Everybody Hates David Starbuck

The police are not surprised when, in connection with a highly publicized murder that has gone unsolved, a number of people come forth to confess to the crime.

It is, on the other hand, unusual if not unknown for a man to confess to having committed a murder when beyond the shadow of a doubt a suicide rather than a killing was involved. That is why nobody paid any attention to Walt Swanson when he said he had murdered David Starbuck. Starbuck killed himself in the bathroom of his palatial Palm Springs home on the night of September 14th. There were at least 30 people who knew that Swanson had spent that night at the bar of the Villa Loma, a spaghetti-and-rendezvous joint on the Sunset Strip.

The door of Starbuck's toilet was locked from the inside. He had slashed his wrists, stretched out on the pink tile floor with a folded rug-mat under his head, and died almost peacefully. As one wag said when Swanson first confessed that he had cut Starbuck's wrists, although it was clearly established that he had been in Beverly Hills on the night in question, "Must have had a mighty long razor."

The police spent a little time checking Swanson's story, marked him as a psycho, and told him to get' lost. I guess I'm the only one who knows that he was telling the truth after all, because I listened to the whole story.

To say that Starbuck was not widely admired is to win the understatement championship of any year. The movie business is never short of phonies but Dave was the champ. He came out here in the late Thirties with a reputation as a hot-shot salesman and there was always the vague idea that he had had to come West, that something he had been involved in in the East had not been strictly kosher. The idea was founded on bedrock. Dave had gotten into the habit of selling things he didn't own. In Hollywood he soon found that this trick could be valuable. First he palmed himself off as a writer, sold a book he hadn't written, stole half the profits from the poor bum who did write it, wangled a share of the production arrangement and found himself with a smash on his hands. From there on in there was no stopping him.

By 1945 he was second in command at World-American, living in Bel Air with his fourth wife, and climbing fast by reason of his shrewd and ruthless ability to manipulate men with big talent and small guts.

But I am getting ahead of myself, as they say. Let's go back a wife or two. We never knew just who Dave was married to back East. She never made the trip. He stole his second woman from Walt Swanson. Nobody but the old-timers remember much about Walt now, but in his time he was the greatest cameraman of them all. Some of the old stars wouldn't make a picture without him. Eventually he started directing and he would have made a fine director except that he began belting the bottle. Charming as he was sober, he was a mean drunk. They put up with his bats for a couple of years but eventually the word got around that hiring him for a picture meant added costs in lost shooting time. He never had a prayer after that. Well, no, he did have one chance. Dave Starbuck hired him for a picture and made a rather peculiar deal with him.

"Walt," Dave said, "here's the arrangement. Nobody else in town will hire you because you're a stewbum, right? Here's my offer. I'll give you your regular price for this picture and you get it the day we're through shooting, in one lump. Unless you start drinking. The first day you're drunk on the set the money drops to 50 percent. If you pull it a second time you get 25 percent. Take it or leave it."

Walt took it. You have to eat.

The third week of shooting Starbuck hired an out-of-work writer to take Walt to lunch and get him loaded. Then he came around to the set after lunch, walked up to Swanson, smiled broadly, (continued on page 81) Everybody Hates Starbuck (continued from page 60) smelled Walt's breath and said, "Cheer up, baby. At 50 percent you're still being overpaid." Walt's ego being what it was, he went on a week's bender. Starbuck threatened to throw him off the picture. Eventually he paid him peanuts and kicked him out. In desperation Walt sent his wife around to plead for a break.

"Listen, sweetie," Dave said, "what do you want from me? We made a deal."

"But Dave," Swanson's wife said, "Walt's having a rough time. He did a good job for you, didn't he?"

Dave looked at Swanson's wife. She had good legs and was years younger than Walt.

"Listen, Myrna," he said, "doesn't it make you feel sorta cheap to have to go around town begging for handouts for a has-been like Walt? You deserve better than that. You're a looker. I happen to know you have talent. You should be acting again. Whadda ya say we forget about the deal Walt and I made? It's all over. He made his bed. Let him lie in it. But let's say you have a small part in my next picture, at pretty good money. Now how's that?"

Well, when you're a former callgirl, when you'd love to do a little picture work, when you're married to a man 20 years your senior, and when you married him in the first place just because you were tired and he offered someplace to rest, a pitch like Starbuck's is pretty hard to resist. To spare the painful details, within six months Myrna had left Walt and moved in with Dave.

That did it for the poor bastard. He was no good after that. Never directed another picture. It must have been about that time that he first thought of killing Starbuck. He wasn't the first, of course, nor the only one, but he must have been head of the club.

The philosophers tell us that when you lust after a woman in your heart, or long to commit a murder, you're already on record, even if you never get to realize your ambition. On that basis I guess quite a few of us around town are guilty of the murder of David Starbuck. But here's how Walt Swanson did it.

By 1955 he was all washed up as a director, although Alcoholics Anonymous had put him back in one physical piece for the time being. To pay for the booze he had sold everything he had and now to keep eating he had to take any odd job he could get. An old friend eventually landed him a spot with Consolidated Film Service, a subsidiary of the Consolidated Studio, that did film exchange work. For example, when a wealthy producer wanted to go to the movies, well, it didn't work out that way. The movies went to him. His secretary just called the film exchange, ordered a certain picture, or maybe a double feature, and the films were shipped to the producer's home, to be shown in his private projection room, for his private pleasure. Walt Swanson thought it was a pretty grim joke the first time he got an order to ship a can of film to Starbuck's Bel Air pleasure-dome.

Then one day he learned that Starbuck had an ulcer. A snatch of conversation overheard at a restaurant and Walt's own stomach tingled in a momentary frenzy of vengeful glee. So the bastard could be hurt after all, if only by his conscience, his own fears. At the time that Walt noted this fact he did not file it away in any sort of conscious realization that eventually he would be able to call it out, to employ it. It was just something he heard about and was glad about and that was that.

The catalyst was dropped into the seething caldron of his mind a year later when he read a story in the Hollywood Reporter about subliminal advertising. A theatre in New Jersey had cut into a motion picture film commercial announcements that flashed on the screen too quickly to be seen consciously but, according to the theory, not too quickly to transmit to the eye and the subconscious mind an impression which subsequently would suggest action to the individual. In the test case the action suggested was the purchase of a particular soft drink. Sales of the drink increased markedly on the night of the test.

It was after reading that story that Walt Swanson began to get even with David Starbuck. At first the idea of murder was not actually in his mind. He only wanted to hurt, to lash out, to avenge himself. The first thing he did was to print up two small cards, using white ink on black paper. One card said "Dave Starbuck, you stink." The other one said "Everybody hates David Starbuck." Then he borrowed a handoperated movie camera from a friend, shot stills of the two cards, clipped out the film frames, put them into his wallet and waited.

Within a week Starbuck's secretary called to order a picture. When Walt received the shipping slip he got the film out of the vault, set it up on spools, scissored a line and inserted one of the still frames he had shot at home. Twenty minutes farther along on the reel he slipped in the second insert.

The picture was a comedy but that night after running it Dave Starbuck didn't feel amused. A certain insensitivity had always been part of his make-up, but faced even if subconsciously with the knowledge that he was actively disliked, and being at the same time unable to erect any of his (concluded on page 84) Everybody Hates Starbuck (continued from page 81) customary defenses, he became vaguely depressed.

Swanson at first, and for a long time afterward, had no sure way of knowing how effective his attack was, but eventually he began to pick up stray bits of information that convinced him that he was striking telling blows. Column items about suddenly planned vacations, rumors about physical check-ups, stories about angry blowups in conference rooms. And only Swanson knew the reason. Once a week for a whole year he sent his invisible arrows into Starbuck's hide. "Starbuck, you're no good." "Dave, you're a heel." "Starbuck, you're sick."

And every Monday when the film would come back to the exchange, Walt would scissor out his inserts and patch up the reel, leaving no evidence.

"Starbuck, your wife despises you!"

"David Starbuck is a jerk!"

"Starbuck, you are the lowest of the low."

Starbuck's irritation increased to the point where he became careless about his attitude toward his superiors, and in Hollywood no matter how high up you are you have to answer to somebody: chairmen of the board, stockholders' groups. One night at a party he told the head of his studio's New York office to go to hell. From that moment he started to slide downhill, although at first his speed was so slow nobody was quite sure he was moving.

It was about that time that Swanson aimed his coup de grace. The next time Starbuck had a picture run off he received this message: "Dave, why don't you kill yourself?"

The following week it was "Kill yourself, Dave. It's the only way out."

Starbuck put up with eight weeks of it. He began to fall apart. Having no friends to sympathize with him, he went from bad to worse fast. Then one day he went to Palm Springs, spent all afternoon lying in the sun by his swimming pool, got drunk, went into the bathroom, locked the door, lay down on the pink tile floor, folded the fluffy lamb's-wool bath mat under his head, slashed his wrists with a single-edge razor and bled to death, slowly, lying still.

After it happened Walt began drinking again. I wouldn't be telling the story now except that, as some of you may know, poor Walt got careless with a cigarette one night in the lab and burned himself up along with a hell of a lot of film. A few weeks before the end he told me the story one night at the Villa Loma bar.

Good thing Walt didn't work in a TV film lab.