Life to Life: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (13 page)

Mother Maybelle was known
professionally as Maizey McCall (maiden name) and was respected in
the industry as a daring stuntwoman. If you have ever seen a
forties-vintage western in which a runaway buckboard or covered
wagon driven by a female character flipped over or rolled down an
embankment or plunged off a cliff into a river, then you might have
seen Maizey at work. She and Tony had been married for twelve years
and had given up the idea of having kids until Ann Marie came
along.

Maizey lost her taste for
stunts when her husband was killed. She decided that her child
deserved a mother with a somewhat safer life-style so she worked
when she could as a stand-in or extra while also continuing to
operate the stables and riding school that she and Tony had
established in the foothill community of Azusa several years
earlier.

When Ann Marie was three,
Maizey got a break with a supporting role in a television series—a
western, naturally. She had never thought of herself as an actress
but she was still quite beautiful and looked much younger than her
forty years, and I guess the role was not too demanding; she still
worked primarily with horses. That only lasted a couple of seasons,
though, and there ensued a period of several years during which
Maizey apparently worked at nothing. She sold the horse ranch in
Azusa and moved into a Hollywood apartment with Ann Marie where
they lived until her marriage to Wilson Turner, an insurance
broker, when Ann Marie was ten.

Turner was a widower and
about ten years older than Maizey. Mother and daughter moved to his
fashionable home in the Los Feliz section of Hollywood where they
lived until Turner died eight years later. It turned out that he
had been living beyond his means and was deeply in debt. Even the
house was heavily burdened with mortgages that left very little
equity. The upshot was that Maizey was left virtually penniless.
She and her daughter moved to modest quarters in a rundown section
of Hollywood for several months pending Ann's graduation from high
school, after which Maizey—now in her fifties—found a live-in job
at a boarding stable near San Fernando. Ann Marie married
Hollywood High classmate Nathan Sturgis and the newlyweds moved in
with his parents.

That marriage was
apparently an immediate disaster and ended very quickly. Ann Marie
went on with her young life, though, and Maizey seemed content with
her own lot for the next few years. But mother and daughter became
estranged and were not reconciled until shortly before Maizey's
death by asphyxiation at the age of seventy-two.

I get all this history not
from Annie or Francois or the cops but from the screenwriter who
was present at Church of the Light on the night Herman Milhaul
dramatically took his own life. His name is Arnold Tostermann. He
is a handsome and distinguished gentleman of sixty-eight years and
has worked in the industry for more than four decades. Writers get
around and they tend to know all the ins and outs and ups and downs
of this very interesting community; what is better, they have an
innate curiosity and a strong dramatic sense so they are usually
alert to the pulse of the business and the personalities that drive
it. They are really the very heart of Hollywood. Forget all that
ego stuff from the directors; the writers are where it is at—and
they are even there before the it. “In the beginning was the
word...” and it's still like that. It all begins with a script, and
from that script the entire industry finds its sustenance—actors,
directors, producers, cameramen, set designers, soundmen, makeup
artists and costumers, all the technical crafts and even the
typists and secretaries, publicity people, accountants, studio
executives, agents; everyone who works in this town feeds from the
hand of the writer, and they all know it.

But there is something
even more special about Arnold Tostermann. This is the guy who
introduced Maizey McCall to young Francois Mirabel.

It is ten o'clock and the night is unusually
balmy so we are seated on the garden patio of Tostermann's hillside
home in Laurel Canyon. This house has been here awhile, but then so
has Arnold. He bought it for a song in 1950 and has watched the
property appreciate "about a thousand percent" but never saw any
reason to sell. I doubt that you could pry him out of there with a
crowbar. He has the look of a self-satisfied man, a guy who has
carried the fire and found it comfortable, and you just sort of
know that this sense of satisfaction permeates the personal life,
as well.

His wife is at least thirty years younger
than he, maybe more—very pretty and shapely, poised, pleasant. Her
name is Joan and she carries herself like a dancer. Joan has not
joined us on the patio but she is back and forth a lot, very
attentive, pushing food and drink at us.

We are bathed in the reflected dancing
lights of a Mexican fountain that dominates this garden. The lights
are submerged in the pool of the fountain and set to beam
vertically onto the tiered bowls and falling streams; there are six
of them, each a different color and sequenced to flash on and off
in rhythmic patterns of dancing light. So as I look at my host I
see him in constantly changing hues and sparkling patterns; the
effect is sometimes weird.

"I don't know, Ash—okay to call you
Ash?—sometimes I don't know what the future holds for young people
in this town. Don't get me wrong; it's a very dynamic industry and
the new technologies make it all the more exciting—you know, like
subscription TV and the videocassette markets—all very hungry right
now—but it's not the same business I started in forty-odd years
ago."

He smiles, sips at his wine, looks to see
how I'm doing with mine.

"I don't know, I guess it
was just a closer community then. More of a
sense
of community, I guess. I mean
the days of Zanuck and Goldwyn and...you know. Nowadays a young
writer may never even meet a studio head, never mind dining with
him."

He chuckles.

"In fact, if he doesn't
read the trades every day he probably won't know who's heading the
studio at any given moment. We have become conglomerated, taken
over by accountants and corporate climbers who measure artistic
value nowhere but in the quarterly reports."

Another chuckle.

"What in the world would one of those guys
find to discuss over dinner with a writer?"

"Francois doesn't fall
into that category?"

"More and more, now, I
guess he does; yes. But with a difference. He came to this town
with love and fascination, and I mean he loved every aspect of it.
Never met a man with more enthusiasm, more sense of adventure, more
delight in tackling something new. He got into all our heads. I
mean writers, directors, actors, all of us. He was a charming guy.
You know, it's strange for this town but I don't think I know
anybody who really dislikes Francois Mirabel. He's
just..."

"Know what you mean, yeah."

"Exactly. Even stumbling
around with the language the way he does... I think it adds to the
charm."

I am thinking about dissimulation but I nod
my head and agree.

"Of course, between you and me., Ash, he
uses that to his own advantage. Like my Mexican gardener. Been
coming here once a week for at least the past ten years. Can't
understand a damned thing I want to tell him but he has no
problem whatever when it comes to a discussion of his monthly bill
for services."

I sip the wine and watch
sparkling jewels of light play across my host's face and I am
thinking about a different Hollywood, a young Hollywood still
filled with the excitement of its own magic and the romance of its
possibilities as I say to Tostermann, "So it was you more than
anyone else who helped Francois get his feet down and find his way
in this town."

I get a surprised blink of the eyes.. "Did I
say that?"

He did not, but I smile and reply, "Didn't
you?"

"Never really thought of
it like that but I suppose that could be true." His face is cast in
blue now, and the silvery hair sparkles with ruby highlights.
"Drove him out to Malibu his first week in town; he bought Sol
Hirsch's house the next day. Gorgeous place, cost a bundle. And I
introduced him to Ed North and several other top writers. Ed had
just done
The Day the Earth Stood
Still
for Fox, and Francois was very
impressed by that piece of work. Introduced him to Robert Wise,
too, director of that film. Yes uh, guess you could say I helped
him find his way around. Didn't take long, though, until the town
started coming to his door."

"The women too, I take it."

"Well now don't get the
idea he was a womanizer because he was not, or at least not openly
so. Face it, though—this guy was young, he was handsome and
charming, he was
French
, and he was filthy rich. I have found that to be a
combination guaranteed to discourage lonely nights." He chuckles.
"Especially in this town."

“
His wife...?”

He gives me a green
grimace. "Sickly, I think—or, at least, very delicate health. She
wouldn't travel, stuck close to Paris, wouldn't even go to Cannes.
So Francois would be over here for sometimes two or three months
running. He did not womanize, let me say that. But he did not have
many lonely nights, either, I'd have to say."

"So his relationship with Maizey McCall
was..."

"Oh, well—no—that changed
everything. He was crazy about Maizey, if you'll pardon the poetry.
But that's a good way to describe their early relationship...pure
poetry. They were very much in love. But Francois was not the kind
of man to divorce an ailing wife. And Maizey was not the kind of
woman to be kept by a man forever. And she had this kid. So...very
sad." A ruby smile, then: "But of course I was not writing that
script, otherwise the wife would have conveniently died ten years
earlier than she did, and I would fade out with the two lovers
walking hand in hand into the sunset."

"How would you have handled the kid? In your
script, I mean."

"I'd have to find her a royal prince of the
line, wouldn't I? Anything less would be anticlimactic for a kid
named Mirabel."

"Or make her a movie star," I suggest.

"A very big star, maybe."

"How about television evangelist?"

He shows a rainbow smile to ask, "What?"

"Isn't that what you were doing at Church of
the Light? Checking out Reverend Annie for television angles?"

"Oh that. Yes. See what
you mean. Wouldn't
that
make a hell of a story."

A glimmer in the eyes is followed by a
totally blue grimace. "Jesus H. Christ! No! Annie...? Little Ann
Marie...?"

I show him what has to be
a dazzlingly red smile as I feed that glimmer. "Want to reconsider
that script, Arnold?"

"It appears," he replies musingly, "as
though someone already did that."

Chapter Seventeen: Hollywood Mystique

The night was wearing on but I was in easy
striking distance from the Los Feliz area so I decided to give it a
shot. The address I had for the Sturgis family was more than
fifteen years old but the telephone directory still carried a
listing there; I figured what the hell.

Laurel Canyon dumps off
near the western end of Hollywood Boulevard; the Los Feliz
neighborhood snuggles into the hills at the southern approaches to
Griffith Park, east of downtown Hollywood. It's maybe a ten-minute
run across, that time of night. But don't try it on a Saturday.
That's cruisin' night; you'll find fifty thousand kids in ten
thousand cars solidly gridlocked along Hollywood Boulevard between
La Brea and Western with ten thousand blaring radios, just
socializing in this modern motorized version of the mating
ritual.

Weeknights are different.
I had an easy run; almost enjoyed it. Hollywood Boulevard can be
enjoyable still. It's not Broadway in Manhattan but you'll see even
more colorful scenery sometimes—punk rockers in leather and chains
and electric hair, sidewalk vendors, pimps and hipsters, hookers
male and female, shopping-cart ladies, winos and beggars, sex shops
and porno theaters. All that glitters is not gold or even brass but
sometimes it can be fun to just drag the boulevard and be
reminded.

This is not the Hollywood of old, no. Not
the Hollywood where hopeful stars of the future are discovered at
soda fountains, not the Hollywood where Bogey and teenager Bacall
rendezvous at the corner of Hollywood and Vine to hold hands and
sigh and entertain forbidden dreams—but it's still Hollywood and
the mystique still drifts in the atmosphere there. You can catch it
if you try.

So I dragged the boulevard
all the way to Western then jumped up to the wriggly residential
streets above Los Feliz, and I found the place at almost exactly
eleven o'clock. Bad time to go calling, even on friends, but I had
a hunch that would not let me go and I had to give it a
try.

Worked out okay. Wayne
Sturgis seemed a very nice man—open, receptive—fifty-five or so,
slightly balding, a worn-in smile—dignified but not stuffy, nice
looking.

I identified myself at the
door and told him right up front what I was about. He glanced back
inside then stepped onto the porch with me and pulled the door
shut.

"I'd ask you in but I think my wife has gone
to bed."

I said, "That's okay."

"Hate to disturb her. She's been having
trouble sleeping."