AFTER HIS DEPARTMENT’S screening room, the graduate library was Valentino’s favorite place on campus. Thanks in large part to Kyle Broadhead’s talents at squeezing blood (donations of cash, private collections, and above all, cash), UCLA maintained an impressive, although incomplete, archive of fan magazines. It spanned the industry from the silents through Cinerama, when the voracious competition from television lured readers in droves from Photoplay to TV Guide, demolishing a publicity machine that had existed for half a century. In those pages—some slick and sturdy, others pulp and crumbling—a surprising amount of authentic Hollywood history could be found among the studio hype. It was like panning a stream for nuggets; all it required was someone who knew how to separate the genuine article from fool’s gold.
Efforts to commit the material to microfilm were ongoing, but it was an expensive and tedious process, and far down the list of priorities; any major university is a honeycomb, with many bees to sustain, the drones last of all. For every drawerful of microfilm spools, there were hundreds of periodicals moldering in stout storage cartons. These last stood in rows on steel utility shelves from floor to ceiling, like the anonymous antiquities in the government storeroom at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Guided by the dates in card slots (and with the help of a ten-foot stepladder), Valentino made some likely selections and carried them to a carrel and a vacant microfilm reader. Sitting, he looked forward to his chore with almost the same anticipation he brought to a screening; for him, what seemed toxic to a civilian was an adventure in time travel: Thread the film onto the pegs, switch on the glorified slide projector, crank forward, and leap ahead, days, weeks, months, years at a turn; crank backward, and enter the past. Same thing depending on which way you fanned through musty-smelling pages, the world speeding past at sixty frames a second.
There, among advertisements for Packards and Lucky Strikes, he found some production and pre-production material on Bleak Street. Most of it was photographic: stills of the actors in and out of costume, horsing around on the set, pretending to menace one another in tableaus similar to the scenes they’d shot. Few people studying such pictures in modern film books realized they were looking at fake publicity stills and not actual frames from the movies. By and large they were posed and shot by house photographers. Valentino, for one, sometimes wished the movies themselves looked as good as their advertising.
In our cynical time, the burlesque teasing among the players was stagy and anything but spontaneous, an attempt to show the world how well everyone got along and that even major stars didn’t really take themselves seriously. In their own time, the scheme backfired, convincing outsiders that “Hollywood people” were shallow, facetious, narcissistic parasites, when in most cases they were dedicated professionals, working inhuman hours under conditions of near-slavery.
Van Oliver, it appeared, was quite chummy with Roy Fitzhugh, who played the gangster hero’s bodyguard until he was killed in the first reel during an attempt on his boss’s life. The pair were photographed with their arms around each other’s shoulders, trading mock punches and grinning, and messing each other’s Brilliantined pompadours with impudent hands. The archivist knew that such carryings-on were often a ruse to disguise deep mutual dislike, similar to the one that had led to fisticuffs between George Raft and Edward G. Robinson on the set of Manpower. However, there were rather more of them than the average, despite the brevity of Fitzhugh’s part in the picture. Valentino was inclined to believe the two were close.
Which was a break; provided the elderly actor retained the wits necessary to remember events from so long ago. Many a promising trip to the Motion Picture Country Home had dashed itself to bits on the rocks of Alzheimer’s and senile dementia. They were crueler even than the pernicious decay that had sentenced ninety percent of world film to oblivion.
Bleak Street vanished from the puff columns in June 1957—its announced month of release—as thoroughly as its star had dropped from sight weeks earlier. Under normal circumstances, the feature would have been mentioned everywhere at that time, with cover articles on its leading players in Modern Screen and Liberty, billboards splashed throughout Los Angeles and its suburbs, press kits sent out in flocks like carrier pigeons, and advertisements in newspapers in key cities across the country. Instead, the story moved to the city section of the L.A. Times, where burly detectives assigned to Missing Persons and Homicide were photographed grilling hapless suspects raked in from the local underworld. Almost overnight, a routine campaign intended for the Entertainment section decamped to the crime pages.
Studio clout had managed to squelch any negative publicity concerning its chief commercial property of the season; in those “factory town” days, the police commission took its marching orders from Louis B. Mayer, Howard Hughes, Harry Cohn, Darryl Zanuck, and the Brothers Warner (none of whom realized how quickly their influence would evaporate in the face of the competition from TV). But when Hughes’s people drop-kicked the production, the Oliver case became open season. As his sinister background became public property, the focus of the investigation shifted from Where is he? to Where is his body? Racketeer Mickey Cohen reported to police headquarters with his attorneys, disavowing any knowledge of the missing man’s fate, or for that matter the man himself: “Oh, sure, we was seen places, but I go lots of places and meet lots of people I don’t remember after. I’m like the Queen that way.”
“Which queen might that be?” sneered one of the reporters who’d swarmed around him on the steps of City Hall. (This from Confidential, the controversial scandal sheet that at the time had violated all the unspoken rules that prohibited seamy speculation.)
The obligatory sweep of known local offenders harvested a bumper crop of newspaper photos of men hiding their faces behind their hats and jut-chinned detectives subjecting pale-faced suspects to the third-degree; generations of exposure to Hollywood hype had taught the LAPD a thing or two about public relations, but the yield in solid leads was negative.
As in every successful drama, there was comic relief. A plainclothes sergeant flew to New York City to interview Mafia kingpin Frank Costello, who assured him he’d never heard of anyone named Van Oliver or Benny Obrilenski, and in any case Costello was a legitimate businessman, currently engaged in supplying jukeboxes to neighborhood bars. A front-page picture appeared of the sergeant emerging from a well-known brothel said to belong to Lucky Luciano, who’d been deported to Sicily for running a prostitution racket. The sergeant came home to find himself back in uniform, directing traffic at Hollywood and Vine.
The entire affair was precisely the kind of publicity the studios paid millions to avoid. The ghosts of William Desmond Taylor, a director whose murder had exposed a sordid 1920s landscape of drugs and sex, Fatty Arbuckle, a silent comic accused of involuntary manslaughter at a wild party, and sundry other figures caught up in sinful boomtown excess, had haunted the industry throughout its history, threatening it each time with stepped-up censorship and congressional investigation. No wonder Bleak Street was pulled and buried as deep as Oliver himself.
If he was buried. Once again, the “film detective” had been saddled with the unpleasant task of turning over old bones, churning up ancient secrets, and making himself equally unpopular with the people who were paid to investigate crimes and those who profited by committing them. It was like stepping from the safety of a climate-controlled auditorium onto the silver screen, and square into harm’s way.