“She would have just been eligible. Anyway that doesn’t explain the earlier years. It wasn’t a lush life, but it was more than subsistence.”
“You mentioned the shopping coupons she used at the grocer’s.” Arthur must be the last man in America to use the word grocer, as if there were still active family purveyors tugging their forelocks, By Appointment to J. F. French. “That was an inventive way to stretch her budget.”
He had a gift for being insufferable. “Did you have her on some kind of annuity?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because it seems there were twice-monthly payments into her savings account.”
“You are a romantic, Jack,” Arthur French said.
“Does that mean no?”
“It means I have a mare about to foal, and that’s of more interest to me than some cock-and-bull speculation about a bag lady’s annuity.”
“Even if the bag lady is Blue Tyler.”
“If it’s a colt, I’ll name him Broderick,” Arthur French said as he hung up.
Maury Ahearne again.
“I checked the bus schedules for the night that cabdriver took her to the bus station downtown. The dispatcher on the dog remembered a bag-lady type, not bad-looking, she only had one suitcase, and it was falling apart. Couldn’t lift it, it was so heavy, she was pulling it behind her with a piece of rope or something.”
Exactly what the cabdriver had told me.
“Got on a bus to Kansas City. I got hold of the driver finally, he remembered her, all right, she sat right behind him the whole trip. Wouldn’t let him put the suitcase in the baggage compartment. Never slept. Humming songs the whole way. They get to K.C., he had to carry the suitcase for her, and it fell apart, spilled out all over the platform …”
“He remember what was in it?”
“Shit, mostly.”
I had the feeling that Maury was holding out. “Anything that wasn’t shit?”
He waited for a moment. “You remember that dirty picture of the little girl?”
The naked child in the strangely erotic old-fashioned photograph Maury Ahearne had stolen from Melba Mae Toolate’s RV. The postcard-sized photograph Melba Mae had so many copies of. “Yes.”
“She had a bunch of them in the bag. The driver tried to cop one, and she took a swing at him.”
I got one suitcase, that’s it. If it gets heavy, I just get rid of stuff. The story of my life.
If she was on the run, why would she bring those photographs. How did they fit into the story of her life?
“What happened then?”
“The cops came. I checked someone I know in the department down there. They wanted to book her for vag loitering, but she had over five hundred cash with her. And the bus driver didn’t want to press charges. I showed him a copy of the picture. It was the same one.”
“So it was her.”
“Looks that way.”
The trail went cold after Kansas City.
It was then that I took the photograph of the unknown nude woman from my desk and pinned it on my bulletin board alongside the two pictures of Blue Tyler, the one in the conference at the William Morris Agency with her covey of managers, and the other of her dancing at Ciro’s in the arms of Arthur French on the night of Jacob King’s funeral.
XIV
When did it begin to go wrong? I asked Chuckie O’Hara.
I suppose I should have seen the signs when I went over there, Chuckie said.
Jake wanted me to see Playland, and he wanted Blue to come over too, she’d only been there once since the groundbreaking. She said it was boring, there was nothing to do, it was like watching grass grow, except there was no grass. What Jake was trying to do was run the building from L.A. He’d left that gorilla of his in charge over there …
Eddie Binhoff …
Whatever his name was, and the construction guy …
Jackie Heller …
… and he thought that would do it, there was no real need for him to be over there all the time, he wasn’t going to take a hammer and start banging nails, after all. He kept the architect’s drawing of the place in the living room at the house on St. Pierre Road. It was the first thing you saw when you came in, and he’d tell you how it was going, this was done, that was done. It was as if he thought it was the Sistine Chapel, and he was Michelangelo. He didn’t really want to be in Vegas, there was no place good enough to stay, and he was having too good a time being this millionaire sportsman he was supposed to be, with the croquet parties and the gin games at Hillcrest and the box at Santa Anita, and his picture in the paper all the time. So what he was going to do was rent a little plane and we’d all fly over, but after Carole Lombard died, you couldn’t get Blue near a plane, so I drove over with her and Jake. It was a miserable drive, a lousy two-lane road, six or seven hours in the heat.
How was Blue?
A pain in the ass. She didn’t like the sun, she thought it gave her freckles, like Kate Hepburn, for some reason she never liked Kate. And she hadn’t figured out a way to tell Jake yet she was going back to work …
On Broadway Babe?
I was supposed to direct it, it was a nice story, the script needed some work, but I couldn’t put my mind to it, because someone had told me that Irving Page, that no-talent little prick, had named me to the Committee in closed session.
He named two hundred ninety-one people.
Well, I didn’t give a rat’s ass about the other two hundred ninety, I was just worried about me. If you were named in closed session, you couldn’t find anything out, they wouldn’t tell you, you didn’t want to check too closely, and you didn’t want to get a lawyer yet, it might look suspicious, like you were guilty.
So you really didn’t know if you’d been named or not until you got a subpoena?
Right.
Who told you you’d been named?
Reilly Holt. (Chuckie paused.) The screenwriter. (Another pause.) I suppose today you’d call him my significant other. Or more significant than the others, if truth be told.
And he was in the Party?
My dear, the Grand High Poo-bah. He hated my enlisting in the Marines after Pearl Harbor. He said I was a capitalist tool and was only going to be cannon fodder in capitalism’s employ. Reilly always did have a certain gift for prognostication. But then when I came back, he was absolutely besotted by my stump. I thought that was rather weird, even by my recherché standards.
How was Jacob on the trip over?
Sullen. And talkative. Too talkative. Dropping names. It’s an art, name-dropping, and with Jake it was always a little too obvious.
Whose names?
Sam and Frances Goldwyn, for starters. He and Blue had gone up to Laurel Lane for a screening. Or, to be accurate, Frances had asked Blue, and she brought Jake without checking with them. Frances wasn’t too happy about it, the Harrimans were the guests of honor, a pair of trophies is more like it. I bet it was the only time in his life Averell was in the same room with someone who’d made his bones. I was there that night, and Lilo was too, and Lilo said, Tell Ambassador Harriman who your biggest hit was, Jake. He could be a cunt, Lilo. Sam, of course, got Jake’s name wrong, par for the course, he thought his name was King Jacob, and he told Jake he’d met King Carol of Romania and King Victor Emmanuel of Italy, but never a King Jacob, what country was he from? Jake just laughed, he’d been around long enough by then to do that when something went over his head. Anyway, Sam gave him the name of his tailor in London, Huntsman, and pretty soon Jake was going around saying he thought he’d buy some suits in London, he’d heard Huntsman was the best, Sam Goldwyn used him. He even brought it up again in the car on the way over, but then he got sullen when Blue said be sure to have the tailor make the jackets extra large so his holster wouldn’t show. She was kidding, but there were some things Jake didn’t think were funny anymore. I thought he was going to throw her out of the car right then and there, but just at that moment we came up over a rise, and there it was, in the distance, in the
dusk, Playland.
The night work lights already were on, and the night crews were unloading materials, and there was this haze of dust as the trucks drove in and out, but you could see the shell of what would be the hotel and the casino beginning to take shape, beginning to look like the rendering in Jake’s living room. The sun was going down behind us, and it was starting to get cold, but Jake wanted to pull off the road so we could stop a moment and look down at it. We got out, and Blue put her arm around his waist and burrowed up against his jacket. She was trying to make amends, I guess, for her smart mouth, until finally, without a word, he unbuttoned the coat and wrapped it around her. It was like she was part of him. I think it was the closest I ever saw them.
“Who ordered the double crews, Jake?” Eddie Binhoff said. He was wearing a white shirt and a black string tie, the uniform he wore when he was dealing blackjack at the Bronco Club, except now his sleeves were rolled up, and in his hand he held a work schedule attached to a clipboard.
Jacob King gave no indication he had heard Eddie Binhoff’s question. In the dirt and noise of the work site, he seemed peculiarly alone, surrounded by his own presence, oblivious to Eddie and to Chuckie and to Jackie Heller, who was poring over a blueprint outside the construction trailer, oblivious to everyone except Blue, who appeared to be playing hide-and-seek with herself in the framing of an adjoining structure, nature’s child. Jacob rotated slowly, three hundred sixty degrees, taking in his new domain, missing nothing. He seemed transfixed, Chuckie would remember, as if Playland had opened for him a future he had never contemplated.
“You know what I like best about it?” Jacob King said. It was not clear to whom he was addressing the question. Perhaps only to himself.
“Jake,” Eddie Binhoff persisted, scratching the purplish bruise of the tattooed tribute to Roxanne that curled around his forearm. “Do Lilo and Jimmy know about these extra crews?”
“What I like best about it is that it’s mine,” Jacob King said quietly to no one in particular, still ignoring Eddie Binhoff. The words chilled Chuckie O’Hara. Or was it just the cold desert night air that made him shiver? Then Jacob added a quick smile, the trance broken.
“Jake, I’m supposed to okay this,” Eddie Binhoff said. “You say it’s okay, I’ll sign, we’ll put them on the payroll. But I can’t do it on my own.”
“I don’t check things out with Lilo, you know that, Eddie,” Jacob said. He initialed the work order, then stepped through the rubble to a pile of marble Blue was now examining in the building where she had been playing. She pointed to the marble, then whispered something into Jacob’s ear. He examined the billing slip, then whistled sharply through his teeth. “Hey, Jackie, what kind of fucking marble is this?”
Jackie Heller folded his blueprint and walked toward Jacob King. “Domestic, Jake.” He looked at Blue, then at Chuckie, as if waiting for an introduction. “I showed you the samples,” he continued when no introduction was forthcoming. “You said it was okay. Eddie, Jake said it was okay, right?”
Eddie Binhoff shrugged.
Again Blue whispered into Jacob’s ear.
“Blue says domestic is shit,” Jacob said. “I want Italian marble.”
“You know what that costs, Jake …”
“Jackie, I don’t give a fuck what it costs, I want Italian marble,” Jacob said.
“Who the fuck’s going to know it’s Italian or not?” Jackie Heller said.
“I’m going to know, Jackie. Blue’s going to know. Chuckie’s going to know. My friends are coming to this joint …” Jacob paused, his face mottling with rage. He hefted a piece of marble, as if testing its capacity to be a weapon. “My friends are coming to this hotel”—a subtle change, joint to hotel, joint belonging to the old Jacob King, hotel to the new—“and my friends are the kind of people who know the difference between fucking domestic marble and fucking Italian marble, you fucking understand that?”
It was the first time Chuckie had ever seen the volcanic side of Jacob King’s temper, the side people talked about when he was not around. He thought Jacob was going to brain Jackie Heller with the piece of marble, and Eddie Binhoff seemed to think so too, moving into Jacob’s path to prevent an assault if one came.
Jackie Heller took a deep breath, not a man to give up easily. “It means we’re going to have to reorder.”
Jacob watched Blue as she wandered away into the framed corridor of the adjacent building. She grabbed an unfinished upright and began to swing around it as if it were a maypole. “Then reorder, Jackie.”
“We don’t just give this stuff here back, Jake. And it means another delay.”
“Jackie,” Jacob said, once more back in control, and in control even more dangerous, it seemed to Chuckie O’Hara, with every word a warning. “Just do what you’re told.”
“Jacob,” Blue Tyler suddenly moaned. She was sucking on a finger.
“What’s the matter, what happened?” Jacob King said.
“I have a splinter in my finger,” Blue Tyler said, holding her finger out to him. “Kiss it away.” She fell into the lascivious movie pout Chuckie O’Hara had shot so many times, tears gathering in the corner of her eyes. She always could cry on cue, fifteen takes with never a miss, and cry again in all the coverage. With most actresses he would say, Think of something sad, but never with Blue, if the script said cry, she cried. What dark thoughts brought her so easily to tears he did not wish to know. It was enough that she did it. “Then we’ll do something dirty later that Chuckie doesn’t know how to do.” She paused. “At least with a girl.”
Jackie Heller looked at Eddie Binhoff, whose face betrayed nothing. Jackie seemed at the point of apoplexy.
Jacob King squeezed Blue’s finger until a spot of blood appeared, then removed the splinter.
“Jacob,” Blue said, licking her finger, “you think this ceiling’s maybe … a little low or something?”
Jacob looked up, then stood on his tiptoes, and finally jumped, pushing the flat of his hand against the ceiling.
It was too much for Jackie Heller. “That ceiling is here to stay.”
“What do you mean, the ceiling’s here to stay?” Jacob King said.
“I mean, the whole building is framed at this height,” Jackie Heller said. “You didn’t like how high the ceilings were, you could’ve changed the fucking plans. Two months ago is when you should’ve done it, not now, it’s too fucking late, that’s a fact.”
“If you raise it another foot,” Blue said serenely, “you wouldn’t get that … that Brooklyn tenement feeling.”
Jacob examined the ceiling once more. “Raise it another foot, Jackie.”
“Jake.” Jackie Heller was almost pleading. “You want me to tear the whole place down and start over, because she says it looks like a fucking tenement? In Brooklyn? Where she’s never even fucking been?”
“I grew up in Brooklyn, Jackie. Tear it down. Do it right. It’s simple.”
“For your information,” Blue said to Jackie Heller, “I did P.A.s for Carioca Carnival in Brooklyn. So there.”
“P.A.s?” Jackie Heller said after a moment. “I don’t know P.A.s.”
“Personal appearances,” Blue said. “No wonder the ceiling’s so low, you don’t know anything.” She turned her back to Jackie Heller, and said, “Jacob, I’m hungry, can’t we go get something to eat?”
It was during dinner downtown at the Bronco that Blue let slip she was going back to work. Jacob had wanted to go to the Fremont, but Blue refused, she said it was awful, and Jacob said how did she know, she had never been there, and Blue said she’d been there the night Carole Lombard’s plane crashed, and it was a bad-luck place, and she wasn’t going to eat there, if Jacob wanted to eat there, he could eat there alone, she’d have dinner with Chuckie.
“Chuckie,” Blue said over her shrimp cocktail, “the new script doesn’t work, have Moe put that fat writer on it, Sonya whatever her name is.”
“What new script?” Jacob King said.
> Blue looked at Chuckie, then at Jacob. “Arthur’s sent me a script. I mean, I haven’t even really read it yet.
“All the way through,” she added evasively when she sensed her denial was not playing. “I just know the story. I mean, this could be the crossover picture.” She was talking fast now. “This could be where I grow up. So when I’m thirty-five years old, like you are—”
“You going to direct it, Chuckie?”
Chuckie sliced his steak and nodded.
“Maybe I can produce it, then,” Jacob King said suddenly. That Blue had not told him about the new script now seemed secondary. “When the hotel’s finished, I’m thinking of branching out. Into new areas. I’d like to produce, I think I’d be good at it.”
“Jacob, you don’t even know the story.”
“So tell me the story.”
“Well, in it I play this musical comedy star, see, queen of Broadway, everybody claps when I walk into Sardi’s, blah blah, and I fall in love with a big-time mobster, see, and there’s this great scene when I’m in my dressing room, opening night, flowers, telegrams, blah blah, and my maid—who loves me like a mother, black-mammy Hattie McDaniel type—she tells me he’s been killed. Mob shoot-out. Big tragedy. Love-of-my-life-type thing. Camera comes in close on me, putting on my makeup—”
“No close-up if you’re having your period,” Chuckie O’Hara said lightly, watching Jacob’s face.
“—and what happens is, I go on with the show,” Blue said, pressing on. “Triumph. Great reviews. ‘Last night on the stage of the Belasco Theater a legend was born,’ et cetera. And only I know the price I paid. I live with the tragedy. Do you love it?”
“It needs work,” Chuckie said.
“Jacob, aren’t you going to tell me what you think?”
“You lost me after ‘he gets killed,’ ” Jacob King said.
The announcement that Blue was to star in Broadway Babe was big news in the trade papers, BLUE TYLER SET FOR BROADWAY BABE, BROADWAY BABE MARKS CAREER SHIFT FOR BLUE, AND BLUE TYLER—YESTERDAY’S BABY, TOMORROW’S BABE were three of the front-page headlines I found in the microfilm room at the UCLA library. The press conference announcing the new picture was held at the Brown Derby, with Blue and Chuckie taking questions and posing for photographers, and Jacob King so discreetly in the background he was not mentioned in the news stories. J. F. French was nominally the host, but it was Blue’s moment, Chuckie remembered, and she made the most of it. She was clearly in charge, a child-woman with the movie star’s contempt for the reporters who covered the Industry, free to be outrageous because she knew that nothing outrageous she said would ever be printed in their newspapers.
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