Script for Scandal Page 2

  STREETLIGHT STORY

  by

  George Dolan and

  Clyde Fentress

  ‘Don’t think much of the title.’ I fanned the pages. ‘Is it a musical?’

  ‘Heavens, no. A crime story. A B picture, to be honest.’

  ‘I often like those more than the featured attractions. So there’s a big, juicy murder.’

  ‘More than one. May I have some of your water?’ Edith didn’t wait for my reply. She helped herself to a sip, leaving a ghostly imprint of lipstick on the glass. I had never seen her so nervous. ‘It recounts a bank robbery, and the pursuit of the men responsible. I’m afraid I only recently learned the truth about the picture.’

  ‘What truth?’

  Edith reached across the table and took my hand. ‘The script is based on the California Republic bank robbery of 1936.’

  I pushed my sandwich aside. I couldn’t eat now. Or for the foreseeable future.

  TWO

  On April 14, 1936, I was still living in New York City with my uncle Danny and aunt Joyce. I couldn’t say with certainty what I did that particular Tuesday, but I could hazard a guess. Odds were I went to work in the basement of the Empire State Assurance Company, where I was a mediocre typist but excelled at avoiding the wandering hands of my boss Mr Armbruster. On the train ride home to Flushing, it’s possible I tried to talk myself into entering the Miss Astoria Park beauty pageant, with its grand prize of a Hollywood screen test, being touted in the newspapers.

  Three things I could guarantee were true of that date, though. I had potatoes with my dinner, I wondered if anything special would ever happen to me, and that night I went to the pictures.

  On the other side of the country that morning, three men pulled up outside the California Republic Bank branch on Vermont Avenue near Franklin in a black Ford. One of the men, Leo James Hoyer, remained in the car while the others, Borden C. Yates and Giuseppe ‘Gio’ Bianchi, went inside brandishing guns. Several bank patrons said the belligerent Bianchi behaved like a mad dog while Yates was quiet, even solicitous, fetching a chair for an elderly woman who felt faint. The two men exited the bank with twenty thousand dollars in cash.

  They made it as far as the Ford. A police car in the vicinity responded immediately. The officers exchanged fire with the bandits. Bianchi and Patrolman Wendell Starnes were both killed at the scene. Starnes left behind two young daughters. Patrolman Eamonn Murphy took a bullet in the leg but continued to fire at the fleeing Ford containing Hoyer and Yates.

  Two days later, Hoyer was found dead of injuries sustained in the shootout by Los Angeles Police Department Detectives Gene Morrow and Teddy Lomax. Only Borden Yates remained at large, the stolen twenty thousand dollars still missing. Teddy got a line on Yates’s location. He and Gene followed the lead to a rundown Victorian on Bunker Hill, not far from where Gene grew up. The tip proved out. Yates’s gentlemanly days had ended at the bank; he emerged from the house guns blazing. Teddy Lomax fell at once. Gene, in turn, cut Yates down with a shot that an eyewitness described as ‘worthy of Wild Bill Hickok’.

  That should have brought the sordid saga to a close. Only the money was never recovered, a fact that set tongues to wagging. Gene found himself dogged by rumors that he and Abigail Lomax, Teddy’s widow, were an item and had been for some time. Never mind that Gene had known Abigail since childhood, had introduced her to the man she would marry, had served as best man at the wedding. The rumors still dogged Gene, with Teddy Lomax almost three years in the cold ground. The whispers didn’t stop Gene from remaining close to Abigail, or prevent him from doing his job. The Los Angeles Police Department had a reputation for corruption, after all. A little dirt only helped Gene fit in.

  Just over eighteen months later, my path would cross with his. We had been together ever since.

  Not that Gene had filled in these particulars. He seldom spoke about the worst day of his life. Once, at a police function, he’d pointed out Eamonn Murphy to me, walking with a cane and an old man’s gait. I had looked up the details in newspapers myself, and committed them all to memory.

  I returned the script to Edith’s side of the table, banishing it to whence it came. ‘So I’ll sit this picture out.’

  ‘There’s more, I’m afraid.’ Edith shifted in her chair and looked directly into my eyes. ‘The film’s producer, Max Ramsey, is an old friend. Yesterday he told me the writer, or one of them, at any rate, knows what actually happened.’

  ‘What do you mean, “actually”?’ The tension in my voice resounded in the relative quiet of the restaurant. Billy Wilder turned to check on me. Even Trixie offered a pitying glance in my direction. Mind your own business, Trixie.

  Edith as always remained unflappable, her tone level. ‘The writer in question is a former convict, one who served time in San Quentin and elsewhere. He specializes in underworld stories, based on his own experience and what he learns from his … cohort. This writer didn’t commit the robbery, but says he knows who did.’

  ‘So do I.’ I muscled the words past my clenched jaw. ‘Giuseppe Bianchi, Leo Hoyer, and Borden Yates. They’re all dead.’

  ‘That they are.’ The lenses of Edith’s glasses swung back toward Paramount’s Bronson Gate and her adjacent office window. She’d gone out on a limb for me, and I had to remember that. ‘But this movie will tell a different story when it goes into production next week. According to the script, the robbery was conceived by a police detective, although here he’s left the force. His former partner is killed in the pursuit of the thieves, and this man takes up with his wife.’

  Now I knew why we were here, on the neutral ground of Oblath’s. I reached back across the table for the script. ‘What’s this character’s name? This sinister mastermind?’

  Edith paused. She’d led me right up to the landmine. Time to learn if it would go off. ‘Jim Morris.’

  Gene Morrow, Jim Morris. Only the thinnest of veils for the writing duo of Dolan and Fentress. The name JIM leapt up at me from the pages. At least they’d given him plenty of dialogue.

  From the kitchen came an angry sizzle, Oblath’s beginning the shift into evening when it would churn out steaks and chops for the hungry Paramount hordes. The scents of meat and smoke made my stomach clench.

  ‘I’d like to talk to your friend,’ I heard myself say. ‘The producer of this epic. I want this from the horse’s mouth.’

  The waitress, sensing I’d abandoned my lunch, slapped a bill on the table. Edith paid it. I rose woozily, like a bushwhacked boxer who wanted to punch back but didn’t have his legs under him yet. Teetering toward the door, I spied Junior sulking at his table while Trixie spoke animatedly with Billy Wilder. She gently swatted him with her sailor hat, feigning outrage at something he’d said. Without the hat she seemed older, more like a wised-up veteran trying to salvage her career than some waif hoping for her big break. She and Wilder didn’t notice us leaving.

  Good on you, sister, I thought. But remember this lesson. No matter how good you think you have it, Hollywood will always find a way to sandbag you.

  THREE

  We double-timed across the lot, facsimiles of Jerry the messenger boy zipping by on bicycles. ‘Max is something of a veteran,’ Edith said. ‘He’s been with Paramount almost since the beginning. He knew Jesse Lasky. To hear him tell it, he scouted the ranch in Agoura before the studio bought it.’

  I wondered if that’s where we were walking. The messenger boys had become few and far between. We passed a man in a Foreign Legion uniform clutching a canteen, and I told myself he was working on a picture. Max Ramsey might have had seniority, but judging from the remote location of his office he didn’t cut much ice at Paramount.

  ‘He’s with the B unit now,’ Edith said, ‘but he’s part of the history of this place. Clara Bow took his advice as gospel. And Max was so kind to me when I started. I doubt I’d be here today if he hadn’t requested me for some of his pictures in those early years. Normally, we’d shop Streetlight Story’s cost
umes, perhaps borrow a few items from stock. But Max asked me for a favor, and I simply couldn’t say no. I told him I’d stretch the wardrobe budget to give the picture some distinction. I’m glad I did. I’d never have learned about the script’s history otherwise.’

  Edith was unusually chatty this afternoon, I thought, chalking it up to nerves. Then another explanation occurred to me. She was merely filling up my silences. I usually blathered incessantly whenever I visited the lot, questions tumbling out of me, every set prompting a memory of some favorite film. But I’d said next to nothing since we’d left Oblath’s. The enormity of what Edith had told me had shaken me to my core.

  I’d lived for the movies since I was a child. I really didn’t want to hate them now.

  We reached the frontier outpost where Max Ramsey was now stationed. The blonde working in his outer office barely glanced up from her magazine. I got more eye contact from a grinning Sonja Henie on the cover of Photoplay as the receptionist hooked a thumb toward the next door. ‘He’s in there,’ she said, popping her gum.

  Edith and I proceeded on unannounced. As we entered his office Max Ramsey lurched forward and slammed a meaty hand onto his telephone. Whether the pantomime was to indicate he was expecting an important call or had just ended one, I didn’t know.

  ‘For the last time, Max,’ Edith said, ‘fire that girl.’

  ‘But I can’t! She’s my discovery!’ Max hoisted himself out of his chair and came around the desk to embrace Edith. He was an imposing, barrel-chested presence, his frame sporting what had to be close to three hundred pounds. But the head perched atop his bulk, dusted with hair the color of iron filings, seemed to belong to an earlier, smaller model. Perhaps one from his heyday in the 1920s; his dated gray suit, double-breasted with flared lapels and wide-hemmed trousers, was a freshly tailored relic. He gazed out through deep-set eyes like a man under siege. Only one thing in Hollywood was worse than a producer who needed a hit, and Max Ramsey was it: a producer beginning to suspect that even a hit wouldn’t save him.

  Edith introduced me as a friend who worked for the well-known Addison Rice. Max proved his producer bona fides by immediately applying this information to his own woes. ‘An Addison Rice party! That’s what the nightclub scene has to be like. Not just gaiety but scale! A rambunctious energy! The whole picture falls apart if our boys look like pikers there. Are you sure you can manage it, Edith?’

  ‘Of course. I promised you my best. I wanted to ask—’

  ‘Suppose I could try springing a few more shekels from the coffers.’ Max returned to his desk and placed his hand on the telephone again. He didn’t lift the receiver; clearly it was more talisman than tool. ‘Let the front office know Streetlight Story requires a certain sheen.’

  ‘About the picture, Max.’ Edith spoke in a patient voice, indulging an old friend. ‘Lillian and I wanted some information on the writer you told me about—’

  ‘Fentress!’ He thundered the name as if summoning a Norse god. ‘Only reason I did this picture. It’s not your usual programmer. Thanks to Clyde Fentress, it’ll have the stink of real life.’

  It certainly stank of something. ‘I’d like to know a little more about this real-life business,’ I said. ‘Edith tells me Fentress has been in prison.’

  ‘More than once. Used to be a thief. Occasional strong-arm stuff, but mainly he was a burglar. Even escaped from prison a time or two. Wrote a picture about one of his crashouts. I wanted to do it here, but there was no interest.’

  ‘How’d he become a writer?’ I asked.

  ‘On his last turn up in Q’ – Max shivered, thrilling at his own use of hardboiled lingo for San Quentin – ‘he started writing for the prison journal. His scribblings came to the attention of a big name literary type back East.’

  ‘H.L. Mencken, I believe,’ Edith said.

  ‘Mencken. He under contract out here? Anyway, Clyde was one of several fellows in stir who showed a knack for storytelling. Mencken became their advocate. They started selling ideas to the studios back in the twenties while they were still locked up. Jailbird scribes, can you imagine? Say, that’d be a good angle to promote this picture. Adolph, Jesse and I bought a few of Clyde’s stories, but didn’t make them. He was more of a Warners talent back then, grittier stuff. The kind of thing I could use right now, I don’t mind telling you. The writing helped get him paroled, and Clyde’s been cranking them out since.’

  ‘Is Streetlight Story based on a real crime?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s what drew me to it. A bank robbery over on Wilshire in 1935.’

  ‘Franklin in 1936,’ Edith said.

  ‘Yes, well, the details don’t matter. Liberties have been taken with the facts, but I have it on Clyde’s authority we’re getting the truth. He’s done his homework. Scandalous, what happened, when you think about it.’

  I wanted credit for my good behavior. I didn’t scream, or cry, or wrench the phone from under Max’s hand and hurl it at his tiny, tiny head. ‘And your movie is just going to put Clyde’s version of events out there, unchecked. No matter who it hurts.’

  Max’s gaze shifted to Edith in something resembling alarm. ‘Lillian knows some of the people involved,’ she said.

  ‘Ah. I see. Let me assure you, you have nothing to fear. Names and locations have been changed.’

  ‘Not enough.’ I snapped off the words as if biting into pemmican.

  I knew I was making Max uncomfortable when he turtled back and finally relinquished his hold on the telephone. He commenced his argument by blithely contradicting himself. ‘The picture isn’t based on fact, per se. The actual robbery’s more of an inspiration. It’s why we partnered Clyde with the other fella, Dolan, ex-newspaperman. To clean the material up. Fentress, you see, he knows that milieu, the characters, the way the environment shapes and bends these people. Again, Warners-type material. He’s merely using the robbery as a framework. Just to give it—’

  ‘The stink of real life,’ I finished for him.

  ‘Precisely. So you understand.’ He beamed at me, now that we were speaking the same language. ‘We need some of that realism for the nightclub scene. The glamour, the extravagance. Like one of your Addison’s parties! Any pointers you can give?’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I said.

  My flat line reading didn’t register in Max’s ears. Having heard what he wanted to hear, he turned to Edith. ‘You can work miracles. I’ve seen you do it before, Edie. I need it again.’ He attempted puppy dog eyes, but only succeeded in looking like an aging hound trying to avoid another trip to the veterinarian’s office.

  Edith, to my surprise, played parrot. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said.

  The needy Max required reassurance on several other scenes, so I made to leave. Edith squeezed my hand as we said goodbye. ‘Don’t forget this,’ she said, pressing the copy of Streetlight Story’s script on me. I didn’t want it, but I couldn’t leave it behind.

  As soon as Max’s door closed, I took off running. Tracking down Clyde Fentress might take some time.

  Writers’ offices were scattered across the Paramount lot. I went to the closest building housing several of them and trotted along its length, reading the names off each closed door. There was a noticeable lack of clacking keys on this Friday afternoon. I’d probably have better luck locating Fentress if I went back to Oblath’s.

  On I went, mounting the building’s exterior staircase and scouting the upstairs tenants. No sign of Fentress’s name. Down below a bicycle rolled past bearing Jerry the messenger boy, formerly known as Junior. Feet braced on the handlebars, cocky grin smeared across his face.

  I hollered down at him. ‘How’d you do? The girl say yes?’

  Jerry brought the bike to an effortless halt. ‘Taking her to the pictures tonight. Who are you, anyway?’

  ‘Cupid. Don’t let the duds fool you. Where can a gal find a writer named Clyde Fentress?’

  ‘Deep in the wilds of the lot. Southeast corner, over by Van Ne
ss. End of the row.’

  At the very least, I figured, all this walking had to be doing wonders for my legs.

  I knew Fentress’s office was empty. I sensed his absence as I approached and hammered on the door anyway. Nobody answered. None of the neighboring doors opened at the racket I raised either, including the one bearing George Dolan’s name. Friday had indeed come to the lot early.

  ‘We both musta missed him.’ The voice emerged from the shadows at the corner of the somewhat shabby building. I turned toward it and instantly wished I hadn’t.

  The man had brown hair, neatly combed and parted. His suit was well kept, despite being the color of boarding-house wash-water. But no one, it was safe to say, took in these attributes, at least not at first. Not with the man’s left eye commanding your attention. It drooped, as if it had been set lower in his face. Worse, because of some palsy or nerve damage it functioned independently of the right eye, never quite looking where its partner did.

  Naturally, the man didn’t comment on his condition himself. ‘Clyde’s probably out drinking, given the hour. Trying to avoid his missus. She’s a piece of work. Sorry, where are my manners? Name’s Nap.’ He bowed slightly as he introduced himself, the left eye rolling up to leer at me.

  Completely nonplussed, I blurted out the first thing that came to mind. ‘Short for Napoleon?’

  ‘Short for Aloysius. Aloysius Conlin, if this is a cotillion. They call me Nap, because, well …’ He casually flicked a finger against his cheekbone, close enough to his wandering eye that I flinched. ‘This tends to make me look sleepy.’

  What was I supposed to say, that I hadn’t noticed? Instead I nodded. ‘I suppose it does.’

  Conlin scanned the lot. His left eye sought me out. Like the picture of Jesus Christ hanging over my aunt Joyce’s dining room table in Flushing, Nap Conlin always seemed to be looking at me. ‘So who are you? You work on the lot?’