[Celebrity Murder Case 05] - The Greta Garbo Murder Case Read online

  THE

  GRETA GARBO

  MURDER

  CASE

  BY

  GEORGE BAXT

  ST MARTIN'S PRESS

  NEW YORK

  THE GRETA GARBO MURDER CASE.

  All rights reserved. Copyright © 1992 by George Baxt.

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  Design by Judith Stagnito

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Baxt, George.

  The Greta Garbo murder case / George Baxt.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-06988-X

  1. Garbo, Greta, 190S—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.A8478G74 1992

  813'.54—dc2091-38122

  CIP

  First Edition: March 1992

  10 987654321

  for

  Hope Dellon

  and

  Eleanor Sullivan

  with love and gratitude

  ONE

  She wanted to scream for help, but didn’t dare. If someone came to her rescue, how would she explain her situation? Could she dare admit she was spying? Eavesdropping on a conspiracy, or what she and her employer suspected was a conspiracy. Real blood-and-guts stuff, grist for the mills of the dime pulps. She paused in her flight to catch her breath and remove her sandals. It would be easier to run along the sand barefoot. She looked behind her and saw nothing, heard nothing. But still, they could be there, not too far behind, pursuing her, and if they caught her, they’d kill her. They were without mercy, these conspirators. In time of war, mercy is redundant. And the United States was at war, with Nazi Germany and with Japan. Was it only a month since the infamy of Pearl Harbor? God, how time flies when you’re in danger.

  She climbed a dune and then hunkered down for a moment to gain her bearings. Under the Pacific blackout it was almost impossible to see anything. Only the stars were twinkling, as only the stars over Santa Monica could twinkle. There was a curtain of haze over the moon, and the waves breaking against the shore sounded like the staccato of gunfire.

  Garbo. What the hell does Garbo have to do with this? While eavesdropping in the tastelessly furnished mansion just a few hundred yards past Marion Davies’s immense beach house, she’d heard Garbo’s name mentioned several times.

  “Garbo would be perfect.” A man’s deep baritone, German accent. Although with the war on, nowadays for German you could read Swiss or Austrian.

  “Isn’t she a bit old?” Woman’s voice, continental, but which brand of continental? Hard to detect.

  “Is thirty-seven so old?” Pleasant voice. European too, but what part European? France? Hungary? He repeated his question. 'Is thirty-seven so old?”

  “I don’t give a good god damn how old she is, we need her.” The deep baritone, very officious. Undoubtedly used to giving orders and demanding and receiving respect.

  “Why not Dietrich?” The woman, continental voice.

  A derisive snort was followed by the baritone’s, “You think Garbo’s too old? Dietrich’s forty-three, God bless her.”

  “Oh, she can’t be. She’s so divine looking.” A new country heard from. Possibly Italy, British educated. Male.

  “I want Garbo.” The baritone nailed his demand to their ears.

  “Hush.” The woman, continental voice. “I think someone’s out there.”

  The woman held her breath. She had managed to raise the window slightly without their hearing her. What had she done to give herself away? Oh Christ, it was a poodle. A nasty black poodle with ribbons in its elegant, expensive coiffure. It wagged its tail and licked her face while she gave it a rough shove away from her. Roundly insulted, the dog gave voice, and, fearful of discovery, the woman took off. Luckily, the dog didn’t pursue her. But she heard a door open and a voice shout, “There! Over there! Heading toward the dunes! I see something!”

  “Here! See! The window is slightly open. Someone’s been listening.”

  “Stop shouting! Quiet! You’ll wake up William Randolph Hearst.”

  “It’s about time someone did.” Possibly Italy, British educated.

  “Wh-wh-wh-what the hell’s g-g-going on out there?” Marion Davies was a vision of middle-aged dissipation, standing in the enclosed garden of her Santa Monica beach house, one hand on her left hip and the other holding a fresh highball.

  “I don’t hear anything,” said her melancholy guest, her voice smoky and husky and reeking with despair.

  “I w-w-wonder who’s living in that b-b-b-big dump.”

  “I only hear the crashing of the waves.” Her chuckle was dry and brittle. “Better to hear the crashing of waves then the crashing of careers. No, Marion?”

  “Y-y-y-yes Greta.”

  “Marion, why is it you never stuttered on screen?”

  “S-s-s-self c-c-control Have another sherry'.”

  “I still have some.”

  “Have more. We’re up to our hips in amontillado. The old bugger knew there’d be a war so he had gallons of it imported from Spain or wherever it comes from.”

  ‘‘You’re not stuttering.”

  “It comes and it goes.”

  “You’re a fraud.”

  Davies smiled. She admired her guest’s unique beauty. William Daniels, the cameraman, had said of her, “Greta Garbo doesn’t have an unphotographable angle. You can place the camera anywhere and she’ll emerge on film more breathtaking than an old master.”

  “Why didn’t you marry’ John Gilbert?” Davies asked Garbo. “He wanted children.”

  “So?”

  “Somewhere there’s an unborn child who’s terribly lucky I’m not its mother.”

  “What a terrible thing to say about yourself.”

  “Why haven’t you had children?”

  “Out of wedlock? Are you mad?”

  Garbo’s laugh was like an explosion of dynamite. “All these decades living in sin … ha ha ha … and you wouldn’t consider mothering a bastard?”

  “I am mothering a bastard. He’s asleep upstairs. What are you staring at?”

  “Worms.”

  “What kind of worms?”

  “Insignificant ones. I’m sure. Without a care in the world. They don’t face a meeting with Louis B. Mayer tomorrow morning.”

  “You still under contract to Metro?”

  “On paper, yes. In my soul, no.”

  “You haven’t done a picture in a year. I thought Two-Faced Woman was kind of cute.”

  Garbo got up from her chair and stretched her arms lavishly. “There were two great cataclysms in 1941, Pearl Harbor and Two-Faced Woman. She leaned over and resumed staring at the worms. “Marion?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “I wonder how worms make love.” Davies suppressed a shudder and swigged her highball. “Don’t you suppose they repulse each other? And yet, there are so many worms, billions and trillions of them. I should imagine, come to think of it, worms must be very sexy.”

  “Greta, if you ever decide to go into analysis, can I sit in on a few sessions?”

  Garbo now concentrated on the haze-covered moon. “Look at the moon.”

  “I’ve already seen it.”

  “Look at the haze. They call that a Bomber’s Moon.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Yes it is. It is perfect for raiding airplanes. Not too bright t
o give them away, not too dull to obscure their targets.”

  “Where the hell do you pick up stuff like that?”

  “The Reader’s Digest,” came the world-weary reply. “I think I’ll go home.”

  “Why, for crying out loud? It’s early yet.”

  “I must be up early to run on the beach.”

  “What an exhausting idea. You Swedes beat hell. No wonder there’s such a high rate of suicide in Sweden.”

  “Thank you for dinner, it was lovely.”

  “Oh?” asked Davies through an alcoholic haze, “Did we eat dinner?”

  Fifteen minutes later, Garbo sat alone on her patio facing the ocean, deep in thought. As she did too frequently, she dwelt morbidly on the past. Her abusive, alcoholic father. Her passive and permissive mother. Then she thought of Marie Curie and wondered why Louis B. Mayer was no longer interested in filming Curie’s life story.

  “Nothing happens!” Mayer had insisted at their last meeting. “She discovers radium. Big deal!”

  “But you made two pictures about Thomas Edison.”

  “They both lost money!” Mayer puffed ferociously on his cigar. “For a while there I considered your doing something really different, like playing Mother Goddam in The Shanghai Gesture. Y’know, Von Sternberg’s bomb. But then I figured, what the hell, you’ve played enough whores. Even though a Chinese whore would’ve been a change of pace.” He smiled benignly. “So I didn’t bother you with the idea.”

  “Thank you for having the good taste to spare me your bad taste.” And tomorrow morning there was to be another confrontation with the despised head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. I am thirty-seven years old, she thought, and I am still a beautiful woman. I am very wealthy, I need never want for the rest of my life. This tiresome war, how long could it possibly last? A year, maybe two, and then I could resume traveling. The Far East, how I yearn to travel to the Far East. Damn the Japanese. Damn the Germans. Damn Louis B. Mayer. “Who’s there?”

  She heard a noise coming from beneath the patio. She looked over the railing, and saw what seemed to be the figure of a woman emerging from behind a rose bush and running across the sand toward Peter Lorre’s house. She thought of alerting the police and just as quickly scrubbed the idea. The house swarming with police was not her idea of absolute privacy. Probably some young girl playing hide-and-seek with her lover.

  Lover. How long has it been since I’ve had a lover? And if I had one now, how would I handle the situation? My career teetering on the edge of oblivion, a world at war and I’m not cut out to be a soldier. I could be a leader, but never a follower. What shall I do? What shall I do? She snapped her fingers. I’ll make some Ovaltine.

  Peter Lorre was urbane enough to smile charmingly at his unwelcome guest.

  She had scrabbled at his back door and for a moment he thought it might be a neighbor’s dog come to beg for scraps. On the other hand, it could be the police. He hastily secreted his stash of cocaine in its hiding place in the butler’s larder when the scrabbling became more insistent. He crossed to the back door and opened it a crack. “Yes, what do you want? Don’t you know there’s a blackout?”

  She pleaded, “Please let me in. I’ve lost my way. I need to call a cab.”

  It was a young voice and young voices usually emitted from young faces and young faces usually belonged to young bodies and Lorre was partial to young bodies. “Hurry.” He pulled the door back and she hurried in. She was carrying a purse and a pair of sandals, and the windblown hair partially obscuring her face could not camouflage her beauty.

  “Thank you, you’re very kind.” Then she recognized him. “You’re Peter Lorre.”

  “Yes,” he acknowledged eagerly, “and my wife’s away.”

  “If you could show me the phone.”

  He wanted to show her something else, but Jack Warner had only recently cautioned him about his indiscretions with young women. “I’d be delighted to show you my phone. I think you’ll find it quite attractive. It’s lilac, the only lilac-colored telephone in all Hollywood.” She followed him into the tastefully furnished sitting room with what was usually a spectacular view of the Pacific Ocean, but now was heavily draped to keep the light in and the view out. “You look all tuckered. Has someone been chasing you?”

  “I’m not sure. I think so. I was walking on the beach…”

  “That’s very dangerous in the blackout…”

  “I do it frequently. Nothing untoward has ever happened.” You’ve never met Lorre before, he was thinking, and then silently admonished himself. He said, “You were walking on the beach, and … ?”

  “I suddenly heard these noises behind me, you know, that slop-slop noise shoes make when they’re running on sand.”

  “Oh yes. I’m a slop-slop maven.”

  “Maven?”

  “Connoisseur, Yiddish version.” His real name was Laszlo Lowenstein.

  "Mavent,” she repeated solemnly. “I like it.”

  “Shall we go back to the slop-slop noise?”

  “If you insist. Well anyway, I began to run. I just panicked. I ran past Marion Davies’s place…”

  “Why didn’t you ask for help there?”

  “I couldn’t find the back door.”

  “Marion is always misplacing things.”

  “And then I hid behind a rose bush under a patio…”

  “That sounds like Greta’s place.”

  “Garbo?”

  “Hardly Rabinowitz.”

  “I should have liked to have met Greta Garbo.”

  “Well, apparently you’ve shaken your pursuers.” There was a firm knock at the back door. “Apparently you haven’t” He indicated a door to her left. “The only person who looks in that closet is my wife. Closets are her secret vice and on indiscreet occasions my undoing.” The knock was now firmer.

  “Perhaps it’s your wife.”

  “Goodness no. She has a key. She even knows how to use it.” She slipped into the closet as he went to the back door. He opened it and recognized one of the private policemen the community had hired to patrol the area since war had been declared.

  “Why, Thomas Toth, I do declare. What brings you to my back door at this hour?”

  “Have you seen a young woman?”

  “If I had, I wouldn’t tell you.”

  “That’s usually Groucho’s line.”

  “What kind of a young woman did you have in mind?”

  “One on the run. She was last seen by Miss Garbo’s neighbor darting around under her patio.”

  “Anyone would be safe under Greta’s patio.”

  “Obviously you haven’t seen her.”

  “Obviously. Is this my cue to invite you in for a drink?”

  “No, thanks. My partner’s waiting for me near your dune.”

  ‘It’s a very comfortable dune. I designed it myself.”

  “Mr. Lorre, you sure are a caution.” He disappeared into the darkness and Lorre shut the door, hoping the light from the kitchen hadn’t attracted any Japanese bombers cavorting overhead in wild abandon. He hurried back to the living room and opened the closet door. She wasn’t there.

  “Hello?” He shut the door and crossed to the adjoining library. She wasn’t there either. He went from room to room, but there was no sign of his night visitor. He said aloud, “She doesn’t exist. It was all my imagination. I better go easy on the cocaine.”

  At ten o’clock the following morning, Greta Garbo sat across from Louis B. Mayer. His good right arm and master spy, Ida Koverman, sat near Mayer. Garbo wondered if Koverman’s perpetual smile had been plastered onto her face.

  “Now Greta darling,” Mayer said cozily, “we certainly wish to continue making pictures with you, but you have to understand, they can’t carry big budgets anymore.” Garbo said nothing. A sphinx never speaks. “Your major market is lost to us.” He was uncomfortable. “Europe is gone. You’re big in Europe, very big, but you’ve lost your American audience. But darling, we’d like to continue starring y
ou and we’ll stockpile these films and when the war is over, we’ll bombard Europe with them.”

  She finally spoke, mournfully. “Poor Europe. Always bombarded.”

  “You agree, don’t you, Ida?”

  “Oh yes,” piped Koverman, who had years ago mastered the Hollywood art of saying yes.

  “So you see, Greta, we can’t spend too much money on your next films. We have to bring them in on the budgets we have for the Andy Hardy and the Doctor Kildare series.”

  “I see.”

  “But we can do some very lovely subjects. We have an idea for one where you play twin sisters…

  She moaned, “But I just played sisters and it was a disaster.”

  “But they weren’t really sisters,” interjected Koverman, “it was a woman making believe she was her own twin sister…”

  “Please Ida, don’t remind me.”

  Mayer stepped in swiftly. “These twin sisters are very different. One is a schoolteacher in Brooklyn and the other is a Nazi spy. And the schoolteacher is mistaken for the Nazi and she’s in trouble with Conrad Voidt…”

  “It is not for Greta Garbo, Louis.”

  Mayer rubbed his eyes. “We have a play by Noel Coward, We Were Dancing. Norma Shearer wants to do it, but I think I can talk her out of it.”

  “Please don’t. I hear she’s having a hard time with Mickey Rooney.”

  “That’s a lie!” roared Mayer.

  “Oh Louis, I don’t care if she is or she isn’t. Noel Coward is very droll. I am not droll. I am sad.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you. Jack Warner has a movie coming up called The Conspirators. All-star cast. Of course you’ll get top billing. He asked for Hedy but I know if I tell him you’re interested, he’ll be beside himself.”

  “You wish to loan me out to Jack Warner?”

  Mayer spread out his hands. “Why not?”

  Garbo said forlornly, “Louis, I don’t want to be a loan.”

  TWO

  Later that day, sharing the patio with her closest friend and confidante, Salka Viertel, Garbo asked mournfully, “What’s to become of me now that I’m forgotten and forsaken?”

  Salka smiled as she applied a match to a cigarette. “You’ll never be forgotten and you’ll never be forsaken.” A Polish refugee, the woman had struggled her way to Hollywood and in no time learned English and became one of the film industry’s highest paid scriptwriters. She had worked on several of Garbo’s films and was one of the few people to win the star’s trust and admiration.