Read Online All the Stars in the Heavens by Adriana Trigiani - Free Book Online

his lines aloud without pausing, rapid-fire. He barely took a breath. Most of the sounds he made didn’t sound like language, but the drone of a machine.
    He got up and poured himself a cup of coffee, all the while muttering his dialogue. He stopped, closed his eyes, and pictured what he would do with his body when delivering the lines. He leaned one arm against the wall and shifted his feet. He dropped his shoulders, extended his hands, then buried them in his pockets. He nodded and muttered some more.
    Spencer rocked up and down on the balls of his feet as he recited through a major speech in the script three times. He patted his shirtpocket and his pants pockets, finally finding a pencil behind his ear. His thick sandy hair, with natural marcel waves, was so unruly that it regularly swallowed pencils. He chewed the eraser and stared into the middle distance. He scratched a few words onto the page. Tracy circled a line of dialogue several times until it was encased in a thick gray oval. He looked down at the words inside the oval while chewing the pencil. He placed the pencil on the coffee table and closed the script.
    Spencer paced back and forth in the small dressing room, only to stop and touch his toes. He stood up straight and shook out any tension in his body. He twirled his head slowly in a full circle to a series of pops and cracks, as his neck bones settled at the top of his spine. He washed his hair with his fingers with invisible shampoo. He pulled the hair at the root. He grumbled and sighed.
    He walked out the door and onto the set.
    Spencer Tracy was known in acting as an “everyman,” which he took to mean as “nobody in particular.” He blended in with the crew, moving in and out among them anonymously and effortlessly like a whipstitch, drawing neither attention nor curiosity. An actor should be a blank slate, Tracy believed, so he moved through the world without attaching to anyone, or any particular group, instead remaining free to be an ardent observer of others.
    Unnoticed on the Columbia sound stage, Tracy circled back around the camera rig and eavesdropped as his director and cameraman talked shop. He looked up at the grid, then took in the expanse of the scenery, sizing up the joint as he walked the set, stopped, studied the entrances and exits, as if to kick the tires of the vehicle that would take him into the story of the movie.

    A page of new dialogue was shoved under Loretta Young’s dressing room door.
    Loretta’s hairdresser was asleep, snoring softly under the wardrobe rack. Loretta sat at her makeup table, lit brighter than an operating room in a city hospital, doing her own hair.
    LaWanda Thompson, her makeup artist, a put-upon fortysomething matron with a brilliant smile and a suntan out of the old daysof the gold rush, stood back and squinted at Loretta’s face in the mirror.
    â€œCan I get you anything?” Alda asked as she placed the new page of dialogue on the table.
    â€œA new hairdresser,” LaWanda groused.
    â€œLet her sleep it off,” Loretta said as she patted down the baby hairs that framed her face.
    â€œWhat actress does her own hair?” LaWanda asked as she stirred black powder and water to make mascara for Loretta.
    â€œAn actress that doesn’t want her hairdresser to lose her job. She has three kids.”
    â€œI got four.”
    â€œBut you don’t drink.”
    â€œI want to.”
    â€œBut you won’t, LaWanda, will you?”
    â€œNah.”
    â€œBecause I can’t do my makeup too.”
    â€œYou could. It’s simple. I layer a little powder, curl your lashes with mascara, a touch of pink on those cheeks, a tint of red on those lips, and you look like a rose.”
    â€œA rose doesn’t have black pits. Get rid of those circles under my eyes.” Loretta closed her eyes.
    â€œCan do.” LaWanda pressed a sponge gently on Loretta’s under-eye circles.
    â€œDo you know