Melody

Melody is a party guest. She attends a campaign fundraiser thrown in 1947 Los Angeles by Calvin Chadwick, an industrialist courting support for a run at the United States Congress, the kind of glittering evening where Hollywood money and political ambition mix over cocktails. At the bar she notices Jack Thompson, the visiting New York chief of the Strategic Scientific Reserve, drinking with a frown she takes as a challenge, and she decides she can be the one to make him smile. Melody belongs to the period texture of postwar Los Angeles society: the guests, gowns, and flirtations of that world.