Star Witness

by D. W. Buffa

  Chapter Ten

  I READ BLUE ZEPHYR, AND then I read it again. I read it the first time because Stanley Roth had written it, and said there were people who would do anything to stop it being made into a motion picture; I read it the second time because it was so much better than what I had thought it would be. Blue Zephyr was good; it might even be great; and the comparison Stanley Roth had drawn with Citizen Kane no longer seemed all that far from the truth.

  Stanley Roth wanted to be what Orson Welles had been, what Orson Welles would be, not fifty years ago, but today; he wanted to make Citizen Kane all over again—now, today—not based on William Randolph Hearst, but on himself, Stanley Roth. The central character, the Charles Foster Kane of Blue Zephyr, is named William Welles.

  In Citizen Kane, Kane is incredibly rich, just as William Randolph Hearst was incredibly rich. In Blue Zephyr, William Welles, like Stanley Roth, does not have much of anything. Hearst and Kane can have anything money can buy; Stanley Roth and William Welles have only their talent and ambition to sell. The first half of Blue Zephyr describes what Welles had to do; the people with whom he had to deal; the deals he had to make to get to top, to have a studio of his own, a studio that would become the dominant force in the industry, and make William Welles the most powerful man in town.

  Stanley Roth was right. Blue Zephyr was an indictment of Hollywood: the greed, the corruption, the indecent haste with which one person betrayed another, the ease with which disloyalty was disguised as an opportunity that might never come again. Roth spared no one, least of all himself, or, rather, his alter ego. William Welles just wants the chance to make pictures, the kind that were not being made anymore. He is not interested in money or power; and he is not thinking about one day having a studio of his own. Because he believes so fervently in his dream, he knows that others will believe in it as well. The young William Welles sets out to show Hollywood the kind of movies he can make.

  He fails miserably. No one is interested in hearing what he thinks; no one wants to do anything except make pictures that make money. Disillusioned, he thinks about giving up, but he gets an offer to work as an assistant director to someone whose work he respects. The director is a much older man who has spent most of his life making pictures and remembers more than just one of the supposed golden ages of Hollywood. He tells him that the only way to survive is to make the movies the people with money, the people who own the studios, think are the movies people will pay to see. Welles learns a lesson, but not the one the director was trying to teach.

  Stanley Roth thought he was writing a second Citizen Kane, but he was not writing about someone who had money and learned the limitations and the disappointments of power: he was writing about someone who had neither money nor power and knew he was better than those who did. Stanley Roth was William Welles, but William Welles was not Charles Foster Kane; William Welles was Julian Sorel. Without knowing it, Roth had written a second The Red and the Black. Like Julian Sorel, the young William Welles learns to keep his own counsel and make everyone believe he thinks the same way they do. He makes pictures that make money, and he does them so well that he becomes famous for it.

  It was at this point in the script that I was first struck by how seriously I had underestimated Stanley Roth. He understood the way success makes prisoners of those who achieve it. William Welles had a name of his own, a famous name, a name respected in the industry; but instead of making the kind of picture he had dreamed of making, he keeps going on, doing the same thing over and over again, more obsessed than ever with making money. He tells himself that he needs it, that it is the only way he can have a studio of his own. He needs the money for the studio, and he needs the studio to make the kind of pictures he wants. He has to become rich because he wants to do good; and because he only wants to do good, it does not matter if he has to lie or cheat to get the money he needs.

  Unscrupulous, remorseless, without a care for what happens to the people he uses, without a trace of conscience for what he does to the people he abandons once they have served their purpose, Welles gets the money he needs and then some. He becomes one of the wealthiest men in Hollywood, and then, finally, he gets a studio of his own. He calls it Blue Zephyr.

  I do not know why Stanley Roth did this, called it Blue Zephyr. I suppose he had to if he wanted to make a movie about himself. Blue Zephyr was his signature, his stamp, his way of telling everyone that it was all about him. It added an authenticity to what he had done, gave it just a little more credibility; though, if anything, it was almost too believable as it was, too uncomfortably close to what must have happened at the other Blue Zephyr, the one I visited, the one where Stanley Roth now lived. Some the most famous people in Hollywood were in that script. Their names were changed, though sometimes not by very much, and their characters were altered a little, but all of them were recognizable, even by an outsider like me.

  William Welles has his studio, but he still does not make the kind of pictures he always thought he wanted to make. He has Blue Zephyr, but Blue Zephyr has to survive. The expenses are enormous, and he has a partner. Stanley Roth had two partners, Louis Griffin, whom he considered a friend; and Michael Wirthlin, whom he did not. In the script, Roth combines them into one character, a man who, like Wirthlin, brought money and the ability to raise more, and, like Griffin, was a friend of long standing, someone who could be trusted. He had to be someone Welles could trust: without trust there can be no betrayal, and the script of Blue Zephyr had no meaning if not the willing treachery of those you think you know the best.

  The studio requires money, and Welles has to keep making the same kind of mindless movies he had been making before to get it. Then he meets her, Margaret Meyers—Mary Margaret Flanders—a young actress in whom he sees something no one else has seen, a quality that can be seen only through the lens of a camera. He does something utterly unexpected, but which, after he does it, makes perfect sense: he marries her.

  It is an act of perfect cynicism, a way for Welles to take his revenge on the world of which he has become such a prominent part. He cannot make the movies he wants; he cannot be the kind of creative genius he thinks he could have been. He decides to show everyone how breathtakingly easy it is to succeed on the only terms Hollywood, and perhaps not just Hollywood, understands. He marries Margaret Meyers, this unknown actress of questionable talent, and by that single act makes her what everyone in Hollywood—and nearly everyone in America—wants so desperately to be: a celebrity, someone whose face is on the cover of glossy, colorful magazines; someone suddenly endowed with every virtue a publicity department could want or even God could invent. Welles does more than marry her. Ignoring all the conventional wisdom, to say nothing of the vehement objections of his partner, he casts his young wife, instead of an established box office draw, as the female lead in the most expensive movie Blue Zephyr has ever made.

  Had Welles known that she would turn out to be as good as she was? Had he put her in that role to let everyone know that anyone could become a star if they were given the chance: that it was all an artifice, a parlor trick with lights and cameras; that the great American dream was nothing more than a kind of credible fraud, dependent on a willingness to believe what you knew was untrue? Whatever Welles thought he was doing— whatever strange, twisted thoughts of revenge he might have had—the woman he had first made a celebrity became with that single motion picture what the world thought of as a legitimate star. William Welles was now married to a woman suddenly more famous, more in demand, than himself.

  This changed everything. Margaret Meyers was no longer dependent for her celebrity on being Mrs. William Welles. She was, however, still dependent on Blue Zephyr for her career. This is when we begin to find out what Margaret Meyers—and perhaps Mary Margaret Flanders—is all about. She begins an affair with her husband’s friend, the partner in Blue Zephyr, and talks him—or rather seduces him—into starting a studio of his own, one where she can make the kind of pictures she wants. She leaves her
husband, and she leaves Blue Zephyr. The studio Welles built is on the verge of bankruptcy. He stakes everything on one picture, the one he has always wanted to make. He calls it Blue Zephyr.

  Yes, Blue Zephyr. The whole thing is an imitation of an imitation, of art imitating—art. Stanley Roth wanted to make a second Citizen Kane, a movie about himself, in which he is the second Charles Foster Kane, William Welles, the most powerful man in Hollywood. Roth wanted to make a movie about himself, and that meant he had to make a movie about someone who ends up making a movie about ... himself. The movie Welles makes in Blue Zephyr is the same movie Roth is making. Or so it seemed until I turned to the last page of the script and discovered that Stanley Roth had written two alternative endings. Welles makes Blue Zephyr, the picture that is going to give the world an unvarnished look at the way Hollywood really works, but no one ever sees it. The night it is finished, Welles sits alone, watching it for the first time, the movie he always wanted to make, the one with which he hoped to save the studio he was otherwise going to lose. It is better than he had ever dared dream. He watches it by himself in his private theater at home; and then, at the very end, he slumps forward in his chair, the rhythmic clicking of the projector the last sound William Welles will ever hear. That is the way the movie ends, with William Welles dead. The two different endings deal with the way in which he dies. In one, Welles slumps forward, clutching his chest, dying of a heart attack, his eyes still focused on the screen. In the other, the camera draws away until all you see is the darkened silhouette of the back of his head, watching as the movie comes to an end. Then you hear it, a single gunshot, and the screen goes black.

  IS THIS WHAT STANLEY ROTH had thought might happen to him— that someone might be willing to kill him to stop the movie from being made? Had he now changed his mind and decided that someone else had written a better ending? The death of William Welles might stop anyone from seeing the movie he had made; the death of Stanley Roth, like the murder of Mary Margaret Flanders, would almost guarantee that Blue Zephyr would be shown in movie theaters all over the world. Stanley Roth did not have to be killed; he had to be destroyed, and what better way to do that than to have everyone believe he murdered the woman America had learned to love.

  There was another difference between the script and the situation in which Stanley Roth now found himself. In the movie, it was not a secret that William Welles was making Blue Zephyr; but there were only two copies of the script Roth had written, one of which he kept locked in a desk drawer, the other of which he kept hidden in a place he thought secure. If Roth was the only one who knew it existed, it could not have been the motive for the murder of Mary Margaret Flanders as part of a plan to discredit him. Someone must have known, if not exactly what was in the script, then at least the broad outline of what Stanley Roth intended to do. He must have mentioned it to Julie Evans. He trusted her judgment, if he did not completely trust her. He had probably had her read it, wanting her reaction, and she, in turn, might easily have mentioned it to someone else. It was almost a week after he gave it to me that I had finally picked up the script and read Blue Zephyr; it was more than a week after that before I had a chance to ask Julie Evans what she knew about it.

  STANLEY ROTH HAD INSISTED THAT I join his party at the premiere of Mary Margaret Flanders’s last picture. Dressed in black tie, I stood in front of the Chateau Marmont under the sun-drenched Southern California sky, tapping my feet on the curb, getting more irritated with each passing minute. Half an hour late, Julie blamed it in her casual way on traffic. Wrapped in a long blue dress, her blonde hair pulled up and a diamond necklace fastened around her neck, she was so gorgeous I forgot how angry I had been about being made to wait.

  “What can you tell me about anything that may have happened between Mary Margaret Flanders and either one of Roth’s partners?” I asked as we pulled out into the street.

  Her eyes glittered. A shrewd smile cut across her mouth.

  “You mean, was she sleeping with one of them? The answer is, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised.” She glanced across at me. “Why? That sounds more like a motive for a husband to kill his wife. You’re supposed to be helping Stanley, aren’t you?”

  I ignored it, the only sign of my displeasure a brief, icy stare. For a few minutes neither of us said a word. Aware that she had overstepped herself, but unwilling to acknowledge a mistake, she added a slight qualification to what she had said before.

  “She might have with Wirthlin. He would have jumped at the chance; not because she was Mary Margaret Flanders, but because she was Stanley Roth’s wife. That would have appealed to him: the feeling that he could take her away from Stanley.”

  “But not with Louis Griffin?”

  “Louis wouldn’t have done it. In part because he’s Stanley’s friend, but mainly because he’s something of a throwback, a man who thinks it’s dishonorable to sleep with a woman married to another man.”

  A faint smile curled around the corners of her mouth, a reflection of a melancholy thought.

  “It’s nice to know there is still someone left like that,” she added in a soft, rather husky voice. “Especially in this town.”

  I felt like a tourist, straining for a clearer view of a famous place. The premiere was being held at Mann’s Chinese Theater. Not that long ago, Mary Margaret Flanders had knelt down on her knees and placed both hands on the wet cement that when it dried would make them, along with a plaque that bore her name, a permanent part of the movie-star procession in the sidewalk outside.

  “Louis may have been the only man in Hollywood she didn’t sleep with,” said Julie with ill-concealed contempt. “She was fairly notorious that way, you know.”

  “That’s interesting,” I remarked in an offhand way. “In Blue Zephyr, the only affair mentioned is with William Welles’s partner.”

  She seemed surprised.

  “Blue Zephyr. The movie. The script Stanley Roth has been working on.”

  Julie glanced at me, her eyes full of caution. “Is that what Stanley told you?” She tried to sound nonchalant. “That there was one affair—the one with the partner?”

  “No,” I replied, curious about her reaction. “Stanley did not tell me; I read it.”

  A look, at first of astonishment, then of what seemed like anger, shone for a single, uncontrolled moment in her eyes.

  “How much of it did he give you to read?”

  There was an undercurrent of resentment, directed, not at me, but at Stanley Roth; as if by letting me see even a part of the script of Blue Zephyr he had somehow violated a trust or betrayed a secret.

  I tried to make it sound as if I had not noticed.

  “All of it,” I replied, looking out the window on my side. “I read it straight through, then I read it again. I thought it was extraordinary. What do you think about it?” I asked, turning toward her.

  Her polished lips were pressed tight together, her chin raised in an attitude of defiance.

  “Am I in it?”

  Her voice was quiet, ominously so.

  “You haven’t read it?” I asked, just to be sure.

  Rather impatiently, she shook her head. “No one has read it. You’re the first. I’ve read parts of it,” she went on after she caught her breath, “a few pages at a time; a scene here, a scene there; none of it in sequence, never two scenes in a row.”

  The tension began to ebb. She looked at me, seeking confirmation.

  “You’re sure I’m not in it?”

  “You didn’t want to be in it?”

  She looked like she wanted to laugh.

  “Everybody knows about Blue Zephyr,” she explained. “Everybody knows Stanley has been working on it for a couple of years now. No one has ever seen it—except you—seen all of it, I mean.”

  We were in front of the theater, waiting in line for the parking attendant to take the car. The handprints of once-famous people paraded silently down the street.

  “Stanley has shown parts of it to people,
people inside the studio; and he talks about it, what he wants it to be.”

  “The second Citizen Kane,” I offered, in part to see her reaction, but also to see what it felt like, now that I had read it, to say it out loud.

  “Is that what Stanley told you?” she asked shrewdly. “Is that what he thinks?”

  Avoiding a direct reply, I told her only that reading the script it was impossible not to notice the similarities.

  “Except that Blue Zephyr tells the story about the motion picture industry,” she immediately remarked. “It’s Stanley’s dream—to tell that story better than it’s ever been told before. That’s the reason that it makes everyone who knows about it so nervous—the fear that he might tell the truth about the things he knows. But you’re sure I’m not in it?” she asked with a visible sense of relief as we got out of the car.

  Looking every inch the movie star herself, Julie took my arm as we entered the gauntlet of photographers and television cameras. Waving and smiling to the crowd surging behind the velvet ropes that cordoned off the red-carpeted walkway, she had them all thinking she must be famous as we made our way toward the entrance to the theater.