“How did you know about the house?”
“He took me there a few times. All Cora wants is his money. She doesn’t care about him. During one of his lucid moments, he asked to see her—crazy old man does love her—and she refused to come, to punish us for trying to untie her from his finances. She asked to speak to him just to say she wasn’t coming and incite him to hysterics, I think. We had to call the doctor to sedate him.”
“How long has Cora been in his life?”
“She says fifteen years, but it’s hard to be sure. They were discreet.”
“That’s a long time.”
“He’s been married to my mother for forty.” Nathan ran both of his hands through his hair. It was always the first indicator of his distress. “I know I shouldn’t cancel production for personal reasons, but…”
She went to touch his arm but stopped herself. “I understand your feelings, but Cora’s under contract.”
“Which is why it has to be her decision.”
“I think we should talk about her contract after the film.”
“We’d have to find a writer willing to touch ‘Abner Tate’s masterpiece.’ Someone we can also trust not to talk about the original.”
“How about you?” Kitty suggested. “That way, if it gets out, it’ll still be good for the papers.”
“No one is supposed to know he’s sick.”
“Maybe it’s time they did. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
Nathan looked as though he was considering it. “Listen, I’m not in a rush. This studio can survive on our television shows until next year.”
“I don’t think you have that sort of time.”
“Or what? Mutiny?”
That was exactly what happened. No one on the lot, except the administration staff, got paid unless they were working on a project. Another month’s indecision led to a petition for Nathan’s removal, forcing him to green-light The Misfits and two other undecided films that would begin production in the first quarter of 1956. It was the first and last time Nathan went against Kitty’s advice.
* * *
The weeks flew by, and they weren’t any closer to finding new material to shoot in mere months. When Kitty stumbled upon some unfinished drafts about a young divorcée named Daisy Lawson, she went to Nathan’s office. “She’s the eternal optimist, still looking for love and getting into mischief.”
“That’s a new perspective.” He leaned back in his chair to put his feet on the desk.
“I don’t think housewives want to see family shows,” Kitty said. “They’re the ones home every day. There’s nothing interesting about that.” Kitty preferred romantic movies and musicals. Family shows reminded her of everything she missed, of the people she had never met who had occupied her rightful place.
“I agree. More women want careers and lives away from home these days. Is it for television?”
“Doesn’t have to be. There are five short scripts. They could be lengthened into a movie,” Kitty said.
“Let’s try it. Can you have something in a week?”
“Oh … you want me to write it?”
“Do what you did with Windfall, but with scenes.”
She knew what to do; she was just surprised he was asking her to do it.
Thinking he was reading her, he said, “Don’t worry; we’ll work on it together before anyone sees it.” He propelled himself from his desk chair and poured a drink. “Do you want children?”
“That’s an odd opener.”
He apologized. “We were talking about the character, Daisy, and it made me wonder. If you’re going to write, you have to think of these things, right? You have to have a connection to the material.”
“Do you?” Emma had told her to delay answering that question for as long as possible. Some men found an aversion to motherhood unattractive, and to a few, it would pose a challenge. You don’t want them trying to get you pregnant.
“Right now, the studio is my baby. I don’t want to work here when I have kids—I know what that’s like.”
“My mother wasn’t around a lot either. She worked at night.”
“Doing what?”
She struggled to explain as they settled on either side of his desk. “Reading. Teaching reading.”
“At night?”
Her mind raced for a plausible explanation. “Her students were factory workers.”
“Immigrants?”
“Yes,” Kitty said.
“That’s noble. Your father didn’t mind?”
Kitty shook her head no. “He wanted her to help people.”
“My dad was charitable to everyone but me. This place might as well have been his son.” His face froze as if he was picturing something. “My family is complicated. With my dad’s illness, I’m learning just how much.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. It’s never been a secret that he would have preferred someone else to take over, but my mother forbade it.”
His mother’s family’s oil money, Nathan explained, had helped start the studio and kept it afloat over the last two years that Abner spent obsessing about The Misfits, to the detriment of the studio’s bread-and-butter productions. Maybe Nathan would have been more suited to be an engineer or mathematician, but his mother had pushed her husband to cultivate their son’s creative abilities. She held her ground, despite Abner’s claims that their son had no talent for film beyond “his ability to spot a pretty woman.”
Nathan had come to the lot every day after school but was never encouraged to make comments on set, let alone pick up a camera or write a script. He was a film lover but knew nothing about the mechanics of plot. According to his father, he couldn’t even tell a good story about his own life. “Maybe I could have been a writer or a director had it been encouraged.”
“It’s not too late. You do own the place,” Kitty reminded him. Kitty couldn’t see how anyone—especially his father—could think so negatively of him.
Nathan shook his head. “I’m too old to be chasing childhood dreams. I can be just as brilliant at the head of the operation, pulling the strings and resurrecting Telescope. That’s what pushes me these days: returning my family to glory.”
“That’ll make them proud.”
He chuckled, but his reply wasn’t funny. “I doubt they’d even notice.” He reached for his cigarettes on his desk. “Shit, I’m just going on and on—you must think I’m a sap.”
“No, I want to hear everything about you.” She shifted her eyes away from his, embarrassed by her disclosure. “I should get back to reading.” She stood.
He offered her two cigarettes. “For listening.”
She waved them away. “I only really smoke with you.” She walked down the hall to her office, dizzy with emotion.
Kitty had never met anyone whom she enjoyed talking to so much. It excited her to exhaustion. Every morning, she told herself she’d visit Lucy on the Windfall set, but every evening, she went home instead, favoring a bath. It was where she indulged in thoughts of Nathan, thoughts that had become too risqué to even write. Nathan’s Whiteness complicated her feelings, and so she tried to suppress them, afraid of where they would lead. But something was pulling her to him, or back to him. It was as if she didn’t have a choice. Sometimes, when they spoke, she got the feeling she’d known him her whole life, as if they’d had that same conversation before.
All of these things made Nathan the most interesting person she’d ever met. His equal adoration was addictive, and although she wasn’t planning to act on her feelings, at last she mailed the goodbye letter to Richard.
She didn’t open his letters anymore, knowing what they said. There was nothing he could say to change her mind; Richard and her life in Winston seemed so far away. Even her mother felt like a ghost, a memory she worked to conjure every night with pen and paper. Writing to Hazel had become her diary. She wrote in color, sparing no details, knowing there wasn’t a thought or life event that would ever receive a reply.
CHAPTER 22
Kitty
November 1955
Lucy made a left leaving the lot instead of a right toward her house.
“Where are we going?” She’d invited Kitty over for dinner to celebrate the production news. Kitty assumed that meant Laurie was cooking.