“Of course I love you, Nora. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Lord knows, I wouldn’t want to be ridiculous at a time like this.” She turned her body away from him to give herself a minute to think. She faced him again. “What would Halstead think?”
Billy looked out at the ocean stirring beyond him. “It was his idea.”
And there was something so disappointing to Nora about the fact that Billy hadn’t even thought of it on his own.
“Well?” Billy stood there with his hands in his pockets, the wind, surf, and sun clamoring around them.
20
Nora Wheeler
Hollywood, 1934
With a budget of one million dollars, Max and Me was a hit, earning the studio a seven-hundred-thousand-dollar profit. Of the big studios, Monumental was known for its directors wielding great power—even more than Irving Thalberg at MGM. While Monumental was a smaller studio than MGM, it had a reputation for quality dramas. Max and Me was the rare attempt at screwball comedy, with Nora playing a version of Carole Lombard. In the comedy, a husband and wife get switched—the husband waking up in the wife’s body and the wife in the husband’s. This role reversal gives each spouse an appreciation for the other, and the pure physical comedy required of Nora challenged her for the first time. She’d been rewarded well by Halstead for being overlooked.
But Max and Me wasn’t the only hit that year. Starlight Circus made a star of Monumental’s Jayne McKenna, who had dyed her hair from her original Max Factor–coined “brownette” to a darker brown, making the girl look exotic opposite the blond Ford Tremaine. While her role was largely a prop for Ford, she’d become a household name. Billy had been right. Starlight Circus was Ford’s movie. The camera loved him. The performance he delivered was unlike anything he’d done in his career before. Nora thought it had to be Billy’s creative influence.
Three weeks after Billy’s proposal and one week before the wedding, Monumental announced that Billy Rapp would direct Beyond the Shore, an epic picture about a general who is shot by his wife’s lover after returning from the Great War. Ford Tremaine would once again have the lead. Again, Nora would not have a part in her new husband’s film.
But one good thing was that she hadn’t seen Clint since the night at the restaurant. She was sure it was because of the news of her engagement to Billy. Part of the reason she was going along with the marriage was out of fear of Clint. Billy Rapp would keep Clint away from her.
The Beverly Hills mansion of Harold Halstead, located next door to the expansive Harold Lloyd estate, was lush and green that June as it served as the location of Nora Wheeler’s wedding to Billy Rapp. The wedding itself was a low-key affair that had an air of functionality to it that Nora found distasteful. It was her wedding, even if it amounted to another part she was playing.
Nora felt the ivory silk dress against her skin. It was hot that day, and she was worried that the long sleeves would be too confining and the crepe and jeweled bodice too tight, but they were perfect in the end. The dress designed by Inez London was both intricately textured and elegantly simple, complemented by a four-foot silk train. But there was another dress in her head—it was pink and Nora wore a black mask. Each time Nora closed her eyes at the reception, she was haunted by this version of herself and Billy, at least a version of him, telling her that he never wanted to see her again. It was as though the images were slipping through a thin veil, like she was getting a glimpse of something that felt like the past, but was perhaps an omen of things to come?
Photographers got the shots Halstead had wanted: the couple cutting the cake, the couple posed in front of the courtyard fountain. Billy looked happy. From somewhere far away, perhaps an upstairs room, Nora heard a piano playing a rich, sad melody—too sad for a wedding really, but no one else seemed to hear it, or was bothered by its beauty as well as its pain. Nora looked past Halstead’s carefully manicured hedges, so precise it was as though they’d been clipped with the aid of a ruler, to see Billy standing with his hands in his pockets, deep in thought. Nora had fallen hopelessly in love with Billy, and although she knew something was wrong, she hoped everything would be better now. He looked up, caught her eye, and smiled at her. For a brief second, she thought that this was a sign they could be happy.
As the ceremony and reception unfolded, there was a topsy-turvy motion to it all, as if the day were moving both fast and slow in tandem, something tugging her backward as events of the day propelled her forward. In moments like this, she was haunted by the details—the lace on her wedding veil, the ornateness of Halstead’s fireplace, the smell of the furniture polish—as though she were a visitor in this time and place. As she’d gotten ready for her wedding that morning, Nora felt faint and held on to the vanity until it stopped moving. Instinctively, she knew she needed to absorb what happiness she could from the day.
The wedding was over by two in the afternoon and Nora and Billy drove the Phaeton down to the Agua Caliente Resort and Casino in Tijuana for a small honeymoon. He was due back on the set in less than a week.
Just eighteen miles south of the Mexican border, Agua Caliente was buzzing with Americans for the weekend. Located on more than six hundred acres, the resort had been built by Biltmore owner Baron Long to cater to tourists from San Diego and Los Angeles who’d take advantage of the spa, golf course, casino, or the main draw: the racetrack, home to the richest racing purse in the country. This had been an attempt at a second racetrack—the first built four miles north, closer to the border. The new track drew crowds of hard gamblers who didn’t seem to mind mixing with a few locals as well as celebrities, sports figures, and gangsters. No one thing embodied that decadence like the Gold Bar and Casino. Windowless with an elaborate coffered ceiling, the casino even featured real gold chips.
Billy drove the Phaeton past the swimming pool and airstrip before pulling up to the entrance. Guests strained to see who got out of the car as two bellmen rushed to greet them. Since Billy hadn’t so much as held Nora’s hand since they’d met, she wasn’t sure what to expect on their honeymoon—or if she should expect anything at all. When they got to their room, Billy was nervous and twitchy, like a jackrabbit, insisting they immediately head to the racetrack. Dressed in a black-and-white dress with a black bolero hat that Inez had loaned her, Nora followed silently behind Billy as he ignored her for most of the afternoon. After the race, Billy and Nora watched the sunset from their lawn chairs sipping champagne. Then they dressed for dinner, where Billy drank more glasses of gin than Nora could count. Several of the waitstaff dressed in their white uniforms carried Billy back to the room in the early morning. Nora covered him with the bedspread on the couch and spent her first night as Mrs. William Rapp sleeping alone.
Nora was up early, walking the grounds of the Spanish-style resort. She navigated through the palm-lined walkways and the fountains tiled with ornate mosaics and the overflowing terra-cotta planters
with yellow and pink flowers dripping over the sides. Groundskeepers had started their days clipping hedges and cleaning chairs. Nora heard the pounding of hooves from the racetrack’s morning practice, mixing with some of the workhorses carrying flowers on their carts. When enough time had passed, the sun began to burn brighter and guests began to spill out of their rooms.