Authors: Hugh Pentecost
“Sophomoric,” I said.
“Does it help to know it’s a sophomore who just kicked you in the groin?” Chambrun asked. “They play games like children, Mark, vicious games. They laugh at honest sentiment. But it goes a lot deeper than this. They destroy genuine human relationships. They drive people out of important jobs, out of government posts. The people have to be consequential so that the audience will be large and wide. When they appear on the scene, you can know that someone is about to be burned. They don’t act on impulse. Their plans are elaborate and detailed. They travel the whole world looking for important victims. People laugh when they see them coming, but if they’re sensible they run for the nearest exit.”
“And you think they’re coming here?”
“We have three United Nations delegations housed under our roof,” Chambrun said. “We have a half-dozen top stars in the entertainment world. We have the representatives of great wealth and great power. One of them could be the target for a game—Game spelled with a capital G.” Chambrun’s face was bleak. “Their one venture here had to do with the late Julie Frazer. You remember her?”
“Of course,” I said. “Singer, movie star. The original Cinderella girl.”
Chambrun nodded. “Millions of people loved her from the days of that Cinderella movie. She was a great chanteuse. She packed them in all over this country and abroad. She had her problems—liquor and eventually drugs. She went completely to pieces. But she made a heroic effort to get herself in hand. I was approached to give her a chance for a comeback, here in the Blue Lagoon Room. That,” Chambrun said, and his face went stony, “was when I first met Emlyn Teague.”
“Who is Emlyn Teague?” I asked.
“Doris Standing’s alter ego—her game-twin, you might call him. But I didn’t know, then. He posed as Julie Frazer’s friend. His personal charm sold me completely. He wanted the comeback chance for her, and he would underwrite a two-week contract for her. He didn’t mean just her salary, but what the Beaumont had to take to break even for two weeks in the Blue Lagoon Room. I was magnanimous. I refused the underwriting. I’d take a chance on Julie, I told him.” Chambrun’s lips were a thin, straight line. “Bastard,” he said quietly. I’d never seen him quite so stirred. “It was decided there’d be no hullabaloo about Julie. It was to be staged as something quite casual as far as the public was concerned. We gave a dinner that night for all the columnists. The regular floor show was to go on, and in the middle of it the MC was to spot Julie at a corner table. He would introduce her, beg her to sing. She would hesitate, and then come forward and put on a performance. Teague said he would spread the word, enough to guarantee a full house. He was as good as his word. Julie Frazer sat at her corner table with Emlyn Teague, and Doris Standing, and a young man named Jeremy Slade, and another girl named Barbara Towers. The big moment came, and the MC went into his spiel that would lead into the introduction of Julie. Suddenly, Jeremy Slade projected himself into the middle of the floor. He had a gun in his hand. Women screamed. The MC, who was a cowardly twerp, backed away from him instead of trying to stop him from what he had in mind. Before I could reach him, or Cardoza, the Blue Lagoon’s captain, could reach Slade, he waved for silence. He shouted a jumble of words to the effect that we live in a crazy world, threatened by the atom bomb, our lives in danger in the city’s subways and parks, the air we breath polluted, our water supply dwindling. Every moment of every day we risked death. Well, he wasn’t going to let other people threaten him. He’d create his own risks. Then he spun the cylinder on his gun. ‘I do this every day,’ he shouted, ‘and I thought I’d give you the pleasure of watching a game of Russian roulette.’
“The place was bedlam, women screaming. Cardoza and I were fighting our way toward Slade when he put the gun to his forehead and pulled the trigger. Of course nothing happened but a dull click. We got to him and dragged him away.
“That wasn’t the moment for Julie to appear with her nostalgic, sentimental ballads. Teague professed to be horrified. Slade, he said, was a casual acquaintance. He suggested that we wait until the second show to introduce Julie. And so we waited.”
Chambrun sighed.
“I remember,” I said. “It didn’t come off.”
“It didn’t come off,” Chambrun said, grimly. “When the MC introduced Julie to a delighted audience, she came out onto the floor, dead, staggering drunk. She sang one number—a horrible caricature of herself. We took her away as gently as we could. Teague professed himself to be heartbroken. She had been so shaken by Slade’s performance that she’d needed a drink. She’d been close to fainting, he said. He hadn’t dreamed that a drink or two would have the effect it did have.
“The columnists were as decent about it as you could expect, except for one of the most important ones whose stuff is syndicated all over the world. I’ve since come to know that he was a member of Doris’ Standing Army. He very effectively ended any chance of a comeback for Julie. She gave up trying and really went off the deep end. She wound up in an institution for alcoholics, where her heart stopped beating one cold, rainy day.”
Chambrun got up and went over to the sideboard for a fresh cup of Turkish coffee. He seemed to need a moment to control a long-smoldering anger.
“They made me an accessory to what happened to Julie Frazer. Innocent, but an accessory.” Chambrun walked back to his desk and sat down, balancing his demitasse in the palm of his left hand. “I have a list of names here, Mark.” He shoved a slip of paper across the desktop. I picked it up and read:
Emlyn Teague
Jeremy Slade
Oscar Maxwell
Barbara (“Bobby”) Towers
Van Delaney
Ivor Jerningham
“You might call those people the high command of Doris’ Standing Army,” Chambrun said. “I want them watched for. The reception desk has been alerted. Jerry Dodd in security knows each one of them by sight. I want you and your staff alert around the clock.”
“Right,” I said. I hesitated. “You seemed to place some significance in the fact that La Standing arrived without luggage.”
Chambrun shrugged. “Anything unusual about any of these people suggests trouble in the wind.”
The house phone on Chambrun’s desk rang. He answered and listened. Then he said, “Thank you, Jerry,” and hung up.
“Jerry Dodd reports that Doris Standing has just ordered about three thousand dollars’ worth of clothes from Marinelli’s. Daytime stuff, evening gowns, negligees, lingerie.”
Marinelli’s was the very chic women’s shop in the lobby.
“It would seem she plans to stay,” I said.
Part of my job as public relations man for the Beaumont is to keep society columnists and the Broadway boys posted on arrivals and departures that have any news value. My judgement on what is news is important to the hotel. There’s an old chestnut in the business about one of the first PR men in the trade. He conceived the idea of sending items back to the home-town newspapers of guests: “Mr. and Mrs. Tom Jones of X-ville are spending the weekend at the Waldorf.” This would work for the hotel when other prominent citizens of X-ville came to New York. It did work—for about four days. And then the hotel received an irate call from a lady in X-ville. “I am Mrs. Tom Jones and I am in X-ville. I would like to know who the blankety blank the woman is who’s spending the weekend with my husband in your hotel!”
Doris Standing was news, wherever she went. But since she had registered as Dorothy Smith, I chose to ignore her presence in our midst. The situation wasn’t unique. Dozens of famous movie stars have registered under phoney names, with our full knowledge, to keep autograph hunters and salesmen and other nuts out of their hair. We always check with a famous name before we release any publicity on his presence.
I had routine things to do that morning. Ormanski, the famous couturier, was showing his new spring line of fashions in the ballroom that afternoon. It involved special arrangements for fashion writers, buyers, a select list of prominent ladies on the “best-dressed” lists, television people, models, and God knows what else. These are high-strung people with a tendency toward hysteria. Let one small item in the arrangements go wrong, and the foundations of the hotel would begin to shake. I spent the balance of the morning after my chat with Chambrun, checking out each detail of the arrangements personally.
At a quarter to one, I went up to the Trapeze Bar to keep a prearranged appointment with Ormanski’s business manager. The Trapeze Bar is suspended in space, like a birdcage, over the foyer to the Grand Ballroom. Its walls are an elaborate Florentine grillwork. An artist of the Calder school has decorated it with mobiles of circus performers working on trapezes. They sway slightly in the draft from a concealed air-freshening system. They create the illusion that the whole place sways gently.
I was on time, and Mr. Del Greco, the captain in the Trapeze, led me to a table where the Ormanski party waited. I found myself being treated like an incompetent small boy. I had to report on every detail of the afternoon’s performance and how well we were prepared to cope. I was getting irritated—and thirsty—when I heard a woman scream. The quiet hum of conversation in the Trapeze rose to an excited babble. People were standing, and I had to stand to see what on earth was happening.
A young man with dark hair, cut long, was standing at the bar. He was holding a dry martini in his left hand and a revolver in his right. He was shouting something I couldn’t distinguish over the crowd noise. He waved the gun threateningly at Mr. Del Greco and a small army of waiters who had started to close in on him. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Eddie, the head bartender, talking urgently on the phone behind the bar. Then the young man held the revolver to his head.
The woman screamed again.
I could see the man’s finger squeeze the trigger.
And nothing happened.
The young man threw back his head and began to laugh. Del Greco and his men moved in. Instantly, the young man sprang onto the bar. He ran along it, kicking glasses right and left, sprang past a stunned drinker at the far end, and raced out the door. He didn’t take the stairway to the foyer, but ducked out a fire exit. That way he could go up or down.
I left the Ormanski crowd and joined Eddie behind the bar. Eddie had been trying to locate Jerry Dodd. I called Chambrun’s office.
“We have with us Jeremy Slade,” I told him. …
The Russian-roulette player vanished into thin air. By the time Jerry Dodd reached the Trapeze and organized a search, there was no immediate trail to follow. Slade could have gone up into any one of more than a thousand rooms, or down into the labyrinth of kitchens, laundries, utility spaces, storage areas. There were a good fifty exits that would have taken him to one of the half-dozen ways to the street. No doorman had seen anything suspicious. But there had been no time to alert doormen if Slade had gone directly out to the street.
There was one specific place to go, and Chambrun went there, accompanied by Jerry Dodd and me.
Suite 9F.
I had seen pictures of Doris Standing but never the lady herself. Pictures can be misleading. Except for candid shots, they’re apt to be very much to the advantage of the subject. This was not so in Doris Standing’s case. I knew I could never tell my glamorous secretary what I really thought about Miss Standing. Shelda might be right about the red hair, but if so, the Standing hairdresser was a genius. I was reminded of the breathtaking beauty of the young Maureen O’Hara. The door to Suite 9F had been opened to us by Madame Marinelli from the dress shop. Her intention to give us a haughty “be off” was abruptly changed when she saw Chambrun.
“Miss Standing is trying on clothes,” Marinelli said. “I don’t think—”
“It’s an emergency,” Chambrun said, and walked into the sitting room.
Madame Marinelli, a black-gowned duenna, disappeared into the bedroom and, a few moments later, Doris Standing appeared, wearing a housecoat she’d evidently been trying on. I could see the price tag on its gold, quilted sleeve.
“Hello, Mr. Chambrun,” she said. “Miss Standing.” He gave her a stiff little bow. “Are you and Madame Marinelli the only people in this suite?”
“One of my girls—” Marinelli said from the doorway, indicating the bedroom with a nod. “No one else?” Chambrun asked. “Would that be any of your business, Mr. Chambrun?” Doris asked. She stood very straight, her head held high. The gold housecoat fitted her as if it had been tailored for her. The gray-green eyes were very bright, a little angry, a little amused. Her voice was low, pleasant, but used to giving orders.
“Twenty minutes ago, a friend of yours played his familiar game of Russian roulette in the Trapeze Bar,” Chambrun said. “I want him, because I want him placed under arrest for creating a disturbance.”
Just for an instant her wide scarlet mouth seemed to tighten, and then it relaxed into a completely charming smile.
“Really, Mr. Chambrun, I’m not Jeremy’s keeper,” the girl said. She looked at me. “I know Dodd,” she said, “but this one—?”
“Mr. Haskell, my public relations man.”
“Ah, so you’re going to make a field day out of Jeremy?” Doris Standing said. “The hotel must live, I suppose.”
I think it was the first and only time I ever saw Chambrun dismissed as a management stooge. He’s respected by real kings and tycoons and political powers, by movie stars and great ladies in the social world, and by busboys and washroom attendants and call girls and headwaiters, and by that most temperamental of all human beings—chefs. I had come to understand that his genius lay in his ability to show deference to the important, the famous, and the very rich without being servile, and to be friendly to people in the lower social echelons without being patronizing.
He had broken one of his fundamental rules in the case of this golden girl. He had allowed his own emotions to play a part in the moment. His anger showed and she was prepared to laugh at him. That was her way. Expose some genuine feeling, and Doris’ Standing Army would indulge in derisive mirth.
“I do wish you’d tell me what the reaction was,” Doris said. “In the Trapeze Bar at the height of the lunch hour? Did the ladies scream? That always tickles Jeremy. One good scream is worth the performance.”