Script for Scandal Page 28

‘I’m having lunch with Brenda next week before she starts on the Benny picture. And there’s some news. Abigail accepted a teaching job in Oregon, where her sister lives. She’ll move up there over the summer, begin work in the fall.’

  ‘A change of scenery will do that poor girl a world of good.’ She deliberately stirred cream into her coffee. ‘And Detective Morrow?’

  ‘Detective Morrow is currently on a fishing trip, all by his lonesome. It’s kicking off a few weeks’ deserved vacation. Which he will also be spending largely by his lonesome, if the tea leaves I’ve read are any indication.’

  ‘I doubt that. Mark my words, a few days of solitude and he’ll come around.’

  Not sure if I shared this opinion, I said nothing.

  ‘Have you seen your friend Mr Fischer?’

  ‘Yes. I thanked Simon for his help and told him we’d get together for coffee on occasion. But that’s all.’

  ‘Then for the time being, we shall be alone together,’ Edith declared.

  I smiled. If a solo life was good enough for Edith …

  We clinked coffee cups in solidarity. Edith then summoned our waitress. ‘Nix on the fruit salad, my dear. I’ll have a hamburger as well. Double onions.’

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  We wanted Script for Scandal to have, as Max Ramsey would say, the stink of real life. A few words on liberties taken and sources used. Any errors are our own.

  There were two ‘jailbird screenwriters’ in 1930s Hollywood. Ernest Booth returned to a life of crime. He was apprehended in the parking lot of Musso & Frank in March 1947 for his role in several bank robberies, and died serving his sentence in San Quentin. Robert Tasker married into society during his Hollywood heyday, then later wed the granddaughter of Costa Rica’s former president. He was writing movies in Mexico when he was found dead in December 1944; the circumstances surrounding his apparent suicide, naturally, remain suspicious. We learned of this fascinating footnote in film history through an article in Noir City, the magazine of the Film Noir Foundation, by Philippe Garnier, who kindly elaborated on the subject for us. His article was excerpted from his 1996 book Honni soit qui Malibu: quelques écrivains à Hollywood, which also includes an invaluable section on the role bookstores, especially Stanley Rose’s, played in the Los Angeles writing community. We’re thrilled Philippe’s singular book will at last receive an English translation, to be called Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s (Black Pool Productions).

  We had long been intrigued by Hollywood’s glamorous gangster Bugsy – sorry, Benjamin Siegel, particularly by the oft-cited fact that he controlled the powerful extras union. We started researching and immediately found a red flag: there was no independent extras union until 1946, at which time Siegel was preoccupied with a certain real estate venture in Las Vegas. He was murdered the following year. We became even more curious about how this story became part of Siegel lore, and how Siegel might have exploited the campaign surrounding the May 1939 election in which extras voted by an overwhelming sixty-to-one margin to remain with the Screen Actors Guild.

  Anyone wanting to know about atmosphere players should consult Kerry Segrave’s Extras of Early Hollywood: A History of the Crowd, 1913–1945 and Anthony Slide’s Hollywood Unknowns: A History of Extras, Bit Players and Stand-Ins. Mr Slide, a preeminent Hollywood historian, graciously answered our questions. We are also indebted to another book Mr Slide edited, It’s the Pictures That Got Small: Charles Brackett on Billy Wilder and Hollywood’s Golden Age, which captures the behind-the-scenes flavor of Paramount in the 1930s and ‘40s.

  Astoundingly, no biographer has of yet tackled the life of Countess Dorothy di Frasso. (Note to selves – potential project?) One confirmed fact: her paramour Ben Siegel accompanied her on that April 1939 cruise to Italy. Their objective was to sell a new explosive called ‘Atomite’ to the Italian military, but the demonstration proved a bust. Of the Contessa’s villa, Bugsy said ‘half the guys she had hanging around were counts or dukes or kings out of a job,’ and in later years he lamented not seizing the opportunity to whack two of her other houseguests, ‘that fat bastard (Hermann) Göring’ and ‘that dirty (Joseph) Goebbels.’ Siegel’s claim of a potential Nazi-hunting party has since been discredited, but still, we’re alerting the Paramount story department. While Virginia Hill does not appear in the 1941 film Manpower no matter what IMDb says, there are rumors she regularly mingled with extras whenever she and Siegel visited pals like George Raft on set in the hope of sneaking into a film. We haven’t seen her in the background of any movies yet, but we’ll keep looking.

  Florabel Muir covered Hollywood high and low for decades; her memoir Headline Happy (1950) makes for hair-raising reading. We also recommend the 1951 autobiography of Edith Head’s mentor Howard Greer, Designing Male. The description of his salon is taken from period accounts, and we’re launching a campaign for it to be rebuilt according to those exact specifications.

  The long-hidden tale of the studio-funded effort to track Nazi sympathizers in Southern California has now been told in two books, Hollywood’s Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles by Laura B. Rosenzweig and Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America by Steven J. Ross, both published in 2017.

  Edith Head’s relationship with Max Ramsey is based on one she revealed to her biographer David Chierichetti. The Paulette Goddard incident is recounted in Hollywood Magic, an unpublished manuscript Edith co-wrote with Norma Lee Browning, now in the collection of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’s Margaret Herrick Library. Miss Goddard would go on to have a sterling 1939. She was a late addition to the cast of The Women, appearing alongside Joan Crawford, and the box office success of The Cat and the Canary led to a lengthy Paramount career. In 1940, she reteamed with her then-husband Charlie Chaplin – yes, they were married – on The Great Dictator.

  Shaun Considine’s Bette & Joan: The Divine Feud admirably traces the lives of both of these actresses. Their voices ring through loud and clear in the books they wrote themselves.

  Lastly, the Transogram Movie Millions game is real. We do not own a copy. Versions with the complete set of cards sometimes surface on eBay, at the cost of several hundred dollars, in the event you’re preparing your Christmas list.