Alta Journal is pleased to present the second installment of a five-part original fiction series by author and Alta contributor David Talbot. Each week, we’ll publish online the next portion of “Murder on the Starlight Express.” Visit altaonline.com/serials to keep reading, and sign up here to be notified by email when each new installment is available.
This Alta Serial is a fictional account of a 17-day, cross-continental whistle-stop tour that carried Warner Bros. stars (including the author’s father, Lyle Talbot) from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. The train journey took place during the depths of the Depression, and its purpose was to promote the new movie 42nd Street and entertain the public at each city along the route, spreading good cheer in the run-up to president-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration.
The second act opens with the Starlight Express en route to Yuma, Arizona.
Act 2
We steamed into the future on board the Starlight Express. The train was equipped with the latest General Electric gadgetry. (It was Bertie’s idea to stick a big GE logo on the rear platform, alongside the Warner Bros. Starlight Express sign.) GE lights blazed the train’s path at night. One car featured a kitchen of tomorrow, with the latest GE appliances. Another had been transformed into a Malibu Beach on Rails, with brightly striped lounge chairs, GE sunlamps for the stars, a ceiling painted summer blue, and even sand.
Bertie had dreamed up a cross-country publicity tour that was the first of its kind. Not only would it launch the new Warners musical spectacular, Gold Diggers of 1933, along with the Roosevelt presidency, but he had convinced General Electric to help bankroll the whole thing. The brothers Warner—who knew how to make a penny squeal—were duly impressed by Bertie’s magic.
On board the train, Bertie kept the publicity machine humming. Reporters boarded the Starlight Express wherever it stopped to interview the screen actors. As I raced from one end of the train to the next, I spotted the stars chatting dutifully with the press. Bertie had fed them all their lines, which they were good at repeating. In between the interviews, they relaxed in the beach chairs or the dining car.
One minute, Talbot was reclining in the Malibu car, trading small talk with Mix and comic actor Joe E. Brown, then he was slipping into Toby Wing’s private compartment. Later, I saw him ducking inside Joan Blondell’s room. According to Bertie, who knew all the dish, Talbot also had designs on Bette Davis, who was a blonde too in those days.
The two young Warners players had worked together in a couple of movies—Fog over Frisco and the hard-hitting Three on a Match, which featured adultery, cocaine, and kidnapping (and a brief, memorable turn by Bogie as a gangster). But according to Bertie, Talbot was crestfallen to learn that Davis was shacking up with her boyish-looking new husband—bandleader Harmon Nelson. The two had been high school sweethearts. But, as it turned out, the couple were not enjoying their honeymoon behind their compartment’s closed door. As Nelson sadly stated in a divorce court later, Davis “read too much.”
Bertie liked to trade gossip with Mrs. Parker. She told him she planned to give Talbot an I Love You rubber stamp that he could use in correspondence with all his paramours. She gradually warmed up to me, because I fetched her cigarettes and illicit scotch and ran other errands for her.
On our first morning, I found Mrs. Parker gazing out the train window at the passing scenery. We were going through the Arizona desert in early spring, and there were purple mountain peaks, circus-yellow wildflowers, and stately cacti everywhere. I had never seen anything like it in my life. But she was unimpressed. “I find nature an acquired taste,” she told me.
But Mrs. Parker came alive among the train porters, the efficient, self-assured Black men in their crisp white uniforms—especially the man who loomed as their leader, the union activist C.L. Dellums. I sometimes came upon the two of them talking about labor politics, including the harsh working conditions and never-ending hours imposed on the porters by the Pullman Company and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters’ hopes for the new Roosevelt presidency. They let me listen in, trusting that I wouldn’t report what I heard. Mr. Dellums said his days on the train were numbered. The Pullman Company had spies everywhere, and they knew about his union activities. Soon, he’d be fired—but he vowed to join A. Philip Randolph, the union president, and become the railway company’s worst nightmare.
“Fight or be slaves—that’s what I tell the men. The company will keep treating us like dogs until we bite back. Under Roosevelt, we’ll finally have a fair fight. We’ll be able to recruit members without the company intimidating us and beating us.” This was obviously a man who could use his words, or his fists, as weapons when he needed to.
Mrs. Parker was surprisingly informed; I had thought of her as nothing more than a Manhattan bon vivant. She discussed strategy while flirting shamelessly with Mr. Dellums, who kept his composure, treating her with respect, like a comradely sister. He was tall and good-looking, with magnetic hazel-blue eyes, a dapper mustache, and a deep voice that demanded to be heard. His porter’s uniform looked like it had been tailored for his athletic body, which Mrs. Parker seemed to take in with undisguised enthusiasm.
New York and Hollywood were filled with loudmouthed liberals, she drolly observed, but they tended to disappear when the going got tough. “When the train of history goes around a sharp curve, they fall out of the dining car,” she wisecracked. Bertie was right—she had a wicked tongue.
Mrs. Parker and Mr. Dellums looked frankly into each other’s eyes. The train made a rhythmic sound and motion as it chugged down the tracks. Was the Starlight Express one big bedroom? I began to wonder.
Throughout the trip, my nights were haunted by the moans and exultations and thumpings on the other side of my thin wall. At first, I woke up in alarm, thinking that the star who occupied the adjoining room was suffering a medical emergency. But when the sounds revealed their true nature, I found them sometimes annoying and frankly sometimes arousing. When I bumped into the object of the star’s affections—a statuesque Busby Berkeley dancer—in the narrow train passage the next morning, she was pink-cheeked and cheery, wearing a man’s robe as she squeezed past me. But the middle-aged star looked wrung out and hangdog, as he should have. Discretion prevents me from naming him, even at this late date, but he was very married at the time.
We began to get a hint of the Starlight Express’s impact on the public in Yuma, Arizona. As the train pulled into the station, the overflow crowd broke through the police line and swarmed the tracks, despite the danger. There was a charge of desperation, even madness, in the air, as if anything could happen. The stars in their tuxedos and evening gowns who waved to the surging mass from the rear platform seemed unfazed by the delirium, but it unnerved me. The mayor joined the celebrities and, using the big loudspeakers installed on the train, addressed the crowd in a bombastic voice. But the men and women below—some dressed in their Sunday best, some in clothes that had been worn too often—had eyes and ears only for Mix, Talbot, Davis, and the other Warners stars. They reached out frantically, as if touching their screen heroes would save them.
One woman in a gingham dress lifted up her baby for Joe E. Brown to hold. The rubber-faced comedian was surprised—his eyes and mouth grew even wider—but he cradled the infant in his arms. Suddenly, the train jerked forward; it was starting to move while Brown was still holding the baby. I quickly scanned the crowd for the mother, but she had fainted, from all the excitement or perhaps hunger. I ran to the front of the train and alerted the engineer, who slowly backed up the train so we could unload the infant.
“That was something!” exclaimed Bertie, who clearly saw the chaotic whistle-stop as a publicity coup. But I found the looks on the men’s and women’s faces harrowing.
When the Starlight Express stopped in Dallas for the premiere of Gold Diggers, the crowd around the gilded Majestic Theatre was even bigger—more people, we were told, than even aviation wonder Charles Lindbergh had drawn. The crowd was in a raucous mood; most of them couldn’t fit inside the movie palace—they had come just to gawk at the stars. A marble-and-bronze frieze of scantily clothed Greek gods and goddesses towered over the theater box office. Premiere lights cut through the evening darkness.
“Like torches, like a lynching,” said Mr. Dellums grimly. “I grew up not far from here.” He had seen some terrible things, he let us know, without going into the details. The railway man, who guided Mrs. Parker and me to the theater, had switched into his civilian clothes; he wore a tailored three-piece suit and a homburg hat. Still, he knew, he would be shown to the “Negro Section” in the theater balcony.
The audience reacted enthusiastically as the movie played, hooting at the jokes, swaying to the show tunes. But during the big Joan Blondell number at the end, a somber hush fell over the theater. The audience knew what it was like to come back from the horrors of war. Knew what it was like to tramp for jobs that weren’t there. Knew what it was like to be forgotten. After the lights went up, they sat there silently. Bertie, sitting next to me in the velvet-rope VIP section, shifted uneasily in his seat, nervous about the muted reaction. But then they started applauding wildly and whistling. Warner Bros. had scored a hit.
“It might be a turkey, but even I can’t carve it up,” said Mrs. Parker, leaning toward Bertie. I saw that she was wiping a few tears from her eyes.
The next day, the Starlight Express changed engines in the Oklahoma City train yard, a dusty and dreary expanse with nothing but empty freight cars. While we were stuck there, Talbot and I got off the train and stretched our legs. He was dressed casually, in a white shirt and slacks, saddle shoes, and a cream-colored sweater wrapped around his shoulders. He was telling me about his next role, as a hoodlum on the run in a thriller called Heat Lightning. “I’m costarring with Ann Dvorak, who runs a gas station in the desert with her sister. She’s even sexier than Lombard or Stanwyck, if you ask me.” I had to agree about Dvorak, who always made me tongue-tied at the studio commissary, with her almond eyes, Slavic nose, and knowing smile. “In fact, they’re all wonderful gals.”
I decided that Talbot was not the lady-killer that Bertie and others made him out to be. In fact, there was something sweet and old-fashioned about the way he appreciated women. He seemed to genuinely enjoy their company—lots of it. He told me a story about when he was a young boy and how he shared a big bed with the servant girls at the Nebraska hotel that his grandmother ran for traveling salesmen. Maybe that explained it, his easy way with the opposite sex and all that.
“You’re all right, Kid Cafferty,” said Talbot, tossing his arm over my shoulders like a big brother.
We hiked up a dirt embankment, and when we got to the top, we stopped in our tracks. A squadron of police and bulky plainclothesmen—I guess they were railway guards—were attacking a bunch of train hoppers, most of them young. The cops and bulls were hitting the kids hard, with clubs. Some of the tramps were fighting back, throwing rocks at their attackers, but they were quickly overwhelmed. A cluster of Black kids were surrounded by the club-swinging thugs, and they went down under the blows. It seemed as though most of the violence was aimed at them.
I looked away from the sickening sight, and as I did, I spotted Mr. Dellums and other porters standing outside our train. The men were angry, and they looked ready to join the fray, but Mr. Dellums was holding them back. He knew what they did to Black men who got out of line in Oklahoma.
It was all over in another minute or two. Talbot and I walked back to the train without saying a word. Finally, he said, “Like that scene from Wild Boys of the Road,” another tough drama that Warners had just released. I was shaken by what I’d seen, and at first, it seemed like Talbot was minimizing it, seeing it as a movie. But when I looked at his ashen face, I could tell he was horrified too. “Roosevelt will make us better,” said Talbot as we got back on the train. It was like he was talking to himself. “That’s why we’re going to Washington.”
When the Starlight Express finally started moving again, I could tell the porters were still in a tense mood. They didn’t greet the white passengers in the hallway with the same deferential cheer. The smoldering resentment seemed to grow worse as the train headed toward our next stop, in St. Louis. At dinnertime, Mr. Dellums ripped down the curtain that separated his table of porters from the white diners. We stared at one another as if we were still separated.
Later, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch began swigging heavily from his flask and treating a porter rudely, calling him insulting names. The newspaperman was so drunk that he vomited as he climbed into his sleeping berth, and the porter had to clean up the mess. But I heard that revenge came swiftly. After the reporter fell into a sodden slumber, he was slugged repeatedly in the face. When he groggily awoke the next morning, aching with a badly bruised jaw and swollen eye, he was informed that he’d fallen on his face during the night while making his way to the bathroom.
When we pulled into St. Louis Union Station around noon, there was a collective sigh of relief as the passengers and then the porters left the train. We went to our whites-only downtown hotel to get ready for the movie festivities that night. They went to boardinghouses in their part of town. That’s the way it was in those days. Maybe it hasn’t changed all that much.
Gold Diggers was screening at the downtown Orpheum Theater that night, near our hotel. The Orpheum had an impressive Beaux-Arts-style exterior, but the inside of the movie palace was even more spectacular, with its gilded proscenium and chandelier and its three plush balconies. Bertie and I crowded inside with more than 2,000 other people. But we stayed only for the stars’ pre-curtain remarks this time. Leaning over to me, Bertie suggested we escape when it went dark and the movie began, to see “what St. Louie had to offer.”
As we strolled along the city streets, Bertie told me he wasn’t interested in nightclubs or other types of entertainment. “We can always enjoy the fleshpots in New York or back in Los Angeles,” he said. “I want to know what makes this town really tick. Why, it’s the heart of America, my boy.”
“Thanks for the geography lesson, Bertie.” That tugged a grin from him.
After turning down a side street, we didn’t walk long before Bertie found what he was looking for, a big warehouse filled with workingmen. Bertie seemed excited by the intensity in the dimly lit, cavernous room. But I immediately recoiled from the sweaty, sour smell of it and the way the men looked at us. In our expensive suits and fedoras, we clearly didn’t belong there. On the makeshift stage in front of us, a speaker—some sort of preacher—was working himself into a froth. He condemned the Jews who were gouging us, the Negroes (he used the vicious word) who were taking our jobs, even our women. We would never be free until we took back our country from the moneylenders and the race mixers, he insisted. His voice was high-pitched and loud; it worked like a drill on a bad tooth. The crowd was getting worked up too.
“This is the real America,” Bertie said under his breath to me. “Unless Roosevelt saves us from ourselves.”
But I only half heard him—I was aware of the growing menace in the room, a rising resentment directed at us, the fancy-looking interlopers.
“What do you want here?” said one man to Bertie. His bulging chest and stomach seemed to have outgrown his clothes. Bertie, looking embarrassed to be singled out, was starting to answer when someone else—it was hard to see in the shadow light—took a swing at him. It was only a glancing blow to Bertie’s face, but it was forceful enough to stagger him. I reached out my arm to steady him, and then I began pulling him toward the door. My heart was thumping, and I lost my hat along the way, but suddenly, we were outside. We began walking, nearly running, toward a more brightly lit, more heavily trafficked street. We were breathing hard by the time we reached it.
“You OK?” I asked Bertie.
He nodded, dabbing at the corner of his mouth with his pocket handkerchief. When he stopped to refold it, the trickle of blood started again.
“We belong in the make-believe world,” he said. “This is too real.”
Bertie started drinking in his hotel room that night. I don’t believe he ever stopped.
Somewhere between St. Louis and Chicago, a hard-looking man got on the train. I was talking with Miss Blondell when he boarded, and when I went looking for him to ask for his credentials, he’d disappeared. He didn’t look like a reporter; he was tougher. Like Bogie or Cagney, but real. I can still summon the cold, dead look in his eyes.
I searched for Bertie to tell him about the stranger, finding him in the dining car enjoying one of the extravagant suppers prepared by the Starlight Express chef, who’d been hired away from the fancy Ambassador Hotel by the studio. Across from Bertie at the table was Mrs. Parker, and spread between them were an icy platter of raw oysters with mignonette sauce, a brace of lamb chops, a fillet of halibut bathed in a creamy dressing, and serving dishes of English peas as well as gold potatoes dripping with butter. Despite the banquet, it looked like they were drinking their dinner. I’d never seen my boss so inebriated.
“Join us!” they sang out in near unison. Slipping onto the chair next to Bertie, I told him about the intruder, but he waved away my concern. “Probably some autograph hound—we’ll jettison the stowaway at the next stop.”
You could have lit Bertie’s breath with a match. “I think you’ve had enough,” I told him, lowering my voice. But he wouldn’t hear it. “Tut-tut, Dark Irish—I can hold my liquor.” He was talking loud enough for the whole dining car to hear.
I turned toward Mrs. Parker—my voice was more scolding than I intended. “Don’t you have a magazine article to write?” She took a drag from her cigarette and blew the smoke in my direction. “I’ve been too fucking busy—or maybe it was the other way around.” She arched one eyebrow, but I didn’t laugh. “Anyway,” she continued, “work is the province of cattle.”
They were drinking martinis, and they matched each other round for round. I don’t know where they got the stuff, but they poured drink after drink from a big silver tumbler. Even Mrs. Parker’s dachshund, nestled in her lap, was slurping from a glass. Was it gin too?
The booze brought out the performer in Mrs. Parker. “One martini, two at the most, three I’m under the table, four…
“I’m under the host!”
Bertie joined her for the punch line, and they erupted with laughter.
But as the evening wore on, the two of them descended into gloom. She called it her “scotch mist.” (By then, she had switched to her favorite beverage.) They began talking about their long strings of failed romances.
“Dottie, let’s face it, we’re both attracted to the wrong men,” Bertie concluded forlornly.
She offered some resistance. “But I’m going to marry Alan.”
“It won’t last. He’s gayer than a goose.”
There was a pause. The tracks seemed to make more of a racket.
“But he loves me.” Her voice sounded unusually soft, almost pleading.
“We all do,” said Bertie.
I don’t know why I stayed so long, but looking back, I’m glad I did. Yes, they were in their cups. They grew maudlin. But they were no longer acting.
It was the last time I saw Bertie alive.
Early the next morning, as we were nearing Chicago Union Station, I knocked on Bertie’s private compartment as usual. There was no reply. Thinking he was still sleeping it off and needed to be roused, I tried the door, and finding it unlocked, I entered the room. The disarray struck me first—Bertie always kept his rooms as neat as a pin. His trunk was open, and its contents were scattered everywhere. Then I saw him. He was lying face down on the floor, in a puddle of blood. There was an oozing hole in the back of his head. He was wearing his silk underwear and his socks—the monogrammed ones we had chipped in to buy for Christmas. For some reason, that was the trigger. I slumped to the floor and began weeping—deep, racking sobs, more convulsive than I’d ever cried before, even for my parents.
I knew I should run out of the room, that I should immediately report the murder. But I sat there next to Bertie for some time. I didn’t want to leave him.
I already missed him, missed the man who had given me a life.•
ACT 3 »
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David Talbot's latest book is Between Heaven and Hell. He is the founder of Salon magazine; the author of Brothers, The Devil's Chessboard, and Season of the Witch, and a journalist and columnist who has written for the New Yorker, Time, the San Francisco Chronicle, and others.
