The next morning after my exercise and run I went over to Warner Brothers for my Maverick stint. They were ready for me in makeup and costume. Ben Maverick rides again!
The storyline is Ben finds a lady and her beautiful daughter who have been cheated out of their savings and gets their money back for them plus the store they had thought they had bought.
It opens with Ben coming out of a saloon where he has been in an all-night poker game. He had won most of the money earlier in the evening but couldn’t leave without being robbed on the way out.
His simple solution was to outlast them all until daylight when the town marshal would be patrolling and then leave the game. That part worked.
As he was going back to his hotel he finds the two women crying on a bench at the stage station. They had just found out the deed that they had paid for by mail in answer to a newspaper ad was a fraud.
The dress shop they thought they had bought didn’t have the signature of the owner. One would have thought they would have been suspicious of buying a dress shop from a man but they went ahead and did it.
They had shown their deed to the town marshal and he told them there was nothing they could do.
Being the nice guy that he was, Ben gets them a room at his hotel.
He runs a game of his own by conning the fraudulent store owner into buying a played-out gold mine. He did this by buying gold ore from a prospector he knew and then claimed it was from an old mine in the mountains near town.
He bought the mine from the owner for a song as it really was worthless.
Making sure the bad guy saw the assay he listened to the guy’s offer to buy it. He bargained him out of the store and the same amount of money as the ladies lost.
Making certain he had a good deed to the store he returned the lady's money to them and then sold them the store for one dollar. This transaction was performed in front of the town marshal and the leading banker.
The swindler now was dead broke and the town marshal ran him out of town as being a worthless bum.
A very weak plot but what can you do in a short TV program.
What I thought was going to make the whole thing fun was that I got to kiss the girl at the end.
She and I had no personal chemistry during the filming and it showed during our kiss. They had to do fourteen takes to get the kiss right. I think it had to do with the fact she smoked and I didn’t. Try to picture an ashtray forcing itself into your mouth.
That is when I found out that kissing the wrong person could be work. I think she learned the same lesson, as we both couldn’t get off the set fast enough.
Chapter 23
The TV show took two days, Thursday and Friday. I was glad when it was done and told the producers that it was fun but that I wasn’t in a hurry to do another one, and certainly not with that actress.
I took most of Saturday off but caught the early evening flight to London. That put me into Heathrow at nine o’clock Sunday morning. I went to my suite at the Plaza and cleaned up then went out to my favorite fish and chips shop.
When I got back from lunch the front desk had a message for me. I don’t know how he tracked me down but Mr. Norman asked if I could drop by Monday morning around nine.
It is some world going from owning houses in Bellefontaine to dropping in at Buckingham Palace.
The next morning after my run down Rotten Row in Hyde Park I went to the Palace to see Mr. Norman.
While at the park I kept an eye out for my young lady of the fickle finger of fate but she wasn’t to be seen.
Did she give everyone the finger or just me? If so who could it be? The only one that I could think of was the blonde Christine, but that just wasn’t her style. Running around like a madwoman that is, giving me the finger wasn’t within her repertoire, at least the running around like a madwoman.
At the Palace, I was escorted immediately to Mr. Norman. I found that they had been looking for me everywhere. They had no idea that I had gone to the US for a TV appearance. It had taken a phone call to Jackson House to find out that I was back in England.
I was asked, a little curtly, to keep them informed in the future if I was leaving the country. By the way, they had checked all the airline manifests. Did I travel under an assumed name?
You should have seen his look when I told him I chartered a 707 when I couldn’t get a commercial seat.
I didn’t bother to tell him about my hitchhikers. He had enough to mull over.
He got down to why they were hunting me.
They needed civilian transportation to take a Russian spy to Berlin for a prisoner exchange. I was to take delivery of a ‘package’ and take it to the Glienicke Bridge and exchange it for another ‘package.’ There would be no record of the contents of these packages.
I would be
