WY CHAPTER THREE HENRIETTA

Well. I had some strong words regarding the hospitality of the Woodbury Facial Soap Company. A “grand send-off ” consisting of a single bored photographer and a hurried handshake from “Mr. Woodbury,” a man who looked like he couldn’t even spell s-o-a-p, let alone sell it. A one-way rail ticket that made it clear I’d get to Hollywood but failed to mention I’d have to switch trains in St. Louis, Oklahoma City, and Albuquerque, or that my every accommodation would get successively smaller, until when I fi nally arrived, I had to carefully unfold each of my limbs from the cramped compartment. I suppose I couldn’t blame Woodbury Soap for the weather—far from California sunshine, I emerged into a storm that seemed to legally obligate every resident of Los Angeles to comment, “There hasn’t been rain like this in years!”

Undeterred, I hauled off to the Hollywood Studio Club, which I quickly learned was an entirely different place from the “Studio Club of Hollywood,” because one of them existed, with a six-month waiting list, and the other was an elaborate swindle I’d unfortunately fallen for.

“Oh dear. You didn’t mail them a deposit, did you?” the girl at the front desk asked me.

“First month’s rent,” I answered, feeling a bit sick.

“Oh dear,” the girl repeated. “Not another one.”

Instead of spending my fi rst night in Hollywood dreaming peacefully in a clean bed, I sat up for hours in a string of dingy tea rooms, dozing over cups of cooling orange pekoe and dodging friendly male customers.

But still. I was here, in Hollywood, and once the rain cleared out the next morning, the sunshine rolled in so warm and glowing that I barely made it two blocks before I stopped, pulled every pair of woolen stockings from my suitcases, and gleefully tossed them in the trash. Already, I could feel the heat of the city on my skin, warming up the parts of me that had gone cold those last few white-knuckle years in Chicago.

The Woodbury Soap winner’s letter came with scant information about my screen test: just the date and time, along with directions to “A. F. Chilton Studios.” I’d never heard of them before, although that didn’t mean much— there were plenty of independent studios. So A. F. Chilton wasn’t Silver Wing Studios, the perennial first place when it came to box office standings, but there was no shame in getting one’s start in a small pond.

After ditching my bags in a shabby little boardinghouse, I trekked out to A. F. Chilton Studios, located so far south in the city I kept wondering when I’d hit the ocean. Most of Los Angeles below Santa Monica Boulevard seemed to be industrial graveyards or wide, fenced-in lots with broken-down construction equipment. I passed several old movie studios, names I didn’t recognize: Cheshire Films and Actors Amalgamated, their warehouse windows boarded up, their exterior sets of English gardens and Spanish villages sun-bleached and rotting.

Sweating through my best dress, I fi nally made it to a run-down building barely bigger than my home in Chicago. Outside the front door, a skinny boy in dingy clothing leaned against the stoop, smoking a harsh-smelling cigarette and giving me a long look.

“Lost?”

“Is this A. F. Chilton Studios?”

The boy blinked and then said, “Oh yeah. Yeah, sure.”

“I have a screen test,” I said, my voice bright in spite of a funny kick in my stomach. I held up my letter to show him. He squinted at it and then dropped his cigarette.

“Someone’ll get you in a sec.”

He pushed open the door to the building, and I was wondering if I should follow him when out of the corner of my eye, a girl just . . . appeared—there really wasn’t any other word for it—as though she’d popped right into existence, startling the hell out of me.

“Oh!” I said, grabbing my chest, and then I laughed. She looked my age, dressed neatly in a forest-green suit, dark-copper hair pulled into an elegant chignon under a hat. “Excuse me! Are you here for a screen test, too?”

She stared up at the squat building. “Don’t go in there.”

“What do you mean? I’ve my test in just a minute.”

“No.” She shook her head, glaring at the building as though she could will it to burst into flames. “No, I would not suggest you go in there. They’re not what they say they are.”

The little hairs on the back of my neck went up. I looked over at the building and turned to ask the girl what she was talking about, but she had vanished, the long sidewalk empty in both directions.

“Oh, miss! Miss, hello!” A man burst through the front door, pulling me from my thoughts. He wore clothes that showed stains, the edges frayed, his hair colorless, slicked with grease or cheap pomade. “You’re, ah, my new girl?” The way he stared at me made me feel like a plate of sausages set in front of a slathering dog—he literally licked his lips in a way that made my stomach turn.

“No,” I said, the word popping out of me, pure animal instinct. Surprised at myself, I tried to recover with a polite smile, but it wilted immediately. “No, my mistake.” And I turned tail and ran.

Later, back at my temporary boardinghouse digs, crammed into the crowded bunkroom, I rubbed my blistered feet and told the story to one of my new roommates, a woman who’d been in and out of extra work for years.

“You threw away a screen test?” Her face scrunched up in disappointment. “A real screen test? For nothing!”

“It didn’t feel right,” I said with a shrug, although as I sat cozy and safe on my bed, embarrassment set in.

“From Chicago to here, and now what? Your one chance! I think you should go back there and apologize and you better pray they—”

“No.” From across the room, an older woman sitting on her bunk set down the laundry she was folding and looked me right in the face. “Did you say A. F. Chilton? They’ve got a bad name around here. I don’t know what they do with young girls, but they don’t make them into movie stars.”

A chill went through me. “What do you mean?”

My bunkmate let out a scoff. “Oh, don’t listen to her.” She threw her hands in the air, shaking her head. “Honestly! Some gals got all the luck and none of the brains.” She stomped off to the washroom, leaving me wondering what dumb thing I’d done, when the older woman sidled up to me and patted my shoulder.

“You did right. Only a fool’d go into a building you don’t know what they do inside’a it.”

“You don’t think I threw away my good luck?”

She shrugged. “Better no job than a bad job, eh? You keep it up, you’ll fi nd something. Luck—luck was that girl fi ndin’ you when she did.”

“Oh, sure.” I let out a dry laugh. “My guardian angel.”

The woman didn’t smile back. “Maybe she was,” she said, her deep voice thoughtful. “I’ll tell you this, miss. You come across any other guardian angels in this city—listen to them.”