The Last Embrace Read online

  “I’m fine, Pico,” Lily called, keeping her eyes on the fallen men. “You can come rescue me now.”

  “Hold on,” Pico bellowed. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  One side of Lily’s mouth twitched. Just then Frank Rhodes braced his arms against the ground and she thought he might try to rise.

  “Stay down,” she ordered. “Or I shoot you in the thigh. And maybe I miss by a couple inches, know what I mean? Everyone knows girls can’t shoot straight.”

  Rhodes’s mouth twisted. “I should have killed you when I had the chance,” he slurred.

  “But you were too vain and sure of yourself. Playing God. You’re about to get the justice you deserve, Rhodes. I’m just sorry it comes too late for Kitty Hayden and those other girls.”

  “What was she to you, anyway?”

  “You might say she was the only family I had left.”

  Lily heard a commotion just below the sign. Pico’s head popped up, then the rest of him, gun drawn. He gaped.

  “Well, I’ll be damned, Lily. I guess you didn’t need me after all.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Stephen,” Lily said. “I need you very much. Now will you get over here so I can put down this gun? My wrist’s starting to ache.”

  CHAPTER 36

  October 19, 1949

  It was dawn by the time she finished recounting everything that had happened. Frank Rhodes and his stepson were in the medical ward of the county jail, under arrest for murder. Their cohort, Louie, was dead of a broken neck from his fall.

  After a long series of interviews, the last remaining pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place.

  “So Magruder wasn’t in league with Rhodes after all?” Lily asked Pico, feeling numb as they sipped coffee in the hallway of the LAPD headquarters.

  Pico looked solemn. “He was dirty, and that’s going to come out, but he wasn’t a murderer. He proved it last night. He died trying to rescue you.”

  “Then he didn’t kill Bernard Keck?”

  “No. Rhodes’s thugs did. That stepson of his is a real piece of work. Turns out he has a rap sheet as long as your arm and five aliases. Narcotics, petty theft. Assault with a deadly weapon.”

  “I thought Magruder dropped you off at the Farmers Market so he could go back and kill Keck.”

  “He wanted me out of the way so he could go to Paramount and get more autographed photos for his kid. That’s what was in the manila envelope in his briefcase.”

  “Then why’d he hide it?”

  Pico shrugged. “Maybe he was embarrassed. A grown man…But he loved that kid. Left quite a nest egg for his nursing care.”

  “So how did Rhodes find out about Keck?” Lily persisted.

  Pico wouldn’t meet her eyes. “My father,” he said at last. “Kitty had threatened to go to the DA if the LAPD kept stalling. Then one day Hollywood Division gets a call from Bernard Keck asking all sorts of questions. My father went right to Rhodes. Apparently dear old Dad’s been on the payroll at various studios for years. I knew some of it but had no idea how deep it went.”

  She touched his cheek. “What will happen to him?”

  “His pension’s suspended and they’ve launched an investigation. I don’t think they’ll be able to sweep it under the rug this time.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m on leave until they sort everything out.”

  “I’m very sorry, Stephen. But you’re not like your father. You have nothing to fear.”

  Lily’s brain moved backward, unwinding the tape of memory. Suddenly she clutched Pico’s hand, hoping beyond hope.

  “Max?” she said.

  Pico’s jaw twitched. He shook his head. “Gone.”

  A series of images came to her—Max, his face aglow as he described the werewolf movie he wanted to make. Leaning against a wall in his studio, explaining the magic of stop-motion animation. The purity of his convictions and the ferocity of his rage as he brought the terrarium down on the producer’s head. His howling-mad unrequited love for Kitty.

  “Did Rhodes kill him too?”

  “We’re looking into it. He denies it.”

  “And what about Mrs. Potter and Beverly?”

  “They’re gone. Cleared out, left your roommates high and dry. Turns out they were only leasing that place. They owe the owner six months’ back rent.”

  “They’re blackmailers. They sold information about Kitty to Frank Rhodes.”

  “They ever come back, the police will want to bring them in for a long talk. And there’s a reporter who keeps showing up saying you two are old friends from Berlin and she wants to see you. Violet McCree. My buddies have been chasing her away.”

  “Keep doing it, please.”

  Lily looked out the window. She was grateful to have survived, when so many others hadn’t. And to be here with this man, who stood awkwardly before her. Outside, another flawless California day was under way. It still felt strange to see the blue sky, the red tile roofs, and the tropical foliage. And yet this landscape was imprinted on her psyche. It was the New World. The land of limitless possibility and expansion. Of shucking off the past like last year’s frock, of reinvention and second chances. And then something clicked and Lily realized that it was where she belonged. It was home.

  She turned to Pico and her smile grew more somber. “What about Kirk Armstrong?”

  “He issued a statement through the studio saying he’s very sorry about everything that happened, but he wants to make it clear he had nothing to do with any of it and reiterated that he only knew Kitty Hayden casually from the studio.”

  “Beverly played me a tape of Kitty admitting the affair and naming Kirk as the father.”

  Pico looked at her. “But where’s the proof?” he said. “And it’s bizarre, but I heard the editor of Confidential talking on the radio this morning and he didn’t even mention Kirk Armstrong. I guess Violet’s too busy with the Rhett Taylor scandal.”

  Lily thought about how both Armstrong and Taylor were signed to Warner Brothers. Again, she saw Violet McCree hurrying alongside the rooming house. With the photo of Kitty and Kirk that Mrs. Potter had sold her? She recalled Vile Violet taunting Rhett about how the studio had hung him out to dry.

  “I think Jack Warner cut a deal with that Confidential reporter to hand over Rhett Taylor if she killed the Kirk story. Oh God, I wish none of it had ever happened.”

  “Then I never would have met you.” Pico leaned in, and his face loomed closer. She saw those lips, the tawny skin, the long, straight nose that had so captivated her, it seemed like ages ago. She lifted her chin toward him and felt her jaw throb where Rhodes had hit her with the pistol butt.

  “Be still,” he said, his mouth inches from hers.

  And then they heard a voice.

  “Whaddaya mean, we can’t come in? I’m a staff photographer with the Mirror and Gadge here has known her for ages. Why, we’re practically family.”

  And then Harry Jack stomped into the police station, awkwardly holding a bunch of flowers.

  “Lily,” he said, the delighted look on his face fading as he saw Pico. “I’m so glad to see you.”

  He paused, wiped something from his eye. “I’m so glad you’re alive.”

  EPILOGUE

  October 29, 1949

  Lily and Pico were walking out the door with her belongings, moving them to her new apartment, when a pretty girl with a fresh, scrubbed face walked up to the Wilcox Boardinghouse for Young Ladies.

  She carried a battered brown suitcase in one hand and a Daily Variety with an advertisement circled in red in the other.

  “Howdy and good day to you,” she said. “My name is Ruby Ann Packard and I have just arrived from Montgomery, Alabama. I understand that there is a room to let at your fine establishment.”

  Lily pushed her hair out of her face. “Pardon me?” she said.

  “I’ve come out here to be an actress. I’ve had major parts in seven theatrical productions back
home and I was voted ‘most likely to succeed’ in our high school yearbook. So I sure hope that room is still available.”

  She handed the newspaper ad to Lily, who took it and read:

  CASTING NOW UNDER WAY

  Be a STAR at Wilcox Boardinghouse for Young Actresses

  Room to Let Starting Nov. 1, Reasonable Monthly Rate

  Safe, Clean & Respectable

  Run by Experienced Matron

  Call SR-7 5903 and ask for Mrs. Potter

  References provided upon request

  “Let Our Home Become Yours”

  “Might you be Mrs. Potter?” the girl asked politely.

  “Why, no,” Lily said, startled. “She’s gone away.”

  “But this is the place where they’re letting the room, isn’t it?”

  Lily examined Ruby Ann Packard’s hopeful face.

  For the briefest second, she hesitated.

  Then she smiled.

  “Come in, Ruby. There’s a room that’s just become available.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Cecilia Rasmussen, who writes the delightful L.A. Times “Then and Now” column, where I first learned about Jean Spangler’s short and tragic life.

  Ray Harryhausen, the master, generously shared his recollections about working in Hollywood and the techniques he pioneered in stop-motion animation.

  Several books shed light on the era: From the Land Beyond Time: The Films of Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen by Jeff Rovin and Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life by Ray Harryhausen and Tony Dalton. Also helpful was the DVD of the 1949 movie Mighty Joe Young, especially the audio commentary and the interview “featurette.”

  Stephen Chiodo kindly showed my boys and I exactly how stop motion works, patiently answered my endless questions, and vetted a key scene. Any mistakes that remain are solely mine.

  Librarian Carolyn Cisneros at the American Film Institute Library got me started researching behind-the-scenes Hollywood.

  Laura June Kenny’s memoir Fleeing the Fates of the Little Rascals gave me insight into early Hollywood. Steve Stevens and Craig Lockwood’s book King of the Sunset Strip provided firsthand accounts of life inside Mickey Cohen’s circle. Autobiographies by Cohen and Hollywood journalist Florabel Muir brought the era to life, though I diverged from history as needed to suit my creative purposes.

  Writer gals Kerry Madden, Lienna Silver, Heather Dundas, Ellen Slezak, Diane Arieff, and Diana Wagman offered coffee and comments, and Donna Rifkind read the novel in manuscript and made it better.

  Marissa Roth provided friendship and walks. Co-madre Julia Spencer-Fleming inspired me on the road and off.

  Thanks to Anne Borchardt and to everyone at Scribner and Pocket, especially Maggie Crawford, Susan Moldow, Louise Burke, Katherine Monaghan, Kathleen Rizzo, and Dave Cole.

  Hurray for librarians everywhere, those wonderfully sly, subversive supporters of literacy who are the unsung heroes of American letters today.

  And last, thanks to my family, David, Adrian, and Alexander, who had to live with me while I wrote this book. Watching Joe through the fresh eyes of my children brought home the timeless magic and wizardry of this art, which gave me a new respect for what Harryhausen and his mentor, Willis O’Brien, created so many years ago.

  MY INSPIRATION FOR THE LAST EMBRACE

  As an L.A. native who grew up in the shadow of Hollywood, I’ve long been fascinated by classic noir literature. Authors like Raymond Chandler and James Cain were my touchstones, and I dreamed of escaping into their dark and alluring worlds. But if you really want to know why I wrote this book, well, it started with a dress.

  I was eighteen when I bought it for five dollars at a vintage clothing store, a glamorous frock of black crepe that clung and draped with such panache that the girl who looked back in the mirror might have stepped out of the Cocoanut Grove Nightclub, circa 1949.

  Back then, I had no idea that the designer of my dress had worked as a costumer for the studios, leaving in the late 1940s to launch her own line. All I knew was that the elegant label in cursive writing—Dorothy O’Hara, California—had a tantalizing, noiry magic all its own.

  But those were the punk years, and the nightclubs I frequented were a far cry from Hollywood’s Golden Age. Eventually spilled beer, perspiration, and fraying seams took their toll on my lovely frock.

  By then, the dress and the world it evoked had become part of my inner landscape. Driving around L.A., I saw ghosts on every street corner, heard snatches of big band music on the wind, sipped bourbon in oak-paneled bars on foggy, neon-lit nights.

  Eventually I became a reporter, then a novelist. My books filtered Chandler’s Los Angeles through a twenty-first-century lens.

  But somewhere in my head, a 1940s soundtrack kept playing. I pictured a girl in her twenties, bantering with gangsters and crooked cops and Hollywood special effects whizzes, living in a rooming house with aspiring starlets, crisscrossing the city by trolley, and slipping into a Dorothy O’Hara cocktail frock for a night of dancing at the Mocambo.

  In my imagination that girl already existed, I just didn’t know her story yet. Then one day while researching Hollywood’s Golden Age, I ran across an L.A. Times story by Cecilia Rasmussen about Jean Spangler, a Hollywood starlet who vanished without a trace in October 1949.

  Jean disappeared two years following the Black Dahlia murder after telling her mother that she was going out on a night shoot. When I examined the characters that swirled around her, I knew I had found the inspiration for my next novel.

  Jean had a violent ex-husband and was fighting a custody battle for their only child. She’d partied in Palm Springs with two associates of L.A. gangster Mickey Cohen, men who also disappeared mysteriously that fall. Her purse eventually turned up in L.A.’s Griffith Park, bearing a cryptic note to a mysterious “Kirk” that suggested she might have been pregnant and was seeking an abortion.

  It soon emerged that Jean had just filmed a movie with Kirk Douglas. The handsome star said he only knew the actress casually, they hadn’t been having an affair, and he knew nothing about her disappearance. After interviewing him, the police agreed.

  As I read, I realized that Jean Spangler’s very desires and dreams had made her vulnerable. She symbolized every modern girl who yearned for independence at a time when society was lurching back toward more traditional roles. And she disappeared into thin air, creating the perfect mystery template.

  Jean’s body was never found and the puzzle was never solved, but almost sixty years later, I had no interest in recounting the real story. I wanted to write a novel with new characters that would bring the world of 1949 Hollywood to life in all its brawling, contradictory glory.

  It was a fascinating and transitional time—just after World War II, at the beginning of the Atomic Age and the Cold War, just before the conservative 1950s. Los Angeles was teeming with intrigue and crime: a mob war raged between Mickey Cohen and Jack Dragna for control of L.A.’s turf and there were shoot-outs on the Sunset Strip. The police were notoriously corrupt. (Both the LAPD chief and his deputy were indicted that summer.) It was the waning days of the studio star system, the dawn of television. We had the Hollywood blacklist, the rise of lurid tabloids like Confidential, closeted gay actors, and the explosion of suburbia.

  It was also the golden era of movie special effects.

  I’ve always been intrigued by the inner workings of the Dream Factory, the technician magicians who create the illusion of reality up on the big screen. I also realized I needed to infuse my 1940s world with fresh, ahem, blood and find a new window into a Hollywood world that people already knew so well.

  So I decided to create a character who was a special effects wizard. Through him, I could explore the world of movie animation long before Steven Spielberg and George Lucas made CGI geeks hip and trendy.

  I had the great good fortune around this time to meet the legendary Ray Harryhausen. With his mentor, Willis O’Brien, Harryhausen pioneered stop-motion anim
ation. Harryhausen was eighty-six and hale and hearty when I interviewed him at Dark Delicacies Bookstore in Burbank and learned what the special effects world was like in 1949, the year Mighty Joe Young came out. (Harryhausen did most of the animation on Joe; O’Brien had animated King Kong.)

  Thanks to the generosity of Chiodo Brothers Productions, especially Stephen Chiodo, I also toured an animation studio and watched stop motion in progress and was greatly impressed by the painstaking detail, dedication, and artistry involved. In addition, I read several books and watched documentaries and the DVD of the original Mighty Joe Young, in which Harryhausen describes how he filmed each scene.

  In reading oral histories, I was also struck by what a small town Hollywood was, even fifty years ago, and how movie stars were just part of the landscape. You’d see Marlon Brando shopping with his wife at the Hollywood Ranch Market or Montgomery Clift studying his lines at the local coffee shop. You could sit in on Steve Allen’s midnight radio shows, watch Frank Sinatra record at Capitol Records. The access was amazing.

  Emerging from the dreamworld of my writing, I’d grow melancholy at how much of historic Los Angeles was gone. We all yearn for authenticity, we’re nostalgic for the past, yet we systematically destroy what made us unique throughout the world.

  On most days, it’s difficult to envision how the city must have looked in 1949. But cock your head and squint and it falls into focus, in the bas-relief façade of a downtown hotel, the deco tile of an old bar, the scattered oil derricks that still pump in L.A.’s forgotten quadrants, and in thrift stores where forlorn frocks drape on hangers like bashful starlets, waiting to be discovered once more. And hopefully, in the pages of this book.

  —Denise Hamilton

  January 2008

  A SCRIBNER

  READING GROUP GUIDEs

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