Night Film(91)

I dialed his office.

His assistant answered. After putting me on hold, she informed me, “Mr. Laughton is in a meeting,” which meant Stu was sitting at his desk eating an egg-salad sandwich, playing computer solitaire, and would call me back when he was in the mood.

To my surprise, it was just two minutes later.





62


“You talked,” I said.

“Haven’t said a word,” insisted Stu on the other end.

“You must have mentioned my name in connection with Cordova at one of your power lunches, because nothing else explains this.”

“You’ll find it difficult to fathom, McGrath, but I have other clients and I don’t always discuss you at every hour of every day, though I admit, it’s terribly tricky to pull off, you’re so damn captivating.”

It was always a mental adjustment talking to Stu. As a posh Englishman, he was so well educated, with such an expansive vocabulary, his briefest conversations peppered with irony and wit and deep knowledge of current events—it was like communicating with Jeeves if he ever anchored the BBC.

“How do you explain it, then?” I asked.

“Damned if I know. If, by some miracle of God, Olivia Endicott wants you to ghostwrite her autobiography, take the job. To quote Captain Smith, ‘Grab what you can and fight your way to a lifeboat.’ Everyone associated with the slow printed word is fast becoming the Great Crested Newt of the culture. First it was the poets, the playwrights, then the novelists. Veteran newspapermen are next.”

“Is that supposed to make me nervous?”

“Grab the work when it comes, my man. Your competition is now a fourteen-year-old in pajamas with the username Truth-ninja-12 who believes fact-checking a story is reading his subject’s Twitter feed. Be afraid.”

Assuring Stu I’d call Endicott, I hung up.

“A means to track down Marlowe Hughes just fell into our lap,” I said to Nora, rearing back my desk chair. “The timing can’t be a coincidence. Someone’s been talking. Someone we’ve talked to or bribed.”

Nora looked bewildered.

“Olivia Endicott du Pont wants to meet with me.”

Nora frowned. “Who’s Olivia Endicott du Pont?”





63


“They were sisters. They were actors. And they loathed each other.”

This was how Beckman always began his favorite true Hollywood story—the Tale of the Warring Endicott Sisters—intoning that last sentence with such Old Testament severity, you could practically feel the sky turning gray, clouds turning inside out, and a black mist of locusts swarming the horizon.

I’d heard Beckman recount the story at least five times, always after three in the morning after a dinner party at his apartment with his students, when he was amped up on vodka and rapt attention, his black hair falling into his face glistening with sweat.

I was always game to hear the Endicott story for two reasons: One, feuding sisters fueled the imagination. As Beckman liked to say: “Marlowe and Olivia Endicott make Cain and Abel look like the Farrelly brothers.”

Unlike the infamous feuds between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, Liz Taylor and Debbie Reynolds, Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine, Angie and Jennifer, the Endicott sisters’ bad blood was kept entirely out of the press—apart from a few blind items in Bill Dakota’s Hollywood “Confidential” Star Magazine—a dead silence that only emphasized its evident ferocity.

Second, for all of Beckman’s flair for dramatics, his propensity to act out all of the parts as if he were on stage at the Nederlander, on each occasion, every detail remained exactly the same, without any new aspect or embellishment. The story was like a precious jeweled necklace; every time Beckman brought it out, each gleaming detail was cut and meticulously set in the exact same pattern it always had been.

I’d fact-checked it myself when I was first researching Cordova five years ago, and, by association, Marlowe Hughes. She was his leading lady and former wife of three months, star of Cordova’s harrowing Lovechild. Every name, date, and location Beckman mentioned flawlessly corroborated with public record, so I’d come to believe that this tale of fighting sisters, however wild it sounded, must be true.

Born in April 1948, Olivia Endicott was Marlowe Hughes’s older sister by just ten months.

Naturally, Marlowe Hughes wasn’t born Marlowe Hughes. She was born Jean-Louise “J.L.” Endicott on February 1, 1949, in Tokyo.

Most people enter the world looking like red, shriveled trolls. J.L. resembled an angel. When the nurses spanked her so she’d take her first breath, rather than squealing like a monkey, J.L. sighed, smiled, and fell asleep. From the moment she was brought home from the hospital, it was as if Olivia had become a piece of furniture.

“Olivia wasn’t ugly,” Beckman said. “Far from it. With dark hair, a sweet face, she was pretty. And yet from the time she was ten months old, she might as well have been chintz curtains when her sister was in the room.”

They were army brats. Their mother was a nurse, their father a medical doctor at Iruma Air Base. In 1950, the family left Japan for Pasadena, California, though within a few months, their father, John, deserted the family, leaving them in deep debt and forcing their mother to take on work cleaning rooms at a motor hotel and washing dishes. Years later, Marlowe would hire a detective to find her father, learning he’d moved to Argentina with a male retired army colonel with whom he still lived.