West of Paradise

by Gwen Davis

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Dramatis Personae

  Epigraph

  A Celebrity Funeral

  A Party at Wolfgang Puck’s

  A Snowflake in Hell

  By Hook or by Crook

  Rats

  A Stalker’s Daisy Chain

  Special Occasions

  Incidental Music

  Last Lunches

  Building Bridges

  People Who Live in Glass Houses

  Burning Bridges

  Will the Real Larry Drayco Please Stand Up

  Paradise East

  And the Winner Is …

  Afterword

  Also by Gwen Davis

  Copyright

  For Gary L. Bostwick, Esq., who told me, “Not the ghost of Swifty Lazar, not the Buddha himself, should stop you from writing this book.” Well, they didn’t, but they tried.

  And for Jamie Lee Curtis, without whom …

  Dramatis Personae

  (In Order of Appearance)

  LARRY DRAYCO—a dead Producer

  KATE DONNELLY—a would-be Writer

  WILTON SPENSER—Actor/Dope Dealer

  SARAH NASH—Author of a Hollywood exposé

  ARTHUR FINSTER—a scrofulous Publisher

  FLETCHER MCCALLUM—Dealmaker/Lawyer

  WENDY—an ex-Duchess

  SAMANTHA CHATSWORTH—West Coast Editor

  ALGERNON REDDY—Philosopher/Guru

  RODNEY SAMETH—a reclusive Director

  DARCY LINETTE—Studio Head/Good Guy

  MORTY SCHEIN—Clothing Manufacturer

  JAKE ALONZO—Movie Star

  LILA DARSHOWITZ—Relative of the Deceased

  CHARLEY BEST—a once Top Attraction

  BRANDY—a Bimbo

  HELEN MANNING—the number one Female Star

  LINUS ARCHER—an aging Enfant Terrible

  VICTOR LIPPTON—a major Player

  NORMAN JESSUP—just as major

  CHEN—Mrs. Lippton

  CARINA—Jessup’s Fiancée

  PERRY ZEMMIS—a Fool

  ALEXA DE CARVILLE—a Mistress

  TYLER HAYDEN—a Pure Soul

  MEL BRYNNER—an Agent

  ASHER PFALTZ—Hollywood Historian

  MORGAN CRAIG—a Graduate Student

  RALPH ROBERTSON—Interviewer/Lecher

  HALLOWELL VINCENT—Private Detective

  BOBBY SHORT—an Entertainer

  BINKY DANFORTH-SMYTHE—a Bounder

  LORI—a New York Literary Agent

  Special Guest Star:

  F. SCOTT FITZGERALD—a dead Writer

  You will always need the favour of the inhabitants to take possession of a province.

  —Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

  A Celebrity Funeral

  Marilyn Monroe was there, and Natalie Wood, and Dorothy Stratten, the murdered centerfold, beneath an embittered message to the world left by her lover, near the slaughtered daughter of the writer who still covered the courts in search of a justice that seemed never to prevail for victims, and Darryl F. Zanuck with a hot brass plate on his grave, the Hollywood version of the eternal flame, and next to him the wife to whom he had been so brazenly unfaithful, and some few feet away, Armand Hammer in his own mausoleum, a contemporary Capulet. It was a wonder any room remained in the cemetery.

  The place was less than a quarter of a New York City block wide, and space was at a premium. Workmen had removed Peter Lawford from his niche in the white-marbled wall when his widow failed to keep up the payments. Those who still put flowers in the tiny vase by Marilyn’s crypt—just around the corner—took satisfaction from that, since well-documented gossip made it Lawford’s fault that she was there at all, the original introduction to the Kennedys having been made by him.

  But the bodies interred at Pierce Brothers in Westwood, behind the movie theater complex fronting it, were truly chockablock. Non-celebrity couples, even rich, had to make arrangements to be buried one atop the other. So it rather surprised Kate, who in her research about Hollywood had learned about that cemetery, that the funeral for Larry Drayco was being held there. From what she had read in the obituaries he was without family that anyone knew of, or even close friends who’d deserted him, as they had Dean Martin, laid to rest a while before in the crowded sod, amid sobbing eulogies from those who hadn’t spoken to him for decades.

  Kate didn’t belong at the funeral. She crashed it as some would an Oscar party. Isolated in the unique way people could be in Los Angeles, where the only real crowds were on the freeway, she was desperate for company. Recently arrived in that spread-out city, she had had no opportunity to make friends. There were no casual meeting places. People got together only by design. It was the social equivalent of job opportunity: you couldn’t get an assignment unless you had done something before. You couldn’t really connect with people in L.A. unless you already knew them.

  Believing the lore, she had been certain Hollywood would mean rubbing shoulders with celebrities. And they were visible, in the same way movies were, always around, but not genuinely accessible. Not to talk back to you, not to touch, like the romance on the screen that life rarely provided.

  She had come to Los Angeles in the hope of being a writer. She already was a writer in her mind, and in the piles of half-finished manuscripts, and in the will of her father, who’d left her enough insurance to underwrite a beginning, giving her in death what he hadn’t been able to in life. So she was free to pursue her dream, for a little while anyway, taking two afternoons a week to go to the library and help someone else pursue her dream, a Hispanic chambermaid who’d never learned to read, and longed to. So Kate worked with her and taught her, and they became, in a way, friends. But there wasn’t anyone who would ask Kate to her home, or feel comfortable being invited to Kate’s, or give her a real feeling of connection. So even in doing good, Kate’s isolation was intensified. She was ready to give her soul for a friend.

  Coming into the chapel, Kate felt a rush of genuine exhilaration. So many famous people, none of whom she knew, all of whom she felt she knew, none of them knowing her. In the short time she had lived there, she had found no one to confide in but an agent. And he was hardly courting her confidence, suffering her more than appreciating her. Her honesty seemed to embarrass him, a direct contradiction to the way he operated. She had called him once in a crisis and he’d put her on hold.

  So she was at sea on the almost empty pavements, where the celebrated sometimes roamed. To walk down streets where Alec Baldwin carried his dry cleaning, sit at sidewalk restaurants where Julia Roberts suffered aloud about whether to cut her hair, and not be able to interact, was a shroud on Kate’s outgoing spirit. She had things to say to these people, these luminous beings whom she knew from Vanity Fair were as lonely as she. She had read of Larry Drayco’s death and the planned proceedings as though it were an invitation. Finally, a kind of Welcome Wagon, the mortuary version. What harm was there in her going, really? It wasn’t as if he could say she hadn’t known him.

  It was an unaccustomed audacity on her part, masquerading among strangers, especially since she did not yet fully know who she herself was. As a young, aspiring writer, she had fallen in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald, and through him had cultivated a love of things that were out of reach. His last obsession had been this town and its industry, Hollywood
as the glowing amplification of the golden siren who’d destroyed him. As though his dream were a fallen standard, Kate had picked it up, ready to bear the flag across the battlefield, in a war fought for no true cause.

  “Are you on the bride’s side or the groom’s?” whispered a familiar-looking man she couldn’t quite put a name on, one of those nondescript supporting players in TV movies that the solitary pretended they didn’t watch.

  She guessed he was being sardonic. But as she didn’t know him, she wasn’t sure, and suppressed a smile.

  “It’s all right to laugh, trust me.” He had lively brown eyes, lightly shaded at the corners with awnings of skin. He was busily checking out everyone coming in, looking past Kate even as he spoke to her, with a barely detectable lisp. “Did you ever do business with Drayco?”

  “No.”

  “Are you a relative or a former lover?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’re in no position to say this isn’t a laughing matter.” He held out his hand, still without exactly being there, his attention focused on the possibility of someone coming in who mattered more to him than even he did. “I’m Wilton Spenser.”

  “Kate Donnelly.”

  There was in his handclasp a kind of sincerity. It was not a strong grasp, but it felt as though his fingers, at least, were trying to make real contact. She experienced a wave of relief: he was funny, and he didn’t know she didn’t belong. It was the closest she had come to communication since arriving in Los Angeles.

  The chapel was filled with the subdued buzz surrounding the solemn celebration of death, made somehow alluring because of those in attendance. Kate recognized the established stars. Tight in their ranks moved the recently deposed duchess, who was giving her title to a new line of clothes. Behind her, but not with her, as he seemed to be with no one of this world, walked Algernon Reddy, gingerly, with a cane. This philosopher, writer, and once guru of the psychedelic seekers was now ingesting the process of dying as he had mushrooms in the sixties. Rodney Sameth, the reclusive director who made his home on the Isle of Wight where his money was, had apparently overcome his phobia about flying in order to attend.

  Present also was the studio head everybody loved whom nobody could say a bad word about, with the mate about whom no one could say anything good. Most of the people there were unknown to the general public. But Kate had seen their pictures in the trade papers and carefully filed them in her brain: studio executives, producers, entertainment lawyers, as powerful as the clients they represented.

  Most noteworthy among those was tall, somber, balding Fletcher McCallum, who had been on the front page of the Wall Street Journal a few days before, brokering a giant industry merger. Kate had seen McCallum depicted in the paper only in caricature, a pen-and-ink sketch. But the jut of his jaw was unmistakable.

  “Fletcher!” said a short, round man with dreadlocks that appeared to be extensions woven into his hair. He wore Armani glasses, sun lenses attached to their tops and flipped up at the moment to reveal albino eyes, a gray that was eerily translucent. His smile was wide and pointy-toothed, a light film around the enamel and gum line, as if he had not bothered to brush. It seemed to Kate a contemptuousness past confidence, as though he didn’t concern himself with other people’s sensibilities. He held out his manicured hand to the attorney, the half moons of his nails glowing pale pink, the only part of him that looked really clean.

  McCallum ignored the offered hand and pointedly looked away. “Is that any way to treat a client?” the short man said.

  “There’s a letter in the mail to you, Arthur. The firm will no longer be representing you or your publishing company.”

  “For what reason?”

  “It’s all in the letter.”

  “Oh, come on. You can be straight with me.”

  “If you insist.” McCallum drew a breath, and the massive jaw seemed to grow. There was a pugnaciousness to it that seemed almost prosthetic, as if he had implanted in his chin a wedge that said, Don’t mess with me. Leading with his jaw, McCallum spoke. “Because you’re a fraud.”

  “That’s slander!” Even as he said it, Arthur Finster looked exultant at having gotten under such important skin.

  “Worse than that, you do it knowing you’re a fraud.”

  “I think I’ll sue.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Okay. Will you represent me?” Finster grinned darkly, a troll with luminous eyes, and slipped into a seat a few rows away.

  The minister, a former child star now with the liver freckling of age, stepped to the microphone at the podium. Kate had read a facetious article about his getting the call one day on the set of an MGM movie, when the studio still had sets and “more Stars than there are in Heaven.” All that, the piece went on to say, had vanished under the reins and reigns of various incompetents, the prideful motto disappearing along with sections of real estate sold off to the Japanese. Now, the article added, there were few MGM stars who weren’t in Heaven, except Katharine Hepburn, and, arguably, those grounded in Forest Lawn.

  Even that kind of great Hollywood tradition, the old-time funeral, was apparently over. No one these days would drive, even in limousines, as far as they had for Clark Gable, buried next to Carole Lombard, a gravestone’s throw from a private movie theater, one of the prior perks.

  There had been no question of Larry Drayco’s being interred at Forest Lawn. It was all the head of Marathon Studios had been able to do to cull a respectable crowd for a place this convenient, and then only by promising a lunch afterwards at the new Wolfgang Puck’s.

  “Friends,” intoned the minister, “we are gathered here this darkly sunlit morning…” The talking subsided. “Friends,” he began again, “we are gathered to honor a most unusual man—”

  There was a loud clattering of high heels. Everyone turned. Darkly radiant in black, Helen Manning swept noisily by, like a preened, exotic bird, feathers jutting from a boa drawn around her honey-skinned shoulders. Her phoenix eyes, so labeled by the writer-painter Bunyan Reis in his birthday piece on her in Life magazine, glowed amber, a shade darker than her hair. They slanted at angles to the sides of her head, flaring like rebirth from the ashes, as her career, like her many loves, had done. The dress she wore ended just below her knees and looked painted on her body, her remarkable breasts and thighs distinguishable beneath the satiny cling.

  The ensemble by Vera Wang, recently featured on the cover of W, was sleekly suitable for daytime, though the glossy raven feathers looked out of place. But whose place was it, this side of Marilyn Monroe? Kate wondered. Who was there, alive, besides Helen Manning, who had that kind of glamour, the ancient Scottish word that meant to “cast a spell”?

  “Oh.” Helen seemed surprised at having caused such a stir, chagrined at interrupting the proceedings. Her black gloved hand moved to her darkly outlined cupid’s bow mouth, from which issued her little-girl voice. “I’m so sorry.”

  She moved down the aisle, head bowed as if in remorse. Silky blond hair drawn back into a knot at the base of her perfectly shaped skull, she made her way to the front of the chapel, ignoring those who signaled vacant places in the rows she passed.

  “To honor a man,” the minister went on, looking at Helen as though awaiting license to continue, “who has meant so much to the motion picture industry.”

  What Larry Drayco had meant, as most of those present knew, was major scandal in a business where no one thought another, saltier scandal possible. In the argot of gossip—the official language of Hollywood—he had fucked the town’s most impressive women, and fucked over most of its men. But he’d always failed up, as the expression went, moving on to more exalted positions in bed and in the boardroom. Even when he’d actually broken the law, he’d gotten off scot-free, becoming the head of a better studio than the one he’d embezzled from. It was as though the town, like the judge who’d suspended his sentence, couldn’t do enough to make him feel better about getting caught.

  “Larry Drayc
o has given us…” Here the minister began listing his many credits. Behind him, an auburn-haired harpist who’d been Drayco’s sponsor in Narcotics Anonymous, to which the judge had remanded him for his cocaine habit, played the themes from his movies. There were snatches of familiar melody, strung together on the strings. As the harpist strummed the most moving strain from the song that had won the Academy Award the year Drayco couldn’t, having been ruled out by his confreres because of his behavior, Helen Manning rose and started to sing. The lyrics were curiously apt, dealing with a love that was stronger than death. The sound of her childishly clear soprano struck such an honest note that the minister was silenced without seeming offended.

  Others started to sing, and then, the minister himself. He had a deep voice, a bass baritone, that made the song into a hymn. As music could transform, the scene changed to one of reverential solemnity, where several people seemed genuinely moved. Some wept openly. Was the sadness for Larry Drayco, Kate wondered, a black sheep transfigured by death to scapegoat? Or were the tears they shed for themselves? As little experience as she’d had in her young life with funerals, she knew people usually grieved for a number of things: what they had lost, that they were left behind, that they would not be left behind forever. Their own mortality, really.

  One who seemed determined to live forever sat just in front of Kate: Charley Best, the biggest star of the fifties. His face was still oddly cherubic, his skin miraculously unsallowed in spite of years of admitted alcohol and drug abuse. But the scars behind his ears were ill-concealed by his curly brown toupee. The platinum blonde with him wore an outfit that looked like Frederick’s of Hollywood, a store that specialized in ready-to-wear for Heidi Fleiss–type professionals. It was a rubber dress, ebony for the occasion, pumping up her breasts like expectations. She started to sing along with Helen, her voice a Playboy magazine squeal. It was an out-of-date, out-of-style bimbo kind of sound, like her look. She seemed unconscious at a level that superseded stupidity, totally unaware, as though no one had told her Hugh Hefner had gotten out of his pajamas, married, sired a new set of children, and put toy fire engines in his front hall. Charley Best looked delighted at the awful impression she was obviously making.