Manhattan Mayhem (19 page)

“I got paid a pittance,” Jerry said, “but Danny did it strictly for the war effort.”

“What a sucker, huh?” Danny said with a wink.

“Headliners worked for free,” Jerry explained. “I’m not a headliner.”

“One of these days, you’ll be another Gershwin!”

Next to arrive was Rosey Patterson, a theatrical agent and an old pal of mine—in our respective roles as herders of actors, we’d been indirectly involved in an early-1930s murder case right there in Manhattan. He wasn’t quite as compactly built as Danny, but he was just as hyper, always on the move. I remember thinking it might be a strain on the nerves to be around both of them at the same time. Rosey embraced me in the best show business fashion and said he wanted to tell me about a great detective story he’d just read. But there were two tall men filling the doorway right behind him, and I don’t think he ever got the chance.

The older one, who had the muscular frame of a body builder, gripped my hand before waiting to be introduced and said, “So you’re Seb, Danny’s Hollywood connection. I’m Elmer Belasco.” He gestured to the younger man. “This is my worthless son, Arthur.”

“Not totally worthless,” Arthur said. “I’m a new father. Baby girl. Fresh out of cigars, though.”

“You fellows related to David Belasco?” I asked.

“When it suits us,” Arthur said. “Back in the twenties, when dad worked for Flo Ziegfeld, he figured the name helped him.”

“Didn’t help at all,” Elmer said. “The opposite, if anything.”

“More likely he reminded Ziegfeld of Sandow the strongman,” Rosey said.

Apparently, these spontaneous gatherings were a regular thing to Mildred. She knew we’d be drinking and gossiping and catching up and drinking—how we drank back then—and that what began in the late afternoon would likely extend into the evening.

It was Jerry Cordova who made it a party. He resembled his late hero George Gershwin in one respect. If he entered a room with a piano—and Danny Crenshaw wouldn’t be without one—he would be asked to play, and if he wasn’t asked, he’d do it anyway, singing along in a reedy voice something like Cole Porter’s. Shortly after he got there, he sat down at the keyboard unbidden, as if this were why he was invited, and maybe it was.

Arthur Belasco was just twenty-two. He was starting to make inroads as an actor on Broadway, though his father constantly grumbled that he had no talent. Father and son were always sniping at each other, with insults that sounded pointed but presumably weren’t to be taken seriously.

“I had to find some way to get into the family business,” Arthur said. “The old man here insisted. Medical school was a dead end, he said.”

“He could do less harm on the stage than in the operating room,” Elmer retorted. It sounded like a practiced routine, and everybody took it as harmless kidding. Except for Mildred, who had a pained look on her face every time father or son launched a zinger.

In later years, remembering Mildred, Danny would say, “She was the kindest, sweetest person God ever put on earth. Imagine a dame with no sense of humor putting up with a joker like me for as long as she did. Mildred was a bleeding heart, full of empathy, but she couldn’t see nuances.”

That day in 1946, I witnessed an example. Jerry Cordova had launched into “Who Cares?” from
Of Thee I Sing,
written by the Gershwin brothers deep in the Depression. Mildred listened with apparent appreciation and joined the applause when he was finished.

“That was great, Jerry,” she said, “but I’ve always hated that song.”

“Oh, dear, I’ve offended my hostess,” he said.

“No, don’t be silly. It’s a nice tune, but I hate the lyrics. They’re nasty, uncaring, mean spirited.”

“How so, Mildred?” Rosey Patterson inquired.

“You’ll be sorry you asked,” Danny said.

Mildred said, “It’s that line that goes ‘Who cares if banks fail in Yonkers?’ Well, a lot of banks failed in the Depression. We had to go to war to get out of it. When I hear that, I think about all the people I knew and those I didn’t know who had money in those failing banks, who maybe lost everything. How could you not care that banks failed in Yonkers or anywhere else?”

“I’ve tried to explain this,” Danny said with a mock long-suffering expression. “Baby, the people in that song are trying to get through difficult times, like we all were back then. They depend on the power of their love to see them through. Whatever happened, they could handle it because they were in love. That’s the point. It’s called a love song, see? It’s got nothing to do with people who lost money in banks that failed.”

“Well, it’s just not right to be so cavalier about it, that’s all,” she said. “Play something else, Jerry.”

“Give me a minute while I run through all the lyrics in my head,” the pianist said.

Everybody laughed. Mildred didn’t—she seldom did—but she was a good enough hostess not to throw a wet blanket on the evening, even providing an improvised meal from a nearby deli when it became apparent nobody was going anywhere till well after nightfall.

I’m sure we covered a lot of subjects that night. Did we touch on peacetime transition, the bomb, our relationship with the Soviet Union, prospects for the returning veteran, President Truman’s job performance, the Yankees and the Giants and the Dodgers? Maybe. But these were Broadway folks, so mostly we talked about Broadway. Could Tennessee Williams duplicate his great success with
The Glass Menagerie
? Opinions were mixed, but most thought he couldn’t. How did Maurice Evans’s current production of
Hamlet
stack up against his
predecessors’? Rosey Patterson swore nobody ever topped Barrymore, but Danny made a case for Gielgud as the dean of Danes, and Mildred mentioned Leslie Howard. Who was the greatest composer of Broadway musicals? Jerry loyally argued for Gershwin, others countered with Jerome Kern or Richard Rodgers, and Elmer Belasco shocked everybody by insisting it was Kurt Weill. Was Adele Astaire really a greater talent than Fred? Danny said so with a straight face, and a lot of old-timers agreed with him, but when he claimed Gummo was the funniest Marx Brother, I doubted he was serious.

One topic was inevitable for theater people that particular day. I was surprised we’d been there for two or three cocktails before anybody mentioned it.

“So, I guess you all heard about Claude Anselm,” Rosey said.

Heads all nodded.

“What happened exactly?” Arthur Belasco said. “I mean, was he murdered?”

“Papers say he was mugged,” Rosey said. “Back alley thing late at night. He’d been to see some avant-garde artist who was staying with all the other bohemians at the Chelsea Hotel down in the Village.”

“Anton LeMaster,” Danny supplied. “Anselm wanted to get him to design a set for his next production, thought his surrealistic style would fit the creative concept.”

“More important,” Rosey said, “he’d work cheap.”

“Yeah, old Claude would have made a lot of promises, appealed to the vain artist’s ego and the starving artist’s wallet. I think somebody had warned LeMaster what a bastard Anselm was, and he’d turned him down. Not two blocks from the Chelsea, somebody clubbed Claude to death.”

“The poor man,” Mildred said. “I know what he did to people, but even so.”

“Nobody here’s going to mourn that guy,” Jerry Cordova said, picking out the melody of “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You” but sparing us his Louis Armstrong imitation.

“Most hated man on Broadway,” Danny said.

“In the running, anyway,” Rosey said. “Who cheats my client cheats me. And he didn’t just cheat actors. He cheated backers, playwrights, theater managers—and always got away with it. Wanted to add a scenic designer to his trophy case, I guess.”

“I used to see Anselm on the golf course,” Elmer Belasco said. “Never played a round with him, thank God.”

“Too good?” Arthur kidded. “Dad can hit the ball a mile, but you should see the yardage he gets on his putts.”

“Hey, why don’t you go learn your lines or something and not smart off at your elders?”

“What do you mean? I’ve memorized the whole play.”

“It’s true,” Elmer told us. “Kid has a photographic memory. He could do
Hamlet
for you right here if he’d ever learned how to act. Anselm was as bad a golfer as the kid is an actor. Couldn’t play worth a damn, but for some reason he kept at it. I think he looked for opponents who were even worse than he was. Or were motivated to pretend they were.”

“Too bad some anonymous mugger got him,” Danny mused. “Lot of people on Broadway wish they could have done the job.”

“I can just see the full obits in the papers tomorrow,” Rosey said. “ ‘Broadway’s lights grew a little dimmer with the shocking death of a beloved man of the theater.’ And they’ll be able to get plenty of quotes from mourners who are secretly cheering.”

Elmer nodded. “Scoundrels die, but deals live on.”

Rosey had a mischievous gleam in his eye. “Here’s an idea. Let’s say I was the person who bumped off Anselm, revenge on behalf of my clients and all the bastard’s other victims. I wasn’t seen, covered my tracks, managed to make it look like a routine mugging.”

“Congratulations,” Jerry said, playing a snatch of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

“Yeah, great, but I think I’d feel something was lacking.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. Rosey loved to have a straight man to feed him cues.

“It wouldn’t be enough that the guy was dead. I’d want to claim credit.”

“And get yourself fried in that nice comfy electric chair they got up at Sing Sing?” Danny asked.

“No, I’d do it indirectly and anonymously. It wouldn’t be necessary to put my own name on it, but I’d want the world to know he was executed on behalf of Broadway and all the people whose careers and lives he stomped on.”

“And once you did that fine gesture, would you be able to stop at just one?” Arthur Belasco asked.

“Yeah,” Danny chimed in. “I can suggest some other vermin in our fine theatrical profession that are just as deserving.”

I hadn’t contributed much, not being a Broadway insider like these folks, but now I decided to go along with the gag. “Rosey, it’s an attractive idea, but you have to think this through. The mistake those clever murderers in books make is getting too cute for their own good. Gilding the lily. Giving the supersleuth a way to get at them in the last chapter. Why provide a deliberate clue that could be traced back to you?”

Rosey shrugged. “Anonymous letters to the cops or the press maybe. I’d give myself a name. The Stage Door Avenger?”

“Naw, the newspapers would do it for you, and they’d come up with something better than that,” Danny said.

“Jack the Ripper named himself,” I pointed out.

“Let’s get to the important stuff, Rosey,” Danny said. “Who’d you pick as your next victim?”

Mildred had been silent through all of this. Now she raised her hands as if in surrender. “Fellows, I just hate this kind of talk. Can we change the subject, or can you play something else for us, Jerry?”

Jerry launched into a medley from
Show Boat,
and that was that.

The next day, a cryptic message in all capital letters appeared in the personals columns of all the evening papers, and there were a slew of them in New York at that time: “
YOU DON
’
T EVEN KNOW A HAZARD FROM A GREEN
.” At the time, nobody knew what it meant or had any reason to connect it to the death of Claude Anselm. By the time anybody made the connection, three more Broadway scumbags had died.

As I knew she would, Evan turned up the next day with the answers. When I kidded her about visiting two days in a row, said they’d have to put her on the payroll with the nurses and maids and social directors and therapy dogs, she rolled her eyes impatiently.

“I did them in the order you listed them. Is the order significant?”

“Not really, but go ahead and do ’em that way.”

“Okay. ‘Massachusetts is a long way from New York.’ That one threw me for a while. I kept getting bogged down with driving distances between cities in Massachusetts and New York, but then I remembered an obvious trick to using a search engine. To get the exact words, you put the whole phrase in quotation marks. Then it was easy. It’s a line from a song called ‘Lizzie Borden’ written by Michael Brown. Wasn’t Lizzie Borden a famous murderer, Gramps?”

“Many people think so, if murderers can be famous.”

“At that point, I thought the other lines might have to do with murderers, too, but they didn’t. Pretty soon I knew what they had in common. They’re all from songs in old Broadway shows. I took down some more relevant information about each one, not knowing what was important and what wasn’t, and I made a little chart for you.” She handed me a sheet of paper.