A bolt of déjà vu hit Kathryn like a sudden chill.
First Mayer and now Cohn. Life at the top of the heap was starting to feel like an Agatha Christie novel: Death Stalks Tinseltown. With the Grim Reaper hunting down the crowned heads of Hollywood, she wondered if stubborn old Adolph Zukor was getting nervous. He was well into his eighties and still on the Paramount Pictures board.
She studied the scarlet lipstick she’d chosen. It was a beautiful shade but inappropriate for a funeral. She was poking around the bathroom drawer for a more suitable color when she heard Nelson’s special knock—two slow, followed by four quick. She called to him that the door was open.
Dressed in a suit of midnight blue teamed with the necktie she had given him last Christmas, he looked rather dashing—or would have if he’d cracked a smile. She had grown to recognize that enigmatic look he now wore. “Got a new case, have you?”
“Yes but—”
“—you can’t talk about it.”
She chose a new claret-red lipstick from Westmore Brothers. She probably shouldn’t wear it for the first time out in public but tick-tock-tick-tock. Cohn’s memorial started at noon and it was twenty minutes to that now; Columbia was at least a fifteen-minute drive from the Garden.
“You know I can’t.”
“That must mean it’s someone famous with an appalling secret. Am I close, Sammy?”
A while back, Kathryn had started calling him Sam Spade, after the private eye from Dashiell Hammett’s novels. At some point, the nickname had truncated to “Sammy.” In return, he’d started to call her “Wonderly” after Ruth Wonderly, the femme fatale Mary Astor had played in The Maltese Falcon.
“You’re usually right but not this time.”
There was a distance to his expression that she rarely saw. Her girl-reporter intuition tingled but warned her not to intrude. “I hope they’re at least paying you well.”
“Just a preliminary consultation. If he hires me, it might take all my Sammy skills.”
“Which are considerable. Whoever ‘he’ is, I know he’ll get his money’s worth.”
He smiled, but she could see it was an effort. “I’d kiss you,” she told him, “but it’d smudge my Westmore.”
He twirled the ring of his car keys around his index finger. Around and around and around.
Harry Cohn had never been a contender for the title of Hollywood’s Most Likable Boss, so Kathryn was surprised to find a throng so large that it took soundstages twelve and fourteen to accommodate everybody.
By the time Kathryn and Nelson arrived, the joke circulating through the milling crowd was that they’d all had shown up “just to make sure the bastard really is dead.” For forty years, Harry Cohn had run Columbia with the finesse of a battering ram. Somehow, Kathryn had never been directly exposed to the prickly spikes of his temper. Consequently, she thought the joke was in poor taste, but she could see that she was in the minority.
She put on her professional face as she mingled and greeted and chatted with Clark Gable, who’d been loaned out to Columbia against his will, and Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak, who’d discovered how constricting their contractual straightjackets were. There was a liberal sprinkling of directors—Frank Capra most prominent among them—who’d probably fought Cohn for everything they needed to make the pictures they’d wanted. And yet, Kathryn saw, they had come to pay their respects anyway.
Cohn had specifically requested that no memorial or funeral be held. Maybe he’d feared nobody would show up. Or that if a service was held, there’d be a line of people waiting to kick his coffin. Kathryn wondered how he’d have felt watching two thousand people crowding into the studio lot.
For an irritable bastard with no desire to play nicey-nice, he received a decent send-off. Several people got up to deliver eulogies that lacked the usual rapturous beatitudes but managed to include some sort of compliment.
Afterwards, she joined the crowds outside the soundstage and was chatting with Arthur Lake, who’d made twenty-eight Blondie pictures at Columbia, when she heard angry shouting at the Gower Street studio gate. Arthur rolled his eyes. “It’s those ghastly protesters who picketed L.B. Mayer’s funeral.”
Kathryn elbowed through the crowd until she was standing on the sidewalk staring at Vincent Haynes and his collection of ratbags and malcontents. He had somehow managed to pied-piper twice the number of people he’d lured to Mayer’s funeral.
“YOU!” she yelled, pointing at Haynes. “We’ve had just about enough of you and your—your—” She cast around for an appropriate word for his gang of disciples but couldn’t land on one that wasn’t spelled with four letters. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?”
“Saving America’s soul!” Haynes lifted his placard high in the air.
BRING BACK THE
PRODUCTION CODE
BEFORE HOLLYWOOD SENDS
US ALL TO HELL!
His group began to chant. “Sin won’t win! Beat the devil within!”
By the second iteration, Haynes’s faithful sheep were bleating behind him in well-rehearsed unison.
Kathryn stepped forward. “I’m on to you,” she shouted over the screeching mob. “I know who you are and what you’re about, and if you think you’re going to get away with it, you’ve got a huge disappointment coming your way.”
“We’re not going to stop until we see the entire film industry closed down—and right along with it, the sin and depravity and vice and decadence—”
“Not going to happen!” Kathryn cut in.
“—and immorality and licentiousness and wantonness and lust—”
“We are not a bunch of degenerates. This industry is mostly made up of hardworking, talented people who love the movies and everything they can do.”
“We will not rest until every last one of you is cast down.”
Kathryn was now close enough to see the craziness in his eyes. She ignored the vein throbbing her temple and shot Haynes her sharpest withering glare. “Over my dead body.”
He took another step toward her. “Starting with your dead body.”
When they got to Nelson’s Skylark, he opened the passenger door for her. She thanked him with her eyes and climbed in. He slipped behind the wheel and pulled into the traffic inching along Gower Street without saying a word.
Kathryn was grateful that she had a boyfriend who knew better than to patronize her with banal platitudes about getting control of herself, or not letting her emotions get the better of her. The only sound in the car was the plink-plink-plink of the turn signal until they were well past Hollywood High School.
“The guy’s a lunatic, right?” Kathryn blurted out.
“Quite possibly.”
“‘Starting with your dead body.’ Was that a threat? Am I supposed to take him seriously? Should we report him to the cops?” She could hear that she was starting to babble, but her nerves were jangling like guitar strings. She decided that the best way to deal with them was to blurt out everything spinning around her brain. “Or would they tell me he’s just a crazy person and only another crazy person would believe anything that came out of a dingbat like that?”
“Some dingbats are dangerous.”
“You know who that was, don’t you?”
“No. Who?”
She turned to face him. “Vincent Haynes.”
He went silent longer than Kathryn would have liked. “I didn’t realize.”
“Who did you think he was?”
“The sort of religious screwball who knows when, where, and how to attract the press. Mayer’s and Cohn’s funerals will probably be the two biggest ones of the year.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Kathryn told him. “It’s only March. Movie tycoons are dropping like summer peaches.”
They pulled into the Garden of Allah parking lot. He got out of the car and opened her door, extending his hand to help her out. Not that she needed it, but she rather liked these little gentlemanly quirks of his that were falling by the wayside these days.
He took her arm as they started down the path back to her villa. “During the whole Sheldon Voss situation, Haynes’s name kept cropping up, so I did some digging.”
“And?”
“Turns out, he’s related to Dr. James Wingate.”
The name rang a distant bell but Kathryn couldn’t place it.
Nelson asked, “Remember how in the early days, the Studio Relations Committee was tasked with the job of enforcing the Hays Code? Well, the first committee head was a Colonel Joy, who lasted a couple of years. His replacement was a Dr. Wingate.”
“But they were useless,” Kathryn said. “The studios played lip service to the idea of industry-run self-censorship, but nobody bothered much with either of those windbags. The movies got racier and racier. But what does Haynes have to do with the Studio Relations Committee?”
“He’s Dr. Wingate’s nephew. From what I could piece together, he grew up witnessing his uncle’s frustrations at the studio system. Wingate got replaced by his assistant—”
A pinball bell went off inside Kathryn’s head. “Joseph Breen!”
“Ten points to Miss Wonderly.” Nelson took Kathryn’s house keys from her and unlocked her front door. “Breen succeeded where others had failed, but Haynes was on the wings taking all this in. Once he was out of college, he became a key figure in the formation of the Legion of Decency.”
Kathryn threw her gloves on the dining table. “No!”
“The dots nearly always connect if you dig deep enough.”
“Is he still involved?”
“Very much so.”
She slapped the table. “Didn’t I tell you that they were behind this Harrison list? And now you tell me that Vincent Haynes is one of their movers and shakers. I’d lay money that he’s the one circulating that list.”
“I would too,” Nelson said, “which means we should proceed with extreme caution.”
“You know what my favorite word in that sentence was?”
Kathryn wasn’t often able to stump this guy, so when he pulled back slightly and frowned at her, she took a rare measure of delight.
“We.”