City of Nets (47 page)

Houseman went to lunch with Chandler that same day at Lucey's restaurant. Chandler complained, he recalled, of being stuck on a book about three homecoming war veterans. The hero, Johnny Morrison, returned to discover that his wife was being unfaithful. They quarreled. Then she was found dead. Chandler didn't know exactly how the story would turn out. He was thinking vaguely of turning it into a screenplay. Houseman hungrily followed Chandler home to his Spanish bungalow on Drexel Avenue, where they found the aged Cissy swathed in pink tarlatan and nursing a broken leg. Houseman sat down right there and read about a hundred pages of
The Blue Dahlia.
He sensed success. Two days later, Paramount bought the story and assigned Houseman and Chandler to work on it. “They are already casting it without a line of screenplay written,” Chandler wrote anxiously to a friend. “Why do I get myself into these jams?”

Worse was to come. When Chandler delivered the first sixty pages of script, roughly the first half of the film, Paramount assigned the picture to a veteran director, George Marshall, and told him to start shooting the beginning while Chandler continued working on the script. After a month or so, a script girl pointed out the alarming fact that Marshall was filming faster than Chandler was writing. At that point, the crew had finished sixty-two pages but the writer had produced only another twenty-two.

“Ray's problem with the script . . .” Houseman cheerily recalled, “was a simple one: he had no ending.” Alan Ladd, the betrayed war hero, was naturally a prime suspect in his wife's murder, but many other people might have committed the crime, anyone in that swarm of shadowy dealmakers and black marketeers who had flocked to the dead woman's rowdy parties. Houseman said he remained “quite confident” that Chandler would think up some interesting solution to the murder, but when the front office started worrying about the dwindling number of unfilmed pages, the story conferences began. “It was during one of these meetings, early one afternoon,” Houseman recalled, “that a man came running down the Studio street, stopping at various windows to shout to the people inside something we could not hear. When he reached us, he shoved his head in and told us that Franklin D. Roosevelt was dead.” They all “sat stunned for a while,” and then, like everyone else, “said all the obvious things,” and then “fell silent and sat there gloomily for a while.” But
The Blue Dahlia
still had no ending, so the executives resumed their search for the murderer. “We went through all the tired alternatives,” Houseman said, “using them to smother the realities of the world outside, and Ray sat listening, only half there, nodding his head, saying little.”

Two days later, Chandler presented himself at Houseman's office and dolefully announced that he would have to withdraw from the whole project. He looked very shaky. He couldn't solve the murder. Ginsberg, the officious studio manager, had summoned Chandler to his office—warning him not to mention this to Houseman—and then offered him a bonus of five thousand dollars if he could deliver the finished script of
The Blue Dahlia
on time. Chandler appeared to be shocked, stricken. It took Houseman a little time to figure out why, and he concluded that there were three reasons. First, since Houseman had always feigned confidence in Chandler's ability to finish the script, Ginsberg's offer of five thousand dollars provided the first disclosure that Paramount was worried, and therefore Chandler's “sense of security was now hopelessly shattered.” Second, Chandler had been “insulted” by the offer of additional money to complete an assignment that he had agreed to undertake. Third, Ginsberg's action in making the offer without Houseman's knowledge meant to Chandler that he was being invited “to betray a friend and a fellow Public School man.”

This may sound a little too labyrinthine even for Hollywood, but the Paramount administration building was ornamented with Elizabethan timbering and casement windows and quasi-antique hunting prints, so perhaps it was fitting for Chandler and Houseman to sit there and ruminate on the possibilities of an affront to a Public School man. By now, according to Houseman, there were only thirteen pages of script still to be shot, no prospect of an ending, and Ladd due to enter the army in ten days. While Houseman pondered what to do next, Chandler returned to the studio the following day with a remarkable proposition. Although he remained convinced that he could never finish the script while sober, he was just as convinced that he could easily finish it if he stayed drunk. This was a serious matter, for Chandler had only with great difficulty stopped drinking, and his doctor had warned him that he might jeopardize his life if he ever resumed. But for the sake of honor and all that, Chandler now produced a sheet of yellow paper on which he had listed for Houseman his basic requirements:

 

A. Two Cadillac limousines, to stand day and night outside the house with drivers available for:

1. Fetching the doctor (Ray's or Cissy's or both).

2. Taking script pages to and from the studio.

3. Driving the maid to market.

4. Contingencies and emergencies.

 

B. Six secretaries—in three relays of two—to be in constant attendance and readiness, available at all times for dictation, typing and other emergencies.

 

C. A direct line open at all times to my office by day and the studio switchboard at night.

 

This bizarre proposal included obvious signs of a writer's neurotic need for attention, and of an alcoholic's desire to camouflage his need for liquor, but Houseman took it all very literally. His own boss, Joe Sistrom, approved the arrangement on the ground that “if the picture closed down we'd all be fired anyway.” And so, to get the project under way, Houseman took Chandler to an expensive lunch at Perrino's, where the novelist fortified himself with three double martinis before eating and three double stingers afterward.

For the next week, according to Houseman, Chandler “did not draw one sober breath.” Nor did he eat. His doctor came twice a day to give him injections of glucose. He worked intermittently and drank steadily, around the clock. From time to time, he would fall into a light sleep. “He woke in full possession of his faculties,” Houseman recalled, “to pick up exactly where he had stopped with whichever of the rotating secretaries happened to be with him. He continued until he felt himself growing drowsy again, then dropped back comfortably into sleep while the girl went into the next room, typed the pages and left them on the table beside him to be reread and corrected when he woke up.”

Houseman, who dropped by periodically to see how Chandler was progressing, arrived one morning to find that the murder had been solved. Although Chandler was lying unconscious on his sofa, there were several pages of neatly corrected script lying next to a half-empty glass of bourbon, and these pages provided the answers. It was Dad Newell, the house detective, who had murdered Morrison's unfaithful wife. And now the killer turned on his pursuers: “Cheap, huh? Sure—a cigar and a drink and a couple of dirty bucks—that's all it takes to buy me! That's what
she
thought—Found out a little different, didn't she? Maybe I could get tired of being pushed around by cops—and hotel managers—and ritzy dames in bungalows. . . .” It was not very plausible, but that didn't greatly matter, since there were so many suspects that almost anyone in the cast could have committed the crime. Besides, it was an Alan Ladd movie, and Alan Ladd movies didn't need to be plausible; they just needed to display the handsome star, always the loner, hard but vulnerable, vulnerable but hard. He was, as Chandler tartly observed, and as
Shane
was later to demonstrate, “a small boy's idea of a tough guy.”

“The film was finished with four days to spare,” Houseman said, to conclude his splendid story, “Alan Ladd went off to the army, and Paramount made a lot of money.” One of several problems with this splendid story, however, is that although there were announcements the previous fall that Ladd would soon be drafted, there seems to be no evidence that he actually did return to uniform. Ladd had in fact joined the Army Air Corps early in 1943, had served nearly a year in various promotional and fund-raising assignments, and then had received a medical discharge for a double hernia. The idea that a man with such a record should be threatened by the draft in 1945, when the war was virtually over, is rather hard to believe. When this flaw in the story was pointed out to Houseman, though, he strongly answered that “the facts about
The Blue Dahlia,
as outlined in my book—believe me—are totally correct.” On the other hand, Ladd's biographer, Beverly Linet, stated just as firmly that no such redrafting ever took place. What Ladd did do after finishing
The Blue Dahlia
was to go off to his ranch in Hidden Valley while his wife, Sue Carol, a prominent Hollywood agent, bargained with Paramount for a new contract.

Another problem with Houseman's story is that Chandler seems to have had a solution to the murder from the beginning. The killer was not really the house detective, a very marginal character, but the hero's best friend, Buzz Wanchek. Nor was
The Blue Dahlia
a book on which Chandler found himself blocked. On the contrary, he wrote to a friend at the start of 1945 that he was having “a lot of fun” in “writing an original screenplay—a murder mystery, but not entirely that—and if it turns out good enough, I have the right to make a book of it.” Chandler's original idea was that Buzz Wanchek (played to perfection by William Bendix) was a hot-tempered man who returned from the war with a serious head injury that left him periodically subject both to bursts of violence and to spells of amnesia. “What I wrote,” Chandler said later, “was a story of a man who killed (executed would be a better word) his pal's wife under the stress of a great and legitimate anger, then blanked out and forgot all about it; then with perfect honesty did his best to help the pal get out of a jam, then found himself in a set of circumstances which brought about partial recall.”

In a strange way that Chandler himself could hardly have known, his original plot bore remarkable resemblances to the real relationship between Ladd and Bendix. They had met in 1942 in filming a remake of Dashiell Hammett's
The Glass Key.
It was a peculiarly sadomasochistic film, in which the mountainous Bendix, assigned to guard the diminutive Ladd inside a locked basement, kept hitting him and then picking him up and hitting him again, until, ordered to stop, he complained, “Aw, you mean I don't get to smack baby no more?” This was all playacting, of course, except that in the middle of it, Bendix accidentally smashed Ladd on the jaw and knocked him cold. Then, when he realized what had happened, he burst into tears. “My God, what have I done?” he cried.

Ladd, on recovering, was oddly touched by Bendix's concern, and the two became good friends; so did their wives. Bendix, still a newcomer from Broadway, was living in a rented bungalow, and Ladd insisted that he move up in the world, to a house across from Ladd's own place on Cromwell Avenue. So when Ladd came home on leave in 1943 and grumbled to Bendix about the military life, Bendix felt no hesitation about making light of it. “Aw, come on, Laddie, stop griping,” said Bendix, who had been rejected for military service because of severe asthma. “You know you're living a plush life down there in San Diego.” Ladd didn't seem to mind, but his wife, who devoted her whole life to shining and polishing the image of her husband/client, bristled. “You're a fine one to talk—considering you're not rushing off to join up,” she said. Bendix, the gentle giant, was stunned. “He just got up from his chair,” his wife, Tess, recalled, “and walked right out of Alan's house without saying a word.”

Bendix retreated to his own house across the street and waited for his friend Ladd to apologize. Ladd thought that Bendix's abrupt departure was an insult to Mrs. Ladd, for which Bendix should apologize. When Ladd did nothing to make amends, Bendix sold his house on Cromwell Avenue and moved away. For months, the two former friends never spoke to each other, and when business brought them together, the reunions were stiff, polite, formal. As on the set of
The Blue Dahlia,
in which, according to Chandler's original idea, Buzz (Bendix) had been so outraged by the misbehavior of the wife of his best friend, Johnny Morrison (Ladd), that he had killed her, and then forgotten about it.

Chandler had prepared for this explosion—a little obviously but quite powerfully—in the very first scene of his script. Ladd and Bendix, newly out of uniform, got off a bus and went into a bar to toast each other farewell. There, a uniformed marine kept putting nickels into the jukebox, and the noise began to drive Bendix wild.

“
BUZZ:
How about giving that thing a rest?

“The Marine grins at him and drops the nickel in the juke box.

“
BUZZ:
I got a headache.

“
MARINE:
Ain't that a pity!

“The juke box starts up again very loud. Buzz moves around it and kicks the cord loose from the wall. The juke box stops dead.

“
MARINE
[in a hard voice]: Plug that in again, chum—but quick!

“Buzz picks up the cord and jerks it loose from the juke box, holds it out to the Marine.

“
BUZZ:
You plug it in!”

The marine lunged at Buzz, but Morrison stepped in to break it up, not by fighting, interestingly enough, but by flattering and soothing the indignant marine. Only then, when peace was restored, did the bartender scold the returning veterans: “You gents oughta respect the uniform.” And only then did Buzz lean over the bar, part some of the hair over his temple, and say, “What do you figure I had on when I got this? There's a plate under there as big as your brains—maybe bigger.”