The American Chronicle - Hollywood Part 39

"I thought she was working for Sennett."

"That's why she's low. She's in trouble."

"Drugs."

"She's tried very hard. I've helped her as much as you can ever help anybody ... help themselves."

Caroline remained in the car while Taylor went into Robinson's. "Could I have your autograph, Miss Traxler?" The chauffeur was young and fresh-faced. Emma's dazzling smile no longer made Caroline uneasy. She wrote Emma's name in a Woolworth's note-book. There were a dozen other signatures in the book but she did not dare riffle the pages, as she returned book and pen. "It's sure a great honor getting to drive you, and all the other big stars."

Caroline simpered briefly. "Is there any news about Eddie ... Eddie Sands?"

The boy frowned. "Well, he's been signing Mr. Taylor's name to checks up in Fresno and Sacramento. Then there was this p.a.w.n shop where he hocked some things, using a name Mr. Taylor recognized. But that's all."

Taylor was back in the car. "Nothing I wanted. Let's go by the bank," he said to Fellows. "My G.o.d," he said to Caroline, money on his mind, "this income tax business is a nuisance."

"And expensive."

Taylor nodded. "I wish you'd work on your friends in Washington to let up on us." They were driving along a dusty lane lined with eucalyptus trees which would, presently, cross Sunset Boulevard. The day was bright, blue and cold. "I told you Eddie's been forging my name to checks ..."

"Another nuisance."

Taylor laughed suddenly. "The real nuisance is that he's such a good forger I can't tell his writing from my own. Marjorie Berger's coming over to the house this evening with all the receipted checks."

"Anyway, you're lucky he's gone."

Taylor gave her a quick curious look. Then he said, somewhat ambiguously, "Am I?" After the bank and a stop at Fowler's Bookstore, they went on to Alvarado Street, where Caroline was shown into the familiar drawing room by the new Negro servant, an agreeable somewhat nervous man, plainly devoted to Taylor. "Miss Berger called to say she'll be here at six-thirty, sir. Then another lady called, but didn't leave her name."

"Thank you, Henry." Taylor went over to his desk and picked up a script. "Monte Carlo," he said. "There's a wonderful part for you. The star's part," he added quickly. "You're a White Russian grand d.u.c.h.ess, working as a maid for this rich American lady-very vulgar. You go to Monte Carlo with her, and there's your fiance from St. Petersburg, who's supposed to have died in the Revolution."

"I know the story," said Caroline, sweetly, she hoped. "What do I wear?" He told her. She was thrilled.

"I think I can really get Valentino for this one."

"I'll do it." Caroline looked about the room where she had played so many games of backgammon. Now she felt nothing, nothing at all. Taylor suggested that she take his car home while he walked to his dancing cla.s.s in Orange Street. "I'm learning the tango," he said, and kissed her cheek.

CAROLINE WAS AWAKENED BY THE telephone, which had merged, most unpleasantly, with a dream involving a train's departure without her. As she ran beside the train pulling out of the station, the conductor, Eddie Sands, grinned at her, and rang a bell and said in what sounded to be German-Alsatian?-"All aboard." Yet her luggage was on the train, including a Poussin painting and a childhood doll with one arm. "I must get aboard," said Caroline, into the receiver.

"What?" It was a man's voice, a familiar voice.

Caroline was now awake. She looked at the luminous dial on her bedside clock: nine-thirty. She had slept late. "I'm sorry," she said. "Who is this?"

"Charlie Eyton." The voice sounded tense, and unlike its owner's usual soothing head-of-studio drone. "Have the police called you?"

"What about?" Caroline sat up in bed, completely alert.

"Taylor's been murdered. I think you better get down here, to my office. They'll want to question you. The police. The press, too. But don't talk to them. Everybody who saw Bill yesterday's being questioned. Luckily, I've got all the letters ..."

"What letters?" she asked stupidly.

"Yours to him. Don't worry. I've got the whole lot. I've already been to Alvarado Street. Anyway, we've got to work on a statement for you to make ..."

"Why was he murdered? I mean, how was he murdered?" Caroline was having great trouble absorbing so grotesque a fact.

"He was shot in the back a couple of hours after you left him."

"That would be after his tango cla.s.s in the Orange Street dance studio." Caroline was shrewd and precise in her shock.

"Sure. Sure." Eyton hung up.

Caroline warned Heloise not to speak to anybody in her absence. "There's been an accident," she said. "Poor Mr. Taylor's dead."

"I knew it!" When it came to disaster, Heloise was never taken by surprise.

"Of course you did." Caroline left the apartment and got into her car. The j.a.panese gardener greeted her politely. The day was cold and perfect. Sunset Boulevard was almost deserted. So many times she had driven like this through empty streets to studios near and far as well as to locations where it was often necessary to start out before the sun rose. If she ever looked back over this extraordinary period in her life, she would recall, first, the sun coming up over the studio ranch in the San Fernando Valley and then the torturing blaze of klieg lights in her eyes. "Interlock." The rest was confusion.

Charles Eyton was at his desk, speaking on the telephone. He waved Caroline to a chair. "Yes, it was murder. At first they said natural causes but then the coroner rolled him over and saw that he'd been shot in the back. When? Around seven, seven-thirty last night. Yes, all h.e.l.l is going to break loose." He hung up. "I'm sorry to rout you out, but we've got to co-ordinate our stories."

"We?"

"Yes. We. The studio. The movie business. This could be worse than Fatty Arbuckle."

"Oh," was all that Caroline could manage. Then she thought how delighted Blaise would be that her acting career, what was left of it, would end in such a spectacular Gotterdammerung. Would scandal also affect what she had come to think of as the real imaginary American town?

"The colored man found him at seven-thirty this morning on the floor. In the living room. He called the police. He called me, thank G.o.d. I sent our people over to take away anything that would look bad for the studio. Bootleg whisky, love letters. Articles of feminine apparel."

"I shouldn't have thought that there would be many of those."

Eyton gave her a hard look; but said nothing. "We got the bottles out. I personally got the letters. While the police were busy questioning the neighbors, I went upstairs." He indicated three stacks on his desk. "Letters from you and Mabel Normand and Claire Windsor and Mary Miles Minter ..."

"Nothing incriminating-in my letters, anyway."

"No. But that won't stop the press from running full-page pictures of you as a foreign temptress, capable of an act of pa.s.sion."

"No, it won't," said Caroline bleakly. "After all, I am the press, too."

Eyton was suddenly all apparent candor. "You can help us. A lot. First ..."

"First, what happened?"

"Who knows? Taylor came home with you. Went out again for a walk-to your tango cla.s.s, I suppose. They'll check it out. Then he came back to the house, where his accountant, Marjorie Berger, was waiting for him. That was six-fifteen. An hour later Mabel Normand arrived. Her chauffeur waited for her in Alvarado Street, in full view of everyone in the court. Then the colored man, who let her in, went home. At around seven-thirty, Taylor walked Mabel to her car. She had a paper bag of peanuts in her hand." Eyton paused to see if Caroline grasped the significance of the peanuts, but Caroline chose to acknowledge nothing. "Then Mabel was driven away, and Taylor went inside the bungalow and a few minutes later the neighbors heard what sounded like a shot, which was a shot, the shot that killed him, but since it could have been an automobile's exhaust or a firecracker, n.o.body thought anything about it."

"Do the police know about Mabel?"

Eyton nodded.

"This will not exactly help her career."

"If we all work together, we can all stay clear of this thing. As you know, we can pretty much control the press from the studio, if we're all agreed on just what we want to feed them."

"Can you control the police?"

There was a pause. Then Eyton shrugged. "We always have. It's expensive. You have to pay off everybody, which means the district attorney, too, and he comes high."

Caroline was beginning to grasp the nature of the problem. "What is it that we must all agree to?"

"Do you have any idea who killed William?" The tone was so casual that Caroline found herself smiling politely.

"I didn't, of course."

"Of course." Eyton was now smiling at Caroline, as if a preview at Bakersfield had gone unexpectedly well. Back of Eyton's chair, a portrait of Adolph Zukor glowered at them. Above the picture, like heraldic devices, two polo mallets were crossed, a gift from Cecil B. DeMille.

"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 pa.s.sion far too large for her tiny frame and frustrated yet again in her l.u.s.t, 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 nation-wide manhunt."

"Will they find Eddie?"

"I don't know." Eyton touched the stack of letters. "I 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 pa.s.sions, 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 h.e.l.lo 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 garconniere."

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

2.

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 d.u.c.h.ess, 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.