Read Online Ball of Fire by Stefan Kanfer - Free Book Online Page B

the studio watching and waiting for
the
opportunity. The difference was that she was a worker. That, and Jesus, what energy!” Lucille’s unique amalgam of vigor and humor caught the eye of a touring New York journalist, Walter Winchell, who gave her a few modest plugs in his column. These were duly noted by studio executives and helped her keep her job. The trouble was that her job was little more than human decoration, a cut above those faceless players who filled out crowd scenes.
    While Lucille caromed from Fox to United Artists and back again playing small parts, she expended very few ergs on romance. Only one of the men she dated expressed any long-term interest: an actor named Ralph Forbes, who had just been divorced from the stage actress Ruth Chatterton. Forbes’s elegant carriage and English accent dazzled Lucille—until he proposed marriage. Lucille immediately dropped him. “I’m not the crooked-finger-and-teacup type,” she explained. But the breakup had nothing to do with two people separated by a common language. It was simply that romantic commitment terrified her. She was more at ease with blithe, emotionally uninvolving dates, like the ones she had with Mack Grey. Né Max Greenberg, the former boxing manager served as factotum and bodyguard for George Raft, an exhoofer, now middle-level movie star who had trouble separating his tough-guy roles from real life. Both men had risen from the streets of Manhattan, both were known to carry guns and slap people around— although when Raft did the slapping it was usually while Grey held the victim’s arms behind his back. Yet Raft had a sentimental side. He took an avuncular interest in Lucille, encouraged by Carole Lombard, his current flame. The blonde actress could be every bit as foulmouthed as her date, if not more so. (Groucho Marx described her with admiration: “She talked like a man, used words men use with other men. She was a gutsy dame. She was a real show business girl.”) Even though Lucille’s vocabulary was comparatively chaste, the real show business girl recognized a sister under the skin. Carole began to advise her new friend on what she called “studio behavior”: how to speak to producers, staying genial without actually winding up on the casting couch; how to negotiate for bigger parts; and how to drop names.
    The twenty-three-year-old Lucille worked in a succession of pictures, but despite the sagacious advice, casting directors assigned her to roles so small she went unlisted in the credits. Besides appearing in
Roman Scandals,
she was in three bottom-of-the-bill pictures released by United Artists: first
Broadway Thru a Keyhole,
then
The Bowery
and
Blood Money.
She also had a bit part in the film version of
Nana,
Émile Zola’s naturalistic novel about the life of a demimondaine. Sam Goldwyn’s inflated production was a critical failure and a box office bomb. “In all these pictures,” Lucille would wryly and accurately note, “I was just part of the scenery, strolling past the camera in chiffon and feathers.” She briefly became a stand-in for Constance Bennett, and she tried to strike up a conversation with the actress, only to learn that Bennett could not remember meeting the young Hattie Carnegie model. Lombard urged Lucille to try out for comedy, but Goldwyn and United Artists displayed little interest in the genre and even less in Lucille, beyond offering a modest extension of her contract. All things considered, it was not a bad deal. After all, of the dozen Goldwyn Girls who had started out together, only four were still in town.
    Every week or so Lucille felt pangs of homesickness. To allay them she called home, pleading with her mother, brother, and grandfather to come out to California and live with her. The weather was ideal, she assured them: no more upstate New York winters—no winter at all, in fact. They could play in the sun, sit on the porch as long as they liked. The job market was beginning to pick up;