I opened my purse and pulled out a twenty. “Here, take this for today, leave now, and come back tomorrow.”
She stared at it in confusion. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“You don’t have to. I’m paying you twenty dollars in cash for not working today. Come back tomorrow morning. But you have to go right now and not ask questions.”
“I . . . but I don’t understand,” she repeated, not moving an inch.
I pulled another ten from my purse.
“If you’ll leave immediately and not ask any more questions, I’ll add this.”
“I couldn’t do that without calling the agency first. May I use your phone?”
I knew the jig was up. “Sure,” I said, got up and motioned for her to take my seat behind the reception desk. While she made the call, I picked up my purse, put the thirty dollars back inside, and walked out the door, wondering what Robert Rich would think when he came back in and found her behind the desk instead of me.
I sat in the window of the cafe across the street, wearing my sunglasses, and watched the building. Soon Robert Rich entered. After half a minute, he stuck his head out the door and looked both ways, as if I’d still be on the block, having left ten minutes before. He shook his head and went back in.
An hour later a Chrysler with fins so big they could stab a pedestrian drove up and three middle-aged men got out. I assumed they were his uncles. I rushed across the street and climbed up the hill alongside the building hoping to hear the ensuing conversation through one of the small, high, open windows. A few loud words made their way to my ears. Like “Keee-rist!” and “Holy shit!” Of course, I didn’t know if they were in response to my short presence there that morning or the phone message from Mr. Friendly.
A few minutes later, Robert Rich came out of the building holding a white business-size envelope and hopped into a beat-up, green 1949 Plymouth in a nearby parking lot. As he waited to make a left turn onto Sunset Boulevard, I jumped into David’s Chevy and made a U-turn to get into position to follow.
The Plymouth drove east on Sunset and left onto Highland. It went through Cahuenga Pass to the San Fernando Valley, alongside the gigantic Forest Lawn cemetery, past NBC and the Warner Brothers and Disney Studios, and east on Riverside Drive next to a bridal path, to Figueroa, where it made a left. The sign said Highland Park. It turned out to be a rundown, blue-collar neighborhood that looked to have been built in the 1920s. A lot of the people and stores seemed to be Mexican.
The Plymouth pulled up in front of Fuentes Drugs, a neighborhood pharmacy. Robert Rich got out, envelope in hand, and walked into the store. I followed, keeping a shelf or two between us. I saw him give the white envelope to the white-haired Mexican pharmacist behind the tall prescription counter, and get a larger, nine-by-twelve manila envelope in return. I ducked behind the cosmetics counter as the pharmacist picked up a telephone and dialed and Rich walked past me up the next aisle.
Outside, I watched him drive off, knowing there was little reason to follow him any farther. I’d learned long ago at John Jay College of Police Science to follow the money. Well, in this case, it was more like “follow the envelope,” but it looked like it contained money. A bribe, perhaps, for not telling the L.A. Times? But if so, what was in the larger envelope, the one the pharmacist gave to Mr. Rich?
It wasn’t easy to kill time inside a fairly small drug store. I bought several items I didn’t need. I’d heard of men being embarrassed to buy rubbers—not the kind for your feet—so they bought up a bunch of innocuous items, combs and toothpaste and such, to seem less conspicuous. But I bought only innocuous items; I had no need for rubbers, unfortunately. God, did they sell them to women? I’d never thought of that. In fact, it was hard to tell that drugstores sold them at all since they always kept them hidden behind the counter. Wouldn’t want any children catching a glimpse of a box of prophylactics and asking their Mommy what they were. No, sirree. Of course, maybe there’d be fewer babies born out of wedlock if they had.
Speaking of children, a teenaged boy, maybe fourteen or so, passed me and went up to the pharmacist. They chatted a moment. The boy was Caucasian, unlike most of the customers. He wore glasses and looked like he’d be in the science and chess clubs at school, not the football team. The pharmacist handed him the white envelope he’d received from Mr. Rich, and said to give his parents his best; and the kid walked by me and out of the store.
I stepped out front and saw him climb onto a Schwinn and pedal away. I’d never followed a bike with a car before. Good thing I didn’t have to jump into a cab and yell, “Follow that bike!” I learned it’s not easy to go slow enough to follow a bike while cars are honking at you to go faster. Nevertheless I did my best Lamont Cranston imitation, trying to remain invisible to my prey.
Eventually he turned off Figueroa onto a side street of small cottages, and up a hill. He disappeared behind a fence of the house on the hill, a larger whitewash California bungalow not quite Craftsman style, overlooking the neighborhood. I parked where I could keep an eye on it and waited for something to happen. I’d been there half an hour and eaten all the candy bars and potato chips I’d bought in the drug store when something did.
A man in his fifties with a mustache, horn-rimmed glasses, and thinning, water-slicked hair came out of the house and walked down the hill toward my car. I pretended to read the paper while he passed. But he didn’t. He opened the passenger door I apparently hadn’t locked and slid right in beside me. He wasn’t big and didn’t look threatening. On the other hand, he did look like an accountant in an Alfred Hitchcock TV show. You know, the meek little man who murders his large, domineering wife and cuts up her body and carts it away in those cardboard cartons they call transfer files.
“Hello,” he said.
I just stared at him in disbelief.
“You don’t look like FBI,” he continued. “Or HUAC. And you certainly don’t look like a member of the I.A.T.S.E.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The International Alliance of Theater and Stage Employees,” he said. “The watchdogs of the blacklist.”
“Oh,” I replied cleverly.
“So you must be a reporter.”
“No, I’m not a reporter,” I said. “I’m a private detective.” I showed him my I.D.
He glanced at it. “From New York. Well, we’re honored,” he replied. He took a pack of Chesterfields from his inside jacket pocket and offered me one. I shook my head.
He lit up, coughed, and went on. “We get lots of FBI and police and HUAC investigators and reporters but very few private eyes,” he said. “I think the city reserves this parking place for people staking out my house. It’s a courtesy, like the green for fifteen minutes, yellow for deliveries, and this spot for watching Dalton Trumbo.”
Oh. So that’s who he was.
“So what were you doing following my son home from the drug store?”
I guess I’d failed at clouding his son’s mind to make myself invisible to him.
“Trying to figure out what was in the envelope he picked up there. It looked like a bribe.”
“Why did it look like a bribe? Why didn’t it just look like an envelope?”
“Well, you’ve got a point there,” I admitted. “It was the context that made it look like a bribe, Mr. Friendly.”
“Ahh. I thought your voice was familiar. You really get around, Naomi. Would you like to come up for some tea?” I agreed, but I decided if we passed any transfer files on the way I’d make a run for it.
While it was 1957 outside Mr. Trumbo’s house, inside it was 1940. He explained he’d stored all his old furniture when he moved to Mexico to try to make a living after he got out of prison, and reclaimed it all when that plan didn’t work out. This was the furniture he’d bought back when he was the highest paid—and biggest spending—writer in Hollywood. I met his wife—she wasn’t big or domineering but slender, younger, and pretty. He showed me some of her prize-winning photographs.
/>
We had tea on the veranda overlooking the tree-filled valley and the San Gabriel Mountains beyond. “Who are you working for, Naomi?” asked Mr. Trumbo as he poured me a cup, catching the loose tea in a tiny strainer.
“I’m not at liberty to say,” I said, feeling stupid considering I was hoping I could get him to answer that very question.
“Then answer this. What is it they want to know?”
“Whether you wrote The Brave One,” I replied. I saw no reason to be cozy about that.
“Ah. Of course.”
My heart raced. “Of course you wrote it?” I asked.
He laughed. “No, no. Of course, that’s what they would want to know. It’s the question of the moment.” He picked up a pipe, fiddled with it but never lit it.
“So. Did you?”
“Well, I can’t confirm that,” he said. “But then I can’t deny it either.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, if I did write it, then the King Brothers must have hired me—or bought the story from me—despite the blacklist. Of course, the movie industry insists there is no blacklist. But on the other hand, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences passed a new rule this year excluding blacklisted writers from winning Oscars. So if there were no blacklist, there’d be no reason for that rule. Of course, they did it only because my friend Michael Wilson was about to be nominated for writing Friendly Persuasion and Michael had already had the audacity to embarrass the Academy by winning the Oscar for A Place in the Sun, which he wrote before he was blacklisted.”
“Have you won any Oscars since you’ve been blacklisted?” I asked.
He smiled. “I’ve been nominated once or twice, but I can’t say if I’ve won. That would be telling. It’s common practice for Hollywood companies, big and small, to hire blacklisted writers on the black market. It’s an open secret that’s received the blessings of the industry while at the same time the Academy is acting as policeman, beating up on weak victims, independent producers like the Kings. If The Brave One had been made by a major studio, I promise you the Academy would be looking the other way.”
I asked, “Do you know who wrote The Brave One?”
He nodded. “I’d guess Michael Wilson. But what I know mostly is that it has no murders in it, no dope addiction, no gunfights, and no seduction of innocent girls. So now that I think about it, I don’t know how it got onto the screen.”
It hit me. The manila envelope probably contained script pages. He was writing another movie for the King Brothers. The money was for that. I tried my new theory on him.
He smiled and said, “Blacklist or no, it’s impossible to stop a writer from writing. They murdered Thucydides, and beheaded Sir Thomas More, but all of the other writers who were thrown in jail continued to write, and so have I. Why just today I was writing a letter to the phone company. In fact, I was on my way to mail it when I stopped by to see you.”
He pulled the envelope from his pocket. “They’d written me a very clever and charming missive about why they couldn’t seem to make my phone lines work properly. Personally, I believe it has something to do with all the juice that’s being drained off by the FBI tap, but they didn’t mention that. They did say they had more pressing things to do than make the phones of a Communist work. So this is my reply.”
He tore open the stamped envelope so that I could read his tome. It said in part, “When we Reds come into power we are going to shoot merchants in the following order: 1. those who are greedy, and 2. those who are witty. Since you fall into both categories it will be a sad story when we finally lay hands on it.”
I looked up at him as he drained his tea. “You don’t take this very seriously, do you?”
He put down the cup. “The Hollywood, or so-called Unfriendly Ten, including myself have had the worst press since Bruno Hauptman. I lost my livelihood, my house in the hills, my ranch in Ventura County, and all my savings. Well, I never had any savings. I didn’t know I’d need them. I was imprisoned for a year. My passport was revoked. I’ve been audited chronically by the IRS. Since we moved here, my daughter was driven out of her elementary school by tormenting classmates, and tormenting parents of classmates. We had to put her into a different school where the parents are a little less red-blooded American. I have borrowed from all my friends and associates, not to mention lawyers, and struggle to pay them back. I will pay, every cent. I used to earn three thousand dollars a week. When I got out of prison, I was lucky to get three thousand for an entire script. I take it seriously.” He shrugged his eyebrows and shoulders. I got the idea.
“How do you feel about the people who talked,” I asked, “who named names to save their careers?”
“I used to look for villains, but I’m beginning to think there were no villains, or heroes or saints or devils; there were only victims. Some suffered less than others, some of us grew and some diminished, but in the final tally we were all victims.”
He poured us both more tea. “Try Michael Wilson,” he said again. “Maybe he’ll tell you he wrote it.”
I stopped at a payphone and called Michael Wilson at the San Fernando Valley number Mr. Trumbo had given me. He said he’d be happy to see me, especially after I told him who I’d just had tea with. We made an appointment for that evening at his house at 11662 Sunshine Terrace at nine. He asked me to give him a phone number to reach me just in case, and I did, both the motel’s and David’s.
David listened intently as I filled him in on my day over burgers at the Sunset Strip Hamburger Hamlet. It had a Southern plantation motif carried through to the point that the waitresses were all black and the customers were all white. I felt like Scarlet O’Hara sipping mint juleps with David Horvitz. Well, he didn’t look much like Rhett.
David was a TV writer, working for a writer-producer named Roy Huggins on a new Western series at Warner Brothers that was supposed to premiere in the fall on ABC. He told me it was called “Maverick” and starred a guy named James Garner who David thought was going to be a big star. And, he said, the lead character wasn’t a gunfighter, like on all the other Westerns, but a card sharp and confidence man who was basically a coward and ran from danger.
I laughed, thinking he was joking. When he made me realize he wasn’t, I said the American public would never stand for it. It didn’t have a chance to succeed. He thanked me for my encouragement.
“But what would possess somebody to think up a hero who was a coward?” I persisted.
David said, “I have the feeling at some level, conscious or not, Roy patterned the Maverick character after himself.”
I looked up, puzzled. He went on, “Roy named names to HUAC and saved his career. He says he’s regretted it ever since.”
I was dumbfounded. “But how could you work for someone who did that?” I said.
“The same reason he did what he did. In order to work.”
When we got back to David’s neo-Gothic apartment on Fountain Avenue, he raced in to answer the ringing phone and I followed. He surprised the hell out of me by saying, “It’s for you.” It was Michael Wilson begging off for tonight. He said something had come up, and asked if we could meet for breakfast tomorrow instead at Nate ’n Al’s on Beverly Drive? I agreed. And hung up, puzzled. He’d sounded nervous. “What could have happened to make him cancel?” I said out loud.
David replied, “You’re the detective.”
He was right. I grabbed my purse and camera. “Can I borrow your car again?” He shook his head. “No. You can borrow me.”
And we piled in, him at the wheel.
Twenty minutes and a trip over Laurel Canyon later we were coasting to a stop, lights off, on a winding road in the hills of Studio City overlooking the San Fernando Valley. We parked across the street from 11662 and waited. But not for long.
At nine, an old black Cadillac pulled out of the driveway. I couldn’t make out the driver but we figured it was Michael Wilson. David followed, leaving a block between us and the Caddy. “Funny, you wouldn�
��t think a Communist would drive a Cadillac,” I said.
“We don’t know if he is or ever was a Communist,” said David. “He just wouldn’t tell the committee or name names, is all we know.”
“I thought the Unfriendly Ten all took the Fifth Amendment.”
“That wouldn’t have made them guilty. But even so, they didn’t. Ironically, if they had, they wouldn’t have gone to prison. But they felt they weren’t guilty of anything and therefore shouldn’t hide behind it. They pled the First Amendment, believing that freedom of speech included the freedom not to speak, and that the committee had no right to force them.”
“Is that a legal argument or wishful thinking?” I responded.
“Word has it that if two liberal Supreme Court justices hadn’t died before the case got put in front of the Court, they would probably have won.”
I whistled through my teeth at the vicissitudes of luck and history.
We followed Wilson’s car back over Laurel Canyon to Beverly Hills. It pulled up in front of a large fur shop on Wilshire Boulevard just east of La Cienega. Flyer Furriers and Fur Storage said the neon sign. A moment later a Pontiac woody station wagon pulled up right behind, its Indian-head hood ornament aglow, then a Chevy panel truck. “Left-wing Jews don’t buy Fords,” David whispered. One man got out of each and they conferred quietly under a street light.
“Do any of them look familiar?” I asked David. He nodded. “Yes. They’ve all been in the paper. That is Wilson,” he said, indicating the man we’d followed. He was tall, forties with prematurely white hair. “The others are Herbert Biberman and Paul Jarrico. Biberman’s a director. Jarrico’s a writer-producer. They’re blacklisted, too.” Biberman was barrel-chested and intense in his mannerisms. Jarrico was shorter, dumpy looking, and spectacled.
The men got back in their cars, turned the corner and into the parking lot behind the store. We waited a moment, then followed on foot.
By the time we got to the back of the building, a double door was open and the men were apparently inside. We crouched down in the dark. After a moment Jarrico came out carrying a cardboard carton, about twelve by eighteen inches. I swallowed hard and whispered to David, “Isn’t that what they call a transfer file?” He nodded. “Yes, the studios use them to store scripts.” It wasn’t scripts I was worried about, but body parts.
Show Business Is Murder Page 14