Beyond the Headlines

by R. G. Belsky

  “No, I didn’t talk to her then either. I haven’t talked to my daughter in several years. We don’t speak anymore.”

  That was another shocker I hadn’t seen coming.

  “Why is that?”

  “I disagreed with my daughter’s decision to marry that Hollister man. I pleaded with her not to do it. She ignored me and married him anyway. She got the wealth she wanted, I guess, but she and I no longer have a relationship.”

  “Why didn’t you want her to marry Hollister?”

  “I had my reasons.”

  “Have you met him?”

  “Yes, I met him.”

  “When was that?”

  “The last time? Not long ago. A few weeks before he died. He showed up at my door here. Just like you did today. He wanted to talk to me, too. But I wouldn’t see him. I just slammed the door in his face. That made me feel good to do that.”

  “Why did you hate him so much?”

  “I thought he was wrong for my daughter. He hurt her and did bad things to her. He was a bad person. That’s why I was willing to talk to you. You helped my daughter. I still love my daughter. And I will do anything I can to protect her from people like Charles Hollister.”

  “Even though you haven’t talked to her in years?”

  “She’s still my daughter.”

  CHAPTER 41

  IF THE YEARS had been kind to Laurie’s mother, they weren’t to Stuart Gilmore, her first agent.

  His office was in a run-down-looking building near the old center of Hollywood at Hollywood and Vine. There were so many legends about that spot. Lana Turner being discovered at a soda fountain at a Schwab’s drugstore and all the rest. Many of those colorful buildings from the old days were gone now, replaced by fast-food places, coffee shops, and convenience stores.

  They hadn’t gotten around to replacing Stuart Gilmore’s building yet. But it didn’t look like it would be there for long. There was a sign on the elevator in the lobby that said it was out of order. There was also a tattered directory with only a few names on it; all the other offices seemed to be empty.

  Gilmore’s office was listed on the sixth floor. I trudged up the steps, gingerly making my way through debris, garbage, and even a sleeping derelict.

  “I’ve been here for a long, long time,” Gilmore told me inside his office. It was small, but comfortable. There were pictures of celebrities on the wall behind his desk, many of them either dead or long forgotten. One of the pictures, though, was of Laurie Bateman.

  Gilmore himself must have been near eighty now, and the suit and tie he was wearing looked almost as old. He was bald and frail, but he seemed to enjoy the opportunity to talk about the old days when he represented a young Laurie Bateman. I wondered if he had any clients now or if he just came to the office every day out of habit.

  “Laurie was only probably four or five when I met her. That must have been back around 1980. She came to see me with her mother. Of course, her name wasn’t Laurie Bateman then. It was still her Vietnamese name, Pham Van Kieu.

  “She was cute and precocious, and I thought she could be special. But there are a lot of cute, pretty little girls in Hollywood. Hundreds of mothers seem to bring them in to agents like me thinking their daughter can be a big star. As you might suspect, most of them aren’t. It’s hard to get attention in this town.

  “That’s what happened to the little girl I knew as Pham Van Kieu at first. She didn’t get much attention. She was just another face in the crowd when I was representing her. Those were tough years for her—and her mother. Her mother wanted to make her a star. Every rejection made her more and more desperate to try something else. Nothing worked. And then, suddenly, she exploded into this incredible celebrity superstar she became. It was pretty amazing.”

  “What changed to make all this success happen?”

  “Pham Van Kieu became Laurie Bateman.”

  “You mean the name change did it?”

  “Not just the name. Her mother married Marvin Bateman, the big Hollywood producer.”

  “And that’s what made her a star?”

  Gilmore nodded.

  “Bateman was powerful enough to pull a lot of strings and get her the roles I couldn’t. She went on to become the Laurie Bateman she is today. Me, I didn’t get anything out of it. After Bateman came into the picture, her mother told me she didn’t need me anymore. And I guess she was right. I mean, she had Marvin Bateman.”

  I thought about what he had just told me.

  “What was the mother doing for a living when you first met her?”

  “She had a couple of jobs. She cleaned houses for people in Hollywood. She worked as a waitress, too, at a restaurant out in the valley. Back then, she did anything she had to to support her and her daughter. Her husband had died, I believe, and they didn’t have much money.”

  “Then how did she meet someone like Marvin Bateman?”

  “I always wondered about that. At first, I thought it was just luck. But later I wasn’t so sure. The mother was a beautiful woman. I think she realized that and used it to her advantage. She used her sexual attractiveness to get what she wanted—and what she wanted for her daughter.”

  I remembered her story now of using sex to help her get her and her baby daughter out of Vietnam.

  “She slept with Bateman to get her daughter the big break that made her a star in Hollywood?” I asked.

  “Something like that.”

  “Do you know that for a fact?”

  He shook his head. “All I know is that I found out she had gotten herself a job as Bateman’s housekeeper. He was married to another woman at the time. But shortly after she started working for him, he divorced his wife and married the housekeeper. She became Gloria Bateman and Kieu became Laurie Bateman. Everything exploded for her in Hollywood after that. You can connect the dots on that pretty easily, right?”

  I sure could. And, having just met Gloria Bateman, I had no doubt that she was capable of using her beauty and sexual wiles to snare a big catch like Marvin Bateman. Damn, this was a woman who would do anything to get what she wanted. I wondered if her daughter was the same way.

  “From what I’ve heard though, she and Bateman were pretty happy together,” Gilmore said. “They seemed to be in love with each other. He was supposed to have been a good father to Laurie when she was growing up. No matter how the whole thing started, people say it turned out to be a good marriage.”

  “That’s what they said about Laurie’s marriage to Charles Hollister, too, before the real truth emerged,” I pointed out.

  Gilmore shrugged. “Anyway, then Marvin Bateman died.”

  “How did that happen?”

  I realized I’d never checked into the details of Bateman’s death. It didn’t seem important at the time.

  “Suicide.”

  “He killed himself?”

  “Yes. They discovered him in the bedroom with a gunshot to his head. There was no suicide note, but he was holding the pistol in his hand. And there was no sign of any kind of break-in or other criminal activity in the house. It was declared a suicide. I’m told Laurie was devastated by his death. That it took her a long time to get over what happened to her stepfather. It was horrible for her.”

  “Because they were so close?”

  “Because she was the one who found the body.”

  CHAPTER 42

  I WAS SUPPOSED to take a meeting with Mitchell Lansburg at West Coast Media Studios. That’s the way people in Hollywood talked, you “took a meeting” with someone. Or you “do lunch.” I’d done my research on this. I wanted to fit into the Southern California lifestyle. And my knowledge of that lifestyle up to this point had pretty much consisted of watching reruns of Baywatch and Melrose Place.

  The West Coast Media studios were located in Burbank, like many of the other big TV studios for shows that were produced in LA. I drove there in my rental convertible with the top down, singing “It Never Rains in Southern California.” Except it did. Well, i
t wasn’t actually raining at the moment, but it was cloudy and the temperature was barely above sixty. Still, it was better than the sub-freezing weather back in New York.

  I wondered if I’d see any celebrities at West Coast Media. I wasn’t doing that well on the celebrity sighting front. The only one I’d encountered so far was Pat Sajak, who was eating dinner in a restaurant at the hotel where I was staying. I wasn’t sure if Pat Sajak qualified as a bona fide celebrity or not, but he was the best I had so far. I resisted the urge to go over and get his autograph. If I had, I planned to ask him if he would “sell me a vowel” in his name. But then he’s probably heard that joke a lot. So I let him eat in peace. Now if it was Vanna White, that would have been a whole different story. I would have been all over Vanna doing autographs and selfies and anything else until they threw me out of the place.

  There were a lot of people lined up in the lobby of the West Coast Media studio building. Not celebrities though, just tourists and sightseers on one of the tours or with tickets for a show. I talked to one of the security people and told him who I was and why I was there. He checked with Mitchell Lansburg’s office, then escorted me to the front, past the waiting crowd and toward the elevator. Everyone in the crowd looked at me with curiosity as I walked by them. Probably figured I was a celebrity. I waved at them and tried to smile like a star. Some of them waved back. They’d seen a Hollywood star, even if they weren’t sure who it was. Something to tell the folks back home.

  Lansburg was waiting for me when I got off the elevator. He was dressed more casually than he’d been in New York—no suit, just slacks and an open-collared sports shirt. He was still wearing the wedding ring though, not that it really mattered to me. He led me to an office with a long window wrapped around with a view of Hollywood and the hills in the distance. It was a pretty terrific view.

  “So how are you enjoying Southern California so far?” he asked. “Is it everything you hoped it would be? Does it look like a place where you’d be comfortable working and living?”

  “I like it, Mr. Lansburg,” I said. “I like it a lot.”

  “Call me Mitchell,” he said, like he had the first time we met.

  “Mitchell seems awfully formal for a first name.”

  “That’s my name.”

  “Can I call you Mitch?”

  “Not if you want this job.” He smiled.

  “Then I guess Mitchie would be out of the question.”

  He smiled again. “That’s what we like about you. The snappy comebacks, the quips, the repartee. Imagine yourself doing that on the air, not just sitting here with me. Just being yourself. That’s all we’d be asking you to do, Clare. Be yourself on the air. Just be Clare Carlson for the audience.”

  “And you’d pay me a lot of money to do that?”

  “We would.”

  “That sounds like a pretty good deal.”

  He took me then on a tour of the place. Showed me the studio where the show would likely be broadcast from. It was empty now. But I tried to imagine it filled with people and me onstage in front of them. Like Ellen or Dr. Phil or the people from The View or The Talk. It was an exciting image. He said that I’d have my own big office like the one we’d been sitting in, my own assistant—and they’d rent me a car and also pay for my rent in a condo to live out here.

  “Can I have a convertible?” I asked.

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “What make?”

  “What make do you want?”

  “Something more expensive than Ellen drives.”

  I did have a serious question for him. “You haven’t made me a specific offer yet. Is that coming soon? I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do, but I can’t do anything until you actually offer me the job.”

  “These things take time.” He sighed. “We have to get approval from the West Coast Media board of directors and set up the advertising and talk about marketing options and a lot of other things like making sure all the local outlets are on board. It’s not a simple process. But I have every confidence that we’ll get a green light for your show, Clare. Then it will be up to you to decide what you want to do.”

  He asked me about the Laurie Bateman story. I told him what I’d been doing. He was excited about it all. Said that was the exact kind of story he hoped I’d be doing on the air soon for them. Digging into a big murder, exploring the past, looking for answers even if I wasn’t sure what the questions were.

  “Would you like to have dinner with me tomorrow night?” he asked me then out of the blue.

  “Dinner?”

  “Yes, I thought we could talk more about all these ideas—in a less formal setting. I’ve got a business conference I need to attend tonight. But I thought maybe tomorrow night you and I could hang out and go over all this.”

  “Dinner,” I repeated, thinking about my options here.

  I looked down at the wedding ring on his hand. Yep, the wedding ring was still there on his finger.

  “I’m going up to Sacramento tomorrow to talk to Charles Hollister’s ex-wife,” I said finally.

  I’d already made an appointment to see Susan Daily, Hollister’s first wife, and I didn’t want to take any chance of her backing out on that.

  “Okay, then let’s say we do it when you get back to New York.”

  “That would be nice,” I said.

  After I left his office, I spent time making phone calls.

  First to Janet.

  “He asked me out on a date,” I told her.

  “The guy who’s interviewing you for this big job?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I told her about our conversation.

  “That’s not necessarily an invitation for a date,” she pointed out.

  “I know, but it sure sounded like a date invitation.”

  “Okay, this is potentially a real dangerous area, professionally speaking. He’s in charge of hiring you. If he comes on to you, that’s a real mess depending on what happens after that. For both of you. He comes across as a guy flaunting his power and authority to get sex. And you run the risk of being accused of using sex to climb the career ladder.”

  “Good point.”

  “And, from what you say, he’s also married.”

  “Even better point.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Probably have dinner with him when I get back to New York.”

  “Are you that desperate for a man, Clare?”

  “I think my actions speak for themselves,” I told her.

  Later, I called my daughter. She asked me if I’d decided yet whether or not I could come to Virginia to spend Christmas with her and my granddaughter, Audrey, and her husband and family. I said I still wasn’t sure about that. She said it would be wonderful if I could figure out a way for us all to be together for the holidays.

  Then she brought up the business about the breast cancer gene again. I’d been trying to avoid that topic, but I assured her that I had gone to see a doctor and taken the tests to determine if I was carrying the gene.

  “You’re telling me the truth about this, right?”

  “Why would I lie?”

  “Because I know you well enough now to know that you put off things that you don’t want to deal with.”

  “I promise you I will let you know as soon as I find out the test results.”

  “Why don’t you call the doctor again and check?”

  I did do that after I got off the phone with her. But the people that were in the office then didn’t know anything. They asked if I wanted to leave a message for someone to get back to me. But I said I’d call back later on.

  The truth was I didn’t want to deal with this right now.

  I had a big story to do.

  The Laurie Bateman/Charles Hollister story.

  I’d deal with everything else later …

  CHAPTER 43

  I SAW SUSAN Daily in Sacramento the next day. The wife Hollister left—and eventually divorced—in a
psychiatric hospital. I wasn’t sure what I’d find when I met her, but it turned out to be a lot different than what I expected.

  She was a psychiatrist herself now.

  After getting treated for depression, she decided she wanted to devote her life to helping other people with the same problems. After her marriage to Hollister ended, she used the money from the divorce settlement to go to medical school, get her degree in psychiatry, and open up a practice in Sacramento.

  I sat in her office in a medical complex and listened to her as she told me about how she’d managed to turn her life around.

  “Doctor, heal thyself,” I said when she was finished.

  “Something like that.”

  “Hey, that’s great, Dr. Daily.”

  But what I really wanted to talk about, of course, was her ex-husband. She’d been stunned by the news of his murder, she said. Especially, she said, because she had just reconnected with him again before that happened. He had come to see her again after all this time, she told me.

  “When was that?”

  “A few weeks ago, I guess.”

  About the same time he’d gone to see Laurie Bateman’s mother.

  “To say that I was surprised to see him after all this time would be an understatement. I was floored when he walked in. I mean this was the Charles Hollister who had gone on to become so rich and so famous. But he didn’t act that way when he was here that day. He was just … well, just Charles. The good Charles. The one I knew a long time ago and married.

  “I told him that I was mostly responsible for the failure of our marriage, not him. I mean, it wasn’t deliberate. But I was sick, and I had no idea how or why I did many of the things I did. It turned out that I was living with a chemical imbalance. I had a disease. I didn’t understand all of the ramifications of depression then. I do now.

  “The doctors I saw back then diagnosed me with clinical depression. The first doctor gave me drugs to deal with the depression. The second put me in psychiatric analysis five times a week. The third tried both at the same time and suggested electroshock therapy. None of it worked. My problems, my depression, just got worse.