The Silver Blonde

by Elizabeth Ross

  On the wall next to the bookshelf were framed photographs. Clara peered at one: 1937, the year he won the Oscar. Roger was seated at a table with Pearce and Carole Lombard, his Oscar gleaming against the white tablecloth. He looked dashing in his tux—and younger, his hair darker, his mustache the same. His expression was cocky, almost confrontational; he stared down the camera like a challenge. It was a more potent, dangerous Brackett than the gossipy dandy she had encountered at the studio. Clara shuddered and moved to the desk.

  An ashtray sat on top of a pile of script pages. There was a tablet of yellow paper covered in notes, and a dark red agenda. Clara pounced on it—Roger’s diary. She flicked through it, turning to the night of the murder, and then carefully back through the previous weeks to the start of filming. It was his social calendar: dinner dates, rounds of golf, a lunch for the board of a museum, a dentist appointment. Nothing significant. She scanned the phone numbers on the back pages, imagining that the vault combination might jump out at her, but as far as she could tell, it was just studio contacts and restaurants he frequented.

  She opened the top drawer of the desk and rummaged through the contents: a brand-new shirt still in its box, a spare tie (silk), a map of Los Angeles, a hand mirror, a toothbrush, and dental paste. She closed it and tried the bottom drawer—it was locked. She rattled it. What could be inside? Blackmail letters? A weapon? But then she felt a wave of futility. Why would he hang on to anything damning, anything to connect him to the murder? Clara could hear the soft tick of a wall clock. Think, think. She bit her lip as she inspected the items on the desk again, moving the ashtray and fanning out the script pages. Argentan revisions, typed up by Gil. If only she could find something, she could help him. From somewhere across Hollywood a distant siren wailed. It had the effect of an alarm. She should leave.

  As she swept the script pages back into a neat pile—she stopped. Script pages. Leni’s German screenplay of Penthesilea would have needed to be translated, rewritten for Hollywood. Her eyes darted to the bookshelf with its rows of leather-bound screenplays. A magnetic force pulled her toward it. All of Brackett’s scripts organized in chronological order. Her pulse ticked up as she scanned the volumes, eyes flitting across the titles—The Paris Bride; A Weekend Affair; a couple of Westerns; and the Oscar winner from ’37, the musical My Genevieve. She ran her finger across the leather spines and landed on Blind Summit, a crime drama from the forties that had tanked—she skipped back. A jolt as the gold letters flashed at her: Amazon Queen. Clara let out a small gasp—Roger hadn’t even attempted to disguise it. Her fingertips tingled as she reached for it. It was tightly packed on the shelf, reluctant to budge. Her nails scraped the leather spine.

  A noise from outside, and Clara froze.

  She held her breath. Seconds ticked by, which she measured by the beat of her heart—one-two, two-two, three-two, four-two. The stillness held. The sound must have come from another office. The walls were paper thin. She tugged at the script until it slid out. Her heart was now hammering along on a double-time jazz beat. She opened the screenplay. On the title page, there was an inscription:

  Mein lieber Roger,

  To our collaboration—on and off the page.

  All my love,

  Leni

  (And then some joke in German about beating him at tennis.)

  Of course, he must have helped Leni with the English version of Amazon Queen—her English wasn’t good enough to write a script on her own. Connie would have been hired to type up the pages because Roger hated to type. In the rush of adrenaline Clara could barely focus on the sea of words. She flicked through the pages: battle scenes, love scenes, dramatic monologues—all the ingredients of an epic. Amazon Queen had been sitting here all this time, just steps away from Gil. She could have burst out laughing, but she noticed that the paper in her hands was trembling. Before she could turn to the last page, the script fell open at a bookmark. No—a photograph. Recognizing the faces, a nauseous wave swept over her. Leni Riefenstahl and Roger Brackett stood on a lawn, smiling broadly. They flanked a sober-looking man in a dark suit—his infamous mustache…the Führer himself. Leni, Brackett, and Adolf Hitler. The excitement of Clara’s discovery curdled to revulsion. The photo quivered in her hand, and she turned it over. Berlin. Spring, 1939.

  “Hello there,” said an affable voice.

  Clara’s head snapped up to find Roger Brackett in the doorway.

  “What are you reading?” He tossed his hat onto a chair and ambled toward her.

  Clara was frozen to the spot, watching him approach, unable to speak. The voice in her head shrieked. He still wore the mask of charming-man-about-town—he didn’t know what she was holding. Clara slotted the photograph between the pages and tried to shove the script back onto the shelf, but her hands were thick and clumsy. She fumbled, and the smooth leather-bound volume slipped from her fingers and thudded onto the carpet—the photograph slid out.

  Brackett bent down and picked up the script. He squinted at the title. There was a beat before he spoke. “Amazon Queen.” He tucked the photograph into his jacket pocket. “Not one of my best,” he said. “Only a first draft. And you know what Hemingway says about first drafts.”

  Clara’s mouth was dry. “Have you met him, Hemingway?” It was a silly question, but she was forcing herself to appear normal and light. She wished she could pretend—just for a moment—that he had nothing to do with Connie’s murder. She wanted to conjure the other Mr. Brackett: the witty gossip, the dandy, impeccably dressed and as lazy as a cat. But their eyes met, and Clara saw behind his mask.

  “I stayed at his place in Key West.” He was incapable of resisting the chance to name-drop. “Hem taught me how to make caipirinhas—you need a boatload of limes.” A wry smile. “The man can drink.”

  His dialogue was classic Brackett, but there was a tightness to his voice, a stiffness in his manner. As he returned the script to its correct place on the shelf, Clara had a crazy notion that she could spin a yarn, pretend she’d been looking for something else. She could play dumb. Maybe he didn’t know why she’d been looking for it. But her mind came up empty. Besides, Gil was in a cell—it was too late for games.

  She squeezed her hands into tight fists. “I know.” She held his gaze. “I know about you and Leni, the contract for Amazon Queen. All of it.” Her words tumbled out in a rush; her breath was fast and raspy.

  In the silence that followed she felt her courage draining, replaced by fear.

  Brackett considered her for a long beat, a coldness behind his eyes. “Take a seat.” He gestured to the couch. It was an order, not an invitation. He remained standing, blocking her path to the door—she couldn’t make a run for it without tackling him.

  She sank onto the couch. Faces grinned at her from the magazines on the coffee table. There was a pretty teacup, and a plate with crumbs. The soft furnishings, the cozy setting, were at odds with the threat of the man in front of her. Would he do the same to her as he’d done to Connie? A renewed jolt of fear surged across her body. She could feel a pulse throbbing at her neck. Did he notice the twitching vein?

  Keep him talking. It was Gil’s voice she imagined.

  “Queen of the Amazons—it was a role she was born to play,” said Clara. Her voice sounded young and soft.

  “She couldn’t ride a horse, you know.” He shook his head. “For all that athleticism.” He drew a chair over and sat down between Clara and the door, like a guard. “She took lessons when she returned to Germany.” He smiled faintly at the memory. “Got herself her own mare, Märchen—means ‘fairy tale.’ ” Clara had never noticed how smooth and rich his voice was. He could have been an actor, one of those irrepressible supporting roles. When it came to actors, everyone thought it was about appearance—the face—but Sam had told her that the essential thing was the voice, that the audience responded more to sound than to picture.


  “She was like that, determined,” he went on, “when she got the bit between her teeth—pardon the pun.” It was absurd. They were chatting like old pals, but underneath, a silent alarm kept her senses heightened. Gil’s voice again: Don’t fall for the smooth charm—he’s dangerous. Figure out how you can get away. To her left was the door, the path to it blocked by Roger; to the right was his desk. Clara flicked a glance at the telephone. She would barely be able to pick up the receiver, much less get two words out, before he’d stop her. Behind her the blinds were drawn on the second-floor window. But as long as he was talking, she was safe. She could stall for time. Someone might come by the office—a custodian or another writer.

  “Why Leni Riefenstahl?” said Clara. “Why sign such a risky prospect?”

  “She was talented,” he said simply.

  “And the Hollywood boycott?”

  Brackett waved his hand in the air, dismissing it. “The boycott was for show, to sell papers. Hollywood likes to play politics. I mean, Kristallnacht was hardly Leni’s fault.” He let out a laugh. “She was in New York when it happened.” He shrugged. “I believed she should get another shot—once the fuss had died down. I mean, Kristallnacht didn’t stop the moguls from selling their movies in Germany. It was a huge market.” He was still bitter about it. “Hollywood doesn’t have principles if there’s a profit to be made.” He’d had time to justify his actions over the years, file off the unattractive edges, smooth over his inconvenient choices.

  “What about her politics?” said Clara, thinking back to those images in Triumph of the Will, of the Führer coming down from the sky like a god, and the goose-stepping parades and the saluting and the screaming euphoria of it all. And Leni on a cherry picker up a flag pole to get the perfect crane shot.

  “She was ambitious.” A flare of anger riled him. “You do what you need to—to get ahead.”

  “Triumph of the Will sold Hitler to all of Germany as someone to admire, to unite behind,” said Clara, finding her courage. “It convinced the rest of the world that he was someone to fear.” She remembered Gil’s reaction to seeing Triumph of the Will at the start of the war and thinking “We’re beat.” That fatalistic feeling had echoed the world over because of Leni and her powers of film persuasion. Just politics.

  “She wasn’t in the Nazi Party,” Roger went on.

  “Even better—she had the Führer’s ear,” said Clara with a surge of defiance. She recalled the photo of Brackett and Leni with Hitler. “Why did you go to Berlin?”

  He considered her through narrowed eyes. “Pearce sent me, it was business.” Prompted by Clara’s confused expression, he elaborated. “Hitler had promised Leni that he would finance Penthesilea—from his own personal funds. He was going to build her a huge film studio near Berlin. But it wouldn’t be ready for over a year. He didn’t know she had signed a contract with Silver Pacific. That worried her. And Goebbels—who ran the film industry—wasn’t always on Leni’s side. I went over to Berlin to pitch the idea of a co-production. Shoot here in California. Make the movie in English. Instead of an expensive domestic German picture with little return on investment, share the production costs and make it an international hit: big box office, global recognition. Goebbels had plans for expanding the German film industry. With a thousand-year Reich the Jewish moguls wouldn’t be running the show forever.” He smirked. “But prizing Leni from Hitler’s control was tricky. With some convincing from Goebbels and yours truly, he signed off on it and would still back the picture.”

  Clara let out a gasp. “Hitler was going to bankroll Amazon Queen?” The scandal went much deeper than she or Gil could have imagined. If any of this got out now, the studio would be done for.

  “We finished the script that spring of ’39. Plans were moving forward. We’d shoot in the fall. Pearce and I assumed that by then, the HANL crowd would have calmed down—a year later and Kristallnacht would be a distant memory. Public feeling was on our side. A lot of people didn’t want to get involved in Europe’s problems. Lindbergh was popular: America First. But then we hit a snag.” He shook his head. “September 1, 1939.”

  “Hitler invaded Poland,” said Clara.

  “Exactly. And shortly after, Britain declared war on Germany. Pearce got cold feet, axed the project.” He gave a small shake of his head. “That was the end of Amazon Queen.” He let out a long sigh. “Leni’s Hollywood career could have been incredible,” he marveled. He said it like that was the most regrettable fallout—the war had gotten in the way of his lover’s career. “What’s prompting your curiosity anyway? That business with Leni, it’s all in the past.”

  She felt like he was testing her, daring her to bring up Connie’s name—the person they’d been dancing around. She dug her nails into the patterned couch. “Connie Milligan. She know all this?”

  Brackett flinched at her name.

  “On the Argentan set—did you remember her from Palm Springs?” Clara kept pushing.

  He let out a laugh. “Do you know how many blondes you come across in the film industry?”

  “But she remembered you.”

  “She might have mentioned something the first day on set—‘I worked with you before’—but I assumed it was on a movie. She never mentioned Palm Springs or Leni…at first.”

  Until she read the article that jogged her memory. Clara’s knee was trembling; she steadied it with her hand.

  “What did she want?”

  “To give me a piece of her mind, blow off some steam. She’d read some article about Leni in the Evening Post. She was mad at me—at herself. She had admired Leni in ’38. ‘The foreign actress.’ Said she had felt giddy just to be around us. Back then she hadn’t known about the controversy, about the boycott or even who Leni was. Back then Connie Milligan was a small-town secretary with stars in her eyes.”

  “Did Connie try to blackmail you?” asked Clara. She could feel her pulse galloping along, out of control.

  “At the beginning she wanted small stuff—a walk-on part, a speaking role, a screen test, a meeting with a director at any of the studios.” He batted his hand like it was nothing. “I could give her all that and more.”

  “And later?” Clara said.

  He gave a laugh. “She got greedy. A Hollywood career wasn’t enough.” With a gust of irritation, his voice rose. “She wanted to punish the studio for being on the wrong side of history.” He rolled his eyes. “She wanted to go after Pearce. She wanted justice.”

  “Go after him how?” asked Clara.

  “What do you think?” he snapped. “She would go to the press, go public.”

  “What did you do?” She tried to sound neutral.

  He threw his hands up in mock surrender. “I convinced her I was on her side. I tried to buy some time.”

  “Was Pearce involved? Did he know what Connie planned to do?”

  Roger sneered. “Pearce doesn’t get his hands dirty. That’s what money can buy you. I talked to him over a round of golf—not about Connie specifically, but I took his temperature on a potential scandal if news of the Leni contract got out.”

  Clara listened as Roger barreled on unprompted; he was getting riled up.

  “Pearce shrugged off the past. For him it was simple. He’d met Leni before the war. The project hadn’t moved forward. When war broke out, the studio made good on army films for Uncle Sam and sent its best contract stars to entertain the troops. Silver Pacific did its bit; his conscience was clear. He told me: ‘We have a new enemy, and it’s called Communism.’ But I knew, if anything was made public about Leni, I would take the hit, I would be sacrificed. Salacious articles about my affair with her. Photographs would surface. Most of the studios are still run by Jews. I would be blacklisted, my career over. And Pearce would let me rot to save himself, his studio.” He had a wild look in his eye. Connie had put his livelihood in peril, his legacy. She had threat
ened his best work of fiction—himself. He was nothing without that. He had been desperate.

  “Pearce never made the connection that Connie Milligan, the stand-in, had been his secretary years before?”

  “He runs a studio. He didn’t remember a temp’s name from eight years ago,” he snapped. “I was alone against a woman on a crusade with nothing to lose.” There was a sheen of sweat on his face. “I had a few days to come up with a plan.”

  The day of the murder. Clara didn’t blink. She remembered she had left the Amazon Queen reel cued up on the Moviola. Would anyone find it? Would anyone put it together if something happened to her?

  “I overheard Connie ask Bannon if she could use her dressing room that night. I waited and watched outside the bungalow. Bannon took her sweet time to leave.”

  “And then?”

  “As I was about to go inside, Connie left in a hurry, caught me off guard.”

  Clara nodded. Connie had been heading straight to the vaults.

  “You followed her?”

  He nodded. “Couldn’t figure out what she was up to at first. But then the penny dropped. Amazon Queen, the test reel. I knew it had been destroyed. Pearce had told me. But I was furious that she would go that far, to try to find that film.” Clara noticed his mid-Atlantic affectation drift in and out as he got riled up. “Connie Milligan, a secretary, a stand-in,” he sneered in disgust. “A few weeks on the lot.”

  He talked as though Connie’s low rank in the Hollywood hierarchy justified his actions. His need to defend himself was palpable—and Clara was right there, a willing audience. “Your back was against a wall. You had to do something,” she said. She was baiting him to tell her more.

  “Connie Milligan was a no one. Another hopeful. Another blonde. This town gobbles them up. No one cares—it’s true. Admit it. After the public found out it wasn’t Babe Bannon in the vault, they didn’t care. Some lives are worth less than others.”