By Donnell Rubay

Editor’s note: Second of two parts. Read part one by CLICKING HERE.

AT THE END OF PART ONE, Anita Loos, author of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” has met Addison Mizner’s rogue of a brother, Wilson. The two have become inseparable — but how does Wilson really feel about her? She is about to find out.

Among the group around Addison were a mother and daughter from Duluth, Minnesota. The mother was an avid customer of the Spanish/Moorish furnishings Addison manufactured to go with his houses, while the gorgeous, blonde, virginal daughter declared to Wilson that her goal in life was to become his “passion playground.”

One day at tea, Ray, another member of Addison’s group, reported that he’d just passed Wilson’s open door and had glimpsed the man, in his dressing gown, pouring champagne for a smitten Louisa. As she listened, Anita felt a bolt of betrayal — even though Wilson had yet to tell her he “cared” for her. While Anita was — admittedly unreasonably — “outraged over being a ‘cast off,’” Addison was frantic that Wilson’s deflowering of Louisa might lose him the profitable business of her mother. Immediately he demanded that Anita call Wilson to disrupt things. Anita felt a challenge, but were Wilson’s feelings for her strong enough that she could pull him away from Louisa?

In the heat of the moment, with the rest of the tea group eagerly listening, she called Wilson’s room and begged to see him right away. His cheerful reply: “I’m busy going over some accounts … I’ll meet you in an hour.” Addison shook his head; an hour would be too long. Anita pressed: “It’s got to be right now!” Wilson’s reply: “What’s the matter Mama Nita” — another of his nicknames for her — “is something wrong?” Desperate for an answer, Anita came up with something that sounded good but wasn’t exactly based on fact: “My husband has found out about us!” Since there was nothing for her husband to have found out, Anita held her breath in suspense. After a pause, Wilson replied: “Where are you now?” Not sure why, she said she was at home. Immediately he responded: “I’ll be right over.”

Anita hung up, pleased she’d accomplished what she’d been asked to do, though mystified as to why Wilson appeared to feel guilt over what her husband might know, since there was not yet anything for her husband to know. Ray then suggested the entire tea group accompany Anita home to wait for Wilson, which they did.

Anita met Wilson alone as the others watched in hiding. “My husband is on his way now, to confront you,” she gasped, expecting his reply to be something like: “Confront me with what?” Instead he said: “If (he) knows about us, we’re free to go away together for keeps.”

Anita later recalled that she “was speechless.” Wilson was such a free spirit, she could not have imagined him making any sort of statement that involved a commitment. At the same time, as she wrote, she was “electrified by his proposal” while his “confession that he ‘cared’ shook me to the very soul.”

But before she could say anything, Addison stepped out of hiding, explained the joke and apologized. Addison then added: “What did you think (her husband) could find out about you anyway?” To which an embarrassed Wilson replied: “Husbands have second sight; I was convinced he’d read my mind.”

The “smartest guy in town” had been had. Turning to Anita, “with that sheepish grin (she) knew so well, he announced: ‘I wish you were dead.’”

Anita sucked in her breath; regret knifed through her. She had just botched the most important relationship in her life. This is where she would have given half her future life to undo what she’d just done.

Still, she was troubled: How could Wilson have planned a seduction with Louisa if she, Anita, was the one he wanted? The answer came one evening at the dive, when someone asked what had become of Louisa. Wilson’s answer was to explain that he hadn’t seen Louisa since his attempted seduction — undertaken to rid himself of a “terrific” longing “for the wife of a friend.”

Irving Berlin wrote a song about how Wilson, the master con, could be conned by a woman: “You’re a Sucker for a Dame.” Yet Berlin too recognized the part of Wilson that was ready to run away with Anita, in “Sentimental Guy.” Another songwriter, Stephen Sondheim, described Wilson’s attraction for women in “Isn’t He Something.”

According to Anita, Ray, who began the whole episode, “was a seasoned playboy in his mid-forties … who tried to follow Wilson in everything he … did.” One day, a little more than a year after Wilson’s death, Ray proposed to Anita. When she responded with shock, he explained: “That day Wilson said he wanted you for keeps … then I suddenly wanted you, too.” She declined the proposal.

* * *

MEANWHILE, BACK IN FLORIDA IN THE 1920s, to earn money — in the millions — the Mizner brothers were busy selling Florida land and creating the city of Boca Raton. By 1926, however, the boom in Florida land sales was busting. Not only was Wilson now out of money, he was being hauled into court over selling underwater lots. (This is not completely fair since Wilson came from Benicia, where his family owned many underwater lots; such lots continue to have owners to this day.) According to Anita, Wilson’s departure from Florida involved jumping bail and racing to beat the sheriff across the state line.

Like a black cat with many lives, Wilson soon landed in Hollywood for still another adventure in his multi-faceted life. He established himself in a suite in the Ambassador Hotel (where, more than 40 years later, Robert Kennedy was shot). Next, because there was no place, as Anita described it, “where a man of his inertia could loaf in comfort,” he found some partners and opened a restaurant they called the Brown Derby.

For the next few years, while Wilson held court in Booth 50 at the Brown Derby, conveniently located across Wilshire Boulevard from the Ambassador Hotel, Anita was often a continent away in New York. They kept in touch, though, via telephone and telegram until Anita moved to California in 1931. The two were then together “practically every day” until Wilson’s death in 1933.

Both Wilson and Anita worked as screenwriters in Los Angeles — Wilson for Warner Brothers, providing realistic dialogue for gangster movies; Anita at MGM under the legendary Irving Thalberg. According to Anita, one movie Wilson co-wrote, “One Way Passage” starring William Powell, began life as an ad lib he told Darryl Zanuck, then head of production at Warner, one evening at the Brown Derby. The movie went on to win the Academy Award now called “Best Original Screenplay,” for 1932-33.

“One Way Passage” reveals elements of Wilson’s personality. According to his biographer John Burke, “It was clear that the suave and sophisticated (main character) was modeled after Wilson himself. The dialogue often reflected his rueful attitude toward the human condition, his conviction that nothing, even the best planned and most skillfully executed capers, ever worked out right, his eventual conviction that ‘Maybe Easy Street is only a blind alley.’”

Another Mizner script was for “Hard to Handle,” a James Cagney movie released in 1933. Famously, Mizner always had a co-author to do the physical typing he was disinclined to do. This system worked because Mizner’s words were so valued. As Cagney explained: “We would go in for a story conference, but there’d be no conference. Everyone would just sit and listen to Wilson and all of it was delightful.”

Back in Florida after the bust of the land boom, Addison’s health began to fail, and he died in February 1933. A few weeks later, shortly before his 57th birthday, Wilson had a heart attack that left him confined to his bed at the Ambassador and connected to an oxygen tank.

Much has been written about the jokes Wilson continued making as the end approached. For example, when told death was near, he replied, “What? No two weeks’ notice?”

* * *

THE LAST TIME ANITA SAW WILSON, she could no longer hold back her emotions. As she hurried to leave before tears flowed, he called after her: “Wait a minute … Don’t run out on your boy like this! It won’t be long now before the Main Event.”

A few hours later Wilson delivered his last words to a clergyman: “I don’t expect too much … You can’t be a rascal for forty years and then cop a plea at the last minute. God keeps better books than that.”

The day after Wilson’s death, an MGM producer who adored him stopped Anita to tell her: “Well honey, from now on the Hereafter is going to be a much better place.” More than forty years later, because of the friends she’d met through him and the other ways he’d enriched her life, Anita would write: “Even this side of the Hereafter is better, for me, because of Wilson Mizner.”

As a last goodbye to Wilson, Anita teamed up with Robert Hopkins to write a movie about him.

Both Anita and Hopkins fondly remembered San Francisco’s Barbary Coast. In fact, Hopkins, then a messenger boy, had known Wilson when he was, in Anita’s words, “a young dandy in silk hat, white tie and tails, who gambled with rich suckers for big stakes.” The movie would be called “San Francisco” and the Wilson Mizner character would be named “Blackie Norton” and played by Clark Gable. Since Irving Thalberg was a Wilson admirer, studio approval was granted readily.

Monitoring the movie as it was made, Anita made sure that the man who was “as lovable as he was monstrous” was faithfully immortalized on film.

Donnell Rubay is a Benicia resident and the author of the Benicia-based novel, “Emma and the Oyster Pirate.” This is an excerpt from her latest book, “The Rogue and the Little Lady: The Romance of Anita Loos and Wilson Mizner.”