they hoped to get to—and her meeting them right there on the start line, not budging one bit. She knew she had only one person she needed to keep happy, the head of the studio, Monte Cartwright—and she had carefully and wisely cultivated fatherly feelings in him from the start, until he was patting himself on the back for being such a mensch, at least where Mimi Harrison was concerned.
The past decade in Hollywood, career-wise, had been remarkably successful. She had contractually retained the right to one outside-studio film a year, and she was averaging four in-house movies on top of that, keeping her too busy for much of a social or romantic life. With a per-film take of forty thousand dollars, she was considered one of the highest-paid actresses in the world.
It would be only a matter of time before she met Jack Leonard, who made even more money than that.
He had been watching her box-office ascension from a rival up-and-coming studio with a degree of patience for which he was not usually known. His own success had been less linear and much more questionable. With generations of family money from the garment industry behind him, he had counter-bet the Depression, picking up any stock that looked as if its final days had come, then buying up any surviving competitors. As FDR’s antitrust teams moved in, Jack started moving abroad, cultivating alliances with steel and weapons producers in Europe, and becoming both financially and diplomatically indispensable to them as various countries started assembling munitions factories for the increasing military demand. He had an uncanny knack for knowing exactly where things were heading, and for isolating the most critical weaknesses of his opponents, who were many. For Jack Leonard, life was a constant battle.
He possessed not one ounce of introspection and instead directed his total energy at summing up the people around him. Understanding himself was not important because there was nothing there to understand. He knew that, and he knew that no one else would ever believe it. After all, he walked and talked and acted like a normal person, yet he won, again and again, in a way that few others consistently could. If everyone else had had the capacity to imagine how much he was focused on beating them, they might have stood a chance. But even then, they would not have been able to live with the terms of success. So Jack Leonard continued to win, and destroy others, and make money, and he convinced himself (because when one is devoid of a soul, it takes little work to convince the self of anything) that his success was due to his own superiority in having figured all of this out.
The more he made money, the more he needed to make—it was a compulsion that he made no qualms about. If you weren’t moving forward, you weren’t winning—and if you weren’t making money while you were at it, you were losing even more. So when a few business associates from New York decided to invest in a new studio venture out West, he hopped on—what better way to meet beautiful young women with little expense or effort. Plus there was no better time to enter the movie business, with so many prominent producers, actors, and directors off fighting the Nazis.
Now, in the spring of 1945, with America fully in the war, and his steel and weapons contracts worth millions, and his studio putting out a film a week, Jack Leonard stood towering over Mimi Harrison as she lay on a lounge chair in her purple one-piece swimsuit.
Mimi opened one eye against the sun, now partially obscured by Jack standing there, and said simply, “You’re blocking my sun.”
“Your sun?” he asked with one eyebrow raised.
She sat up a bit, peering at him from underneath her sunglasses, then placed them back down on her still slightly freckled nose. “Well, I have it on loan from our host today.”
“Loans. I can give out those. Jack”—he held out his hand to her—“Jack Leonard.”
No glimpse of recognition passed over her face, and he could feel the back of his neck start to tighten in irritation.
“Mimi Harrison,” she replied, shaking his hand. He noticed that she had a strong, assured grip for a woman. He also noticed her hands were bare of any jewellery and slightly calloused.
She looked down at her hand still resting in his and added, “I ride.”
“And you act.”
“When I’m not riding.”
“Or reading.” He casually picked up the book on