‘Always the money with Zukor, isn’t it?’ Fay said, her mood altered, distaste tugging down the corners of her mouth. ‘And reputations.’
The last thing Tom wanted was to dig over all that again and put a maudlin turn on the evening. Not on her first night back. He caught a waiter’s eye, flashed him a bill and asked if he could bring them something warming. Colony speak for an under-the-table brandy. The waiter nodded and went to see what he could do. Fay flashed her approval and he thought he had got away with it. But it was obviously a night for not letting go.
‘I never get that thing you have for Zukor,’ she said quietly. ‘What is it between you? You’re always so crazy loyal to him. Even now, when he threw you out on your ear, still you won’t hear a word against him.’
‘You know it wasn’t him who sacked me. It was Charlie.’ A pointless distinction, one he knew she would not let him get away with.
‘Oh, come on, Tom. You know all Zukor need do is click his fingers and you’d have been back in there like a shot. Point is, he didn’t. After all you did for him, it’s shameful. I never liked the man. Even when he was fawning over me to sign my contract. It was like all he ever saw in me was dollar bills and useful connections. You know what the girls in the New York office call him, yes?’
‘Yeah. Mr Creepy,’ he laughed, thankful for the release.
‘Most don’t credit him with the Mister,’ she said.
‘Come on, he’s not that bad. Sure, he’s a shark, but he doesn’t try to hide it. And you’re right about the money. It’s all he dreams about. Given a choice between a buck and a fu— fabulously nice girl’ – he winked again – ‘he’d go for the buck every time.’
‘You are incorrigible, Thomas Collins,’ she laughed. ‘It’s just as well you have a facility for making friends.’
The waiter arrived with their drinks in coffee cups, which they chinked like the old days and drank a toast to the future. Whereupon they were distracted by a new commotion, a big party arriving loudly across the floor. Swanson and her coterie attracting a swarm of waiters.
Fay grinned. ‘Something else for the tourists to talk about back home.’
Tom looked on as Neilan tucked a cushion under Swanson’s bead-encrusted behind, her thanks a flash of those extraordinary eyes. The sight of them together brought something of what Neilan said to him earlier bubbling up in memory. Something about the publicity department. Something that wasn’t right. Or was it what Fairbanks had said? Hollywood royalty visiting Valentino’s set under cover of darkness – any publicity department in Hollywood would kill for a story like that. No way would they let that go. But it was actually what Fairbanks said about nobody else being out there. An opportunity? Maybe it could be for him, too.
‘Is everything quite all right, Tom?’ He turned, startled by Fay’s inquiry, the concern in her voice. He hadn’t realized he had drifted so far away.
He apologized, told her an idea had occurred to him about the Sennett job he was working on. He thought it through quickly, adding Olsen to the picture forming in his mind, realizing he might not get another chance to act.
He leant across the table and took Fay’s hand in his. ‘Look, I know it’s our first night back together and all, but I need to ask a favor.’
She pursed her lips, eyes afire. ‘Depends on what you’re asking for, I guess.’
‘That too, believe me,’ Tom said. ‘But later. Thing is, if this Pickfair job turns out like I hope it will, I’ll need to have the deck clear. Doug’ll want me to start straight away. And I can’t afford to have Sennett stomping around, complaining I let him down. Much as I can’t stand the old bastard, I don’t want him bad-mouthing me.’
‘I can see that,’ Fay said. ‘But what can you hope to do about it tonight?’
‘Do you have your studio pass with you?’
‘Oh, Tom. Really? Do I look like I came out to work? Do you see pockets on this gown?’
‘OK,’ he laughed, appreciating anew the perfect lines of the dress, its daring neckline and back. ‘I guess we have to go via your apartment. You can change there.’
For a moment Fay looked uncertain, then her smile broadened, getting into the spirit. ‘But why? Where are we going?’
It was what he found most attractive in her. Curiosity. Mischievousness. Her willingness to play along.
‘On an adventure,’ he said.
‘Well, I do like the sound of that,’ she said. ‘But can’t we stay for a dance or two first?’
THIRTY
Through the coachwork he heard a muffled exchange of voices. One male and imperative, the other Fay’s, bright and confident. Curled up in the trunk, he felt the shift of the clutch, a meshing of gears. But the acceleration, when it came, was not in the expected direction. Instead, the machine reversed in what felt like a sweeping arc, and it was all he could do to stop himself being pitched around the cramped, lightless luggage space like an egg in a box before the brakes squealed sharply and the auto came to another bone-crunching halt. Disoriented, he braced himself for another stab of pain. Instead, he heard Fay’s voice outside and a rumbling male response, more amiable this time, and they were on the move again, slower now. They were in.
‘What happened there?’
The raising of the trunk lid revealed the moon sharp and yellow above the soaring glass walls of one of the Lasky studio’s gigantic covered stages, Fay’s face radiant alongside it.
‘They wouldn’t let me in on Vine,’ she said. ‘Nobody in or out. Had me come round to Argyle instead. The gate guy waved me through soon as I mentioned Niblo.’
He clambered out. Fay had picked a good dark spot for surreptitious work. Back at her apartment, she had changed into a close-fitting two-piece riding suit. It looked just the ticket for an actress on her way to film an actioner with Valentino. Enough to convince the Lasky gate men, who knew her well.
‘Come on, hurry. While there’s no one about,’ she whispered, with the urgency of one whose reputation, and contract, was on the line.
Although she had been redirected on to the Lasky backlot, Fay had driven deep into the studio’s muddle of passages and alleyways to get Tom as near as possible to where he needed to be. But it would still take time to pick his way back through the dark, prop-strewn maze that lay between the stages and the long, low executive block that fronted the studios on Vine Street. He looked around, getting his bearings. Through the muslin-draped glass of the stage building beside them, he saw a familiar glow of lights on the other side of Argyle. Either Klieg lamps or the emanation of Valentino’s ego.
‘OK, if anyone spots you here, they’ll know something’s up. You head over to the stage and I’ll come find you once I’m done. You’ll be OK?’
‘If they ask, I’ll say I got an urgent casting call. Let them figure it out.’ She hesitated a moment, then grabbed his coat sleeve and tiptoed up to kiss him. ‘Be careful.’
And she was gone, climbing into the machine again, pulling away, a discord of jasmine and gasoline dancing in the air.
He stuck to the edge of the shadows, threading through the industrial heart of the studio, a labyrinth of blacksmith and carpentry shops, hangers brimming with scaffold and scenery flats, the costume factory and store, long, narrow film-processing sheds that reeked worse than tanning factories. In five years working here, he could not remember the lot ever being this still, this eerily quiet. Jesse Lasky and Charlie Eyton were no respecters of time or custom; if a thing needed doing, it needed doing now. Even weekend nights, something was always being torn down or rebuilt, forged or recast, spliced or pushed through. But tonight? Nothing.
It was a good ten minutes before he reached the executive compound. Amid quadrangles of low-slung, shingled bungalows, darkness and silence reigned where lights usually glimmered into the morning hours. Cautiously, Tom made his way to where the bungalows stopped a few feet short of a back wall rising blank and imposing. It was only two floors higher, but built of solid brick and stucco in an altogether gr
ander style, accentuating the gulf between the bigwigs and the casually employed.
He made for a door he knew gave access to the back stairs and up to the executive quarters. Snicking it open with a creak, he stepped inside with all the familiarity and misgiving of a thief breaking into the home of an old friend. This building had been his life once. He’d watched it constructed from the foundations up, was present when the ribbon was cut with cheers, streamers, flash pans and brass bands. Now, up stairways and along dark corridors, he threaded his quick and quiet way. An open window in one stairwell revealed a glow of light from the suite of rooms below. Something was going on down there, but he didn’t need to know what.
He pressed on.
At last he reached the third-floor apartments where the publicity teams toiled day to day. Everyone knew Famous Players-Lasky spent millions more dollars than any other studio lavishly promoting its stars and movies. But few would have dreamed the true cost, the legions of publicity men hired to churn out oceans of press-friendly boosterism on every scrap of news from the latest starlet signing to the next DeMille extravaganza. No one in America had a keener understanding of the value of publicity than Mr Zukor. And it repaid him well. But underhand projects had to be done discreetly, away from the mainstream. Tom made his way to the suite of offices occupied by publicity director J.J. Fine and the handful of private staff he used for his most sensitive operations.
Tom’s heart beat faster as the glass-panelled door yielded to a twist of the handle. Inside, a quartet of desks squared off against each other. A fifth protected access to Fine’s inner sanctum. This was where he would find what he was looking for, if it was anywhere. He took a flashlight from his pocket. All four desks were piled with newspapers and fan magazines, mimeographed check-off lists and handwritten notes. The first two desks yielded only puff pieces about top stars – Tommy Meighan, Pauline Frederick and Blanche Sweet among others. A handwritten note from Fine was attached to a bundle of magazine cuttings hinting at Marshall Neilan’s affair with Gloria Swanson, listing editors to be telephoned and threatened. Others related to Artcraft leading man Wallace Reid and rumors of his dope addiction.
On the other desks Tom hit pay dirt. Stacks of papers and cuttings devoted to Taylor’s murder. It was too soon for the weeklies to have published anything, yet piles of magazines – Photoplay, Motion Picture News, Variety, Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang – lay open at articles speculating on whether Mabel Normand had a new man in her life, and whether it could be Taylor. Many featured large studio portraits of Mack Sennett looking moody and forlorn, their captions hinting at loss, sorrow, the pain of unrequited love. Lies returning to haunt him.
There was too much for the flashlight’s restrictive beam. Tom risked switching on a desk lamp. Laid out in rows were clippings and articles about Taylor, gushing homilies about his seriousness and artistry, his war service in Europe, his achievements as head of the Directors Association. Newspaper reports speculating on the reasons for his murder. Attached was a handwritten list of names – well-known reporters – a tick beside each. Another stack of cuttings related to Mary Miles Minter, slurs hinting at her friendship with an older man. Beside them a mimeographed batch of ecstatic, high-flown romantic pieces topped by rotogravure portraits of Minter, all innocence and golden curls. Again the lists: editors, reporters, publications – suggested stories and rumor bait. Everything Olsen had suggested earlier, laid out like a storybook.
Even so, Tom could find nothing that amounted to outright slander. Least of all against Normand. Despite the material on the desks, the enigmatic notes and jottings, lists of tips and whispers, there was no hard proof he could simply slip in his pocket and take back to Sennett. Unless …
He was down on his haunches, attempting to pick the lock on J.J. Fine’s office door when he heard a noise. Shoe leather on linoleum, approaching along the corridor outside. He froze, glanced over his shoulder at the glass panel door, then at the desk lamp. The footsteps kept coming, and with them some jauntily whistled bars of ‘Hallelujah, I’m a Bum’. Only one thing for it. He took a breath, concentrated on the metal prongs in his hand and willed the tumbler to turn. A click. The lock yielded and he scrambled inside, heart thumping, back to the wall, just as the outer office door was flung open.
The whistling stopped abruptly, then a loud tut and the desk lamp was doused with a peremptory click, and another lit opposite. Through the barely open door, Tom glimpsed a gangling, carrot-haired figure in a tan check suit and brown-and-white brogues. Jed ‘Red’ Peppard, the youngest member of Fine’s inner circle and not the brightest. In the same glance, with a nauseating lurch of his gut, Tom spotted his flashlight on the floor outside the door, left while fishing the lock picks from his pocket. It was switched off, but no less a beacon for that. If Peppard saw it, there was no way he wouldn’t investigate.
Eons passed, or so it seemed, before Peppard found what he was searching for, the light was doused and the slam of the door was followed by the pad of receding footsteps. Quickly, Tom retrieved the flashlight and turned its beam on J.J. Fine’s carved oak desk, so large it had to be placed crosswise in the room. Its surface was bare but for a leather-trimmed ink blotter and a pen stand. Behind stood a pair of tall file cabinets. Locked, but it took Tom seconds to unpick them, and three drawer pulls later his eyes fell on something he knew instinctively should not be in there. A bulky manila file folder with M. Normand inscribed on the tab.
He laid it open on the desk. Saw yet more clippings, sheaves of private memos from sources in the studio containing every variety of scurrilous rumor regarding Normand’s dope habit, poor health and relationships with men. At the back were four blurred photographs of a muscular, buck-naked man squiring a tiny woman whose disheveled black curls and outsize, glazed-over eyes might well have been Normand’s, though little else could be discerned. The reports were far too many and thorough to read through. Tom considered his options, urgency and excitement quarreling. To take the entire file would be too risky – he could never talk his way out if he were stopped. The cops would be called. And, just up the Boulevard, Hollywood police station was one place he really couldn’t afford to land in again. Not if he wanted to stay alive.
What he needed were one or two sheets of paper that would say it all. He laid the file on the desk, preparing to rifle through it again, when he noticed a note pinned to the inside front of the folder, a scrawled memo from Charlie Eyton, dated the day of Taylor’s discovery:
Feb 3
J.J., regarding matter so urgently discussed, see attached from New York, congratulate your perspicacity and agree best way to proceed is turn all light on Normand. Most everybody on lot has some story to tell.
Yours, Charles E.
Unpinning the memo, Tom unfolded the telegram attached, shocked by the simple ferocity of the sparse words laid out in two strips of green type, datelined Paramount, New York:
***IMPERATIVE SUPPRESS MMM RUMORS ANY COST=STOP=SPOTLIGHT MN AS SUGGESTED WITH ALL SPEED=STOP=ZUKOR=STOP***
Even as Tom slid the folded papers into his pocket, a lingering, irrational sense of loyalty made him sicken at the thought of what he was about to do.
But what more proof could be wanted?
THIRTY-ONE
All he had to do was retrace his steps, locate Fay and get over to Sennett’s, and he would be done. But as he descended the stairs, a landing door thumped open right in front of him, near taking his nose with it. Red Peppard halted like he’d been knocked back, more surprised than Tom, his pale eyebrows mounting almost to the copper curls above.
‘Holy moly, Tom … Tom Collins, how the heck you doin’, friend? We ain’t seen you in—’ The penny dropped, and the eyebrows knit together now for a slow-witted glance up the stairs.
‘Red, hey, that’s what I call lucky.’ Tom leaned forward to seize him by the shoulders, as if this unexpected renewal of acquaintance was all he’d ever wished for. ‘You wouldn’t think a guy could forget the layout of this place in six months,
would you? I lost my bearings, coming back from the can.’
He wiped his hands together as though he had just washed them, mostly to let Peppard see they were empty. It was a ludicrous excuse for being there and, slow as he was, the boy probably wouldn’t buy it. Tom slipped his hand in his pocket and gripped the heavy flashlight. He was a nice kid, but even so …
‘Oh, yeah,’ Peppard blurted, his cogs finally getting in a full turn. ‘Sure, I heard you were working for Dick Rowland now, but I didn’t see your name on the list. Rush job, was it?’
What Peppard was talking about, or what the president of Metro Pictures had to do with it, Tom had no idea. But he went along with it.
‘Sure, you got it now, Red.’
Peppard’s mind seemed to be engaged on other business anyhow.
‘Look, Tom, ol’ buddy, I don’t want to get you in trouble, but you know the rules. Hell, you probably made ’em, for all I know. Stick to the meeting rooms, no wandering.’ Peppard’s tone was admonishing, but conciliatory. For whatever reason, he didn’t want a confrontation. ‘You best get back in there and rejoin your people before you’re missed. They’re wrapping it up now anyway.’
Still Tom had no clue. But at a guess some kind of pow-wow was going on downstairs. Something big. Enough for Peppard not to want to rock the boat.
‘Sure, Red. You know how it is. I’ll hold it in next time, OK?’
The kid grunted. His eyes darted back up the stairs. He was in a hurry. ‘Bottom of the stairwell, left through the doors, and no straying. Yeah?’
The gratitude in Tom’s handshake did not need to be feigned. He made his way down the last two flights. At the bottom, he pushed loudly through the swing door, then stopped, waiting, until he heard Peppard skipping upwards again. He peered out, ran straight across the stairwell and into the corridor opposite. Two minutes later he was out in the air again, in the gap between the buildings, breathing in deep gulps of relief and leaning his forehead against the cool stucco of the wall.
The Long Silence Page 17
