West of Paradise

by Gwen Davis

  “The coffin’s closed,” Charley turned and whispered to Wilton. “How can we be sure he’s dead?”

  “The same way we know you are,” Wilton answered.

  “To be insulting…” murmured a painfully thin woman with a modified Mohawk, brown hair barely more than fuzz along the sides of her head, with heavily moussed high scarlet spikes down the center. The width and size and steel blue of her eyes would have been exquisite in a softer face. As it was, they looked trapped in the wrong person, trying to figure out a way to escape. “… is not the same as being clever.”

  “Your editor should have told that to you,” Wilton said.

  The chapel, like the service, was nondenominational, no crosses, Jewish stars, or obtrusive stained glass. It was a simple, tasteful structure with polished wooden benches, a model of understatement except for the lavish floral displays and the people who were getting up to make speeches. Speaking, like reading, was a skill that was not much practiced in the town, except at black-tie dinners honoring the accomplished and occasions like these where accomplishments were at an end. Reading had become a low-echelon occupation, with young people doing “coverage” for studio heads and producers, a few sentences summarizing what writers had taken years and thousands of words to express. But there was no one to do that for speeches, with the exception of Army Archerd, who could be counted on to sympathetically synthesize the tributes in Daily Variety the next day, the only columnist in town who was nice to everybody.

  All this Kate knew, although she knew no one, being an assiduous researcher who’d had plenty of alone time to dissect a society. And a society it was, without question: not one that might have engaged fully the mental capacities of a Jane Austen but one that might easily have seduced her had she been alive to be celebrated by it. To be feted as the winners always were. Not a society based on breeding or education or land—although the real estate holdings of the heirs and stockholders of Disney were enviable—but a society where Success was the key. Success here meant grosses, which meant money, which meant people wanted you, and that, in her spinster longings, Jane Austen would have surely understood. Just as Kate, for all her wit and wish for detachment and objectivity, understood. Understood to the marrow of her bones as she read every week—for the purposes of her studies, she assured herself—the glossy giveaway paper called Beverly Hills 213, all the while trying to convince herself she wouldn’t have wanted to be at all those parties. Her bibliography also included the trade papers printed on slick paper, Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, and an even slicker magazine, Buzz, that acidly scoffed at the industry while, like Kate, longing to be embraced by it. Every day she read the Los Angeles Times, torn to shreds monthly by Buzz, which seemed to have an unnamed insider within the Times organization as potent as the one who had spied on the Clinton campaign, and become “Anonymous.”

  The chapel was silent now except for the sultry voice of a television actress who had been one of Drayco’s few avowedly loyal friends. She addressed the coffin in wry tones, chiding him for dying as though he’d been a sitcom that had been canceled.

  “It used to be that she knew where the bodies were buried,” Wilton whispered about the actress to Kate. “Now the word is that she finds them.”

  It had been in that morning’s Times that a woman friend, the one who stood now acerbically raging, had gone to Drayco’s house when he failed to answer his phone, and discovered his lifeless body. They had attended the same party two evenings before, where she had noted that he seemed depressed. Though the coroner was to rule out both the rumored drug overdose and suicide, there was still a patina of sensationalism over the proceedings. Few seemed to believe that Larry had simply died. The actress recounted funny tales of him, making him seem warmer than the vision the general public had. She spoke of his generosity of spirit, which, according to Wilton’s whispers, no one was aware of but her.

  “She is unfailingly loyal to friends,” he murmured, “and fabulous in intensive care wards. They’re starting to call her the angel of death.”

  “Have you no shame?” said Sarah, fingering her Mohawk.

  “You’re rich on the blood of others,” said Wilton. “Why don’t you buy me some?”

  “Who is that woman?” Kate whispered to Wilton, of the person with the dinosaur back on her head.

  “Sarah Nash.”

  “That’s Sarah Nash?” Kate felt a flood of excitement. She had read Sarah’s bestselling book about Hollywood, and heard, beneath the barbs, the voice of a genuine writer. Fettered by her own innocence and affection for the naivete that had been Fitzgerald’s, Kate attributed a questing spirit and vulnerability to anyone who could put words together. “I thought she’d be older.”

  “She is older. She sold her soul to the devil. Mike Ovitz was still an agent at the time and made the deal.”

  Sarah Nash was one of the few California writers whom the New York literary establishment took seriously, and was well reviewed, welcome at Elaine’s, probably accepted by Gay Talese. At the same time she struck fear and loathing into the movie industry, the kind of panic that prevailed when people had both the capacity to wound and make money.

  The press, with the exception of Army, a writer from The Hollywood Reporter, Larry King, and Samantha Chatsworth, the studiedly chic West Coast editor of the high-line New York magazine East, were kept outside the chapel. Even now they were being held off by security men. They stood behind a temporary barrier wheeled in for celebrity funerals, next to a permanent barbed wire fence put in place after the third time someone had scaled the wall after midnight in an attempt to steal Marilyn’s brass nameplate.

  People still came through the open gates by daylight and took flowers from notable graves. Kate had witnessed such thefts on her way to the chapel. In Natalie Wood’s case flowers had been replaced by potted plants, chained and bolted to the metal covering her portion of earth, bearing the legend left by R.J., “More than love.” It saddened Kate, beyond the too-early, long-ago death, that a surviving lover could not even give a gift of flowers in this souvenir-crazed city without suffering additional loss.

  “They had a lot of names for that big guy,” the woman delivering the eulogy was saying, in the style of vanished sportscasters, her full-lipped mouth twisting in a wry smile. “And some were pretty dirty. But I tell you no one ever had a better friend.”

  “That’s because she’s an actress,” said Wilton. “Even she doesn’t know what she’s really feeling.”

  “You’re an actor,” Kate said.

  “Only sometimes.”

  “What else do you do?”

  He did not respond. He looked uneasily at Sarah Nash.

  “Why so shy about yourself, Wilton?” Sarah muttered.

  “Why don’t you tell her? Or do we have to wait for your next memoir, where you hang the rest of the town by the balls?”

  “There’s nobody left after what Arthur Finster just published.”

  “Maybe you could expose Arthur.”

  “Maybe,” Sarah said. A look of mischief softened her too-thin face, making it seem fleetingly girlish. “I’ll check with my lawyer.”

  “And now,” said the minister, looking at the list of speakers. “We will hear from Larry Drayco’s longtime associate and co-producer.”

  A pallid, gray-haired man with thyroid eyes moved to the platform. In a halting voice, he began to speak, reading from a piece of paper a prose reworking of Gray’s Elegy in a Country Graveyard. He paused, swallowed, his enormous Adam’s apple bobbing visibly. “God rest you, pallie,” he said, rapping his knuckles gently on the coffin.

  “Knock, knock, who’s there?” cried an enormously fat woman in a pew across the aisle, getting to her feet. “Nobody!” She took an audible breath, loud as she was, as if the mere act of standing, with that heft, had taken all the air out of her. “You’re a bunch of empty phonies. Where were you when his stock got low and he needed real friends?” She had Pillsbury Doughboy skin, pasty, with puffed cheeks
, great sacks of flesh atop her eyes, bags below them. She looked to Kate to be the only older woman at the funeral who hadn’t had plastic surgery. Her ankles were conspicuously swollen above worn leather shoes. “Talking about him like you cared about him. Most of you didn’t even know his real name.”

  “Darshowitz,” Wilton whispered. “That’s probably his mother, Lila. The one person on the planet he was truly afraid of.”

  One of the ushers went over to calm the woman. “Get your hands off me, you fairy,” Lila said.

  “From Queens, you know,” murmured Wilton. “They haven’t heard yet there’s a new vocabulary.”

  “The interment will be private,” the minister said quickly, and raced from the microphone.

  * * *

  “Nothing in his life so became him as the leaving of it.” Wilton pinned onto his lapel a little sprig of violets twisted around a green-wrapped pipe cleaner that a woman handed him as he exited the chapel. “As Kenneth Branagh might have said.”

  “Where’s your car?” Kate had parked her Saab by the Sanctuary of Peace, a white-marbled crypt wall-to-wall with slotted, cremated tenants.

  “I came by cab. One never knows when one might bump into one’s Destiny, and ought to be without a way of getting home.” He pulled the stem of his violets, arranged it so the tiny nosegay sat more neatly on his olive drab corduroy jacket. “I think they got this idea from Elizabeth. Now there was a woman who knew how to bury people. I remember when Laurence Harvey left us, and she arranged a ceremony where grown men wept not on cue.”

  “Would you like me to drop you someplace?” Kate asked.

  “Aren’t you coming to the lunch?”

  “I don’t really know any of these people.”

  “Nobody knows them but Gore Vidal and he’s got too much taste to examine them.”

  “Hey, Wilton!” Linus Archer sprang from behind the open gate to the Sanctuary of Tranquility. His hair was close-cropped and silver, the grin on his angular, sharp-nosed face still boyish and cocky, as though he were smugly pleased he could continue to surprise people with sudden entrances and the ability to spring. He was close to sixty now, Kate guessed. His career spanned over four decades, only the early films less than memorable, while he was still trying to portray likeable people. “The mantel of Jimmy Dean,” a Hollywood historian had written, “has fallen on Linus Archer like a Boy Scout tent.” It had taken him a lot of years to untangle himself, emerging as the villain he had been born to play. Perhaps, from the talk, not just in the movies. “What do you think really killed Larry?”

  “I heard it was an aneurism.”

  “Well, sure, that’s the official line. But let us not forget his own M.D. OD’d. And there is the book.”

  “Book?” asked Kate.

  “You’re pretty cute. Have I ever been married to you?” asked Linus. His heavy, still-thick eyebrows pulled together, forming one straight line over his nose, as though he were really trying to remember. His hazel eyes, small-pupiled, were at once searching and blank.

  “She’s new in town,” Wilton said.

  “I just moved here from—”

  “Then you don’t know about me,” Linus interrupted. Origins seemed no longer of interest to him, since he had overcome his own.

  “No, I don’t,” Kate lied, setting aside her usual honesty. Judging from this morning, a little duplicity worked wonders. Though she had no firsthand knowledge of these people, she intuited the enormity of their egos. Like cats, they were more likely to try and cozy up to what they saw as indifference.

  “You didn’t catch my interview on A & E? You didn’t see the cover of GQ?”

  “Linus likes to talk in initials,” Wilton said. “It makes him think he’s in Washington.”

  “Hey, those guys like to think they’re in Hollywood.”

  “Aren’t they?” Kate asked.

  “Not just another pretty face,” said Linus. “You sure we haven’t been married?”

  “She isn’t your type,” said Wilton. “She thinks.”

  “I’ve been with women who think.”

  “Not the ones who wrote the book,” said Wilton.

  “What book?” asked Kate again.

  “We’re instituting a class action libel suit against Harbinger Press and Arthur Finster,” Linus said. “Fletcher McCallum is handling it for us. Can you believe Arthur publishing that book, the creep?”

  “I heard he has notarized affidavits from the hookers and the madam. Lie detector tests.”

  “They’re going to find him with his cock in his mouth,” said Linus.

  “Strapped in black leather?” Wilton said.

  “I’m not into bondage,” said Linus, fuming. “That’s a fucking lie!”

  “Affidavits,” Wilton said archly. “Lie detector tests.”

  “Finster should be strung up just for killing the trees to print that shit. Can you believe the writing? ‘He put his hot hand on my tight buns.’”

  “I don’t think it’s being bought for the prose.”

  “Nancy Drew and the Hidden Screw,” Linus said contemptuously. “I wish Larry was still alive so he could join in the suit.”

  “Talk is he was reading it when he died. They found him naked on the toilet, with the book open on his lap to the chapter about him.”

  “Maybe we could add wrongful death to the lawsuit. The stuntman’s widow on my last picture got five mil. But we’d have a hard time proving he wasn’t drugging. Everyone thinks he OD’d.”

  “A bubble burst in his brain.”

  “You weren’t supplying him?”

  “He wasn’t using anymore.”

  “Right. And O.J. never did crystal meth.”

  “I don’t think we should be talking about this here,” said Wilton, looking around at the crowds coming out of the chapel.

  “We should have a wake at Larry’s house. I know where he kept his stash.”

  “He no longer did coke.”

  “A pop in the brain from what he was reading?”

  “Only because he couldn’t get to the kitchen to put a knife through his heart.”

  * * *

  “So is that what you do?” Kate said, as she drove her car onto Wilshire Boulevard. “You’re a drug dealer?”

  “Only for friends,” Wilton said. “It started during the Screen Actor’s strike. So many actors were losing their houses, I knew I needed a second career.”

  She adjusted her rearview mirror and caught a glimpse of herself. She looked a little too wide-eyed for someone twenty-seven, her chestnut curl–capped face with its faint, barely detectable lines starting at the corners of her chocolate eyes slightly too eager, as though she were still taking creative writing courses at Stanford. “Aren’t you afraid of getting caught?”

  “I’m afraid of being poor. And my friends are afraid of being bored and empty. It’s a charity I perform, really.”

  “What if they overdose?”

  “I don’t deal anything low grade. No crack. And nothing really hard.”

  “You don’t think cocaine is hard?”

  “Not in this town. Cocaine is easy. If they didn’t get it from me, they’d get it from someone who didn’t care about them, and that could be fatal.”

  His smile was guileless, his expression amused, tolerant. Now that she looked at him carefully, Kate realized he was older than her first impression. His haircut, flat-topped, military, made him look youthful, athletic, as his trim, long-legged body did. His hands were graceful, a musician’s hands they looked to be, only the high, blue veins on the backs of them indicating age. He was tanned a George Hamilton brown, as if not being good-looking were more to be feared than skin cancer.

  “So now you know about me,” Wilton said. “What about you? What do you do besides give lifts to the slightly stoned?”

  “You’re on cocaine?”

  “I never do cocaine. Do I look stupid? I just took a little hit on a joint to take the edge off the morning. The sting out of funerals. Tell, tell.�
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  “I’m a writer.”

  “Low man on the town totem pole,” said Wilton. “Writers don’t count for shit here, unless they eviscerate people like Sarah Nash did and make themselves into bigger celebs than the people they destroy.”

  “What about this book that Linus was talking about, that Larry was reading?”

  “It isn’t anything you have to read. It’s just something you move your lips to while the girls go down on you. Writers are beneath contempt here, and contempt is the janitor. Did you hear the joke about the Polish actress who wanted to be a movie star, so she slept with the screenwriter?”

  “I don’t write screenplays. I’m trying to write a book.”

  “Why would you move here to write books?” A black Jeep Cherokee cut in front of them. Wilton opened his window. “How very four-wheel and macho!” he shouted at the driver.

  The man raised his middle finger. “Soooo articulate.” Wilton closed his window. “Why L.A.? You could live anywhere.”

  Dark green fronds, like cheerleaders’ pom-poms urging the team to victory, waved from the tops of tall, gray-barked palm trees lining the wide boulevard. The fanlike stirring surges of color softened the white and gray stone of the high-rises on either side, their windows a cool, jewellike mint green. In the distance the white peaks of the San Bernardino Mountains sparkled with perfect clarity, snowcapped after the recent heavy rains. It was one of those rare, crystal days in Los Angeles that swept doubt away along with the smog, rid the mind of earthquake, fire and flood, made people wonder why they considered living anywhere else. It would have been truthful for Kate to say she really liked the place, hungered for what it could offer if she succeeded.

  But there had been her PhD thesis and the oral report before the committee. The words were still stored in her, easily remembered, and Wilton was obviously bright. “As a young romantic,” she tried not to seem to recite, “a would-be writer, I fell in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not just his writing. His life.