The self-enchanted : Mae Murray : image of an era (1959)

She ran faster. Sarah Bernhardt had run right out of the theatre in France she was a kid. In he: room Mae flung oft her prim cap and dress, put on her own clothes and went home. But it wasn't home. It was a perfectly good house up on Vine Street and a perfectly nice maid: but it i't Jenny and :: wasn't home: there \ even a kitten. choked down some dinner, v her hair, arranged it on little curl papers and went to bed. Her troubled dreams :ed something that had actually happened on the lot. She'd heard a group of actresses in the washroom talking. They hadn't known she was there. ". . . absolutely no experience." "Why do you suppose they signc "Well, now why do \ ou suppose . . ." A suggestive snicker made her rush out crying. "I have inborn talent, you hear: Inborn. I know by instinct all you've learned and a lot you'll never learn." Or.lv in the dream they threw sand at her. Her eyes were filled with sand, she wake; . bd with pain, rolled out of bed to the floor, crawled to the door shrieking, she was blind ! A doctor came. He dropped cocaine on her -c.-.lbir.g eyeballs and told her never, never to look into kleig lights, the horrible white blaze from the firepl: " Those lights should be covered." he said. '"It's criminal." "No one gives a damn." Waliy told her. "We've all had kleig eyes. Sometimes the pain lasts for weeks. I keep a flask handy.*' It was a strange alley she'd wandered into in her headlong flight from Jay. no camaraderie or gaiety*. Wally was kind to her, but he had his own life, his fast cars, his music, his magic tricks, his pretty wife Dorothy, and his beautiful house up on DeLongpre. She walked past it sometimes at night. a great mysterious Moorish house softly lighted by fringed lamps. One room was dark: that's where he showed movies. Every night! No one out here danced, no one was interested in anything except movies. They ate, slept, dreamed movies. 57