She excused herself to knock on a door across from the entrance. “Mr. Valentino’s here.” After a muffled invitation she opened the door and held it for him. As he stepped past, she lowered her voice. “Find out where she hides the cigarettes.”
When the door closed behind him, he was in a large bedroom done in white and gold. There was a white four-poster bed, neatly made, a dresser and vanity table, and a sitting area made up of two reproduction Louis XIV chairs and a chaise, all upholstered in Cloth of Gold. Plastic prescription containers and over-the-counter pill bottles took up every horizontal space except one: Valentino’s practiced eye went immediately to four flat aluminum film cans stacked on the vanity table.
“You look like a Valentino. Family resemblance, or plastic surgery?”
The tobacco-roughened voice came from a very old, very plump woman seated in one of the chairs. She wore a red sweater that made her look like a tomato, blue sweatpants with sharp creases, and thick socks in heelless slippers. Her hair was shorn to a white haze on her scalp. She had blue eyes.
“Neither,” Valentino said. “There might be some relation way back; not enough to inherit.”
“He didn’t have much to leave. His career was on the skids when he died at thirty-one. ‘Good career move,’ someone said. It was the same with Lombard. She hadn’t made a movie worth shouting about in years when that plane cracked up. She was mostly famous as Mrs. Clark Gable.”
“So much for breaking the ice.”
“I’m ninety-eight. I can’t wait for it to melt on its own. Sit down.”
As he lowered himself into the chair facing hers, she took the top off a fat pill bottle and drew out a filterless cigarette. A smaller container yielded a slim throwaway lighter. “If you tell Field Marshal von Voss about my stash, the deal’s off.” She blew twin jets of smoke out her nostrils.
“Trying to keep you healthy doesn’t make her a Nazi.”
“I gave up two breasts for the privilege years ago. Fortunately, they weren’t much to begin with. It was practically out-patient surgery.”
He laughed, more in response to the wicked gleam in her eye than to the black humor. His work put him in frequent contact with senior citizens, veterans of the Golden Age, and he found them more entertaining company than most of his own generation. “How did you come into possession of A Perfect Crime?”
“It was no feat. They hadn’t invented re-releasing back then, no TV or video markets, so no one gave them any thought after the first run. But you know that. If the studios had kept better track of the inventory, we’d be up to our butts in celluloid and you’d be out of a job.”
“Were you in the industry?”
“I came out here when I was eight years old. It wasn’t an industry then. But it was the only factory in town, and if you wanted to work, that’s where you went.”
He excused himself and got up to look at the film cans. A Perfect Crime was stenciled on the lid of the one on top, with the year and production number. It looked genuine, but he’d been fooled before. “Silver nitrate?”
“No. I had it transferred to safety stock before you were born. I burned the original negative before it burned me. That stuff’s worse than nitroglycerine.”
“Were you a technician?”
“I could’ve joined the union if I’d wanted. I always got on with all my crews. They like to talk about their work, like everyone else.”
He went back and sat down. Time had done its work on her face and figure, but essential beauty leaves a glowing memory, stubborn as embers clustered here and there. “Were you an actress?”
She laughed, coughing smoke, and deposited the smoldering stub in a water glass. It spat and died in the inch of liquid in the bottom. “The critics didn’t all agree on that. I used to be Carole Lombard.”
He was silent long enough for her to fish out a fresh cancer stick and set fire to it.
“Jane Peters,” he said. “Lombard’s real name was Jane Alice Peters. I didn’t make the connection.”
“I was still fooling with it until I was almost thirty, when I made it legal. I was Carol without the e until Fast and Loose; my twenty-eighth, for hell’s sake, counting the Sennett shorts. Spelling mistake in the credits. That e made me a star.”
He almost said, It wasn’t that that made you a star, then remembered she was a fraud or delusional. “Lombard’s been dead more than sixty years. Even you said so.”
“I said her plane cracked up. I didn’t say she was in it. I mean I. I’ve been talking about myself in the third person so long I sometimes get to thinking I’m somebody else.”
“Her remains were found on the scene, along with the pilot and all the other passengers. One of them was her mother.”
“I never got over that.” She used the little finger of the hand holding the cigarette to sop a tear from the corner of one eye. “She was my buddy. Pa was nuts about her. Gable, I mean. We called each other Ma and Pa, not Carole and Clark. Sounds like an advertising agency.” She took a long, shuddering drag and seemed to collect herself. “They found some wisps of blond hair and a mass of pulp in a section of fuselage squashed into a block ten feet long. It wasn’t me. I gave up my seat to an army nurse when we landed in Albuquerque to refuel. I told Mom to stay aboard and tell Pa I’d be along later by train. I said it was my patriotic duty, but what I really wanted was to drive him so batty he’d take me right there in the station. We were always pulling pranks like that on each other.”
Valentino said nothing. He’d encountered cases of Alzheimer’s and senile dementia often enough to know better than to upset the afflicted party by contradicting her.
“I scrubbed off my makeup and tied a scarf around my hair before I boarded the train in Albuquerque,” she said. “I was tired of signing autographs and grinning at fans. I found out about the crash when we stopped in Flagstaff, where the newsboys were shouting. ‘Carole Lombard Dead,’ that knocked all the tired out of me. I got out and bought a paper. I didn’t make it through the first paragraph before I fainted.
“I woke up in a doctor’s office. He told me I was pregnant.”
“Clark Gable’s child.” He couldn’t keep the cynicism out of his tone.
She nodded. “In the course of thirty minutes I learned I was an orphan, I was responsible for an innocent young woman’s death, and that I was going to be a mother. It starts you thinking.” She smiled crookedly. He wondered if she’d rehearsed the expression in front of a mirror with Lombard’s picture taped to it. “ ‘Madcap.’ ‘Screwball.’ Those were the words that came up most often when people talked or wrote about me. Not much of a legacy to leave your kid with. I was getting a little long in the tooth to get away with the reputation much longer before it became pathetic. The public already sensed it, and had stopped going to see my pictures. A star fades quickly under those circumstances; neither the doctor nor the people who carried me to his office nor his nurse recognized me. So what was I working so hard for?”
“You’re forgetting Gable. He grieved the rest of his life.”
“When I heard he’d volunteered to serve as a tailgunner in the air force, I almost came forward,” she said. “It was a suicide’s cry for help. But then I realized MGM would protect him if it meant bribing Hitler to send the Luftwaffe in the other direction. And later, when he remarried, he seemed happy. I kept up with him through the trades and film magazines right up until he died. I cried that day, too. But, you see, I didn’t love him.”
Anger flared. He tamped it down through an effort of will. “Gable and Lombard is Hollywood’s greatest love story. Greater than Bogie and Betty. Greater than Pickford and Fairbanks and Garbo and Gilbert and all the rest.”
“You’re overlooking the fact that Garbo left Gilbert at the altar. That Pickford and Fairbanks broke up. That Bogie may have cheated on Betty and vice versa. The rest is PR. You’ve been around this town long enough not to judge by appearances. Russ Columbo was the love of my life.”
“The bandleader. He and Lom
bard were seeing each other when he was killed in a hunting accident.”
“For a long time after that, I expected to die any minute of a broken heart. Well, I didn’t and I knew Pa wouldn’t either. Deep down, under the public show of tragedy, I think he knew we couldn’t have lasted. He’d been through divorce; me too, and it stinks. Drives a wedge right down through the center of your fan base. But everyone gathers around a handsome widower.
“Meanwhile,” she continued, “I had someone new to love, a beautiful daughter. I raised her in Buffalo, New York, which is as far as you can get from Hollywood culture without going Amish. She died four years ago of leukemia, still thinking her father was the man I married, the owner of a fleet of Great Lakes ore carriers.” She flicked away another tear, leaving a smudge of ash on her temple. “By then he was dead, too, so I moved back here, away from the Buffalo winters. The old bastard left me loaded. I never did take his name.”
“Why are you telling me all this now?”
She was busy lighting a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last. She dropped the remnant among the others floating in the water glass. “I keep thinking about that poor girl, that army nurse who took my place on the plane. There’s a family somewhere that doesn’t know if she was murdered or ran away or if she is lying at the bottom of a well. They can identify people now by DNA. If they exhume the body interred under my name in Forest Lawn and run tests, maybe someone can be notified, even if it’s a grandnephew who wasn’t even born at the time of the crash. What’s that word? Closure? Everyone deserves that.”
“Are you telling me the film’s a dummy, just to get me to listen to your story?”
“Of course not. It’s the McCoy. I’ll even let you take a reel with you to screen. Reel three, to guarantee you won’t just run off with it. No one wants to come into a picture in the middle.”
“But why now? Why not years ago, when there was a better chance some of the dead woman’s immediate family was still around to hear the news?”
“Well, that’s not the only reason.” She blew smoke at the ceiling, tipping her head back the way actresses used to do in glamour shots to show the smooth line of a throat. Hers was festooned with loose skin. “It’s part of the price for donating that turkey to UCLA. I want you to tell the world my story. You can use the campaign to promote the film as a vehicle. ‘Lombard Lives!’ Boffo box office.”
He leaned forward, choosing his words carefully. If she wasn’t just posing, his pointing out the basic inconsistency in her story could arouse paranoia and possibly violence. “I don’t understand. I thought the whole point of your not coming forward was to put all that behind you.”
“It was. But I miss it. I miss the fame, God help me. Gable’s gone, Bogie’s gone, Jimmy and Kate and Spence and Bette. At the end they were dropping like leaves, from one Oscar telecast to the next. I’m the only name-above-the-title star left from the glory days. The last dinosaur. I want to feel flashbulbs bursting in my face one more time, put my dainty foot on the red carpet, wave at whoever knows who the hell I am sitting in the bleachers on the sidewalk. Stick my hands and feet in the cement at Grauman’s. I never got to do that.”
“That’s your price? Fifteen minutes more in the spotlight?”
She flashed that crooked smile. “Time is relative. Gloria will tell you I haven’t much longer than that.”
“I can’t promise anything without proof. Will you submit to a DNA test?”
“Absolutely not. Even if you can find some shirttail blood relative to provide a match, I won’t open my mouth for some joker to swab around inside it. How do I know they won’t clone me after I’m gone? There’s only one of me; that’s the selling point.” She extinguished another butt. “I want to be Carole Lombard again. Who wouldn’t?”
He and Kyle Broadhead screened the silent reel in the projection room where the professor showed films to his students. They sat at kidney-shaped writing tables and watched the pubescent star-to-be pretending to be Monte Blue’s kid sister. She was unconvincing, even in pantomime. “Howard Hawks said she couldn’t act,” Broadhead said. “Getting the performance he got out of her in Twentieth Century proves just how great a director he was.”
Valentino said, “John Barrymore told her she was the best he ever worked with. She claimed she learned more from him on that shoot than she did during her previous twelve years in pictures.”
“What are you going to tell the old lady?”
“I owe her a look-see into her story just for this. Do you know anyone who could check and see if any army nurses vanished around the time of the crash?”
“If I knew my way around the Net as well as the worst of my students, I could hack into the Bank of America and finance the whole preservation program. I’ll ask one. Don’t tell me you’re buying into this fairy tale.”
“Give me a break. People who are supposed to be dead are rumored to be still alive every day, and none of them has come out of hiding yet.”
“If you try trotting her out like Princess Anastasia, when it blows up in your face the scandal will do more harm to the program than if this piece of tripe stayed buried.”
“I know.”
“The smart thing to do is to return the reel and call it off.”
“I know.”
Broadhead blew through his pipe. He never lit it in a room that contained film. “So how far do you think you can string her along?”
“What makes you think I won’t do the smart thing and forget all about it?”
“Ten years of daily association. Every loose frame left unaccounted for is an orphan. You’d adopt them all even if it ended in disgrace for you and the institution that keeps us off food stamps.”
Valentino patted his friend’s knee and stood. “Put your whiz kid to work.”
Star vehicles are like peanuts, and twenty minutes of A Perfect Crime created a hunger that demanded satisfaction. Valentino checked out Twentieth Century, My Man Godfrey, and No Man of Her Own — her only appearance on film with Clark Gable — from the university library and watched them back-to-back at the Oracle, using the rebuilt Bell & Howell projector and state-of-the-art composition screen that had set him back two mortgage payments. He had them all on tape and disc, but preferred to watch the classics the same way they were seen back when stars still glittered like gifts from the Milky Way and ushers prowled the aisles ready to expel any atheists who wouldn’t stop talking during the feature.
There in the dark he fell in love all over again with the incendiary blonde who had won the heart of America’s Rhett Butler and hundreds of thousands of moviegoers in New York and San Francisco, Terre Haute and Cincinnati. He had always found her unsympathetic in Century, and so had most of middle America during its first run, but now he appreciated the breezy skill with which she met every challenge from John Barrymore, the prince of players. Her ditzy debutante in Godfrey charmed him as it had William Powell, who despite their real-life divorce had insisted upon casting her opposite his socialite-turned-tramp-turned-butler (and netting her an Academy Award nomination), and although little of the chemistry between her and Gable showed in No Man, it comforted Valentino to see them together again, in a medium where no catastrophe, natural or man-made, could separate them. From her golden hair to her shimmering gowns she glowed, and there was more erotic tension in the arch of her brow and the hollow of her cheek than in the most explicit NC-17 ever shot.
Gable had known that. Valentino rejected out of hand the notion that the spark between them had been just another invention of the flacks in the MGM publicity department. What if all the legends were fake? If someone else had been at the wheel of James Dean’s wrecked Porsche? If Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn had secretly loathed each other? If a stunt double had hung off the high clock in Harold Lloyd’s place? An industry without a healthy mythos might as well churn out bottle caps.
When the last frame flapped through the gate he rewound the final reel and retired to bed and his Deco dreams.
“W
ell?”
Two days had passed since their conference in the projection room. Broadhead had entered Valentino’s memorabilia-cluttered office in his usual fashion, without knocking, swept a stack of French film journals off a chair, and sat scraping out the bowl of his pipe with a Tom Mix penknife he found on the desk.
“Edith Jenkins,” he said.
“What about her, whoever she is?”
“Was. She enlisted as a nurse just after Pearl Harbor, to escape her abusive husband. When she’d been AWOL six weeks, the husband was arrested for questioning, but without a body or any other evidence he was released. The papers lost interest after a while, as they will when the story has no conclusion. She never turned up.”
Valentino started to rise. “Then that means—”
“Don’t get excited. This isn’t a movie, where everything ties together just before the fade-out. She was a brunette. She wouldn’t have left any blond hair in any broken airplane.”
“She might’ve dyed it when she ran away from her husband. Lombard dyed hers.”
“I’m not through.”
Valentino sat.
“This kid’s a freshman, but Bill Gates better watch his back. He dug up a dozen unexplained disappearances involving young women within two weeks of the accident. Two showed up alive later, three dead. No information on whether any of the others were in the army, although two were nurses, a vulnerable occupation then as now. One of them might have signed up under a nom de guerre. Point is the results are inconclusive.”
“Huh.”
“Eloquently put.” Broadhead found high C on his stem.
“We could use that.”
“You could. I’m a publish-or-perish academic. If I start endorsing Elvis and Bigfoot, this institution will retire me on my over-upholstered laurels and I’ll wind up writing paperbacks about alien autopsies and weapons of mass destruction.”
“Your liberal bias is showing.”
“You’re right. Scratch the alien autopsies. So what are you going to do?”
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 793 & 794, September/October 2007 Page 10