The Curse of Vilma Valentine

By Tom Canford

Adored by some, abhorred by others, actress Vilma Valentine is presumed dead after a fiery automobile collision in Mexico, her body never recovered. In the intervening years the fabled star is sighted more often than Bigfoot. Is it her ghost that crashes a party for Ronald Reagan in Juarez, appears at the deathbed of her estranged father in Rome, flees from Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst at the Parthenon?

In 1969 Virginia Dofstader wins the Valentine lookalike contest publicizing The Curse of Vilma Valentine by literary heavyweight Gerald Carstairs. In the course of the book's promotion, it is discovered that Virginia's mother looks even more like Vilma than Miss Dofstader does.

As notorious in death as in life, Vilma haunts the imagination of aficionados of 1940 movies. Did she really kill all those husbands? Was she a Nazi spy? Was she truly responsible for the bombing of Pearl Harbor?

Her story, a suspenseful stew of WWII saboteurs, stolen European artworks, murders and massacres, is told in the words of major Hollywood figures-lovers, friends, enemies, and Vilma herself. It's all seasoned with a knowing dose of romantic comedy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 5, 2006
• ISBN: 9780595835485

Tom Canford

Tom Canford, author of Boy at Sea, is a member of ASCAP, the Dramatists Guild, and the Publicists Guild. He worked as press representative on a number of prestigious motion pictures. Three of his plays have been produced in New York, one in Los Angeles. He now lives in Alabama.

Book preview

The Curse of

Vilma Valentine

Tom Canford

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Lincoln Shanghai

The Curse of Vilma Valentine

Copyright © 2006 by Tom Canford

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any

means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

iUniverse

2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100

Lincoln, NE 68512

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

ISBN-13: 978-0-595-39160-8 (pbk)

ISBN-13: 978-0-595-83548-5 (ebk)

ISBN-10: 0-595-39160-5 (pbk)

ISBN-10: 0-595-83548-1 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

A Note to the Reader

The Curse of Vilma Valentine is a work of fiction. Actual persons are used to comment on Vilma Valentine and her times. With one exception, they are used fictionally, and the actions and words attributed to them are the fabrications of the author. The one exception is Robert Mitchum. His story ofbeing hijacked on a Mexico road by a drunken gang waving machetes was told to the author by Mitchum himself on a movie location in Mexico. Anyone who knew Robert Mitchum may well understand that this story too may be fiction, or at least an embroidery on the facts.

Real events, places, and organizations are mentioned in the novel. They too are used fictionally, and only those details known to be accepted historical fact are true.

Vilma’s story is told in diaries, letters, recollections years after the events described, newspaper articles, press releases, gossip columns, and excerpts from the titular biography by Gerald Carstairs. Because of the way in which these items accumulate, Vilma’s story is not always told in a chronological manner. Any reader wishing to orient himself or herself in the specific time line may consult the various filmographies in the appendix that follows the novel and particularly the final section with the title Rest in Peace.

I hope that the reader will find in reading the novel at least a fraction of the enjoyment that the author experienced while writing it.

Tom Canford

Groucho Marx, 1967

Vilma Valentine? She was seventeen when I worked with her and had already buried two husbands. She almost buried me. Too bad At The Beach was such a dog. Irving Thalberg was dead and Louis B. Mayer was a turkey that had lost its gobbler. Mervyn LeRoy produced if you can call it that. If you talk to Merv, tell him to send me the five dollars he owes me. I’ve forgotten who directed or even if it was. Vilma directed the scene with Harpo on the beach. The crutches were her idea. The funniest thing in the movie. The next funniest was hers too, the Ferris wheel. The girl thought visually. Coming from a stunt family, it figures.

In a way Vilma reminded me of Marilyn Monroe who I worked with later. Or a less fleshy Thelma Todd. Remember Thelma Todd? She made two movies with us, Horsefeathers and Monkey Business, before somebody monkeyed with her business in a garage on Pacific Coast Highway, and that’s all she wrote. December 1935. A Night at the Opera was opening. Rave reviews, yes, but Thelma’s murder put a sizeable damper on it. The girl was big, strong as an ox. She was unique, Thelma.

So was Vilma. Vilma could walk onto a set, even in jeans, and you’d think they’d called a wrap. Production came to a vertiginous halt—lights overheated and popped, cameras froze and unfocused, directors become unglued, switch-hitting makeup guys dropped their rouge and hairpins, and Chico’s fingers stiffened at the keyboard. We all knew she was going to be a star. You couldn’t take your eyes off her and some guys their hands. Until she read them the riot act. Vilma’s comic timing, whether deadpan or Anne of Green Gables, was the best. She could do a slow burn the equal of Margaret Dumont’s. She even looked...well, no, give her her due, nobody looked like Margaret Dumont but Margaret Dumont, and nobody had her feet either. Except maybe Vilma. Well, Garbo. Vilma may have had Margaret Dumont’s feet but the rest of her was something movies hadn’t seen before or since. She looked like Thelma Todd only around the eyes and around eight in the morning, depending on what she ate in the morning.

Harry Joe Brown, 1967

Saddle Bum was the last picture I directed and no, it wasn’t Vilma who made me turn exclusively to producing. They say I had problems with her. No way. She was a kid, twelve going on thirteen. And she’d do what she was told, except that once. To hear people tell it, you’d think she was already the vamp they’d make her out to be. She liked flesh all right, but horseflesh. What happened with the horse was an accident no matter what they say. Yak Canutt was stunt captain and main heavy and Vilma’s stepfather, Pete Melendres, was his assistant, doubling Ken Maynard and a couple of other guys. Pete had a gig where he bursts through the bannister of a barroom balcony onto a breakaway table, scattering cards, whores, roughnecks, drinks. It was Vilma’s idea to attach roller skates to the legs so that when the table collapsed, as we’d rigged it to, it would roll. The table rolls, accelerates, Pete stretched out on it like riding a surfboard. Five feet from Yak, who’s standing at the bar playing the bad hombre, Pete sweeps up a spittoon slurping over with dirty butts, tobacco juice, maybe a little vomit. TB juice, we called it. He caroms into Yak, topples him, then empties this shit all over his head. God damn! You should have heard the kids screaming when we showed it the first Saturday matinee. Thereafter, too, I hear. Of course, we had to do it a second time with Ken and Yak in close up. I don’t think Yak ever forgave her for that stunt.

She was Esther when I knew her. Esther Melendres. When she became Vilma Valentine, I saw a lot obits in her movies that I knew were hers. Look at the crazy scene in At the Beach. The crutches. Groucho told me that was her idea.

The Saddle Bum trouble started when I saw Vilma doing a neat horse trick on location and decided we should film it for the movie. Clydette went crying to her mother that I was building Vilma’s role up at her expense. Heck, Vilma didn’t have a role. It wasn’t scripted. Clydette was only in the movie as a favor to her mother who was an agent for cowboy actors. We had to keep on her good side. Pete said why didn’t we let Vilma double Clydette. It did make sense. Clydette, though only a few months older than Vilma, was I’d say a kind of secondary ingenue. Vilma exploded when Pete told her she would do the trick in Clydette’s costume. She refused. Pete told her she’d do it or else. Or else leave the movie. She sulked, kicked, maybe cursed, but eventually put on Clydette’s costume and wig and did what she was told but not before first slugging Clydette, not that I blamed her, the way Clydette was gloating and lording it over her that she had won.

When we got around to filming it, you know what happened.

The stunt work for J. P. McGowan was done by Pete also. We kept the boy busy changing costumes and hats—now Ken Maynard, now J. P. McGowan. Although Ken did most of his own stunts. McGowan played the principal heavy. What’s the word they use today—choreograph? We choreographed this bit, blocked it—it worked beautifully. Then we filmed it. The horse didn’t do like it was trained. It landed both hoofs square in the middle of Pete’s chest, flat-out killed him. The horse was made to buck by way of a flank strap circling its stomach and tightened on his balls by means of a controlling strap. Strapped testicles will cause a horse to buck. One jerk of the belt to tighten, two to loosen. Pete’s invention, the loosening mechanism. Well, it didn’t work. Vilma jerked twice to loosen. The second jerk tightened it more. The horse was furious. It kicked Pete and threw Vilma. The breath was knocked out ofher but she was otherwise unharmed. The boys had a heck of a time catching the horse. Couple of them hurt doing it. The awful thing was Pete. We worked feverishly on him but couldn’t revive him, and Clydette was crying that Vilma had done it on purpose, for spite. A sorry scene. We had it all on film too. Some say the film verifies Clydette’s accusation, Vilma tightening the strap. Bullshit. It shows nothing of the kind. I’ll give Vilma credit. She came back after the funeral and finished the movie. I never heard another hard word between her and Clydette. In fact I never heard any. Vilma doubled Clydette another two days. I wouldn’t have asked her to if it hadn’t been absolutely necessary. I could see it killed her soul to do it.

Clydette White, 1967

I still think it was deliberate, a fit of pique. She misjudged the total and final effectiveness it was to have. However, if I’d not acted on my emotions I wouldn’t have said what I did. Pete Melendres was the focus of an almost sibling rivalry between Vilma and me. Years would go by before I’d realize that. It hurt having to leave the Highwire, having to leave Vilma. I lived with her for over ten years. From the age of three we shared the same bedroom at the ranch. Then accusing me of what she did, and Ofelia believing her. It was a humiliating, hurtful eviction.

William Faulkner, 1957

Even a remote understanding of Vilma Valentine must begin with her past. Nay, even further back, with the past of her father, Richard Milos.

His life is fascinating. Or would be if you could get him to supply the missing details. Sometimes when you talk to him about his life, you get the impression that he’s hanging his words on the line like wash, and if you step back you’ll see the whole wash. When you step back what you see is the whitewash, the daylight between the shorts and socks, the holes, the gaps, the airing that backlights but throws no light on the man who wore these garments, this life. Still, even with all that dark perceived in the glare of the gaps, you can see why Howard Hawks was—maybe still is—interested in putting Richard Milos’s life on film. The question is, which part? I fear it would end up an arabesque of improvisation.

I met Milos when Howard hired him deviously—for Howard had other things in mind for him—to be stunt advisor on Land of the Pharoahs three years ago. I traveled all over the world on that one, which is unusual for me, and I did it only to be in Howard’s company. Cairo, Paris, Rome, Zurich. We filmed everywhere. Milos also directed some of the second unit stuff. Howard and I got to know the man as well as he’d let us. He had a neat bounce of energy for a man of sixty. Mentally as well as physically he had the stamina of a bear. His daughter inherited his coloring—the hair, the skin tone—as well as, I suspect, his penchant for adventure and political intrigue, not to mention his mastery of the elliptical, the daylight between the shorts, and his mastery of horseflesh that he bequeathed to her by genes if not, due to circumstance, by example.

Richard Milos—Milosz, he spelled it in those times past—was a stableman’s son on a Polish estate owned by a German count. It amused the count to own a small circus. The boy toured with it throughout Germany, Poland, the Balkans.

When the war comes, the boy is excused from military service to train cavalry troops on the count’s estate. He gets the count’s daughter pregnant. The count, instead of horsewhipping him and throwing him out, blesses what the count assumes will be the boy’s happy marriage to his daughter. Dutifully, Milos marries her. Despite the promise of wealth as the count’s heir, Milos is disgruntled. Marriage to a German girl is not for him, and neither is training Polish troops to fight for Germany.

In the count’s employ he openly if rashly sympathizes with the nationalist movement that would restore to Poland land such as his German landowner father-in-law holds. Milos is for agrarian reform, which, if effected, would greatly reduce the holdings of the count and Milos’s own future holdings as well. It doesn’t matter. Milos wants to see Germany defeated. A German defeat would hasten agrarian reform. Yet here he is—yes, and his father too, as like-minded in these matters as his son—training riders and horses to fight a cause in opposition to what he believes in.

It weighs on Milos’s mind. But not for long.

He deserts wife, son, infant daughter, father, father-in-law, Poland, and the estate he stands to inherit, and joins the American army just in time to be in that army’s first big European battle in 1918. He’s wounded and sent to hospital, where he becomes friends with Pedro Melendres, a kid from Texas who occupies an adjoining bed. Melendres too is adept with horses and trick riding. After the armistice and their mutual recovery from minor wounds, Melendres returns to the States and Milos accompanies him. Together they tour with a circus from which they part company in Los Angeles. Both slim, good looking guys. Either could have been a star if they’d gone for it. They get movie stunt work. Filming Westerns, Milos meets the daughter of a Mexican-American character actor and marries her, neglecting to mention a wife and children in Poland.

The fruit of Milo’s marriage to Ofelia Rodriguez was Vilma Valentine, christened Esther Milos. Esther Juanita Milos. When she’s three years old, her daddy is kidnapped and returned to his wife and family in Poland. Ofelia thinks she’s been deserted, and so she has, though not by choice. Milos writes to her about what has happened and why he is unable to return due to previous obligations. To ensure her future and that of their daughter, he suggests she take Pete Melendres as her new husband.

After Dick Milos’s return to Poland, the story becomes as chock full of color and packed with action as anything that came before, but now it is more ambiguous, clouded. Milos never talked much about his work with the Resistance. His attempts at clarification only raised more questions. Was he a fighter for the Resistance, or, as some thought, a mole within it? To me it’s debatable. I think he prefers it that way.

Eventually I told Howard I wouldn’t write the screenplay. Milos wouldn’t cooperate, and not knowing the whole story how could I proceed? Howard was also interested in doing a film about Vilma. With Marilyn Monroe as Vilma and Jane Russell as Clydette White. I guess he couldn’t come down off Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I wouldn’t touch Vilma’s story with a ten-foot pole. Where do you start? You’d need Hemingway for one part and Vicki Baum for another. And, as I told Howard, just because I knew her doesn’t mean I knew her.

Los Angeles Examiner, March 19,1920

NEW STUNT RANCH WILL TRAIN COWBOY STUNT MEN

Fairbanks Stunt Captain Involved Will Offer 3-Week Course

Want to be a movie cowboy and can’t ride a horse? Or fly through the air with the greatest of ease? Ride a bull?

Richard Milosz, former circus trick rider and aerialist now working with Douglas Fairbanks, is starting a school for stuntmen. The school will be at the Santo Rodriguez ranch near San Fernando which will henceforth, under Mr. Milosz’s management, be known as the Highwire. Plans include expanding the program to include women at a later date.

We’ll be teaching all aspects of cowboy and Indian trick riding as well as circus stunts, said Mr. Milosz.

The training will include highwire, rings, horses, acrobatics. The first course will be limited to cowboy and circus stunt basics. In time Milosz plans to bring in fencing instructors, all to help fill a growing need in movies for people who can double actors unskilled in the action arts, a category which Mr. Milosz stresses does not include Mr. Fairbanks, who was recently injured doing his own stunts for Mollycoddle on the Arizona location from which Mr. Milosz has just returned.

Mr. Milosz purchased the San Fernando Valley ranch from Santo Rodriguez, an actor and expert horseman who happens to be Mr. Milosz’s father-in-law. After the sale Mr. Rodriguez relocated to Santa Monica.

Mr. Milosz’s first class will be limited to ten male students. It will begin on Monday, April 5, to last a total of five weeks. Men accepted for the class will spend the entire training period at the ranch. They will be billeted in a bunkhouse on the property and will eat communally. Room and board will be figured in the tuition.

Mr. Milosz urges anyone interested in the course to get his application in immediately. Applicants will be required to demonstrate aptitude before acceptance. All those accepted must begin residence at the Highwire on the afternoon of Sunday, April 4.

Los Angeles Examiner, November 2,1920

FREAK ACCIDENT KILLS DOCTOR DELIVERING BABY

Richard Milos, who runs a cowboy stunt school near here, and his wife, Ofelia, are having a muted celebration of the birth of the couple’s first child, Esther Juanita, born at home this past Sunday, October 31.

The celebration is muted because the happy occasion was touched by tragedy. The doctor in attendance died while getting the child to breathe.

According to actor Santo Rodriguez, father of Mrs. Milos, Dr. Juan Carreras, the family physician, spanked the child three times. Getting no response, he took a step backward for better leverage for a fourth slap and slipped on a throw rug at the side of the bed. In falling he tossed the baby to a nurse who caught her. Dr. Carreras struck his head on the side of a foot locker and died at the same moment the infant, with a sharp cry, drew her first breath.

Yakima Canutt, 1967

She wasn’t beautiful as a kid, not in the way she became. A kind of know-it-all. She was appealing in her eagerness to learn, but she was obnoxious with it. To say that she had a high opinion of herself is to say that a cow drops dung. What she dropped was so fresh you could smell it. I’m talking ego. She wanted to be a stunt woman. Not a star. I don’t think she ever wanted to be a star. She was pure tomboy but there was no hiding the pure blossoming woman underneath the wildness. That kid was alive and into everything. Withdrawn, too. Secretive. Like she didn’t want you to see what she was into, or up to. I saw it way back then, through that unwashed face of hers she was no ordinary piece of ornery, she was a tall jagged peak of it. What I didn’t figure her for was trouble.

I’ve outlived Melendres by thirty-five years, and Dick Milos by three, and Vilma by twenty. Milos and I had the same birthday. October 29. Of course I was older.

Now everybody always hoots when I say this. You can laugh if you want but I’m going to say it anyway. I think there was something supernatural about her. I’m not surprised that practically every year of the twenty she’s been gone you read that somebody thinks they’ve seen her. Marion Davies and Hearst saw her in Athens, chased her through the Parthenon. A year after she died Pat Bryan saw her in a night club in Juarez. He fainted and she vanished. A bit more than a year later Pat was murdered on Valentine’s Day no less. The spiritualists and tabloids stumbled all over themselves hyping that one. The ghost done it. The same ghost that was seen hovering at Milos’s deathbed.

I worked with her after she was grown, too. On Buffalo I was Errol Flynn’s stunt double. She was a girl passing as a boy for more than half the movie. The way her hair was cut, costuming and all, she looked like a boy. She was even stuffed. It was a joke. She had a bigger basket than Flynn’s. Until he stuffed his to outdo her. News for you, he was always stuffed. Stuffed or not, in jeans she didn’t look much different from what she looked on Saddle Bum, and I kept remembering what had happened to poor Pete on that one. I was a nervous wreck on Buffalo.

Buffalo was 1940? Jimmy Cody died the year before—at her house, nobody quite sure how, but they got the body from her house to his, and you know they had to settle a bundle on the wife to keep her quiet.