It was in the frozen food aisle that Mitch ran smack into a local innkeeper named Les Josephson, who was not exactly Mitch’s favorite Dorseteer right now-for reasons that had to do with this upcoming weekend and with Les’s famous mother-in-law, Ada Geiger. Les, who operated Astrid’s Castle with his wife, Norma, had talked him into participating in something that Mitch would never in a million years be caught doing were it not for the fact that Les had, well, lied to him.
“Mitch, I am so glad I ran into you,” Les exclaimed, smiling at him radiantly as he stood there, cradling a gallon jug of milk under one arm. “I was just going to call you.”
“Is that right?” Mitch noticed that Les was not only blocking his path but had a firm grip on his left-leaning grocery cart as well. “What about, Les?”
“I want to throw myself on your mercy. I feel as if I got you involved under false pretenses.”
“Only because you did, Les.”
“You’re absolutely right,” he agreed readily. “You couldn’t be more right.”
He was a most agreeable fellow, Les Josephson was. Outgoing, friendly, helpful-everything you could ask for in an innkeeper. Although, in fact, he had been one only since he latched on to Norma a few years back. Les was actually a retired Madison Avenue advertising executive, which Mitch felt explained a lot about him. Because this was a man who was always selling something, always on, and never totally on the level. Les was in his early sixties, not quite five feet nine but very chesty and broad-shouldered, with a big head of wavy silver hair that he was obviously very proud of since he never wore a hat, not even in the snow. Taking good care of himself was clearly important to Les. He held himself very erect-shoulders back, chin up, feet planted wide apart. His smooth, squarish face had a healthy pink glow to it, his teeth looked exceedingly white and strong. He wore a Kelly-green ski jacket with the Astrid’s Castle tower insignia stitched on its left breast, corduroy trousers and L. L. Bean duck boots.
“I’m hoping I can make this up to you, Mitch,” Les went on, as the sound system segued into “Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen, the funeral dirge re-mix. “I’d really like to, if you’ll let me.”
Mitch tried to pull away, but Les wouldn’t let go of his cart. “If you don’t mind, Les, I really have to get these groceries delivered.”
“But Ada really wants to meet you. Before this weekend, I mean.”
Mitch immediately felt his pulse quicken. “She does?”
“Absolutely. She’s most insistent. After all, you’re the man who dubbed her The Queen of the B’s.”
“No, that wasn’t me. That was Manny Farber, years and years ago.”
“Ada’s very grateful to you, Mitch. She wants to thank you personally.”
Norma’s legendary ninety-four-year-old mother, Ada Geiger, was one of the twentieth century’s most illustrious, controversial and remarkable cultural figures. Also one of Mitch’s absolute idols. It was safe to say that Ada Geiger was the only person, living or dead, who had been a colleague of both Amelia Earhart and the Rolling Stones. The beautiful, fiercely independent daughter of millionaire Wall Street financier Moses Geiger, Ada had captured America’s imagination back in the Roaring Twenties when, at the age of sixteen she became the youngest woman ever to fly solo from New York to Washington. That feat earned her a charter membership in the Ninety-Nines, a group of daring young female pilots whose first president was Earhart. After brief stints as a socialite, fashion model and Broadway actress, the spirited young Ada bought herself a Speed Graphic and stormed the rollicking world of New York tabloid journalism as a crime scene photographer. Soon she was writing the news copy that went with her uncommonly lurid photos. By 1934, she’d moved on to penning politically charged plays that were being staged by a band of upstarts called the Group Theatre. Among the Group’s founders were Harold Clutman, Lee Strasberg and Clifford Odets. Among its discoveries was the brilliant young Brooklyn playwright Luther Altshuler, whom Ada would marry.
When World War II came, Ada Geiger served as a combat correspondent for Life magazine: Her collected dispatches and combat photographs, To Serve Man, became America’s unofficial scrapbook of the war. Practically everyone who made it home owned a copy. It was the top-selling book of the post-war era, an era that found Ada and Luther out in Hollywood raising a family and producing low-budget movies together. Ada directed several of the films herself, making her the only woman besides Ida Lupino and Dorothy Arzner to crash through the industry’s concrete gender barrier. Her films were reminiscent of her photographs-shadowy, gritty, and unfailingly bleak. And while they attracted only very small audiences at the time, she began to develop an ardent cult following through the years among critics and film buffs. Mitch stumbled on to her work at the Bleecker Street Cinema when he was a teenager and was totally blown away. For him, Ten Cent Dreams, her taut, twisted 1949 love triangle about a conniving dance hall girl (Marie Windsor), a consumptive bookie (Edmond O’Brien) and a crooked cop (Robert Mitchum) ranked right up there with Out of the Past as one of the greatest noir dramas ever filmed. And he thought that her seldom-screened 1952 melodrama about big-city political corruption, Whip-saw, totally eclipsed the universally overrated High Noon as a parable about the dangers of the Hollywood blacklist. When he became a critic, Mitch championed it as a lost American classic. And hailed Ada Geiger as “the greatest American film director no one has ever seen.”
She might have achieved genuine Hollywood greatness had it not been for that blacklist. Both she and Luther were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify about their Communist Party affiliations back in their Group Theatre days. They refused to name names. Both were jailed for a year. Upon their release in 1954 they fled the country for London, where they wrote and produced plays, and where Ada went on to direct documentaries for the BBC, including Not Fade Away, her electrifying 1964 Rolling Stones concert film. Later, she and Luther moved on to Paris. Ada’s films had long been beloved there. Her work was a huge influence on Clouzot, Melville and Godard. Francois Truffaut called her his favorite American director. She acted in a pair of Truffaut’s films, scripted another with Luther, and spoke out loudly against the Vietnam War. When Luther died, she retired to a solitary villa on the Amalfi coast.
Now she was back in America for the first time in fifty years.
Back in Dorset, actually. It turned out that Ada had a local connection and that connection was Astrid’s Castle, the colossal, turreted stone edifice that had been erected back in the Roaring Twenties as a love shack for Ada’s father and his longtime mistress, Astrid Lindstrom, a leggy Ziegfeld Follies girl. Eventually, the mountaintop castle became an inn. Now it belonged to Norma and her second husband, Les.
Ada’s return was proving to be a triumphant one. America had “discovered” her. Steven Soderbergh had just finished the principal photography on his stylish remake of Ten Cent Dreams with Julia Roberts, Kevin Spacey and George Clooney. A digitally re-mastered print of her original film was due for theatrical release in March. And a retrospective of her tabloid crime scene photos was slated for April at the International Center of Photography on Sixth Avenue, accompanied by a lavish coffee-table book.
It had been Les’s idea to host a small tribute for Ada at Astrid’s Castle upon her arrival. When the innkeeper had contacted Mitch about it a few weeks back, Mitch was thrilled to participate in the event. He’d always wanted to meet the great lady. And Les had promised him that it would be a dignified, low-key symposium for a select group of film scholars, critics and authors. However-and here was the really big surprise-Les hadn’t been totally straight with Mitch. It turned out that he had much, much bigger plans for Ada’s tribute. An entire delegation of Panorama Studios heavy-hitters was en route to Astrid’s Castle for a weekend-long blitz of cocktail parties and testimonial dinners, accompanied by Soderbergh, his starstudded cast and a bevy of celebrated Geigerphiles like Quentin Tarantino, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese and the Coen Brothers. The likes of Jodie Foster, Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins were coming. So were assorted supermodels, rap music stars and high-profile professional athletes. Camera crews from every media outlet in America would be on hand. This was going to be a major, major celebrity gala-everything short of velvet ropes, klieg lights and Joan Rivers standing at curbside, hissing at all of the skanky outfits.