Shooting for the Stars

by R. G. Belsky

  It all seemed so simple to the cops back then. Now, of course, there was a whole different story—and a lot more questions.

  By the time I was finished, I had made a lot of notes and written down a lot of names. The major people I wanted to talk to were:

  Beverly Makofsky, Laura’s mother

  Edward Holloway, her husband

  David Valentine, Laura’s father

  Sherry DeConde, the ex-agent

  Bill Erlich, Luther Wiggins, and Jack McPhee, the three cops who handled the case.

  * * *

  There was one other element to the police file that baffled me. It was a section that had been blacked out. There was a stamp on it that said: Classified: For CID use only. CID stood for Criminal Intelligence, which dealt mostly with organized crime cases. It wouldn’t have anything to do with the murder of a movie star.

  So why was the CID designation in this file?

  I had no idea.

  Maybe one of the people on my list would know.

  Chapter 14

  BEVERLY Makofsky lived in a penthouse apartment in a fancy building on Fifth Avenue. The place looked like something out of a glossy magazine spread. There were windows on all sides with breathtaking views of the skyscrapers of Manhattan. It had eight bedrooms, leaving plenty of room for both overnight guests and the full-time help—always a pesky problem for me too. The furniture was very expensive; most of it looked like it came from antique stores or museums.

  Her name wasn’t Beverly Makofsky now, she said. It was Beverly Richmond.

  “I’ve been married three times. First to Laura’s father, when I was Beverly Valentine. I didn’t want to keep his name, so I went back to my maiden name of Beverly Makofsky when Laura was growing up. Then I was Beverly Maddox. And now I’m Beverly Richmond.”

  “Richmond is the name of your third husband?”

  “Arthur Richmond. A lovely man. The best of my husbands.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Dead, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “A heart attack four years ago.”

  Probably wore himself out walking around this damn apartment, I thought to myself.

  She was probably close to seventy by now, but you could see that she’d once been stunningly beautiful, like her daughter, when she was young. I’d told her that I was doing an in-depth feature on Laura for the Daily News because there was so much interest after Abbie’s TV piece. She seemed eager to help. I remembered the articles I’d read that said how much money she’d made off her dead daughter’s memory. On the other hand, maybe she just liked talking about Laura and keeping the memory alive. Sometimes I’m too cynical.

  “This has been an incredibly traumatic experience,” she said to me. “After all these years, I’d finally come to peace with Laura’s death. It was difficult, but at least we knew what happened. Or we thought we did. Now this has opened up all the old wounds again.”

  “Do you have any thoughts on who might have really killed your daughter?” I asked.

  “Some other crazy fan, I suppose.”

  “Most people are killed by someone they know, not by strangers. All of this time, everyone assumed she was shot by some lone nut. But maybe that’s all wrong. We have to at least consider the possibility now there was some other motive behind her murder.”

  “Who did Laura know that would want her dead? She was such a lovely person.”

  She talked for a long time about her daughter’s career. The struggles, the rejections, and then the glory days when Lucky Lady made Laura an overnight superstar. She dropped in names along the way like Jack Nicholson and Robert Redford and Marlon Brando. She made it sound like a fairy tale where everything was magical and nothing ever went wrong. Whenever I asked about something that had gone wrong—Laura’s disappearance from the set of her last movie, rumors of substance abuse problems, other personal problems she might have been having—she deflected the question and changed the topic. She didn’t want to talk about any of those things. Or maybe she just wanted to remember the good times.

  She didn’t have any reluctance to talk about Laura’s father.

  “That son of a bitch,” she said. “I married him right out of high school because I was pregnant with Laura. It was a disaster right from the very start. I had ambitions of my own as an actress, but I had to put them all on hold, which was fine with Davy because he had absolutely no ambition of any kind. All he wanted to do was drink and go out on some boat and fish all day. I thought my life couldn’t get any worse. But then it did. After I found out what he did to Laura.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He abused her.”

  “You mean physically? He hit her?”

  “That too.”

  “Sexually?”

  She nodded.

  “How did you react?”

  “I told him I would kill him if he ever laid a hand on her again. I meant it too. My God, she was four years old! But I got lucky. He left on his own. One day he just never came home from a fishing trip. That was the way Davy did things. No goodbyes, no money, no nothing—he just disappeared. Good riddance, as far as I was concerned.”

  “And that’s the last you ever saw of him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Laura ever ask about him when she was growing up?”

  “A few times. I told her the truth.”

  “How did she take it?”

  “She hated him. Laura was suspicious of all men for a long time. In fact, she never really dated or had a romantic relationship with anyone until she met Edward Holloway. Eddie was so different from her father. Eddie was gentle and kind and he loved her so much. He was just devastated when she died. He’s never remarried, you know. I asked him why once. He said to me that once you’ve been married to Laura Marlowe, no other woman could ever take her place.”

  “I’m going to try to talk to Holloway later,” I said. “Tell me a little more about him.”

  “Eddie’s a good boy. He’s a producer. Raises money to put on Broadway plays and he works with theater groups. He’s very involved in the whole New York City cultural community.”

  “And you still work with him on the Laura Marlowe enterprises?”

  “Yes, we share that fifty-fifty.”

  “And everyone’s happy with that arrangement?”

  “Absolutely,” she smiled.

  I’ll bet you are, I thought to myself as I looked around the lavish apartment.

  * * *

  Eddie wasn’t a boy anymore. He was in his fifties and waging a valiant battle against the ravages of Father Time. He’d had several plastic surgeries, he told me proudly—showing off the changes that had been done to his nose, cheekbones, eyelids, and even his ears. He wore a toupee that he said cost $10,000 and was made out of real hair. He took a handful of pills every day to keep his weight down; they gave him enough energy and stamina to run in last year’s New York City Marathon.

  “If you look young, you feel young too,” Holloway said to me. “I’m fifty-six years old and I feel like I’m twenty-six.”

  “I’m thirty-seven and I feel like I’m fifty-seven.”

  “Have you ever had plastic surgery?”

  “Not yet.”

  He studied my face. “You’ll need some in a few years.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed about.”

  “Didn’t God create us all in his or her own image?”

  “God didn’t count on double chins and crow’s-feet.”

  We were sitting in Sardi’s, the legendary Broadway celebrity hangout in New York City. Edward Holloway seemed to really rate there. We had the best table in the place, in the front of the restaurant. I’d been there before on my own and wound up sitting near the kitchen. I was impressed.

  All sorts of
people stopped by to say hello or chat for a few minutes. There was a TV anchorwoman, a bestselling author, a Broadway actor, and even a couple of baseball players from the Yankees.

  “Let me guess,” I said to Holloway in between people. “You’ve been here before.”

  “Yes,” he laughed.

  “What do you do for a living again?”

  “I do a lot of things.”

  “Like running the Laura Marlowe memorial business with her mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you invest in Broadway plays?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Such as?”

  He gave me a few names that I’d never heard of.

  “And you’re a producer?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So what are you producing right now?”

  “I’ve got several things in development.”

  “How far developed are they?”

  “Various stages.”

  “You know, I’m still having a hard time figuring out exactly what it is you do,” I said.

  He smiled. “So what do you want to know about Laura?”

  Holloway gave me the same version of the story that her mother had. The sanitized one. Laura was a beautiful person. Laura was so happy. Laura was a saint. Laura had so much to look forward to. Nothing about drugs or depression or any imperfections in the little fairytale world they’d created about her.

  “How did you meet her?” I asked.

  “She hit me.”

  “She hit you?”

  He laughed. “I know it sounds kind of strange, but that’s what happened. I was crossing the street on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles when a car hit me. I was knocked to the ground, but not really hurt. When I looked up, the driver was standing over me. It was Laura Marlowe. I thought I was dreaming. Once she knew I was all right, she was so grateful she offered to buy me lunch. I guess it was just fate, because we really hit it off—and, of course, we fell in love.”

  “How long after that were you married?”

  “Very soon.”

  “Were you happy together?”

  “Deliriously so.”

  Laura Marlowe didn’t sound too happy to me at the end, but I didn’t say anything.

  “We had such wonderful plans together,” he said, his eyes tearing up now. “For her career, for a family, for a real life outside Hollywood. But she never got the chance. That bastard—whoever it was, Ray Janson or someone else—killed her. For me, it was like the JFK assassination. Those few seconds changed history and changed me forever. I’ve had a lot of good things happen to me since then, but I’d trade them all to spend just a few seconds with Laura again. She was so special. But she was gone so quickly. And nothing can ever change that now.”

  I asked him about the shooting. He gave me an account that was similar to the one I’d read in the police report. “I’d left the party and gone back to the hotel to look for Laura,” he said. “I just got out of my cab when I heard the gunshot and saw Laura lying on the ground. Someone—I always assumed it was Janson, but I never got a good look at the face—was standing over her with a gun in their hand, then ran away. I went to Laura’s side, and held her and tried to comfort her until the ambulance arrived. She couldn’t speak, she just looked up at me with these sad eyes. She died shortly afterward.”

  I checked my notes from the interview with the mother to see if there was anything else I needed to ask him.

  “Did you know Laura’s father?” I asked.

  He made a face. “Yes, I sure did.”

  “You didn’t like him?”

  “He abandoned Laura when she was just a little girl. Ran off and left her and Beverly on their own. Then he shows up after she becomes a big star and tries to act like he’s her father again. Trying to get his hands on some of her money, I’m sure.”

  “What did Laura say about him?”

  “She never talked to me about her father. I guess it was too painful. He apparently did things to her when she was a child. Things that, well . . . bad things. Maybe she still remembered them, maybe they were in her subconscious somewhere. That guy was bad news.”

  “So why was he still in her life at the end? Even at the hospital on the night Laura died?”

  Holloway looked pained. “That was such a terrible night. Beverly wasn’t there and I was . . . well, I don’t remember a lot. I was pretty shaken up by what happened. But when Beverly came back, she made sure Valentine was out of the picture for good.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Got any idea where I might go looking for him?”

  Holloway suddenly realized where I was headed with this.

  “My God, do you think he might have killed her?” he asked.

  “You said he was very angry. Maybe he was angry enough at her and her mother to shoot her as some sort of twisted revenge for cutting him out of all her money.”

  “I’ve never thought about it, but it could have happened that way.”

  “It’s just a theory,” I shrugged.

  “I’ve spent thirty years hating Ray Janson for what I thought he did,” Holloway said. “I guess I can’t hate him anymore. But I want someone to blame for what happened to Laura. If it turns out to be Davy Valentine, her father, that would be great. I’d love to hate that bastard Valentine for the next thirty years.”

  Chapter 15

  SHERRY DeConde, Laura Marlowe’s first agent, had an office on the second floor of a townhouse in Greenwich Village.

  “I remember the first day I met Laura,” she told me. “I was just starting out then, barely out of college and trying to break into the business of being an agent. She came up to see me with her mother. I knew right away she could be a star. Even at that young age you could tell. She had something special. You spend a lifetime in this business looking for someone like Laura. And she just walked into my office that day.”

  Doing the math, I knew that Sherry DeConde had to be close to sixty. But she looked a lot younger than that. She had long, blond, straight hair that hung halfway down her back and made her look a bit like like a ’60s hippie. She was wearing blue jeans, brown leather boots, and a T-shirt underneath a checkered flannel shirt on top. It wasn’t exactly sexy attire, but somehow it made her look sexy. Not in a young girl way, but that “been there, done that . . . this is the real me, take it or leave it” look.

  “People talk about overnight stars, but there really aren’t any,” she said. “Sure, stardom is about luck and opportunity and sometimes even talent too. But most of all, you can’t give up. That’s what I always told Laura and her mother. I put her up for everything—teen shows, commercials, movie roles. But she was just another face in the crowd. Then suddenly, when she was nineteen, she exploded into this incredible superstar. I’ve been in this business a long time, and I’ve never seen anything like it. It was amazing.”

  “How did Laura handle the early rejections?”

  “She was fine, but it really bothered her mother. Beverly is not what you would call a patient woman. She was, to put it bluntly, the stage mother from hell. Always second guessing, always criticizing, always giving me a hard time over everything I did. Look, I know Beverly wanted to be an actress herself once so there was a lot of frustration on her part. Unfortunately, she took it out on everybody around her—me, producers and, worst of all, on Laura. I felt sorry for that girl. I took care of her. Somebody had to.”

  “Didn’t her mother take care of her?”

  She shrugged. “I’m sure Beverly loved her daughter. But she showed it in funny ways. It was like she wanted to turn Laura into what she always wanted to be. She said she was doing it all for Laura, but I think she was really doing it for herself. Maybe it would have been different if Laura’s father was around. But he left when she was just a little girl. Laura
had no one to rely on but Beverly and me. I think she was very lonely. So I wound up spending a lot of time with her. I was more than Laura’s agent. She became kind of like a daughter to me.”

  That’s what Abbie had said. Sherry DeConde had been almost like a “surrogate mother” to the struggling young actress.

  “But you were probably only a few years older than her back then, right?” I pointed out.

  “Okay, maybe I was more like a big sister,” she laughed.

  It was a nice laugh. A helluva laugh actually. I looked around the office. There were photos of celebrities on her desk and walls. Some I knew, some I didn’t. But no sign of any pictures that looked like a husband or children. I glanced down at her left hand. There was no ring there. I’m a reporter. I notice stuff like that.

  “What about her husband?”

  “Holloway?”

  “He was her husband, wasn’t he?”

  “In a manner of speaking, I suppose.”

  “What are we talking about here?”

  “People tell me that marriage was arranged by Beverly, the same way she tried to arrange everything in Laura’s life.”

  “Why would Laura’s mother want her to marry Holloway?”

  “I don’t know, but Beverly had a reason for everything she did.”

  She talked more about how surprised she was when Laura suddenly became an overnight star after struggling for so many years.

  “I kept sending her up for every part I could think of, but nothing ever happened,” she said. “She got very depressed. At one point, I think she dropped out of the business altogether—I didn’t hear from her for nearly a year. Then one day she calls me up out of the blue. She said she was in Hollywood, there was a movie project called Lucky Lady, and they were looking for a teenage ingénue with a new face to play the lead. They thought she was perfect for the role. The rest, as they say, is history. She became a star.”