Alta Journal is pleased to present the final installment of a five-part original fiction series by author and Alta contributor David Talbot. Each week, we’ve published online the next portion of “Murder on the Starlight Express.” Visit altaonline.com/serials to read earlier installments, and sign up here to receive email notifications for future serials.
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.
Here is an afterword from our author.
This story is a work of fiction, but it’s based on a true event.
In early 1933, my father, actor Lyle Talbot, and other Warner Bros. stars—including Bette Davis, screen cowboy Tom Mix, and a dozen Busby Berkeley dancers—crossed the country in a special train, headed for the first presidential inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was the depths of the Great Depression and the final days of Prohibition, and hijinks on board the train, of course, ensued. During the Warners stars’ stopover in Chicago, my father was reluctantly taken under the protective wing of Spike O’Donnell, a notorious gangster who had admired my father’s performance in a crime thriller. (Yes, Lyle’s “escorts” were nicknamed Babe and Dingy.) In Washington, D.C., my father did dine with FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and his intimate companion Clyde Tolson.
My father, who died in 1996 at age 94, was always very proud of the Warner Bros. train trip, which not only promoted the studio but also brought Rooseveltian good cheer to the suffering nation. He kept scrapbooks about the trip, which was celebrated in the press at the time, and regaled his children, including me, with accounts of the journey.
Everything else in the story—including the murder on the train—springs from my imagination. For instance, the famous humorist Dorothy Parker and the legendary labor leader C.L. Dellums (the uncle of the late congressperson and Oakland mayor Ron Dellums) were not on board the train. Louis Howe, the adviser to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, did not secretly meet with them before the inauguration. There was no agent in the Chicago office of the FBI named Sam Bullock. Likewise, Neal Cafferty and Herbert “Bertie” Swindell are figments of my mind. I’ve taken the liberty—like the novelist E.L. Doctorow in Ragtime—of casting real historical figures in my dramatic plot and of creating fictional characters.
Nonetheless, all fiction contains a deeper truth. That’s why we read it. We also read stories to be entertained, to be transported somewhere.
You’ve been on board the Starlight Express (real name: the 42nd Street Special). I hope you enjoyed the ride.•
This completes our five-part serialization of “Murder on the Starlight Express,” by David Talbot. Kindly drop us a note and let us know if you enjoyed this wild journey. Sign up for more Alta Serials here.
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.
