Scandal in Babylon

by Barbara Hambly

  She counted on her fingers again. ‘But I never saw Rex again,’ she finished, with the air of one virtuously returning to the subject at hand. ‘He’d been pretty sober when we had our fight, so I knew he meant it, when he said he’d divorce me. And frankly, considering the kind of people he ran around with, I’m a little surprised he made it all the way up to this afternoon.’

  ‘Do you know anything about his family?’ asked Emma after a moment. ‘Or where he was from originally?’

  ‘Oh, New York, I’m pretty sure. And to hear him tell it, his family had been well-off, though he sometimes said he’d been to Yale, and sometimes to Princeton. He was always telling me I was just like his mother, which I don’t think was supposed to be a compliment. I always thought he was sort of like me – the family had some kind of money, but gave him the bum’s rush for some damn thing. And frankly, I was just as happy to get out of New York at that point, because to be honest I was always a little afraid I’d run into my parents, or Jim, or one of Papa’s rabbi friends on the street – not that I ever was on the street during the daytime.’

  And all during that time, reflected Emma – during Kitty’s brief, tempestuous marriage and her career as a showgirl on the Great White Way – her older brother Jim, after a discreet name-change from Blechstein to Blackstone, had been studying, first at City College and then at New York University. Like his sister, he had sought to shake free from his scholarly father’s expectation that the only proper use of education was to become a rabbi.

  He’d been a year from his degree in architecture, when he’d been drafted.

  That tall, young man in American uniform, black curly hair falling into his eyes as he gazed around a fashionable shop in the Regent’s Arcade. Then he’d shyly approached her, asked, ‘Excuse me, miss, but … could you spare a minute to help me pick out something for my sister?’

  The sister who at that moment had been surreptitiously packing her bags in preparation to leave her third husband (or, as it turned out, the man she thought was her third husband) to head out for Hollywood …

  The sister he had written to in secret, without their parents’ knowledge, for years.

  The sister he had never ceased to love.

  Kitty stubbed out her cigarette, poured herself another gin, kissed her and Zal goodnight, and went up to bed. ‘Of course Frank isn’t going to stop the shooting and I’ve got to be in costume by seven … I suppose it would make more sense to stay up than to get up, but it isn’t fair to you, Zally, or to poor Emma. Frank’s going to send a studio car for us …’

  She blithered for another fifteen minutes about how they all really should get some sleep, before Emma finally herded her up to bed. Coming downstairs, she found Zal still in the kitchen, Chang Ming snoring like a fluffy red-gold bear in his lap. Zal gently shifted the little dog to another chair without waking it, rose, and picked up his cap. ‘Anything else you need?’

  ‘Other than three more hours of sleep than I’m going to get?’ Emma smiled ruefully. ‘I trust Mr Pugh is going to hand this Mr Madison carte blanche to question everybody in the studio about whether they saw either Kitty, or anybody else coming or going from her dressing room? Or heard a shot between two ten and four this afternoon?’

  ‘Good luck with that.’ Zal poked his glasses more firmly onto the bridge of his nose as he followed her across the living room, with its chromium furniture and Chinese antiques, and out the front door. ‘You could probably shoot off a gun without a silencer and people would figure it was palace revolutionaries warming up for scene sixty-seven. We have close to four thousand people working on that lot, plus probably 300 extras, between Temptress of Babylon and Scandalous Lady and the comedies over on Stage Three.’

  ‘And that’s not even counting people like your friend Taffy in the prop barn.’

  ‘I forgot about Taffy.’ Zal grinned. ‘Not that Taffy would hurt a fly.’ It was very late now; a night bird in the abyssal shadows of the hills whooped a strange, eerie cry. Emma saw the reflected glow of the lamp in Kitty’s bedroom vanish from the leaves of the eucalyptus tree. She felt suddenly, absolutely exhausted, and the thought of getting up again in four hours was like sandpaper on her nerves.

  ‘But Kitty’s Number One Boy sounds like he could have pretty much anybody after him,’ Zal went on after a moment. ‘Except I think you’re right. Why drag Kitty into it at all? Why not take Mr Festraw up to the mountains and shoot him? Or drop him off the Venice Pier at four o’clock some morning? Unless there’s somebody so obviously pissed at Festraw the cops would land on him – or her – first thing, if he was just found in some bean field in the Valley.’

  ‘Then why not do a better job forging her handwriting? The samples I saw didn’t look a thing like hers. Why set up something as obvious as a love tryst to keep her busy – because I’ll swear that’s what it’s going to turn out to be …’

  Zal slowly shook his head. ‘But you’re right about one thing,’ he said. ‘We don’t know who’s passing along information to who, or why. There’s a lot of money in this town, Em, and everybody from the mayor to the shoeshine boy is on the take from the studios and the bootleggers. The head of the Vice Squad used to run the biggest prostitution ring in town.’

  Emma shivered. Her months in Hollywood had given her a front-row seat on an astounding display of the misuse of power, and there were far worse things to spend money on than fountains of bootleg champagne at one’s parties or solid gold door-handles for one’s car.

  ‘Whether Kitty murdered her husband or whatever else she was doing for those two hours, what’s going to matter at the hearing is what somebody else wants to happen … for reasons we have no idea what they are.’

  He took her fingers gently in his, and lifted himself – a very little – on the balls of his feet to kiss her lips. In a film, Emma reflected with a tiny inner smile, Madge would have had him stand on a box.

  ‘See you in Babylon,’ he said.

  She stood on the high porch and watched him descend the steps, cross the drive in the yellow California moonlight, and – after a suitable cranking and grinding and advancing and adjusting the old Model-T’s spark – drive slowly up to the road, and vanish into the blackness of the hills.

  SIX

  LOVE’S FATAL TRAGEDY! sobbed the headline in the Examiner.

  ‘I like that,’ approved Zal, when Emma brought it – and a cup of coffee – to the empress’s garden at eight thirty the following morning. ‘Fishy’s a better writer than most of the people cranking out scenarios in this town.’

  ‘The same could be said of Black Jasmine.’ She unfurled the Times, which trumpeted, THE SILVER SCREEN MURDER across the front page, accompanied by a studio publicity shot – not a snap from the sidewalk outside the Sixth Division police station – of Camille de la Rose. Personally, Emma was a little surprised they’d managed to find one that made Kitty look tragic and hunted (though still heart-stoppingly beautiful) instead of like a femme fatale.

  Fatale, she reflected, was not the image that people needed to see at the moment.

  ‘Looks like Crain got right on it.’ Zal sipped the coffee gratefully, keeping a watchful eye on the assembled Nubians, Praetorians, and dancing girls, similarly reviving themselves on the palace steps. Knowing exactly what he sought, Emma also made a mental note of coffee cups and cigarette butts. Madge Burdon – chain-smoking like the Dark Satanic Mills of Manchester – had the look of a woman who didn’t need the news that scene ten would require yet another retake (elephant and all) because someone had left a half-burned Chesterfield on the pedestal of Michelangelo’s David.

  ‘You should’ve seen the headlines about the pink nightie somebody found in Bill Taylor’s bungalow when he was murdered,’ he went on. ‘I heard Paramount dropped Mary Minter as soon as they could do it without a lawsuit – it was supposed to be hers. The scandal went on for months.’

  ‘According to this’ – Emma refolded the paper to the inner-column continuation of the story of poor �
�Camille’s’ shock, prostration, and tremulous courage in going on with shooting of Temptress of Babylon – ‘Mr Festraw was mixed up with bootleggers, both in New York – where he’s evidently been living – and here. Somebody on the Times must have stayed up late wiring the East Coast.’

  ‘Or else they made it up.’ Zal set down his cup and took the paper. Madge glared at her watch, glared at the gates, and glared at Zal, though until Kitty was finished with her make-up and came across to the set there wasn’t much the cameraman or anyone else could do. They had already set up the lights and reflectors – Ginny Field, a bathrobe over her copy of the empress’s diaphanous black-and-gold gown, now made up the fourth of the musicians’ endless pinochle game by the David statue. ‘It sounds a lot like what the publicity boys at Goldwyn came up with, about drug dealers murdering Bill Taylor because he was about to turn stool-pigeon. Though from what Kitty said last night, it could actually be true about the late lamented.’

  Madge swung toward the big stage door like a gun dog scenting blood, but it was only four soldiers of the Praetorian Guard, grumbling curses about Colt Madison’s wholesale enquiries in the studio canteen.

  The detective had already set up shop there when Emma and Kitty had arrived at the studio gates at six thirty, and was systematically grilling everyone who’d been on the lot the previous day about where they had been and what they had seen between one forty-five and four p.m. By seven, Madge had been ready to do murder herself. So had Ned Bergen, who had barely a week to complete the Burning of Rome set and whose workers were being held for special questioning about small dogs and crimson kimonos.

  When Emma had gone to the canteen for coffee, the line of gaffers, riggers, women from Wardrobe, and extras had snaked around amongst the tables and almost out the door, reminding her of a somewhat eccentric East End soup kitchen. Six old-fashioned Victorian dressing-screens – borrowed from the prop warehouse – formed a sort of cubicle in one corner, and from behind them, Madison’s clear, sharp voice could be heard: ‘So what time did you come out of Wardrobe? And what route did you take to Stage Two?’

  ‘Which is silly,’ Emma had remarked to Kitty, when she’d returned to the dressing room with her tray. Actually to Nick Thaxter’s dressing room, now a jumble of make-up kits, kimonos, costumes, shoes, and astrology magazines … Poor Nick had been moved in with Marsh Sloane for the time being, to the great alarm of them both. ‘There are whole categories of people who couldn’t possibly have seen anything: the entire camera and lights crews of Temptress, to begin with, and everyone working on Scandalous Lady. Plus Mr Sloane and Miss MacKenzie and Miss Violet …’ She had named the principal players of the Ruritanian epic. Down below, a little gang of prop men swarmed in and out of Kitty’s room, bearing buckets and holystone and the remains of the bloodstained carpet.

  ‘It’s silly because I wasn’t anywhere!’ Kitty had insisted, pouring gin from her flask into the coffee. ‘I mean, I was in the backlot looking for my poor little creamcake …’ She’d cast a melting glance at Buttercreme, visible as nothing more than a leash and a few strands of ivory-pale tail, trailing out of the wicker crate.

  In a corner, Chang Ming and Black Jasmine had stared at one another in hostility over a marabou slipper, like two wigs readying to do battle.

  Emma had opened her mouth to point out that she was perfectly well aware that so far as she knew, the carpenters at work on Rome had seen nothing of the studio’s major star – in a crimson kimono and four square inches of sequins, she’d have been difficult to miss – and then closed it. She read the defensive glint in Kitty’s eye, and the tightening of those fragile shoulders, and knew that contradiction would only result in a display of mulishness that would make Scenes Nine through Twelve even later than they already were.

  Entering the garden now, trailed by Mary Blanque bearing the peacock-feather cloak (in itself easily worth more than the salary of all the extras put together), Kitty looked fresh and bright-eyed – astonishingly so, given how little sleep she’d had. As she hastened to Madge, grasped her hands and begged her forgiveness with her beautiful smile, Emma retreated with the newspapers to the little camp outside the string-marked boundaries of the shot, and settled into Kitty’s chair. On location, she had at times doubled her chores as scenarist by acting as script-girl, but on the lot, it was usually Herbie Carboy, Zal’s assistant, or one of the extras, who would hold the clapperboard. So she was free – if ‘free’ was a word applicable to anyone on a film set – to peruse the articles regarding the quietus of Rex Festraw.

  Zal was right, she reflected. The enamored Mr Crain had clearly used his influence at both the Examiner and the Times (and to a lesser degree the Express and the Hearst-owned Herald) to slant the accounts of yesterday’s events to emphasize mysterious tragedy and the victimization of a plucky and dazzling film star, rather than the somewhat bald fact that Camille de la Rose’s ex-husband had been found shot dead in her dressing room, with her gun. Stunned as much by the sudden shadow arising from her tragic past, as by the terrible shock of the discovery itself, Miss de la Rose nevertheless insisted on accompanying detectives to the Hollywood Division station to assist with their investigations …

  No hint whatever that the weapon had been hers.

  The Herald contained a full-column letter from Bushrod Pettinger denouncing the moral turpitude of the West Coast Babylon (right next to a half page extolling the latest models of ladies’ underwear), but Emma sensed that not only Mr Fishbein, but the all-powerful Mr Hays of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, had been at work to soften the scandal.

  In the past few years, Emma gathered, there had been scandals enough. Where there was room to turn this one from a sordid melodrama to a Gothic tragedy, it would be done.

  At least, she reflected uneasily, so long as Kitty had Frank Pugh’s support.

  She returned her attention to the Examiner article, and the skimpy paragraph at the bottom that gave details about Rex Festraw’s (1880–1924) life. He had, indeed, been born in New York, and was described as an actor, though no stage credits were given to support this assertion. They had been married ‘during the War’ (which Emma knew wasn’t true) and Festraw was described as deserting ‘Camille’, also not true – no date given. In the end, after searching in vain for word of the man who, in spite of his treatment of her, she still loved, Miss de la Rose had no choice but to file for divorce on the grounds of desertion. In her heart, she told this reporter, she believed him dead, and for many dark months was consumed with grief.

  In that, Emma also detected the fine hand of Conrad Fishbein.

  She glimpsed Mr Fishbein’s influence as well in the insinuations that Mr Festraw – ‘an habitual drunkard and wife-beater’ – was mixed up with gangsters and bootleggers in New York and had undoubtedly come west to get into the smuggling business. For weeks, it said, he had been harassing his terrified ex-spouse with threats which she gallantly threw back in his face.

  ‘All right, you guys,’ yelled Madge. ‘Remember you’re pagans! You hate these goddam Christians! They tried to murder the empress who’s frikkin’ paying you! She gets killed, and you’ll all be suckin’ sidewalk!’

  Emma looked up, her attention drawn to the gaggle of extras assembling behind the great bronze doors which had already done years of service in British castles, Egyptian palaces, and French dungeons … rather, she reflected, like the extras themselves. Clothed in rough tunics, tattered dresses, and the occasional more patrician toga, they had stormed fortresses, fled in panic from invading Huns, and cheered triumphant heroes … and in street clothes, like everybody else, had undoubtedly driven cabs and slung hash and loved their children and hated their in-laws when they got home …

  She’d see them every morning on arrival, lined up outside Belle Delaney’s office just within the studio gates: ‘You got anything for me today, Belle?’ If the answer was no, it was a short streetcar ride down Sunset Boulevard to Nestor or Enterprise or Monarch, hoping for tha
t three dollars and fifty cents that might prove the difference between making the rent and packing your slender belongings in a shoebox and doing a midnight flit.

  ‘So charge in there like you mean it!’ Madge flung fisted hands into the air like a Ruritanian dictator yelling for the head of the hero.

  Four dollars, Emma thought, if you were a ‘dress extra’ in a rich-people’s party scene and you had your own evening dress.

  Five-fifty, for those displaced cowboys who’d drifted West with the closing of the cattle ranges, to become ‘riding extras’. Most of these, Emma knew, were at this moment over in Wardrobe, being fitted by Millie Katz in cavalry uniforms while the studio wrangler and the fellow from Chatsworth Livery out in the San Fernando Valley saddled up a 150 horses …

  Mr Madison will never track down all the extras.

  She lowered the newspaper and frowned, completely ignoring the sudden near-riot as forty-two enraged citizens of Rome burst the gates of the Babylonian empress’s garden to surround poor Darlene Golden, cowering at Kitty’s feet. Though the film was silent, the mob cried, ‘Slay her! Slay her!’ though several gentlemen audibly yelled, ‘Repeal Prohibition!’

  An extra could walk all over the lot in costume and nobody would look twice at him.

  Emma got to her feet and went back into Stage One, threading her way between the empress’s deserted balcony, where it was still night (with the stars dark in the backdrop of the sky) and a vaguely Regency parlor being set up for a party sequence in Scandalous Lady, and so to the outer door. From it the Hacienda was visible, across the dusty plaza bounded by the studio gates, and, extending from one side of the Hacienda, the dressing rooms.

  People crossed and recrossed the square: extras in swanky evening dress, prop-men carrying chairs. Young women from the accounting and purchasing offices wearing the short skirts that Emma still found slightly disconcerting. (Her mother, she recalled, had been scandalized at the three inches of leg visible above Emma’s ankle in her VAD uniform. What she’d say of the current hemlines – just below the knee …!) A trickle of cameramen, of shirtsleeved gaffers and drivers emerged from the canteen, where Mr Madison was still hard at work.