Blacklist

by Jerry Ludwig

  Valerie Nolan was subpoenaed to testify. The news wasn’t public yet, but she turned to Harry in terror. She had never actually been a Party member, she was what was categorized in those days as “a fellow-traveler.” But a HUAC subpoena was enough to turn America’s sweetheart into Mata Hari.

  In dealing with her problem, Harry made his reputation as a go-between, shuttling between the Hollywood community and the Congressional committee. He contacted the head counsel for HUAC, took him to dinner at Romanoff’s, explained that apart from donating some money to now-unpopular causes, the worst thing Valerie had done was let a bunch of Lefties hold a Marxist “study session” that she thought was a reception for a Stanislavski acting guru. She was away on location in Utah at the time. HUAC’s counsel said, “Great, let her testify about that.” He was figuring HUAC would still get their headline. But Harry played his hole card: Valerie, then married to a local architect, was three months pregnant. Harry had a sworn affidavit from her doctor to prove it.

  “If you put that sweet defenseless woman on the stand and she loses that baby,” he warned the HUAC counselor, “your Committee is finished. Public opinion will destroy you.” Teddy roared with laughter when he told me how Harry had reenacted this part of the pitch for him. One hand on his heart, the other upraised to the heavens, protecting the best interests of all sides, Harry the Honest Broker.

  The subpoena was withdrawn. Never made public. And Valerie was never called to testify.

  “And that’s the sort of thing I wanted to do for Teddy,” Harry told me as we approached the entrance to the commissary. “There’s always a way to maneuver around these things. A way to weather the storm. To survive.”

  Usually, it was the same maneuver. Give names, keep on working. Like Leo. But, hey, I’m listening to Harry’s version of those events.

  * * *

  We’re seated at the best table in the executive alcove of the Panorama commissary, just off the main dining room, but plainly visible to all. I’m encouraged that Harry is willing to be seen in public with me. He introduces me to everyone who stops by. “Teddy’s boy,” he always adds. I’m starting to relax, feeling less and less like an interloper. Wendy Travers comes up to the table to kiss Harry’s cheek and greet me with a tentative smile.

  “Are you coming to work here?” she asks me.

  “All the best people are.” Harry points proudly at Wendy. “Wooed her away from Metro. She’s adapting Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility for us.”

  “Classy stuff,” I say.

  She smiles again. But under her smile, there’s pain, as if it hurts to look at me. I know what it is, of course.

  I hear myself say, “Teddy would have been glad you came yesterday.” Who knows? He might have been. Teddy was a bigger man than I am.

  “Last chance to say good-bye to an old friend.” Then she adds, “Welcome home, David.”

  I realize she’s the first person to say that to me since my return.

  While I fish for a response, she touches my shoulder and walks on to the raucous writers’ table. The fawning waiter is at Harry’s elbow; he orders for both of us.

  “So what were we talkin’ about, kiddo?”

  “How you became head of the studio.”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, after I solved Valerie’s problem, I had a big ticket specialty. Cutting the best deals possible with the Committee. It was a service that benefited a lot of people—including the studios that had huge investments in these film artists. So when the Blacklist finally started to fade, like it has now, the studio owners remembered who pulled their bacon out of the fire, who they could trust—”

  “And here you are.”

  He nods. “So you might say I owe my big break in the business to the Blacklist.” Harry looks past me at a man sauntering toward us from the main dining room.

  * * *

  The man is in his mid-forties, whippet-thin, dapper as a duke, sporting a pencil-thin, William Powell–style mustache. But what looks suave on The Thin Man comes out sinister on him. He brings a dark rain cloud with him. But Harry gives him a warm smile.

  “Hey, kiddo, how’d you like the picture?”

  “Good one, Harry. Think you’ve got a winner. Thanks for setting up the screening. Who’s your friend?” I get the feeling he knows the answer.

  “This is David Weaver.”

  “Teddy’s boy,” he says. “Isn’t that what they call you?”

  “People who know me.”

  “I’m Joe Shannon.” So this is what the asshole looks like. The Red-baiting columnist who used to smear Teddy—up to and including yesterday. And Shannon relishes the flare of recognition in my eyes.

  “You were a household word when I was a kid,” I acknowledge. “And you can imagine what that word was.”

  I hope that’s enough to embarrass him, so he’ll move on. But it only turns him on. “Guess you’re in town to plant your father.” What a fucked way to put it! But he rolls on. “Or maybe you’re job hunting, planning to stay a while?” He whips out his notebook as if gathering an important item. “So, Harry, the way you and the Prodigal Son are yukking it up together, can I assume you’re about to hire him?” I see menace poised in his ballpoint pen.

  This turd is used to kicking people without them kicking back. Before I can say or do anything, Harry steps in as an ameliorating referee. “We’re just two old friends, gabbing about the past. I’ve known David since—”

  Shannon overrides. Loud enough to be heard by all the neighboring tables. “Harry, if you are thinking of hiring Teddy’s boy, well, as a friend I’d advise you strongly to think twice. For the good of the studio and yourself.” Looking contemptuously at me again. “The apple never falls far from the rotten tree, I always say.”

  “C’mon, Joe, no need for that sort of talk,” Harry protests, but Shannon isn’t listening. He’s too busy trying to goad me. Spark a shouting match that will make him look good and me bad. Intrepid Columnist Clashes with Commie’s Son. Ain’t gonna happen. Not going to allow it. But I do want this pissant to vanish.

  So I fold my napkin on the table and slowly rise. I’m way bigger than Shannon. But he stands his ground, hoping I’ve reached the flashpoint that can make him the talk of the town tomorrow. I put my palms on the white linen table cloth and lean closer to him—and closer—looming over him, putting my face into his and giving him the stink eye.

  Then I whisper softly so no one around us can hear. But making sure he gets the threat, “Time for you to go back to your own table, little man.”

  He drills me with his gaze, but I intensify the stink eye. He blinks first. With a warning glare over his shoulder at Harry, Shannon strolls off to greet a buxom starlet in the main dining room.

  I’m relieved I didn’t blow my stack. Kept the black rage in check. I sit down again. Harry looks disgusted, but also worried.

  “Sorry about that, David,” he says. “Guess those ugly days aren’t completely over yet.”

  Then we go on with lunch. Pretending nothing happened. But I know the hiring window at this shop has closed. Harry charms me with colorful tales about Teddy and a few fond memories of me as a child. The distant past is evergreen, but the conversation doesn’t get around to my future. Maybe I have none.

  CHAPTER

  9

  MCKENNA

  I’m a victim of the Sunday blues, moping around my apartment. Truth is, I’m a bit hungover. I went to a fund-raising dinner at The Beverly Hilton last night. Harry Rains was being presented the Brotherhood and Humanity Award by the National Conference of Christians and Jews. I called Barney Ott, a big gun at Panorama, and promoted a free ticket. Because it was last minute, I could only get one. I was seated between Loretta Young and Fred MacMurray’s wife, June Haver, so that was boring but nice. Afterwards Harry asked me to join his coterie for a nightcap next door in Trader Vic’s, which told me Harry knows the Bureau is vetting him. One drink led to another and it was after one o’clock when we broke up.

  I brew a
pot of extra-strong coffee and settle down in the breakfast nook of my apartment to read the Sunday papers. I live in what the local Realtors describe as an upscale apartment house on Wilshire near Westwood. An interior decorator I dated for a while once said my pad looked impersonal. “That’s because I’m undercover,” I teased her. I never have felt L.A. is home. So what’s getting me down today is that the D.C. job is beginning to look like a pipe dream. And I may have to stay here forever.

  But that’s pushed aside when I flip to the Local News section of the L.A. Times. I’m shocked to see a story about a murder in Beverly Hills about twelve last night. It’s someone I knew very well. Screenwriter Wendy Travers. She was on her way home from Harry’s award dinner—we’d even chatted earlier for a moment at the bar; she was with Busby Berkeley, the choreographer she’d worked with in the old days on the Esther Williams watercade pictures.

  As the Beverly Hills cops pieced it together, Wendy was driving alone in her red Ferrari from the Hilton to her house on Kings Road north of the Sunset Strip. There’s a stop sign at the top of the hill. She stopped, and apparently an assailant stepped out of the darkness and smashed the driver’s window with a hammer or a tire iron. There were shards of glass showered over Wendy and the side of her head was smashed in. Her purse was taken and a diamond necklace she wore. No witnesses. The assumption is, it was a junkie hiding behind a tree who spotted a woman in an expensive car and saw a payday.

  I pick up the phone and dial Jerry Borison, the homicide detective quoted in the paper, whom I’ve worked with in the past. I ask him for more details, but he says that’s about it so far. They haven’t turned up any real leads. “All her friends seem real broken up; she was a popular gal. How well did you know her?”

  “Real well,” I say. I let it go at that. But ask him to keep me posted on any new developments. No, nothing professional. Just personal. Clearly it’s not a federal case. I hang up the phone and stare out the window at the Sunday drivers passing below on Wilshire.

  Wendy and I were closest after I served her with the HUAC subpoena. It was fairly late in the game, the hearings were almost wrapped. Earlier her name had cropped up occasionally. But we tended to go slower in pursuit of pinko women. Especially after playwright Lillian Hellman snookered the Committee by getting her statement about “I will not cut my principles to fit this year’s fashions” onto the public record. Women were too sympathetic and too unpredictable.

  Not that Wendy was a die-hard. She had dabbled with Communism as a youngster—her first job in the business at age nineteen was in the mail room at MGM, and she tried to unionize the other workers. She was fired, but came back later after winning local swim championships to be Esther Williams’ stand-in—or “swim-in,” as she called herself. When that career dried up she became mogul Louis B. Mayer’s number one screenwriter. Spinning a string of warmhearted movies for the whole family that were lightweight but consistent box office winners.

  By the time I got to her, she was decades away from the Party. “It’s one thing,” she told me, “to throw yourself off a cliff for what you believe in. But not for what you don’t believe in anymore.”

  But like all the cooperative witnesses, she drew the line at naming others. Or at least she tried to. She wouldn’t name anyone who hadn’t already been named at least ten times. “Not seven or eight,” she insisted, “it has to be ten!” That was her way of trying not to hurt people. I went along with her, more or less, but things were murky in those days, so some of the names we got her to give up in the public hearing were more like fours and fives. She adamantly refused to name Teddy Weaver because he was only a two. In any case, the distinction was totally lost to the people on the Left. To them an informer was an informer.

  None of that is in the obituary in the L.A. Times. The focus is on the Esther Williams days and then the hit movies she wrote, her Oscar nominations and the Golden Globe Award.

  There was a man-woman attraction between us back then, but Wendy was too vulnerable and I had made it a rule never to get involved with anyone we were investigating. So it never went anywhere, the moment passed with nothing happening, but we have always been glad to see each other whenever our paths crossed.

  And now Wendy’s dead. A stupid, pointless street crime. A lovely lady. Ambushed for dollars. So some dope-crazed asshole can buy poison to jam into his arm. What kind of screwed up world do we live in?

  * * *

  The phone beside me on the breakfast table rings. I scoop it up thinking it may be Borison calling back with more info. But it’s Tom Churillo from his house in Arlington, Virginia.

  “Hate to amp up the pressure, buddy.” He tells me a hotshot agent from my class at the Bureau training program is making a big push for the job I’m after. “He’s just scored a major gun-running bust on the Tex-Mex border.” Churillo says he’ll hold him off as long as he can, but: “Hurry up, pal, I don’t want you to miss this boat.”

  I tell him I’m hurrying. But so far all I’m doing is treading water. It feels like my life is slipping away.

  CHAPTER

  10

  JANA

  It’s not quite seven thirty on Monday morning when I drive onto the lot, but that’s not early for a movie studio. The camera crews report at seven to start rigging the lights on the soundstages for the first setup.

  I don’t take the usual route to my office. Instead I detour by the writers’ building and stop for a moment. The parking area is deserted. Writers never show up until nine. Her name is still there, stenciled in black on the white curbing at the head of her parking space. Wendy Travers. By tomorrow it will be gone. Just like she is.

  I cried away all of Sunday after Valerie called with the news.

  “We’ve lost her,” she said.

  As if saying those words would make the horror easier to accept. But it still seems like a bad B movie. The beautiful, witty, wonderful heroine is unexpectedly killed. Wendy’s meaningless death leaves me chilled and despairing.

  My father hadn’t heard when I picked him up late last night at the airport. He’d been flying fourteen hours from London. At the arrival gate I wept into his shoulder. We drove home and sat in his study and got drunk together, but that didn’t take away the pain. He went to sleep, exhausted from the trip; I nodded off for a couple of hours. Then woke up into the immutable awful dawn and decided to go to work.

  Panorama’s research department is in a white, wooden two-story building dating back to silent-film days. Accounting is downstairs, research upstairs. Now I trudge up the steps and find the lights still dark in every office but mine. When I get there I’m surprised to see Harry Rains sitting on my couch, rimless glasses perched on the tip of his nose like Scrooge’s bean-counter Bob Cratchit, perusing a sheaf of legal-size papers. When he sees me he tosses the papers into the attaché case open at his feet and takes off the glasses. His eyes are bloodshot.

  “Thought you’d probably be in early,” he says softly. “I couldn’t sleep either. So howyadoin’ kid?”

  I know I look like hell, eyes swollen. He doesn’t look much better. Immaculately dressed as always, but emitting a marrow-deep sadness. Harry being here is not a rare occurrence, it’s unique. In the two years I’ve been working at Panorama, he has never had occasion to enter the building.

  He gestures at the spot next to him on the couch. I sink wearily into the cushions and he clasps both my hands. “There’ll never be another one like her,” he says.

  That chokes me up. All I can do is nod.

  “Valerie is too shattered to work today,” he says. “But I had to see you.” I’m touched that he’s come to comfort me. He leans back, sighs heavily, rubs his eyes as if that will erase the images I know we’re both thinking. A monster bashing in Wendy’s car window, snuffing out her life. When he looks back at me, he attempts a smile.

  “Do you know how she became a writer?” he says.

  “She was Louis B. Mayer’s Scheherazade. He hated to read scripts and he overheard her telli
ng some girls the story of the movie she saw the night before. So he hired her to be his official storyteller.”

  “Yeah, everybody knows that, but the way she became a screenwriter was, months later, she tells him a story he loves. He wants to buy it, but who wrote it? Wendy admits she’s slipped in a ringer. She wrote it. For a second she was scared he’d can her—and she really liked the job. ‘Well, it’s not your job anymore,’ he says. ‘Now you’re a screenwriter.’”

  He chuckles—and I join him. It makes us both feel a bit better. Then I get a vibe. Like he’s softening me up for something.

  “Any special reason you stopped by, Harry? I mean, besides…”

  “Wow, you are one sharp cookie.” He reaches down for the legal papers in his attaché case. “This is Wendy’s will. I drew it up for her when she was my client. After I took the job here at the studio, I referred her out to Gang, Kopp & Tyre. Last year she had them do a codicil.”

  “I don’t understand. Did she leave me something?”

  “Yeah, a few pieces of jewelry she said you admired. She also made you executor of her estate.”

  It comes as a complete surprise. One that throws me for a loop. “She did that? Why?”

  “Because she loved you and trusted you.”

  “Harry, I’m not a lawyer or a banker, I wouldn’t know what to do—”

  “Not to worry, Martin Gang and Al Lewis at Citibank can handle the nitty-gritty. All you have to do is look over their shoulders and make sure Wendy’s wishes are observed.”

  He holds out the papers. I hesitate taking them. “You can’t say no, Jana, it was what she wanted.”

  I accept the legal papers. Harry snaps his attaché case shut and rises.

  “Sorry to be the one to spring this on you,” he says.

  “You were very gentle,” I say, also rising, and I kiss his cheek. We hug, then he looks carefully at me.