The Man Who Died Laughing

by David Handler

  She was off and rolling again, playacting her ass off.

  I refilled our glasses and charged right in. “I don’t think you look very tough at all.”

  “You see right through me, don’t you?”

  “It’s easy. Your despair is showing.”

  She looked hurt. “You go right for the bone, man.”

  “Nothing personal. I’m in the same place, remember?”

  “There’s very little I’m sure about,” she said, “but that’s one of the things—nobody is in the same place I am.”

  We ate a pizza that was covered with some sort of rare, aromatic fungus that only grows in a tiny region of the Alps, following it with grilled tuna and a second bottle of champagne. Wanda only picked at the food. She was much more interested in the champagne. When the waiter took our plates away, I ordered a third bottle and lit her cigarette for her.

  “About you and Merilee,” she said. “What happened?”

  “Not much. I lost interest.”

  “Someone else?”

  “No one else.”

  She took one of my hands in hers. Her fingers were smooth and cold. “Tell me about it, Hoagy.”

  “I’m rather hung up on myself and on my work. That doesn’t leave enough for other people. At least that’s Sonny’s theory.”

  She dropped my hand. “Sonny’s hardly one to talk.”

  “How come you and he don’t get along?”

  “I don’t want to talk about him. I want to talk about you and me. Why won’t you fuck me? You promised me you’d tell me. Are you involved? Are you gay?”

  “When I say I lost interest, I mean …”

  “You lost the urge.”

  “That’s right. I suppose I just have to—”

  “Meet the right woman?” She raised an eyebrow. I felt the toe of her shoe toying with the cuff of my trousers under the table. “How do you know I’m not her?”

  “I don’t.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “Four years.”

  “Whew. I wouldn’t want to be her.”

  “No?”

  “At least, not on the first night. Or the second. Or the … christ, you really know how to issue a sexual challenge, don’t you?”

  “I didn’t intend to.”

  “Too worried about what Sonny would think.” She shook her head. “You’ve been taken in by him, haven’t you?”

  “I’m doing a job. I don’t want to mess up the relationship he and I have going right now. It’s important to the book, and it’s shaky.”

  “So what are we doing here tonight?”

  “Having dinner. Being friends. I like you. I want to get to know you better.”

  “So you can use me?” Her voice rose.

  “Absolutely not.”

  “So you can find out who I’ve fucked and put it in your fucking book?!”

  Heads began to turn.

  “Maybe you’d better say it a little louder,” I said. “I don’t think everyone heard you.”

  “You cocksucker! All you care about is that book! All you want is some juicy dirt! I won’t tell you a thing, you motherfucker! Not a thing!” She jumped to her feet. “Motherfucker!”

  She liked scenes and she got one. Everyone in the place was staring at her now in stunned silence, avid for her next move.

  Wanda turned on her heel and marched for the door. But she wasn’t done. When she got to the bar she stopped and screamed at me again, “Motherfucker! Motherfucker!”

  Not wanting to let her down, I chipped in with what I thought was a marvelous ad-lib. “Does this mean we’re not going dancing?”

  In response she grabbed a platter of duck ravioli from a passing waiter and hurled it across the restaurant at me. It didn’t come anywhere near me. Lee Radziwill took most of it, if you want to know.

  Then Wanda ran out the door and slammed it behind her. Sonny was right. They should have named her Stormy.

  I’ll grant her one thing—she didn’t drive off and leave me stranded there. She was waiting for me in her Alfa after I paid the check and strolled leisurely out to the parking lot, toting our half-full bottle of champagne. She had on a soft doeskin jacket and racing gloves. The top was down, and she was revving the engine and flaring her nostrils. I took a swig and hopped in. She took off with a screech before my butt hit the seat.

  She headed up into the Hollywood hills, her foot to the floor. Wanda drove exactly the way you’d expect Wanda to drive—like a nut. She shifted gears with fury, skidding around the hairpin curves, the little car barely holding on to the road. Actually, it did leave the pavement completely when we cleared a hump at the top of the hill and started flying down. That was when we really picked up speed. Houses and parked cars flew by. We tore down the narrow canyon road, Wanda accelerating blindly into the curves. If anybody happened to be coming up the canyon, we’d all be raspberry jam.

  I held on and enjoyed the ride. I knew what she wanted me to do. She wanted me to tell her no, tell her bad girl. She would have a long wait.

  When we got back down to Sunset she pulled over and wept in my arms. I gave her a linen handkerchief and she blew her nose in it. Then she took several breaths in and out and ran her fingers through her hair. I passed her the champagne bottle and she drank deeply from it. Then she lit a cigarette. I finished what was left of the bubbly.

  “Get all of that out of your system?” I asked.

  “Yes. Where to?”

  We had to make seven stops before we found an ice cream parlor that sold licorice. It was a place down in Ocean Park on Main Street, and it was good licorice, though she thought it tasted “icky.” I suggested she was too old to keep using a word such as “icky.” She told me to get fucked.

  We walked for a while, eating our ice cream, looking in the windows of the antique shops and galleries. It had turned chilly and foggy. No one else was out walking.

  Suddenly she stopped and stared at me long and hard with narrowed eyes.

  “What is it?” I said.

  She just kept staring. Then she turned and strode away.

  “Where are you going?” I called.

  “I want to take you somewhere,” she called back over her shoulder.

  She took me to Malibu, to the beach. Their beach, where she and Sonny had gone for those morning walks when she was a little girl. We walked a long time in the damp mist, not talking, the waves pounding. She was a lot smaller in her bare feet. And when she started talking, her voice was higher and more girlish than I’d ever heard it before. She wasn’t playing a role anymore.

  “We used to come down here every morning when he was in town,” she said. “He’d hold my hand and he’d point out the prettiest shells for me. He always knew exactly where to find them. I don’t know how, he just did.”

  I cleared my throat, but I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t have the heart to tell her.

  “I—I couldn’t cope, Hoagy. I never could.”

  “With what?”

  “What was going on around me. Any of it. I’m like him—I’ve got thin skin. Only, he grew up in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is real. I grew up in Hollywood. It’s not. It’s all make-believe here. Make-believe is real. Sly Stallone isn’t acting. He actually thinks he is Rocky. He really does. People here become whatever they want to be, and as long as they stay hot enough, nobody turns the lights off on them. Would you like to hear the benefits of my twenty-eight years in therapy?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  “Okay, here goes: In the absence of a rational, ordered reality, people sometimes create one of their own, one that has the values and standards they require to survive. I grew up in a household that didn’t make sense to me. Daddy was either crazed or bombed or trying to be Mister Macho—fucking around, beating up on people. And Mommy never tried to change him. He was Sonny Day. The One. She gave in to him. He treated her like total shit and she just came back for more. I couldn’t deal with that. I just couldn’t. It was wrong. So, when I was little, I started my own w
orld. My make-believe place. My … my movie. And sometimes I still live in it. Partly for fun. Partly because I need to. See, I never outgrew it.”

  “I never outgrew wanting to play shortstop for the New York Yankees.”

  “Most of the time, I’m okay. I’m aware that it’s make-believe. But sometimes … sometimes I’m not. I kind of lose touch with the so-called real world, and I… I’m what they call a borderline schizo.”

  “What’s it about, your movie?”

  “Me. What’s going on around me. Only things make sense. They turn out the way I want them to.”

  “You seem okay right now.”

  “I always am when I’m down here.”

  She flopped down on the sand. I flopped down next to her. She snuggled into me. She smelled good against the sharp salt spray.

  “I’m telling you all of this,” she said, gazing out at the water, “because I think I’m falling in love with you.”

  I put an arm around her and she pressed her head against my chest. I was seeing her now for who she really was—a sweet, sad, vulnerable, and messed-up little girl who happened to be thirty-nine years old and all mine, if I wanted her. If I could handle her.

  “And what about Hoagy’s Little Condition?” I asked.

  “I don’t care about that. The real problem for me is this book. It’s like a barrier. I keep wanting to trust you. Wanting to open up to you. But I’m afraid.”

  “I’m glad you trusted me.”

  “Are you really?”

  “Yes.”

  “How is it going?”

  “You really want to talk about it?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “It’s hard work. He’s a complex man. And it’s his own memory of his life. Memory is really another form of make-believe. But I’m getting there. I’m starting to feel like I comprehend him and what’s gone on. I spoke to your mom. She helped a lot.”

  “Did she tell you … ?”

  “Tell me what?”

  She placed her hand behind my head and brought my face down toward hers. I thought she was going to give me a kiss, but she had something else to give, a far greater token of her love.

  She put her mouth to my ear, and in an urgent whisper Wanda told me why Sonny Day and Gabe Knight got in that fistfight in Chasen’s.

  CHAPTER NINE

  (Tape #7 with Sonny Day. Recorded in his study, February 28.)

  HOAG: OKAY, SO YOU quit your TV series and moved back here.

  Day: Right away, I feel different. Like something has gone out of me. Nowadays, they call it burnout. All I knew was I felt like I was just going through the motions. With Gabe. With Connie. I was very unsatisfied by my life all of a sudden. I was down. Gabe and I started a picture, Alpine Lodge. It was the same damned picture as BMOC, only with snow. Nobody seemed to notice. Or care. We did a couple of specials for NBC that season that were stale as hell—top-rated shows of the season. We did our six, eight weeks in Vegas. Again, stale. Again, sold out. It was fucking depressing.

  Hoag: Did Gabe feel the same way you did?

  Day: He did.

  Hoag: Did you talk about it?

  Day: Nah. We were like two people with a marriage that didn’t work anymore. Bringing out the worst in each other. But the love was still there. And so was the dough. We flat out couldn’t afford to break up, and we knew it, and it made us resent each other even more. I drank more and more. Took pills. Then my old lady died, and I don’t know, I felt like nobody was looking over my shoulder no more. I started kicking up my heels. But I was still low. Show you how low, Francis calls me up one day and says, “We’re doing a caper picture in Vegas together—Dean, Sam, Peter, Joey, everybody. Who do you and Gabe want to play?” And I said, “I don’t know. I’ll get back to you.” I never did. It didn’t sound like fun to me. We never did appear in Ocean’s Eleven.

  Hoag: I understand you had an affair with Jayne Mansfield.

  Day: Connie told ya, huh? She was a sweet kid. Hottest new piece in town. Everybody wanted her. For a while, I had her. And I felt, for a while, a little bit fulfilled. Until Connie threw me the fuck out. That’s when Wanda started to give us trouble. Stopped doing well in school. Got very quiet. Didn’t want to be around me anymore at all. I figured God was punishing me for fucking around. We put her in a special school. Sent her to a shrink five days a week. She just kept getting worse. Anyway, Connie and me decided I should move back in. Give Wanda as stable an environment as possible. So I did. So one morning we’re having breakfast, and I’m complaining to Connie about not wanting to go to the studio, not wanting to work, and it hits me.

  Hoag: What hits you?

  Day: This isn’t Sonny Day. If Sonny Day is unhappy, he should do something about it. I needed to stretch. It took me a long time to realize that. See, people were constantly telling Gabe to branch out so he wouldn’t be hanging on to my coattails. But nobody ever said that to me. This was a breakthrough for me. I started tummeling an idea with Norman Lear. It was a kind of satire on Madison Avenue, but it was a real statement on modern morality, you know, with depth and sophistication and a message …

  Hoag: This would be The Boy in the Gray Flannel Suit,

  Day: Warners thought it was brilliant. But they said, where’s the part for Gabe? I said there isn’t one, and they said put one in. They wouldn’t let me do it by myself. They also wouldn’t let me take it elsewhere. I was under exclusive contract—with Gabe. There was nothing I could do. Studios still ran things in those days. So I got drunk. Then Norman and I put in a part for Gabe. And guess what?

  Hoag: He didn’t want to do it.

  Day: He said it was stupid and one-dimensional. He wanted us to do a big musical, a Guys and Dolls kind of picture. Only, that didn’t interest Warners. Or me. He ended up by doing one on Broadway. And he was a smash. But my little movie he wouldn’t touch. The studio said to him, you don’t do this picture, we’ll make it without you. Give Sonny a new partner. Which they did—they gave me a kid named Jim Garner. I made him into a star. Anyway, it was a standoff. Gabe wasn’t bluffing. Warners wasn’t bluffing. They gave him a few days to think it over, but it was over. In the meantime, we kept on the happy face. Connie threw me a huge birthday party here at the new house. Must have been three hundred people. She invited Gabe and Vicki and they came. We hadn’t socialized in ages. And what a performance Gabe put on. All hugs and kisses. Even got up and made a birthday toast. He said, and I’ll never forget this as long as I live, he said, “Here’s to my best friend, Sonny Day. The man who gave me everything.” We hugged. He sang me our song, “Night and Day.” Henry Mancini played the piano. Then we sang it together. Everybody sobbed, it was so fucking moving. Nobody knew we was gonna bust up. Nobody but Heshie. The rest of them, the industry people, they thought Gabe would back down. Not even the wives knew.

  Hoag: So Gabe was really the one who ended it? It was his decision?

  Day: That was one helluva birthday party. We drank and danced and sang and cried. Next day, Knight and Day was history.

  Hoag: Next day you had your fight at Chasen’s.

  Day: Yeah.

  Hoag: You’re saying it had to do with Boy in the Gray Flannel Suit.

  Day: That was part of it.

  Hoag: What else was?

  Day: (silence) There was bad blood.

  Hoag: It was alleged in the book about you, You Are the One, that the fight was over your gambling debts. That you sucked Gabe into debt with you.

  Day: That’s not even worth discussing.

  Hoag: At the time, you said the book was garbage. Now is your opportunity to refute it.

  Day: All right, all right. Sure, I got in money trouble from time to time. So what? Gabe got in deep with his divorce. I bailed him out. He bailed me out.

  Hoag: I see. (silence) Sonny, there’s also been an allegation concerning Connie. That she was …

  Day: She was what?

  Hoag: That she and Gabe Knight were lovers. Secretly, and for a number of years. And you fou
nd out about it. And that’s why the two of you fought.

  Day: What? Where’d you hear that crap?!

  Hoag: It isn’t important.

  Day: It’s a vicious lie! No truth to it. Who told ya that crap?

  Hoag: Sonny, I know this isn’t easy for you to deal with. I understand. But you’ve got to deal with it. I’m going to ask you again—is that what the fight was about? Be honest.

  Day: What, you think I’m lying?

  Hoag: No …

  Day: Then why’d you say that?

  Hoag: I’m simply trying to get at the truth.

  Day: You do think I’m lying. I can see it in your eyes. You don’t believe me. You believe some lie somebody told ya. Just like that, the trust between us is gone. This is something. This is really something.

  Hoag: Don’t do this, Sonny.

  Day: Don’t do what? Get sore at ya? Wanna punch ya? For slandering my wife. For saying she’d fuck around on me with that …

  Hoag: I’m only doing my job.

  Day: Stirring up garbage? No. Forget it. I won’t discuss it.

  Hoag: You must.

  Day: Or what? You’ll print your lies anyway? Don’t try to bully me, pally. I been bullied by the best, and they’re still picking up their teeth all over town.

  Hoag: Sonny, I’m not the Enquirer. We have to deal with this thing. Get it out in the open. Now, you mentioned to me once that Gabe broke your heart. Is this how? By sleeping with Connie?

  Day: Turn off the tape. This interview is over.

  Hoag: All right, then let’s address ourselves to the fight itself. It took place at Chasen’s the afternoon after your birthday party. What happened?

  Day: Turn it off, damn it!

  Hoag: Sonny, we’ve done a lot of good work so far. Won a lot of battles. But this is the big one. I know it’s tough. It’s hard on your ego, your pride. But you’ve got to take it on. We have to deal with it.

  Day: You’re not dealing with anything, pally. You sure have knocked me for a loop. After all we’ve been through, the love I’ve given you. …

  Hoag: I’m fired again, right?

  Day: Clear out. You’re through. And that’s no lie.

  Hoag: I see. (silence) You know, I do. I really do.