CHAPTER 37

 

 

Marcus still had Gwendolyn’s latest letter gripped in his hand as he turned the corner onto his street.

Pregnant by Gable!

He nipped inside the tabaccheria to stock up on cigarettes. He needed to read the letter a second time before he could compose a reply.

Miscarried! In the middle of Grauman’s!

He added matches and a couple of ballpoint pens to his pile and handed over a fistful of lira. He had never felt so separated from Gwendolyn and Kathryn and life at the Garden of Allah.

He turned up his lapels against the chilled wind gusting up the street as he headed toward his pensione. A snifter of brandy, some biscotti, his one thick sweater, the armchair next to the signora’s oil heater: he’d need them all to respond to a letter like that. If he’d known what was inside, he wouldn’t have taken it to the café where he always read his letters from home.

The double doors into his pensione were pale wood, pock-marked from decades of weather and war, and tall enough to permit a horse and carriage to pass through. Marcus stepped through them and spotted a familiar figure standing next to the tiled fountain in the center of the courtyard. He ducked back into the shadows but was a half-second too late.

“Mister Adler? Is that you?”

He contemplated dashing out into the street and going into hiding for the rest of the day, but she would only come back again. He wiped his clammy hands down his trousers and stepped back into the alleyway.

At forty, Ingrid Bergman still possessed the beauty that had illuminated Hollywood movie screens, but up close, Marcus could see the last five or six years had seasoned her allure with a worldliness that sat on her like a favorite hat.

“Miss Bergman!”

She walked toward him, her hand outstretched. “Please call me Ingrid.”

Her skin was soft but her handshake was firm.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

She duplicated that reticent smile she’d used on Bing Crosby in The Bells of St. Mary’s. “I was hoping we might have a chat. Perhaps we could get out of this cold?”

Up in his room, she unbuttoned her plain black duffel coat and pulled the gray knitted scarf from around her neck. “Your pensione is charming!”

Marcus set Gwendolyn’s letter onto the mantel next to a framed photograph of Kathryn and Gwendolyn, Doris, Arlene, and Bertie crowded on the Garden of Allah diving board. Quentin took it when he asked Doris to be his date to the opening of White Christmas. The photo flattered all five of them, so he placed it in full view where he could see it every day.

“I was going to have some brandy to warm up,” he told Ingrid, “but I could make us some coffee.”

Ingrid beelined for the photo. “Either or.” She ran her finger along the top edge of the frame. “Is this Kathryn Massey?”

“I met her the first week I came to Hollywood. I have limoncello someone brought back from Capri, if you’d prefer.”

Her eyes, a delightful shade of blue, lit up. “I adore limoncello! Roberto introduced me to it during Stromboli.”

Marcus lifted the bottle and two shot glasses from the shelf above his desk and told her to take one of his two dining chairs. “Is this about the Look magazine photos? Because if they caused you any trouble, it wasn’t my intention.”

She let out a disarmingly tinkling laugh. “Goodness me, no! I’ve come to beg for your assistance.” The limoncello Domenico had brought back from a couple of weeks on location had a refreshingly tart bite to it. The shadow of the lace curtains covering the window behind Marcus speckled her face. “To be specific, the assistance of Lo Scattino Simpatico.”

Marcus didn’t think anything of Bella Darvi’s joke until his La Strada photos started appearing in magazines across the continent, prompting a call from Look, who wanted to do a feature on him: “An American in Rome: Lo Scattino Americano becomes Lo Scattino Simpatico.”

When Marcus asked how they came up with the idea, the guy said he had interviewed Bella Darvi in Paris as part of a press junket for The Egyptian and she talked about the Scattino Americano who took those La Strada photos.

The article had come out a couple of weeks ago, but Marcus hadn’t seen it until Doris sent him a copy of the issue. It sat on the coffee table next to the heater.

“What can Lo Scattino Simpatico do for you?”

“Well!” Ingrid cupped her luminous face in her palms. “I recently finished Journey to Italy. My husband directed it but the film’s having trouble finding a US distributor. I was complaining about it to Humphrey—”

“Bogart?”

“We have kept up a friendship since Casablanca. He’s one of the few people who didn’t desert me after I was denounced on the floor of the Senate. At any rate, he brought up those photos in Look that you took of me. He said Americans need reminding that I’m a real person, with real feelings, and your photos helped do that.”

The vodka in the limoncello warmed Marcus’s innards. Or it may have been the relief to know that his work hadn’t been as intrusive as he’d feared. “You want me to take some more shots of you?”

Her smile turned impish. “There’s a French play called Anastasia about a girl who is posing as the heir to the Russian throne. An English version is now playing on Broadway starring Viveca Lindfors.”

“And you’re angling for the film?”

“Fox have bought the screen rights. Naturally Viveca is lobbying for the lead, but I think I can do it better. Humphrey told me that you know Zanuck quite well.”

“I wouldn’t say that, but I do know someone with access to him.” He thought of a particularly picturesque corner of the Cinecittà back lot that he discovered when taking photos of a strikingly gorgeous extra.

Not long after Bella Darvi left Rome, he got a call from Domenico. Warner Brothers were soon to start work on Helen of Troy at Cinecittà and the director, Robert Wise had asked if he knew an on-set photographer. The job paid well so Marcus took the assignment.

When he spotted one of the extras, the beauty of her unspoiled freshness made her stick out amid a sea of pretty girls. She carried herself like a ballerina, but at the same time seemed delicate as a dandelion.

When he approached her, she seemed faintly surprised. It could have been a ruse—she later confessed that she’d worked as a model from a young age—but it didn’t matter. Marcus’s photos revealed how much the camera adored the twenty-year-old.

Wise told him to take “as many pictures of her as you want” and arranged twenty-four hour access to Cinecittà. Later, his work turned up in Epoca and its equivalents in France, Spain, Germany, and Holland. He didn’t receive any more money for them but he did gain extra scattini credibility being the guy that helped boost the career of Brigitte Bardot.

Marcus refilled their shot glasses. “How about we rummage through Cinecittà’s costume department? I know of a particularly picturesque setting on the back lot where I could take some interesting shots and then send the best of them to Zanuck along with a suggestion that he consider you.”

“Perfecto!” Ingrid clapped her hands together. “I’m desperate to get back to America and from what I understand, you know how that feels.”

Gwendolyn’s letter on the mantel glowed like an SOS beacon. She had written about the Gable situation in her usual self-effacing style, as though she’d accidently spilled coffee into his lap instead of falling pregnant by him. But he knew how to read between her lines, and he knew that she knew it too.

Despite the contented relationship he’d developed with Domenico and the success he’d made with this photography job he’d fallen into, Los Angeles sat like a golden bubble below the horizon, shining just brightly enough for him to catch a glimmer every now and then, beckoning him home.

“Yes,” he admitted, “I do.”

* * *

It took a warehouse the size of Union Station to house Cinecittà’s costumes. The togas and uniforms of Ancient Rome filled two full aisles, but Marcus and Ingrid weren’t looking for them.

Eastern European peasant girl?

1920s Parisian waif?

Turn-of-the-century Imperial Russia?

“I’ll know it when I see it.”

Ingrid pawed through dirndls, pinafores, sarafans, and 1920s couture until she pulled out a floor-length gown of white silk, stenciled with an ivy design in gold thread running in vertical bands from the waist. The bodice had a purple sash secured across it, with a tiny gold medal pinned over the left breast.

The stern signora who managed the costume department made it clear that Marcus and Ingrid were free to look around as long as they wished, but under no circumstances could she permit them to take anything outside the building. No, not even Ingrid Bergman.

“There must be a rear entrance to this building,” Marcus whispered.

They found a fire escape in the far corner. It was locked, but the key hung from a nearby nail. The door opened directly onto the outer perimeter of a Tuscan village. It wasn’t what Marcus had in mind, but the church façade gave Ingrid the privacy she needed to change into the gown.

She emerged five minutes later, lipstick reapplied, hair brushed, and looking more like “Movie Star Ingrid” than Marcus had seen in a while. She turned around so that he could zip her into the dress. It was made for someone with the waist of a twenty-three-year-old but they managed to squeeze her into it.

He steered her through the Roman Forum to a side alley that led to a town square dominated by a richly decorated façade that could be a church, a palazzo, a town hall, or the entrance to the home of an especially rich citizen of the Roman Empire.

“They used this as the outside of Nero’s palace in Quo Vadis,” Marcus explained, “but at the right angle, it can be pretty much anything.”

He positioned her in front of a door off to the side. It was stained dark brown with black iron hinges and served as a stark contrast to her white silk. Wooden columns carved with interlocking blackbirds and ivy bordered each side of the door. They didn’t look especially Russian, but the ivy in the design reflected the gold ivy in her dress.

With years of posing for portraits and taking direction, Ingrid was a dream model and within ten minutes, Marcus had burned through three rolls of film and was confident he’d caught a handful of images that might seize Zanuck’s attention.

The door was still unlocked when they returned to the costume warehouse, and Ingrid was rehanging her gown as the manager called down the aisle, asking if they needed any assistance.

As Ingrid called out, “I think we’ve got a good idea of what you have,” Marcus noticed that the rack opposite held the studio’s collection of religious apparel: basic friar habits, cassocks, more elaborate ferraiolos, and up the church ladder to papal vestments.

“Do me a favor,” he whispered to Ingrid, “keep her busy down the other end.”

Ingrid launched into a speech about the elaborate headdresses for the wives of Roman senators.

Marcus ran his hand along the costumes until he came to a black ankle-length cassock with a tab collar and fuchsia piping. Its neighbor was almost identical but with purple edging, and the one on the other side had red. He knew that each color denoted a different rank within church hierarchy, but damned if he knew which color meant what.

The cassock with the fuchsia piping looked like it fitted him best, so he pulled it from the rack and returned to the rear entrance, where he opened the door and checked to see if anyone was about. He dropped the garment onto the ground and closed the door, locked it, and ran up the aisle.

* * *

Ingrid said nothing until they were three blocks past Cinecittà’s main gate.

“I’m sure you have a perfectly reasonable explanation for what’s under your arm,” she said, “but I won’t pry.”

Marcus’s heart was still beating like a bongo player hopped up on bennies. “I have a substantial amount of money stuck here.”

“Locked funds?”

“It’s been suggested that if I disguise myself as a clergyman, nobody will question me.”

“Couldn’t you have just bought one of those?”

“I tried, but they only sell to bona fide members of the church.”

“So you’ll be smuggling funds out of the country wearing that?” Ingrid laughed. “Oh my! What guts!”

Marcus had been sure he had the nerve to pull off this audacious plan back at the olive grove in Tivoli, but now that he had an actual cassock in his arms, the reality of what Oliver had suggested weighed more heavily. “Not that I can leave any time soon. My passport was confiscated back in June.”

“Eight months? But how is that even legal?”

He gave her a rundown on Sinatra’s reaction to the fake scattini photos he had taken of Ava and his lover.

“Have you asked someone to intercede on your behalf?”

“Kathryn cornered Frank but nothing happened. My lawyer got nowhere, and neither did the US embassy.”

“Then matters must be taken in hand.”

“I’ve tried everything I can think of.”

“Yes, but now you’ve got me on your side, and in my years on the arm of Roberto Rossellini, I’ve learned how to handle these Italians. It’s like dealing with Louella or Hedda. You have to charm them into doing what you want. Tell me, who’s the mover-and-shaker in this scenario?”

“Napoleon Conti.”

“What a snake! Now we need something we can hold over his head.”

“I think I might have something,” Marcus said. Metropolitana was Fratelli di Conti’s all-time box office champ, which made Melody Hope the big meatball in their bowl of spaghetti. Now that she had successfully made the transition from historical dramas to twentieth-century stories, they were planning a new movie set in current-day Rome about a female scattino. “It involves Melody Hope.”

Comprehension bloomed on Ingrid’s angelic face. “So it’s true? Eccellente!”

“I’ve heard he’s got mafia connections.”

“Who in Italy doesn’t have those? And anyway, we have better ones. Have you heard about the Holmby Hills Rat Pack?”

Kathryn had mentioned it in one of her letters, but only in passing. “What do you know about them?”

“It’s sort of a social group that’s sprung up among a bunch of Hollywood celebrities who live in and around Holmby Hills. The Pack Master, as he’s called, is Frank Sinatra. We need to prevail on Bogie to get Sinatra to use his connections to back off.”

“According to Kathryn, he’s already tried.”

“Then he needs to try again.”

“And what if he doesn’t—or can’t?”

Ingrid smiled. “Have you heard about the Wrong Door Raid?” I know someone who was there, but how the hell do you know? He nodded cautiously. “Sinatra has the whole debacle under wraps, but what if we each wrote to Bogie? Maybe together we could get him to find a way to convince Frank to directly persuade Napoleon to return your passport.”

She didn’t know that Kathryn had already given Walter Winchell the Wrong Door Raid scoop so that he could turn it over to Confidential. They hadn’t exposed it yet, but surely that was only a matter of time. If he and Ingrid were going to act on this nutty plan, they needed to do it now.

Marcus asked, “But what if Napoleon refuses? I put one over on him; he hates that.”

“In that case, we need to soften him up then attack at both ends. How well do you know Melody?”

“On a scale of one to ten? Pretty high, I’d say.”

“We must get Napoleon and Melody together in the same place with you and me. It needs to be public.”

The stolen cassock under Marcus’s arm was growing heavy. He flagged down a taxi and opened the door for Ingrid. “I know just the place.”