Hollywood Gothic

by Thomas Gifford

  Morgan put the diary down and closed it. “So, the refrain repeats itself like an infinity of mirrors. Money, women, insults, hysteria, threats of violence … she keeps talking about trouble at the studio, how worried Aaron is about the mess, the scandal, but she never says what the hell it is … this still in 1947. She went ahead and did the big musical in 1948, but she tells it like it was, talks about how she started hitting the bottle, how her nerve was gone, how Aaron kept taunting her with his women, how he spent the money she’d made. God, why didn’t she leave him? Did she need him, Toby? In some weird way?” She munched a piece of cheesecake, reached over and poked the coals.

  “I very much doubt if we’ll ever know. Long time ago, one side of the story, and who the hell knows what kind of kicks they gave each other? But the point is, somebody was lying. Aaron certainly lied to Sol when he told him about Donovan and Goldie having the diaries. Aaron told Sol that the nasty truth about Kay was going to wind up in Cosmopolitan or someplace, what was going to get noised around was the awful truth about poor hysterical, sobbing, gambling, womanizing, embezzling Aaron! Well, shit, that would never do … and it would sure never do for Sol to know what was in the diaries. Aaron is still scared half to death of the old man, you can see it in his eyes and the way his hands shake when the old man arrives. Hell, Donovan probably offered to show the diaries to Sol and sent Aaron back into a 1947-style frenzy. You gotta believe that Donovan let Aaron know what was in them … and you can imagine what those diaries meant to Goldie—I really get the point of her excitement, for the first time. She was really about to nail Aaron head-on, not obliquely by dragging Kay through the mud. It was Aaron himself who was going into the toilet.” He shook his head, grinned philosophically. “You have to give Goldie credit. She’d hated Aaron all these years—now, I assume because of what she’d seen him do to Kay—and she wasn’t about to forgive and forget. She was taking Aaron apart for Kay, at least as much as for herself.”

  Morgan said, “Aaron must have wanted the diaries destroyed more than anything—”

  “Look, he could’ve burned them himself and it wouldn’t have done any good. Photocopies … but, you’re right, I suppose he would have felt better, logic be damned.”

  “But with Donovan and Goldie both dead, the diaries burned, well … that sounds a lot safer to me.”

  “Then you think Aaron killed Donovan? And Goldie?”

  “He looks like a better bet all the time.”

  “Except for one thing. No guts.”

  Morgan sipped cold coffee, tiredly brushed a strand of blond hair from the corner of her eye. “He may not have lots of guts, Toby, but think of it this way. What would he be more frightened of—killing people or facing one Solomon Roth who knew about the actual contents of the diaries?”

  They sat silently, listening to the rain outside.

  Challis said, “What’s that envelope?”

  “Oh, that … it was stuck inside the back cover of the last diary. Bent the cover all out of shape.” She fingered the envelope, plucked weakly at a red rubber band.

  “Well,” he said, trying to work up some kind of impatience, “what is it?”

  “Can’t we call it a night?” She tried to cover a yawn and missed. “No, silly, we can’t call it a night when Toby is still awake.” She handed him the envelope. “I haven’t got the strength.”

  He rolled the rubber band back. “Checks.” He shrugged, dumped them onto the coffee table. “Lots of checks.”

  Working together, they sorted the checks into piles by dates, beginning in 1954. Through 1968, the checks were all signed by Kay Roth, dated at irregular intervals, fifty-six checks totaling $16,800. From the death of Kay Roth in 1968 until early in 1970, there were no checks at all. Then they began again on a monthly basis, eighty-seven more checks totaling $39,150, all signed by Goldie Challis. There were seven checks signed by Jack Donovan, up through December 1977, again on a monthly basis, adding up to $3,500. They were all made out to the same person. One hundred and fifty checks. $59,450. Almost twenty-four years. One recipient.

  “So who the hell is Priscilla Morpeth?” Challis sagged back and massaged his calf, moaning.

  Morgan, eyes closed, leaned against the couch, shook her head. “Is she in the diaries?”

  “No,” Morgan said.

  “All three of them, Kay and Goldie and Donovan—they’re all writing checks to Priscilla Morpeth. A quarter of a century, for God’s sake.”

  “And they’re all dead, Toby.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “Somehow Priscilla Morpeth doesn’t strike me as the name of a blackmailer. Pay up, Sluggo, or Priscilla will stop round and beat the shit out of you. No, it doesn’t play.”

  Morgan stretched her long arms over her head, pulling her sweater tight across her small breasts. Challis was almost too tired to notice, almost. “Y’know,” she said, “that name is familiar … Morpeth …”

  “It’s a street in Westminster, by the cathedral, a couple of blocks from Victoria Station—”

  “I mean a person,” she interrupted, “I can remember somebody … no, I guess I can’t, but I think I should be able to … something Hollywood, somebody in the business. My father, I remember something he was talking about, and Morpeth came up in what he said. But it’s gone, I can’t get it. Dammit!” She rubbed her eyes. “I’ve had it, Toby. Bed.”

  She made up the couch in her library, kissed him good night, and staggered off to her bedroom.

  His exhaustion was complete. He lay on his back with a dim light casting blurred shadows. Morpeth … The walls were covered with photographs Morgan had of movie people, a gallery. They looked down at him. Maria Montez. Turhan Bey. Buddy Ebsen. Donald O’Connor. Charles Coburn. Phyllis Thaxter. Charles Laughton. Bill Demarest. Veronica Lake. Mary Murphy. John Kerr. Bruce Bennett. Richard Denning. Christ, it scared him … he knew them all, didn’t miss a one. Nobody in the world should be able to identify all those people. Two murders … Hitchcock looked down from the wall above his head, eyes bulging from gray pouches of fleshy tissue, a fisheye lens. Goldie and Donovan … How many people knew two murder victims? One in a million, maybe … no, longer odds than that. … Priscilla Morpeth sure hadn’t been lucky for Kay and Goldie and Donovan. Vernon might know. That was a thought—Vernon Purcell. He wished he were holding Morgan … the little breasts, the long body flexing. But his last thoughts were of Vernon Purcell.

  21

  SHE WAS WAITING AT THE breakfast table on the patio, dressed in gray Jax slacks and a turtleneck in forest green, reading the Los Angeles Times, absentmindedly pushing a buttery piece of toast into her mouth. She waved without looking up. “Bring your own coffee,” she called. The fog seemed not to have moved, and the city continued to recede behind it, as if ashamed of an awful secret, looking for somewhere to hide. He brought his coffee and sat down. The cold wet air felt good. He burned his tongue on the first sip. “I don’t think Aaron killed anybody,” he said. “That was middle-of-the-night talk. I mean, what the hell can Sol do to him now for embezzling a little money thirty years ago? Treat him with scorn? So be it. Aaron would need more of a prod than that.”

  “Look at The Hollywood Reporter. Page one, lower right …” She went after another piece of toast while he read:

  LAGGIARDI NEW TV

  HEAD AT MAXIMUS

  Howard Laggiardi, a New York lawyer-accountant, has been named new chief of Maximus TV, it was announced by longtime CEO Solomon Roth. “We have chosen this outstanding young man from outside our industry,” Roth said, “because it is increasingly obvious that a fresh objectivity is required in an era of change and new challenges which weren’t dreamed of as recently as a decade ago.” Laggiardi is already officed on the Maximus lot. At 31, he is one of the youngest men ever to hold a position of such power within a major video production studio. In a brief statement, Laggiardi noted that he intended “to maintain a low profile, keep my nose out of the creative end, and attend to the numbers and learning some
thing about the business/art mutant that television is.”

  Challis looked up and frowned. “He’s a Trojan horse for Vito. Right? Vito’s inside the gates. Next he’ll try to put a skateboard under Aaron, send him off with a knife in his back, and wait for Sol to keel over of natural causes. And if that takes too long, well, you can always fiddle with Mother Nature.”

  Morgan finally looked up from the Times. She smelled like a garden in the rain. She licked butter from her upper lip. “It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? What did Vito have to do to get this Howard the job? Is it tied in with Aaron and Donovan romancing all over town? What a dance card those three make—Aaron, Jack, and Vito. Ouch. Whattya think?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve spent twenty years trying to figure this kind of Hollywood doodah, and I don’t think I’ve ever come close. Maybe Howard went to the Maximus personnel office, filled out an application, took the Minnesota Multi-Phasic, and got the job. No, you don’t think so … well, I suppose not. Am I in the papers somewhere this side of the funnies?”

  The fog carried rain. The wind shifted, and he felt the spray.

  “You’ve been demoted to the Metro section,” she said, “but you have a wee headline of your own, which is something. You’re still missing, as you have doubtless surmised, and the search of the mountain has been called off. Fellow in charge says there’s maybe a ten-percent chance you got down off the mountain, and they are pursuing the Bandersnatch lead and interviewing ‘the wanted man’s former associates.’ Do you think anybody will tell on you? Your agent? Anybody?”

  “I doubt it. They’re all too busy planning my getaway. No, I haven’t met a solitary soul who wants me back in jail … they just want me gone. I’m not complaining, just confused. The rich, the powerful, they pay late—”

  “They don’t pay at all. You know that.”

  Sirens were going again as more houses slid down more canyon walls.

  “Did you remember who Morpeth was?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Well, I know a man. He’ll tell us.”

  Vernon Purcell was the rarest of the rare, a man who had turned his back on Hollywood success and found his own kind of happiness by letting himself go, submerging into a haywire world uniquely his own. Almost everybody who had known him in the old days, when he had held court from his own perfectly central table at Romanoff’s, when he had been the architect of a dozen hugely successful careers and responsible for scores of the most publicized pictures ever made, almost all of those old friends had lost track of him and figured he was dead. As far as the business went, he was dead. But he was only living in Santa Monica.

  The little bastard-Spanish stucco was so worn and chipped that it blurred into the thick furry fog. A scruffy palm that needed trimming listed until it had finally come to rest like a bleary old wino against the cracked red tile roof. A bus stopped in front of the house, picked up a woman wearing a snood, wheezed blackness out of its backside, and ground on down the wide, empty street. Challis parked the Mustang behind a mailbox. He was sweating in the thick humidity.

  “I called Vernon early this morning,” he said. “I told him that it was indeed me, and Vernon just laughed. Vernon looks at life’s passing parade and just doesn’t give a shit. So relax … dammit, I forgot to tell you to wear a gas mask. If you can’t take it after a while, just step outside. It’s not fatal.”

  Vernon Purcell, five-foot-eight and three hundred pounds, met them at the door wearing clothes he hadn’t changed in a month. He had lived in them, eaten in and on them, bathed his seventeen black cats while wearing them, and slept in them. His thin gray hair was plastered straight back from his pale, fleshy face, giving him a youthful, innocent quality, though he was pushing seventy. There was a brown crust at the neckline of his heavy T-shirt which seemed at first glance to be an extra chin crease. He smiled at Challis, his eyes floated sleepily, and the first shock wave of his peculiar scent hit them. Morgan turned her head and coughed into her fist. Kitty litter? Sweat? Cooking smells?

  “Tobias,” he said, his voice a still-strong tenor, “I never thought I’d see you again. How long has it been? Ten years? Twelve? Come in, both of you … you’re just in time to see me put the finishing touches on an oddity.” He parted the sea of black cats. To the left the kitchen rotted, dozens of plates speckled with fossilized pork chops and scrambled eggs and tacos, all developing a growth of mold. Dishes of cat food; one small ragged-looking animal bathed in the water dish. “Over here, an original four-color poster from The Sun Also Rises … Ty Power, Miss Gardner, Eddie Albert, Flynn at his best, and young Robert Evans.” Purcell stood back and viewed the poster, which was framed under glass, hooking his thumbs in his pockets, rocking on his heels. “Found this in a junk shop in Petaluma. Mounted it on white linen, painstaking work, and I have to keep the cats from walking all over it, but now it’s worth eight-hundred and fifty dollars to a collector in Santa Barbara.” He stood back admiring the poster, which was garish and appealing. “And so it goes. The years pass, Tobias, and now they’re all pretty much the same. Which is just the way I wanted it.”

  “I finally wore out my soundtrack from that picture,” Morgan said.

  “Tobias? A fellow collector?”

  “The lady I mentioned on the phone.”

  “Of course, Dyer’s daughter.” He smiled at her and creased his bulk ever so slightly in the hint of a bow. “Your father’s picture Man in the Fog had a wonderful poster. Quite a demand for it. I sold one in mint condition to a Japanese collector about a year ago. Two thousand simoleons—my way of getting back at them for Pearl Harbor.” He wheezed like a man with ground glass and Elmer’s glue clogging his throat. “Miss Dyer, I have become a human archive, a repository—or refuse dump, maybe—of movie history, paraphernalia, trivia, a resource, if you will. Perhaps Tobias has recounted to you my bizarre story. I was once somebody in this town, but I suppose the industry, the profligacy of it, the waste and the sorrow of the reality of it, I suppose it wore me down … too many years in the sun, you finally go crazy—that is, if you have any brains at all. Instead of wandering off to a mountaintop and howling at the moon, instead of going religious, I finally discovered that the movies themselves are what matters about the business—not the poor jerks and fools and greedmongers and ruined idealists and outright criminals who make them. Not even the good, decent people who somehow survive and succeed—they aren’t what matters. They aren’t important to anyone but themselves … it’s the movies that matter. And I know more about them than I should. For instance, I’ve got six soundtracks of The Sun Also Rises in the original wrappers, never played, and one is for you. … Coffee? Tea?”

  The mustiness of the room seemed to suck the breath from their lungs. Both Challis and Morgan declined, sat down carefully on a cat-hair sofa, and waited while Purcell waddled off to the kitchen and added the smell of steaming tea to the overall miasma.

  “Are you okay?” Challis whispered.

  “Mmm.” She kept her mouth tightly closed, rolled her eyes.

  A large black cat with green eyes like pumpkin seeds wormed its way out from under a stack of ancient, dusty Hollywood Reporters. The animal’s face was festooned with dust and cobwebs. There were two Mickey Mouse lamps at the end of a leatherette couch which belonged in a rundown bus depot. A perfect framed poster of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House was propped against a six-foot-high stack of forties press kits; the poster was a masterpiece, all the copy and art laid over a blueprint.

  Purcell wedged his way back through a wide archway stacked tight with newspapers, file folders, books about movies, and the dented fender of an old Thunderbird. He sipped tea from a Porky Pig mug and handed Morgan the soundtrack recording. “In fond memory of your father, my dear. One of the industry’s very good, very decent men, and you may quote me on that.” He wheezed mightily and lowered himself into a wicker porch chair that had once been apple-green. Over the years the apple had spoiled, gone bad. Creamy tea dribbled over the rim, ran dow
n Porky Pig, and added several more splotches to his grim plaid shirt. “Now, Tobias, you mentioned that you had a question for me.” He rubbed the stubble on his face. The only life in his face came from his tiny eyes, waiting for the question, the challenge.

  “Morpeth,” Challis said.

  “Ah, poor Morpeth …” Purcell slurped his tea, wiped his mouth with the long sleeve of his undershirt, which projected from beneath the rolled back cuff of his plaid shirt. “Morton Alexander Morpeth, born 1920, died 1947, a man of little consequence and therefore largely unnoticed in our little community. His demise created a very minor stir, mentioned in passing for a day or two at Romanoff’s, the Brown Derby, Schwab’s. Then he slipped into the unimportant past.”

  “What happened to him, Vernon?”

  “Well, it’s a strange story, if you have a moment?” He raised his eyebrows, which appeared to have been both greased and plucked. Challis nodded, motioned him onward. “Morty Morpeth was a member of the postwar English community, which stuck together fairly closely in those days. I only met him once, as I recollect, he was a lean, tallish gent, one of those sandy Englishmen. Bit of an adventurer, something of a hero in North Africa with Montgomery … he’d seen a lot and he gave the impression that there were things going on under the surface that you might not want to know about—there were a lot of men who came back from the war who gave off that sort of aura. A bright, literate young man. I remember asking him what he thought about Southern California, and he surprised me by quoting my own favorite novelist—that of course, would be J. B. Priestley. He said he agreed with Priestley, who had summed it up, ‘We’ve more nutty people to the square mile here than anywhere on God’s green earth. … It’s just one big loony bin.’ Well, you had to like a fellow who could come up with that on the spur of the moment.”