Tinseltown Confidential

by Martin Turnbull

  Voss seemed to be gearing up for a showdown in Los Angeles, but what gave Kathryn hope was his apparent failure to grasp how his labels described most people living there. If he was expecting his Los Angeles congregants to resemble those he’d encountered everywhere else, he was in for a letdown. Working under the Hays Code for the past twenty years had taught Angelenos to reconcile the reality that the conduct they put on the screen had nothing to do with their private lives.

  “I’m surprised he’s staying here,” Kathryn said to Delmar.

  “It’s close to MacArthur Park. That’s where he’s pitching his tent.”

  “What about the Voss Vanguard?” Leo asked.

  Whoever was handling Voss’ public relations knew what they were doing. Angelenos couldn’t pass a billboard, open a newspaper, or switch on a radio without hearing about the traveling circus. The latest proclamation revolved around the band of volunteers who set up base camp, raised the enormous tent, spread the word with handbills along the route. They were called the Voss Vanguard and their numbers grew at every stop.

  “We’ve started to see them dribble in,” Delmar said. “I thought I had one this morning. His shoes were real classy, like you’d buy at Silverwoods, but real muddy. So I says to him, you look like you been puddle jumping, only it ain’t rained since April. Where the dickens did you find some mud around here?”

  “What did he say?”

  “He started right in with the big-noting. Telling me how he’d been scoping out MacArthur Park for Sheldon Voss. I asks him if he’s with the Voss Vanguard, and he says, ‘Hell, no, boy. I’m with NBC TV.’”

  Leo gave a little start. “TV?”

  “Yes, sir. NBC television is what he said plain as day.”

  Leo shot Kathryn a look. Why was this the first they were hearing about it?

  Delmar curled a finger, leading them to a door camouflaged behind his stand. “Take a gander at this.”

  It was a storage room, fifteen by fifteen feet, filled to the edge with battered paint cans.

  Kathryn felt vaguely let down. “What are these?”

  “Why, them’s the famous quarter cans.”

  At the end of each Sea to Shining Sea meeting, Voss sent his vanguard into the congregation to solicit donations. He asked for “only a quarter, and may the good Lord see fit to multiply them as he did the loaves and fishes.” Typically, people donated more than one, so the dollars quickly added up. The cans became a symbol for donating to a good cause and a new expression entered the national lexicon: “I quarter-canned it!”

  “So they really are just old paint cans,” Kathryn said.

  Delmar let out a high-pitched whistle. “He sure is going to clean up.”

  Leo paid Delmar and they headed for the tearoom. Halfway there, they passed a glass case where a display of Elizabeth Arden cosmetics was arranged against sapphire velvet. Beneath it, a sign proclaimed,

  Elizabeth Arden’s new summer line!

  Available exclusively at

  Bullocks’ department stores!

  It was hard to know if it was the Confidential article or the “N” window, but Gwendolyn had received a curt letter from Herman Dewberry informing her that Bullocks had declined to proceed with her extended line.

  Gwennie tried to make light of it. “I’ll just concentrate on what I do best: sew stunning outfits!” They were brave, hopeful words, but business at the store had slowed to a trickle of what it had been a year before.

  Voss sure had a lot to answer for. So did Confidential.

  “KATH-RYN! MASS-EY!” Hedda Hopper’s voice pierced the Biltmore’s genteel hush. “You’re even worse than I imagined.” Red-faced and snorting like a bronco, Hedda charged at Kathryn, brandishing a rolled-up Confidential like a billy club. “I always knew you were one of those rag-tag leftists. You and all your Garden of Allah bohemians.”

  Oh, Hedda. I’m a forty-five-year-old woman who wears a girdle and subscribes to Reader’s Digest. I’m about as bohemian as Mamie Eisenhower.

  “Did you hear that?” Kathryn asked Leo. “I’m a bohemian.”

  “It wasn’t a compliment.” Hedda pressed her lipless mouth together and unfurled her Confidential. It fell open to the Garden of Eden spread. “Aren’t you the least bit ashamed?”

  After fretting over that article for a whole week, Kathryn had avoided looking at it again. As Hedda held it up, she saw it with fresh eyes. Instead of seeing whites and coloreds brazenly flaunting convention by dancing together, she saw a bunch of people enjoying an uproariously good time amid a sea of champagne. In other words, it was no different from any of the countless dozens of Garden parties that preceded it.

  “Hedda,” Kathryn said, “do you have a point? I’m due to meet my mother in one min—”

  “You should have heard Senator McCarthy when he called to thank me for mailing him a copy of this.”

  “I bet you sent it express.”

  “He and I have come to the inescapable conclusion that you are responsible—perhaps not in full, but certainly in a large part—for the recent breakdown of relations between Mr. Hoover and Mr. Voss.”

  Kathryn heard Leo’s gasp in her left ear and hoped Hedda hadn’t picked up on it.

  After that day in Wilkerson’s office, the plan to stop Voss in his tracks hadn’t gone quite so well. Hoover had yet to take any of Wilkerson’s calls. Zanuck had tried to put pressure on Breen, but Breen saw Voss as a white knight charging toward Sodom and Gomorrah. And if anybody needed a white knight, it was Joseph Breen. The Moon is Blue was in theaters despite its lack of PCA approval and its condemnation by the Catholic Legion of Decency, and it was a huge hit.

  “Really, Hedda, you credit me with far too much power.”

  Hedda sneered back at Kathryn. “Do you think I’ve forgotten about that cozy little tête-à-tête you had with Hoover?”

  “Which cozy little—?”

  “The day of the Spruce Goose in Long Beach when you sat in his car and had a fine old natter. Oh, yes, I saw it. I recall it very well.”

  Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose flight was five years ago, maybe six. Kathryn wondered what sort of person hoarded information like that. But of course she knew: the sort who called MGM “Metro-Goldwyn-Moscow,” who buried careers and personal lives without thinking twice, and who named names in front of HUAC without even being subpoenaed and then bleated about it in her column.

  But what about Voss? Did Hedda think Kathryn had pull because of her radio show? She doubted this dried-up old cow huffing in front of her had rooted up the family connection.

  “Whatever you think you saw that day down at Long Beach,” Kathryn said, “it was anything but a ‘fine old natter.’”

  “What was it, then?”

  Kathryn chose her words carefully. “There was a hatchet that needed burying. It was advantageous to bury it before it ended up in either of our backs.”

  “Regarding what?”

  The hat on Hedda’s head today was particularly ridiculous—even by Hedda’s standards. It was a ring of puce silk roses inside a row of broad white ribbons dotted with black circles coiled into large loops. Kathryn wanted desperately to knock it off her head.

  “Regarding you, if you must know,” she told Hedda.

  “You and Hoover were talking about me?”

  “Not just you. But Louella, and Sheilah, as well as myself, Army Archerd and Mike Connolly, and all the other Hollywood columnists.”

  Hedda’s eyes narrowed.

  “He’d been after me to recruit us to help unseat Truman in the ’48 election and put Dewey into the White House. He felt Democrats had been in power long enough and it was time Republicans had a go.”

  “Is that right?”

  “I told him flat out that the Republicans will win the White House when the American public wants a change, and not because they’ll listen to a bunch of Hollywood gossipmongers. I told him, ‘If you want a sympathetic ear, go bend Hedda’s.’ And then I told him, ‘I’m not her greatest fan, bu
t she’s sharp as a tack and has the courage of a lion.’”

  Bull’s-eye.

  “We’re late,” Kathryn told Leo, “and you know how Mother is.” She stalked away before the bitch with the world’s worst taste in millinery could get in a final word.

  The Biltmore Tea Room was a large rectangular space with a glass-smooth parquet floor, ornately carved ceiling, and enormous translucent skylight. The skylight was fake, but it lent the room a calming glow, which Kathryn needed—Hedda’s ambush had drained her.

  Francine greeted her with a cheek-press kiss and announced that she’d already ordered a pot of tea and petits fours.

  “Thank you, Mother. That’s very thoughtful.”

  “You’re looking awfully pale.”

  Kathryn flicked her linen napkin onto her lap. “One of my tipsters showed us a broom closet filled with Sheldon Voss’ quarter cans.”

  Francine rolled her eyes. “That old racket, huh? Some things never change.”

  Their waiter arrived holding a tray laden with a willow-patterned teapot and a four-tiered stand filled with bite-sized cakes. Kathryn told him that they were happy to pour the tea themselves.

  “What old racket?”

  Francine motioned for Leo to start pouring. “Back when we were kids, Cam—or should I say, Sheldon—used to steal pennies from Mom’s purse. He figured she wouldn’t miss them, and she never did. He’d save them until he had enough to go to the bank and change the pennies into a quarter. Then he’d take that quarter across town where he’d stand on a street corner and start to cry. He had such a baby face that it wouldn’t be long before some poor sucker stopped to ask him what the matter was.

  “He’d pull the quarter out of one pocket and turn the other inside out to show the hole he’d picked in it. He’d say he’d been saving his pocket money for six months to buy his mother a birthday present, but he’d only just discovered he had a hole in his pocket and he’d lost one of his two quarters. Every single time, they’d give him a quarter. He’d save those quarters and change them into a dollar bill.”

  “How long did that go on?”

  “Years. He was still at it when he started hanging around with Joe Kennedy.”

  “The one who plundered RKO back in the day?”

  “Mm-hmm.” Francine bit into her petit four with the delicacy of a hummingbird. “They met at some Boston Catholic social club dance. Thick as thieves, they were—and you know what a straight arrow Kennedy is.”

  “I’ve met mobsters less threatening than that guy,” Leo said.

  Francine nodded sagely. “As soon as I heard about those damned quarter cans, I knew it was a scam.”

  “Money laundering?” Kathryn whispered.

  “Nothing’s impossible when it comes to Camden’s feverish little mind. Coins aren’t numbered like dollar bills, so nothing’s traceable.”

  Kathryn stared at Leo, who stared back.

  “How many quarters do you think would fit into one of those paint cans?” he asked. “Five hundred? A thousand?”

  “Which means each can could hold around two hundred dollars,” Kathryn said. “There must have been fifty cans in Delmar’s closet.”

  Leo pulled a pen and a laundry receipt from his jacket pocket and made some quick calculations. “Ten thousand or thereabouts.”

  “And that’s just LA.”

  “Multiply that by twelve stops,” Kathryn said. “What if he gets a chance to appeal to America on television?”

  CHAPTER 37

  Gwendolyn slid the key into the alley door of her store but didn’t turn it. She leaned against the bricks; at ten a.m., the August heat was already warming them. She strummed her fingernails against the weathered wood and considered going to the beach instead.

  There seemed little point in opening up these days.

  It had been disheartening to scrub away the “N” on her window. Leo’s paint thinner helped; by midnight there was no trace. At least, not on the window.

  It took effort to smile at people who offered platitudes. Don’t worry, things will pick up again . . . Nobody takes Confidential seriously . . . This’ll blow over soon enough.

  At least Marcus and Kathryn hadn’t tried to pretend. She’d asked herself countless times, “Why did I call Voss like that?”

  Because champagne plus outrage equals folly.

  And now she sat alone in her empty store feeling like she was the only person left in the world.

  She shouldered the door ajar. The calendar in her workroom, opened to August 1953, reminded her that her bank statement should arrive today. She used to look forward to getting those, but now they were just a reminder of how long she could go on before she was forced to declare Chez Gwendolyn DOA.

  She yanked the calendar off the nail and tore it in half, then tore those halves into quarters, and didn’t stop tearing until shreds of cardboard were strewn across the floor.

  She stowed her handbag in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet and walked into the salon. Immediately past the velvet curtains, she smelled something. Car exhaust? No. Worse than that. Burned oil?

  Everything looked exactly as she’d left it the previous night.

  The sunlight creeping over the rooftops across Sunset caught on shards of glass on the carpet. Two steps closer, she felt a crunch under her heel.

  A hole in the window the length of her arm let a warm breeze blow past her face.

  Her foot brushed against a brick wrapped in newspaper held in place by a rubber band. She picked it up, pulled off the rubber band, and unfurled a page from the L.A. Times. It was the usual: a ceasefire in Korea, the new British queen back from her honeymoon, Mt. Everest had at last been conquered.

  She turned the page over.

  Under the Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood logo, a headline screeched: MARILYN MONROE—MODERN MOVIE STAR OR BRAZEN BOHEMIAN?

  Gwendolyn skimmed the article. Immoral . . . blitzed . . . monkeyshines . . . unwed . . . Garden of Eden . . .

  It was a rehash of Confidential’s story. Hedda cast Marilyn exactly as Voss had: a villainous expression of everything wrong with Western civilization.

  Gwendolyn read the final paragraph.

  Photographs in the most recent Confidential featured Chez Gwendolyn, a Sunset Strip boutique infamous for catering to Negroes. Miss Brick may ply her wares as she pleases, but I hear there’s quite the rainbow in her back room. Mixing cocktails is one thing, but mixing races? Tsk, tsk, Miss Brick. Miscegenation helped bring the fall of Rome, and we know how that dark tale unraveled.”

  Dropping the newssheet onto the glass scattered across her carpeting, Gwendolyn retreated to the counter and picked up the phone to call her landlord. The receiver felt as heavy in her hand as the brick had.

  The landlord promised to send a glazier to measure the window and another guy to board it up. It would look ugly as hell, he said, but the store would be secure.

  Secure from what, she wanted to ask. The hordes of customers charging into my den of iniquity?

  She leaned a hip against her glove display while she smoked a cigarette and watched the lengthening morning light hit the fragments of glass, shooting tiny rainbows onto the cream walls.

  Now there is a rainbow for you, Hedda.

  She lit a second cigarette from the butt of the first and followed the light creeping from the floor to the walls. She told herself she’d set to work when it reached the ceiling.

  It was only halfway there when the window guy showed up. He displayed genuine sympathy as he replaced the broken glass with corrugated metal. The whole procedure took forty minutes and he was gone.

  Gwendolyn was still brushing shards into a dustpan when she heard the bell above the door jangle. Nobody comes in for two weeks, and NOW they come shopping?

  Walter Winchell studied the metal window. “Is this a bad time?”

  She wanted to hurl the dustpan at him, if only because he was the sole person around.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I’ve
come to negotiate a little business.”

  Gwendolyn led him to two chairs beside the trifold mirrors against her back wall. She let him sit first, then joined him. “And what might this concern?”

  “I can fix this.”

  “You’re a glazier, too?”

  He indulged her with a smile. “I can fix your reputation and what I assume is your negligible trade. In one swoop.”

  It sounded like a deal with the devil. “How intriguing.”

  “In September, NBC is premiering an anthology series called Letter to Loretta. Personally, I think they should just call it The Loretta Young Show. At any rate, the idea is to have Loretta introduce the show each week. At the top of the episode, she’ll make a dramatic entrance. It’s a gimmick, but it’ll work. And that’s where you come in.”

  As long as I sell my soul.

  “I have a very good relationship with the head of NBC TV and his wife. NBC is broadcasting live at Sheldon Voss’ tent meeting in MacArthur Park, so they’re in town. I’ve already told his wife about you. They’re progressives, so this whole Negro situation isn’t an obstacle. In fact, Mrs. NBC is keen to see what you’ve got. If you impress her, it won’t take much to land you Loretta’s gowns.”

  Gwendolyn kept her hands clasped in her lap as she ran through the reasons he was making this offer. What was in it for him? And what would she have to do in return?

  “Mr. and Mrs. NBC,” she said. “What’s their name?”

  “Crawley.” Winchell leaned back and crossed his legs. “Patrick and Irene.”

  “Okay, so Irene is going to come in here and—what? I give her a dress?”

  “How you impress her is up to you. She’s rather nice in a Midwestern, liberal-arts-college, corporate-wife sort of way. But don’t let that fool you. She’s very smart, very savvy, and has her husband’s ear like nobody else.”