Soap Opera Slaughters Read online

  “I’m impressed. The Great Brain, Frank Butler, is so successful that he’s opening a New York office, too!”

  I told her my boss had nothing to do with my being at WBS. “I’m doing a friend a favor.”

  “A friend? Whom?”

  Just then, the sound stage door opened. Lara emerged, saw me and Hilary and froze. After an awkward silence more damning than speech, Hilary, acting as though she’d noticed nothing, addressed her cousin in a brisk tone.

  “Jess Brass just called. She still wants to interview you. Should I tell her to go to hell?”

  “No, she’s too powerful to cross. Set it up.”

  “When and where? She says she’ll come to the studio whenever—”

  Lara shook her head. “No way. After the column she wrote this morning, she’d better stay far clear of Ames.”

  “Why?” I asked. “What did Brass write?”

  “The truth. That Ed didn’t hand in a new ‘Bible’ on time. That we’re going to run out of storyline soon and Ames can’t hire a new head writer fast enough. That our ratings will slip badly.”

  “You’ve got a spy on staff,” Hilary observed.

  “Afraid so. That’s why Ames is livid. He wants to find out who the informer is.”

  “Well,” said Hilary, “Florence McKinley is the only cast member well known to be in Brass’ good graces.”

  Lara and I exchanged a look.

  “All right,” Hilary said, “I’ll try to set up a lunch interview with her tomorrow. Okay?”

  “Yes.”

  With a curt nod of her head, Hilary turned sharply and departed. I watched her till she rounded a corner and disappeared from view.

  “She’s in one sweet mood,” I remarked.

  “Her way of coping, Gene. Would you prefer histrionics?” Lara glanced at her watch. “I’d better get back on set. You’re cleared, so come on. By the way, where did you disappear to?”

  “Took a walk with Joanne Carpenter.”

  Lara shot me a sharp glance. “Oh?” A single chilly syllable.

  “A prime suspect, remember?”

  “Yes. Sorry.” She promptly looked sheepish, for which I gave her points over Hilary. ‘It’s not like me to play Jennie Jealous. But Joanne’s a very horny lady.”

  “A very lonely one, anyway.”

  “Hey, junior, watch that empathic streak.” She gave me a quick squeeze. “Hilary warned me about it.”

  It was my turn to say “Oh?” icily.

  “Galahad in galoshes.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That’s what she dubbed you. My cousin says all a woman has to do is bat her eyes helplessly and you’ll wade through a gutterful of crocodile tears to rescue her.” Dimpling at my irritation, Lara gave me another affectionate squeeze. “Hey, don’t look so steamed. I think it’s a lovely trait in a man. In moderation.”

  “Meaning Joanne comes under the classification of immoderate”

  Kissing a fingertip, she touched it to my lips. “Lover, when it comes to storm warnings, you’ve got twenty-twenty.”

  Had it been Hilary, I would have argued, but that’s because my former boss expects commitment without making any in return. Instead of objecting, I attempted to return her kiss in more traditional fashion, but Lara stepped back.

  “Not now, you’ll smear my makeup.” Opening the thick muffling door to the taping facility, she invited me to go through. “Come on, Gene, it’s about time I introduced you to the dream factory.”

  My first impression was confused: the vertigo of too much space, vast and cloaked in shadow. I expected the “Riverday” sound stage to be big, but its immensity staggered me. When I stepped through the door, I found myself on a metal platform suspended in space. Looking down, I saw the concrete floor at least ten feet below. Far above me I could barely discern in the gloom a grid of cables, pipes and fixturing. I looked down again, then back up and estimated that from floor to ceiling it must be at least thirty feet.

  Lara came up behind me and, placing her hands on my shoulders, whispered, “Some day, my boy, this will all be yours.”

  “My God, I had no idea it was this huge! How high is it, anyway?”

  Four stories.”

  A flight of black iron stairs led from the platform down to the studio floor. As we began to descend, I realized the reason it was so dim was because we’d entered on the studio’s perimeter and most of the place was masked by enormous black burlap curtains hanging down from poles at the edge of the ceiling grid. Yards and yards wide, the coarse draperies blocked off most of the illumination from the arcs and floods suspended over the various sets, which, at the moment, were hidden from view.

  Walking softly, we left the stairs and Lara led me along the edge of the place, a wall on our left—padded, with two more iron stairs leading up to the second floor of WBS—while on our right we skirted the cloak of the great curtains. We passed a makeup table equipped with lamp-ringed mirror and touchup supplies scattered and smeared on its powdery surface. A chubby technician in a matching messy smock smiled at Lara over his paper coffee container, but she shook her head, declining his services.

  Further along, just before the barrier drapery ended, I saw a man hunched over an electronic prompting device. A scroll of paper in it displayed what I assumed must be lines from the “Riverday” script just being taped. The dialogue was printed in enormously oversized letters; they were so big that only a few lines showed.

  Matt (on telephone)

  YES, ROSALIND?

  Nurse (on telephone)

  MS. SAVAGE INSISTS ON SEEING YOU.

  Matt (on telephone)

  DID SHE SAY WHAT SHE WANTS? SHE KNOWS I’M OFF DUTY.

  That’s all the lines that showed. But as I watched, the scrap of script began to crawl upward, vanishing into the prompter’s upper compartment New dialogue emerged from the bottom roller.

  KNOWS I’M OFF DUTY.

  Nurse (on telephone)

  SHE’S VERY UPSET. WE CAN’T DO A THING WITH HER.

  Matt (on telephone, SIGHS)

  WELL, I KNOW HOW DIFFICULT SHE CAN GET. BETTER TELL HER I’LL BE THERE AS SOON AS I CAN MANAGE IT.

  I asked Lara what the man sitting by the prompter was doing, since there were no actors in the vicinity to be cued. She explained there was a duplicate roller on the set that moved in tandem with the remote. “He hears the lines over his headset and keeps the rollers paced with the actual flow of the scene. He’s got a stop-start foot pedal that works both prompters, so we’ve always got the next line we have to say in front of our eyes if we need it.”

  “Ingenious. Why even bother learning the lines?”

  “You’re kidding,” she replied. “How can you act, project emotion, move around if you don’t know your lines? Prompters are only for emergencies, so if you draw a blank, you can pick up your line without stopping the tape.”

  Meanwhile, the big block letters crept up again. My mind boggled over the amount of labor the thing represented. I couldn’t imagine how it was possible to turn five scripts a week into the huge scrolls required.

  THERE AS SOON AS I CAN MANAGE IT.

  Nurse (on telephone)

  THAT’S A RELIEF. SHE WONT EVEN TAKE HER MEDICINE UNLESS YOU GIVE IT TO HER. I SWEAR SHE THINKS IM TRYING TO POISON HER.

  Matt (on telephone)

  HAVE FAITH, THE CAVALRY’S COMING. I SUPPOSE I’D BETTER HAVE A LITTLE

  The crawler stopped in midsentence. The technician peeled off his headset, sat back and stretched.

  “Problem on set?” Lara asked him. He nodded. “Come on, Gene, let’s see what’s going on.”

  We rounded the corner of the big black curtain and turned right into a long, wide vista of cable-strewn concrete. On either side of a central aisle, rooms and porches and business establishments stood in two long rows, like model environment booths at an industrial show in the New York Coliseum. I recognized them all, the various locations in which the action of
“Riverday” unfolded, familiar places I’d seen at home on television. Near us on the left was the same Jennett living room set that Ames harangued the cast from earlier that morning. An actress who played a nurse was sitting on the sofa studying her lines; at a card table a pair of extras labored over the Times crossword puzzle. All three performers were intent on their respective activities; none of them noticed us as we walked by.

  To our right was the Jennett dining room, smaller and plainer than I ever would have imagined. Next to it was Eloise Savage’s back lawn, the one with the swimming pool she liked to loll around in, showing off her legs to whichever man she was busy manipulating at the moment. Her lawn consisted of plastic grass mats unrolled next to one another, and the pool was a flimsy semicircular affair about a foot and a half deep. The water in it looked dirty.

  We kept walking. I still couldn’t see any cameras or working actors. Lara explained there was a second aisle parallel to the one we were on. “We have to go all the way to the end of this one, turn right, go through to the other half of the building and head back down the direction we came.”

  In addition to the sets themselves, the aisle had numerous wooden cabinets positioned every twenty or thirty feet: on their open shelves rested all sorts of tools, props and lighting instruments. Hammers and ratchets hung side by side with Fresnels and miscellaneous male and female plugs and connectors. Other shelves held books, towels, dishes, bottles, sealed jars with dark liquid that Lara said was flat cola, the beverage usually employed when coffee is allegedly poured on a daytime drama (a frequent occurrence).

  “Doesn’t that get stale sitting around like that?”

  Lara stopped walking. “No. Props is very good about refilling drinkables. Why?”

  ‘Idle curiosity of a fan. But look, I’ve been wanting to ask you a few more important questions.”

  “All right. Here’s my office, step in.”

  By then, we’d crossed almost to the end of the long aisle. The last “Riverday” set on our right before the turn was Roberta Jennett’s law office. Smaller than it seemed on television, it consisted of a single white pine and painted canvas wall on which was hung an undistinguished oil painting of a stallion. Against the wall was placed Roberta’s desk and chair and a four-drawer filing cabinet.

  Lara sat down in her usual place and I faced her, taking the client’s chair across the desk. She was in her costume, a smartly tailored navy business suit, and her blond hair was pulled severely behind her ears. I was living a double fantasy: consulting the brusque, efficient Roberta Jennett, and also discussing a case with Ms. Hilary Quayle.

  Remembering my night with Lara, I decided I preferred the real world to either fairy tale.

  “First question?”

  “Which cast members like to sunbathe nude?”

  “What?” She laughed abruptly, more out of surprise than mirth. “Where’d you get that idea?”

  I told her I’d been talking to Umberto.

  “Naturally.” Lara frowned. “Did he tell you what he pulled a couple of months ago?”

  “No. What?”

  “Me and Joanne and Kit Yerby had a long stretch before our next scenes. This was in June. We asked Umberto to keep the men out of the sleeping alcove while we tanned for a while. Actually, I wanted the privacy, the others didn’t care who saw them.”

  “What happened?”

  “We put our clothes on a towel by the door and lay on beach blankets. When we got up to go in, our clothes were gone and the door was locked. We had to yell our heads off for twenty minutes before Florence heard us and let us in. Our clothes were inside on the cots. Joanne was late for her entrance, and so was Kit.”

  “And you think Umberto was responsible?”

  “He always denied it, but I think it’d be just the sort of thing he’d pull. He’s a woman hater.”

  “Possibly.” I tapped my forefinger on the desk top. “Possibly. But what about Florence?”

  “What about her?”

  “Maybe she locked you out, not Umberto.”

  “Florence? Why would she?”

  “To get Joanne in trouble.”

  “Oh, I see,” Lara said, bristling. “You have one talk with Joanne, and right away you’re willing to believe her and not—”

  “Just hold on,” I cut in. “I’m not siding with anyone, I’m looking at things from all angles. And I don’t even have a client.”

  “Gene, I’m truly sorry,” Lara repented. “I’m just tense. Go on.”

  I got up, perched on the edge of her desk and took her hand. “Look, I know Florence is your friend, I’m not saying she was responsible for anything, but I have to eliminate the possibility entirely if I’m going to blame someone else. I’m asking about the sunbathing to see whether it provides a reason why Niven was on the roof in the first place.”

  “You think he’d make a special trip here on a Saturday just to sunbathe in the buff?”

  “Lara, I don’t have any answers or theories, just questions. If he was in the habit of sneaking onto the roof, say, with Florence—”

  She stood up, taking her hand away from me. “Gene, I’d better check where they are.”

  “Ten seconds more. Tell me what the story is with Ira Powell.”

  Mention of the sottish actor made Lara look both sad and displeased. She came around the desk and peered into the aisle at a young man in Levi’s carrying a ladder. “Gene, do you really need to hear? It’s ugly.”

  “Yes.”

  “All right,” she sighed, turning to me, “haven’t you noticed a difference lately in Ira’s on-screen character?”

  “Matt?” I pondered it “Not especially. He has done a few dumb things.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Matt’s popularity as a character is based on him being the all-knowing kindly doctor cum father-figure. Safe, smart, sweet and sexy—that’s the formula that made Matt a hero and Ira a star. And Ames is changing it.”

  “Why?”

  “Why else? He doesn’t like him. That’s why he hired Harry Whelan. Ames is grooming him to replace Ira eventually.”

  “How? As Matt?” It was incredible.

  “No. By cheapening Matt and making Harry’s role, Todd, more appealing.”

  I got off the desk, shaking my head. “I’m surprised the network would allow Ames to tamper with the ratings. Mart’s still plenty popular.”

  Oh, it’s a very slow, subtle change, it’ll take months to cross-fade Matt and Todd.”

  “But Ira knows about it?”

  “He’s already seen a slight slack-off in fan mail. And instead of fighting back, he goes fey, holding his own wake. Drinking all night, heaving all over himself, stumbling in here without showering or even changing his shirt” She shuddered in pity and disgust “I told you it’s ugly, Gene.”

  “Can’t he do anything about it?”

  “I don’t know. He ought to try while he’s still got some clout left.

  • She took my arm and we began walking again. Leaving the office behind, we turned the corner at the far end of the sound stage. There were flats and other scenery piled all over. Bins full of lighting equipment cable, props, rolls of half-used adhesive were jammed against the padded walls, and a matching set of black curtains hung down from the ceiling, making the area dim, eerily hushed.

  I thought about Ames’ despicable slow-motion destruction of Ira Powell. It occurred to me as we went through an archway and neared the second, parallel aisle that whatever the producer elected to do had to have been carried out up to now, by none other than Ed Niven, head writer of “Riverday.” I wondered which of the two Powell blamed more.

  We entered the aisle. Its arrangement was identical to the first. On either side of the wide middle passage were sets, one next to another. The exit portal of a make-believe parlor doubled as the entrance to some fictional character’s bedroom. The large and fully equipped kitchen of the Jennett supper club stood across the aisle from Eloise Savage’s lofty library. I felt an
irrelevant impulse to borrow the ladder I’d seen and browse among the high stacks for possible volumes on Hilary’s want list (one of the extra little chores she used to throw at me when I was working for her).

  Almost at the other end of the aisle I saw a group of people milling about in the midst of three bulky cameras and a pair of boom mikes. We headed towards them, and as we passed familiar sets, occasionally we noticed a cast member hunched over his or her script oblivious to us.

  “One other question,” I said to Lara as we stepped along. “Did you ever hear of any cast member getting stuck in a building elevator and holding up shooting?”

  “No. That one must be before my time. Oh, look, there’s DB. You could ask him.”

  “DB” was the “tentpole” actor, Donald Bannister, portrayer of “Father” Leo Jennett. A tall, stoop-shouldered gentleman in his sixties, he had a pot belly, jowls and thick glasses, and at that moment, seemed pretty hale, possibly because of the deep sun-tan crinkling his benevolently wrinkled. Bannister was a veteran of 1940s Hollywood, where he played countless gangster roles in films. I imagined the role of kindly restaurateur and daddy, Leo Jennett, might be a relaxing change of pace for him, especially since he rarely appeared more than once a week on “Riverday.” As a matter of fact, I realized he hadn’t been on at all lately.

  Bannister was perched on a stool in another kitchen set tamping tobacco into a gnarled darkwood pipe. Lara introduced me to him by name and profession.

  “hEAr about Eddie?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Dreadful,” he mourned. “I only heard about it this morning. Been vacationing in Palm Beach, just got back last night. Dreadful.” He drew on the pipe and tossed away the match. “Something you wanted to ask me?”

  “Yes. Whether you know which one of the cast got stuck in an elevator a while back.”

  “That was Ira Powell. Why? What’s that got to do with Eddie’s death?”

  “Maybe nothing.”

  I asked a few more things, but Bannister added nothing new to my scant store of facts. I was about to give Lara the nod that I was done when he pointed at me with the stem of his pipe and said, “I noticed you admiring the books in the library set, laddie. You a collector?”