Siren Queen(61)
For a solid week, the papers were full of the disappearance of Harry Long. The first reports were spurious and sensational, declaring he had perished fighting the fire like a hero, or that he had gone back to save a wardrobe girl who was cut off from the rest of the crew. Though we had all felt the heat from the fire, I knew that no one had tried to fight it, and the cast and crew did their own headcounts to find no one missing.
One story said that he had been terribly hurt in the dash back to safe ground and that he was dying in a private hospital in La Jolla, Lana Brooks dressed in black and mourning by his side. Another claimed that Harry had heroically saved Annette Walker from the flames and spirited her away to a secret love nest in Baja. Annette Walker put these rumors to rest quickly when she checked into an exclusive convalescent home, giving interviews from a bay window in her rose dressing gown.
Another story which got a little more play suggested that Whalen Mannheim was hiding him, readying him for a triumphant return when Siren Queen premiered. I knew that wasn’t true because I saw Whalen Mannheim talking with Harvey Rose at the café just a few days after the fire. Whalen knocked his tea off the table, sending the tumbler bouncing off the tile below. Miraculously, it didn’t break, but neither man noticed. Whalen covered his face with his hand, and I realized he was crying. Harvey Rose’s face was serious, even sympathetic, as he reached out to clasp Whalen’s shoulder, but he didn’t let go of it. Instead, they both stood, and with his hand remaining on Whalen Mannheim’s shoulder, he forced the still-weeping man out the door. I rose from my seat to watch them get into a sleek black car waiting outside. Right before he got in, Whalen looked wildly up at the sky, the most desperate look I’ve ever seen on a man, and then he was gone.
Harvey Rose paused a moment after he shut the door, looking back with a sphinx’s calm over the rest of us watching from the café. From where I sat, his green-tinted glasses looked like eyes themselves, and I shivered when I thought of what those eyes had seen. We were all problems that Oberlin Wolfe might need fixed one day, whether we needed to disappear, to have a new face or to have every bit of light scraped out of our heads and to be set to nodding, and he seemed to promise us that when the time came, he would be there.
No one ever saw Whalen Mannheim again. Scottie Mannheim went on to some lasting fame in war propaganda films, but that there was ever a second Mannheim brother, no trace remained. He survives, in some small way, in footnotes and in unexplained mentions of two Mannheims and not one. Once I thought I saw him feeding birds at Holmby Park, but then I got closer, and it was someone else instead. It was enough that I remembered him for a moment. It might have bought him another handful of days, wherever he was, to be remembered by something like me. Immortality is a tricky business.
Two weeks after the fire, I knew it was all over when Dottie Wendt’s piece came out. THE LEGACY AND LOYALTIES OF HARRY LONG took up the entire front page while Harry’s publicity shot from Love of the Sun, his first big hit, stared out below. There was a subtle shock in seeing Harry so young, and I felt the thing that had awakened in me when I saw Josephine Beaufort’s immortal Juliet again.
Dorothy Wendt declared Harry dead on the mountain, burned up like a harvest king of old. Lana Brooks was devastated, taken to her bed and cared for by grave doctors, and those who knew him best sank into mourning.
“A star has been extinguished, and all the world is darker for it,” Oberlin Wolfe was quoted as saying, and that was what made me cry, hiding behind the paper and trying not to put my fingers straight through it. If Oberlin Wolfe said it, it was true even if it wasn’t, and I knew Harry was gone.
The stories started up almost immediately. Lennie Washington, the man who beat the devil on the trumpet in Abilene, said he had been hitching along Route 66 and Harry Long appeared in his midnight blue Bentley, taking him from Tulsa to Santa Fe. A young housewife from San Diego swore up and down she saw him buying sandwiches at her bodega, while firefighters from San Dimas saw a figure in coat and tails walking through the flames on a mountaintop inferno four years later.
“Like he was in his own house,” said the fire chief.
I’ll tell you what I saw. Some eight years ago, the Majestic on Third was doing a classic film festival. They were showing two of the siren movies, but in glasses, scarf, and a long coat, I went to see Love of the Sun instead. It was well attended: grave filmmakers, young hopefuls, girls and boys in love with ghosts, and auteurs of all kinds filled the velvet seats. The first shot of the movie was Harry gazing out over the dim passageways of Barcelona, his body lean, young and lovely in silver.
Believe me when I say it was horrible.
Love of the Sun was well loved in its time—brilliant, even—but the acting, the light work, the dialogue, even for a silent film, was terrible. It came out when I was only two, and if I had seen it at seven instead of Romeo and Juliet, I imagine I would have fallen just as in love. Today, it’s ridiculous, a lumbering slab of black-and-white kitsch that barely manages to hold on because of Harry’s young beauty and the incandescent loveliness of his co-star, Elsa Bergeron. The entire theater watched it with grave rapture, but I had to hold my hand over my mouth, lowering my face so that I wouldn’t laugh out loud at the worst lines.
Someone else in the theater didn’t hold back, however, and he started snickering from the very beginning, when Harry wrapped his arms around the neck of a nervy palomino, the silver text telling us the horse was his only friend in the world. It wasn’t until the climactic scene where Harry and Elsa fall into a very Los Angeles swimming pool standing in for a silent Spanish grotto that a loud peal of laughter rocked the theater. I sat straight up, because I knew that laugh, twisting around in my seat to see two ushers gesture for the offender, an old man and his somewhat younger companion, to leave. They stood and left in high good spirits, but my breath caught in my chest.