He did scripts, but none of them was produced. He drank on the money and he grew quarrelsome. There were stories of fights with producers, and once he took a plane out at Santa Monica and buzzed a studio executive’s house at Malibu.
It was in 1949, while he was struggling to do another novel and sell a script, that Dix got involved in the Mildred Atkinson case. She was a hatcheck girl at a restaurant. He saw her reading the very novel that he had been hired to turn into a script. Rather than read the book—a fat bore of a thing—he took her back to his place at the Virginibus Arms on Camden. Later that night she was found strangled. Laurel Gray, who also lived at the Arms, said she had seen Atkinson leave, alone, but then Laurel fell in love with Dix. Brub Nicolai, one of the detectives on the case, had flown with Dix. He hated having to investigate his old commander; but he could never forget the completeness of Dix’s nature as a killer. In the end, they decided that Atkinson’s fiancé had killed her. But Dix’s nerves snapped along the way, and he even threatened to strangle Laurel once when he thought she doubted him.
She left him. Dix wrote another novel, The Evening of the Day (1952), about a man who is suspected of a string of rapes and killings. There were people who couldn’t finish the book, it was so disturbing and true. But it was a hit, and the movie was a triumph for Montgomery Clift. Dix worked less; he remained friends with Nicolai; and he knew Laura Hunt when she was in Los Angeles.
I corresponded with Nicolai, but there was not much he wanted to say. Was the LAPD ever satisfied about the Atkinson case? There were other, similar murders in the fifties and once or twice Dix came under suspicion. “He would laugh at me,” Nicolai wrote. “And he’d taunt me: ‘Just because I write mystery stories, you think I’m fit to be a killer.’ ”
His last novel was Beneath Suspicion (1964), about a police chief who plays a game with the world. He kills his mistress, knowing that he will be called upon to investigate the crime. When the trail goes cold, the man commits other murders to rekindle interest. The book was a sensation: the more so because Dix had given up company by then, living in Topanga Canyon, seldom seen in public. He died up there in 1970, wealthy, a man of letters, a distinguished soldier. But there were some sure he was a killer.
There was a new book, three-quarters done at his death. Laura was his agent then, and she told me it tells everything—even without an ending. I don’t know. An ending is important; it can say the writer has been pretending, or not. The book was locked away in her safe, and, as I said, she is dead.
I don’t know where that safe is. It might be untouched in the office still, or waiting on some L.A. dump, battered and rotting, about to fall apart, so the pages can scatter with the ash and the seagulls. Or be found by a red-hot publisher?
LAUREL GRAY
Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place, 1949,
directed by Nicholas Ray
I wonder why incest is such an American fascination? Is it because of our superstition about coincidence bringing the proper strangers together in the new desert land so that their magical coupling wipes away the loss and separation of leaving Europe? But if we believe in Mr. and Miss Right, then we must suppose an author who made them but deliberately flung them in opposite directions. It takes something like storying to crisscross the emptiness. We have formed a taste for lucky encounter, for intersection and unrecognized coincidence, for the story turning round to examine the storyteller’s face. And because we aspire so much to love, we think of this instinct as incest. Yet the chance of coincidence makes us suspicious, too, nervous that the narrator is sleeping with the story, that nice girl who seems to be ours in the daytime. Don’t we know when we see the lovely lady on the screen that the very camera has had her?
If she had been less famous or less rich when she died, in 1970, Laurel Gray might have been in an asylum. But that is how we are, here; we buy or talk our way to freedom, and our craziness lays claim to all the visible world. Laurel Gray had rights on the invisible, as well. She was a celebrated seer, who had virtually no contact with other people. Her house in Laurel Canyon was arranged so that she could live as fully in the spirit realm as possible. Perhaps she died from lack of substance, forgetting to breathe in her desire to feel out the future.
Who could have imagined that ending when she was born, in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, in 1926? She was a granddaughter of the man who had funded Henry Ford’s first company in 1903. It was said as she grew up that if Grandfather had been more resolute, why, all those cars would be Grays. But he had only invested his money (and it was only a little of his money), watched it grow and then let Ford buy him out in 1917. Laurel was born in a crowd of Grays sure of their place in the century, nearly neutralized by comfort and unaware of the foolishness in being so rich but remaining in Detroit.
Old Gray is the only man I ever heard of who really lost it all in 1929. For all those stories of suicides on Wall Street and families ruined, Gray is the one case that checks out. He lost an eight-figure sum: Laurel was three then. Of course, there was six-figure money left, the loose change, as well as a house, cars and a skeleton crew of servants. Laurel grew up plump, pretty and spoiled; she wore silk underclothes as a child, and there were Maine lobsters brought in twice a week. But the mood of the family was crushed. She lived in the shadow of a greater past, in a family that began to see how Detroit society now looked down on them.
Laurel didn’t much care. She took it as it came, tutors, private schools in the East, and the wartime summers at home and at Charlevoix. She moved with military men and older people; she used to sing at supper parties at the Chicago Club; there were stories of an abortion in 1944. In 1945, she went to Hollywood, on the say-so of a producer she had met.
She was in a few pictures: you can see her in The Harvey Girls, in the chorus on “The Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” number. For a year, 1946–47, she was married to Henry St. Andrews, a real-estate dealer from Santa Barbara. He had a ten-year-old son from another marriage, Lindsay, and the 20-year-old stepmother was always moved by the beautiful, timid child. They were better company than ever Laurel and St. Andrews managed to be. Even after the divorce, she would call the boy and take him to museums and movies. Lindsay was never robust, and he had an analyst who said Laurel was good for him. As for Laurel, she moved into an apartment at the Virginibus Arms, she had a good settlement from St. Andrews so long as she never remarried, and she tried out for movies sometimes. She had a masseuse come to the place three times a week, a woman who had been a theosophist and met Krishnamurti at Ojai. She went by the professional name “Miss Adele.” She talked to Laurel about the handsome young Indian who was supposed to be the reincarnation of Madame Blavatsky, and about his teachings as she worked the oil into Laurel’s bare back to the beat of samba music on the radio.
Laurel always sensed something about Dickson Steele; but she was sensing things about most people. Lindsay St. Andrews was off at St. Paul’s and, time after time, they used to write to each other on the same days. There wasn’t a plan about it. Maybe they had a rhythm. But Laurel suspected it was something deeper. And she thought Steele was dangerous, all through their affair. That was what attracted her—the aura of violence, and the mystery too, the feeling that there was a story there waiting to be read. She guessed he was a murderer, and she told Brub Nicolai what she felt.
Nothing was ever proved. Laurel went in fear for several years, yet it was not just fear. When she heard footsteps following her, or when the phone rang at night and then stopped without a word when she answered, she thought this was it, coming true. She was thrilled. She called Lindsay one night—he was at Yale then—and she had picked on a moment of great crisis for him. Laurel drifted into spiritualism as a business, carried along by this knack. She never advertised, but word got out that she was good. Once or twice, Nicolai consulted her on police matters; he never made it official, he never said where the hunch came from, but he got a reputation for instinct.
It was in 1959 that Laurel and Lindsay married. T
hey were only ten years apart, with no blood ties. But what were blood ties compared to the way they thought of things at the same time? It made news, and there was gossip; some people talked about incest. Laurel replied that while they might have been stepson and stepmother in this world, it was likely they had been brother and sister in another. But she didn’t sleep with him, and she took lovers to disperse what she called “those distracting impulses”—this said with a comical shiver. Lindsay sold fine art in Beverly Hills, and they had an intricate double act, bringing paintings and spiritual solace to several homes.
They moved into Laurel Canyon, and there were people in the sixties who spoke of “Laurel,” meaning her and the place, with hints of magic or danger there. Then Lindsay walked out, calling her a sick, grotesque woman who didn’t wash enough and sat in trances in front of daytime television. He was killed in a car crash in 1966, a year after the divorce. Laurel was reported to have murmured, “A Ford, of course,” closing the door on reporters. But it had been a Mercedes, on Highland.
To be a spiritualist, I suppose, you must be very selective. When you’re wrong, you forget it. When you’re right, it verifies the system. Gamblers work the same way. So most people decided Laurel was a charlatan, and a handful believed in her. But she stayed up in the house, with servants to look after her. People saw her by private consultation, except for Joan Didion, who wrote a piece on her for the Saturday Evening Post. It was a good article, funny, dry and touching, as if Didion knew this was a deluded woman yet an actress with her own odd poetry. The article contained some of Laurel’s predictions—most of them wrong and forgotten now. But everyone remembers the one about an appointed outrage coming, killers and wolves slipping down out of the hills, “retribution … somewhere like Beverly Glen or Cielo Drive,” Laurel had opined. That was published nine weeks before Manson. A year later, Laurel died, of cancer. She hadn’t seen a doctor in fourteen years. She was forty-four, and I suppose in that long a time most of us will experience one astonishing coincidence or premonition. Or did the Manson gang read the Saturday Evening Post and believe in destiny?
ROY EARLE
Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra, 1941,
directed by Raoul Walsh
All these people going west, have they got names to be blessed? It’s like being way off from a line of trees, toward sunset, watching people walking through them, all going in the same direction. While the sun beats on your eyes, you study the people, and then you start to feel that the trees are moving too, just ebbing out toward the west, like stick people staggering into the fire.
It’s all one motion, I think, the way so many people came west from Europe, and then west again across the country. And these were not nomads. They were the members of families who had lived in one tight place for centuries. And then in the space of a couple of hundred years, they cut off their own heritage, because they were persecuted, because they were poor and always would be, or because they were angry and difficult, and they headed west. But where do they go when they have got as far as they can go, and when they see the kingfisher color of the sea? Can they ever stop?
The great-grandfather of Roy Earle was a cider farmer in the Calvados region, in Normandy, France. The name then was Oeul. He was a Huguenot, and he came to Boston in 1836, though he’d never once in his life seen Paris. There must have been some commotion or upset, something that urged him to get away; no one knows what it was now. You can see the birds go south in August, but don’t ask them if they know why they’re doing it.
Roy Earle was born in Rush Creek Valley, Indiana, in 1902, in lush farming country, with a creek and a hole where the catfish basked on afternoons. His father grew corn and vegetables, and kept pigs and chickens. In the Great War, as Roy was growing up, his father got enough money selling corn to buy the farm. But he remembered how hard it had been, for him and his father, and he expected Roy to work after school without asking for anything. Roy loved the farm and the country, but there was a knot of anger in him.
When he was seventeen, he went to Indianapolis and worked in a factory making parts for cars. But he never got on with the boss, and one day he attacked him and beat him up. The boss pressed charges and in 1920 Roy got a six-month sentence in the city jail.
So, after that, he went back to the farm, no matter that his father treated him like an outcast. That passed away a while, but Roy had a friend in the next town whose brother had been a bank robber. They all hung out together in 1921 and 1922, and Roy got talked into joining them. There were small towns in the south of the state, and the young men held up a couple of stores and a bank without ever alarming or hurting anyone. But no one they robbed was ever going to take them on. Then, in 1924, with some help from Chicago, they went after a bank in Lafayette, and the three of them were caught. Roy got three years in the state penitentiary.
When he came out in 1927, he moved on to Chicago and he was a part of the Mob there, whether he knew it or not. In 1931, he held up the biggest bank in South Bend, and a lady was killed in the shooting. There was a manhunt, and they got Roy and he was sentenced to life in Mossmoor in 1932. He was thirty, and “life” then meant another thirty years before anyone would remember he was there.
But something happened. Some of the old Chicago people put in a word for him. They must have put some money in too, because they got Roy out of jail in 1940 on a pardon. There was noise about it in the papers, but the authorities said that Earle was a sick man. He’d been ill at Mossmoor and he looked thin and gray when he got out.
Of course, the money that had sprung him didn’t forget. The Chicago organization told Roy to make his way to California; he could pay his dues there. They gave him a car and in the spring of 1940 Roy drove out by way of Des Moines and Denver to Los Angeles.
He had never seen mountains, or known air as clear. Some days, he reckoned anyone could make a fresh start there. He met a girl, Velma Goodhue, who had a bad leg. Roy thought that maybe if he could raise the money for her to have an operation, she might think of marrying him. So that’s how he got drawn in on the Palm Springs Hotel job, along with Red Hattery and Babe Kozak, and Louis Mendoza, a clerk at the hotel. There was a woman with them too, Marie Garson, a dance-hall girl.
They did the hotel, and got away with $500,000 worth of jewels and cash—or so the hotel claimed. Velma had the operation, but once she could dance with anyone who asked, she saw Roy as a sad-looking, middle-aged guy. Roy had trouble fencing the stuff. He knew he was being double-crossed by the Mob, and he killed a man named Kranmer, who tried to take the jewels from him.
So Earle was on the run, with Marie Garson, who was in love with him. He went into the Sierras, around Mount Whitney, and the manhunt closed in on him—“Mad-Dog Earle,” as they called him by then. He clawed his way up into the rocks, but it was cold at night, and he had nowhere to go. A sharpshooter got him on the second day, from half a mile away. The press said what a wretched end it was, but Roy really loved the mountains and the views and the streaks of iron and copper color in the rock as the sun went down.
MARIE GARSON
Ida Lupino in High Sierra, 1941,
directed by Raoul Walsh
Before the two bridges were built in the 1930s, the Golden Gate and the Bay, San Francisco was an island city that relied on ferries to Oakland and Sausalito. The city was made so that the Ferry Building could be seen all the way down Market Street. That point was the eye and ear of the city, and Marie Garson was born a shout away, at Mission and Beale. Her father was a seaman on the ferry, and her mother had been a housemaid in one of the big mansions on Russian Hill. Marie was born in 1919, and the ferry boat hooted its way home through the fog on that November night.
The father was a big, boastful man, a tyrant in the house, and a boyo in the bars. But in the 1930s, as the new bridges felt their way across the water, spelling the end of the ferries, he drank more. He became morose and brutal, and he beat Marie and her mother. In 1936, Marie packed a bag and hitched a ride on a truck going sout
h. Two days later, she was in Los Angeles.
She met a young writer, John Fante, and lived with him on Bunker Hill. It was her first gasp of happiness. She worked as a waitress and read his stories and they made each other feel good. Sometimes they took a bus down to the beach in the evening and swam in the darkness. He told her great stories, and she loved to keep warm in his arms. But he grew gloomy over his poverty and one day another man flirted with her when she served him. His name was Kozak, and Marie could not get his tough face out of her head.
She moved in with him, and he put her to work at a dance hall: she was an available partner for anyone with a dime. Marie hated it, but she was in awe of Kozak and she slept with some of his cronies if he suggested it. They were small-time crooks too, and it was when they got involved in the Palm Springs Hotel job in 1940 that she met Roy Earle. She liked his rueful eyes, and the scorn he had for Kozak: one glance of his taught her what to see. Marie could tell that Earle was soft on someone else, but she stuck with Roy, hoping that if she stayed loyal and patient he would come round. They had only a summer together, but Roy loved her and trusted her, and she thought of him as a father.
When Roy was shot, in the Sierras, Marie took his dog, Pard. She realized later that the ring he had given her—from the spoils of the hotel robbery—was enough to get her a small place in Culver City. She had a job on the assembly line with the Hughes Company, and that was how she met several fliers. There was even a weekend when Hughes himself noticed her, flew her down to Mexico and had dinner with her. He didn’t speak to her again, but he never treated her badly and he had her made a supervisor.
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