Angel in black nh-11

by Max Allan Collins

  Fowley said, “So how about giving us one?”

  Richardson ripped a page out of a notepad. “I saved the best one for my best boys-the Florentine Gardens.”

  “Hog dog,” Fowley said. “Not bad!”

  Fowley’s reaction was understandable: the Florentine Gardens was a nightclub whose current floor show, The Beautiful Girl Revue for 1947, was the nudest in town-unusually so, considering the Mills Brothers were headlining, a mainstream (if colored) act for that kind of venue.

  For many years, the Gardens had played second fiddle to Earl Carroll’s luxurious deco nightclub at Sunset and Vine, where nearly naked showgirls and most of the celebrities in Hollywood converged. But ever since Ziegfeld’s personal pulchritude picker-the legendary starmaker Nils Thor Granlund-had taken over as impresario, the nitery was flourishing.

  “Seems till late last year,” Richardson was saying, “the Short dame was one of Mark Lansom’s harem living in that castle on San Carlos Street, behind the Gardens.”

  “Who’s Mark Lansom?” I asked.

  “Lansom owns the Gardens,” Fowley said. “Also, a buncha moviehouses and some dime-a-dance halls.”

  I said, “I thought the Florentine was N.T.G.’s spot.”

  N. T.G. was one of Nils Thor Granlund’s two well-known nicknames; the other was “Granny.”

  “Granlund’s the manager of the Gardens,” Richardson said. “But Lansom owns the joint, and it’s his baby as much as Granny’s.”

  “What’s this about a ‘harem,’ and a ‘castle’ behind the nightclub?”

  “Lansom’s a regular ass hound,” Fowley said. “A lot of the chorus girls and waitresses live in this big house of his-fancy place, with a pool and everything.”

  “A dormitory of babes,” Richardson said, leering, “and Lansom’s the housemother.”

  Fowley gave me the rundown on Lansom: the former bootlegger was now a respected member of the Hollywood community, even a sponsor of the Junior Philharmonic. He was separated from a wife tied to him by mutual ownership of real estate; she lived in Beverly Hills, alone, and he lived on San Carlos Street, with all those girls.

  “Jim,” I said, “I know Granny a little bit, from when he brought his revue to Chicago.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Well, nobody knows his way around publicity-good or bad-like Granny. If I go there alone, and let him stay off the record, we might get further.”

  Fowley bolted upright. “Don’t be a pig, Heller! Aren’t you getting enough pussy on your honeymoon to hold you?”

  I gave Fowley a long unfriendly look. “Is it true you’re Noel Coward’s ghostwriter?”

  Richardson was pacing, nodding, smoking. “You got something there, Heller. Tell Granlund we’ll keep his name away from the cops if he talks to us on the q.t.”

  “Can we do that?”

  “What’s stopping us?”

  “Well, this lead came from the stuff you turned over to the cops this morning, right?”

  “It might have.”

  “Jesus, Jim! What are you withholding?”

  “Your paycheck, if you keep asking me the nosy questions.” He turned to Fowley. “I got a good little lead left for you, too-a roomful of girls at the Atwater Hotel in Long Beach… Here’s the address.”

  Scowling, Fowley scribbled it down, then took the names of the girls.

  “Right before Short moved in at Lansom’s,” Richardson said, “she bunked in with these babes-they’re B-girls and would-be singers and actresses. Short was one of five dolls jammed into one little hotel room.”

  “Sounds like the stateroom scene in Night at the Opera,” Fowley said, his attitude toward the assignment improving visibly, “only with titties.”

  “Well,” his boss said, ignoring this astute observation, “grab a camera, and don’t take all morning. I’m sending you up to Camp Cooke this afternoon.”

  “I thought Sid Hughes was covering that.”

  “Yeah, but Sid got busted, flashing a badge and pretending to be Harry the Hat. Irritated Harry, when he found out, and didn’t make the U.S. Army love the Examiner, either.”

  Fowley pointed at himself with a thumb. “What makes you think I’ll do any better?”

  “Say you’re with the Herald-Express. All in the family.”

  Fowley and I went our separate ways, he in the Examiner ’s Ford and me in the A-1’s Buick.

  The Florentine Gardens was at 5955 Hollywood Boulevard, just a few blocks from its main competition, Earl Carroll’s. In the morning sunlight, the building was blinding white, a massive structure with modern lines and classical trim, including neon-lined columns. Spanish-style wrought-iron front doors were positioned between a pair of palm trees, and a banner advertising the Mills Brothers flapped above the club’s boldly neon-lettered name.

  The place was closed, but the doors were open. The lobby walls were rounded and powder-blue, trimmed in gold, the carpet a luxurious floral number; to my left the hat- and coat-check window was unattended, and to my right an entryway revealed the black-and-white jungle of the Zanzibar Cocktail Lounge, also unattended. Straight ahead double doors closed off the ballroom; but I could hear a piano, seeping through, echoing across the big room beyond, playing “Don’t Fence Me In,” Cole Porter’s improbable cowboy tune.

  When Nils Thor Granlund took this place over, a few years back, he had jettisoned the exotic motif designed to invoke ancient Florence (Italy), and went for an art moderne look, invoking Florenz (Ziegfeld). Still, the main room retained an open, airy feel, powder-blue rounded walls mirroring a central round dance floor with two tiers of spacious, high-backed golden-upholstered booths on either side, and private nooks recessed in the walls.

  As I strolled in, down a wide gold-carpeted aisle that emptied onto the dance floor, I was facing the stage, way across the yawning room-a bandstand designed to look like a big top hat, with a window cut in it, its brim surrounding the stage. The tiered seating for the orchestra was empty, but a bored bald heavyset cigar-chomping guy in his shirtsleeves was playing piano, while strung across the stage, a dozen pretty girls were rehearsing a dance number.

  The chorus girls were in various casual leg-baring outfits-sunsuits, halter tops, short-sleeve blouses, shorts and short skirts-and their hair was either ponytailed back or in pincurls under a kerchief; they also weren’t wearing any makeup. And yet they seemed much sexier looking to me than if they’d been all dolled up.

  “No, no, no! You impossible cows!” The choreographer, down on the dance floor in front, was a guy about forty in a short-sleeve white sweater, frayed dungarees, and moccasins.

  The girls froze in midkick, the pianist stopped, taking time to relight his cigar. The girls relaxed as the choreographer began performing all of their steps (“Land, lots of land!”), admittedly with more grace than the girls, and comparable femininity, for that matter.

  The chorus line nodded, acknowledging his superiority, and soon they were back at it, better than before. The guy knew his stuff.

  I was just watching them, forgetting my troubles, enjoying their athletic beauty, thinking about how goddamn many beautiful women there were in the state of California, wondering why California couldn’t get along without the beautiful woman I was married to, when a gravel-edged voice called out to me.

  “Are you still alive?”

  I turned and noticed, nestled in one of the booths, the Florentine Gardens’ resident impresario, N.T.G. himself.

  “Hiya, Granny,” I said, on my way over to join him.

  Granlund was a big lumpy-nosed Swede who wouldn’t have looked out of place at a plow in the middle of a field, if he hadn’t been dressed in tailored gray sharkskin with a silk black-and-white-patterned tie. Smiling in his avuncular manner, gray hair slicked back, eyes a dark twinkling blue, Granny-who was in his late fifties-leaned his chin on a hand bedecked with gold rings, exposing gold cufflinks and a gold wristwatch no more expensive than a new Plymouth.

  “I heard you were in town,” he
said, gesturing for me to sit next to him in the booth. “You and Fred should do well.”

  Granlund knew both Fred Rubinski and me primarily from his stay managing the showroom at Chicago’s Congress Hotel in the mid-’30s, where I’d handled security.

  “Thanks, Granny. Nice little joint you got here.”

  “Not mine, exactly, but thank you, Nathan. How do you like my girls?”

  “You still know how to pick ’em.”

  “Yes, I do.” Gazing almost dreamily at the chorus line as the choreographer whipped them into shape, he said, “The Short girl wasn’t in the chorus, by the way. She was strictly a waitress-Mark hired her.”

  That caught me like the sucker punch it was. I said, “You don’t fool around, do you, Granny?”

  He beamed at me like a big Swedish elf. “You’re mentioned in the Examiner coverage, fairly prominently. I assumed someone from the press or the police would show up-rather relieved it’s you.”

  “To my knowledge, the cops haven’t connected Beth Short to the Gardens.”

  With a smile and a contented sigh, pleased by the array of pulchritude he’d assembled, Granny leaned back in the booth, withdrew a gold cigarette case from his inside suitcoat pocket, offered me a smoke, which I declined, and then lit up.

  “The police will connect her with us,” he said offhandedly, “if the Examiner runs a story.”

  “The Examiner is prepared not to mention the Gardens-not until, or unless, the cops make that connection.”

  Raising an eyebrow, he said, “Really. Why? Has Jim Richardson come down with a sudden bout of compassion?”

  “It’s on the assumption that you could provide a few exclusive leads on the girl.”

  “Off-the-record tidbits?”

  I nodded.

  He sat and smoked and watched his girls dance, for maybe a minute-a long one. The bored piano player kept grinding out “Don’t Fence Me In.”

  Then Granny said, softly, “I only spoke to the girl a few times. As I say, Mark hired her. She was strictly a waitress, albeit a very decorative one, but then all of the waitresses here are beautiful… You don’t come to the Florentine Gardens to see plain janes.”

  “Having beautiful waitresses encourages drinking among male patrons.”

  Half a smile dimpled one cheek. “Nathan… I know you too well. You’re trying to suggest that our waitresses are B-girls. That’s not the case. There’s no prostitution here. We did have a bad incident last year-”

  “Those underage twins.”

  Both eyebrows arched this time, smoke trailing out his nostrils. “You know about that?”

  “I know you’ve always hired underage girls when you could get away with it, Granny.”

  He shrugged. “What’s prettier than a pretty fifteen- or sixteen-year-old? And what’s wrong with displaying their charms, in a tasteful fashion? It’s just that one of the girls got involved with a customer, and… well, we were prosecuted for placing a minor in an ‘unsavory situation,’ and we’ve been most circumspect ever since.”

  “How circumspect is it, this Lansom having your girls rooming over at his own house? Right behind the Gardens?”

  Granny twitched a smile. “How off the record is this, Nathan?”

  “All the way off-level with me about Lansom. This is for me, not Richardson.”

  The dark blue eyes narrowed. “You have a… personal stake in this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which is the extent of what you’ll reveal to me?”

  “Yes.”

  He gazed at his girls as they bounced to the piano. “I’m considering leaving the Gardens.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I’m not entirely… in tune with my employer.”

  “And why is that?”

  Granny’s thin lips formed a faint sneer. “Let’s return to the subject of Elizabeth Short, shall we? She’s rather a case in point. You see, Mark hires these girls as waitresses, implying that this is the next step to their being discovered by yours truly.”

  “And placed in the chorus line.”

  “Yes, or for the aspiring actresses, that I’ll put them in the movies.”

  None of this was far-fetched. As a starmaker over the years, Granny numbered among his discoveries Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers, Martha Raye, and Alice Faye; and more recently, here at the Florentine Gardens, N.T.G. had hired and showcased Betty Hutton, Yvonne DeCarlo (another of his underage finds), and Marie “the Body” McDonald.

  “Granny, no offense, but you’ve been known to… work closely with your ‘discoveries.’ ”

  The choreographer was chewing the girls out again.

  Granny said, “You’re not an angel, Nathan, nor am I. Mark generously provides me with an apartment, over his garage, where I can… provide guidance to my discoveries.”

  Away from his wife, with whom he lived in a near-mansion near the Greek Theater.

  “Granny, I’m not seeing the problem, here. Lansom’s hiring pretty girls and giving you a home-away-from-home to check out the merchandise.”

  He frowned at me, and his voice had a sudden cross edge. “Nathan, I do not make false promises to these young women. Nor do I take advantage of their friendship… and it is friendship. I’m a big brother to them.”

  Frequently committing incest, but a big brother.

  “Granny, you’re making some fine distinction I’m just not grasping.”

  He grimaced in irritation. “I don’t use who I am to fool young girls into giving themselves to me-that’s not who N. T.G. is. I am a judge of feminine beauty, a connoisseur, if you will… and I don’t use my position to deceive the fairer sex into rewarding me for something I am not prepared to give.”

  I managed not to laugh, finally getting it. Banging Granny wasn’t the audition to get into the chorus line: the girls had to pass the audition, first-then Granny banged them. Funny, the different ways people learn to live with themselves.

  “I simply don’t like being used to put girls in another man’s bed,” he said, quietly self-righteous. “Owner or not, Mark damn well knows my contract specifically grants me full casting-these were empty promises on his part. He’d screw them, and they would audition, miserably, and they would wind up in one of his dime-a-dance halls, downtown.”

  “Did Beth Short audition, miserably or otherwise?”

  “That girl was a case in point-Mark promised her a part in my revue-a featured role, of the sort I’m currently giving Lily St. Cyr.”

  “And only you do the casting.”

  “Precisely. Oh, the Short girl was a pretty thing, even glamorous… and perhaps, in a g-string, and high heels and ankle straps, she would have dressed up the stage.”

  Undressed up the stage.

  “I understand Elizabeth Short was fairly talented,” I said. “I’ve heard she was a decent singer and dancer.”

  Granny was leaning on his hand again, watching the girls dance, the piano relentlessly grinding through the Cole Porter “cowboy” tune. Almost absently, he said, “I wouldn’t know-I never did audition her. Mark simply cast her, without approval, or permission. Foisted her upon me.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “I fired her.”

  “That’s a little harsh.”

  “Mark’s misconduct wasn’t the only factor. She contributed to her own dismissal.”

  “How so?”

  He gazed at me; the avuncular mask was gone-there was a lumpy, unforgiving quality to those previously pleasant features, now. “The Short girl did not have what it took to make it in this town. Oh, she had the beauty, the sex appeal; and she had the ambition, or said she did. But she… wasn’t discriminating in the friends she made, the companions she chose.”

  “Like Mark Lansom?”

  “That’s not who I’m referring to.”

  “Who are you referring to?”

  “She had a hoodlum boy friend.”

  I frowned. “An Italian, by any chance?”

  “I
believe so, yes. At any rate, I think you may recall, from Chicago days, my attitude toward my girls cohabiting with gangsters.”

  Granny-like anybody in show business, particularly in the nightclub game-had worked for his share of underworld figures. But ever since one of his Ziegfeld girls got notoriously involved with Legs Diamond, Granlund had let his chorines know that if they got in bed with a hoodlum, they would be asked to leave the show.

  “Who was this boy friend?”

  Another shrug. “I don’t know his name. But I received the information from a source I trust, a source close to Mark.”

  “Who would that be?”

  “One of the actresses living in Mark’s house. Don’t ask for her name. Why don’t you walk over there, and ask around? You should find Mark on the premises.”

  “All right-I’ll do that.” I shifted gears. “Word is you and Lansom encourage your girls to entertain celebrity guests, and special customers.”

  Granlund gave me a sharp look. “I won’t deny that’s done… but it’s not prostitution!”

  “I didn’t say it was… exactly. Who did Beth Short ‘entertain’?”

  “If by ‘entertain’ you mean a euphemism for sexual intercourse, I don’t know that she ‘entertained’ anybody. But she was friendly with Mark Hellinger, the producer.”

  Hellinger had passed away a few months ago, heart attack.

  “Who else?”

  “Franchot Tone, the actor-I believe he went out with her a time or two. Also, Arthur Lake.”

  “Who, the guy that plays Dagwood in the movies?”

  “The same.” He pressed his cigarette out in a powder-blue tray. “And, of course, she was particularly friendly with Orson.”

  I blinked again; he was pitching fast, and they were all landing like beanballs. “Welles?”

  “Oh yes. Apparently they’d met before-several times. Orson was generous with performing his magic act on army bases-she was working at one, I understand. I believe they knew each other from the Hollywood Canteen. She was a waitress there; it was one of her references.”

  Welles certainly fit the bill for that “famous director” who’d been promising Beth Short a screen test. I asked, “Did they date?”