I would never tell Ruth but she wasn’t a very good actress. Was the woman fooled by her enactment of intimacy? Did the woman care, as long as she got what she wanted?
Hollywood was all about sex. Everybody was on the hussle. Florenz Ziegfield had a casting couch. Given that some of his Ziegfield Girls started at 14 everyone knew what his preferences. Paulette Goddard had been that age when she joined his company. Marion Davies too. Mind you, Davies was only 17 when she became the lover of married, 52 year old Randolph Hearst.
Nobody messed with Randolph Hearst. Davies had an affair with Tom Ince and next thing you know Ince had died on Hearst’s yacht, one day into a cruise. Unknown journalist Louella Parsons was on board. Suddenly, she became the syndicated gossip columnist for all Hearst’s many newspapers. People assumed that was in return for keeping her trap shut.
Clark Gable got George Cukor replaced on Gone With The Wind by Gable’s friend, Victor Fleming. The official reason was that Cukor was too much of a woman’s director. The truth was that Gable had got ahead early in his career by giving a blow job to a queer movie star friend of Cukor and Clark didn’t want reminding of it every day on set.
Everybody seemed to sleep with everybody in Hollywood. They say Cary Grant and Howard Hughes were close. Very close. Grant also shared a house with Randolph Scott down on the beach.
Lots of stars had their secrets. MGM were spending a fortune buying up all the copies of Joan Crawford’s stag movie but the more they bought, the more copies kept turning up.
Rathbone and Bruce were still with Garbo. She had put a towel over her shoulders. Two women were also attending to her. I took my tray of cocktails back into the house and the rest of the party.
All the talk among the British contingent was of the European war since it had been declared a month earlier. That and an article in the British press entitled Gone With The Wind-up by Sir Seymour Hicks, in which the author had castigated the British actors in Hollywood for not coming home to enlist.
Actually, quite a number had done that very thing. I’d attended a farewell party Douglas Fairbanks Jnr had thrown in September for those who were heading back. All the men had red roses in the lapels of their dinner jackets.
Cary Grant, Ronald Colman, Willy Bruce, Herbert Marshall, Brian Aherne, Larry Olivier, Robert Coote, Rathbone, George Sanders and Reggie Gardiner all attended. Niven, who’d gone to Sandhurst and been commissioned in the Highland Light Infantry, had already gone back.
Willy Bruce and Basil Rathbone were both Great War heroes. Rathbone had the Military Cross. Bruce limped because a German machine-gunner had ripped his leg apart. Bruce was gung-ho. He was paying the fares of young British men in Hollywood to get back to England to enlist.
He had given me money for that. My boat sailed in a week. But before I went back to fight for king and country I had something to do. I was vaguely hoping he and Rathbone might help with the first part of it, though not the second.
I had seven days to track down and kill the person who had murdered my sister…
The Belgian and The Beekeeper Page 18
