Girl of My Dreams (58 page)

“Let's see the old balladeer sing himself out of this one,” Elise said once we were alone, “and how the emperor of Jubilee handles it.” In the panel truck I shuddered as we lifted the body into the crate I'd bought, then padded it with many blankets and pillows so it wouldn't move. “This is a new depth in capitalist decadence,” said Katinka the Red with righteous assurance. “You won't find anyone in the Kremlin mucking around with a corpse.” Elise and I led the little cortege in my Essex while Katinka drove what had now become the hearse.

At the Beverly Wilshire I commandeered porters and checked into the Henscher suite. The crate was labeled MUSICAL INSTRUMENT—VERY FRAGILE—HANDLE WITH EXTREME CARE. PROPERTY OF CYRUS HENSCHER. Katinka refused to enter the Beverly Wilshire. “Kid,” she said to me, “You're not really Red after all, are you? No self-respecting Communist would go in a dump like this, built on the backs of the exploited masses.” She drove off as soon as the porters had the crate out of her van. To disguise the odor of formaldehyde that was beginning to seep from the crate, Elise and I smoked like incinerators as the four unwitting pallbearers hauled what we told them was a spinet up to the Henscher suite. Since I was on crutches Elise carried the suitcase.

Once we were in the suite, we wore surgical gloves and worked as fast as possible. I almost vomited as we unwrapped Aunt Cornelia from her shroud and hoisted her into the bed. “Think of it as a trout you caught or a duck you shot,” Elise said. “I don't hunt or fish,” I said. “All right,” she said, “the carcass of a turkey at Thanksgiving.” Everything she said made it worse. “Let's just hurry,” was all I could say.

We stuck the crate into a living room closet and covered it with the bedspread to contain the odor. From the suitcase Elise unpacked whips, chains, a pair of handcuffs, a padlock, a huge bottle of perfume and a wig. She virtually soaked the bed in perfume and fitted the wig, identical to her own hair, onto the corpse, which lay facedown. We covered Aunt Cornelia with blankets, leaving only a wisp of hair showing.

“Okay, please, let's get out of here,” I said.

Elise savored the moment. “A bad man goes down,” she said.

“For something he didn't do,” I said. “It's not fair.”

“No,” she said, “It's only just.”

“It can't be,” I said.

“Justice, like dresses, comes in different colors,” she said.

She printed a note and stuck it on the table in the suite's foyer. “Hon,” it read, “I fell asleep, but I've left some toys on the chair for us to play with. Give me a good swat or two, the harder the better, and I'll wake up and screw your pants off. Your Panther.”

We hurried out, still in our disguises, careful to place a Do Not Disturb sign on the double doors to the suite.

It took almost two years for Cyrus Henscher to complete the process that began in the suite at the Beverly Wilshire. Elise called him before lunch, gave him the suite number, and said she'd be there by eight o'clock. She knew Henscher was invited to a sneak preview by Mossy that evening. He apologized to Elise that he'd be late. “That will not be a problem,” she told him.

The concierge at the Beverly Wilshire remembered Henscher waddling to the registration desk for his key around ten o'clock. He brought Champagne to the suite and uncorked it in the bedroom after reading Elise's note. As the police reconstructed what happened next from his fingerprints and what he stammered to them, he picked up a whip and laid it across the corpse. When nothing happened he repeatedly struck the presumed torso of Elise Millevoix with a chain. Apparently he was so worked up with lust that at length he pulled back the covers to apply the chain directly to his date's buttocks. That was when he recognized what he was dealing with. He shrieked. His scream was loud and long enough to alarm other guests in the hall, who summoned help from the lobby.

By the time the hotel management burst into the suite, Henscher had had a mild heart attack and was rolling on the floor, still bellowing. Police found him babbling, and they booked him downtown, turning him over to the vice squad. After they held him overnight he made bail and was permitted to check into the Good Samaritan Hospital with what was was generously termed nervous exhaustion as well as his heart condition.

Chastened by the fright they'd had when Trent Amberlyn was arrested picking up a boy, Jubilee executives now had excellent paid contacts at the Los Angeles Police Department. The next morning Dunster Clapp alertly called attention to the morals clause contained in all Jubilee contracts. The composer was not only charged with half a dozen crimes, including the desecration of a corpse, but also fired from Jubilee for extreme turpitude and depravity as well as bringing disgrace upon the institution that had placed such trust in him. His salary ended immediately and he was forced to fight his medical and legal battles on his own, battles that kept columnists and photographers happy for many months. When he reached Elise on the phone she told him she had no idea what he was talking about and hung up. By 1936 Cyrus Henscher was working again, playing in a piano bar in Fort Worth.

29

Mossy Schemes, Pammy Walks

IF YOU'RE WAITING FOR THE APOCALYPSE IT'S ALMOST HERE STOP COME SEE THE SHOW STOP QUIN

The telegram peeked out from under my door on Sumac Lane. The end of June had arrived, and it was as though a roller coaster had reached the top of its tracks. My view momentarily was of everything—the motion picture business, strikes, plots, the Communists, the wider confused country, my lonely heart floating on the breeze. Shortly the ride would dip and curve and plummet. But for an instant the world's breath was held.

At the studio, Mossy was furious, though not as furious as he soon would be. He had to stop the troubled picture Cyrus Henscher had been working on, pay off the actors and crew, renege on his obligations to theaters around the country waiting for the Atlantic City romance, and swallow a huge loss. He cast wary looks in all directions, on and off the lot, suspecting that someone from Jubilee had set up Henscher but not knowing who. If he thought the Millevoix sisters were behind what newspapers were calling the Aunt Cornelia caper, or that I was their accomplice, he gave no sign.

Labor strife was everywhere. Secretaries and elevator operators, even manicurists, were walking out. The West Coast seethed, with shut downs and dock violence from Seattle to San Diego. At the studio Pammy was trying to help the Mexican seamstresses get organized. The stagily affable Colonel DeLight, who remained in charge of the sewing brigade, dropped his charm and told Pammy to get off his plantation. “I always knew he was overseer material,” Yeatsman said, “a southerner all other southerners despise. Scrapped his insincere charm and now shows us what he's made of.”

Pammy thought injustice at the studio was everyone's business and said so to Colonel DeLight. Like bears emerging from hibernation, Jubilee people were blinking their eyes and stretching. Wilkins, the senior carpenter, had lost control of the set-builders and came over to the writers building to tell Yeatsman he realized they'd been bought off cheaply. Writers themselves—I along with them—poked their heads out of their holes and began to fuss, more noisily every day. Everyone was restless.

Everyone also knew the studio was under pressure from New York to make more cuts. The amiable dunce among Mossy's entourage, Goddard Minghoff, was told to start saving money fast. Pammy was shooting scenes on a picture called
Love Is for Strangers
when the blue-eyed, silver-haired yes-man Minghoff, looking like a senator, came to the set and told her grievously untalented director, Wick Fairless, that he'd have to lay off one of the camera assistants, a set decorator, the assistant sound man, and a grip. Fairless did this with barely a wave of his hand, but Pammy was enraged.

With the encouragement of set decorators and designers, her sister among them, Pammy complained bitterly to Mossy about the crew layoffs and brought up the issue of the Mexican seamstresses. Mossy told her he didn't give her advice on how to act and he'd appreciate her not telling him how to run his studio. The next day she didn't report to work. Wick Fairless shot around her but called her to say she had to come in the following day. She didn't. Mossy simmered, held his fire, but told the suave, overeducated Englishman, Percy Shumway, to let it be known around town that disobedience at Jubilee would not be tolerated. Of all Mossy's retinue, Shumway was the most delicate at running indelicate errands.

The following day Louella wrote in the
Examiner
, “A certain Miss who oughta be a Mrs. is acting like she owns her studio instead of being lucky enough to work there. The ungrateful girl is making demands when she should be making a picture, causing scenes when she should be filming them. She seems to be under the influence of foreign ideas that are no good where they came from and worse here. Let's hope she comes to her senses and trundles her shapely
derrière
back onto the lot as fast as it can wiggle.”

The planted item infuriated Pammy and she quit her picture outright. Mossy summoned her. Elena Frye, with her hypersensitive secretarial ears, heard him remind her she was under contract. She reminded him he'd promised her her pick of pictures, and she was stuck with a terrible script, a nearsighted tin-eared director, and a drunk costar. She also reminded him he was responsible for Joey Jouet's death in more ways than one, and that planted items in gossip columns could cut both ways. “Oh shit, Pammy,” Mossy said, “what do you want me to do?”

“Pay people what they're worth, right down to the bottom of the ladder.”

“I do better than other studio heads.”

“That's like telling me Mussolini is better than Hitler. You have to recognize the right of everyone here to bargain collectively like people in any factory.”

“We're
not
a factory, dammit. Look, you know I want to make a picture about your own life, the Palmyra Millevoix story. It'll be a smash. Let's get back to work so we can do that. No more factory talk.”

“Oh but we
are
a factory,” she shot at Mossy. “You've said so yourself. That's what we are, factory workers, so treat us like factory workers and recognize our unions. Bank tellers, grocery clerks are joining unions. Pretty soon no one will be able to die and be buried, for Christ's sake, unless the gravediggers have a contract with the cemeteries.”

“You can't unionize artists,” Mossy said a bit lamely.

“Oh yes you can if you put them on an assembly line, and pictures are made on assembly lines. We're all on one, even you, our foreman.”

“Aw, come on, Pammy dear,” Mossy said, trying to tap a bank account that was already overdrawn.

“Aw, come on, Mossy dear,” she said, uncharmed.

“You know I can't break with all the other studios even if I wanted to, which I don't. We're getting nowhere.”

“That's right,” Pammy said on her way out. “But we'll get somewhere soon.”

She drove off the lot right after paying a call to her set and informing Wick Fairless, who she didn't think could direct traffic anyway, that she would not be returning to
Love Is for Strangers
. From what he'd seen of the dailies, Mossy knew he had a dog on his hands and considered canceling the film. But he couldn't take the assault to his authority, the precedent it could set, and suspended his star.

Two mornings later Jubilee directors reported for work to find that three of their sets on as many sound stages had been broken into splinters overnight. Apparently the carpenters were restive, though it could have been teamsters, janitors, anyone. Mossy sent out the hatchet men Curtt Weigerer and Dunster Clapp to discover what was going on, but everyone hated them and no one talked. The police filed their reports, snooped around the lot, coming up with nothing. That night four more sets were destroyed. An ornate living room, a banquet hall with faux crystal chandeliers, a Chinese opium den, even the interior of a police station—all reduced to rubble. The sets looked as if they'd been bombed, walls imploded on themselves, doors blown off their hinges, lights and lamps and tables shattered. All the structures were fake, of course—the walls themselves were beaverboard or
papier-mâché
—yet you could imagine actual people dead underneath them, war victims. Mossy hired more security guards, but no one trusted them either.

The next morning the notorious fixer and labor racketeer Willie Bioff, who had begun his union career running a stagehands' local in Chicago, appeared in Mossy's office. The jowly cigar-chomping Bioff, with more connections to organized crime than to organized labor, was accompanied by Hop Daigle, the jelly-eyed carpenter. Bioff loved his work; he lived to shake down bosses, which he managed with a dash of humor.

According to Elena Frye, the meeting was punctuated with Mossy's shouts and curses. For a big man Bioff had a high-pitched, foggy voice which he never raised. “This damage to your studio property, Mr. Zangwill,” Bioff said, “it's so sad. You have my deepest sympathies.”

Hop Daigle didn't speak. He looked at the ceiling, which created a strange effect because only one of his eyes shot upward; the other one focused its jelly on Mossy. This was momentarily disconcerting, but Mossy quickly looked away from Daigle and focused his rage on Bioff.

“All right,
Mr.
Bioff, what do you want to stop this criminal vandalism?”

“Oh, I want what you want, Mr. Zangwill. I want the destruction of your property to come to an end.”

“Let's cut to the cash register. How much will it cost?”

“Not so much, Mr. Zangwill. Fifty thousand dollars should solve this problem.”

That's when Mossy screamed. “FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS WILL BREAK THIS STUDIO!”

“I like to stay calm, Mr. Z. If that will kill grandma, then grandma must die.”