Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Everything that happened next is pretty much public knowledge.
It was reported in the trades the following Monday.
Charles Mann cited ill health as his reason for resigning as producer of Bloodrock.
The columnists said it was a bleeding ulcer, the unfortunate result of all the pressure off a difficult production.
A new producer was brought in, and Mr. Mann took the position of executive producer. But he left the location.
The new producer was Jack Kenyon, a competent man. We made up four days and were almost back on schedule when we returned to the studio to finish our interiors. The company was happy and confident.
Everybody was still with us, except Al Chadney.
Greenblatt pulled some strings and got him a big job as stunt gaffer on The Saturday Boys at Warner’s.
And there are rumors that when that’s over, he’ll do the stunts for Madame Bovary.
I didn’t know there were any stunts in that story, but maybe they’ll put some in. Anyway, I assume Chadney is happy.
I’m okay myself. The publicity on Bloodrock has been excellent. Even Appelbaum is pleased. Every time I see Greenblatt, he tells me that I’ll be doing Bovary for sure, and I believe him. Sometimes you know when a man isn’t lying.
I saw Mann the other day. I was driving along Sunset Boulevard one Sunday afternoon, and he went past me, going the other way, in a white Rolls convertible.
He was smiling, and he had a blond girl sitting next to him.
I don’t think it was Sally, but I couldn’t tell for sure.
I don’t know why he was smiling, but I just read in the trades today that he’s probably going to produce the remake of Gunga Din with Redford and Newman and Michael Caine.
That may or may not be true. A lot of what you read in the trades isn’t.
But stranger things have happened, and maybe it doesn’t really matter.
When I first came to LA from Vegas, I got an apartment in a very old building off La Brea.
The manager told me it used to be Myrna Loy’s apartment.
I liked it because it had a marble fireplace and terrific wooden beams on the ceiling.
The only trouble was that somebody had painted over the wooden beams. I wanted to have them stripped and restored to the natural wood color.
So I got this guy who’s a wood-stripper, and he came in and took a look and said the beams weren’t wood at all.
They were plaster molded to look like beams. And sure enough, when he pointed it out, every beam was the same—a crack in one beam had an identical matching crack in the next one, and the next one.
And the “marble” fireplace was also painted to look like marble. It wasn’t real marble at all.
This guy told me that the old stars used to get studio technicians to come in and do the work on their houses and apartments. The apartment interiors are just like sets, after all.
I asked him what I could do, and he recommended this old guy who’s a retired studio painter, and he came in and painted the wooden beams and aged them and they look absolutely real now. It didn’t cost much. When people come in and compliment me on the ceiling, I don’t tell them it isn’t real wood.
Maybe I should tell them, but I don’t. Does anyone really care if something is fake or real anymore? Not in this town.
That’s what I mean when I say it doesn’t really matter.
* * *
I promised you at the beginning that I’d tell you everything I’d seen and heard.
And then I’d let you make up your own mind, even though it’s pretty much a moot point now that the great Harlow Perkins has solved the mystery.
But before you sign off on that, let me tell you about one more thing that happened.
It was the night of Bloodrock’s premiere.
I was there at the theater, of course, but I had to watch the stars walking down the red carpet from behind the ropes, with all the rest of the regular people.
They were all there: Brenda Conrad; Sally Oldman (now Sally Vega, which, I’m sorry, just doesn’t sound right either); and of course Clete Williams, doing a masterful job of filling out his tuxedo jacket.
Later that night, when everything else was done, I was sitting alone at a back table in the Studio Grill, having my usual double Scotch.
Who should walk in but Clete Williams himself, surrounded by a half-dozen members of his entourage.
Somehow he spotted me and came back to say a quick hello.
I congratulated him on the premiere. He thanked me and was about to return to his entourage when three well-dressed women came over and asked for his autograph.
They looked right past me like I was part of the furniture.
He gave me a Hollywood smile and a Hey, what can you do?
look as he signed his name on the first cocktail napkin.
That’s when something hit me, and the whole scene ground to a stop like a strip of misthreaded film.
I replayed Perkins’s speech in the limo, laying out everything Mann had done.
And I replayed Mann’s reactions to each point too.
When Perkins told him he delivered opium to McDougall’s room at three a.m. .
. . and was seen by Al Chadney . . . and then took the opium out of the room when the dead body was discovered .
. . and then got blackmailed by Chadney .
. . and tried to kill him with the nitrogen ram .
. . Mann shut his mouth and acted like a man who’d just been caught.
In fact, the only time he protested was when Perkins accused him of cleaning the fingerprints from the room and straightening the desk—and doing it wrong because he was left-handed.
Why take your lumps when you’re being accused of attempted murder, but speak up when you’re being accused of just doing something stupid?
Was it possible that the room had already been wiped and the desk straightened when Mann got there?
“You ladies have a nice night,” Clete said as he signed the last napkin.
When the ladies tittered off and left the two of us alone, I nodded to the pen Clete was still holding and said, “I didn’t realize you were left-handed.”
He froze for a second and looked at me. I mean, for the first time ever, he really looked at me. It was one single second that seemed to last forever, until he finally broke the spell and put the Hollywood smile right back on his face.
“See you around, Jason,” he said, and then he whistled for his entourage. The last glimpse I got of Clete Williams, he was still wearing that smile as he led them out the door.
Was it real? Or was it fake?
Like I said before, in this town, it doesn’t really matter.