All those things were too mundane and too utterly normal to coexist with the idea of my sister being dead.
I sat down hard on the kitchen chair.
There was no way to play back what the radio had said. The words had evaporated into the air.
I told myself, Someone would have called you if something happened to Clara. You’ve got a telephone now—there it is in the hallway.
It was the new rotary model, where the headset lay horizontally across the base, instead of the old upright candlestick style. When Mr. Welnick had borrowed it the week before to call his mother, he had tried to hold the receiver to his ear while shouting into the base. I had to hold the headset at an angle to his face so he could both speak and listen.
The silence of my phone comforted me.
I was Clara’s only family. I knew I’d be the one to receive a phone call if something had actually happened.
But then, with nightmarish timing, the phone began to rattle on its stand, right before my eyes. Three times it rang, while I stared at it in horror.
My body seemed to stand and walk forward without my consent. I watched my hand lift the receiver and raise it to my ear.
“Ms. Bloom speaking,” I said.
I couldn’t tell if my voice was steady or not. I couldn’t tell if the silence on the other end of the line was really as long as it seemed.
“Alice Bloom?” a voice said at last. “This is Sergeant Palmer. Are you the sister of Clara Bloom?”
“I am,” I said.
I waited. And waited.
He cleared his throat.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
The following morning, I caught the new Super Chief diesel train, nonstop from Chicago to Los Angeles. Under any other circumstance, this would have been a fascinating journey. They called it “The Train of the Stars”: an impossibly sleek steel bullet with gold and red trim, private sleeper cabins, air-conditioned cars, and the attentive service of the finest hotel.
In the morning, the steward brought me a steaming cup of coffee at precisely 8:35 as a wake-up call. For lunch, I dined on grilled fish and chilled salad at a linen-swathed table. My supper came accompanied by a china dish of caviar and a slender glass of champagne, while a violinist serenaded the tables.
I couldn’t enjoy any of it. I booked the room only because it was the quickest way to get to Clara—other than flying, which I couldn’t afford. Actually, even the train wiped out most of my savings. I took the express route because it saved two days’ travel.
I knew it was pointless to hurry. If Clara was really dead, then time meant nothing to her. It was my own anxiety I was trying to soothe. Rushing felt like doing something. Getting Clara out of the morgue felt like helping her.
I was furious that nobody from the studio called me. Instead, it was some lackey from the L.A. County Sherriff’s Department that found my number in Clara’s notebook and announced the news to me in his flat, fumbling tone. He never met Clara. He had no idea what a loss this was, that he was talking about the most gorgeous and talented woman on the planet.
I didn’t think that just because Clara was my sister.
Anybody who met her thought the same. She was funny and charming and brimming with confidence. She thought she could do anything, and she made you believe it too.
Clara was only two years older than me.
She always took care of me, though. Even after she moved to California, she still sent as much money as she could spare.
The sergeant didn’t want to tell me how she died. He said it would only upset me, that it was better not to know.
I kept my voice calm and stern as I said, “You will tell me the circumstances immediately, or I will hang up this phone and call your superior officer.”
Sergeant Palmer said that Clara had been strangled.
I couldn’t understand that at all.
Who would want to do it?
Who would dare to do it?
I cried almost the entire journey. I was grateful for my private room. Even when I had to come out to the public dining cars, my swollen face was enough to keep the other passengers away.
It made me particularly miserable to think how much Clara would have enjoyed the scenery and the food, and the fancy passengers in their elegant clothes.
On the second night, the waiter tried to cheer me up by telling me that Judy Garland had been on the train the week before.
“She said the Peach Charlotte was the best she’d ever tasted! Shall I bring you a dish?” he asked kindly.
“No, thank you,” I said.
I couldn’t help thinking that if Clara had been on the journey with me, the next week he would have been telling his passengers that Clara Bloom sat in that very chair.
I tipped him a dollar to try to make up for how gloomy I’d been. Then I regretted it afterward, realizing I was almost out of cash.
When the train arrived in Los Angeles three days later, I disembarked into relentless sunshine. Palm trees waving, convertibles cruising by with their tops rolled down and their whitewalls gleaming. No one would share my low mood here—L.A. was the city of optimism and ambition. Perfect for Clara.
I had been to Los Angeles once before, for the premiere of Clara’s first feature film, All the Girls Love Bobby Brown. I was only nineteen at the time, and the city dazzled me. I stood next to Clara on the red carpet, wearing her borrowed gown and shoes, almost jumping out of my skin every time a flashbulb exploded by my ear and a reporter shouted a question:
“Ms. Bloom, have you got a sweetheart?”
“Ms. Bloom, where do you get your hair done?”
“Ms. Bloom, how did you like working with Chico Marx?”
I’d seen every film my sister appeared in, from her first roles as an extra where I could barely spot her in the background, then on to her one- and two-line speaking parts in B-movies where she played the ditzy waitress, the lovelorn teenager, or the shy schoolgirl.
Clara looked young when she started. She was slim, three inches shorter than me, and exuded a kind of manic, comic energy that emphasized her youthfulness.
It was this edge of daffiness that got her a break. Paramount Pictures wanted to make a female comedic duo in the mold of Laurel and Hardy, or Thelma Todd and ZaSu Pitts.
They paired Clara with a young actress from the vaudeville circuit, Lillie LaShay. Together they shot a dozen comedy shorts, and then three forty-five-minute films, which made full use of Clara’s charm and rapid-fire dialogue delivery, and Lillie’s remarkable skills at juggling, acrobatics, pratfalls, balancing acts, and roller skating.
The girls played hapless bank robbers, desperate debutantes, pirate princesses, harassed secretaries, and maids who flooded the top floor of their hotel. They were wildly successful in the darkest days of the depression, when people would pay their last dime for a laugh.
Recently, Clara had been branching into more serious dramatic roles. She’d been given a full-time contract with Paramount, who planned to make her one of their A-list stars. Her most recent role was her biggest yet, second-billed to The King of Hollywood himself, Clark Gable. Clara had screamed into the phone when she called to tell me all about it. It took twenty minutes to get her calmed down enough that I could hear the details.
“It’s an epic,” Clara told me. “They say it’ll be bigger than Gone with the Wind!”
Of course the reality was less glamorous than Clara expected—long hours, unseasonable heat, complicated sets with hundreds of extras, insane pressure from the producers, and the autocratic rages of the director, Mr. Cecil B. DeMille.