Our town worships success, the bitch goddess whose smile hides a taste for blood. She has a habit, before she destroys her worshipers, of turning them into spitting images of herself. She has an army of beauties in attendance at her shrine.
Not many survive the encounter with success. Wreathed in smiles, she kills them in cars, like Jimmy Dean; or with torment, like Marilyn Monroe; or with illness, like Jean Harlow. She turns them into drunkards, liars, or cheats who are as dishonest in business as in love. This is the story of four women and what success did to them.
One of them who escaped in a single piece is Lucille Ball. She grabbed the prizes of talent, fame, and money, and Lucy is only slightly battered as a consequence. She even survived after she gave Desi Arnaz, with whom she was madly in love, the shock of his life by divorcing him.
Lucille had the sense to quit as TV’s “Lucy” when she sat on top of the world. That show had an audience rating so high that America took time out for half an hour every Tuesday evening to look at that little black box. I remember that the 1952 inauguration party that Colonel Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune gave in Washington came to a temporary halt while everybody had to watch in silence. Lucy’s baby was being born on the program that night and Bertie wanted to see.
But the time came when Lucy told Desi: “I won’t do any more. The writers have run out of ideas, and I’m dead tired.” They sold out the series to CBS for reruns and on the proceeds bought the two RKO studios for $6,150,000. These studios had a certain sentimental appeal on top of their commercial value. Lucy and Desi first met at RKO in 1940 when they were filming Too Many Girls, a prophetic title. The former Earl Carroll chorus girl and the ex-bongo drummer from Cuba proceeded to spread themselves over a whole pile of enterprises that included a Palm Springs hotel, a golf course, and a $12,000,000 production contract for Westinghouse.
Desi took to putting a few drinks under his belt as a diet, and the fireworks started. They split up two or three times, but Lucy always forgave him and took him back. To save the marriage, as she hoped, she set up a trip to Europe for them both. “We’ll take the children along, too,” she said.
I begged her not to. “If you’d just try it alone, the two of you,” I said. “Little Desi and Lucie are too young to enjoy a trip like that.”
But Lucy can be stubborn. “I won’t go without them,” she said. So she took a maid along to look after them. For the voyage, which she hoped would be a second honeymoon, she bought clothes by the trunkload; big picture hats that she never put on her head; a magnificent full-length sable coat. “But it’s May now, and you’ll be running into summer over there,” I said.
“I’ve bought it and I’m going to take it,” she said. “Besides, Desi hasn’t seen it.”
They sailed aboard the Liberté. “We are having a wonderful crossing—so far—weather perfect,” she wrote me. “Food divine—too divine. Eating ourselves out of shape. Everyone loves our kids—that makes us happy. They have even forgiven us our forty pieces of baggage and two trunks.”
Just how wonderful the trip was I heard when she got back, scarcely speaking to Desi. He had been weary, resenting the presence of their children, though he’s a loving father. He and Lucy collided head on in one quarrel after another. “What did he think about the sable coat?” I asked.
“Never saw it,” she said. “I used it on the ship as a blanket for the kids.”
The following Christmas, when the Westinghouse contract had three more months to run, she asked me to appear on a TV show on which she was making her bow as director; it included a dozen or more players she had been training in her school. Desi was just back from a solo trip to Europe, shooting a picture there.
On the set, Vivian Vance and Bill Frawley, veterans of happier “I Love Lucy” days, wanted to take cover along with me to shelter from the storms between Lucy and Desi. It was dreadful. “You can’t insult him before the entire company,” I warned her in her dressing room. “You’re partly responsible for this show, too, you know.”
It seemed we were doomed to have a flop on our hands. As director, Lucy was lost without a compass, too mad to see straight, and the show was going to pieces. In dress rehearsal Desi said mildly: “Lucy, dear, will you let me see if I can pull this thing together for you?”
“Okay, try it!” she snapped.
Desi was winning no medals as husband, but he shines as a director and producer. In ten minutes he had that Christmas program ticking like a clock. The New Year hadn’t yet come around the corner before Lucy wanted to sue him for divorce, which was something Desi had been convinced she would never do.
“You can’t,” I told her. “You and Desi both signed the Westinghouse contract as partners. If you walk out, they could cancel and sue you.”
She had to listen to the same tune from me every week. She was itching to dump Desi and so desperate to leave Hollywood that she’d have played Uncle Tom’s Cabin if it would take her to Broadway. Instead she took on the next best thing—a musical called Wildcat, on which she staked money and her reputation.
Lucy hasn’t many illusions about herself. “I’m not beautiful, not sexy, and I don’t have a good figure,” she says. She knows she can’t sing and she admits that too many years have flowed under the bridge for her to dance like Cyd Charisse. But for Wildcat she had to sing, dance, and hold the show together. She tried to inject some sparkle by ad-libbing wisecracks à la Lucy. The author, instead of being grateful, was fit to be tied.
After a lot of her cash had vanished and she’d collapsed two or three times on stage, she returned to Hollywood. She licked her wounds and, with Desi down on his ranch breeding horses, earned fresh medals as a businesswoman by helping to put Desilu back on its feet.
In November 1961, I went to the wedding of Lucy and Gary Morton, a young man she met on a blind date while she was playing in Wildcat and he was telling jokes at the Copacabana. He makes her happy, and she told me that he’d be able to spend the summer at home while she started a new television series. No, Gary would not co-star.
* * * * *
Joan Crawford has been a priestess at the shrine of success since she was a hoofer named Lucille Le Sueur. She’s been put to the sacrificial flames more than once, but has always risen like Lazarus and lived to burn another day.
She’s cool, courageous, and thinks like a man. She labors twenty-four hours a day to keep her name in the pupil of the public eye. She’ll time her arrival at a theater seconds before the curtain goes up and make such an entrance that the audience sees only her through act one, scene one. The actors on stage may hate it, but she’s having a ball. If she has a surviving fan club in any city she’s visiting, she’ll carefully supply its president in advance with a complete schedule for the day, detailed to the minute, and collect such crowds that by evening there’ll be a mob hundreds strong escorting her.
She was called box-office poison and couldn’t get a job for years after her Metro contract ended. Out of money, she continued to play the star and hold her head high, and she had the town’s sympathy. Mildred Pierce put her back in pictures and won her an Oscar, as much for bravery under fire as for her acting. The same gutsy quality showed when her husband, Al Steele, died and she took on a job as traveling ambassador for his company, Pepsi-Cola. Just before that, he’d arranged for her to visit the Strategic Air Command base at Omaha, Nebraska. Typically, she went through with the visit alone. Going on from there to Hollywood, she told me about it over dinner at the home of Billy Haines, once a picture star, now a top decorator with Joan among his customers.
Nothing would suit but I had to see SAC, too. She fixed it with General Thomas Power, the commander in chief. The Air Force flew me out from Los Angeles. Joan, who’d meantime returned to New York, came on from there on a commercial flight that got in an hour ahead of me. I found her waiting at the airport, with the mayor of the city in tow. She hadn’t yet checked into the hotel suite we were sharing, so we went straight to SAC, where General Power took us through the most amazing setup you could dream of. Joan and I rode to town together in the chauffeured limousine Mr. Mayor had put at her disposal.
She had enough luggage and hatboxes with her to fill a department store. She carried a jewel case two feet long. “I always travel with it,” she told us. “By the way [this to the mayor] would you be kind enough to provide someone to guard my jewels? I’ll need two men—one for day and one for night.”
“Certainly, Miss Crawford,” he said, hypnotized. “Whatever you need, just ask for it.”
Our suite consisted of a living room and two separate bedrooms, one for Joan, and one for me. As soon as we’d checked in, she unpacked. For our two-day visit she brought twenty-two dresses, which she spread out all over her room, and fourteen hats. “I don’t know what I’ll want to wear,” she explained seriously when my eyebrows hit my hairline, “so I brought them along in case.”
We were no sooner unpacked than she rang for an iron and ironing board. The iron the bellboy brought wasn’t the kind she liked, so she sent him out to buy a new one. With it, she proceeded to press every one of the dresses and hang each in its cellophane wrapper in her closet.
“Would you like to see my jewels?” she asked. I nodded, speechless. She unlocked the case and—abracadabra!—it was like peering at Aladdin’s treasure, half a million dollars’ worth; trays and trays loaded with diamonds and emeralds and pearls, bracelets and necklaces and earrings.
“This is the most dangerous thing you’ve ever done,” I said. “Someday you’ll wake up with your throat cut.”
“But I always have it guarded,” she said, “and I keep it beside me on the plane.”
“Why isn’t it in a safety-deposit box?”
“I like to look at them,” she said, as though she were talking to an idiot.
I went into my room for a minute. When I came back into the living room she had disappeared. “Where are you?” Her voice came from the bathroom: “In here.” She was on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor. “It wasn’t very clean,” she said.
Next to the goddess in their prayers, many of the worshipers place a compulsive kind of cleanliness. Sinatra, Jerry Lewis, Doris Day—they’ll shower three times a day like pilgrims in the Ganges trying to wash away their sins. But only Joan and Garbo will personally scrub the bathroom or kitchen floor to make sure there are no germs lingering there.
The mayor returned to make us his guests at a small dinner party. We both wore simple dresses because Omaha doesn’t run much to evening clothes. We were back in the hotel by eleven-thirty and had Mr. Mayor and two or three others up for a drink.
As soon as they had said their good nights, Joan, who doesn’t smoke, flung every window wide open and carried the ash trays out into the hall, where her night guard had dutifully stationed himself outside the door. She gathered up the glasses and washed them in the kitchenette off the living room. She then unlocked another item of her luggage that the bellboy had staggered under when we moved in.
It was a massive chest perhaps a yard long, packed with ice. It contained four bottles of hundred-proof vodka, bottles of her favorite brand of champagne, and a silver chalice, which she took out for her bedtime ceremony. Into the chalice she poured a split of champagne and raised it in a simple toast, “To Al,” before she put it to her lips.
“What do you want for breakfast?” she asked when the chalice was empty.
“Can’t we order in the morning?”
“No, I like breakfast when I get up. I’ll put our order in tonight.” I settled for juice, coffee, and a boiled egg. That taken care of, we agreed that eight-thirty in the morning would suit us both as time to arise. Come the morrow, I’d bathed when at eight-thirty sharp there was a rapping at my bedroom door. In the living room stood a waiter ready to serve us. Outside the front door stood a new guard, keeping the daytime watch.
Then we spent a full, fascinating, reassuring, awe-inspiring day at SAC; saw the H-bombers take off in a practice scramble; again met General Power, who gave us dinner. I started sleeping more easily from that night on as a result of what I’d witnessed. It seemed to me to be an up-to-date necessity in a fearful world where the best rule for America’s conduct was advocated by Teddy Roosevelt: Speak softly and carry a big stick. The next morning, every inch a star and clean as a hound’s tooth, Joan flew on to Chicago, with her twenty-two dresses, fourteen hats, jewel case, ice chest, and silver chalice, to scrub another bathroom if she had to.
* * * * *
Some of our women can walk through the temple’s sacrificial flames and not get as much as singed. They’re so deep-down innocent they wouldn’t recognize the goddess if they saw her. Ann Blyth, a devout Catholic and a darling, doesn’t know that she’s used as regularly as tap water by people seeking favors, charity, or a conducted tour around the studios.
Kathryn Grayson is another, so guileless that a fat, bow-legged producer with lust in his eyes used to arrive on her doorstep many a morning before she’d had breakfast and literally chase her through the house.
The most gullible of all is Mary Martin, who sees, hears, and speaks no evil and, by a miracle, lives by it and through it. Judge Preston Martin’s daughter was friendly as a kitten when she drove her bright, new, yellow convertible to Hollywood in 1936 from Weatherford, Texas, which boasted a population of 5000 people at the time. She’d always been the girl who sang sweetest in church, stood out in school plays, worked the most enthusiastically in civic causes.
Her father gave her $500 as stake money on the strict understanding that as soon as that was gone, she’d come back home. He also saddled her with her five-year-old son, Larry, who resulted when Mary eloped from finishing school in Nashville, Tennessee, with a boy from Fort Worth. That marriage lasted in fact two years, was dissolved in five. “Larry’s your responsibility and you’ve got to take him along,” her father insisted, figuring this was a fair means of keeping his wide-eyed darling out of new romances and would bring her back quicker.
Around the studios they got to calling her “Audition Mary.” She sang for everybody, and everybody turned thumbs down. “Nice voice, fair figure, but impossible to photograph that face,” was the verdict. She sang for Oscar Hammerstein II—remember South Pacific?—at his house on Benedict Canyon at the end of my dead-end street. He knew she wasn’t ready. Years later Mary told me he taught her how to phrase a song, how to read lines, how to move. “In fact,” said she, “I learned show business from Oscar Hammerstein.”
When he thought she was ready, he and Richard Rodgers adapted a play called Green Grow the Lilacs, and she was offered the leading role. At the same time, she had also been offered a lead in a play produced by Vinton Freedley, who’d given Mary her first Broadway chance in Leave It to Me.
“I was torn between the two offers. Talking to Hammerstein over the phone, I said: ‘Will you give me a minute?’ I tossed a coin and Freedley won. The play was a success in Boston, but I felt certain it’d never reach Broadway—it didn’t.”
Green Grow the Lilacs also failed and later was rewritten for a man instead of a woman in a new version called Oklahoma!
When her $500 had melted away, she picked up what jobs she could find. She sang for $60 at a little night spot. She taught slew-footed stars how to get through dancing scenes. Her voice was dubbed on sound tracks for tin-eared girls who couldn’t sing. Then she managed to get signed by a producer named Lawrence Schwab for a Broadway musical he had in mind.
When she got to New York, she found that plans for the show had come to nothing, but Schwab lent her to another producer, Vinton Freedley, for Leave It to Me. It had a song called “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” by Cole Porter, which Sophie Tucker encouraged Mary to sing with the innocence of a lamb. That was the making of Mary. Soon she was singing on radio, then back in Hollywood with a contract at Paramount. Judge Martin went to his grave believing that “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” was written especially for him.
But making movies is a cold-blooded, impersonal, highly technical business. Some performers slowly freeze inside when they work for staring cameras instead of for human beings sitting in a theater waiting to burst into applause. Mary was like that. “I beat my brains out,” she says, “and I like to hear the echo.” She didn’t cotton to Hollywood.
Glamour and Mary were strangers in those days. The studio put her in curls and ruffles. She arrived at one dress-up affair in a sports suit. And make-up men hadn’t yet acquired their present techniques, which can transform literally any girl into a beauty queen.
Mary didn’t start to glow until Mainbocher took her over and made her one of America’s best-dressed women. Any woman wearing a beautiful gown can peek at herself in a mirror and think: “My, how pretty you look in that!” The thought itself puts a sparkle in her eye and a smile on her lips, making her just what she fancies herself to be.
I only once saw Mainbocher cringe at the sight of his pride and joy. That was in New Orleans, when we sat together watching Mary’s opening in Kind Sir, produced by her long-time friend and Connecticut neighbor, Josh Logan. I smelled a fiasco during her rehearsals, but I did whatever was possible to boost her morale. She poured out her gratitude in a telegram: ONCE BEFORE ANOTHER GREAT WOMAN SOPHIE TUCKER HELPED ME IN MY VERY FIRST SHOW STOP NOW YOU BY SOME MIRACLE WERE SENT TO ME GOD BLESS YOU AND THANK YOU MY LOVE ALWAYS—MARY.
But nothing helped Kind Sir. On opening night, when the last-act curtain fell, even the flowers that were pushed into her arms were tired. In the seat next to me, Mainbocher, who’d done her costumes, slid down almost out of sight so he wouldn’t be asked to take a bow. But he took it with a smile like all the rest.
I almost made an enemy of Josh Logan by nagging him to use Mary in the movie of South Pacific instead of Mitzi Gaynor. “There are make-up men today who’ll make Mary look like a young girl,” I told him. “Mitzi’s a fine entertainer, but she’ll be only a carbon copy of Mary as Nellie Forbush.” Josh wrote me a twelve-page letter explaining why I was wrong. South Pacific turned out to be only a modest success as a movie, earned around $5,000,000, but it would have done better if Mary had starred in it.
She played Nellie in London, of course, and reported rapturously, in red ink yet: “Dear Hedda: Look where we are! Exactly where you said we’d be! And—oh!—it has been just as wonderful as I had hoped and dreamed it would be. All of it has been unbelievably perfect.”
When she came home she was bone-weary. She and her husband, Richard Halliday, had booked passage on a slow boat to South America. Then Leland Hayward told her: “I’m going to do a big TV spectacular, and I can’t do it without you.” She begged off and started on the cruise. When they reached Brazil, Adrian talked her into buying land near the house he and Janet Gaynor built in the middle of the jungle that he loved.
Mary had as much need for a Brazilian hideaway as for two heads, but she can’t go on saying no to anybody. She and Richard, who was the only big reward she won in Hollywood, discovered that the first jungle real estate they bought was sold to them by a woman who didn’t own it. The local authorities hushed that up since they couldn’t afford to have the news leak back to the United States. So Mary, $40,000 poorer, sank another $50,000 into some other property, which the surrounding, giant-sized greenery constantly threatens to steal back from her.
When Leland Hayward heard about her proposed rest cure in Brazil, he flew down ahead of the Hallidays and was waiting for them as they landed. Brushing aside her pleas of fatigue, he told her: “Ethel Merman says she’ll do my TV show if you will.” Mary, as ever, couldn’t say no. After the two of them made television history that season, she asked Ethel casually one day: “How did Leland get you to do it?”
“At first I told him to go to hell,” said Ethel, “but then he said you’d do it if I would, and I couldn’t refuse.”
Where Joan can’t stop washing, Mary can’t stop working. She hasn’t a clue as to the size of her bank account, and I’ll guarantee she never looks inside a checkbook. She waded trustingly into ventures, often backed with her own money, where she found herself up to her ears in problems.
“But that’s all ended,” she declares. “Never again would I do a play that I’m not suited to and take another two and a half years out of my life.”
But so long as she can go on flying, she’ll be happy in the theater. As Peter Pan, which was a lifetime dream come true, she’s the world’s most celebrated flying grandmother. Her son, Larry, and his Swedish wife are the parents of two children.
The other member of the Halliday family, daughter Heller, “eloped” with her fiancé, Tony Weir, along with her parents, his parents and family, and the twenty-six guests. They’d planned a reception at New York’s River Club. Her bridal gown by Mainbocher was made but never worn. Heller decided that instead of a big wedding, she’d rather have cash to get her household started, so Mary’s big production plans went up in smoke.
This was an elopement with a difference. In two cars, one Friday morning, the wedding party made for Elkton, Maryland, without anyone remembering that the state law there requires forty-eight hours’ residence before the knot is tied. That made it impossible for them to get a marriage license before Monday. Heller, Tony, and his sister Karen took one of the cars and headed south for Alexandria, Virginia, while the rest of the faltering band drove up to stay in Baltimore.
The bride and groom went through their blood tests in Alexandria. Heller had to be jabbed half a dozen times before blood could be drawn, and she finished the day with three pieces of adhesive plaster on each arm. But they still couldn’t get a license; Heller, short of twenty-one, needed her parents’ consent. On the following day, Saturday, the nearest license bureau open in the state of Virginia was in Leesburg. The doors there closed at noon. So the party took off bright and early, covered 150 miles in waltz time, and got to Leesburg just before the deadline.
“Our darling elopers,” Mary related, “were married there in the first Methodist Church to be built in America. Both mothers cried. I sat on the wrong side of the church, the groom’s. The happy pair were, oh so happy, and we are, oh so tired.” Heller went to work showing off wedding gowns as a model, instead of wearing one.
* * * * *
Sometimes the first breath of success converts an otherwise nice, well-adjusted girl into a priestess of the cult. Sometimes it takes longer. It took eleven years, her third husband, and a turnabout in her faith to convert Doris Day, who was born to Wilhelm and Alma von Kappelhoff, a German-Catholic couple in Cincinnati, on April 3, 1924, and christened Doris because her mother rated Doris Kenyon the greatest actress that ever breathed.
The von Kappelhoff became “Day” because band leader Barney Rapp wanted a name that would fit on the marquee of the Cincinnati night club where Doris, a puppy-fat sixteen-year-old girl, earned $25 a week singing with his orchestra. She graduated from there to sing with Les Brown and His Band of Renown, and the goddess started to breathe harder on her when Doris recorded her first hit, “Sentimental Journey” with them. She was making $500 a week when she left the band.
She was a girl who fell in love without pausing for breath. In April 1941 she up and married Al Jorden, a trombonist from Cincinnati who played for Jimmy Dorsey. On February 4, 1942, Doris gave birth to her son, Terry. A year later, she went through her first divorce, left her baby in her mother’s care, and joined up again with Les Brown, the girl singer who sat primly in front of the band until her turn came to go up to the microphone.
They were playing at the old Pennsylvania Hotel, which became the Statler, on Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue, when agent Al Levy first heard her. Struck by a funny feeling that this girl might go someplace, he sent her a note inviting her to join him at the table where he sat with Mannie Sachs, who was then head of Columbia Records. “Have you ever thought of going on your own?” he asked.
“Not really,” she said. “I’m going to get married soon.”
Eighteen months after, Les Brown was appearing at the Palladium in Los Angeles, and Doris and her new husband, George Weidler, a saxophonist in the orchestra, were living in a trailer camp on Sepulveda Boulevard out toward Long Beach. They quit Les Brown and went on living in the camp, Doris out of work, George picking up occasional weekend engagements. Terry was still with his grandmother.
Al Levy had trouble contacting Doris. The trailer was a block away from the only telephone and, if anybody called Doris, the proprietress of the camp found it easier to say “She’s not here” than go get her. But Al managed to exchange a few words: “Call me sometime if you get ambitious, and we’ll talk some more.”
Mannie Sachs got her one brief job—as singer on a sustaining radio show that starred Bob Sweeney, now a TV director, and Hal March, who made a Broadway hit in Come Blow Your Horn. She worked for thirteen weeks at $89 a week, after deductions, but then she was dropped; the network figured she had no future. So, with no money coming in, it was time to call Al Levy. “All right, let’s see what can happen now,” she said.
He had put $25,000 into a management agency called Century Artists, which gave him forty per cent ownership. Dick Dorso had started the business with a small stake from Lew Levy, no relation of Al’s, who was manager of the Andrews Sisters and the husband of one of them, Maxine. Lew wasn’t acting out of undiluted generosity—he wanted to get his brother-in-law, Marty Melcher, out from under his feet. Marty, Patti’s husband, used to handle such chores as fixing the lights for the sisters’ act. Marty became the second partner in Century Artists as part of Lew’s deal with Dorso. The agency, which took on the sisters as clients, had its offices next to mine in the Guaranty Building on Hollywood Boulevard. Al also assisted my manager, Dema Harshbarger, in booking talent for my weekly radio show.
Al brought Doris to say hello as soon as he’d signed her. She was a scared little creature, smothered in freckles, wearing scuffed-up shoes, skirt and sweater, but not a lick of make-up. For months she wore skirts and sweaters. When I asked why she never wore a dress, she said: “I can only afford skirts and sweaters.” Her first need was clothes. He found a little dressmaker in Los Angeles to make her four evening dresses on Century Artists’ money.
In New York, Billy Reed was opening his Little Club on East Fifty-fifth Street, uncertain whether or not to have any entertainer work in the squeezed-in room he’d rented, which he was doing up with striped-silk walls. A friend of Billy’s, Monte Proser, thought Doris might fit there. He passed the word to Al, who persuaded Billy by telephone to try her for two weeks at $150 a week.
Al bought train tickets to New York for Doris and himself. Still deeply in love with George Weidler, she telephoned him every night. For the opening of the Little Club, Billy and Al had packed their friends in, making sure Doris got a good hand. This was going to be her springboard. If she succeeded here, it would be easier to make it in Hollywood.
The notices she received were encouraging. Billy engaged her for an extra four weeks, and Al returned to California to see what he could line up for her there. Ten days later she telephoned him in tears: “I can’t handle the rest of my time at the club alone. I want to get back to George. I’ve had it.” Al took it philosophically. “Come on back then,” he said. On the way, she stopped off in Cincinnati to see her son.
Meantime, Mike Curtiz, a sentimental Lothario from Hungary at Warner Brothers moved in to succeed Hal Wallis, who started in business for himself. Mike had Jack Warner breathing down his neck to start making a musical to be called Romance on the High Seas. Betty Hutton was supposed to play the girl lead, but at the last minute Curtiz wouldn’t hire her. He decided to look around for a lesser, cheaper name, though he was growing more panicky by the day with Warner starting to twist his arms.
Song writers Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, who were writing the score for Romance, had an idea that Doris might do for the picture and suggested to Al that he ought to arrange an audition for her. He called Doris to come home. The day of her promised return to Los Angeles brought no news of her, though her audition had been fixed for the following morning. In the evening, on a hunch, Al drove out to the Sepulveda camp. In the darkness he thumped on the trailer’s door until Doris put her head out the window and promised again to turn up in the morning.
When he collected her in his car, she was weeping hysterically. Her marriage was on the rocks, she said. George Weidler wanted out. “I can’t do the audition. You’ll have to cancel.”
“Look, if your marriage is breaking up, you’ll sure need a job,” said Al. “It’ll get your mind off your trouble, and you’ll have to make a living.”
She accepted the logic of th