Playland

by John Gregory Dunne

  “You’re a good girl, Rita.”

  “I’m always a good girl, Morris. That’s how I got out of your showroom. All those nice old guys trying to goose me and feel me up. When all I wanted to do was save myself for you. It makes me wonder if that’s why you gave me the mink coat.”

  “Thank you for the favor, Rita.”

  “Morris, no more favors. I figure I paid enough for that fur already.”

  Rita Lewis stood up, and walking on her heels to protect her pedicure, she placed the telephone back on the wrought-iron pool table, then sat down again on the chaise next to Lilo Kusack, who was still sunning and stroking himself.

  “What I want to know is how close were you and Jake King anyway?” Lilo said.

  Rita removed Lilo’s hand from his crotch. “No closer than I am to you,” she said.

  Rita would shag anyone with a pulse, Chuckie O’Hara said. She’d fuck anywhere. Once in an elevator going to the Top of the Mark in San Francisco. She loved to talk fucking with us old queens. She was on her way up to meet Lilo and on a whim she pressed the stop button. What’d you do that for, ma’am, the elevator man said, but before he had the words out of his mouth she was unbuttoning his fly. She was like that. They were alone, and she liked his elevator-man uniform, it was claret-colored, with a little pillbox hat and chin strap, like Johnny in the Philip Morris radio commercials, you know, the midget who said “Call-for-Philip-Mor-riiiiiissss,” it was so sexual. She was wearing a Mainbocher jacket in ridged black wool, and a black wool Mainbocher dress set off by a white chiffon guimpe. No one would ever mistake Rita for Elsie de Wolfe, darling, but she did have a kind of gun-moll chic, and Lilo made sure she dressed well, Mainbocher, Adrian—his real name was Adrian Greenberg, you knew that, of course, quelle drôle. Anyway, when she was finished, she buttoned his fly, the alarm bell was ringing by now, then she pressed the Up button and they went straight to the Top, where Lilo’s waiting for her. What took you so long, Lilo said, and she said, I sucked off the elevator man, that’s what took me so long, I always suck off the elevator man at the Mark, you ought to know that by now.

  She had this thing for mob guys, Chuckie said. Al Capone. Morris Lefkowitz. Jacob. Lilo. It was Capone that sent her to Morris. A kind of lend-lease offering between Chicago and New York. She was only seventeen when she was with Al, she said he had a piano player always on call, he liked to listen to the piano when he fucked, so twenty-fours a day this guy was on duty, Al said if he didn’t show up he would kill him, and Rita said she didn’t think he was kidding. The stories about her. When she was called to testify at the Kefauver hearings on organized crime, the senator from New Hampshire, I think his name was Tobey, he wanted to know how and why Rita happened to have been so close to so many of the top gangsters, and there she was in her Adrian suit, the one with the geometric stripes that was on the cover of Life, I mean, there had never been anyone so well turned out at a Senate committee hearing, and Rita said to this senator from New Hampshire, Are you sure you really want to know, Senator Tobey, and the senator said, I want to know, Miss Lewis, and the American people want to know, and Rita said, Are you really sure, and Senator Tobey said, I am waiting, Miss Lewis, and Rita said, Well, then, Senator, it’s because I’m the best cocksucker in the world. My dear, there hadn’t been that much chaos in a committee room since I took off my leg. Of course the committee couldn’t cite Rita for contempt because she gave a legitimate answer to a legitimate question, and there was more truth than fiction in what she said.

  It was a story I had heard for years, but when I looked up the exchange in the Congressional Record, here is what it actually said:

  Senator Tobey: Miss Lewis, how is it that you happened to get so close to so many of the top and most vicious gangsters in America?

  Miss Lewis (after consultation with counsel): Senator, on advice of counsel, I will stand on my rights under the Fifth Amendment and will decline to answer that question on the grounds that it could tend to incriminate me.

  They must’ve cut it out of the transcript then, Chuckie O’Hara said. I mean, you don’t really expect the Congressional Record to use the word …

  None of the newspapers mentioned any unusual exchanges either, I said.

  I prefer my version, Chuckie O’Hara said.

  III

  I write with a keen awareness of the imperfections of history, and the opportunity these imperfections present to a facile imagination. While I am neither so grand nor so self-absorbed as to call myself a social historian, especially insofar as I occasionally yield to temptation and take inductive narrative liberties to fill in history’s gaps, I see it as the duty of the historical narrator to try to piece together why what happened did happen, to lend what happened a sense of inevitability, to create the most plausible scenario for whatever appointments were to be kept in Samarra. It is well to remember here, as the Super Chief sped Jacob King and his briefcase filled with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in legal tender across the Arizona desert, that he and Blue Tyler, she not even nineteen years old, were agents, and again victims, of a past that was fast becoming inoperative. In fact, when Jimmy Riordan complained in Jacob’s drawing room on the Limited about the way the LP record was changing America’s leisure habits, he was only venting some inchoate feeling that new technologies and new venues in combination with old, dangerous ideas were navigating both the country and the various satraps of crime and entertainment that he represented into uncharted waters.

  Television was a new technology, scorned by the motion picture industry, its possibilities underestimated in much the same way as the moguls twenty years earlier had underestimated the potential of sound (“like putting lipstick on Mona Lister,” J. F. French had said at the time, as if Lister was the surname of Leonardo’s model), underestimated it in part because to these unlettered immigrants, uneasy in the language of their adopted country, sound and wordplay they did not entirely understand were threats to their hegemony, and its concomitant tyranny. If the LP record kept people at home, pictures seen on a small screen in the living room would also keep them at home, a heretical idea to executives and producers whose livelihoods were dependent on an audience with a habit of moviegoing twice a week, like sex in marriage. It was true that people did not go to Harlem anymore, but less because it was dangerous than because tying on a load after hours was no longer so appealing without any action, the action that was a by-product of the war and the good times the war had produced, the need for danger a high, if only the financial high of betting money you did not have. This was where Nevada came in, and it is to Morris Lefkowitz’s credit that he understood this, as did Jimmy Riordan and Lilo Kusack. Nevada would be a new venue, where the ribs might be lousy and the chicken wings, too, but the tables would be in play day and night, and it would be possible to win or lose ten thousand dollars on the turn of a card, and get fellated in the bargain by a house hooker, a bonus for the winner, lagniappe for the loser.

  What was called patriotism had kept the lid on labor unrest during the war, patriotism and a president who would not hesitate to take over any union that threatened the war effort, as John L. Lewis and his United Mine Workers found out. The making of motion pictures was seen as an integral part of that war effort, pictures that explicitly furthered the notion of a nation united, all for one, one for all, against a common enemy that had made the mistake of stirring the American melting pot—“when those dirty yellow bellies meet the Cohens and the Kellys,” as one wartime song lyric put it. The motion picture unions were run by Benny Draper, who came out of Chicago claiming Capone connections, and by use of muscle and extortion and the Capone name he hammered together a consortium of nine unions that he called the Organization of Motion Picture Craft Employees—the OMPCE. Benny Draper had a simple formula for maintaining labor peace: When a contract expired, he informed the studios of the cash payment to him that it would take to avert a strike, and if they balked, then he would bring out his projectionists or his stagehands, closing down a
ll the theaters in a given city or all the soundstages at a given studio. “The math is simple,” Benny Draper was fond of saying. “It will cost you more not paying me than it will cost you paying me. You need product for your theayters, and I can stop you making that product, or I can stop you showing it in your theayters, your choice, I don’t give a shit.” This was a direct quote given to a California state senate labor subcommittee investigating union corruption in the motion picture industry by one of Benny Draper’s own dissident members, who testified in open session before the panel wearing a paper bag over his head so that he could not be identified. The union witness was later identified through his dental records as Matty Stivic, an electrician as well as an officer in OMPCE Local 11; the identification was made some months after his testimony, when his body was discovered in a shallow grave in the desert outside Barstow, his face destroyed by a claw hammer. The official explanation tendered by the San Bernardino County sheriff’s department was that Matty Stivic had fallen among bad companions, most likely Hell’s Angels, when he went off-road motorcycling one weekend in the Mojave.

  If Benny Draper’s own OMPCE members were sullen at not sharing in the largesse directed into his pocket, they were not so sullen as to be mutinous, his reputation for violence, vide the example of Matty Stivic, enforcing solidarity. For a union man, Benny Draper was a remarkably effective strikebreaker. Any locals that resisted his offer to merge with the OMPCE he would label as Communist-infiltrated, and if they struck he would lend enforcers to break the arms of those Cohens and Kellys who had beaten the dirty yellow bellies and who now had the misplaced idea that it was their turn to climb aboard the union gravy train. However the studios complained about the cash payments to Benny Draper, they also realized that his was a sweetheart deal, and if he needed money to buy a house for a girlfriend or for a union executive who had gone to the penitentiary for charges that could not be made against Benny Draper himself, a loan could be arranged that would look like, but could never be proven to be, a bribe, even when said loan went unpaid. At the same time, his OMPCE pension fund was the lender of last resort to certain studios when the Bank of America cut off its loan spigot, and at rates that approached, but did not cross over the line into, usury.

  Benny Draper was not alone in invoking Communism to describe his enemies. Witch-hunting was in the air. “If the witch is a Communist, you can call me a witch-hunter, and I’m proud of it,” J. F. French told the trade papers. “If the person I am baiting is a Red, then you can call me a Red-baiter, and I am proud of it.” With Rabbi Baruch Tyger, whose Temple Beth Israel on Sunset Boulevard had been constructed to have the look and proportions of a fifteen-hundred-seat theater, and which Barry Tyger, as he preferred to be known, called the Roxy of Judaism, and with Hugh Cardinal Danaher, the archbishop of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles, J. F. French had founded the I Am an American Foundation for the Preservation of American Ideals. “The American motion picture industry is, and will continue to be, held by Americans for Americans,” read the foundation’s manifesto, written by a screenwriter named Irving Page, who also crafted secular sermons with titles like “The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of” for Rabbi Tyger and who later appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and identified 291 toilers in the Industry as Communists, “and is dedicated to the interests of America and the preservation and continuation of the American scene and the American way of life.” J. F. French had other reasons for backing America for Americans. “The goyim hear ‘Jew,’ they think ‘Communist,’ ” he told Lilo Kusack. “People don’t like us, so we got to use our heads. All the talk you hear about this Holocaust and the suffering of the poor Jews. The goddamn fools, they don’t realize the more you tell gentiles nobody likes Jews, the more the gentiles say there must be a reason for it. That’s why I hate these kike Communist bastards. I’m ashamed of the money I made off their pictures. I’d give it all to charity if the pictures weren’t cross-collateralized. To an American charity. The Red Cross. The USO. The chamber of commerce. The March of Dimes for those little babies with the braces on their legs that are such good anti-Communist Americans.”

  I heard all of this fourth-hand forty-five years after the fact from Chuckie O’Hara, who never really tried to disguise his anti-Semitism (he was too fastidious and too aware of who employed him ever to use words like kike or sheeny, but in selected purlieus and with selected acquaintances he often talked about “the chosen” or “our chosen friends”), and Chuckie’s version came from Rita Lewis, who because of some unspecified sexual misdemeanor in the past was never enthusiastic about J. F. French, and as a writer I added some fine-tuning of my own. When I repeated the story to Arthur French, he only smiled and said it sounded more or less like his father except for the March of Dimes line, but even that had J.F.’s resonance, and his father would have added it had he thought of it, even though he hated Franklin Roosevelt.

  J.F. would have put you under contract, Arthur said, comedy polishes on all the Cosmo scripts.

  I never met J. F. French. When I arrived in Los Angeles he was already senile, living alone at Willingham, cared for by a staff of twenty-two, one of whom, it was said locally, was a professional woman who once a day tried to find heft in his phallus. J.F. finally died, peacefully, during an afternoon nap in the solarium at his house, his flaccid member, according to Industry lore, cradled in the palm of the professional woman. Arthur was unable to attend the funeral because a horse had thrown him a week or so before his father’s death, the accident breaking both his legs, making it impossible for him to travel up from Nogales, and so out of friendship (I think as a matter of fact that I was as close a friend as Arthur ever had, in spite of the twenty-plus-year difference in our ages) I attended the nondenominational service at the Westwood Mortuary, a pricey little cemetery surrounded by high-rise buildings in the heart of Westwood.

  Did anyone show up? Arthur asked when I called him in Nogales after the service.

  Of course.

  Anyone you recognized?

  Not offhand, I said.

  Were you the only one there?

  It was a moment before I replied. How did you know?

  He was ninety-four, Jack. If he died twenty years ago, as he should have, they would have had the service on a soundstage at Cosmo, and the whole town would have turned out. Like they did at Harry Cohn’s. On the lot at Columbia. SRO. Stage Seven. Chuckie O’Hara was at Harry’s funeral, and he said you give the people something they want to see, they’ll show up.

  I’m sorry, Arthur.

  It’s a kettle of very different fish, Arthur said.

  What?

  It’s something J.F. used to say. He used to mangle the language pretty good. He’d want to say a very different kettle of fish, and it would come out …

  Arthur fell silent, and I knew he was trying to compose himself, that in the end when all was said and done and however loathsome a shit J. F. French most certainly was, his father was still his father.

  Arthur, I said finally, the obituaries never said what the initials J.F. stood for.

  Nothing.

  Nothing?

  Nothing. When he first got into the nickelodeon business, he was always looking for product to steal, and he saw this English play, it might’ve been by Freddy Lonsdale, or someone like that, and there was a character in it named J. F. Something-or-other, and so Moe just appropriated it.

  It was the first time I had ever heard Arthur refer to his father as Moe.

  He was too busy to think of names to go along with it, Arthur said. You asked him to come up with a name for a four-year-old Cosmo was considering putting under contract, and without even thinking he’d come up with Blue Tyler. It was only his own name he had trouble with.

  Joseph Fennimore French, I said suddenly.

  Now I know he would have put you under contract, Arthur French said the day of his father’s funeral, many years ago.

  Lilo Kusack had as a matter of course told J. F. French that Jacob K
ing was on his way to California as Morris Lefkowitz’s special economic negotiator, as he had also told Benny Draper, whose OMPCE pension fund was a heavy investor in La Casa Nevada, which Lilo and Cosmopolitan Pictures were fronting. Benny Draper said there was no fucking way that Morris Lefkowitz was going to muscle into Nevada and the best way to make that clear was to whack Jacob King on the Super Chief before he ever set foot in California, he knew people he could call right that fucking minute, would pick up the Chief in Albuquerque the next afternoon and get the job done before Phoenix, and nobody would fucking know, a meal for the fucking coyotes is what Jake’d be, they’d pick his fucking bones clean, hey, making their bones, I like that. It was the kind of talk that made Lilo Kusack uncomfortable, not out of any scrupulosity or respect for human life, particularly Jacob King’s, nor even because it would have put him legally at risk in the event that talk was translated into action. The main reason for his discomfort was that a move on Jacob King promised immediate retribution and then at least a nominal examination on the part of the authorities, thus adding onto the cost of the Nevada operation the additional expense of payoffs, as well as construction delays until the heat died down, and so he told Benny Draper not to worry, he had already taken steps to neutralize Jacob King, and perhaps even co-opt him. I don’t know from co-opt, Benny Draper said, I just know the only fucking thing Jakey King understands is a big fucking hole behind his ear, you remember I told you that, Lilo, it’s the way of the world, you guys with manicures don’t like to think that, but that’s the way it is.