PEGGY IN HOLLYWOOD

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 March 1939, Page 12

PEGGY IN HOLLYWOOD

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT.

. COPYRIGHT.

BY

MRS PATRICK MACGILL.

CHAPTER V.

(Continued). David Whitley was no prig; it would have been absurd to have denied that he was pleasantly flattered by the attention he and his play were receiving. On the surface, it was a splendid chance that he was throwing away; on the other hand, if the first producer who read “Success” recognised its worth, might not the rest do the same —or the next? Looking up, he caught Peggy’s blue, pleading, altogether lovely eyes fastened upon his, and immediately, his heart hardened towards his chances and he flung both the production and the offer to be its leading man in the faces of whatever gods were their inspiration. “Thanks ever so much, Miss Orth, and you too, Mr Finklesteen.” Making his grand gesture, David even felt a little condescending towards the producer “. . . But I think that we will leave ‘Success’ open for the present, at least.” Both Opal and Finklesteen looked glum, and Peggy permitted herself the tiniest smile. Suddenly David felt desperately tired. “Let’s get out of here, Pegs,” he said, hurriedly. “We’ve had a wonderful time, Miss Orth,” said Peggy, politely, holding out her hand in her frank, friendly fashion. “I’m sure we are going to see a lot of each other. Isn’t Hollywood exciting?” said Opal, returning the smile and the handshake, but Peggy had an idea that she meant something else all the time. “By the way, David, where am I going to sleep for what is left of the night?” Peggy’s voice was blank. David was bound to admit that no Y.W.C.A., even though situated in Hollywood, would be likely to countenance the homecoming of a new arrival at such a late hour. Opal, who seemed to miss nothing, came up and joined in the discussion as to where Peggy could sleep. “Well, what is the matter with stopping here as my guest? David, ring downstairs and tell them to arrange it. I’ll lend you a nightie, dear, and I’m never without a new tooth-brush,” she coaxed, her arm round Peggy’s waist as she led her to the door. “Good-night, darling,” she called after Peggy who, 10 minutes later, arrayed in an orchid crepe de chine nightdress belonging to the girl whom she could not help but know was in love with her sweetheart, was lying awake thinking of the strange beginning of her Hollywood adventure and wondering what would be its end, until Dame Nature, ever kind to tired youth, touched her eyelids with a smiling benison and sent her into a dreamless sleep. CHAPTER VI. Peggy awoke at 10 o’clock and all the blue and gold wonder of the morning ran along her veins like fire.. From between Rose du Barrie silk curtains, she saw the tops of the palm trees waving and, beyond them, the Sierra Madre mountains melting into the sky like ever-present sentinels. The telephone beside her bed' shrilled. Peggy felt—and certainly- looked—in the best movie star tradition as she raised herself languidly on a white elbow from which a froth of orchid tinted lace —Opal Orth’s—fell in graceful disarray over the finest of linen pillow slips, as she picked up the instrument. “Hello, darling?” The voice was that of her hostess . . honey sweet .... a counterfeit anxiety in the inquiry as to whether she had slept well. “Oh, yes, indeed! I didn’t bat an eyelash until just this minute.” Peggy tried to infuse into her voice an enthusiasm she certainly did not feel, and felt still less when the too sweet voice added, “Hurry up and come down to breakfast; we are as hungry as wolves. I’ll send you up a pair of lounging pyjamas if you like . . . really, all the women in the patio here are wearing them . . David says he loves mine . . . didn’t you?”—apparently appealing to David, whose reply was translated by distance from the telephone into a deep, unintelligible murmur. “Don’t trouble, thanks. I’ll get into the things I took off and be down in 10 minutes.” Peggy hoped that the banged received was thought to have slipped from her haricl; but if she could have seen the sly smile of triumph curving Opal’s lips as she replaced her own instrument in its nest and turned to David, she would have known that an exactly correct interpretation was put upon the gesture. David rose as Peggy entered the clematis-covered patio where they had their breakfast table set in close proximity to a musically splashing fountain.

An attentive waiter pulled out a chair, and Opal, looking exquisite in lounging pyjamas of verbena crepe de Chine with a huge sun-hat shading her face, held out two crimson-tipped fingers in greeting. “How divine our Pegs looks, doesn’t she, David?”

Peggy sat down and tried to remember that it was. bad manners to show annoyance before one’s hostess. “Well, shall we tell Peggy the day’s programme, David?” Peggy flashed David a look which asked almost as plainly as if she had spoken, why he had not yet thrown up his job. Catching it, and interpreting it in the only possible way, Opal replied, “I have persuaded David to stay on until I can get somebody suitable to take his place. After all, a girl alone in Hollywood has to be careful,” she added, sententiously. David asked permission to smoke, and lit a cigarette. Opal nibbled at a piece of dry toast and deliberately allowed the silence to grow somewhat oppressive. Finally, “We are to call for Finky at half-past 11, and he is taking us tp swim at Santa Monica and

lunch at the “Wicked Waffle,” out at Long Beach, where the earthquake was. Ugh! I hope no earthquakes came while we are here!” and Opal leaned her verbena-clad beauty towards David so that Peggy also got a whiff of the perfume she used on her hair. Peggy gave in and let Opal arrange her day, although in reality, she would have preferred to have scent her morning trying her luck in the casting offices of the studios, and her evenings with David, roaming the boulevards on foot, savouring Hollywood in sips, not great, heady draughts, as Opal Orth was doing.

But there was David, she realised now how much, she loved him, how much he must love her to have thrown up everything in order to follow her. He released something in her, some tautness, due to a youth devoid of anything but driving ambition and study.

It was just noon when they drove up to the ornate Italian villa occupied by Samuel Finklesteen. The house reminded Peggy of nothing so much as a huge iced Christmas cake standing white and stark against the brown hillside. It was barely noon, but Finklesteen was in an enormous room with a domed ceiling, mixing cocktails, for a miscellaneous collection of motion picture actors, and actresses, directors, and what not. These people were sprawling over-chairs and couches covered with equisite brocades, and furnished with expensive silken cushions. Peggy gasped. Glorious tapestries. Flemish and Gobelin, marbles of Jean Bologne side by side with Roden’s “Kiss” in black marble, a sober Rembrandt horribly out of place, and next to that a queer set of original caricatures by one of the world’s most famous in the art. In an alcove leading to a splendid aviary were 20 chattering monkeys in cages, a sad, sickening sight. Peggy felt a swift, sudden drop of her spirits to zero. She kept close to David, who had not let go of her arm. “Finky, our tongues are simply hanging out with thirst, aren’t they, David” said Opal, in a too loud voice, turning a coy glance on her secretary. “Yours, too, Peggy, darling?” graciously deigning to include the clear-eyed, clean-cut young girl in her silly, affected littlespeech. “Mine'isn’t,” replied Peggy, briefly. “No cocktail for me, thanks,” said David crisply, as he declined the proffered glass. “High hat! They won’t last long in Hollywood!” To be dubbed “high hat” in the Tinsel Kingdom is the equivalent to committing suicide so far as one’s chances in motion pictures are concerned. The inferiority complex of the makers of movies is too deeply ingrained not to resent the slightest suggestion of mental or social superiority, whether real or assumed. A man detached himself from a little knot of other men and came over to. speak to Peggy. “Aren’t you the little girl I met on the train day before yesterddy?” he queslined Peggy, flashing a keen look at David as he spoke. “Lewisohn, my name is,” he told him briefly. “Oh, yes, I remember. It was you who recommended me to go to the Y.W.C.A.,” said Peggy, giving the tired disillusioned director one of her brightest smiles. “Did you go?” he asked, snapping his words off like an angry dog. . I “I did,” dimpled Peggy. “And you? How long have you known Hollywood?” There was something fundamentally sincere and utterly kind about Oscar Lewisohn. In spite of his ugliness and lack of polish, everybody liked him. David did, instantly. Lewisohn snorted. “What is she doing with this outfit, then?” he barked. “Nothing. It’s this way,” and David explained as briefly and clearly as he could. “As soon as she t get her bearings, Peggy and I are getting married,” he told him, with the quick, frank smile that invariably drew like a magnet those on whom it was bestowed. “And then get out of this damnable place that sucks the life blood from a man and afterwards flings him on the dung heap” Lewisohn growled, and for a brief, revealing instant, David saw the raw, bleeding spirit of a man suffering the keen edge of defeat. “Let that painted Jane over there learn all that Hollywood can teach her,but don’t let this nice kid here suffer. I sort of took a liking to her just by meeting her in the train,” he said. He ;hook hands with David and Peggy and gave a sour glance by way of farewell to Opal, who was surrounded with a court of ready advisers, facile comedians simulating passions they were incapable of feeling. , “The tragedy of woman lies in the fact that she demands love but succumbs to a waxed moustache,” Peggy overheard an elegant, hand-kissing Italian youth.remark to their hostesses. “That’s a good one, Florio! I must remember that. David, I’ve got to go mto'conference with Finky. Will you take Peggy to look at the monkeys or something? I’ll be about 15 minutes,” ordered David’s employer, who was certainly doing her best to live up to the term “glamorous" that had been applied to her by one of her cohorts of flatterers. In the small badly, but comfortably furnished room where he did as he pleased and which formed his real home, Samuel Finklesteen faced a tight-lipped drawn, desperately determined woman from whose countenance every vestige of gaiety, every semblance of youth had for the moment fled. "Now, then, just go ahead and give me the straight dope on .this David Whitley proposition; and come clean, or I can't help you, honey! What de you want of me, and how does Peggy Rooney fit in?” Opal answered the question by asking another, apparently irreVelant yel containing the whole gist of her reason for holding David when he woulc rather leave her employ. “Finky, you are a man , , .” she began. “I hope so,” interrupted Finklesteen, facetiously, scenting an interesting confidence, and pulling his chair a bi! nearer to receive it. “Do you know what it is to burn up inside, to go mad over the very touch of someone?” Opal asked intensely, hei black eyes fixed steadily upon the somewhat embarrassed director, whe

up till then had not taken her quite seriously. “I have known.such feelings,” he admitted. “That is how I feel about' David Whitley.” Opal Orth’s voice was soft, lilting, exquisite with the mere mention of the man, she evidently loved with all the ardour of a deeply , passionate, equally determined nature. “If the microphone could pick up that note in her voice and the camera catch that look in her eyes, there’s a fortune in that girl. People feel all mushy inside when girls look that way in pictures,” Finklesteen told himself, shrewdly. Aloud, he said: “What do you want me to do about Whitley?” (To be Continued).