I Should Have Stayed Home
Horace McCoy
Language: English
Pages: 124
ISBN: 159654712X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Temptation and desire in Hollywood. Hard-boiled. Perverse! Ralph Carston, a handsome young man from Georgia, and roommate Mona Matthews work as extras and dream of Hollywood stardom when a courtroom fracas by Mona gives them a flash of notoriety. This leads to a swank Hollywood party and an introduction to Ethel Smithers, a rich older woman with a less than pure interest in Carston.
‘He’s an actor,’ Mrs. Smithers said. ‘He’s the new big star of 1938. Aren’t you?’ she asked me. ‘I hope so,’ I replied, self-conscious. She wasn’t kidding when she said Arthur Wharton was the finest director in the world. I had heard of him, even back home. He was as important as De Mille. ‘Arthur,’ she said, ‘you’ve simply got to give this boy a test.’ ‘Well, now—’ Wharton said, his face clouding a little. ‘You’ve simply got to,’ she insisted. ‘Tell you what, Carston,’ he said to me. ‘You
set?’ I asked. ‘Yes. Pictures too.’ ‘That’s why,’ I said. ‘She’s nice.’ ‘Yes, she is. —Are you trying to get into pictures?’ She laughed. ‘No.’ ‘No?’ I asked. I was surprised. ‘No.’ ‘You’re certainly pretty enough.’ ‘But I can’t act.’ ‘You don’t have to act. There’s a lot of girls in pictures who can’t act.’ ‘That’s what she said. She told me she would get me a test if I came to the party.’ I got a little sore at Mrs. Smithers. She’d promised to help me too—and she had promised me
my name, begging him to have Mona get in touch with me right away, telling him it was a matter of life or death. He said he’d do that little thing. Dorothy, I thought, Dorothy—a faint pain hit me in the heart and I breathed three or four times in rapid succession before I exhaled once. This is what I should have felt yesterday when I saw her body, I thought.... I finally got up and went into the kitchen and started washing the breakfast dishes because there was nothing else to do. About ten
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Didn’t Bob Minor and I get out of Alabama a jump ahead of the mob that wanted to lynch us for going to bat for the Scottsboro boys? You’re a lot of goddam parlor Communists. You guys get new fads every year.’ ‘How you talk!’ the other one said. ‘Yeah, how I talk!’ the little one replied. ‘Where the hell were all you united-front guys when the Federated Crafts were out on strike? I didn’t see any one of you in the picket line around the theaters. You were afraid to jeopardize that two grand a