Siren Queen(36)

The bit part in The Lying Wife could have been worse, but that was about all I could say for it. It was my job to drunkenly flirt with Paul Winslow at a nightclub before he had an attack of conscience and pushed me back. Winslow was overenthusiastic about pushing me, and I landed on my rear twice before the director called for a scene change.

“Hey, good scene,” Winslow said to me, and abruptly, I stopped giving the benefit of the doubt to any man who seemed to like pushing women that much. I glared at him and walked off set, ready to change and go back to the dorm, but a young Black woman in pale linen approached me instead, an assistant from her patent white heels to the leather folder she carried under her arm.

“Miss Wei, Mrs. Davis would like to speak with you.”

People who had assistants didn’t make requests, so I followed along, wondering who in the world Mrs. Davis was. The heroine of the piece was Marianne Cheshire, who was tiny and delicate and had to be hefted up on apple crates so she could be in the same shot as Winslow, but I had already seen her give him and the director an earful of hell over an unexpected costume change. Marianne might have wanted to chew me out for one reason or another, but she only gave me a friendly wave as she went by with two girls from costuming on her diminutive heels.

The dressing room I was led to had an extravagant star on the door but no name painted on it. The assistant who had summoned me knocked twice, and then opened the door a crack, leaning in to talk with whoever was on the other side. I heard a soft murmur, and then she pulled back with a nod.

“Mrs. Davis will see you now,” she said, and mystified, I entered.

The dressing room was the same size as my and Greta’s apartment and decked out in reds and golds. Brocade curtains had been hung up to hide walls that I knew were only plaster behind, and feathery sheaves of decorative wheat sat on either side of the grand velvet chaise where I found—

“Tiny Annie?”

The elegant woman on the couch, her hair covered with white fabric pinned with a bloodred jewel, draped in a silk robe that pooled around her and dripped richly to the rug, gave me a dry look.

“Is that who I look like right now?” she asked.

It wasn’t, and I bit my lip in chagrin.

“No, it’s not. I’m sorry,” I said, and she snorted, rising to a sitting position with a dancer’s grace. She had been a dancer before she came to Hollywood, but Hollywood didn’t want her to dance, not with her dark skin or her curves.

“Why?” she asked. “I am Tiny Annie. That little idiot made me a rich woman.”

She had, too. Tiny Annie ran along behind Belle Gwynn in That Bayou Night, fussing at her skirts, holding her when Marshall Gray broke her heart, and coddling her whether she was a little girl or a grown woman. She promised she would always take care of her baby miss, no matter what came, and white people had a hunger for Black women who would say such a thing.

She might have been called Opal, or Nelley, or Bessie Lou, but she always played Tiny Annie, played her so well and so relentlessly that no one else could claim the spot. When some other actress tried, the audiences didn’t believe it, insisted on the real thing, and that was Louisa Davis.

Now Mrs. Davis stood, her copper robe falling in lush folds down to her toes. She was shorter than I was, her face as round as a pearl and her lips shaded in plum and outlined with the most delicate strokes of a makeup pencil.

“I wanted to get a look at you,” she said. “I wanted to see the girl who said she was too good to play a maid.”

I would have said it a thousand times to Oberlin Wolfe and just as often to the casting directors, but it made me ashamed to hear it now from Mrs. Davis. I stayed silent, and she examined me with a candid, caustic eye.

“I knew Su Tong Lin before she left for Paris,” she said. “She was a real sweetheart.”

I waited to hear her say that she was nothing like me, smarter and prettier too, but Mrs. Davis was silent.

Finally, she shook her head.

“I can’t tell. I don’t know what you’re going to be.”

“The casting directors don’t know either,” I said truculently, and she gave me a cold smile.

“Sure they do. They know just like they know I’m Tiny Annie and Susie is Lovely Peony.”

“You’re not,” I said, obscurely shocked, and she laughed at me.

“Oh, we are,” she said. “Tiny Annie got my family nice houses in Santa Monica and a string of businesses where I say what goes. Lovely Peony got Susie’s sisters into school in the East, got her daddy medicine for his sugar. What makes you better than us?”

“I’m not.”

“No, you aren’t. But we all know why you have to say you are.”

There was a brisk rap on the door.

“Five minutes, Mrs. Davis,” said her assistant, and Mrs. Davis said she would be right out.

She pulled the red jewel off her wrap, and when she shrugged off the robe, she revealed a calico dress with a fantastically stained apron underneath. She went from statuesque to dumpy, from a woman who owned houses all over Santa Monica to a nursemaid who only wanted to care for her baby miss.

She caught me staring and gave me a dark smile.

“You better know who you are,” she said, “because you don’t look strong enough to be me.”

Her lovely assistant escorted her to set, and I was left sitting on a crate by her starred and nameless door. It was as if a storm had gone by and left me somehow intact.