The Devil May Dance by Jake Tapper (books to read fiction txt) 📗

The waitress returned with bourbon rocks for Lawford and Charlie and a caipirinha for Margaret.

“This is a preposterous number of fabulous people,” Margaret said, taking a swig of her drink.

“Where else can they go on a Saturday night?” Lawford replied.

While overwhelmed by the sheer number of celebrities, Margaret was surprised at how much tinier they appeared in person. Liz Taylor was so short she almost resembled an elf, and walking in, Margaret had towered over several leading men. Also surprising were Rock Hudson’s drinking companions. They weren’t exactly the nubile young starlets Margaret might have expected; the strapping heartthrob, a vision of all-American swinging bachelorhood, had surrounded himself with four slim, handsome—even pretty—young men.

A framed photograph hung on either side of the doorway. One was an image of Sinatra punching a photographer in the nose, and the other showed Dean Martin holding a finger to his lips, an instruction: Shh.

“Our crew’s in the back,” Lawford said, pointing. Live jazz played in one of the rooms; the Daisy had so many, it was hard to keep track. Charlie recognized the tune: “Pfrancing,” from Someday My Prince Will Come. He polished off his bourbon in one gulp and began to lose himself in the tempo and the strutting trumpet solo, which sounded to him like a man crying.

“It’s like Miles Davis himself is here,” Margaret said. She was trying to keep cool, but she had her hand on his arm, and he could tell she was a bit thrilled. They followed Lawford through the crowd of stars, ogling in every direction and catching snippets of gossip:

So there was Rock in a mink, looking as fabulous as you might imagine, and the studio sent the goddamn pic to every paper from here to Piscataway like it was a joke, like ha-ha-ha, look at the he-man in the mink. If they only knew!

Ed Sullivan is boycotting anyone who goes on Paar. That’s just the reality of it.

No, no, no, you’re drunk, West Side Story is gonna end the year number one, Guns of Navarone two.

Nuremberg and Tiffany’s won’t be in the top ten. They didn’t make any money. They were just for awards.

As the journalists might say, Chris Powell couldn’t be reached for comment.

All of it reminded Margaret of when she and Charlie had first arrived in Washington, DC, in 1954. She’d seen then how stunningly, pathetically human the boldface names actually were—Senator Jack Kennedy hobbling around with his wretched back, Vice President Nixon as insecure as Othello. Margaret would read about a seemingly omnipotent committee chairman, witness him banging his gavel and throwing his weight around, only to meet him later at a cocktail party and see he was nothing more than a sack of neuroses with clever writers and a good poker face. Stalwart moralists were in truth libidinous bed-hoppers; Christian wives were beehived roundheels; iron-jawed anti-Communist crusaders were terrified of even a lightly critical editorial. Public images were as fragile as they were phony, Margaret had concluded, so it wasn’t surprising to find that the silver screen’s wholesome girls next door and pillars of manhood were, in reality, lascivious, desperate, drunk, sad.

They walked past a billiards room, where none other than Paul Newman was lining up a shot. Another, darker room was packed with couches and love seats. Finally, they took a right into yet another room, this one even smokier than the others. Congregated around a card table, perched on high leather stools, were Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and his young blond wife, May Britt, Shirley MacLaine, and two men wearing sunglasses and nondescript suits whom neither Charlie nor Margaret recognized. One was tan and good-looking with thick black eyebrows and a movie-star smirk; the other was pale and squat.

“Brother-in-Lawford!” Dean Martin called out, looking up from shuffling the cards. “Who are your friends?”

Lawford had been distracted by a curvy cigarette girl, but he turned back to the pack. “They’re working on Frank’s picture,” he said. “Consultants. Congressman Charlie Marder and his wife, Margaret.”

Sinatra looked up from the table as the new arrivals sat down. “Congressman.” He nodded pleasantly. Then to Margaret: “Madame.” She suppressed a grin. Then, to no one in particular and less pleasantly, he barked: “Can we change the music to something that swings? Enough jazz! I’d even listen to Dago sing ‘Volare’ instead of this.”

“Call the papers! Frank’s willing to listen to someone else sing!” Martin quipped.

Sinatra smiled as Martin dealt the cards clockwise around the table: Sinatra, Davis, Britt, MacLaine, Lawford, and the two silent men. He skipped Charlie and Margaret.

Charlie noticed, of course. He couldn’t put his finger on why, but he got an unwelcoming feeling from Martin.

“You’re not dealing in the congressman and his missus?” Lawford asked him.

Martin paused. “We’ve never had three broads in one game before,” he observed.

“As long as they know the rules,” Sinatra said. He turned to Margaret. “You know the rules, right, dollface?”

Margaret loathed Marilyn Monroe’s breathless dumb-blonde persona, but she did a devastatingly accurate impression of it, as she demonstrated now: “The eights are crazy, right, daddy?”

Everyone laughed except Sinatra, who stared at Margaret for a moment and then looked down at the card table as he lit a cigarette. “Poor Marilyn,” he said, and shrugged.

The brief acknowledgment of Monroe’s downward spiral reminded Charlie of the way all good people sometimes followed words of sympathy with a shrug. The shrug conveyed a resignation, an understanding that humanity was fragile and life could be brutal. And in Sinatra’s case, Charlie thought, given that he’d treated Monroe as if she were just another piece of leftover cheesecake, perhaps his shrug also suggested that not just life but, yeah, maybe he himself could be brutal.

Sinatra’s blue-eyed stare had not signaled anything so psychologically complicated to Margaret; quite the contrary. His cool look had washed a warm wave over her. Thin and blond with bewitching hazel eyes, Margaret constantly had to fend off the inquiring gazes of congressmen at dinners; lawyers and CEOs at fundraisers; policemen and