“Rumor was it didn’t sit well with Chicago,” he went on. “Maybe they didn’t approve of moonlighting, or Big Al wasn’t flattered by his characterization. The fat bastard had spies on all the sets; we know that from George Raft’s experience when he worked on Scarface. Maybe Oliver fell for his own publicity and told the mob where to go. Anyway, he dropped out of sight the day after the picture wrapped. People don’t just disappear, except in Universal horror films. When his resumé came to light, the truth wasn’t hard to figure out.”
Valentino pondered. In the background, he heard Ernesto removing the last reel from the projector and placing it carefully in its can. He knew the sounds better than the beating of his own heart. “A rediscovered classic of this quality and an unsolved disappearance. I can hear our man in Information Services rubbing his hands together over the publicity. This gift is beyond generous, Mr. Bozal. There may be an honorary doctorate in it for you.”
“A mug like me, with ‘Doctor’ in front of his name? Don’t make me laugh.” The old man’s snicker carried traces of Allen Jenkins and Torquemada. Then his face grew thoughtful. “I’d be tickled down to the ground if you could swing a print of Greed. My sources tell me you stumbled over von Stroheim’s original full-length version.”
“You’ll have it if I have to bootleg it myself,” Valentino said.
“God, I love foul play!”
Henry Anklemire leaped up from behind his desk next to the boiler room. “Our man in Information Services” was an evil cherub in a toupee a shade too dark for his vintage and a checked suit (size portly), polka-dot tie, and striped shirt that made a cataclysmic statement Valentino thought could not have been coincidental. His face glowed as from a strong shot of whiskey.
“We’ll keep that between ourselves,” Valentino said. “My department head thinks Sherlock Holmes was a sociopath.”
But Anklemire was on a roll. “Look at Marilyn Monroe; not one-tenth the talent of Judy Holliday, but she had the good sense to get murdered by the Kennedys. You ever see Judy Holliday on a T-shirt?”
“There’s some question about whether the Kennedys were involved. And you wouldn’t know Judy Holliday from Doc Holliday if I hadn’t forced you to watch Born Yesterday on DVD.”
Anklemire had offered his expertise to the university after a year of retirement on top of forty years of advertising cigarettes, automobiles, and feminine hygiene products for a venerable agency on Madison Avenue, on condition that his salary wouldn’t threaten his Social Security benefits; twelve months of shooting golf and playing canasta with his next-door neighbors in Tarzana had made him desperate for any activity that didn’t involve listening to anyone’s blow-by-blow account of his prostate operation. The director of Information Services had assured him that low pay was no obstacle to his employment.
Most of Valentino’s academic colleagues loathed the bouncy little flack, for the very reasons that the archivist liked him. He was an aggressive promoter who knew the common denominator that shook loose money from every area of society, and he had no patience for questions of propriety or prestige. Give him a salable commodity and he’d sell it. He knew nothing about movies or their history, but he knew how to turn silver nitrate into gold.
“Born Yesterday. Great flick. They ought to colorize it. What you want to do, you want to send the picture on tour, book the revival houses, pass the hat for donations. Then you bring it out on DVD. This outfit sure can use the cash.” He raised his voice above the banging of the water pipes next-door. “What we do to get them in is play up the mysterious-disappearance angle and the Capone connection. That didn’t hurt Geraldo one little bit, even if he did come up with bupkus from Al’s secret vault.”
“We found a great movie that’s been missing for most of the last century. Isn’t that worth anything?”
“Boring. Strictly third paragraph. Nobody cares.”
“Nobody but the people you and I work for.” But he didn’t put up an argument; Anklemire’s opinion sadly reflected the majority’s. “What do you need from me?”
“You’re the archaeologist. Start digging. I can’t write copy without material.”
“Archivist, not archaeologist.”
“What’s the difference? Do some homework. Interview people. Get me color: big hats, gun molls, armor-plated Cadillacs, rat-a-tat-tat!” He mimed firing a submachine gun. Anklemire was a living video arcade.
“Who do you suggest I interview? Capone’s been dead almost sixty years, and time hasn’t been any kinder to the cast of Big Ed. Wait.” Valentino took out his notebook, into which he’d scribbled his impressions after the basement screening. “Roy Fitzhugh’s still around. He played one of Oliver’s henchmen. He lives at the actors’ home up in Woodland Hills.”
“He must be a hundred.”
“Not quite that bad. He always played older than he was. He had one of those faces. I hope his memory’s still good.”
“I’d send a photog with you, but the flash might stop every pump in the place. Try to keep him on topic. We want to know what happened to Oliver, not how many football teams Clara Bow went to bed with.”
Valentino laughed. “What do you want me to do, solve his murder?”
“If it isn’t too much trouble.”
The archivist was still shaking his head when he dropped by the lab to see how the technicians were coming with the film he’d brought back from East L.A. A young expert in a Haz-Mat suit—everything but the hood and latex gloves, which he would don before approaching fragile, volatile celluloid—told him there were several films to be duplicated before Big Ed, but that it had been moved up the list by order of the head of the Film Preservation Department. Valentino, who knew quite a bit about what was involved in striking off a new negative from an ancient positive, then making a new master print from the negative, kept his impatience to himself and went from there to the library. UCLA kept an impressive, although incomplete, collection of fan magazines, beginning with the silent cinema and continuing through the 1950s, when the voracious competition from television lured readers in droves from Photoplay to TV Guide. Much of the material had been committed to microfilm; much had not, and Valentino wore a path through the linoleum between the drawers where the microfilm spools were kept and the shelves of thumb-smeared magazines in their tattered cardboard file boxes. In among the ads for Packards and Lucky Strikes, he found some production and preproduction material on Big Ed, which was mostly photographic: stills of the actors in and out of costume, horsing around on the set, pretending to menace one another in tableaus similar to the scenes they’d shot. Few people studying such pictures in film books realized they were looking at fake publicity stills and not actual frames from the films. By and large they were posed and shot by legitimate artists of the photographic medium; Valentino sometimes wished the movies themselves looked as good as their advertising.
Van Oliver, it appeared, was quite chummy with Roy Fitzhugh, “Big Ed” ’s right-hand man in the motion picture. The pair always seemed to have their arms around each other’s shoulders, trading mock punches and grinning, and messing each other’s brilliantined pompadours with impudent hands. The archivist knew that such carryings-on were often a ruse to disguise deep mutual dislike. However, there were rather more of them than the average. He was inclined to believe the two were close.
Big Ed vanished from the puff columns in June 1931—its announced month of release—as thoroughly as its star had dropped from sight weeks earlier. Under normal circumstances, the feature would have been mentioned everywhere at that time, with cover articles on its leading players in Modern Screen and Liberty, billboards splashed throughout Los Angeles, press kits sent out, and advertisements in newspapers in key cities across the country. Instead, the story moved to the city section of the L.A. Times, where burly detectives assigned to Missing Persons and Homicide were photographed grilling hapless suspects raked in from the local underworld.
As Van Oliver’s sinister origins became general knowledge, the fo
cus of the investigation shifted from Where is he? to Where is his body? A plainclothes sergeant was sent to Chicago to interview Big Al himself, who showed him the hospitality of his Hawthorne Hotel headquarters, gave him tickets to a Cubs game, and assured him he had no memory of ever meeting Vincent Olivera. He said he was flattered by what he’d heard about Olivera’s impersonation of him on camera. A picture of the sergeant with Capone and Roger Hornsby at Wrigley Field appeared on the front page and the sergeant came home to find himself back in uniform, directing traffic at Hollywood and Vine.
It was the kind of publicity the nascent motion-picture industry paid millions to avoid. Less than ten years had elapsed since the unsolved murder of director William Desmond Taylor, a sordid episode involving drugs and sex, and with pressure from organized religion and the puritan public for Hollywood to clean up its act, Warner Brothers’ first move was to shelve Big Ed and hope the scandal would go away.
It didn’t work, of course; such measures never did.
The next year, Howard Hughes released Scarface: Shame of a Nation, the Church banned it, and a ton of letters from outraged parishioners forced the studios to shift the heroic emphasis from criminals to crimebusters for most of the next two decades. There was no telling how many potentially classic films were banished, unseen by the world, to underground vaults during this period, and eventually lost through attrition and neglect. It was only through employee theft (for even a condemned film is studio property, not to be removed from the lot without permission) and the generosity of an elderly collector that Van Oliver’s performance had survived. Whatever unsavory practices he’d provided the mob, his artistry deserved recognition.
Emerging from the building, blinking against the toxic beauty of the Southern California sunset, Valentino looked up a number in his notebook and used his cell phone to call the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills.
“You ready to check in?” greeted Kym Trujillo, his contact in Admissions. “A creaky old-movie buff like you ought to be able to hold his own in the conversation in the cafeteria.”
“Ask me again next year. I’d like to arrange a visit with one of your residents. Roy Fitzhugh.”
“I know Roy. I admitted him myself. He’s a hoot. Hang on.” She came back on the line three minutes later, sounding subdued. “I talked to one of his nurses. He’s an Alzheimer’s case, has his good days and his bad. Today’s not so good. He’s usually at his best mornings.”
He thanked her and said he’d call in the morning. Standing there holding the telephone, he felt again the humming sensation he’d experienced in Ignacio Bozal’s screening room; he was hooked. He called the L.A. Police Department and asked for Lieutenant Henry McPherson in Homicide.
McPherson remembered him from the Dundrear murder at Twentieth Century Fox. Valentino had helped him break the case, but the lieutenant’s goodwill evaporated when he learned what he wanted.
“The mainframe hard-drive has enough to remember without a seventy-year-old murder investigation,” he growled. “The file would be in the subbasement, if it didn’t go into the incinerator under Eisenhower. Why should I send a uniform down there to dig through the boxes with two new cases on my desk this morning, and four left over from last week?”
“Show me where they are and I’ll dig through them myself. It’s what I’m trained for.”
“There was something in my training about not letting civilians monkey with open cases.”
“It’s just research, Lieutenant. I’m not looking to bring anyone to justice, even if whoever killed Oliver is alive and getting around without bottled oxygen. There’s an acknowledgment in it for the L.A.P.D. when we go public. I thought you chief might appreciate the good press.”
“Well, I’m not letting you into the basement. I’ll send a man down when I can spare him. Next week, maybe.”
“If you could do it before tomorrow morning, I’ll credit you as a consultant. I’m interviewing a surviving witness then and I’d like to go in with all the information I can get.”
McPherson broke the silence on his end. “If you’re asking me would I like to be in pictures, the answer would be ‘Over my dead body,’ except we don’t sling that one around in Homicide. You’ll get it when you get it.”
That evening, Valentino kept his adrenaline pumping by screening his favorite gangster pictures. He watched Robinson, Cagney, and Muni riddled with bullets in close succession, then reacquainted himself with the Coen brothers’ retro Miller’s Crossing (complete with the best, if ballistically impossible, machine-gunning scene on film) and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club. Long past midnight he switched off the projector in the booth where he kept his apartment in the Oracle Theater, his combination home and screening room in West Hollywood, and went to bed.
He dreamed he was riding in a beer truck with a pistol under his arm. The cases in the back contained reels of film, not beer. He was bootlegging them across the border between the past and the present, and Father Time was waiting for him at a roadblock with a tommygun that ticked like a clock when he squeezed the trigger.
The buzzer downstairs had been going for some time when he stirred. The first thing he saw was a ball of exposed wiring hanging like a deserted bird’s nest through a hole in the ceiling. Renovations had laid claim to most of his princely academic salary since he’d bought the building two years earlier and would continue to do so until the rich aunt he didn’t have in Sacramento died and left him beachfront property in Monterey.
The uniformed officer on his doorstep looked less disheveled than Valentino in the bathrobe he’d flung on, but just as sleepy. He shoved a fat insulated mailer the size of a pillow into Valentino’s hands and stuck out a clipboard. “You have to sign for it. Lieutenant McPherson said to come back for you with the siren if you don’t return it by four o’clock.”
Someone had scribbled V. OLIVERA on the big envelope with a thick black felt-tip. Valentino balanced it under one arm and signed the receipt. “What’s the rush after seventy-plus years?”
“Hey, you’re the one who woke up the bureaucracy.” The officer sneezed violently, fished out a handkerchief. “Dust.” He left on weary legs.
Valentino put on a pot of coffee in the kitchenette he’d installed in the little room where the week’s features used to be stored and read the file, a thick sheaf of reports and statements typewritten on yellow sheets in a dusty cardboard folder bound with rubber bands. He found two photographs sandwiched between pages: a publicity shot of Van Oliver, smiling in a beautifully tailored suit with wide lapels, and a front-and-profile mug of Vincent Olivera, not smiling, taken at the time of an arrest in Chicago in 1927 for the illegal transportation and sale of alcoholic beverages. It appeared to be the only arrest on his record, and he’d been released for lack of evidence. His physical description, printed beneath the mug, revealed he was shorter than he appeared onscreen, a mere five foot six.
The director, a former studio hack named Melvin Fletcher, told police he’d last seen Oliver “tying one on” at the cast party Fletcher threw at his house on Sunset after the end of principal photography on Big Ed, but didn’t see him leave, and never saw him again. The officers spent considerably more time interviewing Madeleine Crane, Oliver’s costar, but she, too, claimed to have lost track of him in the crush at the party; she dismissed rumors of an off-screen romantic involvement as PR hooey. Valentino remembered Bozal saying she’d married not long after and gone to live abroad.
Roy Fitzhugh told detectives he’d accompanied Oliver out to the curb and put him in a cab that was waiting there. He’d assumed the star had called for it, as he was too drunk to drive and had declined Fitzhugh’s invitation to take him home. When Oliver failed to report to Warner Brothers the next day to discuss publicity, a flunky was sent to his home, where he found the front door unlocked and Oliver’s bed made. There was no sign of disturbance, but also none to indicate he’d gone home after leaving the party.
That made Fitzhugh the last person know
n to have seen Van Oliver/Vincent Olivera alive. Everyone, the host included, denied ordering the cab, and none of the local companies or gypsies had any record of the fare. Consequently, Fitzhugh had been interviewed twice more, the second time at police headquarters after it was discovered he’d been detained in Mexico in 1925 on suspicion of smuggling firearms across the border from the U.S. He told Homicide he’d been with his late father, an Irish rebel, and that the guns were intended for Free Staters fighting in Belfast. No firearms were found in their possession, and they were escorted out of the country. Roy had been only ten years old, but he could never return to Mexico.
He stuck to his story, however, and since in those days the department had no shortage of Irish-Americans who were in favor of Home Rule, he got the benefit of the doubt.
Robbery-murder was considered. Oliver had been paid $2,500 per week for twelve weeks of shooting, and since he had no bank account under either of his names and the cash was never found, it was possible he had the entire $30,000—a fabulous sum in that third year of the Depression—on his person when he left the party. But the prevailing opinion, stated in interoffice memos, was that the mob, or some old rival from Chicago, had abducted him in a phony cab and taken him for the well-known ride. Bodies disposed of under such circumstances were rarely found.
The fates of the others involved, Valentino remembered, were varied. Madeleine Crane, née Magdalena Carvello, quit show business, presumably for wedded bliss; Fitzhugh went on to play a one-man repertory company of second-tier hoods, tired desk sergeants, and, yes, cab drivers, until his retirement; other cast members appeared in other features, successful and not; director Fletcher was yanked early from his next assignment over “artistic differences” and replaced, and took his own life sometime in the 1950s when the only work he could get was directing second-unit crews for TV Westerns. Valentino could only speculate on what might have happened to all of them had Big Ed ever seen the light of day.
Valentino: Film Detective Page 16