Show Business is Murder

The Search for Robert Rich by BOB SHAYNE

I’D COME FROM a land called Brooklyn where everybody was Jewish and poor. Now I was going to a land called Hollywood where everybody was Jewish and rich. Well, that might be a bit of an exaggeration on both ends, but it seemed that way.

It was 1957 and I was twenty-five. I may or may not have been the youngest licensed private detective in the New York phone book, but I was certainly the femalest. My name’s Naomi Weinstein. The second syllable rhymes with the first.

We pulled into Los Angeles Union Station at 1:32 P.M. on a late April afternoon. I’d slept well and long to the rock and sway and the clicking wheels, and I was looking forward to seeing my dear friend David. He’d moved to Hollywood four years earlier, after a slight problem wherein he’d been charged with murder. I had a hand in getting him off, but then I’d had a hand in getting him accused, so it seemed only right.

“Naomi!” he shouted as I stepped off the train in the bowels of Union Station. We ran to each other and embraced. He picked me up and swung me around in a circle. I wriggled out of his arms to avoid throwing up on him, stepped back, and took a look.

He was just as tall and skinny as always, the ever-present gold modernistic mezuzah resting just under his Adam’s apple, his long pointy nose angled slightly to the right, hazel eyes, enough of that thick, wavy, dirty-blond hair for two or three guys, and that great crooked smile that always made me smile to see.

He was studying me, too, all five foot three, fuzzy reddish-brown hair, and a few too many pounds of me. I stuck out my breasts and sucked in my tummy as his eyes passed various portions of my anatomy. If I could have added a few inches to my calves I would have done that, too.

“How was your trip?” he asked as he grabbed my bags and we walked toward the Moorish-Aztec style lobby. I doubt that the Moors ever met the Aztecs, but apparently the architect had.

David took me for lunch on a nearby block called Olvera Street. It’s supposed to be a 150-year-old section of old Los Angeles, but it looked more like Coney Island to me. A block of souvenir shops and taco stands. (Okay, in Coney they’d be hotdogs stands instead.) I bought three things that were advertised as Mexican jumping beans. Later in my motel room I opened one; it turned out to be a soft capsule, and inside was a ball-bearing, so that when you dropped it the little bearing would roll to one end then the other making the capsule jump. How authentic can you get! I didn’t know then it was the perfect metaphor for Hollywood.

We piled my stuff into David’s spiffy aqua-and-white Chevy Bel Air convertible and he put the top down at my request. I’d never ridden in a convertible. (When I tried to untangle my Semitic curls that evening, I swore I’d never ride in one again.)

David asked me what my case was about, shouting over the wind as he drove up San Vicente, a wide street with trolley tracks down the middle, on our way to Hollywood. I told him it was to track down somebody named Robert Rich.

He laughed, saying that was the biggest mystery there was. It was all over the papers. The whole town wanted to know who Robert Rich was.

It seems Mr. Rich had won the Oscar a few weeks earlier for Best Original Story for the Screen, for a movie about a little boy and a bull called The Brave One, but nobody could find him. Or many people were claiming to be him. Or both. When the award was announced, Jesse Lasky Jr. of the Writers Guild stepped up to the microphone on national television and said, “I’ll accept this on behalf of my close friend Robert Rich, who is at this moment at Santa Monica hospital where his wife is giving birth.” But Hedda Hopper checked all the hospitals and no such baby had been born. A few days later when push came to shove Lasky admitted he had never met Robert Rich and hadn’t a clue who he was.

You’d think the producers of the movie who bought the story would know who they’d bought it from, but it didn’t seem that way. They were brothers named King. When a reporter noticed they had a nephew by the name Robert Rich, the nephew gave a statement saying, yes, he’d written the picture. But then his uncles denied it.

“Did the Kings hire you to find the guy?” David asked.

“No, the L.A. Times did,” I shouted back over the hot wind-something David told me the locals call a Santa Ana. “Their reporters haven’t been able to find him so they decided to try a private eye.”

“Makes sense. But we have our own private eyes right here in Los Angeles. You know, like Philip Marlowe?”

“Yeah, but he’s fictional. They wanted a factual one,” I said. “I don’t know why, maybe they’re just prejudiced against fiction, being a newspaper and all.”

“But why bring one in all the way from New York?”

I shrugged. “Not sure. I just know I got a call from some guy who said he worked there. Named Chandler.”

David did a double take worthy of Oliver Hardy. “What first name?”

“Uh, Norman. Yeah, Norman.”

“Norman Chandler doesn’t work at the L.A. Times,” said David with a laugh. “He owns it.”

“Oh,” I replied snappily.

“How’d he happen to pick you?”

“You’ll never guess.”

David sat quietly for a moment, then said, “You’re right. So tell me.”

“A friend of his recommended me.”

“Yes? Yes?”

“J. Edgar Hoover.”

David broke out in laughter and said, “I should have guessed.”

I’d had a sort of weird relationship with Mr. Hoover in the case that involved David. I wouldn’t say I was exactly friends with the person who’d been called the most powerful man in America, but we had developed a kind of healthy respect for one another. Well, respect, anyway. Maybe “healthy” isn’t the operative word.

I checked into the Hollywood Sands Motel at Sunset and Highland, across the street from Hollywood High. It was new and boxy and full of red and yellow plastic. Two single beds with bedspreads made of some chemical material that sucked the moisture from my fingers, drapes that stopped about an inch short of the bottom of the window, and prints of ducks in a swamp on the off-yellow walls. I liked it. No place ever felt less like the Morris and Sylvia Weinstein home in Canarsie, Brooklyn, New York. Not an antimacassar in sight.

After more sightseeing, David and I hit the Formosa Cafe on Santa Monica Boulevard for dinner, across the street from the Sam Goldwyn Studios. David called it a Hollywood dive. The walls were full of pictures of movie stars you never heard of. And some you have. David warned me if the chow mein moved of its own accord, I probably shouldn’t eat it. As far as I could tell, it was lying there fairly still when I tried to pick it up with chopsticks and get it all the way to my mouth before it fell back onto the plate and I started all over again. I’d never used chopsticks before. And I swore I’d never do so again. Back East we have things called forks. David said eating chow mein by this method was so much work it had minus two calories.

The following morning, I borrowed David’s car and drove it to the Sunset Strip, past the Mocambo and Ciro’s, those glamorous nightclubs I’d seen in movies all my life, the places where all the sophisticates go. Or used to. It all looked a little seedy now. The Mocambo had been “closed for alterations” for about three years, and Ciro’s-where a few years before Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and the Will Mastin Trio starring Sammy Davis Jr. had headlined-had replaced its floor show with an all-you-can-eat buffet.

A few blocks farther west was a small white stucco building with beveled corners, round deco windows, and black wood trim. The words KING BROTHERS PRODUCTIONS were embossed on a gold placard on the shiny black door.

It hit me that this could be an important case for me. I’d been thinking of moving to L.A. A lot of my work involved show business companies and they’d been moving west in droves. Getting on the good side of the L.A. Times would be a great way to build up a clientele.

I parked on the street and walked up and down the block thinking about how to play this. I knew there were three King brothers: Frank, Hymie, and Maury, and that their nephew-named Robert Rich, but allegedly not the Robert Rich-worked there, too. What could I say that would elicit more information than they’d already given out?

As I stood in front of the door, contemplating any options I could think of, and finding none, the door opened right into my foot. “Ouch!” I said in response.

“Oh, sorry,” said the young man who had pushed it into my big toe. His looks kind of reminded me of Anthony Perkins, who’d been nominated for an Oscar the year before for Friendly Persuasion, only this guy seemed a little crazier. He wore an alligator shirt and cotton pegs, and held several stamped letters in his hand. “Were you on your way in?”

“Uh…” Well, there was only one answer that made much sense. “Yes.”

“Oh,” he replied. It was a scintillating conversation.

He looked me over. I felt naked. “Are you the girl from the agency?”

Before I could weigh the consequences I said, “Yes.”

“Good, good. Come in,” he bid, holding the door open for me. I had the feeling he smelled my hair as I passed.

“What’s your name?” he said, looking directly at my boobs.

I thought of answering, the left one’s Zelda and the right Rebecca. Instead, I said, “Naomi. Naomi Weinstein.” I’d learned when I first started out that staying as close to the truth as possible was usually best. That way I didn’t have to spend so much time remembering which lie I’d told.

“Oh,” he replied, letting the door close behind him. “They said the girl was named Carey something. McNally, I think.”

My heart stopped while I searched for a reply. “Oh, yeah. Carey couldn’t make it. She got called back to another job she was on last week. So they sent me.” I only prayed that the agency in question was a secretarial agency, not a talent agency or an out-call brothel. The good part about being a lady private eye was that everybody always assumed I was a secretary. Or bank teller. Or school teacher. Or nurse. It made it awfully easy to pass. In fact, the one thing no one ever believed I was, when I told them, was a private eye.

“Well, good,” he said. “Here.”

He motioned to the reception desk facing the door. It was beige, like all the other furniture in the room. Everything had rounded edges and moderne designs. They must have picked it up at a going-out-of-style sale.

“Just answer the phones and take messages and I’ll be back as soon as I mail these letters,” he said, licking his lips repeatedly. There was something reptilian about him, like William Buckley.

I wished I could get a look at the letters before he deposited them in a mailbox. “Would you like me to mail those for you?” I asked.

“Naw. I’m gonna get a cuppa at Ben Frank’s since you’re here. Want me to bring you back one?” Well, he might appear dangerously psychotic, but he was certainly polite.

I said, “No thanks.”

“By the way,” he added, “the rest room is right though that door, the one next to my office, if you need to use it at any time. But tell me first so I can cover the phones for you.”

I nodded, and shivered a little. I had a feeling he’d probably drilled a peephole in the wall between his office and the bathroom. Just then the phone rang. I picked up the receiver and pushed down the button that was flashing.

“Just say…” he was saying as I did.

“King Brothers Productions,” I said into the phone.

“Good,” he said with a cockeyed nod.

“Hello, this is Robert Rich,” said a voice at the other end of the phone. I want to give you my address to send my Oscar.”

“Hold on just a moment, Mr. Rich,” I said, and put the line on hold.

“Did they say they were Robert Rich?” said the young man. He twisted his mouth into a grimace.

I nodded.

“That’s funny, because I’m Robert Rich,” he snapped.

I felt like I’d walked into the TV show To Tell the Truth. But where was Bud Collyer?

He picked up the phone on the other desk and pressed the blinking button. “Listen, you lying bastard, you just go jump in a lake.” And he hung up.

“What was that all about?” I asked with the greatest of innocence. I may even have fluttered my eyelashes.

He snickered. “You know, our movie, The Brave One? It won the Oscar for Best Original Story. But no one knows who or where the writer is. My uncles, they used my name for the credit. They didn’t know it was going to win an Oscar,” he shrugged. “I tried to cover and tell the Academy I’d written it, but I sort of lost my nerve when they started questioning me. So my Uncle Frank told them it was actually another Robert Rich who he met in Germany some years ago.”

“Was it?” I asked, even though he’d more or less confessed it wasn’t.

“Oh, yeah. Of course,” he said much too quickly. “They’ve been trying to locate him to give him the award.”

“I see,” I said, although I didn’t see at all. “Any luck?”

“Naw.”

I took a chance. “Then why did you hang up on the man on the phone?”

Robert Rich was startled. Perhaps he realized he’d dug himself a hole. “It… it was the wrong guy,” he stuttered, and walked to his office as quickly as he could. He couldn’t have known it was the wrong guy since he hadn’t heard the guy’s voice when he hung up on him. It could only have been the wrong guy if there was no other Robert Rich to be found. So I guess I had the answer to question number one: The Brave One was written by someone not named Robert Rich.

His departure gave me a moment to look over the outgoing mail he’d left on the desk. Phone bill payment. Electric bill payment. One to the Producers Guild. One to somebody named King in Glendale. And a letter to Blue Chip Stamps. I’d noticed from the signs in gas stations and on grocery stores that that was a big premium company in L.A., like S & H Green Stamps back where I came from.

Robert Rich came back in with another envelope. I caught him looking at my boobs again as he gathered up the letters he’d left and headed for the door. “I’ll be back in a few. My uncles are due to return this afternoon,” he said, and left.

As the door closed behind him, I whirled around and started thumbing through the Rolodex on the side table. There was a Robert Rich in it, probably the one I’d just met. But I jotted down the address and phone number anyway. Before I finished, I was startled by the ringing phone.

“King Brothers Productions,” I said into the receiver.

“Hello, is Frank there?”

“No, I’m sorry, he’s not. May I take a message?”

“How about Maury?” said the somewhat high-pitched male voice.

“Afraid not.”

“Hymie?”

“Sorry. They’re all due back this afternoon.”

“Okay, give me that little pipsqueak Rich.”

“Sir, I’m afraid he’s out as well. May I help you?”

The man sighed. “Okay, tell Frank to call…” He paused a moment. “U.N. Friendly.”

“Could I have your number, Mr. Friendly?”

“Of course. It’s Pleasant 6-5211.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “Mr. Friendly has a Pleasant phone number.”

“Yes, a laugh riot,” he replied somewhat dryly. “Tell that son of a bitch Frank if he doesn’t call me by this afternoon that I’m going to tell the L. A. Times.”

Mr. Friendly didn’t sound too friendly. I figured, what the hell. “What will you tell them, Mr. Friendly?”

He laughed. “I’ll tell them they can renew my subscription. You just give Frank the message.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good girl,” he said, and hung up.

I added his admonition to the message and looked again at his name. Could it be a joke of some sort? I recalled in Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians the host who invited all the guilty people to the island was “U.N. Owen,” a homophone for “unknown.” So “U.N. Friendly.” Could it be as in the Unfriendly Ten? The ten Hollywood writers who were sent to prison for not cooperating with the House Un-American Activities Committee?

I looked through the Rolodex for the phone number Mr. Friendly had given me, and I found it when I got to the T’s. It went with the name Dalton Trumbo. Yes! He was one of the Ten!

I wrote down the address in Highland Park, which I discovered, from a street atlas in the bookcase, was a suburb of Los Angeles between downtown L.A. and Pasadena. I rifled the filing cabinets, searching for any files marked Rich or Trumbo. Nothing.

There were two whole drawers of Brave One files, but before I could start searching through them the door opened and in walked a woman in her forties, a bit chubby, wearing glasses, her hair pulled back in a bun. “Sorry, I’m late,” she said. “My car broke down.”

Maybe she’s someone with an appointment, I hoped.

She came up to me, stuck out her hand and said, “I’m Carey McNally.”

I stood up and shook her hand as my knees knocked. What was I going to do?

“Uh, Carey,” I said, being fast with witty repartee. “Uh, Carey, well, let’s see.” Finally it came to me. “How much do you get a day?”

“Twelve-fifty, but I seem to be starting two hours late, so I should get less for today.”

I opened my purse and pulled out a twenty. “Here, take this for today, leave now, and come back tomorrow.”

She stared at it in confusion. “I don’t understand,” she said.

“You don’t have to. I’m paying you twenty dollars in cash for not working today. Come back tomorrow morning. But you have to go right now and not ask questions.”

“I… but I don’t understand,” she repeated, not moving an inch.

I pulled another ten from my purse.

“If you’ll leave immediately and not ask any more questions, I’ll add this.”

“I couldn’t do that without calling the agency first. May I use your phone?”

I knew the jig was up. “Sure,” I said, got up and motioned for her to take my seat behind the reception desk. While she made the call, I picked up my purse, put the thirty dollars back inside, and walked out the door, wondering what Robert Rich would think when he came back in and found her behind the desk instead of me.

I sat in the window of the cafe across the street, wearing my sunglasses, and watched the building. Soon Robert Rich entered. After half a minute, he stuck his head out the door and looked both ways, as if I’d still be on the block, having left ten minutes before. He shook his head and went back in.

An hour later a Chrysler with fins so big they could stab a pedestrian drove up and three middle-aged men got out. I assumed they were his uncles. I rushed across the street and climbed up the hill alongside the building hoping to hear the ensuing conversation through one of the small, high, open windows. A few loud words made their way to my ears. Like “Keee-rist!” and “Holy shit!” Of course, I didn’t know if they were in response to my short presence there that morning or the phone message from Mr. Friendly.

A few minutes later, Robert Rich came out of the building holding a white business-size envelope and hopped into a beat-up, green 1949 Plymouth in a nearby parking lot. As he waited to make a left turn onto Sunset Boulevard, I jumped into David’s Chevy and made a U-turn to get into position to follow.

The Plymouth drove east on Sunset and left onto Highland. It went through Cahuenga Pass to the San Fernando Valley, alongside the gigantic Forest Lawn cemetery, past NBC and the Warner Brothers and Disney Studios, and east on Riverside Drive next to a bridal path, to Figueroa, where it made a left. The sign said Highland Park. It turned out to be a rundown, blue-collar neighborhood that looked to have been built in the 1920s. A lot of the people and stores seemed to be Mexican.

The Plymouth pulled up in front of Fuentes Drugs, a neighborhood pharmacy. Robert Rich got out, envelope in hand, and walked into the store. I followed, keeping a shelf or two between us. I saw him give the white envelope to the white-haired Mexican pharmacist behind the tall prescription counter, and get a larger, nine-by-twelve manila envelope in return. I ducked behind the cosmetics counter as the pharmacist picked up a telephone and dialed and Rich walked past me up the next aisle.

Outside, I watched him drive off, knowing there was little reason to follow him any farther. I’d learned long ago at John Jay College of Police Science to follow the money. Well, in this case, it was more like “follow the envelope,” but it looked like it contained money. A bribe, perhaps, for not telling the L.A. Times? But if so, what was in the larger envelope, the one the pharmacist gave to Mr. Rich?

It wasn’t easy to kill time inside a fairly small drug store. I bought several items I didn’t need. I’d heard of men being embarrassed to buy rubbers-not the kind for your feet-so they bought up a bunch of innocuous items, combs and toothpaste and such, to seem less conspicuous. But I bought only innocuous items; I had no need for rubbers, unfortunately. God, did they sell them to women? I’d never thought of that. In fact, it was hard to tell that drugstores sold them at all since they always kept them hidden behind the counter. Wouldn’t want any children catching a glimpse of a box of prophylactics and asking their Mommy what they were. No, sirree. Of course, maybe there’d be fewer babies born out of wedlock if they had.

Speaking of children, a teenaged boy, maybe fourteen or so, passed me and went up to the pharmacist. They chatted a moment. The boy was Caucasian, unlike most of the customers. He wore glasses and looked like he’d be in the science and chess clubs at school, not the football team. The pharmacist handed him the white envelope he’d received from Mr. Rich, and said to give his parents his best; and the kid walked by me and out of the store.

I stepped out front and saw him climb onto a Schwinn and pedal away. I’d never followed a bike with a car before. Good thing I didn’t have to jump into a cab and yell, “Follow that bike!” I learned it’s not easy to go slow enough to follow a bike while cars are honking at you to go faster. Nevertheless I did my best Lamont Cranston imitation, trying to remain invisible to my prey.

Eventually he turned off Figueroa onto a side street of small cottages, and up a hill. He disappeared behind a fence of the house on the hill, a larger whitewash California bungalow not quite Craftsman style, overlooking the neighborhood. I parked where I could keep an eye on it and waited for something to happen. I’d been there half an hour and eaten all the candy bars and potato chips I’d bought in the drug store when something did.

A man in his fifties with a mustache, horn-rimmed glasses, and thinning, water-slicked hair came out of the house and walked down the hill toward my car. I pretended to read the paper while he passed. But he didn’t. He opened the passenger door I apparently hadn’t locked and slid right in beside me. He wasn’t big and didn’t look threatening. On the other hand, he did look like an accountant in an Alfred Hitchcock TV show. You know, the meek little man who murders his large, domineering wife and cuts up her body and carts it away in those cardboard cartons they call transfer files.

“Hello,” he said.

I just stared at him in disbelief.

“You don’t look like FBI,” he continued. “Or HUAC. And you certainly don’t look like a member of the I.A.T.S.E.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The International Alliance of Theater and Stage Employees,” he said. “The watchdogs of the blacklist.”

“Oh,” I replied cleverly.

“So you must be a reporter.”

“No, I’m not a reporter,” I said. “I’m a private detective.” I showed him my I.D.

He glanced at it. “From New York. Well, we’re honored,” he replied. He took a pack of Chesterfields from his inside jacket pocket and offered me one. I shook my head.

He lit up, coughed, and went on. “We get lots of FBI and police and HUAC investigators and reporters but very few private eyes,” he said. “I think the city reserves this parking place for people staking out my house. It’s a courtesy, like the green for fifteen minutes, yellow for deliveries, and this spot for watching Dalton Trumbo.”

Oh. So that’s who he was.

“So what were you doing following my son home from the drug store?”

I guess I’d failed at clouding his son’s mind to make myself invisible to him.

“Trying to figure out what was in the envelope he picked up there. It looked like a bribe.”

“Why did it look like a bribe? Why didn’t it just look like an envelope?”

“Well, you’ve got a point there,” I admitted. “It was the context that made it look like a bribe, Mr. Friendly.”

“Ahh. I thought your voice was familiar. You really get around, Naomi. Would you like to come up for some tea?” I agreed, but I decided if we passed any transfer files on the way I’d make a run for it.

While it was 1957 outside Mr. Trumbo’s house, inside it was 1940. He explained he’d stored all his old furniture when he moved to Mexico to try to make a living after he got out of prison, and reclaimed it all when that plan didn’t work out. This was the furniture he’d bought back when he was the highest paid-and biggest spending-writer in Hollywood. I met his wife-she wasn’t big or domineering but slender, younger, and pretty. He showed me some of her prize-winning photographs.

We had tea on the veranda overlooking the tree-filled valley and the San Gabriel Mountains beyond. “Who are you working for, Naomi?” asked Mr. Trumbo as he poured me a cup, catching the loose tea in a tiny strainer.

“I’m not at liberty to say,” I said, feeling stupid considering I was hoping I could get him to answer that very question.

“Then answer this. What is it they want to know?”

“Whether you wrote The Brave One,” I replied. I saw no reason to be cozy about that.

“Ah. Of course.”

My heart raced. “Of course you wrote it?” I asked.

He laughed. “No, no. Of course, that’s what they would want to know. It’s the question of the moment.” He picked up a pipe, fiddled with it but never lit it.

“So. Did you?”

“Well, I can’t confirm that,” he said. “But then I can’t deny it either.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, if I did write it, then the King Brothers must have hired me-or bought the story from me-despite the blacklist. Of course, the movie industry insists there is no blacklist. But on the other hand, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences passed a new rule this year excluding blacklisted writers from winning Oscars. So if there were no blacklist, there’d be no reason for that rule. Of course, they did it only because my friend Michael Wilson was about to be nominated for writing Friendly Persuasion and Michael had already had the audacity to embarrass the Academy by winning the Oscar for A Place in the Sun, which he wrote before he was blacklisted.”

“Have you won any Oscars since you’ve been blacklisted?” I asked.

He smiled. “I’ve been nominated once or twice, but I can’t say if I’ve won. That would be telling. It’s common practice for Hollywood companies, big and small, to hire blacklisted writers on the black market. It’s an open secret that’s received the blessings of the industry while at the same time the Academy is acting as policeman, beating up on weak victims, independent producers like the Kings. If The Brave One had been made by a major studio, I promise you the Academy would be looking the other way.”

I asked, “Do you know who wrote The Brave One?”

He nodded. “I’d guess Michael Wilson. But what I know mostly is that it has no murders in it, no dope addiction, no gunfights, and no seduction of innocent girls. So now that I think about it, I don’t know how it got onto the screen.”

It hit me. The manila envelope probably contained script pages. He was writing another movie for the King Brothers. The money was for that. I tried my new theory on him.

He smiled and said, “Blacklist or no, it’s impossible to stop a writer from writing. They murdered Thucydides, and beheaded Sir Thomas More, but all of the other writers who were thrown in jail continued to write, and so have I. Why just today I was writing a letter to the phone company. In fact, I was on my way to mail it when I stopped by to see you.”

He pulled the envelope from his pocket. “They’d written me a very clever and charming missive about why they couldn’t seem to make my phone lines work properly. Personally, I believe it has something to do with all the juice that’s being drained off by the FBI tap, but they didn’t mention that. They did say they had more pressing things to do than make the phones of a Communist work. So this is my reply.”

He tore open the stamped envelope so that I could read his tome. It said in part, “When we Reds come into power we are going to shoot merchants in the following order: 1. those who are greedy, and 2. those who are witty. Since you fall into both categories it will be a sad story when we finally lay hands on it.”

I looked up at him as he drained his tea. “You don’t take this very seriously, do you?”

He put down the cup. “The Hollywood, or so-called Unfriendly Ten, including myself have had the worst press since Bruno Hauptman. I lost my livelihood, my house in the hills, my ranch in Ventura County, and all my savings. Well, I never had any savings. I didn’t know I’d need them. I was imprisoned for a year. My passport was revoked. I’ve been audited chronically by the IRS. Since we moved here, my daughter was driven out of her elementary school by tormenting classmates, and tormenting parents of classmates. We had to put her into a different school where the parents are a little less red-blooded American. I have borrowed from all my friends and associates, not to mention lawyers, and struggle to pay them back. I will pay, every cent. I used to earn three thousand dollars a week. When I got out of prison, I was lucky to get three thousand for an entire script. I take it seriously.” He shrugged his eyebrows and shoulders. I got the idea.

“How do you feel about the people who talked,” I asked, “who named names to save their careers?”

“I used to look for villains, but I’m beginning to think there were no villains, or heroes or saints or devils; there were only victims. Some suffered less than others, some of us grew and some diminished, but in the final tally we were all victims.”

He poured us both more tea. “Try Michael Wilson,” he said again. “Maybe he’ll tell you he wrote it.”

I stopped at a payphone and called Michael Wilson at the San Fernando Valley number Mr. Trumbo had given me. He said he’d be happy to see me, especially after I told him who I’d just had tea with. We made an appointment for that evening at his house at 11662 Sunshine Terrace at nine. He asked me to give him a phone number to reach me just in case, and I did, both the motel’s and David’s.

David listened intently as I filled him in on my day over burgers at the Sunset Strip Hamburger Hamlet. It had a Southern plantation motif carried through to the point that the waitresses were all black and the customers were all white. I felt like Scarlet O’Hara sipping mint juleps with David Horvitz. Well, he didn’t look much like Rhett.

David was a TV writer, working for a writer-producer named Roy Huggins on a new Western series at Warner Brothers that was supposed to premiere in the fall on ABC. He told me it was called “Maverick” and starred a guy named James Garner who David thought was going to be a big star. And, he said, the lead character wasn’t a gunfighter, like on all the other Westerns, but a card sharp and confidence man who was basically a coward and ran from danger.

I laughed, thinking he was joking. When he made me realize he wasn’t, I said the American public would never stand for it. It didn’t have a chance to succeed. He thanked me for my encouragement.

“But what would possess somebody to think up a hero who was a coward?” I persisted.

David said, “I have the feeling at some level, conscious or not, Roy patterned the Maverick character after himself.”

I looked up, puzzled. He went on, “Roy named names to HUAC and saved his career. He says he’s regretted it ever since.”

I was dumbfounded. “But how could you work for someone who did that?” I said.

“The same reason he did what he did. In order to work.”

When we got back to David’s neo-Gothic apartment on Fountain Avenue, he raced in to answer the ringing phone and I followed. He surprised the hell out of me by saying, “It’s for you.” It was Michael Wilson begging off for tonight. He said something had come up, and asked if we could meet for breakfast tomorrow instead at Nate ’n Al’s on Beverly Drive? I agreed. And hung up, puzzled. He’d sounded nervous. “What could have happened to make him cancel?” I said out loud.

David replied, “You’re the detective.”

He was right. I grabbed my purse and camera. “Can I borrow your car again?” He shook his head. “No. You can borrow me.”

And we piled in, him at the wheel.

Twenty minutes and a trip over Laurel Canyon later we were coasting to a stop, lights off, on a winding road in the hills of Studio City overlooking the San Fernando Valley. We parked across the street from 11662 and waited. But not for long.

At nine, an old black Cadillac pulled out of the driveway. I couldn’t make out the driver but we figured it was Michael Wilson. David followed, leaving a block between us and the Caddy. “Funny, you wouldn’t think a Communist would drive a Cadillac,” I said.

“We don’t know if he is or ever was a Communist,” said David. “He just wouldn’t tell the committee or name names, is all we know.”

“I thought the Unfriendly Ten all took the Fifth Amendment.”

“That wouldn’t have made them guilty. But even so, they didn’t. Ironically, if they had, they wouldn’t have gone to prison. But they felt they weren’t guilty of anything and therefore shouldn’t hide behind it. They pled the First Amendment, believing that freedom of speech included the freedom not to speak, and that the committee had no right to force them.”

“Is that a legal argument or wishful thinking?” I responded.

“Word has it that if two liberal Supreme Court justices hadn’t died before the case got put in front of the Court, they would probably have won.”

I whistled through my teeth at the vicissitudes of luck and history.

We followed Wilson’s car back over Laurel Canyon to Beverly Hills. It pulled up in front of a large fur shop on Wilshire Boulevard just east of La Cienega. Flyer Furriers and Fur Storage said the neon sign. A moment later a Pontiac woody station wagon pulled up right behind, its Indian-head hood ornament aglow, then a Chevy panel truck. “Left-wing Jews don’t buy Fords,” David whispered. One man got out of each and they conferred quietly under a street light.

“Do any of them look familiar?” I asked David. He nodded. “Yes. They’ve all been in the paper. That is Wilson,” he said, indicating the man we’d followed. He was tall, forties with prematurely white hair. “The others are Herbert Biberman and Paul Jarrico. Biberman’s a director. Jarrico’s a writer-producer. They’re blacklisted, too.” Biberman was barrel-chested and intense in his mannerisms. Jarrico was shorter, dumpy looking, and spectacled.

The men got back in their cars, turned the corner and into the parking lot behind the store. We waited a moment, then followed on foot.

By the time we got to the back of the building, a double door was open and the men were apparently inside. We crouched down in the dark. After a moment Jarrico came out carrying a cardboard carton, about twelve by eighteen inches. I swallowed hard and whispered to David, “Isn’t that what they call a transfer file?” He nodded. “Yes, the studios use them to store scripts.” It wasn’t scripts I was worried about, but body parts.

Jarrico slid the box into the van. The others followed, each carrying another similarly shaped carton. I pictured three dead wives lying in pieces in the furrier’s refrigerator. They loaded the boxes into the vehicles and went back inside the building, then came back again with more cartons and put them in the cars.

I decided I was being silly. Obviously they weren’t body parts; they were fur coats. “Have we caught three blacklisted Hollywood men robbing a fur store?” I whispered to David.

“Would furs be stored in cartons like that?”

“No, I guess not,” I said. “What could they have in there?”

As if on cue, Biberman slipped, dropping the box he was holding, and several disc-shaped round cans, about an inch thick and twelve inches in diameter, rolled out of it and across the blacktop.

David stifled a laugh. “Those are film cans,” he whispered. “They’ve been using the furrier’s refrigerator to store their film.”

“Why?” I asked, as the men finished loading their vehicles, and David and I, crouched down, ran back to his car.

“They made an independent movie,” he whispered. “It’s called Salt of the Earth. Wilson wrote it, Jarrico produced it, and Biberman directed. They all worked for free and raised the budget from private investors. It’s a dramatized documentary about a union strike by poor Mexican-American mineworkers in New Mexico. I read the script. It’s wonderful, sort of Italian neo-realism, like Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thief.

“The studios, and some congressmen, and Howard Hughes, all tried like mad to keep them from making it. There were demonstrations against the film. The cast and crew were thrown out of their hotel in New Mexico. Before they were finished shooting, the State Department deported their Mexican leading lady for no reason. And two of the buildings they were using were burned down.”

I couldn’t imagine such a thing.

“The union, the IATSE, tried to keep every crew person in Hollywood from working on it. And to keep every laboratory in the country from processing the film. They must have been hiding the work print in the furrier’s refrigerator so it wouldn’t get set afire by some patriotic citizen.”

“Jesus,” I sighed. “I thought this was America.”

“Apparently it is except when it’s under stress,” he said with a sigh.

We followed the caravan at a safe distance to an old dilapidated bungalow on the outskirts of L.A., where they unloaded the cans. Through one of the small windows, we saw a five-foot-high Rube Goldberg-like apparatus full of wheels and levers, and a little four-by-six-inch screen. David told me was a Moviola, a film-editing machine. “This must be their secret editing room,” David whispered.

Suddenly, I felt a presence behind me. I whirled around and saw the tall, white-haired man coming up the driveway, only two feet away, with a large flashlight in hand. He shined it in my eyes. “Who the hell are you?” he shouted. “What are you doing here?”

Oh, shit, I’d blown it. “Uh, hi,” I said. “I’m Naomi Weinstein. I guess I’m a little early for breakfast at Nate ’n Al’s.”

“Oh, Christ,” he sighed. “We’ve blown it,” he shouted to the others, who were still inside.

“Shit,” shouted Biberman. Jarrico threw up his hands.

“No, no,” I said quickly. “I’m not going to tell anybody. And I’m sure my friend isn’t either.”

“Then why did you follow us here?” Wilson demanded.

“I was only hired to find out one thing.”

“Yes?”

“Who wrote The Brave One? Who deserves the Academy Award?”

Wilson laughed. “And Trumbo sent you to me?”

I nodded.

He doubled over laughing some more. He told the others through the window and they laughed, too.

Finally it became quiet enough for me to ask, “Why is that funny?”

“Trumbo wrote The Brave One,” said Wilson. “He’s just trying to get extra publicity over it by confusing everyone.”

“Are you sure?”

He shook his head. “I can’t be sure. That’s Trumbo’s master plan. He’s trying to shame Hollywood into ending the blacklist without exposing the people who buy our work.”

I did have breakfast at Nate ’n Al’s, the New York-style deli in the middle of Beverly Hills. But with David instead of Wilson. During which David pointed out to me that neither Wilson nor Trumbo was Jewish, so my theory about everyone in Hollywood being so must be wrong.

I wrote up my report on David’s Smith-Corona standard-mentioning nothing about the Wilson-Jarrico-Biberman odyssey-and handed it to Norman Chandler in person in his palatial office at the L.A. Times. He was an imposing man, reminded me of Franklin Roosevelt. He read it. “There’s not one actual admission in here. Trumbo says Wilson. Wilson says Trumbo. It’s all a farce,” he said.

“I think that was the idea,” I added.

“That fucking Trumbo, pardon my French,” he muttered, handing me a generous check for my services and expenses. Still, I had a feeling he wasn’t about to give me a glowing reference.

David dropped me off at the train and kissed me goodbye almost as if he meant it.

I read two Agatha Christies and a Raymond Chandler as the train took me back across the country. I guess it hadn’t been my shining hour. Or my country’s.

Note

Except for Naomi’s involvement, all of the events of the story are true, although I’ve tampered slightly with the timeline.

When Salt of the Earth was finally, against all odds, completed, it was blocked from distribution in the United States by the studios and the IATSE-which forbade all the union projectionists in every movie theater in the country from running it-while it went on to win the French equivalent of the Oscar as Best Motion Picture of the Year.

In 1958, the year after The Brave One debacle, another blacklisted writer, Ned Young, won the Oscar for The Defiant Ones under a pseudonym. In 1959 Kirk Douglas hired Dalton Trumbo under a pseudonym to write Spartacus for $50,000, and they let the story leak. Soon Otto Preminger hired Trumbo to write Exodus under his own name. And the blacklist was effectively over for Trumbo, Wilson, and the few other best known of the hundreds of writers, directors, actors, craftsmen and women who’d been drummed out of Hollywood. But the lesser known vast majority of them never worked in the motion picture industry again.

In 1973 Trumbo was finally given his Oscar for The Brave One. He was presented an Oscar for his earlier pseudonymous writing of Roman Holiday many years after his death.

The Writers Guild has spent the last twenty-six years trying to correct the credits on films made during the years of the blacklist.

The research and columns of Patrick Goldstein of the L.A. Times and recollections of Christopher Trumbo (the boy on the Schwinn) contributed immeasurably to this history.