Listen for the Whisperer

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  “Your own heritage on your mother’s side lies in Norway,” my father’s letter continued, “and it’s time you learned what that heritage is. I believe your mother lives in your grandmother’s house, and even though the old people are gone, the house, the town, the country, will tell you more about yourself than you’re now able to know. It’s time for you to forgive and understand your mother. Ruth won’t keep you from going. She’ll understand.”

  He closed with loving wishes for my happiness, my future, that brought tears to my eyes. He had worried about me for a long while. This was his way of trying to mend something in me that had been damaged beyond repair long ago. The attached letter to Gunnar Thoresen was sealed, and I did not wonder then what was in it.

  Laura Worth and I could never be friends. I might be able to write a piece about her as an actress, but I could never forgive her as a human being. As far as our being mother and daughter, I had a grim need in me to confront her with that Perhaps to cause her pain, if that was possible.

  Watching her tonight in The Whisperer had stiffened my resolve. I was going to Bergen. I was going to use all my ingenuity to get to see her. Whatever walls she had built around herself, I would break through. Presented with me in the flesh, she would have to give me something more than the stony silence I had had over the years. Whether she granted me an interview or not, she would have to claim me as being of her own blood. It was time for her to confront what she had done in the past, and to understand that actions have consequences. It did not occur to me that there was a certain arrogance in my attitude that might have been worthy of Laura Worth herself. I only knew that I meant to bring her far more than a millefiori paperweight.

  From the picture on the desk her young face looked back at me with that faint mockery she often revealed in her more pungent characterizations. What would she be like at fifty-eight? I had talked to other aging movie stars. I knew how tenderly they preserved their beauty, and I admired them for the life and drive that still kept them active, busy, glamorous figures. But Laura had fled from the very life she had so loved, as she had fled from my father and me.

  I knew few details of what had happened after she left Hollywood. She had traveled in Europe for a while. She had married an Englishman who held a position in Oslo at a diplomatic level. They’d lived in Norway for a time, but the marriage had not worked out. There had been a divorce. For a few years all that Laura Worth did was newsworthy. But after the divorce she had moved to her mother’s old home in Bergen, and had disappeared entirely from the public eye.

  Why had she run away from everything? Why had she really run away? Oh, I knew about the scandal that had erupted in Hollywood before the filming of The Whisperer was finished. But other actresses had surmounted gossip just as vicious and had continued with their careers. What if the director, Cass Alroy, had been found dead—murdered—on the set of The Whisperer that I had seen on the screen tonight? True, there had been suspicion of Laura Worth in the beginning. There had been a time when it was thought that she might even be brought to trial for his murder. Everyone knew that Cass and Laura had quarreled all the way through this first picture they had made together. It was rumored that they had been lovers—but then, that sort of rumor haunted every star constantly. The gossip columnists waited avidly to pick up the slightest acquaintance and blow it out of all proportion. At least she had been completely exonerated during the inquest, and if rumors continued, they were the sort of thing a woman like Laura Worth would surely have had the strength to live down. So what had caused her crack-up?

  The murder case was never solved. It still stood open on the books. But after Laura Worth was freed of all suspicion she had a complete nervous breakdown. Friends spirited her out of sight, took care of her, kept the reporters away. The Whisperer—which she had managed to finish—did not gross as much as expected, and someone else won the Oscar. After her recovery she had found that her option was not being picked up by Premier Pictures where she worked, and no one else wanted her services at that moment.

  I knew from talking to other stars that a waning popularity could happen suddenly like that. But usually such actresses kept their hand in. Especially if they had the followers, the adulation that Laura Worth commanded. They did stints on the stage when they could, appeared on television, worked abroad. Sooner or later the right vehicle might come along and their stardom prove undimmed. Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Lillian Gish, Gloria Swanson, were all busy, active women. But Laura Worth had fled.

  There were too many questions. I pushed the picture aside and got up from the desk. At one end of the bookshelves Father had kept his scrapbooks and I went to look over the years marked on the matching cover of each. Ruth had kept these books faithfully for him, since he was not one to save every review, every clipping and published picture, or account of talks he had given across the country. But Ruth had treasured them all, and I had her to thank for a complete record of Victor Hollins’s professional life. There was just one scrapbook into which he himself had pasted certain items—in this case items that did not concern him personally. I had discovered this book long ago, and I sought it now, carrying it to the desk.

  It fell open easily at the place I wanted because I had pored over the story so many times. Pictures of an older, even more beautiful Laura Worth looked up at me from the page. These were no posed pictures, but candid shots caught by news photographers of a woman in tragic trouble. Her eyes were stark, the famous hollows in her cheeks emphasized. Those wide cheekbones gave her face strength and character, the girlish softness of an earlier day was gone. Here was a woman who had suffered deeply—the same woman who had played Helen Bradley so brilliantly in The Whisperer.

  Lower down the page was a picture of Cass Alroy, with an account of his gifts and accomplishments as a director. I had never liked his face. It was thin, rather ascetic, and somehow the mouth looked cruel to me. He was said to have driven almost despotically the actors with whom he worked. He held them to what he desired at all costs, even resorting to trickery to call forth emotion when he wanted it for the sake of a scene in a picture.

  But it was not the news pictures which interested me most at the moment. It was the story of what had happened that night at the studio when Cass Alroy was found murdered, and which my father had clipped so carefully and pasted in this scrapbook. I knew the account by heart, but I read it again.

  Sometimes when Laura Worth was working on a picture she would stay in the studio, living in her dressing room, even sleeping there overnight. She had found that she could sustain the mood of a given role and story far better if she did not allow the outside world to intrude. She would study the script, learn her lines for the next day’s shooting, sometimes walk about the darkened sound stage, rehearsing scenes for the following day.

  On this particular night she had gone to the empty set of stairway, hall, and parlor for The Whisperer, and had acted out a scene that was to be shot the next day. Afterwards, she had returned to her dressing room and prepared for bed. Everything had seemed to rustle and creak around the great sound stage, and though she had never been uneasy before when she had stayed in her dressing room, that night she kept listening nervously. When the crash came from the direction of the set, she had flung on a dressing gown and rushed out.

  A light was left burning all night, so that the set was partially illumined, as it had been when she had rehearsed earlier. She rushed into the parlor set and almost stumbled over Cass Alroy’s body. Terrified, she had run to the door of the stage and screamed for help. One of the studio police had come in from outside. It was found that Cass had been felled by a heavy iron doorstop that was one of the props on the set, his skull crushed by a blow that must have caused immediate death.

  Further clippings developed the story. Laura Worth was being questioned by the police. Laura’s quarrels with Cass Alroy, her reputed affair with him, her resentment of his direction, all were brought out in unpleasant detail. But there were three circumstances which could
not be shaken or denied, and which eventually won her a waiving of all suspicion.

  First of all, someone else was on the set that night—a young girl who was a Laura Worth fan had managed to hide herself in the studio at closing time in the hope of seeing Laura, and had stayed in the sound stage through the night.

  Fans were an integral part of every movie star’s life. Any popular star might have a fan club with membership spread across the country. Fans were a breed apart and the stars loved and feared them. They could storm a theater during a personal appearance and rip the clothes from their idol’s back. Or they could run errands, and answer phones, write letters, do endless small chores, if they were permitted to indulge their worshipful eagerness to serve. Some of them would go to extremes to be near the star they adored. Most were young and impulsive and emotional.

  Laura had such fans all over the country. She had one in particular in Los Angeles. This girl’s name was Rita Bond, and she was an impulsive eighteen-year-old who had decided that the best way to be near Laura, perhaps to have a chance to see her, speak to her, was to hire herself out as an extra for one of Laura’s pictures. Her plan worked better than she expected and she was given the bit part of a maid in The Whisperer. A face was wanted—a young face, roundly plump, that could look frightened in the proper scene. Rita must have looked perpetually timid and frightened, judging from the news accounts.

  This girl discovered that Laura sometimes stayed overnight in her dressing room near the set, and on this occasion Laura had announced when the day’s filming was over that this was her plan. Not only Rita, but everyone on the set had known her intention. Rita had seized an opportunity and hidden herself away among the cranes and vast camera and sound equipment—all the usual clutter that surrounded a set where they were shooting. She managed to remain in the sound stage unnoticed when the studio closed. She borrowed a cushion or two from The Whisperer set, and made herself a sort of bed near Laura’s dressing room. Exactly how she was to approach her idol, she later admitted, she did not know. Being much too excited and thrilled to sleep, she lay awake on her improvised bed.

  She heard Laura speaking her lines aloud. She crept after her when she went to the set and walked about rehearsing the next day’s scenes. In no way did she intrude upon her. It was enough for her giddy little soul to be permitted to watch such glorious rites. When Laura returned to her dressing room, Rita followed unseen. She lay down again, and again she did not sleep. When the crash came from the set and Laura rushed out of her dressing room, Rita rushed after her, right on her heels. She waited in helpless horror when Laura went to the door and screamed for help. She was there when the police came. And she was there through the weeks of testimony that followed. Fortunately, she had been on guard over Laura all that night, and she had seen every move the actress had made outside her dressing room. She had vouched for the facts of what had happened.

  A second circumstance provided even stronger evidence so that Laura could not be seriously suspected, in spite of the rumors that flew around. It was found that the cat-shaped iron doorstop which had killed Cass Alroy was too heavy to have been used as a weapon by either Laura or Rita. Neither could lift it easily, let alone have used it to strike a blow. A big man might have wielded it, but not a woman of Laura’s or Rita’s build.

  There would have been a complete impasse if the third circumstance had not come to light. The police discovered that the fire door at the back of the stage had been opened that night. A day or so before, someone had dumped a pile of fresh earth intended for use in a plant border, in front of the seldom used door. In this earth were the prints of a man’s 10½ size shoes made clearly when he had come out the door. There were no entry prints, so he must have gone in by the main door. Fragments of earth trailed for a little way on the asphalt alley, and then disappeared, undoubtedly jarred from his shoes by the act of running away.

  Cass had gained more than one enemy over the years—so there were plenty of possibilities. Investigation brought one of these in particular into the picture as a likely suspect. Dr. Miles Fletcher was Laura Worth’s personal physician—a man a few years older than she, and rumored to be in love with her. She had been seen about town in his company a number of times recently. He was a tall, well-built, muscular man, and his shoe size matched that of the prints found in the dirt pile. What was more, he had been in the studio that afternoon to attend Miss Worth, when she had been thoroughly upset by an altercation with Cass Alroy. Everyone on the set had heard him exchange heated words with Cass that afternoon. This, however, was all that the police were able to establish. Dr. Fletcher had an ironclad alibi.

  He had checked out of the studio gate after he had attended Miss Worth. The discovery of the murder had taken place about eleven o’clock at night. At which time Miles Fletcher had been in the company of his sister, Mrs. Donia Jaffe, watching a play in a downtown theater. There were others present at the theater who attested to seeing him there in Donia’s company. Nothing could be done to connect Dr. Fletcher with the murder. Nevertheless, those footprints remained and there was no gainsaying them. The inquest verdict was murder at the hands of a person, or persons unknown. The immediate flap was over.

  Laura was free to have her breakdown, and Rita Bond was free to go wherever all ex-adoring teenage fans may go.

  The clippings I followed had nearly finished with the story. There was just one more. Dr. Miles Fletcher had attended Laura constantly through her days of uncertainty and trouble. She turned to him as she turned to no one else, and when she finally collapsed it was he who helped to spirit her away to a place where he and his sister nursed her back to health. How she rewarded this devotion was never known. Or at least not made clear in anything I had read about the affair. He too seemed to vanish from the public eye when Laura herself vanished.

  That was the strangest thing of all for me to realize—that so many years had passed. The scandal died at last and there was a huge revival of interest in Worth pictures. If she had been willing, contracts would have been offered. Once more in old pictures she flashed across movie and television screens in the full beauty of her youth and young womanhood. For the world she would never age, though in reality she was now nearing sixty. The clippings, a little yellowed in the book before me, had the same sense of current immediacy. They recounted events that had—in the minds of the writers—only just happened. Coming to them after the picture I had viewed tonight, it seemed as though the tragedy must have taken place yesterday. If I turned on the radio, a news broadcast would surely send Laura’s name echoing through the air to startle listeners.

  Yet, in truth, all those who were young and beautiful were old by this time. Those who were still alive would wear wrinkles and gray hair and sagging flesh. Not one of them would resemble these news pictures from another day.

  I carried the scrapbook to the bookcase and put it away with a strange heavyheartedness. There was no sadness for me in knowing that Laura Worth was no longer young. I could not help hoping that she missed her youth and lost beauty. Whatever pain she suffered was merited. She could never make real payment for the harm she had done to others who were good and deserving. Victor, my father, and Ruth, his wife. Not me. I was neither good nor deserving as they were. Nevertheless, having read through the clippings again, the sense of tragedy lay heavy upon my spirit.

  When I had turned off the lamp on the desk, I stood for a moment in the darkened hush of my father’s study. From outside closed windows came the subdued roar of New York. Pale moonlight fell through panes of glass, touching the carpet, an armchair, the desk. I did not see them. A voice was whispering through my mind. “Listen …” it said. “Listen …” In my father’s book a dumbwaiter had been used to achieve the illusion of a whispering that came out of the void. I needed no such device. The voice itself seemed to sound through my very pulses, and I was remembering again the scene in The Whisperer when Helen Bradley came upon her husband’s body—that dreadful moment when she screamed.

  Ye
s, Laura Worth had known how to scream.

  Another director had been hired to finish the picture. And Laura, being an actress, had postponed her moment of collapse and played her role through to the end. I wondered how those in the studio—cameramen, propmen, script girl, technicians—all the crew and assistants to director and star, had felt when she screamed. It must have been a moment of horror for them all. Perhaps Cass Alroy’s blood had stained the very carpet where actors stood speaking lines that now had a dreadful meaning. They must have all been aware of that door to the dining room where an iron doorstop had stood. It was gone in the final scenes of the picture. No one had made an effort to replace it.

  Abruptly I wrenched myself from these imaginings, turned the lamp on, and looked again into the eyes of the portrait. There was no horror there—that was yet to come. Only that faint trace of mockery, that hint of growing self-assurance, that suggestion of ruthlessness, perhaps, in the wide young mouth that was not altogether soft. But I did not want to search her young face any longer, and I laid the portrait face down on the desk. Then I opened a lower drawer and took out the millefiori paperweight. As my father wished, I would take with me this gift of Laura’s to Victor—his gift to me. I hoped her eyes would reveal something of old pain when I gave it to her.

  I went upstairs to tell Ruth that I was going to Norway.

  Chapter 2

  I stood at the window of my comfortable room at the Norge Hotel and looked out at what I could see of Bergen. This part of the city occupied a peninsula that thrust into the waters of the town fjord and held much of the business district. Coming in from the airport I had been oppressively aware of sheer crags of rock overlooked by crouching black mountains, some of them with snow ridging their peaks.