Beyond the Headlines

by R. G. Belsky

  The first thing I planned to do was look into the death of Laurie Bateman’s father. Sure, it had been more than half a century ago when he was killed in a traffic accident. But I was still intrigued by the timing of that—so soon after his family arrived from Vietnam—and figured it would be an interesting part of whatever Laurie Bateman background story I came up with. My ex-husband Sam had set me up for a meeting with an LA cop friend of his who said he would dig up the old file on the case for me.

  The biggest thing, though, was getting an interview with Laurie Bateman’s mother. She still lived in her dead husband Marvin Bateman’s house located in La Jolla, a few hours south near San Diego. I wasn’t sure she’d talk to me. I hadn’t called ahead to try and set up an interview though. It’s too easy for her to say no like that. I was going to just show up at her door and see what happened. Sometimes the surprise interview is the best way to go.

  I’d discovered that Laurie Bateman’s first agent—the one her mother had used to try and make her a child star in the beginning—was still working in LA. His name was Stuart Gilmore, and I made an appointment to meet with him after I went to see Laurie’s mother in La Jolla. I figured he might have good information for the story too.

  There was also a Charles Hollister angle. His first wife, the one he married in the seventies, was still alive and living in Northern California. She wouldn’t know anything about Laurie Bateman, but maybe she could tell me more about Charles Hollister back then in his early days after he first came back from Vietnam. I contacted her and made arrangements to fly up to see her before I went back to New York.

  And no, I hadn’t forgotten about the job offer. I’d notified Mitchell Lansburg that I planned to be here and could meet with anyone he wanted me to see. Turned out he was going to be in LA at the same time. So, we made plans to get together and he would introduce me to everyone I might be working with in LA.

  Yep, I had a busy time ahead of me. A jam-packed schedule. But right now, I was tired from my long trip. So after lunch I drove to my hotel, checked in, fell onto the bed, and took a nap. When the going gets tough, the tough get some sleep. I woke up feeling refreshed, rejuvenated, and ready to go to work. There was a window in the hotel room where I could see another view of the beauty and enormity of Los Angeles.

  Hollywood, the place where dreams come true.

  That’s what happened to a lot of people who’ve passed through this town, including Laurie Bateman.

  And now I was here.

  Clare Carlson, the hotshot TV chick.

  Look out LA, here I come!

  CHAPTER 39

  I DROVE THE next morning over to Parker Center police headquarters in downtown LA to meet with Sam’s cop friend.

  His name was Sergeant Dennis Lang. Lang looked to be at least fifty, with gray, thinning hair, and a paunch that suggested to me he hadn’t been running around on the streets for a while. He confirmed that, telling me he’d worked in the records division at Parker Center for a number of years now.

  He used to be on the NYPD, he said, which was where he worked with Sam. But he retired and left New York for the West Coast. When he got bored in retirement, he signed up with the LAPD and wound up in this desk job.

  “Sam told me you were a good journalist and I could trust you,” Lang said.

  “Good to hear.”

  “He also said that you had a big mouth and could be a real pain in the ass.”

  “Hard to believe, huh?”

  “Why do you think he would say something like that about you? Do you know him pretty well?

  “Uh, we used to be married.”

  “Sam never mentioned that to me.”

  “It might have slipped his mind. It was over so quickly.”

  “And he’s still your friend?”

  “He used to be my enemy right after the divorce.”

  “And now?”

  “I think he tolerates me.”

  Eventually he got around to the death of Pham Van Quong, the father of the little infant girl who would grow up to be Laurie Bateman. He had a file with a few records and documents he’d copied on the accident that killed Pham. It wasn’t a big file. Not that I expected it to be for a traffic accident that happened nearly fifty years ago.

  Lang said Pham had attended night classes at UCLA and also worked as a repairman in an electronics shop. He had come to America on a government grant program from the South Vietnamese regime a year or so earlier—then was joined by his family later after the collapse of the South Vietnam government.

  Pham had been hit by a car at an intersection not far from the UCLA campus as he was heading home from classes there on September 23, 1975. The impact hurled him onto the hood of the car until he fell back onto the street. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

  “And that’s all there is to it?” I asked. “What’s in this file?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “What about the driver of the car that hit him?”

  “No one ever found out what the driver’s story was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He left the scene without stopping or contacting anyone for help.”

  “It was a hit-and-run?”

  “Yes. This man you’re asking about was killed by a hit-and-run driver.”

  The file on Pham Van Quong contained the address of the electronics shop where he had worked and also the address of where he had lived back then. Presumably with his wife and the baby that would grow up to be Laurie Bateman. I went to both places. It was foolish, I knew—there was going to be nothing there after all this time that could help me. But I did it anyway. And, of course, I was right—both places were long gone. The electronics store was now a CVS pharmacy and the house where Pham Van Quong and his family lived had been torn down many years earlier to make room for a new apartment complex.

  I went to UCLA, too. That took a long time because I first had to find someone who would be willing to help me on what was going to be a difficult—and probably fruitless—task. I eventually talked to a young woman named Cheryl who was impressed by the fact that I was a TV reporter working on a story. Cheryl said she would love to be a TV reporter one day. The fact that I told her I might be joining a TV show in LA soon didn’t hurt my image in her eyes either. She agreed to do whatever she could to help.

  “Everything’s on computer now,” she explained when I told her what I was looking for.

  “That should make it easier, right?”

  “The computer files only go back about twenty-five years or so.”

  “Right.”

  It’s never easy.

  “What about paper records? Would they still be around?”

  “We never throw anything away.” She smiled.

  “So you could go look through them?”

  “It would require a lot of work for something that long ago.”

  “Hey, that’s what we reporters do, right, Cheryl?”

  It did take a while, but she came back with records on Pham Van Quong. They showed he had attended UCLA until September of 1975 when he suddenly stopped showing up at classes. Which I now knew was because he was dead. I asked if there was anything in the records about the government program that had allowed him to come to America and enroll at the school.

  “Yes, it does appear that he was here on a government grant program. That’s where the money came from. I have records of his tuition payments here and they all are from the government.”

  “The South Vietnamese government, right?”

  “No, the U.S. government.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Pham Van Quong’s tuition was being paid for at UCLA by funds from the U.S. Government.”

  “What agency?”

  “It looks like the Department of Defense.”

  “Why would the U.S. Department of Defense pay for his tuition?”

  “I have no idea.”

  There was one other thing I wanted to know before I left.

  “What was he stu
dying at UCLA?”

  She looked back through the records for the information.

  “Well, it looks as if he was enrolled in several different kinds of courses. American History. English, learning how to speak it better. But most of all it looked like he was pursuing a course of study in computer sciences.”

  “They had computer sciences back then?’

  “It was the beginning of the computer era, and I can see from the records that Pham Van Quong’s goal was to work in this field.”

  The final thing I did was go to the location near the UCLA campus where he had been run down by a car on that long-ago night.

  Again, I didn’t expect to find anything out there that I didn’t know. It was a busy intersection with lots of cars and people walking on the sidewalk or sitting in cafés and visiting stores nearby. No one knew anything or cared about an accident that happened there a half century ago. But standing there now, on the same spot where Pham Van Quong might have stood that night, I tried to put together all the pieces I knew about his life and his death.

  There were an awful lot of coincidences in this story.

  Charles Hollister had been in Vietnam, which was where Laurie Bateman’s family came from.

  Both Hollister and Laurie’s father had been interested in computers, which were just starting to emerge as a force at the time.

  Hollister went on to become a billionaire from his groundbreaking work with computers while Pham Van Quong—Laurie’s father—died a lonely death right here.

  I didn’t know what any of this meant—or if it meant anything at all.

  Neither did the police.

  But maybe Pham Van Quong’s wife—the mother of Laurie Bateman—would.

  CHAPTER 40

  IF I WAS looking for reasons to make the move to California, La Jolla sure would be a good one. The two-hour drive down there from LA was pretty spectacular. But the town of La Jolla itself was even better. Nestled against the coast with beautiful homes and beautiful views and the smell of the ocean everywhere you went. I even stopped off at a Starbucks in town when I got there, and the table where I sat overlooked the Pacific Ocean. Definitely a cool spot to drink your morning coffee.

  Laurie Bateman’s mother lived in a place about five minutes out of town. Her name was Gloria Bateman. As with her daughter, she’d changed her Vietnamese name to an American one when she came here. And she still used the name Gloria Bateman, even though her husband had died years earlier. She had been Gloria Bateman for a long time now.

  The house was impressive, but not ostentatious. It was located on a slight hill, which gave it an unfettered view of the water and many of the other nearby houses. I’d read how Marvin Bateman had bought this house as a retreat from Hollywood and all the people and pressures there.

  Gloria Bateman herself had to be close to seventy now, but she didn’t look it. She was almost a mirror image of her daughter, albeit a more mature version. But still beautiful with striking features and an almost regal presence about her.

  I hadn’t been sure on the drive down to La Jolla whether or not she’d agree to talk to me. But that turned out to be no problem at all. When I knocked on her door and told her who I was and why I was there, she invited me in without any hesitation.

  Sitting in the living room now and drinking tea, I asked her why she was so willing to meet with a strange reporter who unexpectedly knocked on her door. I was curious.

  “I know exactly who you are,” she said. “I know all about you. You’re the woman who helped save my daughter from prison. I am so grateful to you. And happy to help you now in any way that I can.”

  I told her that I was putting together a piece about her daughter’s background, coming here to America as a baby and finding fame and fortune. I said I wanted to find out everything I could about that time. Which was pretty much true. I asked what she could tell me about their flight from Vietnam to arrive in the U.S.

  “I know it was a long time ago, and you probably don’t remember …”

  “Oh, I remember,” she said. “I remember every second of it. You can never forget something so life-changing as that. They aren’t pleasant memories, I’m afraid. Instead, it was a nightmare for a long time, a horrible nightmare that I thought I would never be able to wake up from.”

  There were pictures on the wall next to me. Many of them were of her and her young daughter in America. A distinguished-looking man was in a few of them. I assumed that was Marvin Bateman, the husband she had met here—after her first husband died—who became Laurie’s stepfather. But there was one picture that showed her with a good-looking Vietnamese man and a baby. I asked her if that was the birth father of Laurie, Pham Van Quong. She said he was. I couldn’t tell from the picture whether it had been taken before they left Vietnam or after they arrived in America. Looking at it now after all these years, I couldn’t help but wonder if the people in the picture had any idea about what the future held in store for them. Or, in the case of Pham Van Quong, no future at all.

  She talked then about those last days in Vietnam and the fall of Saigon and the desperate efforts to get out of the war-torn country.

  “Vietnam was our home, the only home we had ever known. But now the war was lost and the Communists were coming. We all knew the horrors that would mean to those of us who had supported the South Vietnamese government and the U.S, so we had to get out. I lived in a small town at the time, which was outside of Saigon.

  “My husband had already left for America to attend classes in college here. But we—me and my newborn baby—were left behind. I knew we had to get to Saigon if we were to have any chance of escaping. That’s where the American helicopters were evacuating people to ships off the coast. It was terribly difficult to get to Saigon.

  “And, when we finally did, even more difficult to get close to the American embassy where the helicopters were taking off from. Thousands of people were massed outside, storming the embassy in hopes of being one of the people picked to leave. Marines had to battle the crowds back. It seemed hopeless.”

  “But you did manage to get out of Vietnam,” I pointed out. “How did you do that?”

  “I sold the most valuable thing I had to the U.S. Marines guarding the embassy.”

  “What did you have that was so valuable?”

  “My body.”

  I suddenly realized what she was telling me. I let that sink in for a few seconds without saying anything. I didn’t have to. She was perfectly willing to keep telling the story without any prodding from me.

  “Yes, I knew I was attractive to men. And so I used that to my advantage. I had to do something to get myself and my baby daughter on one of those evacuation helicopters. So that’s what I did. I did whatever it took.”

  I sipped on my tea. This was a great story. One way or another, this was going to be great stuff on the background of Laurie Bateman. This wasn’t the fairy tale we’d already heard about the American Dream and all that crap; it was the real deal.

  I’d come without a video crew because I wasn’t sure if she’d talk to me, and I figured it was best to meet one-on-one first. But my plan was to do a big on-air interview with her later, and to do the same with everyone else I talked to out here. Then, rather than just put the interviews on air immediately, I’d do a special exclusive report on all of it when I got back to New York. Right now though, I wanted to hear more of Gloria Bateman’s story.

  “I thought that was the worst part of my nightmare, but it wasn’t over yet,” she told me. “It took us a long time to get to America. First, they switched us to Guam, then to Hawaii, and finally to San Francisco before we wound up in Los Angeles. I was reunited with my husband then. But times were still hard as he tried to work to make enough money to support a family while going to college at the same time. And then he died.”

  I tried to find out more about how her husband managed to come to America before the rest of his family. But she didn’t know, or at least wouldn’t tell me if she did. She said he did so
me kind of work for the government in South Vietnam and they sent him to the U.S. for training in electronic sciences. She also told me she didn’t know anything about any involvement by the U.S. government—or more specifically the Defense Department, as the clerk at UCLA had told me.

  I asked her about the car accident that had killed her husband. She didn’t give me many more details. But she did say: “I was devastated when he died. I was living in a strange country, along with my baby daughter, and I had no money and no way of knowing how we were going to survive here.”

  “Until you met Marvin Bateman,” I said.

  “Yes. Marvin was the solution to my problems. He married me, he gave me a home, and he later made my daughter a star. As a child actress in TV commercials at first, then modeling, and eventually TV and movies.”

  The American Dream. It had all come true for her. There was one other question I had though. The accounts I’d read in Maggie’s file said she’d had a brother that lived with them in Vietnam. I’d wondered about the brother when she’d been talking, but I didn’t want to interrupt the flow. Now I brought it up.

  “You had a brother with you in Vietnam. Where was he when all this was happening?”

  She shook her head sadly.

  “My brother, Binh, never made it out of Vietnam. It was only Laurie and me.”

  “Why … ?”

  “Binh died in Vietnam.”

  “Died how?”

  “He was killed during the war.”

  “Killed in the fighting?”

  She nodded.

  “Was he with the South Vietnamese Army?”

  “My brother died during the war,” she said, and that was all.

  It was clear that it still pained her to talk about her dead brother even after all this time.

  “Have you talked to Laurie since she took over Charles Hollister’s business?” I asked now, deciding to switch the subject.

  “No.”

  “When is the last time you talked to her? When she was in jail and charged with murder?”