Groucho Marx, Secret Agent by Ron Goulart

Author:Ron Goulart
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-05-17T04:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

By early Friday afternoon I’d determined that Herman Brix had worn his rented Grim Reaper costume to a Halloween party thrown by Basil Rathbone and his wife. The other three names that Jane’s friend had come up with had also put their Grim Reaper costumes to other uses, and none of them had been in Santa Monica at the Lockwood festivities on the fateful night of the thirtieth.

That left the costume missing from the Warlock Wardrobe Department to find out about.

My agent had set up a meeting for me with Vince Novsam that afternoon to talk about the rewriting job on the Ty-Gor script, and I figured I could also nose around in wardrobe while I was on the Warlock lot.

As I drove out to the valley, I switched from station to station on my car radio. A news commentator was criticizing John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers for staging a coal strike in such troubled times, while on another station the Incomparable Hildegarde was singing “The Last Time I Saw Paris.” The third station I sampled mentioned me.

It was one of Johnny Whistler’s frequent 15-minute Hollywood gossip shows. When I tuned in, Whistler was saying, “ … Though you’ve never heard of Frank Denby, I predict he’s destined to be a major motion-picture writer any edition now. If, and it’s a mighty big if, this talented young scripter sticks to his typewriter and leaves detective work to the professionals. Bumbling along with the aging Groucho Marx and sticking his snoot into what’s none of his business, young Master Denby is only riding for a fall. Think it over, Frankie. And now an Open Letter to Ann Sheridan. Dear Ann, you can have too much oomph, and if …”

I switched back to Hildegarde, turned the radio off a moment later.

“Major motion picture writer’s not bad,” I said to myself. “But I wonder who told Whistler to tell us to lay off.”

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