A Touch of Stardust (45 page)

“I would’ve told you sooner, but I wasn’t sure myself. Now I’m anxious to get into it.”

“You have to go.”

“Yes.”

“You know what Carole said? She said taking chances could make one braver. That’s what you are doing. I know it now.”

“You mean it?”

She made one more foray into her heart to find the true answer. “Yes,” she said. “And you know what? I’m proud of you.”

“Frankly, my dear”—he chuckled—“I fervently give a damn.”

Her flight to Fort Wayne was scheduled to leave the next morning at nine o’clock. Andy drove her to the airport, and they talked very little. But it was comfortable—nothing further needed to be said. Julie glanced up at one turn in the winding road to the airport and caught sight of the
HOLLYWOODLAND
sign. It was indeed a jaunty symbol of glamour lifted high above the city, filled with promises and expectations. What would the future here hold for her? For Andy?

He walked with her, down a narrow path separated from the field by a high wire-mesh fence, to the gate where her plane waited. He leaned forward and kissed her tenderly. His lips were soft and strong; she shivered.

“Please don’t cry,” he said.

“I won’t.”

She could do that much for him, couldn’t she? She managed a smile and stepped away, turning toward the wire fence, then
trudged to the steps of the plane. She turned again and waved. Andy, to her bleak satisfaction—hands stuffed into his pocket, hunched forward—looked miserable. Then it was up the stairs, handing her ticket to the pretty blonde stewardess, having the absurd thought that, you know, this could be Andy’s old girlfriend.

She made her way to her seat and opened her purse. She stared at its interior, at the one comforting thing she had placed there this morning: a new script, pinned to a new contract. When she came back after Christmas, that would see her through.

Julie closed her eyes. One year ago, she had come stumbling into this town, dreaming of glamour and work and love, and she hadn’t been denied. She and Carole were true friends, and how did that ever happen? And now a page was turning. She had finally accepted that yesterday, as they walked together early in the morning, in the swirling low-hanging fog that rolled across the meadows at the Encino ranch.

The propellers began to turn, filling the cabin with noise. As Julie peered out the window, she remembered she hadn’t told Andy about that conversation—or that one of those hens finally laid two eggs. He would’ve laughed at that. Maybe, in a few months, where he was going, doing what he felt he had to do, nothing much would seem funny anymore. Maybe she had missed the chance to hear that loose, easy, warm laugh of his just one more time.

But he was already gone. She saw his receding back; that was he, wasn’t it? Maybe not. But he was gone.

Her fingers curling around the contract, she thought, I wish he had waited until the plane took off. But the figure she thought might be Andy turned just as the plane lifted from the tarmac and roared up into the sky. He was waving.

She waved back.

Maybe it was corny. But, yes, she still believed in the possibility of happy endings.

Gone with the Wind
grossed twenty-six million dollars in its first six months; the equivalent amount in 2014 dollars would be more than four hundred million. The movie received eleven Academy Award nominations. As it swept across the major cities of America, it was met with raves. “The mightiest achievement in the history of the motion picture,” declared
The Hollywood Reporter
. Indisputably, America fell in love with
Gone with the Wind
.

Reaction was indeed mixed among black Americans. Many loved the movie as much as white audiences did, but others felt as did the reviewer for
The Chicago Defender
, who called the movie a “weapon of terror against black America.” Yet it did pave the way for African American actors and actresses—including Hattie McDaniel, who won the first Oscar awarded to an African American in motion-picture history for her performance as Mammy. When she was called an “Uncle Tom” by the NAACP for playing the role, she said, “I’d rather make seven hundred dollars a week playing a maid than seven dollars being one.”

At the Oscar ceremony on February 29, 1940,
Gone with the Wind
won Best Picture of 1939 and swept the top performance awards, with the exception of Best Actor. Clark Gable did not win for his performance as the dashing, unforgettable Rhett Butler.

The war in Europe was closing in on the United States, and Hollywood studio moguls—so shamefully in collusion with the
Nazis to preserve their overseas profits—were about to stop playing dodgeball. War movies would soon emerge from the movie industry. It wasn’t long before France fell to the Nazis, in the spring of 1940, shaking up the Western world. Winston Churchill announced in the House of Commons that the battle of France was over, adding, “I expect that the battle of Britain is about to begin.”

The world was slipping into war. And Hollywood began changing fast.

Leslie Howard did return immediately to Britain to help with the war effort when England declared war on Germany—he was no vacillating Ashley Wilkes. He died at the age of fifty, in 1943, when his plane was shot down by the Germans, leaving unresolved questions as to whether he had been on a secret spy mission for Britain.

Carole Lombard threw herself into the war effort after Pearl Harbor, giving it her all, pretty much the way she did everything. She traveled around the country selling war bonds, and was in great demand, until tragedy struck.

Carole was returning home to Hollywood after speaking at a war-bond rally in 1942 when her plane slammed into a mountain. All aboard died in the fiery crash, including Carole and her mother. The actress—at that time, one of the highest paid in Hollywood—was only thirty-three years old.

To switch off my writer’s cap for a moment, I must admit I became very fond of this woman, who has lived all these months in my imagination—and I mourn her.

Clark Gable was devastated by Carole’s death. I find myself imagining how he might have received the news. I see him in a darkened room, head down, sitting alone, unable to cry, unable to rewrite the script that had snatched his wife away.

Clark was known as a womanizer, but his marriage to Carole was clearly a happy one. And the key to that was Carole. She had recognized for some time the diffident, shy man inside the glamorous shell of Rhett Butler as someone who craved love and honesty, and she set out to give it to him. When she died, a shield that kept Clark safe was surely gone.

Shortly after her death, he joined the U.S. Army Air Forces and
flew several combat missions. He married twice more, and died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-nine.

Vivien Leigh—who married and later divorced Laurence Olivier—went on to a stellar career, but also, plagued by health problems, died in her fifties.

As of May 2014, Olivia de Havilland remains the last surviving member of the legendary troupe of actors who made
Gone with the Wind
one of the most memorable films in history.

And I add a salute here to Frances Marion, a brilliant, trailblazing screenwriter, whose name is barely remembered today. She and Mary Pickford were partners in the making of many Pickford films, and her humor and desire to help other women in the business of screenwriting deserve more recognition. She died in 1973, at the age of eighty-four.

About Carole and Clark. It’s no secret that Hollywood marriages spun out of fantasy tend not to survive in reality. But I will risk this observation: even though they did not have a long marriage, they shared both the ability to laugh at themselves and a certain common sense about life, traits that might have given them a better chance to endure than many other Hollywood couples of that time—or any other.

That may be
my
fantasy. But, after all, this is about Hollywood.

As for my fictional characters? I think Andy would throw himself into rescue work and go wherever he could feel his efforts were worthwhile. I like to think he would possibly have been able to save some in his family, and to survive. And I believe he would do his best to return to Julie.

And Julie? Julie is one version of Everywoman—that girl in any generation at any point in history who strikes out with a small arsenal of choices and expands them to search for—if not always to find—what she wants. She grows, she changes. And at a certain point, the reader salutes her on her journey, and wishes her well.

Hope so.

I do.

Kate Alcott
     

This is a work of fiction, with invented details and characters, and I have taken liberties with some facts and time sequences—although the central structure, many anecdotes, and key dates are accurate. Also, descriptions and dialogue from the actual filming of scenes from
Gone with the Wind
have been compressed. As for quotes, Carole was a wonderfully colorful talker, and much of what she actually said has made its way into my book. Thank you, Carole.

I also owe thanks to Catherine Wyler for lending me her mother’s unpublished memoir. Margaret Tallichet was befriended by Carole Lombard and given a screen test for the part of Scarlett O’Hara, and her remembrances of that time were a delight to read. She later married producer and director William Wyler.

My grateful thanks to Judy Silber, the daughter of Sam Jaffe, a legendary agent and producer in Hollywood, who lent me her father’s delightfully juicy memoir, an oral history now in the archives of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

And once again, a salute to my treasured manuscript readers, who keep me from falling on my face: Mary Dillon, Ellen Goodman, Irene Wurtzel, Judy Viorst, Margaret Power, Lynn Sherr, and Linda Cashdan.

Esther Newberg, you have been behind me every step of the way for a long time. Nobody could ask for a better agent.

Melissa Danaczko, as my editor, you wield your red pencil with intelligence and care—always tuned in to what I am trying to do and finding ways to help me say it better.

And always, my thanks to my husband, Frank Mankiewicz, who grew up in that house on Tower Road in Beverly Hills. With both a pencil—drawing the layout of his family home for me—and his memories, he helped bring me back into that time between the wars when Hollywood shone so brightly and brilliantly.

It’s been a privilege and a pleasure to visit there.

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