Наташа Купер - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 1. Whole No. 767, July 2005

Show business is often at the center of David Handler’s fiction: in his Berger and Mitry novels, which pair a film critic and a cop; in his Edgar-winning series starring ghost writer Stewart Hoag and former Broadway actress Merilee Nash; and in this new story. Mr. Handler lives in Old Lyme, Connecticut. His most recent book, the fourth in the Berger and Mitry series, is A Burnt Orange Sunrise (St. Martin’s).

This is the ugliest show-business story that I know.

It’s a story I’ve never told anyone. And it’s a true story. I know this because I was there when it happened thirty years ago. For reasons that will soon become clear, I haven’t been able to share it until now. Not that it gives me any great pleasure to do so. Believe me, I wish I could forget this. Only, I can’t.

You see, this is a story about somebody who got away with murder.

In those days, I was a very young writer trying to scratch out a living as a newspaperman in New York City. It was not a great time to be looking for work or for anything else in the Big Apple. The city was bankrupt, and President Ford had just told it in no uncertain terms to drop dead. Gangs roamed the parks. Drug dealers and prostitutes worked any corner they felt like. Homeless people slept in doorways and vestibules, wrapped in blankets and despair, babbling to themselves. The subways were dangerous. The garbage never got picked up. The hottest cultural rage of the day was disco. Let me put it this way: No one was mistaking this for one of New York’s golden ages.

Me, I loved the city with an intensity that I’ve rarely felt since. It was lean, mean, and real. Tingling with excitement, I prowled its grimy streets with my hands in my pockets and my eyes wide open, certain that something new and wonderful was right around the corner. I had never been happier. After all, I was twenty-four and I was about to become the next Ernest Hemingway. No one else knew this yet, but that didn’t matter. My faith in my destiny was unshakable. Any day now, the world would wake up to the undeniable fact that I was the single most important literary talent of my generation.

Like I said, I was a very young writer.

Mostly, I starved. To cover the $135 monthly rent on my basement studio in Greenwich Village, I had to be very resourceful. For the princely sum of seventy-five dollars a week, I masqueraded as Aunt Penny of Aunt Penny’s Pointers, a housewives’ hints column that went out to some 350 small-town newspapers across America. The real Aunt Penny had died in 1955, leaving behind her fount of knowledge about how to do things like remove ink stains from a vinyl sofa cushion (hairspray, if memory serves me right). For another fifty dollars a week, I ghosted many of the capsule movie reviews that were delivered every Friday by the movie critic for one of those network television morning news shows — a critic who never saw half of the films so cleverly skewered. And once every week or two, Al Posner, the entertainment editor at one of the city’s two remaining tabloids, would throw an off-Broadway roundup or celebrity interview my way.

Al was gruff, grumpy, and streetwise. Looked as if he hadn’t left the newsroom or had his suit pressed since V-J Day. To my great surprise, he took a shine to me. Opie, he called me — even though I hailed from the Midwest, not Mayberry, North Carolina. But Al, a citizen of Brooklyn, U.S.A., thought that pretty much anyone born outside of the five boroughs was from Mayberry. Plus, I did possess an open, innocent face, a thatch of unruly blond hair, and a sunny earnestness that hadn’t been knocked out of me yet.

In part, this is the story of how it was.

I’d taken to dropping by the vast newsroom on 42nd Street regularly to see if Al had an assignment for me. I wanted to show him how eager and persistent I was. Plus, it was harder for him to duck me in person than on the phone. When you walked into a newspaper office in those days, you were practically bowled over by the clatter and the smoke. Journalists still pounded away on heavy black steel manual typewriters. They smoked cigarettes. Lots and lots of cigarettes. And they went out for drinks at lunch. Lots and lots of drinks.

“Hey, Opie, how’s Barney Fife?” Al called to me that day from his glassed-in office against the wall. Al asked me this every time he saw me. It never failed to make him roar with laughter.

“Just dandy, Chief. And Goober says hey.” I lingered in his doorway hungrily. “Got anything for me today?”

“I do, I do. Where the hell’s...?” He rummaged through the memos and phone messages heaped all over his desk. “Oh yeah, here it is — want to go interview the happy couple?”

“Which happy couple, Al?”

“Babsy and Tony,” he said offhandedly.

I don’t think I let out a gasp, but my jaw did drop. Because he was referring to none other than Barbara Darrow and Anthony Beck, the legendary husband-and-wife duo who were starring in the wildly successful stage revival of Noel Coward’s Private Lives at the Broadhurst Theater. Their twelve-week engagement was completely sold out. They were set to take the show to London after that. “Are you kidding me?”

“Do I look like I’m kidding you?” he growled, squinting at me. “I need it by Thursday noon. I can pay you three hundred dollars. You want it or not?”

I assured him I did and dashed out of there, thrilled. Partly because such a plum meant that Al Posner trusted me. Mostly because I’d been madly in love with Barbara Darrow since I was twelve and was dying to meet her. Anthony Beck, as well. He was a great, great actor.

Not surprisingly, Broadway was suffering in those days. Tourism was way down. Plus, Times Square was so sleazy that a lot of the Wednesday-matinee regulars from Scarsdale were staying away, too. Sober, serious cultural critics were writing sober, serious obituaries for the American theater, which is a ritual I’ve since discovered they perform every ten years, much like the national census. To rope people in, producers were relying more and more on proven crowd-pleasers — big-time performers starring in glittering revivals of big-time hits. But it was actually a stroke of genius casting Darrow and Beck as Amanda Prynne and Elyot Chase in Private Lives, Noel Coward’s wondrously witty 1930 romantic comedy about a married couple who can’t stay together but can’t stay apart. If ever there was a case of art imitating life imitating art, this was it.

She was America’s plucky little raven-haired sweetheart — had been ever since Paramount pulled her out of the USC cheerleading squad in 1949 and put her on-screen in a college musical. The movie was quickly forgotten, but Barbara Darrow wasn’t. She was gorgeous, to be sure, with a lush hourglass figure and a dazzling wrap-around smile. But she also possessed a sweetness and vulnerability that set her apart from the other young Hollywood lovelies. Male filmgoers didn’t just want to ravage Barbara Darrow, they wanted to bring her home to Mom and take care of her for the rest of her life. She was a perennial good girl. A perennial, period. Her career spanned multiple generations of Hollywood leading men, all the way from Gary Cooper to Elvis to Dustin Hoffman.

But none of her leading men had captivated her quite like Anthony Beck had. A swashbuckling British rogue with a flowing mane of blond hair and terrific cheekbones, Beck was a rare combination of guts and pedigree, both a fearless World War II fighter pilot and a third-generation West End stage star. By the time Paramount beckoned him to Hollywood to star in its 1953 remake of The Adventures of Robin Hood, he had already established himself as the greatest Hamlet of his era — an actor who possessed smoldering intensity, an aching inner despair, and a purr of a voice so velvety that you could happily listen to him read aloud from the side of a box of Farina. Paramount picked him to play Robin Hood because they believed he would be the next Errol Flynn. Barbara Darrow was a natural to play the virginal Maid Marian. She was twenty-two at the time. He was thirty-six.