She alighted in front of Rockefeller Center so she might give it a salute, remind it she existed and was heading its way, before strolling down to the Adelphi offices. It might have been the lingering effects of her character studies, or all those mysterious phone calls, or simply that all the women in her scripts endured it, but she felt sure someone was following her. She whirled around into another sea of hats, and a massive man in a pinstriped suit plowed right into her.
“What’s the big idea, sister, you trying to break my neck or something?” he shouted at her.
“What neck? I only see chins,” Phoebe muttered. More passersby stormed around her, offering their opinions on people who stood right in the middle of Sixth Avenue and where they ought to stand instead.
Been reading too many crime stories, Phoebe decided. Oh well, they say heightened sensitivity is the mark of a true artist. She put her nose in the air and marched to the side door of the Linwood Theatre, congratulating herself on not being a glamour-puss. Those women had to live with being stared at and followed all the time. No wonder some of them end up empty-headed. That sort of thing can drive a gal to distraction.
* * *
• • •
Half an hour early, Phoebe indulged in her usual twenty-minute coffee in what was optimistically called the staff canteen. She settled at her favorite table with the morning copy of Variety.
“Phoebe! Good morning!”
Geraldine, the actress who played the secretary to the detectives on At Your Service, hovered by the chair opposite Phoebe. “Do you mind if I join you?”
Phoebe didn’t. She liked Geraldine, who made good use of her own glamour-puss status to play the game of Being Seen. She would do better in a chic little bistro in the shadow of Rockefeller Center, or Sardi’s if she was aiming for Broadway, but you never knew who was preparing for meetings with whom, and reminding everyone present that she was a model of wit and vivacity was all to the good. Phoebe was glad to help, not least because she might work in a few good jokes. Together, they could help each other into the big time.
“I simply adore your latest script!” Geraldine gushed in her well-trained voice. “It’s such fun to rehearse.”
“Gosh, thanks,” Phoebe answered in the boom she’d honed on the streets of the Lower East Side. “Writing for you is a dream, there’s nothing you can’t make even better.”
“They taught me well at the Actors Studio, but truly, I never know what you’re going to throw at me, and I know the boys feel the same.”
Phoebe doubted “the boys” felt any such thing, but Geraldine was awfully convincing. Her personal gratitude, at least, was no act. Phoebe was the only writer who gave her lines beyond “Let me get you some more coffee.”
“Well, I like to keep things interesting,” Phoebe said. “I’m working on what might be a real doozy for next time.”
“What fun! Can you spill a bean or two?”
Phoebe glanced at her silver watch, her only good piece of jewelry and the only grand present her parents had ever been able to give her (“So you’ll never miss a shift at the airfield,” her father had said).
“I’d better get up to Hank. He panics if I’m not five minutes early.”
They bestowed their prettiest air-kisses near each other’s cheeks, and Phoebe headed for the elevator.
Hank’s door was ajar, but Phoebe knocked anyway.
“I don’t know why I don’t just set our meetings five minutes earlier,” Hank greeted her. He was a reedy, sandy-haired man with huge tortoiseshell glasses who always pumped Phoebe’s hand like he was hoping to produce water.
“It’d likely ruin Miss Ebbs’s appointment book,” Phoebe said, wringing out her sore fingers behind her back. Miss Ebbs was the lone, and long-suffering, secretary shared among head writers.
“Who?” Hank asked. “Oh, of course. All right, always ready for one of yours, let’s have a look at it. The gal isn’t too tough now, is she?”
“Just tough enough,” Phoebe said, smiling. Hank never seemed to realize they had this exact exchange every time.
Hank flipped through her pages. “People like soft ladies,” he muttered, shaking his head.
Phoebe knew what he meant, but never understood it. She supposed she presented as rather “soft” herself—a shortish, plumpish woman with a big bust and hips, though her big bust and hips had nothing like the effect of Anne’s. Hurrah for girdles, she thought, ignoring her frivolous desire for regular deep breathing.
“They may like soft ladies, but everyone loves a bad girl,” she pointed out.
“Long as she gets hers in the end,” Hank rejoined.
“Painful spot to get it,” Phoebe said, “plus the censors would die of apoplexy.”
Hank ignored this. “All I mean is, I think some folks get squirrelly about a gal writing hard-boiled gals.”
“Lucky for us no one ever reads credits, huh?” said Phoebe.
Hank sighed. “I’ll get your check sent out today,” he said, and Phoebe knew she’d won. He settled down to business. “Whatever you’re cooking right now, back-burner it—I want you to do one about a star ballet dancer who gets iced. Try to include a lot of background dancers, all right?”
“Lots of leg, I get it. Why me?”
“All girls like ballet, right? You know the lingo.”
Phoebe didn’t have the heart to remind him she’d grown up about as far from the sort of New York girls who like ballet as Genghis Khan had from Bonnie Prince Charlie. One trip to the library would give her enough lingo to seem like an expert.
“That’s super, Hank, thanks so much. Oh, and I brought my neighbor’s stuff for that fella who wants someone cheap and quick.” She handed him Jimmy’s samples. Anne couldn’t understand why Phoebe didn’t ask Hank to help her get more work elsewhere, but it wasn’t the done thing. Hank considered Phoebe his discovery. He knew she’d done other work and needed more—and he knew she needed that work for Mona, more than for herself, but he didn’t want to share her. Phoebe nominally had an agent, a man much more focused on his film-writing clients and who would be hard-pressed to remember Phoebe’s name. He was only for show. Phoebe had always gotten work on her own and saw no reason to change that as she forged her path upward.
Hank dropped the script on a pile and grinned indulgently at Phoebe. “Say, want to come down and watch your latest magnum opus start rehearsal?”
“Are you kidding?” she cried, bounding to the door. “They won’t mind?”
“So long as you don’t bawl if you hear a line altered, no, they won’t mind. Won’t even notice, most likely.”