Fowley pointed at himself with a thumb. “What makes you think I’ll do any better?”
“Say you’re with the Herald-Express. All in the family.”
Fowley and I went our separate ways, he in the Examiner ’s Ford and me in the A-1’s Buick.
The Florentine Gardens was at 5955 Hollywood Boulevard, just a few blocks from its main competition, Earl Carroll’s. In the morning sunlight, the building was blinding white, a massive structure with modern lines and classical trim, including neon-lined columns. Spanish-style wrought-iron front doors were positioned between a pair of palm trees, and a banner advertising the Mills Brothers flapped above the club’s boldly neon-lettered name.
The place was closed, but the doors were open. The lobby walls were rounded and powder-blue, trimmed in gold, the carpet a luxurious floral number; to my left the hat- and coat-check window was unattended, and to my right an entryway revealed the black-and-white jungle of the Zanzibar Cocktail Lounge, also unattended. Straight ahead double doors closed off the ballroom; but I could hear a piano, seeping through, echoing across the big room beyond, playing “Don’t Fence Me In,” Cole Porter’s improbable cowboy tune.
When Nils Thor Granlund took this place over, a few years back, he had jettisoned the exotic motif designed to invoke ancient Florence (Italy), and went for an art moderne look, invoking Florenz (Ziegfeld). Still, the main room retained an open, airy feel, powder-blue rounded walls mirroring a central round dance floor with two tiers of spacious, high-backed golden-upholstered booths on either side, and private nooks recessed in the walls.
As I strolled in, down a wide gold-carpeted aisle that emptied onto the dance floor, I was facing the stage, way across the yawning room-a bandstand designed to look like a big top hat, with a window cut in it, its brim surrounding the stage. The tiered seating for the orchestra was empty, but a bored bald heavyset cigar-chomping guy in his shirtsleeves was playing piano, while strung across the stage, a dozen pretty girls were rehearsing a dance number.
The chorus girls were in various casual leg-baring outfits-sunsuits, halter tops, short-sleeve blouses, shorts and short skirts-and their hair was either ponytailed back or in pincurls under a kerchief; they also weren’t wearing any makeup. And yet they seemed much sexier looking to me than if they’d been all dolled up.
“No, no, no! You impossible cows!” The choreographer, down on the dance floor in front, was a guy about forty in a short-sleeve white sweater, frayed dungarees, and moccasins.
The girls froze in midkick, the pianist stopped, taking time to relight his cigar. The girls relaxed as the choreographer began performing all of their steps (“Land, lots of land!”), admittedly with more grace than the girls, and comparable femininity, for that matter.
The chorus line nodded, acknowledging his superiority, and soon they were back at it, better than before. The guy knew his stuff.
I was just watching them, forgetting my troubles, enjoying their athletic beauty, thinking about how goddamn many beautiful women there were in the state of California, wondering why California couldn’t get along without the beautiful woman I was married to, when a gravel-edged voice called out to me.
“Are you still alive?”
I turned and noticed, nestled in one of the booths, the Florentine Gardens’ resident impresario, N.T.G. himself.
“Hiya, Granny,” I said, on my way over to join him.
Granlund was a big lumpy-nosed Swede who wouldn’t have looked out of place at a plow in the middle of a field, if he hadn’t been dressed in tailored gray sharkskin with a silk black-and-white-patterned tie. Smiling in his avuncular manner, gray hair slicked back, eyes a dark twinkling blue, Granny-who was in his late fifties-leaned his chin on a hand bedecked with gold rings, exposing gold cufflinks and a gold wristwatch no more expensive than a new Plymouth.
“I heard you were in town,” he said, gesturing for me to sit next to him in the booth. “You and Fred should do well.”
Granlund knew both Fred Rubinski and me primarily from his stay managing the showroom at Chicago’s Congress Hotel in the mid-’30s, where I’d handled security.
“Thanks, Granny. Nice little joint you got here.”
“Not mine, exactly, but thank you, Nathan. How do you like my girls?”
“You still know how to pick ’em.”
“Yes, I do.” Gazing almost dreamily at the chorus line as the choreographer whipped them into shape, he said, “The Short girl wasn’t in the chorus, by the way. She was strictly a waitress-Mark hired her.”
That caught me like the sucker punch it was. I said, “You don’t fool around, do you, Granny?”
He beamed at me like a big Swedish elf. “You’re mentioned in the Examiner coverage, fairly prominently. I assumed someone from the press or the police would show up-rather relieved it’s you.”
“To my knowledge, the cops haven’t connected Beth Short to the Gardens.”
With a smile and a contented sigh, pleased by the array of pulchritude he’d assembled, Granny leaned back in the booth, withdrew a gold cigarette case from his inside suitcoat pocket, offered me a smoke, which I declined, and then lit up.
“The police will connect her with us,” he said offhandedly, “if the Examiner runs a story.”
“The Examiner is prepared not to mention the Gardens-not until, or unless, the cops make that connection.”
Raising an eyebrow, he said, “Really. Why? Has Jim Richardson come down with a sudden bout of compassion?”
“It’s on the assumption that you could provide a few exclusive leads on the girl.”
“Off-the-record tidbits?”
I nodded.
He sat and smoked and watched his girls dance, for maybe a minute-a long one. The bored piano player kept grinding out “Don’t Fence Me In.”
Then Granny said, softly, “I only spoke to the girl a few times. As I say, Mark hired her. She was strictly a waitress, albeit a very decorative one, but then all of the waitresses here are beautiful… You don’t come to the Florentine Gardens to see plain janes.”
“Having beautiful waitresses encourages drinking among male patrons.”
Half a smile dimpled one cheek. “Nathan… I know you too well. You’re trying to suggest that our waitresses are B-girls. That’s not the case. There’s no prostitution here. We did have a bad incident last year-”
“Those underage twins.”
Both eyebrows arched this time, smoke trailing out his nostrils. “You know about that?”
“I know you’ve always hired underage girls when you could get away with it, Granny.”
He shrugged. “What’s prettier than a pretty fifteen- or sixteen-year-old? And what’s wrong with displaying their charms, in a tasteful fashion? It’s just that one of the girls got involved with a customer, and… well, we were prosecuted for placing a minor in an ‘unsavory situation,’ and we’ve been most circumspect ever since.”
“How circumspect is it, this Lansom having your girls rooming over at his own house? Right behind the Gardens?”
Granny twitched a smile. “How off the record is this, Nathan?”
“All the way off-level with me about Lansom. This is for me, not Richardson.”
The dark blue eyes narrowed. “You have a… personal stake in this?”
“Yes.”
“Which is the extent of what you’ll reveal to me?”
“Yes.”
He gazed at his girls as they bounced to the piano. “I’m considering leaving the Gardens.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I’m not entirely… in tune with my employer.”
“And why is that?”
Granny’s thin lips formed a faint sneer. “Let’s return to the subject of Elizabeth Short, shall we? She’s rather a case in point. You see, Mark hires these girls as waitresses, implying that this is the next step to their being discovered by yours truly.”
“And placed in the chorus line.”
“Yes, or for the aspiring actresses, that I’ll put them in the movies.”
None of this was far-fetched. As a starmaker over the years, Granny numbered among his discoveries Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers, Martha Raye, and Alice Faye; and more recently, here at the Florentine Gardens, N.T.G. had hired and showcased Betty Hutton, Yvonne DeCarlo (another of his underage finds), and Marie “the Body” McDonald.