Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (4 page)

She was not the sort who usually gave into obsessions. If she lost a filling or had a tooth that ached, she was perfectly able to keep her tongue from probing the pain until she saw the dentist. She really was capable of being very sensible.

It was just, she told herself, that Doug Ringling had caught her at a bad time.

Four weeks ago she had lost her house. It had been a little two-bedroom cottage off Topanga Canyon Road near the Pacific Coast Highway. A towering pile of mud had rumbled down the hillside, uprooting trees, dragging down electric poles, sweeping away two houses, one of which had been Jill's.

She had been out of the country at the time, but her neighbors had alerted her father's office, and his former secretary had sent out a moving crew. With the mud approaching fast, there had been no time to give them instructions. They had saved what they would have saved from their own houses: the stereo, the televisions, the VCRs, all of which were insured and easily replaced. They did get Jill's clothes, her modest accumulation of jewelry, and her father's two Oscars. They left behind her Rolodex, her calendar, and her kitchen drinking glasses, having no way of knowing that these ordinary-looking glasses were startlingly valuable, as they had been used on the set of
Casablanca.
She had inherited them from her father who, decades ago, had roomed with someone who was a prop boy on the
Casablanca
set. Cass's roommate had lifted a box of glasses simply because he had needed glasses, and despite their value to collectors now, that's how Jill had used them, to drink from.

Jill was determined to be all right about having lost her house. She always refused to attach any sentimental importance to objects. Her mother was a compulsive shopper, and, as a result, Jill loathed accumulating things. If there was any woman able to cope with losing most of her belongings, she told her concerned friends, she was.

Nonetheless, it had been an unsettling month. She had had to reconstruct her Rolodex, and almost all her friends— children of the Hollywood famous or celebrities in their own right—had unlisted phone numbers. Losing her calendar had been an even greater problem. Her mother had suggested that she be hypnotized in an effort to remember her appointments. Jill had chosen not to, concluding that if her presence at some event was truly essential, someone would remind her of it.

Life was finally starting to seem normal again, but odd moments would catch her off guard. She would reach for a particular shade of lipstick, then remember it was at the bottom of a huge pile of mud. She would want a certain book, she would picture exactly where it sat on the shelf, she would want to run over to the house and pick it up... then she would remember that the house, the shelf, and the book weren't there anymore.

It was a little like after her father died, and she would think about calling him or dropping by the big Bel Air house. Then she would remember and all the hurt would start up again.

Of course, losing her house hadn't been nearly as bad as losing her father, but it hadn't been one of life's better experiences. So it certainly wasn't the best time to hear that someone with the face of a Confederate horseman thought that her father's reputation was undeserved.

The next morning Jill drove to her father's office. This was not the office of his production company, that had been closed after his death. The two people working in this office had managed Cass's investments during his lifetime and now ran the estate for Jill.

A true Southerner, Cass had believed in land and had plowed every dime he ever made into California real estate. He had two sons by his first marriage, men so much older than Jill that their children were her age, but Cass had provided for them in the punishing settlement made during the bitter divorce from his first wife, Ellen. He did set up some very generous trusts for the grandchildren, whom Ellen had not allowed him to see.

"I'm not going to leave a thing to the boys," Cass had told Jill. "That's what their mother has been telling me for twenty-five years, and I'm not going to disappoint her. I shall leave something to their children, which will make her hopping mad, but if fortune smiles upon us, she will die before me and be spared the agony of knowing that I am capable of doing the right thing."

A glint in his eye suggested that making Ellen mad was half the reason he was setting up these trusts.

So Jill, the only child of his short-lived second marriage, inherited the bulk of his estate. This left her beyond every euphemism of "comfortable" or "independent." She was flat-out rich, way above the ten-to-twenty million dollars of the "moderately wealthy" and solidly in the ranks of the "truly wealthy." She was, on paper at least, a centi-million-aire several times over.

No one observing Jill's life would have a clue that she had so much money. Like almost every truly wealthy American, except for the late Malcolm Forbes, she lived quietly, having neither a yacht nor a private plane, because having yachts and private planes complicated one's life, breeding worries about staffing and logistics. Only the moderately wealthy bought yachts, planes, and flashy jewels. Only the moderately wealthy needed to show off; the truly wealthy had nothing to prove.

This money came from her father. From her mother, Melody, Jill inherited her willowy build. She had a dancer's body—tall, with elegant, tapering fingers and a swan's graceful neck. She had narrow shoulders, and her breasts, waist, and hips moved with lithe, flowing curves. Her legs, identical to her mother's, were her best feature, gloriously long with a line of trim strength behind the glowing, tanned skin. Her height was in her legs, the extra inches naturally giving her the look other women achieved by hiking their leotards up to their hipbones or wearing high heels with their swim suits.

She had her mother's blond hair, which she wore long, sometimes swinging loose, sometimes clipped back at her neck. Facially she resembled neither of her parents. Melody was classically pretty with the even, delicate features of a Greek statue. Jill had a stronger jaw, more definite cheekbones, fuller lips. Her mother's look was delicate, Jill's was engaging. This was consistent with her casual clothes and her informal, friendly manner, both of which disarmed anyone who had gotten his ideas about rich people from the behavior of the merely moderately wealthy. The truly wealthy were often rather nice.

The Casler Properties offices were in a complex of low, Spanish-style buildings a few blocks off the Hollywood Freeway. A red-tiled arch led into a courtyard that had recently been paved over for parking. The space nearest the main door was prominently marked "Reserved for Miss Casler." Somebody else's white Mercedes was parked in it. Jill managed to squeeze her own American-made car between a pair of Porsches that were each angled across two spaces.

Currently employed by the estate were the two people Jill trusted more than anyone on earth. Ken Sommerston, an attorney now more involved with real estate and investments than with the law, was a good-hearted, genial man. The estate's secretary, Lynette Shepherd, had been with Cass longer than either of his two wives. With graying hair twisted into a hairnet at the back of her head and glasses, which she wore suspended from a chain, she looked like a grammar-school librarian, but she was an exceptionally competent woman. Her memory was superb. If Cass had ever told her anything about the making of
Weary Hearts,
she would remember.

Both Ken and Lynette were always delighted to see Jill, having known her since the day she was born. As soon as Jill opened the door to the fourth-floor suite, Lynette, presiding over the outer office from a large mahogany desk, flipped a switch on the intercom. "Ken, Jill's here." Then she came around the desk, holding out her arms.

In a moment Ken was with them, he, too, kissing Jill's cheek. The file folder he was carrying caught in her hair.

Smiling, she untangled herself. "I suppose this is something you want me to sign."

"It's the inventories for the insurance claims." He was filing for her mudslide losses. "Do you want to go over them? See if we've forgotten anything?"

How was she going to do that? Only by picturing in detail each room of her lost home. On the table opposite the front door had been a tiny watercolor framed in gilt, standing on a little easel. Next to it was a vase that her friend Susannah Donovan had given her. Was either of them valuable? Jill didn't know. They had been lovely, that's all she had cared about. What about the arrangement of dried flowers and sea grasses in the vase? Her mother had brought in a florist to design it specifically for the vase; it picked up some of the colors in the painting. Like many things Melody purchased, it had cost the earth. Should that be listed on the claim?

Jill did not want to have to think about each and every one of her lost possessions. Getting every last dime out of the insurance company wasn't worth it. She shook her head. "I'm sure you're close enough."

She sat down on the sofa across from Lynette's desk. She was glad to be there. After taking her to see the empty mudland that had been her house, Ken had planned on bringing her to his own home, but she had asked to come here. The offices felt warm, comforting, full of her father's presence.

Cass had not opened it until he was quite affluent, and the furnishings revealed that. Although the rooms were washed with Southern California's straw-colored light, they were decorated as if they were in Williamsburg or Richmond. The large, square reception room was dominated by a dramatic Jacobean pattern of scarlet and navy flowers on a parchment background. The fabric covered the camelback sofa and the rolled-arm wing chairs; it had also been fashioned into deep fringed swags over the windows. The inner offices had gentler toiles, airy designs of vines, ferns, and birds in white and faded blues.

In the midst of this steady dignity, Doug Ringling's story seemed hardly worth talking about. But Ken and Lynette had taken seats on the wing chairs and were looking concerned, waiting to hear why she had come.

"I wanted to tell you about this visitor I had," she said. "He was a nephew of Bix Ringling. It was the strangest thing, but the nephew looked exactly like him."

"I think we knew about that boy," Lynette said. Even after so many years in California, her accent still whispered of North Carolina. "When the studio was putting on all that whoop-la for the movie's fortieth anniversary, they wanted him to come to the publicity events dressed up like Phillip, but he wouldn't do it. What did he want from you?"

To stomp all over my most cherished fantasies.
"He had an odd story about the movie." She related it as he had told it, leaving out any judgments on Cass's role, but even so she felt a little disloyal. Why was she bothering to explore this any further? Why couldn't she forget it? "I know neither of you was with Cass then, but did he ever say anything?"

Ken shrugged. "I don't think so."

Lynette took a moment, but then had to agree. "He didn't talk to the two of us about what was happening in the production office. He certainly didn't say anything about the movies he had done in the past. He wasn't one to insist that you admire his work all the time. But you know we have the files on that movie over here. Do you want me to get them?"

That was why Jill had come. For a year after Cass's death, despite her refusal to become attached to the objects in her own life, she held on to her father's papers. She paid for storage space and for someone to assist the scholars and writers who wanted to examine the material. But as it became essential to screen the people with a genuine critical interest in the papers from those who wanted to pilfer valuable autographs, Jill was prevailed on to donate them to the University of Southern California. The Doheny Library there already had Arthur Freed's and Mark Hellinger's papers as well as the MGM script library and the Warner Brothers' production and personnel records.

She secretly wanted to give them to the University of Virginia—she thought Cass might have liked that—but Frank Capra's papers were in Connecticut, David Selznick's were in Texas, Dore Schary's were in Wisconsin. Jill knew that she could best serve the travel budgets of film historians by keeping Cass's papers in California. He himself was always practical about things like that.

She had felt a wrench at turning the papers over and so had thrown her emotions one completely irrational bone— she had kept copies of everything relating to
Weary Hearts
and to
Nancy. Nancy
had won Cass his first Academy Award. It was Jill's second favorite of his movies because she had spent so much time with him on its set.

As Cass had produced
Nancy
himself, its files were bulky, covering every aspect of the film, from the story-conference notes through the detailed budgets to the distribution contracts. There was much less material for
Weary Hearts,
as Cass had been an employee of the studio at the time.

So Lynette was able to carry the
Weary Hearts
files back to the conference room in a single armload. She laid them on the glossy table and left Jill alone.

Jill had looked through this material when copies had been made the year before. As she remembered, the only script-related items were a copy of Bix's first treatment, the one that had prompted John Ransome's article, and a copy of the "Script As Shot," a version constructed after the movie had been completed. An "As Shot" script told nothing about the process of making a film; it detailed the result.

Some of Cass's editing notes were in the file, as were drafts of a few of his memos to Miles Smithson. Jill read these carefully, but they were all dated late August and September, after the filming had been completed. There was nothing from the June and July period during which Cass was helping to redraft the script. Jill imagined that that material had been left in the studio files.

She was coming towards the end of the stack of folders. She knew that what remained would be more contemporary, including, for example, the copy of the studio's plan for promoting the video and of the press release in which they announced that they were donating all their original camera negatives on nitrate stock—of which
Weary Hearts
was the best known—to the Library of Congress. The studio's publicity department had forwarded both of those to Cass as a courtesy.