Indigo, page 5
“Let me guess. Fanta’s been after you to get in shape, and this is your answer.”
“Don’t be a loon. I address that by taking the stairs instead of the elevator the third Wednesday of each month.”
“Why the third Wednesday?”
“It’s the day my Social Security check is deposited. That way I never forget, and have become the fine physical specimen you see before you as a result.”
The pot-bellied academic, in a corduroy jacket worn shiny at the elbows, ill-advised horizontally striped sweater vest, frayed collar, baggy slacks, and scuffed Spectators, stepped up to the board and retrieved the dart.
Valentino held his tongue as regard to his mentor’s self-description; Broadhead’s infamous iconoclasm did not extend to remarks directed against himself. “In that case, I can only conclude that you intend to turn this place into an Irish pub.”
“English. The Irish need the extra room for drunken brawls. I can say that without incurring the wrath of HR, because my grandfather on my mother’s side came from County Sligo. He disinherited Mom for marrying a Brit.” He returned to his mark—it was there on the floor, an actual chalk line—and took aim.
“Where are the other darts?”
“Budget cuts.” The projectile struck the target dead center. “Blast!”
“What’s wrong? You hit the bull’s-eye.”
“Don’t offer an opinion until you understand the rules. This infernal enterprise represents my work ethic.”
“You call this working?”
Broadhead cocked a polished elbow toward his computer, a battleship-gray antique as big as a pizza oven. “It’s how I warm up. The part of the board I hit determines the number of pages I’ll write that day.”
“So today it’s ten.”
“As on every other day, it’s best two out of three. I can manage the five pages represented by the outer perimeter standing on my head—if I use fifteen-point type and three-inch margins.”
“Blocked?”
“No, I just suck at darts. Blast and double-blast!” Ten again. He left the dart there and slouched behind his desk. “I can’t seem to finish the damn chapter on drinking in the movies. It makes me thirsty, and I swore off liquor a year ago.”
Reflecting on last night, Valentino realized he hadn’t seen Broadhead do more than lift his champagne glass in salute. “Why? I’ve never seen you drunk.”
“Nor will you. My age is the time to quit bad habits for good. That way I won’t have to keep it up for long.”
“So put the chapter aside and move on.”
“Not an option. In addition to being a recovering alcoholic I’m an obsessive compulsive. I cannot ‘move on’ to Chapter Four until I’ve completed Chapter Three.”
“You’ve only written three chapters? You started the book two years ago.”
“Thank you for pointing that out. Something tells me you didn’t come here to cause me torment. When I need that, I can always call out to Ruth.”
His visitor pulled up the only other chair in the room and sat. He told him about his trip to Bozal’s house and the old man’s gift and what he’d asked for in return.
“You both profit,” Broadhead said. “He winds up with the director’s cut of the most eagerly sought Grail in our profession, and you get yet another feather to stick in a cap that already resembles a Sioux war bonnet.”
“Actually, Bleak Street and Greed are equals, in terms of being fellow victims. They were both considered to be casualties of attrition and neglect, destroyed probably to make storage room for more commercial properties.”
“Like Francis the Talking Mule.” Broadhead stabbed a fistful of tobacco into his dilapidated pipe from the Taster’s Choice can where he kept it; his disdain for the aesthetics of his vice stood shoulder-to-shoulder with his disregard for university rules and state law. He struck a match and filled the room with smoke the color of dirty cotton batting and the odor of burning tires. Valentino tipped his chair far enough back to crack the door.
“So what troubles you, sprout? Conflicted over whether to keep this latest windfall to yourself or pass it along to the university that keeps you in Milk Duds and Big Gulps?”
“No. I resolved that issue by turning it in to the lab. Maybe you can use your influence with the dean to loan it to me for the premiere. You’re teacher’s pet; I got that on the authority of Jack Dupree.”
“And who in thunder is Jack Dupree? Sounds like a riverboat gambler.”
“He’s only run the lab as long as I’ve been here. You just gave him your hangover cure.”
“Oh, yes, the black youngster with the bowling-ball dome. Did it help?”
“Never mind that. You should make an effort to learn the names of your staff.”
“I’m an educator. I don’t have a staff. That sign on my door was a gift in lieu of a raise.”
“There isn’t any sign on your door.”
“I misplaced it along with the key. My position as head of the Film and TV Preservation Department is strictly honorary, a title to impress would-be donors in the endless round of cocktail parties I’m obliged to show up at and pretend apple juice is bourbon. I made it clear at the outset I would attend no meetings and make no decisions.”
“Kind of the way you teach class.”
“I never miss the first day or the last. I provide the sturdy bookends between which the teaching assistants mold young minds. Many of those moldy young minds have gone on to respectably mediocre academic careers.” He took the pipe from between his teeth and let it smolder in the jar cover he used for an ashtray. “Cut to the chase, lad. Those five pages aren’t going to write themselves.”
“Ten.”
“Speak!”
“Henry Anklemire wants me to close the case on Van Oliver’s vanishing act.”
Broadhead’s expression was as bitter as his tobacco. “That little imp of the perverse has gotten you in Dutch more times than his closet has moths. I wouldn’t complain, except sooner or later I always get sucked in.”
“You always volunteered. I never asked you to do anything that would put you in danger or in trouble with the police.”
“That’s what I meant when I said ‘sucked in.’ Any muddling about in real-life crime, no matter how remote and how much dust has collected on it, is a slippery slope; and Anklemire’s the banana peel. Have you ever seen even one Mack Sennett comedy in which the peel got hurt?”
“All I want is your advice.”
“Tell the little troll to strap a refrigerator to his back and swim up the coast. Chances are he’ll meet Oliver on the way.”
“You know his heart won’t be in the publicity campaign if I don’t at least make the effort.”
“Why ask me if your mind’s made up?”
“Because I knew you’d do just what you’re doing: make faces, apply a colorful metaphor in reference to Anklemire’s lack of physical stature and excess of chutzpah, and eventually come around to give me grudging approval.”
“I haven’t come around.”
Valentino rose, walked to the corkboard, jerked loose the dart, took up Broadhead’s late position, toe to the mark, took aim, and pierced the target in the No. 5 ring.
“Days of Wine and Roses,” he said, dusting his palms. “The drying-out scene, with Jack Lemmon screaming in restraints. If that one doesn’t kill your taste for booze, you’re better off eliminating the chapter altogether.”
The professor’s scowl deepened. He stuck his pipe back between his teeth, drew a gnawed yellow pencil from the plain white mug on his desk, and scribbled a note on his blotter. Then he raised the pencil to make the sign of the cross. “Go with God, my son. You’ll need Him.”
9
AFTER HIS DEPARTMENT’S screening room, the graduate library was Valentino’s favorite place on campus. Thanks in large part to Kyle Broadhead’s talents at squeezing blood (donations of cash, private collections, and above all, cash), UCLA maintained an impressive, although incomplete, archive of fan magazines. It spanned the industry from the silents through Cinerama, when the voracious competition from television lured readers in droves from Photoplay to TV Guide, demolishing a publicity machine that had existed for half a century. In those pages—some slick and sturdy, others pulp and crumbling—a surprising amount of authentic Hollywood history could be found among the studio hype. It was like panning a stream for nuggets; all it required was someone who knew how to separate the genuine article from fool’s gold.
Efforts to commit the material to microfilm were ongoing, but it was an expensive and tedious process, and far down the list of priorities; any major university is a honeycomb, with many bees to sustain, the drones last of all. For every drawerful of microfilm spools, there were hundreds of periodicals moldering in stout storage cartons. These last stood in rows on steel utility shelves from floor to ceiling, like the anonymous antiquities in the government storeroom at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Guided by the dates in card slots (and with the help of a ten-foot stepladder), Valentino made some likely selections and carried them to a carrel and a vacant microfilm reader. Sitting, he looked forward to his chore with almost the same anticipation he brought to a screening; for him, what seemed toxic to a civilian was an adventure in time travel: Thread the film onto the pegs, switch on the glorified slide projector, crank forward, and leap ahead, days, weeks, months, years at a turn; crank backward, and enter the past. Same thing depending on which way you fanned through musty-smelling pages, the world speeding past at sixty frames a second.
There, among advertisements for Packards and Lucky Strikes, he found some production and pre-production material on Bleak Street. Most of it was photographic: stills of the actors in and out of costume, horsing around on the set, pretending to menace one another in tableaus similar to the scenes they’d shot. Few people studying such pictures in modern film books realized they were looking at fake publicity stills and not actual frames from the movies. By and large they were posed and shot by house photographers. Valentino, for one, sometimes wished the movies themselves looked as good as their advertising.
In our cynical time, the burlesque teasing among the players was stagy and anything but spontaneous, an attempt to show the world how well everyone got along and that even major stars didn’t really take themselves seriously. In their own time, the scheme backfired, convincing outsiders that “Hollywood people” were shallow, facetious, narcissistic parasites, when in most cases they were dedicated professionals, working inhuman hours under conditions of near-slavery.
Van Oliver, it appeared, was quite chummy with Roy Fitzhugh, who played the gangster hero’s bodyguard until he was killed in the first reel during an attempt on his boss’s life. The pair were photographed with their arms around each other’s shoulders, trading mock punches and grinning, and messing each other’s Brilliantined pompadours with impudent hands. The archivist knew that such carryings-on were often a ruse to disguise deep mutual dislike, similar to the one that had led to fisticuffs between George Raft and Edward G. Robinson on the set of Manpower. However, there were rather more of them than the average, despite the brevity of Fitzhugh’s part in the picture. Valentino was inclined to believe the two were close.
Which was a break; provided the elderly actor retained the wits necessary to remember events from so long ago. Many a promising trip to the Motion Picture Country Home had dashed itself to bits on the rocks of Alzheimer’s and senile dementia. They were crueler even than the pernicious decay that had sentenced ninety percent of world film to oblivion.
Bleak Street vanished from the puff columns in June 1957—its announced month of release—as thoroughly as its star had dropped from sight weeks earlier. Under normal circumstances, the feature would have been mentioned everywhere at that time, with cover articles on its leading players in Modern Screen and Liberty, billboards splashed throughout Los Angeles and its suburbs, press kits sent out in flocks like carrier pigeons, and advertisements in newspapers in key cities across the country. Instead, the story moved to the city section of the L.A. Times, where burly detectives assigned to Missing Persons and Homicide were photographed grilling hapless suspects raked in from the local underworld. Almost overnight, a routine campaign intended for the Entertainment section decamped to the crime pages.
Studio clout had managed to squelch any negative publicity concerning its chief commercial property of the season; in those “factory town” days, the police commission took its marching orders from Louis B. Mayer, Howard Hughes, Harry Cohn, Darryl Zanuck, and the Brothers Warner (none of whom realized how quickly their influence would evaporate in the face of the competition from TV). But when Hughes’s people drop-kicked the production, the Oliver case became open season. As his sinister background became public property, the focus of the investigation shifted from Where is he? to Where is his body? Racketeer Mickey Cohen reported to police headquarters with his attorneys, disavowing any knowledge of the missing man’s fate, or for that matter the man himself: “Oh, sure, we was seen places, but I go lots of places and meet lots of people I don’t remember after. I’m like the Queen that way.”
“Which queen might that be?” sneered one of the reporters who’d swarmed around him on the steps of City Hall. (This from Confidential, the controversial scandal sheet that at the time had violated all the unspoken rules that prohibited seamy speculation.)
The obligatory sweep of known local offenders harvested a bumper crop of newspaper photos of men hiding their faces behind their hats and jut-chinned detectives subjecting pale-faced suspects to the third-degree; generations of exposure to Hollywood hype had taught the LAPD a thing or two about public relations, but the yield in solid leads was negative.
As in every successful drama, there was comic relief. A plainclothes sergeant flew to New York City to interview Mafia kingpin Frank Costello, who assured him he’d never heard of anyone named Van Oliver or Benny Obrilenski, and in any case Costello was a legitimate businessman, currently engaged in supplying jukeboxes to neighborhood bars. A front-page picture appeared of the sergeant emerging from a well-known brothel said to belong to Lucky Luciano, who’d been deported to Sicily for running a prostitution racket. The sergeant came home to find himself back in uniform, directing traffic at Hollywood and Vine.
The entire affair was precisely the kind of publicity the studios paid millions to avoid. The ghosts of William Desmond Taylor, a director whose murder had exposed a sordid 1920s landscape of drugs and sex, Fatty Arbuckle, a silent comic accused of involuntary manslaughter at a wild party, and sundry other figures caught up in sinful boomtown excess, had haunted the industry throughout its history, threatening it each time with stepped-up censorship and congressional investigation. No wonder Bleak Street was pulled and buried as deep as Oliver himself.
If he was buried. Once again, the “film detective” had been saddled with the unpleasant task of turning over old bones, churning up ancient secrets, and making himself equally unpopular with the people who were paid to investigate crimes and those who profited by committing them. It was like stepping from the safety of a climate-controlled auditorium onto the silver screen, and square into harm’s way.
10
“TELL ME MORE about this flirting,” Harriet said.
They were dining in The Brass Gimbal, a hangout that favored behind-the-scenes personnel connected to the movie industry: Foley operators, script supervisors, set decorators, wardrobe and makeup specialists, electricians, cinematographers, laboratory technicians, and sometimes second-unit directors, provided they minded their manners and weren’t overheard using terms like auteur, mise-en-scene, or day-for-night; the management valued craftsmen above artists. On occasion an A-list movie star would ask for a table, but although the establishment turned away no one, a chilly reception and indifferent service discouraged a return visit.
It was far from Harriet’s favorite meeting place (iceberg salad was the only item listed under “healthy choices”), but since it stood approximately halfway between the UCLA campus and LAPD headquarters, they often met there for lunch; on this day, more particularly supper. Four hours had slipped out from under Valentino unnoticed as he was convening with Old Hollywood in the undergrad library, and Harriet was due back at work in an hour. A bus transporting prisoners from the Riverside County jail to San Quentin had gone off the Pacific Coast Highway in a fiery crash near Long Beach, claiming the lives of half a dozen convicts, and the entire CSI unit had been recruited to help out with identification.
Notwithstanding her pressing schedule, she’d taken time to change from her smock and sweats into a sleek sleeveless dress that displayed her well-developed biceps to advantage; turn over just a few more cadavers and she could out-arm-wrestle him ten times out of ten.
“Flirting, that’s what you took from what I said? I’m more or less under Anklemire’s orders to plunge headfirst into a sixty-year-old police case, and all you heard was a girl batted her eyes at me?”
She poked her fork at a pile of bleached pasta topped with black squid ink—the weekly Monochrome Special—like a farmer trying to skewer a trespasser hidden in a haystack. “She batted her eyes, seriously? That’s the kind of detail I’m after. As for the other, you were up to your chin in disgruntled cops when we met, and many times thereafter. Who was it who said that beyond a certain point all risks are equal?”
“The captain of the Lusitania. She didn’t exactly bat her eyes; that was just an expression. I’m not even sure she was coming on to me. Maybe she’s that way with everyone and just doesn’t realize what it looks like.”
“You’re sweet.” She smiled. “And worse than blind. When you do manage to see something that isn’t on cold celluloid, you talk yourself out of it.”
