Groucho Marx, Secret Agent

by Ron Goulart

  “People don’t usually leave suicide notes before accidentally knocking themselves off, my dear.”

  “Are you going to take the case?”

  “It’s my civic duty,” he answered, exhaling smoke. “Call the grieving widow at her Beverly Hills mansion and inform her that—”

  “She’s not staying there.”

  “Why so?”

  “Too many reporters and movie nuts lurking around the place,” Nan replied. “So she’s holed up at her beach joint in Malibu. Here’s the telephone number.”

  “I already know the telephone number.” Groucho reached for the phone.

  By the time Groucho arrived at the actress’s beachside house in Malibu, the fact that she was hiding out there was no longer a secret. Several reporters and photographers were loitering outside the solid, high, white wooden fence that shielded the place.

  Parking his Cadillac down the road from the beach house, Groucho loped back through the late afternoon.

  Dan Bockman of the L.A. Times spotted him first. He went hurrying to intercept him. “Groucho, what the heck are you doing here?”

  “You’ve made a mistake, sir,” he said, dodging the oncoming reporter. “I’m actually Baby Leroy, and this is my Groucho Marx Halloween costume. Originally I was going to dress up like Frankenstein, then decided this was scarier.”

  Norm Lenzer of the Herald-Examiner joined them. “Is it true you’ve been romancing Dinah?”

  “Nay, my heart still belongs to Greta Garbo.” He worked his way to the high, solid wooden gate and rapped on it.

  Gil Lumbard of the Hollywood Citizen-News, after instructing his photographer to take some shots of Groucho, asked, “You going to be playing detective again maybe?”

  Facing the circling newsmen, Groucho said, “I’ll be holding a press conference shortly, at which time all your questions and more will be answered.”

  He fished a fresh cigar from a pocket of his sunset-colored sport coat. “The only problem for you lads is that we’ll be holding it in Guatemala.”

  A sliding panel in the white gate slid aside, and a gruff-faced, gruff-voiced man scowled out. “Yeah? I thought I told all you newshounds to scram?”

  “My good man, do I look like a newshound?”

  “You look more like an interior decorator. Get lost.”

  “I have an appointment with Miss Flanders.”

  “Oh, yeah? And who are you?”

  “Groucho Marx.”

  “Naw, Groucho Marx has got a moustache.”

  Touching his upper lip and then looking downward, Groucho said, “Doggone, it’s slipped down to my crotch again. Just a sec, and I’ll show it to—”

  “You halfwit, let him in,” came Dinah’s voice from behind the fence.

  “This guy looks like a phony to me, ma’am.”

  “He looks like that to most people. That’s one way to tell it’s Groucho. Open the damn gate for him.”

  The guard said, “Okay, Marx, you can come in. But don’t any of you other bums try anything.”

  Turning to bestow a quick curtsy on the reporters, Groucho eased in through the narrow opening that appeared in the fence.

  “The whole thing stinks,” said Dinah as she paced the large black-and-white living room. “Everybody’s trying to hand me a line of crap.”

  “Give me some details,” requested Groucho. He was sitting in a white-painted wicker armchair, watching the angry actress.

  Dinah, wearing tan slacks and a navy blue pullover, walked over to the bar in the corner and poured herself a tumbler of bourbon. “You sure you don’t want a drink?”

  “Not while I’m on duty.”

  “I don’t know who I can trust anymore, for Christ sake.” She left the drink sitting on the bar top, wandered over to the high, wide-view window.

  Twilight was settling in, and the ocean was darkening. A flock of gulls drifted down to land on the stretch of private beach downhill from the actress’s home.

  “Details,” reminded Groucho.

  “Shit, I’m not even sure I loved the guy.” She sat on the arm of a low black sofa, her slim back to the waning day. “We were only married for a few months.”

  He asked, “And why weren’t you together when he died?”

  “It was sort of a mutual thing, Groucho. We both realized that we just weren’t getting along anymore,” the actress answered. “So we decided to split, quietly and unofficially for now. If we really figured we were through for good, then we’d make it legal and tell the papers. It was as much Eric’s idea as it was mine.”

  “There are several traditional reasons for people breaking up, Dinah.” He took a cigar out of a pocket. “One, so I hear, is the husband’s fooling around on the side, and another—”

  “Nope, that wasn’t it at all. Eric never messed around with other women,” she assured him. “And, despite what you may’ve read in the goddamn gossip columns, I was totally loyal to the guy. I never—that’s my rule—fool around while I’m married to somebody.”

  “Booze is another frequent—”

  “No, Eric didn’t drink much at all, especially since he started having problems with his heart.”

  “How serious was this heart problem?”

  She shook her head, frowning. “I’m not sure, except that the past month or two he’d had a couple other of those fainting spells and his doctor told him he was suffering from some kind of heart condition and to take it easy.”

  “Who was his doctor?”

  Dinah said, “Somebody Warren Lockwood recommended. The guy has an office in Beverly Hills, just off Santa Monica Boulevard. His name’s Martin Farrell.”

  “You ever talk to him about your husband’s illness?”

  “Never even met the guy. All I know is what Eric told me after he consulted him.”

  Groucho unwrapped his cigar. “Why’d you and Olmstead show up together at the party last night?”

  “For one thing, we didn’t want people to start talking,” she answered. “And I was sort of worried about Eric’s health and wanted to keep an eye on him.”

  Groucho unwrapped the cigar. “What was that business with the Grim Reaper all about?”

  “I wish to hell I knew, Groucho.”

  “You don’t know who that was in the Death outfit?”

  “Wish I did,” she said forlornly. “When I asked Eric about it on the way back to the Beverly Hills place, he clammed up.” She recounted to him her conversation with Olmstead.

  When she finished, Groucho asked, “You think he was covering up?”

  “I think that bozo in the skull mask scared the hell out of Eric,” she said. “But I don’t know how or why.”

  “You didn’t stay with him last night?”

  “Eric claimed he’d be okay and that we ought to stick to our separation agreement. So I, reluctantly, came back here.”

  “How long have you been living in Malibu?”

  “About two weeks.”

  “While you and Olmstead were still together, did any other odd stuff take place, Dinah? For instance, what caused his other fainting spells?”

  “Once he passed out after talking to somebody on the phone,” she answered. “The other time, I found him out cold in his den,” she said. “Eric and I weren’t what you’d call a confiding couple. He never told me what was bothering him. But I got the feeling, the last weeks we were together, that he was …” She didn’t finish the sentence.

  “He was what?”

  “I really think he was in some kind of trouble, but he denied that.”

  “You’ve got no idea exactly what kind of trouble?”

  She shook her head forlornly. “That’s what I want you to find out for me,” she said. “You and that buddy of yours. What’s his name—Fred Quimby?”

  “Frank Denby. A brilliant scriptwriter and a first-rate investigator on the side.” At least that’s what Groucho later claimed he’d told her.

  “You’ve got to find out what the hell is going on and who kill
ed my husband,” she continued. “It’s not that I was deeply in love with Eric, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit still for some kind of cover-up.”

  “You think you might be in danger, too?”

  “The thought has crossed my mind, yeah,” she said. “Everybody’s trying to write this off as a suicide, but that’s so much bullshit. Eric wasn’t the kind of man who’d kill himself.”

  “Who are you alluding to, Dinah, when you say, ‘everybody’?”

  She stood up. “Let me tell you about how I found out Eric was dead,” she said.

  Six

  The Sunset Talent Agency had once had offices on Sunset Boulevard. But ever since I’d been with them—nearly two years now—they’d had a suite high above Wilshire. The reception room was large and relatively stark, furnished mostly in chrome and black leather.

  The actor Dean Jagger, without his hairpiece, was waiting in one of the chrome-and-leather chairs, leafing through a copy of Architectural Digest. And a fellow I’m fairly certain was the writer John O’Hara was slumped in another chair, apparently dozing.

  The blond receptionist was someone I’d never seen before. She was slim and on the icy side, and her nail polish was the color of igloo walls. “Yes?” she inquired in a nearly convincing Eastern-girls’-college voice.

  “Frank Denby to see Max Bickford.”

  She consulted a silver-covered appointment book. “What it says here is Fred Dumphy. Could that be you?”

  “In a pinch, sure.”

  “Then he’s expecting you,” she said, nodding toward one of the several corridors that led off the vast oval reception room. In a lower and less formal voice, she added, “He’s in one of his despondent moods, so do try to cheer him up.”

  “That’s all I need, a despondent agent,” I said, starting for his office.

  After I knocked on his door, about twenty seconds after, my agent’s voice called out faintly, “Sure, come on in.”

  Max Bickford was a medium-sized man in his middle thirties. He had crinkly black hair, deep-set and shadow-underlined eyes. At the moment he was standing in the center of his large office, wearing a pale blue dress shirt, a red knit tie, and polka-dot boxer shorts.

  “What sort of transition are you in, Max?” I asked.

  “I’m fairly certain I have a tennis date in an hour,” he answered. “So I’m changing. Have you, by any chance, seen a pair of tennis shorts hereabouts?”

  “Might that be them amidst the array of clutter atop your desk? There under the tennis racket?”

  “Right, exactly.” He extracted the shorts from beneath the racket, knocking several scripts and a stack of glossy head shots to the thick cream-colored carpeting. “Wiener’s out.”

  “He’s what?” I shifted a cardboard box filled with fat file folders to the floor and occupied a chrome-and-black-leather chair.

  “Bob Wiener’s no longer producing Ty-Gor and the Ivory Treasure,” my agent explained as he slipped into his tennis shorts. “But I’m setting up an appointment for you with Novsam.”

  “Who is—”

  “The new producer.” Max grabbed up the tennis racket and tried a few slashing strokes with it. “Oh, and the new title of the movie is Ty-Gor and the Lost City.”

  “No more ivory treasure?”

  “They decided the budget couldn’t afford all those elephants.” Putting the racket atop his desk, Max walked over to the single photo on his office wall.

  It was a framed glossy of Onita Sands in the costume she wore when she starred in Jada of the Jungle. I knew the inscription read, “To my one and only true love, Maxie. XXXXX, Onita.”

  “When I talked to Lockwood last night, as I mentioned on the phone, he told me they weren’t happy with the script they’ve got and wanted more laughs added to—”

  “So you were at the Lockwood Halloween shindig?”

  “Yeah, that’s where he brought up the Ty-Gor rewrite.”

  Max said, “How’d Eric Olmstead look?”

  “Pale,” I answered, “though not especially suicidal.”

  “I didn’t make it to the party, mostly because I was waiting around the telephone to hear from Onita,” my agent said. “If you ask me, though, Olmstead was already on his way down and bumped himself off before he hit bottom.”

  “Meaning what?”

  Max said, “I heard someplace he was going to direct a Ted Timberlake horse opera. That’s not exactly a step up.”

  “Getting back to Ty-Gor,” I said. “Is this Novsam going to want funny stuff, too?”

  “Less humor is Novsam’s specialty—he’s a very serious guy.” My agent was still gazing at the photo of Onita in her jungle-girl outfit.

  “Oh, so? I was thinking we could work in some laughs with Ty-Gor’s chimpanzee and maybe—”

  “The chimp’s out, too,” said Max. “Novsam’s replacing him with a gorilla.”

  “Why?”

  “He thinks a gorilla has more dignity. And, also, a guy in a gorilla suit is a heck of a lot easier to work with than a real chimp. They’re always trying to take a nip out of you.”

  “So maybe I’m not right for the job anymore.”

  Sighing, my agent nodded at the picture. “She’s taken one again,” he said.

  “One of your cars. Which one?”

  “She borrowed the thirty-four Packard convertible roadster. Three days ago.”

  “Did she drive it to Mexico again?”

  “Palm Springs this time.”

  “With that stuntman from Republic?”

  He shook his head, turning his back to the framed photograph. “The private eye I have watching Onita tells me this is that guy who did the tango with Joan Crawford in The Much-Maligned Miss Matson.”

  “As I recall, Max, Onita has a fondness for dancers. The time she disappeared with your Reo, she went off with that tap dancer who—”

  “It’s my fault really.” He settled in behind his cluttered desk. “I promised her stardom long ago, and I simply haven’t delivered.”

  “Max, she’s starred in four Republic serials in the last two-and-a-half years,” I reminded him. “And Variety says she’s set to star in The Masked Pilot Flies Again, wherein she plays the daughter of the original Masked Pilot and dons his flying togs to avenge—”

  “Right, exactly. She’s starred in chapter plays and continues to star in ’em, but what Onita really yearns for is a big part in an A-budget flicker, Frank,” he said forlornly.

  “Even if you’d gotten her the title role in Good-Bye, Mr. Chips, she’d still wander off now and then to shack up with—”

  “Well, enough of my unhappy love life,” Max said, sighing yet again. “Let’s get back to the Ty-Gor situation. I’m working on getting you in to talk to Novsam, out at the Warlock studios in the Valley.” He eyed me. “You and Groucho Marx aren’t working on any murder cases right now that’ll interfere with your writing career, are you?”

  “Not that I know of,” I assured him. “But if this guy wants a deadly serious picture, Max, maybe I’m not the writer for him.”

  “Hooey,” said my agent. “I know you can be deadly serious if you just try.”

  Evening had settled in when Groucho parked his car down the street from our house in Bayside. The streetlights were on, illuminating the scatters of costumed kids who were working the block.

  He eased out of the Cadillac, started walking in the direction of our place.

  A plump woman who was escorting a little boy in a baggy Superman costume produced a startled noise as he approached.

  Pointing, she said, “I know you.”

  “You shouldn’t admit anything like that in front of witnesses, madam.”

  “You are one of the Three Stooges, aren’t you?”

  “Ah, I do wish you hadn’t brought that up,” he said, sighing forlornly. “Actually, I happen to be the Fourth Stooge, and I’ve been out of work ever since they trimmed the act last winter. If you should happen to hear of any jobs for a freelance stooge, do
let me know.”

  “C’mon, Ma,” urged the little boy. “We got five more houses yet on this block.”

  Bowing to them, Groucho continued on his way.

  As he turned onto our path, he encountered two children, gotten up as Hansel and Gretel, who’d just called on us.

  “Don’t trick-or-treat there, mister,” warned Hansel. “All you’ll get is an orange.”

  “Usually I get lemons, so this’ll be an improvement, my lad.”

  “Nertz,” observed Gretel.

  Slouching some, Groucho aimed himself at our front door.

  Groucho was standing with his back to our empty fireplace. “You’re certain you have no objection to Frank’s working with me on this, my dear?”

  Jane glanced over at me. “It’s up to him.”

  From my armchair I said, “You’re sure you’ll be okay if—”

  “I am, all things considered, in pretty good shape,” she assured us. “It’s possible I’m in better shape than either one of you. Which isn’t saying much.”

  “Have a care,” said Groucho. “I’ll have you know that the last time Charles Atlas saw me without my shirt on, he was overcome with envy. That is envy, isn’t it, where you double up and make retching noises?”

  Jane smiled. “Go ahead and work on this case, Frank.”

  I got up from my chair, crossed over, and sat near my wife on the sofa. “It does sound sort of interesting. Since we have our reputation as amateur detectives to uphold, I think I’d like to.”

  “Splendid.” Groucho took out a cigar and unwrapped it.

  “Why not,” suggested Jane, “fill Frank in on the details? Fact is, I’d like to hear them myself.”

  Starting to pace, chewing on his unlit cigar, Groucho recounted what had happened at Warren Lockwood’s Halloween gala after we’d left. He then gave us an account of his interview with Dinah Flanders at her Malibu hideaway.

  When he concluded, I asked, “Why is Lockwood so involved in this mess?”

  “Something we’ll have to find out, Rollo.”

  Jane said, “Lockwood’s got a reputation for trying to take over the lives of his actresses and running off anybody who looks like he’ll cause any trouble for their reputations. Did the same thing with his last blond bombshell, Elana Lore, back in nineteen-thirty-six.”