Show Business Is Murder

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Show Business is Murder

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ISBN: 978-1-1012-0513-6

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BERKLEY
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Electronic edition: September, 2004

Individual Copyrights

Introduction

STUART M. KAMINSKY

“
THE PLAY'S THE
thing wherein we'll catch the conscience of the king.”

Hamlet was playing detective and using show business, a troupe of traveling players, in an attempt to get the killer to give himself away. Hamlet, being Hamlet, can't resist the urge to step in and tell the actors how to do their job.

Shakespeare was not the first to use a show business/mystery tie-in. Hamlet wasn't the first would-be show business detective.

But he may have been the first truly famous one created by a major author. Excuse me,
the
major author in the English language, if we ignore George Bernard Shaw's somewhat disingenuous dismissal of the bard.

But I digress.

The icons of mystery fiction have always been drawn to show business. An actress took in Sherlock. Poirot was constantly running into theater people. Dorothy Sayers wrote a novel about murder in a publishing house.

It's hard to think of a mystery novelist who wrote more than five books who wasn't drawn to show business.

And then came Hollywood.

Show business mysteries went far beyond and deeply into Hollywood. In his novel
The Little Sister,
Raymond Chandler
set the tone of fascination with, and repulsion by, Hollywood. Ross MacDonaldÂ .Â .Â . I could go on with a list that would include almost every major mystery writer of the last century, but let's focus, at least for a paragraph or two, on one quirky byway of the show business mystery.

A popular, and generally forgotten, young readers' genre in the 1930s and 1940s featured the movie star as detective. I read books with detectives like Bonita Granville and Shirley Temple. I think Jackie Cooper even solved a murder or two.

Andrew Bergman picked up the idea of using real show business figures in mysteries with his LeVine novels, and I, George Bagby, and others kept the books coming. The public that loved mystery movies also seemed to love mystery novels about movies and stars.

This is not to say that other sides of show business were being neglected by the fleet fingers of those of us who like to kill performers and artists on our pages.

Let's jump to this collection of stories. If it has a design, besides the obvious one of show business as focus, it is varietyâvariety in style, subject matter, media, and seriousness. Some of the stories, like John Lutz's tale of a talking dog and mine about an inept vaudevillian, are meant to be funny. Some, like Annette Meyers's tale of a failed show business marriage, are clearly tragic.

Just for fun, we've included a script by Gary Phillips and Ed Hoch's near-fantasy about a performance artist whose act consists of her being a roulette ball.

And media? We have stories about television, movies, theater, the music industry, and even a woman who hires a private detective to find Elvis. We have actors, producers, writers, and musicians who solve the crimes or become the victims.

We have stories set in England, Germany, Chicago, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and an imaginary small town.

We have traditional first-person private-eye novels and third-person not-so-traditional tales from the perspective of killers and victims.

Our tales take place in time over the past 70 years.

If anything else holds this collection of whimsy together, it is that show business is possibly at its most interesting when it is, indeed, murder.

âStuart M. Kaminsky

Small Time in His Heart

CAROLYN WHEAT

T
HEATRE
80 S
T
. M
ARK
'
S
The Movie Musical Theatre
Screening Schedule, SeptemberâOctober 1972

SUN-THURS:
Girl Crazy
11
AM,
3:30
PM,
8
PM
Mickey and Judy put on another show, this time at a Western college. Great Gershwin songs stitch together a paper-thin plot; Judy shines as always.
For Me and My Gal
1
PM,
6:15
PM,
10:15
PM
Gene Kelly's first feature for MGM has him high-stepping with Judy and then breaking her heart by dodging WWI draft (ahead of his time?). Great period fun.

Birch Tate, 1972

WALKING ALONG EIGHTH
Street from the Village, you first crossed Sixth Avenue, under the benevolent eye of the Jefferson Market Courthouse Library. With its turrets and
narrow leaded windows, it looked like a fairy-tale castle. You could picture Rapunzel letting down her long thick hair, which made Scotty laugh when Birch said it, because Scotty remembered when the old Women's House of Detention was there and prisoners leaned out of barred windows, yelling at boyfriends and girlfriends on the street below.

Rapunzel,
Scotty said again, and laughed.

If there was one thing Birch was getting tired of, it was being young. Too young to remember the Women's House of D. Too young to remember Busby Berkeley. Too young to care much about seeing Judy Garland in a movie; to her, Garland was a boozy concert singer with a drug problem and a ruined voice. Which was cool when it was Joplin, but Judy Garland was
old.

She was not, Scotty had decided, going to spend one more day in this abysmally ignorant state. Theatre 80 St. Mark's in the East Village was running a Garland double feature and Birch was, by God, going to know by the end of this afternoon precisely why Judy Garland was the greatest star Hollywood ever produced.

They passed Orange Julius and the wedding-ring store, pushed through the crowd at Macdougal, and met the boys on the corner of Sullivan. Patrick and Stanley were even crazier than Scotty when it came to old movies. Patrick liked to say he was the reincarnation of Ann Miller, which was supposed to be funny because Ann Miller wasn't dead. Stanley preferred somebody called Lubitsch whom Birch had never heard of, and then Scotty said, “But he didn't do musicals,” and Stanley arched his eyebrow and asked, “What about
The Merry Widow?
” and Scotty said, “Oh, you mean that blatant ripoff of Mamoulian's
Love Me Tonight?
”

Who cares?
was what Birch thought, and wondered how long she could stay with Scotty if all they were going to do was spend blue-sky Sunday afternoons watching old movies with a couple ofâ

Queers.

The word popped into her mind before she could stop herself. It wasn't a nice word, and it was especially not nice because what were she and Scotty? But somehow it was different when it was boys.

The trouble was, she was new at this. She'd “come out”âand in her mind the words were always in quotesâonly a few months earlier, and not by choice. She wasn't even sure she really was one, except for one thing: there had never been a boy or a man, in the movies or in real life, who made her feel the way certain girls did. First Enid and now Scotty. She felt a stirring in her jeans just looking at Scottyâher elegant short hair with its slight curl, her long legs in those tight jeans, the silk shirt, the studded belt, the Frye bootsâBirch looked down at her own feet, clad in moccasins, peeking out from under frayed bell-bottoms and wondered for the fiftieth time what a really cool chick like Scotty saw in her.

“My baby dyke,” Scotty called her. “My little tomboy from the Catskills.”

Birch didn't mind being called a tomboy; she'd spent her entire seventeen years of life answering to that description. But “dyke” sounded so ugly. It had sounded especially ugly in the mouths of kids she'd known since kindergarten. When some of her former friends caught her holding hands with Enid at the Tinker Street Cinema last summer, they'd thrown stones at her, called her dyke. Now Scotty used the word with amused affection, as if it could never hurt.

Scotty, present

“
ALL SINGING, ALL
dancing” it said on the long red awning that stretched from Theatre 80's double doors to the curb. You could see that awning from as far away as the Bowery, and you walked toward it with heart high, knowing that no
matter how dreary the day or how low your spirits, the double feature at the end of your trek would change your mood more rapidly and surely than any of the illegal substances being thrust at you along the way. Who needed grass when you had Busby Berkeley? Who needed uppers when Fred and Ginger were dancing cheek to cheek?

Patrick I still miss every day. He was the brother I never had, and yes, I'm well aware that I have three brothers, thank you very much. Three brothers who hate me for three different reasons: Brian because he's a Christian now and I'm going to hell, Ian because he's a stuffy old fart and I embarrass him, and Colin because I had the nerve to be born at all. The only saving grace to Colin is that he'd feel that way even if I liked men.

So Patrick was my soul-friend, the girl I should have been.

Birch, 1972

“
LIKE THAT PLACE
in Hollywood,” Birch said, and Patrick rolled his eyes. Usually she liked Patrick, but she could tell she was about to get another lesson in how little she knew.

“That one's Joan Blondell.” He pointed to the square of sidewalk with handprints and a scrawled signature. As if she couldn't read. Of course, who Joan Blondell
was
and why her handprints belonged in cement outside the theater was unclear; still, she thought she recognized the name Ruby Keeler.

“I was here when she came,” Patrick said with a rapturous sigh. “Oh, she's put on weight and her hair can't possibly be that color in real life, but just to see her, to stand next to herâit was a dream come true.”

Scotty came back with the tickets and they walked through the double doors into the narrow hallway that led to the seats. The white walls were covered with posters and
black-and-white glossies signed by the stars personally to the theater's owner, Howard Otway. Patrick always made a point of blowing kisses at his favorites as they made their way to the coffee bar, a little black-painted cubbyhole just off the screening room.

No popcorn, just movie candy and tiny little cups of very black, very strong coffee. Everyone but Birch bought a cup; she decided on Milk Duds because they lasted nice and long. She suppressed a sigh. The little theatre reminded her of the Tinker Street Cinema back home, where she'd spent so many happy hoursâuntil last summer.

Scotty, present

WHAT WE DID
at Theatre 80 was buy our coffee in the anteroom, push aside the heavy red velvet curtain, and walk across the stage to our seats. Theatre 80 hadn't started life as a movie theater. It was a legitimate stage once home to
You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

This meant that not only did the theater have a little foot-high stage, but the seats were nice and plushy, set wider apart than usual. There was also a real curtain that opened and closed, giving the showings a special touch you just couldn't get at the Quad or even the Regency uptown.

The regulars were there: three old ladies I privately thought of as the weird sisters, a little matched set that reminded me of salt shakers. The old man with the liver spots and the burgundy-colored beret who sat by himself in the fourth row. Groups of gay men wearing sheepskin coats and laughing loudly. Black-clad film students from NYU, who discussed the social implications of the musical in not-hushed-enough voices. Patrick made it a point to steer us to seats as far away from them as possible.

We loved each other very much, Patrick and I, but we
never actually sat together during a movie. He favored the center seats, and I had to have an aisle. No idea why, just an overwhelming need to know I could get up and run out if I had toânot that I ever did. It was just that the thought of being trapped in the center brought on a panic I couldn't control. So I led Birch toward the extreme right side of the theater and found us two seats in the seventh row while the boys edged past a plus-sized couple who glared at them.

The lights dimmed and then darkened, the red curtain was pulled back, the projector began to whir, and a thin blue vapor emanated from a tiny window in the back, projecting an image onto the screen.

And not just any image: The MGM lion roared, and the audience clapped. We were notorious for applause. First the stars received their due (Judy most of all), and then the director got a hand, and the choreographer, and, from the gay men especially, the costume designer.

For Me and My Gal
contains one of the great movie lines of all time. Judy and Gene play vaudevillians in 1917 or so. Just as they get the booking to play the Palaceâthat ultimate clichÃ© of vaudeville musicalsâGene gets his draft notice to fight in World War One. He injures himself to beat the draft, and Judy, whose brother has just died in battle, catches him at it. She turns to him and in a voice dripping with contempt, says: “You'll never be big time because you're small time in your heart.”

Patrick and I loved this line. We repeated it often, cracking each other up every time. Of Richard Nixon the unspeakable, we said only, “He's small time in his heart.”

So of course at intermission, when we met for a shot-glass-size cardboard espresso, we said the line in unison and laughed. Next to us, the weird sister with the whitest hair turned to her companion and said, “I remember the war. I was in high school. We were supposed to knit socks for the soldiers.”

“I knitted three pair,” the other said with pride. “My brother was a doughboy.”

“I only finished one sock,” white hair admitted. “And then the war was over.”

The little old man with the burgundy beret stepped into the room on light, dancer's feet. When he saw me looking at him, he winked and did a little dance, humming “For Me and My Gal” under his breath.

He did a nice soft shoe, his leather soles gliding across the floor, no taps, just thumps of emphasis with the heel. His lithe body was perfect for the moves and the twinkle in his eye told me he was enjoying the little burst of applause that greeted his impromptu performance.

When he was finished, he bowed low and removed his beret. Long wisps of yellow-gray hair barely covered a scalp dotted with liver spots. He stepped to the counter next to me and ordered a double espresso.

Blinking lights in the lobby signaled the end of intermission and the start of the second feature. We made our way back to our seats, but the conversation, and the old man, was not forgotten.

Birch, 1972

GIRL CRAZY
HAD
maybe the dippiest plotline of any movie Birch Tate had ever seen. This playboy from the East, Mickey Rooney, gets sent to a Western college so he'll shape up. Judy Garland works there because her grandfather owns the place or something, and she falls in love with Mickey even though he's the biggest goofball on the planet. Mickey and Judy decide they need to put on a big show to make money for the college, only Mickey has no idea that Judy loves him, so he's always making out with some blonde or other. It was really stupid, and Mickey Rooney struck her as a guy even
straight girls would have a hard time finding sexy, but Judy Garlandâwell, Scotty was right. Judy was amazing.

There was that incredible voice, for one thing, and the big brown eyes and the way her face changed to show exactly what she was thinking all the time. When she sang “They're writing songs of love, but not for me,” Birch found tears on her cheeks. The plot, Mickey Rooney, none of it mattered when Judy sang. The song went clear out of the stupid movie and into a whole world of its own, a world of love and pain and compassion, a world of someone who'd longed for love and wondered if she'd ever find it.

Birch knew that feeling. Back in her freshman year, she and her dad agreed that it was no big deal that nobody asked her to the school dance. She was only fourteen, and there was plenty of time to outgrow her tomboy stage. They both kept saying it as dance after dance came and went without anyone asking Birch (which was not her name back then but the name she took for herself when she realized she had to bend or she would break).

The junior prom was the first one that hurt. Not only had nobody asked her, but the boys she asked turned her down flat. Boys she'd known for years, gone hiking with, played baseball with, told her they wanted to ask other girls instead of her.

Then she took the dainty little watch with the real diamond chips her dad gave her for her sweet sixteen and exchanged it for a waterproof sports watch. For the first time in his life, Sam Tate allowed himself to say what Birch guessed he'd been thinking for a long time: Did she want everyone in Woodstock to think she was a lesbian, for God's sake?

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