Final Curtain: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries) (14 page)

Clorinda built a kingdom for folks who led lives of unsurpassed dullness, whose hunger for wonder demanded release.

Frankly, I was in awe of the woman’s power.

Tobias was in his own trance. With a large white handkerchief he mopped his brow and dabbed at his eyes.

“She is a gift from God, no?”

George and I nodded.

He leaned over, in front of us, and signaled to Dak. “Your mother is not of this Earth.”

Dak bit his lip, but kept still.

The crowd began shuffling out, and I noticed there were ushers at the end of each row who cradled bushel baskets. As congregants left, coins and bills dropped into the baskets. Over and over each usher intoned, “Bless you, sister. Bless you, brother. Alms for the journey to heaven.”

Suddenly Dak rose and tapped his leather satchel. “I’m headed home.”

“Where’s home?” I asked.

“I rent a room on Springfield.”

“I’m surprised you don’t live at your parents’ home.”

He didn’t answer but waved a good-bye.

Tobias was talking, his wrinkled face inches from George’s impassive one. “Clorinda is the incarnation of the great Billy Sunday.” He paused. “That great Pentecostal revivalist. You know, like Clorinda, he was worldly in his youth, a baseball player with the White Stockings. But God had a different path for him”—he grinned widely—“even though he was a good base runner. God touched him on the shoulder and walked him to a tent where the spirit waited.”

George and I stood, but Tobias was still talking. “I heard him preach once before he died. I can still remember his voice, horrible and compelling and seductive. He understood that we in America are in a holy war. A foolish nation, this one. No wonder the Depression has shut us down. We are drinking again—liquor in the bloodstream. Evil is afoot.” A dark grin that showed stained teeth. “Billy Sunday told us, ‘I have no interest in a God that does not smite.’”

***

Clorinda appeared in a day smock as though she’d just returned from buying groceries in the Village at Driscoll’s Food Market. Her voice was back to her gravelly inflection. She stood in front of us, a little timid, and addressed me. “So what did you think?” The ingénue auditioning for her first role.

What to say: I simply nodded like a doll’s head loosed from its bearings. The transformation in her was so radical, this shift from spiritual to worldly, that I was at a loss for words. Yes, the diamond earrings were in place, the only color on the unadorned face.

Clorinda insisted George and I accompany Tobias and her to their home for dinner. Though we begged off—George actually became mute and kept nudging me, so obvious a gesture I was surprised nothing was said—we finally agreed. “A short stay,” I pleaded. “An early morning rehearsal. Right, George?”

He found his voice. “Edna needs special coaching.”

I glared at him.

“It’s settled. A feast awaits us.”

I didn’t know about that, but we followed both out to the town car where Alexander opened the doors for us. “We were hoping to see Dak and Annika again.”

Clorinda tilted back her head and laughed. “Lovebirds, those two. Dakota wanted to go hide in his rooms, but I told Annika to waylay him for a short hop over to Newark. A weekly visit to an old folks home where, not surprisingly, my handsome son gets a few old ladies’ hearts aflutter.”

“A missionary,” Tobias insisted.

Clorinda sighed. “If left to his own devices, Dakota would do nothing but hole up in solitude and draw, draw, draw.”

Tobias muttered, “A dilettante, that boy.”

I kept still.

At the grand home a supper was already spread, the housekeeper Hilda greeting us without humor and ushering us into the dining room. A buffet of cold dishes: an ice-cold Hungarian sour-cherry soup, aspic, sliced tongue, cold roast beef, various pickles and relishes. On the sideboard a monstrous Black Forest cake. Tempting, this confection, though I planned to pick at the other drab fare.

Tobias was still under the spell of his wife because he couldn’t stay still, rocking back and forth on his heels, repeatedly touching Clorinda’s elbow affectionately, nodding at her. Nothing short of utter delirium, I considered. She looked embarrassed by his fawning attention, but I caught her winking at him when George and I turned away.

“Before we eat, come.” He pointed to a hallway that led to a study, the walls covered with floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with—my cursory glance noticed—Biblical texts and scholarly studies. A concordance to the Scriptures lay open on a desk. On a library table a copy of
What Would Jesus Do?
as well as Bruce Barton’s
The Man Nobody Knows
. Charles Sheldon’s
In His Steps
. Popular fare, Biblical exempla glossily reduced for mass consumption. Best sellers all, hypnotic confections. Notes for Tobias’ own book—what had he said it was?—the herbs and plants of the Bible?—lay in neat, careful piles. Dried herbs—or so I assumed—displayed in small, squat bottles, corked.

“There is something I want to show you.”

He pointed to a small poster mounted under glass, a black-and-white placard for a silent moving picture. I peered closer:
The Way Back
, directed by Fred Fischbach, and starring Wallace Reid and Alice Blake. But Tobias indicated a line at the bottom, small print that identified some of the minor players. Included was: Clorrie House. He bowed toward Clorinda. “My beloved wife.”

Clorinda was shaking her head. “He found that idiotic bit of my past in a Salvation Army store in Newark. Displayed in the front window with other best-forgotten junk. A past I
fled
.” She looked at him. “Fled. My girlfriend Virginia got me the part. The two of us played sisters. Wide-eyed and innocent colleens. I had one real scene—We batted our eyes at Wallace Reid and followed him down the street.”

“Then you found Sister Aimee,” Tobias said.

“God directed me away from sin and perdition. Hollywood is nothing more than Satan’s playground. A cesspool.”

“But then you left Aimee Semple McPherson’s church, no?” I said.

A deep sigh. “Ah, Sister Aimee—the temptations of the flesh. She was too enamored of Hollywood herself, with those radio broadcasts and onstage shows and the splendid sensationalism. She started small in a modest chapel, you know. A true believer. I loved her. But then she built the Angelus Temple in 1923. I started to suspect some great corruption there. The International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. She was herself an advocate for women, but she was a bit of a fraud with her faith healing and the promised return of Christ. And of course look what happened to her—that fake kidnapping in 1926 at Venice Beach, that supposed adulterous tryst. Who knows the
real
story?” Clorinda shivered. “Horrible. I wanted a more rigid religion. Old-time religion.”

“My religion,” Tobias added.

“After my husband died, the world was different for me. A scary place for me.”

Clorinda shooed us back into the dining room where, I discovered, Ilona was seated at the table. She was smiling, though it seemed an orchestrated smile, frozen in place. A long black dress, ruffles around the neck. She looked in mourning. “Hello again.” We nodded as we sat down. “Did you enjoy Clorinda’s sermonizing?” Again we nodded.

“I think they were…surprised,” Clorinda confided. “I’m a different soul up there. When I am doing the work of the Lord.”

“Very impressive,” I croaked out.

“Wasn’t it?” Tobias remarked. “It never fails to shatter me, this wife of mine.”

I changed the subject. “I was hoping Dak would stay and talk with us.”

A faint titter from Clorinda. “You know how youngsters are.”

“Actually I don’t. I’ve never married.”

Ilona eyed me intently. “Nor have I, though I raised Dak as a son. The spinster mother, although our father”—she glared at Clorinda—“took special care of him, doting on him, favoring him, stupidly indulging, but nevertheless stern with a swift rod against the boy’s bottom. The only grandson. I was sometimes…helpless.”

“Yes, yes,” Clorinda interrupted, nervous. “Miss Ferber heard you last time.”

For a second Ilona wore a hurt look, mixed with some anger, but then her face looked resigned, the shuttled-about sister dependent on the largesse of Clorinda and her Johnny-come-lately rich husband.

“How long have you lived here?” I asked her.

The question surprised her. “Since our old home was sold.” She glared at her sister.

“I came back to our old home,” Clorinda added. “A comfort zone, that place. Those interminable tours on a broken-down bus—tiresome. When Dakota and I needed to refresh ourselves, we came home. But when I married Tobias, he wanted a grand place. This place. After Hollywood I just wanted to come home. Away from
there
.” She looked around the room. “All the old furniture. Calm. Serenity. Tobias insisted we not change the old trappings. The table we’re eating at was my grandfather’s, brought from Vermont in the last century. This was to be a home for Dakota. A sanctuary. Someday he’ll live here. With Annika.”

“Where does Annika live now?” I asked.

“In a young ladies’ lodge in Newark. A refined Christian home. She is happy there. She was an orphan who came into town for the Junior Christian Endeavor Society on Saturday nights. Then she found us.”

“Of course.” My words might have been too clipped. George shot me a look, which I ignored.

Then, out of nowhere, Tobias launched into an animated—and unnecessary—animadversion on the proper conduct of young folks, some screed I imagined Cotton Mather would deliver as an Election Day Sermon, filled with admonition and punishment and Biblical quotation. He went on too long, of course, and it got worse when Clorinda added her New Testament softening to his Old Testament harangue. A genial battle of damnation and redemption for a heaven neither George nor I was allowed to enter. Or, I supposed, most folks living after the Enlightenment. No matter; their spiritual and dogmatic banter was obviously some sort of marital foreplay, private and cozy and titillating, and the rest of us were idle spectators.

At one point during a particularly tiresome ramble about America as metaphor for Sodom and Gomorrah and the trials of a beleaguered Job—my mind wandered, lost as I was in my own irreverent reverie—I caught Ilona’s eye: a bemused look that suggested she understood how bored I was—and a certain joy that I had now had insight into the horrible hell she was living in this grand mausoleum.

She actually winked, then looked away.

I noticed how pronounced the veins in her neck were, how tense her fingers were as they gripped a fork. She was wearing a shrill crimson lipstick, so out of place in the puritanical room and with her own pitch-black monastic outfit, as though she’d slapped on a blood-red mouth to garner attention. A scarlet letter for the untouched spinster. Now, unfortunately, the garish red had smeared onto her front teeth. She looked as though she’d gnawed into raw flesh.

George seemed to be nodding off, though I knew such feigned drowsiness was one of his preambles to a barrage of cruel comment. Sometimes unexpected dinner invitations were fodder for his satire. The people you dine with—especially invitations you were compelled to accept—were born to be mocked. That was his impish thinking. Elmer Rice once quipped that George said many “devastatingly witty things, but never a kind one.” And George once dismissed me as a Confederate general, then added, “Remember, I’m from Pittsburgh.” We’d been through this scenario before, and I was always the recipient of a headache. I sensed a volcano ready to erupt, so I caught his eye. No, George, I signaled, no.

Tobias shifted the conversation with a remark about saving Clorinda—and now Dakota—from the clutches of Hollywood’s fiery maw and the satanic hold of life on the stage.

George looked up. “I know that there are people who see the theater as evil but”—a clownish grin on his face—“does anyone really want to know such people?”

Quiet in the room. Ilona snickered.

Tobias narrowed his eyes. “They
murder
each other, sir.” Said with a finality that silenced us all.

Clorinda, fluttering, reached for the iced tea. “Annika is a calming influence on Dakota.” Another throwaway line.

Tobias went on. “The only theater is a church hall.”

“Clorinda,” I began, “an idle question. Last time when I mentioned Nadine Chappelle, you were horrified. In fact, you ran out of the room. You didn’t know Dak’s ex-wife was in town…”

“Stop!” she yelled. Her fist pounded the table. “Did you hear what Tobias was saying?
She
is Hollywood. She tried to destroy my boy…that…that foolish marriage. I could not believe that she’s come here. To Maplewood. She came back with one purpose. To seduce him back to Hollywood.” She pounded the table again. “I won’t allow it.”

I’d had enough. “There was even the suggestion that you employed Evan to seduce Nadine as a way of getting Dak to agree to an annulment…”

I stopped, so raw was the look on her face.

“How dare you, Miss Ferber?”

“I have these questions. Believe me, Clorinda, I’m trying to save Dak from a murder charge.”

“And you do it by accusing me of being a…a panderer?”

“I’m trying to clear…”

George was clearing his throat. “Edna.”

Tobias stood, his small body shaking. All of us turned to look at him as he trembled, head bobbing, his skin an awful purple. He shook his fist at me. “How dare you? In my own house. How dare you?” He reached out toward Clorinda, his fingertips touching her extended hand. It reminded me of Adam and God in Michelangelo’s famous ceiling fresco. Fingertips touching. The blessings of heaven on earth. The merest touch that suggested volumes. Tobias grabbed at his heart and bent forward. “How dare you? My wife is a saint.”

Chapter Eleven

The desk clerk called to me as I headed into the breakfast room. “Miss Ferber, a package came for you this morning.” He handed me a rectangular box wrapped in wrinkled brown paper and tied with white string. I joined George at the corner table and as the waiter poured me coffee—with the whipped hot milk I requested—I tore open the package. An exquisite drawing in a burnished gold Victorian frame, the fully realized landscape that Dak had promised me. Finished now, and beautifully done: the result of his sensitive, intimate touch. A luminous work that reminded me of the Durand landscape Dak had pointed out to me. A woodland scene in lush summer. I fairly lost my breath. An accompanying note said, briefly, “Miss Ferber, as promised. Fondly, Dak.” The drawing was signed on the back:
Dakota Roberts for Edna Ferber, Orange Mountain in Summer
.

“I know where I’ll hang this.”

George smiled. “I’ll sell you the one he made for me, Edna. Then you’ll have a matching pair.” A lengthy pause while he lifted a coffee cup. “Oh, that’s right. I haven’t received mine yet.”

“I’m the one who believes in his innocence.”

“As do I.”

“I’m…looking into it.”

“And I’ve been your tagalong jester, Sancho Panza lurching uphill while you tilt madly at windmills.”

“Jealousy is an awful thing, George.”

“Edna, eat your breakfast. You have a long day. You need to hide the painting so I can’t steal it, attend a rehearsal under my direction, and catch a murderer. In that order.”

“It’s not funny, George. Evan is dead.”

His voice got small but with an edge. “Oh, I know, Edna. And I’m worried that you’ll blunder into something that will get you killed.”

“Nonsense.”

“I joke about everything, my dear, but I’m not joking about this.”

I touched Dak’s gift affectionately and tucked it back into the box.

“I have a busy day. I’ll be rushing back to the city after rehearsals, George. I need to meet with Doubleday, and I’m having dinner with Aleck.” Aleck Woollcott was a close friend who invited me to dinner after a brief business meeting with my publisher. Aleck Woollcott, bon vivant and critic, the inspiration for the popular drink, the brandy Alexander; and, unfortunately, the enormously rotund instigator of some of my most vitriolic and smoldering feuds. At the present time, however, we’d called a
pax manahatta
. The two of us were cut from the same piece of easily bruised cloth. Tonight’s dinner—a prelude to Aleck’s making the trek to Maplewood next week for my own final curtain—was to test the waters. Aleck could not wait to see a disaster. Or perhaps not. Lately, I’d practiced good behavior, cloyingly sweet with the café society legend, though sometimes it took all my strength to avoid the easy skirmish with the gloriously round Aleck.

“Are you going to behave yourself this time, Edna?” George grinned his ah-shucks Huck Finn grin.

“Why should I?” Then I smiled, too. “We’re friends this summer, Aleck and I. I’ve decided to have peace in our time. I have nothing on Chamberlain selling out Czechoslovakia.”

George stood. “Good. Time for rehearsal.”

Which went smoothly, with George very pleased. Louis almost dropped me in a crucial staircase scene, but didn’t. Panicking, he jostled me as if I were a burlap sack of old potatoes. His face turned scarlet as he whispered an apology. As the author of
The Royal Family
, I was treated with undue reverence, and Louis Calhern, a longtime star player and robust man, usually picked me up as though I were a fragile Ming vase. George, noting his tentative scooping up of the lovely authoress, had yelled, “Christ, Louis, imagine she’s a clay pot from Woolworth’s.”

“Thank you, George,” I answered back.

“Edna, that’s not a line from the play I wrote.”

Everyone laughed, and so did I. Louis, grinning, swooped me up as though I were a bale of hay and hurled me up the stairs.

Spontaneous applause, and Louis bowed. I tried to look ten pounds lighter.

After lunch, I caught the Lackawanna into Manhattan, a half-hour ride. Arriving at bustling Penn Station, for a moment disoriented by the ebb and flow of rushing crowds, I veered toward a taxi stand to head uptown. Queued up, hit by a blast of noxious bus fumes, I turned away, shielding my face. My eyes locked on a small kiosk where daily newspapers were suspended on a rack.

The
New York
Post
, a subway tabloid usually considered by me as tawdry yellow journalism, caught my eye, an array of papers hanging left to right. The garish big-font headline:

NAZI NOSE DIVE!

Stunned, I handed over a nickel and scanned the front page, looking at the sheet-covered corpse positioned on a subway platform, alongside a steel post that identified the stop as Times Square.

“Lady.” I looked up as the young man squiring folks into taxis called to me. “You going or not? I ain’t got all day.” Grumpy, yet oddly friendly, the paradoxical mix of New York City attitude. I nodded and slipped into the backseat and gave the address of Doubleday.

To this day I cannot say how I knew, what dark atavistic impulse told me, but I knew under that morbid sheet was the body of Gus Schnelling. No matter: sometimes my journalistic nose understood situations long before my intellect grappled with them. A nose for news, my father once called it.

The
Post
misspelled his name: Gus Shelling.

The article contained very little information. There had been a much-publicized Nazi rally at downtown Union Square, which drew upwards of fifty people, many of them carrying placards and banners displaying swastikas and the ferret-like visage of the German madman. Inside the
Post
there was a photo taken of the rally—arms raised in grotesque salute, straight-out, rigid, menacing. A fiery speaker lauded Hitler’s economic rejuvenation of the Rhineland—and his rapid dominion over brutalized Europe. Photographs of families, too, with one man holding up a child whose simpering grin especially alarmed me. The father was a beefy lout, adenoidal looking, and a woman with stringy hair and pasty face clung to his arm. The starved, pinched faces of the Depression. Other men and women celebrated German ascendancy, German-American alliance, the awful Bund, a worship of the Führer, whose redundant picture dominated so many posters. Swastika armbands graced upper arms. Nowhere in the photo—I stared, eyes close to the grainy shot—could I see Gus Schnelling or Meaka Snow.

Yet, hours later, his body lay on a subway platform blocks north of Union Square.

The rally had been rowdy, the
Post
reported, the police ringing the crowd as anti-fascist protestors yelled catcalls at the Nazis. The boisterous rally was intended as a crowd-provoking preamble to a speech in a hall up in Yorkville at ten that night. But Gus never made it. After the rally, a dozen cohorts headed through the underground, planning to make a transfer at the Forty-second Street subway stop. Some vociferous protestors followed, monitored by the police. Both groups screamed at each other, and the police broke up fistfights. On the packed subway platform at Times Square, around nine o’clock, an hour after the rally ended, the jostling crowd shifted. While police restrained another aggressive protester who tried to assault a taunting Nazi, the train approached and, in a flash, one of the Nazis, standing on the edge, was pushed into the path of the speeding train.

Gus Shelling (their spelling), aged twenty-seven, of uncertain address, was pronounced dead moments later.

Witnesses said an old man, white-haired and wearing a baggy trench coat despite the awful heat down there, had deliberately pushed Gus. The sign Gus carried flew into the air, and in the ensuing panic, as cohorts tried to reach him before the train crushed him, the old man had fled up the stairs and into the street. In the confusion the police, alerted, rushed to rescue Gus, not realizing he’d been pushed. When others yelled about the old man, they gave chase—to no avail.

I read and reread the short piece. Horrible, such a death. A violent end to a life that celebrated violence. What mattered now was that a young man had been crushed to death. Awful, awful.

There was no mention of Meaka Snow. I wondered whether she’d been there, at his side, the loyal comrade in a frightening cause. Gus’ convert who came to love his cause. The Nazi maiden with the electric hatred.

Gus Schnelling, dead. Evan Street dead, his crony. Or enemy? Gus who wanted to retrieve something from Evan’s room. Something incriminating? Evidence? Had he killed Evan? Well, Constable Biggers need not monitor the swaggering Gus any longer.

Now his full attention would rest on Dak.

Dak.

Back in Maplewood, a short train ride away.

***

My business at my publisher’s concluded successfully, I met Aleck Woollcott for an early dinner at Maxim’s on East Sixtieth Street, a familiar if pedestrian watering hole and eatery for the ragtag remnants of the old Rose Room of the Algonquin Round Table, long gone now but nostalgically remembered. Aleck relished the French cuisine because the elegant dessert cart, wheeled past him a number of times in the course of our dinner, was calculated to get the obese man salivating and tongue-tied. I liked the place because they always remembered my name and gave me the table by the front window. The maitre d’ had a wife who had memorized parts of
Show Boat
—the autographed copy I gave her insured copious sherry aperitifs and the coveted table. The spoils of fame, mocked by me in my fiction yet, sadly, savored by a woman who liked her fame and fortune.

“Edna,” Aleck began, “we’re all driving out on Saturday.”

“All?”

“I’m gathering carloads of your enemies, but I fear such a caravan would clog the highways.”

“What cattle car are you commandeering?”

He squinted. “Fat jokes, Edna? A week in New Jersey and you’re already indulging in puerile humor.”

“I seem to recall that you were born in New Jersey.”

He shut up, peering at the menu. “Ah, sirloin with fried potatoes.”

Aleck sat back, adjusting his eyeglasses. A huge man, round as a bowling ball, with an owl-like pink face and short, pudgy fingers, he looked the court eunuch in his rumpled white linen suit that was his one summer look. For a while he discussed recent croquet games played in Central Park and at the Swopes estate at Sands Point, Long Island—everyone’s current passion, Aleck being particularly good at it. George despised sports—except for croquet. Aleck told me an anecdote of Harpo Marx trying to cheat, which I’d heard before. Noteworthy games went on for eight or nine hours, Aleck indefatigable at the obsession. “Really, Edna, no one can beat me.”

Then, suddenly, as we were served our dinners, he looked me in the eye. “I hear you’re involved in a murder in Maplewood.”

“Evan Street, an understudy.”

A smile. “Let me ask you this, dear Ferb. How are you going to get away with it?”

I cut into my steak and then held the knife toward him, menacingly. “Aleck, if I’m going to murder someone, I’d pick a more expansive target to shoot. Then I wouldn’t need a good aim. Just fury.”

“Nice, Edna. Did you rehearse that witticism?” He chuckled. “Tell me all about it.”

So I did, and Aleck, a curious man with keen observation, listened closely as I chronicled Evan’s death and the cast of characters in Maplewood.

He reflected, sipping his cocktail, “You know, Edna, I talked to Louis Calhern one night.”

“Louis?”

“Yes, an old friend, but this was before the murder. He did mention an understudy that got on Frank’s nerves, and he was a little peeved at Cheryl for bringing him into the mix. Frank’s not one to abide nonsense. Evan, I assume. Too good-looking for his own good. Louis told me that this Evan seemed too…hungry. A cocksure lad, annoying as spit.”

“Aptly put, Aleck, I grant you. A man who relied on his looks and glib tongue.”

“Good looks. Hah! You have to feel alone in the world to develop a personality.” He let me consider the words for a minute.

“So you know Frank Resnick?”

“Everyone on Broadway knows Frank. Except you, of course, who only socialize with the very rich or the very poor. All the rest—that middle road of drab functionaries—you cavalierly ignore. Not colorful enough for you. The rich intrigue you with their corruption and secrets, and the poor intrigue you with their pettiness and secrets.”

“Well, thank you. Wit and wisdom from the oracle of Carnegie Deli.”

“Ah, my dear Ferb!”

“Tell me about Frank.”

“An efficient stage manager, much in demand, though Louis and I both discussed why he is in exile with you in Maplewood. People
leave
New Jersey—they don’t
go
there. Not willingly. Not without a judge’s mandate. Once again, you’re the exception. And Frank, too.”

“I wondered the same thing. He’s giving undue attention to a charming young man who is suspected of murdering Evan.”

“My, my, Edna, a regular cesspool you inhabit in that sylvan glen.”

“Tell me about him.”

He sat back, his fingers drumming the dessert menu. “Frank has always been a quiet, quiet man, almost a hermit. No one is ever invited to his place on West End Avenue. He refuses most invitations to get-togethers, unless mandated—you know, the demands of staying alive on Broadway. He refuses to gossip and argue—though he knows a lot of scandal, let me assure you. And he has decided to avoid all facial expression lest an onlooker assume he cares.”

“But he obviously does care these days. He’s a different man in Maplewood, it seems. Nothing like what you describe. I can see it in his fury. His pointed—almost manic—defense of Dak. Why such a shift in character? He had a confrontation in the street with this…this Annika Tuttle, one of the zealots of the town.”

His eyebrows rose. “Really? Frank engaging in a street scene? Are you sure? The Frank I know walks away from confrontation.” He signaled to a passing waiter and ordered coffee—a pot, not a cup—and a strawberry soufflé and a Bavarian chocolate roll. “Anything for you, Edna?”

I shook my head. “No, Aleck. Go on, please.”

“Frank led a wild younger life, if rumor is to be believed—and it usually is. I always believe the worst of people. That why I’m pleasantly surprised when I notice crumbs of decency in them later on. But Frank—where was I?—Oh yes, Frank spent or misspent his young manhood in Hollywood, supposedly as a budding actor. I gather he got caught up in a life of parties, drinking, drugs, mayhem, women who should know better, and sleepy-eyed mornings waking up in a sheriff’s cell. Hubba hubba, dance the night away.”