by Mary Miley
Mary Pickford took Barbara’s hand and held it between her own two. Looking deep into her eyes, she said, ‘You are very important to us at the studio, Barbara, but I want you to know that we will carry on without you until you are ready to return.’ When Barbara dissolved into fresh tears, Miss Pickford turned to Simon Wallace. ‘She’s not to worry about her job, d’you hear?’
He nodded and his eyes misted up. ‘Bless you, Miss Pickford. That’s very kind of you. We’ll see how she does. But it’s true that staying busy is the best way to heal. Knowing my little sis the way I do, I think you’ll be seeing her back at the studio before too long.’
As soon as they had delivered their condolences, Douglas and Miss Pickford – I could never bring myself to call ‘America’s Sweetheart’ by her first name – got ready to leave for the studio. They offered to give me a ride back, but I declined. I had no clear goal in mind, but something was urging me to linger and talk with these people a little longer.
I thanked them and said I’d catch a Red Car back if I couldn’t cadge a ride. No one was ever too far from one of the bright red electric streetcars that shuttled all over the city.
Picking up a beef croquette and a glass of orange punch, I worked my way across the room to Bunny, Barbara’s older sister. She was standing in the corner with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of water in the other, sucking furtively on the cigarette between sips of something that I quickly realized wasn’t really water, making me wonder if she was sneaking the smoke or the drink. Or both.
‘Hello, I’m Jessie Beckett. I work with Barbara at the studio.’
‘Bunny Wallace, Barbara’s older sister.’ So she wasn’t married. I wondered briefly who she was hiding from with her cigarette and hooch if not a husband. Big Brother, no doubt. He couldn’t see her from where he stood. I pegged him as the self-appointed patriarch of the family.
‘All of us at Pickford-Fairbanks are so sorry about this tragedy.’
Bunny made appreciative noises about Barbara’s film friends being there when she needed them, and we continued this soft, useless palaver for a few minutes while I waited for her to loosen up. People don’t burst out with the truth, I’ve learned. They need to be coaxed. I was usually good at coaxing, not because I had any magic words, but because I listened closely and was content to be patient – traits I’d learned growing up in vaudeville where success depended on concentration, patience, and close attention to detail.
‘I didn’t know Joe at all,’ I said, after I’d established my credentials.
‘Lucky you,’ she sneered, filling her lungs with smoke and blowing it out through her lips in a perfect O.
‘What do you mean?’
She offered me a Chesterfield. I don’t smoke very often, but I accepted, knowing that the first few draws would leave me a trifle light-headed. She flicked her lighter and held it close. ‘Want something stronger than that?’ she asked with a scornful glance at my punch.
‘Sure.’
She sloshed a bit of her drink into mine. We were friends.
‘Joe Petrovitch was a bastard.’
‘How do you mean?’
She waited. I waited longer. Silence is one of the best ways to nudge someone into confidences. She gave a furtive look around, as if to make sure no one was within earshot, and took another swig of her drink.
‘I thought Joe was all right at first. Nice enough looking. A decent provider, if you know what I mean. Barbara had never been married before, and she was pretty old – thirty-three – when she got married to Joe, who was a few years older. After a couple months, she started changing. Oh, I was such a simp, I didn’t notice at first. When she canceled coming to Simon’s house for dinner because she was sick, I thought nothing of it. We all get sick, right? When she stopped our Saturday morning movies together because she was so busy at the studio, I understood. Jobs come first, right? When she said she couldn’t meet me for shopping on her birthday, I wasn’t suspicious. In fact, I was such a chump that when I dropped by her house later with a birthday cake, I believed her when she said she’d fallen down the stairs and broken her arm. It wasn’t until the third time I saw her face bruised that I started wondering how many times a person could walk into a door.’
She drew a lung full of smoke and let the ashes fall to the floor. I waited.
‘I talked to Simon. I wanted to call the police, but he said, Are you crazy? The police aren’t going to get involved in a family matter. He said let him deal with it. Next thing I knew, he’d gone over to Barbara’s and beaten the bejesus out of Joe. Told him if he ever touched a hair on her head again, he’d come back and cut off his balls.’
She stopped talking, and I worried that she had finished. I took a drag on my Chesterfield and said, ‘So, did that take care of the problem?’
Bunny shook her head. ‘Maybe for a coupla months. But it was hard to tell, because Barbara kept dodging us, so maybe we just weren’t seeing her when she was banged up. Then, a week ago, I ran into her at the butcher’s and saw her split lip. She tried to tell me it was a fever blister, but by now, I’ve grown out of the Dumb Dora stage. She begged me not to tell Simon.’
‘Did you?’
‘Hell, yeah. He said he’d take care of Joe once and for all. But right about then, Joe got himself killed at the theater.’
‘And the cops don’t know who did it?’
She shook her head. ‘They oughta pin a medal on whoever it was. Saved Simon the trouble. I hope they don’t catch the guy.’
Was I the only person who wondered the obvious – whether Simon Wallace had been the killer in the red coat? But it was obvious only if you knew Simon had beaten Joe up that one time and threatened him with worse. Maybe the cops weren’t aware of that. I surveyed the crowd. There were perhaps fifty people inside the house and more spilling onto the porch and lawn. Some looked familiar because they worked at the studio, but most were strangers to me. Friends of the family, no doubt. Neighbors. People from church. Friends of Joe’s. Enemies of Joe’s?
Never mind, I told myself firmly. This was none of my business, and I was too busy to get involved in another murder investigation. The last time I’d played Sherlock Holmes, it had nearly killed me, and I was keen on staying alive. Crushing my cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, I excused myself and caught a ride back to Pickford-Fairbanks with one of the senior pirates, who I almost didn’t recognize without his bare feet and pirate rags. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that the killer had been right there all along, mingling with the mourners at the reception.
THREE
Walking through a studio’s bustling back lot can play havoc with a person’s sense of time and place. As I made my way through the slums of New York, past an ancient Arabian bazaar, and around a Mississippi bayou – dodging carpenters and electricians who were lugging supplies to the sets for Miss Pickford’s current film, Sparrows – a familiar, sharp whistle pierced the din.
‘David!’ I called. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Just come to pay a call on my favorite girl,’ he said, circling my waist with his arm and giving me a squeeze. He looked like a million bucks in his Oxford bags and smart two-toned shoes. ‘I haven’t seen you in two whole days,’ he said softly, ‘and I’m getting desperately lonely … will you come over tonight if I dangle a bottle of French champagne?’
There were a lot of people around, so I couldn’t throw my arms around his neck like I wanted to. I settled on a discrete peck on the cheek. ‘I’ll come even if you’re serving panther sweat.’
‘Never touch the stuff. I’m not in the bootlegging business anymore, remember? All my liquor sales are medicinal – lock, stock, and legal. However, in the interest of total honesty, which I know you prize above jewels, I’ll confess that my real reason for stopping by the studio is to have a look at Doug’s latest stunt. Rumor says it’s a jaw dropper.’
‘And it’s a big secret, but I expect they’ll let you in to see.’
He gave me that boyish g
rin that never fails to melt my heart. ‘I expect they will, since I’m one of the investors.’
‘In The Black Pirate?’ That was news to me. I knew he’d put up half the money for Mary Pickford’s last picture after he’d followed me to Hollywood from Oregon, investing some of the fortune he’d made as Portland’s bootleg boss and establishing himself as a film collaborator and honest entrepreneur. I was the only person who knew otherwise, and I was no more likely to blab about his shady past than he was to blab about mine.
Even David didn’t know the full extent of my wayward youth. My mother died when I was twelve, leaving me to make my way in vaudeville unsupervised, so to speak. I’d parlayed the skills I’d picked up as a magician’s assistant into something more lucrative, becoming a passable thief. The few times I got caught, my young appearance usually got me off with threats and a beating. I was still playing kiddie roles at twenty-four, and it was nothing for me to pass for fifteen or sixteen; even so, I saw the inside of a jail cell more than once. I’d helped a phony Hindoo mystic con the gullible and bereaved into believing we contacted the spirits of their loved ones, and I’d narrowly missed a prison sentence for impersonating a missing heiress in a swindle to steal her fortune. But I went straight last year and planned to stay that way.
‘Yes, siree bob. Do you know, I’ve already earned my original hundred thousand clams back from Little Annie Rooney? And it was only just released last month! It’s tearing across the country, playing to full theaters several times a day. At this rate, who knows how much I’ll clear – three, four, maybe ten times what I put in. If I can do that again with Doug’s pirate picture, well, I’ll be twice blessed, as me sainted mother would say.’
He delivered that last line in a convincing Irish brogue with his hand on his heart in the familiar melodramatic pose, reminding me what a good actor he could have been. David Carr looked more like a film star than most film stars, and he had charm enough to melt icebergs, but unlike all the other handsome men who flocked to Hollywood to try their luck in the pictures, he had never expressed the slightest interest in acting. ‘I aim to make lots of money,’ he’d once told me, ‘and acting isn’t the way to do that.’ His fortune had been built on bootlegging, speakeasies, gambling dens, whorehouses, and smuggling, but since coming to Hollywood, he’d gone straight.
Or so he kept telling me.
Hands clasped, we threaded our way through the construction to the back lot where Douglas Fairbanks and Donald Crisp, the film’s director, had been working on the ship’s rigging stunt. ‘They’ve been going at it for the past three weeks,’ I said.
‘When you see a Fairbanks film, you get your money’s worth, that’s for damn sure. Is he doing the stunt himself?’
I grimaced. ‘Of course he is! And Crisp has been giving him hell about it. Accusing him of being a show-off and taking reckless chances with his safety.’
‘Ouch.’
‘They’ve been quarreling a lot. We all pretend not to hear.’
‘Isn’t Crisp acting in this one too?’
‘Yeah, he plays a one-armed Scottish pirate – the comic relief – who protects the princess when Douglas’s character isn’t around.’
‘How does that work? I mean, him with two arms.’
‘They pull it behind his back at the elbow. Not the most convincing one-armed man I’ve ever seen, but as long as the camera angles are right, it seems to work.’
I escorted David to the set where the spectacular stunt in the ship’s rigging would take place. There, on the topmost spar, was Charlie Stevens, Douglas’s sometime double. As we watched, he plunged his dagger into the heavy canvas sail and, holding on to its hilt, swooped down the sail with an old-fashioned rebel yell, ripping the canvas in two as he plummeted to the deck. After landing on his feet with a resounding thud, Charlie made his way over to Director Crisp, and a serious discussion ensued.
‘Holy Moses!’ exclaimed David.
‘Charlie and Chuck Lewis and Douglas have been practicing the descent for days and Crisp still isn’t happy with it.’
‘But Doug’s going to do the scene when the cameras roll?’
‘Of course he is. You know his pride.’ We all knew. Douglas Fairbanks’s remarkable acrobatic skills were his trademark. Stand-ins might practice his stunts in order to spare him the exhausting repetitions, but Douglas insisted on performing virtually all of his own stunts for the actual filming.
As men began dismantling the split sail to sew the canvas together for the next trial run, Crisp snapped, ‘Get that other canvas strung up pronto!’ and clipped a hook to Charlie’s belt to hoist him back up to the spar. I left David to his own devices and reported for work.
Back-lot sets work well enough for most scenes, but pirate films need ships and an ocean. So the next week, The Black Pirate cast and crew loaded up and left Hollywood for a few days on location on Santa Catalina Island.
It was my first visit to Santa Catalina, an island lying off the California coast an hour-and-a-half ferry ride from Los Angeles. Back in the days when it belonged to Spain and then to Mexico, it harbored smugglers, seal hunters, gold prospectors, and pirates, which made it an obvious choice for a swashbuckling pirate picture. Me, I think it was the long-standing rumors of buried treasure swirling about the island like sea mist that persuaded Douglas to choose this particular location. It was a simple matter for him to get permission from the island’s owner, Mr William Wrigley, the chewing gum millionaire: Douglas had never met a man who wasn’t a friend. Mr Wrigley even lent his private steamship to carry us and our equipment there and back.
As assistant script girl, I stood on the lowest rung of the production ladder. My supervisor, Julia Girone, held a spot somewhere in the middle. She played a key role as the director’s right hand, the liaison between him and the film editor. Her main responsibility was continuity, which means making sure clothing, props, make-up, and weather stay the same from scene to scene. She also tracked wardrobe and make-up, kept notes on each scene, and took each day’s film and notes to the editor. I was eager to learn everything I could about filmmaking so I could be promoted to script girl one day. For now, I played the assistant’s role cheerfully enough, doubling as a girl Friday and doing whatever anyone asked. Growing up alone had taught me to work hard, as if everything depended on me. It usually did.
‘Jessie, you help with the wigs,’ said Julia, thumbing through a sheaf of papers as she muttered, ‘Geez, I hope Barbara Petrovitch comes back soon. Shed number four, Jessie; you’ll see it, just follow Harry. Then suitcases. You’re bunking with Mildred Young and Fannie Kirchner.’ She smiled and added, ‘Two beds. One cot. Draw straws.’ She raised her voice so everyone on the dock could hear and added, ‘Hot dogs on the terrace when you need them, but we need to hustle to get everything stashed by dark. Early to bed, early to rise.’
The first day, we filmed from the shore as two dozen extras rowed a longboat past the point. Then we moved to a more sheltered spot to film Douglas doing a beach scene and walking the plank.
‘He did it seven times,’ I told David when I telephoned him that night from the lobby of the Metropole Hotel. ‘And he needed a dry costume for each take. We also finished the on-shore scene when Douglas gallops to the rescue along the beach. This new Technicolor process makes filming a lot harder. We had five cameras yesterday filming the galley scene. But Douglas says the results will be spectacular. Oh, and I have news – Douglas fired Donald Crisp. Al Parker is going to direct now.’
‘What the hell happened?’
‘Rumor says they fell out over Douglas’s stunts. Crisp is still here, since he’s also the Scottish pirate, and they couldn’t change that in the middle of the picture, but he’s no longer directing.’
‘That sounds messy. And you sound tired.’ I liked the concern I could hear in his voice.
‘I’m dead! We worked fourteen hours the first day and sixteen today. I don’t think I sat down once. But I’m not complaining. Douglas works harder than anyone. D
id I tell you he wrote this scenario himself? And he gets into every detail. He and Miss Pickford are on site even when he’s not in the scene.’
‘Mary’s there? I thought she was filming Sparrows.’
‘She took a break. When one goes on location, the other goes too. They’re staying at the Wrigley mansion. You know what someone told me? They’ve never spent a single night apart in their entire six-year marriage.’
He probably heard the wistful note in my voice, because he said softly, ‘I wish we didn’t have to spend our nights apart.’
‘Me too. I’m sorry to be gone all week. I’ll come over Sunday night as soon as we get back.’
‘We could be together every night if you moved in here with me.’
My wistful note hardened. ‘David, we’ve talked this over before. Neither of us can risk our reputations. You’d not be welcome at Pickfair any longer, and I’d lose my job for sure.’
‘That’s the most two-faced—’
‘No, it’s business. Pickford-Fairbanks can’t afford to be known as a studio with immoral employees. Their wholesome reputation is a big part of their success.’
‘You could quit your job. I’ve got more money than you could spend if you lived to be a hundred and five.’
There was an obvious solution to this dilemma – one we carefully avoided after David told me he thought marriage wasn’t a word, but a sentence. And to be frank, I wasn’t sure what my answer would be if he did ask. Vaudeville vagabonds who moved to a new town every week usually dreamed of a stable life, and I was no different. I thought it would be swell to have a picket-fence house, a husband who worked an honest job, and maybe a few kids playing in the yard. I didn’t really think it would ever happen – respectable men don’t marry women born on the wrong side of the blanket, like me. But a backsliding, bootlegging crime boss didn’t sound like a safe bet either. I couldn’t help being crazy about David. But marry him? Time to change the subject.
