Valentino: Film Detective

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Apartment.” She led the way up a narrow staircase and flicked her bright nails in the direction of a closed door. Padilla tried the knob.

  “He keeps it locked,” she said with satisfaction. “As if I’d pry.”

  He produced a ring of assorted keys from a polyester pocket. “Okay if I try these?”

  “Knock yourself out.” She sounded sincere.

  He was halfway through the ring when the latch clicked.

  “Oh, my stars.” The woman’s voice was a squeak.

  Posters leapt out from the walls when the door was opened. Some were pricey originals, others reproductions: Marilyn sprawled before the falls in Niagara, Jayne’s vapid face grinning between her cotton-candy hair and her ice-cream breasts in The Girl Can’t Help It, Thelma Todd looking fetching in a lobby card for one of her comedy shorts, a chilling rendition of Sharon Tate wielding a bloody stake in The Fearless Vampire Killers. There were other four-color images, all of them tragic blondes: Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, Dorothy Stratten, Inger Stevens—the long, sad Parthenon of yellow hair, gaudy lives, and early death. Someone had taken a four-inch brush and slashed scarlet paint diagonally across every lovely face.

  Oh, my stars, indeed.

  Augustine’s library was a miniature version of Valentino’s, apart from its emphasis on the Industry’s dark side: Hollywood Babylon, Fade to Black, Hollywood’s Unsolved Mysteries, Helter Skelter. An empty CD box atop a Sony player caught his eye: a single of Marilyn singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”

  Padilla called to him. He joined the lieutenant at a small writing table, where yesterday’s L.A. Times lay folded to a gossip column, with a check mark beside the fourth paragraph:

  … Holiday O’Shea, popular road-company star of Hello, Dolly; Gypsy; and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, celebrating her 55th with husband and friends with a private screening of a local cable documentary of her life at Orson’s Grill Friday …

  Padilla looked at the archivist. “What day is today?”

  Orson’s Grill, in a defunct Burger Chef on Cahuenga, featured posters and memorabilia—the latter locked inside shatterproof glass cases—relating to the life and career of Orson Welles, with a menu engineered to replicate the late actor/director’s expansive waistline in its clientele. The maître d’ pointed Padilla and Valentino toward a private room in back. The lieutenant drew his sidearm, towing a chain of gasps through the crowded common room.

  “Has-beens, also-rans, and wannabes,” he said. “Those are his targets. Life would be simpler if these twisted jerks would just kill their mothers and be done with it.”

  Valentino said nothing. He was tense and his throat was hoarse from arguing in favor of his civilian presence at the showdown. He’d finally compromised, agreeing to hang behind in order to avoid being trapped in the crossfire between Padilla and the backup he’d ordered for the rear entrance.

  A burly waiter stood before the door to the back room. “Sorry, fellows. Private party. Not even staff ’s allowed inside till after the movie.”

  “Whose orders?” Padilla showed him his gun and shield. The waiter blanched.

  “Why, the young man’s, sir. He said he was the projectionist.”

  “You see a projector?”

  “He was carrying a big black case like one comes in.”

  “How long ago?”

  The waiter shrugged. “Twenty minutes.”

  Padilla told him to stand clear.

  The door was locked from the other side. The lieutenant clasped his automatic in both hands, raised a foot, and threw his heel at the latch. The door was more cooperative for him than Beata’s had been for Valentino. It swung open and banged against the wall inside the room.

  “Police! Drop it!”

  Valentino craned his neck to see inside. Four middle-aged people in formal dress sat around a linen-covered table, eyes wide above gags tied around their mouths. One was a woman in her middle fifties with a chrysanthemum head of improbably butter-colored hair. Their hands were out of sight; tied, Valentino supposed, to their chairs.

  A reedy young man in cords and a tweed sportcoat stood this side of the table with his back to Padilla, looking over his shoulder at the source of the interruption. Annoyance was plain on his narrow features, which were a younger version of Mother Augustine’s. He’d stopped in the midst of drawing a collapsible steel baton—the kind police used in place of nightsticks—from a black case standing open on the table. The case was filled with long-bladed knives and coils of nylon rope.

  Just then a door on the other side of the room burst open and two policemen in uniform sprang through, one standing, his partner dropping into a crouch. Their sidearms were trained on the young man holding the baton.

  His head spun that way. Then his shoulders sagged and he let his weapon fall back into the case.

  Padilla barked another command. Arthur Augustine turned to face him and folded his hands on top of his head.

  “Pigs,” he said.

  Holiday O’Shea whimpered through her gag.

  The “Curse Killer” stained front pages and breaking newscasts for two weeks, complete with its familiar back story of parental neglect and adolescent jealousy. It made Valentino feel sorry for Augustine, until he thought of Beata Limerick. Ray Padilla was forced to buy a new suit to wear before the cameras. When Augustine was declared mentally unfit to stand trial and remanded to the maximum-security ward of the state mental hospital in Camarillo, the entire episode began to fade, joining the shockers of Hollywood past.

  Beata’s print of The Sandpiper went to auction. Valentino, remembering her now without sadness, topped Ted Turner’s bid and claimed it. The restoration experts at UCLA put it on the list behind Charlie Chan’s Chance and two hundred feet of Theda Bara’s Cleopatra, which was all of that silent feature that had ever come to light.

  Six months after the arrest in Orson’s Grill, ABC announced plans to tape a TV movie about the murders. The producers didn’t lack for fair-haired hasbeens, also-rans, and wannabes to fill the cast.

  Shooting Big Ed

  THERE’S NOTHING RARER than an East L.A. millionaire. That paradox might have been enough in itself to pique Valentino’s interest, without the added incentive of acquiring a lost film from the first decade of talking pictures for the UCLA Film Preservation Department, free of charge; together, they compelled him to cancel his day’s appointments and brave the gangs and carjackers to pay the old man a visit.

  Sometime in the late 1940s, Ignacio Bozal had suddenly appeared in Acapulco with a bankroll big enough to buy and renovate a broken-down resort hotel and open for business just before the birth of the Mexican Riviera. Rumors persisted that he’d made his stake harboring Nazi war criminals in Argentina, or had been a member of the Perón government and looted the treasury, but no serious investigation was ever made, and Bozal’s claim of a silent partnership in a gold mine in the Sierra Madres was accepted as plausible by his American investors. Thirty years later, having doubled his fortune many times over, he’d sold out to a corporation and emigrated to California.

  There, scorning the mansions of Bel-Air and Beverly Hills, he’d bought a city block of modest houses in the largely Mexican-American suburb of Los Angeles. A wall went up around it, sheltering his middle-aged children, grown grandchildren, and great-grandchildren under his benevolent eye. He kept his fleet of mint-condition classic automobiles in the attached garages and converted the basement of his personal dwelling to store his huge film collection. He told interviewers of his sentimental attachment to the American cinema, which he said had taught him his English. Visitors were amused by the 1930s American slang that peppered his speech; he looked like an old Spanish grandee and talked like a combination of Wallace Beery and Roscoe Karns. At ninety-six he was said to be in good health and better humor. He was a frequent contributor to the film program at UCLA.

  The gateman, a thirty-year-old Hispanic in a tailored gray uniform who referred to Bozal as Grandpapa, found Valentino’
s name on his clipboard and told him where to park. The compound reminded the newcomer of a street in The Godfather, if it had been filmed south of the border: tawny children in baggy swimsuits frolicking in the spray from open fire hydrants, heavyset women in light summer dresses sitting on porches, slick-haired hombres in bright sport shirts smoking cigarettes and conversing in rapid Spanish on the sidewalks. There was plenty of family resemblance to go around.

  “Ever hear of a mug named Van Oliver?”

  Ignacio Bozal, it developed, had little patience for small talk. The question, delivered in a refined Spanish accent incompatible with the vocabulary, came two minutes after a white-coated houseboy (who also called him Grandpapa) led Valentino into a sunken living room and left him alone with his host.

  “Old-time picture actor,” Valentino said. “He was murdered. Another one of Hollywood’s unsolved mysteries.”

  The old man jerked his chin, approving. He was a small man and ancient, but erect, and his thin build gave the illusion of height. His gold Rolex and cuff links looked too heavy for his fragile wrists. But his eyes were bright behind huge glasses and he had a full head of fine white hair like Cesar Romero’s.

  “At least you know more than that punk I talked to on the phone. He thought Garbo was a brand of mouthwash.”

  Valentino winced, knowing who’d answered. All the other archivists in his department had interns who were film school grad students. His had gone to see Scooby-Doo fourteen times.

  He came to the young man’s defense. “We can’t all be buffs. Most people wouldn’t know Oliver. He only made one movie.” He wondered, with a little thrill, if that was the film Bozal was offering to donate.

  The old man kept him in suspense. “Officially, he just disappeared. My bet is they buried him up in the hills, or rowed him out past Catalina and dumped him overboard in a cement jacket. In those days, you couldn’t convict anyone of murder in the State of California without a corpse. It was almost a double murder, if you can call a movie studio a victim. It drove Warner Brothers close to bankruptcy.”

  “They shelved the film without releasing it,” Valentino said. “Publicity couldn’t promote it properly without a star to interview and show up at premieres. That was in nineteen thirty-one. They might have recut and reshot to build up one of the other players and brought it out later, except the Catholic Decency League shut down gangster films.”

  “Protecting the nation’s youth.” Bozal snarled out of the side of his mouth. “Nothing’s changed in seventy years except the width of the lapels. Anyway, the picture was eventually lost. Nobody cared about preservation back then; rereleasing hadn’t caught on, and there was no TV or home video. They remade it in ’thirty-seven as a musical with George Brent in the lead. It tanked, natch. You know the title?”

  “Big Ed. Oliver played a gangster loosely based on Al Capone. Only he didn’t play him like Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar or Paul Muni in the original Scarface. The few insiders who saw the final cut said he had an entirely new take on the character. Had the film made it into theaters, it might have changed the history of the gangster movie.”

  “Not just gangster movies. Acting. Robinson was nasty, Muni played psycho. Jimmy Cagney in Public Enemy was like a bomb about to go off. Oliver kept his cool, like James Dean twenty years later, and Al Pacino in The Godfather. He may have been the first actor to play to the camera instead of the back row of the balcony. A lot of the production is what you’d expect of the transitional period between silents and talkies: stagebound and static, chained to those damn hidden microphones, but his performance would stand up beside anyone’s today.”

  Valentino’s thrill became a cozy hum. Bozal wasn’t parroting something he’d read or heard; he spoke as someone who’d seen the evidence firsthand, and recently. “Where’d you find it?”

  “Former Warner Brothers splicer died last year. I bought his estate.”

  “I can’t believe I missed a sale like that. What was his name?”

  “You wouldn’t recognize the name. He was out before the industry gave film editors screen credit. It was a private deal in Europe.”

  Valentino was sure this rapid-fire response was a lie. He assumed the millionaire was protecting a favorite fishing hole. “Is Big Ed the film you’re donating? I’d sure like to see it even if it isn’t.”

  “It is. Screening room’s downstairs.”

  They went down to the basement. Bozal used the handrail, but the stairs didn’t slow him down. He seemed fit for any age past sixty. The lower level appeared equal in square footage to the rest of the house, with thousands of film cans stored like wine in racks on the walls, three rows of theater seats upholstered in green plush, and a nylon screen framed by an Art Deco proscenium. Three steps led up to a platform at the opposite end, where the houseboy who’d admitted Valentino had the gate open on a Bell & Howell projector of 1930s vintage. “No problems, Ernesto?”

  “Ready when you are, G.P.!”

  “Cut that out.” Bozal indicated a seat up front and sat next to his guest. “Half my family is in pictures and the other half wants to be. If we were in Mexico, it would be artichokes.”

  Ernesto slammed shut the gate, switched off the recessed lights in the ceiling, and started the feature. As the numerals thrown onto the screen counted down from ten, jumping a little because of broken sprocket-holes, the sound track popping and crackling, Valentino felt the delicious anticipation he’d known the first time he saw a movie in a theater when he was a boy. The millions of miles of celluloid he’d studied in the course of his job had failed to dim its silvery luster; and to know that he was about to see a nearly seventy-five-year-old feature for the very first time made him almost giddy. But he was apprehensive as well: What if he didn’t like it?

  Five minutes in, his fears vanished.

  His host had been right about the creaky production values. The talking-picture revolution of 1927 had looted the Broadway stage of actors who could really act, and some of the players were wooden and unsure of themselves emoting before a working crew instead of a rapt audience; rooted as they were to the vicinity of the primitive microphones, concealed in potted plants and prop telephones, they were unable to gesture widely or roam the soundstage, and the camera’s soundproof booth had put a temporary end to pans, zooms, and dollies. It was like photographing an amateur theatrical production. There was no background music to enhance mood, just some scratchy Stravinsky under the opening and closing titles; in 1931, the studios worried that audiences would wonder where the music was coming from. Big Ed had, in fact, every disadvantage of its time.

  But from the moment Van Oliver made his entrance, stepping down off a train from New York and pausing, only his eyes moving as he stood on the platform with one hand inside his long overcoat, searching for friends or enemies, the movie became unique, and all his. He was a lean man in his early twenties, with dark Mediterranean features under the curled-down brim of his fedora, piratically handsome. When he opened his mouth to speak his first line, Valentino half expected an exotic accent. Pure American came out instead, in a casual baritone that took on an ominous edge when he met resistance. He acted balletic rings around stage professionals and more than held his own against seasoned character actors from Warner Brothers’ rich reperatory stock—Murderers’ Row, Variety called it. All the time he was on camera he was mesmerizing, and scenes in which he did not appear crackled with tension, anticipating his entrance. He seemed to have star tattooed on his forehead.

  The action scenes—Oliver disarming a rival with one hand, punishing him with a backward swipe of the other, police cars barreling around corners, the inevitable montage of clattering tommyguns, crashing sedans, exploding storefronts, illegal alcohol gushing into glasses stacked in sparkling pyramids—were exciting and fresh with the adolescent inspiration of the period. Valentino’s back seldom touched the plush back of his seat. Even the love scenes between Oliver and Madeleine Crane, a striking brunette with enormous, expressive eyes, seemed to
set the screen afire; within two years of its filming, the Motion Picture Code would bar such raw sexuality for the next three decades.

  The ending electrified. Oliver’s death scene was defiant, not contrite. Had the picture been released, his curtain line—“You and what army?”—would have made every reference book on great movie quotations. Valentino found himself applauding when the closing credits sprang onto the screen.

  The lights came up. Ignacio Bozal, lounging in the adjoining seat with legs crossed, observed Valentino’s expression with a smirk. “Quite a show, eh? Bogart wouldn’t have got a chance at The Petrified Forest if Oliver had stuck around five more years. He’d’ve finished out his career saying, ‘Tennis, anyone?’ on the Great White Way, just like he started.”

  “Whatever happened to Madeleine Crane? She looked familiar.”

  “She had bit parts as wisecracking secretaries in a couple of programmers before Big Ed. Her real name was Magdalena Carvello; she was Puerto Rican. She could turn the accent on and off. When the Roman Catholic lobby shut down gangster pictures, Warners didn’t renew her contract. RKO offered her a long-term deal, but that would’ve meant sleeping with Howard Hughes, so she turned it down. She married some joker and moved to Europe.”

  “Too bad. For moviegoers, I mean.”

  “She’d’ve been out of work in a couple of years anyway. Can you see her as the long-suffering wife of some philanderer played by Chester Morris? The Hays Office wouldn’t have let her play anything else.”

  “For someone who came here late in life, you know a lot about inside Hollywood.”

  The old man blew a raspberry. “Everybody who was anybody wintered at my joint in Acapulco. You hear a lot of gossip when you mingle. See a lot, too. Garbo went skinny-dipping in the indoor pool.” He leered.

  “What did you hear about Van Oliver?”

  “Nothing you probably didn’t read. It’s part of industry lore. He was just what you saw on the screen, though I don’t know if he ever shot anyone. He ran errands for the Capone mob in Chicago, and came out here to scout a new racket when the actors started talking union. Jack Warner liked his looks and offered him a screen test. Well, you can see the impression he made. The studio changed his name from Vincent Olivera and signed him for three pictures.