Hollywood (68 page)

“Mabel didn’t either. So if it’s to be a star, that leaves only Mary Miles Minter, doesn’t it?” Caroline’s journalistic sense was aroused. Consumed by a passion far too large for her tiny frame and frustrated yet again in her lust, the golden-ringletted dwarf swept to the floor the backgammon set whilst firing her pistol into William Desmond Taylor, aged Joseph to her nubile Madame Potiphar.

“But why do you think it has to be a star?” Eyton’s question was more of a statement.

“Because the press will insist that it’s one of us, which is why you’ve asked me here. Isn’t it?”

Eyton sighed. “I guess I can handle just about any actor in the business, but to deal with one who’s also a publisher …” The voice trailed off.

“There was a letter last summer, to William, which I read by accident. Someone wrote that he—or she, I never saw the signature—would shoot him. Did you find that letter?”

Eyton shook his head. “No. But I found one from Eddie Sands. A recent letter. A blackmail letter. Now it’s my view that last night Eddie paid Bill
a call, and asked maybe for money and there was this quarrel, and then Eddie …” Eyton suddenly pointed a forefinger at Caroline, who winced. “Naturally it’s a bit early for the police to make an announcement, but I have a hunch they’re just about convinced he did it—as is the district attorney, Mr. Woolwine. So that means the heat is off us and there will be a nationwide manhunt.”

“Will they find Eddie?”

“I don’t know.” Eyton touched the stack of letters. “1 hope not. It would be better if he had an accident first. That is, before he was arrested.”

Caroline and Eyton looked at one another. She had never suspected that this very amiable highly ordinary man could be so swift in his responses, and so ruthless. “What,” asked Caroline at last, “does Eddie know?”

Eyton held up one of the letters. “I have no way of knowing what he knows but I do know what he was threatening. If Taylor didn’t drop the charges against him, he says here that he will expose him.”

“Men?”

“Boys.” Eyton unexpectedly smiled. “If the press gets on to this, Hollywood has had it. Thanks to Arbuckle, we’re being boycotted all through the Bible Belt. One more scandal, and …”

“Boycott.” In context, Caroline found the word darkly witty. “Let us say we—you—can control the press. How do you control the police investigation?”

“By paying them to go after Eddie.”

“Suppose they find him, and he tells—
his
story?”

“We’ll have to pay them
not
to find him—alive, anyway.”

“An accident?”

Eyton nodded. “Meanwhile, we’re turning Bill into a lady-killer, a real Don Juan. In a couple of weeks I’ll confess to having got off with some letters from some of his glamorous lady friends on the ground that I did not want innocent people involved in this sad and tragic affair. So I will turn every single one of the letters over to the police except for the ones I keep.”

“Are the others as dull as mine?”

“Mary Miles Minter’s aren’t dull at all. Fact, they’re a lot better than any of the movies she’s been doing lately. She writes how she expects Bill to marry her so that she can get away from her mother who locks her up when she suspects she’s on the prowl but things are coming to a head now, because the last time Mrs. Shelby locked her up Mary took a gun and tried to kill herself.”

Caroline saw the letter on William’s desk; saw the large bold handwriting;
saw the word “shoot.” “That means she has a gun. That means we know who killed him, don’t we?”

“Do we?” Eyton was mild. “Well, I suppose we do when you come right down to it. It was Eddie who’d been blackmailing his old employer about his … lady friends, as we’ll call them. Actually we didn’t take away the feminine apparel that we found in the house. We even left a pink dressing gown with three M’s embroidered on it. So he’ll be depicted as another Casanova, which is all right by the studio, and though a number of famous ladies will be mentioned as possible victims or would-be victims of his normal passions, only Mary and Mabel may come out of this just a little bit tarnished, and poor Mabel wouldn’t’ve been involved at all if she hadn’t decided to come by and say hello just before Eddie shot him.”

“Drugs?”

“We found nothing. The police found nothing.” If Eyton was lying he was most convincing. “Hollywood is once again pure and blameless—in that department, anyway.” Eyton smiled. “But those peanuts in that brown paper bag.” He shook his head.

Caroline rose. “When the police question me …”

“Tell the truth. What else? But you might, if you want to, mention Eddie as a possible killer. It would be a big help if you did.” Eyton was on his feet, always polite. “You know the colored man, Henry Peavey, was due in court today and Bill was going to testify to his good character.”

“In court for what?”

“Soliciting boys. In Westlake Park.”

“For himself?”

“For his employer, he tells me. The police have found a bunch of keys that don’t fit any of the locks at 404 Alvarado Street. Apparently, there is another apartment somewhere else …”

“A
garçonnière.
”

“I’m afraid I don’t know any French.” Eyton showed Caroline to the door. “Just a bit of Tijuana Spanish.”

By the middle of March, Emma Traxler was again before the cameras, directed by her all-time favorite megaphoner, Timothy X. Farrell, as Grace Kingsley put it in a long story for the Los Angeles
Times
. Apparently, Emma had intended to give up the bright lights of Hollywood for her native Alsace-Lorraine,
where her moated family castle was ever at her disposal. But letters from fans all round the world had convinced her that she should return to the screen in a photo-play to be directed by William Desmond Taylor. Caroline shuddered every time she saw the name, which was several times a day.

As Eyton had predicted, the scandal was huge but delicately orchestrated. Emma was simply one of a number of glamorous stars that he had pursued. Beyond a single deposition to the Los Angeles Police Department, Caroline had been bothered by no one official. But what the police were releasing to the public and what Eyton was manufacturing were often contradictory. The pink nightgown with the three M’s was discussed in every paper; yet the police affected not to have seen it. Had Eyton invented the whole thing to involve Minter more deeply in the plot? As it was, Eyton was feeding Minter’s love letters to the
Examiner
. Fortunately, Mary herself had a perfect alibi for the fatal night. She was at home, reading aloud to her mother and sister. Yet, somewhat mysteriously, on the morning after the murder, she had come to the Alvarado house
before
the newspapers had spread the news of Taylor’s death. On the other hand, the telephones of Hollywood had not stopped ringing all that morning and everyone in any way concerned knew of the murder. While the press continued to print salacious stories about Taylor’s womanizing, the police spoke only of the thief, Eddie, who had vanished.

Caroline sat in her dressing room just off the sound-stage, where the casino at Monte Carlo had been re-created. She had taken over Taylor’s script for Traxler Productions. A former grand duchess, she was now a lady’s maid, decked out in her employer’s splendor for an anonymous night at a masked ball.

Caroline lay on an incline board in order to keep her hair and dress pristine. More than ever, she felt like a doll being manipulated, not unpleasurably, by Tim. There was comedy as well as Traxler heartbreak in her role, and although the new face was not yet entirely hers, it photographed well. Certainly she looked a decade younger than poor Mary Queen of Scots, who had been forced to undergo the Renaissance’s only solution to age, a beheading with an ax.

Suddenly the door to the dressing room opened. “Tim,” said Caroline, since he was the only one who could come and go without knocking. But it was not Tim. It was Mabel Normand.

“Em, can I see you?” For reasons unknown, Mabel had always called her
Em. But then better the bleak Em than the full panoply of the sombre three M’s.

“Of course.” Caroline turned to her dresser. “Could you wait outside, please?” The dresser departed and Mabel turned on both taps in the wash basin. “They can’t record you with the water running.”

“Who can’t record what?”

“Anybody. The police.” Mabel crossed the room, toes turned in, hands turned out; the effect was, as always, enchanting and curiously boyish. Had that been Mabel’s appeal to William Desmond Taylor? “Will you do me a favor, Em?” The long upper lip was suddenly that of Huck Finn in a winsome mood.

“If I can.” Caroline was cautious. She also felt a fool, lying on an incline board, unable to move for fear of losing sequins from her gown or disturbing the fantastic arrangement of her hair, a towering beehive buttressed with braids not her own and jewels.

“You’re having dinner at Pickfair tonight.”

“Are you coming, too?”

“Me? I’m never invited there. Thank God. But tonight it’s for all the bigwigs of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors. Now, listen, Em. There’s this blacklist in the town. It’s not official—yet. But everybody knows about it. Because of all this Central Casting Agency business.”

The new committee had announced that in order to maintain high moral standards within the motion-picture business, all players would be obliged to join an agency that would, somehow, determine if they were morally worthy of being transformed into shadows upon a screen. “I thought it was to keep out the … the …”

“The hookers. Well, sure. But it also has to do with drugs and politics and anything else they happen to think up. Well, I’m on the blacklist.”

“How do you know?”

“Mack, Mack Sennett. He told me.
He
isn’t bothered, but that’s all the work I can get. No one else is ever going to hire me again until the word comes down from whoever Washington sends out here. So will you talk to whoever that is? About me?”

“Yes.” Caroline felt virtuous; she was also aroused by yet another example of American hypocrisy in full cry. “Do you think it’s drugs?” She was blunt.

“No. It’s William Desmond Taylor. You see, I’m sort of a suspect. In the press, that is.” Mabel sat at Caroline’s dressing table and, reflexively, began to make herself up as if for a scene. Caroline was fascinated by her swift
professionalism. But then Mabel knew more about movies than any woman in the business.

“But you’re not a real suspect, are you? I mean, the police …”

“Are you kidding?” Mabel chuckled. “The fix is in. The district attorney’s been paid off. He’ll go on looking for Eddie Sands, until the whole thing just peters out. Eddie’s dead, by the way.”

Startled, Caroline moved her head, breaking off a section of her hair. Mabel leapt to her feet; picked up the braid and expertly reattached it to the glittering beehive. “They found him in the Connecticut River. A bullet in his head. They said it was suicide.”

“Who’s they?”

“The police in Darien, Connecticut.”

“Why didn’t they tell the Los Angeles police?”

“They did. That’s how we know. Only Woolwine—the D.A.—says he’s not convinced it’s really Eddie, and so the manhunt goes on. They’ll get tired of it, the press. But I’d like to go back to work before then.”

“I’ll certainly talk to the … bigwigs tonight.”

“They’re all afraid of you.” Mabel was precise and blunt. “Everyone in politics is afraid of people who own newspapers. The way we are, too. The way
I
am, anyway. I miss Bill.”

“I’m not sure that I do.” Caroline was not certain just what she thought of the whole extraordinary business. In a sense she was still literally shocked by what had happened. Certainly it seemed odd that she would never again see him at lunch in the commissary or over the backgammon board in Alvarado Street. “Who,” Caroline was suddenly inspired to ask, “killed him?”

“Don’t you know?” The boy’s face was suddenly mischievous and the eyes were bright.

“How could I?”

“I thought you’d figured it out. I did even before Mary told me.”

“Surely she didn’t kill him.”

“Well,” Mabel was enjoying herself, “let’s say she was a logical suspect. The police found three long golden hairs on Bill’s jacket. Neither you nor I have—at the moment, anyway—long golden hair.”

“Wasn’t she at home, reading aloud to her mother and sister?” Caroline knew the catechism of that famous evening in all its intricate detail.

“No. She was upstairs when I came to call.”

Caroline stared, as best she could out of the corner of her eye, at Mabel, who was now trying on a pair of Emma Traxler’s long lashes. “How do you know?”

“She told me.”

“Why? You’d be the last person I’d tell, in that situation.”

Mabel sighed. “They don’t look right on me, do they?” She blinked her eyes at her reflection in the mirror.

“No,” said Caroline. “They are for an aging grand duchess at the Casino in Monte Carlo, not ‘our Mabel.’ ”

“The next day, little Mary rang me: could we meet? We did. I can’t stand her and she can’t stand me and no one can stand that mother of hers, the Louisiana belle.”

“Why did Mary want to see you?”

Mabel took off the lashes; and turned to face Caroline directly. “She wanted to know if Bill had said anything about her being in the house when he hustled me out the door and walked me to my car and gave me this book by Freud, which he said was better than my usual reading, the
Police Gazette
. I told Mary, yes. He told me.” The grin was impish. “Of course he hadn’t. But she fell for it. Then she told me what happened. After I drove off, Charlotte came into the house. She’d been hiding outside the bungalow, spying on her little girl. You can imagine how surprised she was to see me on the premises. Then, when I was off the premises, Charlotte went inside the house and shot Bill dead, as she’d been threatening to do if he married her meal ticket, which little Mary had told her he planned to do and which, poor bastard, he had no intention of doing. Anyway, she shot him right in front of her daughter, which makes little Mary—technically—an accomplice.”

“Do the police know this?”