Тимоти Уилльямз - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

“And the theater inside the Hollywood & Highland is where they now hold the awards ceremonies for the academy and the awards banquet afterwards,” he said. Like I didn’t know. “So many great films of mine and never one nomination, except one in foreign, and the winner something out of a garbage bucket by some director with an unpronounceable name from another of those laughable countries, whose subtitles were more interesting than anything photographed.” Like I was supposed to agree.

I said, “Uh-huh, but going back to Howard Strickling. You called him a villain. Why was that, Alain?”

He adjusted his thick lenses and squinted at me under meshed eyebrows. “You think he’s a savior because he protected Harlow in her moment of greatest need? A villain, more like it, the way he spit in the face of justice. One should not spit in the face of justice. Sins and sinners must be accounted for.” His voice had risen enough to attract attention from tourists leaving the hotel under a load of cameras and backpacks. He stared them to a standoff until they’d all loaded onto a double-decker bus whose painted frame advertised:

When I had his attention, I said, “Strickling protected Harlow how?”

“How else? From the gas chamber, of course. Or was it still the electric chair? You think he was named the Fix-It Man for nothing? For something Howard Strickling was named the Fix-It Man.”

I expected to hear the old legends. How Harlow was there that night and it was she, not the butler, who put in a frantic call to the studio and Mayer. How Bern had returned home late and unexpected to discover his sweet bride, impatient with his inability to perform, in bed and kindling a romance with actor William Powell. How Harlow was visiting her “Mama Jean,” and Bern’s ex-wife, Dorothy Millette, had invaded the mansion, wielding the .38 and threatening to tell the world the Harlow marriage was invalid because, as opposed to an “ex,” she and Bern had never divorced — leading to a demand for blackmail, a struggle, and the fatal shot. How Strickling, in the hours before he summoned police, had restaged the scene and caused a phony suicide note to be written. How he’d directed Jean’s repugnant stepfather Marino Bello to ask Bello’s gangster friend Bugsy Siegel to find and dispose of Dorothy Millette.

How whatever the truth was, the brilliant press agent had orchestrated the kind of follow-up that would not tarnish Harlow’s reputation or career or marginalize her value at the box office to Louis B. Mayer. How it had all played out according to plan with the support of cops whose honesty wasn’t as bankable as Strickling’s payoffs.

Similar legends and contradictions had grown up around Marilyn and her suicide, which through the years had come to be a CIA kill caused by John F. Kennedy or Bobby Kennedy, take your pick; or a murder bought and paid for by their old man, Joe, and arranged by JFK’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford, using underworld contacts he was steered to by Frank Sinatra.

Elvis, of course, was murdered, which didn’t quite explain how he happened to still be alive after his fatal overdose at Graceland, and—

I didn’t expect anything new from Alain, no matter how fiercely his egg-sized eyes shone with the conviction of a man who’s seen the burning bush for himself.

He massaged his beard and sighed to the sky, as if I had flunked another test. “Come, I show you.”

Alain sped off down the avenue toward Hollywood Boulevard, angled forward against a modest breeze, one hand clamped on his skullcap, covering ground like an Olympic sprinter who is not going to pass his test for steroids. He weaved through sidewalk traffic that grew fatter the closer we got to Grauman’s Chinese, winning rude words where he wasn’t quick enough to avoid banging a shoulder or bumping a thigh, few of the words in English.

I chased after him, gaining sweat and losing ground, even though my morning regimen for years has included a trot around Westwood, where I’ve lived in a condo since I was dumped in the name of true love, she said, by Ms. Stephanie Marriner, not long after Stevie was anointed “Sex Queen of the Soaps” by an entertainment media with an unyielding appetite for sex queens.

* * * *

The Grauman’s forecourt was buried under more than a hundred tourists taking pictures and testing against their own the hand- and footprints of favorites among the famous film stars past and present who had been stopping by to memorialize themselves in wet cement since an elf of a showman named Sid Grauman began the custom shortly before his movie palace opened its doors for the first time in 1927 with the world premiere of DeMille’s silent version of The King of Kings.

The area was designed to resemble a King Kong-sized red pagoda. Dragon silhouettes played on the copper roof, while stone lion-dogs guarded the entrance to a lobby supported by red and gold columns, dotted with restored wall murals of life in the Orient under an immense, intricate chandelier of Chinese design.

Grauman, whose partners in the theater were the reigning royalty of Hollywood, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, hadn’t set out to seal stardom in cement. The practice started after actress Constance Talmadge visited the construction site, and accidentally stepped onto a wet slab. In jest, she dedicated the slab to Sid and signed her name and — kazam! — a klieg light erupted over Grauman’s head. Or so the legend goes.

Alain spent a few minutes on the outer sidewalk, hands forming a rectangle, as if he were framing the scene for a camera take, himself framed between Batman and someone dressed like some superhero from an X-Men movie, and not far from Wonder Woman and Superman, they and others paid by the theater to wear costumes, make nice-nice, and pose for photos with the tourists.

“This would not ever happen in France,” Alain said, grunting distemper as he obeyed the command of a lantern-jawed guy in khaki shorts to move out of the picture he was trying to take of Batman with his arms wrapped suggestively around his elephantine wife, in an English spoken with a vaguely Germanic tint. “In France, wherever I go out in public, they are always begging to have their picture taken with me.”

“But not with a rabbi,” I said.

That reminded Alain that he was in disguise. He blew out a small hurricane of relief.

“There,” he said, his index finger pointing to an area by the advertising windows on the west side of the forecourt. “There is where I have to show you.” He hurried over, excusing his way past the clutters of people trying on the prints of Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. He hovered over a striking blond teenager hanging out of a halter top while matching her elegant, finely-boned fingers against those in the oversized gray-tinted cement block of—

Jean Harlow.

When she cleared away, Alain quickly giant-stepped forward and took possession of the slab like a demonic landlord, shooing away everyone while urging me closer. “You see it now, mon ami?”

Harlow’s memorial to herself read: “To Sid in sincere appreciation.” Under her signature were her hand-prints and high-heeled footprints separated by a vertical row of three penny-sized depressions and under that the date, September 29, 1933.

“The holes were from the black pennies Jean inserted for good luck,” Alain said. “Long missing. Long gone. Stolen by somebody no better than graverobbers.” I gave him a So what? look. He dug out a folded sheet from a pocket and handed it over. It was a glossy photo of the Harlow slab. It won him another questioning look from me. “You think you see, but you do not see,” he said.