’clock.”

  She agreed.

  For the next few hours, Hop tried to get work done, made his calls, filed some press releases. But his mind kept pitching back to Iolene.

  He used to see her all the time back in his Cinestar days. As many times as they ran into each other at the studio or at nightclubs, she wouldn’t let him make her. Iolene, lips like tight raspberries. The girl who wouldn’t spread her fine legs, not ever, not for him. What could be better than that? He felt her caramel skin in his sleep nights after he saw her. She’d pretend, even, not to get his meaning (Sure can’t be your hand there on my new belt, can it?). She liked to play it, but only so far. She wouldn’t come across. Even if she was the type—and maybe she wasn’t, but let’s face it, in this town, they all were, himself included—she wouldn’t lay for a Cinestar reporter, a lousy feature writer. A columnist, maybe, if he had some jingle, but not a schmuck like him. Not when she could get a three-line walk-on by laying for Otto Preminger just once.

  That night back in ‘49, the night she was talking about, well, he’d been playing craps, minding his own business and losing his rent money, when Iolene and her friend Jean approached him. Sure, he’d offered to take Iolene and Jean out on the town. Sure, he’d talked them into swinging by his apartment first for a cocktail. They’d had whiskey sours and Hop, mostly joking, angled to try to begin and end the evening right there on his sofa. Jean had yawned and wondered aloud if he really had any idea at all where the interesting people would be. That was what she’d said, “interesting.”

  “What she means is famous,” Iolene had said, sitting back and raising one sparkling leg over the other.

  “What I mean is important,” Jean corrected. With another yawn, she looked over at the side table and the set of framed photos on it. Nodding to one, she said, “This is your wife?”

  “Can’t say I know any important people,” Hop said, talking over her question. “But I know they like to roll in the mud as much as the rest of us. More, really. So let’s go to the mudhole, ladies.”

  Because he did know of a place that, thanks to a backroom betting parlor and hash den, was lately drawing some of the biz’s more adventurous types.

  “Make it happen for us, big boy,” said Jean, smiling for the first time. And, as she did, she was suddenly jaw-achingly pretty. Well, gosh darn.

  It had been late, later than late, and they’d racked up quite a tab at the Eight Ball, a sweat-on-the-walls roadhouse in a dark stretch of nowhere just east of civilization. By eleven, they’d collected a shabby but starry group. Iolene and Jean—Jean and Iolene, one of the men sang drunkenly—seemed to know everyone. But Jean never seemed satisfied, was always looking over heads, even famous heads. At one point, Sammy Davis Jr., bandleader Artie Shaw, and director Howard Hawks were all crowding into their table, pushing drinks on the girls, including a new fetch, a knockout white-blonde. Iolene, drinking only a few sips of Rose’s lime juice and soda all night, mostly sat, smoking Julep cigarettes one after the other. Jean imbibed at a more social pace and played it bright-eyed, leaving the full-on sprawling party-girl routine to the blonde who, Jean confided, was a burlesque performer at the Follies Theatre, where her stage name was Miss Hotcha. “What else could it possibly be,” Hop had sighed, shaking his head and smiling wistfully at her.

  Jean kept flipping her matchbook over and over in her hand.

  “Who you waiting for, Legs?” Hop had said to her, winking. “Clark Gable don’t make it out to places like this.”

  She’d looked at him long and slow and it was as mean and sexy a look as they could give, these girls. It was scorching.

  “She’s waiting for her new fella,” Iolene whispered in his ear, lower lip nearly pulsing against it in the crush of the booth. “She thinks he might come.”

  Before Hop could ask who the fella was, Miss Hotcha had pushed her tight little thigh against his, leaned on his shoulder, and began singing “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl” in his ear. It was a very good night, he thought. Very good night, boy-o.

  It was close to one o’clock when the biggest stars yet strode into the creaking, blaring roadhouse. Marv Sutton and Gene Merrel. Hollywood’s premier song-and-dance duo. Suave Sutton with his buttery baritone and dreamy-eyed Merrel, voice like sweet ice cream, both of them acrobatic, athletic dancers with pretty faces that could be plugged into any picture formula: two Broadway hoofers and one lusc
ious blonde, two baseball players and one sultry brunette, two cadets and one fiery redhead. It was simple, and it worked over and over again. Sutton, the charmer who got the girl, dancing in glorious tandem with the angel-faced Merrel, who watched him get her. Seven, eight years ago, they were swinging it for peanuts in East Coast nightclubs. Next thing, they’re movie stars.

  Drinks were now on the house, bottle on the table, thanks to Sutton and Merrel’s own personal studio press agent, Bix Noonan, who kept the liquor flowing freely, kept the boys happy. Hop might well have stayed were it not for Miss Hotcha. Before he knew it, he was caroming along the Arroyo Seco with the burlesque blonde in the seat next to him. He’d always been a lucky fella.

  The next day, when the brunette Jean went missing, Bix called and Hop helped him out.

  End of story.

  After Iolene left his office, Hop tried to conjure up every detail he could still recall about that night. But by noon, when he was supposed to meet her, he had distracted himself out of the memory. He hadn’t heard a Barbara Payton update yet, but Louella Parsons had called, saying she’d heard rumblings of Barbara sending her maid to Union Station for a train ticket.

  When he walked into the bar, the kind of quiet, no-questions-asked place where colored women and white men could both get service, Iolene was already there. They ordered prairie oysters and carried them to a booth in the back.

  “Okay, Iolene. What’s it about?” He wasn’t going to bother with charm or finesse. She wasn’t buying, anyway. She never had.

  She leaned back in her chair and glared at him.

  “What you did, Hop, it wasn’t right.”

  Hop’s eyes widened. “Hey, I think you got the wrong guy.”

  “You sold Jean Spangler up the river to get your lousy job.”

  She’s so angry, he thought. Why is she so angry? What did he do that was so wrong? She was looking at him like he was something stuck to the bottom of her shoe.

  “I could make trouble.”