The Fame Thief (7 page)

“They were
fun
,”
she said. Her first glass from the new bottle was half-empty, and the additional wine seemed to be energizing her, or maybe it was the memory of those long-dead gangsters. “When a girl had gotten used to going out with men who wore
more makeup than she did, it was exciting to be with someone who could barely be bothered to shave and whose suits were tailored to hide a shoulder holster.” She held the glass out for more, and I purposely misunderstood and clinked it with my mostly-empty one. It was getting on toward 10
P.M.
, and I had to drive back to the Valley, back to where Ronnie would be waiting in the Valentine Shmalentine Motel.

“They were real, do you know what I mean?” Dolores La Marr said. She gave her glass a disappointed glance. “If they got shot, they really bled. Sometimes, they really died. They lived with the knowledge they could die tomorrow, so they made everything they could out of today. Or tonight, if it was dress-up time. The men in Hollywood, most of them, half-believe that after they die they’ll be brought back for the sequel.”

“How were they with women?”

“Awful, mostly. But not with me. They treated me fine. Even the crazy ones, because there were some crazy ones. Like Nitti, who was a complete bedbug. But they knew that the not-so-crazy ones would punch holes in them if they got wrong with me, so everybody was a gentleman. As much of a gentleman as they could be, I mean.”

“So there you were, making movies in the daytime and going out at night with gangsters.”

“Going back and forth to New York, too, once or twice. Owney Madden owned part of The Stork Club—oh, I already told you that, sorry—and we were treated like royalty. And Georgie was still a star, then. Even my own wretched little career was taking off. I’d made
Hell’s Sisters
with the Queen Bitch of Hollywood, Olivia Dupont, and even though it was a quickie, it packed them in, at least, in the middle of the country and the South. Variety’s headline was
SISTER HISSER HITS IN STICKS
. The
Life
cover came out. This was all in the first half
of 1950. Mr. Winterman was talking to my agent, Dickie Willeford, about giving me a good small part in a bigger movie.” She held out the glass once more. “Toast me again, and I’ll pour the rest of it into your lap.”

“Olivia Dupont,” I said, tilting the bottle. “I remember her. Come to think of it, I remember
Hell’s Sisters
. I saw it on Turner a few years back. I’d never seen women go at each other like that in a film that—that—”

“That old,” she said. “Like I said, it was 1950, which is sixty-two years ago. Jesus, where did the time go? Livvy and I were good at going after each other because we just purely, chemically loathed each other. She was a rotten little bitch who’d been sleeping her way sideways for years and years, and she felt she was
far
too good for the movie, and, by extension, me. She wasn’t pretty, but she had one of those faces the camera assembled. It loved her eyes, and the eyes kind of dragged the rest of her face along with them.”

“Your eyes aren’t exactly forgettable.”

“
I’ve
forgotten them.”

“Well, I haven’t. When I saw the movie, I remember thinking it was a film about women’s eyes.”

“That’s very kind of you, considering it was actually a potboiler about two sisters in an old house, with one trying to drive the other one crazy so she could stick her in an asylum and inherit everything. What
I
remember was restraining myself from breaking Livvy’s neck. We actually knocked each other around a bit in one of the fight scenes. I put a nice mouse under her left eye and they had to shoot what she called
her bad side
, as though she had a good one, for days and days. The only time I was happy on the whole miserable shoot. And the clothes were awful.”

“But it was a pretty good movie.”

“There’s no relationship between how happy a set is and how good the movie is. As much as I hate to say it, Livvy was better than I was. She had the good part, by which I mean the bad sister. It was my fate to be the good one, the one who suffered silently off to the right while Livvy exuded malice, screen center. My luck. If I’d been playing the bad one, I probably could have survived the scandal and the committee hearings.”

The bottles of pills were digging into my leg, and I was having trouble reconciling Dolores La Marr’s vitality, as she looked back on her life, with the enormous, elderly woman on the couch, a woman who had probably gained all that weight as a protective layer for the beauty she had once been. A woman who’d stockpiled a lethal cache of sleeping pills. I said, “But you weren’t the bad girl. You were playing the innocent.”

“And there I was in real life,” she said, “up to my neck in the mob.” She leaned back on the couch, lifted her head, and closed her eyes. Her eyelids were almost translucent, and with her chin lifted, I could see that she’d had work done on her neck and, possibly, at her hairline: a neck lift, a face tug. Her mouth, I realized, was less full than the lipstick made it. For a moment, she almost looked her age.

“It was June 23, 1950. Friday. I was going to a weekend party in Las Vegas. Georgie had invited me. Sam Giancana was there, and a couple of other
capos
. Also a six-pack of the big-knuckle guys who were always around as human shields. It was in a hotel, Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo, in a huge suite Johnny Roselli had taken for the weekend. Poor Johnny. Got caught up in that crazy CIA plot to kill Castro, wound up floating in an oil drum off of Miami with his legs sawed off. Handsome Johnny, they called him.

“Anyway, usually the Vegas cops were clued in and the guys were left alone, but this night, some local cops and a couple
of Feds kicked the door in, and with them were two freelance photographers, paparazzi, you’d call them today. We were all photographed to death in the suite, which the photographers messed up first to make it look like the leftovers of a massive orgy, and then we were booked, but everyone was bailed out within an hour or two. Everyone but me. The cops forgot to haul me into the night court to set bail. The photographers came back the next morning and shot me through the bars. No sleep, no shower, no hairbrush, my makeup all over my face from crying. A nightmare picture. It was
everywhere
.

“In the next few days, a dozen other stories came out, leaked from who-knows-where. Where I’d been, who I’d been with. Vegas, New York, Scandia Restaurant, Ciro’s, and the Moulin Rouge, here on Sunset. Pictures taken with a long lens. Known criminals and me. Bathing suits next to swimming pools, one with my top off, although my back was turned, and a man—Johnny Stampanato, it was, the one Lana Turner’s daughter killed—oiling my back. Johnny had just gotten out of the Marines, and he—oh, never mind. One day, I was the wide-eyed innocent from Scranton who was hitting it big in the sticks, and a week later I was the Whore of Babylon, I was a gun moll, I was a paid companion. I was a prostitute.” She put the empty glass down and sat slumped, looking at it. “I was over.”

I said, “It was a setup.”

She looked at me as though I were a personal disappointment. “Of course, it was. And that’s the actual reason you’re here, isn’t it? To find out who set me up.”

I pointed the car west on Olympic, then took LaBrea north and grabbed the ramp in the Cahuenga Pass that leads to the Hollywood Freeway. It was drizzling, as it often does in February, and drizzle turns LA roads into skating rinks, so I kept a lot of space between me and the car in front of me.

I had a list of names of people who had known about Dolores La Marr’s choice of nocturnal companionship back at the end of the 1940s. It was quite a long list. Then I had a list of those of them who were still alive, or might be. This was a much shorter list.

I was going to spend the next week or so with senior citizens.

Interesting senior citizens, to be sure. A former director, Doug Trent. The dragonlike Olivia Dupont, apparently too mean to die. A writer, Oriole Finlayson. A one-time gossip columnist and the reputed squeeze of a couple of studio heads, Melly Crain. The longtime editor of the Las Vegas paper, a guy reputed to have been mobbed up to his teeth, Abe Frank. A woman who had worked in publicity under Bugsy Siegel, back before he got his left eye blown out in his girlfriend’s living room, Delilah Polland.

Both Abe Frank and Delilah Polland were still living in Vegas, so I guessed I was going to Vegas.

And I still couldn’t see who was going to benefit from all this effort. Dolores La Marr, if suddenly absolved of all sins, would remain a hugely overweight woman in her eighties. Her career was not simply on hold, the waiting film sets silent with hushed anticipation, and she knew it. The sense I’d gotten from talking to her was that she saw the whole thing as a lot of useless fuss, but since it was
Irwin Dressler’s
useless fuss, she was willing to cooperate.

We’d barely touched on it, she and I, but there was also the chance that my activities could backfire somehow and put the spotlight back on her, in a way she wouldn’t want. There’s no story modern journalism loves more than the wreckage of beauty, the destruction of high hopes, the fall of a star, all the way from the top of the highest marquee to the most sodden trash heap. It had been more than sixty years since Dolores La Marr was a star, and she hadn’t been much of a star even then, but the laziest editor in the world would see the value of that
Life
cover side-by-side with a 300-pound woman with hair darker than Elvis’s and tattooed eyebrows. On a slow day, it would lead every ten o’clock news show in the country.

Mine was not to reason why, not where Irwin Dressler was concerned.

Almost eleven, and traffic to the Valley was still slow. As I approached Van Nuys Boulevard, I took a chance and dialed the cell phone that belongs to my daughter, Rina. I knew she kept it beside her—if not actually surgically attached to her ear—at all times, so the ringing probably wouldn’t wake up my ex-wife, Kathy.

But it did wake up Rina.

“H’lo?” Although she’s only thirteen, my daughter sings bass when she’s awakened, and the voice was something that might have come from a very large, very deepwater fish.

“Were you asleep?”

“No,” she said. Then she mumbled something to herself and said, “Of course, I was asleep. But for some reason, everybody always says no. Why is that?”

“You’re not actually expecting me to give you an answer, are you?”

“You woke me up,” she said. “You’ve got to do something.”

“Okay. At a guess, it’s so the person who called won’t feel like a schmuck for interrupting your sleep.”

“And do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Feel like a schmuck.”

“No. Would you like me to?”

She stretched, and I could hear it in her breathing. “You’re no fun.”

“Estes Kefauver,” I said.

She said, “Listen to me not say
gesundheit
. Who is Estes Kefauver, and why do I care?”

“You want to earn money, right? For the Mac Air? Well, here’s how.”

“Spell
Kefauver
.”

“Figure it out yourself, and bill me. Twelve-fifty an hour. Senator Estes Kefauver presided over hearings into American organized crime back in the early fifties, and I want either transcripts or video of the testimony of one witness.”

“Any old witness?”

“An actress called Dolores La Marr.”

“L-a-m-a-r-r-?”

“No. The fancy way, in two parts
La
and
Marr
.”

“Dolores La Marr,” Rina said. “Why do I have a feeling that’s not her real name?”

“Good point. Her real name is Wanda Altshuler.”

“Are you looking for anything special? Or just a data dump?”

“I don’t know. Or maybe I do. I want to know what the panel asked her. Somebody set her up, practically framed her, and she was hauled to Washington to testify.”

There was a pause, which was good because I was changing lanes to avoid someone who wanted to drive up my tailpipe. “I don’t get it,” Rina said. “What are you supposed to be doing? Somebody framed her, you said. It would seem to me you’d be looking for the person who framed her, even if it
was
, like, sixty years ago.”

“And you’d be right.”

“Then why do you care what she was asked?”

Why
did
I care what she was asked? “Someone went to a lot of trouble to bring her down, probably paid off cops and even got the Feds into it. It was dangerous and complicated. In fact, maybe it was too dangerous and too complicated just to wreck the career of a B-movie actress. So maybe they wanted to destroy Dolores La Marr, and maybe they didn’t actually care about that. Maybe they wanted to put her somewhere where she’d have to answer a specific question.”

“You mean about someone else?”

“Presumably.”

“What you’re saying,” Rina said, “is that Dolores La Marr might not have been the victim. She might have been the weapon.”

“You are
so
my daughter,” I said.

I’d been living
in motels since I left the house in Tarzana in which Rina and Kathy still lived. My routine is simple: a new motel every month. It’s one of the ways I try to be available only to those who are relatively unlikely to kill me. This month, as Dressler had somehow discovered, Ronnie and I were at Valentine Shmalentine, the pinkest building in greater Los Angeles,
a city in no danger of running out of pink buildings. In its gray semi-industrial area of Canoga Park it stood out like a boil, but just in case both of the lovers in urgent need of a room were color-blind, a giant neon heart, the sizzling purple of a power-mad fuchsia, burned in front of it twenty-four hours a day.