Maddie Ellis and the Malibu Movie Colony is an old-fashioned mystery serial set during the end of the silent movie era. In chapter 10, Maddie learns how the actress Clarice Auclair ended up almost drowning, and why Johnny Roberts, the star of the film Maddie was hired to rewrite, may have been acting so erratically. Join us as we travel back in time to January 1928.
Maddie rose to check on her patient several times during the night. Each time, the girl was sleeping peacefully, but when Maddie returned to her sofa and drifted off to sleep herself she woke with a start, convinced that the tide was rising, or that someone was in the house. Someone was, she told herself sourly: the girl she and Milo had pulled from the tide the night before. She was dressed and on her second cup of coffee when the girl emerged from the back bedroom.
Maddie poured coffee for her without saying a word, and pushed a packet of aspirin tablets across the table to her. “Take two,” she advised. “Can you eat anything? Toast and a poached egg, maybe?”
The girl looked blank, then nodded and winced.
Maddie pretended not to notice and began making breakfast. By the time the girl had swallowed her aspirin and drunk a cup of coffee she looked less like something washed up by the tide. Clarice Auclair was dark-haired and dark-eyed, with ivory skin that had, at the moment at least, a distinctly greenish cast. Unlike the vast majority of Hollywood starlets, she wore her hair long, instead of fashionably bobbed. She was beautiful even with a hangover, but without the sophisticated dress and artful makeup of the previous evening she looked very young, hardly older than a school girl.
Maddie watched while she ate two pieces of toast with butter and jam and a poached egg. “How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Better, thank you,” the girl said. “I’m sorry to put you through so much trouble.”
“Where are you staying, Miss Auclair?” Maddie asked. “Is there someone I should notify of your whereabouts who might be wondering what became of you last night?”
“It’s a sort of boarding house for girls who are in the movies or hoping to be,” she said. “I share a room with several other girls. No one will care. They were probably out last night, too.” She sounded defiant, but it was a feeble defiance that swiftly dissolved into tears. Maddie handed her a clean tea towel to wipe her eyes.
“Do you remember what happened last night?” Maddie asked.
The girl flushed. “I almost drowned,” she said. “And also I drank an awful lot of something that tasted like the Paregoric Mama used to give us when we were sick. I’ve had gin before, but it didn’t make me feel like that.”
“Tell me about it,” Maddie invited, her voice calm and encouraging, but her expression unreadable behind her round glasses.
The girl began to talk, slowly at first and then with more animation.
“Johnny, he has this new boat—you saw it—and I’ve always longed to be on a sailboat—I never had before. I’d never even seen the ocean until I came to California, so I said yes. Only, he brought a load of other people with him that I didn’t know, and he kept flirting with that Lulu Desmond girl, and everyone was drinking the stuff in the green bottles—there was a whole case of it—but it made me feel sick. I feel sick if I just think about it,” she shuttered with revulsion.
Maddie poured her a glass of water.
Clarice mopped her face with the tea towel, drank the water with the resolute determination of someone trying to remove a bad taste from their mouth and took a deep breath. She continued her tale.
“You have to understand how exciting it was,” Clarice said earnestly. “That first day on the set when Johnny noticed me—really noticed me as a person and not just a girl with a bit part—was like winning a prize. I had to bring him a message. It wasn’t a complicated scene, or anything, but things kept going wrong and we had to keep doing takes. Johnny and I started laughing and couldn’t stop. We finally got the scene finished and he invited me for drinks, so of course I said yes.
“It was fun at first. I got to know Isabel—Miss Flores. The director—the one who left—said I was pretty good, and Johnny was kind and funny, a real pal. At least, I thought he was. He called me ‘kid’, just like my brothers used to do. He’s awfully old, older than thirty, but he was always nice to me. I’ve been so lonely since coming to Hollywood. It felt a bit like having family again. Johnny’s an awful joker, just like my brother Henry. He always makes—made—everyone laugh, and Isabel was fun to be with, too. She’s nice. She was always laughing and joking, too.
“Then the accident with Isabel happened. I was on set waiting for my cue and saw it. The wall—it was supposed to be a ruined palace—collapsed on her. It wasn’t supposed to. Not then. But it did, and Isabel was buried alive, just like in the script. When they dug her out I thought she was dead. She just lay there, not moving. Johnny went crazy. They had to get the studio guards and the stunt people to hold him back.
“Were they using a set that was rigged to collapse in another scene?” Maddie interrupted.
“Yes. They were going to have a stand-in for the scene where it collapsed, but it was supposed to be quite safe, only it wasn’t. They took Isabel away in an ambulance, and Johnny in another one. They gave him tranquilizers.” Clarice said. “He was raving that she was dead and it was all his fault, but it wasn’t. I mean, the wall fell on her, how could it be his fault? It was an accident.
“They put the production on hold right after that, but Johnny still came round to see me, only he was different. Wild and, I don’t know, angry. He was drinking a lot,” she lowered her voice, although there was no one there to hear except Maddie. “Whiskey and gin, you know, but I think maybe other things, too.”
“Narcotics?” Maddie said.
Clarice nodded. “I saw a movie once about a man who became a dope fiend, and I keep thinking about it, because Johnny has been, well, just not himself.”
“What did he do?” Maddie asked.
“He was always nice to me, well, until last night.” Clarice was crying again. “Last night was awful. He was like a madman, raving about pirates and revenge and things like that, and the more he drank, the more he raged.
“I was so glad when we were on land again,” Clarice told Maddie. “When it was time to go back out to the sailboat I didn’t want to go. I just wanted to go home, but Johnny only laughed. He and I were the last ones to get into the boat, and the others were shouting for us to hurry up and climb in, but I still didn’t want to go.
“Johnny picked me up and put me in the rowboat, as if I was a little kid. Then he got into the boat, too, but he was still holding on to me, and then he, he kissed me. I’d seen him do that a hundred times in movies, sweeping the girl into a manly embrace and all that, but it wasn’t like that at all. I can’t pretend I hadn’t imagined what it might be like, being kissed by Johnny,” Clarice blushed crimson.
“I had a picture of him at home that I’d cut out of a newspaper. He was so handsome and romantic. Always rescuing the girl from peril. Always dashing around with a sword and swinging from the riggings of ships and things. And now he was kissing me, and all I could think of was Miss Flores with all of her broken bones, and how they were supposed to be engaged, and that it wasn’t right.”
She lifted candid brown eyes to meet Maddie’s gaze and Maddie realized she was blushing not with embarrassment now but with anger.
“It wasn’t the way I thought it would be at all. It hurt, and I couldn’t breathe. I tried to push him away, but he was all over me, like, like an octopus, you know? I was scared, really scared, I kept trying to push him away, but he was a beast. He hurt my arm.” She pushed up the sleeve of her borrowed robe to show five round bruises.
“I finally got one arm free. I didn’t know what to do, so I hit him with my free hand as hard as I could on the side of his head and he let go for a moment, but then he lunged for me. That other fellow, Billy, tried to stop him—he was shouting at him. That was when the boat turned over. The next thing I knew, I was in the water. It was cold and took my breath away. Everyone was yelling, swearing, and screaming.
“Instead of trying to grab onto the boat I just swam away as fast as I could. I’m a good swimmer. There was a river at home and we swam in it every summer, but this wasn’t like swimming in the river. The waves kept pushing me under. Then the current caught me and swept me to the rock. I just clung on, as hard as I could. When the next wave came it pushed me up onto the rock. I grabbed hold of the seaweed and pulled myself up, out of the water.
“At first I was just glad to be left alone, but then I realized they had rowed away and left me, and I felt so helpless and alone and cold. You don’t feel the cold when you are in the water, but once you are out of it it’s awful. You know the rest,” she said, drearily. “I’m not usually hysterical. You can’t afford to be in this business, I don’t know what got into me.”
She began to cry again. Eventually the sobs subsided into sniffles and stopped.
“You did the right thing,” Maddie said, gently. “Now go lie down. We’ll worry about getting you home later, when you feel a little better.”
Milo found Maddie standing by the edge of the water looking out at the ocean.
“How’s the patient?” He asked.
“Hung over, battered body and soul, and suffering from a bad scare and a case of disillusionment, but I think she’ll recover,” Maddie replied. “She’s very young, isn’t she?” She gave him a succinct summary of Clarice’s misadventure.
Milo wasn’t sympathetic. “Silly goose,” he said. “What did she expect?”
“Not what she received,” Maddie said. “She wanted kindness, I think, friendship, not assault and battery.”
“Poor abandoned Ariadne,” Milo mocked.
“It’s serious, Milo. If we hadn’t arrived on the scene just then Miss Auclair’s life might have ended before it really began, as a morbid headline in the tabloids.”
“Yes, the ‘curse of Sands of Afar.’ That was clever, Maddie. Roberts needs the film to be a success as much as the rest of us. That yacht must have cost a packet. But tell me, how did you ever resist his irresistible charm last night?”
“He made me think of Peter Pan,” Maddie said. “I can never forget that the reason why Peter Pan can fly is because he is heartless, and the reason he can stay that way is because he always forgets what he has done after he’s done it.”
“I had a telegram from Hoffmann,” Milo said, changing the subject. “He’s expecting us at the studio bright and early tomorrow.”
“Good. I can drop Clarice off at her home on my way into town. I’m not thrilled that she will have to continue to work with Roberts after this incident, but we need both of them if we are going to salvage the film.”
