I awoke Thursday morning with a serious lump on my head, which reminded me of Constance Fairbridge, which aroused my curiosity.
Of all the names in my notebook, she stood out as the one about whom I knew the least.
I took my curiosity down to the house, where I drank a cup of Maurice’s fresh-ground coffee while he went looking for a copy of the
Filmgoer’s Companion
.
Fred sat in his underwear at the kitchen table, scratching his big belly and reading the sports page. He nodded when I said good morning; that was it. He generally got more sociable as the day progressed—by late afternoon, you might even get a few words out of him, if his mood was good.
Maurice came padding back in rubber sandals and a silk robe, his bracelets jangling and his long white hair pulled back into a ponytail. He placed a vintage edition of the book on the countertop.
“Constance Fairbridge, you said.”
I nodded, stirring the scrambled eggs and chopped parsley he’d started on the stove. Next to them, potatoes and onions sizzled in olive oil, seasoned with salt, pepper, and a dash of rosemary. Somewhere in the mix of aromas was more coffee brewing.
“Constance Fairbridge,” Maurice repeated. “Rings a bell. Distant, but with a definite little clang.”
He turned the book’s musty brown pages.
“I’m consulting my oldest Halliwell’s. Sometimes the more recent volumes eliminate the lesser-knowns.”
“You’re assuming she was a lesser-known.”
“Trust me, darling, if she’d been an important star, I’d know the name. Isn’t that right, Fred?”
A grunt came from the breakfast table.
“Here she is,” Maurice said. “Coming just after the two Fairbanks.”
He handed me the open book, his finger pointing to a brief entry.
Fairbridge, Constance (1908–)
. American ingenue of the ’20s and early ’30s known for her fluttery eyes and lovelorn expression. Most notable role was in
Damsel in Distress
(1926), which vaulted her briefly to stardom. Her potential as a leading lady was never fully realized, her career cut short by the advent of the talkies. Later appeared in supporting roles in B movies of the ’40s and ’50s, then bit parts in TV before permanently retiring in 1959 following the suicide of her only child, minor actress Gloria Cantwell.
A list of her primary credits followed, along with their year of release, but I wasn’t paying much attention to that.
My eyes were fixed on the last few words of her biography:
…following the suicide of her only child, minor actress Gloria Cantwell
.
Maurice scooped the hot food onto two plates, and began to butter whole grain toast.
“Did you find what you needed?”
“Maybe more.” I refilled my coffee cup. “Does the name Gloria Cantwell ring a louder bell?”
Maurice looked up from preparing a third plate.
“Gloria Cantwell, the actress?”
I nodded.
“Dear boy, I knew Gloria Cantwell.”
On the third plate, Maurice arranged a piece of dry toast, a slice of canteloupe and a peeled banana, a chunk of skinless broiled chicken, and a sprig of parsley for color.
“We weren’t what you’d call bosom buddies,” he went on. “But I got to know her a bit when I was hanging around with Sal and Jimmy.”
Sal Mineo and James Dean, part of the underground gay Hollywood scene of the early fifties, where Maurice had dallied before settling down with Fred.
“I was dating Randolph Scott at the time, just after the release of
The Bounty Hunter
. All on the hush-hush, of course—Scottie was pathologically discreet, he lived his whole career in fear of being exposed. Now and then, I see him on TV in
The Last of the Mohicans
, the nineteen thirty-six version. Standing tall in his buckskins, with that lean, rugged face—”
Maurice paused to fan himself.
“Oh, my, I believe I’m getting hot flashes.”
Fred harrumphed, snapped and folded the sports section, and buried his face in it again.
“Then I met Fred,” Maurice added diplomatically. “And Randolph Scott was just another name in my little black book.”
“According to this edition of
Halliwell’s
,” I said, “Constance Fairbridge was Gloria Cantwell’s mother.”
“Of course—that’s where I heard the name!”
“Did you ever meet her?”
“Mrs. Fairbridge? No. I don’t think she approved of her daughter’s lifestyle. Gloria was always throwing parties up at that strange house she owned in Beachwood Canyon.”
“The one shaped like a castle.”
“Yes! How did you know?”
“I was there last Saturday night.”
Maurice froze with the diet plate halfway to the table.
“The party where the boy died?”
“The very same.”
“How absolutely creepy.”
Maurice placed the plate in front of Fred.
“Fred’s cutting down on his cholesterol and calories. Doctor’s orders. Aren’t you, Fred?”
Fred put the sports page aside and stared at the plate as if it were infested with cockroaches. His fleshy face bristled with two or three days of nearly white beard. His big, hairy gut expanded to deliver a put-upon sigh.
“Eat,” Maurice said. He kissed Fred tenderly on one of his stubbled cheeks, then patted his stomach. “We’re going to get you back into shape.”
Fred growled but picked up his fork; Maurice had that way of getting you to do small things for him that added up to something significant.
“You, too, Benjamin.”
He nudged me toward a table setting where he’d lodged a plate of eggs, potatoes and onions, buttered toast and jam, and a glass of fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice with the seeds carefully strained off.
“I promise to eat every bite, Maurice, if you tell me more about Gloria Cantwell.”
Maurice, seated now, paused with his fork poised near his lips.
“She was quite beautiful, I remember that. Also neurotic, chronically depressed. Utterly wild with men. Fatally attracted to Jimmy, I’m afraid.”
“She and James Dean were lovers?”
“They probably slept together a few times. Jimmy didn’t discriminate all that much between women and men, at least not when I knew him.”
“Did she ever marry?”
“When she was still a teenager, before she met Jimmy. Sixteen or seventeen, I think.”
“The husband?”
“Victor Cantwell. Small-time producer. Rumor had it that Cantwell raped her, then agreed to marry her when she got preggers. Promised to make her a star, which never happened. He didn’t have the clout and she didn’t have the talent.”
“What happened to Cantwell?”
“They divorced a few years later. He died of a heart attack not long after. She got the house and the life insurance money. Worked now and then in small parts. Mostly, she liked to bed as many good-looking men as possible.”
“What about the child?”
“The boy? He lived with Gloria. Until she committed suicide in fifty-five. After that, I’m not sure.”
“You still remember the year?”
Maurice smiled ruefully.
“It was the year Rebel Without a Cause came out—the same year Jimmy died. Gloria took her life a few days after the crash, out of her mind with grief. Drank a lethal dose of cyanide mixed with gin. She’d always kept some around, waving the bottle, threatening to end it all.”
“Quite the drama queen, I gather.”
Maurice’s face creased with sympathy.
“Unfortunately, it wasn’t all talk.”
“Her suicide must have made headlines.”
“Not really. All the big news was about Jimmy dying in a fiery desert car crash. Gloria Cantwell was just a footnote to the James Dean story.”
“The boy’s name was Gordon?”
“I think that’s right. Yes, Gordon. Gordie, Jimmy called him.”
“What else do you remember about him?”
“I recall a bespectacled, redheaded child. Precocious, sad, lonely. Gloria shunted him off to his upstairs room whenever there was a party.”
Maurice paused, two fingers pressed thoughtfully to his lips, which were close to smiling.
“He loved baseball, I remember that. I recall one time when he sneaked down from his room with a ball and glove and got Jimmy to play catch with him—until his mother saw them and sent the boy back up.”
“She wanted James Dean all to herself?”
Maurice nodded.
“I’m sure she did the same when she had other men over. And there were lots of men in her life, believe me. That’s not gossip—she even tried to seduce me on one occasion!”
Fred stifled a laugh and Maurice cast him a reproachful look.
“Meaning the kid didn’t get much attention.”
“Gloria was a selfish woman—coy, demanding, manipulative. The type who would squeeze you like a tube of toothpaste one moment, smothering you with love, then turn vicious on you the next. I don’t suppose it was a lot of fun being her only child.”
We ate in silence for a while until Maurice suddenly put down his fork.
“Isn’t Gordie Cantwell the fellow who threw the party Saturday night?”
I nodded while I chewed my eggs.
“Then he’s still in the same house? And there’s been another untimely death there, all these decades later? My goodness gracious—no wonder you’re so interested, Benjamin.”
“By the way, I locked four bags of Gordon Cantwell’s trash in your garage last night. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Of course not. But why?”
“It’s trash from the party. I plan to sort through it when I get the chance. See if anything interesting turns up.”
“You’re really quite involved in all this, aren’t you?”
“I guess I am.”
I stared into the morning brightness of the little house, connecting two more names in my mind. Gordon Cantwell to Constance Fairbridge. I hadn’t expected that one.
Maurice wiggled his finger at my plate.
“Eat all your onions, Benjamin. They’re good for you.”
I picked up my fork and did as I was told.
Late Thursday morning, with the questions in my notebook outnumbering the answers, I paid a visit to the Margaret Herrick Library.
The address written down by Katie Nakamura led me to an unfenced section of park land in southeast Beverly Hills where the boulevards of San Vicente and Olympic joined.
The centerpiece was an imposing concrete structure that resembled an ancient Spanish cathedral. I recognized it as the landmark building that had once housed the city’s water-processing plant, a seventy-year-old white elephant that preservationists had fought to save from the wrecking ball in the 1980s, when I was still a working newspaperman and paying attention to such matters.
Clearly, the preservationists had won. The old water building now rose up before me renovated and expanded, its Spanish-Romanesque style intact, including the picturesque tower that had been constructed in 1927 to disguise a smokestack. Tree-lined walkways, broad lawns, and a rose-filled plaza added further touches from another time.
A brass plaque mounted near the arched entrance told me I was about to step inside the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Center for Motion Picture Study. I passed through big wooden doors framing windows of wrought iron and glass, crossed a lobby of French limestone the color of sand, and signed in with the uniformed guard. He examined my driver’s license, instructed me to fill out a security form, and pointed me toward the second floor.
I mounted stairs carpeted in the color of old money, and passed another plaque that told me I was on the Kirk Douglas Grand Staircase. After that came more bronzed names of Movieland notables who had made generous donations to ensure the center’s longevity. The stairway—solid and attractive but hardly grand—led me into the Cecil B. De Mille Reading Room, a pleasant space of soft light, arched white ceilings, and hushed whispers that reminded me of a church at weekday.
Bookshelves laden with thousands of volumes devoted to movies lined both sides of the long room. In the middle, a few dozen men and women sat at rectangular tables, poring over pages with the pious concentration of monks.
I handed in my security form and driver’s license at the orientation desk and was given a library card, useful only for that day. My next stop was the reference desk at the room’s north end, where I requested files on Gloria Cantwell and Gordon Cantwell.
The librarian was a pleasant, efficient woman wearing fifties-style horn-rim glasses and a perky hair bob of the same period. She asked me if it was my first time at the library. I told her it was.
“Feel free to look around if you’d like,” she said. “I’ll be a few minutes.”
I crossed through the De Mille reading room and passed under an archway into the smaller Special Collections Reading Room. It was square with round tables, and housed the more rare collections of producers, directors, stars, and other prominent movie figures, the contents ranging from personal papers to annotated shooting scripts to costume sketches and rare photos.
In a locked display case outside the Karl Malden Conference Room, I saw the leatherbound shooting scripts of John Huston, George Cukor, Lewis Milestone, and other noted filmmakers. Oscar statuettes, some showing their age, also decorated the shelves, bearing such film titles as
All About Eve
and
Diary of Anne Frank
and names like Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, and Edith Head.
Inside the conference room, a large, circular window on the east wall had been redesigned with interior framing to resemble a film reel. Next door, a smaller space was devoted to microfilm and microfiche reading, with screens and printers where the studious could survey indexes of the thousands and thousands of pieces of Hollywood history that were housed in the deeper recesses of the building’s forty thousand square feet.
Everywhere I turned, I saw another vintage movie poster, framed and flawless—
The Red Shoes
,
The Maltese Falcon
,
Wuthering Heights
,
Duck Soup
,
The Best Years of Our Lives
,
The Lady Vanishes
. They reminded me of Gordon Cantwell’s house, with its countless tributes to a time and way of making movies that would never come again.
My several minutes were up, so I strolled the length of the library back to the reference desk, where I put my back against the counter and waited.
That’s when I glimpsed a pair of eyes watching me from behind a distant row of stacks.
The eyes were masked behind dark Oakley lenses and looked away the moment I fixed on them. The figure, barely visible through the slats between the shelves, disappeared a moment after that.
I started to cross the room to see who the watcher might be when the librarian’s voice called me back.
“Mr. Justice?”
She held out the two Cantwell files I’d requested.
I took them, thanked her, and carried them with me across the room to the row of stacks where I’d spotted the mysterious face, or at least a masked portion of it. The space between the shelving was flooded with soft window light, but otherwise empty.
I scanned the room; the stylish Oakley frames were nowhere in sight, and the faces meant nothing to me.
Maybe it was my imagination, I thought. Maybe the troubling questions surrounding Reza JaFari’s death were starting to make me jumpy.
I found a seat and opened the file on Gloria Cantwell. Her movie credits were skimpy, all bit parts, except for featured roles in a few forgettable monster flicks from the early fifties. The clippings were comprised of two short pieces from the old magazine
Photoplay
, accompanied by busty-starlet photos and several later news items about her death at the age of twenty-seven.
The news articles reiterated pretty much what Maurice had already told me: She had ingested cyanide mixed with gin during a late-night drinking binge while her ten-year-old son, Gordon, had slept. According to her part-time housekeeper, the binge had started three days earlier, soon after Mrs. Cantwell learned of James Dean’s death in a fiery automobile crash. The housekeeper had discovered the body when she let herself in the following morning. She had awakened the boy and taken him out the back door to a neighbor’s house, sparing him the sight of his mother’s corpse on the living room floor. No note was found, but the police recovered a bottle of the poison with enough missing to have killed her quite easily, along with an empty fifth of gin smelling of what one detective identified as the distinctive scent of cyanide.
The file photos of Gloria Cantwell were all retouched publicity stills. They showed a striking young woman with wavy auburn hair, pale green eyes, high cheekbones, and a sensual mouth glossed darkly in the Jean Harlow style.
Her mother, Constance Fairbridge, was mentioned only briefly as a former silent screen star who occasionally worked in television. Victor Cantwell got a few lines as her ex-husband, whose paltry credits supported Maurice’s description of him as a small-time producer lacking the power to make his child bride a star.
The file on Gordon Cantwell was considerably deeper and quite up to date. Virtually all of the material—press clippings and publicity handouts—concerned Cantwell’s success as a pioneering instructor in the art of screenplay structure. The clippings were from sources worldwide, publications large and small, many of which seemed beyond the reach of the ordinary clipping services that a nonprofit institution like the library might employ. I suspected that Cantwell, given his penchant for self-promotion, had supplied most of them himself.
The clips repeated what I had already read in the author bio included in
The Cantwell Method
—his early years as a development executive, his success as a screenwriter, his devotion to passing on his knowledge to a new generation of screenwriters—with a similar and surprising lack of detail.
I finally found something more specific in one of the earlier press releases, dated 1978. In it, Cantwell listed Film World Productions as the company where he had performed his executive duties. I also found three titles mentioned as films produced from Cantwell’s original screenplays. None of them turned up in the most recent edition of Leonard Maltin’s
Movie & Video Guide
, or in any of the other comprehensive movie resource books available at the library.
I returned both files to the reference desk and asked the librarian if it would be possible to see copies of Gordon Cantwell’s screenplays.
“You’d have to check those out at the Special Collections desk, Mr. Justice.”
“Gordon Cantwell’s scripts are considered that valuable?”
The librarian dropped her eyes discreetly.
“Actually, we’ve had to make special accommodations for Mr. Cantwell’s script collection.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Mr. Cantwell has been very good to the library. He’s helped us gather some historical material and donated a number of rare movie posters. When he offered his own papers and scripts, it put us in a bit of a quandary.”
“How’s that?”
She folded her hands on the counter, looking a trifle embarrassed.
“None of Mr. Cantwell’s scripts has ever been produced. I’m not sure they were ever sold or even optioned. We didn’t want to turn him down, but we can’t house unproduced screenplays in our general collection—you know, a concern over plagiarism, theft of idea, that kind of thing.”
“So even though the scripts are of no real importance, you placed them in Special Collections, where they’re protected from general inspection.”
“That’s correct.”
“But in his file, his early publicity materials list several produced films.”
She smiled apologetically.
“Perhaps Mr. Cantwell is prone to overstatement.”
“Would you happen to know anything about Film World Productions?”
“I haven’t heard of them. Is it a new company?”
I opened Cantwell’s file and showed her the reference in Cantwell’s earlier promotion material.
“Ah, yes. I do remember now. That was the company where Mr. Cantwell worked as a young man, before he wrote his book and started teaching. It wasn’t exactly a bona-fide production company. That is, they never actually produced any pictures.”
“What did they do, then?”
“Film World Productions was part of Film World Catering. That was their real business.”
“A catering company?”
“Back in the nineteen sixties and early seventies, they were quite successful supplying meals to the casts and crews of movies on location. Someone in the company thought they might venture into film production. I believe Mr. Cantwell was hired as a reader to sift through scripts. It was basically a one-person operation. As I said, they never did produce any movies.”
“In his biographical material, Cantwell calls himself a film development executive, not a reader.”
She smiled again, more broadly this time.
“We’re talking about Hollywood, Mr. Justice. The land of make-believe. The place where illusion is an art form.”
I thanked her for her help, turned in my library card, reclaimed my driver’s license, and descended the Kirk Douglas Grand Staircase to sign out with the guard.
As I crossed the plaza toward the street, I stood back to take one last look at the renovated building.
As I glanced up at the reel-shaped window of the Karl Malden Conference Room, I noticed a pair of eyes peering at me from behind a familiar pair of dark glasses. The sun was in my face and the window in shadow, making it impossible to discern any facial features between the window’s spokes. I couldn’t even tell if they belonged to a man or a woman.
Then, just as quickly as I glimpsed them, they were gone.