Starstruck Read Online Free

reading comic books off the rack, Ann Sheridan combing her famous red hair in the backseat of a car.
    But the whole time, in a deep, dark corner of herself she scarcely dared visit, Margaret was hoping that someone wouldnotice
her
. That someone important would see that she was more than just some silly teenage fan, staring and squealing and trying to get up the nerve to ask for an autograph in the little yellow leather album Doris had given her for Christmas. That just like Ann Sheridan or Joan Crawford or Diana Chesterfield, Margaret Frobisher could be a star.
    “Do me one favor, huh, kid?” Larry Julius was saying, draining the last of his coffee. “Now I’ve put the idea in your head, don’t go waltzing off to Paramount or MGM, seeing if they’ve got an eye out. You’re a lady, aren’t you?”
    “I hope so.”
    “Good. Because every girl we got at Olympus is a lady, and if she isn’t, we turn her into one. And we’ve got a saying: ‘A lady leaves the dance with the one that brung her.’ You got me?” He peered at her intently. “Say, duchess, you look pale. You feel okay?”
    “Yes. I mean … it’s just …”
    “Spit it out, kid. You ain’t cracking up on me, are you?”
    Margaret squeezed her eyes shut tight for a moment, trying to collect her thoughts. “It’s just … it can’t happen like this, can it?”
    “Like what?”
    “Like this.” Margaret gestured toward the counter. “I mean, you can’t be a schoolgirl drinking a chocolate soda one minute and a star the next. Things like that don’t happen in real life. Things like that only happen in the movies.”
    Larry Julius put on his hat. “This is Hollywood, kid. Who the hell knows the difference?”

A manda Farraday looked like trouble. That was what folks had been saying ever since she was a little girl back in Oklahoma.
    She was Norma then, Norma Mae Gustafson, the redheaded daughter of the town drunk. By the age of twelve she already had the kind of body that made the matrons in the front pews of the clapboard church cluck their tongues in disapproval. By the time she was thirteen they’d put that clucking to words.
    “Watch out for the Gustafson girl,” they’d say to their sons and brothers. Even their husbands. Even their
fathers
, if the old coots looked like they were getting any ideas. “That Gustafson girl looks like trouble.”
    They were still saying it, for all she knew, but she wasn’t around to hear them. She’d gotten so tired of hearing it that she’d run off at fourteen, with no more than the dress on her back and a pickling jar filled with cash from doing things she’drather not recall, and by doing more of the same, and with no more in her belly most nights than grit and fear, she’d made her way west to Hollywood. But even in the movie colony, where bodies and faces like hers were scarcely in short supply, she knew folks were saying it still.
    Harry Gordon had said it, the first time they met, in the casting office in the Olympus lot. It had been just a few weeks ago, but it seemed like a year. Her skin was as soft as silk now, her copper hair sleek, her tapering fingers perfectly manicured. The body, a touch more fashionably slender than in the Oklahoma days, had been encased in a black silk dress that cost a hundred dollars. There was no trace of the rough farm girl who had drawn stares and hisses when she walked down the main road in town every day, and who had cowered on her straw-stuffed mattress every night, hoping her stepfather would come home too drunk to bother her instead of hollering about how the Bible said that since her mother had gone and died, it was Norma’s duty to take her place. She knew what he meant by that, and even now it made her shudder to think of it. She had a new name, a new identity, a new life.
    And still, Harry Gordon, the young writer once called “the fiercest and freshest voice of our age” by no less an authority than Brooks Atkinson of the
New York Times
, had