The Magnificent Esme Wells Read online

  Dedication

  For my mother, truly magnificent

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

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  23

  24

  25

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  27

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  29

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  31

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  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

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  45

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  47

  48

  49

  50

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  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Adrienne Sharp

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Las Vegas

  1945

  My father and I first drove out to Vegas with Benny Siegel in late summer, 1945, all three of us covered with fine brown sand by the time we got there. We shook it from our clothes and our hair and swept it from the seats, the floor, even the dashboard of Mr. Siegel’s little red coupe convertible. And when we were done sweeping, Mr. Siegel offered me his hand with his manicured nails to help me out of the cramped little backseat where no one but a child could possibly fit, his face jubilant and eager, as if he were about to show us some great prize. I jumped from the car, all excited, only to gaze with my father and Benny at the blank acres that held the ruins of some old motel where the Flamingo Club and hotel would soon be built.

  That was the prize. The unformed future.

  The landscape was otherwise empty, except for the carcass of a prairie dog, a collapsed bundle of dull fur and bones. I looked around for something else to focus on and when I found it, I squinted to see the shapes better—not cacti, but the El Rancho and the Last Frontier, the casinos built before the war, the only things in sight, little specks far down the highway that would eventually be called the Strip.

  It took less than thirty minutes for my face to burn a deep red while Mr. Siegel and my father walked the site. I hadn’t worn a hat, just one of my mother’s big silk scarves. It was seventy degrees back in Los Angeles, but a hundred and five here. I fanned myself futilely with my hands while Mr. Siegel pointed out to my father where the hotel would lie. They were all smiles, the two of them with their movie-star faces, dark hair combed back, dapper in their checked sports jackets. Jackets! Even as a child, I’d noticed that Mr. Siegel liked to surround himself with handsome, well-tailored men, the better to share his vision of a prosperous future. The war was over, he was telling my father, VJ Day an explosion of flags and confetti and bonfires and cars with the letters vj painted on them cruising and honking their way down the Los Angeles streets, and now, according to Benny, every G.I. and his wife were going to be jumping into those cars looking for fun and adventure. And the town of Las Vegas was going to be that adventure, a glamorous destination.

  Really.

  Because to me, Las Vegas felt like a punishment. The dusty superheated ground quickly burned through the soles of my espadrilles. How long could they talk and look at nothing? At one point, I tried to get back into the car, but that was worse. In half an hour, it had become a killing box. There was no shade. None. And we hadn’t rented a hydrofan air conditioner to hang on the window of the car, either. We’d driven east with the top down.

  My father’s face turned death-ray red, but still the men walked and talked. I tried to get my father to look my way, but he wouldn’t. He only had eyes for Mr. Siegel. Here be the pool—I wish! I’d jump right in it!—the lobby, the restaurant, the casino where my father would soon manage the off-track betting. An upscale gambling palace, a miracle, certainly, for just when my father had come to understand that Los Angeles was never going to make him his fortune, another city appeared in the east, new mirage, all for him.

  Mirage was right.

  You have to understand that back then, Los Angeles was everything. Vegas, in the early forties, was not much of anything. A small oasis, a railway depot, a little grid of streets by the tracks and then emptiness. Small town. Big desert. Big sky. Grit. Heat. Distant mountains. Stunted brown-needled cacti. Sagebrush. And Block 16, the red-light district that serviced the workers from the dam and the mines, with its gambling and its liquor and its girls, who sat on wooden chairs by the open doorways of their concrete-block shanties, waiting for customers.

  But in Ben Siegel’s mind, this highway, Highway 91, sprouted one extravagant hotel after another, all of them in possession of casinos and restaurants and pools. And nightclubs, too, apparently, for after a while, Mr. Siegel called to me, waved me over from where I was pouting and flapping my hands at my hot face, saying, “Esme, come here and have a look at where your stage will be.”

  I guess it was a given even then that, like my mother, I would need a stage. Partly it was because I wore my mother’s gorgeous face, which begged to be looked at, though I didn’t know that yet. And partly it was because all the way out to Vegas I’d chattered myself silly as a parrot, as my mother would say, about how I was taking tap and ballet lessons at Daddy Mack’s studio up on Melrose and how I was going to dance in the Daddy Mack Revue in August, where talent scouts and casting directors and newspaper reporters made up the audience. Every kid in that revue wanted more than anything to be noticed by one of those men, wanted to be picked to be in pictures. As did I, without thought, without question. Because that’s what my mother had wanted.

  Yes, I’d talked and talked because the drive was so long, and I didn’t even think Mr. Siegel had been listening to me. But apparently he had been.

  Hence, his grand gesture with his arm to my square of sand.

  Command performance. My own fault.

  I looked at my father, who nodded.

  So, inspired, probably, by the western landscape around me, I refashioned my head scarf into a bandanna and took my place to perform a number to “Ragtime Cowboy Joe,” which my class was polishing up for the revue. I flapped my elbows and bent my knees like a bow-legged cowboy and crowed,

  Out in Arizona where the bad men are

  And the only friend to guide you is an evening star

  The roughest and the toughest man by far

  Is Ragtime Cowboy Joe.

  He’s a high-falutin’, rootin’, shootin’,

  Son of a gun from Arizona

  Ragtime Cowboy Joe!

  I went through the entire song, complete with do-si-dos and pretend lasso twirls and a lot of clomping around in my imaginary boots, and when I finished, Mr. Siegel frowned.

  A western number was not really part of his vision for his new casino, not really the right sort of bait for the type of person Mr. Siegel was hoping to draw here. In his casino, he didn’t want the scruffy locals from the Henderson magnesium mines or the workers from Boulder City who had settled in the desert once the dam was completed or the ranch hands who watched after the g
razing horses or the airmen the war would leave behind at the old Las Vegas Gunnery School. Las Vegas was then still pretty much enmeshed in its cowboy past—men with sunburns despite their ten-gallon hats, sweaty, unshaven prospectors—and it had not yet met its future filled with new men, like Benny Siegel, with their wide-lapel silk suits and shiny shoes, men who imagined a whole city with hotels as glamorous as the nightclubs on Sunset Boulevard, which Vegas would eventually drain of talent and audiences, desert hotels that filled its pockets with human desire.

  Right from the start, there was to be nothing of the El Rancho, which billed itself as the Queen of the West, or the Last Frontier, which needed no special billing to explain itself, about Benny’s Flamingo Club. There were to be no sawdust floors, no slot machines painted to look like cowboys. The showgirls weren’t going to dance like Indians or twirl lassoes and they wouldn’t wear sombreros or bandanas. As Mr. Siegel imagined it, a stay at the Flamingo would be a glamorous event, like going to Monte Carlo, but even better, Hollywood style, where guests would rub shoulders with Bing Crosby and Jimmy Durante. The staff would wear tuxedos, and the girls would wear feathers, pink high heels, and glass jewels.

  And one day all that would come to be, but right now, even before I yodeled out “Ragtime Cowboy Joe!”, took my hee-haw bow, and shook my scarf like a pair of reins, I knew I’d made a mistake. I hadn’t given my audience what it wanted. It wouldn’t be a mistake I’d make often. Mr. Siegel clapped and winked at me with one of those amazing blue eyes, but it was only to be polite, because when he wasn’t being a sociopathic killer, he always displayed the exquisite manners he learned from his fancy lady mistress and his Hollywood friends. He was not enthusiastic, and even at age twelve, I could sense that. I hadn’t given him what he wanted. But by the time Las Vegas was finished with me, I would be exactly what he and everybody else wanted. Exactly.

  2

  Just so you know, my mother was a showgirl, too, though never here in Las Vegas. She started out as a Busby Berkeley girl, one of the first, a gorgeous thing with a headdress four feet tall, ostrich feathers dripping like waterfalls, and satin bows rippling on her elegant shoes as she walked the great soundstages of Warner Brothers and MGM. She was not quite sixteen years old when Buzz came out to Los Angeles, looking to scrounge up some dancing girls for his first Warner Brothers picture, Gold Diggers of 1933, which had been a big Ziegfeld hit on Broadway. At her audition, Buzz called her over, measured her leg from knee to ankle, instructed her to twirl, and then hired her on the spot. That’s all it took.

  For the Shadow Waltz number in Gold Diggers she wore a platinum blonde wig, gold metallic shoes, and a two-layered chiffon skirt stretched over a hoop. In the black-and-white photograph I keep of her in my dressing room, she looks like a little doll, her skin manufactured partly of white wax, partly of alabaster. All she had to do in that number was stand with a hundred other girls on a tall staircase that doubled back on itself like a looped ribbon and pretend to play a lit-up violin while the camera sailed by, forty feet in the air. No wonder her audition was so brief.

  Shooting from above was Buzz’s trademark; he had done a hundred numbers that way back at Warner Brothers, in picture after picture like Gold Diggers and 42nd Street and Footlight Parade, his girls rotating like flecks in a kaleidoscope, making geometric patterns of stars or layer cakes or blossoming flowers. That’s all they did, but that wasn’t all they wanted. When the camera panned his girls’ beautiful faces, they smiled, one by one, into the lens, dying to be noticed. My mother was fourth in line, always yearning to be the first. The only. The magnificent. Just like me.

  3

  Los Angeles

  1939

  I think Babes in Arms was the last picture my mother worked on at MGM, but by the time it was released in October 1939, my father and I couldn’t bring ourselves to see it. And even though I was on the lot with her almost every day, I never saw any of the great pictures made at MGM that year, like The Wizard of Oz or Gone with the Wind, because my mother wasn’t cast in any of those. She worked almost exclusively on MGM’s B films, like the Andy Hardys or Babes, which was shot that summer on Lot One, Stage Eighteen, while I watched it all, settled behind the grips and the boom and the monstrous camera. I was a small blond child with big blue eyes that didn’t miss a trick, my limbs as thin as the No. 2 school pencils I never got to use. I was six that year, and I should have been enrolled in school, of course, but as far as the Los Angeles City School Board knew, I didn’t exist. We moved far too much for anyone to keep track of me and this suited my parents and me just fine.

  At the end of each shooting day, when we finally emerged from General Wardrobe, we’d join the big crush of women making a mob at the counter to turn back in their costumes beneath the big posted sign:

  TAG NUMBER

  Given You When Wardrobe

  Issued Must Be Attached

  To Wardrobe When

  Returned

  and my father would be waiting for us, out by the studio’s East Gate, by the tall columns with the words no parking stenciled on each of their bases, leaning against the car he’d parked there anyway, when had a rule ever caged him in? our big new green 1939 Cadillac 61 with white-walled tires and a silver grille pushing out in front like the prow of a ship. My father’s face was always lit up, agreeable, cut in two with a big smile. Trouble almost never showed itself there. He had dark hair that he wore slicked straight back and he wore his hat tipped back, too, exposing his friendly handsome face, as if he knew it was his best asset.

  Yes, my father looked like a movie star, even though he scorned them, thought all actors were puppets and that the movie moguls Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Harry Cohn, Carl Laemmle, and Jesse Lasky were just Jewish peddlers from the old country, like my grandfather, who had dropped their rags, fur pieces, and scrap metal so they could traffic in people, pull their strings, pay their actors by the week at one rate and loan them out to each other’s studios at ten times that amount and put the profit in their own pockets. Don’t be a puppet, he always told me. Be the one pulling the strings.

  That’s what he did. Or, anyway, that’s what he thought he was doing.

  One July day, the day our fortunes turned us east toward the Vegas desert, though we didn’t know this yet, I climbed into the front seat of the Cadillac, as usual, and my mother followed, as usual, pushing open the sliding front windscreen so we could inhale the late afternoon air coming in off the ocean, damp and salty, so thick you could almost grab hold of it, the kind of cloudy air that had drenched our cottage every evening when we had lived, briefly, in Redondo Beach so my father could take the water taxis out to the offshore gambling boats. When my father took his seat, my mother laid her head back and stretched one arm behind me so that it touched my father’s shoulder. I could see the lipstick mark of her red kiss on my father’s jaw, a kiss she must have just given him. Her summer dress was made of a light calico print, the fabric fluttering in a breeze that seemed manufactured just for her by one of the big soundstage fans.

  She wore her hair that summer in marcelled waves that rippled like black sand, using a rhinestone barrette to pin those waves back, a bob favored by the twenties flappers, yet a bit old-fashioned for 1939. My mother often said if she’d only been born just a decade earlier, she knew she would have been a great silent film star. A Louise Brooks. A Joan Crawford. A Gloria Swanson. And so, the hair. What else? The black pinpoints of her pupils were surrounded by the discs of two brilliantly blue irises, a blue you could almost see even in the black-and-white films of the thirties. A cerulean blue. I have her color eyes, though I’m blond, my light hair courtesy of my Austrian grandfather, but I have my mother’s eyes. And as my father tells me, her face.

  What else do I remember? The way my mother walked, which was a cross between a glide and a sashay. And her perfume, Tabu, which came in a small cello-shaped glass bottle, let me conjure it for you, the scent amber and oriental and sultry, and which permeated her clothes like a fuzzy clo
ud of cloves and oranges. It was a drugstore perfume, but it didn’t smell that way on her. Far from it. Nothing about her was ordinary to me.

  “Scenic way home?” my father asked and my mother said, “Of course,” which meant we were going to drive up into the hills to park and look down at the beads of light that made up the nighttime cityscape before heading back down into it, to the Hollywood flats, to home. We liked to do that. Or maybe I should say, they liked to do that. So I fit myself under my father’s free arm, while my mother lit her cigarette and turned her head from me to exhale into the balmy air.

  4

  Ahead and above us rose the enormous Hollywoodland sign, the letters as tall as five men. Years ago, in 1923, the sign had been lit up with thousands of lightbulbs to advertise a new housing development, its five hundred acres pocked with copies of French chateaus, English Tudors, Spanish haciendas, Italian villas. But now the lights on the Hollywoodland sign were gone and the H had fallen down so the word didn’t make any sense. And the neighborhood wasn’t new anymore. It was all filled up with movie people from the twenties, now retired. Bela Lugosi. Erté. Cedric Gibbons. So, of course, this was the perfect neighborhood for my mother, the perfect encapsulation of her perfect era.

  It was still just light enough for my father to send our Cadillac along the steep and narrow roads that threaded the neighborhood’s canyons and its cypress, pine, and magnolia trees. Gradually the gasoline and exhaust smells of the cars and buses receded, overlaid by the scents of honeysuckle and wisteria and jasmine and lemon flowers, the air flecked with oleander and jacaranda, the whole city saturated with its trademark scent until we inhaled nothing but its perfume, heard nothing but birds and little animals scurrying all around us through the shrubbery. I thought I saw not only squirrels, but cottontails, raccoons, and what looked like a small red fox dart under some brush, probably to his little home, where he had an armchair and a tea kettle.