Playland

by John Gregory Dunne

  “We will talk, Jimmy. Playland. I like the sound of that.”

  Morris Lefkowitz hung up the telephone and examined the naked young woman. “The secret of being a successful showroom model,” he said, “is posture.”

  “Yes, Mr. Lefkowitz.”

  “You got to remember that. Posture.”

  “Yes, Mr. Lefkowitz.”

  “In fur, tits are secondary,” Morris Lefkowitz said.

  “I talked to Morris,” Jimmy Riordan said over the telephone to Jacob King in Los Angeles. “He likes the name you picked out for this place.”

  “Playland, Jimmy,” Jacob King said. “Say it. It comes out easy, you won’t choke on it. It’ll grow on you.”

  Jacob’s pushing, Jimmy Riordan thought. When there was no need to push. It was his history. Success in itself was never enough to satisfy him. He always wanted more. Toward those he conquered Jacob was never benevolent. That yesterday’s enemy could be tomorrow’s ally was a concept he could never comprehend. Take no prisoners, sack the villages, kill the women and children. These were the rules under which he operated. It was time to let him know the new guidelines. “I’ve been talking to Lilo,” Jimmy Riordan said.

  Jacob took his time answering. “You been talking to who?”

  “Lilo,” Jimmy Riordan said. “Morris asked me to.” A minor prevarication. In fact it was he who had suggested it to Morris, when Morris was enjoying the fruits of Jacob’s triumphs in an almost unseemly way. He could read Morris, he had spent most of a professional lifetime reading Morris Lefkowitz, and Morris was what Jacob was not, benign in victory. “Lilo and I reached an understanding—”

  “Lilo and you? You making Morris’s decisions for him now, you telling me Morris is an old man, can’t think for himself anymore?”

  “Lilo and Morris,” Jimmy Riordan said quietly, correcting himself. It was a tactical mistake of the kind he rarely made. In the background he could hear a rhythmic sound that was familiar but that he could not quite place. “Morris is cutting Lilo and his people out there in. You run the operation, California takes part of it.”

  How large that part was, and the form it was to take, Jimmy Riordan deliberately neglected to say. The concept of oversight, insofar as it meant control over the purse, was not one to which Jacob King would ever agree willingly. He would accept, if grudgingly, Morris Lefkowitz controlling the purse, but he had a history with Morris, a history that had added significantly to Morris’s power and profit. Oversight from Lilo Kusack was something else again, even though Lilo would only have the power to recommend, not the power to order. Whatever fealty Jacob King felt he owed Morris Lefkowitz, whatever his sense of obligation to him, he would never accept orders from Lilo. Even Jimmy recognized that, and he hoped Lilo did, too. Jimmy liked Jacob, even trusted him to a point, as a staff officer must trust a commander in the field or fire him, and he neither liked nor trusted Lilo Kusack. Yet he wondered, if push came to shove, whether he would back Jacob or Lilo, then banished the thought as idle speculation. Speculation, however, and thinking the unthinkable, were what Morris Lefkowitz paid him handsomely for. Morris would as always be the court of last resort, and he retained the absolute power to overrule Lilo, and anyone else in the deal.

  “Partners,” Jimmy Riordan continued. “No more rough stuff. All we ever wanted out there was a deal. Now we’ve got the deal we wanted in the first place.”

  The deal we should have had in the first place was what Jimmy Riordan actually meant, and Jacob did not miss the implicit rebuke. “Rough stuff got us this far.”

  He was like a victorious general who, having won a war, discovered he had no aptitude for peace, Jimmy Riordan thought. “Perhaps,” he said.

  “Fuck perhaps,” Jacob said, “it’s not going to work, this partners thing.”

  “It’s your job to make it work, Jake.” The quietness of Jimmy Riordan’s voice did not mask the warning in his words.

  “There’s no way I go to Lilo with my hat in my hand,” Jacob said truculently. Or if he did, there would be a gun in his other hand.

  “Of course not.” The smooth Jimmy Riordan. “You have a free hand.” He paused. “Within reason.”

  “What’s within reason?”

  “Morris decides.” Two words that ended argument. Morris was like Moses, inventing commandments as he went along. Even sitting at Morris’s right hand as he had these many years, Jimmy Riordan still did not fully comprehend how Morris Lefkowitz computed all the factors by which he arrived at a decision. “You know there’s a built-in flexibility in every budget, Jake. For the unexpected contingency.” Jimmy was careful not to define the extent of the flexibility, or what might be construed as an unexpected contingency. Give him something else to think about. “By the way, I’m coming out for the groundbreaking.”

  “It’s a long fucking way to come just to see a steam shovel pick up some dirt,” Jacob King said. But of course he knew why Jimmy Riordan was coming, and it did not improve his disposition. To dot the is and cross the ts. Blessed are the peacemakers.

  “Morris thinks a New York presence would be advantageous,” Jimmy Riordan explained. A thought Jimmy had impressed on Morris. To let the locals know, and Jacob King as well, that for all his laurels, Jacob was just a consul, not a monarch. Jimmy could still hear the rhythmic banging, thwonk, thwonk, behind Jacob King. It offered an opportunity to change the subject. “What’s that noise I keep hearing, Jake?”

  “A ball,” Jacob King said.

  “Against a backboard?”

  “Yes.”

  He had a sense that Jacob was being evasive. Even in middle age with a daily trim and a weekly manicure, Jimmy Riordan still had the soul of the prosecutor he had years before left Yorkville for Fordham to become. His ability to cross-examine once he smelled evasiveness or sensed a flawed argument, a failed excuse, was one of the things that made him so valuable to Morris Lefkowitz. Another thwonk, and another. It was suddenly important to him to identify the sound positively, if only to keep his talents in shape. “Stickball?”

  “No.”

  “Someone’s playing catch?”

  “Tennis,” Jacob said after a moment.

  “You play tennis?”

  “I’m having a lesson.”

  About the groundbreaking ceremony for Playland, there was little I could find on file in the newspaper microfilm rooms, and if Melba Mae Toolate’s memories were vague, Arthur French’s were opaque. Melba Mae remembered that it was boiling hot, and that Shelley Flynn was funny, he was wearing a midnight-blue tuxedo even though it was the middle of the day, but she could not recall anything he had said, it was, she said, the usual Shelley nightclub shit. She also remembered that it was the first time she had been to Las Vegas since Carole Lombard died. Arthur French had refused to drive over, one of his few acts of rebellion against his father, Arthur could be such a pill sometimes, Melba Mae said, but Arthur’s story was that he was supervising Chuckie O’Hara’s director’s cut of Red River Rosie so that it could meet its release date. Melba remembered that Jacob King wore a new white suit, the color of milk, sewn up especially for the occasion by Eddie Schmidt, tailor to the stars, and that he had wanted to wear a black silk shirt and a white silk four-in-hand with it, but Rita Lewis, that cunt (Melba’s words), said it made Jacob look like a gangster, it wasn’t the image he was trying to project. The gossip columnist in the Hollywood Reporter itemed that Blue Tyler would attend the groundbreaking in the company of “mysterious Manhattan Hotel Investor Jacob King,” and in his column Jimmy Fidler wrote, “Manhattan Hotel Investor Jacob King (the big bux behind new Nevada hotspot Playland, breaking ground today) is burning to branch into pic biz with his True Blue!!!!!” In the Los Angeles Express, there was a photo of Blue showing more leg and bum than the studio usually let photographers shoot, a shot that to J. F. French’s consternation went out over the wires, after which J. F. French fired the entire publicity department. The Las Vegas Review-Journal featured two full pages of Blue Tyler photographs a
nd one picture, on page seven, of Clark County Supervisor Lyle Ledbetter digging up a shovelful of desert sand. Jacob King appeared in just a single photo, a group shot with Blue, Shelley Flynn (in a dinner jacket, as Melba had remembered), and Lyle Ledbetter, but the picture was cropped in such a way that only Jacob’s white-sleeved left arm and a quarter of his face showed. In the caption he was identified as “Manhattan Hotel Investor Jacob King, who put together the financing for this new enterprise in association with L.A. Attorney Lilo Kusack.”

  Whose idea was “Hotel Investor?” I asked Melba Mae.

  Chuckie’s, Melba Mae said.

  Well, yes, of course, it was my idea, Chuckie O’Hara said. I thought it had a certain panache. Like “actress-model” for hooker.

  “I see the sun, a great blistering orb,” Sydney Allen said. “Space. Panorama. Kitsch. Giant earthmovers gouging out the landscape. Ecological murder in the service of corrupt mammon. Let your imagination run riot, Jack.”

  I refrained from saying that ecological murder was not the direction in which my imagination ran riot.

  “One other thing. I want Jacob in that white suit with the black shirt and the white tie.”

  EXT. PLAYLAND CONSTRUCTION SITE DAY

  LYLE LEDBETTER

  the Clark County supervisor, holding a shovel in his hands on a makeshift stage, is making a speech in the blinding midday sun.

  LYLE LEDBETTER

  I see Las Vegas as a city in its takeoff phase, an unspoiled national resource …

  It is the dialogue from his grand jury testimony when he recalled JACOB KING trying successfully to bribe him.

  ANOTHER ANGLE—AN ARCHITECTURAL RENDERING

  of Playland resting on an easel next to Lyle Ledbetter. It is a modernistic building surrounded by grass and palm trees, and shows tennis courts and swimming pools.

  LYLE LEDBETTER

  … a community with clean air, a decent place to raise a family …

  ANGLE ON JACOB KING

  He stands with Jimmy Riordan, Lilo Kusack, Rita Lewis, and Blue Tyler. The presence of Lilo Kusack and Jimmy Riordan, both wearing ties and silk suits, seals the armistice between the two factions.

  ANOTHER ANGLE

  Red ribbon surrounding the building site.

  ANOTHER ANGLE

  A sign that says:

  PLAYLAND

  WHERE THE FUTURE IS NOW

  ANOTHER ANGLE

  Earthmoving equipment in the distance ready to move in and begin work.

  ANOTHER ANGLE

  Reporters taking notes.

  ANGLE ON BLUE TYLER

  posing for photographers more intent on snapping her picture than Lyle Ledbetter’s or Jacob King’s. Blue wets her lips, arches her neck, lifts her skirts, all the poses of a star doing a day’s work.

  ANOTHER ANGLE—SHELLEY FLYNN

  in full evening dress—tuxedo, ruffled shirt, patent-leather pumps in spite of its being high noon. With a buck-and-wing, he bounces to stage center, elbows Leo Ledbetter aside, and takes the shovel from his hand.

  SHELLEY FLYNN

  Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my first show here at Playland, what a beautiful gang you are …

  (a beat)

  So I’m early. That’s how excited I am to be here …

  (conspiratorially)

  I also don’t have another gig.

  (into a routine)

  Appearances are everything, right? Take a look at me. Pretend I’m a lifeguard. How far out would you go?

  (as if hearing applause)

  What an audience, jeez. What an audience. Listen up. Right here, on this spot, Jake King—Jake, take a bow—Jake is going to build the biggest goddamn hotel in the state of Nevada …

  ANGLE ON JACOB KING

  who acknowledges the smattering of applause.

  ANGLE ON LILO KUSACK

  LILO KUSACK

  (quietly)

  We are going to build …

  ANGLE ON JIMMY RIORDAN

  who looks at Lilo but makes no response.

  ANGLE ON JACOB KING

  who winks almost imperceptibly at Rita Lewis.

  JACOB

  Opening night, Lilo. You and Rita. The honeymoon suite. On the house. And you know what else?

  RITA

  Don’t tell me. Shelley Flynn in the big room. You’re going to comp us.

  ANGLE ON SHELLEY FLYNN

  SHELLEY FLYNN

  (shoots his cuffs)

  … you see sand now …

  (shaking the shovel)

  … but in six months you’re going to see a fucking paradise, excuse my French. Swimming pools. Fountains. Tropical plants. Those big pink birds they got in Florida. Music. Hotshot singers. Me, Shelley Flynn. Star of stage, screen, radio, bar mitzvahs, I’ll go to the opening of a door …

  (milking imaginary applause)

  Guys in tuxedos every night of the year, and I don’t mean fucking headwaiters, or bandleaders …

  LYLE LEDBETTER

  seems slightly discomfited. This is not the churches-and-schools line he had hoped Jacob King would take.

  SHELLEY FLYNN

  … all the broads are going to get out their diamond bracelets, they come here. Satin sheets, if you want them. Bathtubs you can swim in. Gold fixtures …

  ANGLE ON LILO KUSACK

  LILO KUSACK

  (sotto voce to Jimmy Riordan)

  It’s supposed to be a casino, not a fancy whorehouse.

  ANGLE ON JIMMY RIORDAN

  who again does not respond.

  ANGLE ON JACOB KING

  focusing on Shelley Flynn as if Lilo had not spoken.

  SHELLEY FLYNN

  … class games. Crap tables, sure, but baccarat …

  ANGLE ON BLUE TYLER

  now bored, stifles a yawn and looks at her watch. She flashes a smile at Jacob King, then leans toward Lilo Kusack.

  BLUE TYLER

  (whispering)

  Lilo, my new contract. I want it in writing. No close-ups when I’m having my period. You can always tell.

  (puffs out her cheeks)

  I look like this.

  LILO KUSACK

  takes a leather notepad from his suit pocket, and with a gold pencil jots down Blue’s instructions.

  SHELLEY FLYNN

  wipes the sweat from his brow.

  SHELLEY FLYNN

  … behind those braided silk ropes they used to have in places like Europe …

  (a beat)

  Hey, Pm just wasting time …

  (to Jackie Heller)

  … Jackie, let’s get those guys of yours working, time is money, time is money …

  ANOTHER ANGLE

  The earthmoving equipment moves toward the site, rolling over the red ribbon, and then carving out great hunks of sand from the desert.

  ANGLE ON THE GROUP

  all turning away except for

  JACOB KING

  who lingers, gazing at the site.

  ANGLE ON JIMMY RIORDAN & LILO KUSACK

  who look back at Jacob King. They look at each other wordlessly, then get into their chauffeur-driven car for the ride back to Los Angeles.

  HOLD ON JACOB KING

  as he removes the architect’s rendering of Playland from the easel.

  DISSOLVE TO:

  XII

  Montage:

  It was Chuckie O’Hara who dubbed Jacob King The Great Gatzberg, and the name stuck, to Chuckie’s initial dismay and horror, for it was accepted as sacred writ in the film community that Jacob did not suffer perceived slights with equanimity. In the past, it was whispered, bones had been broken for less, but because battery was not considered a viable social option for a guest member at Hillcrest, a member of the congregation at Barry Tyger’s Temple Beth Israel, it was now said that husbands who uttered any public slur about Jacob King, his origins or his reputed profession, would be quietly cuckolded, their wives fucked up the ass as punishment. Although Rita Lewis and Lilo Kusack were not joined in matri
mony, theirs was the example most commonly given, albeit sotto voce, since Lilo’s documented capacity for retaliation—if only economic career-ending retaliation—was said to equal Jacob King’s. Jacob, however, took Chuckie’s remark as a compliment, a comment on the style and stylishness he was trying to affect, although I find it difficult to believe he had ever read or even heard of Gatsby, or seen the movie. Someone however must have told him about the book, probably Blue. She was an avid, if primitive, reader, sliding her forefinger slowly along each line of type, her lips moving as she read, two habits that the teachers at Cosmo’s Little Red Schoolhouse could never break her of, habits she still had when I met her as Melba Mae Toolate. She was less an autodidact than a seeker after romance, or, to be precise, romantic parts she thought she could play, Jane Eyre or Elizabeth Bennet, say, or best of all Joan of Arc, especially (according to Arthur French) if the Maid of Orleans could have a couple of love scenes. In her reading of Gatsby, Blue identified with Jordan Baker; in her opinion (and this too was via Arthur, and so open to question), Daisy Buchanan was “a cunt.”

  They were gorgeous together, Chuckie O’Hara said. He was always buying her things. Emerald earrings. A diamond necklace. I remember the premiere of Red River Rosie at Grauman’s. Real Hollywood stuff. The searchlights crisscrossing the sky, a big crowd in the bleachers. Blue being the star of the picture, her limo was the last to arrive. Moe had wanted to ride in the same car, but she said only Jake or she wasn’t coming, and if Moe insisted on riding in her car, she’d tell Jimmy Fidler, who was doing the live radio feed, that she had cramps, and she would’ve done it, too, Moe knew that. Jake got out of the car first, and he was wearing tails. Nobody wore tails to an opening, but he could bring it off. He helped her out of the car, and they walked up the red carpet into the theater, Blue blowing kisses, the flashbulbs exploding. You remember what Nick Carraway said about Gatsby, that there was a romantic readiness about him that he had never found in anyone else? Well, that’s what Jake had. Usually the stars slipped out of the theater after the houselights went down, but Blue always stayed, she just loved looking at herself on screen. There was a party afterward at Moe’s, everyone was there, Elsa Maxwell and Cole Porter, Noel Coward, my date was Hedy Lamarr, if you can believe it, Moe didn’t like guys to come with guys, except Noel, and I always thought Elsa was in drag. I liked Hedy, she was fun, she said, Chuckie, I’m having my period, we can’t do it. That huge fucking house of Moe’s, three bands rotating so the music never stopped. Jake and Blue never seemed to leave the dance floor. It was as if they were alone out there, and everyone was watching them, but what I remember best was Lilo. His face was almost totally shrouded by cigar smoke, and he never took his eyes off them. It was scary.