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I turned and looked up. Jean Harlow-Dietrich-Colbert leaned over the top rail, smiling wildly, waiting for Von Stroheim to shoot her close-up.
“There’s someone else like me, even crazier. Quickly!”
“Alberto Quickly!” I called. “He’s alive?”
“He does one nightclub a week, then hospital rehabs. When they sew him up he repeats his farewell tour. Damn fool, in his nineties, said he found Constance (a lie!) on Route 66 when he was, my God, forty, fifty. Driving across country, he picked up this tomboy with suspicious breasts. Made her a star while his act faded. Runs a théâtre intime in his parlor. Charges folks on Friday nights to see Caesar stabbed, Antony on his sword, Cleopatra bitten.” A piece of paper sailed down. “There! And something else!”
“What?”
“Connie, Helen, Annette, Roberta. Constance didn’t show up for more lessons in changing lives! Last week. She was supposed to come back and didn’t.”
“I don’t understand,” I yelled.
“I had taught her things, dark, light, loud, soft, wild, quiet, some sort of new role she was looking for. She was coming back to me to learn some more. She wanted to be a new person. Maybe like her old self. But I didn’t know how to help. Role-playing, Jesus, how do you get actors unhooked? W. C. Fields learned to be W. C. Fields in vaudeville. He never escaped those handcuffs. So here was Constance saying ‘Help me to find a new self.’ I said, ‘Constance, I don’t know how to help you. Get a priest to put a new skin around you.’ ”
A great bell rang in my head. Priest.
“Well, that’s it,” said Jean Harlow. “Did I confuse but amuse? Ciao.” Bradford vanished.
“Quickly,” I gasped. “Let’s call Crumley.”
“What’s the rush?” said Henry.
“No, no, Alberto Quickly, the rabbit in and out of the hat, Hamlet’s father’s ghost.”
“Oh, him,” said Henry.
Chapter Thirty-Five
We dropped Henry off at some nice soft-spoken relatives on Central Avenue and then Crumley delivered me to the home of Alberto Quickly, ninety-nine years old, Rattigan’s first “teacher.”
“The first,” he said. “The Bertillion expert, who fingerprinted Constance toenail to elbow to knees.”
In vaudeville he had been known as Mr. Metaphor, who acted all of Old Curiosity Shop or every last one of Fagin’s brood in Oliver Twist as audiences cried “Mercy.” He was more morbid than Marley, paler than Poe.
Quickly, the critics cried, orchestrated requiems to flood the Thames with mournful tides when, as Tosca, he flung himself into forever.
All this Metaphor-Quickly said glibly, happily, as I sat in his small theater-stage parlor. I waved away the box of Kleenex he offered before he treated me to his Lucia, mad again.
“Stop,” I cried at last. “What about Constance?”
“Hardly knew her,” he said, “but I did know Katy Kelleher, 1926, my first Pygmalion child!”
“Pygmalion?” I murmured, pieces falling into place.
“Do you recall Molly Callahan, 1927?”
“Faintly.”
“How about Polly Riordan, 1926?”
“Almost.”
“Katy was Alice in Wonderland, Molly was Molly in Mad Molly O’Day. Polly was Polly of the Circus, same year. Katy, Molly, Polly—all Constance. A whirlwind blew in nameless, blew out famous. I taught her to shout, ‘I’m Polly!’ Producers cried, ‘You are, you are!’ The film was shot in six days. Then I revamped her to jump down Leo the Lion’s throat. ‘I’m Pretty Katy Kelly.’ ‘You are!’ the lion pride yelled. Her second film done in four days! Kelly vanished, then Molly climbed the RKO radio tower. So it was Molly, Polly, Dolly, Sally, Gerty, Connie … and Constance rabbiting studio lawns!”
“No one ever guessed Constance played more than one part over the years?”
“Only I, Alberto Quickly, helped her to grab onto fame, fortune, and fondling! The golden greased pig! No one ever knew that some of the marquee names on Hollywood Boulevard were names Constance made up or borrowed. Could be she shuffled her tootsies in Grauman’s forecourt with four different shoe sizes!”
