The Song Is You by Megan Abbott

Author:Megan Abbott
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General, Mystery & Detective, Fiction
ISBN: 9781416538516
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2007-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The Red Lily

It was a long drive from the Eight Ball to the harbor and Hop’s mind jammed itself with doubts and self-recriminations. Especially about what he thought he was accomplishing by nudging his way back into these places, these lives. A movie-star tour of one very bad night.

He looked again and again at the card Freddy Townsend had given him, its cryptic notations guiding him to a sludge-brimmed corner of the San Pedro docks.

As he drove, he remembered writing pieces about Sutton and Merrel back at Cinestar, fizzy bits of dross about their “peculiar duo magic.” They were coming off their famous string of wartime musicals—Merry Marines (1943), Air Force Follies (1944), Sailors’ Serenade (1944), Army Antics (1945)—all box-office bonanzas, as they say. As Hop wrote. Endlessly.

Merry Marines was the one that started it all, sealed their fame. Seventy minutes of splashy patriotic-themed numbers choreographed to regimental perfection by drillmaster extraordinaire Busby Berkeley. And then that famous last number. Gene Merrel’s final solo, shot in glorious close-up, with his curlicue forelock dangling and Irish blues shining, face lit soft and luminous as Lillian Gish. It was “God Bless America,” with Merrel, using every bit of his God-given, milk-and-honeyed tenor and wet-eyed boyish looks, famously looking straight into the camera and, in so doing, transforming himself into every audience member’s son, brother, fiance. As he hit the second verse, Marv Sutton, every inch the dream American man, entered the frame, pointed his finger directly into the camera, and, with that gesture, took hold of the heart of every warmblooded moviegoer in the land as he beseeched the audience, Sing along, America. Sing along for our boys.”

The timing couldn’t have been better, the whole country at its war-craziest, Stars and Stripes bursting out of every mouth. In theater after theater, audiences sang along, full-voiced and buoyant. And then, one afternoon, three days into the pictures release, a returning soldier, one arm lost from the elbow down in the Coral Sea, stood as he sang, stood up right in the movie theater, and others followed suit, setting off a wave of similar phenomena. Finally, to seal it, the celebrated Life magazine photograph of the cavernous Electric Theatre in Kansas City, filled to capacity with twenty-two hundred audience members on their feet, hands over hearts, illuminated only by the projector’s smoky ray and the screen itself, where Gene Merrel’s face loomed, beatific.

Fuck, if that don’t make them stars … America’s goddamned sweethearts both.

Now, as Hop arrived at the docks, the flickering movie image in his mind darkened, blurred. Merrel’s on-screen face shed its balmy innocence, its patriotic glimmer. In its place was something else.

Something he didn’t want to think about. America’s sweethearts, sure—who in their offscreen time liked to pick up eager starlets and bang them into no-man’s-land. For kicks.

Townsend’s card in hand, Hop got out of his car and wound around the docks in search of the storied Red Lily. At first, he felt pretty ready to admit to himself that he was a sap.

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