Hollywood Exposé
Scholars of the Popular Mind.
29
Hollywood Exposé
The name haunted Tom.
Just like …
Just like whom, Miriam?
Some … girl …
Miriam had stumbled over the word ‘girl,’ as if even that was giving too much away.
“…went missing years ago. The tabloids…”
Tabloids — that was a big clue right there, the tabloids.
“…made an awful hullabaloo…”
About whom, Miriam?
She looked about fitfully. She was hiding something.
About whom?
Barely able to speak beyond a troubled whisper, she surrendered the name
Annie.
“Well, hello stranger!” Woody cried, throwing his arms open in a sweaty air-embrace.
Tom, a favorite customer from way back, had just entered MovieWorld, Woody’s famous magazine and movie-stills shop that used to be on Hollywood Boulevard (“in front of Vincent Price’s star,” as the bus-seat ads once proclaimed with an arcing yellow star that held an unrecognizably young photo of a smooth-faced VincentPrice). Soaring rents in the 90s had driven Woody to relocate the shop to Studio City in the Valley.
“Bloody hell, old bean. Haven’t seen you in a dog’s age!” the goggly-eyed Woody continued in a fruity British accent, which slipped imperceptibly into Brooklynese. “How’s tricks, Mugsy” he intoned in a swanky Jimmy Cagney register, circa Public Enemy.
Woody was the best thing about Woody’s MovieWorld, and Tom realized how much he missed the entertaining little sideshow the cheery, elephantine Woody put on from behind the counter and among the stacks. Woody came from an ancient era when movie stars were everything, and he had come to Hollywood and made himself a Boulevard Character, a super fan in service to the super fans. His store specialized not only in movie stills but in movie magazines of the most purple and scandal-mongering kind. Tom used to come here to find rare behind-the-scene studio stills for the books he was working on. Today, he was strictly interested in the tabloids.
“Annie?” repeated Woody, clearly flummoxed when Tom explained he was looking for a girl who had disappeared at a premiere in 1964.
“The tabloids made a big deal about it,” pressed Tom encouragingly. Tom joined Woody on the familiar threadbare couch where, as a young writer, new to Hollywood, many a routine visit had stretched out into a hilarious afternoon with the gregarious Woody who was always full of Hollywood chit-chat.
“Ahh-So,” Woody repeated, his tone full of sinister Fu Manchu machinations.
In his own way, Woody was a scholar of the popular mind. Not only did he carry every back number of headline-screaming pulps like Hollywood Confessions, The Naked Truth, and Tattler After Dark, forever replenishing them with auction sales and warehouse clearances, but he read nearly every issue, lapping them up with the same relish that he devoured his ubiquitous hot pastrami sandwiches — grease stains on covers being a sort of imprimatur that you had purchased a trash magazine at the venerable Hollywood Boulevard landmark.
Yet for all his expertise, Woody could recall no Annie who had ever appeared on a tabloid cover.
“Iz a puzzlement!” he said, tossing his chin high in the manner of a pompous Yul Brynner. “But wait, Igor —SCIENCE! My son put our entire stock on the internets. Cross-referenced by stars, years, scandals. Woody!” he bellowed, stomping on the floor. “Come up here at once, me lad! We’ll see what we have for 1964.”
“It happened at the premiere of The Cats,” said Tom, “which came out in December. So issues from late ’64, early ’65.”
Up from the cellar lumbered a younger version of Woody, but this one dour-faced and in his sulky, prematurely balding way, decades older than his ever-buoyant father. “Young Woody educated me on comic books,” Tom’s companion on the sofa beamed proudly. “You wouldn’t believe what those Marvel action figures bring in. I gave him the downstairs as a store of his own. Kid makes more than me now!” He slipped into a staccato. “‘Somewhere along the line, the world has lost all its standards and taste’ as Bette Davis told Susan Hayward in Where Love Has Gone.”
It was always amazing that Woody had a son at all. To Tom’s eye, Woody was flamingly, flamboyantly gay in a most unbothered way. Yet he had married shortly upon arriving in Los Angeles. Tom guessed it was Woody’s way of Going Hollywood, to be living, if in a rather careless, pay-it-no-mind way, a “double life,” a sort of homage to the classic closeted stars whose “lavender peccadilloes” (a trademark Woody phrase) he took such infectious delight in gossiping about.
At the back of the store, the bearish Young Woody lingered over a clunky computer monitor that took up much of a cluttered, coffee-stained desk. Cricking his neck, he pushed aside a half-eaten donut, shedding powdery sugar on his lumpy fingers that he absently licked before he began to type. “No Annies,” he pronounced dully. “No Anns, Annas, or Annmaries.”
“Do you mind if I take a look?” asked Tom.
Woody the Younger shrugged his shoulders.
Tom unhooked the chain with the “Private - Keep Out” sign and made his way along a precarious aisle of waist-high magazines waiting to be cataloged.
Tom propped his glasses on his forehead. Before him on the white computer screen was a spreadsheet, listing titles that had been on the covers of magazines. It was a perfect snapshot of the early ‘60s, a time when one story dominated the hyped-up tabloid outrage: “Homewrecker Liz,” “Debbie’s Turn to Laugh,” “Eddie on Suicide Watch,” “‘She’s a Pig,’ Screams Jilted Sybil,” “Secret Photos of Liz and Dick’s Roman Love Nest.”
One headline, though, was very different from the others.
“I’d like to see this magazine,” said Tom, “the March ’65 issue of Hollywood Exposé.”
Listlessly, Young Woody shambled off to fetch it from the shelves, and when the shopworn, dog-eared scandal mag was put into Tom’s hands, he turned to the article, and let out a gasp.
“You found it!” exclaimed Old Woody with happy surprise. “What was it?”
Tom pointed to the cover headline as he came back to the worn couch. “Did you ever hear of this?”
“Oh, of course!” Woody said with fresh realization. “She was quite a looker too,” then added in a silky George Sanders undertone, “‘a graduate of the Copacaban-ya School of Dramatic Arts.’"
Sitting down, Tom flipped through the pages until he found the article. It took no more than the first sentence to realize this was indeed the Annie he was looking for.
"Happened at the Egyptian Theater, didn’t it?”
“No, the Palatine.”
"That's right. The Palatine. Out in Venice. Heard they knocked it down."
“It’s being refurbished,” Tom said distractedly. The article he was skimming was clearly sensationalized.
"A spooky old place."
"Oh?" Tom looked up.
"There were always rumors about the Palatine,” recounted Woody. “Orgies, rituals, naked people…stuff like that. Sin sells. The scandal sheets loved to rant and rave about it for the rubes in the Heartland, who have this love-hate thing for Hollywood: City of Dreams; Babylon of Depravity. Plus, there was only so much crap the tabs could make up about the stars without getting punished by the studios. So the Palatine had quite a reputation in its day. A lot of cluck-clucking. 'Out in Venice …away from prying eyes.’ Heard it became a porn house."
"Actually, it was declared a landmark. I teach a course there now."
“Ya don’t say …Ya don’t say.” Woody had slipped into the wheedling voice of W. C. Fields. Staying in character, he read aloud the headline on the magazine’s lurid cover.
“‘The Strange Disappearance of the Wayward Redhead.’”
Tipsily, Woody doffed an imaginary top hat, then fluttered his fingers over imaginary lapels. “Wayward, hmm? … What a euphonious appellation, my incarnadine blossom.”
“Annie,” Tom said quietly, “I’ve got you now.”
Coming upon the full name at the end of a paragraph, Tom seized it as if scooping up treasure from the bottom of the sea.
“Annie,” he whispered. “Annie Hammerstein!”
Preview: Soldier boy.
