***Out In The 1940s Noir Night-With Blonde Ice In Mind

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Les Lewis, who knew her best, who had been her benighted lover, probably summed her up best, summed up the late Claire Summers, when he said he didn’t really know her at all, that he had no idea what made her tick, if anything. He added that as time went on and he got more of a sense of her outrageousness, of her outrageous demands and her wanting habits he realized that she had no moral compass, no moral core at all. That was the point where he started using the term Blonde Ice when speaking of her, although that did not stop him from being entrapped, ensnared, and enthralled by her. No way, not even when the bodies, male bodies, started piling up before his eyes. What did he say, oh yah, she went through her men so fast she didn’t have time to have her initials embroidered on their sets of towels. Yah, Claire, Blonde Ice, take your pick, had a good run while it lasted, a damn good run. Maybe, though it’s best to go through the story so you will know how close, if you were a man, you were to falling in her clutches.

Claire’s story, the story she told anyway, to her fellows in the Frisco Gazette newsroom where she held forth as the society page editor, was that she was for nowhere USA like a lot of young people who migrated West after the war, World War Two for those who are asking, and that she was from hunger, from the cheap mean streets of that from nowhere that she had come from. She made it plain, plain as day, to everybody, no, to every guy in the place, and elsewhere that the from hunger thing was strictly in the past and that if anybody wanted to keep company with her they better have dough, big dough, and connections to the Mayfair swells, or leave her alone. That didn’t stop anybody, any guy, in the newsroom, or elsewhere from taking a run at her, a hard run. See she was blonde, young, with a good shape, and pleasing, publicly pleasing, like a kitten. A kitten that would scratch you as soon as look at you but that came later.

Here is how Claire operated, operated up front and in public to give you an idea of what she was capable of when she had her wanting habits on. Les Lewis, the editorial page writer, you might have seen his by-line if you got the Gazettewas, well, smitten by her, and she by him in a calculating sort of way. And so while she was waiting for the next best thing they stuck together. And only for that amount of time. A while later, maybe six, eight, months later this Carl Castle, a self-made millionaire took a run at her. He didn’t have to run hard, not hard at all because all she saw was dollar signs. So she dumped Les, forthwith, and married Carl and his money. But see here is where she, hell, maybe all dames, went screwy. She wanted to keep Les around as a stand-by, keep him around for those nights when Carl was away on business, or she just wanted an off-hand romp. Needless to say a guy who was a self-made millionaire didn’t get that kale by being a stooge, even for a dame.

So when Carl caught on to Claire’s act, caught on during their honeymoon for chrissakes, he dropped her like a hot potato. Or rather he would have if he had had the chance. But Claire, clear-eyed Claire, was not giving up the gravy train after what she had been through and so she wasted him, wasted him before he could cut her out. Here is the beauty of it though she set the scene up like Carl had committed suicide. Nice touch. And that kept the wolves, the legal wolves, away for a while. And here is a nicer touch she took right up with Les like nothing had happened. And he was so gone on her that he bought into her fantasy.

Of course Les for Claire was just a safe harbor until she could snare something else, and you know she did. That is how strong her wanting habits were. So the next best that came along was a high-priced lawyer, Stan Lewin, yes, that Stan Lewin the big corporate lawyer for Ajax Consolidated. A big catch. So Les was out the door, or half-way out the door, again. Poor sap, he had it bad, as bad as man could have it for a woman and still be on two feet. Maybe he was getting just a little wise, because around that time he started referring to her as Blonde Ice around the office. Little good it did him once Stan announced that he and Mrs. Castle were to be wedded.

Those wedding plans though were Claire’s undoing. Somehow someone had gotten to Stan and put a bug in his about Claire’s virtue and so he called the whole thing off. Mistake, Stan mistake, a big one. See you couldn’t do something like that to Claire once she had her plans set, set in stone apparently. And so Stan went underground, six feet under. And here again is the beauty of her mind she let Les take the fall for it. Set him up for the big set-off. And didn’t bat an eyelash. Evil, sheer evil.

Les, and his fellows, by this point were no fools and could see a certain pattern to Claire’s behavior, and so they were ready to move heaven and earth to get Les out from under a murder rap. However they were saved the effort by a very strange occurrence. Apparently back in nowhere Claire had been married, a child-bride it seemed, to some farmer in Utah, or someplace like that. This farmer, Clyde Smythe read about Carl Castle’s demise and accompanying picture of his widow, his own dear wife. He headed to Frisco, armed, armed and filled with righteous indignation. And that righteous indignation put one Blonde Ice on ice. RIP.

Oh yah, it later came out that Claire had killed a couple of other guys on her way up. One, a guy who had been pimping her off doing tricks on the cheap streets of Reno and she blasted him one night when he was wasted. The newsies figured that was when she developed the taste for the rooty-toot-toot to solve her problems. The other guy was a guy from Vegas who knew that she had wasted her pimp and was trying to blackmail her. Bad idea, very bad. So maybe she did have her comeuppance when Clyde showed up to even things out for mankind before it ran out of men. But don’t tell Les that, okay. He goes out to Garden Grove Cemetery every week to visit her grave. Some guys have it bad, real bad, and some dames, good or evil, make them that way.