The Brink of Fame Read online

  “That would be foolish of me, wouldn’t it?”

  “I’ll say it would. I’m not completely green, you know.”

  “A pity. Now let’s open up this steamer trunk and make sure I didn’t damage any of your clothes.”

  “You open it up.” Agnes tossed her the key. “And I’d better not find out you stole anything. Mr. Ziegfeld’s man will be here any minute to pick up my things; you can give him that key. As for me, I’m getting away from here before you try something funny.”

  “I don’t do comedy, Agnes.”

  “Ha-ha. Well, neither do I. I’m seriously getting out of this lousy studio. I can’t stand woiking for you another five minutes, you and your rules about the clean life and your fake stories about me. Why should I be ashamed of who I am? Who cares how old I am, for instance? Who cares whether I like to take a drink now and then, or who I choose to spend my time with?” Hurrying now, she did up the buttons of her dress. “Or whether I show up at this stinking studio or not. Once, just once, I want to sleep past eight o’clock without people yelling at me.”

  “Won’t you miss your dinner?”

  “Shut up, Mrs. Weiss. Just shut up. You think you’re smotter than me just because you married a rich guy.”

  “No, I think I’m smarter than you because you’re stupider than me.”

  “We’ll just see about that. It just so happens that I’m deeply in love with Flo Ziegfeld. Who happens to be rich, richer than Adam Weiss, rich enough to buy you and sell you and your stupid contract.”

  “And who also happens to be married.”

  “So what? And let me tell you something else. If I find out you got shavings all over my best clothes you’ll hear from Mr. Ziegfeld’s lawyers.” She jammed a hat on her head.

  “Miss Gelert, you have a contractual obligation to be here tomorrow morning at seven to finish this moving picture.”

  “Sue me.” She grabbed her handbag and gloves.

  “I’ll do better than that. I’ll kick your hind end up between your ears.”

  She backed through the door. “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “No? Watch me.”

  “Mr. Ziegfeld’s man will come for my luggage,” Agnes said, still backing up. “Good-bye, Mrs. Weiss. Don’t think it hasn’t been fun, because it hasn’t.” She turned and rushed out of the studio, right through the front lobby and into a waiting cab.

  It was Melpomene’s trusty receptionist who helped Emily unpack the steamer trunk, select Agnes’s prettiest dress, and wrestle it onto the unconscious form of Billie Burke. When the man came to take the trunk to Ziegfeld’s stateroom on the Mauretania, Miss Burke was attractively nestled inside it among Emily’s pillows, still fast asleep. How could Ziegfeld resist her? How could he think of the trashy Agnes, with his own fair wife in front of him? The cab outside the studio that Agnes boarded in her haste was a movie prop driven by Ed Eardley’s cousin Frank, who had instructions to drive her to Trenton and back and deliver her to the studio at seven the next morning.

  When Agnes did arrive at the studio the next morning, exactly on time, for a change, Emily fully expected her to throw a fit. They were all used to her fits. Instead of that, she gave Emily a long, cool stare and got straight to work. In fact she acquitted herself so well that Adam promised her the leading role in his Arabian epic, and the following week the two of them took off for Flagstaff.

  Once again proving that all’s well that ends well.

  Yes, there were flowers involved, three camellias, to be exact. Emily placed them in Miss Burke’s lovely bosom before closing the trunk. She also took the liberty of lifting the gun from Miss Burke’s handbag. She had it with her still; a woman never knows when she might need a pearl-handled revolver.

  TWO

  The dusty windows of the California Limited were streaked with rain by the time they pulled into the station in Flagstaff. Holbert Bruns offered to escort Emily as far as her hotel.

  “No thank you, Mr. Bruns,” she said. “Now that I’m here in Flagstaff I can confidently place myself under the protection of my husband.” She looked out of the streaky window. Adam did not appear to be on the station platform. Carefully holding her skirt, she stepped down off the train and went in search of her bags, as Holbert Bruns strode off in the direction of the main street of town with his Gladstone bag in his hand. Oh, to be a man, Emily thought fleetingly, and travel light. A porter unloaded her things from the baggage car onto a big-wheeled cart.

  “Where is the sun? I thought it shone all the time here. Where is the desert?” she asked the porter. Flagstaff looked nothing like a Western movie set. It was too built up, although blurry gray mountains loomed over the town in an interesting way, and a few stray cowboys and Indians huddled in the shelter of storefronts. How could anyone make a movie here? There wasn’t even a tree to hang the outlaws. Fort Lee back east had more to offer.

  “This is the desert,” the porter said. “Only sometimes it rains. Been raining three days now.” Things looked bad for Adam’s desert epic. He was surely holed up at the hotel, striving to amuse himself, with no company other than the vapid Agnes Gelert, and maybe his elusive silent partner, Howie Kazanow.

  Emily tipped the porter, checked her bags with the station’s baggage clerk, and set off for the Weatherford Hotel, two blocks away. Who could have guessed how badly she would need an umbrella, here in this so-called desert? Her saucy hat was beginning to droop. But Adam would be waiting and would provide her with tea and sandwiches. Perhaps she would at last meet the mysterious Howie. Adam had mentioned that Howie was coming from California to Flagstaff to see him. Too bad she looked like a drowned rat for their first meeting.

  The interior of the Weatherford Hotel smelled of wet wool and sheep manure, with a subtle undertone of bay rum that seemed to be emanating from a group of slick-looking men gathered at the far end of the lobby. None of them was Adam. At the desk Emily inquired after her husband.

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Adam Weiss.”

  The clerk put his pimply nose to the guest register, squinting, turning the pages one by one. “We had a Mr. and Mrs. Adam Weiss here, but they checked out yesterday evening,” he said finally.

  “There has to be some mistake.”

  “Can’t help it, lady.”

  “I’m sorry. I must be in the wrong hotel,” Emily said. “Excuse me.” She moved away from the desk and sat down to think. Either she was in the wrong hotel or Adam was registered under an assumed name for reasons of his own. A drop of water, and then another, fell from the ostrich pom-pom onto Emily’s good gray skirt. The dye was running. She rubbed it with her gloved hand. Maybe Adam thought Thomas Edison and his Trust detectives were after him again. Yes, that would account for it. He was registered under an assumed name. Or he was staying at another hotel. How many hotels were there in Flagstaff?

  The chair where she was sitting and collecting herself was backed up against a sofa. Some man on the sofa emitted a braying laugh, breaking Emily’s train of thought. She glanced over her shoulder to see two men, the quiet one apparently a traveling salesman, and the other a very sharply dressed … no telling what he was.

  “The schmuck lost it to me in a poker game,” said the sharp one. “Can you beat that? Ha-ha! You’d think he would have learned in college not to challenge me at poker. I never lose. So I am now the sole owner of Melpomene Moving Picture Studios.”

  “I guess congratulations are in order, Mr. Kazanow,” the salesman said. “I’ll certainly think a long time before I play poker with you.”

  So this was Howie Kazanow, Adam’s childhood friend and longtime adversary. Emily had always hated him, even though they had never met. He hung over her marriage to Adam like a sword, threatening to fall on them every time they made an economic misstep. And yet Adam refused to disentangle his finances from this person’s; like some sick gambler, he kept saying that this time, this time for sure, he would get the better of Howie Kazanow.

  Nowadays Kazanow was Adam’s We
st Coast silent partner, having invested heavily in Melpomene over Emily’s objections. Adam kept telling her that Howie was scouting out a place in California for them to build another studio. But in the partnership was an element of risk that Adam had never adequately explained to her. Sometimes Adam would tell her that she would have to do better in this way or that way, business-wise, or else Howie Kazanow would come and take it all; what he meant by that, he would never say. It seemed from what Kazanow was saying now that Adam had finally got into a struggle with him that he couldn’t win.

  A poker game? How was this possible? Now that Emily saw his face—his smug, full lips, his needle nose, his beetling yellow brows—her hatred for Howie Kazanow matured and blossomed. At that moment she hated this man so much that it was causing her to feel faint.

  “The first thing I’ll do is tell that trollop wife of his to get out of my studio and go back to the kitchen where she belongs. If she even has a kitchen to go back to. Ha-ha-ha. He left her, did you hear about that? Sneaked out of town as soon as he signed everything over to me. They say she was supposed to meet him here.”

  “Is Mrs. Weiss a trollop, then?” the drummer asked mildly.

  “She used to be a chorus girl. They’re all trollops.”

  The last drop of blood drained out of Emily’s head. The room turned black. She leaned forward and put her head between her knees, hoping that people would think she was adjusting the buttons on her shoes, and tried to breathe deeply. Chuckling together, the two men rose from the sofa with a twanging of upholstery springs and walked away. One of them left behind a strong hair tonic smell.

  When the blackness passed off, Emily stood up. Touching pieces of furniture for balance, leaning on the wall, she made her way as best she could to the ladies’ lounge. Before the long mirror where the ladies were expected to primp stood five backless upholstered stools, relics of the days of bustles. Emily sat down on one of them, put her head in her hands, and wept.

  Presently she felt a hand patting her back. She took one last shuddering, gasping sob and looked up. A woman stood over her—dark-haired, handsome, lightly rouged, wearing kid gloves and a hat trimmed in leghorn and pheasant feathers, a better hat than Emily’s. She leaned on a walking stick, although Emily would have said she was too young to need one.

  The woman’s face was all concern. “Can I be of some help?”

  “No,” Emily said. How could anyone be of help, except by murdering Agnes Gelert? Even that would be too late to do any good. Emily’s own Adam was a faithless sneak. Nothing could change that. She took out one of the handkerchiefs he had given her for her birthday and blew her nose.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “My husband left me for another woman.” On her lips the statement felt like a lie. How could it be true? Her Adam?

  “You poor dear,” the woman said, patting her back some more. “I know too well how painful that is.”

  “Do you?”

  “It’s been fifteen years since my daughter and I were left alone, and I still feel it. But it gets easier to bear with time. And look at it this way: you’re young; you can start a whole new life now.”

  “He took all of our money and lost it.”

  “Then you will owe him nothing. Do you have children?”

  “No children. I don’t know why. They simply never came.” Why was Emily telling these intimate things to a perfectly strange woman?

  “Children are a comfort, but they’re a terrible responsibility, too, when you’re alone. You’ll be fine,” the woman said. “You’ll start to feel better soon, and then better and better, until you find that you have a happy life again. But I’ll give you a valuable piece of advice. You must let him go. People part for a reason, and it’s a mistake to try to breathe life into that which is truly dead.” She gave Emily a bracing grip on the shoulder and went out, supporting herself on the stick.

  Truly dead? How could this be? Emily blew her nose again and composed herself for a dignified exit from the Weatherford. Keeping her chin up, keeping her hat high, she walked out the front door to find that the sun had come out and moisture was rising in steam from the wooden sidewalks of Flagstaff. The mountains stood sharp against the sky, no longer obscured in rain and clouds.

  Across the street from the railroad station was a hotel called the Commercial Exchange. It looked more reasonably priced than the Weatherford. Emily turned her steps in that direction, ignoring the rude glances of passing cowboys.

  Handbills and posters covered a board fence. Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, in town for two nights only! A creaky old show; in the summer of 1905, Emily had played Madame Aurelia Trentoni, a part that required her to wear a bustle, at the Bangor Opera House. She felt in her purse; a dollar and fifty-seven cents. The big challenge now would be finding the money to get back east.

  The Commercial Exchange was much more modest than the Weatherford. To be on the safe side Emily inquired after Adam at the desk; perhaps Howie Kazanow had been lying; but the snotty little clerk assured her that no one by the name of Adam Weiss had ever been registered there.

  “Then I’d like a single room, please,” she told him. “With a bath.”

  “Ain’t got no single rooms.”

  “What have you got?”

  “You can bunk with some actresses for fifty cents a night. There’s a bath down the hall.”

  Rooming with actresses again. With a sharp sense of déjà vu Emily signed the hotel register “Emily Daggett,” her name in the days when she herself was a touring actress. As Emily Daggett she could hide out until she somehow raised train fare to take her back east; in the unlikely event that Adam came looking for her, he would recognize her maiden name. The Commercial Exchange was clearly the place for theater people to stay, right across the street from the railroad tracks, the better to leave town in a hurry.

  No one was in the room, up two creaky wooden flights of stairs and down a dirty hallway, when Emily let herself in, although it took her a moment to determine this. Frilly underwear was hung up to dry from a network of improvised wash lines, obscuring her view. The odor of Cashmere Bouquet hand soap rolled out the door in a damp cloud. Wash day. How well she remembered it. She pushed her way through a pair of lacy combinations, stretched out on the nearest bed, and fell into a deep sleep, shoes and all.

  When she awoke, three actresses were staring down at her.

  “Wake up, sweetie,” the little plump one said. “I don’t care what that poisonous toad of a clerk told you, you get the daybed. This here bed is mine and Wanda’s.” She tossed her yellow curls and pointed to the redhead.

  “Yeah. Mine and Etta’s.” Wanda’s voice, deep and adenoidal, was flavored with the accents of Cliffside Park, New Jersey.

  “I’m so sorry,” Emily said. “Of course. I didn’t realize.”

  “Just so there’s no mistake.” The redhead pointed to a narrow cot under the window. “And that one belongs to Gertrude.” That would be the brunette.

  “Say, where’s your luggage?” Etta said. “Or ain’t you got any? We’re respectable girls here. Just so there’s no mistake about that either.”

  “My bags are at the station,” Emily said. “I’m Emily … er … Daggett. How do you do.”

  “Lardy-dah. Her bags are at the station.”

  “Aw, lay off her, Etta,” Wanda said. “Can’t you see her clothes? She’s a rich lady.”

  Emily sat up and took her feet off the coverlet. Etta turned her back to her and began feeling the underwear draped over their heads, testing for dryness. She took down a pair of stockings and rolled them up together. “What’s a rich lady doing in this dump?”

  “There’s no need for you all to be so disagreeable. As it happens I’m between engagements.”

  All three spoke together: “She’s an actress!”

  The brunette—Gertrude—touched the material in Emily’s sleeve. “So where did you get the tailored traveling suit? And that hat?” It was on the nightstand, together with her dye-stai
ned gloves.

  “I got them in happier times.”

  “Oh.” The actresses exchanged a look. Happier times meant men with money.

  “For a little while I had a rich husband,” Emily explained further, not wanting to be mistaken for a chorus trollop. But where, after all, was the shame in that? Here she was with a little over a dollar left in her pocket, no man, no job, and no train fare home, wherever that might be. Chorus trollop would be a step up. It was almost as though the last few years had never happened, as though the brilliant success of Melpomene Moving Pictures had all been a dream, as though Adam himself, with his beautiful face, his handsome shoulders, his money, and his improvidence, had been a dream as well.

  “Will it cheer you up to learn that we’re leaving tomorrow? You’ll have the room all to yourself then,” Gertrude said.

  “At least until Poison downstairs rents it to someone else,” Wanda said. “Better hope it ain’t a bunch of cowboys.”

  “Are there many cowboys in Flagstaff?”

  “You’d think so if you was on the stage with us last night.”

  “You’re in Jinks, aren’t you?” Emily said. “Which one of you is Madame Trentoni?”

  “Madame Trentoni and her mother are in the good hotel, lardy-dah,” Etta said.

  Wanda struck an attitude. “We’re the ballet ladies.”

  Something about her reminded Emily of a vaudeville act she once saw. “Say, aren’t you Baby Wanda Rose?”

  “Not anymore, honey.”

  “Young Etta, here, is Hochspitz, the German dancer,” Gertrude said. “It’s sort of a good part. She gets to do the accent, anyway. So you know the show?”

  “I was in it years ago in Bangor, Maine. Why did they put Trentoni in another hotel?”

  “Her mother insisted.”

  Wanda stuck her nose in the air. “Mrs. Swaine wouldn’t let her precious weshious stay in no low-class hotel with the likes of us.”

  “We’re perfectly respectable girls, actually,” Gertrude said. “When you get to know us.” She squinted into the mirror and touched up her mascara. “Of course Babette de Long’s mother doesn’t really know us. The dear little thing just joined the troupe a few days ago, after Eunice ran away with the silver baron in Wallace, Idaho.”