Vance Varley seemed to be having a terrible problem. He came running out of his dressing room both horror stricken and hysterical. The commotion he made was so loud that it was heard all over the set. A number of personnel gathered around the bathrobe-clad star to find out what was wrong. Something had frightened him out of his wits, that was apparent. It was almost impossible for the producer of Vance’s current film to calm him down.
“Here, here,” the producer soothed. “Why don’t you tell your old buddy here exactly what’s scaring you and making you so upset? That way maybe we can do something about it and you won’t be scared anymore.”
When Vance finally stopped shaking he said between small sobs: “There’s a daddy long legs in my sink and I’m afraid of daddy long legs.”
“Oh,” the producer said. “So that’s it, a daddy long legs in your sink, huh? Well, no wonder you’re scared. But now there’s no need to worry about it anymore. You just stay right where you are and I’ll go in there and take care of that big, nasty daddy long legs.”
Vance sat on a folding chair holding the hand of the motherly coffee wagon lady while the producer went on his mission. A moment later he came out of Vance’s dressing room and looked into Vance’s big blue eyes.
“Okay, Vance, the coast is clear. That bad old daddy long legs is dead.”
“Are you sure?” Vance asked, his voice still fearful.
“Sure I’m sure. Now why don’t you let me help you back into your dressing room so that you can get yourself ready for your next scene, okay? The cameras are just about to roll.”
The film being made was about a young soldier on leave and a girl who’d fallen in love with each other during a Ferris wheel ride in an amusement park. The story line had the soldier proposing to the girl and her accepting followed by the pair’s having to find someone to marry them before the soldier’s departure to a far-off battleground scheduled for the very next morning.
Vance, playing the young soldier, allowed himself to be helped back to his dressing room, but was still wary of the spider.
“What if he had relatives?” Vance asked, stopping suddenly before stepping foot into the luxuriously appointed dressing room.
“He didn’t,” the producer said in a calm voice. “He lived alone.”
It was another half hour for Vance’s dresser to get him into the uniform of the soldier and a further hour for the film’s director to persuade him to get into the waiting Ferris wheel car.
“It looks shaky,” Vance complained.
“It’s perfectly stable,” the director said as patiently as he could. With all of these delays of Vance’s, the production was going to cost a fortune. But he knew from bitter experience that it was absolutely pointless ordering Vance to do something that he didn’t want to do. With Vance, you had to be exceedingly gentle or he might walk off the set. And he was a big enough star to get away with it.
In the Ferris wheel car, Maggie Graym waited patiently while Vance was being coaxed to sit beside her. She kept an
Agatha Christie paperback tucked into the folds of her buttercup yellow frock, just in case this turned out to be yet another one of those marathon sessions with Vance being difficult.
One thing about working with this guy, Maggie recently realized, was that she had read just about every Agatha Christie mystery ever published. Not to mention Ellery Queen and Dorothy Sayers.
When Vance was finally seated, the wheel started to move slowly upward.
“Stop,” Vance shrieked, practically deafening Maggie as he did so. “You didn’t tell me that this thing was going to move. I hate heights!”
“You’ll be okay, Vance,” the director said, slowing the car almost to a halt. “Just sit there next to Maggie and remember not to look down from the top.”
“I refuse to do this scene,” Vance answered loudly. “I demand you get a stuntman for it.”
Tom Driscoll stood near the set having just completed yet another whole set of stunts for Bradford on the tenement set. Again, they were all identical, but this time, Tom just kept quiet about it.
“It won’t work to have a stuntman in this sequence, Vance,” the director was telling his highly agitated and panicked star. “I want to go from closeup to longshot in one sweeping, continuous movement. Which means that you have to be in the car with Maggie for the whole time or it won’t come off. So you’ll just have to stay seated where you are until I get the shot I need.”
Tom wondered if this director was going to pull a “Bradford” on Vance and have him do a lot of takes. He would never stand the strain.
“I don’t have to do anything. I’m a star,” Vance said, starting to get up.
Maggie, usually cool toward Vance, was now beginning to feel sorry for him. He was, without a doubt, absolutely petrified. “Listen, Vance,” she said, trying to comfort him, “it won’t be nearly as bad as you think. I’ll hold your hand the entire time and you won’t even know that we’re climbing.”
The word “climbing” set Vance off once again and he was about to leap out of the car when the director, seizing what might be his last chance, gave the order for the wheel to move and the cameras to roll.
With the speed of the car, Vance was thrown back into his seat and he felt Maggie’s arms around him in a romantic pose. Anyone witnessing the scene would have seen what appeared to be a beautiful young woman and a handsome soldier gazing deeply into each other’s eyes. No one could know that through Vance’s clenched teeth, he was saving: “Keep your sympathy for yourself, bitch.”
The people on the ground gave a huge sigh of relief when the car was underway, but when it reached the top, they saw Vance suddenly push Maggie away from him and stand up on his seat causing the car to rock violently back and forth. Maggie did her best to get him to sit back down again, but to no avail.
Then Vance’s vigorous rocking of the car turned his greatest fear to reality.
There was a heavy grinding sound like metal separating from metal and the car actually started to detach from the structure of the wheel.
Almost instantly, the car fell sharply to one side with such force as to propel Vance right out of it. With a hideous, ear-deafening scream, he plunged toward his death leaving Maggie only slighdy more fortunate: clinging to the side of the dangling car for dear life.
As the spectators down below watched in horror, Vance had miraculously grabbed a crossbar on the way down and had somehow managed to swing himself into another car positioned directly below the one he’d been in with Maggie. Whereupon he promptly fainted.
The chance of Maggie swinging into another car as Vance had done was about one in a million.
Below her, the studio people gathered, shocked at the prospect that Hollywood’s most beautiful and most valuable property was about to die in a tragic fall.
Emerson Waldie, just then coming onto the set, looked up at his famous star hanging some sixty feet above him.
“I don’t remember that being in the script,” he said to one of the producers. “How many times do I have to tell you guys to keep me informed of all script changes?”
“I hate to tell you, E.W,” the producer answered, “but this is no script change. The car just fell. All of a sudden,” he tried to explain.
“Well, do something,” Waldie shouted. “Climb up there. Get her down!” The look of fear on his face now reflected not so much the death of Maggie Graym, but the death of Grove Pictures.
“We’ve got the fire department coming,” the producer said. “If she can just hang on until they get here.”
Just then the suspended car fell even further off the Ferris wheel frame and Maggie was left hanging from the side of it, her feet dangling in space. She could feel her fingers giving way. It was apparent to her that her struggle to hold on was about to come to an end.
One hand lost its grip and the other was slipping fast. And then it was impossible for her to hang on any longer.
She let go.