Night Film

63

“They were sisters. They were actors. And they loathed each other.”

This was how Beckman always began his favorite true Hollywood story — the Tale of the Warring Endicott Sisters — intoning that last sentence with such Old Testament severity, you could practically feel the sky turning gray, clouds turning inside out, and a black mist of locusts swarming the horizon.

I’d heard Beckman recount the story at least five times, always after three in the morning after a dinner party at his apartment with his students, when he was amped up on vodka and rapt attention, his black hair falling into his face glistening with sweat.

I was always game to hear the Endicott story for two reasons: One, feuding sisters fueled the imagination. As Beckman liked to say: “Marlowe and Olivia Endicott make Cain and Abel look like the Farrelly brothers.”

Unlike the infamous feuds between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, Liz Taylor and Debbie Reynolds, Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine, Angie and Jennifer, the Endicott sisters’ bad blood was kept entirely out of the press — apart from a few blind items in Bill Dakota’s Hollywood “Confidential” Star Magazine—a dead silence that only emphasized its evident ferocity.

Second, for all of Beckman’s flair for dramatics, his propensity to act out all of the parts as if he were on stage at the Nederlander, on each occasion, every detail remained exactly the same, without any new aspect or embellishment. The story was like a precious jeweled necklace; every time Beckman brought it out, each gleaming detail was cut and meticulously set in the exact same pattern it always had been.

I’d fact-checked it myself when I was first researching Cordova five years ago, and, by association, Marlowe Hughes. She was his leading lady and former wife of three months, star of Cordova’s harrowing Lovechild. Every name, date, and location Beckman mentioned flawlessly corroborated with public record, so I’d come to believe that this tale of fighting sisters, however wild it sounded, must be true.

Born in April 1948, Olivia Endicott was Marlowe Hughes’s older sister by just ten months.

Naturally, Marlowe Hughes wasn’t born Marlowe Hughes. She was born Jean-Louise “J.L.” Endicott on February 1, 1949, in Tokyo.

Most people enter the world looking like red, shriveled trolls. J.L. resembled an angel. When the nurses spanked her so she’d take her first breath, rather than squealing like a monkey, J.L. sighed, smiled, and fell asleep. From the moment she was brought home from the hospital, it was as if Olivia had become a piece of furniture.

“Olivia wasn’t ugly,” Beckman said. “Far from it. With dark hair, a sweet face, she was pretty. And yet from the time she was ten months old, she might as well have been chintz curtains when her sister was in the room.”

They were army brats. Their mother was a nurse, their father a medical doctor at Iruma Air Base. In 1950, the family left Japan for Pasadena, California, though within a few months, their father, John, deserted the family, leaving them in deep debt and forcing their mother to take on work cleaning rooms at a motor hotel and washing dishes. Years later, Marlowe would hire a detective to find her father, learning he’d moved to Argentina with a male retired army colonel with whom he still lived.

Neither sister would speak of their father ever again.

The rivalry was there, even in grade school. Olivia cut up J.L.’s clothes and peed on J.L.’s toothbrush. For retaliation, J.L. would only have to show up anywhere Olivia was—at ballet school, at choir — in order to render her “a tiny tear in the wallpaper,” as Beckman put it. Because J.L. could dance, too, and sing. And while Olivia was shy, uptight, and nervous in temperament, J.L. cracked dirty sailor jokes and laughed with her head back. She was a blond Ava Gardner: green eyes, faint cleft chin (as if God, wanting to sign this particular work, had proudly pressed his thumb in there), a face like a heart. The reaction was always the same, from the ballet teacher to the choir director to Olivia’s own friends: besotted.

Olivia secretly referred to her sister as Jail Endicott, a verbal smearing of her initials.

They attended different middle and high schools — their mother’s attempt to diffuse the tension — but any boy Olivia brought by the house was unfailingly smitten by J.L. Was she doing it on purpose? Were her looks her fault?

According to Beckman, it couldn’t be helped.

“If you’re given a free Aston Martin, you’re going to take it for a wild ride to test how fast it goes. Naturally, as a teenager Marlowe overdid it. If Olivia had done something to her, like steal her math homework or put mayonnaise in her Pond’s cold cream, J.L. would drape herself on the couch and watch The Ford Television Theatre, wearing shorts and a halter top right in front of Olivia’s boyfriend. When Olivia suggested they move into another room, the poor delirious kid wouldn’t even hear her.”

Olivia resolved to keep friends away from the house, but to keep her sister out of sight was like trying to keep the sun down.

“So what could Olivia do, a mere mortal chained by way of genetics to a goddess?”

She ran away from home.

In 1964, at sixteen, Olivia moved to West Hollywood with two girlfriends from Miss Dina’s Ballet School. Within three months, Olivia had an agent and a small walk-on role in the 1965 film Beach Blanket Bingo. She was hardworking, diligent, rehearsing more than anyone else. Olivia had finally found her voice and her calling, landing roles in television, including Run for Your Life and Death Valley Days.

“For the first time in her life, she felt she existed,” Beckman said.

At that point, acting wasn’t even on J.L.’s radar.

She’d discovered sex, having lost her virginity to a science teacher. But when Olivia was the focus of a short write-up in Variety called “Rising Stars,” for the hell of it, J.L. cut school and went to an open call for the television series Combat! The casting director fell in love with her but knew she needed a better name than the thorny mouthful J.L. Endicott.

He happened to be reading Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep at the time, featuring the famous detective Philip Marlowe. There was also a ten-cent Los Angeles scandal tabloid in front of him, Confidential: Uncensored and Off the Record, open to an article about Howard Hughes’s rumored narcotic addiction.

He stitched together a name fit for a movie queen: Marlowe Hughes.

Marlowe received her big break in 1966 as Woman in The Appaloosa, starring Marlon Brando (having a brief affair with Brando himself), while Olivia languished in bad TV, appearing in bit parts on The Andy Griffith Show and Hawk. By 1969, Marlowe was a star, appearing in four films, her name emblazoned across billboards over Sunset Boulevard. Olivia retreated to New York to try the stage. In 1978, at Warren Beatty’s bungalow party at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Marlowe was introduced to the dashing Michael Knight Winthrop du Pont, a Princeton-educated football player, war hero, one of the heirs to the Du Pont fortune, and the basis for Beatty’s dashing millionaire character Leo Farnsworth in Heaven Can Wait. Everyone called him Knightly, due to his perfect looks and old-fashioned charm. Within three months, Marlowe and Knightly were engaged.

As Marlowe’s life burned so bright one needed shades, Olivia’s dimmed into nonexistence. Her only booked job was as an understudy in the 1972 Broadway production of Ring Around the Bathtub, which closed the very night it opened.

The sisters had allegedly not spoken in over thirteen years. But it seemed with one on the West Coast, the other on the East, at last there was enough space between them.

And then on October 25, 1979: a fateful accident.

While Marlowe was horseback riding with friends in Montecito, a lawnmower spooked her horse. It reared and bolted, leaping over a fence and onto Highway 101, throwing Marlowe from the saddle. Miraculously, she sustained only multiple fractures to her left leg, though it was so severe doctors ordered her to stay at Cedars-Sinai hospital in traction for two months.

Every afternoon, Knightly came to her bedside to read to her. When the months were finished, doctors decided she needed another few weeks. Knightly continued his visits — until one day he was late and the next day, later, and on the third day, he didn’t show up at all. After a ten-day absence, during which Marlowe heard nothing from him, he finally appeared at the hospital.

He announced their engagement was off. Apologizing, sobbing out of his own sadness and guilt, he presented Marlowe Hughes with a black pearl ring, the platinum band inscribed with four words: Fly on, beautiful child.

Marlowe was devastated. Nurses claimed she tried to throw herself out of the window in her room. Four weeks later, two days after she was released from the hospital, The New York Times made the stunning announcement: “Du Pont Heir ‘Knightly’ Marries Olivia Endicott, Actress.”

It was a private ceremony at the family’s estate in the Hudson River Valley.

No one, not even Beckman, had any idea how Olivia had pulled it off — where she’d met Knightly or how she’d transferred his affection for Marlowe, one of the most beautiful women in the world, onto her, an ordinary woman. Some suggested it was hypnosis, even a deal with the devil, starting with the fateful horseback-riding accident.

Or was it simply an unfortunate coincidence?

Marlowe never spoke publicly of the incident, though years later, when she was asked about her sister in an interview, she said: “I wouldn’t piss on Olivia if she were on fire.”

She did fly on—or at least tried to. Marlowe married three times: to a set designer in 1981, to Cordova in 1985—their union lasting just three months, though he was able to extract a stunning performance from her in Lovechild. She married a veterinarian in 1994; they divorced just four years later. She had no children. In her forties, Ms. Hughes found herself sliding down that character arc of so many movie goddesses before her: She became mortal. She aged. Roles stopped coming. There was plastic surgery, whispers of a painkiller addiction, and after an embarrassing appearance in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, in which her makeup looked like it’d been applied with crayons, a quick cane-tug exit from the public stage.

Olivia remained married to Knightly. They had three sons. For the past twenty-seven years, she sat on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the most socially exalted position in the city, and still does.

“Marlowe got the fame, Olivia the prince,” Beckman would intone in a low voice, his eyes sparking in the firelight. “But who won at life?”

The consensus was Olivia.

“Perhaps,” Beckman would say. “But who knows what jealousies have eaten away her insides like acid on old pipes?”

There was one final detail. It concerned Cordova.

Even after she was married to Knightly, Olivia Endicott continued to work here and there on Broadway throughout the eighties, though she gave up the stage in order to fulfill her role as a mother, wife, and philanthropist.

Yet she remained a rabid Cordova fan.

According to Beckman, Olivia wrote the director letter after letter, hounding him with mad persistence. She begged to work with him, audition for him, take even a silent walk-on role. At the very least, she hoped to meet him. Cordova appeared to be the last thing she required — the final pie piece — to wholly vanquish her sister.

“And to Olivia’s every letter, Cordova responded with the same typewritten sentence,” Beckman said.

At this point in the story, Beckman stood up, steadying himself on his Persian ottoman. Then he’d shuffle over to the dark, dank corner of his living room, where he’d brutally jerk open a desk drawer stuffed with papers, receipts, Broadway Playbills, rooting around the contents. A minute later, when he staggered back to the gathering, he’d be holding a pristine cream-colored envelope in his hands.

Slowly, he’d present it to the nearest student, who would nervously open it, pulling out a letter, silently reading it before blinking in awe and passing it to the kid next to him.

Beckman claimed he’d found the copy randomly at an estate sale.

November 11, 1988

My dear du Pont:

If all of the people on Earth were dead but you, you would still not appear in my picture.

Cordova