Someone to Watch Over Me

By Dan Bronson

"If Raymond Chandler had turned a steely eye to the notorious Hollywood casting couch, the result might well be called Someone To Watch Over Me."—Malcolm Brooks, author of Painted Horses and Cloudmaker

 

Hollywood, 1947. Jack Shannon, a former actor whose promising career was interrupted by the war and ended by a facial scar sustained in combat, is now a studio publicist.  He jokes that the only thing he knows about publicity is how to suppress it, but that, in fact, is his real job.  He's a fixer who babysits the studio's stars and covers up their bad behavior.

 

Everything changes for Jack when Savannah Stevens enters his life.  A sexpot star in the mold of Jean Harlow and the studio's biggest box-office draw, she's a deeply troubled young woman given to emotional breakdowns, unexplained absences from the set, and time-devouring delays occasioned by her paralyzing insecurities and her insistence on dozens of takes.

 

Jack's job is to stay with her 24/7, deliver her to the set on time each day, and make sure she completes her current picture, a picture on which the future of the studio depends.  All goes well until Savannah disappears, and Jack is assigned the task of finding her…without revealing to anyone, including the police, that she is missing.

 

 

"There was Sam Spade, Lew Archer, Travis McGee. Now there is Jack Shannon." —Jameson Parker, Recovering Actor (Simon and Simon), Working Writer (Dancing with the Dead)

• Language: English
• Publisher: BearManor Media
• Release date: Mar 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393012177

Book preview

1

I’m a nursemaid.

Six-two. Built like a heavyweight. A dandy scar across my cheek. And what do I do?

I babysit…for the studios.

One studio, actually. Titanic Pictures. Big. Unsinkable. Like the ship.

They call the spoiled children I look after stars. You know. Up above the world so high. They got that part right. Some of them put a lot of effort into getting high and staying there.

Like a diamond in the sky. That’s how they see themselves, and that’s certainly the way the studio bigwigs see them. Diamonds. Gems. Assets.

Money in the bank.

The problem is that at the end of the business day, these assets walk right out of the vault and put themselves at risk. Risk of exposure as brawlers, drunkards, whoremongers, and worse. That’s where I come in.

My job is to protect them from themselves.

Think of it this way.

You walk onto a studio lot…if you’re lucky enough to get past the guard at the gate, and you see row after row of identical buildings—big, maybe not as big as blimp hangars but almost, with high white walls and rainbow roofs. You spot an elephant door cracked partway open on one of them, sneak inside, and find a construction crew putting the finishing touches on a set that outshines the Taj Mahal.

Soaring staircases.

Glistening gold domes.

And in the middle…a pair of massive wooden doors carved with the inviting figures of unicorns, satyrs, and lovely ladies pursued by handsome lords.

The gateway to romance!

You slip past the carpenters and painters, through the doors to the other side, and are confronted with a blank wall, its heavy insulation spilling from the tears and rents of years of use. Aside from that…

…nothing.

Nothing except, perhaps, a pile of construction trash.

Just then a guard discovers you and escorts you out the gate, warning you never to darken the studio’s doorstep again.

The sound stage set and the stars who act on it, they’re a lot alike—constructed images with nothing much behind them but trash. And me, I’m that guard…except I’m better at my job. If it’d been me, you’d never have gotten onto that stage, never peeked behind that door.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

I’m the guy who keeps you from looking behind the curtain and who, if you do, makes sure you forget what you’ve seen. I try to keep you on that yellow brick road with visions of the Emerald City dancing in your eyes.

My official title?

Publicist.

Right.

The only thing I know about publicity is how to suppress it.

Let’s call a spade a spade. I am, like I said, a nursemaid, though I guess I should say, for the sake of accuracy, I was a nursemaid.

After all, that difference in tense—my trip from am to was—is really what this story is all about.

2

I say Brian Murphy…and you say?

Warm. Solid. A man’s man.

Someone you’d like to know, right? Someone you could count on. Someone who’d always have your back.

Doesn’t matter what he plays. Priest or pilot. Father or friend. He’s your kind of guy. It’s that image that made him the number one box-office draw in America and Titanic’s single most important asset.

So he was a raging, violent alcoholic.

So what? What did it matter…as long as the public didn’t know?

Murphy was my current assignment, and my job, of course, was to keep you from knowing that man behind the curtain.

I kind of liked him. I myself had been known to get a little oiled from time to time. I might even have torn up a few bars here and there. But I couldn’t hold a candle to Brian Murphy.

He saw the demolition of gin joints, nightclubs and the occasional movie set as a sacred duty. It was his favorite sport…along with whoring whenever the opportunity presented itself, and in his case, it presented itself constantly.

Now, again like him, I’d never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth, though with a mug like mine, windfalls like that were few and far between. What I’m trying to say is this: Murphy seemed to recognize a kindred spirit in me. He liked me enough to accept me as his publicist after putting a bunch of others on the serious casualty list.

So there I sat, inside Stage 12, waiting for him to die.

Lights all around him. The lens only a few feet from that chiseled face of his. Terence Ardmore, the director, crouching alongside the camera. Twenty or thirty crew scattered about the set, which was a pretty good facsimile of an out-cropping in the Alabama Hills where we did most of the shooting.

I’d been there on location with him, beginning to end, holed up at the Dow Villa in Lone Pine—classier than the freight cars I used to call home but not exactly the Biltmore.

I never let him out of my sight. I couldn’t stop his drinking, of course. No one could. No one except him.

He actually did it every now and then. Cold turkey. On the wagon a month. Sometimes two or three. One time, over a year. And then it would begin all over as suddenly as it had ended, usually with a lot of drama.

It had been a couple of years since his last breather.

These days, he’d start out sober. Show up on the set knowing all his lines. Give a perfect performance. And the instant the A.D. called the wrap, head for one of the bars that lined Lone Pine’s main drag. It was a little shit-hole of a town out in the middle of the high desert, but it had enough dives and honky-tonks to service a city.

Murphy would drink himself pie-eyed, and I’d stay busy pretending to match him drink for drink, trying to keep that white-hot temper of his from boiling over, and paying for the damages when it did.

For ten weeks I never left his side. Now we were back at the studio, last day of the shoot, and I was steeling myself for the big drunk that inevitably came when he finished a picture.

So there he was, about to die in close-up after muttering a few words to the invisible companions who’d rushed to his side when he was shot and who were now off in their dressing rooms, getting ready for the wrap party that evening.

Quiet, everyone.

Roll sound.

Speed.

Scene 256. Take 1.

The slap of the sticks.

And…action.

Murphy looks up at those missing companions. Speaks in a hard-won whisper.

We had a good ride, didn’t we?

His eyes drift shut. A final tremor. And he dies.

I’ll be damned if I didn’t tear up. After all the trouble he’d caused me, you’d think I’d be glad to see him go. But the really amazing thing was that he didn’t appear to be doing anything. Especially not acting.

And…cut.

The overhead lights came up. Murphy got to his feet. Ardmore rushed over and hugged him.

Goddamn, that was beautiful!

With his arm still around his star’s shoulders, Ardmore led him away from the rest of us, speaking in hushed, almost inaudible tones. Just then, I heard a voice at my side.

Jack?

I looked up from my director’s chair at the backlit figure looming above me: my boss, Ted Bauer.

Wavy hair streaked with gray. A Gary Cooper jaw. A voice as smooth as high-grade whiskey. All in all, a classy package gift-wrapped in a Saville Row suit.

Let’s go.

Bauer was Head of Publicity at Titanic. If he said Walk, he expected you to run. If he said Run, he expected Olympic Gold.

Me, I was never real good at following orders. I had what they called an attitude, an attitude that got me in trouble more than once during the war and got me into trouble with Bauer all the time. But I was good at my job—too good for him to fire, especially since it was the top dog here who’d forced him to hire me in the first place.

I stayed in my chair.

We’re ready to wrap. You know what that means as far as Brian’s concerned. He’s not going to wait until the party to start drinking.

I’m putting Buddy on it. You and I have an appointment with Adler.

Great.

Buddy Moses was just a kid. Good for one thing: standing in front of a mirror combing his hair. Endlessly.

The perfect guy to handle Murphy.

I got up reluctantly and was following Bauer toward the door when I heard Murphy’s voice, splitting with rage.

Godammit, Terence! I said one take, and one’s all you’re gonna get from me. I’m sick of doing things over and over. I get it right first time out of the gate. Why can’t you?

I winced at his words and at the bright blade of light cutting through the door from outside.

3

Sunny Southern California!

Nothing but bowers and flowers and birdies that sing, right?

We’ve all heard the song. Hell, there are probably thousands of hopefuls belting it out right now while they hitch their way across the country to the Promised Land.

California, Here They Come! It’s awfully nice. In fact, it’s paradise.

It’s the sun kissing mountain tops forever green…if you can see the damned things through the smog. As for those birdies singing in bowers…most of them end up choking on the air they’re trying to breathe. California might have lived up to its billing back in the twenties when Jolson introduced the song, but in 1947?

Let me put it this way.

When we left the set of Murphy’s movie and stepped outside, I found myself squinting down that long corridor of sound stages at a sun boiling in a red-orange soup of smog.

Another perfect end to another perfect day.

We headed toward the Admin Building, leaving the sound stages behind us and walking fast through the streets of Tombstone and New York, past Notre Dame de Paris and the British Parliament buildings, over the Thames and into a jungle unspoiled by the cries of birds or animals, alive instead with the hum of spinning tires and the honking horns of metal beasts prowling the road on the other side of the wall.

Bauer moved with an easy, confident stride—unless he happened to be walking with Abraham Adler, the head of the studio and the man we were racing off to meet. When he was with Adler, he moved like Adler…with a bit of a slouch and a barely discernible limp. He became his shadow. His twin.

Adler himself loved to point out that in Hebrew, Abraham meant Father of All. That, he insisted, was how he saw himself in relation to his hundreds upon hundreds of employees.

Now I wouldn’t want to suggest Bauer was a kiss-ass, but it was pretty obvious that he hoped to be Isaac to Adler’s Abraham. Surrogate son. And with luck…successor. Anything for dear old Dad.

What he was overlooking, of course, was the fact that Dad, like the Abraham of old, would sacrifice him in an instant for the good of the studio. Abe Adler worshipped the box-office. He had no other gods before it. And he’d offer up anyone or anything to placate it.

In any case, for the time being at least, Adler was the hand, and Bauer was his glove.

I’ve gotta admit, Ted Bauer was like that with everyone—politicians, cops, reporters, gossip columnists. He himself would tell you, no matter whose name came up, "He (or she) and I are just like this," demonstrating their intimate relationship by twisting his fore and middle fingers together.

That’s what made him Head of Publicity at Titanic. There was no one of importance in the city of L.A. that he didn’t know and couldn’t pay off with a campaign donation, a little money under the table, or, best of all, because it didn’t cost anything, an exclusive.

Now if Adler and he were Abraham and Isaac, he and I were Cain and Abel. It remained to be seen which was which, but I was sure of one thing: there was no love lost there. None at all.

I suppose you’re wondering about a guy like me quoting the Bible. How the hell did that come about?

I’m the first one to tell you, I was invited to leave just about every school I ever went to. Spent more time in detention than in the classroom. They sent those of us honored with a place on the teachers’ shit lists to the library, and I found out I liked to read.

Books.

Any kind. Any category. Couldn’t get enough.

When I wasn’t in detention, I had a habit of skipping school altogether and hanging out at the Bijou where they ran movies all day and all night. But that’s another story.

Bauer hadn’t said a word since we’d left the stage, so I decided to break the silence.

What’s it about?

Miss Madsen wouldn’t say. Very tight-lipped.

Her lips are always tight.

Margaret Madsen was Adler’s executive secretary.

Ramrod straight. Tough as case-hardened steel. Brooked no nonsense of any kind and completely controlled access to the big man. Some of us suspected she was the one who really ran the studio and that she was half in love with the boss, a secret she kept even from herself.

So…

Over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother’s house we went. Up the steps and through the doors…

…and there she was: Cerberus at the Gate!

Gray hair. Gray eyes. Gray suit.

She gave us her usual withering look.

Please sit down. Mr. Adler is tied up in a meeting that’s gone unexpectedly long.

No one had ever seen her smile.

Or laugh.

Oh, there was an unconfirmed rumor that once, back in the very early days of the studio, there was a momentary break in the black cloud perpetually hovering above her head, a faint hint of a curve forming on her lips, but it passed before those who saw it could be sure.

In fact, we had an office pool going. The first of us to get even the suggestion of a smile from her would take the whole pot…if they had a witness to confirm the event. I knew it was hopeless, but I always gave it my best effort.

Miss Madsen…Meg.

A Medusa stare.

I know this is short notice, but Nat King Cole’s going to be over at Ciro’s tonight, and I thought you might like to join me there. You know. Sip a little champagne. Trip the light fantastic. Who knows?

She cut me off so hard and fast, I’m still bleeding.

"Sit down, Mr. Shannon."

I shrugged, turned, looked over at Ted, and winked. He was not amused.

I sat, as instructed, and waited dutifully in the painful silence of the anteroom, a silence broken only by the clack, zip and ding of Miss Madsen’s typewriter as she attacked the keyboard with an unsettling ferocity.

4

I have to admit that I was tempted to leave this chapter blank.

To put nothing in it.

Why?

Because that’s exactly what happened.

Nothing.

We waited two hours with me slouching in my chair and Bauer maintaining a posture as broomstick-straight as Miss Madsen herself. God only knew what Brian Murphy might be up to in my absence, but there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. So I focused on listening.

Most of Adler’s meetings ran ten minutes. Never more than fifteen. There could no doubt about it: something was up on the other side of those double doors.

His office was better soundproofed than any of the stages on the lot, so it might just have been my imagination, but when I concentrated hard enough, I convinced myself that I could hear two voices, both of them raised. Shouting. But it was faint, so faint that it may have been nothing more than a fan in the cooling system they’d just installed in the building.

After two hours, Miss Madsen’s gray face began to glow in the flash of a blinking red light, and she picked up one of the several phones on her desk.

Yes?

A long pause.

I understand.

She hung up, turned to us, and said, without any wasted words, Eight tomorrow morning. Sharp.

5

Remember old Henry Ford telling us we could have any color car we wanted as long as it was black?

Well, that’s what I had when I first got the job in Publicity.

A black Ford Coupe.

Anything but new. Doors dimpled with dents. A slightly crumpled rear fender. Some scratches to give it character.

But it got the job done. At least it did until I had to pick up Bauer at his home one day and drive him in to the studio.

"Jesus, Jack! You can’t drive a wreck like this. This is Hollywood. You are what you drive."

Well, then, I’ve probably got the right car.

I’m serious.

So am I. This is what I can afford. Now if you want to consider giving me a raise…

I’ll do better than that. I’ll buy you a new car.

It turned out that there would be no commonplace Ford, Chevy or Dodge for yours truly. I was going to be ferrying around stars! Only a sexy import would do.

Bauer chose the car and the color: a late-model Triumph Roadster in a tasteful dark blue.

Stylish but restrained.

A lot like me.

Right.

I figured, what the hell, the studio was paying for it. Why would a stylish and restrained guy like me complain?

So I had to pick up the tab when it broke down. So what? It didn’t happen more than every other week. After all, those Brits really know how to build a car.

Anyhow, when the Dragon Lady finally dismissed us, I didn’t waste any time pondering the mystery of what had been going on in Adler’s office. I just raced for the Triumph and tore out of the studio.

My destination?

The Chateau Marmont.

A luxury hotel favored by the rich and famous and disguised as a French castle, it perched on a hillside just above Sunset, conveniently located across the street from the Garden of Allah Apartments where many of our best-known stars gathered to sport and cavort.

The Marmont was Brian Murphy’s current residence, the latest in the succession of hotels he called home.

Truth be known (and of course, as you know, it was my job to prevent that), he actually had a home. It was in the San Fernando Valley, and it came neatly furnished with a wife and children.

Oh, yeah. He was married, but he did his best to forget it, and for the most part, he succeeded.

Sure, we occasionally had to remind him of this unfortunate fact and herd him over there for some public relations shots of our star happily ensconced at home with his even happier family. But most of the time, when he wasn’t working at the studio or trashing a favorite bar, he holed up at the Marmont, entertaining an endless succession of eager young women and emptying an equally endless succession of bottles.

That’s where I was hoping to find him before he launched himself on the monumental bender that inevitably followed the completion of a film.

I squealed to a stop, tossed my keys to the valet, hurried to Brian’s cottage, and knocked lightly on the door.

No response.

Warm, inviting light glowed out into the night from the windows on either side of the door.

I knocked again.

Waited.

Pulled out the duplicate key I always carried in my pocket. And I let myself into the living room, where I spotted random pieces of the outfit Murphy had worn for his death scene scattered about: the vest crumpled on the tile floor, the hat crushed on the