Hollywood and Levine

by Andrew Bergman

  My Central American fantasy was not discouraged by the sloth of the baggage handling. I waited for a half hour in the stifling American Airlines shed while stray pieces of luggage came sliding down a metal chute, one by one. I noticed that the blond had gotten pretty drunk and was leaning heavily on the arm of the Boston ad man, who had the unhappy appearance of one whose plans for the evening were souring and out of control.

  When the leather suitcase with the gold “J. LeV.” came down the chute, I grabbed it before the redcaps could and hustled outside to hail a cab. It was already six o’clock and I wanted to see Adrian before the transcontinental lag in time made me too sleepy to think straight.

  A row of hacks was waiting outside the baggage shed. The first in line, a chunky, impassive Mexican with a deep scar on his forehead, signaled to me and took my bag. I said “Camino Real” and he nodded solemnly, placing my suitcase in the trunk with the gentle care of a man returning his infant daughter to her bed. He held the back door for me and I got into the cab. This was nothing, nothing at all, like New York. The hackie did not speak as he pulled out into traffic, not about the weather or politics or the Dodgers. I was in a foreign land.

  That sense of foreignness accelerated as I settled in for the ride to the hotel. Palms stood full and gawky before a sky turning from pale secret blue to gaudy Hollywood sunset pink. White and salmon stucco houses, their roofs spiny red tile, glowed with a kind of doomsday phosphorescence. Windows burned off reflected pinks and oranges; behind them I supposed wives were preparing suppers for husbands but it was hard to imagine. No people sat in yards or took down wash; perhaps only fruit baskets occupied these jukebox-colored houses. I lowered my chin into a moist palm and felt that mixture of bemusement and sick-to-the-gut loneliness that comes with entering a strange city. And there is, I learned, no city stranger than Los Angeles, even to its inhabitants.

  My sense of time and place was bent completely out of whack. It was that most numbing and private hour, sunset, and I stared out the windows of this cab wondering what the hell I was doing in California, so far from my small comforts. The more I speculated on the Adrian tale, the more half-baked the whole venture seemed, three hundred bills or not. I knew nothing about the writer’s life or the worlds in which he moved, nothing about his friends or enemies. I didn’t know the good guys from the heavies, the golden girls from the floozies. I wasn’t even sure I could really trust Adrian; God knows what he might have flown me out here for. To be his alibi, to save his marriage. People with money can exercise their whims in a more dramatic fashion than can those without it.

  I massaged my brain in this useless fashon all the way to the hotel, located on a residential Hollywood street called Sierra Bonita, just off Sunset Boulevard. The Camino Real was three stories of unpretentious white stucco separated from the street by a driveway which curved around a broad lawn boasting a slightly oily lily pond. I paid the Mexican, somnambulated through the Spanish-style lobby of wrought iron railings and red tile floors, and was led to my room by an elderly priss named Roy. He told me I looked like the rugged type. I congratulated him on his perception and closed the door in his face.

  Adrian had gotten me a large and airy back room. It overlooked a small patio set in a grove of fragrant fruit trees, but I was too tired to enjoy it. I flopped down on the soft double bed and closed my eyes. It was a quarter to seven. What I really wanted to do was grab some dinner, go to sleep, and check in with Adrian early the next morning. But I rarely do what I want to do, who of us does? So I sat up and decided to get right on the case.

  Funny thing is the case was practically over.

  When I called Adrian’s house a woman answered. I asked if she was Helen Adrian. She sounded guarded.

  “Yes, this is. Who am I speaking to?”

  “It’s Jack LeVine, Mrs. Adrian, from New York.”

  “Walter’s friend the private eye?” She sounded relieved.

  “Himself. In person.”

  “Well, it’s just marvelous that you’re here. Walter’s been raving about you.” Helen Adrian had the kind of husky and unvarnished voice that usually went with women I got silly over.

  “Walter always raves. Can I speak to him?”

  “Well, Jack, Walter’s still at the studio. He’s working late on a rewrite that was due five days ago.”

  “So he’s still working?”

  “Oh yes. Contract squabbles or not. He’s devoted to his work.” I couldn’t separate the irony from the admiration. Both were present in her voice.

  “How’s he been?”

  “Up and down,” she said carefully. “Mainly down. As far as I know, his agent and Warners are still negotiating. Apparently they’re starting to give in a little and Larry—that’s Larry Goldmark, Walter’s agent—thinks there might have been some misunderstanding all along. But he’s not sure.”

  “Sounds vague as hell.”

  “Doesn’t it? This business really stinks, Jack, you can’t imagine.” Her words were bitter but the tone remained detached, analytical.

  “I’ll have to learn,” I told her. “Listen, will I be able to see Walter tonight?” I hoped she’d say no.

  “Of course,” she said. “He left a gate pass, for you at the studio, so there won’t be any trouble getting in. And we dropped the car off at the Real last night. It’s in the garage. You know how to get to Warners?”

  I told her no and she gave me the directions, which were relatively uncomplicated. Sunset to Highland to Cahuenga Boulevard through something called the Cahuenga Pass; from there to Barham Boulevard, which led directly to a complex of hangar-like sound stages, which was Warner Brothers.

  “Then I’ll get off the phone and go see him, Mrs. Adrian.”

  “Wonderful.” Her voice went cautious again. “Watch out for him, Jack. This is a terrible time for Walter.”

  I told her that I knew it, then hung up. I left the room, locked up and immediately unlocked and returned to the room. I took my gun out of the suitcase and slipped it into my jacket pocket. Then I left again, for real.

  I took the elevator down to the hotel garage and found my car, a black 1947 Chrysler New Yorker, not quite as long as an aircraft carrier but every bit as practical. The interior was plushly customized, with ripe tomato red upholstery and a highly polished wooden dashboard containing so many dials and gauges that I couldn’t decide whether to drive the car or fly it. When I opened the glove compartment to find some kind of owner’s manual, all I discovered was a box of Kleenex and a note from Adrian: “Dear Jack – Welcome to Hollywood! Hope the car is to your liking. Best, Walter.” The car was not to my liking. I started the engine and shifted into reverse, at which point the front end started clattering like two milk bottles rolling down a flight of stairs, until the engine died. I performed this comic pantomime two more times, to the kittenish amusement of a long-legged young woman, who waved at me and pulled out of the garage in a red Buick convertible, hitting fifty as she went up the ramp. I tried starting in gear. The car lurched forward. I stepped on the brake and practically sailed out the windshield, at which point it dawned on me that the car had an automatic transmission and that the clutch was as functionless as a wax banana. You could shift, if you were so inclined, but only from second to third. LeVine victimized by somebody’s idea of progress.

  Driving as gingerly as a man astride a pair of horses, I maneuvered the Chrysler into evening traffic, easily finding my way to Highland and Cahuenga. It was getting quite dark, but a last thin slice of western sky glowed the smoky electric yellow of a radio dial. Speeding along Cahuenga, everything broke down into points of light: headlights, tail-lights, and the blinking, star-like lights of the tract homes spread like crushed ice across the valley floors. You could see for many miles ahead. I sat back in my seat, steering with one hand and gazing out at the plowed fields of light. Again, the foreigner.

  I got off Cahuenga at Barham and took a right. After three or four miles, I reached the top of a rise and saw the grayish sound
stages of Warner Brothers crouched in the distance like a herd of elephants asleep in the brush. Lights were on, but the studio parking lots were nearly empty. It was an undeniable gee-whiz kick seeing the back lot for the first time, and I slowed down to let it sink in. There lay the place where Rita Hayworth got undressed, the back alleys where Cagney and Bogart slapped guys around. Someone started honking in back of me and I accelerated, down the hill to the dreamworks.

  There was a main gate, and a center island with a small office staffed by a couple of guys wearing studio blazers. One of them stopped me as I drove in.

  “Evening, sir,” he said brightly. “Name please?”

  “Jack LeVine.”

  He lowered his young blond head and leafed through some orange slips of paper attached to a clipboard he was holding.

  “L—e capital v—i—n—e?”

  “Correct. Walter Adrian left me a pass.”

  He inserted one of the orange slips under the windshield wiper.

  “All right, Mr. LeVine,” he said. “You will find Mr. Adrian in the Writer’s Building. Just go straight up, take your second left and then another and you’ll double back to the Writer’s Building. It is roughly parallel to where we are right now.”

  “How late do you folks stay open?” I asked.

  He grinned. “Always and forever. That’s what movies are all about.” He pointed. “That’s two lefts.”

  I followed his directions and arrived in a small parking lot occupied by perhaps a half-dozen cars, very large and elaborate cars. The lot was adjacent to a three-story white building, inevitably stucco and red-roofed. This was the un-imposing lair of Warners’ writers. The modesty of the building was a blind; inside, there were guys typing in cubbyholes who pulled down five grand each and every week. A lot of them had gone home; half the windows in the place were dark. On the bottom floor I could see a couple of men arguing in a medium-sized office. They were drinking highballs and making a lot of sweeping hand gestures; the younger of the two men was pacing back and forth. It appeared to be a friendly argument. Finally, the older guy, a bald man in horn-rimmed glasses and a v-neck sweater that revealed a patch of graying chest hair, broke into peals of unfelt laughter. He arose from his chair and slapped the younger man on the back, then led him out of the office with his arm draped around his shoulder. Without knowing the particulars, I was pretty sure that the younger man was getting the raw end of it.

  I walked inside and headed down a long corridor lined with offices on both sides. Each door was marked with a shingle bearing someone’s name. I didn’t recognize the names. A woman in her forties was locking up an office at the far end. She observed me wandering aimlessly about.

  “May I help you?” she asked.

  “I’m looking for Walter Adrian’s office.”

  She pointed to a set of double doors.

  “He’s upstairs.”

  He wasn’t upstairs. When I got to Adrian’s office, the door was open and the lights were on, but the chair behind the desk was empty. There was a piece of paper on the floor. I picked it up and saw that my name was on it. “Jack—Am on the Western Street at far tip of back lot. Blocking out some action for overdue rewrite. Meet me there. Best, Walter.” It must have blown on the floor. I dropped the note in my pocket and left Adrian’s office in a foul temper. I had been running ever since disembarking from the plane, and every time I got someplace it turned out to be nowhere at all.

  I was further delighted to learn that I was nearly a half-mile from the Western Street. A maintenance man directed me to follow the main center strip of Warners down to the end, and then hang every conceivable right.

  The back lot began at the terminus of the main studio drag. It was quite a show. At seven-thirty on a warm Wednesday night in Southern California, I stood in a replica of my childhood, surrounded by the tenements and store fronts of the Lower East Side. It was fraud, deceit, and gross tampering with my emotions. As anxious as I was to see Adrian, I walked very slowly down this street, savoring the Hebrew signs, the Italian grocery stores and bakeries, the stoops and iron railings and chalk-scrawled pavements. It was as empty as a midnight graveyard on what a signpost said was Hester Street. My old sweet Hester Street, lovingly duplicated but chillingly unpopulated. It was post-atomic war Hester Street. I stood at a dead lamppost and lit a cigarette and, yes, I felt like George Raft. With a hitch of my shoulders, I continued on down the street, my shoes thunderous on the pavement. I anticipated the razzing of the Dead End Kids, or a tip of the cap from patrolman Ward Bond, and I wished—as I have always wished—that Ann Sheridan would emerge from a doorway, take one look at me, and realize that here was the man she had been waiting for.

  There was a green newsstand at the corner, shuttered and peeling. When I passed it, I left the Lower East Side and entered Prohibition Chicago. Black sedans were parked at the curb and yellow election posters were placed in the smoked windows of O’Casey’s Bar. The Gem Cinema was across the street, but the lights were off and the marquee was blank. The buildings and cars had been used much too often; they appeared to be in bad need of repair, but the magic still worked. I knew this place with the certainty of dream-knowledge; a dozen movies had burned every cornice and bit of masonry into my brain cells. This was the street of swells in tuxedos, of platinum blonds, of gunmen rolling in the gutters. I stood with my hands in my pockets, awed and self-conscious, knowing I didn’t belong here.

  Past the sidewalk cafés and dress shops of Paris, the plaza and bleached walls of a Mexican village, ten yards of downtown Berlin, and into Anyville, U.S.A., identifiable by white picket fences, home sweet homes, and Junior’s jalopy parked out front. It was goyische heaven, as foreign to me as the Casbah, which was right around the corner, a cheat of whitewashed walls and tacky vendors’ stalls. A cobbled alleyway led me out.

  And directly into the Western Street.

  It was the largest area on the whole back lot, a complete frontier town built around a wide dirt street that took a dogleg curve to the right. The street was lined with buildings, real and fake-front, on both sides, but it was too dark to make them out very clearly. It was very quiet, except for the high and low notes of a wind that blew with unobstructed force down the wide and dusty street. Something toppled over in the distance, something small but heavy, like a cart or wheelbarrow. I strained to see Walter walking about, but couldn’t, so I called his name. The wind blew the words back in my face and I received no reply.

  I started up the street, past a hotel, livery stable, blacksmith, and notions shop to my right; to the left lay the inevitable saloon, dry goods store, and a jailhouse with barred front windows and a gallows complete with dangling dummy in the back. I went over to the saloon and pushed through the swinging doors. Inside was a wooden bar, all right, but the rest of the room was a technicians’ chaos of wood shavings, pieces of cable, a large arc light laid on its side, and a muddy porridge of rags and rope and pages of script gathered in a janitor’s careful pile in the corner. The wind blew the doors back and forth, and I backed out of the room in a gunfighter’s crouch, hands at the ready.

  Back on the street, I again called for Walter and drew another blank. I walked around the dogleg bend, past the church, schoolhouse, and large red barn. I tried the barn, tugging hard at a tall jammed door. It screeched open on unoiled hinges. There was no light inside. I cupped my hand around a match and saw more electronic litter strewn about. I walked out, leaving the door open, and traced my steps back down the street, intending to return to the Writer’s Building. I strode past the dry goods store and the jailhouse. The gallows creaked in the wind and the lonely dummy swung to and fro. I stopped in my tracks and stared. A queasy, icy sweat drenched my entire body.

  It was not a dummy.

  It was Walter Adrian.

  Adrian’s dead eyes looked merely surprised. His tongue was protruding and I wanted to put it back where it belonged, but I knew I couldn’t tamper with what was now one hundred and sixty pounds of evidence. Evidence
of what, I did not know. I just kind of held Walter, as if to stop the strangling, then figured what the hell, and let go. He swung back and forth, slowly, heavily, and the wooden planks groaned in the evening silence. I’d run into enough stiffs in my time, but this one really hurt bad. I wanted to cut him down, to help him some, because that’s what he had flown me out here for, to help him, but rearranging a body, any body, is not a clever thing to do.

  So LeVine stood there and tried to catch his breath, in back of the jailhouse at Warner Brothers. When I had my breath and a few of my wits back, I felt around Walter’s clothing for a note of some kind, coming up empty except for a scrap of notebook paper with scribbling on it: “Check pos. stables. Jailhouse?” I decided to put the note in my pocket, then climbed the gallows steps. There was nothing much up there, again no suicide note. I noticed a little blood on the edge of the opening through which Adrian had fallen, blood smeared thin and already drying. I knelt down and felt the back of Walter’s head. There was a partial swelling. It figured that he’d cracked his head going down. On the assumption it was suicide, an assumption I was in no big hurry to accept.

  I looked down at my old cafeteria chum gone Hollywood and the questions started percolating. Why would he conceivably finish himself off? Why back here? Why summon me out West, if only to croak himself on the day of my anticipated arrival? The questions found nothing resembling answers. All I could think about was how lousy I felt. I climbed down the wooden steps, took a last look at Walter Adrian and said good-bye to him. I might even have squeezed his hand. Then I started back to the Writer’s Building. The wind was blowing harder now and it was time to call the cops.

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