by Tapper, Jake
“Right,” Fontaine interrupted. “I was calling around to see if anyone knew where you were, and I called here.”
The explanation seemed unlikely, but Margaret put her hand on Charlie’s, a way to urge Manny to move on to why he was here. Surely, she thought, this had to do with the previous night’s events and Sheryl Ann. Fontaine reached into his left jacket pocket and took out a pack of Marlboros.
“So what was his message?” Margaret asked.
Fontaine lit the cigarette, took a deep drag, and exhaled. “The man said: ‘If you want your friend, bring the file tonight, including the film.’” He looked at Charlie. “What friend?” he asked. “What file? What film?”
Charlie glanced at Margaret, who asked: “Where are we supposed to bring it?”
“To the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium,” Fontaine said. “To the Academy Awards.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Santa Monica, California
April 1962
“Good evening,” Bob Hope said, “and welcome to Judgment at Santa Monica.” He wore a white tie and tails and received a steady stream of polite laughter.
Sitting on the aisle in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in a rented tux, Charlie wondered whether the laughs were real or just a sign of relief that the interminable opening—national anthem, orchestral overtures, and a stem-winder by the chairman of the Academy—had ended. Charlie fidgeted.
“Yes,” Hope said, “here we are at Santa Monica for the real West Side Story.” More rote ha-has.
Margaret, in an aqua dress she’d borrowed from Evans, allowed herself a moment to stargaze. Having already said hello to Sinatra, Martin, Davis, and Lawford, who had seats in the first few rows, she spotted Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Warren Beatty and his girlfriend, Natalie Wood, Audrey Hepburn…
“In the lobby before the show everyone was shaking hands and smiling,” Hope continued. “And in a few minutes the suspense will be over, we’ll all know who to hate.”
Ha-ha-ha-ha. Margaret pushed out an obviously fake laugh, amusing Charlie, who adored her occasional displays of discreet subversiveness. He knew that in a different situation, one less anxious, Margaret might commit to this fake laugh for the entire Hope routine just to please Charlie (and fend off her own boredom). Hope had quickly descended into tiresome inside jokes about studio bosses and pictures in perpetual turnaround and complaints about not being nominated for an award for his first feature film, The Big Broadcast of 1938.
“There’s Fontaine,” Margaret noted, back to business, pointing to the nattily dressed flack as he strode purposefully from the front of the auditorium toward them.
Apparently the man who had reached out to Fontaine that morning had also told him to be by his office phone at five p.m. to be notified on how the quid pro quo would go down. Presumably, Fontaine was about to share that information.
When Fontaine had told them that the handoff of the secret file in exchange for Sheryl Ann would take place at the Oscars, Charlie and Margaret were stunned. But Fontaine—who seemed to have a vague idea of what was going on—argued it made a certain kind of sense. Crowds and cameras could guarantee a layer of security.
Fontaine smiled as he approached now, holding out his arms approvingly as if to say, Look at this wonderful display, look at these two handsome creatures. He took a knee and whispered into Charlie’s ear. “We’re gonna go to the East Wing Meeting Room, which United Artists rented for a reception. Your name’s on the list, so you should be able to get in. I’ll come with you just to make sure it’s okay. I don’t know if anyone will be there. There’s an ice sculpture of a rumble on a table with a long tablecloth. You’re to leave the packet under there.”
“A rumble?” Charlie asked.
“Like Jets versus Sharks,” Fontaine said. “To honor West Side Story. It’s a carving of two teenage hoods with switchblades. I don’t know, it wasn’t my idea. It looks pretty good, though.” He realized he was talking nonsense. “We need to go.”
Charlie turned to Margaret. “I need the file.”
She reached into her purse and grabbed a folder she’d rolled into something resembling a tube so she could wedge it into her stylish barrel-pouch bag. Charlie received the baton and headed off with Fontaine. Margaret second-guessed their decision to leave the film canister back at Street’s hotel suite; there was no room for it in her purse and it would have been too odd to carry it around at the Oscars. But now she worried that these thugs knew of its existence.
The auditorium was packed with ushers and publicists and members of various entourages who had somehow managed to access the event without tickets. There were also agents, managers, valets, and wardrobe and makeup artists. Fontaine steered them through the chaos to the meeting room. An usher checked their names and stepped aside.
“Charlie!” a woman cried from behind them.
Before they could enter the room, the congressman turned to see Janet Leigh, lovely in an emerald gown, drinking a Coca-Cola from a plastic cup and smiling as if she’d just won a gold statue.
“Already bored?” the actress asked.
Fontaine wiped an expression of irritation off his face and replaced it with a battalion of shining white teeth. “Hey, Janet!” he said. “Where’s Tony? Oh, wait, never mind. Sorry!”
Charlie knew that a smart, calculating publicist like Fontaine would never let something so mean slip out by accident. His intent was to wound her; God only knew why. These people were vicious, as casually cruel as their counterparts in the snake-infested swamp of DC politics.
“Where are you guys headed?” Leigh asked, ignoring the question. “The event’s in there.” She thumbed toward the auditorium. Charlie looked at Fontaine.
“Just grabbing a drink,” the publicist said.
Leigh hooked her arm through Charlie’s as naturally as putting a hand into a mitten. “Well, say no more,” she said. “Lead on.”
Charlie looked at Fontaine, who shrugged, and they entered the East Wing Meeting Room. Fontaine walked ahead while Charlie whispered to Leigh.
Beyond the bartenders and cocktail waitresses, three stocked bars lined the walls, their shiny bottles arranged in neat rows. Charlie felt a twinge of—what? Love? Nostalgia? Regret? He wasn’t sure. He changed his focus, examining the ice sculpture looming over a buffet of delicacies. It was even more impressive than advertised, a detailed rendering of Richard Beymer as Tony lurching and stabbing George Chakiris as Bernardo. A knife fight. Charlie recalled another knife fight on the banks of the faux Missouri river and that bilious taste in his mouth when it ended.
“Well, that’s sure weird,” said Leigh of the sculpture. She turned to Charlie. “Champagne?”
Charlie smiled, unsure. Fontaine grabbed her shoulder. “Why don’t I escort Miss Leigh to the champagne while you admire the melting artwork?” Fontaine said. He steered Leigh away.
Charlie stepped closer to the ice sculpture, bent down to tie his shoe, placed the papers on the ground, and pushed them under the folds of the tablecloth. He stood and watched Leigh accepting a flute of bubbly from the bartender. Fontaine winked at him as they walked back to Charlie.
After a few minutes of conversation, Fontaine observed it was probably time to head back to their seats, so they did. Leigh lagged behind, chatting with a cocktail waitress, sipping her champagne.
A young woman in a caramel gown with a pink rose corsage on her wrist was sitting in Charlie’s seat on the aisle. Upon seeing Charlie, she stood immediately. He was surprised but he eased back into his seat.
“She’s a seat-filler,” Margaret whispered to him. “That’s apparently a profession in this town. She and a whole bunch of other young people—all of them with pink roses as corsages or boutonnières—run around and make sure no chairs are empty should the cameras pan this way.”
Onstage, Hope began mocking George C. Scott, a Best Supporting Actor nominee for The Hustler, for not showing up to the awards ceremony, which Scott had called “a weird beauty or perso
nality contest” that corrupted the craft of acting. “He’s sitting at home with his back to the set,” Hope said. “He’s the one person in our audience who will come back into the room for the commercials.”
“Manny came back a minute later.” Janet Leigh had suddenly appeared at Charlie’s side and was whispering in his ear. “He grabbed the file. I followed him down the hall. He was with a man I didn’t recognize. Also in a tux.”
Charlie looked up at her. “Thanks,” he said. Leigh smiled, waved at Margaret, and returned to her seat.
“Great idea to enlist her help,” Charlie said. Margaret had called Leigh that afternoon and explained that they desperately needed someone to keep an eye on a folder Charlie was going to drop off. It was seriously a matter of life and death, one Margaret would tell her all about later over drinks, but for now she needed her help. Leigh was tickled to be recruited for actual cloak-and-dagger work, not just playacting, and immediately agreed.
“So what now?” Margaret whispered.
Charlie scanned the audience. “Keep our eyes open,” he said.
“For?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” he said. “An anomaly. Maybe someone returning to his seat after meeting with Manny. Or maybe Manny coming back to talk to someone here.”
They surveyed the scene before them. Hope continued with his jokes. The audience sat there, responding obediently. The aisles were empty. In the corners and along the back of the auditorium, seat-fillers loitered. Up front, the orchestra began their next number.
Margaret pointed out a skinny young man wearing a pink rose boutonnière. He quickly stood to make room for a man returning to his seat.
“Who is that?” Charlie asked.
“Can’t tell,” Margaret said. “Should I check?” Charlie nodded.
She edged past him and exited the auditorium.
Outside in the hall, Margaret stood nervously for a second.
It was entirely possible that their foes intended to take the file and kill her friend Sheryl Ann Gold. But despite their precautions and plans for the night, it was clear that their enemies’ response would depend on their own—and their friends’—ability to ad lib.
Margaret walked down the hall and up a few steps into a control room in the back of the theater. She opened up a heavy door to see a producer with a headset and a map looking out to the audience.
“Richard Widmark leaving his seat, copy,” he said, glancing down at the map. “Row fourteen, seat H, gamma sector. Row one-four, seat H, as in hotel.”
“Copy,” said a voice from the radio.
Margaret took a step closer to the man. “You’re sending out the seat-fillers.”
The man jumped, startled. He looked at Margaret, quickly assessed that she was a harmless rich lady, and returned his attention to the audience.
“Yes, ma’am, our scouts sit up front and watch who’s getting up, and we have four teams scattered throughout so the odds of a pan to the audience showing an empty seat are close to nil—”
He was interrupted by a call on his walkie-talkie. Margaret noted he had several devices for communication—a headset, two walkie-talkies, and probably more.
“Shirley Jones is on the move,” the voice crackled.
“Copy that,” said the man, scanning his seating chart. “That’s row twenty, two-zero, seat B, as in bravo, also gamma sector, Carlos.”
“Copy,” said Carlos.
“This is so cool!” Margaret said.
The man smiled, happy to be appreciated and gushed over.
“You’re single-handedly making sure that there aren’t any empty seats!” she said, really selling the notion that this constituted an achievement. “Are a lot of people out of their seats?”
“Nah,” he said with false modesty, motioning toward a handwritten list on a legal pad. “A couple dozen so far.”
Margaret walked over and looked down at the list. She scanned the names, then tapped the pad twice with her finger, seeing one that she recognized, one that made sense.
“First time at the Oscars?” he asked, but she was already gone, the door slowly closing behind her.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Santa Monica, California
April 1962
“Let’s split up,” Margaret whispered.
She and Charlie stood in the hall out of earshot of the ushers.
“You don’t think we should wait for them to come to us,” Charlie clarified.
“We need to get the drop on them,” she said. “They have Sheryl Ann, and they think they have the file—the only advantage we have right now is the element of surprise. They think we’re meekly waiting for them.”
“We don’t know where they are,” Charlie said. “We don’t even know who is a part of this, other than your speculation based on a name you saw on the seat-filler list.”
“That’s my point,” Margaret said. “We need to figure it out. Back here in ten?”
Charlie nodded and they began walking in opposite directions.
The loudspeakers in the hall continued to broadcast the events onstage. Shelley Winters, who’d won a Best Supporting Actress award two years before for her performance in The Diary of Anne Frank, presented the award for Best Cinematography together with Vince Edwards—television’s Ben Casey. It struck Margaret as crass to have Winters—who’d donated her Oscar to the Anne Frank House—alongside some cheesy TV doctor, but then again, Hollywood was crass. Ben Casey made as much sense on that stage as Howdy Doody or Mr. Ed. These people were acting. They were paid to pretend. None of it was real.
Margaret continued down the hall.
There—in the distance, near a scrum of photographers waiting to enter the auditorium—was Manny Fontaine walking solo. She followed him back into the auditorium as the audience seemed to suddenly tense up. A young man had jumped onto the stage and grabbed the microphone, interrupting Edwards and Winters.
“I’m the world’s most famous gate-crasher,” he said, “and I just came here to present Bob Hope with his 1938 trophy.” He plunked down on the podium a miniature faux Oscar, the kind a tourist might purchase at a souvenir shop. Except for some gasps, the audience was silent.
“We’ll give it to him,” said Winters, trying to end the awkward moment, which was compounded by the gate-crasher’s unfounded confidence that anyone found this remotely amusing or charming.
Margaret hadn’t noticed much security around that night. There were a couple of boys in blue out front, and a private auditorium guard had surveyed the stars as they walked in. But now, with the gate-crasher on the stage, a dozen men—some in uniform, most not—appeared and rushed out to remove him. Margaret was pushed forward and collided with several seat-fillers and Fontaine himself. He turned to see who had rammed into him, then did a double take. To avoid being crushed as the crowd continued to bunch up at the corner of stage right, Fontaine walked up the stairs onto the stage and then behind the curtain, out of view.
“Crazy, huh?” Margaret said, right behind him.
Fontaine shot her a look. “Where’s the real file?” he asked, dropping all pretense and barely concealing his rage.
Charlie made his way to the opposite end of the hall. No sign of Fontaine or anyone who might be involved. He opened a door marked NO ENTRY, revealing an industrial stairwell with worn steel railings and a buzzing fluorescent light. He entered, and the door closed behind him, but before it could snap shut a Santa Monica Police cadet burst in. He moved his right hand to his holster and unsnapped it. “Sir, what are you doing here, sir?”
“I’m, um,” Charlie said, “just looking for someone.”
“Sir, we need you out of here, sir,” the cadet said. He put his right hand on his gun. Charlie studied him. He looked barely old enough to vote.
“Son, I’m a U.S. congressman,” Charlie said.
The cadet panicked, drew his gun, flipped off the safety, and yelled, scared, “Sir, I need you to put your hands in the air, sir!”
The cadet was too
hyped up to reason with. Charlie complied; who knew what could happen in such a situation? The cadet marched him out of the stairwell, down the hallway, and out the doors of the auditorium. He continued trying to explain that the kid had it all wrong, but fear had taken over the cadet and Charlie knew the best he could hope for was that an older, wiser officer would realize the insanity of the situation and release him.
But bedlam—not a wise police supervisor—was all that awaited Charlie outside the auditorium. Three police cars, lights flashing, pulled up onto the red carpet. Their occupants got out and ran into the arena, keys, cuffs, and weaponry jingling. More police stood in front of the doors, and sirens in the distance suggested yet more were on the way. Charlie was relieved when the cadet, perhaps desiring to be in on the real action, pushed him forward and released him like a fish before heading back into the building. Charlie stood for a moment.
“I need to get back in there,” Charlie told the officers, holding up his ticket, but the men ignored him, stone-faced, forming a wall of blue. His heart sank as it dawned on him that he was now trapped outside with no idea what to do next.
“Where’s Sheryl Ann?” Margaret asked.
They were tucked in the far corner backstage, away from the stagehands and dancers preparing for the next number.
“Safe,” he said. She wondered if he was still attempting to convince her that he was a mere go-between in this evil trade.
“We’re not giving you anything until she’s back with us,” she said, staring into his beady brown eyes.
“I’m not running this,” Fontaine insisted. “I’m just trying to help.”
Margaret raised an eyebrow skeptically. She heard a familiar voice and turned to see Sinatra in the wings, receiving last-minute hair and makeup assistance. A flock of two dozen dancers appeared, all wearing black tights, long red devil tails, and headbands festooned with pointed red horns. The ladies flooded past Margaret and Fontaine, their high heels clacking, and made their way through the scaffolding and sets and ropes attached to sandbags to their places around Sinatra.
