The elderly proprietor of an Alameda, California movie memorabilia shop starts digging into her grandmother's past after she overhears PI Jeri Howard mention her actress grandmother, Jerusha Layne, in connection with the unsolved 1942 murder of British actor Ralph Tarrant.

Bit Player

A Jeri Howard MysteryBy Janet Dawson

perseverance press

Copyright © 2011 Janet Dawson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-56474-494-4

Chapter One

"GRANDMA SAID John Barrymore made a pass at her." I nudged my friend Cassie and pointed at the framed poster from Rasputin and the Empress, displaying the famous profiles of John, Ethel, and Lionel in the 1932 film, the only movie the three Barrymores ever made together.

Cassie chuckled. "From what I've heard about John Barrymore, he made passes at anything in skirts."

On this sunny Saturday afternoon, the last weekend in May, Cassie and I were in downtown Alameda, where we'd gone to a movie at the city's newly restored Art Deco movie palace, glittering anew like the jewel it had been when it opened back in the 1930s. After the movie, we crossed Central Avenue to the produce market on the corner. After making a few purchases, I suggested a visit to the ice cream parlor around the corner, on Park Street. Cassie heartily concurred and we strolled back up Central. Just opposite the theater I stopped, lured by the display of old movie magazines and posters in the window of a shop that hadn't been here the last time I'd been downtown, just a few weeks earlier. The sign above the door looked like a movie marquee, mirroring the real one across the street. The shop was called Matinee—Classic Hollywood Memorabilia. We decided to take a look. On the left, shelves held books about the movies and the stars, emphasizing the golden years of the thirties and forties. On the right, I saw movie memorabilia—the ephemera of Tinseltown, dating from the early part of the twentieth century up through the early 1960s. Posters and inserts hung on the walls. In the shallow bins along the wall, protected by clear plastic sleeves, were lobby and title cards, programs, and photographs, as well as old movie magazines, and publicity files containing yellowed clippings from newspapers and magazines.

The Rasputin and the Empress poster, with big red letters on a cream background, had the patina of age, with faded colors. At one edge the paper was cracked and brittle. The poster was an original, the real deal, with a high price to match. Most movie memorabilia of the pre–World War II era had answered the call to duty and wound up in paper drives for the war effort. Much of what was available from that time period was reprints. The vintage stuff was harder to get, and priced accordingly.

I really like movie memorabilia, but I have to be picky and buy only what I can afford. I'm Jeri Howard, self-employed private investigator, with a slim profit margin, a mortgage payment to make, and not much room in my budget for frills.

"When did your grandmother encounter John Barrymore?" Cassie asked.

"On the set of Marie Antoinette. Barrymore was playing King Louis the Fifteenth."

Grandma was thrilled to be an extra in the lavish costume drama, in production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the spring of 1938, especially because she was in a scene with her favorite actress, Norma Shearer, who starred as the doomed queen. The movie also featured handsome young Tyrone Power and a panoply of Hollywood names, including Barrymore.

My grandmother, Jerusha Layne, went to Hollywood in the fall of 1937. She was eighteen, just out of high school. Ever since she was old enough to stand on a box behind the counter, she'd worked in her family's theater in Jackson, California, selling tickets and popcorn, enthralled by the movies spinning from the huge reels her father wrestled onto the projector upstairs in the booth. She wanted more from life than she could find in that small Gold Rush–era mining town. The new gold rush, for pretty young women like Jerusha, was to Hollywood. Visions of movie stardom beckoned, as ethereal as El Dorado's glittering dust. Lightning could strike. She could climb the ladder to the top. After all, she sang, she danced, and she'd played the lead in several high school plays.

Except it didn't work out that way. Pretty and talented as she was, Jerusha discovered lots of young women just like her, scrabbling at the bottom of that Hollywood ladder, trying to get their feet on the first rung. She worked in the movies, all right, first as an extra, a silent face in the crowd, walking down a sidewalk or sitting at a table at a restaurant, filling in the background while the cameras focused on the stars. Then she worked as a bit player, or day player, as they were sometimes called. Bit players were different from extras, because they had a few lines of dialogue, or they did bits, specific pieces of business. Jerusha played telephone operators, hat check girls, waitresses. She was the shop clerk, chatting while she waited on the star, or the neighbor who witnessed the gangland shooting and gave a statement to the cops. She got jobs through agents, but often bit players weren't under contract like actors who worked steadily in larger roles. As she sat in the background, Jerusha dreamed of the day when the parts would get bigger, when someone at a studio would notice her and offer her a contract.

It didn't happen. But Jerusha stuck it out for nearly five years, working primarily at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Then she left Hollywood, realizing her future wasn't written in lights on a movie palace marquee. Besides, she'd met a young man named Ted Howard. They married in the spring of 1942, like so many young couples in those war years, full of hopes and fears for the future. Later that year, Ted Howard, United States Navy, left to fight battles in the remote islands of the Pacific. But he came back, and my father, Timothy, was their firstborn. Grandma never had any regrets, but she certainly had some great Hollywood stories to tell her grandchildren. And I—the granddaughter named after her—relished every tale.

"I've always wanted something from one of Grandma's movies," I told Cassie. "A one-sheet, an insert, a title or lobby card—that would be great."

Cassie looked up from a bin of black-and-white photos, a still of Cary Grant in her hand. "What are all those things? I'm not familiar with the terms."

"This is a lobby card." I pulled one from a nearby bin. Encased in a clear plastic sleeve, the eleven-by-fourteen-inch card displayed a color photo of Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in the Billy Wilder masterpiece, Some Like It Hot.

"Lobby cards showed colored photos of scenes from the movie," I explained, "even if the film itself was shot in black-and-white, like this one. The cards usually came in sets of eight. They were displayed in theater lobbies. You don't see lobby cards for movies made after the early sixties. I guess they stopped making them. Sometimes there was a ninth card in the set, a title card. Instead of photographs, title cards showed the title, names of the cast, and an image, usually the same as on the one-sheet."

I gestured at the posters ranked along the walls—William Powell and Irene Dunne in Life with Father, Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's. "These are one-sheets. A one-sheet is a full-size movie poster, twenty-seven inches wide and forty-one inches high. There's a larger size poster called a three-sheet, which is forty-one inches wide by eighty-one inches. Got to have a lot of wall space for one of those. But an insert is a good size for display, thirty-six inches high, but narrower, about fourteen inches."

"So the ones you have at home are inserts," Cassie said.

"That's right." The inserts...