Chapter 4

 

I had enough reasons for believing that the color of Stella Stevens, Shannon Tweed, Pricilla Presley and Angela Lansbury’s clothes were special to Fuhrman to write about them in my first two Smoking Guns. Murder in Greenwich taught me something new about shades of red. In the rainy croquet scene Hildy wears black and white clothes but the clothing link is in what she says about her high school. She tells Fuhrman that she went to Sacred Heart. In The Ballad of Cable Hogue (’71) Andrew Stevens’ mother Stella wears a flamingo pink heart (valentine) over her crotch while pouring water over Jason Robards as Cable in a bathtub. Beneath her pink heart is a white one outlined in pink with little pink hearts above her name in blue cursive letters. Her name is Hildy.

Viewing hundreds of hours of Fuhrman-related movies sets you up to expect things in Murder in Greenwich that you usually see in six minutes or less. But they are so numerous that they can run together. In the first drafts of this chapter I wrote “queen of hearts” three times when I meant to write “queen of diamonds.” Andrew Stevens’ role in Night Eyes 3 with his mother’s look-alike Shannon Tweed was only one source of the confusion. The “Mothers” poem in Fuhrman’s Murder in Brentwood with the  “hearts forever” line in blue cursive letters and the pink flower drawn like a butterfly two lines above it was another. When Hildy moves in with Cable at his water stop in the desert she chases chickens, collects eggs and sings “Butterfly Mornings and Wildflower Afternoons.”  

These things were still jumbled in my mind when I saw the mannequins less than a minute into Murder in Greenwich. But somehow the quick shots of the water, the eggs and the mailbox that preceded it told me that a man in a wheelchair, a wig and a red dress were coming.  

All I could see at first was the water-in-the gutter link to an ex-boxer in The Naked Gun 2 ½ with Pricilla Presley as Jane watching him escape in the rain after planting a bomb. When I went back to check that scene, my association didn’t make sense. Jane is standing in front of a window. It is pouring rain but she is wearing a blue dress. She is crying nostalgically over a press clipping of Frank Drebin sliding across a banquet table on top of England’s Queen Elizabeth II. The clipping is in black and white so the color of the queen’s dress in the clipping is no help.

I checked the queen’s dress color in the original Naked Gun where the shot of Drebin lying on top of her came from. In that movie she is wearing a yellow dress. With the queen of England in The Naked Gun 2 ½, I had the Greenwich connection and the Elizabeth connection to Martha Moxley, whose ghost is narrating the Murder in Greenwich scene, but no red dress. The red dress – two red dresses and a store shop mannequin in red lingerie  – came later. 

In The Naked Gun 2 ½ crying scene, a professor named Meinheimer pulls up to Jane in a wheelchair, which explained why I expected to see the wheelchair in the two-second Greenwich store window shot. But it didn’t explain why I expected to see a red dress or why I was surprised not to see a wheelchair.  

The action in The Naked Gun 2 ½ proceeds from Jane and Meinheimer talking about her lingering feelings for Frank Drebin to a janitor picking out of a wastebasket a clock attached to a bundle of dynamite. The janitor takes it to the security guard and all of them wonder why anyone would throw away a good clock. A guard notices that “it’s four-minutes slow.” In a close-up of the clock face you see a brown hen pecking at the ground and chicks coming out of two broken eggs. The security guard sets the clock and the bomb explodes. When you smash an egg it explodes. No one has to tell you what that means when you see the broken eggs getting hosed away with the mailbox in the background in Murder in Greenwich. You saw the same elements in The Naked Gun 2 ½ and The Face of Fear. 

The actor playing the janitor in The Naked Gun 2 ½ is part of the joke. He is a security guard in The Face of Fear. Bollinger asks him about janitors and other people who might be working in the building. The guard gets suspicious and asks Bollinger what’s going on.  Bollinger tells him that there is a bomb and shoots him. The nameless guard is the Naked Gun 2 ½ link to Edna Moray, the Blue Note and Frank Drebin – a name you can get out of playing Scrabble with Franklin Dwight Bollinger.

Jane Spenser’s red dress is another joke. She was wearing a blue one when the bomb exploded. But when Frank Drebin shows up to investigate, confers with George Kenney as Ed and O.J. Simpson as Nordberg, she’s standing by a window wearing a red dress and posing like a fashion model. It might occur to you here that Jane was a blonde in the first Naked Gun and that Nicole Brown Simpson’s sister Denise was a fashion model. It might also occur to you that Denise had black hair when she testified at O.J.’s criminal trial and wore a black dress like Hildy Southerlyn’s. You can see how much Denies would have looked like in Nicole a blonde wig. One of the mannequins in Murder in Greenwich has a black wig.  

There is more. All of it leads to a red queen and a strong suggestion of incest in The Manchurian Candidate.   

While Jane posies for a sketch artist in her red dress, Drebin looks at her in a trance. You hear him thinking, “She had the kind of calves you’d love to suck on” and “breasts that seemed to say, ‘Hey! look at these.’” He thinks, “She’s the kind of woman that makes you want to get down on your knees and thank God you’re a man…Yep, she reminded me of my mother, all right.” Frank’s partner Ed comes up to him and says, “Snap out of it Frank, You’re looking at her like she was your mother, for Christ’s sake.”  

Pricilla, Presley who plays Jane, was married to the King of Rock, Elvis Presley. The wife of a king is a queen. 

Drebin, Ed and Nordberg track the assassin to a sex shop where Drebin and Ed interview the clerk. The street is wet. As the assassin makes his getaway, you see a mannequin in a white negligee. In the background is a painting of a woman in a red negligee. Next to the mannequin is a red negligee on a clothes rack. A mannequin off to the side of the picture near the window is wearing a red negligee. Note the fuzzy white hat she’s wearing 

When I looked at the Naked Gun 2 ½ after seeing Murder in Greenwich, I realized why I expected to see a red dress and why I expected to see a man in a wheelchair. The man in a wheelchair is in the name written by pranksters across the dress shop window – HACKER.  

Earl Hacker is the man the bad guy Quinton Hapsberg hires to impersonate Professor Meinheimer to give a speech that goes against the real professor’s beliefs after the bombing plot fails. Hacker looks and talks like Meinheimer. You’ve seen this before in The Prize and in Silver Steak. Hacker wears a false beard and a wig and he sits in a wheelchair. Jane believes that he is the real professor when she joins him and Quinton at a banquet wearing another red dress. Frank crashes the party. Jane eats an olive and Quinton tells Frank that his name is not on the guest list. Sound familiar? 

At first I thought that my red queen idea came from Queen Elizabeth at a baseball game in the original Naked Gun. Her fuzzy white hat made the mannequin connection but it didn’t fit the pattern I saw in the scene with Jane in her blue dress pining for Frank while looking at the clipping of him on top of the queen. There should have been a matching pattern in both movies. There was.  

At the ballgame Jane is wearing a blue dress. That’s were I got the idea that the queen was wearing a red one in the photo. But the color of the queen’s dress in the photo is irrelevant. The important thing is her diamond tiara. What does a baseball field have in common with a diamond tiara? A diamond.  

You’re going to see more red dresses and more mannequins that plug into the Murder in Greenwich mannequins. But if the red queen, specifically the queen of diamonds, meant anything to Fuhrman, there should have been a deck of cards in The Naked Gun 2 ½ and Murder in Greenwich closely related to Jane and Elizabeth. You see it in The Naked Gun 2 ½ with Quinton playing a game of solitaire. Jane sits next to him while Frank accesses him of hiring the bomber. Quinton gives him a subtle hint by holding up the ace of spades – the death card.  

By the way, the baseball diamond does mean something special to Mark Fuhrman. In the McKinny tapes he boasted to her about taking black criminal suspects to “the baseball diamond” to beat them. That’s where Fuhrman’s infamous words “Every try to find a bruise on a nigger” comes from. 

The Murder in Greenwich connection between the red dresses in the store window and the playing cards is made through the narration of Martha’s ghost. You see a quick segment that includes the “red queens” in the window. The next time you hear her voice she takes up where she left off and you get a succession of scenes that include Rob Mathers playing a card game with his mother. Notice that the mother is handing the son a card. At the beginning of this three-second piece you see a white fence through a window crisscrossed in a diamond pattern. As the camera pans to the left you see the same diamond pattern on a window over the mother’s right shoulder. You see that diamond pattern only one other time – when Martha shares a kiss with the teenager that Fuhrman says killed her.  

Rob’s Mother has a glass of red wine in front of her. He has milk and cookies in front of him. Rob’s milk and cookies are probably somebody’s idea of a joke. James Beaumont plays the adult Rob Mathers. Hugh Beaumont was Beaver Cleaver’s father in the 1970’s TV series Leave it to Beaver. Jerry Mathers was Beaver. But the wine and milk combination take you to related scenes in The Manchurian Candidate where the wine-sipping mother sets up her Medal of Honor winning son Raymond Shaw to attend a costume party. There, she invites him to have a drink with her and puts him in a trance with the suggestion that he play solitaire. The milk comes later when he kills a man holding a carton of milk.

The queen of diamonds is the trigger to get Raymond to kill a Presidential candidate at a high point in his nomination acceptance speech. His mother gives him his assassination instructions. Then she plants a decidedly un-motherly kiss on his lips.   

Rob Mathers is Fuhrman’s name for a “22-year-old” man who was in reality a 26-year-old man named Edward Hammond. Playing the Scrabble game again and using the “y” in “year,” you have all the letters you need with Rob Mathers and Edward Hammond to spell Raymond Shaw. In this case, cheating is appropriate. You’ll see why when Major Ben Marcos uses a card trick to show his girlfriend the secret of the red queen. The Manchurian Candidate was filmed in black and white. That’s why the picture of Jane holding the black and white photo of Frank laying on top of the queen in The Naked Gun 2 ½ is significant. In The Manchurian Candidate, Frank Sinatra is Major Marco.  

During the Korean War Ben Marco was an Army captain who led a small patrol of infantrymen on a dangerous mission. The man they thought was a South Korean guide was an enemy agent who led them into a trap. The entire patrol was captured by Russian soldiers and transported by helicopter to a brainwashing institute in Manchuria.   

After three days of brainwashing, the Chinese head of if the Pavlov Institute Yen Lo conditions the captured soldiers to accept whatever vision of realty he imposes on them and to obey orders without question. The yak dung cigarettes he gives them to smoke are indistinguishable to them from American cigarettes. Lo tells his audience of high-ranking Chinese and Russian officers and their staffs, “Tastes good like a cigarette should.” He thinks he has a great sense of humor although he is the only one who laughs at his jokes. 

Lo conditions the Americans to think that their insufferable, Sgt. Raymond Shaw is the kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful human being they have ever met. He convinces them that he saved their lives and took out an entire company of Chinese infantrymen single-handedly. He conditions Raymond to go into a trance when he hears the words “Why don’t you pass the time by playing a game of solitaire,” to play the game with or without cards and to respond without question to whatever further instructions he receives. He can murder without feeling guilt or remorse in his waking state because he has been instructed to forget his acts of murder.  

The Americans Raymond kills during Lo’s demonstration go along with the program willingly just because Lo tells them that they should cooperate. Lo comments that one murder victim named Bobby doesn’t look old enough to be in the Army. Raymond agrees that he probably isn’t. Bobby sits in his chair smiling broadly as Raymond shoots him in the head with a service pistol. Martha Moxley was hit in the head by a six-iron. Another name for a pistol is a shooting iron. How could Fuhrman have tuned Bobby into Martha? Easily….  

In Fuhrman’s Murder in Greenwich book he makes it clear that the person who gave him the Martha Moxley files in Greenwich was a woman. In his movie, he uses a woman crossing guard’s face to morph into the face of Lancaster, the male cop who moonlights at the Belle Haven Country Club as a private security guard.  In The Manchurian Candidate, Lo and all of the Communist officers in his audience morph into women. The American’s, including Bobby, see Lo as Mrs. Henry Whittaker, the speaker at a women’s garden club meeting in New Jersey. Capt. Marco sees him as a white woman. A black corporal named Al Melvin sees him as a black woman.  

The captured American’s believe that they are waiting out a storm in a hotel lobby. Lo doesn’t say what kind of storm it is but the relaxed atmosphere and the women’s summer dresses implies a rainstorm. The plant you see, like the one in Hildy Southerlyn’s foyer during the rainy croquet scene, is not enough to link it to that scene in Murder in Greenwich. But when you see a bald Russian general morph into a woman with a cigarette holder, you can see where some leakage from The Manchurian Candidate seeped in. You’ll see more when you review a few scenes from The Naked Gun series.

The Naked Gun 2 ½ gives us two red queens to match the two red dresses in the Greenwich dress shop window – a three-second shot that is part of a sequence naming the Kenney family. The Manchurian Candidate also gives us two red queens. You don’t need color film to know that the queen of diamonds playing card is red.  The Manchurian Candidate was pulled from circulation for thirty years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1962. The number 22 comes up more often than it should in Murder in Greenwich. 

The Manchurian Candidate title comes from the Manchurian brainwashing institute’s candidate for President of the United States. He’s an extreme rightwing Republican senator named John Iseland modeled after the infamous Republican senator Joseph McCarty. The plan is to win Iseland the Republican Vice Presidential nomination, to assassinate the Presidential candidate on the floor of the convention and to sweep Iseland into power with the emotional fallout.  

Raymond Shaw’s mother is married to Iselin and controls him completely. She pretends to be a more strident anti-Communist than he is. She is secretly working for the Russian and Chinese Communists. The Communist chose Raymond as their assassin because they think it will make her easier for them to control. They are wrong because they don’t know how she really feels about her son. It only angers her and prompts her to turn their plan for power into plans of her own for personal power.  

Everything goes wrong when the hypnotic conditioning is partially revealed in the nightmares of Marcus and Melvin and two things happen coincidentally that no one could have predicted.  

Raymond sits at the bar in a long dark coat where the bartender is telling a customer that his brother-in-law is a terrible poker player and he said to him, “Why don’t you pass the time by playing a game of solitaire.” Raymond asks for a deck of cards. He plays solitaire until the queen of diamonds appears and waits for instruction.  

Marco comes in as the bartender relates how he told his brother-in-law to jump in a lake. Raymond leaves the pub, hails a taxi, goes to a lake and jumps in. The shock of the cold water takes him out of his trance but leaves him with no memory of what happened. Marco is on the dock to pull him out of the water and the incident triggers more details of his dream, which lead him to the significance of the solitaire game. 

You might have gotten a flash a of Joanna Stayton in Overboard as well as Fuhrman and Hildy sitting at the bar in her long black coat and on her patio asking Fuhrman if he is trying to shock her into saying something. If you didn’t make the Hildy connection you would have if you’d recalled Fuhrman responding, “Do you have something to say or are you just another lonesome alcoholic with too much money and too few distractions?” Then again you might need a previous scene in The Manchurian Candidate where a Russian agent posing as a staff doctor brings Raymond into his clinic to test the assassination mechanism.  

The Russian agent tells Dr. Lo that the facility is a legitimate clinic for rich alcoholics. He keeps it running as a cover for his only patient that matters in case someone accidentally drops by for a visit – although he can’t imagine who would want to visit Raymond. He cannot plan for the second accident that messes with the assassination mechanism in Raymond’s brain because the odds of it happening are incalculable.  

Raymond was conditioned to kill only after he hears the words “Why don’t you pass the time by playing a game of solitaire” followed by playing the game seeing the queen of diamonds and getting instructions. His mother has gotten him to play the game but before she can give him his instructions her husband calls her though the door to handle a diplomatic problem with one of her guests. She takes the queen of diamonds card with her to guard against anything going wrong.  

Mrs. Iselin doesn’t realize that her son’s old girlfriend Josie is standing outside on the patio watching through the curtain flanking the glass French doors. She sees nothing suspicious. She is only glad to see Raymond after being away from him in Paris for two years. When his mother leaves she comes though the door wearing a costume she decided on at the last minute after seeing a large playing card in a store window. She comes to the party as the queen of diamonds.