Maddie Ellis and the Malibu Movie Colony is an old-fashioned mystery serial set during the end of the silent movie era. It’s a night on the town in Santa Monica for Maddie Ellis—a welcome break from life in Malibu, that includes a visit to the Santa Monica Pier and the La Monica Ballroom. There is more about this celebrated landmark in the Discover section of this issue of TNT.
Maddie was going out to dinner. Hoffmann invited her to meet the man who would be writing music for Sands of Afar. One thing to come out of the production delays was an opportunity to take advantage of the new fashion for sound.
“We’re taking the opportunity to add music—a synchronized score, they call it—to the production,” Hoffmann told her. “One has to move with the times.”
Maddie was joining Hoffmann, Milo, and the composer at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica. She had driven past the hotel, once the private home of Santa Monica co-founder and Nevada Senator John Percival Jones, but she had never been inside. The old mansion was now part of a luxurious hotel resort, which included an immaculate, six-story addition. She was looking forward to seeing what it looked like.
She dressed for the occasion in a plum-colored silk dress with matching shoes. She added her black velvet wrap, her beaded clutch, and an elegant hair ornament with a pattern of birds on it worked in iridescent purple and green thread, and looked at her reflection with satisfaction.
The new wing of the hotel was comfortable, elegant, and modern, with cream-colored paint and light wood. Maddie was ever so slightly disappointed that the restaurant wasn’t in the turreted old mansion, but the ambiance was sublime. She was shown into an elegant lounge, where the gentlemen rose to meet her. All three were attired in dinner jackets. Hoffmann, wearing a stiff, boiled shirtfront, resembled an anxious penguin. Maddie privately felt Milo looked at his best in his old tweed suit. His lanky height and soft shirt suggested, ever so slightly, a scarecrow in fancy dress. The third man was elegant and aristocratic. In defiance of fashion, he wore a full beard. Like his hair, it was dark and liberally streaked with gray. His eyes were dark, too, and deeply set. He would make a delightful vampire, or a count from a Russian novel, Maddie thought. All that was missing was a red sash and some kind of noble order from an obscure royal house pinned on his chest.
The man’s name was Antos Syzmanski and Maddie found him to be entirely delightful. They were soon deep in conversation about music.
“Mr. Hoffmann here is taken with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade,” Syzmanski said. His voice was deep and rich, with a strong accent. “And I do appreciate what Rimsky-Korsakov called ‘music, that carries the impression that it is beyond a doubt an Oriental narrative of some numerous and varied fairy-tale wonders,’ but I prefer something less romantic, more visceral. You have, perhaps, heard Igor Stravinsky’s L’Oiseau de feu? In it he uses the leit-motif—he calls it leit-harmony—to evoke the themes, and that is what I hear in my thoughts. This, with the use of special techniques—sul ponticello, glissando, col legno battuto—will create texture, evoke a mood, wonders, magic. The music becomes alive, it becomes part of the story, not apart from it.”
Maddie was not entirely sure what she ate for dinner that evening. She was so absorbed by Syzmanski’s vision for the music he was writing. What he was proposing was that the music should be an integral part of the story, not simply a background for the images on the screen.
It was a gamble for Mammoth Pictures. The sound-on-film recording process was costly and not every theater was equipped with sound equipment, but Hoffmann was keen to try the new technology. “It’s the future,” the producer told them.
Milo, the film’s director, appeared less sanguine—he kept shaking his head—but he kept his thoughts to himself.
When the coffee was finished and the conversation waned, Hoffman and Syzmanski took their leave of Maddie and left together, but Milo lingered.
“You wouldn’t care to join me for a walk on the pier, would you?” he asked, tentatively.
“What a good idea,” Maddie said. “I’ve been longing to go. I used to take my sister, Anna, sometimes. We would ride on the carousel and eat ice cream. It was lovely.”
It was still lovely. The carousel was the way she remembered it, the beautifully carved animals, gilded and bejeweled, housed in their own fanciful pavilion. Maddie insisted on going for a ride, and picked the horse she loved the best—the black one with the flowing mane and tail.
“I’ll race you,” she cried.
Milo gingerly lowered his tall frame onto the seat of the green-painted sleigh.
“I think you won by a full length,” he told her with a laugh when the ride was over. “When I was a child we once went to Bray, it’s a famous sea town not far from where we lived in Ireland,” Milo said. “We walked on the promenade and ate rock candy, and we all got to ride the carousel. It was the highlight of my young life, but I haven’t been on one since, and I never imagined riding one again as a grown man.”
“I ride every carousel I can,” Maddie said. “I didn’t get much of a chance when I was a child, either, but I make up for it every opportunity I get, and this carousel is an especially nice one.”
They walked down the pier, Maddie gave the towering roller coaster and the ferris wheel a longing glance as they walked by, but refrained from suggesting that they go for a ride. They strolled past elderly Mexican gentlemen fishing for stingrays and halibut, past the booths with the carnival games and the shooting gallery. The air was filled with a pungent combination of hot grease, popcorn, dead fish, creosote, and ocean brine, and alive with the sounds of the rollercoaster roaring, riders screaming, people laughing and talking, and the rumble of the waves.
At the end of the pier was the La Monica Ballroom, an Arabian Nights fantasy more elaborate than anything dreamed up at Mammoth Pictures. Pennants flew from the onion domes of a dozen slender minarets. The entire preposterous building was held up by hundreds of wooden pylons, which made it sway ever so slightly with the rush and pull of the tide. Jazz music spilled out of the open doors.
“Would you like to go in?” Milo asked. “We could watch for a bit. I can’t dance the Charleston or the Lindy Hop,” he said, indicating his cane. “But it’s fun to watch, and they serve coffee. The inside is worth seeing. I can’t help wondering if this building isn’t what gave Hoffmann the idea for this film of ours.”
Maddie smiled and took his arm. “I would love it,” she said.
The immense ballroom was supported by tall columns topped with fanciful, gold-gilt capitals. The ceiling, far above, suggested the roof of a tent, but it was decorated with plaster rosettes, also covered in gold leaf. Huge chandeliers shaped like lanterns gave a rosy light. At the far end of the room was a concession stand, with gleaming urns of coffee. All along the sides of the dance floor were tables and comfortable settees. Dancers swayed and gyrated in the colored lights to the music of the jazz band—a good one. It was delightful. Maddie took a seat while Milo went for coffee. She was enjoying the music with her thoughts far away when she was accosted by a familiar but unwelcome presence.
Polly Pollard was a gossip and society columnist for a popular Hollywood rag. Maddie wasn’t entirely sure if she was goodnatured but hopelessly dense, a frustrated romance writer with a dim grasp of reality, or a kind of modern day harpy who was intentionally malevolent. She was a friendly, cheerful, plump little person who suggested a fearless sparrow hopping about in pursuit of crumbs, but somehow, whatever she got ahold of always turned into something unrecognizable and inevitably embarrassing to her victim. Apparently Maddie was now being pounced on the way a bird would pounce upon a hapless worm.
“Magdalena Ellis!” Polly chirped. “I heard you are working on that unlucky film of Hoffmann’s, The Sins of Afar, isn’t it? Aren’t you worried about the terrible curse?”
“No. No, I’m not,” Maddie said.
“Is it true you came all the way from Belgrade to rewrite the script for Hoffmann?”
“I had a flat in Belgravia, London,” Maddie said, cautiously. “Not Belgrade, but yes, I returned to work on the film.”
Polly was not finished. “And you had a romantic affair with a poet, I heard!” Now she reminded Maddie of a stage magician triumphantly producing a rabbit from a hat. “Is your heart broken? Did you leave the love of your life to return to the empty promises of Hollywood?”
“‘Hearts do not break,’ Miss Pollard”, Maddie said gravely. “‘They sting and ache for old love’s sake, but do not die’. Oh look! I believe that gentleman over there is signaling to you. Yes, that one, the one who looks like Douglas Fairb…” the woman was gone, off like a bloodhound on the scent of the squirrel.
“That wasn’t Polly E. Pollard the Poison Pen, was it?” Milo asked, setting the coffee down.
“As ever was. She didn’t spot you did she?
“I hope not! I was lurking behind that handy column there.”
“Lucky man. I made the mistake of doing an interview with her once for a feature about ‘lady film writers.’ It’s a good thing I left the country right afterward. I still haven’t recovered from the embarrassment.”
“I haven’t had the pleasure, but the things she’s said about some of my friends and acquaintances would make the angels weep.”
“With sorrow or laughter?” Maddie enquired.
“So, what were you doing in Belgrade?” Milo inquired.
“Why, learning to break curses, of course.” Maddie raised her coffee cup in a mock salute. She couldn’t tell if Milo was serious or not, but she was determined not to be. It was bad enough having Polly and her ilk dig up one’s past life and then twist it into knots, but she wasn’t obliged to keep talking about it, not here, and not even with Milo.
“And why did you leave the poet?” Milo asked.
“Because I grew weary of anapestic poetry?” Maddie replied. “Or perhaps he left me for the fortune teller who was teaching me to break curses. Is that sufficiently sensational? Which do you think is the prettier plot?”
“You should have told all of that to Polly,” Milo said.
“Oh don’t worry, when she gets done with me it will be far worse than anything I could ever dream up,” Maddie sighed. “Even now she’s speculating that you are either the missing heir of Ruritania and that we’ve eloped in defiance of your father, the king, or that you are, in fact, the Serbian poet, come to Los Angeles from Belgrade seeking vengeance because I accidentally levanted with either your diamonds or your lucky fountain pen and your fount of inspiration with it.”
“Was there ever a poet, Maddie?” Milo asked, serious now.
“Oh, dozens of them, not including the one who only wrote in rhyming couplets,” Maddie said. “Does it matter?” But it was clear that it did. Her flippant reply had struck like a blow to this sensitive, shy man.
“He was a journalist, really, if you mean his bread-and-butter job,” Maddie said. “But he also wrote poetry, so yes, he was a poet, and I loved him, but it wasn’t destined to be one of those great love stories that gossip columnists adore, and my heart wasn’t broken, only bruised a bit. Messieurs Gilbert and Sullivan have it right. Most of the time, hearts don’t break, or if they do, they mend in time.”
Milo was looking into his coffee cup, not at her. Maddie could tell he was embarrassed. “Also, my name, in case you weren’t aware of it, is Madeleine, not Magdalene,” she added, tartly. “My apartment was in Belgravia, not Belgrave. I’ve never been to Serbia, although I wouldn’t mind visiting some day. I hear it’s beautiful. And the film you and I are working to save is The Sands of Afar, and not the sins, and it isn’t cursed, just a bit unfortunate. You ought to know that while the things Polly starts out with may have a grain of truth in them, she will smother that grain in gallons of sticky sentiment and fantastical embellishments. She does have a wonderful imagination, I’ll give her that.”
Milo laughed sheepishly. “I couldn’t help wondering,” he said.
“I’m not the only victim tonight,” Maddie said. “It looks like she’s pouncing upon Lulu Desmond and that Billy Worthington character. It’s like swimming in shark-infested waters here tonight. No one is safe.”
Lulu spotted Maddie and Milo, broke away from the columnist, and made her way to their table. The actress looked sensational in a sparkling white dress that managed to be astonishingly low cut both fore and aft while full in the skirt in the latest Paris style. She appeared only slightly tipsy.
“Polly told me she’d just finished savaging you, darling,” Lulu told Maddie. “She told me you lived with a Hungarian poet or something, and I told her I thought he was a count or an earl. Simply a scream!”
“Thanks a lot,” Maddie said dryly, but Lulu’s attention was across the room.
“You didn’t see me at the coffee shop,” she hissed at Maddie. “Please? Oh Billy, come here, it’s Miss Ellis and Mr. Devlin, from that fabulous beach party in Malibu, you remember?”
“Miss Ellis, Mr. Devlin!” Billy exclaimed with evident enthusiasm. He looked dapper in evening clothes and appeared entirely sober. His blue eyes positively shone. “How nice to see you again! I trust Miss Auclair has dried out and recovered from her dunking. That incident was all so unfortunate. I don’t know what got into Johnny.”
“Miss Auclair was under the impression it was absinthe,” Maddie said.
“Foul stuff!” exclaimed Billy. “I can’t imagine what Johnny wanted with it. I’ve sworn it off for life. I plan to stick to wholesome American gin for the duration.”
“Ooooh I could use some right now, Billy.” Lulu draped herself artfully over her escort’s shoulder and gave him a passionate and imploring look.
“Then let’s find you some, Lulu, darling,” he said. “Ready to go? Care to join us?” He asked Maddie and Milo. They politely declined. “Goodnight, then. I hope to see you again soon!”
Lulu winked over her shoulder at Maddie. Then they were off, vanishing into the throng.
“I think it’s goodnight for me too, Milo,” Maddie said. “It’s been lovely, but it’s getting late and I still have a long drive home.”
“I wish I was heading that way,” Milo said. “I miss the beach, but it’s too long a drive when I have so much work to do at the studio. Who knows, if your script and my directing manage to save this mess maybe we’ll both be able to afford beach houses of our own one day.”
“Stranger things have happened,” Maddie said.
“Tell me, why didn’t Miss Desmond want Mr. Worthington to know you saw her at a coffee shop?” Milo asked.
“Because she was there with Johnny Roberts, and perhaps because it was a coffee shop that doesn’t sell coffee.” Maddie told Milo about her adventure at the speakeasy.
“I don’t like it, Maddie,” Milo said. “Those places can be dangerous, by all accounts.”
“I believe it,” Maddie replied. “You might easily contract dysentery from the dirty cups, or lead poisoning from the homemade gin. I’m not convinced the stuff they were serving wasn’t methylated spirits—the kind used to dilute shellac—but I don’t regret crashing the gate. It was interesting.”
“Just what is anapestic poetry?” Milo asked as they made their way back along the pier.
“You, an Irishman, have to ask?” Maddie said with a laugh. “For shame. It’s a limerick, or at least, a limerick is a form of poetry that uses anapestic trimeter.”
Milo was dumbstruck. But he quickly recovered and they spent the rest of the walk back to the hotel composing increasingly ridiculous limericks. They parted in good spirits amidst laughter, but Maddie was glad to be headed home. n
