remain very truly yours, Frieda Spelling (Mrs. Hector Mann) .
Again, I didn’t allow myself to get carried away. My response was concise, formal, perhaps even a bit rude, but before I committed myself to anything, I had to know that she could be trusted. I want to believe you , I wrote, but I must have proof. If you expect me to go all the way to New Mexico, I need to know that your statements are credible and that Hector Mann is indeed alive. Once my doubts have been removed, I will go to the ranch. But I must warn you that I don’t travel by plane. Sincerely yours, D. Z .
There was no question that she would be back in touch—unless I had scared her off. If I had done that, then she would be tacitly admitting that she had deceived me, and the story would be over. I didn’t think that was the case, but whatever she was or wasn’t up to, it wasn’t going to take long for me to find out the truth. The tone of her second letter had been urgent, almost imploring, and if in fact she was who she said she was, she wasn’t going to waste any time before writing to me again. Silence would mean that I had called her bluff, but if she answered—and I was fully expecting her to answer—the letter would come quickly. It had taken nine days for the last one to reach me. All things being equal (no delays, no bungles by the post office), I figured the next one would come even faster than that.
I did my best to stay calm, to stick to my routine and forge ahead with the Memoirs , but it was no use. I was too distracted, too keyed up to give them the proper attention, and after struggling to meet my quotas for several days in a row, I finally declared a moratorium on the project. Bright and early the next morning, I crawled into the closet in the spare bedroom and pulled out my old research files on Hector, which I had packed away in cardboard boxes after finishing the book. There were six cartons in all. Five of them held the notes, outlines, and drafts of my own manuscript, but the other one was crammed with all sorts of precious material: clippings, photos, microfilmed documents, xeroxed articles, squibs from ancient gossip columns, every scrap of print I had been able to lay my fingers on that referred to Hector Mann. I hadn’t looked at those papers in a long time, and with nothing to do now but wait for Frieda Spelling to contact me again, I carried the box into my study and spent the rest of the week combing through it. I don’t think I was expecting to learn anything I didn’t already know, but the contents of the file had become rather dim to me by then, and I felt that it deserved another look. Most of the information I had collected was unreliable: articles from the tabloid press, junk from the fan magazines, bits of movie reportage rife with hyperbole, erroneous suppositions, and out-and-out falsehoods. Still, as long as I remembered not to believe what I read, I didn’t see how the exercise could do any harm.
Hector was the subject of four profiles written between August 1927 and October 1928. The first one appeared in Kaleidoscope’s monthly Bulletin , the publicity organ of Hunt’s newly formed production company. It was essentially a press release to announce the contract they had signed with Hector, and because little was known about him at that point, they were free to invent any story that served their purposes. Those were the last days of the Hollywood Latin Lover, the period just after Valentino’s death when dark, exotic foreigners were still drawing large crowds, and Kaleidoscope tried to cash in on the phenomenon by billing Hector as Señor Slapstick, the South American heart-throb with the comic touch . To back up this assertion, they fabricated an intriguing list of credits for him, an entire career that supposedly predated his arrival in California: music hall appearances in Buenos Aires, extended vaudeville tours through Argentina and Brazil, a series of smash-hit films produced in Mexico. By
Again, I didn’t allow myself to get carried away. My response was concise, formal, perhaps even a bit rude, but before I committed myself to anything, I had to know that she could be trusted. I want to believe you , I wrote, but I must have proof. If you expect me to go all the way to New Mexico, I need to know that your statements are credible and that Hector Mann is indeed alive. Once my doubts have been removed, I will go to the ranch. But I must warn you that I don’t travel by plane. Sincerely yours, D. Z .
There was no question that she would be back in touch—unless I had scared her off. If I had done that, then she would be tacitly admitting that she had deceived me, and the story would be over. I didn’t think that was the case, but whatever she was or wasn’t up to, it wasn’t going to take long for me to find out the truth. The tone of her second letter had been urgent, almost imploring, and if in fact she was who she said she was, she wasn’t going to waste any time before writing to me again. Silence would mean that I had called her bluff, but if she answered—and I was fully expecting her to answer—the letter would come quickly. It had taken nine days for the last one to reach me. All things being equal (no delays, no bungles by the post office), I figured the next one would come even faster than that.
I did my best to stay calm, to stick to my routine and forge ahead with the Memoirs , but it was no use. I was too distracted, too keyed up to give them the proper attention, and after struggling to meet my quotas for several days in a row, I finally declared a moratorium on the project. Bright and early the next morning, I crawled into the closet in the spare bedroom and pulled out my old research files on Hector, which I had packed away in cardboard boxes after finishing the book. There were six cartons in all. Five of them held the notes, outlines, and drafts of my own manuscript, but the other one was crammed with all sorts of precious material: clippings, photos, microfilmed documents, xeroxed articles, squibs from ancient gossip columns, every scrap of print I had been able to lay my fingers on that referred to Hector Mann. I hadn’t looked at those papers in a long time, and with nothing to do now but wait for Frieda Spelling to contact me again, I carried the box into my study and spent the rest of the week combing through it. I don’t think I was expecting to learn anything I didn’t already know, but the contents of the file had become rather dim to me by then, and I felt that it deserved another look. Most of the information I had collected was unreliable: articles from the tabloid press, junk from the fan magazines, bits of movie reportage rife with hyperbole, erroneous suppositions, and out-and-out falsehoods. Still, as long as I remembered not to believe what I read, I didn’t see how the exercise could do any harm.
Hector was the subject of four profiles written between August 1927 and October 1928. The first one appeared in Kaleidoscope’s monthly Bulletin , the publicity organ of Hunt’s newly formed production company. It was essentially a press release to announce the contract they had signed with Hector, and because little was known about him at that point, they were free to invent any story that served their purposes. Those were the last days of the Hollywood Latin Lover, the period just after Valentino’s death when dark, exotic foreigners were still drawing large crowds, and Kaleidoscope tried to cash in on the phenomenon by billing Hector as Señor Slapstick, the South American heart-throb with the comic touch . To back up this assertion, they fabricated an intriguing list of credits for him, an entire career that supposedly predated his arrival in California: music hall appearances in Buenos Aires, extended vaudeville tours through Argentina and Brazil, a series of smash-hit films produced in Mexico. By
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