Читать книгу Jericho's Daughters - Paul Iselin Wellman - Страница 10

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The cocktail party turned out to be a typical Hollywood herd movement: a playroom larger than the rest of the house, overdecorated with indiscriminate modernistic prints and modernistic furniture, and overfilled with people standing, sitting, talking, drinking while servants in white mess jackets flitted about with trays of hors d’oeuvres and cocktails.

Mary Agnes knew some of the guests, minor denizens of the film colony chiefly, bit-part actors and actresses, assistant directors, script writers, song writers, and others whom she had difficulty in cataloguing. It was characteristic of this kind of an assemblage that when you were introduced to someone you received an odd, searching look, as if that person were trying to decide what might be your particular claim to distinction. Thereafter, if you were an outlander, or nobody in particular from a Hollywood standpoint, the person might try to ignore you.

But one did not ignore Mary Agnes successfully. She was sufficiently striking in appearance and manner so that she made a rather passé actress, still living on her success of a dozen years before, seem somewhat inferior by comparison. And though the rather passé actress was rude enough to address all her remarks to her male companion of the moment, she was no match for the keen feminine intellect which had just joined them, and she soon found that the male companion was engrossed in conversation with the invader; to the point that when she somewhat resentfully detached herself and went elsewhere, her departure was hardly noticed by the gentleman.

With this kind of minor triumph Mary Agnes was familiar, and she passed from group to group. Snatches of the kind of talk one forever heard at gatherings of this type came to her:

“... makes you almost weep for her. She’s had a nervous breakdown—her last husband committed suicide, you know, while she was in Las Vegas with that Argentine boy friend of hers, and she blames herself ...”

“... and the idiot gave all that up for the blonde, when everyone knows she’s nothing but a Pacific Palisades pushover ...”

“... married again, is she? To that human cartoon? This is her fifth or sixth, which? The old boy must have plenty ...”

“... rotten luck. A role in this TV series and one in the new MGM picture came up at the same time. Couldn’t take both ...”

“... says she has to sleep with every leading man she works with, because that’s the only way she can get the emotional feeling for him that makes her performance valid ...”

The Hollywood jungle, a restless stirring of frustrations and fears, prowlings and preyings, backbitings and bitterness. A few years ago glimpses like this into the shadowy inner world of the film colony had interested, even excited Mary Agnes. But now they wearied her, and when she found Erskine beside her, suggesting that they leave, she assented.