The Fame Thief (5 page)

I looked around the kitchen, much as Dolores La Marr had looked around the living room, said
“WEEoooo WEEooo WEEooo”
quietly and asked myself where the tray was. This time I just closed my eyes and stood there for a moment, waiting for the next bit of guidance, and when I opened my eyes again, I was looking at one out of a large number of closed cabinets. In that cabinet, I found the tray.

I might have hurried a bit getting back to the living room.

“You may pour,” Dolores La Marr said, a bit grandly, when I was seated.

When I had the cork worked out, I poured her a good full glass, waiting for her to say, “Stop,” but she didn’t. I was still feeling the wine from Dressler’s house, so I was in
do-I-don’t-I
mode, but the wine smelled like a green hillside with a hint of cut grass, so I poured myself some, hoisted my glass, and said, “Cheers.”

“And cheers to you, dear. Are you married?”

“Divorced. One daughter, thirteen.”

“Pretty?”

“So pretty it’s too bad
Life
isn’t still publishing.”

“That was a mixed blessing at best,” she said. “I think that was what tipped everything over.”

“How so?”

“People,” she said vaguely. “Do you get to see your daughter?”

“Yes. My ex-wife and I are polite to each other, through our teeth sometimes, but we both love her too much to make her the rope in a tug of war.”

“Good for you. So many parents these days—”

“Miss La Marr,” I said.

“Dolly.”

“Well, Dolly, I’m not trying to be rude, but you’re not giving me your time to talk about me. We’re here to start trying to understand what happened to you.”

“Actually,” she said, and the quaver was back in her voice, “actually, I’m giving you my time
precisely
to talk about you, at least at the beginning. I need to know who’s going to be bulldozing my past. I need, for example, to be relatively certain that whoever it is has the wit to figure it out and the discretion not to sell it to the tabloids. Is that you, dear?”

I said, “I’ve been a professional burglar since I was fifteen. That’s twenty-two years now, and I’ve never been caught. I have no criminal record. I’ve been working as a kind of detective for crooks, some of them extremely
muscular
crooks, for fifteen years, and none of them has decided to kill me in the aftermath. And except for one richly deserved incident in which I used what I’d learned for blackmail, I’ve never violated a confidence.”

“How does someone deserve to be blackmailed?”

“When the crime he committed involved a young girl who was terrified about the story coming out. At the same time, though, the man who messed with her was on the verge of messing with
someone else. Someone thirteen years old. My client had forbidden me to kill him, so I used what I knew about Girl Number One to force him to abandon his plans for Girl Number Two. He was famous, so being exposed as a child molester was pretty firmly in the
No
column.”

“And would you have killed him?”

“If it had seemed to be the only way to stop him without publicly involving the first girl. If he’d called my bluff, I didn’t have a fallback position because I’d told the first girl I wouldn’t expose her.”

“So you
would
have killed him.”

“My daughter is thirteen.”

“Well, that covers discretion. What about wit?”

“Up to you,” I said. “What am I going to do, tell you I’m smart? Want to see me do calculus on my fingers?”

She pushed her lower lip out and looked down into her wine. Then she looked up at me and then past me, letting her eyes float around the room until they came to rest on something, and once again I had the urge to turn around. She nodded. “I see,” she said. “Do I see?” She waited a moment and then nodded again, and her eyes came back to me. “Yes, I see.”

I said, “Can I have a vote next time?”

“Why not?” she said. “It’s not really like I have a choice. There’s Winnie, up there in the clouds pulling the strings, and he’s probably checking his watch right now, wondering how far we’ve gotten. A million years ago, Al Hirschfeld—do you know Hirschfeld?”

“A caricaturist, right?

“You might say that. He was a genius, but he was a caricaturist, too. Anyway, he did a poster for
My Fair Lady
, the Broadway version, of George Bernard Shaw peering over the tops of clouds and manipulating two puppets representing Rex
Harrison and Julie Andrews. That’s the way I think of Winnie sometimes, although Shaw was more benign than Winnie is.” She held out her glass, which was empty. “Top me up, please.”

I picked up the bottle and poured. “I once knew a con man,” I said, “a gay guy, probably the biggest
My Fair Lady
fan on earth, who told me that poster was the first modern representation of God he’d ever seen, and he always visualized Shaw when he thought of God.”

“There are probably worse gods than Shaw, if you don’t mind relentless rationality. Me, I’d prefer some mysticism, even some quirkiness.” She drank and put the glass down, hard. “We really
are
all over the place, aren’t we? Here’s what you came to find out. Do you want a pen and some paper?”

“I’ll remember it.”

“Fine.” She reached up to the microphone-ear-piece rig and pushed a button. “No reason to tell those adorable Korean boys downstairs all my secrets.”

“Is that what that thing is for?”

“Partly. My cleaning people come in once a week, not that they do much, and I use it to talk to them, too. I don’t get up very easily these days. Mostly, though, it’s to let the boys downstairs know I’m still breathing.”

“I interrupted you. You were about to tell—”

“The tale of me. I was born in a trunk—not really—in a year that was not numbered, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. One of America’s rust capitals. I was a pretty child, and my mother, who had always wanted to be an actress, et cetera, et cetera. You can fill it in. She finally made it out here with me in her suitcase when I was sixteen and she hauled me to every agent in town until one of them looked at me and saw in me precisely the kind of young woman after whom one of the moguls of the day, Max Zeffire of Zephyr Pictures, perpetually lusted. And I mean insatiably.
If he’d been offered nine of me before breakfast he’d have done all of us and still made it to the table before his eggs got cold. So I entered womanhood, so to speak, on Max Zeffire’s casting couch while my mother remained demurely in the outer office, talking race horses with Max’s receptionist.”

“How did you feel about it?”

“I was sixteen, dear, what did I know? It hurt, but it would have hurt exactly as much if I’d given it up to some pimply Scranton boy destined to die in a coal mine at the age of twenty and abandon me to a cold little house full of black dust.” She tipped back the glass, and once again her eyes searched the room behind me. “Instead, I got into the movies, a much better deal. Through Max and some other—oh, let’s call them flirtations—I actually made it up onto the screen.” She wagged a hand back and forth, minimizing the accomplishment. “Along with a thousand other girls who’d
flirted
, in quotation marks, with the right men. But there were
ten thousand
others—this is one of the things that kept us going, dear—there were ten thousand
other
girls who’d given it up to every rake in Hollywood, some of them multiple times, and never even got through the studio gates. So we were a meritocracy of sorts, even if it was a whorish meritocracy. Am I boring you?”

“Not even a little bit.”

“Good. You didn’t want to get involved in this in the first place, dear, so it would be awful if you had to be bored, too. Where was I?”

“A meritocracy. You were in the movies.”

“I was, I was. Have you ever been in a movie?”

“I’ve been on sets.”

“Then you know. People who haven’t made movies think it’s glamorous, but it’s mainly getting up while it’s still dark, having makeup pasted on you and getting pinned into a costume that
someone else has sweated into, and then standing around for hours and hours without wrinkling your clothes until it’s time to step into the light and say your line or raise your eyebrow or whatever you’ve been hired to do. Not tremendously interesting work, but not exhausting, either. For a girl my age, it was wonderful. There were handsome men everywhere, some of them famous, and everyone looked at me, and for the first time in my life, I had enough money. And if I had to sleep with people—men and, once in a while, women—well, so what? Some of them were beautiful and some of them were rich, and some of them were both.” She smiled at me. “But none of them was neither.”

“And Los Angeles was nice back then.”

“It was very, very not Scranton. We had an orange tree in the yard of our apartment house. It took me a year to get over having an orange tree in the yard. I ate the damn things green, I didn’t care. And then we moved to Beverly Hills, the flats, not the fancy part, and we had
several
orange trees, plus rattlesnakes. Beverly Hills used to be infested with rattlesnakes.”

“It still is.”

“Yes, but back then, they warned you before they struck. So I was moving up in the world of movies, going from
Girl in Background
to
Second Chorine
to
Ellie’s Friend
and then all the way up to where I got my first character with a name. Judy, she was called, Judy, and Judy had a really good moment in a Boston Blackie movie—do you remember Boston Blackie?”

“Not really.”

“Budget detective series, but they had their audience. So Judy—who, you’ll recall, was me—had a good moment when her necklace got caught on Chester Morris’s bow tie and her pearls bounced all over the place but she couldn’t bend to pick them up because the necklace was still tangled in his bow tie—he was wearing a tuxedo—so they leaned down together and
bumped heads and wound up in a kiss. Fade out, except that was the moment that brought letters in from the hinterlands and got me into Universe, and into movies that didn’t have Chester Morris in them. With a contract.
Regular money
. My mother was in heaven.”

“Universe Pictures was the studio Dressler helped to run.”

“He helped to run all of them, dear. And the banks and the racetracks and both the movie unions and the studios that hired them, although lesser people might have seen that as a conflict of interest. Nobody did anything important in Los Angeles in those days without Winnie. He was the man behind the screen, like in
The Wizard of Oz
. You know,
Do not look at the man behind the curtain
. So I met Winnie, and he took an interest in my career—all very up-and-up, because of Blanche. Winnie never fooled around on Blanche, even though he had all sorts of romantic yearnings for pretty girls—and he got Mr. Winterman to notice me, and I began to get better parts.”

“Blanche,” I said.

“Winnie’s wife. Winnie was the Husband of the Century.”

“Is she dead?”

“I have no idea, dear. It would be a misery if she weren’t. She had advanced senile dementia, got it very young and had it forever. Practically the only thing she remembered, poor thing, was that her older sister had died of scarlet fever when Blanche was twelve. She did nothing but cry for years.”

I’d seen no sign that Dressler was married, nor had I read about it, although very few aspects of his private life ever made it into print. “Did you meet her?”

“I’d never have met her, not in my circle, but practically nobody did. She was from an old family, listed in the Los Angeles Blue Book. Gentile, of course, in those days, and her parents were frantic not to have it get out that she’d married a Jew, and
a
gangster
Jew at that. She and Winnie eloped, got married by a justice of the peace in Santa Barbara, and lived very quietly. But, in the interest of time, let me get back to my story. The funny thing was that it wasn’t Winnie who got me involved with organized crime. It was George Raft.”

“I remember George—”

“Georgie was dumb,” she said. She was looking down into her empty glass as though she could see tiny figures from the past in it. “A sweet man and great in the sack, but dumb as a bag of nuts. I was never sure he could actually read or write. I know he had his movie scripts read to him, because I’m the one who read some of them. Here’s how dumb Georgie was. He wanted to get out of his contract at Warner Brothers, and that prick Jack Warner was sick and tired of him, so he asked Georgie what it would take to terminate the contract. Warner was thinking he’d have to pay Georgie a hundred thousand, a hundred and a half, to get out of the arrangement, but Georgie said, ten thousand. Warner practically leapt at it, but before he could write Georgie a check, Georgie wrote
him
one.” She shook her head. “Dumb, dumb, dumb. Ten thousand was a lot of money in those days. My big contract at Universe, I made three hundred fifty dollars a week.”

She looked up at me and gave me a smile that almost melted me, the smile that had sold a hundred thousand copies of
Life
. “Poor Georgie. He made Bogart a star, you know. Turned down
High Sierra
and
The Maltese Falcon
and
Casablanca
, turned down half the scripts that transformed Bogart into Bogey. Everybody thought Bogey was the tough guy, but Bogey was a tennis-playing socialite and Georgie grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, with real gangsters, not the movie kind. It wasn’t his fault he was dumb. One of his friends when he was a boy was Owney Madden. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of Owney Madden.”

“I remember. The Killer, right?”

“Right, that was his nickname. The Killer. Little cocky English guy, but he grew up in New York near Georgie, got famous as the kid who was shot eleven times one night on 52nd Street and lived. After he got out of the hospital, the boys who shot him began to turn up in the East River. Showed his talent early. He grew up to be a big man in the mobs, much to Georgie’s envy. Owned the Cotton Club in Harlem, owned part of The Stork Club—where I had some of the best nights of my life. Probably Owney’s most famous murder was when he killed Vincent ‘Mad Dog’ McColl, whom I’m sorry to say I never met. Nickname like that, I’d have liked to have a drink with him. Most of the guys with the horrific nicknames were pussycats. Anyway, Owney Madden was Georgie’s friend, and I was also Georgie’s friend. And you know what they say about the friends of my friends.”