Excerpt from Big Red by Jerome Charyn, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The walls of his entire suite were white-on-white, like Il Duce's. The outer office was as big as a baseball diamond. A receptionist sat at the far end behind a tiny desk. Hers was the only chair in the room. A bleached blonde in a tailored outfit and a teal necktie, she didn't bother to look up as I approached.

"Rusty Redburn to see Harry," I said.

"Mr. Cohn," she rasped, correcting me in a clipped British accent she must have picked up in an elocution class on Hollywood Boulevard. "Do you have an appointment, young lady?"

"I believe your boss is expecting me."

The receptionist ambled out of her seat and sashayed into an inner office with all the aplomb of a starlet on Poverty Row with stiletto heels. I waited at least fifteen minutes for her to come back. Then she squired me into an inner office with a bump of her derriere. This office had the same barren white-on-white walls. It was occupied by the boss's number-one secretary and her assistant, with deep suspicion in their hooded eyes. Both of them could have just stepped out of Max Factor's Hollywood salon, that's how artful their pancake had been put on.

Again, there were no other chairs in the room.

They murmured to one another as if I were a pimple that Max Factor could make disappear.

"Rusty Redburn, honest to God, I can't locate her file."

"Do you think she polishes saddles at the Columbia ranch?"

Then a buzzer sounded, and a curious door, without a doorknob or a keyhole, clicked open.

"Enter, please," the assistant said.

And I stepped into Harry Cohn's private office, which was twice as large as his secretary's, with a Steinway near the door. It had a semicircular desk at the far end, on a platform, and two chairs that were much lower than the desk and looked as if they belonged in a nursery. But Cohn wasn't sitting behind his desk. He stood near a picture window that opened onto Gower Street. It was his way, I had been told, to check when his employees arrived at his fiefdom. Cohn himself never appeared before noon. He often stayed until midnight, wandering across the studio to make sure that no one had left a light on. He liked to think of himself as Harry the First, or King Cohn, but the other studio heads called him the Janitor behind his back. I'd also been told how crass he was, but the Janitor didn't seem crude to me.

He was a handsome man in his fifties, with muscular shoulders, an assassin's clear blue eyes, and an angelic smile. He'd once been a streetcar conductor. He wore a houndstooth jacket from a haberdasher in Beverly Hills, and a Sulka shirt open at the neck to reveal a hint of his hairy chest.

He dug into me with his blue eyes. "You're a dyke, ain't ya?"

"Suppose I am."

He laughed, and I could spot the amazing symmetry of his dental work. His teeth were whiter than white, like a mouth made of Chiclets.

"Sweetheart, what do you think of Orson Welles?"

I wasn't an idiot. Rita Hayworth, Cohn's prize property, had just moved in with Welles on Woodrow Wilson Drive, in the Hollywood Hills. I adored Citizen Kane. We Hollywoodians had our own second-run movie house, the Regina, right on the boulevard, wedged between Grauman's Chinese and Grauman's Egyptian. I wrote reviews for all the classics shown at our little box of a theater, plus tidbits about the stars, and signed my pieces Regina X. There had been nothing like Kane, before or since. It exploded onto the screen—and into my head—from its first shot. I couldn't catch my breath until after the final credits. But I didn't tell that to Harry. You had to lie and lie if you wanted to remain in Hollywood, even as a basement clerk in the Publicity Department who lived in a roomette.

"Welles is a has-been," I said. But I was puzzled. "Mr. Archibald couldn't have told you about me. He hates my guts."

"Who's this Archibald?" Cohn asked, with a sudden gruffness in his voice.

Excerpted from Big Red by Jerome Charyn. Copyright © 2022 by Jerome Charyn. Excerpted by permission of Liveright/W.W. Norton. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.