1954: ninety-day sentence in Amarillo, Texas, for shoplifting
1955: occasional disc-jockey and raconteur on Arkansas radio station, but he was fired for persistent use of obscenities on the air. He said he just couldn’t eliminate them
1955–56: worked for a chain of supermarkets as manager for stunts and promotions
1956–57: arrested for brawling in Wichita, Kansas; assigned to State Mental Hospital for observation, and released
1957: drifted north; time in McCook, Nebraska, as railroad maintenance man
1957–58: into South Dakota; barman in Rapid City, fired for haranguing customers; to Fort Dupree, worked as member of a garbage crew.
On June 8, 1958, Carruthers went into the offices of the local newspaper and demanded to be interviewed. A reporter sat with him, to humor him, and the young man said that as “a decent, enterprising American who liked to listen to the other man’s point of view, I have got nowhere.” He added that he was about ready to do something. A week later, he supposed that the paper was not going to run his story. On June 17, he met Holly Sargis, and June 29 he shot and killed her father, set fire to the Sargis house, and he and Holly drove away, toward the buttes. She was an impressionable girl, and all agreed he was a rousing talker.
They led the life of hideaways that summer, living in the forests and then beating out across open country into Montana. The thing that tickled him was stopping off in small towns to take a look at how he was doing in the newspapers. In that summer he shot Sargis, and two, three, four, some hunters that stumbled on their tree house, then five, an old friend of his, six, seven, the two kids who happened by—he shut them in a shelter and fired into it—and then a policeman who came after them, that’s eight.
He was stopped finally on a back road in Rosebud County, not far from the Little Bighorn battleground. He was taken back to Rapid City in South Dakota to be tried. He gave interviews and pleaded guilty, and when the judge asked if he had anything to say, he talked for twenty minutes, saying that Holly Sargis hadn’t been old enough to know what was happening, and how he’d started to get respect after he killed some people. Then he said he hoped he’d get the juice, and he did, in the state prison, January 23, 1959. In his last interview, he asked to be known as “The Dakota Kid” after he had died, and if he didn’t rise again. But he had donated his body to science, and they cut him in pieces.
WALDO LYDECKER
Clifton Webb in Laura, 1944,
directed by Otto Preminger
In 1935, at the peak of his fame, and just before the scandal that ensured this would be his only honorary degree, Waldo Lydecker was dressed in an academic gown at Pembroke College and asked to speak to the senior class. He surprised the occasion by offering not some barbed remarks on how young ladies should behave, but a heartfelt tribute to the example set by Charles Dickens. Among his few intimates, it was remembered that he sometimes quoted from the English novelist, did own a set of first editions, and may have inspired a passion for Dickens in the young Welsh actor Emlyn Williams.
The journals of Waldo Lydecker cannot yet be published: too many mentioned and mocked there are still alive. But I have had an opportunity to examine them (my thanks to the Steffensen Collection at Wesleyan University) and I believe that this will be the first public revelation that “Waldo Lydecker” was born Walter Little, in 1893, in Portsmouth, the English south-coast port, where Dickens had been born, eighty-one years earlier.
He was the son of Elsie, a boardinghouse keeper in the Fratton district, and of a sailor, Arthur Little, who was lost at sea in what we must now call the first Battle of the Falkland Islands (in 1914). Young Walter, an only child, grew up with few advantages and poor schooling, earning coppers collecting glasses in Portsmouth public houses and being an errand boy for sailors on shore leave. Fond of horses and always slight, he was an apprentice jockey in the years 1908–11, familiar at the various stables and racecourses in southern England. However, a controversy over his rough riding at the Goodwood meeting of 1911 put an end to his career, and it was noted that, thereafter, he went into employment with bookmakers.
At around the same time, he fell in with traveling theatrical companies, working as an actor and a writer of romantic lyrics. This seems to have been a happy time, in and out of scrapes, as Walter roamed that lovely, gentle part of England, playing Malvolio at Haslemere one evening, and taking bets at Plumpton races the following afternoon. There is some evidence that Walter appeared a few times on Fred Karno’s houseboat at Tagg’s Island, on the Thames, and the possibility that he had shared the homemade limelight there with the young Chaplin. More intriguing still, although no text survives, it is clear that Walter adapted a stage version of Nicholas Nickleby that played in Brighton, Bournemouth and Portsmouth in 1914—“the last summer of enchantment” Waldo once called it in his New York column.
He was conscripted into the British army in 1916, shortly after the death in Rye, Sussex, of Henry James. Walter had been employed in the James household, to read to the dying novelist, a task that may have accounted for the rather stilted grace of his speech. Whatever, he went from reading Dombey and Son to James to khaki and drill in a few weeks, and he might have died in the Flanders mud but for an emotional involvement with a lieutenant (Walter was only a private) from one of the nation’s most distinguished families (the de Winters). No action was taken by the authorities, and no evidence preserved. However, in 1917, Walter Little was discharged, without comment, and sent back to England. The country had changed, and Walter was not the same blithe young man. He had influenza in 1919, and was never strong again. There were incidents with the police and a squalid business with a canon at Chichester Cathedral.
Escape came in the form of work as a steward on the Cunard line, and so Walter Little arrived in New York in 1920. The city and the prospect of a fresh start there thrilled him, and a year later he quit his ship at the docks and hailed a cab.
The next few years are vague: the journal ceases, as if its author were busy transforming himself. It is certain that Walter Little went to Los Angeles, to the new picture business. While there, he became Wallace Lydell, an extra and a stringer for gossip columns. But in 1928 he surfaced as Waldo Lydecker, running a salon in Santa Monica that never let its own notoriety detract from the verve with which it pronounced on the stupidity or iniquity of others in that city. Waldo started a column for a Hearst paper, rose quickly to syndication, and appeared to relish the fear and loathing of many film stars. Without stooping to sensation, let me just say that he was by then a promiscuous homosexual who ran the dangerous gauntlet of reporting on liaisons and human mishaps observed among his own circle of associates. Attacked once or twice, he adopted a walking stick and did nothing to discourage rumors that it sheathed a weapon.
It was in 1931 that Waldo moved to New York to make the nation as a whole his target. In an interview given at that time, he indulged the legend that he was Hungarian and of noble birth. This was the foundation of his reputation as a model of Manhattan manners, correcting speech and table arrangements, advising on dress and deportment, but always, somehow, remaining a law unto himself. It was the Lydecker secret that while he intimidated others with etiquette, he behaved like a libertine of insult, deploring, criticizing and making himself a fountain of sarcastic rebuke, all in the name of politeness.
In addition to his column, he had a regular radio program on CBS, a potpourri, in which he wearied of current affairs, recommended restaurants and designers, and read from Dowson, Swinburne and Tennyson. There were books—How to be Insulting but Forgiven (1934) and The Caustic Christmas Book (1937)—overly mannered, to be sure, but amusing still and forever spiked by the nervy line drawings of Norman Clyde, Waldo’s close friend in those years.
Lydeckerism was characteristic of the smartest American cities of the 1930s—glamorous, heartless and addicted to fads and cults. In fact, Waldo had a healthy streak of ordinariness: he enjoyed Laurel and Hardy; at home he fed on rice pudding and blan
cmange; and even when he posed in his marble bath, at the typewriter, for Cecil Beaton, he took care to wear shorts in the water, of what looks like a very garish plaid. He lived on Park Avenue in two apartments knocked into one and furnished with ostentatious “taste”: “It’s lavish, but I call it home.” He was fond of bogus antiques that deceived guests, and he was a sleeping partner in the company of “Lejon Fils, Paris” (to be found in Hoboken), specializing in Louis XV reproductions.
By this stage he was too prominent to escape the public censure that followed his arrest in Central Park for soliciting a sailor. He was fined $5,000, and he “retired” from his column for over a year. He came back eventually, for Kane papers, but never with the same space or brio. His nerve had been shaken; there was a new edge of jittery malice in his talk and writing.
No longer feared, sometimes laughed at, he was lunching at the Algonquin one day in 1942 when Laura Hunt, fresh in advertising, approached him to endorse a pen for which her agency, Bullitt’s, had the account. That he accepted impressed Miss Hunt as a testament to her winningness. Waldo’s diary says simply that he appreciated how a young actor in the restaurant noticed him only when the “glaringly luscious” Laura appeared.
The entire patronage of Laura Hunt was for ulterior motives: she was bait in a time when he feared his own looks were fading, not much helped by a new mustache. He made her, “if it counts for anything to make this city notice a selfish sexpot from Nebraska who will give as much head as it takes to get ahead.” He would say anything for a laugh. Behind her creamy back he ridiculed her—especially to Tavorian Jacoby, the painter he coaxed into doing what he regarded as a swooningly vulgar portrait of Laura. In time, Miss Hunt discovered his real scorn and did anything she could to oppose him. “My dear,” he said to her one night, “if you only had real intelligence I would have to kill you.”
Laura threatened to expose him, and he urged her to do her worst. He felt his life was a bore, marginally alleviated by a teenage protégé named Falco. Perhaps Waldo meant to murder Laura that sweltering weekend in August 1944; perhaps he knew that Diane Redfern, a model, was staying in Laura’s apartment and put both barrels of buckshot in her face as a warning. Whatever the answer, self-destructiveness had set in, and his fate was fixed when—in the course of the investigation—Waldo made an erudite pass at the detective in charge, Mark McPherson, and then explained its raw meaning. Forty-eight hours later Waldo was dead, shot by McPherson’s assistant in Laura’s apartment, as he lunged theatrically at the heart-shaped face he had made famous.
I cannot write that without flinching—my arm jumps out—to protect her, or is it because I have imagined myself aiming at her? In the years since, I have sometimes cursed Laura and supposed her desire accounted for my action. We imagine others with so much more zeal than we ever see ourselves. We are like close-ups in a movie, staring into the dark so that we do not have to face the camera or the discipline of being seen.
Am I jealous of Waldo, because he discovered Laura when I wanted to be her auteur? We watch in a crowd, sure the picture is ours alone.
LAURA HUNT
Gene Tierney in Laura, 1944,
directed by Otto Preminger
“Only prettiness,” I say out loud in the quiet house, flipping through the packet of photographs in Laura’s file. The prints fall like rubber leaves, preserved but unnatural. I put them in order long ago to trace her life. There is always the same body—from when she had a career as a model—a promontory of bare shoulder and the taut slopes of her breasts, arising from this or that cast-satin evening gown, or the season’s most tastefully risqué swimsuit. There are painted clouds behind her, ghosts of sky. But what was risqué in the 1940s only makes her smile naive now; unless you were young then and grew up with her.
Her body has a hundred heads on it, all turning to be seen, to catch some fleeting lens or lover, to monopolize a nightclub flashbulb. In every picture, the face wants to gobble up its watchers. But look at twenty pictures and you notice it is those “pretty” eyes that are at bay, and her face that is being eaten. The mouth is open, and the teeth are polished tablets. Her tongue, in the dark slit of her lips, is as blatant as 1942 or 1943 allowed, and sometimes there is a saucer of saliva in her mouth, ice to skate on in December.
I would as soon do without these photographs; there will be no illustrations. The sharp corners and the clammy sheen of these prints feel dangerous. They make anyone they “take” the viewer’s slave, an unfree being, a woman “taken in photography.” The movement in movies is redemption for the death in photography.
To look at Laura’s glossiness here I could despise her. Put the stills away and I can recall the trembling white woman who took me to her cool body at the Pierre and let an afternoon swell with unspoken healing. It must have been a very sudden, chaste love we made; there was nothing expert about it. I have kept her pictures, but I seldom look at them. I do not want to make a shrine of her or what we shared. If we did share. Two people can come away from such an afternoon in love, or in love with love, but strangers in their sense of the words. And if I ever felt, leaving the Pierre, that knowledge or wisdom had come down on me like grace to save me—even now I say “healing,” pouring the word into the wound—I had to learn that the brief touching had ensured all the rest of the damage. The afternoon had prepared me for the night.
Laura Hunt was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1920, the younger of two daughters, the Hunt girls teenage Omaha called them in the 1930s, when it seemed possible that their parents, two tall worriers, might have in one characterless home the best actress and the prettiest girl in America. Their father was in insurance and their mother was the maker of some forty-five thousand wholesome and lacklustre meals in a scheme of regularity which never quite blanked out the speck of a visiting madness. Once a year, when the prairie wind stirred her nerves, their mother went domestically crazy, taking apart clothes she had made or snapping the handles off every cup in the house. Then she was sensible again, and her life resumed its level, grounded stretch. Every few years, their father bought sets of new crockery at a sale.
The other sister, Mary Frances, was three years older than Laura. She was not unappealing, not unappealing, but she deferred to her younger, more accessible sister; she was somber in her expressions and outlook, except when on the stage. There, and only there, Mary Frances Hunt came to life. People who had seen her acting sometimes passed her by backstage, no matter that they were on their way to give her flowers and to tell her she had a remarkable future. But I married her.
“Muffy,” said Laura one day, “if you looked like me you would be Margaret Sullavan, but if I acted like you I would only be … Hedy Lamarr. As it is … ” I know, I heard it, and winced at the smart, three-quarter accuracy. The true dilemma was much stranger. On stage, Mary Frances was beautiful, but she had not one spark of Laura’s lust for getting ahead and pretending. Laura could worm her way in anywhere, she was slippery and convincing. But Mary Frances waited to be asked, and stood back from crowded elevators. It was called timidity by most people, but there was an iron door of suppressed vanity there, a fearful pride too great to speak. She was a great actress, but too shy or too ashamed to talk about it.
Laura was a poor actress, fussy and overdone: in one gesture on stage she became blurred. So she drifted, from regret, into being a liar and a user. There was no plan or malice to it; it was the sign of how much her prettiness troubled her. But so close in age, they grew up together, Laura with beaux and secrets, Mary Frances with Electra, Hedda Gabler, Perdita in The Winter’s Tale and an implacably closed-off inner self. Which I once thought I could free. For, in 1938, rather than risk New York and the theater, Mary Frances Hunt had a breakdown: it was called marriage, to put the theater out of bounds. She is alive today, alive tonight, upstairs like a threat, but she has never got over it. Laura found herself alone, all the more determined to leave Nebraska and impress the world, but guilty because she was a mere pretender, untouched by acting’s genius.
She started east in 1939, and in Iowa she entered a beauty contest under the name of Mitzi Glass. It was a hysterical adventure to disprove her own reputation. But, mortified, she won and had to smile for the slow photographers of Des Moines. One of her prizes was a ticket to Hollywood—“Good God!” raged Mary Frances—but Laura went steadily east, out of love with herself, yet wooed twice on the train. In retaliation, she surrendered to a traveling salesman who called her “doll” and roughed her up when he was satisfied. “My lovers are always disappointed,” she said years later at the Pierre Hotel. “They expect me to be Cleopatra, but I am as plain as Nebraska!” Did she think I was let down?
For two years in New York she was a photographers’ model, kept by several men, indulged, idealized and then dropped so often that she became brittle if not breakable. She might have been more in the city, but she was too hostile to herself to try hard, and too attractive to want for much. She lifted herself out of this dismal hole in 1942 for nothing but money. Laura went into advertising, so that she could sometimes send a check back to Nebraska. The challenge reminded her of her old ability to get whatever she wanted.
And so, in 1942, she broke in on Waldo Lydecker’s solitary lunch at the Algonquin and asked his austere celebrity to endorse a fountain pen for an advertisement.
“Does it work?” he asked her, signing the menu.
“Does it matter?” she replied, dipping a breadstick in his hollandaise and sucking it clean.
They neither of them appreciated it, but Waldo and Laura were two “personalities” yearning to escape their base selves. He schooled her, and did not think of touching her. She learned about fame, imposing herself, and how the means of mass communication told the dreamy public what to think. “I am always addressing the vast unknown,” said Waldo, “just as you in your photos are looking out at those you will never meet. We are both of us without private character.” She met influential people, and she found that she enjoyed advertising just because she saw through it: it was a way of bringing prettiness to any cause or commodity, spreading the joke. It was a language not spoiled by aging or lack of substance. Laura Hunt was one of the first in America to guess that people bought magazines for the legendary prospect conspired in by all the advertisements. It was a new culture, movies in your lap.
Suspects Page 5