Groucho Marx, Secret Agent

by Ron Goulart

  “As I recall, the majority of them went into fits.”

  “Hardly any of the fits fit, however.” Groucho slowed as we passed the Filmland Wax Museum. That was where the crooked cop had tried to do us in. “Ah, look at how I’ve fallen in public esteem.” He stopped, scowling.

  One of the large circus-lettering signs in front of the place invited:

  SEE THE COMEDY HALL OF FAME!! LIFE-LIKE IMACES OF ALL THE GREATS!!

  BOB HOPE

  W.C. FIELDS

  CHARLIE CHAPLIN

  LAUREL & HARDY

  CHARLEY CHASE

  Joe Penner

  Wheeler & Woolsey

  Benny Rubin

  The Marx Brothers

  The Ritz Brothers

  “At least you’re billed above the Ritz Brothers,” I pointed out.

  “I admit that Benny Rubin is much more hilarious than I can ever hope to be,” he granted. “But most of these other parvenus can’t hold a candle to me. Which is just as well, since I might catch fire, and then where would we all be?”

  “Suppose we continue on our—”

  “If I had my choice, I’d like to be in a little grass shack in Hawaii,” said Groucho. “In fact, when I was in Hawaii I did shack up with … but you were saying?”

  “We’re supposed to be calling on Linda Gilkinson.”

  “Why didn’t you think of that earlier, Rollo?” he said. “Yes, old man, that’s an excellent suggestion.”

  Twenty-seven

  There were at least three cats in the shadowy parlor. A white one was sprawled across Linda’s Gilkinson’s lap, while a calico was prowling a bookcase shelf that contained a scatter of dusty crystal balls, a collection of yellowing scrimshaw, and a skull made of off-white plastic. The third cat was lurking behind the sofa that Groucho and I were sharing. It frequently scratched at the rug, making low, mournful noises.

  “The cats belong to Dolores—I promised to look after them while she’s on vacation,” Linda was explaining. “That’s how come I have the key to this dump. Dolores bought the Madam Ayesha dodge from the previous Madam Ayesha summer before last.”

  “Did the cats come with the franchise?” I asked.

  “Only the white one.” She was a blonde, in her late twenties and on the border of being plump. Her dress was a flowered print, and she wore a pale blue ribbon in her hair.

  Groucho produced a cigar from a pocket of his beige sport coat. “You were a close friend of Len Hickman.”

  She nodded, sniffling twice. “I was pretty much his fiancée,” she replied. “Is it true that you two fellows found him?”

  I said, “We did, yeah.”

  She sighed, used the small embroidered handkerchief she had balled in her left hand to wipe at the tip of her nose. “I really don’t think I want to hear the details.”

  “How long had you known him?” asked Groucho, lighting his cigar. “Ever since May, when he came out to Warlock Pictures to—”

  “You work for Warlock?” I asked.

  “Used to, as a script girl,” she said, absently petting the cat. “I quit a month ago, and I’m supposed to start working at 20th Century—Fox the second week in December. If I dare come out in the open by then.”

  “We’d very much like to hear the reason for your being in hiding, my dear,” said Groucho. “But first, perhaps you can tell us a bit more about how you happened to meet Len Hickman, alias Pearson, and what he was doing at the studio.”

  “He’d come out to talk to Warren Lockwood and Val Sharkey,” she explained, touching again at her nose with the handkerchief. “Afterwards, Len came over to the set of the Ted Timberlake picture I was working on to talk to one of his buddies who’s a grip.”

  “You met and fell in love?”

  “Pretty much so. At least he asked me out,” Linda said. “Usually I don’t much like redheaded guys. They’re too short-tempered and inclined to hoist a few too many. Len, it turned out, was different, and—”

  “When you met him, Lockwood had just hired him to keep an eye on Eric Olmstead, hadn’t he?” asked Groucho.

  She said, “Yes. He wanted Len to pose as a valet and take the place of the guy he’d just paid to give Olmstead notice. He provided Len with some fake identification, forged some letters of recommendation, and personally suggested him to Olmstead. It was Sharkey told Len he was going to be known as James Pearson.”

  “According to what we’ve found out, Lockwood wanted somebody inside the house to keep an eye on Dinah Flanders once she and Olmstead got hitched,” said Groucho, taking a puff of his stogie.

  “That was part of it, sure,” the blonde said. “I also think Lockwood was jealous of Olmstead, still had a crush on Dinah. And, too, he wanted to make sure Olmstead didn’t do anything to hurt her, since he considers Dinah Flanders his property.”

  I asked, “How did Len report to Lockwood?”

  “Always by telephone, because Lockwood didn’t want anything on paper,” Linda answered. “Every other day, between ten and midnight, Len had to telephone a number that Lockwood gave him and report to either Lockwood himself or Sharkey.”

  After exhaling smoke, Groucho asked, “When did Hickman find out that Olmstead was a Nazi agent?”

  When she straightened in her chair, the surprised white cat hopped to the floor. “You know about that, too, huh?”

  “We do, but we’re always willing to learn more.”

  “Len had been a private investigator for about ten years, and he’d done inside jobs like this before, where he posed as a valet or a chauffeur to get the goods on somebody for a client,” Linda said. “He knew how to snoop around and find out just about everything that was going on in a household, you know. So he tumbled to the fact that Olmstead was linked up with a fifth-column bunch headed up by that kraut bastard, the German consul Spearman. Len also found out that Olmstead was getting code messages and sending them out.”

  I asked her, “What about the safe?”

  She smiled briefly. “That was a cinch for somebody with Len’s background, a snap to crack,” she said. “So he’d check the contents every once in a while. That’s how he found out that Olmstead had been in on smuggling some plans out of Lockwood Aero.”

  “Were the plans turned over to somebody?”

  “Nope, Olmstead burned them rather than give them to any of Spearman’s Nazi gang,” she said. “See, what happened was, the way Len had it figured, Olmstead had really fallen for Dinah in a big way. The sap was going to try to quit the whole spy setup and just be Mr. Dinah Flanders from then on.” There was disdain in her quick laugh. “A lot of these guys who work in the movies too long start to believe that all that hokum that takes place on the screen has a chance of happening in real life. That’s mostly a lot of hooey, but Olmstead thought it was going to happen for him.”

  “He was working under the supervision of the Gestapo,” said Groucho, shaking his head. “That’s not the kind of job you can quit simply by giving two weeks’ notice.”

  “He sure found that out, didn’t he? They started threatening him, warning him if he didn’t do exactly what they wanted, he’d be up the creek,” she said. “Olmstead had a bad heart, and he passed out a couple times after they warned him.”

  Groucho leaned forward, resting his cigar hand on his knee. “You visited Hickman at the mansion,” he said.

  “Sure I did,” she admitted. “Sometimes I’d stay the night, if Dinah and Olmstead were off someplace. Fact is, I even stayed over some nights when they were home. Len had—”

  “Hickman/Pearson had a private entrance to his quarters, meaning you could drop in and depart without anybody knowing about it,” said Groucho.

  “Nothing wrong with that, is—”

  “Those are your things in the closet and in the middle drawer of the bureau,” he continued, watching her.

  “Spare undies, stockings, a robe, a couple of dresses, and a pair of mules, sure.”

  Groucho tapped his cigar on the edge of the onyx ashtray that
sat on the end table. “Were you there the night Olmstead was killed?”

  Linda leaned back in the armchair. She took a slow breath in, exhaled even more slowly. “Len sent me home. I had my own Plymouth coupe parked down the hill.”

  “Was that,” persisted Groucho, “before or after Olmstead was shot?”

  She started to say something, hesitated, then flinched when the calico cat succeeded in slapping one of the small crystal balls off the shelf.

  It hit the imitation Persian carpet, rolled against her foot. She picked it up, rubbed it along her sleeve. “Get off there, Muffin.”

  The cat ignored her, began slapping at the fake skull.

  “Before or after Olmstead was shot?” repeated Groucho.

  She let the crystal ball drop from her hand, taking another slow breath in and out. “That’s why Len is dead.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It was muffled, but we heard the shot,” said Linda. “That was about four in the morning, and it woke us up. Len put on his robe and, very quietly, went to see what it was. You see, they hadn’t intended to kill Olmstead then and there. But there was a fight and … well, he got killed.”

  “Len saw who did it?” asked Groucho.

  After a few seconds the young woman answered, “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  She shook her head. “He didn’t, I swear, tell me,” she said. “What happened was he saw them leaving the mansion. But they didn’t see him.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “Len came back to his bedroom, told me to dress and get the hell out of there,” she said. “When I asked him what had happened, he only told me that Olmstead was dead. Then he …” She shook her head again. “This is where it all went wrong, Groucho. Len said he figured there were at least two ways he could make a lot of money out of this.”

  “Blackmail,” I said quietly.

  “That’s right, Frank,” she said. “I told him what he ought to think about was making sure nobody shot him, but he insisted this was the biggest break that had come his way so far. Jesus, he sounded like one of those dopes in a James M. Cain novel, you know.”

  “He was,” suggested Groucho, “going to blackmail the killers and the Nazi agents?”

  She said, “Yes, that’s why he took a letter of Olmstead’s out of the safe. He’d come across that a couple weeks before. See, Olmstead had a feeling his days were numbered, and he—”

  “We know about the letter,” Groucho told her.

  “What’d he do after you left, do you know?” I asked her.

  The calico cat whapped the skull clean off the shelf, and this time Linda jumped to her feet. “That’s enough of that, Muffin,” she said, lifting the chubby cat off the shelf and dropping her on the floor.

  “What did Len do next?” said Groucho.

  “He cracked the safe, took whatever was in it that he thought would do him some good,” she said. “Then he went back to bed, and at about seven the next morning, he called Warren Lockwood at that private number, pretended he’d just discovered Olmstead’s body. Lockwood, Sharkey, and some other of the studio cover-up boys got there about an hour later.”

  “And Lockwood decided they didn’t want too much bad publicity, so they’d forget the Nazi spy angle and write this off as a suicide,” said Groucho.

  “That’s it, sure, Groucho,” she said. “Sharkey gave Len an extra five hundred bucks to keep his mouth shut and not mention that there was no gun. Lockwood brought in the FBI before he called the cops. By the time the local law got there, they were simply told what they were to do.” She shrugged. “You know, nobody argues with J. Edgar Hoover’s boys.”

  “And the FBI didn’t want any news about the spy ring leaked out until they had more proof,” added Groucho.

  “When’s the last time you heard from Hickman?” I asked her.

  “That next day,” she said, sniffling again. “He stuck around until Dinah moved back in to the mansion, then very quietly folded his tent and took off. If he’d talked to me first, I would’ve tried to convince him that what he was planning was a mistake. He called me from a phone booth in San Pedro someplace, filled me in on some of what he planned to do, and said he was going to stay out of sight for a while.”

  “Meaning he was going to the Catalina hideaway,” I said.

  “I knew he had a place someplace on the island, but I didn’t know where,” said Linda. “I was never there. We were close, you know, but he sure as hell wasn’t the confiding type.”

  Groucho snuffed out his cigar. “Who do you think he was blackmailing about the murder of Olmstead?”

  “I’m not certain,” she said. “But I can make a guess.”

  “Do,” Groucho invited.

  Twenty-eight

  The little neighborhood movie theater across the street from Larry Shell’s studio was running a Marx Brothers double bill. On the narrow marquee it announced, “Comedy Festival! The Marx Brothers in MONKEY BUSINESS and HORSE FEATHERS.”

  As he parked his Cadillac on the rainy afternoon street, Groucho observed, “That’s their idea of a festival? Sitting around in a Santa Monica flea pit watching a bunch of superannuated street urchins cavorting?”

  “If people are looking for excitement, they don’t come to Santa Monica anyway,” I pointed out, opening my door and disembarking.

  Stepping out into the rain, Groucho unfurled his small polka-dot umbrella. “And why would any rational human being sit through not one but two Marx Brothers movies?”

  “It’s raining out,” I suggested, following him along the wet sidewalk to Larry’s studio.

  “True, but I’d rather get drenched to the skin than endure endless hours of such piffle.”

  “One man’s piffle is another man’s comedy.”

  Groucho said, “Did I ever tell you that Eugene O’Neill was miffed about Monkey Business? That was because he’d been intending to use the title for a play of his and had to settle for Strange Interlude.”

  The white lettering on the glass door of Larry’s photographic studio read simply, “L. Shell, Photographer.” The buff-colored window shade was pulled all the way down, and the door was locked. I knocked on the door.

  “Then when O’Neill penned Ah, Wilderness, he was hoping to entitle it Ah, Duck Soup, but once again we beat him to the punch,” added Groucho while we waited in the doorway. “It was, as I recall, a fruit punch laced with bathtub gin. The tub itself was later used by Admiral Byrd when he circumnavigated the globe. That was because you couldn’t become a member of his congregation unless you’d been circumnavigated first.”

  The door was unlocked and opened. “Hi, Frank,” greeted Larry. “Hi, Mr. Marx.”

  “Don’t be so formal, my boy,” said Groucho. “You can call me just plain Haile Selassie.”

  The outer office was small, and the narrow redwood desk had stacks of glossy photos spread out atop it. There were a few framed news photos on the off-white walls.

  Larry closed the door, locked it again. “I made contact proofs of everything that was on those other two rolls of film I shot at Lockwood’s Halloween party the other night,” he told us. “I imagine you fellas want to see everything.”

  “Such is our avowed wish,” answered Groucho, closing up his umbrella and leaning it against the eagle-topped hat rack.

  I asked the photographer, “Did you spot anything of interest?”

  “I didn’t go over all of them that closely,” he replied. “But I did notice a few interesting shots. C’mon.” He headed for the door to his work area.

  The day was fading, the rain was hitting hard at the wide slanting skylight. Larry crossed over to a switch, turned on a couple of wall lamps.

  Groucho and I were leaning over a worktable. Spread out on top of it were six sheets of photographic proofs, each with a dozen small photos. We’d just started studying them, and Groucho was holding a magnifying glass Larry’d provided.

  We stood at the left-hand side of the long table, still studying the fir
st sheet of contact prints.

  “Alas, I see that Paulette Goddard wasn’t entirely faithful to me during the course of the evening,” observed Groucho, pointing to the third shot in the top row with the handle of the magnifying glass.

  “Nor you to her.” I tapped the second picture in the third row, which showed him dancing with Bette Davis, who was in a Queen Elizabeth costume.

  “I was merely called upon to stand in for Errol Flynn in that instance,” he explained. “I don’t know exactly what Errol had been standing in, but he had to go change his boots before continuing to—”

  “Here’s an interesting tableau,” I said, pointing to a shot two over from the Groucho-Davis one.

  “Chap in what appears to be an Attila the Hun getup talking to that chump who’s Ted Timberlake’s stunt double,” said Groucho, scanning the photo proof through the magnifying glass. “And so?”

  “That guy decked out as Attila,” I said, “is Werner Spearman, the German consul in L.A. I saw him in a newsreel the other afternoon, warning the United States not to mess around in Europe.”

  “Spearman is also a local representative of the Gestapo.” Groucho frowned.

  “He and Les Michaelson seem to be having a cordial conversation,” I pointed out.

  Groucho picked up the contact sheet, held it toward me. “Notice Michaelson’s cowpoke costume,” he suggested. “It’s dripping with leather fringe, in the movie-cowboy mode.”

  “Black fringe,” I said. “If a piece of that fell off his shirt, it’d look a lot like a length of dark leather cord.”

  “Much like the elusive piece of string you viewed before getting bonked on the skonce out at the Warlock studios.”