American Blonde (3 page)

The man said, “I’m looking for Velva Jean Hart.” He stood in the yard fanning himself with his hat, his face shining and red, either from the heat or from climbing the hill. He had a thin blond mustache that gave him a slick look, and blond hair with plenty of pomade, which was starting to melt in the afternoon sun.

I came down the steps to meet him. “I’m Velva Jean Hart.”

“Lowell Grann.” He held out his hand and I shook it. “I’m with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in New York. We’ve seen your newsreel with the footage of you and your brother. You’re quite the hero.”

“Thank you.” By this time, Granny and Ruby Poole had appeared.

The man said, “We’ve been trying to get ahold of you. We’ve sent telegrams, tried to phone you. We don’t usually do this kind of thing in person, but you aren’t easy to reach.” He looked around at the woods as if now he could see why. “Lucille Ryman is head of talent at MGM. She’d like to offer you a test.”

“What kind of test?”

“A motion picture test.”

“To do what?”

“To be an actress.”

Ruby Poole said, “The movies? Oh, Velva Jean!”

“She can sing,” Granny said. “Prettiest voice you ever heard. Better than any singer you got out there in Hollywood.”

The man wiped his forehead. “I’m sure that’s true.” He said it as if he didn’t believe it for a minute, as if this was something people said to him all the time. “Ms. Ryman wants you in Los Angeles. I’m to arrange for your ticket. On the next train, if possible. You’re quite the national hero, Miss Hart, and we want to keep you in the public eye while you’re already in it. I won’t be able to accompany you, but someone will be there to meet you in California.”

I finally found my voice. “I have a friend at MGM. Barbara Fanning. We trained at Avenger Field together. We were WASP together. She was at MGM when the war started, and after we graduated she went back.” Until the studio renamed her, she’d been Eloise Mudge, and the last time I’d seen her was spring of 1944 at the funeral of our friend Sally Hallatassee, a pilot like us.

“Barbara Fanning’s one of our most popular stars.”

Ruby Poole said, “She’s playing Mallory in
Home of the Brave
, Velva Jean. The movie based on the book. Nigel Gray is Daniel, and I read that Ophelia Lloyd came out of retirement to play Martha Washington. It’s going to be the biggest picture ever made.”

“What would I do at MGM, Mr. Grann? You wouldn’t put me in movies right away.”

“You would train, take classes, prepare.”

“Music classes?” Ruby Poole had once told me that the stars were given music lessons. Even Joan Crawford and Bette Davis had to study when they first began.

“We have the finest music teachers in the world.” He could tell he had my interest. “We teach types of music you’ve never heard of. Every instrument. Every vocal technique. Song styling, phrasing, interpretation of lyrics. Do you think Judy Garland could sing when she came to us? Yes, of course, but not like she can now.”

Before I could ask anything else, Johnny Clay said from the porch, “You should go, Velva Jean.”

I turned to look at him. I hadn’t even known he was there. “You could come with me.”

He glanced at the man, at Daddy Hoyt and the rest of our family. “Velva Jean, I need to find my own way, ride my own coattails for a while.” The shadows and the sharp angles of his face and collarbone had started to fill in thanks to the sunshine, the fresh air, and Granny’s home cooking. “‘If now is only two days, then two days is your life.’”

I glanced at the book wedged in his back pocket. I was going to write to Helen and tell her to stop sending packages to my brother. I said, “What’s that supposed to mean?” Even as I asked it, I thought: You know what he’s talking about. You feel that way too.

“It means if you only got two days, you need to treat those two days like a lifetime. You need to find your place and figure out what it is you’re supposed to do there, and I need to find mine.”

Lowell Grann cleared his throat and replaced his hat. “Miss Hart. I will be on the four o’clock train. If you’re interested in our offer, you can find me down at the general store. If not, I wish you luck. But I want you to realize that this is an opportunity that doesn’t come around often. There are thousands of young women and men across this country who would give everything they have for an opportunity like this. We may see a thousand people a month, all wanting a chance. Of those, we might test five and sign only one. Wouldn’t you like to be that one?”

He touched the brim of his hat and started down the hill.

Hollywood.
All my life, I’d only dreamed of one place—Nashville—but Judge Hay, of the Grand Ole Opry, and Darlon C. Reynolds, record producer, weren’t the ones who had traveled all this way to ask me to come with them. In Hollywood, I could train with the finest music teachers in the world and get all the experience I ever needed so that I could go back to Tennessee and show them I was ready.
We teach types of music you’ve never heard of.

Everyone stared at me as Lowell Grann disappeared out of sight. I thought, I want to be that one. And then I started to run.

O
n October 2, four days after I’d left North Carolina, the Santa Fe Super Chief pulled into Los Angeles, California. I walked through the depot, carrying Mama’s old suitcase and my hatbox, which, after all these years, still held my treasures. My Mexican guitar was strapped to my back.

I felt a fluttering in my heart as I left the station, stepping out into sunshine. It was a warm, cloudless morning. The palm trees swayed overhead. The air smelled like roses and wildflowers. The streets shone white. Layers of hills rose in the distance. Heavy red roses and other bright flowers bloomed everywhere. Fat oranges and lemons hung from trees. I didn’t know any place could be filled with so much color anymore.
California.
It was a different world, a different planet.
A new world, a new life.

I set my bag down and waited on the curb. Cars rolled past, pausing long enough to pick people up or drop them off. Here I am, I thought. Yessir, here I am.

After twenty minutes, I fished in my purse for the number Lowell Grann had given me.
Someone will be there to meet you
, he’d said, but here I was, alone. I took one last look around and then picked up my bag and headed back into the station. I found the Traveler’s Aid desk and asked where I could find a telephone.

The man at the counter said, “If it’s a local call, you can use this one.”

At that very moment, I heard my name. “Hartsie!” For a minute, I thought I’d imagined it, but then I heard it again: “Velva Jean!”

A woman flounced toward me—dark glasses, hair tucked under a scarf, mink coat with the collar turned up. I didn’t recognize her at first, even after she hugged me, her perfume turning the air sweeter. She held me out at arm’s length, her lips and nails a feverish red, and said, “Don’t look so terrified, Hartsie; it’s me.”

“Mudge?”

“That old nickname. No one’s called me that since I left the WASP.” She took the suitcase from me, linked her arm with mine, and said, “Where are your bags?” Her voice sounded throatier, huskier than I remembered.

“These are my bags.”

From behind her glasses she raised one eyebrow, then she hugged my arm tight against her and we walked out into the sunshine. She steered me toward a long red car, bright as a ripe apple, one wheel sitting on the curb, the front bumper jutting out over the sidewalk so that people had to steer around it.

She tossed everything into the back except for a thick stack of bound rainbow-colored paper and the fattest book I’d ever seen. “Hold these for me.”

I slid in beside her, holding them on my lap.
Home of the Brave
, it said on the cover of the bound paper stack.
Home of the Brave
, it said on the cover of the book. The car looked new, but a pile of lipsticks filled a compartment in the dash, and the ashtray was filled to the rim with red-smudged cigarette butts.

Mudge took off her sunglasses, and started the car. “I’m to bring you to the studio with me, orders of Lucille Ryman.” She looked at me square, her eyes on my face, my dress, my shoes, then my face again. “Now what else have you got to wear?”

We drove directly to Bullock’s department store, where Mudge picked out a capped-sleeve cotton dress that was the pure, sweet green of spring grass. It cost 150 dollars, and Mudge told them to bill it to her account. “It’s the least I can do, after you’ve traveled all this way,” she said. “Besides, you needed it.”

We headed down Sunset Boulevard, the mountains to the north, the ocean to the west, past Schwab’s Pharmacy, the Garden of Allah, Ciro’s, the Cafe Trocadero, and the Melody Room.

“Hold the wheel.” I reached for it as she shrugged off her mink, flinging it in the back as if it was nothing more than an old napkin, and untied the scarf so that her black hair came spilling out. She ran her fingers through it, fluffing the ends, checking it in the rearview mirror. She lit a cigarette before taking the wheel back. “Don’t ever start smoking because once you do you’ll never want to give it up. Cigarettes are worse than men.”

Something flashed silver on her dress.

“You’re wearing your wings.” The wings we’d earned as WASP.

She held up her collar, turning it toward me. “Sisters forever, Hartsie.” She smiled into the distance, her hand resting on the pin as she smoothed the collar flat again. “No matter what.”

Culver City was a mix of farmland and dime stores, bars and diners, small houses and ugly apartment buildings. Depending on the breeze, one minute the air smelled like cow manure and the next like fresh baked bread, which Mudge said came from nearby Helms Bakery. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer sat grandly in the middle of this, a sprawling, white-columned fortress.

The red car turned down a narrow street and rolled past a handsome white building shaped like the bottom half of an
H
. Four stories, tall windows, rounded corners, a covered walkway leading to double glass doors. Mudge paused in front, rolling down her window. “Louis B. Mayer himself works there, along with all the producers, directors, publicists.” She turned to me. “I want you to watch out for the executives. Every one of them has a button on his desk that locks the door behind you, along with a private interview room, which is used for ‘casting,’ if you know what I mean. They promise you the moon, but it doesn’t mean they plan to get it for you.”

We paused at the East Gate, which wasn’t a gate at all but just a paved drive with a stop sign separating the two lanes, along with a guard station no bigger than an outhouse. She flashed a bright red smile at the uniformed guard.

“Morning, Miss Fanning. Where’s your driver?”

“I gave him the day off. Jimmy, I want you to meet the newest MGM contract player and future movie star, Velva Jean Hart. We were pilots together in the war.”

The guard ducked his head so he could see me. “It’s a pleasure, Miss Hart. I look forward to your pictures.”

Mudge gave me the tour: There were the casting offices—see the people all lined up, waiting? There was the writers building, and, just past, music departments A and B. Over there was the portrait studio, where I would pose for pictures, one of the most important parts of the job when you were just starting out. Over there, the research department, where they kept thousands of files on every MGM actor, past and present. Over there, the fire department—and if I thought that was something, well Metro had its own school, barbershop, dentist, funeral parlor, and railway station. It even had its own police department—a police force of fifty officers, four captains, two plainclothesmen, an inspector, and the chief, Whitey Hendry, who’d been there as long as anyone could remember and who was also chief of police for Culver City.

Back down there was the commissary. And just past that, the art department. Wardrobe to the right. Scoring stages to the left. Makeup, where I would be reporting every day first thing, once a contract was signed. The rehearsal halls were air-conditioned, and how many other studios could claim that?

“One hundred seventy-six acres . . . four thousand employees . . . sixty stars, the most of any studio. More stars than there are in heaven . . . Clark Gable, Judy Garland, Lana Turner, Nigel Gray . . .” City streets, Western towns, a French railway station, European villages, a fifteen-acre jungle. It seemed like all the world was right here at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

The general dressing room building looked like a two-story barracks left over from World War I. In front of this was what Mudge called the “star suites”—two buildings, side by side. She paused just long enough so I could read the names on the directory—Greer Garson, Judy Garland, Esther Williams, June Allyson, Lana Turner. Then she unlocked one of the doors—“Barbara Fanning,” it said in gold—and showed me into her suite, which was as large as an apartment and done up in rich shades of blue. She said, “It used to be Garbo’s,” and I could hear the awe in her voice.

Near the dressing room building was Stage 5, and the office of Lillian Burns, the dramatic coach. We walked inside and were greeted by her secretary, who sat at a desk in the outer office, fielding telephone calls. She handed us a stack of bound white paper, which I now knew was a script, and said I was to memorize pages seventy-five through eighty and to be ready to test on Friday.

For the rest of the day, I followed Mudge from the makeup and hair departments to wardrobe to one of the interior sets of
Home of the Brave
, on Stage 15, the largest in the world.

In addition to the legendary Ophelia Lloyd, the picture costarred Nigel Gray, Hal MacGinnis, Phoebe Phillips, and the great Webster Hayes, who, for the past three decades, had been known as America’s finest actor. The producer was Ophelia Lloyd’s husband, William “Billy” Taub, one of Mr. Mayer’s top executives and the creative genius behind
Immortal Wife
,
The Haunted Man
, and
Darrow
. Leslie Edgar, who had won an Academy Award for
The Mill on the Floss
, was directing.

While the cameramen arranged and angled giant lights and cameras, Mr. Edgar, small as a cricket, talked to his actors in a soft, gentle voice. Under the spotlights, I watched Mudge transform instantly into Mallory Rourke, Revolutionary War–era lady, torn between the love of two brothers, played by Hal MacGinnis and Nigel Gray. According to the movie magazines Ruby Poole had loaned me for the train, Hal and Mudge had fallen for each other their first day on the set. In person he was taller and broader than he looked in his pictures, while Nigel Gray was even handsomer.

A man, about thirty, sank into the chair next to me. He closed his eyes and propped his cheek on one hand. He sighed, long and deep, and opened one eye. He studied me a good ten seconds before saying, “Never try to outdrink Webster Hayes.”

I glanced over at the actor, easily twice his age. “I’ll remember that.”

“Don’t let the grandfatherly demeanor fool you. He’s got the constitution of an elephant. Or an Irishman. Which sounds funnier?”

“Elephant.”

“Got an aspirin?”

“No. Sorry.”

He frowned. “Bourbon, then?”

“I drank it all.”

He held out his hand. “Sam.” He had rich-boy good looks, but there was something rumpled about him.

“Velva Jean.”

“Seriously?”

“What?”

“I’ve just never heard a name quite like it.
Velma Jean
.”

“
Velva
Jean.”

“Velva Jean. Never heard a name like that one either. Let me guess. Secretary?”

“No.”

He squinted his eyes at me. “Rodeo rider.”

“No.”

“Candlestick maker.”

“Singer.”

He shook his head. “Sorry, you’ll have to pick something else. You’re too pretty to be a singer.”

“What do singers look like?”

He stared out into the distance. “Faces only a mother could love. That’s why radio works so well for them.” He nodded at the script in my lap. “So that’s only for show? To throw inquisitive men off the scent?”

“I carry it with me everywhere.”

“Smart girl. Have you read the book?” Now he nodded at the set. “They say every person in America has read it.”

“Well, I haven’t. I got back from England in June. They don’t seem to be reading it over there.”