THE UNFORGETTABLE LORETTA DARLING

A young English makeup artist, hoarding secrets as well as starry-eyed dreams, takes on midcentury Hollywood.

Margaret, a 20-year-old from England, lands in Los Angeles in 1950 having successfully blackmailed a con artist named Jimmie into getting her there. Renaming herself Loretta as soon as she hits U.S. shores, she heads for Sunset Boulevard, appearing to be a wide-eyed ingenue. But Margaret-now-Loretta is anything but naïve; in fact, she arrives with a particular knowledge gleaned from her mother—a pinch of this vegetation and a petal of that plant, and she has the means to impact another person’s health and even end their life. Still, what she really wants to be is a makeup artist. She befriends Primrose, a proverbial gold-hearted prostitute, and soon meets and marries Raphael Goddard, a ridiculously handsome man whose heart proves to be as tarnished as Primrose’s is pure. As Loretta apprentices with Alecs Petraś, a celebrated makeup artist, she also develops a tantalizing relationship with screenwriter Scott Eliot. So far, so golden Hollywood with a frisson of mystery. There are entertaining scenes focusing on the art and magic of makeup, and Blake clearly enjoys exposing the cattiness of Loretta’s colleagues. But the uneven narrative is frustrating at times: The plentiful and lighthearted celebrity sightings and glamour-infused scenes—at one point, Loretta attends the Academy Awards—clash jarringly with an unexpected violent near-rape, and what is meant to be a final big reveal is foreshadowed so frequently that it emerges as a whimper rather than a bang.

Scattered elements of mystery and an entertaining Hollywood success story never quite gel in this unsatisfying debut.