ALSO BY LAURENCE KLAVAN
The Cutting Room
While set in real places, this book is a work of fiction. The characters and events are products of the author’s imagination and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual people is unintentional. In the few instances where well-known or real names are used, the related characters, incidents, or dialogues are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict any actual people or events.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2004 by Laurence Klavan
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher upon request.
eISBN: 978-0-345-48175-7
v3.1
For my mother
And in memory of my father,
who always got the joke
Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.
—attributed to the actor Edmund Gwenn, on his deathbed
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part 1 - New York City
Part 2 - The Hamptons
Part 3 - Los Angeles
Part 4 - Amsterdam
Part 5 - Maine and Philadelphia
Part 6 - New York City
Epilogue
About the Author
PROLOGUE
THE OSCAR FOR BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS CAME DOWN ON MY HEAD.
Before I blacked out, I saw the face of the most famous child star of the 1970s. Today, she looked like a combination of Bette Davis in Baby Jane, a Bel Air trophy wife, and a dead dog.
Gratey McBride stood at the top of a staircase I was ascending. She’d emerged from the shadows of the house’s second floor like a bat flying from an attic. She’d even given a little batlike scream. Or maybe I had screamed, as she lifted then brought down the statuette she’d won for acting thirty years before.
Gratey, of course, had played an adorably cynical six-year-old grifter in the 1976 hit Macaroon Heart. Though it was rumored that her part had been dubbed by a male dwarf, she had still managed to nab an Oscar and a few more roles. Puberty ended her career, and adulthood brought her a tumultuous marriage, drug abuse, and oblivion.
To be honest, I wasn’t that surprised to see her. I’d seen all kinds of familiar, famous, and infamous faces since I’d arrived in L.A., looking for the world’s second-most coveted lost film. I, Roy Milano, had once again gone from being a passive movie sleuth to an active movie sleuth.
My head twanging, I felt my feet sliding out behind me, off the step, one away from the top. I fell backward as Gratey’s famous, destroyed face receded into the darkness like a Halloween mask.
As I plunged down the length of the long staircase, I thought, Hey! I’ve never seen a real Oscar before. I’m not kidding; that’s what I thought.
I better rewind this tape to the FBI Warning, right?
SEQUELS ARE AS OLD AS MOVIES THEMSELVES, IF YOU COUNT A SERIAL LIKE The Perils of Pauline. The first sequel to win the Best Picture Oscar, though, was The Godfather Part II in 1974. The first one to be nominated in that category was probably The Bells of St. Mary’s in 1945, the sequel to Going My Way, which won the year before. Bing Crosby repeated his role as …
Sorry. Occupational hazard.
A year ago, I had discovered the most sought-after “lost” film, the full version of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons. I thought I would like being a movie detective. After all, it beat just being what I was: a “trivial man,” a person devoted to finding, hoarding, and recounting arcane movie information—in other words, a loser, I think it’s generally called.
Word of my discovery had spread through the “trivial” community like a virus that caused self-loathing. From obscure fan Web sites to tiny film festivals to dusty memorabilia stores, it was rumored that I had found, then given up—without even seeing!—Ambersons. In the trivial world, which is populated by people even less socialized than I, the rumor led to incredulity, awe, and (of course) jealousy and hatred.
My little newsletter, Trivial Man, which I publish out of my jammed apartment on West Forty-third Street in New York and subsidize through typesetting work, suddenly exploded in popularity, which meant it actually sold a few copies. I began to receive phone calls from trivial people seeking my deductive services, people not accustomed to navigating in the real world.
“I’ve got a movie I want you to find,” they’d say.
