Tinseltown Confidential: A Novel of Golden-Era Hollywood (Hollywood's Garden of Allah novels Book 7)

by Martin Turnbull

“I redecorated.”

  “It looks peculiar without your dahlias,” Marcus said.

  “They’re a lot of work,” Francine said blithely, and pointed to the sofa.

  The two of them took a seat. The redecoration had thrown Kathryn a curve ball. She pulled a face at Marcus. Yes, I want you to take the lead.

  “Francine,” he pressed his hands together, “when Kathryn and I were in New York, I rented a car and drove up to Sing Sing.”

  Francine leaned a hip against the club chair. “Please tell me you didn’t.”

  “I did. And—”

  “What on earth were you hoping to achieve?” She faced her daughter. “Did you know about this?”

  Kathryn nodded.

  “You swore to me you’d have no communication with him. You sat right here in this room and promised me—”

  “You asked me to promise, but I didn’t actually promise you anything. And even if I did, you can’t hold me to it. He’s my father! Don’t I deserve to know him, even just a little?”

  “Not when he’s serving time.”

  “But you said yourself that you didn’t think he was guilty.”

  “Tell that to Louella and Hedda when the truth comes out. At least you were sensible enough to send a scouting party.” She dropped into the chair and asked Marcus, “Did they let you see him? In person? How was he?”

  “Despite his reduced circumstances—”

  “There’s an understatement.”

  “He’s still a very impressive gentleman. I can see why you fell for him.”

  “I’m so very grateful for your approval.”

  See? Kathryn thought. This is why it’s hard to be around you. “Will you please just listen to what Marcus has to say?”

  “Obviously, I have no choice—”

  “So anyway,” Marcus cut her off, “I saw him, told him who his daughter is, and he said it would be better for everyone concerned if there was no contact between them.”

  Francine ran her fingernails back and forth across the double strand of pearls slung at the base of her throat. The rapid click-click-click-click grated on Kathryn’s nerves; she fought to keep silent.

  “But that’s not why we’ve come,” Marcus continued.

  “Well now, this just gets better and better. I hope you took notes; perhaps one day you can turn it into a movie. Oh, that’s right, you’re not allowed to write them anymore, are you?”

  “Mother!”

  “As the guard was leading him away,” Marcus continued, “Thomas said to me, ‘One black sheep in the family is more than enough.’”

  The irritating click-click-click against the pearls halted. A windowpane rattled as a fire engine rumbled along Sunset. Francine waited until the siren’s wail petered out. “And now you want to know who this black sheep is.”

  “His side of the family or ours?” Kathryn asked.

  Francine rubbed the tips of her fingers across her forehead. “Have you ever wondered why I’ve never talked about my family?”

  “My whole life,” Kathryn replied. “But there was always a high brick wall around the past. And a wide moat. Filled with sharks. But no drawbridge.”

  “Well then, here’s your drawbridge. I have a brother. His real name is Camden Caldecott; we called him Cam.”

  “What do you mean, ‘his real name’?”

  “He now goes by the name of Sheldon Voss.” She glared at them expectantly, but the name drew a blank. “You might want to pick up an East Coast newspaper once in a while.”

  “So he’s famous enough to make the papers?”

  “For the past thirty years, he’s eked out a living as an itinerant tent revival evangelist.”

  “I thought you were going to say ‘serial killer’!” Kathryn burst out. “Or that he was the real Lindbergh baby kidnapper. A Bible thumper doesn’t sound nearly so bad.”

  “Shows what you know.”

  “Go on, Francine,” Marcus said softly.

  “Growing up, Cam was a wonderful older brother. He looked out for me, and I adored him. But all hell broke loose when I fell pregnant. He was away at college at the time, and he came thundering home and made an ugly scene. He was outraged beyond reason. Screaming, yelling, virtually frothing at the mouth. In the middle of all that, poor Thomas arrived on the doorstep. Talk about bad timing. Cam just about killed him. Accusations of rape, threatening to call the cops. Oh, it was terrible. Thomas fled down the street, but Cam could barely be placated.

  “I managed to convince him that I was okay and he should go back to college in Philadelphia. Next thing I know, I get a letter from him saying that he’s had a religious conversion and was dropping out to become a preacher.”

  Kathryn perched on the edge of the sofa. “But why is this such a big, dark secret? If he wants to spend his life roaming the countryside pontificating—”

  “BECAUSE HE’S A LIAR, AND A CHEAT, AND A THIEF, AND A CHISELER, AND AN UTTER FRAUD!”

  For all her contrariness, Kathryn’s mother wasn’t a screamer. She always kept her emotions buttoned down while she made her point with a strong, trenchant line. But yelling fit to bust a jugular was as unheard of as redecorating.

  “Why is he a liar and a cheat?” Kathryn used the measured tone she usually reserved for movie stars hopped up on bennies or going through an incendiary divorce.

  Francine rubbed her forehead until her bunched-up shoulders drooped. “I’ve been keeping track of him over the years using a clipping service.”

  “So he was good at this preaching business?”

  “If only that were the case, dear.” The ‘dear’ was a good sign. Francine tended to only use it in her more relaxed moods. “Unfortunately, my brother has rarely been out of trouble for long. Theft, forgery, swindling, defrauding the recently bereaved, the infirm, the just plain ignorant.”

  “In other words, easy targets,” Marcus said.

  “Precisely. Always in the name of the Lord, and always petty stuff that won’t get him a long stretch in the county lock-up. Usually he’d skip town. He’s wandered all over. And if that’s the way he stayed, I wouldn’t be quite so worried. But then Billy Graham showed up.”

  A few years after the war, the Southern Baptist minister struck a deep chord with conservative, middle-class Protestants. He was now the most famous preacher in America, thanks to his Hour of Decision radio show.

  “What does Billy Graham have to do with your brother?” Kathryn asked. Or my uncle. Oh my God, I’ve got an uncle!

  For someone who’d spent her whole life thinking her only blood relative was her unpredictably crabby mother, the idea that she had an uncle pushed Kathryn into uncharted territory.

  “Cam—or should I say Sheldon—has gotten it into his head that he wants to be the next Billy Graham. Only bigger. And knowing him as I do, he’s figured out a way to take his petty grafts and swindles and turn them into monstrous cons.”

  “All in the name of the Lord,” Marcus said.

  “Precisely. He can be a very charismatic man when he wants to be. His Labor Day meeting in Wichita drew five thousand people.” Francine wagged a warning finger at Kathryn. “Let me be crystal clear. Cam has no moral compass, and even fewer scruples. I am ashamed and appalled that we’re related. That’s why I’ve remained so tight-lipped about my past. It was bad enough that you were an illegitimate birth, but you’ve got a charlatan evangelist for an uncle and a father in the slammer. You can’t finesse your way out of circumstances like that in your profession. Yes, I built a wall and dug a moat around you. That was because I tried to protect you from it all. But you had to go and dig, didn’t you?” Francine was on her feet now. “Dig, dig, dig! So now you’re like a dog with a pile of moldy, old bones. Are you happy?”

  * * *

  Kathryn and Marcus walked in silence until they were within sight of the big neon GARDEN OF ALLAH VILLAS sign facing Sunset.

  “So,” Marcus said, “you’ve got an uncle.”

  “Seems that way.”

 
“But of course he’s not just any regular uncle. Oh no, you had to go and get yourself Elmer Gantry.”

  At the corner of Havenhurst, Kathryn perched her rear end on the low brick wall and pulled Marcus down with her. “You know what worries me? Winchell and Hoover are thick as thieves.”

  “And now this McCarthy clown is in the picture.”

  “And where we have McCarthy, we have Otis Courtland. But why are we talking about them?”

  “Between the four of them, that’s a hell of a wide network of spies and informers. The question is, do any of them even suspect that I’m related to this Sheldon Voss guy?”

  Marcus pulled out his gold cigarette lighter and started flipping it, Cagney style. It caught the light of the neon sign flashing white and gold behind him in the chilly November air. “You need to assume the worst. You’re a threat to Winchell’s supremacy on radio; you stood up to Hoover without blinking; and you publicly embarrassed Courtland’s daughter. That’s three strikes against you right there.”

  “What about McCarthy?”

  The rush hour traffic crawled along Sunset. It had been growing heavier lately—the evening peak hour now stretched to an evening peak hour-and-a-half.

  Marcus said, “McCarthy’s a real jerk, and jerks are hard to predict. So you better watch your Ps and Qs—and it wouldn’t hurt to watch the rest of the alphabet while you’re at it.”

  Kathryn dropped her head into her hands and wondered if it was too late to take a job as a secretary at some dismal ball bearings factory. What a relief it would be to simply type up letters, file away invoices, and get coffee for a middle-aged boss whose greatest ambition was to reach retirement before a heart attack laid him out at an Atlantic City convention.

  Nice work if you can get it.

  CHAPTER 17

  1951 was Chez Gwendolyn’s fourth Christmas, and it struck Gwendolyn that every year, the Christmas rush arrived earlier and earlier. Was that because holiday parties started sooner? Or because her store was more famous now that Sunset Boulevard was available in all the Bullocks stores? Whatever the reason, by the second Friday of December, she was so busy that she started to consider engaging someone to help her through the rush.

  As she changed the OPEN sign on her front door to CLOSED, she ran her mind through a meager list of candidates. She kicked off her heels and decided she was too tired to care about that right now. It was well past nine and she was starving, but she had to tally her intake for the day.

  She heard three slow knocks at her back door. The only people who did that were delivery drivers.

  She ignored it.

  Thirty seconds ticked past.

  Another three loud knocks.

  She slid back into her heels and thrust aside the black curtain separating the salon from the workroom out back. She pulled open the alley door and Ella Fitzgerald stepped out of the shadows.

  “Oh my!” Gwendolyn exclaimed. “What a surprise.” She widened the door. “Come on in.”

  Ella pointed behind her to a figure cloaked in the gloom. “This here is my good pal, Isobel Jenkins.”

  “Remember me?” she asked. It was the woman Gwendolyn and Marcus had tangled with at the Dunbar.

  “Hello again,” Gwendolyn said. “Come in, come in! You don’t have to wait in the alley! Why didn’t you just come to the front door?”

  “Oh, sugar, no. I wouldn’t dream of putting you in such a position. We just thought it best to wait out back until you’d closed.”

  She guided the women through the workshop into the salon. “How long were you two out there?”

  “Not long. Maybe twenty minutes. Now, you told me you had a whole bunch of outfits you thought would suit me.”

  “Hold on a minute.” Gwendolyn shifted her weight from one aching foot to the other. “You stood in that stinky old alley until I was closed? Why for heaven’s sake didn’t you just come through the front like regular—”

  Ella gently tapped Gwendolyn’s wrist.

  Gwendolyn felt the heat of a furious blush sear her face. “What can I do for you ladies?”

  Isobel headed for a white dress with dark orange embroidery across the bust and neckline. “Ella, honey, I can see you in that.”

  Ella pressed a finger to her chin. “I do like that one, I must say. But it might be hard to find a lipstick to match. Do you have it in red?”

  “I’m sorry—but—I have to say this. You’re Ella Fitzgerald,” Gwendolyn blurted out. “You’ve played some of the ritziest nightclubs in the country.”

  “Yeah,” Isobel jeered, “now ask Miss Ella if she’s allowed to walk in through the front door of those swelegant establishments, or does she have to slink in via the kitchen, and hope she doesn’t end up with marinara stains all over her dress?”

  “But that doesn’t still happen, does it?” Gwendolyn asked Ella.

  “See?” Isobel scolded Ella.

  “I said I hoped she was different.”

  “And what did I say?” Isobel turned to Gwendolyn. “I said, ‘Sitting through a show down Central Avenue with Travilla’s wife don’t make her anymore understanding than any other nice white girl out there.’”

  Ella waved a dismissive hand at her friend. “Don’t pay her no nevermind.

  “This is 1951!” Gwendolyn exclaimed. “Circumstances change, people change, attitudes change.”

  Isobel stepped forward, her eyes blazing. “Lemme tell you something: back in the twenties, I was a chorus girl at the Cotton Club up in Harlem. Twenty-five dollars a week they paid me; that was a king’s ransom to me and my poor black behind. But we hadda walk in via the kitchen. And worse, they didn’t even give us no proper place to pee. We hadda go in the basin in the wings. Downright humiliating, is what it was. And if you think it’s any different thirty years later, you’re living in a bubble.”

  Those words torpedoed Gwendolyn back to her tenth birthday party. When her best friend, Joey, failed to show up, her mother rolled those watery blue eyes of hers and growled, “You’re living in a bubble that someone’s just achin’ to prick. Little Joey won’t be coming around no more and that’s all there is to it.”

  Standing in the middle of her Sunset Strip store thirty years later, Gwendolyn could still hear the shake in her voice as she asked her mother why not.

  “When you were just a little bitty snip, I didn’t mind you playing dollies and hopscotch with the neighbor’s maid’s daughter. However, there comes a time when it’s no longer appropriate. You need to start mixing with your equals.”

  Gwendolyn cried for two straight days, but she never saw or heard from Joey again.

  Gwendolyn tried not to hate her mother for what she’d done. Even at the age of ten, she was able to grasp that Desiréé Boyington, of the Savannah Boyingtons, was a victim of a hopelessly obsolete upbringing.

  Gwendolyn’s grandmother, Rosamond, had brought up Desiréé as though the South’s halcyon days were still in full flower, even though Rosamond herself had never experienced them. The opening shots of the Civil War rent the air over Fort Sumter as Rosamond’s wet nurse weaned her among crinolines, magnolia blossoms, and mint juleps on the family’s cotton plantation. And yet there was Desiréé, standing in that squalid little kitchen in Hollywood, Florida, more than fifty years after Appomattox, pretending it was still 1840.

  “It’s been a hundred years since the Emancipation Proclamation,” Gwendolyn said. “You have the right to enter like everybody else.”

  Ella and Isabella looked at each other askance.

  “As fine as that sentiment is,” Ella said, “that just ain’t how the world works.”

  Gwendolyn marched to the CLOSED sign and switched it back to OPEN.

  “Sweetie,” Ella said, “I hear a twang in your voice, so I suspect you know what we’re talking about.”

  It hadn’t taken Gwendolyn long to realize that “Southern” was a euphemism for “country-hick stupid” in LA, so she’d worked hard to lose her Southern lilt. But every now and then, a split vow
el snuck out while she wasn’t looking.

  “I do,” Gwendolyn admitted, “but I figured it didn’t matter out here.”

  “Of course that’s what you figured,” Isobel said. “You’re white, you’re pretty, you have a store on the Sunset Strip, you have your own perfume.”

  Gwendolyn wanted to tell this woman that she’d spent the last of her money on developing her fragrance. Its failure would have wiped out everything she possessed.

  “But this is my store, so I get to run it however I see fit.”

  “I suspect that’s not as true as you’d like to think,” Ella said.

  “And I’d like to believe that we’ve made more progress than that.”

  “This isn’t Arkansas.”

  “And it ain’t Lost Horizon, either.”

  Gwendolyn uncrossed her arms. “My store, my rules,” she told Ella and Isobel. “There’ll be no more creeping in through the back door. Okay?”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do. And you can tell your friends.”

  CHAPTER 18

  As Kathryn walked along the brick path to Humphrey Bogart and Betty Bacall’s home in the Hollywood Hills, she found herself listing to the right. If Leo hadn’t called her at lunchtime, she’d probably have stayed in bed all afternoon.

  Purple and pink petunias lined the edges of the garden path. Bacall’s voice from the previous night came back to Kathryn in blurred snippets. “I planted them myself, you know. On my hands and knees, every last goddamned one of them.” Kathryn remembered someone challenging her. “I don’t believe a word of it!” Was it Kate Hepburn? Or John Huston’s wife? Whoever it was managed to spill her zinfandel all over the table. That was when Bogie said, “See? This is why Dave Chasen covers his linens with glass.”

  Kathryn’s memory of what happened next faded in and out. James Agee talked to her—or rather, at her—about some novel he’d been working on since 1940-whenever. She no longer possessed lucid recall of the one-sided conversation. If it came to that, she no longer had lucid recall of the entire evening.

  It had started out entertainingly enough.