the men to crimes of passion!”)
The new script must have worked just as well; the studio asked for two more movies as soon as the film was in.
After the Sidewalk Cafe one Sunday I drove her home, to some bank of stucco apartments in a no-man’s-land north of the city.
“We have to get you a better place if you’re going to be worth photographing,” I said. “I’ll talk to the studio.”
“You shouldn’t,” she said. “I like it here.”
“But the cameras don’t,” I said, and cut the engine.
I helped her out of the car. Her skin was shining in the light, and her sharp green eyes were captivating, and I felt like some poor sucker lord of the manor for letting her get to me like this. I should know better. My head was swimming; I wanted her, I needed her.
Before she was steady on her feet, I pulled her roughly against me.
She took a breath. Then for an instant she was in two dimensions, flat enough for the streetlight to bleed through her like a stained glass window, and before I could even really understand what I was seeing the world had snapped back into place, and there was a flurry of jewel-colored bodies and sharp green wings.
They scattered, and I was left with a satin dress in my hands, blinking at the startling-white impressions of two hundred vanished birds.
My first thought was,
My second was,
Eva was set to play Ruby, the sultry Latin dancer in the musical of the month (
But when I got to the set the next morning she was already there and in costume, practicing the steps on the nightclub set with her partner.
I didn’t dare push it with him right there, so I watched quietly from behind the camera all morning, until the director called lunch and the crew scattered.
She stayed where she was, and for a moment I thought about how to keep the cameras rolling in case she did it again. (I couldn’t help it; a director’s always looking for the shot no one can top.)
“You look like you have something to say,” she said, folded her arms.
I kept my distance. If it wasn’t on film, there was no point in provoking her.
“Where did you learn to do that?”
She smiled thinly. “It can’t be taught. It’s just something you are.”
“No, I didn’t mean—where did you
“Nogales.”
That wasn’t what I meant, either. “But there had to be some reason you showed me and not anyone else,” I went on.
She looked at me, frowning, like I was some kind of idiot instead of the guy who had built her career from the ground up.
“I’m here to be an actress,” she said. “I’m not doing any of this for you.”
I let it go. It wasn’t the time to argue facts.
I said, “We could make a movie about it. I could build the whole plot around you, a leading part. Something from the Arabian Nights!” I paused, overcome with the image of a pasha’s throne room and a storyteller who has a trick up her sleeve.
“Just think,” I said, “we could show everyone what kind of star you can be.”
“No.”
That stung. You’d think she’d have taken a starring role from the guy who knew how to direct her. “But imagine it,” I pleaded. “Forget the Reporter—this would be history! This town would never top it. We’d go down in the record books with the shot no one could ever figure out.”
She narrowed her eyes. “No one would believe it.”
Who cared what anyone believed so long as they paid to see it, I thought.
I said, “I can make people believe anything.”
Then the crew was filing back in, and the director wanted to see her, so I let her go.
I stayed all afternoon to watch her backstage-at-the-contest scene (I was a better director than the music man), and to think how best to go about getting hold of that moment again.
She was too caught up in the thrill of it to remember who had given her the first shot; she didn’t understand how I had built up her audience, that was all.
At least she didn’t have much of a part in the musical. When she came back to me for her next contract, I thought, we’d have another talk about who makes a star.
The weekend the musical opened, the Reporter wrote her up as “Eva with the Ruby Throat” (I laughed— what were the odds?), and the studio sent her to the Trocadero alone, without telling me.
Turns out they had engineered a romance for Eva with Paul Maitland over at Atlas Pictures. He was marquee material—his last gig had been Ivanhoe, and they were talking about him for Robin Hood next. He was light in his loafers, though, so someone at Atlas had struck a deal with Capital to get curvy little Eva on his arm but quick.
They had arranged for Maitland to be waiting just under the canopy, so that when Eva slid her arm into his, an enterprising photographer could get a decent shot before they ducked inside.
And plenty did.
The Reporter ran two pictures of them on the front page: one of them arm in arm, and one of him kissing her goodnight at the curb, his arms around her. The gossip column squealed—“Sultry Spanish Siren Seduces Arch Aristocrat!”—and wondered when they’d have the pleasure of seeing them together on the screen.
She really was good at what she did. The way she looked at him in those pictures—if you didn’t know, you’d think she’d loved Paul for years.
But now I knew better, and all I could do when I got the paper was stare at Maitland’s arms around her waist and wonder what he was going to do when she turned into a flock of birds and vanished.
She didn’t vanish.
The contract she signed for the Maitland affair must have been stellar, because her next two pictures went to other directors, and every time I picked up the Reporter there was a picture of her, her jewelry shimmering in the flashbulbs.
At first it was always with Maitland, and I didn’t like it, but I could understand. There were terms in her contract she had to fulfill.
But sometimes she was alone. Those I hated, those snaps of her standing in the doorway of the Brown Derby or the Trocadero like she had sprung up there all by herself, like she knew something the world didn’t know, like she had made this happen all on her own.
I knocked out two movies that year: a detective picture and a turn-of-the-century romance. The romance took off (“Starmaker Strikes Again!”), and soon I could get into the Trocadero no matter who I had on my arm.
I never went alone; when you had as many movies under your belt as I did, it wasn’t hard to find a woman who would appreciate it.
(Eva rarely appeared where I was going. I suspected the studio had arranged things that way.)
I read up on the ruby-throated hummingbird, just on a whim. Turned out she wasn’t lying; the Aztecs had used them as talismans because of their power. Maybe that really was just something you were.
I saw the scene unfold in front of me: an ancient stone temple, a hundred wailing warriors, a human sacrifice loved by the gods who exploded into glittering birds. I’d have to put in some explorers (for moral perspective, the Code was pretty clear on that), but it could be a spectacular movie if only she’d agree.
Capital called me in. They wanted a historical epic, and they wanted me.
Right there in the office, I pitched them
“I have an effect no one’s ever dreamed of,” I said. “People will wonder about it for a hundred years.”
They upped my budget on the spot, asked me who I wanted most.
