A DINOSAUR

My friend Noma Copley (1916–2006) led an interesting life. During the war she was a translator on Eisenhower’s staff in France. She was responsible for discovering Cartier-Bresson, engaging him to document the atrocities of the camps.

She was great friends with Magritte and Man Ray and can be seen in many of Man’s photographs. We have one, in which she’s displaying her hands and, on them, jewelry of her design.

After the war she worked for Walt Disney. She told us that, when she was hired, she was asked into his inner office, the walls of which depicted Disney characters involved in an orgy. “Call me Walt,” he said. “Yes, Mr. Disney,” she replied.

We had dinner recently with Rebecca’s cousin Paul Huson. He was a child actor in films, playing with Larry Olivier in Richard III. His mother, Olga Lehmann, whom I knew, was a painter and designer. After the war she worked for Elstree Studios, designing clothes and sets, and painting those portraits of the stars that appeared on-screen.

I told Paul I’d just read that Olga had worked for Errol Flynn, designing his Caribbean hotel. Yes, he said, and she covered the dining room in a mural depicting him in various swashbuckling guises. The mural was done on canvas, and removed before the hotel burnt. But no one knows where the mural is. Nor if there are photos of Mr. Disney’s studio ornée. Nor if the story is true.

But I drank now and then with Roland Winters, famed for playing Charlie Chan. He was an old and longtime member of The Players club, I was a new light, come for the bar and the poker (Wednesday afternoons, and Saturdays).

Roland stayed in the bar playing gin, but I was up in the library at the poker table. And there, every week, was Eddie Bracken, comic genius of Preston Sturges’s Hail the Conquering Hero and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. The game was always seven-card stud. Eddie had “The Bracken Theory,” that if an opponent held four open cards of a suit, he didn’t have a fifth in the hole, and so it was safe to call.

He was a rotten poker player, as was Walter Matthau. I played with him in the famed Begelman Game in Century City.^I Matthau came late to the poker game and announced he’d picked five out of seven winners at Hialeah. I knew without asking that, although he’d picked them, he had not bet. And that proved to be the case. He’d penciled in the winners at home, and came to the game, happy with his non-remunerative prescience, to lose at poker. I lost that night, too; playing at a table far over my head, and happy to get away cheaply.

Roland often told the story of John Barrymore at The Players. Barrymore had been barred for showing up drunk, drinking on, and sweeping the glasses and bottles from the bar with his cane. On his reinstatement a member standing at the bar, and just returned from overseas, asked, “Jack, why’d they kick you out?” Barrymore said, “For doing this,” and took his cane and swept the top of the bar clean.

I met Neil Fitzgerald at the club. He’d been a member of the Abbey, and played for John Ford in The Informer. He was friendly with Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the West, who lived just kitty-corner from the club around the park.

Neil invited me to go with him to her Christmas Party, but I didn’t go. And I didn’t go to meet Brando when he and I were both shooting in Montreal—but I treasure Jack Nicholson’s stories of him.

Jack lived up on Mulholland, and Marlon had the neighboring estate. According to Jack, no door could defeat Marlon if he got the munchies and found his cupboard bare; so Jack had to wreath his refrigerator with thick padlocks and chains.

Neil Fitzgerald told me that he was the man who killed Otis Skinner. Neil was onstage, on Broadway, in 1941 in Mr. Wookey. Mr. Wookey and his brood live through the Blitz. At one point a buzz bomb is heard, and a young Wookey (Fitzgerald) screams, “LOOK OUT!” As he does so he sees an ancient fellow in the front row clutch his chest. He said that’s how he killed Otis Skinner.

Otis’s daughter, Cornelia Otis Skinner, traveled through Europe with her great chum Emily Kimbrough. The two of ’em wrote of their 1920 Wanderjahr in Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. It was adapted as a film, a stage play, a musical comedy, and a short-lived TV series. (Note from Wikipedia: during WWII German intelligence used it for a codebook.)

Emily’s niece, Linda Kimbrough, was a colleague in our Chicago theater companies. She can be seen in my film Spartan, as the Secret Service agent, and in State and Main, my film location comedy, as Edith Head.

Olga worked for Charlie Chaplin on Monsieur Verdoux.

Charles Bronson lived in Malibu and painted extensively under his birth name, Buchinsky. I’ve always felt I’ll discover one of his paintings at the Santa Monica flea market.

Nobody knows who knows what happened to the ebony dildo incised in silver with his name which was used to kill Ramon Novarro. Nor has authenticated the original Maltese Falcon. Nor identified the killers of Ron and Nicole.

In 1870 Heinrich Schliemann unearthed the ruins of Troy, a city whose existence, prior to his discovery, was considered a myth.

Paleontologists assert they can re-create a dinosaur based upon discovery of one bone, but where is the creature, long dead, come back to explain “it wasn’t that way at all.”

And then hear his report ridiculed?

1. I. For latecomers, David Begelman became head of Columbia Pictures in 1973. In ’77 Cliff Robertson discovered that Begelman had been forging his name on checks. Cliff blew the whistle. The cops uncovered extensive Begelman forgery and he was eventually ousted from Columbia. The Wall Street Journal exposé got turned into the bestseller Indecent Exposure (1982). Cliff Robertson got graylisted for talking out of school, and Begelman blew his brains out in 1995.