Sam listened and drank his coffee. He liked people-common people-the way they talked and reasoned with things. He smiled at the girl. Not because she was pretty, because she surely wasn’t, with big lips and eyes and teeth like a rake.
“You sure you don’t want no eggs?”
He shook his head.
“You should eat some eggs or hash or something. You’re the thinnest man I’ve ever seen.”
Sam’s stomach grumbled, one of his last quarters by the saltshaker.
“You been around, hadn’t you?” she asked.
“Some.”
“Some? Some, I bet. You look like you been around plenty. You’re not from around here. I can tell. You got the look like you’re passing through. Where’d you come from?”
“Tacoma.”
“Before that?”
“Seattle.”
“Before that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Baltimore. Spent some time in Montana.”
“Yeah, what’d you do in Tacoma?”
“Lay around a Vet hospital.”
“You in the war?”
“I was gonna drive an ambulance but came down with the Spanish.”
“What you do now?”
“I’m a fortune-teller.”
“Get outta town.”
Sam nodded. The waitress with the double name smiled with her eyes and tucked a pencil behind her ear. She pressed her butt against the counter and crossed her arms over her little chest.
“Hey, I ain’t even told you about my chapter on Economical Janes yet, but it’s going to be a rich one. You want to hear about it?”
Sam looked around. There was an old guy in a corner booth watching a conductor turn the cable car around on Powell. It took three men to turn a cable car on its big swivel, but the mass of it all finally made it and locked, and then the men wiped their hands on their pants from grime and work. The diner was bare except for the short-order cook, who’d fallen asleep on a barstool, a cigarette burning between his fingers.
The wall clock read two o’clock.
“Hey, you make much money telling fortunes?”
“Depends on the fortune. If I tell a fat woman she’s about to meet a prince, I get a nice chunk of change. If I see that a rich fella is about to be down on his luck, I might get a nickel.”
“So why don’t you just lie?”
“Professionalism.”
“Get outta town.”
Sam shrugged.
A newsboy came in off the street, not more than twelve, in knickers and vest and small newsboy cap and all smiles and young muscle, hefting a thick stack of the Examiner tied tight with string. He wiped his brow with his forearm and called the waitress over with a “Hey, sister” and sat there at the counter and drank coffee with his two little hands around the mug, warming himself before cutting his eyes over at Sam.
“What’s the news?” Sam asked.
“Give me a nickel and I’ll tell you.”
Sam reached into his vest pocket and popped a nickel off his thumb. The boy caught it in midair and tucked it into his apron. “Ole Fatty Arbuckle has gotten himself in a pinch.”
“The actor?”
“The fat bastard who falls down and gets shot in the ass. He was giving some broad the high hard one at the St. Francis and the damn girl got crushed from the weight. Doesn’t that beat all? The cops arrested him at midnight and have him behind bars at the Hall of Justice.”
The boy cut open the stack of papers and proudly popped open a fresh edition announcing s.F. BOOZE PARTY KILLS YOUNG ACTRESS.
The boy walked over and laid down the paper, and Sam read through the first few paragraphs, getting the gist, as the boy slurped down his coffee and adjusted the cap on his head. He winked at the waitress, pushing out of the door with the papers. The bell overhead jingled as he left.
“Yes, sir. It’s going to be a banner day.”
THE WORD OF THE ARBUCKLE ARREST was passed from cop reporter to editor to managing editor until the news reached The Chief himself in a whisper from his personal valet, George. George leaned into the ear of William Randolph Hearst just as the wine had been poured at the center of a big round soundstage at Paramount. Mr. Hearst had asked for the set to be cleared for the night and now he was finally alone at the table, a big, solid affair, the kind of table that would befit King Henry VIII himself, with his big turkey legs and goblets and wine and lusty wenches by his side.
The picture was to be called When Knighthood Was in Flower.
Mr. Hearst liked big, sprawling historical numbers. On the set, he was sure that every penny had gone into making sure that the era was re-created just so. Even the food on the table was real, but he’d yet to eat, still waiting for the picture’s star, Miss Davies, to join him. But the news had stopped the service of the meal, Miss Davies still getting out of her makeup, and he told George to please wait for him outside.
“I have something to cable San Francisco.”
Mr. Hearst pushed the big wooden chair back and stood, wiping the wine from his mouth, and walked from one end of the table to the other, and then over to the second set, the bedroom, where that fat actor, Lyn Harding, would play out his scenes with Miss Davies as Mary Tudor.
This was the third adaptation of the book. The first two pictures never got the feel of the story. The bigness of it all. The other productions looked like a school play, not life.
“W.R.?”
He turned to see Marion Davies, in a silk robe and no shoes, shuffle out onto the soundstage, bare of makeup, with a big, broad smile on her face. She turned to the spread on the table. “C-can we really eat there? Real f-food and all?”
She was playing a Brit, but her accent was all Brooklyn between the stutters. Good thing you couldn’t hear people talk in pictures.
“We can do whatever we want. Isn’t it marvelous? Look at this place. It’s another world.”
Miss Davies screwed up her face and looked at Mr. Hearst as if he’d gone nuts.
“The set, I mean. It’s another world. Can’t you just feel the castle and the giant hall. I mean, we’re really here.”
“We’re in Hollywood, W.R.”
“Close your eyes,” he said.
She stood in that little silk robe that barely covered her knees and closed her eyes just as Mr. Hearst had said.
“And concentrate on the olden times.”
“When knighthood was a f-flower.”
“When knighthood was in flower.”
“Of c-course.”
“We must go to Europe,” Mr. Hearst said. “You can put your hands on the old stones and feel the music resonate.”
“W.R.?”
“Yes, dear.”
“I s-sure am hungry. C-can we eat?”
“Sure thing.”
Miss Davies sat alone at the end of that big table and pulled off the leg of the turkey and wrapped her other hand around a jeweled goblet of wine.
Mr. Hearst paced.
His feet made cavernous clicking noises, and he moved back and forth and back and forth, and then forward, toward the big set for tomorrow’s scene at the Tower of London. He leaned into the fake brick wall-just plaster-and felt for the shackles that hung there, thinking of what George had told him, and he whistled for George, and George, knowing what a whistle meant, came running with a writing tablet in hand, ready to cable the Examiner offices. The story would be fed to the Hearst wires, cabling from coast to coast and around the globe.
“A virgin. A star of tomorrow. A waif.”
George wrote down the words.
“And Arbuckle. A bloated beast. Three hundred and fifty pounds and lecherous and thirsty. An absolute animal.”
“The girl?”
“A simple insect drawn into the spider’s web.”
“Do you want a drawing of that, sir?”
“George, you are a smart one,” Mr. Hearst said. “You should be the one running the newspapers.”
“I do my best.”
“Make sure the spider has the bloated face of the man and that they have plenty of booze bottles in the web.”