That’s the way it was, Lilo Kusack thought to himself, a thought he did not share with Benny Draper.
Of more immediate concern to J. F. French than the anticipated arrival of Jacob King onto the local scene was Blue Tyler, who in the first week of shooting on Red River Rosie was making trouble on the set. Chuckie O’Hara was directing the picture, in which once more she was playing a teenager of indeterminate years, but certainly no older than fifteen. Blue wanted to grow up, and she wanted to graduate into adult roles without observing the rite of passage that Hollywood traditionally demanded of its child stars. A child actress was supposed to marry at eighteen, as Elizabeth Taylor and Shirley Temple had, marry a slightly older contemporary associated at least in some tangential way with the Industry so that he could be vetted, his credentials checked to see that he was not just some kind of fortune hunter or troublemaker with a big cock; someone with whom she shared a passion for hamburgers or Frank Sinatra ballads, which the fan magazines said made their love inevitable, and from whom she could be easily divorced at nineteen, the divorce sanctifying her transition from child to adult, she now a woman who during her year of matrimony had engaged in sexual intercourse, perhaps even oral and anal intercourse, which finally allowed her to be the object of sexual intention on film, and perhaps even a collaborator in sexual license, so long as it did not go unpunished.
The meeting on Red River Rosie took place in J. F. French’s private screening room on the Cosmopolitan lot. J. F. French was present, and Arthur and Chuckie O’Hara and Lilo Kusack and Blue’s agent and her press agent and her accountant and her business manager. Frick and Frack and Flack was how Chuckie O’Hara referred to Blue’s support team, and as their names meant nothing to me it is what I shall call them as well. Onscreen the dailies of Red River Rosie from the day before were being run. In the take, a close-up, Blue was wearing a gingham dress with puffed sleeves and a high-necked collar and she clutched a bouquet of roses to her bosom as she expressed dismay at the advances of an unseen suitor. The take ended, and onscreen a clapper appeared:
Red River Rosie
Scene 52
Take 23
Dir: O’Hara Cam: Sklar
“Lights,” Blue Tyler suddenly said in the darkened screening room. “Turn it off.” The film wound down, the house lights came on, and Blue stood up. “You still want to know why I walked off this picture? Because this picture’s a piece of shit, that’s why I walked off this picture.”
J. F. French puffed on a cigar and said nothing.
“Well,” Blue said. “That’s all I get? Silence?”
Frack looked at J. F. French and, when no one spoke, cleared his throat. “What I think, Blue, is, and when I say ‘I,’ I mean all of us here, Arthur and Chuckie and Mr. Kusack and Mr. French, who has given up a great deal of his valuable time to be at this meeting when he has a studio to run, and an entire menu of pictures to cast, not to mention dealing with un-American subversion from that bunch of Communists in the Directors Guild, present company excepted, Chuckie, and then since you don’t seem to be aware of it, there is the possibility of a strike that could shut the entire Industry down, isn’t that right, J.F.?”
J. F. French sat like a sphinx, not acknowledging Frack’s question with even a flicker of the eye.
Frack plowed on. “I suppose what I’m saying, what we’re all saying, Freddy and Maurice and Sidney and Gary and all of us who have your best interests at heart, is that by walking off Red River Rosie, as you are threatening to do, perhaps, just perhaps, you don’t really comprehend the exigencies of the business …”
“J.F. doesn’t make these decisions cold, Blue,” Arthur French said after a moment’s silence. “We’ve done considerable testing …”
Lilo Kusack was conciliatory. “There’s no problem, Moe, about Blue finishing Red River Rosie, but—”
“Lilo, who’s paying you?” Blue Tyler interrupted. “Are you here as my lawyer or what?”
Lilo shrugged and lit a cigarette.
“Lilo’s talking business, Blue,” Arthur said, “and you don’t seem to understand business.”
Blue took a deep breath. “Listen, Arthur. And Moe.” She was the only Cosmopolitan contract actor who would dare call him Moe, which always seemed to amuse him. “And Lilo. And Chuckie. And Gary and Stan and whatever the fuck the rest of you people are called. I am the number-five box office attraction in America. I have been in this business since I was four years old. I make twelve thousand five hundred dollars a week, forty weeks a year, and my price bumps to fifteen when my next option gets picked up next month. So believe me, when you talk business, I know what you’re talking about.”
Chuckie O’Hara put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. He wondered if his missing leg would ever stop itching. Time and again he would reach to scratch and only hit the plastic prosthesis, but still it itched, as the doctors had told him it would. Chuckie knew he was present only as window dressing, and while he would agree with Blue’s opinion of the script, he was quite pleased with what he had shot. However the meeting turned out, he did not wish to antagonize his star by saying anything that she could use to make his life difficult when she came back to work, as come back to work he knew she would.
“What the business seems to be saying, Blue,” Arthur said, “is that perhaps the present climate is not the best time for you to be making a crossover picture. Isn’t that right, J.F.?”
“Arthur, why do you always call your father J.F.?” Blue said. “His name is Moe.”
J. F. French permitted himself a small smile.
“Moe, the fact of the matter is I’m almost nineteen years old,” Blue said. “You can’t keep casting me as a fifteen-year-old cherry until my tits start banging off my belly button.”
J. F. French roused himself to speak for the first time. “Nice talk from America’s favorite teenager.”
“That’s exactly my point. I’m not a fifteen-year-old cherry anymore. You can’t keep me playing one.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Missy,” J. F. French said. “Fifteen-year-old cherries happens to be what Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea want to see you play.”
“Chuckie,” Blue said. “Tell Moe why you made me carry the bouquet in that shot. To cover my nips. They’re like fucking acorns.”
“Very effective, Chuckie,” J. F. French said.
“Thank you, J.F.,” Chuckie O’Hara said. There were times he would call J. F. French Moe, but this was not one of them.
“Arthur,” J. F. French said without turning, “are you responsible for those acorns when you know she’s got a five A.M. call?”
Arthur did not reply.
“You can’t sell me in this shit anymore, Moe. The public won’t buy me as little Miss Priss with her knees welded together. You’re always telling me how you can’t fool the public. Well, you’re trying to fool them when you give me a bouquet in every shot so my boobs don’t show. You’re the one that sent the memo to wardrobe. ‘Do something about Miss Tyler’s tits.’ ”
“Arthur, you showed that memo to her?”
Arthur sank farther down into his seat. Chuckie O’Hara bit his tongue and tried not to laugh. Blue’s tits were a problem, and her nipples looked as if she were nursing twins. Pad the nipples and it only made her breasts look larger, and there were only so many trees he could hide her behind.
“I’m almost nineteen—”
“You said that already—”
“—and I can have a valuable career at Cosmo until I’m thirty, maybe even thirty-five, if you start letting me play grown-up women.”
“Who are these grown-up women she keeps talking about?” J. F. French said.
No one spoke for a moment. “Blue means bad girls, Moe,” Lilo Kusack finally said.
The color began to rise in J. F. French’s face. “What bad girls,” he shouted.
“Blue means bad girls in general, J.F.,” Lilo Kusack said. He was an expert in mood changes, and he knew th
at at that moment familiarity would not be politic. Had he not known him so well he might even have said “Mr. French,” a lawyer’s trick. “She means that maybe, in her next project, she gets a shot at a bad … at a more adult role.”
J. F. French rose from his seat. “We let Shelley Winters play the bad girls. We let America’s favorite teenager play Red River Rosie.” He headed for the door of the screening room. “You,” he said to Blue. “Stage Nine. You already cost this studio half a day’s shooting. If you weren’t America’s favorite teenager, I would deduct it from your salary.”
Blue waited until he opened the door. “Moe, who is Jacob King?”
J. F. French stopped. He turned and stared at Arthur. “You take your fiancée to New York, and that’s who you let her meet?”
Arthur looked thoroughly miserable. “It’s all right, J.F. Nobody took any pictures.”
“He’s a good dancer,” Blue said.
“She wanted to go dancing, I should’ve sent her to New York with George Raft,” J. F. French said to his son, almost shouting.
“So who is he?” Blue asked again.
“One of Morris Lefkowitz’s guys,” Lilo Kusack said after a moment.
“Who is Morris Lefkowitz?”
You have to remember, Chuckie O’Hara said years later, that for all her tough mouth and tough business sense she was a true innocent. She had been brought up in the Industry and so sheltered by it that she knew virtually nothing of the world outside it.
“You don’t want to know,” J. F. French said. And then he said the wrong thing. “And something else you don’t want to know. You definitely don’t want to know Jacob King.”
That the Frenches, first Arthur in New York and then J.F. at the studio, had both told her to stay away from Jacob King only stimulated that anarchic spirit that in her was like an erogenous zone. “I was only thinking a dinner date?”
“Dinner date?” Lilo Kusack said. “A lot of people had their last supper with your dinner date.”
“Last supper, like in that picture about Jesus and them that Mr. DeMille did?” Blue said.
J. F. French’s gaze suddenly took in Frick and Frack and Flack. This was a conversation that had unexpectedly gone into areas not covered by their pay grade. “Out,” he shouted. “What are you doing here anyway? Who asked you? You. You’re fired. You. You’re fired. You—”
“I don’t work here, Mr. French.”
“You’re fired anyway. You don’t come on this lot again. Ever.”
“Arthur,” J. F. French said when the room had cleared. Then he saw Chuckie O’Hara, who supposed he had been included in the dismissal order, but who because of his leg had difficulty scurrying out. “O’Hara. You’re a war hero. War heroes can stay. Arthur,” he repeated.
“Sir.”
“I think after Red River Rosie we let your fiancée grow up. I think we start setting the date for you and Blue to get married. We do it on a stage. White confetti. Bluebirds of happiness. Cosmo Newsreel.” He moved over and put his arms around Blue. “I will give the bride away.”
MAURY
I
For five days Melba Mae Toolate had talked.
Nonstop. She swore. Cried. Laughed. Hit me twice.
Nearly killed herself once. Not deliberately. Although in these arias I had on tape (and on the tapes of her own that she finally retrieved, reluctantly, on that fifth day, several of which she let me listen to) she always seemed to be courting violence and danger so assiduously that I thought she might be something of a death lover, albeit one who thought the actual dying, in the event the outcome of the courtship could not be forestalled, would be done by a stunt woman, with the star available for the close-up. She divided random violent death into two categories, those that would make a good visual and those that would not. She was particularly taken by a wire-service report I read to her from USA Today about an elderly woman in Chicago, wearing a mink coat and carrying a Chanel bag containing only a single hundred-dollar bill and no identification, who had placed herself snugly against the right rear wheels of an eighteen-wheeler transcontinental Allied moving van stopped at a traffic light on Michigan Avenue, and when the light turned green, the truck moved forward and the four huge wheels flattened her, the driver in the cab noticing only a slight bump he attributed, in the press report, to a pothole. A good visual, Melba Mae had said.
She always did want to direct, Chuckie O’Hara said when I told him about the woman in Chicago, he like Blue contemplating the master and the coverage, I on the other hand wondering what made the unidentified woman do what she had done, and whether it was spontaneous or planned.
This is the way Melba nearly killed herself. I was listening to her tapes, straining to hear because of their bad quality (she often re-recorded over an existing tape, and she usually seemed to be drunk when she did), which made her monologues difficult to follow, and she had fallen asleep on the king-sized bed with the Indian blanket. It was cold in the trailer and she had turned the Sears electric heater at the foot of the bed up so high that when the blanket rubbed against its grill it caught fire. I was in the middle section of the trailer and it was a moment before I noticed the smell. I took my jacket and smothered the flame, then pulled the seared and smoking blanket off her and ran it outside onto her tiny patch of brown lawn, where I could finally stamp the embers completely out. When I came back inside, she was awake and lighting a cigarette, as if nothing had happened. You’re going to burn yourself to death, I told her, get so deep fried they’ll only be able to identify you with your dental charts. A crispy critter. She thought “crispy critter” was a cute phrase. Cute was her word. I told her it was what a napalm victim was called in Vietnam when I was a reporter there. It turned out she did not know what napalm was, and Vietnam, she said, that was that war we were in, right? In any case, she was never really interested in my back story. Are we talking about me or you? she would say irritably. This was a woman, after all, who I doubt had ever spent eight consecutive seconds not thinking about herself.
Selectively.
Chuckie O’Hara knew enough of her history to fill in some of the blanks. He knew she had fucked Chocolate Walker Franklin. Resulting in the first of the two abortions Lou Lerner, M.D., the studio doctor, had performed on her. The first when I was fourteen, and is that a story, she had said elliptically, a tease in Hamtramck. Not now. Maybe not ever. Too many skeletons I don’t want to rattle in too many closets. Not knowing that Chuckie would give the bones a good shake. Walker was one of the all-time great swordsmen, Chuckie said, he’d fuck a jar of Skippy’s peanut butter if there was nothing else around. Moe French said he’d run Walker Franklin out of the Industry when he finally found out about him and Blue. It was Lilo who told him. Lilo was the keeper of the secrets, he doled them out like communion wafers whenever it served his purposes. I never knew what his particular purpose was in telling Moe about Blue and Walker, but he did, five or six years after it was over, right after Jake was killed and I got my subpoena. Moe was true to his word. Walker never worked in pictures again. And Moe made sure he couldn’t grab a job in nightclubs or on Broadway either, so Walker went to Paris, the only French he knew was “sit on my face,” asseyez-vous sur mon visage, I think it was. Jean Gabin taught him that, they were fuck buddies when Gabin was at Fox, but after he got to France he danced at the Follies and the Crazy Horse and he had a good run as a fancy man until he was killed in a car crash on his way to Deauville to meet some vicomtesse he was boning—a colorful Afro-American phrase, they always have the best words for it, don’t they, and a natural sense of rhythm—Brigitte de Freycinet, remember her, Jack, wasn’t she one of your father’s girls, too? The Maserati he totaled belonged to a Monegasque princess he was also boning, Léonie Grimaldi, a minor scandal at the time.
So said Chuckie O’Hara.
A couple of things Chuckie didn’t know. One way Melba supported herself was via phone sex. She had a listing with a service she had found in the Personals of a local fuck sheet an
d guys would call her up and she would talk them off. His cock, her cunt, how wet she was getting, bingo. A couple of her regulars checked in when I was there. She wasn’t embarrassed by it. Her telephone name was Mona. Just a minute, hon, let me take off my panties, she would say, and cover the phone and ask me to fix her a cup of instant coffee with Preem, and then back on the phone, You want to smell Mona’s finger, I just put it up there, lick it. This was a woman after all who as a child had been sent fan mail caked with come; for her, dirty talk on the telephone was just a natural way for the older woman to make ends meet. How did you get the job, I had asked. I sent them a tape. A demo. It was the voice. I don’t think they’d’ve hired me if they’d known how old I was.
She also had a tattoo. A pair of eyes just above her pubic line, looking down at her bush. The tattooed eyes had mascara and eye shadow, and the eyebrows were thick, modeled on hers. She wasn’t sure when she got the tattoo. Or where. It was when she was out of it, she knew that. When she fell off the planet earth. Baby, I just fell off the planet earth, she said for the fourth or fifth or ninth time. It took me a while to realize that she wanted some variant of “Baby, I just fell off the planet earth” as the title of the autobiography she thought I was going to ghost for her. She really liked that tattoo. It’s like the eyes are checking out how good you’re doing, she had said. The tattooed eyes were disconcerting, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.
On the sixth day she was gone.
The door to the recreational vehicle in Slot 123, Forsythia Lane, was unlocked, and the inside stripped of the more valuable appliances, the thirty-inch television set and the VCRs and the microwave oven and the Cuisinart, even the pack of ribbed Trojan-Enz condoms. The Sub-Zero freezer was open and had defrosted, leaving pools of water on the floor, and the frozen food thawing. The manager of the Autumn Breeze trailer park and recreational vehicle encampment, Mr. August Johnson, said that Mrs. Toolate had rented her mobile home furnished, was paid up until the end of the month, and had left no forwarding address. She had asked August Johnson if anyone had tried to gain entrance to her RV, her things had seemed disturbed, and August Johnson had told her that a detective from the Detroit police department had been asking questions about her, it was a police matter. She had become abusive, August Johnson said. Did he have a warrant, she wanted to know, he had to have a warrant, she knew that from watching Hill Street Blues, and August Johnson had told her not to call him the dirty words she was calling him, and that the Autumn Breeze would have to ask her to vacate her vehicle at the end of the month, the management did not wish any trouble with the Detroit police department, this was a camp of law-abiding citizens.
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