It was an accepted fact in Hollywood that the more famous an actor became, the fewer people could be trusted. The ones that Marilyn let into her circle were often brainy academic types who wore thick glasses and read Dostoyevsky—probably in the original Russian—and could quote Ibsen speeches verbatim.
Sheila Stuart was the opposite of Marilyn’s highbrows. With a pleasant, wide-open face and a mass of curls neither brown nor blonde, Sheila was like thousands of other girls Gwendolyn had met over the years: pleasant, but not memorable; talented enough to be cast, but not in a role that would let her shine.
She was, however, loyal to Marilyn and had readily agreed to let her apartment be the place where tonight’s confrontation would play out. Assuming, of course, that anything played out. If Marilyn failed to show, Gwendolyn would be doubly disappointed. She wouldn’t be at the Pasadena Playhouse to calm a jittery Kathryn, and she’d be denied the opportunity to berate Frank Sinatra and badger him into undoing whatever he’d done to Marcus.
She adjusted the dial to KNX, where Perry Como was singing “Papa Loves Mambo.”
A flare of headlights brushed Sheila’s lace curtains and Gwendolyn pulled them aside to see Marilyn park her Cadillac under the streetlight out front. She closed the door with a jut of her hip and hurried up the path to Sheila’s door, her heels clattering on the stone. Gwendolyn opened the door as Marilyn arrived at the front step.
“Did they take the bait?” Sheila asked.
Marilyn’s eyes gleamed. “And how!”
Gwendolyn joined Sheila at the window. A gray Chrysler New Yorker was now parked behind Marilyn’s car, shining like a newly minted quarter. Five men piled out of it and gathered on the curb. Marilyn peaked over their shoulders.
“The two next to Joe and Frank are Barney and his partner, Phil Irwin. And the guy in the dark suit—I think he’s Sinatra’s manager, Hank.”
Backlit by the streetlight, DiMaggio and Sinatra stood face to face. DiMaggio’s hands were a blur of wild gestures as he worked himself up into a fury. Sinatra nodded slowly, rhythmically, but made no other movement.
Ruditsky stood off to the side, studying the apartment building. His partner shouted the odd comment, but Gwendolyn couldn’t make them out.
Sinatra’s manager kept trying to insert himself between Joe and Frank. His left hand pointed to an object hidden by the shadow Joe cast along the lawn until Joe hoisted a long tube over his head.
Gwendolyn gasped. “Is that a baseball bat?”
Marilyn let out a little cry. “I can’t watch this!” She backed away from the window.
Sinatra pulled at Joe’s arm. The bat vaulted out of his hands and bounced onto the lawn. He wrenched himself free from Sinatra’s grip, collected the bat, and marched across the grass.
“What’s happening?” Marilyn asked.
“Joe’s walking toward the building,” Gwendolyn craned her neck “but he’s going to the left.”
Sheila gasped. “He’s heading for the wrong door! They must think I live at 8120.”
Marilyn pressed her hands together tight enough to crack knuckles. “Who lives there?”
“Her name’s Florence and she wouldn’t say boo to a butterfly.”
“Is she home?”
A crack of splintering wood ripped the tranquil night air. Muffled shouting followed, then the crash of shattered glass.
Gwendolyn held her breath.
Shrieking erupted, piercing the walls and filling Sheila’s apartment.
All five men disappeared inside, roaring like bulls.
Gwendolyn pulled out one of Marcus’s old cameras from her purse. She raced down the tiled stairwell and into the front yard. A porch light hung over the doorway to 8120, where fractured chunks of painted wood were scattered across the steps and into the passageway beyond. A matching pair of dented brass hinges swung in the porch light, and Florence was still screaming.
Gwendolyn tugged the lens cap off Marcus’s Leica and took a couple of shots.
“Joe! We’ve screwed up! Come ON!” Sinatra’s voice blasted through the empty doorway. “Someone’s bound to call the cops.”
Gwendolyn melted into the shadows and waited until DiMaggio and Sinatra stepped over the wreckage in the passageway and onto the porch. She started taking photos as fast as she could. Click! Click! She wasn’t even sure if there was film in the camera—it was enough that they saw her taking photos of them running from the wrong door, which the Yankee Clipper had reduced to toothpicks. Click! Click!
“Who’s that?” Joe yelled. “Who are you taking my goddamned picture?”
Ruditsky and Irwin joined them. “Let’s GO!” Ruditsky pulled Joe along by the elbow and Irwin did the same with Frank.
“YOU IDIOT!” Gwendolyn stepped into the circle cast by Florence’s porch light. “A baseball bat? What did you think was going to happen tonight?”
“I—just—I—can’t—”
Joe slunk toward the silver Chrysler.
Gwendolyn followed him. “You thought Hal Schaefer was in there, didn’t you?” That was enough to get the guy to stop at the curb. “You thought you’d hack down the door and race into the boudoir, catch Hal and Marilyn in flagrante delicto—and then what? Bash their heads in? Was that the plan, Mister Great Big Hero to the Nation? Well, guess what?” She lifted Marcus’s camera and snapped a bunch more shots. “That’s why people get sent to jail.”
“I only wanted to scare her!” DiMaggio bawled. “Since the divorce, I’ve been all—”
“Gwendolyn!” Sinatra’s tone was love-ballad smooth. He stepped out from behind Joe’s shadow and into the street lamp, wearing an affable smile. “Howdy, neighbor! I haven’t seen you since—was it some party at the Garden of Allah? Maybe for Bogie and Bacall? Anyway, all this fuss, it’s not how it looks. Trust me.”
“TRUST YOU? I’m here because of you.”
“Me?” Frank pressed his hands to his diaphragm. “What did I do?”
“It’s what you did to Marcus Adler. He’s stranded over there. Without a passport. In a foreign country. Where he barely knows anybody. What kind of miserable heel does that?”
“Whoa! Gwennie!” Frank maintained his convivial smile, though from the way it twitched at the ends, she could see it was disintegrating.
“Okay, so he took some pictures,” Gwendolyn taunted. “Big whoop-de-doo. You know they were staged, don’t you? It was Ava’s idea. And that guy? He wasn’t her Italian lover; he’s Marcus’s. And you fell for it like a fool.”
Frank charged forward. “He shoulda said, ‘No, Ava, no.’ A guy doesn’t do that sort of thing to another guy, especially when he knows a photo like that would end up on half the magazines around the world. Humiliating me. Mortifying me. Y’know what? I hope he rots over there for an eternity, because you don’t cross Frank Sinatra like that and get away with it.” He turned his back on her. “Come on, fellas, we’re leaving.”
Gwendolyn felt a pebble scuff her shoe. She picked it up and took aim. It struck him on the left shoulder, causing him to stumble off the curb.
He reeled around. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“I want you to call whoever it was you called and get them to give Marcus back his passport.”
“And the way to do that is throw goddamned rocks at me?”
Gwendolyn realized too late that lobbing missiles probably wasn’t the smartest tactic. “And I want it to be the first call you make tomorrow.”
“Jesus Christ! I used to wonder why you never landed a man. A looker like you—great face, knockout figure, you’ve even got a wicked sense of humor. I didn’t get it until now that you ain’t nothing but an ordinary, garden-variety, loud-mouthed shrew.”
What did he—? I’m a—? Did he just call me—?
“Wait a second! I know who you are.” DiMaggio looked like he’d stepped in something that would be unpleasant to scrub off later. “You’re that dressmaker.” He made ‘dressmaker’ sound like ‘streetwalker.’ “You pretend to
listen to Marilyn, and then you go running off to Zanuck and tell him everything. I bet the next phone call you make will be to the boss telling him about what happened tonight.” He slapped the thick end of his bat into the palm of his left hand. “You think you’re so damned smart.”
Joe’s snide speech was long enough for Gwendolyn to find her wits again. “Says the guy who battered down the wrong door.” She pointed to the jumble of splintered wood behind her. “Poor Florence has every right to sue you. And if I can help, I will.”
It was a good exit line, so she spun on her heel, but then a more cutting remark came to her.
“Oh, and for the record, Marilyn was here, but she took off out the back. Her last words to me were, ‘Tell Joe that if he was hoping for a reconciliation, it died when I saw his baseball bat.’ In other words, you completely blew it, you stupid, stupid schmuck.”
A block away, rotating red-and-blue lights mottled the night. The five men raced for the Chrysler; Gwendolyn flew back inside. Sheila stood at the window, alone.
“Where’s Marilyn?” Gwendolyn asked.
“Gone.”
She collapsed onto the sofa with Sinatra’s words stinging in her ear. I used to wonder why you never landed a man.
“You could do with a drink,” Sheila said. “Vodka okay?”
“On the rocks. Make it a double.”
With princes like Sinatra and DiMaggio treating their women like dirt, or playthings, or trophies, why would I want to tie myself down? Just because I’ve never wanted to get married doesn’t make me a shrew.
Sheila emerged from the kitchen with a matching pair of filled tumblers. “Boy oh boy,” she said, dropping onto the sofa, “you sure gave it to them down there.”
Gwendolyn felt the adrenalin bleed out of her system, leaving her heavy-limbed. The spiraling red-and-blue police lights threw a bizarre show through the lace curtains. “The cops will be up here soon.”
“I smell a coincidence.” Sheila ripped open a fresh pack of Pall Malls. “Back in the forties when film noirs were getting popular, Barney Ruditsky was a technical consultant at Fox on account of how he used to work for the NYPD. Ten years later, he’s tailing their biggest star.” She kicked off her shoes. “Could be nothing.”
Her vodka was the sort of top-shelf stuff that slid effortlessly down a shrew’s throat. Gwendolyn threw back a mouthful and thought about how Sheila Stuart had failed to make the big time, or even the middle time. But she was capable of delivering a line like Could be nothing when she really meant I’d bet my last dime that it’s not.
CHAPTER 30
Kathryn was pouring her six a.m. coffee when she heard The New York Times thump her doorstep. She didn’t get up from her table until the LA Times joined it. She was halfway to the door when she heard a timid knock and “It’s just me.”
Gwendolyn stepped inside, holding Kathryn’s papers. She dropped them on the table as Kathryn poured her a cup.
“Tell me everything. Did DiMaggio show? Did he see Marilyn? Did they reconcile—”
“Everything happened when your broadcast was on so I didn’t get to hear anything. It went off okay, didn’t it?”
By the time the curtain went up, Leo’s extravaganza had included chorus girls dressed as boxes of Betty Crocker cake mix, a rotating Westinghouse refrigerator, and a live band that had almost drowned her out, which was a relief.
“Nothing dropped on my head, and nobody fell off the stage. I call that a win. The suits are hard to read, but they appeared to be happy.”
Gwendolyn sighed. “When it comes to men, who knows what’s going through their tiny little pea brains?” She crossed her arms. “Tell me, honestly, am I a garden-variety, loud-mouthed shrew?”
Kathryn would have laughed if not for the earnest look on Gwendolyn’s face. “What the hell happened last night?”
“I’m not, am I?”
“Did DiMaggio call you that? He might be a world-class baseball player, but given how he’s treated Marilyn, he’s also a world-class cretin, so who cares—”
“It was Frank.”
“I hope you gave it to him with both guns blazing.”
Gwendolyn smiled. “You’d have been proud of me. I even threw a rock at him.”
“You didn’t!”
“It was really just a pebble, but Trevor Bergin never had better aim.”
Kathryn slotted two slices of bread into her toaster. “Start at the beginning and leave out nothing.”
Her jaw dropped open little by little as Gwendolyn relayed the disgraceful events of the previous night.
“I can’t believe I missed it!”
“I wish I had,” Gwendolyn said.
“You know it’s not true, don’t you? That business about being a shrew.”
Gwendolyn gave off an evasive shrug. “Getting married wasn’t something I yearned for. Does that make me some kind of freak?”
Kathryn clamped her hand over Gwendolyn’s. “Who cares what that skinny little twerp thinks? He’s lost one of the most beautiful women on the planet, so who’s he to hand out marital advice? And the same goes for Joe DiMaggio. How was Marilyn during all this?”
“You should have seen her when we heard Joe bust that door down. I thought she’d faint.”
“You remember what’s happening this afternoon, don’t you?” It was the day Winchell was planning to sneak onto the Fox lot to interview Marilyn on the Seven Year Itch subway set.
Gwendolyn nodded.
“Do you think she’ll show?”
“Marilyn’s become so erratic, it’s hard to pin her down.” Gwendolyn drained the last of her coffee. “I’d better get going. Charles has petitioned Zanuck to let me assist on Bette’s Virgin Queen costumes. They’re as complicated as hell and we’re slipping behind.”
“What happened to you being Zanuck’s special-projects assistant?”
“Lately I’ve been doing trivial stuff that anyone could do, so I told Charles to ask for me. I don’t want to waste an hour in case Zanuck changes his mind.”
After Gwendolyn left, Kathryn shoved her dishes into the sink and flipped open the LA Times. It was a slow news day when the big story was how the 100th citrus tree had been removed from the site Walt Disney was excavating for his planned amusement park.
She shoved the paper aside, turned to The New York Times, and gripped the edge of her kitchen counter when she read the headline.
EXECUTION DATE SET FOR
SUPPLIER OF SECRETS TO NAZIS
Danford to face electric chair in February
All this time, she’d assumed that Danford got a prison sentence, not a death sentence, so she thought she had time. Lots and lots of it. But now she had less than four months and the exoneration process could take years.
Halfway down the page was a photo of her father leaving the courthouse, his wrists manacled together, his head bowed and turned away from the cameras.
I should have been doing more. I should have flown to New York and cornered Winchell. Or to Boston and demanded to see my father’s file. Or Washington and pleaded my case to Hoover. They knew it was a frame-up. They have to serve justice. It’s their job.
A sharp knock on her front door startled her.
“GWENNIE!” She pulled at the brass doorknob. “You saw the paper?”
Frank Sinatra’s lids drooped over bloodshot eyes, his hair wild and uncombed. He ran a hand over two-day growth; the stink of a thousand cigarettes radiated from him. “Gwendolyn’s already told you, huh?”
“Yep.”
“I screwed up. Real bad. I need to make amends. I know, I know. I tried to do the right thing. Honest.” He made the sign of the cross. “But the whole situation got out of hand.” He stepped past her.
“I didn’t invite you in.”
“Don’t make me stand out there where half the Garden can hear us.”
Kathryn slammed her door with all the force she could muster. “I’m sure they heard that.”
“I haven’t had a hit since From
Here to Eternity, and that opened a year ago. I’ve got a lot riding on this new movie with Doris Day.”
“You land on my doorstep at six in the morning to talk about your career?”
“Hear me out. I need Young at Heart to open big, but after last night I’m scared I’ll be dragged through the mud once word gets out.”
“Maybe you should have thought of that before you jumped into the mud.”
His ears reddened. “Someone had to talk him down. None of those other slobs were doing it. But when Joe gets mad, he gets crazy mad. You gotta believe me, I tried to stop it.”
“For crying out loud, Frank, I’m not mad about what happened last night—wait, yes, I am, but that’s not all.”
He blanched. “The Marcus thing?”
“YES, THE MARCUS THING!”
“Gwendolyn’s already ripped into me about that.”
“She told me your reply: ‘You don’t cross Frank Sinatra and get away with it.’ Of all the unmitigated ego—”
“One lecture is quite enough, thank you,” Frank bit back. “I sure as hell don’t need yet another one from yet another furious dame who—”
“—who you’ve ambushed asking for a favor to prop up your failing career.” She pressed him against the wall of her foyer with a sharp fingernail. “Marcus Adler is my best friend, and you screwed him over.”
“He had it coming. His photos wrecked my marriage.”
“No, Frank, you wrecked your marriage. You had it coming. But you used Marcus as a scapegoat. He’s stranded in a foreign country with no proper identification and roadblocked at every turn.”
She rolled the Times into a truncheon and brought it down on his head.
“HEY!” He tried to swat it down but was fighting fatigue.
“I am sick—” whack!
“—and tired—” whack!
“—of men like you—” whack!
“—who think they can do—” whack!
“—whatever they want—” whack!
“—just because they’re men!”
“Christ, Kathryn!” Frank yelled. “Get a hold of yourself.”
She backhanded the Times across his chest.
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