To change the subject, Lucille asked, “Do you know the story of Arabian Nights?”
“I read the bit of the script Ruby gave me,” I said. “I’ll be playing Scheherazade. She’s married to the Shahryar, played by Clark Gable. He plans to execute her, so she has to trick him into keeping her alive by telling him a new story each night.”
“That’s right,” Lucille said. “So you have the bits that are real life, so to speak, and then you have kind of a movie within a movie, whenever you tell him a story.”
“Won’t that be confusing to the audience?” I asked.
“It’s something new, that’s for certain,” Lucille said. “But they’ve seen flashbacks before, so I think they’ll figure it out. Mr. DeMille will make it all work; he’s a visionary.”
“I hear he’s awful to work with, though,” I said, dreading the very little time left before I’d find out for myself.
“Well, he’s not thrilled about working with an amateur, that’s true,” Lucille said. “But he knows as well as everybody else that we’ve got to make do since we’ve lost Clara. He won’t dare be too nasty to you.”
“That’s encouraging . . . I guess,” I said.
There was a knock on the door. Without waiting for an answer, Freida Kantor entered, her arms full of costumes. She began to hang them up on a rack along the trailer wall.
“Did you finish all those already?” Lucille asked in wonder.
Freida shrugged. “I worked all night,” she said, as if that was only to be expected.
“Try this on,” she commanded, thrusting a flimsy chiffon garment at me.
I looked around for somewhere to try it on in private, but soon realized that the trailer was the private place, or at least as much as one was likely to get on a film set. Lucille and Freida watched expectantly. They clearly thought no more of stripping naked in company than they did of working all night.
I sighed and began to kick off my shoes and unhook my stockings.
Once I’d undressed to my knickers, I tried to puzzle out the garment that Freida had handed me, but it was complicated. Freida made a tsking sound and came forward to help.
“No, no!” she barked. “Be careful, you’ll tear the fabric. I’ll do it.”
She helped me to dress with strong, capable hands, calloused at the fingertips from constant needlework.
The costume was a sort of transparent, gauzy shift, sleeveless, with a breast-piece and straps made of silver covered in dazzling paste jewels. It had a belt, similarly bejeweled, and then a shawl that wrapped around my waist, which likewise bore a silver hem of beadwork that sparkled with every movement. The shift was mostly white, with a purple patterned hem around the base of the skirt, the shawl patterned in lavender and gray like an exotic rug.
Once I was dressed, Freida bedecked me with a plethora of jewelry: a silver headdress, armbands, bracelets, anklets, and rings.
Though the outfit looked like something that would tinkle when you walked, I noticed that it had been made to stay perfectly silent, so as not to interrupt the sound on set. It was beautiful, and masterfully made. I admired Freida’s skill.
Thanks to Freida’s exactness, it all fit perfectly—the only thing that didn’t fit were the silver slippers. Though Clara was shorter than me, she had an average-sized foot. I wore an unusually small size of 5 1/2.
“It can’t be helped,” Freida said, watching me shuffle in the shoes. “It takes three weeks to have those made.”
The costume was far more revealing than what I would usually wear in public. I blushed at the thought of walking outside the trailer in it. Yet I knew that was exactly what I had signed up to do.
Ruby came inside the trailer to check Freida’s handiwork.
“That’s perfect!” she said. “Mr. DeMille isn’t quite ready for us, so, Alice, why don’t you come read your lines with Mr. Gable first?”
I followed Ruby to Clark Gable’s trailer, taking care not to tread on the hem of the costume and ruin Freida’s work.
“Enter!” Gable called when Ruby knocked on the door.
He was sitting at his vanity, a white towel draped around his neck to protect his costume from the makeup his assistant was dabbing on his face. The sponge was stained brown—the assistant seemed to be darkening Gable’s face with some cosmetic akin to shoe polish. His eyes had been lined with kohl and his mustache drawn in thicker.
He still looked extremely handsome. When he smiled at me, his teeth flashed white against the browned skin.
“Ah, my new co-star!” he said, rising to shake my hand. “By god they have done you up, haven’t they? I could have taken you for a ghost. Of course, I’m terribly sorry about Clara. She was an absolute doll. We all loved her.”
“She was wonderful,” I said, swallowing hard.
“The show must go on, though, isn’t that what they say?” Gable said.
“Are you free to run lines with Alice?” Ruby asked. “Warm her up a little before we shoot?”
“I’m at your disposal,” Gable said with a bow. He whipped the towel off from around his neck, tossing it to his assistant. “You were finished, weren’t you, Willie?”
“Close enough,” Willie said in a resigned voice, putting down his sponge.
Gable’s assistant was a thin, fastidious-looking man, who styled his hair and mustache in obvious imitation of his boss. It didn’t have quite the same effect on Willie’s pallid face.
“Let’s go outside,” Gable said. “It’s so damned crowded in here.”
As he was over six feet tall, he had to crouch just to walk around at the sloped edge of the trailer. I followed him outside to the open air.
“Much better!” he said. “Do you need your script?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I memorized it last night.”
I had always had a good head for memorization. Most things I read, I could remember. Even things that were odd or useless—for instance, I wished I hadn’t consumed so many Tin Tin comic strips, as I still had far too many details of Tin Tin and Snowy and Captain Haddock’s adventures rattling around in my brain.
“Well done,” Gable said approvingly. “You won’t judge if I keep mine handy up till the bitter end.”
“Not at all,” I said.
“Let’s begin then,” Gable said. “Tell me your tale! But I must warn you: I’m in a most wretched mood this evening!”
I could tell immediately that he had begun the scene, because something very odd had happened to Gable. It happened all at once, in the blink of an eye, like a glamour had been thrown over him: he threw back his shoulders and puffed out his chest, tilted his chin upward ever so slightly and cocked one eyebrow. His walk became a swagger, his voice grew deeper and more imperious. Gable had disappeared, a haughty sultan stood before me.
It was so fascinating that I nearly forgot I was supposed to reply.
“I will tell you a wretched tale then, my lord,” I said. “A tale of betrayal and intrigue, that will shock you to your very core.”
“That’s not bad!” Gable said, himself once more. I noticed how much higher his voice was in its natural tone, a tenor instead of a bass. He must have worked a long time to make it sound so fluid in the lower register. “Don’t rush, though! Wring every bit of drama that you can out of your lines.”