Super (24 page)

When the scene was over, Grace Dodsworth mouthed the word
CUT!

Then she unwrapped the scarf, pulled it from around Rinehart’s neck and tied it back over her head. She replaced her sunglasses, picked up her gin and walked back to her compartment.

She remained there for the rest of the night until, from the passageway outside, she heard shouts of alarm, calls for Detective Pryor to come immediately as the Super Chief completed its silvery streak to Chicago.

Jack Pryor immediately closed off the observation car, securing, as is, the body of Darwin Rinehart and any accompanying evidence there might be.

Then, through conductors and attendants, he ordered that everyone remain on the train upon arrival at Dearborn Station.

That happened ninety nonstop minutes later.

Pryor, after talking briefly to several crew members, had concluded that Rinehart’s death must have occurred after the Super crossed the Mississippi River into Illinois—probably somewhere between Streator and Joliet. That meant the Rinehart death was the official business of the State of Illinois, a declaration
Pryor made official with phone calls to local, state and railroad authorities once at the station.

Three hours later the coroner, forensic and other investigative personnel released Rinehart’s body and an hour after that the passengers began to be told they were free to go.

The first allowed to leave were Claudette Colbert and Grace Dodsworth.

The Rinehart case remains officially open after more than fifty years.

There have been no developments since July 1956, when a Chicago coroner concluded after a three-month investigation that Darwin Rinehart was the victim of strangulation by “a means and person unknown.”

Jack Pryor was not faulted by the Santa Fe for his handling of either the Rinehart or Wheeler deaths. He was also cleared of any wrongdoing in putting Dale L. Lawrence off the Super. Pryor went on to be deputy chief of the Santa Fe police, retired in 1972 and died ten years later of congestive heart failure.

Grace Dodsworth’s last public appearance in the United States was in 1996 at the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, DC. The strangling scene from
The Tie That Binds
was among the movie excerpts in her tribute film narrated by Elizabeth Taylor. Grace Dodsworth died of pneumonia two years later at age eighty-four in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Former Valerie County sheriff Hubert Ratzlaff resides in Otto Wheeler Village, a Randallite assisted-living facility in Bethel. In 1967 he judged the Wheeler killing as closed after a Chicago hit man named Ronald Allen (“Doak”) Faulkner confirmed
in open court that Wheeler was one of his fourteen for-hire victims. Faulkner was not forced to identify who hired him to kill Wheeler.

Faulkner’s confessions were an add-on part of a deal to avoid the death penalty. He is serving life without parole at Stateville State Prison, next to the abandoned Joliet prison building now used as a rent-a-prison movie and TV set. “Doak” came from Faulkner’s admiration for the famous football player Doak Walker.

Charlie Sanders never finished his “confession” to Jack Pryor or said a word about it to anyone else. He also did not pursue a job in Hollywood. After rising to be vice president of the railroad, he is retired and lives in Naples, Florida. There is no sign of any connection between his Super idea and the movie
North by Northwest
. Whatever happened, he felt—feels, still—he would have been owed no credit or anything else because he did what he did as an employee of the Santa Fe.

Claudette Colbert, a 1989 Kennedy Center Honors recipient, appeared in her last movie in 1961 but continued to act onstage and on television. She was ninety-two when she died in 1996 at her Barbardos home after a series of strokes.

Gene Mathews had no involvement in
North by Northwest
or
Elmer Gantry
. He left the movie business shortly after Darwin Rinehart’s death. Mathews staged a memorial service at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for his friend, providing a small ballroom with one hundred and fifty chairs, an elaborate buffet
and a lot of red and white flowers. Only twenty-two people showed up.

Mathews died of leukemia in 1968, one of fifteen leukemia or cancer victims among the
Dark Days
Utah crew. Another was Tracy Thurber, the girl Rinehart discovered on a trolley. Ninety-one of the 220 who worked in Utah on
The Conqueror
also became cancer or leukemia victims. The forty-six who died included John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, the Mexican actor Pedro Armendáriz and the director, Dick Powell. Moorehead, just before her death, said, “Everybody in that picture has gotten cancer and died.” Her remark was ignored because most of the famous victims—Wayne and Hayward in particular—had been heavy smokers.

A. C. Browne did not publish anything about Harry Truman or the Super Chief trip, but he did write a brief personal memo on what Dale Lawrence had told him in Dodge City. In 1972 he scribbled on that paper, “S. Hayward dead! Must get on this. A.C.B.” Albert Carlton Browne died from kidney disease a year later before acting on that instruction to himself. A bronze bust of Browne stands in a small park in downtown Strong, next to the
Pantagraph
newspaper office.

Nothing in the Truman presidential library mentions Browne, Dale Lawrence or the 1956 Super ride. But there is a note in Truman’s own handwriting from a conversation he had with an Atomic Energy Commission official in 1971 about the Nevada tests. “Somebody’s got to start thinking of compensation
for these people!” he wrote. The former president died in December the following year. Compensation legislation was passed by Congress in 1990.

Truman and Browne had it right: Clark Gable was a phony. He was really Will Masters, founder and still the owner of The King’s Motors, a Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep dealership in Janesville, Wisconsin. Masters was born with a striking resemblance to Gable, and he perfected the actor’s speech and mannerisms as he grew older for social and, later, business reasons. Masters was egged on by a friend to put on a mustache, among other false things, and test his Gable role on the Super. Masters selected that specific 1956 Super westbound trip because he knew from the newspapers Gable was in California preparing to shoot another picture. Something about the Civil War with Yvonne De Carlo.

The blonde from Missouri who visited the Masters/Gable compartment went ahead with her I-had-sex-with-The-King boast. Her lawyer husband divorced her, and he was about to sue Gable until it was proved Gable was nowhere near the Super Chief that night. The woman lost her job with the Missouri lieutenant governor.

Ralph, the sleeping car porter, knew it was not the real Clark Gable. Ralph had been close to The King too many times before. But he had no reason to help Jack Pryor expose the man and, besides, he figured the phony was likely to give a larger tip than the real Gable. The imposter did give Ralph seventy-five dollars—a crisp fifty, a twenty and a five. Gable’s
usual amount was fifty. Ralph retired without ever being caught on a Private transaction or identified as the go-between for the Wheeler shooting. He lives now on a beachfront estate in the Virgin Islands.

The Super ended its thirty-five-year Santa Fe life on May 1, 1971, when the federal government, through Amtrak, took over. Santa Fe made Amtrak remove the Super Chief name when onboard service deteriorated, but Santa Fe partially relented in 1984 to permit what remains to this day as the Southwest Chief.

The full Super story has been preserved at the Museum of the Super Chief, the only institution of its kind in the world devoted to a single train. It is housed in the restored Santa Fe depot and Harvey House hotel/restaurant in Bethel, Kansas. A reconditioned Warbonnet diesel engine and seven cars of the Super Chief sit on a track next to the buildings.

In exchange for a tax-free contribution, the display train is being made available for two television projects—a cold cases story about the Rinehart death and a pilot for a fictional miniseries based on the Super deaths fifty years ago.

The Museum of the Super Chief is open to the public Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. April through October, 11 to 3 the rest of the year. Admission is $7.50—seniors $3.00, students free.

I needed a lot of help in walking my wavy lines between the real and the made-up.

I mined a variety of printed and video material—from newspaper clippings, Google entries and thick books to short documentaries and full-length feature movies. The details of
The Barbarians
saga came from Harry and Michael Medved’s
The Hollywood Hall of Shame
. Gar Alperovitz’s
The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb
and David McCullough’s
Truman
were important sources. So were
Super Chief … Train of the Stars
by Stan Repp,
Clark Gable
by Warren G. Harris,
Picture
by Lillian Ross,
Rising from the Rails
by Larry Tye and Frederic Wakeman’s novel
The Hucksters
—plus the movie it spawned.

Bob LaPrelle, director of the Museum of the American Railroad in Dallas, was with me from the beginning. I visited a restored Super Chief dining car at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. The Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, answered a call for assistance. So did Jan McCloud of the Newton, Kansas, police department, the folks at
The Emporia
(Kansas)
Gazette
, Sue Blechl of the Emporia Public Library and Chris Childers, a young man of Emporia research.

I am grateful to everyone involved and I hereby absolve them of any responsibility—or blame.

This is J
IM
L
EHRER’S
twentieth novel. He is also the author of two memoirs and three plays and is the executive editor and anchor of
PBS News Hour
. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his novelist wife, Kate. They have three daughters.