The Great Pretenders

by Laura Kalpakian

  “Please, please, Roxanne, find a front for my father. Marian told Mother you did it for Max. Oh, Roxanne, your heart would break to see Daddy. He’s going crazy down there in Mexico with nothing to do but drink and quarrel. He’s diabetic, and asthmatic, and he’s killing himself, and driving my mother mad, and her health is buckling under the strain. He weighs three hundred and fifty pounds, and they had to move to a ground-floor apartment, and when he falls, my mother can’t even get him back into bed. He’s killing her, Roxanne. She won’t leave him. If only he could be working again, think what it would do for him, for her.” Susan collected herself, fumbling in her handbag for a handkerchief. “They’re running out of money. I send them what I can, but I have a husband, you know? Kids. Please, Roxanne, Daddy always thought so much of you, but now I’m begging you to help him. To help us. If he can only work again, you’ll save his life. I mean it!”

  “Susan,” I said at last, “I’ll read these, but I won’t promise you anything.”

  “I don’t care how you sell them. Mother and Daddy don’t care. He just needs to work again. To feel as though he has some hope.”

  “Sure, Susan. I understand. Leave me your phone number, and I’ll call you. But don’t come back here, all right?”

  She wiped her nose. “The car is borrowed. Don’t worry.”

  “So you do know what’s at stake here.”

  “How could I not know what’s at stake? My parents are living in Mexico and can never come home. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t a matter of life and death. Really, Roxanne, my parents’ life or death!”

  The scripts were true Simon Strassman Westerns. Full of energetic derring-do, distressed damsels, laconic, straight-laced Good Guys whose underarms never darkened with sweat, lots of horses and dust and a gunfight at the end where the Good Guy wins, and the girl looks up at him full of chaste admiration. Still, it had not escaped my attention that though the Saturday serials in theaters had vanished, the form, now known as the “adult Western,” was all over the television. These weekly serials were cheap and easy to make. Each episode could be shot in six days, max; unknown actors could be put under contract for two hundred fifty a week and made to work six days in a row while the network shot sometimes as many as thirty-nine episodes to fill up TV screens night after night. For the writers, the actors, and the crew, TV Westerns were the equivalent of chopping cotton, as Terrence said—downright servitude. But it was work, and people wanted to work no matter what. Warner Brothers Television was the main maw for TV Westerns, and I had a new contact there, none other than Ernest Todd, the guy I had met at the Banner Headline party whom Warner Brothers Television had seduced away from CBS. The next day I asked Thelma to type up two carbons of each. I called Jimmy Ashford.

  “Hey, Roxanne! You’ve sold my script, haven’t you?” In the background I could hear the tinny wail of an infant.

  “No, Jimmy, but I have a proposition for you. Come by the office at your convenience.”

  Two hours later he walked through the door. I offered Jimmy the possibility that he might want to put Simon’s Westerns under his name and I would sell them to television. I started to explain the risks, the Reds, and the need for secrecy.

  “Fuck HUAC, and fuck the FBI! Of course I’ll do it! We’ve had to move in with my folks at the walnut farm. I never want to see another walnut.”

  When he left I began to count all the people who had been sworn to absolute secrecy, including myself. Thelma and Terrence, Max, Marian, Simon, Leah, Kathleen, and Susan. These women obviously trusted one another, and talked or wrote often. But what about Susan’s husband, or her sister, or the sister’s husband? What about Kathleen’s daughters, who were still just teenagers? What about all the ancillary people I didn’t know? Jimmy’s desperate wife maybe, telling a neighbor, or even his parents whispering how they happened to be suddenly solvent if these Westerns sold? All those people. Who might they talk to? How much, how far could they be trusted? How far could anyone be trusted? Cue the thunder rumbled through my heart and mind as I waded deeper and deeper into the rampant distrust, the prickly suspicion that had dirtied, corroded every imaginable relationship in Hollywood.

  * * *

  • • •

  My sense of peril intensified when I drove up to Clara Bow Drive one afternoon and slowed to a crawl because some kids were playing kickball in the street. Across from our place, I passed a guy sitting in a gray sedan reading a newspaper. The car wasn’t one I was used to seeing on the street, and why would a neighbor sit there reading? I turned to get a better look at him. He put the newspaper down and stared at me. He was a middle-aged white guy with a bad haircut and a squint.

  “Did you see the gray sedan on the street?” Thelma asked when I came in. “He followed me from home this morning.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s FBI. I’m sure of it.”

  The blood drained from my head, and I slowly lowered myself into the chair across from her. “What does this mean?”

  Thelma lit a cigarette. The match trembled in her hand. “I don’t know for sure, but I’ll bet the FBI knows Max is not in Mexico any longer. They could have observers in Mexico who noticed that Max wasn’t hanging out at the same bars and cafés as the rest of them. They don’t know where he is, or they’d be in Riverside.”

  “But we’ve been so careful!”

  “We have to be even more careful. We have to be—” Thelma choked back tears. “Oh, god, I can’t even think of the word.”

  “Vigilant.”

  “Vigilant.” She took a deep, satisfying drag. “They know that I am a longtime friend of the family. They must think I will lead them to him. I work for you. You’re an agent representing writers. And . . .”

  “But could they have guessed about Charlie?” I lowered my voice to a whisper.

  “If they haven’t yet, they will. They may have bugged our phones. Be careful what you say on the phone. Listen for little clicks. They might have planted microphones here in the house.” She lifted the desk lamp and looked under it.

  A knock sounded at the door and I hesitated. “Answer it,” said Thelma, going pale.

  He wore a rumpled, cheap suit. With his squint he looked like Popeye, lacking only the pipe and the sailor hat. “Mrs. Smith?”

  “You have the wrong house.”

  “No one here by that name?” His eyes lingered on Thelma, then darted over the living room that clearly served as an office. “I was told Mrs. Smith lived here. I’m looking for her.”

  “Look somewhere else.”

  We closed the door behind him. “We are screwed,” said Thelma.

  “We’ll call him Popeye,” I offered, my mouth dry with anxiety. “If we need a name for him, that’s what we’ll call him.”

  “You better tell Terrence. The Challenger is no stranger to the FBI.”

  I picked up the latest Challenger, which lay on her desk. All this fall, inflamed by the death of Emmett Till in August, the paper had blasted the travesty of the Mississippi trial that followed, the rhetoric escalating with every issue.

  But when I went home and told Terrence about Popeye, he was less upset than I thought he’d be. “The NAACP is bugged for sure. The Challenger probably is too. J. Edgar Hoover has a burr up his butt about all of us. You get used to it.”

  “I don’t want to get used to it.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you want, Roxanne. You gotta be extra careful. Here.” He took a matchbook off the table. “Let me show you an old trick Booker taught me.” He tore the cover off a matchbook, rolled it up tight, and showed me how to stick it at the very base of the door when I left the house. “If anyone’s been inside, you’ll know it before you open the door.”

  “Popeye could come here?” My voice escalated to a near wail. “Find out about us?”

  “They’re the FBI, Roxanne.” I knew when he called me Roxanne it was s
omething important. “They can snoop all over your life, and they will. You and Thelma can’t ever let down your guard.”

  “All right, but, baby, from now on you put the Porsche in the garage and close the door.”

  He chuckled. “Greater love hath no person but that they should give up their garage for another. Scripture, girl. Honest.”

  “Really? From the Church of Rick and Ilsa?”

  “Chapter and verse.”

  Thelma certainly seemed to be the main target of Popeye’s observations. He sometimes followed her home and parked outside her house in Tarzana. He followed me home only once—on a night, thank god, when Terrence was staying at Naomi Avenue to make a deadline. I gave Terrence Max’s number and asked him to call from Naomi and alert him. Max was grateful, and he said he had a new script, nearly finished, but he would hang on to it. If anything happened to Thelma or me, he asked if Terrence would please let him know.

  A few weeks passed and nothing happened to Thelma or me. But the kid who lived next door knocked on our door one afternoon to get his ball from our backyard, and he told us that Popeye had been asking up and down Clara Bow Drive for what people knew of us. Which was nothing except that Thelma drove a Nash, and I drove an MG. When Thelma took me out to Reg’s to pick up the Silver Bullet after it was again repaired, Reg said that a man flashing an FBI badge had insisted on pawing through the MG, through the glove box, the trunk, under the seats.

  “I had to let him look, Miss Granville,” said Reg sorrowfully. “I got to keep my immigration papers clean, and I don’t want no trouble.”

  “Sure, Reg. I understand,” I said calmly, though I was seething. “Did he ask after Terrence Dexter at all? After Terrence’s car?”

  “No, miss. Only you.”

  I often wondered what the back seat of Popeye’s Chevy must look like. Old newspapers? Apple cores? Bags of stale potato chips? Coke bottles? Did he read pulp magazines? Detective stories? Edgar Rice Burroughs while he sweltered in his sedan? We feared he might harass the mailman, so we got a post office box. True, he could harass the post office people, but he might need a warrant for that. I feared he might harass any clients who came to the office. I told Jimmy and Maurice to stay away. Charlie never showed up anyway. I met my clients at lunch dates, or for drinks at the most expensive places I could think of, places where a guy like Popeye would stand out just for looking like the dumpy little squirt that he was. But after that immediate, unnerving flurry of inquiries and poking about, Popeye became an intermittent rather than a continual presence. The fact that we never knew when he might turn up made him more scary, rather than less. He seemed a kind of ghost in our lives, and we feared him whether we could see him or not.

  I was certainly unhappy to see his car on Clara Bow Drive one November afternoon when he followed me up to Laurel Canyon. I was going to Jonathan’s to give him first glimpse at a script by Maurice Allen (one of Nelson’s that Maurice had completed), a serious drama I thought would appeal to him. I pulled into the Casa Fiesta driveway beside Jonathan’s car and turned off the motor. On the driver’s side of my car was a big, old Packard. It had long scratches on the passenger’s side. That’s the car I was driving when I rolled it down a ravine in high school. I didn’t know Leon still owned it, but then I hadn’t been in the Summit Drive garages since the day I moved out three years ago. I looked up to the bedroom window and saw a curtain twitch, and a flash of bright blonde hair. I started my car and left immediately, watching Popeye in the rearview mirror all the way back to Clara Bow Drive. I watch the rearview mirror a lot more than I used to.

  Jonathan telephoned me that night. His voice was theatrically upbeat as he cascaded reams of juicy gossip. Diana Jordan (who had indeed eloped) was about to work again. Bongo had been arrested for indecent exposure, and Jonathan had to call his own attorney, Adam Ornstein, to bail him out. People kept showing up at Casa Fiesta thinking the parties must still be going on . . . He nattered on and on. I made one-syllable replies. And then he said that Denise had dropped by that afternoon to rehearse. Though what they were rehearsing he did not say. “You understand, Quacker? You see what I am saying? Don’t you?”

  “Oh yes, I understand,” I said before he hung up.

  Terrence looked up from the bed, where he had the out-of-town papers spread out, comparing coverage. He took off his glasses. “What in hell was that all about? What’s wrong with Jonathan? What does he want from you now?”

  “Nothing,” I said, unable to bring myself to put in actual words that I knew, deep down, that the longest friendship of my life had tattered into lies and distrust. On both sides. We each had a lot to lose.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Popeye wasn’t there the afternoon that I drove to the Culver City post office to pick up a script that would change many lives. We had a key to this post office box, and Susan Strassman had a key, and that’s how she gave us her father’s scripts and how we paid her when we sold them. (And we did. My hunch about Warner Brothers Television and the adult Westerns was absolutely correct.) This envelope had in it just one script, and a note. This one is different. Daddy has quit drinking and fighting and falling out of bed. Thank you so much, Roxanne. Love, Susan.

  Adios Diablo was indeed different—it was the story of an American railway inspector in 1915 who answers to corporate interests in the US. He goes to Mexico to make routine inspections, where he encounters the Mexican Revolution in all its chaos, turmoil, and drama. The story included a Mexican girl; not your usual lacy señorita, but a real soldadera, complete with a gun, a bandolier of ammo, and the kind of sexiness that Rita Hayworth does so well, brazen enough to make plain what she wanted from a man, but sufficiently simmering to sidestep the Hays Code. There was also a train wreck. And there was a Negro character: a middle-aged man who had fled Texas many years before and was vehemently on the side of the revolution. This man and the railroad inspector had to learn to trust each other, another strand of story that made it richer. Leaping up off the page, the film seemed to splash across my vision: the sound of the train wreck, the dust and smoke, the sacrifices of the men and women fighting the Mexican Revolution. And that, of course, was the whole trouble. The story wore Simon’s old proletarian sympathies like a badge of honor. The hero was a man of conflicted integrity, the heroine was no shrinking virgin cowering in the corner, the struggle was that of people who had been oppressed for eons rising up against corporations who had grown fat and rich from their labor. All well and good, even heroic, but in Cold War America, any revolution looks like a call to Red arms.

  I took it home, and Terrence read it, cheered to see that the black character was not a shoeshine boy, or an Uncle Tom, that no one did a jive dance or wore a turban. “This is exactly the kind of picture that will help America save itself.”

  “Agreed. But no one will make it today. For Whom the Bell Tolls could not get made now unless Robert Jordan was a sniper knocking off unwashed peons who want to deprive bankers of their nobly won gains.”

  “You should let Simon know so he doesn’t get his hopes up.”

  “I want his hopes up. If he can write like this, he’s come back to life.”

  The following morning I drove up through Zuma Canyon where, off a rutted road, Art Luke lived in a Quonset hut with a wife and a couple of kids. I remembered that he had grown up in a Mormon colony in Mexico and spoke fluent Spanish. He was just cantankerous enough that the story might appeal to him. When I got out of the MG, he was bringing his face up out of the engine of a pickup truck that was jacked up and had no tires. Joy lit his eyes. But, no, I hadn’t sold another of his noir detective screenplays. We sat on camp stools around an outdoor firepit, and I told him the story of Adios Diablo, and who wrote it, and why that writer was living in Mexico.

  “I remember Simon Strassman’s Westerns. He’s a hack. No offense, Roxanne, but really, everything he wrote had a formula you could follow in your sleep. The Good Guy, the Bad G
uy, the Sidekick, all that shit.”

  “You’re right about most of his stuff. Jimmy’s fronting for him for television.”

  Art’s long jaw dropped. “Damn. So that’s why Jimmy’s buying a house. He said he’d got lucky, and that television was eating his stuff up.”

  “He did get lucky. Television is eating it up. I’m swearing you to secrecy. Routing out the Red vermin is still Hollywood’s favorite sport. I’m offering you a similar proposition with Adios Diablo. Your name, Simon’s work.”

  “I’m no Communist. I fought in the Pacific. Lie down with Reds and you wake up Pink. Guilt by association.” He took the script from me and rifled through the pages. “You know I grew up in Mexico. My father met Pancho Villa. I still have family there. The Mexicans are still fighting the damn revolution forty years after they lost.”

  “Then you know why this is a great picture.”

  “What do you care about Mexico, Roxanne?” Art scoffed. “Why are you taking these risks?”

  “I care about Simon. He’s never written anything this good in all his life, and he deserves a chance to see it on the screen.”

  “If anyone will put it on the screen. Seems dubious to me.”

  I took Adios Diablo from his hands. “I have to get this copied, but if you’re interested, come by my office this afternoon and read it. If not, I trust you’ll keep everything I’ve said here confidential.”

  “I’d never rat out a friend. You can trust me.”

  “If I didn’t believe that, Art, I wouldn’t be here in the first place.”

  He showed up about four. He stretched his long, lanky frame out on the sofa and read. At six he knocked on my office door. “I wish to hell I had written this picture. I love the goddamned story. I love the goddamned train wreck. I’d be proud to have my name on it.”

  “Good,” I said, pleased that my intuition had been correct.

  “Now, where in hell are you going to offer a script like this?”