Final Curtain: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries)

by Ed Ifkovic

  Dak lapsed into silence. Upfront, some technician was fiddling with the stops on the Wurlitzer organ, and the intermittent bursts of sound jarred, annoyed.

  Dak sighed. “But you know everything about Hollywood, Miss Ferber. It was so…so short a time—a time I didn’t deal well with. I betrayed Nadine, horribly. I know, I know. She slept with Evan. I don’t care because I know what Evan was capable of doing. Nadine felt alone—deserted by me. I didn’t stick up for her. I abandoned her. Nadine, for all the makeup and…and Hollywood worldliness…is real naïve.” His head tilted backward. “That’s why I like her.”

  “Love her, Dak. That’s why you love her.”

  “I guess so.”

  “You don’t love Annika.”

  Another long silence. His mouth trembled. “No, I don’t. But I respect…”

  I gripped his forearm tightly. “Stop it. You can’t respect someone who always wants to tell you who you are. Stop it.”

  He checked his watch and jumped up. “I have to get back. Frank will be on my case.”

  “Just a minute, Dak. One more question. About Frank.”

  Dak stepped back but didn’t sit down. “What?”

  “Your mother was stunned to see Frank in town. I gather they knew each other back in Hollywood.”

  “I asked her about that. She said he…well, pursued her, relentless. And she was involved and shortly married to my father, who was his friend. A betrayal. She claims Frank was sneaking behind my father’s back. They had a fight—I mean, my father and Frank, and Frank, she says, said some nasty things. Cruel things. So when she saw him with Nadine—and here in Maplewood, of all places—she was horrified. The last time she saw him was unpleasant. That was before I was born. A ghost from her past.”

  I waited a bit. “And you believe that story?”

  He squinted and glanced off toward the stage. “I do.”

  “I don’t.”

  He rolled his head, helpless. “But what else?”

  “Does that sound like the Frank you know? Frank is taciturn, unobtrusive, a shadow.”

  “Ah, but remember that it was back decades. I don’t know—1916 or so. They were young and hot-blooded—and it was Hollywood…”

  “And now here he is again. Because of your mother?”

  He was shaking his head. “Then wouldn’t he have contacted her? He’s in town, working on The Royal Family and other plays. If he chose to come here for that reason, wouldn’t he have called her? Or accidentally bumped into her in the Village? He’d find a way to reach her. And who waits a couple decades for a contact? Over twenty years.”

  “I don’t know, but it seems to me everyone came to Maplewood for a reason that had nothing to do with my stunning debut as Fanny Cavendish.”

  He smiled warily, that broken smile that so charmed me. “Are you sure?” He did a little dance step. “I’ve been watching you act from the wings, and I’m loving it. You’re…good.”

  “And you’re being kind.”

  He bowed. “No, it’s a pleasure.”

  “And Frank, I might add, has taken a shine to you, Dak. He’s very protective. And of Nadine, I gather. Perhaps he’s using you as a way to get to your mother. Perhaps not—just a thought.”

  “That’s preposterous. He’s never mentioned her at all.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’s not planning something.”

  He tapped on the back of a chair. “I like him.”

  “He strikes me as a harmless man, but who knows?”

  A sudden lightning flash in his eyes. “Miss Ferber, you don’t think Frank is the murderer, do you?”

  “I don’t know who the murderer is.”

  “You’re not answering my question.”

  “Because I have no answer—yet.”

  That thin, infectious smile, the mouth crinkly. “But you will.”

  I thought about Ilona’s remarks—the other Hollywood. “Maybe Frank’s tempestuous sojourn in Hollywood, back when your mother was acting in the silents, is the genesis of murder in Maplewood.”

  “That seems impossible.”

  “Well, this is the summer of our discontent. The world is crumbling. Hitler walks under the Arc de Triomphe. The Battle of Britain begins. Gestapo troops march across farm fields. Bombs destroy cities. When the axis of the Earth shifts and all the players topple into Maplewood, then there’s havoc on the land.”

  “You’re a cheerful lady, Miss Ferber.”

  “Yes, everyone says that about me.”

  ***

  I skipped lunch, stopped back at the inn where a message was waiting for me. I’d called Loretta Dawson, a part-time researcher I sometimes employed. Loretta, a down-to-earth buxom woman with an intelligent, adventurous mind, had the uncanny capacity to ferret out arcane facts and anecdotes worth their weight in gold. Yes, her message informed me, she was free to meet me that afternoon at the New York Public Library on Forty-second Street. “I’ll be in the reading room all afternoon. I’m intrigued by your request—but, Edna, all your requests intrigue me.” I checked my wristwatch. I’d be able to grab a sandwich and catch the 2:11 into Manhattan. Loretta, I knew, would have stacks of reading materials assembled on a table, notepad at the ready.

  By the time I arrived at the reading room, Loretta was already sequestered at a library table in a back corner, pasty-looking under two green-shade lamps, piles of books at her elbow. She looked up and smiled. “Quite the assignment, Edna. And I thought you’d have a peaceful, though challenging, respite acting in Maplewood. This is a whole different world.” Loretta indicated the stacks of books, and smiled.

  An efficient woman, thorough, her iron-gray hair pulled into a severe bun and her schoolmarm reading glasses tipped on the front of her nose, Loretta understood the dark recesses of any library—where exquisite treasures were hidden.

  “What do you have for me?”

  She started handing me bound volumes, slips of paper indicating pages. “Here.” She pointed to a copy of Variety. “You asked about Nadine Chappelle.”

  While Loretta busied herself with other pursuits, I read the short article, a brief account of Nadine represented by the Caldwell Agency, scheduled to play the role of “sister” in Rainy Summer, a minor part, but pivotal, according to the notice. She’d taken courses in Los Angeles at the Leland Pouten School of Dramatic Arts, did some summer stock in Anaheim, and was signed to do a second movie titled Chicago Moonlight. Four or five lines of laudatory prose, with a picture of her. A promo squib, doubtless paid for by her agency. A studio shot, head tilted coyly, lips parted seductively.

  Loretta looked over as I closed the volume. “And then she disappears from the trades. Another Hollywood almost-was. They never made Chicago Moonlight.”

  Another volume, tiny pulp print, flaky to the touch. A Los Angeles directory. I had no idea what I was looking at. Loretta cleared her throat. “It’s a 1934-35 municipal guide. Sort of a Chamber of Commerce business and residence directory. Where people are.” She indicated Nadine’s address on Sepulveda, and then flipped one page. “Two blocks away, Dakota Roberts and Evan Street, obviously in the same rooming house—or even roommates. Maybe. Hard to tell.” Another volume: 1935-36. “Nadine and Dakota married, new address. Evan Street in an apartment on the same street. Your Gus Schnelling”—she flipped another page—“across town.” Then finally: “Dakota gone. Nadine alone. Evan and Gus gone from the records, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t in town.”

  “Dak’s short marriage.”

  “Which leads to the best article of all.” She reached for a volume of Hollywood Beat, some yellow-pulp tabloid with grainy pictures and bold-font headlines, a gossip sheet of intrigue and scandal. I thought of Evan’s collection of sordid Hollywood stories.

  The headline read: “Famed East Coast Preacher Squelches Nuptials.” A revelation, this article. Given Clorinda�
��s fame as spiritual leader—particularly her earlier association with Aimee Semple McPherson—it was not surprising her sudden descent in Hollywood garnered some yellow press. The article spoke of “newcomer Nadine Chappelle, a pretty ingénue” who was married to stagehand Dakota Roberts, son of famed evangelist Clorinda Roberts Tyler. “Mommy frowned on her boy’s quickie marriage to the once-divorced young starlet whose first husband committed suicide in a prison cell.” I gather Clorinda created a ruckus, involving the police, and Dak was cited for public nuisance—an explosive scene in a restaurant. What I also learned was that Clorinda made two visits to California—the first to try to extricate Dak diplomatically—and quietly—from his marriage, the second with a team of lawyers to complete the annulment.

  “Interesting,” I told Loretta. “A powerful woman. She got what she wanted.”

  Loretta looked up from her reading. “But they never win in the end, do they, Edna?”

  “No, they don’t.”

  The rest of the article caught my attention because it focused, with silly titillation and innuendo, on Clorinda’s own brief Hollywood career, mentioning her brief acting in silent pictures during the Great War, an uneventful career that ended when she became a follower of Aimee Semple McPherson and her “Knock Out the Devil” crusade. “Screen siren goes angelic”—so read the sub-headline. The article mentioned the streetcar death of her husband Philip Roberts, who played the romantic sidekick in two or three Fatty Arbuckle two-reelers at Keystone Pictures, including Fatty’s Day Off and The Village Scandal. The writer speculated that Clorinda—Clorrie House then—met Philip when she appeared in She Did and She Didn’t, a movie being filmed on some back lot during the production of one of Arbuckle’s movies. Clorinda had been roommates with two other starlets, and the three played “three young beautiful sisters” in A Foolish Romance. But Clorinda turned her back on Hollywood after finding God. The writer embellished the information, talking of Clorinda’s Assembly of God “cathedral” in New Jersey, her “many thousands of worshippers. “The stink of Hollywood transformed her into the perfume of heaven.” I cringed. And reviewers lamented my purple prose?

  “Clorinda must have cringed when the article appeared,” I said to Loretta. I pointed to the stack of volumes. “Anything of Frank Resnick?”

  “Not much. A short time doing production work at Universal. A year or so. He worked on a movie that Philip Roberts was in, but I don’t know if they knew each other.”

  “Supposedly they did. Friends, until Frank tried to move in on Clorinda and Philip, then an item.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Loretta the cynic.

  For the rest of the afternoon, absorbed, I read back issues of Moving Picture World, Screenland, The Motion Picture News, and Variety, even searching through bound L.A. newspapers. Dakota’s life in Hollywood. Clorinda’s life in Hollywood. Parallel disasters. Late in the afternoon I found a piece in the Los Angeles Times about the streetcar death of Philip Roberts, a “budding actor in Fatty Arbuckle’s comedies and in one-reel westerns with William S. Hart.” He was killed when a passing streetcar jumped the tracks. He died immediately. He left behind a wife who was expecting a child. A brief, sad coda to a short life. The obituary, though vague, spoke of his “presence” on the screen, and quoted Buster Keaton who praised him.

  Then, in Hollywood Scoop, two years after Philip’s death, a bizarre obituary: Maddy Olivia Roberts, once married to dead actor Philip Roberts, died of influenza, leaving behind a young daughter, Marcella.

  Loretta and I talked about it. Had Philip been married earlier? To the mysterious Olivia? Possibly. Was Clorinda his second marriage? We backtracked our research, but found nothing. The tidbit fascinated, but did it mean anything?

  Throughout the afternoon I became absorbed in Hollywood stories, particularly the scandals that so fascinated Evan Street. Fatty Arbuckle, the baby-faced slapstick comic with the bowler derby and bowtie and spats, the highest-paid actor in Hollywood, more popular than Chaplin, enmeshed in a drunken sex orgy in a San Francisco hotel on Labor Day, 1921, at which a minor-league starlet Virginia Rappé died. There were accusations of rape, cruelty, cover-up. The scandal encapsulated all the worst stories of Hollywood as suspected by the America out there in small towns and on farms: sexual romps, drunken sprees in the middle of Prohibition, drugs, booze, rampant disorder. And Fatty’s illustrious career crashed down. The Prince of Whales, destroyed. Three trials, and he was finally found not guilty. But a career over.

  As I read about Fatty Arbuckle’s fall from celluloid grace, I wondered how much Philip Roberts had been a part of the riotous abandon. How well did he know Fatty? Mabel Normand of the pie-in-the-face fame? Yes, on the set—but in private life? Did Philip carouse with the wild revelers? Partying in Catalina, Tijuana, San Francisco? What about his young pregnant wife? The baby Dakota, born after the accident, sent back East for puritanical upbringing. Did Clorrie House join the revelers? Did she indulge in rotgut gin and cocaine? Had Philip’s involvement in the dark side caused Clorinda to seek peace in the stained-glass reflection of Sister Aimee?

  Who were these people?

  Late that afternoon, exhausted, Loretta and I had an early dinner at Mannie’s Deli on Second Avenue. Then she taxied to her studio apartment in Washington Heights while I caught a cab to Penn Station.

  As the train chugged back to Maplewood I drifted off, a fitful nap. When I woke, disoriented, I realized what I’d been dreaming: a runaway streetcar ended the life of a mysterious young man. Philip Roberts, who never saw his son. What about his first wife? And the daughter, Marcella? Suddenly, like a blow to the head, I believed that the answer to murder could be found in the short, unhappy life of a long-forgotten, small-time Hollywood actor.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dak’s father.

  Philip Roberts. Who was this man?

  “What do you know about your father?” I asked Dak. He was walking past me during the end of a rehearsal, carrying a ladder, and my question, sprung out of the blue, caused him to twist his body around, the ladder clanging against a steel girder. He said nothing, but scrunched up his eyes, baffled.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, not really apologizing, “but I’ve tried to get your attention all morning.”

  His reply sounded disingenuous. “I had something on my mind.”

  “Can we talk about some things?”

  He glanced around backstage. “Yes. This afternoon. But”—the smile more hesitant, disappearing—“I gotta meet with Annika at the Full Moon Café at two.”

  Now I was curious. “Something has happened?”

  He put down the ladder. “Well, I won’t go to see my mother, though she’s demanded I show up. Tobias even sent Alexander to my rooms late last night. And Annika is frantic. She phoned last night. She was crying.”

  “Are you sure she’s not an emissary from your mother?”

  A vigorous shake of his head. “No—I mean, maybe a little.” A mixture of confusion and suspicion in his look. “I just don’t know. She’s worried about me.”

  “Well, when can I…”

  “Meet us there. I want you there.”

  I shook my head. “No. Annika won’t like that.”

  He shrugged. “I’m getting a little tired of doing what makes other people happy.”

  I smiled and clapped twice. “It’s about time.” But I deliberated. “I’ll arrive an hour later. You talk to her first—that’s appropriate.”

  “My father?”

  “I have some questions.”

  He started to walk away, forgetting to pick up the ladder. “I might not have any answers for you.”

  George walked by and hissed at me. “Opening night in two days, Edna, and you’re disappearing. I knock on your door—silence. You got lost in New York yesterday.”

  “Research.” I sighed. “I told you I was leaving.”

  “We’ve already
written The Royal Family. No more research.”

  “George—the murder.”

  “A good title for a melodrama. George—the Murder.”

  I bit my lip. “George—the Murdered.”

  “Edna, be careful.”

  “I am.”

  “Edna, Edna. The liar. Edna the Liar: A Cautionary Tale.”

  “That’s what fiction writers do.”

  “Edna, Edna.” With a tilt of his head and a nervous pushing at his eyeglasses, he turned away. “When you need me, call me.”

  Later, he walked with me toward the Full Moon Café. Pausing in front, peering through the front window—Mamie had taped a de jour menu left of the door, a hand-written sheet that highlighted her dessert list, with peach cobbler underlined twice, the best advertisement there was!—I could see Dak sitting with a stiff-backed Annika. George warned me off, saying, “Edna, into the lion’s den…again.”

  I smiled. “At least I’ll die with peach cobbler in my system.” I peeked back through the window. “No one is armed, George.”

  He shook his head.

  Both Dak and Annika appeared nervous at my approach, but I slid into a chair.

  Dak’s voice was low and rumbling. “Annika isn’t happy I invited you. I seem to make everyone unhappy.”

  “Hello, Annika. I’m sorry, my dear, but I need to talk to Dak, too.”

  She kept silent, but I noticed her eyes were red-rimmed. Her chin trembled when she turned her head.

  “I haven’t been to see my mother,” Dak told me. “That’s what we’ve been talking about—for an hour. I won’t—yet. I need time to think about things. When I go into that house, I…weaken.”

  Annika spoke for the first time, addressing me, her voice scratchy. “I’m worried about him. The silences. I don’t like Dakota drifting away.”