Beebo looked away from him. “I wouldn’t hurt your mother—” she began.
“I know,” he said, with surprising warmth and sympathy. “She’ll be okay, don’t worry. The thing that scares me is…well, I don’t want you to leave us, Beebo. You’ve done so much for us. Besides, who’d help me with my biology? Honest—these gossipers—they’ll say anything about anybody.”
Beebo was touched by his anxiety. “I’m not going anywhere, buddy,” she said. But she meant, Not right now. Tomorrow, I may have no choice. And Toby realized it.
Beebo was a thin line away from despair. All the charmingly confessed selfishness that had seemed adorable in Venus at first had become Beebo’s prison.
And having nothing else to do, Beebo studied Venus’s faults as never before. The self-love, the endless clichés. Venus might laugh at them, but she couldn’t abandon them. People said there was only one great glamour queen left in Hollywood: Venus Bogardus. And Venus thought they meant her trimmings—her velvet-paved boudoirs and flashy conceits; not her Self.
Beebo loved her with excited fascination still. And Venus loved Beebo as well and truly as she knew how. More, certainly, than anyone but Toby. And yet…was that enough?
Beebo stood looking out the window of her room at twilight, taking in the grounds of the estate and the evening star. Venus. So high and bright and beautiful. And as far out of reach at that moment as ever it was when she was growing up back in Juniper Hill.
That night, when she tried to write to Jack again, she spoiled her page twice with tears and gave it up. She was trying not to admit that Venus had no room in her life for a gay lover; that theirs was a time-bomb romance, set to explode in their faces. The papers had lighted the fuse. And Beebo, looking at that perfect point of light in the black sky, knew in her heart that her days with Venus were numbered.
The morning of that crucial Tuesday, a nationally syndicated columnist who wielded huge power in Hollywood said she was checking a New York source for verification of a shocking news item about one of the town’s greatest stars…a woman, currently headlining a TV series.
Two other columnists pretended special information on the same subject, but all refused to reveal their information or describe the scandal till it was authenticated.
Venus was on trial that night. One columnist had snickered, “If Leo doesn’t mind, I don’t know why I should. After all, he’s been through this a dozen times.”
Even at that they had let her off pretty easily. But the atmosphere around her crackled. Fortunately, advance notices on Baby were good. They had had a good schedule and an extravagant budget. And Leo, with bench-coaching from Beebo, had wheedled a radiant performance out of his wife.
Venus and Leo watched the broadcast on monitors at Television City with the whole Baby company, and went on afterwards to a baroque party on the famous Restaurant Row of LaCienega Boulevard. They hit most of the eateries, picking up celebrities en route, and capping the bash at the home of a popular singer who had guest-starred on the opener.
The party was noisy and crazy, and Venus, a showstopper in silver sequins, took Hollywood under her thumb, with the subtly effective aid of her husband. She had her arms around every man present at least once, as graceful and captivating as any lovely woman aware of her success. When she was twitted about the dark secrets mentioned in the papers, she laughed and told everyone she was screwing her cat, and the whole subject was swept away in the laughter that followed. Only Leo remained grave, smiling slightly and talking, but inwardly seething.
And Venus, if the truth were known, was even more disturbed than he.
Beebo saw the show in the Bogardus rec room with Toby. The house was eerily quiet. All the servants had been given the night off, except Venus’s correspondence secretary, a fussily officious young man; and Mrs. Sack, who never went anywhere anyway.
The show had hardly started before the phone began to ring: telegrams, roses at the front gate, long distance rhapsodies. The secretary took the calls, but Beebo and Toby picked up the red wall-phone and listened in to some.
At the station break, the secretary put his head in and said, “Beebo? Telegram for you.” He handed her the yellow envelope.
Beebo felt the bottom of her stomach sink southward. She was sure it couldn’t be good news. Not when she had left so much angry confusion behind in New York.
The wire was from Jack: “Get home, pal. N.Y. safer than L.A. Couple of people want your scalp. Jack.”
What does he want me to do, go back and give it to them? she wondered, taking her worry out on Jack.
“Was it bad news?” Toby said, looking at her face. Beebo pursed her lips and nodded.
“A friend in New York. He says my enemies want me dead.”
Toby paled, started to ask about it, and suddenly turned back to the TV screen as if afraid to know the truth.
When the show was over, Toby and Beebo went for a walk on the lawn, meandering side by side and speaking little. Beebo was full of the shadow-image of Venus on the screen; glittering, gorgeous, inaccessible. Finally Toby stopped in a garden path, standing stiff-legged and staring back at the lighted windows of the empty living room. “Beebo,” he said. “You’re not going to leave, are you?” It was not just Beebo he feared to lose. It was his mother as well.
Beebo’s hands curled into fists. “I don’t know,” she said, so softly it was hard to hear her. She knew she was going to have to, that she was way beyond herself here. And yet not even the discouragements of boredom, shame, and abstinence had completely crushed her. She kept thinking of
