The Celebrity by Laura Z. Hobson

Author:Laura Z. Hobson [Hobson, Laura Z.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-3876-9
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE ALICE COHEN SHINDIG was the last big event planned around Gregory and Abby Johns during that month in the City of the Angels. Immediately thereafter, word got about, as word will, about Gregory’s second untimely relapse, and though everybody was sad that he should be so frequently ill, it was as true in Hollywood as anywhere else that a hostess finds it calamitous to have her guest of honor drop out just as the canapés are being prepared.

“Anyway, I bet he isn’t as much fun as Thorn,” Alice Cohen was heard to remark that night, “authors are so stuck on themselves.”

Thus the only social life which Gregory and Abby Johns experienced on the Coast was an occasional evening where the word “party” would not have been a mot juste. To have dinner with Hy Bernstein and his wife could scarcely be called a party, and this they did several times. They also spent two evenings with the Moroskys and their four children, and one, slightly stilted apart from the good shop talk, with Harry and Peg Von Brann. Each of these occasions was singularly free from sequins, plastic ice, or rooms bubbling with brandy glasses.

On most of their evenings, Gregory and Abby stayed at home, or went for a drive, or went to the movies.

Because of their new wealth, each of these activities held new and seductive charms for them. At the movies they always sat in the loge. At the hotel, they slowly trained themselves not to refold damp towels for further use. On mild evenings they had dinner on their awninged balcony, against which blew the spiced air of eucalyptus, sycamore, and pepper trees. They accustomed themselves to buying cigarettes a carton at a time instead of a pack, and gradually lost their guilt at paying thirty cents for an air-mail Herald Tribune on weekdays and sixty on Sundays. Twice they telephoned Hat—at night rates.

But their greatest pleasure came from the drives they took along the curving coast, generally going north, with the shining roaring ocean on their left, and the leather-colored hills of the Malibu chain on their right; in other moods they drove inland through the lush green fertility of the Valley. During their last two weekends, with Gregory in perfect health again, they took two long trips: the first to San Francisco, which they found so glorious a city that they broke through their tight schedule and had to drive most of Sunday night to get home again in time for the studio on Monday; the second, to the desert, past the honky-tonk look of Palm Springs to the small town of Indio, where they stayed at a de-luxe motel at the edge of a date ranch.

“A date ranch,” Gregory said. “Can you tie it?”

“What about that carrot ranch in the valley, and the beet ranch?”

The desert astonished and moved them. They had always pictured it as a flat dead expanse of white sand, like movies of the Sahara; they were charmed by

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