Come Back Dead (2 page)

3

On the other side of the door was a little kiosk behind which sat an equally little man in a gray uniform. He had thick, round glasses and hair that had been tonsured by Mother Nature. He was swiveled half around in his chair, facing the sound of raucous laughter. The guard turned to us when Paddy asked for Carson Drury.

“Follow your ears till you get to the party,” the little man said. “You'll find his highness.”

The trail was a short one that ended at cathedral-size doors paneled in blond wood.

“Howard Hughes's own office when he deigned to visit the lot,” Paddy said, a little in awe. “Drury's no piker for nerve.”

A receptionist's desk sat to our right, but its towering chair was empty. Paddy knocked on the doors loudly enough, I thought, to bother the residents down the block at the Hollywood Cemetery. It wasn't loud enough to interrupt the party, though, so we entered the office uninvited.

In the center of the room, Carson Drury was holding court. The court was small–a woman and two men–but they made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in numbers. The three were seated before Drury–at his feet, it seemed, although their chairs weren't especially low. The impression was created by Drury's famous height. He was six feet seven according to his press agent, but he looked taller because he was extremely thin. He'd actually needed padding back in '41 to play the gaunt D. W. Griffith's fictional counterpart. Drury might have put on a pound or two since, but they didn't show. He still had the figure Tallulah Bankhead had once described as “swizzle stick with mane.” The mane was also intact, black and thick and brushed backward from Drury's high forehead. It swept over his ears and ended with a flourish just above his collar. Only symphony orchestra conductors and physicists had the nerve to wear their hair like that. And Hollywood geniuses.

Drury waved us in without interrupting his story. “So the cop pulls us over. Right on Riverside Drive. He parks his motorcycle and marches back to the cabbie's window, pulling his gauntlets off very dramatically. Then he starts tearing into Larry. The cop had a real talent for it, too. None of that ‘Where's the fire?' grade of material. I remember that he managed to work Eleanor Roosevelt and Flash Gordon into the same sentence, which I'd hesitate to attempt myself. The only thing Larry, the cabbie, can do is nod back toward me and mumble something about his VIP passenger.

“So the cop comes back and looks in my window. I'm already made up as Lincoln, of course, because I knew there wouldn't be time to change at the theater. Fake beard, nose, mole, black suit, the works. Everything but the stovepipe hat, which was up on the front seat with Larry.

“The cop looks at me and then at poor Alice, who was pulling her dress back into place and straightening her hair. Then the goof looks back at me, and I could see that a fog of disassociation was gathering around him.

“So I say”–Drury reached up with one hand to grasp an imaginary lapel–“‘I beg your pardon, officer, but it's imperative that I reach the theater without delay.' Well, the cop doesn't salute, but he does come to attention. I bang Larry on the shoulder, and he pulls the cab back into traffic.

“Just then, the cop starts running after us, shouting something. I lean out the window in time to hear him yell, ‘Don't go to the theater! Don't go to the theater!'”

The two courtiers and the maiden laughed on cue, but the three of them together couldn't drown out Drury. Paddy, who had a healthy laugh himself when he was in the mood, just smiled politely.

When things had calmed down a bit, Drury wiped his eyes and pointed to the carpet at his feet. I noticed then that he was shoeless. That is, he wasn't wearing shoes, but he wasn't exactly without them, either. A dozen pairs were arranged in a semicircle at his feet, toes toward him as though they, too, had been hanging on his every word.

“These will do for starters, Joe,” Drury said, turning down the volume on his deep, vaguely English voice a little. “Call me if you get anything new in from Italy.” To the second man he said, “Harry, make sure everyone knows that we'll be back in business tomorrow–bright and early.”

The two men stepped around Paddy and me on the way to the door. The young woman was following, but Drury stopped her momentarily by saying, “Sue, maybe you can find a cup of coffee for Mr. Maguire and Mr. Elliott.”

I was surprised that Drury knew my name, as Paddy tended to limit his supporting players' billing for as long as possible. I looked to my boss for an explanation, but he was busy adding to his coffee order.

“I'd like a little glass of cold water on the side,” he said, “if it wouldn't be too much trouble.”

Paddy helped himself to Harry's seat, and I took Joe the shoe salesman's. Drury sat on the edge of his desk, his stockinged feet still firmly on the floor, watching as Paddy ground out his corona in a standing ashtray.

Then Drury said, “You didn't care for my Lincoln story?”

“John Barrymore used to tell it better,” Paddy said. “He had two women in the cab with him and the cop on horseback.”

Drury laughed again, louder and longer than he had at his story. “Sounds like it's lucky for me that Barrymore's dead. Forgive the shoe store,” he said to me. “I never have time to shop for things. Or maybe I can't bring myself to waste the time. I found a very civilized way to buy shoes when I was in England during the war; an old, established firm where they measured your feet down to the last bunion and then carved wooden forms to the exact measurements. They had a huge room full of them: the Duke of Windsor's feet, Jack Buchanan's feet, Walter Hagen's feet. After the initial ordeal–my measurements took half a day–all you ever had to do for the rest of your life was write and tell them what you wanted. They whipped the shoes up by hand using your own wooden lasts so you were guaranteed a perfect fit.”

He sighed at the memory.

“So what happened?” I asked, nodding at the non-English shoes that had him surrounded. “Did your feet keep growing?”

“No. A German flying bomb flattened the shop late in the war. Hitler couldn't get Churchill, but he managed to take out his cobbler. They rebuilt the place, of course, but I've never gotten back to be remeasured.”

He'd been telling the story to me, but when he reached the finish, he looked over at Paddy to gauge his reaction. The half of Paddy's face I could see was skeptical.

“That's the excuse I generally use, anyway,” Drury said after a pause. “The truth is, handmade English shoes have been beyond my means these last few years. I made that trip to London back in what I think of now as my salad days, when I was rolling in lettuce. Those days didn't last. So the buzz bomb saved my wooden feet from the embarrassment of being relegated to the basement–or worse, the dust bin.”

“You're doing okay at the moment,” Paddy observed, glancing around the office.

Drury smiled at his disapproval. “Borrowed splendor, I'm afraid. Ty McNally, the titular head of the studio, told me to help myself to an office. He didn't say it couldn't be the best.”

It was surely the biggest–a large room lit by tall windows whose white curtains had horizontal stripes of blue. Compared with the curtains, the brown walls looked especially blank. Drury explained that quality.

“I took down the pictures Mr. Hughes had hanging in here. They were all blowups of actresses with their blouses coming undone. Not to disparage Howard's tastes, but they made the place look like the front office of a brassiere factory.

“And they made Sue here feel self-conscious,” he added as the secretary returned carrying three coffee cups and Paddy's glass of water on a silver tray.

She cleared herself of the self-consciousness charge when she bent over to hand me my coffee. In the course of that simple movement, she displayed cleavage that would have earned her a long-term contract if Hughes had still been around. She smiled at Drury, indulgently this time, and closed the double doors behind her.

Drury had already drained his cup. “Is Scott up to speed?” he asked Paddy.

My boss was just tasting his coffee. It was too hot for him, so he added a little water from his glass. “I haven't briefed Mr. Elliott,” he said. “I didn't think I could do justice to your … scheme.”

This time Drury didn't laugh the rudeness away. He looked at Paddy for a while, the skin around his big, dark eyes crinkled as though he were about to smile. He didn't smile, and it occurred to me that the slightly gathered lids were also effective at conveying pain.

I said, “Are you going to be heading up production for this McNally?”

“No,” Drury said. “Not unless a miracle happens. On the subject of RKO's future, the current gossip is correct. The new owners are really only interested in the studio's film library. All nine hundred titles of it, minus one. That one film is the basis of my little project–or scheme, if you prefer. If the scheme should succeed, who knows? Maybe while I'm saving my own reputation, I can save RKO, too.

“The reputation I'm referring to is my old, circa 1941 model. No one would want to save my current one, which can be summarized as follows: Carson Drury is a man of unlimited talent, almost all of it still unused. After some early successes on Broadway, mostly empty novelties, and one amazing motion picture–probably the stolen work of his partner, his editor, his wardrobe mistress, et cetera–he turned out a steady series of half-realized dreams. No man in Hollywood is so full of ideas or less likely to see one through to the end.

“Anything to add to that, Mr. Maguire?”

“Not a word,” Paddy said.

“As negative as my current resume is, that's how positive the 1941 version, the
First Citizen
reputation, was. That Drury was a whirlwind who could star in one Broadway show while producing and directing another and acting in half a dozen radio programs in his spare time. His first movie, his very first one, is considered by many to be one of the greatest ever made.”

Paddy reached for his cigar case. Drury retrieved a wooden box from his desktop and held it out to him. “Try one of these Havanas. You'll enjoy the change, I think. I know the rest of us will.”

Paddy had already accepted the cigar before Drury delivered his punch line. It was too late to put the cigar back, so he stuck it in the front pocket of his coat.

That little victory put the roses back in Drury's cheeks. He was all smiles again as he asked me, “Do you know what happened to that young genius? What changed my '41 reputation to the current sorry one?”

“Your second picture happened,” I said.

“Exactly.
The Imperial Albertsons
happened, the story of a prominent Indiana family that couldn't adjust to the changing world the automobile brought about. Couldn't accept that they weren't going to be royalty anymore because their little kingdom was going away, swallowed up by the single homogeneous nation that new technologies like the automobile made possible.”

“Sounds like a great idea,” I said.

“It was more than a great idea,” Drury said. “It was a great film. That's what haunts me the most.
Albertsons
, my
Albertsons
, wasn't a failure. It was an achieved work of art that became an early casualty of the war.”

“How?” I asked.

“We wrapped up the rough editing on
Albertsons
early in 1942. That left the scoring, which I was supervising. Just before we finished that, the State Department called to ask if I'd go to England on a kind of cultural lend-lease to boost morale and make speeches about how committed we were to the war now that the Japanese had dragged us into it. They arranged for me to direct a stage production of
Hamlet
while I was over there, a revival of the modern dress version I'd done in New York in '38. I got the idea to make a documentary film about the production. I had this vision of Hamlet's soliloquy being spoken against the background of the blitz. ‘To be or not to be' coming across as ‘to oppose fascism or surrender everything.'”

He had the vision again, his eyes focusing on the empty air between Paddy's chair and mine. He came out of it shaking his head. “The
Hamlet
was never produced and the documentary was never made.”

“Why not?” Paddy asked.

“Too many shortages. Too much red tape. Too many parties. Too many parties mostly. I'd been working like a madman for years. Like two madmen since I'd hit Hollywood. I needed a break and I took one. In a manner of speaking, I've been on it ever since. While I was drinking my way through the air raids, things were falling apart on the home front.

“Unbeknownst to our hero,” he said, patting himself on the chest, “the RKO brass had arranged a preview of
Albertsons
in a little jerkwater town called Yorba Linda. The natives there confirmed the studio's own judgment of the film, which was that it didn't make any sense. All that meant was the studio execs didn't understand it, which was natural enough. No one at RKO had understood
First Citizen
until the East Coast critics explained it to them. The difference was I'd been there to defend
First Citizen
, to protect it. When
The Imperial Albertsons
needed me, I was on the other side of the ocean, drunk, having my feet measured for shoes I'd never buy.

“I'd left my partner from Repertory One in charge of finishing up the film. John Piers Whitehead. Three names for a man who isn't big enough inside to justify an initial. Instead of defending the picture, he conspired with the studio hacks to destroy it. They rewrote the ending completely, the last forty minutes of the film. They brought the cast back in–my loyal company of actors–and reshot it.

“Then they did the unthinkable, the unimaginable: They burned my original ending, print and negative.”