Getting Garbo Page 3

  “Hey, if they didn’t serve the papers on him at Romanoff’s, they’d’ve got him somewhere else,” Podolsky points out. “So let’s not dramatize, dahling.”

  “Divorce. I never thought it’d happen. I mean, I know Roy fooled around a little—”

  Podolsky snorts. “A little?”

  “Okay, a lot, but I thought he and Addie would stay together forever and—”

  Podolsky interrupts. “Heads up, here we go!”

  The doors to the nightclub fly open and people start pouring out. The parking attendants race to bring up the cars for the stars. The last thing they have time for is the handful of collectors, who appear out of the darkness and have a field day. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

  That’s how autograph collecting is on the West Coast. Not that I’m complaining. Of course, most of the collectors out here look like cornfed surfers. They’re nice and all, but the thing of it is, they don’t have a sense of history. For instance, if I say to Podolsky, “I vant to be alone,” he knows I’m imitating Greta Garbo, but the L.A. collectors are too young to even know who Garbo is, let alone how totally rare her autograph is. Generally speaking, the California collectors have it too soft. The stars live out here, so if you miss someone on Monday, there’s always Tuesday, or a week from Tuesday. It’s all mañana. Go stand outside the studio gates and the stars will come driving right up to you. When there’s a premiere, the L.A. Times prints alphabetized lists of the celebs who are coming. It’s almost too easy.

  In New York, you had to be good. Stars might pass through for just a few hours, so you had to be fast, sharp, plugged in. Emergency alert: no one even knew Errol Flynn’s in town, but he’s boozing at the Stork Club before boarding the Queen Mary. Get a move on! Of course, even back East most of the collectors, they were out of it. They were crumb collectors, operating alone, no organization, hit or miss. I say that with no disrespect, because I was a crumb collector myself, until I was rescued by the Secret Six.

  Actually, there were more like ten or eleven of us, but the Secret Six had a nice ring to it. We were like a machine, hardly anyone ever got past us. We always had someone on the pavement at mealtimes at Sardi’s and the “21” Club, clocking in the celebs and coordinating intelligence with Arleigh, who was control central at her apartment in Queens; we all checked in with her by phone. At night we covered the Broadway plays, there was one of us standing in the crowded lobby of every hit show, spotting who arrived. Then we’d gather at the Automat on 45th and Sixth and sit at a couple of tables off in a corner and make free lemonade out of the iced tea fixings and pool our information about who’s where. General Eisenhower is at Mr. Roberts, Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli are at Death of a Salesman, Bing Crosby is at Brigadoon, Cary Grant is at Streetcar, Sinatra and Ava Gardner are at South Pacific. Like that. Of course, we knew the exact times for all the intermissions and when the shows were over. A precision operation.

  Our activities extended to the posh hotels and the luxury ships that sailed the Atlantic. In those days, overseas air flights were just beginning, so most stars traveling to and from Europe still went by one of the great Cunard Liners. We’d find out who was coming in on the Queen Elizabeth and we’d take the subway down to the Customs Office at the Battery a couple days before and get passes to go onto the dock to meet imaginary relatives (they never had the complete passenger lists in advance of arrival) and be there to greet our favorites while they waited for their luggage. A collector working as a file clerk at United Artists used to sneak a peek at Celebrity Service, a very expensive, ultra-exclusive information sheet that detailed which hotels the stars were staying at. That simplified life for us.

  Mostly we’d just call the stars at the hotels and say we were fans and ask when they were coming out. Some of the hotels we could sneak upstairs; we’d get the room numbers by calling the hotel and asking for reservations. Has Richard Widmark arrived yet? The reservation desk would say, He’s already registered, and then they’d click the operator and say, Connect this call with Room Twenty-Two-Twenty. It was that easy in those days, and we had it down to a science.

  We were like a shadow army and we knew everything about the stars, often before anyone else. We’d be waiting and watching late at night at the Pierre Hotel for Mario Lanza or the Plaza for Susan Hayward, when two other celebs married to two other people would come smooching out of a cab and into the hotel (sometimes it’d be two guys). Days, maybe weeks or even months later, the gossip columns might pick up the news, but the collectors knew it first. We talked among ourselves, but we never told anyone else. Spencer Tracy would stop off in town and always stay with Katharine Hepburn in her apartment overlooking the East River, then she’d drive him in her station wagon to catch the 20th Century Limited out of Grand Central. We’d be there, but we kept the stars’ secrets.

  We felt as if we were part of their world. Sure, we knew we were just on the fringes, but everyone else was on the outside. It was kind of our duty, our responsibility, to protect them from prying eyes and narrow minds. They were stars and couldn’t be judged by the same standards as everybody else.

  “Reva, look at that!” Podolsky yells at me across the portico.

  I’m just getting Jane Withers’s autograph; who knew she was still even alive? But I look in the direction Podolsky is pointing. Another second and I’d’ve missed the sight of the night: runty little Frank Sinatra, costumed and made-up as a Navajo Indian, hassling and suddenly leaping up to swing a roundhouse right like a tomahawk at mountainous Sheriff John Wayne. He only succeeds in knocking off his ten-gallon hat. Fearless Frank is obviously pissed at the Duke—probably about politics, money, or women, what else would they have to argue about?—but Wayne shoves Sinatra, who falls on his keister, and then dozens of people intervene, making it the second one-punch battle I’ve seen today.

  Later, as he walks me to the bus stop, I tell Podolsky, “You know, I still blame myself.”

  4

  Roy

  I’m the lead item in Sheilah’s column the next morning—her on-the-scene exclusive, of course. Roy Darnell swears eternal love for wife, Adrienne Ballard, chic Beverly Hills interior decorator to the stars, as process server slaps him with divorce papers. Darnell, known in Hollywood as Roy the Bad Boy, mixes it up in street brawl outside Romanoff’s.

  Okay, Sheilah. Close enough for jazz.

  The New York Daily Mirror gives me the entire front page of their tabloid:

  WIFE CHARGES ADULTERY!

  TV’S JACK HAVOC CAUGHT

  WITH HIS PANTS DOWN?

  The ratings on my show go up three share points the next night.

  • • •

  Nathan Curtis Scanlon chortles. You read about people chortling, but Nate Scanlon is the only person I know who actually does it. The laughing lawyer. An overstuffed, smallish man with a graying spiky crewcut. Enthroned in his also overstuffed armchair behind his oversized desk. Not a sheet of paper on it. Just the small stack of 8x10 glossies Addie gave me. Nate is leafing.

  “Hmmm.” He turns one of the photos sideways, then upside down. Really studies it. “Don’t you have back trouble?”

  “Occasionally.”

  “I can see why.” There he goes again. He’s chortling. I’m burning. Waiting for his expert legal opinion. For which I’m paying a fortune per hour.

  “No question about it, laddie,” he finally pronounces. “The little lady has got you by the gonads.”

  He isn’t talking about the lady in the photos. He means Addie. Addie wants blood. Guess whose? And the thing about Addie is that she always gets what she wants.

  “So what do I do?” I ask.

  “We can fight her. Every inch of the way. Drag our heels. Withhold tax returns, bank accounts, contractual information. Muddy the financial waters. But…eventually we’ll have to go to court. And that, with all due immodesty, is where I shine! I’ll make the rafters o
f the courthouse shake. I’ll bring tears to the eyes of the judge.”

  “Yeah?” Sounding good. “And then?”

  “Then we get our heads kicked in.” Nate Scanlon chortles. “No question about it. She wins, you lose. And winner takes all in this game.”

  He explains it to me. The only local grounds for divorce are insanity or adultery.

  “Insanity or adultery,” I repeat.

  “Based on these,” Nate Scanlon holds up the photos, “I think you definitely qualify on both counts. What’re you, crazy? Shacking up in some fleabag motel—”

  “—the Hotel Bel-Air, a quiet bungalow, nobody saw us coming or going—”

  “Except a hired transom-peeper who snapped candid photos of you and this broad in action!”

  “It’s blackmail, Nate! Addie’s trying to blackmail me. Isn’t that a crime?”

  “Don’t start, laddie. They’ve got all the cards. Mr. Giesler—” Jerry Giesler, who’s representing Addie, and is Nate Scanlon’s only real competition in town “—will flash these glossies in the judge’s chambers and you are chopped liver.”

  See? It’s worse than I thought. “So I suppose your advice is to—”

  “Cave in. I’ll tell Giesler we’re cooperating in every way, you are repentant and willing to pay for your transgression, blah-blah-blah—”

  “Yeah, fine. I’ve got next to nothing in the bank, thanks to Warners’ penny-pinching contract. Even the money I made on the loan-out movie. Warners grabbed it and gave me my usual chicken feed salary, so sure, let her take it all—”

  “Plus your royalties.”

  “Fuck no!” I explode. “She can have the equity in the house, that yappy mutt she loves so much, all the loose change around, but not the royalties!”

  “They’re not asking, laddie, they’re telling. Giesler phoned me. That’s the cornerstone of their demands.”

  Now I’m panicking. Because we’re talking about real money. The only real money I’ve gotten close to in my life. The money that’s going to take care of me in my old age—if I live that long. When TV used to broadcast “live” the shows disappeared into the ether. Then Desi and Lucy decided to put their show on film. Since then most of the shows are done on film. Including mine.

  Back when we made our deal, Nate tried to get me five hundred dollars per show more. Warners dug in their heels, deal breaker. So instead Nate asked for very hefty royalties, in perpetuity, if the shows are ever rerun off-network. Warners figured that’d never happen, so they gave it to us. Couple months ago, Desi negotiated a multi-million dollar deal for local stations to rerun their old shows. Now there’s a new business called Syndication. And I’m in on the ground floor. That’s my jackpot. Those royalty payments.

  “We give them the royalties,” Nate Scanlon says, “and we accept any joint debts and we wrap the whole deal up—lickety-split. Don’t waste a moment!”

  I stare at him. Which side is this bastard on? Hey. He’s grinning like the cat that ate the bird. And it hits me. Something’s happened. “Good news to go with the bad?”

  “You might say that. Providing our footwork is nimble enough.” He tumbles a pair of Chiclets out of a box, offers me some. I shake my head, he starts to chew, I wait him out. It’s worth waiting for.

  “I think I’ve found a way for you to escape from Burbank.”

  • • •

  Okay. Before we go any farther, let me tell you some stuff about Jack Warner and his studio, because it’s important to my tale.

  During the ’30s and ’40s, they made tons of money with prison pictures like 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, Each Dawn I Die, and I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Jack Warner liked those movies so much, that’s how he ran his studio. Anyway. The studio is located in Burbank, a small town in the San Fernando Valley invented by Warner. The studio guards are like prison guards, and Jack L. Warner himself is the warden. Writers are treated like convicts—locked down in their assigned cells from nine to six on weekdays and a half day Saturday. Rumors of a writers’ conspiracy to tunnel out for off-the-lot lunches were part of the Warners legend. Among the actors, long-term contract players felt like lifers—the harder you worked, the farther you were from ever getting out.

  You think I’m bullshitting, right?

  Well, not much.

  You could start out with a seven-year contract and still be there ten, eleven years later. How? Whenever you rejected a script or said no about anything, the studio suspended you. That meant off-salary—and they tacked the suspension time onto your contract. Bette Davis tried to escape by going to England to make movies, but the long arm of Jack Warner kiboshed that. Olivia de Havilland was more successful a couple years later. She sued the studio for involuntary servitude and a high court found in her favor: they could suspend, but they couldn’t extend. So now seven years is the longest sentence you can draw in the fair city of Burbank.

  I’ve only done three years. I owe them four more. We’ve been trying to get a release now while I’m hot in TV and a movie career is possible. Jack L. has personally said no to me in very graphic terms. So I figured that’s it. Breaking a Warner Bros. contract is slightly harder than busting out of Alcatraz.

  But here’s Nathan Curtis Scanlon, Esq. saying he’s found a way.

  • • •

  He struts across his spartan office with the ramrod posture of the West Pointer he once was. A decorated WWII and Korean War vet. Major Scanlon. Never mind the Chasen’s paunch that Nate has added since then. Nate Scanlon looks out the window down onto the Sunset Strip. Now Hollywood is his battleground.

  “It’s in the small print,” he says. “You know what they say, God is in the details. That’s our out.”

  I still don’t get it. Warner Bros. invented small print—Nate taught me that when I first became a client. “They give you on page one of the contract what they take back on pages seventeen, nineteen, and twenty-four.” That’s why I need Nate. A cop to monitor the robbers.

  “They were a day late.” He says it like he’s revealing the secret of the world.

  “A day late—to do what?”

  “To pick up your option for the next year of the contract.”

  “But they started paying me the extra dough anyway, a big hundred-and-fifty dollar a week raise, which brings me to fifty cents above the minimum wage. And I cashed the checks—”

  “Doesn’t matter!” He pivots to face me. For Nate Scanlon, breaking the Warners contract would be more than just a business coup. He’s back at Inchon, trying to free a POW. “They were a day late with their official notification. So the entire contract is no longer binding. It’ll take a tussle in court, but we’re going to win this one. You’ll be a free agent. Count on it. And I’ve already got an offer in my back pocket from Burt Lancaster’s company for you to set up shop over there. You’re going to be a great big movie star!”

  So far nobody’s made the big jump from TV to the movies. I’m ready and willing to be the first. I savor the prospect for a delicious moment.

  Then something Scanlon said plays back in my head. “So what’s the big hurry—with the divorce, I mean?”

  “Everything depends on that. We must get Addie to sign off on final divorce terms before she gets wind of the possibility of a huge movie deal—or she’ll wait and go after the money from that, too.”

  Looking back later, I see that this was one of the key moments that might have changed everything in my life. A get-off point if I’d played it another way. But right then there were only visions of sugar plums and Oscar-winning movies dancing in my head.

  “When you explain it that way…” I shrug expansively. “Hell, give her the royalties, give her whatever she wants. Let’s get this show on the road!”

  He comes closer. Looms over my chair.

  “Understand this clearly, Roy my boy. What I just told you is a secret—known only by you
and me and my paralegal. That’s how it’s got to stay. Our secret. If it leaks prematurely, it will cost you a fortune. So tell no one.” I nod. He leans into my face. “Not your rabbi, not your barber, not your agents, not your saintly mother. No one. You’re a marvelous actor. These next few weeks will be the most important performances you’ve ever given. Act sad because you are being divorced. Act contrite when you tell people that all you want is for dear Addie to get whatever makes her secure. Act happy to be working at the Warner Brothers studio.”

  “That’s asking a lot.” I grin. He doesn’t grin back. Okay. Serious. “I got it, Nate.”

  “I’m not sure you do. You always like to bend the rules. And then there’s your temper.”

  “What temper? Can’t believe everything you read in Confidential.”

  I have Nate chortling again.

  • • •

  You’re probably wondering where this reputation I have as a tough guy comes from. The answer is Merle Heifetz. Blame it all on him.

  Merle is this tiny Jewish leprechaun over in the Warners publicity department. He’s the one who dubbed Anne Sheridan “The Oomph Girl” and labeled Lauren Bacall “The Look.” They sent me to see him my first day on the lot. He was in his cubbyhole office. Shooting paper clips with a rubber band at a framed photo of Jack L. Warner. His aim was pretty good.

  “What’s with your schnoz?” he asked.

  I touched my nose. Self-conscious as always.

  “Slipped on the ice when I was a kid and busted my beak on the curb,” I said.

  “No, no, you—” he stopped firing paper clips and stared at the ceiling like there was writing up there “—you broke your nose fighting in the Golden Gloves. Yeah, you fought sixteen bouts, seven kayos, quit undefeated.”

  And that’s how it began. The making of the legend of Big Bad Roy.

  Merle Heifetz—“No relation to the fiddle player,” he used to introduce himself—started putting out press releases and planting column items that this real tough cookie had come to town. He said it fit the Jack Havoc image. Everything that didn’t fit, we skipped over. Little boy of seven with a bout of meningitis, bedridden for a year. Skip. Glued to the radio, sopping up soap operas. Make it “The Lone Ranger” and we can use it. Going to grade school and getting into a fistfight every day. Definitely use! Minor scrape with the police. Great!