Bit Player Page 7

  Sylvia ran her fingers through her curly blond hair and sat down, pulling her chair very close to Tarrant. She launched into a story about her audition that morning for a new picture going into production in September. “It’s called Johnny Eager, with Lana Turner and Robert Taylor. I just love Robert Taylor. He’s such a he-man. I do like a he-man.” Sylvia laughed and gave Tarrant a sidelong glance. Then she looked at the table. “My goodness, I don’t see any sugar for my tea.” She stood up, turned, and plucked a sugar bowl from the next table. Tarrant’s gaze ranged over Sylvia’s slim figure, encased in a tight blue skirt.

  That’s my skirt, Jerusha realized, annoyed, as Sylvia sat down again. The new girl had moved into the bungalow the first weekend in August and she had the most irritating habit of “borrowing” things that didn’t belong to her. Jerusha really didn’t like Sylvia. The Southern belle act wore thin. But at the time they hadn’t found any other potential housemates. Pearl and Anne suggested giving the blonde from Alabama a try. But already Jerusha was wondering if this was a mistake.

  Chapter 9

  I sat for a moment with the letter in my hand. So the roommates, all four of them, met Ralph Tarrant in August 1941, when the British-expatriate actor sat down at their table in the MGM commissary. Just a casual meeting, over lunch. But Sylvia had flirted with him, right from the start. I wondered if the flirtation had subsequently led to a relationship with the actor. So how did my grandmother fit into this equation?

  I straightened my legs and stretched. I’d been reading letters all day and my eyes were tired. It was now late afternoon, time for a break. I shut down the laptop computer and went out to the family room, where Caro was gathering manuscript pages into a folder. “My brain is fried,” she said. “I’ll have to work on this tomorrow. Any luck?”

  I nodded. “I found Ralph Tarrant’s name. But it was more in the context of sharing a table at the MGM commissary. The guy sat down near Grandma and her roommates while they were eating lunch. That does not a relationship make. At least not at this point. Grandma does say that one of the roommates, a woman named Sylvia, flirted with him. Maybe something developed there. I need to keep reading, and go back over to Graton to read more of Dulcie’s letters. But...” I rubbed the area around my eyes. “I don’t think I can read any more today.”

  “You’re welcome to spend the night here and take another whack at the letters tomorrow. Neil should be back from his tennis date soon. I’ll start dinner. We have tickets to a concert at the Luther Burbank Center, so you’ll have the house to yourself. The guest room is all made up and I’ll give you a key in case you want to go out.”

  “Thanks, that would be great.” I always kept a small bag packed with a change of clothes and toiletries in the trunk of my car, just in case. I called Darcy Stefano, the tenant of my garage apartment, who had a key to my house. She agreed to feed the cats that evening.

  Uncle Neil returned, in sweat-stained shorts and shirt, with a brace enclosing his left knee, a sun visor on his unruly gray hair, and a tote bag containing two tennis racquets and assorted paraphernalia. He greeted us with the news that he and his mixed doubles partner had won their tennis match in straight sets. He also played men’s doubles, and he and his partners in both categories were planning to compete in the National Senior Games, he informed me, having qualified at the state games. Neil grabbed a tumbler of iced tea and headed for the shower.

  I picked up Saturday’s Santa Rosa Press Democrat and sifted through the newspaper sections, glancing at headlines. The front page of the entertainment section caught my attention: GALLERY SHOWCASES HITCHCOCK MEMORABILIA. I read the article that went with the headline. A gallery on the square in Healdsburg, the small town located some fifteen miles north of Santa Rosa, was exhibiting movie memorabilia from Alfred Hitchcock’s films, with an opening reception this evening. The items on display were part of an extensive collection of Hitchcock-related memorabilia belonging to Healdsburg resident Michael Strickland, the white-haired man in the accompanying photograph. He stood next to a large poster from the movie Shadow of a Doubt, which was set in and largely filmed in Santa Rosa.

  I sifted through my memory, going back to an overheard conversation. Earlier in the week, when I was in Matinee, the memorabilia shop in Alameda, I’d heard Raina Makellar say her husband, Chaz, and their employee, Henry Calhoun, had gone to Sonoma County in search of merchandise. She’d mentioned a man who collected Hitchcock memorabilia. Was this the man she’d been talking about? Surely there couldn’t be that many collectors here in Sonoma County focusing on Hitchcock. On the other hand, it was a large county.

  “Look,” I told Caro, pointing at the newspaper article. “This Hitchcock exhibit in Healdsburg opens tonight. That’s what I’ll do after dinner.”

  “I read that. It does look interesting. I’ll have to go another time.”

  I set the table while Caro cut up vegetables for a salad to go with the chicken cacciatore simmering in a pan on top of the stove. After we ate, I drove north to Healdsburg. The gallery reception was due to start at six o’clock. I arrived around six-thirty and found a parking space on a side street, a couple of blocks from the grassy square that is the centerpiece of downtown Healdsburg. My destination was on the south side of the square. On this warm summer evening, people spilled onto the sidewalk in front of the gallery, sipping wine as they talked. Soft jazzy music played in the background. I entered the gallery and stopped, looking up. A framed one-sheet poster hung from the ceiling, dominating the room. It was the Vertigo poster created by Saul Bass, the design as nerve-jangling as the movie itself—orange, black, and white, with the black-and-white figures of a man and woman caught in the middle of a spiral. Alfred Hitchcock’s name was in jagged black letters in the upper left corner, along with the names of the stars, James Stewart and Kim Novak.

  Memorabilia from the movies that defined Hitchcock’s career as a director were displayed throughout the gallery, in a roughly chronological and clockwise fashion, beginning with a one-sheet poster from the 1934 original version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, with Peter Lorre. I snagged a glass of wine from a table near the entrance and strolled through the exhibit, looking first at posters from two Hitchcock films from the thirties, The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes.

  Hitchcock was prolific in the forties. Here were posters and photographs from Rebecca and Suspicion, both starring Joan Fontaine. I saw a narrow insert from Lifeboat and a set of lobby cards from Spellbound. Rounding out the decade were posters, photos and lobby cards from Notorious, The Paradine Case, and Rope. The fifties brought an insert from Stage Fright, with Marlene Dietrich. Next to this poster I saw a one-sheet from Strangers on a Train, starring Robert Walker and Farley Granger. Then came a title card from Dial M for Murder, and a huge poster from one of my favorites, Rear Window, with James Stewart. A pair of framed one-sheet posters showcased Cary Grant, in To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest. James Stewart had also starred in Vertigo and the 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much.

  Hitchcock’s films from the sixties started with Psycho and its memorable shower scene. The film was represented here by a poster and lobby cards. The collection also featured memorabilia from The Birds, Marnie, Torn Curtain, Topaz and Frenzy. Rounding out Hitchcock’s career was artwork from the director’s two forays into television, the 1955-1961 series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, which ran from 1962 to 1965.

  I’d never realized how orange and yellow predominated in the advertising artwork for Hitchcock’s movies. Walking through the gallery, I saw those colors over and over again, in posters for the black-and-white films, The 39 Steps, Notorious, The Paradine Case, Strangers on a Train, and the later color films, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, North by Northwest, and Vertigo, of course. The colors repeated, but it was interesting to see how styles of poster art had changed over the years.

  Hitchcock’s 1943 movie Shadow of a Doubt had a featured role in this exhibit, because much of the film had been shot in nea
rby Santa Rosa. The one-sheet poster showed the faces of stars Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten and Macdonald Carey, caught in the vortex of a dark orange tornado rising from shadowed figures in the lower left corner. Clustered around the poster were framed stills from the movie, as well as photographs taken on the set during location filming. Here was a black-and-white shot of the old Santa Rosa train station, still standing today. It had played a key role in the movie’s action. And another photo showed the house on McDonald Avenue that had, in the film, served as the home of Teresa Wright and her family. Several frames held articles from the local newspaper describing the invasion of the movie folks while the film was in production in the fall of 1942. In a nearby glass case I saw a program from the film’s January 1943 premiere, signed by Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten.

  A man stood near the display case, a friendly smile on his face. I recognized him from the photograph in the newspaper—Michael Strickland, the collector. He was tall, a few inches over six feet, with close-cropped white hair, thinning at the top. Laugh lines crinkled the skin around his mouth and his eyes, hazel in his tanned face. He was casually dressed on this summer evening, in blue slacks and a lightweight beige linen jacket over a white shirt, open at the neck.

  He put out his hand and greeted me. “Hi, I’m Mike Strickland. This is my collection.”

  “I’m Jeri Howard.” I shook his hand. “I’m really impressed. You have a lot of great stuff. How did you get started collecting Hitchcock memorabilia?”

  “Well, there’s a personal connection,” he said. “My older sister Molly was a bit player in Hollywood, back in the forties.”

  “Small world,” I told him. “My grandmother was a bit player, too, in the late thirties and early forties. Her name was Jerusha Layne.”

  He laughed. “Small world indeed. What movies was she in?”

  “She was in Suspicion.” I pointed at a poster from that film. “And Norma Shearer’s last six, including The Women. Your sister?”

  “Molly was in several Hitchcock movies. In fact, she was in this one.” He motioned me toward a still from Shadow of a Doubt and pointed at a tall brunette whose open, friendly face echoed his own. “That’s Molly, there on the end. She played one of Teresa Wright’s girlfriends. We grew up in Los Angeles. Our uncle was a stuntman, worked in the movies from the silents all the way into the talkies. He retired in the fifties. So Molly got bit by the acting bug. She worked at all the studios—Metro, Universal, RKO, Paramount, Warners, Columbia. First she was an extra, then she worked up to bit player.”

  “Same story with my grandmother, an extra first, then doing bits. She worked at Metro and other studios, too. She came to Hollywood in nineteen thirty-seven and left in nineteen forty-two. That’s when she married my grandfather, before he shipped out for the Pacific.”

  “Nineteen forty-two,” Strickland said. “That’s the year Molly started, when she got out of high school. She was the oldest, eight years older than me. I was just eleven then, still a kid. She lived at home. When she was working, sometimes she’d bring some bit players and extras home for dinner. We always had a few of them around the table, some of them names you might recognize, because they went on to bigger and better parts. But back then, they were just bit players like Molly. She only worked in the movies until nineteen forty-six. In ’forty-three she started volunteering at the Hollywood Canteen and met her future husband there, while he was on leave from the Marines. When he got back from the war, she left the business and they got married. Never looked back.”

  I took a sip of wine and steered the conversation back to his Hitchcock collection. “It looks like you have some valuable items.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, some of the stuff is worth a lot. But like any collection, the value depends on what it is, what kind of shape it’s in, and how much you want it. And how much somebody’s willing to pay for it. I know a collector back east who just bought a one-sheet from Bolero, the nineteen thirty-four movie with George Raft and Carole Lombard—and Sally Rand, doing her fan dance! He paid eight thousand dollars because he just had to have it. Now, I wouldn’t have shelled out that kind of dough for the poster, because I’m not interested in collecting Raft or Lombard. But it if had been The Lodger, the movie Hitchcock made in nineteen twenty-six with Ivor Novello, I would have been there with checkbook in hand.”

  “Eight thousand for a movie poster? Wow!” I shook my head. “I had no idea.”

  Strickland laughed. “Oh, that’s pocket change. A poster from a nineteen thirty-four movie called The Black Cat, with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, sold at auction several years ago for two hundred and eighty-six thousand bucks. A short time later, a poster from The Bride of Frankenstein went for three hundred and thirty-four thousand bucks. Now that’s some serious money. I don’t know that I’d shell out that much cash for anything. On the other hand, I’ve been looking for memorabilia from The Lodger, or any of Hitchcock’s movies from the twenties, for years. I might pay big bucks for those items. But I haven’t found much.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Most of it is gone.” Strickland gestured at the display. “These posters and lobby cards were advertising. Nobody ever thought they were art. When it was time to change the bill in the local theater and move on to the next picture, the old posters and cards got tossed in the trash. A lot of the stuff has turned to dust.”

  “So, much of the value is based on the rarity of the item,” I said.

  “Yes. But it’s also based on the condition.” He pointed at the nearby poster. “Now, I’ve had this one-sheet of Shadow of a Doubt since the movie came out in nineteen forty-three. It was Molly’s first Hitchcock film. She got it for me, from the publicity department at Universal. I’ve taken good care of it, had it mounted and framed early on, so it’s in excellent shape. That’s why it’s worth more than a poster that’s been folded or taped to a wall.”

  “I’m sure you have a lot of collectors and dealers wanting to buy.”

  “I get approached by dealers all the time. Four this month. In fact, a couple of them stopped by my house earlier this week. You know, there was something about one of those guys. I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe I’d seen him before. Don’t know where.” He shrugged. “It’ll come to me, though. I never forget a face. Anyway, I’m not interested in selling my collection. I do this for the fun of it. And because of Molly,” he added. “Molly’s dead now. But it’s nice to know I can watch one of the movies she was in and see her the way she was back in the forties, so young and pretty.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said, thinking of Grandma. My own memories of my grandmother were of a woman who was first middle-aged and then elderly, with a face full of wrinkles and a crown of white hair. But the younger Jerusha Layne, fresh-faced, lovely, and full of promise, had been captured on film. All I had to do to see Grandma’s earlier self was watch one of her movies. “I wonder, could you tell me the names of the dealers who’ve approached you recently?”

  “I’ve got some business cards at home, if I haven’t already tossed them. Names, let’s see...”

  For the past few minutes I’d noticed a woman hovering nearby, eavesdropping on my conversation with Strickland. Now, before he could answer my question about dealers, she walked over and put her hand on his arm. She was older than I, and nearly as tall as he was, slender in her pale green slacks and shirt. She had the same hazel eyes, and her short, gray-streaked brown hair was swept back from her face. “Dad, there are some people I’d like you to meet. You’re monopolizing this lady.” From the look she gave me, she meant I was monopolizing him.

  “This is my daughter, Tory Ambrose.” Strickland smiled and put his arm around her waist. “She lives down in Santa Rosa with my grandkids. This is... You said your name is Jeri?”

  “Yes, Jeri Howard. I didn’t mean to take up so much of your time. I’m just fascinated by your collection.”

  “Jeri’s grandmother was a bit player,” Strickland said. “Just like your Aunt Molly.”

>   Tory Ambrose smiled at him affectionately. “You just get Dad talking about Aunt Molly and his collection, and away he goes.”

  “Your grandmother’s name was Jerusha Layne, right?” he asked.

  “Right. I’m named for her.”

  “I’ll look her up on the Internet. Now I guess I’d better go circulate.”

  “It was a pleasure meeting you, Mr. Strickland.”

  Chapter 10

  I found the clipping Sunday morning after breakfast. I was in Caro’s office reading letters. After that one mention of Ralph Tarrant in August 1941, Jerusha had never mentioned him again, at least not in her letters to the man who would soon become her husband. I quickly read through the letters she’d written him while he was in basic training in San Diego, full of plans for their wedding. Jerusha Layne had married Ted Howard in her hometown of Jackson, California in April 1942. They’d gone to Yosemite for their honeymoon, staying four days in Stoneman Lodge at Camp Curry in the Valley. Then Grandpa left, shipping out on a carrier escort. And Grandma had left as well. She didn’t want to spend the war in Jackson. In the summer of 1942 Grandma moved to the Bay Area, taking a job as a welder at Kaiser Shipyard in Richmond. She lived in a rooming house with another set of roommates and she wrote Grandpa frequently, care of a fleet post office, letters that probably took some time to reach him on his ship. But he’d eventually received the letters, perhaps not all, and those he kept.

  The newspaper clipping, weathered yellow and crumbling at the edges, was tucked into a letter postmarked in September 1942. It was short, just a couple of column inches. Written in ink on the top were the words “LA Times” and a date, 8/23/42. One of Jerusha’s Hollywood roommates was dead. Sylvia Jasper, the Southern belle from Mobile, Alabama, had been reported missing in May 1942, by her brother, Byron Jasper. Sylvia’s decomposed body, buried in a shallow grave in the shifting sands of a Santa Monica beach, was found by some beachgoers.