The Fame Thief (10 page)

“What do you think about what happened to Dolores La Marr?”

The ascot had popped partway out of his shirt. He maneuvered it back into place and sighed, and I realized he was tiring. “Well, on one level, of course, she was asking for it. It wasn’t like she went on the occasional
date
with a hoodlum. She was
surrounded
by them. It was odd, because she was such a sweet girl. I knew a couple of other—well, molls, I suppose. I directed Virginia Hill, for example, the one who told the Kefauver
Committee that her male friends gave her money because she was ‘the best cocksucker in town.’ They were all like that—hard girls, the kind of girl who’d get punched occasionally and come back for more, if there was some money or a nice little diamond in it for her. But Dolly was genuinely sweet. Those clowns must have gone crazy for her. I blame that idiot, Raft, for getting her into it. This was a guy who couldn’t remember from one day to the next how many fingers he had, but she liked him. And he took her down to his level.”

“Who hated her enough to dime her out?”

“Well, of course, Livvy,” he said. “But Livvy hated everyone. I’m not sure she’d have exerted the energy to bring Dolly, or anyone else, down. I think she would have blown up the entire town if she could have, but damage just
one
of them? Hardly worth it.”

“Anyone else then? Or just Livvy?”

He raised his fingers to the corner of the eye again and massaged the skin in a tiny circle. “No one,” he said. “Everybody else liked her. Just Livvy.”

“Let’s turn it around, then. Who was closest to her? I mean, you say she was open about the people she spent her time with, but some people must have known more than others. More specifics, maybe—dates, specific restaurants or hotels, things that she wouldn’t share with just anyone.”

Trent frowned, bringing the tendons in his neck into play. Not much a plastic surgeon can do about those. “Her friends,” he said.

“Sure. Who better to dime you out than a friend?”

“Hollywood is different than most places,” Trent said. “In this business, people make friends—or enemies—during the filming of a picture, and then they all move on. If you were on the set of
Hell’s Sisters
, you’d have seen Dolly hanging off the
neck of Alec Roxfield, who was the not-very-good male lead. You’d have thought they were inseparable. But after the picture was finished, they never spoke again, except to say hi and goodbye. Livvy was different; Livvy preserved her hates in formaldehyde to keep them fresh, but for most of us, a picture was like a lifeboat. We were shoved together night and day for as long as it took, relationships blossomed, people loved each other or loathed each other, and then the director called ‘that’s a wrap,’ and everybody went home and picked up where they’d left off.”

“But still,” I said.

“Okay. She had a young PR person, Pinky Pinkerton, who had been with her for a year or two, and they seemed to get along great. He’s alive, Pinky is, still in business, if you can believe that. Has a little office somewhere, probably low-rent Hollywood. The girl who dressed her, I can’t remember her name—” He closed his eyes again, and this time I waited. “Nope,” he said, looking around the room as though he hoped it had gotten a little better while his eyes were closed. “Can’t remember. But that’s not—you know—the age thing, it’s just that it wasn’t my job to remember the names of dressers. Dolly wanted her, asked for her. It was the only thing she asked for, as far as I remember. You might find her name on IMDB, or get a copy of the movie. It’ll be one of two or three names under ‘Costumes,’ if it’s there at all. Call me and read them to me, and I’ll tell you which one it was.”

“But we don’t know whether she’s alive.”

“Nope. Oh, Alec Roxfield, the male lead Dolly was so close to? He died six, seven years back.” He sat back on the couch and crossed his arms. “I have to tell you, when you get to be my age, outliving people is a pale victory.”

“But preferable,” I said.

“Not as much as you’d think.”

“Listen, before I go, tell me what you know about these people.” I read him the names Dolores La Marr had given me: the screenwriter, Oriole Finlayson; the gossip columnist, Melly Crain; the Vegas editor and P.R. woman, Abe Frank and Delilah Polland.

“Oriole wrote
Hell’s Sisters
and a half-dozen other pretty good movies. I liked her. She knew how to keep a story tight without all the machinery showing. She alive?”

“As of last night.”

“Well, good. Melly was a psychotic with a byline, in bed with everyone who could give her a tip, and pathological about her importance, which was negligible. Tell you the truth? If I had one bullet in my little gun and a promise of no prosecution, and both Olivia Dupont and Melly Crain were within range, it’d take me a long time to make up my mind. The other two, the ones in Las Vegas, I don’t know.”

“Did Melly have it in for Dolly?”

“No more than she did for anyone else.”

“Did she run the story? About Las Vegas and the arrest and all that?”

He shrugged. “Everybody ran it. For a few months there, and then again after she talked to the Senate subcommittee, you’d have thought Dolly was a real star, not just one more girl who’d accidentally made a good movie.”

“Was that what she was? Just one more girl?”

“Honey,” Doug Trent said, rubbing his eyes. “There are thousands of them.” He looked around the room again and cleared his throat. “They’re the fuel that Hollywood burns.”

I go months without setting foot in Hollywood, and I can’t say I miss it much. Whatever enchantment it may have had vanished into the black hole of time long ago, and all the hundreds of millions of dollars pumped into glitzy redevelopment just make the rest of the place look even more decayed. I think of Hollywood’s lost glamour as a kind of urban phantom limb syndrome; it’s been gone for decades, but every now and then the city of Los Angeles feels an itch and reaches out to scratch it, and up goes another ugly building.

But Pinky Pinkerton had set up shop in a
genuine
artifact of Hollywood glamour, the still-beautiful—if rundown—art deco tower at the corner of Hollywood and Vine now prosaically called The First National Bank Building. Built in 1927, it was the tallest structure in Los Angeles until City Hall went up, way downtown, seven or eight years later. The building seems especially fine now that it’s across the street from the multi-purpose melanoma of the Hollywood and Highland Center, which contains the Kodak Theater, where the Oscars are given, and at least one outlet for every Eurotrash label on the planet.

As a general rule of business, if you don’t call ahead, you run the risk that the person you want to see might not be in. On the
other hand, if you don’t call ahead, there’s no chance of being told that he or she won’t see you. So when I climbed into the vintage elevator for the ride to the floor that housed Pinky’s P.R. agency, creatively named Pinkerton Ink, I hadn’t called ahead. And sure enough, when I got to the end of the dim, dingy 12th-floor hallway, there was a sign taped to Pinky’s door. It said,
BACK LATER
.

The lettering was done in a dark brown my mother would probably have called sable, and it was shiny. On a whim, I ran the tip of my finger over the word
LATER
, and it smeared. Some of it came off on my finger. I looked at it and thought,
eyebrow pencil
.

So I’d had a little hole punched in my day. I could either get all upset about it or go find something to eat. And right down the block, facing out onto the sad, if occasionally diverting, decline of Hollywood Boulevard, was one of my favorite restaurants, Musso and Frank. The place has been right there, watching the town bloom and wither, since 1919, making it one of the oldest restaurants in Los Angeles, and the waiters have been using every moment of that time to perfect their indifference. Any time I want to have a good meal and feel like the Invisible Man at the same time, I go to Musso and Frank.

It seemed a little odd that Pinky’s office would be closed in the middle of a working day, without even a secretary to answer phones and tell the unlucky caller when they’d be back. As I waited for my salad, I called. I got a recording, a chipper enthusiast with a somewhat quavery voice, who informed me that they were out of the office at the moment, probably assisting a client, but to leave a message at the beep and they’d surely get back to me soon.

I hung up and used the time between the salad and the steak to indulge in mild regrets. I’d never been particularly interested
in movies, and had virtually no interest in older films—say, films of Dolores La Marr’s vintage. My ex-wife, Kathy, had loved them, had talked about the different standards of glamour between that age and our own, about the way the movies of the Depression raised the country’s spirits and how films had brought the country together during World War II. She’d tried to share it with me, but aside from infecting me with her enthusiasm for Hollywood black-and-white photography, she’d failed. In the end, we had almost nothing in common except our love for Rina. I think the divorce, when it came, was a relief to her. For one thing, she could stop worrying about the cops knocking down the door some night and hauling me away as Rina looked on.

So here I was, up to my eyebrows in old movies, eating lunch alone, just one more father who saw his kid once a week, if he was lucky. Ultimately, Kathy and I split because I wouldn’t change into who she wanted me to be. At moments like that one, I wondered what in the world I’d been defending from her attempts to improve it.

At about two o’clock I called again, and this time I got a live one, a somewhat snappish woman who popped the plentiful Ps in “Pinky Pinkerton” as though she had a grudge against them. I waved at the waiters until one of them deigned to notice me, paid the bill, and trudged the Walk of Fame, stepping on as many stars as possible back to Highland and Pinky’s building, trying not to speculate about the person who went with that p-popping, somewhat querulous voice.

Which was probably just as well, because what awaited me was a woman who would have been called a tootsie back in the 1940s, and probably had been. She sat behind a scratched wooden desk in a small reception area the precise brown of chewing-tobacco spit. In addition to the desk and its singular
occupant, it housed two leather armchairs liberally repaired with duct tape. The walls were enlivened, sort of, by head-shots of actors whose faces I hadn’t seen in years, but the face that commanded attention belonged to the woman at the desk. She was defiantly styling her way through her eighth or ninth decade in a bright print dress with Joan Crawford shoulder pads and kelly-green silk Chinese frogs for buttons, and her silver hair hung down around her shoulders in those long, tight ’40s curls that look like Slinkies. The general effect was an extremely lively mummy with excellent retro taste in clothes. The look she gave me said, essentially, that she’d seen me and a thousand more of me, and there’d been no indication over the years that we were getting any more interesting. I couldn’t help noting that her mouth was painted scarlet and that she’d left her blood-red signature on the pile of crimped cigarette butts in the crystal ashtray located just behind the sign that told the world that her name was, I swear to God,
EDNA
.

I said, “I can’t believe they let you smoke in here.”

She said, “I can’t help what you can’t believe, sweetie. Whaddya want?”

“Pinky.”

“Yeah?” Edna picked up the live one from the mountain of butts and decreased its life expectancy by half. “And who’s lookin’ for him?”

“Junior Bender. Seriously, how can you smoke in here? Last I looked, this was a non-smoking city.”

She batted her big flat-screen computer monitor cockeyed so I couldn’t see it, and showed me some lipstick-red teeth. “Who’s gonna tell me no?”

“Good point.”

“We’re the oldest leaseholders in the joint,” she said. “We got privileges. And I never heard of Junior Bender.”

“Well, then this is your lucky day.”

She said, hitting the keys so fast I couldn’t see her fingers move, “Listen to the man.”

I couldn’t help myself. She’d exerted all that energy to keep me from seeing what she was doing, so I asked. “What are you doing?”

“This?” She clicked a long red nail against the edge of the big monitor. “Ahh, why not? I’m putting a pop-up flag, says
Pinkerton Ink
, on the pictures of this dump on Google Earth.”

“My, my.”

“I may be old,” she said, “but I live in the same world as you.”

“So. Is Pinky in?”

She looked up at me, giving me a reflection of the fluorescent overheads in her glasses. “What’s it about?”

“Doug Trent suggested I talk to him.”

“
That
old fart.”

A spasm of coughing came through an open door at the end of the room.

“He speaks well of you,” I said.

“A kidder,” Edna said to the ceiling. Her eyes were lined in kohl-black, definitely not the sable in which the sign had been printed. “What the world needs, another kidder.”

“He thinks, Doug does, that Pinky might be able to help me with something.”