The Bette Davis Club Page 5

  Then I take off the Donna Karan. I fold the dress carefully and place it in my case.

  I pull on a pair of black capri pants, a white cotton shell, and a matching lightweight cardigan, complemented with a darling pair of brand-new Ferragamo flats (Charlotte’s, but I swear they were the last thing I pinched).

  I brush my hair, fix my lipstick, and throw a royal-blue chiffon scarf round my head and tie it under my chin. I take out a pair of wraparound tortoiseshell sunglasses and put those on too. I fancy I look a bit like young Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but the effect is probably more middle-aged, sex-crazed Ava Gardner in Night of the Iguana.

  I push open the restroom door and step out into the sunlight.

  The old woman stands there. She appears to have been waiting for me.

  “Hon,” she says, “I been thinking. You gotta give your man another chance. Try and patch things up.”

  She thrusts a faded book at me. It’s a vintage marriage manual, easily fifty or sixty years old. The title is Starting Your New Life Together—A Modern Guide for Modern Newlyweds.

  “That book helped me considerable,” the old woman says. “And excuse me being forward, but makin’ whoopee can be a high old time. I know. Had six kids.”

  Don’t even try to set her straight, I think. I choke out a thank-you.

  The old woman moves slowly away. I stuff the marriage manual into my case.

  Tully has pulled the car off to one side of the station. It’s dripping wet. The vinyl clings and shaving cream are gone, and Tully’s using a rag to shine up bits of the chrome.

  “After the guy filled the tank,” Tully says when I come up to him, “I asked him to hose off all that junk.”

  “Where are the balloons?” I say, peering over my sunglasses.

  He points behind me. I turn and see a curly-haired little girl, about five years old, standing by the swing set. She’s holding the bouquet of red and white balloons.

  I laugh. “She looks as though she might float away.”

  Tully doesn’t say anything. I’m aware that he’s changed out of his wedding clothes into jeans and a short-sleeved shirt. For the first time, I see his bare arms. His biceps are surprisingly firm.

  But where’s that tuxedo he was wearing? The one he hoped to be married in. Did he toss it into the garbage can in the men’s room? Or did he fold it up and put it in his suitcase—the same way I’m saving Charlotte’s Donna Karan for some future occasion. Could it be, even now, that Tully hopes for a second chance at walking up the aisle with Georgia?

  For Tully’s sake, I hope he threw the tuxedo away. But his chapfallen expression and sloping shoulders tell me it’s more likely tucked away in his case.

  Oh dear. Oh damn. Poor Tully. Perhaps he really can’t stop himself from chasing after Georgia. Perhaps love has caught him in its net.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CARY GRANT AND ICE-CREAM

  There’s a hamburger stand across the road. Not a modern-day franchise, just an old shack with a tin roof.

  Tully’s eyes flick across the highway. “Food,” he says, like some sort of caveman. “You want anything?”

  What I’d like is a glass of gin. But we’re in the desert in more ways than one. “No, thanks,” I say. “I’m fine.” Only I’m not. I’m considering lying down in the dirt, kicking my feet, and crying like an infant. To relieve the tension.

  “Suit yourself,” Tully says, as though agreeing with my thoughts on throwing a tantrum. He looks both ways for traffic (there isn’t any), then strolls across the blacktop.

  Alone now, I strap my case to the luggage rack and climb back into the car. The minute I sit down, the cell phone rings. I fish it out of my leather tote bag.

  “Where are you?” demands a woman’s voice. Charlotte.

  “I’m in the car,” I say, leaning back in my seat and gazing up at the blue, cloudless sky. “I’ll remain in the car until we get to Palm Springs. Then I shall exit the car.”

  “Have you located your quarry?”

  “Just a moment,” I say. “I’ll look.”

  I hold the phone to my chest. The curly-haired little girl is at the picnic table, still clutching the balloons Tully gave her. While her mother lays out food on the table, the child ties the balloons to a baby carrier containing an infant swaddled in pink. The baby sister, I presume. The curly-haired girl stands back, waiting for her sister to float off into space. The carrier doesn’t budge.

  “Rotten luck!” I call to her. In a gesture that reminds me of Charlotte in younger days, the girl folds her arms and sticks out her tongue at me.

  I return the phone to my ear. “I looked, but Georgia isn’t here,” I say. “Perhaps that’s because she’s in Palm Springs.”

  “Contact me as soon as you have any data,” Charlotte says. “Let me know when you achieve your objective.”

  Is there some reason she’s talking like a CIA operative? I can’t imagine. Then it hits me that Charlotte’s paranoid. She probably thinks the tabloids have hacked her phone.

  “I’ll do that,” I say. “I’ll be sure and telephone you when I locate Miss Georgia Illworth, the nineteen-year-old runaway daughter of film producer Charlotte Illworth, of the wealthy and important Illworth family, key players in the Hollywood film industry, who reside in an oceanfront mansion high in the hills of Malibu, California, at—”

  She hangs up.

  I put the phone in my bag. My long legs are cramped from sitting. Without thinking, I reach down and feel for the adjustment lever at the front corner of the seat. There it is. I press the lever to release the catch, and slide the seat back so I can stretch out my legs.

  How long has it been since I did that? I remember my father helping me adjust the seat when I was a child. Only in those days, we were sliding it forward. A dozen memories come to me. Of the car, of my father and mother.

  My father was the screenwriter Arthur Just. You may have seen his name on a few old black-and-white films from the 1940s and ’50s, although he started out in New York, working as a very young assistant to Orson Welles. Early in our friendship, I mentioned this family history to Dottie. “Really, darling?” she said. “The Orson Welles? What was he like?”

  “A whirlwind,” I told her. “That’s what my dad said. But he also said Welles was a genius, that nobody else had his talent or zest for life.”

  In 1940, Welles went to Hollywood to direct his classic film, Citizen Kane. My father and his wife, Irene, came west a few years later, and my father began writing for the movies. He and Welles talked about doing a project together, but nothing ever came of it.

  For many years, I’ve put a lot of energy into not thinking about my parents. Into not thinking about how, due to the death of my mother when I was eight and, two years later, the death of my father, my childhood came to an abrupt and heartbreaking end. Now, I sit in my father’s car, flooded with memories. And when I reflect on all that I have lost, a lump rises in my throat and settles there.

  I look up to see Tully bending over the driver’s side, clutching two ice-cream cones. “Got you something,” he says. He holds out a cone.

  I can’t help myself. Tully’s offer of ice-cream triggers a memory so sharp that tears well up inside me and push their way out, like people fighting for the exit during a real-estate time-share presentation.

  “Oh jeez,” Tully says. He gazes at the cone as though it were a wilted flower. “Did you want a hot dog?”

  I shake my head, I can’t speak.

  “Don’t English ladies like ice-cream?”

  In spite of myself, I laugh. “I haven’t lived in England for years,” I say, wiping a tear from my cheek. “And I am not a lady. I’m just having a rotten day.”

  “Yeah? Me too.” He slings a leg over the car door and drops down in the driver’s seat, still holding the cones.

  “Sorry,” I say, sniffing back tears. “Obviously, your day has been far more wretched than mine.”

  “It’s not a contest,” Tully say
s. He licks one of the cones. “Okay, sure, I’m bummed about what happened, but I’m not so emo as to fall apart over an ice-cream cone.”

  “It’s not only the ice-cream,” I say. “It’s . . . other things.” I touch the dashboard. “This car belonged to my father.”

  “Did he used to take you for ice-cream in it?”

  “Never.” I sniff. “He was allergic to dairy. But he bought this vehicle used—it was already something of a classic—when I was seven. He was working again, after a long dry spell. One day, when he’d had the car a few weeks, Cary Grant dropped by—”

  “The movie star?”

  “The movie star. Mr. Grant came by, and Daddy said he could take the car for a spin if he wanted. So Mr. Grant—”

  Tully stops eating his ice-cream cone. “Cary Grant drove this car?” he says.

  “Yes, he sat right where you’re sitting.”

  Tully takes that in and then glances at the second ice-cream cone he’s holding, the one he bought for me. “Won’t you please take this before it melts all over the ghost of Cary Grant?”

  I accept a paper napkin and the cone, licking the rivulets dripping down its side. After I get the ice-cream under control, I say, “Mr. Grant was very athletic. He was older, had already stopped making movies, but even so he vaulted over the car door and got behind the wheel. This was at our house in Santa Monica, and—”

  “I thought your family lived in Malibu,” Tully says.

  God, where to begin?

  “My father owned the Malibu house, yes,” I say. “His wife lived there. So did their daughter, Charlotte—your intended mother-in-law.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “My father never married my mother, all right? Daddy’s wife, Irene—Charlotte’s mother—was . . . well, she was Catholic, among other things. She was also not a nice person, not a kind person. In any event, she and my father didn’t get along. When he was fortysomething, my dad fell in love with a twenty-three-year-old English actress. She brought grace into his life. She also rather quickly got pregnant with me. But Irene refused to give my dad a divorce. I think, legally, maybe he could have gotten one, but it was about so much more than legalities. So Daddy wound up keeping two homes: one in Malibu with Irene and Charlotte, the other in Santa Monica with my mum and me. And that’s what I called her, by the way—Mum. She liked me to call her that. She was from England.”

  “Your father kept two households at the same time?” Tully says.

  “Yes.”

  “Very Continental of him. Must have been pricey.”

  “It was.”

  “Was he rich?”

  “Not really, he was a writer. Screenplays. He made excellent money in the 1940s, before I was born, hence, the Malibu house. But by the time I came along, he’d been through the Red Scare, the blacklist, all of it, and his career had suffered. He ended up writing for television, which he hated, just to pay the bills. When he bought this car, he was writing for television.”

  Tully has draped himself sideways in the driver’s seat, his back resting against the car door. He munches his ice-cream cone, eyeing me over the top of it. “What about your mom? Is she still alive?”

  “She drowned in the ocean when I was eight.”

  “Oh jeez, I’m sorry,” Tully says. “I didn’t . . . you mean . . . like an accident?”

  I shrug. “She was unhappy. She wanted to be married. She wanted to work again—she sometimes played small parts in films. She adored my father, but so many things had worn her down. I think one day Mum made up her mind to go for a swim and . . .” I’m going to start crying again, I know it.

  “Anyway,” I say, backing off the topic of my mother. “Cary Grant. So there I was on the lawn in Santa Monica, watching my father and Mr. Grant. When Mr. Grant got in the car, he noticed me standing there. He winked and said, ‘Hiya, kid.’ Then he asked my father if I could come along and go get ice-cream. My dad laughed and said sure, and lifted me up and plunked me down in this very seat. And I, seven-year-old Margo Anna-Louise Just, drove off in a red convertible with Cary Grant.”

  “And he molested you?”

  “Certainly not! Absolutely, unequivocally no!” I wave my ice-cream so hard, the top scoop goes soaring off into the desert. “In those days, only Joan Crawford was gaining a reputation for child abuse. Mr. Grant was a wonderful man. He loved children. I always understood he wanted a large family, but that didn’t happen for him.”

  “He was gay,” Tully says.

  “No, he wasn’t.”

  “Gay,” Tully repeats. “It’s like an open secret. He was at least bisexual.”

  “If you mean those old photos everyone’s always going on about—the ones with Randolph Scott—that could have been a one-off. Anyway, Mr. Grant’s sexual orientation is beside the point.”

  “You think?” Tully says. “Then what is the point?” He tongues what’s left of his ice-cream into a curving white peak.

  “The point—and I don’t necessarily expect you to get this, but give it a go—the point is, don’t you see how an adventure like that could imprint on a little girl’s brain? How driving off at the age of seven in a red MG driven by Cary Grant would be difficult to top in later years? You don’t get over it; no woman could. To some extent, it’s influenced everything I’ve ever done. Millions of women melted from just seeing him on the screen, and I . . . I rode with him in a convertible. And that’s why I cried when you brought me ice-cream. Because once—when my parents were alive and I was young and happy—I sat in this very car and was offered ice-cream by—”

  “The greatest male star in the history of American motion pictures.”

  “Precisely. Thank you for understanding that.”

  I lick my cone. Tully watches me. His eyes are a deep, compelling brown, a bit crinkly at the corners. In his rumpled way, he’s rather nice-looking. I suddenly feel protective toward him. “Look,” I say, “I’m sorry about just now, becoming emotional. I’m not always so sentimental, but recently I’ve been going through—”

  “Menopause,” Tully says, with the same know-it-all tone he used in outing Cary Grant.

  I lift an eyebrow. “No,” I say slowly, “as a matter of fact, my medical practitioner tells me I have a few more years to go in that department.”

  I’m still working on my ice-cream cone when Tully finishes his. He wipes his fingers on a paper napkin, then twists round so he’s sitting properly in his seat. He starts up the car. We get back on the road, once again feel the wind in our faces.

  “Go on,” Tully says, raising his voice so I can hear him over the hum of the MG’s engine. “What happened with Cary Grant?”

  I decide to let Tully’s menopause remark go by. After all, he’s having a rough day. And he and I share the common goal of tracking down Georgia. When we do find her, and I get my fifty thousand dollars, perhaps Tully and Georgia really will make up; perhaps they really will get married. That would make him my . . . what? My nephew-in-law. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be chums. There’s no reason I shouldn’t tell him my Cary Grant story.

  “We went for a drive by the ocean,” I say. “After a while, Mr. Grant pulled up to a place like that one back there.” I point behind us, at the hamburger stand we left down the road. “He bought me ice-cream, yes. But it was more than that. He gave me the gift of himself, his time and attention. He was charming, completely focused on me—a little girl—and the moment. It was like spending the day with a handsome, debonair Santa Claus. He taught me that day how to take a compliment. He said—in that delightful, clipped way of his—‘Whenever someone says you’re pretty, Margo, or that’s a nice frock, always smile and say thank you.’ He told me I should remember that because I’d get a great many compliments in life. He asked me about my friends and if I liked school, and he said I’d grow up to be very beautiful, like my mother.”

  “And you did,” Tully says.

  Oh, that was sweet. I smile, the way Cary Grant taught me. “Thank you,” I say.
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  “I was seven years old,” I continue, “and it was the first time I’d ever considered what I looked like. Mr. Grant was the first man who ever made me feel pretty. When he took me home and returned me to my father, something about my life had changed. For the next three years, until I went away to England, I never missed seeing a Cary Grant movie whenever they showed one on television. I’d fallen in love with Cary Grant, or at least the idea of him. Watching those old movies—dreaming over his style, his wit, his sophistication—just made it worse.”

  “Must have set the bar kind of high for guys you met later on.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Do you work in the industry?” Tully says.

  “Films?” I shake my head. “When I was younger, I did some modeling. Now I own a shop in New York.”

  Tully momentarily switches his gaze from the road to me. “Manhattan?” he says. “We’re neighbors. I grew up in Los Angeles, but nowadays I live in Brooklyn. What kind of shop?”

  “Architectural salvage,” I say. With my free hand, I retrieve a card from my bag and offer it to him.

  Tully takes the card and glances down at it. He reads aloud: “Manhattan Architectural Salvage. We Pick Up the Pieces.” He laughs, but he doesn’t sound all that amused.

  “If ever you want a chunk of old Pennsylvania Station,” I say, thinking of Dottie and wishing she were here, “I can fix you up.”

  “You have some of that?” Tully says. He hands back the card.

  “Yes. But do you even know what it is?”

  “Sure.” A jackrabbit shoots across the road. Tully downshifts to avoid hitting it.

  “Penn Station is legendary,” Tully says. “They tore it down in the 1960s, even though lots of people felt it was important. Felt it should be saved. But it wasn’t.”

  After he says this, I find myself warming even more toward Tully. Few people these days remember Penn Station, which was located in midtown Manhattan and was one of the most beautiful Beaux Arts structures of the early 1900s.