• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 9144 0

get her jewelry back. Then moving into a new house in the nice part of Santa Monica cost a lot. There was a cook and a housemaid's wages to pay and they had to have a chauf feur now that Tony had gone. And there were clothes and'a publicityman and al kinds of charities and handouts around the studio that you couldn't refuse. Agnes was won-derful. She attended to everything. Whenever any busi-ness matter came up Margo would press her fingers to the two sides of her forehead and let her eyes close for a minute and groan. "It's too bad but I just haven't got a head for business." It was Agnes who picked out the new house, a Puerto Rican cottage with the cutest balconies, jampacked with antique Spanish furniture. In the evening Margo sat in an easychair in the big livingroom in front of an open fire playing Russian bank with Agnes. They got a few invitations from actors and people Margo met on the lot, but Margo said she wasn't going out until she found out what was what in this town. "First thing you know we'l be going around with a bunch of bums who'l do us more harm than good.""How true that is," sighed Agnes.

"Like those awful twins in Miami."

They didn't see anything of Tony until, one Sunday

night that Sam Margolies was coming to the house for the first time, he turned up drunk at about six o'clock and said that he and Max Hirsch wanted to start a polo school and that he had to have a thousand dol ars right away.

"But, Tony," said Agnes, "where's Margie going to get it? . . . You know just as wel as I do how heavy our expenses are." Tony made a big scene, stormed and cried and said Agnes and Margo had ruined his stage career and that now they were out to ruin his career in pictures.

-405-"I have been too patient," he yel ed, tapping himself on the chest. "I have let myself be ruined by women." Margo kept looking at the clock on the mantel. It was nearly seven. She final y shel ed out twentyfive bucks and told him to come back during the week. "He's hitting the hop again," she said after he'd gone. "He'l go crazy one of these days.""Poor boy," sighed Agnes, "he's not a bad boy, only weak."

"What I'm scared of is that that heinie'l get hold of him and make us a lot of trouble. . . . That bird had a face like state's prison . . . guess the best thing to do is get a lawyer and start a divorce.""But think of the pub-licity," wailed Agnes. "Anyway," said Margo, " Tony's got to pass out of the picture. I've taken al I'm going to take from that greaser." Sam Margolies came an hour late. "How peaceful," he was saying. "How can you do it in delirious Hol ywood?"

"Why, Margie's just a quiet little workinggirl," said Agnes, picking up her sewingbasket and starting to sidle out. He sat down in the easychair without taking off his white beret and stretched out his bowlegs towards the fire.

"I hate the artificiality of it.""Don't you now?" said Agnes from the door. Margo offered him a cocktail but he said he didn't drink. When the maid brought out the dinner that Agnes had worked on al day he wouldn't eat anything but toast and lettuce. "I never eat or drink at mealtimes. I come only to look and to talk.""That's why you've gotten so thin," kidded Margo. "Do you remember the way I used to be in those old days? My New York period. Let's not talk about it. I have no memory. I live only in the present. Now I am thinking of the picture you are going to star in. I never go to parties but you must come with me to Irwin Harris's tonight. There wil be people there you'l have

'to know. Let me see your dresses. I'l pick out what you bught to wear. After this you must always let me come

-406-when you buy a dress." Fol owing her up the creaking stairs to her bedroom he said, "We must have a different setting for you. This won't do. This is suburban." Margo felt funny driving out through the avenues of palms of Beverly Hil s sitting beside Sam Margolies. He'd made her put on the old yel ow eveningdress she'd bought at Piquot's years ago that Agnes had recently had done over and lengthened by a little French dressmaker she'd found in Los