The Ticket Out

by Helen Knode

  I sat down, set my bag down, and smiled back at her. What an actress; she had a trained voice and impeccable delivery. I hoped I could keep up with her.

  I said, “And screw the cops, right?”

  Mrs. May blushed. “Your language, dear.”

  “But you did tell Scott they were here today.”

  She nodded, patting my knee. “Of course I did—he’s aware of it. For whom do you write, my dear?”

  “The L.A. Millennium. You might know Barry Melling—he’s a friend of Scott’s.”

  “Friend and mentor—he’s been very helpful to Scotties career. If you don’t mind my saying, you’re awfully darling for a reporter.”

  I smiled. “Where was Scott when he called? We could reschedule right now.”

  She went vague suddenly. She said, “Where was he?”

  “I mean, where can I reach him?” I pulled out my pen to write down a phone number.

  She smiled and patted my pen hand. “Oh, no, no—not now, dear. Call him tomorrow. He said you should ask me about the Casa. It’s an important inspiration for him.”

  I knew that Lockwood would want me to humor her, to see where it led. I leaned down and pulled out my notebook. “Scott must have named his company after the Casa de Amor.”

  Her smile got beatific. “The Casa de Amor is my whole life.” She lingered over the Is in “whole” and “life.” Wholllle llllife.

  I said, “I’ve always been curious about this place. I’m over at the Thalberg a lot.”

  “We’re going to be declared a historic landmark.”

  “Really? What’s historic about it?”

  She smiled. “The Casa is a Temple of Love.”

  Too wild, I thought. I wrote down “TEMPLE OF LOVE.” Mrs. May liked that; she waited until I finished to go on.

  “It was built in thirty-seven by people from Metro—as a lark, I think, because it is a bit much, honestly, all the hearts and whatnot. Even I’ll admit that.”

  “Nineteen thirty-seven. So it’s the same age as the Thalberg Building.”

  She nodded. “Metro owned this land and the bungalows were built as a trysting spot for studio executives. They kept their lady friends here, or rendezvoused in the units that were empty. It was a wonderful, magical retreat from the world.”

  Or a cross between a casting couch and an extramarital romper room. I said, “How did the men get here without being seen?”

  “...How?...Oh, yes, how? Well ... in those days, you’re right, there was no wall and you could see the Thalberg plainly from here. The men drove, yes ... and they parked behind.... We had open carports in back that led to the courtyard. They were closed years ago, when we closed off the rear for security reasons.”

  I was watching Mrs. May; something was bothering her. As she answered my question, she looked away and lost focus. I said, “What’s the matter?’’

  “No, no, nothing, dear.” She looked back, smiling. “One’s memory goes at my age. Heavens, I’d forgotten all about those old carports.”

  I said, “How did you come to be here?”

  “I? Do you mean the Casa, or Hollywood?”

  “Both.”

  “Oh, you’ve heard my little story many times. Little ballerina from the sticks wins a beauty contest and goes to Hollywood with big dreams. I was lucky, though. I met a producer, an adorable but very married man, rest his soul. He found me a place at the Casa.”

  “And now you own it.”

  “I do, dear. Harry passed away and left me comfortably off, and I bought the Casa in ’69 when it was put up for sale. It’s sad, don’t you feel, that the greatest studio of all has come to the worst end? Metro hardly makes pictures anymore. When you think of their glory days, it’s very sad.”

  She looked to me for agreement so I nodded. Since the late 1960s MGM had been raided and sacked, mismanaged and chopped into pieces. Kirk Kerkorian sold the back lot to developers, auctioned the movable property, and co-opted the lion logo for hotels and airlines. United Artists was added, subtracted, and added again. Ted Turner took the film library. MGM the company moved, and rented out the lot. The last renter, Lorimar Telepictures, bought the lot, then sold it to Sony. A shifty Italian moneyman owned MGM for awhile in the early ’90s. He was foreclosed by his French bank, who sold the company to I forgot who, and now Kerkorian owned it again. MGM hadn’t shown a profit in thirty years.

  Mrs. May said, “I’ve tried to keep the Casa just as it always was, and I only rent to fallen women with pasts as spotted as mine.” She smiled.

  “Scott Dolgin isn’t a fallen woman.”

  She stopped smiling and her eyes misted. “I think of Scott as the son Harry and I could never have. Scotties my special boy.”

  She folded her hands and stared into space. I didn’t think she was acting: Dolgin was her special boy.

  I said, “Are you sure I can’t call Scott now? I really have to nail down an interview.”

  She wasn’t listening. I said, “Mrs. May, can’t I call—?”

  “Flo, dear.”

  “Flo, can’t I—?”

  She turned to me. “What did the police say about Scottie this morning?”

  “They wanted to know if I knew where he was.”

  “You were with them a long time.”

  I shrugged. “Scott’s a friend, and I think their suspicions are stupid. Just because he was working with Greta Stenholm.”

  Mrs. May patted my knee. “That’s what I think, too.”

  She reached for her bucket of garden tools and stood up. I said, “Did Scott go alone?”

  She patted me again. “It was nice to meet you, dear. Don’t worry, everything’s fine.”

  She walked across to her bungalow and went inside. I waited a minute to see if she’d come back.

  When I decided it was safe, I got up, walked down the path, and started ringing doorbells. I rang and waited, moved on to the next bungalow, rang, and waited. I’d been sent there to debunk the landlady’s story, and I was determined to do it. Some other tenant might have seen Scott Dolgin, or Isabelle Pavich, or the two of them together.

  I worked my way around the courtyard and rang all the bells. Not one single person opened up.

  I stood beside the fountain, scanning front doors. There were people inside the bungalows; there had to be. The signs came slowly. Venetian blinds separated, and old women peered out. I walked up to the nearest window. The blinds snapped shut, but I caught a glimpse of glassy eyes and a gray Medusa head. I crossed to another window. Another glimpse: sloppy dye job and flowered housecoat. I took off running. I ran up to the end of the courtyard and ran back. Blinds snapped shut as fast as I could arrive.

  But I’d seen enough.

  Mrs. May only rented to women with pasts? This looked like the harem of the living dead.

  I’D LEFT my car in front of the Casa de Amor. I walked out to use the car phone, and glanced across the street toward the Sony lot. I tried to picture the view before Sony put up the high wall and even higher trees. The Thalberg Building was invisible from the bungalows.

  I followed the line of the wall. There were two men standing together on the far corner of Washington. I stared: I knew them. One was Jack Nevenson. The other was Neil John Phillips’s neighbor—the obnoxious guy who caught me in Phillips’s garage and wouldn’t tell me where Phillips was.

  Nevenson and the neighbor turned down Madison and headed for the lot entrance. Without thinking, I started across Washington. Brakes squealed and people leaned on their horns. I jumped back on the curb, took a look at traffic, and ran up to the corner. I punched and punched the crosswalk button, but the light was long. When it finally changed, I sprinted across the intersection, ran down Madison, and stopped at the lot entrance. I craned for a look inside.

  I couldn’t see them.

  The street entrance was guarded by a kiosk and a gate. Access was easier for pedestrians. A car pulled up and distracted the guard. I slipped behind the kiosk, ducked into the trees, and ran to the f
ront of the Thalberg. Nevenson and the neighbor weren’t around. I kept running, past buildings with false fronts and up the road between the soundstages. I checked the side alleys off the road. They were nowhere—damn.

  I ran back and tried the gift store. I tried the commissary across from it. The cafe and restaurant were empty after lunch hour. I searched both rooms, and even tried the emergency doors. They weren’t there either.

  I ran back to the Thalberg. It said COLUMBIA PICTURES over the entrance, and the lobby was lined with Oscars won by Columbia movies. I walked up to the reception desk and asked the guard if two guys had just come in. The guard shook his head.

  The lot covered thirty acres—I could run all day for nothing. But I didn’t want to give up so soon. I walked outside, picked a bench, and sat down in the shade. From there I could watch the street entrance and the Thalberg at the same time. I tried to be inconspicuous; I’d get kicked out without a pass.

  I sat watching people go by. A studio lot was a busy place, but I got bored real fast. After a while my eyes moved automatically and I let my mind wander.

  I started thinking about the Thalberg, looming up in front of me. The Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Building.

  It was a massive, bright white Moderne building, with streamline and WPA influences thrown in. I’d never been a starry-eyed lover of classic Hollywood, not like some movie fanatics. But when I went to my first Thalberg press screening, even I had felt the glamor and the weight of movie history—

  Two men walked up the ramp from the Thalberg basement. It wasn’t my guys. It was two Japanese men with attaches stamped SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT.

  Irving Thalberg...

  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s first head of production. The studio system’s first boy wonder. The Academy had named an Oscar after him, and posterity elevated him to a god. I’d even heard a local historian argue that Irving Thalberg invented Hollywood as we knew it.

  I didn’t think I’d go that far. But if the film industry was founded on the conflict between Art and Commerce, then Thalberg was the first producer with enough power, taste, and profits to take the fight to its highest level. He was the creative force behind MGM for eight years; his philosophy and methods established the new studio and an Industry standard. He oversaw hundreds of the types of film that Hollywood still considered its best achievement. He took the big-budget star-studded studio movie as far as it would ever go. He also showed what Hollywood could never do because of the constraints of business, and the business mentality.

  When he died in 1936 he was only thirty-seven. Louis Mayer had hated Thalberg by the end. He hated the Thalberg legend; he hated the Industry perception that Thalberg, not Mayer, had made MGM. At the funeral Mayer supposedly said, “Isn’t God good to me?” But they named the new administration building after Thalberg...

  ...and set the Art-Commerce battle in stone.

  I reached for my notebook. Against all predictions, and despite some rough years, Sony had not tanked in the motion-picture business. There was a “Ghost of Irving Thalberg’’ piece in there somewhere.

  I started making notes.

  The building stood by itself, outside the original studio walls, on the eastern tip of the lot. The architecture was not imaginative. It looked more like a post office or a bank than the center of redhot artistic activity. But that was the point. Art happened inside the studio walls, on the soundstages and back lot west of the building. The Thalberg was administration, the Thalberg was Commerce. It guarded the studio gates and anchored the rest of the lot—a counterweight to ephemera, a reminder of what Art cost. If you want to send a message, the Thalberg Building said, you buy your stamps here.

  I stopped writing and smiled. I’d had a cynical thought. Commerce had triumphed over Art in corporate Hollywood. The battle now was Commerce versus Commerce: conflicting ideas about how to get the most return on the studio’s investment. There was a Thalberg quote I read once—I didn’t recall it exactly. Someone brought him an oddball idea and Thalberg said something like, “Sounds interesting, let’s do it. The studio made enough money this year.” It was a different planet.

  I looked up.

  Irving Thalberg had been bugging me ever since Neil John Phillips’s garage. I remembered Penny Proft’s remark: the only person Phillips would nuzzle was Irving Thalberg.

  He was a strange hero for a guy like Phillips. Nobody cared who Irving Thalberg was anymore except film cognos and Industry fossils. Besides which, Phillips aimed to be the greatest screenwriter who ever lived. But he had to know that MGM was a producers studio. Thalberg’s treatment of writers was famously bad, although he worshiped literary talent and routinely overpaid for it.

  I watched two men walk out the main doors of the Thalberg. They weren’t who I was looking for.

  That coincidence was strange, too. What was Jack Nevenson doing with Neil John Phillips’s neighbor on Phillips’s sacred MGM turf?

  I shut my notebook and jumped up. Jesus, I was dumb. How could I be so dumb?

  The neighbor guy was Neil John Phillips.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I SAID, “WHAT does Neil John Phillips look like?”

  Hamilton Ashburn rubbed his nose. I’d tracked him down across town at Raleigh Studios. He was directing a movie; that’s why he hadn’t returned my phone call last week. He’d made it clear that he was extremely busy, and could only talk between camera setups.

  The soundstage was freezing. Ashburn had on a big parka and woolen mitts. I suggested going someplace warm—outside in the sun, or under the lights of the set. But Ashburn wouldn’t leave the stage, and he didn’t want me to see what he was filming. So we stood in a dark, cold corner. I turned up my collar and held it closed around my throat.

  He said, "Neil is medium. He’s medium-sized, and his hair’s medium brown. He’s hard to describe—there’s nothing to distinguish him physically.”

  Ashburn was pretty medium himself. There was nothing to distinguish him from a jillion other young directors. He wore the usual accessories—baseball cap and wire-rim glasses—and had a typical beard. He also disliked Phillips: that much was obvious from his tepid testimonial.

  He spoke into his walkie-talkie. “Lisa, bring my binder.”

  An assistant rushed up, gave Ashburn a binder, and rushed off again. Ashburn opened the binder and showed me a group photograph he kept inside the front cover. It was the USC Film Class of 1996.

  I spotted Penny Proft and Greta Stenholm. Ashburn pointed to a face in the second row. He said, “Neil.”

  It was him: the obnoxious neighbor. He had the same spoiled expression, but a lot more hair.

  Ashburn closed the binder and checked his watch for time. “Why do you care if Greta was murdered? What is she to you?”

  “She wrote a screenplay that she said tells the truth about the condition of women.”

  Ashburn nodded. “GB Dreams Big.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “I know that Neil cowrote the script.”

  I shook my head. “Penny Proft said their partnership broke up years ago.”

  “But Neil couldn’t get work after The Last Real Man, and Greta needed structural advice. Neil told me he did a complete rewrite but left his name off the final version. Greta agreed to split the fee and share credit once the script sold.”

  “Do you know who’s agenting the script, or who bought it?”

  Ashburn rubbed his nose. “Neil was letting Greta handle that part. I haven’t read anything in the trades.”

  “Do you know if Scott Dolgin was involved at any point? I heard you were doing work for In-Casa Productions.”

  Ashburn curled his lip. He didn’t like Dolgin either. “Charity work. All you need to start a production company is a telephone and some friends, and Scott has no friends. He scraped up backing somehow and came to the SC crowd for material. We unloaded all the stuff our agents couldn’t sell. Only Neil was writing original work on spec.”

  I said, “Why’d Dolgi
n come to the SC crowd in particular?”

  “Because he knew us. He was in the producing program until they asked him to leave.”

  That connection clicked into place. I knew Dolgin had been thrown out of film school; I should have put it together sooner.

  Something else clicked. I said, “Do you know Isabelle Pavich?”

  “Who?”

  I described her. Ashburn listened, and shrugged. “I’d forgotten the name. She’s Scott’s girlfriend—works some nothing development job.”

  “Did she go to USC?”

  “Not with us.” He checked his watch again.

  “Greta thought In-Casa was a farce but Dolgin told people he had projects going with her.”

  “If he did, it's because Greta had no choice. She hated Scott. He’s been in love with her since school, but she hated him.”

  Ashburn's assistant appeared, holding up five fingers. Ashburn checked his watch and waved her away.

  I had to hear it again. I said, “Scott Dolgin was in love with Greta Stenholm?”

  “And Greta was in love with Ted Abadi. You know what happened to Ted?”

  I nodded.

  “I still wonder about his death. The police suspected Greta, which is insane. She was devastated by the murder, as Neil was—as we all were. It was a tough break for Neil. He never got another agent, and nobody thinks his career will recover.”

  “Greta never got another agent either.”

  “But CAA had already let her go. It was her own fault—she made herself unmarketable with her ball-busting ideas. That’s why Neil broke up with her in the first place.”

  I said, “He agreed to rework GB Dreams Big.”

  “Neil would do anything to get his career back. He saw the commercial potential of the script and wanted to attach himself to it.”

  I shivered and rubbed my hands. “If Phillips is so career minded, why did he sabotage himself over The Last Real Man? Why’s he so nutty for the old MGM? What does that get him when Hollywood’s frame of reference is hit movies from the past two years?”

  The walkie-talkie crackled: “Ham, we’re ready.”