Ling made a face. “He’s hammy. I like Anna May Wong.”
Mabel laughed. “No. I mean who do you like?” She waggled her eyebrows as if Ling hadn’t understood the first time.
Anna May Wong, Ling thought, the movie star’s beautiful face swimming up so strongly in Ling’s mind that she hoped the embarrassment couldn’t be read on her face.
“Albert Einstein,” Ling said, and pushed forward on her crutches.
“I don’t think he counts,” Mabel said, following after.
“He does in my book.”
Outside, a swarm of Erasmus Hall High School girls milled in front of the studio gate. They were doing their best posing, but trying not to look too obvious about it.
“Look at that,” Evie said, and Theta knew whatever came next would be a little catty and probably true. “They all hope if they pose and sigh and bat their peepers, they’ll be picked out of the crowd to become the next Norma Talmadge. I’ve got news for them: Not everybody is Norma Talmadge. Excuse us, please,” Evie announced with a circus barker’s flair as she parted the girl-throng. “Miss Theta Knight of the Follies coming through for her screen test. Excuse us, please, thank you, thank you.”
A guard waited at the front gate. He frowned. “Only Miss Knight is expected.”
“Oh, but I’m her sister and her chaperone,” Evie bluffed, putting a hand to her chest as if the idea of Theta going into the Hollywood viper pit unaccompanied was unthinkable. “And this lovely lady is her secretary, Miss Ling Chan, and this is her personal seamstress, Miss Mabel Rose.”
“I’ve made all of Miss Knight’s costumes for the Follies,” Mabel said, falling right in. “I love to sew.”
The guard eyed Ling suspiciously. “And I love to… secretary.”
“Fine. Go in,” the weary guard said, ushering them inside the gates of Brooklyn’s famous film lot.
“I love to secretary?” Mabel whispered to Ling.
“We’re in, aren’t we?” Ling groused.
Theta gawked at the many painted sets and the tall, bright lights, the movie cameras perched like giant birds around the lot. They passed a shop where carpenters hammered away at sets and a costume shop where the sewing machines revved. Actors milled about, drinking coffee, smoking, and going over their lines. A tall, somber-looking man walked past.
“Oh, jeepers! That’s Boris Karloff!” Mabel said excitedly. “I loved him in Flaming Fury!”
“For a socialist, you sure do know a lot about movie stars,” Ling said. She’d stopped to examine a recording machine of some sort. She couldn’t help but fiddle with the gears to see how it worked. A man in a pair of plus fours came racing toward her, his ridiculous puffy trouser legs waffling like a bellows. “Say, what are you doing? Now, come on, sweetheart, come away from there!”
“I like machines,” Ling said quietly.
“She’s very good with machines,” Mabel confirmed.
“That’s no place for ladies,” the man said. “We have a wonderful costume shop if you’d like to visit.”
Ling narrowed her eyes. “Perhaps you could see them about a pair of proper pants, then.”
“I think you might’ve made him angry,” Mabel said with a glance over her shoulder as they walked away.
“Good. Do you know why I like machines?” Ling said.
“Why?”
“They’re not nearly as annoying as people.”
They caught up to Evie and Theta.
“I’m sorry,” a cameraman told them. “But you ladies will have to wait out by the gate until the screen test is over.”
“Good luck, Theta!” Evie called. The girls waved as the cameraman showed Theta onto a stage decorated like a living room, where a camera and several lights had been positioned.
“Doesn’t she look just like a star?” Mabel said wistfully.
“Have a seat right here, sweetheart,” the director said, ushering Theta to a chair beside a table displaying a photograph of a handsome soldier. “You know Warner Brothers owns this whole kit and caboodle now. Do well here, and you’ll be out in Hollywood in no time, kid.”
“Swell,” Theta said, swallowing down her nerves.
“You know what’s coming next, don’tcha?” the makeup man said, touching up Theta’s powder. “Talkies. Warner Brothers—they’ve got us experimenting with sound out here. I hear Al Jolson is gonna sing in a picture!”
“Is that a fact?” Theta said, though she couldn’t imagine anybody talking in a movie. People would probably laugh it out of the theater.
“You ready, sweetheart?” the director asked from behind the camera.
“Sure.”
The director barked out orders, and Theta followed every command.
“Not quite so much, sweetheart. This isn’t like the stage. The camera does some of the work for you,” he said.
“Oh. Got it,” Theta said, even though she didn’t. She was acting, just like she’d been doing her whole life. But she’d figure it out. Theta was a great performer; she knew that. So many performers needed the audience’s love and approval. Theta didn’t need it, and that seemed to be the very thing that drove audiences wild: They wanted what they felt they couldn’t have. When her stage mother, Mrs. Bowers, had forced Theta to smile and curtsy for all the managers and vaudevillians on the Orpheum Circuit, she’d told her again and again, You’re nobody without them and me. You belong to us. Then Roy had come along and told Theta she belonged to him. But when Theta was onstage, she was hers alone. There, no one could have Theta Knight without her permission.
“Okay, sweetheart! Give me those sad peepers!” the director shouted from behind his camera.
Theta gave a deep sigh, letting her shoulders sag as she pressed the back of her hand to her forehead.
“That’s it! Now I want you to show me your bear cat, but not too hot. You still want the Sunday school crowd thinking you’re pure. That’s the trick: Make ’em want you, make ’em think they’ve got a chance at making whoopee; then show ’em you’re strictly the marrying kind. Think you can do that?”
Theta resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Can I do that? Pal, that’s what every girl learns along with her ABCs,” she mumbled. “Just keep that contraption pointed at my face.”
Theta lowered her head and looked up longingly at the camera with her soulful brown eyes. Lips parted slightly, she stared back at the camera as if it were her lover while she crept a hand up her neck in a desperate caress. She closed her eyes and shuddered. Then, just when she was on the brink of wanton, she clutched the picture of her soldier boy to her chest, kissed his face gently, put it down, and clasped her hands in prayer, beseeching the heavens for his safe return.