Dena’s agent, Sandy Cooper, sat wide-eyed. “Executive vice president in charge of production?”
Wallace smiled. “That’s it, kid. You’re in charge of all the talent, you’ll have a staff of a hundred if you want it. What say? I’ve got to move on this thing.”
Cooper was busy figuring out how much money he might make in five years. Wallace helped out. “We’re talking a guarantee of five million for two years with options and bonuses. And that could be just the beginning. What do you say? You want to be a penny-ante small timer all your life?”
“No. But—”
Capello, sitting in a corner, spoke up. “Tell him the best part, Ira.”
Sandy looked over at the man who he had not been introduced to. Wallace said, “What Sidney is talking about is it’s a package deal. We want your client, too.”
“Dena?”
“Yeah, and we are prepared to offer her a contract that will make her the highest-paid female on television. Look, we know it’s gonna take some negotiation to get her away from the network, and we’re willing to do a profit share, over and above salary. She owns a piece of the company. I know it’s probably a bad move on our part, but—”
Wallace shrugged his shoulders. “Call me crazy, call me sentimental, but I wanted to come to her first with this. You know, not that she owes me. But I have a soft spot, what can I say.”
“Why do you need me in this?” Cooper asked.
“Well, we might have a little problem.”
“Besides the network, what little problem?”
Wallace poked his thumb at Capello. “She don’t like my partner.”
Sandy Cooper was no fool and got the picture. “So, in other words, I deliver her or I don’t have a deal, is that it?”
There was no answer.
After Cooper left, Wallace warned Capello again that she would most likely turn them down, but Capello did not look concerned. “It may take a little more persuasion … but I think she’ll take the offer.”
He didn’t tell Ira but he could almost guarantee it was a done deal. He knew how to negotiate.
The next day, Sandy Cooper asked Dena to meet him after work. He had an offer that had come in for her. She said, “Can’t you just tell me over the phone?”
“No, this is too big, too important. This is something that could change your life.”
At seven o’clock that night she met him across the street at a restaurant on Sixth Avenue. They ordered drinks, Dena specifying chocolate milk because her ulcer had been giving her trouble lately. Cooper ordered a gin and tonic because he was nervous. He took a gulp. “So, Dena, how would you like to be a millionaire by the time you are thirty-five?”
Since she was now thirty-four, he had her attention.
“Just hear me out before you say anything, OK?” And he went on to tell her all about the new show she had been offered, what the deal would be, that she would own a piece of the show, what the floor on her guarantee was. Dena knew how much money there was to be made in syndication, and was intrigued.
“Who’s producing this? Do they have the money?”
“It’s a new company, just formed. But they have the money and the experience.” Cooper looked around the room and confided, “I’m not really supposed to tell you until it is announced, but it’s Ira Wallace … and a partner.”
“Ira?”
“Yes, he’s handing in his resignation to the network and forming his own company. And you know he knows what he is doing and has the money behind him, but the best part is, and I don’t want to let this influence your decision one way or another, but he’s offered to make me executive vice president.”
Dena sat back in her chair. Something was off. She knew Ira thought Sandy was a fool; why would he need to bring Sandy in? “Wait a minute. What’s the name of this company?”
Cooper couldn’t hedge; he’d have to tell her eventually.
“Uh … Wall-Cap Productions.”
“Wall-Cap Productions? Who is Cap?”
“Well, that’s the one thing Ira thought you might have a little problem with. He said you didn’t like this guy but, hell, Dena, where this much money is concerned, you don’t have to like them. I hate, loathe, and despise Ira Wallace—who doesn’t—but that wouldn’t stop me from working with him.”
“What guy? Who are you talking about?”
“A guy named Capello.”
Dena reacted with horror. “Capello, Sidney Capello? Are you serious?”
Sandy nodded sheepishly.
“Forget it. Absolutely not.”
“OK, so he doesn’t have the best reputation. But we are talking about a lot of money here. Couldn’t you just try?”
“Sandy, there is nothing, and I repeat nothing in the world that could make me work for that sleazebag.”
Sandy could see by the look on her face that the odds of his becoming a vice president had just gone from slim to none.
Plain Manila
New York City
1978
Barbara Zofko wandered down the hall in a lump and went back to her office. She sat down and pulled the sleeves of her gray cable-knit sweater up on her plump forearms, kicked off her shoes, and rolled a sheet of paper into her typewriter. She reached into the drawer and pulled out a chocolate chip cookie.
Dear Ms. Nordstrom,
I could lose my job for doing this but I can no longer stand by without warning you … Sidney Capello is a dangerous man. Please do not cross him. He will destroy you. I know what I am talking about. He is an evil man and he will print this information! I beg you to reconsider your decision.
A Friend
She picked up a plain manila envelope and put a copy of the Dena Nordstrom file in it. She searched for her shoes under her desk, found them, and went back to Sidney’s office. He nodded his approval.
That Friday night, her doorman handed her the envelope. “Miss Nordstrom, a lady dropped this by for you earlier.” She took it, with thanks.
As she rode up the sixteen floors she wiped a few raindrops off the sleeve of her coat and opened the envelope.
All her life she had lived with some low-grade dread, a fear of something unknown, and now here it was. That elusive shadow that had been chasing her like a big black dog had finally caught up with her. When the elevator doors opened on her floor she was almost unable to move. Terrified, her heart was pounding so hard she almost fell. When she somehow reached her door, her hand was shaking badly and she could hardly get the key in the lock. The door open, she walked in and slid down to the floor, leaning back against the wall. She could not believe it. Maybe this was someone’s bad idea of a joke. Surely this could not be true. But there it was in black-and-white and with Capello’s name attached to it.
As she sat there and the more she thought about it, she slowly began to realize this might not be a joke.
Maybe it was true. Maybe it was the reason her mother had been so frightened, had kept moving so much. Then Dena remembered what Aunt Elner had told her, about her mother speaking German. She felt sick and she was soaked with sweat. It was as if someone had opened a trapdoor and she was falling into space.
NORDSTROM … MARION CHAPMAN
MOTHER OF AMERICAN BROADCASTER DENA (GENE)
NORDSTROM,
1939 NEW YORK CITY
SUSPECTED OF HAVING NAZI TIES
EMPLOYEE AND CLOSE ASSOCIATE OF STEINER … LILI
CARLOTTA, HIGH-RANKING OFFICIAL, AMERICAN NAZI PARTY
CONVICTED OF SPYING DEC. 13, 1946
SERVED TEN YEARS, DIED IN 1962
CHAPMAN HAD CLOSE CONTACT WITH KNOWN MEMBERS OF THE
AMERICAN NAZI PARTY, SUSPECTED OF SPYING.
CHAPMAN/NORDSTROM REPORTED AS MISSING PERSON, JAN. 1960
WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN.
It was happening to someone else. Nothing seemed real. After a moment she got up off the floor and called downstairs. She asked the doorman what the woman with the envelope looked like. He said, “I don’t remember, exac
tly, she was just a, well … nondescript-looking kind of person.” Dena sat down on the sofa, still in shock. She realized that even if this weren’t true about her mother, it didn’t matter. If the implications of this ever got printed, her career would be over. Just like that, everything she had worked for gone. She had seen it happen to a newscaster friend in Kentucky. A paper printed the fact that his father had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan and her friend’s career was ended the next day.
Dena knew what Capello could do to her and the awful power he had. With this information, saying no to him would be playing Russian roulette with her life.
All night she struggled with herself, wondering what to do, trying to figure out a way to somehow compromise, to save herself. Maybe she should take the job. Maybe she could work for him.
But she knew that however hard she tried, and as much as she wanted a career, or did not want her name or her mother’s dragged through the mud, she could not work for him. She could not let herself become a part of the garbage she knew that Sidney and Ira would be pushing on television to get ratings. Howard Kingsley had warned her, and he had been right. She couldn’t do it, not only for her sake, but for Howard’s sake. He had had too much faith in her. Besides, the real truth was, even if she were to take the job, Capello would never stop threatening her. He would own her for life. And she would rather be dead than have that happen.
When Sandy called again, on Capello’s orders, Dena was particularly brave. She was as terrified as she had ever been but she still said no.
As always, there was a price to pay.
Secrets Can Kill
New York City
1978
On Monday morning when the cleaning woman let herself into Dena’s apartment, she was not prepared for what she saw. Blood was everywhere. Smeared on the walls, on the floor, in the hall. It looked as if a massacre had occurred. When she saw her employer lying on the floor in the doorway to the kitchen in a pool of dried blood, she ran out of the apartment screaming, “Missus Nordstrom’s been murdered!” She ran down sixteen flights of stairs, shouting, “There’s been a murder!” The doorman immediately called the police. He was reluctant to go up alone, worried that the murderer was still in her apartment. When the police arrived, they entered with guns drawn but nobody was there except her dead body, or at least what looked like her dead body. But when the doctor came and started to examine her, he looked up and said, “Call an ambulance. This girl is still alive.”
The paramedics felt a weak pulse. She had lost so much blood the emergency room doctor did not hold out much hope, but he started a transfusion anyway. They checked her for bullet or stab wounds but could not find any. Later, they discovered that she had bleeding ulcers, one had hemorrhaged, and she had almost bled to death. They got her into emergency surgery.
As sick as Dena was, being unconscious was at least some relief from what she had been going through. She had tried not to think about the letter, but it had haunted her. She kept wondering when it might happen, would it happen. When she had gone to the market, she had been too frightened to look at the papers displayed right by the cash register. Would she wake one morning and it would be all over? At night she was haunted by the fact that what she had read might be true. How could it be true? But there were so many unanswered questions. Why did her mother even speak German? Who was that man in Elmwood Springs? Who was the man in the lobby her mother so feared? Why did her mother never let anyone take her picture? Why had her mother never told her she played the piano? She kept going over everything, like a movie that ran again and again. She could not get it out of her mind. Suddenly it seemed like everything about her mother that she had worked so hard to remember became suspicious. She cancelled all her appointments, including Dr. Diggers. The only way she could get any sleep was to drink until she passed out. At four o’clock in the morning on Monday, she sat up in bed and started to throw up blood and could not stop. She tried to crawl down her hall to buzz the doorman but became unconscious.
For days it was touch and go. She remained in the intensive care unit and on the critical list. Nobody knew if she would pull through but her doctors felt that after all the blood she had lost, it was a miracle she was alive at all. And Dena, who did not believe in God, much less in prayer, had the most unlikely people praying for her in the most unlikely of places. When it was announced on the news that she had been rushed to the hospital and was on the critical list, Peggy Hamilton called her husband, Charles, who was in Russia on a world crusade. That night, five thousand or more Russians, who barely spoke English, bowed their heads and prayed for a woman in New York they did not know. Elizabeth Diggers and the entire congregation of the AME Baptist Church on 105th Street said a prayer for her. Sandy Cooper did what a lot of people do when they are terrified of losing something; he started to make a lot of promises and vows he would keep if she lived. When Norma heard about it she was so frightened that she completely bypassed hysteria. She immediately picked up the phone and called her minister. That night in Elmwood Springs, people in all three of the churches came to do the only thing they knew to do. They prayed for her. Calls were made to the Unity Prayer Hot Line for Dena. In Selma, Alabama, Sookie, who was now on a first-name basis with Jesus Christ, had a lot to say, and just to be on the safe side, alerted all the Kappa Bible study groups in the country to say a special prayer for their sister. Sookie’s mother, Lenore, instructed every board member of the local chapter of the International Coalition of Christians and Jews to pray and to get everyone they knew to pray for her as well, and as an afterthought, went right over poor Archbishop Lipscomb’s head, saying to Sookie, “This is too serious to fool around with. We need to go straight to the top.” The next day, a telegram arrived in Vatican City:
DEAR YOUR HOLINESS,
I NEED YOU TO PRAY FOR A FRIEND OF OURS WHO IS GRAVELY ILL. HER NAME IS DENA NORDSTROM AND I NEED YOU TO DO IT IMMEDIATELY IF NOT SOONER. THANKING YOU IN ADVANCE.
MRS. LENORE SIMMONS KRACKENBERRY
SELMA, ALABAMA
If God had been listening, it is most likely the prayer that might have done the trick was Aunt Elner’s, who talked to God every day. She went out into her yard and looked up and said, “Please don’t take her now, Lord. She’s just getting started and that poor little thing has had so many hard knocks. And if you need a family member, just go ahead and take me. I’d be tickled to death to see you and I don’t have a thing planned except for putting up some preserves. Other than that, I’m free as a bird to come on up.”
After three days, Dena was taken off the critical list. Whether or not it had been all those prayers or the skill of the doctors, nobody could say for sure. But to put it in Elner’s words, “It sure didn’t hurt her any.”
A lot of things went on during those long days that she was totally unaware of. Visitors came and went. Reporters and fans tried to get in, but were turned away. As usual when a celebrity gets sick, rumors spread that she had tried to kill herself, that she had overdosed on drugs, that she had suffered a nervous breakdown, that Julian had caught her in bed with another man and fired her. None were true, but it did give the gossips, professional and amateurs alike, something to talk about.
Julian Amsley had called several times and sent flowers, and he had come to the hospital once. But Gerry O’Malley came every day. He had been sitting outside Dena’s room when an intern he had not seen before came down the hall and went into it. Gerry wondered what he was doing in there, and when he saw a flash of light go off, he knew. That son of a bitch had taken a picture. The “intern” came out and hurried down the hall toward the stairwell, but Gerry jumped up and grabbed him just as he hit the first step. Gerry said quietly, so as not to disturb the other patients in intensive care, “Hey, buddy, how about letting me have that camera?”
“Screw you,” the guy said and he kept going. Gerry pulled him by the back of his smock down the stairs to the landing, where a nurse passing by heard a loud snap that sounded like someone had stepped on a
twig. A minute later Gerry came back up the stairs with a camera and went over and sat back down.
Five minutes later, the fake intern, who was out a lot of money he could have made from the sale of that picture, was informed that he had a broken arm. He was lucky. When you attend military school, as Gerry had, you learn a few things. The guy should have been glad it had not been his neck.
And Dena never knew Gerry had been there.
Wake Up and Live
New York City
1978
When Dena woke, she wondered where she was. She could not quite figure it out. Then she heard a familiar voice.
“Well, hello there, Miss Hickory Nut.” Dr. Diggers was sitting in the wheelchair by her bed. She smiled. “You sure scared the hell out of a lot of people.”
Dena was groggy. “I did?”
“You did. Do you remember what happened?”
“No … kind of … no.”
“You hemorrhaged and you passed out. Do you remember that?”
Dena was still confused.
“You just go on back to sleep and rest. You are going to be fine.”
Macky and Norma had been packed, waiting for the doctor to tell them they could come, but he asked them to wait a little while longer until she was stronger. Sookie paid no attention to the doctor. The next day her brother, Buck, flew her to New York and when she walked in the room she burst into tears. Dena looked like a ghost. She had lost fifteen pounds in the past few days. After a while, when she had composed herself, Sookie sat by her bed. “Dena … you have just got to get better. If you die on me after I have crossed the Mason-Dixon line to come up here and see you, I’ll just be furious!”
Sookie had cheered her up, but at night when Dena was all alone in her room, she was still filled with that old black dread. Dena knew she could not stay in New York. She had to get out, get as far away from Capello as she could. She needed time and distance to try and figure out what she was going to do. She had to do something or the fear would eventually kill her. Sookie begged her to come back to Selma for a while, but Dena found herself saying the oddest thing, something she had never even thought of saying. “Sookie, that is so sweet. But I really want to go home, can you understand? I really need to go home for a while.”
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