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The Last of Sheila

Mark Fuhrman’s middle name is James. He drew a picture of a man and a dog on a Mason locomotive for an article about him in People Magazine. He was an aspiring screenwriter born in Tacoma, Washington. His LAPD partner owned a Yacht. His second wife’s name was Hackett. His publicist involved him in the impeachment of President Clinton, who played golf with O.J. shortly before the murders that O.J. was put on trial for committing. His “involvement in the Simpson case” gave him standing to write a bestselling book.

The success of Fuhrman’s first book gave him standing to write a second bestseller with a foreword by Dominick Dunne and stolen private investigator files in Dunne’s possession that he turned over to Fuhrman. The success of that book gave him standing to become a movie producer. The full title of his movie is Dominick Dunne Presents: Murder in Greenwich. It was loosely based on Fuhrman's second book in which he gave a cryptic callout to "Sheila." That was The First of Sheila from the movie producer who gave us a Clue game within his first movie. It didn't have to be the Sheila who found Martha Moxley's body. I don't think it was.

In An Inconvenient Woman (’91), Dunne casts a thinly disguised version of himself as a gossip columnist – like Sheila Green in The Last of Sheila (’73)

The Last of Sheila features an all-star cast which includes James Mason and Dyan Cannon. Dyan Cannon was born in Tacoma, Washington. She plays Clinton Green’s publicist. Clinton hits golf balls on his yacht. Joan Hackett is the wife of the aspiring screenwriter.  Clinton is a major movie producer. The name of his yacht is Sheila.

The Last of Sheila was written by the unlikely team of Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim. I did not go there for reason, nor did I select it randomly. I picked it because of its link to a huge, luxury yacht, to Batman, to Murder in Greenwich and Diary of a Hit Man. It was picked because of its stars and the character of a producer named Clinton (as in President William Jefferson Clinton) who likes to play games using people as tokens.

It has a Cluedo game box, the Clue game board and six people who could correspond to the six Clue suspects. It has a knife, a rope and a candlestick. But it has much more that Mark Fuhrman used to tell his murder stories. His T" to need not involve a a real person like Sheila McGuire. It could be totally appropriate for items he took from The Last of Sheila to create “his” stories and planned to take from it again to produce his screenplay. It seems highly improbable, given his screenplay writing ambitions, that he didn’t write the first Murder in Greenwich draft and approve the last one.

The pie in Fuhrman's Murder in Greenwich book "Thanks for the pie" callout to "Sheila" doesn’t have to refer to a baked good. It can be the mathematical symbol for Pi, the 3.14 number it represents for calculating properties of a circle or a symbol for formulas in general. It can be a pie chart or a metaphor for anything that can be divided into segments like a pie chart. That means anything or anybody with a common point of convergence and a common boundary – like the people in Clinton Green’s circle aboard his yacht. or a game that hadn't been invented when The Last of Sheila was made; a board game named Trivial Pursuit that came up in a 1997 Vanity Fair article about Mark Fuhrman.

James Coburn is Clinton Green, a big-time Hollywood movie producer with a sadistic sense of humor. He is an obsessive game-player and he knows how to create his own games.

Dyan Cannon is Christine, Clinton’s publicist. He is her biggest client. She is an impulsive talker but fun to be around. She is not above cheating a little to get her way.

Richard Benjamin is Tom, a long aspiring screenplay writer. He does well as a Clinton movies re-writer but hopes that Clinton will produce one of his original screenplays.

Joan Hackett is Tom’s wealthy wife Lee, a recovering alcoholic. She has faith in Tom’s talent but she doesn’t think Clinton will ever give him his big break.

James Mason is Philip, a former A-list Hollywood director who has fallen on hard times for no apparent reason. Clinton could be his ticket back to the big time.

Raquel Welch is Alice, a hot new actress eager for a roll that can win her an Oscar.

Ian McShane is Alice’s protective husband Anthony. He has a bit of a short fuse.

Here they are lined up by Clinton in front of his yacht to take a group Polaroid photo.  

Clinton Green’s wife Sheila started in Hollywood as a call girl and rose to great heights of independent wealth and power as a gossip columnist. She was not well liked by anyone, including her husband. One night during a party at the Green’s house in Bel Air, Sheila stalked out and was killed in the hedgerow-lined driveway by a hit and run driver. A year later, Clinton sends out formal invitations to six people asking them to spend a week on his yacht. On a separate card he writes, “The game will begin every night at 8:00 pm SHARP”.

As the beginning screen credits roll, the camera cuts back and fourth, between Clinton preparing the invitations, to short introductory scenes of the people receiving them  

You don’t see Clinton at first. You see the yacht. Then the camera shows a close-up of a crossword puzzle. It pans up to show a Jigsaw puzzle and a three dimensional Tic-Tac-Toe game, a Cluedo box with a tray of poker chips on top of it and a standard playing card deck in a plastic box next to a box of Risk. As the camera gets to Clinton sitting at his typewriter smoking a cigar, you see chessmen on a chess board, a wooden block building game for young children’s and a set of dominoes. On a wall behind him is a Clue game board.

Ah, Clinton Green. This is Clinton being Clinton, wallowing in games of every sort and preparing a covert game for himself within an overt original game that tops all of them.

Clinton’s guests meet him at an Italian port on the Mediterranean. They know that they are going to be playing a week-long game. They don’t know that it started with Clinton moving them around to take his group photo. They don’t know that he’s going to doctor the background of the photo to give it a coded meaning. Even if they saw the photo, which they did, and recognized how it was altered to make a code, which they didn’t, it would have taken more to figure out what else it meant.

For you to get a better idea of what The Last of Sheila has to do with movie producer Mark Fuhrman, it would help if you saw the first 20 seconds of the first scene in his movie. It’s a panning aerial shot of part of a town wrapping around a body of water. If you read the book you know right away that you are going to see something different by the mere appearance of the yacht on the water and more boats on the water as the ghost of Martha Moxley fades into the picture. There is nothing in either shot to indicate that the body of water is an estuary, specifically, the Long Island Sound, and nothing in the book that has anything to do with the Belle Haven coastline or a yacht.

The coastline view of Belle Haven was an artistic place-setting choice. Only it does not say “Belle Haven” the way the Golden Gate Bridge says San Francisco or the St. Louis Arch says St. Louis. It could just as easily be a coastline in France. A town that is visually unfamiliar to most people needs more information like Martha Moxley’s ghost telling you where she lived and died. The entire scene is less than 90 seconds long. At the end of it, Martha’s ghost calls the Skakels “Kennedys.” She calls the night before Halloween, “a night of parties and innocent pranks.” She calls the last name of the girl who found her body Leguire. In the end credits, as in the book, it’s McGuire.

The first name of the girl who found Martha’s body is not in conflict. It’s Sheila.

Herbert Ross (note the Kennedy connection) produced and directed The Last of Sheila.

In The Last of Sheila, Clinton’s game within a game is his idea of an “innocent prank.” He’s not out to harm anyone. He just wants to humiliate them, a closed circle of victims who would have been subject to public exposure if his late wife Sheila had lived. Knowing his relationship with her you know where he probably got the real dirt on them. But as they board his yacht they have no idea of the “pretend” gossip game they are going to play much less the real one that Clinton is playing with them.

The guest’s first stop aboard the Sheila is a room cluttered with games. Lee remarks, “Who designed this room, Parker Brothers?” Clinton explains, “Sometimes it rains.”

You wouldn’t think much of that exchange unless you picked up on the game of Clue inside of Fuhrman’s movie, saw the croquet game in the rain, and The Last of Sheila close-up of the photo of Clinton and Lee’s husband Tom standing together with crossed Croquet mallets. The Croquet game in Fuhrman's Murder in Greenwich movie had nothing to do with his book. The closest thing to it was polo. In The Last of Sheila, the Croquet photo is just another example of Clinton’s obsession with games.

Before Clinton shows his guests to their rooms, he pins the doctored version of the group photo he took onshore to a corkboard within plain view of everyone. No one notices the alteration. It’s a big clue to the solution of the game, but one he’s confident he can plant in the open with a minimum of risk. He knows that all of his guests are preoccupied with their own ambitions and showed up in anticipation of being included in his next big project. He knows that they don’t know the game has already begun. He also knows that he can keep them sidetracked by leaking a rumor through his publicist Christine (the first time you see her in the movie, she's on her office phone with him) that Clinton is going to produce a movie about the late Sheila Green.

Lee: That is truly bizarre

.

Tom: No, not really. She's still a compulsive subject with Clinton.

Lee: But he never really cared about her.

Christine: Oh, yes he did. He cared about her very much. He cared very much about her Arizona real estate holdings, which we are sailing on right now.

Lee: Finding the guy who hit her is just another game with Clinton.

Christine: Absolutely. But what a game! Tom gets to write it, Phillip gets to direct it and what's-her-face -- I mean, my new client, Miss. Alice Wood, gets to thrill you as Sheila Green, "Who rose from call girl to columnist. (laugh)

Clinton butters up his gossip game victims on deck, announcing that he’s going to produce a major motion picture. He says, “I’m thinking of calling it – don’t be shocked now – The Last of Sheila. Fox is interested, Paramount is interested; the perfect woman’s picture – every bit as big as Love Story.”

The body language and verbal responses of his gusts say that they are hooked but not convincingly surprised.

Clinton slaps his hands together and gleefully announces, “Two hours to game time, gang. Let me describe the week’s entertainment.”

Alice: The last time I played a game was Charades at –

Clinton: My house. A year ago. The night Sheila was killed.

Alice: As a matter of fact, everyone here was –

Clinton: Was there. Everyone except Lee. You were sick at home in Santa Barbara, you said.”

[Note: This is not a clue, as it later appears to be, that Clinton thinks Lee drove the hit-and-run car. He thinks she was a hundred miles away. He’s actually hinting that he “knows” why she stayed at home; not because she was sick but because she was drunk.]

Lee: No. I was home sick of Santa Barbara, I said.

Philip: I like games where you don’t have to move.

Clinton: You don’t have to for this one – if you’re smart enough.

Philip: Meaning?

Clinton (caught-off-guard hesitation): Well – It’s sort of – I call it the Sheila Green Memorial Gossip Game.

Christine: (laughter)

Anthony: Sound’s fascinating.

Clinton explains the rules of his game as he passes out small envelops to each guest.

Clinton: Now, I dreamed up six secrets for each of you, six little pieces of pretend gossip. Keep them secret.

(Close-up of unidentified hands sliding Clinton Green's cards out of the envelopes) One card in a man’s hands says, “You are an informer.”   ”Another card in a woman’s hand says, “You are and ex-convict.” The last one in a man’s hands says, “You are an alcoholic.” The pretend gossip cards they look at put everyone in a playful mood. Tom crumples his. Clinton stops him. “No, no!” he says, “Don’t throw them away. Keep them until Saturday.”

Saturday is the day that all of the secrets are supposed to be revealed.

This is the game as Clinton explains it: “The idea is to discover everybody else’s secret, without peeking of course, and prevent the other players from discovering yours... Every day we will park in another port where you can discover the proof of one person’s secret. I’ll announce which secret to look for and give you a clue, which will tell you what to do and where to go onshore. Now if you solve the clue properly it will lead you to where the proof is."

Now listen for the "pie" in Tom's question...

Tom says, "Suppose you announce, say, pyromaniac. And lets say that if my secret is, say pyromaniac, and lets say that's my secret, why should I bother looking for the proof?"

Clinton has that contingency covered. "When the person whose secret it is discovers the proof, I’ll put a card out saying the game for that evening is over.”

You saw game cards that said, Alcoholic, Ex-convict and Informer. If you saw that the rest of the cards were Shoplifter, Homosexual and Little Child Molester you could figure out who was holding which card just by looking at the doctored photo that Clinton pinned to the corkboard. That revelation comes near the end of the movie.

[Note: In Mark Fuhrman’s movie, Batman is an informer, Fuhrman is a “convicted perjurer,” Michael Skakel is an alcoholic. His movie brings in O.J. Simpson who was a juvenile shoplifter. O.J.'s father was a homosexual. In 1984 Fuhrman bought his house in Redondo Beach, which was across the street from a house allegedly traced to O.J. for the production of kiddy porn.]  

Tom: Let’s play.

Clinton: According to the pizza slinger who runs this tub for me, a launch will be back to pick you up at 7:00 p.m. That’s when you’ll get your clue for this evening.

Philip: For whom are we looking tonight?

Clinton: The person with the shoplifter card.

The clue is a silver skeleton key with a “Sterling 18K” inscription on the shaft. Tom and Phillip are the smartest players in the group. While the others stumble and fumble their way around a French village on the Mediterranean coast trying to find out what the key means, Tom and Philip zero in on the name Sterling and find a hotel by that name Meanwhile Tom’s wife Lee gets an accidental lead from a dealer in a silver shop that takes her to the same hotel.

Philip gets there first but while he’s in the lobby trying to get the desk clerk to let him compare his hotel key with the ones on the board, Tom sneaks past him and goes directly to room 18K. Tom opens the door with his key. His ears are immediately assaulted by the gunshots and war whoops of a late 19th century cavalrymen vs. American Indian gun battle. coming from a TV set. Inside he sees that the room is cluttered with stolen merchandise -- they still have price tags on them. Then he sees a male mannequin with a knife stuck in its back

.

Clinton is sitting in the shadows with a cigarette in his fist. He makes his presence known to Tom and critiques his analysis of the crime scene. The mannequin’s wallet shows that he is a private investigator. Tom concludes that he was tracking the shoplifter who killed him. Tom sees a bottle of Chanel N^o5 perfume in the “detective’s” hand. It finally hits him that this the perfume bottle label is the clue to turn the TV dial to channel 5.

The loud gun battle continues. Now you can see a cavalryman and a cowboy on TV and hear the cavalryman speaking excitedly in French. Tom turns to channel 5 where Clinton has made a fictional news story about the shoplifter with "The only known headshot by Bruno of Hollywood.

Lee is next to find room 18K in the Sterling Hotel and to find the proof of the shoplifter’s identity on channel 5. Phillip finds the room and the proof next. Since he has the shoplifter card, the game is over. Clinton hangs out the sign. Anthony gets there too late. Christine doesn’t get there at all. Neither does Alice.

You get your first clue that something is amiss when you see the redhead Alice sitting pensively alone at a table in an outdoor café. For her, the shoplifter is not “pretend gossip.” It’s her real secret. She wonders if Clinton made up the shoplifter card coincidentally or with her in mind. In the end you learn that all of the cards are real secrets of all of the players. Clinton just switched them around so that a different player got the card that applied to him or her. All of the men got the cards that applied to the women. The women got cards that applied to the men. A word is added to one card to make the game code come out right.

If you saw Mark Fuhrman’s Murder in Greenwich movie you’ve seen this “card-shifting” formula. You’ve seen it with O.J. and Fuhrman as characters and with personality traits and actions given to one character but applicable to another. Tommy Skakel is the one with the skeleton key on his key ring, not O.J. who had a master key on his key ring for all of the doors to his house. Hildy Southerlyn tells Fuhrman’s story about Tommy and Martha, not Fuhrman. An anonymous kid bashes a pumpkin with a baseball bat symbolically bashing Martha’s head, not O.J. bashing his Mercedes Benz with a baseball bat symbolically bashing Nicole, etc. etc. etc....

The etceteras don’t end in Murder in Greenwich until the movie ends. They just cross over now and then to other moves with mannequins, croquet mallets, double homicides, bodies in bathtubs, frame-ups, turtles, etc. etc. etc.  

The death of Sheila Green was an accident. Lee drove the car that bounced her into the driveway hedge row. She was drunk. One of the game players tricks her into looking at his card while he is out of sight. The card says, “you are a hit and run driver.” Now she thinks that Clinton knows her real secret and plans to expose her. So, on a stormy night in the second game where everyone is looking for the person with the homosexual card in a Medieval Catholic monastery, she tries to get to him alone to talk him out of it.

Clinton is the first deliberate homicide victim in The Last of Sheila. He is in the priest’s confessional wearing a red wig and make-up to let the game players know that Alice is the one with the homosexual card. Lee ends up thinking that she killed him in a fit of rage by smashing a large, heavy candle holder through the wooden grill of the priest’s box. To her horror, his lifeless body falls out of the confessional cubical.

Lee smokes a cigarette trying to think of what to do until the storm and broken pieces of a stone pillar gives her an idea. She drags Clinton’s body next to stone pillar and slams a broken part of it down on his head to make his death look like an accident caused by the storm. But Tom and Philip make discoveries that indicate he was killed in the confessional and dragged outside. The most damning evidence of murder is a stick in the folds of Clinton’s robe that looks like it came from the shattered grille and a bloody stone that came from the base of a stone column rather than the top of the column next to the body.

Tom leads an investigation aboard the Sheila in which he brilliantly deduces that the killer’s motive and therefore the killer’s identity is in the gossip game cards. To test his hypothesis of murder, he gets everyone to show their cards and to reveal their real secrets one by one, starting with his. As the logic of his hypothesis draws closer to the only possible killer, according to the evidence he lays out, he stops abruptly and claims that his work was meaningless theory. Lee sees where her husband’s methodology will inevitably lead and confesses what she did and why she did it. Later that evening, Philip finds her body in a bathtub with her wrists slashed; an obvious suicide victim.

Philip is not completely satisfied that everything is what it appears to be. It involves something that Clinton said about the game he can’t remember what its. He stays on the yacht and tries to work it out step by step. With Tom’s help, he reexamines the clues on the monastery crime scene and reaches the inescapable conclusion that Clinton was already dead when Lee thought she killed him.  The implications are likewise inescapable. The real killer is still at large and he might have murdered Lee, too.

Tom leaves the room. In his absence Philip pours a drink and finds himself looking at Clinton’s doctored group photo. Clinton’s words about not having to move to play the game come back to him. He realizes that Clinton designed the game so that the first letter in each game card arranged in order would spell S-H-E-I-L-A. He sees that Clinton wrote “little” child molester, instead of “child molester” just to get the L he needed for the name in his consecutive letter code. In breaking the code he also realizes that Tom's “HIT-AND-RUN-KILLER’ card cannot be the one that Clinton typed. The H had already been used and Clinton needed an “A.” One clue leads to another until he pieces together who killed Clinton as well as Lee and why.

The movie ends with Christen, the informer, wrapping up a messy situation and Philip promoting himself to producer  as well as director on a new Sheila project. He wants a fresh writer to do the screenplay. He wants Tom to be the technical advisor and to make the (uncredited) rewrites.

One last thing you have to see is a screenshot from brief party scene onshore. It has no significance to the plot other than to place Tom onshore when cabin lights going on and off on the boat draws him to Philip experimenting with anomalous pieces of evidence like the stick from the grille. 

Tom’s turtle neck sweater is the only clue you need to see what it has to do with Mark Fuhrman’s informant with the Maryland license plate and Martha Moxley’s ghost in Murder in Greenwich.

—Jasper

Brent Bryson (Clarence Steward's lawyer questioning Michael McClinton about Tom Riccio's hotel room key): It was Mr. Riccio gained entry by either opening the door with a key or...in any event, he opened the door.

McClinton: He opened the door with a key. You're right.