Shooting for the Stars (2 page)

Chapter
2

T
HE
meeting with Abbie Kincaid was scheduled for the next morning. After I left Lang's office in midtown, I took a subway downtown to the
Daily News
building in lower Manhattan. I stopped by the entertainment section of the paper and asked one of the movie writers what he could tell me about Laura Marlowe. I was curious.

“Her first movie was
Lucky Lady
, a romantic comedy that became a blockbuster hit,” he said. “Very funny, very charming. It did what
Pretty Woman
would later do for Julia Roberts. It turned Laura Marlowe—who was only nineteen at the time—into a Hollywood superstar virtually overnight.

“A year later, she did
The Langley Caper
. A terrific thriller that was another big hit. Sort of like
Lethal Weapon
meets
All The President's Men
. A complete change of pace for her as an actress, but she pulled it off. Every studio head in Hollywood was clamoring to put her in a picture after that. She was the hottest thing in show business.

“Then she made what turned out to be her last film,
Once Upon a Time Forever
. An epic love story—set in the nineteenth century—about a princess who loses her crown and her wealth, but finds the true meaning of happiness.” He made a face. “Not a great movie. But it's all we have left of her, so a lot of people look at it as kind of a cult classic.”

He clicked on his computer, found a snippet of
Lucky Lady
on YouTube, and played it for me. I watched a few minutes of Laura Marlowe on the screen. She was young and beautiful with jet-black hair, sensual lips and eyes, and a terrific figure. But even more than her looks, it was her charisma and personality that grabbed you right out of the screen. You just knew you were seeing something really special.

Then he played me some Laura Marlowe scenes from
The Langley Caper
and
Once Upon a Time Forever
.

“And those three movies are all she did?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“So why is she such a legend?”

“She died young.”

“Just like James Dean.”

“Right. James Dean only made three movies too, come to think of it. Dying young solves a lot of problems. You never get old, you never do a lot of bad movies at the end of your career, and you never wind up making guest appearances on shows like
Hollywood Squares
or
Celebrity Rehab
.”

“It's better to burn out than fade away,” I agreed.

After that, I read some of the old stories about the Laura Marlowe murder.

It happened when she returned to her New York hotel after a party for
Once Upon a Time Forever
. Witnesses said the guy who shot her had been hanging around the hotel for days, hoping to get a glimpse of her. They thought he was just an enthusiastic fan. They never suspected he was a killer who had somehow made her the target of all his rage and paranoia and obsession.

She was still alive when the first ambulance got there. The paramedics worked on her desperately, trying to stop the bleeding. At
first, there was hope she might make it. Thousands of crying and praying people had gathered at the site and outside the hospital where she was taken to recover. But then she took a turn for the worse and the announcement came that there was no more the doctors could do. She was dead.

Two days after she died, the body of the man who'd been stalking her was found in a cheap hotel room near Times Square. His name was Ray Janson. Janson had hung himself.

He left behind a rambling note in which he professed his undying devotion and love for the slain actress and said that he wanted them to be together for eternity. The last line of the note said simply: “Tell Laura I love her.” The police ruled it a murder-suicide. The case was closed. And Laura Marlowe faded away into history.

There was a famous picture of Laura Marlowe blowing a kiss to the camera at the party just hours before she died. That memorable, haunting photo of the doomed young actress appeared on the
Daily News
front page with a headline that said simply:
ONE LAST KISS
. It became one of the most legendary New York City newspaper Page Ones of all time. A huge blowup of it hangs in the
Daily News
lobby—along with front pages on Son of Sam and all the other big crime stories. I probably must have walked past that famous picture of Laura Marlowe more than a thousand times on my way to and from work and never gave it a second thought. Until now.

I went online to see if I could find more information about her.

Her real name was Laura Makofsky, and she had come from a broken home in New Jersey. Her father left when she was very young, and her mother worked as a costume designer on several Broadway shows. Laura was an adorable child—and by the time she was a teenager, she was going out on casting calls for TV commercials and stage and movie roles. It was her mother who changed
her daughter's name to Laura Marlowe, and—by all ­accounts—was the catalyst in her career as an actress.

For a long time, nothing happened. There was a bit part here and there, but Laura Marlowe was just one of thousands of pretty young girls trying to break into show business. Then, at the age of nineteen and reportedly so discouraged that she was ready to quit, she somehow got plucked out of obscurity and landed the role in
Lucky Lady
that made her famous. She did her second hit movie by the time she was twenty, and she was only twenty-two when she died shortly after filming that final movie.

Even at the height of her fame, though, there were problems.

During the filming of
The Langley Caper
, she was involved in a serious auto accident that left her in the hospital for six weeks and raised fears that she might be permanently disfigured. There was also a behind-the-scenes legal battle going on between her mother and the agent who had represented her for several years before she hit it big in Hollywood—she'd been fired by Laura's mother. They finally reached an out-of-court settlement, but people around Laura said she seemed very upset over the whole thing.

By the time she began shooting
Once Upon a Time Forever
, she was not in good shape. They had to shut down the production several times when she simply stopped showing up on the set. There was a lot of speculation about the reasons for her disappearance. The most prevalent theory was that she'd suffered some kind of breakdown and was undergoing treatment at a rehab or clinic. Eventually she returned and completed the movie, only weeks before her murder in New York City.

Somewhere along the line she'd gotten married. Her husband's name was Edward Holloway, and he was with her in New York the night she got shot. Looking on in horror as the unthinkable happened, just like Yoko with John Lennon. Kneeling at his wife's side as she lay on the street dying. There was a picture of him delivering
the eulogy at her funeral, and descriptions of him breaking down in tears at the gravesite.

Since then he'd dedicated his life to keeping her memory alive. There were Laura Marlowe posters, cups, and other mementos; a Laura Marlowe film seminar and acting school; and even a fan club and newsletter.

“She was the most beautiful person to ever walk this earth,” Holloway said in one article. “I think about her every day. And I want everyone else to know her too, even if she is no longer here with us.”

The article also pointed out that the Laura Marlowe memorial business still earned about $5 million a year.

Dying young like Laura Marlowe sure did pay off for the living.

Stacy Albright, the
Daily News
city editor, walked by my desk.

“Did you get the interview with Abbie Kincaid?” she asked me.

“It's set for tomorrow morning.”

“Great.”

“Absolutely.”

“I think this could be a really important story for you.”

“You know, I was just thinking the same thing.”

“I'd really like to see you become a big part of the team I'm building here, Gil.”

“Hey, Gil Malloy is a team player.”

“Let me know how the interview goes tomorrow.”

“Sure. Just to be clear, Stacy, the interview is supposed to be about an exclusive story that Abbie is going to break on her TV show this week. About the death of Laura Marlowe, the old movie actress. But they won't tell me what the exclusive is.”

“Yes, that's the agreement we worked out.”

“So what exactly is my story here?”

“Let me explain again, Gil,” she said, as if she was talking to a small child. “I'm trying to set up a marketing partnership with
The Prime Time Files
. The idea is we'd promote their exclusives and they'd do the same with ours. In this case, in return for us doing an advance promo on Abbie's exclusive, they'll mention our article in the show and also let us live stream the segment simultaneously on the
Daily News
website and provide us with video to use afterward. Quid pro quo, if you will. I know this is difficult for someone like you—who is more familiar with the old-fashioned, more traditional ways of journalism—to adapt to the ways we want to do things now. But it is essential for our success in new media to not just be a print newspaper anymore. So let me know as soon as you finish the interview tomorrow. I'll work with you on getting up something very quickly on our website before you write your piece for the next day's paper. I think this could be a positive experience for both of us. Don't you agree, Gil?”

“Right back at you, Stacy,” I smiled.

She walked back to her office. Stacy Albright personified everything that was wrong with newspapers today. She was twenty-six years old; she'd been named city editor a few months ago after increasing traffic by 250 percent on the
Daily News
website by completely redesigning and relaunching the site. Her background was in social media, multi-media cross-platform management, and digital marketing. I'm not sure if she ever actually covered a news story on her own. But in the wake of layoffs and dismissals and other changes that had turned the
Daily News
upside down in recent times, she had somehow become a rising star while many of the real editors were now gone. Welcome to the world of newspapers in the age of the Internet.

Me, I'd somehow managed to hang on at the
News
through all
of the turmoil. Even though I had a pretty checkered career at the paper—filled with lots of high points, but also some infamous low moments too.

When I started some fifteen years ago, it was
all
high points. I was the boy wonder—going from copyboy to reporter to columnist in just a few years. I won awards for my coverage of 9/11, crime in New York City, City Hall investigations, and a bunch of other stuff. It was like I could do no wrong.

But then I did. Something wrong, that is. I wrote a story about an interview I did with a legendary New York hooker named Houston for an investigative series on prostitution in the city. The Houston interview was so good that it won me a lot of awards and even got me nominated for a Pulitzer. Except the interview never really happened. Instead, when I couldn't actually find Houston, I used a bunch of second-hand quotes I'd gotten from people on the street and tried to pass off as a first-person interview with her. I'm still not sure why. I guess I just wanted the story so badly that I was even willing to violate my integrity as a journalist to get it. It's the only time I've ever done that. But once is too much. I crossed over the one line that no journalist can ever compromise. The truth.

I thought my newspaper career was over. But then one day I got a second chance. I wrote another big story—about a corrupt police official who had killed people to hide the secrets of his past in order to further his rise to police commissioner. Later, I broke another big exclusive linking the murder of the Manhattan DA's daughter to a series of unsolved serial killings over the years. I was a star again.

But it turned out not to be that easy for me.

There was the integrity issue, of course. A reporter's integrity—his ability to make people trust him—is the most important thing he has. There was always going to be someone who would bring that up. Oh, Gil Malloy—he's the one that made up that story
about the hooker, right? But the truth was that really wasn't so much of a problem for me anymore. In the world of social media and instant journalist online, people tended to forget, forgive, and move on a lot quicker than they used to. You were only as good—or as bad—as your last story.

And that was my real problem.

You see, I'd somehow become more of a celebrity at the
Daily News
than an actual day-to-day reporter. The two big exclusive stories I'd broken had both been high-profile cases that garnered me a lot of attention. There were TV appearances, magazine interviews, book deal offers—all that sort of heady stuff afterward for me both times. So the paper used me as the public face of a
Daily News
reporter whenever they wanted to be noticed or make a big splash in the media. That's how I wound up getting assigned to the Abbie Kincaid story. It was simply a publicity stunt for the paper—or, as Stacy Albright described it, a marketing partnership. So I was a star again these days. Sort of. Except I wanted to be a real reporter. And, to do that, I needed a story. A real story. A big story.

I shut off my computer and walked out of the office. On my way through the
Daily News
lobby, I looked at the picture of Laura Marlowe on the front page from the night she died thirty years ago, blowing a kiss to her adoring crowd at the movie party just before she was murdered. She looked so young, so beautiful, so full of life. Not knowing how little time she had left.

“I think this could be a positive experience for both of us,” Stacy Albright had said to me in the newsroom earlier.