The Fame Thief (30 page)

And it prompted me to recheck the names La Marr had given me when I talked to her. I hadn’t talked to Melly Crain, although apparently she was past being helpful, if Dressler was to be trusted. Oriole Finlayson, the woman who wrote
Hell’s Sisters
, was still among us; she’d had a nice little second career in the 1970s and ’80s writing a series of mysteries narrated by the detective’s cat, one of which had been turned into an animated film. So make a mark next to her name: someone to go see, if nothing broke loose first.

I had the distinct feeling that something was going to break loose.

The woman who’d worked in publicity for Bugsy Siegel, Delilah Polland, had failed to answer a number of calls. I had an address, so I figured I’d drive by on the way to see Ella Cowan and just take a look. That left Olivia Dupont from La Marr’s original list.

Okay, so what
about
Olivia Dupont?

Google took me to a fan site, “Livvy Lives On,” a pixellated shrine to one of Hollywood’s Almosts. Except, as it turned out, she wasn’t quite as much an Almost as I’d thought. She’d gone on working on the downslope of the industry. She’d played the female lead in a couple of the atomic giant bug movies of the 1950s and done a turn as a female biologist in two quickies about a putatively horrifying guy in a lizard suit who emerged from a
Louisiana Bayou to wreak havoc among people in obscure southern ZIP codes. Movies that cost less in their entirety than what they pay today for ten minutes of the average television series, movies where the entire shoot might be twelve days on uncooperative locations, and the important thing was to hire people who always knew their lines and could handle practically anything in one, or at most, two, takes. No matter what they’d said about Livvy, no one had said that she couldn’t get the job done.

And then, in the early seventies, a late-life break: She’d found her way into the Great Shrine of Camp in a series called
Reata
. For three years she’d played a bullwhip-toting rancher named Henrietta “Hank” Hawkins, the sole mistress of a vast spread “in the great Pecos country,” as the website put it—a cigar-smoking, bullwhip-toting matron whom some gay people had gleefully embraced as “the butchest character ever in prime time.” Apparently, Livvy had been a grand marshal of the West Hollywood Halloween parade in 1979, riding in a Cadillac surrounded by guys in leather dresses, carrying bullwhips.

I was laughing when I got to the picture of her in costume, one foot up on a stump, leaning forward with an expression that probably scared the hell out of cattle, with her arms crossed over her thigh and the whip, curled in a circle, dangling from one hand. I took a closer look at her face and stopped laughing. Livvy’s face, twenty-five years after
Hell’s Sisters
, answered any number of questions.

The house where
Delilah Polland was supposed to live was resonantly empty. I knocked on the door a couple of times and peered through the front window, looking at furniture with dust covers on it. When I felt eyes on me, I straightened and turned. On the sidewalk, straddling a bicycle with black fringe coming out of the handlebars, was a red-headed cowboy of perhaps
eight or nine with an expression that said he’d already heard it, no matter what I was going to say.

“She’s not there,” he said.

“So I see.”

He weighed my response, turning his handlebars back and forth. “She fell down.”

I waited, but that seemed to be the bulletin in full. I said, “Is she all right?”

He said, “I don’t know.”

I said, “Well, what about your—” just as a woman called out, “Danny! Danny, come away from there.”

Danny threw me an accusing squint and put his feet on the pedals, and I turned to see the woman next door standing in her doorway and giving me a highly critical eye. “I’m looking for Miss Polland,” I called out. “Your son says she took a fall, is that right?”

“Who are you?”

“Sorry.” I moved less than halfway to her, remaining on the sidewalk rather than setting foot over the magic line at the edge of her lawn. “I’m Edward MacLeish. I spoke with Miss Polland a year or so ago about talking to me for a documentary I’m making on Bugsy Seigel. For PBS?”

The mention of PBS relaxed her a bit. It always does. I use it all the time. Nothing can go wrong, or even get very exciting, with a guy from PBS.

She came down the three steps that led to her door, a woman in her trim mid-thirties with carrot-orange hair. “She took a bad fall, went right down those front steps. Broke both hips. It was terrible, ’cause nobody was around. She was out there, in front of her door, flat on her back on the walkway, for an hour or more before anybody came by.”

“That’s awful,” I said. “How is she now?”

She screwed up her mouth, pulling it to the left, a semaphore of doubt. “She was pretty shaken, mentally. It kind of brought it all home to her. That she was old, I mean, that—you know—she’s eventually going to die. Knocked the cocky right out of her.”

“The cocky?”

“Cockiness. I don’t mean that in a bad way. She was just so full of energy, and she’d worked with all those gangsters and murderers, and she was still here. But after the fall, even after they rebuilt her hips, she wasn’t the same. So now she’s living with her daughter. In West Virginia.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

“I’ve got a phone number. Hang on a second.”

She turned and ran up the three steps, letting the screen door bang behind her. Danny looked at me without much enthusiasm.

“So,” I said to the kid. “You watch a lot of PBS?”

Ella Cowan, the
former showgirl who’d been at the fateful party, had cornered the market in glass grapes, silk flowers, marble-top tables, and those black-and-white silhouette cutouts of girls wearing billowing, wasp-waisted nineteenth-century dresses. There must have been sixty of them on the long wall in her living room.

“Sure, I remember,” she said in a smoker’s baritone, using a big malachite cigarette lighter to set fire to one of those skinny women’s cigarettes I’d thought had disappeared a decade ago. The package announced that this particular Virginia Slim was mentholated, which was almost enough to close my throat completely. “It was a crappy night.”

“Probably not as crappy for you as for Dolly.”

“Oh, Dolly, Dolly, Dolly. Spare me.” Cowan lived in twilight, if the drawn drapes were any indication, and she had the
general air of something that would turn to wisps of burning paper if sunlight should strike it. She was still slender, still elegantly proportioned at more than six feet tall, but her face had the peculiar look of fictional youth achieved by those who spend much of their time on the operating tables of cosmetic surgeons: unlined, colorless, immobile, occasionally—as in the too-full lips—improbable. She looked like she’d been preserved cryonically in 1952 and had thawed halfway, and her personality was chilly enough to bear that out.

“Most people seem to have liked her,” I said. I was sitting across a marble-top coffee table ten feet long, a veritable vineyard of dark purple glass grapes with green plastic leaves. Cowan had apparently grown used to talking to people who were shorter than she was, and even sitting she tilted her head back so she could sight down her nose at me. She held her cigarette dead-center in her mouth, the plumped lips pursed around it, so she may also have been trying to keep smoke out of her eyes. The total package—hair drawn back so tightly it looked like it hurt, tilted-back head, cool eyes, the mouth pulled tight around the cigarette like a rejected kiss—it all had something of the forties vamp about it, the woman in a B-movie whom even a ten-year-old would never mistake for the heroine.

“She was only nice to the men,” she said. “And she wasn’t even
giving
them any. She treated the girls like we were extras on a movie set. I’ll tell you what she was, although I haven’t heard the term in years: she was a cock-teaser. She was all about how wonderful she was, pushing the other girls aside and shaking her little can at the men. No, I didn’t like her.”

“And yet here you are, talking to me about her.”

A long pull on the cigarette, then she took it out of her mouth, leaned her head all the way back, and blew the smoke straight up in the air. “I don’t have many visitors.” She waved
the smoke away and said, “And Irwin Dressler,
himself
, called me up and told me to.”

I said, “Must have been persuasive.”

“It was flattering, I suppose. I’ve been off the radar since JFK was president. And even then I wasn’t exactly at the level where I chatted with Irwin Dressler every day, which I’ll bet is no surprise to you. I only ever saw him maybe four times, and I don’t think he noticed me. Had no eyes for girls at all, that one.”

“He was married,” I said.

“They all were. But I’ll tell you, when he called me yesterday I damn near saluted. He was the only person Bugsy ever told me he was afraid of. And that was Bugsy’s problem, wasn’t it? If he’d had the sense to be afraid of people he probably would have died of old age. Dressler scared me, sure, but to tell you the truth, honey, what’s he going to do to me? At my age I don’t care whether I’ve got another five years or five days.” The coal on the Virginia Slims glowed again, and she said, flapping her hand at the smoke, “Long as it doesn’t hurt.”

I said, “That’s what’s left, huh?”

She said, “This doesn’t interest you. You’re not old enough yet. What does interest you?”

“The night of the party. Who invited you?”

She was shaking her head before I finished the question. “It wasn’t what you’d call an invitation. Tony Accardo picked me out of a line of living statues—that was the act, we were living statues because that way nobody could say we were dancing naked—and sent somebody backstage for me.”

“That night?”

“Yeah, sure, but the first time was about two, three months earlier.”

“So you’re backstage, putting on makeup—

“Having it put on. It was everywhere, right? White greasepaint.
I’m supposed to be marble.” She rubbed the cigarette’s coal against the side of a big cobalt-blue glass ashtray, just scraping off the ash. “So one of the boys comes in, wants to know can I go. Tony was always a gentleman like that. Not ‘Tony wants you,’ but ‘Tony wants to know can you go?’ So I said sure, and what time and like that, and we set it up.”

“For the Flamingo,” I said.

“One of Bugsy’s high-roller suites. Bugsy was dead, then, but they were still Bugsy’s suites. When people read about it back then, they probably imagined some kind of hotel room. But Bugsy’s suites were palaces. Four, five rooms. Big as this place.”

“What was the agenda? I mean, did whoever Accardo sent to invite you say anything about what the evening would be like?”

“Just a party. Drink with four or five of the guys for a few hours, then go down and catch Betty Grable’s last show. Maybe go home with Tony later. Like a million parties. Those guys liked girls. Liked to be around them. Liked us to make them feel big. They were macho, remember macho? We were the people they could show off in front of, and we could go
Ooooooo, what a big guy you are
, and they’d know we weren’t saving up bits and pieces of the things they told us so we could rat it out to Sam or Mostelli and get them whacked so we could take over their job. Those guys spent a lot of time looking at each other when they didn’t think the other one would catch them at it.”

“What time did you get up to the suite?”

Her eyes went up to the ceiling for a second and came back down. “Maybe nine.”

“Didn’t you have a show at ten or so?”

“Ten and midnight. We had floaters, four girls who could stand in if one of us got picked out for the night. Not too hard. All they had to do was stand in the right place and not scratch their nose.”

“So you went up to the suite. Who was there?”

She said, “You know, this was just one night out of a lot of nights, and it was a long time ago.”

“Try,” I said. “I know you can do it.”

She stubbed out the cigarette. “No sweetener?”

“Sure,” I said. “Two thousand bucks.” I pulled some of Dolores La Marr’s remaining hundreds out of my pocket and counted out twenty of them.

“The girls,” she said. She picked up the big ashtray and put it on top of the money. “What’s-her-name, the one who said she was an actress—”

“Kelly Brannigan.”

“Yeah. Her. And herself, of course, the darling Miss La Marr. And George Raft, he was there, nosing around La Marr; and Tony the Ant, that’s Mostelli; Handsome Johnny; Tony Accardo—my date, so to speak; Bobby Pig, that’s Roberto Pigozzi; and Sam Giancana. Couple other guys rotated in and out. Stompanato, he was just a kid then, and one other.…”

“Eddie Israel?”

“Yeah, Eddie. Nice guy, Eddie. Caught one in the head not too long after.”

“What did you do? At the party?”

“Well, it was a
party
, Jack. Remember parties? We drank some good stuff, we smoked cigarettes—hold on a minute.” She tapped the Virginia Slims pack in an expert fashion, and a cigarette obligingly stuck its head up. She put it in her mouth, dead center again, and I hefted the malachite lighter for her. She inhaled and then pulled it out and regarded the glowing tip critically, as though she suspected me of doing it wrong. “And we danced a little,” she said when she’d approved of my work. “Sam had brought three jigs up from the lounge—”

“Jigs?”

She sighed. “Black guys. A trio, you know? Piano, bass, drums. Pretty good. See, that’s what I mean, this wasn’t just a hotel room. Can you imagine a trio, piano and everything, playing in a hotel room?”

She expected an answer, so I said, “No.”

“We were dancing, me and Brannigan. You know, dancing like girls who were interested in each other. Just kidding around. The guys liked that. Miss La Marr was far too elegant to dance.”

“Someone said Giancana was in a bad mood.”

“He was always in a bad mood. But, yeah, he was pretty pissy. Some of the guys—not Tony, not Mostelli, but some of the other ones—were up on tiptoe. Raft was kind of working on him, telling him jokes and stories about Hollywood. Not making much headway. Sam could be a charmer, but when he wasn’t, you wanted to look out.”