Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 52, No. 7 & 8, July/August 2007

I eased out of my jacket and used it to blanket her. “What did he look like, Laura?”

“What do you think? Like you said. Big handlebar he had, and gussied up for a ball or something. An old fart, moving like the dickens, but I spotted him before he saw me and got in here in the nick of time. Go now. Find him for me and kill the SOB.” She pressed a bony hand against my cheek. “For me, handsome, and I’ll owe you big time,” she said, like she was offering me a free pass to her bedroom.

It was the same tone she’d used on the drive here from the Burbank Studios, a failed try at recreating the insinuatingly passionate voice of her stardom years, while resurrecting one memory after another, like they were a cure for her cough and the cobwebs of time.

Some of Laura’s stories I remembered from our brief history together, others from her uproarious, outlandish visits with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. They flowed out of her like she was reading from a well-rehearsed script, leaving no doubt they were imprisoned in her memory as well as the autobiography that rode the bestseller lists for half a year, Dane, Down & Dirty.

“I was once a hooker, you know that?” she had said early in the drive, anxiously, needing to hold center stage. I played along. “Yeah, top of the batting order in Hollywood’s blue-ribbon pussy palace, a favorite with all the important chippy chasers at all the talent agencies and studios. How I met the gent who engineered the breaks that landed me my contract with Warner Brothers and in bed with every star and costar you care to mention — no names, please — and even a leading lady or two.”

When Laura tired of those anecdotes, she opened a new chapter. “I suppose you know I was roommates with Marilyn? She was always Norma Jean to me and I was always Dubinsky to her. My real name, did you know? Jack Warner, Steve Trilling, they heard that and said, No way, which is how I got to be Laura Dane. From the Fox movie Laura, with Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, because Colonel Warner said I resembled a blond Gene, and Dane rang his bell better’n Dana did. The moguls at Fox decided on Marilyn after she picked Monroe in honor of her granny, but that’s old news already.” Laura rattled off a telephone directory of names rich and famous from the Fifties and into the Sixties, challenging me to guess who of them had been bedded first by her, then by Marilyn. Abruptly changing her mind with a flick of the hand. “Let’s us just call it a tie, okay, baby? Although I hate to admit I never made it into the White House any more than the White House ever made it into me.”

Abruptly, she changed the subject. “You know I was AA?”

“Heard something about it somewhere.”

“The career turns sour, the need turns more and more to sour mash, so to speak. Can’t get a call through or a callback from anybody who could throw me a life preserver. Won’t even try to describe what it looks like below the bottom, but I was there, baby, riding the merry-go-round to nowhere, until I woke up one day knowing I wouldn’t wake up some day if life kept leading me on this way. So, I quit. Cold turkey after one last fling with Wild Turkey, you dig? I dragged myself into AA, said hello to familiar faces, and signed autographs for the others, and stuck with it, still, one day at a time. Anytime I felt like abandoning the wagon, which was often, I helped myself to a smoke. The habit climbed up to two, sometimes three packs a day, but it kept me off the sauce, and I’m still here, so that’s that.”

Now, when Laura paused for a dry mouth cough in the middle of telling me how she’d come to work for Hollywood’s most notorious madam in a mansion above Sunset Plaza Drive available almost exclusively to the elite of show business, I said, “You think it could be a guy from those days who’s finally acting on a grudge he’s been holding for forty years?”

“Baby, when I loved ‘em, they stayed loved. And loving.”

“How about when you and Marilyn were roomies, or maybe somebody at Warner Brothers who—”

“No and no, and...”

It was as if she’d stumbled onto an idea that made sense.

She snapped her face to me and broke out a half smile edged in hope. “There was this gawky-looking kid, a gofer trying to make his mark, sucking up to Hal Wallis, Johnny Huston, Jerry Wald, even Mike Curtiz, who was busy turning the English language into a jigsaw puzzle when he wasn’t taking Bogie or Flynn through their paces. Crawford was playing him for a pet until she wangled that Oscar, and after, that’s when he became my uninvited shadow. Finally, I had to say something to Trilling about the pest not leaving me alone. Before the day was over, the kid was on his way to the unemployment line.” She played with the notion. “Elrod was his name. Elrod Stump. You know what any studio would do with that moniker he ever got signed on as an actor. Stumpy, everyone called him. He bothered me a while longer before the murder put him out of commission.”

“The murder?”

“Stumpy caught on at Monogram, or maybe it was Republic, and got involved in a love triangle with some B actress and the exec who booked the studio’s casting couch. Next anybody knew, the exec was dead and a judge was sending Stumpy to San Quentin to learn how to make license plates.”