So around seven I met her in the lobby. I was still in my white linen suit but Margot had slipped into an elegant little black bengaline dress with puffy three-quarter sleeves and no cleavage but nicely form-fitting, and brother was it a nice form. Her turban and gloves were that cherry red of her lipstick, and so were the toenails peeking from the open-toed black patent leather pumps.
“Ever been to Earl Carroll’s?” she asked, looping her arm in mine.
“No. Can we get in without reservations?”
“Mr. Dimity has a membership; we’re guaranteed seats. I just hope you won’t forget about me, with all those pretty girls around.”
“I don’t think there’s much chance of that,” I said, drinking in the smell of her. Since we first met, she’d switched from soap to Chanel Number Five.
Hollywood Boulevard was bathed in dusk, that time of day movie people call “magic hour,” giving neons a special glow, muting colors, coolly air-brushing the handiwork of God and man much as gauze over a camera lens plays Fountain of Youth for an aging actress. We joined the parade sauntering along the celebrated Boulevard, a good-looking couple getting admiring looks from tourists and locals alike, Grauman’s Chinese across the street, then Grauman’s Egyptian on our side of the street, high-tone department stores and lowly five-and-dimes, exclusive shops and postcard parlors, and when we turned down Vine, we soon saw the Brown Derby, not the one shaped like a hat, but the rambling Spanish-style affair with a neon derby riding stilts on the red clay tile rooftop while below a gaggle of fans with autograph books in hand waited to waylay celebs at the canopied entrance.
Earl Carroll’s topped them all, starkly modern in its geometric grace, no pillars for this pastel green palace, rather vertical shafts of white neon. Like Grauman’s Chinese, movie star autographs in cement were on display, not at your feet, but right in front of you, on the outer wall, CARY GRANT, GINGER ROGERS, BOB HOPE, JIMMY STEWART, ROSALIND RUSSELL, dozens more, stretching to the sky, where to their right a haunting electric visage loomed, the face of a beautiful woman, a graceful Art Moderne rendition, ivory neon brushstrokes against the building’s jade, her head tilted enigmatically above the impresario’s neon name, the arc of her chapeau outlined with the blue-electric words THROUGH THESE PORTALS PASS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMEN IN THE WORLD. I ushered my beautiful woman under the blush of pink and blue and yellow lighting and through the chrome entryway, into a foyer that wasn’t much—just a black patent-leather ceiling, columns of pastel light, a gilded streamlined statue of a nude goddess, and a staircase so wide and grand it might have risen to heaven, not the men’s and ladies’ rooms.
The rose plush-carpeted dining room/auditorium, its walls green satin-draped, wasn’t any larger than a couple airplane hangars, seating for a thousand on half a dozen terraced areas with pink table settings and matching chairs under a ceiling that appeared at first to undulate with gracefully curving fringed curtains but on closer look consisted of thin tubular stripes of blue and gold neon fluorescence, which seemed to lead into a similar curving curtain of fringed light above the stage, feeding into thirty-foot light columns on either side.
Margot and I sat alone at a table for four, with only a row of banquet-size tables between us and the footlights. The apparel for men ranged from my own fairly casual white linens to tuxedos, though most of the women wore fancy evening wear, wanting to compete as best they could in a theater whose stage show,
“Members of the Lifetime Cover Charge Club are always guaranteed a seat in the inner circle,” Margot explained, sipping another stinger.
We’d finished dinner, which—despite a menu courtesy of Chef Felix Ganio “of the Waldorf-Astoria”—was just adequate. But how could a mere filet mignon measure up to thousands of feet of neon and the promise of sixty showgirls?
“What do they pay for that privilege?” I asked.
“A thousand dollars…. Mr. Dimity’s status here has been very handy, wining and dining potential Foundation members.”
We had both already broken our promise, several times, not to discuss the Amelia Earhart Foundation. We had also established that Margot was between boyfriends and that she was having the time of her life, hobnobbing with famous people and helping Amelia’s “cause.”
Actually, quite a few famous people were seated around us: Mantz’s charter customers Gable and Lombard, Tyrone Power and Sonja Henie, Jack Benny and his wife, Mary Livingston, Edgar Bergen without Charlie McCarthy (but with a lovely blonde), all seated at various tables of larger parties otherwise consisting of people I didn’t recognize.
Okay, I was a little impressed. But famous folk occasionally wandered through the cowtown I called home, and I’d done a job for Robert Montgomery out here last year, an impressive, classy guy; but most movie actors were, like George Raft, smaller than you’d think, with off-screen dialogue that didn’t exactly sparkle.
What even a thick-headed former cop like yours truly was starting to figure out was that I, too, was being wined and dined for the Foundation’s cause; and I was starting to wonder if cute, curvy Margot was part of the package. And if you think any of that would stir indignation in my breast, you haven’t been paying attention.
A nattily attired, almost skeletally thin, delicately handsome gent who might have been Fred Astaire but wasn’t was winding through the inner-circle crowd, smiling, joking, shaking hands with the celebrities who seemed delighted, even honored, by his attention.
“Who is that?” I asked Margot.
“That’s Earl Carroll himself,” she said.
Carroll and his
“He’s coming this way,” Margot whispered.
“You’re Nate Heller!” he said, as if I were a celebrity too, his smile as dazzling as it was insincere.
“Mr. Carroll,” I said, and we shook hands, “nice little hole in the wall you got here.”
His strong-jawed face had a surprising sensitivity, his cheekbones high, gray-blue eyes piercing, his dark,
