The Count of the Sahara (32 page)

Chapter 24

Los Angeles, California

November 22, 1954

Even after twenty-eight years in California I never got tired of the sunshine. I was whistling, “The Nearness of You,” along with the radio in the old Chevy and tapping on the steering wheel when I turned off Melrose into the Windsor Gate at Paramount Studios.

“Morning, Nathan.” I beat him to it this morning.

“Morning, Will.” Nathan had greeted me the same way for almost twenty years—a jaunty good morning and a tip of the cap. The striped wooden barrier lifted up and I drove towards the workshops at the back of the lot.

The front was all studio offices, busy nebbishy guys in suits and ties and secretaries way too good for them. Then were the working lots, where if you weren’t careful you could get distracted by all the cowboys, saloon girls and extras dressed as Martians. I remember trying to explain to my insurance guy once that I lost a front bumper to a falling suit of armor. Only in L. A. I suppose.

The prop and set workshops were stashed away at the back of the lot. I pulled into my usual spot. Maury Lewis stood expectantly, holding the papers and a bag of crullers. He couldn’t even wait for me to get out of the car before accosting me. “Morning, Will. Whatcha got today?”

I had to think for a moment. “Conquest of Space, I think. You?”

He gave me that smug look he always got when he was working on an A picture. “Starting that Grace Kelly thing today, “The Country Girl”. Bing’s in it, too.” Maury always liked to rub it in when he got a prestige assignment. When he got “Sabrina,” you’d think he won the Irish Sweepstakes and got to marry Audrey Hepburn as a bonus. I’d be hearing “Bing this,” and “Grace that,” for weeks to come. “Conquest of Space,” was just a programmer George Pal was riding herd on. Personally, I didn’t care how big the picture was, just what kind of work I’d be doing on it. Props was a union job, so we all got paid the same no matter what. Maury could have the women’s pictures and the big melodramas. I much preferred playing with swords and guns. Hell, we were building some kind of kooky space ship thing for “Conquest,” which was way more fun than making sure we had the right kind of coffee cup for Miss Kelly, who was a bit of a brat, truth be told.

I’d been at Paramount for twenty years by that time. I came over in thirty-four, after kicking around at the Sennett studios, then Columbia and RKO until JT got me the job on “The Scarlett Empress,” with Marlene Dietrich. I was always good with swords, and some dumb ass had given the Cossacks scimitars instead of shashkas. “Swords are swords,” was good enough for Poverty Row, but not for the big time, and I took over that bonehead’s job on the spot. I’ve been here ever since. Some call it luck, but how hard is it, really, to just do your job?

The routine never changed. Maury and I arrived, checked the schedule to see which lazy S.O.Bs we could pawn off on the other, and which hustlers we could claim for our own teams, then we’d work like crazy to make sure everything was set up for the first shot of the day.

Once shooting was underway, there was plenty of down time, which meant shooting the shit over coffee and the papers. I normally looked at the trades and a little local news. Maury was a racing schedule and sports guy. Lately, he’d taken to reading the obituaries, which worried me a bit, but he said there was nothing to it.

I was on my second cruller when Maury sat up and passed the Examiner across the table. “Hey, don’t you know this guy?” He stabbed it with his finger. “This guy, right here.”

It was Shelley Mazer’s column. I usually didn’t read him, since he was one of those “Broadway is better than pictures” types, but the words leapt off the page at me:

REMEMBERING “COUNT” DE PROROK

One of the hazards of being an old hand at this business, is you hear about a lot of people you know going to their rewards. I was talking to my old New York agent pal, Lee Keedick, who told me one of the oddest ducks on that pond has just passed… “Count” Byron de Prorok.

For those of you too young to remember, “The Count” was quite a character: an archaeologist, lecturer, and shameless self-promoter. In 1925, when Lee first took him on, he was fresh off an expedition in the Sahara that saw him splashed all over the front page of the New York Times. His high-society wedding to the daughter of W F Kenny—yes the Tammany Hall Kenny—was all over the papers. I remember my buddies at the old Brooklyn Eagle couldn’t get enough of them. Pretty Alice Kenny and her Handsome Count were all the rage at parties, at least on the wrong side of the East River.

He was quite the bon vivant and raconteur; handsome, with a stupendous gift of gab. The “Count” was the Lion of the Midwest lecture circuit—a real novelty in the minor metropolises of Iowa and Missouri where he made the housewives’ hearts flutter wildly. He wrote four books, with titles like “Digging for Lost African Gods,” and “Dead Men Do Tell Tales.” The problem is that while dead men might tell tales, so do archaeologists, some of those tales very tall indeed. The “Count” was exposed as something of a “fabulist,” which is Lee’s favorite word for a pathological liar. He could spin a good story, though.

Seems his title was “borrowed” from a Polish Uncle, and his claims of finding tombs full of gold turned out to be pretty much as phony as his English accent and his claims of fighting Tribesmen and Italian agents in Abyssinia or uncovering lost temples in Mexico. Pretty Alice Kenny divorced him, leaving his two daughters with his in-laws, and she very quickly remarried an Englishman with a real title and three names. Byron continued to drag his pictures and films around for years, although he never reached the same level of fame despite getting decent reviews at Carnegie Hall, including one from me. After the divorce, he lived full-time in Europe, where he remarried (at last count, according to Lee who quit keeping tally) three times. Old Byron never had a problem attracting the ladies. He’d just put that silly helmet on his head and they’d melt.

To those of us who knew him, it wasn’t a big surprise he was the worse for drink when they found him a few days ago, aged 58, on a train bound for Paris. According to Keedick, who still represented him stateside, he was about to begin an American lecture tour on his experiences as a Resistance fighter against the Nazis. Whether his experiences with la Resistance were more factual than his claims of finding King Solomon’s Mines, is now known only to the Lost Gods he always talked about.

I remember many a night in New York listening to the Count’s amazing tales, believing half of them, and probably giving him too much credit at that. Like most of New York, I hadn’t thought about him in years, but I’m sorry to see him go. The world is a duller place.

SEEN AROUND TOWN

In other news, who was that blond starlet hanging on the arm of…

The Count was dead. I hadn’t thought of him—really thought of him—in years, so I don’t know why the idea he was gone seemed so ridiculous.

“You okay?” Maury asked.

“Yeah, fine. Huh.”

“You said he was kind of an odd duck.” Maury knew the story, or at least the bones of it. Since no living person was actually born in Los Angeles, the “how did you come to California?” story was part of the ritual when you met folks here. Byron de Prorok was part of my story.

“That he was.”

I was spared any more discussion by the ringing phone. Apparently one of the plywood gyroscopes had fallen off the wall, nearly decapitating Mickey Shaughnessy. The rest of my day was spent stretching canvas over studs and double toe-nailing props in place so it didn’t happen again. Just another day at the office.

I mentioned the Count’s passing to Maureen when I got home. It was no big deal, just one of those, “hey, remember that guy I told you about, well he died,” stories people tell when you get to our age. She made the appropriate tut-tutting noises and that was that until we shut the house down for the night.

I still hadn’t gotten used to things being this quiet. Both boys were out of the house now. Gerry was still at boot camp, and Michael had his own apartment over on Las Palmas. I’d gotten Mikey a job over at Columbia, and he’d managed not to screw it up yet. Time would tell. Maureen always said I was too hard on him. She didn’t know what hard was, but she was probably right. She usually was.

I went out to the garage and pulled the string over my workbench, squinting against the glare of the bulb, then pulled an old box off the shelf. After rummaging around a bit, I finally found what I was looking for, an old grey cloth bag. “Hey, Babe, come here for a minute,” I shouted out to her.

“What’s that?” She leaned into me and looked over my shoulder, rubbing my arm in the playful way married people have if they’re lucky.

“I had this with me when I got to L.A.…” I opened the string wide and pulled out some wire, some loose glass beads, and then a longer package. Wrapped in two pages of the L.A. Examiner from March of 1926 was a broken pasteboard sword. Two blue beads rattled around loose inside the wrapping. I caught them and pressed them back into place. Not that they’d hold. They never had.

“That’s what you had with you? Quite a haul.”

“That and about sixty-five bucks in my pocket.”

She squeezed my waist and sweetly kissed my neck. “Mr. Money Bags, that’s why I married you.” She always said that, although there wasn’t enough money in the world to make that a fair bargain. I got the much better deal.

I wasn’t much of a drinker, so she was surprised when I suggested a night cap.

“Really? What do you want?”

I knew what I wanted. “Do we have any rye?”

“You don’t even like rye. I think we have that bottle Maury and Sheila brought over two Christmases ago, want me to get that?”

She dropped some rocks in a couple of glasses while I found the Wild Turkey. Templeton Rye no longer existed now that booze was legal, it would have to do.

We clinked glasses, and I offered a quiet, “To the Count,” and we each took a sip in silence. I could feel it burn and thought rye wasn’t a drink for sunny climates. For the first time in years I sort of missed the snow. Almost.

I laughed at the way her face crinkled as she swallowed, but she was a sport, like always. Curling her long legs under her on the sofa she leaned her head on my shoulder while I stroked her long, curly hair. After a few minutes of that she asked, “So who was this guy?”

“Oh, he was a piece of work,” I began. Then I told her about my six week career as a projection technician, and getting on the train for Los Angeles, and then about the column in the paper.

“Was he really with the Resistance?” she asked me.

I finished my drink and put it down a little too hard on the glass coffee table. Then I laid my head back against the sofa cushion. “Probably not, but I wouldn’t put anything past him.”

Acknowledgements

My fascination with Byron de Prorok began five years ago when I uncovered several of his books in the Half Price Book Store in Wheaton Illinois. He was the perfect subject for my obsession with people who have all the tools for success and still manage to get in their own way. You get no points for guessing why that’s of interest.

In the back of those books was an autobiographical essay that set me on this path, so I have to thank Michael Tarabulski, who is the only person on the planet who shares my fascination with Byron (although he’s more of an Alonzo Pond guy.) I also have to thank Nicolette Meister, Fred Burwell and the folks at the Logan Museum and Beloit College for allowing the pleasure of rummaging through their archives and taking my research seriously before I did. That goes for the Cedar Rapids and Milwaukee Historical Societies as well.

While I’ve written a lot of non-fiction in my life, this was my first stab at a novel, and I couldn’t have done it without the support of friends and fellow writers. To Teresa Basile, Fiona Stevens, Pat Ryan, the Naperville Writers Group, Ida, Ryno and EJ at the West Suburban Writers Meetup, and my dear Robyn Clarke, thank you.

Thanks to Erik Empson and his team at thebookfolks.com for their hard work bringing my somewhat odd baby into the world.

Finally to The Duchess and Her Serene Highness who have tolerated me while I scratched this itch, all my love and gratitude. To all of you who enjoyed this book, please stop by my website www.WayneTurmel.com and read my blog showcasing other indy and small press writers of historical fiction, learn a bit about me, and hear about upcoming work. There’s another novel on the way.

For more great books like THE COUNT OF THE SAHARA by Wayne Turmel, visit www.thebookfolks.com.