“A pioneer,” Lilo Kusack said, “you have to admire that.” He raised a glass of champagne. “Here’s to him.”
“Wait a minute, Lilo, Jimmy doesn’t have a glass,” J. F. French said. “Arthur, a glass for Mr. Riordan.”
A waiter brought a champagne flute and filled it. The table was wrapped in silence. All over the front room people were looking at them, and Dave Chasen was whispering to favored customers who the stranger with the battered nose was at the Frenches’ booth. Blue tried, but could not take her eyes off Jimmy Riordan. She wanted to ask him what Jacob was like in New York, and if what happened was her fault, and would it have happened if they had never met.
“To Playland,” Lilo Kusack said.
“I can drink to that,” J. F. French said.
Arthur and Lilo and J. F. French clinked their glasses, and so, after a kick under the table from J. F., did Blue.
“And to Jake,” Arthur French said, the unspeakable finally mentioned. “He was what he was.”
Jimmy Riordan tapped a fingernail against his flute but did not raise it with the others. He looked at them all, one by one, troubled not so much by the decisions he had made, even by their cost, as by a residual sense of loyalty, and guilt. He had to say what he came to say. “You know what he was?” Jimmy slid from the booth and stood, staring down at them. “He was worth this whole goddamn table. He was worth this whole goddamn town.”
Lilo put his glass down, and then so did the others. No one said a word. Blue Tyler lowered the veil over her eyes, and after a moment Jimmy Riordan walked out of Chasen’s.
His me absolvo speech, Arthur French said forty years later, his smirk scarcely contained. The Great Gatzberg had his Nick Carraway, and his name was Jimmy Riordan.
XXI
The plan had been for her to cross over, to make that leap so many child actresses had failed to make, from children’s roles to those of adult women. Blue Tyler was never cute, and that was to her advantage. There was always in her a knowingness her contemporaries did not possess, a latent sexual component that allowed the audience to fantasize that when the adults in her pictures might be getting it on, she conceivably was peeking through the keyhole. Unlike the other child stars of her time, she made her better pictures when she was an adolescent, when she had tits and a working twat, as Chuckie O’Hara later said, and the popcorn eaters somehow knew it, however much Cosmopolitan Pictures tried to disguise the fact. The plan, however, was not to be. Broadway Babe was postponed for a year (the official reason was that the score had to be thrown out; the real reason I did not find out until I was able to pull it out of Arthur French), and then first Chuckie O’Hara and later Blue herself became victims of history. Winchell was out front. “Say, didja hear where pinkostinko director Chuckie O’Hara lives in El Lay. In a part of Hollywood they call the Swish Alps!!!!” Preproduction was halted when Chuckie went to Washington to testify, and after he took off his leg in the HUAC hearing room he was fired by J. F. French, and replaced by Victor Higgins. Blue then quit Broadway Babe in protest, and was immediately put on suspension by the studio. Some months later she too was subpoenaed and summoned to Washington. Her primary interrogator was Congressman Theodore (“Ted”) Wilder, the first recipient of the “I Am an American” award, at whose dinner Blue had led the audience in the Pledge of Allegiance. The congressman was particularly interested in her performance, when she was eight, in Little Sister Susan:
Q: That picture was directed by Mr. Charlton O’Hara, is that correct?
A: Yes.
Q: An admitted Communist?
A: The only thing I know about Chuckie, Congressman … I don’t know.
Q: What is the only thing you know about Mr. O’Hara, Miss Tyler?
A: Only that he was a good director.
Q: Now Little Sister Susan was written by Mr. Reilly Holt, is that not correct?
A: Yes.
Q: A Red Bolshevik Communist, is that not correct?
A: I never met Reilly Holt. Mr. French didn’t let stars talk to writers.
Q: A very good idea, if those writers were Red writers. Now you had a line in Little Sister Susan, and that line was “There’s a far land I dream about …”
A: I guess …
Q: And was that far land Red Russia?
A: I don’t know. I mean, I thought it was just someplace, you know, else, someplace else …
Q: Mr. Chairman, that is the insidious nature of these Red degenerates like O’Hara and Holt. They put their propaganda filth in the mouth of a little girl …
In perhaps the most manic moment of Blue’s appearance, she was asked if she was now or ever had been a Communist. “Mr. Tavenner,” she replied to the Committee’s chief counsel, “I won’t be old enough to vote until next year’s election.”
You quit Broadway Babe because of Chuckie? I asked.
And because of Jacob, Melba Mae Toolate said. Because of a lot of things.
What things?
Just let me alone, will you? Everything.
Cosmopolitan Pictures invoked the moral-turpitude clause in her contract, an action that left the studio’s highest-paid star functionally unemployable in the Hollywood community. No one seriously believed that she was a Communist, but the clause covered a multitude of sins, most of which in fact she had committed. Her earnings since the age of four had gone into trust accounts so that her financial position was not as precarious as that of others who had been blacklisted. But then neither were her funds infinite, and Cosmopolitan brought her to the brink of financial ruin through a series of legal maneuvers holding her accountable for production costs on pictures it had developed for her. She formed an independent production company and announced pictures, none of which of course were made. Then in 1951 she was subpoenaed to appear before the Kefauver Crime Committee to answer questions about the murder of Jacob King and whether it was the result of labor racketeering in the motion picture industry. Rather than testify she left the country for Italy via Mexico. Her passport was immediately revoked.
She was broke.
She was twenty-three years old.
Moral turpitude, Arthur?
Well, there was Jake, and there was Chuckie, who was not just queer, he was a Commie on top of it, Arthur French said. And don’t forget Walker Franklin. Any one of those was grounds for the moral-turpitude clause. He hesitated. Then: Plus we didn’t know if she would work out as a grown-up.
Was that the real reason?
It went into the mix. Those were tough days, Jack. Television changed the whole equation. That, and making us get rid of the theater chains.
You people were all heart, Arthur.
I went along with the decision, Jack.
But she was a proven player.
It was a new ballgame.
She made a number of pictures in Italy, none of which were released in the United States. Occasionally exposé magazines featured lurid accounts of her past and present. She was a lesbian, a bag lady for the Mob, a madam, she had fingered Jacob King, she had borne his love child, she had borne Arthur French’s illegitimate daughter, she had aborted both, she had secretly married Jacob, she had secretly married Arthur, she had even secretly married Chuckie O’Hara, she was the beneficiary of hush money from Jacob’s former associates, she was a call girl in Rome, she was a courier for the Italian Communist party. Her putative lovers ranged from Doris Duke to the Duke of Edinburgh, Lucky Luciano was said to be smitten, as was Senator John Kennedy, his father, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, and my father, Hugh Broderick. In rapid succession she married and divorced a gaffer on one of her pictures; a grandnephew of Benito Mussolini; and one of King Farouk’s lesser pimps. Between marriages she briefly took up again with Walker Franklin, but when she could not support him in the style to which he had grown accustomed, he abandoned her for a Venetian principessa. In the late fifties, more or less forgotten, she came back to New York. There was little fanfare, except for a brief flurry when a chorus girl she knew jumped out a window on West
End Avenue, the story she had told me in Hamtramck. Blue Tyler’s chorine gal pal, as the tabloid headlines put it. Nobody really cared except Walter Winchell, and he, like her, was a relic of another age. For two years she sang in a nightclub on Sixth Avenue, married and divorced twice more—two horn players, who also happened to be brothers—and then in the early 1960s, she simply disappeared.
She was broke.
She was unknown.
She was a drunk.
She was thirty-three years old.
As Blue Tyler, she ceased to exist.
Baby, she said, I just fell off the planet earth.
META & THE HOUND OF HEAVEN
I
Actually she did tell me, Arthur French said. After a fashion. In her own way.
On the flight to Tucson and then on the drive from Tucson to Nogales, I had debated whether I should finally mention to Arthur that Melba Mae Toolate, during our last taping session in Hamtramck, had reported matter-of-factly that when she was fourteen years old she was giving his father a blow job at the Fremont Hotel in Las Vegas that sixteenth of January, 1942, at about the time that Carole Lombard’s TWA flight, with Blue Tyler supposedly a passenger on board, crashed into Potosi Mountain in Table Rock, Nevada, with no survivors. Trying to sort out Blue’s life, and Melba Mae’s problematic take on it, I had come to the ranch twice since my return, and talked to Arthur at length on the telephone, and again that one time in his father’s orchid house at Willingham when he had come up to Los Angeles, but the topic was not one with an easy transition into it (“Oh, by the way, Arthur …” did not seem to fill the bill), and so I kept putting it off until I could find an opportune moment. We rode every day, I think because Arthur liked to see my discomfiture in the saddle. I don’t like horses and hated to ride, and he sat a horse better than one might have expected from the son of Moses Frankel, immigrant turned haberdasher turned mogul. And also if we were riding I could not tape, and I had the sense that Arthur wanted few records kept of any discussions we might have about Blue Tyler. It was not until my last night at the ranch, as we sat on the veranda before dinner, with the sun disappearing behind the foothills and a third or perhaps even a fourth drink stiffening my resolve, that the old cop-shop reporter I had once been took charge, the one who in days past could ask the relatives of murder victims to comment on the brutal slaying of their son or daughter or husband or wife or brother or sister, and ask it without hesitation. Still it was with a certain trepidation, earned over the years of our friendship, that I finally told him what Melba Mae Toolate claimed was the reason Blue Tyler had missed Carole Lombard’s plane that night. And as so often with Arthur, I was not prepared for the equanimity of his response.
It was a long time later when she told me, he said. In her own—he paused—devious way.
(For the moment, I let devious pass.) Did you believe her?
I knew my father. I knew his tastes.
Your father ran her out of the Industry. That could be why she said it.
She wasn’t like that, Jack. You never knew Blue Tyler. You just knew Melba Mae whatever her name is …
Toolate.
Anyway, it was after she left Hollywood and dropped out of sight when she told me. Three, four years ago.
How’d she tell you?
You remember how I once said she always kept in touch. Out of the blue I’d get something in the mail.
Like Walker Franklin’s obituary, stuff like that?
That’s it, yes. Well, she’d seen this show on television. Unsolved Murders, I think it was called. One of those shit shows like Hard Copy. Re-created crimes. She sent me a review of it from some paper in the Midwest.
A show about Jacob King?
No. About someone she’d gone to school with. At the Little Red Schoolhouse. Meta … Arthur paused, as if wondering whether to continue; then he did, selecting each word even more carefully than usual.… Meta somebody who the studio publicity department said was her best friend. Blue mixing with real people was the story line. The fan magazines ate up that kind of stuff. It was bullshit.
And this woman was murdered? Arthur seemed to be putting distance between Meta and Blue, and I was curious as to why, so for the moment I chose not to mention that I had already rummaged through dusty studio files and discovered the photographs of Blue doing algebra problems with Meta Dierdorf, and reading Little Women with her, Meta Dierdorf, who even in death took second billing to her more famous schoolmate:
BLUE’S TRAGEDY
NON-PRO CLASSMATE FOUND STRANGLED IN TUB
It happened when I was in the army, Arthur said. Making propaganda films with Ronnie Reagan down at Fort MacArthur in San Pedro. You know, I actually outranked him. This Meta …
Dierdorf, I said. Meta Dierdorf.
Jack, Arthur said, scolding. You knew about her all the time, didn’t you?
I came across her name. In the clips.
Yes, Arthur said, drawing the word out, even in distress never losing his ingrained capacity for irony, his eyes never leaving mine, as if demanding I ask the question that hung in the air between us.
I knew my father, I knew his tastes.
I could not avoid it: Did your father … know her?
Arthur nodded. Yes, he said finally. I can’t say I was surprised, it was a pattern with J.F. The younger they were, the younger he felt. She was—another pause—perfect …
In what way?
Non-industry. She didn’t know anyone we knew. Except Blue. And that was just a friendship the publicity department dreamed up. I don’t think I ever heard Blue mention her.
Melba Mae talking: This girlfriend I had at the studio school. She wasn’t in the business. Meta said dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire.
Arthur continued: J.F. must’ve seen her on the lot. And seen the advantages …
Advantages?
There was always gossip about that … chorus line he kept. And so I asked Lilo.
Why Lilo?
It was the kind of thing he would know. What you’ve got to remember about Lilo is that he was always preparing a defense, for the day he might need one. Looking for an edge. When that girl died …
Miss Dierdorf.
I know her name, Jack, Arthur said sharply.
I did not respond.
When she died, Arthur said after a moment, Lilo told me he’d asked J.F. if he knew her.
Knowing already of course that he did.
Lilo just hated surprises. And he was also Blue’s lawyer. He was watching out for her, too.
Why?
There were all these photographs of the two of them at school …
Arthur was prevaricating, I knew it, but at least he was talking. Better to let him continue. Double back later.
And some at the Hollywood Canteen, I said.
More publicity shots. The Canteen was for enlisted men. Blue wasn’t much of an egalitarian when it came to the military. She preferred officers, but publicity said it was good for morale to send out shots of her with soldier boys and sailor boys.
Your father … I hesitated.
Did he kill her? Arthur said, finishing the question for me. No, I don’t think so. J.F. was capable of doing a lot of terrible things, but I don’t think he was capable of that. He was, and even now it’s hard to say this about your own father, he was a coward.
He might have had somebody do it.
Jack, stop talking like a television writer.
It was a line meant to terminate debate. I let the silence build between us. Then: What did Blue have to say about this Unsolved Murder show? How did that lead into her and your father?
She didn’t have anything to say about the show itself. It was just her way of telling me she knew about J.F. and this Meta girl, and she knew I knew. That’s the only reason she sent it. Arthur smiled. Memories are made of this, he said softly, almost singing the lyric. Then: There was a piece of lined notebook paper with the review, the kind kids use, that seemed to have been ripped out of a
spiral notebook. And on it she’d written that I was always nicer, I was always the nice one. Nicer than J.F. is what she meant without saying it. And then she said she’d been with him when that plane went in. That’s all she said. That she’d been with him. Nobody had to draw me a picture. Even at the time I suppose I knew. Or guessed.
But you never asked her.
No. Arthur stared into the lengthening twilight, biting his lower lip until I thought he might draw blood, and I realized that whatever he had once felt for Blue had never been entirely erased, and never would. J.F. was at the Fremont, he said at last, and I knew she was too because she’d called me from there, I thought she was on the plane, I thought she’d died in the crash with Carole, and she called me because she wanted me to know she was all right, she was registered as Wanda Nash.
Arthur closed his eyes and pinched his face between his hands. Nobody had to draw me a picture, he repeated, his voice trailing off. Then after a moment: We came up with some medical excuse about why she missed the flight.
Strep throat …
You’ve done your homework, Jack. He was back in control, his smile as arch as ever.
So she sent you this clipping.
Our code. When we were together, what counted was not what we said to each other, but what we didn’t say.
It still seems to be, I said.
You know the police never made the connection between that girl … Arthur paused, as if he could not bear to say her name.… that girl and J.F. And they never thought to ask Blue about it. Maybe Lilo had the fix in. It didn’t matter. She would have lied for him.
For your father? Why?
Because he was family, Jack. We were the only family she ever knew.
Playland Page 37