Damsel in Distress (1937)
Directed by George Stevens
Starring Fred Astaire, Joan Fontaine, George Burns, and Gracie Allen
While Frankie sat in Dr. Winston’s waiting room, Mitch set out on the twenty-five mile drive to Arcadia and the thoroughbred racetrack at Santa Anita Park. Opened a mere two years earlier, it was already a popular haunt of the Hollywood set, and given the late producer’s self-professed weakness for horseracing, Mitch thought it highly likely that Arthur Cohen had spent a significant amount of time—and money—there. Today was not a race day, so the parking lot in front of the grandstand entrance was nearly empty. He parked his car in the shade of a cluster of palm trees near the imposing turquoise-blue façade and went inside.
After a morning spent in the brilliant California sunshine, it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dim light within. The grandstand area was as empty as the parking lot and Mitch’s footsteps echoed in the stillness as he walked through the building and out on the other side, where it opened onto the racetrack itself and the view of the San Gabriel Mountains beyond. Here, at last, were signs of life: on the far side of the mile-long track a jockey leaned over the neck of a beautiful chestnut thoroughbred while two men watched from the railing nearby. One held a stopwatch in his hand, obviously timing the practice laps, while the other watched the horse and rider through a pair of binoculars.
It seemed as good a place as any to start. Conscious of a few butterflies in his stomach, Mitch dug in his pocket for the pack of Lucky Strikes that Frankie had so deplored. He felt a certain grudging admiration for the way she plunged headlong into this sort of situation without, apparently, a second thought. Well, if she could do it, so could he. He lit a cigarette and took a long drag, then headed toward the two men standing along the railing.
“ ‘Morning.” He lifted one hand in a careless wave. “I’m looking for Arthur Cohen. I’ve heard he’s a regular here. Know anything about his whereabouts?”
The two men stared at Mitch as if he’d just sprouted horns.
“Have you been living under a rock for the past week?” asked the man with the binoculars. “He’s dead—had a heart attack, or maybe it was a stroke, on the movie set and died instantly, from what I hear.”
“Damn!” Mitch pounded the rail with his fist. “He owes me two hundred dollars!”
“Join the club,” recommended the timekeeper. “You want your money back, you’ll have to petition his estate.”
“What about his wife?” Mitch had to raise his voice as the horse thundered past, clumps of dirt flying from its hooves. “Wasn’t she a big film star back in the day? Seems to me she ought to be loaded.”
“Oh, she ought to be,” agreed the first man, turning back to the track to follow the horse’s progress. “But whether the old man left her anything is another matter. Rumor has it he’d already been selling off her mementos to cover his debts. Unless you can prove a legitimate claim, you’re not likely to see a dime.”
“Just my luck,” muttered Mitch, trying not to sound pleased that he’d just confirmed Frankie’s theory.
“If you want to recoup some of your losses, here’s a tip: Jazz Baby in the Saturday two-thirty,” recommended the timekeeper, gesturing toward the horse rounding the far end of the oval.
“I’ll bear it in mind,” Mitch promised, then turned and walked away, trying to look like a man who had just lost two hundred dollars.
* * * *
The sun was low in the sky by the time Mitch parked his car next to the curb in front of the Hollywood Studio Club and marched up the sidewalk with a spring in his step. Between his “date” the previous night and today’s trip to Santa Anita, he had picked up a tidbit or two that Frankie might find interesting. Now, as he pressed the bell beside the front door, he looked forward to claiming his reward.
It was, to put it mildly, not what he expected. The door flew open to reveal the red-haired Roxie glaring at him with blood in her eye. “Oh, so it’s you,” she said in a voice that would freeze water.
“Hello to you, too,” he said, puzzled by her hostile reception. He gave her what he hoped was a disarming smile. “Is Frankie in?”
For an answer, Roxie balled her fist and let fly, landing a solid punch to the left side of his nose.
“Hey!” Mitch staggered backwards, rubbing his abused face. “D’you mind telling me what that was all about?”
“As if you didn’t know! Frankie is in, all right: in trouble, in the family way, and in over her head, all because of you!” She advanced on him again, waving her fists menacingly.
“Whoa!” Mitch protested, grasping her flailing arms and holding them at a safe distance. “Hold your horses! Where’d you get an idea like that?”
“She told me herself she had an appointment today with Dr. Henry Winston.”
“Is she sick or something?” asked Mitch, all at sea.
Roxie rolled her eyes. “Dr. Henry Winston, in case you didn’t know, is one of the best-known abortionists in Hollywood.”
Mitch had taken many hard hits on the gridiron over the years, but never before had mere words made him feel like he’d been kicked in the solar plexus, gasping for breath and unable to think straight. He almost wished Roxie had hit him again instead; it would have been less painful.
“And you think that I—that she—that we—”
“Who else would it be? Unless you’re implying that she’s the sort of girl who gets around, in which case I’ll have to punch you again.” She took a step closer, prepared to suit the word to the deed.
“I’m not the guy, Roxie, I swear. In fact, I can’t imagine who—” But even as he said the words, he knew they weren’t true. He could imagine who, all right. The one man who had the power to give Frankie what she wanted most of all. The same man who had then gotten himself killed, leaving her not only bereft of her dream, but forced to face the consequences alone. In that moment, Mitch fervently wished Arthur Cohen were still alive, just so he could have the pleasure of killing him himself, with his bare hands.
“Mitch, are you okay?” Roxie asked, all traces of anger vanished. “You look sort of strange.”
“I feel sort of strange.” He gave a shaky little laugh with no trace of humor in it. “After all, it isn’t every day a guy finds out—”
“I’m sorry, Mitch, I really am. Honestly, I thought you knew.” Roxie shook herself, and her voice became businesslike. “You’d better go home and get some ice on that bruise, or you’re going to have a black eye by morning.”
Mitch nodded absently. A black eye. If only that were the worst of his problems. He staggered back to his car and spent most of the evening driving aimlessly around Hollywood, not knowing or caring where he was going.
Frankie—his Frankie, the Snowy Soap Flake girl—was pregnant by a man old enough to be her father. Was that the real reason behind her determined search for justice? Poor Frankie! Even if she could bring Arthur Cohen back from the dead, he would never marry her. Mitch recalled that day in the library, when he’d had to explain to her what an abortifacient was. Had she known of her pregnancy then? Had he unwittingly offered a solution to her dilemma? While he’d been driving to Santa Anita, had she been lying on Dr. Winston’s operating table while the blood of her unborn child—
No, he wouldn’t think of it. Women sometimes died from such procedures, or were permanently scarred. There had to be a better way, and he would help her find it.
By that night, he knew what he had to do. He would marry Frankie himself and take her to Nevada with him, where no one would know her shameful secret. He would raise the child as his own and never utter a word of reproach. And if she should happen to give birth to a cigar-chomping, herbal tea-swilling brat in a pin-striped suit, well, he would love it if it killed him.
* * * *
“What a day!” groaned Frankie, safe in the bedroom she shared with Kathleen. She stripped off her blue jacket and cast it onto the bed, then sat down on the edge of the mattre
ss and kicked off her shoes.
Kathleen looked up from the little desk where she sat memorizing lines for her next audition. “Did everything go—” she paused discreetly— “all right?”
“ ‘All right’ doesn’t begin to cover it.” Frankie leaped up from the bed and began pacing the small room. “Kathleen, I’m onto something here, something big. That Dr. Winston isn’t a real doctor, at least, not the kind who helps sick people. He—well, he treats girls who are in trouble.”
Kathleen went limp with relief. “You mean you didn’t know? You’re not—?”
“What sort of girl do you think I am?” demanded Frankie, torn between amusement and outrage at this insult to her reputation. “I only went there because I found Dr. Winston’s telephone number on Arthur Cohen’s desk. Kathleen, don’t you see? Mr. Cohen could have gotten some actress in trouble—maybe even more than one—and sent them to this Dr. Winston.”
Kathleen shrugged. “Like I told you, Frankie, some girls will do anything for a chance at stardom.”
“But what if it didn’t work out that way?” A shadow crossed her face as she remembered the young women in Dr. Winston’s waiting room, their expressions showing varying degrees of anxiety and desperation. “What if afterwards she felt ashamed of what she’d done? Or what if Mr. Cohen went back on his word? Couldn’t some poor girl see that as justification for murder?”
Kathleen laid her script on the desk and smoothed out the pages. “I don’t know, Frankie, it seems to me an awfully big leap. Besides, even if it were true, how would you ever prove it? There’s no way to prove paternity, you know.”
Frankie sighed. “In this case, there’s no way to prove maternity, either. Most of the girls seem to use false names. Unless—” She paused in her pacing as a new idea struck her.
“Unless what?”
“Unless I could somehow get a look at Dr. Winston’s files. Surely those girls’ real names must appear somewhere.”
Kathleen raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Surely you don’t expect the doctor’s secretary to let you look through the file cabinet!”
“Actually,” Frankie confessed, “I was thinking of breaking in.”
Kathleen shook her head, making her blonde curls swing. “After what happened last time, Mitch said he was through with that sort of thing, remember?”
Frankie had the grace to look ashamed. “I wasn’t thinking of Mitch.”
“Who, then?”
“You.”
“Me? You must be joking!” Seeing from Frankie’s mulish expression that her roommate was quite serious, Kathleen added, “If you’re determined to go through with this—and I’m not at all certain you should—you ought to tell that policeman friend of yours and let him handle it.”
Frankie blushed crimson. “Kathleen! This isn’t the sort of thing you can discuss with a fellow!”
Kathleen did her best, but Frankie refused to be dissuaded. At last, the English girl reluctantly agreed to accompany her friend, expressing the not very hopeful opinion that she might somehow keep Frankie from bringing further trouble upon herself.
And so, long after curfew, both girls donned their darkest skirts and blouses and padded noiselessly down the stairs on stocking feet. They had a bad moment at the bottom of the stairs when they heard Pauline come in, late as usual, but they managed to steal into the shadows of the common room and remain out of sight until she had gone upstairs.
“Why did I let you talk me into this?” Kathleen hissed.
“Shhh!” was Frankie’s only reply.
Once outside, they slipped on their shoes and hurried to the end of the block, where they had arranged for a taxi to meet them. Traffic was light so late at night, and it seemed a very short time later that they were set down at the corner a short distance from Dr. Winston’s office. If the taxi driver was curious about their furtive behavior, he gave no sign, but Frankie tipped him generously anyway, just in case. They waited until the taxi had disappeared up the street, then Frankie unearthed a metal flashlight from the depths of her handbag and they walked up the sidewalk to the door of Dr. Winston’s office. Frankie had never been so thankful for its discreet distance from the street, or for the bushes that partially blocked its door from the view of passersby.
“Here, take this.” She handed the light to Kathleen. “Shine it on the lock so I can see what I’m doing.”
Picking a lock wasn’t nearly as easy as Mitch had made it look. Frankie mangled two bobby pins before she finally heard a faint click and the doorknob turned in her hand.
“At last!”
The two girls scurried inside and Frankie locked the door behind them. Suddenly a blinding light filled the room. Frankie whirled around to see Kathleen with her hand on the light switch.
“Turn that thing off!” She gestured angrily. “Do you want to get us both arrested?”
The room went dark again, but not before Frankie caught a glimpse of Kathleen’s stricken face.
“I’m sorry for snapping at you.” Frankie’s voice echoed in the empty room. “I guess I’m a little jumpy.”
“Perhaps we should just go home,” the British girl suggested.
“We can’t give up now, not after coming this far.” Frankie switched on her flashlight and played its beam against the adjacent wall until it illuminated the counter where she’d signed in that morning. “Come on, the office is this way. That’s where the records will be.”
Unfortunately for her quest, the door into the office was locked as tightly as the outer door, and this one proved even more resistant to Frankie’s bobby pin. In the end, Frankie took off her shoes and clambered over the counter, then unlocked the door from the inside to admit Kathleen. The two girls found themselves standing before a receptionist’s desk flanked by metal filing cabinets.
Frankie pointed to the one on the right. “I’ll take this one, and you can have that one.”
She pulled open the top drawer, cringing at the rasp of metal on metal, and began thumbing through the stacks of manila file folders. Half an hour later, she was almost ready to concede defeat. She’d had vague hopes of discovering a familiar name—Alice Howard, perhaps, who played Gwyneth in The Virgin Queen. Arthur Cohen had made some pretty nasty insinuations about her just before he died. But most of the girls who visited Dr. Winston chose to conceal their identities beneath false names. Besides the plethora of Smiths and Joneses, there were a couple of Jane Does and one Jane Q. Public. The only names that sounded remotely real were ones that had apparently been abandoned by their owners to conceal an unfashionable ethnicity or a blue-collar background, like Esther Mertz or Ruby Mudd. Mudd? The ridiculous name was strangely familiar, but Frankie couldn’t think where she might have heard it. She turned to her left, where Kathleen bent over a similar drawer of file folders, but even as she opened her mouth to ask her roommate for help, her memory provided the missing piece of the puzzle. She hadn’t heard the name before; she had seen it scrawled in ink on the upper left-hand corner of an air mail envelope.
She stared at Kathleen for a long moment, debating her next move. At last she took a deep breath, and when she spoke her voice shook slightly. “Ruby?”
Kathleen glanced up, the instinctive reaction of one hearing the name she’d answered to for the better part of twenty years. Upon seeing the stricken look on Frankie’s face, she realized her mistake. Her lips twisted in a humorless smile. “So you’ve figured it out at last, haven’t you?”
Frankie remembered her arrival at the Studio Club, when she’d first met her roommate. On that occasion, Kathleen had been in bed with an unspecified illness. Had she really been sick, or was she recovering from Dr. Winston’s procedure? Tears stung Frankie’s eyes at the thought of her friend undergoing such an ordeal alone, separated by a continent and an ocean from family and friends who might have helped her.
“Oh, how awful for you,” she breathed. “You must not have known what else to do.”
“I knew what to do, all right,” Kathleen, or rather
Ruby, said with a bitter laugh. “Girls used to come to my Granny all the time when they got in trouble. Married women too, them that didn’t care to have a baby every year.”
Every trace of her clipped British speech had vanished, and now she spoke with an accent not unlike Frankie’s own. Frankie, her mind reeling, latched onto this relatively insignificant discovery. “You’re not really English?”
“Not unless you count New London, West Virginia, population two hundred and twelve.”
Feeling suddenly weak at the knees, Frankie groped for the edge of the cabinet for support. “But how—why—?”
“Because I knew there had to be more to life! Surely you ought to understand that, you felt the same way. I got married when I was fifteen—heaven knows there’s nothing else to do in New London!—and my husband took me to Wheeling for a weekend honeymoon. One day we went to the movies, and Grand Hotel was playing.” Kathleen’s face grew radiant with the memory. “Oh Frankie, I fell in love that day, and I don’t mean with my husband! For weeks afterwards, I would stand in front of the mirror and pretend to be Greta Garbo, acting out her part and reciting her lines.”
“What did your husband think?”
Kathleen shrugged, dismissing her husband as of no importance. “Oh, he didn’t know anything about it. I always waited until he was out working the farm. But I knew what I had to do. I saved up my butter-and-egg money for months until I had enough for the train fare, and then I just—left.”
“You ran away?” Frankie’s family hadn’t been exactly over the moon about her desire to go to Hollywood, but Mama had taken her to Atlanta to shop for a suitable wardrobe, and Mama, Daddy, and both her sisters and their families had seen her off at the railway station. Now, hearing her roommate’s story, Frankie hardly knew whether to be impressed with her bravery or appalled by her callousness.
Kathleen’s chin jerked upward, a small yet defensive gesture. “I guess you could call it running away. It didn’t feel like it to me, though. It felt like this was what I’d been waiting for my whole life.”
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