Glorious Spring Afternoon


So you were asked to go to this soirée at the mansion of the King and Queen of Hollywood by this other person in your life, and it's not quite a romance, and not really a friendship, but you keep up the appearances because of such invitations to the mansion of the King and Queen of Hollywood.

Then the person in question calls you on the eve of the day, and Aunt Mavis is sick and a train back East is the immediate plan, but, you're told, you can still go to the lawn party at the mansion of the King and Queen of Hollywood, it's OK if you go stag.

And so you dress out in your best whites and you pull up in front of their palatial Tuscan digs and there's a whole assortment of LaSalles and Packards and Duesenbergs and your motor seems motley and embarrassed in their company.

On the pleasure lawn there's an assortment of colony people, pretty, lean and tanned, and a record player has been brought out, and people are drinking gin. You realize that without your able guide you don't know any of them. The conversation is insular and superficial and if you'd not been invited, you wouldn't have bothered. The King and Queen are nowhere to be seen. In the house, apparently, settling some kind of tiff, so the buzz goes.

Your nose tingling from a couple of the drinks, you wander away, to take a smoke break, and the swing band on the record fades away. You come to a humped Japanese bridge over a brook, and you clump over it, and there, like a sylvan creature, she is leaning against the incline of a tree which seemed to have grown right there to provide her with support and setting. She's wearing a summer dress of peacock greens, yellows and reds. Her hair is gleaming black and arranged in a sharp bob.

She has a cigarette in her fingers and she's holding it up and saying, toward you, "Look at me, and without anyway to light it."