Free The Blondes by Emily Schultz Page A

was enthralled by them. Scrap sales would give him the means to sign the cheque on his first theatre, then a chain of small theatres in the American Northeast. In—let’s see, was it 1918?—1918, only twenty-one years after viewing his first silent film, he would open his first production, starring Hedda Hopper and Anita Stewart, having realized that making films to put in one’s own theatre would yield a higher profit than simply securing a film from a distributor to show. That same year he moved to Los Angeles, and soon the studio MGM was born, and with it, the star system.
    Tell me, how do I remember all these facts when I forget the names of actors I once liked? That’s the life of a Cultural and Communication Studies major, my little grub. Pure facts and chance of memory. Some of us are better at it than others. Or maybe it just goes to show you how diligently I studied Kovacs’s work. She had a fascinating way of telling the stories of the silent film stars who moved into talkies—the dark-haired leading ladies such as Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, and Hedy Lamarr. But in the ’30s and ’40s the movie business turned away from anything “ethnic.” Nowcame the blondes: Anita Page, Jean Harlow, June Allyson, Lana Turner, Ingrid Bergman, Janet Leigh. Even indisputably striking women like Ava Gardner were under threat: MGM attempted to manipulate her into erasing her chin dimple to render her into a more generic, from-the-mould beauty. She refused.
    No wonder I was shocked to discover the author of this essential tome was of that very class of beauty she seemed to disdain. Or maybe I was simply afraid of beautiful people. Maybe that’s what my thesis was really about, and why I hadn’t been able to put my thoughts down in words.
    Kovacs looked up and saw me hovering a distance from the booth. She rose as I approached, and put her hand out to shake. My grip was sweaty and soft. I fumbled with my bag and sat down.
    “Well, what has Dr. Diclicker sent me?” she said, bemused.
    “Ex—excuse me?”
    “Sorry. Dr. Mann.” Kovacs waved a hand. “Diclicker. Diclicker
was
his name, such a long time ago. He changed it, you know, during his master’s. After Mann, the German novelist—”
    “Thomas Mann?”
    “No. Heinrich. Wrote a novel called
Professor Unrat
, which was adapted into Germany’s first sound film in 1930,
The Blue Angel
. It was Marlene Dietrich’s first major role. Karl wrote his master’s about it, before moving on to that … Howdy Doody shoot-’em-up stuff for his doctorate.”
    Karl’s thesis was
Self-Aware Masculinity in the Late American Western
.
    “But Dietrich was always
my
territory, hmm.” She paused. “I wonder. Do you think our Karl was competing with me or trying to impress me? I guess he just didn’t want to be Dr. Dick-lick-er.” She stressed each syllable. “I cannot fault him.”
    I
had
known Karl changed his surname. But he’d never told me what it was originally. He’d said, “At a certain point in your life, you have to make a break with the past to become your own person.” I tried out his name in my mind as if trying to fit a square peg in a round hole:
Karl Diclicker, Karl Diclicker, Karl Mann
.
    I opened my laptop bag and set up the computer on the table between me and Kovacs. I remember she whisked her wineglass far to one side, as if concerned I would accidentally topple it.
    A waiter came and I asked for a menu.
    Kovacs told me to have a drink with her. “It will settle you,” she said, and the matter was decided. She ordered another glass of red for herself, though she hadn’t finished the first.
    “I’m really not sure I should drink,” I protested, but the server had already turned away.
    “It sounds like you’ve been through a lot, dear,” Kovacs said, but the “dear” again struck my ear as glacial.
    I told myself this was the way accomplished women her age spoke, with distance and sheen. She had a slight accent, and I