Chapter Two: A House on the Sand
Maddie Ellis and the Malibu Movie Colony is an old-fashioned mystery serial set during the end of the silent movie era. In chapter 2, Writer Maddie Ellis, our protagonist, returns to Los Angeles to help fix the script for an ailing film and takes up residence in the Malibu beach house that will be her home for the next three months. Join us as we travel back in time to January 1928.
On the advice of her friend Belle Harrington, Maddie acquired both a motorcar and a swimsuit as soon as she reached her destination. The former was essential in a city that was now increasingly powered by the automobile. She hoped to use the latter when she finally arrived at the beach cottage that would be her home for the next three months. She was intensely grateful to her old friend. So much had changed since she last lived in this rapidly growing city. Knowing she had a place to go, a place of her own, had anchored her during the long voyage home and her disorienting arrival in a city that was almost unrecognizable.
That first week was exhausting. Maddie arrived in Los Angeles on the morning of New Year’s Day, 1928. She spent most of the week behind the towering gates of Mammoth Pictures. The studio wasn’t in the celebrated city of Hollywood, instead it sprawled over forty acres of land in nearby Culver City. Each day involved meeting with a bewildering assortment of people. Each night she collapsed, exhausted, into bed at a nearby hotel that was clean and comfortable but completely impersonal. She longed for the cottage by the sea that was waiting for her in Malibu.
In the early days of the motion picture industry, everyone had known everyone, or at least had heard of them. Now movies were big business and the cast of characters involved in making them was constantly expanding. The project that had brought her back from London was called The Sands of Afar. This romantic Arabian Nights adventure was set in a desert that was being almost entirely recreated inside a warehouse on the studio backlot. Belle’s husband Daniel and his business partner, Isaac Hoffmann, were producing the film. Daniel had hired Maddie to fix the script, but Hoffmann was in charge of the production. He was a small man with a perpetually worried expression. He reminded Maddie of Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit—“Oh, my paws and whiskers!”—but the producer’s anxiety was warranted.
The Sands of Afar was a big budget film with a big cast headlined by A-list actors, including the luminously beautiful Isabel Flores and the dashingly handsome Johnny Roberts—real-life lovers, according to the tabloids—and it was in trouble almost from the start. The list of accidents, setbacks, and arguments was more extensive than Daniel Harrington had revealed.
Maddie began to think that the stories about “The Curse of Afar” weren’t that much of an exaggeration. It seemed almost impossible that so many things could have gone wrong in so short a time.
“How many accidents?” she asked Hoffmann, aghast.
“Only two that count, Miss Ellis,” he said. “Verlaine broke his leg, and then poor Miss Flores was injured when part of the set collapsed. It’s true that Roberts has had a bit of a breakdown, but all the other things were minor. The fire, the flooded sets, things like that happen on any production. No, the real problem is the plot. It isn’t holding together.”
Hoffmann paused, and took an anxious breath. “Daniel says you can fix the story, that you can fix anything.” He looked so hopeful and beseeching that Maddie stifled her growing feeling of dismay and endeavored to embrace the confidence necessary for the kind of writer who could “fix anything.”
A lot was riding on this picture’s success. For Maddie, it meant a return home, and a new start. For the studio, it meant money—a lot of it—either made or lost. Right now it was being lost—a staggering amount every day the production was suspended.
Maddie thought she ought to have her mind on the movie’s problems as she navigated through the crowded streets of Santa Monica on her way to the coast that first Friday, but she didn’t. Her copy of the existing screenplay and her copious notes on what needed to be changed were securely tucked into her luggage. Her faithful Remington typewriter was there, too. She had purchased it with the money she made from selling her first film scenario nearly ten years ago.
The old machine in its battered case had traveled to Europe with her five years earlier. Now it was accompanying her on a new adventure. The boxes that contained all of her other possessions wouldn’t arrive for another couple of weeks at least. They were traveling the long way round on a freighter, but she had crossed the Atlantic on a splendid White Star Line ocean liner that made the trip in just six days. She traveled from New York to California on the train. The typewriter had accompanied her. It was almost the only thing from her earlier life in Los Angeles that she still possessed, except for a small box of photographs and letters and a bigger one of books.
She thought instead of the beach cottage waiting for her, and how her new car, a bright red Nash Roadster, moved smoothly through the traffic. She purchased it on the strength of the advance the studio had given her, and in defiance of her conscience, which said that an economic Model T would be a more sensible choice.
“Sometimes you have to take chances,” she told herself.
She had taken many chances lately, leaving the comfortable life she had established for herself over the past five years in London to return to Hollywood, leaving Hollywood in the first place to pursue…what, exactly? A dream? An escape from past sorrows? Perhaps what she sought was just a future, and that future depended on the success of this project.
Once Maddie reached the coast all of the stress and uncertainty fell away, replaced with a kind of quiet exhilaration. The sun was warm, the sky a brilliant, wind-swept blue. She drove past Inceville, once a thriving movie ranch, now burned and abandoned, its remaining sets—a Norman church and a quaint French village—crumbling in the sea air.
She drove past Topanga Canyon, with its haphazard but lively scattering of businesses and beach cabins. There was a filling station on the corner there now, she noted, and a stand that sold produce and sandwiches.
She passed the Las Flores Inn, which just a few years ago was the end of the road and the start of the legendary Malibu Rancho. She had brought her little sister Anna and her friends here once, in her first car—an old flivver that rattled and shook. They had eaten ice creams and told each other stories about what was on the other side of the gate, with its “no trespassing” sign. Anna had been certain it was something wonderful.
“They wouldn’t work so hard to keep the world out if it isn’t,” Anna had said.
Now Anna was far away, married, with a daughter of her own. Maddie was taking the untraveled road alone. It was a new road. The pavement formed a narrow ribbon between the towering cliffs and the beach sand, winding away into the west, towards the descending sun.
The Malibu Beach Colony lay on a spit of sand next to the lagoon at the mouth of Malibu Creek. There was a small general store on the land side of the road, and the row of houses by the edge of the sea, and nothing else except empty fields and miles of ocean and beach. The bungalows looked like toy houses in that vast expanse of open space.
A gate with a gatekeeper marked the entrance to the development. The tiny gatehouse stood alone in a field that was half cow pasture and half marsh. The task of guarding the row of houses from cows and stray motorists must not have been an exacting one. The gatekeeper was sound asleep. He awoke with a snort, checked Maddie off on a list, and waved her through.
From the road the only thing one could see was a row of garages, and they looked plain and ordinary. From the beach side, the houses were all different: a mad fantasy of styles. Colorful umbrellas bloomed in the sandy yards instead of trees or flowers, but on this winter weekday the houses appeared empty and deserted. The beach was empty, too.
“It’s a stage set,” Maddie thought. “It’s waiting for the players to take up their cues, waiting for the curtain to go up.”
The elation of being at the beach gave the rest of the afternoon a dreamlike holiday feel. Belle Harrington called the house a cottage, but it was far more substantial than that. Each lot in the seaside development was long and narrow. Most of the houses had their kitchens and offices at what would ordinarily have been the front of the house, and the living room and bedrooms at the back, to take advantage of the ocean views. Each lot was leased for the not inconsiderable sum of thirty dollars a month from the landowner for a period of just ten years with no option to purchase, but that didn’t stop the leaseholders from building lavish houses.
Maddie explored her new home with growing astonishment. The living room occupied the back half of the downstairs floor and served as both the main living space and the dining room. Everything was heavy and formal, in keeping with the Tudor-style architecture. The velvet-upholstered sofas rested on carved walnut lion’s paws. So did the dining room table.
A door at the back of the living room opened on a small study. Antlers bristled from the walls, which were paneled in dark wood. A rather disgruntled looking boar’s head glared from above a fireplace. It was surrounded by daggers and maces—enough weapons to fight a small war.
The complete works of Walter Scott bound in leather occupied one of the shelves behind a heavy oak desk, but there was little else to read. A large antique globe on an ornate stand occupied the opposite corner, and didn’t leave much room for anything else. The diamond-paned window here offered only a view of the house next door: a Cape Cod cottage, with shingled sides and an array of lobster floats dangling on the wall.
The door on the opposite side of the living room led to the kitchen. It was painted white, with pretty blue and white tiles. It had a modern gas range and an electric icebox that purred and grumbled in a welcoming way after Maddie found the cord and plugged it in. She was relieved. After seeing the living room and the study she was half-expecting an open fire with an iron pot and a roasting jack.
Off the kitchen was a small bathroom, and behind that a bedroom meant for the hired help, something Maddie didn’t have and couldn’t afford. The room was plain and clean, with a bed and a white-painted chest of drawers.
Maddie continued her exploration. There were three bedrooms upstairs. The biggest one was dominated by a high-canopied bed that was draped in red velvet and so tall that the top of it almost reached the beams of the ceiling. The windows at the opposite side of the room were far larger than anything one would have found in a real Tudor cottage, and they offered a spectacular view of the ocean.
One wall was taken up with another huge fireplace, complete with the Harrington coat of arms emblazoned on a shield above it. Since Daniel Harrington had arrived in New York from Eastern Europe as a child and had chosen the name for himself in his vaudeville days, it seemed entirely reasonable that he should be able to choose a coat of arms to go with it. This one had a rampant white stag and a trio of birds on it, and was framed by crossed swords.
The next bedroom was small but more to Maddie’s taste. It had plain white walls, and a fireplace decorated with tiles featuring ships and sea creatures. A pleasant seascape hung above the white-painted mantelpiece. The bed was designed for ordinary mortals and didn’t require a stepladder to get into or out of it. The view from the window was partially blocked by a large and unlovely house built much farther out on the sand than any of its neighbors, but it still offered a vista sea and sky and the coast stretching away to the west.
The third bedroom was over the garage. It had a narrow bed that could double as a sofa with the addition of some cushions, a white-painted bureau, and a small table that could serve as a desk. The walls were whitewashed. A small fireplace was decorated with leaf-green tiles.
There were no paintings on the wall or ornaments. Perhaps, Maddie thought, Belle was even now hunting through the London shops for Victorian Tudor-revival cupboards, a stuffed owl, and a new selection of halberds and crossbows to hang on the walls. Maddie, grateful that the room currently did not contain antlers or an armory, thought it would be a perfect place to write: quiet and serene. This side of the house faced the road, not the ocean, but the mountains that rose beyond the strip of tarmac were beautiful. She opened the window and leaned out to admire the view. She was filled once again with gratitude for her friends’ kindness.
The upstairs bathroom was opulent, covered in tiles that featured another menagerie of medieval creatures. The ceiling was bedecked with a small golden chandelier, and the frame that surrounded the mirror was a mass of gold gilt acanthus leaves. Maddie looked at her reflection in it and grinned at herself. The reflection grinned back: slight, dark-haired, dark-eyed behind round glasses, self-possessed at the age of 31, but still full of enthusiasm for life and filled with boundless curiosity for the world around her.
“What have you gotten yourself into?” she said to herself.
Maddie went downstairs again, pausing to wind the big grandfather clock on the landing. It was a beauty, with a smiling moon face surrounded by stars. She brought her luggage in from the car and put away the groceries she had prudently purchased in town—uncertain how or where one did one’s shopping in a place described to her as being “at the edge of the world,” and not convinced that an automobile and a swimsuit would be enough to sustain one without the addition of things like coffee and bread. Then she went upstairs and began unpacking. It didn’t take long.
Maddie opened all of the other windows in an effort to vanquish the smell of paint and unopened rooms, and folded the sheets that had covered the furniture. She thought about dusting, but decided the dust could wait. She was sitting by her open bedroom window looking out at the ocean when her first caller arrived. She watched him walk up the beach and through the gate that led into the patch of carefully fenced sand. A moment later she heard him knock on the back door.
The curtain was rising on the first act.
