The Hollywood Starlet Caper

by Robert Muccigrosso

  Chicago. Yeah. I'm not a sentimental sap, but when the New York Central reached the Windy City, I wanted so bad to call Louise. Just can't get her out of my mind. Don't really want to either, and much of the trip after we left Chicago found me thinking of her and picturing how happy we could be together.

  The conductor broke one of these reveries by yelling, “Los Angeles, Los Angeles, everyone off. Use all doors.” I was saddle-sore from too much sitting and regretted not having spent some of my wad of cash for a sleeping car berth. But here I was at last, ready and eager to find a new job and excitement. I grabbed my suitcase, shoved a few people aside, including the obnoxious kid and his obnoxious mother, and found myself in the land of bright sunshine and brighter dreams.

  Trouble was that some moron forgot to tell Mother Nature to hang out the sunshine. Instead, the old bitch had provided enough rain to turn the Sahara into a swamp. To make matters worse, Marty Hardy was nowhere to be seen. I had called him from Chicago to let him know when my train would hit the City of Angeles, and I could have sworn that he said “come to get you there.” As I later found out, Mumbles had said “cab to get you here.” I wasted a nickel to call him. No answer. Between the downpour and the absence of my pal I was half-way decided to catch the next train heading back east. What the hell, I had come this far, and so I grabbed a Checker Cab and headed for Mumbles's place.

  The cabbie told me that he was a dirt farmer from Oklahoma and wouldn't have had to leave had his spread got half as much rain as he'd seen in Los Angeles this month. “Lordy,” he moaned, “why is it that some places go dry and others are as wet as when Noah had his ark?” I couldn't imagine why the dumb fool would want to farm dirt in the first place. Served him right to fail, and I told him to shut up and keep driving. Besides, I wasn't in the mood to listen to his Okie whining, especially when I felt like whining myself.

  I didn't see much of interest along the way, although I was surprised to see a lot of stores in one area that indicated a sort of Chinktown or Niptown. Geez! Those people breed like flies. My thoughts went back to the dead Chink waiter at the time I was solving the Black Llama caper. I also pondered the fairly large number of cars that were on the streets, despite the downpour. Fifty years from now there might be a traffic problem if this continued. Probably not, but who knows?

  “Here we are, mister. Here's your place on Bunker Hill.”

  Bunker Hill! I head for Los Angeles and wind up in Beantown! Either this is a joke or I'm “Wrong Way” Corrigan.

  “Hey, Cabbie, what's a place out here doing with a name like Bunker Hill? I don't see any redcoats running around.”

  “Nope, that's just a name I guess they gave the place because it must have sold bunk beds. It's an interesting part of town. Got some real swell mansions, although some of them, like the address you gave me, have been jigsawed into small apartments. Crying shame, if you ask me. Anyway, lots of artists and young people hang out here. You'll like it, I think.”

  I wasn't sure about that. Didn't care for artists or young people. Didn't care for the land of sunshine greeting me with a miserable rainy day. And didn't care for the shabby looks of my friend's abode. But I was here, and the East was back there. So I took my good old mom's advice: you made your bed, sonny boy, now shut up and lie in it. The cabbie got my suitcase from the trunk, wished me well, but didn't thank me for the nickel tip I added to the fare. Cabbies are the same all over, I guess. You treat them well and they spit in your face.

  I walked to the front door, pressed a buzzer to Marty Hardy's second floor apartment, and waited. Then I waited some more. In the rain.

  “Hey, Mister,” a voice croaked from behind me, “the buzzer ain't working. Hasn't been for six months. Just go in. The door's always open.”

  Welcome to the City of Angels.

  Chapter 3

  In the time that I had known him I could never feel certain whether Marty was glad to see me or not. Oh, he always had a big smile all right, but it was pretty difficult to understand what he said. The booze and the occasional strange cigarettes that he smoked didn't help matters. But today Mumbles seemed sober—or at least relatively so—and a surprisingly understandable “Hiya, buddy, long time no see” accompanied his broad smile and firm handshake. “Put your grip down over there next to the pile of dirty laundry and let's have a snort or two. Whaddya drinking these days?”

  Marty hadn't changed. Nor had my taste for Jack Daniel's, several of which I polished off to keep my host company. He gulped down what seemed to me more rye than the Chicago bootleggers could have run from Canada in a couple of months. Catching up on old times can be more fun than tying a cat's tail to a tin cup–unless the cat's a manx, of course–although I got to confess that between the Jack Daniel's and Marty's rendering of the King's English I didn't learn much from him. And I'm not too sure of what he learned from me either, but we had a swell time.

  About 8:30 one of us mentioned something about eating. Then one of us staggered to the ice box and related its contents to the other. Not much there save for an unwrapped, unscaled fish that resembled and more than smelled like a mackerel that had been taking up residence in Marty's ice box for quite some time. My host said that he'd cook it as a special treat for me, but that he couldn't be bothered with scaling the damn thing. Somehow I felt sober enough to decline his generous offer. I settled for some scrambled eggs, which tasted plenty good once mixed in with an overripe banana; Marty opened a can of sardines and garnished them with dill pickles. For dessert I had a Jack Daniel's and Marty had some more rye. Straight. I hiccuped to him my praises for how well Angelenos eat. He started to reply but covered his mouth and sprinted to the john faster than Jesse Owens raced in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

  The next morning I found myself sprawled on the couch in the living room, my head the size of a prize-winning watermelon at some country fair and my mouth tasting of a bale of cotton. I squinted at the sun streaming in from a large window and wished that I hadn't. The way I felt I would have preferred yesterday's rain. I heard a groan coming from another room. Marty clearly was in no better shape than I.

  Can't beat black java and aspirins for what ailed us both, and we washed down several of the latter with plenty of the former. Our respective hangovers seemed pleased, and the watermelon that last night had passed for my head had dwindled to a mere cantaloupe. We chewed the fat for a while—his came from some strips of undercooked bacon, mine from an open bag of pork rinds. I hadn't had these tasty remains of dead pig since mom used to feed them to me as breakfast before I left for school. She said that they were what I deserved for being the kind of boy I was. Good old Mom.

  After we chewed the fat and talked about this and that, we settled down to business. Marty said that he currently was on a tricky job that involved washing a skirt. Whose skirt was it, I wondered, and why was he washing it anyway? Was it his? Had he become one of those? I shuddered to think so but reminded myself not to shower without clothes when we were alone in the apartment. Skirting the issue, so to speak, I asked him that since it was tricky why he didn't take it to the cleaner's. He looked puzzled. We batted it back and forth for a few minutes until I realized that Marty was “watching” a skirt for some well-heeled old guy whose babe, the lug feared, was rolling her big blue ones at some young hunk. That's the way the balls bounce, I told myself. I also breathed a sigh of relief.

  Then I asked Marty if he had anything in mind for me since I couldn't get by on my looks alone without a job. Marty chuckled at that one and told me about a certain broad back East who had said that if looks were what mattered I couldn't buy my way into a Hooverville. I didn't see what was so funny about that, considering I never planned to move into one. Maybe I misunderstood what Marty said. Besides, Mumbles himself was no Rudy Valentino in the looks department. His mug wasn't bad, although when he opened his mouth you did see two long incisors that would have scared the cape off Count Dracula. And you could see his stomach well before the rest of him rounded a corner. Back East he w
as chubby; out here he was plain fat. Single-handedly he was keeping Schlitz, Pabst, and Budweiser in business.

  “Don't worry, pal,” he assured me, “jobs in our line of work out here are like street cars that run regularly at all hours. Don't get your kisser in an uproar, my friend. You'll be swimming in moola before you can say 'George Gershwin.' ” I was going to tell him that I had no intention of saying the name of the late great songster but let the matter drop. After all, hadn't half of America, it seemed, come to southern California with bright hopes to match the bright sunshine that the place promised? Besides, I had begged, borrowed, but not stolen enough dough to keep me floating for now.

  After breakfast Marty suggested a tour of the city. Boy, this was a strange place. So few tall buildings, unlike my great city back East, but so much land to build on! Marty explained that we couldn't see the whole shebang in a day, a week, or even a month, but he promised to do his best as a guide. He winked and said that he could guess what I wanted to see first. I told him that though I hadn't seen any for a coon's age, I'd save it for later. I was sure that I could catch a Jimmy Cagney film after today, I said. He looked puzzled, but then Marty, to tell the truth, was no Einstein.

  We drove here and there and seemingly everywhere, with Marty giving an explanation of what here, there, and everywhere were. Trouble was that I didn't catch much of what he said. His mumbling played poorly with his open-top coupe and a breeze kicking in. I know we did drive past the swell houses of some Hollywood stars, most of whose names I failed to catch. A lot of these joints clustered in a place called Beverly Hills. Some of them we saw further out in hills and canyons. Marty said that a lot of big Hollywood Mongols lived there. I was surprised that the chinks had done so well. Sure, I knew you couldn't beat them for laundry and tasty food, especially if you liked cats and chows in your chow, but the movie industry? And here I thought that the Hebes ran the show out here. We batted that one back and forth until I managed to figure out that Marty was mumbling about Hollywood “moguls.”

  By that time it was getting late. Having skipped lunch, we could both hear hunger pains strumming our intestines. I could have settled for some grub at a diner, supposing that any such place here was better than the swill served back home at Ma's and that the service was friendlier than that provided by Ma's poor excuse for a waitress. But Marty insisted that we go to one of his favorite spots, a restaurant in Japtown called The Rising Sun. I should have known that any place with this name that was not open for breakfast didn't make sense.

  A young woman of the yellow persuasion greeted us as we entered. She smiled and seemed friendly, but I couldn't get over the fact that she was still in her bathrobe. Hell, it was early afternoon and this sneaky-looking tootsie hadn't bothered to dress? I hadn't recovered from my shock when she asked us to hand over our shoes. Now I wasn't going to give my Keds to anyone, let alone a strange-looking dame. I was sorry that I hadn't brought along my blackjack so that I could teach this would-be thief a lesson or two. I did begin to pull at the oversized sash that was holding her bathrobe together, but Marty said to stop and to give her my clodhoppers. At first I thought that he and Miss Slant-Eyes were working a scam, but I decided to make nice. Wasn't it some great poet or other who said that when we were in Japtown we should do as the Japs do? I gave her my keds but was sorry that I had forgotten to put on socks.

  A smiling Jap, dressed to the nines or tens—I forget which—showed us to a small table located near the kitchen. On the way I saw the meanest-looking snake I had ever seen outside the Bronx Zoo. It was slithering in a tank of water and looked almost as mean as my old foe, the Black Llama, although I doubted if it spoke Spanish. I pointed out the disgusting thing to Marty, who said that it was an eel and not a snake, although who could tell the difference I couldn't say. A waiter came for our order. He was also a Jap. For the life of me I couldn't figure out why they had so many of these undersized people employed here. Hungry as I was, I gladly would have settled for a dish of meat loaf, garnished with plenty of peanut butter, and some mashed potatoes and rutabaga on the side. Marty, however, insisted that we go native—whatever that meant—and ordered the house special for us to share. Naturally, I didn't catch all that he said, but I was sure that he knew what he was doing. He also asked for a bottle of sake, which despite its strange, warm taste wasn't bad. In fact, we ordered and half-finished a second one before our meal arrived. Piping hot, the dish contained some sort of meat that hit the spot. After we finished both it and the last of the sake, I got around to asking my pal what sort of animal we had eaten. “The eel you were looking at,” came the reply. I was sorry that I had asked. So was my stomach, which was doing flip-flops worthy of Olympic gymnastics.

  Marty was in no condition to drive back to his place, nor was I. The sake had knocked our socks off. But there seemed to be little traffic tonight, so what the hell. Maybe this City of Angels would never have a traffic problem, which I had envisioned when I first arrived. Marty ran a few lights, mumbled some curses or other at drivers who cursed him in return, and finally parked half a block away from his digs. We clambered up the stairs, and Marty managed to insert the key into his apartment door. He was in the midst of suggesting a nightcap or two when the phone interrupted. He probably would not have bothered to answer it, but he was standing next to it when it rang. He listened for a while and then wrote something on a pad which was on the telephone table. “Yeah,” he said. “You can bet on it. He's a good man. The salt of the earth.” And then he hung up.

  “Buddy boy,” he said, “you've got a job.”

  Chapter 4

  Too soused on the sauce to talk about my job, we put it off until the morning. Make that the late morning when sobriety gave a faint knock on the door and whispered that we should get our butts out of our respective sacks. Marty fixed breakfast while I took a shave and a shower, my first ones since decamping from the Twentieth Century Limited. Then we sat down at a leaf table with shaky legs to Marty's own special concoction, eggs Benedictine, which went lighter on the eggs than the Benedictine.

  “I'll tell you, pal,” Marty said after applying some jam to his eggs, “you've got a sweetheart of a job coming up.” He slurped the eggs and rinsed them down with some Maxwell House. “Tell the truth, I'd like the set-up for myself, but the client wants a new face in town that nobody recognizes. Know what I mean? Besides, I'm still washing my shirt.” Talking with his mouth full of food, Mumbles's speech had taken another big step toward the land of incoherence. “But I'm glad I can do it for you, buddy boy. What are friends for, if you get my drift?”

  I got his drift and I also got his story. For once, Marty, who was given to telling tall ones, had not exaggerated. I was getting a sweetheart of a job.

  It seems, as Marty told it, that one of the big studios had decided to make a movie out of some book called Gone with the Wind. Now I'm not too big on books, unlike my ditzy secretary Dotty who thinks, on those few occasions when she's thinking, that mugs like Proust and Joyce and a couple of the Russians with names that should have been spelled in English are the greatest thing since white bread. Give me The Daily News any time, or maybe some Black Mask tec stories. But this Gone with the Wind book, as Marty tells it, went over real big and now the Hebes or Mongols have decided to put it on the screen. Rumor has it that they'll get some English broad to play a bird called Scarlett O'Heron and Clark Gable himself to play Red Butler. You know, Marty explained, how you always have to have a butler if the English are involved. Anyway, before the bird was given the part, one of the Hollywood big shot agents had sort of promised the role to someone else, and that someone else was sore as hell that she wasn't going to play the lead in what promised to earn big smackeroos for all concerned.

  Sheila Stitchbottom, that sore-as-hell would-be movie star, had migrated to the City of Los Angeles with her parents and seven brothers and sisters after the Dust Bowl had ripped through Arkansas and their lives. [Hell, I thought, this was the real “gone with the wind.”] The family
kept together as best it could, but hard times won out and they scattered here and there. Sheila had managed to get a job as a notions clerk in a five-and-ten cents store. It didn't pay much, but it was a living, as they say, and that was more than a lot of people had.

  Then one day Sheila was sitting at a counter of a drug store sipping a chocolate milkshake, and this guy, Sheldon Blatt (the name sounded like “Fat” when Mumbles first said it), walks in. He takes one look at her, especially the tight sweater she had on, and decides that he'd better have a milkshake too and sits himself next to this blond eyeful. He tells her that he's a bigwig in the industry and asks her how she'd like to be in movies. Need I say more? The babe got so excited that she spilled her drink on the guy's lap. She was so embarrassed but managed to take a napkin and try to rub the mess off his trousers. To hear Marty tell it, Sheldon didn't want to have her stop rubbing. So impressed was he with her rubbing ability that he took her phone number and address, drew up a contract, and hurried to her small apartment in a seedy part of LA less than twenty-four hours later.

  The Hebe or Mongol who headed the studio was sure that Sheldon knew talent when he spotted it. So he tells Sheldon to sign the broad up but…not until she changes her name. Sheila Stitchbottom? Gimme a break! No one's going to become a star with a handle like that. So the two men put their heads together and decide to call her Shirley Stitchbottom. “Shirley” was real in at the time, thanks to that cute little one who was a big box office draw. Fine, says, Sheldon. I'll get her to change her name and sign on the dotted line. He visited Sheila that same day, convinced her to change her name for professional reasons, promised her the moon, and got her signature. A starlet was born. Sheldon Blatt departed a happy man, or pretty much so, since Shirley, née Sheila, wouldn't show him her tiny bedroom because it was such a mess. Or so she said.