Come Back Dead

by Terence Faherty

  Paddy, who’d set a personal record for listening while another person talked, finally chimed in. “Everyone in Hollywood read the same piece. It said that the heir apparent of that company, Tyrone McNally, has strung together a little network of television stations that are earning almost as much as his daddy’s rubber works. But he needs more entertainment to go with his commercials, so he contacted Hughes a few months back and offered to buy RKO’s film library. Hughes made him buy the whole damn studio.”

  While Paddy was scoring his points, Drury raided the box of Havanas and fired one up. Now he leaned back in his chair, stretching his arms up above his head and leaving them there.

  “When I saw that article, I had another one of my visions,” he said, staring at his own smoke rings as though they were secret messages. “I called Mr. McNally and offered to take one of his nine hundred new films off his hands.”

  “First Citizen?” I asked.

  “Oh, no.” He lowered his arms so he could do his scale routine again. Then he looked down lovingly at the lower hand. “The Imperial Albertsons. McNally was happy enough to part with it, a famous box office disaster. He threw in a camera and sound equipment and lights and a lease on a soundstage for peanuts.”

  I had a vision of my own. “You’re going to remake the movie?”

  “Not the whole movie. Just the ending, the part Whitehead and his fellow vandals destroyed.

  “Think of it! All the actors from Albertsons are still alive and well. Joseph Coffin, Ezra Marley, Angeline Van Ness, all the old Repertory One crew. Their characters age over the course of the film, so if anything, they’ll need less makeup now than they did in ’42.”

  “Are they willing to do it?”

  “They’re desperate to do it. They’re dying to do it. That gang owes me about a dozen favors apiece. They all started with me in New York. Hell, they only ended up in Hollywood because I brought them here.”

  “Carried them out on your back, I suppose,” Paddy said.

  He wasn’t going to ambush Drury again, a message the director conveyed with explosive laughter. “Of course on my back. I had to have my arms free for flying, didn’t I?”

  When he’d laughed himself out, he said, “So I had that debt to call in and another, less pleasant one in reserve.”

  “The actors owe you because they helped RKO reshoot the picture,” I said.

  “Yes.” He ground out his barely tasted cigar. “They were all under contract to RKO, of course, and obligated to follow orders, but if they’d stood together, they could have saved my film. The irony is that they thought they were doing it for my own good. That sounds naive as hell, but they were kids themselves back then. They know better now, and they’re anxious to make amends.”

  He was leaning across the desk, his long face looking younger, almost boyish under the Huck Finn hair. “Luckily a movie studio is like your grandparents’ attic on an epic scale: nothing ever thrown away, some fantastic treasure crammed into every nook. So far we’ve found the very camera we used to shoot Albertsons and sound equipment to match. There are even some of the original costumes in storage, although they may need letting out.”

  He stretched his arms up again, his hands balled into fists. “After all these years in the wilderness, I’ll finally have my vindication. There will finally be a second Carson Drury picture, a masterpiece that will make First Citizen seem like nothing more than a step in the right direction.”

  “While you’re counting your chickens,” Paddy said, “don’t forget to subtract the reason you called us in. The sabotage, I mean.”

  Drury was in the process of remembering, his smile frozen in place and his outstretched arms slowly sinking into his lap, when Sue opened the door behind me.

  “They’re waiting for you in the screening room, Mr. Drury,” she said.

  He sprang from his chair before she’d finished her speech. “Toss me a pair of shoes, Elliott,” he said. “Any two as long as one’s left and one’s right. I forgot that I’d arranged for a team of set designers to see the old version of Albertsons this morning. That’s turned out to be our biggest challenge: duplicating the old sets.”

  He came around the desk at a quick march, his untied laces beating time on the tops of his oxfords. “Come on, chaps. We’ll work up an appetite for lunch.”

  Paddy’s appetite hadn’t needed working up for years. He was already breathing emphatically by the time we rounded the guard’s kiosk and traded the air-conditioning for the blazing concrete of the lot. Drury’s wind was fine, but he didn’t waste any on talking until we were out of earshot of the little guard.

  “The sabotage started right after I closed the deal with Mr. McNally, but in a minor key. First my original shooting script disappeared. Fortunately we found a copy in the studio archives. Then some of our tires were slashed. This was out at RKO’s Culver City lot–the old Selznick Studio–where we’re actually shooting.”

  “You’re filming already?” I asked.

  “Yes. You didn’t read that in the Herald or the Reporter,” Drury said with a satisfied glance at the laboring Mr. Maguire. “That’s one of the reasons I picked the Culver City studio: secrecy.”

  “You were anticipating trouble?”

  “No. Just keeping my left up. Part of my damnable reputation is the inability to see a project through to the end. For once I wanted the peace of having to satisfy no one’s expectations but my own. I wanted to work without the building suspense that usually accompanies one of my projects. The ‘How will Drury screw up this time?’ suspense. In its place I got a new kind of pressure courtesy of a faceless, nameless saboteur.”

  I looked for Paddy to take the podium now that we’d gotten to the actual subject of the meeting, but Drury and I had left him behind. He was standing next to a Civil War–era cannon, surely the veteran of a hundred horse operas, pretending to light the cigar he’d gotten from Drury while he caught his breath. At the moment he was patting his pockets for the matches he’d left at home.

  I started back to do the honors, but the long-legged Drury beat me to it. “I think that brings Mr. Elliott up to date,” he said as he produced a silver lighter as thin for its length as he was. He held it out like an olive branch.

  Paddy twirled the cigar in the proffered flame long enough to have gotten a baseball bat alight. “You told me on the phone that events had taken a nastier turn,” he said at last.

  “Yes. Two nights ago someone set fire to the editing room where we’d stored the Albertsons negative. We would have lost it if it hadn’t been for Hank Shepard. He’s the publicist on the project. Maybe I should say ‘secretist,’ since his job so far has been to keep things out of the papers. Hank’s a very flexible guy. He’s also a brave one. When he spotted the fire, he charged in and saved the film cans. He had to make two trips to get them all.”

  “Is he okay?” I asked.

  “Just singed a little. More to the point, the negative came through the ordeal intact. I’m counting on you gentlemen to keep it that way.”

  Paddy had found his second wind. “Who besides D. W. Griffith’s ghost would give a damn whether you revived your fortunes or not?”

  Drury backed away from us as he answered. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t think I have an enemy in the world–just ex-wives and critics who don’t understand me.

  “I’ve got to run now. I’ve asked Hank to answer any other questions you might have. He’s standing guard in Culver City right now. And you’re both invited to the Club Satyr tonight. I’ve rented the place for a little party. Hank’s talked me into taking the wraps off the production, and we’re going to do it in style. I figure if the studio is blown out from under us, we’ll lose the element of surprise anyway. Eight o’clock. Nothing too fancy. Just black tie.”

  By that time Drury was out of range of our questions. He waved once more and loped off.

  “Just
black tie,” Paddy repeated. “He probably expects us to wait tables.”

  We started back for the DeSoto, Paddy setting an especially leisurely pace. I said, “You two hit it off famously.”

  “Did we not,” Paddy said. “What a character. Did you catch that accent? Drury picked up more than shoes when he was in London. And him born and raised in Cleveland to my certain knowledge.”

  Paddy had been born and raised in Baltimore, but there was a wisp of Ireland about his speech–not in his pronunciation but in the way he cast his sentences. At one time I’d thought this was an echo of the immigrants who had raised him. More recently I’d decided that his speech pattern was a souvenir from his days in vaudeville when he’d been a stage Irishman, complete with red wig and greasepaint freckles.

  Drury had probably acquired his slight English accent the same way, after one performance of Hamlet too many. He and Paddy had a lot in common, genius aside. Both were outgoing personalities used to dominating their little corners of the world. It was a not uncommon quality in Hollywood, and Paddy could dim it down when he needed to accommodate a powerful client. I wondered why he hadn’t made that effort for Drury.

  “If you don’t like the guy, why are we working for him?”

  “We’re not,” Paddy said. “You are. He asked for you by name when he called. Any idea why?”

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s just as well. I’ll be tied up for the next few days on that little matter we’re handling for Joan Crawford. As to why you’re working for him, the answer is money. I like to keep a little more coming in than I have going out. The Depression twisted me that way.”

  “I hope Drury paid us up front,” I said. “When he was describing his bad reputation, he left out the part about his checks bouncing.”

  “That part I already knew,” Paddy said. “It may be the secret of the black temper I’m in this morning. I may resent having to take work from Drury in the first place. Time was I would have referred a deadbeat like him to a fifty-dollar-a-day independent down on Hollywood Boulevard. Now I need the business, and I resent needing the business, so I take it out on poor Mr. Drury. Remind me to send him a card at Christmas.”

  I promised I would.

  “While we’re on the subject of money,” Paddy said, “see if Mr. Shepard can tell you how Drury managed to finance this gamble of his. That may give us a handle on the sabotage. In this town when it isn’t ego driving things, it’s always money. Call me at home before you head to the Satyr.”

  “You won’t be going,” I said, and not as a question. As sociable as Paddy normally was, his wife and business partner, Peggy, was shy. She’d never felt comfortable in glamorous Hollywood, despite her own brief career on the stage. She was growing less comfortable as each year passed. And Paddy was less inclined than he used to be to leave her home alone.

  “For once I’m happy enough to please her nibs,” Paddy said. “If I had to listen to one more of Drury’s stories, I might choke to death on a canapé.

  “Don’t worry about dropping me; I’ll take a cab. Give our love to Ella and the sprouts.”

  5

  I drove to Culver City by way of a phone booth and a call to Ella. She was free that evening and genuinely excited about Carson Drury’s plan to revive The Imperial Albertsons.

  “That’s the best idea I’ve heard since you proposed,” she said.

  “We’ve had two children since then,” I reminded her.

  “They weren’t anybody’s idea, chum,” Ella reminded me.

  As Drury had mentioned, RKO’s Culver City studio had once belonged to David O. Selznick. Selznick’s later films had opened with a long shot of the lot’s centerpiece, an office building disguised as an antebellum southern mansion. It was meant to evoke memories of Selznick’s Gone with the Wind, a melancholy association, I’d always thought, since the producer had never been able to equal that early triumph.

  I wandered Tara’s halls for a while without finding Hank Shepard. Finally a young woman in a calico shirt and dungarees took pity on me and directed me to an unassuming building behind the mansion. Tara’s garage, I told myself as I knocked on its screen door.

  Beyond the door someone was typing as though his life depended on it. He yelled for me to come in without slacking his fire. I followed the sound down a cinder block hallway to a cinder block office lit inadequately by the noon sun bouncing off the street outside and through a louvered window cranked fully open.

  When I made my entrance, the typist broke off with a flourish that made me think of Chico Marx’s piano routines. He hit the last key with an extended forefinger, the rest of his hand shaped to resemble a gun.

  “Bang,” he said. “Another press release bites the dust.” Then he swiveled in his chair and extended his hand. It was a big hand, but not a hard one. “Hank Shepard,” he said. “You must be Scott Elliott. Carson told me to expect you.”

  Shepard reminded me of friends from my old artillery battery. That is, he reminded me of the way the friends had turned out. He was a well-fed, peaceful-looking citizen who smiled easily and seemed to mean it. He had wavy blond hair worn a trifle high on his forehead, blue eyes that weren’t as clear as they probably once had been, and big red ears that drooped a little in the reflected sunlight. One of the ears was wearing a healthy coating of petroleum jelly. Despite the heat, Shepard’s white shirt was buttoned at the collar, and his bow tie–white with blue stripes like the curtains in Drury’s borrowed office–was knotted tightly. He had rolled his sleeves up, however. I could see that his left forearm was wrapped in greasy gauze.

  “Your boss told me you’d been singed,” I said. “It looks worse than that.”

  “It does,” Shepard said, holding up his arm so he could admire it. “Luckily this is Hollywood. Nothing is exactly what it appears to be, and nobody’s who they seem. What time do you have?”

  “Two past twelve.”

  “Time for my pain medicine. Care to join me?”

  He pulled a pint of bourbon from its hiding place behind the typewriter and collected two glasses from a little tray held in place by a big water jug. Shepard’s resemblance to my old army buddies was increasing by the minute.

  “I wasn’t burned,” I said.

  “Not yet,” Shepard said. “But you’re working for Carson Drury now, right? So it’s only a matter of time.” He handed me a generous shot. “Consider this something on account.”

  I raised my glass. “To heroism,” I said.

  Shepard held his laugh until he’d downed his drink. “If you’re referring to the fire the other night, that was no big deal. Nothing like winning the Silver Star.” He looked down at my chest to see if I might be wearing mine.

  “Who told you about that?”

  “Just some scuttlebutt Carson picked up somewhere. It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said. I pulled out my pack of cigarettes and offered one to Shepard, Ella not being around to frown at me.

  She wasn’t around, but she wasn’t that far away, either. As I lit my Lucky, Shepard said, “And you’re married to Pidgin Englehart, aren’t you?”

  Pidgin was Ella’s old nickname from her days as a studio publicist. It was short for pidgin English, an unflattering reference to her early writing style. “More of Drury’s scuttlebutt?” I asked.

  “Nope, my own. I broke in with Pidgin at Warners right after the war. A great girl, a really great girl.”

  I thought about working our children into the conversation as a way of wiping the rosy glow of memory off Shepard’s face. In the end I just said, “How long have you been working for Drury?”

  “Since I quit Warners in ’46. It seemed like a good move at the time. Carson was working on The Gentleman from Macao back then. Did you see that one?”

  “Yes. The closing scene in the house of mirrors is a classic.”

  Shepar
d grimaced. “For twelve reels a detective chases this mysterious killer, and all anybody remembers is the shamus looking into the mirrors and seeing the murderer in place of his own reflection. You’re supposed to know then that the killer and the detective are the same guy, two personalities in one body. I don’t think half of the ticket buyers figured it out or cared by then. That was another picture that got some front-office editing after Carson was asked to clean out his desk.”

  “I liked it,” I said.

  “Me, too,” Shepard said. “But I’m no judge of celluloid. If I were, I wouldn’t still be hanging around, waiting for another heartache.”

  “You don’t give this comeback try much of a chance?”

  “Once burned, twice shy, to return to my earlier joke. Let’s just say I’ve lived through more than one of Carson’s comebacks. None of the others had the panache of this Albertsons stroke, though. I can almost see him bringing this one off. If only …”

  That dangling if brought us around to business. I set my glass on Shepard’s desk. “What’s the story on this fire?”

  “Come on,” Shepard said. “I’ll show you the scene of the crime.”

  He led me back out the way I’d come in, briefing me from a little wire-bound notebook as we went.

  “A week ago I noticed that Carson’s copy of the script was missing. He’d left it on my desk when we quit for the night, and the next morning it was gone.”

  “Was the place locked?”

  “Yep. On account of my typewriter, not Carson’s script. But the locks around here are mostly for keeping the doors from blowing open in the wind. The script that disappeared was Carson’s old copy from 1942, which we were able to replace, but the stolen script had years of notes and rewrites scribbled in the margins, which we can’t replace. That may be a blessing in disguise. Only Carson would spend thirteen years defending his original conception as a work of art while all that time he’s rewriting it. He’s like that Wordsworth guy.”