The Ronald Reagan Murder Case Page 2

  Jack and I hotfooted it back to the party, which was still in full swing. “Rum and Coca-Cola” was blaring out of the phonograph, Gene Kelly had arrived, sporting an entirely new look for Anchors Away, and Leo G. Carroll and Leon Ames were in the middle of a martini-fueled game of cut-throat shuffleboard. While I found a free phone in Gus’s Olde Englishe “library,” Houseman regaled the revelers with an elaborate rumor — a Japanese spy had washed up on shore from some one-man sub lurking out in the Catalina channel. Lt. Reagan was in charge, he cautioned (which got a horselaugh from Lemming and a general chuckle from those who were acquainted with the mild-mannered young actor), and no one was to go anywhere near the corpse…

  The patio emptied immediately. I was watching the stars stagger in a celebrity parade up the beach as my call went through. A voice that sounded like a toad with a frog in its throat belched, “Casey.”

  “Tirebiter.”

  “So the hell what?”

  “I’m calling for Lt. Reagan. He’s dead.”

  “Say that again. Twice.”

  “Ron Reagan gave me this number. He’s out on Santa Monica Beach with a body. The body looks just like him. He said you should get right down here with a squad of MPs.”

  “Gotcha.”

  The phone went dead. The phonograph outside on the patio gave out with amplified ka-chunks from the run-in groove of “Besame Mucho.” I watched as one of the Filipino house-boys took the needle off. The pool was empty except for a Roman-nosed older man with a straw hat shading his face, floating in a life-preserver, his eyes closed. He was a silent-movie has-been whose name escaped my memory.

  I ran my hand across the beautiful leather spines of a full set of Victor Hugo that filled one of the library shelves. As I had suspected, there were no books behind the spines. The entire unit had come from one of Paranoid’s classier efforts, where it had been authoritatively lounged against by Charles Coburn. There was a washroom behind the bookshelves, and I used Gus’s personal bar of Lifebouy to freshen up. After a few minutes I heard sirens blasting past up the Highway, and decided to redeem my automobile and drive back home before the rush began.

  The high school car jockeys had either gone off duty or were part of the curious crowd gathering a few hundred yards north. I could see a couple of khaki-colored sedans and a pair of uniformed sentries with rifles at port arms standing in front of a narrow walk between two houses — an elegant Robin Hood Tudor and a grey shack with driftwood siding. The U.S. Army seemed to have things under control on the homefront as well as on the banks of the Rhine.

  My coupe had been parked on the far side of the Highway, headed in the wrong direction. I got in, found my keys under the floormat and U-turned toward the Pier. A Red Cross ambulance, its siren muted, flashed past me before I got there.

  It occurred to me that I would never know anything more about the surreal activities of the day if I didn’t push my acquaintance with Ronnie beyond the bridge-party stage. The Ron Reagan murder case was certainly the most interesting mystery I’d come upon since arriving in Celluloid City; Jack Houseman and I were the only civilians who knew about the double in the duck costume; I knew that it might be a story worth writing some time. I would evolve some plan to get back together with the Lieutenant as soon as possible.

  Those thoughts took me east and north, toward the San Fernando Valley. Lillie and I had a small home near Bob Hope in Toluca Lake, which is next door to Burbank and an easy drive into downtown Hollywood, where both the Paranoid lot and the CBS broadcasting studios demanded my presence six days a week.

  Lillie had stayed away from the Lemming party claiming a migraine. I knew that she preferred not to appear in public with me in the harsh sunlight. It might expose the ten years’ difference between our ages. On radio, of course, I used the voice of an elderly gentleman to create the put-upon “George Tirebiter” of “Hollywood Madhouse,” and she assumed a similar grande dame persona. Our publicity photos featured me in Monte Wooley-esque character costume, while Lillie’s personal Max Factor makeup artist managed to re-create her as she had once looked playing Marie Antoinette in her final Broadway hit, Vandals of 1934.

  As I wound up the Sepulveda Pass to Mulholland Drive, I evolved a double-headed scheme. First, I would suggest to Lillie she invite the Reagans over for a barbecue. Second, I would invite Ron to do a sketch on my show, which would give me another opportunity to follow up on developments.

  Satisfied, I flipped on the Merc’s radio. The unmistakable saxophone of Charlie Barnet, broadcasting from some Eastern hotel ballroom, filled the coupe with rhythm, and, in a minute or two, he was joined by Lena Horne, singing in that honey-colored silken tone she always had all to herself.

  I crested the Pass and turned right onto Mulholland. Wartime had dimmed the lights of Van Nuys and Encino, but the vista of small towns, farmland and distant mountains was still terrific. Not many people had moved up to this part of the city yet, and only an occasional gate in an occasional low stone wall interrupted the view. The road wound in steep curves along the crest for a couple of miles and the music and the Merc moved perfectly together, putting me into the mellow mood I had felt a couple of times before, sharing a reefer backstage at the Canteen with Bob Mitchum.

  The euphoria was broken by a news bulletin — the Nazi Bulge in Belgium had collapsed. General Patton’s Third Army had taken 3400 prisoners. I hardly noticed the car behind me until its spotlight hit my rear-view mirror and bounced back into my eyes.

  It would have been damn foolishness to pass in broad daylight, let alone in the grey, two-dimensional dusk. There was no shoulder, but I slowed, hoping the LAPD wasn’t on patrol for speeders. The spotlight stayed on my head as the car pulled alongside. I hit the brake. My front windshield dissolved in a cloud of broken glass and my hat flew off my head. I felt a sharp nudge on my front fender, the wheel spun out of my hands and I was airborne. I caught a glimpse of Ventura Boulevard a few hundred feet below, then a brilliant, glittering rectangle of blue light loomed larger and larger in front of me and I was swallowed up in it, swallowing quite a bit of it along the way.

  I was in no shape to realize it at that moment, but I’d just dropped in on a very exclusive pool party at Miss Linda Darnell’s.

  I had very nearly missed accomplishing what the Sioux had failed in — killing Buffalo Bill. Joel McCrea, the star of Linda’s recent Technicolor oater of that name had just left the pool for the buffet table when I and my car did a belly flop into (fortunately) the other end. He told me later that he had been sure a Jap Zero had mistaken Linda’s back yard for Lockheed’s air terminal.

  I shall draw a veil over the rest of that Saturday evening. Suffice it to say that when Dave’s Towing lifted my once immaculate machine onto dry land and the water drained out, I found my favorite fedora resting mushily on the back seat. It had a single hole in it, the same size as the one through Ronnie’s double’s heart. The plot, I thought, was thickening. My blood, however, was turning to chlorinated water, and my one day of rest had drawn to a nearly permanent close.

  Lillie had long since gone to sleep when Tony Quinn dropped me off on his way home from the Darnell affair. I sat up in the breakfast nook, nursing a cognac. It was more important than ever to find out what Reagan was up to, now that I seemed to be on the target list. “Madhouse” had already been cast for the coming Friday, but there was a guest spot open in two weeks. I would have a network V.P. call Ron’s commanding officer and suggest something patriotic, a la Norman Corwin, to feature Ron’s narrative skills. CBS was about to premiere a new Corwin series — somewhat lighter fare than his globe-trotting Free World portraits of the past couple of years — and perhaps we could actually interest our country’s most poetic radio writer enough to come up with a short pageant projecting his dream of a post-war America. It was worth a try, and it would give me a good excuse to have Lillie call Jane and set up the cook-out for mid-week if possible.

  My ability to think and the snifter of cognac came to an end simu
ltaneously. I was still wearing borrowed clothes and my hair still stank of chlorine, in spite of Miss Darnell’s perfumed shampoo. I showered again, dowsed myself with some lime-scented stuff from Bermuda and fell into a watery sleep.

  Left: George Tirebiter in costume for Madhouse” about 1944. Right: Lillie Tirebiter, star of “Hollywood “Hollywood Madhouse” (1944).

  CBS Radio City 1939. Scene of “Madhouse” Broadcasts.

  Chapter 3

  Meet Meat Musso’s

  The work week of a radio player with thirty-two live broadcasts a year — and there were many of us in those halcyon days — was virtually unending. “Hollywood Madhouse” aired on Fridays. On Sundays I would meet with the writers to block out the comedy situations involving Lillie and myself and the “Madhouse” regulars — teen-age singing ingénue Rita Monroe; the phony Shakespearean ham actor “Sir Lionell Flynn,” played by former vaudeville comic Phil Baines; our maid, “Porcelain,” portrayed by a Black actress named Mattie Daniels, who was also a wonderful stride piano player; and announcer Ben Bland, whose mildly alcoholic ramblings were built into the Glamorama Soap commercials.

  On Monday I would meet with the writers again, to punch up the sketches they had written in the meantime. Tuesday and Wednesday my producer-director, a grimly efficient New Yorker named Buzz Melnik, would put together the musical portions of the show, work with our sound-effects men, time out all the ingredients and prepare for full rehearsal. Thursday we ran the show twice, without guest stars, rewriting as we went along. Friday the entire cast assembled for a morning run-through. Then we did two complete live broadcasts — one at 4:30 for the Eastern and Central time zones, and a second at 7:30 for the West. I must say I loved it, even when I was directing a movie and my days lengthened to eighteen or so hours. After all, I was only twenty-five and full of youthful energy.

  My writers and I usually met over Sunday lunch in the back room at Musso & Frank’s — then, as now, my favorite restaurant in Hollywood. The fact that it still exists, and that its red-coated waiters still serve the best double martinis, grilled lamb chops and creamed spinach in North America, is a barely believable anomaly in a town hell-bent on demolishing the past while recreating itself in the worst possible taste every five years or so.

  I met Pete Potash in the lot where I parked my radio-less loaner — a mid-Thirties Dodge sedan that had last been driven by one of the Dead End Kids in a serial called Junior G-Men — and we walked in together. Pete was twice my age and had been one half of a sometime vaudeville comedy act called Potter & Porter which had lasted long enough to play the Palace during the stage show between screenings of Gloria Swanson’s last silent picture. Pete was a funny guy, a great gag writer and the head of my four-man writing team. He was also the last man I ever knew who wore a derby hat and detachable celluloid collar.

  Manny, a waiter who looked and sounded like S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall, showed us into the wood-paneled function room.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Tirebiter, Mr. Potash. It’s a Martini-toony and a…?”

  “Sazerac, heavy on the bitters, Manny.”

  “That’s right, sir. Mr. Murphy and Mr. Gibson have already arrived, sir.”

  Florida Murphy had acquired his first name, which he shortened to Florry, as a result of having been born during that state’s land boom in the early Twenties. He was 4F’d out of the military for a glandular disorder, and weighed about 250 pounds. As usual, he was wearing a badly wilted seersucker suit and one of an apparently endless collection of aloha shirts. This one featured outriggers and purple ginger flowers. Florrie had a couple of credits for Abbott and Costello movies, and was a terrific ventriloquist. His dummy was named Senator T-Bone Culpepper and the two of them bantered about politics, which was a pretty rare thing at the time. CBS had taken him off a local daytime show and given him to me when we were in development on “Madhouse.”

  “Hiya, Georgie. How about this one? The bit where the kid sellin’ the papers gives out with the headlines? He says ‘Tirebiter Crashes Star’s Pool Party! Read all about it!’ An’ you argue with the kid, like always — ‘It was an accident,’ you say, and he says, ‘Geeze, Mr. T., you shudda let the boy park the car for ya. It wouldda only cost a dime.’ An’ then you say…”

  “He says, ‘What the heck, kid. I got a free wash.” Mel Gibson supplied the topper. Not the Mel Gibson who put Australia on the map a generation later. My Mel was a prep-school drop-out from Connecticut. His father, Dana Gibson, was a popular Broadway playwright whose biggest success, It Happened in Philadelphia, had brought the family to Hollywood. Mel could read Ulysses and pop punch lines at the same time, and frequently did.

  “I don’t think I want to bring up my little accident on this week’s broadcast, boys. And come to think of it, how did word get around so quickly on a Sunday morning?”

  Florrie said, “My phone rang at 7:30. Reporter at the News named Squeek. Gives me tips on Hollywood Park sometimes. Got the word from the overnight guy at the County coppers desk. Thought I’d dig the story.”

  “Great,” I said. “I’ll bet he didn’t mention I was the bullseye for some gunsel’s target practice.”

  Manny came in with our drinks, a tray of shrimp cocktails, and a couple of tall containers of bread-sticks. He raised his eyebrows at the overheard suggestion of gun-play.

  “Say,” said Mel out of the corner of his mouth, taking his Florsheims off the table to squint at me. “You in with gangsters, Tirebiter?”

  Manny raised his eyebrows even higher, made a “tsk-tsk-tsk,” and withdrew.

  “Gangsters,” put in Potash, “are a great comedy gimmick. OK. George, howzabout gangsters kidnap you on the way to the studio. Lillie calls up Jack Benny to go the ransom. Big laugh. So Sir Lionell gets the job of carrying a paper sack full of money to some boffo rendezvous…”

  “Cucamonga,” Florrie filled in. “Benny sure put that burg on the map last week.”

  “Whatever.” Mel has the ball now. “So everybody’s waiting for the phone to ring, only we have to get them out of the room somehow. Porcelain is there, and everybody knows how she garbles all your phone calls…”

  “And the phone rings…”

  Pete is interrupted by the phone ringing.

  “Swell sound effects they got in this joint.”

  “Only the best for my writers, Pete.” It’s the plug-in phone at the table, of course. “Tirebiter here. Where the hell are you, Dave?”

  The fourth member of the writing team was Dave Marmelstein, a nice Jewish boy from Los Angeles, whose father was my agent at William Morris. He was sort of “in training” with our show, and he was always late to meetings.

  “You don’t know me, Mr. Tirebiter, but I need your help.” It was not Dave. My ear was caressed by a woman’s voice, sultry as a Gulf Coast summer afternoon. I heard music — “Siboney,” violins…

  “Huh?” That was all I could manage. “Who is this?”

  “I can’t tell you now. Just do this. Drop into Pickwick Bookstore on your way out of Musso’s this afternoon. Ask to see a copy of “Nightmare in Black Glass.”

  “Nightmare in Black Glass?”

  “That’s all I can tell you now. Please, please do what I ask.”

  The phone clicked down on the other end. Summer was over and all the gardenias in the world suddenly turned brown.

  “Business, George?”

  “Funny business, Pete. That’s the business we’re in, isn’t it?”

  “We better be!” chimed in Florrie. “Look, here’s another one. You get kidnapped and natch the show hasta go on. What happens is, all the rest of the kids hafta do your lines an’ they try to copy Tirebiter’s old goat voice, but the sponsor doesn’t buy it…”

  “Meanwhile…”

  “Meanwhile this Grasshopper is starting to taste like the water in Linda Darnell’s pool. Forget gangsters. There’s a clause in my contract that says I have to be alive to pick up my paycheck.”

  “Pretty snappy comeback, Georgie. L
emme write that down.”

  The food arrived, along with another round of drinks. Even Dave arrived, with a pretty good sketch he’d written for Red Bunyun, our comedy guest star. I listened, laughed whenever possible and gradually the show began to emerge from set-ups, punch-lines and cigar smoke. I was only half in the room, however. To borrow Ronnie’s most famous movie line, spoken in Kings Row as he discovered his legs had been amputated, ‘Where was the rest of me?’ Somewhere in the tropics, with a voice sweeter than mango syrup dripping in my ear, my head buzzing with honey bees, and the sensation of an electrical storm — just over the horizon, but coming fast on a hot wind.

  Chapter 4

  Mr. Pickwick’s Paradise

  Hollywood Boulevard was quiet on a Sunday. The Chamber of Commerce’s glamour campaigns to the contrary, the “Main Street of America’s Movie Capital” looked pretty much like any other American Main Street. For size there was the swanky Roosevelt Hotel; at Highland, a towered bank building where Philip Marlowe was supposed to have had his detective business; and a cluster of three multi-story offices at the intersection of Vine. That curiously famous cross-roads was, and remains, shabbily commercial. Musso’s and Pickwick Books were located along a three or four block stretch of mostly single-story buildings, including a number of antiquarian book stores and modest eating establishments, the ubiquitous small-town line-up of drugstore, shoestore, corseterie, haberdasheries, and other specialty shops owned and operated by people who actually knew their customers by name.

  For the benefit of Japanese tourists and Middle Western thrill-seekers, the Boulevard sidewalk is now punctuated with brass stars dedicated to both the celebrated and forgotten folk of show business. The Curators of Fame, for a handful of dollars, can arrange to include nearly anybody, including television producers and cartoon characters, in the tinsel panoply. My star is in a driveway next to a Middle-Eastern take-out stand not far from the old Egyptian Theatre. I try to visit it once a year and scrape off the chewing gum.