Angel in black

14

Horse operas, crime melodramas, horror pictures, comedies, and every other stripe of B-movie were still churned out by the independent studios on Sunset Boulevard, near Gower Street. Despite the ongoing strike by the CSU-the Conference of Studio Unions-the usual parade of featured players was crossing Sunset in full makeup to grab a bite at a hamburger or hot-dog stand; Brittingham’s, the popular eatery in Columbia Square, at the corner of Sunset and Gower, was servicing its usual clientele of actors and extras, including western gunfighters with empty holsters (prop men having confiscated their sixshooters) and starlets in sunglasses and white blouses and dark slacks, freshly waved hair tucked under colorful kerchiefs.

This lack of support for the strike came as no surprise to me, and was in fact why a bit player like Peggy was getting chauffeured to the studio, daily. The CSU was a militant leftist coalition that included carpenters, painters, and machinists; they were an alternative to the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees, IATSE having been organized by Nitti racketeers Willie Bioff and George Browne, both currently still in stir. Under the leadership of new Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan, however, the CSU had been left twisting in the wind, and SAG actors-among other union and guild members-were crossing the picket lines.

Which was how Peggy could be working at Paramount, during a strike, and I could be keeping an appointment with Orson Welles at the giant of Gower Gulch, Columbia. A Poverty Row weed that had blossomed under the firm hand of Harry Cohn, Columbia was now a major force in Tinsel Town, and had been ground zero for the strike last October, when fifteen hundred picketers laid siege to the studio, with nearly seven hundred strikers arrested on charges ranging from unlawful assembly to assault with a deadly weapon.

But now, several months later, sold out by Dutch Reagan and SAG, the picketers were a halfhearted, signs-on-their-shoulders bunch, a sea of Reds who quickly parted to allow me to check in at the guard gate. My unionist pop would have been ashamed of this lackluster picket line-and ashamed of me, for crossing it.

I parked and strolled past surprisingly ramshackle-looking offices onto a typically bustling backlot-workshops, cutting rooms, projection rooms, soundstages. But-despite following Fred Rubinski’s detailed directions-I soon found myself wandering amid chattering extras in costume and bored grips and gaffers in work clothes, ducking cars and trucks transporting people and equipment. Finally I was just standing there, scratching my head, a detective who could have used a detective, when I felt something-or somebody-tug at my sleeve.

I glanced down and a large adult male face was looking up at me.

“You’re Mr. Heller, ain’tcha?” the hunchbacked dwarf asked. His accent said New York, Lower East Side.

“Uh, yes.”

He grinned up at me; he had a pleasant, well-lined face-blue eyes, high forehead, gray hair, late fifties.

“The boss is expectin’ ya.” He shuffled around in front of me and extended a hand. He was wearing white pants and a white shirt and white shoes, and looked like a little ice-cream man-the shirt, however, was spattered with red. “Shorty Chivello, Mr. Heller-I’m Mr. Welles’ chauffeur and personal valet.”

I shook his hand, which was of normal size, his grip firm and confident. “Chauffeur, huh?”

He laughed, saying, “Hey, I’ll save you the embarrassment of askin’ how I manage that, Mr. Heller-I got these special wooden blocks strapped to the pedals.”

“Cut yourself shaving, Shorty?” I asked, as I followed him toward a nearby soundstage.

“Aw, it’s just paint, Mr. Heller.”

“Make it ‘Nate.’ ”

“Naw, that’s okay. I’m ‘Shorty,’ but you’re ‘Mr. Heller.’ The boss likes certain respect paid… He says you’re an old friend.”

“That may be overstating, Shorty. But he was barely out of that prep school in Woodstock when I first met him in Chicago.”

“Jeez, was the boss the boy genius they say he was?”

“Shorty, he still is.”

Shorty opened the door for me and I stepped into the mostly darkened soundstage, and what I saw gave me a start: out of the gloom emerged another giant head-not another hunchbacked dwarf’s, something even better, even stranger… the profile of a wild-eyed, vaguely Chinese dragon, hovering above me, perhaps forty feet off the floor, the head itself thirty feet high, angled skyward, a shiny slide extending from its open mouth like an endless silver tongue snaking its way up into the darkness where the ceiling presumably was; disturbingly, the silver slide also exited the back of the beast’s head, emptying into a vast pit.

“Christ!” I said. My eyes adjusting to the near dark, I could see that the whole preposterous serpentine affair was constructed on roller-coaster-style scaffolding.

Shorty was shuffling around in front me, saying, “Watch your step, Mr. Heller. The boss had ’em dig that pit right through the cement… Ya shoulda heard them jackhammers!”

We skirted the edge of the mini-abyss, which was a good eighty feet long, and half again as wide, perhaps as deep.

“The boss made the cameramen slide down that thing on their stomachs,” Shorty was saying. “Put the camera on a mat. So you could get a whaddayacallit, objective view.”

I figured he meant “subjective,” but I never argue with hunchbacked dwarfs, particularly on soundstages dominated by dragons. Just as a general policy.

Moving past the towering slide, I followed the little man, the movement of his body seeming more side-to-side than straight ahead, to a door in the midst of portable walls that were clearly the back of a set-about a third of the soundstage was blocked off behind these “wild” walls, which could be moved to facilitate filming from varied angles.

Shorty opened the door and revealed a black-haired man in baggy black trousers and loose white shirt and loosened black tie, a big man at least six two and easily pushing two hundred and fifty pounds, standing at a small work table, dabbing red paint onto the wide grin of a grotesque clown mask which lay like a shield on the table. The lighting-provided by occasional work lamps hanging like fruit from extension cords vanishing up into the same darkness that swallowed the ceiling-was harsh and spotty and shadow inducing. The walls were decorated with a scratchy black-and-white mural replete with nightmarish, violent images-medical-text anatomical diagrams and grinning clown faces juxtaposed with the death smiles of dancing skeletons.

The black-haired man smiled over his shoulder at me, puckishly, dark hard eyes melting in a soft baby face where strong cheekbones struggled to be seen, dark slashes of eyebrow expressed constant irony, and an upturned nose seemed to thumb itself, all punctuated by a dimpled chin.

“Nathan, darling,” he said, in that sonorous voice radio listeners all over America adored, including many who disliked the young man who possessed it, “what do you think of my Crazy House?”

“What was that remark that got you in so much trouble?” I asked, moving next to him as he reddened the clown’s grin with a Chinese brush. “Something about a movie studio being your personal train set?”

“Well, now it’s my personal erector set.” He flashed me that raffish smirk of his that seemed to invite you in on every private joke. “Did you know that the definition of one word has kept our two noble unions from coming together? And what is that single word over which our carpenters and painters and set dressers and other skilled artisans have, shall we say, come to blows? Erection, my dear.” He sighed and smiled and lifted his eyebrows as he bent over the clown mask, touching it up skillfully.

“Erection?”

“Yes, they can’t make up their minds-does it mean, the building of sets, or does it refer to simply assembling that which has already been built?” He gave me an amused pixie look. “Perhaps I should point out to them that, in my experience, a woman who is ‘built’ can cause an erection to quite naturally occur. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Shorty had moved in between Orson and myself, paint can in hand, tending his master like a medieval apprentice.

“I think Mr. Heller and I may require some privacy,” Welles said gently to his factotum. “Would you mind terribly leaving us alone?”

Shorty set the paint can on the table, gestured “o.k.,” then trundled off.

“Why’s that little guy a deaf mute, all of a sudden?” I asked. “He was talkative as hell, all the way in here.”

Welles twitched his tiny smile. “Yes, Shorty’s loquaciousness-even his bluntness-can be something of a problem. That’s why I’ve instituted my docking procedure.”

“Your what?”

“I dock Shorty ten dollars every time he speaks around any guest or business associate I’m entertaining.” He carefully set the brush across the open paint can. “Care for the nickel tour?”

The pudgy, congenial, vaguely arrogant man showing me around his film set had, at thirty-one, already made history in theater, radio, and film. His dynamic Broadway productions for the Federal Theater Project and his own Mercury Theater had made him famous; his War of the Worlds radio broadcast, duping thousands into thinking Martians had invaded earth, had made him infamous. His Hollywood achievements included directing and cowriting three movies-two of which were already acknowledged as modern classics, if not box-office favorites-as well as condescending to star on occasion in films for other directors. He was widely considered a genuine genius-and, in the executive suites of the movie industry, a genuine pain-in-the-ass, starting with his ill-advised, barely veiled attack on press lord William Randolph Hearst by way of his film Citizen Kane.

How Welles had come to be directing a movie at Columbia could be explained only one way: his wife, Rita Hayworth, was Harry Cohn’s biggest star… and she was starring in this picture.

For perhaps ten minutes, Welles guided me through his “Crazy House,” a fully operable carnival funhouse, with sliding doors, tilting floors, slanting walls, and a seemingly endless hall-of-mirrors maze. The latter was equipped with plate-glass mirrors seven feet by four feet, one after another, dozens and dozens of them, and several more dozen of the distorting variety, turning Welles razor-thin and making a short fat fool of me.

“I discovered at an early age,” he told me, leading me mischievously through the labyrinth, “that almost everything in this world was phony-done with mirrors.”

Images of each other seemingly blocking our every path, I asked him how in hell he could shoot in here, with all this glass.

“They’re mostly two-way mirrors,” he said, “and those that aren’t have tiny peepholes drilled for the camera operators. Not that way, dear! This way… follow me…”

Welles’ funhouse had a distinctly macabre flavor-he led me gleefully through rooms of flimsy canvas walls and spongy plywood floors that were weirdly angled, painted with skewed faux windows, creating a warped Caligari perspective. He grinned like a naughty child as he ushered me through hanging beads and drooping chains and gauzy half-shredded curtains, past black-and-white murals with STAND UP OR DIE lettered in the quaint fashion of turn-of-the-century circus posters, into areas decorated with papier-mache skeletons and cattle skulls and grotesque grinning clown heads.

Something sprang out at me, and I jumped-a blonde mannequin head on a bobbing spring was suddenly staring right at me; she had the bottom of her pretty face rotted away, and a cigarette in her skull teeth, through which Welles’ booming laughter seemed to emanate.

In the next chamber, dismembered female legs dangled from the ceiling-shapely mannequin limbs, in high heels and sometimes seamed stockings-with further ghastly images painted directly over the fake brick walls, including a trio of handle-bar-mustached gents in old-fashioned bathing attire that revealed where sections of their flesh and musculature had been cut away from the bone.

“We’ve worked our way to the front,” Welles said, gesturing me through a passageway, “which in true movie-magic tradition is in the back.”

The entrance was papier-mache rock, with plywood stairs painted gray to match, as if the “Crazy House” had been fashioned within a cave, and all around the doorway, mannequin hands and reaching arms poked out from the walls, a frame of disembodied limbs. On one wall had been painted a cartoon of a woman, cut in half, a screw protruding from her left breast and dripping blood, lying atop a cow that had been flayed to the midsection.

Welles sat on the steps and fished out a cigar from his suitcoat pocket; just above him a decapitated clown’s head grinned from within a baroque bird cage. “You don’t care for one, do you, Nathan?”

He meant a cigar, not a clown’s head.

“No.” I sat next to him. “No, thanks.”

He fired up the Havana and got it going, waved out his match, and I noticed for the first time that the dark eyes in that cherubic puss were bloodshot.

“You know, I just can’t seem to finish this set. It was the first thing I began on this picture, back in late September… before we went to Mexico, for location shooting… I’m responsible for this strike, you know.”

“How are you responsible?”

He gestured to the gruesome images around us. “By doing all this painting myself, with the help of a few friends. I couldn’t turn over something this… intensely personal… to the hacks in the Columbia art department. I would have had the same artisans who bring their masterful touch to the Three Stooges.”

“And that’s what started the strike?”

He sighed dark, richly fragrant smoke. “It did, when members of the Motion Picture Set Painters Union… local 279… came to this soundstage and discovered that their work had been completed by ‘nonunion’ hands.”

“And here I thought you were such a flaming liberal.”

“Oh I am, my dear, with a notable exception-in matters relating to my art, I am slightly to the right of Genghis Khan.”

“You haven’t asked why I wanted to see you.”

The rosebud mouth twitched a tiny smile. “Did I thank you for recommending your friend, Mr. Rubinski, to handle that piece of business last year?”

“No. You’re welcome. I take it Fred handled that matter… discreetly.”

“Oh yes… of course I had to pay the girl twenty thousand to keep it out of court, and out of the papers. I didn’t rape her, you know-that was utter nonsense.”

“None of my business.”

“My darling, if you had seen her-she was such an ugly thing. I would simply never rape an ugly girl. And I never seem to have to rape the beautiful ones.”

His irony was strained, and as relaxed as that baby face was-so unformed looking, almost fetuslike-his forehead was tight and between his brows was a deep crease of tension.

He leaned toward me and touched my arm. “Have I apologized for snubbing you?”

“When did you snub me?”

“At La Rue, a week or two ago… I was dining with my soon-to-be-ex-wife.”

So he had noticed me.

“You see,” he was saying, “we’ve been making some silly attempts at reconciliation, not the least of which is this film, and if I’d introduced you-my friend the famous divorce detective from Chicago-Rita might have misunderstood.”

“That’s all right. No offense taken.”

“And I was in a particularly black mood, further acerbated by alcohol. Who was your lovely companion?”

“My wife.”

“Really! Congratulations! When did this happen?”

“Not long ago. We’re sort of on our honeymoon.”

“I was given to understand you were out here consolidating your business with Mr. Rubinski-did I read something to that effect in the Examiner?”

“You read the Hearst papers?”

“I’m keeping a particularly close eye on them right now.”

“Why is that?”

Welles ignored the question, exhaling Havana smoke. “I hope your marriage is more successful than mine. I’m sure you wonder how even a ‘monstrous boy’ like me… that’s what Houseman likes to call me… could fail to make a go of it with a beautiful, kind, sensitive, intelligent woman like Margarita Carmen Cansino Welles.”

“You have a child together.”

“Becky. Lovely girl-she is as wonderful a child as I am a beastly father.”

“You don’t have to sound proud of it. Some people would think you had it made.”

“Some people are imbeciles. I’m sure you think I was running around on her-married to Rita Hayworth, and not satisfied with what he has at home. That Welles is a glutton!”

“Not my business.”

“Well, I wasn’t unfaithful, not at first, not for the longest time. But she constantly accused me of infidelity-you see, she is mentally unstable, that lovely child… She has an inferiority complex, largely due to the fact that that fiend of a father put her on stage, not in school, and that’s the least of what that son of bitch did to her… She’s an unhappy woman, my darling Nathan, and a pathologically jealous one. She wept every night of our marriage, and yet, just last week she told me that our marriage was the happiest time of her life… Can you imagine?”

“You’re saying, she accused of you cheating so often, you finally went ahead and did it.”

“As did she. I’ll always love her… and I think she will always love me.” He sat smoking the cigar, then shook his head and said, “You know what she always called me? George. That’s my first name, you know-detestable, ordinary first name-that’s what she always called me.”

“Rita always called you George?”

“Not Rita, my dear-the Short girl. This ‘Black Dahlia’ you think I may have murdered.”

Orson Welles liked to present himself as a harbinger of high culture, bringing Shakespeare, Conrad, and Kafka to the masses; but never forget that this glorious ham was also the Shadow. Melodrama was his metier.

Nonetheless, I was struck as dumb as Shorty, reeling from Welles’ cliffhanger-before-the-commercial punch to my mental solar plexus.

“I told you I’ve been following the Hearst papers especially closely these last few days,” he was saying. “I noted, with no small interest, your involvement in the investigation. I have to say I’m relieved to be talking to you, and not some Hearst reporter-or worse, one of the Los Angeles gestapo.”

“Did you-”

“Know her? Of course I knew her. Perhaps not in the true biblical sense… She was a lovely girl, one of those absolutely black-haired girls, with skin as white as Carrara marble, and eyelashes you could trip over. She rather reminded me of another Betty, Betty Chancellor, also a dark-haired, fair-skinned beauty… my first love, at Dublin’s Gate Theater, back in ’31. As for Betty Short, I met her at Camp Cooke, when we were touring the army camps with my ‘Mercury Wonder Show,’ and again at the late lamented Canteen, then most recently at Brittingham’s, where she mooched the occasional meal.”

“What I was going to ask was if you killed her.”

Welles sighed. “If I knew, darling Nathan, I would tell you.”

I studied that baby face and the haunted eyes staring out of it. “You mean to say, you don’t know where you were, the night she was murdered?”

His smile in response was seemingly guileless. “Not a clue. A blank… It’s a classic pulp premise, my dear-the man wakes up in a room, covered in blood, with a dead body next to him… and no memory of having done the dastardly deed… or for that matter, not having done it.”

“I’m guessing you didn’t wake up in that vacant lot next to that butchered corpse.”

“No… I was in my wife’s house in Brentwood.”

“Was your wife with you?”

“She was in the hospital. Exhaustion and dysentery from our Mexican location shooting. And Shorty had the night off, as did my secretary.”

“So you have no alibi.”

“None, my darling. Nor memory. In a cheap thriller, a blow to the head would have granted me the blessing of amnesia. I, however, earned my loss of memory, every missing moment of it.”

“How?”

“It may come as a shock to you-I know it does to me-but my youth is fading fast, and my energy is no longer boundless. To work for days, without sleep, requires certain pharmaceutical assistance. Similar assistance is necessary to help me maintain my boyish figure, to better perform my leading man duties. And, as you know, I do take the occasional drink.”

“Okay-so we’re talking booze and amphetamines.”

“Did you know that my family tree includes Horace Goldin-the legendary celebrated magician who invented the ‘Divided Woman’ illusion, the trick of sawing a female in half?”

“And that means you bisected Beth Short’s body?”

As if the cigar were a wand, he gestured to the dismembered limbs framing the Crazy House doorway, and to the painting of a woman cut in half, her corpse flung on a flayed cow carcass. “I needed you to see these terrible images, Nathan-these images which were, by the way, created prior to the Short girl’s murder.” He tapped his temple with two fingers; his eyes bugged out. “They were in this mind. Nightmarish visions that I sought to exorcise in this harmless fashion.”

A few terrible moments dragged by, and then he rose, without looking at me, saying, “Let’s continue this in a more reflective setting.”

He almost bolted from the hideous, hellish self-created surroundings, disappearing into the funhouse. I found him in the hall of mirrors, seated on a folding chair, staring blankly at perhaps eighty images of himself. Another folding chair, next to him, awaited me, and I took it.

“Could I have committed this act, Nathan?”

He was asking my reflections; I answered his.

“Orson, I don’t think so. Just because you’re a megalomaniac doesn’t make you a homicidal maniac.”

He continued to meet my gaze in the mirror; and almost the entire conversation that followed was delivered through the buffer of glass. The cigar had disappeared. As we spoke, it was as if I were speaking not to Welles, but his image, projected on a screen, dozens of screens.

“These Bosch-like grotesqueries,” he said, “could they have been unfulfilled wishes? Worse, images I did fulfill on a black, forgotten night?”

“With your bad back?”

That halted the melodrama and made him laugh. “Yes, that did occur to me. I’ve been wearing that damn metal brace about half the time, lately-when I’m under stress, these genetic anomalies of the spine of mine, which my weight hardly helps, make me as helpless… and as harmless… as a kitten. But what if drugs and alcohol combined to blot out the pain? And to unleash some murderous rage in me, and then blot out the memory?”

I looked at him, not his reflection. “I don’t think you killed her. But you may be able to help me figure out who did, by answering a few questions.”

“By all means.”

“Was Beth Short a hooker, Orson?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“When did you see her last?”

He stole a look at me, then spoke to my image. “At Brittingham’s-I hadn’t seen her since October. I bought her a sandwich and a Coke. It must have been… a week prior to the… grisly discovery.”

“You just ran into her…?”

“I don’t think it was a coincidence-she was looking for me, hoping to see me-she admitted as much.”

“What did she want?”

“Money. She said she needed an operation.”

“An abortion?”

“That would be a reasonable assumption, considering she mentioned she was going to see a certain Dr. Dailey.”

The back of my neck was prickling. “Why? Who is he?”

“Wallace A. Dailey-a former L.A. County Hospital chief of staff, a retired, respectable physician… and, I’m told, Hollywoodland’s current abortionist of choice.”

Sensing I’d struck gold, I scribbled the name down in my notepad, asking, “Would this Dailey happen to hail from New England, originally?”

This line of questioning seemed to make Welles uncomfortable, and a certain irritability, even impatience, colored his tone, as he replied, “I wouldn’t know. Nor do I have an address on the man, though I presume he would be listed in the yellow pages, though probably not under ‘abortionist.’ ”

“She tried to shake you down, didn’t she, Orson?”

“Not precisely. There… may have been an implied threat of… embarrassment. I gave her what I could-fifty dollars. The child she was carrying was obviously not mine.”

“You weren’t intimate with her at all?”

“Define intimate.”

“I would consider having your dick sucked intimate.”

He winced at that, but admitted, “She did have a gift for fellatio. Children are seldom conceived in that fashion, you realize.”

“She have any other gifts? Did you promise her a screen test?”

“I did. Not a false promise, either-she was very attractive, as I’ve said, lovely, really, and I understand she had a pleasant singing voice. How did you link me with her?”

“Florentine Gardens.”

He nodded and dozens of him nodded in the mirrors. “N.T.G.?”

“Yeah, him and that actress, Ann Thomson. I don’t think they’ll mention you to the cops. The cops don’t even know about her working at the Gardens, yet. And there were a lot of celebrities she came into contact with there-you’d be on a long list. I got a feeling the same is going to prove true of the Hollywood Canteen.”

Now he looked at me-he seemed very young, like a big child with that helpless baby face. “I’d like to engage your services, Nathan.”

“To cover this up?”

Still holding my gaze with his, he said, “I need to know that I was not responsible for this ghastly act. I need to know, Nathan.”

“And if you are responsible?”

Now he spoke to me in the mirrors, again. “One calamity at a time. Let me just say, there is schizophrenia in my family, Nathan-if I in fact suffer from these agonizing Welles clan strains, then the next ‘Crazy House’ I inhabit may not be on a soundstage.”

“You didn’t do it, Orson.”

His most charming smile beamed at me from dozens of mirrors. “Nathan, darling, there is in even the most humane of men an irrational drive to do evil.”

I could only think of the opening of his old radio show: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”

Now he swiveled on the chair and looked right at me, placing a hand on my shoulder. “The only cover-up I ask is that you not breathe a word of this to the Examiner. If Hearst gets wind of my connection to the Black Dahlia, I’m finished-I might as well have done the crime.”

Welles was right: Hearst would take immense pleasure in finally having his full revenge for Citizen Kane.

“I’ll help you, Orson.”

“Nathan, darling, there’s one other small problem.”

“Another problem?”

“I’m broke.”

“Directing and starring in a Rita Hayworth picture, you’re broke?”

“Dead broke. As a magician, my best act seems to be making money disappear. A horde of creditors, including the IRS, are hounding me, daily.” He gestured to his hall of mirrors. “I’m doing this to repay a fifty-grand advance Harry Cohn wired me when I desperately needed money to pay the costume rental bill for Around the World.”

Orson had recently staged a Broadway show of Around the World in 80 Days, a lavish production with Cole Porter music that had nonetheless tanked. Rumor was Welles had sunk every cent he had into it, and was in hock for hundreds of thousands.

“You can charge me your standard hourly rate against an interest in my next production,” he suggested, as he walked me out onto the soundstage.

“Which is?”

“I’m talking to Herbert Yates about a project over at Republic.”

“Where they make all those B-westerns? You are running out of studios to alienate.”

He was ushering me through the near-darkness of the vast chamber past the endless dragon slide.

“Don’t be cynical, darling Nathan-I’m going to be doing Shakespeare on the same soundstages where Roy Rogers and Gene Autry bring badmen to justice. There is something delightful about that! I’m mounting it as if it were a horror movie, you know, like Universal used to make with Karloff and Lugosi.”

“Which play?”

“ Macbeth — murder in the night, followed by nightmares, guilt and rampant paranoia.”

“Well,” I said, stepping out into the light, “at least you got the research out of the way.”

His expression was blank. “I only hope I haven’t been researching Othello.”

And he slipped back into the darkness.

Then I turned and bumped into Shorty, waiting to show me the way out of Columbia’s backlot, a maze rivaling Welles’ hall of mirrors.