Tony Soma's Speak
Tallulah Bankhead —Tallulah, the Femme Fatale.
Chapter Six
Tallulah arrived promptly at five-thirty with her offering of “White Hearse,” my euphemism for God-knows-where-it-came-from rotgut whiskey.
Irving Berlin bounced in humming a catchy tune and lifting our spirits, figuratively as well as literally, with a bottle of Haig & Haig right off the boat.
Room service sent up ice and White Rock, and by five-thirty-five, the party was in full swing.
Aleck arrived with FPA, who brought along Edna Ferber and George Kaufman and a bottle of gin; Neysa and Sherry toted along three artist friends I hadn’t seen for a while, who had rooms next to Neysa’s studio, and a bottle of Russian Vodka; Harpo and Marc Connolly escorted Ethel Barrymore, who ushered in Frank Morgan, Cliffy (Clifton) Webb, and her brother Jack, carrying a bottle of absinthe and a box of matches. (As suicide was for another day, I kept away from that brew.) Scott and Zelda were in town, briefly, so they popped the corks of three bottles of champagne, while George Arliss brought up the rear with Jeanne Eagles, Sinclair Lewis, Bunny Wilson, Ruth Hale and her husband, Heywood Broun, and a bottle of Canadian rye.
By five-forty-five, three dozen or more friends had descended upon my rooms, and the conversations were high spirited in more ways than one.
There was much talk about the mysterious ailment that was plaguing performers with laryngitis, affording more debuts by understudies this season than combined of several years past. And the question was raised, would there be an Actors Equity strike before Christmas?
Talk and speculation ran rampant about the deaths of RIP and Lucille Montaine. People agreed that the deaths had to be related. Who stood to gain? Had there been some sort of lover’s triangle? I said, “Perhaps, with all the players involved in the victims’ lives, it was a lovers’ octagon.”
A little before six o’clock there was an unexpected surprise. Wilfred Harrison walked through the door carrying a large rectangular package under his arm. Aha! I thought. The package I saw him carrying when I peeked through the curtain panels earlier, at Reggie’s place, was my Renoir!
While Mr. Benchley poured him a Scotch and soda, I placed the package aside to unwrap later. Tallulah’s radar for especially attractive men must have alerted her of his presence in the room, even though her back was turned, for she pivoted on her toes, and made a bee-line to where we stood, silently begging introduction, which I politely carried out.
Wilfred’s disinterest in Tallulah’s charms gave me renewed confidence in my own. He came to see and talk with me, and instead found me surrounded with the company of my friends. Mr. Benchley saved the day when he handed Will the drink and swept Miss Bankhead away to talk to Georgie Burns. In fifteen minutes, Tallulah would be performing cartwheels, sans pantaloons.
Will asked if there was somewhere that we might talk.
I looked through the haze of cigarette smoke. The room was packed. In the bedroom, seven people sat on the bed, another three on the radiator cover, a couple on the floor. The bathroom was in use. Several guests were perched on the tub wall, and peeking over their heads, I saw one of Neysa’s artist friends passed out in the tub. There was nowhere left to go but the closet. Unfortunately, it was occupied by a romancing couple from the chorus of The Greenwich Village Follies.
We plowed through the field of friends and out into the hall.
“I wanted to explain about last evening, at the party, Dorothy.”
“What’s to explain?”
“My intentions were not to embarrass Miss Fields, but I’m afraid I embarrassed all of us with my silly fabrication.”
Who else but a lawyer would substitute for the word “lie” with a word that sounds like it’s meant to be cut into a suit!
“What lie?” I asked, making sure he knew I had a good vocabulary for a high school dropout.
“I told you that Miss Fields and I had never met before, but we had, and it was through Mr. Pierce that we had business.”
“So she didn’t lose the contents of her purse?”
He smiled, making sure I knew that he knew that I knew—well, I think you know.
“In trying to be discreet, I was making everything stand out.”
“It’s none of my business, Mr. Harrison.”
“Oh, please, call me ‘Will’?” he said with a pleading look. His dark eyes crinkled in such a sensual way that I—well, never mind that.
“I was talking business with Miss Fields when you chanced upon us in the hall. You see, she could not very well come to Mr. Pierce’s funeral.”
“It is generally frowned upon for mistresses to make an appearance at such events, yes.” I don’t know why I was helping him out with his explanations. Was I softening because of his attractive—anyway, I told myself to be quiet. If he was going to trip himself up, let him do it.
“All I can tell you is that Mr. Pierce did not forget Miss Fields.”
“It wasn’t necessary for you to tell me, Will.”
“It was. You see, I thought, perhaps, well . . .”
He was going to ask if he might see me, take me to supper and a moonlight dance, a row in the park’s lake, sailing on the Long Island Sound, clamming in the Great South Bay! All right, cut the clamming, but my mind was racing as he blundered along: Aw, shucks, Honey Lamb, I fancy you!
And suddenly, reason overrode fantasy when I glimpsed our reflections in a mirror gracing the far wall of the hallway. The bumbling was just too out of character for an otherwise suave and polished man to be laying on a little cluck like me. Laid on a vamp like Tallulah, maybe. Not that I’d mind being laid upon by Wilfred Harrison.
“Why don’t you ring me up next week sometime,” I managed to say, triumphantly, taking the reins of the stampeding horses. And skillfully putting the misunderstanding to bed, I mean, to rest, I extended my hand. “Thanks for delivering the picture, Will, but I should get back in to my guests.”
If that was as smooth and as sophisticated as I, Mrs. Parker, had been expected to behave, I did not disappoint. After all, I was the sought-after celebrity, not Wilfred Harrison. Better to put him in the elevator immediately than to let him run amuck inside the apartment where more glamorous women awaited introduction, and would not only equal my playing field, but would topple it. In the future, anything that might develop between us would be on my terms.
Yeah, sure.
He took my hand and held it for a moment too long. My pathetic delusion of personal grandeur deflated like a leaky balloon. Harry, the elevator operator, closed the door on him, and I took my first breath in ten minutes.
An hour later, my guests had departed for supper destinations and respective obligations.
Aleck, FPA, Mr. Benchley, and I would go down to the hotel’s more formal dining room, the Oak Room, for dinner, and then on to the theatre. But first, Mr. Benchley crossed the street to his rooms to change into his evening suit, as I quickly bathed and powdered and donned a royal-blue, cut-velvet and satin gown, a matching headband, decorated entirely with a swirl of blue feathers, and, because the night was chilly, a black satin wrap, trimmed in marabou. I finished off my toilet with gold watch, strings of jet beads, dangling jet earrings, and a generous splash of Coty’s Chypre.
I looked in the mirror and thought, sometime this weekend I would have to finish an article for Life magazine, and a short story for The Smart Set. Then, I spoke aloud my daily prayer, my writer’s mantra: “Dear God, Don’t let me write like a woman; please let me write like a man.”
FPA took Woodrow Wilson out for a pee and in search of a Cuban cigar at the tobacconist’s down the street. I had a few minutes alone with Aleck to bring him up to speed on the events of the day. He laughed when I told him of our exile behind the curtain, and our visit to Ralph Chittenham’s apartment, and that the mysterious Chinaman was a Cambridge-educated Brit. I told him of Wilfred’s brief visit, and the mysterious disappearance of an Egyptian artifact, and that neither Mr. Benc
hley nor I could decipher what the object was that was missing.
“Why, it must be the birdie-thingy you saw Marion remove from the vase,” said Aleck, putting an end to the mystery.
“Of course!” So Marion had taken the most valuable item of the collection! And she took it from a hiding spot: the Ming vase. Who had hidden it there? Had she? Had Reggie?
Marion Fields had some explaining to do.
“Tomorrow we three shall pay Mistress Marion a call,” said Aleck, commandingly.
Drinking is not unlike falling in love: Flirting leads to the first kiss, and then a move toward heavy petting; soon you find yourself in bed with the boy. One morning you wake up to see a face you hardly know—staring back at you from the bathroom mirror. In the end, when the bloom of romance has faded, you wonder why you can’t leave the boy. You no longer love him; it’s just that he’s so much a part of your life that you can’t imagine your days without him. No more love, just need. Drinking is like that sour affair: You flirt with a cocktail or two, soon find yourself guzzling down a shaker or two, and then, when you’re very thirsty, you find the bottle is empty, and all that remains is a gripping need and dirty glasses in the sink. Still, one goes back again for the punishment; you can’t call it quits. You’d open your arms for love as eagerly as you’d belly up to the bar for a drink. And like a drunk with a hangover, you say, “Never again,” but you do it over and over again, because to be without the thing that fills you makes life unbearable. The booze is your hope; hope quells the loneliness. But booze is a mendacious lover, telling you what you know in your heart is untrue: that someone will someday really love you, that you are loveable, after all.
What delusions we nurture in our hearts.
Eddie Parker was the only man with whom I’d been intimate since our marriage. Even though we lived separate lives for most of the years of our union (first separated because of the War, and later an emotional withdrawal because of his alcoholism and disinterest in almost everything), I remained faithful and committed to my vows. But, his sudden departure, after years of slow retreat from my life, threw me for a loop, and I could no longer deny that anything was amiss. In the few months after my husband left me, I embarked on a rather treacherous affair with a married man. Treacherous for me, it was, not so much at all for the man. The man gone, Eddie gone, I find a degree of comfort in my friends and in my cups.
My friends are clever, precocious children at heart, who find life difficult to cope with much of the time. You wouldn’t know it to see them, because they learned that laughter and wit and a good dash of gin makes the best recipe for getting through their unpredictable, harried days. I put on my best face when I am with them, and their company is the best distraction I’ve found against melancholy. But there comes the hour in every day when I shut the lights and I am alone. My best face doesn’t count for much then; it doesn’t serve me well when I am left to linger deep within my loneliness. So I leap at another chance at love when the opportunity presents itself, even though love has not served me well.
Now, Wilfred Harrison was tempting, I’ll admit, but I knew the dangers of being with a man like him. Mr. Benchley—my best friend, Fred—knows me well. Although he would never try to instruct me or offer unsolicited advice, he has always been the one person with whom I could be my true self; the friend who shows up at my door, not because I ask for his company, but because he intuits my need not to be alone. Ours is an unusual friendship between a man and woman. I think, more than anything, I fear a time when he won’t be here.
And as we dined on duck in the Oak Room, I caught his unguarded look of concern when I mentioned Wilfred Harrison’s name. That concern made me even more determined to take special care in my dealings with the man.
We were unanimous in our opinion of the new play we attended, and cited our pleasure through our individual reviews. Mr. Benchley and I had taken notes for later reference, as our reviews for magazine deadlines were not due for several days. Aleck’s was midnight for the morning edition of the New York Times, so he scurried off to the paper’s offices, a block away from the theatre, on 44th Street, to dictate its copy with less than an hour to spare. Frank called in the last paragraph of his daily column, The Conning Tower, for the New York Tribune; we’d all be mentioned in it tomorrow morning, in the column that helped make me and my friends famous.
I sat listening by the telephone booth as Frank called his desk. He looked over at me with a smile, winked, and dictated: “Mrs. Dorothy Parker, comma, a vision in blue velvet, comma, feathers and jewels, comma, was escorted by this modest reporter, comma, the dashingly attired Alexander Woollcott, comma, resplendent in white tie, comma, top hat and extravagant cape, comma, and the ever-humorous Robert Benchley, comma, for a glorious evening at the opening night of Sidney Howard’s new play, comma, quote, They Knew What They Wanted, period, end-quote. Sid’s looking toward a Pulitzer, comma, that’s for sure, exclamation mark. And so, comma, off to the Twenty-One Club for a late sup, comma, before cutting the rug uptown at the Savoy, period. What a life, exclamation point.”
We lounged at “21” for cocktails while waiting for Aleck. When he arrived, he barreled through the crowd of diners to stand before us, a dour expression on his face.
“Who died?” asked Mr. Benchley.
“You’ve not heard?”
“What’s the big deal, Aleck?”
“What’s the story, morning glory?” chimed in a jovial FPA.
“Marion Fields,” said Aleck, his voice pitched high and quavering with drama; his eyes, under frowning brows, magnified to bovine proportions by the lenses of his eyeglasses. “She’s dead.”
FPA leaped to his feet. “Holy moly! Stop the presses!”
“I insist that you desist!” shouted Aleck.
His great bulk towered over me, but I knew that his rumbling voice was only for effect. Never could, or would, Aleck be a physical bully; I was safe, as long as he didn’t suddenly pass out and topple over to crush me.
“Your meddling in these murders is too dangerous. Someone out there is killing people! Whoever it is might think you know something, even if you don’t, and then he’ll come after you. And then where will you be?”
“Dead?”
“What would we do without our Mrs. Parker?”
“Mrs. Parker, you can’t abandon this world for us to spend all our evenings with Edna Ferber for company,” agreed Mr. Benchley, “should the killer knock you off, too.”
“If the killer got me, I wouldn’t expect you to enjoy your evenings at all,” I whispered. “So Edna would ensure your misery.”
“Selfish little witch! Aleck’s right, you know!” said Mr. Benchley. “He’ll just have to tag along with us, like a heavy, to protect his darling Dottie.”
We all snorted.
FPA returned to the table. “You kids gone bonkers? What’s all this about desisting, and why is Dottie in danger?”
I looked over at him and realized that the man was totally lost in a world of crazy doubletalk that he was unable to decipher. After all, FPA knew nothing of our investigations.
With his promise that everything we were going to tell him had to be kept out of his column, we retraced our movements since the day of Reggie’s death.
“So let me get this straight—” said Frank, waving his stogie.
“I sure hope you can straighten this whole thing out, Frank,” said Mr. Benchley.
FPA looked up at the chandelier as if its crystals held the answers to the mystery. He puffed out a smoke ring, and chewed on his cigar for a long moment, appearing to ruminate on his words before spitting them out:
“This is how I see it: Somebody murdered RIP, and tried to make it look like an accident. That same person killed Lucille, and it sure didn’t look like an accident. Now, they find Marion Fields, killed, and it looks like an accident, again, but it’s no accident, I’d say, and she is no longer on the list of suspects for murders one and two.” He came down from the chandelier to look at each of
us in turn. “All I can figure out is that everyone connected to RIP is dropping like flies! I say it’s probably best to let the cops try to sort it all out.”
“The voice of reason,” said Aleck, thumping his fist on the table. “Thank you very much, Frank.”
“Yes, Frank,” I said, “Thank you for making me totally confused.”
“How’d she get it, Aleck?” asked Frank.
“Hit by a car, corner Broadway and 46th,” said Aleck.
The Reginald Pierce Theatre was on 46th. I asked if there were any witnesses.
“Rush hour. About fifty witnesses saw it happen.”
“So then, maybe it wasn’t murder,” said Mr. Benchley. “It may just be coincidence.”
“Please, you know how I feel about coincidences.”
“There aren’t any?”
“You know there aren’t,” I said.
“Witnesses say it looked like she was pushed; only nobody could say who pushed her, or give a description of the pusher.”
“Aleck,” I said, “Can anybody say where she was coming from, where she might have been going, if she had a companion with her when she was killed, did she—”
“Hold your horses, Dottie!”
“Well? Do you know?”
“Oh, all right! She’d been seen leaving the theatre’s lobby.”
“The Pierce Theatre? What was she doing there?”
“Don’t know. The box office manager saw her leave.”
“What time?”
“Rush hour. Five o’clock or thereabouts.”
“We were there! At the theatre. In Reggie’s apartment when she was killed.”
“The thing we have to figure out is what the three victims had in common. What did they know or what did they do that got them all killed?”
“You mean, whom did they piss-off,” I said.
“Who felt threatened enough to knock-off three people?” said Mr. Benchley. “We know,” he continued, “at least we think we know, that Mistress Marion may have stolen the bird statue that was considered the most valuable artifact of Reggie’s Egyptian collection. Whoever knew she had it might have killed her for it. The motive would be money, and a strong motive it is. It’s reason enough for someone to kill Reggie, and if the killer couldn’t find the statue because it was hidden in the vase, and he then suspected that Marion had it. . . . But, why kill Lucille? What was her connection? I’m dumbfounded.”
[Dorothy Parker 01] - The Broadway Murders Page 11