Goddess of Love Incarnate. Leslie Zemeckis

of their knees. Madly passionate about their horses, they became expert riders.

      Lili wanted nothing to do with pets. She had no desire to tear around the countryside kicking up dust and dirt in her face, burning her fair skin under the hot sun. “She was the least athletic person I knew,” Dardy said.

      FREQUENTLY LILI HOPPED BUSES AND STREETCARS TO DOWNTOWN Los Angeles. She loved nothing better than to spend hours in the palatial movie houses with hand-carved banisters, giant crystal chandeliers, thick red velvet curtains, plush seats, the lobby a sea of marble. She fell in love with movies—and theatres—when she had lived in Seattle. It was relief from worry as she sank into a darkened theatre. She was no longer a lonely and isolated girl. She was anything she imagined herself to be. Life on the silver screen was glamorous and she felt life should imitate the movies. It was everything Lili, sitting in a narrow bed in a cramped cottage on a quiet street, wanted.

      Fifty years later she could recall in minute detail a scene in Shanghai Express starring Marlene Dietrich as Shanghai Lily (Lili’s future moniker, if not the exact spelling): A train steams slowly through a Chinese slum. As with so many others at the time, movies and the stars were a heavy influence.

      In the 1930s Greta Garbo was “the biggest money making machine” and at the height of her fame.⁴¹ Lili became fascinated by Garbo. She wanted not only to look like her but also to seduce men as her characters often did. She had seen Mata Hari repeatedly, swooning over the costumes. At the opening of Mata Hari in New York, mobs had caused near riots, with dozens of adoring fans hysterical over their idol. Lili loved Garbo’s sphinx-like expression, her mysterious manner and how it drove the men wild. From Garbo Lili learned the power behind being inscrutable. Everything was about cloaking, hiding, obscuring, protecting. She would invoke an alter ego when she went on the stage, most likely that of the actress.

      John Gilbert, Garbo’s leading man on and off the screen, was dark, good-looking, and rugged. He would become the epitome of the type of man Lili would fall for.

      Clark Gable was another Lili developed a crush on. Her type, but elegant. Paired with Harlow and Crawford and Lombard, Gable was the crystallization of Lili’s desires.

      With her long dancer legs sprawled across her bed, Lili spent hours flicking through movie magazines. She tacked pictures of Garbo on the walls. She had begun her quest to reinvent herself.

      A movie Lili would have enjoyed was Dinner at Eight starring that slinky Jean Harlow, who famously wore silky gowns that clung to her perfect body, leaving nothing to the imagination. She was laughter and light and beauty. In the film she plays Kitty, a gold digger with social aspirations to better herself by marrying a tycoon whom she is unfaithful to. Lili longed to be desirable enough to be a gold digger.⁴² Lili’s hair color would eventually match the star’s distinctive shade after she discovered a recipe on the back of a box of Lux soap flakes, which consisted of adding Clorox, peroxide, and ammonia.

      In Pasadena Lili would walk down Colorado Boulevard to the library and sit for hours flipping through Photoplay. She loved fashion and would buy Vogue, reading it until the pages were worn. Her dream was to be on a “best dressed” list.

      Lili had begun waitressing at a Chinese restaurant owned by a family named Fong. It was there Lili developed a lifelong love of Asian food (that and the fact that most burlesque theatres seemed to have a Chinese joint nearby for inexpensive meals between shows). Sundays she spent at the movies with the Fongs in Chinatown watching Charlie Chan movies. She claimed she searched for opium—but never found it. Maybe she had a romantic idea of what taking drugs was like.

       Lili at fifteen

      Having a job meant Lili soon quit school. She never regretted it, saying, “I wanted to have money to buy things.” She turned her nose up at attempting to learn “a lot of dates in history.”⁴³ She was more interested in making history.

      While at the restaurant Lili was “discovered” by a photographer named Jack Powell, a local Pasadena resident who begged her to pose for professional photographs, promising it wouldn’t cost her a thing. Powell developed a crush on the tall skinny girl with the wide smile who served him pan-fried noodles. Lili loved the camera. She appears fearless in front of it.

      LIKE MANY MODELS WHO MADE UP SCENARIOS IN THEIR HEADS TO get into the mood, Lili was adroit at make-believe. Draped in exotic fabrics Lili could let her imagination run rampant. Lili would have many insecurities about her looks but it never showed in pictures.⁴⁴

      Lili and Jack could laugh over the awful photos of her with her head swathed in a striped bandana. They both hoped the pictures would lead to a modeling career. It did not, despite later claims she worked steady for two years. Her first disappointment.

      If Lili showed the photos to her family, Idella would have made a snide remark, Alice would have exclaimed she looked beautiful, and Dardy and Barbara would have wanted their pictures taken too. Her entire life Lili freely gave out advice to family and friends about decorating, work, relationships. She would counsel Barbara and Dardy on how to get men to do things for them. She, after all, would become expert at it. Perhaps it had started with Jack Powell and his free photographs.

      “DADDY DOESN’T FEEL WELL” BARBARA AND DARDY WOULD OFTEN whisper.⁴⁵ In his youth, Ian had fallen off a motorbike in Scotland and suffered migraines that over time would intensify in frequency and strength. When they struck, the girls were ushered outside. The house would be shuttered, and silence would blanket the normally boisterous household. The girls had to tiptoe when they were allowed back in. It was another accommodation of bad luck for the family.

      No one had gotten over the horrible accident that Betty had suffered. In 1925, when Betty was six and still living in Minnesota, a reckless driver in a Model T hit the little girl while she played in the street. The running board sliced through her face, leaving her with an ugly scar from the top of her head across her nose, through her mouth, and down to her chin. Never as pretty as her sisters, Betty suffered both emotionally and physically. The sisters didn’t talk about Betty much. Dardy would refer to Betty only as the “smart” one. Betty and what happened to her would become a tale the family rewrote, oftentimes denying her very existence. She was never mentioned in any of the sisters’ later press.

       A very rare photo taken by Jack Powell of a ravishing Lili

      CHAPTER FOUR

      During the worst year of the Depression, 1933, unemployment was as high as 25 percent. A loaf of bread was 7 cents and a fancy women’s hat cost upwards of $1.60. Then came the repeal of Prohibition. Audiences lined up to see Fay Wray wriggling in King Kong’s hairy palm while the country swooned to Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady” and sultry Ethel Water sang about “Stormy Weather” in Harlem’s Cotton Club. FDR had just become president and food lines stretched across America.

      Pasadena would see its economy fall dramatically. The city with the idyllic climate—this was years before the smog infestation of the late 1950s—was home to around seventy-seven thousand. The city would never recover its pre-Depression splendor.

      Ian Blackadder was thirty-one years old. He had a hard time finding and keeping work. From garage mechanic he became a salesman for Crown City Dairy based in Pasadena. Money had never been easy to come by and things were tight for both the Blackadder and the Klarquist families. Alice sewed from dusk to dawn at Peterson’s. What beauty Alice might have had had long since worn away from hard work and squinting over piles of stitching.

      That year Lili would have seen Joan Crawford shimmy with Gable in Dancing Lady. Lili loved to dance, loved her hours at the barre and in