Getting Garbo (4 page)

I'm the lead item in Sheilah's column the next morning—her on-the-scene exclusive, of course. Roy Darnell swears eternal love for wife, Adrienne Ballard, chic Beverly Hills interior decorator to the stars, as process server slaps him with divorce papers. Darnell, known in Hollywood as Roy the Bad Boy, mixes it up in street brawl outside Romanoff's.

Okay, Sheilah. Close enough for jazz.

The
New York Daily Mirror
gives me the entire front page of their tabloid:

WIFE CHARGES ADULTERY!

TV'S JACK HAVOC CAUGHT

WITH HIS PANTS DOWN?

The ratings on my show go up three share points the next night.

• • •

Nathan Curtis Scanlon chortles. You read about people chortling, but Nate Scanlon is the only person I know who actually does it. The laughing lawyer. An overstuffed, smallish man with a graying spiky crewcut. Enthroned in his also overstuffed armchair behind his oversized desk. Not a sheet of paper on it. Just the small stack of 8x10 glossies Addie gave me. Nate is leafing.

“Hmmm.” He turns one of the photos sideways, then upside down. Really studies it. “Don't you have back trouble?”

“Occasionally.”

“I can see why.” There he goes again. He's chortling. I'm burning. Waiting for his expert legal opinion. For which I'm paying a fortune per hour.

“No question about it, laddie,” he finally pronounces. “The little lady has got you by the gonads.”

He isn't talking about the lady in the photos. He means Addie. Addie wants blood. Guess whose? And the thing about Addie is that she always gets what she wants.

“So what do I do?” I ask.

“We can fight her. Every inch of the way. Drag our heels. Withhold tax returns, bank accounts, contractual information. Muddy the financial waters. But…eventually we'll have to go to court. And that, with all due immodesty, is where I shine! I'll make the rafters of the courthouse shake. I'll bring tears to the eyes of the judge.”

“Yeah?” Sounding good. “And then?”

“Then we get our heads kicked in.” Nate Scanlon chortles. “No question about it. She wins, you lose. And winner takes all in this game.”

He explains it to me. The only local grounds for divorce are insanity or adultery.

“Insanity or adultery,” I repeat.

“Based on these,” Nate Scanlon holds up the photos, “I think you definitely qualify on both counts. What're you,
crazy?
Shacking up in some fleabag motel—”

“—the Hotel Bel-Air, a quiet bungalow, nobody saw us coming or going—”

“Except a hired transom-peeper who snapped candid photos of you and this broad in action!”

“It's blackmail, Nate! Addie's trying to blackmail me. Isn't that a crime?”

“Don't start, laddie. They've got all the cards. Mr. Giesler—” Jerry Giesler, who's representing Addie, and is Nate Scanlon's only real competition in town “—will flash these glossies in the judge's chambers and you are chopped liver.”

See? It's worse than I thought. “So I suppose your advice is to—”

“Cave in. I'll tell Giesler we're cooperating in every way, you are repentant and willing to pay for your transgression, blah-blah-blah—”

“Yeah, fine. I've got next to nothing in the bank, thanks to Warners' penny-pinching contract. Even the money I made on the loan-out movie. Warners grabbed it and gave me my usual chicken feed salary, so sure, let her take it all—”

“Plus your royalties.”

“Fuck no!” I explode. “She can have the equity in the house, that yappy mutt she loves so much, all the loose change around, but not the royalties!”

“They're not asking, laddie, they're telling. Giesler phoned me. That's the cornerstone of their demands.”

Now I'm panicking. Because we're talking about real money. The only real money I've gotten close to in my life. The money that's going to take care of me in my old age—if I live that long. When TV used to broadcast “live” the shows disappeared into the ether. Then Desi and Lucy decided to put their show on film. Since then most of the shows are done on film. Including mine.

Back when we made our deal, Nate tried to get me five hundred dollars per show more. Warners dug in their heels, deal breaker. So instead Nate asked for very hefty royalties, in perpetuity, if the shows are ever rerun off-network. Warners figured that'd never happen, so they gave it to us. Couple months ago, Desi negotiated a multi-million dollar deal for local stations to rerun their old shows. Now there's a new business called Syndication. And I'm in on the ground floor. That's my jackpot. Those royalty payments.

“We give them the royalties,” Nate Scanlon says, “and we accept any joint debts and we wrap the whole deal up—lickety-split. Don't waste a moment!”

I stare at him. Which side is this bastard on? Hey. He's grinning like the cat that ate the bird. And it hits me. Something's happened. “Good news to go with the bad?”

“You might say that. Providing our footwork is nimble enough.” He tumbles a pair of Chiclets out of a box, offers me some. I shake my head, he starts to chew, I wait him out. It's worth waiting for.

“I think I've found a way for you to escape from Burbank.”

• • •

Okay. Before we go any farther, let me tell you some stuff about Jack Warner and his studio, because it's important to my tale.

During the '30s and '40s, they made tons of money with prison pictures like
20,000 Years in Sing Sing,
Each Dawn I Die,
and
I
Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.
Jack Warner liked those movies so much, that's how he ran his studio. Anyway. The studio is located in Burbank, a small town in the San Fernando Valley invented by Warner. The studio guards are like prison guards, and Jack L. Warner himself is the warden. Writers are treated like convicts—locked down in their assigned cells from nine to six on weekdays and a half day Saturday. Rumors of a writers' conspiracy to tunnel out for off-the-lot lunches were part of the Warners legend. Among the actors, long-term contract players felt like lifers—the harder you worked, the farther you were from ever getting out.

You think I'm bullshitting, right?

Well, not much.

You could start out with a seven-year contract and still be there ten, eleven years later. How? Whenever you rejected a script or said no about anything, the studio suspended you. That meant off-salary—and they tacked the suspension time onto your contract. Bette Davis tried to escape by going to England to make movies, but the long arm of Jack Warner kiboshed that. Olivia de Havilland was more successful a couple years later. She sued the studio for involuntary servitude and a high court found in her favor: they could suspend, but they couldn't extend. So now seven years is the longest sentence you can draw in the fair city of Burbank.

I've only done three years. I owe them four more. We've been trying to get a release now while I'm hot in TV and a movie career is possible. Jack L. has personally said no to me in very graphic terms. So I figured that's it. Breaking a Warner Bros. contract is slightly harder than busting out of Alcatraz.

But here's Nathan Curtis Scanlon, Esq. saying he's found a way.

• • •

He struts across his spartan office with the ramrod posture of the West Pointer he once was. A decorated WWII and Korean War vet. Major Scanlon. Never mind the Chasen's paunch that Nate has added since then. Nate Scanlon looks out the window down onto the Sunset Strip. Now Hollywood is his battleground.

“It's in the small print,” he says. “You know what they say, God is in the details. That's our out.”

I still don't get it. Warner Bros. invented small print—Nate taught me that when I first became a client. “They give you on page one of the contract what they take back on pages seventeen, nineteen, and twenty-four.” That's why I need Nate. A cop to monitor the robbers.

“They were a day late.” He says it like he's revealing the secret of the world.

“A day late—to do what?”

“To pick up your option for the next year of the contract.”

“But they started paying me the extra dough anyway, a big hundred-and-fifty dollar a week raise, which brings me to fifty cents above the minimum wage. And I cashed the checks—”

“Doesn't matter!” He pivots to face me. For Nate Scanlon, breaking the Warners contract would be more than just a business coup. He's back at Inchon, trying to free a POW. “They were a day late with their official notification. So the entire contract is no longer binding. It'll take a tussle in court, but we're going to win this one. You'll be a free agent. Count on it. And I've already got an offer in my back pocket from Burt Lancaster's company for you to set up shop over there. You're going to be a great big movie star!”

So far nobody's made the big jump from TV to the movies. I'm ready and willing to be the first. I savor the prospect for a delicious moment.

Then something Scanlon said plays back in my head. “So what's the big hurry—with the divorce, I mean?”

“Everything depends on that. We must get Addie to sign off on final divorce terms before she gets wind of the possibility of a huge movie deal—or she'll wait and go after the money from that, too.”

Looking back later, I see that this was one of the key moments that might have changed everything in my life. A get-off point if I'd played it another way. But right then there were only visions of sugar plums and Oscar-winning movies dancing in my head.

“When you explain it that way…” I shrug expansively. “Hell, give her the royalties, give her whatever she wants. Let's get this show on the road!”

He comes closer. Looms over my chair.

“Understand this clearly, Roy my boy. What I just told you is a secret—known only by you and me and my paralegal. That's how it's got to stay. Our secret. If it leaks prematurely, it will cost you a fortune. So tell no one.” I nod. He leans into my face. “Not your rabbi, not your barber, not your agents, not your saintly mother. No one. You're a marvelous actor. These next few weeks will be the most important performances you've ever given. Act sad because you are being divorced. Act contrite when you tell people that all you want is for dear Addie to get whatever makes her secure. Act happy to be working at the Warner Brothers studio.”

“That's asking a lot.” I grin. He doesn't grin back. Okay. Serious. “I got it, Nate.”

“I'm not sure you do. You always like to bend the rules. And then there's your temper.”

“What temper? Can't believe everything you read in
Confidential.
”

I have Nate chortling again.

• • •

You're probably wondering where this reputation I have as a tough guy comes from. The answer is Merle Heifetz. Blame it all on him.

Merle is this tiny Jewish leprechaun over in the Warners publicity department. He's the one who dubbed Anne Sheridan “The Oomph Girl” and labeled Lauren Bacall “The Look.” They sent me to see him my first day on the lot. He was in his cubbyhole office. Shooting paper clips with a rubber band at a framed photo of Jack L. Warner. His aim was pretty good.

“What's with your schnoz?” he asked.

I touched my nose. Self-conscious as always.

“Slipped on the ice when I was a kid and busted my beak on the curb,” I said.

“No, no, you—” he stopped firing paper clips and stared at the ceiling like there was writing up there “—you broke your nose fighting in the Golden Gloves. Yeah, you fought sixteen bouts, seven kayos, quit undefeated.”

And that's how it began. The making of the legend of Big Bad Roy.

Merle Heifetz—“No relation to the fiddle player,” he used to introduce himself—started putting out press releases and planting column items that this real tough cookie had come to town. He said it fit the Jack Havoc image. Everything that didn't fit, we skipped over. Little boy of seven with a bout of meningitis, bedridden for a year.
Skip.
Glued to the radio, sopping up soap operas.
Make it “The Lone Ranger” and we can use it.
Going to grade school and getting into a fistfight every day.
Definitely use!
Minor scrape with the police.
Great!

I got the hang of it fast and censored stuff by myself. My nose really got busted by my father, the South Street bookie, who used me as a punching bag whenever he got drunk.
Skip.
Daddy passes out in the gutter on an icy winter night and freezes to death.
Skip.
Just say:
Roy Darnell lost his father, a well-known Philadelphia sportsman, at an early age.
Mother encouraged Roy's youthful dream to act.
Use.
But skip parts about when she was half-bagged and came on to casting directors, stage managers, and anyone else who showed a flicker of interest.

Then Merle and I went beyond the gossip columns and broke into the legit news pages.

A cowboy, half a head taller than me, sashays up during jam-packed cocktail hour at the Polo Lounge and sneers, “So yer the lil' peckerwood from TV who's supposed to be such a badass.” He swings and misses. I give him one in the gut and he goes down. In front of the whole damn town. Story moves on both the AP and UPI wires. Merle Heifetz is proud as punch. Tells me
now
that it was a put-up job, he paid the cowboy to pick the fight and take the dive. “If Sinatra's people can hire bobbysox swooners, why can't we use a few barroom brawlers?”

Pretty soon Merle didn't have to hire 'em. I'd joined the select group of he-man actors who are magnets for every saloon blowhard out to show off in front of his girl. It's like being the fastest gun in the west. They all want to test you.

Not that I wasn't kind of fast with my fists when I was a kid in Philly. You had to be to stay alive. Even during my New York days, I got into a scrape or two. For my art. I always thoroughly research my roles, and one time I was going to play a longshoreman on a TV show. So I hung out in some of the waterfront bars, studying the dock wallopers. Two bruisers followed me out onto the street one night. Push led to shove. But I pumped up on adrenaline. Pretended I was my guardian angel, who's absolutely fearless. Really got into it. Like I became him. It had worked for me before and it did this time, too. I creamed those two guys. Definitely put the big one in the hospital with a concussion. So that was the attitude I used on the TV show. Got a good mention from John Crosby in the
Herald Trib
review.