The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [165]
Hollywood
Rosa’s Hollywood living quarters were very little different from New York; a single room instead of two, a few sticks of furniture, an old bed where the four of them slept top and tail, a kitchen shared with the other boarders, and a bathroom down the hall. The only change was that this was on the ground floor of a weatherboarded house with a porch tacked onto the front, a square of rusty grass beyond, and a view over the Hollywood Cemetery. And it was on the wrong corner of a street called Gower, where Sunset met Santa Monica.
Its disadvantages were that it was dismal, cramped, and hot as hell in the long summer and dismal, cold, and damp when it rained in winter—which it did occasionally and more heavily than she had been led to expect. Its advantages were that the view of the flowery Hollywood Hills with their backdrop of purple-bronze mountains offered a daily changing feast for her eyes, sometimes tipped with the pale blush-gold of daybreak when the air sparkled like crystal, sometimes broiling to a brown noonday crisp, and sometimes glazed with a roseate varnish as the giant red sun shifted westward over Santa Monica like some epic D. W. Griffith movie set in the sky.
Rosa was in love with Hollywood, only she wasn’t so sure Hollywood was in love with her. She loved the palm trees and the pepper trees, the yucca and oleander and hibiscus; their colors made her feel like a tropical flower herself, ripening and unfolding her yearning petals in the sun—though what she yearned for she did not know. She loved the make-believe she saw enacted daily on the streets where “thieves” fled with swag bags while black-eyed “damsels” in yellow makeup screamed in distress as the cameraman turned his reels frantically to keep pace with the action. She loved seeing faces familiar from magazines at the corner drugstore in Hollywood where she worked, laughing and drinking sodas just like regular people, or stepping into their luxury automobiles, swanky imported Rolls-Royces and Bugattis and de Courmonts. Once she had even served the personal maid of the Nation’s Sweetheart herself, who had come by to pick up the special cream Miss Pickford used to keep her skin beautiful for the benefit of her fans. But most of all, she liked the way her three kids were able to play outdoors in the sunshine, away from the grime and filth and dangerous traffic of the Lower East Side. Poor they might still be but they were healthier and happier, not least because Meyer was finally out of their lives. Yes, there was no doubt about it, Rosa told herself, smiling as she sat on the porch in the cool of the evening, she felt like a woman again, a young girl even. Finally. After all these years and three kids.
And her kids were something else again. Sonia loved Hollywood High and was already determined to be a teacher, though where she would find the money for college she didn’t know. Hannah and Rachel were as movie-crazy as their mother and wanted to be in pictures, and Rosa was as ambitious for them as any true stage mother. She would do the rounds of the casting offices at the nearby studios, a neatly brushed and furbished child on each hand, starting with National on the opposite corner from the house and progressing through Metro at Romaine and Wilcox, Famous Players-Lasky on Selma, Chaplin at La Brea, and Griffith on Sunset. They were all within easy walking distance—the rest were out because they would have meant trolley-car fares.
The girls were pretty like her, with merry dark eyes and tumbling dark curls, and their plump, smiling innocent faces had already gained them several small roles as “walk-ons”—just one step up from extras really, but at least it meant the casting directors knew them by name, and there was always the chance they would think of them when the perfect role came along. That’s the only way it was in Hollywood, they had told her: One day you’re nothing, the next a star! And Rosa believed it.