And You Will Find Love

Chicago, Early 1936

Barbara cringed, sitting alone in a dark movie theater in downtown Chicago, when up on the screen James Stewart was serenading Eleanor Powell in Born to Dance by singing "I've Got You Under My Skin."Not because Stewart couldn't sing, which he couldn't, but because it reminded her of how she still felt, about Paul Riordan.

And, too, one of the first things she had said to Gail when she learned she was engaged to Paul was, "Oh, then we won't be able to go to the show anymore!"

Funny, she thought, how things like that come to mind and are spoken; sometimes seemingly unimportant things that at one time or another become more important. After her friends' marriage, she came to realize how lonely she felt going to the movies alone, when that had never bothered her before she knew Gail.

How their lives had changed, in a few short months, she reflected, unable to concentrate on the movie which, outside of its Cole Porter songs, was really not very good. She knew where she'd rather be, besides in Paul's arms; home in her apartment, reading more of Gone With the Wind.

Margaret Mitchell's sweeping, steamy novel of the Old South had taken America by storm. Barbara and every other woman reading it was already casting the movie. Everyone agreed Clark Gable had to be Rhett Butler. But a nationwide search had already begun for the actress to play Scarlett O'Hara. She didn't agree with the choice of any of the front-runners: Bette Davis, Miriam Hopkins, Susan Hayward, or Paulette Goddard. There was only one woman who could really play the tempestuous Scarlett -- Barbara Markey! Only, she reluctantly admitted to herself, besides the fact she couldn't act, she didn't have red hair.

There was another song she began hearing in Born to Dance, and it troubled her...

"You'd be so Easy to Love, so easy to idolize, all others above..."

Was she easy to love? No, she admitted to herself. She had not found it easy to fall in love, except with the man she could not have. No one else interested her; certainly not Chet Armstrong the Fourth. She thanked her stars she had not seen since he crashed Gail's and Paul's wedding.

Chet had gotten obnoxiously drunk at the reception and passed out at the urinal in the men's room while in the act of relieving himself. Two playful and also inebriated society boy friends of his poured their bottles of beer up and down over him as he lay on the tile floor, then ran out laughing.