by Tapper, Jake
“What are those women anyway?” Charlie said. “Heiresses and divorcées? Trust-fundees? Something…more commercial?”
“What was it that Lord Beaverbrook said about haggling over the price?” Margaret asked. Charlie knew the answer but didn’t respond.
Several martinis later, Margaret was deep in conversation with Janet Leigh at a two-top. It was that time of the night—or, technically, the morning—when parties take on lives of their own and libations explain almost any detour.
Their conversation had started innocently enough with Margaret reintroducing herself to Leigh at the sinks in the ladies’ room.
“It’s probably a cliché at this point for someone to tell you she hasn’t taken a shower without fear since seeing Psycho,” Margaret said as she reapplied her lipstick in the mirror to a knowing chuckle from Leigh, “but I have to wonder if it was traumatic for you too.”
“Are you kidding? I almost stopped taking showers,” Leigh said, dabbing her nose with a powder puff. “And I’m always facing the door, watching, no matter where the showerhead is.”
Margaret laughed. “You have no idea how much better that makes me feel.”
Leigh reached over and gently caressed Margaret’s cheek as a sister might. The two closed their purses, wandered to the bar, then found a table, drinks in hand. The shower scene, Leigh confided, was the most difficult shoot of her life; though it lasted just forty-five seconds in the movie, it was composed of fifty-two cuts requiring seventy-eight camera setups. It took more than seven days to film, Leigh said. The shower water was ice cold, the blood was Hershey’s chocolate sauce, the sound effects came from a knife plunging into a casaba melon, and a body double was used for every shot in which the audience didn’t see her face.
“Marli Renfro was her name,” Leigh said. “A stripper from Dallas. One of the first Playboy cover girls! She’s shooting some dreck right now, a soft-core comedy, the only gig she could get.” She tsked knowingly and took a sip of her cosmopolitan.
“Well, at least she’s safe from these octopuses,” Margaret said. “Octopi,” she corrected herself.
Leigh laughed. “They’re a handsy bunch, aren’t they,” she said. “As soon as they found out Tony was leaving me for that teenager, every one of them stepped right on up for a piece.”
It hadn’t hit the papers yet, but Leigh’s husband, actor Tony Curtis, had filed for divorce and was leaving her for Christine Kaufmann, his seventeen-year-old costar in the film Taras Bulba.
“Frank was first in line, of course,” Leigh continued. “Tony had me served right before we shot the train scene on Manchurian and the attempts to ‘console’ me began shortly thereafter.” She smiled modestly. “But I’ve heard far too many horror stories.”
“What do you mean?”
Leigh looked around the room. Charlie and Lawford were deep in conversation, as were Giancana and Judy, but most of the remaining crowd was gathered around the main table where Sinatra, Frankenheimer, and others regaled the guests with uproarious tales.
“Don’t get me wrong, Frank is a real charmer,” Leigh said. “He’s just also kind of, well, unstable.”
“He has moods,” Margaret agreed.
“Sammy even gave those dark moods a nickname—‘Stormy Weather.’” Leigh chuckled. “But I’m talking about real problems. He tried to kill himself a couple times after breakups with Ava. And I don’t mean like threatening to do it or taking two extra aspirin or any of that bullshit Hollywood drama. I mean gun in hand, Ava trying to wrestle it away, bullet goes through the door. Scary stuff.”
Leigh reached into her purse and withdrew a pack of cigarettes and a gold lighter. She offered a smoke to Margaret, who accepted, feeling wild.
“I don’t know much about…celebrities’ personal lives,” Margaret said not particularly truthfully, searching for a more respectful term than gossip.
“You don’t?” Leigh asked. “Well, I wish more people were like you. It’s bad enough Tony’s shtupping a teenager, but soon enough the whole world’s going to find out.” She downed her cosmo and motioned for another. “Worst thing is, Charlotte Goode tried to warn me and I dismissed her.”
“You know Charlotte?” Margaret asked.
“Everyone knows Charlotte—and she knows everything,” Leigh said. “Thank God she prints only a fraction of it.”
“Really?” Margaret asked. “Why does she hold back?”
“I don’t know,” Leigh said. “She’s barely touched anything relating to Frank. She wrote about how horrible Ava was to him, though—just awful. Really cruel. But she didn’t print anything about the abortions Ava got that broke Frank’s heart. Or his suicide attempts.”
“How do you know Charlotte even knew about them?” Margaret asked.
“Sweetie, Charlotte told me herself,” Leigh said. She sighed and looked at the main table. “And now Frank is getting his revenge on our whole gender. Poor Juliet better watch out or she’ll end up just like Betty.”
Margaret knew “Betty” was the actress Lauren Bacall, the widow of Sinatra’s idol Humphrey Bogart. But that was where her understanding ended.
Someone in the dining room turned up the volume of the background music, blasting Joey Dee and the Starliters singing “Peppermint Twist”: In a night like this, a peppermint twist. Round and round, up and down…
“I’m afraid I don’t know what Frank did to Betty,” Margaret said.
Leigh looked around to make sure no one was listening. “Frank idolized Bogie, you know. Worshipped him. Him and Bogie and Bacall and Judy Garland—they were the original Rat Pack, the real Rat Pack. This is all just nonsense.” Her expression turned sour and she waved her hand toward the main table and then around the room, as if everything at Toots Shor’s that night was a joke.
“So Bogie got cancer and died in…when was it?” Leigh continued. “In ’57, I think. And then Frank started dating Betty. It got serious—quick. He proposed. But he wanted it to be a secret. Bogie had died only like a year before. One day she went out to see a picture with Swifty—Lazar, you know, the agent—and a reporter was there and asked about the engagement and she told the truth. She admitted it. I mean, why not, right? So it was going to hit the papers and Betty called Frank—I think he was in Miami or something—to explain how it had happened and apologize, and Frank lost his mind. I mean, deranged. Yelling. Punching the walls. The whole nine.”
She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. Margaret sat patiently, waiting for the rest of the story.
“And then he did something that rivaled the cruelty Ava had subjected him to—he never spoke to Betty again. He didn’t answer the phone. He didn’t return her calls. This is a relatively recent widow, remember, so she was already something of a mess. But he just—pffffttt—snuffed out their relationship as if Betty Bacall had never existed. Imagine the kind of screwy wiring you have to have to do that to your fiancée merely because she told someone that the two of you were getting married. I mean, I love Frank and all, he’s a close personal friend and a marvelous performer, but let’s be honest—that’s psychotic.”
Across the room, Peter Lawford noticed Margaret’s empty seat and sidled up to Charlie.
“Congressman,” he said. “May I sit?”
Charlie extended his hand, offering the chair. The music continued to blare; the lights dimmed and under the cover of the artificial dusk, several guests stood and began to dance.
Who put the bomp in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp? boomed Barry Mann. Who put the ram in the rama lama ding dong?
“I’ve been trying to reach you since Rancho Mirage, but you’re impossible to track down,” Charlie said.
“I’ve seen you since then, have I not?” Lawford asked, pouring on the British charm as he poured more martini down his gullet.
“Not anywhere we could talk,” Charlie said. “I’ve been hoping you could tell me more about Margaret’s niece Violet. You said you saw her at a party.”
“Indeed I did, old chap. It was
late, quite late, and I was party-hopping with a group of rich expats I’d met at the Daisy.” He leaned forward. “I will be honest. I’m not unfamiliar with the experience of intoxication—none of us are, and you’re a dog that runs right with the rest of us hounds, Charlie—but on this particular night, I was quite smashed, and all of a sudden I was in this party in, oh, I don’t know…Malibu, maybe? Santa Monica? Venice? We were driving—”
Charlie raised his tumbler and downed more bourbon to hide his irritation. Lawford fancied himself quite the raconteur, but like most of the actors Charlie had encountered in Hollywood, he mistook the clever lines written for him by others as his own cleverness. That Americans were so easily seduced by an English accent only compounded the delusion.
“—then we were in this party, I have no idea who was throwing it, and it was full of old men and young girls. And somewhere in that blur—I kind of came to in the midst of this bacchanal, and there she was, this girl, I recognized her but didn’t quite know how, and you know, to be perfectly honest, it was her chest that I recognized. I mean, certain works of art one just remembers forever.” He smiled lasciviously, then seemed to recall that Violet was missing; he winced in regret and gulped a new martini that had been placed in front of him by an attentive waitress.
“You’re sure it was her, though?” Charlie asked.
“As sure as I can ever be of anything after a night like that, I suppose,” Lawford said. “But listen, old sport, I have a favor I’d like to ask of you.”
“Ask away,” Charlie said.
Lawford checked over his shoulder to make sure no one could hear him. The music was blasting and no one was within earshot.
“I got a call from Bob earlier today,” he continued. “Jack is not going to stay with Frank next month. Bob won’t let him.”
Charlie nodded as if this were news to him.
“Needless to say, Frank is going to flip his lid. And I have to deliver the news.”
“I’m picturing one of those Tasmanian Devil cartoons,” said Charlie.
“I know,” Lawford said, sighing deeply, “but as the Kennedy ambassador to Hollywood, I’ve been told this is my job. So you, my friend, have got to be there with me. Might help keep him under control. Please.”
Charlie wasn’t sure when he and Lawford had become friends. “There?” asked Charlie. “Where? And when? Not tonight. I’m not going anywhere near a blotto Frank bearing bad news.”
“No, no, no,” Lawford said, leaning back in his chair and lighting a cigarette. “Not tonight. When we’re all back in Los Angeles. I’ll pick you up and we can drive there together—strength in numbers. Frank respects you, and it will be over quick, then we can go have a good time.”
Charlie thought about it. He didn’t really have to do this. Since December, he’d been on a mission he had no desire to carry out, one a different Kennedy was forcing him to undertake. And now this? There was nothing appealing about the proposition.
“I’m sorry, Peter,” he said, “I’m afraid I have some business I need to attend to that day.”
“What day?” Lawford asked, shocked.
“Any,” Charlie said. “Any day.”
Clearly not unfamiliar with hitting the limits of his charm, Lawford looked sideways at Charlie. “Okay, friend, tell me what you’d like in exchange.”
Charlie scratched his head. “There is literally nothing you have that I want,” he said. He looked around the room for his wife, finally spotted her absorbed in conversation with Janet Leigh. And then he had an idea.
“Well, actually, there is something I’d like from you,” Charlie said. “But you cannot tell anyone—not even Frank.”
Chapter Eighteen
Los Angeles, California
March 1962
“We have three young daughters ourselves, so I feel strongly about protecting children from material intended only for mature audiences,” Stanley Kubrick told Charlotte Goode, who raised a skeptical eyebrow. “That said, when Nabokov’s novel came out, I knew I had to bring it to the screen.”
After days of having her calls go unreturned, Margaret had found Goode at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre at a film premiere, on the wrong side of the rope blocking off the red carpet. She didn’t want to interrupt her work, so she stood next to her quietly as she talked with Kubrick.
“But didn’t you shoot the film in England to escape American censors?” Goode asked.
Kubrick looked to his right, hoping someone would rescue him, but alas, the MGM public relations escorts were tending to the needs of Peter Sellers, James Mason, and Sue Lyon, the teenager who played the eponymous nymphet. The paparazzi and fans called out to her by the name of her character. “Lolita!” they cried. “Lolita! Over here!” The actress swiveled seductively and it broke Margaret’s heart. A teenage girl given so much immediate short-term fame in exchange for unnamed sacrifices was just plain wrong. It made Margaret wonder where Violet was and whether Goode would ever be of any help. She kept asking, and Goode kept saying she hadn’t found anything yet.
“No,” Kubrick said. “Shooting it over there was more about control. It’s nice to have the studio an ocean away.”
“What were you worried about them controlling?” Goode asked. “The degree to which you put a twelve-year-old girl in perverted situations?”
Kubrick turned his head toward the theater as if someone had called his name. He took a subtle step in that direction, signaling that the interview was coming to an end. “Sue is fifteen,” he said uncomfortably. “And we made some adjustments to the book so it would be less shocking. Look, if you see the film, I mean, Lolita is one of the great love stories, isn’t it? If you consider Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, they all have this in common, this element of the illicit! And in each case, it causes the couple’s complete alienation from society.”
“I saw the film, Stanley,” Goode said. “And it doesn’t matter whether she’s twelve or fourteen—how do you think the National Legion of Decency is going to respond to the reference to Camp Climax for the girls or that line about ‘Your uncle is going to fill my daughter’s cavity on Thursday afternoon’?”
Kubrick coughed and took another step away from Goode. “The general public is a good deal more sophisticated than most censors imagine and certainly more than these groups who get up petitions believe,” he said. “I have to move on now, thank you for your questions!”
Goode tried to squeeze in another but Kubrick had escaped. She turned to Margaret.
“When you were twelve, were you interested in getting your jollies with grown men?” she asked. “Men in their fifties?”
“When I was twelve I had a slight crush on a boy in the eighth grade, but even he seemed too old for me,” recalled Margaret. “I was busy with school and a job at the local grocer’s.”
“The men in this town,” Goode said. “They should be put in a hospital for the criminally insane, not given Oscars. Look at the poster! The little girl barely has breasts and she’s all sultry in a bikini, the lollipop in her mouth.” She exhaled like she was blowing her anger out of her body. “What are you doing here?”
“You haven’t been returning my calls.”
“I haven’t gotten any messages.”
“I left several with that creepy guy, what’s his name, Tarantula.”
Goode laughed. “Tah-ran-too-la,” she corrected her. “Ick. A toad. And a horrible colleague.”
A small ruckus sounded as costar Shelley Winters emerged from her limo and eagerly posed for pictures and waved to fans. Red Buttons, Joan Fontaine, Hugh O’Brian, and other stars slow-walked into the theater, stopping to grin for cameras, sign autographs, and offer up quotes to the press.
“Can we talk somewhere?” Margaret asked as an usher with a brass gong and a rubber mallet alerted any celebrities still on the red carpet that the film was about to begin.
Goode nodded. “Come with me,” she said. She led Margaret out of the crowd, down Hollywood Boulevard, and onto No
rth Orange. The neighborhood immediately turned seedier, with vagrants, hucksters, and star-maps salesmen. Storefronts advertised ALCOHOL and SOUVENIRS.
“Everything in New York is jake?” Goode asked. “Kids good?”
“All well,” Margaret said. “Growing like weeds. It was wonderful to be home. And it looks as though Charlie will have the challenger of his dreams this November, a city councilman who’s been indicted like three times.”
Goode grunted supportively, turned down an alley, and walked up to a sturdy green metal door sealed by three different locks she needed three separate keys to open.
“Welcome to Hollywood Nightlife,” Goode announced as she hit the light switch and led Margaret in. Much to Margaret’s surprise, the square, windowless newsroom was relatively immaculate. The walls were covered in calendars, posters, and schedules pinned on floor-to-ceiling corkboard. At the far wall stood ten filing cabinets, different colors, each secured with a thick padlock. Goode walked to her desk in a nook in the far left of the room, Margaret following closely behind.
“It’s shockingly organized,” she said.
“You mean for a crappy scandal sheet?” Goode asked, reaching into one of her desk drawers.
“For any press outlet,” Margaret said, though Goode had read her correctly. Charlotte took a long swig from a silver flask sitting on her desk, then began perusing her reporter’s notebook, occasionally marking passages with a felt-tip marker.
“It’s not usually this empty,” Goode said, distracted.
Margaret walked to the file cabinets, which were thick metal, almost safety-deposit-box quality. The drawers were marked with anodyne labels—years, the names of film studios, awards, and some that didn’t make sense to Margaret, like TOYS and TOTS and TULIPS and DAISIES.
