City of Myths

by Martin Turnbull

  Up in his room, she unbuttoned her plain black duffel coat and pulled the gray knitted scarf from around her neck. “Your pensione is charming!”

  Marcus set Gwendolyn’s letter onto the mantel next to a framed photograph of Kathryn and Gwendolyn, Doris, Arlene, and Bertie crowded on the Garden of Allah diving board. Quentin took it when he asked Doris to be his date to the opening of White Christmas. The photo flattered all five of them, so he placed it in full view where he could see it every day.

  “I was going to have some brandy to warm up,” he told Ingrid, “but I could make us some coffee.”

  Ingrid beelined for the photo. “Either or.” She ran her finger along the top edge of the frame. “Is this Kathryn Massey?”

  “I met her the first week I came to Hollywood. I have limoncello someone brought back from Capri, if you’d prefer.”

  Her eyes, a delightful shade of blue, lit up. “I adore limoncello! Roberto introduced me to it during Stromboli.”

  Marcus lifted the bottle and two shot glasses from the shelf above his desk and told her to take one of his two dining chairs. “Is this about the Look magazine photos? Because if they caused you any trouble, it wasn’t my intention.”

  She let out a disarmingly tinkling laugh. “Goodness me, no! I’ve come to beg for your assistance.” The limoncello Domenico had brought back from a couple of weeks on location had a refreshingly tart bite to it. The shadow of the lace curtains covering the window behind Marcus speckled her face. “To be specific, the assistance of Lo Scattino Simpatico.”

  Marcus didn’t think anything of Bella Darvi’s joke until his La Strada photos started appearing in magazines across the continent, prompting a call from Look, who wanted to do a feature on him: “An American in Rome: Lo Scattino Americano becomes Lo Scattino Simpatico.”

  When Marcus asked how they came up with the idea, the guy said he had interviewed Bella Darvi in Paris as part of a press junket for The Egyptian and she talked about the Scattino Americano who took those La Strada photos.

  The article had come out a couple of weeks ago, but Marcus hadn’t seen it until Doris sent him a copy of the issue. It sat on the coffee table next to the heater.

  “What can Lo Scattino Simpatico do for you?”

  “Well!” Ingrid cupped her luminous face in her palms. “I recently finished Journey to Italy. My husband directed it but the film’s having trouble finding a US distributor. I was complaining about it to Humphrey—”

  “Bogart?”

  “We have kept up a friendship since Casablanca. He’s one of the few people who didn’t desert me after I was denounced on the floor of the Senate. At any rate, he brought up those photos in Look that you took of me. He said Americans need reminding that I’m a real person, with real feelings, and your photos helped do that.”

  The vodka in the limoncello warmed Marcus’s innards. Or it may have been the relief to know that his work hadn’t been as intrusive as he’d feared. “You want me to take some more shots of you?”

  Her smile turned impish. “There’s a French play called Anastasia about a girl who is posing as the heir to the Russian throne. An English version is now playing on Broadway starring Viveca Lindfors.”

  “And you’re angling for the film?”

  “Fox have bought the screen rights. Naturally Viveca is lobbying for the lead, but I think I can do it better. Humphrey told me that you know Zanuck quite well.”

  “I wouldn’t say that, but I do know someone with access to him.” He thought of a particularly picturesque corner of the Cinecittà back lot that he discovered when taking photos of a strikingly gorgeous extra.

  Not long after Bella Darvi left Rome, he got a call from Domenico. Warner Brothers were soon to start work on Helen of Troy at Cinecittà and the director, Robert Wise had asked if he knew an on-set photographer. The job paid well so Marcus took the assignment.

  When he spotted one of the extras, the beauty of her unspoiled freshness made her stick out amid a sea of pretty girls. She carried herself like a ballerina, but at the same time seemed delicate as a dandelion.

  When he approached her, she seemed faintly surprised. It could have been a ruse—she later confessed that she’d worked as a model from a young age—but it didn’t matter. Marcus’s photos revealed how much the camera adored the twenty-year-old.

  Wise told him to take “as many pictures of her as you want” and arranged twenty-four hour access to Cinecittà. Later, his work turned up in Epoca and its equivalents in France, Spain, Germany, and Holland. He didn’t receive any more money for them but he did gain extra scattini credibility being the guy that helped boost the career of Brigitte Bardot.

  Marcus refilled their shot glasses. “How about we rummage through Cinecittà’s costume department? I know of a particularly picturesque setting on the back lot where I could take some interesting shots and then send the best of them to Zanuck along with a suggestion that he consider you.”

  “Perfecto!” Ingrid clapped her hands together. “I’m desperate to get back to America and from what I understand, you know how that feels.”

  Gwendolyn’s letter on the mantel glowed like an SOS beacon. She had written about the Gable situation in her usual self-effacing style, as though she’d accidently spilled coffee into his lap instead of falling pregnant by him. But he knew how to read between her lines, and he knew that she knew it too.

  Despite the contented relationship he’d developed with Domenico and the success he’d made with this photography job he’d fallen into, Los Angeles sat like a golden bubble below the horizon, shining just brightly enough for him to catch a glimmer every now and then, beckoning him home.

  “Yes,” he admitted, “I do.”

  * * *

  It took a warehouse the size of Union Station to house Cinecittà’s costumes. The togas and uniforms of Ancient Rome filled two full aisles, but Marcus and Ingrid weren’t looking for them.

  Eastern European peasant girl?

  1920s Parisian waif?

  Turn-of-the-century Imperial Russia?

  “I’ll know it when I see it.”

  Ingrid pawed through dirndls, pinafores, sarafans, and 1920s couture until she pulled out a floor-length gown of white silk, stenciled with an ivy design in gold thread running in vertical bands from the waist. The bodice had a purple sash secured across it, with a tiny gold medal pinned over the left breast.

  The stern signora who managed the costume department made it clear that Marcus and Ingrid were free to look around as long as they wished, but under no circumstances could she permit them to take anything outside the building. No, not even Ingrid Bergman.

  “There must be a rear entrance to this building,” Marcus whispered.

  They found a fire escape in the far corner. It was locked, but the key hung from a nearby nail. The door opened directly onto the outer perimeter of a Tuscan village. It wasn’t what Marcus had in mind, but the church façade gave Ingrid the privacy she needed to change into the gown.

  She emerged five minutes later, lipstick reapplied, hair brushed, and looking more like “Movie Star Ingrid” than Marcus had seen in a while. She turned around so that he could zip her into the dress. It was made for someone with the waist of a twenty-three-year-old but they managed to squeeze her into it.

  He steered her through the Roman Forum to a side alley that led to a town square dominated by a richly decorated façade that could be a church, a palazzo, a town hall, or the entrance to the home of an especially rich citizen of the Roman Empire.

  “They used this as the outside of Nero’s palace in Quo Vadis,” Marcus explained, “but at the right angle, it can be pretty much anything.”

  He positioned her in front of a door off to the side. It was stained dark brown with black iron hinges and served as a stark contrast to her white silk. Wooden columns carved with interlocking blackbirds and ivy bordered each side of the door. They didn’t look especially Russian, but the ivy in the design reflected the gold ivy in her dress.


  With years of posing for portraits and taking direction, Ingrid was a dream model and within ten minutes, Marcus had burned through three rolls of film and was confident he’d caught a handful of images that might seize Zanuck’s attention.

  The door was still unlocked when they returned to the costume warehouse, and Ingrid was rehanging her gown as the manager called down the aisle, asking if they needed any assistance.

  As Ingrid called out, “I think we’ve got a good idea of what you have,” Marcus noticed that the rack opposite held the studio’s collection of religious apparel: basic friar habits, cassocks, more elaborate ferraiolos, and up the church ladder to papal vestments.

  “Do me a favor,” he whispered to Ingrid, “keep her busy down the other end.”

  Ingrid launched into a speech about the elaborate headdresses for the wives of Roman senators.

  Marcus ran his hand along the costumes until he came to a black ankle-length cassock with a tab collar and fuchsia piping. Its neighbor was almost identical but with purple edging, and the one on the other side had red. He knew that each color denoted a different rank within church hierarchy, but damned if he knew which color meant what.

  The cassock with the fuchsia piping looked like it fitted him best, so he pulled it from the rack and returned to the rear entrance, where he opened the door and checked to see if anyone was about. He dropped the garment onto the ground and closed the door, locked it, and ran up the aisle.

  * * *

  Ingrid said nothing until they were three blocks past Cinecittà’s main gate.

  “I’m sure you have a perfectly reasonable explanation for what’s under your arm,” she said, “but I won’t pry.”

  Marcus’s heart was still beating like a bongo player hopped up on bennies. “I have a substantial amount of money stuck here.”

  “Locked funds?”

  “It’s been suggested that if I disguise myself as a clergyman, nobody will question me.”

  “Couldn’t you have just bought one of those?”

  “I tried, but they only sell to bona fide members of the church.”

  “So you’ll be smuggling funds out of the country wearing that?” Ingrid laughed. “Oh my! What guts!”

  Marcus had been sure he had the nerve to pull off this audacious plan back at the olive grove in Tivoli, but now that he had an actual cassock in his arms, the reality of what Oliver had suggested weighed more heavily. “Not that I can leave any time soon. My passport was confiscated back in June.”

  “Eight months? But how is that even legal?”

  He gave her a rundown on Sinatra’s reaction to the fake scattini photos he had taken of Ava and his lover.

  “Have you asked someone to intercede on your behalf?”

  “Kathryn cornered Frank but nothing happened. My lawyer got nowhere, and neither did the US embassy.”

  “Then matters must be taken in hand.”

  “I’ve tried everything I can think of.”

  “Yes, but now you’ve got me on your side, and in my years on the arm of Roberto Rossellini, I’ve learned how to handle these Italians. It’s like dealing with Louella or Hedda. You have to charm them into doing what you want. Tell me, who’s the mover-and-shaker in this scenario?”

  “Napoleon Conti.”

  “What a snake! Now we need something we can hold over his head.”

  “I think I might have something,” Marcus said. Metropolitana was Fratelli di Conti’s all-time box office champ, which made Melody Hope the big meatball in their bowl of spaghetti. Now that she had successfully made the transition from historical dramas to twentieth-century stories, they were planning a new movie set in current-day Rome about a female scattino. “It involves Melody Hope.”

  Comprehension bloomed on Ingrid’s angelic face. “So it’s true? Eccellente!”

  “I’ve heard he’s got mafia connections.”

  “Who in Italy doesn’t have those? And anyway, we have better ones. Have you heard about the Holmby Hills Rat Pack?”

  Kathryn had mentioned it in one of her letters, but only in passing. “What do you know about them?”

  “It’s sort of a social group that’s sprung up among a bunch of Hollywood celebrities who live in and around Holmby Hills. The Pack Master, as he’s called, is Frank Sinatra. We need to prevail on Bogie to get Sinatra to use his connections to back off.”

  “According to Kathryn, he’s already tried.”

  “Then he needs to try again.”

  “And what if he doesn’t—or can’t?”

  Ingrid smiled. “Have you heard about the Wrong Door Raid?” I know someone who was there, but how the hell do you know? He nodded cautiously. “Sinatra has the whole debacle under wraps, but what if we each wrote to Bogie? Maybe together we could get him to find a way to convince Frank to directly persuade Napoleon to return your passport.”

  She didn’t know that Kathryn had already given Walter Winchell the Wrong Door Raid scoop so that he could turn it over to Confidential. They hadn’t exposed it yet, but surely that was only a matter of time. If he and Ingrid were going to act on this nutty plan, they needed to do it now.

  Marcus asked, “But what if Napoleon refuses? I put one over on him; he hates that.”

  “In that case, we need to soften him up then attack at both ends. How well do you know Melody?”

  “On a scale of one to ten? Pretty high, I’d say.”

  “We must get Napoleon and Melody together in the same place with you and me. It needs to be public.”

  The stolen cassock under Marcus’s arm was growing heavy. He flagged down a taxi and opened the door for Ingrid. “I know just the place.”

  CHAPTER 38

  Gwendolyn peered at the afternoon sky through the willow tree at the northern end of the pool. The clouds congealing overhead were tinged with gray and would soon block out the sun.

  “Should we move everything indoors?” she asked.

  “Nah.” Doris deposited her deviled eggs and celery stalks filled with Cheez Whiz on the table Monty had dragged from Marcus’s villa. “Whoever heard of an indoor tiki party?”

  “Don the Beachcomber.” Gwendolyn peered over at Kathryn’s villa.

  “Where is she?” Doris asked. “Wasn’t this party her idea?”

  A few weeks ago, when Kathryn had suggested a ‘Welcome Back to Hollywood’ party for Bette Davis, Gwendolyn had been all for it. Shooting on The Virgin Queen was due to start on Monday, and with Bette being absent so long in Maine, she’d liked Kathryn’s idea of easing her back into the Hollywood swim.

  And then Kathryn had disappeared.

  Not physically. Not immediately. But something had happened and she was keeping tight-lipped about it.

  With Voss’s so-called suicide following closely on Francine’s passing, it made sense that Kathryn would be affected by the death of her sole remaining relative—even one she hated.

  Gwendolyn knew what “sad Kathryn” and “angry Kathryn” looked like, but this felt different. Whatever the secret, it was occupying all of Kathryn’s spare time. She left home only when the demands of her job beckoned. Otherwise, she kept herself cooped up in her villa with the blinds drawn.

  When the time had come to organize the party, Gwendolyn quietly took on the task of inviting people, asking them to bring food, drink, and music. She’d asked Monty to see what he could do with Marcus’s tree lights, which sat in a box in the main house’s basement, and assigned Clark to bring six bags of ice.

  “Yes,” she told Doris, “it was her idea. Her only task was to tell Bette Davis when and where.”

  “And did she?” Doris asked.

  Darned if I know. “When Monty shows up with the lights, could you give him a hand? I’m going to check on Kathryn.” She eyed the drawn blinds. Assuming she’ll even answer.

  * * *

  Kathryn stood in her living room and wedged her fists on her hips. “I’ve done it!” she whispered to the papers arranged like tiles, filling nearly every square inc
h of the floor. “My logic might be flawed or I could be fooling myself, but I think there’s enough here to—” She didn’t dare say the words out loud.

  Getting this far without anybody the wiser felt like a major achievement. But what choice did she have? She couldn’t let anybody know she’d been at the Ambassador that night. Not Leo; not Nelson; not Gwennie.

  She had expected to find everything in that file arranged in chronological order. Instead, she had a hodge-podge of maps, newspaper articles, grainy photostats of telegrams, FBI memos, as well as dated and undated photos of Danford in various places across New England.

  Night after night, Kathryn had laid out each piece of evidence on her living room floor and patched together a timeline. It took her nearly two weeks: the maple plantations in Maine, Operation Pastorius, Amagansett, as well as a whole litany of names, addresses, and telephone numbers of people connected with Jack Sheehan, the present Massachusetts governor and the man who had benefited most from Thomas Danford’s downfall.

  But was it enough to reopen the case? Kathryn didn’t know, but Dudley would. And possibly Nelson. But seeing him again would only muddle her thinking and eat at her resolve. But it was now late February and Danford’s execution date was March 31st. She didn’t have time to pick and choose.

  A knock on the door.

  She ignored it.

  The second knock was louder, more insistent. “It’s me!”

  Kathryn stood still, not sure what to do.

  “You’re getting ready, aren’t you?” Gwennie called out.

  Kathryn wedged her front door open. “For what?”

  “Bette’s ‘Welcome Back to Hollywood’ party.”

  “No, honey, that’s tomorrow.”

  Worry narrowed Gwendolyn’s eyes. “Today’s the nineteenth.”

  What happened to the eighteenth?

  “Okay. That’s it.” Gwendolyn pushed against the door until it was wide enough to squeeze through. “I want to know what’s going on with you, and you better talk fast because in less than an hour Bette, Clark, Bogie and Lauren, Charles LeMaire, and a whole slew of others besides will be arriv—” She caught sight of Kathryn’s living room with the furniture pushed aside and the carpet covered with sheets of paper.