A Touch of Stardust (7 page)

Julie thought of the book. “They’re all happy ‘darkies,’ and no one’s too worried about slavery. Is that it?”

He looked at her and smiled. “Pretty obvious, isn’t it?” His smile quickly faded. “That’s just one example. He’s obsessed with this story. He can’t let a single detail go, and it could kill him. If this movie falls apart, we’ll all crash.” He put his head back and closed his eyes. “The damn script—all the different versions—fill four suitcases. Nothing is good enough for Selznick. Do you know how many women he’s considered to play Scarlett? Just about every major actress in Hollywood, plus hundreds more. At least he isn’t testing all of them. We’re already two years behind schedule.”

He didn’t seem to need any further response from her, which was good, because she could think of nothing to say. But she felt comforted that he would tell her all this.

“Did you read what Gary Cooper told Louella this week? Said the damn movie was going to be a flop, and he was glad it was Gable who was going to fall on his face, not him.”

“Maybe he just wishes he had accepted the part of Rhett Butler instead of turning it down,” she said.

That brought another flicker of a smile. “Could be, but it feeds all the bastards who want Selznick to fail. You know how he got Gable for the part? Convinced MGM to ante up an extra fifty thousand to pay off that stubborn wife who won’t give him a divorce. She says it isn’t enough, she wants more—one reason Gable is always in a foul mood.” Andy folded his arms across the steering wheel and stared at the glittering lights below. He looked so dejected, Julie reached out and touched his hand.

“Sorry, I’m not great company,” he said, turning to her. “It’s the cost of working with a true gambler who also happens to be a genius, I guess.” He paused, then added, almost wonderingly, “You know, if one thing had gone wrong in the burning-of-Atlanta scene—just one thing—it would all have been over.”

He was so close, and surely in need of comfort. Everything in her scolded against what she wanted to do, that it was not proper, but why shouldn’t a woman act first?

She moved forward and kissed him hesitantly on the lips.

He didn’t respond for a second or two. Then, with a sigh, he pulled her into his arms. The first thing she registered was that his lips smelled faintly of tobacco. The second was, how good they tasted.

He drew back sooner than she wanted. “Can’t take advantage of a girl like you in the old Hollywood way,” he said, cupping her head in his hands, dropping a gentle kiss on her nose.

“Why not?” she asked recklessly.

“It would be too much of a cliché,” he said. “You know, don’t you, this is the classic spot in L.A. for discreet deflowering?”

She started to speak, but he put a finger to her mouth. “Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know if you’re a virgin or not.”

“Andy—”

He kissed her again, and then slowly pulled away. “Time to take you home, Miss Julie Crawford,” he said.

Julie didn’t know whether to be embarrassed at her own temerity or hurt by his rejection. She was twelve years younger than he was, but she wasn’t a child. They had only known each other for a month, it was true. She fought consternation as they made their way down the winding mountain road—he must be terribly worried, he was burdened by responsibilities, she wanted to help him—but concluded finally that he simply might not be attracted to her. That was devastating. She thought of him all the time. She stared out the window as he chatted about the weather, about the movie. She didn’t look at him, just focusing instead on the headlights of drivers on the other side of the looping curves of Sunset Boulevard, growing increasingly miserable. Was this all there was?

They reached the rooming house. She turned to him, first putting her hand firmly on the door handle. “Don’t get out,” she said coolly. “You obviously don’t take me seriously. I’m fine getting up to the door on my own.”

“On the contrary, Miss Crawford,” he said. “I take you very seriously.”

“It doesn’t seem like it to me.”

He reached out and pushed back a lock of hair from her face, then traced her lips with a finger. “You’ll either see it or you won’t,” he said. “Time will tell.”

She couldn’t think of a thing to say. “Good night,” she managed lamely.

Rose was already asleep when she undressed and slipped into bed. Had Rose heard anything yet about her screen test? Julie wondered. She’d have to wait until morning to find out. Just as well. Her own thoughts were too mixed up for her to concentrate on anything tonight. Andy had invited her in, and then pushed her out.

The thought did occur to her later, just before she fell off to sleep, that if her father knew how properly Andy Weinstein had behaved up on Mulholland Drive, there might have been a faint thaw in what she knew would be his icy disapproval.

Somewhere near the end of the week, Selznick triumphantly announced his choice for Scarlett O’Hara: it was indeed to be that beautiful little English actress Julie had seen on the platform the night he burned down Atlanta, Vivien Leigh.

Rose was unfazed. “I never dreamed I would get it,” she said, “but I’ve had a wonderful time.”

“You’re handling it much more calmly than I would,” Julie said.

“Better not to want anything too much,” Rose responded. Still, a flicker of wistfulness tugged at her face. “You know who was tested just before me?” she said. “Vivien Leigh. The wardrobe mistress told me they sneaked her in, hardly anybody knew.”

“Did you see her?”

“No. But they put me in the same dress; the wardrobe lady told me that. And you know what? It was still warm.” Rose lifted two delicate fingers, pressing them together. “I was that close,” she said, beaming.

The red earth of the Back Forty rumbled with the sound of trucks and hammers and the shouts of workmen hauling paint and plasterboard and roof tiles and paper chandeliers and everything else Selznick demanded. Julie often spied Susan Myrick, a Georgia journalist and friend of Margaret Mitchell’s, who was here to make sure Hollywood didn’t tamper too much with her old friend’s depiction of the antebellum South. She was a woman of serious demeanor, never without a copy of
Gone with the Wind
in her hand, and Julie was too much in awe to approach her. Myrick had already objected to a proposed scene of slaves cutting cotton in April—wrong time of the year, she announced to Selznick. And Scarlett could not carry a bowl of olives into the dining room, because olives were not grown on Georgia plantations. But Myrick lost her fight to build Tara without columns—which were never envisioned by Mitchell—to a stubborn Selznick, who conceded only to making them Georgia style—square, not round.

And now here it was, in front of Julie—the home of Scarlett O’Hara, a pillared white mansion standing proud and seemingly unbreakable. Unless you blew too heavily. That was the joke, but you only heard it from the construction workers.

A fairy-tale city was taking shape on this sweep of land, so amazing that Julie could, at least once in a while, get Andy out of her thoughts. The rapidly growing set was impervious to the honking horns and grubby hurrying of Culver City. It wasn’t just Tara: a network of the streets and houses of Atlanta was springing up, and the scene expanded every day.

Each morning, she pulled herself from bed and joined the cleaning ladies and the plumbers and other sleepy travelers on the 5:00 a.m. bus to get to the studio early. That way, she could step onto the back lot alone and be in the old South and feel the magical world of
Gone with the Wind
come to life. In front of Tara, the trees that had been fashioned over telephone poles looked real, and if she hadn’t known the dogwood blossoms were made of white paper, the illusion would have been complete. It just took believing. She loved watching it grow—over fifty building façades now, and two miles of streets. It didn’t matter that she walked in a landscape of glued plasterboard, a place of fake structures held together by little more than Selznick’s frenzied dreams. It was vividly real.

And—if she came early enough—deserted. So the morning she saw a sole figure standing in front of Scarlett’s home, hands shoved in his pockets, hunched forward, collar up against the cold, it almost felt like an intrusion on her personal territory. Until she realized who it was.

David Selznick glanced up and saw her. She was shocked at how strained and spidered with red his eyes were. He looked like a man who didn’t sleep. There were rumors that he was living on Benzedrine and gambling every night until three in the morning, and that his marriage was shaky. All this before principal filming had even begun. But his passion for perfection was legendary: Horses’ tails had to be cropped in exactly the fashion of the Civil War; furniture had to be aged so it looked authentic. The gowns and uniforms had
to be exact replicas of Civil War clothing, and not just the clothing that would show. Vivien Leigh was complaining vigorously about the dauntingly rigid whalebone corset she would be forced to wear, to no avail. The edict from Selznick was firm.

“Spectacular, isn’t it?” he said, looking at her without a glimmer of recognition.

“Yes,” she said.

“Every goddamn critic in town says I’m a jackass for taking this on. So what do they think gets accomplished if somebody with guts doesn’t roll the dice every now and then?” He was staring at Tara now.

Was he talking to himself? She stepped back, sure now she had intruded on a soliloquy.

“We start shooting tomorrow,” he said. “Right here. Scarlett will sit on those steps. I’m going to make a movie nobody will ever forget.” He beckoned to her. “Come on, take a peek at history in the making.”

There didn’t seem to be any option, so Julie followed him up the stairs. He reached out to touch the knob on the door that was supposed to open onto the front hall of Tara, then pulled back.

“It’s not much more than cardboard,” he said with an offhand shrug, “but more real to me than a lot of damn things around here.”

Julie stayed silent. He wasn’t expecting a reply.

“Hell, nothing wrong with a good façade,” he continued. “Just like everything else in Hollywood. It’s enough for me.”

Without another word, he turned, walked slowly down the steps, and strode away.

“Nothing nervous about this happy crowd, I’d say,” murmured Doris, surveying the field where she and dozens of others stood waiting. Her speech had its usual cynical tone, delivered with a roll of the eyes and a wry, impatient twist of the mouth—not quite a smirk. It occurred to Julie that Doris sounded a little too much like the wisecracking, flip Rosalind Russell. Maybe it wasn’t just coincidence. Lots of girls here were walking around emulating some star they wished they could be. Why not tough, sexy Doris? Thinking about it made her less intimidating, if not more likable.

Still, she was right. A roll of jittery chatter was threading through the huddled crowd of people on the edge of the Back Forty.

Selznick had invited everybody who worked at the studio to watch the “festivities” of the first day of shooting, a word that had produced a fair number of snickers among those who knew how fraught with problems this venture was. You could see it in the director George Cukor’s rigid stance. He held himself immobile in the restless crowd, arms folded, a set expression on his face.