Whatever Peppard had been talking about, it had saved his neck. Now he had time to, he wondered what Dick Rowland and his ‘people’ from Metro – one of Lasky’s biggest rivals – could be doing right here at the heart of the Lasky operation? A secret deal, maybe? Some kind of merger? That kind of business usually got done in New York, not out here. Still, it would explain all the cloak and dagger, the block on the Vine Street gate, the total shutdown. Something major enough to merit all that.
A roar of automobile engines and a flare of headlamps drew his attention to the far end of the passage. The smart thing, he knew, would be to get straight back across Argyle, find Fay and get the hell off the lot. But the idea that he might have stumbled across something secret spurred him on. Some folk would pay well for a tip-off about a deal between Lasky and Metro – not least of them Phil Olsen.
Out front, the night air was thick with noise. Limousines lined up in two curving rows, engines running, liveried chauffeurs standing by. From his vantage point, Tom had a direct line of sight to the portico of the executive building as a lone figure in a dinner suit emerged, pushed a fat cigar between his lips and struck a match on one of the pillars. Tall, balding and possessed of a nose that would not have looked out of place on a punchbag, there was no mistaking him. Still, Tom had to blink three times before he convinced himself it really was one of Lasky’s biggest, most powerful business rivals. Joe Schenck. Standing there, puffing away, like he had just bought the place.
Tom had no time to think it through. The door swung open again and a stream of voluble men in black dress coats emerged on to the portico and began signaling to the waiting drivers. Again, Tom was dumbstruck. Every one of them was a name of national importance. There was Dick Rowland, as Peppard had said. Beside him the still more eminent Marcus Loew, and the diminutive figure of ‘Uncle’ Carl Laemmle of Universal, William Fox, Sam Goldwyn, Lewis Selznick, Hiram Abrams of United Artists and – godammit, there was good ol’ Doug Fairbanks strolling out alongside him. So much for the stupid story about Valentino, even if he had known it was bunkum from the get-go.
What could have brought all these men together, so many of them known to despise each other? The only ones missing were the Lasky contingent. But then they too emerged: Jesse Lasky and Charlie Eyton and last of all – impossible as it might seem that no news had leaked of his arrival from New York, yet there he was – the president of Famous Players-Lasky and the Paramount Corporation, the most powerful man in movieland: Adolph Zukor.
What in hellfire and damnation was going on?
THIRTY-TWO
Back on the far side of Argyle, things couldn’t have been more different. Drawn by the umbrella of yellow light, Tom found himself by a luxuriously appointed set, a three-wall interior – open to the night sky apart from the rigging and a broad sweep of muslin hanging from it to diffuse the glare from the Kliegs ranged above. Outside, chalk marks on the timber flats identified the movie as Blood and Sand. He smiled at the seductive cruelty. How many careworn hearts would flutter back to life at the sight of Valentino in a toreador’s skintight suit of lights. The young Italian had stormed the box office in Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Sheik. Every production he could be levered into was in overdrive; this must have been the fourth in as many months for Lasky. Nothing – not even a meeting so secret it shut down the rest of the lot – could halt the money machine that was Rudy Valentino.
The open stage was an island of opulent luxury, an ornate Moorish salon, all pencil-thin columns and sinuous arches, cascading silks, embroidered wall hangings suspended from the rigging above. On the floor, an artfully configured profusion of Persian carpets, animal skins and furs. Tables strained to support bowls of abundant fruit, flowers and baubles. At the center, the principal point of focus for lighting and lens, a grand divan smothered in lustrous folds of silk and satin cushions.
‘Tom, over here,’ Fay called out, hand raised aloft as if she had every right to be there. She was standing by the camera platform with a short, plump, homely-looking woman dressed in a slouchy, old-fashioned fur over a severe three-quarter-length dress. The waved bob cut she wore was a sole concession to fashion. The plain face it framed seemed unlikely to have graced a screen, but it was familiar.
‘Have you met Miss Mathis?’ Fay asked.
He knew the name. June Mathis. Recognized her now from magazines. Valentino’s chief promoter and scenario writer, a former executive at Metro who had pushed so hard for this Italian unknown to be given the role that made his name – she had resigned her position to go with him when he turned his back on Metro and moved to Lasky.
‘We haven’t met but, yes, of course—’ Tom stopped short as the woman extended a gloved hand, sweeping frank, black, polished-pebble eyes up and down him as he made his introduction, before beaming her approval to Fay.
‘Miss Mathis is kind enough to patronize the Oasis occasionally,’ Fay interjected. ‘We have become such good friends.’
‘I heard Mrs Parker sing and, of course, I was enchanted.’ Miss Mathis ran her eyes over Tom again. This time he detected a diamantine hardness in them. ‘But I think our friendship is more probably founded on shared dislikes. Such as that dreadful Swanson woman. I’m told me she was putting on a scandalous display at the Alexandria earlier. So unnecessary, Mr Collins, don’t you agree?’
He had no opportunity to reply. Amid a general murmur, a switch was thrown and the set lit up in a brighter blaze than before. Something stirred on the richly upholstered ottoman at its center and, for the first time, Tom noticed a sinuous female form draped upon it, her face buried under silks until now.
A shout went up. ‘No, Nita. No! For Chrissakes, stay still. We’ve only just got the light right. You wanna look good, don’t you?’
Tom looked up and saw the familiar figure of Fred Niblo striding to the edge of a scaffold platform beside a big, twin-reeled Bell & Howell camera. He was clothed in the standard movie-director outfit of jodhpurs, riding boots and tailored safari jacket, and appeared entirely unconcerned by the stream of muffled invective directed at him from the actress lying face down on the bed.
‘I’m roasting my tush off under these lights, Fred. I don’t see Rudy being subjected to this torture. If you don’t get started, I’m walking. I mean it.’
Niblo rattled down the scaffold and, ensuring he didn’t disturb the lie of the props, leaned over the divan and stroked the actress’s mounded black hair and bare shoulders. ‘OK, sweetheart, lift your head and get your breath for a minute. We can’t let you move just yet as we need that close-up of you when Rudy comes into your lair for the first time. We can’t let the fans miss the flash of those fiery eyes of yours as you rise and catch sight of him, can we? We need the long lens for that, so we need to get the lights spot on.’
Tom looked on in silence as screen siren Nita Naldi raised her head from the fabric in which she was buried. Sultry, raven-haired, as she shifted slightly, the curve of a voluptuous white haunch, previously blended perfectly into the hillocks of surrounding silk, came visible through the translucent veil of near-nothing in which she was attired. Niblo’s expression changed to barely controlled ecstasy.
‘Are you getting that, Alvin?’ he shouted to the lensman above and got a double thumbs-up by way of reply. ‘OK, let’s go for the shot. Musicians, you strike up something hot. And Norm, tell Mr Valentino he’s up next. Let’s roll ’em now.’
As Niblo stepped carefully out of frame, a trio of musicians in the wings struck up a slow-burning Latin rhythm on viola, bass and piano accordion. Under the director’s shouted encouragement, Naldi began to writhe sensuously on the divan, her urgent desire speaking eloquently from dark-rimmed eyes gazing straight into the camera. Tom wondered how many present knew that Naldi, this epitome of Eastern promise, was in reality Mary Dooley, progeny of impoverished Irish immigrants in New York, whose sloe-eyed beauty and curvaceous form won her first a place in Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies, and then a ticket West to immortality.
‘Miss Mathis tells me she knew poor Mr Taylor very well,’ Fay said, turning away from the scene. ‘And like you, Tom, she believes his death was most peculiar.’
‘I would hardly be alone in that, my dear,’ Miss Mathis objected with considerable hauteur. ‘He was murdered. What I meant you to understand was that I could agree with none of the accounts offered hitherto as to why. Certainly none of those concocted by the authorities, or by this city’s nincompoop newspapers, are in the least credible. Is this your opinion, too, Mr Collins?’
It was not so far from his own opinion, although he would have expressed it differently. ‘You’re not wrong there, Miss Mathis. Nothing about his death makes sense to me. But then, I only knew Mr Taylor slightly. You were close?’
‘I knew him professionally.’ She swept a hand around the set. ‘And we dined occasionally as friends. More so recently, as I was preparing a scenario for Mr Valentino to play in under his direction.’
Tom offered condolences, and wondered whether Miss Mathis had noticed her friend behaving any way abnormally or fearfully in recent weeks.
‘There were one or two occurrences, since you ask,’ she replied. ‘I did not set great store by them before, but now I’m not so certain. As you doubtless know, all of Mr Taylor’s leading ladies adored him. Worshipped the ground on which he walked, in fact.’ With this, she struck a vaguely tragic pose. ‘A very attractive man he was, too. But there were two in particular about whom he was quite concerned. To the point of distress, I fear.’
Apparently under a professional obligation to dramatize, Miss Mathis made a meal of trying to look hesitant, but also seemed very eager to get something off her ample chest. Tittle-tattle, Tom didn’t doubt.
‘Obviously, I can reveal no names,’ she continued. ‘Mr Taylor was the very soul of discretion and I would not wish to sully his reputation. But perhaps, if you knew him, you already know the two ladies I’m talking of?’
‘Perhaps,’ Tom said, with as much knowingness as he could muster.
‘Well,’ Miss Mathis said, ‘whatever they say, or don’t, about the young one in the newspapers, Mr Collins, I believe Mr Taylor was genuinely anxious that she was trouble. She was infatuated with him, you know – a case of youthful amour fou, I imagine. She insisted on calling at his quarters in the evenings, shamelessly begging him to, well, to make love to her. There’s no other way of putting it. It’s not as if he encouraged her. He had to get that manservant of his to demur and tell her he was out. Even so, the child turned up at three in the morning only two weeks ago, out of her wits with ardor and threatening to injure herself unless he consented to wed her.’
‘Really?’ Tom said, unprepared for Mathis to so comprehensively back up everything that Olsen had suggested to him about Minter and which J.J. Fine’s memo had all but confirmed. ‘You think she might have acted violently against him?’
Mathis gave him a derisory glare. ‘No, no, Mr Collins, not Mary. That crazy mother of hers – the dreaded Mrs Shelby. It is she who would have delivered the coup de grace. Just think of her, alone in that big house, fearful she might lose her daughter, lose control of all that money, her only source of income, after she’d fought so fiercely to establish her child’s name, and to drag her family up from abject poverty. Only to lose control of it to Mr Taylor? If they had married, Mother Shelby would have been cut out entirely – finished, for ever. The young lady made that consequence quite clear. Mother couldn’t afford to let it happen, could she? In fact, she said as much to someone of my acquaintance.’
‘She did?’ Tom asked, as surprised by her powers of imagination now as anything else. ‘And have you reported any of this to the investigating detectives?’
Miss Mathis was taken aback by the suggestion. ‘Well, I didn’t feel it was my place, but I certainly advised my friend to do so.’
Tom rather doubted it and was about to ask straight out who this friend was when he got a kick on the ankle from Fay, who had a question of her own.
‘Which is all one could expect,’ she interjected. ‘But what about the other woman, Miss Mathis? Tell Mr Collins what you were saying to me about her condition.’
Tom arched his eyebrows at this, a response Miss Mathis took for skepticism. She began to look uncertain about continuing the conversation.
‘Well, I’m not sure it’s appropriate, my dear. It is only hearsay, and whatever one might say among we ladies, I’m not sure Mr Collins …’
In the event, she was saved her blushes. Their conference was interrupted by a shout from the wings as Niblo darted out from the curtained cubicle and marched straight across to where they stood.
Puce-faced, bursting with indignation, he demanded Mathis’s adjudication at a crisis meeting in Mr Valentino’s dressing room, post-haste.
‘He’s gone mad, June. It’s just too much. How are we ever going to get this picture made with these constant, unreasonable, ridiculous demands?’
Without a by-your-leave, Miss Mathis was away, swept up by the tornado of angst that was the director of Blood and Sand.
‘What did you kick me for?’ Tom asked. ‘I was about to ask her who this friend was. Now she’s gone.’
‘You can see she would never have told you,’ Fay insisted. ‘But me, on the other hand—’
‘She did?’
‘Yes,’ Faye laughed. ‘But that’s not all. I was hoping she would repeat what she confided to me about Mabel Normand. It is scandalous, Tom. I wasn’t sure you would believe it coming from me alone. I still don’t know quite what to think.’
Fay looked around guardedly. ‘She said there’s no question but that Miss Normand is hopelessly addicted to cocaine. By her own witness.’
‘Come on, Fay. That’s hardly news.’
She shushed him, her own voice low and confidential. ‘Not entirely perhaps, but then she said Normand only started using the dope after’ – at this she dropped her voice to a whisper – ‘after she was forced to engage the services of an abortionist.’
‘Miss Normand? You’re kidding? She was having a baby?’
Fay frowned at his response. ‘Poor thing, she must have been so distressed.’
Tom’s racing thoughts were taking him through less compassionate territory. ‘Did she say who the father was? Was it Taylor?’
Fay shook her head. ‘She wouldn’t, or couldn’t, say more. I gather Miss Mathis heard this not from Taylor but a mutual friend – a Mrs Ivers, she said her name was. Do you know her?’
He thought hard on it, his mind churning. There was so much conflicting information about Taylor. How much of it was reliable? Credible even? The problem with movie folk was that their lives were bound up in fantasy. Writing, acting, their business was dreams. Some of them would believe anything. Then it hit him: the lady in blue.
‘Do you, Tom?’ Fay repeated, taking his arm now and starting away from the set.
‘Maybe I do at that,’ he said. ‘At least, I think so. Not to speak to, but once or twice I saw Taylor hanging around the lot late in the evening, talking with a little old lady. She was always dressed the same, in a long blue dress – old-style, you know? He asked me to arrange a studio pass for her, and that’s the name he gave: Mrs Ivers. I’m sure of it. Said she wrote scenarios for him, and came in at night to advise him on details for the sets and all. Hours at a time, just talking. He said they worked together something like five or six years. They looked close.’
Fay raised the inevitable eyebrow.
‘No, not like that,’ Tom said. ‘She was much older, and if
what I’ve been hearing is true, Taylor liked his fruit on the green side if anything. From what I remember, though, he sure loved talking to her.’
Rocking his head back, Tom worked the tension from his shoulders. The moon was still so bright that there was barely a star to be seen. ‘There must be someone around who knew Taylor well. Maybe this Ivers woman is the one to ask. Otherwise, all the random trash that’s coming out about him, it’s crazy. One fella at the Alexandria tonight wanted me to believe Taylor didn’t go for women at all. Said he knew for a fact Taylor liked men. What’re we supposed to believe?’
‘Well, it’s not impossible, is it?’ Fay ventured.
‘Maybe not, but you’ve got to admit it is unlikely, given what we’ve just heard. It’s just one secret life too many – even for Taylor. Nobody could live like that and keep quiet about it. Not out here.’
Fay was not convinced and Tom lapsed into silence as they walked.
‘I forgot to ask,’ she said. ‘Did you get what you wanted for Sennett?’
He tapped his pocket but couldn’t quite raise a smile about it. ‘I think so. I just hope it’ll be enough. There was something crazy going on over there, too. Some studio pow-wow, a gathering of chiefs of some kind.’
‘So that’s why Vine Street spurned us. Any idea what it was?’
‘No.’ He held his hands up. ‘Whole place’s gone mad, far as I can see.’ His voice dipped on the final phrase, the last of his energy draining from him.
She leaned in, squeezed her arm against his and pulled him close. ‘It’s been a long day. We should get out of here and have ourselves a nightcap. You look like you could do with one. And I know I could. You might as well sit up front with me now. I can’t imagine they’ll check us going out.’
The Long Silence Page 18
