Something sprang out at me, and I jumped-a blonde mannequin head on a bobbing spring was suddenly staring right at me; she had the bottom of her pretty face rotted away, and a cigarette in her skull teeth, through which Welles’ booming laughter seemed to emanate.
In the next chamber, dismembered female legs dangled from the ceiling-shapely mannequin limbs, in high heels and sometimes seamed stockings-with further ghastly images painted directly over the fake brick walls, including a trio of handle-bar-mustached gents in old-fashioned bathing attire that revealed where sections of their flesh and musculature had been cut away from the bone.
“We’ve worked our way to the front,” Welles said, gesturing me through a passageway, “which in true movie-magic tradition is in the back.”
The entrance was papier-mache rock, with plywood stairs painted gray to match, as if the “Crazy House” had been fashioned within a cave, and all around the doorway, mannequin hands and reaching arms poked out from the walls, a frame of disembodied limbs. On one wall had been painted a cartoon of a woman, cut in half, a screw protruding from her left breast and dripping blood, lying atop a cow that had been flayed to the midsection.
Welles sat on the steps and fished out a cigar from his suitcoat pocket; just above him a decapitated clown’s head grinned from within a baroque bird cage. “You don’t care for one, do you, Nathan?”
He meant a cigar, not a clown’s head.
“No.” I sat next to him. “No, thanks.”
He fired up the Havana and got it going, waved out his match, and I noticed for the first time that the dark eyes in that cherubic puss were bloodshot.
“You know, I just can’t seem to finish this set. It was the first thing I began on this picture, back in late September… before we went to Mexico, for location shooting… I’m responsible for this strike, you know.”
“How are you responsible?”
He gestured to the gruesome images around us. “By doing all this painting myself, with the help of a few friends. I couldn’t turn over something this… intensely personal… to the hacks in the Columbia art department. I would have had the same artisans who bring their masterful touch to the Three Stooges.”
“And that’s what started the strike?”
He sighed dark, richly fragrant smoke. “It did, when members of the Motion Picture Set Painters Union… local 279… came to this soundstage and discovered that their work had been completed by ‘nonunion’ hands.”
“And here I thought you were such a flaming liberal.”
“Oh I am, my dear, with a notable exception-in matters relating to my art, I am slightly to the right of Genghis Khan.”
“You haven’t asked why I wanted to see you.”
The rosebud mouth twitched a tiny smile. “Did I thank you for recommending your friend, Mr. Rubinski, to handle that piece of business last year?”
“No. You’re welcome. I take it Fred handled that matter… discreetly.”
“Oh yes… of course I had to pay the girl twenty thousand to keep it out of court, and out of the papers. I didn’t rape her, you know-that was utter nonsense.”
“None of my business.”
“My darling, if you had seen her-she was such an ugly thing. I would simply never rape an ugly girl. And I never seem to have to rape the beautiful ones.”
His irony was strained, and as relaxed as that baby face was-so unformed looking, almost fetuslike-his forehead was tight and between his brows was a deep crease of tension.
He leaned toward me and touched my arm. “Have I apologized for snubbing you?”
“When did you snub me?”
“At La Rue, a week or two ago… I was dining with my soon-to-be-ex-wife.”
So he had noticed me.
“You see,” he was saying, “we’ve been making some silly attempts at reconciliation, not the least of which is this film, and if I’d introduced you-my friend the famous divorce detective from Chicago-Rita might have misunderstood.”
“That’s all right. No offense taken.”
“And I was in a particularly black mood, further acerbated by alcohol. Who was your lovely companion?”
“My wife.”
“Really! Congratulations! When did this happen?”
“Not long ago. We’re sort of on our honeymoon.”
“I was given to understand you were out here consolidating your business with Mr. Rubinski-did I read something to that effect in the Examiner?”
“You read the Hearst papers?”
“I’m keeping a particularly close eye on them right now.”
“Why is that?”
Welles ignored the question, exhaling Havana smoke. “I hope your marriage is more successful than mine. I’m sure you wonder how even a ‘monstrous boy’ like me… that’s what Houseman likes to call me… could fail to make a go of it with a beautiful, kind, sensitive, intelligent woman like Margarita Carmen Cansino Welles.”
“You have a child together.”
“Becky. Lovely girl-she is as wonderful a child as I am a beastly father.”
“You don’t have to sound proud of it. Some people would think you had it made.”
“Some people are imbeciles. I’m sure you think I was running around on her-married to Rita Hayworth, and not satisfied with what he has at home. That Welles is a glutton!”
“Not my business.”
“Well, I wasn’t unfaithful, not at first, not for the longest time. But she constantly accused me of infidelity-you see, she is mentally unstable, that lovely child… She has an inferiority complex, largely due to the fact that that fiend of a father put her on stage, not in school, and that’s the least of what that son of bitch did to her… She’s an unhappy woman, my darling Nathan, and a pathologically jealous one. She wept every night of our marriage, and yet, just last week she told me that our marriage was the happiest time of her life… Can you imagine?”
“You’re saying, she accused of you cheating so often, you finally went ahead and did it.”
“As did she. I’ll always love her… and I think she will always love me.” He sat smoking the cigar, then shook his head and said, “You know what she always called me? George. That’s my first name, you know-detestable, ordinary first name-that’s what she always called me.”
“Rita always called you George?”
“Not Rita, my dear-the Short girl. This ‘Black Dahlia’ you think I may have murdered.”
Orson Welles liked to present himself as a harbinger of high culture, bringing Shakespeare, Conrad, and Kafka to the masses; but never forget that this glorious ham was also the Shadow. Melodrama was his metier.
Nonetheless, I was struck as dumb as Shorty, reeling from Welles’ cliffhanger-before-the-commercial punch to my mental solar plexus.
“I told you I’ve been following the Hearst papers especially closely these last few days,” he was saying. “I noted, with no small interest, your involvement in the investigation. I have to say I’m relieved to be talking to you, and not some Hearst reporter-or worse, one of the Los Angeles gestapo.”
“Did you-”
“Know her? Of course I knew her. Perhaps not in the true biblical sense… She was a lovely girl, one of those absolutely black-haired girls, with skin as white as Carrara marble, and eyelashes you could trip over. She rather reminded me of another Betty, Betty Chancellor, also a dark-haired, fair-skinned beauty… my first love, at Dublin’s Gate Theater, back in ’31. As for Betty Short, I met her at Camp Cooke, when we were touring the army camps with my ‘Mercury Wonder Show,’ and again at the late lamented Canteen, then most recently at Brittingham’s, where she mooched the occasional meal.”
“What I was going to ask was if you killed her.”
Welles sighed. “If I knew, darling Nathan, I would tell you.”
I studied that baby face and the haunted eyes staring out of it. “You mean to say, you don’t know where you were, the night she was murdered?”
His smile in response was seemingly guilel
ess. “Not a clue. A blank… It’s a classic pulp premise, my dear-the man wakes up in a room, covered in blood, with a dead body next to him… and no memory of having done the dastardly deed… or for that matter, not having done it.”
“I’m guessing you didn’t wake up in that vacant lot next to that butchered corpse.”
“No… I was in my wife’s house in Brentwood.”
“Was your wife with you?”
“She was in the hospital. Exhaustion and dysentery from our Mexican location shooting. And Shorty had the night off, as did my secretary.”
“So you have no alibi.”
“None, my darling. Nor memory. In a cheap thriller, a blow to the head would have granted me the blessing of amnesia. I, however, earned my loss of memory, every missing moment of it.”
“How?”
“It may come as a shock to you-I know it does to me-but my youth is fading fast, and my energy is no longer boundless. To work for days, without sleep, requires certain pharmaceutical assistance. Similar assistance is necessary to help me maintain my boyish figure, to better perform my leading man duties. And, as you know, I do take the occasional drink.”
“Okay-so we’re talking booze and amphetamines.”
“Did you know that my family tree includes Horace Goldin-the legendary celebrated magician who invented the ‘Divided Woman’ illusion, the trick of sawing a female in half?”
“And that means you bisected Beth Short’s body?”
As if the cigar were a wand, he gestured to the dismembered limbs framing the Crazy House doorway, and to the painting of a woman cut in half, her corpse flung on a flayed cow carcass. “I needed you to see these terrible images, Nathan-these images which were, by the way, created prior to the Short girl’s murder.” He tapped his temple with two fingers; his eyes bugged out. “They were in this mind. Nightmarish visions that I sought to exorcise in this harmless fashion.”
A few terrible moments dragged by, and then he rose, without looking at me, saying, “Let’s continue this in a more reflective setting.”
He almost bolted from the hideous, hellish self-created surroundings, disappearing into the funhouse. I found him in the hall of mirrors, seated on a folding chair, staring blankly at perhaps eighty images of himself. Another folding chair, next to him, awaited me, and I took it.
“Could I have committed this act, Nathan?”
He was asking my reflections; I answered his.
“Orson, I don’t think so. Just because you’re a megalomaniac doesn’t make you a homicidal maniac.”
He continued to meet my gaze in the mirror; and almost the entire conversation that followed was delivered through the buffer of glass. The cigar had disappeared. As we spoke, it was as if I were speaking not to Welles, but his image, projected on a screen, dozens of screens.
“These Bosch-like grotesqueries,” he said, “could they have been unfulfilled wishes? Worse, images I did fulfill on a black, forgotten night?”
“With your bad back?”
That halted the melodrama and made him laugh. “Yes, that did occur to me. I’ve been wearing that damn metal brace about half the time, lately-when I’m under stress, these genetic anomalies of the spine of mine, which my weight hardly helps, make me as helpless… and as harmless… as a kitten. But what if drugs and alcohol combined to blot out the pain? And to unleash some murderous rage in me, and then blot out the memory?”
I looked at him, not his reflection. “I don’t think you killed her. But you may be able to help me figure out who did, by answering a few questions.”
“By all means.”
“Was Beth Short a hooker, Orson?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“When did you see her last?”
He stole a look at me, then spoke to my image. “At Brittingham’s-I hadn’t seen her since October. I bought her a sandwich and a Coke. It must have been… a week prior to the… grisly discovery.”
“You just ran into her…?”
“I don’t think it was a coincidence-she was looking for me, hoping to see me-she admitted as much.”
“What did she want?”
“Money. She said she needed an operation.”
“An abortion?”
“That would be a reasonable assumption, considering she mentioned she was going to see a certain Dr. Dailey.”
The back of my neck was prickling. “Why? Who is he?”
“Wallace A. Dailey-a former L.A. County Hospital chief of staff, a retired, respectable physician… and, I’m told, Hollywoodland’s current abortionist of choice.”
Sensing I’d struck gold, I scribbled the name down in my notepad, asking, “Would this Dailey happen to hail from New England, originally?”
This line of questioning seemed to make Welles uncomfortable, and a certain irritability, even impatience, colored his tone, as he replied, “I wouldn’t know. Nor do I have an address on the man, though I presume he would be listed in the yellow pages, though probably not under ‘abortionist.’ ”
“She tried to shake you down, didn’t she, Orson?”
“Not precisely. There… may have been an implied threat of… embarrassment. I gave her what I could-fifty dollars. The child she was carrying was obviously not mine.”
“You weren’t intimate with her at all?”
“Define intimate.”
“I would consider having your dick sucked intimate.”
He winced at that, but admitted, “She did have a gift for fellatio. Children are seldom conceived in that fashion, you realize.”
“She have any other gifts? Did you promise her a screen test?”
“I did. Not a false promise, either-she was very attractive, as I’ve said, lovely, really, and I understand she had a pleasant singing voice. How did you link me with her?”
“Florentine Gardens.”
He nodded and dozens of him nodded in the mirrors. “N.T.G.?”
“Yeah, him and that actress, Ann Thomson. I don’t think they’ll mention you to the cops. The cops don’t even know about her working at the Gardens, yet. And there were a lot of celebrities she came into contact with there-you’d be on a long list. I got a feeling the same is going to prove true of the Hollywood Canteen.”
Now he looked at me-he seemed very young, like a big child with that helpless baby face. “I’d like to engage your services, Nathan.”
“To cover this up?”
Still holding my gaze with his, he said, “I need to know that I was not responsible for this ghastly act. I need to know, Nathan.”
“And if you are responsible?”
Now he spoke to me in the mirrors, again. “One calamity at a time. Let me just say, there is schizophrenia in my family, Nathan-if I in fact suffer from these agonizing Welles clan strains, then the next ‘Crazy House’ I inhabit may not be on a soundstage.”
“You didn’t do it, Orson.”
His most charming smile beamed at me from dozens of mirrors. “Nathan, darling, there is in even the most humane of men an irrational drive to do evil.”
I could only think of the opening of his old radio show: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”
Now he swiveled on the chair and looked right at me, placing a hand on my shoulder. “The only cover-up I ask is that you not breathe a word of this to the Examiner. If Hearst gets wind of my connection to the Black Dahlia, I’m finished-I might as well have done the crime.”
Welles was right: Hearst would take immense pleasure in finally having his full revenge for Citizen Kane.
“I’ll help you, Orson.”
“Nathan, darling, there’s one other small problem.”
“Another problem?”
“I’m broke.”
“Directing and starring in a Rita Hayworth picture, you’re broke?”
“Dead broke. As a magician, my best act seems to be making money disappear. A horde of creditors, including the IRS, are hounding me, daily.” He gestured to his hall of mirrors. “I’m doing
this to repay a fifty-grand advance Harry Cohn wired me when I desperately needed money to pay the costume rental bill for Around the World.”
Orson had recently staged a Broadway show of Around the World in 80 Days, a lavish production with Cole Porter music that had nonetheless tanked. Rumor was Welles had sunk every cent he had into it, and was in hock for hundreds of thousands.
“You can charge me your standard hourly rate against an interest in my next production,” he suggested, as he walked me out onto the soundstage.
“Which is?”
“I’m talking to Herbert Yates about a project over at Republic.”
“Where they make all those B-westerns? You are running out of studios to alienate.”
He was ushering me through the near-darkness of the vast chamber past the endless dragon slide.
“Don’t be cynical, darling Nathan-I’m going to be doing Shakespeare on the same soundstages where Roy Rogers and Gene Autry bring badmen to justice. There is something delightful about that! I’m mounting it as if it were a horror movie, you know, like Universal used to make with Karloff and Lugosi.”
“Which play?”
“ Macbeth — murder in the night, followed by nightmares, guilt and rampant paranoia.”
“Well,” I said, stepping out into the light, “at least you got the research out of the way.”
His expression was blank. “I only hope I haven’t been researching Othello.”
And he slipped back into the darkness.
Then I turned and bumped into Shorty, waiting to show me the way out of Columbia’s backlot, a maze rivaling Welles’ hall of mirrors.
15
The Bradbury Building, on the southeast corner of Third and Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, was only slightly less bizarre than Welles’ Crazy House. The five-story turn-of-the-century building’s unremarkable brownstone exterior concealed a baroque secret life: ornamental wrought-iron stairwells and balconies, globed fixtures illuminating the open brick-and-tile corridors; caged elevators, their cables and gears and rollers exposed, like contraptions out of Jules Verne; and an enormous greenhouse-style skylight that bounced an eerie gold-white light off the glazed floor of the huge central court that was the Bradbury’s lobby.
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