U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [490]
Margo was dizzy. She couldn't say anything. "Come, dear child, you are tired." Margolies'
voice burred sooth-ingly in her ears. She let him lead her into the bedroom and careful y take her clothes off and lay her between the black silk sheets of the big poster bed. It was broad daylight when Sam drove her back to the house. The detective outside touched his hat as they turned into the drive. It made her feel good to see the man's big pugface as he stood there guarding her house. Agnes was up and walking up and down in a padded flowered dress-inggown in the livingroom with a newspaper in her hand.
"Where have you been?" she cried. "Oh, Margie, you'l ruin your looks if you go on like this and you're just get-ting a start too. . . . Look at this . . . now don't be shocked . . . remember it's al for the best." She handed the Times to Margo, pointing out a head-line with the sharp pink manicured nail of her forefinger.
"Didn't I tel you Frank was watching over us?" HOLLYWOOD EXTRA SLAIN AT
PARTY
Noted Polo Player Disappears
Sailors Held
Two enlisted men in uniform, George Cook and Fred Cos-tel o, from the battleship Kenesaw were held for questioning when they were found stupefied with liquor or narcotics in the basement of an apartment house at 2234 Higueras Drive, San Pedro, where residents al ege a drunken party had been in
-423-progress al night. Near them was found the body of a young man whose skul had been fractured by a blow from a blunt instrument who was identified as a Cuban, Antonio Garrido, erstwhile extra on several prominent studio lots. He was stil breathing when the police broke in in response to telephoned complaints from the neighbors. The fourth member of the party, a German citizen named Max Hirsch, supposed by some to be an Austrian nobleman, who shared an apartment at Mimosa in a fashionable bungalow court with the handsome young Cuban, had fled before police reached the scene of the tragedy. At an early hour this morning he had not yet been located by the police. Margo felt the room swinging in@great circles around her head. "Oh, my God," she said. Going upstairs she had to hold tight to the baluster to keep from fal ing. She tore off her clothes and ran herself a hot bath and lay back in it with her eyes closed.
"Oh, Margie," wailed Agnes from the other room,
"your lovely new gown is a wreck."
Margo and Sam Margolies flew to Tucson to be mar-ried. Nobody was present except Agnes and Rodney Cathcart. After the ceremony Margolies handed the jus-tice of the peace a new hundreddol ar bil . The going was pretty bumpy on the way back and the big rattly Ford tri-motor gave them quite a shakingup crossing the desert. Margolies' face was al colors under his white beret but he said it was delightful. Rodney Cathcart and Agnes vomited frankly into their cardboard containers. Margo felt her pretty smile tightening into a desperate grin but she managed to keep the wedding breakfast down. When the plane came to rest at the airport at last, they kept the cameramen waiting a half an hour before they could trust themselves to come down the gangplank flushed and smil-ing into a rain of streamers and confetti thrown by the attendants and the whir of the motionpicture cameras.
-424-Rodney Cathcart had to drink most of a pint of scotch before he could get his legs not to buckle under him. Margo wore her smile over a mass of yel ow orchids that had been waiting for her in the refrigerator at the airport, and Compton looked tickled to death because Sam had bought her orchids too, lavender ones, and insisted that she stride down the gangplank into the cameras with the rest of them.
It was a relief after the glare of the desert and the lurching of the plane in the airpockets to get back to the quiet dressingroom at the lot. By three o'clock they were in their makeup. In a smal room in the ground floor Margolies went right back to work taking closeups of Margo and Rodney Cathcart in a clinch against the back-ground of a corner of a mud fort. Si was stripped to the waist with two cartridgebelts crossed over his chest and a canvas legionnaire's kepi on his head and Margo was in a white eveningdress with highheeled satin slippers. They were having trouble with the clinch on account of the cartridgebelts. Margolies with his porcelainhandled cane thrashing in front of him kept strutting back and forth from the little box he stood on behind the camera into the glare of the klieg light where Margo and Si clinched and unclinched a dozen times before they hit a position that suited him. "My dear Si," he was saying