I started through the Busby Berkeleys, short as they were on dancing, and found her tapping without music in Gold Diggers of 1935 and in the big finale of 42nd Street, but that was it. I did better (and apparently so had she) in non-Busbys. Hats Off, wearing a hat, natch, and The Show of Shows and Too Much Harmony, “Buckin’ the Wind” in a number made for Marilyn, in garters and a white skirt that blew up around her stockinged legs. She was in Born to Dance, too, but in the chorus, and I couldn’t find her in any other Eleanor Powell movies.
It took me a week to finish the b-and-w’s, during which time I couldn’t get through to Heada, and she didn’t access me. When my comp finally did beep, I didn’t wait for her to come on. “Did you find out anything?” I said.
“I found out all right!” Mayer said, twitching. “You haven’t sent in a movie in three weeks! I was planning to give the whole package to my boss at next week’s meeting, and you’re wasting time with Rising Sun, which isn’t even on the list!”
Which meant Vincent was costarring in the role of Joe Spinell as snitch in The Godfather II.
“I needed to replace a couple of scenes,” I said. “There were too many visuals to do wipes. One of them’s a dance number. You don’t know anybody who can dance, do you?” I watched him, looking for some sign, some indication that he remembered Alis, knew her, had wanted to pop her badly enough that he’d pasted her face in over a dozen dancers’. Nothing. Not even a pause in the twitches.
“There was a face at a couple of the parties a while back,” I said. “Pretty, light brown hair, she wanted to dance in the movies.”
Nothing. It wasn’t Mayer.
“Forget dancers,” he said. “Forget The Time Machine. Just take the damned alcohol out! I want the rest of that list done by Monday, or you’ll never work for ILMGM again!”
“You can count on me, Mr. Potter,” I said, and let him tell me he was shutting down my credit.
“I want you sober!” he said.
Which, oddly enough, I was.
I took “Moonshine Lullaby” out of Annie Get Your Gun and the hookahs out of Kismet to show him I’d been listening, and started through the forties, looking for alcohol and Alis, two birds with one ff. She was in Yankee Doodle Dandy, and in the hoedown number in Babes on Broadway, wearing the pinafore she’d had on the night she’d come to ask me for the disk.
Heada came in while I was watching Three Little Girls in Blue, which had an assortment of bustles and Vera-Ellen, but no Alis.
“I found the exec,” she said. “He’s working for Warner now. He says they’re looking at ILMGM as a possible takeover.”
“What’s his name?” I said.
“He wouldn’t tell me anything. He said the reason they haven’t rereleased Somewhere in Time is because they couldn’t decide whether to cast Vivien Leigh or Marilyn Monroe.”
“I’ll talk to him. What’s his name?”
She hesitated. “I talked to the hackates, too. They said last year they were transmitting images through a negative-matter region and got some interference that they thought was a time discrepancy, but they haven’t been able to duplicate the results, and now they think it was a transmission from another source.”
“How big of a time discrepancy?” I said.
She looked unhappy. “I asked them if they could duplicate the results, could they send a person back into the past, and they said even if it worked, they were only talking about electrons, not atoms, and there was no way anything living could survive a negative-matter region.”
Which eliminated parallel timefeeds, and there must be worse to come because Heada was still hovering by the door like Clara Bow in Wings, unwilling to tell me the bad news.
“Have you found her in any more movies?” she said.
“Six,” I said. “And if it’s not time travel, she must have walked up onto the screen like Mia Farrow. Because it’s not a paste-up. And it’s not Mayer.”
“There’s another explanation,” she said unhappily. “You were pretty splatted there for a while. One of the movies I watched was about a guy who was an alcoholic.”
“The Lost Weekend,” I said. “Ray Milland,” and could already see where this was going.
“He had blackouts when he drank,” she said. “He did things and couldn’t remember them.” She looked at me. “You knew what she looked like. And you had the accesses.”
DANA ANDREWS: [Standing over police sergeant’s desk] She didn’t do it, I tell you.
BRODERICK CRAWFORD: Is that so? Then who did?
DANA ANDREWS: I don’t know, but I know she couldn’t have. She’s not that kind of girl.
BRODERICK CRAWFORD: Well, somebody did it. [Eyes narrowing suspiciously] Maybe you did it. Where were you when Carson was killed?
DANA ANDREWS: I was out taking a walk.
It was the likeliest explanation. I was an expert at paste-ups. And I’d had her face stuck in my head ever since the moment I flashed. And I had full studio access. Motive and opportunity.
I had wanted her, and she had wanted to dance in the movies, and in the wonderful world of CGs, anything is possible. But if I had done it, I wouldn’t have given her a two-minute bit in a production number. I’d have deleted Doris Day and her teeth and let Alis dance with Gene Nelson in front of those rehearsal-hall mirrors. If I’d known about the routine, which I hadn’t. I’d never even seen Tea for Two.
Or I didn’t remember seeing it. Right after the episode on the skids, Mayer had credited my account for half a dozen Westerns, none of which I remembered doing. But if I had done it, I wouldn’t have dressed her in a bustle. I wouldn’t have made her dance with Gene Kelly.
I’d put a watch-and-warn on Fred Astaire and Funny Face. I changed it to Broadway Melody of 1940 and asked for a status report on the case. It was close to being settled, but a secondary suit was expected to be filed, and the FPS was considering proceedings.
The Film Preservation Society. Every change was automatically recorded with them, and the studios didn’t have any control over them. Mayer hadn’t been able to get me out of putting in those codes because they were part and parcel of the fibe-op feed. If it was a paste-up, it would have to be listed in their records.
I called up the FPS’s files and asked for the record for Seven Brides.
Legalese. I’d forgotten it was in litigation. “Singin’ in the Rain,” I said.
The champagne wipes I’d done in the party scene were listed, along with one I hadn’t. “Frame 9-106,” it read, and listed the coordinates and the data. Jean Hagen’s cigarette holder. It had been done by the Anti-Smoking League.
“Tea for Two,” I said, and tried to remember the frame numbers for the Charleston scene, but it didn’t matter. The screen was empty.
Which left time travel. I went back to doing the musicals, saying, “Next, please!” to conga lines and male choruses and a horrible blackface number I was surprised nobody’d wiped before this. She was in Can-Can and Bells Are Ringing, both made in 1960, after which I didn’t expect to find much. Musicals had gone big-budget around then, which meant buying up Broadway shows and casting box-office properties like Audrey Hepburn and Richard Harris in them who couldn’t sing or dance, and then cutting out all the musical numbers to conceal the fact. And then musicals’d turned socially relevant. As if the coffin had needed any more nails pounded into it.