Show Business Is Murder Page 3

  Scotty, present

  WHAT WAS IT about musicals that grabbed me so in those days?

  The boys—well, the boys loved the fashions, the campy lines, the red lipstick, even though neither was a cross-dresser. They loved the romance, too, and so did I in spite of myself. I might identify more with Fred the wooer than with Ginger the wooed, but still, the act of wooing, of loving so completely at first dance, had me in its thrall. I was, after all, a child of the fifties, of Loretta Young and her swirling skirt.

  I’d always pictured my ideal lover wearing that skirt, a little Kim Novak evening sweater over her creamy shoulders, hair piled into an elegant French twist.

  Instead, I had Birch, whose knees had barely healed from childhood skinnings, whose frayed bell-bottoms picked up the dirt of Manhattan streets, whose sad eyes reminded me that she’d lost everything dear to her when she came out: home and father, friends and family, everything she’d ever known. It was up to me to fill all her empty places, to show her a new life beyond the village of Woodstock, to buy her egg creams at Gem Spa and introduce her to Twyla Tharp’s dance company.

  There were times I wondered if I’d taken on too much.

  Birch, 1972

  BIRCH HAD MISSED Mendy at Ratner’s the time before. With Stanley along, Patrick and Scotty had really done a number, remembering old movies Birch had never heard of, talking about favorite scenes, quoting lines, arguing about which studios had the best stock companies. Birch had gazed out the window into the crisp fall night, watching people walk past Kamenstein’s hardware store across the street, wondering what the hell she was doing here with these people.

  She didn’t belong with Scotty and never would. She was only staying with her because she had no place else to go, nobody else to turn to. Scotty didn’t love her and never would. She was only being nice to a waif from the country.

  The mood passed as soon as they left the dairy restaurant; Scotty took her hand as they walked home along Bleecker Street, past the welfare hotels and jazz joints, and Birch felt okay again.

  But still, she was pleased to see that tonight Mendy was in his accustomed seat in the fourth row right, two rows down from where she and Scotty sat.

  Scotty, present

  THE SONG I love from Roberta is “Yesterdays.” It’s a wonderful Jerome Kern ballad, filled with a very Russian sense of longing for the past, and it’s sung by Irene Dunne just as her mentor, played by Helen Westleigh, lies on a couch dying one of those picturesque Hollywood movie deaths.

  And perhaps Mendy died while that number played on the screen. I don’t know. All I do know is that when the curtain closed and Birch and I went over to him, he was no longer alive.

  I’d shaken his shoulder after saying his name brought no response. He was slumped as if in sleep, but too still, too eerily silent, for death’s younger brother.

  “He must have had a heart attack,” Patrick said, no trace of campy playfulness in his reedy voice.

  We hung around the corridor, oddly reluctant to leave, yet having no real reason to be there. Sure, we’d known Mendy, shared food and stories of Hollywood, but we weren’t really friends. Still, leaving wasn’t an option any of us considered, at least not out loud.

  The police arrived after the ambulance. I waited to be questioned, wondering whether I should tell them about the mystery man who’d followed Mendy.

  But what did it matter who was following him if Mendy died of a heart attack?

  The words “bitter almonds” caught my ear, reminding me of English murder mysteries set in enormous country houses. What did bitter almonds smell like, anyway, and how were they different from ordinary almonds? For a wild second, I wanted to ask the nearest cop if I could go in and sniff Mendy’s breath so I’d know for good and all.

  I restrained myself. This wasn’t a Dame Agatha story; it was the real death of a real man I’d known and liked.

  Correction: it was the real murder of a man I’d known and liked.

  Because Mendy wasn’t a suicide. This I knew. He’d been wholly alive, not a thought of death in his head. He’d reveled in the discovery that there were people like us out there, people who wanted to hear his stories and relive his Hollywood glory days. People to whom the blacklist was an outrage and he a hero for enduring it.

  Next question: How did you get cyanide—because that was the poison that smelled like bitter almonds—into someone’s coffee? Had Mendy put his cup down somewhere, just long enough for the killer to slip in the poison? Was it liquid or solid? Mrs. Christie’s Sparkling Cyanide made it sound liquid, which would be easier to administer—but wouldn’t it make the coffee taste bad?

  The biggest question of all was why. Why was someone following Mendy? Why would anyone want him dead?

  I went over to one of the cops and told him what I’d seen. The response I got was less than satisfactory.

  How did I know it was Mendy he was following? How did I know he was following anybody at all? Couldn’t he have just been annoyed that Patrick bumped into him?

  It wasn’t just that the police weren’t listening, I realized after a few minutes. They weren’t listening because of who we were. One cop kept looking at Patrick as if viewing a giant cockroach, and his partner asked me several times just how old Birch was. I had a sudden realization that in the eyes of the law, I was taking advantage of a minor.

  I wound up the conversation quickly, leaving the theater dejected because of Mendy’s passing, but also frustrated that the police were going to call it suicide.

  But what could I do about it?

  Birch, 1972

  GOING TO RATNER’s was like holding a wake for Mendy. At least, that was how Birch Tate saw it. They were eating Jewish food and talking about the old man and how much they’d liked him and how his death wasn’t suicide, and that was as close to a memorial as they were ever going to get.

  Scotty and Patrick were deep in discussion about how somebody could have slipped poison into Mendy’s coffee when the guy at the counter took out a little pillbox and popped a tiny white pill into his coffee and then stirred. Funny way to take a pill, Birch thought and then realized: saccharin. People put saccharin in coffee when they wanted to lose weight or if they were diabetics or—

  “That’s it,” she said, so loudly that even the man at the counter turned around. “Because you would,” she added, turning to Scotty.

  “Would what?”

  “Take a saccharin tablet if somebody offered it to you. Just like you’d take a joint. You wouldn’t say, no thanks, and take out your own because that would be rude. Mendy was a diabetic, remember?” Now Birch had Scotty’s attention, and Patrick’s too. “He put saccharin in his coffee the night we talked to him.”

  “That is sheer brilliance,” Patrick said, and Birch blushed.

  “That means the killer was in the theater,” Scotty pointed out. “Mendy always had espresso from the coffee bar.”

  “Yeah, somebody walked up to him, opened his little pillbox first and offered him one and he said, sure, thanks, and didn’t think twice.”

  “Which means one more thing,” Patrick said, his blue eyes alight. “The killer was somebody Mendy trusted. Or, no, maybe not trusted exactly, but not somebody he didn’t trust. Does that make sense?”

  “I think so, Watson,” Scotty replied thoughtfully, her chin resting on steepled fingers.

  “Why do I have to be Watson?” Patrick said, polishing off the last of his potato pierogies with onions. “What makes you think I’m not Holmes?”

  “What makes you think I’m not Holmes?” Birch cut in, surprising herself at her own boldness. “I thought of the saccharin thing.”

  “If you’re Holmes, then explain what Patrick just said.”

  “It’s like the dog in the night-time,” Birch began.

  “My God, you’re a Sherlockian!” Scotty reached over and took Birch’s powdered-sugary hand, lifted it to her lips and kissed it.

  “If you mean, have I read the Canon, then I guess I am,
” Birch replied, deliberately (and for the first time) using the term she’d read in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

  “It’s love, folks,” Patrick said with a wide smile. “Birch, honey, Scotty here has been looking for you all her life. A girl who gets Sherlock. When’s the wedding?”

  The warm feeling coursing through Birch like heated maple syrup wasn’t a bit dimmed by the dirty looks she received from two old ladies at the next table. Who cared what anybody thought about her and Scotty being together? Who cared whether or not some guy named Gershwin was writing songs of love for two girls—what mattered was the love itself. And this, thanks to Sherlock Holmes, she had.

  “Right now, I think I’d rather come up with Mendy’s killer,” Scotty said, releasing Birch’s hand. “And I suspect we’ve all hit the same mental obstacle. If the killer is someone from Mendy’s blacklist days out to avenge an old wrong, why would Mendy take a saccharin tablet from him?”

  “Exactly.” Birch leaned back in the booth with a satisfied expression on her face. “Just like the dog not barking. If Mendy didn’t recognize the guy who gave him the poison, it couldn’t have been an old enemy.”

  “Unless Mendy didn’t realize the guy was an enemy.” Patrick’s voice was thoughtful and he gazed into the distance. “There were people who testified in executive session, secretly naming names and never getting the rap as informers. Poor Larry Parks, the guy married to Betty Garrett, had to do that.”

  “But Mendy didn’t name names,” Birch objected. “He was a victim of the blacklist, so why would someone want to kill him?”

  “You’re supposing he told us the truth,” Scotty said. She reached for a cigarette and Birch wrinkled her nose. Smoking was one of the few things about Scotty she genuinely disliked.

  “What if he lied to us?” Scotty blew smoke into the air and waved out her match. “What if he did name names and somebody he named killed him out of revenge?”

  “We’re back to the old problem,” Patrick said, irritation wrinkling his smooth forehead. “If Mendy ruined some guy’s life by giving him up to the Committee, why would he accept a pill from the guy?”

  “Who expects somebody to poison you, for God’s sake?” Birch wasn’t sure why she’d decided to become devil’s advocate. “Maybe Mendy recognized the guy but thought bygones were bygones.”

  “Not those people, honey.” Patrick shook his head and his long blond hair fell into his eyes. “Elia Kazan, to name just one, will never be forgiven for naming names. People who lived through the blacklist have long memories and there are no buried hatchets that I know about.”

  “What if Mendy didn’t recognize the guy? It was a long time ago, and frankly, one old guy kind of looks like the next to me.”

  “Wow.” Patrick gave a long low whistle. “Imagine. Ruining somebody’s life and then adding insult to injury by forgetting you’d ever done it. Heavy.”

  “Heavy indeed,” said another, deeper, voice.

  It was the man Scotty said had followed Mendy out of the theatre. Birch might never have recognized him out of context, but in Ratner’s, while they were talking of Mendy, he was in context.

  “Sit,” Scotty said, moving over in the booth. “Sit and explain.”

  “You can’t think he’s going to confess?”

  Patrick looked at the old man and his blue eyes widened. “Are you who I think you are?”

  “Paul Dixon. The former Paul Dixon. The present Paul Damrosch, not that it matters. I can’t keep a job under any name.”

  “You blame Mendy for that?”

  “He wrote the letter.” The little old man’s breathy voice held a world of sadness. “My best friend, and he goes into executive testimony, talks just to the committee, no publicity, names names, and my name leads all the rest. Then he plants that phony story with Pegler, calls me a faggot. Makes sure I’ll never work again. To this day, to this goddamn day I got FBI guys following me around.”

  “How do you know it was Mendy?” Scotty’s voice held a note of pleading. “Couldn’t it have been somebody else?”

  “You ever hear of the Freedom of Information Act?” Dixon looked around the group. Patrick nodded and Scotty started to speak, then closed her mouth.

  “I got my files. I looked close, and even though they put black ink over all the names, I thought about where I was when, who I was with. Who took me to those so-called Communist meetings. I took out my old diaries I used to keep when I first got to Hollywood. Kept them so I could write home to my mother, tell her all the glamorous people I was meeting.”

  “And you figured out that Mendy ratted on you,” Scotty said. A long blue cloud of smoke emanated from her lips; she crushed the butt into an ashtray. “He destroyed your career—but is that a good enough reason to kill somebody?”

  “My wife couldn’t stand it. She was high-strung when we married, I knew that. But when we sold the house in the hills and moved to Compton, when I couldn’t even hold a job in a bakery, when she started seeing guys in black cars everywhere she went, she lost control. One night she took too many pills and died in her sleep and I will never, so long as the sun sets in the West, forgive Mendelson for that. He killed her with his big mouth.”

  “If you were married, how could anybody believe you were gay?” Birch thought it was a good question, but Patrick rolled his eyes and Dixon gave a short, mirthless laugh.

  “Kid,” the old man replied, “Rock Hudson was married. Every faggot in Hollywood—” he gave a brief, apologetic nod in Patrick’s direction—” pardon my French, makes damn sure to get married.”

  When Birch blurted, “Rock Hudson is gay?” Patrick almost fell out of the booth laughing.

  Scotty brought them back to the matter at hand. “Maybe he was just trying to save himself. Maybe he named you thinking the Committee already had your name.”

  “That doesn’t excuse the call to Pegler,” the old man replied. “Mendy was jealous—he wanted the breaks I was getting and he thought if I was out of the way, he’d be cast in the roles I was up for. Happiest day of my life was when Gene Kelly said yes to Summer Stock, because that meant Mendy was screwed.”

  “We figured out that you offered Mendy a saccharin tablet and he took it,” Patrick said. “Do you mean to tell us he didn’t recognize you?”

  A slow, sweet smile crossed the wizened face. “Oh, he recognized me, all right. That’s why I’m not afraid you’ll tell the cops what I’m telling you. He recognized me and he knew he had two choices: take the pill and go quietly or let me tell my story. One thing about the old ham: he really liked putting on that ‘I was a victim of the blacklist’ crap, and he didn’t want anybody knowing him for the rat he was. I expected him to take the poison, the dirty coward. At least now I can go tell my Stella the bastard is dead.”

  “Your wife?”

  “Yeah. She’s buried out in Woodlawn; I brought her home to be with her family. So I’ll take her a bouquet tomorrow and tell her that Mendy’s gone and she’ll maybe forgive me for going to those stupid meetings and screwing up my life.”

  Scotty, present

  THE COPS HAD Mendy’s death down as a suicide, and now it looked as if it really might have been one. There was nothing for us to do but drift home and make a date to see another double feature next week.

  The newspapers reported the death of Paul Dixon, blacklisted “onetime movie hopeful,” about four months later. I figured he’d already been diagnosed with the emphysema that killed him; one more reason he wasn’t afraid of jail.

  There’s a strange undercurrent of sadness in movie musicals. Judy’s addictions, Mickey’s pathetic eagerness to please, the frenetic tone of thirties musicals, the ones that packed as many chorus girls onto the screen as possible, perhaps just to keep them eating during the Depression. And what the blacklist did to a couple of young hoofers.

  I once went to a church basement with an old friend and her deaf sister to see a silent movie. Before the film, a man made a speech in sign language, which Beth kindly
interpreted for me, saying that the great days of silent film were still alive in the church basements and libraries where, as he put it, “The lights are turned down, the projector is turned on, and the deaf watch.”

  It was a strangely moving experience, seeing Lillian Gish and John Gilbert with people who saw their movies as whole, not soundless. I think of that when I recall the days and nights we spent at Theatre 80. The movie musicals were made for Main Street, for families and “kids of all ages.” Old people and gay people bought the tickets at Theatre 80. We were an audience not planned for, but perhaps especially sweet because unexpected. We kept the musical alive in those lean years between Brigadoon and Saturday Night Fever—not that even Patrick, with his huge crush on Travolta, ever accepted Fever as a true musical.

  Patrick died a year ago today. He was our cruise director, our emcee, our encylopedia of all things Hollywood. Gay Hollywood was his specialty, and like so many of us, he took great pleasure in claiming the brightest, most incandescent stars for “our side.” As if straight America would come to tolerate us if they learned that some of their favorite stars were “that way.”

  Oh, Patrick, I do miss you!

  My life back then had more Patrick in it than I knew. I breathed him like air, and it never occurred to me that one day he would cease to exist, like the musical itself.

  No, not AIDS; he hated clichés, except when they were lines from old movies. Plain, ordinary, vanilla cancer, the kind straight people get, too. And, yes, I brought a VCR to the hospital so he could watch all the musicals his heart desired and I think, I hope, Footlight Parade was the last one he saw.

  So tonight Birch and I will gather together all the people who loved him. We’ll make buttered popcorn, toast him with champagne, and celebrate the life of a man who was completely and totally big time in his heart.

  And perhaps we’ll raise one of those glasses to the late, never-great Paul Dixon.

  Money on the Red