PEGGY IN HOLLYWOOD

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 March 1939, Page 10

PEGGY IN HOLLYWOOD

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT. COPYRIGHT.

BY

MRS PATRICK MACGILL.

The thought- came to stab and sting, “Is there anything between them already? Am I a back number so far as David is concerned?” With the sweet lack of logic belonging to feminine youth, Peggy did not stop to remember that, when David offered her his love, his name, his whole life, it was she who had sent him away because she was following the call of Hollywood with eager, flying feet. The megaphone man was shouting, “David Whitley and Opal Orth —the handsomest couple on the floor, ladies and gentlemen. Mr Whitley and Miss Orth are distinguished visitors from England—let’s give them a hand!” Followed a clapping and a pretty show of mock confusion on Opal’s part, as she mounted the platform to take her bow. “Ain’t you got manners enough to listen when big money talks?” asked a man at the next table, of another who had casually dropped a whole roll of bread in his soup splashing his shirt front beyond hope.

CHAPTER TV—(Continued)

“Ladies* and gentlemen,” said Opal’s really very pleasing low well-modulat-ed voice, “thank you so very much for the lovely welcome you have given my secretary, Mr Whitley, and myself. Come along up, David,” she invited prettily, extending her hand in a graceful gesture towards David, who had half hidden himself behind a pillar.

Lhere was qn ill-concealed titter from a group of actresses in a corner, sternly and instantly suppressed by their escorts. Not for the first, but for the twentieth time since he had embarked on his Hollywood adventure, David wished himself out of it. “Excuse me,” he muttered, making his way, not up to the platform to be the not so secret laughing stock of the room, but outside, where the night air was stealing the scene from the calla lilies and stars were hanging so low in the midnight sky that they looked like, golden lamps that could be pulled down at will. “David, darling.”

Peggy, too, had got up and fled the ball-room. “Oh, it was an outrageous thing to do! Who is she really, David? You know, the very name, Opal Orth, sounds sort of stagey and made-up to me,” said Peggy, seating herself on the marble bench beside David. “Oh, she’s the daughter of a South African diamond king, the only child. Her mother died at her birth and her father a year’ later. She came in for everything, and was brought up by trustees. Having always been able to buy her way everywhere, she has set out to buy herself into Hollywood. It looks as though she’ll get all the help she needs, but it- wasn t pai’t of oui understanding that I should be made to look like a cheap packet rat in the town.”

David's fine, open, strong face was still flushed with anger, and Peggy’s indignation showed in her burning eyes and the stiff line of her lovely young mouth.

“David—l love you so,” she whispered tenderly, her whole heart going out to him in a surge of longing to heal the hurt to his pride.

He took her in his arms and kissed her. For one exquisite moment she yielded herself in a wild, tumultuous craving, without power of resistance or even of thought, deliciously, frantically awakened. “What shall we do, David?” Peggy breathed, rather than spoke the question, and at that moment there seemed only one answer, only one thing for David Whitley to do.

“We must get married, sweetheart — and I must get some sort of job to keep us going for a bit. I’ll work in a gas station, or a shop, or even on the road,, but I’m not going to be Opal Orth’s Hollywood playboy, and she need not think it. I reckon I’ve earned my fare, but all the same. I’ll give it back to her just as soon as I’m able.” “Yes, that would close the episode nicely. Then we can both forget all about her," said Peggy, with youthful assurance.

“I’ll hand in my resignation tonight, and make inquiries tomorrow about how long one has to be in the place before a marriage licence can be obtained. Hollywood looks like a lot of fun, doesn’t it, sweetheart?" David punctuated his words with kisses; naturally time was forgotten. A fragment of some half-forgotten verse floated through Peggy's ecstatic consciousness —“Never the lime, the place, and the loved one all together.” “But I’ve got all three,” she told herself, in a paean of triumph as complete as that of any cavewoman of the dark ages who had got her man in the only way she knew. “Beg pardon, sir, but Miss Orth sent me to find you,”'said the waiter apologetically, coughing his way for at least 30 seconds prior to his. approach. “Tell her that lam not —" began David his manner filled with the raptine of moonlight and kisses and love. Then pride asserted itself, ugly, rebellious. grim. He would go back and face the crowded ballroom. Hollywood’s laugh should be thrown in its teeth. “All right, waiter. Come along. Peggy,” and, offering Peggy his arm. David went back to the dance, colour a little heightened, his emotions a strange compound of savage anger, triumph, dislike, and supreme happiness, mingled with a profound conviction that he had been wise ,to follow Peggy to Hollywood. CHAPTER V. Opal Orth was dancing with Samuel Finklesteen when David and Peggy leentered the Cocoanut Grove. Her lovely flushed face was a little raised and thrown back, the slender line of her marble white throat displayed to perfection; but the black eyes were sharp as gimlets beneath the half-closed lids, and they observed David and Peggy immediately.

“Oh, here are the runaways.” Beneath the gaiety, there was a distinct edge to Opal’s voice. “Waiter, some more seltzer, please,” she ordered, seating herself next to David, while Finklesteen appropriated Peggy, his coolly appraising eyes taking their fill of her more vivid and natural beauty. “You must come out and take a test, Baby. I believe you’ve got something,” he told Peggy, in the jargon of the Tinsel Kingdom. “David, did you hear that? Isn’t it grand? Mr Finklesteen wants me to take a test,” cried Peggy, her eyes shining; in her happy excitement, she was exquisitely alluring. David Whitley became conscious of an almost uncontrollable desire to knock the director’s false teeth down what he correctly judged to be his equally false throat. For a brief moment Peggy enjoyed the really unusual distinction of monopolising the limelight on. her very first night in Hollywood. But, brief as it was, it was too long for her strangely restless, excited hostess, who seemed to be labouring under some stimulating secret which she was impatient to divulge. “We’ll go upstairs, David. Mr Finklesteen and I have something to say to you.” Opal took David’s arm lightly, yet intimately, so that the pirn-prick felt by Peggy deepened into definite resentment. There was no chance for David to say anything to Opal just then. Rising, she paired off with David as a matter of course, and Finklesteen threaded his way through the closely packed mob of dancers with Peggy on his arm. Upstairs in the elegant impersonal suite of private rooms that they occupied, David declined a cigarette, also a drink, and was conscious of a dawning enmity on Finklesteen’s dark Jewish face. Following David’s lead, Peggy also declined drink or smoke, explaining what was the simple truth, that for the sake of her voice, she did neither. Finklesteen and Opal exchanged a meaning glance, Opal’s seeming to say, “You do it.” The atmosphere grew interesting and a little tense. The Jew cleared his throat. “Mr Whitley, I understand that you have written a very fine play, called ‘Success,’ ” he began. The heart leaped in Peggy’s breast; unconsciously she clasped her hands and her eyes were wide with eagerness like a child’s, her mouth trembled a little, she was so deadly anxious for what was to follow. “Miss Orth was good enough to read ‘Success’ and I believed liked it very much,” said David, holding his own excitement sternly in leash, fearful of giving exultation its heady rein. Two pairs of black, piercing, inscrutable eyes fixed themselves on David and Peggy; once again they held the centre of the stage. Finklesteen spoke, thickly, slowly, in the would-be weighty manner typical of even the most unimportant di-J rector in Hollywood. “Miss Orth has decided to go into partnership with another gentleman (they always speak of themselves and each other as gentlemen in Hollywood) and myself,” he told David and Peggy. “Yes?” David looked suitably impressed and waited. ‘ "... And form a corporation for the production of “Success,’ ” he finished, with a shrewd glance at the two young, hopeful, untried faces before him. “You have some sort of offer to make, then, I take it, Mr Finklesteen?” said David, quietly, some of his enthusiasm abating, for some reason that he could not define. “Yes, the finest, most generous offer from the finest, most generous lady that ever set a young man on the road to fame and fortune.” The typical producer’s sales talk was accompanied by a wave of the oily, diamond-bedizened hand in the direction of Opal Orth. It caught David on the raw, and Peggy saw him wince; she moved her chair a little closer to his in unconscious, intuitive sympathy. “I am sorry, Mr Finklesteen, but I have other plans for the production of Success.’ ” David’s voice was firm and final; if he had dropped a bomb between Opal Orth and her recently-ac-quired partner, they could hardly have looked more astonished. Peggy’s eager face clouded. “David, hadn’t you better let Mr Finklesteen finish? His offer may be better than the plan you have in mind for ‘Success,’ ” she said anxiously, not being able to see a reason for his queer objection. Just as though Finklesteen and Opal Orth were not with them, David turned to Peggy and said, with simple directness that made one girl’s heart sing and the others ache, “I had only written the first act of ‘Success’ when T met you. Peggy, and because you loved it. [ rewrote it for you, and the second and third acts are yours, too, I want you, and nobody else, to play Esta.” Thus David. Peggy’s blue eyes shone; there was so much and yet so little that she could say at that particular moment. Opal Orth took in the scene with a Tigrine ferocity, intensified by repression. Her answer was in the form of a barbed, laughing comment that disguiseci a threat. “I thought that secretaries were always ‘Yes,’ not ‘No’ men,” she smiled. There was only the briefest answering smile in David’s eyes as they met hers. “I should like to resign my job, Miss Orth. I am afraid I am not cut out for a lady’s secretary. Doubtless Mr Finklesteen will be able to recommend you somebody who knows his Hollywood and' will be much more useful than I.” “Don’t talk rot, David!” Of course, I won’t let you resign; and as for ‘Success’—well, I simply must play Esta It is a part that I feel—here.” She

struck her breast with a dramatic gesture, and the electric chandelier caught up and reflected the rich glow of the pigeon blood rubies on her wrist and fingers. “Another thing ” Opal Orth either forgot or deliberately disregarded Peggy’s presence as she got up and perched herself lightly on the arm of David’s chair, bending her scented, ash blonde head very near to his, as she spoke in a wheedling voice that made Peggy long to bite her. “I want you to act in it. too—be my leading man.” (To be Continued).