Fade to Black (5 page)
Authors: Wendy Corsi Staub
There are a lot of things he’s never asked her.
The screen door in the kitchen bangs, and he hears footsteps in the hall, then voices speaking in Portuguese.
His grandfather’s, then his grandmother’s. Then a third voice.
It’s
her
.
He moves closer to the television set, stretching his arm to turn up the volume. It’s just some stupid cartoon, but he focuses on the screen intently, as though mere are no distractions.
No stupid golden oldies music blasting from his grandfather’s small radio in the next room.
No simmering teapot building to a whistle, forgotten, on the gas range down the hall in the kitchen.
No voices bickering, then hollering from the bedroom in a language he understands but has never chosen to speak.
Money.
She’s come for money.
She always comes for money.
Doesn’t ask to see him, or even about him.
Her child.
Her father hollers that he has no money to give her, especially not for what she’ll spend it on. Crack.
Her mother screams at him to shut up, or the whole neighborhood will hear.
Then, open windows clearly forgotten, they rant at their daughter; she rants back at them.
She knows they have money; do they want her to starve?
“What about your son?” her mother shouts. “We can barely afford to feed him now that your father’s out of work on disability. Do you want to take food out of your son’s mouth? Do you want him to starve? Do you care?”
“He won’t starve,” comes the reckless reply. “He’s got that lady. She must give him money.”
The child squeezes his eyes closed and bends his head, shaking it. Elizabeth. But how does she know?
“What lady?” his grandmother asks, sounding slightly less angry. Curious.
“That lady who takes him out for ice cream all the time. I have friends. They see her with him. She’s trying to take my place. She’s trying to take over as his mother.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” his grandfather demands.
“she’s hallucinating again,” his grandmother says, as if that’s the only possible explanation. “Calm down, Rafael. You don’t want to get worked up. Your heart—”
“My heart is fine.”
“I’m not hallucinating,” says their daughter. “You two don’t even know what he’s up to half the time, do you? What the hell kind of guardians are you?”
“Don’t you curse at us!” Manny’s grandfather bellows. “What kind of mother are you? What kind of daughter? What kind of person leaves her own flesh and blood without looking back? Except when you need money for—”
“Rafael, your heart!”
“Forget it! I don’t need your money. I don’t need anything from you.”
Footsteps again, retreating quickly down the hall toward the back of the house. The door creaks open, slams closed.
His grandmother makes her way down the hall into the kitchen and the teapot makes a deflating, moaning sound as it slowly ceases to whistle.
His grandfather mutters something to himself, then curses and throws something against the wall in the next room.
And the child opens his eyes just in time to see a large brown roach the size of a small mouse scurrying across the linoleum inches from his bare leg.
H
ad she actually thought she could escape the fear, escape the memories, even for a short time?
Elizabeth draws a deep breath and forces herself to look back at the headline that has caught her eye in this evening’s edition of the
Harbor Times
.
It’s a major story, located on the second page, opposite a piece about the ongoing reservoir water shortage in the East Bay, compounded by the hot, dry August they’ve had.
Five Years Since Mysterious Death
of America’s Sweetheart
Even the dinky local paper has marked the anniversary with a full-length feature story off the wire, accompanied by several photographs.
One is a flattering shot of Mallory Eden taken, according to the caption beneath, in the March before her suicide.
In it, she is standing on the red carpet at the Shrine Auditorium just before the Oscar ceremony. Her golden hair is upswept in a mass of curls to reveal dazzling jewels at her throat and ears. Her blue eyes are bright with anticipation, and her lithe figure is clad in a slinky black Dolce & Gabbana midriff-baring gown.
She is on the arm of one of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors, one of the five nominees for best supporting actor that particular year. Though the tabloids practically had them married off the following morning, the date was in truth a publicity stunt, arranged by their mutual manager.
Two years later, the actor would finally win the golden statuette that had eluded him the night Mallory had been his date; in the year following that he would be forced out of the closet by a militant gay tabloid, only to fade to near obscurity soon afterward.
You and me both
, Elizabeth tells him ruefully, laying a fingertip on his newsprint image.
The next photo is a grainy candid that had been published in the tabloids early that terrible summer, showing her drawn and pale, leaving the hospital in a wheelchair. She remembers how she had tried to hide her bony frame beneath a baggy sweatshirt and jeans, but now she realizes that the sagging clothes only emphasized that her once-celebrated curves had given way to skeletal proportions. One of her hands is thrown up in front of her face, as though to shield herself … from the photographer? Or from the bullets she had suddenly found herself expecting at every turn?
The final picture shows the desolate Rock River Falls Bridge—a rickety structure looming high above the raging white water that had, presumably, swallowed Mallory Eden’s battered body.
Elizabeth looks away again, clears her throat. The sound seems deafening in the quiet room.
She wraps a strand of long, dark hair around her index finger and glances at the loudly ticking mantel clock above the yellow brick fireplace—how she loathes yellow brick. In her Malibu mansion there were three huge, rustic stone fireplaces.
She notes absently that according to the clock, it’s twenty after eight.
Almost time to turn on the television and watch a rerun of
Family of Foes
, the sitcom starring Kenny Abner, one of her old Hollywood pals. Every time she sees his familiar freckled face beaming at her from her television screen, she finds herself battling the impulse to pick up the phone and call him.
Of course, that’s impossible.
She continues to twist her hair and look around at the room that suddenly, somehow, seems foreign to her—to Mallory Eden. None of this belongs to her—the blue-and-green-striped couch, the boxy coffee table with its scarred wood veneer, the peach-colored silk flowers in a basket on the television console. The room could desperately use a paint job, and the area rug beneath the coffee table, a cheap polyester Oriental, is worn. Shabby—it’s all so shabby.
But it isn’t mine, so it doesn’t matter
, she tells herself.
It’s rented; the house is rented; even her identity is rented.
Stolen, rather, from the real Elizabeth Baxter, who won’t be needing it anymore.
Finally, she reaches up, beneath the shade on the floor lamp beside her chair, and clicks the switch so that the bulb is a touch brighter.
It was actually bright enough before, but she needs another moment of reprieve before reading the article about her life—and death.
For a moment she considers tossing the paper away without reading it.
Why put herself through more torture?
Then she realizes that she has no choice. She has to read it; has to know what the press is saying now, five years later. Has to know what kind of stuff
he’s
been reading; whether there are any clues in the article that could tip someone off—not just that Mallory Eden didn’t die, but where she is, and who she has become.
And so she takes a deep breath and begins to relive the nightmare one more time.
Five Years Since Mysterious Death
of America’s Sweetheart
In countless films earlier this decade, Mallory Eden portrayed the perky, pretty girl-next-door who captured the leading man’s heart—and the hearts of her audience. But five years ago today, August twenty-second, the twenty-four-year-old actress took her own life when she jumped from the Rock River Falls Bridge in a rural, mountainous region of northwestern Montana. Her body has never been found
.
What led a woman who had everything to such a tragic end?
There is no question among those who knew her
.
“It was the stalker, pure and simple,” maintains Flynn Soderland, the late star’s flamboyant agent, who has since retired
.
“The stalker” refers to the anonymous fan who became obsessed with Mallory Eden at least six months before her suicide. Star stalking is certainly nothing new, but the death nearly a decade ago of
My Sister Sam
actress Rebecca Schaeffer, murdered at the hands of an obsessed fan, thrust the syndrome into the public eye
.
According to Roger Boyd of Boyd Security, a Los Angeles firm with many of tinseltown’s top names on its client roster, “Highly visible show business professionals are certainly accustomed to overzealous fans, and everyone, even the most universally popular stars, receives threatening mail occasionally. But once in a while you have a situation where the fan is a true psychopath, where the threats start to cross the line, and where the victim is in real danger.”
That is precisely what happened to Mallory Eden
.
At first she was reportedly not even aware of the menacing letters that had been addressed to her and received at her publicity office over a period of several weeks during the spring before her death. When the messages became increasingly ominous and threatened violence, however, the actress was alerted. She hired a security consultant and was rarely seen thereafter in public without a bodyguard at her side. Yet despite the unsettling problems in her personal life, Eden continued to display the sunny, breezy California-girl demeanor that made her famous
.
It is rumored that the letters gradually gave way to threatening telephone calls, and that Mallory Eden arrived at her rented Malibu mansion one evening to find that her beloved pet dog had had its throat slashed. According to Soderland, there was a note accompanying the corpse, written in the animal’s blood that read, “You’re next.” Los Angeles police have consistently refused to comment on that report
.
The cunning stalker somehow managed to continue to elude both the star’s security advisers and the police. Finally, in July, after several months of harassment, the gun-toting intruder broke into the house and attacked Mallory Eden herself. The actress was shot as she slept in her bedroom, hit by a single bullet in her stomach
.
The plucky actress survived the wound and the subsequent surgery, which left her unable to bear children. Despite that traumatizing condition, she released a statement thanking the medical professionals, Los Angeles police, and friends who had stood by her, and requesting that her fans allow her a private recovery
.
Just days after Eden’s release from the hospital, as her personal assistant, Gretchen Dodd, sorted mail and gifts sent by well-wishers, a floral arrangement exploded. Dodd was disfigured in the blast. She has since dropped from public view and could not be reached by this reporter for comment
.
Meanwhile, the injury to Eden’s assistant seemed to drive the actress over the edge. Reclusive in the weeks that followed the explosion, she ultimately eluded the press and her bodyguards, apparently fleeing alone in mid-Auqust to a secluded wilderness area of northern Montana. Little is known of how she spent the days before her black Lexus was found abandoned at the Rock River Falls Bridge, a suicide note on the dashboard
.
The text of the note has never been released, but the motive behind her death is no mystery to loved ones left behind
.
“Mallory loved life. She was always upbeat, always laughing and joking around,” says Rae Hamilton, Eden’s closest friend and former roommate who was until recently seen as a semiregular on the daytime soap opera
Morning, Noon, and Night.
“She had hoped to marry one day and have children. That possibility was cruelly stolen from her.”
Another Eden confidante, former stand-up comic Kenny Abner, who now stars in the popular NBC sitcom
Family of Foes,
declined to be interviewed for this article. He did release a statement through his publicist, calling his late friend “a superior human being. She is still missed every day, not just by those who knew her, but by the fans who worshipped her.”
Rae Hamilton concurs. “She was a rare commodity in Hollywood. I don’t know a soul who didn’t think she was a great person, and that doesn’t happen very often in this town.”
The golden-haired, azure-eyed Hamilton, chairwoman of the Mallory Eden Foundation—which according to the actress’s will provides scholarship money to single mothers—bears an almost eerie resemblance to her late friend. In fact, the two met at an audition when both were struggling actresses, up for the same role—a sexy, slightly ditzy blue-eyed blond con woman in director Cal Lansing’s comedy smash
, “Wrong Side of the Tracks.”
In an interview, Eden once cited the audition as “the turning point in my life. Not just because it helped to launch my career, but because it was how I met Rae. My first thought when I saw her was that it was like looking into a mirror—only a trick mirror, the opposite of one of those funhouse kinds. In this mirror, everything looks slightly better than in real life. I mean, Rae is gorgeous. My second thought, when I learned I was to audition directly after her, was ‘uh-oh.’ I never thought I’d measure up.”
Eden, of course, won the role, a small part that nonetheless captured the attention of critics and audiences alike
.
Meanwhile, Hamilton and Eden went on to share more than a striking resemblance. For two years they shared a house in LA. ‘s San Fernando Valley. And they shared a genuine friendship, rare by Hollywood standards
.
Meanwhile, Hamilton admits that they look so much alike that fans have always mistaken her for Eden, and it continued even after her suicide
.
“People would stop on the street and do a double take,” she said recently. “It’s like they thought I was a ghost, or that Mallory was still alive after all. But that doesn’t happen so much anymore. I guess after so many years, people start to forget.”
Not everyone. The Mallory Eden Fan Club has an active Web site and continues to publish a semiannual newsletter filled with facts, photos, and tributes to their fallen idol
.
“Just because she’s gone doesn’t mean she’s not still on our minds and in our hearts,” says Elise Sweet, a San Diego housewife and president of the fan club. “She was truly special—so different from other successful actresses. She never minded signing autographs or stopping to chat and kid around with fans.”
Sweet refuses to acknowledge that it might have been that very accessibility that triggered Eden’s stalker’s obsession. She comments, “Mallory was a kind and loving person, and there’s no way that what happened to her was her fault.”
Hamilton sheds additional light on the true character of the late actress. “When this nutcase began stalking Mallory, threatening her, and finally physically attacking not just her, but someone close to her, she fell apart. She simply couldn’t go on that way. She felt that it was only a matter of time before the stalker again hurt somebody she cared about, and this time fatally. And then there was the knowledge that she could never bear a child because of what that bullet wound had done to her. Mallory adored children.”
Growing up in the tiny town of Custer Creek in rural Nebraska, the future actress—born Cindy O’Neal—had often displayed that caring nature, not to mention her trademark sense of humor. She was loved by everyone she met, though according to those who knew her, she displayed a wild, restless streak not surprising for an overprotected small-town girl with lofty aspirations
.
After being abandoned as a toddler by her unwed teenage mother, she was raised by her maternal grandmother. Vera O’Neal kept a strict rein on young Cindy, who began entering—and winning—local beauty pageants as an adolescent
.
According to hometown legend, on the night she graduated from Custer Creek High School, Cindy O’Neal ran away from home with her then boyfriend, Brawley Johnson, seven years her senior. Hours later, her grief-stricken grandmother died of a heart attack
.
“She always blamed herself [for her grandmother’s death],” says Johnson, 36, now a Los Angeles limousine driver, and still single. “If that hadn’t happened, she probably would have gone back home after we had our taste of freedom. I know I would have. I always figured we’d go back to Custer Creek, get married, and have a bunch of kids. But when Vera died, Cindy had nothing to go back to. So she turned to acting. She was determined not to let anything get in the way of her dream.”
According to Johnson, he and Eden stayed together for several years, and he supported her financially while she, like countless other midwestern runaways, struggled to make it in Hollywood. Unlike the vast majority of nubile young hopefuls, Mallory Eden made it
.
And like other suddenly successful stars, she didn’t waste time in severing her relationship with the hometown lover who knew her when
.
By some accounts, the split between Eden and Johnson was a bitter one. But the man who is, by all accounts, the only serious lover the famed actress ever had, refuses to comment on the end of their relationship
.
He will say only, “She was a great lady, and I will always be grateful for the time we had together. She taught me a lot, and no one knows how much I miss her to this day.”
After performing bit parts in high-profile, big-budget movies, the actress, just after her twentieth birthday, landed a lead in Oscar-winning director Langdon McKay’s romantic comedy
Stars in Her Eyes,
opposite veteran actor Tom Hawes. She became an overnight sensation and leading lady, appearing in a number of well-received films in the years that followed. Among them are the blockbusters
Mommy’s Boyfriend,
and
Monday in the Park,
the latter her final film, which was released shortly after her death
.
“She had an incredible amount of potential, and she had only begun to tap into her thespian skills. Had she lived,” says Soderland, her agent, from his retirement home in Pacific Palisades, “I have no doubt that Mallory would have become one of the greatest dramatic actresses of our time. I continue to mourn her loss.”
As do legions of fans—some of whom, it is said, believe that the actress’s untimely death wasn’t a suicide
.
Some of those who have speculated that Mallory Eden didn’t take her own life theorize that she was abducted to Montana by her stalker, then forced to write the suicide note before being thrown or pushed from the bridge into the deadly rocky gorge
.
Still others believe that the actress never jumped or was forced, off that bridge at all. Their assumption is that she faked her death to escape her stalker, and is presumably alive and well somewhere in the world, perhaps still living in fear of the crazed fan who shattered her fairytale life
.
Subscribers to this speculation point as evidence to the fact that Mallory Eden’s body has never been found
.
However, Allen Macy, the sheriff of Dry Fork, Montana, a remote town not far from the fateful bridge, contends that the failure to recover a body from the raging Rock River is hardly unusual
.
“This is one of the fastest-moving, most treacherous bodies of water in the country,” Macy said. “First, you have the waterfall just downstream from the bridge. There is a deep vault underwater in the rock beneath the falls that has been known to temporarily—and maybe permanently—trap debris and bodies that go over.”
Beyond that point, according to Macy, the river travels primarily through rugged wilderness, where very few humans have ventured. Therefore, it would be not only conceivable, but highly likely, for a body to travel downstream and become snagged in the rough terrain along the way
.
As an example, the sheriff cited the case of three Canadian fly-fishermen who drowned a decade ago in the river, not far from the bridge in question, after being swept over the falls. Two of the bodies were recovered thirteen miles downstream several weeks later, and the third has never been found
It is understandable that some of her fans prefer to believe that the effervescent Mallory Eden escaped such a grisly fate
.
Meanwhile, the stalker who tormented the actress and ultimately destroyed her remains at large. There have been no leads and no suspects in the case, which remains open to this day
.