Within three years Maude Antrim was playing opposite the great star in Sherlock Holmes, and in another year Crispin brought his production of Romeo into New York, with his wife as Juliet. That year she and he had performed prodigies of salesmanship in the matter of U.S. bond sales all over the East (a tour in which the young Babe Austrian had also participated), after which they sailed for Europe to entertain the troops as they came out of the trenches. They returned only six weeks before the Armistice.
Life was gay, and no one was happier than this new acting team that America was fast taking to its heart. In the next few years the lissome Maude played a wide variety of roles that caught the fancy of the public. Back to Chicago for more “flickers” at AyanBee, then on to Hollywood, for Crispin’s own Sunshine Company. Crispin Antrim had fallen under the spell of Sir Walter Scott’s works, and it was his Sunshine Pictures that brought to the screen such works as Ivanhoe, Lady of the Lake, and The Bride of Lammermoor, in which his wife, Maude, distinguished herself with a mad scene that is still talked about.
When Hollywood fell into panic with the coming of sound, the Antrims were ready to face the microphone. In fact, the miracle of sound only enhanced their screen personalities, and they were to earn even greater stardom. It was at that time that many of those persons whom I was subsequently to meet, and who were bound to come together and have their effect on one another, were gathering in the movie capital to make their names. Sam Ueberroth was by now a top producer. His sister, Viola, had already discovered Fedora; Frank Adonis had hit town with Babe Austrian in tow; Claire Regrett, still Cora Sue Brodsky, was on her way west.
Maude’s autobiography brought it all back in its modest, direct, lighthearted way. Others might take her seriously; she did not. I was surprised when I got to the last page. Having read my way through the book in three hours flat, I fell instantly asleep. I awoke with Bones whining to be let out. I jumped when a fist pounded on my door.
“You got a dog in there?” came the bald question, followed by more banging. Dick Tracy was working late. I heard his key in the lock as Bones and I disappeared out the window, me with my bag and duffel, down the fire escape. We slept in the car that night, Bones and I; next day I paid up and checked out. I saw the gumshoe standing by the door and hollered, “Take an animal to lunch!”
Sunnyside, here I come.
One thing I’d forgotten with the passage of the years. I had always thought the name of the house had some connection with Sunshine, Crispin’s old production company, but no. Sunnyside was named after the estate Washington Irving had built on the Hudson in New York, but owed its architectural debt to the great houses of Florida, those palazzi that Addison Mizner erected in Palm Beach and Miami and that inflated the Florida bubble back in the twenties—another bubble that went bust.
I drove out Sunset Boulevard to Benedict Canyon and hung a right at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I passed Tropical Drive, where Hedda had lived, went by Tower Road, at whose top David Selznick had lived with Jennifer Jones in one of Hollywood’s most handsomely unpretentious houses, now razed to the ground by a rock-and-roll “artiste” with pretensions to Borgian grandeur. I kept a sharp lookout for the street, Caligula Way, since Frank had said watch carefully, it was hard to find. I turned at Cielo Drive—up there was Falcon Lair, Valentino’s house, and across the way the house the French actress Michele Morgan had built when she was married to one of Ginger Rogers’s husbands, a French country farmhouse where the Manson gang’s bloody massacre had taken place, and over there the fabled Harold Lloyd estate, now dug up like a field of turnips.
I must have missed my sign, because I did get lost, and finally had to ask directions of a Japanese gardener. To my chagrin I was actually on Caligula, smack in front of the place, though you’d never have known it. A little farther up the hill I saw the gates I’d had pointed out to me twenty years before, the gates of Sunnyside.
Remembering Frank’s injunction to use the lower gates, I left the crest of the hill and drove around the descending curve until I passed another pair of gates, one of these left ajar. I backed up, stopped, got out, pushed both gates open, and drove in. And there was the guesthouse under a tall shady tree, the door wide open, and a maid in white uniform running the vacuum around the living room.
She was Chinese-Hawaiian—called Suzi-Q—and she most generously offered to help me get settled in. Since I had brought so few things, I decided instead to have a look around the place while she finished up. The lawns to the guest cottage were spare, and to the side of the house an escarpment of some sort climbed away steeply, as though to discourage investigation of the upper grounds. When I went back inside, I asked Suzi-Q if I could drive her up to the main house, but as we approached the main gate she thanked me and slipped out, to disappear through a smaller gate to one side. Like a Dickens lad, I got out and peered through the wrought-iron portals. Secretly I had hoped for a glimpse of my new landlady, but Frank had said she’d be away until after New Year’s, and according to Suzi-Q there was only a male servant and herself in the house.
I soon settled into a new sort of life. I defy anyone not to have felt at home in the “Cottage,” as it was called, a low-ceilinged set of nicely proportioned rooms with heavy beams of adzed oak, a large stone fireplace with cobra-shaped firedogs whose yellow eyes gleamed in the flames, and mullioned windows and windowboxes planted in varicolored impatiens. The bed was hard, the bathroom a tiled glory in black and Nile green, with a six-nozzle shower stall and a tub large enough to wash a horse in. It was like living in a country lodge cloistered in a patch of green country forest, like a chateau at Fontainebleau, and I blessed whoever had kept this section of Beverly Hills from being built up. I hung my things neatly in the closet, put others away in drawers, placed my copy of Girl of the Golden East in the window niche. Then I set my typewriter on the heavily carved table and sat myself down in front of a casement window where I could gaze out across the canyon vista and dream up whatever might occur and try to get it down on paper.
Christmas came on in a burst of fine weather, blue skies and warm temperatures. Southern California was Sunny California and those unbelievable pink- and blue-flocked Christmas trees in the little park across from the Beverly Hills post office loomed in the Yuletide heat. I was reminded of the first time I’d ever seen Maude Antrim in person. This was also at Christmastime, nearly twenty years ago: Jenny had sent me to the post office with some packages for last minute mailing to the East, I’d pulled into the parking space outside the post office and there was a car just backing out—a Rolls-Royce. I’d cut in rather close and I saw the driver lean across and roll down the window. “Would you mind moving a bit, I can’t get out.” I did so, with alacrity. “Merry Christmas, Miss Antrim,” I called as the car drove off. She’d nodded, that was all.
But this Christmas, not a sign of her. Enjoying my new digs, my new freedom, I found I was impatient for her to come, as if something wonderful were waiting in the wings. Frank had invited me to spend the holidays at his house in the Springs, but I declined; I liked my new house. I spent New Year’s Eve there, Bones my only companion. Dumb, but that’s how I wanted it.
The rains came, went, and came again. It was an excessively wet winter that year, but there I was, snug as a nickel. There were no leaks anywhere; a roof at Sunnyside wouldn’t dare leak! I ordered up a full cord of wood and kindling with which to stoke my fireplace; there was a venerable system of forced heated air, even in the bathroom, whose tiles stayed dry and toasty.
Bones reveled in the place. The floors of thick varnished stone flagging were impervious to all dogdom, the click of his twenty nails on the slates was pleasant to my ear, becoming silent again as he moved from the stone to one of the braided rag rugs that were strewn about, while in front of the fire lay a large fur rug, the skin, paws, and head of a Kodiak bear that Crispin had shot in the Klondike; the animal must have stood twelve or fourteen feet tall. Here I lay on my back, my head pillowed on the skull, staring at the ceiling, whi
le the rain pattered briskly on the roof. Ah, the joys of solitude. The only drawback I could come up with was that the drive-in gates were not automated; I had to get out every time to open and close them, a nuisance of major proportions because of the rain. I had to go out and buy an umbrella. No one in California ever carried an umbrella—umbrellas were for New York.
Sunnyside was a domain any monarch would be proud to rule over. And since it was now mine, without the upkeep and the taxes (what must those be?), it was doubly pleasurable to contemplate. From the Cottage to get to the main house you walked up a short, woodsy trail to an abruptly visible set of stone steps, and climbing those—there were 135, I have laboriously counted them many times—you came out on what looked like granite abutments, like old fortifications, built to sustain much weight and green with lichen. Proceeding upwards, you reached an esplanade, beyond which was a wide strip of well-kept lawn, and the pool, with a brick surround and stone statues at the corners—were they the Four Seasons? So it appeared. Across the huge pool that Crispin Antrim had ordered built so he could keep up his muscles, past plantings of clipped yew trees and neat boxwood hedge, sat the house itself. There were flower beds laid out in glorious pattern, banked by allées of dark green Italian cypresses, so columnar they seemed to be holding up the sky itself. The handsome sprawling house, built in the Quattrocento style, was imposing but not pretentious. It was reminiscent of the grand villas that dotted the hills of Lombardy and Tuscany, sloping hip roofs of red tile nicely worn, a few galleries and balconies, windows, grilles set into the masonry, tall, narrow chimneys, and vents here and there. Whoever had built the place had known what he was doing.
Between the house and the garages was the famous “Playhouse,” which Perry Antrim and his bride, Claire, had occupied following their honeymoon, and which, my bed-making Suzi-Q informed me, was used these days by Belinda’s daughter whenever she happened to be in town.
The view from the hilltop was magnificent. Down one slope you looked onto the clay tennis courts, and beyond them, across the vale, the red-tiled roofs of the old Harold Lloyd estate, now badly eaten into by land development, growing typical two- and three-million-dollar ersatz chateaux put up for the nouveau riche of the Nouveau Hollywood. On the far side you overlooked Falcon Lair, and I wondered what stories Maude Antrim could tell of fifty years ago. Did she ever wander over to Rudy’s to borrow a cup of sugar? (It was three and a quarter miles to the nearest market; I had clocked it.)
Frank had said I could use the tennis courts, and one day when Jenny was out I went home and got my racquet from the closet, and I encouraged friends to come and play. They came, but were far more interested in being inside the gates of Sunnyside than in playing tennis. Meanwhile, where oh where was the lady of the manor?
I languished, lord of this empty domain hidden behind the gates of Caligula Way. She came at last—in mid-January. The manservant, of whom I’d caught no more than a glimpse, donned his livery, brought out the Rolls, passed my gate as he went down the hill. Two hours later the car was back, and I glimpsed a figure in the back seat. She never saw me, and if I reasoned that an invitation would quickly arrive for dinner, I reasoned foolishly. My invitation must have blown off the porch.
Then the wind really blew, the leaves flew, and it was, in the words of that eminent Victorian Bulwer-Lytton, “a dark and stormy night.” Had been in fact a particularly stormy day, which downed the power lines in the neighborhood, giving us our dark night. My electric typewriter died an ugly death, as well as every light, and I couldn’t find a flashlight. I searched everywhere for even a candle stub but found nothing. Eventually I slipped on a poncho and a rain hat and mushed up the stairs to the big house.
It brooded, the large dark house. No lights showed. Great night for a murder, I thought, as I moved along the side doors, looking for signs of life. Then I caught the faint glimmer of a candle far off; it came nearer and I suddenly found myself staring straight into the face of Dr. Fu Manchu—or better yet, the Asp out of Orphan Annie; there were the inscrutable slant eyes, the yellow skin, the sinister Oriental mien. He must have observed me on my way up to the house and alerted his mistress, for he admitted me without a word and escorted me through a far door, then through a smaller passageway into the large front hall, where he knocked on the door of another room.
“Come in, Ling,” I heard a clear, pleasant voice ring out, and when the servant opened the door I walked in. The room was lighted by at least twenty candles plus the glowing fire, and there in the tall hearthside chair, a picture out of a book, sat the lady herself.
She got up briskly and came toward me; the outstretched hand she offered was warm and firm.
“Well, hel-lo. You are Mr. Caine, of course. I am Maude Antrim. Do come in. I thought perhaps you’d be coming up, so I asked Ling if I mightn’t speak to you. I tried the telephones but I think they’re out, too. Are you in the dark down there? Yes, I was afraid so. There used to be some candles but probably they’re all gone and we just forgot to order more. But we can easily let you have as many as you need. Beastly out, isn’t it? Won’t you sit down and have some nice hot tea?”
Tea with Maude Antrim? I leaped at the chance, saying tea would be perfect.
“Yes, that’s right, that’s a nice comfortable chair.” I sat down beside a fluted mahogany pedestal on which rested a bronze bust of Crispin Antrim as Shylock, a fine likeness.
“Now,” Maude went on, “just give that cord a tug, won’t you, save me getting up. Ling will appear as if by magic, you’ll see.”
I pulled the cord and “rang for tea.” At Maude’s. It was a beginning. Ling entered on cue with the tray, making not a sound as he set it down.
When he had gone, she poured in an elegant fashion and handed me my cup. “Constant Comment?” I asked. She held her sip, put down her cup, and clapped her hands: “You’re—you’re on my team. Only people who know C.C. can get on my tea team.”
“My initials,” I said, “I should know.” She nodded, smiled, showed pleasure, looked lovely, beautiful, was mine. What a coup. I remembered I was a writer and made mental notes. Though she had been all alone and obviously not expecting company, she was dressed. She sat rather tall and straight; her form was slender, even spare, her hair a soft brown and done in the easy style I remembered from so many of her modern films, shaped to the head and softly curled. She wore lipstick and perhaps just a sketch of penciling along the brows. Her suit looked like a Chanel, a becoming cherry-red shade; she’d had it for years, you could tell—one of those outfits that had become her from the minute she put it on. Her wrists were delicate, her hands prominently veined with blue, and brown-spotted, the badge of age. She wore a gold wedding band, no other rings.
But her eyes—how they danced, how they sparkled. And the smile. It was a scene from some familiar movie I couldn’t quite pin down, the dramatic lighting, the play of color, the solitary figure in the high-backed chair—not Miss Havisham, certainly, but there were echoes of something, very English chintz, very country manor. A scene without artifice or trickery, yet the candlelight tossed its amber coinage everywhere, onto the Italian marble mantel, the fruitwood boiserie, the panels of billiard-table-green damask upholstering the walls, the different tasseled velvets and brocades on the chairs beside the bookshelves—many many books of all kinds. A little world. She called the room “the Snuggery,” said it was her favorite spot in the whole house, the place she had sat with her lover-husband for so much of her married life. And here she sat now, in cherry red, while the outside world was plunged by wind and rain into turbulent darkness, and made small talk with her boarder.
Easing into matters, she spoke, about the weather—all the rain, her winter garden just into glorious bloom and now more rain. Whole trees were going down outside, she was afraid of damage; one year, half the bill had washed away, cost a fortune to shore it up. The house was half a century old, the electrical wiring was bad and needed redoing, but she didn’t enjoy the thought of coming to grips wit
h things like that at her age. She laughed—oh, that laugh, I knew it so well, bright and bubbly and full of high good spirits: Maude’s laugh. I recalled how someone—was it Louella?—had dubbed her the “Champagne Lady”; the name had stuck.
I had a lot of questions I wanted to ask her, but I refrained. She was amused when I said I’d stayed up late one night brushing up on her. When I said I had her book down at the Cottage, she invited me to bring it up for her signature. I took this as a special favor, since she was famous for not giving autographs.
I felt she was going out of her way to be kind, but on whose behalf? Mine? Frank’s, Belinda’s? Or maybe Vi’s. We spoke of Viola—they were longstanding friends, going all the way back to the old AyanBee days. Those were the days I longed to hear about, and soon I had her reminiscing about “Cowflop City,” which was what the old-timers called the lot, which when it began had been located in the middle of a pasture.
When I noted that both Babe Austrian and Claire Regrett had also had their starts there, she paused and her glance shifted. Had I made a faux pas? I waited through the pause; then she laughed, saying that if their three ages were totaled they’d go back beyond the Battle of Bunker Hill. “Remember, I saw McKinley shot.” Golly; how many people did I know who’d seen McKinley shot? When I mentioned how much I liked the films Babe had made with Crispin, she accepted the compliment gracefully but wasn’t inclined to comment. The same thing with Claire. She wasn’t rude, she just didn’t seem interested.