Show Business Is Murder (15 page)

“Ah. Of course.”

My heart raced. “Of course you wrote it?” I asked.

He laughed. “No, no. Of course, that's what they would want to know. It's the question of the moment.” He picked up a pipe, fiddled with it but never lit it.

“So. Did you?”

“Well, I can't confirm that,” he said. “But then I can't deny it either.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, if I did write it, then the King Brothers must have hired me—or bought the story from me—despite the blacklist. Of course, the movie industry insists there is no blacklist. But on the other hand, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences passed a new rule this year excluding blacklisted writers from winning Oscars. So if there were no blacklist, there'd be no reason for that rule. Of course, they did it only because my friend Michael Wilson was about to be nominated for writing
Friendly Persuasion
and Michael had already had the audacity to embarrass the Academy by winning the Oscar for
A Place in the Sun,
which he wrote before he was blacklisted.”

“Have you won any Oscars since you've been blacklisted?” I asked.

He smiled. “I've been nominated once or twice, but I can't say if I've won. That would be telling. It's common practice for Hollywood companies, big and small, to hire blacklisted writers on the black market. It's an open secret that's received the blessings of the industry while at the same time the Academy is acting as policeman, beating up on weak victims, independent producers like the Kings. If
The Brave One
had been made by a major studio, I promise you the Academy would be looking the other way.”

I asked, “Do you know who wrote
The Brave One?
”

He nodded. “I'd guess Michael Wilson. But what I know mostly is that it has no murders in it, no dope addiction, no gunfights, and no seduction of innocent girls. So now that I think about it, I don't know how it got onto the screen.”

It hit me. The manila envelope probably contained script pages. He was writing another movie for the King Brothers. The money was for that. I tried my new theory on him.

He smiled and said, “Blacklist or no, it's impossible to stop a writer from writing. They murdered Thucydides, and beheaded Sir Thomas More, but all of the other writers who were thrown in jail continued to write, and so have I. Why just today I was writing a letter to the phone company. In fact, I was on my way to mail it when I stopped by to see you.”

He pulled the envelope from his pocket. “They'd written me a very clever and charming missive about why they couldn't seem to make my phone lines work properly. Personally, I believe it has something to do with all the juice that's being drained off by the FBI tap, but they didn't mention that. They did say they had more pressing things to do than make the phones of a Communist work. So this is my reply.”

He tore open the stamped envelope so that I could read his tome. It said in part, “When we Reds come into power we are going to shoot merchants in the following order: 1. those who are greedy, and 2. those who are witty. Since you fall into both categories it will be a sad story when we finally lay hands on it.”

I looked up at him as he drained his tea. “You don't take this very seriously, do you?”

He put down the cup. “The Hollywood, or so-called Unfriendly Ten, including myself have had the worst press since Bruno Hauptman. I lost my livelihood, my house in the hills, my ranch in Ventura County, and all my savings. Well, I never had any savings. I didn't know I'd need them. I was imprisoned for a year. My passport was revoked. I've been audited chronically by the IRS. Since we moved here, my daughter was driven out of her elementary school by tormenting classmates, and tormenting parents of classmates. We had to put her into a different school where the parents are a little less red-blooded American. I have borrowed from all my friends and associates, not to mention lawyers, and struggle to pay them back. I will pay, every cent. I used to earn three
thousand dollars a week. When I got out of prison, I was lucky to get three thousand for an entire script. I take it seriously.” He shrugged his eyebrows and shoulders. I got the idea.

“How do you feel about the people who talked,” I asked, “who named names to save their careers?”

“I used to look for villains, but I'm beginning to think there were no villains, or heroes or saints or devils; there were only victims. Some suffered less than others, some of us grew and some diminished, but in the final tally we were
all
victims.”

He poured us both more tea. “Try Michael Wilson,” he said again. “Maybe he'll tell you he wrote it.”

I stopped at a payphone and called Michael Wilson at the San Fernando Valley number Mr. Trumbo had given me. He said he'd be happy to see me, especially after I told him who I'd just had tea with. We made an appointment for that evening at his house at 11662 Sunshine Terrace at nine. He asked me to give him a phone number to reach me just in case, and I did, both the motel's and David's.

David listened intently as I filled him in on my day over burgers at the Sunset Strip Hamburger Hamlet. It had a Southern plantation motif carried through to the point that the waitresses were all black and the customers were all white. I felt like Scarlet O'Hara sipping mint juleps with David Horvitz. Well, he didn't look much like Rhett.

David was a TV writer, working for a writer-producer named Roy Huggins on a new Western series at Warner Brothers that was supposed to premiere in the fall on ABC. He told me it was called “Maverick” and starred a guy named James Garner who David thought was going to be a big star. And, he said, the lead character wasn't a gunfighter, like on all the other Westerns, but a card sharp and confidence man who was basically a coward and ran from danger.

I laughed, thinking he was joking. When he made me
realize he wasn't, I said the American public would never stand for it. It didn't have a chance to succeed. He thanked me for my encouragement.

“But what would possess somebody to think up a hero who was a coward?” I persisted.

David said, “I have the feeling at some level, conscious or not, Roy patterned the Maverick character after himself.”

I looked up, puzzled. He went on, “Roy named names to HUAC and saved his career. He says he's regretted it ever since.”

I was dumbfounded. “But how could you work for someone who did that?” I said.

“The same reason he did what he did. In order to work.”

When we got back to David's neo-Gothic apartment on Fountain Avenue, he raced in to answer the ringing phone and I followed. He surprised the hell out of me by saying, “It's for you.” It was Michael Wilson begging off for tonight. He said something had come up, and asked if we could meet for breakfast tomorrow instead at Nate 'n Al's on Beverly Drive? I agreed. And hung up, puzzled. He'd sounded nervous. “What could have happened to make him cancel?” I said out loud.

David replied, “You're the detective.”

He was right. I grabbed my purse and camera. “Can I borrow your car again?” He shook his head. “No. You can borrow me.”

And we piled in, him at the wheel.

Twenty minutes and a trip over Laurel Canyon later we were coasting to a stop, lights off, on a winding road in the hills of Studio City overlooking the San Fernando Valley. We parked across the street from 11662 and waited. But not for long.

At nine, an old black Cadillac pulled out of the driveway. I couldn't make out the driver but we figured it was Michael Wilson. David followed, leaving a block between us and the
Caddy. “Funny, you wouldn't think a Communist would drive a Cadillac,” I said.

“We don't know if he is or ever was a Communist,” said David. “He just wouldn't tell the committee or name names, is all we know.”

“I thought the Unfriendly Ten all took the Fifth Amendment.”

“That wouldn't have made them guilty. But even so, they didn't. Ironically, if they had, they wouldn't have gone to prison. But they felt they weren't guilty of anything and therefore shouldn't hide behind it. They pled the First Amendment, believing that freedom of speech included the freedom not to speak, and that the committee had no right to force them.”

“Is that a legal argument or wishful thinking?” I responded.

“Word has it that if two liberal Supreme Court justices hadn't died before the case got put in front of the Court, they would probably have won.”

I whistled through my teeth at the vicissitudes of luck and history.

We followed Wilson's car back over Laurel Canyon to Beverly Hills. It pulled up in front of a large fur shop on Wilshire Boulevard just east of La Cienega. Flyer Furriers and Fur Storage said the neon sign. A moment later a Pontiac woody station wagon pulled up right behind, its Indian-head hood ornament aglow, then a Chevy panel truck. “Left-wing Jews don't buy Fords,” David whispered. One man got out of each and they conferred quietly under a street light.

“Do any of them look familiar?” I asked David. He nodded. “Yes. They've all been in the paper. That is Wilson,” he said, indicating the man we'd followed. He was tall, forties with prematurely white hair. “The others are Herbert Biberman and Paul Jarrico. Biberman's a director. Jarrico's a writer-producer. They're blacklisted, too.” Biberman was
barrel-chested and intense in his mannerisms. Jarrico was shorter, dumpy looking, and spectacled.

The men got back in their cars, turned the corner and into the parking lot behind the store. We waited a moment, then followed on foot.

By the time we got to the back of the building, a double door was open and the men were apparently inside. We crouched down in the dark. After a moment Jarrico came out carrying a cardboard carton, about twelve by eighteen inches. I swallowed hard and whispered to David, “Isn't that what they call a transfer file?” He nodded. “Yes, the studios use them to store scripts.” It wasn't scripts I was worried about, but body parts.

Jarrico slid the box into the van. The others followed, each carrying another similarly shaped carton. I pictured three dead wives lying in pieces in the furrier's refrigerator. They loaded the boxes into the vehicles and went back inside the building, then came back again with more cartons and put them in the cars.

I decided I was being silly. Obviously they weren't body parts; they were fur coats. “Have we caught three blacklisted Hollywood men robbing a fur store?” I whispered to David.

“Would furs be stored in cartons like that?”

“No, I guess not,” I said. “What could they have in there?”

As if on cue, Biberman slipped, dropping the box he was holding, and several disc-shaped round cans, about an inch thick and twelve inches in diameter, rolled out of it and across the blacktop.

David stifled a laugh. “Those are film cans,” he whispered. “They've been using the furrier's refrigerator to store their film.”

“Why?” I asked, as the men finished loading their vehicles, and David and I, crouched down, ran back to his car.

“They made an independent movie,” he whispered. “It's called
Salt of the Earth.
Wilson wrote it, Jarrico produced it, and Biberman directed. They all worked for free and raised the budget from private investors. It's a dramatized documentary about a union strike by poor Mexican-American mineworkers in New Mexico. I read the script. It's wonderful, sort of Italian neo-realism, like Vittorio de Sica's
Bicycle Thief
.

“The studios, and some congressmen, and Howard Hughes, all tried like mad to keep them from making it. There were demonstrations against the film. The cast and crew were thrown out of their hotel in New Mexico. Before they were finished shooting, the State Department deported their Mexican leading lady for no reason. And two of the buildings they were using were burned down.”

I couldn't imagine such a thing.

“The union, the IATSE, tried to keep every crew person in Hollywood from working on it. And to keep every laboratory in the country from processing the film. They must have been hiding the work print in the furrier's refrigerator so it wouldn't get set afire by some patriotic citizen.”

“Jesus,” I sighed. “I thought this was America.”

“Apparently it is except when it's under stress,” he said with a sigh.

We followed the caravan at a safe distance to an old dilapidated bungalow on the outskirts of L.A., where they unloaded the cans. Through one of the small windows, we saw a five-foot-high Rube Goldberg–like apparatus full of wheels and levers, and a little four-by-six-inch screen. David told me was a Moviola, a film-editing machine. “This must be their secret editing room,” David whispered.

Suddenly, I felt a presence behind me. I whirled around and saw the tall, white-haired man coming up the driveway, only two feet away, with a large flashlight in hand. He
shined it in my eyes. “Who the hell are you?” he shouted. “What are you doing here?”

Oh, shit, I'd blown it. “Uh, hi,” I said. “I'm Naomi Weinstein. I guess I'm a little early for breakfast at Nate 'n Al's.”

“Oh, Christ,” he sighed. “We've blown it,” he shouted to the others, who were still inside.