Missing Reels (33 page)

“She’s always wanted to see
Mysteries
again,” said Ceinwen. “She told me that.”

He took the matches, and with one hand, he flicked one alight and held it out. She’d always known better than to try and learn that technique. “Then why haven’t you asked her for help?”

“Well …” She lit up. He blew out the match and waited. “She’s a pessimist.” Jim nodded, like a reporter waiting for an interview to continue. “She thinks it’s all dust now and she’s resigned to it. So if I tell her I’m looking for
Mysteries
, she’ll say everybody in Hollywood was an awful person and she wants nothing to do with them anymore.” She paused. “But if somebody finds Emil’s whole entire film, that’s different.” His mouth was shut tight. “She loved Emil so much. You should have seen her face when she was telling me about him. She’s still sad about what happened. She wants him to get his due, she said so. But that can’t happen just from an itty-bitty piece of the movie.” No movement. “You see?”

“I definitely think it’s a good idea not to get her involved,” Jim said.

“Until I actually find it.”

“Uh, yeah. Tell her then.”

She blew her smoke toward the ceiling, then sat up, alert again. “Hey. Gimme my letter.”

Jim pulled it out from under his leg. “Here you go. I have to run a few errands. When you’re done reading, for heaven’s sake take a nap. You’ve got trenches under your eyes.”

He told her he would be back soon. She took the envelope into her bedroom. The letter had a nice weight to it, but there was no name, just a return address in Fresno, and she didn’t remember writing to Fresno. She slid a finger under the flap and felt the edge cut a line of blood along her knuckle. She finished by ripping, and stuck the finger in her mouth. Sheets of airmail paper, folded neatly around a pamphlet. She picked up the pamphlet, which showed shafts of sunlight shining down on a neatly trimmed meadow. “First Apostolic Reformed Church of Fresno,” it said. Oh brother. She peeled off the last page of the letter and her attitude improved on the spot.

“Very truly yours, Lucile Pierrepoint Miller.”

Frank Gregory’s secretary, the one she had written to care of the Beverly Hills Women’s League. Praise be, the ex-debs had forwarded her letter. She’d have to be nicer about them. A little nicer. She fanned the pages slightly—seven, front and back, covered in a neat, prim hand, the letters round and upright like little balloons. I’m going to read it from the top, she scolded herself. If I try to skim, I may miss something.

“Dear Miss Reilly,

“My old friends at the Women’s League were kind enough to forward your letter to me. It has been a long while since anyone asked about the old days at Civitas. I do not know how much help I can give you on your proposed freelance article, but I will answer your questions as best I can. And I hope that my doing so can reinforce your thesis about Mr. Gregory and the influence of the great studio heads. He certainly was one, and I applaud your desire to clarify the record and give him his due.

“However, I must say that
The Mysteries of Udolpho
”—Lucile had underlined the title, the way they taught Ceinwen in high school—“does not strike me as the best topic for a look at Mr. Gregory’s life work, and I can’t help wishing you had picked something else. Still, it does show some of his unique qualities as an executive, so I will go along.

“The project was a difficult one from the beginning. It is an old-fashioned and not terribly exciting book. I believe Mr. Gregory had wanted to take on a work with more obvious literary merit, such as
The House of the Seven Gables
or
D’Ri and I
.”

D’Ri and I
? What in the world?

“But when he brought Emil Arnheim over from Germany (at considerable expense, Civitas paid his way) Arnheim was most insistent about the choice of book. And even though the screenplay was by one of the best writers Civitas had, Arnheim also demanded extensive revisions.”

No “Mr.” for Emil.

“It was the first, but by no means the last time that Arnheim would make trouble for us all. I am sorry to say that he was a thoroughly distasteful person, with all of the bad parts of the German character and none of the good. He did not have much experience, but he was far too cold and arrogant to attempt to benefit from anyone’s advice, not even Mr. Gregory’s. I experienced this first-hand.

“It was my task to type Mr. Gregory’s memos to Arnheim, concerning things that needed to be done in order to make a movie that people would want to see, which in the end of course, he did not manage. I would send the errand boy over to the set and tell him to wait for the message back from Arnheim. The boy would come back in an hour or so and I’d ask what Arnheim had to say. Had he read the memo? Oh yes ma’am, the boy would tell me, I watched him read it just like you told me. And what was the reply? He said to tell Mr. Gregory ‘thank you,’ the boy said.

“Now what was I supposed to do with that? I would go back to Mr. Gregory and tell him the memo had been delivered, but we never knew if Arnheim was paying them any mind. Mr. G. was seeing rushes, of course, but the high-handedness of Arnheim was still incredible.

“One day I got so angry that instead of sending the boy I went myself. And I walked in and they were setting up a shot and there was Arnheim. I marched over and handed him the paper and said ‘This time, Mr. Arnheim, I am waiting for the reply myself, because I am sure you will have something to say other than thank you.’ He sat down and made a show of unfolding and reading it. He asked if I could wait another minute, because he wanted to re-read and make sure he had the reply just right. So he read it again, while I stood there on that boiling hot set. And he folded it up again and said, ‘All right, Fraulein Pierrepoint. Please tell Mr. Gregory I said danke schoen.’ Then he turned his back on me and walked away.

“So you can see what kind of a man we were all dealing with.”

I certainly do, thought Ceinwen. She looked to the still, in its paper bag on the table, and gave it a thumbs-up.

“And you can see also what Mr. Gregory had to endure from a man who should have been nothing but grateful to him. Probably you will hear and read a great deal of nonsense from people about Mr. G. But surely you can see how patient he was. Arnheim was very smooth and reassuring, and Mr. Gregory trusted him, and he should not have. That was clear when we held the preview. I went to take notes, as always. And the movie was quite dreadful. The lead actress had never made a picture before”—why, you lying old bat—“and she simply wasn’t up to it. Most of the movie was just Arnheim showing off, moving the camera for no reason at all. Putting up a shot of something nonsensical, like dust, if you can believe it. A shot of dust! I assure you, Arnheim didn’t have that in the dailies when I was there with Mr. Gregory.”

Dust. On a piece of furniture? In the air? Blowing across something? Should she write back and ask?

“When the screening was over, and it seemed to go on for hours, Mr. G. went to talk to Arnheim. Instead of apologizing for refusing his guidance and asking how the picture could be fixed, Arnheim proceeded to insult the audience. He said they were dull people in a dull town, compared them to that book,
Babbitt
, and said that the movie was never aimed at them. That was when Mr. Gregory let him have it. He told him that a movie was made for whoever had the means to pay for a ticket, and since Arnheim couldn’t turn the movie into something this or any other audience would like, he would have his own people cut it in half if that was what it took.

“That finally shook up Mein Herr a little. He told Mr. Gregory not to do it, that he could cut it himself. Mr. Gregory didn’t want to do it, good money after bad he said, but he finally gave Arnheim two weeks. You see how kind he was? Who else would do such a thing? Why, Mayer would have had the man locked out of the studio.

“So he recut it, and it still wasn’t right, and Mr. G. had his editors go in and take out things like the dust and the candles and the mirrors and everything else that was boring people to death. We released it and I believe we did manage to break even, barely.”

So what are you complaining about?

“After all that, Arnheim thought Mr. Gregory should just up and give him another picture. For a few months it seemed as though I was fielding a call from that man every day. Then he started coming to the office. I would tell him Mr. Gregory was otherwise engaged, and he would say he’d wait, and he would sit there doing nothing but reading and giving me those cold German stares until he decided it was time to leave.

“At first he thought he could still ask for the projects he wanted. When it dawned on him that he wasn’t going to get those, he got off his high horse and said he’d do whatever Mr. G. asked. But we knew he couldn’t be trusted. For one thing, everyone knew he was running through his salary, still maintaining a big fancy car and the same house and spending on gambling and drink, which I smelled on him more often than not. Mr. G. gave him a loan against his salary on the contract, just to get him to go away. And Arnheim ran through that too, and Mr. G. advanced the next year’s salary, thinking maybe he’d get it back if Arnheim turned out to be a decent director of Bs or something, I suppose. Or perhaps he just felt sorry for him. In any event, by the time Arnheim died, he owed the studio the equivalent of another full year’s pay.”

Sort of like sharecropping, she thought. Lovely.

“But I am afraid that I am sounding harsh and unforgiving, when that is not so. I could see only how selfishly Arnheim was behaving. It wasn’t until a few years later, when Mr. G. had retired and I was no longer working, that I began reading the Bible and I realized that Arnheim deserved my pity. He was a very sick person, sick in his soul. All I could see was how he took advantage of Mr. G., and how bad his behavior was, with all that extravagance and drinking and rudeness. I didn’t realize that people turn to alcohol when they must fill a great emptiness inside. That was also the reason he was carrying on with that actress, the one he forced on poor Mr. G. She was a stuck-up little thing, too, no time for anyone but Arnheim. If she had known the love of God, I believe she would have been a far different person.”

Don’t bet on it.

“It is for that reason that I have enclosed a tract for you. I don’t know you, but I always try to spread the word. We can never know who among us might be in need of comfort.”

She better read the tract before she tossed it, in case it had real information. Like, “We believe it’s a sin to throw away nitrate.”

“And that is why, later on, I also felt regret that Arnheim died before he could find the spiritual fulfillment he needed so badly. At the time, I am sorry to tell you, all that I and just about everyone else thought was that his chickens were coming home to roost at last.”

She laid the letter down on the bed, went into the kitchen, got a glass of water from the tap, chugged it, set the glass in the sink, and went back. She lit a cigarette and picked the letter up.

“You ask me about what went on at Arnheim’s house the day after he died. No, Mr. Gregory did not go. He sent me and Myron Badgley to look through Arnheim’s papers. As I said, he owed Civitas a good bit of money and Mr. G. very properly wanted to see if the studio had a way to seek repayment. He also wanted to make sure any studio correspondence didn’t fall into the wrong hands. There was no point in damaging Arnheim’s reputation any further.

“We went through the house front to back. I was concentrating on my work and the notes I was taking, so I can’t tell you everyone I saw. I do remember that Arnheim’s actress was there—”

Miriam Clare. You remember all this, you remember her name, too.

“—and she wasn’t speaking to anyone, just walking around in silence and trying to put things back even though she knew we were tallying them. I also remember Norman Stallings, the assistant director, hanging around and questioning everything. He had a close relationship with Arnheim. I suppose that wasn’t surprising, considering that Norman himself was dissolute in a different way.”

Dissolute, but in a different way. Gay, thought Ceinwen, although Miriam hadn’t mentioned it.

“One thing I can tell you is that when we got to the bedroom in the back, there was no film there. I hope you understand that prints were studio property and it would have been quite improper for Arnheim to have one. It would have been repossessed, and anyone who found such a thing would have had to notify Mr. Gregory immediately, through me. I can tell you with complete confidence that no print of
The Mysteries of Udolpho
was ever found that day. I suspect that whoever told you such a thing was indulging in gossip, and nothing more.

“I hope this serves to answer your questions, and to give you a better picture of Mr. Gregory and how fine a man he was. I am sorry that the Arnheim film is gone, as indeed I am sorry that anything Mr. G. put his efforts into is gone. But of all the Civitas films that are no longer available, I certainly regret that one the least.

“If you have further questions, you may write to me at this address. I hope you also find time to look at the reading I sent. Without the grace of God, we are all inches away from becoming Emil Arnheim.

“Very truly yours,

“Lucile Pierrepoint.”

Myron Badgley, the studio’s lawyer, was dead. What the hell happened to Norman?

She took Jim’s advice and lay down for a nap, but woke up a couple of hours later to him shaking her shoulder and handing her the phone.

“Hello.” Matthew sounded formal.

“Hello yourself. What’s up?” Jim began to walk away.

“I’ve given the matter some thought.” Sheesh, this skipped formal and ran straight into stuffy. “And I believe I owe you an apology.”

Had he ever once apologized for anything, even stealing the covers? “That’s all right, don’t worry about it.”

Jim stopped.

“I overreacted.”

“I understand. You were pissed.” More than once he’d told her that to him, pissed meant drunk, but she never remembered until after she’d said it. “I canceled on you, it was natural.”