Silent Murders (2 page)

Myrna was laughing, too. “You didn’t!”

“I’m afraid I did. But the minute I understood it was an invitation and not a job, I thought how much I’d rather come with a friend. I figured since he was laughing, the odds were in my favor, so I asked. He said, ‘A girlfriend or a boyfriend?’ I said, ‘A girlfriend who shares a house with me.’ ‘Is she pretty as you?’ he asked. ‘Prettier,’ I said.”

“Aw, come on!” she said, nudging me with her elbow.

Myrna was not a classic beauty like Gloria Swanson or Greta Garbo. Cataloged individually, her features were nothing unique—a cute upturned nose, wide-set blue eyes, and high cheekbones—but the package sure turned heads. At nineteen, her carrot hair was maturing to a more sophisticated hue, her freckles were fading, and her soft, sexy voice was deepening … not that that would help her until someone figured out how to make pictures with sound. I had been in vaudeville dance acts for years and was a pretty good hoofer myself, but Myrna was a gifted, classically trained dancer who made reaching for the salt look like something out of
Swan Lake
. She had recently left her dancing job for a shot at the silver screen. With the predictable outcome … that is, none. We met two months ago when I took a room in the house on Fernwood Avenue where she lived with Melva, Helen, and Lillian—all nice girls, but I liked Myrna best.

The noisy commercialism of Hollywood Boulevard faded behind us, replaced with the sound of crickets and the exotic fragrance of eucalyptus trees as we wound our way through the narrow roads of Whitley Heights. Although there were no street lamps, a nearly full moon lit our stage like a distant floodlight. “The stars are out tonight,” I said.

“I hope I meet some. What if no one will talk to us?”

“Then we’ll talk to each other. But don’t worry. Douglas Fairbanks, at least, will talk to us. He told me he’d be there tonight for a short while, and he’s always so kind to his people. And we’re bound to know some of the others,” I said with more hope than certainty. “Surely someone from
Son of Zorro
will be there. And maybe from
Ben-Hur
.”

“Even so, they won’t know me. I’m just an extra.” Myrna was still glum over her recent failures. She had tested for the Virgin Mary with
Ben-Hur
but came away with only a $7.50-a-day job as a Roman senator’s mistress at the chariot races. Earlier she’d tested for a role with the great Rudolph Valentino in
Cobra
but missed that one, as well. Too young for the part, Valentino had ruled.

We stepped through a gate and into a semicircular courtyard with five Spanish-style haciendas arranged in an arc around a dolphin fountain spouting streams of water. There was no mistaking the house—flaming torches lit the path to Bruno Heilmann’s front door.

“Good thing Mr. Heilmann put torches out or we’d never have guessed which place was his,” Myrna deadpanned.

I smiled. The Heilmann home could have doubled as an advertisement for the electric company, with light spilling out of every open door and window, raucous laughter surging and ebbing like waves at the seashore, and lively band music pulsating from behind the house, competing with the people indoors who were lustily singing to piano accompaniment. I’d been to parties in Hollywood, but nothing classy like this.

“It looks like he invited all the neighbors,” I said, indicating the other four houses that were dark.

“That or they left town before the ruckus started!”

We approached the wide-open front door. Inside it was wall-to-wall actors, actresses, directors, and studio big shots, all dressed to the nines in dinner jackets and glamorous flapper dresses that bared more arms, shoulders, calves, and backs than you could see at a burlesque show. A thick haze of cigarette smoke clogged the air. Myrna and I exchanged nervous glances, put on our most confident smiles, and stepped into the foyer. When no one sprang from behind a corner to challenge us, my fears receded.

Bruno Heilmann didn’t live in one of those flashy mansions you see photographed in
Motion Picture, Photoplay,
or any of the fan magazines. We could see most of the first floor from the foyer, all of it decorated in the modern German style, cold, spare, and angular, with subtle colors, no bric-a-brac, and lots of abstract paintings. Intimidating, like its owner, but not overly large. I guessed he didn’t need a huge place, being a bachelor.

A butler descended the stairs to take our wraps. Several couples wobbled past him on their way to the second floor, planting each footstep with care and steadying themselves with the handrail.

I wore a custom-made, sleeveless tea-length frock, green to bring out the color in my eyes, with bugle beads sewn onto every square inch. It was expensive, left over from my last role, where I had played the part of a long-lost heiress in a swindle to bilk her relatives out of her fortune. No one cared to have the clothes back, so I kept them. Myrna was dressed in her finest, a blue silk backless with a handkerchief hem; not costly, but Myrna could wear rags and look like a million bucks. Still, she came across as very young and inexperienced. I made a mental note to keep an eye on her.

“Shall I use your new name?” I asked, thinking ahead to the introductions.

She nodded uncertainly, then sighed. “I suppose so. I’ve just started using it on the back of my photographs and to sign my checks.”

“Good girl. It’s a great name.” The artistic, avant-garde crowd she hung around with had been urging her for some time to come up with a more distinctive-sounding moniker, and she had finally settled on one.

“Every one of my friends thought Williams was too ordinary for an actress. I still consider it a very, very good name, but … well, I guess they were right. Anyway, everyone had ideas for my new last name—someone suggested Myrna Lisa, can you believe that?” She giggled. “It’s catchy all right, but I’d be too embarrassed to use something so silly.”

There must have been a hundred people at the party already, with more arriving behind us. We surveyed the living room from our vantage point at the top of the steps and jostled our way through the crush toward an enormous slate patio ringed with more torches. Colorful Japanese lanterns dangled overhead. In the space of sixty seconds I’d spotted several familiar faces from the
Son of Zorro
and a few people I’d met on my Fairbanks errands. I began to breathe easier. I could fit in here.

A waiter came near us with a tray of canapés, and I managed to snatch one. Another was taking orders for the bar. Myrna and I were about to request gin rickeys when I caught sight of a waitress circulating the room with a tray of champagne. My all-time favorite.

“Wait, Myrna! Have you ever had champagne?”

She shook her head.

“Try this,” I said, lifting two glasses off the tray and thanking the waitress with a smile.

She took a sip, but before I could hear her opinion, her eyes opened wide. “Gosh, there’s Raoul Walsh,” she said, pointing to the well-known director. I spun around. “He hired my dance troupe at Grauman’s Egyptian to do the orgy scene in
The Wanderer
. I was drinking and hanging over a couch with a wine goblet, trying to do what they told me to do. It was really fun.”

“Can you introduce me?”

Her mouth turned down. “He doesn’t know me. I’m just a dancer.”

The champagne was delicious and cold as ice. It had not taken me long to realize that in Hollywood, as elsewhere, Prohibition laws were treated with the scorn they deserved. Liquor was served at every party, brazenly, defiantly, without fear of raids, arrests, or fines, not merely because the police were bribed as they were in most cities, but because the studio bosses ran the show here. The police did what they were told.

Every man in the room was handsome and every woman beautiful, so why I should find myself staring at one particularly compelling, dark-haired gentleman, I do not know. He had just entered the house and was standing in the foyer unaccompanied, surveying the crowded room. His eyes worked from right to left quickly, then back again more methodically, until he had taken stock of every face. It reminded me of another man I used to know—a bootlegger—who did the same thing before entering a room. All at once a shout came from behind me, and an actor I recognized from the screen as Jack Pickford called, “Johnnie! Over here!” Only then did Johnnie descend the two steps into the living room and plunge into the party.

Someone tapped my shoulder and there was Douglas Fairbanks in his smart midnight-blue dinner jacket, looking like he’d just stepped out of a high-society picture. “Good evening, Jessie,” he said, sipping a frosted glass of orange juice. “You’re looking lovely tonight.”

“Thank you. I’m here with a friend, and I’d like you to meet her. This is Myrna Loy.” And for form’s sake, I added the entirely unnecessary second half of the introduction, “Myrna, this is Douglas Fairbanks.”

Douglas made a short bow. “Charmed, I’m sure, Miss Loy.”

Myrna stood rooted to the rug, hopelessly tongue-tied. “Gee, Mr. Fairbanks. This is such an honor. I, um—I’ve seen all your pictures.”

“Until recently, Myrna was a dancer at Grauman’s Egyptian Theater,” I said helpfully, nudging her with my elbow.

“Um, that’s right, I used to dance the prologue to
Thief of Bagdad
.” She was referring to the lavish live spectacle presented on the stage before every showing of Douglas’s most recent film, a fairy tale with astonishing special effects that had been released last year and was still playing in many theaters.

“So you and I have shared the same stage, so to speak? Allow me to express my gratitude for your part in making my picture such a success. Ah, here she is … Mary, darling, I’ve told you about my temporary assistant. This is Jessie Beckett and her friend Myrna Loy.”

As one of the few adults whose height matched that of “Little Mary” Pickford, I could look her straight in the eye. “I’m honored to meet you,” I began, trying not to appear overawed by her presence and hoping she couldn’t see my heart hammering beneath my frock. I’d seen her at the studio a few times, but being introduced socially almost took away my powers of speech. “I’ve learned so much from you over the years, I feel I owe whatever success I had in vaudeville to you.”

“How very kind.” Mary Pickford looked even prettier than she did in her pictures, with wide hazel eyes and delicate lips darkened red. Her voice was higher than I had imagined and soft as a cat’s fur. For the party, she had swept her famous blond ringlets in a mass behind her head and donned a pale gold flapper dress embroidered with pearls. Hard to believe I was talking to the woman who had virtually invented film acting, the woman who had not only starred in hundreds of pictures, but who had started her own studio; the woman who could play a feisty eleven-year-old boy as convincingly as she did an old woman. I’d’ve rather met “Little Mary” than the queen of England.

“Douglas said you played children’s roles in vaudeville?” she asked politely, sipping her orange juice and no doubt wondering why a lowly assistant script girl had been invited to this chic affair.

I nodded. “I grew up on stage, too. Just like you. My mother was a headliner, and she managed to keep both of us working most of the time.” The truth was, things were pretty darn good while Mother was alive. It was later, after she died, that my life fell apart.

“No father?”

“Died.”

Sympathy wrinkled her smooth brow. “Oh, Jessie, so did mine. And my mother took us kids—Lottie and Jack and me—on the stage and managed our careers. She still does. I don’t know what I’d do without her. I’ll bet you never went to school, either.”

“You can’t go to school when you move to a different city every week. My mother taught me my letters and numbers, and I read every book I could lay my hands on.”

“I learned to read from the billboards along the train tracks,” Miss Pickford said, shaking her head with the wonder of it. I was about to ask her what early roles she had played, when she said, “What sort of roles did you play?”

“My first was Moses in the bulrushes, the second was Baby Jesus. After that I specialized in kidnapped-baby roles, caterwauling like the devil during chase scenes. When I got old enough to memorize lines, I played the brat in
Ransom of Red Chief
and scenes from
Romeo and Juliet,
that sort of thing.”

She gave a knowing nod and smiled at the recollection. “I played Juliet myself. I milked that death scene for all it was worth!”

“Juliet was my first death scene … they became something of a specialty for me: Juliet, Ophelia, Desdemona, Cleopatra—”

Miss Pickford’s perfectly arched brows moved together in a slight frown. “Ophelia doesn’t have a death scene.”

I waved my hand dismissively. “Yes, I know. Shakespeare missed a real opportunity there, so we added one. Audiences love death scenes and mine were pretty darn convincing. As I got older, I continued with the kiddie roles. It was what I knew best and my size let me get away with it. I learned the tricks of the trade from watching your pictures.”

Miss Pickford smiled, putting her hand lightly on my arm, almost as if we were real friends. “And what tricks were those?”

“Well, for one, to keep thin and flat-chested. And to make short, quick movements. Also, to add a skip to my step whenever possible. To accentuate my freckles and keep my fingernails short and unpolished. And of course, to keep my hair in long ringlets.”

“But you’ve bobbed yours.” She sounded envious.

“Just a couple months ago. I hated those curls!”

“I loathe mine. So babyish! Now don’t you dare tell a soul I said that! Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I could cut my hair, but my public would think it a betrayal as bad as Benedict Arnold’s and would probably quit watching my pictures. I don’t dare risk it.”

I was more than a little surprised at this confession. Like most people, I had supposed that “The Most Popular Girl in America” did whatever she wanted. Suddenly I saw how naïve that was. In some respects, Mary Pickford was a prisoner of her image.

For a few minutes, we swapped recollections of night trains, dollar hotels, and boardinghouse food, until a waitress carrying a tray of champagne approached. I set my empty glass on the tray and picked up a full one. Miss Pickford glanced over her shoulder, then did the same, replacing her glass of orange juice with one of champagne.