by Erik Tarloff
But he said, “Nah, thanks for saying all that, but it isn’t the show. The reviews pissed me off, but, shit, like you say, bad reviews come with the territory. Critics love to build you up and then knock you down, I’m aware of that. And besides, there have been times I deserved bad notices and got raves, so that side of things more or less balances out. I might feel bad for the cast and for Jimmy, but for myself, I just chalk the whole thing up to experience.”
“Then what is eating you?”
He sighed. Big involuntary sigh. “I don’t know, Gil. I honestly don’t know. It feels like…I feel like I’ve…like I’ve disappeared. Do you know what I mean? With all the stardom nonsense and the publicity and the reviews and overwork and the strategic socializing and my picture in the papers and in the magazines, and Hedda and Louella making up shit about me…it’s like I don’t even know who I am anymore. I don’t even know if I am anymore. It’s like there’s this Chance Hardwick out there everyone thinks they know, and he’s a total stranger to me, and then there’s me, this little homunculus denuded of his soul, cowering on a moth-eaten sofa in a bare room watching the hoopla through a crack in the window and wondering who this guy is that they’re talking about.”
“I’m sure everybody feels that way from time to time,” I told him. Still trying to cheer him up.
“Maybe. But I feel that way all the time. It’s like some essential part of myself has been cannibalized. They’ve chewed it up, they’ve swallowed every part of me except this shell of a body that goes where it’s told and smiles when it doesn’t feel like it. The only times I feel real is when I’m playing a part.” And then he said, “I honestly can’t take much more of this, Gil. I just want to disappear.”
“Isn’t it what you always wanted?”
He trotted out a very good Bogie impression. He said, “I was misinformed.”
Briel Charpentier
I didn’t understand much about American politics at the time. I wasn’t a citizen yet, and after what my country had been through, politics in any form was something I preferred to avoid. If the government would just leave me and my friends alone, I didn’t care too much. Besides, American politics reminded me more of a football match than a contest about government. It seemed like you rooted for your team, you wanted your team to win, that that was the main thing.
But this was the summer the Democratic Party was having its convention in Los Angeles, you know, so suddenly politics was everywhere. It was all anyone was talking about. Most of the people I knew were Democrats, and even though I couldn’t see much difference between the two parties myself, it was obvious there was a lot of excitement about the Democrats coming here.
Chance really liked Adlai Stevenson. He wanted Stevenson to run again, he thought he could win this time, could defeat Nixon. He told me Stevenson was the most intelligent and the most civilized of all the politicians. When Kennedy was nominated instead, Chance was disappointed. He was suspicious of Kennedy, you know, because he was so rich, and because of his father. But he finally changed his mind. Frank Sinatra invited Chance to a party to meet Kennedy—those kinds of people, people like Frank Sinatra, they now regarded Chance as being one of them, so he was on their lists for such events—and Chance went and was impressed. By Kennedy, I mean. And he became enthusiastic. He gave money, he made some personal appearances, he even filmed a TV ad for the campaign, mostly talking about Kennedy’s heroism in the war. That was the script they gave him. He told me, “Of all the reasons I’m for Kennedy, what he did in the war is very far down the list.” But he did what they asked.
And he made me watch the debates with him. And I must say, I liked Kennedy more after watching those debates. I became enthusiastic too. He seemed…in French we say sympathique. I would have been very unhappy if Nixon became president. He was not sympathique. I was very unhappy when he did become president, but of course that was years later, a very different time, and by then I was an American myself, you know, and was able to vote. I cannot say I loved the choices I was offered that year, but I did vote.
But that’s all by the way. I am telling you this information about Chance and Kennedy, which in truth is not so interesting in itself, only because of one rather macabre detail. Sometime that autumn, in fact it was Halloween night—which I remember because we were out at Malibu on Halloween and all these kids came to his door, rich kids I guess, because for one thing they were inside the Colony gate, and also because they were wearing very elaborate costumes, like professional-type costumes, and Chance gave them all candy even though some of them demanded money, they said Jack Benny gave out money at his house, and Chance was offended, both by their rudeness and by their being so entitled, and he said, “Then by all means go there, all you’re going to get from me is candy”—but anyway, this night, Chance mentioned to me something he had recently read. He said he had read that the number of people who die in the weeks before a presidential election is much smaller than other times. People, even very ill people, even terminal people, are so curious to see how the election will turn out that they somehow hold off dying. And considering that Chance died less than a fortnight after the election…well, you can see why this might have stayed in my memory.
Martha Davis (reporter, Variety)
The coroner ruled it an accident by drowning. I don’t think too many people were convinced, but it’s how they handle deaths that aren’t clear-cut suicides, calling them accidents, especially when the decedents are celebrities. To spare the immediate family, no doubt, and to protect the dead person’s reputation. And it could have been an accident, I suppose. It’s remotely possible. He didn’t leave a note. That was considered significant. The presence of a note would have made a suicide verdict unavoidable of course, and its absence allowed them to fudge the business and call it an accident. And listen, the undertow around Malibu can be treacherous, that’s well known around here. Especially in the cold months and when the tide’s going out. People in Southern California warn their kids about the undertow the way folks in other places warn their kids about talking to strangers. But still, let’s be real…
Heather Brooke (neighbor)
Of course the police came around and asked a lot of questions. I didn’t have much to tell them. When you have a famous neighbor—and here in Malibu a lot of your neighbors are famous—when that’s the case, you don’t crowd them. Dan and I would wave to Chance if we saw him on the beach or whatever, he’d wave back. He might say “Good morning” if we were getting into our cars to go to work at the same time, that sort of thing. We had perfectly friendly, neighborly relations. But we weren’t close at all. We didn’t socialize. Dan and I had never even seen the inside of his house.
So as to whether it was suicide…I don’t know more than anyone else. No particular insight. On the one hand you might say, “Who goes into the ocean in November?” I mean, people do, I suppose, and it was pretty warm that day. But the ocean is damned cold in November even on warm days. And the man had a swimming pool. A heated swimming pool. If he just wanted to take a dip, he didn’t have to come down to the beach.
On the other hand, the cops found a beach towel out there, and a movie script he was apparently reading, and a pencil for making notes, and his glasses. So that sure doesn’t sound like…I mean, if you’re planning to end it all, you don’t need a towel, and you don’t bring unfinished work along. Why bother? It’s going to stay unfinished forever, right?
So I can argue it either way. I guess we’ll never know for sure.
Bernice Franklin (secretary)
I used to work for an accountant, Lester Strong. He was one of the partners in the firm. Garten, Moscow, & Strong. They had a lot of show business clients, and Chance Hardwick was one of them. When Lester was alive, he instructed me to never tell anybody what I’m about to tell you, and I never have. Up till now. Of course, I was never asked before. Nobody thought to ask. Not until you, Mr. Frost. And at this point, I just can’t see
the harm in it.
I was Lester’s personal assistant—you understand that, right? That’s all. Not a colleague or anything. He didn’t share a lot of information with me. Men didn’t treat their secretaries as equals in those days, we were just…we were “the girls,” that’s how the partners referred to me and the other secretaries in the firm. “I’ll ask the girl to bring us some coffee,” like that. It seems really obnoxious now, but at the time we just took it for granted. It was like the smog we all breathed back then, so much a part of our lives we didn’t even think about it. But the thing is, when you work in an office, you pick up all sorts of info whether you want to or not, and whether people intend to share it with you or not. So I do know Chance must have had a lot of money, because if you didn’t have a lot of money the firm wouldn’t even accept you as a client, and I know…see, here’s the thing, the thing Lester didn’t want me to talk about…[lowers voice] In the days before he died, Chance Hardwick made some very generous gifts to people. I don’t know the exact sums, but Lester sort of hinted that they were substantial. Hardwick died intestate, but he sent these checks to his mother, and to his aunt, and to his sister. And to that artist, the French woman he was supposedly dating. And there was some clinic in Pennsylvania, in the Appalachian region, I think the name of the guy who ran it was Dr. Denny. One of the checks Hardwick sent was to that guy’s clinic. Maybe he was like a cousin or something.
And because I handled Lester’s incoming and outgoing, I was aware of this. And the day after Hardwick’s death, Lester pulled me into his office and shut the door behind him and told me I absolutely must keep my mouth shut about those checks. I think…I think Lester believed those checks, especially considering their timing, could be construed as evidence that Chance Hardwick had committed suicide. Had planned it out in advance and taken care of personal business and then done it. And Lester felt his relationship with his clients was privileged and that there was no reason to share such information with anyone else. Hardwick was just as dead whether it was an accident or a suicide. What difference could it make what the coroner said?
Gil Fraser
You know what still gets me after all these years? All the things Chance didn’t live to see. The Kennedy assassination. Vietnam. The Beatles. I mean, he used to sneer at rock music, he loved jazz and dismissed rock as jejune and brainless. But what would he have made of Sgt. Pepper? Of Bob Dylan? Or of the other great music from that period? What about Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard? The Sopranos and The Wire? Barack Obama, for fuck’s sake? You see what I mean? All that stuff would have fascinated him, would have thrilled him, would have horrified him. And it just kills me that he never got to see any of it, and I never got to hear how he felt about it all.
Dorothy Goren Mckenzie
It was Gil who called with the news. Which I realize in retrospect was sweet of him, or maybe brave of him. He didn’t have to. Breaking something like that to next of kin isn’t a pleasant task.
He was sobbing, which surprised me, since I could never have pictured a tough guy like Gil crying. [begins to cry] And then I was sobbing too. And for a while we couldn’t even talk, we just wept at each other over the phone. And then we hung up. There was nothing more to say.
And I told my mom and Aunt Mary and all three of us started crying like it was one of those Arab funerals, with the women keening and ululating. I don’t think we ever got over it, any of us. My mom died pretty soon after, and though grief is never an official cause of death, nor heartbreak, I think in some fundamental way my mom died of grief. I think her heart broke. She never really knew Chance—none of us did, he was unknowable, even Gil said something like that—but it was still a colossal loss. Just realizing he wasn’t there anymore. And coming to realize she hadn’t been much of a mother to him. When all the tributes started, well, that was almost unbearable. It was like the world was appropriating him. Appropriating our Chance. But I guess that’s how it works when great people die. It’s the world’s loss every bit as much as his loved ones’.
Briel Charpentier
I had not talked to Gil in several months. Without Chance as our connection, we lost touch a little bit, you know. I saw him at the memorial, and we were both invited to the unveiling of the headstone and we embraced there. But other than that, there had not been any contact. And then, to my surprise, he phoned me in March and suggested we watch the Oscars together. That was sweet of him. He’s much more thoughtful than he sometimes appears.
So we were watching at his place. He’d moved out of the apartment on Holloway after Chance left, he now was renting a little house in the Silver Lake. So I went over there. He’d ordered pizza, so we were eating pizza and drinking wine—I’d brought a bottle of wine even though I knew Gil was more of a beer person—and we were watching the Oscars, and we became tenser and tenser as they got closer to the best actor category. Neither of us could eat by then or say anything, we were too nervous, the pizza was getting cold in its box on the coffee table and we were both leaning forward, watching the television intently. And then they announced that Chance had won, and the audience erupted, and Mark Cernovic went up to accept the award for Chance, and Gil and I looked at each other and we both just burst into tears. It’s funny…I didn’t cry when I first heard about his death, maybe it was too much of a shock, I just went numb. And I didn’t cry at his memorial, maybe at most a tear in the corner of my eye. But I cried a lot when he won the Academy Award. I couldn’t stop for the longest time.
Ward Paulsen (Memorial Park groundskeeper)
People talk about Chance Hardwick’s grave, they come here sometimes and ask me to direct them to it. But they’ve got it wrong, of course. The body was never recovered. That often happens with these drowning incidents, I’m told. The victims are washed out to sea, and that’s what I heard happened with Mr. Hardwick. His mother and aunt and sister flew out here and erected a memorial to him. With a really nice headstone. They didn’t count pennies. There was a pretty big service at a church in Hollywood first, a lot of people went to that, big stars and just regular people, and then a few invited guests came out here for the unveiling of the memorial.
It’s interesting they picked LA. I guess he never really cared for his hometown, he liked it better out here. This was the place where he settled. And now he’s settled here permanently, hasn’t he? [laughs briefly] Sorry. You start to have a kind of sick sense of humor when you work long enough at a place like this. It’s the only way not to become nutty.
Yeah, people still come out here to leave flowers and notes and things. Even videocassettes of his movies. I guess those aren’t much use for anything else anymore. [laughs] But it’s been what? Sixty years? Something along those lines. And they still show up. The woman in black, of course, she’s famous, a legend. We see her pretty often, and not, by the way, only on the anniversary of the drowning. That’s the visit everyone talks about, but she shows up at other times too. Usually late at night, when no one’s around. No one but me. I see her walking up the path in the dark, just a shadow, black on black. On the actual anniversary, people sometimes come and wait around for her, like they’re whale-watching or something, but she keeps out of sight until the place has mostly emptied out. I run interference for her sometimes, let her know when the coast is on the clear side, flash her a signal. She sometimes gives me a little tip, slips me a century every once in a while. She doesn’t have to do that, I’d be happy to help out for free, but I guess she appreciates being able to pay her respects without an audience watching, so she gives me a little thank-you present. It might be a sort of insurance policy too.
That’s why the photos of her are always from a distance. She avoids the crowds and the photographers. The, whatchamacallem, the paparazzi. But seriously, even if they waited around till midnight or whenever she chose to show up, what would they see? An old lady in black, wearing a hat and a veil, kneeling down by a headstone, leaving a little bouquet? What’s so exciting about that? It’s
not like she talks to anybody. You get too close, she disappears.
But I tell you, folks are lunatics when it comes to celebrities. They want to see stars’ homes, stars’ costumes, stars’ graves. Judy Garland’s shoes, for Christ’s sake! They even pay to see wax models of stars at that cheesy Madame Tussaud’s place over the hill there on Hollywood Boulevard. I don’t get that at all. I was born in LA, I’ve lived here all my life, and that kind of thing puzzles the hell out of me.
But anyway, the woman in black isn’t the only one. Other people come too. Just regular folk. Lotta teenage girls, and women who used to be teenage girls. But not only them. All types, from all over. Fewer than used to, but we get a few a week maybe. And they show up in shorts and tee shirts and sandals, I mean no respect at all. They ask me where Hardwick’s grave is. I don’t bother correcting ’em anymore, I just point ’em down the path over there. The first ten years or so after he died, we were a major tourist destination—it was like we were on one of those maps of the stars’ homes they sell out on the street. I swear I don’t get it, but people wanted to visit the site. I guess they figure Hardwick’s buried here, they make that mistake, they think they’ll be near his body, but even still, I just don’t get it at all. Let’s say he was buried here, what does visiting the site do for you that just looking at a photo or watching one of his old movies or just thinking about the guy doesn’t do? But they come. It’s dwindled down to just a few now, a few every week like I said, but come they do. If you go look—it’s along that path to your right—you’ll see the stuff they leave: flowers and poems and drawings and even candy. Candy! That’s really wacko. Not only is he not here, but even if he was, it’s been a damned long time since he ate any fucking candy.