Bit Player

by Janet Dawson

  “If she was involved with Tarrant...” Cassie began.

  I shook my head and repeated, “No way.”

  “Hey, I’m only playing devil’s advocate here. My point is that if she had dated Tarrant while she was engaged to your grandfather, it’s hardly something she’d have told her fiancé, let alone her grandchildren.”

  “Dated? Hell, that old man implied they were lovers. He said they were ‘an item.’ I didn’t like the way he said it, either. What nonsense. I don’t believe it. And he claimed the cops questioned Grandma about Tarrant’s murder.”

  “I’m sure he was just dramatizing,” Cassie said. “Did you see the look on his face, when he called it a Hollywood mystery?”

  I recalled the avid expression in the man’s eyes as he’d told us about Tarrant’s murder and implied that my grandmother had had some involvement in the crime. “Yeah. He was really getting a buzz out of it.”

  We reached my car and I unlocked it, setting the title cards on the floor behind the driver’s seat. Cassie levered herself into the passenger seat and fastened the safety harness over her burgeoning belly. She and her husband, Eric, were expecting their first child in three months. I fastened my own seat belt, started the Toyota and maneuvered out of the parking space.

  “So he was embellishing, having fun at your expense,” Cassie declared as I turned right off Oak Street onto Encinal Avenue, driving away from the downtown area. “Just because you told him about your grandmother, the actress. The more I think about it, his story sounds like complete fiction. For all we know, he made the whole thing up. Was there really a Ralph Tarrant? I’ve never heard of him.”

  “Presumably because he wasn’t famous,” I said. “There were—and are—a lot of people like Grandma in Hollywood. People you never heard of, working as extras and bit players, trying to break in.”

  “Or maybe he was famous, but not for long,” Cassie said. “That old man said Tarrant came to Hollywood in nineteen thirty-six. If he was killed in ’forty-two, he didn’t have time to build much of a career.”

  “Maybe. How many people today—besides old movie buffs—have heard of Miriam Hopkins or Kay Francis?”

  Cassie chuckled. “I’ve never heard of either of them. But then, you’re the old-movie buff, not me. Anyway, even if there was a Ralph Tarrant, how do we know he was murdered? Or that the crime was never solved.”

  I didn’t answer. I was thinking about a couple of other unsolved Hollywood mysteries. Thelma Todd was an actress who’d worked in Hollywood from the mid-twenties through the early thirties. Known as Hot Toddy because of her hard-playing social life, she’d been found dead in her car in 1935. The death, due to carbon monoxide poisoning, was labeled accidental. But rumors she’d been murdered persisted to this day.

  Equally intriguing was the 1922 slaying of director William Desmond Taylor, detailed in a book by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick, called A Cast of Killers. Among the suspects questioned by the police in that homicide were silent-era actresses Mabel Normand and Mary Miles Minter. That murder had never been officially solved either, though several authors had theorized that Minter’s mother was responsible.

  I stopped at a red light, turned right onto Chestnut Street, then left at Alameda Avenue. Cassie and Eric had bought their house, a Victorian-era fixer-upper, last year. I pulled up at the curb in front. “Whether Ralph Tarrant existed is easy enough to find out. As for his murder, when it comes to Hollywood mysteries, the man in the store picked the wrong audience for his yarn.”

  “A private investigator, you mean?” Cassie smiled as she unhooked the harness and opened the passenger door. “Don’t tell me you’re going to investigate your grandmother’s purported involvement in a murder that might have happened more than sixty years ago.”

  “I just might,” I said.

  * * *

  I headed home. I had a fixer-upper of my own, in Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood. The truism about owning a house or a condo is that there’s always something that needs doing, and it’s usually expensive. I’d been saving up for a kitchen remodel, new appliances and countertops. Then a plumbing situation became a crisis and moved to the top of the priority list. I’d get to the kitchen one of these days, when I had enough money. Business had been slow this last month. I had more time on my hands, but that was affecting my bank account. Right now I had a flash of buyer’s remorse about my impulse to purchase those title cards from The Women and We Were Dancing. Then I took them from the bag, and propped them up, side by side, admiring them. They would look great in matching frames with red and yellow mats, to highlight the colors. What’s done is done, I told myself.

  I carried the title cards to my home office, where I already had a spot picked out to hang the cards when they were framed. I switched on my computer and moved my tabby cat, Abigail, off my chair. She grumped at me and stalked off to join Black Bart, the other cat, who was curled up on my bed doing what cats do best—sleeping.

  The Internet Movie Database and the Turner Classic Movies websites are great tools for movie buffs. Key in the name of an actor, a director or any other human being associated with a film, and both sites will provide a list of films that person worked on, as well as a short biography. Frequently there are photos, images of movie posters, and sometimes even a link to play an old movie trailer. The TCM site will even tell you when the film was in production and when it was released.

  My grandmother worked in Hollywood for nearly five years. During that time Jerusha Layne appeared in many films. In all of these movies, her name is down at the bottom of the cast list. There is no photograph on the IMDB or TCM websites. The biography section simply states the date and place of her birth, and the date she died.

  Jerusha’s first job was as an extra in an Andy Hardy movie with Mickey Rooney, called You’re Only Young Once. Her penultimate movie was We Were Dancing, starring Norma Shearer and Melvyn Douglas. Now, on the TCM site, I typed in the title We Were Dancing and clicked on the button labeled “Search.” The page that came up had a graphic, the same image on the title card I’d just purchased. I scrolled down the cast list and found Grandma’s name: Jerusha Layne, her role listed simply as “bit part (uncredited).”

  Now I typed in Ralph Tarrant’s name and clicked my mouse. A few seconds later I had a photograph. So Tarrant was real. He’d lived and died. He had a lean, wolfish face. His dark hair was slicked back from his forehead, and his hooded eyes reminded me of George Raft. He didn’t have Raft’s Hell’s Kitchen background, though. What I read about Tarrant reminded more of his better-known countryman, the elegant and urbane Leslie Howard.

  According to the brief bio, Tarrant had been born in London, England, in August 1906, too young to serve in the army during the First World War but old enough to serve in the Second—though it appeared he hadn’t done so. He went on the stage in the late 1920s, appearing in several plays. Then he turned to the movies, first in England. Like Howard, Tarrant had migrated to the United States. Unlike Howard, who returned to England in 1939 to aid in the war effort, Tarrant stayed in Hollywood. He was thirty-six years old when he’d died on February 21, 1942. As the result of a homicide, read the biographical note. Tarrant had indeed been murdered.

  I glanced through the list of films Tarrant had appeared in and recognized a few of the later titles. Then I sent the search-engine spider crawling across the World Wide Web, looking for hits. These days there’s a website for everything. William Desmond Taylor and Thelma Todd even have sites dedicated to their deaths. Tarrant was mentioned on a number of web pages. One of these, devoted to Hollywood mysteries, gave me some background on Tarrant’s Hollywood career and a brief account of the actor’s murder.

  Tarrant had arrived in Hollywood in 1936. He had a minor role in Lloyd’s of London, at Twentieth Century Fox. It was evidently on this film set that Tarrant had met another cast member, George Sanders. The two Britons became friends.

  Many of Tarrant’s movies had been made at Fox, but studios had the habit of loaning ou
t actors who were under contract to them. So Tarrant’s filmography showed movies made at several studios, including Columbia, Warner Brothers and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, moving gradually up the cast list as he got bigger parts. But he’d never achieved top or even second or third billing. Since Jerusha had made most of her movies at Metro, I checked to see if she and Tarrant had ever worked on the same film. But they hadn’t. After examining cast lists, I didn’t see any career intersection between my grandmother and the British actor. Had they met because they were working on the same lot at the same time?

  Tarrant was filming a movie at Metro in early 1941, I discovered. He was listed in the cast of They Met in Bombay, starring Clark Gable and Rosalind Russell, in production February through April and released in June 1941. At the same time Jerusha was working in the Hitchcock movie Suspicion at RKO. Then she had a part in a George Raft picture, Manpower, at Warner Brothers. No connection there. But she’d had a small role in The Feminine Touch, which was the next movie Russell had made at Metro, shot during the month of July 1941, a tenuous connection at best. Jerusha had appeared in another movie at Metro, When Ladies Meet, a movie featuring Greer Garson and Joan Crawford. That film was in production June through August of 1941. Tarrant was also at Metro in August 1941. He had appeared in H.M. Pulham, Esq., directed by the great King Vidor. That film, starring Hedy Lamarr and Robert Young, had been shot during August and September of 1941, then released in December 1941.

  So they could have met at some point, I reluctantly conceded.

  I turned my attention to Tarrant’s murder, described briefly on the Hollywood mysteries website on the screen in front of me, reading the short account of Tarrant’s death, then I went to a database of historic newspapers that included the Los Angeles Times and searched on a range of dates from February 21, 1942, the date of Tarrant’s demise, to the end of the year. The search returned several hits and I clicked on the links that led to the scanned articles.

  Ralph Tarrant was killed sometime Saturday evening at his rented Hollywood bungalow. He was supposed to meet friends for dinner at eight that evening, at a restaurant in nearby Beverly Hills, but he never showed up. A next-door neighbor saw the shadowy figure of a woman get into a car and drive away. A short time later, the neighbor saw an orange glow, flames dancing in Tarrant’s windows, and called the fire department.

  Tarrant’s body was discovered sprawled on the living room rug, with five slugs in the corpse. LAPD’s subsequent investigation into the actor’s murder evidently hadn’t come up with any leads. As I read through the articles I saw that coverage went from the front page to small columns on the inside pages of the Times, and ultimately out of the public consciousness altogether. The last article was dated August of 1942. I checked an Internet timeline for World War II and saw that there were more pressing matters occupying the attentions of newspaper readers in the spring of 1942. Tarrant was killed right after the British surrendered Singapore to the Japanese invasion force on February 15, 1942. The murder of a little-known actor didn’t mean much when it competed with headlines about a Japanese sub shelling an oil refinery off Santa Barbara; the creation of the War Relocation Authority that ultimately sent over a hundred thousand Japanese American civilians to internment camps; the attack on, invasion, and surrender of Bataan; and the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo.

  Nobody knew who killed Ralph Tarrant. I guessed the case got colder and colder, with no more evidence, only speculation. I pictured the case file, stuffed with documents and the investigating officer’s notes, pushed farther back on the detective’s desk, as other cases demanded precedence, then finally transferred to an anonymous shelf somewhere at LAPD, gathering dust.

  Where was that case file now? And could I get my hands on it? I frowned at the computer screen, itching to get more details about Tarrant’s death, such as a list of people interviewed in the course of the investigation, to see if my grandmother’s name was on that list. I was betting that list was in the Tarrant case file.

  What if I went down to LA?

  Wait a minute, Jeri, I told myself, putting on the brakes. A crime that happened during World War II? You’ve got to be kidding. Why was I so irked by the old man in the movie memorabilia shop and his innuendo about my grandmother and Tarrant? Most people would call it ancient history and leave it at that. But it was my grandmother he was implicating in Tarrant’s murder. And I’m the kind of person who likes to get to the bottom of things, no matter how old the case. I had a few resources here in the Bay Area, ones I should use before getting on a plane to Los Angeles.

  Chapter 3

  The roommates, I thought, later that evening after I’d had dinner.

  When Jerusha arrived in Hollywood, she rented a room in a boarding house, living there for a couple of years. In 1939 or 1940, she moved into a bungalow court, sharing a house with a series of roommates, all of them aspiring actresses. I remembered her stories of how small the place was for the four of them. It was a cottage really, originally with two bedrooms and one full bathroom. The tiny back porch had been enclosed and converted into a third bedroom. The master bedroom, a decent size, was partitioned and occupied by two of the roommates. The second bedroom, much smaller, had room for one person. The most recent arrival always got stuck with the back porch. Though it had the benefit of proximity to a tiny half bath with toilet and sink, the porch was cold, damp and drafty in the winter, and it didn’t have a closet, just a makeshift rod and some hooks, hidden by a curtain. Grandma chuckled as she described how elated she felt when she’d been promoted from the porch to a real bedroom. It was warmer, she said, and it had a closet.

  Jerusha had lots of roommates during her Hollywood years, first in the boarding house and later in the bungalow. But she’d kept in touch with some of them. Every now and then she’d talk about receiving letters from the girls who’d shared her quarters. That would lead to the stories I enjoyed so much as Grandma reminisced about those Hollywood years. But who were they? What were their names? Try as I might, I could not dredge them from my memory.

  Now I wished I could get my hands on those letters. But they were probably long gone. Grandma had been dead for several years now. I recalled my father and his siblings clearing out her house in Alameda. Those possessions that Grandma had not already given to her children and grandchildren had been divided among family members and the house had been sold. Had anyone kept Grandma’s personal papers and correspondence?

  I called my father at his condo in Castro Valley. He had been a history professor at California State University in Hayward. Now he was retired and enthusiastically enjoying a new passion, birding. While walking for exercise, he became interested in the birds he was seeing and bought a book. That led to more books and a beginning birding class. Then he joined the local chapter of the Audubon Society, going on their field trips. I had accompanied him on several of his own excursions to East Bay parks and a bird walk at Abbott’s Lagoon in the Point Reyes National Seashore in Marin County. Now he was planning to attend a birding festival later in June, the Mono Basin Bird Chautauqua in Lee Vining, the site of Mono Lake in the Eastern Sierra Nevada. I envied him his trip. The most direct route was over Tioga Pass Road, which wound through the beautiful high country of Yosemite National Park.

  “You should come with me,” Dad said. “I rented a cabin at the Lakeview Lodge in Lee Vining. I know you like hiking in Yosemite and it’s not that far from Lee Vining to the east entrance of the park. You could go tramping around Tuolumne Meadows.”

  “It’s tempting,” I said, and it was. “I’ll check my calendar. Say, Dad, what do you know about Grandma’s time in Hollywood?”

  “Only what I remember from the stories she used to tell. She worked with some big stars and a lot of people we’d never heard of. She really enjoyed those years, but after she met Dad, she was ready to give it up and settle down.”

  Unless something had happened, something darker, like a murder. Something that propelled her to leave Hollywood. I pushed away that thought a
s my father asked why I was interested in Grandma’s years as a bit player.

  “Just curious,” I told him. “There’s a new movie memorabilia shop in Alameda. Cassie and I stopped for a look. I bought a couple of title cards from two of Grandma’s old movies, The Women and We Were Dancing. Both starred Norma Shearer.”

  “Norma Shearer,” Dad said. “Mom thought the world of Norma Shearer. Said she was a real lady.”

  “I know. I wished I’d recorded some of Grandma’s Hollywood yarns while she was still alive.”

  “Water under the bridge,” he said. “You did record her oral history about working at the Kaiser Shipyard in Richmond during the war, and that was important.”

  I’d made the recording about the time they were building the Rosie the Riveter National Monument up in Richmond. Digital versions of the oral history recordings were now available through the Oral History office at the University of California’s Bancroft Library. “Here I am in my welder togs,” Grandma used to say when she showed off the picture that now stands framed on my desk at home. The photograph was taken in 1944 at Kaiser. Grandma’s welder togs were a pair of coveralls that hung on her slender frame. She also wore a mask pushed back to show her short blond hair and a big smile. That was her life after she’d married Grandpa. It was the Hollywood years that nagged at me now.

  “She kept corresponding with a couple of her roommates. Maybe they’re still alive. But I don’t remember their names. Did anyone save any of Grandma’s letters?”

  “I don’t know,” Dad said. “You should check with your Aunt Caro. She took a lot of Mom’s personal papers.”

  Dad and I chatted awhile longer. After I hung up, I looked up the phone number for Aunt Caro, my father’s younger sister Caroline. She and her husband, Neil, lived in Santa Rosa, up in Sonoma County.