The Gossip Columnist's Daughter, page 13
The Los Angeles Times said Andy Prine flushed her out from up there. But the truth is she climbed down on her own.
“Let me get dressed first,” Cookie says.
“You’re naked?”
“I’m broiling.”
HIS DATE IS an actress named Ahna Capri and now she’s waiting in the kitchen for this tedious scene to be over. She’s also trying to make her way. Couple of guest spots on Leave It to Beaver. Who needs this drama on her off-time?
Andy, six feet four in his socks, stands in the living room and looks down at Cookie, who’s huddled on the love seat. For a change, the big lug does the right thing. He listens. Without telling her she’s nuts. She is nuts. She’s been hiding in his crawl space, naked, for how many hours? But for now he listens to her as she quivers and sobs and forgives him, she forgives him for being such a dunce and for all the other girls, including that Wendy in the kitchen. Andy doesn’t correct her. What Cookie calls his date is the least of his worries right now, but it annoys Ahna Capri, who can hear every word from the kitchen.
How’s he going to get rid of her? Not just tonight but generally?
Andy kneels on the rug before her like he really means to accept all the forgiveness she’s been bestowing. He’s acting better than he does on TV. Using the Method technique, he conjures the funeral of a beloved grandmother, and tears begin to collect in his eyes.
The doorbell rings. Andy asks Ahna to get it.
“What am I, the maid?”
But she does it anyway, and comes into the living room to report that two officers from the Los Angeles Police Department would like a word with the man of the house.
“Wendy!” Cookie points.
“What do you want me to tell them?”
“It’s okay. It’s not a prowler.”
“You think I’m a prowler?”
“You were hiding in the attic.”
“It’s a crawl space.”
“Shit, I’ll talk to them.”
Andy gets up off his knees, leaving Ahna Capri alone with Cookie.
“I’m not sure he’s worth the trouble,” Ahna says and joins Cookie on the love seat.
Cookie, a little less exhilarated now that the cops are on the premises, turns to Ahna and says, “What is your name?”
“Ah-na. Anna but with an h.”
“Oh.”
Two women on a love seat. It’s late. All the lights are on in the room. The scene makes me think of Daisy Buchanan and her friend the tennis player in The Great Gatsby, when their dresses begin to rise and billow in the wind. Two women in their twenties, their entire lives ahead—
I’m weak. I can’t just leave them be where they are right now. Impossible to resist looking up what happened to Ahna Capri. It’s a kind of hell. The idea that we can know a life in milliseconds. Some fame in the seventies. A Bruce Lee movie. Died after a collision with a truck in 2010.
Andy’s still talking to the cops.
A cop guffaws. “One in the bed, one in the attic. I should audition for something.”
“It’s a pretty name,” Cookie says.
“Hungarian,” Ahna says.
After the cops leave, Andy offers to drive both women home. Cookie refuses, says she’ll walk, and she does. She walks, four-plus miles in the dark, from Laurel Canyon to her apartment on Sweetzer, barefoot, swinging her shoes.
THE PHONE’S STOPPED ringing as much as it used to, even a few months back. I wonder if word hasn’t gotten around about her, that producers and directors have become wary.
But there are times now, even when it does ring, that she doesn’t pick up. She stops paying the bills, too. Pacific Bell sends threatening letters. She doesn’t read them.
FOR DECADES A critic named Claudia Cassidy wrote a column for the Chicago Tribune called “On the Aisle.” They called her Acidy Cassidy. Also the Viper, the Executioner, Medusa of the Midwest, the Hatchet from Shawneetown, and most damning of all, That Woman from the Tribune.
Of a fellow Chicagoan, a pianist named Rosalyn Tureck, she wrote:
… in the face of the inexhaustible vitality, the splendor, the scope, the joy of the great Bach, hers is pedantic, even bigoted.
Acidy Cassidy must have forced more than one artist to take a good look in the mirror. As my high school cross-country coach, Jordy Hanson, used to say when I, again, failed to reach the top of the hill at Ravine Drive, “Are we going to be honest with ourself now?”
In July of 1962, Cookie returned to Chicago to take a lead in a play called Sunday in New York. They put it on at the Edgewater Beach Playhouse, a temporary theater on the beach. They put the tent up in June, took it down in August. Often gusts threatened to send the entire tent and everybody inside into the lake.
Her parents, of course, were in the audience. As were my dutiful grandparents.
There was a moment during Act 2 when Essee winced at how wide Cookie—not her character—opened her mouth.
When the curtain fell, Babs Rosenthal applauded the longest. Everybody else had stopped, she continued to slap her hands together. Not only out of loyalty to Essee and Irv, there was always that, my grandmother was ever the good soldier, but also because she knew what it meant to perform before a hometown crowd, in front of people who know you. Amid all the applause, jealousy, even rage, born of familiarity. And so Babs, whatever she thought of the play and Cookie’s performance, kept clapping…
I’ve always been a little transfixed by the curtain call, that brief minute or two when the actors haven’t entirely shed their characters, but the stresses of their lives have already begun to fill their eyes again. A divorce, a father in the hospital. They hid it all so well for a couple of hours. I think of Cookie basking in the applause, and at the same time wanting to get the hell out of Chicago.
Under a kinder star, she says, Cookie might have made it all the way.
After Cookie’s death, Claudia Cassidy remembered that the direction of Sunday in New York had been shoddy, that the play was as inconsequential as it was poorly written, that she was bored stiff, and yet… “this slender girl with the huge dark eyes held on, and it seemed to me that in the right hands she might become something special.”
Kinder star? All the way? I just want her to make it past 1963.
IN THE GUEST spot on Perry Mason that aired in January of 1964, Cookie plays the sister of a woman accused of murdering an ex-lover. Under penetrating yet manfully gentle questioning by Raymond Burr, she does a convincing job of loyally declaring her sister’s innocence. My sister? No, she’s not capable of such treachery. How can you even suggest it? And yet there’s this glint in her big eyes, which are open just a hair wider than they should be, that says, Hell yeah, she shot the bastard.
Afterlife of Karyn
DECEMBER 1991. Oliver Stone’s JFK is released in theaters. Conspiracy theorists across the country enjoy multiple orgasms.
In February 1992, the Today show airs an interview with Stone and cohost Bryant Gumbel. In the segment that immediately follows, Gumbel presents a list of people who died violently in the weeks and months following Kennedy’s death and who might have had a connection to the assassination.
First on this list: Karyn Kupcinet. Found murdered in Hollywood on November 30, 1963. Case remains unsolved.
In a column published days later, Kup blasts the Today show for what he calls an “outrage.” He concedes that Cookie died violently: “but there is no link whatsoever between her and the assassination.”
It isn’t the first time Kup has heard of the possible connection between Cookie and JFK. He refers, without mentioning the title, to a book published more than two decades earlier. Here’s where the rabbit hole gets deeper, the weeds denser, the quagmire more sinkholeish—
Rudy, on the office radiator, yawns. Please, please, not the conspiracy stuff. You’ve become enough of a nutbag as it is and now you’re going to start in on all this—
Go back to sleep.
You’re no better than Ellroy. You think you are, Mr. Iowa MFA. Get over yourself, Mr. Literary, the fewer books you sell, the better you think you are. Dead white actresses are catnip and you’re just as happy to roll around in the muck as Ellroy—
Is it catnip, is that what you want?
The good stuff. Not the cheap stuff from Pet Smart. Go to Bentley’s on Devon.
The book that Kup referenced without naming is called Forgive My Grief, self-published in 1966 by a Texan named Penn Jones Jr., considered by many to be the godfather of first-generation JFK conspiracy theorists. The title comes from a Tennyson poem: “Forgive my grief for one removed / Thy creature, whom I found so fair.”
This book gives names and details of THE STRANGE DEATHS OF 24 PEOPLE who knew something, learned something or saw something that was supposed to have remained secret.
Then comes a contents page so inspiringly bonkers it rises to the level of conceptual art, a kind of history of the world in eight words:
Deaths
Deaths
Deaths
More Deaths
And More Deaths
Karyn Kupcinet’s name doesn’t appear in Forgive My Grief until chapter 4. Jones briefly sketches out the unusual circumstances of her death and why it made it into the book. In Jones’s telling, it started with Jack Ruby. Back in Chicago when Ruby worked as a low-level union operative, he was friendly with Irv Kupcinet. Years later, after he became involved in a Mob plot to kill Kennedy, Ruby got back in touch with his old buddy Irv, now a famous columnist, and told him about it. Irv, in turn, constitutionally unable to keep any news to himself, told his twenty-two-year-old daughter, an actress out in Hollywood.
Are you following this?
No, the cat says. This part I’ve never understood. Let’s say Ruby did tell Kup. Why would Kup tell Cookie? Why not the cops, or the FBI?
I’m just telling you what Jones says in his book. I’m not saying it makes any sense. Anyway, I thought you weren’t interested in any of—
Just go on.
And Cookie, in turn, couldn’t keep the information to herself, and on the morning of November 22 she attempted to notify somebody—anybody—by calling an operator in California and shrieking into the phone that the president was about to be shot. Twenty minutes later—
Skip that, I know that.
And a week later, in order to send a message to her father never to open his trap again, the Mob ordered a hit on Cookie Kupcinet.
IS ANY OF this shit true?
That’s the problem.
1. Kup did know Jack Ruby in Chicago the way all Chicago Jews know each other, either directly or through somebody or through… et cetera, et cetera. Were they pals? Kup had pals under every rock. Jack Ruby wasn’t one of them. He just knew the guy. Were they in touch after Ruby moved to Dallas? Possible, but unlikely. Kup wasn’t a snob, but there’s no evidence in the Warren Report that Ruby—
This is in the Warren Report?
I forget. Ruby is, of course, maybe not Kup.6
2. A woman did call an operator at 10:10 a.m. California time, twenty minutes before the assassination. This woman didn’t shriek into the phone that the president was about to be shot, she whispered it. It’s known as the “Oxnard call” because operators traced the call to the Oxnard-Camarillo area, fifty miles from Los Angeles. The woman also whispered that the chief justice of the Supreme Court was going to be killed, and the entire government was about to collapse. The Washington Post ran a story about the call a week later, around the time of Cookie’s death, quoting one of the operators as saying that the woman had sounded rehearsed, as if she were reading from a script.
So how do we know Cookie was the one who made that call?
For a cat who wasn’t interested, you’ve got a lot—
Just tell it.
Because some guy named Penn Jones Jr. said so.
That’s it?
That’s it.
He made it up?
Whole cloth.
Footnote
6 Kup is in the Warren Report. Back in Chicago, Ruby once approached Kup about helping a friend of his who was trying to break into showbiz. The act was “Jerry the Talking Dog,” and Kup secured him a booking. (Warren Commission, Volume XXII: CE 1257).
CUT TO 1991 and Oliver Stone.
Karyn Kupcinet (or the Oxnard caller) doesn’t appear in JFK, though there was, apparently, a character based on her in the original script. Yet the movie does include a scene where a woman strapped to a hospital bed says something like what the Oxnard caller is said to have said, i.e., that somebody’s going to whack Kennedy in Dallas… (This character is based, as I understand it, not on Karyn but on another woman who also, the story goes, warned of the assassination before it happened. I forget her name, she’s in my notes somewhere.) Where was I? Right, so Oliver Stone allegedly cut the Karyn Kupcinet character from the script, but Kup, given his connections in Hollywood, might have gotten wind of it anyway. Because Kup’s hatred for Stone’s movie goes far beyond the fact that Stone simply kicked the door wide open to whackadoodle theories about the assassination in general. It’s personal.
In column after column after column, over the course of a year, Kup trashes Stone and the movie.
Oliver Stone… Another theory for his collection of astounding assumptions on the assassination of JFK, the butler did it…
And that’s mild. When Stone didn’t win an Academy Award, Kup mocked him, wondering if he was going to claim a conspiracy against him. In 1992, a Chicago writer named Jim Kielty did a detailed examination of Kup’s obsession with Stone in a Chicago Reader piece called “Kup vs. JFK.” Kielty writes that Kup pummeled Stone at least two dozen times over the course of the previous year. The figure is inexact because Kielty stopped counting. Kielty agrees that Kup’s animus toward Stone was driven by the suggestion that he and Cookie were somehow mixed up in the assassination.
At the same time, I’m convinced that Kup, like plenty of other people, believed firmly in the lone-gunman theory and the conclusions of the Warren Commission Report. In one column, he quotes a line of Kevin Costner, who plays the New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison in JFK, from another movie—I’m told I can’t quote it even though Kup did in the Sun-Times and it’s everywhere on the fucking internet—but you know the line?
About Susan Sontag being overrated? And good scotch and Oswald acting alone?
Good kitty.
WAIT.
Yes?
You believe that the Warren Report is sacrosanct? Case closed?
Fuck if I know. My only point here is that Penn Jones opened the door to the theory that Cookie was somehow wrapped up in the assassination. Then years later Oliver Stone, in his way, kicked it open in the sense that now anything went, any crackpot association, and then the internet and Reddit or whatever and then every true-crime fanatic, that just exploded her entire presence—
And Ellroy?
ON MY FIELD trip to California, I also stopped by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to see if I could get a look at Cookie’s case file. The cop behind the thick wall of smudged bulletproof glass was a blur. Her hair looked like it was blowing around in the wind. Maybe there was a fan back there. I pressed the button for the intercom.
“Good morning, I mean good afternoon, I’m a professor of creative writing at Loyola University in Chicago. I’m conducting research into the unsolved murder of Karyn Kupcinet, who was found strangled in West Hollywood in November 1963.”
“What can I do for you, honey?”
I hit the button again.
“I’d like to examine the case file. It’s my understanding that the file is still open, that it’s, you know, a cold case. Unsolved.”
“A cold case?”
“That’s right.”
“Like on TV?”
“Right.”
“Are you related to the victim?”
“No, I’m not. But my grandparents were close to the victim’s parents. Very close, for years they—”
“Do you have a notarized release from an authorized third party?”
“No, I don’t, how do I—”
“Instructions on our website.”
“You gave the file to Ellroy.”
“Who?”
“James Ellroy, you handed him Cookie’s entire case file.”
“Who’s Cookie?”
“Karyn Kupcinet.”
“Is Ellroy the guy who wrote The Black Dahlia?”
“That’s him.”
“That book kept me up at night. Him and Elmore Leonard.
I get them mixed up. Names kind of similar, you know? But those two, they really get it. They’re out there. On the streets. And I mean the dialogue in Get Shorty! Book’s even better than the movie. It pops off the page! You teach writing? You know who I really love, James Cain. Double Indemnity. If you can make an insurance scam interesting—”
“Would you like to get a coffee?”
“Excuse me.”
I pressed the button again and held it. This thick smudged glass. Like staring into a murky aquarium. A blurry, windblown phantom. As if she was encased in ice.
“Drink later?”
“Check the website, okay, honey?”
ASIDE FROM Penn Jones Jr. and all those who followed—taking his fable about Kup and Cookie knowing something about the assassination ahead of time and running with it (Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs, High Treason: The Assassination of JFK and the Case for Conspiracy by Harrison Livingstone and Robert Groden, and the list goes on and on)—nobody’s done more to keep Karyn Kupcinet’s name out there than James Ellroy. To his credit, he’s never expressed any interest in the JFK bullshit. What turns Ellroy on is the aspiring-actress-found-naked-and-dead-in-Hollywood angle. In 1998, he published a piece in GQ. It’s provided fodder that’s now been recycled by true crime ad infinitum. It seems that Ellroy, given his status as celebrity bad-boy crime writer, was given full access to Cookie’s case file. My guess is that either he secured a release from an authorized third party, whatever that means, or the Sheriff’s Department figured he couldn’t do any worse of a job solving this case than anyone else over the decades so what the hell, give the file to Ellroy.
