Show Business is Murder

the young director insists on-looks so real it turns your stomach-Corey imagined her there, head bowed, alone on the darkened set. Sobbing.

As for his killer, would justice prevail? Probably. Howard will more than likely brag about it, tell the story to some producer who’ll drop a dime. Or the autopsy will reveal the lethal injection of drugs, cops’ll get a list of enemies. Something…

Everyone knows you can’t get away with murder in Hollywood.

The Search for Robert Rich by BOB SHAYNE

I’D COME FROM a land called Brooklyn where everybody was Jewish and poor. Now I was going to a land called Hollywood where everybody was Jewish and rich. Well, that might be a bit of an exaggeration on both ends, but it seemed that way.

It was 1957 and I was twenty-five. I may or may not have been the youngest licensed private detective in the New York phone book, but I was certainly the femalest. My name’s Naomi Weinstein. The second syllable rhymes with the first.

We pulled into Los Angeles Union Station at 1:32 P.M. on a late April afternoon. I’d slept well and long to the rock and sway and the clicking wheels, and I was looking forward to seeing my dear friend David. He’d moved to Hollywood four years earlier, after a slight problem wherein he’d been charged with murder. I had a hand in getting him off, but then I’d had a hand in getting him accused, so it seemed only right.

“Naomi!” he shouted as I stepped off the train in the bowels of Union Station. We ran to each other and embraced. He picked me up and swung me around in a circle. I wriggled out of his arms to avoid throwing up on him, stepped back, and took a look.

He was just as tall and skinny as always, the ever-present gold modernistic mezuzah resting just under his Adam’s apple, his long pointy nose angled slightly to the right, hazel eyes, enough of that thick, wavy, dirty-blond hair for two or three guys, and that great crooked smile that always made me smile to see.

He was studying me, too, all five foot three, fuzzy reddish-brown hair, and a few too many pounds of me. I stuck out my breasts and sucked in my tummy as his eyes passed various portions of my anatomy. If I could have added a few inches to my calves I would have done that, too.

“How was your trip?” he asked as he grabbed my bags and we walked toward the Moorish-Aztec style lobby. I doubt that the Moors ever met the Aztecs, but apparently the architect had.

David took me for lunch on a nearby block called Olvera Street. It’s supposed to be a 150-year-old section of old Los Angeles, but it looked more like Coney Island to me. A block of souvenir shops and taco stands. (Okay, in Coney they’d be hotdogs stands instead.) I bought three things that were advertised as Mexican jumping beans. Later in my motel room I opened one; it turned out to be a soft capsule, and inside was a ball-bearing, so that when you dropped it the little bearing would roll to one end then the other making the capsule jump. How authentic can you get! I didn’t know then it was the perfect metaphor for Hollywood.

We piled my stuff into David’s spiffy aqua-and-white Chevy Bel Air convertible and he put the top down at my request. I’d never ridden in a convertible. (When I tried to untangle my Semitic curls that evening, I swore I’d never ride in one again.)

David asked me what my case was about, shouting over the wind as he drove up San Vicente, a wide street with trolley tracks down the middle, on our way to Hollywood. I told him it was to track down somebody named Robert Rich.

He laughed, saying that was the biggest mystery there was. It was all over the papers. The whole town wanted to know who Robert Rich was.

It seems Mr. Rich had won the Oscar a few weeks earlier for Best Original Story for the Screen, for a movie about a little boy and a bull called The Brave One, but nobody could find him. Or many people were claiming to be him. Or both. When the award was announced, Jesse Lasky Jr. of the Writers Guild stepped up to the microphone on national television and said, “I’ll accept this on behalf of my close friend Robert Rich, who is at this moment at Santa Monica hospital where his wife is giving birth.” But Hedda Hopper checked all the hospitals and no such baby had been born. A few days later when push came to shove Lasky admitted he had never met Robert Rich and hadn’t a clue who he was.

You’d think the producers of the movie who bought the story would know who they’d bought it from, but it didn’t seem that way. They were brothers named King. When a reporter noticed they had a nephew by the name Robert Rich, the nephew gave a statement saying, yes, he’d written the picture. But then his uncles denied it.

“Did the Kings hire you to find the guy?” David asked.

“No, the L.A. Times did,” I shouted back over the hot wind-something David told me the locals call a Santa Ana. “Their reporters haven’t been able to find him so they decided to try a private eye.”

“Makes sense. But we have our own private eyes right here in Los Angeles. You know, like Philip Marlowe?”

“Yeah, but he’s fictional. They wanted a factual one,” I said. “I don’t know why, maybe they’re just prejudiced against fiction, being a newspaper and all.”

“But why bring one in all the way from New York?”

I shrugged. “Not sure. I just know I got a call from some guy who said he worked there. Named Chandler.”

David did a double take worthy of Oliver Hardy. “What first name?”

“Uh, Norman. Yeah, Norman.”

“Norman Chandler doesn’t work at the L.A. Times,” said David with a laugh. “He owns it.”

“Oh,” I replied snappily.

“How’d he happen to pick you?”

“You’ll never guess.”

David sat quietly for a moment, then said, “You’re right. So tell me.”

“A friend of his recommended me.”

“Yes? Yes?”

“J. Edgar Hoover.”

David broke out in laughter and said, “I should have guessed.”

I’d had a sort of weird relationship with Mr. Hoover in the case that involved David. I wouldn’t say I was exactly friends with the person who’d been called the most powerful man in America, but we had developed a kind of healthy respect for one another. Well, respect, anyway. Maybe “healthy” isn’t the operative word.

I checked into the Hollywood Sands Motel at Sunset and Highland, across the street from Hollywood High. It was new and boxy and full of red and yellow plastic. Two single beds with bedspreads made of some chemical material that sucked the moisture from my fingers, drapes that stopped about an inch short of the bottom of the window, and prints of ducks in a swamp on the off-yellow walls. I liked it. No place ever felt less like the Morris and Sylvia Weinstein home in Canarsie, Brooklyn, New York. Not an antimacassar in sight.

After more sightseeing, David and I hit the Formosa Cafe on Santa Monica Boulevard for dinner, across the street from the Sam Goldwyn Studios. David called it a Hollywood dive. The walls were full of pictures of movie stars you never heard of. And some you have. David warned me if the chow mein moved of its own accord, I probably shouldn’t eat it. As far as I could tell, it was lying there fairly still when I tried to pick it up with chopsticks and get it all the way to my mouth before it fell back onto the plate and I started all over again. I’d never used chopsticks before. And I swore I’d never do so again. Back East we have things called forks. David said eating chow mein by this method was so much work it had minus two calories.

The following morning, I borrowed David’s car and drove it to the Sunset Strip, past the Mocambo and Ciro’s, those glamorous nightclubs I’d seen in movies all my life, the places where all the sophisticates go. Or used to. It all looked a little seedy now. The Mocambo had been “closed for alterations” for about three years, and Ciro’s- where a few years before Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and the Will Mastin Trio starring Sammy Davis Jr. had headlined-had replaced its floor show with an all-you-can-eat buffet.