Shooting for the Stars

by R. G. Belsky

  She looked around the stately bar. “And so here I am today, sitting in the Beverly Wilshire and looking like I belong,” she said.

  I nodded. I figured this was a good time to make my move.

  “Let’s talk about Laura Marlowe.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Did she work for you?”

  “You know she did.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “The stuff we made was what you called soft porn, I guess. There was nudity, and a lot of foreplay—but no actual sex. We got in a lot more stores that way, and we didn’t have to worry so much about getting in trouble with the postal service. But everyone knew what they really were. Porn is an old story. It’s been around forever, you know.

  “The girls that came to me were an old story too. Some of them just arrived in Hollywood and were still dreaming they’d find their big break. Others had been beaten down and chewed up already by the Hollywood machine. But they didn’t want to go back to wherever they came from. Or maybe they couldn’t. Or maybe they still had a fantasy that a talent scout or producer would discover them one day if they just didn’t quit. Sometimes the dream dies hard.

  “Laura was different though. You could tell that from the first moment you met her. She was beautiful, of course, but it was more than that. She had this aura about her, something that just made her stand out from all the other gorgeous women in this town. She was in pretty bad psychological shape by the time she got to me. She’d been working in show business her entire life, she said, and she was discouraged and depressed. She’d never had any kind of a real life. She was nineteen years old, but she was like a child. She told me that she never really knew her father, and that her mother was very overbearing and demanding. She was a mess.”

  “Where was the mother?”

  “Back in New York. There’d been some kind of a falling out between them. She’d left New York, drifted around the country for six months or so, and finally wound up in Los Angeles. Laura didn’t even know if she wanted to be in show business anymore at that point. She was very confused. I think she was just looking for some kind of peace in her life. She told me she’d never had a chance to be happy. Maybe I felt sorry for her. Maybe it was some kind of motherly instinct in me. Maybe I saw something of myself in Laura, and I wanted to help her have the career I never had. But I decided to help her become a movie star. And that’s just what I did.”

  “The question is: How did she go from being in porn films to becoming America’s sweetheart?”

  “Not exactly the most common route to stardom, is it? But not that uncommon either,” she said. “You’d be surprised.”

  I thought about asking her who else had followed that same route. But I resisted the temptation. She was talking about Laura Marlowe, telling me things I didn’t know. I didn’t want to do anything to interrupt that.

  “In addition to making the films, my girls used to perform other services too. There were many wealthy, powerful men in this town who were eager to pay big money for a chance to spend an hour or two of pleasure with one of these young lovelies. The funny thing is some of them were producers and directors, the same ones who had rejected them at casting calls. But they didn’t seem to object to going to bed with them. I used to think there was a certain irony to that. Which I guess is what gave me the idea.

  “One of the men Laura was seeing was a big-time producer—the same producer who had beaten me up years earlier. When I found out, I got mad at first. But then I decided to get even. I set up a hidden camera in the hotel room where they had their trysts—and I filmed it all. The producer was still having trouble in the sack, which came across in his performance—or lack of performance, I guess. Besides, I knew he had a big house now in Beverly Hills with a wife who would take him to the cleaners if she ever found out he was playing around. One way or another, this film would have ruined him in Hollywood if it ever got out.

  “So I went to his office and told him what I did. I even showed him the film. I especially enjoyed watching his embarrassment as he watched it. At first, he thought I was there to blackmail him. Which I guess I was. But not in the way he thought. He asked me how much money I wanted. No money, I said. He looked confused. Then I told him my price. He was starting a new movie in a few weeks. I wanted Laura to have a part in it. He had no choice, of course. It wasn’t a big part, but it got her started. And the rest, as they say, is history.”

  There was something missing. She had told me a lot of the story, but she’d left out one big piece of the puzzle.

  “What about Thomas Rizzo?” I asked.

  “Who?” she smiled.

  “He was the money man for your operation, right?”

  “I guess that’s as good a way as any to put it.”

  “And one of your clients too?”

  “I’d hardly call him a client.”

  “But he sometimes slept with the girls.”

  “Only one. Laura.”

  She told me that Rizzo had always treated her well. No rough stuff, no threats—it was always business. And despite his reputation, she said he was a very moral, almost puritanical man. She believed it made him uncomfortable to be involved in a pornography business, but that’s all it was to him—a business. He never messed with the merchandise. He talked about his wife, he talked about his young son, he went to church regularly. He’d told her once that he had never broken his marital vows.

  “But then he met Laura,” she said. “And Rizzo fell in love with Laura.”

  “What kind of love are we talking about here?”

  “Head over heels. Passionate. Schoolboy crush. Whatever you wanted to call it. He had it bad. He wanted to marry her and live happily ever after.”

  “Except he was already married. How did he deal with that dilemma?”

  “Laura was the love of his life, he told me. She cared about him too. Oh, I don’t know if she loved him in the same way he loved her. He was kind of like a friend and a lover and a father figure all rolled into one. She’d been confused and scared and lost for so long. Rizzo protected her.”

  “What else did he do for her?”

  “He really made her a big movie star. I got her started that day with the producer, but Rizzo was the one who catapulted her to fame. He was a silent partner then in one of the big studios. It was off the books, of course. But the mob was very involved in Hollywood. Rizzo used all his clout and all his money and all his powers of intimidation to get her the lead role in Lucky Lady, which made her an overnight star. The fantasy is that Laura got that part through a lucky break. Well, she got a break, alright. But there was more than luck involved. There always is in Hollywood. It’s all about who you know. Laura knew Rizzo.”

  “What happened to the two of them?” I asked.

  “I talked to Laura at the end before she died. She was very confused at that point. Being a big star hadn’t solved all the problems in her life. I was never sure what they all were. She didn’t talk about them a lot. But she did talk that day about Rizzo. She told me he had gone back to his wife and family. He was a stand-up guy, she said. She knew that sounded funny, because of all the terrible things that they said he’d done. But he’d always treated her well. She spoke of him with great affection. She cared about him very much.

  “Anyway, he went back to New York. Laura became a big star, then she died—and she became a legend. They were like two ships passing in the night, I guess. People tell me Rizzo never forgot her though. They say he gets very emotional if anyone ever mentions her name or one of her movies comes on TV. I heard a story that he sends a dozen roses to the cemetery where her ashes are buried every year on the anniversary of her death and on her birthday.” She shook her head. “The mobster and the movie star. Love works in strange ways, huh? You never know what it does to people.”

  After Glimmer Productions went out of business, Jackie Sincl
air said she’d gotten involved in real estate, buying up a lot of properties in Beverly Hills and in the Valley just before prices started to skyrocket. She was a wealthy woman now. She threw lavish parties, she knew the rich and famous, and she moved in all the right circles. She’d taken Hollywood on at its own game, and she’d beaten it.

  But, sitting there in that dark bar, she looked wistful as she talked about it all. Maybe it was the memories of Laura Marlowe. Maybe it was memories of her long-ago death. Or maybe it was the memories of herself back then, the young girl with the southern accent who came to Hollywood with dreams of becoming a famous movie star.

  Sure, she’d made it in Hollywood in a different way.

  She was a player.

  But she wasn’t a star.

  Sometimes the dream dies hard.

  Chapter 29

  I DROVE up to Barstow the next day to see Sally Easton, the surviving member of Sign of the Z. I took the freeway out of Los Angeles, then headed north up into the mountains and through the desert until I got there. Barstow was like another world compared to Hollywood. A sleepy little place surrounded by sand, sagebrush, and cactus. Easton lived about thirty minutes beyond the town, at the end of a long gravel road with no other houses around. If she was trying to get away from it all, she’d picked the right spot.

  I’d called her the night before and said I was coming. I went through several scenarios in my head beforehand about how to play this. I thought about telling her I was interested in buying her property. I thought about posing as some sort of federal law enforcement official and bluffing her into talking to me. In the end though, I wound up just telling her the truth. Or at least most of it. I said I was a journalist who wanted to do a story about her new life after prison. She was fine with that. She told me to come up.

  Sally Easton was in her early fifties now. She had gray hair and lines in her face, and looked a lot different than she did in the newspaper picture taken when she was arrested. But she still had that lost little girl quality to her. It was as if she’d never found what she was looking for so she buried herself in whatever life she was in at the moment—whether it be a cult like Sign of the Z or a lonely farm in the middle of the desert.

  She met me at the front door holding a bible in her hand. Inside there were several pictures of Jesus in the living room and a large cross hung over the fireplace.

  “I discovered Jesus in jail,” she said. “He gave me the peace that I’d been seeking. All my problems, all my worries, all my anxieties disappeared as soon as I accepted Jesus as my savior. Have you accepted him, Mr. Malloy?”

  “Actually, I have,” I said.

  I told her I’d been baptized as a young boy growing up in Ohio.

  “Have you continued to accept him as your friend and savior since then?”

  “We’ve drifted apart a bit over the years.”

  “You should reaffirm those vows,” she said.

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “Jesus can change your life.”

  “My life could use some changing,” I said.

  She told me she’d bought the farm after she got out of jail with money her parents left her. She raised chickens, sold eggs and vegetables she grew, and lived a quiet life here. She was a member of the local church and taught Sunday School. I pretended to be interested, waiting for a chance to ask her about her days with Zorn and the cult.

  “How much do you remember about Sign of the Z?” I asked.

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “But it’s part of the story of your life.”

  “Yes, of course it is.”

  “What was Russell Zorn like?” I asked.

  I thought it might be difficult to get her to talk about Zorn and the cult, but it wasn’t. She seemed almost eager to relive those days. Like they were happy times, not a nightmare of blood and violence and insanity that had put her in jail for most of her adult life. Maybe Russell Zorn was like Jesus was to her now. He was the answer to all of her problems back then, someone she could believe in no matter what.

  “He was an amazing man,” she recalled. “The first time I ever saw him was in a coffee shop on the boardwalk along the beach in Venice. I was living on the street, broke and desperate. Russell was like a beacon in the night providing me with a safe sanctuary. I don’t remember what he said to me or what I said to him. It really didn’t matter. He just stared at me with those beautiful blue eyes, and I was drawn to him immediately. I sat down and I stayed with him from that moment on.

  “We all lived together in the desert. We cut ourselves off from the rest of the world. We had our own world. Russell’s idol was Charles Manson, you know. Manson was in prison, but Russell said he was the embodiment of Charlie’s spiritual presence outside that cell. It was almost like Charlie was living with us there too. That song “Helter Skelter”—which is where Charlie got the name for the coming war he said would overthrow the establishment—was always playing in the house. And Russell was constantly quoting from Manson sayings to us. I remember some of them like it was yesterday: ‘Total paranoia is just total awareness’; ‘Pain is not bad, it’s good. It teaches you things’; ‘Death is the greatest form of love’; and—my favorite Russell–Charlie Manson quote—‘No sense makes sense.’ ”

  No sense makes sense. That phrase had been on one of the threatening notes sent to Abbie before her death.

  “Were you Russell Zorn’s girl?” I asked.

  “We were all his girls.” She said it with an obvious sense of pride, even after all these years. “Me. Gail. Clarissa. Any of the women who passed through our collective. Russell wasn’t like other men. I was never jealous of the others. I was just gratified to be close to him. He was a very complicated and unique individual.”

  “He killed people, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  I waited to see how she would explain that one away. It could be a thorny kind of moral dilemma, what with her being saved by Jesus and all now.

  “Russell explained to me that sometimes killing was necessary for the good of society,” she said. “He said it was like in a war. A soldier becomes a hero for killing the enemy because doing so saves a lot of other lives in the long run. That’s what we were doing, he said. Fighting a war.”

  “Against who?”

  “The oppressors. The rich. The powerful. He wanted to lead a revolution against the oppressors. When Manson killed Sharon Tate and all those other Hollywood people, it was the first step in the revolution. Russell wanted to carry on that fight.”

  “Did he specifically say he wanted to kill famous people?” I asked.

  “Yes, he said it would make a statement to the people.”

  “How about movie stars?”

  She nodded. “He believed movie stars and all the other celebrities of our culture were the symbols of an evil and corrupt society. He wanted to burn their big houses and distribute their wealth among the poor and the downtrodden. He wanted to punish them, to make them pay for all the damage they had done to our planet.”

  I took out the list of names Abbie had written down. I showed it to Sally Easton and asked if the names meant anything to her.

  “They were famous people,” I said. “Celebrities, stars.”

  “Okay.”

  “And they’re all dead.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  “I think they may have been killed by Russell Zorn and the Sign of the Z. Do you recognize any of the names on the list?”

  She pointed to the name of Deborah Ditmar, the actress who’d been shot on her doorstep in Los Angeles three years before Laura Marlowe’s murder.

  “Just that one.”

  “How do you know her?”

  “Sometimes when he got high or had a lot to drink, Russell used to brag to people that he had killed an actress named Deborah Ditmar to
teach the pigs of Hollywood a lesson—to scare them, just the way Manson had done with that other actress, Sharon Tate.”

  I stared at her in amazement. This all seemed too easy.

  “I was never sure if I believed him though,” Easton said. “Russell sometimes made up stuff like that to impress us or the new recruits in the group. I think he liked to see the look on our faces when he talked about murdering someone famous in cold blood. He thought it was really funny. Russell liked to make jokes like that. I know this is probably difficult for you to understand, but he was an awful lot of fun to be around.”

  Yeah, that Russell Zorn sure sounds like he was a lot of laughs, I thought to myself.

  “So you don’t know whether or not he killed Deborah Ditmar?”

  “No.”

  “And you don’t recognize any other names on the list or remember Russell ever bragging about killing any of them?”

  She shook her head no.

  Damn.

  “The only people I know we killed was during that holdup at the store,” Easton said. “Then Russell and me were arrested. The rest all died. Russell, Bobby Mesa, and me survived. Russell and Bobby are dead now too. The Sign of the Z has been history for a long time.”

  “Maybe somebody else in the group decided to keep the dream alive.”

  “Who?”

  “There were others over the years, weren’t there?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “So who were they?”

  “Most of them were just people that came and went. There was Doug and Clarissa and Jerry and Gail and Billy and Heather, I think. None of them stayed. Clarissa and one of them ran off together after about six months. Or maybe Russell banished them, I don’t remember. Billy died of a drug overdose. Jerry got busted for shoplifting and went to jail before the robbery. Heather went back to her parents’ house in upstate New York. None of them were dedicated. None of them were true believers. They never would have carried on Russell’s mission after he was gone.”

  I showed her a picture of Ray Janson. I knew now Janson didn’t kill Laura Marlowe, but he was stalking her. There had to be some connection between him and Sign of the Z. I was desperate at this point.