Unlike most of the dramas you see on TV these days, this was not written in a “writers’ room” at a studio in Hollywood or Burbank. This was written down somewhere in the United States of America.
About two months ago, I got a call from my very small bank in West Hollywood. It’s a tiny bank and I was literally their first customer when they opened in late 1978 or early 1979. The young woman on the other end of the line told me that they had some problems with quite a large number of checks that had come in for payment. (READ MORE from Ben Stein: Indispensable Lessons From My Life)
The problem, in a few words, was that someone or someones had apparently stolen a large number of blank checks from the home of my wife and me in Beverly Hills. That person, or someone connected with that person, had forged my signature and then successfully attempted to cash the checks or use them to buy items or services. I drove over to the bank and studied a good-sized pile of checks with what were clearly forgeries. Some of the forgeries were sadly obvious and of poor quality.
I had an idea of who the forger was almost instantly. He or she was a close friend of some 10 years standing. She had, at one point, lived quite near our house in Trancas, a neighborhood in far north-western Malibu. I knew the neighborhood from the “get-go” of my many years in Hollywood because my friends and idols, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, great writers and great friends, lived on a cliff there overlooking the Pacific.
They had been kind and invited me over for social events and just to talk. The suspected forger lived near there. She had various serious life problems. Our bank worked diligently to make sure that the accounts were made whole. And it was in that labyrinth that the problems rested for some time.
Many years later after I first came, my wife and I bought a modest home there in nowhere near as prestigious a spot as the Dunnes’ home but still in a lovely spot overlooking the waves.
By the beginning of this year, my wife and I had gone through several trials. Our 37-year-old son had died in a ghastly firearms tragedy. My wife had health problems that kept her from leaving Beverly Hills and coming to Malibu. I still went out there with friends and caregivers whom I needed because a poorly done orthopedic surgery had left me virtually immobilized.
Still, I loved that house and went there whenever I could.
Roughly two weeks ago I made arrangements to meet a dear friend, a middle-aged woman whose husband had recently died of pancreatic cancer. She went ahead of my little party. She arrived ahead of me and when we got there she was already there. She had discovered that someone or someones had unlawfully entered our home. It had been badly ransacked with many TVs, computers, and stereos strewn around the first floor and our basement.
There was also a mess of souvenirs of my life and my wife’s life missing from where they had been for literally decades. I was especially upset that several drawers of correspondence between Mr. Richard Nixon and me and my father were missing.
My helpful friends and I scoured the house. We also called the “Malibu-Lost Hills” Sheriff’s station. In slightly less than half an hour, a pleasant, cheerful sheriff’s deputy in a leather jacket appeared at the door.
He had some alarming suggestions. The main one was that there were some signs that persons unknown were trying to “squat” in our house. In California, housebreakers could break into our house. Set up housekeeping even for a very short time, and then it was a long, painful, expensive ordeal to go into court here to get them out. In the meantime, my wife and I were deprived of the use of our home. Who knew what kind of mischief and vandalism could go on there?
And what kind of maniac would want armloads of correspondence between Richard Nixon, post-1974, and me and my father, Herbert Stein?
It is all deeply upsetting. As far as I know, there have been no crimes of this kind in our neighborhood — ever. And, again, who wants all of those letters from Richard Nixon at this stage? I already know Carl Bernstein very well and there’s nothing in my possession he would want or need.
Too much like the beginning of a detective story. I don’t like it.