Soap Opera Slaughters (12 page)

To our right was the Jennett dining room, smaller and plainer than I ever would have imagined. Next to it was Eloise Savage’s back lawn, the one with the swimming pool she liked to loll around in, showing off her legs to whichever man she was busy manipulating at the moment. Her lawn consisted of plastic grass mats unrolled next to one another, and the pool was a flimsy semicircular affair about a foot and a half deep. The water in it looked dirty.

We kept walking. I still couldn’t see any cameras or working actors. Lara explained there was a second aisle parallel to the one we were on. “We have to go all the way to the end of this one, turn right, go through to the other half of the building and head back down the direction we came.”

In addition to the sets themselves, the aisle had numerous wooden cabinets positioned every twenty or thirty feet: on their open shelves rested all sorts of tools, props and lighting instruments. Hammers and ratchets hung side by side with Fresnels and miscellaneous male and female plugs and connectors. Other shelves held books, towels, dishes, bottles, sealed jars with dark liquid that Lara said was flat cola, the beverage usually employed when coffee is allegedly poured on a daytime drama (a frequent occurrence).

“Doesn’t that get stale sitting around like that?”

Lara stopped walking. “No. Props is very good about refilling drinkables. Why?”

‘Idle curiosity of a fan. But look, I’ve been wanting to ask you a few more important questions.”

“All right. Here’s my office, step in.”

By then, we’d crossed almost to the end of the long aisle. The last “Riverday” set on our right before the turn was Roberta Jennett’s law office. Smaller than it seemed on television, it consisted of a single white pine and painted canvas wall on which was hung an undistinguished oil painting of a stallion. Against the wall was placed Roberta’s desk and chair and a four-drawer filing cabinet.

Lara sat down in her usual place and I faced her, taking the client’s chair across the desk. She was in her costume, a smartly tailored navy business suit, and her blond hair was pulled severely behind her ears. I was living a double fantasy: consulting the brusque, efficient Roberta Jennett, and also discussing a case with Ms. Hilary Quayle.

Remembering my night with Lara, I decided I preferred the real world to either fairy tale.

“First question?”

“Which cast members like to sunbathe nude?”

“What?”
She laughed abruptly, more out of surprise than mirth. “Where’d you get that idea?”

I told her I’d been talking to Umberto.

“Naturally.” Lara frowned. “Did he tell you what he pulled a couple of months ago?”

“No. What?”

“Me and Joanne and Kit Yerby had a long stretch before our next scenes. This was in June. We asked Umberto to keep the men out of the sleeping alcove while we tanned for a while. Actually,
I
wanted the privacy, the others didn’t care who saw them.”

“What happened?”

“We put our clothes on a towel by the door and lay on beach blankets. When we got up to go in, our clothes were gone and the door was locked. We had to yell our heads off for twenty minutes before Florence heard us and let us in. Our clothes were inside on the cots. Joanne was late for her entrance, and so was Kit.”

“And you think Umberto was responsible?”

“He always denied it, but I think it’d be just the sort of thing he’d pull. He’s a woman hater.”

“Possibly.” I tapped my forefinger on the desk top. “Possibly. But what about Florence?”

“What about her?”

“Maybe she locked you out, not Umberto.”

“Florence? Why would she?”

“To get Joanne in trouble.”

“Oh, I see,” Lara said, bristling. “You have one talk with Joanne, and right away you’re willing to believe her and not—”

“Just hold on,” I cut in. “I’m not siding with anyone, I’m looking at things from all angles. And I don’t even have a client.”

“Gene, I’m truly sorry,” Lara repented. “I’m just tense. Go on.”

I got up, perched on the edge of her desk and took her hand. “Look, I know Florence is your friend, I’m not saying she was responsible for anything, but I have to eliminate the possibility entirely if I’m going to blame someone else. I’m asking about the sunbathing to see whether it provides a reason why Niven was on the roof in the first place.”

“You think he’d make a special trip here on a Saturday just to sunbathe in the buff?”

“Lara, I don’t have any answers or theories, just questions. If he was in the habit of sneaking onto the roof, say, with Florence—”

She stood up, taking her hand away from me. “Gene, I’d better check where they are.”

“Ten seconds more. Tell me what the story is with Ira Powell.”

Mention of the sottish actor made Lara look both sad and displeased. She came around the desk and peered into the aisle at a young man in Levi’s carrying a ladder. “Gene, do you really need to hear? It’s ugly.”

“Yes.”

“All right,” she sighed, turning to me, “haven’t you noticed a difference lately in Ira’s on-screen character?”

“Matt?” I pondered it “Not especially. He
has
done a few dumb things.”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Matt’s popularity as a character is based on him being the all-knowing kindly doctor
cum
father-figure. Safe, smart, sweet and sexy—that’s the formula that made Matt a hero and Ira a star. And Ames is changing it.”

“Why?”

“Why else? He doesn’t like him. That’s why he hired Harry Whelan. Ames is grooming him to replace Ira eventually.”

“How? As Matt?” It was incredible.

“No. By cheapening Matt and making Harry’s role, Todd, more appealing.”

I got off the desk, shaking my head. “I’m surprised the network would allow Ames to tamper with the ratings. Mart’s still plenty popular.”

Oh, it’s a very slow, subtle change, it’ll take months to cross-fade Matt and Todd.”

“But Ira knows about it?”

“He’s already seen a slight slack-off in fan mail. And instead of fighting back, he goes fey, holding his own wake. Drinking all night, heaving all over himself, stumbling in here without showering or even changing his shirt” She shuddered in pity and disgust “I told you it’s ugly, Gene.”

“Can’t he do anything about it?”

“I don’t know. He ought to try while he’s still got some clout left.

•  She took my arm and we began walking again. Leaving the office behind, we turned the corner at the far end of the sound stage. There were flats and other scenery piled all over. Bins full of lighting equipment cable, props, rolls of half-used adhesive were jammed against the padded walls, and a matching set of black curtains hung down from the ceiling, making the area dim, eerily hushed.

I thought about Ames’ despicable slow-motion destruction of Ira Powell. It occurred to me as we went through an archway and neared the second, parallel aisle that whatever the producer elected to do had to have been carried out up to now, by none other than Ed Niven, head writer of “Riverday.” I wondered which of the two Powell blamed more.

We entered the aisle. Its arrangement was identical to the first. On either side of the wide middle passage were sets, one next to another. The exit portal of a make-believe parlor doubled as the entrance to some fictional character’s bedroom. The large and fully equipped kitchen of the Jennett supper club stood across the aisle from Eloise Savage’s lofty library. I felt an irrelevant impulse to borrow the ladder I’d seen and browse among the high stacks for possible volumes on Hilary’s want list (one of the extra little chores she used to throw at me when I was working for her).

Almost at the other end of the aisle I saw a group of people milling about in the midst of three bulky cameras and a pair of boom mikes. We headed towards them, and as we passed familiar sets, occasionally we noticed a cast member hunched over his or her script oblivious to us.

“One other question,” I said to Lara as we stepped along. “Did you ever hear of any cast member getting stuck in a building elevator and holding up shooting?”

“No. That one must be before my time. Oh, look, there’s DB. You could ask him.”

“DB” was the “tentpole” actor, Donald Bannister, portrayer of “Father” Leo Jennett. A tall, stoop-shouldered gentleman in his sixties, he had a pot belly, jowls and thick glasses, and at that moment, seemed pretty hale, possibly because of the deep sun-tan crinkling his benevolently wrinkled. Bannister was a veteran of 1940s Hollywood, where he played countless gangster roles in films. I imagined the role of kindly restaurateur and daddy, Leo Jennett, might be a relaxing change of pace for him, especially since he rarely appeared more than once a week on “Riverday.” As a matter of fact, I realized he hadn’t been on at all lately.

Bannister was perched on a stool in another kitchen set tamping tobacco into a gnarled darkwood pipe. Lara introduced me to him by name and profession.

“hEAr about Eddie?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Dreadful,” he mourned. “I only heard about it this morning. Been vacationing in Palm Beach, just got back last night. Dreadful.” He drew on the pipe and tossed away the match. “Something you wanted to ask me?”

“Yes. Whether you know which one of the cast got stuck in an elevator a while back.”

“That was Ira Powell. Why? What’s that got to do with Eddie’s death?”

“Maybe nothing.”

I asked a few more things, but Bannister added nothing new to my scant store of facts. I was about to give Lara the nod that I was done when he pointed at me with the stem of his pipe and said, “I noticed you admiring the books in the library set, laddie. You a collector?”

“I used to work for one.”

“Ah.” He gestured toward the stacks of books I’d recently passed. “I donated all those. You can save your time looking, they’re all worthless.”

“So you’re a collector, then?”

“I run a secondhand bookshop.” He fished in his pocket and produced a business card, which he handed to me. His address was on Montague Street in “the Heights,” a ten-minute walk from Florence’s apartment. According to the card, the shop was only open three evenings a week.

“Strictly a hobby,” he explained. “Drop in sometime, if you’re in the neighborhood.”

“Thanks. Maybe I will.” I was half-inclined to ask him whether he might have one or two of Hilary’s book wants, but Lara was getting fidgety, so I put the card in my pocket.

“DB,” Lara asked, putting her arm through mine, an action which he noted with benign amusement, “what’s holding things up? Shouldn’t they be about finished with the supper club scene?”

“Well, they had to run and get a ladder and raise the chandelier,” Bannister explained. “That new boy they got to play Todd hit his head against it when he came in, he’s so tall”

“Poor Harry,” I murmured, “what a pity.”

Counting all the actors and crew members, there must have been nearly thirty people in the vicinity of the cameras. The technicians were moving around so much I couldn’t get a fix on them all, but there were at least ten. The extras mostly were gathered on the sidelines in one self-protective clump. A beefy young man in the inevitable bluejeans stood on a ladder fiddling with the chandelier, calling directions to someone I couldn’t see.

Practically underneath the fixture was my old rival, “poor Harry,” as tall and slim and curly-haired as ever. Except for the man on the ladder, he was alone on the supper club set.

“That stocky fellow in the plaid shirt,” Lara informed me, pointing to a fiftyish man near one of the cameras, “is Mack Joel, our assistant director.”

“Where’s the director?”

“In the control room. He watches all the shots on monitors and punches up what actually goes on the tape. Mack keeps
us
in line. Sometimes he’s referred to as the floor director.”

Just then, the technician on the ladder shouted to his invisible assistant and the chandelier rose several inches further in the air. Its new height was tested and marked, the man dismounted and removed the ladder, and the cast streamed back onto the set Extras in evening wear sat at restaurant tables, actors dressed as waiters took up posts around the room. VeldaLee Boyce, pregnant once more, stood by the cash register while “brother” Matt (Ira Powell) joined her and Harry exited.

Mack, the floor director, repositioned one of the waiters, then the booms moved closer and another crew member with a cigarette stub in his flabby lips extended a clapstick in front of one camera.

“All right,” Mack said, “this is tape. Nine...eight...seven...six...five...quiet...four...three...two...He gestured. The clapstick closed.

Animation. Like wax figures touched by a magic wand, the performers unfroze. Tinkling of glasses. Music. The Jennett supper club came to life as waiters took orders, poured wine, served food, bustled busily in and out of the place where the kitchen was supposed to be, carrying trays laden with cold, unappetizing food that the extras ate with seeming savor.

Watching the artificial scene with its boundaries and substitutes for truth, I felt a disproportionate disillusionment, even though I know magic looks lousy if you’re standing behind the conjurer.

And now Dr. Matt Powell was called away from talking with his sister Bella Royce to take a phone call from his nurse, but I couldn’t hear either of the Jennett siblings, Ira or VeldaLee, there was no Volume knob I could fiddle with. Then Todd Harry Whelan Jennett entered through a pine-and-canvas door flat and I could hear his lines perfectly.

The director stopped the scene and called Harry aside.

“What’s wrong?” I asked Lara.

“One of the first things a theatre actor learns on a soap is not to project, it overloads the mikes. You have to say your lines in a natural voice.”

“Isn’t that a bad habit for an actor to get into?”

Lara nodded. “It eventually ruins the lazy ones. If you have any brains, you practice at home, you take classes, you do tours and summer stock just so your instrument won’t get flabby.
Shh,
here they go again.”

“Let’s make this one work” the floor director said as the waiters collected plates, poured liquid back into bottles, backtracked like a film in reverse. “Alright, nine...eight...seven...six...five...quiet...four...three...two... His hand waved, the clapstick shut, the scene began again, but Mack Joel called an almost immediate halt while a makeup assistant ran to powder Bella/Velda’s.