A look of caution appeared in her eyes, even as she tried to bring a smile to her lips.
Bernie Norman hurried onto the set. A flicker of relief showed in her face and I knew the whole story.
She reached for Bernie's arm as he turned toward me.
"Mr. Cord," he asked, "is anything wrong?"
"Yeah," I said grimly. "Her. Get her off the set. She's fired!"
"You just can't do that, Mr. Cord!" he exclaimed. "She has a contract for this picture!"
"Maybe she has," I admitted, "but not with me.
It wasn't my pen she squeezed the last drop of ink out of."
Bernie stared at me, the pale coming up underneath his tan.
He knew what I was talking about.
"This is highly irregular," he protested. "Miss Randall is a very important star."
"I don't care if she's the Mother of God," I interrupted. I held out my wrist and looked down at the watch and then back up at him. "You've got exactly five minutes to get her off this set or I’ll close down this picture and hit you with the biggest lawsuit you ever had!"
I sat down on the canvas chair with my name on it and looked around the now deserted set.
Only a few people hovered about, moving like disembodied ghosts at a banquet.
I looked over at the sound man hunched over his control board, his earphones still glued to his head. I closed my eyes wearily.
It was after ten o'clock at night.
I heard footsteps approaching and opened my eyes.
It was Dan Pierce.
He'd been on the phone trying to borrow a star from one of the other studios.
"Well?" I asked.
He shook his head negatively.
"No dice. MGM wouldn't lend us Garbo. They're planning a talking picture for her themselves."
"What about Marion Davies?"
"I just hung up on her. She loves the part but it isn't the kind of thing she feels she can do.
Maybe we should've stuck with Cynthia Randall.
It's costing you thirty grand a day to sit around like this."
I lit the cigarette and stared up at him.
"I’d rather drop it now than be laughed out of the theater and lose it all later."
"Maybe we could bring an actress in from New York?"
"We haven't the time," I said. "Ten days, three hundred grand."
Just then, Rina came up with some sandwiches.
"I thought you'd be hungry," she said, "so I sent out for these."
I took one and bit into it somberly.
She turned and gave one to the second man.
"Thanks, Miss Marlowe."
"You're welcome," she said and walked back to where she'd been sitting with Nevada.
"Too bad you can't find one that sounds like her," the sound man mumbled through a mouthful of sandwich.
I looked at him. "What do you mean?"
"She's got somethin' in her voice that gets yuh," he said.
"If it came through on the sound track like that, you'd have them falling out of the balconies."
I stared at him now. "You mean Rina?"
He nodded and swallowed his mouthful. "Yeah." A slow, meaningful grin came to his lips. "An' if I ain't crazy, she'd photograph like a roll in the hay, too.
She's all woman."
I turned to Dan. "What do you think?"
"It's possible," he admitted cautiously.
"Then, let's go," I said, getting to my feet. "Thirty grand a day is a lot of money."
Rina took it as a big joke when I asked her to speak a few of the lines into the microphone.
She still didn't think I meant it when I called the crew back for a full-scale screen test.
I don't think she took me seriously at all until we sat in the screening room at two that morning and watched her and Nevada play one scene.
I’d never seen anything like her on the screen before.