BACK IN THE AVENUE’S holy-rolling heyday, the Laurel Canyon limousines would idle at the curb from Friday night until the Sunday sermons. It was a colored town to be sure, but one with painted porches and barbershop poles. Bernie the Weisenheimer (who had a nose for making money off of those who couldn’t make it off of themselves), he bought a roadhouse on an empty block and christened it the Rum Tum Club. He slapped tuxedos on the boys in the band and dropped some red leather booths around the four-tops. Then he ran a rope right down the middle of the dance floor, so the ises and aints would know where to do their dancing.

But after the Crash, Bernie went bust right along with the neighborhood. The porch paint peeled, the candy stripes stalled, and the highfalutins headed for higher ground. By the summer of ’36, when a Harlemite by way of Havana reopened the club as El Rey’s, he didn’t need a rope to keep the order on the dance floor anymore; but he left it lying there just the same. And as the bands played a jazz as half-bred as he was, the local girls would sweat through their dresses and shimmy over that rope with relish.

That’s why Litsky couldn’t believe his eyes when the front door opened at eleven P.M. and in walked Miss Olivia de Havilland in a strappy red dress. She was on the arm of that ravaged blonde he’d heard about, the one who’d come out of nowhere. With the blonde leading the way, the girls took one of the tables near the band and ordered tequilas and lime as if they’d been born in the barrio.

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EARLIER THAT YEAR, Litsky had followed Dehavvy around a bit like everybody else—but what a waste of shoe leather. The boys at the studio had her on a short leash and it showed. She was all seltzer at six, supper at seven, and safely home by nine for some Mother Goose and milk before they tightly tucked her in. But then, you really couldn’t blame them. They knew exactly what they were sitting on: the 79th element.

Because on every Saturday night in every small town in America—after milking the pigs and slopping the cows—Fred and Edna were headed for the picture show. And while in exchange for their hard-earned nickels they surely hoped to see an escapade, once they’d traveled all that way to merry old England, it was the girl next door who they hoped to find on the throne.

And Dehavvy was just the ticket. As genteely in person as she was on the screen.