A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking Read online

  Rhea Gore, mother of John Huston and grandmother of'Angelica, was a terrific journalist and a helluva lady. She taught me plenty about crime reporting.

  "If this is a double suicide," said Rhea, after a careful look at the two bodies, "then I'm flying back to Manhattan tomorrow by flapping my arms."

  She figured it as a murder, except the murderer had gotten away with his crime by putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. The only way to find out for sure, she explained, was to be invited to the autopsy. The next day, Rhea became the coroner's best buddy and wrangled her way into the county morgue, where they'd brought the corpses. Rhea's hunch turned out to be right on the money. The woman had died by strangulation, the man by a self-inflicted gunshot. They proved she'd fought like crazy, because they scraped little pieces of the boyfriend's flesh and hair from underneath her fingernails. Strands of her hair with their roots on his skin was clear evidence that they'd struggled. He killed her, then himself.

  Step by step, Rhea led me through the investigation and the writing of our article. We interviewed the couple's parents and friends, who told us about their stormy relationship. It was a crash course in crime reporting. Rhea taught me that every detail, every strand of hair, was important. Gauvreau was delighted when we came back with a helluva story exposing the guy who'd killed his girlfriend and then shot himself to escape the law. Rhea Gore and I worked together on lots of stories at the Graphic. She was always full of enthusiasm and determination. I'll never forget her showing me the ropes when I was a cub reporter.

  Many years later, John Huston and I were having drinks at some Hollywood watering hole. It must have been the fifties. Huston asked me the name of the sonofabitch editor who'd fired him from the Graphic.

  "Gauvreau," I said.

  "Gauvreau! God bless him!" cried John. "Let's drink to that wonderful man! Thank the Lord he had the good sense to can me!" A few drinks later, Huston teased me with his old refrain: "You know, Sam, you spent more time with my mother than I did."

  As soon as I made reporter, my life changed. I'd come home late at night, if at all, sometimes not showing up until breakfast. After a bath and a quick bite, I was off to my classes at high school. Sure, my mother was plenty proud of her son's hard work and bylines. But she was terribly worried about her precious boy growing up too fast. By reading my articles, she correctly deduced that I was keeping strange company as well as strange hours. I explained to her it was all just part of the job. Covering crime obliged you to frequent some very disreputable places, rubbing shoulders with stoolies, bootleggers, prostitutes, and petty mobsters, the full gamut of characters from society's underbelly. I was most intrigued by the pickpockets, or "cannons," as they were called on the street, quickhanded grifters who lifted wallets and purses with remarkable skill, originality, and boldness. Needless to say, I kept the pungent details of all these rogues to myself, for the reality of my new life would have made Rebecca lose too much sleep.

  A helluva lot of your time as a crime reporter is spent with cops, either at the crime scene or in the station houses. The police were essential sources of information, though sometimes unwilling to give reporters a lead on a breaking story. I used to walk from one precinct to another, slipping sticks of chewing gum to the desk sergeants in exchange for something newsworthy. After I started smoking cigars, I'd give out cigars. That worked better. Maybe I took up cigar smoking just so the police would think I was a grown-up. My teenage face never failed to betray me, sometimes causing chuckles when I hit the cops with hard questions. Everybody smoked cigars in those days. It was nothing stylish or extraordinary, just something men did. I got hooked on the pleasure. As you puff awaynever inhaling, of course-the smoke warms your heart and your mind. In the last seven decades since my reporting days, I've rarely been without a cigar firmly planted between my lips. That chagrins some people, mostly the uninitiated. When they protest, I act deaf, smile, and take another puff.

  See, the police didn't file charges against someone after a brilliant investigation. Unlike a Sherlock Holmes story or those page-turners by Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, solving crimes was never a very respectable enterprise. To incriminate suspects, the cops needed to be tipped off. The only way to get information was from an informer, somebody who sang on the guilty party. There were all kinds of pigeons. Some were professionals who regularly passed on information for cash or favors. Some were bystanders who witnessed the crime. Many were doublecrossed women.

  Let's say you rob a bank and shoot a teller in the melee, then hide out with your girlfriend. If you lie low with her and the money, nobody'll catch you. But being a dumb bastard, you decide to dump the girlfriend. You give her a wad of cash and tell her to get lost. The scorned lady goes away, but she's aching for a chance to get even with you. Six months later, when you're least expecting it, she calls the police and tells them to go to room 316 at the Olympia Hotel if they want to grab the guy who killed the teller in the First National Bank robbery. She hangs up, and it's the beginning of the end. Next thing you know, the police pick you up in the seedy hotel room, haul you back to the precinct, and book you for murder. When they strap you into the electric chair at Sing Sing and throw the switch, the jilted lady will be laughing.

  Whenever I got a hot tip on a breaking item, I slammed a nickel into a pay phone and called my city editor, a guy named Shainmark. I'd give him a quick summary over the phone. He'd decide the importance of the story, maybe send a photographer to join me, and surely make me dig for more details. When I had all my facts straight, I'd get myself to the paper as quickly as humanly possible, either by subway, taxi, or on foot. Or all three. At the Graphic, I'd plop down at a typewriter and bang out an article for the morning edition, kicking it off with an eye-catching lead, giving the essence of the story in the first paragraph.

  It was inevitable that my schooling would suffer, though I never expected to get booted out of Washington High. That's exactly what happened, but not because of bad grades or poor attendance, though neither were very brilliant. Hell, I was set up by Shainmark.

  "Say, aren't you still going to George Washington, Sammy?" he asked me one day.

  "Yeah," I said. "Mornings."

  "You hear any rumors about parties up there, parties with teachers and students? Know anything about that?"

  I shook my head.

  Tedious, not titillating, was how I thought of high school. I had no time or interest in socializing with my classmates. Like a racehorse, I was out of class at the sound of the bell and back to work at the Graphic. When I was on a hot story, I skipped school altogether. The only reason I was still making a half-baked attempt to attend classes was to please my mother. Rebecca believed that without a high school diploma, I'd be seriously handicapped for the rest of my life.

  "I got a tip that some teachers up there are throwing wild cocktail parties and inviting students," said Shainmark. "And there's some necking going on after class. Between teachers and students. Take a photographer with you to school tomorrow. Get him into the classrooms, show him the library, the gym, the football field. Help him take photos for a story we want to do about Washington High."

  Pleased to do something at school that contributed to my job at the Graphic, I escorted the photographer, a guy named Frank Carson, into Washington High. Nothing out of the ordinary happened. At lunchtime, there was some necking going on behind the stadium, nothing to get excited about. There certainly didn't seem to be anything to hook an article on. But those were Prohibition days. Public morality was already whipped up to a feverish pitch. Back at the Graphic, Shainniark asked me to write down what I'd seen at school. A rewrite man took my firsthand account and added a lot of scandalous gossip about supposed goingson at Washington High without asking my opinion or showing it to me for a final edit. The Graphic published it under the banner headline "HIGH SCHOOL ORGY." The article was signed "by Samuel Fuller for the Graphic."

  The next morning, all hell broke loose at Washington High. The principa
l called an assembly for the entire student body and gave us a fire-andbrimstone speech, calling the behavior described in the Graphic article reprehensible. He announced a series of strict new rules, so that there wouldn't be any more scandals at his school. Finally, to my complete surprise and embarrassment, he pointed me out in the back of the auditorium, saying how I'd betrayed my teachers and fellow students, the Judas Iscariot of George Washington High School. It was so goddamned unfair. There was no way to respond to his charge, but no denying that I'd participated in the muckraking story.

  To my mother's great despair, I was suspended from high school that very day. She insisted on having the injustice repaired and my name cleared. I didn't have the heart to even try. Secretly, I was relieved I didn't have to show up for classes and go through the motions of being a student anymore. I never did get my high school diploma, nor any other diploma for that matter. Like all mothers, Rebecca had dreamed of me going to college and getting a higher education. Over the years, I've had to educate myself, gulping down all the classics I got my hands on, hungry for great writers like Flaubert, Faulkner, Dickens, Twain, Hugo, Dostoyevsky, and Balzac. By reading them, I was in touch with great minds without the fluff of a classroom. Gene Fowler, who was to have a big influence on me, wrote, "The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from."

  To hell with college! How many mothers' sons learned nothing much higher on a college campus than betting on football games, drinking beer, and playing poker? Some very educated gangsters had attended college. Still, my mother was disconsolate about the precipitous end of my formal schooling. For me, being a reporter was the greatest school of all.

  That Shainmark-with Gauvreau's blessing-had manipulated me into getting that high school scandal piece published bothered the hell out of me. But I had no intention of jumping out of any window over the incident. I was just too busy covering all the other "leapers," as reporters called them.

  We'd get an urgent call about some guy standing on the ledge of a skyscraper high above Manhattan, threatening to commit suicide. I'd get over there on the double with a photographer. The last thing you wanted was for a priest, a mother, or a wife to arrive before you, crawling out onto the ledge of the building screaming, "Please don't! Please don't!" The best way to save the leaper was to make him talk about himself and his problems. Besides, as he blabbered about his heartaches, you could jot down facts for your story. All the while, you had to watch his toes. That's how you could tell if the miserable bastard was really going to jump or not. As the toes went, so went the leaper. If the guy was inconsolable, he'd move his toes closer and closer to the edge of oblivion, determined to take the plunge. That's when you'd blurt out one last question for your article. The good photographers primed their cameras, ready to snap, for those photographers who knew about the toe business always got the best pictures of the guy leaping to his death.

  God, I loved being a reporter! I was hungry to learn and picked it up quick. What I wanted more than anything was a lead that might produce the dream of every cub reporter: a scoop. Then it happened. One night in the early fall of 1929, I got a tip about a mysterious corpse at one of Manhattan's most exclusive funeral parlors. I was out the door and on my way over there before my informant, the maintenance man at the parlor, had hung up the phone. I'd befriended the guy on an earlier assignment when I wrote an article about New York mortuaries, mentioning this classy establishment. The owner threatened to call the police if I ever set foot inside his establishment again. He hadn't appreciated my piece, because it underscored how the rich got buried in opulence while the poor ended up in Potter's Field. This time, instead of walking in the front door, I used the service entrance in the alleyway.

  The funeral parlor was partitioned into the "gold" and "red" rooms, both deathly quiet, swell places if you were a stiff. In the gold room, I saw a glorious coffin with six polished brass handles. Mountains of flowers had been placed around it on the rostrum. I lifted the massive cover of the coffin. Inside was the most beautiful corpse I'd ever laid eyes on, and, believe me, I'd seen plenty of them by then. I stopped breathing as I stared at Jeanne Eagels, one of Broadway's most celebrated actresses. I could hardly believe it was her. Yet there she was, laid out in a stunning evening gown, her bleached-blond hair perfectly done up, as if she were going out on the town. She wasn't going anywhere. She was dead.

  I was staggered. Jeanne Eagels had electrified Broadway with her performance in Rain, a play adapted from a Somerset Maugham story that opened in November 1922 and played for four years, nearly fifteen hundred performances. I'd taken my mother to see Eagels in another play Maugham wrote especially for her, The Letter. She was sensational. I adored Jeanne Eagels and knew she'd just finished doing the filmed version of The Letter for MGM. It would be her last performance. All that beauty and talent was now extinguished, nothing more than a cold corpse lying in that splendid goddamned coffin.

  I heard voices in the funeral parlor. Before anybody saw me, I slipped outside into the alleyway. I ran to a pay phone and called Shainmark.

  "Are you sure it's her?" said Shainmark incredulously. "In the casket?"

  "Yeah," I said. "I'm absolutely sure."

  "Wait for me in the alley. I'm going to check with the police, then I'm coming over there to see for myself. This is big."

  Shainmark arrived fifteen minutes later. The police had told him they had no record of Eagels's death. We went into the funeral parlor through the front door. Someone was warming up the big organ. Near the entrance to the gold room we overheard the manager of the funeral parlor talking to somebody.

  "We will take care of the corpse," said the man, as coldly as if he were talking about fixing a machine.

  Quickly, I showed Shainmark the coffin and lifted the lid for him to look inside. He was as stunned as I was. The manager saw us and kicked us out. "There's got to be a death certificate," said Shainmark. "We need the cause of death. Get your ass over to the coroner's office."

  I rushed down to the city morgue. The chief coroner said that it was Eagels in the coffin all right, but there wouldn't be an official announcement until the exact cause of death could be determined. Shainmark suspected that the authorities were buying time to conceal a drug overdose. In those days, alcohol abuse was commonly mentioned in the papers, but, because of all the moralistic reactionaries, the word "drugs" was taboo in the press. Even Gauvreau and Macfadden wouldn't touch the subject with a ten-foot pole. Nevertheless, we knew damn well that drug use-probably heroin-was common in the company that Jeanne Eagels was keeping. The cause of her death was eventually registered as "Intoxication of Alcohol, Deterioration of Organs." Somebody was trying to protect Eagels's reputation and doing a pretty good job. Later, the cause was changed to "self-administered sedative."

  My front-page article on the mysterious death of Jeanne Eagels in the morning edition of October 4, 1929, scooped every other daily paper in New York. Under the Graphic's main headline, a smaller one said, "WE WILL TAKE CARE OF THE CORPSE." That mortician's words, so icy and unforgiving, still give me the shivers. After a big memorial service in New York, the glorious coffin was shipped back for burial to Kansas City, Eagels's hometown, a place she said she hated. I remember her philosophy: "Never deny. Never explain. Say nothing and become a legend." More than a legend for me, she was like a shooting star, ascending so magnificently, then falling precipitously into nothingness.

  I wasn't the only one who'd never forget the beauty and talent of Jeanne Eagels. Several movies borrowed from her life and times, basing their stories on a talented young actress struggling against all obstacles, including herself, to achieve fame and glory. One of the wittiest was Gregory La Cava's Stage Door (1937), adapted from a play by Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman. It follows an up-andcoming actress from a wealthy family, played by Katharine Hepburn, who aspires to Eagels's brilliance. In 1957 George Sidney directed the biographical Jeanne Eagels, with Kim Novak playin
g the lead. But as beautiful as she was, Novak couldn't get close to Eagels's charisma. Joseph Mankiewicz told me once that the main character of All About Eve, Broadway actress Margo Channing, was inspired by Jeanne Eagels, though Bette Davis played the character caustically, more like Tallulah Bankhead.

  Jeanne Eagels in The Letter (1929). She was beautiful, talented, and destined for greatness. Then a drug overdose shortcircuited her life and career.

  Rain was made into a movie by Lewis Milestone in 1932, with Joan Crawford getting the role of Sadie Thompson-whom Jeanne had played so memorably on Broadway-a prostitute quarantined with other passengers on Pago Pago Island. While Sadie gets along with the American soldiers stationed there, the missionaries make her life miserable. The Reverend Davidson finally forces Sadie to repent, rapes her, and commits suicide. Only then is Sadie able to accept Sergeant O'Hara's genuine love. Crawford became a star after that movie, but for me, she couldn't ever equal the inimitable Eagels.

  The tragedy of Jeanne Eagels would have a lifelong effect on me. She'd worked in the circus as a kid before moving into legitimate theater. I like to think she'd been a high-wire acrobat because she had an appetite for spectacular risks, both personal and professional. Her talent was like a shimmering diamond that transfixes your eyes on its brilliance. Her arrogance was legend, too. She changed the spelling of her name from "Eagles" to "Eagels" because "it looked better in lights." I was damned proud of my first scoop but, at the same time, deeply saddened by the terrible waste of the young actress, only thirty-five when she died. I'll always remember the angelic expression on Jeanne Eagels's face in that godforsaken coffin. Through her, I understood for the first time the quicksand nature of fame, a seductive mistress I'd never court.