by D. W. Buffa
At the funeral a young girl tosses a single flower on the casket as it is being lowered into the ground and then, crying quietly, turns away and with the other mourners leaves Stanley Roth alone to say his last goodbye. The camera pulls back and keeps pulling back, and then, as I had seen it all happen once before on television, the image of Stanley Roth grieving for his murdered wife fades away into the golden sunlit afternoon. All around me in the darkened theater I could hear the muffled sounds of short dry coughing and stifled sobs. Julie, sitting next to me on my left, wiped her eye; Stanley Roth, sitting next to her, had a look of satisfaction. It seemed strange and out of place; then I realized that he was not reacting to what he saw but to the effect he had been able to produce. He caught me staring and nodded toward the screen, and with a fugitive smile let me know he was going to be particularly interested in what I thought about what we were going to see next. I felt Julie’s hand take my wrist and squeeze it, and I knew she was waiting for the same thing.
Stanley Roth was sitting at his desk in the bungalow. He was watching Joseph Antonelli—Antonelli! How easy it is to surrender your own identity to someone, someone famous pretending to be you! He was watching Walker Bradley as he read the inscription on the Oscar that stood on a bookshelf on the other side of the room.
I shot a glance at Stanley Roth. A knowing smile, one that was not without a certain sympathy, settled over his mouth. His eyes went back to the screen.
I had been in that bungalow, talking with Stanley Roth for the first time in person, more than an hour before the telephone rang and he was told the police had come to arrest him. The scene that I was watching could not have lasted more than three minutes, yet the dozen or so lines of dialogue seemed so far as I could remember an accurate summary of what had actually been said: Roth tells Antonelli that he once hit his wife and he tells him why, but he insists he did not kill her. He explains why he was sleeping in another room, but he can’t explain how someone could have gotten into the house without being detected. All the time Roth is talking, Antonelli is moving around the room. Each time he pauses in front of a photograph, the camera, and the audience, see it too, a brief, compressed look at the private life of someone famous everyone already thinks they know.
“She slept with other men,” said Roth on screen. “I loved her anyway
And with that, Stanley Roth turns his dead wife’s infidelity into a kind of bittersweet regret, a measure, not just of how much he loved her, but of the remarkable loyalty that could forgive and in a way forget the very betrayal that made it possible. It made Stanley Roth someone to feel sorry for.
It was an odd sensation, watching how the words I remembered speaking seemed now to have a different meaning, and change not just what I had meant, but who I was—or who I thought I was. I sat there, in that dark, crowded theater, watching myself become the figment of another man’s imagination, knowing that this was how those who saw the movie would always think of me: ruthless and without conscience, indifferent to the guilt or innocence of his client, willing—no, eager—to take a case because of its notoriety; the lawyer who only gradually and, as it were, reluctantly, becomes convinced that Stanley Roth is one of the few men he has ever defended who is not guilty of the murder for which he has been accused.
Roth did not forget a thing. Outside the bungalow, as they walk toward the front gate of the studio where the police are waiting to take Stanley Roth away, he turns to the man who has just agreed to become his attorney and asks without reproach:
“You don’t believe me, do you?” And then adds: “I don’t blame you. There is no reason you should. But it’s the truth: I didn’t do it, I didn’t kill Mary Margaret, I didn’t murder my wife.”
Antonelli watches the police load his new client into the police car and drive off. You can tell from the expression on Walker Bradley’s face that he is wondering if Stanley Roth might just be innocent after all.
He keeps his doubts to himself and insists from the beginning that the police have arrested the wrong man. He stands there—I stood there!—outside the gate to Blue Zephyr, and in front of a movie audience that knew I was lying told a crowd of actors playing reporters that before the trial was over they will know who the real killer is. In this respect at least, Stanley Roth had been brutally honest. All through the trial he shows me telling reporters, telling the jury, telling anyone who will listen that someone else did it, and then in those scenes in which the two of us are alone, he shows me challenging him to tell me the truth, to tell me what happened the night he killed his wife.
There was something almost insidious about the way that despite everything I knew Stanley Roth drew me into this remarkable movie he had made. It was remarkable— whatever else it was, it was that—and nowhere was this more apparent than in the manner in which he had handled the problem of time. At first I did not notice. I was too taken with the way in which he had changed the whole visual structure of the courtroom and what went on inside it. Reduced to its elements, a trial—any trial—is nothing more than lawyers asking questions and witnesses giving answers. A judge speaks; a lawyer makes a statement. There is no action, no movement, no great shiny spectacle that captures the eye and makes your blank mind forget that nothing is being said: Everything is being said and you could listen to it just as well if you were blind. I began to understand why Roth had been so excited that day he told me what Orson Welles had done in Citizen Kane, and what had been done in The Third Man as well. Under Roth’s scrupulous direction, the courtroom was turned into a series of what only seemed like random fragments shot from the shifting angle of a camera that seldom stayed still. While a lawyer asked a question, the camera showed the face of the witness or the line of faces in the jury box; when the witness answered, the camera showed the face of the lawyer, or the defendant, or someone in the audience of spectators who filled the courtroom.
That was how he solved the problem of time: by showing something that was happening in the courtroom while the words of the trial were droning on in the background. When the trial begins and the court clerk, who also combines the function of the court reporter, makes her first appearance, the camera follows her every move. She was nothing like the evil-tempered woman I had watched every day of trial make even the simplest task seem a burden. She was younger, and rather graceful; and if she did not have striking good looks, she had elegant, sculpted hands, as lovely as any I had ever seen. The camera concentrated on them, those two hands, flashing silently over the keys of the stenotype machine, taking down every word spoken, measuring like a metronome the constant irrevocable passage of time. A witness who might have been on the stand for hours or even days was there for a few seconds, and as his voice faded away the hands kept moving and the voice of the next witness began to be heard and the face of a lawyer, a juror, a spectator or the judge was there in front of you, shown from a distance, shown close-up, shown in full or maybe only in part, betraying in some subtle fashion a reaction to what was now being said.
It was not until I had seen those hands for the third or fourth time that I realized I had seen them somewhere before, and it was not until the prosecution was calling the detective to the stand and her face was shown in close-up that I remembered where. I grabbed Julie’s arm and whispered angrily:
“Did you know about this?”
Startled by my sudden vehemence, she searched my eyes.
“What?” she asked, clearly puzzled.
I glanced beyond her to Stanley Roth, and then beyond him to Louis Griffin. Which one of them had done it, and how had it been arranged, I wondered as I sat back and turned my eyes again to the flickering images on the screen. I had spent all those months defending Stanley Roth and it had never once occurred to me that he would do something like this and that instead of defending him in a second trial, I might now have to defend myself. I tried to tell myself that perhaps no one else would notice. I had not recognized her at first; I might not have recognized her at all if I had not remembered her hands. There had
been no cameras allowed in the courtroom; only Annabelle Van Roten and I had really been close enough to see her. Perhaps Stanley Roth and I were the only two people who would ever know that he had bribed a juror with the promise of a part in a movie he had not yet made.
The detective was on the screen, testifying in a voice that in its velvet smoothness was uncannily close to that of the real Richard Crenshaw. The way he looked, the way he dressed, the careful, always conscious way he held himself—even the fluid movement of his head and shoulders each time he turned to the jury—all of it had been reproduced. His testimony, as I realized after he had answered the first few questions put to him by the actress who played the always impassioned and occasionally cruel Annabelle Van Roten, had been taken word for word from the transcript of the trial; not all of the questions and not all of the answers, but those that counted, those that went right to the heart of things. The detective emphatically denied that he had moved Stanley Roth’s bloody clothing to the laundry hamper where he claimed to have found it, he denied everything Walker Bradley with a knowing half-smile threw at him with lightning speed during a rigorous cross-examination made all the more intense not only by the short duration it was allowed to last but by the constant alteration of the faces and expressions shown on the screen.
The detective’s testimony—Crenshaw’s testimony sealed Stanley Roth’s fate. He was the only one there, the only one who could have murdered Mary Margaret Flanders, and her blood was all over the clothing he had tried to hide. Even his best friends think he is guilty. Some, who are not his best friends, try to take advantage of it. His partner, Michael Wirthlin, tries to force him to resign. For the first time, Roth confides in his lawyer that his wife and Wirthlin had been having an affair and that he thought Wirthlin was trying to get her to leave the studio so the two of them could start one of their own.
How many times, I wondered, had Stanley Roth written and rewritten Blue Zephyr? How many times had he tried to work out the connection between the moviestar wife and her husband’s partner until it came out the way he wanted—until the partner, Michael Wirthlin, was almost evil incarnate, and the movie star, Mary Margaret Flanders, had at least the excuse of having eventually changed her mind?
“Michael is ruthless, but he wouldn’t have killed her because she ended the affair. Michael hates me, but he wouldn’t have killed her so I’d be accused of it and he could take over the studio.”
There is no secret script called Blue Zephyr; there are no discussions in which Roth suggests his wife was murdered because someone wanted to harm him; there is no drunken confrontation in which Stanley Roth tries to knock Michael Wirthlin’s brains out with a bottle; nothing but that single implicit, seemingly innocent suggestion that Wirthlin might have had reasons of his own to want her dead. It is of course all that the relentless Joseph Antonelli needs to know. From that point forward, everything he does in court, beginning with the cross-examination of Michael Wirthlin himself, is designed to convince the jury that Stanley Roth’s partner is the one who had the most to gain by the victim’s death.
“You wanted Stanley Roth’s wife, didn’t you?”
“No, I... ”
“You had an affair with her?”
Wirthlin turns to the judge, who orders him to answer the question.
“Yes, but... ”
“You wanted the studio?”
“No, I... ”
“She broke off the affair. You couldn’t have her anymore. But you still wanted the studio. And now that she’s dead, you have that, too, don’t you?”
Walker Bradley flashes a triumphant smile, wheels away from the witness, and strides back to the counsel table; but as he sits down next to Stanley Roth you can see in his eyes that he knows it was not enough. As he watches the film playing in the courtroom, the one in which Mary Margaret Flanders is on the lawn outside The Palms in the middle of several hundred affluent guests at that charity event for the children’s wing of the hospital, a mood of depression deepens the lines of the face now shadowed in the darkened light of the courtroom.
It was not Mary Margaret Flanders, it was that girl I had completely forgotten moments after we left her in that Venice Beach bar, but my eye was drawn to her the same way it had been when, instead of Walker Bradley, I was the one staring at that portable screen from my place at the counsel table during the trial. Roth had staged it all over again, put hundreds of extras on the lawn that spread out from the patio around the swimming pool, all for the purpose of reminding us again how she dominated every scene she was in and made even well-known faces fade into the common anonymity of a background blur.
When the film stopped running and the light came back on in the courtroom, the look on the face of Joseph Antonelli—the other Joseph Antonelli—had changed. Instead of being depressed, he was intense, agitated, barely able to sit still, and at the same time utterly preoccupied. Annabelle Van Roten announces that the People have no more witnesses to call. The judge instructs the jury that defense will begin its case tomorrow morning. Stanley Roth tries to say something to his lawyer, but his lawyer is in too much of a hurry to leave. Long into the night, Antonelli sits locked in a small screening room, watching over and over again that same film of Mary Margaret Flanders taken outside The Palms late in the afternoon, just hours before she died. When he has seen it for the last time, he picks up a telephone and calls Stanley Roth:
“I believe you. You didn’t do it.”
He hangs up the telephone, a grim smile on his mouth as he narrows his eyes, anticipating what he knows is going to happen next.
The first witness called by the defense is the defendant, Stanley Roth. He admits he once hit his wife and that she called the police. He describes what happened when the police arrived and how he agreed to pay a quarter of a million dollars for a screenplay Richard Crenshaw had written. Annabelle Van Roten nervously taps a pencil against the edge of the counsel table, waiting to see whom the defense is going to call next.
“The defense calls Detective Richard Crenshaw.”
There is something stern, heartless and even savage in the way Walker Bradley sets out on the destruction of the man who had first been called to the stand as the prosecution’s most important witness. I had spent hours with Crenshaw in court; Roth cut to the bare essentials and in less than ten minutes produced an effect I could never have dreamed of duplicating. Each time I— I mean Bradley—asked a question, the camera closed in on the face of Crenshaw; each time Crenshaw answered a question, the camera closed in on Bradley. With each question, Bradley, intense, ruthless, unstoppable, becomes angrier, but also more confident, more openly certain about how it will all end; while with each answer, Crenshaw becomes a little more hesitant, a little less sure of himself.
“You testified that you didn’t know either the victim or the defendant, that you didn’t have any connection with either one of them, but then you admitted that you worked as a consultant on one of their pictures. Isn’t that correct, Detective Crenshaw?”
“Yes, but... ”
“But that wasn’t the truth, either, was it? You were at their home, you agreed not to report the fact that Stanley Roth had hit his wife, and Stanley Roth agreed to pay you a quarter million for your screenplay. This screenplay!” exclaims Walker Bradley, waving the blue bound script in the air. “The screenplay that was never made into a movie. What did that feel like, Detective Crenshaw—when you finally figured out that Stanley Roth had no intention of making it into a movie, that he probably never bothered to read it? Was that the reason you went back to their house, back to The Palms—to get even? Or was there another reason, a reason that had nothing to do with Stanley Roth?”
After a concentrated close-up on the startled face of Annabelle Van Roten, the camera moves in a slow half circle behind her to show in the same frame the two antagonists, the lawyer and the witness, staring hard at each other.
“The next time I was at that house was when I was called there to investigate her murder!”
“The next time you went there she was dead?”
“Yes,” angrily insisted Crenshaw.
With a gesture of Bradley’s hand, the lights in the courtroom dimmed. On the portable screen Mary Margaret Flanders was again surrounded by a crowd on the poolside lawn of The Palms the afternoon before her death.
“This was shown in court before,” said the voice of Walker Bradley as every eye, in the courtroom, and in the theater, was fastened on the smiling actress who had mastered the graceful movements of the actress Marian Walsh had become. When the film reached the point where the projector had been turned off before, Bradley kept it going. “This is where it ended. This is what I want you to see.”
But there was nothing to see. Moving in a slow arc the camera covered the same anonymous crowd we had all seen before. Then, at the very edge of it, near a gathering of gnarled oaks, the camera stopped, the frame froze.
“I’ve had this part enlarged,” explained the other Joseph Antonelli as the center of the picture shown on the screen began to expand, forcing out of view everything and everyone around it. There was no mistake. Lost among those hundreds of invited guests was a face we could all now see twice, once on the screen and once on the stand. Richard Crenshaw had been there, at The Palms, not after she died, but just hours before she was killed. The lights came on in the courtroom. With his left hand resting on the front corner of the counsel table, Walker Bradley bent forward at the waist, and when he did I felt the muscles in my stomach tighten as if I was now imitating him.