Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  He asked this so adamantly, his voice cracked. He fell silent for a moment, faltering, clearing his throat, and, bending over his work again, began to ink the last pink blossom.

  “That night after your friend came in I went home, thought about it. I wondered if she was one a’ those kids Larry talked about. One a’ the runaways. ’cause that’s what he called them. They were goin’ somewhere together. Where, I don’t know. Probably Timbuktu.”

  Tommy stopped working and stared up at us, a surprisingly tender expression on his face.

  “So, who was she?” he asked.

  The Japanese kirin is believed to be the most powerful creature that has ever lived, mightier than dragons, the minotaur, the phoenix—and even man. While physically powerful, the kirin's true supremacy lies in its kindness, for it uses its strength only to defend the innocent. The kirin is a guardian and protector, the champion of all that is good. It is so kind that it doesn't hunt, but thrives on the wind and the rain, and when it walks it does so without disturbing the grass under its feet.

  In the face of malevolence and deceit, however, the kirin unleashes a devastation that knows no bounds. It lights the sky on fire, creating the reddest of sunsets, and leaping into the air, emits a roar so deafening birds go hoarse, oceans freeze. The ground has been known to shake for a year.

  They have the head of a dragon, the body of a deer, the scales of a fish, the legs of a horse, and the tail of a bull. They usually have antlers or a single horn. The kirin is often depicted with fire all over its body.

  In repose, the kirin is quiet, allowing itself be seen only by the pure of heart. Those who have had a kirin sighting claim it is a lightning-quick creature, with a dragon's head and horse's body, often covered in the luminescent scales of a fish. By all accounts it is an incredible creature to behold, for in whatever spot on Earth it has just left, observers swear that the clouds are always parting, revealing golden sky and sun.

  61

  I handed the printed page back to Nora.

  “Why would Ashley go back to Rising Dragon for the photo?” Nora asked. She was sitting on the couch, Septimus fluttering along the armrest.

  “Maybe the photo had a clue in it,” I said. “Something to help her track down this Spider.”

  “The Spider might have the missing half of the tattoo.”

  I leaned forward, scanning the timeline of Ashley’s movements I’d typed on my laptop. “Devold broke Ashley out of Briarwood on September thirtieth. She turned up at Klavierhaus and played a Fazioli piano on October fourth. Rising Dragon Tattoos on the fifth. Two days later, on the seventh, she reappeared at Klavierhaus. According to the manager, Peter Schmid, she looked unkempt and behaved strangely. On the tenth, she mailed Hopper the package, visited the Four Seasons bar, and hours later fell or jumped or was pushed to her death that night. Somewhere within this eleven-day time frame she checked into 83 Henry Street and appeared at Oubliette and the Waldorf Towers.”

  And last but not least—she went to the Reservoir.

  “It’s almost as if she was visiting important places a final time,” Nora said, “tying up loose ends, taking a last look around, just before she …” She was unable to finish the thought.

  “Before she killed herself,” I finished.

  She nodded reluctantly.

  “Or before someone she was hiding from—or chasing—caught up to her.”

  “Someone like the Spider,” Nora said.

  There had to be some hidden reason that would give perfect logic to Ashley’s wanderings, a reason that wasn’t a resolve to commit suicide. What had Peg Martin said about the family? They mopped life up with themselves. None of them were encumbered by anything. There were no limits. A desire to die at twenty-four wasn’t in keeping with that or anything we learned about Ashley. And if the Cordovas weren’t afraid of what I might uncover, Theo Cordova wouldn’t have been following me.

  I grabbed my phone, buzzing with an incoming email.

  * * *

  To: Scott B. McGrath

  * * *

  From: Stu

  FW: Your Client

  31 Oct 2011 13:59

  * * *

  McGrath:

  This morning I received an interesting request. See below.

  Fondly,

  Stu

  P.S. Are you alive?

  ------------------

  To: Stuart Laughton

  From: Assistant

  Subject: Your Client

  Dear Mr. Laughton:

  Mrs. Olivia Endicott du Pont would like to speak with your client, the investigative reporter Scott McGrath. Could you forward this email to him so he might get in touch?

  Ms. du Pont has a matter of the utmost importance she would like to discuss with him.

  Very truly yours,

  Louise Burne

  Personal Assistant to Mrs. Olivia E. du Pont

  (212) 555-9290

  * * *

  I hadn’t heard from my attorney, Stu Laughton, since I was marooned at that charity cocktail party weeks ago. He’d sent me a text alerting me to the news of Ashley’s death, asking me to call him.

  I hadn’t. Stu was a British aristocrat and inveterate gossip, and if I gave him the slightest hint that I might be returning to my investigation of Cordova, everyone from here to McMurdo Station, Antarctica, would know.

  I dialed his office.

  His assistant answered. After putting me on hold, she informed me, “Mr. Laughton is in a meeting,” which meant Stu was sitting at his desk eating an egg-salad sandwich, playing computer solitaire, and would call me back when he was in the mood.

  To my surprise, it was just two minutes later.

  62

  “You talked,” I said.

  “Haven’t said a word,” insisted Stu on the other end.

  “You must have mentioned my name in connection with Cordova at one of your power lunches, because nothing else explains this.”

  “You’ll find it difficult to fathom, McGrath, but I have other clients and I don’t always discuss you at every hour of every day, though I admit, it’s terribly tricky to pull off, you’re so damn captivating.”

  It was always a mental adjustment talking to Stu. As a posh Englishman, he was so well educated, with such an expansive vocabulary, his briefest conversations peppered with irony and wit and deep knowledge of current events—it was like communicating with Jeeves if he ever anchored the BBC.

  “How do you explain it, then?” I asked.

  “Damned if I know. If, by some miracle of God, Olivia Endicott wants you to ghostwrite her autobiography, take the job. To quote Captain Smith, ‘Grab what you can and fight your way to a lifeboat.’ Everyone associated with the slow printed word is fast becoming the Great Crested Newt of the culture. First it was the poets, the playwrights, then the novelists. Veteran newspapermen are next.”

  “Is that supposed to make me nervous?”

  “Grab the work when it comes, my man. Your competition is now a fourteen-year-old in pajamas with the username Truth-ninja-12 who believes fact-checking a story is reading his subject’s Twitter feed. Be afraid.”

  Assuring Stu I’d call Endicott, I hung up.

  “A means to track down Marlowe Hughes just fell into our lap,” I said to Nora, rearing back my desk chair. “The timing can’t be a coincidence. Someone’s been talking. Someone we’ve talked to or bribed.”

  Nora looked bewildered.

  “Olivia Endicott du Pont wants to meet with me.”

  Nora frowned. “Who’s Olivia Endicott du Pont?”

  63

  “They were sisters. They were actors. And they loathed each other.”

  This was how Beckman always began his favorite true Hollywood story—the Tale of the Warring Endicott Sisters—intoning that last sentence with such Old Testament severity, you could practically feel the sky turning gray, clouds turning inside out, and a black mist of locusts swarming the horizon.

  I’d heard Beckman recount the story at le
ast five times, always after three in the morning after a dinner party at his apartment with his students, when he was amped up on vodka and rapt attention, his black hair falling into his face glistening with sweat.

  I was always game to hear the Endicott story for two reasons: One, feuding sisters fueled the imagination. As Beckman liked to say: “Marlowe and Olivia Endicott make Cain and Abel look like the Farrelly brothers.”

  Unlike the infamous feuds between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, Liz Taylor and Debbie Reynolds, Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine, Angie and Jennifer, the Endicott sisters’ bad blood was kept entirely out of the press—apart from a few blind items in Bill Dakota’s Hollywood “Confidential” Star Magazine—a dead silence that only emphasized its evident ferocity.

  Second, for all of Beckman’s flair for dramatics, his propensity to act out all of the parts as if he were on stage at the Nederlander, on each occasion, every detail remained exactly the same, without any new aspect or embellishment. The story was like a precious jeweled necklace; every time Beckman brought it out, each gleaming detail was cut and meticulously set in the exact same pattern it always had been.

  I’d fact-checked it myself when I was first researching Cordova five years ago, and, by association, Marlowe Hughes. She was his leading lady and former wife of three months, star of Cordova’s harrowing Lovechild. Every name, date, and location Beckman mentioned flawlessly corroborated with public record, so I’d come to believe that this tale of fighting sisters, however wild it sounded, must be true.

  Born in April 1948, Olivia Endicott was Marlowe Hughes’s older sister by just ten months.

  Naturally, Marlowe Hughes wasn’t born Marlowe Hughes. She was born Jean-Louise “J.L.” Endicott on February 1, 1949, in Tokyo.

  Most people enter the world looking like red, shriveled trolls. J.L. resembled an angel. When the nurses spanked her so she’d take her first breath, rather than squealing like a monkey, J.L. sighed, smiled, and fell asleep. From the moment she was brought home from the hospital, it was as if Olivia had become a piece of furniture.

  “Olivia wasn’t ugly,” Beckman said. “Far from it. With dark hair, a sweet face, she was pretty. And yet from the time she was ten months old, she might as well have been chintz curtains when her sister was in the room.”

  They were army brats. Their mother was a nurse, their father a medical doctor at Iruma Air Base. In 1950, the family left Japan for Pasadena, California, though within a few months, their father, John, deserted the family, leaving them in deep debt and forcing their mother to take on work cleaning rooms at a motor hotel and washing dishes. Years later, Marlowe would hire a detective to find her father, learning he’d moved to Argentina with a male retired army colonel with whom he still lived.

  Neither sister would speak of their father ever again.

  The rivalry was there, even in grade school. Olivia cut up J.L.’s clothes and peed on J.L.’s toothbrush. For retaliation, J.L. would only have to show up anywhere Olivia was—at ballet school, at choir—in order to render her “a tiny tear in the wallpaper,” as Beckman put it. Because J.L. could dance, too, and sing. And while Olivia was shy, uptight, and nervous in temperament, J.L. cracked dirty sailor jokes and laughed with her head back. She was a blond Ava Gardner: green eyes, faint cleft chin (as if God, wanting to sign this particular work, had proudly pressed his thumb in there), a face like a heart. The reaction was always the same, from the ballet teacher to the choir director to Olivia’s own friends: besotted.

  Olivia secretly referred to her sister as Jail Endicott, a verbal smearing of her initials.

  They attended different middle and high schools—their mother’s attempt to diffuse the tension—but any boy Olivia brought by the house was unfailingly smitten by J.L. Was she doing it on purpose? Were her looks her fault?

  According to Beckman, it couldn’t be helped.

  “If you’re given a free Aston Martin, you’re going to take it for a wild ride to test how fast it goes. Naturally, as a teenager Marlowe overdid it. If Olivia had done something to her, like steal her math homework or put mayonnaise in her Pond’s cold cream, J.L. would drape herself on the couch and watch The Ford Television Theatre, wearing shorts and a halter top right in front of Olivia’s boyfriend. When Olivia suggested they move into another room, the poor delirious kid wouldn’t even hear her.”

  Olivia resolved to keep friends away from the house, but to keep her sister out of sight was like trying to keep the sun down.

  “So what could Olivia do, a mere mortal chained by way of genetics to a goddess?”

  She ran away from home.

  In 1964, at sixteen, Olivia moved to West Hollywood with two girlfriends from Miss Dina’s Ballet School. Within three months, Olivia had an agent and a small walk-on role in the 1965 film Beach Blanket Bingo. She was hardworking, diligent, rehearsing more than anyone else. Olivia had finally found her voice and her calling, landing roles in television, including Run for Your Life and Death Valley Days.

  “For the first time in her life, she felt she existed,” Beckman said.

  At that point, acting wasn’t even on J.L.’s radar.

  She’d discovered sex, having lost her virginity to a science teacher. But when Olivia was the focus of a short write-up in Variety called “Rising Stars,” for the hell of it, J.L. cut school and went to an open call for the television series Combat! The casting director fell in love with her but knew she needed a better name than the thorny mouthful J.L. Endicott.

  He happened to be reading Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep at the time, featuring the famous detective Philip Marlowe. There was also a ten-cent Los Angeles scandal tabloid in front of him, Confidential: Uncensored and Off the Record, open to an article about Howard Hughes’s rumored narcotic addiction.

  He stitched together a name fit for a movie queen: Marlowe Hughes.

  Marlowe received her big break in 1966 as Woman in The Appaloosa, starring Marlon Brando (having a brief affair with Brando himself), while Olivia languished in bad TV, appearing in bit parts on The Andy Griffith Show and Hawk. By 1969, Marlowe was a star, appearing in four films, her name emblazoned across billboards over Sunset Boulevard. Olivia retreated to New York to try the stage. In 1978, at Warren Beatty’s bungalow party at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Marlowe was introduced to the dashing Michael Knight Winthrop du Pont, a Princeton-educated football player, war hero, one of the heirs to the Du Pont fortune, and the basis for Beatty’s dashing millionaire character Leo Farnsworth in Heaven Can Wait. Everyone called him Knightly, due to his perfect looks and old-fashioned charm. Within three months, Marlowe and Knightly were engaged.

  As Marlowe’s life burned so bright one needed shades, Olivia’s dimmed into nonexistence. Her only booked job was as an understudy in the 1972 Broadway production of Ring Around the Bathtub, which closed the very night it opened.

  The sisters had allegedly not spoken in over thirteen years. But it seemed with one on the West Coast, the other on the East, at last there was enough space between them.

  And then on October 25, 1979: a fateful accident.

  While Marlowe was horseback riding with friends in Montecito, a lawnmower spooked her horse. It reared and bolted, leaping over a fence and onto Highway 101, throwing Marlowe from the saddle. Miraculously, she sustained only multiple fractures to her left leg, though it was so severe doctors ordered her to stay at Cedars-Sinai hospital in traction for two months.

  Every afternoon, Knightly came to her bedside to read to her. When the months were finished, doctors decided she needed another few weeks. Knightly continued his visits—until one day he was late and the next day, later, and on the third day, he didn’t show up at all. After a ten-day absence, during which Marlowe heard nothing from him, he finally appeared at the hospital.

  He announced their engagement was off. Apologizing, sobbing out of his own sadness and guilt, he presented Marlowe Hughes with a black pearl ring, the platinum band inscribed with four words: Fly on, beautiful child.

>   Marlowe was devastated. Nurses claimed she tried to throw herself out of the window in her room. Four weeks later, two days after she was released from the hospital, The New York Times made the stunning announcement: “Du Pont Heir ‘Knightly’ Marries Olivia Endicott, Actress.”

  It was a private ceremony at the family’s estate in the Hudson River Valley.

  No one, not even Beckman, had any idea how Olivia had pulled it off—where she’d met Knightly or how she’d transferred his affection for Marlowe, one of the most beautiful women in the world, onto her, an ordinary woman. Some suggested it was hypnosis, even a deal with the devil, starting with the fateful horseback-riding accident.

  Or was it simply an unfortunate coincidence?

  Marlowe never spoke publicly of the incident, though years later, when she was asked about her sister in an interview, she said: “I wouldn’t piss on Olivia if she were on fire.”

  She did fly on—or at least tried to. Marlowe married three times: to a set designer in 1981, to Cordova in 1985—their union lasting just three months, though he was able to extract a stunning performance from her in Lovechild. She married a veterinarian in 1994; they divorced just four years later. She had no children. In her forties, Ms. Hughes found herself sliding down that character arc of so many movie goddesses before her: She became mortal. She aged. Roles stopped coming. There was plastic surgery, whispers of a painkiller addiction, and after an embarrassing appearance in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, in which her makeup looked like it’d been applied with crayons, a quick cane-tug exit from the public stage.

  Olivia remained married to Knightly. They had three sons. For the past twenty-seven years, she sat on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the most socially exalted position in the city, and still does.

  “Marlowe got the fame, Olivia the prince,” Beckman would intone in a low voice, his eyes sparking in the firelight. “But who won at life?”